Unless you are an omniscient deity, the disk is indistinguishable from one with random bits. So there are no "actual files" on the disk until it gets decrypted. Furthermore, there is a pretty clear line between searching someone's possessions (legal with a court order) and forcing them to assist in their own conviction by producing evidence (unconstitutional). This falls under the latter category.
Poverty isn't serfdom. A poor person can leave where he or she is. It may not be easy, but it's legal. In the case of the company store, the worker would have legal problems if he or she just left.
In your "case of the company store", presumably referring to various forms of coerced labor dressed up in contracts and debt, the problem isn't "capitalism", it's the fact that government enforces such contracts with draconian punishments. In a purely capitalist society, when people break contracts with you, you are effectively limited in practice by two factors: (1) you can only recover actual damages, and (2) you can only recover what they actually have. So, under capitalism, if the workers find that their economic situation is deteriorating and they already don't have anything, they can simply walk off the job with no consequences. If they don't do that, it's the result of disproportionate use of government coercion and force. I.e., that situation may be "serfdom", but it's serfdom for the same reason serfdom and slavery always arise: due to excessive government force, not free markets.
Note two things. First, the company-store-and-worker situation pretty much nails the situation under which people in communist and socialist regimes live. Second, people in our society frequently commit to working in specific locations for specific amounts of time, often with serious penalties when they fail to complete their work; there is nothing intrinsically wrong with that. It only becomes a problem when the penalties exceed the actual damages or the actual resources people bring to the table.
no, it's narrower than that. under our system you can't utter or sign. but you have to give the other side (in this case the gov't) the unencrypted data.
Your idea that this is a settled question only shows that you are utterly ignorant of how "our system" works.
In our system, the meaning of the Constitution is interpreted by the courts, and their interpretation has changed significantly over the years. Whether anybody is obligated to decrypt their own data for the government or not still is an open question, to be decided probably by lots of court cases and legislation.
You can buy USB audio dongles for about $5, and that's for a rarely used item including all connectors and packaging. I'd be surprised if a USB audio chip adds more than $1 to dumb headphones. Smart headphones (those that already have audio controls) probably get no more expensive since they already have some chip.
Although fairly new for the US legal system, this kind of "rubber hose" attack on cryptographic systems is nothing new. The solution is to use some form of deniable encryption.
"You can't incriminate yourself. But please sign this confession now, or be held in contempt of court! After all, signing something isn't technically self incrimination."
Now, what we don't know is what that analysis found. They 'may' have seen that those disks were used at the same time as the accessed the child porn site, and 'may' had other evidence on his computer that showed he likely downloaded. If so, that would all be pretty compelling evidence as a whole.
Then they don't need to force him to decrypt his hard drives, do they?
And make no mistake: while this sort of thing starts with the lest likable characters, it will eventually be used against anybody from Snowden to your grandmother to go on legal fishing expeditions against anybody that police, prosecutors, or the executive branch doesn't like.
the United States "imprisons a larger percentage of its black population than South Africa did at the height of apartheid" [...] incarceration rate exceeded the average incarceration levels in the Soviet Union during the existence of the infamous Gulag system [...] Unfortunately the United States incarcerate people 8 times more than Europe for example.
Well, when your whole country is a kind of prison and people don't have a lot of privacy or freedom, you don't need to stick your citizens into prisons as much. How is that surprising? And, of course, when your entire country is an ethnically and culturally homogeneous, increasingly geriatric population, indoctrinated from birth to submit to authority figures and have low expectations of success, you also don't get as much crime to begin with.
There are clearly things wrong with the US justice and prison system. But Europe has little to teach the US about how to address these issues. As usual, the US will have to pioneer its own solutions, and these will then likely be adopted by Europe a couple of decades later.
Environmental policy in China is set by the National People's Congress and managed by the Ministry of Environmental Protection. The Center for American Progress has described China's environmental policy as similar to that of the United States before 1970. That is, the central government issues fairly strict regulations, but the actual monitoring and enforcement is largely undertaken by local governments that have greater interest in economic growth. The environmental work of non-governmental forces, such as lawyers, journalists, and non-governmental organizations, is limited by government regulations.
