You'll think differently once you settle down, buy a house, and get married. Either that, or you just posted the main reason why genius is not an evolutionary survival trait....
And I'm sure somebody will say that education is still usefull- despite this becoming almost a cliche story. You never hear "Major Labortory/Tech Company to lay off C-level exectutives in an attempt to keep R&D running". Why would any young person go into science or technology if this is the way they treat people?
Is it this kind of software that I need Wine to run?
No, just scripting web browsers like Firefox, Opera, and IE.....Linux based spyware may not be as crappy as Windows based spyware, but that's just due to the stability of the underlying operating system.
Bush wasn't elected with a majority- in either case. He was elected by electoral college votes, which are specifically designed to avoid a tyranny of the majority, and have been since the founding fathers figured out there were more poor people than rich people.
The key that I was trying to get at is that while it is technically possible to remove every last cheat and parasite from the economy, it isn't very practical. It would take a direct democracy- a type of government that historically has been extremely slow in acting (in fact, that's what ended the world's most democratic government ever- the constitutional monarchy of Poland, when the Council of Landowners couldn't agree on how to defend the country from the Turks) and can be very cruel (such as the idea of permanent solitary confinement; nothing like welding people into 10' cubes of steel for deterance....)
I see ways to do it- but it would require a police state run by a group of localized electronic democracies to do it. Tryanny of the Majority, with exile and permanent solitary confinement as punishments would make it very hard to cheat and survive.
The two things that excite me the most about distributism are the restoration of real human face to face relationships, combined with the potential for making direct democracy work. In practice- well, up until about 1990 you had to have a VERY small community. Catholic Monasteries could handle it. Small towns in the western U.S. still operate this way somewhat. But surrounded by a larger community that had other interests, all sorts of laws were put forth in the United States to stop and discourage the practice, and since the death of Sam Walton in 1992, one single corporation seems hell bent on destroying it utterly.
I contend that we've got the solution to the size problem right here. You'd still have to maintain size somewhat, since when you get too large, you start having competition between local artisans stealing business from each other, instead of maintaining only the customers they personally know. But the number of people a single individual can "know" has gone up imensely with computer networks- it would not be unimagineable for say, a community of 1000 or even 2000 to operate in this way now (where the previous limit seems to have been 500 or so).
The problems are problems, yes (except the stock buyout if you control your stock).
It's still a problem for your customers. But as you say- I doubt greatly that this fine was about the customers OR the market.
In general I don't know of any real solution, though. In any case the price of memory is then something that we have to live with, and - honestly - even if it were 50% higher, it's quite affordable.
What's pushing the issue is the falling developer salaries over the last few years; that's where it becomes unaffordable. For maximum productivity, you want your developers working on the same machines at home as at work; if developers can no longer afford that machine at home that's a problem. I don't see a solution either, though. Not within the current economic system anyway- American developers are just going to have to get used to the fact that they're now competing on price more than on quality.
You end up with some industries with only "natural" profits, while investment-intensive oligopolies have higher profits, but that doesn't make me believe in (expensive) intervention. Assuming you have the ton of resources needed to build a fab, you could probably compete in that market. Also, increasingly more investment-heavy projects seem to be done by joint-ventures of big corps, in order to spread the risk. This could be done by any set of companies that depend on cheap memory (say, Dell, IBM, Apple + HP).
True enough- though I have to wonder how cheap memory would be if the government got into the game and was allowed to compete. Talk about the ultimate intervention! But what I see isn't a need for less intervention- it's a need for more and swifter intervention, intervention that removes parasites and cheats from the system. (as opposed to weak, ineffectual intervention that just encourages more wrongdoing in ever more creative ways)
I guess it's the difference between a problem in reality, and one in practice, but that's just my heavily biased opinion;)
It's more between a problem in theory, one in reality, and one in practice- and I've got to admit, most theories I've seen fail to match either reality or practice.
Have you seen some of the articles advocating private ownership of water on these sites? How's that for supplying necessities to your neighbors?
I'm fine with it as long as such private ownership is limited to local individuals. In the distributionist ideal- the guy owning the water company would be living in a nice house on the resivoir- and he'd be in partnership with a local plumber, who runs pipe to all the houses in the town, and together they would be collecting their monthly bills by hand, so that they can see the faces and living arangements of people who can't pay, before they shut off the valve to that house.
