Re:s/Stranger /Moon Is a Harsh Mistress/
on
Top 20 Geek Novels
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· Score: 1
Ignoring the gay sex (if that was it I would just tell everyone to go read Poppy Z. Brite), the Forever series were wonderful books, the last one was kind of weak, but still decent.
I know people are going to hate me, by why is Cryptonomicon on there? It is SO long, and SO boring, its like Stephenson got some Umberto Eco envy, but couldn't pull of Foucault's Pendulum.
I also think that Illumantis! Trilogy should be on there, to keep the tinfoil hat crowd busy.
Ayn Rand isn't a geek novelist. It's faux philosophical fiction for people who want to feel good about being greedy. I think most geeks don't like her, but this is/., also known as the totality of the Libertarian party.
Not a value judgement, some people might like her. Doesn't stop her from being in the top five of my "If I could Go Back in Time and Kill Famous Dead People" list, though.
LeGuin has written a couple decent short stories, though.
The movies were lacking tons of things. Now we just get to compain more. Also, what non-geek really wants to sit through 1000+ pages of backstory, poetry, and languages?
At least GoogleNet wouldn't be as obnoxious as SkyNet, it would just watch what your doing, and offer tasteful ads from time to time, instead of trying to extinguish you.
Interesting question, and further diversion from reality, if Google gain sentience, would it monitor its own browsing and email, and send itself little tasteful ads?
Very sad, but you fail to cite any proof that piracy is causing harm to you or your business, besides two kids (who from your description could have got the law on you for assault).
Perhaps the problem is that you are in a very very small niche market, and being so you are more vulnerable to economic changes. Perhaps a switch of the demographic of your base area. Perhaps the economy in general.
Perhaps people like me who rely on free music (like from Jemundo and such), and iTMS to cut out the middle man, and the resultant high prices from it ($17 for a CD?! 9.99 is about right). Perhaps it is because people are buying less, period.
For your niche, I really doubt that many people are pirating that type of music. Go on to any P2P service, and count the amount of Christian rock, as compaired to the stuff that you don't want to sell. You'll notice that it is a severe minority, in that most people don't want to listen to it, and the people who do are less apt to pirate it.
I think you wasted a sob story, since there is no overt causation between piracy and your plight. I don't agree with you being modded as a troll though (though you might be one, indeed), being that your post can open up a dialogue, and you offer a solution of some type.
I'm all for your pirate blacklist, since most pirates won't really need to ever go to your store, if they are indeed pirates. I'm sure if they were dilligent they could find a.torrent, or a copy of what ever P2P service kids are using these days. Speaking of, from my case I think you can tell that most P2P pirates don't stay in the game forever, I used to pirate my fair share back in High School, but now that I'm out in the real world, I've switched to legal free music, iTMS, and buying indie CDs from the bands themselves (show your support twice, being at the show, and buying their music). Nope, never gonna step foot in your store, probably, but not doing any illegal.
The CD store niche is probably suffering, since there are so many more convienient and inexpensive alternatives.
I didn't know, BTW, that there was a pirate lobby, I knew that there was a huge corporate lobby trying to restrict my right to IP, since they have more money (money = rights). Companies are allowed to do nasty blackhat-ish activities that restrict me (Sony, oppressive DRM), and lower my security. They are restricting constitutional rights of IP by making it eternal, and thus stiffling the creativity of the whole world (by coercing other countries to buy our system of insanity) so some folk can make more money. This piracy lobby really should actually do something from time to time, I think.
Who said that CS = Geek? I think most geeks can fall into CS, or a science, since they are all very technical control-freak jobs, where they can tweak variables, hack systems (in the Linus sense), and control the living crap out of something all in the reason of grokking.
From this I take geek = obsessive. Geek = someone who wants to know everything about an aspect of a system.
We, if I'm allowed to be a geek (not CS, not fully science), are intellectuals, we obsess more about theory and knowledge than about how we look, if people like us. Also, please compair the depth and number of hobbies that you average/.er has, compaired to the normal population. It is the curiosity, not necissarily the technology.
This might be because of two definitions of the word geek. One is the socially bad one, of a some smart, but socially annoying guy hiding in his parents basement. The other, good definition is that of a generally tech savvy individual with wide reaching interests, and a short attention span for various forms of knowlege (grokk everything, and move on). The later is okay now, whereas before we were creepy.
