You lack imagination, I can see that. The command line is decidedly not a different world from the GUI. Fundamentally, you talk to the X GUI over a socket. Well, when you telnet to a remote host, you use a socket. How is that so different?
-russ
Go read it again. If you want to delete all files beginning with "foo", but not "foobar" or "foobaz", you have a hard time using file completion.
-russ
In other words, no, you don't support the freedom to work. Why don't you just come out and say it?
Why should I have to pay for the righ to work?
-russ
A union can only succeed in its stated goals if it can establish a monopoly over labor. Market monopolies are rare to nonexistent. If you support the success of unions, then you support a government-propped-up monopoly of unions over labor. If you simply wish people to be free to unionize if they wish, then more power to you.
-russ
It's not a troll, you silly git. It's a celebration of the death of the old OSI, and the birth of the new. I mean, really, is *anybody* talking about OSI protocols supplanting IP at this point?
-russ
Didn't Van Jacobsen show that intelligent nics actually slow down your networking? The main loop of the TCP/IP protocol is quite small. If you're careful to cause the error conditions to be the taken part of the jump, then on modern machines the prefetch will always get it right.
With an intelligent nic, you're going to spend just as much memory bandwidth on the transfer as you would if the protocol is in the main processor. You're just not saving anything with an intelligent nic. The price premium causes them to be *much* more expensive that a regular nic, plus you have to write the stack that runs on it, plus you have to have operating system support for a stack on the card. All for what? No extra performance.
-russ
14 responses (as of this moment). Some of them agree, but some do not. Notice how I said that some people are confused? Those people expressed their confusion, in paragraph after paragraph. Insurance is for things you can't predict. It's for spreading risk around among groups that share equal risk. If there is some information that can be used to divide the groups further, then it should be used, because it will make the insurance more fair.
Now, as for the problem of genetic testing, you could spread that risk around by parents purchasing insurance for their child before it was born. So yes, the parents get genetically tested, however that can just tell you what risk pool you get into. You still have a risk, and if you're likely to have a child with predictably high medical bills, then perhaps you should reconsider having that child.
But really, this is only a short-term problem. Before too long, we'll be able to repair genetic damage, and prevent genetically-linked diseases. And by then, opponents of the future will be opposing *those* measures as well.
-russ
Yes, you don't know as much about your risk as the insurance company knows. Other insurance companies do, though. That's why we need a free market for insurance -- so that all the excess profits get competed away.
-russ
You are confusing wealth redistribution with risk disperal. If you do the first, you cannot do the second. And yet the second is of value to society.
-russ
Insurance spreads risk over people whose level of risk is identical, or as identical as the insurance company can make it. NOT over the largest number of people.
This is exactly what I meant when I said that "people" (more specifically, you) are confused. You want insurance to be a combination of risk dispersal and wealth redistribution. The more it does the latter, the less it can do the former. But the former serves a useful societal purpose. If you want to redistribute wealth, go ahead, get out a gun, and do it. But don't ruin the value of insurance doing it!
-russ
You are, in the end, pretty confused. First of all, the human condition is that wants always exceed the ability to fulfill them. This is not necessarily bad. I want an Open Source page layout program.
Second of all, in a free market, a monopolist can only keep her monopoly by continuing to compete more efficiently than anyone else. Fail to compete, and the market will discard you like last year's pop music star.
Third, most of your complaints are due to too much government regulation, not too little. Sure, if a monopoly can use government to hinder the freedom of the market, then it's not subject to correction. And that's bad. Any free-market economist will tell you that it's bad. But the solution is not more regulation, it's less. Why? Because when you pass regulations, the regulatee inevitably has a greater interest than anyone else, and so can apply political power to affect the regulations to help them. Very, very often, corporations welcome regulation. Regulation hinders the market, and lets corporations achieve greater profits than a free market would support.
Anyway, learn more about economics and you'll see where you're wrong.
-russ
No company willingly reduces its profits. Here's how it happens in spite of their desires:
Company finds new way to cut its costs.
Its cost/profit curve has shifted so that the company makes the most money by cutting cost a little and outselling the competition.
If the other companies cut their costs in a similar manner, then can regain some market share.
If not, then they continue to lose market share to the innovator.
Eventually the innovator either faces competition as efficient, or it has a monopoly.
It cannot raise its prices, however, because the other competitors will come back. Its monopoly profits are naturally limited by its less efficient competitors.
This process takes time, and companies can make use of this to make large profits. That's acceptable, though, because government takes time to deal with this process as well. There's no magic bullet you can fire to kill the huge profits. Only free and unhindered competition can stop excessive profits in the long run.
