Fire increases entropy all around. When a log burns in a room, the entropy of the ashes left over is greater than the entropy of the unburned wood, the entropy of the carbon oxides and water vapor in the air is greater than the unbound oxygen, and as a result there is a lot more heat everywhere.
Life reduces entropy in some area, even though it can only do that by increasing entropy in another area. An aerobic organism is basically a fire-based life form, and yes it takes in carbohydrates and oxygen from the environment and outputs carbon oxides and water and heat, increasing the total entropy, but as a byproduct of that process the interior of the cell itself becomes less entropic. Not enough to completely counter the increase of entropy elsewhere, so overall entropy still increases, but there is nevertheless a local decrease, unlike with fire.
Life is limited not only by the available energy it has to consume, but by the available space it has to dump the entropy it pumps out of itself. Not enough food, or too much waste, and it will starve or be smothered.
Without disputing that there is no consensus on the definition of life, I am of the opinion that there is a possible definition which includes everything we take to be alive and nothing we reasonably shouldn't take to be alive. It is in terms of thermodynamics, specifically entropy.
Let us define mechanical work as "productive" upon some system when it changes the said system to a state which is less entropic. We can then say that a machine X is productive upon some other system Y when the product of its work is a decrease in the entropy of Y. There may be limited circumstances under which X is productive upon Y; to do work X will need some sort of energy flow through it, but not any energy flow will do. So for example, an electric machine which sorts and stacks coins coined can be said to be productive upon the coins when it is plugged in to an electrical circuit of the proper frequency and voltage, and turned on, and otherwise in its operating conditions, but not just when it is being heated, say.
With that out of the way, we can now define a system as "alive" when it is productive upon itself, or more simply define "life" as "self-productive machinery". The given conditions under which a given system is self-productive will of course be limited and vary, but those constitute the conditions under which a given system can live, which are also limited and vary.
Crystals, fire, and car batteries all seek lower-energy, higher-entropy states, and so are not life, though they might fuel life (like fire) or be instrumental in the construction of living things (like crystals).
Viruses, by this definition, can only live inside of more complicated cells, the way that a severely deformed baby might only live on life support, or humans in general can only live in an atmosphere of appropriate composition, temperature, and pressure, with sufficient water and appropriate chemical fuels available. A virus floating around by itself is dead, though under the right circumstances it can come to life (unlike humans, but that's because dead humans decay more readily than dead viruses, being big complex things instead of simple molecules). Spores and seeds likewise: not alive just sitting there inert, but alive when put into the conditions in which they grow. Prions I don't know enough about to say.
Mules are definitely alive, whether or not they are a viable species; reproduction is just one way for life to continue living, not a prerequisite for living at all.
The only really controversial part of this definition is that computers may count as alive, when plugged in and turned on etc, the same way that viruses may count as alive when inside another cell of the appropriate type. But that's only controversial because they are artificially constructed machines made from something other than the stuff we are made of. Artificially constructed organic nanomachines modelled after the ones we're built on are indisputably alive: artificial life, but life nonetheless. Computers differ only in being bigger, and made of different materials. Their information-processing functions certainly reduce the information entropy of their storage media.
This factor has the nice benefit to this definition of ensuring that intelligence, sentience, sapience, etc, are a proper subset of life; you can't have something which takes in information about the world around it and does something productive with it, without that thing being alive by this definition in the process.
The metaphor to gun control is not completely accurate, but you could be on the right track with it.
Regulating general computing is more analogous to regulating general commerce. We who complain about the threat of restricting what programs a computer may run because we might run something harmful are like shopkeepers complaining about the threat of having to vet every product they ever sell, or consumers having to vet every product they ever buy, because otherwise someone might buy or sell a gun.
Whether software that can do harm, or guns, should be regulated, or just the harmful actions they each can do, is a further question. Prior restraint of a general activity to prevent the potential possession of something that might be used for harm is the real issue.
Philosophers have devised, over the years, a number of relatively complex arguments for the existence of God. None of them is unarguably true...
I'd like to really emphasize this point by noting that in contemporary philosophy of religion, the pro-theist side of things isn't even trying to argue that God must exist. They're not even trying to argue that God *could* exist. The strongest point any practicing philosopher attempts to prove these days is that it's not irrational to consider that it might be possible that God exists; that, even though it might actually be false that God exists, even though it might even by physically or even metaphysically impossible that God exists, it is at the least not completely logically impossible that God exists, and so atheists can't win the debate a priori.
It's the equivalent of saying "Look, I'm not saying that I can prove there's a tea kettle orbiting the Earth one mile above my house; I'm not saying the evidence is in favor of the position that there's a tea kettle orbiting the Earth one mile above my house; I'm not saying I have any evidence at all that there's a tea kettle orbiting the Earth one mile above my house; I'm not saying that there *is* a tea kettle orbiting the Earth one mile above my house; I'm not even saying that there physically could be a tea kettle orbiting the Earth a mile above my house; but you can't prove with logic alone that there isn't one there, so it's not completely crazy to believe there is."
The debate is no longer between "God exists" vs "God does not exist"; it's between "We can conclusively prove that God as you construe him does not exist", and "N-not *conclusively*!"
You realize Satanists don't actually worship or even believe in the existence of Satan, right? They're basically anti-Christians, not only disbelieving the factuality of Christian claims, but more emphatically disputing the moral lessons of it, which they consider authoritarian and submissive, in favor of a more individualistic moral code. They just use an alternate character interpretation of the "villain" from their opponents' stories to make that point.
Compare (though it's not a perfect analogue) the use of "Xenu" by opponents to Scientology.
The problem with "leave it to the states" is that, though the effects of bad legislation are limited, the effects of good legislation are likewise limited. In a debate between "we should kill all kittens!" and "nobody should kill any kittens!", saying "lets let each group decide how many kittens they will kill" is practically siding with the "kill all kittens" camp, because you're leaving that camp to kill all the kittens they want, even if nobody else is killing any.
There are certainly some things that should be left up to individual or local choice, but those are precisely the kinds of things which there should not be laws about, leaving the right to do it or not in the hands of the people where it belongs. If there is something worth legislating, if there's a reason to say that this or that thing must be done (or must not be done), then it's worth saying that to everybody.
A compromise that I could see is, first, to return to the principle that everything is permitted which is not explicitly forbidden by law: laws are never to make something legal, as everything is legal by default, so every law is saying that you cannot do something (or refrain from doing something). Then, make it progressively more difficult to get a prohibition (law) passed at higher levels of government: it should be much easier to ban something in your city than in your state, and much easier to ban it in the state than in the whole country. But, conversely, each higher level has the power to protect the (to use a technical term) immunities of the people, their rights against the exercise of government power, by making legislation of a certain sort illegal within their jurisdiction. Thus, for example, by default smoking marijuana would be legal anywhere; most cities might choose to ban it; California may legislate that those bans are illegitimate, and thus every city in California would have its bans lifted. To counteract that, you would need to either convince California to change its mind, or convince the Federal government to pass a nation-wide ban, which would be much more difficult. But, conversely, if many cities and states are passing laws, say, obliging certain persons to remain on the property and obey the orders and be subject to the punishment of certain other persons (i.e. slavery), it should not be incredibly more difficult to get the Federal government to strike down all such laws than it would be to get a local city government to strike them down locally.
In other words, it should be hard to project power through the higher levels of government over the whole nation; but it should be easy to get relief at the highest levels from power projected at lower levels, thus favoring the status quo of liberty for all unless the issue is important enough to get the entire country behind it.
I think most people should minimize their use of cell phones in moving vehicles. Texting in a moving vehicle should almost never happen. Eating a burger in a moving vehicle also a pretty bad idea. Being drunk or otherwise inebriated in a moving vehicle is an extremely bad idea. So is being very tired, or angry, or otherwise out of your right state of mind for any reason.
But none of these things, per se, should be illegal. The reason why we make these things illegal is to cut back on something that they cause: reckless driving. The strength of the supposed justification for banning them is proportional to their correlation to reckless driving: the more frequently and the more extremely reckless peoples' driving becomes as a result of these things, the more we want to ban them.
But if we just enforce the laws that are already on the books about reckless driving (exceeding the speed of traffic or safe road conditions, following too closely, poor lane control, impeding the flow of traffic, etc), then we will punish people for doing these behaviors exactly in proportion to how frequently and extremely it makes them drive recklessly; and we will spare the people who defy the statistic and drive safely despite partaking in a behavior which has a strong but imperfect correlation with reckless driving.
