There is no such thing as being "too successful". The platter manufacturers have not been "too successful", they have made poor business decisions.
Increasing platter capacity far beyond demand is exactly the equivalent of simply charging less for a product than the buyer is willing to pay.
Economically successful means the greatest production of wealth possible. The resources that went into producing a surplus of platter storage capacity could have been better used elsewhere. If you had a designed economy, and you were the designer, wouldn't you allocate just as much resources to research and production of improved platter capacity as there was a demand? Well, no, you wouldn't. If you did, then hopefully you'd recognize your mistake, and then move those resources elsewhere. This is exactly what is happening to the platter industry as a result of market forces. The system is working just fine.
It's silly to try to defend the show, in general, from people who have a low opinion of it -- especially those who haven't watched it or have watched only a few episodes. Buffy's quality is very uneven, I don't think the show taken as a whole deserves an Emmy. But that's just my opinion.
Specifically, the post was talking about "One More, With Feeling", which is another matter entirely.
Lots of individual episodes of series where exceptional quality in some sort is displayed are recognized in the Emmys. OMWF is, in my opinion and many, many, other people's opinion (not all Buffy fans) very definitely Emmy-worthy. It's really a pretty daring and remarkable accomplishment. This season was pretty bad -- it's almost as if the writers put everything they had into that one episode.
I should have included a key point about why market economics is, currently, the best method for increasing economic efficiency.
Put simply, we're not smart enough to design this stuff ourselves. Maybe someday we will be. (Complex adaptive systems simulation of market economies and the resultant possibilty for good experimentation could really make a huge difference here.)
People don't really understand just how complex economics really is. I'm reading Ian Stewart's "Flatterland", and I enjoyed the part where a character explains the geometricization of algebraic variables as generalized dimensionality. Thus, a horrendously simplified economic system with a hundred different agents (acting simply! which they don't!) is like describing things in a 100-dimensional space. Economics is far, far closer to organic chemistry and biology than it is to simple mechanics. And yet, many people expect that they can have a job, and plenty to eat, schools for their kids, and maybe some entertainment, all as a result of some designed economy. But that's absurd.
I've been writing on this subject a lot lately, but I want to take a crack at concisely explaining a few fundamental ideas to everyone concerned.
Rule #1: Don't talk about Fight Club.
Rule #2 (okay, fine, the rest of these aren't really "rules"): Trade is necessary to create wealth since two people can create more wealth in cooperation than they can independently.
Rule #3: Market economics is a way of "organizing" trade. Really, though, it's a way of letting people's self-interest act as the organizing force and the end result is that the market naturally tends towards maximum wealth creation.
Rule #4: "People's rational self-interest" won't very effectively encourage people to cooperate if they have an alternate means of getting wealth than participating in its production. Such as, a big rock they can use to hit Igor over the head and steal his sheep. That's a broken market. Because people will naturally do this sort of thing (literally violent, or metaphorically violent in terms of violating the proper functioning of the market), government of some sort is absolutely necessary in order to prevent this.
Rule #5: Killing people is obvious. As we move into more and more subtle varieties of violating the proper functioning of the market, things get murkier in terms of whether and how much regulatory oversight is required. Really, this calls for a cost/benefit analysis where you evaluate how large a risk certain types of things are, and how badly they would violate the market, and how much inefficiency (as a result of diversion of resources into regulatory activity) would be generated by policing for it. People have lots of different opinions on this, and this is where people argue.
Rule #6: It can be helpful to think of market economics in some sort of physical terms. I like to vaguely imagine water flowing downhill. But the general idea is that the "movement" toward increased ecnomic efficiency is an aggregate movement that results from smaller movements that, as you scale down, look increasingly chaotic. More to the point, at all levels of description it may not be possible for the system to reach a given lower inefficiency level without moving through a higher inefficency first. And that usually won't happen. The point is that markets don't achieve perfect efficiency, and they certainly don't achieve perfect efficiency at all levels of description, e.g., locally.
Rule #7: Because of that last bit, there very well may be quite a few locally optimal or desirable economic "states" that a market won't achieve without intervention. In some cases, that little "energy" expenditure will reap benefits in powering the market to a higher efficiency than it otherwise would have reached. In other cases, that expenditure increases economic inefficiency as the price to pay for a specific, local, desirable outcome. Doing this makes sense in many cases, particularly when human values about intangible things are involved.
Most conservatives that complain about government intervention in free markets don't complain about nationalized defense and nationalized highway systems, even though both are undoubtedly less efficient (on the whole) than they would be if privatized. The reasons why conservatives tend to find this acceptable are completely valid reasons to find other government intervention acceptable.
I hope this helps someone think about these issues. As you and others have said, although in theory the market would take care of fraud itself; in practice it doesn't always (or if really subtle, it won't at all), and most people, even conservatives, don't have too much of a problem with prosecuting fraud. Truth in advertising is really just a variation on that theme.
"(And this could be one of the reasons why you can't use a cellphone inside an airplane)"
Officially, you're correct: cell phones in airborne planes are seen by too many towers. Also, again officially, they're moving too fast between cells.
I use the word "officially" because, as we saw on Sept. 11th, people can and do get decent though oft short-lived connections on cell phones on planes in flight.
I attended St. John's College (Annapolis and Santa Fe), where the Laboratory program reads original works and recreates original experiments. We used some extremely lovely and apparently quite rare and valuable balance scales that were donated by the Los Alamos labs when they switched to the modern electronic scales. Anyway, is any of this equipment stuff that was used in 19th and early 20th century EM experiments (for example) where contemporary students use radically different equipment? (And I'm keenly interested in that gravitation instrument.) Here's the junior year lab schedule in SF, and here's the senior year lab schedule in SF.
"One more reason why I've never been to a 'class reunion' - how they treated us geeks."
Go. You'll probably be surprised at how much some of the social structure is inverted.
This is assuming that you were a "geek" in the sense that you weren't an athlete or otherwise in whatever was considered the popular crowd, not a "geek" in the sense that you were/are exceptionally maladroit. (Well, okay, if you were exceptionally maladroit but no longer are, you might be very surprised, as well.)
Now, I don't think this will be as true at, say, the five year reunion as the tenth or beyond. But in the Real World(tm), intelligence counts for a hell of a lot more than it does in high school. If you are successful in the Real World(tm) (batteries not included, void where prohibited), that's likely to be admired among your peers. Also, if you're successful, you'll likely be more self-confident, and that will make a huge difference.
It is not unusual for the people that were the most obsessed with being popular in high school to never "unlearn" the behaviors and strategies that worked for them there. But in the Real World(tm), often such strategies seem incredibly petty and foolish. They can't quite make "it" work the way they did in school, and they increasingly cling to a version of themselves that's long gone. They become incredibly pathetic creatures. It's very amusing.
I was never quite able to evaluate my own social position in high school. I was some strange kind of school genius who skipped classes a lot, got A's and F's, mostly, played drums in band, wasn't a jock but being that this was a small town I was casual friends with all the popular folks because I was one of them until my puberty (when I didn't grow as much as the other boys did--popularity kiss of death), sometimes teacher's pet, sometimes wiseass, always an iconclast, and voted "most radical" by my senior class, whatever the hell that meant. Anyway, I thought I wasn't very popular, but I was aware that many, many people were less popular than I was. I wasn't sure what to expect of my 10 Year HS Reunion.
Even though I grew up completely in that small town, I didn't have any familial ties there, and not too long after I graduated both myself and my family moved away. So I hadn't been there in a while. As my wife (now ex) and I pulled into the parking lot before the first informal meeting, I had this amazing, wonderful realization that I did not care in the tiniest amount what these people thought of me. I did when I was in HS, although I affected a disinterest in such things like everyone else did. But it was an odd feeling realizing that these people whose approval I desperately wanted ten years before had absolutely no power over me now. It was a really, really neat feeling.
I stopped and told my wife (now ex) that I hugely regretted the fact that I wasn't gay and could therefore be scandalously "out" and not care what they thought.
So, anyway, the gist of the rest of this silly story is that everyone seemed to remember and know me, everyone came up to talk to me, everyone seemed happy to see me, and I could hardly remember anyone's name at all.
It was strange.
This month, I believe, I will be attending my 10th Year High School Reunion. That cheerleader I had a crush on for three years is supposed to be there this time. I can't wait.
"Wealth gets generated by consuming natural resources and no matter how hard people try to deny it it's a zero sum game. Eventually the resources will run out."
No.
One thing you might consider is that your general point about the input side of the equation is also true about the output side. It's not possible to create something from nothing, but it's also not possible to create nothing from something. Admittedly, it's really easy to convert something useful into something that's not useful.
The majority of our artifacts can be recycled. That includes the clothes you wear, your shelter, the vehicle you use for transport, writing materials, most everything else. So the amount of actual consumption of resources can be made to be quite a bit closer to zero than it currently is.
Much of this stuff, along with your food, is or can be a renewable resource.
Fossil fuels are not realistically renewable. But there's a large number of alternative energy sources that are renewable or effectively infinite.
Renewable resources, things we consume, are renewed because there's an enormous energy source powering a constant battle against local entropy: sunlight.
Just because the creation of wealth ultimately requires an energy input, doesn't mean that there's a real concern that that energy supply will run out. Every single "natural resource" that exists, exists because, against all odds, really complicated stuff was made from simpler stuff. That includes everything biological as a result of life; but it also includes almost every element above helium in the periodic table. A huge amount of energy went into creating this complexity out of simplicity, and it did so long before we came on the stage.
Our real problem at this point is that we are absolutely dependent upon this pre-existing machinery (the Earth's ecology) to support us. We can't do ourselves what life does for us. Not by a long shot.
As a matter of fact, because of the point I've been making above--that resources aren't really the problem--the real danger is that we'll break the biological machinery that we're dependent upon. I'll repeat that: using up resources is not the problem. Breaking the Earth's ecology is the problem. We could solve a large portion of the resource problem today if we had the will to do so. But we are not even remotely close to even starting to understand how we could do the many things that the Earth's ecology does that we rely upon. Worse, in my opinion, if there were a "resource countdown clock" and an "ecological breakdown clock" like there's a "nuclear risk clock", the ecological clock would be a lot closer to midnight than the resource clock would be.
