The problem, I think, is that there are two forms of liberalism, conservative- and progressive liberalism. Where I live, and I believe in most European countries, the large liberal parties are all very conservative. I read a nice piece about this "negative" (focussing on the limits of ones' freedom) and "positive" (stressing what a person should be able to do instead of what he shouldn't) based on a piece by Isaiah Berlin somewhere, too bad it's in Dutch - the original author also explained that conservative and progressive liberalism both come from one of these.
To conclude: you're right, I do mean conservative ideology, but because of my own enviroment, I defined conservatism as liberalism, while there are other forms of liberalism as well. What I ment is indeed the ideology in support of a tiny little goverment, a sort of "Reaganism" (Reagan's an excellent example of a conservative liberal, I think, and his ideology is dominant in liberal/conservative circles around the world).
Indeed. Democracy and capitalism are not irrevocably bound together. One is a government type, the other is an economic system.
I do actually know that.. which is good, me being who I am. I just don't see what this has to do with it. I'm saying that the point of liberalism (liberal-democrats is, atleast where I live, the name for captilasms strongest supporters. You may be right that democracy and capitalism are in no way dependend of eachother, but liberal democrats want a democratic capitalism. That means the society they want is based on economics and the free market, and that means what I said is still right) is that it believes the market economy can regulate everything by itself with satisfactory results. How that free market came into being - be it by democratic elections or by a dictatorial goverment, doesn't matter here.
or even a democratic socialist system (like we haven't seen yet, as far as I know).
Depends on what kind of socialism. There's more to the socialist movement than just marxism, althought that's by far it''s most popular/known form. We've had a very left wing goverment here in Holland for some years (years ago, too), democratically chosen. Funny thing is it ended because a party necessary for a majority decided to build a coalition with the liberal party after months of negotiating. The joys of a multiple-party system (not saying I'd prefer one party, but I think a 3 party system as in the U.K. could work).
In other words, you're saying "You can't make capitalism work, that's against the rules! It's cheating!"
You might say it that way, although you're obviously trying to make it look childish. You can make capitalism work by regulating it, but the moment you do that, you don't have real capitalism anymore. The Reinland (German/French/Dutch/Scandinavian) variant of capitalism sometimes looks more like a socialist system.
You socialists are just pissy because you've never gotten the chance to see if your philosophy would really work. All of the world's "socialist" countries have really just been thinly-disguised dictatorships, parading under the banner of equality yet hoarding everything for a select few.
You're right - and that's why you can't judge socialism at the hand of examples such as the old Sovjet Union and Maoistic China, which many people do. Pure socialism has never been implemented on a large scale, so we don't know if it'd fail or not. Funny thing is, capitalism has been implemented, and depending on the criteria you judge it by (and possible depending on you're income:P), it either fails terribly or succeeds normally.
The funny (hilarious) thing is that you might never find out if your philosophy would work in the real world. Man has harnessed the awesome power of human greed, and in the current world climate there may be no turning back.
Hilarious. Ha-ha-ha! I also find it funny (hilarious) that you here say capitalism harnessed the "awesome power of human greed", and just a few sentences above, you denied that liberal-capitalistic society is about money.
You're saying that because there is no such things as a "pure" system, an unpure system is pure? What I ment to say is that a truely free market doesn't exist, exactly as you say, because it needs to be regulated. Liberalism (allot of liberals, that is) state that the goverment must not middle at all in the economic system. As we agree that its impossible to maintain an unregulated capitalism, I trust we also agree that that means those liberals are wrong: regulation is in fact necessary, and the free market is not a way to handle society an sich.
There is no natural concept of ownership of ideas. If there were, the constitution would not need a special section creating the artificial protection of intellectual works.
I agree! Yet, todays capitalism (the Anglosaxon variant) does require that everything (services, products, and ideas) can be sold. After all, it's whole point is that you should let the market govern everything, and that can't happen if you can't sell something... This requirement is why your constitution needs that special section to justify "intellectual property".
I don't believe the consultant was right.. don't know the correct word then.:P I ment one of them persons that's hired by a corp to tell it what it has to do with it's IT systems ("Linux would be best for you!":P).. I do actually know someone who does that for a living at Cap Gemini (small company, I believe.. dunno if it's international. Think they do chemistry stuff or something). You could argue that these people sell services, and not ideas, but if you look at it that way, leasing the use of an idea is (patent liscensing) is also a service, and so is thinking of something so others can use it. Shouldn't you be able to sell that?
