I would disagree. Take a look at building a chip foundry, automotive assembly line, textile mill, or pretty much any manufacturing process.
You said that the "cost of entry was relatively fixed for all players", which presumably meant that you believed cost of entry was equitable for all market participants, and implicitly because you believe that there were no monopolies hindering that entrance. Historically, that is ludicrous.
When I say that "the cost of entry is high because of government regulation", in that context, what I mean is that the cost of entry is high relative to the intrinsic cost of entry into a market, or the cost of entry in a free market. It was so back in Smith's time, and it is so today, and for the same reason: government-created barriers to entry.
theories on the economy, and his impressions of how things worked. Show me what "vast monopolies" and "barriers to entry" that existed prior to 1790 in the US, when he died.
Well, the prototypical example is the East India Company, controlling half the entire world's trade. And the guilds at the time created big barriers to entry. There are many more examples. You really need to actually read the books and read and understand something about history.
The same mechanisms flourish just as much today as they did then, and Adam Smith's criticism is as valid now as it was then: the requirement for government and occupational licenses, exempting or limiting businesses from liability, taxation of imports, subsidies of exports, monopolization of resources through government grants.
Again, I disagree. Smith was a philosopher and economist. A brief skim indicate his papers were
You can't understand his "papers" from a brief skim. In fact, understanding economics is harder than understanding relativity or quantum mechanics, since understanding economics requires a lot of knowledge of history, businesses, and human behavior.
Your views are bizarrely out of touch with reality. In fact, it was businesses and corporations that widely adopted new technologies because they made production more efficient and made companies more competitive in the free market. It was the Luddites who demonstrated against that operation of the free market.
Likewise, most risk-shifting is done courtesy of government, government that bails out businesses and limits their liabilities.
Patently false. Many branded products sell by convincing the consumer that a benefit exists, when in fact no benefit exists at all.
I didn't use the term "benefit", I was simply echoing it in the context of "subscriptions and microtransactions"; those succeed only if people "benefit" from them, in the sense that they find it more convenient.
The point is that businesses don't "extract" revenue from buyers as if buyers were passive bystanders. In most markets, buyers, not businesses, are in charge, and the buyers ultimately determine what products businesses offer and create.
Want more laundry detergent? Press the detergent button. Done. No fumbling through a crappy menu and display that's overly complicated to program and use.
I didn't say that there should be a "menu" that I need to "fumble through". I want a static set of 20 choices, each with one button next to it, for the most common items I need in the kitchen, bathroom, and other places.
That seems like typical geek thinking (no offense intended)... add more features, more buttons, more complexity, and more expense.
You should make things as simple as possible but no simpler. A single plastic button with a fixed function is useless to me, since in order to order all the staples I need that way, I'd have to scatter dozens of ugly buttons around the place, and I'd probably never find them if I need them.
This is entirely aimed at people who prefer simplicity and convenience.
No, this is entirely aimed at geeks who prefer useless gadgets. Normal people just pick up toilet paper in the store, along with all the other stuff they need to go to the store for anyway.
Today, cost of entry is high for anyone attempting to enter an existing market,
The cost of entry into most markets is high not because of capitalism or free markets, it is high because of government interference and regulation.
When the original capitalism and free markets were thought out, the known monopolies were so small as to be laughable
Nonsense. Read Adam Smith. Not only were there plenty of monopolies and barriers to entry, he recognized that the source of those monopolies and barriers to entry was government. He argued for free markets and against government interference precisely because he wanted to end the vast monopolies and barriers to entry that existed.
The ideal of Capitalism falls short at this very problem: The information level on the supply side is usually vastly superior to that on the demand side.
Irrelevant. Free markets don't assume perfect information or symmetry; they function perfectly fine without it. Any information deficit by any party is priced into transactions.
Maximizing profits may be in the interest of a business, but even this is not without a limit. Henry Ford understood this. He increased his workers' wages with the, correct, assumption that if they get more money, not only will they be far more interested in keeping their job, they will also become his customers.
In different words, Ford didn't act out of altruism when he raised his workers' salaries, he maximized his profits.
You should see what inserting a MicroSD card can do to a card slot on one of these phones. And unlike a pen, it's far less obvious which way is the right way for these cards; there isn't even a lot of resistance to inserting them the wrong way compared to the right way.
I think in its current form, this thing is not a good design. But give it a cheap 20 line LCD display and 20 corresponding buttons, with each line displaying a user-selectable product and the number of items currently on order, you have a winner. I'd get a handful and put them around the house for common items.
