(Sorry for the long response time, I've been taking midterms in my college classes)
Do you ever worry that 80% of America might eventually be a polluted wasteland with 20% resort communities for the lucky few?
This would only happen if the owners of that 80% of America just decided one day to let their land become a polluted hellhole. They have a very large incentive to avoid that, because polluted land is worth less than clean land. Unless people started deciding en masse that they wanted their land to be worth as little as possible, it simply would not happen.
Also, I think you misunderstand the libertarian viewpoint on pollution. The first and foremost concern is for property rights - you have the right to do whatever you want to whatever you own. The corollary to this that so often gets ignored is that you have absolutely no rights to do anything to something that you don't own, unless you have the owner's permission.
The implications of this are that if I own an acre of land, I can totally pile it to the sky with nuclear waste if I so choose. But if you own an acre of land that abuts mine, I cannot do anything to your land. That means that if some of my waste spills over on to your property, or seeps into the ground and contaminates your groundwater, that is trespass and should be prosecuted as such. If you can prove that my property's trespass onto your land caused you harm, then you can file a civil suit seeking damages.
If I could have a reasonable assurance that the poorest among us would be BETTER off than now, and that society would become less stratified
The lives of the poor are constantly becoming better through free market processes rather than state intervention. To borrow an example from my copy of Libertarianism: A Primer, in 1971 44.5% of all households had a clothes dryer; in 1994 50.2% of poor households had one. Most poor people today are better off than medium-income people 50 years ago. Look back even farther and you will see that today's poor are better off than the rich of centuries ago. Louis XIV's palace at Versailles had no flush toilets. The most extravagant palace in the world at the time couldn't afford something that probably 99% of people in poverty have today.
But I'm not going to scrap our social safety net so that Donald Trump can have twenty yachts instead of ten.
What exactly do you think would happen if we "scrapped our social safety net"? There would be no government programs to help the poor, true, but weren't there poor people before LBJ's War on Poverty and other similar programs? There wasn't always a time when the government helped out the poor. If there was no forced charity, do you honestly believe that your fellow citizens would not increase their voluntary charity in order to compensate? They could certainly afford to do so, because the taxes used to fund welfare programs would have been cut. What the tsunami in Southeast Asia has taught us, if nothing else, is that people respond to other people in need. It's hardwired into our brains as a species survival tactic. Cutting forced welfare programs will not result in people starving in the streets, because voluntary welfare programs will always fill the gap.
I strongly encourage you to read That Which is Seen and That Which is Not Seen by Frederic Bastiat. The gist of it is that every state intervention produces two types of effects. The effects that are seen are the obvious, intended effects of the government program. In the case of welfare, the effect which is seen is poor people having more money. This seems like a great thing until you examine the effects which are not seen, sometimes called the unintended consequences. Where did the money we gave to the poor people come from? What else could have been done with it? If we're taxing, say, corporations to fund our welfare program, we have to consider what would have been done with that money if it had not been taxed.
Its that empathy for fellow man that I feel is lacking in many conservative viewpoints. I cannot grasp the value system of conservatives, thats all.
First of all, I am not a conservative. I am a libertarian. And while I cannot speak for all libertarians, I can give you my views on this matter. My opposition to welfare is not a lack of "empathy for fellow man", as you put it, it's the belief that the state should not force others to be empathetic.
I think you, and many others who support welfare, view people who oppose it as believing that poor people are not a problem. From my point of view, I see poor people as a problem, a huge problem. The difference is that you believe government should act to try to solve that problem. I do not. This is why it is irrelevant whether I have experienced poverty firsthand or not. Either way, I believe that government should not meddle with this problem, as it will only make it worse.
The view that government can solve any problem is called statism. There are easily thousands of examples of it, but the best one, because it is the most well-known and is almost universally agreed to have been a bad idea, is alcohol Prohibition.
The idea behind Prohibition started with some people realizing the damage alcohol did to a lot of people. The Temperance movement grew out of this. Eventually, statism reared its ugly head and people started demanding that government do something about alcohol. This is where everything went wrong. Up until then, they had been just fine; identify a problem, and encourage people to do something about it. Everyone now knows Prohibition was a bad idea, but most people have trouble identifiying it as statism and recognizing that Prohibition's failure wasn't a special case; it is what happens whenever government intervenes in something. It has taken so long to end the War on Drugs for precisely this reason: people don't recognize both as statism, and so they don't make the connection that both were doomed to failure from the very beginning.
