Smoking pot will contribute to lung cancer. Anything burnt, other than perhaps hydrogen, natural gas, and other substances that burn cleanly, will produce soot. The soot will deposit on your lungs and will work much the same way as air pollution will.
Granted, smoking tobacco will be a good 10 times more damaging because tobacco smokers smoke far more than pot smokers, but it isn't totally harmless.
That said, it is safe enough that people who want to make the trade off should be allowed to.
Normal gambling takes a sure bet (you keeping your money) and makes is a risky proposition (big chance of losing money, small chance of gaining money).
Insurace takes a risky proposition (a chance your house will burn down and you lose everything) and makes it a sure bet (you will lose $1000 in insurance premiums and keep your house, whether or not there is a calamity).
Of course, insurance companies can be very shady too, but this does not make the idea of insurance a bad one.
Furthermore, that tax dollars are spent advertising to get people to throw their money away on state lotteries sickens me. That is like the government advertising in favor of people smoking tobacco in order to get more tobacco tax money.
Humans might be human, but it is society's responsibility to push people away from self destructive activities, not towards them.
A long-haul jumbo jet generally does get about 50 mpg when fully loaded.
However, do you regularly drive your small car halfway around the globe in a single day? Before planes were invented, taking a globe spanning trip took weeks or months on steam ships. As a result, far fewer people travelled.
Also, the comparison is with a single passenger car. If you take a Hummer and stick 6 people in it, it will be more efficient than both the jumbo jet and the single occupant subcompact. A loaded train will be more efficient than all of the above.
That's because when it comes to math (and money sense essentially applied math), the average US person sucks at it. If they suck at anything worse, it's planning ahead.
Now if you keep that 3-6 month cushion of liquid money that you should be keeping around, then you would just be able to dip into those funds for a few days while you cancel the cable and do whatever other options are needed to stop the red ink.
Also, on the society level, citizens are bombarded with advertisements. They don't make it easy for the normal person to live within their budget and save adequately. There are no HS or grammar school level classes to teach money sense or finance, so kids must research this on their own (fat chance of that when you can barely get them to do their normal schoolwork).
This would be both insignful and plainfully obviously is if was the case, but GM companies can do the equivalent of recording a song on your CD-RWs, overwriting your personal recordings you were going to sell, and then charging you for copyright infringement.
At least according to the case with the Canadian farmer who had his field infested with the GM stuff from cross-pollination and did try to sue for damages because his crop was no longer considered organic. Monsanto won, and won big in that case.
Unless the event must be live and not delayed by even an few hours, bittorrent is far superior in my view. It uses the same bandwidth but allows you to watch the stuff when you want to and you get a copy on your computer.
Broadcasting is a relic from when technology made on demand downloading impractical. The internet can just as easily do on demand as broadcast, so why cripple yourself?
What is your rate per kilowatt-hour. Over here it is 18 cents/kwh, and that works out to about $20/month for my computer running 24/7 (with the monitor on perhaps 12 hours a day - I am an addict).
1 watt costs you about 10 cents/month where I am, so that probably is about 200 watts, including the big and hungry CRT.
What pisses me off more is buying an item that is labelled as.99 dollars, and ending up with almost a dollar in little coins. If prices had to be with taxes included, I'm sure a lot of the.99 cents would become.92 dollar or whatever would arrive at.99 dollars after tax.
Not only that, but the dollar seems headed for a long term fall. That will make outsourcing even less competitive. If Indians are 10% more expensive after all is said and done now, they'll be 30% more expensive if the dollar falls another 15-20%.
Quite the contrary. The reason I don't buy any RIAA CDs is because they're total bastards. The thought that my money is contributing to lobbying efforts against both my interests and ideals will give me too way too much of a nagging conscience to ever enjoy the thing I bought.
Perhaps if they stop suing people and lobby for sane copyright laws (like a 14 year term with mandatory registration and repealing the DMCA and all other related legislation) and wait a few years, I might reconsider my boycott, but I figure I've got shorter odds of seeing pigs fly while being struck by lighting and winning the lottery all at the same time.
Depending on what you put on that disc, 120 DVD-Rs isn't a bad idea, and the 20 Blue Rays will be even better.
I generally burn stuff as soon as I have a DVD full of it, and the HD just stores my most recently viewed or popular material. If it crashes, it takes me a day to reinstall the OS and restore the data, but little lost data.
