Just like Al Gore. Not long ago, back in April, he was incensed in the Congress when questioned about whether or not he would personally benefit from environmental legislation. If Republicans were giving themselves half a billion government dollars, we'd never hear the end of it. I guess that's the Democrat playbook:
1. Invest in companies that can "solve some issue". 2. Make liberals feel bad about the issue. 3. Liberals feel so bad they campaign to enact legislation to fix the issue. 4. Write legislation to give companies you've backed massive amounts of money. 5. Profit! 6. Laugh at the idiots that support you, they're too stupid to realize that you're taking advantage of them. Rinse and repeat.
Yes we wouldn't want anyone to color anyone's perception of any facts, of law or of the circumstances of the case, would we?
No, we wouldn't. You don't want public opinion and emotion getting in the way of the facts.
No wait, that is what the attorneys are doing and I expect news bans and Google bans are lawyers attempting to protect their income streams.
You really believe it would be better if trials were left to popular public opinion?
You see, the whole idea of "law" was supposed to be for a code to bind a society together by making every member capable of some action affecting others to follow a simple set of clear rules, which, again by definition, were to be simple enough to be memorized in entirety by everyone. That is why Hammurabi had the thing carved in stone and placed at public squares, so that "ignorance of the law" was not an excuse for breaking it.
That's a great example, but not in the way that you think. The Hammurabi code didn't really work that well in practice. It turns out, it's really not that simple. You can't just build a state machine, input what happened, and output punishment. For example, do you see the difference between a woman that kills her abusive husband in the heat of the moment, and someone that abducts, tortures, and murders a random person. Our modern system is designed to deal with things like degree and severity, and adapt as times change. Lot's of laws have subjective terminology, like "reasonable", that's designed to change as people change. That's why we have lawyers.
The moment however when the "law" becomes so complicated and ambiguous that it requires someone to "interpret it" (i.e. twist it to whatever whim of the moment is fanciful) the whole concept breaks. In short a society which needs lawyers, is by definition lawless, as "law" has morphed from the universal code of conduct to a byzantine, convoluted, religious scripture which requires a career priesthood to worship, massage, "interpret" and twist to the needs of whatever power caste is running the place at the time. The average denizen then simply becomes hapless prey for this caste of parasites with no recourse but to prostate himself/herself before the high-priests of "law" who hold the strings of the citizen's life or death in their hands.
You're being hypocritical here. You're pontificating about the law being turned into a religion. You need people to interpret and argue because things are never as simple as you'd like them to be. You need to be able to balance contradictory ideals. A great example of this is defamation law. To balance first amendment rights and the public's "right to know", there is a different standard for public figures than there is for everyone else. In order to win a defamation case, the public figure must prove actual malice, that the person knew what they were saying wasn't true, and said it to hurt the public figure, maliciously. You need to be able to argue, and then have an impartial group of people, not swayed by public opinion, weight the arguments and make a decision.
Ultimately, in a country of lawyers, by lawyers and for lawyers, the laws become such a sick caricature of the original idea that no one knows the "law" to its full extent, including all of its priests. One can test this simple supposition by simply asking any one of them to recite the "law" of the land from memory. In the USA, not only no lawyer, judge or politician could do it (even though the "law" is supposedly binding everyone and its ignorance is "no excuse") but they would not be able to tell you what the current definitive law is at all, even when given the ability to use books and databases to do it, as the code has become so byzantine that its successive layers upon layers of modifications and arcane religious language are so completely unmanageable that pretty much any "legal" decision needs an arbitrary "interp
Too bad there isn't a -1 Wrong moderation. A high end Cisco router, and a Linksys consumer router are so fundamentally different that your assertion is laughable on its face. Perhaps the reason they are sticking with IOS is because their hardware and software is purpose built to shift orders of magnitudes more packets per second than LInksys Linux routers would ever be capable of? Watch out for the corporate conspiracy black helicopters though.
What is also odd is that so many of these comments claim healthcare cost will increase (which is weird considering americans spend a lot more on it than most countries with public healthcare) and declining quality (again weird, considering average life expectancy is rather low in the US compared to other countries).
We spend more largely because most advanced health-care R&D is done here, and other countries don't respect our intellectual property rights. When other countries decide to create generic drugs from US IP, they are directly raising health care costs in this country. The average life expectancy is higher in the US than in any other country if you exclude people that don't have insurance, so that point is moot.
As someone that is opposed to public health care, I'd be happy to explain. There are two basic issues that I have with it. Primarily, I already have the best health care in the world. For those with good insurance, the United States has the best health care in the world. I could see a doctor right now, and be back here in two hours if I had a problem, for about $10. The care is great, and I am willing to pay for it. Those without insurance, and those that don't take care of themselves drag down the national care statistics. The biggest myth in this whole debate is that quality of care for non-deadbeats is poor.
