- taxes were collected of sales most of the time over those years, not on people's work.
Wrong. Since the days of Ancient Egypt, taxes were mainly collected as percentage of farmers' crop and craftsmen's production. And remember that for most of the past 5,000 years, over 90% of working population ruled over by kings or emperors were farmers.
- if there is no profit there, then it's a clear indication that the market is not interested in it, and any money allocated to it will be destructive to the economy.
Or it's an indication that the region has hit some natural obstacle in its economic development and it cannot develop further on its own without external stimuli. Government investment in infrastructure may be the solution to the problem. On the other hand, the market "solution" of this problem is to wait until the economic gap between regions grows so big that the poor region effectively becomes source of grossly underpriced resources and labor. Then it will become profitable to build the required infrastructure from private resources but it will also create a one-sided dependency rather than mutually beneficial trade, effectively killing the economic potential of the poor region for decades. However, if the poor region receives investment in infrastructure from government, it can develop on its own and enter trade with other regions as equal, achieving its full economic potential, and the overall result will be much more efficient allocation of resources. Even when you include the initial "inefficient" investment from government.
One of interesting obstacles for economic development is localized currency drain which happens when a region imports a lot of goods but exports very little for too long. It essentially stops all economic activity in the region because there's not enough money in circulation for effective trade. What's even more interesting, cash injections and the like from government don't work very well here (so don't bother bringing this up, I know that and it's not the point). But what surprisingly does work is something called Local Exchange Trading System. It's basically a regional currency which reboots local trade up to the point when local businesses can start exporting goods again and bring national currency back to the region. Think about this problem and the solution for a while, it might give you a better idea how economy really works and why free market isn't a magical silver bullet.
- nonsense. People have been building infrastructure before any governments ever existed and they continue to do so today just as well, and government infrastructure is never self-sufficient because it relies on expensive support from subsidies and not from the actual market demand.
There's infrastructure and infrastructure. What can be built in a month by private investor in one region may take several decades in another even if everybody contributes everything they can, no matter how much it is needed. Maybe you should try playing some economic strategy video games. Even though the economic rules are often oversimplified, the basic concepts of economic decision making we're talking about here are there. My personal favorite is Master of Orion 2.
I am definitely not trying to impress you with my Marxism indoctrination, but if you understand what it is, then it is somewhat surprising that you don't see the income taxes, (which started as income taxes on the rich first) as the natural extension of those very ideas.
That's because taxes have been around in one form or another since the days of Ancient Egypt, for over 5,000 years.
As to the public infrastructure - if you look at the link, which I attached, you'll see all the arguments there, how it actually is destructive from the beginning to the end - killing profitable businesses, destroying possibility of other profitable businesses, creating unfair competition (in case of roads - subsidizing car companies and destroying opportunities for public transit companies), creating an unmaintainable life style, causing insane amounts of pollution, creating unsustainable energy policy, etc.etc., all because government precisely does NOT have to make it profitable, but can just spend without any regard to any market signals, that would have been sent to any private enterprise, all because money is not a question for government, but money is expression of work, so work of people is not a question for government, who can abuse it, even if it absolutely is against what the market is requiring.
I don't dispute that. But it's only a small fraction of a much larger picture. The government shouldn't interfere with profitable private infrastructure. Its job is to build infrastructure where private companies are not interested in building anything because there's no immediate profit to be made. Infrastructure which is necessary to attract investments and trade into poor regions in the first place. Private infrastructure can only reinforce economic advantages which already exist. Unlike government funded public infrastructure, it doesn't create new opportunities, it merely follows existing ones.
- I was indoctrinated in the ways of Marxism long before you were born, which was very unfortunate for me back in the USSR.
I don't believe I've told you my age. But I'll tell you where I live: Czech republic. So your Marxism indoctrination won't impress me. Been there, done that. I even know a lot of people like you who went through Marxism class and the only thing they brought out of there were radical right beliefs.
- wrong. Profit is almost always the only good measure of usefulness of a product/service to the market, and it's definitely the only real measure of success of a business, and thus a good compass for the future direction of the investment and work. But I already left a comment on that topic a while ago, I don't want to repeat it.
Has it ever occured to you that net indirect benefits from free use of public infrastructure may be significantly higher than direct profits and net indirect benefits combined when everybody has to pay?
The very concept that work must be taxed by the government in the first place - income and corporate and payroll taxes, that's already Marxism.
