Some posts downbelow indicate that Gibson may not be squeaky-clean in this matter, but the point still stands -- asset forfeiture is theft under colour of law, without the tedious need to actually *prove* a crime occurred.
Yeah, several that I reported back in the olden times are still around -- but are variously marked closed, worksforme, or what amounts to "don't bother us unless you upgrade to the nightly build first." And I don't usually report 'em unless they make the browser seriously misbehave or totally stall (the longstanding issue of the STOP button failing if a script is running leaps to mind).
[goes looking] Not in the (very crappy) L.A. County library system, but they do have something of his entitled "The economy of British America, 1607-1789" which might be interesting...
Costs that I'm directly impacted by have inflated rather grossly in the past few years, even compared to the worst spikes across the past 40 years (how long I've paid attention as a small-business owner). Last time I checked some of my primary expenses vs the inflation index, turns out my costs are now from 2 to 10 times more than they should be (the more something can be trussed up in a "service" wrapper, the more it's inflated). And the relative size of the price jumps is growing too (used to be 1-2% max, now 10-30% at a crack is the norm).
But no, I don't think this would create an imbalance, at least not for long. Corporate entities need a steady income to keep functioning even more than individuals do -- an individual is more flexible and if necessary can take another job. Corporations have payrolls and dividends and various regulatory fees that they're required to pay no matter what, and they're usually not geared toward a change of direction. Corps may have more in the bank initially but when things aren't going well, corps bleed money a lot faster (relative to production) than an individual who need only support his immediate family.
I suspect what would happen is that corporate ownership of copyright would break down rather quickly (a matter of a few years) but individual output, now being more directly profitable (immediate income, no need to pry royalties out of the corporate marketing machine) would go up, and there would be a veritable spawn of much smaller companies marketing individual works and works by very small producers, so the individual creator doesn't have to become expert at that as well as at producing content.
Rather like the indie music business, and the new indie publishers like Smashwords. And a great deal more like how things were before corporations became massive conglomerates.
And I'd forgotten that they'd also added gov't spending -- which should also be ranked as a cost. You don't report your expenses as income, do you? Well, neither should they.
When you say spending is 14% of today's GDP vs 18% of yesteryear's, don't forget that somewhere between, services got added to the GNP which artificially inflates the GDP's value by roughly half. So it would probably be more accurate to peg yesteryear's as 9%.
[Personally I would count services as a cost against the GDP, since they're insubstantial (not holdable and salable as such) yet still use up money. Adding services to the GDP is a sort of broken-window fallacy.]
Is this long-term chart you mentioned handy online somewhere? Sounds quite enlightening.
I'd say the similarity with the French Revolution and the decline of the Roman era are that they both got themselves into the same kind of deep financial shit we're in right now, with accelerating inflation and an unsustainable debt load. (The parallels with Rome ca. 250AD are striking, but we're on a much faster track to destruction.)
For some reason your post inspired this new copyright scheme, in which you can choose to either have a short copyright and benefit today, or a long copyright and only your heirs will benefit:
You can set your copyright length as long as you wish. HOWEVER, all income (gross, not net) from that property goes into escrow for the duration, and you do *not* collect interest on the escrow funds (we could argue what to use them for, but reading-education programs sounds reasonable for a start.)
The incentive would therefore be to set copyright for the shortest possible period, during that first major market interest (which is when the majority of profit is made anyway) and only in rare cases would it be worthwhile to hold copyright through a secondary sales period.
A further alternative under this scheme is that you could choose to treat it as a work-for-hire for the public, with no copyright protection whatever, and collect all the money you can from day one (just like a regular job!) This might incentivize smaller publishers as well, since the competition would really be to get the product in front of the buying public, just like any other goods.
The tax code could also be structured to benefit those who choose a shorter or absent copyright period.
And that 9 year old kid goes to show that our brains have some pretty good heuristic software.:)
I can see where the calculated path approach might be useful -- with the price of diesel today, you don't want to waste any that you can avoid. So farmers with irregular plots might find this useful, if adapted to take input (swath length, turning radius, etc.)
