If NGDP growth was any good, the Fed would not be injecting money into the system. But NGDP growth is very low in the US, and flat at best in Europe. And given that wages are sticky, low NGDP growth leads to major trouble.
If you are really so afraid of inflation, invest in TIPS, and make a killing if you are right. As it is, market consensus is that inflation will remain under the 2% target, not over. Seems like an amazing opportunity with someone with your economic beliefs.
It'll be very easy: All you have to do is, instead of opening your own online store, you just list your items in Amazon, and they'll collect the tax for you!
Even if we ignored every other problem (and it has many), the supply of Bitcoin does nothing to try to adapt to monetary demand. Modern economics will tell you that there's a base demand for money, that is dependent on economic activity. Therefore, if we do not change the money supply, the value of a currency changes along with said levels of economic activity. Today, central bankers change the money supply levels to try to keep the value of a currency relatively stable : Most target a 2% inflation. This makes most contracts, and holding currency, relatively simple. When the value of money changes unpredictably, an economy will not work anywhere near as well: Keeping any contract working on nominal term becomes a pretty big gamble. Imagine being paid 200 BitPesos an hour. when one week the loaf of bread costs 20 BitPesos, but next week could go to just 0.1 BitPesos: It'd be quite the nightmare.
Now, Bitcoin is built to be naturally deflationary due to the way the supply curve is defined. A naturally deflationary currency is a very bad idea, because, in essence, keeping it in your hand is a form of investment. This means you are always better off keeping it in your hand than spending it. So, over time, the number of Bitcoins actually in circulation would naturally decrease, which would only make the prices spiral, until in the end, there's so few bitcoins out there, that people abandon it as a currency. At that point, the currency collapses.
Neither of those are features me, or any economist, would want in a currency.
Legitimacy involves having actual currency like properties, in the sense that it should be a decent method of account. Thus, it behaves much more like a commodity than a currency: Its price fluctuates wildly, and those fluctuations have very little to do with the fluctuations of major indicators of the real economy.
I'd argue that the shares in any company in the DOW industrial average have more currency-like properties than Bitcoin.
If China wanted to stockpile natural resources, they could. However, they prefer buying treasury bonds. That means that if they were afraid of dollar inflation, they'd buy a different currency, or TIPS.
You won't find many people that manage large amounts of money that are afraid of dollar devaluation.
The fact that there are errors doesn't make the metric bad.
Imagine that I had a machine that could tell you, within 10 points, what the DOW will be tomorrow, but that got it wrong once every two weeks. Would you think it'd be a pretty bad predictor of the stock market?
Being wrong is only a problem if one mistake is deadly or if errors are so frequent as to make the data noise. When it comes to global warming, I do not think that overestimating human influence falls under either of those two options, so agreeing with scientific consensus seems like a pretty good idea to me.
There is an argument to be made for privatization of health care, but only of you go all in: Defang the medical lobbies, and let anyone practice medicine, and buy drugs. No more tax exempt status for medical expenses. Foreign doctors want to practice here? let them come. Measures like that would at least make a dent on the cost of medicine. It'd not provide a floor of care to everyone, like the European systems, but at least you'd not see middle class, insured families going bankrupt, and prices going up forever.
And no, that doesn't mean that I'd prefer that world over the European system, just that a free market plan would probably beat what we have today in the US, which is the worst of both worlds: A very large private sector that lobbies the government to increase barriers of entry, and therefore increase rents.
I remember watching an interview of Nichelle where she talks about how she was unhappy about how she was still getting a relatively uninteresting part, and considered quitting. Apparently she changed her tune when MLK told her that, even if her part was not equal to most men in the show, it was still far better than anything else a black woman would do back then in television. I guess that when MLK tells you that keeping your job is helping black women everywhere, you'd have to be a big jerk to quit.
The stock markets are high due to enormous inflation? I guess that's why food is 20 times more expensive than it was 3 years ago, and why TIPS have double digit rate of returns.
And of course I want to pay extremely expensive tuition, and then strategically live like a pauper so I don't have to pay back loans. Then, after the first 10 years are up, I can go to any employer with my decade old education, and expect to make a bunch of money. It seems like a foolproof plan of action, because not only are 10 year old degrees very important, but humans are great at delaying gratification.
There is no way that, after colleges only get a percentage of earnings instead of a flat fee, we'd see colleges shrinking their budgets on majors that don't lead to good career prospects. They will willingly spend millions on students that will never pay back, instead of, say, focus on majors where graduates actually make money on average.
