No, Jon, they couldn't. Those have been proven to be mostly environmental factors. There are a few mental disorders that lead to those, but nothing in the genetic code. Did you do any research on modern psychology before writing this?
But research gets in the way of writing over the top tripe like this.
It's inevitable with Mr. Katz's writing: when he writes about technology, he mangles the concepts. When he writes about history, he often gets his facts totally wrong. And when he writes about psychology he so often misses the point that it is laughable. Hell, Mr. Katz's comments on the United States clearly tells me he has never traveled overseas--it's as if his knowledge of world affairs was spoon fed to him by old 1930's National Geographic magazines.
He's like Rush Limbaugh: so completely wrong he's entertaining.
Is it my imagination, or does Katz's use of language get even more obscure and hard to follow when he has less to say?
As far as I can figure, his points are:
1) The "corporate technological elite" culture of the United States is Evil.
2) The Human Genome Project is a technology that affects human life that is in the hands of the evil U.S.
3) Making a profit is Evil. (One hopes Katz wasn't paid for this bit of tripe, or else it would justify my fears that Katz himself is evil.)
4) Fertility drugs is an example of the havoc the Genome Project may create, because it creates x-tuplet births which we celebrate, even though they're dangerous.
5) Even though the results of the Genome Project may do good, it will only lead to Evil.
6) It will lead to Evil because the HGP will lead to Eugenics.
7) And we all know that only the United States has tinkered with Evil Eugenics.
8) Worse: with Eugenics, we can even breed people who aren't angry, obnoxious and who blindly follow authority.
Most of these points are made with the hubris typical of most hack writers: for example, Katz simply presents the "corporate technological elite" culture of the United States as evil as if it was a Universally Accepted Truth. Putting aside the fact that the United States is not the only country in the world which has things like money, companies and technology, one has to suspect anything that is presented as a Universally Accepted Truth, no matter how often it is repeated.
Because Katz repeats this statement over and over again (while sucking at the corporate tit which pays him for this sort of tripe) doesn't make the statement true. It only makes Katz a poor parrot.
Further, Katz makes statements such as Individualism and "wierdness" could show up in the new human map, along with tendencies towards anger, dissent, and bad skin. By completely whitewashing the entire "nature verses nurture" argument, and by repeating the point that perhaps things like "obnoxiousness" or "wierdness" could be edited out of the Human Genome.
What he's alluding to here, folks, is the fact that perhaps they'll find the "geek" gene and wipe us all out of existance and turn us all into mindless Microsoft drones a'la Gattaca.
Dispite the fact that this point occupies about 1/3rd of Katz's article, it's a load of crap: even if there is a gene which may cause someone to tend to mental illness such as a chemical imbalance in the brain that leads to psychotic behavior, it's pretty clear that normal behaviors (such as anger, obnoxiousness or a tendency towards excellence with computers) are at least as much learned traits as they are genetically ordained. In fact, the most that can be said about the "nature verses nurture" argument is that at most genetics tends paint in broad strokes while nurture tends to fill in the gaps (such as a tendency to write overly pompous, bad articles about the Eugenic tendencies of the U.S. "corporate technological elite" culture).
Though I suppose if there was a gene which controlled bad writing such as this bit of tripe, I don't think I wouldn't cry if it was edited out of the Human Genome...
Frankenstein was right when he told his doctor-creator that it was a sin to create things one doesn't take any responsibility for.
Frankenstein was the name of the Doctor. Frankenstein's monster was the name of the Doctor's creation.
It's also important to remember that Frankenstein's monster was as much a parabole about being a misfit in a cold and uncomprehending world than anything else: created by a creator who didn't care, tossed to a world who didn't understand full of villagers who, because Frankenstein's monster was different, sought to destroy him. Katz, so wrapped up in the technology aspects of the story of Frankenstein, completely missed the point.
Typical.
Had Katz understood the story rather than resorting to seeing the video clips of the parody made with Abbot and Castello, would have realized that we (geeks) are all Frankenstein's monster: creations of a culture who doesn't care, sought to be destroyed by villagers who don't understand.
I don't get you people. You complain about Windows being hard to program half the time, and the other half you complain about them making new languages that will make Windows development easier!
Windows is hard to program because the model Microsoft used for the Windows API sucks really hard. Hiding the whole thing in a new language which sits on top of an object-oriented abstraction of a bad API model doesn't make things easier--it makes things more convoluted.
Not to mention making it harder to port core functionality from one platform to another without having to rewrite the whole thing from scratch...
Considering that Cuba, the most US-hating counry in the world, has an US military base on its territory, I don't think that it can be considering as "not minding" American military bases. More likely treating US as "ridiculously overpowered character" in world politics.
The base at Quantanimo was established when Cuba was an ally of the US. We have a lease on the land where the base sits, paid with a token amount of money. When the current regime lead by Castro overthrew the previous regime, Castro decided to leave our base alone, and has refused to cash the checks we send the Castro goverment in lease payments as a form of protest.
Of course we're not giving up the base--after Castro tried to put nuclear warheads pointed at the US east coast on his territory, we sort of have a very strong interest in making sure Castro doesn't repeat that fairly serious mistake that almost plunged us into a nuclear war with the Soviets back in the 60's.
Better to invade a small country than to kill billions.
However, our relations with Cuba is the exception to the rule. Most of the places where the United States has a base, the host country has desired to have our base be there--in part because they see the presence of a US base as a stabalizing force in the region, and in part because they see us as helping foot part of the hosting country's defense bill.
Money talks in international relations.
Of course the United States is fairly well hated by most of the world--but that's in part because we tend to staff our overseas bases with testosterone-laden 19 year olds who have no respect for anything except their own penis, who then take R&R where they are stationed. And in part because of the fact that because it's so expensive for us Americans to go to a foreign country that is not Canada or Mexico, the people who do make the journey to Europe tend to be wealthy snobs.
And the best way to be universally hated is to have tourists who make the French seem exceedingly reasonable and respectful in comparason.
The Central Intelligence Agency's charter is to "spy" on foreign nations and report back their findings.
Which begs a question that no-one here seems to be asking, which is "what is spying?"
In the 40's and 50's, long before the Internet and global reporting by media outlets, when even a simple road map of the highways in the Soviet Union were classified, "spying" was basically trying to go out and get an accurate picture of events in the world. It may sound odd to us, but much of that "spying" included things like making accurate road maps and getting an accurate report of events such as uprisings, troup movements, and to profile reasonably accurate psychological profiles of foreign world leaders so that we could try to second guess what these leaders would do. All stuff which we pretty much take forgranted thanks to CNN and the Internet.
By the way, I know about the road maps because my uncle's job in the 50's was to take U-2 pictures and produce accurate road maps of the Soviet Union. And yes, the very thing that we Americans take forgranted--road maps--were classified as a Soviet state secret.
Today's world is much different than the paranoid world of the cold war. With Moscow relying on tourism, maps are all over the place on the Internet. CNN's reach throughout the world is greater than the CIA in terms of reporting foreign events--why have a report from some mole suggesting troup movement when you can have live video from reporters on the field? And as far as figuring out the psychological profile of world leaders, which is more useful: second-hand guessing from people who may have never met a world leader, or an on-camera interview from a reporter from ABC News where they flat out ask the guy what he's thinking?
I've heard that today, many analysts for the CIA have CNN turned on in the background where they work. That's because more likely than not, CNN will scoop CIA's field spooks in reporting events in the field.
Obviously there are areas where the CIA's field reporting staff (or "spys") are useful: in countries who clamp down on the reporting of information (China, Libya, North Korea). And there is information that cannot be gathered by CNN that our government still needs (such as troup readiness and assessment of the current state of technology, as well as an assessment of what our allies and our enemies may be withholding from us). But by and large, the Internet, media news outlets such as CNN and the desire of closed countries such as China to open themselves to tourism will eventually make most of the spying the CIA performed in the 50's and 60's obsolete.
Given this strange behavior to this story, I have to ask. Is it "information wants to be free, except when lives are at stake"? Is it "information wants to be free, especially since beer isn't free"? Is it "information wants to be free, because I can't afford to pay programmers"? Or is it "information wants to be free, because Courtney Love teaches us how we gotta stick it to the man"?
I stuck a camera in your bedroom when you weren't suspecting it, and I vidcap'ed your masturbation technique. Yeah, I know--I shouldn't have tresspassed. And I'll own up to that part. But now I've digitized all this information--your hand movements, the naughty pictures you look at, the beastiality...
Digitized video images is also information. And information should be free, regardless of what that information is, right? Expect my anonymous posts to be put up on alt.binaries.pictures.erotica.masturbation for all to see.
Don't worry--there was no camera. And there was no digitized video. But the above is ment to illustrate a point, which is that there is a balance point where information should and should not be free. Sometimes one's privacy is more important than the free flow of information about a person--or are you selectively reading only the articles on Linux and skipping the ones on Doubleclick?
What we're dealing with here is an example of the latter: the desire to preserve one's privacy for something they did 30 years ago (and which could get them killed) is greater than the need for the free flow of abstract, impersonal scientific or historical information. While the consequences are greater (they're getting killed is probably worse than the imbarasment you would feel if vidcaps of your masturbation made it on the alt.sex groups), the principle is the same: the need for privacy must outweigh the need for the free flow of information.
They are building public transportation systems and people use them but not quick enough.
