The same place anyone else would get it from, if they bothered to look: research on how modern graphics pipelines work, how modern toolkits work, and the design of the X11 protocol. With a few exceptions (mainly text via the new XRender glyph extensions, excellent for terminal emulators but not much else) the X11 protocol encodes pixel-oriented drawing primitives which are no longer directly supported by current graphics cards, or even efficient to emulate (e.g. pixel-accurate aliased ellipses, stipple patterns) and which can't be efficiently mixed with direct rendering on the client side via OpenGL and DRM. Standard rendering these days—using GTK+ 2.8+, Qt 4+, or a custom toolkit based on Cairo or OpenGL—consists of drawing into a buffer with OpenGL or into a pixmap with the CPU, and then handing that buffer or pixmap to the X server just so that it can hand it over to the compositor. That works okay locally due to shared memory, despite the extra overhead of having the X server in the middle, but it's hardly "network transparent", especially given that the protocol doesn't provide for any means of compressing pixmaps.
It's simply more efficient to let the client do all the drawing with local graphics resources and push the resulting surface to a remote compositor, particularly if you can take advantage of hardware-accelerated video codecs. That's how the application is designed to work anyway, but with X11 it only works well if the application is local. Otherwise you have to use some sort of fallback in place of direct rendering (perhaps XRender, but more likely software raster), doubling the development and testing effort, and the resulting solution requires more bandwidth and lower latency than a properly designed remote video protocol.
Like I said, modern applications. That means applications designed for modern computers, not just ones written recently. Sure, you can stick to X11 primitives provided you don't care about performance or power consumption or your UI looking like it dates back to the 90s. Apps written for X11 will continue to work using the same network protocols they've always used via XWayland, inefficiently emulating ancient hardware. However, programs written with modern graphics subsystems in mind will benefit from the remoting approach taken by Wayland.
As a downside, it does not allow applications to be displayed on a remote desktop and for example VNC has to be used instead.
The use of a vaguely VNC-like protocol optimized for forwarding compressed video over a network rather than the X11 protocol optimized for primitive drawing operations very few applications actually use is not a downside. If you prefer, think of it as X11 as it's actually used by modern applications (a series of pixmaps), but with compression and fewer latency-sensitive round-trips. Or even better, like xpra with fewer rough edges.
So, the argument is that you can eat if the previous three generations scraped enough away for you to afford food?... Cheap food is still expensive if you have no money and no job.
No, I'm assuming that even in a society technologically advanced enough that almost everything is done by machines, there will still be ways you can make yourself useful enough to someone to earn what you need to survive. If nothing else, you can always grow your own food, build your own shelter—it's not much, but with knowledge of modern science and access to cultivated seedstock you'd still have an advantage over most humans throughout history. Of course, we're talking about the bottom 0.01% here, under the assumption that they don't have any marketable skills whatsoever and can't rely on charity or salvage to get by, none of which seems very realistic to me.
As you've already pointed out, a commune cannot exist if people can choose to join it or not. That's the whole point of communism. If you are fairly skilled/etc then there is no incentive to join, and thus the commune fails since only those who cannot provide for themselves join.
It goes further than that. The commune has to do more than just force you to nominally join; it has to force you to contribute. Without, needless to say, offering positive incentives conditioned on your contribution, since that would go against the whole point of a commune. The commune essentially has to consider each individual's skills and labor property of the commune rather than the individual, with failure to contribute according to one's ability punishable as a form of theft from the commune. As I see it, a system where each individual is a slave to the group is no better than one with distinct slaves and masters.
Communism can really only exist if it is imposed at a societal level. That's why communist societies tend to be associated with atrocities - it takes a very authoritarian government to sustain communism for any period of time.
I'm glad to see that we're in agreement, then. I thought you were advocating a communist society.
Why would anybody who is productive agree to share part of their income with the rest of the co-op? They have no incentive to return the favor should the tables turn.
