Hey, you're the first to mention the concept for which I was looking, so you get the reply:
The only way out is lots of wealth creation to raise everyone's standard of living, but it's not happening.
This is correct, in my opinion. The big myth - which was not cited in the article - is that you can actually maintain an economy with high standard of living based on "high value" services alone. The key to an economy is really its ability to produce wealth - hard, physical, tangible goods that, as you said, actually raise the standard of living of that society's citizens. All the dentists and doctors in the world cannot help you if you don't have good tools, good infrastructure, or even good food.
I remember from one of my early economics classes that the only wealth-producing endeavours known are agriculture and manufacturing - the rest of economic activity just shuffles that wealth around.
If the economy of a country switches to being service-based, it is then a slave to the actual wealth-producing nations, because if the nations that have the wealth no longer need or want the services, with what is the service-based economy left? The reason the US economy used to be so robust is it had a good balance between service and wealth production. The shift away from producing wealth locally (I don't mean by ownership, I mean physically) is probably a greater risk than most are able to recognize.
This is probably picking nits to the extreme, but it is still the coder which instantiates the bug. There's probably an interesting philosophical discussion that could be had regarding "if a bug isn't actually coded, but it would be a bug if it was, is it sill a bug?"
Also, that's one danger in commoditizing coders. When coders do not have neither the skills nor responsibility to sanity check designs these types of problems can rise all the time.
That said, it is true that most bugs are actually probably what I call "communications failure" bugs - poor requirements, misunderstood requirements, design flaws, etc. rather than simply "oh crap, I got that plus sign backwards" bugs.
Actually, a blanket cannot warm you just as a gas cannot warm you.
What both can do, incidentally, is keep you warm. A blanket just keeps your metabolic waste energy trapped close to you as warmth. Various gases just keep solar energy trapped close to the planet longer.
The problem isn't so much 'bringing the information to them' but 'bringing the information to them in a way that doesn't take too much time away from meeting their basic needs'. This is why improving the base quality of living is so important.
Here's a for instance. Let's say that a child in some part of the world has 16 waking hours a day, and it takes 12 of those to get food, clean water, etc. This means that there are 4 hours left for education. I am not convinced that a person can learn more in 4 hours from a computer than they can learn in 4 hours from more tranditional means. However, if you give them some kind of automated washing machine, or refrigeration so they can store food, so they only need to spend 8 hours getting food and clean clothes, you have doubled the amount of time available for education - and I'm quite convinced that you can learn more in 8 hours than you can in 4 hours (all else being equal, of course).
Now, having a computer might make it possible to learn more per unit time, because, for instance, if there is only a single book people have to share, so some time is wasted. Electronic copies could mean more people can look at the same material in a given period of time, but I'm still not convinced that it will help speed up the learning process. But I don't think that has anything to do with the rate of learning, but just with the availability issue, as you mentioned. The problem I think isn't that "villiages" don't have enough books - it's that they don't have *any* books. Here's a for-instance: instead of spending time to ship the laptops into the area, why not spend the time to ship in books? Unless the licenses (ugh, I hate that word) for the educational material are very inexpensive, and can easily be brought to the "villiages", I think books are just as viable an alternative. Books tend to last longer, too, and don't suffer from "what format is that in" syndrome either.
As a final note, is anyone aware of studies that show the relative rate of learning using traditional means versus with electronic presentation?
Am I the only person that things quoting sales growth in monetary units is, at best, misleading? Because of things like exchange rates and inflation, I really dislike that the media is always posting information about "sales grew by $X from the period last year."
I would *much* rather see things in quantity of units, like the auto industry: they quote sales in number of vehicles, and they quote monetary units separately. This way, it's easy to tell the health of the industry versus the health of the individual companies (if a company sold more cars, but its revenue and/or profit fell, that's a serious issue - where if a company sold fewer cars and profit rose, that is a different story).
So, what about games? The linked article only talks about monetary units, not real goods sold, so it's very difficult to really get a grasp on the point of the article...at least "industry sales were $X on N million units, versus $Y on M million units last year" would be helpful. Just for fun, throw in population growth too...is it just tracking population growth?
The moon has an orbital radius of 384,400 km. The radius of Earth is 6370 km. If you want to try and see the lander bits we left, they are probably on the scale of 2 meters.
From the surface of Earth: 2 meters at a distance of 378,030 km subtend an angle of 5.29 x 10^-9 radians. The angular resolution of the human eye is about 1/60 of a degree, or 2.91 x 10^-4 radians.
So, just build yourself a telescope with a 55000X magnification and you should be all set.
Regarding theft of services, I mis-spoke my idea there and clarified what I meant in another response in this thread.
Regarding your discussion on the elasticity of the supply curves: let's look at your example:
Yet you are saying that once a certain level of demand has been met, people experiencing the work for free does not deprive anyone of anything. Whether or not they pay for the product, the supply is unchanged. This represents a completely inelastic supply curve where artists supply the same creative output regardless of the compensation they receive for their works.