It's not really about screwing the common American, but of helping one set of retailer over others. Extremely large B&M retailers already purchase tax packages and have large teams of accountants to allow them to handle all US local taxes. Giving their current sales, it's not really very difficult to comply with the law cheaply. Amazon will lose some sales, but they are more than large enough to handle this too.
But what happens if you are not huge already, but want to go national? When you get past the threshold, you need a large accounting team, overnight. And the threshold is pretty darned low: If you have 10 employees, averaging 50K in salaries and benefits, just paying them makes you have to reach half the threshold to break even, and that's if your merchandise is free. If your gross margin is 50% (and it's probably smaller), you are already over the threshold: Get ready to pay for the expensive sales tax software subscription, and hire an accounting team just to file forms.
So really, this is just about protecting incumbent large retailers, screwing over every other retailer. And, just like most things that hinder competition, the consumer gets shafted, if just because there'll be less pressure on prices.
Paying a salary in bitcoins is playing roulette, because it fluctuates too much. It'd be like being paid only in stock options. It's not a salary, it's downright gambling. Now, if I was to get into an arrangement that paid me bitcoins in a regular basis, I'd spend a lot of free time trying to drum up interest in the currency, so that I get a raise, just like people hawk penny stocks.
I wonder if I've seen that kind of behavior before?
Not quite. Price will be somewhat correlated with that of gold, but there are reasons for deviation. A country in the gold standard can leave it at any moment: The promise of gold is just that, a promise, and promises are often broken, especially when one is promising gold. Look at the gold standard throughout history.
Sure, you can request experience that will only fit a specific H1-B candidate, but that involves 2 details:
1) First, the H1-B needs the experience on the tech, which typically means he's already been working for the firm, typically in a work-study fashion. At that point, why go and hire someone new, when you have a guy you are happy with in house?
2) You still have to pay them the prevailing rate. You could argue about whether each regional prevailing wage makes sense, but the rule is still in use. You won't be able to pay an H1-B programmer 30K, even if the poor guy would accept such a ridiculous rate. This affects green cards too: If you try to sponsor someone for a green card as an EB-2, you better be paying him a decent rate.
The best way to improve the H1-B system is to shorten Green Card lines. Many people become H1-Bs hoping for eventual permanent residency. Today, that route can take you a decade, depending on your experience. And during that decade, changing jobs is tough. Let them get a green card faster, and suddenly the H1-B is not any cheaper.
The general jobs data tells you jack about, say, employment for programmers. If unemployment is very high among people without a degree, or just degrees of liberal arts, that will make unemployment rates look pretty high, while you might actually be short of more specialized workers. How is unemployment for brain surgeons? Any developer with 3 years of experience will have no trouble finding a job around here at all.
So, if you want to talk about bad unemployment numbers that are affected by H1-B, at the very least link to detailed data. It's not as if people are hiring H1-Bs to work at Abercrombie.
If you have problems finding job as an experienced Java, C++ or C# programmer, you might want to move: There's plenty of cities in the US where programmers are well in demand and senior people make 6 figures. Forget the bay area, try the midwest.
Now, if there's a problem with the job market among programmers is that few are willing to risk entry level hires: Companies that have a high demand for high skill people are just unwilling to take risks on the young. So many places around here where 25 year olds are junior team members.
Your argument could be made for geographic regions smaller than a country. If a programmer leaves Montana, he is not creating opportunities in his home state, and when he moves to California, he takes opportunities from locals.
Not enough for you? How about making the same argument for, municipalities? You weaken your hometown if you ever leave it!
Maybe you do believe in the value of loyalty to your country, but asking for, say, a young greek to stay at home, in his country with over 25% unemployment, when he could find a better job somewhere else, is putting very little value on freedom. It also means having a very naive look at economics: Does the high skilled immigrant not eat? Doesn't the fact that he is increasing the supply of his skill in his destination town not make it more likely that people will make new high tech jobs in that same town, because it's much easier to open a company in a place where it's easy to recruit than one where it isn't?
But hey, who wants to study economics anyway? I am sure they are all full of shit, like the geologists or the biologists.
But the laptop monitor probably has a very different pixel density as the large monitor, so even if you place it at the right height, it'll probably be difficult to use them together.
When dealing with a worker as expensive as a programmer, getting a second monitor of the right size, or even go all they way up to three, pays off extremely quickly.
