Those kinds of statistics aren't really important though,
Not important? 14,000,000,000 human lives aren't important? Because that's how many additional people the planet could support if no one ate beef.
Raising a plant requires several gallons of water, but you aren't going to see vegetarians complaining about the amount of water wasted to grow a plant.
They don't complain because there's no plausible way for humans to survive without eating plants. But living without eating animals is quite possible.
There's a step of the (water + dirt) -> (plant) -> (cow) -> (human) food chain that can be safely skipped with modern nutrient + agriculture technology. Dropping the cow out of the sequence removes a 95% inefficiency factor, reducing the amount of plants needed to feed the human, as well as the water needed to grow those plants, etc.
The saying is "The richs' desire for beef is stronger than the poors' need for grain"
I see what you're saying. But if subliminal ads were effective, it's quite possible that a theater owner (whose resale of Coca-Cola is a big part of lobby profits) would have incentive to insert those messages, without encouragement from Cocacola Corp itself.
In that case, he'd truely be sullying their name by association with dubious techniques.
You can plug a three-button mouse into a Mac and select text merely by highlighting it, then use the middle button to paste it. Does the Windows UI support that?
No, it does not. Which is another great example of how Microsoft(tm) is not copying the Mac UI! (If anything, Apple copied that one from "Open Source")
Prehaps they copied it once, but Apple's UI developments in the past 4 years haven't made their way into Windows(r).
Perhaps not a dollar value, but certainly an acceptable utility tradeoff.
Utility has a dollar value, which can be easily computed by running a free market and observing how much people will pay for the utility. Knowning that, you can compute a value for human life. Just because some commodity is not easily traded doesn't mean there's NO price- it's just harder to see. A good economist could discover how much someone will pay to get to work 4 minutes faster daily.
For instance, statistics clearly show that increasing speed limits causes more accidents to happen.
There is such a thing as acceptable utility tradeoffs, but that's not a great example. Yes, high-speed driving increases risk of sudden death. But amoung the many benefits of faster travel are many factors that reduce the risk of other deaths (emergency medical care is just the most obvious of those). I think if you did the calculations, fast driving saves more lives (in the short term) than it kills.
Commercial fishing is a simpler example. Depending on region, fishermen may have an accidental death rate of 8% or more over a career (much more dangerous than serving in the US Army). Sit that next to the expected sale price of the fish collected, or his accumulated wages, and it's rather simple to get a good feel for how much a human is worth.
on the whole we've done nothing but hurt the humanitarian cause there
True. The most humane thing would've been to intervene in Iraq in 1981 (but there was no economic incentive then). Failing that, non-intervention in 1991 would've hurt less people, and we'd have been able to buy oil from them at roughly the same price, as set by OPEC.
Actuarians place a monetary value on risk, not on life.
So to compute the value of one life, just multiply (value of risk) * (percent chance of hazard), as revealed by statistical analysis of historical records. Boom, $ per human life.
PS. Listen to the first 3 minutes of the Travolta film "A Civil Action" for Hollywood recitation of the dollar values for different classes of inadvertent homicide.
I didn't forget it; conservation of matter is maintained under this theory. Conditions in the old and new universe are exactly equal.
You seem to be thinking that removing the time-vehicle and it's pilot will change state of the universe so that it doesn't resemble the next one, but that isn't so. I'm assuming complete determinism (of course), so whatever you do to change universe N was already done by your predecessor in universe N-1. If the universe eternally duplicates a bang->crunch cycle, then each cycle step N will produce a traveler who moves forward into step N+1. Since every universe lost the traveler's mass at exactly the same point, they all suffer identical perturbation. Similarly, the effect of inserting a remote vistor into the next universe is the same for each.
Of course, all of this hinges on an ability to step outside the timestream to go forward, evading the big crunch, which is itself impossible.
how will you ever gauge time in the new universe to know when to come out of stasis? How will you find Earth?
