This doesn't make sense to me. Suppose I create a machine that makes a million widgets, and I sell each one for $1. How can people say that my work was not worth $1 million?
That is because you are depending here on an arithmetical anomaly. That is the arithmetics of the capitalist marketplace become increasingly divorced from the "merit" to society as the numerical multiplications increase. Your, incorrect, assumption is that monetary value equals "merit". "Merit" is a complex concept, only part of which is dependant on the number of the recipients of your product, it also has to include factors such as what your machine does to produce the items (i.e. the negative short-term and long-term side effects of your activity), the unwanted societal impact of your product, the resource depletion and objective value of this product in relation to these resources as seen from the perspective of overall progress of humanity and on and on.
That monetary value equals "merit" is one of fundamental deceptions concocted by very greedy and self-absorbed people who espouse superiority of "markets" over every other method of valuation of things, chiefly because it suits their aim to fullfill their desire to rule over other people. Beware, if you attempt to use this method, increasing levels of illogic, social injustice and eventually disaster will inevietably follow. Life is far more complex then simple monetary evaluations.
If any person did not believe my widget was worth $1, he should not have given me $1. By placing money in my hand, you are stamping your seal of approval on the fact that I am now $1 richer, so a million seals of approval must result in a fortune you approve as well.
See above: the dollars simply add up, but the "merit" does not follow the same logic.
By the way, this example does not depend on patents; I'm just assuming each consumer would rather pay $1 than spend the time and labor to research, design, and develop their own machine
This is irrelevant, your fundamental assumption about your calculation is simply wrong.
Most of us choose to work for someone else; the fact that it would be absurd to do anything else shows how much we benefit from our relationship with our employer
That is a circular logic. We choose to work for an employer because the employers have structured the society in such a way as to make employers the primary choice, not because it is the wisest course of action for a civilization.
But that does not entitle you to take another man's work.
How so? There is a fee for membership in any club, why not in society? That fee goes to make the society benefit all of its members, not just a chosen few would be feudal "meritocratic" masters. (You are of course aware of the fact that all the kings and nobles in the past used precisely the same argument you do, that their "merit" to society, versus that of the "peons" was what guaranteed them their position?).
If you start your own company, you can hire a CEO and pay him a working-man's salary, tell him every day he is extremely replacable, and that you think nothing of his so-called "talents". But please remember, the owners of other companies (i.e. stockholders) are also free to pay their CEO a very large sum of money, because they see it as only a fraction of the money he is making them. Is he really worth that much? Who cares? It has nothing to do with you, unless you are a stockholder, in which case you are the one who chose to buy the stock. I see nothing immoral here.
I have no problem with any of this, my problem is with the fact that the dynamics of the present "marketplace" is such as to allow individuals and companies to accumulate resources far, far, far in excess to any conceivable "merit" they represent. If the market functioned sanely, the ability to increase
Let's say you get rid of the billionaires and are left with millionaires. At what point will they be deemed without value to society or that they are more "dangerous" than valuable? Who gets to determine what is an acceptable level of value/"danger" relative to one's assets? Why are they qualified to make they decision?
Thare is no definite, "absolute" value. There is however a sense of proportion and excess. No man (or woman) is so "meritorious" to society as to warrant an income or wealth equivalent to that of millions of his fellow society members.
My personal feeling is that a "fair" situation would be based on a ratio of, say, 10:1, whereby the most productive members of the society could expect to receive up to 10 times the rewards, as measured against the statistical mean (as opposed to arithmetical average) of the society in which they operate, and whereby any gains above the statistical means meet ever increasing in power "law of diminishing returns", whereby an attempt to increase the earnings from 10:1 to 11:1 would require 100-fold increase in "merit", and to 12:1 a 1000 fold etc.
This is in direct opposition to the present situation where earning money becomes easier the larger capital available, thus causing such patently absurd disparity between "merit" and rewards.
Why do you think there are eleventy billion varieties of Coca-Cola products?
There are many reasons, chief amongst them patently anti-competetive strategy of ownership of other food delivery services and/or forcing exclusivity of product on entire retail chains. That and outright purchase of any, even remotely, threatening competitors. Once corporate power becomes so great, there are no possible challengers. This, easily visible to any observer who looks for it, truth is of course in direct contradiction to Anarcho-Capitalist/Libertarian religious dogma.
Let's say Coca-Cola loses 2-3% market share to a smaller competitor. If Coca-Cola comes out with a new product that regains that market share loss at the expense of the smaller company, is that a bad thing for society?
In that case Coca-Cola (or Pepsi) simply buys the said competitor, which is what always happened historically, and then adds its brand name to its own list of products. And yes, it is bad for society.
The Coca-colas and Pepsis of the world operate in near-invulnerable positions of power, in which they are capable of controlling the "barriers to entry" for the upstarts and should that (rarely) fail, they have resources many orders of magnitude greater than any would-be challengers and simply buy them. Should that fail, they also resourt to other, less clean means.
These business dynasties are no longer "companies", they are globe-spanning "kingdoms" - above the laws of men and individual nations.
I don't think so - it means that Coca-Cola is innovating to improve its bottom line, and also forces the smaller company to continue to innovate and compete to take more share away from Coca-Cola.
Tell me of this "innovation"! What was the last time the main Coca-cola formula was changed (I mean since its early time when it was actually using coca leaves for their addictive cocaine when cocaine was still legal in 1800s)?
What is the solution? Preventing people and institutions from earning above a certain amount or gaining a certain level of market share?
