No, he's saying that new technologies are introduced in luxury products and then gradually become mainstream. In cars that was true of power-adjustable seats, power windows, stability control, side curtain airbags, automatic transmissions with more than four gears, automatic transmissions that use electronic clutches instead of a torque converter (like the Audi DSG - first available on their top models, now available on some cars that cost less than $30,000), touch screen systems, DVD players, and so forth.
Likewise the Tesla Roadster was $100,000. The Model S starts at $57,500 before tax incentives, although if you purchase a charging station and a few other features it will probably really cost closer to $65,000. The longest range version of the Model S starts around $75,000 although you can add luxury and high performance features to drive the cost up to $100,000. Hopefully Tesla gets better at managing their production processes and high sales volume, technological advances, and (if we are lucky) competition between component vendors will all drive down their costs. Maybe in five years the successor to the Model S will deliver an equivalent product to their current $75,000 version for $50,000.
Even at $75,000, if the battery pack can maintain 75% of its charge up to 200,000 miles it's about as cost-effective to own as a $55,000 sedan with equivalent performance and a traditional gasoline engine. The Tesla Model S requires about 0.3 kwh of charging per mile driven, so as long as the price of electricity rises more slowly than the price of gasoline the long term savings are good. On the other hand, if you're looking to save money it will never pay off compared to a used car or a new Prius (or even a new Fiat 500, Honda Civic, etc... ) but of course those vehicles are substantially slower.
Azure now offers the ability to rent Linux servers. Obviously that means you would be using Windows Azure as an "Infrastrustructure As A Service" instead of "Platform As A Service", but that would stop you from being locked in. Plus I like the idea of giving Microsoft money for offering free software virtual servers. I don't like it as much as the idea of Microsoft going out of business, but if that happens it won't be soon (even with Windows 8 on the horizon).
I think the distaste for App Engine came when Google bumped the prices. Everyone knew it was coming, but they still expected their favorite tech company to let them have peace and butterflies forever.
I'm not sure about the distaste for Amazon, though - I've heard from friends who work at their warehouses that they run you ragged and generally treat you poorly ( do a web search on all the hospitalizations for heat exhaustion at the Amazon warehouse in Allentown, Pennsylvania ). But to my knowledge, AWS customers are generally satisfied.
Getting things done in C++ is comparatively easy. If you can learn C, you can learn C++.
On the other hand, maintaining someone else's code in C++ is a crap shoot - just like it is in heavily macro'ed C, just like it is in poorly written Perl. The danger with any overly complex language with tons of features is that the codebase you're looking at could use corners of the language you personally know poorly or not at all.
The people working on GCC are compiling C++, I'm sure they know every corner of the C++ language as well as Larry Wall knows Perl and Guido van Rossum knows Python. So this is not a problem for them.
In any domain where getting speed on par with well-written C is not a priority, I would suggest a language with fewer special features.
The Java community is working around some of the design flaws in the language related to exceptions. As you probably know, RuntimeExceptions don't have to be declared or explicitly caught with try/catch, unless the developer wants to catch them. So I've seen tons of code in different open source libraries that wraps the core Java libraries with code that does try { doSomethingWithCoreJavaLibrary(); } catch (Exception ex) { throw new RuntimeException(ex); }
Java keeps evolving, they keep adding new features and offering simpler syntax for common tasks. Maybe by version 11 or 12 it will be a language that won't make experienced Python, Ruby, Perl, and Lisp developers get sick to their stomach just reading it.;)
C++ is awesomely powerful, incredibly fast and resource efficient, and between new high performance applications and existing codebases it will continue to be used for decades.
However, it also has a beastly learning curve and lots of corner cases, and while its execution speed is wonderful it's so complex that compilation times for non-trivial applications are slower than equivalent feature (but slower execution) applications written in most other languages. If you really need performance that only C++ can provide, use C++. If you have a team of brilliant C++ developers, use C++.
If you don't have either of those needs, you owe it to yourself to investigate alternatives.
I'm sure the people working on GCC are C++ experts, so I think that's a place where C++ is an optimal or nearly optimal choice.
If you have a fire at your local location, you can still lose everything. The point of backups is to have at least one valid copy of the data survive any given catastrophe. So if my encrypted files are in Amazon's S3 storage on the west coast and my local copies are at my house on the east coast, one copy can be totally destroyed and I just recreate it from the other. The odds of both copies getting destroyed at the same time are very low - but if you're that paranoid, invest in a second cloud backup solution hosted by a different provider in another part of the world (Europe, Asia, etc...).
If you're going to use the cloud, investigate TNO (Trust No One) solutions - options where the data is encrypted on your computer and uploaded to the cloud, and the cloud hosting provider does not have access to the decryption key. If you want to do it yourself, use GnuPG or 7-zip to encrypt the file, and then put the file into the folder that gets automatically synced to DropBox or SkyDrive or Ubuntu One or whatever. As long as you don't upload your decryption key or password, nobody should be able to read your data. Just make sure to keep safe backups of your decryption keys and passwords.