Well, the problem with L.A.'s transportation infrastructure is:
a) We are a decentralized metropolitan area of tens of millions of people, with no fixed transportation patterns. This makes mass public transit (light rail, subways) virtually impossible because there is no fixed pattern. And most mass transit systems rely on reliable transportation patterns (such as in Boston, where the system is outbound to downtown in the morning and downtown to outbound in the evening). We also have one of the lowest population densities of any similarly sized metropolitan area, meaning there is a lot more square miles that would have to be brought in range of a subway stop, either via light mass transit (busses) or through "park and drive" systems (putting huge car parking lots next to various subway stops).
b) The Los Angeles area is built on geographically unstable stuff that requires a lot of engineering to tunnel through. That is, most of the ground here is crumbly, in sharp contrast with Manhattan, which is basically one large volcanic rock plug and is much easier to bore through. Further, we are a major earthquake zone: we're just all biding our time until the next 7.5 to 8 earthquake. Making a subway tunnel bored through crumbly rock survive an 8 is a much bigger problem than making a subway tunnel bored through solid volcanic rock survive cars driving overhead.
c) Because of the higher cost of tunneling subways, most of the tens of billions that has been available to the city of Los Angeles has gone into building the subways, and not into expanding the capacity of the freeways. Thus, with the exception of the construction of the Imperial Freeway to replace the Imperial Highway route into LAX, and the construction of the carpool lanes on the Harbor Freeway south of downtown Los Angeles (adding 4 lanes of carpool a hundred feet in the air above the existing 10 lane freeway below), very little expansion or improvements have been made to our freeway system since the 80's, when there were a few million fewer people living here.
d) The subways were built on the theory of "if you build a subway stop here, people will relocate to use the subway." That is, the theory was that by having access to a mass transit stop, people would consider the value of homes within walking distance to that stop, and offices within walking distance, to be more valuable. However, these stops were built along existing trasit corradors (read: freeways), and so the theory was that if there is more noisy infrastructure, people would consider that noisy infrastructure better, and so would pay more to give up privacy, a sense of isolation, and to live in an area with more noise and more (foot/car) traffic.
Yeah, right.
When I first heard about the plan to build a subway system in L.A., I wanted to bitch-slap a few people on the L.A. city council. Or at least force them to relocate to New York for a few years...
America was founded by the actions of tax protestors. The American people have a looooong history of resisting taxation. Can you imagine what we'd be paying if it were otherwise?
Actually, America was founded on the principle of revolting against "taxation without representation." That is, America was founded on the principle that the colonists were pissed off because they saw their tax dollars going off into the black-hole of Great Britain, and not a dime was going into stuff that was important back home.
This is identical to the situation Americans grumble about now: they will gladly vote themselves a tax increase if they know where the money is going. They will fight tooth and nail if they think the tax money is being waisted.
"Encourage savings" or "repress consumption", the effect is the same: people buy less stuff. And when people buy less stuff, there is less demand for stuff.
When there is less demand for stuff, companies make less so they don't have to warehouse stuff no-one wants. They then lay people off. Prices also drop in order to clear out the stuff that is just sitting around.
And what do economists call a cycle where there is both a productivity slowdown and falling prices in a sector? A depressionary cycle.
Likewise, if there is more money available for investments, that'd be good, right? But if companies are in a depressionary cycle, they won't need as much money from investments to pay for production of goods no-one wants. Given that there would be grater investment money and less demand for that money, that means the amount someone would be willing to pay for investment money would go down. (Supply and demand, right?)
That means the amount of returns you would get on your investment dollar would go down.
Overall, the whole thing would work itself out, but with a smaller economic engine than we have now. That is, it would depress our overall GDP by a small amount.
Furthermore, given the fact that the middle class would wind up sharing the greater part of the tax burden (because any new national sales tax would have to be revenue neutral, and the middle class consume more as a percentage of their income than the rich, and so would pay more of their overall income in sales tax than the rich), the overall effect of this would be that the middle class would be worse off both in terms of the rate of return on their investments and on what they are able to purchase with their dollar.
Look at the sites I referenced previously. They address all of these problems. I'll just hit some of the highlights.
Been there, done that, bought the t-shirt.
The fundamental problem with all of these sites and other proponents of replacing income tax with a VAT or a national sales tax (NST) is that they assume that consumption is a constant against income. That is, for such a tax to be properly progressive, they assume that consumption is a fixed percentage of the income someone makes, (say) around 90%.
But in the real world, the "rich" are able to save more than the middle class, and thus would be able to enjoy a larger percentage of their income "tax free."
Because of this, if the NST was 23%, and a typical middle class family spends 70% of it's income on taxable consumables, while a rich family spends more like 50% on taxable consumables (I'm assuming things like rent are not taxed), then the middle class family is actually paying 16.1%, while the rich family is actually paying 11.5% of overall income.
One way of thinking of an NST is to think of it as allowing savings and certain forms of spending (such as paying rent) as tax-deductable activities. That is, we could gauge the effect of an NST by making it rougly equivalent of the existing income tax system by beefing up the schedule A deductions to include all activities which are not consumption-oriented: that is, allow people to deduct savings (or rather, by treating all savings as an IRA without an early withdrawl penalty), and to allow them to deduct those services which are not taxed, such as paying rent or morgage.
If we do this, we realize that as an NST has a much smaller percentage of one's overall income being taxed, in order to make up for the lost tax income (as we both know that any change in the tax code will be revenue neutral), we will have to crank the NST to be much higher than the 16-25% rate that is often quoted by NST advocates. (The only reason why a VAT of around 23-25% would work is because a VAT tax is added every time goods exchange hands, even companies paying for raw materials pay a VAT tax. Thus, goods wind up getting taxed several times through the production cycle. This double, triple, or quadruple taxation makes the overall amount collected by the government greater than the VAT rate suggests.)
Is it any wonder, given the fact that rich people are able to save more than middle class people, that some of the biggest supporters of a NST are the wealthy? Personally, having made it out of the middle class vortex, a NST would save me thousands in taxes. However, there is no such thing as a free lunch--for every dime I don't pay in taxes, someone else has to make that dime up.
And guess who that will be? The guy paying 16.1% of his overall income? Or the guy paying 11.5%?
First, that's why Pensylvania and other states who levy such sales taxes are hoping no-one takes them to the supreme court--because the legal justifiation for such taxes is questionable at best. (They may be able to justify it by calling it a "uniform consumption tax"; that is, a tax which is equally levied on it's citizens for consumption--which they may try to argue is not an "import tax" as it is "uniform" and taxed against it's citizens and not against "imports.")
Second, that's why all eyes are on Congress to pass a nation-wide uniform Internet tax, and all eyes are on Congress to give the states consent to levy additional Internet taxes.
Taxes have one major benefit for the people: They fund public projects. Public projects are good, they are things like roads, schools, libraries, busses etc. Without taxes you don't get these things.
If you poll most Americans (or read existing polls which have been done on this subject), you'll find that most Americans are willing to pay taxes if they know the money will be spent on worthwile public projects. That is, they're willing to pay more in taxes if they know the money is going to fund schools or libraries or whatever. Recently, in Fresno (for example), the voters overwhelmingly voted themselves a tax increase in the form of the "Arts to Zoo" proposal which would increase funding for libraries, museums, the local Fresno Zoo, and other similar projects--and pay for them in an increase in the local sales tax levy.
The problem that most Americans have with taxes is that they appear to believe that the majority of taxes is being "wasted" on "pork-barrel" projects and on paying bureaucrats who are "out of touch" or are "unresponsive" or "do not care." To support this assertion, we are constantly bombarded with reports of a $3000 toilet seat or an 8-lane highway built in the middle of nowhere.
The other problem that most Americans have with taxes is the belief that taxes are being assessed "unfairly"--that is, they believe that the rich are somehow not being forced to share their fair load, and that the middle class is having it socked to them. And in a sense, if you count Social Security (where 15% of your income up to around $70K or so goes to social security, but each dollar you make above that cut-off is only taxed at 2%), then there is a middle-class "vortex" where the combined income and social security taxes take a greater percentage of your income than those who are rich and paying the top income bracket.
If we could somehow eliminate these two problems, then Americans wouldn't see taxes as a four-letter word.
Oh, and in Los Angeles, traffic is worse than it is in Seattle: yesterday, my drive at 6:00 in the morning (when traffic is supposed to be "light") to the LAX area from Glendale (about 30 miles) took me about an hour and three-quarters. The reason for this, though, is that the city of Los Angeles and the State of California, instead of spending money to widen the freeways, spent several tens billion dollars on a subway and light-rail project which only has a maximum capacity of a hundred-thousand or so per day, and has a fixed commute pattern (from the outerlying communities to downtown Los Angeles) which runs counter to the decentralized commute patterns that are normally used by Angelinos.
This is a perfect example of why Americans have problems with paying taxes: because no effort was made to increase the capacity of the freeways here, average traffic speeds during rush-hour traffic is now down below 17MPH (yes, seventeen miles per hour), yet even if the entire LA metropolitan area could rearrange itself to maximize use of our new multi-billion dollar subway system, we'd perhaps reduce traffic by a couple of percentage points.
I'd rather have taken the money used to pay for the art installations around the Hollywood subway stop and used it to help support the LA county museum of art. But no-one asked me...
As to regressivity, there are two ways to eliminate that. One can either exempt certain items from the tax, which is a bad idea because it sets a precedent for loopholes and exceptions, and is horrendously complicated to administer. The better way is to provide a rebate to everyone, based on family size instead of income, that refunds the amount of tax paid on subsistence-level spending. The NRST proposals do this latter approach, and even pay the rebate in advance. As such, a family living at the poverty line pays, in effect, no taxes yet still has a 23% tax rate at the register.