Really, its sort of like saying "Yeah I hacked my box", where the non-geek will take it as what we take to mean "skr1ptk1dd13" crap, when we actually mean, "it didn't work right, so I rewrote my OS" We're so used to talking to ourselves, that we forget that people use these words differently in the real (non/., non serverfarm) world.
Also, who said you have to be a techie to be a geek? I'm a philosophy geek first, and technology comes second. I think tech is just the primary obsession of geeks since it's easier to tweak/hack/control.
I'm more the philosophical type, than the math type, never really bothered much for the practical in school.
I don't see pred. logic (or symbolic in general) to be a natural science. Even if it does explain natural phenomena it does so through an abstract and universal means, without ever really touching the grounds of empiricism. Math, it seems is an extention of logic (according to Russell, at least), so I just view it as non-natural science in the same way logic is.
I think math would boil down to the same thing as logic and physical science, a very very useful toolset for interpretting other data gained from the world, or from the sciences that they support. Look at language for example, if I write a complex description of the plant sitting on my desk, I am using language in the same manner of math or pred. logic (in a simplified form, granted), as a descriptive tool. Logic, math, and language, without an empirical grounding, are empty activities, and that is why I don't think they are natural sciences.
And now the qualifier, there are certain instances where the line blurs. And, I am not demeaning math, in any way. All my physicist friends always think I'm saying math is meaningless when I make this statement, I'm not, I'm just saying that its meaning relies on outside context.
If we're going by tectonics, than I can fairly say that Russia and China are part of Europe (except for the Indian subcontinent), since they both are on the Eurasian landmass?
And would that mean that the US can lose northern California, being that it is on the Juan de Fuca?
Better solution, don't steel focus, EVER. A program does not need my immediate attention, EVER. Even if it is a terrible virus that will kill my hard drive, or a new version of FF that is SO much better than the previous, it can wait until I finish answering that email, or typing that/. response.
I have enough distractions on my computer taking my productivity away, that I don't need one more. Steeling focus is a design flaw, period. There is no reason for it. It is bad usability, in that programs in the back ground are there for a reason, I don't need to be reminded that they exist. As for FF, I really don't need it to check for updates, and it really doesn't have to ruin my work-flow (/. reading?) for a silly update.
I like how OS X does it in theory, by bouncing a dock icon. Tasteful, subtle, and not to attention grabbing. Windows does it all wrong, though I've noticed a move on some Mac developers to do the "PAY ATTENTION TO ME!!!!! NOW!" thing to.
Intersting point, but compairing a translation to a Cliffs Note, is slightly off. Yes, things are lost in translation, but most translators try to keep it as close to the actual text as possible, in ALL aspects. And good translations, like the one of Being and Time that I am reading right now, keep footnotes of parts that might be ambiguous (this one even has intertext notes with the original German).
Also a translation keeps all of the important aspects of the text, that you, the reader, must digest and interpret in-itself. This is the hard work that the whole topic seems to be avoiding. Even in translations you need to dig around, interpret and think for yourself, to find the true (and perhaps subjective) meaning of text.
With cliff notes you get what someone else digested for you, saving you all work, and independant thought. Part of the important part of reading is EFFORT, yes, this is modern America, and that word is a naughty one now. But you only get out, what you put in. Cliff Note's are the lazy answer, a person who has any intellectual worth would get his answers from the text itself. It is the only honest way to do things.
Translators have the job or mindset of trying to bring the exact, uninterpretted, text to readers. Cliff Notes has the goal of digesting it to peices, sorted out what they feel is interesting, simplifying it grossly, then sending it out to lazy people who can't read the text in itself.
Yes, some people use Cliff Notes as a guide, as they are meant to be, and I have nothing against them, since they still are doing the work themselves. But those who use Cliff Notes alone, they are dishonest and lazy.
My state (Arizona) finally got a standardized testing program, and it rose a HUGE stink, since most of the local teachers could not pass it, even. But then again, at the college I went to, the mean IQ and SAT for the education department was lower than any other course of study. And the things they taught the kids were frightening. Like how to make cute little ditties to keep the kids interested, and such. Also, to specialize in something (like science) you wouldn't have to break 12 credits of 100-200 level classes, most of which had the suffix "for education" on them.
