... it is by far not the wealthy that bare the brunt of our tax system. FYI.
And with the top 2% owning over 50% of all the assets in the USA, you see absolutely nothing wrong with that situation?
The top income brackets in the period I mentioned were 90%. Now they are around 35% or so, not taking into account all the loopholes. Most of the largest US corporations and their billionaire owners pay no taxes whatsoever due to "creative" accounting. Failing that, they move their HQ to Dubai, or some such.
And if the US hadn't been fighting Nazism and Communism in Europe the last 60 years, there'd be no Holland.
That sounds like a good excuse until one realizes that in the WWII the USA's involvement in Europe was far behind that of the Soviets, even ignoring the fact that the British faught a prolonged aerial war to hold Hitler at bay. The majority of the WWII action for the USA was its tangle with Japan, not in Europe. As a matter of fact, a significant portion of the business elites of the USA were sympathetic to Hitler and did brisk business with him, until (and for some even after this point) it became very dangerous for them to do so.
As to Communism, if the Soviets managed to take over Holland (an exceedingly unlikely scenario since all the other countries they took over were in their path to Berlin, at which point the Soviet public had no apetite whatsoever for further warfare after paying such a horrendous price so far, and by the time they did, the Western Europe already had nukes), their empire would have crumbled that much sooner, as its inherent internal deficiencies, accelerated by its being an over-stretched military monstrosity, brought it down, Reagan's hand waving nothwistanding.
And to truly put a lie to all these claims of "protection" of Europe in post WWII era (never you mind that both UK and France are nuclear powers) the USA kept on building its ever-more expensive arsenals and armies long after the Cold War ended, and now it seeks to employ these armies in an effort to brutally impose its will on random resource-rich countries. So much for all the bullshit. After Vietnam and Iraq, attempts at painting the USA as a "protector" of anything but its own elites and profits have become an exercise in pathetically comical futility.
The rates are comparatively high, but not higher then they used to be in the 50-60s in the USA, at the height of the post-WWII prosperity boom.
Furthermore, a majority of Americans are now realizing that saving some few hundred to few thousand bucks (at the majorities' income levels) a year in exchange for not being able to afford medical care or education for one's children is a rather rotten deal. Hence strong (and getting stronger) support amongst the American populace for following in the footsteps of those in the "utopia", even if it means taxing the billionaires and their Libertarian flunkies.
Shortly after they start snowball fighting in hell there will be two laws passed.
1. It will be illegal to donate to more than one candidate in any given race, as bribery is WRONG.
2. It will be illegal to donate to any candidate one is not eligible to cast a vote for. I can't vote for Senator Hatch's opponent without moving to Utah and registering there, Bill Gates can't donate to Dick Durbin without moving to Illinois and registering here, and neither my employer nor my union can donate to anybody at all.
Unfortunately the asshats of the world would quickly do an end run around this: they would simply feed their bribes to a proxy stooge who is living and registered in the area in question who would then pass them onto the target bribee.
Personally, I am getting fed up with these so-called "elections" and I am beginning to lean towards an old idea once used in ancient Greece: a system of "sortition", whereby the representatives of the population were selected simply via lottery, which guaranteed some semblance of representation of all social castes. I would add some rudamentary "pre-qualifications" (i.e. being able to read, write and answer some simple logical questions about the most basic common sense things in order to exclude complete dolts who drool on their shoes) but otherwise I think this would improve the process of selection of our representatives by orders of magnitude by removing the correlation of money and electability. Not to mention it would drastically improve the representation for the common, working people.
Of course one has to worry about their susceptibility to bribery after the turkeys are already in office, but that is another discussion. That and the corporate control of mass media. And so on.
And, with AACS, that's a fundamental flaw. Since said source of the media file is not anywhere nearly as well protected and can easily be (and has been) subverted, thus the entropy of the session-unique can easily be eliminated.
That depends. There are two obvious ways to make it very difficult: a) demand an online connection to initiate viewing of contents and then send random tokens, not to mention that this will allow the "contents owner" to be able to spy on the poor sod otherwise known as the "consumer" (which is where all the media companies are doing their damnest to get) or b) make sure that the MEGA-UBER-HD-DVD controller is a fully-self-contained, high-entropy (achievable with the right hardware, such as thermal noise based A/D random number generators and what not) source endpoint of the communications and that only it stores (irretrievably I presume) the actual kets of whatever actual encryption scheme is on disk.
Note that this does not fix the fundamental flaw of all DRM systems, i.e. the fact that as soon as someone gets the contents decrypted, by whatever means, then the unencrypted contents can be distributed freely. But it can (if properly implemented) make the process of decryption rather painful (as in very specialized custom hardware etc). It will also remove the possibility of simply sharing the decryption keys, which is how the CSS system is being presently thoroughly defeated on a large scale.
In short, the TPM will reduce very significantly the availability of easy methods of, say, playing one's legally purchased HD-DVD, without the owner grovelling for an approval from MPAA for every viewing, which is what that organization apparently consider its primary reason for existence, as they believe that this will allow them to shorten the life-time of any media drastically and allow them to re-sell the same contents, to the same people, many, many, many times over. And they might be right, given that Joe Sixpack will have very little recourse in the realm of corporate-bought laws to escape, other then to become a "vile pirate criminal" and face penalties harsher then those for rape and murder (as is already the case in some jurisdictions) for possession of the said custom decryption hardware. Given the current trends in American politics and law, I am not very optimistic looking towards the future of this.
Either you use the TPM's asymmetric algorithms and wait forever because they are so slow, or you use symmetric algorithms like AES outside the TPM and in the host and just the TPM for key mgmt. That's the approach that a system like AACS must use, and thus the #1 public use for TPM is vulnerable to the attack that I originally described.
Not if the AES key is generated per-session, and the contents is encrypted with that session-unique key, based on random tokens supplied by the other end of the connection (i.e. the source of your media file). The fact that the media key is being exported outside of the TPM gets you nothing as that key becomes useless as soon as the session is complete. In order to do you what you described you would have to crack the entire internal mechanism of the TPM, complete with its secret, hardware-embedded master key which is supposed to be inaccessible from the outside of the chip, so that you can generate these session-spanning keys at will. Otherwise the key you managed to snatch from the memory outside of the TPM (a trick requiring hardware mods in order to get past the CPU process memory separation) is useless not only for anybody else, but even for yourself 5 minutes later, with the very same contents from the very same source (which a second time will require a different, TPM generated/certified AES key).
Have you ever considered the possibility that it's WinAmp, not iTunes, that is b0rking the metadata?
It does not matter which application does it, I am merely pointing out that it is a bad idea.
Personally, I don't know the answer, but just assuming that it's iTunes seems an awful lot like jumping to conclusions to me.
Before you rant and rave about how iTunes is destroying your metadata, why don't you try taking a look at the same tagged MP3 in a few other players? You should also put the same tags on in those other players, then open it in iTunes, and in WinAmp. That should tell you who the real culprit is.
If it's iTunes, then you were right, and can rant and rave all you want (or, better, tell Apple about it and ask them to fix it). If it's WinAmp, then shut up and quit complaining about things you don't know anything about.
You are seriously projecting some sort of personal, music archiving application related (of all things), insecurity onto me here.
I do not use neither WinAMP or iTunes and I have no personal stake in any feud regarding music managment applications. My comments deal explicitely with the bad coding style of any application which attempts to store any sort of data in a binary format inside human readable user's comment field. Music and MP3 tags are just a specific example.
Garbage in your MP3s? Let's consider that iTunes adds functionality to your MP3s by letting you tack on much more information than WinAMP, including album artwork, playback position, expanded tags for TV show organization, different fields for display info and sort info, etc. WinAMP can't TOUCH the massive organizational capabilities of iTunes, which, when combined with Smart Playlists allows you to autogenerate complex playlists based on criteria in your tags, which, if you are as much of a music geek as you think you are, your tags are incredibly intricate and detailed, allowing for more flexibility in autogeneration.
