There is a concept known as "extraterritoriality" that describes a nation's attempts to make its laws apply outside its own borders. This is usually a symptom of arrogance if not outright insanity.
Remember Manuel Noriega? A foreign national, in a foreign country, who was jailed for violating U.S. law. The U.S. has some banking and foreign trade laws that work that way too. In fact, our Congress probably does this sort of thing much more often than the French.
The French have no monopoly on either arrogance or stupidity. Thay are also not alone in passing laws that are ill-conceived, unenforceable, and likely to bring ridicule onto their country.
Yes, my argument would also say that a pyramid scheme is not precisely zero-sum unless the value of the underlying asset is constant. In most pyramid schemes, that asset is worthless, or nearly so, so your assumption would make sense. But it would be straightforward to construct a non-zero-sum pyramid scheme by varying the underlying asset value.
In a zero-sum game, the sum of all player's losses in the game equals the sum of all players' gains.
So it depend on who's counted as being "in the game" at the time. That was my boundary-condition argument above. And it depends on how the game counters (e.g., shares) are related to the value of the asset they represent.
Yes, when money changes hands, a debit shows up somewhere, and a credit somewhere else. But that's at the level of individual transactions. In that sense, you could maybe say that the boundary of the market with the rest of the economy is zero-sum. But that zero-sum condition won't necessarily be true of the current state of the market as a whole. Say, in a hypothetical small market, that everyone bought and just held for three years, and during those three years, economic prospects improved greatly. So, the value of assets held within the market would have increased, and if the outside economy were very large relative to the market, share volume would rise to a new, higher equilibrium point once people started trading again. In a zero-sum game, this change in valuation could only have happened if new suckers were lured in.
Now for dividends: zero-dividend shares, unlike baseball cards, represent a percentage of the equity of a firm (yes, a VERY small percentage, but anyway...). There are good reasons for choosing to pay dividends or using the money to increase the capital retained in the firm instead. Which one is better for shareholders depends, among other things, on the marginal tax rate on capital gains and on dividend income, and on the investors' willingness to bet on the long ball instead of taking the money out right now.
Mind you, I prefer getting dividends, since a zero-dividend policy also implies that the firm thinks they know better than I do how to invest my money. And I concur that, in a speculative market, I want to have sold all my shares before the balloon pops.
I just didn't agree with your usage of "zero-sum."
Had you said "usually not a good deal," instead of "zero-sum", though, I would have readily agreed.
This would only be a zero-sum game if there were a fixed pool of investors, investing a fixed amount of cash. But it is possible to choose whether to put your money in stock or in other investments, or none at all. Further, new money can come into the market (for example, from wages). And corporations raise money from other sources, such as the bond market, which can lead to growth that affects share prices. So flows into and out of the market as a whole also have to be taken into account. Yes, your earnings on stocks have to come from somewhere, but that's not what's meant by "zero-sum." That's just double-entry bookkeeping.
Keep in mind that, if the money starts flowing rapidly OUT of the stockmarket into other money parking places (say, cash, real estate, or tulip bulbs), it can also look for a while like a less-than-zero-sum game. Does the term "liquidity crisis" ring a bell?
Comparing the stockmarket to a poker game is like comparing the ocean to a small box of marbles. There are some boundary- and scale-related phenomena that are too important to ignore.
Government-funded researchers developed the Web. Remember ARPA? All the porn sites did was find ways to commercially exploit it. There was no innovation there, except perhaps the adoption of banner ads, which are a plague.
One could argue that the big corp's deserve the problems they have with cybersquatters. It's the penalty they pay for lacking the mental agility to notice the Web taking off. I recall a number of corporate clients of mine who smugly told me that the Internet was a passing fad, and they planned to just ignore it until it went away. Three years later, I'm sure they were whining that someone stole "their" domain name. The sliminess of cybersquatting isn't much different than the sliminess of any such form of speculation.
And if there WERE a site where corp managers discuss our conspiracy against them and what to do about it, you can be sure it's on a VPN where we wouldn't see it. They're sometimes complacent, but not nearly as stupid as some/.-ers think.
How about another example of this same reasoning: that your right to life outweighs my right to shoot out the window of my car at random targets?