It wouldn't be up to them. The organization's charter would dictate its purpose as providing a basic income to as many people as it can afford, starting with those most in need, after targeting a particular rate of growth. A bit like a trust, really. The idea would be that you start with a some donated seed money, say $10M. That gets invested at a real return of, say, 7%. You want to target 6% growth, so that leaves 1% of $10M ($100k), which you split five ways to provide a basic income of $20k each for five individual members. Assuming conditions remain unchanged, after 25 years you could support up to 21 members. After a century, nearly 1700 members. After three centuries, 3.5 billion members. Of course, the real world won't be this tidy, and there is plenty of room for fine-tuning, but the basic principle seems sound.
Sure, people NEED to become owners of capital. However, if you walk up to the average poor person how does it help to explain to them that if they merely owned $500k worth of stock they could easily afford to live just above the poverty line on their capital gains and dividends?
For a start, if they understood that then they could start working toward it. Naturally, if they really have no capacity for earning money beyond the minimum needed to survive then they'll need help of some sort. Apart from that (rare) case, there is always some opportunity to set some savings aside. Over time, perhaps several generations, those savings add up. Also, the flip side of the technology-driven obsolescence of labor is dramatically lower prices. After all, the whole point of using machines is that they're cheaper than humans for the same tasks. That means you don't have to earn as much to support yourself.
Communism is simply a system of government where everybody becomes an owner of capital by the virtue of being born.
It's not quite that simple. Capital doesn't just magically appear for each new person, you know. It's a scarce resource, like anything else. If everyone is entitled to sufficient capital to sustain them simply by virtue of being born, then you have to somehow limit births to what you can accommodate out of surplus capital. People tend not to appreciate that sort of interference in their personal lives, which means some of them will want to leave. If they are prevented from leaving then you have an authoritarian dystopia. However, if you let them leave then your system is no longer universal; those who are born outside become second-class citizens from the commune's perspective. If those who leave happen to prosper more than the commune (which is historically likely) then more will leave and the commune will fade away. If not, you still have the problem that there are more people than your commune can support, so you can't just invite the extras back into the fold.
A capitalist society will respect the rights of the communists living in it to join together for their own common good; the problem is more the reverse, as the communists, eschewing property rights among themselves, often fail to respect the property rights of those who choose not to join the commune. You're quite welcome to start up a commune along the lines of your ideal system of government, provided you accept its boundaries and don't force anyone to join (or stay). I think you'll find, however, that if you want it to last you'll have to impose some conditions; simply granting a full share to anyone born into the commune won't work over the long run for the same reason democracy stops working once enough people learn they can simply vote themselves money from the treasury. It's fine as long as you have enough people dedicated to the ideal of the commune and willing to put in the necessary extra effort voluntarily, but that never lasts.
A co-op which guaranteed a basic income to its members out of capital gains and/or dividends on shared investments would be an interesting and practical experiment. I think it would be necessary to limit the induction of new members, however. If the system works it could be gradually expanded over time.
My client tells me he will purchase program X for $Y.... Except my client takes the program and doesn't pay because he doesn't believe in copyright, and I've still got the original program, so he hasn't stolen anything.... I haven't lost the program - all I've lost is the ability to economically exploit it. And yet almost all of us will acknowledge I've had my work stolen.
If by "almost all of us" you mean "people who agree with me"... well, that's obvious. Otherwise, no, you haven't had your work "stolen". Not legally, not morally. Unless your client agreed to a contract to purchase the program from you, you never had any claim to the money you expected to sell the program for at the end, just the program itself, the actual product of your labor, which you still have. The just reward for producing something is you have the product and can use it as you please; there is nothing inherently exclusive about the arrangement, particularly when it comes to non-scarce goods like information.
Now, if you did have a contract in place (which would have been the smart way to arrange matters, as opposed to working on speculation) then the promised money became yours when you delivered the program. At that point the client is in possession of your money, and if they refuse to turn it over to you on request then they are withholding your property from you and actual theft has taken place. You don't need copyright for that, of course, just regular property rights and contract law.
I don't think artists who are lucky enough to be successful should be denied what is essentially their only pension - the fruits of a lifetime worth of labor.
If they want a pension they can buy one (more commonly known as an "annuity") with the money they bring in up front. This is no reason to grant them a distribution monopoly for life at the expense of others' natural rights.