And the frightening part is that this school is ranked in the top schools for primary and secondary Ed. All of the ed people were english majors who couldn't hack it. (Moral of the story, don't go to school for ed in a state with the 2nd lowest literacy rates)
My high school english teacher did this, actually, and my Jr. high english and social studies core did too.
We got to read, on top of the requisite Shakespeare, Slaughterhouse 5, Brave New World, 1984, and Animal Farm. They focused more on intelligent, and applicable, lit than classics-for-classics-sake. Which is laudable (My senior lit teacher was better, forcing us to read Mort D'Auther, with the reward of The Holy Grail after, but this is also the guy who let me read a book on chaos maths instead of Shakespeare)
I think there are two very good reason to force kids to read the Classics, though, the first being that it is hard to identify culturally standing books that are recent, without the large body of critism. Having teachers pick their favorite books would be bad, since kids would be reading Anne Rice and Daniel Steele, neither of which is very academic.
The second reason is just the fact that they are classic, i.e. they form an important part of our cultural grounding. Much of our thought is guided by these works, no matter what their merit actually is.
I always hated the critism aspect of it, though, its like teaching kids how NOT to read. How can you grade someone opinion on a literary work, against the classical body of opinions on the same book. They are all opinions, and thus incomparible. (Yes, classic philosophy is different, since it is logical structures more than mear content).
Why is helping apathetic kids pass tests a good thing? Let them fail. This sort of reasoning is how we get drones into our society, these idgets who care about nothing, and are perfectly happy watching TV all day, eating bon bons, while their children go blow other kids away.
Did you ever think that by reading through it, it would increase you intelligence, and ability to do it again. Learning isn't supposed to be easy, the harder the climb, the more pathways you develop, and the easier it is to do again.
I'm glad I did, because now I'm trying to get through Heidegger, but I think that was mostly because I finally could read/reason through all of Kant. Sure, I could have taken a short cut, but what is the point? I don't plan on reading Ann Rice my whole life, I'd much rather read something that makes me a better person, and doing this requires work.
The best ever is the one year, in college, where I got through all of Dostoevsky, Kafka, Camus, and the short fictions and plays of Sartre, all in the course of one lazy summer, on my own. Was some of it hard? Could I have quit and got the Cliff Notes, no, since I would feel like a moron, a cheater. I would have rather quit than that.
But this is coming from someone who has never touched a Cliffs note in their lives. Cliff Bars, though, thats a different story.
Perhaps my view of the world was skewed since I came from a family that read a lot, while working 8+ hours a day. And in my busy schedual I still manage to finish a book a week (of nonfiction, generally), not counting all of the other reading I must do in the run of my life, all the articals, forums, books, etc.
But then again I haven't turned on my TV for 3 months, and have started limiting my online times, because they were taking away from intellectual activities.
Sometimes when I go to the huge used bookstore by my house, I can't find what I'm looking for, just because I have no idea what genre some publisher monkey wanted to force that book to be in. Try House of Leaves, or such, what genre is it? Fiction? Sci-Fi? Horror? Or even authors who right across genres but are popular for one, hence all of Stephen King's Gunslinger books being thrown into horror, same with some of Koontz' fiction.
Then we have the older books just thown into literature. What the heck does that mean? Should Kerouac be thown in with Kafka and Tolstoy as general lit? In most bookstores Self Help and hard Psychology are thrown together. And Philosophy and New Age. Neither of these make sense.
But with Amazon, this makes less sense, being that they have a search feature. Do people really browse Amazon like they browse physical shops?
t. It's wrong because it goes against the nature of free markets.
So? It isn't a free market anymore? Thus, it doesn't matter if it goes against the nature of free markets, since it isn't trying to be one. Your using a standard to compare against something not of that standard.
Also you made an implicit value judgement which you failed to evaluate. Why are free markets so good? I'm not going against it, per se, but I don't see the hidden connection. What has free markets ever done for us? It looks like most of the world, and most American sectors, are a mess because of them.
Slashdot Mirror
Ignoring the gay sex (if that was it I would just tell everyone to go read Poppy Z. Brite), the Forever series were wonderful books, the last one was kind of weak, but still decent.
I know people are going to hate me, by why is Cryptonomicon on there? It is SO long, and SO boring, its like Stephenson got some Umberto Eco envy, but couldn't pull of Foucault's Pendulum.
I also think that Illumantis! Trilogy should be on there, to keep the tinfoil hat crowd busy.
