The trouble with capitalism is that continual inflation and continual growth are a requirement.
I don't think continuous growth is a requirement of "capitalism" so much as a requirement of "the stock market". If I start a company or go self-employed, nothing says I have to grow my company to the point that I have to start hiring random strangers to get all the work done. If I have a public company there's a fear that the stock holders will lynch (err, sue) me if I don't grow the company as fast as possible, since bigger numbers translate to a bigger stock price and they don't understand the business well enough to know what's being destroyed to achieve that.
Basically, it seems like giving clueless people (stock holders, in this case) the ability to make demands is what causes the "growth is always good" phenomena (because growth is trivially easy to observe).
Really? I thought the very fact that gold kept being mined out of the ground, caused a steady inflation. Except it was uncontrollable and unpredictable.
Then you had stuff like the discovery of gold and silver mines by the Spanish in America, caused some uncontrollable bursts and fits of hyper-inflation in Spain.
I found some data here that comes to inflation between -3% and 4% per year from 1500 to 1650, with an average of about... 0.84% (350% total). Whereas if I go to the first google result for "Inflation Calculator", I see that we've had 360% cumulative inflation since 1976, or about 4% per year.
Recent inflation averages 5 times as high as this "Spanish Hyperinflation" (or if I use the shadowstats numbers about 6% or 7% per year, so 8 times the Spanish hyperinflation).
Or read a bit about the Black Death outbreaks. Unemployment practically disappeared, as there were not enough peasants and craftsmen for the nobles to employ. Prices shot up. There was some _massive_ inflation in the 14'th and 15'th centuries. (Which also provides some early illustration for that curve at work.)
Sure. Fewer people equals more money per person equals higher prices. Fewer people also equals more land (capital) per person which makes it easier to get use of the capital you need in order to work. No causal relation between the inflation and the unemployment, since there's a third change driving them both.
At any rate, heck, your government (assuming you're in a western country) still applies that curve quite successfuly. Again, that's how and why we all control inflation. But, at the very least, there you go, most governments still didn't abandon it at all.
Right, they didn't abandon it. Which means that if it worked, we wouldn't get stagflation and jobless recoveries.
There are still people to hire. You just have to hire them away from someone else by offering better compensation. So, everyone gets raises. Which causes inflation.....
No, because the money to pay for the raises has to come from somewhere. Probably the best result would be it coming from top management salaries and reducing income disparity, or the worst result would be canning all the R&D people and making your company stagnate.
Actually, it would come from loans. The way to manipulate inflation and unemployment is to change the loan rate.
Which is not low unemployment causing inflation. It's creation of temporary money (since that's how you lower the loan rate - let people borrow more than is lent) causing inflation. And the existence of stagflation shows that it doesn't always lower unemployment.
I'd think the people at fault (traders who have stop-loss orders because they're essentially gambling instead of investing in companies that they've researched properly) have already lost their money.
The policy came to light after two environmental campaigners dressed as penguins were thrown out of the park last month when caught handing out leaflets on climate change.
Telford and Wrekin Council said Rachel Whittaker and Neil Donaldson were ejected because they had not undergone Criminal Records Bureau checks or risk assessments before entering the park - a requirement under the Child Protection Act
For all our faults (TSA, Gitmo, customs laptop inspections,...), at least over here a story like this would probably include the city getting sued for civil rights violations.
There are still people to hire. You just have to hire them away from someone else by offering better compensation. So, everyone gets raises. Which causes inflation.....
No, because the money to pay for the raises has to come from somewhere. Probably the best result would be it coming from top management salaries and reducing income disparity, or the worst result would be canning all the R&D people and making your company stagnate.
1. A dirty little secret of all governments, the USA included, is that they _can't_ get rid of unemployment or inflation, and they're actually trying to keep both where they want them. There's this funny little hyperbolic-looking curve called the Phillips Curve, which ties inflation to unemployment. If you even tried to push one to zero, the other rises sky-high.
