If that was true, then governments would be able to make property rights "disappear" with a mere stroke of the pen.
And indeed they can. For example, they make quite a large portion of my wage disappear each month.
The history of the 20th century shows us that property rights are innate in the nature of man.
Claiming things as your own is innate in the nature of man. Ignoring such claims made by others and taking what you want because you can is also innate to the nature of man. Property rights are a codification by the state of which claims it will back by force. In the absence of state and its laws property belongs to whoever can keep it against all others who want it. This is not desirable for the majority of people, since they would end up on the losing side, so most societies have such laws. However, that doesn't make them any less artificial constructs, especially when dealing with things that aren't personal possessions (stocks as opposed to clothes).
So no, free market can't exist without an entity which enforces property rights.
Before political financing reform in Canada esentially banned union funding of political parties, unions traditionally made the bulk of their donations to socialist parties out of MANDATORY dues workers had to pay to obtain employment, even if those workers were not socialist and never voted for a socialist party in their lives.
What happens if the owner of the place I'm working for decides to support a right-wing party, one I'd never vote for myself? Is that okay? I mean, I can't work in the place without supporting - through my labour - that party, just like I couldn't work in a union shop without supporting a left-wing one.
The only difference I can see is that the union shop ends up paying me less due to the union dues, which may or may not be compensated or even turned into a larger effective wage by union negotiating a better base wage.
Speaking for myself, I believe I have the right to profit off of anyone to whom I provide a service to. I don't think that makes me elite - I reserve that same right for anyone.
Right to profit, or right to try to profit?
My agenda is freedom. Freedom from coercion. That's why I favor a smaller government and a simple set of rules to abide by. I like my government like I like my software, if you will. I'm not sure how that promotes corporate feudalism. Could you explain that for me?
When the central government is weak, power rest with local ones. Since corporations already have such huge quantities of power, they are well positioned to take up any slack if the government loosens its hold on the reins.
Feudalism was basically landowners being able to use their income to hire private armies to oppress everyone else. It ended when the central government got powerful enough to subjugate them. A weak central government doesn't make you free, it simply means that power shifts to whoever controls most resources locally; in other words, feudalism redone.
I've never seen a political group where all or even a decisive majority of its members were reasonable people.
That's because members of the group based on political, philosophical, religious, or any other kind of idea, when acting in their role as a member, take said idea as an unchangable part of their identity (because if they change it, they stop identifying as members of said group). Since the idea is unchangable, any idea that comes into conflict with it must change unless the member learns doublethink; and since most ideas are simplifications of reality they tend to conflict with it sooner or later - you get circumstances where the idea doesn't hold - resulting in seemingly insane behaviour.
Name one case where this happened without the assistance of the government. And by the "assistance" of the government I mean subsidies (railroads, ISPs), physical force (historical: using the government to put down unions), copyrights (RIAA), patents (Intel/AMD) and monopolies directly created by government policies (cell phone companies -- because of how the wireless spectrum is sold).
Since "free market" cannot exist without a government to enforce property rights, or to simply keep the population density required to have an economy specialized enough to qualify as a market without people killing each other, any and all market failures have government involvment, as do market successes.
And don't take this to mean that some of these might be useful, some of them might be. My point is just that the monopoly-creating tendency isn't the free market.
Actually, it is. The more money you have, the easier it is to make more, since you can expand your business, hire more people, open side stores, etc. This means that free market - indeed, any unregulated economy - is inherently unstable, since success breeds success and any small initial differences are magnified exponentially as time passes. This is true of markets of any scale, up to and including the whole world.
Think about it: why do large companies get more subsidies than small ones? Because they can afford to give more bribes than smaller ones. They have more money, thus wield more power, and consequently can use that power to get more. It's exactly like landed aristocracy, by the virtue of owning land and thus being able to afford a private army, could then use that army to tax the people working that land and get an even bigger army.