Some cloud storage plans claim to have a complete TNO architecture, like SpiderOak - the way I understand it is that you create a password on your computer, and it hashes it. That first hash is used to encrypt your files. Then it concatenates that hash plus the password and hashes it again, and the second hash is your authentication token to SpiderOak servers so it permits files to be uploaded and downloaded. SpiderOak's servers hold your encrypted files and the second hash, but since they never get the first hash and hashing algorithms are one-way by definition (given a particular input you can recreate the output, but given a particular output you can't recreate the input it came from), they can't decrypt your data. However, while SpiderOak open sources most of their code, they haven't open sourced their encryption code so it's always possible they're lying.
My ancestors worked the coal mines before the labor strikes - I grew up learning history about thousands of people killed due to unsafe working conditions, armed thugs sitting right inside the voting both to make sure everyone voted for the candidates personally selected by the local robber baron, and lives as indentured servants in perpetual debt to the company store. The ancient Egyptians made some of their greatest accomplishments on the backs of thousands of slaves - that doesn't mean their economic system should be modeled or admired.
Eliminating minimum wage and giving the person the choice between starving to death slowly on $3 per hour instead of starving to death rapidly on $0 per hour is not ethical and cannot be permitted - using supply and demand to exploit starving people for cheap labor is wrong, period.
As I've said many times before, and I will repeat now - the economy functioned fine 40 years ago when the wealthiest Americans paid twice as much tax as they do today. When we were at war in 1944 the highest tax bracket was over 80% - contrast that to the 15% long term capital gains tax on the wealthiest people today even while we were at war. This isn't a fair economy or an opportunity for people to follow the American Dream, it's an oligarchy: people who already have tons of wealth can accumulate additional wealth far faster than anyone earning a salary (instead of benefitting from long term investments) can gain wealth.
In the PA coal region, where I grew up and most of my family still resides, the job opportunities are nil. So I have relatives with good work histories looking for work and getting offered minimum wage, part time, swing shifts - so gross pay is maybe $150 per week and their schedule prevents them from taking a second minimum wage job elsewhere. And promotion options are poor, because if you demand an extra $10 per week from your employer they can replace you with someone else that's desperate to get off unemployment.
The type of economy you're describing already exists, and it's fueled by illegal aliens - some tiny percentage of them are taking legal jobs from US citizens, but most of them are used as day laborers paid subsistence wages. They live three or five or fifteen in single person apartments. If they get hurt, they are dumped from the labor force and left to beg for help. And if someone tries to demand safer treatment or more pay, they are replaced by someone else more desperate. That's your ideal economy?
The United States had a period when capitalism was unfettered, it was the 19th century. The robber barons bought their local governments and police agencies, and employees were worked to death or put into perpetual debt slavery, or both. That's not the goal.
You survived by minimum wage completely on your own? Really? I'd like the details. I couldn't pay my car insurance and fuel for my commute on minimum wage. I couldn't pay rent and utilities on a one bedroom apartment on minimum wage in my area. In most of the country it is not enough to provide food, shelter, and transport to work - let alone medical coverage.
I realize that the Declaration of Independence has no specific legal impact. But the point is that this country secures freedoms for all of its citizens. It's a social contract, and starting about a hundred years ago with Teddy Roosevelt and gradually increasing with time is the public, national sense that our attitude towards among us that need help should be something other than "too bad".
We don't have bigger needs than worrying whether grannie eats cat food. If I have to choose between putting taxes on wealthy Americans - at 1980s levels or 1960s levels versus letting people starve, I'll vote for the tax and pay it without hesitation. Telling the people who paid into the program that we decided not to support them is immoral. It's also going to cause an awful lot of civil unrest - and maybe you like the idea of trying to get the national guard to gun down angry grandparents, but I don't.
In World War 2 the top tax brackets in the US was over 80%. The people of the nation felt their survival was threatened, and everyone suffered for it - most especially the troops killed and wounded, but everyone here paid a price. We spent the last decade at war, and that whole time taxes were near a hundred year low and were not increased. We're facing a debt crisis and economic crisis we built because in the last decade our transition from a democracy to an oligarchy shifted into high gear and somehow half the population has been conned into thinking social costs shouldn't be funded by taxes.
The changes you advocate are absurd. If you really believe in them, emigrate to China and go work in one of their sweat shops. Your "survival of the fittest" plans are convenient when you're certain you won't be one of the ones fed to the wolves.
I've read most of it, but I have had problems understanding parts of it. I'm still working on it.