That page says "In the 1970s, many countries experienced high levels of both inflation and unemployment also known as stagflation. Theories based on the Phillips curve suggested that this could not happen, and... The idea that there was a simple, predictable, and persistent relationship between inflation and unemployment was abandoned by most if not all macroeconomists.".
And conversely, if anyone actually managed to eliminate inflation, like some idiots demand, most of you would be out of job.
It used to be rather difficult to produce inflation, back before we switched to a fiat money system. I don't believe that most people were jobless back then.
There is no solid relation between unemployment and inflation.
2. Well, actually, the reluctance to make people change jobs was arguably one of the (several) reasons the Soviet economy colapsed. They were very reluctant to kick people out of a job, since the whole theory was that everyone should be given a job in communism. So if they made a hammer manufacturing company, and 20 years later there would be more of a need for wrenches, they'd still keep a bunch of people there making hammers, just so they don't kick them out and tell them to find another job. It's not the only factor, of course, but worth thinking about.
They couldn't just say "you will now work at the wrench factory on the other side of town"? I'd thought they replaced markets ("the wrench factory will pay me twice as much") with centralized command, but it sounds like they just got rid of markets without replacing them with anything?
Or seen at another level, they wanted to eliminate both the unemployment _and_ inflation (via price controls) which had the same devastating results as when it had been attempted before.
Yep, price controls just fuck things up. It's not caused by inflation vs. unemployment though, it's caused by garbling everyone's communication lines (pricing signals) so that nobody knows WTF needs to be done.
The whole thing about capitalism and the free market is that it's an optimization algorithm.... The genes which lost, and the companies which bet on them, die. Sometimes spectacularly, leaving a bunch of people temporarily unemployed..... Trying to prevent that optimization cycle from happening, deviates from optimum very quickly, and produces even worse results.
So instead of trying to prevent it, try to make it work better. Make it as easy as possible for people to learn a different job. Encourage public analysis of failed companies, so the same mistakes don't have to be repeated as often. Try to encourage a cultural desire for excellence instead of superiority, and a cultural stigma for hindering others.
I noticed they claim 1,000,000+ h MTBF, but they only warranty for less than 10,000 h (or 20,000 in some cases). What makes you wonder why they have so little faith in their product (or in their own reliability estimate).
Because those are completely different things. One is "this drive has an expected lifespan of 10,000 hours", the other is "if you are using 1,000,000 drives that haven't reached the end of their expected lifespan, you can expect approximately one to fail every hour" (a way to measure how likely a drive is to fail before the end of its expected lifespan). Remember the "bathtub curve"? MTBF is how high the low middle part is, lifespan is where the rise at the end is. Of course, this assumes that the "bathtub curve" theory is accurate...
I thought destructors were the inverse of init (constructor) and C++ has operator delete as the inverse of alloc (operator new), the difference between a destructor and a finalizer being that you can't rely on a finalizer being called at a particular time, or even being called at all.
Let's say I'm running Company A, and I compete with Companies B and C. If I subsidize an OSS project (rather than paying external or internal devs for a private custom solution that might give me a competitive advantage), what's to stop Companies B and C from using the OSS code that I funded, for free?
Maybe they don't know about it, maybe they're not set up properly to use it effectively, maybe they've already bought in to a competing solution.
Or the reverse: If Companies B and/or C are willing to subsidize an OSS project, why should I subsidize when I can mooch that code for free myself? I'd be more than happy to let my competitors fund code that I then can use for free.
Maybe you want faster development, or maybe you want slightly different features than what your competitors are going for.
As time goes on, more and more companies would wise up and realize that funding OSS code let's their competitors mooch that code for free, and more and more companies will stop subsidizing since they're being played as suckers.
You're not automatically a "sucker" just because you happen to be creating positive externalities. I doubt that a lumber mill would much care who else used benefited from the software they helped fund for their HR department to use, unless the wider use actually benefited them by, say, getting bugs found/fixed quicker.
When's that last time OSS folk actually invented something? IBM or Google tweaking Linux or Apache and giving those tweaks back to the community is baby shit. Let's see Google release their search algorithm code so that Yahoo, MS, Ask, etc can use it for free, then I'll be convinced that subisdizing OSS is worthwhile.