Yes, that is difficult or impossible- but the same problem would obstruct a foward-aiming traveler as well. Since we're assuming he could go forward, a solution is likewise assumed.
all 900 billion pages of the latest Neal Stephenson novel, they'd wind up spending more on paper and toner than to buy it from the store.
The nerdy audience for Stephenson's books will have an above-average preference to read from a computer screen, anyhow.
Just compare your copy of Cryptonomicon with any typical PDA or E-Book Reader; the paper version is at least triple the size! I'm pretty sure Sony makes laptops that are lighter than a hardbound Quicksilver.
No, they were both hugely innovative. If you don't think so, then your standards must be set really high.
The idea of "messaging" people is in IRC and *nix's talk.
The innovation of ICQ isn't the messaging, but the non-invasive online presence-indicator.
First, freeware isn't a form of commercial software. Freeware doesn't involve trade.
Microsoft IE is freeware. But I'm pretty sure it was developed for commercial purposes. "Freeware" means that the set per-copy price is zero dollars.
Second, you make the leap throughout your post that something has to be innovative *and* successful. Innovative things aren't always successful.
I mentioned that because innovation is trivially meaningless without some success. I could write 5 innovative failures in the next hour. You need some filter of overall quality to make any interesting judgements.
If you were to look at innovative failures, they'd be preponderantly non-commercial efforts, as funding guys can smell the truely bad ideas coming a long way off.
A few innovative things which have arisen include BSD and perl.
BSD is a clone of Unix. Perl is a combination of AWK, GREP, and C.
various emulators (yay pocketnes for gba
Uhm, any kind of emulator is not innovative! It's a CLONE.
The X Window system was innovative, but it's not Open Source. The open source version is, once again, a clone of the original. It happens to have superceded the original in popularity, but that's not where the innovation came from.
I'll agree that BitTorrent is innovative, not quite as much as CVS. (I'm not sure if BT is 100% open source, but it kinda looks that way)
Apache is a clone of NCSA httpd.
LateX is not succesful.
GCC is not innovative. It's yet another C complier. It may be impressive, but that's a separate category from innovation.
Gnutella is a closed source program, written by Justin Frankel during his employment at AOL-Time Warner. A few Source clones of Gnutella were written, but they're just clones.
I refuse to place a monetary price on human life, because what has a price can be sold, discounted and liquidated.
Your principles aren't shared by a society which supports a vigorous actuarial industry. Deny it if you want, but there is a dollar value for a human life.
Any scifi with timetravelers going back in time is a major turnoff for me, because it doesn't appear to be remotely possible,
Every other book ever written involves timetravelers going forwards, it's really not that special. We do it all the time.
If you had some special means to travel forward in time, besides just sitting quietly and waiting, then in some cosmological theories you could go backwards as well. Assume the universe is sufficiently massy to eventually recondense onto a single, solid point. At that time, the conditions "preceding" the big-bang will have re-occured precisely, and the entirety of existence will start again, with exactly the same events occuring.
So, hypothetically if you had a "time machine" that went forward, you could reach the past just by waiting long enough to wrap all the way around.
Oooh so selfish of them! How awful it is that they don't want people to die.
Yes, it is quite selfish to divert $100,000s of dollars to keeping the heart beating in a braindead human, when the same money could save the lives of a dozen non-vegetable children.
No, I don't think it would be a good idea to abort a fetus because we knew it would be mentally disabled.
If an expectant mother really wanted an abortion because of retardation (and wasn't just looking for an excuse to avoid parenthood), then she'd surely try to have a healthy child later on. In fact, maybe more than one. It is right to deny those potential people a chance to exist?
One woman can theoretically have 135+ children in her life. But realistically, only 10% of that could be managed. She'll have to choose which of those 135 get a chance. Why should the 1st or 2nd be more deserving than #97 and #98?
Furthermore, the disabled person himself often enjoys life just as much as a "normal" person.
"Just as much as a normal person". Equally as much, you say?
