so my call for limits on ip law is what, exactly in your mind? the first step on an unstoppable slippery slope to pol pot? Your call is tentamount to abolishing it. It's already limited. While it severly needs reform because the current system of determining what's truly innovative doesn't accomplish its mandate, abolishing it would essentially be the American Cultural Revolution.
you're quite the hysterical twit. you really are Say it again, because the bigger the lie the more it becomes true if you repeat enough times.
ip law and its continued extension by corporate lawyers is completely natural and valid I don't like the "natural law". In my mind (being a geek and all) mother nature is a bitch. And we can figure out a better way than its random trial and error hackery. Corporate lawyers controlling the conversation is pretty much an outgrowth of the fact that the patent system is controlled by lawyers rather than epxerts.
it does not need to be reigned in No, its teeth don't need to be dulled. Its tastes (to extend the analogy) do need to be changed however.
you're just trolling me, right? No, Slashdot editors have become the trolls on this issue. They always present it in a very biased one-sided way.
you: "why are you for bestial necrophilic (sic) pedophilia!"
...right. if you accuse someone of making farfetched statements, you may want to avoid the temptation to do it yourself, first.
ts called hysteria, fear. no, it's called "learning from experience".
it makes sense for sicety (sic) to have LIMITS on this artificial construct it created "artificial" means "men-made". And it's already limited. Patents, unlike copyrights, have very short lifespans.
And in this case the causality actually goes in reverse order. It is because this generation is not trained in logical thinking and are trained to make judgments based on the majority opinion of their peers that they are so blindingly trusting of anything that is written.
The problem with suing copyright violators is that copyrights last too long. Patents are issued for 3 years. They can be extended over and over for maybe 18 years. Usually they expire much sooner. They hardly prevent the innovation in research the way copyrights prevent innovation in arts. This is knee-jerk. And it's the first time in 10 years that I am considering switching my home page from Slashdot to something else. Maybe some site with news on it.
but you can't live without life saving drugs... and you can't live without food You also can't live without profit. Life without profit has a name: "loss". And organizations that operate at a loss stop operating.
balance: you harness greed in order to serve mankind. Or, and that's just a suggestion, you can go fucking serve yourself. Making others slaves in the name of people still makes them slaves. And "the people" very quickly acquire an ugly face of a tyrant.
The farmers get caught because the yields really are better and can't compete as well if they don't buy the patented products. So the farmers should be getting all the profits from higher yields while the people who designed the crops should be getting a one time payment? That's nothing but a tip. What if they would like to be paid for their work? You know... as in negotiate what their work is worth. Separation of labor doesn't work if the only people who ever get paid are the very end producers. It makes them owners of everyone else. And serfs don't work to please their masters -- they work to make it look like the minimum of work they were told to do was done. It's bad enough that programmers now own mathematicians. Now you want farmers to own bio-scientists?
Ignoring racism and claiming it doesn't exist is not the best way to make it go away. Are you sure? It marginalizes it. Whereas creating government institutions to deal with it makes it publicly recognized reality. Skin color differences have a chance of drifting away as a meme when they are not constantly re-enforced. And, as all memes they stick, around when they are re-enforced. People "move on" because different concerns emerge -- not because they become more ethical. And having a constant reminder doesn't allow for this concern to disappear.
What's next? A virus "could" come about that wipes out humanity? A company "could" decide that it will destroy humanity for profit? This could happen and that could happen is not news. It's not even speculation. It's just fud.
But the state of NY has no recourse. If they believe that Amazon is in violation of NY State tax code, they would have to raid their facilities to get evidence and then try to sue them (and possibly collect by liquidating their NY assets). But they don't have offices in NY. They don't have assets in NY. The affiliates are separate companies which do not have access to the records of customers that purchased from Amazon itself or other affiliates. My point is not that NY cannot claim to have jurisdiction. They claim it. But the reality simply disagrees.
