innovate, vb.: 1. To appropriate third-party technology through purchase, immitation, or theft and to integrate it into a de-facto, monopoly-position product. 2. To increase in size or complexity but not in utility; to reduce compatibility or interoperability. 3. To lock out competitors or to lock in users. 4. To charge more money; to increase prices or costs. 5. To acquire profits from investments in other companies but not from direct product or service sales. 6. To stifle or manipulate a free market; to extend monopoly powers into new markets. 7. To evade liability for wrong doings; to get off. 8. To purchase legislation, legistators, legislatures, or chiefs of state. 9. To mediate all transactions in a global economy; to embezzle; to co-opt power (coup d'état). Cf. innovate, English usage (antonym).
Instead of using a one-bit flag for the "anti-circumvention device", they should use a zero-bit string instead. Then, the only safe course of action for CD-burning program would be to refuse to burn anything at all. This would also simplify the programming a great deal, since CD-burning programs wouldn't need to be any more complicated than a "Hello World" program, except that they would say "I'm not allowed to copy anything; go away!"
UTF-8 can indeed be scanned backwards. You could also locate the start of the current character given a random pointer into a byte buffer. RTFM. UTF-8 can also directly encode 2 billion characters. UTF-8 is the right general solution to data interchange, and this is why it's catching on.
They kept getting turned down for an FM license because they couldn't prove that they needed the competitive advantage of being on FM, until eventually they went under in '93 or '94.
The real collapse will occur when these resources start to run out. This appears to be starting to happen to both oil and natural gas right now.
As far as I am aware, there's little danger of running out of oil for hundreds of years. The only reason that oil prices are high right is that the oil cartels have agreed to shut down production in order to keep the prices artifically high, in order to maximize profits. Monopoly abuse and collusion like this is supposed to be illegal, but this is a complex international matter.
Of course, the cartels need to walk a fine line. If their prices go too high, people will begin to adopt alternatives.
The issue is not really whether the resources you consumed were "hauled out of the ground" or were simply the intellectual output of other humans.
That's the issue being argued about in the rest of the thread, the false notion that the only stuff of any value is stuff that is hauled directly out of the ground.
When you are talking about "resouces" in general, the $1000/$20 example doesn't apply. There are many big direct costs to producing software, including my salary and benefits, marketing, management, rent, taxes, etc. [My software-tool costs are pretty low, though, since my primary development platform is Linux.] My $1M education would need to be amortized over my entire productive life.
In general, though, businesses do produce products of greater value than the costs of all the resources used to make the stuff; otherwise, they wouldn't be in business for long. But in general, as you indicate, the only products that have the capability of outrageous profitability are products that can be reproduced cheaply (like software), or which are must-have one-of-a-kind (like some art).
Think about it for a moment: why do you draw a distinction between wealth produced by humans and that produced by other animals or organisms? Are humans something entirely apart from nature? Of course not, we are all part of the material world, albeit a rather special part (special to us, at least).
That's a rather bizarre perspective. Labour costs are usually considered differently from raw materials. Animals would normally be accounted as livestock and are generally utilized in a different way from humans (at least literally).
Intellectual resources also have some anomalous properties when compared to natural resources. For example, it is often the case that the more that you "harvest" from the resource, the more it has to offer for future harvesting and the more valuable it becomes. Whereas, you can't burn the same tankful of gasoline twice. Good luck trying to sell the exhaust fumes.
You had bits? Why, in my day we only had zeros... none o' them fancy 'ones'! And we had to carry them by hand eight miles through the snow... up hill both ways! {shakes cane in the air}
I hate to be one of those "Back in the day..." guys, but back in the day when I bought my first RAM upgrade for a PC, I payed more for 8MB than I would pay for 512MB today. Now that's fucking progress, mates.
Yeah well I remember paying over $80.00 for 8 *K* of memory. And data had to travel over the memory bus uphill both ways! You young whippersnappers!
Congratulations, your brain is a materializer! Say you do this every week, and buy a new computer every week for the money. This new computer has been created just out of the contents and processes of your brain? I believe this would violate the law of conservation of energy.