The problem with this is that if it's coupled with a reduction or elimination of income tax, will solidly nail the middle class. Think about it: the poor will get a rebate, so they will only pay a small percentage of their taxes (or, for the poorest, perhaps even get a "refund" that is greater than what they paid in various VAT or sales taxes). The rich who save more than they consume will pay a small percentage of their income in taxes--as a smaller percentage of their income goes to consumption. Further, as more of their money (perctange-wise) is going into savings and investment instruments, their ability to make even more money through returns on their investments is virtually assured. Those who will pay this tax (and thus, shoulder the majority of the burden, at least percentage-wise) will be the middle class.
Another threat of this tax is that it will repress consumption. While on the one hand that may seem like a good idea (as anything that reduces the amount of consumer goods we consume will help alleviate the pressure on various resources used to make those goods), this will have a "slow-down" affect on our economy, and may push various sectors of the economy into a depressionary cycle.
Any new tax structure (or for that matter, any tinkering we do to the existing tax structure) needs to address the twin problems of alleviating the middle-class "vortex" which causes the middle-class to bear the greatest tax load (percentage-wise), and to make sure that sectors of our economy aren't pushed into a depression.
Unfortunately, most VAT or national sales tax proposals I've seen go by will make both problems substantially worse.
Having been sucked into the wonderful world of eCommerce, I've been spending a lot of time thinking about the very same question. It seems to me that when the shakeout takes place, we will probably have the following sites left:
1) Goodwill sites. Those are sites which are run at a loss by a company who is interested in some form of good will. In this category I would lump sites like/., the developer sites at Apple and Microsoft, and many sites set up and run by open source advocates who aren't interested in making money, but are instead interested in the good will running such a site generates.
2) Service sites. These are sites which provide a time-saving service or provides a service which would otherwise not be available by going to the local mall or grocery store. In this category I also lump merchant sites: as the fascination of merchant sites has declined, all that is left is the service of obtaining difficult to find or difficult to obtain merchandise, usually for a premium. In this category I would include sites such as Amazon, Fatbrain, and HomeGrocer. (Amazon and Fatbrain provides the service of allowing us to quickly find otherwise impossible to find books such as programming or technical books--but at a price that is, in the end, about a buck or two more than if you could have bought the book at the local bookstore. HomeGrocer provides the service of home grocery delivery--but at a price that is, in the end, about 5% greater than buying the groceries at the local grocery store. HomeGrocer is a reasonable example of this because, as you order more and more products, a "favorites" list is generated that allows you to quickly, in about 5 minutes or so, reorder those same products--a typical grocery shopping pattern. So the service HomeGrocer provides is delivery and time savings.)
If you are a merchant site and you are not providing a valuable service beyond shipping crap to someone, or you're the on-line version of your regular catalog (such as Victoria's Secret's on-line web site is simply a browsable version of their catalog), IMHO you're doomed to failure.
On the other hand, if you do provide a valuable service people are willing to pay for, you'll do well just as long as you remember the "three year rule." The three year rule, which everyone in this "modern, faster than the speed of light web world" where time appears to be measured in negative dog years, is that no matter how good your business is, it will take three years to establish a solid clientel. For some reason or another, perhaps because they were blinded by the shiny bobbles of web technology, otherwise intelligent businessmen thought they could start a web commerce site and establish clientel in 2 or 3 months--and that just does not happen. It takes three years to establish a business, no matter how good you are, if only because it takes three years for people to get used to using your service. That most web companies don't last half that long speaks tons about the short-sightedness of the people who run those companies.
3) Closed-network B2B sites which in an earlier era would have been done using a mainframe coded in COBOL and a bunch of VT100 terminals. I'm currently working on such a site. The site is structured as an eCommerce web site, but from the business model perspective, all we're doing is bringing out the business's existing database system to the web in a password-protected web site which permits their partner companies to connect and order product.
Of course the one group of people who will make money in the future of eCommerce is the programmers and software tool developers who are helping to build all this stuff. Just so long as you negotiate a good contract that doesn't screw you up-front so you can be screwed when the company founder's hair-brained idea doesn't generate a multi-million dollar IPO.
Value is a relative thing, and just because you hold value in something whether it be tangible or not, does not mean I hold that same value for it. And yes, it would be arrogant of you to assume that it does. What's more, I cannot be held responsible for your time and efforts, unless I have had some direct impact on them, but when you spend your time to write a song, that I did not ask you to write, did not want you to write, and did not enjoy when you were finished writing, I do not feel compelled to reimburse you for your time. It was a choice that you have made to spend doing as you wished, and any loss of income, or inability to support your family that results from such actions, are your responsibility, not mine.
You know, one of the things I keep forgetting in interacting with other people is that I take the concept of risk forgranted: that is, I simply assume that as all things have a certain degree of risk associated with it, and I forget that people may tend to read my words and interpret them as an absolute statement rather than as a risk assessment.
Meaning that I took it forgranted that one of the risks involved is that different people may value things differently. Me, I think Metallica sucks. Not because of the Napster thing--I just think their music sucks really hard. And so the value of having 5 megabytes free on my hard disk is greater than the value of having that 5 megabytes filled with a pirated copy of one of their songs. On the other hand, I happen to love Journey--something which my roommates in college thought was wierd beyond belief.
Value is a relative thing, and obviously when an artist uses time that he could have otherwise spent making money flipping hamburgers writing a song, he's taking the risk that the reward of writing the song will be greater than the monetary reward he would have gotten flipping hamburgers. Personally, I'd like to see an environment where that artist has the opportunity to then share that song in a way which gives him the opportunity to make money in return--but note that I said "opportunity."
If he's a Metallica wannabe, I ain't giving him a red cent.:-)
Actually, he admits a natural right to possessions, but says that ownership is a right created by society: "By an universal law, indeed, whatever, whether fixed or movable, belongs to all men equally and in common, is the property for the moment of him who occupies it; but when he relinquishes the occupation, the property goes with it." A common view since Grotius, I think, & maybe the scholastics before him.
But this concept of "possession" is limited to whatever you happen to be holding in your hand, wearing on your body, or sitting on at the moment. The moment you open your hand, take the clothes off your body, or stand up, you no longer possess that thing.
This is less of a "natural right" than it is a simple observation that two people cannot wear the same shirt or eat the same bite of banana or drink the same gulp of water.
I think that it was established Christian doctrine that women had souls long before Jefferson's time, indeed right from the start. But please feel free to tell me otherwise.
Unfortunately I don't have my references on this topic in front of me. However, as I recall (sans references to back me up), it was long debated up until fairly recently who had (and who did not have) souls--of course, in our modern interpretation, we even think that dogs and cats have souls. But as recently as in Jefferson's time, the debate as to if women, Indians, and people of color had souls carried on.
As I don't have anything to back this up at the moment (and I'm too lazy to dig through the pile in the basement), take it with a grain of salt.
Do you mean to imply that the simple act of creating music at personal cost merits an entitlement to compensation?
Actually, I'm only implying that the simple act of creating music at personal cost entitles the creator the opportunity to be compensated for his/her effort. Opportunities imply risk: sometimes the musician would have been better off investing his time and energy flipping hamburgers at McDonalds. But by no means does investing time and effort into an enterprise, be it making music, writing software, or building houses on speculation should entitle the person taking that risk to a minimal reward.
As I've said a million times before, risk is inherent to being an artist,...
I fully agree. My original comment, by the way, was in response to what appeared to be a suggestion that as it is potentially cheap and easy to copy ideas (such as music), that makes the inherent value of that idea (or musical composition) essentially zero. And that's nonsense.
In other words, if I write a song, and it is recorded, I no longer have control over the spread of said song, and my song must stand on it's own value. If people like my song, and they like it a lot, then those people have the choice to make payment to me, not necessarily for the song itself, but as an encouragement to produce more songs.
No. Re-read what Jefferson said:
Society may give an exclusive right to the profits arising from [ideas], as an encouragement to men to pursue ideas which may produce utility,...
This means society may give you the right to sell your song, and have people to buy your song (and thus have you profit from it) as an encouragement to you to write more songs. Of course people do not have to buy your song--but society may give you the exclusive right to profit: that is, society may give you the right to force other people not to sell your song, or otherwise distribute that song in a manner which prevents you from profiting from it. That is, Jefferson is describing the state of affairs that we currently "enjoy" today.
However, it would be arrogant of me to assume that anything is owed me.
No. What Jefferson is saying is that "rights" are things that arise out of a social compact: that your "inherent" right to possessions such as owning land or owning your clothes, or your right to profit exclusively from ideas you create (such as writings, music, inventions, etc) doesn't exist. "Rights" as such arise because we as a society agree to give eachother certain rights, such as the right to property (through enforcement of laws preventing theft) or rights to "intellectual property" (through enforcement of laws that prevent IP piracy). Other rights arise similarly: your right to life, for example, is only as good as our society's acknowledgement of laws against murder.
Just because these rights are man-made and not God-given or inherent to nature doesn't mean you're arrogant in thinking that you should enjoy them--any more than you should feel arrogant in thinking that you have the right not to have some mad-man come over to your place with a baseball bat and turn your skull into red-colored tapioca pudding.
How can I charge a price for something that no longer costs me anything? And how do I determine a price to charge another man for something that holds no value to him until it is given to him, especially when it may be of no value?
A thing has no value if it costs nothing, either in time, space, or material goods to reproduce. Unfortunately, even ideas take some time, and if they are recorded, take space and material goods to reproduce. Further, any idea of merit probably took a master artist a non-trivial amount of time to create. Perhaps some artists feel the reward of creation is it's own payment--but most people live in the real world, and the time it took them to create their idea was time they don't have to spend to make money to put food on their table or a roof over their head.
