" after all, it's public, where expectations of privacy come only from one's incompetence at spotting voyeurs, or their incompetence at staring."
There are two kinds of privacy, and they're getting mixed up every time this issue comes up. There is a privacy that comes from not being seen or having one's presence otherwise perceived by fellow humans. You don't have this kind of privacy in a public place, granted. You only have it some kind of seclusion.
But there is another kind of privacy - that comes from not being monitored and/or identified. From not being *watched*. Unless you have police or a private eye tailing you, in a modern city you're almost perfectly anonymous, even as you're being seen by hundreds of people, likewise anonymous to you.
I would argue that the latter kind of privacy is far more important and it certainly is the kind we're losing. This is the kind of privacy you lose when being monitored by CCTV, spyware, cookies, RFID, whatever technology does these days. Even if it doesn't identify you by name, it identifies you by a number of characteristics that's sufficient for purpises of marketing, law-enforcement and, if anyone wants, invigilation.
Oh no. Plese tell me Stepheson won't now be writing a sequel!
What I loved about the first volume was following the story of Newton and the Royal Society experiments and thought patterns. I'd never have thought a mostly fictional account of mostly failed experiments and meandering alchemists' thoughts could be so gripping. But everything else was so much padding and I gave up about a hundred pages into the second volume. If Stephenson wrote a biography of Newton, I'd probably devour it, though.
"This is exactly the kind of attitude that I'm talking about - the kind where you do something because you have to, and nothing more."
It's that thing called incentive. Why should I care beyond my personal well-being? A corporation certainly doesn't care about what happens to me. Oh yeah, we should all make this extra effort so your company can go IPO sooner, so half of us can get fired sooner when investors come in?
Give me a reason to make extra effort. It doesn't have to be financial. Give me a sense of security for example - I believe lots of people will gladly take that instead of a hefty raise.
I once freelanced for a small (2 people) company that suddenly stopped paying me. Their customers weren't paying _them_, so they passed it on to me and a number of other people whose work they contracted. After three months I was unable to pay my rent, and had to find another job fast. I was stopping by at their offices every week to get the overdue payment. One day I walked in and they had their office totally redone, new shiny leather chairs and all. The bill for that must have been several times what they owed me. This was 10 years ago, and they never paid up. Every freelancer has a couple of stories like that. So forgive me if I paint company owners with a broad brush, but there it is.
"But if you want an extra penny for every little effort that you put..."
No, I want an extra penny for extra effort. If my contract says eight hours, five days a week, and you want 10 hours plus Saturday, pay extra. Or do you expect your employees to work for free under threat of termination, since they'd rather have a sucky job than none at all? This kind of attitude is exactly why there are minimum wage laws. If you could, you'd be paying people 10c an hour, and they would still take it, because it's greather than zero.
You don't pay people only for the work tbey do. You pay them for the part of their lives they give you. They won't get those Saturdays back, remember.
"I've had good experience with folks from Eastern Europe"
Heck, I'm from (and in) Eastern Europe. Do you know why thousands of my countryfolks work their asses off in the UK? Because they earn more there than they could here. This means they too expect to be paid for their work. Their expectations may be lower than those of most Western Europeans, but don't count on it forever.
"don't appreciate how much it costs to produce these things in the first place, and consider only replication and distribution costs"
I think people have a pretty good idea what it costs to produce a CD or a DVD and what it costs to distribute it - and this is exactly why private use copying of music (and software) is usually not given a second thought.
What people are saying to music and movie studios is exactly what corporations are saying to workers in the US and Europe: you're too expensive, we're going shopping elsewhere.
"So they think they can set the price to what they deem appropriate?"
Of course. Just like eomployers can drive down wages to what THEY think is appropriate. Think of it as outsourcing. It's called free market, or so capitalists told me.
"If Europe loses 13,000 jobs, and India gains 14,000, how is that less work for fewer people? Don't Indians count?"
They certainly do, but since they are paid considerably less, they collectively won't be able to buy as many Thinkpads as US or EU employees could. Somewhere down the line this means collapse for whoever is manufacturing Thinkpads these days.
