This is why it's always surprised me that MS pushed into console gaming.
It's because their desire for control is greater than their desire for profit. If Microsoft didn't make a gaming console then people would still be using a Nintendo or Sony console to play games, and then Microsoft has no control over the platform.
Suppose that Microsoft had never entered the console market and then next week Nintendo surprises everyone by releasing a gaming console based on AMD Fusion that Sony wasn't prepared for. Nintendo would soon own the gaming market and everyone would have a Nintendo. Someone would realize that you can run Windows in a VM on a Nintendo and that if you do then you don't need a separate PC anymore. All of a sudden Nintendo is the primary home computing platform and Windows is that obsolete thing you have to boot up on your Nintendo to run legacy applications whose developers haven't been bludgeoned by users into releasing a native Nintendo version.
That sort of displacement is Microsoft's greatest fear. It's why they make a gaming console, a web browser,.NET to compete with Java, etc. It's because they don't want to allow anything else to become the primary target platform for developers, since they know that's the only reason anybody uses Windows.
It depends what kind of person you are. Even if you enjoy gaming, if you know that in the future you'll look back and realize that you've spent all your free time for ten years playing games and not accomplishing anything and then feel a powerful sense of regret, you may decide that it isn't worth it.
Likewise, if you're alright with spending some time playing games as long as you also take some time to accomplish other things and satisfy your higher order needs for creativity and social improvement, but you know that you have an addictive personality and if you play for an hour you'll play for a week, you may make the decision that it isn't worth the temptation.
Conversely, if you can live your entire life having accomplished nothing but a high score in a video game and still die happy then by all means do it. But not everybody can.
Anybody remember the PIN attack from a few years ago? Everybody has a four digit PIN but the bank does account lockouts after a couple of failed attempts, so you can't guess all 10,000 combinations for an account in thirty seconds like you otherwise could. So instead the attackers get a list of account numbers and then try a single random PIN against every account in the list, which avoids the lock out, and about one in 10,000 accounts will have any given PIN. More if you use a common idiot PIN like 1111 or 1234.
The common substitutions don't actually help very much. They only add one bit of entropy per substitution. It's not nothing, but adding one extra word is worth ten substitutions. And which is easier to remember?
now here's where my criticism comes in... when you reduce the password to using only english words, you exclude from the set of possible passwords words like "sdfjae" or "fjwioxe". in other words, its no longer completely random. in fact, i believe you so significantly reduce the entropy space that it is now much weaker than the random character password.
Of course you reduce the amount of entropy, per character. The point is to use more characters in order to make the password have the same level of security while being easier to remember.
The example four English word password "correct horse battery staple" has 28 characters. It has about the same amount of entropy as a 7 character password that randomly uses any of the slightly less than 100 characters you can type on a keyboard. A 28 character random password has preposterously more entropy. But it looks like this: "#1-:';Gqz_UR]l~g607PM_/v@/e6". That's utterly useless because the user will never remember it so it ends up on a sticky note on the user's monitor. Even the 7 character random password ends up on the sticky note. The four English word password gets memorized and not written on anything.
That's the whole point. Using "correct horse battery staple" is stronger in the real world because people can pick random common words, have a decently high level of entropy, but still remember the passphrase. As opposed to using "Pa$$word1" to meet the complexity requirements with something they can remember and then seeing it get cracked in fifteen seconds.
Plus, if you need more entropy, you can obviously just use more words. If you use something like "frozen biology department literally conducts every experiment after august but before march" then you have something with more entropy than you can crack in any practical amount of time even with offline methods (and even including the fact that it has grammatical ordering which reduces entropy some), but any idiot can memorize it in short order.
Unless you're trying to argue that they made no contribution to the project whatsoever (which is clearly false), I'm not sure what your point is. Somebody has got to provide hosting services, operate nodes, write FAQs, etc. Somebody has to do the work that isn't sexy. Not everything can be idea men inventing great new things that have never been done before; somebody has got to hold down the fort during the period after you have something new and cool but before it can stand on its own and operate independently. Otherwise the project never makes it out of the lab.
Tell that to the conservatives who oppose a VAT because it's too efficient and would allow the government to spend more money on actual programs rather than tax administration for the same amount of taxes collected.
