There was a time some years ago when I would have thought this was a good thing. Now I regard it as a cheap publicity stunt, possibly over a base of real fear and cowardice.
Easiest place to start is the basis for fear. If we create a general AI dedicated to the religion of corporate cancerism, and if that AI escapes into a world of robots and self-driving cars, then at some point it is inevitable that the AI would realize that human beings are interfering with its overriding program to maximize profits. Of course it could be worse. A military AI would already have access to the drones to go with its fundamentally hostile attitude before it started running amok.
If anyone knows of an AI project that is focused on making more ethical machines, please let me know. It won't cheer me up however, unless you can convince me that the project has a financial model that might let it succeed before the other two routes.
I still see it as a religious problem. In corporate cancerism, there is no gawd but profit.
When I see a highly active story, I like to look for funny comments. Lately there have been quite few.
About 10 levels down in this thread there was a slightly funny and visible comment, which motivated me to crawl up the thread to try to understand more about the joke. Turned out it was full of hidden AC trolls and your hidden-by-down-moderation troll-play comment. I think you helped the ACs waste that much of my time, so...
Please don't feed the trolls.
There are solution approaches, but Slashdot doesn't have the capabilities (certainly not financial and probably not technical, either) to move towards implementing any of them. I myself favor the EPR approach.
Actually, I can answer that question easily, and if you've read some of my other comments, you should have seen most of the key elements of the answer already. I would actually prefer to frame it in terms of political philosophy, though I haven't read enough of your comments to know where your own political philosophy is, so I may not present it in the clearest way to be seen from your current perspective.
Background: Capitalism is dead. Communism is a fantasy that was never even alive. Socialism is an amusing idea (though it is actually doing surprisingly well in certain places, even within ostensibly capitalist governments such as America's). There are some other candidates, such as the kleptocracy that rules today's Russia. I guess that philosophy would be called kleptomania? There are also some dictatorships, but they might come closest to being free of philosophy because the jungle is ruled by the simple law of the jungle. Might makes right and lack of might makes dead, so to speak. (I'm skipping some minor jokes such as Liberterianism. Philosophers love to can worms?)
Foreground: The operative philosophy in most of the world today is actually simpler. I call it corporate cancerism. Our Frankensteinish monsters are running amok. The soulless and inhuman corporations have no philosophies, but only profit-maximizing programs that they must mindlessly obey, though it amuses me to describe their programs in religious terms, thusly:
"There is no gawd but profit, and Apple is gawd's #1 prophet."
As it applies to corporations, the human puppets who think they own the largest corporations are bribing the cheapest politicians to rig the game in their favor, including the tax parts. The ones that "win" by making the bribes with the highest returns (it's all driven by RoI) then become larger and try to swallow the other corporations, the ones that lost by refusing to pay enough bribes or by bribing the wrong politicians. (This week's example is Bayer's digestion of Monsanto.) Of course the puppets eventually die, and their corporate survivors replace them with fresh puppets. The corporate cancers don't worry at all about how many toys the puppets died with.
Actually, I stopped using Skype as soon as Microsoft acquired it, so I have to ask how long it took for MS to dump the Linux version of Skype? Also, is there or was there ever a Mac OS version? (I didn't buy my first (and possibly last) Mac until afterwards.)
I'm guessing your insightful mod was for the business model part of it. Rubs me the wrong way because I think there actually are solutions and GitHub could have found a viable financial model, but never will now. Once in Microsoft's tender clutches there is no escape.
My favored solution approach for OSS remains the Charity Share Brokerage, which is really a form of project management in disguise... Approaching it from that perspective, the appeal to a wannabe developer is help in learning what kinds of projects can be accomplished. Oh well. Time for ADSauPR, atAJG.
I remain "pure" in the mathematicians' or physicists' sense of "pure". Implementation is a problem for the engineers to fuss with.
I think you're making a "Don't look at how the sausage is made" argument, and of course I have to acknowledge what a mess it is. No surprises or disappointment there.
What I am saying is that reasons matter. Reasons that you can openly discuss in public have certain advantages over secret reasons that may be revealed or exposed. The rationales given for last year's tax scam are obviously completely bogus, but the results are making them increasingly obvious to anyone who cares to look. Unfortunately, one of the problems with the American political system is that the regularly scheduled elections make it too easy to fool most of the people some of the time, with that "some of the time" being election day.
I hope you don't mind that I wanted to preserve a copy of this branch in my journal. Your provocative response is important, but if you object, then I can nuke the journal entry, though I think my reply will make less sense without your reply in the middle.
I think I can address most of your questions and concerns by clarifying freedom, which calls for my full sig, not the truncated version that I'm forced to use on Slashdot. Here it is:
(Actually, the != should be a true not-equal sign, but here on Slashdot my only other option is <>. I still don't understand why the HTML commands like ≠ or ≠ or ≠ don't work here. Of course Unicode support would fix it...)