Minimum viable product, maximum revenue extraction.
If you don't like the product, don't buy it or use it.
Or did you think the evolution of subscriptions and microtransactions was to benefit you, the customer?
Oddly enough, yes. Successful businesses are motivated by maximizing their profit. But they succeed at this only if people actually choose to buy their products because they benefit. The fact that the business is primarily motivated by its own profits is not a problem, because in a free market, the only way to increase those profits is when people choose to buy their products and actually hand them their money.
It's not zero-sum game, it's a positive sum game: both buyers and sellers benefit, each in their own way.
Buttons are satisfying to press because they make things happen. Just watch two kids under the age of 12 fight for the privilege of pushing the elevator.
"Mommy, why is there a mountain of Macaroni and Cheese boxes in our front yard?"
"Johnny, have you been playing with the button in the kitchen again???"
I doubt even full legal liability for the damage would help.
Yes, I'm sure you do. That's because you don't understand how markets work.
Look at Ashley Madison, it will be a miracle if they survive now, and their entire business was built around being discrete, and yet they didn't care enough to have solid security.
So they go out of business. That's a far worse penalty than any fine the FTC could impose. With better legal liability, the founders of Ashley Madison would be paying until they die.
In addition, customers always have the option of not signing up. If you want to cheat on your wife and you publish that fact on a site with less than iron-clad guarantees and liability, you're taking a big risk. But the fact that you want to engage in such a privacy-sensitive transaction shouldn't impose a cost on me if I want to sell Origami cranes over the internet; yet, giving FTC the authority to regulate this means that everybody will be paying the cost.
Notice how they see basic security features like being able to delete your data as both something they should profit from and something that they shouldn't really offer (i.e. they charge you and then don't do it anyway).
Oh, I love how you try to link what is essentially blackmail to "profit", thereby subtly implying that profit in general is somehow criminal. Larry Ellison could fart in a crowded elevator and you would somehow manage to link that to profits and the need for the FTC to regulate farting.
This sounds good, but it isn't. Companies should be fully legally liable for the damage that their lax cybersecurity causes. It's a failing of our court system and laws that they aren't. FTC enforcement, on the other hand, is going to be ineffective. The FTC is going to give selected companies a slap on the wrist, and it's going to be lenient on big corporate supporters of whatever administration is in power.
Science Fiction is largely a vision about the future, and often it is used to promote particular political views. There are communist and socialist futures, corporatist futures, libertarian futures, militaristic futures; authors explore these futures from a utopian, dystopian, or neutral point of view. Science Fiction also validates or contradicts scientific and economic predictions like climate change. Depending on your own political leanings, you may find a particular science fiction story interesting and insightful, or manipulative and propagandistic.
Occasionally, there are stories that straddle political lines and are interesting even if you disagree with them. For example, although I think Ursula LeGuin is wrong on many political points, but her stories are still interesting and thought provoking. On the other hand, I find Arthur C. Clarke's politics utterly naive; I think he thought himself above politics and I can see why people who aren't very much interested in politics might like his stories, but I find him an utterly naive technocrat and really don't enjoy his books very much anymore (I used to enjoy him more when I was younger and didn't really understand much of the political dimension).
I think it's a bit too much to expect a single convention or set of awards to be able to cover all those different political views. We'll have to accept the fact that there is going to be at least a split between progressive, libertarian, and apolitical science fiction fans. There is even some Christian and conservative science fiction (arguably, the ultra-crappy "Left Behind" falls into that category, in addition to the only slightly less crappy C.S. Lewis), though perhaps not enough to support large conventions or awards.
Many network file systems don't have seekable streams at the protocol level; it makes more sense to transmit range requests and keep the "stream position" and the rest of the stream abstraction on the client.
What really is needed is a hybrid file system that contains some of the aspects of object storage and some of the aspects of a POSIX file system.... Add byte-level access in some fashion to object storage
Everyone should not be armed, because quite frankly, most people are more a danger with a weapon than an asset. Especially gung-ho idiots with IQ's smaller than their shoe size, whether by nature or by alcohol.
Based on your comments, I think that certainly you have no business carrying a gun.
If you falsely believe that economics is a zero-sum game.
consensus opinion,
If by "consensus opinion" you mean the opinion of progressive activists, then it probably does. However, their "consensus" is worthless.
and numerous anecdotal reports.