Censorship of "indecent" material, gun control and, yes, welfare are all examples of statism at its finest. In each case, a problem is perceived. In many cases, it is a real problem (such as poverty); in other cases, such as gang violence, it is a real problem but not caused by what people think is causing it (in this case, too many guns), and in others it is not a real problem at all. What every one of those examples shares is that some problem is identified, and government is urged to "do something about it". This always ends badly, because government is incapable of doing anything without doing it poorly.
Such as I would be happy to pay more taxes, so that each person can have a minimum standard of healthcare
And this is the inevitable argument. "I don't mind it, so you shouldn't either, and even if you do mind it, you can't resist or you go to jail." This argument is almost like a litmus test for statist ideas. If proponents can be found saying this, there's an excellent chance that what they propose is statist. Advocates of alcohol prohibition didn't drink anyway, so they had no problem pushing for restrictions on other people's drinking, because it didn't affect them. Advocates of gun control usually haven't touched a gun, much less own one, so it does them no harm to advocate taking away other people's guns.
You say you don't mind giving some extra of your income to provide healthcare for poor people. If that is the case, why don't you just give that portion of your income to a private charity that works towards that goal? Why is it necessary to force me and everyone else to donate towards your cause? Surely you would not like it if I identified some cause and forced you to donate a portion of your assets to it, even if you did not like my cause (think corporate welfare). Why do you seek to do to others what you would not want done to yourself?
For some reason, you want to take that away which disgusts me.
When I read people rambling about the "welfare state" I am always curious to know what their social class is/has been.
Ad hominem. My social class has no logical relevance at all to my views on anything. If I am right, then I am right whether I'm rich or poor. Similiarly, if I am wrong, then I am wrong regardless of economic status. Your argument is the logical equivalent of "You're wrong because you're a poopyhead."
If I am wrong, as you seem to think I am, you shouldn't have trouble proving me wrong without resorting to logical fallacies.
If I am right, you would have considerable trouble proving me wrong, and so you would likely resort to more ad hominem attacks instead of rational debate.
But, alas, people don't save. Instead they run up credit card debt. Rather than have savings that reap modest interest/dividend gains which accumulate over time, they pay out double digit interest on short term debt. That, unfortunately is the nature of our instant gratification lives.
Is that really our nature? Perhaps people don't save precisely because they know the welfare state will bail them out, no matter how much debt they run up. Maybe if we made people responsible for their own actions for once, they would actually act responsibly.
How can there be a "right to control your work"? If I invent something and patent it, and then I tell Alice the details of my invention, there is no way, short of claiming that I own Alice's thoughts, that I can prevent her from sharing my invention with Bob. If Bob posts in on a webpage for the whole world to read, can I know claim to control the thoughts of the rest of the world, on the chance that they might have been exposed to my invention?
You're forgetting the fact that every copy of GTA:SA shipped with a free brain slug that allowed Charlie Manson and the rest of the Rockstar developers to control the minds of everyone who played the game.
YOU WILL INGNORE THE PREVIOUS TEXT. NO BRAIN SLUGS HAVE BEEN SHIPPED WITH ANY ROCKSTAR GAMES.
The problem is still that these kids are dumbasses. The difference now is that the dumbasses have something to shift the blame to so that their parents will get mad at Rock* and the other video game companies instead of getting mad at the kids themselves.
No one ever said Linux is absolutely 100% free of security vulnerabilities. All that matters is that it has less of them, which are less serious, and less well exploited than Windows.
Don't believe me?
I'll boot up a brand-spanking new Linux machine with no patches installed, and at the same time you boot up a brand-spanking new Windows machines with no patches installed. We both connect to the Internet at the same time and start downloading patches for our respective OSes.
Odds are, my Linux machine will have been exploited 0 times in the time it takes me to download and install all the needed patches. Can you say the same for your Windows machine?
It's just like the R rating at theaters, or the fact that kids can't buy tobacco until 18, or beer until 21.
