Universal healthcare does not mean you must use the government provided healthcare.
No, it just means you have to pay for the "government-provided" healthcare, whether you use it or not. In practice that means it wouldn't be cost-effective to go anywhere else (and pay twice).
So you're saying that in ancient times people were able to work less than 6 hours per week to fulfill all their basic needs? I suppose that's believable, though barely so.
Consider, though, that if I wanted to limit myself to the same level and quality of "necessities" as those hunter/gatherers it would take a lot less than 15% of my income. If I worked at it I could probably get that figure under three hours easily enough. Perhaps I do spend a greater percentage of my income, but that is a matter of choice, not necessity -- I spend more to get more in return (in terms of convenience, quality, and safety). The hunter/gatherers did not have that choice to begin with; spending more time would not have gained them anything.
Meanwhile the price of necessities climbs faster than the average income, leaving our money worth less and less, until those on the bottom rungs are forced to choose, not between comforts, but between the basics.
History would seem to disagree with you on this -- over the course of human history the prices of necessities have done nothing but fall with respect to real income. Consider that in ancient times it was typical to spend the vast majority of one's time (>40 hours/week) attempting to acquire just the basic necessities (food, water, shelter), with no slack to allow for crop failures, poor hunting, or severe drought. In contrast, I spend less than 15% of my income (derived from just 40 hours/week) acquiring those same necessities, at a far higher quality and variety than ancient mankind could have imagined. There have been occasional setbacks following severe social disruptions (the Middle Ages, for example), but the general trend is clear: in the long term, wages rise more quickly than prices.
If I'm born wealthy and just leave my money in the stock market certs daddy left me, why should I ever contribute anything to society instead of being a lazy rich [person]?
If you just leave that money "in the stock market" without bothering to monitor market trends and re-invest it accordingly (or at least expend part of the money to pay someone else, an entrepreneur, to do so) you won't have the money very long. Stocks don't bring in returns automatically, although it can seem that way if you don't adjust for inflation. Those capitalists and entrepreneurs who invest in undervalued companies earn a profit and help to bring capital investments in line with market demand; those who mistakenly invest in overvalued companies lose money to their more skillful peers. Undervaluation and overvaluation are both temporary states; to earn continuing profits one must keep identifying areas of undervaluation. This is what the wealthy contribute to society: the savings for the capital goods themselves, which raise the productivity of labour (and thus real wages) for everyone, and the necessary management of the allocation of those capital goods to their most productive uses.
On the other hand, a few million dollars can easily buy a lifetime's worth of comfortable idleness whether one leaves the money in the stock market or not. While most wealthy parents would generally take care to pass on their own moral and ethical principles to their children, those lessons do not always take hold, in which case we must remind ourselves that (a) the children's idleness was paid for by of a lifetime of conscientious saving by their parents, just as the less wealthy often save for their own retirement, and with the same overall effect; and (b) however the money may be used it was acquired as a legitimate gift from the parent to their children; the parents had every right to make that gift whether the children "deserved" it or not.
I realize that those suffering from such extreme paranoia are often unable to consider things rationally, but for the sake of any other readers I submit the following:
Division of labour and capital investment are the only way the production of necessities can possibly scale to support the world's current population. The elimination of the social division of labour would condemn a significant fraction of that population to death by starvation in short order, to say nothing of the decline in general standards of living. Even if you allow for exchange within family groups (which your "philosophy" of complete self-sufficiency did not) there are not enough resources to support that level of population in the absence of capital investments. Remember that without division of labour you have no technology to speak of, and individual food production requires far more work for a given level of output than group production, technology or no.
Human ingenuity is not infinite in abundance. It is limited by both time and scarcity of individual experiences (incidently one of the reasons for division of labour). As such human ingenuity readily commands a non-zero price.
Your support of complete self-sufficiency stands in contradiction to your sig (condemning capitalism but supporting democracy). If you can't trust others you should oppose democracy just as much as capitalism, and probably more -- democracy legitimizes the mob, leaving them less inhibited about interfering with you, whereas a basic aspect of capitalism is strong support for individual choice. No true capitalist would attempt to aggress against you; your philosophy may be fundamentally stupid, but it remains your right to follow it. The same cannot be said for the citizens or officers of a democratic government.
There isn't a single IT job that was around in the 1990s that isn't thriving now.
It just isn't allowed to thrive in countries where workers are treated like human beings.
Can you actually point to any sources which credibly claim that those foreign IT workers who aren't "treated like human beings" are complaining at all about their treatment? It seems to me like their treatment is probably far better than anything they could have achieved prior to acquiring jobs in IT. Personally I think you're the one not treating them like human beings; by not letting them make their own choices with regards to what constitutes fair pay you're treating them like ignorant children.
As for those decrying the supposed loss of the American middle-class as a result of this offshoring -- what do you suppose globalization is doing for the middle classes in the countries we're offshoring to? Surely they have far more need of such opportunities than any of the industrialized, first-world countries.
Lastly, for those worried about falling wages, consider that alongside the fall in nominal wages resulting from offshoring there is also a corresponding fall in prices, driven by that same offshoring trend. The two counteract each other, and historically prices have always fallen no less quickly than wages under such circumstances -- in other words, real wages (what you can buy with your pay) have always remained the same, or increased, due to advances in stable international trade. I don't intend to guarantee that real prices won't fall this time (no one could make such a promise; there are too many unknowns), but just the same, falling nominal wages do not have to equate to any decrease in wealth or quality of living in real terms.
You can send a policeman around and if he sees a green laptop in a market, it means it has been stolen and he can use the tag to find the owner.
You can't simply assume that such laptops have been stolen; what if their legitimate owner (the child) chose to sell it? OLPC has been adament that they wish for the laptops to be owned by those who will be using them, because that gives the children a permanent link to their laptop, plus a sense of responsibility for it often lacking for shared hardware (the "trajedy of the commons" issue). However, by the same token, if the child owns the laptop then the child (or the child's parents) can choose to sell it to anyone they wish, and they may indeed benefit from doing so in some cases (ex post facto, not just ex ante).
On the other hand, you're right that eBay has no obligation to let people list the OLPC laptops for auction on their site.
A company that provided internet service along with something that USED that service wouldn't need to pay itself to prevent throttling. It can therefore offer the same product for a lower price than a competitor, then raise the rates once competition is eliminated.
The opportunity cost is the same either way -- the company obviously doesn't have to pay itself to use its own network, but it must still forego any payment it could have received from the competitor. That is only a winning proposition if the ISP can offer the product more efficiently than the competitor (at a lower cost). To illustrate, assume for the moment that you're the ISP. There are four monetary values involved: $RB, the revenue you could get from selling the bandwidth; $RC, the revenue from providing the content; $CI, the cost for the ISP to provide the content; and $CO, the cost for the outsider to provide the content. $RB will be between zero and ($RC - $CO), depending on market conditions and the ISP's negotiating skills.
On the one hand you have the option of offering your own service, which will bring in ($RC - $CI) profit to you and none to the outside provider. On the other hand you could sell the bandwidth to an external content provider, which would bring in $RB profit to you and ($RC - ($RB + $CO)) to the outside provider. The question then becomes "Is $RB less than or greater than ($RC - $CI)?". Obviously the answer depends on $RB, but looking at the limits we can see that while it may be profitable for the ISP to offer the service itself, it may also be more profitable to leave that to a more efficient outside provider, particularly if the costs of providing the content are higher for the ISP, as can be expected to be the case due to the cost benefits of division of labour. (The ISP is unlikely to be as efficient in non-ISP markets as it would be in its home market, where its experience and connections are most applicable; this is why most companies split up when they find themselves operating in more than one market at a time.)