In other words, you're using the word "Marxism" as a catch-all term for anything you disagree with. Poor Karl, he must be spinning in his grave now.
and I am saying: he is a Marxist one more time, as his concern is labor without understanding the economics at all, that all costs need to go down due to competition, including labor costs, and if the costs go down due to competition of companies with each other and not due to companies getting favors from government, who protects their monopoly, then this is a net positive gain for the economy and the market.
Except when it's not. Henry Ford and many others like him have taught us a very important lesson over a century ago: If you want to sell on a consumer market, you have to pay your employees enough so they can afford your own products. Otherwise there will be noone to sell to. I guess that US is on the way to learn this lesson again the hard way.
No government in the world can do what these companies do - create actual real jobs and improve the economy and raise the standard of living of people, who now have those jobs and push prices down for consumer goods. Governments can only destroys this movement - reduce economic activity via taxes and regulations, push prices up due to less competition.
Actually, no. Governments can enable a lot of jobs by building and maintaining important infrastructure. Profit is not always a good measure of usefulness.
What's Marxist on criticising the idiotic policy of giving foreign businesses exemptions from taxes and even laws including Labor Code that local businesses can't get? Read RMS's statements again and again until you understand that THIS is what he's talking about.
That's because traditional distributors already sit on top of the most profitable established distribution channels and they get to decide who gets in and who doesn't. Copy-friendly distribution fights an uphill battle on a very steep slope but it still has tremendous success when you look at how little they invest in advertisment compared to traditional distributors. And don't forget that selling copies is not the only way to make money from content.
Trouble is that RMS's message is meant to... effectively marginalize the "content creation" market.
Citation needed. Actually, content creators have been marginalized by distributors long time ago. Creative Commons/FOSS licenses are the best way out of this right now.
Oh come on. RMS is clearly criticising governments for distorting the market even more by giving free lunch to corporations every time they ask for it and you call him Marxist for that? Give me a break.
Or even better, set a limit how many videos a month are included in the subscription fee and charge money for anything over the limit. If you give your password to a lot of people then, well, you pay for them using your account.
I'm seriously wondering whether the goal of recording industry is to make money, or if they just want to see how much they can piss their paying customers off.
Erm, you realize that trend studies usually cite several hundred data collection studies from dozens of research teams, and that data from those studies are available on their research teams' websites? It's physically impossible for Phil Jones alone to tamper with all of that.
A single top scientist is an originator of all climate research data? You mean that just one man alone was taking meteorological measurements for over 300 years all around the world, drilling ice cores in both Arctic and Antarctic, studying tree rings all around the world, lake and ocean sediments and studying at least a dozen other sources of climate data? Really just one man alone? Wow, that's quite an achievement.
You're mistaking numerical precision of result for importance. Statistical significance means numerical precision of the result. And yes, you really need the data before you can calculate numerical precision of the result.
Actually, the data DID show an increase in temperature, but the time interval was too short to make the result statistically significant. There's a HUGE difference between no increase in temperature at all and a clear increase but with only 94.9% certainty that the trend is definitely positive, you know? Statistical significance means at least 95% certainty that the actual number falls within some predefined range around the calculated value (in this case, strictly greater than zero). Also, you should update your propaganda because the trend in raw temperature data from 1995 to 2011 has already achieved statistical significance, as opposed to trend in data from 1995 to early 2010 when BBC made that interview. This kind of statistics misrepresentation has very limited lifetime.
Well you can just get fucked you useless cunt - your ignorant attitude, on a wider scale, is the type of reason that html5 most likely won't get anywhere.
Eat W3C's and browser developers' shit and like it, if you want to call yourself a web dev!!!
FTFY. And no, I'm not gonna eat someone else's shit. I'll get behind HTML5 when W3C gives me a stable set of features I can expect from its implementation (ie. a fixed version of the standard).
Oh, and the masochistic attitude like yours is the reason why MSIE still hasn't died the horrible death it deserves for its crimes against web developers' sanity.
He was the only one qualified because he prevented any other person from learning the system and kept the keys to himself. The only thing that he is securing is his own job.
Was it really Childs keeping everybody out of the system, or was it his bosses' decision to save money by having only one admin for the whole network up until the incident? From what I've read about the case so far, I get the feeling that the latter was the case.
It is no longer your responsibility after that point. If your supervisor messes up the network, it is would be their ass that gets in trouble.
