I think Franken was being somewhat facetious, citing a mainstream conservative source against an independent liberal source, and doing in front of a liberal audience. The point I'm making is that, ironically, what he says as a joke might just happen if net neutrality is not implemented, just not for partisan reasons.
I don't know about your experiences, but my experience with libertarians is that they consistently believe that any restrictions placed on business by the government - in terms of hiring practices, sales practices, or any interaction with the public - serves as a detriment to the market. The market would be stronger and more vibrant if government simply got out of the way. If you advocate for a government that cannot pass laws restricting the unethical behavior of a company, that a business should be able to do what it wishes without government intervention, then you are essentially advocating for businesses that are stronger than government.
When I ask libertarians who would punish a business that particpates in unethical practices, such as trapping customers into misleading contracts or participating in sexism or racism in pay practice, the standard retort has been that the employees will find work elsewhere and the customers will stop shopping there, thus putting the company out of business. This is essentially believing that businesses will be weaker than individuals, that individuals will be able to contain businesses that harm the country without the aid of government, through the use of boycotts and protest.
That is what my sig means, and considering that most curbing of unethical business practice has come from government regulation, and that I have no personal ability to boycott Halliburton, Blackwater, AIG, or Goldman Sachs as a consumer that has no relation to those companies but feels that those companies are harming the structure of our country, I consider this to be an error in the logic of libertarianism.
In fact, a fully functional Judicial system is critical to keeping a business economy working properly. The problems we see today are largely caused by government CORRUPTION, where a big business is able to buy influence in government.
Usually what I hear libertarians say about this matter is that if government was small and unobtrusive in the market, then there would be no way for business to corrupt government. There would be no reason for them to buy access into government because government would be unable to do anything for them. The logical error here is that if government were that small, then that would imply that big business would be able to do whatever they wanted. A small government wouldn't need to be corrupted and bought out - you could just do what you want without them. What good would a strong judiciary be if the legislature had no power to pass laws that the judiciary could rule on? This is the first time that I have ever heard the words "strong judiciary" from a libertarian, made even more poignant by the number of times I've heard the words "activist judges."
Big business, as we now know it, is pretty much like a major league football game where the refs can be bought off easily by any team's manager who wants to work a deal with them. The ones with the most money can cheat their way to victory, game after game, with impunity.
In a freer market, the ones with the most money could still cheat their way to victory - except it wouldn't actually be cheating since there wouldn't be any rules in place. For example, financial businesses could have financial ties to the advisory boards that rate their bonds, influencing the ratings that their derivatives earn. That's what libertarians call "self-regulation" from within the industry, which they generally prefer to government regulation. Any large business is going to spend its resources to influence the people who might restrict it, government or private, so unless you're calling for the breakup of large businesses (which would not be very libertarian), that is something that you're not going to solve by getting government out of the regulation industry.
Franken asked the audience of bloggers how long it would take before the Fox News website loads significantly more quickly than the Daily Kos website.
The more likely model of what will happen is not that the internet companies will favor conservatives over liberals, but rather that they will favor companies by size. The cable companies will say that companies need to pay their fair share for bandwidth, and so they'll announce that any internet hosting that doesn't pay a certain amount of usage fees to the ISP will be throttled. So yes, it's likely under this model that Fox News will load faster than DailyKos - and that MSNBC will load faster than the Drudge Report - because those large media organizations will have the cash to give kickbacks to Comcast to make sure that they get full speed downloads, while the smaller bloggers and indie organizations may find themselves unable to meet the ISPs' demands.
That's not "crowdsourcing." That's "competing for bids." We've had amateurs underbidding experts for jobs like this as long as the market's been open. If you had the expensive people go ahead and recreate your entire website, and then you said, "Thanks, but we had someone else create the website at the same time, and we're just gonna pay him instead," you're gonna get sued for not paying for the work.
This doesn't sound like a directly similar problem, though. If your friend had an issue with the prices that their IT contractors were charging, they could have gone to the contractors and said, "We can't really afford your prices any more. If you can't renegotiate with us, then we're going to call some other web designers and get more bids." It sounds like your contractors gave a price and the clients decided to pay it.
TFA talks about people who are essentially doing work and then not getting paid for it. Lots of designers will compete for bids, but most of them will expect to be paid once they've started doing the work.