Tho chances are most farmers can calculate the path in their heads as well as any 9 year old kid with a lawn mower.
I've used both, extensively, and sometimes on the same lawn so I have a direct basis for comparison. With the gas mower it's most efficient to basically circle from edges to middle, eating up the little irregular areas as you get to them. With the electric mower it's most efficient (due to the logistics of keeping the cord out of your way, tho with older models the whole handle flips so you don't have to turn the mower itself nor flip the cord over) to mow back and forth in uniform strips, and do the irregular areas as a separate job.
On average, the electric mower path is a little more time-efficient, as it's more assembly-line and less adaptive-on-the-fly. But the gas mower's more-adaptive path tends to produce a slightly better-looking and more-uniform result, especially if the mower is self-propelled.
Looks to me like it's sitting on a sheet of quarter-inch plexiglass, so it's maybe 18 inches, ie. a bit over a cubit. I'd guess that the tool itself was exactly one cubit in length, making it multipurpose.
And I don't know what the mystery is, when it's stated that the case was with a bunch of related tools and is of such an obvious shape for the tool. When I was in high school lo those several decades ago, we still used protractors of this exact same type in Geometry class; if I look in enough boxes, I probably still have mine. It's basically this thing -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Protractor2.jpg -- with an extended straight-edge.
I've sometimes wished we could borrow Her Majesty to head things up here in the States... we could use someone with a spot of ethics and common sense, and perhaps a good deal more long-term perspective than the common elected-today booted-tomorrow politician.
It would be interesting to see the revenue chart for when it was free vs after it became pay only.
I kept my old downloaded copy too.
Occurs to me to wonder if there's a business opportunity here... dollar-a-seat theatres that are absolutely minimal, and show streamed free content such as Dr.Horrible, with revenue sharing to the filmmakers on a basis of how many fannies are in the seats for each showing. This would be suitable for small, old, otherwise-outdated venues, especially in small towns that can't support a namebrand theatre anymore. I can imagine this being a use for an old motel that's no longer viable due to being bypassed by the interstate, etc.
If you want to make it really attractive to a cash-strapped market, maybe a buck to get in the front door, stay as long as you like, charge a quarter for each film you watch, and have cheap concessions, maybe even auto-vendor machines.
Obviously this isn't practical with high-cost films, but for cheap indies? Quite probably would compete well with streaming, for kids and families who want a cheap night out.
I vaguely recall that one state has dashcams that record all highway patrol stops. Some years ago there was a hoorah from an incident that somehow failed to get recorded. I don't remember the details but the upshot was -- no recording, no reasonable tech failure, then no bust.
I don't think it's the shooting incidents that are the worst (if those were SOP, there'd soon be no reason for the public not to shoot back), but rather the intimidation tactics, the "well, if you're innocent, then you won't mind me pawing through your stuff, right?" attitudes, the threat that something worse might happen if you don't knuckle under. Lot harder to cope with, overall, as it encourages sheeplike behaviour.
I wouldn't call getting up and lunging at the cops a feeble attempt. And at first they only gave him sharp taps, not good hard smacks. Yeah, they should have stopped when he ceased resisting, and at that point they were out of bounds. But it irritates me (much as I dislike the local cops, and I live in L.A. County where too many of 'em are little tin gods) to see it skewed all one way. In this case, BOTH sides were at fault.
I don't think it does we the public any good either, as painting the cops as =always= in the wrong causes an even greater "US vs THEM" rift than we already have, and that is the fundamental problem here. The cops don't feel that they're part of the public anymore, and (mis)behave accordingly. So now instead of counting on them to protect us, we have to watch their every move.
And I think a lot of this comes out of the politics of "drug war/tough on crime" and the SWAT culture and asset forfeiture for fun and profit, and it won't get any better until we stop criminalising ordinary behaviour and go back to only policing against direct harm to others.