It depends on the crop: Replanting corn, while possible, will get you way worse yields than not. Pretty much every commercial seed you can buy, whether GMO or not, is a hybrid, so a second generation will not have the same genetic makeup as the previous generation. So replanting corn is not exactly good business proposition, even without any licensing issues: You just get worse plants.
With, say, soybeans, it's not that case at all. Soybeans have perfect flowers, so they self pollinate. This makes it relatlively expensive to try new crosses, as you have a very small window to manipulate the flowers manually, and even then, you won't have a very high success rate. But once you have a cross you like, going from a plant to a field's worth is very cheap. In that way, soybeans are a bit like software.
Therefore, without licensing agreements and IP, it'd make very little sense to spend money developing soybeans specifically, since everyone that you sell a seed to becomes instantly able to compete with you, just like if you tried to sell GPL derived software: You better make all the money you expect on that first sale. So it'd only make sense to do development for the same reasons it makes sense to develop GPL apps: Mainly because you are a user too, and distributing your work makes it more valuable to you than keeping it. In agricultural terms, that'd only happen if you planted your own crops for sale, and you had the majority of the market.
So really, remove IP protection, and development would drop like a rock. Whether that'd be a good or a bad thing, or whether there's a different balance of IP that would provide more utility to society is a different story.
The problem with labeling is that, a binary GMO/non GMO label is a very poor indication of risk. It only provides information if we just say GMOs are bad, across the board. First, we have to determine what the risk actually is. If all we say is 'any new plant strain is risky', then what matters is knowing how much testing it's had, either by being tested after yield trials, or by just being seed that has been on the market for a long while. Maybe the transgenes are old, but they are combined with a plant with extremely well known genetics.
The issue is that, once you consider that the genetics inside of a plant are very relevant to the consumer, we quickly reach a situation where nobody actually understands the risks. It becomes a bit like medication labeling, except without the list of side effects. And the costs of keeping that much data through a food supply chain will not be cheap: Grain goes into elevators, and once in the elevator, it's hard to know which is which. So labeling, say, apples, would not be complicated. But labeling products that use transgenic corn? a nightmare.
I believe that if there are legitimate questions about plant safety, it'd be far better to set up mandatory testing, and then make sure said tests are done.Otherwise, we get incomprehensible mumbo-jumbo for someone that isn't an expert, or labeling so basic that only helps spread FUD.
Yes, English beats random code, but comments can get outdated very easily. One of the worst things that can happen when trying to maintain a piece of code is to see out of date comments that don't really reflect what the system is doing. All it takes is someone to create a comment that spends time describing a dependency, or just someone that fails to remove a comment that isn't valid anymore. At that point, the comment lies. I'd much rather be told nothing that lies.
Now, since English is very valuable, that's why we just use English in ways that will not betray us. Unit tests tend to lie very little, and aren't hard to name well in most frameworks. You can also automate bigger tests using something like Cucumber, and then know when the specs aren't being met: If the story fails, there's a good chance that what it says isn't true anymore. You can then either fix the code to make the spec pass again, or update the spec. Either way, no more lies.
In places where code is expected to have to be maintained years later, there are ways to get what you want and minimize comments, like Specification by Example and unit tests. If your design is so complicated that the automated specifications and the unit tests do not cover, then sure, comment away, but that should be a very rare event.
That's where SBE comes along: If your documentation runs your acceptance tests, the documentation itself will let you know if it's out of date. Some code will be undocumented, but what the documents say should at least be true. Now, that means another layer of tests along with the thousands of unit tests that should be in the codebase in the first place.
Those pirates will never go away, and wouldn't buy your stuff if it was cheap, so stopping them from pirating doesn't accomplish much. It's much better to use pricing and convenience to compete. I can buy a very large amount of songs without drm in a convenient fashion. I can listen to internet radio legally to discover new music. Why can't they do something similar for video?
Perl was exciting because it provided a lot of power without having to be as low level as C. It's still a useful, albeit not all that pretty language. Javascript is used a bunch of one reason only: It's the only thing you can sensibly run in a web browser without an iffy user experience. Large chunks of the language are horrible, and while it has enough decent bits to do real work on, you won't find that many people that wouldn't wish for the languages said bits were taken from. I mean, if people actually liked the language, would we find things like Coffeescript and objective-J out there?
Slashdot Mirror
If NGDP growth was any good, the Fed would not be injecting money into the system. But NGDP growth is very low in the US, and flat at best in Europe. And given that wages are sticky, low NGDP growth leads to major trouble.