I'd rather have a 600rpm/1TB drive than either a 7200rpm/500GB or 15,000/200GB drive, at least for my second drive.
My main use for storage is to store video, and even a 600rpm drive would give enough bandwidth to serve P2P and watch them. The primary drive would be the 15,000/10GB drive to store the OS and applications.
The basic tenet of communism is "from all according to ability, to all according to need". It would be trivial to deduce that any free good, such as art after the first copy has been made, should be available to all.
So, yes, communism is about sharing. If the state will do anything, it will be to punish leechers, because they are not giving according to their abilities.
Government granted monopolies without regulation (like copyright) are signs of cronyism, not of either capitalism or communism. Cronyism can happen to any system as it is a political thing, not an economic thing (democracy, royalty, and oligarchy are examples of political systems, while capitalism, communism, and feudalism are examples of economic systems).
Under communism, the people would own all copyrights, which is essentially the same as having everything in the public domain. Of course, crony communism might have copyrights, as it would be one way of moving wealth to the leader's friends, but they would be going against the ideals of communism much like monopoly goes against the ideals of a free market.
If you want to call something communist, then copyleft is, since it is essentially putting material in the public domain with the added protections that private interests cannot privatise it by making changes and claiming copyright or by not allowing redistribution.
Do not confuse communist ideals with the USSR, China, or North Korea. Communism itself functions best under a democracy and the free flow of information, just like capitalism works best with democracy and free markets (no monopolies and having everyone well informed on the products they buy).
What you're arguing is basically the broken windows fallacy. The money will be spent one way or another, and if a person has to spend money fixing a window (or buying movies), then they won't have that money to spend on other consumer goods, to pay taxes, or to invest privately.
Basic textbook economics says the the most efficient price is when marginal price equals marginal cost.
While having copy priviledges will get some movies produced, the inefficiencies are catastrophic and multiplicative. In all, information industries (software, games, movies, music, etc) are less than 10% efficient (as measured from the ideal communist efficiency [or the borg efficiency, for Star Trek fans], which is as good as can theoretically be done).
Since you probably feel that I came up with that 10% figure out of the top of my head, I'll proceed to elaborate on how I came about to it.
First, we start off with 100% efficincy. All resources go to paying artists and production workers and the workers have all the tools that society and technology can provide to them. Now come all the distortions from the copyright system and the accompanying profit system.
- Marketing. Since marketing is on average 2/3 of the budget, only 1/3 is left for actual production, so we go from 100% to 33%. To fully account for the cost of marketing, we would have to account for the cost on the viewer of the ads since it distorts their buying decision and takes away their time and attention.
- Selling costs. Only the money paid from the middleman to the copyright holder counts in their decision to commission or not commission a work. This appears to be around 50%-66% of the retail price depending on retailer and type of work, with video games being the worst because of the large chunk taken by the console maker. Taking the conservative value of 66%, we go from 33% to 22% efficiency.
- Law of Diminishing Returns. When every movie house is chasing after the same stars, their salaries can go through the roof. Since it is unlikely that stars would ever be paid such obscene sums without copyrights and the profit system, we can subtract their salaries almost in full. This is most important in movies and TV shows, so I will conservatively say that the average effect is a multiplier or 90%, so we go from 22% to 20% efficiency.
- Increased costs because of restricted public domain. This is most evident with software, but all media stand to benefit from sharing ideas and reusing material than hoarding it. I would peg this cost at 40%, meaning that 40% of the effort in an average work could be eliminated if there was source for everything and everything was public domain (with no reduction in quality). That brings us from 20% to 12% efficiency.
- Profits. Profits kept by rich people aren't useful to the 99.9% of us that aren't rich, so they are 100% inefficiency. It is hard to get a hard figure because of all the accounting trickery, but a 30% profit rate (including executive pay as well as corporate profits) seems conservative enough, considering how much gets skimmed off of the top in these industries. That brings us from 12% to 8% efficiency.
- Reduced utility. Not having ready access to cheap backups/replacements. Not being able to view media in any device of your choice. Having your privacy compromised by DRM. Not being able to get certain works because they're not longer for sale. Permenant loss of works because the existing copies cannot be refurbished (most prevelant with old films). Hard to measure exactly, but 25% seems reasonable, with TV and movies contributing the most. That brings us from 8% to 6% efficiency.
