On the contrary, it's proving the point. A hundred thousand is a tiny sliver of the what, tens of millions of software developers in the world?
And it isn't about quantity anyway. It's about control. You can have a million million software developers in the app store, but if no one is allowed to produce anything that "duplicates functionality" of an existing app, you have no competition. If no one is allowed to produce anything detrimental to the curator (or to anyone that can lean sufficiently hard on the curator), you have no freedom.
You're a lot safer if you live your life inside a cage. A lot safer.
You can't include malware that way, as the devices check the applications signatures and thus will reject everything not authorized.
You're assuming the signing keys aren't on a server somewhere that the attackers can hack into. They are.
A single point of failure is a heck of a lot easier to patrol and fix then the billions points of failure you have on a PC.
You don't seem to understand the problem with a single point of failure. If you're negligent and you run malware on your device, your device is infected. If Apple is negligent and an infected iOS update gets pushed out, everybody's device is infected.
The gardener is not a god. There is a trade off between false negatives and false positives. The only way to eliminate all of the bad is to eliminate most of the good.
More than that, to keep malware off of a device you would have to crush all security vulnerabilities whatsoever, otherwise the malware author can use the vulnerability to jump the wall. And if you could somehow miraculously create perfect security, why do you need a walled garden on top of it? Open the floodgates; you have perfect security so nothing can touch anything it's not supposed to.
It isn't about every user being able to write software. That is never going to happen. What it's about is the ability of the millions of independent developers to give users software the gatekeepers don't approve. If there are billions of people with Windows 7 or Snow Leopard or Ubuntu, I can write a piece of software and sell it or give it away to those users and there isn't anything Microsoft, Apple or Canonical can do to stop me.
If those users have to jailbreak their computers before they can install my software, and they don't know how to do that, I'm now beholden to the troll under the bridge into the walled garden. No apps that compete with iTunes. No apps that "ridicule public figures." No apps that help dissidents unless Apple is willing to give up China.
And precisely how does that explain FreeBSD, Haiku OS or any number of other OSes that are tiny in terms of the desktop market, yet still attract enough following to be viable?
You can't really separate the viability of FreeBSD from Linux, which is the most popular server platform by most measures. Think about where FreeBSD would be without the GNU userland and all the other software developed primarily by the Linux community and then ported to BSD. None of that stuff exists without the market share of "GNU/Linux."
And you know perfectly well that all the little non-Unix-like operating systems are just toys and senior projects. Nobody uses Haiku OS but a few nostalgic former BeOS users, and there is a reason that BeOS itself was discontinued.
No, but you can define "quality" as "quality attributable to the meritorious conduct of Microsoft" as distinguished from "quality attributable to dominant market position."
You arent considering the full-breadth of what 'quality' means.
You're attempting to fold all of the market barriers to entry into the definition of quality, so that any barrier to entry (like third party application support) is written off as a good quality of the monopolist's product. Which is totally useless when the point to distinguish between barriers to entry and meritorious competition on the basis of price and quality.
But the a huge abuse in this case is also that Google forbid advertisers on Google running the same ads on other networks. That is pure monopoly abuse.
You want to provide a link for where you got this? Because it sure sounds like you're just parroting the line from the CNET article linked in the summary ("Those obligations bar advertisers from using the same ads they run on Google on their own sites or competing search engines such as Bing and Yahoo.") But the whole CNET article is just rewording the Financial Times article it links, and it looks like the game of telephone has produced a transcription error, because the FT instead has: "Google is also said to impose exclusivity obligations on advertising partners, preventing them from placing certain types of competing ads on their websites"
Which is a completely different thing. As in, a completely legitimate and understandable thing, because the point of paying "advertising partners" to put ads on their websites is so that users will see them, and if you fill your website with ads from a dozen ad companies then users are not going to look at all of them and you're ripping off the ad companies because they're paying you for eyeballs that never see their ads.
So let's see the link for your claims other than the CNET article that itself doesn't cite any source for it.
You could say the same for the Microsoft monopoly.
No, you really can't. People don't choose Microsoft because they like it, they choose Microsoft because they don't have a choice. It is necessary to run third party software, which has nothing to do with the quality or price of the actual Microsoft product. And by and large it comes on your new PC whether you want it or not.