It's primarily the work of non-governmental forces that has led to the environmental improvements in the US over the last half century. Now, in part, the EPA and other government agencies have responded to those pressures, but they have now ended up abusing their powers in different ways.
Let me repeat that again: China is what happens when you give government nearly absolute power to impose environmental policy.
Altogether, as I was saying the EPA is better than nothing, given our current system, but in absolute terms, it's an inefficient and poor way of protecting Americans from environmental problems.
But apparently corporate interests had her whacked over a century ago,
Yes, which is why they created the EPA and similar regulatory agencies, which basically give them a license to pollute.
Given what court and lawyers cost these days and that the worst of the pollution tends to fall on the poorest citizens, that leaves a regulatory agency as the lest bad way to accomplish it.
Many of these lawsuits would be class action lawsuits, so what "courts and lawyers cost" matters less and less. In fact, the US has been moving in that direction.
Something like the FDA might have made sense a century ago, when information was hard to get and insurance was largely unknown. These days, FDA functions are far better taken care of by private and voluntary mechanisms; the FDA has become a vehicle for massive crony capitalism and both holds back advances in medicine and contributes to out of control medical costs.
As for air pollution, if you have public cities, you end up having to have public regulation of air quality. But that's not the only mechanism either, and it's not a very good one. It would be far better if people actually got compensated for damage caused by air pollution and the polluters were made to pay.
Serfdom is a legal constraint on liberty. Poverty and economic necessity are not serfdom,. More importantly, the same people that ended up in the company town unable to leave would have ended up there under other economic systems; in fact, more people would have.
India was full of small kingdoms, with weak centralization of power, almost everything ruled at the local level using village five-man councils. It was quite powerful, it had 25% of world GDP before 17th century, very very wealthy. And the Europeans just walked in and took over the whole continent, stuffed out the local resistance, killed the pride and self worth of all the people of the continent.
And this is an argument for big, centralized government... how?
People like Raghuram Rajan who know and feel the arc of history from both sides, from colonial powers and the colonized people, is likely to be far more astute than you. I would not be surprised if he lands a Nobel in economics sometime.
Because I am... oh, right, you know nothing about my background, but love to spew platitudes.
This is why I don't contribute to Wikipedia anymore, and why I do not browse it as much as I used to. The idea was interesting, but due to the way it was set up, the trolls run the place.
So you're implying you know of a better way of setting it up? If so, why don't you go ahead and do it?
And then there's your blatant ignorance of the fact that just about every country providing a really excellent standard of living for the majority of its population would be identified by you as "socialist".
Quite the opposite: in fact none of the US, Canada, the EU members, and Japan are even remotely socialist. Furthermore, economic freedom correlates strongly with economic success; countries that "provide a really excellent standard of living" do so precisely because they are capitalist.
What a load of condescending crap! Your implicit assumption that nobody in their late teens and early 20's has any capacity for critical thought is, to be charitable, inaccurate.
Quite the opposite: I'm glad that 42% of millennials are smart enough to support capitalism. Hopefully, more of the rest will come around as they grow older.
Doctors get paid a set wage, not per treatment. And insurance companies play no part...
Yeah, just like there are no private companies involved in national defense, because national defense is after all the job of the federal government and fully paid for by tax dollars! Seriously, the ignorance and stupidity of people like you seems to know no bounds.
Socialized medicine, in many countries, is delivered through private insurance companies. Doctors in such system may be paid per procedure, or based on other "performance measures" that they can game. And the "set wage" is a wage that is determined through political lobbying by doctors themselves.
when capitalism went global it turned third world nations in to slave-states while the first world nations keep losing jobs and what jobs remain are given to illegal aliens or immigrants on H1B
He argues that like in any system, in Capitalism too, the current generation of winners will do everything possible to stay on top and make it difficult for others to dislodge them. Without a strong government to break up cartels, trusts, de facto monopolies, the current winners will take too much of the fruits of the economy
Strong government inevitably gets bought by "the current generation of winners". Strong government is, in fact, the very mechanism by which "the current generation of winners" stays on top and makes it difficult for others to dislodge them.