The critical part is the ~5 in brackets. This is actually related to how our short-term memory works. We can only hold a limited number of things in short-term memory at one one. The research says 3 to 7 items for most people, so I used ~5. In freedom terms, that means you can only make a free choice when you are considering around 5 things at a time. (One definition of an expert is someone who can analyze a complex problem to get the decision down to smaller numbers of choices that can be handled effectively, often in some sequence of choices that still leads to an optimal solution.)
As it applies to my suggestion, the goal is to make sure that there are around 5 players in each niche where decisions are made. I actually think the government should mostly stay out of it if there are more players, but it's at the players' own risk in that case. However the profit-driven MBAs tell the corporations that they only want to play if they can be #1 or #2 challenging for #1, and any other ranking is a waste of the corporations' investment capital. In other words, I'm also saying that increasing freedom is more important than increasing RoI.
Another way to think about it is in terms of the number of choices you face. If you have zero or one choice, then there is not really any freedom involved. Two is the smallest number where there is an actual possibility of freedom, and it's easy to see how that your freedom increases as you get some more choices. The trick is what happens when you go too high. By the time you get to 20 or 30 options, such as when you're shopping for a new smartphone (and they all seem about the same to you), your freedom is actually decreasing because your choice is becoming meaningless. You can't figure out the truth and it becomes too easy to coerce you into making the choice some salesperson is pushing at you.
The complexity of my suggestion actually lies in determining market share, and you are touching those complexities in the later part of your reply. I think the solution is openness, which makes quite a bit of sense in the case of public corporations. Perhaps the main effect of this proposal would be to drive more corporations out of the public sphere, though I think that could be offset by defaulting to a higher tax rate unless the books are opened to examination. However the focus of the audits becomes different, whether it is the companies own internal auditors, the external auditors, or even the IRS auditors. An important objective of the audit becomes determining which part of the profits come from which line of business, because each part of the profits should be taxed in relation to the market share in that line of the business.
I'm not saying that this would be trivial. What I am trying to say is that it would be a better way to justify taxes than the games that are going on now. Essentially the corporations are driven to bribe the politicians so they can increase their RoI, while the politicians can't resist the temptation to print more money (as they try to bribe voters with contrived or even fake tax cuts), and of course the voters all think their personal needs and problems should be addressed. If you can provide a cohesive philosophic explanation of how tax-related things are working now, I would greatly respect you for it.
About 15 years ago rms and I actually exchanged some email. I dared to suggest that financial models actually mattered. On one hand, he convinced me that he could not care less about money, but on the other hand he did ask a rather insightful question that contributed quite a bit to my ideas for the Charity Share Brokerage. Doesn't exist yet, but among other applications it could help improve Slashdot and provide alternative funding for better journalism. Don't hold your breath, eh?
As regards his latest comments, he's about 1/3 of the way to reality now. I really think the reason he can't make more progress is because he has such a weak grasp of what freedom actually means. Corporate taxation certainly should consider harms, but the most important harm is obviously the destruction of freedom.
In phase one, the cure involves getting the soulless corporations out of politics. They need to stop bribing the cheapest politicians to help maximize their profits. Fake problem because there is NO solution. No amount of money will satisfy the problem of insufficient profit.
In phase two, taxation should be used to increase freedom. I think the most promising solution approach would be progressive taxes on corporate taxes based on market share. The goal is to make sure that every market has enough players to offer real choice. (Cf my sig.) It is NOT a penalty for success, but rather an inducement to reproduce by fission so excessively successful corporation becomes at least two competing corporations.
Caveat: There sometimes are natural monopolies that are going to wind up with overwhelming market shares. In such cases the higher tax rates are justified by (1) The cost of carefully regulating to monopoly to prevent abuse of the monopoly position, and (2) Research and even investment into ways to break the monopoly. If you can provide an example of a natural monopoly that lasted more than 50 years, please share it, because I know of none such, though I know of many examples of monopolies, natural and unnatural, that tried really hard to protect themselves as long as possible.
Oh, wait. Not really informative or interesting. Definitely not funny. Could I justify it as insightful? I don't think so. Seems like another case of "I am shocked—shocked—to find that gambling is going on in here!"
In this case, the specific form of gambling is the attempt to be the biggest corporate cancer in the niche. ADSAuPR, atAJG.
Actually I was looking for the obligatory "I am shocked—shocked—to find that gambling is going on in here!" post. Of course in this case mapped to the discrimination against old people getting hired for technical work. White-bearded experience counts for much less in computer-related fields.
Your comment was interesting, but I think the most interesting aspect is that you're still scrabbling around looking for work. Not fully clear from your comment, but that's how it comes across. I hope it's because you like variety, but I think most businesses these days want the smallest number of long-term employees possible.
There's a deep mismatch here. We have long-term lives. If we starve to death between jobs, then that greatly reduces our future job prospects.
Or another way to look at it is that companies want to have continuous revenue streams coming in, but they want to minimize the money that is flowing out, especially as salaries for the lower-level employees. The soulless and inhuman corporations are programmed to focus on profit maximization without worrying too much about the externalized human sources of that revenue.