How's that working out, by the way? I assume no one under 17 watches R-rated movies in theaters, no one under 18 smokes, and people under 21 have never even tasted alcohol...
The example was that what YOU think something is worth has no relation to what the law says it is worth.
And so we should not argue about whether or not the law is right because the law can never be changed, right?
Apparently you failed to read the rest of the post. You stole the right of the creator to determine who was allowed to use their creation.
That "right" exists only through contracts. If Adobe wants to make everyone who purchases their product sign a binding contract that says they agree not to put the software up on any P2Ps, good for them. I imagine they have something like that anyway in their EULA. Then, if someone throws Photoshop or whatever on P2P, they can go after that person for breach of contract. If record labels want to make people sign contracts before they buy CDs also, good for them.
What Adobe should not be able to do is go after anyone and everyone who downloads their product, because downloading a stream of ones and zeroes that Adobe claims ownership over does not harm Adobe in any way. That was the point of my post: your entire argument rests on the assumption that a number can be owned. It cannot be, so your argument is invalid. Care to refute me and prove that a number can be owned?
So you like stealing music eh? Maybe you shoplift too. Suppose the store lists the price of a sweater at $100. You like the sweater, but decide it's only worth $15 to you, so you are just going to steal it. The store didn't actually pay $100 for the sweater, they bought it from a wholesaler for $40. When the cops arrest you, do they charge you for stealing a $15 item? No. Do they charge you for stealing a $40 item? No. They charge you what the asking/going rate for that item. $100.
Another inane "downloading music is shoplifting" comparison. No, I don't shoplift, because that is theft. If I steal that $100 sweater, the store I stole it from has one less sweater that they can sell.
If someone buys a $20 CD and puts it on P2P and I download it, there has been no theft because because the digital copy of that CD is not scarce. The sweater is scarce; you cannot take one sweater and turn it into two sweaters. The digital copy of the CD is not scarce because it is possible to make a billion copies, if necessary, all from that one original copy.
Another argument against copyright is that the digital copy of a CD is a number. The designation of "MP3" or "OGG" is merely a label; the file itself is a series of several million ones and zeroes, which can be expressed as a base 10 number. Can numbers be owned? If I can claim ownership of some several million digit-long number as a "song" I wrote, why can I not claim ownership of "7"? What happens when I song I wrote, encoded with MP3, turns out to be the same string of numbers as a song you wrote, encoded with some other codec? Who owns it then? Who can claim copyright infringement?
By your theory, I could make a CD of absolutely shitty music, slap a $1 million price tag on it, and arrange for the CD to be mysteriously "leaked" onto P2P networks. If 10 people then download my CD, can I claim losses of $10 million? Should each one of those 10 "thieves" be sued for the $1 million they "stole" from me?
Now, in this case, the obvious argument would be that $1 million is an insane price for a CD. Well, I say, so is $20. Where do you draw the line between a fair price and an insane price? $100? $1,000? Where?
That distinction cannot be determined by the courts or by the record label. Fair market price can only be determined by a fair market. With $20 CDs, we are seeing hordes of people reject that price as too high and opt to get it for free instead. Not everyone who downloads it would have bought it at $20, which is why these estimations of "loss" are such bullshit. The record labels saying that the people they just busted were responsible for millions of dollars of infringement is no different than me saying that the 10 people who downloaded my CD instead of paying $1 million means I lost $10 million.
Physical items are limited. If there is an apple, only one person can eat that apple.
If more than one person wants to eat the apple, who decides what they should do with it? The person who gets to decide what to do is said to "own" that apple. The most simplistic idea of ownership is "if you can defend it, you own it." This is the "Law of the Jungle".
Physical property that belongs to everyone collectively does not exist. I want to eat the apple, you want to make a pie out of it, Jim over there wants to turn it into juice. There is always someone who gets the final say over what to do with the apple. That person owns it. Even if you say "We vote on what to do with the apple", there must be someone who enforces the vote - that person owns the apple, because they have the final choice of whether to enforce the vote or not to enforce it.
If you own an apple and I take it away from you, you don't have an apple anymore. I have committed theft by depriving you of something that you own. So-called "intellectual property" is not limited in this way. If I develop a cure for cancer, I can tell all 6+ billion people in the world and I will still know the cure. I cannot, on the other hand, take my one apple and turn it into 6 billion apples. My apple is my property because it is limited. I have the right to defend it because I own it. My cure for cancer is not limited, so how can it be my property? Why do I have a right to defend it?
