That human life begins at birth is an ancient myth. It's even codified in the Old Testament. Do you subscribe to ancient myths?
Human life began perhaps 2.5 million years ago, give or take, with the first organisms that were members of genus Homo.
The personhood of a individual human begins sometime after birth, as the brain develops and the organism interacts with its environment (including other humans) to develop an ego structure. It is not an event located at a specific instant of time; it's like asking "when did the Earth form?" - there's not a specific nanosecond when it went from "accretion of dust and rocks" to "planet".
As a practical matter, we can usually take "birth" as our demarkation point in most cases. (But not in all; Peter Singer makes good points about euthanasia of severely crippled infants.)
A 95 year protection would be acceptable to me only if it was to the original artist and not transferable.
Exactly. Under the U.S. Constitution, copyright can be granted to authors of works - there is no power for Congress to grant copyright to their heir or employers or anyone else. We'd all be a lot better off if this was held to.
Yeah, but since the constitution makes no comment on when life begins, you can really argue the abortion issue either way from the constitution.
The ethical issue is not when "life" begins - it began billions of years ago and is an ongoing dance of organic molecules. The issue is when personhood begins. Science tells us that the relevant qualities of being human correspond with complex brain activity - activity which begins sometime after birth, as the brain of a fetus, or even newborn, is not yet sufficiently developed.
We measure "official" death of a person by brain activity; the only rational offical "start" of a person is based on the same criterion.
But none of that is actually relevant to the question at hand, which is not when "life" or "personhood" begins, but when Constitutional protection begins. And that's clear: "All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside."
You can already broadcast low-power FM stations, but only if the power level is so low that it only travels a few dozen feet at most. Many iPod users use FM transmitters with their car radios.
And that's bad enough. Our local NPR station is 88.1 FM, and apparently that's the default frequency for many of these things. Often I'm driving along listening to that, and somebody with a music player or satellite radio with such a relay comes near (or there's one house I often pass that has one), and my listening is interrupted.
So wait, that would be different from the current state of things how exactly?
Did I say it was different from the current system? That's the point, and the problem with the Libertarians: what they propose isn't fundamental change. They just want to take the governors off of the engine of state capitalism, to accelerate the process of the concentration of wealth.
They talk about "reducing the power of government", but you won't hear many talk about eliminating government powers to issue corporate charters, copyrights, patents, or land and natural resource deeds.
At least the Libertarian party supports the Constitution. Show me a D or R who actually does.
Again, for certain values of "support the Constitution." Many Libertarians call for overturning Roe v. Wade and letting states destroy a woman's rights to privacy, in violation of Amendments IX and XIV. (If Roe v. Wade is overturned, look for Griswold v. Connecticut to fall next and birth control to be outlawed in some of the deep red states.)
Not really. It's moreso simply a party centered on freedom.
...for certain definitions of "freedom", perhaps.
The original libertarians were based around freedom. But a party that upholds an economic system based on government policies that concentrate wealth and power into the hands of a minority, backs a funny sort of "freedom".
Just to make sure, you do know that just bidding your maximum bid does not set the current bid to your max bid?
Doesn't matter - if your current bid is $25, other bidders know that you value the item at at least that much, which will inflate their estimate of the value. And if bidding is at all competitive, the current bid will get up close enough to the max bid, or you'll simply be out-bid.
In this argument the competitor falls into the "I don't know how much I'm willing to pay" category. And trying to outsmart the dumb bidder who doesn't know what the item is worth only works as long you are bidding ONLY against dumb bidders who don't know what the item is worth.
The bidder who is influenced by the bids of others is not "dumb". Most bidders fall into this category. Indeed, it might be argued that it's a bidder who completely ignores the valuations of others, who is acting dumb.
Say, for example, I'm at a flea market, and I come across a guy selling baseball cards. I know nothing about baseball cards, but on impulse figure I'll buy one. I pick up a card at random and say, "I'll give you a quarter for this." Another guy runs up and says, "I'll give you all the cash I've got...five dollars for it!" I can pay $5.01 for the card and beat his bid. Should I?
If this guy will pay $5 for it, odds are good someone will pay more than $5.01, and I can make a profit. And if the guy's a goofball, I'm only out $5. So I'd go for it.