Compare this to search engines: They all cost the same (free), and there is no switching cost because there is no third party software (you don't have to buy a different web browser and retrain your employees etc.), you don't have to learn anything new because they all work the same way and the thing that comes on your new PC is Bing rather than Google. The only reason to choose a search engine is if you actually prefer the search results.
Your argument is similar to hiring someone to paint your house, then refusing to pay them after the job is done. You have deprived the painter of his time.
The difference is that you never promised anyone you would pay for the work.
You can try to extend that to the social contract, but then the analogy breaks down immediately because in the case of the painter, without your specific, individual promise to pay the work would not be done, but in the case of the author the work will be done whether any specific individual buys a copy or not. More to the point, society in general is upholding the social contract because people are still spending their entire entertainment budgets on entertainment.
Let's put it this way: Piracy is irrelevant as long as artists are getting paid. And they are.
Most of the housing already exists; what doesn't would be produced in the usual way by supply and demand.
The key to the program is who it cuts out of the costs: Bankers. Right now you go to the bank, you take out a mortgage loan and then you pay a mortgage payment which goes almost entirely to pay the interest. If the government made the loan directly to homeowners, the rate could be lower because the government can borrow money very cheaply and pass on the savings, and because the government doesn't need to make a profit. All that money not paid in interest is now in the pocket of the homeowner. And because the rate is so low, the government can afford to subsidize the interest entirely for those who buy low cost homes, at the cost of a very modest tax on those who buy more extravagant homes.
It's exactly because this isotope is stable in this extremely toxic chemical form for so long that it deserves to be singled out.
Except that stability is not rare. It isn't a reason to single something out. It's just a propaganda tool: "Toxic for 24000 years!!11!" Never mind that most other toxic elements are toxic forever.
hope of the prospect of dealing with plutonium with technology that isn't available with existing materials technology.
You do understand that it has nothing to do with materials technology and nothing to do with untested reactors. You don't even need new reactors. A variety of existing reactors can use mixed oxide fuel. As I recall the CANDU is supposed to be the most effective at destroying Plutonium of those already in commission.
The hold up on actually doing it with all existing "waste" Plutonium -- which isn't to say that it hasn't been done before -- is the proliferation concern. Supposedly if you go around transporting Plutonium to be reprocessed into reactor fuel, it gives terrorists more opportunities to steal it. Of course, that's completely nonsense because it can't be stolen once it's destroyed, but it can be if you just leave it sitting around indefinitely. (One can also imagine a trivial way to deal with this: Put the military in charge of transporting it from place to place and have them take the same precautions they do with actual nuclear weapons.)
Ingest one millionth of a gram of plutonium and it will kill you, the radiation will induce cancer in the body - they are facts.
So you're reiterating that it's toxic and saying cancer because it's scary. Now distinguish why we should care about Plutonium but not care about arsenic, mercury, cadmium, lead, vinyl chloride, polychlorinated biphenyls, benzene, cyanide, cobalt, etc. etc.
On the contrary I have cited many reasons for Plutonium to be singled out. It's precisely that we continue to make these mistakes so often that we can't afford to continue to make these mistakes with plutonium any more. It's extreme toxicity is stable for at least 25000 years despite the level of radioactivity it's gone through a process of significant concentration and neutron bombardment to achieve its form.
That isn't "many reasons." That's "it's toxic" and "irrelevant information can be scary." What does neutron bombardment have anything to do with anything? If you make the same isotope of the same element by bombarding a lower atomic weight element with neutrons as opposed to spontaneous decay from a higher atomic weight element, is the result somehow more or less dangerous?
Yes I do, to gauge your depth of consideration.
What you are attempting to engage in is known as the "ad hominem fallacy." You attack the person you're arguing with instead of the argument. If I say, "Plutonium can be destroyed by neutron bombardment," and that is a true statement of fact, it doesn't matter one iota whether it's the only thing I know about Plutonium whatsoever. It isn't made false by the lack of additional knowledge on the part of the speaker. So as you seem to have no interest in disputing the fact of the matter, please forgive me if I lack the time to answer irrelevant questions that anyone can look up on the internet and which have no bearing on the original matter in any event.
Yes it is fissionable but on an industrial scale, unlikely.
