How many times have you gotten separated from your buddies at a trade show? If you don't have their cell numbers, it's going to be a bitch to find them in the crowd. But if everyone can go to a kiosk and wave one's badge into a "group finder" app to register into a group, then you have only to go to the nearest kiosk to find everyone in your group.
But note that the problem is the winner-take-all atmosphere, which could be addressed by a runoff system. It's not unlikely that Schwarzenegger would still have won over McClintock in a regular primary.
And I agree with you that McClintock was the better candidate to an educated voter. I just don't think many voters feel sufficiently empowered to do that much research. Another problem with the winner-take-all system is that it leaves voters very apathetic.
You don't want 50 seperate startup companies all laying their own custom fiber or coax networks through your city redundantly, when you know that when it all shakes out, at best 3 will survive.
The problem is not the 50 fibers, but the 50 times the street is dug up, or the 50 trucks that string cable on poles. Set a reasonable price for that process that compensates the users of the streets, and allow newcomers to merge and share their infrastructure before they burn through their capital, and you allay a lot of these problems.
What we need is a governing body with exactly the opposite incentive: A House of Repeal which shows how much work it's doing for the People by removing laws, regulations, and taxes that are no longer appropriate. No new laws can be created by this House.
This House could also be granted veto power over the other bodies. Before going to the Executive's desk for signature, the bill would go through the House of Repeal for a possible veto.
The last California gubernatorial election demonstrated that a ballot with many candidates was workable. There was no primary. All primary candidates from all parties showed up on the same final ballot. Republicans ran not only against Democrats and Libertarians but against other Republicans, forcing each candidate to substantially differentiate himself/herself from the crowd to attain a reasonable degree of recognition.
Not only can it be argued that this is a fairer system, but it also saves the state the cost of a separate primary election.
You're right, of course. The danger is that some will fail to see that this is not a free market, and think that more government intervention is a solution. The current situation has arisen because government is already too powerful, and there's a natural incentive to co-opt that power lest it be used against you.
You also caught me in an artificial separation of economic roles: Consumers and producers are not different people. The same people fulfill both roles. One can also be both an employer and laborer. We have to be careful in balancing power between these roles, as sometimes that regulation will work against us, depending on the role we play at any given moment.
For example, labor laws usually account for large corporations with excess political power, but fail to account for small businesses with little capital, both physical and human, to accomodate excessive regulation.
One of the frightening problems with our current trend towards relegating all social process to competetive, "for profit" entities, is the erosion of cooperative "non profit" entities.
Note that "competition" is between producers, not between a producer and a consumer. The producers vie to better provide what the consumer desires. Meanwhile, consumers compete (bid) for the limited capacity of the available producers. "Cooperation" is between the producer and consumer. A "price" occurs when all these forces are in balance. And the many actors may each agree on a different price for each transaction.
As business pushes ever harder to own all IP, the availability, even the existence of an intellectual commons come under greater and greater threat. This is just one of many places that a our current social trends indicate grave consequences for the future of liberty, and human self dertermination.
True, but this is an independent issue. The property rights historically defined around IP are in conflict with current information techology and create a host of unnatural stresses.
Cooperation is really the defining characteristic of a free market.
A big part of the "brokenness" of our system is the extensive coercive forces that distort the free flow of information (particularly prices but also non-monetary factors). For instance, there's the tax system that creates the artificial distinction between for-profit and "non-profit" entities. Or the regulatory systems that get co-opted by the regulated to block competition from small upstarts.
Everything in our public discourse -- and our manifest social organizations -- has been reduced to a function of economics
Of course it has: Economics is the study of value, a subset of praxeology, the study of human action. No matter what we do, we act based on our values and the relative value we place on the choices available. Prices are really just ways to assign numbers to these values.
To claim otherwise is to hide or obscure the most basic tool we use to make all of our decisions.
