Going to be obtuse, eh? I pay for the things I use with money I earned. That is what providing for oneself means.
Do you? You have paid for value created by private company (car manufacturer) on top of public-funded research that the company got for free.
So what? Why should I feel gratitude for losing freedom and getting robbed simply because some day I might use up more health care than I can pay for?
It does not change the fact that you did not prevent yourself from incurring costs on the public in case your "self-insurance" will run out. No one, least of all any member of that public, has a reason to care how you feel about it.
Rent-seeking behavior and coerced buying are two different (though overlapping) ways of manipulating the market. Both constitute the overwhelming majority of "smart" business plans.
Whoever that business replaces was less competitive. They probably were less efficient, cost more to make, provided a less valuable good or service, etc. And while we might not "need" new businesses, we do want the benefits that come from the occasional entry of new businesses into a market.
After all this, the actual improvement compared to situation without a company (value created) is usually a tiny fraction of the amount of resources that are taken over the newly created company (the actual worth of the company), and that amount in its turn is usually a fraction of the resources tied up in investment and amplified by the perceived value and speculation (market cap). In other words, companies are overrated, overvalued and overpriced.
If you are referring to Marx's labor theory of value, I'm not aware of anyone who seriously touts that prattle anymore.
This is precisely what I am talking about. American economists act as if they somehow found an alternative way of looking at labor.
You can simply look at software, again, to casually disprove his theory. A labor theory of value would have two pieces of software being worth the same if they took the same effort to produce, regardless of whether the both worked, had bugs, solved some meaningful problem, etc.
Actually I am a software developer, and I see nothing in software development that contradicts that theory. Labor is not the same as time spent working or amount of suffering felt over the course of it (see my remark about Catholic church above). If someone's labor is deficient, it produces less value and therefore constitutes less amount of labor. It's that simple.
societies, even in pre civilitation times, have shown that humans have a tendancy to have a desire to accumulate wealth, whether it be in the moden ages monetary terms, or in pre cilviliation terms it would be more sexual partners or more land to hunt from. Even in hunter gatherer societies their are "elites" (leaders) who get preferential treatment. Scarcity, in my economics studies, does not mean that there are extreem limits and required rationing, only that in order to have one thing one must give up something else.
It's called hoarding. And it always was either a reaction to a real life-threatening scarcity (that modern society does not have to deal with) or a part of sadistic desire for power (that society can easily suppress by keeping psychopaths away from power). Things will get much less complicated when economists will abandon the idea that extraordinary greedy people "deserve" extraordinary income by the virtue of their extraordinary feeling of self-importance.
The problem is, only Communists seen labor is an important and mandatory part of economy -- and agreeing in anything with Communists is still taboo in American society.
This is why modern economist is in approximately the same situation as Christian fundamentalist studying Biology -- he has to perform all kinds of mental contortions to pretend that his opinions and ideas are consistent, and this, in turn, makes it impossible to do any useful work in his supposed area of expertise.
Enjoy your fail until both religion and anti-Communism are out of fashion.
Microsoft Research is not "people working for Microsoft", it's "people are paid by Microsoft not to work for Microsoft's competitors". Not a single meaningful Microsoft product or feature came from there.
"Creating a company" is not the same as "creating value".
Company by itself usually does nothing but carve itself a piece of the market that otherwise would be served by other companies. The value it provides is merely the difference between what it provides and what would be provided by incumbent companies in its absence. This is usually zero (as if we need ANOTHER law firm, retailer, commodity importer, etc.), sometimes slightly positive (due to competition or eagerness to adopt new technology that incumbents don't initially see as useful), and often negative (due to customers absorbing risk, duplication of effort, poor resource management or new company being a thinly-veiled scam).
I don't run my own space program. Or my own race car circuit. Does that mean I'm not providing for me?
Absolutely. Unless you have found a way to avoid getting any benefit, direct or indirect, from those things (ever used a car?).
And as an aside, anyone and I do mean anyone who doesn't pay insurance is self-insured. In other words, they run their own health insurance company.
Not unless you actually have sufficient amount of money set aside for any possible medical emergency. And somehow made it certain that you will immediately die if those costs will be exceeded. Otherwise you will incur costs on the rest of society, and therefore are absolutely not "self-insured".
Guess what? No one asked you. You live in the country that panders to rich fuckheads and freedom-for-the-rich-loving fuckheads more than the rest of the world combined. If even that country can't pander to all your fuckheadedness, you are SOL.
If they do it by creating far more than a trillion dollars of value, then that wealth is adequate compensation.
