That would make sense if typesetting math formulas was the only reason that kept LaTeX being used up to this day. You cannot do collaborative work with MS Word, let alone employ any semblance of a version control system.
At no point am I saying that LaTeX has no advantages over Word. What I am saying is that, in terms of Literature and Humanities specific needs, the advantages are neither obvious or compelling.
Add to this that your claim that Word doesn't support versioning, which isn't accurate (while you can't version it using CVS, git, etc, it does in fact support internal versioning), and that it doesn't support collaboration (untrue, although I do admit that it's of poor quality).
And employing a version control system is trivial, as your entire document is nothing more than a list of source code files and images.
Yes, employing a version control system is trivial. Yes, the document is source code. Your technical bias is showing. I'm guessing that you didn't come up through the Humanities or Literature, and that you don't do tech support for the average population of those areas of study. Those TERMS aren't common knowledge in those communities, much less the concepts behind them.
You are assuming that academic types from fields such as soft sciences and humanities are, somehow, complete idiots who can't manage to grasp simple aspects that even first-year students from any IT degree manage to grasp on their first weeks on the course. They may not be familiar with the workflow associated with writing a LaTeX document but to go as far as insinuate that they are so technically incompetent that they can't possibly manage to work through all that voodoo... Well, you aren't basing your opinion on reality.
I'm not saying that at all; I'm saying that the skills and knowledge involved in becoming proficient in LaTeX are entirely separate from the skills and knowledge that are central to the departments of Humanities and soft sciences. Just as a side note on this, while I'm personally technically adept, I have a B.A. in British and American Literature, and am currently working on a LIS Masters. Nine-tenths of my friends in college and beyond are former or current Literature or humanities majors; I spent a large amount of time discussing publishing and writing tools with my professors, as well. I've personally used Word, Openoffice, LaTeX (Lyx, Auctex, and raw with a code-highlighting text editor.
This comment is completely out of touch with reality. I point it out to you that no one is born knowing how to use a WYSIWYG editor, let alone MS Word. If you need to use MS Word you have to spend your "time" and you must have enough "background" to come to grips with MS Word.
Yes. Which 100% of US schoolchildren do, since it's taught in late elementary through high school. Additionally, while yes, Word has gotchas and problems, most of what a Literature or Humanities person needs is either discoverable through poking around, or is available through the first resource most people consult - their slightly more experienced peers.
By claiming that learning how to use LaTeX is somehow cumbersome while using MS Word is somehow an error-free experience you are both demonstrating you don't have a clue about what's it like to use LaTeX and MS Word.
So, is there a particular reason you're being so rude here? This isn't a particularly emotional issue, as far as I can see; furthermore, you seem to be inventing some sort of anti-LaTeX bias here. I'm a happy Linux-head with a good deal of affection for LaTeX. I also routinely taught HTML and other technical subjects to classmates during college, and did software and hardware troubleshooting for both students and faculty. I'm at no point saying "WORD IS GREAT, LaTeX SUX," just that it's understandable that Word and other WYSIWYG editors are the standard in non-technical academic fields.
I will agree that LaTeX is less commonly known in humanities and literature, but that's the effect, not the cause. (Note, I'm not claiming sole effect)
You mention reference and figure numbering. Now, welcome to Literature. What you need is footnotes; if you need a figure, it's quite unusual, and Word's (or Openoffice's, for that matter) methods suffice quite easily.
References can be automatically handled by Word as of recent versions, but more likely will be farmed out to refworks, especially since there's no numbering involved, using either MLA or APA citations.
Note that I say this as a big fan of LaTeX, and as someone with an undergrad degree in British/American Literature, in graduate school for a humanities-similar field (Library and Information Science). I'm not at any point saying that LaTeX isn't excellent, or even the superior choice if you have the technical mindset and desire to pick it up. But, honestly, producing real, quality documents with LaTeX is more complicated than HTML. Installing LaTeX is liable to be more complicated than beginning HTML, come to think of it. And for these people the only benefit is its presentational edge over word since the time savings certainly don't occur for the first document you layout with it, or, for the technically uninclined, likely the second, third, or... well, they've given up by now.