Secondarily, cost will rise, and quality of care will decline for those that are insured, as we will be paying for everyone else. The bottom line is that people without health care in this country have generally chosen not to prioritize health care over other things, like cable television, cigarettes and alcohol. That's regrettable, but it's also their problem. Poor planning on your part doesn't constitute crisis on mine. These people won't be paying for their insurance under a national plan either. The already-insured will be picking up their tab. More demand and less supply doesn't reduce costs unless demand is seriously checked via reduced coverage and lesser care. While the overall quality of care will increase allowing the proponents of the system to proclaim victory, quality of care for everyone that currently receives care will drop.
In addition to the obvious economics of the situation, there is also the more pressing issue of increased bureaucracy. What is it that fundementally separates national health care from every other government program to the extent that it won't be mismanaged just as every other government program? Public health care will be just like public education, you can show up and get a basic sub-par education, but for anything decent you need to pay for public education that you'll never use, and private education. We'd be better off investing in ending the entitlement culture, than in more public services.
I think we can almost take it for granted that current copyright policy is damaging to our cultural development.
At what point in history was cultural development more pervasive, or faster? It seems to me that art has become so pervasive that thousands of channels of it our broadcast twenty-four hours a day. When has it been easier for an individual to create and publish art? It costs essentially nothing today, how about in the past?
How could it not be to have all our creative expression tied up and limited based on whether or not someone created something similar?
It's not, you just can't share what someone else has created. You can create something similar if you want, you just can't steal what someone else has created.
However, whenever the whole issue gets raised, questions get quashed by talking about "the economy" and economic benefits bestowed on certain groups by copyright.
There isn't a conversation because it inevitably degenerates into "I want something for nothing." You need copyright so people and companies can afford to invest in intellectual property.
Those are certainly issues to think about. By what means would authors and songwriters make money if copyright ceased on exist, or even was much more limited? What happens to all the jobs created by the publishing industry, the music industry, and the movie industry? It's particularly a concern in the US because we don't manufacture very much anymore, and a lot of what we export are our ideas and creative works.
And someone will pipe up and say that they can make all the money they need from live performance. What they don't understand is that it further limits the number of people that can partake in the material.
On the other hand, what almost no one talks about is the economic waste generated by all this. The broken window fallacy doesn't just apply to damage, but it applies to all money that need not be spent. How much money do businesses spend figuring out copyright issues, dealing with lawyers to protect copyrights or to defend against copyright lawsuits? How much more cheaply could Google do this indexing if the restrictions were eased? If movies and music and books were cheaper, then we would have the extra money in our pockets to spend on other things.
So who is going to generate all of this material without economic incentive. The whole purpose of copyright is to allow people to invest money in intellectual property, and ultimately recuperate that investment, plus profit, plus risk. Without it, anyone could take the story you wrote, and publish it themselves without giving you anything. This is precisely why we have copyright today.
We keep hearing about how much money is "generated" by creative industries, and how big a portion of our economy they represent. The information is always offered as evidence that these industries need to be protected, because of the economic damage caused by loss of jobs and loss of profit. However, there's a flip-side to that coin. All that money they're making is coming from somewhere. I'm not claiming it's a zero-sum game because it's not that simple, but for all the billions of dollars these industries make, there's a question of how that money would be spent and where it would go if the government weren't actively protecting fat profit margins for these business models.
It's impossible to say how it would be spent if that property couldn't be protected, but it is possible to say how it wouldn't be spent. It wouldn't be spent on producing media that couldn't be protected. It might be spent on stronger DRM and more centralized distribution systems to eliminate the ability to copy the media. But doesn't that amplify the walled garden problem you all keep bitching about.
(I will assume you're generalizing from the U.S.) You missed the part where the United States became a service sector economy entirely dependent on goods made from a manufacturing-based economy (China).
And you missed the part where the US produces so much food it exports it.
Hybrid systems provide the basics of survival but still have a competitive economy for non-basic items. People in those systems seem to be happy enough.
But won't making people more and more dependent on the state ultimately lead to more and more power for the state, until fascism sets in. It has nearly every time it's been tried.
Ah I see, you're a libertarian. Carry on then, no more to see here.
I'm not a libertarian. What do you believe the state produces? It's fueled entirely by the production of others, and the redistribution of their production.
Maslow's heirarchy of needs is one description of what drives individual motivation, usually depicted a pyramid with "psysiological needs" at the bottom and "self-actualization" at the top. Maslow generalized that most people seek to satisfy each level before focusing on the next level. Though it has its criticisms, generalizing this idea to society at large can be useful.
Imagine Maslow's heirarchy of needs for society, with layers for "food and shelter" (bottom), "national defense" (next up), "civil order", and so on up to whatever top you wish. As you move up Maslow's heirarchy of needs, the number of people employed or otherwise exchanging their time to produce goods that satisfy those needs diminishes. It takes hundreds of millions of people (worldwide) to build houses, roads, cars, chemicals, etc., but only hundreds of thousands to produce enough books and music for the entire world. On the bottom-most level of Maslow's heirarchy, automation can remove over half the people needed, yet the economy does not have jobs for them at higher layers.
