OK, we're losing the thread. My point isn't that we shouldn't have third parties. Its that the current voting system makes third parties have a negative impact on the state of politics. I think it would be better if we moved to a better voting system and until that happens, I think third party members should focus their efforts on that. Third parties are trying to dig a canal with spoons. They should join a major party, make shovels available to everyone and then go back to what they were doing before as third parties.
So when you are faced with a choice between Tweedle-Dee and Tweedle-Dum, you expect me to choose the lesser of two evils ?
Well, if you were able to vote in the primaries for one of the major parties maybe the choice wouldn't be that bad. At any rate, I think its better than voting for someone who's not going to win at all.
Frankly, I'd rather that both parties wise up and take notice of an ever increasing minority vote that is willing to vote for an good candidate that truely reflects the will of the people of the USA.
Yes, it is so much easier to want other people to come around to your point of view than it is to dirty yourself and compromise your ideals by joining a party that has a chance of winning.
So given a lack of choices between the two primary parties
Head's up. You helped cause that lack of an appealing choice by not being a member of a party that most closely aligns with your ideals.
Third parties are for people who want to cling to their ideals while the world goes down a shit hole. Saying your voted your conscience doesn't amount to much while civilization falls apart around you, and saying the two main parties are just two evils doesn't count for much when you know only they have the power to elect a president and you don't participate in either.
Yes, I'm certain that the sizes and strength of their positions on views are such that the result is the same as if they didn't exist. By that argument all third party members shouldn't even bother voting.
Incorrect. They do not "remove themselves from the main political process" - they are voting for what they believe in just like everyone else.
And if the result is that they don't influence national elections, or worse, their influence is actually the opposite of the intended effect, that's OK? I'm all for voting your conscience. That's why I think such third party members should join a party that has a real chance of being able to change the voting system to one where voting the way you really want to doesn't erode reduce your actual political power. I might have voted for Nader in 2000 if I hadn't known that it would be a vote for Bush in pratical terms.
...abolition of slavery...
Just an FYI, I wouldn't go around trying to cast the end of slavery in the US as a stunning example of the success of the political process if I were you.
who makes up this libertarian subset of the democratic party
You're missing the point. Whether a libertarian would identify more closely with the GOP or the Dems, my point is that third parties should close ranks with a party capable of accomplishing change on a national level until such time as the voting system in this country is changed such that third parties have a chance. I don't think libertarians or greens or socialists should give up their views or their convictions. But right now voting for Buchannon or Nader or basically anyone but Bush or Kerry is as likely to effect change as trying to teach a brick wall to dance.
Why do you think a member of the Libertarian Party would more closely match the Democratic Party and be opposed by the Republican Party?
Because most libertarians I meet strike me more as socially liberal as opposed to fiscally conservative, but that's probably just because I live in California. The argument still holds though. If you think the de-facto two party system is detrimental to the health of politics in this country, then work for change within one of the two main parties. Otherwise your political impact is less than that of your average knitting circle.
The libertarian party wouldn't be doing this if they were in the debate, even if all the other 'third' parties were excluded. That much seems self evident. Since that's likely the case, this means its less about what the two main parties are getting and more about what the libertarians are not getting. Which makes the whole thing bullshit from an ethical standpoint.
People need to realize that the two party system is essentially the result of our voting system. Fine, say you're a libertarian, but register democrat and work towards a change in the voting system. Otherwise by clinging fiercly to a third party system you're essentially giving more power to the main party that opposes your views by taking your vote away from the main party that's closest to your views. This works both ways, whether your liberal or conservative. That's why third party members piss me off so much. They essentially remove themselves from the main political process because they don't want to compromise their principles in a party that has an actual chance of winning, but in the end they only give the opposition more power. There's a lot more to be accomplished by being an active member of the libertarian subset of the democrative party than by being in the libertarian party. At least on a national level.
But then again, the famed 7-minute pause was *after* the 2nd jet crashed into the WTC. So even had he calmly stood up, excused himself, and taken/delegated control, it was too late.
