No you took moderate assertions to an extreme conclusion, which is a quite common failing amongst zealots.
If by "zealots" you mean people employing logic, then sure. Actually this method of logical argument is so useful and commonly deployed amongst us "zealots" of reason and logic that it has its own name: Reductio ad absurdum.
Although I could see how you would hate the idea.
This is a false cause and effect relationship. Just because I build a mansion doesn't place you in the ghetto or cause you to starve. I don't deny there are negative externalities that should be addressed, such as ensuring environmental friendliness, but that is a seperate issue from social inequity.
Building such mansions has such effects in this way: in order to build them, the jerks in question need to appropriate labour/resources of countless other people and redirect them towards themselves. Since no one is capable of producing such amounts of fruits of labour by themselves (physical impossibility) and the only way to accomplish this is to abuse others by claiming portions of their work based upon completely bogus "contribution"/"reward" calculation (as in pretending that a CEO is more important then all of the employees in a company put together and that he produces more goods then all of them or that a spoiled kid heir of a major shareholder who doesn't even know what the company produces is "contributing" to society more then all of the said employees). Or to put it plainly, the only way to achieve the necessary resources for such a mansion is to rob others in the society. You can use any euphemism for such an activity you want, but it will still remain robbery.
And the effects of robbery are that some people will be denied whatever portion of the "reward" for their contribution that is due to them, some to the point of becoming destitute. It is as simple as that and it all boils down to the utter unreliability/inadequacy of the core element of the capitalist system: a woefully faulty "contribution" to "reward" ratio computation.
Neither is insane. Agrarian societies had much larger families because it put more heads in the field, pumping out kids was a reasonable way to ensure survival.
Which, of course, is insane because spewing kids out so that 2/3rd of them can die horribly in filth by the age of 5 is something a maggot would do, not sentient beings, who would promptly organize a common effort to grow food and to irigate fields, and soon would have a reliable food supply and a society-wide system of taking care of their elderly involving multiple families. And the direct cause of the insanity is, naturally, greed. As this is what causes the family to attempt to make it on their own in isolation and to treat all the others as competition to the very end. Animal stupidity at its best again.
It also makes me laugh how your truly reptilian brain figured that this was a "reasonable" approach.
Ultimately we are all faced with the choice of how to use the resources at our disposal, and we can disagree on how to use them. Some people value family, some people value comfort, and there are as many other value sets as there are people in this world.
And most do not subsribe to reason, or let reason be overruled by their animal instincts. Hence all the trouble in world. I have no respect for utter stupidity, just because large numbers of people profess to "believe" in it. Faced with a vast gap between these reptiles' and monkeys' "values" and insane urges versus the reality, causes most to crack wholesale and results in the so-called "mainstream religions" complete with omnitpotent invisible men in the sky with sandals on.
Poor, pitiful animals so far out of their element.
You keep missing the point of how wants are infinite - it's not about wanting the universe, it's about always wanting more.
No, I only took your assertions to their logical conclusion. You want to propose something but then you try to pretend that it does not have consequences because you do not like them. So you call them "an interpretation" or "a conjecture" etc. It is actually a quite common failing amongst various religious/political/economic ideologues.
I merely advocate not holding people back because others will feel bad.
This is a strawman (another logical fallacy in your collection). "Feeling bad" is not a criterion by which to judge the validity of societal rules, "causing harm to others" is. Of course this immediately translates into yet another canard of Greed Apologists: that starving or being forced to live a ghetto because some jerks have built "mansions" at your expense is not "harming" you, according to them. Only physical violence is, or that is at least their rather amusingly self-serving "definition" of the thing.
If I decide to spend my resources building a mansion instead of having 10 kids and living in a trailer, don't complain that I'm living an "insane" lifestyle.
Which of course is another logical fallacy, this time of "false dichotomy". You are on a roll! The false choice is between building a "mansion" (which sounds reasonable until one realizes that we were discussing 5000 room ones, with a staff of 1000) and having 10 kids, which, if one was not paying attention, would sound actually more unreasonable at the first glance. In fact they are both examples of animal, unreasoning, insane behaviour. Both your choices are insane! The choice which you purposefully avoided, that of reason and intelligence, is not listed.
How sad that working hard to be able to afford things (not just physical, but also things like vacations around the world to experience other cultures, meet other people) is considered insanity.
Strawman. You were claiming a set of infinite wants. Traveling to France and attempting to own the Universe are somewhat apart on the scale.
Personally I think contributing to society and reaping an equal reward isn't something that should punished because somebody else feels bad they can't get the same reward for contributing less.
I would not be complaining about the prevailing lunacy of the thing so much if the reward was "equal". I do realise that the current human society is not composed of reasonable, truly sentient, intelligent beings. Therefore any advanced societal structures will not work, as they would get sabotaged and subverted by the jerks in a flash. So we are stuck with cleverly disguised dog-collars, muzzles and leashes for the rabidly insane, like for example Capitalism, because that is the best one can do under the circumstances. But even by this token, the rewards which the likes of you try to grant themselves for their vaunted "contributions" have no relationship whatsoever with those "contributions". You always demand orders of magnitude more then you deserve, which in turn leads to wholesale, attrocious devaluation of the contributions of others.
So no, for the most part your reward is not "equal". It exceeds your "contributions" by a large factor and in the case of many of the idols of the Capitalist societies, by many, many orders of magnitude, sometimes even approaching infinity! (as is in the obviously demonstrable cases of inheretance and lotery windfalls)
Even to other industrialized societies this disparity is jarringly obvious. A typical Japanese CEO earns around 10-20 times the salary of an average employee in his firm. In the USA, this ratio recently exceeded 500. Next thing you are going to tell me that GM makes products 50 times superior to Toyota.
Typical desperate Von Misses/Hayek bulshit. In order to make their "analysis" work, they only had to assume that central planners must be all idiots and that proper allocation of resources is just "too computationally complex" for poor wittle us, with all of our computers and data networks...
Talk about whiny apologists!
In actuality the problem with central planning is the very reason why Capitalism "works" (limps along is more like it): personal greed coupled with sociopathic tendencies make short work of any centrally planned system which depends on sane participants. Capitalism on the other hand depends on insane participants and attempts to redirect their insanity towards something remotely approximating societal progress.
In short, centrally planed system works only in a hypothetical society of advanced intelligences, while "free market" is a pride and joy of barely evolved bare-assed monkeys, large parts of whose brains are dedicated to fighting each other over bananas and who gets to fuck who.
As I said before, our economy is just an approximation of a perfect market.
In the same way a square is an "approximation" of a sphere.
But surely, we should pass laws and regulations that help make this approximation closer.
The point of regulations should be to protect people from the fallout of this slight gap between your "model" and the rather unimpressed with it Universe.
No, let me explain this again. Every mutualy benificial transaction is done, and then the resulting allocation of resources that occur as an equilibrium are Pareto efficient.
One is contradictory to the other. What you just said is "If all transactions are Pareto-inefficient then the whole system is Pareto-efficient!". Bonus points for trully impressive pretzel "logic".
No, I did not say that at all.
Yes you did. It appears you can't even grasp the implications of your own "models".
The Free-Market is just a means of distributing resources.
Huh? What does this have to do with the point?
Progress is when the total number of resources increase, usualy as a result of new technologies.
You apparently have never heard of such far-out ideas as Thermodynamics and Entropy. "Free Market" as you have defined it would simply violate the laws of physics.
For more information, look up CGEs on wikipedia.
Listed between the "Tooth Fairy" and "Pixie Dust". CGEs are total fantasy, their predictive powers are less then those of your garden variety "psychic" from a late-night infomercial.
That's the "no child left behind" argument, hold back anybody who may excel so that others don't feel bad about themselves.
Right, the we should allow some super-greedy jerks to piss all over everybody else in the name of "progress". Better yet, use everyone else as tools, wreck them and then discard them, because the fastest rate of "progress" possible is the One And Only Answer To Universe and Everything! All else does not count! Right?
Or maybe sane, sentient beings see "progress" as a mere tool employed with a goal of improving quality of their lives. If the speed of progress comes into contradiction with this primary goal... then the "progress" loses. It is as simple as that, except that self-absorbed, sociopathic jerks do not want to hear it, as their whole "phillosophy" is a sad, contorted excuse for "justfying" the fullfilment of their own greed at other's expense.
So to follow you "logic", all environmental regulation should be abolished because it slows down the "enterpreneurs". Similarly all labour laws, all medical and drug regulation etc etc. Let Greed Reign Supreme! In the name of "progress"! Who the fuck cares about millions of sick, destitute and diseased living in filth? You got yours, they should have gotten out of the way of the members of the supreme race, the super-jerks, right?
Most everybody has unlimited wants.
It only looks like that in the insane asylum you inabit. Your social circle is likely composed nearly exclusively of the insane, infintely-greedy fucks. It also explains your desperate attempts at "justifying" yourself.
It reminds me of the story where in India a guy had bought an old plane fusilage and was selling tickets to people to enjoy a similuated plane flight. Many people who take flying for granted chuckle, but then I realize those same people are willing to pay hundreds of dollars to experience simulated space flight. No matter what you have, you'll want a little more.
This is called a non sequitur, yet another logical fallacy you grace us with. If person A wants a cube of sugar, then, according to your "logic", everyone else must want the whole Universe!
Why? If I work hard and take risk, should I not reap the rewards of my sweat? Does the man who decides to spend his free time making a fishing net instead of slacking off be forced to give up the extra food he catches?
Another non sequitur. A kettle of fish and 5000 room "house" are not equivalent. Fishing a few fish is a modest past-time, owning 5000 room "house" is an example of insanity and you know it, your dishonest "comparisons", nothwidthstanding.
