Nickelling and diming is a nuisance to people; it induces people to look for alternatives or push for a change in policies or technologies. If anything, you are already being nickelled and dimed by the Government (much of it being squandered), but that's simply hidden through the indirection and obfuscation that is inherent in taxation, subsidies, and politics.
If your world requires six months and $100,000 to suitably air your grievances against a corporation that has a legion of lawyers who can wait you out anyway, then that is a failure of your Government; people forget that it is GOVERNMENT that they have established as the provider of law, courts, and enforcement.
Corporations buy Government influence, because Government has so much influence to sell (all the more so as Government power is consolidated and expanded). Big Bad Corporations require Big Bad Government through regulations (which mainly inhibit variation) and through privileges like subsidies and bailouts (which mainly inhibit selective forces).
Basically, your argument is that privatization of infrastructure like roads is a bad idea, because you are only capable of imagining that it will probably end up just like Government. Well, it will indeed end up just like Government—in the worst case scenario!
A monopoly is not necessarily a bad thing, and it does not contradict the nature of the Free Market. This is especially the case when a monopoly creeps into existence by virtue of providing goods and services at sustainable rates; it takes time and dedication to evolve the knowledge, resources, and culture not only to build a large, complex system, but also to sustain it well in the long term. If a megacorporation is able to do so without special privileges, then it's probably generally a good steward of its mission, and can train people to continue that stewardship. For instance, this megacorporation probably won't take resources that could be put towards maintaining and expanding its infrastructure and instead squander it by assassinating children and dropping bombs on people in other countries in the name of "exporting Democracy".
If anybody is a religious fundamentalist, it is the Statist who can't fathom any solution to society other than the worship of an Intelligent Designer, the "noble" bureaucrat who peers into his crystal ball and then—at everyone else's expense—pulls and pushes naive levers and buttons based on what he thinks he sees.
Tollways are NOT the ultimate or even the only solution; that's just the solution that your limited imagination has produced, especially with yesterday's limited technologies. Indeed, our minds are too limited to attempt to be Intelligent Designers; it's best to let society evolve efficient solutions by means of the Free Market.
A king's place in life is only as good as his soldiers can maintain it, or only as good as his good nature can sustain it.
At worst, a corporation is like the Government, especially as the Government consolidates its power in an ever more expansive and centralized nature.
no matter how much you protest that we would still have a democracy
Democracy involves forcing one person's opinion on another, which is exactly what a dictatorship is all about. That's why [pure] democracy is often denounced as "Tyranny of the Majority".
The essence of the virtue of moving from a dictatorship to a democracy is that it is a step away from a centralized power structure toward a decentralized, localized power structure. When you take it to the limit, you end up with society that is an emergent phenomenon engendered by voluntary contracts between each pair of individuals.
Society, like everything else of complexity in the Universe, must evolve. The process of evolution is what we call the combination of the process of variation and the process of selection. These processes are the most robust under decentralized, localized power structures; indeed, a centralized power structure—by its very nature—tends to quash variation and restrict selective forces in order to inhibit competition that threatens its monopoly.
It's clear you're just barely reading what I'm writing; I don't know whether your reading comprehension is generally poor or you just have too much mental baggage to allow for making sense of what I'm saying.
i'm not aware of any case where the free market has built actual infrastructure with no involvement from government.
I already sent you a link. You should actually try reading things some time.
Firstly, I was responding more directly to the notion that markets "require a government, some form of central control." This is obviously not the case; indeed, such central control inevitably leads to myopic central planning by would-be Intelligent Designers. Even systems as complex as the Human evolved through a mostly mindless process (and I say mostly mindless, because the process of evolution became mindful as soon as the first brain turned on; something like the brain simply allows for the processes of variation and selection to be more sophisticated, which is why there was a relatively short period of time between the appearance of modern man and the development of civilization. However, there is danger and strife in the revolution caused by central planning—the Great Leaps Forward that all of our Dear Leaders are so eager to make).
Secondly, it depends on one's notion of "Free Market". Frankly, I don't care what it's called; I'm just interested in portraying the need for robust evolution, a process that the centralization of power always tends to inhibit by quashing variation and stifling selective forces.
Just because we can't fathom the necessary, intermediate support structures for evolving a society that has, say, completely privatized infrastructure doesn't mean it's not possible—it just means we don't have the imagination to envision the path; instead of trying to be Intelligent Designers, we ought to unshackle the evolutionary process as much as we can figure out how to do so in the current moment, and that means spreading a message of decentralization and localization of the power structure.
