Putting it in that realm, IMHO, puts it in the supernatural and outside the realm of observation. Then empirically, it becomes irrelevant. We cannot tell whether it exists or not since we can no longer observe it.
It's not "supernatural", just not something we can quantify deterministically, like quantum mechanics or the product of a chaotic system. You can make observations about the results but they don't lead to a predictive, deterministic model of how the system works.
Since I know Mises and others use this theory to make profound claims about human behavior in the real world...
I don't see them doing that at all. The entire point of saying that you can't experimentally model the way that humans (actors) make choices is to eliminate it as a factor in what follows. Rather, Mises's conclusions are based on axioms which tend to hold regardless of the specific decision-making mechanism, often because assuming the opposite would lead to a contradiction. If you disagree with any of the necessary axioms then you'll naturally disagree with his conclusions as well, but note that not all of the axioms are necessary. Many of the arguments can be simplified, and others (such as Rothbard) have done exactly that, placing Mises's conclusions on a more concrete foundation.
The theory must be observable. You can have hidden parts that you cannot observe, but these are merely a convenient mnemonic representing otherwise overly complex machinery of the theory, not an important part of the theory.
It must fit with what we have already observed.
These are already true of "Mises 1.0".
It can have additional axioms beyond being an empirical theory, but we should stop thinking of these as being "self-evident". Variations of the theory with different choices for the axioms are quite permissible.
That's fine. I don't think Mises intended for the study of human action to imply any particular choice of axioms. That selection process is fundamentally philosophical, not necessarily empirical—just as the preference for the scientific approach is itself a philosophical position. It is, however, perfectly reasonable to start the study of human action with axioms based on observation if that is your preference.
I think the concept of action is fruitful and should be preserved, but it should be separated from the concept of "human". For example, there are examples of animals making real economic decisions....
No argument here. The use of the term "human" was never more than a matter of style in any event; at the time Mises was describing his theory animals and machines were not thought of as economic actors. The theory should properly encompass all actors, whatever their form, provided their actions are effectively non-deterministic—whether this is truly so, as with quantum systems, or they are merely too complex to analyze in practice (chaotic).
It's worth noting that the Nobel Prize for Economics is handed out by a completely different organization than all the other Nobel prizes, and that this organization has a reputation for certain political biases when it comes to recognizing innovative developments in the field of economics.
The GP is not treating money as an unlimited resource. Potentially unlimited in value, yes, but not in quantity.
What you're missing is that value is not an inherent property of the resources being traded. Rather, value is subjective; each individual involved in the trade has a different idea of the value of each resource. The trade occurs because each individual values the other's resource more than they value their own. Assuming their ex ante valuations were correct (which becomes very likely over the course of repeated trades), after the trade they both have increased in wealth from their own point of view (by trading something they value less for something they value more), even though resources have been neither created nor destroyed.
Note that this increase in wealth means that the value of the currency has increased as well, again without any being created or destroyed—since the new owner values the non-currency good more than the old owner did, the amount of currency required to purchase the resource would purchase a larger quantity of other goods, all else being equal.
Value can only be created by consuming resources.
False. Consuming resources is one sort of value, but having resources is another. Value is defined as the inverse of (subjective) discomfort, and having resources, without consuming them in the present, is one way to reduce the discomfort which results from an uncertain future. This is where trade comes in, because (trivially) having a good which one values more is a greater value than having a good one values less.
Ever-increasing consumption of resources is unsustainable over the long term. Ever-increasing wealth—or equivalently, ever-decreasing discomfort—is not, because wealth/discomfort is subjective and thus not inherently limited by the available resources.
In practice I doubt humans could be comfortable given a severe lack of resources, but that is a matter of preferences and thus properly the domain of psychology rather than economics.
P.S. It is truly amazing how many people stubbornly cling to the concept of inherent value even though it has long been known to be incapable of addressing such basic questions as "Why are diamonds (generally) valued more than water?" and "Why is the valuation exactly the opposite to someone stuck in the desert?". Value is subjective; every serious school of economics has accepted this for decades, if not longer.
The thing is, Malthusian population growth in humans is a myth. Humans consistently choose to spend their resources on things other than population growth; if this were not the case then we would all be stuck in a purely subsistence standard-of-living, which we obviously aren't. It is a consistent observation that population growth is slowest in countries with the highest standards of living.
I'm not worried about reaching the limits of technological advancement for two reasons. First, I think that's a very long way off. Second, even if we hit that limit tomorrow, I think humans would continue to choose (over the course of a couple of generations) to limit their own population growth voluntarily rather than significantly reduce their standard of living and that of their children, as they have always chosen in the past.
Computer scientists are mathematicians. Computer science is a branch of mathematics (specifically discrete logic). This is separate from software engineering and programming (which are also independent of each other).
We can do lots of this. In fact, a huge amount of modern product design and marketing is based on successfully and accurately predicting human action.
I already responded to this elsewhere, so I'm just going to link to it: comment #30050802. Suffice it to say that you are referring to human behavioral psychology, which is not "human action" as the term is used by Mises: the study of choices entirely apart from preferences, whether they be genetic, cultural, environmental (e.g. advertising, as in your example), free (ex nihilo), or "other".
So humans are magic eh? The brain is a black box? Its IMPOSSIBLE to predict what someone will do? This isn't just wrong, its irrational.
If it were practical to derive a model of the decision-making aspects of the brain other than as a black-box then that argument would begin to make sense. However, it is not "irrational" to recognize that isn't the case, and most likely won't be for the foreseeable future, so our only option for the present is to treat the brain as though it were a black-box when it comes to decision-making.
We can make certain observations about it, and we can note patterns of behavior which suggest past preferences (though only according to some a priori model), but the essence of any scientific model is the ability to say that if conditions A, B, and C are met, then condition D will result, and if A, B, and C are met and D does not result then the model is falsified. You can't do this with choices; every human being and every choice is unique. Oh, you can construct such models, but no one has managed to come up with any predictive ones that apply to a all humans and all their choices. Coming up with a model for a specific individual's past choices is easy enough, but once they learn about the model it tends to invalidate itself regarding their future choices.