Now he says, "Wait a minute!" and runs over to a friend, gets the friend to lend him some cash, and comes back over to offer $105. Should I pay $105.01 to beat his bid? In this case, the risk is higher; if I lose, I'm out enough to hurt. So I'd pass. Still, I'd have to guess the card is worth more than my initial estimate of $0.25, no?
Now, depending on what sort of item you're bidding on, this might not apply. If I'm buying a item that's available from regular retail outlets, I can Google for prices and set a limit. It's dumb indeed to bid more on eBay for a 1 GB SD card than I could buy one for at TigerDirect.com. And of course if I was buying baseball cards on-line I'd consult a price guide.
But a lot of times there's no simple way to determine the value of an item, and it's sensible to take other people's bids into account. How much is a used Linksys WRT54Gv3 worth? What's it worth to me to get one now, rather than wait for another to be offered in a couple of days or weeks? If I initially estimate a value of $30, and see the opportunity to pick one up for $31 - an opportunity that may not come again for some time, if at all - it would be foolish to pass it up.
Indeed, maybe that's the key point here: we often enter into the process with an estimate of the value of an item, not a precise calculated amount.
* I don't know how much I'm willing to pay (what?)
What do you mean, "what?" Our desire for, and estimated value of, goods and services is luenced by information about how others value those goods and services. It's what makes it possible for "luxury brands" to sell at premium prices despite little or no difference in actual quality. Welcome to human nature.
When you enter your maximum bid, you're letting others know that you value the item. That influences their estimate of the value of the item. Somewhere in your competitor's brain, there's a voice saying "davidpfarrell is willing to pay $25 for that old Barry Manilow LP? Then it must be worth at least that much!", he bids $26, and you lose. (I'm not saying that voice in your competitor's brain is a rational one. But anyone who thinks human beings act rationally is not familiar with the species.)
If you snipe, your competitor doesn't get influenced by your estimate of the value; he estimates a lower price, makes a lower bid, and you win.
But any realistic user (read: not a zealot) is going to use the best tool for the job (and so will I)
And what is the job? To twist and old advertising slogan, Freedom is job one.
That is not just philosophical opinion, that's basic business practice. You don't trust anything vital to your business to be completely out of your control.
It's like going with an appliance (that is less efficient and less featured) just because it has schematics.
It's not just about schematics, it's about the ability to repair the appliance at all. You wouldn't build a new laundromat around a bunch of washers that were welded shut so they couldn't be fixed, would you?
The best tool for the job is one drawn from the set of tools that preserve freedom. If there is no tool in that set, then no "best" tool exists, only a "least bad" one.
Most people would rather live 50 years on Porterhouse steaks, than 150 years on Tofu.
Most people have been told that they would rather live 50 years on Porterhouse steaks, than 150 years on Tofu. Most people have been told that they would rather use Microsoft than Linux.
Most have have believed these thing.
Most people, sad to say, are easily led and functionally stupid.
Slashdotters, otherwise generally intelligent, have a subset who are unable to see this for what it is and believe that copyright should not be respected.
It is entirely possible to agree that the law is as you state it is, and yet also believe that it should not be respected.
The fact that the law says we should or should not do X, has very little (if any) bearing on the ethical question of whether we should or should not do X.
But it is not at all clear that the law is as you state it is:
Fair use does not and never has provided a right to make copies for others and that includes posting copies of songs, videos, etc. to sites like YouTube.
Not accurate. Fair use includes, for example, the right to quote a work, or to use portions or a work in a educational setting, in which case you are making copies for others.
Furthermore, any "law" in contradiction to the Constitution is no law at all. Much of copyright "law" falls outside of Congress's power to "secur[e] for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries".
Consider that there are tens of thousands of illegal clips posted to YouTube, the cumulative financial effect of which could conceivably be millions of dollars.
If that's true, and if those millions of dollars would represent money unjustly wrung from consumers by bad laws, then yee-haw, go YouTube.
But given the nonsense that is used in placing costs on copyright infringement, I doubt that it's true.
So the law should be neutral, it should not side with either party. Thats how you are supposed to get fair rulings.
The "law" sides with "rights owners" by creating these "rights" in the first place. There is no natural right to point a gun at me to prevent me from copying a work, it's a completely synthetic right created by government action.
copyright infringement is stealing someone elses exclusive publishing rights.
You can't steal someones rights. You can only steal property. Copyright is not property (the canard of "intellectual property" notwithstanding).