You're stuck on an idea that probably made a big impression upon you years ago. But what you don't understand is that it's a lot harder to truly destroy (as in, nothing is recoverable) resources than you think that it is. Resources are a red herring. A failing Earth ecology is the real problem. Aside from everything else I've written, resources aren't as big a problem because market forces will solve it. But market forces can't fix what people don't understand--we could break our ecology without knowing it, and therefore never be aware of the price we are paying for doing so until it's too late to do anything about it.
"And Term 2C says that if someone even alleges you are infringing on copyright, you can be shut down with no notice, no recourse, and there's nothing you can do about it--the agreement indemnifies them completely." I was really looking forward to getting one of these, too." Under that agreement, SonicBlue claims the right to destroy your device when you connect for updates.
Oh, pshaw!
Look, people can argue about the ethics of true copyright violation; and, in fact, people have offered reasonable arguments concluding that there's nothing wrong with it. I disagree. Many other people disgaree, as well.
But what all of us agree upon is that within the boundaries of fair use, we should be able to do what we want with copyrighted material. It is absolutely ridiculous that everyone's ability to utilize content in a way that the law has recognized as benign is essentially illegalized in order to control the people who are violating copyright law. It's outrageous.
Now, since we all agree on this regardless of whether or not we fundamentally agree on the legitimacy of intellectual property, shouldn't we concentrate on this battle first?
And what SonicBlue is doing is to enforce copyright protections while still fighting against draconian controls. Hooray for them! Everyone who complains about this and everyone that uses a ReplayTV to violate copyright laws are undermining the effort to fight against these outrageous laws that effectively invalidate fair use.
Why otherwise rational people keep repeating this is beyond me.
Because it's true. Do a web search on "comparative advantage".
But I'm not sure if that's your point. Essentially, you seem to be saying that ultimately it's a zero-sum game and you can't fight thermodynamics. Well, you're right. But that's mostly irrelevant. The second law doesn't disallow localized decreases in entropy. That is, in fact, why life is able to exist.
One misconception that you seem to have is that "wealth" is necessarily something that inherently has value. That is to say, the value that is represented in that "wealth" has to come from somewhere, per the previous paragraph. But that's not true. Wealth only has to be perceived to be valuable to someone for it to be "wealth".[1]
Let's lock you in a room for a day. You have a pencil and a pad of paper. In one hypothetical universe, you doodle for 12 hours and then sleep. In another hypothetical universe, you make origami. And in a third, you write down your unexpected physical insight that allows for a true Theory of Everything.
In each case you consumed about the same amount of calories.
Now, is the "wealth", if it is wealth, found in that notebook equal in all three universes? No, it's not. The origami is arguably more valuable than the doodles, and the Theory of Everything is arguably more valuable than the origami. Somehow, putting the same into each of the three situations produces different outputs, each with different values. Poof! Wealth has been created.
Does this make sense? Yes, because wealth is not necessarily a physical attribute. To your dog, the ToE is no more valuable than the doodles, and the origami is probably more valuable than both. To a rock, none of them matter in the least.
Wealth can be, and is, often represented in a reduction of physical entropy. But even there, the "wealth" only exists as wealth because the stored energy is valuable to us in some way.
So, disabuse yourself of the idea that wealth can't "really" be "created". It can. The physical manifestation of it in a house (as opposed to a pile of wood); and the abstract manifestation of it in creative and organizing thought; and the abstract manifestation of it as it is temporarily stored in "money"....are all just variations on a theme. All are qualitatively (regarding the quality we are discussing here) the same.
But comparative advantage explains why some systems are able, as a matter of principle, to create more wealth than other systems. It has everything to do with trade and the division of labor.
Mind boggling amounts of human effort is represented and stored (and often discarded) in even the most trivial and common things familiar to people like ourselves. That fast-food paper cup, lid, and straw with the beverage in it in front of me is the result of an enormous amount of human effort. One person, even given millions of years, probably couldn't produce this. It's simply not achievable outside the context of divison of labor, which is most efficiently organized through the workings of markets. Now, I don't deny that this stupid beverage and cup and straw (and lid) seem like a terrific waste. Taken in isolation, it indisputably is. But I don't know, can't know, the full extent of the economic connections involved in making this beverage and its container. Somewhere in there may be something that saved a hundred-thousand lives, or even a marshland or species from extinction. There's things we can do with created wealth that almost all of us will agree are the very reason it makes any sense at all to go to the trouble in the first place. I'd love to get just those things without the shit. At the moment, people aren't smart enough--not even close--to design an economy which does so.
Your real motivation, as I think you already know that I recognize, is related to the wasting of natural resources and destruction of ecological systems. I think you're basically right in most anything you're likely to say about them. Except an assertion that market economics is somehow inherently inimical to these things. It's not. The only reason it works out this way in practice is because economic agents aren't nearly so rational and informed as economists, and myself, would like them to be. Ecological exploitation and despoilation occur because there's something not working in the market. Mostly, this has to do with human attention span and our difficulty thinking long-term.
[1] Only something obviously physical, like a localized decrease in entropy, are things that I can imagine could inherently represent wealth. But I'm pretty sure that that doesn't make sense, either. How could anything have value outside of the context of someone deciding that it has value? A massively engineered planetary system, organized around a constructed black hole, would seem to be an awesome display of tangible, physical wealth. But if there's no one to value decreased entropy over increased entropy, then how can any one thing be any different than another, really?
"...but right now we've got Market Cultists in the White House, and this bad news for a market that needs some coralling."
I think it's worse than that. I don't think that these folks have a naive, or, possibly, ideological view of markets, which was the case with Reagan's crew.
Instead, I think many of the folks in this administration are simply pro-rich people and corporations. I believe there are some very morally corrupt people hanging out at the White House. I still believe that G. W. Bush is a well-meaning dupe, however.
In general I tend to think that most free-market Republicans and others are merely naive, and to some degree ideological. Recognizing that demand economies don't work, recognizing that over-regulated markets are wasteful, and being heirs to the American political ethos of "government==bad", well, they jump to a simple and rigid conclusion that regulation is inherently bad.
I'm pretty intransigent in my insistence that judgments such as these be based upon an informal utilitarianism. I do very much think that the poor of market economies share in wealth creation, and that what is considered poverty today would have been privileged not too long ago. (For example, there was recently a study that showed that people's satisfaction and estimation of their wealth is relative, and that in real terms, with a few exceptions, the poorest of today have significant wealth in comparison to their predecessors.) My point is that I support market economics because it works, and not because of some ideological or metaphysical principle. I imagine that most working economists are similar (er, I don't mean to give the impression that I'm an economist), but a lot of policy people are more ideological. This can result in some deep differences of opinion that are baffling to each side.
Your comment on lawsuits was provocative. You've called my attention to something that I want to muse over for a while.
Thank you, by the way, for the compliment on my post.
You can just go to the beginning (of the so-called "west"), and find Plato, in the "Republic", offering a prescient critique of capitalism and democracy. His argument was that power inevitably accrues to the wealthy, who then institute formally or informally an plutocracy. That's why it's called a "plutocracy". (Everyone wants money, that's why it's called "money".)
I stand by my contention that it's not markets to blame for the symptoms of illness you're describing; but, rather, they're the symptoms of a second stage of plutocratic distortion in our very mature capitalist democracy (the first stage being the robber-baron era). Under-regulated markets (or, worse, markets regulated by the marketers) allow for what I suppose can be called "dishonesty". And the market breaks. All that's left is the unpleasant side-effects of capitalism without the benefits.
Not only might there be a necessary level of wealth redistibution at present, it's worth noting that a significant portion of Euro-American wealth is built upon a foundation of stolen capital. It's also worth noting that multinational corporations (or governments, or whomever) will repeat this plunder if given the opportunity.
Latin America should be far, far more wealthy than it is today. A lot of resources have been exploited, not traded. The fact that they haven't had the wealth they should have had as a result of honest trade, and a tradition of very corrupt government and distorted ecnomies, is why they're as poor as they are. We, the wealthy, owe them something, I think.
But there is the difficult problem of bootstrapping the economies of the very poorest regions of the world. Market forces would take care of it if they had something to trade (and were allowed to do so). But, for example, Africa's biggest problem is that much of it is resource-poor and it's simply over-populated. The only thing they have to trade is labor. Ideally, market globalism should include as fundamental complete fluidity of labor. But the biggest bleeding-heart liberals, worrying over the world's impoverished, become notably less caring when it comes to the question of those poor people "taking away jobs".
So, I don't know. If simple market forces can't get the job done, then these regions need huge infusions of capital that is correctly distributed. It's that last bit that's the problem. Of course, that's always the problem when you're trying to build something that only can be grown.
I have a friend who's a senior analyst at one of the big banks. He told something that I already knew, but that many people don't.
The "buy/sell" ratings are unimportant. If you're an investor basing your decisions on ratings, then you're an idiot. It simply isn't true that an analyst's job (even in theory) is to study a company and then come up with a simplistic investment recommendation that's universally applicable. That's not the analysts's chief concern.
Their chief concern is understanding what's happening with the company. They try to present that understanding in detailed reports and those are what you should pay attention to. The real investors are looking at that, not the rating; and, in fact, they're not really even looking at the report so much as they calling up the analyst and talking about the stock in person.
If I were in my friend's shoes, which I'm certainly not, because I'm pretty outspoken and a risk-taker, I'd go right to the top of the company and say, "Let's position ourselves as the one that investors trust. Let's stop making buy/sell ratings, and insist that investors and their advisors make decisions based upon our lengthy analysis of a stock, and the personal situation of the investor." I'd either lose the job, or have contributed to a real smart strategic move.
I'm not defending analysts as much as it may appear. Theoretically, they were supposed to have integrity, and their integrity was compromised at many firms during the boom. Reading Blodgett's emails is enlightening. But day-traders and other retail investors deserve a huge chunk of the blame for jumping into the market as if they were running to the craps table because they thought they were on a hot streak.
"Capitalism 'works' (to what extent is arguable), because it expects people to act selfishly. And there's just no stopping that."
Exactly. And that's why a functional market requires a mininum level of regulation to assure that a selfish agent is unable to subvert the market.
Capitalism does not glorify "selfishness"; and an understanding of macroeconomics and the benefits of free markets does not require that selfishness be elevated to a virtue.
Rather, capitalism elevates rational self-interest as a fundamental principle. Rational self-interest allows--requires--some level of enforcement of the rule of law such that less rational people are prevented from literally and metaphorically hitting other people over the head with a rock and stealing their sheep. Rational self-interested agents support the rule of law because they recognize the fundamental benefit of markets: the principle of comparative advantage. Stealing is zero-sum, comparative advantage is not.