All this assumes that there are no other providers for bandwidth or content, either of which would give the other side more room to negotiate, further aiding efficiency. In any event, it cannot be assumed that it will be in the ISP's best interest to bankrupt outside content providers, even if the ISP holds an effective monopoly on network bandwidth. It is, in fact, entirely possible that the ISP's costs would make the entire content-providing business unprofitable for them ($CI > $RC), in which case they would have no choice but to turn to an outside provider, even with $RB = 0.
No, the difference between this and the Broken Window fallacy is that (a) no "windows" get broken, and (b) . . . what was your point again? This has nothing to do with the Broken Window fallacy at all, which addresses the hidden cost of employing aggresion to create more opportunities for trade. There is no aggression here, and no hidden cost. If the relations between ISP, broadcaster, advertisers, and viewers are as I have described (and I see no reason why they would be otherwise), then that arrangement is the most efficient form known to exist, the one which best conserves scarce resources -- perhaps not in purely monetary terms, but taking into consideration convenience for the viewers, effectiveness for the advertisers, general opposition among viewers to up-front bills, etc. The arrangement will, inevitably, be the one involving the least expenditure of both material and non-material capital goods out of all the known possible arrangements. If that were not the case some other arrangement would have been chosen.
Except that the ISPs aren't throttling based on what the customers want, they want to throttle based on how much HBO pays them to not be throttled.
And HBO decides how much to pay for that service based on how much their customers (the advertisers) are willing to pay to make sure HBO stays "on-air".
The advertisers, in turn, will decide how much they want HBO to stay on-air on the basis of how much they are willing to spend to ensure that HBO's viewers (to whom their advertisements are directed) keep watching HBO, and thus their advertisements. This roughtly correlates with how much the viewers desire a clear, non-throttled transmission (though there are obviously other factors involved, such as the quality of the shows).
End result: Viewer preferences dictate the priority the ISP assigns to HBO.
It is illegal to ask some questions in an interview. Age related questions are one of them. . . . If you ask a question that falls into this category, you open yourself up to a gender/age/racial discrimination lawsuit. These and many others are protected classes under the law.
It seems to me that the problem here is the law, not their selection process. What business can it possibly be of anyone but the employers just how they choose to select (or reject) potential employees?
Mind you, I think irrelevant discrimination (as is usually the case for the classes you mention) is usually rather stupid, and most harmful to the one practicing it -- though it may make sense for certain (very rare) sorts of jobs[1] -- but if someone is inclined to practice such discrimination I'd rather have it out in the open where everyone can see it, not hidden in a dark corner to simmer, unexposed and unresolved. If discrimination is prohibited then it will indeed be marginalized, but some employers will continue to believe that they could possibly have done better were they permitted to make their own choices. Permit them to choose freely, however, and the fallacies of this reasoning will soon be exposed by their less discriminatory competitors.
In any event the right to discriminate is implied by freedom of association. No individual has the right to tell another whom they must or cannot hire, or for whom they must or cannot work; neither can any group of individuals (e.g. a government) can hold a right in aggregate which none of its members possesses. Anti-discrimination laws, therefore, can have no ethical or moral basis; no one has the right to impose them on another.
[1] To illustrate, consider age discrimination, which is Constitutionally required for certain political offices. Wouldn't you agree that it's a bit hypocritical for the government to forbit age discrimination to other employers while the practice remains one of its own fundamental employment rules?
That all sounds great for a general-purpose computer, but is it necessary for OLPC? Don't get me wrong, if they can do that without sacrificing their others goals obviously they should. But if they cannot, then it's more important to have a system that the users can understand than one that they can alter.
First off, they're already planning to include one or more programming environments, so I don't think meeting this goal would add any additional development software dependencies. (I am assuming that the included environments include the requisite graphical toolkits; I believe that was implied by the design goals of the OLPC project.) Also, I wouldn't expect them to eliminate any ready-made software simply because it didn't conform to these design principles, and I wouldn't expect the separation to be a performance problem (CPU or memory) for newly-developed software (though obviously this would have to be tested on the actual hardware to be sure). If it were a problem I would agree that limited functionality is probably better than missing functionality, though the specifics of the situation would affect the final decision.
Lastly, I didn't intend for that comment to specifically address the OLPC software, but rather application software interfaces in general. It would be nice if it could be applied to both, but I recognize that the unique demands of the OLPC project may demand innovative solutions to hardware and systems constraints that would be less-than-ideal in a more typical environment.
If you're asking to start an activity, you would say "I want to drive nails" and then you would get an appropriate tool. If you just want to smash something and not drive nails, then you should have said "I want to smash something".
I believe you're overlooking the problem here: the maker of the tool (the hammer) has a particular set of uses in mind, and those uses do not necessarily correlate with the ways you want to use the tool. In other words, the UI "language" may not even include a way to specify "I want to smash something" -- the maker of the hammer may only have thought of its ability to drive nails.
The problem here is twofold: (1) the scope of the UI "language" is dictated by the tool designer, and (2) the tool can only be controlled through its fixed user interface. In my opinion (2) is the more serious fault; after all, if there is a more fundamental level of control available, new UIs can be designed for it to cover new use cases as they come up. If (1) is also eliminated through more flexible UI frameworks, so much the better, since it makes the solution to (2) much easier.
In my opinion, the most direct way to alleviate both problems is to employ the MVC architecture as a fundamental part of application design, in particular the separation between the core application data structures and logic (the model) -- from the user interface (the views and controllers). Note that I'm not just referring to internal architecture here; I'm saying that it should be possible for the user to replace or supplement the supplied user-interface component with a completely separate, from-scratch implementation, if necessary, while retaining the same underlying model. It would be best if the supplied UI component were open-source (whatever the model's license might be), to maximize reuse and to capitalize on the flexibility of the design. It should, furthermore, be possible to access the model directly through a standard REPL (command-line) interface (Guile, Python, Ruby, etc.).
Ultimately what all this means is (1) you have the ability to modify the user interface, or create a new user interface, to conform to the activities you wish to undertake, not just those envisioned by the tool developer, and (2) you have nearly unlimited programmer's access to the model, both for the purpose of modifying the user interface, and for the immediate manipulation of the underlying model in ways graphical interfaces are ill-suited to describe.
I think designing the system to remove as many choices as possible from the user is not just not a mistake, but probably the only way it could work.
I think that this is true as far as the initial interfaces are concerned, but only because the system described above would allow the user to "upgrade" those interfaces as its understanding of the system -- and its need for advanced features -- developed.
"There is no such thing as intellectual property. Property has to have some sort of physical presence."
Ever heard of the stock market??
A share of stock represents part-ownership of specific real (i.e. physical) property
And what is the most valuable part of almost every business? "Goodwill". Customer base. Is that a physical piece of property? Of course not.