So in the brave new world, the client will get 100 designs, none of which will be quite what they want. So they'll go back to the author of the one that came closest and ask for a meeting. At which point that designer can say, "I charge $X hundred for a design but $X thousand for a meeting."
Why bother doing any of that? Why not just have the company say, "None of the hundred designs we got are any good. Pay the best one from this group a pittance, then hold another contest."
I often pirate games, don't pay anything for the ones I dislike and I stop playing after one hour (even though it cost someone to create the game) but then buy the ones I enjoy. A lot of people (Not everyone, but a lot of people) find this to be ethical as long as I really pay for the ones I like. What the companies do here is in many ways similar:
You're right, this actually is a pertinent example. A lot of people say that they pirate a lot of games and then go buy the ones they actually like. The truth is that most of them never pay for any of the games that they pirate.
Similarly, a lot of clients will say that quality matters to them and they'll pay for quality when they see it. And then most times they'll ignore the experience and go with whoever puts up the cheapest bid. That's not a problem unique to the design industry.
They're angry because they're established. Expensive suits. Exquisitely designed suites to work in.
How many artists and designers, though, actually make that much of a salary? It's more likely that the "established" artists have to pay rent and buy food and only have so much time during the week to experiment with designs that there's only a 1/100 chance they'll get paid for.
The established way that you get designers together with clients is that the designer will create something - and the client will say they don't like it. They'll say, here's what we want instead. So the designer will go create something else. The client still won't like it, and they'll tell the designer what they want instead. Actually, let me take it back a moment. The first time, the designer will probably bring five different logos, and then the client will say, we like the colors on this one, but we like the attitude conveyed by this other one, etc. So then the designer will take that feedback and go create another five designs. You might repeat this process a couple of times until you narrow it down to something that fits what the client is thinking. The designers that I've casually heard from have mentioned that that's part of the contract - you might be signing on to create "one" logo, but you put language in the contract that you'll submit 10 different logos and then another 5 after first feedback, etc., not that you'll just draw one logo and send it in and take a paycheck.
Commercial design has always been about having multiple examples to choose from and consider. For established designers, that means taking feedback, making informed decisions, talking it out with the client. What this website is basically saying is that to get paid by the client, you have to know exactly what the client is thinking with the first design you submit to them, which is difficult even for the ones who know what they're doing since we haven't invented telepathy yet. What the designers would probably consider more fair is if every designer that submits an idea gets paid amount $X, while the winning designer gets paid $3*X or so, or perhaps at least paying the 10 developers who all submitted interesting ideas while not showing the best prize, or inviting the top 10 submitters to submit a second logo after receiving feedback. Something that recognizes that submitting rejected designs is all a part of the process and is something that still deserves some recognition.
I'll note that my own personal opinion of unions is that unions can become corrupt just like any business or government or other organization can become corrupt, but that doesn't mean that I advocate for the dissolution of all labor unions. I was just noting that it's interesting the way we pitch this - Goods made in China are poor quality because we pay the workers too little! Goods made in America are poor quality because we pay the workers too much!
I'm not sure where the workforce is that we would pay just the right amount of wages to get quality goods....Canada, maybe?
There's something amazing about invoking Poe's Law here, similar to the number of far-rightists who think that Stephen Colbert is secretly a real conservative who's just pretending to play a fake one so that he has a chance to mock liberals - that even when you make it clear up front that you have a parody, some fundamentalists will still miss or ignore that part. Apparently, there's nothing you can do to get 100% certain with parody.
People talk about Detroit autoworkers exactly the same way. Doesn't mean much, really.
Actually, we say that Detroit autoworkers were overpaid and got way too many benefits for their unskilled labor due to inflexible, corrupt unions - sort of the opposite thing to what we're saying about offshored labor. But who's counting?
Oh my god, I've just had a disturbing philosophical question - what if we're already in an RTS? What if the gods each spawn their own planets, raise their own creatures from cellular organisms all the way up, have them spawn and research technologies, and then lead them out to attack each other? The only reason we haven't seen any aliens yet is because the gods are playing, "15 millenia no rush gl hf!"
