Obligatory SMBC. It's interesting that people can be persuaded to undergo all kinds of ridiculous virtual drudgery because it matches their schedules of operant conditioning reinforcement better than other ultimately more satisfying ways to spend those hundreds of hours. Like so many white rats.
It can't be both 72 million cu.ft and 13.3 million cu.m. A foot is 0.3048 meters so a cubic meter is over 31.3 cubic feet. No idea how someone would come up with a cubic meter being 5.4 cubic feet.
13.3 million cubic meters is correct; that's 470 million cubic feet.
Even if the waste heat is a benefit, that's still turning a pure usable form of energy, one that's ready to do useful work, into waste heat. That electricity was probably generated by burning fossil fuels, spending roughly 3.3W of heat per 1W of generated electricity. Then you have transmission losses etc too. Any kind of resistive electric heating is extremely inefficient.
The only kind of electric heating that makes sense at household or larger scales is using the electricity to do the work of running a heat pump. A geothermal heat pump can have a high enough coefficient of performance to compensate for other inefficiencies.
Been a while since I read this last. On this reading, this struck me as relevant in the slacktivist era:
"61. Do not wish to be called holy before one is holy; but first to be holy, that you may be truly so called."
As with some other provisions of this Rule, and as with that other defining work at the other end of the Middle Ages, The Imitation of Christ, great emphasis was placed on avoiding self-righteousness and on discovering your own faults rather than expecting to be praised for discovering the faults of others.
Perhaps in today's world it's seen as offensive to adopt a code of conduct that tells you to respect all people (a clearer translation of #8 from the Latin) and hate no one (#64) rather than defining special protected classes. Perhaps it's seen as offensive to have a code that says to make peace with one's adversary before the sun sets in the era when we're being encouraged to protect certain viewpoints while harassing those perceived to be on the "wrong side" and ensuring "they're not welcome anymore, anywhere."
More ethical thought went into the composition of this code 1500 years ago than into the codes of today, that's for certain.
I'm sick and tired of phone review sites that seem to maintain an outsized influence on what people think is "trendy" and what people think is "boring" yet don't actually have a connection to whether the phone is a better tool or not.
Aesthetics and screen size trump all else. Design elements for the sake of novelty (OMG A CURVED SCREEN!) are valued over basic functionality. (It's easy to find reviews that complain at length about 'dull design' because omg simple and functional is so last year.) Getting rid of the 3.5" jack really was courage, because [cool-aid reason here]. Higher numbers are always better whether they have any impact on the user experience or not. Must have 4K! (even though phone users would be hard-pressed to tell the difference from e.g. 1440p in double-blind testing.) Must have 8GB RAM because it's what the trendy flagships are doing! (even though no benchmark has ever shown any real performance advantage in realistic contemporary use.) and so on and so on. And they seem to manage to dictate to users what to buy and dictate to manufacturers what to make.
For people who actually want to use their phone as a tool rather than as an all-consuming 24/7 Netflix and Instagram stream, it's a travesty that Android has had so little in the way of decent small phones. This is especially true for people who spend considerable time doing physical activity outdoors rather than sitting at a desk writing fawning reviews of $1200 toys.
The Xperia Compact has been the only line with good performance and cameras, but it's gotten steadily more expensive and less compact. Plenty of people were interested in the Unihertz Jelly and Atom because they offered a smaller form factor, even despite the phones' clear limitations. I would be likely to buy the Atom myself if it had a quarter-HD (960x540) screen; that's 450 dpi, which is not unreasonable, while the 432x240 screen is just too low-res for many kinds of uses.
"Palm" has ticked a lot of the right boxes with this- genuinely small, high screen area to total area ratio, HD res (1280x720), IP68 and decent impact protection. But the price point is a real problem, and it's too bad it's tied to Verizon.
RSS is one of the few innovations in the web since the IE5 days that really empowered users and not ad providers / trackers.
Firefox claims to be all about enhancing users' power and privacy. They've claimed that Pocket and other things they're doing are there to try to do more to help people discover content they want without going through search engines and social media sites that track them. But RSS is one of the best ways for making that connection and they're killing it.
All five of the warmest five years on record in my area have been since 2012. The fact that we're experiencing an extreme drought is not a coincidence. This area would not be catching fire, especially in September, in a year when we had a remotely normal climate.
