Dude, I think you might want to take a deep breath here. A collective is just a collection of individuals, working towards a common goal under a shared set of rules. It is neither meaningless, nor some all consuming Borg-like bogey man that is going to destroy society. How can a single concept be both impotent and the biggest threat to mankind? And I don't quite understand how the idea of people contributing to society is going to kill us all by....destroying society?
Obviously the individual is way, way, radically, hugely suppressed.
Where? Certainly not in America, or any other society I've personally experienced. I get that you don't like having other people tell you what to do and you object to being forced to contribute back to the society that enabled your production, I'm not most best fond of it, but that's just the way it is. It is impossible for you (or me), as an individual, to produce the electricity that powers the refrigerator you built to keep fresh the food that you grew to feed yourself. Extrapolate that out to all the things you need/enjoy in life and it takes a team of people just to make your life possible. I understand you would like for that team to operate under the paradigm you prefer (whatever that is - I don't really understand exactly how you think society SHOULD work), but it doesn't. The fact that our society is functioning indicates that most people are mostly OK with the current teamwork paradigm. I'm sorry you're not; like I said earlier, it would be great if you could go live in the wilderness by yourself rather than have to interact with other people in a manner you don't like. In fact, if you really wanted to live the life of an individual, you probably can find some wilderness somewhere; the world isn't quite that small yet.
and all individuals must fight the abuse of the individuals by the collective.
And the collective will (I won't pretend that any of this rises to the level of moral imperative; it's simply how human interactions will happen) fight abuse of the collective by the individual. The rest of us are over here making individual sacrifices so that all of us (the collective) can have nice things. Like herd immunity, in this instance. An individual that comes along and wants to share in our nice things, but doesn't want to make the same sacrifices, is not going to be well received. And simply by virtue of the fact that there are more of us means we, the collective, have more ability to assert our will than you the individual does. And it's an unfortunate fact, society is not a la carte; you can't just pick and choose which parts to participate in and which parts you'd rather not. I agree that there needs to be mechanisms in place to insure a balance in society - the individual should not be completely consumed by and subordinate to the collective in every aspect. However, there are instances where the individual must be subordinate to the collective, or we can't have a collective at all. And whether you like it or not, it is human instinct to form collectives; the average member of the collective is better off than he/she would be outside the collective. We would not be much above the level of hunter/gatherer without some form of cooperative society. You can rail about moral imperatives and rights all you want, but insisting that everybody else has to respect your choices at the expense of our own well being and comfort if futile. As long as more people see a benefit to the collective than don't, those that want something different are SOL. It would be great if you could wander off and do your own thing somewhere else, but the planet is pretty full. Besides, you don't really want that, you still want scientists and farmers and all the nice things society (the collective) produces. You just want the collective to observe the rules you want rather than the rules that an apparent majority of other people want.
2. Pile everything in the corner
3. Have no demo models at all
4. Have a single catalog with pictures of the merchandise on a pedestal at the center of the store
5. Put that pedestal in a corner
6. Have pictures of the merchandise hung on the walls
7. Have a single giant screen that rolls through a video presentation of the merchandise
8. Have models hold/display the merchandise
9. Have a single large conveyor belt, like a luggage returner at an airport, displaying the merchandise.
10. Embed the merchandise under a clear material that serves as the floor, so you are walking over it.
That was pretty easy; I could probably do another 50 of those. Sure, they are almost certainly BAD layout ideas, but that was his point. While there are lots and lots of bad ways to it, there are only a very small number of GOOD ways to design such a store.
Society is a collection of individuals. It is what we, as a group, say it is. You don't like society, don't want to play by the rules the rest of us collectively agreed on, fine. You can go live in the wilderness and grow/hunt your own food, build your own shelter, etc. Can't find a space to do that where there aren't already other people that have rules they insist on? Tough shit. The only rights you have are those you can prevent others from taking. In a society, everyone helps you protect those rights the society has agreed upon. In exchange for everyone else helping you protect your rights, you get to obey the rules of society. Insisting that society respect your "right" to make a personal choice that endangers everyone else is absurd, unless you are powerful enough to force your decisions on society. Although why you think you have the right to endanger me and my loved ones against my will is an interesting question.