Don't get me wrong - there's no question this all sucks if you work in Europe. But it's the voters, through their elected governments, who've created this situation"
Elected governments now kiss the dirt where an Investor has walked. If democracy means electing decision-makers who influence your society, we should be voting for CEOs. And unless one day we do, we'll be back to feudal class system in short order.
There is tremendous risk in investing, as the.com boom showed. Many people lost millions of dollars, for some stocks you need nerves of steal."
I'm so awed at those investors with nerves of steel! - not. How about you ask why they lost those millions? Surely not due to an unforeseen natural disaster? What you sing praises of is the core of the problem - investing on stock market is much like gambling, but other people bear the consequences besides the investor. The stock market is a destabilizing agent. It introduces chaos, unpredictability and irrationality into processes that peoples' livelihoods depend on, and those people - not investors - have no influence on those processes.
"If you have a credit card, a mortgage, or any loan you are borrowing money from a company"
I don't, actually. I only have a debit card and I never spend what I don't have. I think it's only rational. I didn't have an apartment of my own until I could afford it, and I still don't have a car, because where I live I can do just fine with a bike. I don't gamble, either.
The only thing this means is that the law is seriously wrong. Corporations are allowed to exist by the society, and the same society may and will change its mind one day, since the society does not sufficiently benefit from their existence.
Well, for one thing, a working democracy requires a population that is not preoccupied solely with their short-term survival. If you can't put food on the table, or if you worry about paying bills and educating your kids, you're not going to worry much about what your government is otherwise doing. You're not going to write letters to your congresspeople about human rights, say. You're not going to send money to NGOs. You're not going to do any charity work yourself, or read too many books or write any yourself. You're not going to worry about Chinese dissidents and you won't be putting up a website to help them in some way. In short, you won't be working towards any cause other than putting food on the table.
"The fact that you think having a job is linked to "luck" really explains a lot about your mentality towards capitalism"
So you're saying these 14000 IBM employees, to the last one, have only themselves to blame for getting fired? And those whose retirement plans depended on Enron stocks, too, I guess?
You may not call it luck if you wish. But please realize that your hard work, your skills, loyalty and whatnot mean exactly zilch when shareholders decide they want more or a CEO decides to screw the company.
Capitalists believe in self-reliance. Communists believe in being conditioned by society. The truth, as always, is pretty much in-between.
Society created corporations and society will undo them - by revoking their charters - when enough people realize that society does not derive any benefit from the existence of corporations but shoulders all the burden in externalities. One day, it will happen.
"just because they have a union doesnt mean they're ENTITLED TO MORE AND MORE EVERY FUCKING YEAR"
Good, now turn around and say the same to the shareholders. Why do THEY think they're entitled to more and more "value" every year? Why can't THEY take a cut, for once, so that people whose work they live off can keep their work and feed their families?
"If you're so pissed off about how much CEOs make, why don't you become one?"
But I am not pissed off about how much they make. I am pissed off about how they make relative to their employees. Oh, and about how they treat their workforce like shit, demanding loyalty and offering none. This is what I am indeed pissed off about.
Ah, so what's good for the proles ain't so good for the masters, is this what youy're saying?
Shareholders, pay attention! Instead of the CEO who makes 100 million a year in the US, you can have a CEO based in India, who will do the same job for only 10 million. It's your call.
But none of you free-marketeers in this thread have yet answered the simple question: who is going to buy products if everyone is either unemployed or barely making a living?
Certainly not the folks in India - they may be paid one-tenth of a US worker's pay, but IBM servers are not ten-fold cheaper there.
Sure enough, but back then corporations were strictly limited in what they could do. They were set up for a limited time and only to fulfil a particular goal, like building a railway, because such enterprises were too costly to be financed by a single person. Originally corporations were not allowed to own other corpoations, for example. It should have stayed that way.
Today a corporation can dump toxic waste in your backyard and shareholders applaud because it's cheaper than disposing of the pollutants safely. Profit motive at work.
Slashdot Mirror
" after all, it's public, where expectations of privacy come only from one's incompetence at spotting voyeurs, or their incompetence at staring."
There are two kinds of privacy, and they're getting mixed up every time this issue comes up. There is a privacy that comes from not being seen or having one's presence otherwise perceived by fellow humans. You don't have this kind of privacy in a public place, granted. You only have it some kind of seclusion.