Furthermore, there is no conceivable way in which the results of your "sweat" would warrant such rewards. None whatsoever. Everything you do is based upon work of countless other people, countless generations of them in fact, to whom you gave nothing back for using their achievments, and yet you demand, for your infinitesimally small "contribution" to civilization, the rewards which would equal the lifetime earnings of millions of others. The very definition of an insane jerk.
Yes, scientists always publish anonymously.
Irrelevant. Desire for personal recogniton is not greed.
They never compete for grant money.
Research priorities must be measured in some way, this is one of them.
They all work for minimum wage and only care that the wealth of human knowledge has expanded.
Another non sequitur. Nowhere did I demand that everyone starves. Sicentists only need reasonably comfortable living to be productive. Very few of them desire opulence.
One of the reasons scientists share their discoveries is because they must to get the resources they need. Socie
No, perfect competition dictates that individual actors do not have control over the "choices", or specificly, the prices of goods.
LOL, and this "perfect" competition comes to be right after the Proletariat of The World unites in a Harmonious Workers' And Peasants' Paradise, which occurs shortly after the Porcine Aviation Association is formed!
It is rather sad that I have to explain it to you, but all these silly never-never-land utopian (or in your case distopian) models break into a million shards as soon as they meet the real world, which features such wee things like geography, geophysics (affecting the distribution of natural resources) and socially, culturally and technologically based barriers to entry for competitiors into markets. Never you mind other itsy-bitsy anomalies such as the fact that for long stretches of time natural, self-forming (in laughable contradiction to the Holy Model) monopolies and oligopolies appear to control whole sections of markets for natural resources or access to particular geographical areas (completely unrelated to governance of any kind). And then there are the governments to add their own flavour to this unholy brew.
In short your model is in the same boat as that of the Commies: it works (sort of, if you squint, make a lot of wild, unproveable assumptions, and do not ask too many questions) on paper but it has a snowball's-in-Hell chance of remaining even remotely close to its "ideal" in the real world.
That of course on top of what I described at length already, that its very foundation consists of primitive, shameful, evolutionary baggage, which precludes it from ever becoming sane and thus its only practically viable function is to mitigate the effects of the wide-spread insanity by trying to redirect its destructive force in to something resembling productivity and societal growth (which is we find it marginally useful at present).
Refering to your other complaint, transactions in which one person is made better off at the expense of the other, do not occur in a free-market.
Muahahaha! So you've abandoned your idols, the Hyaks, the Von Mises, the Friedmans, the Sachs etc who all claimed that Pareto-efficiency is the cornerstone of "free markets" and their defining feature!
And so now you claim that, in effect, the supply always exceeds demand!
Or in actuality, and its again sad that I have to explain to you your own Holy Scriptures, it is that they've tried to eat the proverbial cake and have it too! Their assertion was to acknowledge that boundless avarice leads, by necessity, to Pareto-efficiency but they understood that such a system is a complete disaster so, in a glorious display of cognitive dissonance, they also claimed that the system continuously "moves about" its Pareto-efficiency point, thus being (ever temporarily) in Pareto-inefficent state, and that is where all the progress comes from!
A comedic act, really.
As Sir Walter Scott once wrote: "Oh what a tangled web we weave when first we practice to deceive!". Old fart was right on the money, specially when it comes to Greed Worshippers.
Both rapid explosions of greed and slow paced growth will eventually reach the same equalibrium state.
But with very different societal costs along the way!
It still does not change the underlying fact that people have unlimited wants.
Some people have unlimited wants, which as I already explained is the very definition of being an insane animal.
In other words, the philosophy of individual freedom is fundamentally flawed, and people should be controlled.
That is a strawman always trotted out by the acolytes of The Religion of Greed. In reality the equilibrium is when sane, sentient beings decide on their own that getting a 5,000 room "house" is not a reasonable thing to want to do. There is no coercion, merely individual excercise of reason and sanity. But only possible if humanity manages to rid itself of its evolutionary baggage of primitive, reptilian brain functions.
What you describe is intellectual greed. People want to know more and more with an insatiable thirst for knowledge.
LOL! If that were so, every scientist would jealously guard "his" discoveries, locking them up in a safe in his basement, to go there at night to count them by candle-light while giggling to himself! Instead they share them with everyone with an access to a library in scientific journals! A positive bunch of heretic Commies!
Further, the realization of any knowledge into a good or service is driven by greed.
Only because we live in a society designed by reptiles for reptiles. This however does not make it into the apex of all societal achievement, not by a long shot.
Maybe Einstein didn't profit by developing his theories, but contractors who make particle accelerators, or other tools to test the theories do.
See above. You've already completely conceeded the wholly indefensible point of "Science is Greed Motivated", now you've only got free-loaders-cum "enterpreneurs" left to ineffectively try to prop-up your lost arguments.
Again you describe an individual want. Greed does not need to be material, it can include mental, or emotional profit for an individual.
Bullshit. You do not get to redefine the basic functions of our psyche, such as curiosity about the world, and re-label them "Greed" so that you can justify your owm wholly unrelated and sick avarice. And that on top of the fact that these "wants" are satisfiable without anyone else having to part with anything, and their results are also freely shared with everyone, in exchange for nothing physical. Information, just in case you are confused about it, is not subject to any kind of trade, simply due to its properties.
You remind me of a salesman I once knew, who claimed that everything in life, from family, friends to school to work to marriage is... making sales!
The old addage of "If all you got is a hammer..." comes to mind.
How many artists or scientists create anonymously? Fame can also be a primal desire, to gain standing in society.
Which requires no payment at all to be made to the supposedly "greedy" individual. Social standing and recognition are wholly abstract and are not a subject to any economic system. You are flailing desperately, trying to mis-apply a wholly incompatible Greed-centered "model" where it is not possible to apply it.
People will always rationally work to maximize their individual profit, for many that is money, fame, ensuring their children live a better life....
No, that is what unreasoning animals do. Sentient beings are able to make trade-offs based on logic, sacrifices of immediate personal gain in an expectation of sh
Actions which help one person at the expense of another do not happen in Walrusian competition, as all transactions are volentary.
Sigh, yet another copout. "Voluntary" is a code word for "making a choice from an available list of choices" in which the major sociopaths (i.e. successful Capitalists) get to control what's on the list. As in for example: having been born in an economic ghetto, you can become a prostitute or die from hunger, as you have no other options for employment and no money to depart your particular ghetto. Thus, according to the apologists, the choice to become a whore is wholly "voluntary" as there was no one actually standing there next to you with a gun. Because a gun as a "motivator" = Communism = Baaad! and mere death by starvation as a "motivator" = Capitalist = Doubleplus Good! Quite simple, no?
To be honest, I am not familiar with the "Walrusian" competiton "model" (a group of fat flubbery Walruses pounding heads against and biting each other to win the right to impregnate the patiently waiting harem of the females of the species comes to mind), although I am sure some arcane, convoluted and wholly useless thing exists in the rarefied realms of the High Priesthood, concocted specifically so that you can throw about a "reference" to this Holy Item of The Inner Sanctum of the Annointed Ones, Google having returned mere 16 results for it! Arcane "science" indeed!
I'm not sure how I claim that at all, please elaborate.
Ahem...
Moreover, the reason we pick it is that an ideal free-market provides Pareto-efficient distribution of goods, not something that many other resource allocation models can achieve in real life.
You claim that free-markets are supposed to be Pareto-efficient...
Then:
Right, but such an outcome is not Pareto efficient. Starving people to own a galaxy makes one person better off, while making someone else worse off. This is not allowed.
You claim that improving one's position at expense of others means Pareto-inefficiency (which is the exact opposite of the definition)
Followed by:
In a true free-market system, this person made his money by creating resources, not by hurting anyone. If he wishes to build a giant house with a large staff, that is his perogotive.
I.e. the very definition of Pareto-inefficiency (an ability to improve one's position without reducing that of others) which you now claim is an integral property of "free markets", in direct contradiction to your first statement. A complete loop of inconsistency and illogic.
Your right, they do not. They do on the other hand, have to satisfy certain requirements, outlined in the welfare theorem, that the Soviet Union did not.
Internally, in respect to some criteria, it did not. But it did externally as a state. Furthermore, small businesses were allowed to exist in the Soviet satellite countries, even though all large ones were owned by the state.
I do not think that we are arguing about the same thing. You are refering to plutocratic darwinism, where the people in power actively work to screw over those who are not. These groups sometimes claim that they are capitalist, but they are not. These groups will fight capitalism, because in a true free-market system, power is meaningless.
Again, you are trying to treat individuals within Soviet Union as economic entities, which in their system they were not. The state was the only economic entity, both supplier and consumer. And it acted in all respects as a capitalist in its dealings abroad. Citizens of the Soviet Union however were simply not part of the equation. They were a monolitic block of, essentially, robots, from the perspective of the markets, with no economic function of their own.
Incidentally this very formula is applied in China, where the state capitalist uses its cheap human robots for its own production and also rents them to foreign, Western capitalists for a profit.
Right, but such an outcome is not Pareto efficient. Starving people to own a galaxy makes one person better off, while making someone else worse off. This is not allowed.
What?! Do you actually read your own theories? Pareto-efficiency is precisely a state where improvement of a position of one individual must be accompanied by a loss to others. You've now completely lost track of your own argument!
In a true free-market system, this person made his money by creating resources, not by hurting anyone. If he wishes to build a giant house with a large staff, that is his perogotive. I couldn't care less, assuming that he did not hurt anyone by getting the money.