Even leaving out some major costs (like the necessary curtailments on free speech and the cost of all the lawyers - I'm also not sure if the effects of monopolistic competition are refelected in my numbers), I've shown that the current system is only about 6% efficient. Most any other system will yield a better return.
Paradoxily, the most efficient way would probably be a mix of
That's a non sequitor. There exist other ways to profit off of someone else's labor, therefore the implication "if it is a fundamental right to share information then it is a fundamental right to profit from somebody else's labor" is invalid.
Assuming that getting some enjoyment can be considered profit (quite a stretch), the most you can say is that "there exist some cases where you have a right to profit from somebody else's labor". For that there are numerous other examples as essentially all government services work that way.
If it's a law, then just repeal that bloody stupid law.
If it's in the constitution, then exchange services for services with other governments, preferably ones with strong socialist or communist roots. Have it go through a shell company if that is needed.
Private business should exist only to provide goods and services that the government fails to provide efficiently. Services such as broadband, telephone, electricity, water, fire protection, police, military, parks, education, science (both applied and basic), information (both the arts and databases/catalogues/maps/etc), and a whole host of other areas have strong structural benefits to being run by non-profit organizations, and the best funded and most accountable non-profit is the government.
Well I for one have been boycotting Scholastic for some time. If I hadn't been boycotting them over other copy priveledge related stuff in the past (attacking makers of knock-off books), this news certainly would be enough.
I'm not the type of person to boycott things on a dime, but most media corporations go out of their way to tick me off. My boycott list now includes all MPAA and RIAA member corporations and some computer and book publishers. PBS is the only broadcast network that I'm not boycotting, and I'm not even 50% pleased with them. Even Microsoft isn't on my boycott list, though it is darned close and I don't use its operating systems outside of when I have to (in school, at kiosks, or embedded in appliances ususally).
The list of offenses goes on and on:
- Villainizing Fidel Castro and Chavez, leaders of Cuba and Venezuela, which suffer the crime of not giving US multinationals carte blance.
- Supporting an administration who might unseat Hoover's as the worst one yet.
- Right wing propaganda. Fits in with the first 2 grievances.
- Advertising. I only tolerate a very few forms of advertising, and it better be either so subtle I don't notice it (some product placement) or useful (Google ads, yellow pages, catalogues).
- Buying monopolies and taking away my rights without my consent. I consider the right to share a human right (and copy priveledges to be a priveledge that is incompatible with it). Even if there are valid economic arguements in favor of copy priviledges, the system they lobby for and get is completely out of whack. Copy priledges would have to provide the smallest incentive needed, and measures would be needed to enhance the public domain and reduce the risk of accidental infringement ( 5 year term, mandatory registration including 'source' escrow [for non software works, this would be the intermediary materials such as 3d models, animation layers, sound effects, etc], and a prohibition of using contract law or trademarks in the domain of copy privileges [no EULAs and trademarks on characters, places, or other 'things' that are part of a story instead of just a logo linking a company with a product]).
Net utility value (utility value - cost) would probably be the best metric. It is the metric that is used [ideally] in communism to decide what and how much gets produced. It does not require prices or currency to work. In fact, to work optimally, the benefits and costs should be kept in their raw form, and the exchange rates between various outputs, raw materials, and labor calculated dynamically.
It is hard to calculate, but maximising net utility value gives both the ideal production scenario for communism (to all according to need) and for capitalism (marginal price = marginal cost).
For two examples, let us take creating a new movie and downloading a movie from P2P, burning it, and watching it 3 times.
Creating a new movie (the actual genre and movie to be made is left up to the sum of personal tastes and demands): inputs:
- 800,000 human-hours time
- data from the public domain (this is a wash with the output, but listing this acknowledges that no movie is made in a vacuum).
- various other consumables, capital, and other raw materials.
outputs:
- 1 new movie -> increases diversity of movies available, incresing utility of all existing movie entertainment services and equipment. The amount can be estimated empiracally.
- new data for public domain (restricting this output by having copyright would be economic waste, so I'm ignoring that reality).
Downloading, burning, and watching a movie 3 times: inputs:
- 1 copy of the movie (infinite supply available, but not infinite selection - the quality of this input is very important)
- 7 hours time (1 hour to download and burn, 6 hours to watch it three times).