Of course, a given city usually only has two major options for obtaining its own water: retention ponds (surface water) and wells (subsurface water). If you owned the aquifer under the town, how would you go about making sure nobody but you drilled into it?
Why would anybody do such an immoral thing? Or have you missed that distributism is strongly linked to a central church?
How would you find out who spilled the chemicals into it?
The same way we find out now- by tracing back to the source.
Would you even care, or would you just raise the prices and sell flavored water?
Well, with your own family drinking out of the same source as everybody else, I'd think that you would care...but that's a point FOR distributism. With no trade and no foreign ownership- the guy who spilled chemicals in the well is likely killing off his own friends and family and self- and who would do that?
Heck, if you owned the only source of water for a city, would you be able to resist the temptation to refuse to sell water to that guy who cut you off on the way to work that morning?
Well, "way to work" is a bit of a misnomer- most city artisans work at home. But that's also a part and parcel of the beauty of the distributist system- you wouldn't cut somebody else off on the road that you recognized as being your local water supplier. No anonymity, you see, turns business relationships into actual HUMAN relationships, thus making everybody more polite.
Don't give me any of that "economics says someone will move in to undercut me" crap.
Nope, that's capitalism. In Distributism, the town council starts taxing your extra income instead- to the point that it is no longer profitable to overcharge- and distributs what they collect in either services or direct payments to the community.
someone did start extorting the entire city, how long would it take someone else to start their own water supply company?
Only as long as the town council taxes can be raise to encourage YOU to sell your water company to somebody else- because it's become unprofitable.
Years? Decades?
More like Months in the old way- which to me is still intollerable. By making the town council a computer bulletin board however, with nightly votes, the process of fine tuning the local tariff system could actually be greatly reduced.
Mr. Marxist Economic Genius, what do you think banks do with the money that rich people deposit? They use it to make loans to those who don't have money in exchange for interest, and people use those loans to buy houses and start businesses providing jobs.
Thus creating what many call "legalized counterfieting" of interest. However, it doesn't ALWAYS happen that way- after all, they're required to keep 10% of all deposits in ready cash.
Actually I think I'm expecting too much from you. Of course a guy whose nick is "Marxist Hacker 42" is a) not going to know the first thing about how capitalism works, and b) going to mindlessly bash the "rich" at every opportunity.
I can point to several instances right here in Cascadia of capitalism not working at all. Even when it does "work" it steals 92 cents out of every local dollar for interest and taxes and paying back stockholders, the grand majority of whom and which live elsewhere. Which is why I'm against foreign trade- and by foreign I mean "external to my town". Whenever possible I buy local. If possible, I buy from local artisans who use local suppliers. If there was anything that was discredited by the events of the 20th century, it was not communism or capitalism, but rather a concept common to both: CENTRALISM. Central large accumulations of wealth, whether for the State (USSR) or Wall Street (USA) is *bad* for anybody not living local to the centralizations of power.
How's that for understanding for you?
My favorite part of your post though, was the sheer comedy of a Marxist trying to tell everyone else what he considers a good use of their money. It'd be great satire if you weren't serious.
It is half satire. But the point comes back to the question, what is the purpose of money? Why does the government print it? Why are you prosecuted if you print it up for yourself?
The answers are in the Constitution- and without those answers, we wouldn't have a national economy. We'd have 50, or more likely 80000, local economies instead in the United States. It isn't "a Marxist trying to tell everyone else what he considers a good use of their money", it's "the Founding Fathers telling a Marxist who likes liberty what the purpose of money is". And I'd have to say, centralists like you and the Waltons are people we'd be better off without.
First of all, nobody is "trying to break up" anything. The state only decided to fine Samsung.
Agreed, at best this was just for show- a slap on the wrist, with the resulting encouragement to continue.
Secondly, why? The Reuters article isn't too insightful, but http://www.anandtech.com/memory/showdoc.aspx?i=198 3 says that the "Big 4" fixed prices. Great! If the big 4 in any market fixed prices (probably HIGH prices), then guess what I'd do? Buy memory from the competition! If there is no competition, build competition! After all, if the big 4 make a huge profit (because of inflated prices) you should make a decent profit (and cut deeply into the market) with lower prices.