The solution is rather simple. Steep, progressive income (and above certain threshold, asset) taxation. This creates a "law of diminishing returns" whereby to get from 10 times the mean income of society to 11 times would require an individual to increase his supposed "merit" 100-fold.
The advantage of this simple system is that it sets no "hard" limits on income, it simply makes it progresivelly harder (in logarithmic progression) to earn more.
I don't see it that way at all. True, economies of scale can improve cost of things but they also reduce choice. The balance is surely somewhere before the choices get reduced to one or two, no?
Speaking of AMD and Intel, that is an example of a failure of the market. Thanks to Wintel domination, AMD is forced to compete mainly on speed and power consumption and is wholly prevented from any true innovation in overall computing architecture. If the marketplace was divided between many, at most 10% or so of marketplace share, players, the amount of radical innovation would have been orders of magnitude greater.
I am fairly confident that the multi-mega-billionaires do more with their money than what you espouse. I imagine they do not keep their billions under their golden-goose-feathered mattresses or in their diamond-encrusted cookie jars. My guess is that their money:
- is in a bank, giving the bank the ability to lend money to the "little people" to purchase homes, cars. etc.
- is in stock, giving companies of all shapes/sizes capital they need to fund operations, make investments, and grow, thus having some benefit to the "little people"
Very well, replace the billionaires with depositor-owned Credit unions. Then explain to me how a whole organization of thousands of people, which is far more effective in all these "funding" areas then a billionaire heir is less advantageous to the society then his pampered ass?
Then explain to me, exactly, the reasoning behind awarding this man all that power and the "merit" to society that his "ownership" of those billions provides...
Did you type this on your PC after you did some searching on Google while drinking Coca-Cola with your Large Big Mac Meal? I believe that each of those items I just mentioned were bourne from "little people" and small businesses that came up with products/ideas that the market has responded to, and thus, making many of those involved mega-bazillionaire corporate oligopolistic emperors of evil.
You miss the point. The problem is with the scale of things. There should never be a duo-poly of Coca-Cola and Pepsi ruling 90% of the marketplace. Nor a gigantic all-powerful Google or Microsoft. Allowing such is a market and societal failure. The very existence of billionaires ia a sure indicator of failure of the society to organize things fairly.
Market forces will eventually make these oligopolistic fiefdoms has-beens fit for a future documentary on the History Channel
That is insufficient. A societal injstice that takes a life-time (or many) to correct is, for those whose life-times it spans, practically eternal. Not to mention that its removal usually corelates with creation of another.
a channel which will probably be broacast directly to your grey matter because someone without a lot of money today will have an idea to make it possible, and will make billions from it.
If someone made "billions" on the History Channel, we all got badly cheated.
In many cases they are as they had the ambition and the ability to implement their idea. If you look back through history you'll see that technological development is seldom a collective effort. Almost all major technological inventions have been done by individuals or at most a handful of people. In case they have a sense for business they start their own shops and in other cases they are employed by others. The former category is more common but the latter one exists as well. In any case the best they can hope for is to be underappreciated. In the normal case - especially if they try to get paid for their work - they get stomped on.
The problem is with your (and many other would-be rulers of humanity) idea of "rewards" for such "merit". True, some people contribute more to the progress of civilization then others, but the rewards due to them for those contributions are a subject of a rather lively controversy. Some businessmen and inventors claim that a difference of earnings running into millions of life-time incomes to one is the "just minimum" due by the society to the said inventors for their "contributions" of, say, a chemical formula for a drug keeps dicks erect, a thing impossible without adding a truly miniscule amount to the few centuries of knowledge accumulated by humanity in chemistry and biology.
So yes, clever people should get rewards for their clever contributions to society, but these contributions are never so great as to warrant great fortunes. It is a physical impossibility. No one is so important.
In short your entire tirade is about creation of yet another band of rulers of society who, like all those before them, would claim that their position is due to their oh-so-great "merit" to humanity, and thus warrants massive disparities in power and wealth. Except that you replaced coats of arms with patents.
If you voluntarily sign a work contract with a company where you give them the right to sell the result of your work in exchange for direct payment, then it was a fair deal. If then the CEO uses the money gained from your work to buy a second beach house for his third mistress you have no grounds for objection. You are free to quit and to sell your work on the free market, keeping the profits and perhaps investing them more wisely.
That is more Libertarian bullshit religion. None of us does these things "voluntarily". If it were "voluntary" the vast majority of humanity would live on tropical islands feeding of marvellous miraculous fruits that taste delicious and keep you fed for weeks. We are forced by circumstances to struggle for living. Our choices (in a vast majority of cases) are reduced to picking whose slave we become to achieve that.
Of course those who were positioned favourably in the society (usually due to lottery of birth, be it in wealthy families or wealthy nations) advocate that such a system is "fair", because it is far more "fair" to them.
Far more immoral than the CEO is the government that takes your money force, but that's a different story.
I do not see a marked difference in "unfairness" of money being taken in order to make sure that basic necessities of life are provided to those unlucky and in hopeless situations versus the "fairness" of being put in competetive scenarios at a gigiantic, insurmountable by most, disadvantage and then being blamed for "being average" and "not performing".
How many people don't benefit from Sergey Brin's and Larry Pages work and ideas?
Nowhere nearly enough to warrant these two a "billionaire" status. There isn't an invention in history of mankind to warrant that.
Think about how many are enjoying the results of the effort of a person like Steve Jobs.
On the last point, having a few mega-bazillion corporation that were owned by their workers (stakeholder?) would probably benefit society even more but what are the odds of that ever happening?