Ayn Rand isn't a geek novelist. It's faux philosophical fiction for people who want to feel good about being greedy. I think most geeks don't like her, but this is /., also known as the totality of the Libertarian party.
Not a value judgement, some people might like her. Doesn't stop her from being in the top five of my "If I could Go Back in Time and Kill Famous Dead People" list, though.
LeGuin has written a couple decent short stories, though.
Actually, I still do.
The movies were lacking tons of things. Now we just get to compain more. Also, what non-geek really wants to sit through 1000+ pages of backstory, poetry, and languages?
Of course the story would be on Google News?
At least GoogleNet wouldn't be as obnoxious as SkyNet, it would just watch what your doing, and offer tasteful ads from time to time, instead of trying to extinguish you.
Interesting question, and further diversion from reality, if Google gain sentience, would it monitor its own browsing and email, and send itself little tasteful ads?
And it is the only movie to have space be quiet, absolutely quiet.
The sound of a rocket engine, in space, makes me mad. Sadly it is the norm in Hollywood. Hooray physics!
But compaired to Lem's book, it is really quite trite.
The book had movement, the move just was boring. Artistic, yes, good, yes, but VERY overlong and boring.
The Clooney one was just bad.
Very sad, but you fail to cite any proof that piracy is causing harm to you or your business, besides two kids (who from your description could have got the law on you for assault).
.torrent, or a copy of what ever P2P service kids are using these days. Speaking of, from my case I think you can tell that most P2P pirates don't stay in the game forever, I used to pirate my fair share back in High School, but now that I'm out in the real world, I've switched to legal free music, iTMS, and buying indie CDs from the bands themselves (show your support twice, being at the show, and buying their music). Nope, never gonna step foot in your store, probably, but not doing any illegal.
Perhaps the problem is that you are in a very very small niche market, and being so you are more vulnerable to economic changes. Perhaps a switch of the demographic of your base area. Perhaps the economy in general.
Perhaps people like me who rely on free music (like from Jemundo and such), and iTMS to cut out the middle man, and the resultant high prices from it ($17 for a CD?! 9.99 is about right). Perhaps it is because people are buying less, period.
For your niche, I really doubt that many people are pirating that type of music. Go on to any P2P service, and count the amount of Christian rock, as compaired to the stuff that you don't want to sell. You'll notice that it is a severe minority, in that most people don't want to listen to it, and the people who do are less apt to pirate it.
I think you wasted a sob story, since there is no overt causation between piracy and your plight. I don't agree with you being modded as a troll though (though you might be one, indeed), being that your post can open up a dialogue, and you offer a solution of some type.
I'm all for your pirate blacklist, since most pirates won't really need to ever go to your store, if they are indeed pirates. I'm sure if they were dilligent they could find a
The CD store niche is probably suffering, since there are so many more convienient and inexpensive alternatives.
I didn't know, BTW, that there was a pirate lobby, I knew that there was a huge corporate lobby trying to restrict my right to IP, since they have more money (money = rights). Companies are allowed to do nasty blackhat-ish activities that restrict me (Sony, oppressive DRM), and lower my security. They are restricting constitutional rights of IP by making it eternal, and thus stiffling the creativity of the whole world (by coercing other countries to buy our system of insanity) so some folk can make more money. This piracy lobby really should actually do something from time to time, I think.
Who said that CS = Geek? I think most geeks can fall into CS, or a science, since they are all very technical control-freak jobs, where they can tweak variables, hack systems (in the Linus sense), and control the living crap out of something all in the reason of grokking.
/.er has, compaired to the normal population. It is the curiosity, not necissarily the technology.
From this I take geek = obsessive. Geek = someone who wants to know everything about an aspect of a system.
We, if I'm allowed to be a geek (not CS, not fully science), are intellectuals, we obsess more about theory and knowledge than about how we look, if people like us. Also, please compair the depth and number of hobbies that you average
This might be because of two definitions of the word geek. One is the socially bad one, of a some smart, but socially annoying guy hiding in his parents basement. The other, good definition is that of a generally tech savvy individual with wide reaching interests, and a short attention span for various forms of knowlege (grokk everything, and move on). The later is okay now, whereas before we were creepy.
/., non serverfarm) world.