Sorry, I don't buy that. In the real world, I could easily get into trouble for actually letting the unqualified supervisor anywhere near the system configuration. It's a really awful choice: Keep the passwords to myself and face legal charges for not handing them over, or hand them over and face legal charges for somebody else's screw up that I was supposed to prevent in the first place by keeping those passwords secret.
The issue was that he thought he was the only person who was qualified.
And it seems to me from the reports that he was right. Even if they had somebody around who knows the technology inside out, it'd still take a few weeks to get him up to speed on system configuration. Until his training is finished, it's better not to give the new admin full system access because he might accidentally nuke the network because he didn't get to some important configuration detail in his training yet.
Yes, the city has a lot of work to do to clean up its IT policies, but that has no bearing whatsoever on Childs' decision to commit a criminal act.
Excuse me but since when is not giving full admin access to somebody not qualified to administer the network a criminal act? If I was in Terry Childs' place, I'd give the passwords to my unqualified superiors only against a written disclaimer saying that I no longer have any responsibility for any downtime or damage to the network.
I don't comment on the maniacal god-complexed wanna-be hackers and FOSS types who think that "information wants to be free" and that we should give up the crown jewels in the interest of making life better.
Those FOSS types don't do it to make others' life better. They do it so that others polish their piece of dirty rock until it becomes a crown jewel and in the process make their own lives better. There are still many ways to make money off that, they're just less obvious than in the world of proprietary software.
You're confusing "theory" with "hypothesis". Biologists have agreed that evolution is no longer a mere hypothesis over a century ago.
What most intelligent design supporters seem to lack is the ability to imagine huge numbers. To be specific, huge numbers of individuals from one species which are born in every generation, huge numbers of individuals that die before they get a chance to reproduce and huge number of generations born over millions of years. If you realize how incredibly huge these numbers are, you also realize that those incredibly small odds for single individual are actually very close to 1 for the population as a whole.
Sorry but most mainstream religions fall in the same category as Catholic christianity in this matter. And I'm pretty sure that the above list is far from complete.
Slashdot Mirror
Those coins are only worth what someone will pay for them -- maybe some products online you could buy with them.
Thank you, Captain Obvious. That's pretty much the definition of money.
- taxes were collected of sales most of the time over those years, not on people's work.
Wrong. Since the days of Ancient Egypt, taxes were mainly collected as percentage of farmers' crop and craftsmen's production. And remember that for most of the past 5,000 years, over 90% of working population ruled over by kings or emperors were farmers.
- if there is no profit there, then it's a clear indication that the market is not interested in it, and any money allocated to it will be destructive to the economy.
Or it's an indication that the region has hit some natural obstacle in its economic development and it cannot develop further on its own without external stimuli. Government investment in infrastructure may be the solution to the problem. On the other hand, the market "solution" of this problem is to wait until the economic gap between regions grows so big that the poor region effectively becomes source of grossly underpriced resources and labor. Then it will become profitable to build the required infrastructure from private resources but it will also create a one-sided dependency rather than mutually beneficial trade, effectively killing the economic potential of the poor region for decades. However, if the poor region receives investment in infrastructure from government, it can develop on its own and enter trade with other regions as equal, achieving its full economic potential, and the overall result will be much more efficient allocation of resources. Even when you include the initial "inefficient" investment from government.
One of interesting obstacles for economic development is localized currency drain which happens when a region imports a lot of goods but exports very little for too long. It essentially stops all economic activity in the region because there's not enough money in circulation for effective trade. What's even more interesting, cash injections and the like from government don't work very well here (so don't bother bringing this up, I know that and it's not the point). But what surprisingly does work is something called Local Exchange Trading System. It's basically a regional currency which reboots local trade up to the point when local businesses can start exporting goods again and bring national currency back to the region. Think about this problem and the solution for a while, it might give you a better idea how economy really works and why free market isn't a magical silver bullet.
- nonsense. People have been building infrastructure before any governments ever existed and they continue to do so today just as well, and government infrastructure is never self-sufficient because it relies on expensive support from subsidies and not from the actual market demand.
There's infrastructure and infrastructure. What can be built in a month by private investor in one region may take several decades in another even if everybody contributes everything they can, no matter how much it is needed. Maybe you should try playing some economic strategy video games. Even though the economic rules are often oversimplified, the basic concepts of economic decision making we're talking about here are there. My personal favorite is Master of Orion 2.
I am definitely not trying to impress you with my Marxism indoctrination, but if you understand what it is, then it is somewhat surprising that you don't see the income taxes, (which started as income taxes on the rich first) as the natural extension of those very ideas.