It is not, understandably, the standard for the soft sciences and humanities, for the simple reason that, if you don't need the ability to typeset complicated formulas (or don't need it badly enough), the cost/reward tradeoff for learning any kind of markup language is never going to look good enough to offset the initial outlay of effort.
Add that to the comparative rarity of technically inclined people in those fields, and I'm not sure the tradeoff is worth it in the end. These are not failproof, cookie-cutter solutions, and if you add becoming familiar with the concept of markup-based styling to the effort of learning TeX specifically...
Most soft sciences and humanities students don't have the time or background to come to grips with LaTeX, and most faculty can afford to leave formatting up to the publisher; after all, English grammar is handled reasonably well by Word.
Note: previous post should have this text inserted: "Search utility capable of synonyms is a much harder problem than you may suspect. It's merely difficult at the word level (complicated by words with same-spelling/different meaning), but quickly spirals into deep magic territory on the phrase level.
Add this to the problem of subject description of pictorial material, and you've quickly gotten way ahead of what we're actually capable of, at least at the price-point and effort level attached to the average textbook."
The problem isn't getting names attached, the problem is having those names be in the human reading the book's memory when he/she goes to look for the picture/graph.
Now, grant you, having an explicit description of each figure, and an index of figures with descriptions would be very useful. But it doesn't actually 100% solve the problem; it just substitutes a different competency for the missing one.
I've always used indexes and explicit bookmarking much more extensively than I've really used browsing in this manner, personally; not that I haven't used this method, just that, when searching for specific materials, I would generally use these methods first.
Of course, as a Literature major, I read a LOT of unindexed works. And there, the Kindle does fall down.
One thing I've found really hard, actually, is to switch my thinking from pages to locations. It's just an arbitrary number, which is theoretically identical in function to page number, but I'm so used to the way pages work, I almost always forget to note position in eBooks.
Unfortunately, in the U.S., that doesn't function because of copyright law and fair use limitations. Professors can copy things, but only if they're small portions of a work, and if they aren't going to be used in repeated classes, et cetera, et cetera.
I will say that, unless they're assigning their own book (or taking illegal kickback monies), professors generally don't profit from textbook sales. And even when using their own book, the royalties are so small for any individual purchase, that they're probably making a (insert dollars, pounds, 100 yen, etc) or so over an entire class, maximum.
As a grad student myself and a very prolific reader, I love my Kindle 6''. If I was still taking literature classes, instead of Library School classes, I would make heavy use of it for readings that don't involve secondary materials specific to editions. As it is I read the hell out of Gutenberg, Baen's Free Library, and books bought through http://webscriptions.net./
Granted, I couldn't have afforded to buy one myself; but if I had the money, I would have, and I probably would have bought specifically the Kindle, because the other readers available had a variety of hardware or pricing issues at the time I got mine.
As someone who's used one extensively, I'll say this - the Kindle isn't great for flipping back and forth in large works, which is a problem that needs to be solved. Being text searchable makes up for this somewhat, but the balance is moderately tipped toward paper textbooks.
On the other hand, for articles assigned that are available in full text (or, with the DX, PDF - the 6-inch Kindle isn't really suitable for most PDFs), the Kindle is amazing. Being able to take assigned articles on the train, or just to read them on my bed without having a laptop crushing my chest, is pretty great. The eyestrain benefits are also very significant, although to someone with less terrible eyes than me, it might be less so.
Except that history books do cover those things, and if anyone comes out of a high school history class thinking Nixon started Vietnam, the problem isn't in the textbooks. Note on the experience I'm speaking from; in addition to taking the classes way back when, I've taught high school civics and history within the past four years.
No textbook is perfect or unbiased; however, it's just incorrect to impute a generalized liberal bias to our U.S. textbooks as they currently stand. For crying out loud, the reason this story is such a big issue is, in fact, because Texas already has a huge influence on textbooks across the nation. While this current set of changes is particularly egregious, the Texas school board wasn't twiddling its thumbs for the decades they've had this influence. The issue is, in fact, the danger of conservative-biased textbooks becoming right-wing pamphlets.
Also, the church-and-state arguments Texas is making are asinine on their face, as is the idea that it's ok to minimize the role of Thomas Jefferson because you disagree with his religious or political positions.
