We're in this mess in large part because a bunch of economists convinced themselves that the market is always perfectly rational and prices things correctly.
I hate to break it to you, but no one actually believes this. No one cares whether the market "prices things correctly" as long as the losers are allowed to fail.
I must admit I'm a bit confused why you think the government is at fault here- the folks running all those sophisticated models were private investors.
If you are not aware of the history of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the largest mortgage underwriters in the world, that were chartered by the US government and recently re-nationalized at taxpayer expense, along with the Fed's market manipulation by lowering interest rates and robbing from savers in order to stimulate irrational lending, as well as the myriad government regulations that forced lenders to make sub-prime loans to otherwise unqualified borrowers (that they then had find creative ways to pawn off on others), then I suggest you inform yourself.
If someone in the government had had the balls to actually restrain them we wouldn't be here.
Yes but we also wouldn't be here if government had the balls to let the losers fail and let the courts sort through the remains. What we have is the worst of both worlds, and it will get worse by trying to control every tiny aspect of the market through Congress and regulation rather than allowing the free market to function as designed.
Crime families and drug gangs are economic phenomena.
Both usually comprise an underground economy of immigrants (people outside the normal purview of government) working to avoid government regulation of business activity.
This is such a stupid distraction to claim that Wall Street's models should take "irrationality" into account.
The market already takes irrationality into account. Irrational actors fail. Instead of robbing taxpayers in order to reward irrational investors, a just government would let them fail.
Any rational Wall Street firm would invest in overthrowing an unjust government that robs from it in order to prop up it's competitors rather than investing in any more ridiculous computer models that attempt to make human irrationality an quantifiable concept.
"Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former." -you know who
Personally I think this is a terrible sign. Irrational investors should be discouraged from gambling in the markets instead of coddled and encouraged through tax breaks and an extensive regime of inconsistent regulation. Governments and the fraudulent investment advisors they subsidize and fail to regulate have done us all a disservice by suckering the average person into investing in derivatives markets like the stock exchanges. And now instead of letting the market correct the problem all sides are dragging us further down the path of government interference and command economy. They actually have the brazen stupidity to think that a command economy will work if only they can come up with some better computer models of market behaviour.
Of course it's a myth. Dozens of established IT companies will sell you a support contract for any software you can come up with. "Employee turnover blah blah one person knew how to operate any particular system" is MBA-speak for "We only use software that any idiot off the street can use because we refuse to pay a dollar more than what the Fed prints and the banks give us to hand out to the wage slaves and maintain full employment".
The dots connecting this to OSS aren't immediately apparent to me.
1) OSS is easier to support as SaaS. Furthermore, I think it demolishes closed-source software in this area. OSS doesn't have all of the downsides that you mentioned. Instead of giving the customer a choice of which version of the software he would prefer using, or worse "upgrade or else", you can ask the more beneficial question of "what do you want the software to do?" and then make the decision of how best to support that need accordingly.
2) To the extent that SaaS removes choice and control from the end-user, it makes OSS more attractive as an in-house option. SaaS makes it easier to argue for OSS since the true costs of closed-source software are more apparent.
I'll tell you exactly what the cloud is. The cloud is a place to put all of your companies most valuable assets, your IP, where none of your employees have direct control over it. It's an anonymous box in an underground bunker somewhere guarded by men with machine guns. The cloud means that when it's time to declare bankruptcy, strap on your golden parachute, fire all of your employees, and sell that IP to the highest bidder, all it takes is a flip of the switch.
From the point of view of the employee, the cloud is a pointless waste of money. But from the point of view of the executives and shareholders, the cloud is immensely valuable.
The thing is, most commercial software already might as well be SaaS, since the minute the vendor stops issuing security updates, you had better disconnect that software from your network or stop using it entirely.
Recognizing this fact and formalizing this arrangement should actually be beneficial for both software developers and users. It's also extremely beneficial for OSS, imho.
Consultants don't give two shits about the "right" solution because the "right" solution is the most expensive one they can get a signature on. The lack of trust in their permanent employees has ironically led to them being bled dry by people who don't give a shit about the company... They're only there to install or maintain a thing now, in and out in a day.
Personally, I spent years trying to be a consultant who implemented the "right" solutions, all the while telling everyone who would listen that I could do a better job and would be better off making half as much money as a permanent employee with budgetary control. It got me absolutely nowhere.