That's irrelevant though. A company's "policy" is just a course of action that it has mandated for itself. They still have to be compliant with the law. But the point I was trying to make was that any law made by the state of NY would not apply to Amazon. Amazon is simply out of their reach.
(3) Selfless. Acting to improve the welfare of others without regard for my own welfare. This does not exist. Whatever the motivation, we choose our actions. And thus we choose our end-goals. Defining an attempt to achieve ones' end goals as selfish (even though it may benefit others) makes this (3) an impossibility. Even doing something that hurts one can be regarded as a choice of masochistic action.
So your position is that one should be selfish, _except_ with all the normal human moral instincts that make one act unselfishly in a wide variety of contexts "normal"? You must be joking. I axiomatize ethics for a reason -- there is not well-established norm for it. And all the ones that are established for the sake of providing a "better society" disregard the fact that people's minds are sufficiently independent. The only axiom of ethics that I put forward is "do not do to others what you wouldn't have them do to you". Notice the negative. Ethics restrict (rather than mandate) behavior. Everything else is allowed. If one wants to elicit an action from anyone else, one must do so through an agreement. The end goal is civil interactions of everyone with me. Anyone who claims to care to much for me is assumed to be attempting to compel me to act without paying for it (ie, without eliciting my consent). The end goal is freedom. I will put higher value on it than I will on maximization of resources (freedom is actually more dangerous because it diminishes barriers on people). As for your statements about reason and evolutionary psychology, I strongly suspect your considerations are economic first and psychological second, but that's only my personal sense. Reasonable behavior is a choice and (as such) it is a conscious one. It is not always a psychological need. Given the restrictions put forward above, it will produce a better society. And having a "civil" society (a society in which it is not acceptable to take proactive steps to hurt each other) is a worthwhile goal. Confusing it with a society in which people are compelled to take care of the people they don't care to take care of will quickly deteriorate into a society of caprices and whims and will erase civility. All the "community-oriented" thinking produces is xenophobia and lack of privacy. I think I am done. With one reminder, once personal freedom is taken away, a group of people (acting in the name of a "greater good") becomes a tyrannical entity... an entity that rules over adults as parents do over children. Taking up arms against such an entity is not immoral. The degree to which a violent revolution is justified is largely controlled by the degree to which the personal freedoms have been infringed. If you disagree at this point, I am sure that your argument will circulate to something that we already covered. It's already beginning to be circular. So I this time I really am done.
Affiliates are not agents though. They are business partners. Affiliation is a voluntary relationship and as such does not allow one party to compel another to do anything through a mandate (only through an agreement). Agents can be compelled to act on a mandate and as such are part of a company. In other words, affiliates are entities with which Amazon does business (just as it would with vendors and end-customers). NY still can't compel Amazon to do anything, BUT and (here's where you might be right) NY can compel NY-based affiliates to collect sales information for the purchases made from them (but not from all of Amazon).
Excise tax on imported goods is buyers' burden. And the burden for compliance is on the buyers as well. With cars it's easy to track because a car must be registered in the state into which it has been brought. NY State is proposing to make this tax the sellers' burden. It's not the same situation. The question is whether they can compel Amazon to report to the NY State information about Amazon customers with NY shipping addresses. If they can't, then this is an exercise in futility. They might as well pass laws about non-US nationals on non-US territory.
And the recent Fed rescue of investment banks. Making money by taking it from people wins any day of the week. FED didn't rescue investment banks. That's just how the news got reported to make the story more sensational. They arranged for a merger to take place and gave a loan on which the FED will actually make money. Taxpayers are in no way involved. Taxpayers pay their money into the US Treasury. FED lends money out of thin air -- not out of the treasury. Yes, "out of thin air". It says the money exists and by the virtue of that fact it comes to exist. And when the loan is repaid, the money ceases to exist.
The difference is in that when the door is opened it provides no new information about the door you initially picked. But it does provide new information about the "other" door. That's why the two door remaining unopened are asymmetric as far as information about them is concerned.
If interactions are fully optional, I agree that you can turn any negative interaction into a zero interaction on the next trial.