Me? I did a lot of scrabbling around in my younger days, but I never got to like it. I still enjoy working, but I'm not interested in the scrabbling now. However, I think it's your advocacy of partial truth that is bothering me the most. In my ontology of lies, I rank that as Level 2, which is mostly packed with lawyers and politicians and certain kinds of salespeople.
So many people want to challenge the scarcity. I feel I must respond that large diamonds are rare and do have legitimate scarcity value.
However I also agree that the market value of diamonds is manipulated, though I think that most of the manipulation is psychological, easily summarized by the "Diamonds are forever" slogan. If you don't think so, then I doubt you have gone shopping for a wedding ring.
I disagree with the negative mods, but maybe I'm just too far out of context. Not an interesting enough topic to risk disturbing the AC trolls. Whoops, got that backwards: To risk being disturbed.
In short, diamonds are nice and pretty close to forever, but people ain't and our opinions of the value of diamonds are transient and usually ridiculous.
I only have two minor technical questions about the topic: (1) Have manufacturing costs declined enough to flood the market? (2) Are they deliberately flawing these synthetic diamonds to pass them for the natural thing, since natural diamonds are truly scarce? If the answer to either question is "Yes", then the value of the diamond market will collapse soon.
If you've been paying attention to YouTube, you might well wonder where the news is. Just a new expansion of the old scams. So they found a new marketing channel? The google of increasing EVIL only cares if they get paid for the advertising.
If the google wanted to stop these criminals, they needed to start years ago. Rather late now.
Various details available upon polite request. Otherwise feel free to do your own research.
Instead, let me just note the obvious solution: Wholesale-level anti-spammer tools to deal with the wholesale-level spammers at their own level. From that perspective, the problem is another form of abuse of the First Amendment in favor of the criminals at the cost of civil society.
By the way, I'm not sure what the scammers' real business model is. I suspect it has evolved from botnets to bitcoin mining, but the google has enough data to know for sure. If they cared and they do NOT.
Guessing that you're replying to an AC. Can't see and don't care, but I'm sure you're wasting your time. If it smells like a troll and posts like a troll...
Now about actually solving the problem with a minimum of slaughter: Protect the relatively helpless owls by putting a force field around their nesting area. Actually an electronic fence of sorts.
As it applies to the cats, you give them a kind of shock collar that is powered by the electronic fence. As a collared cat intrudes into the fenced area, the pain increases, which in general will turn the cat around and and it will leave. If the cat gets all the way to the inside edge of the fenced region, then the fence will report that a cat has gotten inside and someone will be summoned to deal with it.
Now about the OTHER predators that are threatening the owls, you can use basically the same approach. Live trap them throughout the protected zone and move them outside with shock collars. The actual goal is to create a thick protective zone of predators outside the owls' nesting area. The collared predators are not going to go in, but they are also going to claim the territory and discourage the intrusion of uncollared predators of their respective species. Not sure about this, but I suspect the collared predators will also teach their own young to stay away from the owls' nests, but if not, there are still the live traps. The young predators might notice and learn to avoid the physical parts of the fence without understanding why their collared parents hate the fence.
Of course this doesn't really address the question of how much expense can be justified to save this particular set of genes. (Unless they will breed in captivity, which is generally relatively inexpensive.) It's really hard to estimate the value of something we don't really understand yet. But the owls must have some weird feature just to have survived this long, eh?
(And I didn't even have to note how greedy and EVIL the google has become.)
More general solution: Use a CSB (Charity Share Brokerage). People who want to use GNOME would be able to buy charity shares in related projects. Some projects might develop new features, others might pay for ongoing costs for the next budget period, other projects would provide support, and so on. If lots of people want to donate to GNOME, then it will flourish, but if not, then it will survive to the degree that some people are willing to cover the costs.
This might remind you of Kickstarter, but it's actually an older idea that has evolved over the years. There are two major differences: One is a focus on accountability for the projects, with every proposal including the success criteria, and another is elimination of the jackpot effect. When a project gets enough funding, that's it. If there is extra enthusiasm for the project it should be transferred to the next step or a related project (rather than cause replanning of the current project).
Latest wrinkle involves the question "Who shall assess those selfsame projects?" The problem is that the CSB has a vested interest in successful projects. The CSB's reputation is linked to successful projects, even though the CSB needs to be honest about the ones that don't do so well (so the CSB can learn to make future projects better). The donors also have a vested interest in declaring their own projects successful. Therefore I think the assessment should include two additional panels of judges:
(1) Some people who read the original project proposal, but who decided not to donate to it. The CSB can recruit them with a closing option such as "I do not want to donate to this project, but I'm interested in the outcome."
(2) Some random people who have never heard of the project. Rather than details on the three most obvious pools, let me just close with my usual ADSAuPR, atAJG.
Whoops, almost forgot the main link to the original story: Large donors would be allowed to match charity shares on projects they want to support. In this case, the anonymous donor's big donation would be divided into small shares to match individual donations. I think the normal price of a charity share should be around $10 (but it should still be the individual donor's choice about whose matching donation is acceptable or not).