It's not the government that's the problem, but rather any large concentration of power. Once a company or a private individual has that, it can bribe the government to bust an union, or it can hire thugs of its own to do it. Either way, it's anyone having that kind of power that's the source of hte problem.
As an example, see how Microsoft basically muscled its way into the console market simple because it had resources derived from its "victory" in an unrelated sector. If the incumbent becomes stagnant, there is always the possibility that a major player from a related sector can come in and eat their lunch.
So not only will we get a single monopoly per market segment, but eventually some company will manage to get them all and get total control of the entire economy.
Maybe not class as in the classical sense with aristocracy etc, but class as in how much money you can get together (by yourself or your direct environment).
Actually, since old aristocracy was made of those rich enough to be able to afford their own private army, or at the very least a horse and armor at the very bottom, I'd say it's class justice in every sense of the word.
(nearly) 1% of the population behind bars is an awful lot and compares very bad with the rest of the world.
Yes, but making both the rich and the poor equal before law would require for the state to pay for all the expenses of the trial - yes, even for the losing side, since otherwise the rich can afford to try defend themselves even if victory is not certain, while the poor can't - which sounds like socialism, which is evil. Furthermore, to actually pay for this would require taxation, which is stealing and thus also evil.
Compared to these horrible evils, surely you must agree that locking up or executing innocent or at least undeserving people is far better? Injustice and a huge wrongfully convicted prison population are the price of freedom!
All it takes is three independent people to accuse them of stealing copyrighted content on different occasions.
You missed the point: how do you ensure that the law is actually applied to them? The grandparent suggested making a stink, while I pointed out that it's pretty difficult to make a stink against someone who has a chokehold on communications.
Look at the bright side. If space debris becomes such a big problem someone is bound to start a company to try making money cleaning it. A kind of space janitor if you will.
And since space is basically a public area - that is, not owned by anyone - guess who's going to be paying that company? Monopoly rates with no requirements for results, of course.
The only thing inherently worse about driving with a stick than with a wheel and pedals is that it's much easier to accidentally overcorrect, especially if you are unfamiliar with using an analog joystick (in other words you're either not pressing it at all, or you're pressing it as far to the right or left as you can). Well, there's also the stopping issue causing your body to shift and therefore bump the stick, possibly preventing you from stopping.
Well, there's the little issue of a stick being a lot more sensitive to any foreign object accidentally pumping into it than a steering wheel. It also has less range of motion, making it inherently less accurate. If you use the same stick for acceleration/braking than steering then you're going to have nice issues with unintended steering while changing speed or the other way around. Extra points if the stick has centering issues, as many computer sticks do. Finally, a steering wheel simply gives a better "feel" for controlling the car than a stick, and did the very first time I sat on behind one, having ever only used a stick to drive cars in computer games before.
In short, this is a stupid idea, has been tried before, and has never once worked. A stick is inherently vastly inferior to a steering wheel when it comes to controlling fast ground vehicles.
At low speeds, I don't see these as being much more dangerous than a conventional steering mechanism, especially if there is signal noise filtration (shaky hands? let's ignore that) and a rate-of-turn limiter that scales with speed (simulation of "wheel resistance").
Oh yes, there's also the issue of this requiring electronics, so if the car loses electricity it also loses all control. Wonderful.
I wonder if they use Windows Mobile with a Visual Basic application to run the control computer, which of course allows remote control of the system through an open Wi-Fi access point, just to complete their combo of fail?
I'd be happy with just a new 2010 Civic to replace my old 97 model. So long as I don't have to pay for it, and the bill falls upon my neighbors. Using the government to steal money is fun!
Indeed, it allows such heinous activities as driving on a toll-free road. I trust you've never done that, since that would make you a hypocrite?
/end sarcasm
It's often hard to tell whether someone is being sarcastic or a genuine libertarian.
If they want to put in 3-strikes disconnection based on accusations alone, target the people who approve of it. They've almost certainly done something that'll justify at least an accusation. Once they've got 3 of them, make a huge stink about the law they insisted be passed and demand that they be subject to it.
