In the city where I grew up here in the US, you can still see movies in a mainstream theater for like $5 at night and $3-$4 for a matinee. It sounds like you are getting ripped off for your movies, as well.
That's all well and good, but all this would prove is that SCO knew that one guy they contracted couldn't find a basis for their claims, not that they knew the lawsuit was baseless. Or do you think that SCO's lawyers are the only ones that have ever shopped around for multiple expert witnesses before keeping the one that best supported their claim?
You can make cute little comments all you like, but until you provide a citation as to why you chose that particular list of names, I am going to assume you are just regurgitating someone else's talking points.
Did you just pull those names out of a hat, or did you just get them from some conservative talk show host's website? I mean, Russ Feingold? The guy voted against Clinton's health care reform because he thought it was too pro-insurance. Hell, per his wikipedia article, his 2003 tax return shows home mortgages and a 1998 Buick, so if he was in bed with big business, he sure got the short end of that stick.
That's funny, I didn't see the summary state that it was unsolveable by current computers. It said "conventional computers", which is completely different. Even problems that are not feasible to solve today will still be solved by conventional computers. This is why our key lengths for cryptography are not the same as they were in 1970.
Conspiring to commit a crime can make you a criminal, whether or not you are caught online. You can't really get caught hiring a hitman or soliciting a prostitute, for instance, and say that they can't arrest you because the crime itself has not yet been committed. I assume this was GP's point.
With regard to the Star Wars remakes, I was more or less agreeing with you. I just felt the need to make specific the implications with regard to the IP of the franchise and more specifically the remakes; the way you stated it made it almost sound like Lucas could protect the copyright of the original trilogy by putting out slightly remastered versions every 14 years.
As for protecting commercial reproduction, we gain cohesive canon within a franchise until the original creator of said mythology passes away. To take the Star Wars example further (and please no facetious remarks as I talk about the Star Wars prequels, I know they aren't everyone's cup of tea), it would be conceivable that without some sort of protection, after The Phantom Menace came out, somebody else could have jumped in and released a movie before Clone Wars came out that attempted to beat it to the market and usurp the direction of the series. You run into bizarre issues where an author has control over their series through serialized books when they release them over the span of a few years, but if they either keep expanding the same mythology for more than 14 years or (like in the case of Star Wars) decide to revisit it after a significant break, they lose the ability to protect their newly produced IP for even a day after publication. On the other hand, we don't want to renew their copyright claim on old works just because they have written sequels, so it seems like my suggested compromise is a happy medium. I am, of course, not so attached to it that I don't think there are any other ways to address my concern.
The owner is only the owner because they got the right to the works for free. The Tolkien estate does a better job freeloading than I could ever dream of by that metric.
There are regulations in place that make your chair making business profitable when it wouldn't be under a true free market, actually. A bigger chair and furniture manufacturer can't engage in any number of different anti-competitive behaviors to put you out of business, for instance.
The easy solution to the widow scenario is to have a minimum length for the copyright. It can last 14 years or for the author's lifetime, whichever is longer. If we believe an author's entitlement to profits is in actuality 14 years (or whatever other number), if he dies after that, it ends up being no more society's problem than when a construction worker's wife is deprived of income because of her husband's untimely death.
Just to clarify, the special edition would have been a harder sell even in 1991, because with the copyright expired on the original trilogy, it would have had to compete with a free version of itself that just didn't have new special effects. Not that there is anything wrong with this, as if it were actually worthwhile on its own merits, it would have been profitable anyway. But as it stands, right now a significant portion of the special edition sales were of a result of consumers wanting a new copy of the old films and possibly having little to no interest in the modifications.
The other result would be that in 1991, I would have been able to write unlicensed material using Star Wars characters and lore and sell it as my own. I think is the more interesting discussion, as I'm not sure how comfortable I am with authors having to deal with this sort of thing during their lifetime. There are, of course, compromises to be made on this. A full copyright could last 14 years, and then the author could retain a limited copyright protection in the form of a monopoly on commercial licensing until death. That way, Lucas could make money off of Star Wars until 1991, and then after that, I could freely burn a copy of the original movie for my friend, but I could not sell it to anybody at a profit. I would also therefore be able to write my own prequel trilogy if I wanted, but I could not sell it until after his death. That way, he gets fully control his franchise canon until his death (at which point his canon is finished in my eyes anyway), but at the same time we get to assimilate some portion of his contributions to society much sooner.
