More likely we are saying that shareholder lawsuits are a stupid idea. I don't know if I agree with that sentiment, but it is a pretty blunt tool of shareholder control.
My take is that shareholder lawsuits are never a given in this country. There is a good possiblity that Yahoo will just show in court that their managerial view of the long view showed greater long term shareholder value in avoiding the merger. there is a good possibility that the suit might be dismissed on face. However, this doesn't always happen. If these investors are large enough, or find other plaintiffs who are, the mere public pressure of the suit could pressure the Yahoo board to do a few possible things:
1. Make a deal with microsoft to put it up to a vote of shareholders.
2. Just go ahead with the deal anyways.
I can't remember the last time a lawsuit like this went through off the top of my head. But I know that the record on them is not completely one-sided. I'll do some digging and be back
It isn't polite if I didn't exhibit the fallacy. Or I guess that isn't fair. You probably weren't being impolite on purpose. What I ams saying is that if I WERE to suggest a false dilemma, I would have to demand that the DNC (and like minded groups, for the sake of simplification) run either ads or foment political change, not do both. I don't think I have explicitly suggested that. There isn't a strong argument for it, even if you consider a trade-off argument, whereby time/money spent on political change trades off at some level with time spent making ads. I'm not making that argument, and I think it is pretty weak.
I also think we are both getting angry partially because there isn't too much difference between our positions. We both feel that democrats need to take more strong positions in favor of principles we espouse and we both feel that they should succeed politically. Given that, we see differences in magnitude between us.
I am not suggesting a dilemma. I am suggesting that it is unwise to refer to policy positions as just a neccessary condition. I don't mean the standard democratic crap when I say policy positions. I don't mean some 10 point plan on increasing insurance for orphans or some other shit that the democrats talk about every 4 years. I mean strong, relevant stances like the ones the democrats took (FINALLY) in the house on FISA. Positions like they took in confronting Al Gonzales. The victories (here I qualify a victory as a point where democrats didn't just fold, not that they achieved something measurable and notable) are few and far between, but I can't honestly see too many between 1980 and 2006. Maybe the showdown in 1995 between the clinton white house and the budget. Maybe the beginnings of the Iran-Contra investigations. But not much in between.
To me there isn't even a fucking comparison. Taking serious and strong policy stances on shit that really matters and making sure that compromise is a two way street is worth 1000 ads. IT isn't that one displaces the other. It's just that press like "Congress defies the bush administration" in the NYT is worth millions in ad buys to say nice things about health care plans that no one is going to get passed anyway.
I hope I'm clear. It is a necessary condition, and in my mind, it is close to being sufficient. There is a reason why republicans spent ~25 years kicking our asses (even after fucking nixon, who should have kept them in the political shitter for decades) and it has nothing to do with ads. I'm proud of what the EFF is doing. And I want other people to be proud too. The way for that to happen is for democrats in power to ensure that the EFF's lawsuits are not in vain. If they do that, they will be electorally rewarded. If they do that and run ads, great, but the ads will be almost completely superfluous.
Republicans don't win elections because they have better ad buyers or are better at lying. That's absurd. Republicans win elections because they have had simple, emotional messages and their message and stance resonated with their political base. They appealed to peoples fears and looked strong in the face of danger. They demonized the democrats as being weak in the face of danger. How did they do it? By pushing legislation on the dems and telling them to go along, or else they would be called "soft on terror". The dems went along, and got called soft on terror. This has nothing to do with ads. This could have been and was basically illustrated with press reporting and press releases.
In 2006 there was a viable counter narrative: "Get us the fuck out of Iraq. Also, stop fucking little boys." People like Jim Webb (Reagan's Sct. of the Navy, if you will recall) and Jon Tester got elected. Incumbents got unseated. People were pissed. Turnout was high. Democrats that didn't go to the polls before because they didn't really get excited went. The republicans didn't have a monopoly on the themes of politics. So little of this had to do with ads. So much of it has t
I don't know where the assertion that I somehow am confused about health care came from. health care is one of the sectors in economies that benefits from government intervention (if not neessarily government ownership). There are cases to be made that numerous market failures cause the private sector to result in an inefficient outcome. The case is pretty clear, if you are anyone but an insurance company, that health care could stand with more regulation rather than less.
But we aren't talking about health care. We are talking about the allocation of goods. I'm not talking about production. I said that like two posts ago. My point about information has to do directly with the allocative problem. We can talk about the production problem as a function of the allocative problem, but that just obscures things. It is like talking about who pays sales tax. It is nonsensical to speak of sales tax as being paid by the customer independent of choices made by the producer. Whoever the sales tax is imposed upon, it changes decisions for the other.
My point is that the pricing system allows a capitalist society to use information particular to individuals and times without centrally ordering things. Sure, a capitalist system usually has a market price for something, but that is always negotiable. Bannanas are 99c/lb at the store. You can feel free to pay the store more for the bannanas if you like, they will probably accept it. You might also be ably to pay less, if you can negotiate a new price. That market price simply saves you the cost of negotiating. Most people negotiate for big ticket items (cars, houses, etc) but accept market prices from smaller items (bananas). Part of this has to do with volume for the seller (a supermarket probably doesn't give a shit if you want to spend 97c for bananas instead of 99 and won't bother to negotiate with you) but it also has to do with worth to you. It is worth your time to negotiate that extra 1000 dollars for the car but not worth it to negotiate that 2 c for the banana. So those market prices and your willingness to buy things AT the market price are the result of a mutually beneficial transaction. You pay 99c for bananas and you have signalled to the market that bananas are worth at least 99c to you.