The roads that lead to an $800,000 house don't cost 10 times as much to build and maintain as the roads that lead to an $80,000 house. The schools don't (inherently) cost 10 times as much. And you can raise the same amount of taxes with a lower mill rate if the houses in the area cost more.
Third, it gives private citizens at all income levels a stake in paying for the services and monies provided by the federal government. Currently almost half the population pays no federal income tax. As a result, they often have no concern for the costs of benefit programs. This change would mean that the "poor" while not taxed on basic necessities, would be paying some tax - and that tax would increase as federal spending increases. "Want national healthcare? No problem. Your taxes will go up X amount next year to pay for it."
You're not identifying the right argument for this. Unless the actual amount of tax paid by poor people is the same as what rich people pay, they're always going to want more spending. Getting $10,000/year worth of medical coverage by paying an extra $800/year in taxes (and having other taxpayers pay the rest) is an obvious win for a poor person.
The real problem with having "taxpayers" who pay no taxes is the perverse incentive it gives to Congress. The single best and most agreeable way to increase tax revenue is to grow the economy. But if a large swath of people pay no taxes then you can't raise tax revenue by growing those sectors of the economy. And you can raise tax revenue by not creating any growth at all, as long as you create a wealth transfer from the poor (who pay zero taxes) to the rich (who pay nonzero taxes).
And the corollary to that is the kicker: Anything that transfers wealth from the rich to the poor results in a reduction in tax revenue. So Congress has their bean counters consider the revenue impact of every bill, and if it helps the poor at the expense of the rich then it gets canned because it makes the deficit bigger.
Or you have absolutely no clue how expensive things are.
Most things are not that expensive. The large majority of federal money goes to social security, medicare, medicaid and the military. Basically any other single program is a rounding error. For the states it's pretty much the same, except that it's public education rather than the military.
The real problem at the state level is the way federal funding works. For a lot of programs the federal government gives states matching funds. The federal government will give them billions of dollars in free money, but only if they spend the same amount themselves. It makes it so if they cut the program they lose a billion dollars in federal funding, but if they keep it then they have to raise an extra billion dollars in state tax revenue.
So they almost always continue the programs, even when they're ineffective or inefficient programs -- a program that took 40% of the cash and set it on fire would leave the state happy to fund it, because that 40% comes out of the 50% provided by the feds. And meanwhile the programs don't get cut at the federal level because for almost any given program some states will benefit disproportionally to others, which means those states will never let them be repealed.
You're assuming that all music is desirable, or that dropping the price of music to free would diminish the value of desirable music.
All I'm assuming is that some desirable music would be free. Which seems like a pretty fair assumption, considering that there can only be 40 artists in the Top 40 but there are a lot more than 40 desirable artists. And that's even assuming that artists in the Top 40 are desirable.
There exist artists who make good music but nobody buys it because nobody has ever heard of them. Giving away recordings allows them to bootstrap and build a fan base, because people will listen to for free what they wouldn't have paid for. In theory they could then start charging for recordings after they have a fan base, but then the next up and coming artist is trying to become known and giving away music to do it, so you have to "compete with free." And that's fine, because selling out concert halls is good business even if no one will pay for recordings.
It wouldn't surprise me in the slightest that even for an artist who is already popular, it would be more profitable to give away recordings as promotion and then sell 10,000 concert tickets instead of 5000 every Friday night than it would be to sell albums for money and then have fewer fans and sell fewer tickets.
Third parties are inherently doomed by a first past the post voting system. And if you fixed that (e.g. with approval voting) then third parties would have the same ability to raise money as major parties -- nobody donates to third parties because they can't win, if they could win then people would donate.
I don't really see that changing very much. We already have limits on what a corporation can donate to a candidate, and it doesn't seem like it would make much difference to see each member of the board of directors making a personal contribution rather than the corporation itself contributing the same amount of money.
What people (somewhat legitimately) complain about is Citizens United, but the problem isn't donations. It's direct expenditures. Microsoft decides that they like Candidate A rather than Candidate B. Then they realize that Candidate B is pro-choice and the district has a lot of Catholics, so they themselves run ads in media consumed predominantly by Catholics "reminding" voters of Candidate B's position on abortion. And they run ads in media consumed by blue collar workers that show Candidate B in a video clip advocating corporate tax cuts (but cutting out the part about how it would be aimed at reducing domestic unemployment), etc.