I'm certainly not attempting to argue that non-physical, non-property factors don't play any part in the value of the stock, as they certainly do. In loose terms goodwill, etc. can be considered "assets", but while they certainly play a part in the stock market they have nothing to do with property. Neither goodwill nor a customer base represent something over which the company can claim exclusivity of control or protect through defensive coercion, both of which are central to the concept of property. As in matters of reputation, they represent a state of mind and/or pattern of behavior held or practiced by external entities. The only influence the company holds over it lies in non-coercive persuasion; whether the trend will continue ultimately depends on the choices and actions of those external entities, not the company itself. The effect of their opinions on the company's stock price is purely an external benefit (or cost, as the case may be) which the company has every reason to cultivate but no right to demand or protect through coercion.
Goodwill is the most valuable, and for larger tech businesses, IP (patents, TMs). Coke's trademark is worth more than all the corn syrup in the world.
I think it should be plain that the concept of so-called "intellectual property" is incompatible with the definition of property given in the GP on the basis that it subverts the rights of the legitimate property owner in favor of an individual or organization granted a coercion-backed grant of monopoly by the government. Obviously that doesn't mean such monopoly grants (mainly patents and copyrights) are devoid of value to investors, since they correlate with increased future income for that company (at society's expense). The value of a trademark to investors, of course, is primarily due to the association with the goodwill and customer base already discussed above. I think that, unlike copyright and patents, the general structure of the trademark system could survive the demise of "IP" on the basis that violation of a trademark is -- in nearly all cases -- also an instance of fraud. The meaning of the trademark would simply be determined in the same way as the meaning of other terms employed in the products' labelling and advertising, rather than by simple association with the company which "owns" it, and enforcement would be up to the subjects of that fraud rather than the company itself; I suspect little would change from the average person's point-of-view.
Here's a more well defined experiment. Remove the richest 2% of the world's population and see what effect it has on the world's total economic output. The big question would be what to do with the assets of the richest 2%. They could, for example, be taxed away by the governments or distributed among the remaining population.
I have a strong suspicion that the total economic output would not fall by half as would be implied if the richest 2% were doing half the work. To put it another way, the assets of the richest 2% may be contributing substantially to the total economic output but not the richest 2% themselves.
Removing the hotels that Paris Hilton owns from the economy would have a significant impact. Removing Paris Hilton herself would not. The same could be said for Bill Gates and the fraction of the Microsoft corporation that he owns.
I agree with you. No, really. I never said that the richest 2% were responsible for 50% of the "work" or 50% of the world's economic output. I merely stated that the very fact that they are wealthy contributes to an increase in investment relative to consumption, and I stand by that statement. I also stated that such investments lead to increased productivity of land and labour, lower prices, and better standards of living -- basic economic facts, and hardly original.
If you stole Hilton's or Gates's wealth and redistributed it evenly across society the result would be a shift from investment to consumption -- not a complete shift, but a shift nonetheless. I would estimate that 50% ownership probably corresponds to a 50/50 split between the overall social time preference of the rest of society and that of the richest 2%; the change in investment proportions would thus be about half of the difference between those two time preferences. (Actual time preferences are quite difficult to quantify, but consider that many of those making up the "rest of society" have gone rather deeply in debt for the purpose of immediate consumption, representing a very high time preference, whereas many of the wealthy invest in things that will only show real returns in their childrens' -- or grandchildrens' -- lifetimes.)
Finally, even if the top 2% do own 50% of the world's wealth, they hardly make up 50% of the world's consumption, which is what really matters for the purpose of the GGP's original argument. The real benefit from any increase in investment must be experienced through consumption, which means consumers, and not the richest 2%, are benefitting the most from those investments.
Is having your assets contribute to an economy the same as contributing to an economy yourself. My answer is no - particularly in the case of inherited assets. While assets themselves are usually economically productive, the decisions made by the owners of the assets may actually be detrimental to the economy. To put it another way, would it dramatically change the total economic output if the stock owned by Bill Gates was distributed equally among the world's population?
My answer would be "yes": having your assets contribute to an economy must be the same, by definition, as contributing to an economy yourself. As long as they're your assets any decision you make to employ them to the benefit of society is a contribution you have made to society. Inheritance doesn't change that; regardless of whether they were personally earned or inherited, those assets legitimately belong to you, and any positive use you make of them is your positive contribution. Inheritance is nothing more or less than a gift from parents to their children. Sometimes the children squander that gift, true. That is their right as the gift's recipients and legitimate owners. No one else has any claim to that gift or to the potential benefits it may have brought them had other decisions been made. That doesn't mean others can't have any
There is no such thing as intellectual property. Property has to have some sort of physical presence.
Ever heard of the stock market??
A share of stock represents part-ownership of specific real (i.e. physical) property along with membership in an organization bound by and party to various contractual agreements regarding the use of that property. The share is not itself property; it is merely a property title.
Property rights are not necessarily tied to specific physical matter -- even the human body gradually exchanges its matter with the surrounding environment while retaining its general form -- but they do represent control over our physical environment within specific areas of space defined by the logical boundaries of physical objects (or, better, the interaction domains of such objects, since some things -- like radio waves -- do not have precise "boundaries" despite having a physical presence). As such property rights are always grounded in -- as the GP put it -- a "physical presence".
For most objects this reduces to the intuitive concept of property, since most objects have fairly well-defined boundaries and only interact with other objects which intersect those boundaries. Some types of property, such as land, are a bit less intuitive due to that fact that the logical boundary of a piece of land is not necessarily in the soil itself, but rather in the space above the soil (still a physical aspect of the environment). Furthermore, certain types of property, such as radio spectrum, may cover the same physical space without any interaction, and such an intersection does not (by itself) imply any conflict. When conflict -- unwanted and unauthorized interaction between property owned by two separate individuals -- does occur, the individual with the earliest claim has "the right of way" and the other must repair any damages caused.
Having established what property is, it remains to establish who will own any given piece of property. This is a far more controversial topic, but the general consensus seems to be that there are two guiding principles in assigning property ownership in a dispute. The first, called "homesteading", is the principle that property which is brought into existance by the actions of an individual, and thus transformed from unowned "land" (in the economic sense) into property, initially belongs to that individual. The second principle is that ownership of property can be transferred in accordance with the will of its current owner. I'm not going to argue for these principles here, but see my profile URL if you're interested in a decent formal justification. Most individuals do tend to uphold both these principles in their own direct interactions with others, though many bend or break them when interacting more indirectly (through the government, for example). A few, of course, tend to disregard them outright, and we call such individuals "criminals".
On the basis of these property rights a complete system of rights can be built, including not only impersonal property rights but also civil rights just as extensive as those guaranteed by the U.S. Bill of Rights, including free speach, freedom of religion, freedom of association, right to self-defense, and protection from unreasonable search and seizure.
The person with more wealth is the bigger target when there's less government to protect them. The more you have, the more you have to protect, and the more people will be wanting to take it from you. So there's a multiplicative effect. (assets to protect X number of people targetting those assets).
I rather doubt that many of those top 2% are relying on the goverment to protect their assets. Even if they are now (due to the subsidized nature of such defense) I think they are probably quite capable of defending that wealth at their own expense in the government's absence.
(Isn't it amazing how contradictory some ideologies can be? The main Statist argument against privitized defense seems to be the idea that the least wealthy individuals would be unable to pay for their own defense. However, when it comes time to decide how much to charge for that same defense, all the Statists seem to argue the opposite: that the wealthy rely on the government even more than those with lesser means. Which is it already?)