Eventually you run out of other people's money, and then what?
You layoff thousands of workers, maybe sell off a couple of profitable divisions, to temporarily drive up the stock price. Then take your golden parachute and jump to another company before the stockholders realize they've been suckered.
Manning did break US law in US jurisdiction. If Assange helped him plan his crime (by helping him plan how to conceal it), that certainly could be construed as conspiracy. I don't know how jurisdictional and citizenship matters play in at that point, or what legal theories charges might be leveled under, but I can't imagine that it is perfectly legal for a foreign citizen on foreign soil to help an American citizen on American soil plan a crime.
When it comes to managing government abuse, size is a bit of a red herring. Sure, a smaller government means smaller scope for abuse by government. But now, with a neutered government, you open the door to abuse by any entity powerful enough to get away with it. Which is lots of them, without someone preventing them. I'm not saying government (at least in the US) shouldn't be shrunk; I'm saying doing so won't do much to make our systems fairer. It will just allow different actors to get away with slightly different, not fewer, abuses.
What we actually need, and our system was designed to provide, is actual oversight of government. While it's true that we have let government get too big, a much larger problem is that WE THE PEOPLE have abdicated our responsibility to oversee our government and hold it accountable. We could put an end to a very large chunk of government abuse without any budget cuts whatsoever, simply by holding the people in government responsible for their actions. Vote them out of office; if they're appointed, make getting them fired a central issue for their bosses' re-election. The main benefit of shrinking government (in size/complexity, not necessarily power) would come in the form of making that task easier.
Of course, that requires a majority of the populace to be informed and engaged. Not to mention in agreement with what constitutes abuses of government authority. It's a democracy - we get the government we deserve.
Well, we've tried a couple of rather well-known demonstrations, didn't seem to accomplish a whole lot. Strikes, I don't understand how punishing my employer for the government's actions, and probably losing my job, does much. Voting, now you're getting somewhere. However, we probably have somewhere around 10 times the population of your country (you didn't specify). If we don't, unless you're Germany, your country is just as fucked as the US, so clean up your own shit-hole before worrying about ours. If you're German, carry on. Given that level of population and the incredible geographic diversity here, convincing enough people that shit is bad enough that they should educate themselves AND vote against certain self-interests out of concern for the whole is incredibly difficult. Sure, long term, reducing Federal power and corruption is a huge benefit to everyone. Short term, some of us are more worried about vanishing water supplies and who has what rights to them. Others are more concerned about controlling immigration. And of course, the biggest concern of some is that Jesus is gonna cock-slap this country is we let the gays officially promise to remain monogamous for life. With this many people and interests, convincing everyone that MY pet peeve is the real issue we should all focus on is pretty damn difficult.
It's true that welfare types tend to vote Republican, at least in federal elections. It's quite easy to find both how a state voted in the last presidential election AND the amount of Federal dollars it receives in aid. The states that receive more Federal aid tend to vote Republican. Cause/effect or correlation, who can say? It's worth noting both of these tend to to correlate to poor national rankings on education, less population density (i.e. more rural populations) and a perception of being more religious (I'm unaware of any actual data one could use to verify this perception).
Less easy to find, or at least to compile for each state, is local election trends. I know, for instance, that NC tends to vote Republican in Federal elections (Obama being the first Democrat to receive NC's electoral votes since the Civil Rights Act). However, governor and state legislature tends to lean Democrat (oddly enough, legislature swung Republican at the same time we voted for Obama). I don't know if NC is unusual in this manner, or if categorizing the states as Red vs. Blue is far more complex than the media tends to make it (neither would actually surprise me).
It's not that trainers train the dog to lie. Dogs are pack animals and pick up on cues from the pack leader (the handler); if the human thinks "this guy must have drugs", the dog picks up on his pack leader's subtle (possibly unconscious) cues and performs as he believes he is expected. No maliciousness required on the part of the trainer or handler, just a ridiculous legal precedent that allows a dumb (as in unable to properly communicate) non-human animal to make legally valid "judgment" calls that trump citizens' constitutional rights.
