Fair enough - I definitely object to any such corporate welfare policies. If all they're doing is protecting IP rights, that isn't corporate welfare. But collecting taxes on blank media (for example) is shading into corporate welfare in my book.
Yet you seem perfectly comfortable making you own judgements about what classes of things do and do not deserve to have their IP protected...
Believe me, when I'm perfectly comfortable with a statement, I don't qualify it with weasel words like "seems".:) So no, I'm not perfectly comfortable with that judgment. I think you make some really good points, too, and if the only argument were over how "socially valuable" (or whatever) the IP is, I would probably be convinced. But there's also a practical argument that it's simply a lot easier to enforce pharmaceutical IP than music and video. I think the practical argument is fairly powerful, and I don't think we should be such purists about our beliefs that we have to throw out all IP protection in every sphere just because they no longer make sense in one sphere (not saying you're making this argument, I'm just heading off a potential objection).
It's pre-existing, meaning we don't build it all anew on a yearly basis. So it's more like the total expendeture ever, less the cost of infrastructure replaced and/or destroyed divided by population. This may or may not result in a figure that makes more sense.
My post should have been clearer on this point. I didn't mean to directly compare $150 trillion to an annual tax revenue 50-60 times lower and just leave it at that, QED. The step I left out is that you can think of this ratio something like a P/E ratio when valuing stocks. The ratio I calculated is 50-60, meaning that the maximum annual expenditure is 50-60 times lower than the proposed current value. I think there's simply no possible way this could be a fair valuation.
First of all, we know for a fact (just look at the actual budget) that a huge percentage of tax revenue doesn't go to infrastructure, even factoring in state and local government. The actual percentage is way less than half, and probably less than 25% (I would be willing to believe figures as low as 10%). But let's say it's 1/3 for argument's sake. That makes the ratio of value to annual expenditure 150-180. If you take current public spending on infrastructure and extend it indefinitely back in time, taking a reasonable cost of money into account, and counting depreciation, I think it's highly unlikely to get a ratio greater than, perhaps, 20. So we're off by about an order of magnitude (or, if my guess than only 10% goes to infrastructure and the real ratio is more like 10, which I think are outside estimates the other way, we might be off by as much as two orders of magnitude).
Every American is born with almost half a million dollars in pre-existing infrastructure...
Source, please? By my calculations that means there is $150 trillion in infrastructure in the US that is publicly available - meaning that you can't count private buildings or land. Since annual tax revenues are under $3 trillion, and not all of this goes to infrastructure, I'm going to go ahead and significantly doubt the accuracy of your figure.
Maybe you're playing with the word "born". Since about 10 million Americans are born per year, that would cut the total value of infrastructure to $5 trillion, which is believable. But then your figure is bogus, because that infrastructure is used over a person's entire lifetime. So the value should be divided by the total population, not by the annual rate of increase.
Fair enough. I'm not comfortable with the government making the call on which drugs are important enough to protect their IP and which ones aren't, though, so I'm lumping them all in the same category as a first approximation. There seems (to me) to be a material difference between drug development and sheer entertainment regardless.
Macadamizer already wrote a nice response to you, but I have a couple of things to add.
I said that property rights should be respected. But your response is to a much stronger claim, perhaps that anything I want to do is OK. Forget slavery - how does "property rights should be respected" become an argument in favor of smoking dope in my own house? You might as well make the argument that I have the right to own a gun and the right to shoot it in my own house - if the bullet happens to hit someone on the street, hey, not my problem! A conception of human liberty must contain more than just a description of property rights.
Similarly, "respecting" property rights doesn't mean that no other considerations are ever allowed to matter. I think property rights are very important, but they aren't all-important. If the cops have probable cause to think that you are building a nuclear bomb in your basement, I'm OK with them violating your property rights to check it out, maybe breaking down a door in the process.
That's exactly why this is a tricky issue - if I were an absolutist it would be easy.
Should government protected industries be required to open their books to the public, so that these profit margins and how they are spent can be easily known?