That's a somewhat simplistic view, honestly; any closer look at this history, or for that matter, the literature of the period will show that there were also a lot of conditions in the period where standard of living declined, particularly comparing hand-manufacturers versus factory workers. Yes, income overall increased, but that's a flat number that doesn't take into account the loss of self-sufficiency; a broke person with recourse to the family farm is in a better position than the broke factory worker who now is out of home and food as well as money.
And, even if it was an unqualified success compared to the previous generation of techniques, it was horrible by the standards of today, and a large part of our better standard of living is the regulation of industry practices. I mean, it's not the free market that struck down child labor in Britain and the USA.
Honestly, I'm very liberal on social issues, and economically, I believe that we need stronger restrictions on corporate power, particularly extra-national corporations, and especially in the ways that corporations can interact with the process of government. I'm not opposed to capitalism in general, but once it moves past producing a product or service into coercive behavior, regulation is necessary, as well as places where profit motive doesn't serve the public welfare.
Just out of curiosity, how did you fund your studies?
Also, I'm 27, have never owned a new car or a TV that wasn't secondhand, and have never lived in other than cheap rental property in terrifying sections of town. The credit card debts I've incurred (mostly taken care of or paid off) were either medical, rent, or cost of transport related; not optional "glitz purchases."
Most credit card debt isn't toys and entertainment; it's food, rent, appendectomies sans insurance.
1. No, you don't need cable TV, but since we were discussing the concept of "voting with your dollars," that's not a relevant issue. Removing yourself completely from the marketplace at hand removes even the tenuous level of influence that spending your money on a competitor's service might be said to have.
2. You don't, per se, need one, but, in fact, it's pretty hard to do without, and making something unreasonably difficult does, in fact, matter in the same way making it impossible does, albeit to a different degree. It's theoretically possible for me to opt out of the purchasing of food by stealthily hunting squirrels on the Boston Commons, but in practice, I need to buy groceries if I want to effectively live my life. Also, the personal attack here is pretty stupid, given that only certain classes of loans are federally subsidized, and those alone are insufficient to pay for any school worth a damn.
3. I personally don't buy from Walmart, on moral grounds - but I don't expect everyone to know all of their failings, and I don't look down on people who buy from Walmart. I buy from Target, which, as far as I've been able to tell, has better business practices - but I can't vouch for every brand they carry, or the trucking company they use to aquire product.
My point here is that, in fact, it is almost impossible to know with anything approaching certainty the complete moral record of the supply chain of any one purchase, much less every purchase you make. The act of purchasing isn't immoral, because it's not the responsibility of the consumer to police corporate behavior. That the actual parties responsible for policing this behavior (the SEC, etc) are less than effective is a problem with the laws, not a failure of consumers as a whole.
The slam on American culture here comes off as really juvenile. What culture are you putting forward as your perfect culture that never buys things based on price and value alone?
It's actually a result from interacting with local political groups of Libertarians over long periods of time, reading position statements of Libertarian and Libertarian-leaning politician over time, and discussions with people with Libertarian views.
I'm not saying that there aren't people who have reasonable positions who identify as Libertarians, but, honestly, I think the only really reasonable ideas attached to the platform are in reforming areas of our government process that are more-or-less run as games or which deal with subjective elements; for instance, the vote-reform platform tends to be sensible, or their social and drug policies.
No, with regulation, you get children not chained to desks (Not hyperbole - Gilded age). You see, people en masse in the public eye, responsible to constituencies to some degree, are actually a somewhat more reliable system than people making decisions in a closed boardroom, responsible only for profit. Sorry, but it's proven by history.
Neither are infallible, or even reliably good-trending; but one is less vulnerable to corruption, and it's not corporations.
In my personal case (student loans), I can't, because my income doesn't allow for substantial savings, and won't until I have the degree that allows me to seek professional-level jobs.
And, yes, it's theoretically possible to save money for a car; assuming that your job and city don't require you to have a car to get to work. Living in Sarasota, FL, for instance, the bus isn't an option, because its service hours end before 99% of jobs do.
You can buy a cheap-ass used car for $500-$1000, but everyone (every single person) who has done so has spent more in repairs over time than the loan would have cost them, and been stuck someplace when their car broke down multiple times.