I'm always fascinated when people quote our Founding Fathers in order to justify things like erasing IP laws. Not only for the obvious reason that these people lived in a different time with different values--in a world where slavery was acceptable to many, where women were considered not to have an immortal soul and thus were no more spiritually valuable than a small dog, and in a world where only the landed arristocracy were given the vote.
But also because our Founding Fathers had completely different ideas about what should--and should not--be included with our Federal Government. And it wasn't until around the early 1800's when the actual shape and form of our Federal Government was really established--it took almost a couple of generations for people to "get it right", so to speak. (I'm refering to a number of Supreme Court decisions which were used to "fine tune" the accepted interpretation of the Constitution.)
While it is instructive to quote Jefferson, we're talking about a generation of people who were still trying to figure out if the Federal Government should be exclusively responsible for issuing currency, for heaven's sake! If they were still debating the idea of a central currency system (which wasn't even brought into being in it's current form until the early part of this century), then what makes you think their ideas about intellectual property rights would be any better formulated?
How ironic that young gamers have sensed for years (the original Shadowrunner rules were published in l989) what journalists and politicians still keep missing -- that life for individuals gets rougher by the year here in the Corporate Republic.
How does it get rougher, exactly?
That a handful of megacorporations are becoming powerful beyond anyone's control.
You mean like the aformentioned Shell Oil and United Fruit? You're right: when a megacorporation such as C&H Holdings can force the overthrow of the legitimate monarchy of Hawai'i and force it's annexation into a United States which is predominately being controlled by a handfull of megacorporations who promise to restore prosperity after a damaging Civil War forced unemployment into the 30% range--oh, wait: that was last centry. Sorry. We're supposed to be talking about this century...
That individualism is not only growing more difficult, but one day soon may actually be dangerous.
I just love it how you can make a sweeping generalization unbacked by any evidence and present it as a defacto "truth." Repeat this often enough and people presume that this is simply The Truth, without realizing the fact that you never backed up this assertion at any point in your career.
That this creeping reality has been a role-playing exercise for brainy kids for more than a decade is an amazing thing.
I don't think I need to point out that this sort of fiction (extrapolating a future as a dysfunctional projection of the present) isn't anything new. Others have already pointed out a number of examples, to which I will add "1984" and "Animal Farm".
A lot of the people reading this are already Shadowrunners, or are about to be. For Corporate Republic renegades, life is increasingly an adventure.
Well DUH! It's a bloody game! Do you think Mad Max would have been as interesting a movie if the characters were transplanted to the Los Angeles of today, where instead of being something to fight to the death over, gas was simply $1.69/gallon? Do you think Escape from New York would have been as interesting a movie if it were placed in today's New York, where "escape" means coming up with correct change at the toll booth?
Any form of entertainment is going to extrapolate the present, twist it in some unexpected way (Gataca's DNA tests, 1984's omnipresent two-way televisions and thought crimes), throw in an element which makes it possible to have some fun (how can a society which made individuality a crime have such an inept police force?) and presents it as entertainment.
Hell, this formula is so popular that it even shows up in right-wing stuff like the Turner Diaries--which makes the bad guys the government (instead of corporations) and anyone who doesn't recognize the inherent superiority of white people (instead of cyberpunks). Yes, this may be an abhorent example to some folks here, but for God's sake, paranoid fantasies are paranoid fantasies, no matter who are the good guys and who are the bad guys.
The turning point for the modern real-world corporatism came in the l980s, when government decided to de-regulate many industries at almost precisely the same time as new marketing strategies and technologies were exploding, arming business with the ability to mass-market, monopolize and globalize.
Bwwaaah ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha! Katz, are you really so ignorant of history that your memory doesn't go back to before the Reagan administration?
The "modern" corporation was born hundreds of years ago, when Kings would give exclusive license to partnerships of merchantile agents who would go out and engage in business on behalf of the crown. Britain's expansion into India, Spain's expansion into the New World, and just about everyone's expansion into China in the last few centuries were driven by corporations who were thoroughly in bed with the governments who gave them a license to exist. Even the United States played along with the annexation of Hawai'i, or our fiddling around with the internal politics of many Latin American countries.
The only reason why megacorporations were not influential during the Dark Ages was because the fudal dictatorships who actually repressed 95% of the population and forced them into poverty and early death to support the requirements of the local fudal lord (often little more than a bully with a club) were suspictious of anything that couldn't be forced to toil in the fields for food.
What's really remarkable thing is that Shadowrun was written before Microsoft sotware was in more than 90 percent of the world's personal computers, before five companies owned virtually all the radio stations in America, before AOL/Time-Warner became the largest information entity in history, and before the Justice Department blithely approved AT&T's acquisition of the MediaOne Group, giving AT&T control of more than a third of the nation's cable networks for television, high-speed Net access and online telephone service.
But it was written after other great examples such as Shell Oil, railroad barons and the Hearst family's control of most newspapers across the country. (You remember Hearst's comment about the Spanish-American war? "You furnish the pictures and I'll furnish the war.")
You don't need high-speed net access to manipulate the dailies. Just a telegraph and a will to use it. And William Randolph Hearst had both. The land that currently houses the Hearst castle was stolen from my Salinan Indian ancestors in a deal that Hearst made with the government: throw in the support of his local papers, and promise to partition the land and hand half of it off to the Hunter Liggot military reservation, and the government will rubber stamp a land deal dispite competiting interests.
Megacorporations aren't anything new either: a term originally coined for companies who have interlocking directorships with overseas counterparts, these things have been around long before Shell. And their influence on the government has been around just as long as feudal lords realized the value of a gold coin.
The idea of the Shadowrunner in such a universe almost perfectly captures the worsening plight of the individual in our own era, when family farmers, small businesspeople, software designers, individuals of all sorts are losing opportunity to tell their own stories, shape their own lives and economic futures.
In an era where more than 70% of all people working in the United States are employed by small businesses employing 50 or fewer people, where a web site can be set up on a number of systems for $50/month if you don't want to have banner ads pastered all over your work, where individual purchasers are heavily influencing the design and delivery of products (see "Clue Train"), individuality is "losing?"
Small farmers are getting the shaft for two reasons. First, they are losing out to larger corporate farmers because larger corporate farmers are able to diversify the crops they plant and thus are able to reduce the risk when the price of one of those crops falls through the floor. Second, they are losing out to large corporate farmers because the vast majority of the population in the United States is simply unwilling to pay $2.00 for an apple or $1.50 for an orange. That is, price pressure to keep food incredibly cheap is driving small farmers out of business, because they simply cannot afford to keep up with the corporate farmers.
It's the same rational which keeps overseas sweat shops in business making cheap clothing for people in the United States: because we are unwilling to pay $30 for a $4 white t-shirt, and we are unwilling to pay $150 for a $30 pair of pants. So long as we are unwilling to pay the higher wages demanded by non-sweat shop factories, so long as we are unwilling to pay higher food costs needed by smaller farmers to allow them to continue to operate, we will continue to have cheap clothing and cheap food--and out of work family farmers and overseas sweat shops.
There are so many things wrong with Katz's posting which shows his lack of comprehension of politics, economics, history and culture that is is beyond me why he continues to post this sort of ignorant drivel.
Shadowrunner may be a fun game. But as a reflection of the current trends of our society, it isn't exactly groundbreaking. Nor is it accurate. And there are much better examples of the sort of "megacorporationism" from the last century than there is in this century.
You're not the only exception. Occassionally I may play "Dungeon Keeper", but that's when I'm blowing off some steam. I'm more likely to go bikeriding or take an Aikido class than play computer games--and frankly, first person shooters give me a headache.
Well, the answer to the "clack" question is pretty simple. When I learned to type in high school in the early 80's, our school only had mechanical typewriters. They make this wonderful "clack"ing sound when you type. So it's easy to talk about someone "clacking away", if your mind hasn't moved beyond the days of an old Underwood typewriter.
How do I know that Katz's mindset is stuck in the mechanical typewriter days, and that he probably has little (if any) clue about computers? Besides the obvious clue that he thinks "clacking away at a web log" is a productive thing to do, or the other obvious clue that he thinks that a web log and a message system are similar, or that people playing games is somehow equivalent to creating games is the way he types 1999.
He types it 'l999'. As in lower-case "L", 999.
Why? Because in order to save a little bit on the mechanical movements, old mechanical typewriters do not have a '1' key. Instead, people who learn on a mechanical typewriter are taught to use a lower-case "L" in place of the number "1" when typing in numbers. Some of us who have used computers know there is a difference between a "1" and an "l", especially while programming, and have moved beyond using a 'l' for a '1'. Especially younger folks like myself, who only used a mechanical typewriter for the first year of our typing classes, and moved to computers as quickly as we could.
But then, there are those who have remained locked in the dark ages. Whose ingrained habits and ingrained thinking patterns betray themselves.
I'm still trying to figure out how playing games is a form of literary expression...
The experiments I was refering to were conducted in the mid 80's, while I was there at 'Tech. Most of the experiments tended to be multiple two-player senarios, or on occassion three-player senarios, played out repeatedly. Mostly game theory stuff, not the computer-tallied economic models in the web site you provided.
Actually there are some exciting results coming out of Caltech's economics studies in the last few years on the macroeconomic front. On the microeconomic front, though, that's mostly game theory--and that's what I was refering to, mostly.
