In the 50s, it wasn't unusual for a family to not have home telephone service. Through the early-mid 80s, it was usual for middle-class families to only have one television set.
And then technology advanced and become more commoditized and cheaper.
So, yes, the change in tax policy coincided with and perhaps even caused the disparity but the total amount of wealth for all increased.
Not really, people make less in inflation adjusted dollars than they used to, well most people. A small subset off people make orders of magnitude more.
You're talking about cutting off your own nose to spite your face. You don't want the rich guys to have so much more than you do, but you don't seem to understand that you would have less too.
You are going to need to support that hypothesis. What we were talking about wanting was lower violent crime, and places with less wealth disparity have it. They also seem to have just as many televisions and telephones in the average home as we do... plus more effective health care, better upward mobility, etc. The american dream exists, it's just been moved overseas where there is now better chance of moving up the ladder than in the U.S., for shame.
Your argument might have more merit if you can explain how so many people who are poor and come from nothing but the clothes on their back and manage to become wealthy. Are they all, each and every one helpless to achieve without the government providing them everything?
Sure people manage that, but statistically, it is not really relevant. Some short people are excellent basketball players, that doesn't mean you're not an idiot if you build your team based upon that as a premise. In general, taxation levels that don't balance wealth condensation simply result in long term instability and wealth consolidating into fewer hands until the system collapses.
As far as "the people" voting democratically to decide what gets done with the wealth created by some of "the people," what makes this mass of people more worthy of taking what I built and struggled for away from my family?
Because your family starting out with more than some other family is unfair, just as the king's family starting with more legal power than any other family is unfair. By your argument why shouldn't president Obama be able to name his children as president after his term, after all he worked hard to become president. Who are you to say he can't pass it on to his family?
Why should I even try to build something for my family, when I know that it will never get to them, because "the people" decide they're not worthy of it?
That's fine. Don't build something for your family. Build it for society and make the whole of society better for your family and everyone else's. Or don't. That's your prerogative.
My fervent wish is for people with your beliefs to live in the world you want to make, so lomg[sic] as I'm lomg[sic] dead.
You know what correlates very, very well with violent crime rates around the world? Wealth disparity.
I absolutely agree. But whilst waiting for wealth disparity in the US to be dealt with (don't hold your breath) removing the guns helps too.
As far as studies have been able to determine, neither rate of gun ownership, nor any gun control laws have had any significant impact on violent crime levels, so... no not really. Maybe you'd like that to be true, maybe you believe it to be true, but the science just doesn't back it up.
If you read more detail in history, you'll see that the "historically high rates" from earlier years weren't actually extracted from those with wealth, as they all managed (and still do) to gain loopholes.
Not any more so than now, as far as I've read, unless you have some citation otherwise.
As far as the fairness of a 100% inheritance tax, what does that do to the families of entrepreneurs who build companies in their lifetimes, sometimes huge billion-dollar companies that employ thousands of people and provide goods and services for millions? Should those companies be liquidated to pay that tax, in order to achieve your vision of "fairness" and "equality" simply because "it's worked before" (it really hasn't)?
As I said, it engenders waste, but it is fair, and it's not like the company needs be shut down, it just means ownership of the shares is transferred to the state for sale on the market. Mind you, I'm not proposing that as an ideal solution, merely the "fairest" one.
Do you honestly believe that giving the government all the wealth that gets created by private citizens on their death is better than letting individuals decide what's best for their families?
???
I'm not sure what you're talking about. How does being born poor as hell into a family that can't provide you with any opportunities and having to take out loans for school, college, and basic necessities such as transportation (loans paid to those born wealthy) mean any sort of freedom? Freedom to do what exactly, have no opportunity that does not benefit those born wealthy more than it does you?
The government is democratic and represents the people. It is by the people for the people. But more importantly, we're talking about the government redistributing wealth in ways that help level the playing field. Ever played the second round of monopoly? It was made as an educational game for economics students. Try it some time.
We're not talking about an untested hypothesis here either. Lots of other nations have much better social safety nets and they recovered from the economic collapse faster, have more stable economies, and less violent crime. Correlation does not imply a specific causation, but it does provide some great beginnings to testable hypothesis and those hypothesis have been borne out. Go ahead and look at violent crime stats around the world and just try to find one that does not line up well with wealth disparity. Maybe you don't like the answer because it does not fit with your preconceived notions, but too bad. Science works. Deal with it.
The problem lies in how the "meritocracy" gets created when the ones who inherit wealth refuse to give it up.
Not really. 100% inheritance tax is one way, although it inserts large amounts of waste into the system. Traditionally, we just tax wealth at increasingly high rates as you go up the scale so that while those with money can still use it to make money, they have to make proportionally more money to offset the higher taxes. Heck, the income taxes in the late 50's through the early 80's did just that and the relative proportions of wealth in society remained quite stable. Then we slashed taxes on the high end and now more and more wealth is in fewer and fewer hands. This isn't rocket science. It is fairly basic economics.
Unless you're willing to apply force to take it from them, or otherwise restrict the freedom of people who inherit great wealth such that they can only spend and not invest or otherwise grow that wealth, your "meritocracy" is doomed.
I don't really understand your perspective. Income taxes are already by force and returning to historically normal rates instead of the extreme rates we have now is not some radical concept. It's been done. It worked. It is, in fact, historically more common than the unsustainable system we have now.
So, if we take from the people that have "too much" and give it all to the potential criminals, they'll decide not to be criminals anymore.