Are you suggesting it requires 4 years of higher education, then 2-4 years residency to be able to use LaTeX? Or we should all just hire specialists to write our documents?
I think you meant United Mexican States there; clearly, abbreviating any portion of a country's name will cause AC to throw a temper tantrum. God help us all if he sees someone referring to "China"!
While broad conspiracy theories imagining that Apple (and/or the MPAA/RIAA) is pulling the FBI's strings might be pretty fanciful,
While I have no knowledge of any influence Apple (and/or MPAA/RIAA) may have with the FBI, imagining US federal agencies taking questionable actions abroad in the interests of major US corporations isn't so much fanciful as it is documented history.
If you think the US is anywhere NEAR anything that can be described as tyranny, you have no clue what tyranny actually is
Well, the US government has the authority to jail any citizen it wants indefinitely, in practice for any reason whatsoever. That sounds pretty tyrannical. And before you say "Sure, they have that power, but only for the bad guys" consider that the US imprisons more people, both per capita and raw numbers, than any other nation on the planet. Our intelligence agencies are known to have acted against figures they felt provided a political threat to the established interests. Sure, the US government isn't cartoonishly evil, such as you seem to feel China is. But that doesn't make it a non-repressive government, it just means they only resort to violence and overt oppression when more subtle methods of control don't work. Methods like propaganda along the lines of "Anything that weakens the good guys (US) will only give bad guys (China) an advantage. Therefore, any means to which you object, trust us that the ends justify those means. You really don't want to see the dystopia that THE BAD GUYS will implement if we let them win".
Of course they shouldn't press charges where the evidence clearly doesn't hold but they should "overprosecute" a little and let judges and juries decide. I'd be far more concerned about a court system where nobody is acquitted at trial than the opposite.
So you think it's better to subject some innocent people to the economic and emotional hardship of a trial, as well as the non-zero chance of faulty conviction, than let some criminals go unprosecuted? Me, I tend to the opposite philosophy. Especially given the fact that over time, your little bit of "overprosecution" easily becomes what we have today.
That's not equivalent to what we're seeing on a daily basis in modern times.
You're right, it's not equivalent, it was MUCH WORSE. Seriously, read the link if you've never heard of the trail of tears. POTUS ignored a court order stating that a certain people owned a certain land and sent in the Army to forcibly remove them, causing thousands of deaths. This shouldn't make you feel better, but it should put the current climate in perspective.
But lead in Chinese drinking water or plastics in Chinese landfills doesn't impact me here in America. CO2 in the atmosphere does. Which is a bigger problem depends on your perspective (and geographical location).
By definition the person who builds a successful business somehow is involved in some form of production (even if the business is an equity fund, whose entire job is to buy and tear down businesses, as long as there is profit at the end of this, it means that resources have been allocated more efficiently for purposes that are more useful to the market).
That's complete nonsense. If your entire business model is to rip resources (wealth) away from other companies, destroying them in the process, and stick that money in your bank account, how have those resources been allocated more efficiently? They are no longer producing goods and services, they are being used to fund a wealthy person or group of persons having the power to rip more resources away from other companies. The sum total of goods and services in society has been reduced, even though a few people have created enormous profit for themselves.
And pretending that all economic activity that produces a profit benefits society is inane. I produce enormous profit for myself by economically destroying 10 people, you say society benefits b/c that wealth can now be used more efficiently. I destroy 100 people, more efficiency. I bankrupt entire countries, more efficiency! You do realize that "society" is synonymous with "people", not "economies", right? If I manage to leverage the global economy in such a way that I grow global GDP (for lack of a better term) by a factor of 10, but end up in possession all the wealth in the world, and the rest of you can either work for me or starve, does that benefit society?
And before you answer (if you do so) with some fantasy about free markets and corrections and blah blah blah, there is not, never has been, never will be a free market that is not subject to the influence of some group of power brokers, whether you call them governments or cartels or whatever. Economies and markets are built on the interactions of actual people; pretending that your idealized version of a market is perfect if only people would behave right is THE EXACT same problem communism has.