But automation has trimmed this workforce considerable. Look at modern farm equipment and large commercial farming. Look at modern construction, with nail guns and prefab walls and parts. The food industry represents roughly 10% of the GDP, but only employs approximately 5% of the population. For every skill-less manual labor job you lose, you gain jobs producing items higher up the pyramid. This is kind of like how glass blowing, cotton picking, and blacksmithing used to be huge industries, and now are largely automated. This increases the supply of educated workers, since fewer jobs are available for uneducated workers, which reduces the cost, which spurs innovation. Rinse and repeat.
Correct. In non-capitalistic systems those people might be paid by the state, in the same manner private military contractors are paid by the US government. Or perhaps through religious channels. Who knows? Until the technology is widely deployed we can only speculate how such a society might operate.
And who is going to pay the state? If they are the only people working, what benefit would the pay give them? You aren't advocating forcing the people to work, are you? You aren't in favor of slavery, are you? The state produces nothing of value, it only consumes.
I only generalized, I didn't make moral judgments. You can make whatever moral judgments you wish. You might also ask: "Why should I care if others don't work, so long as I am happy with my own achievements?" "When has anyone been motivated by something other than compensation to do work?" Or even: "Wouldn't it be really nice if the people who obviously don't want to do work weren't in everyone else's way?"
Because it builds resentment. This is precisely why communism won't work. In every system, people are discriminated against. In the case of capitalism, the people that are discriminated against are those least fit to do something about it. If you attempt to give some people easy jobs, or no jobs at all, yet require others to work long, hard hours at tough jobs, they will resent it. Unfortunately for the people that work the easy jobs, or don't have jobs, the people that are being held down so they don't have to work won't stand for it, and they're the most capable of doing something about it. This leads to revolution. The bums always lose.
Whatever. If you don't believe we all live embedded in a social fabric, if you believe instead that everyone is an island, then there's no further point to this discussion.
A conspiracy isn't something that everyone is in on.
Different business models value different things. Some businesses operate in a model of "shooting for the A" over "being happy with a B", as in they really try to produce the highest quality item and still be profitable. Other businesses seek to minimize the bottom line at all t
Just for you, I'll address the grandparents idiocy point by point.
1. Technology of the 1970's can provide enough food and shelter for the entire world. However, we cannot employ the entire world in the production of food and shelter, because at some point we have all the food and shelter we need and thus people become unemployable again.
So there is no demand for anything but food and shelter? All human beings presently produce nothing but food and shelter? I want a lot more stuff besides food and shelter, and I'm willing to work to pay for it. I don't want to live in a welfare state, I've seen the average welfare recipient.
The obvious solution of "making basic stuff for no cost to consumers" would drastically undermine the economic pyramid, so that cannot be pursued.
Who is going to make the basic stuff for no cost to consumers for free. Even if you build robots that can do all the work, someone still has to design, build, and maintain them. Why should those people have to work when nobody else does?
Therefore, the only way to maintain the existing economic pyramid is to slow down the pace of technology until such time as other social controls (e.g. consumer debt) can become more effective.
And who exactly made the decision to slow down the pace? How did they communicate this decision, in a binding way to everyone else? How do they prevent people not directly under their control from innovating themselves? Why did they open of vast information sources like the Internet, and make them searchable, if they are trying to impede progress?
Call this is the Conspiracy Theory version of why we don't develop technology advanced enough such that we no longer need to work for The Man.
Bullshit is a synonym for conspiracy in this case.
2. Globalization's "race to the bottom" has produced a business culture that values short-term profits over long-term progress, such that it makes more economic sense to squeeze a little more money out of what we have than take the risk of shooting for something much better.
Business never valued progress. It isn't a business goal. Businesses promote progress, but don't value it. It's always been about the profit.
That's not to say that progress doesn't pay, there wouldn't be so many private venture capital firms if progress didn't pay, and they wouldn't be making investments in risky things like green tech.
Thus it is more profitable to make things last just until the manufacturer's warranty runs out than as long as possible, partly due to existing infrastructure but also largely due to consumer preferences for newer-is-better (who still wants power tools from the 1950's even if they continue to work well?).
Newer generally is better. The flip side of that is, sometimes things don't need to last forever. I was talking to an engineer that was involved in the construction of a highway once, and asked why only a portion of it was concrete, since concrete lasts much longer. He explained that before they construct highways, they study the area to see what the future growth will be like. The area that is concrete has a well understood growth chart, and was actually wider than strictly necessary so two additional lanes in each direction could be opened by repainting the lines. It made sense in that area to build a highway that would last fifty years. In the other areas, a smaller highway would do for the time being, and area expansion was unsure. Because of this, it was paved with asphalt. If the road were built to last 50 years, but it had to be expanded or rebuilt in 10 or 20, then it was originally far overbuilt, and the money would be wasted.