- 150g oil (50g for plastic, 100g for manufacturing, packaging, and shipping - assuming you get a spindle of discs and don't waste resources on individually packaged discs)
- 2kWh electricity (computers, internet, manufacturing equipment)
- 1,400 MB one-way bandwidth (P2P requires 1 uploaded bit for 1 downloaded bit, so 700 MB gets doubled).
- Capital equipment (computer, TV, etc).
Outputs:
- 1 hard copy (useful for the operation of P2P networks, and can always be used should centralized libraries ever lose or destroy their copies).
- 6 hours of entertainment, the quality of which is dependant on the quality of the inputs (A good movie that matches the viewer's tastes shown on a good display device with top notch speakers will be better than Gigli seen on a 3" black and white TV using the internal PC speaker for sound output).
Each input is either labor (provided by workers), virgin raw materials (provided by nature), or the output of another process (recycled materials along with almost all goods and services).
We only care about the end products (those that directly serve human needs, wants, and wishes) and we can maximize the end products without assigning values to the intermediaries. We get a huge multivariate equation which describes our production possibilities curve and another set of single and multivariate equations that link the production of particular end products and services to 'utility'. Maximize for utility and you have now found the ideal production mix for the economy. In an ideal communist economy, this data would be used by the central planning board to set production targets, which will be exactly met since they are at the edge of the production possibilities curve.
Even under other systems (like capitalism) where this information could not be acted on because there is no central planning board, it can be used to give a far more detailed and accurate accounting of economic activity than a crude metric like GDP.
Slashdot Mirror
Smoking pot will contribute to lung cancer. Anything burnt, other than perhaps hydrogen, natural gas, and other substances that burn cleanly, will produce soot. The soot will deposit on your lungs and will work much the same way as air pollution will.
Granted, smoking tobacco will be a good 10 times more damaging because tobacco smokers smoke far more than pot smokers, but it isn't totally harmless.
That said, it is safe enough that people who want to make the trade off should be allowed to.
Normal gambling takes a sure bet (you keeping your money) and makes is a risky proposition (big chance of losing money, small chance of gaining money).
Insurace takes a risky proposition (a chance your house will burn down and you lose everything) and makes it a sure bet (you will lose $1000 in insurance premiums and keep your house, whether or not there is a calamity).
Of course, insurance companies can be very shady too, but this does not make the idea of insurance a bad one.
I totally agree.
Furthermore, that tax dollars are spent advertising to get people to throw their money away on state lotteries sickens me. That is like the government advertising in favor of people smoking tobacco in order to get more tobacco tax money.
Humans might be human, but it is society's responsibility to push people away from self destructive activities, not towards them.
A long-haul jumbo jet generally does get about 50 mpg when fully loaded.
However, do you regularly drive your small car halfway around the globe in a single day? Before planes were invented, taking a globe spanning trip took weeks or months on steam ships. As a result, far fewer people travelled.
Also, the comparison is with a single passenger car. If you take a Hummer and stick 6 people in it, it will be more efficient than both the jumbo jet and the single occupant subcompact. A loaded train will be more efficient than all of the above.
TW recently announced that they would be raising the down cap from 3Mbps to 5Bbps sometime in January. I guess they actually delivered :)
I'm still waiting for my upgrade.
That's because when it comes to math (and money sense essentially applied math), the average US person sucks at it. If they suck at anything worse, it's planning ahead.
Now if you keep that 3-6 month cushion of liquid money that you should be keeping around, then you would just be able to dip into those funds for a few days while you cancel the cable and do whatever other options are needed to stop the red ink.
Also, on the society level, citizens are bombarded with advertisements. They don't make it easy for the normal person to live within their budget and save adequately. There are no HS or grammar school level classes to teach money sense or finance, so kids must research this on their own (fat chance of that when you can barely get them to do their normal schoolwork).
Inflation is miniscule over the course of a week or so. It is mostly lousy planning skills or a total lack of math sense that leads people to do this.
Anyone routinely taking loans at over 10% per year is throwing a lot of money away.
This does not apply when inflation is running at 1,000%/year (rate, not yield), but we are far from inflation rates of that order.