One interesting result I recall seeing in a seminar I dropped into a few years ago was a study of the market. And basically they were saying at the time that the stock market boils down to chaos theory--that it's extremely chaotic, owing to the speculative nature of the market.
However, my original comment was in responce to an explanation of utility functions, which are basically the class of optimal solutions to N-player games--the very stuff the Caltech folks realized recently is all fubared.
(Forgive me if I screwed up some of my explanations of this stuff--it's been years since I took an economics class or did anything related to game theory.)
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No, Jon, they couldn't. Those have been proven to be mostly environmental factors. There are a few mental disorders that lead to those, but nothing in the genetic code. Did you do any research on modern psychology before writing this?
But research gets in the way of writing over the top tripe like this.
It's inevitable with Mr. Katz's writing: when he writes about technology, he mangles the concepts. When he writes about history, he often gets his facts totally wrong. And when he writes about psychology he so often misses the point that it is laughable. Hell, Mr. Katz's comments on the United States clearly tells me he has never traveled overseas--it's as if his knowledge of world affairs was spoon fed to him by old 1930's National Geographic magazines.
He's like Rush Limbaugh: so completely wrong he's entertaining.
As far as I can figure, his points are:
Most of these points are made with the hubris typical of most hack writers: for example, Katz simply presents the "corporate technological elite" culture of the United States as evil as if it was a Universally Accepted Truth. Putting aside the fact that the United States is not the only country in the world which has things like money, companies and technology, one has to suspect anything that is presented as a Universally Accepted Truth, no matter how often it is repeated.
Because Katz repeats this statement over and over again (while sucking at the corporate tit which pays him for this sort of tripe) doesn't make the statement true. It only makes Katz a poor parrot.
Further, Katz makes statements such as Individualism and "wierdness" could show up in the new human map, along with tendencies towards anger, dissent, and bad skin. By completely whitewashing the entire "nature verses nurture" argument, and by repeating the point that perhaps things like "obnoxiousness" or "wierdness" could be edited out of the Human Genome.
What he's alluding to here, folks, is the fact that perhaps they'll find the "geek" gene and wipe us all out of existance and turn us all into mindless Microsoft drones a'la Gattaca.
Dispite the fact that this point occupies about 1/3rd of Katz's article, it's a load of crap: even if there is a gene which may cause someone to tend to mental illness such as a chemical imbalance in the brain that leads to psychotic behavior, it's pretty clear that normal behaviors (such as anger, obnoxiousness or a tendency towards excellence with computers) are at least as much learned traits as they are genetically ordained. In fact, the most that can be said about the "nature verses nurture" argument is that at most genetics tends paint in broad strokes while nurture tends to fill in the gaps (such as a tendency to write overly pompous, bad articles about the Eugenic tendencies of the U.S. "corporate technological elite" culture).
Though I suppose if there was a gene which controlled bad writing such as this bit of tripe, I don't think I wouldn't cry if it was edited out of the Human Genome...
Quick nitpick:
Frankenstein was right when he told his doctor-creator that it was a sin to create things one doesn't take any responsibility for.
Frankenstein was the name of the Doctor. Frankenstein's monster was the name of the Doctor's creation.
It's also important to remember that Frankenstein's monster was as much a parabole about being a misfit in a cold and uncomprehending world than anything else: created by a creator who didn't care, tossed to a world who didn't understand full of villagers who, because Frankenstein's monster was different, sought to destroy him. Katz, so wrapped up in the technology aspects of the story of Frankenstein, completely missed the point.
Typical.
Had Katz understood the story rather than resorting to seeing the video clips of the parody made with Abbot and Castello, would have realized that we (geeks) are all Frankenstein's monster: creations of a culture who doesn't care, sought to be destroyed by villagers who don't understand.
I don't get you people. You complain about Windows being hard to program half the time, and the other half you complain about them making new languages that will make Windows development easier!
Windows is hard to program because the model Microsoft used for the Windows API sucks really hard. Hiding the whole thing in a new language which sits on top of an object-oriented abstraction of a bad API model doesn't make things easier--it makes things more convoluted.
Not to mention making it harder to port core functionality from one platform to another without having to rewrite the whole thing from scratch...
By God, I hope that the CIA doesn't rely on US media.
Unfortunately they do.
And that should go a long ways in explaining why US foreign policy is as screwed up as it is.
Considering that Cuba, the most US-hating counry in the world, has an US military base on its territory, I don't think that it can be considering as "not minding" American military bases. More likely treating US as "ridiculously overpowered character" in world politics.
The base at Quantanimo was established when Cuba was an ally of the US. We have a lease on the land where the base sits, paid with a token amount of money. When the current regime lead by Castro overthrew the previous regime, Castro decided to leave our base alone, and has refused to cash the checks we send the Castro goverment in lease payments as a form of protest.
Of course we're not giving up the base--after Castro tried to put nuclear warheads pointed at the US east coast on his territory, we sort of have a very strong interest in making sure Castro doesn't repeat that fairly serious mistake that almost plunged us into a nuclear war with the Soviets back in the 60's.
Better to invade a small country than to kill billions.
However, our relations with Cuba is the exception to the rule. Most of the places where the United States has a base, the host country has desired to have our base be there--in part because they see the presence of a US base as a stabalizing force in the region, and in part because they see us as helping foot part of the hosting country's defense bill.
Money talks in international relations.
Of course the United States is fairly well hated by most of the world--but that's in part because we tend to staff our overseas bases with testosterone-laden 19 year olds who have no respect for anything except their own penis, who then take R&R where they are stationed. And in part because of the fact that because it's so expensive for us Americans to go to a foreign country that is not Canada or Mexico, the people who do make the journey to Europe tend to be wealthy snobs.
And the best way to be universally hated is to have tourists who make the French seem exceedingly reasonable and respectful in comparason.
The Central Intelligence Agency's charter is to "spy" on foreign nations and report back their findings.
Which begs a question that no-one here seems to be asking, which is "what is spying?"
In the 40's and 50's, long before the Internet and global reporting by media outlets, when even a simple road map of the highways in the Soviet Union were classified, "spying" was basically trying to go out and get an accurate picture of events in the world. It may sound odd to us, but much of that "spying" included things like making accurate road maps and getting an accurate report of events such as uprisings, troup movements, and to profile reasonably accurate psychological profiles of foreign world leaders so that we could try to second guess what these leaders would do. All stuff which we pretty much take forgranted thanks to CNN and the Internet.
By the way, I know about the road maps because my uncle's job in the 50's was to take U-2 pictures and produce accurate road maps of the Soviet Union. And yes, the very thing that we Americans take forgranted--road maps--were classified as a Soviet state secret.
Today's world is much different than the paranoid world of the cold war. With Moscow relying on tourism, maps are all over the place on the Internet. CNN's reach throughout the world is greater than the CIA in terms of reporting foreign events--why have a report from some mole suggesting troup movement when you can have live video from reporters on the field? And as far as figuring out the psychological profile of world leaders, which is more useful: second-hand guessing from people who may have never met a world leader, or an on-camera interview from a reporter from ABC News where they flat out ask the guy what he's thinking?
I've heard that today, many analysts for the CIA have CNN turned on in the background where they work. That's because more likely than not, CNN will scoop CIA's field spooks in reporting events in the field.
Obviously there are areas where the CIA's field reporting staff (or "spys") are useful: in countries who clamp down on the reporting of information (China, Libya, North Korea). And there is information that cannot be gathered by CNN that our government still needs (such as troup readiness and assessment of the current state of technology, as well as an assessment of what our allies and our enemies may be withholding from us). But by and large, the Internet, media news outlets such as CNN and the desire of closed countries such as China to open themselves to tourism will eventually make most of the spying the CIA performed in the 50's and 60's obsolete.
Given this strange behavior to this story, I have to ask. Is it "information wants to be free, except when lives are at stake"? Is it "information wants to be free, especially since beer isn't free"? Is it "information wants to be free, because I can't afford to pay programmers"? Or is it "information wants to be free, because Courtney Love teaches us how we gotta stick it to the man"?
I stuck a camera in your bedroom when you weren't suspecting it, and I vidcap'ed your masturbation technique. Yeah, I know--I shouldn't have tresspassed. And I'll own up to that part. But now I've digitized all this information--your hand movements, the naughty pictures you look at, the beastiality...
Digitized video images is also information. And information should be free, regardless of what that information is, right? Expect my anonymous posts to be put up on alt.binaries.pictures.erotica.masturbation for all to see.
Don't worry--there was no camera. And there was no digitized video. But the above is ment to illustrate a point, which is that there is a balance point where information should and should not be free. Sometimes one's privacy is more important than the free flow of information about a person--or are you selectively reading only the articles on Linux and skipping the ones on Doubleclick?
What we're dealing with here is an example of the latter: the desire to preserve one's privacy for something they did 30 years ago (and which could get them killed) is greater than the need for the free flow of abstract, impersonal scientific or historical information. While the consequences are greater (they're getting killed is probably worse than the imbarasment you would feel if vidcaps of your masturbation made it on the alt.sex groups), the principle is the same: the need for privacy must outweigh the need for the free flow of information.
Voyeurism is not scientific inquiry.
They are building public transportation systems and people use them but not quick enough.