That sounds like a strawman, but I'll give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you misunderstood my post. This has nothing to do with taking from those who have "too much". It has to do with balancing the inherent advantage conferred by inherited wealth to the extent that we have a stable economy instead of one where that advantage results in wealth constantly consolidating into fewer and fewer hands. People who don't contribute to society and just live off the wealth of their forebears are fine, but that should not be a stable aristocracy, rather the wealth should be spent and the next generation should have to actually, gasp, work and do something if they want to live in our society. Trust fund bums are a drain on society and I do not abide the useless and neither should society... especially if they want to have a stable economy and the lower level of violent crime that comes with it.
I'm not advocating for a welfare state, I'm advocating for a meritocracy, and the fairness of a meritocracy leads to less violent crime as many a sociologist can demonstrate.
If I were a criminal in spe and wanted to burgle a store or home at night to steal valuables, and lived in, say, England, I would be unarmed. If I lived in the US, I would carry a gun to protect my own life. When guns are outlawed, fewer criminals will have guns. This, I think is a net win, even if some will still have them.
I think we should measure a net win by how many violent crimes are committed and how many homicides and assaults, not how many people have guns. Sure fewer people have guns in the UK, but a lot more people are beaten in their homes or stabbed, relative to the size of the population. In Brazil, fewer people have guns but a lot more people are hit by shrapnel or fire from drive by bombings and fire-bombings. If half as many people are shot with guns, but twice as many are murdered, by your metric that is a win. I strongly believe you should change your metric.
Take those away from the stats, and an amazing thing happens, our gun crime rate is in line with Europes. (Watch some idiots raise "racist" smokescreen out of my factual observation.
No, it's not your racism I draw attention to. It's your lack of knowledge that Europe also has non-european descent minorities. Guns are the difference, not the mix of races.
You're both wrong.
While a mix of different social and cultural norms does correlate (very slightly but significantly) with increased violent crime, it is by no means a large correlation. Gun ownership rates and gun control laws, have little to no correlation with rates of violent crime. Look at some of the high gun ownership rates in northern europe and the very low violent crime rates. Look at the relatively high mix of different races and cultures in places like Anaheim that have very low violent crime compared to the rest of the region.
You know what correlates very, very well with violent crime rates around the world? Wealth disparity. Yup, determining the difference of the real incomes between the top and bottom within a region is an excellent way to predict the rate of violent crime (and often correlates in the US with race as well).
So no, you both lose. It's not "the mixin' of the races" or "the guns." It's about the basic inequalities of our society that drive those without to violent action to try to change their lot in life. Real measures to reduce violent crime, measures that demonstrably have worked elsewhere include: social safety nets like free healthcare; levels of tax progressiveness that balance or more than balance wealth condensation; free education; and programs to encourage new, small business for those without capital. Your pet fears need not apply.
In Australia there was mass shooting in 1996 resulting in the death of 35 people. Public outcry helped push legislation for stricter gun control laws, and there has not been a single mass shooting incident there since then.
Actually, there have been several mass shootings in Australia since 1996, e.g. Monash. On top of that there have been several bombings and arson attacks on children. There have not really been any studies I've seen indicating their gun control measures were effective in reducing violent crime or violent injury or death. There have been several studies showing that the proportion of crimes committed using firearms went down, which is a victory if your goal is to stop gun crimes, but that's a sort of idiotic goal, isn't it?
Thank you for your good intentions, but...just why is this a task for the federal government?
Okay, I'm curious. Are you trolling or is your understanding of interstate commerce drawn directly from (and only from) poorly researched libertarian pamphlets?
That wsa[sic] a reasonable question 40 years ago. Now we can look at the last 40 years of countries tightening up on gun control. The countries that did that have fewer homicides, crime, and gun deaths.
Can you please support this with some numbers? I've seen the UK numbers which are muddled at best with most attempts to do a before-and-after comparison showing fewer crimes with guns but higher overall violent crime rates including murder but excluding suicide. What countries are you thinking of and what studies?
The fact is, most of our most dangerous cities are the very cities with the strictest gun control laws.
That might be true but that is not sufficient to determine a causation. Science can give us the information. If we look at global trends it is fairly clear the most dangerous places due to violent crime are those places with the highest wealth disparity. Taking a look at those same global trends there is not really much correlation with rates of gun ownership. E.g. Sweden and the US have similar rates of gun ownership but are on opposite ends of the spectrum for violent crime.
A lot of people play games with statistics.
And they will continue to do so because people don't understand math and people want easy solutions handed out by politicians. Politicians are happy to champion easy and ineffective answers because it gets them re-elected. Biden is heading up a new commission to look into a reaction to the recent mass shooting, but it will probably have no real impact. What might have an impact on stopping that particular crime is free mental health services, but that isn't palatable to anyone politically and is not interesting enough to drive votes.
Privacy is extremely important to Canonical. The data we collect is not user-identifiable (we automatically anonymize user logs and that information is never available to the teams delivering services to end users), we make users aware of what data will be collected and which third party services will be queried through a notice right in the Dash, and we only collect data that allows us to deliver a great search experience to Ubuntu users. We also recognize that there is always a minority of users who prefer complete data protection, often choosing to avoid services like Google, Facebook or Twitter for those reasons – and for those users, we have made it dead easy to switch the online search tools off with a simple toggle in settings.
So while I think the privacy concerns with sending data to Canonical when you'e doing searches is significant, so long as the user is aware and has the option, more power to them. I don't think I want to integrate my desktop and network search, but I certainly see a mass market that may want this. Depending upon how easy it is to create and configure these "scopes" to plug into this system it might be a great way to build customized searching without the need for Google to know everything about me.