The trouble here is that the curve really is very strange and does not follow traditional curves. The problem is, I think, in how you define "supply" and "demand". In the case of easily duplicatable information (which is all a recording is any more), supply is now the original work, not the copies! Think of supply as, rather than number of copies of songs, number of unique (performances of) songs. I think if you look at the markets in that way, rather than number of records sold, that the picture looks more like the traditional supply and demand curves and the seeming paradox about elasticity should go away.
In general I do not disagree with your comments; they are a result of a combination of me poorly communicating my ideas and some likely poor ideas. Some specifics (briefly this time):
I did not mean to say that distributors did not add value; their existence shows that they do add value. What I meant to say is that if I'm a distributor, the fact that I'm distributing something doesn't mean that people have to buy from me. However, I believe the concept of selling "non-real" goods is a bit fuzzy. For instance, charging for already-performed services (i.e., recorded art like music or programming) is an odd concept, even though our society is based around it.
What I meant by "you can't steal a service" I suppose depends on the situation. You could have the reverse of your situation: I pay you, I get a service, done. The situation you described: You give a service, then I pay you (or not) means that you either made a poor or wise investment. That is, you performed a service hoping for something of value in return that was greater than what you gave up to perform the service. There really is no guarantee that this will happen (in an economic sense - from a moral sense, I think I now see what you mean by 'entitlement' being a moral concern) - just as when I give you money first, I don't have any guarantee that I will be satisfied with the service you perform. However, I think this is all somewhat tangential.
I agree that the consideration of how much compensation an artist thinks will be received from a given work does play into the decision to perform that work or do something else. However, once that work is done, the artist cannot 'unperform' it. If the estimate in compensation was incorrect, that just means that the artist is a poor investor. In the instance of something like a concert, where the recipients pay first, the reverse is true. For something like making an album, however, there is cost involved with the recording and distribution processes - these is the investment risk of the artist, publisher, and distributor. There is no guarantee that all the bits of recording will be purchased. So if people are listenging to a recording - or a re-recording, that doesn't bear anything on the initial investment from an economic standpoint. It just falls into the realm of morality, which was not the focus of my original comment.
You're kind of on the right philosophical track here. Here's my take on the discussion (again):
1) Things like software and music are not scarce resources. They can be reproduced almost indefinitely with almost no effort.
2) People like artists and programmers are scarce resources. There is a finite supply.
3) If enough people pay an artist or programmer for producing something so that the artist or programmer keeps producing, it does not matter how many people experience the work of art without paying the artist because the work is already produced and the use of the work does not deprive anyone of anything.
The idea that an artist (or, worse yet, a distributor) is entitled to payment for anything is a serious economic faux pas. For instance, I can sit in my room and sing original songs all night, heck I can even do it on the street corner, but I'm not entitled to receive compensation for it. If people want me to keep doing that, I'll ask for payment so I can stop my current job and do that. Otherwise, they won't get my performance. The same thing applies with software: if I write a game in my spare time, say it takes me 500 man-hours over the course of a year. If folks want me to make another game but in 6 months, I'd have to ask for compensation because I can't spend that much time and keep my current job.
Now, if I invest a bunch of money, quit my job and make a game and try to sell it - if people do not pay me for the game they do not value it, so I will be forced to do something else to make ends meet. It doesn't have anythign to do with theft at all, because it is impossible to steal a service, which is what programming and other forms of "art" are. Now, you can steal a painting because that is a scarce good, but you cannot steal the image itself.
Anyway I'm starting to ramble, so that's all for now.
It's also not apples-to-apples because there is no way, in the tests that were performed, to separate out the merits of the format itself from the merits of the data on those formats, which are two completely different things.
The other interesting thing is that some features, such as the bookmarks for scenes, have nothing whatever to do with the medium on which the information is stored but just what the media packagers and media players want to do with various bits of information on that media.
However, as others have correctly noted, the problem here is that people do not evaluate things based on technical merit, but only on the experience they get from something. Unfortunately there is no way to get around this. Probably the most disturbing thing is that the author of the article, while noting in several places that there were certain differences in HDMI outputs, etc., failed to adequately describe the differences in the things he was analyzing.
Perhaps they should also require Advanced Economics.
'Waste' doesn't necessarily equate with price or cost. For instance, it is profoundly wasteful that, for instance, in the US we have non-refillable containers for just about every food product we purchase. This is very inexpensive, but is very wasteful - there is no technical reason why a store could not have a sanitary 2-liter filling station where you just take the same bottle over and over to obtain your beverage of choice. This would actually be less expensive in the long run, but it would cost people who make bottles their jobs, etc. etc.
Again, remember that cost does not necessarily match with waste. In fact, generally less expensive alternatives cost less than their less-wasteful alternatives - at the initial investment stage. However, the long-term costs are always lower with less waste.