Those signals exist at the allocative side but they aren't limited to there. I don't want to say start and stop because it is kind of like saying where electric current starts and stops. That decision for bananas provides signals to distributors and producers of bananas. They base their production of bananas on how many they can sell at a price profitable to them. If they can't sell enough at a certain price, they produce less or charge less. Those signals come directly from the fleibility of producers and consumers to come to agreement on prices. If they can't come to an agreement (say, there are price controls in place), then less information gets across. Even more than that, some information gets across (customers would liek to buy more gas than is currently supplied) but can't be acted upon (price controls make it unprofitable for the companies to sell gas at a higher price in order to ration it). The price-information system at the buter level DIRECTLY impacts production decisions.
I'll ignore the canard about business using surveys in capitalist societies.
You last point might have some merit. There are externalities in production (and consumption). They don't relate to the discussion as liablity laws mean that safety costs get internalized by the firms. You might argue that they don't fully internalize them but I think it is a distinction of degree. I don't think it is a forgone conclusion that socialism provides a means to recognize and internalize those externalities. Some may not be fully known. In the 1920's when we put lead in gasoline, we had a pretty good idea it was bad for you. The government knew. Charles Keating and Al Sloan knew. We did it anyway (what might be considered a classic negative externa
Look, I'm going out of my way to be polite here. I don't think it is fair to characterize what I have described as a "false choice" or an irrelevant value comparison, whatever that means.
Democrats acting in a way that makes them not look like pussies is wholly distinct from advertisement. Opposition to the Nixon white house didn't occur as a result of some ad buys on the part of the DNC. It occured when even republicans realized (after the sat. night massacre) that Nixon would stonewall congressional oversight into the breakins at the watergate. After that happened, the floodgates opened and impeachment moved forward (along with one of the most studiously ignored laws of our time, the war powers act).
and fundamentally, advertising is derivative. It doesn't generate political narratives, just acts on them. the same thing is true for most news services. We don't hear much analysis beyond the meta narrative of "Hillary is smart and experienced but unlikable" and "Obama is inspiring but inexperienced". Everything is parsed according to those terms. Ads are written and assimilated according to those terms. Occasionally ads are run that try to break out of those meta-narratives "Hillary is eperienced and she LOVES you! (as long as you live in Ohio or Texas, offer void where prohibited)"
Do you think that the DNC didn't run ads in 2004? Or didn't run enough? in 2002? 2006? Of course they did. They ran as many if not more than the republicans. The problem wasn't that messages weren't getting out. the problem was that there wasn't a message.
I don't mean to insinuate that you felt the EFF shouldn't be suing or giving awards.
My point is this, and it is probably a cynical one. People make decisions based largely on subconscious desires and fears. We operate in small, segmented spheres of rationality, but outside those we make decisions based on emotions. More specifically, there is a small section of decisions where we feel reasonable people might disagree and we come to a conclusion based on relatively dispassionate analysis. Outside this sphere, we have made out decisions already but rationalize it (and consciously feel that we are making a rational decision). Out side THAT sphere we don't acknowledge as rational dissenting positions.
Where these spheres exist, how flexible they are and how large they are differs from person to person. some people are dispassionate about large groups of things and can come to rational decisions about them. some people can rationalize lots of things and have few "dealbreaker" positions. Some people feel so strongly about certain issues that the other position appears to not be rational.
Take for instance abortion. I am pro-choice, and probably could fully rationalize my position on it. I believe in Bill Clinton's idea of abortions, that they should be safe, legal and rare. But part of my feelings on the issue force me to reject opposing positions as irrational. I can't believe the notion that life begins at conception. To me, this seems religiously motivated and overly broad. It is not only convenient but CRITICAL that this assumption would invalidate my beliefs about abortion. If I felt that life begins at conception I would be unable to tenably hold my position. I would end up weighing one life against another.
Conversely, if I were pro-life, I could not 'logically' see a position of pro-choice as tenable. The assumption by pro-choice individuals that life begins when the fetus is independently viable would seems to be horrifying. BUT, if I took that position, I could no longer reconcile it with a pro-lie position.
This is one example of a policy position where I am able to rationalize my views, but my views are not strictly rational. As you well know from commenting on slashdot, there are positions for and against which people abandon rationality. Abortion is among them, religion and free speech is another. My favorite is scapling. Life-long libertarians and free market guys LOSE THEIR FUCKING SHIT when they find out they are paying 200 dollars to see the patriots cheat at football. The general consensus on slashdot becomes "establish a monitoring system, make people show ID at sporting events, tar and feather scalpers." Logic left the building a while ago because it was supplanted by a strongly emotional issue--people felt they were being treated unfairly and someone was profiting by doing nothing. This is not to say that scalpers are good people or that they did nothing wrong, just that the debate wasn't one dictated by logic.
National security is one of those issues too. People who feel that they need a strong, protective figure will want a strong protective government. People who feel that security is important aren't going to be swayed by the notion that the government broke laws already allowing secret surveillance just because they could. They are just going to hear "the terrorists are going to kill you and only spying can save you." Other people, myself included can't logically justify that position. I can rationalize my own fear of government but I can't become totally dispassionate. I can't take their side and see how they come to their conclusions. I just know that I start from a different set of assumptions than they do and so I will come to different conclusions.
This is not to say that there is no space for democratic positions or that ads should never be run. If the democrats continue to cede this space of passion to fear stoked by republicans then we are in deep trouble. There are some good signs and bad signs. Good sign
I feel that you are oversimplifying things. I would invite you to take a look at a few good court decisions. After you et past the 3-4 pages about standing and whatnot, there is some very good reasoning in there. Even though the opinions are written for a very specific audience, they are eloquent (usually) and thoughtful. It is very unlikely that a decision will be rendered entirely on the basis of a bad analogy.
More to the point, for important bench decisions, friend of the court briefs (amicus, silly Latin) are filed by organizations (with an axe to grind) who presumbaly have some technical competence in the field. The EFF commonly files amicus briefs, as does RIAA/MPAA. These briefs usually dictate reasons for the judges to vote a certain way but for some situations they provide some factual backing.