If government has the power to regulate an economic practice, it has the power to grant favors to cronies. If the government does not have the power to regulate an economic activity, the largest corporations in that field have the power to abuse the smaller players. The only way to avoid market distortions (especially externalities) is government regulations, done under the auspices of a closely monitored and controlled government. We The People have abdicated our responsibility to control government, thus allowing politicians to sell it to corporate America.
While that is a valid point, I think you are overestimating the learning curve on libraries. I recently (in the last 6 months) had to pick up C#. I have 20+ years experience with a variety of languages, so the basic philosophy of C# was familiar, my biggest problem was exactly what you said: the libraries (classes? I'm still not clear on the difference in C#). However, with Google, it's just not that big a deal. The underlying concepts of data structures and manipulating them are pretty similar (well, in most languages. Freaking Lisp....), you just have to look up the syntax. Which tends to lead you to the appropriate libraries, classes, includes, whatever your language calls them. The first time I have to look up the syntax necessary to implement FOO, generally by Googling $NewLanguage FOO, I'll find the library where some kind soul has already implemented FOO and provided calls to it. Yes, a little slower than someone that already knew about that library, but the learning curve is shallow and a good programmer unfamiliar with $NewLanguage will rather quickly overtake a mediocre programmer very familiar with $HisOnlyLanguage.
And yes, I too consider myself a good programmer:-) Don't we all.....
Ah, I thought you were referring to cooking. I personally didn't do any chemistry to the food in making a salad. Yeah, if you mean no chemistry during the "manufacturing" as well as preparation process, I think the end result will not qualify as food, at least not for humans.
Slashdot Mirror
Dude, I think you might want to take a deep breath here. A collective is just a collection of individuals, working towards a common goal under a shared set of rules. It is neither meaningless, nor some all consuming Borg-like bogey man that is going to destroy society. How can a single concept be both impotent and the biggest threat to mankind? And I don't quite understand how the idea of people contributing to society is going to kill us all by....destroying society?
Obviously the individual is way, way, radically, hugely suppressed.
Where? Certainly not in America, or any other society I've personally experienced. I get that you don't like having other people tell you what to do and you object to being forced to contribute back to the society that enabled your production, I'm not most best fond of it, but that's just the way it is. It is impossible for you (or me), as an individual, to produce the electricity that powers the refrigerator you built to keep fresh the food that you grew to feed yourself. Extrapolate that out to all the things you need/enjoy in life and it takes a team of people just to make your life possible. I understand you would like for that team to operate under the paradigm you prefer (whatever that is - I don't really understand exactly how you think society SHOULD work), but it doesn't. The fact that our society is functioning indicates that most people are mostly OK with the current teamwork paradigm. I'm sorry you're not; like I said earlier, it would be great if you could go live in the wilderness by yourself rather than have to interact with other people in a manner you don't like. In fact, if you really wanted to live the life of an individual, you probably can find some wilderness somewhere; the world isn't quite that small yet.
Wasn't Obama snorting coke in 1972?
At 11 years old? I kinda doubt it....
and all individuals must fight the abuse of the individuals by the collective.
And the collective will (I won't pretend that any of this rises to the level of moral imperative; it's simply how human interactions will happen) fight abuse of the collective by the individual. The rest of us are over here making individual sacrifices so that all of us (the collective) can have nice things. Like herd immunity, in this instance. An individual that comes along and wants to share in our nice things, but doesn't want to make the same sacrifices, is not going to be well received. And simply by virtue of the fact that there are more of us means we, the collective, have more ability to assert our will than you the individual does. And it's an unfortunate fact, society is not a la carte; you can't just pick and choose which parts to participate in and which parts you'd rather not. I agree that there needs to be mechanisms in place to insure a balance in society - the individual should not be completely consumed by and subordinate to the collective in every aspect. However, there are instances where the individual must be subordinate to the collective, or we can't have a collective at all. And whether you like it or not, it is human instinct to form collectives; the average member of the collective is better off than he/she would be outside the collective. We would not be much above the level of hunter/gatherer without some form of cooperative society. You can rail about moral imperatives and rights all you want, but insisting that everybody else has to respect your choices at the expense of our own well being and comfort if futile. As long as more people see a benefit to the collective than don't, those that want something different are SOL. It would be great if you could wander off and do your own thing somewhere else, but the planet is pretty full. Besides, you don't really want that, you still want scientists and farmers and all the nice things society (the collective) produces. You just want the collective to observe the rules you want rather than the rules that an apparent majority of other people want.