Three problems with that: 1. Chip fab plants are damned expensive, thus making the industry a natural oligopoly. 2. What's to stop the Big 4 from putting you out of business by using their excess profits to undersell your basic cost, then raise prices again once you're out of the picture? 3. What's to stop the Big 4 from buying up YOUR stock, thus continuing to control the market (this is what happens in the diamond market ever since synthetic diamonds came out)?
Thirdly, the economy isn't regulated. It's distorted in many ways, but in the RAM market there's maybe no distortion except for tariffs. Anyway, government only fined Samsung *years* after they fixed prices. Now THAT made a difference in the world!
Nerds are intelligent, and don't usually fall for discredited ideologies like Marxism.
Not everything in Marxism has been discredited- in fact the Stock Market currently runs on theories from Das Kapital (for obvious reasons, not everything that Marx wrote was about his now-failed communist revolution). Of course, the failure of communism was capitalists like Stalin- just as the failure of capitalism is turning out to be communists like Sam Walton's kids.
Prison is no cakewalk. Even a federal camp isn't fun. Want to try?
I've seen the inside of prisons- to a large extent, prisoners in solitary are quite well treated in this country. Perfect for somebody who hates and fears other human beings.
They aren't air-conditioned, and the food will make you puke.
I'm a farm boy- I've eaten food that would make most people puke before, that doesn't scare me a bit.
Cold toast, powdered eggs, and slimy grits, served by a man who scratches his abcessed testicles as he serves the food?
No wonder the prison system is full of lawsuits. But so what? Life is pain anyway- and the outside is not that much better.
I've read Day and it isn't a bad read, but I sense a lot of future poverty in that plan.
Depends on your definition of "poverty"- there's a lot of power in being the supplier of food and other necessities to your family and neighbors.
I advocate true deregulation due to what I see in markets and industries with little regulation: more choice, lower prices, better quality.
I don't see that in markets with little regulation. What I see in markets with little regulation is less choice, higher prices as corporations merge until a price-fixing oligarchy forms.
It is when regulations are incorporated that the consumers suffer. Regulations reduce businesses able to navigate the mandates, increase costs and sometimes enforce a monopoly.
Monopolies happen even in no-regulation economies- because eventually, one corporation earns enough money to merely buy out their competition completely. A great example was software in the early 1980s.
Giving the government the power to regulate business for the benefit of consumers against megacorps also gives the government the power to regulate business for the benefit of the megacorps against the consumers.
Absolutely true. Software patents, which you mention next, are an excellant example of this.
I'm not advocating a totally free market, just that we understand the dangers of granting the government regulatory power over our economy.
We did that far too much the day we let the government print money (instead of individual cities and banks). Ceaser did this in an effort to create stability- not growth, not specific monopolies to individual groups in individual industries, but stability for the so-called "common" man. That's the purpose of a regulated economy- and it's the reason why the 1978 decision that corporate money was free speech is so dangerous.
If you actually honestly believe that rich people keep their money in a vault going to waste, I'm greatly relieved that you have nothing to do with formulating economic policy. Where did you learn about economics, from watching cartoons starring Uncle Scrooge McDuck? It'd be laughable if it wasn't so sad.
Well, it's obvious they're not putting it into say, worker salaries. Or R&D. Or anything else that I'd actually consider worthwhile. Wall Street stocks and banks are not good use of money. Million dollar mansions are not good use of money. I actually do know that most of the money in the United States doesn't need to be kept in a vault- because 9/10 American dollars have no physical presence anymore. They were invented by charging interet- and they'll always remain mere bits in a computer memory bank.
Conjugal visits? Not that I know of. No, minimum security prison is no picnic. I have a client in there right now. He says the trick is, kick someone's ass the first day, or become someone's bitch. Then everything will be alright.
What does a corporation whose sights are set purely on profit care about conjugal visits for a C-level executive who got caught? He's a write off as far as they are concerned, or at best, he'll serve his six months and come out even richer than when he went in due to "deferred compensation". I'd say that's well worth giving up a few conjugal visits and getting a six month vacation. Personally, I hate people enough that if it ever happens to me, I'll choose the "kick somebody's ass the first day (and every day thereafter that they let me out of solitary)" option just to get a little peace and quiet.
So cartel-like behavior is bad because it increases the price to consumers, eh?