If you are really so afraid of inflation, invest in TIPS, and make a killing if you are right. As it is, market consensus is that inflation will remain under the 2% target, not over. Seems like an amazing opportunity with someone with your economic beliefs.
It'll be very easy: All you have to do is, instead of opening your own online store, you just list your items in Amazon, and they'll collect the tax for you!
So much money to be made being a middleman.
Even if we ignored every other problem (and it has many), the supply of Bitcoin does nothing to try to adapt to monetary demand. Modern economics will tell you that there's a base demand for money, that is dependent on economic activity. Therefore, if we do not change the money supply, the value of a currency changes along with said levels of economic activity. Today, central bankers change the money supply levels to try to keep the value of a currency relatively stable : Most target a 2% inflation. This makes most contracts, and holding currency, relatively simple. When the value of money changes unpredictably, an economy will not work anywhere near as well: Keeping any contract working on nominal term becomes a pretty big gamble. Imagine being paid 200 BitPesos an hour. when one week the loaf of bread costs 20 BitPesos, but next week could go to just 0.1 BitPesos: It'd be quite the nightmare.
Now, Bitcoin is built to be naturally deflationary due to the way the supply curve is defined. A naturally deflationary currency is a very bad idea, because, in essence, keeping it in your hand is a form of investment. This means you are always better off keeping it in your hand than spending it. So, over time, the number of Bitcoins actually in circulation would naturally decrease, which would only make the prices spiral, until in the end, there's so few bitcoins out there, that people abandon it as a currency. At that point, the currency collapses.
Neither of those are features me, or any economist, would want in a currency.
Legitimacy involves having actual currency like properties, in the sense that it should be a decent method of account. Thus, it behaves much more like a commodity than a currency: Its price fluctuates wildly, and those fluctuations have very little to do with the fluctuations of major indicators of the real economy.
I'd argue that the shares in any company in the DOW industrial average have more currency-like properties than Bitcoin.
If China wanted to stockpile natural resources, they could. However, they prefer buying treasury bonds. That means that if they were afraid of dollar inflation, they'd buy a different currency, or TIPS.
You won't find many people that manage large amounts of money that are afraid of dollar devaluation.
The fact that there are errors doesn't make the metric bad.
Imagine that I had a machine that could tell you, within 10 points, what the DOW will be tomorrow, but that got it wrong once every two weeks. Would you think it'd be a pretty bad predictor of the stock market?
Being wrong is only a problem if one mistake is deadly or if errors are so frequent as to make the data noise. When it comes to global warming, I do not think that overestimating human influence falls under either of those two options, so agreeing with scientific consensus seems like a pretty good idea to me.
There is an argument to be made for privatization of health care, but only of you go all in: Defang the medical lobbies, and let anyone practice medicine, and buy drugs. No more tax exempt status for medical expenses. Foreign doctors want to practice here? let them come. Measures like that would at least make a dent on the cost of medicine. It'd not provide a floor of care to everyone, like the European systems, but at least you'd not see middle class, insured families going bankrupt, and prices going up forever.
And no, that doesn't mean that I'd prefer that world over the European system, just that a free market plan would probably beat what we have today in the US, which is the worst of both worlds: A very large private sector that lobbies the government to increase barriers of entry, and therefore increase rents.
I remember watching an interview of Nichelle where she talks about how she was unhappy about how she was still getting a relatively uninteresting part, and considered quitting. Apparently she changed her tune when MLK told her that, even if her part was not equal to most men in the show, it was still far better than anything else a black woman would do back then in television. I guess that when MLK tells you that keeping your job is helping black women everywhere, you'd have to be a big jerk to quit.
The stock markets are high due to enormous inflation? I guess that's why food is 20 times more expensive than it was 3 years ago, and why TIPS have double digit rate of returns.
And of course I want to pay extremely expensive tuition, and then strategically live like a pauper so I don't have to pay back loans. Then, after the first 10 years are up, I can go to any employer with my decade old education, and expect to make a bunch of money. It seems like a foolproof plan of action, because not only are 10 year old degrees very important, but humans are great at delaying gratification.
There is no way that, after colleges only get a percentage of earnings instead of a flat fee, we'd see colleges shrinking their budgets on majors that don't lead to good career prospects. They will willingly spend millions on students that will never pay back, instead of, say, focus on majors where graduates actually make money on average.