Introducing a new pool of cheap workers into the economy causes lots of people to "lose their jobs", quickly to be replaced with better jobs for most of them. Those are the "anecdotal reports". It's basically the same fallacy that the Luddites were a victim of.
Peer review exists to help a journal editor to decide whether an article is worth publishing in their journal, not whether the article is true. In principle, a peer reviewer for "The Journal of Irreproducible Results" would have to determine not whether the submitted article is true, but whether it is sufficiently irreproducible and funny to be published there (the JIR doesn't use peer review AFAIK, but it's just to illustrate the point). A low-end, high acceptance journal may not use very rigorous peer review. A journal like Nature, on the other hand, may reject many excellent articles simply because they don't judge them interesting enough, while accepting some questionable articles in order to start discussion. Failures in peer review are a problem for a journal that prides itself on high quality content, but they are not per se a problem for science.
large portion of the world's traffic will flow through networks controlled by governments that are, at least to some extent, hostile to the core values of Western democracies
I think what you need to understand is that some of the "core values of Western democracies" are unintentionally totalitarian and fascist in nature. People vote for politicians and policies that they think are good (save lives, help the poor, protect children, bring about world peace, increase equality, decrease racism,...) but don't understand the ramifications of their choices, and usually those choices involve using government force and violations of individual liberties and civils rights against someone. After enough such votes, eventually, everybody is subject to such force and society has effectively turned totalitarian. The problem is worsened by the fact that the fraction of the population imposing their will often isn't even a majority; the "majority" of many votes in the us is less than 1/4 of the population, and under European parliamentary systems, it is often even smaller. One proposed answer to this is to leave government mostly to experts (Plato's "philosopher-king" and a hallmark of today's progressivism), but that doesn't work either, because those experts end up fallible and corrupt themselves.
This isn't an intrinsic fault of "democracies", it's just a fault of the kind of democracies we have, Western democracies, democracies that tend towards majoritarianism and place more and more power in the hands of government. There are many other possible forms of democracy (i.e., self-governance by the people, as opposed to, say, monarchy or theocracy) besides majoritarianism.
As I was saying, if this were about trademarks, they wouldn't be asking him to prove that the material is in the public domain; public domain is a copyright issue, not a trademark issue.
More importantly, though, you misunderstand the purpose of trademark law. Trademark law doesn't exist to "protect characters" or other intellectual creations, trademark law exists in order make sure that when customers buy something, they know who actually produced it. Applying trademark law to a 70 year old cartoon character does not serve such a purpose.
When a drug company tells the government "we tested this drug, and it does this and this and this," they also need to be telling the truth
They are telling the truth: they (generally) complied with the old FDA requirements and reported their results truthfully, and now they are complying with the new ones. The problem isn't with companies committing fraud, it's with regulations not achieving what you want them to achieve. That is, no matter what regulations you come up with, people and companies will figure out how to comply with the letter of those regulations while still not achieving the goals those regulations were intended to achieve.
It's rather a case of "You attempted to defraud the taxpayers. Here's a prison sentence for you."
I think that would turn our society into a totalitarian society. Be that as it may, you claimed that corporations should be treated like individuals when it comes to lobbying, so presumably you then think that individuals should also be thrown in jail if they misrepresent, say, why they want a raise from government?
Slashdot Mirror
You said that the "cost of entry was relatively fixed for all players", which presumably meant that you believed cost of entry was equitable for all market participants, and implicitly because you believe that there were no monopolies hindering that entrance. Historically, that is ludicrous.
When I say that "the cost of entry is high because of government regulation", in that context, what I mean is that the cost of entry is high relative to the intrinsic cost of entry into a market, or the cost of entry in a free market. It was so back in Smith's time, and it is so today, and for the same reason: government-created barriers to entry.
Well, the prototypical example is the East India Company, controlling half the entire world's trade. And the guilds at the time created big barriers to entry. There are many more examples. You really need to actually read the books and read and understand something about history.
The same mechanisms flourish just as much today as they did then, and Adam Smith's criticism is as valid now as it was then: the requirement for government and occupational licenses, exempting or limiting businesses from liability, taxation of imports, subsidies of exports, monopolization of resources through government grants.
You can't understand his "papers" from a brief skim. In fact, understanding economics is harder than understanding relativity or quantum mechanics, since understanding economics requires a lot of knowledge of history, businesses, and human behavior.
Your views are bizarrely out of touch with reality. In fact, it was businesses and corporations that widely adopted new technologies because they made production more efficient and made companies more competitive in the free market. It was the Luddites who demonstrated against that operation of the free market.