Well, they won't make quite as much money per unit sold, but they'll sell a HELL of a lot of units of a fabulous game (yes, we already know it's fabulous because of the arcade scene and the previous title that it builds upon). That's important when your competition is Super Street Fighter IV.
And while we're on the topic, don't forget that Capcom wisely decided to release Super Street Fighter IV as a $40 title instead of trying to fleece people out of a full $60 dollar price tag again (the way they did with the old SNES releases), knowing that people would be double-extra pissed to have to pay for a full update of the game that came out only a year later.
You mean to tell me they can't make an exception for the president? It would really put all of the questioning to rest if he showed it. It just seems strange to me that he won't.
TFA is all about the fact that, no, it wouldn't. Conspiracy theorists always believe that there's a deeper layer. They demanded to see Obama's birth certificate. So they released the certificate offered by the state of Hawaii. In the minds of the birthers, this only PROVED that he wasn't born in America, because that's not the real birth certificate. He's obviously hiding the truth! He's lying!
That's exactly what the article is pointing out - people who strongly believe something are likely to see evidence against them as a part of the conspiracy, that people are lying to trick them out of their beliefs. Show the birthers the "real" certificate, and they'll probably believe it was a forgery.
We are a culture that values strength over intelligence. A man who is unflexible, unyielding, who cannot be changed is strong. A man who is open to change, who compromises appears to have a weak heart. When we argue and discuss, our goal is not to learn something, is not to find the right answer - our goal is to win the argument
This might also be in part because of... ah, a shattering of expectations. A lot of liberals had hoped that getting their party back into power would mean that they could get things fixed (and I count myself as one of them). Putting this administration into power has made a lot of us realize that there's a lot wrong with Congress that can't be fixed by putting any one particular party in power.
If you want to have an honest GLBT discussion, why are you having it on the WoW boards? That's not being flippant - if I were going to have a discussion about any serious, mature topic, I would consider posting it amongst the flotsam of the WoW boards to be an exercise in futility, lost amongst a sea of uninformed one-liners and arrogant diatribes. On a RealID-backed board, I might not suggest you start a post outing yourself as gay, but I'm not sure I would bother starting ANY discussion on the WoW boards as they stand now.
But what's the threshold for the ban? Part of the problem with the WoW forums is not just trolling and flamebaiting but also just the horrendous signal-to-noise ratio. It's a bit like saying that you're going to browse Slashdot at +3 and see 10 posts and then browse at +1 and see 1,000. But can you ban people just for being stupid or greedy or short-sighted? Is a post that just says "warlocks are overpowered they need to be nerfed" enough for a ban or deletion? And since there are a lot of general-population, non-hardcore players who are naturally attractied to the game's official forums to share their opinions, do you want to deliberately alienate those people by telling them that they're posts aren't good enough?
The advantage that boards like Elitist Jerks have is that they can moderate at a level of not matching the board's standards - they can subjectively lock posts that are overly simplistic or don't add anything to the discussion if they feel like it. I don't think you're ever going to see true "subjective moderation" implemented as a policy at WoW forums - there's just too much politics involved. But the problem as it stands now is that there's so much subjectively bad material clogging up the WoW forums that it's rarely worth trying to read through them, and when you do find a post on a topic you're interested in, it's hard to tell who actually knows what they're talking about and who is just good at bullshitting.
I supported the RealID maneuver because I felt that it was Blizz's attempt to do something to make the forums worthwhile. I don't know 100% if it would have worked, but I hope they manage to come up with something else. Maybe, like, a karma system.:V
That's part of the problem with XBox Live - if you want to run a subscription-based game, Microsoft isn't fond of running those over Live due to the added load and continual updates. The idea of paying for a subscription to Live and then paying a subscription to the game also doesn't gel with people very well.
I used to work at a hotel across the street from a baseball stadium in America. A couple of times, the scalpers just gave away tickets to some of my coworkers, generally ten minutes after the game had started. They were never angry about it, either. Those scalpers made plenty of money on the first sales, so they didn't mind losing a couple.
Slashdot Mirror
I think Franken was being somewhat facetious, citing a mainstream conservative source against an independent liberal source, and doing in front of a liberal audience. The point I'm making is that, ironically, what he says as a joke might just happen if net neutrality is not implemented, just not for partisan reasons.