You've lost it completely. Now you are arguing that free-markets are perpetually Pareto-inefficient! Which of course goes against all the Holy Scriptures of Ludvig Von Mises / Hayek / Milton Friedman! Not to mention your own statements just a few posts ago! Let me remind you:
Says you:
Moreover, the reason we pick it is that an ideal free-market provides Pareto-efficient distribution of goods, not something that many other resource allocation models can achieve in real life.
Pure comedy.
If they harm anyone they can go to jail. Otherwise, I really couldn't care less how they spend the money.
You are seriously confused. It is one of the key dogmas of Free Market Religion that making someone starve via depriving them of livelyhood is not the same as harming them and that only physical violence is to be frowned upon. That is the Article Of Faith Number One amongst all the silly Anarcho-Capitalists (who call themselves Libertarians to avoid the negatively-connotated label "Anarchist", which they reserve for their equally silly Communist brethen). So if you are a True Believer (which you seem to be getting somewhat non-commital about) you would not care for their welfare, because that is their own "personal responsibility" and if your 50,000 room palace had to be built at the expense of 1,000,000 people starving, that is fine and dandy because you are soooo much more productive then they, and besides it is all their damn fault for being so witless and lazy! And that is precisely what Pareto-efficiency really means in plain language! It is an elaborate excuse for egoistical jerks to excuse their own sociopathic greed and to "justify" it to themselves so that they can feel good about what they are doing to others by spouting "scientific" mumbo-jumbo about how Pareto-efficent is the one, true and the only way to be! Cause' them smart "economist" fallas says so!
One of the principles of fascism is corporatism. Corporatism is a anti-competitive form of economic organization for political purposes. This is incompatible with capitalism.
Riiight. So by this token Capitalism can never exist, because its pre-requisite is that it is the only method of organization of everything in a society and any external influence, political or other, immediately destoys it without leaving a trace!
In reality the Capitalist system is a mere economic theory and not a Religious Doctrine by which to organize one's whole existence. That is why your definition of "capitalism" is in such contrast to that normally accepted. Capitalism can function unmolested in one area of societal life, while others are governed by other phillosophies, at the same time.
Also, "corporatism" in the Fascist definition was a way of governance involving an assemby of entities known as "corpus" (not modern corporations) comprised of representatives of social classes: labour, industrialists etc. It in no way impeded actual exchange of money and goods. Fascists were all for Capitalism and some of their greatest backers were top capitalists of the day. Hitler was (despite of initially pretending to support them) a great Union and Labour movement buster. One of the greatest mis-nomers of history is the word "Socialistiche" in the NDSAP (as Hitler killed all the Socialists in his party during the Night of the Long Knives in 1934). You should note that German Communists and Socialists of the day all ended up being shipped to the death camps along with the Jews.
No, it's not. Your confusing plutocracy with capitalism. None of the outcomes you have mentioned are the results of Walrusian competition, but of government intervention.
Except, as I pointed out, it was the Soviet government itself that competed with other capitalists (abroad). You are, in your religious stupor, insisting that the domain of competition be set only the way you want it set, to the exclusion of all other possible macroscopic views of the situation.
Just remember this: in a Capitalist system the player entities (consumers/suppliers) do not have to be individuals.
I don't take it upon myself to judge other people's desires as "sane" or "insane", without a doctor.
This is a typical cop-out of an apologist of boundless greed. Clearly a desire to starve other poeople so that you can own a galaxy or two falls into the category of insanity, no? You can backtrack from there.
I don't see what is insane about preferring to live in a bigger house, or desiring to drive a nice car.
Define "bigger"! 5 rooms? 1500 rooms? 25000 rooms and a staff of 5000?
Same with the car, is "nice": a $40,000 car? a $1,000,000 car with gold-plated, diamond encrusted door handles? a $100,000,000 car with leather seats made out of skins of slave virgins?
I don't have these desires, but I can't dismiss other people for sharing them.
Some people have the desires I just outlined. And we should dismiss them. Because they are simply insane. By any definition except of those of the Priests of the Religion of Unlimited Greed.
Unlimited does not mean people want everything now; what it means is no matter what needs and wants are fulfilled, people continue to want marginally more.
Which in a sane society would be very easy to achieve because it is the giant disparities and rapid explosions of greed which are unsustainable, not modest, slow paced growth of the whole.
I think the topic of the article and discussion demonstrates this. There are people in the world worried about fundamental needs like food, water, and safety; yet people are arguing over the cost and carrier lock-in for the iPhone. For somebody struggling with survival such petty squabbling over a luxury would amount to the insanity of uncontrolled greed.
And he would be absolutely right. The present system is cetifiably insane. And so are its appologists who seem to think that the whole Universe is propped up by the two pillars of their "phillosphy": boundless avarice and out-of control breeding.
I would disagree. The unlimited wants of people is a key driver for human progress; without it most of what we have in modern societies wouldn't exist.
Absolutely incorrect. This is one of the key falsehoods of the Capitalist Religion and easily demonstrable to be so: scientists, the core force behind technological progress, do not pursue science out of personal greed but from an intrinsic desire to understand and discover the mysteries of the Universe. The knowledge itself (and peer recognition) is their reward and it is what drives science, not greed. If it were otherwise, Albert Einstein's estate would be 1000 times that of Bill Gates', followed closely by that of Newton's, Pascal's, Aristotle's etc etc.
Then there is of course art, which is created out of another intrinsic desire: that of an artist to share his insights with others, as opposed to kitsch which is a pretense of art created for profit...
Etc and so on.
As I pointed out, material greed is a function of an unreasoning, primitive, reptilian function of our animal-descended brains, not a core characteristics of sentience or intelligence! It is something we should strive to evolve out of, not to enshrine this sad baggage as an all-powerul deity to worship!
If people stopped wanting more civilization would have pretty much stopped with the domestication of plants and animals.
More civilization? As far as I can tell you are advocating "more greed", not civilization. Your entire premise is based on not only retaining the most base and unreasoning aspects of the animalistic parts of human psyche, but worshipping them as an engine of all that is good! And thus your desire seems to be for less "civilization", not more!
What I am pointing out is that technological and intellectual advancements are not related to greed, never you mind being the function of greed.
This assertion, of supremacy of greed, is one of the founding axioms of the Capitalist Religion and also one of its most odious lies.
That is in direct contradiction to the basis of economics - resources are limited, but wants are unlimited.
Which only highlights the fundamental lie of the modern "economics": resources are (temporarily -- barring space exploration and/or lack of nanotechnology) limited, but individual wants of sane, sentient beings are NOT unlimited.
In fact an ulimited greed is the very definition of insanity.
"Holy Grail" implies an achievable ideal, what you describe is not achievable since the gain of any individual will naturally cause the wants of another individual to not be fulfilled (basic human jealousy).
Which of course assumes, incorrectly, that the goal should be to force the Universe to accomodate a horde of brainless idiots, with an overriding mentality of that of locusts or maggots, devouring with abandon everything in their path and multiplying at a rate which guarantees that they will end up one day eating their own offspring.
I say the object is to change people, so that sane economic and political systems become possible.
Wholly different perspectives. And may I add, I see the one in which humanity grows up as being the only long-term viable one. The other is a path of pain, agony, insanity which eventually ends in a nasty and very terminally final tragedy.
Fascism is not capitalism, it's Fascism. Capitalism is rather incompatible with feudalism, though it sadly seems to work very well with authoritarianism.
Oh no! Not another one of the True Believers! Dude, Capitalism is an economic system, while Fascism is a political one. They can co-exist quite nicely, thank you very much, just like capitalism could coexist with other authoritarian societies, such as the Pinochet's Chile or the present-day China. Even the "communist" Soviet Union was in fact an example of an extreme case of capitalism, with only one capitalist allowed to function: the state. Hint: in a true communist system there is supposed to be no money.
So a world with less stuff, at no extra cost(time or otherwise), is better?
Huh? Which part of satsifying individual physical wants to the point where sane people do not want any more is somehow translating to "less"? Is it because in an insane capitalist empire, insanely greedy people would want to own planets? Galaxies? And would be willing to make others starve to achieve that, no?
That site doesn't document in detail how every option of every LVM tool works.
Oh so now the complaint is that you might have to check two or more places to get a complete picture! How dare they do not re-create the MSDN subscription and the MS "knowledge" base, complete with identical prompts and structure! I mean you would have to actually learn the traditional organization of information in an environment which was not, gasp, "invented" by Mirosoft! Horror! Heresy! Unthinkable! They all must conform to your way! Now!
That site doesn't document in detail how every option of every LVM tool works. Yeah, there are some conceptual basics on how VGs relate to PVs and LVs (which is obvious to anybody who reads the MAN pages or understands sotarge virtualization on any platform), but the exhaustive details of LMV2 simply aren't documented there, or anywhere else I could find.
Err, its a HOWTO, and it does include the basics. It is meant for people to get quickly operational, not as an end-all, exhaustive, last word on methods of storage allocation!
I decided your linked HOWTO page was not a good documentation resource to use when I kept running across pages like this.
Which is a page with an example of a simplistic boot-time script. In a HOWTO recipe. All you have to do is to follow it verbatim. Next thing you will be moaning about is that the HOWTO should also be the man page (which is where these commands and their options are traditionally explained).
Where is the comprehensive reference that documents every option of LVM2?
1. LVM2 Man pages
2. LVM2 HOWTO
3. LVM2 Mailing list
4. Comprehensive LVM administration guide and documentation (LVM2 uses many of concepts present in LVM)
5. LVM2 Source
In other words, where it has always been for every other new, still experimental Linux project. I noticed that you keep failing to mention that aspect.
If you are that incompetent (which it seems you are) that you cannot deal with the documentation which all of the other people using LVM2 follow, you can always pay RedHat to hold your hand and step you through the thing on the phone.