Law as articulated by judges is not a kludgy thing. These are men and women who have been sucessful as lawyers and whose decisions WILL be scrutinized by their peers. If an appellate judge consistently gets things wrong, the higher courts are going to reverse his/her rulings more often. If his rulings are reversed too often, the Bar association will note that and inform whatever appointing body (for non-elected judges) might appoint him to a higher position.
The problems you describe stem from legislation (usually). We ended up with very smart and useful analogies from appropriate case law about copying and computers (most notably, Sony v. Betamax) in the early 80's, when digital computers were FAR less common then the late 90's, when the DMCa was passed. Legislators are accoutable to voters but not for the language in the bills (which are rarely read or remembered). Can you name another law besides the DMCA that passed in 1998? I can't. I can't tell you more than 5 provisions of the DMCA without looking it up and that's pretty good on average. Legislators are thus not directly responsible for the verbage in the bills but responsible for more evocative and emotional stances on issues like abortion and teh gays (don't ask me). They have to tailor their laws to meet judicial review (otherwise they have to write them again) but that tailoring so not nearly so elegant as the reasoning in most of these opinions. part of that is not their fault. It is hard to be eloquent when making policy planks and allocating funds for a national guard base.
More generally, I don't understand your anitpathy toward analogies. You clearly don't like them, and I don't understand why. one commenter said that hatred of analogies tend to indication that the person is angry when people don't share information sets. do you feel that way? I feel that analogies are perfectly useful tools of figurative language as long as people are willing to think abstractly. do you feel that people are too abstract? That literal thinking is better? I'm not trying to bait you, I just want to know, as you seem to be pretty adamant about things.
Just because you say that monopolies are for kings doesn't make it so.
How about this. There is a good reason that line is in the constitution, a document not long on meaningless phrases. It is in there because with no IP protection, people wouldn't create things With no means to move creations into the public domain, society couldn't build on past creations.
IMO, pre Walt Disney copyright law did this fine. We had reasonable fair use (and did until very recently) protection, good lapse times and good incentives for the creative process.
It has gotten steadily worse since then.
That does not mean that I believe for a MINUTE that your right to free speech somehow voids the laws meant to provide for the public interest.
Oh, and congress CAN repeal the first amendment. They just need to draft another one.
It's not a very good analogy, I'll admit, but there is hope yet. I would prefer that computers were treated MORE like homes in the legal sense, rather than less. I suspect that this treatment will change in the future to relfect that.
I mean, we seem to be at odds here about a few things, one of them is the possiblity that non-excludability changes the law in a fundamental sense. It does, but how? How does the fact that stealing a file off my hard drive leaves the file intact for me change the law about stealing? THat's one of the clear and fundamental differences.
Soo.......is there any room for compromise in that model? Any reason why, perhaps, the right to a limited monopoly on intellectual property comes BEFORE the right to free speech in the constitution?
I mean, 500k is a fair amount of money to spend on PR (Far, FAR less than the 2b we spend on recruiting/bonuses for the american military), but my point was that it wasn't spend on PR. I just wasn't. It is beyond disingenuous to claim that this is a PR stunt. It is a research grant. Spending it on PR would be something like this:
"NASA spent 500,000 dollars today to secure the passage of three adult entertainment stars on the space shuttle today, hoping to determine the impact of space on threesomes."
That's PR. This is a research grant for a radio telescope array.
right. I think that the leased monopoly on content creation is a MUCH better argument than unjust enrichement. However, that is a public policy argument, not a legal argument. government enacts a policy accordingly and the legal argument becomes "because I said so". That leaves is un a position of how to speak about it legally and publicly as well as how to use our command of that legal language to determine limits to punishment and scope.
presumably identity theft could be treated as theft if you considered personal details as some sort of priviledged information. I'm not making that claim--I feel that "identity theft" is just fraud, but it could be made without too much contortion.
Legally we need analogies because past cases dictate future decisions and past cases can't possibly be written with the future in mind.
There's a first time for everything. Why can't novel situations produce a novel body of laws based on consideration of the actual harm actually caused by those novel situations per se, rather than a derivative body of laws based on some poorly-conceived and thoroughly inaccurate analogy?
A man's life is not analagous to his property. We don't use property law to try homicide cases.
And why not be literal? Are the basics of computer networking too difficult for judges and lawyers to understand on their own terms? Let's take a literal look at bandwidth "stealing" for example:
When I "steal" you bandwith, what is literally happening is that my device is making a request to your device. Your device, configured by you, activated by you, either approves or denies my request. If it approves my request, there is literally no theft--I have your written permission, recorded in the configuration of your device, to use your bandwidth. And if it denies my request, there is literally no theft, because I cannot use your bandwidth. That's the way the protocol is written, that's the way the protocol is enforced. It's literally that simple and straightforward. No need for analogies. The thing is completely understandable in terms of itself. OK. Let's be clear. Some principles of the law (namely stare decicis) dictate that we can't and shouldn't just generate bodies of novel law. The law is meant to apply some strong continuity--this is why it is not uncommon to see decision today that cite english common law from hundreds of years ago. It is only with great reluctance that new law is generated or decisions made without resting largely on the past.
Homicde cases don't deal with human life as "property" because some standing law exists that criminalizes the act of murder itself. CIVIL penalties exist which do treat human life as an economic object. we can and do value human lives in dollar form all the time for many different types of cases.
It isn't that judges are stupid, though some are certainly incapable of understanding the rather complex nature of computers/networks. Some are very capable (or have very capable aides). Plenty of decisions are made that apply sound judicial reasoning to novel concepts. decisions that are unsound should be reversed on appeal. It is that we make out legal arguments out of analogies. We make our arguments about Tivo by comparing time shifting arguments in Sony v. Betamax. We make broadcast/rebroadcast arguments by analogizing the situation to laws passed by conress for RADIO almost 80 years ago. By and large we come up with pretty sound decisions. Most of the judicial arguments have been sound, it is the legislation that is rotten.