So iTunes can sort your collection by the maiden name of the mother of the 3rd girlfriend of the drummer of the band?
Great!
... except sticking some human-unreadable crap in the comment tag is a big no-no, not just from aestethic point of view, but also from the most basic standpoint of sane software design. That is so because inserting hexadecimal goo into comments fields, and thus essentially destroying their contents and usefulness for human readers, is not an acceptable method of storing data, but a desperate kludge by someone who had no idea where to put the extraneous pile of bits. If an application must store the names of pet cats of the songs writer's landlords, it should do so either in a dedicated MP3 ID tag, or, better yet (since sanity will soon leave us when 152454th tag type is introduced to store the "favourite flower of the accountant of the producer of the album"), in a separate database linked to your files via MD5 checksums or what not as this does not damage/corrupt the MP3 files themselves from the point of use in other software/players or human readability.
The meta-mod system should theoretically mitigate all this somewhat as folks who mod-bomb will get a lot of "unfair" meta-mods, so they will increasingly lose opportunities to moderate until they lose eligibility altogether.
Assuming of course that they do not maintain multiple accounts just for the purpose of bombing. Some people can be quite vindictive... and have no life. An ugly combination.
As a aside I find the whole moderation system here overly complicated. There should be really only one category of "downmod" and that is "Outright vandal, GNAA style", subject to corroboration by multiple downmods from multiple IP addresses. The mod points for this should simply regenerate over time if the account itself is not used for pranks. That way the complete nonsense is removed and the rest... people should participate in the discussion rather then sniping with mod points from the peanut gallery. Slashdot has a thread indentation system so its easy to simply scroll by the parts one finds off-topic or uninteresting. As to emphasis, the simplest, fully transparent and accountable method is simply to rank posts based on the number of replies to them.
I myself nearly never mod anything since usually the GNAA and "First psot" types are nuked by the subscription crowd by the time I get there. After the hooligans are gone, if I find something objectionable I simply respond and tell the poster why, otherwise what's the use? If everyone just modded, the discussion threads might as well be reduced to two posts: "Me like article" and "Me no like article" where the apes could go "expressing" themselves "eloquently" with "Ufg heairy thumb up!" and "Ugh hairy thumb down!".
Or to look at it another way, the moderation system as it stands is a rather childlish re-implementation of the high-school popularity contests, rather then something which facilitates discussion.
They prefer lower price unless there is a compelling reason to pay more. Cooking your own food is even cheaper than going to fast food, but people choose to pay more for prepared food because of a compelling reason (time). People pay more for good food or atmosphere at a mom & pop shop.
The trouble with this reasoning is of course that the "compelling reason" is frequently not obvious and the results are often delayed and hidden amongst the noise of other happenings. This is one of the critical errors in Adam Smith's scheme, the fact that the consumers are often ignorant and/or purposefully misinformed on a large sacle and thus unable to participate in the marketplace in a way that leads to true competition between sellers. If a seller is effectively stealing from buyer's children in order to offer unnaturally cheap price, without the buyer's knowledge, there cannot be any sort of functional "marketplace". And that is precisely what is happening.
Yes, nobody can resist the sheer compelling power of mass media, all Dubya needs to do is start an advertising campaign and all his problems will be forgotten. I tend to give people more credit, mass media may have some limited impact, but it is far from being so compelling it controls people.
This is too rich an irony. You mean it didn't work for him in whipping hysteria with all sorts of bizarre fabrications prior to launching his PNAC designed plan to conquer and loot Iraq, resulting in hundreds of thousands of dead and maimed, unheard of before war profiteering schemes and, now, wholesale fire-sale of Iraq to his closest corporate benefactors?
Besides, the "branding" brainwashing is not achieved in matter of days, it is a decades-long, precisely coordinated effort by multi-generational aristocracies, such as CocaCola, Pepsi or WalMart. There are a miriad companies world-wide which make soft drinks identical in taste to that of Coca-Cola and yet they are forever doomed to tiny market shares because by now people will buy, completely instinctively at this point, like Pavlovian dogs, either Pepsi or Coke. Subsequently this duo-poly has 90%+ ownership of all fast food associated carbonated drink delivery. "Free market" my ass.
Franchises work because people are risk averse. I walk into Starbucks, McDonalds, Apple Store, I know what to expect whether I'm in Louisville or Tokyo. There are better coffee shops than Starbucks, but most people don't want to go around experimenting. I go to a mom & pop coffee shop in town, because they offer better coffee and better pastries. But when I go to other countries, unless a place is recommended I will stick with the safety of a franchise... I don't have the time or patience to look for something better when I'm travelling.
This is one sad rationalization of your own mental shackles, installed compliments of the corporate brainwashing operations. What do you suppose is the perecentage of "travellers" amongst people who patronize those franchises? And even then of course you can get a shrimp burger (no kidding) at the Tokyo McDonalds. But you did know to expect that, right? For your next shock try the ones in Thailand. Then come back talking about "risk aversion" of "travellers". The only thing which is consistent for these franchises is their brand. And that is their true prime property, the key element in their success, based on the art of psychological manipulation (a victim of which you appear to be yourself).
Yes they are at a disadvantage, but it doesn't mean impossible. There are new small businesses started every day, just because the obvious path is dominated by giants doesn't mean that nobody can compete; that's why hundreds of small business start up every year.
Just as your other suggestion whereby you implored me to take on the local telcos with a broom and a length of wire?
It wouldn't be altogether dumb if the Slashdot modding system noticed such modding patterns. Focusing on an individual is highly statistically significant, as compared with modding across stories.
Slashdot put a lot of effort into blocking various kinds of 'crapflooding'; abuse against specific individuals would surely also be worthy of blocking or limiting.
Possibly that's the case already. Even though the goofus(es) have been at it for a while, my "karma" seems largely unaffected, which I think would not be otherwise the case given the relative numbers of mod points in play.
Since the TPM doesn't do actual encryption on its own, all it would take is one grad student with the right equipment about an afternoon of work to fully compromise (as in extract the keys from) any wide-spread DRM system that relies on TPM. And once the keys are extracted, the test equipment is no longer necessary.
You are wrong. The TPM does both signing of remotely originating certificates and decryption key maintenance. That is one of its chief selling points. The decryption keys generated by the TPM are session specific, i.e. they are thrown away after each transmission of "protected contents" and are based on the remote values as well as the secret hardware-embedded keys within the TPM. TPM can also be used in one of its modes of operation to do on the fly decryption of any stream, instead of the CPU.
So you could, with all that equipment, get the throw-away set of decryption keys, or the actual decrypted contents. But this would not break the system for others, who do not have your specialized hardware. The operation you describe would have to be performed each time for each new session, even with the same contents.
Mom & pop shops can and do compete, just not directly with price. People will pay a little more for a burger that doesn't taste like cardboard, for goods that aren't mass market cheap plastic, and for good customer service at the repair shop.
That is untrue. The general public does normally prefer low price and is willing to mindlessly destroy their own livelyhood in its pursuit. But where low price alone is insufficient, it is scientifically proven that the public is also subject to mass scale media-based brainwashing, which in marketing circles goes by the name of "branding". That is why people will buy McCrap burger, even though a Mom & Pop store is offering much better cousine next door. They are simply inundated with incessant multi-billion psychological manipulation, from very young age onwards, for which very purpose the so called "mass media" exists. That is why the advent of "franchise" stores is so popular, as they do provide the mass-media centered mass-mind-warping mechanisms, which individual stores cannot even dream of. So the unholy duo of low price (at the expense of foreign slave labour and environmental destruction) and "branding" pretty much seals the fate of all locally owned opertions.
The approach is backwards in that it promotes cheap & less risky investment, rather than expensive & revolutionary development.
Really? What was the last time "expensive and revolutionary" development occured by a private company, not in any way stolen from the government-funded academia?
You contradict yourself.... If there are these huge margins across the board, then mom & pop shops would be able to compete.