This would be both insignful and plainfully obviously is if was the case, but GM companies can do the equivalent of recording a song on your CD-RWs, overwriting your personal recordings you were going to sell, and then charging you for copyright infringement.
At least according to the case with the Canadian farmer who had his field infested with the GM stuff from cross-pollination and did try to sue for damages because his crop was no longer considered organic. Monsanto won, and won big in that case.
Unless the event must be live and not delayed by even an few hours, bittorrent is far superior in my view. It uses the same bandwidth but allows you to watch the stuff when you want to and you get a copy on your computer.
Broadcasting is a relic from when technology made on demand downloading impractical. The internet can just as easily do on demand as broadcast, so why cripple yourself?
Being convicted means you are found guilty.
Being sentenced means you are given a punishment for the crime you are guilty of.
Conviction comes before sentencing.
What is your rate per kilowatt-hour. Over here it is 18 cents/kwh, and that works out to about $20/month for my computer running 24/7 (with the monitor on perhaps 12 hours a day - I am an addict).
1 watt costs you about 10 cents/month where I am, so that probably is about 200 watts, including the big and hungry CRT.
What pisses me off more is buying an item that is labelled as .99 dollars, and ending up with almost a dollar in little coins. If prices had to be with taxes included, I'm sure a lot of the .99 cents would become .92 dollar or whatever would arrive at .99 dollars after tax.
Not only that, but the dollar seems headed for a long term fall. That will make outsourcing even less competitive. If Indians are 10% more expensive after all is said and done now, they'll be 30% more expensive if the dollar falls another 15-20%.
Quite the contrary. The reason I don't buy any RIAA CDs is because they're total bastards. The thought that my money is contributing to lobbying efforts against both my interests and ideals will give me too way too much of a nagging conscience to ever enjoy the thing I bought.
Perhaps if they stop suing people and lobby for sane copyright laws (like a 14 year term with mandatory registration and repealing the DMCA and all other related legislation) and wait a few years, I might reconsider my boycott, but I figure I've got shorter odds of seeing pigs fly while being struck by lighting and winning the lottery all at the same time.
Hard disks are measured in GB, not GiB, so 1GB = 1 billion bytes and 1TB = 1 trillion bytes.
I'm not sure about the formatting, but the TB/TiB distiction is already about 10%.
Depending on what you put on that disc, 120 DVD-Rs isn't a bad idea, and the 20 Blue Rays will be even better.
I generally burn stuff as soon as I have a DVD full of it, and the HD just stores my most recently viewed or popular material. If it crashes, it takes me a day to reinstall the OS and restore the data, but little lost data.
I'd rather have a 600rpm/1TB drive than either a 7200rpm/500GB or 15,000/200GB drive, at least for my second drive.
My main use for storage is to store video, and even a 600rpm drive would give enough bandwidth to serve P2P and watch them. The primary drive would be the 15,000/10GB drive to store the OS and applications.
I guess different people have different needs.
The basic tenet of communism is "from all according to ability, to all according to need". It would be trivial to deduce that any free good, such as art after the first copy has been made, should be available to all.
So, yes, communism is about sharing. If the state will do anything, it will be to punish leechers, because they are not giving according to their abilities.
Government granted monopolies without regulation (like copyright) are signs of cronyism, not of either capitalism or communism. Cronyism can happen to any system as it is a political thing, not an economic thing (democracy, royalty, and oligarchy are examples of political systems, while capitalism, communism, and feudalism are examples of economic systems).
Under communism, the people would own all copyrights, which is essentially the same as having everything in the public domain. Of course, crony communism might have copyrights, as it would be one way of moving wealth to the leader's friends, but they would be going against the ideals of communism much like monopoly goes against the ideals of a free market.
If you want to call something communist, then copyleft is, since it is essentially putting material in the public domain with the added protections that private interests cannot privatise it by making changes and claiming copyright or by not allowing redistribution.
Do not confuse communist ideals with the USSR, China, or North Korea. Communism itself functions best under a democracy and the free flow of information, just like capitalism works best with democracy and free markets (no monopolies and having everyone well informed on the products they buy).
Quicktime and especially Real Player are awful formats. Xvid or MPEG-2 are much more readily usable formats and Xvid gives superb compression.
The formats used in P2P generally represent the best that is available in terms of compression and widespread readability.
