It is true that they have accountability to customers, but this form of accountability is so much more limited than that they have to their shareholders and the law that it's insignificant. Given that the injury these companies potentially can do to society encompasses considerably more people than those who are direct customers, it's hardly a solution - some companies that are partly along the production chain have customers who are pretty much just other businesses. Even in a fairly capitalistic system, there must be remedies for these kinds of issues beyond depending on whatever customers there might be. The public good is more complex than "get me good stuff as cheaply as possible".
I wouldn't say that competition is always a good thing for the people - even in game theory we can see that Nash Equilibria are only local optima, usually not global. Tragedy of the commons should be another familiar concept to most educated people. Note as well that the formal conditions for perfect markets don't persist in the real world without shaping from some outside forces - if you really believe in capitalism, your flavour is either one divorced from careful study of standard economics or not one much resembling the perfect markets that are typically seen as the ideal for economists.
If I recall correctly, he's spoken enthusiastically about disbanding the IRS. Eliminating a major source of funding for our government combined with being eager to drastically cut government programs (rather than by merit) strikes me as very harmful.
You're describing the American Confederation more than the United States. The Confederation didn't work very well because it was based on the principles you describe, and so they went back to the drawing board after a few years and tried something a little bit less extremist (which is when the Constitution was written). Your statement "it was understood by all" is inaccurate.
Various interests struggle in an active society - threats to autonomy and dignity can come as easily from the state as from each other. The state is theoretically accountable to the people, while businesses are theoretically accountable only to their shareholders and the law. Using laws and other mechanisms of the state to curb business when it harms interests of the people is a vital tactic to protecting society - to give those up because we decide that the state (and the people whose interests it theoretically advances) is naturally evil seems like adopting fatalism towards whatever business decides to do. Admittedly, the state in practice is a tool we struggle over with each other and (even more unfortunately) with business interests, but maybe we can find ways to eliminate the latter. Struggle over society's shape and ends is almost intrinsic to having a society - putting laws on the topics you mentioned completely out of consideration would result in something almost unimaginable. Personally, I'm not interested in residing within whatever that society would become, and will argue and vote the other way whenever I can. I'd hate to see Ron Paul or anyone else who's close enough to being a Libertarian actually make it into office - we'd probably see something pretty close to Anarchocapitalism...
An average congressperson probably comes up with more laws than that. We could probably dig through history and find numerous examples of better "lawgivers" than that. He's mainly up there, presumably, to be venerated and as a reminder of the status that Christianity holds in American society. Part of this is deceptive - a number of the founding fathers were not christians, nor is the british legal system particularly tied to the christian bible. The other part is.. unlikely to be accepted by the many Americans who are not christian. In another hundred years, will we see Mohammad and L. Ron Hubbard joining Jesus on these things in America?
Larger countries also have a larger tax base. Look at per-capita income - if Britain can afford it, the United States could probably afford it too. There are also presumably ways to leave incentives and prods towards healthy living inside of a socialised system...
I understand that dependence on the state is a relationship that one can't readily opt out of, but I can't see any way around it - the state is just another manifestation of society at large. What would it mean to choose not to depend on other people at all? Is it really important to try to figure that out and make ways for it to happen? Why would someone want to withdraw? Maybe there are other solutions to make it so they can get what they want without such withdrawal?
Your public transit argument is actually a good example - maybe a better solution than cars is better public transit - more funding, more frequent busses, better adaptivity to meet the needs of people. I suspect that if 70% of the amount of capital put into cars for individuals went into public transit, we'd have a more cost-efficient, better system that would get people where they need to go quickly when busses are needed. As you note though, sometimes bikes are a better solution - a mix of bikes and PT would make for a much better city than automobiles. Some European cities (like Amsterdam and Brussels) are very bike-friendly and have very good public transit - most people don't have cars, and I think that's what we should be aiming for.
That small town setting does have advantages - it'd be great if we could find ways for those advantages to scale up to big cities better, and encourage adoption of those ways consistent with the social good. The more progress we can make towards such ends, the more smoothly society would presumably work..