Facts are stubborn things. You can stand outside at noon in the noon and deny the sun exists - "no, there is no radiation, or at very least not solar radiation, you know nothing about radiation, get over it" - but you will still get burned.
There can be plenty of legitimate disagreements about what responses to global warming are appropriate. But claiming it's not happening, in the face of a decade of record temperatures and melting ice, or claiming it has nothing to do with us, in the face of obvious science about what CO2, methane, etc do and the fact that we've doubled their atmospheric concentrations in the past 70 years, is simply delusional.
How exactly do you claim to know that about the fire I'm next to?
People can argue about that for many fires, but not for the one near me. The area I'm talking about had low amounts of residual fuel. It has hit pines and aspens, but the period when it spread most rapidly was crossing areas with grasses, sagebrush, and scrub oak, none of which are thinned out by "ordinary small forest fires every few years."
All 5 of our hottest 5 years on record have happened since 2012. The fact that we're experiencing a drought is not a coincidence. This area was not like the forests you have in mind and would not have been burning like this, especially in September, in a year when we had a remotely normal climate.
No. I voted for Kasich in the primary. In the general election I voted third party, and in my state enough of us were disgusted by Trump that the third party candidate was actually leading the polls for a time until last minute desperate disinformation campaigns from the two major parties.
As to why many others around the country nevertheless turned around and voted for Trump in the general election, of course some thought Trump would do less harm than Hillary as chief executive, but that's not all of it. Many people figured that they would be willing to take an executive they disliked if it meant their party would have a better chance at choosing more of the nine unelected unaccountable robed lifetime dictators. That's one of the unfortunate consequences of the activist decisions the Supreme Court has made during the last couple decades.
Note that less than half of the GOP voted for Trump in the primaries - even though by the time of the later primaries most of the other candidates had bowed out.
There are plenty of Republicans who didn't want this President, and painting all of us with that brush is just as foolish as the prejudiced tweets from the Blowhard-In-Chief.
We have got to fix the broken election systems in the US. People keep blaming the Electoral College, but that's not the real problem. The real problem is first-past-the-post plurality voting. In any of the early primaries, Trump would have lost every single head-to-head matchup, so any decent electoral system (i.e. any kind of Condorcet preference balloting) would have avoided this disaster. (Easy explanation from a Nobel winner here.) As long as we keep first-past-the-post primaries, both parties will frequently nominate miserable candidates.
The man who licks Putin's boots and bullies the refugees, the Draft-Dodger-In-Chief, the man without the courage or fortitude to have any kind of consistent moral principles whatsoever, is a coward and should resign.
As a Republican I say that not only the nation but also the party will be better off when he's stepped down (or been declared incompetent, or impeached, or assassinated, or voted out of office if he makes it the full four years).
Trump contradicts himself rapidly, and other than 'towards incivility' one never knows what direction he'll be pointed tomorrow. So if people don't overturn the country to implement the latest rage tweet (only to have the opposite direction tweeted tomorrow), they're not really being unfaithful to their boss, much less being traitors to the nation. They're performing the vital service of helping steady the keel of the ship of state through this self-inflicted storm.
Trump has no ability to self-regulate and he fears those who do.
On a more serious note, this isn't like the IRS targeting scandal. This is "you've spent three years encouraging your supporters to be abusive and so it shouldn't be a surprise that some of them are getting blocked." Social media companies might have a leftward bias in their content blocking but people like Alex Jones are hardly the test case to use.
That's baloney, and I think you know better and are just trying to be provocative (flamebait).
The bakers were perfectly happy to sell those people standard bakery items. They were unwilling to expend their creative and artistic effort to make a custom cake to support an event they have moral objections to. Similarly, one might expect a Jewish bakery to sell rolls and muffins to neo-Nazis but one ought not expect them to create custom cakes for a neo-Nazi rally.
To the extent that calling the 'system of natural liberties' 'capitalism' was a redefinition, it was already redefined that way in standard English usage roughly 150 years ago. Trying to use the word to mean what you claim it means based on your personal interpretation of Marx is a Humpty Dumpty move and not a serious attempt at communication.
'Socialism' never, not even in the earliest "utopian socialist" writers, described "widely distributed ownership," it always described social ownership, which is antithetical to private ownership however widely distributed. That's not identical to a command economy, but no other scheme for social ownership beyond the smallest scale has been seriously propounded.