You might ought to learn a bit more about macroeconomics. Let's take the counter-example you offered. It had to do with one company taking market share from another, and your contention was that this doesn't represent an increase in productivity. No? Well, you're wrong.
Theoretically, there is an increase in productivity because the consumers--presumed to be rational self-interested agents--evaluated one vendor as being superior to the other. The only reason the market works at all is because, collectively, these judgments are usually correct. If company A is making a superior product to company B, then switching resources to the production of company A's widget necessarily represents a gain in productivity. Whatever that extra value is that the consumer recognized is present when it otherwise would not have been present.
We have markets for all sorts of things, and this is because they tend to work significantly better than any designed process. This is true in capital--thus, the securities markets--in international capital flows--the currencies markets (although there's good reason to believe that the currency markets are flawed at present)--and others. In the case of capital, theoretically, your capital investment will only show a return if that investment has generated wealth. In reality, there are speculative bubbles and whatnot that mean that people can, and do, generate large returns on investment where there was no actual wealth generated. But that doesn't mean that it is rational for an investor to make investment decisions independent of real corporate value--because, on average, it's necessarily the case that the market punishes faux wealth creation and rewards genuine wealth creation. Otherwise, we'd all be broke by now.
If you're an investor and you believe that you can predict the short-term false and longer-term-but-false valuation changes, then, hey, go for it. But not only are you less likely to be right than wrong, even if you're right your trading strategy would only be effective until the market incorporated it and cancels it out. So, if you're a gambler--and a certain kind of investor is a gambler--then you'll think that it makes sense to invest outside the context of fundamentals (which ultimately represents wealth creation or destruction). In contrast, if you have any sense, you'll ultimately look for actual wealth creation or destruction to evaluate your investment decisions. Just like you would if you were investing in your brother's bakery.
Market economics is a good thing because it works. It creates wealth where there was no wealth before, and as a general rule everyone benefits from this. (Certainly that's true in contrast to mere wealth redistribution.) That's why it's revered and promoted. Not because it makes sense to elevate simple selfishness to some grand moral principle. That way of thinking is that of the Market Cultists, and they're down the hall, in the padded room with the Objectivists.
Salon published a sort of a review of Wolfram's book recently titled "The Next Newton?". Talk about hyperbole.
As a letter writer to Salon points out, it seems that Wolfram thinks that he's discovered Complexity Theory all by himself. The Salon article certainly gives that impression -- not having read the book, I can't make my own judgment.
The Salon writer writes as if cellular automata were some silly mathematical curiosity (or worse, the writer thinks that CA is recent to computing) that Wolfram "rediscovered" and took seriously for the first time. Of course that's absurd.
The Santa Fe Institute was founded jointly around 1984 by the eminent Nobel Laureate, physicist Murray Gell-Mann, and several others. Stuart Kauffman has researched and written on complexity for many years.
I myself have been following, as a layperson, complexity theory for about fifteen years. In 1991 I had the opportunity to be an undergraduate intern -- an opportunity I didn't follow up on because of my severe academic workload, but an opportunity I will always regret not taking advantage of. Undergraduate intern positions are much more competitive now. This eleven years has made the difference between "bleeding edge" and "cutting edge". Or perhaps complexity theory is even mainstream. I've noticed a burgeoning graduate school interest in complexity studies programs.
Complexity theory intersects many disciplines, and it involves several related ideas such as chaos theory, modeling, self-reference, artificial life, and others. It's evolved into a fairly rigorous discipline, and the more formalized idea of "complex adaptive systems" forms the core. For those who have read Douglas Hofstadter's book, Godel, Escher, Bach, (a very influential book for many of us) published around '82, many of these ideas will be familiar.
Wolfram's quip that seems so risible is really only an overstatement of the central idea of complexity theory: that a limited number of "rules" can give rise to extremely complex behavior. This was the surprise of cellular automata, exemplified by Conway's "Life", invented in 1970. But the underlying idea goes as far back as John von Neumann. Wolfram has done some interesting work in CA. But it sure as hell isn't his idea. For many in the Slashdot community, this is all as familiar as the back of their hands. But apparently there's still a lot of people that should be aware of this stuff that are not.
Finally, many people here would probably be interested to know that SimCity's designer, and Maxis, have had some association with SFI. This makes sense because the emergent behaviors of complex systems are not (as a practical matter) deductively predictable -- their behavior must be studied. The techniques of systems modeling are requisite. SimCity was the general public's first accessible insight into just how fascinating and educational systems modeling can be.
Just because something might be profitable (collecting data) doesn't necessarily mean it should be done.
Several people have made this point in response to my post, and of course it's true. But it's beside the point (of my post).
My point was that a big part of the Amici argument, it seemed to me, was built around a sense of complete inappropriateness of the gathering of that data. Not "inappropriate" as in "wrong", but as in "a sensor built into a wheelchair to record the times that someone sits in it". Let me use an example that's a combination of fact and a hypothetical.
Remember the Kinko's case regarding the copying and distribution of copyrighted material to college students? Profs and TA's had been for a long time assembling some reading materials, and having Kinko's make x number of copies, binding them, and students would come in and pick them up (and pay for them) at the store. Kinko's got sued for copyright infringement; and as a consequence implemented a policy where they won't make copies of copyrighted materials without a signed waiver from the copyright holder. You can go in and make self-service copies of copyrighted materials -- they aren't policing that -- but they won't do it for you.
Now, it is conceivable that those binded copies requested by the Profs and TAs were within fair use. Perhaps they didn't distribute them, as unlikely as this sounds. In the court case, the plaintiff is alleging that Kinko's is participation in copyright infringement. Maybe they aren't. How those copies left the store and who took them makes all the difference. Wouldn't the plaintiff have the right to ask via discovery for the records of how and to whom those copies were delivered? It's reasonable to expect that Kinko's would have enough information to answer the salient question. And if this is an ongoing situation, if Kinko's wasn't keeping any records about who they gave those copies to, wouldn't it make sense for a court to require them to start collecting that information in order to answer the question of whether copyright infringment was occuring?
My objection to that brief was that it was comparing the PVR situation with the most absurd examples possible. I didn't, and still don't, think that the information required in order to answer the question at hand must necessarily be a violation of privacy, nor burdensome on SonicBlue, nor information that is no concern whatsoever to SonicBlue.
Now, the really big difference between the Kinko's and the SonicBlue example is that Kinko's was actively participating in the infringement. SonicBlue is not. Interestingly, Kinko's is off the hook, apparently, when their customers infringe when using the self-service copiers. It would make sense to compare SonicBlue to that situation and say that they are not responsible.
In the VCR case, the test ended up being any legitimate use makes it a-okay. On the other hand, it seems to me that the Napster decision uses a test of whether the product is used primarily as a means of infringement. As far as I'm concernced, that's stupid and the VCR standard makes much more sense. But I think the PVR ruling could go either direction.
I understand that the industry plaintiffs asked for far more information than is relevant, and that much of that information is a violation of privacy. But I wasn't really arguing that their contention was totally legitimate as it stands, but that the Amici objection wasn't as solid as the people here on Slashdot seemed to think.
Manufacturers of these devices and the providers which manage their networking will include exactly as much demographic gathering code as they can get away with. While this community is very concerned about privacy, I don't think that the general public is equally concerned. As is the case with the web, if you restrict the egregious privacy violations, most people are satisfied.
Providing that SonicBlue satisfies this minimal requirement, they will have every incentive to collect and sell information about the viewer's habits. It's free money, as they say. (I don't know who says this, and it doesn't make any sense. But maybe that's why they call money "money".)
I think your keystroke logging monitor is a bad analogy. Like the Amici brief's wheelchair analogy, it's unnatural and intrusive. There would be no reason for Apple to be gathering that information, and the scope of the information is far beyond the use that is being questioned. In this case, SonicBlue has an incentive to be gathering that information (their competitor is), it's easily collected (I disagree with the posters who says that it's not), and it has everything to do with the case.
I think that if the information is made anonymous, Amici's argument about invasion of privacy disapears. Whether or not an injunction to do such a thing outside the context of privacy is legally acceptable, I don't know. IANAL.
Finally, the Constitution does not explicitly guarantee privacy. A "right" to privacy was inferred by a SCOTUS decision, I can't recall which. It's still a contentious issue for the court.
Well, while it is true that commercial-skipping has freaked out the broadcasters, the reason they've gone after ReplayTV and not TiVo is because of the network sharing feature. I just wanted to be clear that it's that usage that is the focus. Or at least I thought it was.
From what I've read about the VCR decision, I think you're 100% correct. But I think that because there's already a thriving trade of captured TV shows on the Net, there's good reason for the broadcasters to worry about the ease of which ReplayTV makes this possible. So although there's the VCR precedent, I have an intuition that it's possible that a judge could undermine it by changing the standard. To the degree that a judge thinks that ReplayTV's sharing mode is a feature explicitly aimed at pirates, it's more likely that a new standard will be set.
But, anyway, that's not my argument. I was more interested in defending specifically the request for usage information.
As much as I desperately want to agree with the general sentiment here on Slashdot about this case and this specific issue, I'm not sure I can.
The fact of the matter is that the viewing habits that can be tracked and utilized by a PVR that is networked are extremely valuable and useful to a whole host of interested parties. It dwarfs the value of similar data about web users' habits and demographics.
I tend not to be as militant about privacy as most of the rest of you. Even so, I agree that this type of information should be anonymous if it is collected. Perhaps also an explicit opt-in. But even with those requirements, the data collected is still very useful and valuable. That data is worth a great deal of money to the PVR manufacturers. The broadcast industry had every reason to expect that SonicBlue was collecting this information; and, if not, that they will in the future. It's disingenuous of SonicBlue to act as if collecting that information is something that they don't do and would never consider doing. Frankly, that would be a stupid business decision.
In this way, this information and its collection is substantially different from the "sensor in the wheelchair" or "microphone in the bar" analogies that Amici uses. In those cases, that information would never be collected for any reason outside the context of a court order. In the SonicBlue case, this information is closer to, for example, Best Buy's information on what kinds of people buy what kinds of products from which Best Buy stores. Best Buy probably collects this information, and there are hypothetical court cases where this would be relevant and completely acceptable for the plaintiff to order its discovery (or how ever that should be worded).