Let's see, you gave one:
2. Pile everything in the corner
3. Have no demo models at all
4. Have a single catalog with pictures of the merchandise on a pedestal at the center of the store
5. Put that pedestal in a corner
6. Have pictures of the merchandise hung on the walls
7. Have a single giant screen that rolls through a video presentation of the merchandise
8. Have models hold/display the merchandise
9. Have a single large conveyor belt, like a luggage returner at an airport, displaying the merchandise.
10. Embed the merchandise under a clear material that serves as the floor, so you are walking over it.
That was pretty easy; I could probably do another 50 of those. Sure, they are almost certainly BAD layout ideas, but that was his point. While there are lots and lots of bad ways to it, there are only a very small number of GOOD ways to design such a store.
Society is a collection of individuals. It is what we, as a group, say it is. You don't like society, don't want to play by the rules the rest of us collectively agreed on, fine. You can go live in the wilderness and grow/hunt your own food, build your own shelter, etc. Can't find a space to do that where there aren't already other people that have rules they insist on? Tough shit. The only rights you have are those you can prevent others from taking. In a society, everyone helps you protect those rights the society has agreed upon. In exchange for everyone else helping you protect your rights, you get to obey the rules of society. Insisting that society respect your "right" to make a personal choice that endangers everyone else is absurd, unless you are powerful enough to force your decisions on society. Although why you think you have the right to endanger me and my loved ones against my will is an interesting question.
Society is a meaningless idea
Oh, right. That's why.
Eventually you run out of other people's money, and then what?
You layoff thousands of workers, maybe sell off a couple of profitable divisions, to temporarily drive up the stock price. Then take your golden parachute and jump to another company before the stockholders realize they've been suckered.
Manning did break US law in US jurisdiction. If Assange helped him plan his crime (by helping him plan how to conceal it), that certainly could be construed as conspiracy. I don't know how jurisdictional and citizenship matters play in at that point, or what legal theories charges might be leveled under, but I can't imagine that it is perfectly legal for a foreign citizen on foreign soil to help an American citizen on American soil plan a crime.
When it comes to managing government abuse, size is a bit of a red herring. Sure, a smaller government means smaller scope for abuse by government. But now, with a neutered government, you open the door to abuse by any entity powerful enough to get away with it. Which is lots of them, without someone preventing them. I'm not saying government (at least in the US) shouldn't be shrunk; I'm saying doing so won't do much to make our systems fairer. It will just allow different actors to get away with slightly different, not fewer, abuses.
What we actually need, and our system was designed to provide, is actual oversight of government. While it's true that we have let government get too big, a much larger problem is that WE THE PEOPLE have abdicated our responsibility to oversee our government and hold it accountable. We could put an end to a very large chunk of government abuse without any budget cuts whatsoever, simply by holding the people in government responsible for their actions. Vote them out of office; if they're appointed, make getting them fired a central issue for their bosses' re-election. The main benefit of shrinking government (in size/complexity, not necessarily power) would come in the form of making that task easier.
Of course, that requires a majority of the populace to be informed and engaged. Not to mention in agreement with what constitutes abuses of government authority. It's a democracy - we get the government we deserve.