I didn't find any true documentation back in 2005, and I still haven't run across it. Compare that to Sun's documentation for ZFS, and you'll see why I think LVM documentation sucks.
The page you linked to does not load for me at all, which makes for an interesting standard to adhere to.
However the general gist of your moaning seems to be that no one has written a 600 page book, starting with a concept of a hard-disk drive and ending at a recipe for every conceivable possibility so that you do not have think at all while installing a new, still experimental software.
In actuality people have done just that, for the current standard, the LVM, like for example here.
Cry me a river.
But I don't code C regularly anymore, and I am certainly not going to try to decipher C source as documentation. I don't have time, and neither do most other IT folks. Professionals do not consider source code documentation.
Microsoft school of "professionals" you mean.
My developers write design and architecture documentation for all of their code, which is then passed on to technical writers so it becomes actual documentation for end users and system administrators.
Which is nice.... and still guarantees absoltuely nothing. At the first inkling of a problem not covered in those glossy pages with cutsey pictures, the user will be up the shit's creek without a paddle as soon as you go bust or they discover that your "yearly support con
The equilibria produced by perfect competition are Pareto-efficient, but there are many restrictions on the equilibria that are reached. These tend to eliminate singular cases like what you mentioned.
Bullshit. Economic systems do not operate in a vacuum (or in some make-believe never-never-land located somewhere up Milton Friedman's at this point imaginary rectum), they are a piece of larger societal order and subject to factors such as the overall political structure of the society. If the feudal lords come to be again, capitalism will not stand in their way. As it did not stand in the way of Fascism.
Ok, suppose such a system existed, and there are actions that improve utility without any cost. Let us keep applying these actions until we cannot do so anymore (clearly such a point exists, otherwise we have infinite resources). Won't this state we just reached be Pareto-efficient?
The point of course would be to maintain the Pareto-inefficiency until for all practical purposes the point is reached where the physical wants of individuals were satisified to a level where other, intellectual pursuits take their place. Only a society including infinitely greedy sociopathic jerks needs to worry about always ending up with Pareto-efficiency, since even one such jerk would always want more and more, irrespective of how much he already has, to eventually claim, if it was in his/her grasp, the entire Universe. Infinite greed is simply a form of mental illness. Amusingly, it is that very mental illness which capitalism and "free markets" are based upon, an acknowledgment of the subservience of humanity's so-called "intelligence" to its reptilian, mindless and in the long-run insane, self-destructive instincts.
So in short, either humanity manages to pull its collective heads out of its reptilian asses and become actually "sentient", at which point Pareto-efficiency will become something which is avoidable by technological means, or it will self-destruct after a looong, slooow and agonizing descent full of pain, suffering, misery and insanity, claiming to be making technological "progress" (in ways of effecting more total and complete agony) all the way down. No other options.
Moreover, the reason we pick it is that an ideal free-market provides Pareto-efficient distribution of goods, not something that many other resource allocation models can achieve in real life
Which is exactly the very last place we want to be, because a Pareto-efficient system requires that any further improvements to a position of one individual (which will happen) must be accompanied by a loss to some other, usually many individuals. A feudal system in which one small group of individuals owns everything and all other people are their slaves with no property or economic power is also Pareto-efficient (and some would argue the very direction in which we are heading). The holy grail of science of economics would be a system that can never become Pareto-efficient, and thus gains are possible to individuals without others losing anything. That is of course if economics were sane science tasked with improvement of society and human condition, which it is not.
You would do well to think before spewing such nonsense conconcted by that bunch of spineless appologist priests in the cult of the rich and powerful.
The truth is that totalitarian govs. are VERY efficient (do not like the result? shoot it). It was the command economy that was not.
The command economy is also far more efficient, except that it is also exceedingly vulnerable to selfish greedy sociopaths who immediately proceed to consume it from within until it collapses. Capitalism on the other hand is a clever (but deeply flawed in many aspects) system in which the insanity of greedy sociopaths is redirected towards something resembling common good. But if the command economy theorists were ever able to solve this wee problem... watch out!
VNC polls the windows for updates, instead of event hooks. This alone gives considerable latency that makes it feel slow.
You are referring to a Windows VNC server, which indeed is forced to do all sorts of underhanded trickery to get its information, since the access to the required data is secret and only available to Microsoft and its partners. In its native environment however, as an X11 server, VNC is simply a framebuffer driver, very much as that of the kernel framebuffer devices. No polling of any kind takes place. The VNC server simply reacts to changes of its buffer state and in this situation it can be on-par with (or exceed) RDP, given correct compression algorithm.
The last thing to do when shit hits the fan is to start reading source code. I'd rather go to shop and buy AIX, Windows and Mac OS combined.
Right, because when shit hits the fan with a Windows server, you can just click your heels three times and say "Please fix yourself from your unreliable state!", unlike that nasty Linux stuff which requires you to read documentation and maybe even, or the horror, source! Or perheaps you are suggesting that calling MS only to get some idiot on the phone who does things such as to try to get you to do magic tricks like to load the MSC console on an unbootable machine, only to abandon you when he discovers the problem is beyond him - with a recommendation to wipe-and-reinstall (after having charged your credit card a multi-hundred dollar bill for this perl of wisdom) and leaving you to do hours of prowling through MSDN and knowledge base articles on your own, only to finally boot a linux live CD and start screwing around with replacing DLLs with their older versions on trial-and-error basis, followed by tens of reboots between Windows and the live CD, to get shit fixed is just soooo fucking superior!
Now I am certain that either you are joking or have never ever administered a single server.
Clearly, I have more experience then you in this regard, otherwise you would not be spouting such nonsense.
No offense but there are abundant amount of F/OSS which has half assed man page, if even that. Actually every single GNU tool has half assed man page (FSF insist on the brain dead "info").
Info pages may be annoying but they do contain the information required.
Lets take Fedora Core 6 as an example. "ps -eo comm | sort -u | wc" gives 130 processes running. How many of them you'd expect to have a manual page? How many of them really does?
Only slightly over one third has! (49 has, 81 does not).
You gotta be kidding. 130 processes?! 2/3 of them are bound to be components of all the GUI crap you've loaded, none of which is expected to have any documentation whatsoever, given that they are internal components of some mega-bloated desktop environment. Unload the Gnome/KDE and then check the process count against man pages.
If you are really interested in manipulating these Gnome components and plugins and what not from a command line, you gotta check the Gnome developer documentation. These things are not Linux applications designated to be used from a command line, and you know it.
Please do not claim *nixes are in any shape better than Windows in this sense (the need of arcane knowledge).
I grant you this: as soon as you try to slap a GUI "environment" designed to have everything and two kitchen sinks included with in it, the amount of knowledge required to maintain this nonsense increases dramatically, in reverse proportion to documentation available. However, if you insist on doing so, in the worst case scenario you still have the source.
I personally do not use Gnome nor KDE, for these very reasons. Do note that these are optional components, design of which is not consistent with the overall Unix/Linux phillosophy and much closer to that of Windows. Hence your complaints.
No, I explicitly mentioned "Apache Tomcat, Sendmail, ntpd or even X configuration". ALl of which have perfect analogues included with Windows Server editions (IIS/ASP.net, SMTPsvc, w32time, and the Windows GDI).
Except of course this is a dishonest "comparison" as Sendmail is rarely used these days, having been superceeded by Exim, Postfix, Courier and the like -- but you picked it specifically because of its complex "config" file -- which is in actuallity a state-machine program and exceedingly well documented, Tomcat is nowhwere near the "equivalent" for ASP.net, PHP is. And so on.
I mentioned Postgres as a positive example in the open source world. It has documentation nearly as good as that which comes with MS SQL Server (which I believe is Microsoft's best individual product).
Which is laughable, because having worked with both, I find the documentation of Postgres orders of magnitude better than that of MS SQL, not to mention all the wacky, undocumented, buggy mis-features in MS SQL versions I run into over the years, for the "privilege" of reporting of which I had my credit card abused by Microsoft.
Yes, 30-year-old GNU utilites are well documented in man pages. But man pages don't cut it for a lot of other,more complex software. Tyring to figure out LVM2 the first time I used it from the man pages was very painful, and the man pages were the best documentation available at that time.
I stand by my initial assertion: you are just incompetent. LVM2 is extensively documented, every distro includes copious examples on how to use it and on top of that there are reams of "How Tos" on the web. Like this one, which was available since the LVM days, never you mind LVM2.
I'm going to play devil's advocate here; I thought your original point was excellent, but suggesting that someone should have to read the source (even if they are capable of it) as a substitute for poor documentation is horrid
No that is not a substitute, it is a measure of last resort. The point is that under no circumstances, no matter how adverse, you are put into the same position as you are with the MS stuff, that is begging someone to tell you some of their secret shit at $175 bucks per "incident". Long before you have to resort to parsing the source, you will get a lot of info from the comments in config file samples, the man pages, the html docs and if these are insufficient or outdated, from wikis, mailing lists and even emailing the developers themselves.
However as I kept pointing out, much of this is very rarely necessary because we were discussing the basic OS utilities of which all are documented to great extent in every distro I ever came accross. It was the other poster who threw in Apache, Postgress and all of the add-on apps which would then make his "comparison" to Windows also include the entire MS product line and those of all Windows software vendors, shareware included, to be fair.
Yes, there are extremely good reasons for having the source available, but it being a substitute for good end-user documentation is not one of them. (Code should be well-documented and clearly written, but for the benefit of maintainers, not end users!).
I agree with you, and in actuality most open-source apps included in major distros are just that: well documented. It is the job of distro maintainers to ensure some sort of standard of documentation and it is one of the factors by which distros are judged.