Praxeology remains a useful topic of study so long as humans' choices cannot be reliably predicted in non-trivial situations.
You should probably try to understand the context, or at least the definitions, before you go tossing around phrases like "one of the most profoundly stupid statements ever uttered by an economist."
You can study human behavior in a lab, at least on a statistical basis and within carefully designated boundaries. Outside those boundaries verification and falsification become rather difficult. For example, your experiments tend to become invalidated if the subject knows that they're being studied, and what the hypothesis is, since humans are adaptive and this knowledge may change their behavior. Also, human behavior is influenced by hidden variables which cannot be directly measured, in a lab setting or otherwise. What is studied in a lab are our purely physical limitations, and our psychological inclinations—neither of which is properly described as part of the study of human action per se. The former determines the scope of our actions, and the latter determines our preferences. The study of human action, however, is the study of how we go about satisfying those preferences; in other words, the study of choices. It is thus a general predictive model of human decision-making which Mises is placing outside the scope of verification and falsification by laboratory experiment, and rightly so.
If you start from the position that choices can be practically reduced to nothing more than measurable impulses in the brain then you have no use for the study of human action. However, even for the purest materialist there remains the fact that we do not currently have the capacity to make that approach practical. Just as chemistry remains a useful and independent avenue of study apart from physics, despite the fact that chemistry is in essence nothing more than the statistical study of certain classes of interaction between fundamental particles governed entirely by physical laws—because we currently lack the capacity and/or knowledge to make the leap from those fundamental particles to the overall properties of specific molecules and the reactions between them—so does praxeology (the study of human action) remain useful on its own merits, independent of the related scientific studies of physics, psychology, sociology, and the like.
We have the right to decide our own political affilialtion [sic], you can't tell me I'm a socialist, anymore than I can tell you that you are a member of the NeoNazi party.
No, no one can dictate the political labels which you choose to apply to yourself. However, if your actions are consistent with Socialism (or Neo-Nazism) then it is perfectly correct to call you a Socialist (or Neo-Nazi), even if that is not a label you would choose for yourself. There can be debate over what Socialism (Neo-Nazism) is (semantics), but for any specific definition you either are or are not a Socialist (Neo-Nazi), based on your beliefs—as evidenced by your actions—and not what you choose to call yourself.
This is complicated by the fact that "Socialism" is a very broad term, having definitions ranging from "all property is completely controlled by the people via a democratic government" to "anything other than strict anarcho-capitalism", and depending on the context any of these definitions can be considered reasonable. This makes the value of the term "Socialism" for purposes of general political classification practically nil; practically everyone is Socialist by some reasonable definition of the term. To me (a strict anarcho-capitalist) the term is a negative one regardless of the definition you choose, but obviously not everyone feels the same way. If you want to advance the discussion at all you need to use a more specific term, or at least spell out your particular definition.
The inner ear tracks the force exerted by the liquid on the solid shell, for example, not the other way round.
Actually, the inner ear detects which side the liquid is concentrated on by measuring disturbances in the microscopic hairs which line the inside. It also has a complex shape which allows it to detect rotation as well as orientation. However, the details are not all that important here. The point is simply that there is no way for the inner ear to detect gravity as separate from (non-gravitational) acceleration.
It's the body itself that senses the downward pull of gravity.
So you can tell the different between free-fall in a gravitational field and free-fall in empty space? I didn't think so. Humans can't sense gravity, period. We sense forces acting on the body which result in acceleration relative to free-fall; in other words, non-gravitational acceleration. There may be other parts of the body which can sense this besides the inner ear, but they work on the same principle, detecting relative acceleration rather than gravity.
If you tip your head to the side, forwards, or backwards, does your body's perception of the weight on/of your arse as you sit down change? I've never found that tipping my head in different directions changes the pain in my feet if I have to stand up for too long, the inner ear's irrelevant to the feeling of force on most of the body.
Now your confusing the sense of orientation with the sense of touch (pressure). Orientation implies that you're not in free-fall, and thus that some force must be acting on you, which you can generally feel as pressure. However, the direct sense of orientation you get from the inner ear is separate from the sense of pressure you get from the skin. The brain combined these, of course, to create a derived sense of orientation, which can become confused when pressure, orientation, and visual clues disagree.
I would have thought that the inner ear is simply detecting the orientation of the liquid within it, and the force of gravity acting upon the liquid is affecting the orientation that it assumes.
That's not entirely wrong, but it's not complete, either. The critical difference is that when other forces are acting on you, such that your total acceleration is not equal to your acceleration due to gravity, this will alter your sense of orientation. The inner ear tracks the force exerted by its solid shell (and by extension, your body) on the liquid inside. Gravity acts on both equally, and thus doesn't register on its own. What you perceive as the downward pull of a gravitational field is actually just the implied opposite of the upward force keeping you from free-fall, e.g. the normal force of your feet on the ground, transmitted through your body to the shell of your inner ear. (And the liquid inside, of course, but only once it's in contact with the side of the shell being accelerated toward it.)
In a gravitational field "motionlessness" is really two equal and opposite acceleration canceling each other out: the downward acceleration due to gravity, and the upward acceleration due to the normal force (or whatever's holding you up, e.g. buoyancy). Only the latter affects the shell of the inner ear separate from the liquid, thus concentrating it on one side and creating a sense of orientation.
Re:Didn't you ever get told to share?
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The Big Questions
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I disagree that "master and slave" is any more accurate as a description than "parent and child"... in democracies, the government is not a permanent privileged class of individuals.... I'd say that "roommates" is the better term: equals who must figure out how much of their liberty to cede in the interest of being able to live together.