Since mankind has been struggling with devising a proper economics system since the dawn of time, it will take a lot of thought before I give this my unreserved approval. It doesn't help that the guy attributes some of the ideas he opposes to a Jewish conspiracy. I'll examine the rest of his arguments on their own merits, but even if I do agree with him it's going to be damn difficult to convince anyone else to take him seriously on those grounds.
Well, the Ayn Rand solution is that if that really is such a problem, then you and like-minded people can fix it with your own money.
But she sees no moral obligation to help others. I disagree with that. "Charity is optional" is a philosophy only popular with the people who would not be dead for lack of charity, and who are naive enough to believe they could never require it.
I have. You'll need to move in with someone who already has an apartment for a few weeks at least.
And if you don't know anyone who will let you move in? Then what?
I have solutions to that little problem: a) drop minimum wage or eliminate it completely, b) drop the tax benefit for employee health care, c) cut social security taxes (and benefits).
1. Try to survive on minimum wage, without relying upon a social support network (because many people don't have one). You will fail. 2. the right to "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" means that citizens should have health care through some means or another. 3. The people collecting Social Security already paid tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars into it, you can't take it away from them now.
A race to the bottom against the Chinese is not the answer. Allowing industrial companies to poison drinking water instead of disposing of chemicals properly will make production cheaper. Removing worker safety regulations will make production cheaper. Removing labor laws related to 40 hour work weeks and child labor will make production cheaper. You really want that world?
I'll take a look at the book, thanks. Something else I've been looking at is "Participatory Economics". For all I know that's derived from the document in your link, I haven't read through it yet.
In any event, I think history has demonstrated that unfettered socialism leads to things like the Stalinist purges of millions of Russians. History has also demonstrated that unfettered capitalism leads to things like debt slavery and oligarchy - the people with the most money buy their way into the government, and then put the fetters back onto the market so that it works in their favor - that's the direction the US has been heading in for the past 30 years.
I haven't read The Fountainhead, I read three of her non-fiction books and Atlas Shrugged. But as I wrote further up in the discussion ( http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3035653&cid=40941475 ), there's more than luck involved - the success of capitalists is built upon a functioning, safe society - roads, police, educated populace, military protection, safe drinking water, safe breathable air, courts, prisons, etc... and that success is also built with the use of research funded by the government (for example computers and the internet both started as government-funded projects). All of that is expensive, and it needs to be funded somehow - why not make the people who benefit the most from this infrastructure pay the most back to support it?
I realize pure socialism can't work. If you take everything from every person and try to redistribute it, you destroy the incentive to work and you turn the persons in charge of redistribution into dictators. But it is completely reasonable to demand that people who benefit from a functioning society help pay to support it.
Really? I read Atlas Shrugged, Capitalism: An Unknown Ideal, For the New Intellectual, and The Virtue of Selfishness. I think that qualifies me to make a comment.
No, you are frankly blind to the reality. You can't make your own luck if you're dead. You can't make your own luck if you're crippled by injury or disease. And the chances that you'll have the knowledge and determination required to make your own luck with that knowledge and determination arising out of nothing are near zero. Almost every great successful businessman or scientist had at least one teacher, parent, friend, colleague, coach, or supervisor that instilled in them the value of hard work and ambition - so the great luck in their life was getting that mentor. Every successful person has their success more from luck than anything else.
There is not always a way to work out of a rat's nest. If you're too sick to work, "working your way out" is not possible. If you have to care for sick family members or friends, or children ( say for example you have an idiot brother that impregnated a woman and then abandoned the child - he shirked his responsibility to care for the kid, and now your chances at making a good career for yourself are shot because you are obligated to care for the family member ). If you live in Detroit, or a rural area, the job opportunities may be very poor and you lack the resources to move. Try moving a 500 miles in search of work and finding a landlord that will rent you an apartment before you found a job. And the job market today is hard and it's getting harder - there are far fewer good opportunities than there are motivated, educated individuals.
You said yourself, "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness". That first freedom requires access to food, shelter, and medical care, and somebody has to pay for it.
Pick a successful, moral capitalist. For the sake of argument, I'll call him, say, John Galt. He was probably educated in a public school. Some of the people he worked with, worked for, or conducted business with were educated in public schools. He communicates over networks managed by the government. He conducts commerce over road and rail that are funded by the government. He can only do business deals because there is a court system for adjudicating contracts, and that court system is funded by the government. The air he breathes and the water he drinks are free of poisons because there is a government agency dedicated to managing air and water quality. He probably uses computers and the internet in some aspect of his business, and those were creations of government research programs and the government continues to fund research in many areas. He is protected from harm by police, fire departments, a prosecution system, and a prison system all managed by the government.
That government is run by people we elect and funded by us through our taxes. No heroic capitalist, even John Galt, can be successful without it. So yes, the people who benefited the most from this giant interwoven network of public institutions that enables them to make their fortune do deserve to pay the most to support the people less likely and to make sure the system still works for the next round of motivated entrepreneurs.