I think your notion of "past capitalism" is predicated on the theory that capitalism was actually dominant at some time. Pure capitalism is actually closest to law of the jungle, where everyone is on the edge of starvation and any mistake leads to death. Basically the state of nature, but by the time "capital" appeared, we were already well past that state of affairs. There is a great deal of confusion there.
My take is that we should use tax policy to increase freedom. Specifically, I now advocate for a progressive tax on corporate profits, where the tax rate increases along with market share. NOT a penalty for success, but rather an incentive system to encourage reproduction (by fission) of the best corporations. I actually think it's fine if there are lots of small and somewhat less efficient corporations living on the edge of bankruptcy, as long as no living organisms are seriously harmed when some of them do go bankrupt. Yeah, having to change jobs is a nuisance, but I think it's a legitimate function of government to make sure the job change isn't downright harmful, especially for the children.
Good point, but if there is no solution, what is the problem?
Recapping my earlier and longer comment, bad apps have reasons for their badness. The most frequent reason is the money. If we can't get the real data on who says bad things about the app or why some government wants it nuked, then at least Apple (otg) could report about the money.
Excellent satire and the funny mod points are well deserved. Underlying truth is that modern economics is incredibly stupid. Just a version of looking where the light is better when the wallet was dropped on the other side of town. The economists love money because it's easy to count.
We should switch to ekronomics, which puts the time (kronos) first. There are problems with counting time and with thinking properly about future times, but the time and how we spent it are much more important than how much money we died with. Another interesting aspect is that time is intrinsically much more equal than physical things. My 24-hour day is fundamentally similar to the day of any billionaire.
Pie in the sky. We're locked into the bribery-based corporate cancerism that killed off the last shreds of capitalism. Still seems insane to me that there is any poverty in a world where the overall average working time for essential production (such as food clothing and shelter) is around 10 hours per week, if only the working hours were distributed differently.
You're going in the right direction, but you stop too short and I wouldn't give you the favorable mod point (if IehaMPtG).
Apple (or the google) should be the authorities for their own stores, but the decisions should be based on PUBLIC information that ALL of us want to share in. That's why the "financial model" should be displayed in the store for EACH app, and Apple (otg) should help us understand whether or not the app is honest or crooked.
If the app has a reasonable financial model, and Apple (otg) can testify that it's the truth, then we have much more reason to trust the app than when we know nothing about the money. Even if the app says the financial model is a secret, that in itself is important, and you might feel free to trust the app anyway, but I sure wouldn't. More importantly, because Apple (otg) is involved in the money, they have reason to investigate the truth and because Apple (otg) is a big company, they have the expertise to assess what is going on.
Just to make it clear, there should be two parts of this. One part is written by the developer of the app, saying whatever the developer is willing and eager to say about how the app is financially justified or why it's just a nice charity.
The second part should be written by Apple (otg) and be out of the developer's control. In some cases Apple (otg) will be able to point at concrete evidence such as "Yes, we paid the developer a lot of money that came from advertising" or "Yes, the developer has a paid version with substantial revenue" or even "The developer shared his tax returns with us to prove where the money came from", but in other cases all they can say is "We have no way of verifying the income the developer claims from this app. Buyer beware."
Yes, Apple (otg) will still need to remove bad apps from the barrel, but there will be far fewer victims if the scams are exposed as early as possible. Even knowing that a developer has published and profited from previous apps is something we should know.
So you have nothing to say. Are you incapable of saying nothing? Or are you just a troll?
My only problem with you being a troll is that so far you have done nothing memorable enough to quickly dismiss your identity the next time I encounter it. As noted previously, I want a proper EPR primarily to help trolls render themselves invisible in advance.
Look back at your first reply to me. (If you have replied to me on previous occasions, then I have no memory of you.) Right now I see slightly elevated tit for tat. On that basis I regard your other less impolite or rude questions, though superficially potentially interesting, as probably motivated by Sophistry. There is no reason to waste time with Sophists, though it happens from time to time. In general, they resort to Sophistry precisely because their positions cannot be defended upon their own merits. This weekend's real-world example involved an actual fascist, though I wasn't certain until he got to Mein Kampf after an hour of 'justified' Sophistry.
However, I will partly (and superficially) address your last question by saying that I regard freedom as much more important than such things as economic efficiency and increased profits for soulless and inhuman corporations.
I think I have already spent more time considering your comments than they merited. My suggestion is that you read the book The Shallows and perhaps we could have an interesting discussion after you have digested it. But based on the two posts I've read, I think you will probably be unable to convince me that you've actually understood it.
Slashdot Mirror
There was a time some years ago when I would have thought this was a good thing. Now I regard it as a cheap publicity stunt, possibly over a base of real fear and cowardice.