It's true that most democracies don't have a permanent ruling class, at least in terms of specific individuals. However, those who do not choose to participate in the democracy, or who never have popularity/numbers on their side, can readily be thought of as a permanent underclass. At best they're left alone, at worst they are, in fact, essentially slaves to those currently in power.
The problem with the "roommate" analogy is that being someone's roommate is a voluntary situation, much like a trivial "democracy" following the principle of Unanimous Consent. Any roommate can walk away at any time if the others' demands become unreasonable or things just don't work out. However, most democracies aren't like that; you aren't given a choice of whether or not to join, and you aren't allowed to withdraw (at least not with your property intact).
Your "roommate" scenario describes voluntary cooperation quite well. However, if all individuals cooperated voluntarily then government would have no purpose; it would be no different than any other private organization. The essence of government is governing: coercion, not cooperation. Ergo, I still feel that my master/slave analogy is more apt.
If something is "not moving" in a gravitational field, that is equivalent to it being accelerated out of the field. It's one of those gravity-warps-spacetime things. It helps to think of gravity not as a force causing acceleration, but rather as a distortion in the shape of space/time such that objects in free-fall—those with no forces acting on them, and thus no acceleration—follow a "straight line" (constant motion) in the curved space, which merely looks like a curved path (or accelerated motion) in flat Euclidean space.
Think about it this way: Ignoring relativity, if you are in free-fall in a gravitational field then your inner ear gets all confused; you have no sense of "up" or "down" (because there is no acceleration against gravity) even though vectors "toward" and "away from" the center of gravity are well-defined. In the absence of any gravitational field, however, if something were to pull on you feet, causing you to accelerate "downward" at 1g, then you would have a distinct (but inverted) sense of "up" and "down" based on that acceleration. In other words, your inner ear detects your acceleration (relative to free-fall) and not "up" and "down" as determined by Earth's gravitational field.
In fact, forget all I said about relativity. The important part is that the inner ear detects acceleration relative to free-fall. However, it's still detecting acceleration, not orientation relative to a gravitational field.
Re:Didn't you ever get told to share?
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The Big Questions
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There are, of course, at least two separate (and obvious) flaws with the original argument. First, the relationship between government and governed is nothing like that parents and their children. Second, the property (toys) being redistributed in the original argument belong to the parent, not the child. Looking at your own argument, what happens if the other child and its toys are not under the control of the first child's parent? In that case the parent isn't going to redistribute the toys on its own, because they belong to another adult, whatever the first child might want.
Finally, parental rights end when the child comes of age. We have a name for the practice of adults seeking parental rights (essentially ownership) over other adults: slavery.
The person making the original argument made a tactical blunder in granting the government the position of parent over those governed. The relation between government and governed, as a coercive relationship between adult peers, is truly closer to that between master and slave than it is to that between parent and child.
Protectionist tariffs level the playing field at least partially, and are therefore critical economically for a free, libertarian market.
I don't think those words mean what you think they mean. What you describe is exactly the opposite: a coercive, authoritarian market.
If you have protectionist tariffs then your market is neither free nor libertarian. If these tariffs were in fact "critical economically" then free, libertarian markets would be a contradiction. Fortunately, they're not.
"Acceleration" is correct. The GP is taking advantage of the fact that we know from General Relativity that gravity and acceleration are equivalent. You know when you are upside-down by the direction of your acceleration (downward, toward your feet, rather than the more usual upward).
(they forget to mention the *EXTRA* fuel expense for the leading vehicle that is basically towing the others..)
Where is this magical extra drag coming from?
A line of well-designed vehicles has basically the same drag characteristics as a single long vehicle. The drag for a vehicle consists mainly of the pressure acting on the front and the vacuum acting on the back; a long vehicle and a short vehicle with the same general profile in these areas will have about the same drag. In a vehicle train, the first and last vehicles benefit the least—but still benefit some, since they only have to deal with the pressure or vacuum, not both—and the vehicles in the middle can disregard air resistance almost entirely. None of the vehicles is stuck "towing" the others; instead, the first and last vehicle share the work of separating, accelerating, and recombining the air stream around the entire vehicle train, tasks which would otherwise have to be repeated independently for each vehicle.
Exactly. Also notice that "fairly compensated" doesn't have to have anything to do with copyright; it can instead consist of fair one-time compensation for the service of creating the work (e.g. work-for-hire, individual or mass patronage, etc.) with no exclusivity to follow. The assumption that "fair compensation" equals "copyright" is part of the problem.
Usually drawing is done by a different entity than processing input. Does your graphic card send you mouse notifications?
A GUI consists of more than just drawing. You can separate drawing and input into separate processes, but a general-purpose GUI must include both, and the two must be coordinated in some fashion. That implies two-way communication. (Can you point out a single example of a practical UI with only unidirectional IPC?)
On the other hand, he clearly doesn't advocate that networked IPC is a better approach for single-machine applications.
That's fine, because Unix-domain sockets aren't networked IPC. They are only usable for intra- or inter-process communication on individual machines. They take advantage of the general socket API, but otherwise are no different than shared memory or FIFOs or message queues or whatever else he classified as non-networked IPC. The fact that they can be transparently exchanged with networked sockets, aside from actually setting up the the connection, is merely a side-benefit of using the same API. If Stevens, or anyone else, tried to claim that Unix-domain sockets aren't a form of IPC he would be wrong; they have no purpose other than IPC. I think he would recognize that.
Obviously X11's approach isn't single-machine, but the question is whether that approach compromises the value of local GUI operations. This is the core of our disagreement.
OK. So in what way are you saying that having a protocol based on Unix-domain sockets rather than pipes as a form of non-networked IPC, and trivially supporting connections from network sockets as well (with no changes to the rest of the server), "compromises the value of local GUI operations"?