But a severely retarded person can cost $10,000s annually to keep alive, for each of the nearly 80 years she may live.
The same amount of money required to support her to age 15 could be used to save the lives of 15+ Cambodian youngsters, who would go on to be self-supporting adults. The "enjoyment per dollar" returned is much higher saving people with real futures, rather than an individual with no more mental potential than a racoon.
I think open source and Microsoft should stop copying the Mac UI.
Yeah! I hate how Microsoft only sells one-button mice. And that huge "Dock" takes up too much space at the bottom of the Windows XP screen. You can't even put windows under there!
And don't even get me started on why you must to drag a CD-R into the Recycle Bin to burn it...
I think that the distinction on innovation isn't relevant to a design model.
OpenSource is not only a design model, but a business model. It's a business model that says "Money isn't highly important to me". In a capitalist economy, most people's actions are guided by profit, forming a disincentive to release useful innovations under Open Source.
Some recent programs I'd term highly innovative, and which were either successful themselves, or spawned major fields: ICQ, Quake, RealAudio, Fraunhofer MP3, Macromedia Flash, Napster, Sun Java. All of them developed and released as closed-source.
You see, if you have a new, amazing idea, it still requires a lot of programming effort to make it workable. That effort can be obtained by finding a corporation or VC to fund workers to come listen to you. They'll do what they're paid to, even if they don't grasp the insight of how the idea will really turn out to be great.
It's much harder to get geographically distributed volunteers to be even INTERESTED in the project. Not to mention understand the new ideas fully enough to work on them coherently. (And any potential volunteer who DOES learn enough to understand the grand implications can go find his own VC, hire 6 assistants, and beat you to market)
If an Open Source project is going to be innovative and successful, the inventor must not only have a great idea, but also a Grade A programmer who can make a robust implementation by herself.
And there's been tons of innovation in commercial, shareware, freeware, and open source code.
Ok, if there's been a ton of innovation, then please name an Open Source project that's innovative, and also mildly successful. (Psst: Shareware and freeware are subcategories of commercial)
The closest I can come up with is CVS, which is used by programmers worldwide and had substantially different behavioral style than the competitors at the time of it's release. (Of course, in the Revision Control field, closed-source BitKeeper can be argued to be much more innovative than CVS, and nearly as successful)
Last time they had to "pay" their fines by giving free MS products to schools.
As I said, it depends on which party controls the White House (and thus the Department of Justice).
The Democrats would be happy to split a megacorp into heavily-regulated fragments. The Republicans wouldn't think of it.
The school-donation incident you are referring to happened in 2002, and is an example of the easy treatment Microsoft can expect to recieve IF Bush is re-elected.
I don't think anyone is arguing that in general open source software doesn't innovate
Um no, that's a very common refrain.
Look at Linux, Apache, OpenOffice, KDE, Mozilla... for each of them, there is a pre-existing closed-source project that it can be called a "clone" of.
In fact, when RMS was initially starting the "Free Software" movement, he explicitally declared they would clone Unix:
Individual programmers can contribute by writing a compatible duplicate of some Unix utility and giving it to me. For most projects, such part-time distributed work would be very hard to coordinate; the independently-written parts would not work together. But for the particular task of replacing Unix, this problem is absent. Most interface specifications are fixed by Unix compatibility. If each contribution works with the rest of Unix, it will probably work with the rest of GNU.
That seminal message suggests that cloning an existing program will be vastly easier than making a new one, because since there's little original thinking involved, the communication needs between distributed developers are much, much smaller.
If the article says so, it is wrong. Probably just propagating a distortion from the builders. Minus spires, the Sears tower is 440m, while Taipei is just 410m.
I bet they'd pay 20 times that out if they could neutralise the Linux threat.
They can't afford to neutralize that threat until learning if the next President will be Democrat or Republican.
If there's a pro-consumer DOJ, then the apparent threat of a viable Linux industry will actually help protect them against the threat of anti-trust punishment.