My gut reaction is to say, "No way!" Because this way lies nationalization (or such strict regulation as to be its equivalent), slowly and inevitably.
I think the term "government protected industries" is loaded, though. Say I'm a farmer. My neighbor starts farming part of my land without my permission and without compensating me. Who do I call? The government. Is my farm a "government protected industry"? Once you accept that IP is property, then protecting it is no different from any other form of defense of property right which even the staunchest of libertarians typically accepts is a correct role for government.
The drug companies have to make their R&D money back from someone, so people in wealthy nations cannot have the product at the same prices as everyone else.
Actually, there are lots of similarities between the music biz and the drug biz - maybe why these are both such hot-button issues in the age of easy IP transfers. In both industries, it costs a lot to develop a new product, and next to nothing to produce copies of it. In both industries, the argument for IP controls is that they are needed to keep up high levels of interest in developing new products, while the argument against is that there would be high levels anyway and all high prices are doing is propping up bloated corporate profit margins.
This is kind of an interesting revelation for me. But maybe I'm late to the game on this one.
It's a tricky issue for a libertarian-leaning capitalist like myself. On the one hand, big businesses deserve no special favors. On the other, property rights should be respected. On yet another, making copies is so cheap and easy that enforcement of property rights is next to impossible without extremely intrusive verification. Where's the right balance?
I do think that the fact that music is entertainment while pharmaceuticals are life-sustaining makes a big difference. Just because the two industries share a similar stance with respect to IP doesn't mean that the balance between all those hands in my previous paragraph must come at the same point. My inclination has usually been to tell the music (and content in general) business that they're SOL on this one - technology has simply passed them by - but to protect drug companies' patents as well as possible. But I might be convinced otherwise.
Hmm, maybe, although that's "losing money" in the same way that increasing the federal budget by only 3% instead of 5% is "cutting spending". You'd be making more money and more profits, in fact. As to Huffy, I certainly agree that one can go bankrupt by cutting prices to serve Wal-Mart; only that you have to be complicit in it (i.e., it may be a road to bankruptcy, just not a one-way road).
Put another way, Dell's margins will be very thin, but they should expect to make up for the losses in volume. Until, of course, Walmart renegotiates the deal. Lather, rinse, repeat. Why renegotiate if you stand to have your margins shaved even more? Because your company (Dell, in this case) now relies on the increased evenues from the huge increases in volumes to stay afloat.
First of all, you can't "make up for losses in volume". If you're losing money on each sale, selling in volume just means you're losing lots of money. You seem to recognize this since you do mention that Dell's margins will be "thin", not negative. If you're losing money on a sale, then your margin is negative, by definition.
Second of all, increased revenue is worthless if it's tied to an even greater increase in cost. The widgets that Mike's Widgets sells at Wal-Mart may be at a lower margin than the ones they sell at your local Mommenpop Shoppe, but they are positive margins or else Mike is going out of business soon. All Wal-Mart is doing is price discrimination, which is good for the consumer. It's often bad for the Mommenpop Shoppe, but let's not get into that right now since we're talking about how Wal-Mart's tactics affect producers, not rival retailers.
Now, there may be other reasons why selling widgets at Wal-Mart may be bad for Mike's Widgets - perceived quality, customer support, knowledgeable sales assistance, etc. But they aren't directly losing Mike money or else Mike would quite freely stop selling there. Some small companies have stopped selling through Wal-Mart and have thrived, so this is certainly possible and potentially profitable. Selling there is not a one-way ticket to bankruptcy, or even serfdom in Wal-Mart feudalism.
Wouldn't "faster evolution" also mean that species would be wiped out quicker, thus less chance of finding life?
I assume you mean intelligent life; once we're talking about evolution life is already there.
But anyway... it's hard to say whether shorter species lifespans would mean a higher or lower chance of intelligent life. Why would it have to be one way or the other? Bear in mind that a species being "wiped out" may mean extinction with no descendants, but may also mean being out-competed by descendant species.