What's really interesting is that if I open a restaraunt, and a guy next door opens a restaraunt, and people like the food and/or service of the guy next door better, my restaraunt will "suffer losses."
I do not think that "suffering losses" means what people think it means...
Interesting question about tree-dating: has anyone intentionally altered the conditions around a tree to verify that the changes cause the expected effects, or is it just looking at local temperatures and correlating them with tree behaviour? (Kudos if this is how the dating method was verified, I'm just not that familiar with it).
As a scientist myself, I'm much more interested about predictive theories than descriptive theories. So far, I think climatology is just a descriptive theory - coming up with a fit for existing data - mostly because we don't (yet) have the ability to change the inputs with sufficient control to do true tests.
Indeed; someone walking through an open door is vastly different than a device generating and/or responding to varying electromagnetic fields at the location of the device.
Now, I can't say that I have any idea how to appropriately suggest social conventions (i.e. laws) to determine how to coordinate the response of a server to various inputs. That is, if I have a single "server" and two clients, the server can only listen on, say, 1.5 GHz, and there are two clients, the server will communicate with the signal with the best signal to noise ratio. That's the interesting difference between wireless and wired communications: wireless can only really respond to signals, not the device(s) which generate the signals. Once you acknowledge that distinction, it becomes clear that there is no real way to distinguish clients with omnidirectional communications (if you have directional wireless comms, you can use the location as a filter). Remember, a wireless server only knows if the EM field at its antenna is doing what it needs to do to get the server to generate other EM fields in some pattern; it has no way to know if there is an authorized computer, an alien, or some guy with a very fast, accurate potentiometer is on the other end.
Something profound to consider when it comes to authentication: no authentication mechanism in the world can really determine if the person providing that method is really authorized to do whatever that authentication method protects; authorization methods can only determine if the authorization is correct. A simple example: A traditional lock cannot tell if a person is allowed to open a door or not, it can only tell if the tumblers have moved into the correct positions to allow the cylinder to rotate - it cannot tell if the person putting the tumblers in that position should be allowed to do so.
Ah, I think I may have to revise my statement about governments "doing whatever the people give them power to do".
I'm not sure I understand how your hypothetical situation of socialized medicine, free market arbitration, no property rights has anything to do with the idea that government arbitrates between disputes or is called upon to arbitrate disputes.
Your hypothetical situation sounds pretty good, but you absolutely hit the nail on the head when you said
...so when you come to us trying to impose your arbitration and keep us off your land, we ask to see the contract we signed saying we would do stay off. Funny, I don't remember signing that, and as I don't believe in property, who are you to force your beliefs on me?
This situation shows a dispute between two groups of people: you, who don't think the other group "owns" the land in question, and the other group who claims they do and doesn't want you there. Without a third party this situtation is only resolved by A) the people not wanting you on the land forcibly convince you to move or B) They aren't willing to forcibly remove you (or are unable to make you uncomfortable enough to leave) so give up and let you stay. With a third party (government) there are added options: The third party puts in place some conditions on the situation which will either C) be successful because that third party is able to enforce those conditions or D) devolve into A or B because that third party does not have the means to enforce those conditions.
Note, however, that C can be successful for a combination of two reasons: 1. The third party has sufficient ability to enforce the agreement by, er, force; or 2. You and the people who want your land are willing to agree by the conditions the third party set forth.
To include what was said in the sibling post, the idea of a government as an "insurer" is that it sounds like people are willing to give a third party certain resources with the understanding that the third party will use their resources to be able to be strong enough to enforce terms when one of the parties involved in a dispute does not want to voluntarily comply with the terms.
So, how does your little hypothetical group fit in? Perfectly - they can either build up enough resources to maintain their desired way of life themselves, or give resources to another group to maintain that way of life in exchange for certain conditions that group sets up to generally avoid situations where groups resort to destructive means of conflict resolution.
You said that there is "folly [in] deciding for others what government should mean" but this is exactly what every form of government on the planet does, is it not? I think, in closing, when it comes to governments: get strong enough yourself to be one, or help one of your choosing be strong enough to maintain its rules (and hope those rules are the ones you want). There really is no middle ground, unfortunately. Remember, a contract is only as good as either the strongest person or organization with an interest in the object of the contract or the willingness of the involved parties to adhere to the contract.
Ah, I think I like your terminology. I think it better describes what I was trying to convey. It also ties in nicely with the reply I can now better make to the poster above you.
Interestingly enough, you say that "philosophical 'should'-ing...should always be dismissed until the points so made are affirmitvely proven." But I believe your examples of the Romans, medieval Christians, and Chinese do help support my point that
Most of the flavors of government are because of differences of opinion on how to make a decision in arbitration, or what type or extent of force to use.