But Canada does have a very healthy liquor industry.
Part of the continental and global markets, both as customers, and as competitors. Their business practices are constrained by US industrial behavior. Potential rivals in Illinois keep them honest.
If you disagree, you must explain why it makes sense for companies to compete, wasting a lot of time and resources, when the product is already optimized, and no new developments will be made.
Because if one company has no competitors, new developments will be made... to its profit margins. Prices will rise or quality will fall. Maybe both.
Look at the US soft-drink industry. The products it makes were arguably perfected anytime between 60 and 30 years ago. Yet there's still 2 major companies, and 50 small ones. Each acts as quality-control and price-control on the others.
(Sadly, a distressingly amount of the largest firms' reinvestment dollars go to marketing & promotion, areas that harm customers. But it is the publics' own fault for succeptibility to advertising)
And of course, there's always the other rejoinder that "no more developments to be made" is something that'll happen to no industry until it's obselete and dead.
The government then sells the alcohol to the consumers at the same price as alcohol in other places,
Interesting. So Canada leeches off the competitive pricing of alcohol in other countries. Of course they're a small population, and can get away with it. If ALL alcohol was sold by governments, then it'd get into USSR-style doldrums where there's no incentive to create better+cheaper products.
It's like how Canada does medication, too. A government-controlled pricing system that works because a larger, foreign, capitalist economy funds all the R&D for the products.
Canada gets away with schemes like this because it's big enough to be an irrestistable market (even at controlled prices), but small enough so that it's lack of participation doesn't impair the capitalist drive to excell.
Some smart-asses will probably say "but the consumers could just get together and form a single buying body on their own!"
But they DID. Or wasn't the Canadian alcohol system established from some form of voting?
Ever hear of places like England, Japan, Prussia or Sparta?
Under the rule of Samurai, Japan had a longer period without war (250 years) than has been documented in any other nation. (Their physical isolation and inability to safely sail to Asia helped a lot)
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Those kinds of statistics aren't really important though,
Not important? 14,000,000,000 human lives aren't important? Because that's how many additional people the planet could support if no one ate beef.
Raising a plant requires several gallons of water, but you aren't going to see vegetarians complaining about the amount of water wasted to grow a plant.
They don't complain because there's no plausible way for humans to survive without eating plants. But living without eating animals is quite possible.
There's a step of the (water + dirt) -> (plant) -> (cow) -> (human) food chain that can be safely skipped with modern nutrient + agriculture technology. Dropping the cow out of the sequence removes a 95% inefficiency factor, reducing the amount of plants needed to feed the human, as well as the water needed to grow those plants, etc.
The saying is "The richs' desire for beef is stronger than the poors' need for grain"
"But we paid them to do that!"
I see what you're saying. But if subliminal ads were effective, it's quite possible that a theater owner (whose resale of Coca-Cola is a big part of lobby profits) would have incentive to insert those messages, without encouragement from Cocacola Corp itself.
In that case, he'd truely be sullying their name by association with dubious techniques.
You can plug a three-button mouse into a Mac and select text merely by highlighting it, then use the middle button to paste it. Does the Windows UI support that?
No, it does not. Which is another great example of how Microsoft(tm) is not copying the Mac UI! (If anything, Apple copied that one from "Open Source")
Prehaps they copied it once, but Apple's UI developments in the past 4 years haven't made their way into Windows(r).
Perhaps not a dollar value, but certainly an acceptable utility tradeoff.
Utility has a dollar value, which can be easily computed by running a free market and observing how much people will pay for the utility. Knowning that, you can compute a value for human life. Just because some commodity is not easily traded doesn't mean there's NO price- it's just harder to see. A good economist could discover how much someone will pay to get to work 4 minutes faster daily.
For instance, statistics clearly show that increasing speed limits causes more accidents to happen.