A gun does not make you safe, a gun immediately puts you at risk.
Your enemy having a gun puts you at risk, whether you have one or not. Possessing a gun yourself (and knowing how to use it) doesn't make you safe in that situation, but it does even out the situation and give you a fighting chance you wouldn't otherwise have.
Even assuming gun-control laws were actually effective (a bit of a stretch, I know), two random people both armed with guns are much more likely to be evenly matched than two random people armed with close-range weapons or just their fists. Being armed means that the outcome depends more on preparation and training than brute strength. Perhaps if you are uncommonly strong or accustomed to hand-to-hand fighting you would personally be better off in a gun-free environment, but others who lack your natural prowess with violence benefit from the ability to rely on effective defensive tools when threatened.
I doubt that outright communism will ever make sense, but I suspect that as technology advances the ideal economic model will probably be a lot closer to it than the capitalism of the past. What choice is there once technology advances to the point where there is no need to employ humans at all?
Capitalism isn't about labor, it's about capital—of which the capacity for labor is but one example. The advanced technology you speak of is another form of capital. If anything, the emergence of more advanced forms of capital requires a more capitalistic form of economy. More people will need to become capitalists, owning and managing the machines which do the work, rather than trying to market their own labor.
Sure, that sounds like it would work just fine, as long as you couple it with a reasonable set of individual rights to protect against tyranny of the majority. People would get a voice (ideally a veto right) regarding any decisions which negatively affect them, and the freedom to act as they wish otherwise. This system even has a name already: capitalism.
I'll take a correct comment over no comment any day.
While I mostly agree with you, it's worth considering that comments have a cost as well. Duplication of the same information between the code and the comments, in particular, increases the maintenance burden and makes it more likely that the code and comments will get out of synch in the future—and one incorrect, misleading comment can outweigh a thousand correct ones. For that reason, comments which fail to add any useful information should be pruned away no matter how accurate they may be.
Exactly! Good code will have comments, in moderation, which tell you things you couldn't get simply by reading the code. Well-chosen names are part of those comments, however, and can be significantly more valuable when used appropriately.
Which would you rather read:
int x;// number of widgets
int y;// price of each widget (cents)
int z;// total price
// multiply x by y and store the result in z
z = x * y;
int numberOfWidgets;
int centsPerWidget;
int totalCents;
totalCents = numberOfWidgets * centsPerWidget;
Personally, I'd much rather have the latter version, despite the absence of formal comments. The descriptive names more than make up for the lack.
I read it that even if the orbital states ain't the variable, the fact that there are 8 electrons in the outermost shell enables a byte to be stored per atom.
Wouldn't that only allow storing three bits, not eight? You can't tell which of the eight electrons are in the outermost shell, just how many there are, so the possible values are 0-8, not 0-255. Nine unique states gives you three bits plus one state left over.
It'd be better to have an open-standard API with an 'insert proprietary blob here' section that would allow for cross-browser compatibility than to refuse to create the open standard and instead end up with a tangle of incompatible browser extensions.
Really? It seems to me that we end up with a tangle of incompatible browser extensions either way. Why would it make any difference whether it's in the form of browser-specific tags or browser-specific DRM plugins?
Of course, a large proportion of the transfer payments really are funded by money created through Treasury / Fed operations. If the summary were correct, and the money all had to be taken from some to give to others, then it would not be possible for the government to run deficits.
The goods and services the money buys are taken from some to give to others, even if the money itself is made up out of thin air. The supply of money may be theoretically unlimited, but there is only so much actual production to go around.
Where, since one is compelled to work, what "the work is worth to the worker" is defined by what you pay them. Quite.
Perhaps I phrased that poorly. By "what the work is worth to the worker", I was referring to the worker's opportunity cost—the value of whatever they gave up (leisure time, less stress, a preferred location, time with family, etc.) in order to receive their pay. Part of the employment arrangement is that you give the worker something they value more than what they have to give up to work for you.