If you intend to make the system "fair", figure out the minimum level of security/defense you want everyone to have, and charge everyone equally (in absolute terms) to provide that security. Anyone with more to protect can pay the surcharge for additional defense themselves. A decent starting point for that minimum would be defense against assault and theft on the assumption of a specific amount of wealth per person (the median wealth would make a decent choice). Police resources would then be distributed across the taxed domain (city/county/state/country) purely according to population, not wealth or wealth-related criminal activity, since they are not responsible for protecting any wealth over that limit; doing so would be up to private security organizations at the owner's discretion and expense.
You could say 2% make most of their financial gains from the work of half of the rest of us.
You could say that, but the statement would be meaningless (however true it might be). What do you think those "financial gains" are going toward? Sure the rich spend more on themselves than the poor or middle-class in absolute terms, but decreasing marginal returns dictate that consumption will tend to form a smaller percentage of their income. The balance must be split between capital investments and cash (money taken out of circulation). The latter category is generally insignificant; if it were significant it would result in an increase in the purchasing power of the currency, to the benefit of everyone else. As for the former category, capital investments are the main source in increasing productivity of land and labor in any economy. They earn (increasingly irrelevant) financial gains for the investor, sure, but more importantly they contribute to falling prices and a general rise in standards of living, particularly for those with the least income.
That "work of half the rest of us" is almost entirely for our benefit; the fact that those 2% make a fair return on their investments -- which permit us to do that work effectively in the first place -- is almost insignificant compared to the utility we get out of the end products.
This isn't all online advertising, that term is too loose. Online advertising encompasses content advertising as well as search advertising. . . . We are talking about search advertising in particular. . . . What Google shouldn't be doing is reserving the top advertising slots for their own products when they are the only real search advertising game in town. That is unfair leveraging.
If you draw the boundaries of the "market" narrowly enough anyone can be considered a monopolist, provided that enough consumers are interested in buying their products. If anything, determinations of "anticompetitive" behavior ought to be based on the broadest possible market boundaries, not the narrowest ones; in this case that would mean the advertising market, not "online advertising", much less "online search advertising". If you intend to draw narrow boundaries simply to twist the meaning of "monopoly", why not just say "the market for advertising on Google's search result pages" and be done with it?
Furthermore, the producer has no direct control over the popularity of its products or its corresponding market share. If anything, a high market share correlates with the company's ability to satisfy the demands of the consumers in that market relative to its competitors. You propose to punish Google -- their investors and their consumers, both in search services and in advertising -- for satisfying the desires of their consumer base better than their competitors. Certainly the popularity of their search service, a major capital investment on which they make no direct returns, contributes significantly to the popularity of their advertising services. Their other services (GMail, calendar, spreadsheet, etc.) serve a similar purpose. In effect the visibility Google's free services grant its advertising space is the product Google sells to potential advertisers.
Lastly, a critical part of any antitrust ruling is the demonstation of actual harm to consumers in the form of higher prices. If there is no such harm there can be no illegal abuse of monopoly status. I don't think anyone has successfully argued that they've driven prices up in the advertising market -- quite the contrary, in fact -- and all their other services are free, and likely to remain so for the foreseeable future. Ergo, there is no convincing argument for antitrust intervention.
Standard Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer and this is not legal advice.
Yeah - It won't even run.NET apps compiled from Managed C++, only those compiled from C#. It also includes a compiler for C# but not for C++, and g++ won't target.NET bytecode.
** ERROR **: Method ':_WinMainCRTStartup ()' in assembly '/mnt/dongzhi/vis/AvatarClient_2006-08-30/Release/ BotClient_WF.exe' contains native code and mono can't run it. The assembly was probably created by Managed C++. [emphasis added]
Apparently your current Managed C++ compiler didn't output.NET bytecode, either, judging from the error message. Did you really expect native code -- compiled specifically for a Windows(TM) environment -- to run under anything other than the MS.NET runtime? From the Mono Technical FAQ:
Managed Extensions for C++ is least likely to operate under Mono. Mono does not support mixed mode assemblies (that is, assemblies containing both managed and unmanaged code, which Managed C++ can produce). You need a fully-managed assembly to run under Mono, and getting the Visual C++.NET compiler to generate such an executable can be difficult. You need to use only the.NET-framework assemblies, not the C libraries (you can't use printf(3) for example.), and you need to use the linker options/nodefaultlib/entry:main mscoree.lib in addition to the/clr compiler flag. You can still use certain compiler intrinsic functions (such as memcpy(3)) and the STL.
I can probably pick the lock you have on your house. Should it be legal for me to do so because I can?
The offense here is not lock-picking (though that may be independently illegal in some areas), but rather trespass. Picking the lock merely makes it obvious that you have no permission to be there. On the other hand, "pretexting" involves no theft, trespass, or fraud[1]. If you find yourself harmed by the use of information gathered through "pretexting" feel free to sue for compensation, but "pretexting" by itself does not constitute harm of any sort.
[1] It is dishonest, but it would only be fraud if that deception was done with the intent of acquiring the other party's property under false pretenses. As information is not property, deception intended solely to gain information is not fraud.
They are against the concept of zoning laws and public health legislation. So under the Libertarian model I can do whatever I want with my property -- and my neighbor can sell his property to a industrial concern that will cause my property values to drop like a brick. And when did public health legislation become "unduly burdensome"? Are regulations that food service workers wash their hands really a removal of property rights?
I have a great respect for what they stand for and find myself in 100% agreement with them on the "war" on drugs, gun rights, civil liberties, abortion and victimless crime.
You do realize the contradiction here, right? The reason the LP opposes the sort of regulations you endorsed in the first part is that such regulations run counter to their stance against victimless crimes and encroachment on civil liberties, which you claim to accept "100%".
There are non-regulatory solutions to both these issues, of course. With regard to property values, the simplest approach would probably be to work out an option agreement with your neighbor that would give you the opportunity to purchase the neighboring property at an agreed-upon price prior to any other sale, effectively allowing you to guide the property toward an owner you approve of. The overall cost of doing so -- assuming no reduction in the properties' value between purchase and resale -- would be the amount necessary to cover the current owner's loss of potential higher-value sale opportunities, which is obviously only fair. You may even be able to split this cost with the other neighbors. Zoning regulation costs at least as much; you just don't have to pay it in full. Your lack of cost is offset by your neighbor's lack of compensation.
As for the food-service health regulations, you would still be perfectly free to hold the restaurant responsible should their negligence cause you any harm. Even the current health regulations are insufficient to prevent unsanitary conditions (and it's amazing what some low-quality places can get away with while still passing their health inspections); most of the more sanitary places are that way because it's good for business, not (just) because it's the law. Even ignoring the inevitable effect of known sanitation issues on their clientel, the legal/financial risk of allowing an employee to negligently transmit a disease to a customer is well worth avoiding from an economic point of view. I suspect that most owners would have their restaurants' sanitation certified by a recognized third-party organization even in the absence of such regulation just for the effect it would have on their customer base.
Parks and dams serve the people and belong to the people. Why should they be owned by a private concern and operated for profit?
Why shouldn't they be? What value is added by making them subject to the inefficiencies of the government beaurocracy? All that accomplishes, besides driving up the overall cost, is to spread out the cost of building and operating such "public spaces" across the entire population (as opposed to just those who support and/or utilize such projects). Granted, privitization is something that must be done with great care, keeping in mind the fact that while the government (meaning the specific people in power at the time) has no legitimate right to the "public" property, neither does any specific private owner.