I would tend to disagree on a simple principle that size is in inverse proportion to the number of such companies in a given market, and thus in inverse proportion to competetiveness and as a result, consumer choice. A properly functioning marketplace would result in a multitude of competitors in any given area, which by necessity would mean that none of them is relatively large.
The "geniuses" come up with bright new ideas every now and then, which eventually get adopted, raising the productivity of both the "peons" and the "managers".
Not forgetting of course that every "genius" that ever existed based his achievements on the work of countless others who went before him and that all his/her contributions never amounted to more then a few percentile points of the knowlege he was given by those predecessors. A matter of perspetive which is usually lost in human propensity for "hero" worship and other unwarranted personality cults.
The Soviets tried that experiment in the early years after the revolution on a smaller scale, letting soldiers elect their officers, and workers run their factories. The result was economic disaster.
That is of course another mis-conception. The Soviet economy started as a total disatser inhereited from the Tzarist feudal nightmare, further impoverished by the WWI. Under those circumstances one cannot easily attribute these effects to such experimentation as you would like. In the latter years the "managers" and other "betters" did precisely what you suggest: took charge from the goofy "unqualified" peons, "for their own good". The results we all know.
You do need trained managers for things to go smoothly, and they will inevitably form the "elite" simply by virtue of being different.
Not so. A "manager" is just another worker, his expertise is simply in a different area. That however does not make him "elite" in any objective way, other then his and his peers desire to re-create soeme degree of feudal stratification. The "elite" forms simply because it wants to be "elite". Its members see themselves as "superior" and require hordes of "inferiors" to validate their self-worth.
Politicians are really just a different breed of managers, meant to handle the large-scale tasks (well, they are meant to be, at least; mind you, I'm not considering the present-day USA a good model!).
That maybe so, but large-scale tasks do not automatically warrant "superiority" to those who manage them. That is a self-serving lie spread by those who wish to be "superior" to the rest of us.
Also, even if you take all the small business owners, they are still the minority. The vast majority are still working class and white-collar office workers.
Those are the "tradesmen" I mentioned. Remove them and the whole economy dies. Managers and investors would starve to death within days. Reverse is not true, remove the investors, managers and moneyed classes and the economy would suffer loss of efficiency but it would not cease to function permanently. That, if anything, is proof positive of the relative "merit" of these social strata.
While this is true, the interesting side note is that in any of the "class struggle" revolutions we had so far, it's the small businesses that are targeted first in the anti-capitalist witch-hunts. Probably precisely because they "usually work hands-on in their chosen trade", and are thus easiest to reach for the mob.
I am not advocating revolutions, nor trying to somehow glorify past ones. I am merely pointing out that the patently false idea that we are all somehow completely indebted to tiny "meritorious" "elites" and thus in obligation to worship them and shower them with wealth and power is a rather old and worn out one. Its ugly and self-serving nature did not improve with the passage of centuries.
The problem with this is that it isn't your average Joe that makes society work.
That of course is a demonstrable falsity, promulgated by our would-be "betters" since times immemorial. It wasn't the peons that made empires and kingdoms "work", it were the "nobility", right? Starting with examples such as an idiot named Cheops who made thousands of men align stones on top of each other so that his "glorious" and "totally above average" ass can ascend to Heaven as a bigger yet king. No one remembers those "averages" who actually built the thing, never you mind those who fed the empire and its oh-so-superior parasites.
And so human societies were always constructed on the basis of this fundamental idiocy, that "special" people, who are "naturally" (or who in some very rare cases ascend the social strata) born to rule the rest of us mucky-mucks whose destiny is to make sure golden crappers of our "betters" run properly and that the exotic lobster is delivered on time. Anything else would be "class warfare" and frowned upon... by the said betters and their sycophants.
On the contrary, the people that produce and that create jobs are a small exceptional group that often get the short end of the stick in a democratic system.
Total bullshit. The core of any economy are tradesmen (such as the majority of Slashdot readership), very small and small businesses, many millions of which operate in every country. Their owners are no more "special" then their employees and usually work hands-on in their chosen trade, as opposed to "managing" things or "investing" as is the case in larger operations. In most sane countries these owners also earn no more then double (after expenses and taxes) of what their employees make. In places such as Japan, even the CEOs of very large corporations make only about 10 times (on average) more then their workers. In neo-feudal nations, such as USA, that ratio is exceeding 500 and is on the way up.
The rarefied club of "exceptional betters", without whom we would surely not know how to tie our shoe-laces, is actually shrinking (as a percentage of total number of humans on Earth) and now less then 2% of humanity owns more then 50% of its private property (not income - assets!). Those numbers are worsening every year. If the trend continues, less then 0.5% will own 90% of Earth's assets in just few decades.
The would-be corporate royalty and the multi-mega-billionaires add nothing to the society as their activities are confined to "owning" land, machinery and people, people who in turn employ others who in turn do something actually useful. A process which would have gone on just as lively if the mega-billionaires were removed from the picture. Far more efficiently actually as a large number of small businesses competing in a marketplace is far more society-friendly then a few mega-bazillionaire corporate oligopolistic fiefdoms.
I'm not sure what would constitute a better system, but what we have right now certainly isn't it.
Whatever it is, neo-feudalism (this time with hereditary "business" royalty) isn't it.
So it seems that the general rules are well understood but their application leads to an explosion of complexity in their permutations, right? A situation which I keep reading about in many areas of science, and which is probably responsible for the slowdown of progress in many areas which seemed to be ready to yeld significant results in the 1960s, such as the AI research. Until people run into this very wall you are describing.