I think people are too reactionary when it comes to both privacy and commercialism. From the previous posts you'd think this was a mandatory feature and Canonical was selling user data or something. They seem to be responsible players here creating cool tech that some of us may not want. I see nothing for me to get upset about.
To those of you who get up and work everyday to support bums. I'm sorry but you have little idea how much abuse is going on.
Humans are not rational. Have you seen the social studies where you get to divide money between two people, one divides it and the other picks if they both get the money or both get screwed. People always turn down free money just to punish those they think have done wrong. And that is exactly your problem. You're focused on trying to punish those that game the system even at the expense of having an effective system overall.
There is no perfect, un-exploitable system. Deal with it. That doesn't mean we should burn the house down to try to punish someone for not doing the dishes.
Those Chinese workers? They used to buy US goods. Not any more.
What about when the US exports the goods to China, that were designed by US companies in the first place?
I think you're missing the previous poster's point, that the chinese won't be able to buy goods in general because the former workers will be unemployed and have no income.
Health care is not like the other things you list. Want to turn an average person into a criminal, even a murderer? It is easy, just put them or one of their loved ones in the position of a life saving operation being denied because they don't have enough money. Wealth inequality is the best predictor of violent crime. Be Very careful in how you define basic health care and really think about the costs because basic doesn't mean cheap to provide unless you're begging for a violent revolution.
a basic education
If you can't get a job with a basic education, how does this prevent societal disruption?
That is why people have dual income families and a mountain of debt.
Well that and the fact that real income/cost ratios have been going down for decades and wealth inequality has been going up and globalization has made markets less reactive to workers and the progressiveness of taxes is the lowest in many decades.
Except that if Apple really did charge more than needed, than someone else would step in and sell a similar product for cheaper.
People do sell similar products cheaper. Apple can still charge higher margins because of brand loyalty and because the market is heavily distorted by the near monopoly on desktop computer operating systems held by Microsoft. Apple had the capital and position to bypass most of that market distortion using extreme vertical integration, but only with very large upfront costs. This barrier to entry then reduces competitive pressure and lets them make larger than normal margins on the high end.
Market forces are not as simplistic as a supply demand diagram from Econ 101.
Some OSX aficionados really like Pixelmator, a photo editing program which is an alternative to Photoshop. I haven't used it myself so I can't say whether it would be worth it or not.
Pixelmator is a very nice 70% Photoshop replacement that is much, much faster and takes advantage of OS X specific features. That said, it also uses a lot of the graphic libraries that probably are going to be the hardest thing for Darling to get working.
A port of GNUstep to Android would let iOS application developers target Android with much less additional effort.
There are already excellent tools for doing just that. You don't get much easier than Cordova or Unity. Darling seems like a fun project and could even be useful some day, but not really a practical solution to cross platform mobile development unless Google were to buy in in a really, really big way.
The problem with Google's solution is that it does not do just what I described, split the security auditing from the distribution.
No, my point was that the stores with serious restrictions are not purely for security purposes. Google does not have a walled garden, Microsoft and Apple do, and they do because they want 100% control over the platform. Beyond security, it lets them play gatekeeper and impose a toll on both developers and users they haven't been able to before.
I understand your point but I don't think I agree. It is easy to try to villify Apple and MS for their choices and to ascribe all sorts of nefarious motives. I think it's bunk. I think they're primarily interested in making money and the App stores are there to make it convenient and easy for users to get apps without getting any malware. It serves the needs of 90% of users and makes things very easy for those users at the expense of power users and those who want a bit more choice.
You ascribe, for example, the ability to impose a toll on developers, but really Apple makes jack from developer licensing and their share of content distribution. They make their money on the hardware and the whole app store thing is just a means to make users happy so they can get there.
Every store is going to perform its own vetting, there's no real way to divorce it from the companies except in Google's case, and they'll do it anyway if they want their reputation to mean anything (and it needs improving.)
I 100% disagree. It is certainly possible to divorce the vetting from the distribution. We just haven't built a system to do it, but there is certainly not a technological barrier, nor is there a financial reason it wouldn't work.
Microsoft and Apple will never budge, as they want you to be their only option.
Show them a way to make more money by not being the only option, that also doesn't tarnish their brands and we'll see.
Apple may have pushed to remove DRM on music, but they haven't made a peep about ebooks or movies, let alone the effective DRM that iOS as a whole imposes.
Of course they haven't. For movies the DVD format is locked down with legal nonsense so there is no motivation and for e-books, no one scans them in. This means the DRM is not really costing Apple any sales, so Apple has no motivation to fight them. My point was that Apple will happily and effectively fight for better experiences for users when it will make more money for Apple. I believe that divorcing application distribution and security vetting is just such a situation, where Apple would make more money by selling more devices and at the same time we'd win by getting more freedom.
Seriously, fat elf? ELF was fine, it's another TLA that you might pronounce as E-L-F, but there's only one way people would say FatELF. "Just turn the GIMP into a FatELF and it'll run on all platforms.", seriously RMS should add another one to the list, free as in beer, free as in speech and free as in puns.
Funny. Seriously though application formats are not user facing so you can name them "BinaryBlumpers" for all I care. I just wish Linux as a desktop were not quite so castrated by Linux as a server design choices and mentality. Icculus's experiences mirrored my own when trying to discuss ways Linux could borrow from other OS's to make it a better desktop. It's all fine and dandy unless you want to add something fundamental and then a million angry server monkeys appear and throw poo. Unless the culture changes Linux will forever be relegated to server and appliance roles.