'Distributivism' only entails a market economy to the extent that that's entailed by any private ownership.
You're not informing people about "undistorted meaning" or being more clear, you're distorting the meaning of socialism to push your own opinion while ignoring the obvious dilemmas, just like so many advocates of socialism from Saint-Simon to the present day.
The particular words you use don't matter so long as you use enough of them to distinguish
No! The words you use matter immensely - that is, if you have any intention of productive communication. Yes, Adam Smith didn't use the word 'capitalism' or the term 'lassiez-faire' etc but rather the term 'system of natural liberty.' But for a century and a half this is what has been understood by 'capitalism' and no other name for such a system has been anywhere near so widely recognized. Socialism has always meant social ownership rather than private ownership. Coming up with your own redefinitions and playing Humpty Dumpty is just poor communication.
To talk about proposals for trying to decentralize economic power and distribute ownership, again, the term that will communicate that to people is 'distributivism' and not 'socialism.' Claiming that centralization and markets are simply orthogonal is to ignore the obvious issues: there is no way to allow free exchange and simultaneously prevent uneven accumulation of wealth.
BTW Bernard Shaw, who was with the (socialist) Fabian society, had debates with Chesterton about socialism and distributivism. In the 1920s he explained the standard meaning of 'capitalism' and 'socialism' for the Encyclopedia Britannica:
In Socialism private property is anathema, and equal distribution of income the first consideration. In capitalism private property is cardinal, and distribution left to ensue from the play of free contract and selfish interest on that basis, no matter what anomalies it may present.
When economists talk about rent-seeking, they're talking about economic rent which is not the same as contract rent. You have confused the two.
Note that in surveys of economists consistently over 90% agree that rent controls reduce the quality and quantity of available housing.
Similarly, much of the rest of what you say flatly contradicts what "we've already figured out and what you'd learn in a 4 year college economics degree."
You titled your post "Problems your (sic) describing have mostly been solved" but you're not addressing any of the problems I described at all. I didn't talk about Lehman Brothers or fret about overpopulation, and I don't know why you think ranting about such topics constitutes a reply to me. If you want to tell me instead that you've solved e.g. the problems of regulatory capture, please enlighten us as to your miraculous solution.
As the other commenter said, your definitions have nothing to do with any standard use of these terms and everything to do with your personal screed.
What they're calling "crony capitalism" is not just capitalism; indeed it may be said not to be capitalist at all. The entire point of Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations, which launched capitalism as an economic policy, was to oppose mercantilism - the system where the government granted special rights and benefits to particular companies to attempt to increase the government's power - by pointing out that such favors were not only unethical but also tended to impoverish the nation. From every problem with IP law (Eldred v Ashcroft, the patent mess, etc) to the closed-door 'tax incentive' discussions between cities and large corporations, there are a thousand ways in which people who sit on corporate boards or Chambers of Commerce or legislative bodies purport to support capitalism but actually work against a legally level playing field.
Rent is not a market distortion. Your ideal of socialism and your notions of class are a century out of date as well as far removed from reality.
The closest thing to what you're calling "market socialism" is called distributivism. Many bright people have thought about the problems of centralization but no one has found a practicable or just way to put real correctives into practice.
The line between using a computer and programming one used to be thinner. HyperCard and spreadsheets are great examples of how people brought programming to the masses. (Visual Basic, I'm not so sure of.) Shells of all kinds and other environments like MATLAB did some of the same things. Macro languages in programs like WordPerfect likewise empowered the user and lowered the barrier to entry.
My favorite example is RPL on HP 28/48 calculators. It took a little doing to learn how to use a postfix calculator, but once you did, all you had to do was enclose the keystrokes you'd normally use inside a <<>> and BOOM, you're programming. Then users, having already stepped over the low barrier to entry, could gradually learn additional constructs as needed instead of needing a full 'intro to programming' class before they could do anything useful.
Thing is, none of the good examples that come to mind date from 1990 or later. Our ideas about how users interact with computers have for roughly thirty years been too stagnant or too simplifying and un-empowering.
Using proprietary, royalty-required formats for something so fundamental and universal is silly. The original DAB is terrible enough it should be immediately discontinued. And DAB+ is already starting to look outdated.