There seems to be a contradiction in PayPal's descriptions of the program. On the main summary page they say of Express Checkout, "Your customer chooses to pay with PayPal by entering their email address and PayPal password, without leaving your website." However, in the section on Express Checkout all the flow diagrams show the customer clicking on a button which redirects them to the PayPal website, where they enter their login and password, as is currently the case.
I'm inclined to believe that the current situation, with PayPal handling the authentication, is what they intended, and that the sentence on their summary page was a mistake. I'm certainly not going to enter my PayPal password on some random third-party website.
Their "Direct Payment" API, on the other hand, is completely transparent; the customer enters their CC data into the seller's website and never sees PayPal.
No, this discussion is about GUI subsystems and how X11 stacks up against the others. The fact that X11 requires two-way communications doesn't mean it's essential in other solutions.
Any practical GUI solution is going to require that input events be communicated back to the clients. Well, I suppose the GUI server/toolkit could ignore input handling entirely, and make the clients get their input from the drivers directly, but then you need two-way communication between the clients and the input drivers instead (to handle changes in focus). And you'll get synchronization issues trying to coordinate drawing operations with sound, input, etc. if there's no indication from your GUI process back to your clients of when their drawing operations are complete.
I love your statement about a FIFO solution "mimicking" sockets as if sockets were some fundamental building block rather than just one arbitrary solution out of a large set of possible solutions.
Neither FIFOs nor sockets are fundamental. I already acknowledged that all forms of IPC are equivalent in principle, performance issues aside. You can mimick FIFOs with sockets, and sockets with FIFOs, or either one with shared memory or temporary files or.... That doesn't mean that all forms of IPC are an equally good fit for a given problem in practice, however. Given a choice between creating one socket and creating N+1 FIFOs (with N > 1), assuming they are equally fast and ignoring the fact that the socket provides more secure communication, I would choose sockets because they only require a single well-known-name and not the entire extra meta-protocol necessary for the FIFO approach. (Which is much the same reason I would choose sockets or FIFOs over shared memory, unless insurmountable performance issues made shared memory necessary.)
It's possible for anyone to make a mistake but I don't think you'll get much respect dissing Richard Stevens among Unix developers.
I'm not "dissing" Stevens; as you said, anyone can make a mistake. It's still an embarrassing omission given the subject of the book. He'd probably agree with me on that.
Well in the application we are talking about there isn't any need for two-way communication.
What? The application we're talking about is X11, and the X11 protocol requires two-way communication. At the very least you have to be able to receive status reports back (success/failure), and there are all those event notifications (key press, mouse movement, etc.) to consider.
Besides, if you look at Stevens' example you'll see only N+1 one-way pipes are required, not 2N pipes (where N is the number of clients).
The contents of that book do not appear to be available online (and I'm not buying it just for this discussion), but from the source-code examples I assume you're referring to the fact that you can use just one pipe for all communication to the server, and separate pipes for communication to the clients. That works, but the server has no way of knowing which client sent a given message (aside from implementing some sort of ad-hoc message signing protocol itself), whereas sockets given each client a secure path to the server so that a misbehaving or malicious client can't send messages on some other client's behalf. Given that creating a socket takes about the same amount of effort as creating a FIFO, I don't see any reason to waste time mimicking sockets with FIFO pairs (even if half the pair is common to all clients).
Interestingly enough Stevens doesn't consider sockets to be an IPC mechanism.
"Oops". That's a fairly embarrassing omission for a book with Unix, network programming, and IPC all right there in the title.
All true, of course. Certainly on non-Unix systems you would have to find a solution other than Unix-domain sockets. If that solution involves independent, two-way communication channels, with the server side being identified by a single well-known name, you can consider it equivalent to Unix-domain sockets for the purpose of this discussion.
What you said about FIFOs is basically what I meant when I said you would need separate pipes for each client and a meta-protocol to coordinate their use with the server. Note, too, that FIFOs are typically one-way, so you would actually need two per client to replace a single socket.
Other IPC mechanisms can match sockets for speed, but none of them are faster than sockets in principle (apart from shared memory). Among those which are widely available, sockets tend to be the best match for one-to-many, independent, two-way communication. FIFOs, on the other hand, are more convenient for one-way, one-to-one communication. You can emulate either one with the other (as is true for all forms of IPC), but why not pick the one which best matches what you're trying to do?
The notion that, if we don't cling to the moral agency model, all society will fall apart in a maelstrom of liberal depravity is rhetorically powerful; but it is also nonsense. A system based on an empirical understanding of human psychology, rather than an ill-codified mass of folk psychology and emotive moralizing should, in fact, work even better.
The thing is, if you don't assume free will then there are no decisions to be made. The apparent ability to make decisions is nothing more than an illusion. The system simply is what it is, and "attempting" to change it is pointless. If you're going to argue that a specific system is better, and that we should strive to adopt that system, then only if free will exists does your argument have any meaning.
I do agree that genetics should be included in considerations of intent and recidivism. There are two aspects involved in any case: restitution and retribution. The first depends only on the damage inflicted, for which intent is irrelevant. The second only applies if the damage results from an intentional violation of another's rights, and it is here that genetics plays a part.
Personally, I think the determination of free will or predestination should be up to the individual accused. If they claim free will then they are also accepting personal responsibility for their actions. If they claim predestination then they have no personal responsibility, but they are also not protected by the possibility of rehabilitation; they are to be treated as a dangerous animal or machine, with no rights of their own. Their normal rights of self-ownership effectively become abandoned property, and can be claimed by anyone (but most likely the one injured). At that point no punishment is out-of-bounds.
Pipes and sockets are probably about the same speed. The difference is that pipes only provide a single channel of communication; if there are multiple writers their messages get mixed together, and if there are multiple readers each gets a portion of the messages (or parts of messages) depending on the timing. To use pipes you would have to create a separate (named) pipe for every client, and somehow make each client open a different one (while avoiding contention). Unix-domain sockets are one-to-many; each client which opens the socket gets a separate connection to the server, so you only need to create one server socket.