There are trade-offs with big cities, true.. the ecological footprint per-person is lower in large cities, but it alienates those people further from nature. I think public transit is cost-effective in more than the largest of cities though - it's more that it's politically difficult to convince people to give up cars that holds us back there. There's nothing wrong with being dependent on other people though - we're a social species, and all the advances we've made in the thousands of years of civilisation depend on mutual trust and benefit. Some people abuse that, and there are structural problems/areas for improvement, but the state (in its myriad of possible forms) is just one more mechanism of people working together for common cause.
Hmm.. that's a point. I think what you're paying for is the cost of enforcing laws pertaining to the media that you're choosing to involve yourself with... or in part the damages relating to those laws being broken.
It's not quite analogous, but I don't think it'd be a terrible thing if the cost to maintain a driver's license floated to include all costs of enforcement of driving laws and damages from that (that arn't covered by tickets and lawsuits), so those of us who choose not to drive can opt out of that particular collective responsibility of society. While I don't think that in general opting out in that way is a good thing to allow (school vouchers strike me as a particularly bad idea), given that driving is in most areas a harmful vanity (compare with public transit) and society is better served when people don't drive, it seems appropriate.
Note that I'm not arguing for media charges to recompense for activity that's still illegal (I dislike our IP protections as presently implemented), I'm just saying that this type of charging isn't ludicrous (even if we can't find a perfectly pretty argument for it).
I don't personally like the idea of copyright fees for media, but I wouldn't call it ludicrous.. People as diverse as RMS and corporate folk have suggested it as a workable solution..
It's kind of sad to see people attach spit words to anything they disagree with, without telling us why...
A number of geeks tend to be libertarian because they're young, undersocialised, come from a certain economic stratum. Other characteristics flow from there that point them in that direction - youth in western culture tend to be fiercely individualist, and mixed with being undersocialised, they don't tend to understand the fabric of society and think that it would maintain itself in a decent way without the state. Being undersocialised and often from the middle or upper-middle classes, they're led to have little interest in the welfare of others and feel no responsibility for them (social darwinism, or alternatively the naïve notion that everyone would be a winner without the state). Add in the math-y formulation of the philosophy/state and the cheap philosophy/value system that lets them join the "party of principle" (or alternatively identify with the movement but not the party and still be a bit nonconformist), and you have a lure that catch a number of geeks.
I was like this, a number of my friends when I was younger were like this as well. The years between have changed a few of us. A few prominent libertarian philosophers have found age to do the same - Robert Nozick, who wrote "Anarchy, State, and Utopia" (a libertarian favourite) later came to the perspective that his earlier works were lacking in an understanding/care for society, and attacked these views in some of his later works.
It's not math - taking it to what you think is its logical conclusion changes its nature. From their perspective, they're reining in extreme members of their society, moving them back towards a mainstream lifestyle that they've decided to recognise.
With a secret limit, especially if it has a slightly random element to it (say, 10% off by either way), one wouldn't need to worry about every putz throttling themselves to 98% of the limit all the time and hogging the bandwidth. "Be reasonable" is fuzzy advice from a math standpoint, but generally a better way to organise things than the alternative.
I believe the people behind the comic were doing it to protest notions of free speech being limited by political correctness within the European sphere, a region where universal criticisability/mockability is held to be a value - this is meant to suggest that it should not be given up without a fight.
This is not quite the same things as suggesting it to be a worldwide norm - while one might do that as well, there's no reason to believe that that's what was meant. Even if it were, why is bravery desirable when it is also stupid? If open criticism is not possible/safe, doing it from a safe place seems like a better second best than going out in a blaze of glory. If your notion of being a good person reverses the priorities there, go ahead and be brave/stupid and sacrifice yourself - as for me, I admire more the people who get things done.
It seems like a good idea in principle, so long as it focuses on things that people can change in themselves. Unfortunately, public discourse has blurred this distinction, with people who have genetically given urges to eat confusing it, at least in public discourse, with genetically given needs to eat. Smokers and fat people probably have no excuse, while those with issues with blood pressure and the like may not be to blame for their poor health. Shoving people to take care of their health to their ability is probably a good thing though (perhaps something to deal with pro-ana folk too would be prudent)..
