ChromeOS is compelling because netbooks are slow running native applications. With the underpowered CPU and lack of memory, it makes a lot more sense to run web apps. Just boot up to a quick and efficient browser and you have everything you need.
Never once did I asserted that modelling a command-based system is easier than modelling a market-based one. They are different and not directly comparable against each other. The complexity in markets is from "emergence" (of "simple" decisions), while the complexity from a centralized system is through the decision process itself.
If the decision process is fully deterministic, then in theory you would not need to create a model - the model is derived from the process.
The additional problem in market-based scenarios is that the supposedly "simple" decisions aren't. There is a whole field of Behavioral Economics that delve into this.
Resource allocation (the activity itself) should be a commodity. There are many reasons why it isn't right now (mostly because the financial industry has grown enormous on rent-seeking behavior), and the idea is to find them and stamp them out.
It's a lot better than WM6.5, but then again, what isn't? Its greatest strength is also its biggest weakness - because it is a clean departure from WM6.5, it also can't leverage the numerous legacy applications available for that platform, which leads us to the question - is it too little, too late?
1. Markets do not simplify resource allocation, it just provides a mechanism for this to work independent of central planning. Markets are extremely complex, and that is why we have trouble modelling them.
2. Your Patriot Act example is extremely poor as it has no bearing on the market. Legislation != regulation. You can have regulation without primary legislation (ie. SEC in the US and FSA in the UK).
3. Where we want to go is efficient resource allocation. I find it surprising that we are even going over this again. Can we not find common ground and work from there?
1. Windows is still a monopoly. You do not need a 100% marketshare to be a monopoly. It will likely stay being a monopoly until the next technological shift in computing
2. Airline deregulation is a good example. The competitors arrived after the political decision to deregulate, which in effect was anti-trust measures. This effectively changed the market structure and allowed low-cost carriers to surmount the barriers to entry.
3. Health insurance highlights another dynamic to regulation. On one had, it is necessary as it protects market participants which have much less power than their counterparts. When you buy health insurance, for example, you need to be sure that the insurer covers you adequately and that they are in good financial health. The average consumer will not know specialist medical details, nor will they know how to gauge the financial health of insurer.
On the other hand, regulation raises the barrier of entry to a market, so a balance has to be made. It would be very irresponsible to argue that all regulation is bad as most regulation was put in place for a reason, and many of them actually have a real purpose rather than to artificially raise the barrier to entry.
Furthermore, many industrialized countries are able to operate a universal healthcase system based mainly on private insurers. They have a fair regulatory system and legislatively mandates people to obtain coverage. Which is similar to the system that the US is moving towards. Some even have public healthcare as the default, while allowing a private market to flourish. The UK, for example, gives you by default the nationalized NHS as the source of care. With private insurance, you can supplement this or replace it altogether. In total, the UK spends 8% of GDP on healthcare, with outcomes which are comparable to the US in all the important areas. The US, by comparison spends ~ 16%.
Some people in the UK aren't happy with this, including noted right-wing apologist Dan Hannan, and suggested we should dismantle the NHS so we can go with a health system like Singapore's, which is universal but private insurance based. They clock in at under 4% of GDP. What he fails to tell you is that the demographics of Singapore is completely different to the UK or the US. The elderly is only 1/2 as a proportion of population compared to the UK. It's easy to see where all the saving are coming from when you consider that most of the money in the health system is spent on procedures and care on the elderly.
---
I can see that you are a very fervent subscriber to your beliefs, but this is exactly the point I am getting at. The market is useful for us because we *think* it is the most efficient *despite* it's many problems. The cause of the problem isn't the price mechanism, that's quite a straightforward concept of bridging supply and demand. The problem is with macro behavior, on how minor problems compound into major ones. Sometimes these behavors can be attributed to concepts we can see on the micro-level. Sometimes this is due to more complicated mechanism which result from the interaction between markets. In any case we should never focus on the how we get there, but where we want to go. If you repeatedly employ a single strategy in chess, you will be quickly defeated. The idea is to expand the arsenal and to use the right tool at the right time.