What you're arguing is basically the broken windows fallacy. The money will be spent one way or another, and if a person has to spend money fixing a window (or buying movies), then they won't have that money to spend on other consumer goods, to pay taxes, or to invest privately.
Basic textbook economics says the the most efficient price is when marginal price equals marginal cost.
While having copy priviledges will get some movies produced, the inefficiencies are catastrophic and multiplicative. In all, information industries (software, games, movies, music, etc) are less than 10% efficient (as measured from the ideal communist efficiency [or the borg efficiency, for Star Trek fans], which is as good as can theoretically be done).
Since you probably feel that I came up with that 10% figure out of the top of my head, I'll proceed to elaborate on how I came about to it.
First, we start off with 100% efficincy. All resources go to paying artists and production workers and the workers have all the tools that society and technology can provide to them. Now come all the distortions from the copyright system and the accompanying profit system.
- Marketing. Since marketing is on average 2/3 of the budget, only 1/3 is left for actual production, so we go from 100% to 33%. To fully account for the cost of marketing, we would have to account for the cost on the viewer of the ads since it distorts their buying decision and takes away their time and attention.
- Selling costs. Only the money paid from the middleman to the copyright holder counts in their decision to commission or not commission a work. This appears to be around 50%-66% of the retail price depending on retailer and type of work, with video games being the worst because of the large chunk taken by the console maker. Taking the conservative value of 66%, we go from 33% to 22% efficiency.
- Law of Diminishing Returns. When every movie house is chasing after the same stars, their salaries can go through the roof. Since it is unlikely that stars would ever be paid such obscene sums without copyrights and the profit system, we can subtract their salaries almost in full. This is most important in movies and TV shows, so I will conservatively say that the average effect is a multiplier or 90%, so we go from 22% to 20% efficiency.
- Increased costs because of restricted public domain. This is most evident with software, but all media stand to benefit from sharing ideas and reusing material than hoarding it. I would peg this cost at 40%, meaning that 40% of the effort in an average work could be eliminated if there was source for everything and everything was public domain (with no reduction in quality). That brings us from 20% to 12% efficiency.
- Profits. Profits kept by rich people aren't useful to the 99.9% of us that aren't rich, so they are 100% inefficiency. It is hard to get a hard figure because of all the accounting trickery, but a 30% profit rate (including executive pay as well as corporate profits) seems conservative enough, considering how much gets skimmed off of the top in these industries. That brings us from 12% to 8% efficiency.
- Reduced utility. Not having ready access to cheap backups/replacements. Not being able to view media in any device of your choice. Having your privacy compromised by DRM. Not being able to get certain works because they're not longer for sale. Permenant loss of works because the existing copies cannot be refurbished (most prevelant with old films). Hard to measure exactly, but 25% seems reasonable, with TV and movies contributing the most. That brings us from 8% to 6% efficiency.
Even leaving out some major costs (like the necessary curtailments on free speech and the cost of all the lawyers - I'm also not sure if the effects of monopolistic competition are refelected in my numbers), I've shown that the current system is only about 6% efficient. Most any other system will yield a better return.
Paradoxily, the most efficient way would probably be a mix of
That's a non sequitor. There exist other ways to profit off of someone else's labor, therefore the implication "if it is a fundamental right to share information then it is a fundamental right to profit from somebody else's labor" is invalid.
Assuming that getting some enjoyment can be considered profit (quite a stretch), the most you can say is that "there exist some cases where you have a right to profit from somebody else's labor". For that there are numerous other examples as essentially all government services work that way.
If it's a law, then just repeal that bloody stupid law.
If it's in the constitution, then exchange services for services with other governments, preferably ones with strong socialist or communist roots. Have it go through a shell company if that is needed.
Private business should exist only to provide goods and services that the government fails to provide efficiently. Services such as broadband, telephone, electricity, water, fire protection, police, military, parks, education, science (both applied and basic), information (both the arts and databases/catalogues/maps/etc), and a whole host of other areas have strong structural benefits to being run by non-profit organizations, and the best funded and most accountable non-profit is the government.
Well I for one have been boycotting Scholastic for some time. If I hadn't been boycotting them over other copy priveledge related stuff in the past (attacking makers of knock-off books), this news certainly would be enough.