There is such a thing as acceptable utility tradeoffs, but that's not a great example. Yes, high-speed driving increases risk of sudden death. But amoung the many benefits of faster travel are many factors that reduce the risk of other deaths (emergency medical care is just the most obvious of those). I think if you did the calculations, fast driving saves more lives (in the short term) than it kills.
Commercial fishing is a simpler example. Depending on region, fishermen may have an accidental death rate of 8% or more over a career (much more dangerous than serving in the US Army). Sit that next to the expected sale price of the fish collected, or his accumulated wages, and it's rather simple to get a good feel for how much a human is worth.
on the whole we've done nothing but hurt the humanitarian cause there
True. The most humane thing would've been to intervene in Iraq in 1981 (but there was no economic incentive then). Failing that, non-intervention in 1991 would've hurt less people, and we'd have been able to buy oil from them at roughly the same price, as set by OPEC.
Actuarians place a monetary value on risk, not on life.
So to compute the value of one life, just multiply (value of risk) * (percent chance of hazard), as revealed by statistical analysis of historical records. Boom, $ per human life.
PS. Listen to the first 3 minutes of the Travolta film "A Civil Action" for Hollywood recitation of the dollar values for different classes of inadvertent homicide.
There is a book with a story very similar to what you describe, Tau Zero by Poul Anderson.
Actually I got the concept from some other scifi book, whose name escapes me. (The time-travellers were non-human, but that's all I can firmly recall)
You're forgetting the factor of yourself.
I didn't forget it; conservation of matter is maintained under this theory. Conditions in the old and new universe are exactly equal.
You seem to be thinking that removing the time-vehicle and it's pilot will change state of the universe so that it doesn't resemble the next one, but that isn't so. I'm assuming complete determinism (of course), so whatever you do to change universe N was already done by your predecessor in universe N-1. If the universe eternally duplicates a bang->crunch cycle, then each cycle step N will produce a traveler who moves forward into step N+1. Since every universe lost the traveler's mass at exactly the same point, they all suffer identical perturbation. Similarly, the effect of inserting a remote vistor into the next universe is the same for each.
Of course, all of this hinges on an ability to step outside the timestream to go forward, evading the big crunch, which is itself impossible.
how will you ever gauge time in the new universe to know when to come out of stasis? How will you find Earth?
Yes, that is difficult or impossible- but the same problem would obstruct a foward-aiming traveler as well. Since we're assuming he could go forward, a solution is likewise assumed.
all 900 billion pages of the latest Neal Stephenson novel, they'd wind up spending more on paper and toner than to buy it from the store.
The nerdy audience for Stephenson's books will have an above-average preference to read from a computer screen, anyhow.
Just compare your copy of Cryptonomicon with any typical PDA or E-Book Reader; the paper version is at least triple the size! I'm pretty sure Sony makes laptops that are lighter than a hardbound Quicksilver.
ICQ wasn't innovative. Nor was Quake really
No, they were both hugely innovative. If you don't think so, then your standards must be set really high.
The idea of "messaging" people is in IRC and *nix's talk.
The innovation of ICQ isn't the messaging, but the non-invasive online presence-indicator.
First, freeware isn't a form of commercial software. Freeware doesn't involve trade.
Microsoft IE is freeware. But I'm pretty sure it was developed for commercial purposes. "Freeware" means that the set per-copy price is zero dollars.
Second, you make the leap throughout your post that something has to be innovative *and* successful. Innovative things aren't always successful.
I mentioned that because innovation is trivially meaningless without some success. I could write 5 innovative failures in the next hour. You need some filter of overall quality to make any interesting judgements.
If you were to look at innovative failures, they'd be preponderantly non-commercial efforts, as funding guys can smell the truely bad ideas coming a long way off.
A few innovative things which have arisen include BSD and perl.
BSD is a clone of Unix. Perl is a combination of AWK, GREP, and C.
various emulators (yay pocketnes for gba
Uhm, any kind of emulator is not innovative! It's a CLONE.
The X Window system was innovative, but it's not Open Source. The open source version is, once again, a clone of the original. It happens to have superceded the original in popularity, but that's not where the innovation came from.