But, of course, I don't buy a new computer every week. My computer gets replaced only every three years or so, for around $3000, and in the meantime, I have created hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of computer software. And, of course, only a small portion of this $3000 spent on the the new computer is actually used to pay for the raw natural resources consumed in its manufacturing.
AMD, for example, takes (as a wild guess) a few dollars worth of silcon and a few dollars worth of nasty, environment-polluting chemicals and makes a $300 chip. Their big costs are labour in research and production, and capital equipment. But of course, a $1-million piece of capital equipment probably only has $100,000 worth of natural resources consumed in its manufacture, and so on.
As I have said elsewhere in this thread, the total economic value everything else compared to natural resources consumed, is about 94:6 in a modern economy.
... but it wouldn't be as nice to get your salary as coupons for computer software as real money would it... Every time you buy or sell something, there is a counterpart which either gains or loses something, and ultimately, it comes down to potatoes or houses or whatever.
Repeated here, of course, are the common misconceptions that money is anything more than an abstract medium of exchange and that economics is a zero-sum game. Neither of these suppositions are true. A knowledge-based economy creates a tremendous amount of wealth out of mental labour. Thinking that this wealth is any less or any more real than the wealth created from pulling oil out of the ground is to misunderstand the world in which you live.
You are not doing the math right. Not only that but you are making the classic mistake of putting monetary value on things which have no inherent dollar figures attached to them.
I believe I've agreed repeatedly that Mother Earth has been raped and pillaged. But that's not the issue I was addressing. Your initial argument, as I understood it, was that the only thing of value is material that is hauled out of the ground, and that the money supply is precisely defined as the quantity of material that is hauled out of the ground, and both of these assertions are incorrect.
You're making the classic mistake of thinking that gold, or oil, or piles of coal are the only things that have value. Monetary value is a very virtual thing, defined by supply and demand, and the relative prices of natural resources vary as much as any other thing of value, such as computer software. Computer software is expensive to produce and it also has strong demand, and these factors make it valuable. OTOH, diamonds, for example, a concrete natural resource, would be almost worthless if De Beers hadn't brainwashed people into giving them as symbols of love.
You also have to factor into that the resources the people who bought your software took out of the earth. Those people too ate, drank etc. It's all connected and when taken as a whole it all subtracts from the earth at a non renewable rate. The wealth generated by your program came from the buyers of your program so their consumption must be added into the equation too.
Yes, a macro economy is a complicated thing, and money and wealth go around and around between different people. In a modern industrial economy, the ratio of the amount of wealth obtained indirectly vs. the worth of the material hauled out of the ground is about 94:6. Now, this isn't to say that less material is hauled out of the ground, as the economies of most industrial countries have grown year-over-year and as we have undoubtedly become more efficient at cutting down trees over the last 15 years, for example, and this decreases its unit price, i.e., make it less valuable.
So in your example above. You consumed ungodly amounts of food, air, water, energy to live long enough to learn enough to write a piece of software.
I would estimate that computer software is one of the least natural-resource-intensive economic activities there is. While my (extensive) education may have cost society over a million dollars, most of that value went to pay my professors rather than to haul material out of the ground.
The amount of natural resources you all used up is much much more then your software ever made.
This is extremely doubtful, as the most valuable thing in a knowledge-based society are knowledge-based products, worth much more than the natural resources that were indirectly consumed in their production.
Take away those natural resources and your human beings are no longer able to supply the services which constitute the 75% of economic activity.
I have no doubt the natural resources are consumed at a greater rate today than 15 years ago, and that we are not replenishing most of what we take.
However, your original argument seemed to be that all wealth is directly tied to the land, and it isn't. For example, I might consume $20.00 worth of physical natural resources (muffins, soda pop, gasoline, non-renewable electricity, amortized computer-hardware cost) to create $1,000.00 worth of computer software. The $980.00 difference is additional wealth, and what most of the economy is based on (a service).
Yes all money comes from the earth.
I'll assume that you mean "wealth" instead of "money", since "money" is a complete fiction. Unless, of course, you mean paper money, which does, in fact, come from the Earth (paper & inks);-).
But, in the example above, I created $980.00 worth of wealth (production) to the world economy just out of the contents and processes of my brain.