Well, we've tried a couple of rather well-known demonstrations, didn't seem to accomplish a whole lot. Strikes, I don't understand how punishing my employer for the government's actions, and probably losing my job, does much. Voting, now you're getting somewhere. However, we probably have somewhere around 10 times the population of your country (you didn't specify). If we don't, unless you're Germany, your country is just as fucked as the US, so clean up your own shit-hole before worrying about ours. If you're German, carry on. Given that level of population and the incredible geographic diversity here, convincing enough people that shit is bad enough that they should educate themselves AND vote against certain self-interests out of concern for the whole is incredibly difficult. Sure, long term, reducing Federal power and corruption is a huge benefit to everyone. Short term, some of us are more worried about vanishing water supplies and who has what rights to them. Others are more concerned about controlling immigration. And of course, the biggest concern of some is that Jesus is gonna cock-slap this country is we let the gays officially promise to remain monogamous for life. With this many people and interests, convincing everyone that MY pet peeve is the real issue we should all focus on is pretty damn difficult.
It's true that welfare types tend to vote Republican, at least in federal elections. It's quite easy to find both how a state voted in the last presidential election AND the amount of Federal dollars it receives in aid. The states that receive more Federal aid tend to vote Republican. Cause/effect or correlation, who can say? It's worth noting both of these tend to to correlate to poor national rankings on education, less population density (i.e. more rural populations) and a perception of being more religious (I'm unaware of any actual data one could use to verify this perception).
Less easy to find, or at least to compile for each state, is local election trends. I know, for instance, that NC tends to vote Republican in Federal elections (Obama being the first Democrat to receive NC's electoral votes since the Civil Rights Act). However, governor and state legislature tends to lean Democrat (oddly enough, legislature swung Republican at the same time we voted for Obama). I don't know if NC is unusual in this manner, or if categorizing the states as Red vs. Blue is far more complex than the media tends to make it (neither would actually surprise me).
http://www.ucdmc.ucdavis.edu/welcome/features/2010-2011/02/20110223_drug_dogs.html
It's not that trainers train the dog to lie. Dogs are pack animals and pick up on cues from the pack leader (the handler); if the human thinks "this guy must have drugs", the dog picks up on his pack leader's subtle (possibly unconscious) cues and performs as he believes he is expected. No maliciousness required on the part of the trainer or handler, just a ridiculous legal precedent that allows a dumb (as in unable to properly communicate) non-human animal to make legally valid "judgment" calls that trump citizens' constitutional rights.
Are you suggesting it requires 4 years of higher education, then 2-4 years residency to be able to use LaTeX? Or we should all just hire specialists to write our documents?
Yeah, the irony that Germany seems to be annexing Europe due to an economic disaster caused by a global conspiracy amongst bankers is amusing.
I think you meant United Mexican States there; clearly, abbreviating any portion of a country's name will cause AC to throw a temper tantrum. God help us all if he sees someone referring to "China"!
While broad conspiracy theories imagining that Apple (and/or the MPAA/RIAA) is pulling the FBI's strings might be pretty fanciful,
While I have no knowledge of any influence Apple (and/or MPAA/RIAA) may have with the FBI, imagining US federal agencies taking questionable actions abroad in the interests of major US corporations isn't so much fanciful as it is documented history.
If you think the US is anywhere NEAR anything that can be described as tyranny, you have no clue what tyranny actually is
Well, the US government has the authority to jail any citizen it wants indefinitely, in practice for any reason whatsoever. That sounds pretty tyrannical. And before you say "Sure, they have that power, but only for the bad guys" consider that the US imprisons more people, both per capita and raw numbers, than any other nation on the planet. Our intelligence agencies are known to have acted against figures they felt provided a political threat to the established interests. Sure, the US government isn't cartoonishly evil, such as you seem to feel China is. But that doesn't make it a non-repressive government, it just means they only resort to violence and overt oppression when more subtle methods of control don't work. Methods like propaganda along the lines of "Anything that weakens the good guys (US) will only give bad guys (China) an advantage. Therefore, any means to which you object, trust us that the ends justify those means. You really don't want to see the dystopia that THE BAD GUYS will implement if we let them win".
Of course they shouldn't press charges where the evidence clearly doesn't hold but they should "overprosecute" a little and let judges and juries decide. I'd be far more concerned about a court system where nobody is acquitted at trial than the opposite.