I'll agree that BitTorrent is innovative, not quite as much as CVS. (I'm not sure if BT is 100% open source, but it kinda looks that way)
Apache is a clone of NCSA httpd.
LateX is not succesful.
GCC is not innovative. It's yet another C complier. It may be impressive, but that's a separate category from innovation.
Gnutella is a closed source program, written by Justin Frankel during his employment at AOL-Time Warner. A few Source clones of Gnutella were written, but they're just clones.
I refuse to place a monetary price on human life, because what has a price can be sold, discounted and liquidated.
Your principles aren't shared by a society which supports a vigorous actuarial industry. Deny it if you want, but there is a dollar value for a human life.
Any scifi with timetravelers going back in time is a major turnoff for me, because it doesn't appear to be remotely possible,
Every other book ever written involves timetravelers going forwards, it's really not that special. We do it all the time.
If you had some special means to travel forward in time, besides just sitting quietly and waiting, then in some cosmological theories you could go backwards as well. Assume the universe is sufficiently massy to eventually recondense onto a single, solid point. At that time, the conditions "preceding" the big-bang will have re-occured precisely, and the entirety of existence will start again, with exactly the same events occuring.
So, hypothetically if you had a "time machine" that went forward, you could reach the past just by waiting long enough to wrap all the way around.
Oooh so selfish of them! How awful it is that they don't want people to die.
Yes, it is quite selfish to divert $100,000s of dollars to keeping the heart beating in a braindead human, when the same money could save the lives of a dozen non-vegetable children.
No, I don't think it would be a good idea to abort a fetus because we knew it would be mentally disabled.
If an expectant mother really wanted an abortion because of retardation (and wasn't just looking for an excuse to avoid parenthood), then she'd surely try to have a healthy child later on. In fact, maybe more than one. It is right to deny those potential people a chance to exist?
One woman can theoretically have 135+ children in her life. But realistically, only 10% of that could be managed. She'll have to choose which of those 135 get a chance. Why should the 1st or 2nd be more deserving than #97 and #98?
Furthermore, the disabled person himself often enjoys life just as much as a "normal" person.
"Just as much as a normal person". Equally as much, you say?
But a severely retarded person can cost $10,000s annually to keep alive, for each of the nearly 80 years she may live.
The same amount of money required to support her to age 15 could be used to save the lives of 15+ Cambodian youngsters, who would go on to be self-supporting adults. The "enjoyment per dollar" returned is much higher saving people with real futures, rather than an individual with no more mental potential than a racoon.
I think open source and Microsoft should stop copying the Mac UI.
Yeah! I hate how Microsoft only sells one-button mice. And that huge "Dock" takes up too much space at the bottom of the Windows XP screen. You can't even put windows under there!
And don't even get me started on why you must to drag a CD-R into the Recycle Bin to burn it...
I think that the distinction on innovation isn't relevant to a design model.
OpenSource is not only a design model, but a business model. It's a business model that says "Money isn't highly important to me". In a capitalist economy, most people's actions are guided by profit, forming a disincentive to release useful innovations under Open Source.
Some recent programs I'd term highly innovative, and which were either successful themselves, or spawned major fields:
ICQ, Quake, RealAudio, Fraunhofer MP3, Macromedia Flash, Napster, Sun Java.
All of them developed and released as closed-source.
You see, if you have a new, amazing idea, it still requires a lot of programming effort to make it workable. That effort can be obtained by finding a corporation or VC to fund workers to come listen to you. They'll do what they're paid to, even if they don't grasp the insight of how the idea will really turn out to be great.
It's much harder to get geographically distributed volunteers to be even INTERESTED in the project. Not to mention understand the new ideas fully enough to work on them coherently. (And any potential volunteer who DOES learn enough to understand the grand implications can go find his own VC, hire 6 assistants, and beat you to market)
If an Open Source project is going to be innovative and successful, the inventor must not only have a great idea, but also a Grade A programmer who can make a robust implementation by herself.