Now on the other hand, I genuinely understand your last set of points. It's what originally drew me to Objectivism - I was frustrated with the idea that no matter how much I did for others, it was never enough. Where do you draw the line? 10% of income to charity? Why not 11%? Why not 12%? Why not 100%? I don't know the answer, and I hate that there is no easy, logical rule to apply that lets you know exactly when you are doing enough charity and can rest easy. But Ayn Rand's solution, "Fuck you all, I am never morally obligated to do a damn thing for anyone else at any time for any reason, I only help others when I feel like it." is no solution, it's the ethical equivalent of throwing a temper tantrum and running to your room the first time Mom asks you to wash some of your own laundry. I don't have the answer, and it's an important question. But her answer, like the answer from those that believe in reincarnation, is just an excuse to ignore the humanity in others and the social ties that bind us all together.
She did not oppose it, but she did not encourage it or consider it to be virtuous in any way. So Dagny Taggert and John Galt (two of her biggest heroes) could walk past starving children with, in her view, a clear conscience.
If private charity was enough to solve problems of starvation and inadequate medical care in the United States, the problem would have been solved already. It was not, so clearly something else needs to be done. That doesn't mean we should write our politicians a blank check to tackle the problem, they can abuse their power or make well intentioned awful decisions very easily. But it is not acceptable to assert that we should simply let natural selection take its course and have no obligation to fix it, as if unlucky Americans have a right to liberty and the pursuit of happiness but not life itself.
My favorite science fiction story of all time is "Gold at Starbow's End" by Frederick Pohl. I find him uneven, I dislike some of this books a lot. But that one and a few others were, I think really fun and totally different from any other Sci Fi I had encountered.
I enjoy his writings a lot, but they're just very good mystery novels with a few science fiction concept novelties set in space. I like them, I own most of them, but I wouldn't consider McDevitt groundbreaking in any way.
Ayn Rand used strawman fallacy arguments, ad hominem attacks, and false dilemmas to make greed in capitalism look heroic and power-mongering by religions and socialist groups to be criminal. In reality, there are vicious criminals in capitalism as well as socialism and religion - people don't change, weapons just evolve.
But her real con was convincing people that when someone else is suffering, you have no moral obligation to help them out. It's the same bullshit as reincarnation spun a different way. If an Objectivist tries to help the poor, the sick, the injured, the uneducated, etc... he's betraying capitalism and preventing the free trade of the markets from leading the most moral people to success. So while it's not technically evil for him to do it, he has no obligation. The person who believes in reincarnation has no need to help others, because any pain they have in this life will be offset by a happier future life. Either way, it's a fancy justification for saying, "I got lucky in this life, everyone else can go fuck themselves."
I don't care who you are, your success is more luck than anything. Maybe you were born to great parents. Maybe you had a wonderful teacher or career mentor in your chosen field. Maybe you got lucky with your social networking skills (in the non-Facebook sense) and your career skyrocketed that way. Maybe you stumbled across a book or website or meditation practice that taught you the self-discipline to succeed. Most of all, you didn't die of communicable diseases, of cancer, in a car accident. No matter how much work you did to reach your current success, luck is more than 50% of the picture. The Objectivist fantasy that you owe society and the rest of humanity nothing in return is an absurdity.
Society needs to allow hard work to be rewarded, or it will collapse - that's why pure socialism will never work. But this idea that everyone with a hard life somehow earned their pain and does not deserve help from the lucky is nonsense.
With respect to patents, the system is so screwed up that I'm confident Microsoft could dig up patents it's filed in the past 10 years and apply them to code they wrote 20 or 30 years ago.
The judge in the Oracle vs. Google case was very careful to state that any decision made was specific to that case and not copyright in general. Plus the judge in the Oracle vs. Google case was an entry level federal judge, so any precedent his court decisions set is relatively easy to overturn on appeal. If for example a higher tier court or of course the US Supreme Court made the decision, it would almost impossible to have it reversed.
Last but not least, Java has a quasi-open standard that anyone is free to implement (even if they have to pay Oracle a fucking fortune to get access to the test kit required to verify that a particular implementation of the Java Virtual Machine can legally use the 'Java' name), Microsoft's Win32 APIs do not have any similar open standard.
I'm not trying to play Microsoft FUD-monkey. I just figure that if ReactOS ever became a drop-in replacement for Win32, Microsoft would stand to lose billions of dollars in revenue. That would give them every incentive in the world to pull out all the stops to shut it down.
For free software you forgot Hadoop, which has Yahoo! as its biggest contributor and arguably is the most successful open source project they supported.
Variety is good. I'm hopeful that Yahoo can survive for the reasons you state.