A free market is based on the fundamental principles of mutual consent. AND on being able to market everything... is that a self contradiction in the system? Also (sort of offtopic), mutual consent doesn't exist in a lot of situations.. most of the time, the producer/seller of a good/service has more to say than it's consumer, who just has to go along.
Libertarian, I often disagree with other Libertarians about monopolies and the free market. Some hard line Libertarians do argue things similar to what you were saying.
Any idea why people in general consider unpaid work as unrewarding work? I bet that by the time you hit your 30s and after working yourself to death for your degree, you'll realize that it really sucks to live in a crappy apartment in a crime-infested neighbourhood, eat cheap beans every day and take your laundry to an all-night laundromat because you cannot afford any better.
Any idea in general why life without money can suck like that? Only because people are too selfish to look after eachother. Ever heared of welfare funds, btw? Here in Holland, stuff is arranged pretty good (that's gonna change, I'm afrad), so that even if you don't have the time to get a full-time job, you can still live very decently, and Holland's not unique. And where did you hear me say earning money is selfish? I'm just saying that it's way better to not only care about yourself, but about others too (I'm actually surprise you don't agree with me on that). The world really would be a better place if people'd do that, and you're argument that "the world is not perfect" doesn't mean that you can't try to make it a better place.
OMG! A genuine, bonafide socialist! It's been so long since I've seen one of you in the wild, I was starting to think you all had gone extinct.
I actually sometimes think we are extinct in what must be your natural habitat, the USA...
On topic:
You deny that liberal-democratic society is based entirely on economics and the market? That'd be interesting, because I've heared defenders of it's ideas say that that is in fact the case. You can be in favor for it, or you can oppose it, but I think there's little doubt that it's actually the case.
Anyhow, one of the neat (super-neat) things about Regulated Capitalism is that problems like this can be fixed without breaking the system.
Regulating capitalism IS breaking it's system, if you think about it. You should.
Because they are in fact not anti-free market. One necessity of a free market is the idea of "property" (which I *do* support to some extent, jk:P) - otherwise, how can you sell stuff? If you have to be able to sell stuff, that includes selling your ideas. You can think of a few professions that do nothing but "sell" ideas - IT consultants, for example. Patents cover ownership of an idea or product. Monopolies in itself are not anti-free market - it's just that we've called them that in our not-yet-entirely liberal state, to *guarantee* product quality. Remember Marx? His vision of the failing of capitalism actually involved the rise of huge monopolic companies. Perhaps the fact that we've limited the free market this way insured that Marx's economic predictions didn't become a reality. Need to think on that.:P
The world is not a perfect place. In this case you can choose from two alternatives: 1) you encourage drug research by allowing the companies to make profit, thus saving at least some lives, or 2) you take the idealistic no-profit course, slowly kill the drug industry, the poor people AND the people who otherwise could have afforded to pay for the drugs and survive.
As I stated, there's a nice way 'in between': exactly what researchers in this article are doing. Ensure that everything stays public domain, and take only the money you really need for research, and a moderate reward for yourselves (50% split over all researchers, with allot of the profit going to drug distributers isn't allot, I think). If I have my way, this shouldn't be neccesary, but well, I don't have it my way.:P
ware development and drug research. Well, it just doesn't work like that in the latter case. Software is ideas. Drugs are concrete. You have personnel costs (or would you be willing to work for free?)
In fact I would. That is if accomodations etc. would be granted, I need those, obviously, but for something like this, I'd work for free if I had the know-how. I think that's exactly the problem: people have come to see unpayed work as unrewarded work, while that's definatly not the same. It should be a major reward to know you helped people get over SARS.
Ah-ha? And where does the cure come from if research doesn't get funding from the sales?
And let those who can't pay for it die? Survival of the fittest, social darwinism (that is *not* just naziism), woohoo. I think we shouldn't go there.
I can tell you were funding partly *should* come from... goverment funding, and resources given freely by companies, because those should see that finding a cure and keeping it cheap is more important than making a profit.
Of course, that doesn't happen in the US, and the company bit doesn't happen allot elsewhere, either. But fortunatly, this article states that they'll keep 50% of the money to do more research with. You can say allot, but that is actually enough. I personally think it's sad that it's necessary to do it this way.
The principles are that wrong. You see, the princples of the free market as taught by neo-conservative/liberal groups (think ideological followers of Reagan & Thatcher, such as those in the current Bush administration) mean that everything should be seen and handled as a market process, because in the end, this would be the best for all (low prices + high quality) and more importantly: because you should be able to get payed for everything someone else wants. If you look at it that way (and I don't!), is it that wrong to patent a gene? After all, you worked for it's discovery, it's only fair that you own it and get a reward for what you did...