That is why democracy, that keeps the government is check is so important.
Democracy is incapable of keeping strong government from becoming corrupt. That's because voters simply lack both the information and the detailed control to separate the good guys from the bad guys, good policies from corrupt policies. The only system that gives you the necessary control is the market, where billions of people cast hundreds of votes every day, in the form of dollars and other units of currency.
The winners are already very powerful with money and market share, they should not also try to usurp the government, in their own self interest.
They aren't just "trying", they succeed, consistently. That's a constant of government, throughout history. The best way people have found dealing with that is to limit the cost of governmental "corruption" (rent seeking etc.) is to limit the size of government as much as possible and make it as local as possible.
Capitalism favors the accumulation of capital, or, basically, draining resources from society.
Quite the opposite: capitalism means that people vote with little green pieces of paper for what they want, and the people who can provide that most efficiently are the ones that get the resources to do so.
Remember servitude, aristocracy and the middle ages? Yeah, that's the end game of pure capitalism.
Serfdom and aristocracy didn't arise out of capitalism; they are the antithesis of free markets and capitalism. They are the end game of progressivism, namely the idea that a self-appointed elite and group of experts can do a better job at running society and people's lives than the people itself. Hayek's book isn't called "The Road to Serfdom" for nothing.
The pundits have weighed in with their disdain for uninformed millennials - but don't seem to grasp the basic question their generation is confronted with - how does unbounded inequality lead to equality of opportunity? - a central paradox at the heart of Capitalism.
There is no "paradox" because capitalism isn't supposed to provide "equal opportunity" in the sense you imagine; people who are wealthier, of course, have more opportunities and choices. In some sense, that's the whole point of capitalism: to give more opportunities and choices to people who have shown in the past that they can take advantage of those opportunities and choices for the good of others.
The reward/optimisation function in capitalism is greed - why act surprised when the end-game is inevitably an oligopoly?
Because many people are greedy, so being greedy doesn't make you wealthy and powerful in capitalism; what makes you wealthy and powerful is giving people what they want in voluntary exchanges. It's political processes that lead to concentration of power and wealth, not capitalism.
through the fact that most ideologically driven systems that fail to take real-world evidence into account, inevitably lead to injustice.
If you start off with the premise that justice amounts to a more equal distribution of wealth, then you would reach that conclusion. But the problem there is your understanding of justice, not capitalism. Justice, in the traditional Enlightenment sense, means guaranteeing personal autonomy, property rights, and individual liberties. Those values are incompatible with the kind of "justice" you want.
In fact the opposite is true: restricted freedom leads to concentration of wealth. However, wealth can buy off politicians in order to get then to restrict freedom, and people like you are cheering them on doing it
You mean when I'm forced to buy electricity, gas, water, housing, or cars at ludicrously inflated prices, that's OK? When I'm forced to bail out poorly run banks, Wall St firms, and car companies, that's not a problem? When socialized medicine lets doctors and insurance companies bleed patients dry while making them such, that's not a significant interference in the market?
Slashdot Mirror
Unless you are an omniscient deity, the disk is indistinguishable from one with random bits. So there are no "actual files" on the disk until it gets decrypted. Furthermore, there is a pretty clear line between searching someone's possessions (legal with a court order) and forcing them to assist in their own conviction by producing evidence (unconstitutional). This falls under the latter category.
In your "case of the company store", presumably referring to various forms of coerced labor dressed up in contracts and debt, the problem isn't "capitalism", it's the fact that government enforces such contracts with draconian punishments. In a purely capitalist society, when people break contracts with you, you are effectively limited in practice by two factors: (1) you can only recover actual damages, and (2) you can only recover what they actually have. So, under capitalism, if the workers find that their economic situation is deteriorating and they already don't have anything, they can simply walk off the job with no consequences. If they don't do that, it's the result of disproportionate use of government coercion and force. I.e., that situation may be "serfdom", but it's serfdom for the same reason serfdom and slavery always arise: due to excessive government force, not free markets.