Businesses don't want the "right" solutions. They don't want more stable and longer-lasting hardware and software if it comes with fewer bells and whistles. They don't want to pay for security. Their accountants won't cede an inch of control over purchasing decisions. And they fall for even the most obvious marketing bullshit. Most businesses will spend hundreds of thousands of dollars trying to automate IT instead of letting IT save them hundreds of thousands of dollars by automating the rest of their business.
I have had people with literally zero IT knowledge tell me that they want to do everything by themselves, and then ask me how to do it. If you were a consultant, what would your response to this be?
The Boston Tea Party was a protest against the theft of American property via taxation and dictated monopoly rents by the British.
Furthermore, from the Wikipedia article:
In the colonies, Benjamin Franklin stated that the destroyed tea must be repaid, all 90,000 pounds. Robert Murray, a New York merchant went to Lord North with three other merchants and offered to pay for the losses, but the offer was turned down.
Hahaha. That is some serious hyperbole. Building more resilient houses that will last longer and stand up to destructive forces means he is spitefully "attacking everyone who is or ever will be alive".
we are going to need to burn some oil and release more CO2 into the air as we transport workers and materials in the rebuilding effort. I'm glad the ELF thought this through.
I know you're joking, but this is absolutely true. I wouldn't be at all surprised if, in the grand scheme of things, a small child in a third-world country somewhere eventually dies due to lack of food or heat or water because resources were diverted to support the rebuilding of these towers.
Property crimes are not inherently violent crimes.
Do you actually understand this statement well enough to expand upon the distinction between violent and non-violent property crimes, or are you just parroting something you have heard?
As for destroying all the world's farm equipment, that would not be violence
Interesting philosophy you have there.
In order for that statement to be true you'd have to start out with the assumption that certain individuals or groups of people are in fact not people but property
There's no reason to assume that. Slavery is coerced work for the benefit of others. It's certainly possible to have slavery without violence as you define it. And since you don't believe theft or destruction of property constitute violence, there's no reason to distinguish between theft of property and theft of labor, as all property is the result of labor.
By that logic, one can argue that slavery is also not violence.
If someone were to somehow destroy all of the farm machinery in the world and a million people died of starvation as a result, would you argue that that is not violence?
And American companies could be making very profitable investments in firms located overseas without changing the American GDP a whit
True. I'm sure there is a reason that GDP is used to measure recessions. But your point that GNP could rise while GDP falls is a good one.
GDP isn't measured by return on an individual investment dollar
It is ostensibly the aggregate sum of all returns on all investment dollars (domestically).
I'm not really sure what you aren't getting here. You understand that many firms collectively producing products not demanded by the market (people able to pay for them) constitutes a lack of "productive" investment?
Right... so what might cause an economy to stop producing as much stuff? Might it be... people aren't buying the stuff that gets made? That seems like a pretty basic cause-and-effect relationship to me.
It is a cause-and-effect relationship, it's just a completely unimportant one. The important thing is not that people aren't buying enough stuff, it's that the stuff being produced sucks ass.
The Keynesian response is to rob from people who aren't buying enough of the stuff that sucks ass, and give it to the people who do buy the stuff that sucks (and who are not getting enough benefit out of it in order to afford to buy more), in order to prop up the crappy producers who are wasting resources building stuff that sucks.
The correct, most economical, and most beneficial solution is to stop producing stuff that sucks ass, let the people who produce that stuff go bankrupt so that they will learn never to produce stuff that sucks again, and allocate their capital to producers who will create stuff that doesn't suck and that people with money will buy.
One possible advantage is that it is perhaps easier for a small, technologically advanced, densely-populated island nation with no conventional military to maintain physical control of an object in space than one in another country.
How is it that Keynesians continue to absolutely fail to understand basic cause and effect and the free market? "Lack of spending behavior" is neither the definition or cause of the recession. It is the result of the lack of productive return over the last several years due to terrible investments. Recession is defined as negative GDP growth, or lack of improvement in production, not lack of spending.
In this case, it's a terrible sign that the Japanese are so fed up with investing in the US that they now see hurling money into space as a better alternative.
Most wind turbines already automatically lock themselves when wind speeds exceed certain design specifications to protect themselves from damage.
I imagine the newer pitch-controlled turbines would instead just adjust the blade pitch to compensate for higher wind speeds, while still operating near the maximum power output. I doubt they would want to shut down during storms when they could be producing lots of energy.
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It's not rational to believe that the market will always "act rationally". That's just herd behaviour.
We're in this mess in large part because a bunch of economists convinced themselves that the market is always perfectly rational and prices things correctly.
I hate to break it to you, but no one actually believes this. No one cares whether the market "prices things correctly" as long as the losers are allowed to fail.
