Ah, but this is exactly where government can help: by passing laws requiring monopoly utilities to provide such services to even the most remote users.
The question arises though, why does government grant those monopolies in the first place? I find the claim that power is a "natural" monopoly to be rather flimsy, since if it were a "natural" monopoly, there would be no need to prohibit competition.
Medicare has the lowest admin costs in the industry
First of all, Medicare shifts a lot of the admin cost to the provider, and secondly, I'd like to see your source for that claim. There's a reason why a lot of doctors are refusing to accept Medicare customers these days.
The problem with pure-er capitalism is that the rich get richer
This isn't a problem.
and the poor get poorer. ..and this simply isn't true.
Where markets are freer, poorer people see improvements in their standard of living. Just compare east and west Germany, north and south Korea, or China or India before and after they quit trying to dictate all economic activity according to a Soviet-style central planning model.
If you honestly care about poor people, then freedom is the way to go. There's no contest.
GPL or Apache doesn't really matters -- what matters is if you can make money.
Whether you can make money depends to a large extent on whether businesses choose to use your product, and quite a few businesses avoid the GPL like the plague.
There would be more competition in densely populated areas, and no service whatsoever in sparsely populated areas.
Yeah, so?
When you decide where you want to live, you have trade-offs to make. If I want to live way out in the sticks, I have no right to take anyone else's money to run a cable to my house.
If there's a market for rural internet service, then people will devise other approaches (satellite, WiMAX, etc) to serve that market.
Why in the world should we have to choose between funding schools (Johnny's gym jumprope) and fast internet service? The two are totally unrelated
Exactly. Those of us who want the internet service should buy it with our own funds, and the people who want to send their kids to school should do so with their own funds.
First question I have though is what kind of a tactile feedback is possible? Would this eventually make a keyboard that I'd want to use for hours at a time?
Goodness, what a detailed and unassailable critique of a great historian and economist's work. How can I possibly argue against such masterful rhetoric?
Oh, I remember now: I defy you to actually read what the man wrote, and refute it if you can. Go ahead, try to cite a factual error.
I gave you cold, hard numbers, you give me a book by a noted nutcase.
You showed numbers covering a period during which the new deal was in effect. What you left out was the data showing the actual recovery, which took place after the war. Sure, there was some improvement year-over-year during the Roosevelt administration, but the baseline was the aftermath of the greatest crash we'd ever seen. So, this is like strapping a couple hundred pounds to a climber, and claiming that if he makes any progress up the path at all, that the weight is what makes his progress possible.
We'd had crashes from time to time before the first great depression, but back when government had far less power to derail the recovery, they got sorted out relatively quickly. It took the New Deal to turn the crash of 1929 into the disaster it became.
The New Deal worked, and every sane American citizen knows that,
Every north Korean knows that Kim Jong-Il is the source of all blessings on earth, too. Wishing doesn't make it so.
Please explain to me how we were in the depression until 1946, using actual numerical data.
War production isn't wealth. If you have any older relatives who lived through the depression and the war, ask them when they were able to quit living hand-to-mouth.
Go and read Murray Rothbard's America's Great Depression. Of course, you should probably arrange for some counseling after you do, you'll probably find it quite a shock to discover that Roosevelt's propaganda was bullshit.
What you're missing is the simple fact that not all employment is productive. The Soviets ostensibly had full employment, but their economy was still a basket case.
Morgenthau was a man who not only was able to see the obvious failure of the new deal, he had enough integrity to speak up about it.
The history is clear; the USA remained in the depression until 1946, when federal spending was cut by 2/3, wartime economic regulations were lifted, and millions of men were released from military service and war production work.
Oh, and lest I forget to mention it, "Keynesian economics" is an oxymoron. Economists study why people do what they do in the market. Keynes merely invented absurd rationalizations for power-grabbing. He was no more an economist than Lysenko was a biologist.