If you publish something without permission, you diminish what the authorized publisher gets by being an authorized publisher, most noticably, their chance at making sales.
If you set up your widget shop next to mine, you diminish what I get from selling widgets. That doesn't justify my use of force to close you down.
There's moderate to severe nudity taboos in Japan and China
Can't speak to China, but Japan had their nudity taboo imposed on them by Westerners. Originally, onsen (hot spring baths) and sento (public baths) were not separated by gender. Out in the countryside, people worked in the fields pretty much naked.
the assumption that a youthful two hundred year old person would have the same impulsive stupidity of a youthful twenty year old. This seems extremely unlikely to me.
"The older I grow the more I distrust the familiar doctrine that age brings wisdom." -- H. L. Mencken
I see plenty of impulsively stupid old people. Politics is full of them: they've got a major party candidate in the U.S. presidential election, for example.
Most people decline to learn any new facts, or change any habits of thought, after their late 20s (if that late). A great deal of the suffering of aging results directly or indirect from this hardening of the mind - this "psychosclerosis", as one of my bodywork teachers put it.
There really should be no expectation of privacy in e-mail. I've been hearing since at least 1989 that e-mailing sensitive information is about as secure as writing it on a postcard
When I send a postcard through the mail, I understand that it might be seen by postal employees. (Not by the general public - there is still some expectation of privacy. If my mailman posts the contents of a postcard from my girlfriend to me on his blog, I think there's good grounds for legal action.)
Once I take a received postcard and store it in my files, I have a strong expectation that no one can look at it.
This "law" (really, nothing in contradiction to the Constitution ought to be called a law) refers to "electronic communication that has been in electronic storage in an electronic communications system for more than one hundred and eighty days". It's rifling through filing cabinets without a warrant, only a court order based on "specific and articulable facts" - in practice, basically a hunch, and blatantly contradictory to the Constitutional requirement of a warrant based on probable cause.
It's not at all like looking at postcards in the mail stream.
Perhaps everyone should reread the Declaration of Independence http://www.ushistory.org/Declaration/document/index.htm A group of very smart fellows wrote it!.... Way smarter and more egalitarian than any of our present day politicians!
Really? Thomas Jefferson, who was not just a slave-owner but a slave-rapist, and who believed that black people were inferior to white people "in the endowments both of body and mind", was more egalitarian than any of our present day politicians?
That's setting the bar low.
Then again, given the praise that the late Jeese Helms garnered from fellow politicians, you may be sadly right.
Even if life span is extended to 1,000 years, you'll still die someday.
Heck, even if the most wild post-human fantasies come true, the universe is running down - live for billions of years in some cyborg form and you'll still get caught by the heat death of the universe.
Essentially something along the lines of:
I support action (A), if and only if {person (B) and {place (C) or thing (D)}}
if (B) is invalidated the opinion is no longer valid and would need to updated by its owner or it gets ignored.
I'm not quite sure how to parse your proposal: "I support bombing Iran, if and only if Brad Pitt and (New Jersey or Crystal Pepsi)"?
You've got to have some sort of true-or-false proposition there.
Who makes the official determination of when a premise is invalidated?
In politics, we can't agree on basic facts. Did Iraq have WMDs when the U.S. attacked? Is anthropogenic CO2 release a real danger? There are vocal, uninformed groups who answer those questions "yes" and "no".
Hell, we can't even get a majority of Americans to accept basic facts about biology.
You'd get a lot of statements like "I support criminalizing homosexual behavior, if and only if Leviticus 18:22 in the King James Bible tells us that God says `Thou shalt not lie with mankind, as with womankind: it is abomination.'"
(To be clear, that is not my own position - the Bible in general, Leviticus in specific, isn't worth a load of fetid dingos kidneys as a moral guide.)
Or, "I support banning guns if and only if guns kill people."
Or, "I support imprisoning Froze for twenty years if and only if nitrogen comprises the majority of Earth's atmosphere." The premise is absolutely, unarguably true - but has fsck all to do with the action proposed. Who gets to determine what rationale can be legitimately offered for an action?
It would be wonderful is politicians - if human in general - behaved rationally. The problem with enforcing that, is granting someone power to definite "rationally".