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Putting it in that realm, IMHO, puts it in the supernatural and outside the realm of observation. Then empirically, it becomes irrelevant. We cannot tell whether it exists or not since we can no longer observe it.
It's not "supernatural", just not something we can quantify deterministically, like quantum mechanics or the product of a chaotic system. You can make observations about the results but they don't lead to a predictive, deterministic model of how the system works.
Since I know Mises and others use this theory to make profound claims about human behavior in the real world...
I don't see them doing that at all. The entire point of saying that you can't experimentally model the way that humans (actors) make choices is to eliminate it as a factor in what follows. Rather, Mises's conclusions are based on axioms which tend to hold regardless of the specific decision-making mechanism, often because assuming the opposite would lead to a contradiction. If you disagree with any of the necessary axioms then you'll naturally disagree with his conclusions as well, but note that not all of the axioms are necessary. Many of the arguments can be simplified, and others (such as Rothbard) have done exactly that, placing Mises's conclusions on a more concrete foundation.
The theory must be observable. You can have hidden parts that you cannot observe, but these are merely a convenient mnemonic representing otherwise overly complex machinery of the theory, not an important part of the theory.
It must fit with what we have already observed.
These are already true of "Mises 1.0".
It can have additional axioms beyond being an empirical theory, but we should stop thinking of these as being "self-evident". Variations of the theory with different choices for the axioms are quite permissible.
That's fine. I don't think Mises intended for the study of human action to imply any particular choice of axioms. That selection process is fundamentally philosophical, not necessarily empirical—just as the preference for the scientific approach is itself a philosophical position. It is, however, perfectly reasonable to start the study of human action with axioms based on observation if that is your preference.
I think the concept of action is fruitful and should be preserved, but it should be separated from the concept of "human". For example, there are examples of animals making real economic decisions....
No argument here. The use of the term "human" was never more than a matter of style in any event; at the time Mises was describing his theory animals and machines were not thought of as economic actors. The theory should properly encompass all actors, whatever their form, provided their actions are effectively non-deterministic—whether this is truly so, as with quantum systems, or they are merely too complex to analyze in practice (chaotic).
It's worth noting that the Nobel Prize for Economics is handed out by a completely different organization than all the other Nobel prizes, and that this organization has a reputation for certain political biases when it comes to recognizing innovative developments in the field of economics.
The GP is not treating money as an unlimited resource. Potentially unlimited in value, yes, but not in quantity.
What you're missing is that value is not an inherent property of the resources being traded. Rather, value is subjective; each individual involved in the trade has a different idea of the value of each resource. The trade occurs because each individual values the other's resource more than they value their own. Assuming their ex ante valuations were correct (which becomes very likely over the course of repeated trades), after the trade they both have increased in wealth from their own point of view (by trading something they value less for something they value more), even though resources have been neither created nor destroyed.
Note that this increase in wealth means that the value of the currency has increased as well, again without any being created or destroyed—since the new owner values the non-currency good more than the old owner did, the amount of currency required to purchase the resource would purchase a larger quantity of other goods, all else being equal.
Value can only be created by consuming resources.
False. Consuming resources is one sort of value, but having resources is another. Value is defined as the inverse of (subjective) discomfort, and having resources, without consuming them in the present, is one way to reduce the discomfort which results from an uncertain future. This is where trade comes in, because (trivially) having a good which one values more is a greater value than having a good one values less.
Ever-increasing consumption of resources is unsustainable over the long term. Ever-increasing wealth—or equivalently, ever-decreasing discomfort—is not, because wealth/discomfort is subjective and thus not inherently limited by the available resources.
In practice I doubt humans could be comfortable given a severe lack of resources, but that is a matter of preferences and thus properly the domain of psychology rather than economics.
P.S. It is truly amazing how many people stubbornly cling to the concept of inherent value even though it has long been known to be incapable of addressing such basic questions as "Why are diamonds (generally) valued more than water?" and "Why is the valuation exactly the opposite to someone stuck in the desert?". Value is subjective; every serious school of economics has accepted this for decades, if not longer.
The thing is, Malthusian population growth in humans is a myth. Humans consistently choose to spend their resources on things other than population growth; if this were not the case then we would all be stuck in a purely subsistence standard-of-living, which we obviously aren't. It is a consistent observation that population growth is slowest in countries with the highest standards of living.
I'm not worried about reaching the limits of technological advancement for two reasons. First, I think that's a very long way off. Second, even if we hit that limit tomorrow, I think humans would continue to choose (over the course of a couple of generations) to limit their own population growth voluntarily rather than significantly reduce their standard of living and that of their children, as they have always chosen in the past.
Computer scientists are mathematicians. Computer science is a branch of mathematics (specifically discrete logic). This is separate from software engineering and programming (which are also independent of each other).
We can do lots of this. In fact, a huge amount of modern product design and marketing is based on successfully and accurately predicting human action.
I already responded to this elsewhere, so I'm just going to link to it: comment #30050802. Suffice it to say that you are referring to human behavioral psychology, which is not "human action" as the term is used by Mises: the study of choices entirely apart from preferences, whether they be genetic, cultural, environmental (e.g. advertising, as in your example), free (ex nihilo), or "other".
So humans are magic eh? The brain is a black box? Its IMPOSSIBLE to predict what someone will do? This isn't just wrong, its irrational.
If it were practical to derive a model of the decision-making aspects of the brain other than as a black-box then that argument would begin to make sense. However, it is not "irrational" to recognize that isn't the case, and most likely won't be for the foreseeable future, so our only option for the present is to treat the brain as though it were a black-box when it comes to decision-making.
We can make certain observations about it, and we can note patterns of behavior which suggest past preferences (though only according to some a priori model), but the essence of any scientific model is the ability to say that if conditions A, B, and C are met, then condition D will result, and if A, B, and C are met and D does not result then the model is falsified. You can't do this with choices; every human being and every choice is unique. Oh, you can construct such models, but no one has managed to come up with any predictive ones that apply to a all humans and all their choices. Coming up with a model for a specific individual's past choices is easy enough, but once they learn about the model it tends to invalidate itself regarding their future choices.