Again, these things are possible for some; but there's a reason we have an institutionalized system for loans, and that's that generally, people can't afford college before they have the degree conferred by college (and sometimes after, but that's a separate problem).
We've gotten somewhat afield of the original argument, so I'll restate - I'm not saying that Comcast is the result of nothing but pure free-market economics - I'm saying that a free market wouldn't fix the problem.
Also, it's my understanding that their duopoly in my area is at least partially due to their ownership of the physical media of transfer (the last-mile copper and cable wiring).
An interesting argument; but I don't actually agree. There are people who primarily think in terms of understanding and altering sections of the real economy; there are various blended plans that take account real data and potential malfeasance on the part of actors...
At some level, they're all abstractions of the real, yes, but not to the same degree; Libertarianism is much more so than most current economic theories.
It's certainly an option people can take, but removing yourself completely from the market for a class of services hardly works in a "vote with your dollar" scenario, does it?
And how much are you going to opt out of modern society? Comcast and Verizon both suck; I guess I'm not allowed to have internet. Name a cell phone company that isn't terrible in terms of their customer service record. Any one of these things could be done without, perhaps, but I really find it hard to believe that one can maintain actual engagement with society while shunning 100% of its basic communications media.
I've responded to this not as the veiled insult that I'm almost sure it is, but as a genuine question. For the record, let it be known throughout the land that I can take or leave TV, and left it for a four year stretch in undergrad, without missing it.
If you had a point, you wouldn't need to resort to personal insults.
Also, yes, the industrial revolution has had positive effects in the long run, and yes, it's better than feudalism. Neither of those change the fact that it ran on a heaping helping of laissez-faire capitalism, and it was utterly terrible for most people involved. And, again, I see that you haven't remotely dealt with the problem of the Gilded Age, where laissez-faire capitalism led directly to both horrific working conditions and huge monopolies.
Libertarianism looks good to you because, frankly, it's a ridiculously simplified model economy, with very little interaction with the real, dirty, complicated world, full of people who don't always logically pursue their greatest financial interest. It looks good and pure, because it's small enough to fit comfortably in a human mind all at once. So is communism. Neither of them work.
There's also the minor issue that, when one does nothing but "vote with one's dollar," the company has no way to know why. Or that without some sort of overarching organization, people find out about things that piss them off at different times, and so the relation of action to reaction is spread over time to the point that it, again, becomes completely opaque.
We've tried laissez-faire capitalism - it's called the Gilded Age, and it was TERRIBLE for 90% of the population. Previously, we tried it in Edwardian/Victorian Britain. It was horrible and soul-crushingly destructive then, too. Sensing a theme? Pure free market economies are no better an idea than communism, if somewhat more efficient at producing products.
But we want our shiny and we want it now and we don't care what sort of behavior we are rewarding by voting with our wallets. That's the only reason it doesn't work. There is none other. Corporations cannot act against our interests except that we provide the funding by which they do it.
This is a particularly bad argument when talking about cable TV - often, the consumer doesn't HAVE an alternative readily available; I can count the number of places I've been that offer multiple cable TV services on one hand, and I've lived places where satellite wasn't a real option because of geography or various out-of-my-control circumstances.
Corporations can act against our interests in a variety of ways without being immediately funded by those affected, particularly when a corporation has existed long enough and had enough pull to shape society or law in its favor. A good example is credit card companies - while there's no de jure requirement that I have one, if I don't build a credit history, I can't buy a house or car or get loans for school or...
Regardless, even if everything you said was correct, that's still a problem with Libertarianism, not with consumers. Because, well, any system that only works in the platonic world of perfect ideals is a stupid, worthless system, and not worth consideration in this, the real world.
The market idea really could work, except that it requires a people who are both more noble and have a far stronger backbone than our general population. Such a people would individually and voluntarily refuse to ever support any business that takes actions which are not in their interests, at all costs. In turn, the corporations would understand this which would both raise the general standard and guarantee that actually proving this to them would be a relatively rare event.