Would you care to back up your unsupported assertion with some reasoning or citations? Because I can.
The real question is are you aware of how deadly they are outside of your circle of expertise?
I'm going to ask this once more: What is your reasoning behind why these isotopes should be prohibited from the world, when I can give you a list of compounds as long as your arm that in actual fact have each caused more deaths and more cancer and yet we still use regularly in industry?
In any event, I'm not too concerned about the negative consequences of eradicating mosquitoes because it will never happen. A female mosquito can lay anywhere from two hundred to a thousand eggs per brood depending on the species. A single gravid female can lead to a huge population in a few years, with every female in each succeeding generation having several thousand offspring. The best you could hope from a program like this is to establish a stable equilibrium at a lower population; most likely the population will crash, most genetic lines will be extinguished (including this one), and then the population will be back to where it was in two years or so.
I don't know about that. It seems like all you would have to do is maintain a population of mosquitoes in labs from which you could breed males with the new gene and then release half the males into the wild on a regular basis. The number of males you release in a period of time would remain constant while the world population crashes. You could maintain the program for a period of years after anyone has seen a mosquito in the wild, so that any efforts at repopulation are thwarted. And the program could be reinstituted if new mosquitoes are discovered after its discontinuation.
If the plan fails it would be for natural selection reasons. Some females will so happen to have an aversion to the modified males but not the unmodified males and those lines will be unaffected. But one can imagine the scientists being able to compensate for that by further modifying the males in some way.
You started out with something that sounded almost like it was going to be a response to what I posted, but then it turned into something that I can only think to respond to by expressing my condolences about your insobriety.
Some little guy comes up with some clever new widget and the big guys buy out his company *to get his patents*.
In what way is that supposed to allow new companies to enter the market and increase the number of competitors?
Your argument is that the patent system is good because it allows patent trolling. If the small company were to enter the market intent on actually making something, the big guys would be able to squish him into a stain on the floor with their patents. Only by giving up any aspirations of becoming a new competitor can he get any money. Which is, incidentally, the real reason that big companies will pay money for patents: They don't really care that much if the patent falls into the hands of a competitor. If that happens they just cross-license. The problem is what happens if it falls into the hands of a patent troll. Which is another way of saying, the only little guys who make any money are the patent trolls.
So yes, we've prevented small companies from being able to enter the market for actual tech products whatsoever in order to make sure we have a strong patent trolling sector. Good point.
Your proposed replacement reserve currencies are nonsense. The Swiss Franc? Their economy isn't big enough. The people buying Francs already who are doing so because the Swiss have a strong economy in the recession are destroying that very economy by causing excessive deflation. The Swiss government can't respond by increasing the money supply because if they did then the second anywhere else starts to recover, enough people would dump their holdings of Francs that it would trigger hyperinflation. As for Singapore, they're a smaller economy than Switzerland. And nobody is going to adopt Chinese currency because China intentionally keeps its value low to promote exports, which is the opposite of what holders of currency are looking for. The only realistic replacement for the US dollar as the world reserve currency is the Euro, and they don't seem to be in any position to do that right now.
In addition to that, if the world switched reserve currencies then the debt is totally irrelevant. If there was a large migration away from the dollar in a short period of time, the US would have the problem the Swiss need to avoid: All the money people were holding as reserve goes back into the local economy and the currency loses most of its value. At that point the debt is trivial and you can pay it with a song, because it's denominated in devalued currency.
And that would never happen anyway because the whole world would do everything to stop it. A transition to a different reserve currency would cause the value of the dollar to tank faster than anyone could actually unload their holdings. Which means that if such a thing were even rumored, everyone holding US dollars -- which is to say everyone -- would start frantically doing everything possible to stop it, to avoid collectively losing their shirts.
You're still not getting it. Yes, obviously, if you can do more work with less labor then you need less labor to do the same work. But there is no requirement to do the same amount of work. You can do much more work. You can do all the work that isn't cost effective when you have to pay twice as much in labor costs.