One of my complaints about the top menu bar is lack of feedback. I occasionally find myself digging in a file menu that is not menu for the window I meant it to be. I can click another non-overlapping window, or even click the desktop, and there is no massive, immediate change that indicates that I am interacting with a window I had no intention of touching. While this is not necessarily a huge issue, it outweighs an artificial restriction on UI for third party applications, in my mind, as a benefit. I can just avoid the applications that abuse the ability to have non-standard menu bars and get the best of both worlds.
You are using two different (albeit related) senses of "open" interchangeable, which is only intuitive on paper. When I am in an application, command+o opens a dialogue that allows me to select a file to open using the current domain-specific software I have in the foreground. My file browser is not a piece of software that I want to open a file into. It is much more akin to a CLI, where I expect the enter key to execute my previous input. By your logic, I could make a web browser that opens your default search provider whenever I hit ctrl+f on a PC and call it intuitive because I am looking to "find" something, even though most of my users will expect from other analogous applications that it should open a dialogue for doing string matching on my current window.
I personally am enraged every time I hit enter on an application and it sets me up for renaming the icon. I mean, really? That's what I am going to do so frequently that it deserves one of the biggest buttons on my keyboard? That's what passes for intuitive?
Most of those have very little to do with fear-mongering or paranoia. Let's take the corporation + third world equation as an example.
Factories built in low-wage countries have poor working conditions and long hours. The classic free trade advocate's response to this is that the wages and working conditions are still superior to the average in that region, which is actually true. The problem is that all almost all of the new infrastructure for these manufacturing plants is built out in such a way that it benefits only the foreign companies that built it out, and on top of that, wages are inflated in the area. In other words, it damages local businesses and makes it more difficult for the country to strengthen its own infrastructure. The end result is that we pull these communities up a step or two on the economic ladder at the cost of making it far more difficult for them to get up any more steps in the future.
In other words, there are core concerns that are worth addressing with regard to globalization, even if they end up being a little more nuanced than what your average American understands. On the other hand, Glenn Beck is making up fairy tales that have absolutely no connection to any legitimate concern, nuanced or not.
I'd say it is roughly as intellectually dishonest as blaming Islam as a whole for "[blowing] people up" and "[cutting] their heads off ~ while alive" actually. That was kinda the whole point.
That is physical force. How does the government get the money it pays out in subsidies and grants? Please say that taxes are voluntary, you'll be in good company: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H6q0slMhDw8 [youtube.com]
The source of the the government's power and its expenditure are two different processes. Norway's government is largely funded by income generated by money they have invested after selling oil from their large natural reserves. By your logic, if they were to provide grants and farm subsidies, it would not be exerting economic force? Your definition of physical force is as mercurial as Rand's.
You are again confused about what force means.He cannot buy out competition by force, only if the money he offers for their business is a good deal for them. He cannot stop new competition from emerging, hell if he is buying competition out all over the place that alone is an incentive to start a competing company - there is a big check coming in. Even Bill Gates will pretty soon run out of money if he had to buy out everybody.
You don't have to buy out everybody, you just buy out legitimate competitors. What I can't understand is how you can be so delusional that you can pretend it didn't happen when it occured during your lifetime. It is a good deal for them because it is a better option than watching your business crumble when they use any number of other dirty tricks to crush your business. Did you even look at the list of companies that Microsoft bought out?
Talking about industrial revolution:
In the words of Nobel Prize winning Robert E. Lucas, Jr., "For the first time in history, the living standards of the masses of ordinary people have begun to undergo sustained growth.... Nothing remotely like this economic behavior has happened before.
In the words of Nobel prize winning economist F.A. Hayek:the industrial revolution portrayed by the pessimists is the âoeone supreme myth which more than any other has served to discredit the economic system to which we owe our modern day civilization (capitalism)â
In the words of Nobel prize winning economist Milton Friedman: "Industrial Revolution saw a net decline in child labor, rather than an increase."
Nice, free market economists say nice things about free markets. Tonight on the news: bears shit in the woods! Tune in at 10:00!