No, cartel-like behavior is bad because it allows a small segment of the population to horde money at the expense of the rest of the population. The purpose of money is to provide STABILITY, not GROWTH.
Does that include the cartel-like behavior that the US entered into with Japan that doubled the price of memory chips between 1986 and 1988?
Yes- from a worldwide point of view.
What about the anti-dumping laws that force prices above some arbitrary Commerce Department-set price floor?
That has a tendency to protect the workers- which leads back to the entire reason for the government allowing people to have businesses to begin with, to "promote the general welfare". Of course, if we were doing it right, it wouldn't be anti-dumping laws, it would be outright closed borders and no trade.
That's regulation, and it increases consumer prices.
Consumer prices alone aren't the point; hording of cash and other goods are.
What about the enormous import tarrifs that the US charges. That's regulation, and it increases consumer prices.
And if the consumers, who are also workers, can't make a Living Wage they will soon cease to be consumers. Sometimes a higher price is worth it to gain a higher wage.
No economic mechanism delivers better prices, better supply, or faster, fairer market response to changes in demand than a free market. Period. Regulation caused this problem in the first place. Now it's being used to try to ameliorate some of its effects. How is that an indictment of free markets?
Regulation didn't cause Samsung to enter into a cartel to fix prices- if anything, the free market did. Due to the free market, DRAM prices were falling below costs of production and a reasonable profit- so Samsung did the reasonable thing, made a deal with their competitors to keep everybody in business. If it wasn't for the free market, the cartel would never have existed.
I keep refining- my latest is the theories of Dorthy Day and the distributist movement- at least theirs are based on a thousand years of empirical data and some form of morality, which is more than I can say for Marx, the Austrian view, Supply side, or tax and spend.
But in the end, I'm a hacker first- and what keeps hitting me over the head is the fact that money is an invention, and economics ought to be engineered. Where it doesn't work, where it produces "unexpected results", those results need to be eliminated, and the system changed to NEVER allow them again. While I don't see the current regulations doing that (because they haven't been engineered) I don't see the Austrian view of removing all regulations doing it either (because there's no feedback for bad behavior).
Let the Morgawr know in his journal- I'm sure he'd like to argue with you on the subject. As for me, no, I don't fall for any of his libertarian objectivist philosophical texts that he puts forth as economics.
You need to friend The morgawr, you share a lot of the same viewpoint.
First of all, Samsung didn't invent DRAM. Second, this isn't a reasonable reward on investment, it's a price fixing scheme. Third, the government doesn't have to allow you to create a company or use THEIR money at all, they do so for the purpose of having a STABLE economy, not a SUCCESSFUL one.
In the end, it depends on why you think we bother with having an economy to begin with. From the point of view of the government, it's because of the clause in the constitution to "promote the GENERAL welfare"; that is, to provide every citizen with the ability to earn money and raise a family. Letting a foreign corporation like Samsung horde money for their stockholders without providing additional jobs simply doesn't fit that purpose.
OOOh, that's almost as bad- fined a total of a $1 million between the four of them, and six months each in a government-owned resort with color TVs in the cells and free wifi broadband, for a total of two years of jail time.
Yeah, it's hard- but it's well within payback on profit earned. Still a good business decision to break the law.
$300 million is a lot of money to anyone - even a mega-corp.
Given the industry's total take on this scheme to raise chip prices overall- what percentage of profits do you think it is? Maybe 3%? With fines like that- it's a damned good business decision to break the law even if you think you'll get caught.
Who will tell us all how regulation will never solve anything and how the government is evil for trying to break up this scam based on their own outlandish economic theories.
Of course, from my way of thinking, $300 million, or even $485 million if you count the fine against the other chip manufacturer fined so far, is probably just a drop in the bucket compared to the money earned by this scheme. We're lucky to have a regulated economy where the government can do *something* about this at least- but if you think this is going to make those who like money more than people stop trying to destroy the free market, then I've got a bridge or six in Portland to sell you....
Sure- it's because of those darn religious conservatives. The falling investment in R&D due to the Bush Tax Cuts couldn't POSSIBLY have anything to do with fewer students being attracted to working 60 hour weeks for peanuts.
Slashdot Mirror
You'll think differently once you settle down, buy a house, and get married. Either that, or you just posted the main reason why genius is not an evolutionary survival trait....
