I should say that I really don't care much either way about significant white space in Python: it really doesn't seem to make a big difference in practice either way.
Because a single grapheme cluster in Unicode does not fit into a single UTF-32 code unit. If you don't understand the importance of grapheme clusters, try searching this essay [utf8everywhere.org] for the word "cluster".
Allowing strings to be indexed by codepoints does not interfere with providing iterators that iterator over grapheme clusters. The absence of such indexing, however, precludes the easy porting of a lot of existing algorithms that are written in terms of codepoints.
Women are about 50% of the population and the majority of college graduates. Women could easily create women-dominated computer science programs, companies, and open source projects, run according to whatever preferences they have, if they wanted to. When it comes to open source development, none of the usual barriers feminists postulate to explain underrepresentation of women in certain fields apply: if pimply maladjusted male teenagers living in their mom's basement can create open source projects, surely intelligent, educated, empathetic women can do so as well. And if women's empathetic and communication styles result in superior project performance, they'd quickly take over the open source world.
Instead, Perens seems to view women as so weak and inferior that the only way they can create open source software is under male guidance and tutelage, within male-dominated projects. Perens and people like him are the real misogynists and sexists, because he obviously deep down still believes that women are the weaker sex and need protection and help from males like him.
And the real irony behind arguments like Perens's is that on the one hand, he acknowledges deep biological differences between men and women, but then thinks that society should somehow shoe-horn and reeducate people in such a way that despite those differences, outcomes are still statistically equal in a few select areas that he happens to care about.
There is no 'sharing' in Capatalism and no sense of 'common good', so you're always going to end up with a few players at the top.
That's the pre-Enlightenment view of economics. In fact, the reason the Wealth of Nations was such a breakthrough is because it recognized that individually selfish actions in a free market promote the "common good".
And it's the best way of promoting the "common good" that we know, because if you try to replace the free market with politics and government, you end up with not a few players at the top (where "few" in reality means tens of thousands or even millions, depending on how you count), you end up with one player, namely the government. And that one player is run by people who are just as selfish, power-hungry, and greedy as the CEOs of major companies. But unlike those CEOs, they are not constrained by market forces, and they can use violence against anyone with impunity.
Yes, free markets suck, but they suck a lot less than all the known alternatives.
What you seem to be saying is that capitalism is worse than optimal allocation of resources, and you are right. It is. In fact, it is much worse.
it involves stupid ass human beings who evolved from lower animals who's minds are not evolved for market society at all.
And people don't magically stop being "stupid ass human beings" when they enter politics; to the contrary, politicians and government economists are power hungry and greedy, and voters are ignorant without actually having to face the consequences of their ignorance. The result is even worse than capitalism and free markets: in free markets, at least if you screw up, you have to deal with the consequences; in a government run economy, you can screw up again and again and have others pay for your stupidity--nothing forces you to ever learn.
Capitalism and free markets aren't the best possible economic system, but they are the best known economic system for "stupid ass human beings".
If the question is "should Western governments spend massive amounts of money to put solar panels in the Sahara desert", the answer is "no".
When it becomes economically feasible to do so (taking into account political risks and transportation costs), investors will start doing so.
The only reason for Western governments to do this is because Western militaries could (and would) implicitly subsidize the necessary security arrangements. "Subsidize" here means that once our government had built massive solar farms there and we were energy depend on it, our military would do and spend whatever it takes to defend them.
There are plenty of self-contained IP cameras, including D-Link.
There are also dozens of apps for iOS and Android that turn phones and music players into IP cameras.
And if you want something cheap and completely under your control, you can set up IP cameras from a Raspberry Pi and a camera module. That's the cheapest and most flexible option.
In a dog-eat-dog world, you end up with one very fat dog.
You're apparently thinking of industry consolidation as a bad thing, forced by big guys upon little guys in order to monopolize the market and increase profits. But that's not at all what happens. Instead, as industries mature, innovation decreases and profits decrease as well. The people running smaller companies simply have little incentive to stay in the game, so they sell to big companies.