A lot of the work on distributed/decentralized source control (Darcs patch theory, (deterministic) mark-merge, etc). FastCGI. Anything described in the RFCs. Plan 9 and Inferno. Package management. etc...
...point being, who decides that the things the GPL forbids are immoral, or even that it is moral to forbid them (someone who makes physical items certainly doesn't get that kind of control)? Why aren't the end users permitted to choose whether they place more value in complete modifiability or preexisting features & usability, and how is removing this choice from them considered to be giving them more freedom?
Isn't that more of a "dishonest asshole" or "naive fool" issue than a licensing issue? You also can't just say that with GPL, wine would obviously have gotten all of the cedega work, you also have to account for the (probably very hard to quantify) possibility that cedega wouldn't have existed at all...
Free means different things to different people. The GPL provides more freedom to users by requiring coders to give back to the community. The MIT/X11/BSD style license provides more freedom to coders, because they don't have to give back to the community.
What license style increases user freedom by increasing the number of apps available to use?
They don't, at least for numbers that small. If they did, you could take a copy of ssh-keygen and a second-hand computer and make millions in fairly short order.
Unless we get living humans off the planet, residing in a sustainable environment, then any large object hitting the earth could take us all out - permanently.
Who would be left to care? Does this increase people's individual chance of surviving, or just reduce the correlation?
The Oort cloud could hold a planetary mass comet on a collision course with Earth and we would know about it only right before the event or just after.
Offsite backups seem like a good idea to me. How about you?
It's not like there's be anyone around to restore the backups, so what good would they be?
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The trouble with capitalism is that continual inflation and continual growth are a requirement.
I don't think continuous growth is a requirement of "capitalism" so much as a requirement of "the stock market". If I start a company or go self-employed, nothing says I have to grow my company to the point that I have to start hiring random strangers to get all the work done. If I have a public company there's a fear that the stock holders will lynch (err, sue) me if I don't grow the company as fast as possible, since bigger numbers translate to a bigger stock price and they don't understand the business well enough to know what's being destroyed to achieve that.
Basically, it seems like giving clueless people (stock holders, in this case) the ability to make demands is what causes the "growth is always good" phenomena (because growth is trivially easy to observe).
Really? I thought the very fact that gold kept being mined out of the ground, caused a steady inflation. Except it was uncontrollable and unpredictable.
Then you had stuff like the discovery of gold and silver mines by the Spanish in America, caused some uncontrollable bursts and fits of hyper-inflation in Spain.
I found some data here that comes to inflation between -3% and 4% per year from 1500 to 1650, with an average of about... 0.84% (350% total). Whereas if I go to the first google result for "Inflation Calculator", I see that we've had 360% cumulative inflation since 1976, or about 4% per year.
Recent inflation averages 5 times as high as this "Spanish Hyperinflation" (or if I use the shadowstats numbers about 6% or 7% per year, so 8 times the Spanish hyperinflation).
Or read a bit about the Black Death outbreaks. Unemployment practically disappeared, as there were not enough peasants and craftsmen for the nobles to employ. Prices shot up. There was some _massive_ inflation in the 14'th and 15'th centuries. (Which also provides some early illustration for that curve at work.)
Sure. Fewer people equals more money per person equals higher prices. Fewer people also equals more land (capital) per person which makes it easier to get use of the capital you need in order to work. No causal relation between the inflation and the unemployment, since there's a third change driving them both.
At any rate, heck, your government (assuming you're in a western country) still applies that curve quite successfuly. Again, that's how and why we all control inflation. But, at the very least, there you go, most governments still didn't abandon it at all.
Right, they didn't abandon it. Which means that if it worked, we wouldn't get stagflation and jobless recoveries.
There are still people to hire. You just have to hire them away from someone else by offering better compensation. So, everyone gets raises. Which causes inflation.....
No, because the money to pay for the raises has to come from somewhere. Probably the best result would be it coming from top management salaries and reducing income disparity, or the worst result would be canning all the R&D people and making your company stagnate.
Actually, it would come from loans. The way to manipulate inflation and unemployment is to change the loan rate.
