We all benefit from this particular service, some more than others.
Exactly, some more than others, which is unfair. Now, when it's just individuals trying to educate themselves with Landsat images, it sounds like no big deal. But businesses are building models with that data. I'm all for staying out of businesses' way, but when it comes to subsidy, I call that cronyism and corrupt.
And yes, the same logic applies to roads. Light use, for practical reasons, might incur no toll, but heavy use should. I've been on many interstate highways where only the big trucks (which presumably put much more wear on the roads) have to pull off the road, be weighed, and pay a toll, while cars do not. As electronic systems become cheaper/better, we can efficiently allocate costs to the heavier car users at little inconvenience to all. It's not fair that someone who mostly uses a bicycle should subsidize road costs for someone in their car all the time.
If only emergency vehicles needed the roads, their upkeep would be much, much less. For example, potholes grow with typical vehicular traffic. One can only argue that a small fraction of the whole ongoing cost of roads (and many other public goods) is justified for universal access like emergency vehicles. Most use of shared resources is based on individual choices, so most of the cost, in principle, should be borne individually. I wholly appreciate that, as a technical matter, it is difficult/burdensome to collect tolls/fees in many cases, but I'd add that the difficulty is potentially solvable with technology (sensors, internet-of-things, smartphones, GPS, etc.), so the difficulty counterargument is increasingly insupportable.
You seem to think society exists to support companies. On the contrary, there is no purpose to the economy, and hence no purpose to allowing companies to exist, unless the activity supports society. Companies exist and have a purpose purely because they can be a benefit to society.
No, in the US (right there in the Declaration of Independence), the purpose of the government is to secure the inalienable rights of individuals, some of whom own companies and some of whom work at them. Unless the company is breaking any specific law (which largely should only be introduced to protect another individual from direct harm), the company is free (or that is, its owner is).
Yes, centuries ago, companies would ask the King for a charter to enter in some kind of business, and might make the case that their enterprise is somehow useful in the hopes that the charter be granted. Thankfully that is over, and we are (in principle) free unless we harm.
If this service paid for itself then we could either reduce taxes or put that money to other priorities. Wouldn't it be awesome if all the past and future money for Landsat's could be fully remunerated, and dare I say, be profitable, even including R&D and the satellites themselves? It seems shameful that we not exploit opportunity to open up new funds through a government initiative that might pay for itself, so that we can help our truly needy citizens.
OK, coward, the same arguments against the US have been made before global warming was even a debate. And if US is so bad, why are Indians breaking down our door to enter?
Others have said this, but it apparently needs repeating: it is very expensive to do medical research, and patent enforcement is one way to ensure it is remunerated, but since the enforcement is strongest in USA, the prices are highest in USA. Where those patents aren't enforced, cheap copies can be made, but none of that money pays the (mostly American) companies who introduced the drugs.
Just because some funding for a federal project came from taxpayers' does not imply a perpetual right to free use of the service, which has both ongoing costs and unequal benefit. Why should taxes from people who don't use the service subsidize those who do? Thus use fees, even for citizens, is justified.
You write fairly well and sound intelligent, so I believe somewhere, someone would find you useful. I know unsolicited advice is probably least welcome to you right now, but it does come to mind that you might find it useful to continue to "think smaller" and more concretely about any possible dimension along which you could offer some value to someone in the short term. That may bear almost no relation to where you thought it would be, or what people had expected for you. Best of luck to you and keep trying!
The US is very extreme in other direction with no job security
The only real job security is to be so valuable to the company that replacing you would clearly be a large net loss. Other countries are in denial about this.
If a charity wants to help those who lose their jobs, then that charity can do so. A business is not a charity, and it strikes me as both immoral and inefficient (both for the business and the person losing their job) to make charity itself a business's job.
If a society doesn't want to leave the safety net to charity, then society should take on that burden itself. From what I gather, Denmark doesn't burden employers the same way as does, say, France, yet has a strong safety net. This separation of concerns (business vs job security) is a pretty strong argument for a basic income, too.