And I'm sure somebody will say that education is still usefull- despite this becoming almost a cliche story. You never hear "Major Labortory/Tech Company to lay off C-level exectutives in an attempt to keep R&D running". Why would any young person go into science or technology if this is the way they treat people?
Is it this kind of software that I need Wine to run?
No, just scripting web browsers like Firefox, Opera, and IE.....Linux based spyware may not be as crappy as Windows based spyware, but that's just due to the stability of the underlying operating system.
Bush wasn't elected with a majority- in either case. He was elected by electoral college votes, which are specifically designed to avoid a tyranny of the majority, and have been since the founding fathers figured out there were more poor people than rich people.
The key that I was trying to get at is that while it is technically possible to remove every last cheat and parasite from the economy, it isn't very practical. It would take a direct democracy- a type of government that historically has been extremely slow in acting (in fact, that's what ended the world's most democratic government ever- the constitutional monarchy of Poland, when the Council of Landowners couldn't agree on how to defend the country from the Turks) and can be very cruel (such as the idea of permanent solitary confinement; nothing like welding people into 10' cubes of steel for deterance....)
I see ways to do it- but it would require a police state run by a group of localized electronic democracies to do it. Tryanny of the Majority, with exile and permanent solitary confinement as punishments would make it very hard to cheat and survive.
The two things that excite me the most about distributism are the restoration of real human face to face relationships, combined with the potential for making direct democracy work. In practice- well, up until about 1990 you had to have a VERY small community. Catholic Monasteries could handle it. Small towns in the western U.S. still operate this way somewhat. But surrounded by a larger community that had other interests, all sorts of laws were put forth in the United States to stop and discourage the practice, and since the death of Sam Walton in 1992, one single corporation seems hell bent on destroying it utterly.
I contend that we've got the solution to the size problem right here. You'd still have to maintain size somewhat, since when you get too large, you start having competition between local artisans stealing business from each other, instead of maintaining only the customers they personally know. But the number of people a single individual can "know" has gone up imensely with computer networks- it would not be unimagineable for say, a community of 1000 or even 2000 to operate in this way now (where the previous limit seems to have been 500 or so).
The problems are problems, yes (except the stock buyout if you control your stock).
;)
It's still a problem for your customers. But as you say- I doubt greatly that this fine was about the customers OR the market.
In general I don't know of any real solution, though. In any case the price of memory is then something that we have to live with, and - honestly - even if it were 50% higher, it's quite affordable.
What's pushing the issue is the falling developer salaries over the last few years; that's where it becomes unaffordable. For maximum productivity, you want your developers working on the same machines at home as at work; if developers can no longer afford that machine at home that's a problem. I don't see a solution either, though. Not within the current economic system anyway- American developers are just going to have to get used to the fact that they're now competing on price more than on quality.
You end up with some industries with only "natural" profits, while investment-intensive oligopolies have higher profits, but that doesn't make me believe in (expensive) intervention. Assuming you have the ton of resources needed to build a fab, you could probably compete in that market. Also, increasingly more investment-heavy projects seem to be done by joint-ventures of big corps, in order to spread the risk. This could be done by any set of companies that depend on cheap memory (say, Dell, IBM, Apple + HP).
True enough- though I have to wonder how cheap memory would be if the government got into the game and was allowed to compete. Talk about the ultimate intervention! But what I see isn't a need for less intervention- it's a need for more and swifter intervention, intervention that removes parasites and cheats from the system. (as opposed to weak, ineffectual intervention that just encourages more wrongdoing in ever more creative ways)
I guess it's the difference between a problem in reality, and one in practice, but that's just my heavily biased opinion
It's more between a problem in theory, one in reality, and one in practice- and I've got to admit, most theories I've seen fail to match either reality or practice.
Have you seen some of the articles advocating private ownership of water on these sites? How's that for supplying necessities to your neighbors?
I'm fine with it as long as such private ownership is limited to local individuals. In the distributionist ideal- the guy owning the water company would be living in a nice house on the resivoir- and he'd be in partnership with a local plumber, who runs pipe to all the houses in the town, and together they would be collecting their monthly bills by hand, so that they can see the faces and living arangements of people who can't pay, before they shut off the valve to that house.