It's not really about screwing the common American, but of helping one set of retailer over others. Extremely large B&M retailers already purchase tax packages and have large teams of accountants to allow them to handle all US local taxes. Giving their current sales, it's not really very difficult to comply with the law cheaply. Amazon will lose some sales, but they are more than large enough to handle this too.
But what happens if you are not huge already, but want to go national? When you get past the threshold, you need a large accounting team, overnight. And the threshold is pretty darned low: If you have 10 employees, averaging 50K in salaries and benefits, just paying them makes you have to reach half the threshold to break even, and that's if your merchandise is free. If your gross margin is 50% (and it's probably smaller), you are already over the threshold: Get ready to pay for the expensive sales tax software subscription, and hire an accounting team just to file forms.
So really, this is just about protecting incumbent large retailers, screwing over every other retailer. And, just like most things that hinder competition, the consumer gets shafted, if just because there'll be less pressure on prices.
Paying a salary in bitcoins is playing roulette, because it fluctuates too much. It'd be like being paid only in stock options. It's not a salary, it's downright gambling. Now, if I was to get into an arrangement that paid me bitcoins in a regular basis, I'd spend a lot of free time trying to drum up interest in the currency, so that I get a raise, just like people hawk penny stocks.
I wonder if I've seen that kind of behavior before?
Not quite. Price will be somewhat correlated with that of gold, but there are reasons for deviation. A country in the gold standard can leave it at any moment: The promise of gold is just that, a promise, and promises are often broken, especially when one is promising gold. Look at the gold standard throughout history.
Sure, you can request experience that will only fit a specific H1-B candidate, but that involves 2 details:
1) First, the H1-B needs the experience on the tech, which typically means he's already been working for the firm, typically in a work-study fashion. At that point, why go and hire someone new, when you have a guy you are happy with in house?
2) You still have to pay them the prevailing rate. You could argue about whether each regional prevailing wage makes sense, but the rule is still in use. You won't be able to pay an H1-B programmer 30K, even if the poor guy would accept such a ridiculous rate. This affects green cards too: If you try to sponsor someone for a green card as an EB-2, you better be paying him a decent rate.
The best way to improve the H1-B system is to shorten Green Card lines. Many people become H1-Bs hoping for eventual permanent residency. Today, that route can take you a decade, depending on your experience. And during that decade, changing jobs is tough. Let them get a green card faster, and suddenly the H1-B is not any cheaper.
The general jobs data tells you jack about, say, employment for programmers. If unemployment is very high among people without a degree, or just degrees of liberal arts, that will make unemployment rates look pretty high, while you might actually be short of more specialized workers. How is unemployment for brain surgeons? Any developer with 3 years of experience will have no trouble finding a job around here at all.
So, if you want to talk about bad unemployment numbers that are affected by H1-B, at the very least link to detailed data. It's not as if people are hiring H1-Bs to work at Abercrombie.
If you have problems finding job as an experienced Java, C++ or C# programmer, you might want to move: There's plenty of cities in the US where programmers are well in demand and senior people make 6 figures. Forget the bay area, try the midwest.
Now, if there's a problem with the job market among programmers is that few are willing to risk entry level hires: Companies that have a high demand for high skill people are just unwilling to take risks on the young. So many places around here where 25 year olds are junior team members.
Your argument could be made for geographic regions smaller than a country. If a programmer leaves Montana, he is not creating opportunities in his home state, and when he moves to California, he takes opportunities from locals.
Not enough for you? How about making the same argument for, municipalities? You weaken your hometown if you ever leave it!
Maybe you do believe in the value of loyalty to your country, but asking for, say, a young greek to stay at home, in his country with over 25% unemployment, when he could find a better job somewhere else, is putting very little value on freedom. It also means having a very naive look at economics: Does the high skilled immigrant not eat? Doesn't the fact that he is increasing the supply of his skill in his destination town not make it more likely that people will make new high tech jobs in that same town, because it's much easier to open a company in a place where it's easy to recruit than one where it isn't?
But hey, who wants to study economics anyway? I am sure they are all full of shit, like the geologists or the biologists.
But the laptop monitor probably has a very different pixel density as the large monitor, so even if you place it at the right height, it'll probably be difficult to use them together.
When dealing with a worker as expensive as a programmer, getting a second monitor of the right size, or even go all they way up to three, pays off extremely quickly.