Really, its sort of like saying "Yeah I hacked my box", where the non-geek will take it as what we take to mean "skr1ptk1dd13" crap, when we actually mean, "it didn't work right, so I rewrote my OS" We're so used to talking to ourselves, that we forget that people use these words differently in the real (non
Also, who said you have to be a techie to be a geek? I'm a philosophy geek first, and technology comes second. I think tech is just the primary obsession of geeks since it's easier to tweak/hack/control.
I'm more the philosophical type, than the math type, never really bothered much for the practical in school.
I don't see pred. logic (or symbolic in general) to be a natural science. Even if it does explain natural phenomena it does so through an abstract and universal means, without ever really touching the grounds of empiricism. Math, it seems is an extention of logic (according to Russell, at least), so I just view it as non-natural science in the same way logic is.
I think math would boil down to the same thing as logic and physical science, a very very useful toolset for interpretting other data gained from the world, or from the sciences that they support. Look at language for example, if I write a complex description of the plant sitting on my desk, I am using language in the same manner of math or pred. logic (in a simplified form, granted), as a descriptive tool. Logic, math, and language, without an empirical grounding, are empty activities, and that is why I don't think they are natural sciences.
And now the qualifier, there are certain instances where the line blurs. And, I am not demeaning math, in any way. All my physicist friends always think I'm saying math is meaningless when I make this statement, I'm not, I'm just saying that its meaning relies on outside context.
Enough philosophy, I'll be quiet now.
If we're going by tectonics, than I can fairly say that Russia and China are part of Europe (except for the Indian subcontinent), since they both are on the Eurasian landmass?
And would that mean that the US can lose northern California, being that it is on the Juan de Fuca?
You of course mean three others, right?
Canada
Mexico
Cuba (?)
And some of us in the States would like to call Texas and California seperate countries as well.
Since when was mathematics a natural science?
It's like saying predicate logic is a natural science.
Better solution, don't steel focus, EVER. A program does not need my immediate attention, EVER. Even if it is a terrible virus that will kill my hard drive, or a new version of FF that is SO much better than the previous, it can wait until I finish answering that email, or typing that /. response.
I have enough distractions on my computer taking my productivity away, that I don't need one more. Steeling focus is a design flaw, period. There is no reason for it. It is bad usability, in that programs in the back ground are there for a reason, I don't need to be reminded that they exist. As for FF, I really don't need it to check for updates, and it really doesn't have to ruin my work-flow (/. reading?) for a silly update.
I like how OS X does it in theory, by bouncing a dock icon. Tasteful, subtle, and not to attention grabbing. Windows does it all wrong, though I've noticed a move on some Mac developers to do the "PAY ATTENTION TO ME!!!!! NOW!" thing to.
Intersting point, but compairing a translation to a Cliffs Note, is slightly off. Yes, things are lost in translation, but most translators try to keep it as close to the actual text as possible, in ALL aspects. And good translations, like the one of Being and Time that I am reading right now, keep footnotes of parts that might be ambiguous (this one even has intertext notes with the original German).
Also a translation keeps all of the important aspects of the text, that you, the reader, must digest and interpret in-itself. This is the hard work that the whole topic seems to be avoiding. Even in translations you need to dig around, interpret and think for yourself, to find the true (and perhaps subjective) meaning of text.
With cliff notes you get what someone else digested for you, saving you all work, and independant thought. Part of the important part of reading is EFFORT, yes, this is modern America, and that word is a naughty one now. But you only get out, what you put in. Cliff Note's are the lazy answer, a person who has any intellectual worth would get his answers from the text itself. It is the only honest way to do things.
Translators have the job or mindset of trying to bring the exact, uninterpretted, text to readers. Cliff Notes has the goal of digesting it to peices, sorted out what they feel is interesting, simplifying it grossly, then sending it out to lazy people who can't read the text in itself.
Yes, some people use Cliff Notes as a guide, as they are meant to be, and I have nothing against them, since they still are doing the work themselves. But those who use Cliff Notes alone, they are dishonest and lazy.
Boohoo.
My state (Arizona) finally got a standardized testing program, and it rose a HUGE stink, since most of the local teachers could not pass it, even. But then again, at the college I went to, the mean IQ and SAT for the education department was lower than any other course of study. And the things they taught the kids were frightening. Like how to make cute little ditties to keep the kids interested, and such. Also, to specialize in something (like science) you wouldn't have to break 12 credits of 100-200 level classes, most of which had the suffix "for education" on them.