Yeah, its easy to say that in retrospect. Everything that was going to happen was already in its endgame. But unless Bush somehow knew the details of the attack beforehand, then all the information that he had was that one plane had hit a skyscraper (possibly an accident) and that then another plane had hit the one next to it (inconcievably an accident).
Bush was NOT sitting there thinking about the failings of the FAA and NORAD.
No, a monopoly is when there is only one provider of a good or service (hence the prefix mono-). Monopoly means you have no choice, not that the choices are unpleasant.
Once a company becomes the only reasonable choice, then the market forces and effects we associate with monopolies kick in. Microsoft doesn't have an absolute monopoly on operating systems or office software suites, but because they have an effective monopoly, they can use monopoly tactics. You seem to think from your others posts that because their monopoly is not absolute that a competitor will rise and bring them down, but part of the power of a monopoly, whether its absolute or simply nearly absolute is that you can use your monopoly powers to kill competition before it becomes viable.
You also seem to think that IBM fell because from natural market forces because of its monopoly position, but this shows a basic misunderstanding of what happened. A new market emerged, the market for software not tied to hardware, that IBM was not agile enough to capitolize on. The new market supplanted the old market and we traded one monopoly for another. The transition period resulted in tons of innovation, but we're coming to the close of that.
I merely refuted your assertion that a democratic government has any incentive to keep its people fed, housed, and employed.
You did no such thing. That's like saying you can show that I have no incentive to keep my body alive because some of the cells in my body to die. You still haven't shown how libertarian policies would make life better and not worse.
the DTCP is much more secure than the DVD copy protection scheme
Perhaps in an ideal world. In the real world you'll end up with things like cable boxes that have an undocumented sequence of commands to disable encryption, company's choosing laughably simple keys to guess, and so on. I still think that tactics like these will never stop dedicated pirates, only hurt potential markets.
That makes no sense; why don't free markets take the long term into account?
The same reason spammers don't take the obliteration of email as a means of communications into account. In an environment where there are multiple entities, those that focus on long term strategy will not be as effective as those who focus on short term strategy. The more intelligent approach of long term survival will end up being weeded out by simple evolution by all the short term opportunists.
I don't understand how people get the idea that they can actually prosper at the expense of everyone else - ultimately that's a huge lie.
You're absolutely correct, but only in the long term. In the short term its actually much easier to prosper at the expense of others, far easier than creating wealth with effort. Market forces are essentially evolutionary forces and evolutionary forces don't take into account the bigger picture. They don't look down the road to what's best for the species as a whole. They simply favor whoever is doing better at the moment.
Part of the reason that corporations engage in the aforementioned "ass-fucking" is that the shareholders are shielded from liability
Corporations aren't malicious. I shouldn't have used to the term ass-fuck because it connotes enjoyment. The reason they ass-fuck is because it costs more to not harm the consumer, in many many ways. Conservation of resources, protecting the environment, ensuring you're not poisoning your client base slowly... all these things cost more to do than to not do. That's why the government exists to act as a restraining influence on corporations.
Big corporations that abuse their customer base simply couldn't survive without help from the government
There are simply too many counter-examples from history for me to buy that. Standard Oil. Ma Bell. Microsoft. OPEC. Hell, even the mob during prohibition. You're perfect example of the totally free market driven ass fucking entity. Even if 99% of all companies that abuse their customers die out, all it takes is one monopoly or cartel controlling a vital resource to make life hell. Obsess all your want about shielded stockholders. They're not the root cause of the problem. The market forces themselves are the problem. They TEND toward monopolies. They tend towards the most cutthroat company that can present the best IMAGE while at the same time slashing costs by filling your water with arsenic ending up on top.
Then why have governments been so happy to provide a legal framework that allows powerful and abusive corporations to exist
That is the 'have you stopped beating your wife' question. It implies that less legal framework would make companies less abusive. You haven't established that to my satisfaction.
there is nothing to prevent a like-minded group of citizens from getting together to purchase the necessary stock in a block
That's true today. Why don't people do exactly that to misbehaving corporations already? What's stopping them?