Then Candidate B can't respond because the election laws significantly limit who can contribute to a candidate's campaign, so the actual candidates don't have access to as much money as do corporations that can make unlimited direct expenditures (as opposed to donations to candidates).
Sometimes I think it would be better to just open the floodgates and allow unlimited donations from anyone. That would make all the candidates so flush with ad money that no one could be drowned out by corporations outspending them, and none of the candidates would have to compromise their values to get money because they could get more than enough from the companies whose interests already align with the candidate's own preferred policies. If the candidate likes network neutrality then he can get $250K from Google or Netflix. If he doesn't like network neutrality then he can get the same money from AT&T or Comcast.
The idea that some issues have big money backing one side and not the other doesn't hold water because people vote for candidates and not issues. A candidate with five million bucks in the bank from parties who agree with his policies can afford to turn down a $250,000 donation from a party who wants the candidate to change his position, or withstand that party spending the same money attacking him. A candidate with $50,000 in the bank can't.
Allowing the donations would just give the candidates greater control over their campaigns instead of the corporations, and reduce the number of corporate-funded attack ads because the corporation could give the money to the candidate they like instead of attacking his opponent.
I like the idea, but you have to change it from 50%. Otherwise you very often will get Candidate A who has 49% of the people in support, Candidate B who has 51%, and every day when you do the numbers they've switched positions and the other becomes the legislator.
But it's an easy fix. You use approval voting, so that voters can register their approval or disapproval of each candidate at any time. Then as long as the incumbent either has more than 40% approval or has more approval than any challenger he gets to stay, otherwise the challenger with the most approval gets the seat.
You still have the problem that it could be there are several candidates and the two highest only have e.g. 30% approval and they keep switching places, but that seems unlikely. And in that event maybe it isn't a bad thing: With approval voting you have to be some kind of scoundrel to get significantly less than 50% approval, so clearly they're both doing something terrible wrong and it wouldn't take much for a new challenger to come in and beat both of them.
It's true that most people have a similar socioeconomic status to their parents, but I'm not sure that breaks anything. Someone who is a doctor because her parents were doctors and could therefore afford to send her to medical school may have an "unfair" advantage, but she also has a better education and is better able to make sensible decisions than someone who failed to graduate high school.
I'm reminded of the statistic that most lottery winners ultimately file for bankruptcy.
What vote-with-your-wallet does is to deprive idiots of their votes, in the same way (and literally because of the fact that) the market deprives them of their money.
Where it breaks down (as you rightly point out) is where there is a huge disparity in income. If the top 10% has 50% of the wealth then you're probably alright, because the middle class will still have the other 50%. If the top 1% has 90% of the wealth you're in trouble.
The problem is in talking about a market price for something that isn't a free market. You could probably sell millions of hard drives for $2000 each if you had a monopoly on manufacturing them, but that doesn't make that the market price -- or at least it makes "market price" as so defined entirely meaningless, because you can make it arbitrarily high by artificially constraining supply.
The problem is that there isn't a free market for music because of the double monopoly: First, copyright gives an official monopoly for a single work to the copyright holder. Then the major distributors buy up all the copyrights, form a cartel and collude to fix prices. Obviously one song is not a perfect substitute for another, but you can bet your bottom dollar that an album selling for $15 won't sell as many copies as one that sells for $0.15, and that the existence of a large quantity of third party albums selling for $0.15 would erode the ability of the cartel to charge $15.
The price you pay on iTunes includes a bunch of things that a real free market wouldn't allow. The record company is using the profits from the artists who sell a lot of copies to subsidize the artists who never sell enough to pay back their advances. The middle men are taking a huge cut because price fixing allows them to charge monopoly rents.
If you took all of that away and put artists against one another in a free market, the price of music would effectively fall to zero -- enough of the artists who spent their money to record an album and then discovered that no one wanted to buy it for a high price would lower their prices in order to at least recover something, or give away recordings as promotion for live events. A large volume of artists doing that would exert pressure on others to do the same, because they would be losing fans to the artists whose recordings are free.
Basically the problem is that there are enough people who aspire to be rock stars for a living that will produce music in their basements, so that if they all had comparable distribution opportunities, the ones who are willing to lose money on recordings as concert promotion would drive down the market price of recordings to zero. The only thing that stops that is the distribution cartel that prevents most of those artists from simultaneously selling below the cartel's price and getting their music into major distribution channels. Try selling your song on iTunes for a penny. (This is why they're so adamant about crushing distribution channels they don't control, like P2P.)