Many games and game server finder utilities such as qstat, GameSpy, and All-Seeing Eye send out an initial request to a "master server" to get a list all available game servers, then send a query to each such server to get its current status. A given game server might operate on an arbitrary port, and some hosts run multiple game servers on different ports. For a popular game this can result in a flood of UDP packets flung far and wide across the Internet to seemingly-random ports. One would somehow need to inform the Virus Throttle that this was legitimate activity.
Check out the products at Residential Control Systems. I've been contemplating getting one of their RS232 or RS485 thermostats and hooking it up to one of those little RS232-to-Ethernet converters. It was only a matter of time before someone thought to marry the two in one housing.
Let's sell off the national parks to the highest bidders. After all, they are a scarce resource. The highest bidder would certainly do much better than just letting them go to waste the way it is now.
They'd certainly do better than the current regime, which rents the forests out to politically-connected clear-cutters. At least if you own land, you tend to take care of it so you can re-sell it for a profit. Or is it your preferred practice to dump all your trash in your yard and then abandon your house?
The usual argument against privatization is that the spectrum is a "scarce resource". I've got news for you: Everything is a scarce resource. Land for example. There's a finite supply. Yet we let poor people own it, and we have police to enforce their property rights.
Like so many 3rd world dictators, you appear to be arguing for nationalization of a foreigner's property. He had the foresight to invest early, and now you want to punish him for making your life better.
If the value of that strip of land is so high (people are obviously willing to pay a lot to use it), then maybe you could enable some competition, by putting together incentives for a parallel highway operated by someone else. Why hasn't any competition formed if the profit is so high? High profit is a natural incentive for investment, so something else must be going on here.
I didn't see anything in the article saying how big the test sails were. Large ultralight structures have to be pretty ungainly to handle even in zero-g, and designing effective deployment and handling systems can't be easy. Imagine what it takes to steer a fragile gossamer object like that!
The light weight and lack of propellant make this an ideal platform for interplanetary endeavors, even for lifting satellites into high Earth orbit cheaply. Much of the cost of a mission is getting the weight out of Earth's gravity well, and the weight of boosters for that must be lifted by the lower stages.
Just as you point out how automation hasn't reduced labor, but shifted it away from repetitive manual jobs, so wireless monitoring has the potential to free up time and energy to be diverted to some other task. One possibility is that more sensors would be deployed, allowing more detailed analysis of failures. Or more devices requiring monitoring would be deployed, since fewer physical visits would be needed to maintain them.
Slashdot Mirror
How many times have you gotten separated from your buddies at a trade show? If you don't have their cell numbers, it's going to be a bitch to find them in the crowd. But if everyone can go to a kiosk and wave one's badge into a "group finder" app to register into a group, then you have only to go to the nearest kiosk to find everyone in your group.
Economic Fallacies: Is America In Trouble for Lack of Manufacturing?
The Exporting Jobs Scam
Service versus Manufacturing Economy
And I agree with you that McClintock was the better candidate to an educated voter. I just don't think many voters feel sufficiently empowered to do that much research. Another problem with the winner-take-all system is that it leaves voters very apathetic.
Ballot Access News
The problem is not the 50 fibers, but the 50 times the street is dug up, or the 50 trucks that string cable on poles. Set a reasonable price for that process that compensates the users of the streets, and allow newcomers to merge and share their infrastructure before they burn through their capital, and you allay a lot of these problems.
This House could also be granted veto power over the other bodies. Before going to the Executive's desk for signature, the bill would go through the House of Repeal for a possible veto.
Not only can it be argued that this is a fairer system, but it also saves the state the cost of a separate primary election.
You also caught me in an artificial separation of economic roles: Consumers and producers are not different people. The same people fulfill both roles. One can also be both an employer and laborer. We have to be careful in balancing power between these roles, as sometimes that regulation will work against us, depending on the role we play at any given moment.
For example, labor laws usually account for large corporations with excess political power, but fail to account for small businesses with little capital, both physical and human, to accomodate excessive regulation.