That's because taxes have been around in one form or another since the days of Ancient Egypt, for over 5,000 years.
As to the public infrastructure - if you look at the link, which I attached, you'll see all the arguments there, how it actually is destructive from the beginning to the end - killing profitable businesses, destroying possibility of other profitable businesses, creating unfair competition (in case of roads - subsidizing car companies and destroying opportunities for public transit companies), creating an unmaintainable life style, causing insane amounts of pollution, creating unsustainable energy policy, etc.etc., all because government precisely does NOT have to make it profitable, but can just spend without any regard to any market signals, that would have been sent to any private enterprise, all because money is not a question for government, but money is expression of work, so work of people is not a question for government, who can abuse it, even if it absolutely is against what the market is requiring.
I don't dispute that. But it's only a small fraction of a much larger picture. The government shouldn't interfere with profitable private infrastructure. Its job is to build infrastructure where private companies are not interested in building anything because there's no immediate profit to be made. Infrastructure which is necessary to attract investments and trade into poor regions in the first place. Private infrastructure can only reinforce economic advantages which already exist. Unlike government funded public infrastructure, it doesn't create new opportunities, it merely follows existing ones.
- I was indoctrinated in the ways of Marxism long before you were born, which was very unfortunate for me back in the USSR.
I don't believe I've told you my age. But I'll tell you where I live: Czech republic. So your Marxism indoctrination won't impress me. Been there, done that. I even know a lot of people like you who went through Marxism class and the only thing they brought out of there were radical right beliefs.
- wrong. Profit is almost always the only good measure of usefulness of a product/service to the market, and it's definitely the only real measure of success of a business, and thus a good compass for the future direction of the investment and work. But I already left a comment on that topic a while ago, I don't want to repeat it.
Has it ever occured to you that net indirect benefits from free use of public infrastructure may be significantly higher than direct profits and net indirect benefits combined when everybody has to pay?
The very concept that work must be taxed by the government in the first place - income and corporate and payroll taxes, that's already Marxism.
In other words, you're using the word "Marxism" as a catch-all term for anything you disagree with. Poor Karl, he must be spinning in his grave now.
and I am saying: he is a Marxist one more time, as his concern is labor without understanding the economics at all, that all costs need to go down due to competition, including labor costs, and if the costs go down due to competition of companies with each other and not due to companies getting favors from government, who protects their monopoly, then this is a net positive gain for the economy and the market.
Except when it's not. Henry Ford and many others like him have taught us a very important lesson over a century ago: If you want to sell on a consumer market, you have to pay your employees enough so they can afford your own products. Otherwise there will be noone to sell to. I guess that US is on the way to learn this lesson again the hard way.
No government in the world can do what these companies do - create actual real jobs and improve the economy and raise the standard of living of people, who now have those jobs and push prices down for consumer goods. Governments can only destroys this movement - reduce economic activity via taxes and regulations, push prices up due to less competition.
Actually, no. Governments can enable a lot of jobs by building and maintaining important infrastructure. Profit is not always a good measure of usefulness.
What's Marxist on criticising the idiotic policy of giving foreign businesses exemptions from taxes and even laws including Labor Code that local businesses can't get? Read RMS's statements again and again until you understand that THIS is what he's talking about.
That's because traditional distributors already sit on top of the most profitable established distribution channels and they get to decide who gets in and who doesn't. Copy-friendly distribution fights an uphill battle on a very steep slope but it still has tremendous success when you look at how little they invest in advertisment compared to traditional distributors. And don't forget that selling copies is not the only way to make money from content.
Trouble is that RMS's message is meant to ... effectively marginalize the "content creation" market.
Citation needed. Actually, content creators have been marginalized by distributors long time ago. Creative Commons/FOSS licenses are the best way out of this right now.
Oh come on. RMS is clearly criticising governments for distorting the market even more by giving free lunch to corporations every time they ask for it and you call him Marxist for that? Give me a break.
Or even better, set a limit how many videos a month are included in the subscription fee and charge money for anything over the limit. If you give your password to a lot of people then, well, you pay for them using your account.
There is a paradox here with RMS simultaneously being anti-free market capitalism and being pro-government control
Citation needed.
I'm seriously wondering whether the goal of recording industry is to make money, or if they just want to see how much they can piss their paying customers off.