I must admit I'm a bit confused why you think the government is at fault here- the folks running all those sophisticated models were private investors.
If you are not aware of the history of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the largest mortgage underwriters in the world, that were chartered by the US government and recently re-nationalized at taxpayer expense, along with the Fed's market manipulation by lowering interest rates and robbing from savers in order to stimulate irrational lending, as well as the myriad government regulations that forced lenders to make sub-prime loans to otherwise unqualified borrowers (that they then had find creative ways to pawn off on others), then I suggest you inform yourself.
If someone in the government had had the balls to actually restrain them we wouldn't be here.
Yes but we also wouldn't be here if government had the balls to let the losers fail and let the courts sort through the remains. What we have is the worst of both worlds, and it will get worse by trying to control every tiny aspect of the market through Congress and regulation rather than allowing the free market to function as designed.
Crime families and drug gangs are economic phenomena.
Both usually comprise an underground economy of immigrants (people outside the normal purview of government) working to avoid government regulation of business activity.
Bubbles happen when people are behaving irrationally, and they burst when people start being rational again.
Bubbles happen when governments steal from rational people in order to give to irrational people.
This is such a stupid distraction to claim that Wall Street's models should take "irrationality" into account.
The market already takes irrationality into account. Irrational actors fail. Instead of robbing taxpayers in order to reward irrational investors, a just government would let them fail.
Any rational Wall Street firm would invest in overthrowing an unjust government that robs from it in order to prop up it's competitors rather than investing in any more ridiculous computer models that attempt to make human irrationality an quantifiable concept.
"Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former." -you know who
Personally I think this is a terrible sign. Irrational investors should be discouraged from gambling in the markets instead of coddled and encouraged through tax breaks and an extensive regime of inconsistent regulation. Governments and the fraudulent investment advisors they subsidize and fail to regulate have done us all a disservice by suckering the average person into investing in derivatives markets like the stock exchanges. And now instead of letting the market correct the problem all sides are dragging us further down the path of government interference and command economy. They actually have the brazen stupidity to think that a command economy will work if only they can come up with some better computer models of market behaviour.
Hate to break it to you, but those also use steam.
Of course it's a myth. Dozens of established IT companies will sell you a support contract for any software you can come up with. "Employee turnover blah blah one person knew how to operate any particular system" is MBA-speak for "We only use software that any idiot off the street can use because we refuse to pay a dollar more than what the Fed prints and the banks give us to hand out to the wage slaves and maintain full employment".
The dots connecting this to OSS aren't immediately apparent to me.
1) OSS is easier to support as SaaS. Furthermore, I think it demolishes closed-source software in this area. OSS doesn't have all of the downsides that you mentioned. Instead of giving the customer a choice of which version of the software he would prefer using, or worse "upgrade or else", you can ask the more beneficial question of "what do you want the software to do?" and then make the decision of how best to support that need accordingly.
2) To the extent that SaaS removes choice and control from the end-user, it makes OSS more attractive as an in-house option. SaaS makes it easier to argue for OSS since the true costs of closed-source software are more apparent.
I'll tell you exactly what the cloud is. The cloud is a place to put all of your companies most valuable assets, your IP, where none of your employees have direct control over it. It's an anonymous box in an underground bunker somewhere guarded by men with machine guns. The cloud means that when it's time to declare bankruptcy, strap on your golden parachute, fire all of your employees, and sell that IP to the highest bidder, all it takes is a flip of the switch.
From the point of view of the employee, the cloud is a pointless waste of money. But from the point of view of the executives and shareholders, the cloud is immensely valuable.
The thing is, most commercial software already might as well be SaaS, since the minute the vendor stops issuing security updates, you had better disconnect that software from your network or stop using it entirely.
Recognizing this fact and formalizing this arrangement should actually be beneficial for both software developers and users. It's also extremely beneficial for OSS, imho.
Consultants don't give two shits about the "right" solution because the "right" solution is the most expensive one they can get a signature on. The lack of trust in their permanent employees has ironically led to them being bled dry by people who don't give a shit about the company... They're only there to install or maintain a thing now, in and out in a day.
Personally, I spent years trying to be a consultant who implemented the "right" solutions, all the while telling everyone who would listen that I could do a better job and would be better off making half as much money as a permanent employee with budgetary control. It got me absolutely nowhere.
Businesses don't want the "right" solutions. They don't want more stable and longer-lasting hardware and software if it comes with fewer bells and whistles. They don't want to pay for security. Their accountants won't cede an inch of control over purchasing decisions. And they fall for even the most obvious marketing bullshit. Most businesses will spend hundreds of thousands of dollars trying to automate IT instead of letting IT save them hundreds of thousands of dollars by automating the rest of their business.