I think it's quite possible to come up with an FM replacement that will both save bandwidth and substantially improve listeners' experience. But I think it'd be worth putting in research to arrive at codecs, modulation, and error correction schemes we're more confident we won't regret choosing 20 years down the road. Only then should we make such a switchover.
I agree 100% that expression of offensive opinions and ideas needs to be protected. And though as a private entity Reddit's within their rights to draw the line at advocacy of violence, governments can't draw the line there; advocating violence "in the abstract" is constitutionally protected too, and only threats or inciting imminent violence are proscribable.
But contrary to what many people think - even some of the Supreme Court - freedom of speech and the First Amendment are not about protecting offensive means of expression. It really is OK - not just for private organizations like Reddit but also for municipalities and states - to decide on standards of civility. The communicative content is protected, not the form of expression. For instance, obscenity laws can be constitutional.
In general, the Constitution gives us vast latitude to decide democratically, especially at the state and local level, what kind of society we want to be. The Warren Court decided they wanted to take much of that power for themselves. Since then most Supreme Court justices have been loath to give that power up.
Obviously some ways of legislating civility would really be backdoors to restricting ideas and thus are unconstitutional. It's no good enforcing civility standards against racists but letting their opponents be incivil, and it's no good claiming 'Tiananmen 1989' is vulgar. But we the people are within our rights to decide on reasonable standards.
They're turning kids into slaves; They're turning kids into slaves just to make cheaper sneakers. But what's the real cost? 'Cause the sneakers don't seem that much cheaper. Why are we still paying so much for sneakers When you got little kid slaves making them? What are your overheads?
HP calculators got a rap as "hard to use" because you needed to learn to enter operands first and then the sequence of operators rather than using infix math. But once you wrapped your mind around that - and it's not difficult - the sequences of operators you had to enter just to use your calculator were really already programming. All you had to do was enclose the operators you'd enter in double angle brackets and store that somewhere, and BAM, you've created a program.
Spreadsheets, HyperCard, and good macro systems all have some of this same element - merging use and programming, making normal use more powerful and programming more accessible.
We should be looking harder at how to bring that kind of success to broader problem areas and modern platforms.
Slashdot Mirror
Obligatory SMBC. It's interesting that people can be persuaded to undergo all kinds of ridiculous virtual drudgery because it matches their schedules of operant conditioning reinforcement better than other ultimately more satisfying ways to spend those hundreds of hours. Like so many white rats.
It can't be both 72 million cu.ft and 13.3 million cu.m. A foot is 0.3048 meters so a cubic meter is over 31.3 cubic feet. No idea how someone would come up with a cubic meter being 5.4 cubic feet.
13.3 million cubic meters is correct; that's 470 million cubic feet.
Even if the waste heat is a benefit, that's still turning a pure usable form of energy, one that's ready to do useful work, into waste heat. That electricity was probably generated by burning fossil fuels, spending roughly 3.3W of heat per 1W of generated electricity. Then you have transmission losses etc too. Any kind of resistive electric heating is extremely inefficient.
The only kind of electric heating that makes sense at household or larger scales is using the electricity to do the work of running a heat pump. A geothermal heat pump can have a high enough coefficient of performance to compensate for other inefficiencies.
Been a while since I read this last. On this reading, this struck me as relevant in the slacktivist era:
"61. Do not wish to be called holy before one is holy; but first to be holy, that you may be truly so called."
As with some other provisions of this Rule, and as with that other defining work at the other end of the Middle Ages, The Imitation of Christ, great emphasis was placed on avoiding self-righteousness and on discovering your own faults rather than expecting to be praised for discovering the faults of others.
Perhaps in today's world it's seen as offensive to adopt a code of conduct that tells you to respect all people (a clearer translation of #8 from the Latin) and hate no one (#64) rather than defining special protected classes. Perhaps it's seen as offensive to have a code that says to make peace with one's adversary before the sun sets in the era when we're being encouraged to protect certain viewpoints while harassing those perceived to be on the "wrong side" and ensuring "they're not welcome anymore, anywhere."
More ethical thought went into the composition of this code 1500 years ago than into the codes of today, that's for certain.
I'm sick and tired of phone review sites that seem to maintain an outsized influence on what people think is "trendy" and what people think is "boring" yet don't actually have a connection to whether the phone is a better tool or not.