In an absolutely desparate situation if you're prepared to put the time in, reading the source *might* save your bacon, but I'd already be severely pissed off if I had to resort to that. Particularly if the code was opaquely or just downright messily written.
Still it beats begging MS or one of their flunkies for a solution, which you might or might not get based on their whim or buying an app from someone who somehow managed to get an inside track and is now cashing in on it.
You're joking, right? The documentation for a vast majority of open source software is so nonexistent or so out of date as to be laughable.
All of those programs have a natural fall-back mechanism, that is their own source. Every competent Linux/BSD admin is expected to be fluent in several computer languages, starting with the C language.
Sure, the big slatwart projects have some reasonable documentation, but even then, you can't tell me widely used stuff like Apache Tomcat, Sendmail, ntpd or even X configuration is intiutive or well-documented. You usually end up trolling through newsgroup posts or a half-dozen pporly organized Wikis to try to find your answer in the open source world.
See above. Speaking of Tomcat for example, I am not a great fan of Java, but Java was designed to be as self-documenting as possible, and you do have Tomcat's source.
The issue in the open source world is that every single piece of software has its own configuration file format
Vast majority of which are profusely commented, come with examples and have man pages.
and command line syntax for the most part.
And which commands come with man/info pages and respond to --help requests unless you are using some god-awful home brewed distro you yourself concocted.
They are all quite different, and documentation in open source projects typically comes last (PostegreSQL is a major exception). It's quite comparable to editing the Windows registry by hand or by command line to do all configuration. At least in the Windows world, you usually get a graphical representation of the configuration using some GUI tool, and that helps you make some sense of things.
I find all of these assertions highly suspect based on my experience. Sure some bleeding edge software is notorious for being poorly documented, but as I already explained, all of it comes with a natural, built-in fallback mechanism.
We use a large mix of both open source and Microsoft software on about 30 servers in my shop. While speed, functionality, and reliability are the strong points of open source, in my experience documentation and consistency are certainly weak
points. You have far more obscure, arcane, and poorly documented stuff to deal with in the open source world.
I suspect then you are not really qualified to be using the open source stuff as you are apparently unable to do what every competent admin is supposed to.
The one thing I want to do well is connect to my home computer from work with encryption. If it's hard to set up, hard enough that I give up on it and use a competing solution, it's not being done "well", is it?
This is a silly argument. You could define "well" as demanding that your PC does everything you ever wanted a computer to do by pressing the "on" button and saying "Computer! do my stuff!". By that criteria, no software today is well written!
Clearly some balance between "user-centric" and "machine-centric" is needed, until at least we all have sentient computers.
There's nothing wrong with the Unix philosophy except that it's machine-centric and not user-centric. The machine-centric "one thing" is "take a string, encrypt it, then return the encrypted string." The user-centric "one thing" is "I want to check my bittorrent download progress at home from work, with encryption so nobody can snoop what I'm doing." Big difference.
You are right and that is why Microsoft is a champion of the latter approach and sacrifices nearly anything to adhere to it, while Unix/Linux/BSD are aiming for the former and provide the latter only if it makes sense from the perspective of the former. These are essentially opposing world-views and which one is more aligned with your psyche is up to you. Although in your case I sense you would lean towards the Microsoft way.
What does the second part of that sentence have to do with the first? A lot of things I do all the time are hard; doing them often doesn't make them less hard. (It does make you more practiced at it, perhaps, but the difficulty of the task doesn't change.)
It does have the following relationship: I know that it is not hard from experience, by observing the actual relative simplicity of the process, compared to other tasks. It is neither conceptually difficult nor particularly hard to research.
Obviously it's useful now. Duh. But it's not AS useful as solutions it's competing against, that's my complaint.
Again, VNC does not "compete" against RDP. RDP "competes" against SSH + VNC + printer + sound + local file system redirector +... who the heck knows what else?
Microsoft's Remote Desktop might be "unrelated pieces of code with vast-- etc etc" but it sure works well, and that's all I care about.
See above. Your definition of "well" is different then mine. Mine includes my ability to trust the software I use.
And I hate to break this to you, but I don't have any way of verifying whether *any* encryption or complex program is secure or not. I simply don't have the brain for it, or the education for it, so from my point of view, the choice is between "trusting the smart people at Microsoft who have millions of dollars riding on being correct" or "trusting some PhD who has a lot of free time and likes Stallman."
Except that, of course, that first choice reads "trusting the smart people at Microsoft who have millions of dollars riding on on being able to ensure that they remain the dominant market player (direct result of their corporate imperative) and thus no one finding out if and when they are incorrect". Not entirely an "equivalent" position to what that PHD is all about.
Could you explain to me how "VNC should have integrated encryption" and "VNC should use SSL libraries" are mutually-exclusive, please?
By concocting their own "customized" implementation, for example. Then, even if SSL libraries are called, there is quite a large room to manouver involved in setting up the key echanges, initiating encryption, user authentication and all that other, very complicated, security rigamarole full of arcane pitfalls and gotchas.
I think the huge shortcoming is that SSH isn't integrated into VNC in the first place, which would take care of the concern you point out. I've tried "tunneling" VNC over SSH, and it's hard as hell to set up. In the end I just gave up and used Microsoft's protocol which not only does the encryption by default, but also "locks" the remotely-used desktop for additional security.
This would run against the Unix design phillosophy which counsels something along the lines of "small specialized tools, which do one thing well and can be connected together for more complex tasks".
I disagree that VNC is hard to setup over SSH because I do it all the time and I also disagree that VNC must include everything and a kitchen sink, Microsoft-style, to be useful. Microsoft way is the way of complicated, out-of-control, unmanagable balls of spaghetti code made up from a miriad of unrelated pieces of code with vastly different design phillosophies which results in an illusion of security.
For example, no one really knows if the MS RDP server process is secure at all. We have no way of verifying it, but it is also obvious that adding each additional layer of code to it increases its complexity and risk of fatal errors.
MO, VNC is badly in need of an update. It should have encryption integrated and turned-on by default, and it should do more (or anything at all) to prevent screen peepers to see what you're doing.
See above. Unless VNC is made to carefuly use an encryption system which is wholly separate from it and maintained by expert security professionals (via for example loadable SSL libraries) then they should NOT do it otherwise. All that will happen is that they will end up with yet-another poorly reinvented wheel producing the exact opposite of what was intended.
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If by "zealots" you mean people employing logic, then sure. Actually this method of logical argument is so useful and commonly deployed amongst us "zealots" of reason and logic that it has its own name: Reductio ad absurdum.
Although I could see how you would hate the idea.
Building such mansions has such effects in this way: in order to build them, the jerks in question need to appropriate labour/resources of countless other people and redirect them towards themselves. Since no one is capable of producing such amounts of fruits of labour by themselves (physical impossibility) and the only way to accomplish this is to abuse others by claiming portions of their work based upon completely bogus "contribution"/"reward" calculation (as in pretending that a CEO is more important then all of the employees in a company put together and that he produces more goods then all of them or that a spoiled kid heir of a major shareholder who doesn't even know what the company produces is "contributing" to society more then all of the said employees). Or to put it plainly, the only way to achieve the necessary resources for such a mansion is to rob others in the society. You can use any euphemism for such an activity you want, but it will still remain robbery.
And the effects of robbery are that some people will be denied whatever portion of the "reward" for their contribution that is due to them, some to the point of becoming destitute. It is as simple as that and it all boils down to the utter unreliability/inadequacy of the core element of the capitalist system: a woefully faulty "contribution" to "reward" ratio computation.
Which, of course, is insane because spewing kids out so that 2/3rd of them can die horribly in filth by the age of 5 is something a maggot would do, not sentient beings, who would promptly organize a common effort to grow food and to irigate fields, and soon would have a reliable food supply and a society-wide system of taking care of their elderly involving multiple families. And the direct cause of the insanity is, naturally, greed. As this is what causes the family to attempt to make it on their own in isolation and to treat all the others as competition to the very end. Animal stupidity at its best again.
It also makes me laugh how your truly reptilian brain figured that this was a "reasonable" approach.
And most do not subsribe to reason, or let reason be overruled by their animal instincts. Hence all the trouble in world. I have no respect for utter stupidity, just because large numbers of people profess to "believe" in it. Faced with a vast gap between these reptiles' and monkeys' "values" and insane urges versus the reality, causes most to crack wholesale and results in the so-called "mainstream religions" complete with omnitpotent invisible men in the sky with sandals on.
Poor, pitiful animals so far out of their element.
No, I only took your assertions to their logical conclusion. You want to propose something but then you try to pretend that it does not have consequences because you do not like them. So you call them "an interpretation" or "a conjecture" etc. It is actually a quite common failing amongst various religious/political/economic ideologues.
This is a strawman (another logical fallacy in your collection). "Feeling bad" is not a criterion by which to judge the validity of societal rules, "causing harm to others" is. Of course this immediately translates into yet another canard of Greed Apologists: that starving or being forced to live a ghetto because some jerks have built "mansions" at your expense is not "harming" you, according to them. Only physical violence is, or that is at least their rather amusingly self-serving "definition" of the thing.
Which of course is another logical fallacy, this time of "false dichotomy". You are on a roll! The false choice is between building a "mansion" (which sounds reasonable until one realizes that we were discussing 5000 room ones, with a staff of 1000) and having 10 kids, which, if one was not paying attention, would sound actually more unreasonable at the first glance. In fact they are both examples of animal, unreasoning, insane behaviour. Both your choices are insane! The choice which you purposefully avoided, that of reason and intelligence, is not listed.