When you drop into the mode that the default behavior is to let the market decide, then you are basically undoing the past 200 years of improvements we made in the field of economic theory. Since then policy-makers have developed tools to fix particular problems that tend to crop up. It is extremely hard to argue that the average person lived a better life 200 years ago than they do now, but that is exactly the logical conclusion of the Austrian school's argument.
Which tool to use and when (and how much of it to use) is a completely different matter altogether. The problem that you have is that some (most) of these tools run contrary to your free-market ide
I am only responding to your posts. You are the one that needs to provide the evidence that you failed to provide originally.
With regards to monopolies, all historical non-transient monopolies were relieved from the market dominance by the above three factors I mentioned. In an stable geo-political and technological environment, no monopoly would succumb to competition because they have a initial cost advantage due to economies of scale, and they also have the market power to artificially raise the barrier of entry to defeat competition by use of strategies such as dumping. By the time a monopoly is formed, the damage to the market had already been done.
The market requires constant supervision and maintenance. Without this, due to how complex systems interact, small fluctuations amplify and result in the boom and bust cycle. Credit is not the root cause of this, but only amplifies the damage caused by this cycle. It is perfectly possible to create a bubble in which credit is not involved. We had bubbles and crashes in markets before fractional reserve banking and even previous to that.
Re: market stability, we have two factors to consider - Instability in the price equilibrium, and instability in the market structure itself (which tends towards favoring the bigger participants). Both are undesired in an efficient market.
I fear that you have grossly misinterpreted me in my statement that inefficient markets are no better than anything else. I am not saying that it is worse than anything else, just merely that it is *no better* than any other form of resource distribution at the same level of inefficiency.
Unfortunately your beliefs fall into the Austrian camp, especially your rejection of the central bank and fractional reserve banking. Please excuse me if I lumped you unfairly into that group but there was no indication from your post that you were otherwise. Personally I think their theories has some good points but unfortunately they had come about the wrong conclusion due to methodology. Besides, a broken clock is right twice a day.
By your logic, the Earth's existence is just as temporary as your Standard Oil, or Microsoft.
It's a shame that in the real world, your ideal pictur of how markets operate don't hold up. Real world monopolies are rarely tempered by competition, but rather by external factors, such as a geo-political factors, active anti-trust regulation, and technological shifts. By the time this occurs, the damage had already been done.
1. Humans are not the most rational economic actors, leading to a variety of problems with the application of market theory.
2. The market itself is inherently unstable.
Once you accept these facts, which have been proven by experiment over and over again (unlike the Austrian theories), you are up against this -
3. Inefficient markets are no better than any other method of resource distribution.
So what do you do? Do you put up and accept that the market needs "optimization", or preach how economies should work based on the ideas of people that offer no empirical evidence, and in fact reject economics as a empirical field altogether?
The financial turmoil in the past few years (and some would argue for the past 30 years) is the direct result of these inefficiencies, including excessive remuneration of the financial industry in risk taking behaviour. You can not excuse the free-market in its excesses. But on the other hand, to take the cavalier attitude of letting moral hazard run its course and leaving millions of rather innocent people destitute is irresponsible to the extreme.
At the end of the day, what we should be discussing is what we can do to improve the system in the future. This can only be done by improving transparency (so that end-consumers of products and services can make fully-informed choices much more easily) and to lower barriers of entry. That requires regulation without a doubt.
If this mean banning "financial innovation", then so be it. The very opaqueness of the financial industry is what caused the problem in the first place.
Being the most efficient mechanism for distribution of resources is the raison d'être of free markets, as it had been marketed to us for the past 60 years. In fact, not only is it unfair, it is also massively inefficient, mis-allocating resources on a grand scale.
Um..... I'm not anti-EU or anything.. but is is the common market and the free movement of goods, workers and capital prescribed by the Treaty of Rome (and subsequent EU treaties) that allows multi-nationals to pit nation against nation in their quest of ever-decreasing corporation tax rates.
On the pain of repeating myself - efficient markets have two main requirements that is never met in the real world - perfect information and equal market power of participants. This, coupled with the fact that humans do not act rationally in the economic sense is the main cause of boom and bust and illogicality in the reward or economic activities.
It is a fundamental problem with the application of free-market theory that the Austrian school loves to callously disregard. I'm not arguing with having markets - in fact they are probably at this point in time, the best way to allocate resources, but it must be ensured that markets operate efficiently (by regulation that is minimally intrusive). By the time the transformation of the industrialized economies into financial economies is complete, most of the economy will survive on rent-seeking activities, and these economies will implode on itself.