SonicBlue is in a tricky situation here. The broadcast industry is asking for information that SonicBlue might reasonably be collecting and that they very well may want to be collecting if they're not. The broadcast industry wants information on how the ReplayTV devices are being used, and that information is relevant to the case. SonicBlue certainly has an interest in how their PVRs are being used, and that information is at their fingertips.
I don't think that Amici is going to convince the court of their position. The personal privacy issues can be easily addressed while still collecting the information that is relevant to the case. And that information is not merely relevant -- it's crucial. Is the ReplayTV a device that exists to break copyright law? Or is it a perfectly acceptable example of fair use in the VCR tradition? SonicBlue can supply strong evidence one way or another simply by checking to see how their product is being used. As I said, it's at their fingertips, and there's good reason to believe that they are or will be collecting it anyway.
Having said all that, I'm as rabidly angry about the entertainment industry's methods and goals in the wider debate as anyone here on Slashdot.
I enjoyed this book up until the middle portion where these societies entered their version of "the enlightenment". At that point (although this was true to a lesser extent earlier) only a tiny handful of thinkers have an unlikely number of profound new scientific insights. That one man could casually toss off a series of ideas that took several men in our world generations to produce was, well, absurd. Furthermore, it was evident why the author thought that it wasn't absurd: he has an extremely condescending attitude toward those older, "obviously" nonsensical ideas and those who held them, vastly underestimating their acceptability within their context and vastly overestimating the assumed self-evident nature of ideas that we now believe are correct.
This is a huge annoyance to me. Unlike most people, unfortunately including KSR, I have a strong education in the history of science and philosophical thought, with a very strong and particular emphasis on actually doing the scientific work and carefully reading the various texts. For someone who approaches the evolution of western empiricism in this manner, it is very often a surprise at how natural, obvious, and reasonable so many false scientific beliefs are. Very often, Kuhn's paradigm shift is a very difficult and sometimes unlikely event that is enabled because some crucial prerequisite(s) is satisfied. In my opinion, the archetypical example is geocentricism versus heliocentricism.
Moderns assume that the ancients and Ptolemy were just plain batty and obtuse in their adherence to a geocentric geometry of circles upon circles upon circles. Isn't it obvious that a heliocentric model is simpler and compelling? There is an attitude that the ancients were simpletons for not recognizing this. But they did. They were well aware of a heliocentric model, and Ptolemy concedes its simplicity. However, they had absolutely no context within which to find the idea of the Earth in motion (and the consequently enormously large universe) an acceptable idea. Until Galileo's telescope, from an empiricist standpoint, the geocentric model seemed to be completely correct. We grow up learning that the Earth rotates and that it revolves around the Sun, and so vastly underestimate the counter-intuitiveness of that idea.
In closely examining the history of science, over and over this sort of thing becomes evident. Outdated, supposedly absurd ideas are found to be far more reasonable (in context) than is commonly assumed; and modern ideas far more radical, even in context, than is commonly assumed. It takes a lot of hard work, profound insight, chance, and a friendly social and political environment for even the incremental, but crucial, changes in thought to occur.
The reason this is important, in my opinion, is because we are no more exempt from the hubris that arises from ignorance as our ancestors were. The contemporary scientist who has nothing but contempt for those ignorant ancients and their ridiculous ideas -- because they are very sure in the assumption of the (overall) correct state of contemporary thought -- is really no different from those ancients they are ridiculing. "All or most of the things I think about the world are true, isn't it obvious?"
Lest cranks and fringe scientists think I am validating their loonyness, I hasten to make it clear that I am not. In truth, the conservative nature of science and scientists is a necessary and good thing. It's a crucial part of skepticism. The hubris of close-mindedness is the enemy of the Newton or Einstein, that's true. But, while there's only ever going to be a few Newtons or Einsteins, there's (currently) millions of everyday working scientists. So, functionally, this attitude isn't a problem, it's a feature.
But if one has any pretensions of wisdom and education -- and many scientists do -- then a deep and profound skepticism is a necessity. One should respect the immense mysteries of the cosmos and recognize that they dwarf one's puny certainties. Not only because there's so much left to learn, but because there's also very likely much to unlearn. That is the lesson of the history of scientific thought. You don't really need know this to be a good, productive scientist. But you do need to know it if you wish to exist as thinking being in this universe in the manner that the scientific tradition exemplifies.
And, without question, philosophers of science, writers of the history of science, or science-fiction writers constructing an alternate history of science -- for all of these, this comprehension is also a requirement.
Kim Stanley Robison's The Years of Rice and Salt fails in a crucial way for this reason. As he attempts to reconstruct an evolution of empirical thought that mirrors our own, he demonstrates that he doesn't really understand his subject matter. His subject matter is not merely the scientific ideas themselves; but those ideas in the context and tradition of the rational, empiricist tradition and the complexity of factors and ideas that have enabled and nurtured it. He sees the facade, and confuses it for the entire structure and its engineering. That's an egregious error in the context of this book.
Even as a paraphrase, that's a powerful and eloquent quote.
Critics will say that that view is overstating or even mostly inventing a woman's fear and actual risk. And while it is rhetorically excessive, it is also fundamentally true.
About the time I reached adulthood, I had embraced an old-style feminism -- the feminism that emphasizes the similarity and equality of men and women. I very much rejected the idea that biological sexual differentiation amounted to significantly different experiences of being a human being for men and women. Today, however, though I am very cautious in my acceptance of anything that smacks of biological determinism, a couple of decades of solid scientific research indicates that in some important, qualitative ways, men and women are different kinds of people.
I can hear people of a more conservative or anti-feminist bent saying "Duh!". But what is really very interesting and revealing is that male conservatives or male anti-feminists who embrace the idea of significant sexual biological determination (as embodied by the traditional roles, which they claim are fully "natural") resist the idea that women's experience in our society is very different than men's. They pay lip service to the presumed difference, but when confronted by claims like the one above, they dismiss them because it is so unlike the world that they themselves experience.
For a male liberal or male feminist who invests a significant amount of effort in critically examining how women experience our society, it is shocking and disturbing to realize how very different it is in some important ways. One of these is the sense of personal safety and how much one is empowered to protect it.
Almost all women make judgments, some automatic, about their risk of attack by a man in different situations several times a day. Except for men in exceptional circumstances, that degree of constant awareness of a threat to personal safety is simply unimaginable. For that reason, we men tend to vastly underestimate both the risk and rate of incidence of sexual violence against women. It's not something we think about, ever. It's not a world we inhabit. And unless they're like me and are a tempting person to disclose an assault to (because I was a rape crisis advocate), the women they know haven't told them about their experiences as victims of sexual violence because it's just something one doesn't talk about. Perhaps they know one woman that was stranger raped, perhaps it's someone they work with or are related to. 2% seems a reasonable number -- that's their experience. But their experience is misleading.
Anyway, I vividly remember that period in my life where I was highly sensitized to noticing the myriad ways in which women experience our society differently than I do. At school, at work, in conversations, with friends -- to a male, the realization that women inhabit a sort of parallel universe that has many very different rules (most of which work against them) comes as quite a shock. It's very depressing. It's not something one wants to comprehend and notice on a daily basis. I watched a very close friend go through this phase, although he had long been a feminist, simply because he was with a woman who opened his eyes to it. He was very disturbed and unhappy for a good while.
At any rate, this is relevant to this thread only in the sense that there are dangers that are too close, too threatening, for us to be willing to overtly acknowlege. Sometimes we invent monsters in the closet specifically to avoid confronting the monster in the living room. That's literally what children often do when they are abused by a parent. We often do the same thing, metaphorically, as adults.
But if I understand the numbers, it seems the internet is not the most likely source of danger.
It's not. Just as the dark parking garage is not the most likely place to be raped.
In both molestation and rape, the perps are most often someone that is close or known to the victim. A woman is more likely to be raped by a coworker, or someone she's gone on a date with, than she is by a stranger. Similarly, a child is far more likely to be sexually abused by (in this order) a sibling or a parent, another relative, a trusted family acquaintance or someone that has authority over the children.
What is peculiar about these facts are that the dangers that are most feared, obsessed about, and reported, are those that are least likely! I don't think this is mere coincidence.
Firstly, the idea that an immediate family member might be the primary danger in terms of child sexual abuse is so frightening and discomfitting that it's just something most people can't process. For women, who simply can't avoid working with men, or dating or being social with men; to be in constant fear of assault is also frightening and discomfitting. As a result, people concentrate on the threat that they perceive as being more controllable -- teaching kids to not take candy from strangers and being escorted to your car at night.
The other side of this is that there is, nevertheless, an awareness of just how insecure personal safety really is. There is very real fear, and that fear needs a target. So the less likely sources of danger are emphasized both by default and because they are recieving the fear that is transferred from the more likely sources.
And, of course, there's the base human instinct to identify a villainous "other" as "the enemy".
As someone who worked in Rape Crisis for a year or so, I've always been very, very annoyed at the attention that stranger rape gets in the media and around the water cooler and in the dorm. Yes, it happens. And, yes, it's horrible. But while an entire college campus might be mobilized to be on the defensive from an individual (stranger) rapist, over the same period of time there are probably several times the number of acquaintence rapes that occur. The obsession with stranger rape certainly does come at the expense of awareness of the greater risk of acquaintence rape.
And just so with various fears about child abuse: Internet pedophiles, satanic ritual abuse, day-care center pedophiles -- even the current uproar over the Catholic clergy -- all of these only account for a small portion of the total child sexual abuse that is perpetrated. But they get all the press, all of the outrage, and most of the funding and education, and support services.
Parents, in particular, have the very natural desire to protect their children absolutely. Any risk is seen as significant. This is a natural instinct. But the truth is that to truly be responsible for the safety and well-being of their children -- as they have a moral imperative to be -- parents must make the mental effort to identify and protect their children from the threats they actually face, not the threats that are the most sensational. Being outraged, or extremely fearful, or disgusted, or any other strong emotion doesn't validate a "policy" that insufficiently protects your children.
Nice answer, clear, informative and correct. And no mod points. Nice to see the moderation system working so well....
I tend not to be moderated up. Dunno why. Possibly because I'm relativiely verbose, and people simply aren't reading the posts in the first place.
I've also wondered if there's something about my signature that annoys people.