Are there any efforts underway to instead of relying on pure abstract computation to use in its place a combination of a physical device and an analysing computer to circumvent the need for reliable enough models and to shift the focus to a rapid execution of a vast number of computer-controlled mini-experiments, thus letting the complexity handle itself, so that way one can just achieve a desired protein shape in a reasonable time frame, without the otherwise necessary computing power and modelling accuracy?
I hadn't realized that our understanding of physics was so poor. While I was always skeptical about "simulations" such as the one in the article, which in real life involve tens of thousands to millions such immensly complex structures as living cells, I was under the impression that protein folding involved much, much narrower scope and well understood (at the scales involved) laws of physics. Is that not so? I mean we are not dealing here with some poorly understood sub-atomic phenomena, are we? So why is modelling of proteins so difficult?
You are confusing fame which comes about as a result of a peer-reviewed, rigorously tested but nevertheless astonishing discovery and attempts to force acceptance of your "theories" via appeals to the mass-media audience. Then there is also simple "popularization" of science, i.e. recasting complicated discoveries in terms more palatable to the public, which is what Sagan was all about.
Fame and efforts at popularization are not a problem. Attempts to use a personality cult to bypass the peer review process are.
As to politics, money is pretty much a universal corruptor. That is why most sane democracies have publicly funded campaigns and strict laws about acceptance of any contributions. It is not foolproof but it reduces the dirty politicos to rather dangerous to them (by the virtue of possibility of detection) methods, such as the one involving cash and brown envelopes.
The fact that various people continuously try to remodel Science into a contest of egos and popularities does not change the fundamental fact that Science itself is in the long term immune to such tactics.
And those who attempt it end up, sooner or later, with the only scientific title they deserve: "Crackpot", their "theories" having been ground into dust by the slowly, unglamorously, mundanely, steadily turning wheels of the scientific method.
That is because the supposed subject of all this is Science. And hype and personality cults are to science as money is to politics: corrupting, destructive, counter-prodctive forces.
Reason, peer review, rigourous analysis, unassailable demonstration of proof, etc are the ways of science, not ascension to prominence via grooming oneself for mass-media "stardom" by boggling the "minds" of the rather feebly-minded general public.
It amazes me sometimes how the US can be simultaneously treated as the root of evil yet at the same time implicitly as a more moral nation.
That is because you misrepresent the treatment. The US is composed of multiple factions, parties, forces, some of which are, pretty much, "the root of evil" while some others are those of sanity and morality. The problem is that far too frequently (and with increasing success) the forces of evil within the US prevail over all the other ones. Because the US, due to vagaries of geography and history, sprinkled copiously with dumb luck, is such an economic power, these forces are particularly attracted to the US as it offers them the most advantageous position to control the planet, which very much in accordance with the strategies of all parasites everywhere.
If the US was the horrible imperial power it's made out to be, a bunch of artillery pointed at Seoul would make no difference at all. The US attacks, and if Seoul gets flattened, Seoul gets flattened.
I think your case it isn't that you fix the problem in Windows, you fix the symptoms of the problem, but the problem itself is still there.
Which is exactly what I described, but I also pointed out that this is frequently the only thing you can do in Windows-based scenarios and it does return the environment to a workable state, for a while, which is why it has been filed under the label of "fixing" by many IT workers with Microsoft-only experience. I agree with you that such definition of "fixing" is deficient, but the point of my post was merely to explain why the argument over the value of rebooting is so heated.
I think the problem is with different definitions of "fixed" which Windows and Unix/Linux/Mainframe/etc admins have. In the Windows world "fixed" frequently means clearing up an inherent, recurring, deep-seated internal design problems of either Windows or some business app which are fundamentally unsolvable given the lack of access to the source code and even sufficient diagnostics tools to track the cause down. So rebooting "fixes" the problem in the sense that people get back to work and the thing limps along for some unpredictable amount of time again, until one of the many fundamentally unsolveable issues crops up again. Then reboot. Lather, rinse, repeat.
In the other environments "fixing" means employing a set of different diagnostic procedures, from analysing logs (which are actually useful, unlike the Windows ones), turning debugging info on, running strace etc, all the way to parsing source code, all of which procedures are very quickly focused on a specific running process or kernel module, which in turn can, in a vast majority of cases, be stopped/started/loaded/unloaded at runtime. Following which "fixing" means alteration to either the system configuration or applying appropriate patches. In some cases even writing your own.
This is because of this fundamental difference you have such a chorus of disagreement between those who come from Microsoft-only shops and those who have a much broader experience.
This is actually a deficiency in HTML format which is inhereited from much older SGML-based formats designed to handle all conceivable documents at the time when pictures were great luxury and not available on most computer equipment. It is not a feature.
Times have changed and by "documents" we today mean not only text but other forms of visual data, such as pictures, audio and video, all of which need some form of standardisation for use on an universal medium such as the World Wide Web. The lack of such standardisation leads to a myriad of mutually incompatible formats and proprietary implementation wars, in which the first thing usually lost is interopreability, which of course is the whole point of an HTML-based system.
That is why extensions should be allowed for new, experimental means of visualisation, while the basic, established methods should be covered by a common-sense standard. In such it does not matter if Ogg or PNG or what not is chosen, as long as the technology is reasonably efficient, patent unincumbered and well documented.