Seriously, though, Paul Krugman is also a Nobel laureate, and I bet he'd give somewhat different answers if you asked him. Appeals to authority are just as worthless as your other citations. Of course there was a net decline in child labor in the Industrial Revolution. Social reform programs such as Lord Althorp's Act in Britain had already started to cap the number of hours children could work in the week. My contention isn't that the poor did not eventually benefit greatly from the progress made during that time period. It is that all of their gains come from technological advances, and a mostly free market, at best, didn't do anything to help them along, and more than likely, slowed their overall progress.
The great leap forward, the famines in USSR, China, Cambodia, North Korea etc directly caused by agricultural collectivization, immeasurable and unnecessary hunger, poverty and every kind of suffering in India which despite being democratic embraced centrally planned economy until recently etc etc. All those were done with intentions of improving the conditions of people and had the opposite effects.
If you think the government in places like Stalin's Russia and North Korea have the best intentions, then you're more crazy than I realized.
No, Hong Kong is NOT an example of how central planning works better than free market. Just the opposite, it is an example of success of the free market:
You are right in that I don't understand what do you mean by "economic coercion when.. the government is controlling you" as opposed to physical force. What is this economic coercion by the government that does not involve force? How can coercion of any kind not involve physical force?
Just as a quick example that takes place today, farm subsidies. Or the government can require certain concessions in order for me to obtain grant money that I need to stay competitive with rivals, who are also getting the grant money.
You need to be more specific. By what mechanism can he stomp out products competing with his? How does he stop rival corporations and rival billionaires from competing with him and how does he force customers to buy his products as opposed to the competition's products? The evidence is that even without anti-trust laws, the free market does not tend to concentrate anything like that sort of power in the hands of a one or few people and even when it does in a particular market, it does not last for long.
He doesn't stomp out direct and equal competitors. The two collude until they either merge, or one gains enough of an edge to buy out or quash the other. It is utter hogwash that this doesn't happen. As to what he does to smaller companies, to continue our specific example: Microsoft's mergers and acquisitions. That was usually the easier course, but they could also just Embrace, Extend, and Extinguish. And hell, by historical metrics, Microsoft wasn't even that bad as far as monopolistic companies go.
What you are saying is unfounded religious speak. Please provide specific historical examples where true monopolies resolved themselves.
The chart was just one example. For some perspective, in 1600s life expectancy in England was about 35 years which hasn't improved much for centuries prior to industrial revolution. The % of children who died before the age of 5 in London went from something like 75% to 30% in only a few decades. Population: http://apworldhistorywiki.wikispaces.com/file/view/worldpopulationgrowth2%5B1%5D.gif [wikispaces.com] All charts about the period look the same. Why do you think people moved in huge numbers from countryside into the cities to take factory jobs unless it meant a better life and a chance for all four or five children to survive instead of just one as or two was the norm before.
Again you give overly broad statistics and then willfully interpret them to support your stance. Life expectancy was only in the 40s at the start of the 20th century, and a large portion of even that modest growth came from the other statistic you mentioned: infant mortality rates plummeted. This had nothing to do with living in cities and everything to do with medical advances such as pasteurization of milk. The more interesting statistic is that the rate at which people survive through childhood didn't get better at all until much later, because strangely enough, having 8 year olds operate heavy machinery for huge numbers of hours a week in squalid conditions actually was not conducive to a long and happy life.
You've also just flat made up causation that sounds good to you for why people moved to cities. The reality was that between technological advances and population growth, there actually weren't jobs that they could have taken instead away from the cities. They didn't get up one day and say "hey, all those factory workers with their soul crushing poverty sure seem like they have a great life! Let's quit my job fixing shoes for my local community, which is considered a respectable trade and earns me liveable wag
And this is how I know you didn't understand it. You are in agreement with her when you think you are arguing against her: http://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/anarchism.html [aynrandlexicon.com]
Her entire point is that the government's duty (the only moral duty) is to prevent initiation of force by anybody against anybody else, and here you are arguing that without government, someone (corporations) will be able to use force against someone (I guess individuals?). She agrees! Laissez faire capitalism is not anarchy. Itn fact it cannot exist without the rule of law, which means government.
The problem is that Rand convolutes physical violence and economic coercion when she talks about the government controlling you, but then turns around and only addresses physical violence when it comes to what we can do to each other. She's changed the definition of "force" mid-argument, and you've fallen for it wholesale.
This is completely wrong. Bill Gates has billions of dollars. In a society where there is rule of law and the government monopolizes physical force, can he make you do whatever he wants? How?