All the interactions under discussion are optional. We don't pick our family, but we do pick our friends (to some extent) and careers (to a large extent). Those choices are choices of individual actions and choices of the nature of interactions with other people.
But if one only looks out for one's own interests, then having this weird rule about "don't use other people" is suboptimal--it is in effect a hard-wired unselfish motive dropped into the middle of a selfish framework. There's nothing wrong with that, but at least recognize it for what it is!
Ok, sure, but unselfishness, in this stretched definition, is defined negatively. It's sort of equivalent to defining "apathy" as "care" because it is characterized by lack of hate. I don't care to take advantage of the rock formations on the moon. But it's not correct to attribute to me care for the pristine state of the moon. I am not sure what distinction you are trying to make between unselfish and selfless. I suspect it address what I just said. But generally, "unselfish" and "selfless" are considered synonymous. Since the original discussion revolved around the need to "understand" people who do not act in selfless (unselfish?... let's say "altruistic", for the sake of clarity) manner, I think you have to admit that you are conceding that position.
But if one only looks out for one's own interests, then having this weird rule about "don't use other people" is suboptimal
No, it isn't. You forgot the "renormalize" step at the end of each iteration. By taking out the dimensions in which loss/win occurs and by not allowing win/loss to occur (because you act honestly), you are left only with interactions that are win/win. The renormalization emphasizes their weights. I guess your point is why not go for a win/loss solution and then stop the interaction and flatten that dimension? Continued win/win scenarios are more profitable than one-iteration win/loss scenarios. Assuming that changing any dimension from non-involvement to "let the game begin" carries a cost (as forming all personal relations does), the win/loss scenario might become more profitable for "socialites", politicians, etc -- the people for whom such cost is prohibitively low. It also means that people who are more involved in their own self (for whom the cost of forming an interaction is roughly equivalent or higher than the reward for win/loss) are more likely to stay honest... But there is another consideration. The number of non-zero dimensions occurring at any one iteration has (more or less) absolute upper bound. So the number of relations in which one is willing to cheat (and turn a streak of win/win into win/loss continued by nothing) takes up space of the slots which could be filled by the relations one intends to keep as win/win in perpetuity. So dishonesty actually turns out to be standing in the of forming honest relations. Ie, unless you a real socialite, it's not worth the time and effort. In an act of desperation, of course, one could start to "burn bridges" by turning potentially-perpetual win/win games into 1-time win/loss games without any hope of being able to replace them. But starvation for resources could turn people to desperation.
But the principles you cited do not justify your choice of honesty as a virtue.
I think the above should explain it.
You were the one who was using optimality as the argument against unselfishness.
I wasn't using it as the reason. I was countering the argument that unselfishness is more optimal by attempting to demonstrate that it isn't.
If you want to switch to ethical, I think unselfishness does pretty well there, too.
Not at all. Not if you believe that freedom is a virtue and slavery isn't.
Alright, here's a more precise way to explain why PD-considerations do not really apply and are worse than a trivialization. Since a person has to interact with a large number of people, consider each interaction as a separate PD-problem. Then you end up with a restricted direct product of PD-spaces. Actually, even that is an oversimplification. Because you realy end up with a restricted semi-direct product of PD-spaces. At each step, only finitely many spaces are non-zero. The optimal 1-dimension strategy of PD is to repeat the step your oponent took in the last iteration. But the optimal multi-dimension strategy is to zero-out that dimension and renormalize so that the win/win dimensions are the only ones having positive weights. The product is semi-direct because interactions are not independent of each other and interactions in one dimension have influence on the weights of some of the others. That's for the math. As for the "mind-set", think of work as an act of making love. You want to be your best because you self-esteem is tied to it. But you also want to get the best possible service in return. You don't care to play anymore once you realize that the other person is only using you. But using them leaves you an empty shell of a person (even though you get what you need). Now adopt the same attitude towards all achievement and you become directly invested in perfection and begin to look down on those who would tell you how to limit or channel your achievement... just as you would despise anyone who would tell you how to limit your sexual mores. You don't care to rape anyone. Nor do you care to be charity case for your sexual partner. Nor do you want to have sex as an act of charity. But you do want to have it and to have it with a partner that wants you. Striving to achieve this gets everyone laid in the best manner possible. The same with all achievement.