How do you make a huge stink against someone who owns the media and can disconnect you from the Internet at will?
Old Shin'a'in proverb: "If the enemy is in range, so are you.".
Unless you have cannons and your enemy airguns. Guess which one you are, and which one is Government/Big Business?
I wonder how this will affect the recently passed law here in Finland that internet access is a legal right for all citizens.
The same as every other time: our great leaders will fall over each other in their haste to bow to EU - and before that Soviet Union - to prove their loyalty and make themselves feel important. And of course the political elite also has tight ties to various corporations and lobby groups and gets bribes - sorry, campaign funding - from them just as everywhere else; just look for the debacle of the new Finnish copyright law for evidence.
I wonder how far they can push before someone pushes back? Our current prime minister called the national hero linked to in the article a terrorist (he wasn't; he killed a single oppressor and then himself, rather than kill and spread fear amongst people, which makes him an assassin), so I guess he's identifying with the victim, a hated oppressor who tried to destroy Finland for the sake of Russia, and trampled Finnish laws in the process.
This could also be used to crush all but the ruling political party, prohibit free speech, and eliminate anything the government or large corporations don't want people to hear about.
This is precisely why I think that the whole concept of an ISP is fundamentally flawed. Your Internet connection shouldn't be dependant on a company, government, or any other entity. Instead, we should build a mesh of wireless devices, where your computer communicates with nearby ones, they communicate with those further away, and so on all the way to the other side of the world. To solve the issues with latency, we could still have large publicly owned backbone wires serving the function of highways; but your actual connection would be provided by everyone near you.
This kind of systen would make it utterly impossible to cut anyone off the Net, and if implemented properly, would also make communications pretty much untracable. However, I'm afraid that it's already too late: now that powers that be know the threat networking presents them, they'll look at any such development like a hawk. Perhaps small and cheap "insect robots" could be used to get the base mesh going?
The only thing you really need for free exchange of ideas is a society where that its respected, and a government that protects it rather than prosecutes it. Oh... and the courage to speak up and own your own words.
Well now Mr. tverbeek, why don't you post your real name and address here, just to show us how it's done? Unless, of course, you have less than complete faith in this society and its government or your own courage?
Anonymity is a fallback tactic for use in oppressive societies, needed only in extreme circumstances.
Exactly. Anonymity is guaranteed to work even in imperfect societies made of and led by imperfect people. Relying on the niceness and tolerance of people isn't.
We managed to freely exchange ideas long before the internet gave everyone an anonymous soapbox, kids.
And quite a few of those ideas were signed by pseudonyms, or not signed at all.
The right solution, without considering feasibility, is that traffic may be anonymous, but that receivers should be able to refuse to receive anonymous traffic, and should also be able to refuse to grant resources (such as incoming network capacity) to that traffic.
Who is the receiver? Me, or my ISP?
I support anonymity - in fact, I run a TOR proxy on my machine - but what happens if my ISP decides - of its own free will or because Disney/Government forced it to - to deny anonymous inbound traffic? I don't have any choice of ISPs where I live, and of course they too would be forced to obey such laws.
My personal goal is that we develop an internet architecture which allows for provisioned virtual network links on shared physical infrastructure. Then Kaspersky (and anyone who agrees with him) really can have an isolated network, carried on the same physical infrastructure, while those who think anonymity is an important goal can have their own isolated network, sharing hardware but with neither able to impact the other.
No, the rest of us are not allowed to keep our own anonymous network, because anonymity is a threat to those in power by making monitoring people harder. Please cease researching growth hormones for Big Brother, it's huge enough already.
Isn't anyone bothered by government asking commentators to "sign a non-disclosure agreement" about a proposed law disturbing?