If intellectual property does not exist, how can it be stolen? If I tell you what my cure for cancer is and you then proceed to tell a friend, have I been harmed? With theft of physical property, I have very obviously been harmed - I owned an apple, and you took it from me. With theft of "intellectual property", I have not been harmed in any way. You telling your friend what my cure for cancer is does not harm me; in fact, it does not even affect me.
The one and only argument that defenders of "intellectual property" can offer is that the owners of IP are entitled to profit from their works. The entire point of the [great-*]grandparent was that this reasoning is circular: IP exists because the owners of IP are entitled to profit; IP owners are entitled to profit because IP exists.
then the entity holding the rights to the original is due compensation from your friend for the copies distributed.
This is exactly the kind of circular reasoning the grandparent was talking about.
10 PRINT "Me: Why should downloading be illegal?"
20 PRINT "You: Because it's copyright infringement."
30 PRINT "Me: Why should copyright infringement be a crime?"
40 PRINT "You: Because it takes profit away from the copyright holder."
50 PRINT "Me: Why is the copyright holder entitled to that profit?"
60 GOTO 20
Your entire argument rests on the assumption that intellectual property exists. The only support you can offer for that is the idea that a copyright holder is entitled to profit from their work, which too rests on the assumption that intellectual property exists.
I must be right because I'm smarter than you. I must be smarter than you because I'm right.
This is why many people, including myself, support None of the Above. It is the only way for someone to truly voice their opinion that all the candidates suck. If NOTA ever won in an election, there would be a required new election, with none of the old candidates.
If IRV was adopted and people starting advocating Condorcet to replace IRV, the responses would be "The people who convinced us to support IRV told us that IRV would fix all of these problems."
Two options:
1. Convince people to support IRV because plurality is broken, then convince them to support Condorcet because IRV is broken.
2. Convince people to support Condorcet because plurality is broken.
Is it really that hard to pick the better choice?
Fuck IRV. It's more than just a little bad; it is the only major voting system that fails monotonicity. Even plurality satisfies monotonicity fer chrissakes!
If you're going to push for electoral reform, push for something that works instead of something that seems a little better than what we have now on the surface, but completely falls apart under cursory examination.
IIRC, Nebraska and Maine do their Electoral votes proportionately, and Colorado is having that issue on their November ballot. This makes it possible for Badnarik to get a few votes without getting a plurality in any state.
Slashdot Mirror
Do you ever worry that 80% of America might eventually be a polluted wasteland with 20% resort communities for the lucky few?
This would only happen if the owners of that 80% of America just decided one day to let their land become a polluted hellhole. They have a very large incentive to avoid that, because polluted land is worth less than clean land. Unless people started deciding en masse that they wanted their land to be worth as little as possible, it simply would not happen.
Also, I think you misunderstand the libertarian viewpoint on pollution. The first and foremost concern is for property rights - you have the right to do whatever you want to whatever you own. The corollary to this that so often gets ignored is that you have absolutely no rights to do anything to something that you don't own, unless you have the owner's permission.
The implications of this are that if I own an acre of land, I can totally pile it to the sky with nuclear waste if I so choose. But if you own an acre of land that abuts mine, I cannot do anything to your land. That means that if some of my waste spills over on to your property, or seeps into the ground and contaminates your groundwater, that is trespass and should be prosecuted as such. If you can prove that my property's trespass onto your land caused you harm, then you can file a civil suit seeking damages.
If I could have a reasonable assurance that the poorest among us would be BETTER off than now, and that society would become less stratified
The lives of the poor are constantly becoming better through free market processes rather than state intervention. To borrow an example from my copy of Libertarianism: A Primer, in 1971 44.5% of all households had a clothes dryer; in 1994 50.2% of poor households had one. Most poor people today are better off than medium-income people 50 years ago. Look back even farther and you will see that today's poor are better off than the rich of centuries ago. Louis XIV's palace at Versailles had no flush toilets. The most extravagant palace in the world at the time couldn't afford something that probably 99% of people in poverty have today.