If it really looked like NeXTStep, there'd be a lot less to complain about. GNUStep generally looks like "NeXTStep-but-ugly" - part of what defined NeXTStep was that the interface was so polished.
It seems particularly relevant that Google recently bowed to pressure from the Thai government to remove criticism of their monarch due to lese majeste laws. It's a shame...
I don't tend to lock up the silverware whenever I have a party at my place - society depends on a mix of trust, good will, and rules to function. I personally would rather live in a society that would usually prefer to say "don't do X" rather than prevent me from doing X.
TV shows are easy - it's incredibly rare that they're encyclopedic, so there's negligible coverage needed. As for deaths, most people who are encyclopedic are already dead, and for those who arn't, the contribution can be based on an obit (which we'd presume reliable). Wikis are nice, but without a strong, maintained sense of purpose, they fall apart.
19" laptop, 200G disk, 4G RAM, USB ports on both sides, has firewire, no legacy ports (PS/2, modem, parallel), has DVI out, wireless that works without ndiswrapper or any "binary firmware" loading nonsense, soundcard that has excellent ALSA support, gigabit wired interface, battery that lasts 12 hours between charges that's also swappable without powering down the system, CF card interface, high resolution with good 2d performance and open drivers (3d relatively unimportant), 5 year comprehensive warranty, system is very very physically tough. CPU is relatively unimportant (POWER4 or PPC might be amusing, Amd64 would be ok, I'd prefer not to buy Intel).
For those who haven't picked up the little references, I'd probably be running Linux on it (although FreeBSD would be just as nice if the infrastructure were there for the hardware and other things I cared about).
That may be true, but it doesn't mean that people have to stand for it. If some attention-hungry kid on a playground acted that way, we wouldn't expect people not to shun them just because from a certain POV it's reasonable.
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It is true that they have accountability to customers, but this form of accountability is so much more limited than that they have to their shareholders and the law that it's insignificant. Given that the injury these companies potentially can do to society encompasses considerably more people than those who are direct customers, it's hardly a solution - some companies that are partly along the production chain have customers who are pretty much just other businesses. Even in a fairly capitalistic system, there must be remedies for these kinds of issues beyond depending on whatever customers there might be. The public good is more complex than "get me good stuff as cheaply as possible".
I wouldn't say that competition is always a good thing for the people - even in game theory we can see that Nash Equilibria are only local optima, usually not global. Tragedy of the commons should be another familiar concept to most educated people. Note as well that the formal conditions for perfect markets don't persist in the real world without shaping from some outside forces - if you really believe in capitalism, your flavour is either one divorced from careful study of standard economics or not one much resembling the perfect markets that are typically seen as the ideal for economists.
If I recall correctly, he's spoken enthusiastically about disbanding the IRS. Eliminating a major source of funding for our government combined with being eager to drastically cut government programs (rather than by merit) strikes me as very harmful.
You're describing the American Confederation more than the United States. The Confederation didn't work very well because it was based on the principles you describe, and so they went back to the drawing board after a few years and tried something a little bit less extremist (which is when the Constitution was written). Your statement "it was understood by all" is inaccurate.
Various interests struggle in an active society - threats to autonomy and dignity can come as easily from the state as from each other. The state is theoretically accountable to the people, while businesses are theoretically accountable only to their shareholders and the law. Using laws and other mechanisms of the state to curb business when it harms interests of the people is a vital tactic to protecting society - to give those up because we decide that the state (and the people whose interests it theoretically advances) is naturally evil seems like adopting fatalism towards whatever business decides to do. Admittedly, the state in practice is a tool we struggle over with each other and (even more unfortunately) with business interests, but maybe we can find ways to eliminate the latter. Struggle over society's shape and ends is almost intrinsic to having a society - putting laws on the topics you mentioned completely out of consideration would result in something almost unimaginable. Personally, I'm not interested in residing within whatever that society would become, and will argue and vote the other way whenever I can. I'd hate to see Ron Paul or anyone else who's close enough to being a Libertarian actually make it into office - we'd probably see something pretty close to Anarchocapitalism...