Strictly speaking, most people are not compelled to work; they wouldn't simply die if they quit their jobs. Even assuming sustainable self-sufficiency as the minimum standard, one generally has the option to switch to a less demanding career in exchange for a more restricted lifestyle. To the extent that one puts in more than the minimum effort, the work is elective. (And part of what makes work seem "compulsory" is that the "minimum" standard of living now includes a number of luxuries which were well beyond the reach of royalty not so very long ago.)
The problem with your reasoning is that it presumes that money is given in exchange for work of equal value, but of course the very basis of business is that you pay less than what the work is worth, and the difference is your profit.
You have a very strange notion of how business works. The idea is that you pay more than what the work is worth to the worker, and charge less than what the product is worth to the customer. The difference between these two is your profit. It works because the same good can be worth different amounts to different people.
The middleman isn't getting paid for nothing, either. He provides value to the worker in the form of a predictable paycheck, and value to the customer by organizing workers to produce the desired goods. Without him the (now self-employed) workers would have to go out and find individual short-term jobs on their own, and customers would be limited to such goods as can be produced by individuals or small, close-knit groups.
People are attacking libertarians over it because they don't know the difference between anarchist, minarchist, and libertarian.... Libertarians would be, rightfully, more divided on the issue but one thing is certain that [they] should be generally be constitutionalists. Strictly speaking, libertarians want the USD to be backed by something tangibile (like gold).
Apparently you don't know either. Hint: these categories are not mutually exclusive. There are libertarian anarchists, libertarian minarchists, and even some (rather confused) people who are neither anarchist nor minarchist and yet like to think of themselves as libertarian. Some (but not all) constitutionalists would fall into the third category, bordering on minarchist but with significant exceptions.
The defining characteristic of libertarianism, the Non-Aggression Principle, doesn't have anything to say about the USD being backed by gold or anything else. There's a problem with the way in which paper currency replaced gold in the U.S. (via confiscation), but that's ancient history by this point. The N.A.P. does, however, conflict with mandatory deposit insurance (like the FDIC), KYC/AML requirements, money-transmitter licenses, etc. The consistent libertarian will favor unrestrained voluntary trade without third-party interference.
At some point, an actual cash value has to be determined before you can actually SPEND them.
So they're like foreign cash, similar to euros in the U.S.A. or USD in Europe. The fact that local prices are tracked in a different currency, with conversion at the point of sale, doesn't make bitcoins any less a form of cash.
That's, on average, about 6 hours a year I wait for my car to 'recharge'. If I had an electric car, I would be plugging it in every night.
That's assuming you spend no time plugging your vehicle in at night, unplugging it in the morning, or otherwise managing the charge level. The breakeven point is only about 80 seconds per day.
Hypothetically, you might be able to prevent most leverage-providing instruments if all depositors deposited a specific bitcoin, with the right to demand that specific one back...
There is no such thing as a specific bitcoin; it's an abstract unit. If you simply want to store your bitcoins securely, at practically zero cost, there are numerous "paper wallet" systems available, as well as multi-key wallets at various points on the convenience/paranoia continuum.
If you want to receive interest, however, then you have to recognize that you are making a loan—which implies the possibility of default. Interest-bearing accounts are investments, and you should not expect to be insured against investment risk. The best you can expect here is a traditional audit arrangement.
If that's the real problem then don't complain about the prices, complain about the property taxes. Tax rates are well within the city's control. They are under no obligation to collect more taxes no matter how much the prices happen to increase.
Now, the tempting mindset is to hope that the State never actually develops enough to do what I do, thus, I never find myself redundant and always feel needed and like I'm filling a purpose.
Never fear, the State will never actually be able to replace you (or anyone else with a useful skill). The State's area of expertise is bureaucracy, not medicine. The development of a State medical program will only mean that instead of people like you freely donating your medical services to those in need, they will be compelled to pay into a fund to provide their own medical services—which they still can't really afford, so something else will have to go, something they considered more valuable. The State doesn't provide anything; it just undermines people's priorities and substitutes its own. In this case, a propensity for medical care, whatever the cost may be to those ostensibly being cared for.