You just gave examples of the criteria by which various societies based their decisions on how and when to use force, which does not contradict my assertions about the purpose of government. Note that I make a distinction between purpose and goals, because those things might be different. I should note, though, that just because your observations do no contradict my assertion does not make my assertion true; however, I have yet to see evidence that the purpose of government is anything other than to forcibly arbitrate disputes.
I will agree that there is evidence that organizations known as governments today do much more than simply arbitrate disputes, so perhaps the definition has grown to encompass those features. However, I think those 'expansions' are not unique to governments; there are many organizations that are not governments which provide social and economic programs, for instance.
I also think it is very dangerous to say that a government is "supposed to do whatever those that give the government power want it to do". While that is a very attractive philosophy in our modern society, I believe that simply causes governments to lose their ability to effectively arbitrate disputes: being fickle tends to reduce credibility.
Anyway, this has been an interesting discussion, and it is at times like this I wish this forum was a little more condusive to this type of discourse. I actually do not mind the challenge to my assertions, because if those assertions are found to be weak I want to change them to whatever is really true.
Now I wonder...is there a way to transfer this little thread over to the Politics section?
The parent is almost right, and the quote from the grandparent is indeed misinformed. Incidentally, the grandparent's sentiment is partly why the governments we have are the way they are: because we have forgotten the true purpose of a government, and it is simply this: provide an institution with the means to enforce arbitration between disputing parties (including both internal and external disputes). That is the sole fundamental purpose of government. Most of the flavors of government are because of differences of opinion on how to make a decision in arbitration, or what type or extent of force to use. However, whenever a government starts acting beyond that capacity, it's not necessarily a bad thing, but it's not really performing the fundamental purpose of a government any longer.
Now, social programs and "state research" are good things, but in my opinion this is not really the role of the government. In fact, I believe that large populations would set up foundations for social and research programs anyway (we have evidence of the private investors over the centuries, including this one, that are more often the driving force behind innovation rather than state agencies - except where that innovation was at some point related to the primary role of government through military activity). I believe that, if the government let the private interests develop and was only involved in mediating disputes, advances could happen much faster than they do when they are burdened by political ramifications of spending tax dollars.
Half your income for food and rent is not that outrageous - although living in a barracks is probably a little rough. It would be much more informative to indicate the median and average incomes of women in China is - it's probably less than $50/month.
Also, an interesting comparison: If you make minimum wage in the US, that's a gross of around $11,000 per year - or just over $900 a month (I used 48 working weeks of 40 hours for annual income of $11040 at minimum wage of $5.75). I don't know where you live, but rent and food and utilities for a single person can easily come up to $450 per month, and that's not counting taxes (although, if your AGI is only $11k, taxes are fairly low). So, relatively speaking, there are people in *this* country that are in no better condition, except perhaps we don't have many company-owned barracks-style housing projects.
This is an interesting question though, and the real question is along the lines of "Is it better to have jobs and housing that is less than high-income countries but better than nothing, or should you leave them without any jobs at all?" I feel it's more constructive to look at methods of improving standard of living other than creating factory jobs, but right now that's what we've got - because most people in rich countries already have enough food, so providing people farmland and irrigation resources does not result in something for which the rich are willing to trade - but the rich are willing to trade for things like entertainment devices and low-cost daily items.
Anyway, I don't think this is a unique issue to Apple, only it's more sensational to post stories about well-known consumer brands. Remember, most media outlets are about making money and providing entertainment, not really providing useful information to generate social change. (I did say "most" not "all" - some outlets really do try to change things, but those aren't the ones you typically hear discussed around the water cooler.)
So, whose responsibility is it to ensure that a person is safe when working on a piece of industrial equipment? Sure, it makes sense to put in a certain amount of fail-safe procedures. But who is ultimately responsible? I still think it *must* be the person who failed to observe procedures. I would not be opposed to a legal system which said that safety equipment only had to be in place to prevent problems when people were operating the device in accordance with established procedures. The reason for this is that it is probably provable that any system can be used in a way which could circumvent its safety features and result in personal or property damage.
The other side of placing the responsibility on other people is that in making other people responsible you give up some bit of freedom. If I don't have the choice to decide if a procedure is safe or not because I'm told that a device is "safe" and I must do something, that is a problem. I would rather have a "dangerous" piece of equipment and the personal responsibility to decide if it is safe or not and, if I put myself into a dangerous situation, well then that is my own fault.
If you read the article, it's clear that each server isn't limited to three users: it means that the system is such that the number of peak users divided by the number of servers is 3. I'm sure that they have more than three users in a given 16-acre area at any given time. (16 acres is fairly large, actually).
I just realized this is another case which demonstrates the fundamental political issue here in the US: responsibility versus freedom. The reason legislation like this is even considered is because people don't want to have to make the decision themselves to decide what is good or bad regarding some particular topic: video games, marriage, stock options, where tax dollars get spent. They just throw it up the ladder and say "hey leaders, make this decision for us."