Well, the problem with L.A.'s transportation infrastructure is:
a) We are a decentralized metropolitan area of tens of millions of people, with no fixed transportation patterns. This makes mass public transit (light rail, subways) virtually impossible because there is no fixed pattern. And most mass transit systems rely on reliable transportation patterns (such as in Boston, where the system is outbound to downtown in the morning and downtown to outbound in the evening). We also have one of the lowest population densities of any similarly sized metropolitan area, meaning there is a lot more square miles that would have to be brought in range of a subway stop, either via light mass transit (busses) or through "park and drive" systems (putting huge car parking lots next to various subway stops).
b) The Los Angeles area is built on geographically unstable stuff that requires a lot of engineering to tunnel through. That is, most of the ground here is crumbly, in sharp contrast with Manhattan, which is basically one large volcanic rock plug and is much easier to bore through. Further, we are a major earthquake zone: we're just all biding our time until the next 7.5 to 8 earthquake. Making a subway tunnel bored through crumbly rock survive an 8 is a much bigger problem than making a subway tunnel bored through solid volcanic rock survive cars driving overhead.
c) Because of the higher cost of tunneling subways, most of the tens of billions that has been available to the city of Los Angeles has gone into building the subways, and not into expanding the capacity of the freeways. Thus, with the exception of the construction of the Imperial Freeway to replace the Imperial Highway route into LAX, and the construction of the carpool lanes on the Harbor Freeway south of downtown Los Angeles (adding 4 lanes of carpool a hundred feet in the air above the existing 10 lane freeway below), very little expansion or improvements have been made to our freeway system since the 80's, when there were a few million fewer people living here.
d) The subways were built on the theory of "if you build a subway stop here, people will relocate to use the subway." That is, the theory was that by having access to a mass transit stop, people would consider the value of homes within walking distance to that stop, and offices within walking distance, to be more valuable. However, these stops were built along existing trasit corradors (read: freeways), and so the theory was that if there is more noisy infrastructure, people would consider that noisy infrastructure better, and so would pay more to give up privacy, a sense of isolation, and to live in an area with more noise and more (foot/car) traffic.
Yeah, right.
When I first heard about the plan to build a subway system in L.A., I wanted to bitch-slap a few people on the L.A. city council. Or at least force them to relocate to New York for a few years...
America was founded by the actions of tax protestors. The American people have a looooong history of resisting taxation. Can you imagine what we'd be paying if it were otherwise?
Actually, America was founded on the principle of revolting against "taxation without representation." That is, America was founded on the principle that the colonists were pissed off because they saw their tax dollars going off into the black-hole of Great Britain, and not a dime was going into stuff that was important back home.
This is identical to the situation Americans grumble about now: they will gladly vote themselves a tax increase if they know where the money is going. They will fight tooth and nail if they think the tax money is being waisted.
You misspelled "encourage savings".
"Encourage savings" or "repress consumption", the effect is the same: people buy less stuff. And when people buy less stuff, there is less demand for stuff.
When there is less demand for stuff, companies make less so they don't have to warehouse stuff no-one wants. They then lay people off. Prices also drop in order to clear out the stuff that is just sitting around.
And what do economists call a cycle where there is both a productivity slowdown and falling prices in a sector? A depressionary cycle.
Likewise, if there is more money available for investments, that'd be good, right? But if companies are in a depressionary cycle, they won't need as much money from investments to pay for production of goods no-one wants. Given that there would be grater investment money and less demand for that money, that means the amount someone would be willing to pay for investment money would go down. (Supply and demand, right?)
That means the amount of returns you would get on your investment dollar would go down.
Overall, the whole thing would work itself out, but with a smaller economic engine than we have now. That is, it would depress our overall GDP by a small amount.
Furthermore, given the fact that the middle class would wind up sharing the greater part of the tax burden (because any new national sales tax would have to be revenue neutral, and the middle class consume more as a percentage of their income than the rich, and so would pay more of their overall income in sales tax than the rich), the overall effect of this would be that the middle class would be worse off both in terms of the rate of return on their investments and on what they are able to purchase with their dollar.
Look at the sites I referenced previously. They address all of these problems. I'll just hit some of the highlights.
Been there, done that, bought the t-shirt.
The fundamental problem with all of these sites and other proponents of replacing income tax with a VAT or a national sales tax (NST) is that they assume that consumption is a constant against income. That is, for such a tax to be properly progressive, they assume that consumption is a fixed percentage of the income someone makes, (say) around 90%.
But in the real world, the "rich" are able to save more than the middle class, and thus would be able to enjoy a larger percentage of their income "tax free."
Because of this, if the NST was 23%, and a typical middle class family spends 70% of it's income on taxable consumables, while a rich family spends more like 50% on taxable consumables (I'm assuming things like rent are not taxed), then the middle class family is actually paying 16.1%, while the rich family is actually paying 11.5% of overall income.
One way of thinking of an NST is to think of it as allowing savings and certain forms of spending (such as paying rent) as tax-deductable activities. That is, we could gauge the effect of an NST by making it rougly equivalent of the existing income tax system by beefing up the schedule A deductions to include all activities which are not consumption-oriented: that is, allow people to deduct savings (or rather, by treating all savings as an IRA without an early withdrawl penalty), and to allow them to deduct those services which are not taxed, such as paying rent or morgage.
If we do this, we realize that as an NST has a much smaller percentage of one's overall income being taxed, in order to make up for the lost tax income (as we both know that any change in the tax code will be revenue neutral), we will have to crank the NST to be much higher than the 16-25% rate that is often quoted by NST advocates. (The only reason why a VAT of around 23-25% would work is because a VAT tax is added every time goods exchange hands, even companies paying for raw materials pay a VAT tax. Thus, goods wind up getting taxed several times through the production cycle. This double, triple, or quadruple taxation makes the overall amount collected by the government greater than the VAT rate suggests.)
Is it any wonder, given the fact that rich people are able to save more than middle class people, that some of the biggest supporters of a NST are the wealthy? Personally, having made it out of the middle class vortex, a NST would save me thousands in taxes. However, there is no such thing as a free lunch--for every dime I don't pay in taxes, someone else has to make that dime up.
And guess who that will be? The guy paying 16.1% of his overall income? Or the guy paying 11.5%?
First, that's why Pensylvania and other states who levy such sales taxes are hoping no-one takes them to the supreme court--because the legal justifiation for such taxes is questionable at best. (They may be able to justify it by calling it a "uniform consumption tax"; that is, a tax which is equally levied on it's citizens for consumption--which they may try to argue is not an "import tax" as it is "uniform" and taxed against it's citizens and not against "imports.")
Second, that's why all eyes are on Congress to pass a nation-wide uniform Internet tax, and all eyes are on Congress to give the states consent to levy additional Internet taxes.
Taxes have one major benefit for the people: They fund public projects. Public projects are good, they are things like roads, schools, libraries, busses etc. Without taxes you don't get these things.
If you poll most Americans (or read existing polls which have been done on this subject), you'll find that most Americans are willing to pay taxes if they know the money will be spent on worthwile public projects. That is, they're willing to pay more in taxes if they know the money is going to fund schools or libraries or whatever. Recently, in Fresno (for example), the voters overwhelmingly voted themselves a tax increase in the form of the "Arts to Zoo" proposal which would increase funding for libraries, museums, the local Fresno Zoo, and other similar projects--and pay for them in an increase in the local sales tax levy.
The problem that most Americans have with taxes is that they appear to believe that the majority of taxes is being "wasted" on "pork-barrel" projects and on paying bureaucrats who are "out of touch" or are "unresponsive" or "do not care." To support this assertion, we are constantly bombarded with reports of a $3000 toilet seat or an 8-lane highway built in the middle of nowhere.
The other problem that most Americans have with taxes is the belief that taxes are being assessed "unfairly"--that is, they believe that the rich are somehow not being forced to share their fair load, and that the middle class is having it socked to them. And in a sense, if you count Social Security (where 15% of your income up to around $70K or so goes to social security, but each dollar you make above that cut-off is only taxed at 2%), then there is a middle-class "vortex" where the combined income and social security taxes take a greater percentage of your income than those who are rich and paying the top income bracket.
If we could somehow eliminate these two problems, then Americans wouldn't see taxes as a four-letter word.
Oh, and in Los Angeles, traffic is worse than it is in Seattle: yesterday, my drive at 6:00 in the morning (when traffic is supposed to be "light") to the LAX area from Glendale (about 30 miles) took me about an hour and three-quarters. The reason for this, though, is that the city of Los Angeles and the State of California, instead of spending money to widen the freeways, spent several tens billion dollars on a subway and light-rail project which only has a maximum capacity of a hundred-thousand or so per day, and has a fixed commute pattern (from the outerlying communities to downtown Los Angeles) which runs counter to the decentralized commute patterns that are normally used by Angelinos.
This is a perfect example of why Americans have problems with paying taxes: because no effort was made to increase the capacity of the freeways here, average traffic speeds during rush-hour traffic is now down below 17MPH (yes, seventeen miles per hour), yet even if the entire LA metropolitan area could rearrange itself to maximize use of our new multi-billion dollar subway system, we'd perhaps reduce traffic by a couple of percentage points.
I'd rather have taken the money used to pay for the art installations around the Hollywood subway stop and used it to help support the LA county museum of art. But no-one asked me...
As to regressivity, there are two ways to eliminate that. One can either exempt certain items from the tax, which is a bad idea because it sets a precedent for loopholes and exceptions, and is horrendously complicated to administer. The better way is to provide a rebate to everyone, based on family size instead of income, that refunds the amount of tax paid on subsistence-level spending. The NRST proposals do this latter approach, and even pay the rebate in advance. As such, a family living at the poverty line pays, in effect, no taxes yet still has a 23% tax rate at the register.