Rights must be balanced and prioritized, otherwise you just end up in a quagmire. The panelist was correct, at least in general. Their specific application of the principle may have been flawed, though. Certainly, some of the WIPO decisions were based on amazingly flaky inferences.
I cannot agree with your general argument, and your examples are not correct. For example, "fight" in Old English was "feohtan." The "gh" in most English words is cognate with German "ch" and even in Middle English was not yet silent.
The French influence on English was more in the form of loan words, and the abandonment of Germanic plurals in favor of the simpler French "-s" suffix (some holdovers include "ox/oxen", "woman/women", "sheep/sheep"). And in the Middle Ages, English pronunciation shifted from a Germanic pattern to more of a hybrid Germanic/French. That's called the Great Vowel Shift. It made the language less guttural, but broke the older spellings.
Back to the topic: the French Academy would have been a better example. They rule on what is and isn't in the French language. Mostly it's a rearguard battle against the incursion of English loan words (I call that payback for the Norman invasion). Dictionaries are descriptive, not prescriptive, though it's sometimes possible for dictionary writers to tweak the language a little here and there, like Noah Webster did. But if I were to produce a Tom's A-Cold Dictionary of English the Way It Oughtta Be, and it was widely divergent from the language we all use, it's unlikely my brain-farts would redirect the course of the language. That's because dictionary writers have no authority. Which contradicts your main point.
ICANN does have authority, even if compliance by DNS server operators is voluntary. So we need to look elsewhere for parallels.
And the fittest are those who cooperate. That's why we're social, not solitary.
Don't get me wrong, capitalism does some things really well. "Buy low and sell high" is a concept that's got some legs. But if that's all there was to the story, it would be an even more brutal and empty life than it is.
Re:Ugh, I hate those new acronyms.
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LLP means "Limited Liability Partnership." It's been used for much longer than three years. I know of one US firm that has been in business for 75 years with that suffix.
PLC means "Private Limited Company" and is the British equivalent of "Co." Again, far from being an innovation.
While it is hard to dispute your use of "moronic" when referring to the behavior of executives, I think it's probably not a fad to tell people what kind of company you have.
I've played on both sides of the management/engineer fence, and have seen the system you describe work, even in some pretty extreme conditions.
The problem, from the management point of view, is getting coverage when the job requires coverage. That requires some coordination. I've had to fill in the gaps when someone just didn't show up, and I wasn't at all pleased with that.
There can also be a problem when the core hours are too short, because collaboration actually matters, and a lot of the good work gets done in hallways, by the coffee machine, or as the result of random encounters. There are very few technical jobs that you can really do in isolation. Quite a few people seem to think that they can, but that's their lack of social skills talking, not the real needs of the job.
So, flextime works just fine if management and employees communicate. But everything else probably works fine too under those conditions. So don't have a slimebag for a boss, and you're all set. If your boss is scum, then by all means, vote with your feet. Nothing else will fix that.
Another observation about flextime came from one of my old bosses: "Sure, you can put in your 70 hours a week anytime you like, as long as you're here when you're needed." At the time she said it, I thought it was a joke.
I agree that patents are one way to protect innovation. I do not agree that patent law is applied in a way that best achieves that goal.
Take the example of drug companies, and their oft-cited expenditures on R&D. These are dwarfed by their spending on marketing and advertising, so most of the costs they are trying to recover have little to do with innovation. More with gimme hats and bogus seminars for doctors. When the pharmaceutical industry takes out full-page ads in the print media about how much they're innovating for the good of mankind, this is a sure sign that a degree of skepticism is called for.
Another way of encouraging innovation would be to subsidize R&D, or better, to offer prizes for socially-desirable innovations (for example, a cheap treatment for AIDS) with the provision that the prize-winner signs over intellectual property rights in exchange for the prize. Economists have already done some work on how big such a prize would have to be to compensate for the risk of pursuing it. This has the benefit of retaining a competitive market, without the current lock-down that follows the award of a patent. So greed and the desire for publicity can still be satisfied, but the anomalies of the patent system can be avoided.
Copyright's another stinking kettle of fish, though.
I think I agree. So let me throw another couple of gallons of 89-octane onto the hibachi...