Let me give you an example: If you invent the washing machine, you put all of the people who are paid to do laundry by hand out of a job. But nobody can actually afford to pay someone to wash their laundry by hand. It would cost like $20,000 a year in today's dollars. Only the super rich could afford it, and they only comprise a very small part of the population. The middle class just had to wash their own laundry by themselves. So when you invent the washing machine, there are 500 people who lose their jobs washing the laundry of 500 rich families who can afford to pay for it. At the same time, you create tens of thousands of new jobs manufacturing millions of washing machines for millions of middle class families.
It works that way with everything. Automation does not cause money to be created or destroyed. It only reallocates it. If you eliminate someone's job at a savings of $20,000/year and reduce prices by the same amount, there is now an extra $20,000/year distributed throughout the pockets of all the customers because they've saved that much buying the product that is now produced more efficiently. They can now afford to buy something additional that they couldn't previously afford, and whoever lost their job can get a new job producing the extra stuff that people can afford to buy with the money they saved.
Also consider this: You don't have an option between "5 American jobs with automation" and "10 American jobs without automation", you have an option between "5 middle class American jobs with automation" and "10 below-US-minimum-wage Chinese jobs without automation." And in the latter situation demand tanks because everybody with a job is barely making a subsistence wage and can't afford to buy anything, and everyone else is unemployed.
There is no situation in which efficiency is a bad thing. In the absolute worst case, where everyone who saves money from automation totally irrationally decides they would rather hoard currency than spend or invest it, you only have to have the government create a disincentive for doing that, like printing money to inflate the value of hoarded currency and then spending it on social programs to aid the unemployed in the period of time before the inflation batters the irrational hoarders in the wallet and convinces them to change their behavior.
Yes, the butterfly effect is possible. But it's by far the exception rather than the rule. Most of the time when a species goes extinct, no separate and significantly bad consequences result. Of course, it could, and for that reason we shouldn't just stop caring if things go extinct. But when we have something that we hate and serves no apparent good purpose (like mosquitoes), it might be a good thing that they should cease to exist.
Just as killing mosquitoes wholesale would be "bad" for the "cycle of life,"
I'm not at all convinced that mosquitoes aren't an exception. Most of their "positive utility" is in serving as food for critters higher on the food chain, but in that respect they're pretty fungible with most other insects. If we killed all the mosquitoes, it wouldn't kill all the bats -- they would just eat other insects.
The primary other thing they do is draw blood from various animals (which has a negligible effect on anything) and spread disease (which is pretty firmly in the net negative category).
"Pretty much on its own" is by no means equivalent to "on its own." Machines need to be manufactured, stored, marketed, distributed, operated, maintained, accounted for, etc. etc. That's jobs. The only way it isn't is if you automate literally everything, and we're so far away from that point that it's irrelevant. (And if we ever get there then we're living in Star Trek replicator land and nobody "needs" a job because everything is so cheap that a government can collect $10 in tax revenue and with it buy food and shelter for everyone forever.)
I mean, if your goal is keeping a lot of people busy, efficiency is the one thing you don't want.
This nonsense is where all the jobs go. Efficiency is how you create jobs. The reason people don't have jobs is that the cost of doing the things that need to be done (like improving infrastructure) exceeds the amount anyone is willing to pay to do it. The way you fix that is by reducing the cost of doing things. We would have a damn sight less crumbling infrastructure if we could get three times the work for twice the labor, and we would then have twice as many jobs because it became cost effective to do three times as much work.
The problem with promoting inefficiency is that you create a lot of jobs for about three seconds, until someone more efficient from another country or who otherwise isn't under your control comes by and eats your lunch. Then instead increasing the number of jobs, you lose the ones you had in the first place because they go off to some foreign land that doesn't prize inefficiency.
It's not the stock market. It's the legal system. Especially the patent system. If you're the little guy and you start to challenge the big guy, you get a nastygram to the effect of "this is a list of our patents that you're infringing. You can take a license for ONE BILLION DOLLARS, or you could just sell is your company and retire." Naturally the little guy doesn't have to sell his company to the bigger company. There is another option: He can sell his company to a different bigger company, which has sufficient defensive patents to tell the first bigger company to go to hell. Which is why the little guy can get good money -- the big guys will bid against each other for which one buys him out. There just isn't any option left of "remain an independent company."
Slashdot Mirror
On the contrary, it's proving the point. A hundred thousand is a tiny sliver of the what, tens of millions of software developers in the world?