You can't really pick an example from within our controlled economy and have it say anything about a laissez faire system. If all regulation today were dropped, Bill's corporation could stomp out products competing with his, and then they could control how you or anyone else interacts with a computer. Or, if he took a more personal dislike to you, he could purchase every piece of food out from under you when you try to buy it until you submitted. At that point, he would have as much control over you as the government does now (the government can't actually currently make you take whatever arbitrary action it desires)
Industrial revolution era abuse of lower classes? Is this how they were abused: http://images.tdaxp.com/tdaxp_upload/real_income_per_person_in_england_md.jpg [tdaxp.com]
You can draw a chart exactly like that for every aspect of the standard of living, life expectancy, child mortality, income, education etc. By today's standards worker conditions during the industrial revolution were bad. But, and this is very important: they were enormously better than the conditions that preceded the industrial revolution. In fact, short of invention of agriculture, industrial revolution improved the life of ordinary people more than anything else in the history of human race. If that is what you call abuse, then your expectations are unrealistic. Note that this huge improvement in people's lives was accomplished entirely by private sector with government in England wisely staying mostly out of the way, something that current governments could learn from.
The awesome thing about your chart is that it is not descriptive at all of the quality of life for the bottom quintile of income earners during the same time period. That graph could look like that even if the poorest people got twice as poor, provided the people at the top made enough more money. Even if everything you say is true, though, that does not actually mean that the workers were not being abused. The point of comparison isn't what life would be like if the technology had not been invented. There is not a single shred of evidence you can produce that having laws to protect workers actually stifles innovation (The united states ranks #40 in patents granted per capita, far lower than socialized countries like Sweden and Norway), so they would have gotten the quality of life improvements the technology provided whether they had to work in inhumane conditions or not. The only point of comparison is how those workers would have done if factory owners were not allowed to walk all over them. What you are claim
See, I'd repost what I said in response to a reply up above, but that would be uncouth. Instead, I'll say this: calling her an economist is giving her way too much credit.
Slashdot Mirror
In the city where I grew up here in the US, you can still see movies in a mainstream theater for like $5 at night and $3-$4 for a matinee. It sounds like you are getting ripped off for your movies, as well.
That's all well and good, but all this would prove is that SCO knew that one guy they contracted couldn't find a basis for their claims, not that they knew the lawsuit was baseless. Or do you think that SCO's lawyers are the only ones that have ever shopped around for multiple expert witnesses before keeping the one that best supported their claim?
Since Yahoo is powered by Bing, isn't this a little like saying Bing has "overtook" Bing?
You can make cute little comments all you like, but until you provide a citation as to why you chose that particular list of names, I am going to assume you are just regurgitating someone else's talking points.
Did you just pull those names out of a hat, or did you just get them from some conservative talk show host's website? I mean, Russ Feingold? The guy voted against Clinton's health care reform because he thought it was too pro-insurance. Hell, per his wikipedia article, his 2003 tax return shows home mortgages and a 1998 Buick, so if he was in bed with big business, he sure got the short end of that stick.
That's funny, I didn't see the summary state that it was unsolveable by current computers. It said "conventional computers", which is completely different. Even problems that are not feasible to solve today will still be solved by conventional computers. This is why our key lengths for cryptography are not the same as they were in 1970.
Conspiring to commit a crime can make you a criminal, whether or not you are caught online. You can't really get caught hiring a hitman or soliciting a prostitute, for instance, and say that they can't arrest you because the crime itself has not yet been committed. I assume this was GP's point.
With regard to the Star Wars remakes, I was more or less agreeing with you. I just felt the need to make specific the implications with regard to the IP of the franchise and more specifically the remakes; the way you stated it made it almost sound like Lucas could protect the copyright of the original trilogy by putting out slightly remastered versions every 14 years.
As for protecting commercial reproduction, we gain cohesive canon within a franchise until the original creator of said mythology passes away. To take the Star Wars example further (and please no facetious remarks as I talk about the Star Wars prequels, I know they aren't everyone's cup of tea), it would be conceivable that without some sort of protection, after The Phantom Menace came out, somebody else could have jumped in and released a movie before Clone Wars came out that attempted to beat it to the market and usurp the direction of the series. You run into bizarre issues where an author has control over their series through serialized books when they release them over the span of a few years, but if they either keep expanding the same mythology for more than 14 years or (like in the case of Star Wars) decide to revisit it after a significant break, they lose the ability to protect their newly produced IP for even a day after publication. On the other hand, we don't want to renew their copyright claim on old works just because they have written sequels, so it seems like my suggested compromise is a happy medium. I am, of course, not so attached to it that I don't think there are any other ways to address my concern.