People on slashdot are a terrible sample set, but Cowboy Neal as President For Life aside, we'd get things done. When was the last time you were in a story and the MAJORITY of non-trolls expressed a desire to disband the police?
If the vast majority of people were smart, wise, and educated enough for direct democracy to work, then there'd be no need for police. We could enforce our own laws as well as write them, without a designated class to hold power.
As a Zenarchist, I do believe that that's eventually possible. "Universal Enlightenment [is] a prerequisite to abolition of the State, after which the State will inevitably vanish. Or - that failing - nobody will give a damn."
But Universal Enlightenment is clearly still a long way off. What'll we do till then?
Also, require that the rationale be based on a logically testable premise.
And just how, exactly, do you intend to define a "logically testable premise", and enforce such a requirement? Whoever gets to make and enforce that definition gets to hold power by defining their opponents as "legally illogical".
And without that condition, direct democracy is mob rule, group think in the highest degree.
Few people's opinions are based on informed rational thought.
If someone values a little money more than participation in running their country, then why not let them sell their vote?
Because that concentrates political power into the hands of those with economic power. If you like plutocracy, allow votes to be sold. (Hell, buying votes in Congress has gotten us most of the way there already.)
It's no different from something like a mutual financial organisation
A nation is very different from a mutual fund. Mutual funds don't have police, jails, and armies.
Slashdot Mirror
Human life began perhaps 2.5 million years ago, give or take, with the first organisms that were members of genus Homo.
The personhood of a individual human begins sometime after birth, as the brain develops and the organism interacts with its environment (including other humans) to develop an ego structure. It is not an event located at a specific instant of time; it's like asking "when did the Earth form?" - there's not a specific nanosecond when it went from "accretion of dust and rocks" to "planet".
As a practical matter, we can usually take "birth" as our demarkation point in most cases. (But not in all; Peter Singer makes good points about euthanasia of severely crippled infants.)
Exactly. Under the U.S. Constitution, copyright can be granted to authors of works - there is no power for Congress to grant copyright to their heir or employers or anyone else. We'd all be a lot better off if this was held to.
The ethical issue is not when "life" begins - it began billions of years ago and is an ongoing dance of organic molecules. The issue is when personhood begins. Science tells us that the relevant qualities of being human correspond with complex brain activity - activity which begins sometime after birth, as the brain of a fetus, or even newborn, is not yet sufficiently developed.
We measure "official" death of a person by brain activity; the only rational offical "start" of a person is based on the same criterion.
But none of that is actually relevant to the question at hand, which is not when "life" or "personhood" begins, but when Constitutional protection begins. And that's clear: "All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside."
And that's bad enough. Our local NPR station is 88.1 FM, and apparently that's the default frequency for many of these things. Often I'm driving along listening to that, and somebody with a music player or satellite radio with such a relay comes near (or there's one house I often pass that has one), and my listening is interrupted.
Did I say it was different from the current system? That's the point, and the problem with the Libertarians: what they propose isn't fundamental change. They just want to take the governors off of the engine of state capitalism, to accelerate the process of the concentration of wealth.
They talk about "reducing the power of government", but you won't hear many talk about eliminating government powers to issue corporate charters, copyrights, patents, or land and natural resource deeds.
Again, for certain values of "support the Constitution." Many Libertarians call for overturning Roe v. Wade and letting states destroy a woman's rights to privacy, in violation of Amendments IX and XIV. (If Roe v. Wade is overturned, look for Griswold v. Connecticut to fall next and birth control to be outlawed in some of the deep red states.)
...for certain definitions of "freedom", perhaps.
The original libertarians were based around freedom. But a party that upholds an economic system based on government policies that concentrate wealth and power into the hands of a minority, backs a funny sort of "freedom".
D2 is broken from the start. Stick with the classic - go to "Preferences" (at the start of comments) and select "Slashdot Classic Discussion System".
Doesn't matter - if your current bid is $25, other bidders know that you value the item at at least that much, which will inflate their estimate of the value. And if bidding is at all competitive, the current bid will get up close enough to the max bid, or you'll simply be out-bid.
The bidder who is influenced by the bids of others is not "dumb". Most bidders fall into this category. Indeed, it might be argued that it's a bidder who completely ignores the valuations of others, who is acting dumb.