The problem with this is that if it's coupled with a reduction or elimination of income tax, will solidly nail the middle class. Think about it: the poor will get a rebate, so they will only pay a small percentage of their taxes (or, for the poorest, perhaps even get a "refund" that is greater than what they paid in various VAT or sales taxes). The rich who save more than they consume will pay a small percentage of their income in taxes--as a smaller percentage of their income goes to consumption. Further, as more of their money (perctange-wise) is going into savings and investment instruments, their ability to make even more money through returns on their investments is virtually assured. Those who will pay this tax (and thus, shoulder the majority of the burden, at least percentage-wise) will be the middle class.
Another threat of this tax is that it will repress consumption. While on the one hand that may seem like a good idea (as anything that reduces the amount of consumer goods we consume will help alleviate the pressure on various resources used to make those goods), this will have a "slow-down" affect on our economy, and may push various sectors of the economy into a depressionary cycle.
Any new tax structure (or for that matter, any tinkering we do to the existing tax structure) needs to address the twin problems of alleviating the middle-class "vortex" which causes the middle-class to bear the greatest tax load (percentage-wise), and to make sure that sectors of our economy aren't pushed into a depression.
Unfortunately, most VAT or national sales tax proposals I've seen go by will make both problems substantially worse.
Having been sucked into the wonderful world of eCommerce, I've been spending a lot of time thinking about the very same question. It seems to me that when the shakeout takes place, we will probably have the following sites left:
/., the developer sites at Apple and Microsoft, and many sites set up and run by open source advocates who aren't interested in making money, but are instead interested in the good will running such a site generates.
1) Goodwill sites. Those are sites which are run at a loss by a company who is interested in some form of good will. In this category I would lump sites like
2) Service sites. These are sites which provide a time-saving service or provides a service which would otherwise not be available by going to the local mall or grocery store. In this category I also lump merchant sites: as the fascination of merchant sites has declined, all that is left is the service of obtaining difficult to find or difficult to obtain merchandise, usually for a premium. In this category I would include sites such as Amazon, Fatbrain, and HomeGrocer. (Amazon and Fatbrain provides the service of allowing us to quickly find otherwise impossible to find books such as programming or technical books--but at a price that is, in the end, about a buck or two more than if you could have bought the book at the local bookstore. HomeGrocer provides the service of home grocery delivery--but at a price that is, in the end, about 5% greater than buying the groceries at the local grocery store. HomeGrocer is a reasonable example of this because, as you order more and more products, a "favorites" list is generated that allows you to quickly, in about 5 minutes or so, reorder those same products--a typical grocery shopping pattern. So the service HomeGrocer provides is delivery and time savings.)
If you are a merchant site and you are not providing a valuable service beyond shipping crap to someone, or you're the on-line version of your regular catalog (such as Victoria's Secret's on-line web site is simply a browsable version of their catalog), IMHO you're doomed to failure.
On the other hand, if you do provide a valuable service people are willing to pay for, you'll do well just as long as you remember the "three year rule." The three year rule, which everyone in this "modern, faster than the speed of light web world" where time appears to be measured in negative dog years, is that no matter how good your business is, it will take three years to establish a solid clientel. For some reason or another, perhaps because they were blinded by the shiny bobbles of web technology, otherwise intelligent businessmen thought they could start a web commerce site and establish clientel in 2 or 3 months--and that just does not happen. It takes three years to establish a business, no matter how good you are, if only because it takes three years for people to get used to using your service. That most web companies don't last half that long speaks tons about the short-sightedness of the people who run those companies.
3) Closed-network B2B sites which in an earlier era would have been done using a mainframe coded in COBOL and a bunch of VT100 terminals. I'm currently working on such a site. The site is structured as an eCommerce web site, but from the business model perspective, all we're doing is bringing out the business's existing database system to the web in a password-protected web site which permits their partner companies to connect and order product.
Of course the one group of people who will make money in the future of eCommerce is the programmers and software tool developers who are helping to build all this stuff. Just so long as you negotiate a good contract that doesn't screw you up-front so you can be screwed when the company founder's hair-brained idea doesn't generate a multi-million dollar IPO.
with a sledgehammer
computers compute
words are delicate
Value is a relative thing, and just because you hold value in something whether it be tangible or not, does not mean I hold that same value for it. And yes, it would be arrogant of you to assume that it does. What's more, I cannot be held responsible for your time and efforts, unless I have had some direct impact on them, but when you spend your time to write a song, that I did not ask you to write, did not want you to write, and did not enjoy when you were finished writing, I do not feel compelled to reimburse you for your time. It was a choice that you have made to spend doing as you wished, and any loss of income, or inability to support your family that results from such actions, are your responsibility, not mine.
:-)
You know, one of the things I keep forgetting in interacting with other people is that I take the concept of risk forgranted: that is, I simply assume that as all things have a certain degree of risk associated with it, and I forget that people may tend to read my words and interpret them as an absolute statement rather than as a risk assessment.
Meaning that I took it forgranted that one of the risks involved is that different people may value things differently. Me, I think Metallica sucks. Not because of the Napster thing--I just think their music sucks really hard. And so the value of having 5 megabytes free on my hard disk is greater than the value of having that 5 megabytes filled with a pirated copy of one of their songs. On the other hand, I happen to love Journey--something which my roommates in college thought was wierd beyond belief.
Value is a relative thing, and obviously when an artist uses time that he could have otherwise spent making money flipping hamburgers writing a song, he's taking the risk that the reward of writing the song will be greater than the monetary reward he would have gotten flipping hamburgers. Personally, I'd like to see an environment where that artist has the opportunity to then share that song in a way which gives him the opportunity to make money in return--but note that I said "opportunity."
If he's a Metallica wannabe, I ain't giving him a red cent.
Actually, he admits a natural right to possessions, but says that ownership is a right created by society: "By an universal law, indeed, whatever, whether fixed or movable, belongs to all men equally and in common, is the property for the moment of him who occupies it; but when he relinquishes the occupation, the property goes with it." A common view since Grotius, I think, & maybe the scholastics before him.
But this concept of "possession" is limited to whatever you happen to be holding in your hand, wearing on your body, or sitting on at the moment. The moment you open your hand, take the clothes off your body, or stand up, you no longer possess that thing.
This is less of a "natural right" than it is a simple observation that two people cannot wear the same shirt or eat the same bite of banana or drink the same gulp of water.
I think that it was established Christian doctrine that women had souls long before Jefferson's time, indeed right from the start. But please feel free to tell me otherwise.
Unfortunately I don't have my references on this topic in front of me. However, as I recall (sans references to back me up), it was long debated up until fairly recently who had (and who did not have) souls--of course, in our modern interpretation, we even think that dogs and cats have souls. But as recently as in Jefferson's time, the debate as to if women, Indians, and people of color had souls carried on.
As I don't have anything to back this up at the moment (and I'm too lazy to dig through the pile in the basement), take it with a grain of salt.
Do you mean to imply that the simple act of creating music at personal cost merits an entitlement to compensation?
Actually, I'm only implying that the simple act of creating music at personal cost entitles the creator the opportunity to be compensated for his/her effort. Opportunities imply risk: sometimes the musician would have been better off investing his time and energy flipping hamburgers at McDonalds. But by no means does investing time and effort into an enterprise, be it making music, writing software, or building houses on speculation should entitle the person taking that risk to a minimal reward.
As I've said a million times before, risk is inherent to being an artist,...
I fully agree. My original comment, by the way, was in response to what appeared to be a suggestion that as it is potentially cheap and easy to copy ideas (such as music), that makes the inherent value of that idea (or musical composition) essentially zero. And that's nonsense.
No. Re-read what Jefferson said:
This means society may give you the right to sell your song, and have people to buy your song (and thus have you profit from it) as an encouragement to you to write more songs. Of course people do not have to buy your song--but society may give you the exclusive right to profit: that is, society may give you the right to force other people not to sell your song, or otherwise distribute that song in a manner which prevents you from profiting from it. That is, Jefferson is describing the state of affairs that we currently "enjoy" today.
However, it would be arrogant of me to assume that anything is owed me.
No. What Jefferson is saying is that "rights" are things that arise out of a social compact: that your "inherent" right to possessions such as owning land or owning your clothes, or your right to profit exclusively from ideas you create (such as writings, music, inventions, etc) doesn't exist. "Rights" as such arise because we as a society agree to give eachother certain rights, such as the right to property (through enforcement of laws preventing theft) or rights to "intellectual property" (through enforcement of laws that prevent IP piracy). Other rights arise similarly: your right to life, for example, is only as good as our society's acknowledgement of laws against murder.
Just because these rights are man-made and not God-given or inherent to nature doesn't mean you're arrogant in thinking that you should enjoy them--any more than you should feel arrogant in thinking that you have the right not to have some mad-man come over to your place with a baseball bat and turn your skull into red-colored tapioca pudding.
How can I charge a price for something that no longer costs me anything? And how do I determine a price to charge another man for something that holds no value to him until it is given to him, especially when it may be of no value?
A thing has no value if it costs nothing, either in time, space, or material goods to reproduce. Unfortunately, even ideas take some time, and if they are recorded, take space and material goods to reproduce. Further, any idea of merit probably took a master artist a non-trivial amount of time to create. Perhaps some artists feel the reward of creation is it's own payment--but most people live in the real world, and the time it took them to create their idea was time they don't have to spend to make money to put food on their table or a roof over their head.
I'm always fascinated when people quote our Founding Fathers in order to justify things like erasing IP laws. Not only for the obvious reason that these people lived in a different time with different values--in a world where slavery was acceptable to many, where women were considered not to have an immortal soul and thus were no more spiritually valuable than a small dog, and in a world where only the landed arristocracy were given the vote.