You have to separate the DMCA from the wishes as judges. As silly as judges might feel the anti-circumvention provision is, it requires some pretty strong reasoning to reject it as unconstutional because congress took the time to write it. They have to defer to legislation iunless it is clear that the legislation is unconstitutional.
Fine. Your badnwidth stealing argument works ok, but what real life situation does that describe? The case where your badwidth use form the cable companies limits mine? That isn't really a legal issue, and it isn't accurate because I can't veto your use of the badwidth.
I could jsut as easily say that an unlocked door means that no trespass occured in a home. The door opened without resistance, so obviously this means that the owner provided consent to entry by proxy.
where does this literal thinking come from? Legally we need analogies because past cases dictate future decisions and past cases can't possibly be written with the future in mind. This does not mean that analogies are by themselves valid, we are not excused from thought and judgement. What it does mean is that we make connections between the past and the present and we reason based on those connections. Both the reasoning and the connection should be scrutinized.
Take, for example, the current case law surrounding IR surveillance by cops. The case was basically decided by treating heat radiated from a home as "waste" so the person involved forfeited their right to privacy to that waste heat. This may seem like a bad decision, but realize that it was made in a time when IR sensors couldn't 'see' through walls effectively enough to make out features, body parts, etc (they still really can't). Once that happens, the case will come up again and the reasoning will probably be revised.
Semantics does not always have to be used in the perjorative sense. Here we are literally parsing the terms to determine what might be good or bad for society. Semantics is legally important because most legal arguments are made by analogy (fundamentally, that is what a reference to a prior case is).
This is very much worth the read. It is surprisingly erudite for a newspaper and it is also pretty nuanced. The critical points are illuminated (theft as deprivation of a good or theft as an unjust enrichment), the debate is balanced and excellent sources are used. Well worth the click away from/..
How does a payment of 500,000 dollars for a researh grant to send unmanned radio telescopes to the moon in order to study something obscure generate a bigger budget?
Do you just let stuff spill out of your ears when you make comments on this sort of stuff?
First, the array would be bigger than Arecibo, which is already smaller (by virtue of not being an array) than others on earth right now. The limit to accuracy for those arrays is RF interference and the ionosphere.
Second, NASA is ALWAYS short money and long on projects because they are tasked with building fault proof projects for present needs (as elected officials don't care about space exploration 25 years from now) under constant cuts (because cutting funds for nasa doesn't anger hawks and doesn't seem as bad as cutting funds for school lunches) and with dubious management (political appointees over engineers).
Third, wh-----wait a fucking minute, who modded you "interesting"? fuck.
It's apollo. My ability to spell....sucks.
Basically, if you took the cost per pound of payload for the apollo moon missions you would come to the conclusion that even if the surface of the moon were made of pure diamond and it was easily mined (read: pick it up off the ground), it would not be worth the trip.
There are a number of fallacies invoked when people use it to describe current space travel, but the basic principle (that $/lb of payload is very high) stands.
Of course socialism doesn't equal communism. Take all of my arguements and replace the word communism with the word socialism if it makes you feel better.
Ok.
with regard to consumption and the allocation of goods:
Capitalism allocates goods according to ability and willingness to pay. Socialism allocates goods according to needs (or wants, edepnding on the semantics).
That's the fundamental allocative difference. My argument is that allocation based on desire cannot be done effectively unless you have a means to compel truth telling or a complete breakdown of desires among people. There is no way to prove that I need a car more than you without intrusive surveillance.
This may result in prices (in a capitalist society) that diverge from the sum of the inputs. this fact should be self-evident, but the conclusions to be drawn from it are not assured. Just because the price one company will charge for a good does not reflect the cost of the iinputs does not mean that funds are misallocated. For one, if the company charges TOO much, another company will form and eat up the unexploited profit. You can't keep charging 1000 dollars for a telephone, someone will realize that it only costs 500 and figure there is a market to be made selling them for 750. The more companies there are, the closer the price will converge on the sum of the inputs (the marginal cost). Sometimes the price does not converge on the marginal cost. This isn't necessarily a bad thing.
are you suggesting somehow that the very nature of capitalism makes it so that costs will not be accessed by the producers for their "full value"? who makes that valuation? Who is responsible for saying what the value of a dozen roses is? If we are talking about the value of human lives, we have to accept one of three possibilities:
1. Human lives have no value.
2. human lives have an infinite value.
3. Human lives have a value that lies between zero and infinite.
A government and a business would both come to the conclusion that 3 is the best choice. the corporation would come to the conclusion that a human life is worth some function of their future earnings and plan accordingly. the government would make the same conclusion. the fact that liability is not assured doesn't figure in.
How are things different in a socialist society? Where is the magical source of valuation that socialists can draw from which is more accurate than capitalists?
THat's a great position to be in. It will work just like international fisheries. We see how those are shepherded well. Property rights will be fine for the moon. Someone has to own it.
They most certainly ARE split on the idea. If they weren't split George Bush would be in jail. It is that simple. What is likely is that the NSA had expaned illegal spying to a vast dragnet by 2004, when normally permissive officials from DoJ wanted to intervene. They may or may not have scaled back that surveilance as Ashcroft was replaced by someone much more loyal to the pres. The times breaks the story in 2005. 2006 comes around. The president has not only not ben impeached but LAWS HAVE BEEN FUCKING PASSED TO ENSHRINE THE SPYING. Ask people how they feel about the president breaking the law to help americans and the answer SHOULD be 99-1 against. It turns out to be something like 60/40.
Those 40% are not going to be swayed by facts or arguments. They are the same 40% that think that iraq helped plan 9/11. They are the same 40% that are angry at democrats wanting some oversight ability. The disconnect is emotional, not factual.
I hope that 2008 will bring real change. It might. But I would rather money go into attempting to find judicial recourse while legislative recourse remains supine.
Slashdot Mirror
More likely we are saying that shareholder lawsuits are a stupid idea. I don't know if I agree with that sentiment, but it is a pretty blunt tool of shareholder control.
IANAL.