The owner is only the owner because they got the right to the works for free. The Tolkien estate does a better job freeloading than I could ever dream of by that metric.
There are regulations in place that make your chair making business profitable when it wouldn't be under a true free market, actually. A bigger chair and furniture manufacturer can't engage in any number of different anti-competitive behaviors to put you out of business, for instance.
The easy solution to the widow scenario is to have a minimum length for the copyright. It can last 14 years or for the author's lifetime, whichever is longer. If we believe an author's entitlement to profits is in actuality 14 years (or whatever other number), if he dies after that, it ends up being no more society's problem than when a construction worker's wife is deprived of income because of her husband's untimely death.
Just to clarify, the special edition would have been a harder sell even in 1991, because with the copyright expired on the original trilogy, it would have had to compete with a free version of itself that just didn't have new special effects. Not that there is anything wrong with this, as if it were actually worthwhile on its own merits, it would have been profitable anyway. But as it stands, right now a significant portion of the special edition sales were of a result of consumers wanting a new copy of the old films and possibly having little to no interest in the modifications.
The other result would be that in 1991, I would have been able to write unlicensed material using Star Wars characters and lore and sell it as my own. I think is the more interesting discussion, as I'm not sure how comfortable I am with authors having to deal with this sort of thing during their lifetime. There are, of course, compromises to be made on this. A full copyright could last 14 years, and then the author could retain a limited copyright protection in the form of a monopoly on commercial licensing until death. That way, Lucas could make money off of Star Wars until 1991, and then after that, I could freely burn a copy of the original movie for my friend, but I could not sell it to anybody at a profit. I would also therefore be able to write my own prequel trilogy if I wanted, but I could not sell it until after his death. That way, he gets fully control his franchise canon until his death (at which point his canon is finished in my eyes anyway), but at the same time we get to assimilate some portion of his contributions to society much sooner.
That's cute. You think legality has anything to do with whether Hollywood goes after them.
Ha ha! Carnivore.
One of my complaints about the top menu bar is lack of feedback. I occasionally find myself digging in a file menu that is not menu for the window I meant it to be. I can click another non-overlapping window, or even click the desktop, and there is no massive, immediate change that indicates that I am interacting with a window I had no intention of touching. While this is not necessarily a huge issue, it outweighs an artificial restriction on UI for third party applications, in my mind, as a benefit. I can just avoid the applications that abuse the ability to have non-standard menu bars and get the best of both worlds.
You are using two different (albeit related) senses of "open" interchangeable, which is only intuitive on paper. When I am in an application, command+o opens a dialogue that allows me to select a file to open using the current domain-specific software I have in the foreground. My file browser is not a piece of software that I want to open a file into. It is much more akin to a CLI, where I expect the enter key to execute my previous input. By your logic, I could make a web browser that opens your default search provider whenever I hit ctrl+f on a PC and call it intuitive because I am looking to "find" something, even though most of my users will expect from other analogous applications that it should open a dialogue for doing string matching on my current window.
I personally am enraged every time I hit enter on an application and it sets me up for renaming the icon. I mean, really? That's what I am going to do so frequently that it deserves one of the biggest buttons on my keyboard? That's what passes for intuitive?
But maaaaan, safety is really cramping my style! I don't want to seem uncool like one of the old-timers!
Most of those have very little to do with fear-mongering or paranoia. Let's take the corporation + third world equation as an example.
Factories built in low-wage countries have poor working conditions and long hours. The classic free trade advocate's response to this is that the wages and working conditions are still superior to the average in that region, which is actually true. The problem is that all almost all of the new infrastructure for these manufacturing plants is built out in such a way that it benefits only the foreign companies that built it out, and on top of that, wages are inflated in the area. In other words, it damages local businesses and makes it more difficult for the country to strengthen its own infrastructure. The end result is that we pull these communities up a step or two on the economic ladder at the cost of making it far more difficult for them to get up any more steps in the future.
In other words, there are core concerns that are worth addressing with regard to globalization, even if they end up being a little more nuanced than what your average American understands. On the other hand, Glenn Beck is making up fairy tales that have absolutely no connection to any legitimate concern, nuanced or not.