Another free-market apologist. Efficient markets have two main requirements that is never met in the real world - perfect information and equal market power of participants. This, coupled with the fact that humans do not act rationally in the economic sense is the main cause of boom and bust and illogicality in the reward or economic activities.
Besides, taxation without representation only applies to individuals (think citizenship and right of abode). Corporations are not supposed to have representation in the first place.
Not all of the Chinese and Indians are working their lives away. The rich in those countries exploit the poor, just like in the industrialized world. In fact, China and India may have the biggest middle class by population and they have a significant number of the very rich.
It's just that they have a lot of poor people that they can exploit and a regulatory system that allows it. We effectively subsidise that system trough trading.
First, social liberalism is about liberalism in social values (not liberal socialism). Stuff like universal suffrage, civil rights for everyone and basically equal opportunity with advancement in society being based on merit as opposed to birth and circumstance. This is also classic liberalism which does not require a large state per se.
Second, the problem with fiscal irresponsibility is somewhat beyond the left/right continuum. Fiscal responsibility should be encouraged, but the issue is that markets tend to go into a positive feedback loop in the good times and vice versa, leading to the boom and bust cycle. The idea of Keynesian and neo-Keynesian policies is to provide a counter-balance to that.
This is a problem that the Austrian School fails to address. They believe that getting rid of credit and the related money supply expansion you will get rid of boom-and-bust. However, there is not one shred of evidence that this is the case, and by looking at the big all of crashes in markets throughout history, it appears that credit only aids in the boom and bust but does not cause it.
This morning Google gave me 20 results for a search, none of which answered by question. So I tried Bing - 0 results. Several other specialist queries later, so result so I gave up.
People don't switch products unless they feel that the new product is significantly better. So, nuff said.
Did you even try to comprehend the great grand-parent? Markets are inherently unstable, because those with more market power tends to be able to accumulate even more as time progresses. Anti-trust laws exist for a reason. The market is not the "savior" as you claim it to be, and government is not always bad, especially a government that is in effect accountable to the people.
You can't "use" C# without using C or C++. Every time you boot up your computer, you are in effect "using" C.
OTOH, whether more people program in C# than in C is debatable. Web monkeys for sure, but a lot of real apps require the performance afforded by C and C++.
My suggestion - take contract law and then land law, and then you'll understand that any 'right' you may have to property is only possible because there is government. The distinction you make about owning something (in fee simple) and renting something (under a leasehold) is actually a lot less that you think. Both are types of ownership, for example, you can have very long leases which was drawn up with the power to extend. These leaseholds are (almost) as good as freeholds in nearly every regard and is the only way to own land in some common-law jurisdictions.
Looking at your post in whole, I find it somewhat strange; anti-government are usually anarchists, and they oppose all forms of property altogether. Libertarians, however, are all for property rights, and they have no qualms with lease agreements at all.
I suspect you are a libertarian, but in this case you are making the wrong argument.
It's the lag that kills the experience though. Once the novelty wears off, any sort of gaming becomes a drag when there is lag. The used to be a Japanese arcade game like Time Crisis but different in that you had to physically duck to dodge incoming bullets. I played that game once or twice but the lag on it killed the whole experience.
Think about the Wii. Most of the original Wii sports game made use of the precise timing for controller movements to control the on-screen action. Wii tennis for example is all about the timing of your swing. Latency is the single biggest "hidden" (ie. no visual or auditory) factor that determines gaming experience and any sort of lag will definitely kill it.
It is for *legal* *residents*, like those that come and work in the US under an employment contract as employees of legitimate companies. Not for illegals.
And they are only voting for local government that will be dealing with issues that affect them directly (like street crime and trash collection).
Not that I agree with these initiatives, but if you actually think before opening your mouth, instead of letting your knee-jerk reaction get the better of you, then you would look a lot less stupid.
Slashdot Mirror
ChromeOS is compelling because netbooks are slow running native applications. With the underpowered CPU and lack of memory, it makes a lot more sense to run web apps. Just boot up to a quick and efficient browser and you have everything you need.