Slashdot Mirror
The same place anyone else would get it from, if they bothered to look: research on how modern graphics pipelines work, how modern toolkits work, and the design of the X11 protocol. With a few exceptions (mainly text via the new XRender glyph extensions, excellent for terminal emulators but not much else) the X11 protocol encodes pixel-oriented drawing primitives which are no longer directly supported by current graphics cards, or even efficient to emulate (e.g. pixel-accurate aliased ellipses, stipple patterns) and which can't be efficiently mixed with direct rendering on the client side via OpenGL and DRM. Standard rendering these days—using GTK+ 2.8+, Qt 4+, or a custom toolkit based on Cairo or OpenGL—consists of drawing into a buffer with OpenGL or into a pixmap with the CPU, and then handing that buffer or pixmap to the X server just so that it can hand it over to the compositor. That works okay locally due to shared memory, despite the extra overhead of having the X server in the middle, but it's hardly "network transparent", especially given that the protocol doesn't provide for any means of compressing pixmaps.
It's simply more efficient to let the client do all the drawing with local graphics resources and push the resulting surface to a remote compositor, particularly if you can take advantage of hardware-accelerated video codecs. That's how the application is designed to work anyway, but with X11 it only works well if the application is local. Otherwise you have to use some sort of fallback in place of direct rendering (perhaps XRender, but more likely software raster), doubling the development and testing effort, and the resulting solution requires more bandwidth and lower latency than a properly designed remote video protocol.
You seem to be under the mistaken impression that I was quoting someone. I was not, therefore no quote was taken out of context.
Like I said, modern applications. That means applications designed for modern computers, not just ones written recently. Sure, you can stick to X11 primitives provided you don't care about performance or power consumption or your UI looking like it dates back to the 90s. Apps written for X11 will continue to work using the same network protocols they've always used via XWayland, inefficiently emulating ancient hardware. However, programs written with modern graphics subsystems in mind will benefit from the remoting approach taken by Wayland.
Remote Desktop Backend Merged into Wayland
As a downside, it does not allow applications to be displayed on a remote desktop and for example VNC has to be used instead.
The use of a vaguely VNC-like protocol optimized for forwarding compressed video over a network rather than the X11 protocol optimized for primitive drawing operations very few applications actually use is not a downside. If you prefer, think of it as X11 as it's actually used by modern applications (a series of pixmaps), but with compression and fewer latency-sensitive round-trips. Or even better, like xpra with fewer rough edges.
So, the argument is that you can eat if the previous three generations scraped enough away for you to afford food? ... Cheap food is still expensive if you have no money and no job.
No, I'm assuming that even in a society technologically advanced enough that almost everything is done by machines, there will still be ways you can make yourself useful enough to someone to earn what you need to survive. If nothing else, you can always grow your own food, build your own shelter—it's not much, but with knowledge of modern science and access to cultivated seedstock you'd still have an advantage over most humans throughout history. Of course, we're talking about the bottom 0.01% here, under the assumption that they don't have any marketable skills whatsoever and can't rely on charity or salvage to get by, none of which seems very realistic to me.
As you've already pointed out, a commune cannot exist if people can choose to join it or not. That's the whole point of communism. If you are fairly skilled/etc then there is no incentive to join, and thus the commune fails since only those who cannot provide for themselves join.
It goes further than that. The commune has to do more than just force you to nominally join; it has to force you to contribute. Without, needless to say, offering positive incentives conditioned on your contribution, since that would go against the whole point of a commune. The commune essentially has to consider each individual's skills and labor property of the commune rather than the individual, with failure to contribute according to one's ability punishable as a form of theft from the commune. As I see it, a system where each individual is a slave to the group is no better than one with distinct slaves and masters.
Communism can really only exist if it is imposed at a societal level. That's why communist societies tend to be associated with atrocities - it takes a very authoritarian government to sustain communism for any period of time.
I'm glad to see that we're in agreement, then. I thought you were advocating a communist society.
Why would anybody who is productive agree to share part of their income with the rest of the co-op? They have no incentive to return the favor should the tables turn.