I work as a consultant, advising clients on software development methodologies. The reason people pay me is because (a) I know how to develop software, having done lots of it; (b) I've managed development efforts, and (c) I've been successful doing both. I agree that hiring someone who hasn't written and delivered large amounts of code would be foolish. And I've seen clients who have done just that, with predictably disastrous results.
Here's why methodologies matter:
First, even among programmers, there's always the bell curve. Regardless of how well an organization works, there will be bozos, cowpersons, call 'em what you will. They can singlehandedly kill a project unless you do at least some crap detection.
Second, in a good-sized software project, with the usual unreasonable deadlines and flaky requirements, everyone will be under pressure and will occasionally do things they regret later. You may be brilliant at your best, but a little sleep deprivation and some well-timed interventions by the pointy-haired MBAs will quickly expose weak points you never knew you had. In short, typical conditions on software projects will force errors to occur. So you need a consistent way of doing things, to mitigate the impact of these inevitable screw-ups.
I've worked with some of those 100-times-more-productive-than-anyone-else programmers. At my best I've gotten close to that productivity myself (say, twenty times). People like that deserve, and get, special treatment. Write a waiver for them. Then there's the other 99 percent. Methodologies are for us mere mortals.
Incidentally, the best programmers I've seen are highly productive precisely because their code isn't shite. It's well-thought-out, does things in the simplest possible way, and has enough structure and even comments that someone else can find their way through it. It might not meet some moron's ideas of coding standards, but the objective is to have something that can be maintained by someone other than the genius who wrote it. NOT mindless adherence to a standard, whether it makes sense or not.
I tell our clients that standards and methodologies are a means to an end, not an end in themselves. In places where I've seen things get out of hand, it's because someone let the QA people, or some methodology fascist (often a failed programmer that they're too kind-hearted to fire), run rampant without adult supervision. The goal is to write code that works and is maintainable, not to have endless inspections that add no value.
To the extent that methodologies help you do this, they're a good thing. But to work, you need someone hardheaded to make sure that they're delivering the desired result. Otherwise it becomes a counter-productive paper chase.
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There is a concept known as "extraterritoriality" that describes a nation's attempts to make its laws apply outside its own borders. This is usually a symptom of arrogance if not outright insanity.
Remember Manuel Noriega? A foreign national, in a foreign country, who was jailed for violating U.S. law. The U.S. has some banking and foreign trade laws that work that way too. In fact, our Congress probably does this sort of thing much more often than the French.
The French have no monopoly on either arrogance or stupidity. Thay are also not alone in passing laws that are ill-conceived, unenforceable, and likely to bring ridicule onto their country.
Yes, my argument would also say that a pyramid scheme is not precisely zero-sum unless the value of the underlying asset is constant. In most pyramid schemes, that asset is worthless, or nearly so, so your assumption would make sense. But it would be straightforward to construct a non-zero-sum pyramid scheme by varying the underlying asset value.
In a zero-sum game, the sum of all player's losses in the game equals the sum of all players' gains.
So it depend on who's counted as being "in the game" at the time. That was my boundary-condition argument above. And it depends on how the game counters (e.g., shares) are related to the value of the asset they represent.
Yes, when money changes hands, a debit shows up somewhere, and a credit somewhere else. But that's at the level of individual transactions. In that sense, you could maybe say that the boundary of the market with the rest of the economy is zero-sum. But that zero-sum condition won't necessarily be true of the current state of the market as a whole. Say, in a hypothetical small market, that everyone bought and just held for three years, and during those three years, economic prospects improved greatly. So, the value of assets held within the market would have increased, and if the outside economy were very large relative to the market, share volume would rise to a new, higher equilibrium point once people started trading again. In a zero-sum game, this change in valuation could only have happened if new suckers were lured in.
Now for dividends: zero-dividend shares, unlike baseball cards, represent a percentage of the equity of a firm (yes, a VERY small percentage, but anyway...). There are good reasons for choosing to pay dividends or using the money to increase the capital retained in the firm instead. Which one is better for shareholders depends, among other things, on the marginal tax rate on capital gains and on dividend income, and on the investors' willingness to bet on the long ball instead of taking the money out right now.
Mind you, I prefer getting dividends, since a zero-dividend policy also implies that the firm thinks they know better than I do how to invest my money. And I concur that, in a speculative market, I want to have sold all my shares before the balloon pops.