But growth has been under 6% for the past 15 years. So, can't all growth be attributed to resources added to the system, minus some friction?
The rates of real growth have generally been under 3%, but this doesn't imply that all economic growth has been in natural resouces.
One could possibly argue that natural resources has grown at the same rate as the rest of the economy, but really, the economy has been shifting from manufacturing and natural resouces towards services and information for the past 30 years, so one would expect that services would have a higher rate of growth than natural resources.
I'm assuming that you're using "resources" to mean "natural resources".
How much money did these corporations push back into the economy while operating?
To a first approximation, they pushed everything but the profits back into the economy. Most of that is paid to exployees or contractors for goods or services. The profits are either reinvested, or were paid out to shareholders, who, of course, may spend it themselves.
Most of the money in an economy goes back and forth between corporations and households (workers and shareholders). It normally goes back and forth a few times before being siphoned off into investments (for future production) and taxes (to operate government programs).
We are all being exploited for the only thing we can barter with, our slave labor. Governments and corporations are the slave masters. Both capitalism and communism are systems of slave labor.
Strangely, we are the most pampered slaves with the highest standard of living in all of history.
Freedom comes from owning a piece of the earth. Unless you control a piece of income property, you are a slave. Communism confiscates all property and enslaves everybody. Capitalism gives property to a few and enslaves the vast majority.
And what exactly is everyone supposed to do with their little piece of the Earth? Farm it? Grow their own crops? Quite frankly, I would rather write computer programs than break my hump on a plot of dirt like people did hundreds of years ago. If you think these people had life easier or better than us, then you are sadly mistaken.
You seem to equate all work with slavery. Am I supposed to sit on my butt all day long and vegitate to avoid being a "slave"? Or should I exchange something of value (computer skills) for something of value (the means to acquire the things that I need or want), and increase everyone's standard of living in the process?
A course in macro economics should be a required component of everyone's education.
The thing that amazes me is that more emphasis is being put upon services and intangible businesses. A service increases sales / GNP but does not produce anything - if I mow my neighbour's lawn and he mows mine and we charge each other, our sales have increased compared to if we stick to our own turf.
75% of the GDP of a modern economy is based on Services, and services are production. If I write a computer program for you and you give me money for it, that's production. It does something useful (well, we hope; that's what we exchange our hard-earned money for). If we mow each other's lawn, that's production. If you mow your own lawn, that's also production, although it will be unreported production to the GDP.
But even unreported production increases a person's standard of living. For exampe, fifty years ago, most women were housewives and their primary job was to raise children, clean the house, and prepare meals. While this production was normally unreported and not included in the GDP, it was still important and increased our standard of living. Today, the situation has changed, and our standard of living has been affected.
Yes there is more money today then there was 15 years ago but where did it come from? It did not appear out of nowhere.
You might be surprised to learn that yes, in fact, money does appear out of nowhere. The Central Banker of an economy declares that there is more money, and poof, it materializes out of nothingness. Money is an abstract concept in a modern economy that manifests itself mostly as numbers in computers.
It came out of the earth. The earth was pillaged in order to create wealth. The reason there is more money now then there was 15 years ago is because there are now less trees, less oil, less coal, less clean air, less clean water.
While there is little doubt that the Earth is the worse for the wear over the past 15 years, your notion that all wealth comes directly from the Earth is misguided. In most modern economies have about 75% of the GDP (economic activity) is based on Services. Natural resources weighs in at a paltry 6%. Manufacturing & construction is most of the balance.
Lastly, what happened to Microsoft? I'm sure they should be on this list somewhere, but I can't find them.
While Microsoft may be a big player in the software industry, they are a dwarf when compared to the big companies from other industries. Is their income something like $24e9? Look at GM with $177e9.
While I have no doubt that most of the real innovation (vs. the Microsoft version of the word) happens at small companies, the standard model is that the small companies are either bought by the large companies, or their new techology is immitated or stolen outright by the large corporations. The large corporations often lack the means to invent important new technologies, but they do have the means to bring important new technologies to the mass market.