Better than what? Isn't it suboptimal--"destructive"--to not cheat when you have the opportunity to do so and the expected costs are less than the expected reward? Why all the language about esteem and desperation? Now you are mixing your paradigms. In the one I presented, "constructive" solution arises from selfish behavior moderated by honesty. In the one you presented, optimal is defined as the one maximizing outcome of the PD. Your axiomatize "optimal". I axiomatize "ethical". My argument is that we have an internal sense of disomfort at being dishonest. Your argument is that we have an internal sense of discomfort at being insensitive. Mine is based on using one's internal judgement. Yours comes from judging oneself through the eyes of others (you compare yourself to others to get a sense of "how you are doing" in term of resources gained). That's why the talk on insecurity comes into play. A secure person does not need validation from others. Achievement of his creative goals is its own reward. My paradigm excludes possibility of the win/loss solution. And as soon as the solution becomes loss/win, it stops the game. As soon as dishonesty occurs, I don't to play anymore. That's win/win or no deal. PD doesn't allow for this scenario -- it insists that one keep playing even after loss/win in order to maximize one's gain. Actually, that's precisely what PD concerns itself with -- how to maximize long-term gain when the game continues ad infinitum. PD considerations don't ask the question, how do you win one particular game. They ask the question what's the best strategy after n games have been played (and how does the strategy change as n goes to infinity). Stopping the game after k trials if any one particular strategy was deployed at k-1st trial is not part of the consideration. While that's precisely what my paradigm does.
Fairly? Wouldn't it make more sense to treat people as sources of potential benefit to you, and act accordingly to how that benefit plays out? Why be fair, unless you're going to get caught and being caught is worse than being fair? Are you suggesting that fear of getting caught and considerations for other people are the only reasons people don't commit crimes? People don't commit crimes, in my view, mostly because they think that they are better than that. It's mostly their statement to themselves about themselves. It comes from confidence and self-esteem. And it is the people who lack confidence and fall into desperation that begin to cheat to get ahead. Of course, the latter is often made easier by the prevailing feeling that they are owed something because other people are too greedy and don't contribute to society (in the form of thieves pockets).
Fringe benefit: that works for dampening individual greed, too. You attributing to me misunderstanding where all that is happening is disagreement. All your points stem from the assumption that greed is bad and so is selfishness. Yet, you don't really seem that bothered by greed for power -- only greed for money. Well, I don't take those assumptions for granted. The only time you even slightly agree with me is when you feel that what I have to say might reduce the "impact" of selfishness. So when you feel that my argument might achieve that goal, you commend me. But I don't see that goal as an important one. I don't even agree with the premise. That's probably why you think my world view is odd -- it doesn't address what you see as an imperative. But you don't actually show that it is an imperative. While I've made a pretty good argument that it isn't. We haven't spend much time on it, and probably shouldn't. Well, here, here's the explanation. I don't consider myself an objectivist, but I certainly think Rand had more to say than Marx. People shill against her quite a bit and it's as easy as it is to shill against Marx. Both wrote too long to be read by anyone who only cares to produce a quick emotional response. So rather than recommending the whole of Atlas Shrugged, I'd recommend that you read Galt's speech.... Frankly, you can skip her ponderings on love. I don't think she understood love. You don't even have to read it. You can listen to the narration. Here's one http://compuball.com/Inquisition/AynRand/galtspeech_pmark_broken.htm
Yeah, and that's not the same as planning one's own family. "Selective breeding" means choosing mates for other people through coercion in order to achieve certain results. Planning one's own family is not coercion.