With consumer electronics in particular, it doesn't make sense to make things last longer than there practical lifespan. Look at MP3 players from 10 years ago, then look at players today. It doesn't make sen
So there really is a giant corporate conspiracy to slow the rate of technological expansion preventing the fairies from delivering free stuff. Give me a break. I guess only part of society is supposed to work to provide basic subsistence goods, while everyone else sits around and never produces anything? We already kind of have those people, they're called welfare recipients, and having a whole society of them sounds like living in a hellhole.
Your revolution is over. Condolences. The bums lost. My advice is to do what your parents did; get a job, sir. The bums will always lose.
And your example about 50's drills is great, but not for why you think it is. You can still buy those expensive, high quality drills like they sold in the 60's, they're usually pneumatic or battery powered now, since that's the way the industry went. But because there is consumer demand, not a conspiracy against the consumer, cheap, low duty cycle drills are also being sold. They're great for people like me that only ever have to drive a screw occasionally, and don't want to spend more than I need to to do so. I could by 5 cheap drivers over the course of my life for the price of a single good one, and that's more than I'll ever need.
The only way you could honestly believe that progress has slowed since 1956 is if you discount modern semiconductor manufacturing, that global communications network thing that you are all using right now, cell phones, and routine space flight. We have made huge leaps and bounds in just 50 years. These things changed everything.
When I was born in the early 80's, none of these things, except for perhaps routine space flight, was readily available. We didn't have a household computer until close to the 90s, and didn't have internet access until after that. I didn't get a cell phone until 2000. Each of these things fundamentally changed life. Everything kind of sucked without this stuff, and I would never want to go back. The internet, and the ICs that power the whole thing, are probably the single greatest, most useful, most prolific technological innovation of all time.
That's usually not true anymore. "Best value" procurement has been quite popular With this, each proposal is scored first, then prices are reviewed. Technical capability, past performance, and quality are all considered when evaluating for value.
But then they would have to take credit for it, which they hate doing. As long as a single Republican votes for it, when it blows up they can pontificate about how bipartisan the process was.
Whether you supported the Bush administration or not (I voted for him twice - lesser of two evils each time), you have to admit that Congress spent like drunken sailors during his two terms.
And Obama and company has already managed to spend more than Bush. Just take a look at the CBO Budget Estimates.
Claiming that this will allow the executive branch censor dissent is just about as retarded as the death panels argument.
Yeah, it's not like the wise Democratic President had an e-mail address setup so dissenting e-mail can be investigated. The only person that would think to do something like that is Bush, and we got rid of him.
Or to satisfy the demand for inexpensive software that does everything the average person needs it to do. If each 50% of your software cost $1,000 to develop, you have a market of 1,000 people, and only 10% of those thousand need the last 50% of the software, it makes sense to sell two versions. After all, you can sell to the first 90% of people for $1 each, and to the last 10% for $11 each. The numbers are different for Windows, but the concept is the same. Home users aren't willing to pay more, nor should they have to, for features like PAE, IIS, and the ability to join domains.
The vast majority was paid for by investors. You don't have the right to steal, even if your tax dollars did pay for a portion of something. And unless the government dollars came with stipulations about free access, it is stealing. Let's see a citation for the amount of government money paid to DirecTV. The RIAA has nothing to do with the DirecTV example you used, so stop changing the subject.
And not that it matters, but you are grossly underestimating satellite costs. The launch alone can cost between $50 and $400 million. DirecTV satellite and launch costs are thought to be about $300M per satellite, with 15 satellites currrently in orbit. So yeah, billions of dollars is a big deal.
Perhaps you object to my claims of extortion? What else can we call it? How about we look at DirectTV's tactics first. Anyone who purchased a doo-diddy to program a card was sent a notice that they were liable for hacking DTV's broadcast content. DTV collected MILLIONS of dollars from people who couldn't afford to a: hire legal representation b: travel to court c: take time off of work to travel to court d: spend significant time in court
This is a great example of how flawed your argument is. The whole "piracy debate" always boils down to one point, and only one point, which is, "I want a free lunch, with no repercussions." It costs millions of dollars to design a satellite and launch it into orbit. It costs even more to operate the networks that license and broadcast the content to the satellites for redistribution. These are real costs, in real dollars. I guess you believe people are being extorted because they bought devices to steal service, and have to pay for the service that they stole. How awful for them.
The law is nothing more than a legislative grant to content owners to use criminal laws to preserve their own ability to recover the money it cost to produce, distribute, and promote, the copy-written materials I think should should be free.
The law is widely misused and doesn't do anything to all me to continue taking other people's content while giving nothing of value back myself. Let's face it, I want a free lunch. It's just a bad law that won't go away.