You forgot about the barriers to entry. If the barrier to entry (most of the time artifically created by the participants of the cartels) is so high that only a mega-bazillionaire multi-mega-national can enter, the mom & pop crowd is at a distinct disadvantage. Say a government demand that some spectrum be sold whole as a unit to the highest bidder (for a mere few billion dollars usually), instead of being managed by the government and small participants sharing in its use for a nominal fee. Same applies to city wide conduits, which instead of being privately own (and thus monopolized due to geography and building restrictions) should be managed by the government or a non-profit consortium, and leased at a nominal fee to small businesses competing on service delivery. Etc and so on.
Those were just brainstorming examples. The solution most likely is not obvious, but there is a solution - that's how companies are started.
And oft there is no solution, no matter how many try. Go check out the "perpetual motion machine archive" for examples. Raw willpower is not a substitute for reality.
On the flip side, telling a man he is free does not end his hunger. To quote Full Metal Jacket, "They'd rather be alive than free, I guess. Poor dumb bastards."
Western countries do have erosion of freedoms, mostly in "Wars against [drugs, terror, etc]," coupled with organized special interest groups which have greater influence over government due to their ability to organize votes.
So I guess it is all right to be owned by our feudal betters, as long as the TV keeps playing and the bread is available, right?
Have you looked at the demographics for graduate school in engineering? Our highest levels of education are training those H1B workers because people in the US aren't attending.
See your own post above. The foreigners (particularly oriental where all the manufacturing and thus wealth is heading) have far more purchasing power then the locals, and the locals have been repeatedly burned by investing in useless education, only to become underpaid corporate drones, and so their lesson learned was that the educatio
I was exposed to that too, recently. Judging from the pattern of downmods, i.e. always 5 points spread on my 5 recent posts, regardless of topic and all mods occuring in bursts within some minutes from each other, I assume that is someone spending all his mod points at once on his favourite foe, who happens to be my humble persona.
What makes me wonder though, is that some other posters seem to be subject to similar recent activity, which would indicate some larger scale effort... or the cowards have some sort of seasonal migration they all instinctively partake in. Maybe someone can attach a GPS trasmitter to one of them and we can watch their trek through sewers for our edification. There is a PhD in this for someone with selfless dedication to science...
So your answer to fixing the class imbalance is to remove any chance of ownership from the lower and middle classes? Yes you will have more "responsibility" but the risk will then further concentrate power in the hands of the few who can afford to take risk. You can point all you want to "evil" corporations, but privately held business throughout history aren't any better.
At least they are accoutable. But your point about removing chance of ownership from lower and middle classes is laughable. The very reason people cannot own small businesses is because they cannot even dream of compeating with mega-multi-national ones. A small grocery store is dead next to a WalMart. A mom-and-pop burger place has no chance on the same corner as McDonalds. A small-time family car repair shop is nearly always devastated by a national chain. Etc and so on.
First from a practical level, who decides the minimum number of companies, or what size company is too large? A grocery store has different capital investment requirements from a wafer fab.
Second from an economic point of view, we would be eroding economies of scale causing things to be more expensive. Do we really need more bankrupt airlines?
No one decides per-se. Taxation brackets would be adjusted based on median income of the nation, and thus floating automatically with the increase/decrease of the wealth of the whole populace. If the investing class wishes to become wealthier, they would have to asure the appropriate, proportional increase of wealth around them, instead of what they do now, which is syphoning the wealth from the "plebs" around them like a giant vacuum cleaner, and going abroad in search of prey if the locals are at their breaking point. The number of competing companies would be simply decided by the amount of money each of them can make before the tax brackets put a break on their further growth, thus allowing other small operations to grow in places that those companies can no longer reach. It is a system-wide solution to both consolidation of companies and runaway accumulation of wealth. The maximum size is simply decided by maximum profit, not by other, specific, market factors. Thus a low-profit, low margin operations can grow much larger then small, very-high profit ones. Which also answers your economy of scale question. If the profit is high per-unit, there is no "economy" of scale. Just scale.
This of course is one of those big lies of the "free" market, today. Many things, which are supposedly available because of "economy" of scale are simply rip-offs. Microsoft products (up to 10000% margins) or FLASH memory chips (400-800% margins) alike and are simply a result of activities of various cartels.
Most by individual choice. Just look at this weekend, thousands of people waited hours, even days, in line so they could spend $2000+ dollars for a gadget (including the 2year contract). Some of them probably could afford it, but many probably couldn't and just stuck it on their charge card. People overpurchased on homes, bought gas guzzling SUVs, playing the credit game of financing longer, so they could afford the payments because of all the other debt they have. People choose to live on the edge, then cry helplessness when the world doesn't go according to plan.
Perheaps it is so, but you cannot put a blame for the result of the decades of corporate propaganda squarely on the shoulders of its victims. At this point nearly all of the mass media in the US is owned by a handful of corporations who are all doing their absolute damnest to ensure that the rampant, idiotic, consumerism becomes more rampant and out of control. How do you suppose an average Joe is going to behave when he is told, from age 3 on, that buying useless crap on credit is the only, American, way to go. Hell, the Preznit himself went on national TV just after 9/11 imploring the populace to shop till they drop. And
I don't necessarily think that will really accomplish what you want. All that would do is push everything back to privately owned companies with much less transparency and responsibility, and reduce the middle class of ownership. Rather than the rich owning most everything, they would in fact own everything.
My answer is an abolishment of corporate charter (and thus return to personal responsibility of business owners for the actions of their companies - a key element which you forgot to mention being circumvented by the corporate charter) but more importantly, return to 90+% tax brackets. We do not need large businesses and super-wealthy super-businessmen in any area. We need a lot of smaller businesses competing for everything. That is what ensures that the "invisible hand" of the marketplace remains working. Very, very, very steep progressive taxation (along with near 90% inheretance taxation in higher brackets) is what ensures that the capitalist game remains functional, by preventing consolidation and runaway (due to some market failure) fortunes. Otherwise, the removal of "tax friction" to unlimited consolidation of companies and unlimited acquisiton of wealth results in feudalism, which the USA is at this point far too close to for any comfort.
It is truly mind boggling why people carry this sense of helplessness.
Maybe because of the fact that most of the population in the US (and increasingly most of the West) has a negative savings rate?
Why do you feel you are owned?
Because we increasingly are owned. As an example, in an area we nerds find dear to us: where I live, all cell-phone service providers have merged into two cartels, who now charge identical rates of ~0.5$ per kilobyte for internet access on your phone, or roughly $21,000 for 4Gb. Your "consumer choice" is that of a Dick A up your ass, or Dick B up your ass. Same applies to land-based ISPs whose best uplink rate (in a densly populated city centre) is 384kbit/s for a mere $95 a month.
Because somebody else is making more money than you is jealousy not patriotism.
The problem is not that they are making money. It is the way in which they are making money. What I am pointing out is the total breakage of the basic, fundamental rules of the whole "capitalist" society!
If you feel owned start your own company, one that reflects your own ideals.
Oh yea! That will cure the problem! I will just hop on to my bank, get a loan for, say, $5 billion, get the government to sell me some radio spectrum presently used by someone else (I will have to buy a few politicians to do that, bribing them more then the other guy) and then I will start my own cell-phone company and I will never have to pay 50 cents a kilobyte again! That's the truly practical plan for all citizens in my area, surely.... not!
As an aside. I do own my own small business. This however is not a cure to what ails the society. We are discussing systemic, nation-wide problems, not what some more fortunate individuals are privileged to do for themselves. Not everyone can own a business. Not even 1 in 10 people can do so, for many, many reasons.
Yes there are problems in the US, just like there is everywhere else in the world. Most of the problems are caused by the choices of individuals, the structural problem such as medical coverage and access to higher education should be the focus. Not that CEOs make more money, and people are deciding to go into more debt.