And it isn't about quantity anyway. It's about control. You can have a million million software developers in the app store, but if no one is allowed to produce anything that "duplicates functionality" of an existing app, you have no competition. If no one is allowed to produce anything detrimental to the curator (or to anyone that can lean sufficiently hard on the curator), you have no freedom.
You're a lot safer if you live your life inside a cage. A lot safer.
You can't include malware that way, as the devices check the applications signatures and thus will reject everything not authorized.
You're assuming the signing keys aren't on a server somewhere that the attackers can hack into. They are.
A single point of failure is a heck of a lot easier to patrol and fix then the billions points of failure you have on a PC.
You don't seem to understand the problem with a single point of failure. If you're negligent and you run malware on your device, your device is infected. If Apple is negligent and an infected iOS update gets pushed out, everybody's device is infected.
Not if the gardener does his job
The gardener is not a god. There is a trade off between false negatives and false positives. The only way to eliminate all of the bad is to eliminate most of the good.
More than that, to keep malware off of a device you would have to crush all security vulnerabilities whatsoever, otherwise the malware author can use the vulnerability to jump the wall. And if you could somehow miraculously create perfect security, why do you need a walled garden on top of it? Open the floodgates; you have perfect security so nothing can touch anything it's not supposed to.
It isn't about every user being able to write software. That is never going to happen. What it's about is the ability of the millions of independent developers to give users software the gatekeepers don't approve. If there are billions of people with Windows 7 or Snow Leopard or Ubuntu, I can write a piece of software and sell it or give it away to those users and there isn't anything Microsoft, Apple or Canonical can do to stop me.
If those users have to jailbreak their computers before they can install my software, and they don't know how to do that, I'm now beholden to the troll under the bridge into the walled garden. No apps that compete with iTunes. No apps that "ridicule public figures." No apps that help dissidents unless Apple is willing to give up China.
Pardon my French, but fuck that shit.
And precisely how does that explain FreeBSD, Haiku OS or any number of other OSes that are tiny in terms of the desktop market, yet still attract enough following to be viable?
You can't really separate the viability of FreeBSD from Linux, which is the most popular server platform by most measures. Think about where FreeBSD would be without the GNU userland and all the other software developed primarily by the Linux community and then ported to BSD. None of that stuff exists without the market share of "GNU/Linux."
And you know perfectly well that all the little non-Unix-like operating systems are just toys and senior projects. Nobody uses Haiku OS but a few nostalgic former BeOS users, and there is a reason that BeOS itself was discontinued.
No, but you can define "quality" as "quality attributable to the meritorious conduct of Microsoft" as distinguished from "quality attributable to dominant market position."
You arent considering the full-breadth of what 'quality' means.
You're attempting to fold all of the market barriers to entry into the definition of quality, so that any barrier to entry (like third party application support) is written off as a good quality of the monopolist's product. Which is totally useless when the point to distinguish between barriers to entry and meritorious competition on the basis of price and quality.
But the a huge abuse in this case is also that Google forbid advertisers on Google running the same ads on other networks. That is pure monopoly abuse.
You want to provide a link for where you got this? Because it sure sounds like you're just parroting the line from the CNET article linked in the summary ("Those obligations bar advertisers from using the same ads they run on Google on their own sites or competing search engines such as Bing and Yahoo.") But the whole CNET article is just rewording the Financial Times article it links, and it looks like the game of telephone has produced a transcription error, because the FT instead has: "Google is also said to impose exclusivity obligations on advertising partners, preventing them from placing certain types of competing ads on their websites"
Which is a completely different thing. As in, a completely legitimate and understandable thing, because the point of paying "advertising partners" to put ads on their websites is so that users will see them, and if you fill your website with ads from a dozen ad companies then users are not going to look at all of them and you're ripping off the ad companies because they're paying you for eyeballs that never see their ads.
So let's see the link for your claims other than the CNET article that itself doesn't cite any source for it.
You could say the same for the Microsoft monopoly.
No, you really can't. People don't choose Microsoft because they like it, they choose Microsoft because they don't have a choice. It is necessary to run third party software, which has nothing to do with the quality or price of the actual Microsoft product. And by and large it comes on your new PC whether you want it or not.