I'm not the type of person to boycott things on a dime, but most media corporations go out of their way to tick me off. My boycott list now includes all MPAA and RIAA member corporations and some computer and book publishers. PBS is the only broadcast network that I'm not boycotting, and I'm not even 50% pleased with them. Even Microsoft isn't on my boycott list, though it is darned close and I don't use its operating systems outside of when I have to (in school, at kiosks, or embedded in appliances ususally).
The list of offenses goes on and on:
- Villainizing Fidel Castro and Chavez, leaders of Cuba and Venezuela, which suffer the crime of not giving US multinationals carte blance.
- Supporting an administration who might unseat Hoover's as the worst one yet.
- Right wing propaganda. Fits in with the first 2 grievances.
- Advertising. I only tolerate a very few forms of advertising, and it better be either so subtle I don't notice it (some product placement) or useful (Google ads, yellow pages, catalogues).
- Buying monopolies and taking away my rights without my consent. I consider the right to share a human right (and copy priveledges to be a priveledge that is incompatible with it). Even if there are valid economic arguements in favor of copy priviledges, the system they lobby for and get is completely out of whack. Copy priledges would have to provide the smallest incentive needed, and measures would be needed to enhance the public domain and reduce the risk of accidental infringement ( 5 year term, mandatory registration including 'source' escrow [for non software works, this would be the intermediary materials such as 3d models, animation layers, sound effects, etc], and a prohibition of using contract law or trademarks in the domain of copy privileges [no EULAs and trademarks on characters, places, or other 'things' that are part of a story instead of just a logo linking a company with a product]).
Net utility value (utility value - cost) would probably be the best metric. It is the metric that is used [ideally] in communism to decide what and how much gets produced. It does not require prices or currency to work. In fact, to work optimally, the benefits and costs should be kept in their raw form, and the exchange rates between various outputs, raw materials, and labor calculated dynamically.
It is hard to calculate, but maximising net utility value gives both the ideal production scenario for communism (to all according to need) and for capitalism (marginal price = marginal cost).
For two examples, let us take creating a new movie and downloading a movie from P2P, burning it, and watching it 3 times.
Creating a new movie (the actual genre and movie to be made is left up to the sum of personal tastes and demands):
inputs:
- 800,000 human-hours time
- data from the public domain (this is a wash with the output, but listing this acknowledges that no movie is made in a vacuum).
- various other consumables, capital, and other raw materials.
outputs:
- 1 new movie -> increases diversity of movies available, incresing utility of all existing movie entertainment services and equipment. The amount can be estimated empiracally.
- new data for public domain (restricting this output by having copyright would be economic waste, so I'm ignoring that reality).
Downloading, burning, and watching a movie 3 times:
inputs:
- 1 copy of the movie (infinite supply available, but not infinite selection - the quality of this input is very important)
- 7 hours time (1 hour to download and burn, 6 hours to watch it three times).
- 150g oil (50g for plastic, 100g for manufacturing, packaging, and shipping - assuming you get a spindle of discs and don't waste resources on individually packaged discs)
- 2kWh electricity (computers, internet, manufacturing equipment)
- 1,400 MB one-way bandwidth (P2P requires 1 uploaded bit for 1 downloaded bit, so 700 MB gets doubled).
- Capital equipment (computer, TV, etc).
Outputs:
- 1 hard copy (useful for the operation of P2P networks, and can always be used should centralized libraries ever lose or destroy their copies).
- 6 hours of entertainment, the quality of which is dependant on the quality of the inputs (A good movie that matches the viewer's tastes shown on a good display device with top notch speakers will be better than Gigli seen on a 3" black and white TV using the internal PC speaker for sound output).
Each input is either labor (provided by workers), virgin raw materials (provided by nature), or the output of another process (recycled materials along with almost all goods and services).
We only care about the end products (those that directly serve human needs, wants, and wishes) and we can maximize the end products without assigning values to the intermediaries. We get a huge multivariate equation which describes our production possibilities curve and another set of single and multivariate equations that link the production of particular end products and services to 'utility'. Maximize for utility and you have now found the ideal production mix for the economy. In an ideal communist economy, this data would be used by the central planning board to set production targets, which will be exactly met since they are at the edge of the production possibilities curve.
Even under other systems (like capitalism) where this information could not be acted on because there is no central planning board, it can be used to give a far more detailed and accurate accounting of economic activity than a crude metric like GDP.