-russ
I think that many people are confused about the purpose of insurance. Insurance cannot protect you from everything bad. It can only protect you from things which nobody can predict. If you can predict it but the insurance company cannot (or is prohibited by law from doing so), then you can exploit the insurance company's ignorance. If this happens often enough, then the insurance company cannot make money, and goes out of business.
Instead, insurance works to buy an unwanted risk from you. In order to price this risk fairly, the insurance company has to understand the risk. If it cannot understand the risk (because it's prohibited from certain actions), then it must charge more for the insurance. Guess who pays this cost? Yep, all insurance customers do.
Ever noticed how seldom politicians are economists? Perhaps that explains their continued enactment of uneconomic laws.
-russ
Nonsense. Sure, economic reasoning presumes rational action on the part of people. It's the only way to predict how people will behave. Even if people are only rational half the time, at least you can predict half their behavior. If you presume that people will be irrational (as you seem to expect), then you can't make ANY predictions. That would be of no value.
You make a really weird argument. You say that a free market would work fine until government interferes with it. And you use that to object to any attempt to establish a more libertarian society. Well, I hate to tell you, but ANYTHING that works will stop working if you interfere with its proper operation. That's no argument against trying to make something work.
-russ
There is no such thing as a mixed market. A socialist economy has no market. A capitalist economy can be hampered by government action; all of them are. That doesn't make the economy socialist.
-russ
p.s. at the local Wal*Mart, 16MB of CF is $38, 32MB of CF is $73. You can beat that price, but only by going to the web, and when you do, you don't pay any sales taxes to your local government, and you don't help hire local unskilled labor. Obviously you don't care about helping your local government, nor providing jobs for people who aren't as smart as you.
Your example does not apply to one of a free market. You are elitist and dismissive of the people whom you wish to protect. Perhaps you should pay attention to their choices?
-russ
Who would ever purchase privacy from you again? You obviously don't live up to your agreements. For that matter, how does sarah know that you're telling the truth? Perhaps you're lying again.
-russ
Slashdot Mirror
You lack imagination, I can see that. The command line is decidedly not a different world from the GUI. Fundamentally, you talk to the X GUI over a socket. Well, when you telnet to a remote host, you use a socket. How is that so different?
-russ
Go read it again. If you want to delete all files beginning with "foo", but not "foobar" or "foobaz", you have a hard time using file completion.
-russ
In other words, no, you don't support the freedom to work. Why don't you just come out and say it?
Why should I have to pay for the righ to work?
-russ
A union can only succeed in its stated goals if it can establish a monopoly over labor. Market monopolies are rare to nonexistent. If you support the success of unions, then you support a government-propped-up monopoly of unions over labor. If you simply wish people to be free to unionize if they wish, then more power to you.
-russ
It's not a troll, you silly git. It's a celebration of the death of the old OSI, and the birth of the new. I mean, really, is *anybody* talking about OSI protocols supplanting IP at this point?
-russ
It's not usable with a touchscreen.
-russ
Didn't Van Jacobsen show that intelligent nics actually slow down your networking? The main loop of the TCP/IP protocol is quite small. If you're careful to cause the error conditions to be the taken part of the jump, then on modern machines the prefetch will always get it right.
With an intelligent nic, you're going to spend just as much memory bandwidth on the transfer as you would if the protocol is in the main processor. You're just not saving anything with an intelligent nic. The price premium causes them to be *much* more expensive that a regular nic, plus you have to write the stack that runs on it, plus you have to have operating system support for a stack on the card. All for what? No extra performance.
-russ
So you defend the freedom to work? No union-only shops? No required union membership? No required union dues?
I didn't think so.
-russ
And giving power to union leaders solves the problem? Not if history is any predictor.
-russ
There's no Open Source Linux POS software that I'm aware of. The LinuxPOS from LinuxCanada is a binary demo.
-russ
14 responses (as of this moment). Some of them agree, but some do not. Notice how I said that some people are confused? Those people expressed their confusion, in paragraph after paragraph. Insurance is for things you can't predict. It's for spreading risk around among groups that share equal risk. If there is some information that can be used to divide the groups further, then it should be used, because it will make the insurance more fair.
Now, as for the problem of genetic testing, you could spread that risk around by parents purchasing insurance for their child before it was born. So yes, the parents get genetically tested, however that can just tell you what risk pool you get into. You still have a risk, and if you're likely to have a child with predictably high medical bills, then perhaps you should reconsider having that child.
But really, this is only a short-term problem. Before too long, we'll be able to repair genetic damage, and prevent genetically-linked diseases. And by then, opponents of the future will be opposing *those* measures as well.
-russ
Yes, you don't know as much about your risk as the insurance company knows. Other insurance companies do, though. That's why we need a free market for insurance -- so that all the excess profits get competed away.