Note two things. First, the company-store-and-worker situation pretty much nails the situation under which people in communist and socialist regimes live. Second, people in our society frequently commit to working in specific locations for specific amounts of time, often with serious penalties when they fail to complete their work; there is nothing intrinsically wrong with that. It only becomes a problem when the penalties exceed the actual damages or the actual resources people bring to the table.
Your idea that this is a settled question only shows that you are utterly ignorant of how "our system" works.
In our system, the meaning of the Constitution is interpreted by the courts, and their interpretation has changed significantly over the years. Whether anybody is obligated to decrypt their own data for the government or not still is an open question, to be decided probably by lots of court cases and legislation.
You can buy USB audio dongles for about $5, and that's for a rarely used item including all connectors and packaging. I'd be surprised if a USB audio chip adds more than $1 to dumb headphones. Smart headphones (those that already have audio controls) probably get no more expensive since they already have some chip.
Although fairly new for the US legal system, this kind of "rubber hose" attack on cryptographic systems is nothing new. The solution is to use some form of deniable encryption.
Julian Assange developed the rubberhose file system for this purpose.
Chaffing and winnowing are other ways of achieving secrecy without a traditional encryption key.
So what you're saying is:
"You can't incriminate yourself. But please sign this confession now, or be held in contempt of court! After all, signing something isn't technically self incrimination."
Then they don't need to force him to decrypt his hard drives, do they?
And make no mistake: while this sort of thing starts with the lest likable characters, it will eventually be used against anybody from Snowden to your grandmother to go on legal fishing expeditions against anybody that police, prosecutors, or the executive branch doesn't like.
Well, when your whole country is a kind of prison and people don't have a lot of privacy or freedom, you don't need to stick your citizens into prisons as much. How is that surprising? And, of course, when your entire country is an ethnically and culturally homogeneous, increasingly geriatric population, indoctrinated from birth to submit to authority figures and have low expectations of success, you also don't get as much crime to begin with.
There are clearly things wrong with the US justice and prison system. But Europe has little to teach the US about how to address these issues. As usual, the US will have to pioneer its own solutions, and these will then likely be adopted by Europe a couple of decades later.
They get zip, nada, because their government says they should get zip, nada:
Environmental policy in China is set by the National People's Congress and managed by the Ministry of Environmental Protection. The Center for American Progress has described China's environmental policy as similar to that of the United States before 1970. That is, the central government issues fairly strict regulations, but the actual monitoring and enforcement is largely undertaken by local governments that have greater interest in economic growth. The environmental work of non-governmental forces, such as lawyers, journalists, and non-governmental organizations, is limited by government regulations.
It's primarily the work of non-governmental forces that has led to the environmental improvements in the US over the last half century. Now, in part, the EPA and other government agencies have responded to those pressures, but they have now ended up abusing their powers in different ways.
Let me repeat that again: China is what happens when you give government nearly absolute power to impose environmental policy.
Altogether, as I was saying the EPA is better than nothing, given our current system, but in absolute terms, it's an inefficient and poor way of protecting Americans from environmental problems.
Right now, you get nothing if the EPA days the pollution was OK. Zip. Nada.
So do all countries. That's because poorer people tend to commit more crimes. Amazing, isn't it?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Yes, which is why they created the EPA and similar regulatory agencies, which basically give them a license to pollute.
Many of these lawsuits would be class action lawsuits, so what "courts and lawyers cost" matters less and less. In fact, the US has been moving in that direction.
Something like the FDA might have made sense a century ago, when information was hard to get and insurance was largely unknown. These days, FDA functions are far better taken care of by private and voluntary mechanisms; the FDA has become a vehicle for massive crony capitalism and both holds back advances in medicine and contributes to out of control medical costs.