Only those who are... disloyal. Those of us who are not disloyal understand that the giants who carry this world on their shoulders must be free to conduct their business without interference from the public which does not understand its own good. Keep up your harassment by unreasonable demands for democratic oversight and they may decide to withdraw into seclusion, no longer showering the fruits of their genius upon us.
Besides, there are profits at stake. Better dead than red, right? And if speaking against your financial elite doesn't make you a commie traitor, I don't know what would.
But to reiterate, no need to focus on BitTorrent, IRC or Usenet - those are already dead. Yup. Dead and buried. Nothing to see there.
You know, Freenet is actually pretty useful these days. No fast, not by long shot, and the Fred (Freenet Daemon) is of unbelievably shitty programming quality to the point of needing a separate wrapper to reboot it when it gets stuck; but still useful.
The future belongs to untracable networks. CIA and its ilk will yet curse RIAA and MPAA for moving everything to encrypted connections.
My daughter unwillingly installed XCP on my PC, never dreaming that a major corporation would be VANDALS.
Well, let's hope she's learned her lesson: get it from BitTorrent, since reputable warez groups have disinfected their releases. With all the Starforce, Securom and associated malware companies put on game disks nowadays, I'd never dare install anything I bought from a store. Get clean MP3s or disinfected ISOs, that's the safest option.
Ironic, isn't it, that copy prevention makes getting the original the more dangerous option ?-)
Maybe by investing 20 years of your life and millions of dollars to find something that will lead to a process that allows you to create antibiotics that save millions of lives. You can then patent that process and those antibiotics.
The question here is should you be able to patent the DNA itself? You didn't design it, in fact you had nothing whatsoever to do with its existence, you merely figured out how it worked - which took 20 years and millions of dollars. Obviously that effort should be rewarded, and just as obviously you can't possibly own a (very important) part of me, this not being ancient Greece or not-so-ancient USA.
Anyway, I don't think that Nobel prices should be given for patented work. After all, the whole point of the price is to reward improving humanity, but patents already supposedly do this.
Nothing says "I have arrived, and I am a huge nerd" like a porcelain fountain filled with blood-red UV-reactive nonconducting coolant that is also piped through your computer on your teak desktop.
Nothing says "I am a retard, and a huge retard" like exposing your computer's coolant to contamination just to show how big a nerd you are.
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And indeed they can. For example, they make quite a large portion of my wage disappear each month.
Claiming things as your own is innate in the nature of man. Ignoring such claims made by others and taking what you want because you can is also innate to the nature of man. Property rights are a codification by the state of which claims it will back by force. In the absence of state and its laws property belongs to whoever can keep it against all others who want it. This is not desirable for the majority of people, since they would end up on the losing side, so most societies have such laws. However, that doesn't make them any less artificial constructs, especially when dealing with things that aren't personal possessions (stocks as opposed to clothes).
So no, free market can't exist without an entity which enforces property rights.
The problem is, the more individual liberty someone more powerful than me has, the more able he is to exploit me.
What happens if the owner of the place I'm working for decides to support a right-wing party, one I'd never vote for myself? Is that okay? I mean, I can't work in the place without supporting - through my labour - that party, just like I couldn't work in a union shop without supporting a left-wing one.
The only difference I can see is that the union shop ends up paying me less due to the union dues, which may or may not be compensated or even turned into a larger effective wage by union negotiating a better base wage.
Right to profit, or right to try to profit?
When the central government is weak, power rest with local ones. Since corporations already have such huge quantities of power, they are well positioned to take up any slack if the government loosens its hold on the reins.
Feudalism was basically landowners being able to use their income to hire private armies to oppress everyone else. It ended when the central government got powerful enough to subjugate them. A weak central government doesn't make you free, it simply means that power shifts to whoever controls most resources locally; in other words, feudalism redone.