The fairest thing to do would be to sell the property to a private owner for a reasonable price, if one can be had, with certain assurances about how the property would be used in the near future, and then to split the proceeds between the original taxpayers (assuming you could determine who they were or how much each had been forced to pay up front). Short of that (since returning the funds is probably impractical in most cases) the property could be placed in trust with a non-profit priva
It's amazing that we have this for cars, but not for guns.
We don't have these rules for cars. You don't need a driver's license to own a car, or even, strictly speaking, to operate one (on private roads, with the owner's permission). You only need the license and registration to use the vehicle on public, State-owned roads. The equivalent for guns would be something like a concealed-carry license requirement (i.e. a license to carry the gun in public areas), which already exists in most places and typically follows the guidelines you've specified.
Private owners can reasonably refuse to allow you to carry a gun onto their properties, and the government (presuming for the moment that their claim to ownership of "public" property is legitimate) can reasonably restrict possession and/or use of guns on public property, but nothing gives either of them a legitimate right to restrict possession or (non-aggressive) use of any sort of weapon on one's own property.
You're correct that there is no provision in the 1st Amendment, but you couldn't expect the founders to have thought of every contingency when writing the document.
Of course not -- that's why there's a process for passing constitutional amendments in the first place. However, no such amendment has been passed which could possibly be interpreted as limiting the scope of the 1st Amendment. The courts place is to ensure that the existing laws -- including the Constitution itself -- are upheld, not to undermine them by inventing exceptions to the explicit limitations they place on the government's power. The Supreme Court exceeded its authority by ruling contrary to the clear meaning of the Constitution; this occurance is not particularly surprising when you take into consideration that the Supreme Court is itself part of the government and directly benefits from any perceived expansion in the government's authority.
In fact, the entire practice of judicial review is a grave injustice by which the judicial branch has arrogated to itself a critical role which rightfully belongs to the citizens of the United States. The authority of the Constitution -- and thus the government itself, including the courts -- comes from the people, and only the people themselves can determine the limits of that authority, subject to the limits of their own authority (one cannot grant legitimate powers to the government which one does not possess beforehand). The government cannot legitimately grant itself new authority; only the people can do that.
As for whether the harm would be a civil or criminal matter, you may be correct. As I understand the terms, criminal actions are against the State or against society, whereas civil torts are actions against fellow citizens. On the basis of those definitions any harm to others would constitute a civil tort action, one citizen verses another. However, it often appears that the legislature confuses the issue by treating various civil offenses as though they were criminal; they could conceivably attempt to force such harm into a criminal mold. A loose interpretation could see all torts as criminal actions "against society"; a strict interpretation would probably eliminate the concept of criminal actions altogether (removing all victimless "crimes" and limiting judgements to compensation for actual damages inflicted on real people).
Even if it's yelling fire in a theater (or similar action), or conspiracy to commit a crime, freedom of speech should never be inhibited publically.
There, fixed that for you.
There may be (civil) consequences if such speech causes someone harm through malice or negligence, but the speech itself must still be permitted. The 1st Amendment makes no provision for any exceptions: the government cannot legally act to prevent or punish any speech, regardless of the content or circumstances. If harm comes of the speech, the speaker may be held responsible for the harm, not the speech itself.
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No, it just means you have to pay for the "government-provided" healthcare, whether you use it or not. In practice that means it wouldn't be cost-effective to go anywhere else (and pay twice).
So you're saying that in ancient times people were able to work less than 6 hours per week to fulfill all their basic needs? I suppose that's believable, though barely so.
Consider, though, that if I wanted to limit myself to the same level and quality of "necessities" as those hunter/gatherers it would take a lot less than 15% of my income. If I worked at it I could probably get that figure under three hours easily enough. Perhaps I do spend a greater percentage of my income, but that is a matter of choice, not necessity -- I spend more to get more in return (in terms of convenience, quality, and safety). The hunter/gatherers did not have that choice to begin with; spending more time would not have gained them anything.
History would seem to disagree with you on this -- over the course of human history the prices of necessities have done nothing but fall with respect to real income. Consider that in ancient times it was typical to spend the vast majority of one's time (>40 hours/week) attempting to acquire just the basic necessities (food, water, shelter), with no slack to allow for crop failures, poor hunting, or severe drought. In contrast, I spend less than 15% of my income (derived from just 40 hours/week) acquiring those same necessities, at a far higher quality and variety than ancient mankind could have imagined. There have been occasional setbacks following severe social disruptions (the Middle Ages, for example), but the general trend is clear: in the long term, wages rise more quickly than prices.
If you just leave that money "in the stock market" without bothering to monitor market trends and re-invest it accordingly (or at least expend part of the money to pay someone else, an entrepreneur, to do so) you won't have the money very long. Stocks don't bring in returns automatically, although it can seem that way if you don't adjust for inflation. Those capitalists and entrepreneurs who invest in undervalued companies earn a profit and help to bring capital investments in line with market demand; those who mistakenly invest in overvalued companies lose money to their more skillful peers. Undervaluation and overvaluation are both temporary states; to earn continuing profits one must keep identifying areas of undervaluation. This is what the wealthy contribute to society: the savings for the capital goods themselves, which raise the productivity of labour (and thus real wages) for everyone, and the necessary management of the allocation of those capital goods to their most productive uses.
On the other hand, a few million dollars can easily buy a lifetime's worth of comfortable idleness whether one leaves the money in the stock market or not. While most wealthy parents would generally take care to pass on their own moral and ethical principles to their children, those lessons do not always take hold, in which case we must remind ourselves that (a) the children's idleness was paid for by of a lifetime of conscientious saving by their parents, just as the less wealthy often save for their own retirement, and with the same overall effect; and (b) however the money may be used it was acquired as a legitimate gift from the parent to their children; the parents had every right to make that gift whether the children "deserved" it or not.
I realize that those suffering from such extreme paranoia are often unable to consider things rationally, but for the sake of any other readers I submit the following:
Can you actually point to any sources which credibly claim that those foreign IT workers who aren't "treated like human beings" are complaining at all about their treatment? It seems to me like their treatment is probably far better than anything they could have achieved prior to acquiring jobs in IT. Personally I think you're the one not treating them like human beings; by not letting them make their own choices with regards to what constitutes fair pay you're treating them like ignorant children.
As for those decrying the supposed loss of the American middle-class as a result of this offshoring -- what do you suppose globalization is doing for the middle classes in the countries we're offshoring to? Surely they have far more need of such opportunities than any of the industrialized, first-world countries.
Lastly, for those worried about falling wages, consider that alongside the fall in nominal wages resulting from offshoring there is also a corresponding fall in prices, driven by that same offshoring trend. The two counteract each other, and historically prices have always fallen no less quickly than wages under such circumstances -- in other words, real wages (what you can buy with your pay) have always remained the same, or increased, due to advances in stable international trade. I don't intend to guarantee that real prices won't fall this time (no one could make such a promise; there are too many unknowns), but just the same, falling nominal wages do not have to equate to any decrease in wealth or quality of living in real terms.