Never once did I asserted that modelling a command-based system is easier than modelling a market-based one. They are different and not directly comparable against each other. The complexity in markets is from "emergence" (of "simple" decisions), while the complexity from a centralized system is through the decision process itself.
If the decision process is fully deterministic, then in theory you would not need to create a model - the model is derived from the process.
The additional problem in market-based scenarios is that the supposedly "simple" decisions aren't. There is a whole field of Behavioral Economics that delve into this.
Resource allocation (the activity itself) should be a commodity. There are many reasons why it isn't right now (mostly because the financial industry has grown enormous on rent-seeking behavior), and the idea is to find them and stamp them out.
It's a lot better than WM6.5, but then again, what isn't? Its greatest strength is also its biggest weakness - because it is a clean departure from WM6.5, it also can't leverage the numerous legacy applications available for that platform, which leads us to the question - is it too little, too late?
1. Markets do not simplify resource allocation, it just provides a mechanism for this to work independent of central planning. Markets are extremely complex, and that is why we have trouble modelling them.
2. Your Patriot Act example is extremely poor as it has no bearing on the market. Legislation != regulation. You can have regulation without primary legislation (ie. SEC in the US and FSA in the UK).
3. Where we want to go is efficient resource allocation. I find it surprising that we are even going over this again. Can we not find common ground and work from there?
1. Windows is still a monopoly. You do not need a 100% marketshare to be a monopoly. It will likely stay being a monopoly until the next technological shift in computing
2. Airline deregulation is a good example. The competitors arrived after the political decision to deregulate, which in effect was anti-trust measures. This effectively changed the market structure and allowed low-cost carriers to surmount the barriers to entry.
3. Health insurance highlights another dynamic to regulation. On one had, it is necessary as it protects market participants which have much less power than their counterparts. When you buy health insurance, for example, you need to be sure that the insurer covers you adequately and that they are in good financial health. The average consumer will not know specialist medical details, nor will they know how to gauge the financial health of insurer.
On the other hand, regulation raises the barrier of entry to a market, so a balance has to be made. It would be very irresponsible to argue that all regulation is bad as most regulation was put in place for a reason, and many of them actually have a real purpose rather than to artificially raise the barrier to entry.
Furthermore, many industrialized countries are able to operate a universal healthcase system based mainly on private insurers. They have a fair regulatory system and legislatively mandates people to obtain coverage. Which is similar to the system that the US is moving towards. Some even have public healthcare as the default, while allowing a private market to flourish. The UK, for example, gives you by default the nationalized NHS as the source of care. With private insurance, you can supplement this or replace it altogether. In total, the UK spends 8% of GDP on healthcare, with outcomes which are comparable to the US in all the important areas. The US, by comparison spends ~ 16%.
Some people in the UK aren't happy with this, including noted right-wing apologist Dan Hannan, and suggested we should dismantle the NHS so we can go with a health system like Singapore's, which is universal but private insurance based. They clock in at under 4% of GDP. What he fails to tell you is that the demographics of Singapore is completely different to the UK or the US. The elderly is only 1/2 as a proportion of population compared to the UK. It's easy to see where all the saving are coming from when you consider that most of the money in the health system is spent on procedures and care on the elderly.
---
I can see that you are a very fervent subscriber to your beliefs, but this is exactly the point I am getting at. The market is useful for us because we *think* it is the most efficient *despite* it's many problems. The cause of the problem isn't the price mechanism, that's quite a straightforward concept of bridging supply and demand. The problem is with macro behavior, on how minor problems compound into major ones. Sometimes these behavors can be attributed to concepts we can see on the micro-level. Sometimes this is due to more complicated mechanism which result from the interaction between markets. In any case we should never focus on the how we get there, but where we want to go. If you repeatedly employ a single strategy in chess, you will be quickly defeated. The idea is to expand the arsenal and to use the right tool at the right time.
When you drop into the mode that the default behavior is to let the market decide, then you are basically undoing the past 200 years of improvements we made in the field of economic theory. Since then policy-makers have developed tools to fix particular problems that tend to crop up. It is extremely hard to argue that the average person lived a better life 200 years ago than they do now, but that is exactly the logical conclusion of the Austrian school's argument.