I'd say it is roughly as intellectually dishonest as blaming Islam as a whole for "[blowing] people up" and "[cutting] their heads off ~ while alive" actually. That was kinda the whole point.
Yeah, Christians only bomb abortion clinics, and churches full of people with the wrong skin color. Oh, and committing genocide against Jews.
Good thing we can generalize religions based on a few members' actions.
That is physical force. How does the government get the money it pays out in subsidies and grants? Please say that taxes are voluntary, you'll be in good company: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H6q0slMhDw8 [youtube.com]
The source of the the government's power and its expenditure are two different processes. Norway's government is largely funded by income generated by money they have invested after selling oil from their large natural reserves. By your logic, if they were to provide grants and farm subsidies, it would not be exerting economic force? Your definition of physical force is as mercurial as Rand's.
You are again confused about what force means.He cannot buy out competition by force, only if the money he offers for their business is a good deal for them. He cannot stop new competition from emerging, hell if he is buying competition out all over the place that alone is an incentive to start a competing company - there is a big check coming in. Even Bill Gates will pretty soon run out of money if he had to buy out everybody.
You don't have to buy out everybody, you just buy out legitimate competitors. What I can't understand is how you can be so delusional that you can pretend it didn't happen when it occured during your lifetime. It is a good deal for them because it is a better option than watching your business crumble when they use any number of other dirty tricks to crush your business. Did you even look at the list of companies that Microsoft bought out?
Talking about industrial revolution: In the words of Nobel Prize winning Robert E. Lucas, Jr., "For the first time in history, the living standards of the masses of ordinary people have begun to undergo sustained growth. ... Nothing remotely like this economic behavior has happened before.
In the words of Nobel prize winning economist F.A. Hayek :the industrial revolution portrayed by the pessimists is the âoeone supreme myth which more than any other has served to discredit the economic system to which we owe our modern day civilization (capitalism)â
In the words of Nobel prize winning economist Milton Friedman: "Industrial Revolution saw a net decline in child labor, rather than an increase."
Nice, free market economists say nice things about free markets. Tonight on the news: bears shit in the woods! Tune in at 10:00!
Seriously, though, Paul Krugman is also a Nobel laureate, and I bet he'd give somewhat different answers if you asked him. Appeals to authority are just as worthless as your other citations. Of course there was a net decline in child labor in the Industrial Revolution. Social reform programs such as Lord Althorp's Act in Britain had already started to cap the number of hours children could work in the week. My contention isn't that the poor did not eventually benefit greatly from the progress made during that time period. It is that all of their gains come from technological advances, and a mostly free market, at best, didn't do anything to help them along, and more than likely, slowed their overall progress.
The great leap forward, the famines in USSR, China, Cambodia, North Korea etc directly caused by agricultural collectivization, immeasurable and unnecessary hunger, poverty and every kind of suffering in India which despite being democratic embraced centrally planned economy until recently etc etc. All those were done with intentions of improving the conditions of people and had the opposite effects.
If you think the government in places like Stalin's Russia and North Korea have the best intentions, then you're more crazy than I realized.
No, Hong Kong is NOT an example of how central planning works better than free market. Just the opposite, it is an example of success of the free market:
You are right in that I don't understand what do you mean by "economic coercion when .. the government is controlling you" as opposed to physical force. What is this economic coercion by the government that does not involve force? How can coercion of any kind not involve physical force?
Just as a quick example that takes place today, farm subsidies. Or the government can require certain concessions in order for me to obtain grant money that I need to stay competitive with rivals, who are also getting the grant money.
You need to be more specific. By what mechanism can he stomp out products competing with his? How does he stop rival corporations and rival billionaires from competing with him and how does he force customers to buy his products as opposed to the competition's products? The evidence is that even without anti-trust laws, the free market does not tend to concentrate anything like that sort of power in the hands of a one or few people and even when it does in a particular market, it does not last for long.
He doesn't stomp out direct and equal competitors. The two collude until they either merge, or one gains enough of an edge to buy out or quash the other. It is utter hogwash that this doesn't happen. As to what he does to smaller companies, to continue our specific example: Microsoft's mergers and acquisitions. That was usually the easier course, but they could also just Embrace, Extend, and Extinguish. And hell, by historical metrics, Microsoft wasn't even that bad as far as monopolistic companies go.