Which is not low unemployment causing inflation. It's creation of temporary money (since that's how you lower the loan rate - let people borrow more than is lent) causing inflation. And the existence of stagflation shows that it doesn't always lower unemployment.
I wonder who gets sued for this.
I'd think the people at fault (traders who have stop-loss orders because they're essentially gambling instead of investing in companies that they've researched properly) have already lost their money.
...perhaps they'll be more careful about whose luggage they lose.
For all our faults (TSA, Gitmo, customs laptop inspections, ...), at least over here a story like this would probably include the city getting sued for civil rights violations.
There are still people to hire. You just have to hire them away from someone else by offering better compensation. So, everyone gets raises. Which causes inflation.....
No, because the money to pay for the raises has to come from somewhere. Probably the best result would be it coming from top management salaries and reducing income disparity, or the worst result would be canning all the R&D people and making your company stagnate.
1. A dirty little secret of all governments, the USA included, is that they _can't_ get rid of unemployment or inflation, and they're actually trying to keep both where they want them. There's this funny little hyperbolic-looking curve called the Phillips Curve, which ties inflation to unemployment. If you even tried to push one to zero, the other rises sky-high.
That page says "In the 1970s, many countries experienced high levels of both inflation and unemployment also known as stagflation. Theories based on the Phillips curve suggested that this could not happen, and ... The idea that there was a simple, predictable, and persistent relationship between inflation and unemployment was abandoned by most if not all macroeconomists.".
And conversely, if anyone actually managed to eliminate inflation, like some idiots demand, most of you would be out of job.
It used to be rather difficult to produce inflation, back before we switched to a fiat money system. I don't believe that most people were jobless back then.
There is no solid relation between unemployment and inflation.
2. Well, actually, the reluctance to make people change jobs was arguably one of the (several) reasons the Soviet economy colapsed. They were very reluctant to kick people out of a job, since the whole theory was that everyone should be given a job in communism. So if they made a hammer manufacturing company, and 20 years later there would be more of a need for wrenches, they'd still keep a bunch of people there making hammers, just so they don't kick them out and tell them to find another job. It's not the only factor, of course, but worth thinking about.
They couldn't just say "you will now work at the wrench factory on the other side of town"? I'd thought they replaced markets ("the wrench factory will pay me twice as much") with centralized command, but it sounds like they just got rid of markets without replacing them with anything?
Or seen at another level, they wanted to eliminate both the unemployment _and_ inflation (via price controls) which had the same devastating results as when it had been attempted before.
Yep, price controls just fuck things up. It's not caused by inflation vs. unemployment though, it's caused by garbling everyone's communication lines (pricing signals) so that nobody knows WTF needs to be done.
The whole thing about capitalism and the free market is that it's an optimization algorithm. ... The genes which lost, and the companies which bet on them, die. Sometimes spectacularly, leaving a bunch of people temporarily unemployed. .... Trying to prevent that optimization cycle from happening, deviates from optimum very quickly, and produces even worse results.
So instead of trying to prevent it, try to make it work better. Make it as easy as possible for people to learn a different job. Encourage public analysis of failed companies, so the same mistakes don't have to be repeated as often. Try to encourage a cultural desire for excellence instead of superiority, and a cultural stigma for hindering others.
I noticed they claim 1,000,000+ h MTBF, but they only warranty for less than 10,000 h (or 20,000 in some cases). What makes you wonder why they have so little faith in their product (or in their own reliability estimate).
Because those are completely different things. One is "this drive has an expected lifespan of 10,000 hours", the other is "if you are using 1,000,000 drives that haven't reached the end of their expected lifespan, you can expect approximately one to fail every hour" (a way to measure how likely a drive is to fail before the end of its expected lifespan). Remember the "bathtub curve"? MTBF is how high the low middle part is, lifespan is where the rise at the end is. Of course, this assumes that the "bathtub curve" theory is accurate...
I wasn't aware that whether something was right followed directly from whether it was legal.