Strawman. You were claiming a set of infinite wants. Traveling to France and attempting to own the Universe are somewhat apart on the scale.
I would not be complaining about the prevailing lunacy of the thing so much if the reward was "equal". I do realise that the current human society is not composed of reasonable, truly sentient, intelligent beings. Therefore any advanced societal structures will not work, as they would get sabotaged and subverted by the jerks in a flash. So we are stuck with cleverly disguised dog-collars, muzzles and leashes for the rabidly insane, like for example Capitalism, because that is the best one can do under the circumstances. But even by this token, the rewards which the likes of you try to grant themselves for their vaunted "contributions" have no relationship whatsoever with those "contributions". You always demand orders of magnitude more then you deserve, which in turn leads to wholesale, attrocious devaluation of the contributions of others.
So no, for the most part your reward is not "equal". It exceeds your "contributions" by a large factor and in the case of many of the idols of the Capitalist societies, by many, many orders of magnitude, sometimes even approaching infinity! (as is in the obviously demonstrable cases of inheretance and lotery windfalls)
Even to other industrialized societies this disparity is jarringly obvious. A typical Japanese CEO earns around 10-20 times the salary of an average employee in his firm. In the USA, this ratio recently exceeded 500. Next thing you are going to tell me that GM makes products 50 times superior to Toyota.
And then there are the likes of Paris Hilton...
Typical desperate Von Misses/Hayek bulshit. In order to make their "analysis" work, they only had to assume that central planners must be all idiots and that proper allocation of resources is just "too computationally complex" for poor wittle us, with all of our computers and data networks ...
Talk about whiny apologists!
In actuality the problem with central planning is the very reason why Capitalism "works" (limps along is more like it): personal greed coupled with sociopathic tendencies make short work of any centrally planned system which depends on sane participants. Capitalism on the other hand depends on insane participants and attempts to redirect their insanity towards something remotely approximating societal progress.
In short, centrally planed system works only in a hypothetical society of advanced intelligences, while "free market" is a pride and joy of barely evolved bare-assed monkeys, large parts of whose brains are dedicated to fighting each other over bananas and who gets to fuck who.
In the same way a square is an "approximation" of a sphere.
The point of regulations should be to protect people from the fallout of this slight gap between your "model" and the rather unimpressed with it Universe.
One is contradictory to the other. What you just said is "If all transactions are Pareto-inefficient then the whole system is Pareto-efficient!". Bonus points for trully impressive pretzel "logic".
Yes you did. It appears you can't even grasp the implications of your own "models".
Huh? What does this have to do with the point?
You apparently have never heard of such far-out ideas as Thermodynamics and Entropy. "Free Market" as you have defined it would simply violate the laws of physics.
Listed between the "Tooth Fairy" and "Pixie Dust". CGEs are total fantasy, their predictive powers are less then those of your garden variety "psychic" from a late-night infomercial.
Right, the we should allow some super-greedy jerks to piss all over everybody else in the name of "progress". Better yet, use everyone else as tools, wreck them and then discard them, because the fastest rate of "progress" possible is the One And Only Answer To Universe and Everything! All else does not count! Right?
Or maybe sane, sentient beings see "progress" as a mere tool employed with a goal of improving quality of their lives. If the speed of progress comes into contradiction with this primary goal ... then the "progress" loses. It is as simple as that, except that self-absorbed, sociopathic jerks do not want to hear it, as their whole "phillosophy" is a sad, contorted excuse for "justfying" the fullfilment of their own greed at other's expense.
So to follow you "logic", all environmental regulation should be abolished because it slows down the "enterpreneurs". Similarly all labour laws, all medical and drug regulation etc etc. Let Greed Reign Supreme! In the name of "progress"! Who the fuck cares about millions of sick, destitute and diseased living in filth? You got yours, they should have gotten out of the way of the members of the supreme race, the super-jerks, right?
It only looks like that in the insane asylum you inabit. Your social circle is likely composed nearly exclusively of the insane, infintely-greedy fucks. It also explains your desperate attempts at "justifying" yourself.
This is called a non sequitur, yet another logical fallacy you grace us with. If person A wants a cube of sugar, then, according to your "logic", everyone else must want the whole Universe!
Another non sequitur. A kettle of fish and 5000 room "house" are not equivalent. Fishing a few fish is a modest past-time, owning 5000 room "house" is an example of insanity and you know it, your dishonest "comparisons", nothwidthstanding.
Furthermore, there is no conceivable way in which the results of your "sweat" would warrant such rewards. None whatsoever. Everything you do is based upon work of countless other people, countless generations of them in fact, to whom you gave nothing back for using their achievments, and yet you demand, for your infinitesimally small "contribution" to civilization, the rewards which would equal the lifetime earnings of millions of others. The very definition of an insane jerk.
Irrelevant. Desire for personal recogniton is not greed.
Research priorities must be measured in some way, this is one of them.
Another non sequitur. Nowhere did I demand that everyone starves. Sicentists only need reasonably comfortable living to be productive. Very few of them desire opulence.
LOL, and this "perfect" competition comes to be right after the Proletariat of The World unites in a Harmonious Workers' And Peasants' Paradise, which occurs shortly after the Porcine Aviation Association is formed!
It is rather sad that I have to explain it to you, but all these silly never-never-land utopian (or in your case distopian) models break into a million shards as soon as they meet the real world, which features such wee things like geography, geophysics (affecting the distribution of natural resources) and socially, culturally and technologically based barriers to entry for competitiors into markets. Never you mind other itsy-bitsy anomalies such as the fact that for long stretches of time natural, self-forming (in laughable contradiction to the Holy Model) monopolies and oligopolies appear to control whole sections of markets for natural resources or access to particular geographical areas (completely unrelated to governance of any kind). And then there are the governments to add their own flavour to this unholy brew.
In short your model is in the same boat as that of the Commies: it works (sort of, if you squint, make a lot of wild, unproveable assumptions, and do not ask too many questions) on paper but it has a snowball's-in-Hell chance of remaining even remotely close to its "ideal" in the real world.
That of course on top of what I described at length already, that its very foundation consists of primitive, shameful, evolutionary baggage, which precludes it from ever becoming sane and thus its only practically viable function is to mitigate the effects of the wide-spread insanity by trying to redirect its destructive force in to something resembling productivity and societal growth (which is we find it marginally useful at present).
Muahahaha! So you've abandoned your idols, the Hyaks, the Von Mises, the Friedmans, the Sachs etc who all claimed that Pareto-efficiency is the cornerstone of "free markets" and their defining feature!
And so now you claim that, in effect, the supply always exceeds demand!
Or in actuality, and its again sad that I have to explain to you your own Holy Scriptures, it is that they've tried to eat the proverbial cake and have it too! Their assertion was to acknowledge that boundless avarice leads, by necessity, to Pareto-efficiency but they understood that such a system is a complete disaster so, in a glorious display of cognitive dissonance, they also claimed that the system continuously "moves about" its Pareto-efficiency point, thus being (ever temporarily) in Pareto-inefficent state, and that is where all the progress comes from!
A comedic act, really.
As Sir Walter Scott once wrote: "Oh what a tangled web we weave when first we practice to deceive!". Old fart was right on the money, specially when it comes to Greed Worshippers.
But with very different societal costs along the way!
Some people have unlimited wants, which as I already explained is the very definition of being an insane animal.
That is a strawman always trotted out by the acolytes of The Religion of Greed. In reality the equilibrium is when sane, sentient beings decide on their own that getting a 5,000 room "house" is not a reasonable thing to want to do. There is no coercion, merely individual excercise of reason and sanity. But only possible if humanity manages to rid itself of its evolutionary baggage of primitive, reptilian brain functions.
LOL! If that were so, every scientist would jealously guard "his" discoveries, locking them up in a safe in his basement, to go there at night to count them by candle-light while giggling to himself! Instead they share them with everyone with an access to a library in scientific journals! A positive bunch of heretic Commies!
Only because we live in a society designed by reptiles for reptiles. This however does not make it into the apex of all societal achievement, not by a long shot.
See above. You've already completely conceeded the wholly indefensible point of "Science is Greed Motivated", now you've only got free-loaders-cum "enterpreneurs" left to ineffectively try to prop-up your lost arguments.
Bullshit. You do not get to redefine the basic functions of our psyche, such as curiosity about the world, and re-label them "Greed" so that you can justify your owm wholly unrelated and sick avarice. And that on top of the fact that these "wants" are satisfiable without anyone else having to part with anything, and their results are also freely shared with everyone, in exchange for nothing physical. Information, just in case you are confused about it, is not subject to any kind of trade, simply due to its properties.
You remind me of a salesman I once knew, who claimed that everything in life, from family, friends to school to work to marriage is ... making sales!
The old addage of "If all you got is a hammer..." comes to mind.
Which requires no payment at all to be made to the supposedly "greedy" individual. Social standing and recognition are wholly abstract and are not a subject to any economic system. You are flailing desperately, trying to mis-apply a wholly incompatible Greed-centered "model" where it is not possible to apply it.
No, that is what unreasoning animals do. Sentient beings are able to make trade-offs based on logic, sacrifices of immediate personal gain in an expectation of sh
Sigh, yet another copout. "Voluntary" is a code word for "making a choice from an available list of choices" in which the major sociopaths (i.e. successful Capitalists) get to control what's on the list. As in for example: having been born in an economic ghetto, you can become a prostitute or die from hunger, as you have no other options for employment and no money to depart your particular ghetto. Thus, according to the apologists, the choice to become a whore is wholly "voluntary" as there was no one actually standing there next to you with a gun. Because a gun as a "motivator" = Communism = Baaad! and mere death by starvation as a "motivator" = Capitalist = Doubleplus Good! Quite simple, no?