My take is that shareholder lawsuits are never a given in this country. There is a good possiblity that Yahoo will just show in court that their managerial view of the long view showed greater long term shareholder value in avoiding the merger. there is a good possibility that the suit might be dismissed on face. However, this doesn't always happen. If these investors are large enough, or find other plaintiffs who are, the mere public pressure of the suit could pressure the Yahoo board to do a few possible things:
1. Make a deal with microsoft to put it up to a vote of shareholders.
2. Just go ahead with the deal anyways.
I can't remember the last time a lawsuit like this went through off the top of my head. But I know that the record on them is not completely one-sided. I'll do some digging and be back
It isn't polite if I didn't exhibit the fallacy. Or I guess that isn't fair. You probably weren't being impolite on purpose. What I ams saying is that if I WERE to suggest a false dilemma, I would have to demand that the DNC (and like minded groups, for the sake of simplification) run either ads or foment political change, not do both. I don't think I have explicitly suggested that. There isn't a strong argument for it, even if you consider a trade-off argument, whereby time/money spent on political change trades off at some level with time spent making ads. I'm not making that argument, and I think it is pretty weak.
I also think we are both getting angry partially because there isn't too much difference between our positions. We both feel that democrats need to take more strong positions in favor of principles we espouse and we both feel that they should succeed politically. Given that, we see differences in magnitude between us.
I am not suggesting a dilemma. I am suggesting that it is unwise to refer to policy positions as just a neccessary condition. I don't mean the standard democratic crap when I say policy positions. I don't mean some 10 point plan on increasing insurance for orphans or some other shit that the democrats talk about every 4 years. I mean strong, relevant stances like the ones the democrats took (FINALLY) in the house on FISA. Positions like they took in confronting Al Gonzales. The victories (here I qualify a victory as a point where democrats didn't just fold, not that they achieved something measurable and notable) are few and far between, but I can't honestly see too many between 1980 and 2006. Maybe the showdown in 1995 between the clinton white house and the budget. Maybe the beginnings of the Iran-Contra investigations. But not much in between.
To me there isn't even a fucking comparison. Taking serious and strong policy stances on shit that really matters and making sure that compromise is a two way street is worth 1000 ads. IT isn't that one displaces the other. It's just that press like "Congress defies the bush administration" in the NYT is worth millions in ad buys to say nice things about health care plans that no one is going to get passed anyway.
I hope I'm clear. It is a necessary condition, and in my mind, it is close to being sufficient. There is a reason why republicans spent ~25 years kicking our asses (even after fucking nixon, who should have kept them in the political shitter for decades) and it has nothing to do with ads. I'm proud of what the EFF is doing. And I want other people to be proud too. The way for that to happen is for democrats in power to ensure that the EFF's lawsuits are not in vain. If they do that, they will be electorally rewarded. If they do that and run ads, great, but the ads will be almost completely superfluous.
Republicans don't win elections because they have better ad buyers or are better at lying. That's absurd. Republicans win elections because they have had simple, emotional messages and their message and stance resonated with their political base. They appealed to peoples fears and looked strong in the face of danger. They demonized the democrats as being weak in the face of danger. How did they do it? By pushing legislation on the dems and telling them to go along, or else they would be called "soft on terror". The dems went along, and got called soft on terror. This has nothing to do with ads. This could have been and was basically illustrated with press reporting and press releases.
In 2006 there was a viable counter narrative: "Get us the fuck out of Iraq. Also, stop fucking little boys." People like Jim Webb (Reagan's Sct. of the Navy, if you will recall) and Jon Tester got elected. Incumbents got unseated. People were pissed. Turnout was high. Democrats that didn't go to the polls before because they didn't really get excited went. The republicans didn't have a monopoly on the themes of politics. So little of this had to do with ads. So much of it has t
My money is on the incoming democratic president quietly NOT roll back the signing statements.
I don't know where the assertion that I somehow am confused about health care came from. health care is one of the sectors in economies that benefits from government intervention (if not neessarily government ownership). There are cases to be made that numerous market failures cause the private sector to result in an inefficient outcome. The case is pretty clear, if you are anyone but an insurance company, that health care could stand with more regulation rather than less.
But we aren't talking about health care. We are talking about the allocation of goods. I'm not talking about production. I said that like two posts ago. My point about information has to do directly with the allocative problem. We can talk about the production problem as a function of the allocative problem, but that just obscures things. It is like talking about who pays sales tax. It is nonsensical to speak of sales tax as being paid by the customer independent of choices made by the producer. Whoever the sales tax is imposed upon, it changes decisions for the other.
My point is that the pricing system allows a capitalist society to use information particular to individuals and times without centrally ordering things. Sure, a capitalist system usually has a market price for something, but that is always negotiable. Bannanas are 99c/lb at the store. You can feel free to pay the store more for the bannanas if you like, they will probably accept it. You might also be ably to pay less, if you can negotiate a new price. That market price simply saves you the cost of negotiating. Most people negotiate for big ticket items (cars, houses, etc) but accept market prices from smaller items (bananas). Part of this has to do with volume for the seller (a supermarket probably doesn't give a shit if you want to spend 97c for bananas instead of 99 and won't bother to negotiate with you) but it also has to do with worth to you. It is worth your time to negotiate that extra 1000 dollars for the car but not worth it to negotiate that 2 c for the banana. So those market prices and your willingness to buy things AT the market price are the result of a mutually beneficial transaction. You pay 99c for bananas and you have signalled to the market that bananas are worth at least 99c to you.
Those signals exist at the allocative side but they aren't limited to there. I don't want to say start and stop because it is kind of like saying where electric current starts and stops. That decision for bananas provides signals to distributors and producers of bananas. They base their production of bananas on how many they can sell at a price profitable to them. If they can't sell enough at a certain price, they produce less or charge less. Those signals come directly from the fleibility of producers and consumers to come to agreement on prices. If they can't come to an agreement (say, there are price controls in place), then less information gets across. Even more than that, some information gets across (customers would liek to buy more gas than is currently supplied) but can't be acted upon (price controls make it unprofitable for the companies to sell gas at a higher price in order to ration it). The price-information system at the buter level DIRECTLY impacts production decisions.
