Very bad examples here. In both cases of pharma and music, the up-front costs are vastly inflated because of the existence of "intellectual property" laws. This is a basic mechanism: your costs adjust up by the amount of guaranteed income, in the absence of any additional marginal wealth production. Or to put it another way: actual value you produce eventually adjusts down to the amount of value you need to convince other people to pay you. The amount you do not need to convince them to pay, trades for nothing. That's why monopoly rents even exist in the first place: laziness.
One thing Microsoft could do easily and cheaply, which would eventually end this "Calling you from Windows and you have a virus" scam, is to have a short mention about this being a scam on the front page of their website. A single sentence would suffice.
When you get called by the indian call center employee, who for most of them believe they are working for a legitimate business, mention how the caller is NOT really affiliated with Microsoft because their website say it's a scam. "See for yourself !" and hang up.
The actual pirates can probably not do the mass phone call themselves and still rack up enough money, which is why they hire call centres to do it for them, and why they also take precautions to show them some pretense of legitimacy. If the call centres stop working with them they'll go away.
And I wonder what kind of counter-claim of damages the USA can pretend they too suffered in the loss of trade. Probably just about the same amount in total.
Please. Fascism is NOT a form of socialism. It's incompatible with marxist doctrine, through and through. Rather it's the fabled "third way" that is neither free-market nor communism. People who conflate fascism with socialism are just as wrong as those who conflate it with capitalism.
Pinochet was resistant to free market, through most of 1974 his own style of handling economic problems left in the wake of Allende meant putting the army in charge of alleviating penuries through requisitions, rationning and distribution, and it was a complete failure. Chile kept printing money just like under Allende, leading to 300% inflation in 1974 and 1975.
If Pinochet was, as you put it, a "free-market fundamentalist", then explain why did oil and copper industries remain state-owned all through his regime, and why did the fishing and forestry industries remain syndicate-run (CORFO) ? Why did he keep in place many programs of subsidies ? Why did he have several failing corporations bailed out (like the Osorno bank) ? Why did his constitution of 1980 keep copper resources as irrevocably public property ? Why was the Peso pegged to the USD, chinese-style, in the early 80s (leading to a monetary crisis and recession), instead of maintaining a free-floating exchange rate like Friedman advocated in his speeches and books ?
Oh, right: that's because Pinochet was NOT a free-market advocate. He was not even right-wing either - his wife was a senator in the Radical Party, an ally of Allende's Unidad Popular, and he was a close collaborator of Allende until the coup d'état. Instead, his pragmatism at least let him put people who mostly were free-market enthusiasts in charge of some of his government's economic policies. He, himself, had no such convictions, he was just an autoritarian voluntarist. But I guess that makes for an insufficiently romantic narrative to convince you.
Sergio de Castro Spikula was one such free-market enthusiast in Pinochet's government, and he had to bitterly fight (there even was one incident with a gun) with other members, like General Gustavo Leigh, Admiral José Toribio (president of the government's economic committee), or Raul Saez (the man who was responsible for planning the economy of Chile in the Junta), in order to get the reforms done.
Unfortunately Satoshi's wallet is worth a mega-fortune, and it's never been quite established that Satoshi destroyed the private key. All kinds of people would give a try and shake it out of him/her, for that much money.
Committing a guy for writing a book is many things, but it ain't fascism.
You're right, of course, and I should have made clear that is not what I was saying in the first place. What I wish to convey is that the USA abide by all eight core tenets of classical fascism, as detailed by John T. Flynn, and have done so for a long time. Abuses of police power, attorney power and executive power as seen in the article (and others) are but an inevitable consequence of the first two tenets.
Well, there is a word that defines accurately what is happening here, but because this word has been slowly stripped of its rich meaning and turned into an empty slur, most people have stopped using it appropriately, instead merely employing it as a slur. For shame, really, because its attached historical lessons are desperately needed these days.
Do you mean lean like wild american buffalos, camels, et al. who pretty much all have a huge slab of fat on the back ? Or lean like salmons and whales and seals, with fat packed under the skin ? Also, they always ate the brain and bone marrow, which are almost pure fat too.
Also, people during that age were not especially healthy. They probably died in their 40s.
Wrong. Half of them died young (typically before the age of 5) and the rest lived to their 60s and 70s, sometimes even older. Reconstructed modal age for primitive hunter-gatherers is 62 to 64 years of age.
There is a marked reduction in average size, and sudden appearance of generalized tooth decay, traces from infectious diseases and formerly absent bone deformities in our record of skeletons from the paleolithic to neolithic transition. Granted, the infectious disease became more widespread because of the growing densities of populations at the time, but the rest has been determined to come from the evolution of the diet. There is also a reduction of serious injuries observed, because less hunting decreased the exposition to dangerous predators and hunting accidents.