Yes, apparently, as in the example above, we, the individuals (or more accurately our grand-parents), have sinned gravely by deciding to live in this area, no? And higher education will certainly solve the problem of oligarchies, cartels and duo-polies! That is of course righ
The only problem is that I think you just described the ENTIRE human race, and not some sub-class within it. Oh sure, not everybody here would sell their money for cash (although many would if the price was right), the fact is that ALL humans are motivated by greed. That is why capitalism works so well in its inherently-imperfect way.
I would disagree that the entire race is afflicted, although I must admit that a signifcant portion of it indeed is, based on empirical evidence.
Please also take into account that by "greed" I do not mean a desire to create a comfortable life in exchange for labour or other contributions to society, but instead attempts to "get something for nothing" in their miriad of forms. That of course including a delusion of immense self-worth and thus pay completely out of proportion to labour performed, which afflicts many individuals, who would die arguing that they are getting only what they "deserve", i.e. $12300 an hour for playing golf with their socialite friends all day, or some such.
One might kill their mother for $1000, but I might only deprive her of a little happiness for $50,000.
NOBODY reading this is really immune from selfishness - if you think you are then you are simply deluded. Some might not measure their success in dollars, but that doesn't change the fact that everybody is motivated by greed in some way.
I beg to differ. This is probably the very reason why I and many people like me seem to operate on a different wavelength alltogether. I would not do it for a billion dollars, as I do not see a point at all in desiring money beyond what I already have, thank you very much. I work so I can be comfortable and I do not need a lot to achieve comfort. You would be surprised how much nonsense you "desire" is actually completely psychological, induced by mindless advertising propaganda and indirectly by peer preassure. Once you wake up, it is like living in a world inhabited by marionettes. You can see all their strings out of a sudden, pulling them this way and the other, while you are free. It is quite an experience.
I'm not convinced that simply offering free health care without limit to everybody equally is going to work. Ultimately those who are paying for it will resent waiting in line behind those who aren't paying for it. And I don't mean the next door neighbor out of a job for three months. The issue is that not all work is equally valuable, and the reward for being a clerk at the local Walmart shouldn't be the same as the reward for managaing a 5000-employee business.
The reason why healthcare must be provided to all citizens with no charge (be it by the government, non profit mutual-corporations paid from taxes or what not) is that healthcare is not a business and thus does not fall into the realm of the marketplace. One cannot shop for a best doctor while one is unconscious in an ambulance. One cannot "return" a faulty abdominal surgery for a refund. Normal rules of competition, and thus capitalist marketplace, simply do not apply as they do with underware and plastic lawn chairs.
Helthcare, like roads, is one of the foundations of a civilized society, which must be provided to all in order for the society to function. The result of "private" healthcare is pretty much the same as having evey road being a "toll" road. Those who own the critical arteries i.e. the ones which cannot be circumvented, will choke the society with their greed, very much so as the US is being chocked by the "medical insurance" industry.
That is why every OECD country, other then USA, has universal healthcare. Every one.
Another one those people forget is Greed is EVIL. It's not good, it's not the sole driver of all progress, and it motivates plenty of purely evil actions. It's not a virtue, it's not necessary or even helpful to society, and anyone who can't see that has a pretty distorted view of the world. Or maybe they read too much Ayn Rand. Because the real world doesn't depend on a handful of super business men.
Absolutely.
The entire utility, and cleverness, of the concept of "capitalism" was to take the evil vice of greed and try to harness it for the good of the society, based on the recognition of the fact that those afflicted by the disease of greed seem, for the most part, uncurable. That is, the idea was to collar the pathologically greedy and force them to pull some useful payload attached to their leash behind them as they struggle, driven despertately by their disease, wheezing and coughing all the way.
However, as soon as they break away from that leash, it is no longer useful for the society to allow these greed-aflicted individuals to run amok and their activities must be curtailed, or a very large number of people will be severely harmed by the diseased ones in their insane efforts to own everything and everyone.
This is the very lesson which seems to have been forgotten in the USA, and so now the greed-mongers are pretty much free to do as they please, with the resulting effects such as rapid deterioration of the standard of living for most Americans, non-existant competition between gigantic oligopolies and duo-polies, accelerating concentration of wealth in fewer and fewer hands, superiority of corporations over citizenry in the sphere of politics, globalization of corporate profits but not employee benefits, socialized corporate losses and privatized corporate profits, etc and so on.
A good indication that the takover of the US by the parasitic greed-mongers is entering the final stages is the recent emergence of corporate mercenary armies, on a scale rivalling that of the regular US armed forces. The fat lady is truly about to sing for the Republic.
CEO compensation for the most part tracks the S&P 500. They make more money in proportion to the money the stockholders make, which I would say is appropriate compensation.
No it is not. If the CEO compensation and the compensation of employees diverge by a factor of 500, even if profits of some shareholders are proportional (an unlikely scenario since the CEO pay is well known to be wholly independent of the profitability of companies, and in fact tends to be astronomical especially when the company itself is about to fold and more stunning the incompetence and corruption of the CEO, better the pay apparently) then the society has no longer any need for allowing the corporate charter to exist. The purpose of allowing the corporations to come to being is to benefit the society as a whole not a few feudal lords, otherwise known as billionaire stockholders, and their semi-loyal vassals, the CEOs, at the expense of everyone else.
It is truly mind boggling how many excuses people like you come up with in order to justify the galloping return to feudalism-in-all-but-name, which is so advanced already in the USA. Not only that, many of you are apparently not satisifed about how fast can you become wholly owned and operated by your "betters". "Give me liberty or give me death" my ass.
And before you start going off about how average Joe American is a stockholder too, be sure to realize that 90% of all stocks in the USA are owned by less then 20% of the population, with over 30% of all companies owned by just the top 1%.
Your attack on "greed" is pretty obnoxious. Consider this - wealth is security. It means that you aren't at the mercy of others. It means you can provide for your offspring and send them to get good educations so that they can provide for themselves. These are obviously desirable things. You have to work to get them. Your assumption that anyone who acquires wealth is "ME! Mine!" is a really lame simplification. Feel free to give your own wealth away, don't tell me I'm just greedy and try to take mine from me.
There a numerous problems with this reasoning.
For one if your desire for secuirity requires impoverishment, and thus destruction of sequirity for others, it simply leads back to feudalism, where few had all the "security" from their "property", i.e. peasants, enforced via private armies. So the wealth creation has to be spread evenly throughout society. More concentrated it becomes (a process which is accelerating insanely now in the US) less "security" the unwashed masses have. Which can only result in two outcomes: violent revolt or enslavements of many by the very few. Non necessarily in that order.
So if you keep proceeding with only your own ass in mind, the end result will be stuff being taken away from you, including, possibly, you life, should things get really ugly.
Next, there is a huge gap between a wish to provide for one's family and a wish to own a Boeing 767 painted pink, with a toilet seat made out of pure gold. An unrestricted, boundless greed, for greed's sake, is what I am talking about, not a materialistic motivation to achieve a comfortable, secure life-style. The difference between that of a talented engineer, or a bio-scientist living in comfort due to their contributions to society, and, say, Paris Hilton or Prince Bandar.
Finally, even though financial motivations are for many creative people secondary (as my quick run through history books shows), if there was truly a demonstrable, reliable (as opposed to wishful-thinking based one) relationship between wealth and contributions to society, an idea which is the very cornerstone of the "capitalist" societal phillosphy, I would be a card-carrying member of the CATO institute, instead of ridiculing the uncritical wealth-worship which you are so keen to exhibit.
In short, my attack on "greed" is an attack on falsity, boloney and flim-flam of the so-called "Free Market" society, which is by now a thinly-disguised feudal order and my objections have nothing to do with wealth and creation of therof, merely with lies dealing with its distribution.
And I am not even going to venture into the whole realm of attribution of credit for progress presently used by the various greed-mongers, whereby already mentioned Paris Hilton is thousands of times more "valuable" to the society then those dudes a few/. articles back who are busy splicing genes in search of cures for devastating diseases.
Yes, that's right:
Money is Bad,
Freedom is Slavery,
Ignorance is Strength, at least on/.