Anyone who can read a graph knows that the New Deal worked perfectly
Oh, and for the benefit of anyone who thought you might have been serious, here are the words of Henry Morgenthau (Roosevelt's treasury secretary) testifying before the House Ways and Means committee in May 1939, on the failure of the New Deal programs:
"We have tried spending money. We are spending more than we have ever spent before and it does not work. And I have just one interest, and if I am wrong...somebody else can have my job. I want to see this country prosperous. I want to see people get a job. I want to see people get enough to eat. We have never made good on our promises...I say after eight years of this administration we have just as much unemployment as when we started...and an enormous debt to boot!"
Health care is the most regulated activity in this country. I speak from direct experience, having worked on a product over which the FDA claimed jurisdiction.
Don't forget, it was you free market, deregulate everything folks that put us in this position in the first place.
What's your next guess?
The Federal Reserve is not a free market institution. We were put in this position by a policy of holding interest rates below the rate of inflation throughout Greenspan and Bernanke's tenure. The result is just as Von Mises predicted: an inflationary bubble, followed by a crash.
I used to be be agains government until I had to use my local pubic utilities commission (PUC) to get a problem solved
Don't forget that it's government that protects a lot of these vendors from competition. It's great that the PUC bounced on their heads for you, but I would rather have a choice of several vendors.
Spamming is not, and has never been a freedom of speech issue; it's a property rights issue. The spammer has no more right to use my equipment than they do to spray paint their message on my garage door.
Slashdot Mirror
Ah, but this is exactly where government can help: by passing laws requiring monopoly utilities to provide such services to even the most remote users.
The question arises though, why does government grant those monopolies in the first place? I find the claim that power is a "natural" monopoly to be rather flimsy, since if it were a "natural" monopoly, there would be no need to prohibit competition.
-jcr
Medicare has the lowest admin costs in the industry
First of all, Medicare shifts a lot of the admin cost to the provider, and secondly, I'd like to see your source for that claim. There's a reason why a lot of doctors are refusing to accept Medicare customers these days.
-jcr
The government can't do anything better than the private sector with the exception of national defense.
I'm not sure that I'd make that exception.
-jcr
The problem with pure-er capitalism is that the rich get richer
This isn't a problem.
and the poor get poorer. ..and this simply isn't true.
Where markets are freer, poorer people see improvements in their standard of living. Just compare east and west Germany, north and south Korea, or China or India before and after they quit trying to dictate all economic activity according to a Soviet-style central planning model.
If you honestly care about poor people, then freedom is the way to go. There's no contest.
-jcr
GPL or Apache doesn't really matters -- what matters is if you can make money.
Whether you can make money depends to a large extent on whether businesses choose to use your product, and quite a few businesses avoid the GPL like the plague.
-jcr
There would be more competition in densely populated areas, and no service whatsoever in sparsely populated areas.
Yeah, so?
When you decide where you want to live, you have trade-offs to make. If I want to live way out in the sticks, I have no right to take anyone else's money to run a cable to my house.
If there's a market for rural internet service, then people will devise other approaches (satellite, WiMAX, etc) to serve that market.
-jcr
Why in the world should we have to choose between funding schools (Johnny's gym jumprope) and fast internet service? The two are totally unrelated
Exactly. Those of us who want the internet service should buy it with our own funds, and the people who want to send their kids to school should do so with their own funds.
-jcr
First question I have though is what kind of a tactile feedback is possible? Would this eventually make a keyboard that I'd want to use for hours at a time?
-jcr
Rothbard is a whackaloon, and everyone knows it.
Goodness, what a detailed and unassailable critique of a great historian and economist's work. How can I possibly argue against such masterful rhetoric?
Oh, I remember now: I defy you to actually read what the man wrote, and refute it if you can. Go ahead, try to cite a factual error.
-jcr
I gave you cold, hard numbers, you give me a book by a noted nutcase.