Of course it is nonsense that we have to patent genes this days to ensure that they remain public domain, after all, everyone should care more that a cure is available to all who need it, but as you can see, handling these princples, it's a perfectly ok thing to do. That means those principles can't be right.
But you're right in some way: we must have lost all common sense to chose leaders who think this way.:)
No patent? Err... have you read the article? It's about someone patenting the genome to prevent less noble groups from doing that, as:
m$-like farmaceutic company's patent = high prices = much money = rich researchers + little more money for research = dead poor poople who can't avord the expensive cures, as is happening nowdays with 'cures' for AIDS...
It seems to me that politics and the likes has lost perspective.
Is there not a problem in society when somebody is patenting a gene to keep in the free market? I am glad that they are doing it, but I see a bigger problem.
Lost perspective? Perhaps. But things like these are the perfectly rational consequence of creating a society in which everything's about producing, selling, and buying. If you believe in a society like that, it *is* only normal that you can patent genes, for example. Politics the last two decades or so hast willingly steared to a society like this - with the consent of the largest part of the world's population, so IMHO this is not a question of having lost perspective in politics, but simply of politics based on wrong principles.
It shouldn't be that hard filtering out the RIAA's app's - using MD5 checksums (for example) you could easily identify an app you know is malicous. Developers could maintain an online database of malicious checksums, and add to it if new apps are released, for example. Nothing RIAA could do against that, as far as I can see, that'd be perfectly legal. It shouldn't be hard to make a network that filters out corrupt files from your searches, either. I believe Overnet already has some sort of file identifying system working this way.
Problem might be, there's no network out there that can do that, yet, and unless someone at Kazaa or Morpheus suddenly decides it might be a good idea to release the source code of their apps, it might take a long time, too.
Fortunatly of course, it'll be a long time before they discover there are actually other OS's out there then Windows and start compiling for *nix/Linux/etc.;)
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The problem, I think, is that there are two forms of liberalism, conservative- and progressive liberalism. Where I live, and I believe in most European countries, the large liberal parties are all very conservative. I read a nice piece about this "negative" (focussing on the limits of ones' freedom) and "positive" (stressing what a person should be able to do instead of what he shouldn't) based on a piece by Isaiah Berlin somewhere, too bad it's in Dutch - the original author also explained that conservative and progressive liberalism both come from one of these.
To conclude: you're right, I do mean conservative ideology, but because of my own enviroment, I defined conservatism as liberalism, while there are other forms of liberalism as well. What I ment is indeed the ideology in support of a tiny little goverment, a sort of "Reaganism" (Reagan's an excellent example of a conservative liberal, I think, and his ideology is dominant in liberal/conservative circles around the world).
Indeed. Democracy and capitalism are not irrevocably bound together. One is a government type, the other is an economic system.
:P), it either fails terribly or succeeds normally.
I do actually know that.. which is good, me being who I am. I just don't see what this has to do with it. I'm saying that the point of liberalism (liberal-democrats is, atleast where I live, the name for captilasms strongest supporters. You may be right that democracy and capitalism are in no way dependend of eachother, but liberal democrats want a democratic capitalism. That means the society they want is based on economics and the free market, and that means what I said is still right) is that it believes the market economy can regulate everything by itself with satisfactory results. How that free market came into being - be it by democratic elections or by a dictatorial goverment, doesn't matter here.
or even a democratic socialist system (like we haven't seen yet, as far as I know).
Depends on what kind of socialism. There's more to the socialist movement than just marxism, althought that's by far it''s most popular/known form. We've had a very left wing goverment here in Holland for some years (years ago, too), democratically chosen. Funny thing is it ended because a party necessary for a majority decided to build a coalition with the liberal party after months of negotiating. The joys of a multiple-party system (not saying I'd prefer one party, but I think a 3 party system as in the U.K. could work).
In other words, you're saying "You can't make capitalism work, that's against the rules! It's cheating!"
You might say it that way, although you're obviously trying to make it look childish. You can make capitalism work by regulating it, but the moment you do that, you don't have real capitalism anymore. The Reinland (German/French/Dutch/Scandinavian) variant of capitalism sometimes looks more like a socialist system.
You socialists are just pissy because you've never gotten the chance to see if your philosophy would really work. All of the world's "socialist" countries have really just been thinly-disguised dictatorships, parading under the banner of equality yet hoarding everything for a select few.