You are abusing my stance, and you know it. Having government build an entire rail system and then carve it up entirely through management contracts by the decree of some bureaucratic committee or legislative body is a poor example of privatization (let alone the evolutionary nature of the Free Market). Elaborate, complex systems can rarily be forced into existence by fiat.
There is no "Free Market" mechanism for enforcing contracts, for example.
Sure there are. The last I checked, there is no One World Government; each sovereign nation represents a player in the Free Market of law and enforcement, with world-wide society evolving from the interplay between these little experiments.
There are interesting discussions to be had regarding further decentralization and localization (and privatization) of law, courts, and law enforcement. "There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy." Indeed, at one point in time, the notion of your precious democracy was considered harebrained.
it's actually more efficient to fund the roads through taxes than tolls.
Tolls are not the only solution.
Governments waste their money on other, fruitless endeavors, thereby leaving infrastructure to ruin; this is more apparent the larger and expansive Government becomes.
There's no such thing as a trustworthy custodian, especially when that custodian ALSO wastes its resources assassinating children and subsidizing dying or corrupt industries, etc. I'm sure the Government will finally get around to dealing with infrastructure Real Soon Now!®
Political action (voting, or some other such nonsense) is a terrible way to establish management of services; it is subject to politicization just as before. It is better to let a bad company die in the Free Market and then auction off its holdings to more capable hands. At worst, there will be periods of discomfort, but that is no worse than what we have today with an endless, violent, useless monopoly controlling things; eventually, a robust system will evolve—one that is better than any would-be Intelligent Designer in the Government could hope to dream up.
You can't centrally plan a conversion to a privatized system, especially one based on contracts with, I presume, the government. The key is evolution, not revolution.
Where do you think that money to put people back to work building infrastructure comes from?
When it comes to public property, deciding which bridge to rebuild is a decision that is politicized—it is a decision made by favors of power through stealth amendments to unrelated bills with costs (which include kickbacks for cronies) borne out on the backs of the populace under threat of violence. Public works destroy resources, and even if some good came from them, we're all at the mercy of a monoplistic organization (some call it "government") that would rather spend resources dropping bombs on people.
If you want to see resources go into infrastructure WHERE IT IS MOST ASSUREDLY WANTED (let alone NEEDED), and where it will be maintained to high quality, then you want to see the privatization of roads. Private property brings the sense of ownership over a resource and the consequent desire to invest in its sustainable exploitation; it is the engine behind good decisions—including the decision to dismantle and abandon something that is no longer useful. It does no good to put your faith in a supposedly "noble" bureaucrat who gets to play around with other people's money.
But who would invest in such infrastructure? I don't know; that's the point of allowing a Free Market—an environment where there are robust processes of variation and selection that give rise to the evolution of society, allowing society to adapt to the needs of the moment.
Perhaps some roads would be maintained by emergent consortiums of the businesses that exist along them, passing the cost onto the consumers who frequent those businesses, effectively creating an implicit user fee. Perhaps some bridges would have toll booths, possibly owned and operated by businesses that specialize in building and maintaining such infrastructure and thus have an interest in maintenance, expansion, and research in new designs. Perhaps some neighborhood associations would take on the task. The possibilities are endless when you get the bureaucratic thugs of centralized power out of the way.
Perhaps people who drink so much coffee tend to spend all day long INSIDE doing deskwork; they grow lethargic from lack of physical activity, thereby requiring a boost from caffeine.
Perhaps people who forgo coffee do so in order to remain "all natural"; such people might also forgo "unnatural" products like sunscreen.
In these days of ours, if something is actually newsworthy, then it ends up being documented and discussed in Internet fora, often in excruciating detail under all kinds of useful insights (diversity of bias is a great thing).
Newspapers and conventional media are dying because NOBODY NEEDS THEM ANYMORE; this is the nature of the Free Market—society evolves through variation and selection, but of course, people are trying to inhibit this most fundamental process by turning to the steel boot of would-be central planners, in order to pretend otherwise at everyone else's expense; when in doubt, bring out the violent coercion.
Now, don't be confused. There is no doubt still value in expert analysis—value worth paying for (in the traditional sense). However, most of what we call "news" is not in that category. The death of newspapers is a good thing; oh, certainly, there will be some unpleasantness during the evolutionary transition (especially when central planners prolong the agony), but the result will be a society having adapted a more efficient form.