What you are saying is unfounded religious speak. Please provide specific historical examples where true monopolies resolved themselves.
The chart was just one example. For some perspective, in 1600s life expectancy in England was about 35 years which hasn't improved much for centuries prior to industrial revolution. The % of children who died before the age of 5 in London went from something like 75% to 30% in only a few decades. Population: http://apworldhistorywiki.wikispaces.com/file/view/worldpopulationgrowth2%5B1%5D.gif [wikispaces.com] All charts about the period look the same. Why do you think people moved in huge numbers from countryside into the cities to take factory jobs unless it meant a better life and a chance for all four or five children to survive instead of just one as or two was the norm before.
Again you give overly broad statistics and then willfully interpret them to support your stance. Life expectancy was only in the 40s at the start of the 20th century, and a large portion of even that modest growth came from the other statistic you mentioned: infant mortality rates plummeted. This had nothing to do with living in cities and everything to do with medical advances such as pasteurization of milk. The more interesting statistic is that the rate at which people survive through childhood didn't get better at all until much later, because strangely enough, having 8 year olds operate heavy machinery for huge numbers of hours a week in squalid conditions actually was not conducive to a long and happy life.
You've also just flat made up causation that sounds good to you for why people moved to cities. The reality was that between technological advances and population growth, there actually weren't jobs that they could have taken instead away from the cities. They didn't get up one day and say "hey, all those factory workers with their soul crushing poverty sure seem like they have a great life! Let's quit my job fixing shoes for my local community, which is considered a respectable trade and earns me liveable wag
And this is how I know you didn't understand it. You are in agreement with her when you think you are arguing against her: http://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/anarchism.html [aynrandlexicon.com] Her entire point is that the government's duty (the only moral duty) is to prevent initiation of force by anybody against anybody else, and here you are arguing that without government, someone (corporations) will be able to use force against someone (I guess individuals?). She agrees! Laissez faire capitalism is not anarchy. Itn fact it cannot exist without the rule of law, which means government.
The problem is that Rand convolutes physical violence and economic coercion when she talks about the government controlling you, but then turns around and only addresses physical violence when it comes to what we can do to each other. She's changed the definition of "force" mid-argument, and you've fallen for it wholesale.
This is completely wrong. Bill Gates has billions of dollars. In a society where there is rule of law and the government monopolizes physical force, can he make you do whatever he wants? How?
You can't really pick an example from within our controlled economy and have it say anything about a laissez faire system. If all regulation today were dropped, Bill's corporation could stomp out products competing with his, and then they could control how you or anyone else interacts with a computer. Or, if he took a more personal dislike to you, he could purchase every piece of food out from under you when you try to buy it until you submitted. At that point, he would have as much control over you as the government does now (the government can't actually currently make you take whatever arbitrary action it desires)
Industrial revolution era abuse of lower classes? Is this how they were abused: http://images.tdaxp.com/tdaxp_upload/real_income_per_person_in_england_md.jpg [tdaxp.com] You can draw a chart exactly like that for every aspect of the standard of living, life expectancy, child mortality, income, education etc. By today's standards worker conditions during the industrial revolution were bad. But, and this is very important: they were enormously better than the conditions that preceded the industrial revolution. In fact, short of invention of agriculture, industrial revolution improved the life of ordinary people more than anything else in the history of human race. If that is what you call abuse, then your expectations are unrealistic. Note that this huge improvement in people's lives was accomplished entirely by private sector with government in England wisely staying mostly out of the way, something that current governments could learn from.
The awesome thing about your chart is that it is not descriptive at all of the quality of life for the bottom quintile of income earners during the same time period. That graph could look like that even if the poorest people got twice as poor, provided the people at the top made enough more money. Even if everything you say is true, though, that does not actually mean that the workers were not being abused. The point of comparison isn't what life would be like if the technology had not been invented. There is not a single shred of evidence you can produce that having laws to protect workers actually stifles innovation (The united states ranks #40 in patents granted per capita, far lower than socialized countries like Sweden and Norway), so they would have gotten the quality of life improvements the technology provided whether they had to work in inhumane conditions or not. The only point of comparison is how those workers would have done if factory owners were not allowed to walk all over them. What you are claim
See, I'd repost what I said in response to a reply up above, but that would be uncouth. Instead, I'll say this: calling her an economist is giving her way too much credit.