Erm, you realize that trend studies usually cite several hundred data collection studies from dozens of research teams, and that data from those studies are available on their research teams' websites? It's physically impossible for Phil Jones alone to tamper with all of that.
A single top scientist is an originator of all climate research data? You mean that just one man alone was taking meteorological measurements for over 300 years all around the world, drilling ice cores in both Arctic and Antarctic, studying tree rings all around the world, lake and ocean sediments and studying at least a dozen other sources of climate data? Really just one man alone? Wow, that's quite an achievement.
You're mistaking numerical precision of result for importance. Statistical significance means numerical precision of the result. And yes, you really need the data before you can calculate numerical precision of the result.
Actually, the data DID show an increase in temperature, but the time interval was too short to make the result statistically significant. There's a HUGE difference between no increase in temperature at all and a clear increase but with only 94.9% certainty that the trend is definitely positive, you know? Statistical significance means at least 95% certainty that the actual number falls within some predefined range around the calculated value (in this case, strictly greater than zero). Also, you should update your propaganda because the trend in raw temperature data from 1995 to 2011 has already achieved statistical significance, as opposed to trend in data from 1995 to early 2010 when BBC made that interview. This kind of statistics misrepresentation has very limited lifetime.
Well you can just get fucked you useless cunt - your ignorant attitude, on a wider scale, is the type of reason that html5 most likely won't get anywhere.
Eat W3C's and browser developers' shit and like it, if you want to call yourself a web dev!!!
FTFY. And no, I'm not gonna eat someone else's shit. I'll get behind HTML5 when W3C gives me a stable set of features I can expect from its implementation (ie. a fixed version of the standard).
Oh, and the masochistic attitude like yours is the reason why MSIE still hasn't died the horrible death it deserves for its crimes against web developers' sanity.
HTML 4.01 Strict. At least until W3C comes back to its senses and drops the "living standard" crap for HTML5.
The de facto standard is IE.
Which version? I know at least a dozen differences in rendering of HTML 4.01/CSS2 between any two major versions of IE out there.
He was the only one qualified because he prevented any other person from learning the system and kept the keys to himself. The only thing that he is securing is his own job.
Was it really Childs keeping everybody out of the system, or was it his bosses' decision to save money by having only one admin for the whole network up until the incident? From what I've read about the case so far, I get the feeling that the latter was the case.
It is no longer your responsibility after that point. If your supervisor messes up the network, it is would be their ass that gets in trouble.
Sorry, I don't buy that. In the real world, I could easily get into trouble for actually letting the unqualified supervisor anywhere near the system configuration. It's a really awful choice: Keep the passwords to myself and face legal charges for not handing them over, or hand them over and face legal charges for somebody else's screw up that I was supposed to prevent in the first place by keeping those passwords secret.
The issue was that he thought he was the only person who was qualified.
And it seems to me from the reports that he was right. Even if they had somebody around who knows the technology inside out, it'd still take a few weeks to get him up to speed on system configuration. Until his training is finished, it's better not to give the new admin full system access because he might accidentally nuke the network because he didn't get to some important configuration detail in his training yet.
Yes, the city has a lot of work to do to clean up its IT policies, but that has no bearing whatsoever on Childs' decision to commit a criminal act.
Excuse me but since when is not giving full admin access to somebody not qualified to administer the network a criminal act? If I was in Terry Childs' place, I'd give the passwords to my unqualified superiors only against a written disclaimer saying that I no longer have any responsibility for any downtime or damage to the network.
I don't comment on the maniacal god-complexed wanna-be hackers and FOSS types who think that "information wants to be free" and that we should give up the crown jewels in the interest of making life better.
Those FOSS types don't do it to make others' life better. They do it so that others polish their piece of dirty rock until it becomes a crown jewel and in the process make their own lives better. There are still many ways to make money off that, they're just less obvious than in the world of proprietary software.
You're confusing "theory" with "hypothesis". Biologists have agreed that evolution is no longer a mere hypothesis over a century ago.
What most intelligent design supporters seem to lack is the ability to imagine huge numbers. To be specific, huge numbers of individuals from one species which are born in every generation, huge numbers of individuals that die before they get a chance to reproduce and huge number of generations born over millions of years. If you realize how incredibly huge these numbers are, you also realize that those incredibly small odds for single individual are actually very close to 1 for the population as a whole.
So, let's see:
Sorry but most mainstream religions fall in the same category as Catholic christianity in this matter. And I'm pretty sure that the above list is far from complete.