At a risk of feeding a mindless troll, here is the breakdown: Money is merely a mechanism to make exchange of labour and resources convenient. That is all that money is, ergo saying that "money is bad" would be like saying "labour and resources are bad". You are not even trying to make sense, which labels you, with a high probability, as a member of the "ME! Mine! All Mine! Me! My! Myself! I got Mine you go get yours, on some other planet!" school of social sciences.
The only way you can really do this is crippling tax rates on the super rich, which only work for so long and has a side benefit of killing the industrial drive that creates them.
This, of course, is one of those oft repeated, and completely, utterly, false canards, which the accolytes of the All-Powerful Deity of the Free Market Mammon are so fond of breathlessly repeating.
If it were true, the only motivation for progress, since beginning of time, would be massive piles of gold coins. That would mean Aristotle, Socrates and Plato were in it for the money, right? How about Copernicus? They made him the King of Poland, no? Or, say, Da Vinci, who surely ended up owning most of Venice, right? Perheaps this is to old for ya, lets try something modern: Albert Einstein. Given their relative contributions to humankind, that dude certainly died with a fortune which makes Bill Gates look like a pauper, no?
How about industry then? A typical Japanese CEO makes about 10 times the average salary of a worker in his corporation. A CEO of a US corporation is now past 500 times that of an average employee in his operation. Are you trying to tell me that Japanese CEOs lack any motivation to produce quality products and therefore their companies are 50 times less competetive?
I could go on like this for hours.
The point is that the phenomenon of people taking seriously (particularly in the USA) the laughable assertion of unquestionable equivalency between drive to innovation, increase of productivity and unrestricted, boundless, avarice is a very recent one.
This is a testimony to the success of the propaganda of the greed-mongers, in their unceasing efforts to destroy any reasoning ability in people's brains and to obfuscate pretty much all of the recorded history which directly contradicts their inane greed-centered world-view.
If the checking is being done remotely, then your computer must be sending properly-formed packets down the network -- because properly-formed packets are the only thing you can send over the network. That kind of nullifies the address-knocking scheme (it doesn't matter what language the Natives speak amongst themselves, if it has to be translated into English before the messenger can deliver it to their Chief far away). There's still a chink in the armour.
You keep forgetting that each packet is encrypted with a random (per session) key which is generated by the TPM based on the state of the TPM (and thus requires unaltered instruction sequences and memory contents - or helluva of hardware virtualization hacking), a secret key embedded unretrievably in the TPM and a random (per session) number sent by the other party. In other words, in order to crack the thing you either have to build a special-purpose computer, capable of completely isolating and fooling the TPM chip, since any monkeying with the software on its own (such as debugger sessions etc) will alter the internal state of the TPM and thus destroy your per-session decryption keys. Note also that in order to peek at the memory of the "trusted" process one has to somehow defeat the memory isolation between processes which is a pre-requisite of the TPM platform. In other words a custom CPU.
The point of the TPM is that while yes, it is breakable, it is not trivially or cheaply breakable.
You mean helluva a lot of wires. Since the TPM straddles the whole width of data/address busses. In other words you gotta get a specialized board and stick the TPM onto it, following which you have to know precisely the expected memory access/contents change sequences, all the way from the moment the power switch goes into the "on" position on the PC.
Possible? Sure, but at what cost/effort ratio? Furthermore, no more hacking for the unwashed masses unless you've got one of those special, custom modified motherboards + TPM "virtualization" hardware. Stuff which is likely to be more illegal then crack cocaine soon and which can be caught at the border when its being imported from China or who knows where.
Except that there is no way for software to determine whether or not it is running in a virtualised environment. (If there was, that would indicate your virtualisation is not being done right.) Your virtual environment just has to listen for the challenges and send the correct responses. And you can know, by examining the software which is running within the virtualised environment, exactly what response it is expecting.
You misunderstand the way the TPM works. TPM chip computes a running checksum of a number of hardware CPU operations, such as memory access and/or sequence of instructions executed. Then a software in your VM will be asked to return to the remote party requesting attestation a digest value based on a random number sent to you by the other party and then run through the TPM chip. The VM has no access to the internals of the TPM chip (it is an opaque black box as far as the CPU is concerned) and thus cannot compute the correct response. Only the TPM chip can, which it will refuse to do since your running of the VM has altered the "one and only" sequence of instructions/memory accesses that the TPM continuously monitors.
In other words, TPM is specifically designed to defeat virtualization as the virtualized environment does not have sufficient data to recreate the correct responses, only the raw hardware, executing istructions under the supervision of the TPM chip, has.
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And with the top 2% owning over 50% of all the assets in the USA, you see absolutely nothing wrong with that situation?
The top income brackets in the period I mentioned were 90%. Now they are around 35% or so, not taking into account all the loopholes. Most of the largest US corporations and their billionaire owners pay no taxes whatsoever due to "creative" accounting. Failing that, they move their HQ to Dubai, or some such.
That sounds like a good excuse until one realizes that in the WWII the USA's involvement in Europe was far behind that of the Soviets, even ignoring the fact that the British faught a prolonged aerial war to hold Hitler at bay. The majority of the WWII action for the USA was its tangle with Japan, not in Europe. As a matter of fact, a significant portion of the business elites of the USA were sympathetic to Hitler and did brisk business with him, until (and for some even after this point) it became very dangerous for them to do so.
As to Communism, if the Soviets managed to take over Holland (an exceedingly unlikely scenario since all the other countries they took over were in their path to Berlin, at which point the Soviet public had no apetite whatsoever for further warfare after paying such a horrendous price so far, and by the time they did, the Western Europe already had nukes), their empire would have crumbled that much sooner, as its inherent internal deficiencies, accelerated by its being an over-stretched military monstrosity, brought it down, Reagan's hand waving nothwistanding.
And to truly put a lie to all these claims of "protection" of Europe in post WWII era (never you mind that both UK and France are nuclear powers) the USA kept on building its ever-more expensive arsenals and armies long after the Cold War ended, and now it seeks to employ these armies in an effort to brutally impose its will on random resource-rich countries. So much for all the bullshit. After Vietnam and Iraq, attempts at painting the USA as a "protector" of anything but its own elites and profits have become an exercise in pathetically comical futility.
The rates are comparatively high, but not higher then they used to be in the 50-60s in the USA, at the height of the post-WWII prosperity boom.
Furthermore, a majority of Americans are now realizing that saving some few hundred to few thousand bucks (at the majorities' income levels) a year in exchange for not being able to afford medical care or education for one's children is a rather rotten deal. Hence strong (and getting stronger) support amongst the American populace for following in the footsteps of those in the "utopia", even if it means taxing the billionaires and their Libertarian flunkies.
Unfortunately the asshats of the world would quickly do an end run around this: they would simply feed their bribes to a proxy stooge who is living and registered in the area in question who would then pass them onto the target bribee.
Personally, I am getting fed up with these so-called "elections" and I am beginning to lean towards an old idea once used in ancient Greece: a system of "sortition", whereby the representatives of the population were selected simply via lottery, which guaranteed some semblance of representation of all social castes. I would add some rudamentary "pre-qualifications" (i.e. being able to read, write and answer some simple logical questions about the most basic common sense things in order to exclude complete dolts who drool on their shoes) but otherwise I think this would improve the process of selection of our representatives by orders of magnitude by removing the correlation of money and electability. Not to mention it would drastically improve the representation for the common, working people.
Of course one has to worry about their susceptibility to bribery after the turkeys are already in office, but that is another discussion. That and the corporate control of mass media. And so on.
That depends. There are two obvious ways to make it very difficult: a) demand an online connection to initiate viewing of contents and then send random tokens, not to mention that this will allow the "contents owner" to be able to spy on the poor sod otherwise known as the "consumer" (which is where all the media companies are doing their damnest to get) or b) make sure that the MEGA-UBER-HD-DVD controller is a fully-self-contained, high-entropy (achievable with the right hardware, such as thermal noise based A/D random number generators and what not) source endpoint of the communications and that only it stores (irretrievably I presume) the actual kets of whatever actual encryption scheme is on disk.