Oh, well. It only matters a little bit to me in terms of ego; I'm more chagrined just that I took the time to write it and be as clear as possible, but it's not being read.
I was thinking this morning that mod points should be divided into two groups: points that can be applied to 0-2 posts, and points that can be applied to 3-5 posts. Say 75% of the mod points that are given out would be the lower level, thus encouraging people to mod -- and read -- the lower rated posts. My sense is that most of the people that really care are filtering at +2 or above, and so there's something of a glass ceiling at 2. Then, there's not a big distribution within the 3-5 range, because the posts that make through the ceiling mostly get modded up to 5. Just a thought.
I pretty much don't worry about anyone building a bomb that's a threat to the US or whomever. I'm very skeptical of anything less than a top-notch science and engineering facility building an implosion bomb. And u-235 is very rare and prohibitive to produce. I've thought that the bigger danger was someone getting ahold of a working bomb -- one of the ones that were supposed to be decommisioned in the former USSR.
I don't know what to make of the stranglets passing through Earth story. Seems like pretty sparse data to me. It's one of those things that doesn't mean anything until it's confirmed and repeated by several other researchers.
Mid-continental quakes are far more intense, and far more rare, than edge quakes.
The New Madrid quake was enormous -- it changed the course of the Mississippi river. If the same quake occured today, the damage and loss of life throughout the region would be enormous.
Something similar can be said about Washington/British Columbia coastal areas: they're less likely to experience earthquakes than some of the more active zones, but there's also a possibility for a high magnititude quake. In both cases, it's because the more active areas are active -- and thus releasing strain gradually, instead of all at once in a cataclysmic event.
Slashdot Mirror
There is no such thing as being "too successful". The platter manufacturers have not been "too successful", they have made poor business decisions.
Increasing platter capacity far beyond demand is exactly the equivalent of simply charging less for a product than the buyer is willing to pay.
Economically successful means the greatest production of wealth possible. The resources that went into producing a surplus of platter storage capacity could have been better used elsewhere. If you had a designed economy, and you were the designer, wouldn't you allocate just as much resources to research and production of improved platter capacity as there was a demand? Well, no, you wouldn't. If you did, then hopefully you'd recognize your mistake, and then move those resources elsewhere. This is exactly what is happening to the platter industry as a result of market forces. The system is working just fine.
Specifically, the post was talking about "One More, With Feeling", which is another matter entirely.
Lots of individual episodes of series where exceptional quality in some sort is displayed are recognized in the Emmys. OMWF is, in my opinion and many, many, other people's opinion (not all Buffy fans) very definitely Emmy-worthy. It's really a pretty daring and remarkable accomplishment. This season was pretty bad -- it's almost as if the writers put everything they had into that one episode.
Put simply, we're not smart enough to design this stuff ourselves. Maybe someday we will be. (Complex adaptive systems simulation of market economies and the resultant possibilty for good experimentation could really make a huge difference here.)
People don't really understand just how complex economics really is. I'm reading Ian Stewart's "Flatterland", and I enjoyed the part where a character explains the geometricization of algebraic variables as generalized dimensionality. Thus, a horrendously simplified economic system with a hundred different agents (acting simply! which they don't!) is like describing things in a 100-dimensional space. Economics is far, far closer to organic chemistry and biology than it is to simple mechanics. And yet, many people expect that they can have a job, and plenty to eat, schools for their kids, and maybe some entertainment, all as a result of some designed economy. But that's absurd.
At present.
Rule #1: Don't talk about Fight Club.
Rule #2 (okay, fine, the rest of these aren't really "rules"): Trade is necessary to create wealth since two people can create more wealth in cooperation than they can independently.
Rule #3: Market economics is a way of "organizing" trade. Really, though, it's a way of letting people's self-interest act as the organizing force and the end result is that the market naturally tends towards maximum wealth creation.
Rule #4: "People's rational self-interest" won't very effectively encourage people to cooperate if they have an alternate means of getting wealth than participating in its production. Such as, a big rock they can use to hit Igor over the head and steal his sheep. That's a broken market. Because people will naturally do this sort of thing (literally violent, or metaphorically violent in terms of violating the proper functioning of the market), government of some sort is absolutely necessary in order to prevent this.
Rule #5: Killing people is obvious. As we move into more and more subtle varieties of violating the proper functioning of the market, things get murkier in terms of whether and how much regulatory oversight is required. Really, this calls for a cost/benefit analysis where you evaluate how large a risk certain types of things are, and how badly they would violate the market, and how much inefficiency (as a result of diversion of resources into regulatory activity) would be generated by policing for it. People have lots of different opinions on this, and this is where people argue.
Rule #6: It can be helpful to think of market economics in some sort of physical terms. I like to vaguely imagine water flowing downhill. But the general idea is that the "movement" toward increased ecnomic efficiency is an aggregate movement that results from smaller movements that, as you scale down, look increasingly chaotic. More to the point, at all levels of description it may not be possible for the system to reach a given lower inefficiency level without moving through a higher inefficency first. And that usually won't happen. The point is that markets don't achieve perfect efficiency, and they certainly don't achieve perfect efficiency at all levels of description, e.g., locally.
Rule #7: Because of that last bit, there very well may be quite a few locally optimal or desirable economic "states" that a market won't achieve without intervention. In some cases, that little "energy" expenditure will reap benefits in powering the market to a higher efficiency than it otherwise would have reached. In other cases, that expenditure increases economic inefficiency as the price to pay for a specific, local, desirable outcome. Doing this makes sense in many cases, particularly when human values about intangible things are involved.
Most conservatives that complain about government intervention in free markets don't complain about nationalized defense and nationalized highway systems, even though both are undoubtedly less efficient (on the whole) than they would be if privatized. The reasons why conservatives tend to find this acceptable are completely valid reasons to find other government intervention acceptable.
I hope this helps someone think about these issues. As you and others have said, although in theory the market would take care of fraud itself; in practice it doesn't always (or if really subtle, it won't at all), and most people, even conservatives, don't have too much of a problem with prosecuting fraud. Truth in advertising is really just a variation on that theme.
I use the word "officially" because, as we saw on Sept. 11th, people can and do get decent though oft short-lived connections on cell phones on planes in flight.
I attended St. John's College (Annapolis and Santa Fe), where the Laboratory program reads original works and recreates original experiments. We used some extremely lovely and apparently quite rare and valuable balance scales that were donated by the Los Alamos labs when they switched to the modern electronic scales. Anyway, is any of this equipment stuff that was used in 19th and early 20th century EM experiments (for example) where contemporary students use radically different equipment? (And I'm keenly interested in that gravitation instrument.) Here's the junior year lab schedule in SF, and here's the senior year lab schedule in SF.
This is assuming that you were a "geek" in the sense that you weren't an athlete or otherwise in whatever was considered the popular crowd, not a "geek" in the sense that you were/are exceptionally maladroit. (Well, okay, if you were exceptionally maladroit but no longer are, you might be very surprised, as well.)
Now, I don't think this will be as true at, say, the five year reunion as the tenth or beyond. But in the Real World(tm), intelligence counts for a hell of a lot more than it does in high school. If you are successful in the Real World(tm) (batteries not included, void where prohibited), that's likely to be admired among your peers. Also, if you're successful, you'll likely be more self-confident, and that will make a huge difference.
It is not unusual for the people that were the most obsessed with being popular in high school to never "unlearn" the behaviors and strategies that worked for them there. But in the Real World(tm), often such strategies seem incredibly petty and foolish. They can't quite make "it" work the way they did in school, and they increasingly cling to a version of themselves that's long gone. They become incredibly pathetic creatures. It's very amusing.
I was never quite able to evaluate my own social position in high school. I was some strange kind of school genius who skipped classes a lot, got A's and F's, mostly, played drums in band, wasn't a jock but being that this was a small town I was casual friends with all the popular folks because I was one of them until my puberty (when I didn't grow as much as the other boys did--popularity kiss of death), sometimes teacher's pet, sometimes wiseass, always an iconclast, and voted "most radical" by my senior class, whatever the hell that meant. Anyway, I thought I wasn't very popular, but I was aware that many, many people were less popular than I was. I wasn't sure what to expect of my 10 Year HS Reunion.
Even though I grew up completely in that small town, I didn't have any familial ties there, and not too long after I graduated both myself and my family moved away. So I hadn't been there in a while. As my wife (now ex) and I pulled into the parking lot before the first informal meeting, I had this amazing, wonderful realization that I did not care in the tiniest amount what these people thought of me. I did when I was in HS, although I affected a disinterest in such things like everyone else did. But it was an odd feeling realizing that these people whose approval I desperately wanted ten years before had absolutely no power over me now. It was a really, really neat feeling.
I stopped and told my wife (now ex) that I hugely regretted the fact that I wasn't gay and could therefore be scandalously "out" and not care what they thought.
So, anyway, the gist of the rest of this silly story is that everyone seemed to remember and know me, everyone came up to talk to me, everyone seemed happy to see me, and I could hardly remember anyone's name at all.
It was strange.
This month, I believe, I will be attending my 10th Year High School Reunion. That cheerleader I had a crush on for three years is supposed to be there this time. I can't wait.
Go. Don't give a shit. You'll have fun.
One thing you might consider is that your general point about the input side of the equation is also true about the output side. It's not possible to create something from nothing, but it's also not possible to create nothing from something. Admittedly, it's really easy to convert something useful into something that's not useful.
The majority of our artifacts can be recycled. That includes the clothes you wear, your shelter, the vehicle you use for transport, writing materials, most everything else. So the amount of actual consumption of resources can be made to be quite a bit closer to zero than it currently is.
Much of this stuff, along with your food, is or can be a renewable resource.
Fossil fuels are not realistically renewable. But there's a large number of alternative energy sources that are renewable or effectively infinite.
Renewable resources, things we consume, are renewed because there's an enormous energy source powering a constant battle against local entropy: sunlight.
Just because the creation of wealth ultimately requires an energy input, doesn't mean that there's a real concern that that energy supply will run out. Every single "natural resource" that exists, exists because, against all odds, really complicated stuff was made from simpler stuff. That includes everything biological as a result of life; but it also includes almost every element above helium in the periodic table. A huge amount of energy went into creating this complexity out of simplicity, and it did so long before we came on the stage.
Our real problem at this point is that we are absolutely dependent upon this pre-existing machinery (the Earth's ecology) to support us. We can't do ourselves what life does for us. Not by a long shot.