I have had people with literally zero IT knowledge tell me that they want to do everything by themselves, and then ask me how to do it. If you were a consultant, what would your response to this be?
The Boston Tea Party was a protest against the theft of American property via taxation and dictated monopoly rents by the British.
Furthermore, from the Wikipedia article:
In the colonies, Benjamin Franklin stated that the destroyed tea must be repaid, all 90,000 pounds. Robert Murray, a New York merchant went to Lord North with three other merchants and offered to pay for the losses, but the offer was turned down.
Hahaha. That is some serious hyperbole. Building more resilient houses that will last longer and stand up to destructive forces means he is spitefully "attacking everyone who is or ever will be alive".
we are going to need to burn some oil and release more CO2 into the air as we transport workers and materials in the rebuilding effort. I'm glad the ELF thought this through.
I know you're joking, but this is absolutely true. I wouldn't be at all surprised if, in the grand scheme of things, a small child in a third-world country somewhere eventually dies due to lack of food or heat or water because resources were diverted to support the rebuilding of these towers.
Property crimes are not inherently violent crimes.
Do you actually understand this statement well enough to expand upon the distinction between violent and non-violent property crimes, or are you just parroting something you have heard?
As for destroying all the world's farm equipment, that would not be violence
Interesting philosophy you have there.
In order for that statement to be true you'd have to start out with the assumption that certain individuals or groups of people are in fact not people but property
There's no reason to assume that. Slavery is coerced work for the benefit of others. It's certainly possible to have slavery without violence as you define it. And since you don't believe theft or destruction of property constitute violence, there's no reason to distinguish between theft of property and theft of labor, as all property is the result of labor.
First, damage to property is not violence.
By that logic, one can argue that slavery is also not violence.
If someone were to somehow destroy all of the farm machinery in the world and a million people died of starvation as a result, would you argue that that is not violence?
And American companies could be making very profitable investments in firms located overseas without changing the American GDP a whit
True. I'm sure there is a reason that GDP is used to measure recessions. But your point that GNP could rise while GDP falls is a good one.
GDP isn't measured by return on an individual investment dollar
It is ostensibly the aggregate sum of all returns on all investment dollars (domestically).
I'm not really sure what you aren't getting here. You understand that many firms collectively producing products not demanded by the market (people able to pay for them) constitutes a lack of "productive" investment?
Right... so what might cause an economy to stop producing as much stuff? Might it be... people aren't buying the stuff that gets made? That seems like a pretty basic cause-and-effect relationship to me.
It is a cause-and-effect relationship, it's just a completely unimportant one. The important thing is not that people aren't buying enough stuff, it's that the stuff being produced sucks ass.
The Keynesian response is to rob from people who aren't buying enough of the stuff that sucks ass, and give it to the people who do buy the stuff that sucks (and who are not getting enough benefit out of it in order to afford to buy more), in order to prop up the crappy producers who are wasting resources building stuff that sucks.
The correct, most economical, and most beneficial solution is to stop producing stuff that sucks ass, let the people who produce that stuff go bankrupt so that they will learn never to produce stuff that sucks again, and allocate their capital to producers who will create stuff that doesn't suck and that people with money will buy.
I'll respond to the rest in a few mins.
One possible advantage is that it is perhaps easier for a small, technologically advanced, densely-populated island nation with no conventional military to maintain physical control of an object in space than one in another country.
How is it that Keynesians continue to absolutely fail to understand basic cause and effect and the free market? "Lack of spending behavior" is neither the definition or cause of the recession. It is the result of the lack of productive return over the last several years due to terrible investments. Recession is defined as negative GDP growth, or lack of improvement in production, not lack of spending.
In this case, it's a terrible sign that the Japanese are so fed up with investing in the US that they now see hurling money into space as a better alternative.
That can't seriously be your argument. The dead don't spend much?
Can you at least attempt to come up with a plausible way in which suicide hurts the economy?
This is defense from a lawsuit by a company that makes useful products. It doesn't help against patent trolls.
Basically, if you own a patent, you're actually better off not producing any products.
Most wind turbines already automatically lock themselves when wind speeds exceed certain design specifications to protect themselves from damage.
I imagine the newer pitch-controlled turbines would instead just adjust the blade pitch to compensate for higher wind speeds, while still operating near the maximum power output. I doubt they would want to shut down during storms when they could be producing lots of energy.