No, it requires a people infinitely resourceful, a people infinitely knowledgable about the actions of the corporations (and parent companies and subsidiaries) they interact with, even tangentially, and a people that can make their primary activity "making purchasing decisions" rather than work, or raising a family, or anything that is actually central to a real human's life. Also, these mythical people would still need to build a solid method for communicating the reasons behind their purchasing decisions, en masse, to the companies. Making purchasing decisions based solely in a political manner isn't some beautiful, virtuous thing, and doing so based on your own needs isn't immoral.
People not only won't buy things and services primarily according to abstract principles and disagreements, they shouldn't have to. There's no reason why, when deciding what car to buy, I should have to do thirty hours worth of research to see if the company making my car purchases child-slaves in East Examplia and grinds them up for lubricant - the laws of my country (and the world) should make unethical behavior illegal. That's what laws and regulations are for.
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At no point am I saying that LaTeX has no advantages over Word. What I am saying is that, in terms of Literature and Humanities specific needs, the advantages are neither obvious or compelling.
Add to this that your claim that Word doesn't support versioning, which isn't accurate (while you can't version it using CVS, git, etc, it does in fact support internal versioning), and that it doesn't support collaboration (untrue, although I do admit that it's of poor quality).
Yes, employing a version control system is trivial. Yes, the document is source code. Your technical bias is showing. I'm guessing that you didn't come up through the Humanities or Literature, and that you don't do tech support for the average population of those areas of study. Those TERMS aren't common knowledge in those communities, much less the concepts behind them.
I'm not saying that at all; I'm saying that the skills and knowledge involved in becoming proficient in LaTeX are entirely separate from the skills and knowledge that are central to the departments of Humanities and soft sciences. Just as a side note on this, while I'm personally technically adept, I have a B.A. in British and American Literature, and am currently working on a LIS Masters. Nine-tenths of my friends in college and beyond are former or current Literature or humanities majors; I spent a large amount of time discussing publishing and writing tools with my professors, as well. I've personally used Word, Openoffice, LaTeX (Lyx, Auctex, and raw with a code-highlighting text editor.
Yes. Which 100% of US schoolchildren do, since it's taught in late elementary through high school. Additionally, while yes, Word has gotchas and problems, most of what a Literature or Humanities person needs is either discoverable through poking around, or is available through the first resource most people consult - their slightly more experienced peers.
So, is there a particular reason you're being so rude here? This isn't a particularly emotional issue, as far as I can see; furthermore, you seem to be inventing some sort of anti-LaTeX bias here. I'm a happy Linux-head with a good deal of affection for LaTeX. I also routinely taught HTML and other technical subjects to classmates during college, and did software and hardware troubleshooting for both students and faculty. I'm at no point saying "WORD IS GREAT, LaTeX SUX," just that it's understandable that Word and other WYSIWYG editors are the standard in non-technical academic fields.
I will agree that LaTeX is less commonly known in humanities and literature, but that's the effect, not the cause. (Note, I'm not claiming sole effect)
You mention reference and figure numbering. Now, welcome to Literature. What you need is footnotes; if you need a figure, it's quite unusual, and Word's (or Openoffice's, for that matter) methods suffice quite easily.
References can be automatically handled by Word as of recent versions, but more likely will be farmed out to refworks, especially since there's no numbering involved, using either MLA or APA citations.
Note that I say this as a big fan of LaTeX, and as someone with an undergrad degree in British/American Literature, in graduate school for a humanities-similar field (Library and Information Science). I'm not at any point saying that LaTeX isn't excellent, or even the superior choice if you have the technical mindset and desire to pick it up. But, honestly, producing real, quality documents with LaTeX is more complicated than HTML. Installing LaTeX is liable to be more complicated than beginning HTML, come to think of it. And for these people the only benefit is its presentational edge over word since the time savings certainly don't occur for the first document you layout with it, or, for the technically uninclined, likely the second, third, or... well, they've given up by now.
It is not, understandably, the standard for the soft sciences and humanities, for the simple reason that, if you don't need the ability to typeset complicated formulas (or don't need it badly enough), the cost/reward tradeoff for learning any kind of markup language is never going to look good enough to offset the initial outlay of effort.
Add that to the comparative rarity of technically inclined people in those fields, and I'm not sure the tradeoff is worth it in the end. These are not failproof, cookie-cutter solutions, and if you add becoming familiar with the concept of markup-based styling to the effort of learning TeX specifically...