Say, for example, I'm at a flea market, and I come across a guy selling baseball cards. I know nothing about baseball cards, but on impulse figure I'll buy one. I pick up a card at random and say, "I'll give you a quarter for this." Another guy runs up and says, "I'll give you all the cash I've got...five dollars for it!" I can pay $5.01 for the card and beat his bid. Should I?
If this guy will pay $5 for it, odds are good someone will pay more than $5.01, and I can make a profit. And if the guy's a goofball, I'm only out $5. So I'd go for it.
Now he says, "Wait a minute!" and runs over to a friend, gets the friend to lend him some cash, and comes back over to offer $105. Should I pay $105.01 to beat his bid? In this case, the risk is higher; if I lose, I'm out enough to hurt. So I'd pass. Still, I'd have to guess the card is worth more than my initial estimate of $0.25, no?
Now, depending on what sort of item you're bidding on, this might not apply. If I'm buying a item that's available from regular retail outlets, I can Google for prices and set a limit. It's dumb indeed to bid more on eBay for a 1 GB SD card than I could buy one for at TigerDirect.com. And of course if I was buying baseball cards on-line I'd consult a price guide.
But a lot of times there's no simple way to determine the value of an item, and it's sensible to take other people's bids into account. How much is a used Linksys WRT54Gv3 worth? What's it worth to me to get one now, rather than wait for another to be offered in a couple of days or weeks? If I initially estimate a value of $30, and see the opportunity to pick one up for $31 - an opportunity that may not come again for some time, if at all - it would be foolish to pass it up.
Indeed, maybe that's the key point here: we often enter into the process with an estimate of the value of an item, not a precise calculated amount.
What do you mean, "what?" Our desire for, and estimated value of, goods and services is luenced by information about how others value those goods and services. It's what makes it possible for "luxury brands" to sell at premium prices despite little or no difference in actual quality. Welcome to human nature.
When you enter your maximum bid, you're letting others know that you value the item. That influences their estimate of the value of the item. Somewhere in your competitor's brain, there's a voice saying "davidpfarrell is willing to pay $25 for that old Barry Manilow LP? Then it must be worth at least that much!", he bids $26, and you lose. (I'm not saying that voice in your competitor's brain is a rational one. But anyone who thinks human beings act rationally is not familiar with the species.)
If you snipe, your competitor doesn't get influenced by your estimate of the value; he estimates a lower price, makes a lower bid, and you win.
And what is the job? To twist and old advertising slogan, Freedom is job one.
That is not just philosophical opinion, that's basic business practice. You don't trust anything vital to your business to be completely out of your control.
It's not just about schematics, it's about the ability to repair the appliance at all. You wouldn't build a new laundromat around a bunch of washers that were welded shut so they couldn't be fixed, would you?
The best tool for the job is one drawn from the set of tools that preserve freedom. If there is no tool in that set, then no "best" tool exists, only a "least bad" one.
Most people have been told that they would rather live 50 years on Porterhouse steaks, than 150 years on Tofu. Most people have been told that they would rather use Microsoft than Linux.
Most have have believed these thing.
Most people, sad to say, are easily led and functionally stupid.
It is entirely possible to agree that the law is as you state it is, and yet also believe that it should not be respected.
The fact that the law says we should or should not do X, has very little (if any) bearing on the ethical question of whether we should or should not do X.
But it is not at all clear that the law is as you state it is:
Not accurate. Fair use includes, for example, the right to quote a work, or to use portions or a work in a educational setting, in which case you are making copies for others.
Furthermore, any "law" in contradiction to the Constitution is no law at all. Much of copyright "law" falls outside of Congress's power to "secur[e] for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries".
If that's true, and if those millions of dollars would represent money unjustly wrung from consumers by bad laws, then yee-haw, go YouTube.
But given the nonsense that is used in placing costs on copyright infringement, I doubt that it's true.
The "law" sides with "rights owners" by creating these "rights" in the first place. There is no natural right to point a gun at me to prevent me from copying a work, it's a completely synthetic right created by government action.
You can't steal someones rights. You can only steal property. Copyright is not property (the canard of "intellectual property" notwithstanding).
If you set up your widget shop next to mine, you diminish what I get from selling widgets. That doesn't justify my use of force to close you down.
Can't speak to China, but Japan had their nudity taboo imposed on them by Westerners. Originally, onsen (hot spring baths) and sento (public baths) were not separated by gender. Out in the countryside, people worked in the fields pretty much naked.