That is not a bad thing at all. Inventors, innovators, and good managers are a scarce resource. Do you want them competing in the brewery market, working on new varieties of beers, or do you want them to develop electric cars, solar power, recycling systems, AI, robots, and rockets?
Areas where a lot of innovation happens have a lot of small companies, because that's where the market allocates the scarce human resources necessary for innovation. Necessarily, that leaves mature, boring industries consolidated. And that's a good thing.
You're absolutely right: it wasn't Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac alone that caused the housing bubble, it was a combination of factors. The issue is really that on the one hand, government implemented lots of policies supporting, subsidizing, and encouraging home ownership; and on the other hand, it dropped the ball when it came to regulating and supervising financial institutions in order to prevent them from taking advantage of that public influx of money.
Sure, that means that "too little regulation" was the problem, in the sense that "too few matching numbers" are the problem when you buy a lottery ticket and lose. But the answer in both cases is not to gamble again and again that next time you are going to get it right, the answer is not to play at all.
I know that economics has a bad reputation. Rightly so. Keynes doesn't make sense, but seems to work
Keynesianism does make sense, unfortunately it doesn't work in practice. For example, empirical evidence is pretty strong that the Keynesian multiplier (how many dollars the economy gains from each dollars spent by the government) is less than one. Progressives and Democrats on the one hand complain about crony capitalism and big corporations, and on the other hand hand out trillions of dollars to such corporations in stimulus spending and bailouts. And when these programs don't yield the promised results, they say that they should have spent even more. How stupid do you have to be to believe this crap?
and the crazy libertarians make a lot of sense in theory, but got us 2008
How can "libertarians" be responsible for anything in our economy? We haven't had anything even remotely resembling libertarian government for more than a century and government regulations have been steadily increasing. The few areas where we have had "deregulation" and "privatization" (e.g., telecoms, airlines) have not resulted in anything like a free market (although they have still been beneficial). Most deregulation and privatization by Democrats and Republicans have themselves been tied up with corporate interests and crony capitalism, something both parties are deeply beholden to.
Yet some models and explanations are solid and work. One of them is the concept of the natural monopoly.
There is little evidence that natural monopolies exist in any economically meaningful sense. That is, if you define your market sufficiently narrowly, you can claim that some company has a "natural monopoly", but there is no reason to believe that your definition of "market" is economically relevant. For example, if you define the "desktop PC" as a market, Microsoft has a "monopoly", but if you look at the market of all interactive computing devices, Microsoft is just one of many companies. Of course, free markets do sometimes produce monopolies (or cartels), but those monopolies aren't stable, and they collapse the faster the more economically important that monopoly is; if you try to fix those problems with regulation, the cure is worse than the disease.
Social Justice Warriors are followers of Neo-Marxist ideology. Any sane person should oppose that bullshit.
Furthermore, opposition to SJWs and Neo-Marxists can hardly be called "reactionary", because that would imply that SJWs and Neo-Marxists already define the status quo in our society. Reactionaries is what countries call liberals and conservatives after socialist and communist revolutions.
If this is to be different for drones, new legislation or regulations will be required.
Nonsense. The FAA authorization is quite generic; the FAA could easily keep drone registrations private and make other aircraft registrations public if it wanted to.
Funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, the robot was capable of walking with 400 pounds of equipment on its back. LS3 could run for 24 hours straight on a 20-mile mission across rough terrain.
20 miles for 24h with 400 pounds of weight? Sorry, but those specs don't sound all that great compared to a real mule or pack horse.
No, you claimed that a market can't be rigged if the transactions are voluntary. I showed three examples off the top of my head of rigged markets where the transactions were voluntary.
You showed three examples in which companies tried to rig the market and they failed. It should obvious that market mechanisms take some time to bring about such failures.
Nothing lasts forever, but it doesn't have to in order to be immensely profitable to a few and damaging to many.
Really? After the end of DeBeers' monopoly, diamond prices became less stable and went up, not down. And, of course, without DeBeers there wouldn't be much of a gem diamond market in the first place. So, who exactly has been "damaged" by DeBeers's temporary monopoly?