The problem is that one-person-one-vote still gets you Britney Spears.
The advantage of voting with your wallet is that the person who "votes" for a successful enterprise makes a profit and has more "votes" the next time around, whereas the fool and his votes are soon parted. (The disadvantage naturally is that people who steal rather than create wealth do better, but that is little different than being able to convert money into votes through propaganda under one-person-one-vote.)
I don't want to see a locked down Internet, and I'm surely never going to be filthy rich because of this work, but I would like to see the self-entitlement generation grow a pair and accept that if you want good stuff then at some point you have to support the people who make it.
That's the whole point. We need a method of compensating artists that is designed in light of digital technology, that gets artists paid without creating an apparatus of widespread censorship and oppression. We can say that people should just pay even though there is no effective enforcement mechanism, but that's just patronage. If we're satisfied with that then we don't need copyright, we just have artists put out their tin cups and let people pay what they feel like paying.
If that isn't good enough then we need fundamental change. That's what's missing from the debate -- Hollywood demands gatekeeper control of our culture and The Pirate Bay demands free shit for no money, but neither of those is right. There needs to be some mechanism whereby you can get any new media for no marginal cost and use it however the heck you like, but where at some point you pay money (like a flat monthly fee) that ends up in the pockets of creators -- and that's creators, not middle men.
I don't care if you want to create something like ASCAP and charge each consumer a fee on top of their internet connection, or just take money from income tax revenues and give it to creators, or you want to have a coalition of consumer electronics manufacturers come together and subsidize media production so that they can sell more devices. What needs to happen is that money moves from $SOMEWHERE into the hands of people who make the stuff we like so that they can afford to keep making it, but then we get to make additional copies of the stuff for free. Because discouraging the production of additional copies is pointless, economically inefficient and prohibitively expensive to enforce, but we still want artists to get paid.
That's not the same thing as being able to hold all the music ever recorded. The latter would change who you can get music from. Right now you can have more music than you can ever listen to, but you'll pick the genres you like and get that music.
As the price of storage falls even more, you won't have to pick the genre. You just say "give me everything" and you get everything and keep it. That means you'll be able to get anything from anybody, because anybody who has anything has everything.
It removes the transactions with strangers. You don't have to find someone who likes Beethoven to get Beethoven's music, you just have to find someone who likes music. Which is most anybody. So you can get everything from someone who is not a stranger and who you trust not to turn you in, making enforcement effectively impossible.
It makes the internet a red herring. Trying to stop infringement at the intermediaries is destined to failure because the role of the intermediaries is to connect those who have something with those who want it. When everybody has everything, you don't need an intermediary. You go to anyone, you get everything. What need is there for an intermediary?
My assumption is that we could (counter-factually) stop infringement on the internet, and I was explaining why even in that case it doesn't matter because you get to the same place with just sharing in person.
You seem to be arguing that sharing between friends is OK but sharing to the whole world is problematic. What I'm saying is that it leads to the same result. You get a copy of a song from your coworker and your brother gets it from you. Well, keep going like that and very quickly everybody has it. Six degrees of Kevin Bacon and all that. So if you can't stop friend sharing then you're in the same position as just allowing it worldwide -- at the end of the day everyone still ends up having access to a free copy of anything, because everybody knows somebody who knows somebody who has it. And it doesn't matter whether you use the internet or a USB stick.
You're basically saying that Hollywood should declare war on the rest of the world.
I mean forget about consumers. Microsoft wants to sell Visual Studio to random would-be programmers in the general public who can make third party apps that lock people into Windows. Facebook, Amazon and every other web service wants arbitrary Linux hackers improving the kernel that they use on their servers. Exxon wants to be able to produce their own trade secret custom application for oil prospecting and run it on a cheap COTS mobile device.
I don't mean to suggest that we as technology workers should give up the fight because someone else will pick up the slack -- none of those companies is going to really start caring until it gets a lot worse than it already is -- but do you really think that's a war Hollywood can win in the end?
Slashdot Mirror
This is why it's always surprised me that MS pushed into console gaming.
It's because their desire for control is greater than their desire for profit. If Microsoft didn't make a gaming console then people would still be using a Nintendo or Sony console to play games, and then Microsoft has no control over the platform.