Aesthetics and screen size trump all else. Design elements for the sake of novelty (OMG A CURVED SCREEN!) are valued over basic functionality. (It's easy to find reviews that complain at length about 'dull design' because omg simple and functional is so last year.) Getting rid of the 3.5" jack really was courage, because [cool-aid reason here]. Higher numbers are always better whether they have any impact on the user experience or not. Must have 4K! (even though phone users would be hard-pressed to tell the difference from e.g. 1440p in double-blind testing.) Must have 8GB RAM because it's what the trendy flagships are doing! (even though no benchmark has ever shown any real performance advantage in realistic contemporary use.) and so on and so on. And they seem to manage to dictate to users what to buy and dictate to manufacturers what to make.
For people who actually want to use their phone as a tool rather than as an all-consuming 24/7 Netflix and Instagram stream, it's a travesty that Android has had so little in the way of decent small phones. This is especially true for people who spend considerable time doing physical activity outdoors rather than sitting at a desk writing fawning reviews of $1200 toys.
The Xperia Compact has been the only line with good performance and cameras, but it's gotten steadily more expensive and less compact. Plenty of people were interested in the Unihertz Jelly and Atom because they offered a smaller form factor, even despite the phones' clear limitations. I would be likely to buy the Atom myself if it had a quarter-HD (960x540) screen; that's 450 dpi, which is not unreasonable, while the 432x240 screen is just too low-res for many kinds of uses.
"Palm" has ticked a lot of the right boxes with this- genuinely small, high screen area to total area ratio, HD res (1280x720), IP68 and decent impact protection. But the price point is a real problem, and it's too bad it's tied to Verizon.
You are on point.
RSS is one of the few innovations in the web since the IE5 days that really empowered users and not ad providers / trackers.
Firefox claims to be all about enhancing users' power and privacy. They've claimed that Pocket and other things they're doing are there to try to do more to help people discover content they want without going through search engines and social media sites that track them. But RSS is one of the best ways for making that connection and they're killing it.
All five of the warmest five years on record in my area have been since 2012. The fact that we're experiencing an extreme drought is not a coincidence. This area would not be catching fire, especially in September, in a year when we had a remotely normal climate.
Facts are stubborn things. You can stand outside at noon in the noon and deny the sun exists - "no, there is no radiation, or at very least not solar radiation, you know nothing about radiation, get over it" - but you will still get burned.
There can be plenty of legitimate disagreements about what responses to global warming are appropriate. But claiming it's not happening, in the face of a decade of record temperatures and melting ice, or claiming it has nothing to do with us, in the face of obvious science about what CO2, methane, etc do and the fact that we've doubled their atmospheric concentrations in the past 70 years, is simply delusional.
How exactly do you claim to know that about the fire I'm next to?
People can argue about that for many fires, but not for the one near me. The area I'm talking about had low amounts of residual fuel. It has hit pines and aspens, but the period when it spread most rapidly was crossing areas with grasses, sagebrush, and scrub oak, none of which are thinned out by "ordinary small forest fires every few years."
All 5 of our hottest 5 years on record have happened since 2012. The fact that we're experiencing a drought is not a coincidence. This area was not like the forests you have in mind and would not have been burning like this, especially in September, in a year when we had a remotely normal climate.
A lot of the trees just a few miles from me are presently on fire after yet another severe drought year due to climate change.
I imagine that probably doesn't make them happy. I'm disinclined to closely approach a burning tree to ask.
No. I voted for Kasich in the primary. In the general election I voted third party, and in my state enough of us were disgusted by Trump that the third party candidate was actually leading the polls for a time until last minute desperate disinformation campaigns from the two major parties.
As to why many others around the country nevertheless turned around and voted for Trump in the general election, of course some thought Trump would do less harm than Hillary as chief executive, but that's not all of it. Many people figured that they would be willing to take an executive they disliked if it meant their party would have a better chance at choosing more of the nine unelected unaccountable robed lifetime dictators. That's one of the unfortunate consequences of the activist decisions the Supreme Court has made during the last couple decades.
Note that less than half of the GOP voted for Trump in the primaries - even though by the time of the later primaries most of the other candidates had bowed out.
There are plenty of Republicans who didn't want this President, and painting all of us with that brush is just as foolish as the prejudiced tweets from the Blowhard-In-Chief.