Note that "competition" is between producers, not between a producer and a consumer. The producers vie to better provide what the consumer desires. Meanwhile, consumers compete (bid) for the limited capacity of the available producers. "Cooperation" is between the producer and consumer. A "price" occurs when all these forces are in balance. And the many actors may each agree on a different price for each transaction.
As business pushes ever harder to own all IP, the availability, even the existence of an intellectual commons come under greater and greater threat. This is just one of many places that a our current social trends indicate grave consequences for the future of liberty, and human self dertermination.
True, but this is an independent issue. The property rights historically defined around IP are in conflict with current information techology and create a host of unnatural stresses.
Cooperation is really the defining characteristic of a free market.
A big part of the "brokenness" of our system is the extensive coercive forces that distort the free flow of information (particularly prices but also non-monetary factors). For instance, there's the tax system that creates the artificial distinction between for-profit and "non-profit" entities. Or the regulatory systems that get co-opted by the regulated to block competition from small upstarts.
Of course it has: Economics is the study of value, a subset of praxeology, the study of human action. No matter what we do, we act based on our values and the relative value we place on the choices available. Prices are really just ways to assign numbers to these values.
To claim otherwise is to hide or obscure the most basic tool we use to make all of our decisions.
Many games and game server finder utilities such as qstat, GameSpy, and All-Seeing Eye send out an initial request to a "master server" to get a list all available game servers, then send a query to each such server to get its current status. A given game server might operate on an arbitrary port, and some hosts run multiple game servers on different ports. For a popular game this can result in a flood of UDP packets flung far and wide across the Internet to seemingly-random ports. One would somehow need to inform the Virus Throttle that this was legitimate activity.
Eddie Murphy!
Check out the products at Residential Control Systems. I've been contemplating getting one of their RS232 or RS485 thermostats and hooking it up to one of those little RS232-to-Ethernet converters. It was only a matter of time before someone thought to marry the two in one housing.
When you're the only guy with a gun, you can afford to be passionate. When everyone else has one, too, you better show some patience.
I'd expect VC++ and VB to be affected if they're using the integrated version control feature (eg. Visual Source Safe) to access a remote repository.
SPECTRUM PRIVATIZATION: Removing the Barriers to Telecommunications Competition
The paper discusses the mechanisms for returning of the nationalized resource to private hands, modeled on experiences in other countries.
They'd certainly do better than the current regime, which rents the forests out to politically-connected clear-cutters. At least if you own land, you tend to take care of it so you can re-sell it for a profit. Or is it your preferred practice to dump all your trash in your yard and then abandon your house?
See section II.2 in SPECTRUM PRIVATIZATION: Removing the Barriers to Telecommunications Competition, a Reason Public Policy Institute paper.
If the value of that strip of land is so high (people are obviously willing to pay a lot to use it), then maybe you could enable some competition, by putting together incentives for a parallel highway operated by someone else. Why hasn't any competition formed if the profit is so high? High profit is a natural incentive for investment, so something else must be going on here.
I didn't see anything in the article saying how big the test sails were. Large ultralight structures have to be pretty ungainly to handle even in zero-g, and designing effective deployment and handling systems can't be easy. Imagine what it takes to steer a fragile gossamer object like that!
The light weight and lack of propellant make this an ideal platform for interplanetary endeavors, even for lifting satellites into high Earth orbit cheaply. Much of the cost of a mission is getting the weight out of Earth's gravity well, and the weight of boosters for that must be lifted by the lower stages.
Just as you point out how automation hasn't reduced labor, but shifted it away from repetitive manual jobs, so wireless monitoring has the potential to free up time and energy to be diverted to some other task. One possibility is that more sensors would be deployed, allowing more detailed analysis of failures. Or more devices requiring monitoring would be deployed, since fewer physical visits would be needed to maintain them.
Zensys website