I feel like you are talking about different things. Steam isn't a developer, it's a gaming platform and a game store.
Agreed, but Steam is a distribution platform and a store. They add value by handling a lot of the purchasing and with value added integration. They are competing with the App stores for about half of their business model. It is likely not sustainable unless there is some sort of major technological shift.
That would be like talking about putting Steam into Game for Windows Live. You can talk about Valve putting their games into other people's store, but not Steam as a platform.
Well, yes and no. Steam is not a fixed technology. One of the benefits is that across platforms it can link users together to play, chat, share scores, etc. Valve introducing not only their games to Windows Live but also their reputation and ability to audit games to determine which ones are malware or crashy or will otherwise cause users problems is a very real value, especially if MS were to walk away from that service and leave it up to third parties. Xbox, however is the most locked down and least likely of platforms. Phones and desktop OS's on the other hand are a more plausible situation.
So, there is no scenario in which Steam can be a first class citizen. You're mixing Valve the developers, and Steam as a distribution platform.
So imagine a world where Apple announced they were going to allow absolutely any application to be distributed in the App store... but by default users would only see the ones Apple approved. Imagine, however, that users could add any company/organization they wanted to approve or disapprove of software and provide ratings for it. For example, Symantec could feed information to the Apple store and users that enabled it could (for a fee) have all applications vetted against Symantec's white/black list. Users could add the Catholic Church's whitelist to remove even apps Apple provided that did not align with the beliefs of those adherents. Users could also add Valve and see added to the store any games Valve had approved as options for purchase. Further Valve approved apps (submitted to the store by Valve) all included integration with Steam's network services to add value.
In the example above Steam is a first class citizen as much as any other distributor of software and while Apple might exclude some of their games by default for whatever reason, users could still get those games from the same place as all their other games. This is a survivable situation for Valve so long as they keep producing games and adding value with their network services (like integration with other platforms and authentication on other platforms) and Apple wins because more people can get the apps they want and Apple sells more hardware all without seriously degrading the security benefits of the current App store.
From what I understand Apple (and probably the others) makes loads of money out of every sell on their store, they don't make money when someone sell a macosx software outside apple's store.
I'm not sure why you think that. Apple makes a crapton of money selling iPhones, iPods, and Macs. They make basically nothing selling software and content. They have a "razors" business model where they sell the content at near cost to motivate purchases of hardware. Their whole software and services division accounts for something like 3% of revenue. The management would have to be idiots to make any decision to try to get profit from those services at the expense of their current, super profitable, hardware business.
The interesting thing here is that Microsoft, Google, and Apple are all building app stores with serious restrictions as a way to improve security, but aside from making stronger brands and improving user experience in removing malware, they don't get a lot out of the restrictiveness.
Google is largely exempt from this implication so long as Android continues to come with a simple check-box for side loading software.
I'm not sure I agree. The problem with Google's solution is that it does not do just what I described, split the security auditing from the distribution. To get software Google does not approve of (for any not necessarily disclosed reason) you have to go out on a limb and try to independently verify the security of an app, and frankly 99% of users can't do that. This is one of the major reasons why there is such a malware problem on Android compared to the other phone platforms.
For Android this is already possible, as evidenced by the Amazon App Store.
You're missing the point. There are also app stores for jailbroken iPhones and numerous stores for Windows and Mac OS X. The problem with them is that they are separate stores with separate policies and separate interfaces trying to compete with a pre-bundled store. That's great for power users but not so great for normal users.
For Microsoft and Apple, you'll have to force the issue legally. They're quite content to maintain lock-down on their "current" platforms.
Again, I disagree. Both Apple and MS retain their models because of the benefits it brings them, but the model I proposed retains those benefits and actually provides more benefit to the company. It is my belief that both MS and Apple would make more money if they had a store in place that divorced auditing from distribution, but maybe not enough to offset the cost of building such a platform. Sometimes it doesn't take legal action to get something beneficial to the user, just enlightened self interest. Look at Apple's opposition to DRM on music. They fought long and hard to get DRM removed from contracts and to paint it in a negative light in the public eye. They didn't do this out of altruism, but because it made them more money by making the whole system better for end users and thus sold more music players.
Between Apple and Microsoft, Valve has to fight for a less restrictive platform.
The interesting thing here is that Microsoft, Google, and Apple are all building app stores with serious restrictions as a way to improve security, but aside from making stronger brands and improving user experience in removing malware, they don't get a lot out of the restrictiveness. Apple doesn't make money by not allowing pornography apps. There is potential for abuse, but realistically none of the major players have been doing a lot to promote their own software with these restrictions and seem mostly focused on preventing apps that kill battery life, could be malware, or create development chains controlled by their competitors in ways that leave them strategically vulnerable.
That said, I think they could all be persuaded to have more open policies, ones that would allow Steam to be a first class citizen, if they could get the same level of security. The main problem is that in all these walled garden stores the security auditing and the distribution system are tied together and managed centrally by one company. If we could persuade them to split these apart and allow third party security auditing that applies a filter to the distribution system and then put in place policies of completely open distribution, where they distribute anything... but by default apply a user editable filter that removes all the same things they do now it would still solve their security and battery woes for the mass market (potentially improving it by making it competitive) but also open up distribution for third parties like Steam.
In the above scenario Steam would face more competition as well, as much of their value added would already be bundled, but I'm sure Valve would be willing to go with it and innovate in order to earn their dollar.
Slashdot Mirror
In the 50s, it wasn't unusual for a family to not have home telephone service. Through the early-mid 80s, it was usual for middle-class families to only have one television set.