You showed numbers covering a period during which the new deal was in effect. What you left out was the data showing the actual recovery, which took place after the war. Sure, there was some improvement year-over-year during the Roosevelt administration, but the baseline was the aftermath of the greatest crash we'd ever seen. So, this is like strapping a couple hundred pounds to a climber, and claiming that if he makes any progress up the path at all, that the weight is what makes his progress possible.
We'd had crashes from time to time before the first great depression, but back when government had far less power to derail the recovery, they got sorted out relatively quickly. It took the New Deal to turn the crash of 1929 into the disaster it became.
The New Deal worked, and every sane American citizen knows that,
Every north Korean knows that Kim Jong-Il is the source of all blessings on earth, too. Wishing doesn't make it so.
-jcr
Please explain to me how we were in the depression until 1946, using actual numerical data.
War production isn't wealth. If you have any older relatives who lived through the depression and the war, ask them when they were able to quit living hand-to-mouth.
-jcr
Go and read Murray Rothbard's America's Great Depression. Of course, you should probably arrange for some counseling after you do, you'll probably find it quite a shock to discover that Roosevelt's propaganda was bullshit.
-jcr
What you're missing is the simple fact that not all employment is productive. The Soviets ostensibly had full employment, but their economy was still a basket case.
-jcr
Morgenthau was a man who not only was able to see the obvious failure of the new deal, he had enough integrity to speak up about it.
The history is clear; the USA remained in the depression until 1946, when federal spending was cut by 2/3, wartime economic regulations were lifted, and millions of men were released from military service and war production work.
Oh, and lest I forget to mention it, "Keynesian economics" is an oxymoron. Economists study why people do what they do in the market. Keynes merely invented absurd rationalizations for power-grabbing. He was no more an economist than Lysenko was a biologist.
-jcr
Anyone who can read a graph knows that the New Deal worked perfectly
Oh, and for the benefit of anyone who thought you might have been serious, here are the words of Henry Morgenthau (Roosevelt's treasury secretary) testifying before the House Ways and Means committee in May 1939, on the failure of the New Deal programs:
-jcr
This is deregulation.
Health care is the most regulated activity in this country. I speak from direct experience, having worked on a product over which the FDA claimed jurisdiction.
-jcr
Anyone who can read a graph knows that the New Deal worked perfectly.
Ok, you got me. Before you wrote this I wasn't sure if you were serious or not. Well trolled, sir.
-jcr
Don't forget, it was you free market, deregulate everything folks that put us in this position in the first place.
What's your next guess?
The Federal Reserve is not a free market institution. We were put in this position by a policy of holding interest rates below the rate of inflation throughout Greenspan and Bernanke's tenure. The result is just as Von Mises predicted: an inflationary bubble, followed by a crash.
-jcr
We will be out of this recession in a year and a half, and Obama will look like a genius.
The same was said about Roosevelt. Didn't turn out that way.
-jcr
I promise you I can make more than $20 worth of test-worthy cables in one hour.
I'll second that. I make my own cables when I want a specific length, rather than having the extra wire coiled up in a cable tie.
-jcr
I used to be be agains government until I had to use my local pubic utilities commission (PUC) to get a problem solved
Don't forget that it's government that protects a lot of these vendors from competition. It's great that the PUC bounced on their heads for you, but I would rather have a choice of several vendors.
-jcr
This would be like me walking into the Ford dealership and demanding to know why they no longer "support" my 1978 F-150 for parts.
Actually, they probably do. Most auto dealers can order the parts you want for surprisingly old models.
-jcr
Request denied. Go cope.
-jcr
Spamming is not, and has never been a freedom of speech issue; it's a property rights issue. The spammer has no more right to use my equipment than they do to spray paint their message on my garage door.
-jcr
So your solution is an even bigger monopoly?
Did I say anything of the kind?
I've followed your posts, jcr, here and digg, and this is the first time you've really disappointed me.
Read what I wrote again. I was talking about TWC in particular, not businesses in general.
-jcr