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The majority of the people working at Financial Institutions aren't Republicans, just take a look at their campaign contributions.
The summary reeks of an agenda
Just like Al Gore. Not long ago, back in April, he was incensed in the Congress when questioned about whether or not he would personally benefit from environmental legislation. If Republicans were giving themselves half a billion government dollars, we'd never hear the end of it. I guess that's the Democrat playbook:
1. Invest in companies that can "solve some issue".
2. Make liberals feel bad about the issue.
3. Liberals feel so bad they campaign to enact legislation to fix the issue.
4. Write legislation to give companies you've backed massive amounts of money.
5. Profit!
6. Laugh at the idiots that support you, they're too stupid to realize that you're taking advantage of them. Rinse and repeat.
Higher cost. Seriously...
Yes we wouldn't want anyone to color anyone's perception of any facts, of law or of the circumstances of the case, would we?
No, we wouldn't. You don't want public opinion and emotion getting in the way of the facts.
No wait, that is what the attorneys are doing and I expect news bans and Google bans are lawyers attempting to protect their income streams.
You really believe it would be better if trials were left to popular public opinion?
You see, the whole idea of "law" was supposed to be for a code to bind a society together by making every member capable of some action affecting others to follow a simple set of clear rules, which, again by definition, were to be simple enough to be memorized in entirety by everyone. That is why Hammurabi had the thing carved in stone and placed at public squares, so that "ignorance of the law" was not an excuse for breaking it.
That's a great example, but not in the way that you think. The Hammurabi code didn't really work that well in practice. It turns out, it's really not that simple. You can't just build a state machine, input what happened, and output punishment. For example, do you see the difference between a woman that kills her abusive husband in the heat of the moment, and someone that abducts, tortures, and murders a random person. Our modern system is designed to deal with things like degree and severity, and adapt as times change. Lot's of laws have subjective terminology, like "reasonable", that's designed to change as people change. That's why we have lawyers.
The moment however when the "law" becomes so complicated and ambiguous that it requires someone to "interpret it" (i.e. twist it to whatever whim of the moment is fanciful) the whole concept breaks. In short a society which needs lawyers, is by definition lawless, as "law" has morphed from the universal code of conduct to a byzantine, convoluted, religious scripture which requires a career priesthood to worship, massage, "interpret" and twist to the needs of whatever power caste is running the place at the time. The average denizen then simply becomes hapless prey for this caste of parasites with no recourse but to prostate himself/herself before the high-priests of "law" who hold the strings of the citizen's life or death in their hands.
You're being hypocritical here. You're pontificating about the law being turned into a religion. You need people to interpret and argue because things are never as simple as you'd like them to be. You need to be able to balance contradictory ideals. A great example of this is defamation law. To balance first amendment rights and the public's "right to know", there is a different standard for public figures than there is for everyone else. In order to win a defamation case, the public figure must prove actual malice, that the person knew what they were saying wasn't true, and said it to hurt the public figure, maliciously. You need to be able to argue, and then have an impartial group of people, not swayed by public opinion, weight the arguments and make a decision.
Ultimately, in a country of lawyers, by lawyers and for lawyers, the laws become such a sick caricature of the original idea that no one knows the "law" to its full extent, including all of its priests. One can test this simple supposition by simply asking any one of them to recite the "law" of the land from memory. In the USA, not only no lawyer, judge or politician could do it (even though the "law" is supposedly binding everyone and its ignorance is "no excuse") but they would not be able to tell you what the current definitive law is at all, even when given the ability to use books and databases to do it, as the code has become so byzantine that its successive layers upon layers of modifications and arcane religious language are so completely unmanageable that pretty much any "legal" decision needs an arbitrary "interp
Too bad there isn't a -1 Wrong moderation. A high end Cisco router, and a Linksys consumer router are so fundamentally different that your assertion is laughable on its face. Perhaps the reason they are sticking with IOS is because their hardware and software is purpose built to shift orders of magnitudes more packets per second than LInksys Linux routers would ever be capable of? Watch out for the corporate conspiracy black helicopters though.
What is also odd is that so many of these comments claim healthcare cost will increase (which is weird considering americans spend a lot more on it than most countries with public healthcare) and declining quality (again weird, considering average life expectancy is rather low in the US compared to other countries).
We spend more largely because most advanced health-care R&D is done here, and other countries don't respect our intellectual property rights. When other countries decide to create generic drugs from US IP, they are directly raising health care costs in this country. The average life expectancy is higher in the US than in any other country if you exclude people that don't have insurance, so that point is moot.
As someone that is opposed to public health care, I'd be happy to explain. There are two basic issues that I have with it. Primarily, I already have the best health care in the world. For those with good insurance, the United States has the best health care in the world. I could see a doctor right now, and be back here in two hours if I had a problem, for about $10. The care is great, and I am willing to pay for it. Those without insurance, and those that don't take care of themselves drag down the national care statistics. The biggest myth in this whole debate is that quality of care for non-deadbeats is poor.