Praxeology remains a useful topic of study so long as humans' choices cannot be reliably predicted in non-trivial situations.
You should probably try to understand the context, or at least the definitions, before you go tossing around phrases like "one of the most profoundly stupid statements ever uttered by an economist."
You can study human behavior in a lab, at least on a statistical basis and within carefully designated boundaries. Outside those boundaries verification and falsification become rather difficult. For example, your experiments tend to become invalidated if the subject knows that they're being studied, and what the hypothesis is, since humans are adaptive and this knowledge may change their behavior. Also, human behavior is influenced by hidden variables which cannot be directly measured, in a lab setting or otherwise. What is studied in a lab are our purely physical limitations, and our psychological inclinations—neither of which is properly described as part of the study of human action per se. The former determines the scope of our actions, and the latter determines our preferences. The study of human action, however, is the study of how we go about satisfying those preferences; in other words, the study of choices. It is thus a general predictive model of human decision-making which Mises is placing outside the scope of verification and falsification by laboratory experiment, and rightly so.
If you start from the position that choices can be practically reduced to nothing more than measurable impulses in the brain then you have no use for the study of human action. However, even for the purest materialist there remains the fact that we do not currently have the capacity to make that approach practical. Just as chemistry remains a useful and independent avenue of study apart from physics, despite the fact that chemistry is in essence nothing more than the statistical study of certain classes of interaction between fundamental particles governed entirely by physical laws—because we currently lack the capacity and/or knowledge to make the leap from those fundamental particles to the overall properties of specific molecules and the reactions between them—so does praxeology (the study of human action) remain useful on its own merits, independent of the related scientific studies of physics, psychology, sociology, and the like.
We have the right to decide our own political affilialtion [sic], you can't tell me I'm a socialist, anymore than I can tell you that you are a member of the NeoNazi party.
No, no one can dictate the political labels which you choose to apply to yourself. However, if your actions are consistent with Socialism (or Neo-Nazism) then it is perfectly correct to call you a Socialist (or Neo-Nazi), even if that is not a label you would choose for yourself. There can be debate over what Socialism (Neo-Nazism) is (semantics), but for any specific definition you either are or are not a Socialist (Neo-Nazi), based on your beliefs—as evidenced by your actions—and not what you choose to call yourself.
This is complicated by the fact that "Socialism" is a very broad term, having definitions ranging from "all property is completely controlled by the people via a democratic government" to "anything other than strict anarcho-capitalism", and depending on the context any of these definitions can be considered reasonable. This makes the value of the term "Socialism" for purposes of general political classification practically nil; practically everyone is Socialist by some reasonable definition of the term. To me (a strict anarcho-capitalist) the term is a negative one regardless of the definition you choose, but obviously not everyone feels the same way. If you want to advance the discussion at all you need to use a more specific term, or at least spell out your particular definition.
The inner ear tracks the force exerted by the liquid on the solid shell, for example, not the other way round.
Actually, the inner ear detects which side the liquid is concentrated on by measuring disturbances in the microscopic hairs which line the inside. It also has a complex shape which allows it to detect rotation as well as orientation. However, the details are not all that important here. The point is simply that there is no way for the inner ear to detect gravity as separate from (non-gravitational) acceleration.
It's the body itself that senses the downward pull of gravity.
So you can tell the different between free-fall in a gravitational field and free-fall in empty space? I didn't think so. Humans can't sense gravity, period. We sense forces acting on the body which result in acceleration relative to free-fall; in other words, non-gravitational acceleration. There may be other parts of the body which can sense this besides the inner ear, but they work on the same principle, detecting relative acceleration rather than gravity.
If you tip your head to the side, forwards, or backwards, does your body's perception of the weight on/of your arse as you sit down change? I've never found that tipping my head in different directions changes the pain in my feet if I have to stand up for too long, the inner ear's irrelevant to the feeling of force on most of the body.
Now your confusing the sense of orientation with the sense of touch (pressure). Orientation implies that you're not in free-fall, and thus that some force must be acting on you, which you can generally feel as pressure. However, the direct sense of orientation you get from the inner ear is separate from the sense of pressure you get from the skin. The brain combined these, of course, to create a derived sense of orientation, which can become confused when pressure, orientation, and visual clues disagree.
I would have thought that the inner ear is simply detecting the orientation of the liquid within it, and the force of gravity acting upon the liquid is affecting the orientation that it assumes.
That's not entirely wrong, but it's not complete, either. The critical difference is that when other forces are acting on you, such that your total acceleration is not equal to your acceleration due to gravity, this will alter your sense of orientation. The inner ear tracks the force exerted by its solid shell (and by extension, your body) on the liquid inside. Gravity acts on both equally, and thus doesn't register on its own. What you perceive as the downward pull of a gravitational field is actually just the implied opposite of the upward force keeping you from free-fall, e.g. the normal force of your feet on the ground, transmitted through your body to the shell of your inner ear. (And the liquid inside, of course, but only once it's in contact with the side of the shell being accelerated toward it.)
In a gravitational field "motionlessness" is really two equal and opposite acceleration canceling each other out: the downward acceleration due to gravity, and the upward acceleration due to the normal force (or whatever's holding you up, e.g. buoyancy). Only the latter affects the shell of the inner ear separate from the liquid, thus concentrating it on one side and creating a sense of orientation.
I disagree that "master and slave" is any more accurate as a description than "parent and child" ... in democracies, the government is not a permanent privileged class of individuals. ... I'd say that "roommates" is the better term: equals who must figure out how much of their liberty to cede in the interest of being able to live together.