We'll neglect for the moment the fact that pure monopolies are the result of government regulation to exclude competition
Bullshit. Monopolies are the result of market forces. A company that is better than any other will slowly gain market share until it gains enough that it can eliminate the competition. No government gave Microsoft the effective monopoly on desktop operating systems it has now.
You seem to be assuming that corporations are inherently evil, while governments are inherently good.
Not quite. The mandate of a market entity is grow in the market, to earn money on behalf of its investors. Such a mandate taken to extremes is ultimately detrimental to the society. The mandate of a government (one of them) is to act as a safeguard against runaway market effects like cutting down all the trees and filling the air with pollution. Checks and balances.
As opposed to a tax-slave buying all your goods at the government-run store.
No, that's socialism, which is the other end of the spectrum of economics.
Jesus, what's with you people? If I bash socialism I must be a free market libertarian nutball. If I bash libertarianism I must be a commie bastard. In fact I'm just a guy in the middle that recognizes that too much of anything, privitization or nationalization, is deadly to an economy.
similar solution is possible for your baby seal issue: sell the seals to private owners. Then if a corporation clubs your baby seal to death, you can sue them.
There will always be resources for which the current market value is greater than the price any conservationist will be willing or able to pay, no matter how much the long term value of the resource might be, up to and including survival of the race. The free market always places a higher value on short term gain for the individual entity than on long term gain for the society. That's what a free market DOES.
We're already fighting market forces on issues like global warming which could make our planet uninhabitable, even for oil company CEO's. Yet somehow we still sell SUV's to people who don't need them.
they place the ideal of *freedom* above everything else
Last I checked, so did I, so your statement is pretty much meaningless. What counts is how you intend to achieve that freedom via policies.
For one thing, child labor is a great thing in the places where it exists. It allows children to escape what would be their other options -- begging, starvation, stealing, or prostitution -- in those circumstances in which they'd engage in child labor.
Wow... that's unbelievable bullshit. And your argument is fallacious. In places where the only other alternative for a child is begging, starvation, etc..., your free market forces are going to make child labor conditions just better enough to be an alternative to starvation, and exactly no better. Why is a company going to pay a child any more than a 'slave wage' if you will, if the child's only alternative is to starve or sell their body. Children don't get to work for the same reasons they don't get to drink, vote, or buy guns. Because they don't have the maturity to handle the decisions or responsibilities required. Your average 12 year old isn't going to know his market value, and even if they did, would be unlikely to have the strength of character to demand it.
It is not just that the USSR wasn't socialism -- it is that socialism, as defined and understood by Marx, Engels, and the other socialists of the time, is impossible.
My understanding of socialism isn't flawed. What you said was precisely my point. Socialism is just at one end of the economic spectrum, with no privitization, while libertarianism is at the other, with everything privatized. One causes slow economic death, the other is economic cancer. Neither is healthy for the political or public body.
high unemployment in Western European democracies, India's over-crowding problem, the high percentage of homelessness in the United States (in comparison to other Western Democracies)
Congratulations. You've just discovered that democracy is the worst form of government, well, except for every other form of government. I'm unconvinced that just because there are social problems in many modern democracies that libertarianism will make life better and not worse. That's your challenge, not to show me the flaws of the current system but to show me how yours is better.
The idea that holding majority shareholders responsible for a company's misdoings would make it more ethical is laughable. Corporate officers are already supposed to be responsible and there's still greed and corruption. Human psychology says that spreading around the responsibility even more will make it MORE tempting to violate etical bounds, not less. This is the problem with many fringe ideologies. They require the populace at large to be as idealistic as the proponents. That's what was wrong with communism, that's what's wrong with libertarianism, and that's what's wrong with 9 out of 10 of the third party crackpots you see running for president every 4 years. They give you that creepy feeling because they expect you to be as idealistic as them, and hold the same values.
Look, currently our voting structure essentially restricts us to two parties. Personally I think its a shitty system and that the best thing we could do with it is to move to approval voting. But since we're stuck with it for the meantime, pick whichever one of the two major parties best aligns with your point of view and try to move the average viewpoint of that party further in your direction. Join the political process. That's the only way the system is ever going to change and doing otherwise is not only like trying to wear down a mountain with your tongue, its also like scowling at everyone else for not helping. Its essentially admitting defeat and trying to retain the moral high ground.