Of course, a given city usually only has two major options for obtaining its own water: retention ponds (surface water) and wells (subsurface water). If you owned the aquifer under the town, how would you go about making sure nobody but you drilled into it?
Why would anybody do such an immoral thing? Or have you missed that distributism is strongly linked to a central church?
How would you find out who spilled the chemicals into it?
The same way we find out now- by tracing back to the source.
Would you even care, or would you just raise the prices and sell flavored water?
Well, with your own family drinking out of the same source as everybody else, I'd think that you would care...but that's a point FOR distributism. With no trade and no foreign ownership- the guy who spilled chemicals in the well is likely killing off his own friends and family and self- and who would do that?
Heck, if you owned the only source of water for a city, would you be able to resist the temptation to refuse to sell water to that guy who cut you off on the way to work that morning?
Well, "way to work" is a bit of a misnomer- most city artisans work at home. But that's also a part and parcel of the beauty of the distributist system- you wouldn't cut somebody else off on the road that you recognized as being your local water supplier. No anonymity, you see, turns business relationships into actual HUMAN relationships, thus making everybody more polite.
Don't give me any of that "economics says someone will move in to undercut me" crap.
Nope, that's capitalism. In Distributism, the town council starts taxing your extra income instead- to the point that it is no longer profitable to overcharge- and distributs what they collect in either services or direct payments to the community.
someone did start extorting the entire city, how long would it take someone else to start their own water supply company?
Only as long as the town council taxes can be raise to encourage YOU to sell your water company to somebody else- because it's become unprofitable.
Years? Decades?
More like Months in the old way- which to me is still intollerable. By making the town council a computer bulletin board however, with nightly votes, the process of fine tuning the local tariff system could actually be greatly reduced.
Mr. Marxist Economic Genius, what do you think banks do with the money that rich people deposit? They use it to make loans to those who don't have money in exchange for interest, and people use those loans to buy houses and start businesses providing jobs.
Thus creating what many call "legalized counterfieting" of interest. However, it doesn't ALWAYS happen that way- after all, they're required to keep 10% of all deposits in ready cash.
Actually I think I'm expecting too much from you. Of course a guy whose nick is "Marxist Hacker 42" is a) not going to know the first thing about how capitalism works, and b) going to mindlessly bash the "rich" at every opportunity.
I can point to several instances right here in Cascadia of capitalism not working at all. Even when it does "work" it steals 92 cents out of every local dollar for interest and taxes and paying back stockholders, the grand majority of whom and which live elsewhere. Which is why I'm against foreign trade- and by foreign I mean "external to my town". Whenever possible I buy local. If possible, I buy from local artisans who use local suppliers. If there was anything that was discredited by the events of the 20th century, it was not communism or capitalism, but rather a concept common to both: CENTRALISM. Central large accumulations of wealth, whether for the State (USSR) or Wall Street (USA) is *bad* for anybody not living local to the centralizations of power.
How's that for understanding for you?
My favorite part of your post though, was the sheer comedy of a Marxist trying to tell everyone else what he considers a good use of their money. It'd be great satire if you weren't serious.
It is half satire. But the point comes back to the question, what is the purpose of money? Why does the government print it? Why are you prosecuted if you print it up for yourself?
The answers are in the Constitution- and without those answers, we wouldn't have a national economy. We'd have 50, or more likely 80000, local economies instead in the United States. It isn't "a Marxist trying to tell everyone else what he considers a good use of their money", it's "the Founding Fathers telling a Marxist who likes liberty what the purpose of money is". And I'd have to say, centralists like you and the Waltons are people we'd be better off without.
First of all, nobody is "trying to break up" anything. The state only decided to fine Samsung.
8 3 says that the "Big 4" fixed prices. Great! If the big 4 in any market fixed prices (probably HIGH prices), then guess what I'd do? Buy memory from the competition! If there is no competition, build competition! After all, if the big 4 make a huge profit (because of inflated prices) you should make a decent profit (and cut deeply into the market) with lower prices.
Agreed, at best this was just for show- a slap on the wrist, with the resulting encouragement to continue.
Secondly, why? The Reuters article isn't too insightful, but http://www.anandtech.com/memory/showdoc.aspx?i=19
Three problems with that:
1. Chip fab plants are damned expensive, thus making the industry a natural oligopoly.
2. What's to stop the Big 4 from putting you out of business by using their excess profits to undersell your basic cost, then raise prices again once you're out of the picture?