Earth itself has so many favorable factors for it that it is astounding. [various factors snipped]
The problem with all arguments of this type is that they assume life must always be exactly like it is on the modern Earth. But why? Our own Earth has been vastly different at over its history, and we still ended up with intelligent life. Life is extremely adaptable. It's been able to handle an Earth that was warmer, colder, wetter, drier, with a single huge continent or many smaller ones, with more radiation flux, with more asteroid strikes.
Maybe the argument is better phrased that evolution can't proceed as rapidly without certain "ideal" conditions in place. And maybe that's true. But really, I doubt even that. More upheaval probably means faster evolution, since most evidence points to the likelihood that evolution proceeds in sudden bursts when conditions change, and very little otherwise. We have no clue what specific conditions lead to the evolution of large animals or intelligence. Our present knowledge is next to zero on the subject, so we really can't even make an educated guess at what is "ideal" for intelligent life.
Good point, but I wouldn't say this is the same thing, for several reasons. First, it was only highly significant until 1945, and considering the intelligence wasn't usable until after 1940, the highly significant secret was only kept for at most 5 years, not "decades". Second, the secret was being kept during a time of total war. Third, while official disclosure of Ultra didn't come about until the 1970s, some disclosures about it were made public earlier. The fact that this didn't generate a mass of conspiracy theories only supports my point #1: that it was no longer highly significant.
OTOH, if it were true that the US government (or a foreign government, for that matter - let's thrown in the conspiracy theory that Castro backed Oswald just for fun) assassinated JFK, that would still be highly significant today.
What I want to know is, if they're so good at maintaining the cover story for all these years, how come they're so frickin' incompetent at everything else?
Incidentally, I'm perfectly willing to concede that case law, SCOTUS decisions, etc. are against me on this. But that still doesn't make it a fundamental human right.
Although discrimination is wrong in principal, individuals sharing a house or apartment with one another really need to make sure they're compatible.
Wrong in principle, right in practice. That's what I love about modern doublespeak!
Look, the argument you've made completely disproves the notion that discrimination is wrong in principal. It isn't, any more than censorship is "wrong in principal". What you believe, which is what almost everyone believes, is that certain types of discrimination are wrong. Other types are neutral, other types are OK, and yet other types are positively encouraged! (If discrimination is truly wrong "in principal" then the whole concept of meritocracy goes out the window, for example, and I suspect most of us here on Slashdot are in favor of at least an approximation of meritocratic rewards.)
Funny story about censorship: I just received last night an email urging me to complain to CBS News about firing a commentator who allegedly criticized the Iraq war (which I find a little hard to believe on the face of it - or wouldn't most CBS commentators have been fired by now? anyway...). The same email mentions that it took CBS 2 weeks to fire Don Imus for saying some bad things, but only 2 days to fire the commentator. Of course, they consider the latter censorship, but the former? Of course not! Perfectly justified! Not censorship at all! This is complete doublespeak.
I cannot deny you a job because I don't like your non work related lifesyle.
Am I the one hiring you? Then I can deny you a job for any reason I please. Example: I am denying you a job right now (assuming you don't currently work for me, which I think is likely:). You can't make me hire you, regardless of why you think I'm not.
I cannot deny you a place to live over things that don't directly affect me.
Am I the one renting or selling you the place? Then I can in fact choose not to rent or sell for any reason I please.
You do not have a fundamental human right to allocate my resources for me.
I think the problem is that it's impossible to quantify certain ramifications, like customer goodwill, so they are undervalued when large companies do pricing studies.
If it's truly impossible to quantify them, then how do you know they're undervalued? Maybe they're overvalued. Maybe they're valued exactly correctly. Maybe they're never valued exactly correctly, but on average they're about right (this is what I suspect is closest to the truth).
Seriously, with a small or even medium-sized business there is a fair amount of room for companies not understanding how these effects work. But big businesses studies how their actions affect their sales constantly. They know much better than you do how valuable "good will" is. I suspect that it isn't as valuable as you think, and that most consumers are more price-conscious than socially-conscious.
Maybe it would be a better world if that weren't the case - I wouldn't argue with that point.