Suppose that Microsoft had never entered the console market and then next week Nintendo surprises everyone by releasing a gaming console based on AMD Fusion that Sony wasn't prepared for. Nintendo would soon own the gaming market and everyone would have a Nintendo. Someone would realize that you can run Windows in a VM on a Nintendo and that if you do then you don't need a separate PC anymore. All of a sudden Nintendo is the primary home computing platform and Windows is that obsolete thing you have to boot up on your Nintendo to run legacy applications whose developers haven't been bludgeoned by users into releasing a native Nintendo version.
That sort of displacement is Microsoft's greatest fear. It's why they make a gaming console, a web browser, .NET to compete with Java, etc. It's because they don't want to allow anything else to become the primary target platform for developers, since they know that's the only reason anybody uses Windows.
It depends what kind of person you are. Even if you enjoy gaming, if you know that in the future you'll look back and realize that you've spent all your free time for ten years playing games and not accomplishing anything and then feel a powerful sense of regret, you may decide that it isn't worth it.
Likewise, if you're alright with spending some time playing games as long as you also take some time to accomplish other things and satisfy your higher order needs for creativity and social improvement, but you know that you have an addictive personality and if you play for an hour you'll play for a week, you may make the decision that it isn't worth the temptation.
Conversely, if you can live your entire life having accomplished nothing but a high score in a video game and still die happy then by all means do it. But not everybody can.
And four integers for that matter.
Anybody remember the PIN attack from a few years ago? Everybody has a four digit PIN but the bank does account lockouts after a couple of failed attempts, so you can't guess all 10,000 combinations for an account in thirty seconds like you otherwise could. So instead the attackers get a list of account numbers and then try a single random PIN against every account in the list, which avoids the lock out, and about one in 10,000 accounts will have any given PIN. More if you use a common idiot PIN like 1111 or 1234.
The common substitutions don't actually help very much. They only add one bit of entropy per substitution. It's not nothing, but adding one extra word is worth ten substitutions. And which is easier to remember?
now here's where my criticism comes in... when you reduce the password to using only english words, you exclude from the set of possible passwords words like "sdfjae" or "fjwioxe". in other words, its no longer completely random. in fact, i believe you so significantly reduce the entropy space that it is now much weaker than the random character password.
Of course you reduce the amount of entropy, per character. The point is to use more characters in order to make the password have the same level of security while being easier to remember.
The example four English word password "correct horse battery staple" has 28 characters. It has about the same amount of entropy as a 7 character password that randomly uses any of the slightly less than 100 characters you can type on a keyboard. A 28 character random password has preposterously more entropy. But it looks like this: "#1-:';Gqz_UR]l~g607PM_/v@/e6". That's utterly useless because the user will never remember it so it ends up on a sticky note on the user's monitor. Even the 7 character random password ends up on the sticky note. The four English word password gets memorized and not written on anything.
That's the whole point. Using "correct horse battery staple" is stronger in the real world because people can pick random common words, have a decently high level of entropy, but still remember the passphrase. As opposed to using "Pa$$word1" to meet the complexity requirements with something they can remember and then seeing it get cracked in fifteen seconds.
Plus, if you need more entropy, you can obviously just use more words. If you use something like "frozen biology department literally conducts every experiment after august but before march" then you have something with more entropy than you can crack in any practical amount of time even with offline methods (and even including the fact that it has grammatical ordering which reduces entropy some), but any idiot can memorize it in short order.
Unless you're trying to argue that they made no contribution to the project whatsoever (which is clearly false), I'm not sure what your point is. Somebody has got to provide hosting services, operate nodes, write FAQs, etc. Somebody has to do the work that isn't sexy. Not everything can be idea men inventing great new things that have never been done before; somebody has got to hold down the fort during the period after you have something new and cool but before it can stand on its own and operate independently. Otherwise the project never makes it out of the lab.
The EFF is not a law firm. TOR, HTTPS Everywhere, etc. are not lawsuits.
Even where they're involved in litigation, it's to set a precedent that helps you and me, not to line their own coffers with settlement money.
He's a lawyer. Donating money to a lawyer is like donating blood to a vampire. It makes them stronger and then they hurt more innocent people.
Try donating your money to someone who deserves it, like these people
Tell that to the conservatives who oppose a VAT because it's too efficient and would allow the government to spend more money on actual programs rather than tax administration for the same amount of taxes collected.