It wouldn't be up to them. The organization's charter would dictate its purpose as providing a basic income to as many people as it can afford, starting with those most in need, after targeting a particular rate of growth. A bit like a trust, really. The idea would be that you start with a some donated seed money, say $10M. That gets invested at a real return of, say, 7%. You want to target 6% growth, so that leaves 1% of $10M ($100k), which you split five ways to provide a basic income of $20k each for five individual members. Assuming conditions remain unchanged, after 25 years you could support up to 21 members. After a century, nearly 1700 members. After three centuries, 3.5 billion members. Of course, the real world won't be this tidy, and there is plenty of room for fine-tuning, but the basic principle seems sound.
Sure, people NEED to become owners of capital. However, if you walk up to the average poor person how does it help to explain to them that if they merely owned $500k worth of stock they could easily afford to live just above the poverty line on their capital gains and dividends?
For a start, if they understood that then they could start working toward it. Naturally, if they really have no capacity for earning money beyond the minimum needed to survive then they'll need help of some sort. Apart from that (rare) case, there is always some opportunity to set some savings aside. Over time, perhaps several generations, those savings add up. Also, the flip side of the technology-driven obsolescence of labor is dramatically lower prices. After all, the whole point of using machines is that they're cheaper than humans for the same tasks. That means you don't have to earn as much to support yourself.
Communism is simply a system of government where everybody becomes an owner of capital by the virtue of being born.
It's not quite that simple. Capital doesn't just magically appear for each new person, you know. It's a scarce resource, like anything else. If everyone is entitled to sufficient capital to sustain them simply by virtue of being born, then you have to somehow limit births to what you can accommodate out of surplus capital. People tend not to appreciate that sort of interference in their personal lives, which means some of them will want to leave. If they are prevented from leaving then you have an authoritarian dystopia. However, if you let them leave then your system is no longer universal; those who are born outside become second-class citizens from the commune's perspective. If those who leave happen to prosper more than the commune (which is historically likely) then more will leave and the commune will fade away. If not, you still have the problem that there are more people than your commune can support, so you can't just invite the extras back into the fold.
A capitalist society will respect the rights of the communists living in it to join together for their own common good; the problem is more the reverse, as the communists, eschewing property rights among themselves, often fail to respect the property rights of those who choose not to join the commune. You're quite welcome to start up a commune along the lines of your ideal system of government, provided you accept its boundaries and don't force anyone to join (or stay). I think you'll find, however, that if you want it to last you'll have to impose some conditions; simply granting a full share to anyone born into the commune won't work over the long run for the same reason democracy stops working once enough people learn they can simply vote themselves money from the treasury. It's fine as long as you have enough people dedicated to the ideal of the commune and willing to put in the necessary extra effort voluntarily, but that never lasts.
A co-op which guaranteed a basic income to its members out of capital gains and/or dividends on shared investments would be an interesting and practical experiment. I think it would be necessary to limit the induction of new members, however. If the system works it could be gradually expanded over time.
My client tells me he will purchase program X for $Y.... Except my client takes the program and doesn't pay because he doesn't believe in copyright, and I've still got the original program, so he hasn't stolen anything.... I haven't lost the program - all I've lost is the ability to economically exploit it. And yet almost all of us will acknowledge I've had my work stolen.
If by "almost all of us" you mean "people who agree with me"... well, that's obvious. Otherwise, no, you haven't had your work "stolen". Not legally, not morally. Unless your client agreed to a contract to purchase the program from you, you never had any claim to the money you expected to sell the program for at the end, just the program itself, the actual product of your labor, which you still have. The just reward for producing something is you have the product and can use it as you please; there is nothing inherently exclusive about the arrangement, particularly when it comes to non-scarce goods like information.
Now, if you did have a contract in place (which would have been the smart way to arrange matters, as opposed to working on speculation) then the promised money became yours when you delivered the program. At that point the client is in possession of your money, and if they refuse to turn it over to you on request then they are withholding your property from you and actual theft has taken place. You don't need copyright for that, of course, just regular property rights and contract law.
I don't think artists who are lucky enough to be successful should be denied what is essentially their only pension - the fruits of a lifetime worth of labor.