I'll ignore the canard about business using surveys in capitalist societies.
You last point might have some merit. There are externalities in production (and consumption). They don't relate to the discussion as liablity laws mean that safety costs get internalized by the firms. You might argue that they don't fully internalize them but I think it is a distinction of degree. I don't think it is a forgone conclusion that socialism provides a means to recognize and internalize those externalities. Some may not be fully known. In the 1920's when we put lead in gasoline, we had a pretty good idea it was bad for you. The government knew. Charles Keating and Al Sloan knew. We did it anyway (what might be considered a classic negative externa
yeah...but aren't floppy discs just like Vinyl LP's? :)
Look, I'm going out of my way to be polite here. I don't think it is fair to characterize what I have described as a "false choice" or an irrelevant value comparison, whatever that means.
Democrats acting in a way that makes them not look like pussies is wholly distinct from advertisement. Opposition to the Nixon white house didn't occur as a result of some ad buys on the part of the DNC. It occured when even republicans realized (after the sat. night massacre) that Nixon would stonewall congressional oversight into the breakins at the watergate. After that happened, the floodgates opened and impeachment moved forward (along with one of the most studiously ignored laws of our time, the war powers act).
and fundamentally, advertising is derivative. It doesn't generate political narratives, just acts on them. the same thing is true for most news services. We don't hear much analysis beyond the meta narrative of "Hillary is smart and experienced but unlikable" and "Obama is inspiring but inexperienced". Everything is parsed according to those terms. Ads are written and assimilated according to those terms. Occasionally ads are run that try to break out of those meta-narratives "Hillary is eperienced and she LOVES you! (as long as you live in Ohio or Texas, offer void where prohibited)"
Do you think that the DNC didn't run ads in 2004? Or didn't run enough? in 2002? 2006? Of course they did. They ran as many if not more than the republicans. The problem wasn't that messages weren't getting out. the problem was that there wasn't a message.
My point is this, and it is probably a cynical one. People make decisions based largely on subconscious desires and fears. We operate in small, segmented spheres of rationality, but outside those we make decisions based on emotions. More specifically, there is a small section of decisions where we feel reasonable people might disagree and we come to a conclusion based on relatively dispassionate analysis. Outside this sphere, we have made out decisions already but rationalize it (and consciously feel that we are making a rational decision). Out side THAT sphere we don't acknowledge as rational dissenting positions.
Where these spheres exist, how flexible they are and how large they are differs from person to person. some people are dispassionate about large groups of things and can come to rational decisions about them. some people can rationalize lots of things and have few "dealbreaker" positions. Some people feel so strongly about certain issues that the other position appears to not be rational.
Take for instance abortion. I am pro-choice, and probably could fully rationalize my position on it. I believe in Bill Clinton's idea of abortions, that they should be safe, legal and rare. But part of my feelings on the issue force me to reject opposing positions as irrational. I can't believe the notion that life begins at conception. To me, this seems religiously motivated and overly broad. It is not only convenient but CRITICAL that this assumption would invalidate my beliefs about abortion. If I felt that life begins at conception I would be unable to tenably hold my position. I would end up weighing one life against another.
Conversely, if I were pro-life, I could not 'logically' see a position of pro-choice as tenable. The assumption by pro-choice individuals that life begins when the fetus is independently viable would seems to be horrifying. BUT, if I took that position, I could no longer reconcile it with a pro-lie position.
This is one example of a policy position where I am able to rationalize my views, but my views are not strictly rational. As you well know from commenting on slashdot, there are positions for and against which people abandon rationality. Abortion is among them, religion and free speech is another. My favorite is scapling. Life-long libertarians and free market guys LOSE THEIR FUCKING SHIT when they find out they are paying 200 dollars to see the patriots cheat at football. The general consensus on slashdot becomes "establish a monitoring system, make people show ID at sporting events, tar and feather scalpers." Logic left the building a while ago because it was supplanted by a strongly emotional issue--people felt they were being treated unfairly and someone was profiting by doing nothing. This is not to say that scalpers are good people or that they did nothing wrong, just that the debate wasn't one dictated by logic.
National security is one of those issues too. People who feel that they need a strong, protective figure will want a strong protective government. People who feel that security is important aren't going to be swayed by the notion that the government broke laws already allowing secret surveillance just because they could. They are just going to hear "the terrorists are going to kill you and only spying can save you." Other people, myself included can't logically justify that position. I can rationalize my own fear of government but I can't become totally dispassionate. I can't take their side and see how they come to their conclusions. I just know that I start from a different set of assumptions than they do and so I will come to different conclusions.
This is not to say that there is no space for democratic positions or that ads should never be run. If the democrats continue to cede this space of passion to fear stoked by republicans then we are in deep trouble. There are some good signs and bad signs. Good sign
I dunno.
I feel that you are oversimplifying things. I would invite you to take a look at a few good court decisions. After you et past the 3-4 pages about standing and whatnot, there is some very good reasoning in there. Even though the opinions are written for a very specific audience, they are eloquent (usually) and thoughtful. It is very unlikely that a decision will be rendered entirely on the basis of a bad analogy.
More to the point, for important bench decisions, friend of the court briefs (amicus, silly Latin) are filed by organizations (with an axe to grind) who presumbaly have some technical competence in the field. The EFF commonly files amicus briefs, as does RIAA/MPAA. These briefs usually dictate reasons for the judges to vote a certain way but for some situations they provide some factual backing.
Law as articulated by judges is not a kludgy thing. These are men and women who have been sucessful as lawyers and whose decisions WILL be scrutinized by their peers. If an appellate judge consistently gets things wrong, the higher courts are going to reverse his/her rulings more often. If his rulings are reversed too often, the Bar association will note that and inform whatever appointing body (for non-elected judges) might appoint him to a higher position.