Lets us say, hypothetically, there was some activity which had a 100% correlation to reckless driving. If people do this thing and then drive, or do this thing while driving, then absolutely 100% of the time their driving will be reckless. In that case, we'd certainly want to punish people who do this; but there would be no need to punish doing that activity per se, because everyone who does that activity would also be driving recklessly, so punishing reckless drivers would punish all of the people who do this activity.
Now lets say an activity has a 50% correlation with reckless driving, and that correlation is along gender lines: if men do this and drive, or do this while driving, then they will drive recklessly, every time; but women can do this and drive perfectly fine. In such a strange case, I imagine we would want to ban men from doing this activity and driving, but not women; but again, that would be unnecessary, because 100% of men (50% of the population) who do this and drive will be driving recklessly, so punishing reckless driving will punish all the men who do this activity.
Now lets say there's an activity which has a 50% correlation to reckless driving, but it's not along such clear lines. Maybe it's along some simple lines that are hard to tell at a glance, like blood type. Would we want to ban all people with a certain blood type from engaging in a certain activity because it might cause them to drive recklessly? And go out and test everybody's blood to tell who is or isn't allowed to do this and drive? Or wouldn't we just ban driving recklessly?
What if it wasn't one simple factor, but some complex combination of factors which 50% of the population happen to exhibit, and if you have this complex combination of factors and you do this activity, you will always drive recklessly; and if not, you won't? Would we ban doing this activity and driving if you have this complex combination of factors, and test for that? Or would we just ban driving recklessly, and let that catch them?
What if we didn't know what combination of factors contributed to it? Just, 50% of the population drive recklessly while/after engaging in this activity. We can't tell who will do it or not in advance, so we can't ban only those people who will be affected. Is 50% high enough to ban it for everybody? Half the people out there can do this and drive perfectly safely; the other half can't; do we punish half the population for doing something harmless just because we can't tell in advance whether or not it will be harmless? Or do we punish the people who end up doing the harmful thing as a result, i.e. driving recklessly, and leave the people who can do it harmlessly alone?
How do you find and remove from the road the drivers who are simply not paying attention?
Are they exceeding the speed of traffic? Are they following too closely? Are they impeding the flow of traffic? Exhibiting poor lane control? In short, are they driving dangerously?
They can rent it to people [...] [E]ither they're selling it or they aren't. Selling a unit but retaining ownership rights is fraudulent to say the least.
This is somewhat tangential, but I'm fond of harping on the practice of rent (mostly focused on other contexts) for exactly the reasons you describe here: either you sell something, and it's no longer yours and you have no rights in it and whoever you sold it to can do whatever they want with it for however long they like; or you don't sell it, and it's yours and nobody else has any rights in it and you can exclude anybody from using it however you like whenever you like. Isn't rental in general precisely "Selling a unit but retaining ownership rights", and doesn't the fraudulence of that speak against the practice? In other words, if Sony et al kept doing exactly what they're trying to do now and just called it "rental" instead of "purchase", how would that make it any better?
Corporatism does not refer to "corporations" in the sense that we use that term now. It refers specifically to the collusion between business and government, acting together as a single body ("corpus"). It is "socialism" (in the sense that that term is used as the antithesis of free markets) without the egalitarian bent, and was famously promoted by Mussolini who claimed that it was a better name for his style of government than "fascism".
We already have a concept of payment terms which are not tied to interest. E.g. you receive an item with an invoice due in 30 days, or 60 days, or due upon receipt (the default for point-of-sale purchases). If you do not pay on the agreed-upon terms, you have stolen that item. So if I'm buying a $500 item, maybe $100 is due upon receipt, $100 is due in 30 days, $100 is due in 60 days, $100 is due in 90 days, and $100 is due in 120 days. Lots of "As Seen On TV" items are already sold this way ("buy now for just five easy payments of $39.95...") The agreed-upon price may be dependent upon the agreed-upon terms: the store may advertise that I can buy this for $500 in five $100 installations, or buy it for $400 now.
The difference between this and interest is that if I fail to pay, I don't just sink into a deeper hole of debt by accumulating interest: I've stolen the item. I took something on the agreement that I would pay a certain price for it on certain terms, and then failed to do so. So the police can come and take it (or an equivalent value if it's gone) back from me, and return it to the rightful owner; but, I am also due back the payments I have already made. If I walk into a convenience store, buy a $5 item, plop down $2 and try to walk out the door but he stops me, I've got two options: either I give him another $3, in which case I've bought the item and am free to go, or I give back the item, in which case he gives me back me $2. If I walk out with the item without paying full price, I'm stealing from him; but if he keeps the item and the partial payment, then he's stealing from me.
If every seller doesn't want to deal with negotiating terms, banks can perform a service similar to the venture capitalists I described before: the bank buys the thing, and then they sell it to you on delayed terms.
Right, because people who can only afford to rent can DEFINITELY afford to buy, right?
You seem to have missed the main point that eliminating the rental option forces the purchase option to be on more reasonable terms, because property owners aren't just going to sit on their unused property and let it rot when they could sell it for a profit (just not the same profit they could rent it for). The entire aim of this is to make it so that more people can buy.
I've addressed most of your points extensively in replies to other posts in this thread so I won't cover them again here. But:
And apartment owners [...] will just have to eat it and sell off everything they have, putting them out of a job and a livelihood
Owning something and collecting fees for other people using it is not a job, it's parasitism. The inability to do so is literally what defines "working class". Abolishing rent would force the owners to get jobs and work for a living. They could, for example, buy and sell homes (solving the liquidity problem you're so concerned about, a useful service they could perform at a profit), and/or sell home maintenance services (another useful service people would probably pay for).
And yes, it's such a wealth collector because renters owners are just LOADED, aren't they?
You yourself are the one pointing out how few people can afford to buy houses, so if someone not only owns their own house that they live in but also owns others that they can charge other people to live in, then yeah, I'd call that pretty loaded. There are certainly wide degrees of "loaded", but if you own a house you are definitely not poor by any means, and if you own more houses than you can use (i.e. at least two) then I'd say that puts you into the "loaded" category. It puts you into the category of people who can profit just from owning certain assets, at least, which is the definitional distinction between "working class" and "capitalist".
I live in Santa Barbara, one of the single most expensive places in the United States (apparently in the top ten according to a quick Google search). The median home price here is over a million dollars.
I've gotten by quite comfortably making under $25k a year; I am "richer" than most of my peers, in terms of savings, despite having been below the federal poverty line for most of my life. And I'm not even as frugal as I could be: I eat out nearly every day, for instance, when I could be saving by cooking at home. But somehow I seem to be more frugal than everybody else who is balls-deep in debt despite making more than I do. I don't know what they spend it all on. New cars, expensive toys, alcohol? I drive used cars, run an old computer despite being a techie, and don't blow my paychecks trying to make every weekend one I'll never remember.
If I could be making a more-average income of $50k a year, I would stand a reasonable chance of paying off a low-end home, even here in one of the most expensive places in the country, by the time I retire, while continuing my current comfortable-enough lifestyle the whole while. If I had a family to support, I would also have a second income from my spouse which would offset that cost.
If I was making $100k a year, I could buy an average house -- here, in one of the most-expensive places in the country -- well before I retired. If I was making a quarter million a year, I could buy my (currently unconceived) kids their own house by the time they graduate college, and give them the kind of cushy life I never had being born to a family with nothing.
I dunno what the fuck people are spending all their money on that could possibly make comfortable living on a six-figure income a stretch for them anywhere in the world, but jesus people, learn some restraint.
Well, as I am saying that leasing (just another word for renting) should not be happening to begin with, then with regards to housing I'm saying it should work like people who move from house to house before paying one off works now. You move into the house and start making payments on it; when you leave, you find someone else who wants to live where you are now, you get your equity in the first house back from them, and use it to start making payments on the new house. You may move from place to place, but the money you spend on housing doesn't vanish down a hole: it builds assets for you, and eventually you end up owning a whole house and don't have to keep paying for a place to live.