You can't simply assume that such laptops have been stolen; what if their legitimate owner (the child) chose to sell it? OLPC has been adament that they wish for the laptops to be owned by those who will be using them, because that gives the children a permanent link to their laptop, plus a sense of responsibility for it often lacking for shared hardware (the "trajedy of the commons" issue). However, by the same token, if the child owns the laptop then the child (or the child's parents) can choose to sell it to anyone they wish, and they may indeed benefit from doing so in some cases (ex post facto, not just ex ante).
On the other hand, you're right that eBay has no obligation to let people list the OLPC laptops for auction on their site.
The opportunity cost is the same either way -- the company obviously doesn't have to pay itself to use its own network, but it must still forego any payment it could have received from the competitor. That is only a winning proposition if the ISP can offer the product more efficiently than the competitor (at a lower cost). To illustrate, assume for the moment that you're the ISP. There are four monetary values involved: $RB, the revenue you could get from selling the bandwidth; $RC, the revenue from providing the content; $CI, the cost for the ISP to provide the content; and $CO, the cost for the outsider to provide the content. $RB will be between zero and ($RC - $CO), depending on market conditions and the ISP's negotiating skills.
On the one hand you have the option of offering your own service, which will bring in ($RC - $CI) profit to you and none to the outside provider. On the other hand you could sell the bandwidth to an external content provider, which would bring in $RB profit to you and ($RC - ($RB + $CO)) to the outside provider. The question then becomes "Is $RB less than or greater than ($RC - $CI)?". Obviously the answer depends on $RB, but looking at the limits we can see that while it may be profitable for the ISP to offer the service itself, it may also be more profitable to leave that to a more efficient outside provider, particularly if the costs of providing the content are higher for the ISP, as can be expected to be the case due to the cost benefits of division of labour. (The ISP is unlikely to be as efficient in non-ISP markets as it would be in its home market, where its experience and connections are most applicable; this is why most companies split up when they find themselves operating in more than one market at a time.)
All this assumes that there are no other providers for bandwidth or content, either of which would give the other side more room to negotiate, further aiding efficiency. In any event, it cannot be assumed that it will be in the ISP's best interest to bankrupt outside content providers, even if the ISP holds an effective monopoly on network bandwidth. It is, in fact, entirely possible that the ISP's costs would make the entire content-providing business unprofitable for them ($CI > $RC), in which case they would have no choice but to turn to an outside provider, even with $RB = 0.
No, the difference between this and the Broken Window fallacy is that (a) no "windows" get broken, and (b) . . . what was your point again? This has nothing to do with the Broken Window fallacy at all, which addresses the hidden cost of employing aggresion to create more opportunities for trade. There is no aggression here, and no hidden cost. If the relations between ISP, broadcaster, advertisers, and viewers are as I have described (and I see no reason why they would be otherwise), then that arrangement is the most efficient form known to exist, the one which best conserves scarce resources -- perhaps not in purely monetary terms, but taking into consideration convenience for the viewers, effectiveness for the advertisers, general opposition among viewers to up-front bills, etc. The arrangement will, inevitably, be the one involving the least expenditure of both material and non-material capital goods out of all the known possible arrangements. If that were not the case some other arrangement would have been chosen.
And HBO decides how much to pay for that service based on how much their customers (the advertisers) are willing to pay to make sure HBO stays "on-air".
The advertisers, in turn, will decide how much they want HBO to stay on-air on the basis of how much they are willing to spend to ensure that HBO's viewers (to whom their advertisements are directed) keep watching HBO, and thus their advertisements. This roughtly correlates with how much the viewers desire a clear, non-throttled transmission (though there are obviously other factors involved, such as the quality of the shows).
End result: Viewer preferences dictate the priority the ISP assigns to HBO.
It seems to me that the problem here is the law, not their selection process. What business can it possibly be of anyone but the employers just how they choose to select (or reject) potential employees?
Mind you, I think irrelevant discrimination (as is usually the case for the classes you mention) is usually rather stupid, and most harmful to the one practicing it -- though it may make sense for certain (very rare) sorts of jobs[1] -- but if someone is inclined to practice such discrimination I'd rather have it out in the open where everyone can see it, not hidden in a dark corner to simmer, unexposed and unresolved. If discrimination is prohibited then it will indeed be marginalized, but some employers will continue to believe that they could possibly have done better were they permitted to make their own choices. Permit them to choose freely, however, and the fallacies of this reasoning will soon be exposed by their less discriminatory competitors.
In any event the right to discriminate is implied by freedom of association. No individual has the right to tell another whom they must or cannot hire, or for whom they must or cannot work; neither can any group of individuals (e.g. a government) can hold a right in aggregate which none of its members possesses. Anti-discrimination laws, therefore, can have no ethical or moral basis; no one has the right to impose them on another.
[1] To illustrate, consider age discrimination, which is Constitutionally required for certain political offices. Wouldn't you agree that it's a bit hypocritical for the government to forbit age discrimination to other employers while the practice remains one of its own fundamental employment rules?
First off, they're already planning to include one or more programming environments, so I don't think meeting this goal would add any additional development software dependencies. (I am assuming that the included environments include the requisite graphical toolkits; I believe that was implied by the design goals of the OLPC project.) Also, I wouldn't expect them to eliminate any ready-made software simply because it didn't conform to these design principles, and I wouldn't expect the separation to be a performance problem (CPU or memory) for newly-developed software (though obviously this would have to be tested on the actual hardware to be sure). If it were a problem I would agree that limited functionality is probably better than missing functionality, though the specifics of the situation would affect the final decision.
Lastly, I didn't intend for that comment to specifically address the OLPC software, but rather application software interfaces in general. It would be nice if it could be applied to both, but I recognize that the unique demands of the OLPC project may demand innovative solutions to hardware and systems constraints that would be less-than-ideal in a more typical environment.
I believe you're overlooking the problem here: the maker of the tool (the hammer) has a particular set of uses in mind, and those uses do not necessarily correlate with the ways you want to use the tool. In other words, the UI "language" may not even include a way to specify "I want to smash something" -- the maker of the hammer may only have thought of its ability to drive nails.
The problem here is twofold: (1) the scope of the UI "language" is dictated by the tool designer, and (2) the tool can only be controlled through its fixed user interface. In my opinion (2) is the more serious fault; after all, if there is a more fundamental level of control available, new UIs can be designed for it to cover new use cases as they come up. If (1) is also eliminated through more flexible UI frameworks, so much the better, since it makes the solution to (2) much easier.
In my opinion, the most direct way to alleviate both problems is to employ the MVC architecture as a fundamental part of application design, in particular the separation between the core application data structures and logic (the model) -- from the user interface (the views and controllers). Note that I'm not just referring to internal architecture here; I'm saying that it should be possible for the user to replace or supplement the supplied user-interface component with a completely separate, from-scratch implementation, if necessary, while retaining the same underlying model. It would be best if the supplied UI component were open-source (whatever the model's license might be), to maximize reuse and to capitalize on the flexibility of the design. It should, furthermore, be possible to access the model directly through a standard REPL (command-line) interface (Guile, Python, Ruby, etc.).
Ultimately what all this means is (1) you have the ability to modify the user interface, or create a new user interface, to conform to the activities you wish to undertake, not just those envisioned by the tool developer, and (2) you have nearly unlimited programmer's access to the model, both for the purpose of modifying the user interface, and for the immediate manipulation of the underlying model in ways graphical interfaces are ill-suited to describe.
I think that this is true as far as the initial interfaces are concerned, but only because the system described above would allow the user to "upgrade" those interfaces as its understanding of the system -- and its need for advanced features -- developed.