Secondarily, cost will rise, and quality of care will decline for those that are insured, as we will be paying for everyone else. The bottom line is that people without health care in this country have generally chosen not to prioritize health care over other things, like cable television, cigarettes and alcohol. That's regrettable, but it's also their problem. Poor planning on your part doesn't constitute crisis on mine. These people won't be paying for their insurance under a national plan either. The already-insured will be picking up their tab. More demand and less supply doesn't reduce costs unless demand is seriously checked via reduced coverage and lesser care. While the overall quality of care will increase allowing the proponents of the system to proclaim victory, quality of care for everyone that currently receives care will drop.
In addition to the obvious economics of the situation, there is also the more pressing issue of increased bureaucracy. What is it that fundementally separates national health care from every other government program to the extent that it won't be mismanaged just as every other government program? Public health care will be just like public education, you can show up and get a basic sub-par education, but for anything decent you need to pay for public education that you'll never use, and private education. We'd be better off investing in ending the entitlement culture, than in more public services.
I think we can almost take it for granted that current copyright policy is damaging to our cultural development.
At what point in history was cultural development more pervasive, or faster? It seems to me that art has become so pervasive that thousands of channels of it our broadcast twenty-four hours a day. When has it been easier for an individual to create and publish art? It costs essentially nothing today, how about in the past?
How could it not be to have all our creative expression tied up and limited based on whether or not someone created something similar?
It's not, you just can't share what someone else has created. You can create something similar if you want, you just can't steal what someone else has created.
However, whenever the whole issue gets raised, questions get quashed by talking about "the economy" and economic benefits bestowed on certain groups by copyright.
There isn't a conversation because it inevitably degenerates into "I want something for nothing." You need copyright so people and companies can afford to invest in intellectual property.
Those are certainly issues to think about. By what means would authors and songwriters make money if copyright ceased on exist, or even was much more limited? What happens to all the jobs created by the publishing industry, the music industry, and the movie industry? It's particularly a concern in the US because we don't manufacture very much anymore, and a lot of what we export are our ideas and creative works.
And someone will pipe up and say that they can make all the money they need from live performance. What they don't understand is that it further limits the number of people that can partake in the material.
On the other hand, what almost no one talks about is the economic waste generated by all this. The broken window fallacy doesn't just apply to damage, but it applies to all money that need not be spent. How much money do businesses spend figuring out copyright issues, dealing with lawyers to protect copyrights or to defend against copyright lawsuits? How much more cheaply could Google do this indexing if the restrictions were eased? If movies and music and books were cheaper, then we would have the extra money in our pockets to spend on other things.
So who is going to generate all of this material without economic incentive. The whole purpose of copyright is to allow people to invest money in intellectual property, and ultimately recuperate that investment, plus profit, plus risk. Without it, anyone could take the story you wrote, and publish it themselves without giving you anything. This is precisely why we have copyright today.
We keep hearing about how much money is "generated" by creative industries, and how big a portion of our economy they represent. The information is always offered as evidence that these industries need to be protected, because of the economic damage caused by loss of jobs and loss of profit. However, there's a flip-side to that coin. All that money they're making is coming from somewhere. I'm not claiming it's a zero-sum game because it's not that simple, but for all the billions of dollars these industries make, there's a question of how that money would be spent and where it would go if the government weren't actively protecting fat profit margins for these business models.
It's impossible to say how it would be spent if that property couldn't be protected, but it is possible to say how it wouldn't be spent. It wouldn't be spent on producing media that couldn't be protected. It might be spent on stronger DRM and more centralized distribution systems to eliminate the ability to copy the media. But doesn't that amplify the walled garden problem you all keep bitching about.
(I will assume you're generalizing from the U.S.) You missed the part where the United States became a service sector economy entirely dependent on goods made from a manufacturing-based economy (China).
And you missed the part where the US produces so much food it exports it.
Hybrid systems provide the basics of survival but still have a competitive economy for non-basic items. People in those systems seem to be happy enough.
But won't making people more and more dependent on the state ultimately lead to more and more power for the state, until fascism sets in. It has nearly every time it's been tried.
Ah I see, you're a libertarian. Carry on then, no more to see here.
I'm not a libertarian. What do you believe the state produces? It's fueled entirely by the production of others, and the redistribution of their production.
Maslow's heirarchy of needs is one description of what drives individual motivation, usually depicted a pyramid with "psysiological needs" at the bottom and "self-actualization" at the top. Maslow generalized that most people seek to satisfy each level before focusing on the next level. Though it has its criticisms, generalizing this idea to society at large can be useful. Imagine Maslow's heirarchy of needs for society, with layers for "food and shelter" (bottom), "national defense" (next up), "civil order", and so on up to whatever top you wish. As you move up Maslow's heirarchy of needs, the number of people employed or otherwise exchanging their time to produce goods that satisfy those needs diminishes. It takes hundreds of millions of people (worldwide) to build houses, roads, cars, chemicals, etc., but only hundreds of thousands to produce enough books and music for the entire world. On the bottom-most level of Maslow's heirarchy, automation can remove over half the people needed, yet the economy does not have jobs for them at higher layers.