I just didn't agree with your usage of "zero-sum."
Had you said "usually not a good deal," instead of "zero-sum", though, I would have readily agreed.
I recall that, in describing the construction of a temple, the Bible said that pi was exactly 3 1/7. Perhaps in Leviticus.
Perhaps subsequent legislation takes this as a precedent.
This would only be a zero-sum game if there were a fixed pool of investors, investing a fixed amount of cash. But it is possible to choose whether to put your money in stock or in other investments, or none at all. Further, new money can come into the market (for example, from wages). And corporations raise money from other sources, such as the bond market, which can lead to growth that affects share prices. So flows into and out of the market as a whole also have to be taken into account. Yes, your earnings on stocks have to come from somewhere, but that's not what's meant by "zero-sum." That's just double-entry bookkeeping.
Keep in mind that, if the money starts flowing rapidly OUT of the stockmarket into other money parking places (say, cash, real estate, or tulip bulbs), it can also look for a while like a less-than-zero-sum game. Does the term "liquidity crisis" ring a bell?
Comparing the stockmarket to a poker game is like comparing the ocean to a small box of marbles. There are some boundary- and scale-related phenomena that are too important to ignore.
Government-funded researchers developed the Web. Remember ARPA? All the porn sites did was find ways to commercially exploit it. There was no innovation there, except perhaps the adoption of banner ads, which are a plague.
/.-ers think.
One could argue that the big corp's deserve the problems they have with cybersquatters. It's the penalty they pay for lacking the mental agility to notice the Web taking off. I recall a number of corporate clients of mine who smugly told me that the Internet was a passing fad, and they planned to just ignore it until it went away. Three years later, I'm sure they were whining that someone stole "their" domain name. The sliminess of cybersquatting isn't much different than the sliminess of any such form of speculation.
And if there WERE a site where corp managers discuss our conspiracy against them and what to do about it, you can be sure it's on a VPN where we wouldn't see it. They're sometimes complacent, but not nearly as stupid as some
How about another example of this same reasoning: that your right to life outweighs my right to shoot out the window of my car at random targets?
Rights must be balanced and prioritized, otherwise you just end up in a quagmire. The panelist was correct, at least in general. Their specific application of the principle may have been flawed, though. Certainly, some of the WIPO decisions were based on amazingly flaky inferences.
I cannot agree with your general argument, and your examples are not correct. For example, "fight" in Old English was "feohtan." The "gh" in most English words is cognate with German "ch" and even in Middle English was not yet silent.
The French influence on English was more in the form of loan words, and the abandonment of Germanic plurals in favor of the simpler French "-s" suffix (some holdovers include "ox/oxen", "woman/women", "sheep/sheep"). And in the Middle Ages, English pronunciation shifted from a Germanic pattern to more of a hybrid Germanic/French. That's called the Great Vowel Shift. It made the language less guttural, but broke the older spellings.
Back to the topic: the French Academy would have been a better example. They rule on what is and isn't in the French language. Mostly it's a rearguard battle against the incursion of English loan words (I call that payback for the Norman invasion). Dictionaries are descriptive, not prescriptive, though it's sometimes possible for dictionary writers to tweak the language a little here and there, like Noah Webster did. But if I were to produce a Tom's A-Cold Dictionary of English the Way It Oughtta Be, and it was widely divergent from the language we all use, it's unlikely my brain-farts would redirect the course of the language. That's because dictionary writers have no authority. Which contradicts your main point.
ICANN does have authority, even if compliance by DNS server operators is voluntary. So we need to look elsewhere for parallels.
And the fittest are those who cooperate. That's why we're social, not solitary.
Don't get me wrong, capitalism does some things really well. "Buy low and sell high" is a concept that's got some legs. But if that's all there was to the story, it would be an even more brutal and empty life than it is.
LLP means "Limited Liability Partnership." It's been used for much longer than three years. I know of one US firm that has been in business for 75 years with that suffix.
PLC means "Private Limited Company" and is the British equivalent of "Co." Again, far from being an innovation.
While it is hard to dispute your use of "moronic" when referring to the behavior of executives, I think it's probably not a fad to tell people what kind of company you have.