"Landlords" might choose to function in a fashion similar to my hypothetical Blockbuster video "rental" model I just detailed in this post: being a convenient local place to buy and sell from, and making money (leveraging that convenience to draw in customers) by buying back at a lower price than they sell for. They would basically become real estate agencies. That post also details how to cover the expense of upkeep and maintenance in a fairly simple fashion.
There is a complication here in that currently the existing homeowner is paid outright for the house he's selling out of a loan that the new buyer got, and uses that money to pay off the loan he used to buy the house to begin with, keeping the difference to use as a down payment on his new house. As in a rent-free market, large cash loans are unlikely to be given to individuals (lenders would have no interest in doing so - literally), things would have to work a little differently. The most straightforward method is payment terms other than "on delivery" (with prices offered varying by the terms). You would buy the house from its existing owner over time in monthly installments; basically, your "rent" in the house would build equity in the house for you. Then when you move, whoever you sell it to begins paying you off in the same fashion; you take that source of income and use it to finish paying off the old house, and then use your own existing income to start paying off the new one. Since you'd already been paying off the old one, you will pay that off before the person who bought it off you finishes paying you off, and eventually you will have a source of income from your equity in the old house which you can use to finish paying off the new one.
Of course, this leads to some complicated chains of who-owes-who, and this is somewhere that banks could step in and provide a service: you want to sell your old house and just sever all ties and not deal with paying it off while collecting from the new owners, so the bank can offer to buy your house from you right now (so you can pay off the old owner and take your equity straight to the new house) and then slowly collect from the new owner. They could turn a profit for this service by buying it from you for less than the intended new owner would; whether their lower price is worth the convenience of severing all ties like that is up to you. Banks could further involve themselves like this in the first place: you want to buy a house, but nobody wants to offer you terms on it other than due-upon-receipt, so you ask a bank to buy the house and then sell it to you with better terms - albiet, for a higher price. This would make the banks' investment similar to the venture capitalists' under my model as detailed in this reply to another sibling post.
You write:
i am sure the landlord would be happy to [sell the house]. unfortunately, you won't be able to afford the monthly payments required to make that happen.
and:
If you are just going to make being a landlord illegal, then a large percentage of the population of the world will become homeless. Most renters cannot afford to buy a house, or their cre
The system I advocate in place of rental is buy-and-sell-back. That is, take for example "renting" a DVD (not that anybody does that anymore): I would go down to Blockbuster a buy a DVD from them, keep it for as long as I want, and then when I'm done with it I would take it back to them and sell it back. Then they would resell it to the next customer and so on. Blockbuster's business model, like all used-goods dealers, would be in selling for more than they buy back. I could of course try to find someone else who would want to buy it back for more than Blockbuster would, but that would be the competitive force keeping Blockbuster's prices down, and they would be banking on their advantage of being a known, convenient place to buy and sell used DVDs at reasonable prices to bring me straight to them instead of me spending time searching all over for the best deal.
With this sort of model, how to handle things like maintenance and servicing is obvious: if I "rent" something from you and then "return" it in a damaged condition, you "charge me" to cover that damage; which is to say, if I buy it from you and then try to sell it back in a damaged condition, you offer less for the buy-back to cover that damage, because damaged goods are obviously worth less to you then undamaged ones.
Big-ticket items like cars which cannot be purchased outright on the spot and then sold back when you're done have an added complication about how to pay off things over time, which I'm about to address in response to a sibling post of yours...
I'm not sure I completely understand you, but it sounds like you're asking about how venture capital would be handled? I.e. how would small businesses get the money needed to get rolling?
I would say the best method under my rent-free market system would be shareholding. The entrepreneur creates a business, but needs to put money into it to make it go. The venture capitalist buys a big chunk of that business, on the bet that it will be worth more in the future and thus make him money. As the business takes off and begins bringing in money, the entrepreneur takes his share of the profits and, instead of using them to pay back the loan he would get under the current system, he uses it to buy back his business - for more than the initial price he got for it, as the business is now worth more than when it started, which is what made the investment worthwhile to the venture capitalist. The catch, where it differs from a lending-at-interest model, is that if the business is a failure and never brings in any money, the entrepreneur isn't left still on the hook to the venture capitalist: he loses his value in the company still, but the venture capitalist took a share of the risk along with a share of the potential gain when he bought into the company, so he loses his share of the value as well.
This, precisely, is why a home loan is the only kind of debt (excluding a credit card paid off in full every month to build a credit rating) I ever intend to take out.
The problem to be avoided is not so much debt per se, but the interest that inevitably comes with it. And not even just interest, but more what interest is a special case of: rent. Interest is rent on money. So if your options are to pay rent on a home for a period of time while you save up to buy a home, or to pay rent on money with which to buy a home now and then pay back the money over that same period of time, the question is simply which has the higher rent, the home or the money. And even in this lousy market, interest on a home loan is lower than the insane raw profits extracted by landlords renting out property.
Rent is where you pay someone a permanent fee for the temporary use of something and so, when the transaction is over, they have what they rented you back again and you are out that money. This is how wealth accumulates in the hands of the already-wealthy! They have what we need (homes, cash, whatever), and they can hang on to it and "let" us use it for a fee, which then gives them further assets to rent out and further their illegitimate income. If they did not have this option, if rental contracts were not upheld by the law, then those assets beyond which they could personally use would become worthless to them except as things to sell; and they'll only be able to sell them if they offered terms which other people, people who don't already have such things and are in the market for them, could afford.
Simply invalidating rent (having the government refrain from doing something) would "force", by free market forces alone, a voluntary redistribution of excess (unused) wealth from the 'haves' to the 'have-nots' on reasonable terms, by making such sales the option which is most in the 'haves' self-interest (either that or let their useless assets rot), after eliminating the illegitimate option of charging for something and then getting to keep it afterwards. This is the kind of solution people need to be looking for, addressing the systematic problems which cause wealth disparities to grow, not looking to patch the system and simply cover up the symptoms of it!
Except for all the coastal land between Los Angeles and San Francisco. The planned route for this track goes inland from the city centers at either end, through mostly nothing but cow country (and a handful of cities; Bakersfield, Fresno) outside the LA and SF metro areas.
I'm on the northern end of the Santa Barbara metro area, about a third of the way from LA to SF up the coast. Getting to downtown LA by train (and bus and otherwise not using a car) is a 6hr trip, to catch a 2hr train to SF. I haven't checked lately but I'm pretty sure slower trains from here to SF are less than 8hrs but still a good deal longer than the 2hrs you'd get from LA with this.
Of course getting to LA by car is less than a 2hr trip (in good traffic at least), but if I'm driving 2hrs south to catch a 2hr train ride north to SF, I might as well just drive the 4hrs north to SF.
It gets slightly better for the people slightly closer to LA, but say Oxnard (much bigger population center than Santa Barbara) to Union Station by public transit is still quite the ordeal, and driving straight north is still going to be a better deal. But then go further up the coast, to Santa Maria (again bigger than Santa Barbara), or to Morro Bay (almost equidistant between SF and LA), and there's no way using this train could make any sense to about half of the California coast.
Rene Descartes famously argued that conceivability entailed possibility, and then went on to claim to conceive of various nonsense things and conclude therefore that they were possible. "I conceive..." this "I conceive..." that, truly inconceivable things the lot of them, only nominally "conceivable". He keeps using that word. I do not think it means what he thinks it does.
It would also make him a 19 year old man when the United States entered World War II, and therefore he almost certainly has personally literally fought, with literal guns, against literal fascists of one sort or another. Having them now in his own government, telling him he can't continue saving lives with chemistry because some people might want to use his product indirectly to make something else to put in their own bodies and change their own neurochemistry, is probably the kind of nightmare he thought he was fighting to prevent all those decades ago.
Sounds nice. Be aware of over-relying on the screen edges to take advantage of Fitt's Law, though. Those only work for mouse and trackball on small screens but they offer little advantage for touchpads, touchscreens or users with big screens. For those, nothing substitutes having targets that are big.
Agreed that there's little speed advantage to reaching corners or edges without a mouse on a small screen, as "throwing" the cursor in their general direction is less of a factor: but there is definitely still a speed advantage to locating them on an edge or in a corner, as opposed to somewhere anywhere in between. As I'm using corners and edges for broad items that you might want to get at at any time but are never the thing you're directly working on, that location advantage could be very useful.