"Chubby d00dz taser random people", tonight on Fox.
People always get confused about that.
The roads that lead to an $800,000 house don't cost 10 times as much to build and maintain as the roads that lead to an $80,000 house. The schools don't (inherently) cost 10 times as much. And you can raise the same amount of taxes with a lower mill rate if the houses in the area cost more.
Third, it gives private citizens at all income levels a stake in paying for the services and monies provided by the federal government. Currently almost half the population pays no federal income tax. As a result, they often have no concern for the costs of benefit programs. This change would mean that the "poor" while not taxed on basic necessities, would be paying some tax - and that tax would increase as federal spending increases. "Want national healthcare? No problem. Your taxes will go up X amount next year to pay for it."
You're not identifying the right argument for this. Unless the actual amount of tax paid by poor people is the same as what rich people pay, they're always going to want more spending. Getting $10,000/year worth of medical coverage by paying an extra $800/year in taxes (and having other taxpayers pay the rest) is an obvious win for a poor person.
The real problem with having "taxpayers" who pay no taxes is the perverse incentive it gives to Congress. The single best and most agreeable way to increase tax revenue is to grow the economy. But if a large swath of people pay no taxes then you can't raise tax revenue by growing those sectors of the economy. And you can raise tax revenue by not creating any growth at all, as long as you create a wealth transfer from the poor (who pay zero taxes) to the rich (who pay nonzero taxes).
And the corollary to that is the kicker: Anything that transfers wealth from the rich to the poor results in a reduction in tax revenue. So Congress has their bean counters consider the revenue impact of every bill, and if it helps the poor at the expense of the rich then it gets canned because it makes the deficit bigger.
Or you have absolutely no clue how expensive things are.
Most things are not that expensive. The large majority of federal money goes to social security, medicare, medicaid and the military. Basically any other single program is a rounding error. For the states it's pretty much the same, except that it's public education rather than the military.
The real problem at the state level is the way federal funding works. For a lot of programs the federal government gives states matching funds. The federal government will give them billions of dollars in free money, but only if they spend the same amount themselves. It makes it so if they cut the program they lose a billion dollars in federal funding, but if they keep it then they have to raise an extra billion dollars in state tax revenue.
So they almost always continue the programs, even when they're ineffective or inefficient programs -- a program that took 40% of the cash and set it on fire would leave the state happy to fund it, because that 40% comes out of the 50% provided by the feds. And meanwhile the programs don't get cut at the federal level because for almost any given program some states will benefit disproportionally to others, which means those states will never let them be repealed.
You're assuming that all music is desirable, or that dropping the price of music to free would diminish the value of desirable music.
All I'm assuming is that some desirable music would be free. Which seems like a pretty fair assumption, considering that there can only be 40 artists in the Top 40 but there are a lot more than 40 desirable artists. And that's even assuming that artists in the Top 40 are desirable.
There exist artists who make good music but nobody buys it because nobody has ever heard of them. Giving away recordings allows them to bootstrap and build a fan base, because people will listen to for free what they wouldn't have paid for. In theory they could then start charging for recordings after they have a fan base, but then the next up and coming artist is trying to become known and giving away music to do it, so you have to "compete with free." And that's fine, because selling out concert halls is good business even if no one will pay for recordings.
It wouldn't surprise me in the slightest that even for an artist who is already popular, it would be more profitable to give away recordings as promotion and then sell 10,000 concert tickets instead of 5000 every Friday night than it would be to sell albums for money and then have fewer fans and sell fewer tickets.
Third parties are inherently doomed by a first past the post voting system. And if you fixed that (e.g. with approval voting) then third parties would have the same ability to raise money as major parties -- nobody donates to third parties because they can't win, if they could win then people would donate.
I don't really see that changing very much. We already have limits on what a corporation can donate to a candidate, and it doesn't seem like it would make much difference to see each member of the board of directors making a personal contribution rather than the corporation itself contributing the same amount of money.
What people (somewhat legitimately) complain about is Citizens United, but the problem isn't donations. It's direct expenditures. Microsoft decides that they like Candidate A rather than Candidate B. Then they realize that Candidate B is pro-choice and the district has a lot of Catholics, so they themselves run ads in media consumed predominantly by Catholics "reminding" voters of Candidate B's position on abortion. And they run ads in media consumed by blue collar workers that show Candidate B in a video clip advocating corporate tax cuts (but cutting out the part about how it would be aimed at reducing domestic unemployment), etc.