The problems you describe stem from legislation (usually). We ended up with very smart and useful analogies from appropriate case law about copying and computers (most notably, Sony v. Betamax) in the early 80's, when digital computers were FAR less common then the late 90's, when the DMCa was passed. Legislators are accoutable to voters but not for the language in the bills (which are rarely read or remembered). Can you name another law besides the DMCA that passed in 1998? I can't. I can't tell you more than 5 provisions of the DMCA without looking it up and that's pretty good on average. Legislators are thus not directly responsible for the verbage in the bills but responsible for more evocative and emotional stances on issues like abortion and teh gays (don't ask me). They have to tailor their laws to meet judicial review (otherwise they have to write them again) but that tailoring so not nearly so elegant as the reasoning in most of these opinions. part of that is not their fault. It is hard to be eloquent when making policy planks and allocating funds for a national guard base.
More generally, I don't understand your anitpathy toward analogies. You clearly don't like them, and I don't understand why. one commenter said that hatred of analogies tend to indication that the person is angry when people don't share information sets. do you feel that way? I feel that analogies are perfectly useful tools of figurative language as long as people are willing to think abstractly. do you feel that people are too abstract? That literal thinking is better? I'm not trying to bait you, I just want to know, as you seem to be pretty adamant about things.
Ok, calm down bucko.
Just because you say that monopolies are for kings doesn't make it so.
How about this. There is a good reason that line is in the constitution, a document not long on meaningless phrases. It is in there because with no IP protection, people wouldn't create things With no means to move creations into the public domain, society couldn't build on past creations.
IMO, pre Walt Disney copyright law did this fine. We had reasonable fair use (and did until very recently) protection, good lapse times and good incentives for the creative process.
It has gotten steadily worse since then.
That does not mean that I believe for a MINUTE that your right to free speech somehow voids the laws meant to provide for the public interest.
Oh, and congress CAN repeal the first amendment. They just need to draft another one.
It's not a very good analogy, I'll admit, but there is hope yet. I would prefer that computers were treated MORE like homes in the legal sense, rather than less. I suspect that this treatment will change in the future to relfect that.
I mean, we seem to be at odds here about a few things, one of them is the possiblity that non-excludability changes the law in a fundamental sense. It does, but how? How does the fact that stealing a file off my hard drive leaves the file intact for me change the law about stealing? THat's one of the clear and fundamental differences.
Soo.......is there any room for compromise in that model? Any reason why, perhaps, the right to a limited monopoly on intellectual property comes BEFORE the right to free speech in the constitution?
?? Alpha male?
I mean, 500k is a fair amount of money to spend on PR (Far, FAR less than the 2b we spend on recruiting/bonuses for the american military), but my point was that it wasn't spend on PR. I just wasn't. It is beyond disingenuous to claim that this is a PR stunt. It is a research grant. Spending it on PR would be something like this:
"NASA spent 500,000 dollars today to secure the passage of three adult entertainment stars on the space shuttle today, hoping to determine the impact of space on threesomes."
That's PR. This is a research grant for a radio telescope array.
right. I think that the leased monopoly on content creation is a MUCH better argument than unjust enrichement. However, that is a public policy argument, not a legal argument. government enacts a policy accordingly and the legal argument becomes "because I said so". That leaves is un a position of how to speak about it legally and publicly as well as how to use our command of that legal language to determine limits to punishment and scope.
presumably identity theft could be treated as theft if you considered personal details as some sort of priviledged information. I'm not making that claim--I feel that "identity theft" is just fraud, but it could be made without too much contortion.
There's a first time for everything. Why can't novel situations produce a novel body of laws based on consideration of the actual harm actually caused by those novel situations per se, rather than a derivative body of laws based on some poorly-conceived and thoroughly inaccurate analogy?
A man's life is not analagous to his property. We don't use property law to try homicide cases.
And why not be literal? Are the basics of computer networking too difficult for judges and lawyers to understand on their own terms? Let's take a literal look at bandwidth "stealing" for example:
When I "steal" you bandwith, what is literally happening is that my device is making a request to your device. Your device, configured by you, activated by you, either approves or denies my request. If it approves my request, there is literally no theft--I have your written permission, recorded in the configuration of your device, to use your bandwidth. And if it denies my request, there is literally no theft, because I cannot use your bandwidth. That's the way the protocol is written, that's the way the protocol is enforced. It's literally that simple and straightforward. No need for analogies. The thing is completely understandable in terms of itself. OK. Let's be clear. Some principles of the law (namely stare decicis) dictate that we can't and shouldn't just generate bodies of novel law. The law is meant to apply some strong continuity--this is why it is not uncommon to see decision today that cite english common law from hundreds of years ago. It is only with great reluctance that new law is generated or decisions made without resting largely on the past.
Homicde cases don't deal with human life as "property" because some standing law exists that criminalizes the act of murder itself. CIVIL penalties exist which do treat human life as an economic object. we can and do value human lives in dollar form all the time for many different types of cases.
It isn't that judges are stupid, though some are certainly incapable of understanding the rather complex nature of computers/networks. Some are very capable (or have very capable aides). Plenty of decisions are made that apply sound judicial reasoning to novel concepts. decisions that are unsound should be reversed on appeal. It is that we make out legal arguments out of analogies. We make our arguments about Tivo by comparing time shifting arguments in Sony v. Betamax. We make broadcast/rebroadcast arguments by analogizing the situation to laws passed by conress for RADIO almost 80 years ago. By and large we come up with pretty sound decisions. Most of the judicial arguments have been sound, it is the legislation that is rotten.
You have to separate the DMCA from the wishes as judges. As silly as judges might feel the anti-circumvention provision is, it requires some pretty strong reasoning to reject it as unconstutional because congress took the time to write it. They have to defer to legislation iunless it is clear that the legislation is unconstitutional.