To be honest, I am not familiar with the "Walrusian" competiton "model" (a group of fat flubbery Walruses pounding heads against and biting each other to win the right to impregnate the patiently waiting harem of the females of the species comes to mind), although I am sure some arcane, convoluted and wholly useless thing exists in the rarefied realms of the High Priesthood, concocted specifically so that you can throw about a "reference" to this Holy Item of The Inner Sanctum of the Annointed Ones, Google having returned mere 16 results for it! Arcane "science" indeed!
Ahem ...
You claim that free-markets are supposed to be Pareto-efficient...
Then:
You claim that improving one's position at expense of others means Pareto-inefficiency (which is the exact opposite of the definition)
Followed by:
I.e. the very definition of Pareto-inefficiency (an ability to improve one's position without reducing that of others) which you now claim is an integral property of "free markets", in direct contradiction to your first statement. A complete loop of inconsistency and illogic.
Internally, in respect to some criteria, it did not. But it did externally as a state. Furthermore, small businesses were allowed to exist in the Soviet satellite countries, even though all large ones were owned by the state.
Again, you are trying to treat individuals within Soviet Union as economic entities, which in their system they were not. The state was the only economic entity, both supplier and consumer. And it acted in all respects as a capitalist in its dealings abroad. Citizens of the Soviet Union however were simply not part of the equation. They were a monolitic block of, essentially, robots, from the perspective of the markets, with no economic function of their own.
Incidentally this very formula is applied in China, where the state capitalist uses its cheap human robots for its own production and also rents them to foreign, Western capitalists for a profit.
What?! Do you actually read your own theories? Pareto-efficiency is precisely a state where improvement of a position of one individual must be accompanied by a loss to others. You've now completely lost track of your own argument!
You've lost it completely. Now you are arguing that free-markets are perpetually Pareto-inefficient! Which of course goes against all the Holy Scriptures of Ludvig Von Mises / Hayek / Milton Friedman! Not to mention your own statements just a few posts ago! Let me remind you:
Says you:
Pure comedy.
You are seriously confused. It is one of the key dogmas of Free Market Religion that making someone starve via depriving them of livelyhood is not the same as harming them and that only physical violence is to be frowned upon. That is the Article Of Faith Number One amongst all the silly Anarcho-Capitalists (who call themselves Libertarians to avoid the negatively-connotated label "Anarchist", which they reserve for their equally silly Communist brethen). So if you are a True Believer (which you seem to be getting somewhat non-commital about) you would not care for their welfare, because that is their own "personal responsibility" and if your 50,000 room palace had to be built at the expense of 1,000,000 people starving, that is fine and dandy because you are soooo much more productive then they, and besides it is all their damn fault for being so witless and lazy! And that is precisely what Pareto-efficiency really means in plain language! It is an elaborate excuse for egoistical jerks to excuse their own sociopathic greed and to "justify" it to themselves so that they can feel good about what they are doing to others by spouting "scientific" mumbo-jumbo about how Pareto-efficent is the one, true and the only way to be! Cause' them smart "economist" fallas says so!
Riiight. So by this token Capitalism can never exist, because its pre-requisite is that it is the only method of organization of everything in a society and any external influence, political or other, immediately destoys it without leaving a trace!
In reality the Capitalist system is a mere economic theory and not a Religious Doctrine by which to organize one's whole existence. That is why your definition of "capitalism" is in such contrast to that normally accepted. Capitalism can function unmolested in one area of societal life, while others are governed by other phillosophies, at the same time.
Also, "corporatism" in the Fascist definition was a way of governance involving an assemby of entities known as "corpus" (not modern corporations) comprised of representatives of social classes: labour, industrialists etc. It in no way impeded actual exchange of money and goods. Fascists were all for Capitalism and some of their greatest backers were top capitalists of the day. Hitler was (despite of initially pretending to support them) a great Union and Labour movement buster. One of the greatest mis-nomers of history is the word "Socialistiche" in the NDSAP (as Hitler killed all the Socialists in his party during the Night of the Long Knives in 1934). You should note that German Communists and Socialists of the day all ended up being shipped to the death camps along with the Jews.
Except, as I pointed out, it was the Soviet government itself that competed with other capitalists (abroad). You are, in your religious stupor, insisting that the domain of competition be set only the way you want it set, to the exclusion of all other possible macroscopic views of the situation.
Just remember this: in a Capitalist system the player entities (consumers/suppliers) do not have to be individuals.
This is a typical cop-out of an apologist of boundless greed. Clearly a desire to starve other poeople so that you can own a galaxy or two falls into the category of insanity, no? You can backtrack from there.
Define "bigger"! 5 rooms? 1500 rooms? 25000 rooms and a staff of 5000?
Same with the car, is "nice": a $40,000 car? a $1,000,000 car with gold-plated, diamond encrusted door handles? a $100,000,000 car with leather seats made out of skins of slave virgins?
Some people have the desires I just outlined. And we should dismiss them. Because they are simply insane. By any definition except of those of the Priests of the Religion of Unlimited Greed.
Which in a sane society would be very easy to achieve because it is the giant disparities and rapid explosions of greed which are unsustainable, not modest, slow paced growth of the whole.
And he would be absolutely right. The present system is cetifiably insane. And so are its appologists who seem to think that the whole Universe is propped up by the two pillars of their "phillosphy": boundless avarice and out-of control breeding.
Absolutely incorrect. This is one of the key falsehoods of the Capitalist Religion and easily demonstrable to be so: scientists, the core force behind technological progress, do not pursue science out of personal greed but from an intrinsic desire to understand and discover the mysteries of the Universe. The knowledge itself (and peer recognition) is their reward and it is what drives science, not greed. If it were otherwise, Albert Einstein's estate would be 1000 times that of Bill Gates', followed closely by that of Newton's, Pascal's, Aristotle's etc etc.
Then there is of course art, which is created out of another intrinsic desire: that of an artist to share his insights with others, as opposed to kitsch which is a pretense of art created for profit...
Etc and so on.
As I pointed out, material greed is a function of an unreasoning, primitive, reptilian function of our animal-descended brains, not a core characteristics of sentience or intelligence! It is something we should strive to evolve out of, not to enshrine this sad baggage as an all-powerul deity to worship!
More civilization? As far as I can tell you are advocating "more greed", not civilization. Your entire premise is based on not only retaining the most base and unreasoning aspects of the animalistic parts of human psyche, but worshipping them as an engine of all that is good! And thus your desire seems to be for less "civilization", not more!
What I am pointing out is that technological and intellectual advancements are not related to greed, never you mind being the function of greed.
This assertion, of supremacy of greed, is one of the founding axioms of the Capitalist Religion and also one of its most odious lies.
Which only highlights the fundamental lie of the modern "economics": resources are (temporarily -- barring space exploration and/or lack of nanotechnology) limited, but individual wants of sane, sentient beings are NOT unlimited.
In fact an ulimited greed is the very definition of insanity.
Which of course assumes, incorrectly, that the goal should be to force the Universe to accomodate a horde of brainless idiots, with an overriding mentality of that of locusts or maggots, devouring with abandon everything in their path and multiplying at a rate which guarantees that they will end up one day eating their own offspring.
I say the object is to change people, so that sane economic and political systems become possible.
Wholly different perspectives. And may I add, I see the one in which humanity grows up as being the only long-term viable one. The other is a path of pain, agony, insanity which eventually ends in a nasty and very terminally final tragedy.
Oh no! Not another one of the True Believers! Dude, Capitalism is an economic system, while Fascism is a political one. They can co-exist quite nicely, thank you very much, just like capitalism could coexist with other authoritarian societies, such as the Pinochet's Chile or the present-day China. Even the "communist" Soviet Union was in fact an example of an extreme case of capitalism, with only one capitalist allowed to function: the state. Hint: in a true communist system there is supposed to be no money.
Huh? Which part of satsifying individual physical wants to the point where sane people do not want any more is somehow translating to "less"? Is it because in an insane capitalist empire, insanely greedy people would want to own planets? Galaxies? And would be willing to make others starve to achieve that, no?
Do explain.
Oh so now the complaint is that you might have to check two or more places to get a complete picture! How dare they do not re-create the MSDN subscription and the MS "knowledge" base, complete with identical prompts and structure! I mean you would have to actually learn the traditional organization of information in an environment which was not, gasp, "invented" by Mirosoft! Horror! Heresy! Unthinkable! They all must conform to your way! Now!
Err, its a HOWTO, and it does include the basics. It is meant for people to get quickly operational, not as an end-all, exhaustive, last word on methods of storage allocation!
Which is a page with an example of a simplistic boot-time script. In a HOWTO recipe. All you have to do is to follow it verbatim. Next thing you will be moaning about is that the HOWTO should also be the man page (which is where these commands and their options are traditionally explained).
In other words, where it has always been for every other new, still experimental Linux project. I noticed that you keep failing to mention that aspect.
If you are that incompetent (which it seems you are) that you cannot deal with the documentation which all of the other people using LVM2 follow, you can always pay RedHat to hold your hand and step you through the thing on the phone.
The page you linked to does not load for me at all, which makes for an interesting standard to adhere to.
However the general gist of your moaning seems to be that no one has written a 600 page book, starting with a concept of a hard-disk drive and ending at a recipe for every conceivable possibility so that you do not have think at all while installing a new, still experimental software.
In actuality people have done just that, for the current standard, the LVM, like for example here.
Cry me a river.
Microsoft school of "professionals" you mean.