But automation has trimmed this workforce considerable. Look at modern farm equipment and large commercial farming. Look at modern construction, with nail guns and prefab walls and parts. The food industry represents roughly 10% of the GDP, but only employs approximately 5% of the population. For every skill-less manual labor job you lose, you gain jobs producing items higher up the pyramid. This is kind of like how glass blowing, cotton picking, and blacksmithing used to be huge industries, and now are largely automated. This increases the supply of educated workers, since fewer jobs are available for uneducated workers, which reduces the cost, which spurs innovation. Rinse and repeat.
Correct. In non-capitalistic systems those people might be paid by the state, in the same manner private military contractors are paid by the US government. Or perhaps through religious channels. Who knows? Until the technology is widely deployed we can only speculate how such a society might operate.
And who is going to pay the state? If they are the only people working, what benefit would the pay give them? You aren't advocating forcing the people to work, are you? You aren't in favor of slavery, are you? The state produces nothing of value, it only consumes.
I only generalized, I didn't make moral judgments. You can make whatever moral judgments you wish. You might also ask: "Why should I care if others don't work, so long as I am happy with my own achievements?" "When has anyone been motivated by something other than compensation to do work?" Or even: "Wouldn't it be really nice if the people who obviously don't want to do work weren't in everyone else's way?"
Because it builds resentment. This is precisely why communism won't work. In every system, people are discriminated against. In the case of capitalism, the people that are discriminated against are those least fit to do something about it. If you attempt to give some people easy jobs, or no jobs at all, yet require others to work long, hard hours at tough jobs, they will resent it. Unfortunately for the people that work the easy jobs, or don't have jobs, the people that are being held down so they don't have to work won't stand for it, and they're the most capable of doing something about it. This leads to revolution. The bums always lose.
Whatever. If you don't believe we all live embedded in a social fabric, if you believe instead that everyone is an island, then there's no further point to this discussion.
A conspiracy isn't something that everyone is in on.
Different business models value different things. Some businesses operate in a model of "shooting for the A" over "being happy with a B", as in they really try to produce the highest quality item and still be profitable. Other businesses seek to minimize the bottom line at all t
1. Technology of the 1970's can provide enough food and shelter for the entire world. However, we cannot employ the entire world in the production of food and shelter, because at some point we have all the food and shelter we need and thus people become unemployable again.
So there is no demand for anything but food and shelter? All human beings presently produce nothing but food and shelter? I want a lot more stuff besides food and shelter, and I'm willing to work to pay for it. I don't want to live in a welfare state, I've seen the average welfare recipient.
The obvious solution of "making basic stuff for no cost to consumers" would drastically undermine the economic pyramid, so that cannot be pursued.
Who is going to make the basic stuff for no cost to consumers for free. Even if you build robots that can do all the work, someone still has to design, build, and maintain them. Why should those people have to work when nobody else does?
Therefore, the only way to maintain the existing economic pyramid is to slow down the pace of technology until such time as other social controls (e.g. consumer debt) can become more effective.
And who exactly made the decision to slow down the pace? How did they communicate this decision, in a binding way to everyone else? How do they prevent people not directly under their control from innovating themselves? Why did they open of vast information sources like the Internet, and make them searchable, if they are trying to impede progress?
Call this is the Conspiracy Theory version of why we don't develop technology advanced enough such that we no longer need to work for The Man.
Bullshit is a synonym for conspiracy in this case.
2. Globalization's "race to the bottom" has produced a business culture that values short-term profits over long-term progress, such that it makes more economic sense to squeeze a little more money out of what we have than take the risk of shooting for something much better.
Business never valued progress. It isn't a business goal. Businesses promote progress, but don't value it. It's always been about the profit. That's not to say that progress doesn't pay, there wouldn't be so many private venture capital firms if progress didn't pay, and they wouldn't be making investments in risky things like green tech.
Thus it is more profitable to make things last just until the manufacturer's warranty runs out than as long as possible, partly due to existing infrastructure but also largely due to consumer preferences for newer-is-better (who still wants power tools from the 1950's even if they continue to work well?).