Outside of immanent violence, women walking alone must deal with the pervasive catcalling, ogling, etc. that is both intrinsically distasteful and implicitly unsettling, even threatening... a feeling somewhat like being a fresh steak lying in front of a clan of drooling hyenas (to paraphrase my wife).
The geek ought at least to have learned by now that "free as in beer or free as in freedom" is not a driving force for most users.
RMS understood this from the beginning, but from his experience in the early days of MIT's AI lab, he saw the value of (software) freedom, and expended a heroic amount of effort in demonstrating the value and plausibility of this freedom (by jump-starting it with his own implementations), when most others thought proprietary was the only way to go. He has succeeded beyond imagination, at least for server software, wherein UX is less an issue. Now with Android, even end user-facing applications have reasonable UX.
Bear in mind that the most hated companies in America year after year are either a) big Telecom, or b) big banks.
True, but both of these industries are highly regulated, where the regulations were written with help from incumbents. Exposing them to greater competition should be a policy goal.
If you're actually torrenting whole copyrighted video collections, I find it pretty hard to have sympathy for your position. Most people are a lot more sympathetic to legal, personal data needs, like say backup of videos of a birthday party or a personal photo collection or data from some experiment. But not backup of a illegally distributed materials or of every conceivable downloadable photo, taken by all photographers.
Making a buck is what business is. Businesses are not your slave. You just decide whether what they are (actually, not nominally) offering, and what you must give in return. You know their offering is not infinite, even though nominally, they claim otherwise. BUT, they may still be the best deal around, so you accept it. The lie may make you feel dirty, but anger at the lie is different than anger at the deal. It's a pretty good bloody deal! No ACTUAL robbery is taking place here, IMO. The outliers were deluding themselves.
If there's a role for the law here, it's just to expose/stop the lie, so that there's a match between the words and the practice, mostly so that people without your expertise and knowledge can make a rational choice with little effort, which will promote more efficiency, improvements, and profits for those who can deliver. Wins all around.
Please, no nationalization, I beg you. It will just get screwed up.
Yes, corporations lie. But so do politicians... after all, their next meal depends on them either staying in office or being cozy with those in office. You can't escape the lying... ever!
BUT using government to force transparency / disclosure will at least give us the tools to do battle with the lies. And we'll be more successful in this if government and business aren't too close.
You want paid work because you want more than whatever plain rice you'd be able to afford surviving on a basic income. With a universal basic income in place, any money you make in work is entirely in addition to the basic income, so there's a really strong incentive to go for it. By contrast, under a welfare system, paid work is "rewarded" with disqualification from receiving welfare, so people are disincentivized against getting paid work. This "welfare trap" is avoided under a basic income system.
No, everyone who has an interest in educated debate should at least be tolerant of efforts to defend against those who wish to undermine the debate, even if they don't want to do the defending themselves. If we all have to endure trolls and defend ourselves against them individually, then what we'll get is a bunch of folks who are good at such defense, but lose the others who may have the better arguments. It's a kind of natural selection, but we control the environment. I'd rather the environment be selective for your ideas, not your ability to withstand trolls.
I think you basically said that unless you're a schoolyard alpha, you'll never make Fields Medal level contributions. You gotta be bloody kidding me. I think of Claude Shannon, who apparently hid away in his office at AT&T Bell Labs, and I can only imagine he would be chewed to bits in the petty verbal battles you so admire. Or of Alan Turing, who no doubt was relentlessly hounded by the ancestors of your beloved verbal alphas for being gay. He ended up committing suicide, apparently. Most of the repartee you regard as a necessary precondition for your respect is aimed at censoring deviations from the status quo. Shouldn't we support the opposite?
There is no necessary connection between spoken wit and technical achievement.
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Thanks for making this important point. I made it as well later, before seeing this. Sorry.
We all benefit from this particular service, some more than others.