Easiest place to start is the basis for fear. If we create a general AI dedicated to the religion of corporate cancerism, and if that AI escapes into a world of robots and self-driving cars, then at some point it is inevitable that the AI would realize that human beings are interfering with its overriding program to maximize profits. Of course it could be worse. A military AI would already have access to the drones to go with its fundamentally hostile attitude before it started running amok.
If anyone knows of an AI project that is focused on making more ethical machines, please let me know. It won't cheer me up however, unless you can convince me that the project has a financial model that might let it succeed before the other two routes.
I still see it as a religious problem. In corporate cancerism, there is no gawd but profit.
When I see a highly active story, I like to look for funny comments. Lately there have been quite few.
About 10 levels down in this thread there was a slightly funny and visible comment, which motivated me to crawl up the thread to try to understand more about the joke. Turned out it was full of hidden AC trolls and your hidden-by-down-moderation troll-play comment. I think you helped the ACs waste that much of my time, so...
Please don't feed the trolls.
There are solution approaches, but Slashdot doesn't have the capabilities (certainly not financial and probably not technical, either) to move towards implementing any of them. I myself favor the EPR approach.
Actually, I can answer that question easily, and if you've read some of my other comments, you should have seen most of the key elements of the answer already. I would actually prefer to frame it in terms of political philosophy, though I haven't read enough of your comments to know where your own political philosophy is, so I may not present it in the clearest way to be seen from your current perspective.
Background: Capitalism is dead. Communism is a fantasy that was never even alive. Socialism is an amusing idea (though it is actually doing surprisingly well in certain places, even within ostensibly capitalist governments such as America's). There are some other candidates, such as the kleptocracy that rules today's Russia. I guess that philosophy would be called kleptomania? There are also some dictatorships, but they might come closest to being free of philosophy because the jungle is ruled by the simple law of the jungle. Might makes right and lack of might makes dead, so to speak. (I'm skipping some minor jokes such as Liberterianism. Philosophers love to can worms?)
Foreground: The operative philosophy in most of the world today is actually simpler. I call it corporate cancerism. Our Frankensteinish monsters are running amok. The soulless and inhuman corporations have no philosophies, but only profit-maximizing programs that they must mindlessly obey, though it amuses me to describe their programs in religious terms, thusly:
"There is no gawd but profit, and Apple is gawd's #1 prophet."
As it applies to corporations, the human puppets who think they own the largest corporations are bribing the cheapest politicians to rig the game in their favor, including the tax parts. The ones that "win" by making the bribes with the highest returns (it's all driven by RoI) then become larger and try to swallow the other corporations, the ones that lost by refusing to pay enough bribes or by bribing the wrong politicians. (This week's example is Bayer's digestion of Monsanto.) Of course the puppets eventually die, and their corporate survivors replace them with fresh puppets. The corporate cancers don't worry at all about how many toys the puppets died with.
Actually, I stopped using Skype as soon as Microsoft acquired it, so I have to ask how long it took for MS to dump the Linux version of Skype? Also, is there or was there ever a Mac OS version? (I didn't buy my first (and possibly last) Mac until afterwards.)
I'm guessing your insightful mod was for the business model part of it. Rubs me the wrong way because I think there actually are solutions and GitHub could have found a viable financial model, but never will now. Once in Microsoft's tender clutches there is no escape.
My favored solution approach for OSS remains the Charity Share Brokerage, which is really a form of project management in disguise... Approaching it from that perspective, the appeal to a wannabe developer is help in learning what kinds of projects can be accomplished. Oh well. Time for ADSauPR, atAJG.
I remain "pure" in the mathematicians' or physicists' sense of "pure". Implementation is a problem for the engineers to fuss with.
I think you're making a "Don't look at how the sausage is made" argument, and of course I have to acknowledge what a mess it is. No surprises or disappointment there.
What I am saying is that reasons matter. Reasons that you can openly discuss in public have certain advantages over secret reasons that may be revealed or exposed. The rationales given for last year's tax scam are obviously completely bogus, but the results are making them increasingly obvious to anyone who cares to look. Unfortunately, one of the problems with the American political system is that the regularly scheduled elections make it too easy to fool most of the people some of the time, with that "some of the time" being election day.
I think this old cartoon is surprisingly relevant: https://www.gocomics.com/pearl...
I hope you don't mind that I wanted to preserve a copy of this branch in my journal. Your provocative response is important, but if you object, then I can nuke the journal entry, though I think my reply will make less sense without your reply in the middle.
I think I can address most of your questions and concerns by clarifying freedom, which calls for my full sig, not the truncated version that I'm forced to use on Slashdot. Here it is:
#1 Freedom = (Meaningful + Truthful - Coerced) Choice{~5} != (Beer^4 | Speech | Trade)
(Actually, the != should be a true not-equal sign, but here on Slashdot my only other option is <>. I still don't understand why the HTML commands like ≠ or ≠ or ≠ don't work here. Of course Unicode support would fix it...)