The things I have around the edges of the screen are: - Top edge, right side: "Accessories", a combination of system widgets, like you would find in the Windows taskbar tray or on the right side of a Mac menubar, and simple programs like clocks and calculators and other things you might find in something like the OSX "Dashboard". In the top-right corner is the general-purpose system control widget similar to the Apple menu or Start menu, though without the shortcut functionality of the Start menu or the old (pre-X) Apple menu. Directly below this area is a text area where system-wide information can be displayed; I'm not really clear what to put in here yet, but there is space for something given the rest of the design below... - Top edge, left side: tasks/programs, running or not, similar to the left side of the OSX dock or Windows 7 taskbar. Directly in the center of the top edge (on the right side of this area) is the task manager object. Directly below this is where all progress bars live (tasks in progress), showing only one until clicked. - Right edge, top side: devices, including hard disks, printers, scanners, etc, all represented as logical volumes. (e.g. copy a file to the printer to send it to the print queue, copy the image file out of the scanner to capture what's in the scanner bed, etc). In the middle of the right edge, at the bottom of this area, is a representation of the local network or workgroup, with all shared volumes visible inside it. - Right edge, bottom side: "scraps", like a multi-item clipboard: a temporary storage space for bits of content or whole files, where cut or copied items go and where pasted items come from. At the bottom of this, in the lower-right corner, is the trash can / recycle bin / non-look-and-feel-patent-infringing-disposal-device-icon. - Left edge, top side: The toolbar. This is where it gets a little weird by conventional UI standards: this UI is designed with document-centric computing in mind, inspired mostly by Apple's defunct OpenDoc project, and the whole left edge is dedicated to that. This top half is where content-creation tools, like a pen tool or brush tool or text tool or table tool or what have you, are available. At the top of it, in the top-left corner, is where the generic "cursor" tool lives. - Left edge, bottom side: What OpenDoc called "stationary". Blank filetype templates used to create new documents; in lieu of File -> New Whatever in some specific program, just drag a new file into existence somewhere. In the middle of the left edge, at the top of this section, is the New Folder stationary, for creating empty new folders. - Bottom edge, left side: aliases, shortcuts, bookmarks, whatever you want to call them, like the right-hand side of the OSX dock. In the lower left corner is the search widget, similar to OSX's Spotlight. Directly above this area is an address bar showing the filepath/url of the active window, and allowing you to type in a filepath/url to get directly to another resource if you like. - Bottom edge, right side: scripts, like shell scripts or AppleScripts or Photoshop actions, stored sequences of interface commands. In the center of the bottom edge, on the left side of this
I have some very limited mockups which basically exist to delineate what objects go along what edges of the desktop, but they don't say much about the touchable-single-button part of the interface.
A short explanation of how it's intended to work is that a single click (or touch) on any object which is not a direct button (so, a file or folder, say) pops up a contextual menu (I'm considering a radial menu layout, but haven't settled on it) of actions you could perform on that item, similar to a traditional right-click. This is in lieu of any kind of menubars: all menubar functions are accessed through the menus of some objects or another, and there are some special objects (hiding in the corners, the second-fasted place to reach by Fitt's Law) to handle system-wide functions. Then from the contextual menu of an object, any function which you would normally want to do with a left-click, you can do with a click (or touch) on the (now-highlighted) object, e.g. drag it to move it, click it to open it. Notably, this preserves the double-click functionality: first click pops up the contextual menu, but another click on the same object opens it (no menu item pops up directly over the object), so a double-click still opens.
Lack of hover functionality doesn't really impede much compared to traditional GUIs. The only hover functionality I can think of is the higlighting of menu items as you hover over them, but nothing really activates until you click, so that's entirely cosmetic. It seems only newer web-based stuff really relies on hover at all, and that's going away now that touch interfaces are becoming common. So just being mindful not to rely on it, and only needing a single "button" like this, makes the system automatically touch-friendly while still giving the power of traditional mouse-driven interfaces.
I've been clamoring for UI change since the 90s, when there were a lot of new ideas floating around. As a hobby I've been developing and tweaking a UI design (just on paper, not instantiated in anything) that takes Fitt's Law to heart (most functions to perform on an object are in a menu directly under your cursor when you click that object, the most important system-wide functions are in the corners akin to the Apple/Start/etc menus, and everything else lives along the edges of the screen), and works equally well with touchscreens and mice by having no functionality depend on hovering the cursor and having contextual menus that work without a second button. A command line is integrated right into the GUI for the power users, available at all times with a single click but tucked away when not in use. The overall design philosophy is that simple tasks are extremely simple to do, but much more powerful functionality is readily available just below the surface, easy to get to.
Those are the kinds of UI changes I would be interested in seeing. Or some of the things Jef Raskin was working on. Those are interesting, thoughtful, clever. But instead what we're getting is nothing but massives steps directly backwards into earlier eras of user interface simplicity (with the consequent loss of the power we bought with complexity). Things are becoming less functional, less consistent, all for the sake of appealing to the lowest common denominator, pushing computers into devices solely for consumption rather than creation, and taking controls away from the users for the sake of the manufacturers.
All of these things, and other trends, are completely antithetical to the personal computer revolution, which put power in the hands of users, allowing them to become creators themselves and learn and grow above the lowest common denominator. And it saddens me to see Apple, who used to be a leader in that revolution, leading this counter-revolution back to the dark ages of centralized, dumb, consumption devices, now more popular than ever.
To be clear, I am not arguing for scientifically-based policy per se; I am arguing for a method of policy-making modelled after, but distinct from, the scientific method. Every action derives from some intention and some belief; we believe this to be so, and we intend that to be so, and so we do such-and-such to bridge the gap between them. The scientific method has proven an excellent method of determining which beliefs to hold; I'm proposing an analogous method for determining what intentions to hold.
As such, a proposed plan of action, or strategy (analogous to a theory in this system), is tested not against observation, but against something normatively analogous to it. This means that something like "goals" is what the goodness of a proposal is tested against; a proposed strategy is taken to be good to the extent that it satisfies important "goals" without violating others, just as a proposed theory is taken to be true to the extend that it satisfies important observations without violating others.
But "goals" here cannot mean "intentions" or "desires". We don't test scientific theories against people's beliefs; we don't even test them against their perceptions. Those are both models already of what is, and the question in science is "what should we take as the correct model of what is?" - comparing a proposed model against other models is a bit circular, as we can ask why we should give those models any credence. Instead, we look at what direct, uninterpreted experiences give rise to our perceptions - we look at raw observations - and then we try to construct models from those observations consciously, not just intuitively, to come to correct beliefs, not merely popular ones.
Likewise, we can't test a proposed model of what should be against what other people think or feel should be. We instead have to look at why they think or feel those things should be, what experiences gives rise to those desires and intentions - what are their appetites, their pains, their hungers. Sure, we don't have direct access to other people's appetites, but neither do we have access to their observations: the best we can do in either case is place ourselves in the same context and see if we experience the same thing (repeating an experiment, or "walking a mile in their shoes"); or else take their word for it if we are unwilling or unable to do that.
Then once we have this appetite-data, we attempt to construct a model that satisfies as many of those appetites as possible without violating any. The "without violating any" is where inviolable rights come in, and where the analogy to falsification is. It's one thing for a scientific theory to fail to explain some observation, e.g. a theory of ballistics doesn't explain lightning, but that doesn't mean lightning disproves ballistics. It's quite another for a theory to directly contradict observations: if your theory of ballistics predicts a lightning strike every time a projectile hits the ground, well, sorry, you're wrong, even if you got the parabola just right. Likewise, it's one thing for a model to fail to satisfy all appetites, we can't expect any law to ever solve all problems in one fell swoop; but it's quite another for a law to directly cause harm, and such harm should "falsify" the law no matter how much other good it's managing to accomplish in the process. Hippocrates had it right: "first, do no harm".
The models that come out of this process may end up being models nobody desired or intended at first, just as the outcome of the scientific method is not always (or even usually) going to be an existing belief somebody already held. But reasonable people should be swayed to support it if the reasons supporting it are strong, slowly building a consensus, as in science. If people are irrational, then this or any other process is doomed from the get-go; all justice always depends on there being enough rational people in power, no system can make the irrational people operating it behave rationally. The tri
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Fire increases entropy all around. When a log burns in a room, the entropy of the ashes left over is greater than the entropy of the unburned wood, the entropy of the carbon oxides and water vapor in the air is greater than the unbound oxygen, and as a result there is a lot more heat everywhere.