So you think it's better to subject some innocent people to the economic and emotional hardship of a trial, as well as the non-zero chance of faulty conviction, than let some criminals go unprosecuted? Me, I tend to the opposite philosophy. Especially given the fact that over time, your little bit of "overprosecution" easily becomes what we have today.
That's not equivalent to what we're seeing on a daily basis in modern times.
You're right, it's not equivalent, it was MUCH WORSE. Seriously, read the link if you've never heard of the trail of tears. POTUS ignored a court order stating that a certain people owned a certain land and sent in the Army to forcibly remove them, causing thousands of deaths. This shouldn't make you feel better, but it should put the current climate in perspective.
But lead in Chinese drinking water or plastics in Chinese landfills doesn't impact me here in America. CO2 in the atmosphere does. Which is a bigger problem depends on your perspective (and geographical location).
By definition the person who builds a successful business somehow is involved in some form of production (even if the business is an equity fund, whose entire job is to buy and tear down businesses, as long as there is profit at the end of this, it means that resources have been allocated more efficiently for purposes that are more useful to the market).
That's complete nonsense. If your entire business model is to rip resources (wealth) away from other companies, destroying them in the process, and stick that money in your bank account, how have those resources been allocated more efficiently? They are no longer producing goods and services, they are being used to fund a wealthy person or group of persons having the power to rip more resources away from other companies. The sum total of goods and services in society has been reduced, even though a few people have created enormous profit for themselves.
And pretending that all economic activity that produces a profit benefits society is inane. I produce enormous profit for myself by economically destroying 10 people, you say society benefits b/c that wealth can now be used more efficiently. I destroy 100 people, more efficiency. I bankrupt entire countries, more efficiency! You do realize that "society" is synonymous with "people", not "economies", right? If I manage to leverage the global economy in such a way that I grow global GDP (for lack of a better term) by a factor of 10, but end up in possession all the wealth in the world, and the rest of you can either work for me or starve, does that benefit society?
And before you answer (if you do so) with some fantasy about free markets and corrections and blah blah blah, there is not, never has been, never will be a free market that is not subject to the influence of some group of power brokers, whether you call them governments or cartels or whatever. Economies and markets are built on the interactions of actual people; pretending that your idealized version of a market is perfect if only people would behave right is THE EXACT same problem communism has.
If government has the power to regulate an economic practice, it has the power to grant favors to cronies. If the government does not have the power to regulate an economic activity, the largest corporations in that field have the power to abuse the smaller players. The only way to avoid market distortions (especially externalities) is government regulations, done under the auspices of a closely monitored and controlled government. We The People have abdicated our responsibility to control government, thus allowing politicians to sell it to corporate America.
While that is a valid point, I think you are overestimating the learning curve on libraries. I recently (in the last 6 months) had to pick up C#. I have 20+ years experience with a variety of languages, so the basic philosophy of C# was familiar, my biggest problem was exactly what you said: the libraries (classes? I'm still not clear on the difference in C#). However, with Google, it's just not that big a deal. The underlying concepts of data structures and manipulating them are pretty similar (well, in most languages. Freaking Lisp....), you just have to look up the syntax. Which tends to lead you to the appropriate libraries, classes, includes, whatever your language calls them. The first time I have to look up the syntax necessary to implement FOO, generally by Googling $NewLanguage FOO, I'll find the library where some kind soul has already implemented FOO and provided calls to it. Yes, a little slower than someone that already knew about that library, but the learning curve is shallow and a good programmer unfamiliar with $NewLanguage will rather quickly overtake a mediocre programmer very familiar with $HisOnlyLanguage.
:-) Don't we all.....
And yes, I too consider myself a good programmer
. What we want to have happen is we want to create an equitable society.
I would say that for a very influential, powerful set of "we", that is demonstrably false.
Ah, I thought you were referring to cooking. I personally didn't do any chemistry to the food in making a salad. Yeah, if you mean no chemistry during the "manufacturing" as well as preparation process, I think the end result will not qualify as food, at least not for humans.
Salad.