-russ
You are confusing wealth redistribution with risk disperal. If you do the first, you cannot do the second. And yet the second is of value to society.
-russ
Insurance spreads risk over people whose level of risk is identical, or as identical as the insurance company can make it. NOT over the largest number of people.
This is exactly what I meant when I said that "people" (more specifically, you) are confused. You want insurance to be a combination of risk dispersal and wealth redistribution. The more it does the latter, the less it can do the former. But the former serves a useful societal purpose. If you want to redistribute wealth, go ahead, get out a gun, and do it. But don't ruin the value of insurance doing it!
-russ
You are, in the end, pretty confused. First of all, the human condition is that wants always exceed the ability to fulfill them. This is not necessarily bad. I want an Open Source page layout program.
Second of all, in a free market, a monopolist can only keep her monopoly by continuing to compete more efficiently than anyone else. Fail to compete, and the market will discard you like last year's pop music star.
Third, most of your complaints are due to too much government regulation, not too little. Sure, if a monopoly can use government to hinder the freedom of the market, then it's not subject to correction. And that's bad. Any free-market economist will tell you that it's bad. But the solution is not more regulation, it's less. Why? Because when you pass regulations, the regulatee inevitably has a greater interest than anyone else, and so can apply political power to affect the regulations to help them. Very, very often, corporations welcome regulation. Regulation hinders the market, and lets corporations achieve greater profits than a free market would support.
Anyway, learn more about economics and you'll see where you're wrong.
-russ
half-assed deregulatory system like this,
At least we agree on that. Perhaps we could call it "misregulation" instead of "deregulation"?
-russ
- Company finds new way to cut its costs.
- Its cost/profit curve has shifted so that the company makes the most money by cutting cost a little and outselling the competition.
- If the other companies cut their costs in a similar manner, then can regain some market share.
- If not, then they continue to lose market share to the innovator.
- Eventually the innovator either faces competition as efficient, or it has a monopoly.
- It cannot raise its prices, however, because the other competitors will come back. Its monopoly profits are naturally limited by its less efficient competitors.
This process takes time, and companies can make use of this to make large profits. That's acceptable, though, because government takes time to deal with this process as well. There's no magic bullet you can fire to kill the huge profits. Only free and unhindered competition can stop excessive profits in the long run.-russ
I think that many people are confused about the purpose of insurance. Insurance cannot protect you from everything bad. It can only protect you from things which nobody can predict. If you can predict it but the insurance company cannot (or is prohibited by law from doing so), then you can exploit the insurance company's ignorance. If this happens often enough, then the insurance company cannot make money, and goes out of business.
Instead, insurance works to buy an unwanted risk from you. In order to price this risk fairly, the insurance company has to understand the risk. If it cannot understand the risk (because it's prohibited from certain actions), then it must charge more for the insurance. Guess who pays this cost? Yep, all insurance customers do.
Ever noticed how seldom politicians are economists? Perhaps that explains their continued enactment of uneconomic laws.
-russ
No sane person will make "his own decisions" when confronted on any important issue
You have an odd idea of what constitutes sanity. Perhaps you are insane yourself?
-russ
They all assume perfect market conditions
Nonsense. Sure, economic reasoning presumes rational action on the part of people. It's the only way to predict how people will behave. Even if people are only rational half the time, at least you can predict half their behavior. If you presume that people will be irrational (as you seem to expect), then you can't make ANY predictions. That would be of no value.
You make a really weird argument. You say that a free market would work fine until government interferes with it. And you use that to object to any attempt to establish a more libertarian society. Well, I hate to tell you, but ANYTHING that works will stop working if you interfere with its proper operation. That's no argument against trying to make something work.
-russ
There is no such thing as a mixed market. A socialist economy has no market. A capitalist economy can be hampered by government action; all of them are. That doesn't make the economy socialist.
-russ
p.s. at the local Wal*Mart, 16MB of CF is $38, 32MB of CF is $73. You can beat that price, but only by going to the web, and when you do, you don't pay any sales taxes to your local government, and you don't help hire local unskilled labor. Obviously you don't care about helping your local government, nor providing jobs for people who aren't as smart as you.
Your example does not apply to one of a free market. You are elitist and dismissive of the people whom you wish to protect. Perhaps you should pay attention to their choices?
-russ
customers rarely act in their own best self-interest.
If that's how you feel, then you must say the same thing about voters, so how can government action save you from market failure?
-russ
Then the market isn't free, now is it? It's been hampered by government action.
-russ
Who would ever purchase privacy from you again? You obviously don't live up to your agreements. For that matter, how does sarah know that you're telling the truth? Perhaps you're lying again.
-russ