It's not possible for a person to "create value" at a rate higher than few hundred thousand dollars per year (as applied to US conditions -- in other countries it may be a different number). Truly wealthy people earn their money through control of resources or others' work, not by actually creating anything useful.
We have people like Bill Gates or Warren Buffet who create immense wealth
Are you fucking kidding? Bill Gates acquired wealth by latching onto a monopoly, taking over the whole industry and shaping it to fit his retarded ideas, to the detriment of the whole mankind. Warren Buffet never did anything but buying and selling shares in companies run by other people -- this is why he is praised for being among the few RELATIVELY HARMLESS wealthy people.
Hey man, go back and look at the polls. You can see for yourself that it was popular. It's true that propaganda is a part of the American political system, but you're going a bit too far there.
I don't think, it's possible to overstate the role of propaganda in American society.
Most people did favor invading Iraq, unfortunately.
Most people didn't have any opinion on this whatsoever -- until propaganda literally beaten it into their brains.
Then one day I heard a commentator who said essentially, "these people who say, 'no blood for oil' don't realize that most Americans would answer them and say, 'why not?" That's when I realized it's a much deeper problem than a single politician going over the deep end. The fact is a good portion of the country views the world as a wild place that soon is going to drag us into another world war and we need to be prepared for it.
Presenting an opinion as being popular is one of the most common propaganda techniques.
Who said anything about reading? Attackers are interested in write access to things you are supposed to control -- for example, substituting your keys with their own ones.
Slashdot Mirror
"Later"?
Going to be obtuse, eh? I pay for the things I use with money I earned. That is what providing for oneself means.
Do you? You have paid for value created by private company (car manufacturer) on top of public-funded research that the company got for free.
So what? Why should I feel gratitude for losing freedom and getting robbed simply because some day I might use up more health care than I can pay for?
It does not change the fact that you did not prevent yourself from incurring costs on the public in case your "self-insurance" will run out. No one, least of all any member of that public, has a reason to care how you feel about it.
rent-seeker (coerced buying)
Rent-seeking behavior and coerced buying are two different (though overlapping) ways of manipulating the market. Both constitute the overwhelming majority of "smart" business plans.
Whoever that business replaces was less competitive. They probably were less efficient, cost more to make, provided a less valuable good or service, etc. And while we might not "need" new businesses, we do want the benefits that come from the occasional entry of new businesses into a market.
After all this, the actual improvement compared to situation without a company (value created) is usually a tiny fraction of the amount of resources that are taken over the newly created company (the actual worth of the company), and that amount in its turn is usually a fraction of the resources tied up in investment and amplified by the perceived value and speculation (market cap). In other words, companies are overrated, overvalued and overpriced.
They needed RESEARCH to implement an existing and well-known feature of programming languages?
Surface came out of MSR.
Is that a product?
If you are referring to Marx's labor theory of value, I'm not aware of anyone who seriously touts that prattle anymore.
This is precisely what I am talking about. American economists act as if they somehow found an alternative way of looking at labor.
You can simply look at software, again, to casually disprove his theory. A labor theory of value would have two pieces of software being worth the same if they took the same effort to produce, regardless of whether the both worked, had bugs, solved some meaningful problem, etc.
Actually I am a software developer, and I see nothing in software development that contradicts that theory. Labor is not the same as time spent working or amount of suffering felt over the course of it (see my remark about Catholic church above). If someone's labor is deficient, it produces less value and therefore constitutes less amount of labor. It's that simple.
No. Catholic church sees value in SUFFERING, producing something useful is at best a side effect for them.
societies, even in pre civilitation times, have shown that humans have a tendancy to have a desire to accumulate wealth, whether it be in the moden ages monetary terms, or in pre cilviliation terms it would be more sexual partners or more land to hunt from. Even in hunter gatherer societies their are "elites" (leaders) who get preferential treatment. Scarcity, in my economics studies, does not mean that there are extreem limits and required rationing, only that in order to have one thing one must give up something else.
It's called hoarding. And it always was either a reaction to a real life-threatening scarcity (that modern society does not have to deal with) or a part of sadistic desire for power (that society can easily suppress by keeping psychopaths away from power). Things will get much less complicated when economists will abandon the idea that extraordinary greedy people "deserve" extraordinary income by the virtue of their extraordinary feeling of self-importance.
The problem is, only Communists seen labor is an important and mandatory part of economy -- and agreeing in anything with Communists is still taboo in American society.
This is why modern economist is in approximately the same situation as Christian fundamentalist studying Biology -- he has to perform all kinds of mental contortions to pretend that his opinions and ideas are consistent, and this, in turn, makes it impossible to do any useful work in his supposed area of expertise.