Note that this does not fix the fundamental flaw of all DRM systems, i.e. the fact that as soon as someone gets the contents decrypted, by whatever means, then the unencrypted contents can be distributed freely. But it can (if properly implemented) make the process of decryption rather painful (as in very specialized custom hardware etc). It will also remove the possibility of simply sharing the decryption keys, which is how the CSS system is being presently thoroughly defeated on a large scale.
In short, the TPM will reduce very significantly the availability of easy methods of, say, playing one's legally purchased HD-DVD, without the owner grovelling for an approval from MPAA for every viewing, which is what that organization apparently consider its primary reason for existence, as they believe that this will allow them to shorten the life-time of any media drastically and allow them to re-sell the same contents, to the same people, many, many, many times over. And they might be right, given that Joe Sixpack will have very little recourse in the realm of corporate-bought laws to escape, other then to become a "vile pirate criminal" and face penalties harsher then those for rape and murder (as is already the case in some jurisdictions) for possession of the said custom decryption hardware. Given the current trends in American politics and law, I am not very optimistic looking towards the future of this.
Not if the AES key is generated per-session, and the contents is encrypted with that session-unique key, based on random tokens supplied by the other end of the connection (i.e. the source of your media file). The fact that the media key is being exported outside of the TPM gets you nothing as that key becomes useless as soon as the session is complete. In order to do you what you described you would have to crack the entire internal mechanism of the TPM, complete with its secret, hardware-embedded master key which is supposed to be inaccessible from the outside of the chip, so that you can generate these session-spanning keys at will. Otherwise the key you managed to snatch from the memory outside of the TPM (a trick requiring hardware mods in order to get past the CPU process memory separation) is useless not only for anybody else, but even for yourself 5 minutes later, with the very same contents from the very same source (which a second time will require a different, TPM generated/certified AES key).
It does not matter which application does it, I am merely pointing out that it is a bad idea.
You are seriously projecting some sort of personal, music archiving application related (of all things), insecurity onto me here.
I do not use neither WinAMP or iTunes and I have no personal stake in any feud regarding music managment applications. My comments deal explicitely with the bad coding style of any application which attempts to store any sort of data in a binary format inside human readable user's comment field. Music and MP3 tags are just a specific example.
So iTunes can sort your collection by the maiden name of the mother of the 3rd girlfriend of the drummer of the band?
Great!
... except sticking some human-unreadable crap in the comment tag is a big no-no, not just from aestethic point of view, but also from the most basic standpoint of sane software design. That is so because inserting hexadecimal goo into comments fields, and thus essentially destroying their contents and usefulness for human readers, is not an acceptable method of storing data, but a desperate kludge by someone who had no idea where to put the extraneous pile of bits. If an application must store the names of pet cats of the songs writer's landlords, it should do so either in a dedicated MP3 ID tag, or, better yet (since sanity will soon leave us when 152454th tag type is introduced to store the "favourite flower of the accountant of the producer of the album"), in a separate database linked to your files via MD5 checksums or what not as this does not damage/corrupt the MP3 files themselves from the point of use in other software/players or human readability.
Assuming of course that they do not maintain multiple accounts just for the purpose of bombing. Some people can be quite vindictive ... and have no life. An ugly combination.
As a aside I find the whole moderation system here overly complicated. There should be really only one category of "downmod" and that is "Outright vandal, GNAA style", subject to corroboration by multiple downmods from multiple IP addresses. The mod points for this should simply regenerate over time if the account itself is not used for pranks. That way the complete nonsense is removed and the rest ... people should participate in the discussion rather then sniping with mod points from the peanut gallery. Slashdot has a thread indentation system so its easy to simply scroll by the parts one finds off-topic or uninteresting. As to emphasis, the simplest, fully transparent and accountable method is simply to rank posts based on the number of replies to them.
I myself nearly never mod anything since usually the GNAA and "First psot" types are nuked by the subscription crowd by the time I get there. After the hooligans are gone, if I find something objectionable I simply respond and tell the poster why, otherwise what's the use? If everyone just modded, the discussion threads might as well be reduced to two posts: "Me like article" and "Me no like article" where the apes could go "expressing" themselves "eloquently" with "Ufg heairy thumb up!" and "Ugh hairy thumb down!".
Or to look at it another way, the moderation system as it stands is a rather childlish re-implementation of the high-school popularity contests, rather then something which facilitates discussion.
The trouble with this reasoning is of course that the "compelling reason" is frequently not obvious and the results are often delayed and hidden amongst the noise of other happenings. This is one of the critical errors in Adam Smith's scheme, the fact that the consumers are often ignorant and/or purposefully misinformed on a large sacle and thus unable to participate in the marketplace in a way that leads to true competition between sellers. If a seller is effectively stealing from buyer's children in order to offer unnaturally cheap price, without the buyer's knowledge, there cannot be any sort of functional "marketplace". And that is precisely what is happening.
This is too rich an irony. You mean it didn't work for him in whipping hysteria with all sorts of bizarre fabrications prior to launching his PNAC designed plan to conquer and loot Iraq, resulting in hundreds of thousands of dead and maimed, unheard of before war profiteering schemes and, now, wholesale fire-sale of Iraq to his closest corporate benefactors?
Besides, the "branding" brainwashing is not achieved in matter of days, it is a decades-long, precisely coordinated effort by multi-generational aristocracies, such as CocaCola, Pepsi or WalMart. There are a miriad companies world-wide which make soft drinks identical in taste to that of Coca-Cola and yet they are forever doomed to tiny market shares because by now people will buy, completely instinctively at this point, like Pavlovian dogs, either Pepsi or Coke. Subsequently this duo-poly has 90%+ ownership of all fast food associated carbonated drink delivery. "Free market" my ass.
This is one sad rationalization of your own mental shackles, installed compliments of the corporate brainwashing operations. What do you suppose is the perecentage of "travellers" amongst people who patronize those franchises? And even then of course you can get a shrimp burger (no kidding) at the Tokyo McDonalds. But you did know to expect that, right? For your next shock try the ones in Thailand. Then come back talking about "risk aversion" of "travellers". The only thing which is consistent for these franchises is their brand. And that is their true prime property, the key element in their success, based on the art of psychological manipulation (a victim of which you appear to be yourself).
Just as your other suggestion whereby you implored me to take on the local telcos with a broom and a length of wire?
You keep missing the ma
Possibly that's the case already. Even though the goofus(es) have been at it for a while, my "karma" seems largely unaffected, which I think would not be otherwise the case given the relative numbers of mod points in play.
You are wrong. The TPM does both signing of remotely originating certificates and decryption key maintenance. That is one of its chief selling points. The decryption keys generated by the TPM are session specific, i.e. they are thrown away after each transmission of "protected contents" and are based on the remote values as well as the secret hardware-embedded keys within the TPM. TPM can also be used in one of its modes of operation to do on the fly decryption of any stream, instead of the CPU.
So you could, with all that equipment, get the throw-away set of decryption keys, or the actual decrypted contents. But this would not break the system for others, who do not have your specialized hardware. The operation you describe would have to be performed each time for each new session, even with the same contents.
That is untrue. The general public does normally prefer low price and is willing to mindlessly destroy their own livelyhood in its pursuit. But where low price alone is insufficient, it is scientifically proven that the public is also subject to mass scale media-based brainwashing, which in marketing circles goes by the name of "branding". That is why people will buy McCrap burger, even though a Mom & Pop store is offering much better cousine next door. They are simply inundated with incessant multi-billion psychological manipulation, from very young age onwards, for which very purpose the so called "mass media" exists. That is why the advent of "franchise" stores is so popular, as they do provide the mass-media centered mass-mind-warping mechanisms, which individual stores cannot even dream of. So the unholy duo of low price (at the expense of foreign slave labour and environmental destruction) and "branding" pretty much seals the fate of all locally owned opertions.