It's true that most democracies don't have a permanent ruling class, at least in terms of specific individuals. However, those who do not choose to participate in the democracy, or who never have popularity/numbers on their side, can readily be thought of as a permanent underclass. At best they're left alone, at worst they are, in fact, essentially slaves to those currently in power.
The problem with the "roommate" analogy is that being someone's roommate is a voluntary situation, much like a trivial "democracy" following the principle of Unanimous Consent. Any roommate can walk away at any time if the others' demands become unreasonable or things just don't work out. However, most democracies aren't like that; you aren't given a choice of whether or not to join, and you aren't allowed to withdraw (at least not with your property intact).
Your "roommate" scenario describes voluntary cooperation quite well. However, if all individuals cooperated voluntarily then government would have no purpose; it would be no different than any other private organization. The essence of government is governing: coercion, not cooperation. Ergo, I still feel that my master/slave analogy is more apt.
If something is "not moving" in a gravitational field, that is equivalent to it being accelerated out of the field. It's one of those gravity-warps-spacetime things. It helps to think of gravity not as a force causing acceleration, but rather as a distortion in the shape of space/time such that objects in free-fall—those with no forces acting on them, and thus no acceleration—follow a "straight line" (constant motion) in the curved space, which merely looks like a curved path (or accelerated motion) in flat Euclidean space.
Think about it this way: Ignoring relativity, if you are in free-fall in a gravitational field then your inner ear gets all confused; you have no sense of "up" or "down" (because there is no acceleration against gravity) even though vectors "toward" and "away from" the center of gravity are well-defined. In the absence of any gravitational field, however, if something were to pull on you feet, causing you to accelerate "downward" at 1g, then you would have a distinct (but inverted) sense of "up" and "down" based on that acceleration. In other words, your inner ear detects your acceleration (relative to free-fall) and not "up" and "down" as determined by Earth's gravitational field.
In fact, forget all I said about relativity. The important part is that the inner ear detects acceleration relative to free-fall. However, it's still detecting acceleration, not orientation relative to a gravitational field.
There are, of course, at least two separate (and obvious) flaws with the original argument. First, the relationship between government and governed is nothing like that parents and their children. Second, the property (toys) being redistributed in the original argument belong to the parent, not the child. Looking at your own argument, what happens if the other child and its toys are not under the control of the first child's parent? In that case the parent isn't going to redistribute the toys on its own, because they belong to another adult, whatever the first child might want.
Finally, parental rights end when the child comes of age. We have a name for the practice of adults seeking parental rights (essentially ownership) over other adults: slavery.
The person making the original argument made a tactical blunder in granting the government the position of parent over those governed. The relation between government and governed, as a coercive relationship between adult peers, is truly closer to that between master and slave than it is to that between parent and child.
Protectionist tariffs level the playing field at least partially, and are therefore critical economically for a free, libertarian market.
I don't think those words mean what you think they mean. What you describe is exactly the opposite: a coercive, authoritarian market.
If you have protectionist tariffs then your market is neither free nor libertarian. If these tariffs were in fact "critical economically" then free, libertarian markets would be a contradiction. Fortunately, they're not.
"Acceleration" is correct. The GP is taking advantage of the fact that we know from General Relativity that gravity and acceleration are equivalent. You know when you are upside-down by the direction of your acceleration (downward, toward your feet, rather than the more usual upward).
(they forget to mention the *EXTRA* fuel expense for the leading vehicle that is basically towing the others..)
Where is this magical extra drag coming from?
A line of well-designed vehicles has basically the same drag characteristics as a single long vehicle. The drag for a vehicle consists mainly of the pressure acting on the front and the vacuum acting on the back; a long vehicle and a short vehicle with the same general profile in these areas will have about the same drag. In a vehicle train, the first and last vehicles benefit the least—but still benefit some, since they only have to deal with the pressure or vacuum, not both—and the vehicles in the middle can disregard air resistance almost entirely. None of the vehicles is stuck "towing" the others; instead, the first and last vehicle share the work of separating, accelerating, and recombining the air stream around the entire vehicle train, tasks which would otherwise have to be repeated independently for each vehicle.
Exactly. Also notice that "fairly compensated" doesn't have to have anything to do with copyright; it can instead consist of fair one-time compensation for the service of creating the work (e.g. work-for-hire, individual or mass patronage, etc.) with no exclusivity to follow. The assumption that "fair compensation" equals "copyright" is part of the problem.
If the current promotion system is leaving a hold to be filled, then filling it is part of the model (capitalism).
Usually drawing is done by a different entity than processing input. Does your graphic card send you mouse notifications?
A GUI consists of more than just drawing. You can separate drawing and input into separate processes, but a general-purpose GUI must include both, and the two must be coordinated in some fashion. That implies two-way communication. (Can you point out a single example of a practical UI with only unidirectional IPC?)
On the other hand, he clearly doesn't advocate that networked IPC is a better approach for single-machine applications.
That's fine, because Unix-domain sockets aren't networked IPC. They are only usable for intra- or inter-process communication on individual machines. They take advantage of the general socket API, but otherwise are no different than shared memory or FIFOs or message queues or whatever else he classified as non-networked IPC. The fact that they can be transparently exchanged with networked sockets, aside from actually setting up the the connection, is merely a side-benefit of using the same API. If Stevens, or anyone else, tried to claim that Unix-domain sockets aren't a form of IPC he would be wrong; they have no purpose other than IPC. I think he would recognize that.
Obviously X11's approach isn't single-machine, but the question is whether that approach compromises the value of local GUI operations. This is the core of our disagreement.
OK. So in what way are you saying that having a protocol based on Unix-domain sockets rather than pipes as a form of non-networked IPC, and trivially supporting connections from network sockets as well (with no changes to the rest of the server), "compromises the value of local GUI operations"?