Look at it like Asimov's psychohistory - maybe it's possible to predict the broad outlines of human history even if the specifics are vague. Unless the Mule comes along and screws everything up.
The problem with this, of course, is that some seemingly minor event might have derailed the whole prediction. If Lincoln hadn't existed or hadn't been elected in 1860, or hadn't been the person he was, the South might have won the Civil War and remained independent. That would have been a problem for Tocqueville, most likely. The Russian Revolution is not as good an example - a Czarist Russia might have ended up a rival of the US just the same as Stalinist Russia.
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Note: for faster performance you should remove all brake points in your release build.
Whoever this Mr. Noone is, he really sounds like the victim here.
Fair enough - I definitely object to any such corporate welfare policies. If all they're doing is protecting IP rights, that isn't corporate welfare. But collecting taxes on blank media (for example) is shading into corporate welfare in my book.
Believe me, when I'm perfectly comfortable with a statement, I don't qualify it with weasel words like "seems". :) So no, I'm not perfectly comfortable with that judgment. I think you make some really good points, too, and if the only argument were over how "socially valuable" (or whatever) the IP is, I would probably be convinced. But there's also a practical argument that it's simply a lot easier to enforce pharmaceutical IP than music and video. I think the practical argument is fairly powerful, and I don't think we should be such purists about our beliefs that we have to throw out all IP protection in every sphere just because they no longer make sense in one sphere (not saying you're making this argument, I'm just heading off a potential objection).
My post should have been clearer on this point. I didn't mean to directly compare $150 trillion to an annual tax revenue 50-60 times lower and just leave it at that, QED. The step I left out is that you can think of this ratio something like a P/E ratio when valuing stocks. The ratio I calculated is 50-60, meaning that the maximum annual expenditure is 50-60 times lower than the proposed current value. I think there's simply no possible way this could be a fair valuation.
First of all, we know for a fact (just look at the actual budget) that a huge percentage of tax revenue doesn't go to infrastructure, even factoring in state and local government. The actual percentage is way less than half, and probably less than 25% (I would be willing to believe figures as low as 10%). But let's say it's 1/3 for argument's sake. That makes the ratio of value to annual expenditure 150-180. If you take current public spending on infrastructure and extend it indefinitely back in time, taking a reasonable cost of money into account, and counting depreciation, I think it's highly unlikely to get a ratio greater than, perhaps, 20. So we're off by about an order of magnitude (or, if my guess than only 10% goes to infrastructure and the real ratio is more like 10, which I think are outside estimates the other way, we might be off by as much as two orders of magnitude).
Either way, the number is way off.
Well, not really: consider depreciation.
I'm quite open to the possibility that the figure is an order of magnitude wrong. That's pretty wrong.
Source, please? By my calculations that means there is $150 trillion in infrastructure in the US that is publicly available - meaning that you can't count private buildings or land. Since annual tax revenues are under $3 trillion, and not all of this goes to infrastructure, I'm going to go ahead and significantly doubt the accuracy of your figure.
Maybe you're playing with the word "born". Since about 10 million Americans are born per year, that would cut the total value of infrastructure to $5 trillion, which is believable. But then your figure is bogus, because that infrastructure is used over a person's entire lifetime. So the value should be divided by the total population, not by the annual rate of increase.
Fair enough. I'm not comfortable with the government making the call on which drugs are important enough to protect their IP and which ones aren't, though, so I'm lumping them all in the same category as a first approximation. There seems (to me) to be a material difference between drug development and sheer entertainment regardless.
Macadamizer already wrote a nice response to you, but I have a couple of things to add.
I said that property rights should be respected. But your response is to a much stronger claim, perhaps that anything I want to do is OK. Forget slavery - how does "property rights should be respected" become an argument in favor of smoking dope in my own house? You might as well make the argument that I have the right to own a gun and the right to shoot it in my own house - if the bullet happens to hit someone on the street, hey, not my problem! A conception of human liberty must contain more than just a description of property rights.