Exactly, some more than others, which is unfair. Now, when it's just individuals trying to educate themselves with Landsat images, it sounds like no big deal. But businesses are building models with that data. I'm all for staying out of businesses' way, but when it comes to subsidy, I call that cronyism and corrupt. And yes, the same logic applies to roads. Light use, for practical reasons, might incur no toll, but heavy use should. I've been on many interstate highways where only the big trucks (which presumably put much more wear on the roads) have to pull off the road, be weighed, and pay a toll, while cars do not. As electronic systems become cheaper/better, we can efficiently allocate costs to the heavier car users at little inconvenience to all. It's not fair that someone who mostly uses a bicycle should subsidize road costs for someone in their car all the time. If only emergency vehicles needed the roads, their upkeep would be much, much less. For example, potholes grow with typical vehicular traffic. One can only argue that a small fraction of the whole ongoing cost of roads (and many other public goods) is justified for universal access like emergency vehicles. Most use of shared resources is based on individual choices, so most of the cost, in principle, should be borne individually. I wholly appreciate that, as a technical matter, it is difficult/burdensome to collect tolls/fees in many cases, but I'd add that the difficulty is potentially solvable with technology (sensors, internet-of-things, smartphones, GPS, etc.), so the difficulty counterargument is increasingly insupportable.
You seem to think society exists to support companies. On the contrary, there is no purpose to the economy, and hence no purpose to allowing companies to exist, unless the activity supports society. Companies exist and have a purpose purely because they can be a benefit to society.
No, in the US (right there in the Declaration of Independence), the purpose of the government is to secure the inalienable rights of individuals, some of whom own companies and some of whom work at them. Unless the company is breaking any specific law (which largely should only be introduced to protect another individual from direct harm), the company is free (or that is, its owner is). Yes, centuries ago, companies would ask the King for a charter to enter in some kind of business, and might make the case that their enterprise is somehow useful in the hopes that the charter be granted. Thankfully that is over, and we are (in principle) free unless we harm.
If this service paid for itself then we could either reduce taxes or put that money to other priorities. Wouldn't it be awesome if all the past and future money for Landsat's could be fully remunerated, and dare I say, be profitable, even including R&D and the satellites themselves? It seems shameful that we not exploit opportunity to open up new funds through a government initiative that might pay for itself, so that we can help our truly needy citizens.
And how about getting some kind of return on the taxpayers' investment in the Landsats?
OK, coward, the same arguments against the US have been made before global warming was even a debate. And if US is so bad, why are Indians breaking down our door to enter?
Well said.
Those other countries have cheap access to medical advances largely because that research is borne by the US, so the other countries are free riders.
Others have said this, but it apparently needs repeating: it is very expensive to do medical research, and patent enforcement is one way to ensure it is remunerated, but since the enforcement is strongest in USA, the prices are highest in USA. Where those patents aren't enforced, cheap copies can be made, but none of that money pays the (mostly American) companies who introduced the drugs.
Just because some funding for a federal project came from taxpayers' does not imply a perpetual right to free use of the service, which has both ongoing costs and unequal benefit. Why should taxes from people who don't use the service subsidize those who do? Thus use fees, even for citizens, is justified.
You write fairly well and sound intelligent, so I believe somewhere, someone would find you useful. I know unsolicited advice is probably least welcome to you right now, but it does come to mind that you might find it useful to continue to "think smaller" and more concretely about any possible dimension along which you could offer some value to someone in the short term. That may bear almost no relation to where you thought it would be, or what people had expected for you. Best of luck to you and keep trying!
Where is it reported that Sony's content division vetoes engineering's new ideas?
The US is very extreme in other direction with no job security
The only real job security is to be so valuable to the company that replacing you would clearly be a large net loss. Other countries are in denial about this. If a charity wants to help those who lose their jobs, then that charity can do so. A business is not a charity, and it strikes me as both immoral and inefficient (both for the business and the person losing their job) to make charity itself a business's job. If a society doesn't want to leave the safety net to charity, then society should take on that burden itself. From what I gather, Denmark doesn't burden employers the same way as does, say, France, yet has a strong safety net. This separation of concerns (business vs job security) is a pretty strong argument for a basic income, too.