I don't know about your experiences, but my experience with libertarians is that they consistently believe that any restrictions placed on business by the government - in terms of hiring practices, sales practices, or any interaction with the public - serves as a detriment to the market. The market would be stronger and more vibrant if government simply got out of the way. If you advocate for a government that cannot pass laws restricting the unethical behavior of a company, that a business should be able to do what it wishes without government intervention, then you are essentially advocating for businesses that are stronger than government.
When I ask libertarians who would punish a business that particpates in unethical practices, such as trapping customers into misleading contracts or participating in sexism or racism in pay practice, the standard retort has been that the employees will find work elsewhere and the customers will stop shopping there, thus putting the company out of business. This is essentially believing that businesses will be weaker than individuals, that individuals will be able to contain businesses that harm the country without the aid of government, through the use of boycotts and protest.
That is what my sig means, and considering that most curbing of unethical business practice has come from government regulation, and that I have no personal ability to boycott Halliburton, Blackwater, AIG, or Goldman Sachs as a consumer that has no relation to those companies but feels that those companies are harming the structure of our country, I consider this to be an error in the logic of libertarianism.
In fact, a fully functional Judicial system is critical to keeping a business economy working properly. The problems we see today are largely caused by government CORRUPTION, where a big business is able to buy influence in government.
Usually what I hear libertarians say about this matter is that if government was small and unobtrusive in the market, then there would be no way for business to corrupt government. There would be no reason for them to buy access into government because government would be unable to do anything for them. The logical error here is that if government were that small, then that would imply that big business would be able to do whatever they wanted. A small government wouldn't need to be corrupted and bought out - you could just do what you want without them. What good would a strong judiciary be if the legislature had no power to pass laws that the judiciary could rule on? This is the first time that I have ever heard the words "strong judiciary" from a libertarian, made even more poignant by the number of times I've heard the words "activist judges."
Big business, as we now know it, is pretty much like a major league football game where the refs can be bought off easily by any team's manager who wants to work a deal with them. The ones with the most money can cheat their way to victory, game after game, with impunity.
In a freer market, the ones with the most money could still cheat their way to victory - except it wouldn't actually be cheating since there wouldn't be any rules in place. For example, financial businesses could have financial ties to the advisory boards that rate their bonds, influencing the ratings that their derivatives earn. That's what libertarians call "self-regulation" from within the industry, which they generally prefer to government regulation. Any large business is going to spend its resources to influence the people who might restrict it, government or private, so unless you're calling for the breakup of large businesses (which would not be very libertarian), that is something that you're not going to solve by getting government out of the regulation industry.
Ensuring that ISPs can't discriminate against the little guy (such as myself) is elitest?
Sure, that's what they call "reverse discrimination." How dare you discriminate against people who discriminate!
Franken asked the audience of bloggers how long it would take before the Fox News website loads significantly more quickly than the Daily Kos website.
The more likely model of what will happen is not that the internet companies will favor conservatives over liberals, but rather that they will favor companies by size. The cable companies will say that companies need to pay their fair share for bandwidth, and so they'll announce that any internet hosting that doesn't pay a certain amount of usage fees to the ISP will be throttled. So yes, it's likely under this model that Fox News will load faster than DailyKos - and that MSNBC will load faster than the Drudge Report - because those large media organizations will have the cash to give kickbacks to Comcast to make sure that they get full speed downloads, while the smaller bloggers and indie organizations may find themselves unable to meet the ISPs' demands.
That's not "crowdsourcing." That's "competing for bids." We've had amateurs underbidding experts for jobs like this as long as the market's been open. If you had the expensive people go ahead and recreate your entire website, and then you said, "Thanks, but we had someone else create the website at the same time, and we're just gonna pay him instead," you're gonna get sued for not paying for the work.
This doesn't sound like a directly similar problem, though. If your friend had an issue with the prices that their IT contractors were charging, they could have gone to the contractors and said, "We can't really afford your prices any more. If you can't renegotiate with us, then we're going to call some other web designers and get more bids." It sounds like your contractors gave a price and the clients decided to pay it.
TFA talks about people who are essentially doing work and then not getting paid for it. Lots of designers will compete for bids, but most of them will expect to be paid once they've started doing the work.