I've played on both sides of the management/engineer fence, and have seen the system you describe work, even in some pretty extreme conditions. The problem, from the management point of view, is getting coverage when the job requires coverage. That requires some coordination. I've had to fill in the gaps when someone just didn't show up, and I wasn't at all pleased with that. There can also be a problem when the core hours are too short, because collaboration actually matters, and a lot of the good work gets done in hallways, by the coffee machine, or as the result of random encounters. There are very few technical jobs that you can really do in isolation. Quite a few people seem to think that they can, but that's their lack of social skills talking, not the real needs of the job. So, flextime works just fine if management and employees communicate. But everything else probably works fine too under those conditions. So don't have a slimebag for a boss, and you're all set. If your boss is scum, then by all means, vote with your feet. Nothing else will fix that. Another observation about flextime came from one of my old bosses: "Sure, you can put in your 70 hours a week anytime you like, as long as you're here when you're needed." At the time she said it, I thought it was a joke.
Oops, sorry about the bold font. That was an html cut-n-paste error.
I agree that patents are one way to protect innovation. I do not agree that patent law is applied in a way that best achieves that goal. Take the example of drug companies, and their oft-cited expenditures on R&D. These are dwarfed by their spending on marketing and advertising, so most of the costs they are trying to recover have little to do with innovation. More with gimme hats and bogus seminars for doctors. When the pharmaceutical industry takes out full-page ads in the print media about how much they're innovating for the good of mankind, this is a sure sign that a degree of skepticism is called for. Another way of encouraging innovation would be to subsidize R&D, or better, to offer prizes for socially-desirable innovations (for example, a cheap treatment for AIDS) with the provision that the prize-winner signs over intellectual property rights in exchange for the prize. Economists have already done some work on how big such a prize would have to be to compensate for the risk of pursuing it. This has the benefit of retaining a competitive market, without the current lock-down that follows the award of a patent. So greed and the desire for publicity can still be satisfied, but the anomalies of the patent system can be avoided. Copyright's another stinking kettle of fish, though.
I think I agree. So let me throw another couple of gallons of 89-octane onto the hibachi...
I work as a consultant, advising clients on software development methodologies. The reason people pay me is because (a) I know how to develop software, having done lots of it; (b) I've managed development efforts, and (c) I've been successful doing both. I agree that hiring someone who hasn't written and delivered large amounts of code would be foolish. And I've seen clients who have done just that, with predictably disastrous results.
Here's why methodologies matter:
First, even among programmers, there's always the bell curve. Regardless of how well an organization works, there will be bozos, cowpersons, call 'em what you will. They can singlehandedly kill a project unless you do at least some crap detection.
Second, in a good-sized software project, with the usual unreasonable deadlines and flaky requirements, everyone will be under pressure and will occasionally do things they regret later. You may be brilliant at your best, but a little sleep deprivation and some well-timed interventions by the pointy-haired MBAs will quickly expose weak points you never knew you had. In short, typical conditions on software projects will force errors to occur. So you need a consistent way of doing things, to mitigate the impact of these inevitable screw-ups.
I've worked with some of those 100-times-more-productive-than-anyone-else programmers. At my best I've gotten close to that productivity myself (say, twenty times). People like that deserve, and get, special treatment. Write a waiver for them. Then there's the other 99 percent. Methodologies are for us mere mortals.
Incidentally, the best programmers I've seen are highly productive precisely because their code isn't shite. It's well-thought-out, does things in the simplest possible way, and has enough structure and even comments that someone else can find their way through it. It might not meet some moron's ideas of coding standards, but the objective is to have something that can be maintained by someone other than the genius who wrote it. NOT mindless adherence to a standard, whether it makes sense or not.
I tell our clients that standards and methodologies are a means to an end, not an end in themselves. In places where I've seen things get out of hand, it's because someone let the QA people, or some methodology fascist (often a failed programmer that they're too kind-hearted to fire), run rampant without adult supervision. The goal is to write code that works and is maintainable, not to have endless inspections that add no value.
To the extent that methodologies help you do this, they're a good thing. But to work, you need someone hardheaded to make sure that they're delivering the desired result. Otherwise it becomes a counter-productive paper chase.