Which is nice .... and still guarantees absoltuely nothing. At the first inkling of a problem not covered in those glossy pages with cutsey pictures, the user will be up the shit's creek without a paddle as soon as you go bust or they discover that your "yearly support con
Bullshit. Economic systems do not operate in a vacuum (or in some make-believe never-never-land located somewhere up Milton Friedman's at this point imaginary rectum), they are a piece of larger societal order and subject to factors such as the overall political structure of the society. If the feudal lords come to be again, capitalism will not stand in their way. As it did not stand in the way of Fascism.
The point of course would be to maintain the Pareto-inefficiency until for all practical purposes the point is reached where the physical wants of individuals were satisified to a level where other, intellectual pursuits take their place. Only a society including infinitely greedy sociopathic jerks needs to worry about always ending up with Pareto-efficiency, since even one such jerk would always want more and more, irrespective of how much he already has, to eventually claim, if it was in his/her grasp, the entire Universe. Infinite greed is simply a form of mental illness. Amusingly, it is that very mental illness which capitalism and "free markets" are based upon, an acknowledgment of the subservience of humanity's so-called "intelligence" to its reptilian, mindless and in the long-run insane, self-destructive instincts.
So in short, either humanity manages to pull its collective heads out of its reptilian asses and become actually "sentient", at which point Pareto-efficiency will become something which is avoidable by technological means, or it will self-destruct after a looong, slooow and agonizing descent full of pain, suffering, misery and insanity, claiming to be making technological "progress" (in ways of effecting more total and complete agony) all the way down. No other options.
Which is exactly the very last place we want to be, because a Pareto-efficient system requires that any further improvements to a position of one individual (which will happen) must be accompanied by a loss to some other, usually many individuals. A feudal system in which one small group of individuals owns everything and all other people are their slaves with no property or economic power is also Pareto-efficient (and some would argue the very direction in which we are heading). The holy grail of science of economics would be a system that can never become Pareto-efficient, and thus gains are possible to individuals without others losing anything. That is of course if economics were sane science tasked with improvement of society and human condition, which it is not.
You would do well to think before spewing such nonsense conconcted by that bunch of spineless appologist priests in the cult of the rich and powerful.
The command economy is also far more efficient, except that it is also exceedingly vulnerable to selfish greedy sociopaths who immediately proceed to consume it from within until it collapses. Capitalism on the other hand is a clever (but deeply flawed in many aspects) system in which the insanity of greedy sociopaths is redirected towards something resembling common good. But if the command economy theorists were ever able to solve this wee problem ... watch out!
You are referring to a Windows VNC server, which indeed is forced to do all sorts of underhanded trickery to get its information, since the access to the required data is secret and only available to Microsoft and its partners. In its native environment however, as an X11 server, VNC is simply a framebuffer driver, very much as that of the kernel framebuffer devices. No polling of any kind takes place. The VNC server simply reacts to changes of its buffer state and in this situation it can be on-par with (or exceed) RDP, given correct compression algorithm.
Right, because when shit hits the fan with a Windows server, you can just click your heels three times and say "Please fix yourself from your unreliable state!", unlike that nasty Linux stuff which requires you to read documentation and maybe even, or the horror, source! Or perheaps you are suggesting that calling MS only to get some idiot on the phone who does things such as to try to get you to do magic tricks like to load the MSC console on an unbootable machine, only to abandon you when he discovers the problem is beyond him - with a recommendation to wipe-and-reinstall (after having charged your credit card a multi-hundred dollar bill for this perl of wisdom) and leaving you to do hours of prowling through MSDN and knowledge base articles on your own, only to finally boot a linux live CD and start screwing around with replacing DLLs with their older versions on trial-and-error basis, followed by tens of reboots between Windows and the live CD, to get shit fixed is just soooo fucking superior!
Clearly, I have more experience then you in this regard, otherwise you would not be spouting such nonsense.
Info pages may be annoying but they do contain the information required.
You gotta be kidding. 130 processes?! 2/3 of them are bound to be components of all the GUI crap you've loaded, none of which is expected to have any documentation whatsoever, given that they are internal components of some mega-bloated desktop environment. Unload the Gnome/KDE and then check the process count against man pages.
If you are really interested in manipulating these Gnome components and plugins and what not from a command line, you gotta check the Gnome developer documentation. These things are not Linux applications designated to be used from a command line, and you know it.
I grant you this: as soon as you try to slap a GUI "environment" designed to have everything and two kitchen sinks included with in it, the amount of knowledge required to maintain this nonsense increases dramatically, in reverse proportion to documentation available. However, if you insist on doing so, in the worst case scenario you still have the source.
I personally do not use Gnome nor KDE, for these very reasons. Do note that these are optional components, design of which is not consistent with the overall Unix/Linux phillosophy and much closer to that of Windows. Hence your complaints.
Except of course this is a dishonest "comparison" as Sendmail is rarely used these days, having been superceeded by Exim, Postfix, Courier and the like -- but you picked it specifically because of its complex "config" file -- which is in actuallity a state-machine program and exceedingly well documented, Tomcat is nowhwere near the "equivalent" for ASP.net, PHP is. And so on.
Which is laughable, because having worked with both, I find the documentation of Postgres orders of magnitude better than that of MS SQL, not to mention all the wacky, undocumented, buggy mis-features in MS SQL versions I run into over the years, for the "privilege" of reporting of which I had my credit card abused by Microsoft.
I stand by my initial assertion: you are just incompetent. LVM2 is extensively documented, every distro includes copious examples on how to use it and on top of that there are reams of "How Tos" on the web. Like this one, which was available since the LVM days, never you mind LVM2.
No that is not a substitute, it is a measure of last resort. The point is that under no circumstances, no matter how adverse, you are put into the same position as you are with the MS stuff, that is begging someone to tell you some of their secret shit at $175 bucks per "incident". Long before you have to resort to parsing the source, you will get a lot of info from the comments in config file samples, the man pages, the html docs and if these are insufficient or outdated, from wikis, mailing lists and even emailing the developers themselves.
However as I kept pointing out, much of this is very rarely necessary because we were discussing the basic OS utilities of which all are documented to great extent in every distro I ever came accross. It was the other poster who threw in Apache, Postgress and all of the add-on apps which would then make his "comparison" to Windows also include the entire MS product line and those of all Windows software vendors, shareware included, to be fair.
I agree with you, and in actuality most open-source apps included in major distros are just that: well documented. It is the job of distro maintainers to ensure some sort of standard of documentation and it is one of the factors by which distros are judged.
Still it beats begging MS or one of their flunkies for a solution, which you might or might not get based on their whim or buying an app from someone who somehow managed to get an inside track and is now cashing in on it.
All of those programs have a natural fall-back mechanism, that is their own source. Every competent Linux/BSD admin is expected to be fluent in several computer languages, starting with the C language.
See above. Speaking of Tomcat for example, I am not a great fan of Java, but Java was designed to be as self-documenting as possible, and you do have Tomcat's source.
Vast majority of which are profusely commented, come with examples and have man pages.
And which commands come with man/info pages and respond to --help requests unless you are using some god-awful home brewed distro you yourself concocted.
I find all of these assertions highly suspect based on my experience. Sure some bleeding edge software is notorious for being poorly documented, but as I already explained, all of it comes with a natural, built-in fallback mechanism.
I suspect then you are not really qualified to be using the open source stuff as you are apparently unable to do what every competent admin is supposed to.
This is a silly argument. You could define "well" as demanding that your PC does everything you ever wanted a computer to do by pressing the "on" button and saying "Computer! do my stuff!". By that criteria, no software today is well written!
Clearly some balance between "user-centric" and "machine-centric" is needed, until at least we all have sentient computers.
You are right and that is why Microsoft is a champion of the latter approach and sacrifices nearly anything to adhere to it, while Unix/Linux/BSD are aiming for the former and provide the latter only if it makes sense from the perspective of the former. These are essentially opposing world-views and which one is more aligned with your psyche is up to you. Although in your case I sense you would lean towards the Microsoft way.
It does have the following relationship: I know that it is not hard from experience, by observing the actual relative simplicity of the process, compared to other tasks. It is neither conceptually difficult nor particularly hard to research.
Again, VNC does not "compete" against RDP. RDP "competes" against SSH + VNC + printer + sound + local file system redirector + ... who the heck knows what else?
See above. Your definition of "well" is different then mine. Mine includes my ability to trust the software I use.
Except that, of course, that first choice reads "trusting the smart people at Microsoft who have millions of dollars riding on on being able to ensure that they remain the dominant market player (direct result of their corporate imperative) and thus no one finding out if and when they are incorrect". Not entirely an "equivalent" position to what that PHD is all about.
By concocting their own "customized" implementation, for example. Then, even if SSL libraries are called, there is quite a large room to manouver involved in setting up the key echanges, initiating encryption, user authentication and all that other, very complicated, security rigamarole full of arcane pitfalls and gotchas.
This would run against the Unix design phillosophy which counsels something along the lines of "small specialized tools, which do one thing well and can be connected together for more complex tasks".
I disagree that VNC is hard to setup over SSH because I do it all the time and I also disagree that VNC must include everything and a kitchen sink, Microsoft-style, to be useful. Microsoft way is the way of complicated, out-of-control, unmanagable balls of spaghetti code made up from a miriad of unrelated pieces of code with vastly different design phillosophies which results in an illusion of security.
For example, no one really knows if the MS RDP server process is secure at all. We have no way of verifying it, but it is also obvious that adding each additional layer of code to it increases its complexity and risk of fatal errors.
See above. Unless VNC is made to carefuly use an encryption system which is wholly separate from it and maintained by expert security professionals (via for example loadable SSL libraries) then they should NOT do it otherwise. All that will happen is that they will end up with yet-another poorly reinvented wheel producing the exact opposite of what was intended.