Similarly, "respecting" property rights doesn't mean that no other considerations are ever allowed to matter. I think property rights are very important, but they aren't all-important. If the cops have probable cause to think that you are building a nuclear bomb in your basement, I'm OK with them violating your property rights to check it out, maybe breaking down a door in the process.
That's exactly why this is a tricky issue - if I were an absolutist it would be easy.
My gut reaction is to say, "No way!" Because this way lies nationalization (or such strict regulation as to be its equivalent), slowly and inevitably.
I think the term "government protected industries" is loaded, though. Say I'm a farmer. My neighbor starts farming part of my land without my permission and without compensating me. Who do I call? The government. Is my farm a "government protected industry"? Once you accept that IP is property, then protecting it is no different from any other form of defense of property right which even the staunchest of libertarians typically accepts is a correct role for government.
Actually, there are lots of similarities between the music biz and the drug biz - maybe why these are both such hot-button issues in the age of easy IP transfers. In both industries, it costs a lot to develop a new product, and next to nothing to produce copies of it. In both industries, the argument for IP controls is that they are needed to keep up high levels of interest in developing new products, while the argument against is that there would be high levels anyway and all high prices are doing is propping up bloated corporate profit margins.
This is kind of an interesting revelation for me. But maybe I'm late to the game on this one.
It's a tricky issue for a libertarian-leaning capitalist like myself. On the one hand, big businesses deserve no special favors. On the other, property rights should be respected. On yet another, making copies is so cheap and easy that enforcement of property rights is next to impossible without extremely intrusive verification. Where's the right balance?
I do think that the fact that music is entertainment while pharmaceuticals are life-sustaining makes a big difference. Just because the two industries share a similar stance with respect to IP doesn't mean that the balance between all those hands in my previous paragraph must come at the same point. My inclination has usually been to tell the music (and content in general) business that they're SOL on this one - technology has simply passed them by - but to protect drug companies' patents as well as possible. But I might be convinced otherwise.
The good news is, once we get this, we can expect commercial fusion power about 15 years later!
Hmm, maybe, although that's "losing money" in the same way that increasing the federal budget by only 3% instead of 5% is "cutting spending". You'd be making more money and more profits, in fact. As to Huffy, I certainly agree that one can go bankrupt by cutting prices to serve Wal-Mart; only that you have to be complicit in it (i.e., it may be a road to bankruptcy, just not a one-way road).
First of all, you can't "make up for losses in volume". If you're losing money on each sale, selling in volume just means you're losing lots of money. You seem to recognize this since you do mention that Dell's margins will be "thin", not negative. If you're losing money on a sale, then your margin is negative, by definition.
Second of all, increased revenue is worthless if it's tied to an even greater increase in cost. The widgets that Mike's Widgets sells at Wal-Mart may be at a lower margin than the ones they sell at your local Mommenpop Shoppe, but they are positive margins or else Mike is going out of business soon. All Wal-Mart is doing is price discrimination, which is good for the consumer. It's often bad for the Mommenpop Shoppe, but let's not get into that right now since we're talking about how Wal-Mart's tactics affect producers, not rival retailers.
Now, there may be other reasons why selling widgets at Wal-Mart may be bad for Mike's Widgets - perceived quality, customer support, knowledgeable sales assistance, etc. But they aren't directly losing Mike money or else Mike would quite freely stop selling there. Some small companies have stopped selling through Wal-Mart and have thrived, so this is certainly possible and potentially profitable. Selling there is not a one-way ticket to bankruptcy, or even serfdom in Wal-Mart feudalism.
I assume you mean intelligent life; once we're talking about evolution life is already there.
But anyway... it's hard to say whether shorter species lifespans would mean a higher or lower chance of intelligent life. Why would it have to be one way or the other? Bear in mind that a species being "wiped out" may mean extinction with no descendants, but may also mean being out-competed by descendant species.
The problem with all arguments of this type is that they assume life must always be exactly like it is on the modern Earth. But why? Our own Earth has been vastly different at over its history, and we still ended up with intelligent life. Life is extremely adaptable. It's been able to handle an Earth that was warmer, colder, wetter, drier, with a single huge continent or many smaller ones, with more radiation flux, with more asteroid strikes.