The problem with this, though, is that in throwing that decision up the ladder, freedom to make that decision or similar decisions in the future is lost. People in this country are yelling about losing their freedom (DMCA, PATRIOT, etc.) yet they have been asking to lose their freedom for decades by saying "you be responsible for this!"
The fundamental concept here, and it has been proven by history, is this: in order to have freedom, you must have personal responsibility. If you don't want to have responsibility for actions, then you give up your ability to make decisions for yourself. If you want any "leadership entity" (government, bosses at work, religious organization, whatever) telling you what to buy, what you should like and what you shouldn't, what you should fear and what you should embrace - you have lost your freedom.
Incidentally, in this particular issue, the root issue is *not* what is portrated in entertainment media, but the social situation of the individuals who are exposed to that entertainment media.
It's quite simple: you open-source the game, then simply tell everyone who plays it (perhaps on the title screen or whatever) that if they want more games like this from you, send a donation; otherwise you'll have to use up your time doing something that does pay you so you can eat, have a house, etc. which might mean that society will not see more games from you.
If society values your efforts and talents enough, they will compensate you; if they don't, then you will need to choose if you will continue to spend your free time making games and giving them away without compensation or change what you do in your free time.
Economics really isn't that difficult when you realize that there is really no obligation for society to compensate you for your creative efforts unless you were contracted to exert that effort.
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Hey, you're the first to mention the concept for which I was looking, so you get the reply:
This is correct, in my opinion. The big myth - which was not cited in the article - is that you can actually maintain an economy with high standard of living based on "high value" services alone. The key to an economy is really its ability to produce wealth - hard, physical, tangible goods that, as you said, actually raise the standard of living of that society's citizens. All the dentists and doctors in the world cannot help you if you don't have good tools, good infrastructure, or even good food.
I remember from one of my early economics classes that the only wealth-producing endeavours known are agriculture and manufacturing - the rest of economic activity just shuffles that wealth around.
If the economy of a country switches to being service-based, it is then a slave to the actual wealth-producing nations, because if the nations that have the wealth no longer need or want the services, with what is the service-based economy left? The reason the US economy used to be so robust is it had a good balance between service and wealth production. The shift away from producing wealth locally (I don't mean by ownership, I mean physically) is probably a greater risk than most are able to recognize.
This is probably picking nits to the extreme, but it is still the coder which instantiates the bug. There's probably an interesting philosophical discussion that could be had regarding "if a bug isn't actually coded, but it would be a bug if it was, is it sill a bug?"
Also, that's one danger in commoditizing coders. When coders do not have neither the skills nor responsibility to sanity check designs these types of problems can rise all the time.
That said, it is true that most bugs are actually probably what I call "communications failure" bugs - poor requirements, misunderstood requirements, design flaws, etc. rather than simply "oh crap, I got that plus sign backwards" bugs.
Actually, a blanket cannot warm you just as a gas cannot warm you.
What both can do, incidentally, is keep you warm. A blanket just keeps your metabolic waste energy trapped close to you as warmth. Various gases just keep solar energy trapped close to the planet longer.
The problem isn't so much 'bringing the information to them' but 'bringing the information to them in a way that doesn't take too much time away from meeting their basic needs'. This is why improving the base quality of living is so important.
Here's a for instance. Let's say that a child in some part of the world has 16 waking hours a day, and it takes 12 of those to get food, clean water, etc. This means that there are 4 hours left for education. I am not convinced that a person can learn more in 4 hours from a computer than they can learn in 4 hours from more tranditional means. However, if you give them some kind of automated washing machine, or refrigeration so they can store food, so they only need to spend 8 hours getting food and clean clothes, you have doubled the amount of time available for education - and I'm quite convinced that you can learn more in 8 hours than you can in 4 hours (all else being equal, of course).
Now, having a computer might make it possible to learn more per unit time, because, for instance, if there is only a single book people have to share, so some time is wasted. Electronic copies could mean more people can look at the same material in a given period of time, but I'm still not convinced that it will help speed up the learning process. But I don't think that has anything to do with the rate of learning, but just with the availability issue, as you mentioned. The problem I think isn't that "villiages" don't have enough books - it's that they don't have *any* books. Here's a for-instance: instead of spending time to ship the laptops into the area, why not spend the time to ship in books? Unless the licenses (ugh, I hate that word) for the educational material are very inexpensive, and can easily be brought to the "villiages", I think books are just as viable an alternative. Books tend to last longer, too, and don't suffer from "what format is that in" syndrome either.
As a final note, is anyone aware of studies that show the relative rate of learning using traditional means versus with electronic presentation?
Am I the only person that things quoting sales growth in monetary units is, at best, misleading? Because of things like exchange rates and inflation, I really dislike that the media is always posting information about "sales grew by $X from the period last year."