Most soft sciences and humanities students don't have the time or background to come to grips with LaTeX, and most faculty can afford to leave formatting up to the publisher; after all, English grammar is handled reasonably well by Word.
Too much science fiction, most likely.
I would submit, courteously, that your mother's inertial and gravitic masses are arbitrarily large.
Yes.
Note: previous post should have this text inserted: "Search utility capable of synonyms is a much harder problem than you may suspect. It's merely difficult at the word level (complicated by words with same-spelling/different meaning), but quickly spirals into deep magic territory on the phrase level.
Add this to the problem of subject description of pictorial material, and you've quickly gotten way ahead of what we're actually capable of, at least at the price-point and effort level attached to the average textbook."
Partial fix.
The problem isn't getting names attached, the problem is having those names be in the human reading the book's memory when he/she goes to look for the picture/graph.
Now, grant you, having an explicit description of each figure, and an index of figures with descriptions would be very useful. But it doesn't actually 100% solve the problem; it just substitutes a different competency for the missing one.
I've always used indexes and explicit bookmarking much more extensively than I've really used browsing in this manner, personally; not that I haven't used this method, just that, when searching for specific materials, I would generally use these methods first.
Of course, as a Literature major, I read a LOT of unindexed works. And there, the Kindle does fall down.
One thing I've found really hard, actually, is to switch my thinking from pages to locations. It's just an arbitrary number, which is theoretically identical in function to page number, but I'm so used to the way pages work, I almost always forget to note position in eBooks.
Unfortunately, in the U.S., that doesn't function because of copyright law and fair use limitations. Professors can copy things, but only if they're small portions of a work, and if they aren't going to be used in repeated classes, et cetera, et cetera.
I will say that, unless they're assigning their own book (or taking illegal kickback monies), professors generally don't profit from textbook sales. And even when using their own book, the royalties are so small for any individual purchase, that they're probably making a (insert dollars, pounds, 100 yen, etc) or so over an entire class, maximum.
Have you ever used one?
As a grad student myself and a very prolific reader, I love my Kindle 6''. If I was still taking literature classes, instead of Library School classes, I would make heavy use of it for readings that don't involve secondary materials specific to editions. As it is I read the hell out of Gutenberg, Baen's Free Library, and books bought through http://webscriptions.net./
Granted, I couldn't have afforded to buy one myself; but if I had the money, I would have, and I probably would have bought specifically the Kindle, because the other readers available had a variety of hardware or pricing issues at the time I got mine.
As someone who's used one extensively, I'll say this - the Kindle isn't great for flipping back and forth in large works, which is a problem that needs to be solved. Being text searchable makes up for this somewhat, but the balance is moderately tipped toward paper textbooks.
On the other hand, for articles assigned that are available in full text (or, with the DX, PDF - the 6-inch Kindle isn't really suitable for most PDFs), the Kindle is amazing. Being able to take assigned articles on the train, or just to read them on my bed without having a laptop crushing my chest, is pretty great. The eyestrain benefits are also very significant, although to someone with less terrible eyes than me, it might be less so.
Except that history books do cover those things, and if anyone comes out of a high school history class thinking Nixon started Vietnam, the problem isn't in the textbooks. Note on the experience I'm speaking from; in addition to taking the classes way back when, I've taught high school civics and history within the past four years.
No textbook is perfect or unbiased; however, it's just incorrect to impute a generalized liberal bias to our U.S. textbooks as they currently stand. For crying out loud, the reason this story is such a big issue is, in fact, because Texas already has a huge influence on textbooks across the nation. While this current set of changes is particularly egregious, the Texas school board wasn't twiddling its thumbs for the decades they've had this influence. The issue is, in fact, the danger of conservative-biased textbooks becoming right-wing pamphlets.
Also, the church-and-state arguments Texas is making are asinine on their face, as is the idea that it's ok to minimize the role of Thomas Jefferson because you disagree with his religious or political positions.
That's a somewhat simplistic view, honestly; any closer look at this history, or for that matter, the literature of the period will show that there were also a lot of conditions in the period where standard of living declined, particularly comparing hand-manufacturers versus factory workers. Yes, income overall increased, but that's a flat number that doesn't take into account the loss of self-sufficiency; a broke person with recourse to the family farm is in a better position than the broke factory worker who now is out of home and food as well as money.