I doubt DTCP will last any longer than the DVD encryption standard did. All this does is delay the software PC pirates will use by a couple of months and completely disallow any legitimate market for HD on PC's via firewire.
the "ass-fucking" corporations exist only by government fiat
What's your argument for that? From what I see the goverment is the only thing that keeps companies from going overboard in their excesses. And the difference between a government and a corporation is that its the government's mandate to protect its citizens. In a well functioning democracy a government that doesn't serve its citizens is subject to being voted out. Corporations on the other hand can't be voted out. And before you trot out the 'a competing company that serves the populace better will rise to the top' argument, keep in mind that in practice what happens is the major companies either end up with monopoly after which they have no incentive to continue to keep customers happy, or a set of companies will collude to prevent customer choice with tactics like price fixing. Tactics which are only not used because they're made illegal by the government because of the past problems they've caused.
I re-iterate; a democratic government will have more incentive to keep as much the populace fed, housed, employed and relatively happy than any free market solution. Every time I hear the libertarian platform I keep waiting for the follow-up that says exactly how I'm not going to end up a wage slave buying all my goods at the company store. It seems like a self-evident outcome to me and I've yet to hear the counter-argument.
That almost certainly won't work. Cable carried HDTV content is not in the same format as airwave carried HDTV content. The coaxial inputs on the card you suggest will probably not be able to interpret the cable signal and convert it to HDTV data. In many areas the HD content available over a cable box is going to be more extensive that what you will get over an antenna. On the other hand most cable companies will encrypt all the channels except the over the air ones (which they are prevented by law from encrypting) meaning the firewire data is worthless anyway.
I haven't found a solution yet for capturing the HDTV data over the firewire port yet, though I have a mac for this purpose. The mac is unable to render the HD content because its an old G4 400Mhz, but it can stream it to disk just fine and I'm able to use a cross platform tool to render the saves streams on my PC. In practice this ends up being more trouble than I'm usually willing to go through, since I can't actually do this for movies (because of the encryption as stated above) but its what I've got. This does at least let you play the MPEG-2 streams on a PC.
I quite dislike these analogies. People will look at them and laugh at the mocking of opposing ideologies, shrug of the mocking of their own, and come away with the reinforced idea that opposing political views are stupid because they don't come up with the 'common sense' solution to any given problem. This actually detracts from the real situation.
Politics and governing isn't some giant set of easy to solve problems with common sense solutions. Its a bunch of very hard problems, some with extremely counter-intuitive solutions. And what might seem like a good solution for a problem on day 1 might turn out to kind of suck on day 1000 when you find out you've starved 20% of your population. Whoops!
Take communism for example. Everyone thinks of the soviet union when they think communism, but the USSR wasn't a communist state in much other than name. That's not to say they didn't try to be communist. But what the Soviet Union became was what you get when you try to actually implement communism.
I suspect what you would see with an implementation of libertarianism would be a return to things like child labor, wage slavery and the obliteration of the large middle class. When you place the ideal of the free market above everything else and assume it will naturally shape itself to solve all problems, you rapidly discover that the free market serves not the will of the people participating in it, but the will of the free market. People should be able to see this in the mis-behavings of large corporate entities today. Libertarianism only strikes me as taking off whatever shackles currently restrain corporations from totally ass-fucking everyone they can to improve their stock price. If any company on earth could double their stock price merely by clubbing the last baby seal of earth, nothing could keep them from finding a way to do so. That's corporations, no matter if 99% of the employees are saints.
The only way you're going to see the quality of life improve for the majority of the population is when you make that your goal. Not by abandoning the difficult task to some high minded concepts like 'free markets'.
I don't disagree with Bardonik on everything. I think the war on drugs is a counter-productive failure. In fact I agree with him on a lot of social issues. But the libertarian free market ideal, while it might even make the economy grow, would do so at the expense of the citizens.
Yes, everyone knows only stupid or evil people vote for Republicans!