That includes re-defining voluntary to include coerced by circumstance.
Well, yes, that's what you did, contradicting the clear definition of "free market" that we started with. That is, I used the term "voluntary" in the context of free market transactions and the definition of free market, and you took it out of context and tried to re-defined it to "include coerced by circumstance". And this entire subthread is your response to a paranthetical remark, not a response to a carefully stated argument.
DeBeers was also involved in industrial diamonds which are not at all useless.
Well, and guess what, within a little more than a decade, industrial diamonds were fabricated on a large scale, breaking any market control DeBeers might have had.
Enron had a pretty good go at it until it got caught.
They "got caught" committing fraud and self-destructed as a result. What does that have to do with stable monopolies?
If DeBeers isn't Scottish enough, consider the Phoebus cartel
Yes, and that cartel lasted less than a decade.
I didn't claim that monopolies or cartels never exist at all, I said that they aren't stable (or, more accurately, they aren't stable if people try to use them to extract monopoly rents). They aren't stable because they inherently create a strong incentive for competitors to enter the market. Each of your examples actually illustrates that fact.
Then again, not all transactions are fully voluntary. For example, in the emergency room, it's questionable how voluntary the transaction is when the alternative is death within minutes.
Your fallacy is ambiguity. The transaction may not be "voluntary" in some sense, but it's a free market transaction: no third party is coercing the patient to seek treatment. It would still be a "free market transaction" even if the patient were unconscious, since it would be governed by whatever legal instructions the patient put in place before losing consciousness (provided those instructions weren't coerced).
So basically a free market is where who ever has the most power can just take what they want
"Taking whatever they want" is not a "voluntary transaction", so, no, that's not a free market.
Remember, none of that pesky government regulation so things like private property only exist if you can defend them.
Defense of private property is something quite different from government regulations of markets, so your comment is missing the point. Nevertheless, government is not necessary in order to defend private property; voluntary, private mechanisms are sufficient.
I guess the early middle ages was an example of free markets. Powerless government with a rich class fighting amongst themselves to take and defend their property.
You got it backwards: the middle ages were characterized by a political ruling class (whose power was rooted in military strength) that enriched themselves through government coercion. Their oppressive rule was ended through increasing wealth from private businesses. Nobility forced to marry wealthy commoners became a common trope in the literature at the end of the Middle Ages and later.
DeBeers had an economically useless product (gem diamonds) and created a market for them through advertising. Complaining about the DeBeers monopoly is like complaining about a monopoly in ChiaPets. There was little economic incentive for competitors to enter that market, but eventually, they did anyway, and DeBeers's monopoly was history. (There were a bunch of anti-trust suits as well, but they were pretty much irrelevant.)
I'm referring to Amazon potentially blocking sellers of new or used books from using their platform, not Lightning connectors.
So? There are half a dozen competitors already, and they'd be happy to pick up this business if Amazon were stupid enough to do this. Even if there weren't, it would take a few days to set up a new platform. How is anybody "locked out of" anything?
It works temporarily and short term; such agreements are not stable.
He made the (valid) argument that discounting would just lead to a race to the bottom, and minimize our profits.
Sorry to tell you this, but he bamboozled you, and you fell for it.
Furthermore, even if your price fixing agreement had been rational on both your parts, you would simply have attracted new sellers to come into the market next time and undercut you both.
You would be wrong. As someone who spent a fair amount of time in Belgrade during the troubles there in the '90s, I've seen first hand how black markets work. They use currency (govt) and weights and measures (govt) and almost certainly local police are involved (or they couldn't function)
The criterion for a free market is that people conduct business transactions voluntarily and without having terms or conditions imposed on them by others. How does the voluntary use of government currency and the voluntary use of government weights and measures make the market non-free?
As for police involvement, you're engaging in circular reasoning: you assume that police are necessary for markets to function, then infer that police were "almost certainly involved", and then use that to argue that government is necessary for markets to function. In fact, police are not necessary for markets to function; many markets function perfectly well without police, laws, or a legal system to back them up. Reputation and repeat business are sufficient in and of themselves to make sure people live up to their commitments.