As a matter of fact, because of the point I've been making above--that resources aren't really the problem--the real danger is that we'll break the biological machinery that we're dependent upon. I'll repeat that: using up resources is not the problem. Breaking the Earth's ecology is the problem. We could solve a large portion of the resource problem today if we had the will to do so. But we are not even remotely close to even starting to understand how we could do the many things that the Earth's ecology does that we rely upon. Worse, in my opinion, if there were a "resource countdown clock" and an "ecological breakdown clock" like there's a "nuclear risk clock", the ecological clock would be a lot closer to midnight than the resource clock would be.
You're stuck on an idea that probably made a big impression upon you years ago. But what you don't understand is that it's a lot harder to truly destroy (as in, nothing is recoverable) resources than you think that it is. Resources are a red herring. A failing Earth ecology is the real problem. Aside from everything else I've written, resources aren't as big a problem because market forces will solve it. But market forces can't fix what people don't understand--we could break our ecology without knowing it, and therefore never be aware of the price we are paying for doing so until it's too late to do anything about it.
Oh, pshaw!
Look, people can argue about the ethics of true copyright violation; and, in fact, people have offered reasonable arguments concluding that there's nothing wrong with it. I disagree. Many other people disgaree, as well.
But what all of us agree upon is that within the boundaries of fair use, we should be able to do what we want with copyrighted material. It is absolutely ridiculous that everyone's ability to utilize content in a way that the law has recognized as benign is essentially illegalized in order to control the people who are violating copyright law. It's outrageous.
Now, since we all agree on this regardless of whether or not we fundamentally agree on the legitimacy of intellectual property, shouldn't we concentrate on this battle first?
And what SonicBlue is doing is to enforce copyright protections while still fighting against draconian controls. Hooray for them! Everyone who complains about this and everyone that uses a ReplayTV to violate copyright laws are undermining the effort to fight against these outrageous laws that effectively invalidate fair use.
Because it's true. Do a web search on "comparative advantage".
But I'm not sure if that's your point. Essentially, you seem to be saying that ultimately it's a zero-sum game and you can't fight thermodynamics. Well, you're right. But that's mostly irrelevant. The second law doesn't disallow localized decreases in entropy. That is, in fact, why life is able to exist.
One misconception that you seem to have is that "wealth" is necessarily something that inherently has value. That is to say, the value that is represented in that "wealth" has to come from somewhere, per the previous paragraph. But that's not true. Wealth only has to be perceived to be valuable to someone for it to be "wealth".[1]
Let's lock you in a room for a day. You have a pencil and a pad of paper. In one hypothetical universe, you doodle for 12 hours and then sleep. In another hypothetical universe, you make origami. And in a third, you write down your unexpected physical insight that allows for a true Theory of Everything.
In each case you consumed about the same amount of calories.
Now, is the "wealth", if it is wealth, found in that notebook equal in all three universes? No, it's not. The origami is arguably more valuable than the doodles, and the Theory of Everything is arguably more valuable than the origami. Somehow, putting the same into each of the three situations produces different outputs, each with different values. Poof! Wealth has been created.
Does this make sense? Yes, because wealth is not necessarily a physical attribute. To your dog, the ToE is no more valuable than the doodles, and the origami is probably more valuable than both. To a rock, none of them matter in the least.
Wealth can be, and is, often represented in a reduction of physical entropy. But even there, the "wealth" only exists as wealth because the stored energy is valuable to us in some way.
So, disabuse yourself of the idea that wealth can't "really" be "created". It can. The physical manifestation of it in a house (as opposed to a pile of wood); and the abstract manifestation of it in creative and organizing thought; and the abstract manifestation of it as it is temporarily stored in "money"....are all just variations on a theme. All are qualitatively (regarding the quality we are discussing here) the same.
But comparative advantage explains why some systems are able, as a matter of principle, to create more wealth than other systems. It has everything to do with trade and the division of labor.
Mind boggling amounts of human effort is represented and stored (and often discarded) in even the most trivial and common things familiar to people like ourselves. That fast-food paper cup, lid, and straw with the beverage in it in front of me is the result of an enormous amount of human effort. One person, even given millions of years, probably couldn't produce this. It's simply not achievable outside the context of divison of labor, which is most efficiently organized through the workings of markets. Now, I don't deny that this stupid beverage and cup and straw (and lid) seem like a terrific waste. Taken in isolation, it indisputably is. But I don't know, can't know, the full extent of the economic connections involved in making this beverage and its container. Somewhere in there may be something that saved a hundred-thousand lives, or even a marshland or species from extinction. There's things we can do with created wealth that almost all of us will agree are the very reason it makes any sense at all to go to the trouble in the first place. I'd love to get just those things without the shit. At the moment, people aren't smart enough--not even close--to design an economy which does so.
Your real motivation, as I think you already know that I recognize, is related to the wasting of natural resources and destruction of ecological systems. I think you're basically right in most anything you're likely to say about them. Except an assertion that market economics is somehow inherently inimical to these things. It's not. The only reason it works out this way in practice is because economic agents aren't nearly so rational and informed as economists, and myself, would like them to be. Ecological exploitation and despoilation occur because there's something not working in the market. Mostly, this has to do with human attention span and our difficulty thinking long-term.
[1] Only something obviously physical, like a localized decrease in entropy, are things that I can imagine could inherently represent wealth. But I'm pretty sure that that doesn't make sense, either. How could anything have value outside of the context of someone deciding that it has value? A massively engineered planetary system, organized around a constructed black hole, would seem to be an awesome display of tangible, physical wealth. But if there's no one to value decreased entropy over increased entropy, then how can any one thing be any different than another, really?
Instead, I think many of the folks in this administration are simply pro-rich people and corporations. I believe there are some very morally corrupt people hanging out at the White House. I still believe that G. W. Bush is a well-meaning dupe, however.
In general I tend to think that most free-market Republicans and others are merely naive, and to some degree ideological. Recognizing that demand economies don't work, recognizing that over-regulated markets are wasteful, and being heirs to the American political ethos of "government==bad", well, they jump to a simple and rigid conclusion that regulation is inherently bad.
I'm pretty intransigent in my insistence that judgments such as these be based upon an informal utilitarianism. I do very much think that the poor of market economies share in wealth creation, and that what is considered poverty today would have been privileged not too long ago. (For example, there was recently a study that showed that people's satisfaction and estimation of their wealth is relative, and that in real terms, with a few exceptions, the poorest of today have significant wealth in comparison to their predecessors.) My point is that I support market economics because it works, and not because of some ideological or metaphysical principle. I imagine that most working economists are similar (er, I don't mean to give the impression that I'm an economist), but a lot of policy people are more ideological. This can result in some deep differences of opinion that are baffling to each side.
Your comment on lawsuits was provocative. You've called my attention to something that I want to muse over for a while.
Thank you, by the way, for the compliment on my post.
You can just go to the beginning (of the so-called "west"), and find Plato, in the "Republic", offering a prescient critique of capitalism and democracy. His argument was that power inevitably accrues to the wealthy, who then institute formally or informally an plutocracy. That's why it's called a "plutocracy". (Everyone wants money, that's why it's called "money".)
I stand by my contention that it's not markets to blame for the symptoms of illness you're describing; but, rather, they're the symptoms of a second stage of plutocratic distortion in our very mature capitalist democracy (the first stage being the robber-baron era). Under-regulated markets (or, worse, markets regulated by the marketers) allow for what I suppose can be called "dishonesty". And the market breaks. All that's left is the unpleasant side-effects of capitalism without the benefits.
Not only might there be a necessary level of wealth redistibution at present, it's worth noting that a significant portion of Euro-American wealth is built upon a foundation of stolen capital. It's also worth noting that multinational corporations (or governments, or whomever) will repeat this plunder if given the opportunity.
Latin America should be far, far more wealthy than it is today. A lot of resources have been exploited, not traded. The fact that they haven't had the wealth they should have had as a result of honest trade, and a tradition of very corrupt government and distorted ecnomies, is why they're as poor as they are. We, the wealthy, owe them something, I think.
But there is the difficult problem of bootstrapping the economies of the very poorest regions of the world. Market forces would take care of it if they had something to trade (and were allowed to do so). But, for example, Africa's biggest problem is that much of it is resource-poor and it's simply over-populated. The only thing they have to trade is labor. Ideally, market globalism should include as fundamental complete fluidity of labor. But the biggest bleeding-heart liberals, worrying over the world's impoverished, become notably less caring when it comes to the question of those poor people "taking away jobs".
So, I don't know. If simple market forces can't get the job done, then these regions need huge infusions of capital that is correctly distributed. It's that last bit that's the problem. Of course, that's always the problem when you're trying to build something that only can be grown.
The "buy/sell" ratings are unimportant. If you're an investor basing your decisions on ratings, then you're an idiot. It simply isn't true that an analyst's job (even in theory) is to study a company and then come up with a simplistic investment recommendation that's universally applicable. That's not the analysts's chief concern.
Their chief concern is understanding what's happening with the company. They try to present that understanding in detailed reports and those are what you should pay attention to. The real investors are looking at that, not the rating; and, in fact, they're not really even looking at the report so much as they calling up the analyst and talking about the stock in person.
If I were in my friend's shoes, which I'm certainly not, because I'm pretty outspoken and a risk-taker, I'd go right to the top of the company and say, "Let's position ourselves as the one that investors trust. Let's stop making buy/sell ratings, and insist that investors and their advisors make decisions based upon our lengthy analysis of a stock, and the personal situation of the investor." I'd either lose the job, or have contributed to a real smart strategic move.
I'm not defending analysts as much as it may appear. Theoretically, they were supposed to have integrity, and their integrity was compromised at many firms during the boom. Reading Blodgett's emails is enlightening. But day-traders and other retail investors deserve a huge chunk of the blame for jumping into the market as if they were running to the craps table because they thought they were on a hot streak.
Capitalism does not glorify "selfishness"; and an understanding of macroeconomics and the benefits of free markets does not require that selfishness be elevated to a virtue.
Rather, capitalism elevates rational self-interest as a fundamental principle. Rational self-interest allows--requires--some level of enforcement of the rule of law such that less rational people are prevented from literally and metaphorically hitting other people over the head with a rock and stealing their sheep. Rational self-interested agents support the rule of law because they recognize the fundamental benefit of markets: the principle of comparative advantage. Stealing is zero-sum, comparative advantage is not.