Compare this to search engines: They all cost the same (free), and there is no switching cost because there is no third party software (you don't have to buy a different web browser and retrain your employees etc.), you don't have to learn anything new because they all work the same way and the thing that comes on your new PC is Bing rather than Google. The only reason to choose a search engine is if you actually prefer the search results.
Your argument is similar to hiring someone to paint your house, then refusing to pay them after the job is done. You have deprived the painter of his time.
The difference is that you never promised anyone you would pay for the work.
You can try to extend that to the social contract, but then the analogy breaks down immediately because in the case of the painter, without your specific, individual promise to pay the work would not be done, but in the case of the author the work will be done whether any specific individual buys a copy or not. More to the point, society in general is upholding the social contract because people are still spending their entire entertainment budgets on entertainment.
Let's put it this way: Piracy is irrelevant as long as artists are getting paid. And they are.
Most of the housing already exists; what doesn't would be produced in the usual way by supply and demand.
The key to the program is who it cuts out of the costs: Bankers. Right now you go to the bank, you take out a mortgage loan and then you pay a mortgage payment which goes almost entirely to pay the interest. If the government made the loan directly to homeowners, the rate could be lower because the government can borrow money very cheaply and pass on the savings, and because the government doesn't need to make a profit. All that money not paid in interest is now in the pocket of the homeowner. And because the rate is so low, the government can afford to subsidize the interest entirely for those who buy low cost homes, at the cost of a very modest tax on those who buy more extravagant homes.
It's exactly because this isotope is stable in this extremely toxic chemical form for so long that it deserves to be singled out.
Except that stability is not rare. It isn't a reason to single something out. It's just a propaganda tool: "Toxic for 24000 years!!11!" Never mind that most other toxic elements are toxic forever.
hope of the prospect of dealing with plutonium with technology that isn't available with existing materials technology.
You do understand that it has nothing to do with materials technology and nothing to do with untested reactors. You don't even need new reactors. A variety of existing reactors can use mixed oxide fuel. As I recall the CANDU is supposed to be the most effective at destroying Plutonium of those already in commission.
The hold up on actually doing it with all existing "waste" Plutonium -- which isn't to say that it hasn't been done before -- is the proliferation concern. Supposedly if you go around transporting Plutonium to be reprocessed into reactor fuel, it gives terrorists more opportunities to steal it. Of course, that's completely nonsense because it can't be stolen once it's destroyed, but it can be if you just leave it sitting around indefinitely. (One can also imagine a trivial way to deal with this: Put the military in charge of transporting it from place to place and have them take the same precautions they do with actual nuclear weapons.)
Ingest one millionth of a gram of plutonium and it will kill you, the radiation will induce cancer in the body - they are facts.
So you're reiterating that it's toxic and saying cancer because it's scary. Now distinguish why we should care about Plutonium but not care about arsenic, mercury, cadmium, lead, vinyl chloride, polychlorinated biphenyls, benzene, cyanide, cobalt, etc. etc.
On the contrary I have cited many reasons for Plutonium to be singled out. It's precisely that we continue to make these mistakes so often that we can't afford to continue to make these mistakes with plutonium any more. It's extreme toxicity is stable for at least 25000 years despite the level of radioactivity it's gone through a process of significant concentration and neutron bombardment to achieve its form.
That isn't "many reasons." That's "it's toxic" and "irrelevant information can be scary." What does neutron bombardment have anything to do with anything? If you make the same isotope of the same element by bombarding a lower atomic weight element with neutrons as opposed to spontaneous decay from a higher atomic weight element, is the result somehow more or less dangerous?
Yes I do, to gauge your depth of consideration.
What you are attempting to engage in is known as the "ad hominem fallacy." You attack the person you're arguing with instead of the argument. If I say, "Plutonium can be destroyed by neutron bombardment," and that is a true statement of fact, it doesn't matter one iota whether it's the only thing I know about Plutonium whatsoever. It isn't made false by the lack of additional knowledge on the part of the speaker. So as you seem to have no interest in disputing the fact of the matter, please forgive me if I lack the time to answer irrelevant questions that anyone can look up on the internet and which have no bearing on the original matter in any event.
Yes it is fissionable but on an industrial scale, unlikely.