But it's a quote about something that doesn't have anything to do with the fact that you still can't offer a single instance of a "free market".
I have offered several instances; if you don't understand them why they are free markets, that's your problem. But you haven't explained why this is even relevant. Can you offer historical instances of societies with gender equality? Historical instances of societies that have eliminated economic inequality? Nationally recognized gay rights and gay marriage? Would the lack of historical precedent convince you that those things are bad ideas?
Good, then offer some examples of safety and measurement standards being "provided" (and by this, I assume you mean "enforced") without government.
Rothbard's "For a New Liberty: The Libertarian Manifesto" also has a pretty good explanation of how these things work, and provides ample historical precedent.
So is the monopoly conferred by a grant of patent, such as Apple's patent on the Lightning connector. So is the monopoly conferred through an exclusive utility franchise. All of these are government-chartered monopolies.
Correct. And the solution to that issue is not that "government should enforce more standards", as the OP suggested, it is that it "should stop granting monopolies".
Slashdot Mirror
I should say that I really don't care much either way about significant white space in Python: it really doesn't seem to make a big difference in practice either way.
Pretty much all Unicode processing algorithms are expressed in terms of code points. So, quite a lot can be done with them.
Allowing strings to be indexed by codepoints does not interfere with providing iterators that iterator over grapheme clusters. The absence of such indexing, however, precludes the easy porting of a lot of existing algorithms that are written in terms of codepoints.
Unit tests.
if (flag)
if (other_flag) do_this();
else
do_that();
Women are about 50% of the population and the majority of college graduates. Women could easily create women-dominated computer science programs, companies, and open source projects, run according to whatever preferences they have, if they wanted to. When it comes to open source development, none of the usual barriers feminists postulate to explain underrepresentation of women in certain fields apply: if pimply maladjusted male teenagers living in their mom's basement can create open source projects, surely intelligent, educated, empathetic women can do so as well. And if women's empathetic and communication styles result in superior project performance, they'd quickly take over the open source world.
Instead, Perens seems to view women as so weak and inferior that the only way they can create open source software is under male guidance and tutelage, within male-dominated projects. Perens and people like him are the real misogynists and sexists, because he obviously deep down still believes that women are the weaker sex and need protection and help from males like him.
And the real irony behind arguments like Perens's is that on the one hand, he acknowledges deep biological differences between men and women, but then thinks that society should somehow shoe-horn and reeducate people in such a way that despite those differences, outcomes are still statistically equal in a few select areas that he happens to care about.
That's the pre-Enlightenment view of economics. In fact, the reason the Wealth of Nations was such a breakthrough is because it recognized that individually selfish actions in a free market promote the "common good".
And it's the best way of promoting the "common good" that we know, because if you try to replace the free market with politics and government, you end up with not a few players at the top (where "few" in reality means tens of thousands or even millions, depending on how you count), you end up with one player, namely the government. And that one player is run by people who are just as selfish, power-hungry, and greedy as the CEOs of major companies. But unlike those CEOs, they are not constrained by market forces, and they can use violence against anyone with impunity.
Yes, free markets suck, but they suck a lot less than all the known alternatives.
What you seem to be saying is that capitalism is worse than optimal allocation of resources, and you are right. It is. In fact, it is much worse.
And people don't magically stop being "stupid ass human beings" when they enter politics; to the contrary, politicians and government economists are power hungry and greedy, and voters are ignorant without actually having to face the consequences of their ignorance. The result is even worse than capitalism and free markets: in free markets, at least if you screw up, you have to deal with the consequences; in a government run economy, you can screw up again and again and have others pay for your stupidity--nothing forces you to ever learn.
Capitalism and free markets aren't the best possible economic system, but they are the best known economic system for "stupid ass human beings".
If the question is "should Western governments spend massive amounts of money to put solar panels in the Sahara desert", the answer is "no".
When it becomes economically feasible to do so (taking into account political risks and transportation costs), investors will start doing so.