You're right - and that's why you can't judge socialism at the hand of examples such as the old Sovjet Union and Maoistic China, which many people do. Pure socialism has never been implemented on a large scale, so we don't know if it'd fail or not. Funny thing is, capitalism has been implemented, and depending on the criteria you judge it by (and possible depending on you're income
The funny (hilarious) thing is that you might never find out if your philosophy would work in the real world. Man has harnessed the awesome power of human greed, and in the current world climate there may be no turning back.
Hilarious. Ha-ha-ha! I also find it funny (hilarious) that you here say capitalism harnessed the "awesome power of human greed", and just a few sentences above, you denied that liberal-capitalistic society is about money.
You're saying that because there is no such things as a "pure" system, an unpure system is pure? What I ment to say is that a truely free market doesn't exist, exactly as you say, because it needs to be regulated. Liberalism (allot of liberals, that is) state that the goverment must not middle at all in the economic system. As we agree that its impossible to maintain an unregulated capitalism, I trust we also agree that that means those liberals are wrong: regulation is in fact necessary, and the free market is not a way to handle society an sich.
There is no natural concept of ownership of ideas. If there were, the constitution would not need a special section creating the artificial protection of intellectual works.
:P I ment one of them persons that's hired by a corp to tell it what it has to do with it's IT systems ("Linux would be best for you!" :P).. I do actually know someone who does that for a living at Cap Gemini (small company, I believe.. dunno if it's international. Think they do chemistry stuff or something). You could argue that these people sell services, and not ideas, but if you look at it that way, leasing the use of an idea is (patent liscensing) is also a service, and so is thinking of something so others can use it. Shouldn't you be able to sell that?
:)
I agree! Yet, todays capitalism (the Anglosaxon variant) does require that everything (services, products, and ideas) can be sold. After all, it's whole point is that you should let the market govern everything, and that can't happen if you can't sell something... This requirement is why your constitution needs that special section to justify "intellectual property".
I don't believe the consultant was right.. don't know the correct word then.
A free market is based on the fundamental principles of mutual consent. AND on being able to market everything... is that a self contradiction in the system? Also (sort of offtopic), mutual consent doesn't exist in a lot of situations.. most of the time, the producer/seller of a good/service has more to say than it's consumer, who just has to go along.
Libertarian, I often disagree with other Libertarians about monopolies and the free market. Some hard line Libertarians do argue things similar to what you were saying.
I know, even though I'm far from a Libertarian.
I doubt you would
You don't know me.
Any idea why people in general consider unpaid work as unrewarding work? I bet that by the time you hit your 30s and after working yourself to death for your degree, you'll realize that it really sucks to live in a crappy apartment in a crime-infested neighbourhood, eat cheap beans every day and take your laundry to an all-night laundromat because you cannot afford any better.
Any idea in general why life without money can suck like that? Only because people are too selfish to look after eachother. Ever heared of welfare funds, btw? Here in Holland, stuff is arranged pretty good (that's gonna change, I'm afrad), so that even if you don't have the time to get a full-time job, you can still live very decently, and Holland's not unique. And where did you hear me say earning money is selfish? I'm just saying that it's way better to not only care about yourself, but about others too (I'm actually surprise you don't agree with me on that). The world really would be a better place if people'd do that, and you're argument that "the world is not perfect" doesn't mean that you can't try to make it a better place.
OMG! A genuine, bonafide socialist! It's been so long since I've seen one of you in the wild, I was starting to think you all had gone extinct.
I actually sometimes think we are extinct in what must be your natural habitat, the USA...
On topic:
You deny that liberal-democratic society is based entirely on economics and the market? That'd be interesting, because I've heared defenders of it's ideas say that that is in fact the case. You can be in favor for it, or you can oppose it, but I think there's little doubt that it's actually the case.
Anyhow, one of the neat (super-neat) things about Regulated Capitalism is that problems like this can be fixed without breaking the system.
Regulating capitalism IS breaking it's system, if you think about it. You should.
Because they are in fact not anti-free market. One necessity of a free market is the idea of "property" (which I *do* support to some extent, jk :P) - otherwise, how can you sell stuff? If you have to be able to sell stuff, that includes selling your ideas. You can think of a few professions that do nothing but "sell" ideas - IT consultants, for example. Patents cover ownership of an idea or product. Monopolies in itself are not anti-free market - it's just that we've called them that in our not-yet-entirely liberal state, to *guarantee* product quality. Remember Marx? His vision of the failing of capitalism actually involved the rise of huge monopolic companies. Perhaps the fact that we've limited the free market this way insured that Marx's economic predictions didn't become a reality. Need to think on that. :P
The world is not a perfect place. In this case you can choose from two alternatives: 1) you encourage drug research by allowing the companies to make profit, thus saving at least some lives, or 2) you take the idealistic no-profit course, slowly kill the drug industry, the poor people AND the people who otherwise could have afforded to pay for the drugs and survive.