3. What's to stop the Big 4 from buying up YOUR stock, thus continuing to control the market (this is what happens in the diamond market ever since synthetic diamonds came out)?
Thirdly, the economy isn't regulated. It's distorted in many ways, but in the RAM market there's maybe no distortion except for tariffs. Anyway, government only fined Samsung *years* after they fixed prices. Now THAT made a difference in the world!
Completely agreed on that one.
Nerds are intelligent, and don't usually fall for discredited ideologies like Marxism.
Not everything in Marxism has been discredited- in fact the Stock Market currently runs on theories from Das Kapital (for obvious reasons, not everything that Marx wrote was about his now-failed communist revolution). Of course, the failure of communism was capitalists like Stalin- just as the failure of capitalism is turning out to be communists like Sam Walton's kids.
Prison is no cakewalk. Even a federal camp isn't fun. Want to try?
I've seen the inside of prisons- to a large extent, prisoners in solitary are quite well treated in this country. Perfect for somebody who hates and fears other human beings.
They aren't air-conditioned, and the food will make you puke.
I'm a farm boy- I've eaten food that would make most people puke before, that doesn't scare me a bit.
Cold toast, powdered eggs, and slimy grits, served by a man who scratches his abcessed testicles as he serves the food?
No wonder the prison system is full of lawsuits. But so what? Life is pain anyway- and the outside is not that much better.
This is an autistic media- if you joke, you need to include emoticons. I took this as evidence that supposedly minimum security prison is hard time.
The AC parent is in fact the most reasonable thing I've seen posted yet- and is absolutely correct as well.
I've read Day and it isn't a bad read, but I sense a lot of future poverty in that plan.
Depends on your definition of "poverty"- there's a lot of power in being the supplier of food and other necessities to your family and neighbors.
I advocate true deregulation due to what I see in markets and industries with little regulation: more choice, lower prices, better quality.
I don't see that in markets with little regulation. What I see in markets with little regulation is less choice, higher prices as corporations merge until a price-fixing oligarchy forms.
It is when regulations are incorporated that the consumers suffer. Regulations reduce businesses able to navigate the mandates, increase costs and sometimes enforce a monopoly.
Monopolies happen even in no-regulation economies- because eventually, one corporation earns enough money to merely buy out their competition completely. A great example was software in the early 1980s.
Giving the government the power to regulate business for the benefit of consumers against megacorps also gives the government the power to regulate business for the benefit of the megacorps against the consumers.
Absolutely true. Software patents, which you mention next, are an excellant example of this.
I'm not advocating a totally free market, just that we understand the dangers of granting the government regulatory power over our economy.
We did that far too much the day we let the government print money (instead of individual cities and banks). Ceaser did this in an effort to create stability- not growth, not specific monopolies to individual groups in individual industries, but stability for the so-called "common" man. That's the purpose of a regulated economy- and it's the reason why the 1978 decision that corporate money was free speech is so dangerous.
If you actually honestly believe that rich people keep their money in a vault going to waste, I'm greatly relieved that you have nothing to do with formulating economic policy. Where did you learn about economics, from watching cartoons starring Uncle Scrooge McDuck? It'd be laughable if it wasn't so sad.
Well, it's obvious they're not putting it into say, worker salaries. Or R&D. Or anything else that I'd actually consider worthwhile. Wall Street stocks and banks are not good use of money. Million dollar mansions are not good use of money. I actually do know that most of the money in the United States doesn't need to be kept in a vault- because 9/10 American dollars have no physical presence anymore. They were invented by charging interet- and they'll always remain mere bits in a computer memory bank.
Conjugal visits? Not that I know of. No, minimum security prison is no picnic. I have a client in there right now. He says the trick is, kick someone's ass the first day, or become someone's bitch. Then everything will be alright.
What does a corporation whose sights are set purely on profit care about conjugal visits for a C-level executive who got caught? He's a write off as far as they are concerned, or at best, he'll serve his six months and come out even richer than when he went in due to "deferred compensation". I'd say that's well worth giving up a few conjugal visits and getting a six month vacation. Personally, I hate people enough that if it ever happens to me, I'll choose the "kick somebody's ass the first day (and every day thereafter that they let me out of solitary)" option just to get a little peace and quiet.