Wow!! That's amazing! If these guys are as good at making CPUs as they are at math, then we're in for some fun......;)
A cricual point that you seem to be missing is that software is written in a very different way for a very small system like the C64. Of course it is significantly less functional, but a lot of software worked sufficiently well and ran sufficiently quickly for the stock C64 nearly 20 years ago at 1 MHz (its slow disk drive is a different issue).
When you run this style of software on a processor that runs 20 times faster, WHAMO! It suddenly runs 20 times faster. Whereas modern software follows Gates' law ("every 18 months, the speed of software halves"), and its speed never really increases, only its whiz-bangedness.
The 65816 in the SuperCPU is also a 16-bit processor vs. the 8-bit 6510 (6502). This is a significant potential increase as well, similar to the modern transition from 32 to 64 bits.
The meeting may have taken place in Quebec, but it was about North American free trade. The main proponent of which is the US, who also tends to deal with its citizens like that when they protest.
It was about free trade for all of North and South America and Canada is a big proponent of that, too. About 40% of Canada's economy is based on international trade, which is the highest figure of any nation in the world. The amount of trade between Canada and the US dwarfs the trade between any two other nations.
innovate, vb.: 1. To appropriate third-party technology through purchase, immitation, or theft and to integrate it into a de-facto, monopoly-position product. 2. To increase in size or complexity but not in utility; to reduce compatibility or interoperability. 3. To lock out competitors or to lock in users. 4. To charge more money; to increase prices or costs. 5. To acquire profits from investments in other companies but not from direct product or service sales. 6. To stifle or manipulate a free market; to extend monopoly powers into new markets. 7. To evade liability for wrong doings; to get off. 8. To purchase legislation, legistators, legislatures, or chiefs of state. 9. To mediate all transactions in a global economy; to embezzle; to co-opt power (coup d'état). Cf. innovate, English usage (antonym).
Slashdot Mirror
innovate, vb.: 1. To appropriate third-party technology through purchase, immitation, or theft and to integrate it into a de-facto, monopoly-position product. 2. To increase in size or complexity but not in utility; to reduce compatibility or interoperability. 3. To lock out competitors or to lock in users. 4. To charge more money; to increase prices or costs. 5. To acquire profits from investments in other companies but not from direct product or service sales. 6. To stifle or manipulate a free market; to extend monopoly powers into new markets. 7. To evade liability for wrong doings; to get off. 8. To purchase legislation, legistators, legislatures, or chiefs of state. 9. To mediate all transactions in a global economy; to embezzle; to co-opt power (coup d'état). Cf. innovate, English usage (antonym).
The title "The Return of Microsoft" misunderstands our place in the story and the roles of the players. A more accurate title would be:
The Microsoft Strikes Back
Having 50 karma is an itchy feeling; I know I'll get modded down, and I can't rest until the shoe drops.
There, take that! Oh, darn, I made a post to the discussion....
Instead of using a one-bit flag for the "anti-circumvention device", they should use a zero-bit string instead. Then, the only safe course of action for CD-burning program would be to refuse to burn anything at all. This would also simplify the programming a great deal, since CD-burning programs wouldn't need to be any more complicated than a "Hello World" program, except that they would say "I'm not allowed to copy anything; go away!"
or you want to scan the string backwards
UTF-8 can indeed be scanned backwards. You could also locate the start of the current character given a random pointer into a byte buffer. RTFM. UTF-8 can also directly encode 2 billion characters. UTF-8 is the right general solution to data interchange, and this is why it's catching on.
They kept getting turned down for an FM license because they couldn't prove that they needed the competitive advantage of being on FM, until eventually they went under in '93 or '94.
Sounds like proof to me.
The real collapse will occur when these resources start to run out. This appears to be starting to happen to both oil and natural gas right now.
As far as I am aware, there's little danger of running out of oil for hundreds of years. The only reason that oil prices are high right is that the oil cartels have agreed to shut down production in order to keep the prices artifically high, in order to maximize profits. Monopoly abuse and collusion like this is supposed to be illegal, but this is a complex international matter.
Of course, the cartels need to walk a fine line. If their prices go too high, people will begin to adopt alternatives.
The issue is not really whether the resources you consumed were "hauled out of the ground" or were simply the intellectual output of other humans.
That's the issue being argued about in the rest of the thread, the false notion that the only stuff of any value is stuff that is hauled directly out of the ground.