And then technology advanced and become more commoditized and cheaper.
So, yes, the change in tax policy coincided with and perhaps even caused the disparity but the total amount of wealth for all increased.
Not really, people make less in inflation adjusted dollars than they used to, well most people. A small subset off people make orders of magnitude more.
You're talking about cutting off your own nose to spite your face. You don't want the rich guys to have so much more than you do, but you don't seem to understand that you would have less too.
You are going to need to support that hypothesis. What we were talking about wanting was lower violent crime, and places with less wealth disparity have it. They also seem to have just as many televisions and telephones in the average home as we do... plus more effective health care, better upward mobility, etc. The american dream exists, it's just been moved overseas where there is now better chance of moving up the ladder than in the U.S., for shame.
Your argument might have more merit if you can explain how so many people who are poor and come from nothing but the clothes on their back and manage to become wealthy. Are they all, each and every one helpless to achieve without the government providing them everything?
Sure people manage that, but statistically, it is not really relevant. Some short people are excellent basketball players, that doesn't mean you're not an idiot if you build your team based upon that as a premise. In general, taxation levels that don't balance wealth condensation simply result in long term instability and wealth consolidating into fewer hands until the system collapses.
As far as "the people" voting democratically to decide what gets done with the wealth created by some of "the people," what makes this mass of people more worthy of taking what I built and struggled for away from my family?
Because your family starting out with more than some other family is unfair, just as the king's family starting with more legal power than any other family is unfair. By your argument why shouldn't president Obama be able to name his children as president after his term, after all he worked hard to become president. Who are you to say he can't pass it on to his family?
Why should I even try to build something for my family, when I know that it will never get to them, because "the people" decide they're not worthy of it?
That's fine. Don't build something for your family. Build it for society and make the whole of society better for your family and everyone else's. Or don't. That's your prerogative.
My fervent wish is for people with your beliefs to live in the world you want to make, so lomg[sic] as I'm lomg[sic] dead.
Well get to it then chum.
You know what correlates very, very well with violent crime rates around the world? Wealth disparity.
I absolutely agree. But whilst waiting for wealth disparity in the US to be dealt with (don't hold your breath) removing the guns helps too.
As far as studies have been able to determine, neither rate of gun ownership, nor any gun control laws have had any significant impact on violent crime levels, so... no not really. Maybe you'd like that to be true, maybe you believe it to be true, but the science just doesn't back it up.
If you read more detail in history, you'll see that the "historically high rates" from earlier years weren't actually extracted from those with wealth, as they all managed (and still do) to gain loopholes.
Not any more so than now, as far as I've read, unless you have some citation otherwise.
As far as the fairness of a 100% inheritance tax, what does that do to the families of entrepreneurs who build companies in their lifetimes, sometimes huge billion-dollar companies that employ thousands of people and provide goods and services for millions? Should those companies be liquidated to pay that tax, in order to achieve your vision of "fairness" and "equality" simply because "it's worked before" (it really hasn't)?
As I said, it engenders waste, but it is fair, and it's not like the company needs be shut down, it just means ownership of the shares is transferred to the state for sale on the market. Mind you, I'm not proposing that as an ideal solution, merely the "fairest" one.
Do you honestly believe that giving the government all the wealth that gets created by private citizens on their death is better than letting individuals decide what's best for their families?
???
I'm not sure what you're talking about. How does being born poor as hell into a family that can't provide you with any opportunities and having to take out loans for school, college, and basic necessities such as transportation (loans paid to those born wealthy) mean any sort of freedom? Freedom to do what exactly, have no opportunity that does not benefit those born wealthy more than it does you?
The government is democratic and represents the people. It is by the people for the people. But more importantly, we're talking about the government redistributing wealth in ways that help level the playing field. Ever played the second round of monopoly? It was made as an educational game for economics students. Try it some time.
We're not talking about an untested hypothesis here either. Lots of other nations have much better social safety nets and they recovered from the economic collapse faster, have more stable economies, and less violent crime. Correlation does not imply a specific causation, but it does provide some great beginnings to testable hypothesis and those hypothesis have been borne out. Go ahead and look at violent crime stats around the world and just try to find one that does not line up well with wealth disparity. Maybe you don't like the answer because it does not fit with your preconceived notions, but too bad. Science works. Deal with it.
The problem lies in how the "meritocracy" gets created when the ones who inherit wealth refuse to give it up.
Not really. 100% inheritance tax is one way, although it inserts large amounts of waste into the system. Traditionally, we just tax wealth at increasingly high rates as you go up the scale so that while those with money can still use it to make money, they have to make proportionally more money to offset the higher taxes. Heck, the income taxes in the late 50's through the early 80's did just that and the relative proportions of wealth in society remained quite stable. Then we slashed taxes on the high end and now more and more wealth is in fewer and fewer hands. This isn't rocket science. It is fairly basic economics.
Unless you're willing to apply force to take it from them, or otherwise restrict the freedom of people who inherit great wealth such that they can only spend and not invest or otherwise grow that wealth, your "meritocracy" is doomed.
I don't really understand your perspective. Income taxes are already by force and returning to historically normal rates instead of the extreme rates we have now is not some radical concept. It's been done. It worked. It is, in fact, historically more common than the unsustainable system we have now.
So, if we take from the people that have "too much" and give it all to the potential criminals, they'll decide not to be criminals anymore.