But I'm not going to scrap our social safety net so that Donald Trump can have twenty yachts instead of ten.
What exactly do you think would happen if we "scrapped our social safety net"? There would be no government programs to help the poor, true, but weren't there poor people before LBJ's War on Poverty and other similar programs? There wasn't always a time when the government helped out the poor. If there was no forced charity, do you honestly believe that your fellow citizens would not increase their voluntary charity in order to compensate? They could certainly afford to do so, because the taxes used to fund welfare programs would have been cut. What the tsunami in Southeast Asia has taught us, if nothing else, is that people respond to other people in need. It's hardwired into our brains as a species survival tactic. Cutting forced welfare programs will not result in people starving in the streets, because voluntary welfare programs will always fill the gap.
I strongly encourage you to read That Which is Seen and That Which is Not Seen by Frederic Bastiat. The gist of it is that every state intervention produces two types of effects. The effects that are seen are the obvious, intended effects of the government program. In the case of welfare, the effect which is seen is poor people having more money. This seems like a great thing until you examine the effects which are not seen, sometimes called the unintended consequences. Where did the money we gave to the poor people come from? What else could have been done with it? If we're taxing, say, corporations to fund our welfare program, we have to consider what would have been done with that money if it had not been taxed.
Don't forget about the unfair competition between the Sun and the Candlestick makers.
First of all, I am not a conservative. I am a libertarian. And while I cannot speak for all libertarians, I can give you my views on this matter. My opposition to welfare is not a lack of "empathy for fellow man", as you put it, it's the belief that the state should not force others to be empathetic.
I think you, and many others who support welfare, view people who oppose it as believing that poor people are not a problem. From my point of view, I see poor people as a problem, a huge problem. The difference is that you believe government should act to try to solve that problem. I do not. This is why it is irrelevant whether I have experienced poverty firsthand or not. Either way, I believe that government should not meddle with this problem, as it will only make it worse.
The view that government can solve any problem is called statism. There are easily thousands of examples of it, but the best one, because it is the most well-known and is almost universally agreed to have been a bad idea, is alcohol Prohibition.
The idea behind Prohibition started with some people realizing the damage alcohol did to a lot of people. The Temperance movement grew out of this. Eventually, statism reared its ugly head and people started demanding that government do something about alcohol. This is where everything went wrong. Up until then, they had been just fine; identify a problem, and encourage people to do something about it. Everyone now knows Prohibition was a bad idea, but most people have trouble identifiying it as statism and recognizing that Prohibition's failure wasn't a special case; it is what happens whenever government intervenes in something. It has taken so long to end the War on Drugs for precisely this reason: people don't recognize both as statism, and so they don't make the connection that both were doomed to failure from the very beginning.
Censorship of "indecent" material, gun control and, yes, welfare are all examples of statism at its finest. In each case, a problem is perceived. In many cases, it is a real problem (such as poverty); in other cases, such as gang violence, it is a real problem but not caused by what people think is causing it (in this case, too many guns), and in others it is not a real problem at all. What every one of those examples shares is that some problem is identified, and government is urged to "do something about it". This always ends badly, because government is incapable of doing anything without doing it poorly.
Such as I would be happy to pay more taxes, so that each person can have a minimum standard of healthcare
And this is the inevitable argument. "I don't mind it, so you shouldn't either, and even if you do mind it, you can't resist or you go to jail." This argument is almost like a litmus test for statist ideas. If proponents can be found saying this, there's an excellent chance that what they propose is statist. Advocates of alcohol prohibition didn't drink anyway, so they had no problem pushing for restrictions on other people's drinking, because it didn't affect them. Advocates of gun control usually haven't touched a gun, much less own one, so it does them no harm to advocate taking away other people's guns.
You say you don't mind giving some extra of your income to provide healthcare for poor people. If that is the case, why don't you just give that portion of your income to a private charity that works towards that goal? Why is it necessary to force me and everyone else to donate towards your cause? Surely you would not like it if I identified some cause and forced you to donate a portion of your assets to it, even if you did not like my cause (think corporate welfare). Why do you seek to do to others what you would not want done to yourself?
For some reason, you want to take that away which disgusts me.