Life reduces entropy in some area, even though it can only do that by increasing entropy in another area. An aerobic organism is basically a fire-based life form, and yes it takes in carbohydrates and oxygen from the environment and outputs carbon oxides and water and heat, increasing the total entropy, but as a byproduct of that process the interior of the cell itself becomes less entropic. Not enough to completely counter the increase of entropy elsewhere, so overall entropy still increases, but there is nevertheless a local decrease, unlike with fire.
Life is limited not only by the available energy it has to consume, but by the available space it has to dump the entropy it pumps out of itself. Not enough food, or too much waste, and it will starve or be smothered.
Without disputing that there is no consensus on the definition of life, I am of the opinion that there is a possible definition which includes everything we take to be alive and nothing we reasonably shouldn't take to be alive. It is in terms of thermodynamics, specifically entropy.
Let us define mechanical work as "productive" upon some system when it changes the said system to a state which is less entropic. We can then say that a machine X is productive upon some other system Y when the product of its work is a decrease in the entropy of Y. There may be limited circumstances under which X is productive upon Y; to do work X will need some sort of energy flow through it, but not any energy flow will do. So for example, an electric machine which sorts and stacks coins coined can be said to be productive upon the coins when it is plugged in to an electrical circuit of the proper frequency and voltage, and turned on, and otherwise in its operating conditions, but not just when it is being heated, say.
With that out of the way, we can now define a system as "alive" when it is productive upon itself, or more simply define "life" as "self-productive machinery". The given conditions under which a given system is self-productive will of course be limited and vary, but those constitute the conditions under which a given system can live, which are also limited and vary.
Crystals, fire, and car batteries all seek lower-energy, higher-entropy states, and so are not life, though they might fuel life (like fire) or be instrumental in the construction of living things (like crystals).
Viruses, by this definition, can only live inside of more complicated cells, the way that a severely deformed baby might only live on life support, or humans in general can only live in an atmosphere of appropriate composition, temperature, and pressure, with sufficient water and appropriate chemical fuels available. A virus floating around by itself is dead, though under the right circumstances it can come to life (unlike humans, but that's because dead humans decay more readily than dead viruses, being big complex things instead of simple molecules). Spores and seeds likewise: not alive just sitting there inert, but alive when put into the conditions in which they grow. Prions I don't know enough about to say.
Mules are definitely alive, whether or not they are a viable species; reproduction is just one way for life to continue living, not a prerequisite for living at all.
The only really controversial part of this definition is that computers may count as alive, when plugged in and turned on etc, the same way that viruses may count as alive when inside another cell of the appropriate type. But that's only controversial because they are artificially constructed machines made from something other than the stuff we are made of. Artificially constructed organic nanomachines modelled after the ones we're built on are indisputably alive: artificial life, but life nonetheless. Computers differ only in being bigger, and made of different materials. Their information-processing functions certainly reduce the information entropy of their storage media.
This factor has the nice benefit to this definition of ensuring that intelligence, sentience, sapience, etc, are a proper subset of life; you can't have something which takes in information about the world around it and does something productive with it, without that thing being alive by this definition in the process.
The metaphor to gun control is not completely accurate, but you could be on the right track with it.
Regulating general computing is more analogous to regulating general commerce. We who complain about the threat of restricting what programs a computer may run because we might run something harmful are like shopkeepers complaining about the threat of having to vet every product they ever sell, or consumers having to vet every product they ever buy, because otherwise someone might buy or sell a gun.
Whether software that can do harm, or guns, should be regulated, or just the harmful actions they each can do, is a further question. Prior restraint of a general activity to prevent the potential possession of something that might be used for harm is the real issue.
Philosophers have devised, over the years, a number of relatively complex arguments for the existence of God. None of them is unarguably true...
I'd like to really emphasize this point by noting that in contemporary philosophy of religion, the pro-theist side of things isn't even trying to argue that God must exist. They're not even trying to argue that God *could* exist. The strongest point any practicing philosopher attempts to prove these days is that it's not irrational to consider that it might be possible that God exists; that, even though it might actually be false that God exists, even though it might even by physically or even metaphysically impossible that God exists, it is at the least not completely logically impossible that God exists, and so atheists can't win the debate a priori.
It's the equivalent of saying "Look, I'm not saying that I can prove there's a tea kettle orbiting the Earth one mile above my house; I'm not saying the evidence is in favor of the position that there's a tea kettle orbiting the Earth one mile above my house; I'm not saying I have any evidence at all that there's a tea kettle orbiting the Earth one mile above my house; I'm not saying that there *is* a tea kettle orbiting the Earth one mile above my house; I'm not even saying that there physically could be a tea kettle orbiting the Earth a mile above my house; but you can't prove with logic alone that there isn't one there, so it's not completely crazy to believe there is."
The debate is no longer between "God exists" vs "God does not exist"; it's between "We can conclusively prove that God as you construe him does not exist", and "N-not *conclusively*!"
You realize Satanists don't actually worship or even believe in the existence of Satan, right? They're basically anti-Christians, not only disbelieving the factuality of Christian claims, but more emphatically disputing the moral lessons of it, which they consider authoritarian and submissive, in favor of a more individualistic moral code. They just use an alternate character interpretation of the "villain" from their opponents' stories to make that point.
Compare (though it's not a perfect analogue) the use of "Xenu" by opponents to Scientology.
The problem with "leave it to the states" is that, though the effects of bad legislation are limited, the effects of good legislation are likewise limited. In a debate between "we should kill all kittens!" and "nobody should kill any kittens!", saying "lets let each group decide how many kittens they will kill" is practically siding with the "kill all kittens" camp, because you're leaving that camp to kill all the kittens they want, even if nobody else is killing any.
There are certainly some things that should be left up to individual or local choice, but those are precisely the kinds of things which there should not be laws about, leaving the right to do it or not in the hands of the people where it belongs. If there is something worth legislating, if there's a reason to say that this or that thing must be done (or must not be done), then it's worth saying that to everybody.
A compromise that I could see is, first, to return to the principle that everything is permitted which is not explicitly forbidden by law: laws are never to make something legal, as everything is legal by default, so every law is saying that you cannot do something (or refrain from doing something). Then, make it progressively more difficult to get a prohibition (law) passed at higher levels of government: it should be much easier to ban something in your city than in your state, and much easier to ban it in the state than in the whole country. But, conversely, each higher level has the power to protect the (to use a technical term) immunities of the people, their rights against the exercise of government power, by making legislation of a certain sort illegal within their jurisdiction. Thus, for example, by default smoking marijuana would be legal anywhere; most cities might choose to ban it; California may legislate that those bans are illegitimate, and thus every city in California would have its bans lifted. To counteract that, you would need to either convince California to change its mind, or convince the Federal government to pass a nation-wide ban, which would be much more difficult. But, conversely, if many cities and states are passing laws, say, obliging certain persons to remain on the property and obey the orders and be subject to the punishment of certain other persons (i.e. slavery), it should not be incredibly more difficult to get the Federal government to strike down all such laws than it would be to get a local city government to strike them down locally.
In other words, it should be hard to project power through the higher levels of government over the whole nation; but it should be easy to get relief at the highest levels from power projected at lower levels, thus favoring the status quo of liberty for all unless the issue is important enough to get the entire country behind it.
I think most people should minimize their use of cell phones in moving vehicles. Texting in a moving vehicle should almost never happen. Eating a burger in a moving vehicle also a pretty bad idea. Being drunk or otherwise inebriated in a moving vehicle is an extremely bad idea. So is being very tired, or angry, or otherwise out of your right state of mind for any reason.
But none of these things, per se, should be illegal. The reason why we make these things illegal is to cut back on something that they cause: reckless driving. The strength of the supposed justification for banning them is proportional to their correlation to reckless driving: the more frequently and the more extremely reckless peoples' driving becomes as a result of these things, the more we want to ban them.
But if we just enforce the laws that are already on the books about reckless driving (exceeding the speed of traffic or safe road conditions, following too closely, poor lane control, impeding the flow of traffic, etc), then we will punish people for doing these behaviors exactly in proportion to how frequently and extremely it makes them drive recklessly; and we will spare the people who defy the statistic and drive safely despite partaking in a behavior which has a strong but imperfect correlation with reckless driving.