There seems to be a contradiction in PayPal's descriptions of the program. On the main summary page they say of Express Checkout, "Your customer chooses to pay with PayPal by entering their email address and PayPal password, without leaving your website." However, in the section on Express Checkout all the flow diagrams show the customer clicking on a button which redirects them to the PayPal website, where they enter their login and password, as is currently the case.
I'm inclined to believe that the current situation, with PayPal handling the authentication, is what they intended, and that the sentence on their summary page was a mistake. I'm certainly not going to enter my PayPal password on some random third-party website.
Their "Direct Payment" API, on the other hand, is completely transparent; the customer enters their CC data into the seller's website and never sees PayPal.
No, this discussion is about GUI subsystems and how X11 stacks up against the others. The fact that X11 requires two-way communications doesn't mean it's essential in other solutions.
Any practical GUI solution is going to require that input events be communicated back to the clients. Well, I suppose the GUI server/toolkit could ignore input handling entirely, and make the clients get their input from the drivers directly, but then you need two-way communication between the clients and the input drivers instead (to handle changes in focus). And you'll get synchronization issues trying to coordinate drawing operations with sound, input, etc. if there's no indication from your GUI process back to your clients of when their drawing operations are complete.
I love your statement about a FIFO solution "mimicking" sockets as if sockets were some fundamental building block rather than just one arbitrary solution out of a large set of possible solutions.
Neither FIFOs nor sockets are fundamental. I already acknowledged that all forms of IPC are equivalent in principle, performance issues aside. You can mimick FIFOs with sockets, and sockets with FIFOs, or either one with shared memory or temporary files or.... That doesn't mean that all forms of IPC are an equally good fit for a given problem in practice, however. Given a choice between creating one socket and creating N+1 FIFOs (with N > 1), assuming they are equally fast and ignoring the fact that the socket provides more secure communication, I would choose sockets because they only require a single well-known-name and not the entire extra meta-protocol necessary for the FIFO approach. (Which is much the same reason I would choose sockets or FIFOs over shared memory, unless insurmountable performance issues made shared memory necessary.)
It's possible for anyone to make a mistake but I don't think you'll get much respect dissing Richard Stevens among Unix developers.
I'm not "dissing" Stevens; as you said, anyone can make a mistake. It's still an embarrassing omission given the subject of the book. He'd probably agree with me on that.
Well in the application we are talking about there isn't any need for two-way communication.
What? The application we're talking about is X11, and the X11 protocol requires two-way communication. At the very least you have to be able to receive status reports back (success/failure), and there are all those event notifications (key press, mouse movement, etc.) to consider.
Besides, if you look at Stevens' example you'll see only N+1 one-way pipes are required, not 2N pipes (where N is the number of clients).
The contents of that book do not appear to be available online (and I'm not buying it just for this discussion), but from the source-code examples I assume you're referring to the fact that you can use just one pipe for all communication to the server, and separate pipes for communication to the clients. That works, but the server has no way of knowing which client sent a given message (aside from implementing some sort of ad-hoc message signing protocol itself), whereas sockets given each client a secure path to the server so that a misbehaving or malicious client can't send messages on some other client's behalf. Given that creating a socket takes about the same amount of effort as creating a FIFO, I don't see any reason to waste time mimicking sockets with FIFO pairs (even if half the pair is common to all clients).
Interestingly enough Stevens doesn't consider sockets to be an IPC mechanism.
"Oops". That's a fairly embarrassing omission for a book with Unix, network programming, and IPC all right there in the title.
All true, of course. Certainly on non-Unix systems you would have to find a solution other than Unix-domain sockets. If that solution involves independent, two-way communication channels, with the server side being identified by a single well-known name, you can consider it equivalent to Unix-domain sockets for the purpose of this discussion.
What you said about FIFOs is basically what I meant when I said you would need separate pipes for each client and a meta-protocol to coordinate their use with the server. Note, too, that FIFOs are typically one-way, so you would actually need two per client to replace a single socket.
Other IPC mechanisms can match sockets for speed, but none of them are faster than sockets in principle (apart from shared memory). Among those which are widely available, sockets tend to be the best match for one-to-many, independent, two-way communication. FIFOs, on the other hand, are more convenient for one-way, one-to-one communication. You can emulate either one with the other (as is true for all forms of IPC), but why not pick the one which best matches what you're trying to do?
The notion that, if we don't cling to the moral agency model, all society will fall apart in a maelstrom of liberal depravity is rhetorically powerful; but it is also nonsense. A system based on an empirical understanding of human psychology, rather than an ill-codified mass of folk psychology and emotive moralizing should, in fact, work even better.
The thing is, if you don't assume free will then there are no decisions to be made. The apparent ability to make decisions is nothing more than an illusion. The system simply is what it is, and "attempting" to change it is pointless. If you're going to argue that a specific system is better, and that we should strive to adopt that system, then only if free will exists does your argument have any meaning.
I do agree that genetics should be included in considerations of intent and recidivism. There are two aspects involved in any case: restitution and retribution. The first depends only on the damage inflicted, for which intent is irrelevant. The second only applies if the damage results from an intentional violation of another's rights, and it is here that genetics plays a part.
Personally, I think the determination of free will or predestination should be up to the individual accused. If they claim free will then they are also accepting personal responsibility for their actions. If they claim predestination then they have no personal responsibility, but they are also not protected by the possibility of rehabilitation; they are to be treated as a dangerous animal or machine, with no rights of their own. Their normal rights of self-ownership effectively become abandoned property, and can be claimed by anyone (but most likely the one injured). At that point no punishment is out-of-bounds.
Pipes and sockets are probably about the same speed. The difference is that pipes only provide a single channel of communication; if there are multiple writers their messages get mixed together, and if there are multiple readers each gets a portion of the messages (or parts of messages) depending on the timing. To use pipes you would have to create a separate (named) pipe for every client, and somehow make each client open a different one (while avoiding contention). Unix-domain sockets are one-to-many; each client which opens the socket gets a separate connection to the server, so you only need to create one server socket.