That sounds like a strawman, but I'll give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you misunderstood my post. This has nothing to do with taking from those who have "too much". It has to do with balancing the inherent advantage conferred by inherited wealth to the extent that we have a stable economy instead of one where that advantage results in wealth constantly consolidating into fewer and fewer hands. People who don't contribute to society and just live off the wealth of their forebears are fine, but that should not be a stable aristocracy, rather the wealth should be spent and the next generation should have to actually, gasp, work and do something if they want to live in our society. Trust fund bums are a drain on society and I do not abide the useless and neither should society... especially if they want to have a stable economy and the lower level of violent crime that comes with it.
I'm not advocating for a welfare state, I'm advocating for a meritocracy, and the fairness of a meritocracy leads to less violent crime as many a sociologist can demonstrate.
If I were a criminal in spe and wanted to burgle a store or home at night to steal valuables, and lived in, say, England, I would be unarmed. If I lived in the US, I would carry a gun to protect my own life. When guns are outlawed, fewer criminals will have guns. This, I think is a net win, even if some will still have them.
I think we should measure a net win by how many violent crimes are committed and how many homicides and assaults, not how many people have guns. Sure fewer people have guns in the UK, but a lot more people are beaten in their homes or stabbed, relative to the size of the population. In Brazil, fewer people have guns but a lot more people are hit by shrapnel or fire from drive by bombings and fire-bombings. If half as many people are shot with guns, but twice as many are murdered, by your metric that is a win. I strongly believe you should change your metric.
Take those away from the stats, and an amazing thing happens, our gun crime rate is in line with Europes. (Watch some idiots raise "racist" smokescreen out of my factual observation.
No, it's not your racism I draw attention to. It's your lack of knowledge that Europe also has non-european descent minorities. Guns are the difference, not the mix of races.
You're both wrong.
While a mix of different social and cultural norms does correlate (very slightly but significantly) with increased violent crime, it is by no means a large correlation. Gun ownership rates and gun control laws, have little to no correlation with rates of violent crime. Look at some of the high gun ownership rates in northern europe and the very low violent crime rates. Look at the relatively high mix of different races and cultures in places like Anaheim that have very low violent crime compared to the rest of the region.
You know what correlates very, very well with violent crime rates around the world? Wealth disparity. Yup, determining the difference of the real incomes between the top and bottom within a region is an excellent way to predict the rate of violent crime (and often correlates in the US with race as well).
So no, you both lose. It's not "the mixin' of the races" or "the guns." It's about the basic inequalities of our society that drive those without to violent action to try to change their lot in life. Real measures to reduce violent crime, measures that demonstrably have worked elsewhere include: social safety nets like free healthcare; levels of tax progressiveness that balance or more than balance wealth condensation; free education; and programs to encourage new, small business for those without capital. Your pet fears need not apply.
In Australia there was mass shooting in 1996 resulting in the death of 35 people. Public outcry helped push legislation for stricter gun control laws, and there has not been a single mass shooting incident there since then.
Actually, there have been several mass shootings in Australia since 1996, e.g. Monash. On top of that there have been several bombings and arson attacks on children. There have not really been any studies I've seen indicating their gun control measures were effective in reducing violent crime or violent injury or death. There have been several studies showing that the proportion of crimes committed using firearms went down, which is a victory if your goal is to stop gun crimes, but that's a sort of idiotic goal, isn't it?
Thank you for your good intentions, but...just why is this a task for the federal government?
Okay, I'm curious. Are you trolling or is your understanding of interstate commerce drawn directly from (and only from) poorly researched libertarian pamphlets?
That wsa[sic] a reasonable question 40 years ago. Now we can look at the last 40 years of countries tightening up on gun control. The countries that did that have fewer homicides, crime, and gun deaths.
Can you please support this with some numbers? I've seen the UK numbers which are muddled at best with most attempts to do a before-and-after comparison showing fewer crimes with guns but higher overall violent crime rates including murder but excluding suicide. What countries are you thinking of and what studies?
The fact is, most of our most dangerous cities are the very cities with the strictest gun control laws.
That might be true but that is not sufficient to determine a causation. Science can give us the information. If we look at global trends it is fairly clear the most dangerous places due to violent crime are those places with the highest wealth disparity. Taking a look at those same global trends there is not really much correlation with rates of gun ownership. E.g. Sweden and the US have similar rates of gun ownership but are on opposite ends of the spectrum for violent crime.
A lot of people play games with statistics.
And they will continue to do so because people don't understand math and people want easy solutions handed out by politicians. Politicians are happy to champion easy and ineffective answers because it gets them re-elected. Biden is heading up a new commission to look into a reaction to the recent mass shooting, but it will probably have no real impact. What might have an impact on stopping that particular crime is free mental health services, but that isn't palatable to anyone politically and is not interesting enough to drive votes.
From the Canonical Blog Post on the new feature:
Privacy is extremely important to Canonical. The data we collect is not user-identifiable (we automatically anonymize user logs and that information is never available to the teams delivering services to end users), we make users aware of what data will be collected and which third party services will be queried through a notice right in the Dash, and we only collect data that allows us to deliver a great search experience to Ubuntu users. We also recognize that there is always a minority of users who prefer complete data protection, often choosing to avoid services like Google, Facebook or Twitter for those reasons – and for those users, we have made it dead easy to switch the online search tools off with a simple toggle in settings.
So while I think the privacy concerns with sending data to Canonical when you'e doing searches is significant, so long as the user is aware and has the option, more power to them. I don't think I want to integrate my desktop and network search, but I certainly see a mass market that may want this. Depending upon how easy it is to create and configure these "scopes" to plug into this system it might be a great way to build customized searching without the need for Google to know everything about me.