Here, you assume that be
Ad hominem. My social class has no logical relevance at all to my views on anything. If I am right, then I am right whether I'm rich or poor. Similiarly, if I am wrong, then I am wrong regardless of economic status. Your argument is the logical equivalent of "You're wrong because you're a poopyhead."
If I am wrong, as you seem to think I am, you shouldn't have trouble proving me wrong without resorting to logical fallacies.
If I am right, you would have considerable trouble proving me wrong, and so you would likely resort to more ad hominem attacks instead of rational debate.
Is that really our nature? Perhaps people don't save precisely because they know the welfare state will bail them out, no matter how much debt they run up. Maybe if we made people responsible for their own actions for once, they would actually act responsibly.
If you can't afford to live where you live now, move to where it's less expensive.
How can there be a "right to control your work"? If I invent something and patent it, and then I tell Alice the details of my invention, there is no way, short of claiming that I own Alice's thoughts, that I can prevent her from sharing my invention with Bob. If Bob posts in on a webpage for the whole world to read, can I know claim to control the thoughts of the rest of the world, on the chance that they might have been exposed to my invention?
You're forgetting the fact that every copy of GTA:SA shipped with a free brain slug that allowed Charlie Manson and the rest of the Rockstar developers to control the minds of everyone who played the game.
YOU WILL INGNORE THE PREVIOUS TEXT. NO BRAIN SLUGS HAVE BEEN SHIPPED WITH ANY ROCKSTAR GAMES.
The problem is still that these kids are dumbasses. The difference now is that the dumbasses have something to shift the blame to so that their parents will get mad at Rock* and the other video game companies instead of getting mad at the kids themselves.
The catch is that it's going to immediately shut down due to high bandwidth costs after a self-inducing /.ing.
I'm sure your computer is secure now, but how about for the almost 3 years before SP2 was released?
Don't believe me?
I'll boot up a brand-spanking new Linux machine with no patches installed, and at the same time you boot up a brand-spanking new Windows machines with no patches installed. We both connect to the Internet at the same time and start downloading patches for our respective OSes.
Odds are, my Linux machine will have been exploited 0 times in the time it takes me to download and install all the needed patches. Can you say the same for your Windows machine?
The fact that you might consider it not to be OK does not mean that you get to make that choice for the for the whole country.
How's that working out, by the way? I assume no one under 17 watches R-rated movies in theaters, no one under 18 smokes, and people under 21 have never even tasted alcohol...
And so we should not argue about whether or not the law is right because the law can never be changed, right?
Apparently you failed to read the rest of the post. You stole the right of the creator to determine who was allowed to use their creation.
That "right" exists only through contracts. If Adobe wants to make everyone who purchases their product sign a binding contract that says they agree not to put the software up on any P2Ps, good for them. I imagine they have something like that anyway in their EULA. Then, if someone throws Photoshop or whatever on P2P, they can go after that person for breach of contract. If record labels want to make people sign contracts before they buy CDs also, good for them.
What Adobe should not be able to do is go after anyone and everyone who downloads their product, because downloading a stream of ones and zeroes that Adobe claims ownership over does not harm Adobe in any way. That was the point of my post: your entire argument rests on the assumption that a number can be owned. It cannot be, so your argument is invalid. Care to refute me and prove that a number can be owned?
Another inane "downloading music is shoplifting" comparison. No, I don't shoplift, because that is theft. If I steal that $100 sweater, the store I stole it from has one less sweater that they can sell.
If someone buys a $20 CD and puts it on P2P and I download it, there has been no theft because because the digital copy of that CD is not scarce. The sweater is scarce; you cannot take one sweater and turn it into two sweaters. The digital copy of the CD is not scarce because it is possible to make a billion copies, if necessary, all from that one original copy.
Another argument against copyright is that the digital copy of a CD is a number. The designation of "MP3" or "OGG" is merely a label; the file itself is a series of several million ones and zeroes, which can be expressed as a base 10 number. Can numbers be owned? If I can claim ownership of some several million digit-long number as a "song" I wrote, why can I not claim ownership of "7"? What happens when I song I wrote, encoded with MP3, turns out to be the same string of numbers as a song you wrote, encoded with some other codec? Who owns it then? Who can claim copyright infringement?