As for air pollution, if you have public cities, you end up having to have public regulation of air quality. But that's not the only mechanism either, and it's not a very good one. It would be far better if people actually got compensated for damage caused by air pollution and the polluters were made to pay.
Serfdom is a legal constraint on liberty. Poverty and economic necessity are not serfdom,. More importantly, the same people that ended up in the company town unable to leave would have ended up there under other economic systems; in fact, more people would have.
And this is an argument for big, centralized government... how?
Because I am... oh, right, you know nothing about my background, but love to spew platitudes.
So you're implying you know of a better way of setting it up? If so, why don't you go ahead and do it?
Quite the opposite: in fact none of the US, Canada, the EU members, and Japan are even remotely socialist. Furthermore, economic freedom correlates strongly with economic success; countries that "provide a really excellent standard of living" do so precisely because they are capitalist.
Quite the opposite: I'm glad that 42% of millennials are smart enough to support capitalism. Hopefully, more of the rest will come around as they grow older.
Yeah, just like there are no private companies involved in national defense, because national defense is after all the job of the federal government and fully paid for by tax dollars! Seriously, the ignorance and stupidity of people like you seems to know no bounds.
Socialized medicine, in many countries, is delivered through private insurance companies. Doctors in such system may be paid per procedure, or based on other "performance measures" that they can game. And the "set wage" is a wage that is determined through political lobbying by doctors themselves.
When capitalism went global after WWII, it reduced global income inequality and lifted billions out of poverty.
Strong government inevitably gets bought by "the current generation of winners". Strong government is, in fact, the very mechanism by which "the current generation of winners" stays on top and makes it difficult for others to dislodge them.
Democracy is incapable of keeping strong government from becoming corrupt. That's because voters simply lack both the information and the detailed control to separate the good guys from the bad guys, good policies from corrupt policies. The only system that gives you the necessary control is the market, where billions of people cast hundreds of votes every day, in the form of dollars and other units of currency.
They aren't just "trying", they succeed, consistently. That's a constant of government, throughout history. The best way people have found dealing with that is to limit the cost of governmental "corruption" (rent seeking etc.) is to limit the size of government as much as possible and make it as local as possible.
Dr Raghuram Rajan is either a fool or a shill.
Quite the opposite: capitalism means that people vote with little green pieces of paper for what they want, and the people who can provide that most efficiently are the ones that get the resources to do so.
Serfdom and aristocracy didn't arise out of capitalism; they are the antithesis of free markets and capitalism. They are the end game of progressivism, namely the idea that a self-appointed elite and group of experts can do a better job at running society and people's lives than the people itself. Hayek's book isn't called "The Road to Serfdom" for nothing.
It's also not an outcome of capitalism, it's an outcome of progressivism and anti-capitalism.
There is no "paradox" because capitalism isn't supposed to provide "equal opportunity" in the sense you imagine; people who are wealthier, of course, have more opportunities and choices. In some sense, that's the whole point of capitalism: to give more opportunities and choices to people who have shown in the past that they can take advantage of those opportunities and choices for the good of others.
Because many people are greedy, so being greedy doesn't make you wealthy and powerful in capitalism; what makes you wealthy and powerful is giving people what they want in voluntary exchanges. It's political processes that lead to concentration of power and wealth, not capitalism.
If you start off with the premise that justice amounts to a more equal distribution of wealth, then you would reach that conclusion. But the problem there is your understanding of justice, not capitalism. Justice, in the traditional Enlightenment sense, means guaranteeing personal autonomy, property rights, and individual liberties. Those values are incompatible with the kind of "justice" you want.
In fact the opposite is true: restricted freedom leads to concentration of wealth. However, wealth can buy off politicians in order to get then to restrict freedom, and people like you are cheering them on doing it
You mean when I'm forced to buy electricity, gas, water, housing, or cars at ludicrously inflated prices, that's OK? When I'm forced to bail out poorly run banks, Wall St firms, and car companies, that's not a problem? When socialized medicine lets doctors and insurance companies bleed patients dry while making them such, that's not a significant interference in the market?