I do not understand this vehement resistance to standardising anything but textual information formats. Why always stop there? If you do not want a standard in web video delivery, you do not want one in HTML either. In fact you probably want to replace the whole web browser with some proprietary Flash-like plug-in. Otherwise your position makes no sense. Either the basic forms of delivery are standardised or they are not, and everyone is free to introduce a plugin based format of the week, for everyting, including text. Of course the thing would no longer be called World Wide Web, more like Microsoft Web or Adobe Web or some such.
Make no mistake about it, the pressure against standardisation comes precisely from those quarters and the reasoning behind it is anything but technical.
I would love for Gnash to become a viable alternative, unfortunately the deck is severely stacked against its developers. Flash formats can change and grow in obfuscated complexity far faster then they can be reverse-engineered by the Gnash team. Its a battle lost before it begun. The only long-term answer to all of these problems are open formats.
If by "religious" you mean insistence on having a practical, viable choice other then Windows, then the term is "sane", not "religious".
Implicit allowance for a de-facto monopoly to form and to control nearly the entire PC market, followed by all sorts of excuse making as to why having only one viable choice is "superior" for the society at large is what I call "religious".
Some have serious problems with that plugin, which amongst other things hang Mozilla. While this possibly depends on versions of the plugin/mozilla/whatnot it still does not hide the fact that the plugin is a kludgy, rubber-bands+chewing-gum workaround merely obscuring the actual problem of proprietary, single-platform plugins.
What do you mean by "nagging"?! Because it works for you, on your specific hardware/software configuration so that means everyone else does not count?! Because it is working for you so it also means it "works" universally?!
No it is not working even by your definition. The wrapper/Flash combo on Ubuntu is extremely unstable in many configurations, leading to lockups of the browser, evidence of which you can see just by googling the topic, or even just amongst people replying in this thread.
There is no "FUD" about Flash not working properly on Linux. Simply evidence. Flash has 32-bit, x86-only implementation on Linux. That is by definition "not working" on any Linux architecture different from that specification, even though one can do some half-assed, barely functional fakery on 64-bit x86.
I am getting fed up with people who after installing some convoluted set of emulation/virtualization layers get a Windows-only proprietary crapola to limp along pathetically, following which they go around exclaiming that "its working!".
I strongly recommend VMWare to them. Its a far better way to make things "work" in that fashion. Just boot XP in a VM and presto! 100% "workiness" of proprietary crap plugins.
You are using either a 32-bit plugin wrapper, which is in essence giving in to the Windows crowd wholesale, for you might as well be running Wine and call it "linux", or a whole 32-bit chroot environment. In either case this is not "workoing". "Kludging" is more like it.
Slashdot Mirror
That is because you are depending here on an arithmetical anomaly. That is the arithmetics of the capitalist marketplace become increasingly divorced from the "merit" to society as the numerical multiplications increase. Your, incorrect, assumption is that monetary value equals "merit". "Merit" is a complex concept, only part of which is dependant on the number of the recipients of your product, it also has to include factors such as what your machine does to produce the items (i.e. the negative short-term and long-term side effects of your activity), the unwanted societal impact of your product, the resource depletion and objective value of this product in relation to these resources as seen from the perspective of overall progress of humanity and on and on.
That monetary value equals "merit" is one of fundamental deceptions concocted by very greedy and self-absorbed people who espouse superiority of "markets" over every other method of valuation of things, chiefly because it suits their aim to fullfill their desire to rule over other people. Beware, if you attempt to use this method, increasing levels of illogic, social injustice and eventually disaster will inevietably follow. Life is far more complex then simple monetary evaluations.
See above: the dollars simply add up, but the "merit" does not follow the same logic.
This is irrelevant, your fundamental assumption about your calculation is simply wrong.
That is a circular logic. We choose to work for an employer because the employers have structured the society in such a way as to make employers the primary choice, not because it is the wisest course of action for a civilization.
How so? There is a fee for membership in any club, why not in society? That fee goes to make the society benefit all of its members, not just a chosen few would be feudal "meritocratic" masters. (You are of course aware of the fact that all the kings and nobles in the past used precisely the same argument you do, that their "merit" to society, versus that of the "peons" was what guaranteed them their position?).
I have no problem with any of this, my problem is with the fact that the dynamics of the present "marketplace" is such as to allow individuals and companies to accumulate resources far, far, far in excess to any conceivable "merit" they represent. If the market functioned sanely, the ability to increase
Thare is no definite, "absolute" value. There is however a sense of proportion and excess. No man (or woman) is so "meritorious" to society as to warrant an income or wealth equivalent to that of millions of his fellow society members.
My personal feeling is that a "fair" situation would be based on a ratio of, say, 10:1, whereby the most productive members of the society could expect to receive up to 10 times the rewards, as measured against the statistical mean (as opposed to arithmetical average) of the society in which they operate, and whereby any gains above the statistical means meet ever increasing in power "law of diminishing returns", whereby an attempt to increase the earnings from 10:1 to 11:1 would require 100-fold increase in "merit", and to 12:1 a 1000 fold etc.
This is in direct opposition to the present situation where earning money becomes easier the larger capital available, thus causing such patently absurd disparity between "merit" and rewards.
There are many reasons, chief amongst them patently anti-competetive strategy of ownership of other food delivery services and/or forcing exclusivity of product on entire retail chains. That and outright purchase of any, even remotely, threatening competitors. Once corporate power becomes so great, there are no possible challengers. This, easily visible to any observer who looks for it, truth is of course in direct contradiction to Anarcho-Capitalist/Libertarian religious dogma.