As for life expectancy, it decreased slightly with the agricultural revolution until circa 2000 BC, at which point advances in hygiene, sanitation, productivity and trade compensated for the difference. And we only now have caught up the loss in average height. There has been evidence of an adaptation to agricultural diets over time, but its effect is still small in terms of life expectancy.
Maybe instead of automating the grunt work, we need now to automate the automating itself, so that the high-tech tools become just as cheap and prevalent, affordable to every small-scale farm, as the food grown with those tools.
Thanks for the reference, this is all interesting. It seems to confirm that equality has a lot to do with the level of dissemination of information (and other forms of capital). The 'heavy handed" approaches concentrate it, and thus reinforce hierarchies, whereas the "light handed" approaches disseminate it around which dissolves hierarchies.
I went and examined the paper, and damn right the/. summary is misleading.
First one, the researchers don't use the vague term "social inequality". Second, they are merely reporting on the results of a computer model, and not on some new archeological findings. From the abstract:
We model the coevolution of individual preferences for hierarchy alongside the degree of despotism of leaders, and the dispersal preferences of followers. We show that voluntary leadership without coercion can evolve in small groups, when leaders help to solve coordination problems related to resource production.
They did a computer simulation of the classic Coase argument about transaction costs affecting market structure (and its consequences on asymetry of information which equate to inequalities of human capital), applying it to individuals undergoing the agricultural revolution (food surpluses but with delayed returns and higher need for coordination). Well, yeah, a hierarchy emerges in this situation, because the rapid change in productivity is not uniformly distributed and depends on information that is costly to disseminate. That idea's been around at least since Hayek's works on spontaneous order. It's kinda nice to see it verified in a computer model, but it doesn't teach us anything new.
That's domestication for you... You can be pretty sure that guinea fowls, which have kept more of their hunting instinct, would have made short work of the mouse.
That said, from the point of view of the mouse that whole scene must have played much like something out of Jurassic Park 2 or 3.
Administrative takeover of corporations by autoritative central state, with intimidation through abuse of executive power, is textbook fascism. Mussolini would be proud.
Slashdot Mirror
Very bad examples here. In both cases of pharma and music, the up-front costs are vastly inflated because of the existence of "intellectual property" laws. This is a basic mechanism: your costs adjust up by the amount of guaranteed income, in the absence of any additional marginal wealth production. Or to put it another way: actual value you produce eventually adjusts down to the amount of value you need to convince other people to pay you. The amount you do not need to convince them to pay, trades for nothing. That's why monopoly rents even exist in the first place: laziness.
One thing Microsoft could do easily and cheaply, which would eventually end this "Calling you from Windows and you have a virus" scam, is to have a short mention about this being a scam on the front page of their website. A single sentence would suffice.
When you get called by the indian call center employee, who for most of them believe they are working for a legitimate business, mention how the caller is NOT really affiliated with Microsoft because their website say it's a scam. "See for yourself !" and hang up.
The actual pirates can probably not do the mass phone call themselves and still rack up enough money, which is why they hire call centres to do it for them, and why they also take precautions to show them some pretense of legitimacy. If the call centres stop working with them they'll go away.
And I wonder what kind of counter-claim of damages the USA can pretend they too suffered in the loss of trade. Probably just about the same amount in total.
Please. Fascism is NOT a form of socialism. It's incompatible with marxist doctrine, through and through. Rather it's the fabled "third way" that is neither free-market nor communism. People who conflate fascism with socialism are just as wrong as those who conflate it with capitalism.
Repeating a lie often enough does not make it true.
Pinochet was resistant to free market, through most of 1974 his own style of handling economic problems left in the wake of Allende meant putting the army in charge of alleviating penuries through requisitions, rationning and distribution, and it was a complete failure. Chile kept printing money just like under Allende, leading to 300% inflation in 1974 and 1975.
If Pinochet was, as you put it, a "free-market fundamentalist", then explain why did oil and copper industries remain state-owned all through his regime, and why did the fishing and forestry industries remain syndicate-run (CORFO) ? Why did he keep in place many programs of subsidies ? Why did he have several failing corporations bailed out (like the Osorno bank) ? Why did his constitution of 1980 keep copper resources as irrevocably public property ? Why was the Peso pegged to the USD, chinese-style, in the early 80s (leading to a monetary crisis and recession), instead of maintaining a free-floating exchange rate like Friedman advocated in his speeches and books ?
Oh, right: that's because Pinochet was NOT a free-market advocate. He was not even right-wing either - his wife was a senator in the Radical Party, an ally of Allende's Unidad Popular, and he was a close collaborator of Allende until the coup d'état. Instead, his pragmatism at least let him put people who mostly were free-market enthusiasts in charge of some of his government's economic policies. He, himself, had no such convictions, he was just an autoritarian voluntarist. But I guess that makes for an insufficiently romantic narrative to convince you.