Or maybe people grow up accustomed to certain cultural quirks that they want to have in their own family and expect that other people who grew up in the families with the same cultural background would want the same. Just a thought... Or maybe, it's what you said... everyone clinging for some conspiracy to join.
Slashdot Mirror
me: "perhaps gays should be allowed to marry"
you: "why are you for bestial necrophilic (sic) pedophilia!"
...right. if you accuse someone of making farfetched statements, you may want to avoid the temptation to do it yourself, first. ts called hysteria, fear. no, it's called "learning from experience". it makes sense for sicety (sic) to have LIMITS on this artificial construct it created "artificial" means "men-made". And it's already limited. Patents, unlike copyrights, have very short lifespans.And in this case the causality actually goes in reverse order. It is because this generation is not trained in logical thinking and are trained to make judgments based on the majority opinion of their peers that they are so blindingly trusting of anything that is written.
The problem with suing copyright violators is that copyrights last too long. Patents are issued for 3 years. They can be extended over and over for maybe 18 years. Usually they expire much sooner. They hardly prevent the innovation in research the way copyrights prevent innovation in arts. This is knee-jerk. And it's the first time in 10 years that I am considering switching my home page from Slashdot to something else. Maybe some site with news on it.
What's next? A virus "could" come about that wipes out humanity? A company "could" decide that it will destroy humanity for profit? This could happen and that could happen is not news. It's not even speculation. It's just fud.
But the state of NY has no recourse. If they believe that Amazon is in violation of NY State tax code, they would have to raid their facilities to get evidence and then try to sue them (and possibly collect by liquidating their NY assets). But they don't have offices in NY. They don't have assets in NY. The affiliates are separate companies which do not have access to the records of customers that purchased from Amazon itself or other affiliates. My point is not that NY cannot claim to have jurisdiction. They claim it. But the reality simply disagrees.
That's irrelevant though. A company's "policy" is just a course of action that it has mandated for itself. They still have to be compliant with the law. But the point I was trying to make was that any law made by the state of NY would not apply to Amazon. Amazon is simply out of their reach.
Affiliates are not agents though. They are business partners. Affiliation is a voluntary relationship and as such does not allow one party to compel another to do anything through a mandate (only through an agreement). Agents can be compelled to act on a mandate and as such are part of a company. In other words, affiliates are entities with which Amazon does business (just as it would with vendors and end-customers). NY still can't compel Amazon to do anything, BUT and (here's where you might be right) NY can compel NY-based affiliates to collect sales information for the purchases made from them (but not from all of Amazon).
Excise tax on imported goods is buyers' burden. And the burden for compliance is on the buyers as well. With cars it's easy to track because a car must be registered in the state into which it has been brought. NY State is proposing to make this tax the sellers' burden. It's not the same situation. The question is whether they can compel Amazon to report to the NY State information about Amazon customers with NY shipping addresses. If they can't, then this is an exercise in futility. They might as well pass laws about non-US nationals on non-US territory.
Nooo!!! I am not ready! I am not ready, yet!
The difference is in that when the door is opened it provides no new information about the door you initially picked. But it does provide new information about the "other" door. That's why the two door remaining unopened are asymmetric as far as information about them is concerned.
If interactions are fully optional, I agree that you can turn any negative interaction into a zero interaction on the next trial.
All the interactions under discussion are optional. We don't pick our family, but we do pick our friends (to some extent) and careers (to a large extent). Those choices are choices of individual actions and choices of the nature of interactions with other people.
But if one only looks out for one's own interests, then having this weird rule about "don't use other people" is suboptimal--it is in effect a hard-wired unselfish motive dropped into the middle of a selfish framework. There's nothing wrong with that, but at least recognize it for what it is!
Ok, sure, but unselfishness, in this stretched definition, is defined negatively. It's sort of equivalent to defining "apathy" as "care" because it is characterized by lack of hate. I don't care to take advantage of the rock formations on the moon. But it's not correct to attribute to me care for the pristine state of the moon. I am not sure what distinction you are trying to make between unselfish and selfless. I suspect it address what I just said. But generally, "unselfish" and "selfless" are considered synonymous. Since the original discussion revolved around the need to "understand" people who do not act in selfless (unselfish?... let's say "altruistic", for the sake of clarity) manner, I think you have to admit that you are conceding that position.