I would *much* rather see things in quantity of units, like the auto industry: they quote sales in number of vehicles, and they quote monetary units separately. This way, it's easy to tell the health of the industry versus the health of the individual companies (if a company sold more cars, but its revenue and/or profit fell, that's a serious issue - where if a company sold fewer cars and profit rose, that is a different story).
So, what about games? The linked article only talks about monetary units, not real goods sold, so it's very difficult to really get a grasp on the point of the article...at least "industry sales were $X on N million units, versus $Y on M million units last year" would be helpful. Just for fun, throw in population growth too...is it just tracking population growth?
And yes, I am in a weird cynical mood today...
The moon has an orbital radius of 384,400 km. The radius of Earth is 6370 km. If you want to try and see the lander bits we left, they are probably on the scale of 2 meters.
From the surface of Earth: 2 meters at a distance of 378,030 km subtend an angle of 5.29 x 10^-9 radians. The angular resolution of the human eye is about 1/60 of a degree, or 2.91 x 10^-4 radians.
So, just build yourself a telescope with a 55000X magnification and you should be all set.
I'll respond with the simplest item first.
Regarding theft of services, I mis-spoke my idea there and clarified what I meant in another response in this thread.
Regarding your discussion on the elasticity of the supply curves: let's look at your example:
The trouble here is that the curve really is very strange and does not follow traditional curves. The problem is, I think, in how you define "supply" and "demand". In the case of easily duplicatable information (which is all a recording is any more), supply is now the original work, not the copies! Think of supply as, rather than number of copies of songs, number of unique (performances of) songs. I think if you look at the markets in that way, rather than number of records sold, that the picture looks more like the traditional supply and demand curves and the seeming paradox about elasticity should go away.In general I do not disagree with your comments; they are a result of a combination of me poorly communicating my ideas and some likely poor ideas. Some specifics (briefly this time):
I did not mean to say that distributors did not add value; their existence shows that they do add value. What I meant to say is that if I'm a distributor, the fact that I'm distributing something doesn't mean that people have to buy from me. However, I believe the concept of selling "non-real" goods is a bit fuzzy. For instance, charging for already-performed services (i.e., recorded art like music or programming) is an odd concept, even though our society is based around it.
What I meant by "you can't steal a service" I suppose depends on the situation. You could have the reverse of your situation: I pay you, I get a service, done. The situation you described: You give a service, then I pay you (or not) means that you either made a poor or wise investment. That is, you performed a service hoping for something of value in return that was greater than what you gave up to perform the service. There really is no guarantee that this will happen (in an economic sense - from a moral sense, I think I now see what you mean by 'entitlement' being a moral concern) - just as when I give you money first, I don't have any guarantee that I will be satisfied with the service you perform. However, I think this is all somewhat tangential.
I agree that the consideration of how much compensation an artist thinks will be received from a given work does play into the decision to perform that work or do something else. However, once that work is done, the artist cannot 'unperform' it. If the estimate in compensation was incorrect, that just means that the artist is a poor investor. In the instance of something like a concert, where the recipients pay first, the reverse is true. For something like making an album, however, there is cost involved with the recording and distribution processes - these is the investment risk of the artist, publisher, and distributor. There is no guarantee that all the bits of recording will be purchased. So if people are listenging to a recording - or a re-recording, that doesn't bear anything on the initial investment from an economic standpoint. It just falls into the realm of morality, which was not the focus of my original comment.
1) Things like software and music are not scarce resources. They can be reproduced almost indefinitely with almost no effort.
2) People like artists and programmers are scarce resources. There is a finite supply.
3) If enough people pay an artist or programmer for producing something so that the artist or programmer keeps producing, it does not matter how many people experience the work of art without paying the artist because the work is already produced and the use of the work does not deprive anyone of anything.
The idea that an artist (or, worse yet, a distributor) is entitled to payment for anything is a serious economic faux pas. For instance, I can sit in my room and sing original songs all night, heck I can even do it on the street corner, but I'm not entitled to receive compensation for it. If people want me to keep doing that, I'll ask for payment so I can stop my current job and do that. Otherwise, they won't get my performance. The same thing applies with software: if I write a game in my spare time, say it takes me 500 man-hours over the course of a year. If folks want me to make another game but in 6 months, I'd have to ask for compensation because I can't spend that much time and keep my current job.
Now, if I invest a bunch of money, quit my job and make a game and try to sell it - if people do not pay me for the game they do not value it, so I will be forced to do something else to make ends meet. It doesn't have anythign to do with theft at all, because it is impossible to steal a service, which is what programming and other forms of "art" are. Now, you can steal a painting because that is a scarce good, but you cannot steal the image itself.
Anyway I'm starting to ramble, so that's all for now.
The other interesting thing is that some features, such as the bookmarks for scenes, have nothing whatever to do with the medium on which the information is stored but just what the media packagers and media players want to do with various bits of information on that media.