I use it as an example because it's one I've seen with my own eyes, and where I saw the effect of the video blown vastly out of proportion because of what was edited out. I doubt many people would have had such deep sympathy for King if they'd seen his full misbehaviour, rather than only seeing the cops' full misbehaviour.
And how can you say the jury are "the only people who need to see it" when edited videos are used to influence public opinion? (And how do you rectify that with this being public information?) Without the *edited* version being given such wide airplay, I doubt the verdict would have resulted in riots by an under-informed public -- who were given the impression *by* the edited tape that King was totally innocent. Of course, the unedited tape would have made mighty dull news, which was more to the point at the time.
At any rate, I totally agree that everything a cop does while on the job is public, but we need to see the WHOLE truth, which isn't always going to be sympathetic to the "abused" party, as the edited truth may well be.
And you can't have it both ways. If it's okay to edit out the suspect's misbehaviour, it should be equally okay to edit out the cops' misbehaviour. I don't believe it's acceptable to edit out either of them.
Yeah, people will do stuff like only film whichever side they believe is in the wrong, but there's often a second recording by someone else that can substantiate whether the first is a partial view of events. Remember the last time this got discussed here, about the guy who got 100 bullets pumped into his car? Well, yeah, that was overkill, but a second recording showed the 14 cars he'd run into in just the previous half-block.
Don't get me wrong -- in today's pro-prison political climate and SWAT-enhanced mindset, I think the cops are more often in the wrong than not, and I can think of enough examples that I'm inclined to think we all need webcams watching our front doors for our own protection. But we have to be fair. Public doesn't mean "only the parts we want you to see", it means the entire event, without one side edited to insignificance.
I didn't say that. My point was that an incomplete video can lie as well as can an unmonitored cop, and that the King tape was a prime example of why video needs to be recorded out of reach of ALL parties, so it can't be creatively edited by ANYONE, for ANY reason.
Say you shoot at a cop, then turn and run. Video of the incident is edited to omit this, and only records the hail of return gunfire. What is the viewing public to think?
Or what if the King video had been edited the other way around, to show only his attempts to assault the cops, and to omit the beating? (Not all of it was needless; it took some doing to get him to give up in the first place. But for this example, we'll omit all of it.)
I'll be the first to agree that cops need to be monitored (especially now that SWAT equipment has turned every minor raid into a paramilitary action) but it's for both our protection AND theirs. If they think they'll always be edited to be shown in the worst possible light -- some will figure if they're always going to be cast as villains, they may as well act the part; others will give up doing anything the least bit risky, and if that means harm to the public through inaction, so be it.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i8z7NC5sgik Mr. James Duane, a professor at Regent Law School and a former defense attorney, tells you why you should never agree to be interviewed by the police.
View the FULL Rodney King tape and get back to us on that... While I'm all for recording the cops to put the brakes on abuse of authority, this is an excellent example of a recording that was edited to alter perceptions of victim and perp:
Ch.4 News aired the raw tape the first time, without previewing it, and happens I saw it (as did everyone watching the 4pm broadcast). King got up and went after those cops FIVE TIMES before they started whacking on him. But after that first airing, the tape was cut down to just the infamous "beating" segment from the very end, and most people (including the jury during the trial) never saw the whole thing.
Given the tech we have today, a better solution is recordings that automatically get uploaded and archived in pristine, unedited condition, so no one, neither cops nor newsrooms nor "interested citizens" can alter it -- ideally in more than one location, both a gov't archive and a citizen archive.
I'm wondering what happens to the electronic meter on my well pump, which already went mad once when the neighbouring pole got hit by lighting, and charged me an extra $100 for power I didn't use.
Slashdot Mirror
See also http://fear.org/
Some posts downbelow indicate that Gibson may not be squeaky-clean in this matter, but the point still stands -- asset forfeiture is theft under colour of law, without the tedious need to actually *prove* a crime occurred.
Yeah, several that I reported back in the olden times are still around -- but are variously marked closed, worksforme, or what amounts to "don't bother us unless you upgrade to the nightly build first." And I don't usually report 'em unless they make the browser seriously misbehave or totally stall (the longstanding issue of the STOP button failing if a script is running leaps to mind).