If you're willing to substitute 'ignorant and possibly apathetic' for stupid, and 'Bush administration' for republicans, then pretty much yeah.
There are republican leaders I respect. There are democratic leaders I despise. But I haven't heard a single good reason (and even a reason I disagree with can be good) to vote for the Bush administration.
Computers are general purpose machines designed to process just about anything. Each processor design has its advantages and disadvantages in this world of generalized computing. How hardware optimization applies in this case is hard to explain, so let me take an example from another field, cryptography. The DES algorightm has several steps for encrypting a given block of text. Two of them involve an arbitrary reshuffling of bits. For instance in a given 64 bit block, bit 2 might be put in bit 5's position, while bit 5 gets put in bit 29's position and so on. Doing this in software requires a lot of steps because you can't just move a bit to its final position without saving the bit you're replacing somewhere. There are some optimizations you can do but ultimately its a lengthy operation to do this kind of thing in software. However, in hardware specialized for DES it takes virtually no time at all. That's because in hardware you can just make an input register that is crossed wired to an output register in exactly way you need. The physical design of the chip actually rearranges the numbers for you without you having to do anything at all in software.
The fact is that's there's pretty much nothing you can do in software that you can't optimize in hardware to run faster, sometimes orders of magnitude faster. But the fact is that there are far more general problems than there are specialized problems. 3D rendering and by the way, encyrption and compression, are just some of the specialized problems common enough to warrant the creation of dedicated hardware. Even then the tendency is for one or two generations of moore's law to cause generalized processors to surpass even the best hardware. 3D is still a relatively immature technology, so this hasn't happened for it yet, but give it another 10 years and you might find 3D accelerator cards are as rare as dedicated hardware encryption devices today.
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OK, we're losing the thread. My point isn't that we shouldn't have third parties. Its that the current voting system makes third parties have a negative impact on the state of politics. I think it would be better if we moved to a better voting system and until that happens, I think third party members should focus their efforts on that. Third parties are trying to dig a canal with spoons. They should join a major party, make shovels available to everyone and then go back to what they were doing before as third parties.
Well, if you were able to vote in the primaries for one of the major parties maybe the choice wouldn't be that bad. At any rate, I think its better than voting for someone who's not going to win at all.
Yes, it is so much easier to want other people to come around to your point of view than it is to dirty yourself and compromise your ideals by joining a party that has a chance of winning.
Head's up. You helped cause that lack of an appealing choice by not being a member of a party that most closely aligns with your ideals.
Third parties are for people who want to cling to their ideals while the world goes down a shit hole. Saying your voted your conscience doesn't amount to much while civilization falls apart around you, and saying the two main parties are just two evils doesn't count for much when you know only they have the power to elect a president and you don't participate in either.
Yes, I'm certain that the sizes and strength of their positions on views are such that the result is the same as if they didn't exist. By that argument all third party members shouldn't even bother voting.
And if the result is that they don't influence national elections, or worse, their influence is actually the opposite of the intended effect, that's OK? I'm all for voting your conscience. That's why I think such third party members should join a party that has a real chance of being able to change the voting system to one where voting the way you really want to doesn't erode reduce your actual political power. I might have voted for Nader in 2000 if I hadn't known that it would be a vote for Bush in pratical terms.
Just an FYI, I wouldn't go around trying to cast the end of slavery in the US as a stunning example of the success of the political process if I were you.
You're missing the point. Whether a libertarian would identify more closely with the GOP or the Dems, my point is that third parties should close ranks with a party capable of accomplishing change on a national level until such time as the voting system in this country is changed such that third parties have a chance. I don't think libertarians or greens or socialists should give up their views or their convictions. But right now voting for Buchannon or Nader or basically anyone but Bush or Kerry is as likely to effect change as trying to teach a brick wall to dance.
Because most libertarians I meet strike me more as socially liberal as opposed to fiscally conservative, but that's probably just because I live in California. The argument still holds though. If you think the de-facto two party system is detrimental to the health of politics in this country, then work for change within one of the two main parties. Otherwise your political impact is less than that of your average knitting circle.