We have got to fix the broken election systems in the US. People keep blaming the Electoral College, but that's not the real problem. The real problem is first-past-the-post plurality voting. In any of the early primaries, Trump would have lost every single head-to-head matchup, so any decent electoral system (i.e. any kind of Condorcet preference balloting) would have avoided this disaster. (Easy explanation from a Nobel winner here.) As long as we keep first-past-the-post primaries, both parties will frequently nominate miserable candidates.
The man who licks Putin's boots and bullies the refugees, the Draft-Dodger-In-Chief, the man without the courage or fortitude to have any kind of consistent moral principles whatsoever, is a coward and should resign.
As a Republican I say that not only the nation but also the party will be better off when he's stepped down (or been declared incompetent, or impeached, or assassinated, or voted out of office if he makes it the full four years).
Trump contradicts himself rapidly, and other than 'towards incivility' one never knows what direction he'll be pointed tomorrow. So if people don't overturn the country to implement the latest rage tweet (only to have the opposite direction tweeted tomorrow), they're not really being unfaithful to their boss, much less being traitors to the nation. They're performing the vital service of helping steady the keel of the ship of state through this self-inflicted storm.
Trump has no ability to self-regulate and he fears those who do.
On a more serious note, this isn't like the IRS targeting scandal. This is "you've spent three years encouraging your supporters to be abusive and so it shouldn't be a surprise that some of them are getting blocked." Social media companies might have a leftward bias in their content blocking but people like Alex Jones are hardly the test case to use.
That's baloney, and I think you know better and are just trying to be provocative (flamebait).
The bakers were perfectly happy to sell those people standard bakery items. They were unwilling to expend their creative and artistic effort to make a custom cake to support an event they have moral objections to. Similarly, one might expect a Jewish bakery to sell rolls and muffins to neo-Nazis but one ought not expect them to create custom cakes for a neo-Nazi rally.
To the extent that calling the 'system of natural liberties' 'capitalism' was a redefinition, it was already redefined that way in standard English usage roughly 150 years ago. Trying to use the word to mean what you claim it means based on your personal interpretation of Marx is a Humpty Dumpty move and not a serious attempt at communication.
'Socialism' never, not even in the earliest "utopian socialist" writers, described "widely distributed ownership," it always described social ownership, which is antithetical to private ownership however widely distributed. That's not identical to a command economy, but no other scheme for social ownership beyond the smallest scale has been seriously propounded.
'Distributivism' only entails a market economy to the extent that that's entailed by any private ownership.
You're not informing people about "undistorted meaning" or being more clear, you're distorting the meaning of socialism to push your own opinion while ignoring the obvious dilemmas, just like so many advocates of socialism from Saint-Simon to the present day.
No, that's completely false. Any portion of contract rent may be economic rent, from 100% to zero, but they are quite different things.
No! The words you use matter immensely - that is, if you have any intention of productive communication. Yes, Adam Smith didn't use the word 'capitalism' or the term 'lassiez-faire' etc but rather the term 'system of natural liberty.' But for a century and a half this is what has been understood by 'capitalism' and no other name for such a system has been anywhere near so widely recognized. Socialism has always meant social ownership rather than private ownership. Coming up with your own redefinitions and playing Humpty Dumpty is just poor communication.
To talk about proposals for trying to decentralize economic power and distribute ownership, again, the term that will communicate that to people is 'distributivism' and not 'socialism.' Claiming that centralization and markets are simply orthogonal is to ignore the obvious issues: there is no way to allow free exchange and simultaneously prevent uneven accumulation of wealth.
BTW Bernard Shaw, who was with the (socialist) Fabian society, had debates with Chesterton about socialism and distributivism. In the 1920s he explained the standard meaning of 'capitalism' and 'socialism' for the Encyclopedia Britannica:
Shaw
When economists talk about rent-seeking, they're talking about economic rent which is not the same as contract rent. You have confused the two.
Note that in surveys of economists consistently over 90% agree that rent controls reduce the quality and quantity of available housing.
Similarly, much of the rest of what you say flatly contradicts what "we've already figured out and what you'd learn in a 4 year college economics degree."
You titled your post "Problems your (sic) describing have mostly been solved" but you're not addressing any of the problems I described at all. I didn't talk about Lehman Brothers or fret about overpopulation, and I don't know why you think ranting about such topics constitutes a reply to me. If you want to tell me instead that you've solved e.g. the problems of regulatory capture, please enlighten us as to your miraculous solution.