Constitution != Declaration. They served different purposes (and initially set up different systems of government).
An average congressperson probably comes up with more laws than that. We could probably dig through history and find numerous examples of better "lawgivers" than that. He's mainly up there, presumably, to be venerated and as a reminder of the status that Christianity holds in American society. Part of this is deceptive - a number of the founding fathers were not christians, nor is the british legal system particularly tied to the christian bible. The other part is .. unlikely to be accepted by the many Americans who are not christian. In another hundred years, will we see Mohammad and L. Ron Hubbard joining Jesus on these things in America?
Larger countries also have a larger tax base. Look at per-capita income - if Britain can afford it, the United States could probably afford it too. There are also presumably ways to leave incentives and prods towards healthy living inside of a socialised system...
I understand that dependence on the state is a relationship that one can't readily opt out of, but I can't see any way around it - the state is just another manifestation of society at large. What would it mean to choose not to depend on other people at all? Is it really important to try to figure that out and make ways for it to happen? Why would someone want to withdraw? Maybe there are other solutions to make it so they can get what they want without such withdrawal?
Your public transit argument is actually a good example - maybe a better solution than cars is better public transit - more funding, more frequent busses, better adaptivity to meet the needs of people. I suspect that if 70% of the amount of capital put into cars for individuals went into public transit, we'd have a more cost-efficient, better system that would get people where they need to go quickly when busses are needed. As you note though, sometimes bikes are a better solution - a mix of bikes and PT would make for a much better city than automobiles. Some European cities (like Amsterdam and Brussels) are very bike-friendly and have very good public transit - most people don't have cars, and I think that's what we should be aiming for.
That small town setting does have advantages - it'd be great if we could find ways for those advantages to scale up to big cities better, and encourage adoption of those ways consistent with the social good. The more progress we can make towards such ends, the more smoothly society would presumably work..
There are trade-offs with big cities, true.. the ecological footprint per-person is lower in large cities, but it alienates those people further from nature. I think public transit is cost-effective in more than the largest of cities though - it's more that it's politically difficult to convince people to give up cars that holds us back there. There's nothing wrong with being dependent on other people though - we're a social species, and all the advances we've made in the thousands of years of civilisation depend on mutual trust and benefit. Some people abuse that, and there are structural problems/areas for improvement, but the state (in its myriad of possible forms) is just one more mechanism of people working together for common cause.
Hmm.. that's a point. I think what you're paying for is the cost of enforcing laws pertaining to the media that you're choosing to involve yourself with... or in part the damages relating to those laws being broken.
It's not quite analogous, but I don't think it'd be a terrible thing if the cost to maintain a driver's license floated to include all costs of enforcement of driving laws and damages from that (that arn't covered by tickets and lawsuits), so those of us who choose not to drive can opt out of that particular collective responsibility of society. While I don't think that in general opting out in that way is a good thing to allow (school vouchers strike me as a particularly bad idea), given that driving is in most areas a harmful vanity (compare with public transit) and society is better served when people don't drive, it seems appropriate.
Note that I'm not arguing for media charges to recompense for activity that's still illegal (I dislike our IP protections as presently implemented), I'm just saying that this type of charging isn't ludicrous (even if we can't find a perfectly pretty argument for it).
I don't personally like the idea of copyright fees for media, but I wouldn't call it ludicrous.. People as diverse as RMS and corporate folk have suggested it as a workable solution..
It's kind of sad to see people attach spit words to anything they disagree with, without telling us why...
A number of geeks tend to be libertarian because they're young, undersocialised, come from a certain economic stratum. Other characteristics flow from there that point them in that direction - youth in western culture tend to be fiercely individualist, and mixed with being undersocialised, they don't tend to understand the fabric of society and think that it would maintain itself in a decent way without the state. Being undersocialised and often from the middle or upper-middle classes, they're led to have little interest in the welfare of others and feel no responsibility for them (social darwinism, or alternatively the naïve notion that everyone would be a winner without the state). Add in the math-y formulation of the philosophy/state and the cheap philosophy/value system that lets them join the "party of principle" (or alternatively identify with the movement but not the party and still be a bit nonconformist), and you have a lure that catch a number of geeks.