But if one only looks out for one's own interests, then having this weird rule about "don't use other people" is suboptimal
No, it isn't. You forgot the "renormalize" step at the end of each iteration. By taking out the dimensions in which loss/win occurs and by not allowing win/loss to occur (because you act honestly), you are left only with interactions that are win/win. The renormalization emphasizes their weights. I guess your point is why not go for a win/loss solution and then stop the interaction and flatten that dimension? Continued win/win scenarios are more profitable than one-iteration win/loss scenarios. Assuming that changing any dimension from non-involvement to "let the game begin" carries a cost (as forming all personal relations does), the win/loss scenario might become more profitable for "socialites", politicians, etc -- the people for whom such cost is prohibitively low. It also means that people who are more involved in their own self (for whom the cost of forming an interaction is roughly equivalent or higher than the reward for win/loss) are more likely to stay honest... But there is another consideration. The number of non-zero dimensions occurring at any one iteration has (more or less) absolute upper bound. So the number of relations in which one is willing to cheat (and turn a streak of win/win into win/loss continued by nothing) takes up space of the slots which could be filled by the relations one intends to keep as win/win in perpetuity. So dishonesty actually turns out to be standing in the of forming honest relations. Ie, unless you a real socialite, it's not worth the time and effort. In an act of desperation, of course, one could start to "burn bridges" by turning potentially-perpetual win/win games into 1-time win/loss games without any hope of being able to replace them. But starvation for resources could turn people to desperation.
But the principles you cited do not justify your choice of honesty as a virtue.
I think the above should explain it.
You were the one who was using optimality as the argument against unselfishness.
I wasn't using it as the reason. I was countering the argument that unselfishness is more optimal by attempting to demonstrate that it isn't.
If you want to switch to ethical, I think unselfishness does pretty well there, too.
Not at all. Not if you believe that freedom is a virtue and slavery isn't.
If you're in a social envi
Alright, here's a more precise way to explain why PD-considerations do not really apply and are worse than a trivialization. Since a person has to interact with a large number of people, consider each interaction as a separate PD-problem. Then you end up with a restricted direct product of PD-spaces. Actually, even that is an oversimplification. Because you realy end up with a restricted semi-direct product of PD-spaces. At each step, only finitely many spaces are non-zero. The optimal 1-dimension strategy of PD is to repeat the step your oponent took in the last iteration. But the optimal multi-dimension strategy is to zero-out that dimension and renormalize so that the win/win dimensions are the only ones having positive weights. The product is semi-direct because interactions are not independent of each other and interactions in one dimension have influence on the weights of some of the others. That's for the math. As for the "mind-set", think of work as an act of making love. You want to be your best because you self-esteem is tied to it. But you also want to get the best possible service in return. You don't care to play anymore once you realize that the other person is only using you. But using them leaves you an empty shell of a person (even though you get what you need). Now adopt the same attitude towards all achievement and you become directly invested in perfection and begin to look down on those who would tell you how to limit or channel your achievement... just as you would despise anyone who would tell you how to limit your sexual mores. You don't care to rape anyone. Nor do you care to be charity case for your sexual partner. Nor do you want to have sex as an act of charity. But you do want to have it and to have it with a partner that wants you. Striving to achieve this gets everyone laid in the best manner possible. The same with all achievement.
Yeah, and that's not the same as planning one's own family. "Selective breeding" means choosing mates for other people through coercion in order to achieve certain results. Planning one's own family is not coercion.
Or maybe people grow up accustomed to certain cultural quirks that they want to have in their own family and expect that other people who grew up in the families with the same cultural background would want the same. Just a thought... Or maybe, it's what you said... everyone clinging for some conspiracy to join.
You mean to make it more expressed, right? You did say you wanted world peace, right?