But also because our Founding Fathers had completely different ideas about what should--and should not--be included with our Federal Government. And it wasn't until around the early 1800's when the actual shape and form of our Federal Government was really established--it took almost a couple of generations for people to "get it right", so to speak. (I'm refering to a number of Supreme Court decisions which were used to "fine tune" the accepted interpretation of the Constitution.)
While it is instructive to quote Jefferson, we're talking about a generation of people who were still trying to figure out if the Federal Government should be exclusively responsible for issuing currency, for heaven's sake! If they were still debating the idea of a central currency system (which wasn't even brought into being in it's current form until the early part of this century), then what makes you think their ideas about intellectual property rights would be any better formulated?
How ironic that young gamers have sensed for years (the original Shadowrunner rules were published in l989) what journalists and politicians still keep missing -- that life for individuals gets rougher by the year here in the Corporate Republic.
How does it get rougher, exactly?
That a handful of megacorporations are becoming powerful beyond anyone's control.
You mean like the aformentioned Shell Oil and United Fruit? You're right: when a megacorporation such as C&H Holdings can force the overthrow of the legitimate monarchy of Hawai'i and force it's annexation into a United States which is predominately being controlled by a handfull of megacorporations who promise to restore prosperity after a damaging Civil War forced unemployment into the 30% range--oh, wait: that was last centry. Sorry. We're supposed to be talking about this century...
That individualism is not only growing more difficult, but one day soon may actually be dangerous.
I just love it how you can make a sweeping generalization unbacked by any evidence and present it as a defacto "truth." Repeat this often enough and people presume that this is simply The Truth, without realizing the fact that you never backed up this assertion at any point in your career.
That this creeping reality has been a role-playing exercise for brainy kids for more than a decade is an amazing thing.
I don't think I need to point out that this sort of fiction (extrapolating a future as a dysfunctional projection of the present) isn't anything new. Others have already pointed out a number of examples, to which I will add "1984" and "Animal Farm".
A lot of the people reading this are already Shadowrunners, or are about to be. For Corporate Republic renegades, life is increasingly an adventure.
Well DUH! It's a bloody game! Do you think Mad Max would have been as interesting a movie if the characters were transplanted to the Los Angeles of today, where instead of being something to fight to the death over, gas was simply $1.69/gallon? Do you think Escape from New York would have been as interesting a movie if it were placed in today's New York, where "escape" means coming up with correct change at the toll booth?
Any form of entertainment is going to extrapolate the present, twist it in some unexpected way (Gataca's DNA tests, 1984's omnipresent two-way televisions and thought crimes), throw in an element which makes it possible to have some fun (how can a society which made individuality a crime have such an inept police force?) and presents it as entertainment.
Hell, this formula is so popular that it even shows up in right-wing stuff like the Turner Diaries--which makes the bad guys the government (instead of corporations) and anyone who doesn't recognize the inherent superiority of white people (instead of cyberpunks). Yes, this may be an abhorent example to some folks here, but for God's sake, paranoid fantasies are paranoid fantasies, no matter who are the good guys and who are the bad guys.
The turning point for the modern real-world corporatism came in the l980s, when government decided to de-regulate many industries at almost precisely the same time as new marketing strategies and technologies were exploding, arming business with the ability to mass-market, monopolize and globalize.
Bwwaaah ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha! Katz, are you really so ignorant of history that your memory doesn't go back to before the Reagan administration?
The "modern" corporation was born hundreds of years ago, when Kings would give exclusive license to partnerships of merchantile agents who would go out and engage in business on behalf of the crown. Britain's expansion into India, Spain's expansion into the New World, and just about everyone's expansion into China in the last few centuries were driven by corporations who were thoroughly in bed with the governments who gave them a license to exist. Even the United States played along with the annexation of Hawai'i, or our fiddling around with the internal politics of many Latin American countries.
The only reason why megacorporations were not influential during the Dark Ages was because the fudal dictatorships who actually repressed 95% of the population and forced them into poverty and early death to support the requirements of the local fudal lord (often little more than a bully with a club) were suspictious of anything that couldn't be forced to toil in the fields for food.
What's really remarkable thing is that Shadowrun was written before Microsoft sotware was in more than 90 percent of the world's personal computers, before five companies owned virtually all the radio stations in America, before AOL/Time-Warner became the largest information entity in history, and before the Justice Department blithely approved AT&T's acquisition of the MediaOne Group, giving AT&T control of more than a third of the nation's cable networks for television, high-speed Net access and online telephone service.
But it was written after other great examples such as Shell Oil, railroad barons and the Hearst family's control of most newspapers across the country. (You remember Hearst's comment about the Spanish-American war? "You furnish the pictures and I'll furnish the war.")
You don't need high-speed net access to manipulate the dailies. Just a telegraph and a will to use it. And William Randolph Hearst had both. The land that currently houses the Hearst castle was stolen from my Salinan Indian ancestors in a deal that Hearst made with the government: throw in the support of his local papers, and promise to partition the land and hand half of it off to the Hunter Liggot military reservation, and the government will rubber stamp a land deal dispite competiting interests.
Megacorporations aren't anything new either: a term originally coined for companies who have interlocking directorships with overseas counterparts, these things have been around long before Shell. And their influence on the government has been around just as long as feudal lords realized the value of a gold coin.
The idea of the Shadowrunner in such a universe almost perfectly captures the worsening plight of the individual in our own era, when family farmers, small businesspeople, software designers, individuals of all sorts are losing opportunity to tell their own stories, shape their own lives and economic futures.
In an era where more than 70% of all people working in the United States are employed by small businesses employing 50 or fewer people, where a web site can be set up on a number of systems for $50/month if you don't want to have banner ads pastered all over your work, where individual purchasers are heavily influencing the design and delivery of products (see "Clue Train"), individuality is "losing?"
Small farmers are getting the shaft for two reasons. First, they are losing out to larger corporate farmers because larger corporate farmers are able to diversify the crops they plant and thus are able to reduce the risk when the price of one of those crops falls through the floor. Second, they are losing out to large corporate farmers because the vast majority of the population in the United States is simply unwilling to pay $2.00 for an apple or $1.50 for an orange. That is, price pressure to keep food incredibly cheap is driving small farmers out of business, because they simply cannot afford to keep up with the corporate farmers.
It's the same rational which keeps overseas sweat shops in business making cheap clothing for people in the United States: because we are unwilling to pay $30 for a $4 white t-shirt, and we are unwilling to pay $150 for a $30 pair of pants. So long as we are unwilling to pay the higher wages demanded by non-sweat shop factories, so long as we are unwilling to pay higher food costs needed by smaller farmers to allow them to continue to operate, we will continue to have cheap clothing and cheap food--and out of work family farmers and overseas sweat shops.
There are so many things wrong with Katz's posting which shows his lack of comprehension of politics, economics, history and culture that is is beyond me why he continues to post this sort of ignorant drivel.
Shadowrunner may be a fun game. But as a reflection of the current trends of our society, it isn't exactly groundbreaking. Nor is it accurate. And there are much better examples of the sort of "megacorporationism" from the last century than there is in this century.
You're not the only exception. Occassionally I may play "Dungeon Keeper", but that's when I'm blowing off some steam. I'm more likely to go bikeriding or take an Aikido class than play computer games--and frankly, first person shooters give me a headache.
And yes, I'm computer savvy.
First, why would anyone "clack away on a weblog?"
Well, the answer to the "clack" question is pretty simple. When I learned to type in high school in the early 80's, our school only had mechanical typewriters. They make this wonderful "clack"ing sound when you type. So it's easy to talk about someone "clacking away", if your mind hasn't moved beyond the days of an old Underwood typewriter.
How do I know that Katz's mindset is stuck in the mechanical typewriter days, and that he probably has little (if any) clue about computers? Besides the obvious clue that he thinks "clacking away at a web log" is a productive thing to do, or the other obvious clue that he thinks that a web log and a message system are similar, or that people playing games is somehow equivalent to creating games is the way he types 1999.
He types it 'l999'. As in lower-case "L", 999.
Why? Because in order to save a little bit on the mechanical movements, old mechanical typewriters do not have a '1' key. Instead, people who learn on a mechanical typewriter are taught to use a lower-case "L" in place of the number "1" when typing in numbers. Some of us who have used computers know there is a difference between a "1" and an "l", especially while programming, and have moved beyond using a 'l' for a '1'. Especially younger folks like myself, who only used a mechanical typewriter for the first year of our typing classes, and moved to computers as quickly as we could.
But then, there are those who have remained locked in the dark ages. Whose ingrained habits and ingrained thinking patterns betray themselves.
I'm still trying to figure out how playing games is a form of literary expression...
The experiments I was refering to were conducted in the mid 80's, while I was there at 'Tech. Most of the experiments tended to be multiple two-player senarios, or on occassion three-player senarios, played out repeatedly. Mostly game theory stuff, not the computer-tallied economic models in the web site you provided.
Actually there are some exciting results coming out of Caltech's economics studies in the last few years on the macroeconomic front. On the microeconomic front, though, that's mostly game theory--and that's what I was refering to, mostly.
One interesting result I recall seeing in a seminar I dropped into a few years ago was a study of the market. And basically they were saying at the time that the stock market boils down to chaos theory--that it's extremely chaotic, owing to the speculative nature of the market.
However, my original comment was in responce to an explanation of utility functions, which are basically the class of optimal solutions to N-player games--the very stuff the Caltech folks realized recently is all fubared.
(Forgive me if I screwed up some of my explanations of this stuff--it's been years since I took an economics class or did anything related to game theory.)