So cartel-like behavior is bad because it increases the price to consumers, eh?
No, cartel-like behavior is bad because it allows a small segment of the population to horde money at the expense of the rest of the population. The purpose of money is to provide STABILITY, not GROWTH.
Does that include the cartel-like behavior that the US entered into with Japan that doubled the price of memory chips between 1986 and 1988?
Yes- from a worldwide point of view.
What about the anti-dumping laws that force prices above some arbitrary Commerce Department-set price floor?
That has a tendency to protect the workers- which leads back to the entire reason for the government allowing people to have businesses to begin with, to "promote the general welfare". Of course, if we were doing it right, it wouldn't be anti-dumping laws, it would be outright closed borders and no trade.
That's regulation, and it increases consumer prices.
Consumer prices alone aren't the point; hording of cash and other goods are.
What about the enormous import tarrifs that the US charges. That's regulation, and it increases consumer prices.
And if the consumers, who are also workers, can't make a Living Wage they will soon cease to be consumers. Sometimes a higher price is worth it to gain a higher wage.
No economic mechanism delivers better prices, better supply, or faster, fairer market response to changes in demand than a free market. Period. Regulation caused this problem in the first place. Now it's being used to try to ameliorate some of its effects. How is that an indictment of free markets?
Regulation didn't cause Samsung to enter into a cartel to fix prices- if anything, the free market did. Due to the free market, DRAM prices were falling below costs of production and a reasonable profit- so Samsung did the reasonable thing, made a deal with their competitors to keep everybody in business. If it wasn't for the free market, the cartel would never have existed.
I keep refining- my latest is the theories of Dorthy Day and the distributist movement- at least theirs are based on a thousand years of empirical data and some form of morality, which is more than I can say for Marx, the Austrian view, Supply side, or tax and spend.
But in the end, I'm a hacker first- and what keeps hitting me over the head is the fact that money is an invention, and economics ought to be engineered. Where it doesn't work, where it produces "unexpected results", those results need to be eliminated, and the system changed to NEVER allow them again. While I don't see the current regulations doing that (because they haven't been engineered) I don't see the Austrian view of removing all regulations doing it either (because there's no feedback for bad behavior).
Let the Morgawr know in his journal- I'm sure he'd like to argue with you on the subject. As for me, no, I don't fall for any of his libertarian objectivist philosophical texts that he puts forth as economics.
You need to friend The morgawr, you share a lot of the same viewpoint.
First of all, Samsung didn't invent DRAM. Second, this isn't a reasonable reward on investment, it's a price fixing scheme. Third, the government doesn't have to allow you to create a company or use THEIR money at all, they do so for the purpose of having a STABLE economy, not a SUCCESSFUL one.
In the end, it depends on why you think we bother with having an economy to begin with. From the point of view of the government, it's because of the clause in the constitution to "promote the GENERAL welfare"; that is, to provide every citizen with the ability to earn money and raise a family. Letting a foreign corporation like Samsung horde money for their stockholders without providing additional jobs simply doesn't fit that purpose.
OOOh, that's almost as bad- fined a total of a $1 million between the four of them, and six months each in a government-owned resort with color TVs in the cells and free wifi broadband, for a total of two years of jail time.
Yeah, it's hard- but it's well within payback on profit earned. Still a good business decision to break the law.
$300 million is a lot of money to anyone - even a mega-corp.
Given the industry's total take on this scheme to raise chip prices overall- what percentage of profits do you think it is? Maybe 3%? With fines like that- it's a damned good business decision to break the law even if you think you'll get caught.
Who will tell us all how regulation will never solve anything and how the government is evil for trying to break up this scam based on their own outlandish economic theories.
Of course, from my way of thinking, $300 million, or even $485 million if you count the fine against the other chip manufacturer fined so far, is probably just a drop in the bucket compared to the money earned by this scheme. We're lucky to have a regulated economy where the government can do *something* about this at least- but if you think this is going to make those who like money more than people stop trying to destroy the free market, then I've got a bridge or six in Portland to sell you....
Sure- it's because of those darn religious conservatives. The falling investment in R&D due to the Bush Tax Cuts couldn't POSSIBLY have anything to do with fewer students being attracted to working 60 hour weeks for peanuts.