Slashdot Mirror
No, he's saying that new technologies are introduced in luxury products and then gradually become mainstream. In cars that was true of power-adjustable seats, power windows, stability control, side curtain airbags, automatic transmissions with more than four gears, automatic transmissions that use electronic clutches instead of a torque converter (like the Audi DSG - first available on their top models, now available on some cars that cost less than $30,000), touch screen systems, DVD players, and so forth.
Likewise the Tesla Roadster was $100,000. The Model S starts at $57,500 before tax incentives, although if you purchase a charging station and a few other features it will probably really cost closer to $65,000. The longest range version of the Model S starts around $75,000 although you can add luxury and high performance features to drive the cost up to $100,000. Hopefully Tesla gets better at managing their production processes and high sales volume, technological advances, and (if we are lucky) competition between component vendors will all drive down their costs. Maybe in five years the successor to the Model S will deliver an equivalent product to their current $75,000 version for $50,000.
Even at $75,000, if the battery pack can maintain 75% of its charge up to 200,000 miles it's about as cost-effective to own as a $55,000 sedan with equivalent performance and a traditional gasoline engine. The Tesla Model S requires about 0.3 kwh of charging per mile driven, so as long as the price of electricity rises more slowly than the price of gasoline the long term savings are good. On the other hand, if you're looking to save money it will never pay off compared to a used car or a new Prius (or even a new Fiat 500, Honda Civic, etc... ) but of course those vehicles are substantially slower.
Azure now offers the ability to rent Linux servers. Obviously that means you would be using Windows Azure as an "Infrastrustructure As A Service" instead of "Platform As A Service", but that would stop you from being locked in. Plus I like the idea of giving Microsoft money for offering free software virtual servers. I don't like it as much as the idea of Microsoft going out of business, but if that happens it won't be soon (even with Windows 8 on the horizon).
I think the distaste for App Engine came when Google bumped the prices. Everyone knew it was coming, but they still expected their favorite tech company to let them have peace and butterflies forever.
I'm not sure about the distaste for Amazon, though - I've heard from friends who work at their warehouses that they run you ragged and generally treat you poorly ( do a web search on all the hospitalizations for heat exhaustion at the Amazon warehouse in Allentown, Pennsylvania ). But to my knowledge, AWS customers are generally satisfied.
Awesome, sorry I don't have any mod points. It reminds me of this: http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2010/07/wikileaks-to-leak-5000-open-source-java.html
Getting things done in C++ is comparatively easy. If you can learn C, you can learn C++.
On the other hand, maintaining someone else's code in C++ is a crap shoot - just like it is in heavily macro'ed C, just like it is in poorly written Perl. The danger with any overly complex language with tons of features is that the codebase you're looking at could use corners of the language you personally know poorly or not at all.
The people working on GCC are compiling C++, I'm sure they know every corner of the C++ language as well as Larry Wall knows Perl and Guido van Rossum knows Python. So this is not a problem for them.
In any domain where getting speed on par with well-written C is not a priority, I would suggest a language with fewer special features.
The Java community is working around some of the design flaws in the language related to exceptions. As you probably know, RuntimeExceptions don't have to be declared or explicitly caught with try/catch, unless the developer wants to catch them. So I've seen tons of code in different open source libraries that wraps the core Java libraries with code that does try { doSomethingWithCoreJavaLibrary(); } catch (Exception ex) { throw new RuntimeException(ex); }
;)
Java keeps evolving, they keep adding new features and offering simpler syntax for common tasks. Maybe by version 11 or 12 it will be a language that won't make experienced Python, Ruby, Perl, and Lisp developers get sick to their stomach just reading it.
C++ is awesomely powerful, incredibly fast and resource efficient, and between new high performance applications and existing codebases it will continue to be used for decades.
However, it also has a beastly learning curve and lots of corner cases, and while its execution speed is wonderful it's so complex that compilation times for non-trivial applications are slower than equivalent feature (but slower execution) applications written in most other languages. If you really need performance that only C++ can provide, use C++. If you have a team of brilliant C++ developers, use C++.
If you don't have either of those needs, you owe it to yourself to investigate alternatives.
I'm sure the people working on GCC are C++ experts, so I think that's a place where C++ is an optimal or nearly optimal choice.
If you have a fire at your local location, you can still lose everything. The point of backups is to have at least one valid copy of the data survive any given catastrophe. So if my encrypted files are in Amazon's S3 storage on the west coast and my local copies are at my house on the east coast, one copy can be totally destroyed and I just recreate it from the other. The odds of both copies getting destroyed at the same time are very low - but if you're that paranoid, invest in a second cloud backup solution hosted by a different provider in another part of the world (Europe, Asia, etc...).