Really? What was the last time "expensive and revolutionary" development occured by a private company, not in any way stolen from the government-funded academia?
You forgot about the barriers to entry. If the barrier to entry (most of the time artifically created by the participants of the cartels) is so high that only a mega-bazillionaire multi-mega-national can enter, the mom & pop crowd is at a distinct disadvantage. Say a government demand that some spectrum be sold whole as a unit to the highest bidder (for a mere few billion dollars usually), instead of being managed by the government and small participants sharing in its use for a nominal fee. Same applies to city wide conduits, which instead of being privately own (and thus monopolized due to geography and building restrictions) should be managed by the government or a non-profit consortium, and leased at a nominal fee to small businesses competing on service delivery. Etc and so on.
And oft there is no solution, no matter how many try. Go check out the "perpetual motion machine archive" for examples. Raw willpower is not a substitute for reality.
So I guess it is all right to be owned by our feudal betters, as long as the TV keeps playing and the bread is available, right?
See your own post above. The foreigners (particularly oriental where all the manufacturing and thus wealth is heading) have far more purchasing power then the locals, and the locals have been repeatedly burned by investing in useless education, only to become underpaid corporate drones, and so their lesson learned was that the educatio
I was exposed to that too, recently. Judging from the pattern of downmods, i.e. always 5 points spread on my 5 recent posts, regardless of topic and all mods occuring in bursts within some minutes from each other, I assume that is someone spending all his mod points at once on his favourite foe, who happens to be my humble persona.
What makes me wonder though, is that some other posters seem to be subject to similar recent activity, which would indicate some larger scale effort ... or the cowards have some sort of seasonal migration they all instinctively partake in. Maybe someone can attach a GPS trasmitter to one of them and we can watch their trek through sewers for our edification. There is a PhD in this for someone with selfless dedication to science...
At least they are accoutable. But your point about removing chance of ownership from lower and middle classes is laughable. The very reason people cannot own small businesses is because they cannot even dream of compeating with mega-multi-national ones. A small grocery store is dead next to a WalMart. A mom-and-pop burger place has no chance on the same corner as McDonalds. A small-time family car repair shop is nearly always devastated by a national chain. Etc and so on.
No one decides per-se. Taxation brackets would be adjusted based on median income of the nation, and thus floating automatically with the increase/decrease of the wealth of the whole populace. If the investing class wishes to become wealthier, they would have to asure the appropriate, proportional increase of wealth around them, instead of what they do now, which is syphoning the wealth from the "plebs" around them like a giant vacuum cleaner, and going abroad in search of prey if the locals are at their breaking point. The number of competing companies would be simply decided by the amount of money each of them can make before the tax brackets put a break on their further growth, thus allowing other small operations to grow in places that those companies can no longer reach. It is a system-wide solution to both consolidation of companies and runaway accumulation of wealth. The maximum size is simply decided by maximum profit, not by other, specific, market factors. Thus a low-profit, low margin operations can grow much larger then small, very-high profit ones. Which also answers your economy of scale question. If the profit is high per-unit, there is no "economy" of scale. Just scale.
This of course is one of those big lies of the "free" market, today. Many things, which are supposedly available because of "economy" of scale are simply rip-offs. Microsoft products (up to 10000% margins) or FLASH memory chips (400-800% margins) alike and are simply a result of activities of various cartels.
Perheaps it is so, but you cannot put a blame for the result of the decades of corporate propaganda squarely on the shoulders of its victims. At this point nearly all of the mass media in the US is owned by a handful of corporations who are all doing their absolute damnest to ensure that the rampant, idiotic, consumerism becomes more rampant and out of control. How do you suppose an average Joe is going to behave when he is told, from age 3 on, that buying useless crap on credit is the only, American, way to go. Hell, the Preznit himself went on national TV just after 9/11 imploring the populace to shop till they drop. And
My answer is an abolishment of corporate charter (and thus return to personal responsibility of business owners for the actions of their companies - a key element which you forgot to mention being circumvented by the corporate charter) but more importantly, return to 90+% tax brackets. We do not need large businesses and super-wealthy super-businessmen in any area. We need a lot of smaller businesses competing for everything. That is what ensures that the "invisible hand" of the marketplace remains working. Very, very, very steep progressive taxation (along with near 90% inheretance taxation in higher brackets) is what ensures that the capitalist game remains functional, by preventing consolidation and runaway (due to some market failure) fortunes. Otherwise, the removal of "tax friction" to unlimited consolidation of companies and unlimited acquisiton of wealth results in feudalism, which the USA is at this point far too close to for any comfort.
Maybe because of the fact that most of the population in the US (and increasingly most of the West) has a negative savings rate?
Because we increasingly are owned. As an example, in an area we nerds find dear to us: where I live, all cell-phone service providers have merged into two cartels, who now charge identical rates of ~0.5$ per kilobyte for internet access on your phone, or roughly $21,000 for 4Gb. Your "consumer choice" is that of a Dick A up your ass, or Dick B up your ass. Same applies to land-based ISPs whose best uplink rate (in a densly populated city centre) is 384kbit/s for a mere $95 a month.
The problem is not that they are making money. It is the way in which they are making money. What I am pointing out is the total breakage of the basic, fundamental rules of the whole "capitalist" society!
Oh yea! That will cure the problem! I will just hop on to my bank, get a loan for, say, $5 billion, get the government to sell me some radio spectrum presently used by someone else (I will have to buy a few politicians to do that, bribing them more then the other guy) and then I will start my own cell-phone company and I will never have to pay 50 cents a kilobyte again! That's the truly practical plan for all citizens in my area, surely .... not!
As an aside. I do own my own small business. This however is not a cure to what ails the society. We are discussing systemic, nation-wide problems, not what some more fortunate individuals are privileged to do for themselves. Not everyone can own a business. Not even 1 in 10 people can do so, for many, many reasons.
Yes, apparently, as in the example above, we, the individuals (or more accurately our grand-parents), have sinned gravely by deciding to live in this area, no? And higher education will certainly solve the problem of oligarchies, cartels and duo-polies! That is of course righ
I would disagree that the entire race is afflicted, although I must admit that a signifcant portion of it indeed is, based on empirical evidence.
Please also take into account that by "greed" I do not mean a desire to create a comfortable life in exchange for labour or other contributions to society, but instead attempts to "get something for nothing" in their miriad of forms. That of course including a delusion of immense self-worth and thus pay completely out of proportion to labour performed, which afflicts many individuals, who would die arguing that they are getting only what they "deserve", i.e. $12300 an hour for playing golf with their socialite friends all day, or some such.
I beg to differ. This is probably the very reason why I and many people like me seem to operate on a different wavelength alltogether. I would not do it for a billion dollars, as I do not see a point at all in desiring money beyond what I already have, thank you very much. I work so I can be comfortable and I do not need a lot to achieve comfort. You would be surprised how much nonsense you "desire" is actually completely psychological, induced by mindless advertising propaganda and indirectly by peer preassure. Once you wake up, it is like living in a world inhabited by marionettes. You can see all their strings out of a sudden, pulling them this way and the other, while you are free. It is quite an experience.
The reason why healthcare must be provided to all citizens with no charge (be it by the government, non profit mutual-corporations paid from taxes or what not) is that healthcare is not a business and thus does not fall into the realm of the marketplace. One cannot shop for a best doctor while one is unconscious in an ambulance. One cannot "return" a faulty abdominal surgery for a refund. Normal rules of competition, and thus capitalist marketplace, simply do not apply as they do with underware and plastic lawn chairs.
Helthcare, like roads, is one of the foundations of a civilized society, which must be provided to all in order for the society to function. The result of "private" healthcare is pretty much the same as having evey road being a "toll" road. Those who own the critical arteries i.e. the ones which cannot be circumvented, will choke the society with their greed, very much so as the US is being chocked by the "medical insurance" industry.
That is why every OECD country, other then USA, has universal healthcare. Every one.
Absolutely.