When you are talking about "resouces" in general, the $1000/$20 example doesn't apply. There are many big direct costs to producing software, including my salary and benefits, marketing, management, rent, taxes, etc. [My software-tool costs are pretty low, though, since my primary development platform is Linux.] My $1M education would need to be amortized over my entire productive life.
In general, though, businesses do produce products of greater value than the costs of all the resources used to make the stuff; otherwise, they wouldn't be in business for long. But in general, as you indicate, the only products that have the capability of outrageous profitability are products that can be reproduced cheaply (like software), or which are must-have one-of-a-kind (like some art).
Think about it for a moment: why do you draw a distinction between wealth produced by humans and that produced by other animals or organisms? Are humans something entirely apart from nature? Of course not, we are all part of the material world, albeit a rather special part (special to us, at least).
That's a rather bizarre perspective. Labour costs are usually considered differently from raw materials. Animals would normally be accounted as livestock and are generally utilized in a different way from humans (at least literally).
Intellectual resources also have some anomalous properties when compared to natural resources. For example, it is often the case that the more that you "harvest" from the resource, the more it has to offer for future harvesting and the more valuable it becomes. Whereas, you can't burn the same tankful of gasoline twice. Good luck trying to sell the exhaust fumes.
The buckets only held one bit.
You had bits? Why, in my day we only had zeros... none o' them fancy 'ones'! And we had to carry them by hand eight miles through the snow... up hill both ways! {shakes cane in the air}
I hate to be one of those "Back in the day..." guys, but back in the day when I bought my first RAM upgrade for a PC, I payed more for 8MB than I would pay for 512MB today. Now that's fucking progress, mates.
Yeah well I remember paying over $80.00 for 8 *K* of memory. And data had to travel over the memory bus uphill both ways! You young whippersnappers!
Congratulations, your brain is a materializer! Say you do this every week, and buy a new computer every week for the money. This new computer has been created just out of the contents and processes of your brain? I believe this would violate the law of conservation of energy.
... but it wouldn't be as nice to get your salary as coupons for computer software as real money would it ... Every time you buy or sell something, there is a counterpart which either gains or loses something, and ultimately, it comes down to potatoes or houses or whatever.
But, of course, I don't buy a new computer every week. My computer gets replaced only every three years or so, for around $3000, and in the meantime, I have created hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of computer software. And, of course, only a small portion of this $3000 spent on the the new computer is actually used to pay for the raw natural resources consumed in its manufacturing.
AMD, for example, takes (as a wild guess) a few dollars worth of silcon and a few dollars worth of nasty, environment-polluting chemicals and makes a $300 chip. Their big costs are labour in research and production, and capital equipment. But of course, a $1-million piece of capital equipment probably only has $100,000 worth of natural resources consumed in its manufacture, and so on.
As I have said elsewhere in this thread, the total economic value everything else compared to natural resources consumed, is about 94:6 in a modern economy.
Repeated here, of course, are the common misconceptions that money is anything more than an abstract medium of exchange and that economics is a zero-sum game. Neither of these suppositions are true. A knowledge-based economy creates a tremendous amount of wealth out of mental labour. Thinking that this wealth is any less or any more real than the wealth created from pulling oil out of the ground is to misunderstand the world in which you live.
You are not doing the math right. Not only that but you are making the classic mistake of putting monetary value on things which have no inherent dollar figures attached to them.
I believe I've agreed repeatedly that Mother Earth has been raped and pillaged. But that's not the issue I was addressing. Your initial argument, as I understood it, was that the only thing of value is material that is hauled out of the ground, and that the money supply is precisely defined as the quantity of material that is hauled out of the ground, and both of these assertions are incorrect.
You're making the classic mistake of thinking that gold, or oil, or piles of coal are the only things that have value. Monetary value is a very virtual thing, defined by supply and demand, and the relative prices of natural resources vary as much as any other thing of value, such as computer software. Computer software is expensive to produce and it also has strong demand, and these factors make it valuable. OTOH, diamonds, for example, a concrete natural resource, would be almost worthless if De Beers hadn't brainwashed people into giving them as symbols of love.