If you're going to use the cloud, investigate TNO (Trust No One) solutions - options where the data is encrypted on your computer and uploaded to the cloud, and the cloud hosting provider does not have access to the decryption key. If you want to do it yourself, use GnuPG or 7-zip to encrypt the file, and then put the file into the folder that gets automatically synced to DropBox or SkyDrive or Ubuntu One or whatever. As long as you don't upload your decryption key or password, nobody should be able to read your data. Just make sure to keep safe backups of your decryption keys and passwords.
Some cloud storage plans claim to have a complete TNO architecture, like SpiderOak - the way I understand it is that you create a password on your computer, and it hashes it. That first hash is used to encrypt your files. Then it concatenates that hash plus the password and hashes it again, and the second hash is your authentication token to SpiderOak servers so it permits files to be uploaded and downloaded. SpiderOak's servers hold your encrypted files and the second hash, but since they never get the first hash and hashing algorithms are one-way by definition (given a particular input you can recreate the output, but given a particular output you can't recreate the input it came from), they can't decrypt your data. However, while SpiderOak open sources most of their code, they haven't open sourced their encryption code so it's always possible they're lying.
My ancestors worked the coal mines before the labor strikes - I grew up learning history about thousands of people killed due to unsafe working conditions, armed thugs sitting right inside the voting both to make sure everyone voted for the candidates personally selected by the local robber baron, and lives as indentured servants in perpetual debt to the company store. The ancient Egyptians made some of their greatest accomplishments on the backs of thousands of slaves - that doesn't mean their economic system should be modeled or admired.
Eliminating minimum wage and giving the person the choice between starving to death slowly on $3 per hour instead of starving to death rapidly on $0 per hour is not ethical and cannot be permitted - using supply and demand to exploit starving people for cheap labor is wrong, period.
As I've said many times before, and I will repeat now - the economy functioned fine 40 years ago when the wealthiest Americans paid twice as much tax as they do today. When we were at war in 1944 the highest tax bracket was over 80% - contrast that to the 15% long term capital gains tax on the wealthiest people today even while we were at war. This isn't a fair economy or an opportunity for people to follow the American Dream, it's an oligarchy: people who already have tons of wealth can accumulate additional wealth far faster than anyone earning a salary (instead of benefitting from long term investments) can gain wealth.
In the PA coal region, where I grew up and most of my family still resides, the job opportunities are nil. So I have relatives with good work histories looking for work and getting offered minimum wage, part time, swing shifts - so gross pay is maybe $150 per week and their schedule prevents them from taking a second minimum wage job elsewhere. And promotion options are poor, because if you demand an extra $10 per week from your employer they can replace you with someone else that's desperate to get off unemployment.
The type of economy you're describing already exists, and it's fueled by illegal aliens - some tiny percentage of them are taking legal jobs from US citizens, but most of them are used as day laborers paid subsistence wages. They live three or five or fifteen in single person apartments. If they get hurt, they are dumped from the labor force and left to beg for help. And if someone tries to demand safer treatment or more pay, they are replaced by someone else more desperate. That's your ideal economy?
The United States had a period when capitalism was unfettered, it was the 19th century. The robber barons bought their local governments and police agencies, and employees were worked to death or put into perpetual debt slavery, or both. That's not the goal.
You survived by minimum wage completely on your own? Really? I'd like the details. I couldn't pay my car insurance and fuel for my commute on minimum wage. I couldn't pay rent and utilities on a one bedroom apartment on minimum wage in my area. In most of the country it is not enough to provide food, shelter, and transport to work - let alone medical coverage.
I realize that the Declaration of Independence has no specific legal impact. But the point is that this country secures freedoms for all of its citizens. It's a social contract, and starting about a hundred years ago with Teddy Roosevelt and gradually increasing with time is the public, national sense that our attitude towards among us that need help should be something other than "too bad".
We don't have bigger needs than worrying whether grannie eats cat food. If I have to choose between putting taxes on wealthy Americans - at 1980s levels or 1960s levels versus letting people starve, I'll vote for the tax and pay it without hesitation. Telling the people who paid into the program that we decided not to support them is immoral. It's also going to cause an awful lot of civil unrest - and maybe you like the idea of trying to get the national guard to gun down angry grandparents, but I don't.
In World War 2 the top tax brackets in the US was over 80%. The people of the nation felt their survival was threatened, and everyone suffered for it - most especially the troops killed and wounded, but everyone here paid a price. We spent the last decade at war, and that whole time taxes were near a hundred year low and were not increased. We're facing a debt crisis and economic crisis we built because in the last decade our transition from a democracy to an oligarchy shifted into high gear and somehow half the population has been conned into thinking social costs shouldn't be funded by taxes.
The changes you advocate are absurd. If you really believe in them, emigrate to China and go work in one of their sweat shops. Your "survival of the fittest" plans are convenient when you're certain you won't be one of the ones fed to the wolves.
I've read most of it, but I have had problems understanding parts of it. I'm still working on it.