I think people are too reactionary when it comes to both privacy and commercialism. From the previous posts you'd think this was a mandatory feature and Canonical was selling user data or something. They seem to be responsible players here creating cool tech that some of us may not want. I see nothing for me to get upset about.
To those of you who get up and work everyday to support bums. I'm sorry but you have little idea how much abuse is going on.
Humans are not rational. Have you seen the social studies where you get to divide money between two people, one divides it and the other picks if they both get the money or both get screwed. People always turn down free money just to punish those they think have done wrong. And that is exactly your problem. You're focused on trying to punish those that game the system even at the expense of having an effective system overall.
There is no perfect, un-exploitable system. Deal with it. That doesn't mean we should burn the house down to try to punish someone for not doing the dishes.
Those Chinese workers? They used to buy US goods. Not any more.
What about when the US exports the goods to China, that were designed by US companies in the first place?
I think you're missing the previous poster's point, that the chinese won't be able to buy goods in general because the former workers will be unemployed and have no income.
basic and I mean BASIC health care
Health care is not like the other things you list. Want to turn an average person into a criminal, even a murderer? It is easy, just put them or one of their loved ones in the position of a life saving operation being denied because they don't have enough money. Wealth inequality is the best predictor of violent crime. Be Very careful in how you define basic health care and really think about the costs because basic doesn't mean cheap to provide unless you're begging for a violent revolution.
a basic education
If you can't get a job with a basic education, how does this prevent societal disruption?
That is why people have dual income families and a mountain of debt.
Well that and the fact that real income/cost ratios have been going down for decades and wealth inequality has been going up and globalization has made markets less reactive to workers and the progressiveness of taxes is the lowest in many decades.
Except that if Apple really did charge more than needed, than someone else would step in and sell a similar product for cheaper.
People do sell similar products cheaper. Apple can still charge higher margins because of brand loyalty and because the market is heavily distorted by the near monopoly on desktop computer operating systems held by Microsoft. Apple had the capital and position to bypass most of that market distortion using extreme vertical integration, but only with very large upfront costs. This barrier to entry then reduces competitive pressure and lets them make larger than normal margins on the high end.
Market forces are not as simplistic as a supply demand diagram from Econ 101.
Some OSX aficionados really like Pixelmator, a photo editing program which is an alternative to Photoshop. I haven't used it myself so I can't say whether it would be worth it or not.
Pixelmator is a very nice 70% Photoshop replacement that is much, much faster and takes advantage of OS X specific features. That said, it also uses a lot of the graphic libraries that probably are going to be the hardest thing for Darling to get working.
A port of GNUstep to Android would let iOS application developers target Android with much less additional effort.
There are already excellent tools for doing just that. You don't get much easier than Cordova or Unity. Darling seems like a fun project and could even be useful some day, but not really a practical solution to cross platform mobile development unless Google were to buy in in a really, really big way.
The problem with Google's solution is that it does not do just what I described, split the security auditing from the distribution.
No, my point was that the stores with serious restrictions are not purely for security purposes. Google does not have a walled garden, Microsoft and Apple do, and they do because they want 100% control over the platform. Beyond security, it lets them play gatekeeper and impose a toll on both developers and users they haven't been able to before.
I understand your point but I don't think I agree. It is easy to try to villify Apple and MS for their choices and to ascribe all sorts of nefarious motives. I think it's bunk. I think they're primarily interested in making money and the App stores are there to make it convenient and easy for users to get apps without getting any malware. It serves the needs of 90% of users and makes things very easy for those users at the expense of power users and those who want a bit more choice.
You ascribe, for example, the ability to impose a toll on developers, but really Apple makes jack from developer licensing and their share of content distribution. They make their money on the hardware and the whole app store thing is just a means to make users happy so they can get there.
Every store is going to perform its own vetting, there's no real way to divorce it from the companies except in Google's case, and they'll do it anyway if they want their reputation to mean anything (and it needs improving.)
I 100% disagree. It is certainly possible to divorce the vetting from the distribution. We just haven't built a system to do it, but there is certainly not a technological barrier, nor is there a financial reason it wouldn't work.
Microsoft and Apple will never budge, as they want you to be their only option.
Show them a way to make more money by not being the only option, that also doesn't tarnish their brands and we'll see.
Apple may have pushed to remove DRM on music, but they haven't made a peep about ebooks or movies, let alone the effective DRM that iOS as a whole imposes.
Of course they haven't. For movies the DVD format is locked down with legal nonsense so there is no motivation and for e-books, no one scans them in. This means the DRM is not really costing Apple any sales, so Apple has no motivation to fight them. My point was that Apple will happily and effectively fight for better experiences for users when it will make more money for Apple. I believe that divorcing application distribution and security vetting is just such a situation, where Apple would make more money by selling more devices and at the same time we'd win by getting more freedom.
Seriously, fat elf? ELF was fine, it's another TLA that you might pronounce as E-L-F, but there's only one way people would say FatELF. "Just turn the GIMP into a FatELF and it'll run on all platforms.", seriously RMS should add another one to the list, free as in beer, free as in speech and free as in puns.
Funny. Seriously though application formats are not user facing so you can name them "BinaryBlumpers" for all I care. I just wish Linux as a desktop were not quite so castrated by Linux as a server design choices and mentality. Icculus's experiences mirrored my own when trying to discuss ways Linux could borrow from other OS's to make it a better desktop. It's all fine and dandy unless you want to add something fundamental and then a million angry server monkeys appear and throw poo. Unless the culture changes Linux will forever be relegated to server and appliance roles.