However, as others have correctly noted, the problem here is that people do not evaluate things based on technical merit, but only on the experience they get from something. Unfortunately there is no way to get around this. Probably the most disturbing thing is that the author of the article, while noting in several places that there were certain differences in HDMI outputs, etc., failed to adequately describe the differences in the things he was analyzing.
'Waste' doesn't necessarily equate with price or cost. For instance, it is profoundly wasteful that, for instance, in the US we have non-refillable containers for just about every food product we purchase. This is very inexpensive, but is very wasteful - there is no technical reason why a store could not have a sanitary 2-liter filling station where you just take the same bottle over and over to obtain your beverage of choice. This would actually be less expensive in the long run, but it would cost people who make bottles their jobs, etc. etc.
Again, remember that cost does not necessarily match with waste. In fact, generally less expensive alternatives cost less than their less-wasteful alternatives - at the initial investment stage. However, the long-term costs are always lower with less waste.
I do not think that "suffering losses" means what people think it means...
As a scientist myself, I'm much more interested about predictive theories than descriptive theories. So far, I think climatology is just a descriptive theory - coming up with a fit for existing data - mostly because we don't (yet) have the ability to change the inputs with sufficient control to do true tests.
Now, I can't say that I have any idea how to appropriately suggest social conventions (i.e. laws) to determine how to coordinate the response of a server to various inputs. That is, if I have a single "server" and two clients, the server can only listen on, say, 1.5 GHz, and there are two clients, the server will communicate with the signal with the best signal to noise ratio. That's the interesting difference between wireless and wired communications: wireless can only really respond to signals, not the device(s) which generate the signals. Once you acknowledge that distinction, it becomes clear that there is no real way to distinguish clients with omnidirectional communications (if you have directional wireless comms, you can use the location as a filter). Remember, a wireless server only knows if the EM field at its antenna is doing what it needs to do to get the server to generate other EM fields in some pattern; it has no way to know if there is an authorized computer, an alien, or some guy with a very fast, accurate potentiometer is on the other end.
Something profound to consider when it comes to authentication: no authentication mechanism in the world can really determine if the person providing that method is really authorized to do whatever that authentication method protects; authorization methods can only determine if the authorization is correct. A simple example: A traditional lock cannot tell if a person is allowed to open a door or not, it can only tell if the tumblers have moved into the correct positions to allow the cylinder to rotate - it cannot tell if the person putting the tumblers in that position should be allowed to do so.
I'm not sure I understand how your hypothetical situation of socialized medicine, free market arbitration, no property rights has anything to do with the idea that government arbitrates between disputes or is called upon to arbitrate disputes.
Your hypothetical situation sounds pretty good, but you absolutely hit the nail on the head when you said
This situation shows a dispute between two groups of people: you, who don't think the other group "owns" the land in question, and the other group who claims they do and doesn't want you there. Without a third party this situtation is only resolved by A) the people not wanting you on the land forcibly convince you to move or B) They aren't willing to forcibly remove you (or are unable to make you uncomfortable enough to leave) so give up and let you stay. With a third party (government) there are added options: The third party puts in place some conditions on the situation which will either C) be successful because that third party is able to enforce those conditions or D) devolve into A or B because that third party does not have the means to enforce those conditions.Note, however, that C can be successful for a combination of two reasons: 1. The third party has sufficient ability to enforce the agreement by, er, force; or 2. You and the people who want your land are willing to agree by the conditions the third party set forth.
To include what was said in the sibling post, the idea of a government as an "insurer" is that it sounds like people are willing to give a third party certain resources with the understanding that the third party will use their resources to be able to be strong enough to enforce terms when one of the parties involved in a dispute does not want to voluntarily comply with the terms.
So, how does your little hypothetical group fit in? Perfectly - they can either build up enough resources to maintain their desired way of life themselves, or give resources to another group to maintain that way of life in exchange for certain conditions that group sets up to generally avoid situations where groups resort to destructive means of conflict resolution.
You said that there is "folly [in] deciding for others what government should mean" but this is exactly what every form of government on the planet does, is it not? I think, in closing, when it comes to governments: get strong enough yourself to be one, or help one of your choosing be strong enough to maintain its rules (and hope those rules are the ones you want). There really is no middle ground, unfortunately. Remember, a contract is only as good as either the strongest person or organization with an interest in the object of the contract or the willingness of the involved parties to adhere to the contract.
Ah, I think I like your terminology. I think it better describes what I was trying to convey. It also ties in nicely with the reply I can now better make to the poster above you.
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*sighs in dismay*
This is a wonderful comment!
I will agree that there is evidence that organizations known as governments today do much more than simply arbitrate disputes, so perhaps the definition has grown to encompass those features. However, I think those 'expansions' are not unique to governments; there are many organizations that are not governments which provide social and economic programs, for instance.