By your theory, I could make a CD of absolutely shitty music, slap a $1 million price tag on it, and arrange for the CD to be mysteriously "leaked" onto P2P networks. If 10 people then download my CD, can I claim losses of $10 million? Should each one of those 10 "thieves" be sued for the $1 million they "stole" from me?
Now, in this case, the obvious argument would be that $1 million is an insane price for a CD. Well, I say, so is $20. Where do you draw the line between a fair price and an insane price? $100? $1,000? Where?
That distinction cannot be determined by the courts or by the record label. Fair market price can only be determined by a fair market. With $20 CDs, we are seeing hordes of people reject that price as too high and opt to get it for free instead. Not everyone who downloads it would have bought it at $20, which is why these estimations of "loss" are such bullshit. The record labels saying that the people they just busted were responsible for millions of dollars of infringement is no different than me saying that the 10 people who downloaded my CD instead of paying $1 million means I lost $10 million.
If more than one person wants to eat the apple, who decides what they should do with it? The person who gets to decide what to do is said to "own" that apple. The most simplistic idea of ownership is "if you can defend it, you own it." This is the "Law of the Jungle".
Physical property that belongs to everyone collectively does not exist. I want to eat the apple, you want to make a pie out of it, Jim over there wants to turn it into juice. There is always someone who gets the final say over what to do with the apple. That person owns it. Even if you say "We vote on what to do with the apple", there must be someone who enforces the vote - that person owns the apple, because they have the final choice of whether to enforce the vote or not to enforce it.
If you own an apple and I take it away from you, you don't have an apple anymore. I have committed theft by depriving you of something that you own. So-called "intellectual property" is not limited in this way. If I develop a cure for cancer, I can tell all 6+ billion people in the world and I will still know the cure. I cannot, on the other hand, take my one apple and turn it into 6 billion apples. My apple is my property because it is limited. I have the right to defend it because I own it. My cure for cancer is not limited, so how can it be my property? Why do I have a right to defend it?
If intellectual property does not exist, how can it be stolen? If I tell you what my cure for cancer is and you then proceed to tell a friend, have I been harmed? With theft of physical property, I have very obviously been harmed - I owned an apple, and you took it from me. With theft of "intellectual property", I have not been harmed in any way. You telling your friend what my cure for cancer is does not harm me; in fact, it does not even affect me.
The one and only argument that defenders of "intellectual property" can offer is that the owners of IP are entitled to profit from their works. The entire point of the [great-*]grandparent was that this reasoning is circular: IP exists because the owners of IP are entitled to profit; IP owners are entitled to profit because IP exists.
This is exactly the kind of circular reasoning the grandparent was talking about.
10 PRINT "Me: Why should downloading be illegal?"
20 PRINT "You: Because it's copyright infringement."
30 PRINT "Me: Why should copyright infringement be a crime?"
40 PRINT "You: Because it takes profit away from the copyright holder."
50 PRINT "Me: Why is the copyright holder entitled to that profit?"
60 GOTO 20
Your entire argument rests on the assumption that intellectual property exists. The only support you can offer for that is the idea that a copyright holder is entitled to profit from their work, which too rests on the assumption that intellectual property exists.
I must be right because I'm smarter than you. I must be smarter than you because I'm right.
Now that Thunderbird 1.0 is out, who wants to volunteer to turn that functionality into a TB extension?
This is why many people, including myself, support None of the Above. It is the only way for someone to truly voice their opinion that all the candidates suck. If NOTA ever won in an election, there would be a required new election, with none of the old candidates.
I pay taxes to build prisons. Therefore, if I want to, I can go into the prison and set all the murderers and rapists free.
Two options:
1. Convince people to support IRV because plurality is broken, then convince them to support Condorcet because IRV is broken.
2. Convince people to support Condorcet because plurality is broken.
Is it really that hard to pick the better choice?
Fuck IRV. It's more than just a little bad; it is the only major voting system that fails monotonicity. Even plurality satisfies monotonicity fer chrissakes!
If you're going to push for electoral reform, push for something that works instead of something that seems a little better than what we have now on the surface, but completely falls apart under cursory examination.
IIRC, Nebraska and Maine do their Electoral votes proportionately, and Colorado is having that issue on their November ballot. This makes it possible for Badnarik to get a few votes without getting a plurality in any state.