The only reason for Western governments to do this is because Western militaries could (and would) implicitly subsidize the necessary security arrangements. "Subsidize" here means that once our government had built massive solar farms there and we were energy depend on it, our military would do and spend whatever it takes to defend them.
There are plenty of self-contained IP cameras, including D-Link.
There are also dozens of apps for iOS and Android that turn phones and music players into IP cameras.
And if you want something cheap and completely under your control, you can set up IP cameras from a Raspberry Pi and a camera module. That's the cheapest and most flexible option.
You're apparently thinking of industry consolidation as a bad thing, forced by big guys upon little guys in order to monopolize the market and increase profits. But that's not at all what happens. Instead, as industries mature, innovation decreases and profits decrease as well. The people running smaller companies simply have little incentive to stay in the game, so they sell to big companies.
That is not a bad thing at all. Inventors, innovators, and good managers are a scarce resource. Do you want them competing in the brewery market, working on new varieties of beers, or do you want them to develop electric cars, solar power, recycling systems, AI, robots, and rockets?
Areas where a lot of innovation happens have a lot of small companies, because that's where the market allocates the scarce human resources necessary for innovation. Necessarily, that leaves mature, boring industries consolidated. And that's a good thing.
You're absolutely right: it wasn't Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac alone that caused the housing bubble, it was a combination of factors. The issue is really that on the one hand, government implemented lots of policies supporting, subsidizing, and encouraging home ownership; and on the other hand, it dropped the ball when it came to regulating and supervising financial institutions in order to prevent them from taking advantage of that public influx of money.
Sure, that means that "too little regulation" was the problem, in the sense that "too few matching numbers" are the problem when you buy a lottery ticket and lose. But the answer in both cases is not to gamble again and again that next time you are going to get it right, the answer is not to play at all.
Keynesianism does make sense, unfortunately it doesn't work in practice. For example, empirical evidence is pretty strong that the Keynesian multiplier (how many dollars the economy gains from each dollars spent by the government) is less than one. Progressives and Democrats on the one hand complain about crony capitalism and big corporations, and on the other hand hand out trillions of dollars to such corporations in stimulus spending and bailouts. And when these programs don't yield the promised results, they say that they should have spent even more. How stupid do you have to be to believe this crap?
How can "libertarians" be responsible for anything in our economy? We haven't had anything even remotely resembling libertarian government for more than a century and government regulations have been steadily increasing. The few areas where we have had "deregulation" and "privatization" (e.g., telecoms, airlines) have not resulted in anything like a free market (although they have still been beneficial). Most deregulation and privatization by Democrats and Republicans have themselves been tied up with corporate interests and crony capitalism, something both parties are deeply beholden to.
There is little evidence that natural monopolies exist in any economically meaningful sense. That is, if you define your market sufficiently narrowly, you can claim that some company has a "natural monopoly", but there is no reason to believe that your definition of "market" is economically relevant. For example, if you define the "desktop PC" as a market, Microsoft has a "monopoly", but if you look at the market of all interactive computing devices, Microsoft is just one of many companies. Of course, free markets do sometimes produce monopolies (or cartels), but those monopolies aren't stable, and they collapse the faster the more economically important that monopoly is; if you try to fix those problems with regulation, the cure is worse than the disease.
Social Justice Warriors are followers of Neo-Marxist ideology. Any sane person should oppose that bullshit.
Furthermore, opposition to SJWs and Neo-Marxists can hardly be called "reactionary", because that would imply that SJWs and Neo-Marxists already define the status quo in our society. Reactionaries is what countries call liberals and conservatives after socialist and communist revolutions.
Nonsense. The FAA authorization is quite generic; the FAA could easily keep drone registrations private and make other aircraft registrations public if it wanted to.
20 miles for 24h with 400 pounds of weight? Sorry, but those specs don't sound all that great compared to a real mule or pack horse.
You showed three examples in which companies tried to rig the market and they failed. It should obvious that market mechanisms take some time to bring about such failures.