Which tool to use and when (and how much of it to use) is a completely different matter altogether. The problem that you have is that some (most) of these tools run contrary to your free-market ide
I am only responding to your posts. You are the one that needs to provide the evidence that you failed to provide originally.
With regards to monopolies, all historical non-transient monopolies were relieved from the market dominance by the above three factors I mentioned. In an stable geo-political and technological environment, no monopoly would succumb to competition because they have a initial cost advantage due to economies of scale, and they also have the market power to artificially raise the barrier of entry to defeat competition by use of strategies such as dumping. By the time a monopoly is formed, the damage to the market had already been done.
The market requires constant supervision and maintenance. Without this, due to how complex systems interact, small fluctuations amplify and result in the boom and bust cycle. Credit is not the root cause of this, but only amplifies the damage caused by this cycle. It is perfectly possible to create a bubble in which credit is not involved. We had bubbles and crashes in markets before fractional reserve banking and even previous to that.
Re: market stability, we have two factors to consider - Instability in the price equilibrium, and instability in the market structure itself (which tends towards favoring the bigger participants). Both are undesired in an efficient market.
I fear that you have grossly misinterpreted me in my statement that inefficient markets are no better than anything else. I am not saying that it is worse than anything else, just merely that it is *no better* than any other form of resource distribution at the same level of inefficiency.
Unfortunately your beliefs fall into the Austrian camp, especially your rejection of the central bank and fractional reserve banking. Please excuse me if I lumped you unfairly into that group but there was no indication from your post that you were otherwise. Personally I think their theories has some good points but unfortunately they had come about the wrong conclusion due to methodology. Besides, a broken clock is right twice a day.
By your logic, the Earth's existence is just as temporary as your Standard Oil, or Microsoft.
It's a shame that in the real world, your ideal pictur of how markets operate don't hold up. Real world monopolies are rarely tempered by competition, but rather by external factors, such as a geo-political factors, active anti-trust regulation, and technological shifts. By the time this occurs, the damage had already been done.
1. Humans are not the most rational economic actors, leading to a variety of problems with the application of market theory.
2. The market itself is inherently unstable.
Once you accept these facts, which have been proven by experiment over and over again (unlike the Austrian theories), you are up against this -
3. Inefficient markets are no better than any other method of resource distribution.
So what do you do? Do you put up and accept that the market needs "optimization", or preach how economies should work based on the ideas of people that offer no empirical evidence, and in fact reject economics as a empirical field altogether?
If it was truly a free market, those business would have already become monopolies. There, FIFY.
The financial turmoil in the past few years (and some would argue for the past 30 years) is the direct result of these inefficiencies, including excessive remuneration of the financial industry in risk taking behaviour. You can not excuse the free-market in its excesses. But on the other hand, to take the cavalier attitude of letting moral hazard run its course and leaving millions of rather innocent people destitute is irresponsible to the extreme.
At the end of the day, what we should be discussing is what we can do to improve the system in the future. This can only be done by improving transparency (so that end-consumers of products and services can make fully-informed choices much more easily) and to lower barriers of entry. That requires regulation without a doubt.
If this mean banning "financial innovation", then so be it. The very opaqueness of the financial industry is what caused the problem in the first place.
Being the most efficient mechanism for distribution of resources is the raison d'être of free markets, as it had been marketed to us for the past 60 years. In fact, not only is it unfair, it is also massively inefficient, mis-allocating resources on a grand scale.
Um..... I'm not anti-EU or anything.. but is is the common market and the free movement of goods, workers and capital prescribed by the Treaty of Rome (and subsequent EU treaties) that allows multi-nationals to pit nation against nation in their quest of ever-decreasing corporation tax rates.
On the pain of repeating myself - efficient markets have two main requirements that is never met in the real world - perfect information and equal market power of participants. This, coupled with the fact that humans do not act rationally in the economic sense is the main cause of boom and bust and illogicality in the reward or economic activities.
It is a fundamental problem with the application of free-market theory that the Austrian school loves to callously disregard. I'm not arguing with having markets - in fact they are probably at this point in time, the best way to allocate resources, but it must be ensured that markets operate efficiently (by regulation that is minimally intrusive). By the time the transformation of the industrialized economies into financial economies is complete, most of the economy will survive on rent-seeking activities, and these economies will implode on itself.