Since mankind has been struggling with devising a proper economics system since the dawn of time, it will take a lot of thought before I give this my unreserved approval. It doesn't help that the guy attributes some of the ideas he opposes to a Jewish conspiracy. I'll examine the rest of his arguments on their own merits, but even if I do agree with him it's going to be damn difficult to convince anyone else to take him seriously on those grounds.
Well, the Ayn Rand solution is that if that really is such a problem, then you and like-minded people can fix it with your own money.
But she sees no moral obligation to help others. I disagree with that. "Charity is optional" is a philosophy only popular with the people who would not be dead for lack of charity, and who are naive enough to believe they could never require it.
I have. You'll need to move in with someone who already has an apartment for a few weeks at least.
And if you don't know anyone who will let you move in? Then what?
I have solutions to that little problem: a) drop minimum wage or eliminate it completely, b) drop the tax benefit for employee health care, c) cut social security taxes (and benefits).
1. Try to survive on minimum wage, without relying upon a social support network (because many people don't have one). You will fail. 2. the right to "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" means that citizens should have health care through some means or another. 3. The people collecting Social Security already paid tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars into it, you can't take it away from them now.
A race to the bottom against the Chinese is not the answer. Allowing industrial companies to poison drinking water instead of disposing of chemicals properly will make production cheaper. Removing worker safety regulations will make production cheaper. Removing labor laws related to 40 hour work weeks and child labor will make production cheaper. You really want that world?
I'll take a look at the book, thanks. Something else I've been looking at is "Participatory Economics". For all I know that's derived from the document in your link, I haven't read through it yet.
In any event, I think history has demonstrated that unfettered socialism leads to things like the Stalinist purges of millions of Russians. History has also demonstrated that unfettered capitalism leads to things like debt slavery and oligarchy - the people with the most money buy their way into the government, and then put the fetters back onto the market so that it works in their favor - that's the direction the US has been heading in for the past 30 years.
I haven't read The Fountainhead, I read three of her non-fiction books and Atlas Shrugged. But as I wrote further up in the discussion ( http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3035653&cid=40941475 ), there's more than luck involved - the success of capitalists is built upon a functioning, safe society - roads, police, educated populace, military protection, safe drinking water, safe breathable air, courts, prisons, etc... and that success is also built with the use of research funded by the government (for example computers and the internet both started as government-funded projects). All of that is expensive, and it needs to be funded somehow - why not make the people who benefit the most from this infrastructure pay the most back to support it?
I realize pure socialism can't work. If you take everything from every person and try to redistribute it, you destroy the incentive to work and you turn the persons in charge of redistribution into dictators. But it is completely reasonable to demand that people who benefit from a functioning society help pay to support it.
Really? I read Atlas Shrugged, Capitalism: An Unknown Ideal, For the New Intellectual, and The Virtue of Selfishness. I think that qualifies me to make a comment.
No, you are frankly blind to the reality. You can't make your own luck if you're dead. You can't make your own luck if you're crippled by injury or disease. And the chances that you'll have the knowledge and determination required to make your own luck with that knowledge and determination arising out of nothing are near zero. Almost every great successful businessman or scientist had at least one teacher, parent, friend, colleague, coach, or supervisor that instilled in them the value of hard work and ambition - so the great luck in their life was getting that mentor. Every successful person has their success more from luck than anything else.
There is not always a way to work out of a rat's nest. If you're too sick to work, "working your way out" is not possible. If you have to care for sick family members or friends, or children ( say for example you have an idiot brother that impregnated a woman and then abandoned the child - he shirked his responsibility to care for the kid, and now your chances at making a good career for yourself are shot because you are obligated to care for the family member ). If you live in Detroit, or a rural area, the job opportunities may be very poor and you lack the resources to move. Try moving a 500 miles in search of work and finding a landlord that will rent you an apartment before you found a job. And the job market today is hard and it's getting harder - there are far fewer good opportunities than there are motivated, educated individuals.
You said yourself, "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness". That first freedom requires access to food, shelter, and medical care, and somebody has to pay for it.
Pick a successful, moral capitalist. For the sake of argument, I'll call him, say, John Galt. He was probably educated in a public school. Some of the people he worked with, worked for, or conducted business with were educated in public schools. He communicates over networks managed by the government. He conducts commerce over road and rail that are funded by the government. He can only do business deals because there is a court system for adjudicating contracts, and that court system is funded by the government. The air he breathes and the water he drinks are free of poisons because there is a government agency dedicated to managing air and water quality. He probably uses computers and the internet in some aspect of his business, and those were creations of government research programs and the government continues to fund research in many areas. He is protected from harm by police, fire departments, a prosecution system, and a prison system all managed by the government.
That government is run by people we elect and funded by us through our taxes. No heroic capitalist, even John Galt, can be successful without it. So yes, the people who benefited the most from this giant interwoven network of public institutions that enables them to make their fortune do deserve to pay the most to support the people less likely and to make sure the system still works for the next round of motivated entrepreneurs.