In that case Coca-Cola (or Pepsi) simply buys the said competitor, which is what always happened historically, and then adds its brand name to its own list of products. And yes, it is bad for society.
The Coca-colas and Pepsis of the world operate in near-invulnerable positions of power, in which they are capable of controlling the "barriers to entry" for the upstarts and should that (rarely) fail, they have resources many orders of magnitude greater than any would-be challengers and simply buy them. Should that fail, they also resourt to other, less clean means.
These business dynasties are no longer "companies", they are globe-spanning "kingdoms" - above the laws of men and individual nations.
Tell me of this "innovation"! What was the last time the main Coca-cola formula was changed (I mean since its early time when it was actually using coca leaves for their addictive cocaine when cocaine was still legal in 1800s)?
The solution is rather simple. Steep, progressive income (and above certain threshold, asset) taxation. This creates a "law of diminishing returns" whereby to get from 10 times the mean income of society to 11 times would require an individual to increase his supposed "merit" 100-fold.
The advantage of this simple system is that it sets no "hard" limits on income, it simply makes it progresivelly harder (in logarithmic progression) to earn more.
So if individuals w
I don't see it that way at all. True, economies of scale can improve cost of things but they also reduce choice. The balance is surely somewhere before the choices get reduced to one or two, no?
Speaking of AMD and Intel, that is an example of a failure of the market. Thanks to Wintel domination, AMD is forced to compete mainly on speed and power consumption and is wholly prevented from any true innovation in overall computing architecture. If the marketplace was divided between many, at most 10% or so of marketplace share, players, the amount of radical innovation would have been orders of magnitude greater.
Very well, replace the billionaires with depositor-owned Credit unions. Then explain to me how a whole organization of thousands of people, which is far more effective in all these "funding" areas then a billionaire heir is less advantageous to the society then his pampered ass?
Then explain to me, exactly, the reasoning behind awarding this man all that power and the "merit" to society that his "ownership" of those billions provides...
You miss the point. The problem is with the scale of things. There should never be a duo-poly of Coca-Cola and Pepsi ruling 90% of the marketplace. Nor a gigantic all-powerful Google or Microsoft. Allowing such is a market and societal failure. The very existence of billionaires ia a sure indicator of failure of the society to organize things fairly.
That is insufficient. A societal injstice that takes a life-time (or many) to correct is, for those whose life-times it spans, practically eternal. Not to mention that its removal usually corelates with creation of another.
If someone made "billions" on the History Channel, we all got badly cheated.
The problem is with your (and many other would-be rulers of humanity) idea of "rewards" for such "merit". True, some people contribute more to the progress of civilization then others, but the rewards due to them for those contributions are a subject of a rather lively controversy. Some businessmen and inventors claim that a difference of earnings running into millions of life-time incomes to one is the "just minimum" due by the society to the said inventors for their "contributions" of, say, a chemical formula for a drug keeps dicks erect, a thing impossible without adding a truly miniscule amount to the few centuries of knowledge accumulated by humanity in chemistry and biology.
So yes, clever people should get rewards for their clever contributions to society, but these contributions are never so great as to warrant great fortunes. It is a physical impossibility. No one is so important.
In short your entire tirade is about creation of yet another band of rulers of society who, like all those before them, would claim that their position is due to their oh-so-great "merit" to humanity, and thus warrants massive disparities in power and wealth. Except that you replaced coats of arms with patents.
That is more Libertarian bullshit religion. None of us does these things "voluntarily". If it were "voluntary" the vast majority of humanity would live on tropical islands feeding of marvellous miraculous fruits that taste delicious and keep you fed for weeks. We are forced by circumstances to struggle for living. Our choices (in a vast majority of cases) are reduced to picking whose slave we become to achieve that.
Of course those who were positioned favourably in the society (usually due to lottery of birth, be it in wealthy families or wealthy nations) advocate that such a system is "fair", because it is far more "fair" to them.
I do not see a marked difference in "unfairness" of money being taken in order to make sure that basic necessities of life are provided to those unlucky and in hopeless situations versus the "fairness" of being put in competetive scenarios at a gigiantic, insurmountable by most, disadvantage and then being blamed for "being average" and "not performing".
Nowhere nearly enough to warrant these two a "billionaire" status. There isn't an invention in history of mankind to warrant that.
See above.
A company named "Peach" or "Prune
I would tend to disagree on a simple principle that size is in inverse proportion to the number of such companies in a given market, and thus in inverse proportion to competetiveness and as a result, consumer choice. A properly functioning marketplace would result in a multitude of competitors in any given area, which by necessity would mean that none of them is relatively large.
Not forgetting of course that every "genius" that ever existed based his achievements on the work of countless others who went before him and that all his/her contributions never amounted to more then a few percentile points of the knowlege he was given by those predecessors. A matter of perspetive which is usually lost in human propensity for "hero" worship and other unwarranted personality cults.
That is of course another mis-conception. The Soviet economy started as a total disatser inhereited from the Tzarist feudal nightmare, further impoverished by the WWI. Under those circumstances one cannot easily attribute these effects to such experimentation as you would like. In the latter years the "managers" and other "betters" did precisely what you suggest: took charge from the goofy "unqualified" peons, "for their own good". The results we all know.
Not so. A "manager" is just another worker, his expertise is simply in a different area. That however does not make him "elite" in any objective way, other then his and his peers desire to re-create soeme degree of feudal stratification. The "elite" forms simply because it wants to be "elite". Its members see themselves as "superior" and require hordes of "inferiors" to validate their self-worth.