Maybe the argument is better phrased that evolution can't proceed as rapidly without certain "ideal" conditions in place. And maybe that's true. But really, I doubt even that. More upheaval probably means faster evolution, since most evidence points to the likelihood that evolution proceeds in sudden bursts when conditions change, and very little otherwise. We have no clue what specific conditions lead to the evolution of large animals or intelligence. Our present knowledge is next to zero on the subject, so we really can't even make an educated guess at what is "ideal" for intelligent life.
Good point, but I wouldn't say this is the same thing, for several reasons. First, it was only highly significant until 1945, and considering the intelligence wasn't usable until after 1940, the highly significant secret was only kept for at most 5 years, not "decades". Second, the secret was being kept during a time of total war. Third, while official disclosure of Ultra didn't come about until the 1970s, some disclosures about it were made public earlier. The fact that this didn't generate a mass of conspiracy theories only supports my point #1: that it was no longer highly significant.
OTOH, if it were true that the US government (or a foreign government, for that matter - let's thrown in the conspiracy theory that Castro backed Oswald just for fun) assassinated JFK, that would still be highly significant today.
What I want to know is, if they're so good at maintaining the cover story for all these years, how come they're so frickin' incompetent at everything else?
Incidentally, I'm perfectly willing to concede that case law, SCOTUS decisions, etc. are against me on this. But that still doesn't make it a fundamental human right.
Wrong in principle, right in practice. That's what I love about modern doublespeak!
Look, the argument you've made completely disproves the notion that discrimination is wrong in principal. It isn't, any more than censorship is "wrong in principal". What you believe, which is what almost everyone believes, is that certain types of discrimination are wrong. Other types are neutral, other types are OK, and yet other types are positively encouraged! (If discrimination is truly wrong "in principal" then the whole concept of meritocracy goes out the window, for example, and I suspect most of us here on Slashdot are in favor of at least an approximation of meritocratic rewards.)
Funny story about censorship: I just received last night an email urging me to complain to CBS News about firing a commentator who allegedly criticized the Iraq war (which I find a little hard to believe on the face of it - or wouldn't most CBS commentators have been fired by now? anyway...). The same email mentions that it took CBS 2 weeks to fire Don Imus for saying some bad things, but only 2 days to fire the commentator. Of course, they consider the latter censorship, but the former? Of course not! Perfectly justified! Not censorship at all! This is complete doublespeak.
Am I the one hiring you? Then I can deny you a job for any reason I please. Example: I am denying you a job right now (assuming you don't currently work for me, which I think is likely :). You can't make me hire you, regardless of why you think I'm not.
Am I the one renting or selling you the place? Then I can in fact choose not to rent or sell for any reason I please.
You do not have a fundamental human right to allocate my resources for me.
If it's truly impossible to quantify them, then how do you know they're undervalued? Maybe they're overvalued. Maybe they're valued exactly correctly. Maybe they're never valued exactly correctly, but on average they're about right (this is what I suspect is closest to the truth).
Seriously, with a small or even medium-sized business there is a fair amount of room for companies not understanding how these effects work. But big businesses studies how their actions affect their sales constantly. They know much better than you do how valuable "good will" is. I suspect that it isn't as valuable as you think, and that most consumers are more price-conscious than socially-conscious.
Maybe it would be a better world if that weren't the case - I wouldn't argue with that point.
Look at it like Asimov's psychohistory - maybe it's possible to predict the broad outlines of human history even if the specifics are vague. Unless the Mule comes along and screws everything up.
The problem with this, of course, is that some seemingly minor event might have derailed the whole prediction. If Lincoln hadn't existed or hadn't been elected in 1860, or hadn't been the person he was, the South might have won the Civil War and remained independent. That would have been a problem for Tocqueville, most likely. The Russian Revolution is not as good an example - a Czarist Russia might have ended up a rival of the US just the same as Stalinist Russia.
Here's the pic:
(Stupid lameness filter...)
*cough* Xanth! *cough*