Lets us say, hypothetically, there was some activity which had a 100% correlation to reckless driving. If people do this thing and then drive, or do this thing while driving, then absolutely 100% of the time their driving will be reckless. In that case, we'd certainly want to punish people who do this; but there would be no need to punish doing that activity per se, because everyone who does that activity would also be driving recklessly, so punishing reckless drivers would punish all of the people who do this activity.
Now lets say an activity has a 50% correlation with reckless driving, and that correlation is along gender lines: if men do this and drive, or do this while driving, then they will drive recklessly, every time; but women can do this and drive perfectly fine. In such a strange case, I imagine we would want to ban men from doing this activity and driving, but not women; but again, that would be unnecessary, because 100% of men (50% of the population) who do this and drive will be driving recklessly, so punishing reckless driving will punish all the men who do this activity.
Now lets say there's an activity which has a 50% correlation to reckless driving, but it's not along such clear lines. Maybe it's along some simple lines that are hard to tell at a glance, like blood type. Would we want to ban all people with a certain blood type from engaging in a certain activity because it might cause them to drive recklessly? And go out and test everybody's blood to tell who is or isn't allowed to do this and drive? Or wouldn't we just ban driving recklessly?
What if it wasn't one simple factor, but some complex combination of factors which 50% of the population happen to exhibit, and if you have this complex combination of factors and you do this activity, you will always drive recklessly; and if not, you won't? Would we ban doing this activity and driving if you have this complex combination of factors, and test for that? Or would we just ban driving recklessly, and let that catch them?
What if we didn't know what combination of factors contributed to it? Just, 50% of the population drive recklessly while/after engaging in this activity. We can't tell who will do it or not in advance, so we can't ban only those people who will be affected. Is 50% high enough to ban it for everybody? Half the people out there can do this and drive perfectly safely; the other half can't; do we punish half the population for doing something harmless just because we can't tell in advance whether or not it will be harmless? Or do we punish the people who end up doing the harmful thing as a result, i.e. driving recklessly, and leave the people who can do it harmlessly alone?
Or maybe it's
How do you find and remove from the road the drivers who are simply not paying attention?
Are they exceeding the speed of traffic? Are they following too closely? Are they impeding the flow of traffic? Exhibiting poor lane control? In short, are they driving dangerously?
They can rent it to people [...] [E]ither they're selling it or they aren't. Selling a unit but retaining ownership rights is fraudulent to say the least.
This is somewhat tangential, but I'm fond of harping on the practice of rent (mostly focused on other contexts) for exactly the reasons you describe here: either you sell something, and it's no longer yours and you have no rights in it and whoever you sold it to can do whatever they want with it for however long they like; or you don't sell it, and it's yours and nobody else has any rights in it and you can exclude anybody from using it however you like whenever you like. Isn't rental in general precisely "Selling a unit but retaining ownership rights", and doesn't the fraudulence of that speak against the practice? In other words, if Sony et al kept doing exactly what they're trying to do now and just called it "rental" instead of "purchase", how would that make it any better?
"On January 1st, Apple will introduce iNtosh... and you'll see why Two Thousand Twelve will be like Nineteen Eighty-Four."
Corporatism does not refer to "corporations" in the sense that we use that term now. It refers specifically to the collusion between business and government, acting together as a single body ("corpus"). It is "socialism" (in the sense that that term is used as the antithesis of free markets) without the egalitarian bent, and was famously promoted by Mussolini who claimed that it was a better name for his style of government than "fascism".
We already have a concept of payment terms which are not tied to interest. E.g. you receive an item with an invoice due in 30 days, or 60 days, or due upon receipt (the default for point-of-sale purchases). If you do not pay on the agreed-upon terms, you have stolen that item. So if I'm buying a $500 item, maybe $100 is due upon receipt, $100 is due in 30 days, $100 is due in 60 days, $100 is due in 90 days, and $100 is due in 120 days. Lots of "As Seen On TV" items are already sold this way ("buy now for just five easy payments of $39.95...") The agreed-upon price may be dependent upon the agreed-upon terms: the store may advertise that I can buy this for $500 in five $100 installations, or buy it for $400 now.
The difference between this and interest is that if I fail to pay, I don't just sink into a deeper hole of debt by accumulating interest: I've stolen the item. I took something on the agreement that I would pay a certain price for it on certain terms, and then failed to do so. So the police can come and take it (or an equivalent value if it's gone) back from me, and return it to the rightful owner; but, I am also due back the payments I have already made. If I walk into a convenience store, buy a $5 item, plop down $2 and try to walk out the door but he stops me, I've got two options: either I give him another $3, in which case I've bought the item and am free to go, or I give back the item, in which case he gives me back me $2. If I walk out with the item without paying full price, I'm stealing from him; but if he keeps the item and the partial payment, then he's stealing from me.
If every seller doesn't want to deal with negotiating terms, banks can perform a service similar to the venture capitalists I described before: the bank buys the thing, and then they sell it to you on delayed terms.
Right, because people who can only afford to rent can DEFINITELY afford to buy, right?
You seem to have missed the main point that eliminating the rental option forces the purchase option to be on more reasonable terms, because property owners aren't just going to sit on their unused property and let it rot when they could sell it for a profit (just not the same profit they could rent it for). The entire aim of this is to make it so that more people can buy.
I've addressed most of your points extensively in replies to other posts in this thread so I won't cover them again here. But:
And apartment owners [...] will just have to eat it and sell off everything they have, putting them out of a job and a livelihood
Owning something and collecting fees for other people using it is not a job, it's parasitism. The inability to do so is literally what defines "working class". Abolishing rent would force the owners to get jobs and work for a living. They could, for example, buy and sell homes (solving the liquidity problem you're so concerned about, a useful service they could perform at a profit), and/or sell home maintenance services (another useful service people would probably pay for).
And yes, it's such a wealth collector because renters owners are just LOADED, aren't they?
You yourself are the one pointing out how few people can afford to buy houses, so if someone not only owns their own house that they live in but also owns others that they can charge other people to live in, then yeah, I'd call that pretty loaded. There are certainly wide degrees of "loaded", but if you own a house you are definitely not poor by any means, and if you own more houses than you can use (i.e. at least two) then I'd say that puts you into the "loaded" category. It puts you into the category of people who can profit just from owning certain assets, at least, which is the definitional distinction between "working class" and "capitalist".
I live in Santa Barbara, one of the single most expensive places in the United States (apparently in the top ten according to a quick Google search). The median home price here is over a million dollars.
I've gotten by quite comfortably making under $25k a year; I am "richer" than most of my peers, in terms of savings, despite having been below the federal poverty line for most of my life. And I'm not even as frugal as I could be: I eat out nearly every day, for instance, when I could be saving by cooking at home. But somehow I seem to be more frugal than everybody else who is balls-deep in debt despite making more than I do. I don't know what they spend it all on. New cars, expensive toys, alcohol? I drive used cars, run an old computer despite being a techie, and don't blow my paychecks trying to make every weekend one I'll never remember.
If I could be making a more-average income of $50k a year, I would stand a reasonable chance of paying off a low-end home, even here in one of the most expensive places in the country, by the time I retire, while continuing my current comfortable-enough lifestyle the whole while. If I had a family to support, I would also have a second income from my spouse which would offset that cost.
If I was making $100k a year, I could buy an average house -- here, in one of the most-expensive places in the country -- well before I retired. If I was making a quarter million a year, I could buy my (currently unconceived) kids their own house by the time they graduate college, and give them the kind of cushy life I never had being born to a family with nothing.
I dunno what the fuck people are spending all their money on that could possibly make comfortable living on a six-figure income a stretch for them anywhere in the world, but jesus people, learn some restraint.
Well, as I am saying that leasing (just another word for renting) should not be happening to begin with, then with regards to housing I'm saying it should work like people who move from house to house before paying one off works now. You move into the house and start making payments on it; when you leave, you find someone else who wants to live where you are now, you get your equity in the first house back from them, and use it to start making payments on the new house. You may move from place to place, but the money you spend on housing doesn't vanish down a hole: it builds assets for you, and eventually you end up owning a whole house and don't have to keep paying for a place to live.