People need to realize that the two party system is essentially the result of our voting system. Fine, say you're a libertarian, but register democrat and work towards a change in the voting system. Otherwise by clinging fiercly to a third party system you're essentially giving more power to the main party that opposes your views by taking your vote away from the main party that's closest to your views. This works both ways, whether your liberal or conservative. That's why third party members piss me off so much. They essentially remove themselves from the main political process because they don't want to compromise their principles in a party that has an actual chance of winning, but in the end they only give the opposition more power. There's a lot more to be accomplished by being an active member of the libertarian subset of the democrative party than by being in the libertarian party. At least on a national level.
Mediocrity of the masses is no excuse for mediocrity.
Right. Because the democratic modus operandi has always been a rock through a window at 4 in the morning.
And vice versa.
Yeah, its easy to say that in retrospect. Everything that was going to happen was already in its endgame. But unless Bush somehow knew the details of the attack beforehand, then all the information that he had was that one plane had hit a skyscraper (possibly an accident) and that then another plane had hit the one next to it (inconcievably an accident).
Bush was NOT sitting there thinking about the failings of the FAA and NORAD.
Once a company becomes the only reasonable choice, then the market forces and effects we associate with monopolies kick in. Microsoft doesn't have an absolute monopoly on operating systems or office software suites, but because they have an effective monopoly, they can use monopoly tactics. You seem to think from your others posts that because their monopoly is not absolute that a competitor will rise and bring them down, but part of the power of a monopoly, whether its absolute or simply nearly absolute is that you can use your monopoly powers to kill competition before it becomes viable.
You also seem to think that IBM fell because from natural market forces because of its monopoly position, but this shows a basic misunderstanding of what happened. A new market emerged, the market for software not tied to hardware, that IBM was not agile enough to capitolize on. The new market supplanted the old market and we traded one monopoly for another. The transition period resulted in tons of innovation, but we're coming to the close of that.
You did no such thing. That's like saying you can show that I have no incentive to keep my body alive because some of the cells in my body to die. You still haven't shown how libertarian policies would make life better and not worse.
Perhaps in an ideal world. In the real world you'll end up with things like cable boxes that have an undocumented sequence of commands to disable encryption, company's choosing laughably simple keys to guess, and so on. I still think that tactics like these will never stop dedicated pirates, only hurt potential markets.
The same reason spammers don't take the obliteration of email as a means of communications into account. In an environment where there are multiple entities, those that focus on long term strategy will not be as effective as those who focus on short term strategy. The more intelligent approach of long term survival will end up being weeded out by simple evolution by all the short term opportunists.
I don't understand how people get the idea that they can actually prosper at the expense of everyone else - ultimately that's a huge lie.
You're absolutely correct, but only in the long term. In the short term its actually much easier to prosper at the expense of others, far easier than creating wealth with effort. Market forces are essentially evolutionary forces and evolutionary forces don't take into account the bigger picture. They don't look down the road to what's best for the species as a whole. They simply favor whoever is doing better at the moment.
Corporations aren't malicious. I shouldn't have used to the term ass-fuck because it connotes enjoyment. The reason they ass-fuck is because it costs more to not harm the consumer, in many many ways. Conservation of resources, protecting the environment, ensuring you're not poisoning your client base slowly... all these things cost more to do than to not do. That's why the government exists to act as a restraining influence on corporations.
Big corporations that abuse their customer base simply couldn't survive without help from the government
There are simply too many counter-examples from history for me to buy that. Standard Oil. Ma Bell. Microsoft. OPEC. Hell, even the mob during prohibition. You're perfect example of the totally free market driven ass fucking entity. Even if 99% of all companies that abuse their customers die out, all it takes is one monopoly or cartel controlling a vital resource to make life hell. Obsess all your want about shielded stockholders. They're not the root cause of the problem. The market forces themselves are the problem. They TEND toward monopolies. They tend towards the most cutthroat company that can present the best IMAGE while at the same time slashing costs by filling your water with arsenic ending up on top.