Lattner was hired by Apple in 2005 because of his work on LLVM at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He worked on Clang at Apple; it to be open-sourced in 2007. So, I think you are exaggerating a bit.
You probably just needed to clean out the fans, particularly the GPU's fan. At least trying that would be better than smashing up a wonder of technology like a confused caveman; fool.
There is only one kind of evolution in this Universe: Evolution by variation and selection. Nothing is ever "designed" as per, say, Intelligent Design; everything comes about through an iterative process of variation and selection, which is called evolution. This applies not only to biological systems (which are the most popular example of the evolutionary process in action), but also to social systems, economic systems, physical systems like galaxy formation, etc.
In particular, there is absolutely no good reason for the "natural" qualifier (or especially that stupid "artificial" qualifier). Everything is natural. At best, the word "natural" is intended to mean "mindless", but evolution became "mindful" as soon as the first brain turned on; something like the brain just allows for the processes of variation and selection to be more sophisticated (put another way, human beings are just as much a part of this Universe as anything else).
Indeed, DarwinTunes even uses people to do the selecting.
That represents a millionth of a meter, or less than one ten-thousandth of an inch.
For those of you who are having trouble visualizing this: That's about a little more than 9 billionths of a football field (on the short number scale, of course).
To say that the US Constitution provided a much stronger central federal government than provided by the Articles of Confederation is not the same as to say that said federal government wielded any great centralized power.
Nevertheless, there was still an energetic outcry back then at even the little extra centralization afforded by the Constitution, for much the same reason that many of us lament the extraordinary and creeping centralization of today, and it would seem that some of the original concerns have been borne out.
Slashdot Mirror
Nickelling and diming is a nuisance to people; it induces people to look for alternatives or push for a change in policies or technologies. If anything, you are already being nickelled and dimed by the Government (much of it being squandered), but that's simply hidden through the indirection and obfuscation that is inherent in taxation, subsidies, and politics.
If your world requires six months and $100,000 to suitably air your grievances against a corporation that has a legion of lawyers who can wait you out anyway, then that is a failure of your Government; people forget that it is GOVERNMENT that they have established as the provider of law, courts, and enforcement.
Corporations buy Government influence, because Government has so much influence to sell (all the more so as Government power is consolidated and expanded). Big Bad Corporations require Big Bad Government through regulations (which mainly inhibit variation) and through privileges like subsidies and bailouts (which mainly inhibit selective forces).
Basically, your argument is that privatization of infrastructure like roads is a bad idea, because you are only capable of imagining that it will probably end up just like Government. Well, it will indeed end up just like Government—in the worst case scenario!
A monopoly is not necessarily a bad thing, and it does not contradict the nature of the Free Market. This is especially the case when a monopoly creeps into existence by virtue of providing goods and services at sustainable rates; it takes time and dedication to evolve the knowledge, resources, and culture not only to build a large, complex system, but also to sustain it well in the long term. If a megacorporation is able to do so without special privileges, then it's probably generally a good steward of its mission, and can train people to continue that stewardship. For instance, this megacorporation probably won't take resources that could be put towards maintaining and expanding its infrastructure and instead squander it by assassinating children and dropping bombs on people in other countries in the name of "exporting Democracy".
If anybody is a religious fundamentalist, it is the Statist who can't fathom any solution to society other than the worship of an Intelligent Designer, the "noble" bureaucrat who peers into his crystal ball and then—at everyone else's expense—pulls and pushes naive levers and buttons based on what he thinks he sees.
A government does not necessarily inhibit evolution, but centralization of power does. That's always been my point.
The US culture has evolved for the better DESPITE government's meddling.
Tollways are NOT the ultimate or even the only solution; that's just the solution that your limited imagination has produced, especially with yesterday's limited technologies. Indeed, our minds are too limited to attempt to be Intelligent Designers; it's best to let society evolve efficient solutions by means of the Free Market.
A king's place in life is only as good as his soldiers can maintain it, or only as good as his good nature can sustain it.
At worst, a corporation is like the Government, especially as the Government consolidates its power in an ever more expansive and centralized nature.
no matter how much you protest that we would still have a democracy
Democracy involves forcing one person's opinion on another, which is exactly what a dictatorship is all about. That's why [pure] democracy is often denounced as "Tyranny of the Majority".