Newer generally is better. The flip side of that is, sometimes things don't need to last forever. I was talking to an engineer that was involved in the construction of a highway once, and asked why only a portion of it was concrete, since concrete lasts much longer. He explained that before they construct highways, they study the area to see what the future growth will be like. The area that is concrete has a well understood growth chart, and was actually wider than strictly necessary so two additional lanes in each direction could be opened by repainting the lines. It made sense in that area to build a highway that would last fifty years. In the other areas, a smaller highway would do for the time being, and area expansion was unsure. Because of this, it was paved with asphalt. If the road were built to last 50 years, but it had to be expanded or rebuilt in 10 or 20, then it was originally far overbuilt, and the money would be wasted. With consumer electronics in particular, it doesn't make sense to make things last longer than there practical lifespan. Look at MP3 players from 10 years ago, then look at players today. It doesn't make sen
Your revolution is over. Condolences. The bums lost. My advice is to do what your parents did; get a job, sir. The bums will always lose.
And your example about 50's drills is great, but not for why you think it is. You can still buy those expensive, high quality drills like they sold in the 60's, they're usually pneumatic or battery powered now, since that's the way the industry went. But because there is consumer demand, not a conspiracy against the consumer, cheap, low duty cycle drills are also being sold. They're great for people like me that only ever have to drive a screw occasionally, and don't want to spend more than I need to to do so. I could by 5 cheap drivers over the course of my life for the price of a single good one, and that's more than I'll ever need.
The only way you could honestly believe that progress has slowed since 1956 is if you discount modern semiconductor manufacturing, that global communications network thing that you are all using right now, cell phones, and routine space flight. We have made huge leaps and bounds in just 50 years. These things changed everything. When I was born in the early 80's, none of these things, except for perhaps routine space flight, was readily available. We didn't have a household computer until close to the 90s, and didn't have internet access until after that. I didn't get a cell phone until 2000. Each of these things fundamentally changed life. Everything kind of sucked without this stuff, and I would never want to go back. The internet, and the ICs that power the whole thing, are probably the single greatest, most useful, most prolific technological innovation of all time.
Your understanding of basic economics is laughable. They really need to teach this stuff in school.
It's twice the size of Texas, but you can't actually see it to take a picture of it.
That's usually not true anymore. "Best value" procurement has been quite popular With this, each proposal is scored first, then prices are reviewed. Technical capability, past performance, and quality are all considered when evaluating for value.
But then they would have to take credit for it, which they hate doing. As long as a single Republican votes for it, when it blows up they can pontificate about how bipartisan the process was.
Whether you supported the Bush administration or not (I voted for him twice - lesser of two evils each time), you have to admit that Congress spent like drunken sailors during his two terms.
And Obama and company has already managed to spend more than Bush. Just take a look at the CBO Budget Estimates.
Claiming that this will allow the executive branch censor dissent is just about as retarded as the death panels argument.
Yeah, it's not like the wise Democratic President had an e-mail address setup so dissenting e-mail can be investigated. The only person that would think to do something like that is Bush, and we got rid of him.
Or to satisfy the demand for inexpensive software that does everything the average person needs it to do. If each 50% of your software cost $1,000 to develop, you have a market of 1,000 people, and only 10% of those thousand need the last 50% of the software, it makes sense to sell two versions. After all, you can sell to the first 90% of people for $1 each, and to the last 10% for $11 each. The numbers are different for Windows, but the concept is the same. Home users aren't willing to pay more, nor should they have to, for features like PAE, IIS, and the ability to join domains.
Unless you never develop a more expensive version because 90% of the market doesn't need the extra features, but are willing to pay for them.
The only cost in software production isn't disk pressing.
The vast majority was paid for by investors. You don't have the right to steal, even if your tax dollars did pay for a portion of something. And unless the government dollars came with stipulations about free access, it is stealing. Let's see a citation for the amount of government money paid to DirecTV. The RIAA has nothing to do with the DirecTV example you used, so stop changing the subject.
And not that it matters, but you are grossly underestimating satellite costs. The launch alone can cost between $50 and $400 million. DirecTV satellite and launch costs are thought to be about $300M per satellite, with 15 satellites currrently in orbit. So yeah, billions of dollars is a big deal.
Perhaps you object to my claims of extortion? What else can we call it? How about we look at DirectTV's tactics first. Anyone who purchased a doo-diddy to program a card was sent a notice that they were liable for hacking DTV's broadcast content. DTV collected MILLIONS of dollars from people who couldn't afford to a: hire legal representation b: travel to court c: take time off of work to travel to court d: spend significant time in court
This is a great example of how flawed your argument is. The whole "piracy debate" always boils down to one point, and only one point, which is, "I want a free lunch, with no repercussions." It costs millions of dollars to design a satellite and launch it into orbit. It costs even more to operate the networks that license and broadcast the content to the satellites for redistribution. These are real costs, in real dollars. I guess you believe people are being extorted because they bought devices to steal service, and have to pay for the service that they stole. How awful for them.
Let me fix this for you.
The law is nothing more than a legislative grant to content owners to use criminal laws to preserve their own ability to recover the money it cost to produce, distribute, and promote, the copy-written materials I think should should be free.
The law is widely misused and doesn't do anything to all me to continue taking other people's content while giving nothing of value back myself. Let's face it, I want a free lunch. It's just a bad law that won't go away.