You also have to factor into that the resources the people who bought your software took out of the earth. Those people too ate, drank etc. It's all connected and when taken as a whole it all subtracts from the earth at a non renewable rate. The wealth generated by your program came from the buyers of your program so their consumption must be added into the equation too.
Yes, a macro economy is a complicated thing, and money and wealth go around and around between different people. In a modern industrial economy, the ratio of the amount of wealth obtained indirectly vs. the worth of the material hauled out of the ground is about 94:6. Now, this isn't to say that less material is hauled out of the ground, as the economies of most industrial countries have grown year-over-year and as we have undoubtedly become more efficient at cutting down trees over the last 15 years, for example, and this decreases its unit price, i.e., make it less valuable.
So in your example above. You consumed ungodly amounts of food, air, water, energy to live long enough to learn enough to write a piece of software.
I would estimate that computer software is one of the least natural-resource-intensive economic activities there is. While my (extensive) education may have cost society over a million dollars, most of that value went to pay my professors rather than to haul material out of the ground.
The amount of natural resources you all used up is much much more then your software ever made.
This is extremely doubtful, as the most valuable thing in a knowledge-based society are knowledge-based products, worth much more than the natural resources that were indirectly consumed in their production.
But then, there's no pleasing a Malcontent.
Take away those natural resources and your human beings are no longer able to supply the services which constitute the 75% of economic activity.
;-).
I have no doubt the natural resources are consumed at a greater rate today than 15 years ago, and that we are not replenishing most of what we take.
However, your original argument seemed to be that all wealth is directly tied to the land, and it isn't. For example, I might consume $20.00 worth of physical natural resources (muffins, soda pop, gasoline, non-renewable electricity, amortized computer-hardware cost) to create $1,000.00 worth of computer software. The $980.00 difference is additional wealth, and what most of the economy is based on (a service).
Yes all money comes from the earth.
I'll assume that you mean "wealth" instead of "money", since "money" is a complete fiction. Unless, of course, you mean paper money, which does, in fact, come from the Earth (paper & inks)
But, in the example above, I created $980.00 worth of wealth (production) to the world economy just out of the contents and processes of my brain.
But growth has been under 6% for the past 15 years. So, can't all growth be attributed to resources added to the system, minus some friction?
The rates of real growth have generally been under 3%, but this doesn't imply that all economic growth has been in natural resouces.
One could possibly argue that natural resources has grown at the same rate as the rest of the economy, but really, the economy has been shifting from manufacturing and natural resouces towards services and information for the past 30 years, so one would expect that services would have a higher rate of growth than natural resources.
I'm assuming that you're using "resources" to mean "natural resources".
How much money did these corporations push back into the economy while operating?
To a first approximation, they pushed everything but the profits back into the economy. Most of that is paid to exployees or contractors for goods or services. The profits are either reinvested, or were paid out to shareholders, who, of course, may spend it themselves.
Most of the money in an economy goes back and forth between corporations and households (workers and shareholders). It normally goes back and forth a few times before being siphoned off into investments (for future production) and taxes (to operate government programs).
We are all being exploited for the only thing we can barter with, our slave labor. Governments and corporations are the slave masters. Both capitalism and communism are systems of slave labor.
Strangely, we are the most pampered slaves with the highest standard of living in all of history.
Freedom comes from owning a piece of the earth. Unless you control a piece of income property, you are a slave. Communism confiscates all property and enslaves everybody. Capitalism gives property to a few and enslaves the vast majority.
And what exactly is everyone supposed to do with their little piece of the Earth? Farm it? Grow their own crops? Quite frankly, I would rather write computer programs than break my hump on a plot of dirt like people did hundreds of years ago. If you think these people had life easier or better than us, then you are sadly mistaken.
You seem to equate all work with slavery. Am I supposed to sit on my butt all day long and vegitate to avoid being a "slave"? Or should I exchange something of value (computer skills) for something of value (the means to acquire the things that I need or want), and increase everyone's standard of living in the process?
A course in macro economics should be a required component of everyone's education.
The thing that amazes me is that more emphasis is being put upon services and intangible businesses. A service increases sales / GNP but does not produce anything - if I mow my neighbour's lawn and he mows mine and we charge each other, our sales have increased compared to if we stick to our own turf.