And there's been tons of innovation in commercial, shareware, freeware, and open source code.
Ok, if there's been a ton of innovation, then please name an Open Source project that's innovative, and also mildly successful. (Psst: Shareware and freeware are subcategories of commercial)
The closest I can come up with is CVS, which is used by programmers worldwide and had substantially different behavioral style than the competitors at the time of it's release. (Of course, in the Revision Control field, closed-source BitKeeper can be argued to be much more innovative than CVS, and nearly as successful)
Last time they had to "pay" their fines by giving free MS products to schools.
As I said, it depends on which party controls the White House (and thus the Department of Justice).
The Democrats would be happy to split a megacorp into heavily-regulated fragments. The Republicans wouldn't think of it.
The school-donation incident you are referring to happened in 2002, and is an example of the easy treatment Microsoft can expect to recieve IF Bush is re-elected.
GAIM: we need a killer,compatible IM with all features
All the features, huh? Until Gaim gets a barely functional file transfer ability, it won't even match a 1997 release of ICQ.
Um no, that's a very common refrain.
Look at Linux, Apache, OpenOffice, KDE, Mozilla...
for each of them, there is a pre-existing closed-source project that it can be called a "clone" of.
In fact, when RMS was initially starting the "Free Software" movement, he explicitally declared they would clone Unix:
That seminal message suggests that cloning an existing program will be vastly easier than making a new one, because since there's little original thinking involved, the communication needs between distributed developers are much, much smaller.
If the article says so, it is wrong. Probably just propagating a distortion from the builders. Minus spires, the Sears tower is 440m, while Taipei is just 410m.
Islam is a religion, not a race.
I bet they'd pay 20 times that out if they could neutralise the Linux threat.
They can't afford to neutralize that threat until learning if the next President will be Democrat or Republican.
If there's a pro-consumer DOJ, then the apparent threat of a viable Linux industry will actually help protect them against the threat of anti-trust punishment.
But Canada does have a very healthy liquor industry.
Part of the continental and global markets, both as customers, and as competitors. Their business practices are constrained by US industrial behavior. Potential rivals in Illinois keep them honest.
If you disagree, you must explain why it makes sense for companies to compete, wasting a lot of time and resources, when the product is already optimized, and no new developments will be made.
Because if one company has no competitors, new developments will be made... to its profit margins. Prices will rise or quality will fall. Maybe both.
Look at the US soft-drink industry. The products it makes were arguably perfected anytime between 60 and 30 years ago. Yet there's still 2 major companies, and 50 small ones. Each acts as quality-control and price-control on the others.
(Sadly, a distressingly amount of the largest firms' reinvestment dollars go to marketing & promotion, areas that harm customers. But it is the publics' own fault for succeptibility to advertising)
And of course, there's always the other rejoinder that "no more developments to be made" is something that'll happen to no industry until it's obselete and dead.
The government then sells the alcohol to the consumers at the same price as alcohol in other places,
Interesting. So Canada leeches off the competitive pricing of alcohol in other countries. Of course they're a small population, and can get away with it. If ALL alcohol was sold by governments, then it'd get into USSR-style doldrums where there's no incentive to create better+cheaper products.
It's like how Canada does medication, too. A government-controlled pricing system that works because a larger, foreign, capitalist economy funds all the R&D for the products.
Canada gets away with schemes like this because it's big enough to be an irrestistable market (even at controlled prices), but small enough so that it's lack of participation doesn't impair the capitalist drive to excell.
Some smart-asses will probably say "but the consumers could just get together and form a single buying body on their own!"
But they DID. Or wasn't the Canadian alcohol system established from some form of voting?
Ever hear of places like England, Japan, Prussia or Sparta?
Under the rule of Samurai, Japan had a longer period without war (250 years) than has been documented in any other nation. (Their physical isolation and inability to safely sail to Asia helped a lot)