I was like this, a number of my friends when I was younger were like this as well. The years between have changed a few of us. A few prominent libertarian philosophers have found age to do the same - Robert Nozick, who wrote "Anarchy, State, and Utopia" (a libertarian favourite) later came to the perspective that his earlier works were lacking in an understanding/care for society, and attacked these views in some of his later works.
It's not math - taking it to what you think is its logical conclusion changes its nature.
From their perspective, they're reining in extreme members of their society, moving them back
towards a mainstream lifestyle that they've decided to recognise.
With a secret limit, especially if it has a slightly random element to it (say, 10% off by either way), one wouldn't need to worry about every putz throttling themselves to 98% of the limit all the time and hogging the bandwidth. "Be reasonable" is fuzzy advice from a math standpoint, but generally a better way to organise things than the alternative.
I believe the people behind the comic were doing it to protest notions of free speech being limited by political correctness within the European sphere, a region where universal criticisability/mockability is held to be a value - this is meant to suggest that it should not be given up without a fight.
This is not quite the same things as suggesting it to be a worldwide norm - while one might do that as well, there's no reason to believe that that's what was meant. Even if it were, why is bravery desirable when it is also stupid? If open criticism is not possible/safe, doing it from a safe place seems like a better second best than going out in a blaze of glory. If your notion of being a good person reverses the priorities there, go ahead and be brave/stupid and sacrifice yourself - as for me, I admire more the people who get things done.
It seems like a good idea in principle, so long as it focuses on things that people can change in themselves. Unfortunately, public discourse has blurred this distinction, with people who have genetically given urges to eat confusing it, at least in public discourse, with genetically given needs to eat. Smokers and fat people probably have no excuse, while those with issues with blood pressure and the like may not be to blame for their poor health. Shoving people to take care of their health to their ability is probably a good thing though (perhaps something to deal with pro-ana folk too would be prudent)..
If it really looked like NeXTStep, there'd be a lot less to complain about. GNUStep generally looks like "NeXTStep-but-ugly" - part of what defined NeXTStep was that the interface was so polished.
Congrats! You just beat out every sufficiently old geek who wanted to make that joke :)
It seems particularly relevant that Google recently bowed to pressure from the Thai government to remove criticism of their monarch due to lese majeste laws. It's a shame...
I don't tend to lock up the silverware whenever I have a party at my place - society depends on a mix of trust, good will, and rules to function. I personally would rather live in a society that would usually prefer to say "don't do X" rather than prevent me from doing X.
In fact, why have laws at all? The only people who do bad things are bad people, and they're not stopped by laws! :)
TV shows are easy - it's incredibly rare that they're encyclopedic, so there's negligible coverage needed. As for deaths, most people who are encyclopedic are already dead, and for those who arn't, the contribution can be based on an obit (which we'd presume reliable). Wikis are nice, but without a strong, maintained sense of purpose, they fall apart.
19" laptop, 200G disk, 4G RAM, USB ports on both sides, has firewire, no legacy ports (PS/2, modem, parallel), has DVI out, wireless that works without ndiswrapper or any "binary firmware" loading nonsense, soundcard that has excellent ALSA support, gigabit wired interface, battery that lasts 12 hours between charges that's also swappable without powering down the system, CF card interface, high resolution with good 2d performance and open drivers (3d relatively unimportant), 5 year comprehensive warranty, system is very very physically tough. CPU is relatively unimportant (POWER4 or PPC might be amusing, Amd64 would be ok, I'd prefer not to buy Intel).
For those who haven't picked up the little references, I'd probably be running Linux on it (although FreeBSD would be just as nice if the infrastructure were there for the hardware and other things I cared about).
That may be true, but it doesn't mean that people have to stand for it. If some attention-hungry kid on a playground acted that way, we wouldn't expect people not to shun them just because from a certain POV it's reasonable.
The article's phrasing on that point is kind of clumsy. In any case, it was meant as humour :)
Does that mean that Canada taxes Mexicans? That explains everything!