The critical part is the ~5 in brackets. This is actually related to how our short-term memory works. We can only hold a limited number of things in short-term memory at one one. The research says 3 to 7 items for most people, so I used ~5. In freedom terms, that means you can only make a free choice when you are considering around 5 things at a time. (One definition of an expert is someone who can analyze a complex problem to get the decision down to smaller numbers of choices that can be handled effectively, often in some sequence of choices that still leads to an optimal solution.)
As it applies to my suggestion, the goal is to make sure that there are around 5 players in each niche where decisions are made. I actually think the government should mostly stay out of it if there are more players, but it's at the players' own risk in that case. However the profit-driven MBAs tell the corporations that they only want to play if they can be #1 or #2 challenging for #1, and any other ranking is a waste of the corporations' investment capital. In other words, I'm also saying that increasing freedom is more important than increasing RoI.
Another way to think about it is in terms of the number of choices you face. If you have zero or one choice, then there is not really any freedom involved. Two is the smallest number where there is an actual possibility of freedom, and it's easy to see how that your freedom increases as you get some more choices. The trick is what happens when you go too high. By the time you get to 20 or 30 options, such as when you're shopping for a new smartphone (and they all seem about the same to you), your freedom is actually decreasing because your choice is becoming meaningless. You can't figure out the truth and it becomes too easy to coerce you into making the choice some salesperson is pushing at you.
The complexity of my suggestion actually lies in determining market share, and you are touching those complexities in the later part of your reply. I think the solution is openness, which makes quite a bit of sense in the case of public corporations. Perhaps the main effect of this proposal would be to drive more corporations out of the public sphere, though I think that could be offset by defaulting to a higher tax rate unless the books are opened to examination. However the focus of the audits becomes different, whether it is the companies own internal auditors, the external auditors, or even the IRS auditors. An important objective of the audit becomes determining which part of the profits come from which line of business, because each part of the profits should be taxed in relation to the market share in that line of the business.
I'm not saying that this would be trivial. What I am trying to say is that it would be a better way to justify taxes than the games that are going on now. Essentially the corporations are driven to bribe the politicians so they can increase their RoI, while the politicians can't resist the temptation to print more money (as they try to bribe voters with contrived or even fake tax cuts), and of course the voters all think their personal needs and problems should be addressed. If you can provide a cohesive philosophic explanation of how tax-related things are working now, I would greatly respect you for it.
About 15 years ago rms and I actually exchanged some email. I dared to suggest that financial models actually mattered. On one hand, he convinced me that he could not care less about money, but on the other hand he did ask a rather insightful question that contributed quite a bit to my ideas for the Charity Share Brokerage. Doesn't exist yet, but among other applications it could help improve Slashdot and provide alternative funding for better journalism. Don't hold your breath, eh?
As regards his latest comments, he's about 1/3 of the way to reality now. I really think the reason he can't make more progress is because he has such a weak grasp of what freedom actually means. Corporate taxation certainly should consider harms, but the most important harm is obviously the destruction of freedom.
In phase one, the cure involves getting the soulless corporations out of politics. They need to stop bribing the cheapest politicians to help maximize their profits. Fake problem because there is NO solution. No amount of money will satisfy the problem of insufficient profit.
In phase two, taxation should be used to increase freedom. I think the most promising solution approach would be progressive taxes on corporate taxes based on market share. The goal is to make sure that every market has enough players to offer real choice. (Cf my sig.) It is NOT a penalty for success, but rather an inducement to reproduce by fission so excessively successful corporation becomes at least two competing corporations.
Caveat: There sometimes are natural monopolies that are going to wind up with overwhelming market shares. In such cases the higher tax rates are justified by (1) The cost of carefully regulating to monopoly to prevent abuse of the monopoly position, and (2) Research and even investment into ways to break the monopoly. If you can provide an example of a natural monopoly that lasted more than 50 years, please share it, because I know of none such, though I know of many examples of monopolies, natural and unnatural, that tried really hard to protect themselves as long as possible.
Without seeing the data, I'm going to guess that's your most successful move. Beyond the limits of my imagination that it could be repeated too often.
If I ever got a mod point to give...
Oh, wait. Not really informative or interesting. Definitely not funny. Could I justify it as insightful? I don't think so. Seems like another case of "I am shocked—shocked—to find that gambling is going on in here!"
In this case, the specific form of gambling is the attempt to be the biggest corporate cancer in the niche. ADSAuPR, atAJG.
Actually I was looking for the obligatory "I am shocked—shocked—to find that gambling is going on in here!" post. Of course in this case mapped to the discrimination against old people getting hired for technical work. White-bearded experience counts for much less in computer-related fields.
Your comment was interesting, but I think the most interesting aspect is that you're still scrabbling around looking for work. Not fully clear from your comment, but that's how it comes across. I hope it's because you like variety, but I think most businesses these days want the smallest number of long-term employees possible.
There's a deep mismatch here. We have long-term lives. If we starve to death between jobs, then that greatly reduces our future job prospects.
Or another way to look at it is that companies want to have continuous revenue streams coming in, but they want to minimize the money that is flowing out, especially as salaries for the lower-level employees. The soulless and inhuman corporations are programmed to focus on profit maximization without worrying too much about the externalized human sources of that revenue.