But there is another kind of privacy - that comes from not being monitored and/or identified. From not being *watched*. Unless you have police or a private eye tailing you, in a modern city you're almost perfectly anonymous, even as you're being seen by hundreds of people, likewise anonymous to you.
I would argue that the latter kind of privacy is far more important and it certainly is the kind we're losing. This is the kind of privacy you lose when being monitored by CCTV, spyware, cookies, RFID, whatever technology does these days. Even if it doesn't identify you by name, it identifies you by a number of characteristics that's sufficient for purpises of marketing, law-enforcement and, if anyone wants, invigilation.
In 2020, the BSOD crashes you!
Oh no. Plese tell me Stepheson won't now be writing a sequel!
What I loved about the first volume was following the story of Newton and the Royal Society experiments and thought patterns. I'd never have thought a mostly fictional account of mostly failed experiments and meandering alchemists' thoughts could be so gripping. But everything else was so much padding and I gave up about a hundred pages into the second volume. If Stephenson wrote a biography of Newton, I'd probably devour it, though.
Only old Koreans wear implants.
Of course this therefore means Fundamentalism = reason is bad. You start doubting when you start thinking about things.
FWIW, you may have misspelled "Made in Russia".
"This is exactly the kind of attitude that I'm talking about - the kind where you do something because you have to, and nothing more."
It's that thing called incentive. Why should I care beyond my personal well-being? A corporation certainly doesn't care about what happens to me. Oh yeah, we should all make this extra effort so your company can go IPO sooner, so half of us can get fired sooner when investors come in?
Give me a reason to make extra effort. It doesn't have to be financial. Give me a sense of security for example - I believe lots of people will gladly take that instead of a hefty raise.
I once freelanced for a small (2 people) company that suddenly stopped paying me. Their customers weren't paying _them_, so they passed it on to me and a number of other people whose work they contracted. After three months I was unable to pay my rent, and had to find another job fast. I was stopping by at their offices every week to get the overdue payment. One day I walked in and they had their office totally redone, new shiny leather chairs and all. The bill for that must have been several times what they owed me. This was 10 years ago, and they never paid up. Every freelancer has a couple of stories like that. So forgive me if I paint company owners with a broad brush, but there it is.
"But if you want an extra penny for every little effort that you put..."
No, I want an extra penny for extra effort. If my contract says eight hours, five days a week, and you want 10 hours plus Saturday, pay extra. Or do you expect your employees to work for free under threat of termination, since they'd rather have a sucky job than none at all? This kind of attitude is exactly why there are minimum wage laws. If you could, you'd be paying people 10c an hour, and they would still take it, because it's greather than zero.
You don't pay people only for the work tbey do. You pay them for the part of their lives they give you. They won't get those Saturdays back, remember.
"I've had good experience with folks from Eastern Europe"
Heck, I'm from (and in) Eastern Europe. Do you know why thousands of my countryfolks work their asses off in the UK? Because they earn more there than they could here. This means they too expect to be paid for their work. Their expectations may be lower than those of most Western Europeans, but don't count on it forever.
" why is it illegal to copy material we legaly own? Where has the distinction gone?"
It happened when we accepted the idea that we do not "legally own" the material, but are only licensing it for personal use.
Of course he didn't. That's why he's talking about ideas and flame. Intangible things. Like information.
"don't appreciate how much it costs to produce these things in the first place, and consider only replication and distribution costs"
I think people have a pretty good idea what it costs to produce a CD or a DVD and what it costs to distribute it - and this is exactly why private use copying of music (and software) is usually not given a second thought.
What people are saying to music and movie studios is exactly what corporations are saying to workers in the US and Europe: you're too expensive, we're going shopping elsewhere.
"So they think they can set the price to what they deem appropriate?"
Of course. Just like eomployers can drive down wages to what THEY think is appropriate. Think of it as outsourcing. It's called free market, or so capitalists told me.
"If Europe loses 13,000 jobs, and India gains 14,000, how is that less work for fewer people? Don't Indians count?"
They certainly do, but since they are paid considerably less, they collectively won't be able to buy as many Thinkpads as US or EU employees could. Somewhere down the line this means collapse for whoever is manufacturing Thinkpads these days.