Outside of immanent violence, women walking alone must deal with the pervasive catcalling, ogling, etc. that is both intrinsically distasteful and implicitly unsettling, even threatening... a feeling somewhat like being a fresh steak lying in front of a clan of drooling hyenas (to paraphrase my wife).
The problem is not the free ride for the kid, but the arrest of the parent afterward.
The geek ought at least to have learned by now that "free as in beer or free as in freedom" is not a driving force for most users.
RMS understood this from the beginning, but from his experience in the early days of MIT's AI lab, he saw the value of (software) freedom, and expended a heroic amount of effort in demonstrating the value and plausibility of this freedom (by jump-starting it with his own implementations), when most others thought proprietary was the only way to go. He has succeeded beyond imagination, at least for server software, wherein UX is less an issue. Now with Android, even end user-facing applications have reasonable UX.
Bear in mind that the most hated companies in America year after year are either a) big Telecom, or b) big banks.
True, but both of these industries are highly regulated, where the regulations were written with help from incumbents. Exposing them to greater competition should be a policy goal.
If you're actually torrenting whole copyrighted video collections, I find it pretty hard to have sympathy for your position. Most people are a lot more sympathetic to legal, personal data needs, like say backup of videos of a birthday party or a personal photo collection or data from some experiment. But not backup of a illegally distributed materials or of every conceivable downloadable photo, taken by all photographers.
In my neighborhood there is Comcast cable and Verizon FIOS, i.e., real competition. They each might be big, but they aren't monopolies, at least here.
I'm pretty sure that you are *not* one of the outliers: your family is pretty much normal for the well-connected set.
Making a buck is what business is. Businesses are not your slave. You just decide whether what they are (actually, not nominally) offering, and what you must give in return. You know their offering is not infinite, even though nominally, they claim otherwise. BUT, they may still be the best deal around, so you accept it. The lie may make you feel dirty, but anger at the lie is different than anger at the deal. It's a pretty good bloody deal! No ACTUAL robbery is taking place here, IMO. The outliers were deluding themselves. If there's a role for the law here, it's just to expose/stop the lie, so that there's a match between the words and the practice, mostly so that people without your expertise and knowledge can make a rational choice with little effort, which will promote more efficiency, improvements, and profits for those who can deliver. Wins all around.
Please, no nationalization, I beg you. It will just get screwed up. Yes, corporations lie. But so do politicians... after all, their next meal depends on them either staying in office or being cozy with those in office. You can't escape the lying... ever! BUT using government to force transparency / disclosure will at least give us the tools to do battle with the lies. And we'll be more successful in this if government and business aren't too close.
You want paid work because you want more than whatever plain rice you'd be able to afford surviving on a basic income. With a universal basic income in place, any money you make in work is entirely in addition to the basic income, so there's a really strong incentive to go for it. By contrast, under a welfare system, paid work is "rewarded" with disqualification from receiving welfare, so people are disincentivized against getting paid work. This "welfare trap" is avoided under a basic income system.
No, everyone who has an interest in educated debate should at least be tolerant of efforts to defend against those who wish to undermine the debate, even if they don't want to do the defending themselves. If we all have to endure trolls and defend ourselves against them individually, then what we'll get is a bunch of folks who are good at such defense, but lose the others who may have the better arguments. It's a kind of natural selection, but we control the environment. I'd rather the environment be selective for your ideas, not your ability to withstand trolls.
I think you basically said that unless you're a schoolyard alpha, you'll never make Fields Medal level contributions. You gotta be bloody kidding me. I think of Claude Shannon, who apparently hid away in his office at AT&T Bell Labs, and I can only imagine he would be chewed to bits in the petty verbal battles you so admire. Or of Alan Turing, who no doubt was relentlessly hounded by the ancestors of your beloved verbal alphas for being gay. He ended up committing suicide, apparently. Most of the repartee you regard as a necessary precondition for your respect is aimed at censoring deviations from the status quo. Shouldn't we support the opposite? There is no necessary connection between spoken wit and technical achievement.