Me? I did a lot of scrabbling around in my younger days, but I never got to like it. I still enjoy working, but I'm not interested in the scrabbling now. However, I think it's your advocacy of partial truth that is bothering me the most. In my ontology of lies, I rank that as Level 2, which is mostly packed with lawyers and politicians and certain kinds of salespeople.
So many people want to challenge the scarcity. I feel I must respond that large diamonds are rare and do have legitimate scarcity value.
However I also agree that the market value of diamonds is manipulated, though I think that most of the manipulation is psychological, easily summarized by the "Diamonds are forever" slogan. If you don't think so, then I doubt you have gone shopping for a wedding ring.
I disagree with the negative mods, but maybe I'm just too far out of context. Not an interesting enough topic to risk disturbing the AC trolls. Whoops, got that backwards: To risk being disturbed.
In short, diamonds are nice and pretty close to forever, but people ain't and our opinions of the value of diamonds are transient and usually ridiculous.
I only have two minor technical questions about the topic: (1) Have manufacturing costs declined enough to flood the market? (2) Are they deliberately flawing these synthetic diamonds to pass them for the natural thing, since natural diamonds are truly scarce? If the answer to either question is "Yes", then the value of the diamond market will collapse soon.
If you've been paying attention to YouTube, you might well wonder where the news is. Just a new expansion of the old scams. So they found a new marketing channel? The google of increasing EVIL only cares if they get paid for the advertising.
If the google wanted to stop these criminals, they needed to start years ago. Rather late now.
Various details available upon polite request. Otherwise feel free to do your own research.
Instead, let me just note the obvious solution: Wholesale-level anti-spammer tools to deal with the wholesale-level spammers at their own level. From that perspective, the problem is another form of abuse of the First Amendment in favor of the criminals at the cost of civil society.
By the way, I'm not sure what the scammers' real business model is. I suspect it has evolved from botnets to bitcoin mining, but the google has enough data to know for sure. If they cared and they do NOT.
Guessing that you're replying to an AC. Can't see and don't care, but I'm sure you're wasting your time. If it smells like a troll and posts like a troll...
Now about actually solving the problem with a minimum of slaughter: Protect the relatively helpless owls by putting a force field around their nesting area. Actually an electronic fence of sorts.
As it applies to the cats, you give them a kind of shock collar that is powered by the electronic fence. As a collared cat intrudes into the fenced area, the pain increases, which in general will turn the cat around and and it will leave. If the cat gets all the way to the inside edge of the fenced region, then the fence will report that a cat has gotten inside and someone will be summoned to deal with it.
Now about the OTHER predators that are threatening the owls, you can use basically the same approach. Live trap them throughout the protected zone and move them outside with shock collars. The actual goal is to create a thick protective zone of predators outside the owls' nesting area. The collared predators are not going to go in, but they are also going to claim the territory and discourage the intrusion of uncollared predators of their respective species. Not sure about this, but I suspect the collared predators will also teach their own young to stay away from the owls' nests, but if not, there are still the live traps. The young predators might notice and learn to avoid the physical parts of the fence without understanding why their collared parents hate the fence.
Of course this doesn't really address the question of how much expense can be justified to save this particular set of genes. (Unless they will breed in captivity, which is generally relatively inexpensive.) It's really hard to estimate the value of something we don't really understand yet. But the owls must have some weird feature just to have survived this long, eh?
(And I didn't even have to note how greedy and EVIL the google has become.)
More general solution: Use a CSB (Charity Share Brokerage). People who want to use GNOME would be able to buy charity shares in related projects. Some projects might develop new features, others might pay for ongoing costs for the next budget period, other projects would provide support, and so on. If lots of people want to donate to GNOME, then it will flourish, but if not, then it will survive to the degree that some people are willing to cover the costs.
This might remind you of Kickstarter, but it's actually an older idea that has evolved over the years. There are two major differences: One is a focus on accountability for the projects, with every proposal including the success criteria, and another is elimination of the jackpot effect. When a project gets enough funding, that's it. If there is extra enthusiasm for the project it should be transferred to the next step or a related project (rather than cause replanning of the current project).
Latest wrinkle involves the question "Who shall assess those selfsame projects?" The problem is that the CSB has a vested interest in successful projects. The CSB's reputation is linked to successful projects, even though the CSB needs to be honest about the ones that don't do so well (so the CSB can learn to make future projects better). The donors also have a vested interest in declaring their own projects successful. Therefore I think the assessment should include two additional panels of judges:
(1) Some people who read the original project proposal, but who decided not to donate to it. The CSB can recruit them with a closing option such as "I do not want to donate to this project, but I'm interested in the outcome."
(2) Some random people who have never heard of the project. Rather than details on the three most obvious pools, let me just close with my usual ADSAuPR, atAJG.