Fine. Your badnwidth stealing argument works ok, but what real life situation does that describe? The case where your badwidth use form the cable companies limits mine? That isn't really a legal issue, and it isn't accurate because I can't veto your use of the badwidth.
I could jsut as easily say that an unlocked door means that no trespass occured in a home. The door opened without resistance, so obviously this means that the owner provided consent to entry by proxy.
:)
Totally slipped my mind. Doesn't change the fact that the paper:
A: Talks about editorials that they didn't publish.
B: Mentions with clarity the primary sources and arguments for feeling that copying as theft is wrong.
C: Explains some good reasons why copying may be construed as theft, sometimes.
And concludes that the answer isn't strictly to be found by parsing literature for a good analogy.
where does this literal thinking come from? Legally we need analogies because past cases dictate future decisions and past cases can't possibly be written with the future in mind. This does not mean that analogies are by themselves valid, we are not excused from thought and judgement. What it does mean is that we make connections between the past and the present and we reason based on those connections. Both the reasoning and the connection should be scrutinized.
Take, for example, the current case law surrounding IR surveillance by cops. The case was basically decided by treating heat radiated from a home as "waste" so the person involved forfeited their right to privacy to that waste heat. This may seem like a bad decision, but realize that it was made in a time when IR sensors couldn't 'see' through walls effectively enough to make out features, body parts, etc (they still really can't). Once that happens, the case will come up again and the reasoning will probably be revised.
Semantics does not always have to be used in the perjorative sense. Here we are literally parsing the terms to determine what might be good or bad for society. Semantics is legally important because most legal arguments are made by analogy (fundamentally, that is what a reference to a prior case is).
This is very much worth the read. It is surprisingly erudite for a newspaper and it is also pretty nuanced. The critical points are illuminated (theft as deprivation of a good or theft as an unjust enrichment), the debate is balanced and excellent sources are used. Well worth the click away from /..
How does a payment of 500,000 dollars for a researh grant to send unmanned radio telescopes to the moon in order to study something obscure generate a bigger budget?
Do you just let stuff spill out of your ears when you make comments on this sort of stuff?
First, the array would be bigger than Arecibo, which is already smaller (by virtue of not being an array) than others on earth right now. The limit to accuracy for those arrays is RF interference and the ionosphere.
Second, NASA is ALWAYS short money and long on projects because they are tasked with building fault proof projects for present needs (as elected officials don't care about space exploration 25 years from now) under constant cuts (because cutting funds for nasa doesn't anger hawks and doesn't seem as bad as cutting funds for school lunches) and with dubious management (political appointees over engineers).
Third, wh-----wait a fucking minute, who modded you "interesting"? fuck.
It's apollo. My ability to spell....sucks. Basically, if you took the cost per pound of payload for the apollo moon missions you would come to the conclusion that even if the surface of the moon were made of pure diamond and it was easily mined (read: pick it up off the ground), it would not be worth the trip. There are a number of fallacies invoked when people use it to describe current space travel, but the basic principle (that $/lb of payload is very high) stands.
Of course socialism doesn't equal communism. Take all of my arguements and replace the word communism with the word socialism if it makes you feel better.
Ok.
with regard to consumption and the allocation of goods:
Capitalism allocates goods according to ability and willingness to pay. Socialism allocates goods according to needs (or wants, edepnding on the semantics).
That's the fundamental allocative difference. My argument is that allocation based on desire cannot be done effectively unless you have a means to compel truth telling or a complete breakdown of desires among people. There is no way to prove that I need a car more than you without intrusive surveillance.
This may result in prices (in a capitalist society) that diverge from the sum of the inputs. this fact should be self-evident, but the conclusions to be drawn from it are not assured. Just because the price one company will charge for a good does not reflect the cost of the iinputs does not mean that funds are misallocated. For one, if the company charges TOO much, another company will form and eat up the unexploited profit. You can't keep charging 1000 dollars for a telephone, someone will realize that it only costs 500 and figure there is a market to be made selling them for 750. The more companies there are, the closer the price will converge on the sum of the inputs (the marginal cost). Sometimes the price does not converge on the marginal cost. This isn't necessarily a bad thing.
are you suggesting somehow that the very nature of capitalism makes it so that costs will not be accessed by the producers for their "full value"? who makes that valuation? Who is responsible for saying what the value of a dozen roses is? If we are talking about the value of human lives, we have to accept one of three possibilities:
1. Human lives have no value.
2. human lives have an infinite value.
3. Human lives have a value that lies between zero and infinite.
A government and a business would both come to the conclusion that 3 is the best choice. the corporation would come to the conclusion that a human life is worth some function of their future earnings and plan accordingly. the government would make the same conclusion. the fact that liability is not assured doesn't figure in.
How are things different in a socialist society? Where is the magical source of valuation that socialists can draw from which is more accurate than capitalists?
THat's a great position to be in. It will work just like international fisheries. We see how those are shepherded well. Property rights will be fine for the moon. Someone has to own it.
They most certainly ARE split on the idea. If they weren't split George Bush would be in jail. It is that simple. What is likely is that the NSA had expaned illegal spying to a vast dragnet by 2004, when normally permissive officials from DoJ wanted to intervene. They may or may not have scaled back that surveilance as Ashcroft was replaced by someone much more loyal to the pres. The times breaks the story in 2005. 2006 comes around. The president has not only not ben impeached but LAWS HAVE BEEN FUCKING PASSED TO ENSHRINE THE SPYING. Ask people how they feel about the president breaking the law to help americans and the answer SHOULD be 99-1 against. It turns out to be something like 60/40.
Those 40% are not going to be swayed by facts or arguments. They are the same 40% that think that iraq helped plan 9/11. They are the same 40% that are angry at democrats wanting some oversight ability. The disconnect is emotional, not factual.
I hope that 2008 will bring real change. It might. But I would rather money go into attempting to find judicial recourse while legislative recourse remains supine.