Then Candidate B can't respond because the election laws significantly limit who can contribute to a candidate's campaign, so the actual candidates don't have access to as much money as do corporations that can make unlimited direct expenditures (as opposed to donations to candidates).
Sometimes I think it would be better to just open the floodgates and allow unlimited donations from anyone. That would make all the candidates so flush with ad money that no one could be drowned out by corporations outspending them, and none of the candidates would have to compromise their values to get money because they could get more than enough from the companies whose interests already align with the candidate's own preferred policies. If the candidate likes network neutrality then he can get $250K from Google or Netflix. If he doesn't like network neutrality then he can get the same money from AT&T or Comcast.
The idea that some issues have big money backing one side and not the other doesn't hold water because people vote for candidates and not issues. A candidate with five million bucks in the bank from parties who agree with his policies can afford to turn down a $250,000 donation from a party who wants the candidate to change his position, or withstand that party spending the same money attacking him. A candidate with $50,000 in the bank can't.
Allowing the donations would just give the candidates greater control over their campaigns instead of the corporations, and reduce the number of corporate-funded attack ads because the corporation could give the money to the candidate they like instead of attacking his opponent.
I like the idea, but you have to change it from 50%. Otherwise you very often will get Candidate A who has 49% of the people in support, Candidate B who has 51%, and every day when you do the numbers they've switched positions and the other becomes the legislator.
But it's an easy fix. You use approval voting, so that voters can register their approval or disapproval of each candidate at any time. Then as long as the incumbent either has more than 40% approval or has more approval than any challenger he gets to stay, otherwise the challenger with the most approval gets the seat.
You still have the problem that it could be there are several candidates and the two highest only have e.g. 30% approval and they keep switching places, but that seems unlikely. And in that event maybe it isn't a bad thing: With approval voting you have to be some kind of scoundrel to get significantly less than 50% approval, so clearly they're both doing something terrible wrong and it wouldn't take much for a new challenger to come in and beat both of them.
It's true that most people have a similar socioeconomic status to their parents, but I'm not sure that breaks anything. Someone who is a doctor because her parents were doctors and could therefore afford to send her to medical school may have an "unfair" advantage, but she also has a better education and is better able to make sensible decisions than someone who failed to graduate high school.
I'm reminded of the statistic that most lottery winners ultimately file for bankruptcy.
What vote-with-your-wallet does is to deprive idiots of their votes, in the same way (and literally because of the fact that) the market deprives them of their money.
Where it breaks down (as you rightly point out) is where there is a huge disparity in income. If the top 10% has 50% of the wealth then you're probably alright, because the middle class will still have the other 50%. If the top 1% has 90% of the wealth you're in trouble.
The problem is in talking about a market price for something that isn't a free market. You could probably sell millions of hard drives for $2000 each if you had a monopoly on manufacturing them, but that doesn't make that the market price -- or at least it makes "market price" as so defined entirely meaningless, because you can make it arbitrarily high by artificially constraining supply.
The problem is that there isn't a free market for music because of the double monopoly: First, copyright gives an official monopoly for a single work to the copyright holder. Then the major distributors buy up all the copyrights, form a cartel and collude to fix prices. Obviously one song is not a perfect substitute for another, but you can bet your bottom dollar that an album selling for $15 won't sell as many copies as one that sells for $0.15, and that the existence of a large quantity of third party albums selling for $0.15 would erode the ability of the cartel to charge $15.
The price you pay on iTunes includes a bunch of things that a real free market wouldn't allow. The record company is using the profits from the artists who sell a lot of copies to subsidize the artists who never sell enough to pay back their advances. The middle men are taking a huge cut because price fixing allows them to charge monopoly rents.
If you took all of that away and put artists against one another in a free market, the price of music would effectively fall to zero -- enough of the artists who spent their money to record an album and then discovered that no one wanted to buy it for a high price would lower their prices in order to at least recover something, or give away recordings as promotion for live events. A large volume of artists doing that would exert pressure on others to do the same, because they would be losing fans to the artists whose recordings are free.