I'm certainly not attempting to argue that non-physical, non-property factors don't play any part in the value of the stock, as they certainly do. In loose terms goodwill, etc. can be considered "assets", but while they certainly play a part in the stock market they have nothing to do with property. Neither goodwill nor a customer base represent something over which the company can claim exclusivity of control or protect through defensive coercion, both of which are central to the concept of property. As in matters of reputation, they represent a state of mind and/or pattern of behavior held or practiced by external entities. The only influence the company holds over it lies in non-coercive persuasion; whether the trend will continue ultimately depends on the choices and actions of those external entities, not the company itself. The effect of their opinions on the company's stock price is purely an external benefit (or cost, as the case may be) which the company has every reason to cultivate but no right to demand or protect through coercion.
I think it should be plain that the concept of so-called "intellectual property" is incompatible with the definition of property given in the GP on the basis that it subverts the rights of the legitimate property owner in favor of an individual or organization granted a coercion-backed grant of monopoly by the government. Obviously that doesn't mean such monopoly grants (mainly patents and copyrights) are devoid of value to investors, since they correlate with increased future income for that company (at society's expense). The value of a trademark to investors, of course, is primarily due to the association with the goodwill and customer base already discussed above. I think that, unlike copyright and patents, the general structure of the trademark system could survive the demise of "IP" on the basis that violation of a trademark is -- in nearly all cases -- also an instance of fraud. The meaning of the trademark would simply be determined in the same way as the meaning of other terms employed in the products' labelling and advertising, rather than by simple association with the company which "owns" it, and enforcement would be up to the subjects of that fraud rather than the company itself; I suspect little would change from the average person's point-of-view.
I agree with you. No, really. I never said that the richest 2% were responsible for 50% of the "work" or 50% of the world's economic output. I merely stated that the very fact that they are wealthy contributes to an increase in investment relative to consumption, and I stand by that statement. I also stated that such investments lead to increased productivity of land and labour, lower prices, and better standards of living -- basic economic facts, and hardly original.
If you stole Hilton's or Gates's wealth and redistributed it evenly across society the result would be a shift from investment to consumption -- not a complete shift, but a shift nonetheless. I would estimate that 50% ownership probably corresponds to a 50/50 split between the overall social time preference of the rest of society and that of the richest 2%; the change in investment proportions would thus be about half of the difference between those two time preferences. (Actual time preferences are quite difficult to quantify, but consider that many of those making up the "rest of society" have gone rather deeply in debt for the purpose of immediate consumption, representing a very high time preference, whereas many of the wealthy invest in things that will only show real returns in their childrens' -- or grandchildrens' -- lifetimes.)
Finally, even if the top 2% do own 50% of the world's wealth, they hardly make up 50% of the world's consumption, which is what really matters for the purpose of the GGP's original argument. The real benefit from any increase in investment must be experienced through consumption, which means consumers, and not the richest 2%, are benefitting the most from those investments.
My answer would be "yes": having your assets contribute to an economy must be the same, by definition, as contributing to an economy yourself. As long as they're your assets any decision you make to employ them to the benefit of society is a contribution you have made to society. Inheritance doesn't change that; regardless of whether they were personally earned or inherited, those assets legitimately belong to you, and any positive use you make of them is your positive contribution. Inheritance is nothing more or less than a gift from parents to their children. Sometimes the children squander that gift, true. That is their right as the gift's recipients and legitimate owners. No one else has any claim to that gift or to the potential benefits it may have brought them had other decisions been made. That doesn't mean others can't have any
A share of stock represents part-ownership of specific real (i.e. physical) property along with membership in an organization bound by and party to various contractual agreements regarding the use of that property. The share is not itself property; it is merely a property title.
Property rights are not necessarily tied to specific physical matter -- even the human body gradually exchanges its matter with the surrounding environment while retaining its general form -- but they do represent control over our physical environment within specific areas of space defined by the logical boundaries of physical objects (or, better, the interaction domains of such objects, since some things -- like radio waves -- do not have precise "boundaries" despite having a physical presence). As such property rights are always grounded in -- as the GP put it -- a "physical presence".
For most objects this reduces to the intuitive concept of property, since most objects have fairly well-defined boundaries and only interact with other objects which intersect those boundaries. Some types of property, such as land, are a bit less intuitive due to that fact that the logical boundary of a piece of land is not necessarily in the soil itself, but rather in the space above the soil (still a physical aspect of the environment). Furthermore, certain types of property, such as radio spectrum, may cover the same physical space without any interaction, and such an intersection does not (by itself) imply any conflict. When conflict -- unwanted and unauthorized interaction between property owned by two separate individuals -- does occur, the individual with the earliest claim has "the right of way" and the other must repair any damages caused.
Having established what property is, it remains to establish who will own any given piece of property. This is a far more controversial topic, but the general consensus seems to be that there are two guiding principles in assigning property ownership in a dispute. The first, called "homesteading", is the principle that property which is brought into existance by the actions of an individual, and thus transformed from unowned "land" (in the economic sense) into property, initially belongs to that individual. The second principle is that ownership of property can be transferred in accordance with the will of its current owner. I'm not going to argue for these principles here, but see my profile URL if you're interested in a decent formal justification. Most individuals do tend to uphold both these principles in their own direct interactions with others, though many bend or break them when interacting more indirectly (through the government, for example). A few, of course, tend to disregard them outright, and we call such individuals "criminals".
On the basis of these property rights a complete system of rights can be built, including not only impersonal property rights but also civil rights just as extensive as those guaranteed by the U.S. Bill of Rights, including free speach, freedom of religion, freedom of association, right to self-defense, and protection from unreasonable search and seizure.
I rather doubt that many of those top 2% are relying on the goverment to protect their assets. Even if they are now (due to the subsidized nature of such defense) I think they are probably quite capable of defending that wealth at their own expense in the government's absence.
(Isn't it amazing how contradictory some ideologies can be? The main Statist argument against privitized defense seems to be the idea that the least wealthy individuals would be unable to pay for their own defense. However, when it comes time to decide how much to charge for that same defense, all the Statists seem to argue the opposite: that the wealthy rely on the government even more than those with lesser means. Which is it already?)
If you intend to make the system "fair", figure out the minimum level of security/defense you want everyone to have, and charge everyone equally (in absolute terms) to provide that security. Anyone with more to protect can pay the surcharge for additional defense themselves. A decent starting point for that minimum would be defense against assault and theft on the assumption of a specific amount of wealth per person (the median wealth would make a decent choice). Police resources would then be distributed across the taxed domain (city/county/state/country) purely according to population, not wealth or wealth-related criminal activity, since they are not responsible for protecting any wealth over that limit; doing so would be up to private security organizations at the owner's discretion and expense.
You could say that, but the statement would be meaningless (however true it might be). What do you think those "financial gains" are going toward? Sure the rich spend more on themselves than the poor or middle-class in absolute terms, but decreasing marginal returns dictate that consumption will tend to form a smaller percentage of their income. The balance must be split between capital investments and cash (money taken out of circulation). The latter category is generally insignificant; if it were significant it would result in an increase in the purchasing power of the currency, to the benefit of everyone else. As for the former category, capital investments are the main source in increasing productivity of land and labor in any economy. They earn (increasingly irrelevant) financial gains for the investor, sure, but more importantly they contribute to falling prices and a general rise in standards of living, particularly for those with the least income.