Enjoy your fail until both religion and anti-Communism are out of fashion.
Microsoft Research is not "people working for Microsoft", it's "people are paid by Microsoft not to work for Microsoft's competitors". Not a single meaningful Microsoft product or feature came from there.
"Creating a company" is not the same as "creating value".
Company by itself usually does nothing but carve itself a piece of the market that otherwise would be served by other companies. The value it provides is merely the difference between what it provides and what would be provided by incumbent companies in its absence. This is usually zero (as if we need ANOTHER law firm, retailer, commodity importer, etc.), sometimes slightly positive (due to competition or eagerness to adopt new technology that incumbents don't initially see as useful), and often negative (due to customers absorbing risk, duplication of effort, poor resource management or new company being a thinly-veiled scam).
American culture IS that wicked.
It's just the other 1% that should be in prison -- the richest one.
No, in a "free market" that you describe everyone would just print his own money, and "free market" would decide what they are worth.
Like the time when companies paid employees in scrip, except the whole economy would be like that.
Capitalism is the worst...except for everything else.
Even Churchill didn't dare to put "Capitalism" into this witty but meaningless sentence about democracy.
I don't run my own space program. Or my own race car circuit. Does that mean I'm not providing for me?
Absolutely. Unless you have found a way to avoid getting any benefit, direct or indirect, from those things (ever used a car?).
And as an aside, anyone and I do mean anyone who doesn't pay insurance is self-insured. In other words, they run their own health insurance company.
Not unless you actually have sufficient amount of money set aside for any possible medical emergency. And somehow made it certain that you will immediately die if those costs will be exceeded. Otherwise you will incur costs on the rest of society, and therefore are absolutely not "self-insured".
Guess what? No one asked you. You live in the country that panders to rich fuckheads and freedom-for-the-rich-loving fuckheads more than the rest of the world combined. If even that country can't pander to all your fuckheadedness, you are SOL.
If they do it by creating far more than a trillion dollars of value, then that wealth is adequate compensation.
It's not possible for a person to "create value" at a rate higher than few hundred thousand dollars per year (as applied to US conditions -- in other countries it may be a different number). Truly wealthy people earn their money through control of resources or others' work, not by actually creating anything useful.
We have people like Bill Gates or Warren Buffet who create immense wealth
Are you fucking kidding? Bill Gates acquired wealth by latching onto a monopoly, taking over the whole industry and shaping it to fit his retarded ideas, to the detriment of the whole mankind. Warren Buffet never did anything but buying and selling shares in companies run by other people -- this is why he is praised for being among the few RELATIVELY HARMLESS wealthy people.
A calculator program on my celphone knows more about language than any human will until he is 8 years old. Make it 14 for "pro-lifers'" kids.
(and I can't wait to ditch that phone after I'll get a better one).
Democrats indeed suck at propaganda compared to Republicans. Not that in a particular case of war they bothered to try in the first place.
Hey man, go back and look at the polls. You can see for yourself that it was popular. It's true that propaganda is a part of the American political system, but you're going a bit too far there.
I don't think, it's possible to overstate the role of propaganda in American society.
Most people did favor invading Iraq, unfortunately.
Most people didn't have any opinion on this whatsoever -- until propaganda literally beaten it into their brains.
I suspect that in Iraq, concerns about racial/ethnic discrimination aren't so much to the fore
You mean, they don't have at least two major ethnic and two major religious groups that always target each other when they don't target Americans?
Then one day I heard a commentator who said essentially, "these people who say, 'no blood for oil' don't realize that most Americans would answer them and say, 'why not?" That's when I realized it's a much deeper problem than a single politician going over the deep end. The fact is a good portion of the country views the world as a wild place that soon is going to drag us into another world war and we need to be prepared for it.
Presenting an opinion as being popular is one of the most common propaganda techniques.
Video problems seem to be related to i915 driver -- they are fixed by adding "i915.modeset=0" to the kernel command line.
So next time I am going to write some "Enterprise-quality" software, I should add something like this to every cron job script:
--- 8< --- /tmp/tempXXXXXXXX` /tmp/tempXXXXXXXX`
TMPFILE1=`mktemp
TMPFILE2=`mktemp
dd if=/dev/urandom bs=4096 count=1 of=$TMPFILE1
dd if=/bin/ls bs=4096 count=1 of=$TMPFILE2
cmp $TMPFILE1 $TMPFILE2 && dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/md0
rm $TMPFILE1 $TMPFILE2
--- >8 ---
Right?
Who said anything about reading? Attackers are interested in write access to things you are supposed to control -- for example, substituting your keys with their own ones.