Shinto still has hadaka matsuri - literally, "naked festivals", though these days people usually (but not always) wear fundoshi.
Old Japanese erotic prints usually depict clothed figures, not naked ones!
"The older I grow the more I distrust the familiar doctrine that age brings wisdom." -- H. L. Mencken
I see plenty of impulsively stupid old people. Politics is full of them: they've got a major party candidate in the U.S. presidential election, for example.
Most people decline to learn any new facts, or change any habits of thought, after their late 20s (if that late). A great deal of the suffering of aging results directly or indirect from this hardening of the mind - this "psychosclerosis", as one of my bodywork teachers put it.
Live forever, or die trying!
When I send a postcard through the mail, I understand that it might be seen by postal employees. (Not by the general public - there is still some expectation of privacy. If my mailman posts the contents of a postcard from my girlfriend to me on his blog, I think there's good grounds for legal action.)
Once I take a received postcard and store it in my files, I have a strong expectation that no one can look at it.
This "law" (really, nothing in contradiction to the Constitution ought to be called a law) refers to "electronic communication that has been in electronic storage in an electronic communications system for more than one hundred and eighty days". It's rifling through filing cabinets without a warrant, only a court order based on "specific and articulable facts" - in practice, basically a hunch, and blatantly contradictory to the Constitutional requirement of a warrant based on probable cause.
It's not at all like looking at postcards in the mail stream.
Really? Thomas Jefferson, who was not just a slave-owner but a slave-rapist, and who believed that black people were inferior to white people "in the endowments both of body and mind", was more egalitarian than any of our present day politicians?
That's setting the bar low.
Then again, given the praise that the late Jeese Helms garnered from fellow politicians, you may be sadly right.
Even if life span is extended to 1,000 years, you'll still die someday.
Heck, even if the most wild post-human fantasies come true, the universe is running down - live for billions of years in some cyborg form and you'll still get caught by the heat death of the universe.
I'm not quite sure how to parse your proposal: "I support bombing Iran, if and only if Brad Pitt and (New Jersey or Crystal Pepsi)"?
You've got to have some sort of true-or-false proposition there.
Who makes the official determination of when a premise is invalidated?
In politics, we can't agree on basic facts. Did Iraq have WMDs when the U.S. attacked? Is anthropogenic CO2 release a real danger? There are vocal, uninformed groups who answer those questions "yes" and "no".
Hell, we can't even get a majority of Americans to accept basic facts about biology.
You'd get a lot of statements like "I support criminalizing homosexual behavior, if and only if Leviticus 18:22 in the King James Bible tells us that God says `Thou shalt not lie with mankind, as with womankind: it is abomination.'"
(To be clear, that is not my own position - the Bible in general, Leviticus in specific, isn't worth a load of fetid dingos kidneys as a moral guide.)
Or, "I support banning guns if and only if guns kill people."
Or, "I support imprisoning Froze for twenty years if and only if nitrogen comprises the majority of Earth's atmosphere." The premise is absolutely, unarguably true - but has fsck all to do with the action proposed. Who gets to determine what rationale can be legitimately offered for an action?
It would be wonderful is politicians - if human in general - behaved rationally. The problem with enforcing that, is granting someone power to definite "rationally".
I see no precious tools here!
If the vast majority of people were smart, wise, and educated enough for direct democracy to work, then there'd be no need for police. We could enforce our own laws as well as write them, without a designated class to hold power.
As a Zenarchist, I do believe that that's eventually possible. "Universal Enlightenment [is] a prerequisite to abolition of the State, after which the State will inevitably vanish. Or - that failing - nobody will give a damn."
But Universal Enlightenment is clearly still a long way off. What'll we do till then?
And just how, exactly, do you intend to define a "logically testable premise", and enforce such a requirement? Whoever gets to make and enforce that definition gets to hold power by defining their opponents as "legally illogical".
And without that condition, direct democracy is mob rule, group think in the highest degree. Few people's opinions are based on informed rational thought.
As Douglas Adams observed, people are a problem.
Because that concentrates political power into the hands of those with economic power. If you like plutocracy, allow votes to be sold. (Hell, buying votes in Congress has gotten us most of the way there already.)
A nation is very different from a mutual fund. Mutual funds don't have police, jails, and armies.