Now on the other hand, I genuinely understand your last set of points. It's what originally drew me to Objectivism - I was frustrated with the idea that no matter how much I did for others, it was never enough. Where do you draw the line? 10% of income to charity? Why not 11%? Why not 12%? Why not 100%? I don't know the answer, and I hate that there is no easy, logical rule to apply that lets you know exactly when you are doing enough charity and can rest easy. But Ayn Rand's solution, "Fuck you all, I am never morally obligated to do a damn thing for anyone else at any time for any reason, I only help others when I feel like it." is no solution, it's the ethical equivalent of throwing a temper tantrum and running to your room the first time Mom asks you to wash some of your own laundry. I don't have the answer, and it's an important question. But her answer, like the answer from those that believe in reincarnation, is just an excuse to ignore the humanity in others and the social ties that bind us all together.
She did not oppose it, but she did not encourage it or consider it to be virtuous in any way. So Dagny Taggert and John Galt (two of her biggest heroes) could walk past starving children with, in her view, a clear conscience.
If private charity was enough to solve problems of starvation and inadequate medical care in the United States, the problem would have been solved already. It was not, so clearly something else needs to be done. That doesn't mean we should write our politicians a blank check to tackle the problem, they can abuse their power or make well intentioned awful decisions very easily. But it is not acceptable to assert that we should simply let natural selection take its course and have no obligation to fix it, as if unlucky Americans have a right to liberty and the pursuit of happiness but not life itself.
I like Pohl too, although I think some of his stuff is awesome and some is boring.
My favorite science fiction story of all time is "Gold at Starbow's End" by Frederick Pohl. I find him uneven, I dislike some of this books a lot. But that one and a few others were, I think really fun and totally different from any other Sci Fi I had encountered.
I enjoy his writings a lot, but they're just very good mystery novels with a few science fiction concept novelties set in space. I like them, I own most of them, but I wouldn't consider McDevitt groundbreaking in any way.
Ayn Rand used strawman fallacy arguments, ad hominem attacks, and false dilemmas to make greed in capitalism look heroic and power-mongering by religions and socialist groups to be criminal. In reality, there are vicious criminals in capitalism as well as socialism and religion - people don't change, weapons just evolve.
But her real con was convincing people that when someone else is suffering, you have no moral obligation to help them out. It's the same bullshit as reincarnation spun a different way. If an Objectivist tries to help the poor, the sick, the injured, the uneducated, etc... he's betraying capitalism and preventing the free trade of the markets from leading the most moral people to success. So while it's not technically evil for him to do it, he has no obligation. The person who believes in reincarnation has no need to help others, because any pain they have in this life will be offset by a happier future life. Either way, it's a fancy justification for saying, "I got lucky in this life, everyone else can go fuck themselves."
I don't care who you are, your success is more luck than anything. Maybe you were born to great parents. Maybe you had a wonderful teacher or career mentor in your chosen field. Maybe you got lucky with your social networking skills (in the non-Facebook sense) and your career skyrocketed that way. Maybe you stumbled across a book or website or meditation practice that taught you the self-discipline to succeed. Most of all, you didn't die of communicable diseases, of cancer, in a car accident. No matter how much work you did to reach your current success, luck is more than 50% of the picture. The Objectivist fantasy that you owe society and the rest of humanity nothing in return is an absurdity.
Society needs to allow hard work to be rewarded, or it will collapse - that's why pure socialism will never work. But this idea that everyone with a hard life somehow earned their pain and does not deserve help from the lucky is nonsense.
With respect to patents, the system is so screwed up that I'm confident Microsoft could dig up patents it's filed in the past 10 years and apply them to code they wrote 20 or 30 years ago.
The judge in the Oracle vs. Google case was very careful to state that any decision made was specific to that case and not copyright in general. Plus the judge in the Oracle vs. Google case was an entry level federal judge, so any precedent his court decisions set is relatively easy to overturn on appeal. If for example a higher tier court or of course the US Supreme Court made the decision, it would almost impossible to have it reversed.
Last but not least, Java has a quasi-open standard that anyone is free to implement (even if they have to pay Oracle a fucking fortune to get access to the test kit required to verify that a particular implementation of the Java Virtual Machine can legally use the 'Java' name), Microsoft's Win32 APIs do not have any similar open standard.
I'm not trying to play Microsoft FUD-monkey. I just figure that if ReactOS ever became a drop-in replacement for Win32, Microsoft would stand to lose billions of dollars in revenue. That would give them every incentive in the world to pull out all the stops to shut it down.
For free software you forgot Hadoop, which has Yahoo! as its biggest contributor and arguably is the most successful open source project they supported.
Variety is good. I'm hopeful that Yahoo can survive for the reasons you state.