Then why have governments been so happy to provide a legal framework that allows powerful and abusive corporations to exist
That is the 'have you stopped beating your wife' question. It implies that less legal framework would make companies less abusive. You haven't established that to my satisfaction.
there is nothing to prevent a like-minded group of citizens from getting together to purchase the necessary stock in a block
That's true today. Why don't people do exactly that to misbehaving corporations already? What's stopping them?
We'll neglect for the moment the fact that pure monopolies are the result of government regulation to exclude competition
Bullshit. Monopolies are the result of market forces. A company that is better than any other will slowly gain market share until it gains enough that it can eliminate the competition. No government gave Microsoft the effective monopoly on desktop operating systems it has now.
You seem to be assuming that corporations are inherently evil, while governments are inherently good.
Not quite. The mandate of a market entity is grow in the market, to earn money on behalf of its investors. Such a mandate taken to extremes is ultimately detrimental to the society. The mandate of a government (one of them) is to act as a safeguard against runaway market effects like cutting down all the trees and filling the air with pollution. Checks and balances.
As opposed to a tax-slave buying all your goods at the government-run store.
No, that's socialism, which is the other end of the spectrum of economics.
Jesus, what's with you people? If I bash socialism I must be a free market libertarian nutball. If I bash libertarianism I must be a commie bastard. In fact I'm just a guy in the middle that recognizes that too much of anything, privitization or nationalization, is deadly to an economy.
There will always be resources for which the current market value is greater than the price any conservationist will be willing or able to pay, no matter how much the long term value of the resource might be, up to and including survival of the race. The free market always places a higher value on short term gain for the individual entity than on long term gain for the society. That's what a free market DOES.
We're already fighting market forces on issues like global warming which could make our planet uninhabitable, even for oil company CEO's. Yet somehow we still sell SUV's to people who don't need them.
they place the ideal of *freedom* above everything else
Last I checked, so did I, so your statement is pretty much meaningless. What counts is how you intend to achieve that freedom via policies.
For one thing, child labor is a great thing in the places where it exists. It allows children to escape what would be their other options -- begging, starvation, stealing, or prostitution -- in those circumstances in which they'd engage in child labor.
Wow... that's unbelievable bullshit. And your argument is fallacious. In places where the only other alternative for a child is begging, starvation, etc..., your free market forces are going to make child labor conditions just better enough to be an alternative to starvation, and exactly no better. Why is a company going to pay a child any more than a 'slave wage' if you will, if the child's only alternative is to starve or sell their body. Children don't get to work for the same reasons they don't get to drink, vote, or buy guns. Because they don't have the maturity to handle the decisions or responsibilities required. Your average 12 year old isn't going to know his market value, and even if they did, would be unlikely to have the strength of character to demand it.
My understanding of socialism isn't flawed. What you said was precisely my point. Socialism is just at one end of the economic spectrum, with no privitization, while libertarianism is at the other, with everything privatized. One causes slow economic death, the other is economic cancer. Neither is healthy for the political or public body.
Congratulations. You've just discovered that democracy is the worst form of government, well, except for every other form of government. I'm unconvinced that just because there are social problems in many modern democracies that libertarianism will make life better and not worse. That's your challenge, not to show me the flaws of the current system but to show me how yours is better.
The idea that holding majority shareholders responsible for a company's misdoings would make it more ethical is laughable. Corporate officers are already supposed to be responsible and there's still greed and corruption. Human psychology says that spreading around the responsibility even more will make it MORE tempting to violate etical bounds, not less. This is the problem with many fringe ideologies. They require the populace at large to be as idealistic as the proponents. That's what was wrong with communism, that's what's wrong with libertarianism, and that's what's wrong with 9 out of 10 of the third party crackpots you see running for president every 4 years. They give you that creepy feeling because they expect you to be as idealistic as them, and hold the same values.
Look, currently our voting structure essentially restricts us to two parties. Personally I think its a shitty system and that the best thing we could do with it is to move to approval voting. But since we're stuck with it for the meantime, pick whichever one of the two major parties best aligns with your point of view and try to move the average viewpoint of that party further in your direction. Join the political process. That's the only way the system is ever going to change and doing otherwise is not only like trying to wear down a mountain with your tongue, its also like scowling at everyone else for not helping. Its essentially admitting defeat and trying to retain the moral high ground.