So in the brave new world, the client will get 100 designs, none of which will be quite what they want. So they'll go back to the author of the one that came closest and ask for a meeting. At which point that designer can say, "I charge $X hundred for a design but $X thousand for a meeting."
Why bother doing any of that? Why not just have the company say, "None of the hundred designs we got are any good. Pay the best one from this group a pittance, then hold another contest."
I often pirate games, don't pay anything for the ones I dislike and I stop playing after one hour (even though it cost someone to create the game) but then buy the ones I enjoy. A lot of people (Not everyone, but a lot of people) find this to be ethical as long as I really pay for the ones I like. What the companies do here is in many ways similar:
You're right, this actually is a pertinent example. A lot of people say that they pirate a lot of games and then go buy the ones they actually like. The truth is that most of them never pay for any of the games that they pirate.
Similarly, a lot of clients will say that quality matters to them and they'll pay for quality when they see it. And then most times they'll ignore the experience and go with whoever puts up the cheapest bid. That's not a problem unique to the design industry.
They're angry because they're established. Expensive suits. Exquisitely designed suites to work in.
How many artists and designers, though, actually make that much of a salary? It's more likely that the "established" artists have to pay rent and buy food and only have so much time during the week to experiment with designs that there's only a 1/100 chance they'll get paid for.
The established way that you get designers together with clients is that the designer will create something - and the client will say they don't like it. They'll say, here's what we want instead. So the designer will go create something else. The client still won't like it, and they'll tell the designer what they want instead. Actually, let me take it back a moment. The first time, the designer will probably bring five different logos, and then the client will say, we like the colors on this one, but we like the attitude conveyed by this other one, etc. So then the designer will take that feedback and go create another five designs. You might repeat this process a couple of times until you narrow it down to something that fits what the client is thinking. The designers that I've casually heard from have mentioned that that's part of the contract - you might be signing on to create "one" logo, but you put language in the contract that you'll submit 10 different logos and then another 5 after first feedback, etc., not that you'll just draw one logo and send it in and take a paycheck.
Commercial design has always been about having multiple examples to choose from and consider. For established designers, that means taking feedback, making informed decisions, talking it out with the client. What this website is basically saying is that to get paid by the client, you have to know exactly what the client is thinking with the first design you submit to them, which is difficult even for the ones who know what they're doing since we haven't invented telepathy yet. What the designers would probably consider more fair is if every designer that submits an idea gets paid amount $X, while the winning designer gets paid $3*X or so, or perhaps at least paying the 10 developers who all submitted interesting ideas while not showing the best prize, or inviting the top 10 submitters to submit a second logo after receiving feedback. Something that recognizes that submitting rejected designs is all a part of the process and is something that still deserves some recognition.
I'll note that my own personal opinion of unions is that unions can become corrupt just like any business or government or other organization can become corrupt, but that doesn't mean that I advocate for the dissolution of all labor unions. I was just noting that it's interesting the way we pitch this - Goods made in China are poor quality because we pay the workers too little! Goods made in America are poor quality because we pay the workers too much!
...Canada, maybe?
I'm not sure where the workforce is that we would pay just the right amount of wages to get quality goods.
There's something amazing about invoking Poe's Law here, similar to the number of far-rightists who think that Stephen Colbert is secretly a real conservative who's just pretending to play a fake one so that he has a chance to mock liberals - that even when you make it clear up front that you have a parody, some fundamentalists will still miss or ignore that part. Apparently, there's nothing you can do to get 100% certain with parody.
People talk about Detroit autoworkers exactly the same way. Doesn't mean much, really.
Actually, we say that Detroit autoworkers were overpaid and got way too many benefits for their unskilled labor due to inflexible, corrupt unions - sort of the opposite thing to what we're saying about offshored labor. But who's counting?
The Court of Public Opinion does not forgive - but it does forget.
Oh my god, I've just had a disturbing philosophical question - what if we're already in an RTS? What if the gods each spawn their own planets, raise their own creatures from cellular organisms all the way up, have them spawn and research technologies, and then lead them out to attack each other? The only reason we haven't seen any aliens yet is because the gods are playing, "15 millenia no rush gl hf!"
Well, they won't make quite as much money per unit sold, but they'll sell a HELL of a lot of units of a fabulous game (yes, we already know it's fabulous because of the arcade scene and the previous title that it builds upon). That's important when your competition is Super Street Fighter IV.