75% of the GDP of a modern economy is based on Services, and services are production. If I write a computer program for you and you give me money for it, that's production. It does something useful (well, we hope; that's what we exchange our hard-earned money for). If we mow each other's lawn, that's production. If you mow your own lawn, that's also production, although it will be unreported production to the GDP.
But even unreported production increases a person's standard of living. For exampe, fifty years ago, most women were housewives and their primary job was to raise children, clean the house, and prepare meals. While this production was normally unreported and not included in the GDP, it was still important and increased our standard of living. Today, the situation has changed, and our standard of living has been affected.
Yes there is more money today then there was 15 years ago but where did it come from? It did not appear out of nowhere.
You might be surprised to learn that yes, in fact, money does appear out of nowhere. The Central Banker of an economy declares that there is more money, and poof, it materializes out of nothingness. Money is an abstract concept in a modern economy that manifests itself mostly as numbers in computers.
It came out of the earth. The earth was pillaged in order to create wealth. The reason there is more money now then there was 15 years ago is because there are now less trees, less oil, less coal, less clean air, less clean water.
While there is little doubt that the Earth is the worse for the wear over the past 15 years, your notion that all wealth comes directly from the Earth is misguided. In most modern economies have about 75% of the GDP (economic activity) is based on Services. Natural resources weighs in at a paltry 6%. Manufacturing & construction is most of the balance.
those weren't little people, those were mobs of violent socialists with their own agenda.
More pragmatically, one might expect that they were mobs people with few relevant competitive skills to offer to a global economy.
Lastly, what happened to Microsoft? I'm sure they should be on this list somewhere, but I can't find them.
While Microsoft may be a big player in the software industry, they are a dwarf when compared to the big companies from other industries. Is their income something like $24e9? Look at GM with $177e9.
While I have no doubt that most of the real innovation (vs. the Microsoft version of the word) happens at small companies, the standard model is that the small companies are either bought by the large companies, or their new techology is immitated or stolen outright by the large corporations. The large corporations often lack the means to invent important new technologies, but they do have the means to bring important new technologies to the mass market.
And if one has a 1571 or 1581 Commodore drive, Big Blue Reader is an utility that will read/write/format DD DOS disks.
;-)
Hey, you could also use Little Red Reader!
Wow!! That's amazing! If these guys are as good at making CPUs as they are at math, then we're in for some fun......;)
A cricual point that you seem to be missing is that software is written in a very different way for a very small system like the C64. Of course it is significantly less functional, but a lot of software worked sufficiently well and ran sufficiently quickly for the stock C64 nearly 20 years ago at 1 MHz (its slow disk drive is a different issue).
When you run this style of software on a processor that runs 20 times faster, WHAMO! It suddenly runs 20 times faster. Whereas modern software follows Gates' law ("every 18 months, the speed of software halves"), and its speed never really increases, only its whiz-bangedness.
The 65816 in the SuperCPU is also a 16-bit processor vs. the 8-bit 6510 (6502). This is a significant potential increase as well, similar to the modern transition from 32 to 64 bits.
The meeting may have taken place in Quebec, but it was about North American free trade. The main proponent of which is the US, who also tends to deal with its citizens like that when they protest.
It was about free trade for all of North and South America and Canada is a big proponent of that, too. About 40% of Canada's economy is based on international trade, which is the highest figure of any nation in the world. The amount of trade between Canada and the US dwarfs the trade between any two other nations.
innovate, vb.: 1. To appropriate third-party technology through purchase, immitation, or theft and to integrate it into a de-facto, monopoly-position product. 2. To increase in size or complexity but not in utility; to reduce compatibility or interoperability. 3. To lock out competitors or to lock in users. 4. To charge more money; to increase prices or costs. 5. To acquire profits from investments in other companies but not from direct product or service sales. 6. To stifle or manipulate a free market; to extend monopoly powers into new markets. 7. To evade liability for wrong doings; to get off. 8. To purchase legislation, legistators, legislatures, or chiefs of state. 9. To mediate all transactions in a global economy; to embezzle; to co-opt power (coup d'état). Cf. innovate, English usage (antonym).