I doubt DTCP will last any longer than the DVD encryption standard did. All this does is delay the software PC pirates will use by a couple of months and completely disallow any legitimate market for HD on PC's via firewire.
What's your argument for that? From what I see the goverment is the only thing that keeps companies from going overboard in their excesses. And the difference between a government and a corporation is that its the government's mandate to protect its citizens. In a well functioning democracy a government that doesn't serve its citizens is subject to being voted out. Corporations on the other hand can't be voted out. And before you trot out the 'a competing company that serves the populace better will rise to the top' argument, keep in mind that in practice what happens is the major companies either end up with monopoly after which they have no incentive to continue to keep customers happy, or a set of companies will collude to prevent customer choice with tactics like price fixing. Tactics which are only not used because they're made illegal by the government because of the past problems they've caused.
I re-iterate; a democratic government will have more incentive to keep as much the populace fed, housed, employed and relatively happy than any free market solution. Every time I hear the libertarian platform I keep waiting for the follow-up that says exactly how I'm not going to end up a wage slave buying all my goods at the company store. It seems like a self-evident outcome to me and I've yet to hear the counter-argument.
I haven't found a solution yet for capturing the HDTV data over the firewire port yet, though I have a mac for this purpose. The mac is unable to render the HD content because its an old G4 400Mhz, but it can stream it to disk just fine and I'm able to use a cross platform tool to render the saves streams on my PC. In practice this ends up being more trouble than I'm usually willing to go through, since I can't actually do this for movies (because of the encryption as stated above) but its what I've got. This does at least let you play the MPEG-2 streams on a PC.
Politics and governing isn't some giant set of easy to solve problems with common sense solutions. Its a bunch of very hard problems, some with extremely counter-intuitive solutions. And what might seem like a good solution for a problem on day 1 might turn out to kind of suck on day 1000 when you find out you've starved 20% of your population. Whoops!
Take communism for example. Everyone thinks of the soviet union when they think communism, but the USSR wasn't a communist state in much other than name. That's not to say they didn't try to be communist. But what the Soviet Union became was what you get when you try to actually implement communism.
I suspect what you would see with an implementation of libertarianism would be a return to things like child labor, wage slavery and the obliteration of the large middle class. When you place the ideal of the free market above everything else and assume it will naturally shape itself to solve all problems, you rapidly discover that the free market serves not the will of the people participating in it, but the will of the free market. People should be able to see this in the mis-behavings of large corporate entities today. Libertarianism only strikes me as taking off whatever shackles currently restrain corporations from totally ass-fucking everyone they can to improve their stock price. If any company on earth could double their stock price merely by clubbing the last baby seal of earth, nothing could keep them from finding a way to do so. That's corporations, no matter if 99% of the employees are saints.
The only way you're going to see the quality of life improve for the majority of the population is when you make that your goal. Not by abandoning the difficult task to some high minded concepts like 'free markets'.
I don't disagree with Bardonik on everything. I think the war on drugs is a counter-productive failure. In fact I agree with him on a lot of social issues. But the libertarian free market ideal, while it might even make the economy grow, would do so at the expense of the citizens.
If you're willing to substitute 'ignorant and possibly apathetic' for stupid, and 'Bush administration' for republicans, then pretty much yeah.
There are republican leaders I respect. There are democratic leaders I despise. But I haven't heard a single good reason (and even a reason I disagree with can be good) to vote for the Bush administration.
The fact is that's there's pretty much nothing you can do in software that you can't optimize in hardware to run faster, sometimes orders of magnitude faster. But the fact is that there are far more general problems than there are specialized problems. 3D rendering and by the way, encyrption and compression, are just some of the specialized problems common enough to warrant the creation of dedicated hardware. Even then the tendency is for one or two generations of moore's law to cause generalized processors to surpass even the best hardware. 3D is still a relatively immature technology, so this hasn't happened for it yet, but give it another 10 years and you might find 3D accelerator cards are as rare as dedicated hardware encryption devices today.
Maybe you should read the rest of the post, you know, past the subject line.