That maybe so, but large-scale tasks do not automatically warrant "superiority" to those who manage them. That is a self-serving lie spread by those who wish to be "superior" to the rest of us.
Those are the "tradesmen" I mentioned. Remove them and the whole economy dies. Managers and investors would starve to death within days. Reverse is not true, remove the investors, managers and moneyed classes and the economy would suffer loss of efficiency but it would not cease to function permanently. That, if anything, is proof positive of the relative "merit" of these social strata.
I am not advocating revolutions, nor trying to somehow glorify past ones. I am merely pointing out that the patently false idea that we are all somehow completely indebted to tiny "meritorious" "elites" and thus in obligation to worship them and shower them with wealth and power is a rather old and worn out one. Its ugly and self-serving nature did not improve with the passage of centuries.
That of course is a demonstrable falsity, promulgated by our would-be "betters" since times immemorial. It wasn't the peons that made empires and kingdoms "work", it were the "nobility", right? Starting with examples such as an idiot named Cheops who made thousands of men align stones on top of each other so that his "glorious" and "totally above average" ass can ascend to Heaven as a bigger yet king. No one remembers those "averages" who actually built the thing, never you mind those who fed the empire and its oh-so-superior parasites.
And so human societies were always constructed on the basis of this fundamental idiocy, that "special" people, who are "naturally" (or who in some very rare cases ascend the social strata) born to rule the rest of us mucky-mucks whose destiny is to make sure golden crappers of our "betters" run properly and that the exotic lobster is delivered on time. Anything else would be "class warfare" and frowned upon ... by the said betters and their sycophants.
Total bullshit. The core of any economy are tradesmen (such as the majority of Slashdot readership), very small and small businesses, many millions of which operate in every country. Their owners are no more "special" then their employees and usually work hands-on in their chosen trade, as opposed to "managing" things or "investing" as is the case in larger operations. In most sane countries these owners also earn no more then double (after expenses and taxes) of what their employees make. In places such as Japan, even the CEOs of very large corporations make only about 10 times (on average) more then their workers. In neo-feudal nations, such as USA, that ratio is exceeding 500 and is on the way up.
The rarefied club of "exceptional betters", without whom we would surely not know how to tie our shoe-laces, is actually shrinking (as a percentage of total number of humans on Earth) and now less then 2% of humanity owns more then 50% of its private property (not income - assets!). Those numbers are worsening every year. If the trend continues, less then 0.5% will own 90% of Earth's assets in just few decades.
The would-be corporate royalty and the multi-mega-billionaires add nothing to the society as their activities are confined to "owning" land, machinery and people, people who in turn employ others who in turn do something actually useful. A process which would have gone on just as lively if the mega-billionaires were removed from the picture. Far more efficiently actually as a large number of small businesses competing in a marketplace is far more society-friendly then a few mega-bazillionaire corporate oligopolistic fiefdoms.
Whatever it is, neo-feudalism (this time with hereditary "business" royalty) isn't it.
Thanks for the answer.
So it seems that the general rules are well understood but their application leads to an explosion of complexity in their permutations, right? A situation which I keep reading about in many areas of science, and which is probably responsible for the slowdown of progress in many areas which seemed to be ready to yeld significant results in the 1960s, such as the AI research. Until people run into this very wall you are describing.
Are there any efforts underway to instead of relying on pure abstract computation to use in its place a combination of a physical device and an analysing computer to circumvent the need for reliable enough models and to shift the focus to a rapid execution of a vast number of computer-controlled mini-experiments, thus letting the complexity handle itself, so that way one can just achieve a desired protein shape in a reasonable time frame, without the otherwise necessary computing power and modelling accuracy?
I hadn't realized that our understanding of physics was so poor. While I was always skeptical about "simulations" such as the one in the article, which in real life involve tens of thousands to millions such immensly complex structures as living cells, I was under the impression that protein folding involved much, much narrower scope and well understood (at the scales involved) laws of physics. Is that not so? I mean we are not dealing here with some poorly understood sub-atomic phenomena, are we? So why is modelling of proteins so difficult?
You are confusing fame which comes about as a result of a peer-reviewed, rigorously tested but nevertheless astonishing discovery and attempts to force acceptance of your "theories" via appeals to the mass-media audience. Then there is also simple "popularization" of science, i.e. recasting complicated discoveries in terms more palatable to the public, which is what Sagan was all about.
Fame and efforts at popularization are not a problem. Attempts to use a personality cult to bypass the peer review process are.
As to politics, money is pretty much a universal corruptor. That is why most sane democracies have publicly funded campaigns and strict laws about acceptance of any contributions. It is not foolproof but it reduces the dirty politicos to rather dangerous to them (by the virtue of possibility of detection) methods, such as the one involving cash and brown envelopes.
The fact that various people continuously try to remodel Science into a contest of egos and popularities does not change the fundamental fact that Science itself is in the long term immune to such tactics.
And those who attempt it end up, sooner or later, with the only scientific title they deserve: "Crackpot", their "theories" having been ground into dust by the slowly, unglamorously, mundanely, steadily turning wheels of the scientific method.
Nobody's.
And no hype either.
That is because the supposed subject of all this is Science. And hype and personality cults are to science as money is to politics: corrupting, destructive, counter-prodctive forces.
Reason, peer review, rigourous analysis, unassailable demonstration of proof, etc are the ways of science, not ascension to prominence via grooming oneself for mass-media "stardom" by boggling the "minds" of the rather feebly-minded general public.