And, even if it was an unqualified success compared to the previous generation of techniques, it was horrible by the standards of today, and a large part of our better standard of living is the regulation of industry practices. I mean, it's not the free market that struck down child labor in Britain and the USA.
Alright, verbiage isn't important - what is it you're defining when you say "studies," and how did you/did you pay for them?
So we can knock off this weird poking at geography, I live in Boston, and was born and went to undergrad in Florida.
Honestly, I'm very liberal on social issues, and economically, I believe that we need stronger restrictions on corporate power, particularly extra-national corporations, and especially in the ways that corporations can interact with the process of government. I'm not opposed to capitalism in general, but once it moves past producing a product or service into coercive behavior, regulation is necessary, as well as places where profit motive doesn't serve the public welfare.
Just out of curiosity, how did you fund your studies?
Also, I'm 27, have never owned a new car or a TV that wasn't secondhand, and have never lived in other than cheap rental property in terrifying sections of town. The credit card debts I've incurred (mostly taken care of or paid off) were either medical, rent, or cost of transport related; not optional "glitz purchases."
Most credit card debt isn't toys and entertainment; it's food, rent, appendectomies sans insurance.
1. No, you don't need cable TV, but since we were discussing the concept of "voting with your dollars," that's not a relevant issue. Removing yourself completely from the marketplace at hand removes even the tenuous level of influence that spending your money on a competitor's service might be said to have.
2. You don't, per se, need one, but, in fact, it's pretty hard to do without, and making something unreasonably difficult does, in fact, matter in the same way making it impossible does, albeit to a different degree. It's theoretically possible for me to opt out of the purchasing of food by stealthily hunting squirrels on the Boston Commons, but in practice, I need to buy groceries if I want to effectively live my life. Also, the personal attack here is pretty stupid, given that only certain classes of loans are federally subsidized, and those alone are insufficient to pay for any school worth a damn.
3. I personally don't buy from Walmart, on moral grounds - but I don't expect everyone to know all of their failings, and I don't look down on people who buy from Walmart. I buy from Target, which, as far as I've been able to tell, has better business practices - but I can't vouch for every brand they carry, or the trucking company they use to aquire product.
My point here is that, in fact, it is almost impossible to know with anything approaching certainty the complete moral record of the supply chain of any one purchase, much less every purchase you make. The act of purchasing isn't immoral, because it's not the responsibility of the consumer to police corporate behavior. That the actual parties responsible for policing this behavior (the SEC, etc) are less than effective is a problem with the laws, not a failure of consumers as a whole.
The slam on American culture here comes off as really juvenile. What culture are you putting forward as your perfect culture that never buys things based on price and value alone?
It's actually a result from interacting with local political groups of Libertarians over long periods of time, reading position statements of Libertarian and Libertarian-leaning politician over time, and discussions with people with Libertarian views.
I'm not saying that there aren't people who have reasonable positions who identify as Libertarians, but, honestly, I think the only really reasonable ideas attached to the platform are in reforming areas of our government process that are more-or-less run as games or which deal with subjective elements; for instance, the vote-reform platform tends to be sensible, or their social and drug policies.
No, with regulation, you get children not chained to desks (Not hyperbole - Gilded age). You see, people en masse in the public eye, responsible to constituencies to some degree, are actually a somewhat more reliable system than people making decisions in a closed boardroom, responsible only for profit. Sorry, but it's proven by history.
Neither are infallible, or even reliably good-trending; but one is less vulnerable to corruption, and it's not corporations.
In my personal case (student loans), I can't, because my income doesn't allow for substantial savings, and won't until I have the degree that allows me to seek professional-level jobs.
And, yes, it's theoretically possible to save money for a car; assuming that your job and city don't require you to have a car to get to work. Living in Sarasota, FL, for instance, the bus isn't an option, because its service hours end before 99% of jobs do.
You can buy a cheap-ass used car for $500-$1000, but everyone (every single person) who has done so has spent more in repairs over time than the loan would have cost them, and been stuck someplace when their car broke down multiple times.
Again, these things are possible for some; but there's a reason we have an institutionalized system for loans, and that's that generally, people can't afford college before they have the degree conferred by college (and sometimes after, but that's a separate problem).