:P
As I stated, there's a nice way 'in between': exactly what researchers in this article are doing. Ensure that everything stays public domain, and take only the money you really need for research, and a moderate reward for yourselves (50% split over all researchers, with allot of the profit going to drug distributers isn't allot, I think). If I have my way, this shouldn't be neccesary, but well, I don't have it my way.
ware development and drug research. Well, it just doesn't work like that in the latter case. Software is ideas. Drugs are concrete. You have personnel costs (or would you be willing to work for free?)
In fact I would. That is if accomodations etc. would be granted, I need those, obviously, but for something like this, I'd work for free if I had the know-how. I think that's exactly the problem: people have come to see unpayed work as unrewarded work, while that's definatly not the same. It should be a major reward to know you helped people get over SARS.
Ah-ha? And where does the cure come from if research doesn't get funding from the sales?
And let those who can't pay for it die? Survival of the fittest, social darwinism (that is *not* just naziism), woohoo. I think we shouldn't go there.
I can tell you were funding partly *should* come from... goverment funding, and resources given freely by companies, because those should see that finding a cure and keeping it cheap is more important than making a profit.
Of course, that doesn't happen in the US, and the company bit doesn't happen allot elsewhere, either. But fortunatly, this article states that they'll keep 50% of the money to do more research with. You can say allot, but that is actually enough. I personally think it's sad that it's necessary to do it this way.
The principles are that wrong. You see, the princples of the free market as taught by neo-conservative/liberal groups (think ideological followers of Reagan & Thatcher, such as those in the current Bush administration) mean that everything should be seen and handled as a market process, because in the end, this would be the best for all (low prices + high quality) and more importantly: because you should be able to get payed for everything someone else wants. If you look at it that way (and I don't!), is it that wrong to patent a gene? After all, you worked for it's discovery, it's only fair that you own it and get a reward for what you did...
:)
Of course it is nonsense that we have to patent genes this days to ensure that they remain public domain, after all, everyone should care more that a cure is available to all who need it, but as you can see, handling these princples, it's a perfectly ok thing to do. That means those principles can't be right.
But you're right in some way: we must have lost all common sense to chose leaders who think this way.
No patent? Err... have you read the article? It's about someone patenting the genome to prevent less noble groups from doing that, as:
m$-like farmaceutic company's patent = high prices = much money = rich researchers + little more money for research = dead poor poople who can't avord the expensive cures, as is happening nowdays with 'cures' for AIDS...
behaviour that's both principled and commercially astute.
:P
Is that an oxymoron?
It seems to me that politics and the likes has lost perspective. Is there not a problem in society when somebody is patenting a gene to keep in the free market? I am glad that they are doing it, but I see a bigger problem. Lost perspective? Perhaps. But things like these are the perfectly rational consequence of creating a society in which everything's about producing, selling, and buying. If you believe in a society like that, it *is* only normal that you can patent genes, for example. Politics the last two decades or so hast willingly steared to a society like this - with the consent of the largest part of the world's population, so IMHO this is not a question of having lost perspective in politics, but simply of politics based on wrong principles.
Ehm, to clarify: I ment "what exactly could be patented?". Like, individual apps, or app ideas, or software frameworks, etc?
Can someone explain what the effect of introducing patents will be? In normal English please, not Legalese. :)
It shouldn't be that hard filtering out the RIAA's app's - using MD5 checksums (for example) you could easily identify an app you know is malicous. Developers could maintain an online database of malicious checksums, and add to it if new apps are released, for example. Nothing RIAA could do against that, as far as I can see, that'd be perfectly legal. It shouldn't be hard to make a network that filters out corrupt files from your searches, either. I believe Overnet already has some sort of file identifying system working this way. Problem might be, there's no network out there that can do that, yet, and unless someone at Kazaa or Morpheus suddenly decides it might be a good idea to release the source code of their apps, it might take a long time, too. Fortunatly of course, it'll be a long time before they discover there are actually other OS's out there then Windows and start compiling for *nix/Linux/etc. ;)
Woohoo - run Apache and OpenOffice on your housekeeper! :P
Seriously, I wonder what use this... you don't need *mobile* network gateways that actually *think*, do you?