That's because members of the group based on political, philosophical, religious, or any other kind of idea, when acting in their role as a member, take said idea as an unchangable part of their identity (because if they change it, they stop identifying as members of said group). Since the idea is unchangable, any idea that comes into conflict with it must change unless the member learns doublethink; and since most ideas are simplifications of reality they tend to conflict with it sooner or later - you get circumstances where the idea doesn't hold - resulting in seemingly insane behaviour.
Since "free market" cannot exist without a government to enforce property rights, or to simply keep the population density required to have an economy specialized enough to qualify as a market without people killing each other, any and all market failures have government involvment, as do market successes.
Actually, it is. The more money you have, the easier it is to make more, since you can expand your business, hire more people, open side stores, etc. This means that free market - indeed, any unregulated economy - is inherently unstable, since success breeds success and any small initial differences are magnified exponentially as time passes. This is true of markets of any scale, up to and including the whole world.
Think about it: why do large companies get more subsidies than small ones? Because they can afford to give more bribes than smaller ones. They have more money, thus wield more power, and consequently can use that power to get more. It's exactly like landed aristocracy, by the virtue of owning land and thus being able to afford a private army, could then use that army to tax the people working that land and get an even bigger army.
It's not the government that's the problem, but rather any large concentration of power. Once a company or a private individual has that, it can bribe the government to bust an union, or it can hire thugs of its own to do it. Either way, it's anyone having that kind of power that's the source of hte problem.
So not only will we get a single monopoly per market segment, but eventually some company will manage to get them all and get total control of the entire economy.
No, it just means that they've managed to piss of someone even more powerfull.
Actually, since old aristocracy was made of those rich enough to be able to afford their own private army, or at the very least a horse and armor at the very bottom, I'd say it's class justice in every sense of the word.
Yes, but making both the rich and the poor equal before law would require for the state to pay for all the expenses of the trial - yes, even for the losing side, since otherwise the rich can afford to try defend themselves even if victory is not certain, while the poor can't - which sounds like socialism, which is evil. Furthermore, to actually pay for this would require taxation, which is stealing and thus also evil.
Compared to these horrible evils, surely you must agree that locking up or executing innocent or at least undeserving people is far better? Injustice and a huge wrongfully convicted prison population are the price of freedom!
You missed the point: how do you ensure that the law is actually applied to them? The grandparent suggested making a stink, while I pointed out that it's pretty difficult to make a stink against someone who has a chokehold on communications.
And since space is basically a public area - that is, not owned by anyone - guess who's going to be paying that company? Monopoly rates with no requirements for results, of course.
Well, there's the little issue of a stick being a lot more sensitive to any foreign object accidentally pumping into it than a steering wheel. It also has less range of motion, making it inherently less accurate. If you use the same stick for acceleration/braking than steering then you're going to have nice issues with unintended steering while changing speed or the other way around. Extra points if the stick has centering issues, as many computer sticks do. Finally, a steering wheel simply gives a better "feel" for controlling the car than a stick, and did the very first time I sat on behind one, having ever only used a stick to drive cars in computer games before.
In short, this is a stupid idea, has been tried before, and has never once worked. A stick is inherently vastly inferior to a steering wheel when it comes to controlling fast ground vehicles.
Oh yes, there's also the issue of this requiring electronics, so if the car loses electricity it also loses all control. Wonderful.
I wonder if they use Windows Mobile with a Visual Basic application to run the control computer, which of course allows remote control of the system through an open Wi-Fi access point, just to complete their combo of fail?
Indeed, it allows such heinous activities as driving on a toll-free road. I trust you've never done that, since that would make you a hypocrite?
It's often hard to tell whether someone is being sarcastic or a genuine libertarian.
How do you make a huge stink against someone who owns the media and can disconnect you from the Internet at will?
Unless you have cannons and your enemy airguns. Guess which one you are, and which one is Government/Big Business?
The same as every other time: our great leaders will fall over each other in their haste to bow to EU - and before that Soviet Union - to prove their loyalty and make themselves feel important. And of course the political elite also has tight ties to various corporations and lobby groups and gets bribes - sorry, campaign funding - from them just as everywhere else; just look for the debacle of the new Finnish copyright law for evidence.