Likewise, most risk-shifting is done courtesy of government, government that bails out businesses and limits their liabilities.
I didn't use the term "benefit", I was simply echoing it in the context of "subscriptions and microtransactions"; those succeed only if people "benefit" from them, in the sense that they find it more convenient.
The point is that businesses don't "extract" revenue from buyers as if buyers were passive bystanders. In most markets, buyers, not businesses, are in charge, and the buyers ultimately determine what products businesses offer and create.
I didn't say that there should be a "menu" that I need to "fumble through". I want a static set of 20 choices, each with one button next to it, for the most common items I need in the kitchen, bathroom, and other places.
You should make things as simple as possible but no simpler. A single plastic button with a fixed function is useless to me, since in order to order all the staples I need that way, I'd have to scatter dozens of ugly buttons around the place, and I'd probably never find them if I need them.
No, this is entirely aimed at geeks who prefer useless gadgets. Normal people just pick up toilet paper in the store, along with all the other stuff they need to go to the store for anyway.
The cost of entry into most markets is high not because of capitalism or free markets, it is high because of government interference and regulation.
Nonsense. Read Adam Smith. Not only were there plenty of monopolies and barriers to entry, he recognized that the source of those monopolies and barriers to entry was government. He argued for free markets and against government interference precisely because he wanted to end the vast monopolies and barriers to entry that existed.
There are lots of "Econ profs" with wildly different ideas about how the economy works, so I have no idea what you are trying to get at.
Irrelevant. Free markets don't assume perfect information or symmetry; they function perfectly fine without it. Any information deficit by any party is priced into transactions.
In different words, Ford didn't act out of altruism when he raised his workers' salaries, he maximized his profits.
You should see what inserting a MicroSD card can do to a card slot on one of these phones. And unlike a pen, it's far less obvious which way is the right way for these cards; there isn't even a lot of resistance to inserting them the wrong way compared to the right way.
I think in its current form, this thing is not a good design. But give it a cheap 20 line LCD display and 20 corresponding buttons, with each line displaying a user-selectable product and the number of items currently on order, you have a winner. I'd get a handful and put them around the house for common items.
If you don't like the product, don't buy it or use it.
Oddly enough, yes. Successful businesses are motivated by maximizing their profit. But they succeed at this only if people actually choose to buy their products because they benefit. The fact that the business is primarily motivated by its own profits is not a problem, because in a free market, the only way to increase those profits is when people choose to buy their products and actually hand them their money.
It's not zero-sum game, it's a positive sum game: both buyers and sellers benefit, each in their own way.
"Mommy, why is there a mountain of Macaroni and Cheese boxes in our front yard?"
"Johnny, have you been playing with the button in the kitchen again???"
Yes, I'm sure you do. That's because you don't understand how markets work.
So they go out of business. That's a far worse penalty than any fine the FTC could impose. With better legal liability, the founders of Ashley Madison would be paying until they die.
In addition, customers always have the option of not signing up. If you want to cheat on your wife and you publish that fact on a site with less than iron-clad guarantees and liability, you're taking a big risk. But the fact that you want to engage in such a privacy-sensitive transaction shouldn't impose a cost on me if I want to sell Origami cranes over the internet; yet, giving FTC the authority to regulate this means that everybody will be paying the cost.
Oh, I love how you try to link what is essentially blackmail to "profit", thereby subtly implying that profit in general is somehow criminal. Larry Ellison could fart in a crowded elevator and you would somehow manage to link that to profits and the need for the FTC to regulate farting.
You prove again that sufficiently advanced stupidity is indistinguishable from sarcasm.
This sounds good, but it isn't. Companies should be fully legally liable for the damage that their lax cybersecurity causes. It's a failing of our court system and laws that they aren't. FTC enforcement, on the other hand, is going to be ineffective. The FTC is going to give selected companies a slap on the wrist, and it's going to be lenient on big corporate supporters of whatever administration is in power.
Science Fiction is largely a vision about the future, and often it is used to promote particular political views. There are communist and socialist futures, corporatist futures, libertarian futures, militaristic futures; authors explore these futures from a utopian, dystopian, or neutral point of view. Science Fiction also validates or contradicts scientific and economic predictions like climate change. Depending on your own political leanings, you may find a particular science fiction story interesting and insightful, or manipulative and propagandistic.