Sergio de Castro Spikula was one such free-market enthusiast in Pinochet's government, and he had to bitterly fight (there even was one incident with a gun) with other members, like General Gustavo Leigh, Admiral José Toribio (president of the government's economic committee), or Raul Saez (the man who was responsible for planning the economy of Chile in the Junta), in order to get the reforms done.
In other words: Join the cult of the Fedeldar God'nment, suffer a random munching.
Wait. If they are unlikely to be unusual, then they are likely to be usual. Right ?
Alas, that particular reference might be lost on americans slashdotters.
Unfortunately Satoshi's wallet is worth a mega-fortune, and it's never been quite established that Satoshi destroyed the private key. All kinds of people would give a try and shake it out of him/her, for that much money.
You're right, of course, and I should have made clear that is not what I was saying in the first place. What I wish to convey is that the USA abide by all eight core tenets of classical fascism, as detailed by John T. Flynn, and have done so for a long time. Abuses of police power, attorney power and executive power as seen in the article (and others) are but an inevitable consequence of the first two tenets.
There is more than one way to do it.
This one is real though, 16 meters (52' and a half) long, 60 tons and seven days of underwater autonomy. No idea what's the price tag though.
Well, there is a word that defines accurately what is happening here, but because this word has been slowly stripped of its rich meaning and turned into an empty slur, most people have stopped using it appropriately, instead merely employing it as a slur. For shame, really, because its attached historical lessons are desperately needed these days.
The idea of a "personal submarine", IMHO, should be more along the lines of this kind of thing. Just build it yourself !
Do you mean lean like wild american buffalos, camels, et al. who pretty much all have a huge slab of fat on the back ? Or lean like salmons and whales and seals, with fat packed under the skin ? Also, they always ate the brain and bone marrow, which are almost pure fat too.
Wrong. Half of them died young (typically before the age of 5) and the rest lived to their 60s and 70s, sometimes even older. Reconstructed modal age for primitive hunter-gatherers is 62 to 64 years of age.
There is a marked reduction in average size, and sudden appearance of generalized tooth decay, traces from infectious diseases and formerly absent bone deformities in our record of skeletons from the paleolithic to neolithic transition. Granted, the infectious disease became more widespread because of the growing densities of populations at the time, but the rest has been determined to come from the evolution of the diet. There is also a reduction of serious injuries observed, because less hunting decreased the exposition to dangerous predators and hunting accidents.
As for life expectancy, it decreased slightly with the agricultural revolution until circa 2000 BC, at which point advances in hygiene, sanitation, productivity and trade compensated for the difference. And we only now have caught up the loss in average height. There has been evidence of an adaptation to agricultural diets over time, but its effect is still small in terms of life expectancy.
I wonder if similar critters could survive in the liquid methane lakes and rivers of Titan ?
Citation needed.
Maybe instead of automating the grunt work, we need now to automate the automating itself, so that the high-tech tools become just as cheap and prevalent, affordable to every small-scale farm, as the food grown with those tools.
They're called ultralights. Same price range (well, sorta, you may have to double or triple the tag), same kind of performance and mileage.
Thanks for the reference, this is all interesting. It seems to confirm that equality has a lot to do with the level of dissemination of information (and other forms of capital). The 'heavy handed" approaches concentrate it, and thus reinforce hierarchies, whereas the "light handed" approaches disseminate it around which dissolves hierarchies.
I went and examined the paper, and damn right the /. summary is misleading.
First one, the researchers don't use the vague term "social inequality". Second, they are merely reporting on the results of a computer model, and not on some new archeological findings. From the abstract:
They did a computer simulation of the classic Coase argument about transaction costs affecting market structure (and its consequences on asymetry of information which equate to inequalities of human capital), applying it to individuals undergoing the agricultural revolution (food surpluses but with delayed returns and higher need for coordination). Well, yeah, a hierarchy emerges in this situation, because the rapid change in productivity is not uniformly distributed and depends on information that is costly to disseminate. That idea's been around at least since Hayek's works on spontaneous order. It's kinda nice to see it verified in a computer model, but it doesn't teach us anything new.
That's domestication for you... You can be pretty sure that guinea fowls, which have kept more of their hunting instinct, would have made short work of the mouse.
That said, from the point of view of the mouse that whole scene must have played much like something out of Jurassic Park 2 or 3.
Thank you for having actually RTFA and ephasized the really significant part of it (to the current debate).
Administrative takeover of corporations by autoritative central state, with intimidation through abuse of executive power, is textbook fascism. Mussolini would be proud.