I wonder how far they can push before someone pushes back? Our current prime minister called the national hero linked to in the article a terrorist (he wasn't; he killed a single oppressor and then himself, rather than kill and spread fear amongst people, which makes him an assassin), so I guess he's identifying with the victim, a hated oppressor who tried to destroy Finland for the sake of Russia, and trampled Finnish laws in the process.
This is precisely why I think that the whole concept of an ISP is fundamentally flawed. Your Internet connection shouldn't be dependant on a company, government, or any other entity. Instead, we should build a mesh of wireless devices, where your computer communicates with nearby ones, they communicate with those further away, and so on all the way to the other side of the world. To solve the issues with latency, we could still have large publicly owned backbone wires serving the function of highways; but your actual connection would be provided by everyone near you.
This kind of systen would make it utterly impossible to cut anyone off the Net, and if implemented properly, would also make communications pretty much untracable. However, I'm afraid that it's already too late: now that powers that be know the threat networking presents them, they'll look at any such development like a hawk. Perhaps small and cheap "insect robots" could be used to get the base mesh going?
Well now Mr. tverbeek, why don't you post your real name and address here, just to show us how it's done? Unless, of course, you have less than complete faith in this society and its government or your own courage?
Exactly. Anonymity is guaranteed to work even in imperfect societies made of and led by imperfect people. Relying on the niceness and tolerance of people isn't.
And quite a few of those ideas were signed by pseudonyms, or not signed at all.
Who is the receiver? Me, or my ISP?
I support anonymity - in fact, I run a TOR proxy on my machine - but what happens if my ISP decides - of its own free will or because Disney/Government forced it to - to deny anonymous inbound traffic? I don't have any choice of ISPs where I live, and of course they too would be forced to obey such laws.
No, the rest of us are not allowed to keep our own anonymous network, because anonymity is a threat to those in power by making monitoring people harder. Please cease researching growth hormones for Big Brother, it's huge enough already.
Then you just have to decide which is more important: that the product is good, or that buying that product funds War on Freedom.
Only those who are... disloyal. Those of us who are not disloyal understand that the giants who carry this world on their shoulders must be free to conduct their business without interference from the public which does not understand its own good. Keep up your harassment by unreasonable demands for democratic oversight and they may decide to withdraw into seclusion, no longer showering the fruits of their genius upon us.
Besides, there are profits at stake. Better dead than red, right? And if speaking against your financial elite doesn't make you a commie traitor, I don't know what would.
You know, Freenet is actually pretty useful these days. No fast, not by long shot, and the Fred (Freenet Daemon) is of unbelievably shitty programming quality to the point of needing a separate wrapper to reboot it when it gets stuck; but still useful.
The future belongs to untracable networks. CIA and its ilk will yet curse RIAA and MPAA for moving everything to encrypted connections.
Well, let's hope she's learned her lesson: get it from BitTorrent, since reputable warez groups have disinfected their releases. With all the Starforce, Securom and associated malware companies put on game disks nowadays, I'd never dare install anything I bought from a store. Get clean MP3s or disinfected ISOs, that's the safest option.
Ironic, isn't it, that copy prevention makes getting the original the more dangerous option ?-)
The question here is should you be able to patent the DNA itself? You didn't design it, in fact you had nothing whatsoever to do with its existence, you merely figured out how it worked - which took 20 years and millions of dollars. Obviously that effort should be rewarded, and just as obviously you can't possibly own a (very important) part of me, this not being ancient Greece or not-so-ancient USA.
Anyway, I don't think that Nobel prices should be given for patented work. After all, the whole point of the price is to reward improving humanity, but patents already supposedly do this.
Nothing says "I am a retard, and a huge retard" like exposing your computer's coolant to contamination just to show how big a nerd you are.
Next up, on Christian Science: Scientists claim to have located Hell!