Another free-market apologist. Efficient markets have two main requirements that is never met in the real world - perfect information and equal market power of participants. This, coupled with the fact that humans do not act rationally in the economic sense is the main cause of boom and bust and illogicality in the reward or economic activities.
No. You (the natural person) have representation, the fictional legal person (ie. the Corporation) does not.
They have a choice - not to sell to those states.
Besides, taxation without representation only applies to individuals (think citizenship and right of abode). Corporations are not supposed to have representation in the first place.
Not all of the Chinese and Indians are working their lives away. The rich in those countries exploit the poor, just like in the industrialized world. In fact, China and India may have the biggest middle class by population and they have a significant number of the very rich.
It's just that they have a lot of poor people that they can exploit and a regulatory system that allows it. We effectively subsidise that system trough trading.
Ok I took the bait -
First, social liberalism is about liberalism in social values (not liberal socialism). Stuff like universal suffrage, civil rights for everyone and basically equal opportunity with advancement in society being based on merit as opposed to birth and circumstance. This is also classic liberalism which does not require a large state per se.
Second, the problem with fiscal irresponsibility is somewhat beyond the left/right continuum. Fiscal responsibility should be encouraged, but the issue is that markets tend to go into a positive feedback loop in the good times and vice versa, leading to the boom and bust cycle. The idea of Keynesian and neo-Keynesian policies is to provide a counter-balance to that.
This is a problem that the Austrian School fails to address. They believe that getting rid of credit and the related money supply expansion you will get rid of boom-and-bust. However, there is not one shred of evidence that this is the case, and by looking at the big all of crashes in markets throughout history, it appears that credit only aids in the boom and bust but does not cause it.
This morning Google gave me 20 results for a search, none of which answered by question. So I tried Bing - 0 results. Several other specialist queries later, so result so I gave up.
People don't switch products unless they feel that the new product is significantly better. So, nuff said.
Did you even try to comprehend the great grand-parent? Markets are inherently unstable, because those with more market power tends to be able to accumulate even more as time progresses. Anti-trust laws exist for a reason. The market is not the "savior" as you claim it to be, and government is not always bad, especially a government that is in effect accountable to the people.
You can't "use" C# without using C or C++. Every time you boot up your computer, you are in effect "using" C.
OTOH, whether more people program in C# than in C is debatable. Web monkeys for sure, but a lot of real apps require the performance afforded by C and C++.
My suggestion - take contract law and then land law, and then you'll understand that any 'right' you may have to property is only possible because there is government. The distinction you make about owning something (in fee simple) and renting something (under a leasehold) is actually a lot less that you think. Both are types of ownership, for example, you can have very long leases which was drawn up with the power to extend. These leaseholds are (almost) as good as freeholds in nearly every regard and is the only way to own land in some common-law jurisdictions.
Looking at your post in whole, I find it somewhat strange; anti-government are usually anarchists, and they oppose all forms of property altogether. Libertarians, however, are all for property rights, and they have no qualms with lease agreements at all.
I suspect you are a libertarian, but in this case you are making the wrong argument.
It's the lag that kills the experience though. Once the novelty wears off, any sort of gaming becomes a drag when there is lag. The used to be a Japanese arcade game like Time Crisis but different in that you had to physically duck to dodge incoming bullets. I played that game once or twice but the lag on it killed the whole experience.
Think about the Wii. Most of the original Wii sports game made use of the precise timing for controller movements to control the on-screen action. Wii tennis for example is all about the timing of your swing. Latency is the single biggest "hidden" (ie. no visual or auditory) factor that determines gaming experience and any sort of lag will definitely kill it.
/facepalm
What you haven't considered is the legal definition of "freedom". "Abridging the freedom of speech" is in no way the same as "regulating speech".
As a refresher and a hint, the freedom to swing your fists ends at the tip of my nose.
It is for *legal* *residents*, like those that come and work in the US under an employment contract as employees of legitimate companies. Not for illegals.
And they are only voting for local government that will be dealing with issues that affect them directly (like street crime and trash collection).
Not that I agree with these initiatives, but if you actually think before opening your mouth, instead of letting your knee-jerk reaction get the better of you, then you would look a lot less stupid.