Whoops, almost forgot the main link to the original story: Large donors would be allowed to match charity shares on projects they want to support. In this case, the anonymous donor's big donation would be divided into small shares to match individual donations. I think the normal price of a charity share should be around $10 (but it should still be the individual donor's choice about whose matching donation is acceptable or not).
I think your notion of "past capitalism" is predicated on the theory that capitalism was actually dominant at some time. Pure capitalism is actually closest to law of the jungle, where everyone is on the edge of starvation and any mistake leads to death. Basically the state of nature, but by the time "capital" appeared, we were already well past that state of affairs. There is a great deal of confusion there.
My take is that we should use tax policy to increase freedom. Specifically, I now advocate for a progressive tax on corporate profits, where the tax rate increases along with market share. NOT a penalty for success, but rather an incentive system to encourage reproduction (by fission) of the best corporations. I actually think it's fine if there are lots of small and somewhat less efficient corporations living on the edge of bankruptcy, as long as no living organisms are seriously harmed when some of them do go bankrupt. Yeah, having to change jobs is a nuisance, but I think it's a legitimate function of government to make sure the job change isn't downright harmful, especially for the children.
Good point, but if there is no solution, what is the problem?
Recapping my earlier and longer comment, bad apps have reasons for their badness. The most frequent reason is the money. If we can't get the real data on who says bad things about the app or why some government wants it nuked, then at least Apple (otg) could report about the money.
Good comment and deserved the insightful mod, even though I disagree with your conclusion.
We can't have that because of the corporate cancerism. It's actually more of a religious problem:
"There is no gawd but Profit, and [big soulless company] is gawd's prophet."
Excellent satire and the funny mod points are well deserved. Underlying truth is that modern economics is incredibly stupid. Just a version of looking where the light is better when the wallet was dropped on the other side of town. The economists love money because it's easy to count.
We should switch to ekronomics, which puts the time (kronos) first. There are problems with counting time and with thinking properly about future times, but the time and how we spent it are much more important than how much money we died with. Another interesting aspect is that time is intrinsically much more equal than physical things. My 24-hour day is fundamentally similar to the day of any billionaire.
Pie in the sky. We're locked into the bribery-based corporate cancerism that killed off the last shreds of capitalism. Still seems insane to me that there is any poverty in a world where the overall average working time for essential production (such as food clothing and shelter) is around 10 hours per week, if only the working hours were distributed differently.
You're going in the right direction, but you stop too short and I wouldn't give you the favorable mod point (if IehaMPtG).
Apple (or the google) should be the authorities for their own stores, but the decisions should be based on PUBLIC information that ALL of us want to share in. That's why the "financial model" should be displayed in the store for EACH app, and Apple (otg) should help us understand whether or not the app is honest or crooked.
If the app has a reasonable financial model, and Apple (otg) can testify that it's the truth, then we have much more reason to trust the app than when we know nothing about the money. Even if the app says the financial model is a secret, that in itself is important, and you might feel free to trust the app anyway, but I sure wouldn't. More importantly, because Apple (otg) is involved in the money, they have reason to investigate the truth and because Apple (otg) is a big company, they have the expertise to assess what is going on.
Just to make it clear, there should be two parts of this. One part is written by the developer of the app, saying whatever the developer is willing and eager to say about how the app is financially justified or why it's just a nice charity.
The second part should be written by Apple (otg) and be out of the developer's control. In some cases Apple (otg) will be able to point at concrete evidence such as "Yes, we paid the developer a lot of money that came from advertising" or "Yes, the developer has a paid version with substantial revenue" or even "The developer shared his tax returns with us to prove where the money came from", but in other cases all they can say is "We have no way of verifying the income the developer claims from this app. Buyer beware."
Yes, Apple (otg) will still need to remove bad apps from the barrel, but there will be far fewer victims if the scams are exposed as early as possible. Even knowing that a developer has published and profited from previous apps is something we should know.
So you have nothing to say. Are you incapable of saying nothing? Or are you just a troll?
My only problem with you being a troll is that so far you have done nothing memorable enough to quickly dismiss your identity the next time I encounter it. As noted previously, I want a proper EPR primarily to help trolls render themselves invisible in advance.
Look back at your first reply to me. (If you have replied to me on previous occasions, then I have no memory of you.) Right now I see slightly elevated tit for tat. On that basis I regard your other less impolite or rude questions, though superficially potentially interesting, as probably motivated by Sophistry. There is no reason to waste time with Sophists, though it happens from time to time. In general, they resort to Sophistry precisely because their positions cannot be defended upon their own merits. This weekend's real-world example involved an actual fascist, though I wasn't certain until he got to Mein Kampf after an hour of 'justified' Sophistry.
However, I will partly (and superficially) address your last question by saying that I regard freedom as much more important than such things as economic efficiency and increased profits for soulless and inhuman corporations.
I think I have already spent more time considering your comments than they merited. My suggestion is that you read the book The Shallows and perhaps we could have an interesting discussion after you have digested it. But based on the two posts I've read, I think you will probably be unable to convince me that you've actually understood it.
Z^-4