That is because you misrepresent the treatment. The US is composed of multiple factions, parties, forces, some of which are, pretty much, "the root of evil" while some others are those of sanity and morality. The problem is that far too frequently (and with increasing success) the forces of evil within the US prevail over all the other ones. Because the US, due to vagaries of geography and history, sprinkled copiously with dumb luck, is such an economic power, these forces are particularly attracted to the US as it offers them the most advantageous position to control the planet, which very much in accordance with the strategies of all parasites everywhere.
Which is precisely what the US did.
To Iraq.
Which is exactly what I described, but I also pointed out that this is frequently the only thing you can do in Windows-based scenarios and it does return the environment to a workable state, for a while, which is why it has been filed under the label of "fixing" by many IT workers with Microsoft-only experience. I agree with you that such definition of "fixing" is deficient, but the point of my post was merely to explain why the argument over the value of rebooting is so heated.
I think the problem is with different definitions of "fixed" which Windows and Unix/Linux/Mainframe/etc admins have. In the Windows world "fixed" frequently means clearing up an inherent, recurring, deep-seated internal design problems of either Windows or some business app which are fundamentally unsolvable given the lack of access to the source code and even sufficient diagnostics tools to track the cause down. So rebooting "fixes" the problem in the sense that people get back to work and the thing limps along for some unpredictable amount of time again, until one of the many fundamentally unsolveable issues crops up again. Then reboot. Lather, rinse, repeat.
In the other environments "fixing" means employing a set of different diagnostic procedures, from analysing logs (which are actually useful, unlike the Windows ones), turning debugging info on, running strace etc, all the way to parsing source code, all of which procedures are very quickly focused on a specific running process or kernel module, which in turn can, in a vast majority of cases, be stopped/started/loaded/unloaded at runtime. Following which "fixing" means alteration to either the system configuration or applying appropriate patches. In some cases even writing your own.
This is because of this fundamental difference you have such a chorus of disagreement between those who come from Microsoft-only shops and those who have a much broader experience.
This is actually a deficiency in HTML format which is inhereited from much older SGML-based formats designed to handle all conceivable documents at the time when pictures were great luxury and not available on most computer equipment. It is not a feature.
Times have changed and by "documents" we today mean not only text but other forms of visual data, such as pictures, audio and video, all of which need some form of standardisation for use on an universal medium such as the World Wide Web. The lack of such standardisation leads to a myriad of mutually incompatible formats and proprietary implementation wars, in which the first thing usually lost is interopreability, which of course is the whole point of an HTML-based system.
That is why extensions should be allowed for new, experimental means of visualisation, while the basic, established methods should be covered by a common-sense standard. In such it does not matter if Ogg or PNG or what not is chosen, as long as the technology is reasonably efficient, patent unincumbered and well documented.
I do not understand this vehement resistance to standardising anything but textual information formats. Why always stop there? If you do not want a standard in web video delivery, you do not want one in HTML either. In fact you probably want to replace the whole web browser with some proprietary Flash-like plug-in. Otherwise your position makes no sense. Either the basic forms of delivery are standardised or they are not, and everyone is free to introduce a plugin based format of the week, for everyting, including text. Of course the thing would no longer be called World Wide Web, more like Microsoft Web or Adobe Web or some such.
Make no mistake about it, the pressure against standardisation comes precisely from those quarters and the reasoning behind it is anything but technical.
I would love for Gnash to become a viable alternative, unfortunately the deck is severely stacked against its developers. Flash formats can change and grow in obfuscated complexity far faster then they can be reverse-engineered by the Gnash team. Its a battle lost before it begun. The only long-term answer to all of these problems are open formats.
Religious?
If by "religious" you mean insistence on having a practical, viable choice other then Windows, then the term is "sane", not "religious".
Implicit allowance for a de-facto monopoly to form and to control nearly the entire PC market, followed by all sorts of excuse making as to why having only one viable choice is "superior" for the society at large is what I call "religious".
Some have serious problems with that plugin, which amongst other things hang Mozilla. While this possibly depends on versions of the plugin/mozilla/whatnot it still does not hide the fact that the plugin is a kludgy, rubber-bands+chewing-gum workaround merely obscuring the actual problem of proprietary, single-platform plugins.
Which in no way invalidates my point that there are many, many others for whom it does not work.
What do you mean by "nagging"?! Because it works for you, on your specific hardware/software configuration so that means everyone else does not count?! Because it is working for you so it also means it "works" universally?!
Talk about self-centered attitude...
No it is not working even by your definition. The wrapper/Flash combo on Ubuntu is extremely unstable in many configurations, leading to lockups of the browser, evidence of which you can see just by googling the topic, or even just amongst people replying in this thread.
There is no "FUD" about Flash not working properly on Linux. Simply evidence. Flash has 32-bit, x86-only implementation on Linux. That is by definition "not working" on any Linux architecture different from that specification, even though one can do some half-assed, barely functional fakery on 64-bit x86.
Precisely.
I am getting fed up with people who after installing some convoluted set of emulation/virtualization layers get a Windows-only proprietary crapola to limp along pathetically, following which they go around exclaiming that "its working!".
I strongly recommend VMWare to them. Its a far better way to make things "work" in that fashion. Just boot XP in a VM and presto! 100% "workiness" of proprietary crap plugins.
You are using either a 32-bit plugin wrapper, which is in essence giving in to the Windows crowd wholesale, for you might as well be running Wine and call it "linux", or a whole 32-bit chroot environment. In either case this is not "workoing". "Kludging" is more like it.