And while we're on the topic, don't forget that Capcom wisely decided to release Super Street Fighter IV as a $40 title instead of trying to fleece people out of a full $60 dollar price tag again (the way they did with the old SNES releases), knowing that people would be double-extra pissed to have to pay for a full update of the game that came out only a year later.
You mean to tell me they can't make an exception for the president? It would really put all of the questioning to rest if he showed it. It just seems strange to me that he won't.
TFA is all about the fact that, no, it wouldn't. Conspiracy theorists always believe that there's a deeper layer. They demanded to see Obama's birth certificate. So they released the certificate offered by the state of Hawaii. In the minds of the birthers, this only PROVED that he wasn't born in America, because that's not the real birth certificate. He's obviously hiding the truth! He's lying!
That's exactly what the article is pointing out - people who strongly believe something are likely to see evidence against them as a part of the conspiracy, that people are lying to trick them out of their beliefs. Show the birthers the "real" certificate, and they'll probably believe it was a forgery.
We are a culture that values strength over intelligence. A man who is unflexible, unyielding, who cannot be changed is strong. A man who is open to change, who compromises appears to have a weak heart. When we argue and discuss, our goal is not to learn something, is not to find the right answer - our goal is to win the argument
This might also be in part because of... ah, a shattering of expectations. A lot of liberals had hoped that getting their party back into power would mean that they could get things fixed (and I count myself as one of them). Putting this administration into power has made a lot of us realize that there's a lot wrong with Congress that can't be fixed by putting any one particular party in power.
Hey, I learned about global warming when I was in kindergarten, too. GOOOOOOOOO PLANET!
You have just made the single most coherent point against using the RealID system that I have heard to date. I abscond.
If you want to have an honest GLBT discussion, why are you having it on the WoW boards? That's not being flippant - if I were going to have a discussion about any serious, mature topic, I would consider posting it amongst the flotsam of the WoW boards to be an exercise in futility, lost amongst a sea of uninformed one-liners and arrogant diatribes. On a RealID-backed board, I might not suggest you start a post outing yourself as gay, but I'm not sure I would bother starting ANY discussion on the WoW boards as they stand now.
But what's the threshold for the ban? Part of the problem with the WoW forums is not just trolling and flamebaiting but also just the horrendous signal-to-noise ratio. It's a bit like saying that you're going to browse Slashdot at +3 and see 10 posts and then browse at +1 and see 1,000. But can you ban people just for being stupid or greedy or short-sighted? Is a post that just says "warlocks are overpowered they need to be nerfed" enough for a ban or deletion? And since there are a lot of general-population, non-hardcore players who are naturally attractied to the game's official forums to share their opinions, do you want to deliberately alienate those people by telling them that they're posts aren't good enough?
:V
The advantage that boards like Elitist Jerks have is that they can moderate at a level of not matching the board's standards - they can subjectively lock posts that are overly simplistic or don't add anything to the discussion if they feel like it. I don't think you're ever going to see true "subjective moderation" implemented as a policy at WoW forums - there's just too much politics involved. But the problem as it stands now is that there's so much subjectively bad material clogging up the WoW forums that it's rarely worth trying to read through them, and when you do find a post on a topic you're interested in, it's hard to tell who actually knows what they're talking about and who is just good at bullshitting.
I supported the RealID maneuver because I felt that it was Blizz's attempt to do something to make the forums worthwhile. I don't know 100% if it would have worked, but I hope they manage to come up with something else. Maybe, like, a karma system.
That's part of the problem with XBox Live - if you want to run a subscription-based game, Microsoft isn't fond of running those over Live due to the added load and continual updates. The idea of paying for a subscription to Live and then paying a subscription to the game also doesn't gel with people very well.
That's called a marriage, and in the U.S. it seems to only lasts about 20 years, just like any other patent.
;)
The U.S. is in the habit of constantly extending patent rights to last long after such things should have moved into the public domain.
I used to work at a hotel across the street from a baseball stadium in America. A couple of times, the scalpers just gave away tickets to some of my coworkers, generally ten minutes after the game had started. They were never angry about it, either. Those scalpers made plenty of money on the first sales, so they didn't mind losing a couple.