You might ought to learn a bit more about macroeconomics. Let's take the counter-example you offered. It had to do with one company taking market share from another, and your contention was that this doesn't represent an increase in productivity. No? Well, you're wrong.
Theoretically, there is an increase in productivity because the consumers--presumed to be rational self-interested agents--evaluated one vendor as being superior to the other. The only reason the market works at all is because, collectively, these judgments are usually correct. If company A is making a superior product to company B, then switching resources to the production of company A's widget necessarily represents a gain in productivity. Whatever that extra value is that the consumer recognized is present when it otherwise would not have been present.
We have markets for all sorts of things, and this is because they tend to work significantly better than any designed process. This is true in capital--thus, the securities markets--in international capital flows--the currencies markets (although there's good reason to believe that the currency markets are flawed at present)--and others. In the case of capital, theoretically, your capital investment will only show a return if that investment has generated wealth. In reality, there are speculative bubbles and whatnot that mean that people can, and do, generate large returns on investment where there was no actual wealth generated. But that doesn't mean that it is rational for an investor to make investment decisions independent of real corporate value--because, on average, it's necessarily the case that the market punishes faux wealth creation and rewards genuine wealth creation. Otherwise, we'd all be broke by now.
If you're an investor and you believe that you can predict the short-term false and longer-term-but-false valuation changes, then, hey, go for it. But not only are you less likely to be right than wrong, even if you're right your trading strategy would only be effective until the market incorporated it and cancels it out. So, if you're a gambler--and a certain kind of investor is a gambler--then you'll think that it makes sense to invest outside the context of fundamentals (which ultimately represents wealth creation or destruction). In contrast, if you have any sense, you'll ultimately look for actual wealth creation or destruction to evaluate your investment decisions. Just like you would if you were investing in your brother's bakery.
Market economics is a good thing because it works. It creates wealth where there was no wealth before, and as a general rule everyone benefits from this. (Certainly that's true in contrast to mere wealth redistribution.) That's why it's revered and promoted. Not because it makes sense to elevate simple selfishness to some grand moral principle. That way of thinking is that of the Market Cultists, and they're down the hall, in the padded room with the Objectivists.
As a letter writer to Salon points out, it seems that Wolfram thinks that he's discovered Complexity Theory all by himself. The Salon article certainly gives that impression -- not having read the book, I can't make my own judgment.
The Salon writer writes as if cellular automata were some silly mathematical curiosity (or worse, the writer thinks that CA is recent to computing) that Wolfram "rediscovered" and took seriously for the first time. Of course that's absurd.
The Santa Fe Institute was founded jointly around 1984 by the eminent Nobel Laureate, physicist Murray Gell-Mann, and several others. Stuart Kauffman has researched and written on complexity for many years.
I myself have been following, as a layperson, complexity theory for about fifteen years. In 1991 I had the opportunity to be an undergraduate intern -- an opportunity I didn't follow up on because of my severe academic workload, but an opportunity I will always regret not taking advantage of. Undergraduate intern positions are much more competitive now. This eleven years has made the difference between "bleeding edge" and "cutting edge". Or perhaps complexity theory is even mainstream. I've noticed a burgeoning graduate school interest in complexity studies programs.
Complexity theory intersects many disciplines, and it involves several related ideas such as chaos theory, modeling, self-reference, artificial life, and others. It's evolved into a fairly rigorous discipline, and the more formalized idea of "complex adaptive systems" forms the core. For those who have read Douglas Hofstadter's book, Godel, Escher, Bach, (a very influential book for many of us) published around '82, many of these ideas will be familiar.
Wolfram's quip that seems so risible is really only an overstatement of the central idea of complexity theory: that a limited number of "rules" can give rise to extremely complex behavior. This was the surprise of cellular automata, exemplified by Conway's "Life", invented in 1970. But the underlying idea goes as far back as John von Neumann. Wolfram has done some interesting work in CA. But it sure as hell isn't his idea. For many in the Slashdot community, this is all as familiar as the back of their hands. But apparently there's still a lot of people that should be aware of this stuff that are not.
Finally, many people here would probably be interested to know that SimCity's designer, and Maxis, have had some association with SFI. This makes sense because the emergent behaviors of complex systems are not (as a practical matter) deductively predictable -- their behavior must be studied. The techniques of systems modeling are requisite. SimCity was the general public's first accessible insight into just how fascinating and educational systems modeling can be.
I imagine that with supercomputing, or any significant concentration of complicated hardware, hardware administration is a significand cost.
Now, just how do we make sure that no one ever posts this joke again?
Several people have made this point in response to my post, and of course it's true. But it's beside the point (of my post).
My point was that a big part of the Amici argument, it seemed to me, was built around a sense of complete inappropriateness of the gathering of that data. Not "inappropriate" as in "wrong", but as in "a sensor built into a wheelchair to record the times that someone sits in it". Let me use an example that's a combination of fact and a hypothetical.
Remember the Kinko's case regarding the copying and distribution of copyrighted material to college students? Profs and TA's had been for a long time assembling some reading materials, and having Kinko's make x number of copies, binding them, and students would come in and pick them up (and pay for them) at the store. Kinko's got sued for copyright infringement; and as a consequence implemented a policy where they won't make copies of copyrighted materials without a signed waiver from the copyright holder. You can go in and make self-service copies of copyrighted materials -- they aren't policing that -- but they won't do it for you.
Now, it is conceivable that those binded copies requested by the Profs and TAs were within fair use. Perhaps they didn't distribute them, as unlikely as this sounds. In the court case, the plaintiff is alleging that Kinko's is participation in copyright infringement. Maybe they aren't. How those copies left the store and who took them makes all the difference. Wouldn't the plaintiff have the right to ask via discovery for the records of how and to whom those copies were delivered? It's reasonable to expect that Kinko's would have enough information to answer the salient question. And if this is an ongoing situation, if Kinko's wasn't keeping any records about who they gave those copies to, wouldn't it make sense for a court to require them to start collecting that information in order to answer the question of whether copyright infringment was occuring?
My objection to that brief was that it was comparing the PVR situation with the most absurd examples possible. I didn't, and still don't, think that the information required in order to answer the question at hand must necessarily be a violation of privacy, nor burdensome on SonicBlue, nor information that is no concern whatsoever to SonicBlue.
Now, the really big difference between the Kinko's and the SonicBlue example is that Kinko's was actively participating in the infringement. SonicBlue is not. Interestingly, Kinko's is off the hook, apparently, when their customers infringe when using the self-service copiers. It would make sense to compare SonicBlue to that situation and say that they are not responsible.
In the VCR case, the test ended up being any legitimate use makes it a-okay. On the other hand, it seems to me that the Napster decision uses a test of whether the product is used primarily as a means of infringement. As far as I'm concernced, that's stupid and the VCR standard makes much more sense. But I think the PVR ruling could go either direction.
I understand that the industry plaintiffs asked for far more information than is relevant, and that much of that information is a violation of privacy. But I wasn't really arguing that their contention was totally legitimate as it stands, but that the Amici objection wasn't as solid as the people here on Slashdot seemed to think.
Providing that SonicBlue satisfies this minimal requirement, they will have every incentive to collect and sell information about the viewer's habits. It's free money, as they say. (I don't know who says this, and it doesn't make any sense. But maybe that's why they call money "money".)
I think your keystroke logging monitor is a bad analogy. Like the Amici brief's wheelchair analogy, it's unnatural and intrusive. There would be no reason for Apple to be gathering that information, and the scope of the information is far beyond the use that is being questioned. In this case, SonicBlue has an incentive to be gathering that information (their competitor is), it's easily collected (I disagree with the posters who says that it's not), and it has everything to do with the case.
I think that if the information is made anonymous, Amici's argument about invasion of privacy disapears. Whether or not an injunction to do such a thing outside the context of privacy is legally acceptable, I don't know. IANAL.
Finally, the Constitution does not explicitly guarantee privacy. A "right" to privacy was inferred by a SCOTUS decision, I can't recall which. It's still a contentious issue for the court.
From what I've read about the VCR decision, I think you're 100% correct. But I think that because there's already a thriving trade of captured TV shows on the Net, there's good reason for the broadcasters to worry about the ease of which ReplayTV makes this possible. So although there's the VCR precedent, I have an intuition that it's possible that a judge could undermine it by changing the standard. To the degree that a judge thinks that ReplayTV's sharing mode is a feature explicitly aimed at pirates, it's more likely that a new standard will be set.
But, anyway, that's not my argument. I was more interested in defending specifically the request for usage information.
The fact of the matter is that the viewing habits that can be tracked and utilized by a PVR that is networked are extremely valuable and useful to a whole host of interested parties. It dwarfs the value of similar data about web users' habits and demographics.
I tend not to be as militant about privacy as most of the rest of you. Even so, I agree that this type of information should be anonymous if it is collected. Perhaps also an explicit opt-in. But even with those requirements, the data collected is still very useful and valuable. That data is worth a great deal of money to the PVR manufacturers. The broadcast industry had every reason to expect that SonicBlue was collecting this information; and, if not, that they will in the future. It's disingenuous of SonicBlue to act as if collecting that information is something that they don't do and would never consider doing. Frankly, that would be a stupid business decision.
In this way, this information and its collection is substantially different from the "sensor in the wheelchair" or "microphone in the bar" analogies that Amici uses. In those cases, that information would never be collected for any reason outside the context of a court order. In the SonicBlue case, this information is closer to, for example, Best Buy's information on what kinds of people buy what kinds of products from which Best Buy stores. Best Buy probably collects this information, and there are hypothetical court cases where this would be relevant and completely acceptable for the plaintiff to order its discovery (or how ever that should be worded).
SonicBlue is in a tricky situation here. The broadcast industry is asking for information that SonicBlue might reasonably be collecting and that they very well may want to be collecting if they're not. The broadcast industry wants information on how the ReplayTV devices are being used, and that information is relevant to the case. SonicBlue certainly has an interest in how their PVRs are being used, and that information is at their fingertips.
I don't think that Amici is going to convince the court of their position. The personal privacy issues can be easily addressed while still collecting the information that is relevant to the case. And that information is not merely relevant -- it's crucial. Is the ReplayTV a device that exists to break copyright law? Or is it a perfectly acceptable example of fair use in the VCR tradition? SonicBlue can supply strong evidence one way or another simply by checking to see how their product is being used. As I said, it's at their fingertips, and there's good reason to believe that they are or will be collecting it anyway.