The essence of the virtue of moving from a dictatorship to a democracy is that it is a step away from a centralized power structure toward a decentralized, localized power structure. When you take it to the limit, you end up with society that is an emergent phenomenon engendered by voluntary contracts between each pair of individuals.
Society, like everything else of complexity in the Universe, must evolve. The process of evolution is what we call the combination of the process of variation and the process of selection. These processes are the most robust under decentralized, localized power structures; indeed, a centralized power structure—by its very nature—tends to quash variation and restrict selective forces in order to inhibit competition that threatens its monopoly.
It's clear you're just barely reading what I'm writing; I don't know whether your reading comprehension is generally poor or you just have too much mental baggage to allow for making sense of what I'm saying.
i'm not aware of any case where the free market has built actual infrastructure with no involvement from government.
I already sent you a link. You should actually try reading things some time.
Firstly, I was responding more directly to the notion that markets "require a government, some form of central control." This is obviously not the case; indeed, such central control inevitably leads to myopic central planning by would-be Intelligent Designers. Even systems as complex as the Human evolved through a mostly mindless process (and I say mostly mindless, because the process of evolution became mindful as soon as the first brain turned on; something like the brain simply allows for the processes of variation and selection to be more sophisticated, which is why there was a relatively short period of time between the appearance of modern man and the development of civilization. However, there is danger and strife in the revolution caused by central planning—the Great Leaps Forward that all of our Dear Leaders are so eager to make).
Secondly, it depends on one's notion of "Free Market". Frankly, I don't care what it's called; I'm just interested in portraying the need for robust evolution, a process that the centralization of power always tends to inhibit by quashing variation and stifling selective forces.
Just because we can't fathom the necessary, intermediate support structures for evolving a society that has, say, completely privatized infrastructure doesn't mean it's not possible—it just means we don't have the imagination to envision the path; instead of trying to be Intelligent Designers, we ought to unshackle the evolutionary process as much as we can figure out how to do so in the current moment, and that means spreading a message of decentralization and localization of the power structure.
You are abusing my stance, and you know it. Having government build an entire rail system and then carve it up entirely through management contracts by the decree of some bureaucratic committee or legislative body is a poor example of privatization (let alone the evolutionary nature of the Free Market). Elaborate, complex systems can rarily be forced into existence by fiat.
Tollways in the U.S. are government owned.
Ironically, tollways in a number of countries outside the U.S. (like France) have a more privatized aspect to them.
Also, tollways are not the only solution.
There is no "Free Market" mechanism for enforcing contracts, for example.
Sure there are. The last I checked, there is no One World Government; each sovereign nation represents a player in the Free Market of law and enforcement, with world-wide society evolving from the interplay between these little experiments.
There are interesting discussions to be had regarding further decentralization and localization (and privatization) of law, courts, and law enforcement. "There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy." Indeed, at one point in time, the notion of your precious democracy was considered harebrained.
it's actually more efficient to fund the roads through taxes than tolls.
Tolls are not the only solution.
Governments waste their money on other, fruitless endeavors, thereby leaving infrastructure to ruin; this is more apparent the larger and expansive Government becomes.
There's no such thing as a trustworthy custodian, especially when that custodian ALSO wastes its resources assassinating children and subsidizing dying or corrupt industries, etc. I'm sure the Government will finally get around to dealing with infrastructure Real Soon Now!®
Political action (voting, or some other such nonsense) is a terrible way to establish management of services; it is subject to politicization just as before. It is better to let a bad company die in the Free Market and then auction off its holdings to more capable hands. At worst, there will be periods of discomfort, but that is no worse than what we have today with an endless, violent, useless monopoly controlling things; eventually, a robust system will evolve—one that is better than any would-be Intelligent Designer in the Government could hope to dream up.
You can't centrally plan a conversion to a privatized system, especially one based on contracts with, I presume, the government. The key is evolution, not revolution.
Your example is a poor one, and it reminds me of the Robber Barons canard.
Where do you think that money to put people back to work building infrastructure comes from?
When it comes to public property, deciding which bridge to rebuild is a decision that is politicized—it is a decision made by favors of power through stealth amendments to unrelated bills with costs (which include kickbacks for cronies) borne out on the backs of the populace under threat of violence. Public works destroy resources, and even if some good came from them, we're all at the mercy of a monoplistic organization (some call it "government") that would rather spend resources dropping bombs on people.