Occasionally, there are stories that straddle political lines and are interesting even if you disagree with them. For example, although I think Ursula LeGuin is wrong on many political points, but her stories are still interesting and thought provoking. On the other hand, I find Arthur C. Clarke's politics utterly naive; I think he thought himself above politics and I can see why people who aren't very much interested in politics might like his stories, but I find him an utterly naive technocrat and really don't enjoy his books very much anymore (I used to enjoy him more when I was younger and didn't really understand much of the political dimension).
I think it's a bit too much to expect a single convention or set of awards to be able to cover all those different political views. We'll have to accept the fact that there is going to be at least a split between progressive, libertarian, and apolitical science fiction fans. There is even some Christian and conservative science fiction (arguably, the ultra-crappy "Left Behind" falls into that category, in addition to the only slightly less crappy C.S. Lewis), though perhaps not enough to support large conventions or awards.
Many network file systems don't have seekable streams at the protocol level; it makes more sense to transmit range requests and keep the "stream position" and the rest of the stream abstraction on the client.
As in byte serving and the range header? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
You could read and write entire files easily in POSIX, last I checked. You know, as in Python "open(filename).read()".
Based on your comments, I think that certainly you have no business carrying a gun.
If you falsely believe that economics is a zero-sum game.
If by "consensus opinion" you mean the opinion of progressive activists, then it probably does. However, their "consensus" is worthless.
Introducing a new pool of cheap workers into the economy causes lots of people to "lose their jobs", quickly to be replaced with better jobs for most of them. Those are the "anecdotal reports". It's basically the same fallacy that the Luddites were a victim of.
Peer review exists to help a journal editor to decide whether an article is worth publishing in their journal, not whether the article is true. In principle, a peer reviewer for "The Journal of Irreproducible Results" would have to determine not whether the submitted article is true, but whether it is sufficiently irreproducible and funny to be published there (the JIR doesn't use peer review AFAIK, but it's just to illustrate the point). A low-end, high acceptance journal may not use very rigorous peer review. A journal like Nature, on the other hand, may reject many excellent articles simply because they don't judge them interesting enough, while accepting some questionable articles in order to start discussion. Failures in peer review are a problem for a journal that prides itself on high quality content, but they are not per se a problem for science.
Also France, Germany, UK, Finland, Sweden, USSR, Australia, etc. They all listen in, and often with more abandon and fewer restrictions than the US.
I think what you need to understand is that some of the "core values of Western democracies" are unintentionally totalitarian and fascist in nature. People vote for politicians and policies that they think are good (save lives, help the poor, protect children, bring about world peace, increase equality, decrease racism, ...) but don't understand the ramifications of their choices, and usually those choices involve using government force and violations of individual liberties and civils rights against someone. After enough such votes, eventually, everybody is subject to such force and society has effectively turned totalitarian. The problem is worsened by the fact that the fraction of the population imposing their will often isn't even a majority; the "majority" of many votes in the us is less than 1/4 of the population, and under European parliamentary systems, it is often even smaller. One proposed answer to this is to leave government mostly to experts (Plato's "philosopher-king" and a hallmark of today's progressivism), but that doesn't work either, because those experts end up fallible and corrupt themselves.
This isn't an intrinsic fault of "democracies", it's just a fault of the kind of democracies we have, Western democracies, democracies that tend towards majoritarianism and place more and more power in the hands of government. There are many other possible forms of democracy (i.e., self-governance by the people, as opposed to, say, monarchy or theocracy) besides majoritarianism.
As I was saying, if this were about trademarks, they wouldn't be asking him to prove that the material is in the public domain; public domain is a copyright issue, not a trademark issue.
More importantly, though, you misunderstand the purpose of trademark law. Trademark law doesn't exist to "protect characters" or other intellectual creations, trademark law exists in order make sure that when customers buy something, they know who actually produced it. Applying trademark law to a 70 year old cartoon character does not serve such a purpose.
That doesn't make any sense. If this were a trademark issue, they wouldn't be asking him to show that the material is in the public domain.
They are telling the truth: they (generally) complied with the old FDA requirements and reported their results truthfully, and now they are complying with the new ones. The problem isn't with companies committing fraud, it's with regulations not achieving what you want them to achieve. That is, no matter what regulations you come up with, people and companies will figure out how to comply with the letter of those regulations while still not achieving the goals those regulations were intended to achieve.
I think that would turn our society into a totalitarian society. Be that as it may, you claimed that corporations should be treated like individuals when it comes to lobbying, so presumably you then think that individuals should also be thrown in jail if they misrepresent, say, why they want a raise from government?