The entire utility, and cleverness, of the concept of "capitalism" was to take the evil vice of greed and try to harness it for the good of the society, based on the recognition of the fact that those afflicted by the disease of greed seem, for the most part, uncurable. That is, the idea was to collar the pathologically greedy and force them to pull some useful payload attached to their leash behind them as they struggle, driven despertately by their disease, wheezing and coughing all the way.
However, as soon as they break away from that leash, it is no longer useful for the society to allow these greed-aflicted individuals to run amok and their activities must be curtailed, or a very large number of people will be severely harmed by the diseased ones in their insane efforts to own everything and everyone.
This is the very lesson which seems to have been forgotten in the USA, and so now the greed-mongers are pretty much free to do as they please, with the resulting effects such as rapid deterioration of the standard of living for most Americans, non-existant competition between gigantic oligopolies and duo-polies, accelerating concentration of wealth in fewer and fewer hands, superiority of corporations over citizenry in the sphere of politics, globalization of corporate profits but not employee benefits, socialized corporate losses and privatized corporate profits, etc and so on.
A good indication that the takover of the US by the parasitic greed-mongers is entering the final stages is the recent emergence of corporate mercenary armies, on a scale rivalling that of the regular US armed forces. The fat lady is truly about to sing for the Republic.
No it is not. If the CEO compensation and the compensation of employees diverge by a factor of 500, even if profits of some shareholders are proportional (an unlikely scenario since the CEO pay is well known to be wholly independent of the profitability of companies, and in fact tends to be astronomical especially when the company itself is about to fold and more stunning the incompetence and corruption of the CEO, better the pay apparently) then the society has no longer any need for allowing the corporate charter to exist. The purpose of allowing the corporations to come to being is to benefit the society as a whole not a few feudal lords, otherwise known as billionaire stockholders, and their semi-loyal vassals, the CEOs, at the expense of everyone else.
It is truly mind boggling how many excuses people like you come up with in order to justify the galloping return to feudalism-in-all-but-name, which is so advanced already in the USA. Not only that, many of you are apparently not satisifed about how fast can you become wholly owned and operated by your "betters". "Give me liberty or give me death" my ass.
And before you start going off about how average Joe American is a stockholder too, be sure to realize that 90% of all stocks in the USA are owned by less then 20% of the population, with over 30% of all companies owned by just the top 1%.
There a numerous problems with this reasoning.
For one if your desire for secuirity requires impoverishment, and thus destruction of sequirity for others, it simply leads back to feudalism, where few had all the "security" from their "property", i.e. peasants, enforced via private armies. So the wealth creation has to be spread evenly throughout society. More concentrated it becomes (a process which is accelerating insanely now in the US) less "security" the unwashed masses have. Which can only result in two outcomes: violent revolt or enslavements of many by the very few. Non necessarily in that order.
So if you keep proceeding with only your own ass in mind, the end result will be stuff being taken away from you, including, possibly, you life, should things get really ugly.
Next, there is a huge gap between a wish to provide for one's family and a wish to own a Boeing 767 painted pink, with a toilet seat made out of pure gold. An unrestricted, boundless greed, for greed's sake, is what I am talking about, not a materialistic motivation to achieve a comfortable, secure life-style. The difference between that of a talented engineer, or a bio-scientist living in comfort due to their contributions to society, and, say, Paris Hilton or Prince Bandar.
Finally, even though financial motivations are for many creative people secondary (as my quick run through history books shows), if there was truly a demonstrable, reliable (as opposed to wishful-thinking based one) relationship between wealth and contributions to society, an idea which is the very cornerstone of the "capitalist" societal phillosphy, I would be a card-carrying member of the CATO institute, instead of ridiculing the uncritical wealth-worship which you are so keen to exhibit.
In short, my attack on "greed" is an attack on falsity, boloney and flim-flam of the so-called "Free Market" society, which is by now a thinly-disguised feudal order and my objections have nothing to do with wealth and creation of therof, merely with lies dealing with its distribution.
And I am not even going to venture into the whole realm of attribution of credit for progress presently used by the various greed-mongers, whereby already mentioned Paris Hilton is thousands of times more "valuable" to the society then those dudes a few /. articles back who are busy splicing genes in search of cures for devastating diseases.
At a risk of feeding a mindless troll, here is the breakdown: Money is merely a mechanism to make exchange of labour and resources convenient. That is all that money is, ergo saying that "money is bad" would be like saying "labour and resources are bad". You are not even trying to make sense, which labels you, with a high probability, as a member of the "ME! Mine! All Mine! Me! My! Myself! I got Mine you go get yours, on some other planet!" school of social sciences.
This, of course, is one of those oft repeated, and completely, utterly, false canards, which the accolytes of the All-Powerful Deity of the Free Market Mammon are so fond of breathlessly repeating.
If it were true, the only motivation for progress, since beginning of time, would be massive piles of gold coins. That would mean Aristotle, Socrates and Plato were in it for the money, right? How about Copernicus? They made him the King of Poland, no? Or, say, Da Vinci, who surely ended up owning most of Venice, right? Perheaps this is to old for ya, lets try something modern: Albert Einstein. Given their relative contributions to humankind, that dude certainly died with a fortune which makes Bill Gates look like a pauper, no?
How about industry then? A typical Japanese CEO makes about 10 times the average salary of a worker in his corporation. A CEO of a US corporation is now past 500 times that of an average employee in his operation. Are you trying to tell me that Japanese CEOs lack any motivation to produce quality products and therefore their companies are 50 times less competetive?
I could go on like this for hours.
The point is that the phenomenon of people taking seriously (particularly in the USA) the laughable assertion of unquestionable equivalency between drive to innovation, increase of productivity and unrestricted, boundless, avarice is a very recent one.
This is a testimony to the success of the propaganda of the greed-mongers, in their unceasing efforts to destroy any reasoning ability in people's brains and to obfuscate pretty much all of the recorded history which directly contradicts their inane greed-centered world-view.
You keep forgetting that each packet is encrypted with a random (per session) key which is generated by the TPM based on the state of the TPM (and thus requires unaltered instruction sequences and memory contents - or helluva of hardware virtualization hacking), a secret key embedded unretrievably in the TPM and a random (per session) number sent by the other party. In other words, in order to crack the thing you either have to build a special-purpose computer, capable of completely isolating and fooling the TPM chip, since any monkeying with the software on its own (such as debugger sessions etc) will alter the internal state of the TPM and thus destroy your per-session decryption keys. Note also that in order to peek at the memory of the "trusted" process one has to somehow defeat the memory isolation between processes which is a pre-requisite of the TPM platform. In other words a custom CPU.
The point of the TPM is that while yes, it is breakable, it is not trivially or cheaply breakable.
You mean helluva a lot of wires. Since the TPM straddles the whole width of data/address busses. In other words you gotta get a specialized board and stick the TPM onto it, following which you have to know precisely the expected memory access/contents change sequences, all the way from the moment the power switch goes into the "on" position on the PC.
Possible? Sure, but at what cost/effort ratio? Furthermore, no more hacking for the unwashed masses unless you've got one of those special, custom modified motherboards + TPM "virtualization" hardware. Stuff which is likely to be more illegal then crack cocaine soon and which can be caught at the border when its being imported from China or who knows where.
You misunderstand the way the TPM works. TPM chip computes a running checksum of a number of hardware CPU operations, such as memory access and/or sequence of instructions executed. Then a software in your VM will be asked to return to the remote party requesting attestation a digest value based on a random number sent to you by the other party and then run through the TPM chip. The VM has no access to the internals of the TPM chip (it is an opaque black box as far as the CPU is concerned) and thus cannot compute the correct response. Only the TPM chip can, which it will refuse to do since your running of the VM has altered the "one and only" sequence of instructions/memory accesses that the TPM continuously monitors.
In other words, TPM is specifically designed to defeat virtualization as the virtualized environment does not have sufficient data to recreate the correct responses, only the raw hardware, executing istructions under the supervision of the TPM chip, has.