If you want to see resources go into infrastructure WHERE IT IS MOST ASSUREDLY WANTED (let alone NEEDED), and where it will be maintained to high quality, then you want to see the privatization of roads. Private property brings the sense of ownership over a resource and the consequent desire to invest in its sustainable exploitation; it is the engine behind good decisions—including the decision to dismantle and abandon something that is no longer useful. It does no good to put your faith in a supposedly "noble" bureaucrat who gets to play around with other people's money.
But who would invest in such infrastructure? I don't know; that's the point of allowing a Free Market—an environment where there are robust processes of variation and selection that give rise to the evolution of society, allowing society to adapt to the needs of the moment.
Perhaps some roads would be maintained by emergent consortiums of the businesses that exist along them, passing the cost onto the consumers who frequent those businesses, effectively creating an implicit user fee. Perhaps some bridges would have toll booths, possibly owned and operated by businesses that specialize in building and maintaining such infrastructure and thus have an interest in maintenance, expansion, and research in new designs. Perhaps some neighborhood associations would take on the task. The possibilities are endless when you get the bureaucratic thugs of centralized power out of the way.
Sure...
His kids don't know what the heck is going on. As always, the kids are just tools in the machinations of the adults.
That's the point. The study doesn't appear to control for these things.
Perhaps people who drink so much coffee tend to spend all day long INSIDE doing deskwork; they grow lethargic from lack of physical activity, thereby requiring a boost from caffeine.
Perhaps people who forgo coffee do so in order to remain "all natural"; such people might also forgo "unnatural" products like sunscreen.
etc.
send humans to an asteroid by 2025 and to Mars in the 2030s
It's a really sad thing to run the numbers on how old I'll be by then. Life is short—and not terribly interesting.
There's nothing you've said that disagrees with what I've said.
Most "news" is total crap.
In these days of ours, if something is actually newsworthy, then it ends up being documented and discussed in Internet fora, often in excruciating detail under all kinds of useful insights (diversity of bias is a great thing).
Newspapers and conventional media are dying because NOBODY NEEDS THEM ANYMORE; this is the nature of the Free Market—society evolves through variation and selection, but of course, people are trying to inhibit this most fundamental process by turning to the steel boot of would-be central planners, in order to pretend otherwise at everyone else's expense; when in doubt, bring out the violent coercion.
Now, don't be confused. There is no doubt still value in expert analysis—value worth paying for (in the traditional sense). However, most of what we call "news" is not in that category. The death of newspapers is a good thing; oh, certainly, there will be some unpleasantness during the evolutionary transition (especially when central planners prolong the agony), but the result will be a society having adapted a more efficient form.
Lattner was hired by Apple in 2005 because of his work on LLVM at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He worked on Clang at Apple; it to be open-sourced in 2007. So, I think you are exaggerating a bit.
You probably just needed to clean out the fans, particularly the GPU's fan. At least trying that would be better than smashing up a wonder of technology like a confused caveman; fool.
Darwinian evolution by natural selection.
There is only one kind of evolution in this Universe: Evolution by variation and selection. Nothing is ever "designed" as per, say, Intelligent Design; everything comes about through an iterative process of variation and selection, which is called evolution. This applies not only to biological systems (which are the most popular example of the evolutionary process in action), but also to social systems, economic systems, physical systems like galaxy formation, etc.
In particular, there is absolutely no good reason for the "natural" qualifier (or especially that stupid "artificial" qualifier). Everything is natural. At best, the word "natural" is intended to mean "mindless", but evolution became "mindful" as soon as the first brain turned on; something like the brain just allows for the processes of variation and selection to be more sophisticated (put another way, human beings are just as much a part of this Universe as anything else).
Indeed, DarwinTunes even uses people to do the selecting.
That represents a millionth of a meter, or less than one ten-thousandth of an inch.
For those of you who are having trouble visualizing this: That's about a little more than 9 billionths of a football field (on the short number scale, of course).
Sounds like a problem for the Free Market to figure out.
To say that the US Constitution provided a much stronger central federal government than provided by the Articles of Confederation is not the same as to say that said federal government wielded any great centralized power.
Nevertheless, there was still an energetic outcry back then at even the little extra centralization afforded by the Constitution, for much the same reason that many of us lament the extraordinary and creeping centralization of today, and it would seem that some of the original concerns have been borne out.