Don't get me wrong - there's no question this all sucks if you work in Europe. But it's the voters, through their elected governments, who've created this situation"
Elected governments now kiss the dirt where an Investor has walked. If democracy means electing decision-makers who influence your society, we should be voting for CEOs. And unless one day we do, we'll be back to feudal class system in short order.
There is tremendous risk in investing, as the .com boom showed. Many people lost millions of dollars, for some stocks you need nerves of steal."
I'm so awed at those investors with nerves of steel! - not. How about you ask why they lost those millions? Surely not due to an unforeseen natural disaster? What you sing praises of is the core of the problem - investing on stock market is much like gambling, but other people bear the consequences besides the investor. The stock market is a destabilizing agent. It introduces chaos, unpredictability and irrationality into processes that peoples' livelihoods depend on, and those people - not investors - have no influence on those processes.
"If you have a credit card, a mortgage, or any loan you are borrowing money from a company"
I don't, actually. I only have a debit card and I never spend what I don't have. I think it's only rational. I didn't have an apartment of my own until I could afford it, and I still don't have a car, because where I live I can do just fine with a bike. I don't gamble, either.
The only thing this means is that the law is seriously wrong. Corporations are allowed to exist by the society, and the same society may and will change its mind one day, since the society does not sufficiently benefit from their existence.
Well, for one thing, a working democracy requires a population that is not preoccupied solely with their short-term survival. If you can't put food on the table, or if you worry about paying bills and educating your kids, you're not going to worry much about what your government is otherwise doing. You're not going to write letters to your congresspeople about human rights, say. You're not going to send money to NGOs. You're not going to do any charity work yourself, or read too many books or write any yourself. You're not going to worry about Chinese dissidents and you won't be putting up a website to help them in some way. In short, you won't be working towards any cause other than putting food on the table.
"The fact that you think having a job is linked to "luck" really explains a lot about your mentality towards capitalism"
So you're saying these 14000 IBM employees, to the last one, have only themselves to blame for getting fired? And those whose retirement plans depended on Enron stocks, too, I guess?
You may not call it luck if you wish. But please realize that your hard work, your skills, loyalty and whatnot mean exactly zilch when shareholders decide they want more or a CEO decides to screw the company.
Capitalists believe in self-reliance. Communists believe in being conditioned by society. The truth, as always, is pretty much in-between.
"So, let me get this straight. Either you are not investing in a retirement plan of any kind, or you just told yourself to fuck off."
I'm not a USian. And I would never have a stockmarket-based retirement plan. I'd sooner bet on horse races.
Heck, that's why I've always been a freelancer. Here on /. I'm just explaining why :)
You conveniently omitted "for much less pay".
Society created corporations and society will undo them - by revoking their charters - when enough people realize that society does not derive any benefit from the existence of corporations but shoulders all the burden in externalities. One day, it will happen.
"just because they have a union doesnt mean they're ENTITLED TO MORE AND MORE EVERY FUCKING YEAR"
Good, now turn around and say the same to the shareholders. Why do THEY think they're entitled to more and more "value" every year? Why can't THEY take a cut, for once, so that people whose work they live off can keep their work and feed their families?
"If you're so pissed off about how much CEOs make, why don't you become one?"
But I am not pissed off about how much they make. I am pissed off about how they make relative to their employees. Oh, and about how they treat their workforce like shit, demanding loyalty and offering none. This is what I am indeed pissed off about.
Ah, so what's good for the proles ain't so good for the masters, is this what youy're saying?
Shareholders, pay attention! Instead of the CEO who makes 100 million a year in the US, you can have a CEO based in India, who will do the same job for only 10 million. It's your call.
But none of you free-marketeers in this thread have yet answered the simple question: who is going to buy products if everyone is either unemployed or barely making a living?
Certainly not the folks in India - they may be paid one-tenth of a US worker's pay, but IBM servers are not ten-fold cheaper there.
Sure enough, but back then corporations were strictly limited in what they could do. They were set up for a limited time and only to fulfil a particular goal, like building a railway, because such enterprises were too costly to be financed by a single person. Originally corporations were not allowed to own other corpoations, for example. It should have stayed that way.
Today a corporation can dump toxic waste in your backyard and shareholders applaud because it's cheaper than disposing of the pollutants safely. Profit motive at work.