We've gotten somewhat afield of the original argument, so I'll restate - I'm not saying that Comcast is the result of nothing but pure free-market economics - I'm saying that a free market wouldn't fix the problem.
Also, it's my understanding that their duopoly in my area is at least partially due to their ownership of the physical media of transfer (the last-mile copper and cable wiring).
An interesting argument; but I don't actually agree. There are people who primarily think in terms of understanding and altering sections of the real economy; there are various blended plans that take account real data and potential malfeasance on the part of actors...
At some level, they're all abstractions of the real, yes, but not to the same degree; Libertarianism is much more so than most current economic theories.
It's certainly an option people can take, but removing yourself completely from the market for a class of services hardly works in a "vote with your dollar" scenario, does it?
And how much are you going to opt out of modern society? Comcast and Verizon both suck; I guess I'm not allowed to have internet. Name a cell phone company that isn't terrible in terms of their customer service record. Any one of these things could be done without, perhaps, but I really find it hard to believe that one can maintain actual engagement with society while shunning 100% of its basic communications media.
I've responded to this not as the veiled insult that I'm almost sure it is, but as a genuine question. For the record, let it be known throughout the land that I can take or leave TV, and left it for a four year stretch in undergrad, without missing it.
If you had a point, you wouldn't need to resort to personal insults.
Also, yes, the industrial revolution has had positive effects in the long run, and yes, it's better than feudalism. Neither of those change the fact that it ran on a heaping helping of laissez-faire capitalism, and it was utterly terrible for most people involved. And, again, I see that you haven't remotely dealt with the problem of the Gilded Age, where laissez-faire capitalism led directly to both horrific working conditions and huge monopolies.
Libertarianism looks good to you because, frankly, it's a ridiculously simplified model economy, with very little interaction with the real, dirty, complicated world, full of people who don't always logically pursue their greatest financial interest. It looks good and pure, because it's small enough to fit comfortably in a human mind all at once. So is communism. Neither of them work.
There's also the minor issue that, when one does nothing but "vote with one's dollar," the company has no way to know why. Or that without some sort of overarching organization, people find out about things that piss them off at different times, and so the relation of action to reaction is spread over time to the point that it, again, becomes completely opaque.
We've tried laissez-faire capitalism - it's called the Gilded Age, and it was TERRIBLE for 90% of the population. Previously, we tried it in Edwardian/Victorian Britain. It was horrible and soul-crushingly destructive then, too. Sensing a theme? Pure free market economies are no better an idea than communism, if somewhat more efficient at producing products.
This is a particularly bad argument when talking about cable TV - often, the consumer doesn't HAVE an alternative readily available; I can count the number of places I've been that offer multiple cable TV services on one hand, and I've lived places where satellite wasn't a real option because of geography or various out-of-my-control circumstances.
Corporations can act against our interests in a variety of ways without being immediately funded by those affected, particularly when a corporation has existed long enough and had enough pull to shape society or law in its favor. A good example is credit card companies - while there's no de jure requirement that I have one, if I don't build a credit history, I can't buy a house or car or get loans for school or...
Regardless, even if everything you said was correct, that's still a problem with Libertarianism, not with consumers. Because, well, any system that only works in the platonic world of perfect ideals is a stupid, worthless system, and not worth consideration in this, the real world.
No, it requires a people infinitely resourceful, a people infinitely knowledgable about the actions of the corporations (and parent companies and subsidiaries) they interact with, even tangentially, and a people that can make their primary activity "making purchasing decisions" rather than work, or raising a family, or anything that is actually central to a real human's life. Also, these mythical people would still need to build a solid method for communicating the reasons behind their purchasing decisions, en masse, to the companies. Making purchasing decisions based solely in a political manner isn't some beautiful, virtuous thing, and doing so based on your own needs isn't immoral.
People not only won't buy things and services primarily according to abstract principles and disagreements, they shouldn't have to. There's no reason why, when deciding what car to buy, I should have to do thirty hours worth of research to see if the company making my car purchases child-slaves in East Examplia and grinds them up for lubricant - the laws of my country (and the world) should make unethical behavior illegal. That's what laws and regulations are for.