"Landlords" might choose to function in a fashion similar to my hypothetical Blockbuster video "rental" model I just detailed in this post: being a convenient local place to buy and sell from, and making money (leveraging that convenience to draw in customers) by buying back at a lower price than they sell for. They would basically become real estate agencies. That post also details how to cover the expense of upkeep and maintenance in a fairly simple fashion.
There is a complication here in that currently the existing homeowner is paid outright for the house he's selling out of a loan that the new buyer got, and uses that money to pay off the loan he used to buy the house to begin with, keeping the difference to use as a down payment on his new house. As in a rent-free market, large cash loans are unlikely to be given to individuals (lenders would have no interest in doing so - literally), things would have to work a little differently. The most straightforward method is payment terms other than "on delivery" (with prices offered varying by the terms). You would buy the house from its existing owner over time in monthly installments; basically, your "rent" in the house would build equity in the house for you. Then when you move, whoever you sell it to begins paying you off in the same fashion; you take that source of income and use it to finish paying off the old house, and then use your own existing income to start paying off the new one. Since you'd already been paying off the old one, you will pay that off before the person who bought it off you finishes paying you off, and eventually you will have a source of income from your equity in the old house which you can use to finish paying off the new one.
Of course, this leads to some complicated chains of who-owes-who, and this is somewhere that banks could step in and provide a service: you want to sell your old house and just sever all ties and not deal with paying it off while collecting from the new owners, so the bank can offer to buy your house from you right now (so you can pay off the old owner and take your equity straight to the new house) and then slowly collect from the new owner. They could turn a profit for this service by buying it from you for less than the intended new owner would; whether their lower price is worth the convenience of severing all ties like that is up to you. Banks could further involve themselves like this in the first place: you want to buy a house, but nobody wants to offer you terms on it other than due-upon-receipt, so you ask a bank to buy the house and then sell it to you with better terms - albiet, for a higher price. This would make the banks' investment similar to the venture capitalists' under my model as detailed in this reply to another sibling post.
You write:
i am sure the landlord would be happy to [sell the house]. unfortunately, you won't be able to afford the monthly payments required to make that happen.
and:
If you are just going to make being a landlord illegal, then a large percentage of the population of the world will become homeless. Most renters cannot afford to buy a house, or their cre
The system I advocate in place of rental is buy-and-sell-back. That is, take for example "renting" a DVD (not that anybody does that anymore): I would go down to Blockbuster a buy a DVD from them, keep it for as long as I want, and then when I'm done with it I would take it back to them and sell it back. Then they would resell it to the next customer and so on. Blockbuster's business model, like all used-goods dealers, would be in selling for more than they buy back. I could of course try to find someone else who would want to buy it back for more than Blockbuster would, but that would be the competitive force keeping Blockbuster's prices down, and they would be banking on their advantage of being a known, convenient place to buy and sell used DVDs at reasonable prices to bring me straight to them instead of me spending time searching all over for the best deal.
With this sort of model, how to handle things like maintenance and servicing is obvious: if I "rent" something from you and then "return" it in a damaged condition, you "charge me" to cover that damage; which is to say, if I buy it from you and then try to sell it back in a damaged condition, you offer less for the buy-back to cover that damage, because damaged goods are obviously worth less to you then undamaged ones.
Big-ticket items like cars which cannot be purchased outright on the spot and then sold back when you're done have an added complication about how to pay off things over time, which I'm about to address in response to a sibling post of yours...
I'm not sure I completely understand you, but it sounds like you're asking about how venture capital would be handled? I.e. how would small businesses get the money needed to get rolling?
I would say the best method under my rent-free market system would be shareholding. The entrepreneur creates a business, but needs to put money into it to make it go. The venture capitalist buys a big chunk of that business, on the bet that it will be worth more in the future and thus make him money. As the business takes off and begins bringing in money, the entrepreneur takes his share of the profits and, instead of using them to pay back the loan he would get under the current system, he uses it to buy back his business - for more than the initial price he got for it, as the business is now worth more than when it started, which is what made the investment worthwhile to the venture capitalist. The catch, where it differs from a lending-at-interest model, is that if the business is a failure and never brings in any money, the entrepreneur isn't left still on the hook to the venture capitalist: he loses his value in the company still, but the venture capitalist took a share of the risk along with a share of the potential gain when he bought into the company, so he loses his share of the value as well.
This, precisely, is why a home loan is the only kind of debt (excluding a credit card paid off in full every month to build a credit rating) I ever intend to take out.
The problem to be avoided is not so much debt per se, but the interest that inevitably comes with it. And not even just interest, but more what interest is a special case of: rent. Interest is rent on money. So if your options are to pay rent on a home for a period of time while you save up to buy a home, or to pay rent on money with which to buy a home now and then pay back the money over that same period of time, the question is simply which has the higher rent, the home or the money. And even in this lousy market, interest on a home loan is lower than the insane raw profits extracted by landlords renting out property.
Rent is where you pay someone a permanent fee for the temporary use of something and so, when the transaction is over, they have what they rented you back again and you are out that money. This is how wealth accumulates in the hands of the already-wealthy! They have what we need (homes, cash, whatever), and they can hang on to it and "let" us use it for a fee, which then gives them further assets to rent out and further their illegitimate income. If they did not have this option, if rental contracts were not upheld by the law, then those assets beyond which they could personally use would become worthless to them except as things to sell; and they'll only be able to sell them if they offered terms which other people, people who don't already have such things and are in the market for them, could afford.
Simply invalidating rent (having the government refrain from doing something) would "force", by free market forces alone, a voluntary redistribution of excess (unused) wealth from the 'haves' to the 'have-nots' on reasonable terms, by making such sales the option which is most in the 'haves' self-interest (either that or let their useless assets rot), after eliminating the illegitimate option of charging for something and then getting to keep it afterwards. This is the kind of solution people need to be looking for, addressing the systematic problems which cause wealth disparities to grow, not looking to patch the system and simply cover up the symptoms of it!
... and you have all west coast covered
Except for all the coastal land between Los Angeles and San Francisco. The planned route for this track goes inland from the city centers at either end, through mostly nothing but cow country (and a handful of cities; Bakersfield, Fresno) outside the LA and SF metro areas.
I'm on the northern end of the Santa Barbara metro area, about a third of the way from LA to SF up the coast. Getting to downtown LA by train (and bus and otherwise not using a car) is a 6hr trip, to catch a 2hr train to SF. I haven't checked lately but I'm pretty sure slower trains from here to SF are less than 8hrs but still a good deal longer than the 2hrs you'd get from LA with this.
Of course getting to LA by car is less than a 2hr trip (in good traffic at least), but if I'm driving 2hrs south to catch a 2hr train ride north to SF, I might as well just drive the 4hrs north to SF.
It gets slightly better for the people slightly closer to LA, but say Oxnard (much bigger population center than Santa Barbara) to Union Station by public transit is still quite the ordeal, and driving straight north is still going to be a better deal. But then go further up the coast, to Santa Maria (again bigger than Santa Barbara), or to Morro Bay (almost equidistant between SF and LA), and there's no way using this train could make any sense to about half of the California coast.
Rene Descartes famously argued that conceivability entailed possibility, and then went on to claim to conceive of various nonsense things and conclude therefore that they were possible. "I conceive..." this "I conceive..." that, truly inconceivable things the lot of them, only nominally "conceivable". He keeps using that word. I do not think it means what he thinks it does.
It would also make him a 19 year old man when the United States entered World War II, and therefore he almost certainly has personally literally fought, with literal guns, against literal fascists of one sort or another. Having them now in his own government, telling him he can't continue saving lives with chemistry because some people might want to use his product indirectly to make something else to put in their own bodies and change their own neurochemistry, is probably the kind of nightmare he thought he was fighting to prevent all those decades ago.
Sounds nice. Be aware of over-relying on the screen edges to take advantage of Fitt's Law, though. Those only work for mouse and trackball on small screens but they offer little advantage for touchpads, touchscreens or users with big screens. For those, nothing substitutes having targets that are big.
Agreed that there's little speed advantage to reaching corners or edges without a mouse on a small screen, as "throwing" the cursor in their general direction is less of a factor: but there is definitely still a speed advantage to locating them on an edge or in a corner, as opposed to somewhere anywhere in between. As I'm using corners and edges for broad items that you might want to get at at any time but are never the thing you're directly working on, that location advantage could be very useful.