You can get hosting at a real hosting provider for less than that, with FTP, domain name included, far more space, mailboxes, and various other perks.
http://www.1and1.com/?k_id=6761404
Thanks, I'll keep an eye out for it...
[goes looking] Not in the (very crappy) L.A. County library system, but they do have something of his entitled "The economy of British America, 1607-1789" which might be interesting...
Costs that I'm directly impacted by have inflated rather grossly in the past few years, even compared to the worst spikes across the past 40 years (how long I've paid attention as a small-business owner). Last time I checked some of my primary expenses vs the inflation index, turns out my costs are now from 2 to 10 times more than they should be (the more something can be trussed up in a "service" wrapper, the more it's inflated). And the relative size of the price jumps is growing too (used to be 1-2% max, now 10-30% at a crack is the norm).
I dunno, I just thought it up on the fly :)
But no, I don't think this would create an imbalance, at least not for long. Corporate entities need a steady income to keep functioning even more than individuals do -- an individual is more flexible and if necessary can take another job. Corporations have payrolls and dividends and various regulatory fees that they're required to pay no matter what, and they're usually not geared toward a change of direction. Corps may have more in the bank initially but when things aren't going well, corps bleed money a lot faster (relative to production) than an individual who need only support his immediate family.
I suspect what would happen is that corporate ownership of copyright would break down rather quickly (a matter of a few years) but individual output, now being more directly profitable (immediate income, no need to pry royalties out of the corporate marketing machine) would go up, and there would be a veritable spawn of much smaller companies marketing individual works and works by very small producers, so the individual creator doesn't have to become expert at that as well as at producing content.
Rather like the indie music business, and the new indie publishers like Smashwords. And a great deal more like how things were before corporations became massive conglomerates.
And I'd forgotten that they'd also added gov't spending -- which should also be ranked as a cost. You don't report your expenses as income, do you? Well, neither should they.
Calif blazed the way in spending money you don't have, and in destroying the business sector that generates revenue to boot.
And last I heard, California's credit rating had been reduced to "C".
When you say spending is 14% of today's GDP vs 18% of yesteryear's, don't forget that somewhere between, services got added to the GNP which artificially inflates the GDP's value by roughly half. So it would probably be more accurate to peg yesteryear's as 9%.
[Personally I would count services as a cost against the GDP, since they're insubstantial (not holdable and salable as such) yet still use up money. Adding services to the GDP is a sort of broken-window fallacy.]
Is this long-term chart you mentioned handy online somewhere? Sounds quite enlightening.
I'd say the similarity with the French Revolution and the decline of the Roman era are that they both got themselves into the same kind of deep financial shit we're in right now, with accelerating inflation and an unsustainable debt load. (The parallels with Rome ca. 250AD are striking, but we're on a much faster track to destruction.)
[Thanks for the voice of sanity in this thread.]
For some reason your post inspired this new copyright scheme, in which you can choose to either have a short copyright and benefit today, or a long copyright and only your heirs will benefit:
You can set your copyright length as long as you wish. HOWEVER, all income (gross, not net) from that property goes into escrow for the duration, and you do *not* collect interest on the escrow funds (we could argue what to use them for, but reading-education programs sounds reasonable for a start.)
The incentive would therefore be to set copyright for the shortest possible period, during that first major market interest (which is when the majority of profit is made anyway) and only in rare cases would it be worthwhile to hold copyright through a secondary sales period.
A further alternative under this scheme is that you could choose to treat it as a work-for-hire for the public, with no copyright protection whatever, and collect all the money you can from day one (just like a regular job!) This might incentivize smaller publishers as well, since the competition would really be to get the product in front of the buying public, just like any other goods.
The tax code could also be structured to benefit those who choose a shorter or absent copyright period.
And that 9 year old kid goes to show that our brains have some pretty good heuristic software. :)
I can see where the calculated path approach might be useful -- with the price of diesel today, you don't want to waste any that you can avoid. So farmers with irregular plots might find this useful, if adapted to take input (swath length, turning radius, etc.)