It depends on the crop: Replanting corn, while possible, will get you way worse yields than not. Pretty much every commercial seed you can buy, whether GMO or not, is a hybrid, so a second generation will not have the same genetic makeup as the previous generation. So replanting corn is not exactly good business proposition, even without any licensing issues: You just get worse plants.
With, say, soybeans, it's not that case at all. Soybeans have perfect flowers, so they self pollinate. This makes it relatlively expensive to try new crosses, as you have a very small window to manipulate the flowers manually, and even then, you won't have a very high success rate. But once you have a cross you like, going from a plant to a field's worth is very cheap. In that way, soybeans are a bit like software.
Therefore, without licensing agreements and IP, it'd make very little sense to spend money developing soybeans specifically, since everyone that you sell a seed to becomes instantly able to compete with you, just like if you tried to sell GPL derived software: You better make all the money you expect on that first sale. So it'd only make sense to do development for the same reasons it makes sense to develop GPL apps: Mainly because you are a user too, and distributing your work makes it more valuable to you than keeping it. In agricultural terms, that'd only happen if you planted your own crops for sale, and you had the majority of the market.
So really, remove IP protection, and development would drop like a rock. Whether that'd be a good or a bad thing, or whether there's a different balance of IP that would provide more utility to society is a different story.
SCUMM - Script Creation Utility For Maniac Mansion
Scrum - An agile methodology, Not an acronym.
If you tell me you have experience in SCRUMM, It's like telling me you have been using 'C pound' for 5 years.
The problem with labeling is that, a binary GMO/non GMO label is a very poor indication of risk. It only provides information if we just say GMOs are bad, across the board. First, we have to determine what the risk actually is. If all we say is 'any new plant strain is risky', then what matters is knowing how much testing it's had, either by being tested after yield trials, or by just being seed that has been on the market for a long while. Maybe the transgenes are old, but they are combined with a plant with extremely well known genetics.
The issue is that, once you consider that the genetics inside of a plant are very relevant to the consumer, we quickly reach a situation where nobody actually understands the risks. It becomes a bit like medication labeling, except without the list of side effects. And the costs of keeping that much data through a food supply chain will not be cheap: Grain goes into elevators, and once in the elevator, it's hard to know which is which. So labeling, say, apples, would not be complicated. But labeling products that use transgenic corn? a nightmare.
I believe that if there are legitimate questions about plant safety, it'd be far better to set up mandatory testing, and then make sure said tests are done.Otherwise, we get incomprehensible mumbo-jumbo for someone that isn't an expert, or labeling so basic that only helps spread FUD.
Yes, English beats random code, but comments can get outdated very easily. One of the worst things that can happen when trying to maintain a piece of code is to see out of date comments that don't really reflect what the system is doing. All it takes is someone to create a comment that spends time describing a dependency, or just someone that fails to remove a comment that isn't valid anymore. At that point, the comment lies. I'd much rather be told nothing that lies.
Now, since English is very valuable, that's why we just use English in ways that will not betray us. Unit tests tend to lie very little, and aren't hard to name well in most frameworks. You can also automate bigger tests using something like Cucumber, and then know when the specs aren't being met: If the story fails, there's a good chance that what it says isn't true anymore. You can then either fix the code to make the spec pass again, or update the spec. Either way, no more lies.
In places where code is expected to have to be maintained years later, there are ways to get what you want and minimize comments, like Specification by Example and unit tests. If your design is so complicated that the automated specifications and the unit tests do not cover, then sure, comment away, but that should be a very rare event.
That's where SBE comes along: If your documentation runs your acceptance tests, the documentation itself will let you know if it's out of date. Some code will be undocumented, but what the documents say should at least be true. Now, that means another layer of tests along with the thousands of unit tests that should be in the codebase in the first place.
Those pirates will never go away, and wouldn't buy your stuff if it was cheap, so stopping them from pirating doesn't accomplish much. It's much better to use pricing and convenience to compete. I can buy a very large amount of songs without drm in a convenient fashion. I can listen to internet radio legally to discover new music. Why can't they do something similar for video?
Perl was exciting because it provided a lot of power without having to be as low level as C. It's still a useful, albeit not all that pretty language. Javascript is used a bunch of one reason only: It's the only thing you can sensibly run in a web browser without an iffy user experience. Large chunks of the language are horrible, and while it has enough decent bits to do real work on, you won't find that many people that wouldn't wish for the languages said bits were taken from. I mean, if people actually liked the language, would we find things like Coffeescript and objective-J out there?