The things I have around the edges of the screen are:
- Top edge, right side: "Accessories", a combination of system widgets, like you would find in the Windows taskbar tray or on the right side of a Mac menubar, and simple programs like clocks and calculators and other things you might find in something like the OSX "Dashboard". In the top-right corner is the general-purpose system control widget similar to the Apple menu or Start menu, though without the shortcut functionality of the Start menu or the old (pre-X) Apple menu. Directly below this area is a text area where system-wide information can be displayed; I'm not really clear what to put in here yet, but there is space for something given the rest of the design below...
- Top edge, left side: tasks/programs, running or not, similar to the left side of the OSX dock or Windows 7 taskbar. Directly in the center of the top edge (on the right side of this area) is the task manager object. Directly below this is where all progress bars live (tasks in progress), showing only one until clicked.
- Right edge, top side: devices, including hard disks, printers, scanners, etc, all represented as logical volumes. (e.g. copy a file to the printer to send it to the print queue, copy the image file out of the scanner to capture what's in the scanner bed, etc). In the middle of the right edge, at the bottom of this area, is a representation of the local network or workgroup, with all shared volumes visible inside it.
- Right edge, bottom side: "scraps", like a multi-item clipboard: a temporary storage space for bits of content or whole files, where cut or copied items go and where pasted items come from. At the bottom of this, in the lower-right corner, is the trash can / recycle bin / non-look-and-feel-patent-infringing-disposal-device-icon.
- Left edge, top side: The toolbar. This is where it gets a little weird by conventional UI standards: this UI is designed with document-centric computing in mind, inspired mostly by Apple's defunct OpenDoc project, and the whole left edge is dedicated to that. This top half is where content-creation tools, like a pen tool or brush tool or text tool or table tool or what have you, are available. At the top of it, in the top-left corner, is where the generic "cursor" tool lives.
- Left edge, bottom side: What OpenDoc called "stationary". Blank filetype templates used to create new documents; in lieu of File -> New Whatever in some specific program, just drag a new file into existence somewhere. In the middle of the left edge, at the top of this section, is the New Folder stationary, for creating empty new folders.
- Bottom edge, left side: aliases, shortcuts, bookmarks, whatever you want to call them, like the right-hand side of the OSX dock. In the lower left corner is the search widget, similar to OSX's Spotlight. Directly above this area is an address bar showing the filepath/url of the active window, and allowing you to type in a filepath/url to get directly to another resource if you like.
- Bottom edge, right side: scripts, like shell scripts or AppleScripts or Photoshop actions, stored sequences of interface commands. In the center of the bottom edge, on the left side of this
I have some very limited mockups which basically exist to delineate what objects go along what edges of the desktop, but they don't say much about the touchable-single-button part of the interface.
A short explanation of how it's intended to work is that a single click (or touch) on any object which is not a direct button (so, a file or folder, say) pops up a contextual menu (I'm considering a radial menu layout, but haven't settled on it) of actions you could perform on that item, similar to a traditional right-click. This is in lieu of any kind of menubars: all menubar functions are accessed through the menus of some objects or another, and there are some special objects (hiding in the corners, the second-fasted place to reach by Fitt's Law) to handle system-wide functions. Then from the contextual menu of an object, any function which you would normally want to do with a left-click, you can do with a click (or touch) on the (now-highlighted) object, e.g. drag it to move it, click it to open it. Notably, this preserves the double-click functionality: first click pops up the contextual menu, but another click on the same object opens it (no menu item pops up directly over the object), so a double-click still opens.
Lack of hover functionality doesn't really impede much compared to traditional GUIs. The only hover functionality I can think of is the higlighting of menu items as you hover over them, but nothing really activates until you click, so that's entirely cosmetic. It seems only newer web-based stuff really relies on hover at all, and that's going away now that touch interfaces are becoming common. So just being mindful not to rely on it, and only needing a single "button" like this, makes the system automatically touch-friendly while still giving the power of traditional mouse-driven interfaces.
I've been clamoring for UI change since the 90s, when there were a lot of new ideas floating around. As a hobby I've been developing and tweaking a UI design (just on paper, not instantiated in anything) that takes Fitt's Law to heart (most functions to perform on an object are in a menu directly under your cursor when you click that object, the most important system-wide functions are in the corners akin to the Apple/Start/etc menus, and everything else lives along the edges of the screen), and works equally well with touchscreens and mice by having no functionality depend on hovering the cursor and having contextual menus that work without a second button. A command line is integrated right into the GUI for the power users, available at all times with a single click but tucked away when not in use. The overall design philosophy is that simple tasks are extremely simple to do, but much more powerful functionality is readily available just below the surface, easy to get to.
Those are the kinds of UI changes I would be interested in seeing. Or some of the things Jef Raskin was working on. Those are interesting, thoughtful, clever. But instead what we're getting is nothing but massives steps directly backwards into earlier eras of user interface simplicity (with the consequent loss of the power we bought with complexity). Things are becoming less functional, less consistent, all for the sake of appealing to the lowest common denominator, pushing computers into devices solely for consumption rather than creation, and taking controls away from the users for the sake of the manufacturers.
All of these things, and other trends, are completely antithetical to the personal computer revolution, which put power in the hands of users, allowing them to become creators themselves and learn and grow above the lowest common denominator. And it saddens me to see Apple, who used to be a leader in that revolution, leading this counter-revolution back to the dark ages of centralized, dumb, consumption devices, now more popular than ever.
To be clear, I am not arguing for scientifically-based policy per se; I am arguing for a method of policy-making modelled after, but distinct from, the scientific method. Every action derives from some intention and some belief; we believe this to be so, and we intend that to be so, and so we do such-and-such to bridge the gap between them. The scientific method has proven an excellent method of determining which beliefs to hold; I'm proposing an analogous method for determining what intentions to hold.
As such, a proposed plan of action, or strategy (analogous to a theory in this system), is tested not against observation, but against something normatively analogous to it. This means that something like "goals" is what the goodness of a proposal is tested against; a proposed strategy is taken to be good to the extent that it satisfies important "goals" without violating others, just as a proposed theory is taken to be true to the extend that it satisfies important observations without violating others.
But "goals" here cannot mean "intentions" or "desires". We don't test scientific theories against people's beliefs; we don't even test them against their perceptions. Those are both models already of what is, and the question in science is "what should we take as the correct model of what is?" - comparing a proposed model against other models is a bit circular, as we can ask why we should give those models any credence. Instead, we look at what direct, uninterpreted experiences give rise to our perceptions - we look at raw observations - and then we try to construct models from those observations consciously, not just intuitively, to come to correct beliefs, not merely popular ones.
Likewise, we can't test a proposed model of what should be against what other people think or feel should be. We instead have to look at why they think or feel those things should be, what experiences gives rise to those desires and intentions - what are their appetites, their pains, their hungers. Sure, we don't have direct access to other people's appetites, but neither do we have access to their observations: the best we can do in either case is place ourselves in the same context and see if we experience the same thing (repeating an experiment, or "walking a mile in their shoes"); or else take their word for it if we are unwilling or unable to do that.
Then once we have this appetite-data, we attempt to construct a model that satisfies as many of those appetites as possible without violating any. The "without violating any" is where inviolable rights come in, and where the analogy to falsification is. It's one thing for a scientific theory to fail to explain some observation, e.g. a theory of ballistics doesn't explain lightning, but that doesn't mean lightning disproves ballistics. It's quite another for a theory to directly contradict observations: if your theory of ballistics predicts a lightning strike every time a projectile hits the ground, well, sorry, you're wrong, even if you got the parabola just right. Likewise, it's one thing for a model to fail to satisfy all appetites, we can't expect any law to ever solve all problems in one fell swoop; but it's quite another for a law to directly cause harm, and such harm should "falsify" the law no matter how much other good it's managing to accomplish in the process. Hippocrates had it right: "first, do no harm".
The models that come out of this process may end up being models nobody desired or intended at first, just as the outcome of the scientific method is not always (or even usually) going to be an existing belief somebody already held. But reasonable people should be swayed to support it if the reasons supporting it are strong, slowly building a consensus, as in science. If people are irrational, then this or any other process is doomed from the get-go; all justice always depends on there being enough rational people in power, no system can make the irrational people operating it behave rationally. The tri