I feel like you are talking about different things. Steam isn't a developer, it's a gaming platform and a game store.
Agreed, but Steam is a distribution platform and a store. They add value by handling a lot of the purchasing and with value added integration. They are competing with the App stores for about half of their business model. It is likely not sustainable unless there is some sort of major technological shift.
That would be like talking about putting Steam into Game for Windows Live. You can talk about Valve putting their games into other people's store, but not Steam as a platform.
Well, yes and no. Steam is not a fixed technology. One of the benefits is that across platforms it can link users together to play, chat, share scores, etc. Valve introducing not only their games to Windows Live but also their reputation and ability to audit games to determine which ones are malware or crashy or will otherwise cause users problems is a very real value, especially if MS were to walk away from that service and leave it up to third parties. Xbox, however is the most locked down and least likely of platforms. Phones and desktop OS's on the other hand are a more plausible situation.
So, there is no scenario in which Steam can be a first class citizen. You're mixing Valve the developers, and Steam as a distribution platform.
So imagine a world where Apple announced they were going to allow absolutely any application to be distributed in the App store... but by default users would only see the ones Apple approved. Imagine, however, that users could add any company/organization they wanted to approve or disapprove of software and provide ratings for it. For example, Symantec could feed information to the Apple store and users that enabled it could (for a fee) have all applications vetted against Symantec's white/black list. Users could add the Catholic Church's whitelist to remove even apps Apple provided that did not align with the beliefs of those adherents. Users could also add Valve and see added to the store any games Valve had approved as options for purchase. Further Valve approved apps (submitted to the store by Valve) all included integration with Steam's network services to add value.
In the example above Steam is a first class citizen as much as any other distributor of software and while Apple might exclude some of their games by default for whatever reason, users could still get those games from the same place as all their other games. This is a survivable situation for Valve so long as they keep producing games and adding value with their network services (like integration with other platforms and authentication on other platforms) and Apple wins because more people can get the apps they want and Apple sells more hardware all without seriously degrading the security benefits of the current App store.
they don't get a lot out of the restrictiveness
From what I understand Apple (and probably the others) makes loads of money out of every sell on their store, they don't make money when someone sell a macosx software outside apple's store.
I'm not sure why you think that. Apple makes a crapton of money selling iPhones, iPods, and Macs. They make basically nothing selling software and content. They have a "razors" business model where they sell the content at near cost to motivate purchases of hardware. Their whole software and services division accounts for something like 3% of revenue. The management would have to be idiots to make any decision to try to get profit from those services at the expense of their current, super profitable, hardware business.
The interesting thing here is that Microsoft, Google, and Apple are all building app stores with serious restrictions as a way to improve security, but aside from making stronger brands and improving user experience in removing malware, they don't get a lot out of the restrictiveness.
Google is largely exempt from this implication so long as Android continues to come with a simple check-box for side loading software.
I'm not sure I agree. The problem with Google's solution is that it does not do just what I described, split the security auditing from the distribution. To get software Google does not approve of (for any not necessarily disclosed reason) you have to go out on a limb and try to independently verify the security of an app, and frankly 99% of users can't do that. This is one of the major reasons why there is such a malware problem on Android compared to the other phone platforms.
For Android this is already possible, as evidenced by the Amazon App Store.
You're missing the point. There are also app stores for jailbroken iPhones and numerous stores for Windows and Mac OS X. The problem with them is that they are separate stores with separate policies and separate interfaces trying to compete with a pre-bundled store. That's great for power users but not so great for normal users.
For Microsoft and Apple, you'll have to force the issue legally. They're quite content to maintain lock-down on their "current" platforms.
Again, I disagree. Both Apple and MS retain their models because of the benefits it brings them, but the model I proposed retains those benefits and actually provides more benefit to the company. It is my belief that both MS and Apple would make more money if they had a store in place that divorced auditing from distribution, but maybe not enough to offset the cost of building such a platform. Sometimes it doesn't take legal action to get something beneficial to the user, just enlightened self interest. Look at Apple's opposition to DRM on music. They fought long and hard to get DRM removed from contracts and to paint it in a negative light in the public eye. They didn't do this out of altruism, but because it made them more money by making the whole system better for end users and thus sold more music players.
From the interview:
Between Apple and Microsoft, Valve has to fight for a less restrictive platform.
The interesting thing here is that Microsoft, Google, and Apple are all building app stores with serious restrictions as a way to improve security, but aside from making stronger brands and improving user experience in removing malware, they don't get a lot out of the restrictiveness. Apple doesn't make money by not allowing pornography apps. There is potential for abuse, but realistically none of the major players have been doing a lot to promote their own software with these restrictions and seem mostly focused on preventing apps that kill battery life, could be malware, or create development chains controlled by their competitors in ways that leave them strategically vulnerable.
That said, I think they could all be persuaded to have more open policies, ones that would allow Steam to be a first class citizen, if they could get the same level of security. The main problem is that in all these walled garden stores the security auditing and the distribution system are tied together and managed centrally by one company. If we could persuade them to split these apart and allow third party security auditing that applies a filter to the distribution system and then put in place policies of completely open distribution, where they distribute anything... but by default apply a user editable filter that removes all the same things they do now it would still solve their security and battery woes for the mass market (potentially improving it by making it competitive) but also open up distribution for third parties like Steam.
In the above scenario Steam would face more competition as well, as much of their value added would already be bundled, but I'm sure Valve would be willing to go with it and innovate in order to earn their dollar.