If they want a pension they can buy one (more commonly known as an "annuity") with the money they bring in up front. This is no reason to grant them a distribution monopoly for life at the expense of others' natural rights.
A gun does not make you safe, a gun immediately puts you at risk.
Your enemy having a gun puts you at risk, whether you have one or not. Possessing a gun yourself (and knowing how to use it) doesn't make you safe in that situation, but it does even out the situation and give you a fighting chance you wouldn't otherwise have.
Even assuming gun-control laws were actually effective (a bit of a stretch, I know), two random people both armed with guns are much more likely to be evenly matched than two random people armed with close-range weapons or just their fists. Being armed means that the outcome depends more on preparation and training than brute strength. Perhaps if you are uncommonly strong or accustomed to hand-to-hand fighting you would personally be better off in a gun-free environment, but others who lack your natural prowess with violence benefit from the ability to rely on effective defensive tools when threatened.
I doubt that outright communism will ever make sense, but I suspect that as technology advances the ideal economic model will probably be a lot closer to it than the capitalism of the past. What choice is there once technology advances to the point where there is no need to employ humans at all?
Capitalism isn't about labor, it's about capital—of which the capacity for labor is but one example. The advanced technology you speak of is another form of capital. If anything, the emergence of more advanced forms of capital requires a more capitalistic form of economy. More people will need to become capitalists, owning and managing the machines which do the work, rather than trying to market their own labor.
Sure, that sounds like it would work just fine, as long as you couple it with a reasonable set of individual rights to protect against tyranny of the majority. People would get a voice (ideally a veto right) regarding any decisions which negatively affect them, and the freedom to act as they wish otherwise. This system even has a name already: capitalism.
I'll take a correct comment over no comment any day.
While I mostly agree with you, it's worth considering that comments have a cost as well. Duplication of the same information between the code and the comments, in particular, increases the maintenance burden and makes it more likely that the code and comments will get out of synch in the future—and one incorrect, misleading comment can outweigh a thousand correct ones. For that reason, comments which fail to add any useful information should be pruned away no matter how accurate they may be.
Exactly! Good code will have comments, in moderation, which tell you things you couldn't get simply by reading the code. Well-chosen names are part of those comments, however, and can be significantly more valuable when used appropriately.
Which would you rather read:
int x; // number of widgets // price of each widget (cents) // total price
// multiply x by y and store the result in z
int y;
int z;
z = x * y;
int numberOfWidgets;
int centsPerWidget;
int totalCents;
totalCents = numberOfWidgets * centsPerWidget;
Personally, I'd much rather have the latter version, despite the absence of formal comments. The descriptive names more than make up for the lack.
I read it that even if the orbital states ain't the variable, the fact that there are 8 electrons in the outermost shell enables a byte to be stored per atom.
Wouldn't that only allow storing three bits, not eight? You can't tell which of the eight electrons are in the outermost shell, just how many there are, so the possible values are 0-8, not 0-255. Nine unique states gives you three bits plus one state left over.
It'd be better to have an open-standard API with an 'insert proprietary blob here' section that would allow for cross-browser compatibility than to refuse to create the open standard and instead end up with a tangle of incompatible browser extensions.
Really? It seems to me that we end up with a tangle of incompatible browser extensions either way. Why would it make any difference whether it's in the form of browser-specific tags or browser-specific DRM plugins?
Of course, a large proportion of the transfer payments really are funded by money created through Treasury / Fed operations. If the summary were correct, and the money all had to be taken from some to give to others, then it would not be possible for the government to run deficits.
The goods and services the money buys are taken from some to give to others, even if the money itself is made up out of thin air. The supply of money may be theoretically unlimited, but there is only so much actual production to go around.
Where, since one is compelled to work, what "the work is worth to the worker" is defined by what you pay them. Quite.
Perhaps I phrased that poorly. By "what the work is worth to the worker", I was referring to the worker's opportunity cost—the value of whatever they gave up (leisure time, less stress, a preferred location, time with family, etc.) in order to receive their pay. Part of the employment arrangement is that you give the worker something they value more than what they have to give up to work for you.