Really? After the end of DeBeers' monopoly, diamond prices became less stable and went up, not down. And, of course, without DeBeers there wouldn't be much of a gem diamond market in the first place. So, who exactly has been "damaged" by DeBeers's temporary monopoly?
Well, yes, that's what you did, contradicting the clear definition of "free market" that we started with. That is, I used the term "voluntary" in the context of free market transactions and the definition of free market, and you took it out of context and tried to re-defined it to "include coerced by circumstance". And this entire subthread is your response to a paranthetical remark, not a response to a carefully stated argument.
Good!
Sometimes, purpose matters for constitutionality. For 4th Amendment protections, it should not.
Well, and guess what, within a little more than a decade, industrial diamonds were fabricated on a large scale, breaking any market control DeBeers might have had.
They "got caught" committing fraud and self-destructed as a result. What does that have to do with stable monopolies?
Yes, and that cartel lasted less than a decade.
I didn't claim that monopolies or cartels never exist at all, I said that they aren't stable (or, more accurately, they aren't stable if people try to use them to extract monopoly rents). They aren't stable because they inherently create a strong incentive for competitors to enter the market. Each of your examples actually illustrates that fact.
Your fallacy is ambiguity. The transaction may not be "voluntary" in some sense, but it's a free market transaction: no third party is coercing the patient to seek treatment. It would still be a "free market transaction" even if the patient were unconscious, since it would be governed by whatever legal instructions the patient put in place before losing consciousness (provided those instructions weren't coerced).
"Taking whatever they want" is not a "voluntary transaction", so, no, that's not a free market.
Defense of private property is something quite different from government regulations of markets, so your comment is missing the point. Nevertheless, government is not necessary in order to defend private property; voluntary, private mechanisms are sufficient.
You got it backwards: the middle ages were characterized by a political ruling class (whose power was rooted in military strength) that enriched themselves through government coercion. Their oppressive rule was ended through increasing wealth from private businesses. Nobility forced to marry wealthy commoners became a common trope in the literature at the end of the Middle Ages and later.
DeBeers had an economically useless product (gem diamonds) and created a market for them through advertising. Complaining about the DeBeers monopoly is like complaining about a monopoly in ChiaPets. There was little economic incentive for competitors to enter that market, but eventually, they did anyway, and DeBeers's monopoly was history. (There were a bunch of anti-trust suits as well, but they were pretty much irrelevant.)
So? There are half a dozen competitors already, and they'd be happy to pick up this business if Amazon were stupid enough to do this. Even if there weren't, it would take a few days to set up a new platform. How is anybody "locked out of" anything?
It works temporarily and short term; such agreements are not stable.
Sorry to tell you this, but he bamboozled you, and you fell for it.
Furthermore, even if your price fixing agreement had been rational on both your parts, you would simply have attracted new sellers to come into the market next time and undercut you both.
The criterion for a free market is that people conduct business transactions voluntarily and without having terms or conditions imposed on them by others. How does the voluntary use of government currency and the voluntary use of government weights and measures make the market non-free?
As for police involvement, you're engaging in circular reasoning: you assume that police are necessary for markets to function, then infer that police were "almost certainly involved", and then use that to argue that government is necessary for markets to function. In fact, police are not necessary for markets to function; many markets function perfectly well without police, laws, or a legal system to back them up. Reputation and repeat business are sufficient in and of themselves to make sure people live up to their commitments.
I have offered several instances; if you don't understand them why they are free markets, that's your problem. But you haven't explained why this is even relevant. Can you offer historical instances of societies with gender equality? Historical instances of societies that have eliminated economic inequality? Nationally recognized gay rights and gay marriage? Would the lack of historical precedent convince you that those things are bad ideas?
That question is rife with several logical fallacies.
In any case, I'll just refer you to the literature, for example http://www.cato.org/pubs/pas/p...
Rothbard's "For a New Liberty: The Libertarian Manifesto" also has a pretty good explanation of how these things work, and provides ample historical precedent.
Correct. And the solution to that issue is not that "government should enforce more standards", as the OP suggested, it is that it "should stop granting monopolies".