I thought destructors were the inverse of init (constructor) and C++ has operator delete as the inverse of alloc (operator new), the difference between a destructor and a finalizer being that you can't rely on a finalizer being called at a particular time, or even being called at all.
Let's say I'm running Company A, and I compete with Companies B and C. If I subsidize an OSS project (rather than paying external or internal devs for a private custom solution that might give me a competitive advantage), what's to stop Companies B and C from using the OSS code that I funded, for free?
Maybe they don't know about it, maybe they're not set up properly to use it effectively, maybe they've already bought in to a competing solution.
Or the reverse: If Companies B and/or C are willing to subsidize an OSS project, why should I subsidize when I can mooch that code for free myself? I'd be more than happy to let my competitors fund code that I then can use for free.
Maybe you want faster development, or maybe you want slightly different features than what your competitors are going for.
As time goes on, more and more companies would wise up and realize that funding OSS code let's their competitors mooch that code for free, and more and more companies will stop subsidizing since they're being played as suckers.
You're not automatically a "sucker" just because you happen to be creating positive externalities. I doubt that a lumber mill would much care who else used benefited from the software they helped fund for their HR department to use, unless the wider use actually benefited them by, say, getting bugs found/fixed quicker.
When's that last time OSS folk actually invented something? IBM or Google tweaking Linux or Apache and giving those tweaks back to the community is baby shit. Let's see Google release their search algorithm code so that Yahoo, MS, Ask, etc can use it for free, then I'll be convinced that subisdizing OSS is worthwhile.
A lot of the work on distributed/decentralized source control (Darcs patch theory, (deterministic) mark-merge, etc). FastCGI. Anything described in the RFCs. Plan 9 and Inferno. Package management. etc...
The GPL keeps you from taking my code and locking it up in some proprietary application where I won't get to use it.
So the existence of these proprietary postgres-derived databases means that you don't get to use postgres because its code is now "locked up"?
Hmm, maybe there is some benefit to surrendering, cooperation works better than antagonism.
...point being, who decides that the things the GPL forbids are immoral, or even that it is moral to forbid them (someone who makes physical items certainly doesn't get that kind of control)? Why aren't the end users permitted to choose whether they place more value in complete modifiability or preexisting features & usability, and how is removing this choice from them considered to be giving them more freedom?
Funny, I thought it was attaching strings to your gifts that was immoral.
Isn't that more of a "dishonest asshole" or "naive fool" issue than a licensing issue? You also can't just say that with GPL, wine would obviously have gotten all of the cedega work, you also have to account for the (probably very hard to quantify) possibility that cedega wouldn't have existed at all...
Free means different things to different people. The GPL provides more freedom to users by requiring coders to give back to the community. The MIT/X11/BSD style license provides more freedom to coders, because they don't have to give back to the community.
What license style increases user freedom by increasing the number of apps available to use?
... and now tremendous projects like Emacs have to move ahead without him.Fixed that for you... Still, kudos for RMS, he made much for free software.
But what about those of us who don't have the disk space for a 5.89824e37 byte executable?
If that had been a movie, a song or a video game, someone would be getting serious fines, with no take-down notice involved.
How do you know that?
If the porn was disseminated via a torrent, likely the same thing (no take down request, just court and fines).
Probably, since that doesn't involve presumed-innocent third parties doing the hosting on behalf of random users.
They don't, at least for numbers that small. If they did, you could take a copy of ssh-keygen and a second-hand computer and make millions in fairly short order.
But when it comes to primes in the 10 million digit range (I couldn't even guess how many bits you would require for a number that large)
About 33 million bits ( ln(10)/ln(2) = 3.3219 ) or 4MB.
Unless we get living humans off the planet, residing in a sustainable environment, then any large object hitting the earth could take us all out - permanently.
Who would be left to care? Does this increase people's individual chance of surviving, or just reduce the correlation?
The Oort cloud could hold a planetary mass comet on a collision course with Earth and we would know about it only right before the event or just after.
Offsite backups seem like a good idea to me. How about you?
It's not like there's be anyone around to restore the backups, so what good would they be?
I wasn't aware that the profits of monopoly abuse counted as honest money.