Tho chances are most farmers can calculate the path in their heads as well as any 9 year old kid with a lawn mower.
"....but I need 40 acres to turn this rig around!"
I've used both, extensively, and sometimes on the same lawn so I have a direct basis for comparison.
With the gas mower it's most efficient to basically circle from edges to middle, eating up the little irregular areas as you get to them.
With the electric mower it's most efficient (due to the logistics of keeping the cord out of your way, tho with older models the whole handle flips so you don't have to turn the mower itself nor flip the cord over) to mow back and forth in uniform strips, and do the irregular areas as a separate job.
On average, the electric mower path is a little more time-efficient, as it's more assembly-line and less adaptive-on-the-fly. But the gas mower's more-adaptive path tends to produce a slightly better-looking and more-uniform result, especially if the mower is self-propelled.
Looks to me like it's sitting on a sheet of quarter-inch plexiglass, so it's maybe 18 inches, ie. a bit over a cubit. I'd guess that the tool itself was exactly one cubit in length, making it multipurpose.
And I don't know what the mystery is, when it's stated that the case was with a bunch of related tools and is of such an obvious shape for the tool. When I was in high school lo those several decades ago, we still used protractors of this exact same type in Geometry class; if I look in enough boxes, I probably still have mine. It's basically this thing -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Protractor2.jpg -- with an extended straight-edge.
I've sometimes wished we could borrow Her Majesty to head things up here in the States... we could use someone with a spot of ethics and common sense, and perhaps a good deal more long-term perspective than the common elected-today booted-tomorrow politician.
They're using an updated version. When 1984 was published, such actions would have been censored as too pornographic.
It would be interesting to see the revenue chart for when it was free vs after it became pay only.
I kept my old downloaded copy too.
Occurs to me to wonder if there's a business opportunity here ... dollar-a-seat theatres that are absolutely minimal, and show streamed free content such as Dr.Horrible, with revenue sharing to the filmmakers on a basis of how many fannies are in the seats for each showing. This would be suitable for small, old, otherwise-outdated venues, especially in small towns that can't support a namebrand theatre anymore. I can imagine this being a use for an old motel that's no longer viable due to being bypassed by the interstate, etc.
If you want to make it really attractive to a cash-strapped market, maybe a buck to get in the front door, stay as long as you like, charge a quarter for each film you watch, and have cheap concessions, maybe even auto-vendor machines.
Obviously this isn't practical with high-cost films, but for cheap indies? Quite probably would compete well with streaming, for kids and families who want a cheap night out.
What about Dr.Horrible's Sing-along Blog? wasn't that initially distributed mostly via bittorrent?
I vaguely recall that one state has dashcams that record all highway patrol stops. Some years ago there was a hoorah from an incident that somehow failed to get recorded. I don't remember the details but the upshot was -- no recording, no reasonable tech failure, then no bust.
I don't think it's the shooting incidents that are the worst (if those were SOP, there'd soon be no reason for the public not to shoot back), but rather the intimidation tactics, the "well, if you're innocent, then you won't mind me pawing through your stuff, right?" attitudes, the threat that something worse might happen if you don't knuckle under. Lot harder to cope with, overall, as it encourages sheeplike behaviour.
I wouldn't call getting up and lunging at the cops a feeble attempt. And at first they only gave him sharp taps, not good hard smacks. Yeah, they should have stopped when he ceased resisting, and at that point they were out of bounds. But it irritates me (much as I dislike the local cops, and I live in L.A. County where too many of 'em are little tin gods) to see it skewed all one way. In this case, BOTH sides were at fault.
I don't think it does we the public any good either, as painting the cops as =always= in the wrong causes an even greater "US vs THEM" rift than we already have, and that is the fundamental problem here. The cops don't feel that they're part of the public anymore, and (mis)behave accordingly. So now instead of counting on them to protect us, we have to watch their every move.