Basically the problem is that there are enough people who aspire to be rock stars for a living that will produce music in their basements, so that if they all had comparable distribution opportunities, the ones who are willing to lose money on recordings as concert promotion would drive down the market price of recordings to zero. The only thing that stops that is the distribution cartel that prevents most of those artists from simultaneously selling below the cartel's price and getting their music into major distribution channels. Try selling your song on iTunes for a penny. (This is why they're so adamant about crushing distribution channels they don't control, like P2P.)
The problem is that one-person-one-vote still gets you Britney Spears.
The advantage of voting with your wallet is that the person who "votes" for a successful enterprise makes a profit and has more "votes" the next time around, whereas the fool and his votes are soon parted. (The disadvantage naturally is that people who steal rather than create wealth do better, but that is little different than being able to convert money into votes through propaganda under one-person-one-vote.)
I don't want to see a locked down Internet, and I'm surely never going to be filthy rich because of this work, but I would like to see the self-entitlement generation grow a pair and accept that if you want good stuff then at some point you have to support the people who make it.
That's the whole point. We need a method of compensating artists that is designed in light of digital technology, that gets artists paid without creating an apparatus of widespread censorship and oppression. We can say that people should just pay even though there is no effective enforcement mechanism, but that's just patronage. If we're satisfied with that then we don't need copyright, we just have artists put out their tin cups and let people pay what they feel like paying.
If that isn't good enough then we need fundamental change. That's what's missing from the debate -- Hollywood demands gatekeeper control of our culture and The Pirate Bay demands free shit for no money, but neither of those is right. There needs to be some mechanism whereby you can get any new media for no marginal cost and use it however the heck you like, but where at some point you pay money (like a flat monthly fee) that ends up in the pockets of creators -- and that's creators, not middle men.
I don't care if you want to create something like ASCAP and charge each consumer a fee on top of their internet connection, or just take money from income tax revenues and give it to creators, or you want to have a coalition of consumer electronics manufacturers come together and subsidize media production so that they can sell more devices. What needs to happen is that money moves from $SOMEWHERE into the hands of people who make the stuff we like so that they can afford to keep making it, but then we get to make additional copies of the stuff for free. Because discouraging the production of additional copies is pointless, economically inefficient and prohibitively expensive to enforce, but we still want artists to get paid.
That's not the same thing as being able to hold all the music ever recorded. The latter would change who you can get music from. Right now you can have more music than you can ever listen to, but you'll pick the genres you like and get that music.
As the price of storage falls even more, you won't have to pick the genre. You just say "give me everything" and you get everything and keep it. That means you'll be able to get anything from anybody, because anybody who has anything has everything.
It removes the transactions with strangers. You don't have to find someone who likes Beethoven to get Beethoven's music, you just have to find someone who likes music. Which is most anybody. So you can get everything from someone who is not a stranger and who you trust not to turn you in, making enforcement effectively impossible.
It makes the internet a red herring. Trying to stop infringement at the intermediaries is destined to failure because the role of the intermediaries is to connect those who have something with those who want it. When everybody has everything, you don't need an intermediary. You go to anyone, you get everything. What need is there for an intermediary?
Why would you make that assumption?
My assumption is that we could (counter-factually) stop infringement on the internet, and I was explaining why even in that case it doesn't matter because you get to the same place with just sharing in person.
You seem to be arguing that sharing between friends is OK but sharing to the whole world is problematic. What I'm saying is that it leads to the same result. You get a copy of a song from your coworker and your brother gets it from you. Well, keep going like that and very quickly everybody has it. Six degrees of Kevin Bacon and all that. So if you can't stop friend sharing then you're in the same position as just allowing it worldwide -- at the end of the day everyone still ends up having access to a free copy of anything, because everybody knows somebody who knows somebody who has it. And it doesn't matter whether you use the internet or a USB stick.
You're basically saying that Hollywood should declare war on the rest of the world.
I mean forget about consumers. Microsoft wants to sell Visual Studio to random would-be programmers in the general public who can make third party apps that lock people into Windows. Facebook, Amazon and every other web service wants arbitrary Linux hackers improving the kernel that they use on their servers. Exxon wants to be able to produce their own trade secret custom application for oil prospecting and run it on a cheap COTS mobile device.
I don't mean to suggest that we as technology workers should give up the fight because someone else will pick up the slack -- none of those companies is going to really start caring until it gets a lot worse than it already is -- but do you really think that's a war Hollywood can win in the end?