Would you care to back up your unsupported assertion with some reasoning or citations? Because I can.
The real question is are you aware of how deadly they are outside of your circle of expertise?
I'm going to ask this once more: What is your reasoning behind why these isotopes should be prohibited from the world, when I can give you a list of compounds as long as your arm that in actual fact have each caused more deaths and more cancer and yet we still use regularly in industry?
In any event, I'm not too concerned about the negative consequences of eradicating mosquitoes because it will never happen. A female mosquito can lay anywhere from two hundred to a thousand eggs per brood depending on the species. A single gravid female can lead to a huge population in a few years, with every female in each succeeding generation having several thousand offspring. The best you could hope from a program like this is to establish a stable equilibrium at a lower population; most likely the population will crash, most genetic lines will be extinguished (including this one), and then the population will be back to where it was in two years or so.
I don't know about that. It seems like all you would have to do is maintain a population of mosquitoes in labs from which you could breed males with the new gene and then release half the males into the wild on a regular basis. The number of males you release in a period of time would remain constant while the world population crashes. You could maintain the program for a period of years after anyone has seen a mosquito in the wild, so that any efforts at repopulation are thwarted. And the program could be reinstituted if new mosquitoes are discovered after its discontinuation.
If the plan fails it would be for natural selection reasons. Some females will so happen to have an aversion to the modified males but not the unmodified males and those lines will be unaffected. But one can imagine the scientists being able to compensate for that by further modifying the males in some way.
You started out with something that sounded almost like it was going to be a response to what I posted, but then it turned into something that I can only think to respond to by expressing my condolences about your insobriety.
Some little guy comes up with some clever new widget and the big guys buy out his company *to get his patents*.
In what way is that supposed to allow new companies to enter the market and increase the number of competitors?
Your argument is that the patent system is good because it allows patent trolling. If the small company were to enter the market intent on actually making something, the big guys would be able to squish him into a stain on the floor with their patents. Only by giving up any aspirations of becoming a new competitor can he get any money. Which is, incidentally, the real reason that big companies will pay money for patents: They don't really care that much if the patent falls into the hands of a competitor. If that happens they just cross-license. The problem is what happens if it falls into the hands of a patent troll. Which is another way of saying, the only little guys who make any money are the patent trolls.
So yes, we've prevented small companies from being able to enter the market for actual tech products whatsoever in order to make sure we have a strong patent trolling sector. Good point.
Your proposed replacement reserve currencies are nonsense. The Swiss Franc? Their economy isn't big enough. The people buying Francs already who are doing so because the Swiss have a strong economy in the recession are destroying that very economy by causing excessive deflation. The Swiss government can't respond by increasing the money supply because if they did then the second anywhere else starts to recover, enough people would dump their holdings of Francs that it would trigger hyperinflation. As for Singapore, they're a smaller economy than Switzerland. And nobody is going to adopt Chinese currency because China intentionally keeps its value low to promote exports, which is the opposite of what holders of currency are looking for. The only realistic replacement for the US dollar as the world reserve currency is the Euro, and they don't seem to be in any position to do that right now.
In addition to that, if the world switched reserve currencies then the debt is totally irrelevant. If there was a large migration away from the dollar in a short period of time, the US would have the problem the Swiss need to avoid: All the money people were holding as reserve goes back into the local economy and the currency loses most of its value. At that point the debt is trivial and you can pay it with a song, because it's denominated in devalued currency.
And that would never happen anyway because the whole world would do everything to stop it. A transition to a different reserve currency would cause the value of the dollar to tank faster than anyone could actually unload their holdings. Which means that if such a thing were even rumored, everyone holding US dollars -- which is to say everyone -- would start frantically doing everything possible to stop it, to avoid collectively losing their shirts.
You're still not getting it. Yes, obviously, if you can do more work with less labor then you need less labor to do the same work. But there is no requirement to do the same amount of work. You can do much more work. You can do all the work that isn't cost effective when you have to pay twice as much in labor costs.
Let me give you an example: If you invent the washing machine, you put all of the people who are paid to do laundry by hand out of a job. But nobody can actually afford to pay someone to wash their laundry by hand. It would cost like $20,000 a year in today's dollars. Only the super rich could afford it, and they only comprise a very small part of the population. The middle class just had to wash their own laundry by themselves. So when you invent the washing machine, there are 500 people who lose their jobs washing the laundry of 500 rich families who can afford to pay for it. At the same time, you create tens of thousands of new jobs manufacturing millions of washing machines for millions of middle class families.