Having said all that, I'm as rabidly angry about the entertainment industry's methods and goals in the wider debate as anyone here on Slashdot.
This is a huge annoyance to me. Unlike most people, unfortunately including KSR, I have a strong education in the history of science and philosophical thought, with a very strong and particular emphasis on actually doing the scientific work and carefully reading the various texts. For someone who approaches the evolution of western empiricism in this manner, it is very often a surprise at how natural, obvious, and reasonable so many false scientific beliefs are. Very often, Kuhn's paradigm shift is a very difficult and sometimes unlikely event that is enabled because some crucial prerequisite(s) is satisfied. In my opinion, the archetypical example is geocentricism versus heliocentricism.
Moderns assume that the ancients and Ptolemy were just plain batty and obtuse in their adherence to a geocentric geometry of circles upon circles upon circles. Isn't it obvious that a heliocentric model is simpler and compelling? There is an attitude that the ancients were simpletons for not recognizing this. But they did. They were well aware of a heliocentric model, and Ptolemy concedes its simplicity. However, they had absolutely no context within which to find the idea of the Earth in motion (and the consequently enormously large universe) an acceptable idea. Until Galileo's telescope, from an empiricist standpoint, the geocentric model seemed to be completely correct. We grow up learning that the Earth rotates and that it revolves around the Sun, and so vastly underestimate the counter-intuitiveness of that idea.
In closely examining the history of science, over and over this sort of thing becomes evident. Outdated, supposedly absurd ideas are found to be far more reasonable (in context) than is commonly assumed; and modern ideas far more radical, even in context, than is commonly assumed. It takes a lot of hard work, profound insight, chance, and a friendly social and political environment for even the incremental, but crucial, changes in thought to occur.
The reason this is important, in my opinion, is because we are no more exempt from the hubris that arises from ignorance as our ancestors were. The contemporary scientist who has nothing but contempt for those ignorant ancients and their ridiculous ideas -- because they are very sure in the assumption of the (overall) correct state of contemporary thought -- is really no different from those ancients they are ridiculing. "All or most of the things I think about the world are true, isn't it obvious?"
Lest cranks and fringe scientists think I am validating their loonyness, I hasten to make it clear that I am not. In truth, the conservative nature of science and scientists is a necessary and good thing. It's a crucial part of skepticism. The hubris of close-mindedness is the enemy of the Newton or Einstein, that's true. But, while there's only ever going to be a few Newtons or Einsteins, there's (currently) millions of everyday working scientists. So, functionally, this attitude isn't a problem, it's a feature.
But if one has any pretensions of wisdom and education -- and many scientists do -- then a deep and profound skepticism is a necessity. One should respect the immense mysteries of the cosmos and recognize that they dwarf one's puny certainties. Not only because there's so much left to learn, but because there's also very likely much to unlearn. That is the lesson of the history of scientific thought. You don't really need know this to be a good, productive scientist. But you do need to know it if you wish to exist as thinking being in this universe in the manner that the scientific tradition exemplifies.
And, without question, philosophers of science, writers of the history of science, or science-fiction writers constructing an alternate history of science -- for all of these, this comprehension is also a requirement.
Kim Stanley Robison's The Years of Rice and Salt fails in a crucial way for this reason. As he attempts to reconstruct an evolution of empirical thought that mirrors our own, he demonstrates that he doesn't really understand his subject matter. His subject matter is not merely the scientific ideas themselves; but those ideas in the context and tradition of the rational, empiricist tradition and the complexity of factors and ideas that have enabled and nurtured it. He sees the facade, and confuses it for the entire structure and its engineering. That's an egregious error in the context of this book.
Critics will say that that view is overstating or even mostly inventing a woman's fear and actual risk. And while it is rhetorically excessive, it is also fundamentally true.
About the time I reached adulthood, I had embraced an old-style feminism -- the feminism that emphasizes the similarity and equality of men and women. I very much rejected the idea that biological sexual differentiation amounted to significantly different experiences of being a human being for men and women. Today, however, though I am very cautious in my acceptance of anything that smacks of biological determinism, a couple of decades of solid scientific research indicates that in some important, qualitative ways, men and women are different kinds of people.
I can hear people of a more conservative or anti-feminist bent saying "Duh!". But what is really very interesting and revealing is that male conservatives or male anti-feminists who embrace the idea of significant sexual biological determination (as embodied by the traditional roles, which they claim are fully "natural") resist the idea that women's experience in our society is very different than men's. They pay lip service to the presumed difference, but when confronted by claims like the one above, they dismiss them because it is so unlike the world that they themselves experience.
For a male liberal or male feminist who invests a significant amount of effort in critically examining how women experience our society, it is shocking and disturbing to realize how very different it is in some important ways. One of these is the sense of personal safety and how much one is empowered to protect it.
Almost all women make judgments, some automatic, about their risk of attack by a man in different situations several times a day. Except for men in exceptional circumstances, that degree of constant awareness of a threat to personal safety is simply unimaginable. For that reason, we men tend to vastly underestimate both the risk and rate of incidence of sexual violence against women. It's not something we think about, ever. It's not a world we inhabit. And unless they're like me and are a tempting person to disclose an assault to (because I was a rape crisis advocate), the women they know haven't told them about their experiences as victims of sexual violence because it's just something one doesn't talk about. Perhaps they know one woman that was stranger raped, perhaps it's someone they work with or are related to. 2% seems a reasonable number -- that's their experience. But their experience is misleading.
Anyway, I vividly remember that period in my life where I was highly sensitized to noticing the myriad ways in which women experience our society differently than I do. At school, at work, in conversations, with friends -- to a male, the realization that women inhabit a sort of parallel universe that has many very different rules (most of which work against them) comes as quite a shock. It's very depressing. It's not something one wants to comprehend and notice on a daily basis. I watched a very close friend go through this phase, although he had long been a feminist, simply because he was with a woman who opened his eyes to it. He was very disturbed and unhappy for a good while.
At any rate, this is relevant to this thread only in the sense that there are dangers that are too close, too threatening, for us to be willing to overtly acknowlege. Sometimes we invent monsters in the closet specifically to avoid confronting the monster in the living room. That's literally what children often do when they are abused by a parent. We often do the same thing, metaphorically, as adults.
It's not. Just as the dark parking garage is not the most likely place to be raped.
In both molestation and rape, the perps are most often someone that is close or known to the victim. A woman is more likely to be raped by a coworker, or someone she's gone on a date with, than she is by a stranger. Similarly, a child is far more likely to be sexually abused by (in this order) a sibling or a parent, another relative, a trusted family acquaintance or someone that has authority over the children.
What is peculiar about these facts are that the dangers that are most feared, obsessed about, and reported, are those that are least likely! I don't think this is mere coincidence.
Firstly, the idea that an immediate family member might be the primary danger in terms of child sexual abuse is so frightening and discomfitting that it's just something most people can't process. For women, who simply can't avoid working with men, or dating or being social with men; to be in constant fear of assault is also frightening and discomfitting. As a result, people concentrate on the threat that they perceive as being more controllable -- teaching kids to not take candy from strangers and being escorted to your car at night.
The other side of this is that there is, nevertheless, an awareness of just how insecure personal safety really is. There is very real fear, and that fear needs a target. So the less likely sources of danger are emphasized both by default and because they are recieving the fear that is transferred from the more likely sources.
And, of course, there's the base human instinct to identify a villainous "other" as "the enemy".
As someone who worked in Rape Crisis for a year or so, I've always been very, very annoyed at the attention that stranger rape gets in the media and around the water cooler and in the dorm. Yes, it happens. And, yes, it's horrible. But while an entire college campus might be mobilized to be on the defensive from an individual (stranger) rapist, over the same period of time there are probably several times the number of acquaintence rapes that occur. The obsession with stranger rape certainly does come at the expense of awareness of the greater risk of acquaintence rape.
And just so with various fears about child abuse: Internet pedophiles, satanic ritual abuse, day-care center pedophiles -- even the current uproar over the Catholic clergy -- all of these only account for a small portion of the total child sexual abuse that is perpetrated. But they get all the press, all of the outrage, and most of the funding and education, and support services.
Parents, in particular, have the very natural desire to protect their children absolutely. Any risk is seen as significant. This is a natural instinct. But the truth is that to truly be responsible for the safety and well-being of their children -- as they have a moral imperative to be -- parents must make the mental effort to identify and protect their children from the threats they actually face, not the threats that are the most sensational. Being outraged, or extremely fearful, or disgusted, or any other strong emotion doesn't validate a "policy" that insufficiently protects your children.
I tend not to be moderated up. Dunno why. Possibly because I'm relativiely verbose, and people simply aren't reading the posts in the first place.
I've also wondered if there's something about my signature that annoys people.
Oh, well. It only matters a little bit to me in terms of ego; I'm more chagrined just that I took the time to write it and be as clear as possible, but it's not being read.
I was thinking this morning that mod points should be divided into two groups: points that can be applied to 0-2 posts, and points that can be applied to 3-5 posts. Say 75% of the mod points that are given out would be the lower level, thus encouraging people to mod -- and read -- the lower rated posts. My sense is that most of the people that really care are filtering at +2 or above, and so there's something of a glass ceiling at 2. Then, there's not a big distribution within the 3-5 range, because the posts that make through the ceiling mostly get modded up to 5. Just a thought.
I pretty much don't worry about anyone building a bomb that's a threat to the US or whomever. I'm very skeptical of anything less than a top-notch science and engineering facility building an implosion bomb. And u-235 is very rare and prohibitive to produce. I've thought that the bigger danger was someone getting ahold of a working bomb -- one of the ones that were supposed to be decommisioned in the former USSR.
I don't know what to make of the stranglets passing through Earth story. Seems like pretty sparse data to me. It's one of those things that doesn't mean anything until it's confirmed and repeated by several other researchers.
The New Madrid quake was enormous -- it changed the course of the Mississippi river. If the same quake occured today, the damage and loss of life throughout the region would be enormous.
Something similar can be said about Washington/British Columbia coastal areas: they're less likely to experience earthquakes than some of the more active zones, but there's also a possibility for a high magnititude quake. In both cases, it's because the more active areas are active -- and thus releasing strain gradually, instead of all at once in a cataclysmic event.