As the other commenter said, your definitions have nothing to do with any standard use of these terms and everything to do with your personal screed.
What they're calling "crony capitalism" is not just capitalism; indeed it may be said not to be capitalist at all. The entire point of Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations, which launched capitalism as an economic policy, was to oppose mercantilism - the system where the government granted special rights and benefits to particular companies to attempt to increase the government's power - by pointing out that such favors were not only unethical but also tended to impoverish the nation. From every problem with IP law (Eldred v Ashcroft, the patent mess, etc) to the closed-door 'tax incentive' discussions between cities and large corporations, there are a thousand ways in which people who sit on corporate boards or Chambers of Commerce or legislative bodies purport to support capitalism but actually work against a legally level playing field.
Rent is not a market distortion. Your ideal of socialism and your notions of class are a century out of date as well as far removed from reality.
The closest thing to what you're calling "market socialism" is called distributivism. Many bright people have thought about the problems of centralization but no one has found a practicable or just way to put real correctives into practice.
The line between using a computer and programming one used to be thinner. HyperCard and spreadsheets are great examples of how people brought programming to the masses. (Visual Basic, I'm not so sure of.) Shells of all kinds and other environments like MATLAB did some of the same things. Macro languages in programs like WordPerfect likewise empowered the user and lowered the barrier to entry.
My favorite example is RPL on HP 28/48 calculators. It took a little doing to learn how to use a postfix calculator, but once you did, all you had to do was enclose the keystrokes you'd normally use inside a <<>> and BOOM, you're programming. Then users, having already stepped over the low barrier to entry, could gradually learn additional constructs as needed instead of needing a full 'intro to programming' class before they could do anything useful.
Thing is, none of the good examples that come to mind date from 1990 or later. Our ideas about how users interact with computers have for roughly thirty years been too stagnant or too simplifying and un-empowering.
Using proprietary, royalty-required formats for something so fundamental and universal is silly. The original DAB is terrible enough it should be immediately discontinued. And DAB+ is already starting to look outdated.
I think it's quite possible to come up with an FM replacement that will both save bandwidth and substantially improve listeners' experience. But I think it'd be worth putting in research to arrive at codecs, modulation, and error correction schemes we're more confident we won't regret choosing 20 years down the road. Only then should we make such a switchover.
The horses have bolted!
I agree 100% that expression of offensive opinions and ideas needs to be protected. And though as a private entity Reddit's within their rights to draw the line at advocacy of violence, governments can't draw the line there; advocating violence "in the abstract" is constitutionally protected too, and only threats or inciting imminent violence are proscribable.
But contrary to what many people think - even some of the Supreme Court - freedom of speech and the First Amendment are not about protecting offensive means of expression . It really is OK - not just for private organizations like Reddit but also for municipalities and states - to decide on standards of civility. The communicative content is protected, not the form of expression. For instance, obscenity laws can be constitutional.
In general, the Constitution gives us vast latitude to decide democratically, especially at the state and local level, what kind of society we want to be. The Warren Court decided they wanted to take much of that power for themselves. Since then most Supreme Court justices have been loath to give that power up.
Obviously some ways of legislating civility would really be backdoors to restricting ideas and thus are unconstitutional. It's no good enforcing civility standards against racists but letting their opponents be incivil, and it's no good claiming 'Tiananmen 1989' is vulgar. But we the people are within our rights to decide on reasonable standards.
They're turning kids into slaves;
They're turning kids into slaves just to make cheaper sneakers.
But what's the real cost?
'Cause the sneakers don't seem that much cheaper.
Why are we still paying so much for sneakers
When you got little kid slaves making them?
What are your overheads?
HP calculators got a rap as "hard to use" because you needed to learn to enter operands first and then the sequence of operators rather than using infix math. But once you wrapped your mind around that - and it's not difficult - the sequences of operators you had to enter just to use your calculator were really already programming. All you had to do was enclose the operators you'd enter in double angle brackets and store that somewhere, and BAM, you've created a program.
Spreadsheets, HyperCard, and good macro systems all have some of this same element - merging use and programming, making normal use more powerful and programming more accessible.
We should be looking harder at how to bring that kind of success to broader problem areas and modern platforms.