And I think a lot of this comes out of the politics of "drug war/tough on crime" and the SWAT culture and asset forfeiture for fun and profit, and it won't get any better until we stop criminalising ordinary behaviour and go back to only policing against direct harm to others.
I use it as an example because it's one I've seen with my own eyes, and where I saw the effect of the video blown vastly out of proportion because of what was edited out. I doubt many people would have had such deep sympathy for King if they'd seen his full misbehaviour, rather than only seeing the cops' full misbehaviour.
And how can you say the jury are "the only people who need to see it" when edited videos are used to influence public opinion? (And how do you rectify that with this being public information?) Without the *edited* version being given such wide airplay, I doubt the verdict would have resulted in riots by an under-informed public -- who were given the impression *by* the edited tape that King was totally innocent. Of course, the unedited tape would have made mighty dull news, which was more to the point at the time.
At any rate, I totally agree that everything a cop does while on the job is public, but we need to see the WHOLE truth, which isn't always going to be sympathetic to the "abused" party, as the edited truth may well be.
And you can't have it both ways. If it's okay to edit out the suspect's misbehaviour, it should be equally okay to edit out the cops' misbehaviour. I don't believe it's acceptable to edit out either of them.
Yeah, people will do stuff like only film whichever side they believe is in the wrong, but there's often a second recording by someone else that can substantiate whether the first is a partial view of events. Remember the last time this got discussed here, about the guy who got 100 bullets pumped into his car? Well, yeah, that was overkill, but a second recording showed the 14 cars he'd run into in just the previous half-block.
Don't get me wrong -- in today's pro-prison political climate and SWAT-enhanced mindset, I think the cops are more often in the wrong than not, and I can think of enough examples that I'm inclined to think we all need webcams watching our front doors for our own protection. But we have to be fair. Public doesn't mean "only the parts we want you to see", it means the entire event, without one side edited to insignificance.
I didn't say that. My point was that an incomplete video can lie as well as can an unmonitored cop, and that the King tape was a prime example of why video needs to be recorded out of reach of ALL parties, so it can't be creatively edited by ANYONE, for ANY reason.
Say you shoot at a cop, then turn and run. Video of the incident is edited to omit this, and only records the hail of return gunfire. What is the viewing public to think?
Or what if the King video had been edited the other way around, to show only his attempts to assault the cops, and to omit the beating? (Not all of it was needless; it took some doing to get him to give up in the first place. But for this example, we'll omit all of it.)
I'll be the first to agree that cops need to be monitored (especially now that SWAT equipment has turned every minor raid into a paramilitary action) but it's for both our protection AND theirs. If they think they'll always be edited to be shown in the worst possible light -- some will figure if they're always going to be cast as villains, they may as well act the part; others will give up doing anything the least bit risky, and if that means harm to the public through inaction, so be it.
Don't Talk To Cops videos, parts 1 and 2:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i8z7NC5sgik
Mr. James Duane, a professor at Regent Law School and a former defense attorney, tells you why you should never agree to be interviewed by the police.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08fZQWjDVKE
An experienced police officer tells you why you should never agree to be interviewed by the police.
View the FULL Rodney King tape and get back to us on that... While I'm all for recording the cops to put the brakes on abuse of authority, this is an excellent example of a recording that was edited to alter perceptions of victim and perp:
Ch.4 News aired the raw tape the first time, without previewing it, and happens I saw it (as did everyone watching the 4pm broadcast). King got up and went after those cops FIVE TIMES before they started whacking on him. But after that first airing, the tape was cut down to just the infamous "beating" segment from the very end, and most people (including the jury during the trial) never saw the whole thing.
Given the tech we have today, a better solution is recordings that automatically get uploaded and archived in pristine, unedited condition, so no one, neither cops nor newsrooms nor "interested citizens" can alter it -- ideally in more than one location, both a gov't archive and a citizen archive.
I'm wondering what happens to the electronic meter on my well pump, which already went mad once when the neighbouring pole got hit by lighting, and charged me an extra $100 for power I didn't use.