And the frightening part is that this school is ranked in the top schools for primary and secondary Ed. All of the ed people were english majors who couldn't hack it.
(Moral of the story, don't go to school for ed in a state with the 2nd lowest literacy rates)
My high school english teacher did this, actually, and my Jr. high english and social studies core did too.
We got to read, on top of the requisite Shakespeare, Slaughterhouse 5, Brave New World, 1984, and Animal Farm. They focused more on intelligent, and applicable, lit than classics-for-classics-sake. Which is laudable (My senior lit teacher was better, forcing us to read Mort D'Auther, with the reward of The Holy Grail after, but this is also the guy who let me read a book on chaos maths instead of Shakespeare)
I think there are two very good reason to force kids to read the Classics, though, the first being that it is hard to identify culturally standing books that are recent, without the large body of critism. Having teachers pick their favorite books would be bad, since kids would be reading Anne Rice and Daniel Steele, neither of which is very academic.
The second reason is just the fact that they are classic, i.e. they form an important part of our cultural grounding. Much of our thought is guided by these works, no matter what their merit actually is.
I always hated the critism aspect of it, though, its like teaching kids how NOT to read. How can you grade someone opinion on a literary work, against the classical body of opinions on the same book. They are all opinions, and thus incomparible. (Yes, classic philosophy is different, since it is logical structures more than mear content).
Why is helping apathetic kids pass tests a good thing?
Let them fail. This sort of reasoning is how we get drones into our society, these idgets who care about nothing, and are perfectly happy watching TV all day, eating bon bons, while their children go blow other kids away.
Did you ever think that by reading through it, it would increase you intelligence, and ability to do it again. Learning isn't supposed to be easy, the harder the climb, the more pathways you develop, and the easier it is to do again.
I'm glad I did, because now I'm trying to get through Heidegger, but I think that was mostly because I finally could read/reason through all of Kant. Sure, I could have taken a short cut, but what is the point? I don't plan on reading Ann Rice my whole life, I'd much rather read something that makes me a better person, and doing this requires work.
The best ever is the one year, in college, where I got through all of Dostoevsky, Kafka, Camus, and the short fictions and plays of Sartre, all in the course of one lazy summer, on my own. Was some of it hard? Could I have quit and got the Cliff Notes, no, since I would feel like a moron, a cheater. I would have rather quit than that.
But this is coming from someone who has never touched a Cliffs note in their lives. Cliff Bars, though, thats a different story.
Metaphysics != religion.
Metaphysics = a system explaining how the world is.
Compare with the word Ontic.
Your statement, unintentionally, made me sad.
Perhaps my view of the world was skewed since I came from a family that read a lot, while working 8+ hours a day. And in my busy schedual I still manage to finish a book a week (of nonfiction, generally), not counting all of the other reading I must do in the run of my life, all the articals, forums, books, etc.
But then again I haven't turned on my TV for 3 months, and have started limiting my online times, because they were taking away from intellectual activities.
Wow.
Automatic Teller Machine Machine
Personal Identification Number Number.
Wow.
NSFW, of course, Porn.a.licious, all you had to do is search /., it was the first thing in Google.
/, drone.
I think its even maintained by a fellow
Sometimes when I go to the huge used bookstore by my house, I can't find what I'm looking for, just because I have no idea what genre some publisher monkey wanted to force that book to be in. Try House of Leaves, or such, what genre is it? Fiction? Sci-Fi? Horror? Or even authors who right across genres but are popular for one, hence all of Stephen King's Gunslinger books being thrown into horror, same with some of Koontz' fiction.
Then we have the older books just thown into literature. What the heck does that mean? Should Kerouac be thown in with Kafka and Tolstoy as general lit? In most bookstores Self Help and hard Psychology are thrown together. And Philosophy and New Age. Neither of these make sense.
But with Amazon, this makes less sense, being that they have a search feature. Do people really browse Amazon like they browse physical shops?
t. It's wrong because it goes against the nature of free markets.
So? It isn't a free market anymore?
Thus, it doesn't matter if it goes against the nature of free markets, since it isn't trying to be one. Your using a standard to compare against something not of that standard.
Also you made an implicit value judgement which you failed to evaluate. Why are free markets so good? I'm not going against it, per se, but I don't see the hidden connection. What has free markets ever done for us? It looks like most of the world, and most American sectors, are a mess because of them.