I also think it is very dangerous to say that a government is "supposed to do whatever those that give the government power want it to do". While that is a very attractive philosophy in our modern society, I believe that simply causes governments to lose their ability to effectively arbitrate disputes: being fickle tends to reduce credibility.
Anyway, this has been an interesting discussion, and it is at times like this I wish this forum was a little more condusive to this type of discourse. I actually do not mind the challenge to my assertions, because if those assertions are found to be weak I want to change them to whatever is really true.
Now I wonder...is there a way to transfer this little thread over to the Politics section?
The parent is almost right, and the quote from the grandparent is indeed misinformed. Incidentally, the grandparent's sentiment is partly why the governments we have are the way they are: because we have forgotten the true purpose of a government, and it is simply this: provide an institution with the means to enforce arbitration between disputing parties (including both internal and external disputes). That is the sole fundamental purpose of government. Most of the flavors of government are because of differences of opinion on how to make a decision in arbitration, or what type or extent of force to use. However, whenever a government starts acting beyond that capacity, it's not necessarily a bad thing, but it's not really performing the fundamental purpose of a government any longer.
Now, social programs and "state research" are good things, but in my opinion this is not really the role of the government. In fact, I believe that large populations would set up foundations for social and research programs anyway (we have evidence of the private investors over the centuries, including this one, that are more often the driving force behind innovation rather than state agencies - except where that innovation was at some point related to the primary role of government through military activity). I believe that, if the government let the private interests develop and was only involved in mediating disputes, advances could happen much faster than they do when they are burdened by political ramifications of spending tax dollars.
[end potentially off-topic material]
Also, an interesting comparison: If you make minimum wage in the US, that's a gross of around $11,000 per year - or just over $900 a month (I used 48 working weeks of 40 hours for annual income of $11040 at minimum wage of $5.75). I don't know where you live, but rent and food and utilities for a single person can easily come up to $450 per month, and that's not counting taxes (although, if your AGI is only $11k, taxes are fairly low). So, relatively speaking, there are people in *this* country that are in no better condition, except perhaps we don't have many company-owned barracks-style housing projects.
This is an interesting question though, and the real question is along the lines of "Is it better to have jobs and housing that is less than high-income countries but better than nothing, or should you leave them without any jobs at all?" I feel it's more constructive to look at methods of improving standard of living other than creating factory jobs, but right now that's what we've got - because most people in rich countries already have enough food, so providing people farmland and irrigation resources does not result in something for which the rich are willing to trade - but the rich are willing to trade for things like entertainment devices and low-cost daily items.
Anyway, I don't think this is a unique issue to Apple, only it's more sensational to post stories about well-known consumer brands. Remember, most media outlets are about making money and providing entertainment, not really providing useful information to generate social change. (I did say "most" not "all" - some outlets really do try to change things, but those aren't the ones you typically hear discussed around the water cooler.)
So, whose responsibility is it to ensure that a person is safe when working on a piece of industrial equipment? Sure, it makes sense to put in a certain amount of fail-safe procedures. But who is ultimately responsible? I still think it *must* be the person who failed to observe procedures. I would not be opposed to a legal system which said that safety equipment only had to be in place to prevent problems when people were operating the device in accordance with established procedures. The reason for this is that it is probably provable that any system can be used in a way which could circumvent its safety features and result in personal or property damage.
The other side of placing the responsibility on other people is that in making other people responsible you give up some bit of freedom. If I don't have the choice to decide if a procedure is safe or not because I'm told that a device is "safe" and I must do something, that is a problem. I would rather have a "dangerous" piece of equipment and the personal responsibility to decide if it is safe or not and, if I put myself into a dangerous situation, well then that is my own fault.
If you read the article, it's clear that each server isn't limited to three users: it means that the system is such that the number of peak users divided by the number of servers is 3. I'm sure that they have more than three users in a given 16-acre area at any given time. (16 acres is fairly large, actually).
The problem with this, though, is that in throwing that decision up the ladder, freedom to make that decision or similar decisions in the future is lost. People in this country are yelling about losing their freedom (DMCA, PATRIOT, etc.) yet they have been asking to lose their freedom for decades by saying "you be responsible for this!"
The fundamental concept here, and it has been proven by history, is this: in order to have freedom, you must have personal responsibility. If you don't want to have responsibility for actions, then you give up your ability to make decisions for yourself. If you want any "leadership entity" (government, bosses at work, religious organization, whatever) telling you what to buy, what you should like and what you shouldn't, what you should fear and what you should embrace - you have lost your freedom.
Incidentally, in this particular issue, the root issue is *not* what is portrated in entertainment media, but the social situation of the individuals who are exposed to that entertainment media.
If society values your efforts and talents enough, they will compensate you; if they don't, then you will need to choose if you will continue to spend your free time making games and giving them away without compensation or change what you do in your free time.
Economics really isn't that difficult when you realize that there is really no obligation for society to compensate you for your creative efforts unless you were contracted to exert that effort.