That "work of half the rest of us" is almost entirely for our benefit; the fact that those 2% make a fair return on their investments -- which permit us to do that work effectively in the first place -- is almost insignificant compared to the utility we get out of the end products.
If you draw the boundaries of the "market" narrowly enough anyone can be considered a monopolist, provided that enough consumers are interested in buying their products. If anything, determinations of "anticompetitive" behavior ought to be based on the broadest possible market boundaries, not the narrowest ones; in this case that would mean the advertising market, not "online advertising", much less "online search advertising". If you intend to draw narrow boundaries simply to twist the meaning of "monopoly", why not just say "the market for advertising on Google's search result pages" and be done with it?
Furthermore, the producer has no direct control over the popularity of its products or its corresponding market share. If anything, a high market share correlates with the company's ability to satisfy the demands of the consumers in that market relative to its competitors. You propose to punish Google -- their investors and their consumers, both in search services and in advertising -- for satisfying the desires of their consumer base better than their competitors. Certainly the popularity of their search service, a major capital investment on which they make no direct returns, contributes significantly to the popularity of their advertising services. Their other services (GMail, calendar, spreadsheet, etc.) serve a similar purpose. In effect the visibility Google's free services grant its advertising space is the product Google sells to potential advertisers.
Lastly, a critical part of any antitrust ruling is the demonstation of actual harm to consumers in the form of higher prices. If there is no such harm there can be no illegal abuse of monopoly status. I don't think anyone has successfully argued that they've driven prices up in the advertising market -- quite the contrary, in fact -- and all their other services are free, and likely to remain so for the foreseeable future. Ergo, there is no convincing argument for antitrust intervention.
Standard Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer and this is not legal advice.
Apparently your current Managed C++ compiler didn't output .NET bytecode, either, judging from the error message. Did you really expect native code -- compiled specifically for a Windows(TM) environment -- to run under anything other than the MS .NET runtime? From the Mono Technical FAQ:
The offense here is not lock-picking (though that may be independently illegal in some areas), but rather trespass. Picking the lock merely makes it obvious that you have no permission to be there. On the other hand, "pretexting" involves no theft, trespass, or fraud[1]. If you find yourself harmed by the use of information gathered through "pretexting" feel free to sue for compensation, but "pretexting" by itself does not constitute harm of any sort.
[1] It is dishonest, but it would only be fraud if that deception was done with the intent of acquiring the other party's property under false pretenses. As information is not property, deception intended solely to gain information is not fraud.
You do realize the contradiction here, right? The reason the LP opposes the sort of regulations you endorsed in the first part is that such regulations run counter to their stance against victimless crimes and encroachment on civil liberties, which you claim to accept "100%".
There are non-regulatory solutions to both these issues, of course. With regard to property values, the simplest approach would probably be to work out an option agreement with your neighbor that would give you the opportunity to purchase the neighboring property at an agreed-upon price prior to any other sale, effectively allowing you to guide the property toward an owner you approve of. The overall cost of doing so -- assuming no reduction in the properties' value between purchase and resale -- would be the amount necessary to cover the current owner's loss of potential higher-value sale opportunities, which is obviously only fair. You may even be able to split this cost with the other neighbors. Zoning regulation costs at least as much; you just don't have to pay it in full. Your lack of cost is offset by your neighbor's lack of compensation.
As for the food-service health regulations, you would still be perfectly free to hold the restaurant responsible should their negligence cause you any harm. Even the current health regulations are insufficient to prevent unsanitary conditions (and it's amazing what some low-quality places can get away with while still passing their health inspections); most of the more sanitary places are that way because it's good for business, not (just) because it's the law. Even ignoring the inevitable effect of known sanitation issues on their clientel, the legal/financial risk of allowing an employee to negligently transmit a disease to a customer is well worth avoiding from an economic point of view. I suspect that most owners would have their restaurants' sanitation certified by a recognized third-party organization even in the absence of such regulation just for the effect it would have on their customer base.
Why shouldn't they be? What value is added by making them subject to the inefficiencies of the government beaurocracy? All that accomplishes, besides driving up the overall cost, is to spread out the cost of building and operating such "public spaces" across the entire population (as opposed to just those who support and/or utilize such projects). Granted, privitization is something that must be done with great care, keeping in mind the fact that while the government (meaning the specific people in power at the time) has no legitimate right to the "public" property, neither does any specific private owner.
The fairest thing to do would be to sell the property to a private owner for a reasonable price, if one can be had, with certain assurances about how the property would be used in the near future, and then to split the proceeds between the original taxpayers (assuming you could determine who they were or how much each had been forced to pay up front). Short of that (since returning the funds is probably impractical in most cases) the property could be placed in trust with a non-profit priva
We don't have these rules for cars. You don't need a driver's license to own a car, or even, strictly speaking, to operate one (on private roads, with the owner's permission). You only need the license and registration to use the vehicle on public, State-owned roads. The equivalent for guns would be something like a concealed-carry license requirement (i.e. a license to carry the gun in public areas), which already exists in most places and typically follows the guidelines you've specified.
Private owners can reasonably refuse to allow you to carry a gun onto their properties, and the government (presuming for the moment that their claim to ownership of "public" property is legitimate) can reasonably restrict possession and/or use of guns on public property, but nothing gives either of them a legitimate right to restrict possession or (non-aggressive) use of any sort of weapon on one's own property.
Of course not -- that's why there's a process for passing constitutional amendments in the first place. However, no such amendment has been passed which could possibly be interpreted as limiting the scope of the 1st Amendment. The courts place is to ensure that the existing laws -- including the Constitution itself -- are upheld, not to undermine them by inventing exceptions to the explicit limitations they place on the government's power. The Supreme Court exceeded its authority by ruling contrary to the clear meaning of the Constitution; this occurance is not particularly surprising when you take into consideration that the Supreme Court is itself part of the government and directly benefits from any perceived expansion in the government's authority.
In fact, the entire practice of judicial review is a grave injustice by which the judicial branch has arrogated to itself a critical role which rightfully belongs to the citizens of the United States. The authority of the Constitution -- and thus the government itself, including the courts -- comes from the people, and only the people themselves can determine the limits of that authority, subject to the limits of their own authority (one cannot grant legitimate powers to the government which one does not possess beforehand). The government cannot legitimately grant itself new authority; only the people can do that.
As for whether the harm would be a civil or criminal matter, you may be correct. As I understand the terms, criminal actions are against the State or against society, whereas civil torts are actions against fellow citizens. On the basis of those definitions any harm to others would constitute a civil tort action, one citizen verses another. However, it often appears that the legislature confuses the issue by treating various civil offenses as though they were criminal; they could conceivably attempt to force such harm into a criminal mold. A loose interpretation could see all torts as criminal actions "against society"; a strict interpretation would probably eliminate the concept of criminal actions altogether (removing all victimless "crimes" and limiting judgements to compensation for actual damages inflicted on real people).
There, fixed that for you.
There may be (civil) consequences if such speech causes someone harm through malice or negligence, but the speech itself must still be permitted. The 1st Amendment makes no provision for any exceptions: the government cannot legally act to prevent or punish any speech, regardless of the content or circumstances. If harm comes of the speech, the speaker may be held responsible for the harm, not the speech itself.