Strictly speaking, most people are not compelled to work; they wouldn't simply die if they quit their jobs. Even assuming sustainable self-sufficiency as the minimum standard, one generally has the option to switch to a less demanding career in exchange for a more restricted lifestyle. To the extent that one puts in more than the minimum effort, the work is elective. (And part of what makes work seem "compulsory" is that the "minimum" standard of living now includes a number of luxuries which were well beyond the reach of royalty not so very long ago.)
The problem with your reasoning is that it presumes that money is given in exchange for work of equal value, but of course the very basis of business is that you pay less than what the work is worth, and the difference is your profit.
You have a very strange notion of how business works. The idea is that you pay more than what the work is worth to the worker, and charge less than what the product is worth to the customer. The difference between these two is your profit. It works because the same good can be worth different amounts to different people.
The middleman isn't getting paid for nothing, either. He provides value to the worker in the form of a predictable paycheck, and value to the customer by organizing workers to produce the desired goods. Without him the (now self-employed) workers would have to go out and find individual short-term jobs on their own, and customers would be limited to such goods as can be produced by individuals or small, close-knit groups.
People are attacking libertarians over it because they don't know the difference between anarchist, minarchist, and libertarian. ... Libertarians would be, rightfully, more divided on the issue but one thing is certain that [they] should be generally be constitutionalists. Strictly speaking, libertarians want the USD to be backed by something tangibile (like gold).
Apparently you don't know either. Hint: these categories are not mutually exclusive. There are libertarian anarchists, libertarian minarchists, and even some (rather confused) people who are neither anarchist nor minarchist and yet like to think of themselves as libertarian. Some (but not all) constitutionalists would fall into the third category, bordering on minarchist but with significant exceptions.
The defining characteristic of libertarianism, the Non-Aggression Principle, doesn't have anything to say about the USD being backed by gold or anything else. There's a problem with the way in which paper currency replaced gold in the U.S. (via confiscation), but that's ancient history by this point. The N.A.P. does, however, conflict with mandatory deposit insurance (like the FDIC), KYC/AML requirements, money-transmitter licenses, etc. The consistent libertarian will favor unrestrained voluntary trade without third-party interference.
At some point, an actual cash value has to be determined before you can actually SPEND them.
So they're like foreign cash, similar to euros in the U.S.A. or USD in Europe. The fact that local prices are tracked in a different currency, with conversion at the point of sale, doesn't make bitcoins any less a form of cash.
That's, on average, about 6 hours a year I wait for my car to 'recharge'. If I had an electric car, I would be plugging it in every night.
That's assuming you spend no time plugging your vehicle in at night, unplugging it in the morning, or otherwise managing the charge level. The breakeven point is only about 80 seconds per day.
Hypothetically, you might be able to prevent most leverage-providing instruments if all depositors deposited a specific bitcoin, with the right to demand that specific one back...
There is no such thing as a specific bitcoin; it's an abstract unit. If you simply want to store your bitcoins securely, at practically zero cost, there are numerous "paper wallet" systems available, as well as multi-key wallets at various points on the convenience/paranoia continuum.
If you want to receive interest, however, then you have to recognize that you are making a loan—which implies the possibility of default. Interest-bearing accounts are investments, and you should not expect to be insured against investment risk. The best you can expect here is a traditional audit arrangement.
If that's the real problem then don't complain about the prices, complain about the property taxes. Tax rates are well within the city's control. They are under no obligation to collect more taxes no matter how much the prices happen to increase.
Now, the tempting mindset is to hope that the State never actually develops enough to do what I do, thus, I never find myself redundant and always feel needed and like I'm filling a purpose.
Never fear, the State will never actually be able to replace you (or anyone else with a useful skill). The State's area of expertise is bureaucracy, not medicine. The development of a State medical program will only mean that instead of people like you freely donating your medical services to those in need, they will be compelled to pay into a fund to provide their own medical services—which they still can't really afford, so something else will have to go, something they considered more valuable. The State doesn't provide anything; it just undermines people's priorities and substitutes its own. In this case, a propensity for medical care, whatever the cost may be to those ostensibly being cared for.