It works that way with everything. Automation does not cause money to be created or destroyed. It only reallocates it. If you eliminate someone's job at a savings of $20,000/year and reduce prices by the same amount, there is now an extra $20,000/year distributed throughout the pockets of all the customers because they've saved that much buying the product that is now produced more efficiently. They can now afford to buy something additional that they couldn't previously afford, and whoever lost their job can get a new job producing the extra stuff that people can afford to buy with the money they saved.
Also consider this: You don't have an option between "5 American jobs with automation" and "10 American jobs without automation", you have an option between "5 middle class American jobs with automation" and "10 below-US-minimum-wage Chinese jobs without automation." And in the latter situation demand tanks because everybody with a job is barely making a subsistence wage and can't afford to buy anything, and everyone else is unemployed.
There is no situation in which efficiency is a bad thing. In the absolute worst case, where everyone who saves money from automation totally irrationally decides they would rather hoard currency than spend or invest it, you only have to have the government create a disincentive for doing that, like printing money to inflate the value of hoarded currency and then spending it on social programs to aid the unemployed in the period of time before the inflation batters the irrational hoarders in the wallet and convinces them to change their behavior.
My theory is that nature wanted computers.
You mean before we bred them to be fat, stupid and slow?
Yes, the butterfly effect is possible. But it's by far the exception rather than the rule. Most of the time when a species goes extinct, no separate and significantly bad consequences result. Of course, it could, and for that reason we shouldn't just stop caring if things go extinct. But when we have something that we hate and serves no apparent good purpose (like mosquitoes), it might be a good thing that they should cease to exist.
Just as killing mosquitoes wholesale would be "bad" for the "cycle of life,"
I'm not at all convinced that mosquitoes aren't an exception. Most of their "positive utility" is in serving as food for critters higher on the food chain, but in that respect they're pretty fungible with most other insects. If we killed all the mosquitoes, it wouldn't kill all the bats -- they would just eat other insects.
The primary other thing they do is draw blood from various animals (which has a negligible effect on anything) and spread disease (which is pretty firmly in the net negative category).
"Pretty much on its own" is by no means equivalent to "on its own." Machines need to be manufactured, stored, marketed, distributed, operated, maintained, accounted for, etc. etc. That's jobs. The only way it isn't is if you automate literally everything, and we're so far away from that point that it's irrelevant. (And if we ever get there then we're living in Star Trek replicator land and nobody "needs" a job because everything is so cheap that a government can collect $10 in tax revenue and with it buy food and shelter for everyone forever.)
I mean, if your goal is keeping a lot of people busy, efficiency is the one thing you don't want.
This nonsense is where all the jobs go. Efficiency is how you create jobs. The reason people don't have jobs is that the cost of doing the things that need to be done (like improving infrastructure) exceeds the amount anyone is willing to pay to do it. The way you fix that is by reducing the cost of doing things. We would have a damn sight less crumbling infrastructure if we could get three times the work for twice the labor, and we would then have twice as many jobs because it became cost effective to do three times as much work.
The problem with promoting inefficiency is that you create a lot of jobs for about three seconds, until someone more efficient from another country or who otherwise isn't under your control comes by and eats your lunch. Then instead increasing the number of jobs, you lose the ones you had in the first place because they go off to some foreign land that doesn't prize inefficiency.
It's not the stock market. It's the legal system. Especially the patent system. If you're the little guy and you start to challenge the big guy, you get a nastygram to the effect of "this is a list of our patents that you're infringing. You can take a license for ONE BILLION DOLLARS, or you could just sell is your company and retire." Naturally the little guy doesn't have to sell his company to the bigger company. There is another option: He can sell his company to a different bigger company, which has sufficient defensive patents to tell the first bigger company to go to hell. Which is why the little guy can get good money -- the big guys will bid against each other for which one buys him out. There just isn't any option left of "remain an independent company."
Nothing is zero risk, but there isn't anything short of a nuclear war that will cause the US government to not pay its bonds.