I remember my first history teacher discussing with us whether or not the Zimmerman Telegraph was a fake, generated to nudge the American people towards going to war.
He was a good teacher who did his best to equip his young pupils with the paranoia, mistrust and suspicion that we would need to survive in the adult world.
On a related note about the Zimmerman Telegram which the US got so antsy about, the gist of it was that they wanted Mexico to help them if they became at war with the US. It wasn't a declaration of aggression, more one of defensiveness.
Hold on a second - how hard would it be for Al Quaeda to send down a diver with a charge? You'd need some diving equipment and a boat with some sonar. Diving to depth is a skilled task, but so is flying a plane.
And it would be a target that cost billions of dollars without any loss of life. That would really be targeting the interests of US power-brokers.
It's getting harder to do this. With tax and national insurance being deducted direct from your wages before you get them, that cuts off a large avenue of protest. And the unemployed are dependent on benefits.
There is still council tax, but mostly it's the central government who are the enemy, not the councils. Doesn't meant that you can't effectively protest via the councils, but it would be nice to go to the source rather than by (semi-) innocent proxy.
Not disagreeing with you, just highlighting the changing nature of our relationship with the government. With direct debit everywhere and cash becoming obsolete and the banks increasingly complicit with the authorities, the government is increasingly indicating it's preference for people to express their discontent with violence. Not today, certainly, but I intend to live a long time and would like my children to live in a free world. Twenty years from now? Thirty? I doubt that tax protest will be possible. The government will free your assets / eliminate your credit with a few keystrokes. And by that point, you'll be using the system for everything down to catching a bus.
I know how it sounds, and it's increasingly off-topic, but I don't think I'm paranoid, just ten / twelve years premature.
I think multiple currencies are the only security against this.
This is true. But after all the financial contributions US companies made in getting the war started in the first place, don't you think they are entitled to a return on their investment?
You have a point in theory, but if you'd seen it, I think you'd accept his reference. Drop the Dead Donkey was the best of the best. Written by and for intelligent people.
I once saw Haydn Gwynne (one of the main leads in the series) give a lecture on high comedy and it contained more insights than anything else I've ever read or seen on the subject.
And what unbiased source are you going to use to tell you whether or not your sources are unbiased?
You can't, but when an information source is surpressed then there is something there worth finding out.
I should point out that in this case however, the alledged reason for the seizing of the servers is to obtain an IP address of a poster. Therefore it is not obstensibly about censorship.
I haven't seen much this year. I started long ago when I was given the Fri Og Grusom collection and loved it.
I have noticed that by last year it wasn't quite as funny (and Nemi's breasts had tripled in size for some reason), but the old one's still make me laugh.
Holding up a black square of card:
Hva er det?
Nemi's Klevask!
Hva er det?
Nemi's Tanken!
Hva er det?
Nemi's Lungen! Crumpled remains of questioner with card forced in mouth
Hva er det?
Nemi's Lillebror...
What about the argument that even natural monopolies will operate more efficiently if there is pressure from the shareholders to keep costs down (in order to increase the size of dividends paid to shareholders) ?
Well the cost savings will be passed on to the shareholders in the form of profit rather than on to the consumer in the form of reduced charges. That's the main problem. The secondary problem is that there are other ways to milk that profit than being a shareholder. Needless directorships, overly bloated management, etc. I once worked for a private company that had a manager for every two useful people. It was embarrasing watching them shuffle round pretending to have something to do. In theory, shareholders would limit this, but where the majority of shares are held by a small group, this can happen.
This is a good point and you put it better than another poster elsewhere, but there is still a flaw in it.
While there will be a mitigating factor from competing technologies, is it enough? My problems with it would be as follows:
The technologies are not equal - some areas cannot get cable, sometimes wireless doesn't provide enough bandwidth, etc. This creates an unequal playing field which is not conducive to the competitive environment you want.
The technologies will probably continue to diverge. Naturally technology will improve at different rates and in different directions due to both commercial and scientific reasons. Will they still be competing to deliver the same services in ten years time or will a technology have emerged as the "winner" in a given sub-market? Easier to fix the problem now rather than risk another AT&T ten years down the line.
It is not so much the existence of multiple players that creates a competitive market, so much as the freedom of outsiders to enter the market when the originals get greedy. I think customer bleeding is inevitable in a closed system. Four Monopolies with overlapping interests is not as good as truly open markets. Not anywhere near as good, in my opinion
So, I see what you're saying but I think my objections are well-founded. And as I said in my original post, by making the infrastructure a mere commodity, the barrier to entry is lowered down virtually to the 'mom and pop' level. This last, has to be a good thing for the customer
I don't think you understood my point. DSL, satellite and WiFi are not effective competition for each other. If I must, then a good analogy for what you are saying would be to argue that a monopoly on car manufacture is okay because there are also bikes and trains. They can be used for the same purpose (A to B), but to use your favourite word, the means are different. And you go so far as to criticise me for focusing on this means as if there is something wrong with doing so.
Sometimes people will need cars and a bike will not do; just as sometimes a customer needs cable and Wifi will not do. Because the markets are seperate, you will find that they have a very limited effect on lowering each other's prices. They are not effective competition.
There is a further flaw in how you see things as well. And that is that in relying on different technologies to enforce your competition, you are still restricting the number of players in the game. So we have satellite, cable and WiFi. Great - three fixed groups. It is not the fact that there are multiple players in a market that keep prices down, it is that new players can enter that market when the profits exceed the costs too much. A closed system, even with multiple competitors will ultimately collude to screw the customer.
It is only not a monopoly when there is competition on the same technology. The alternatives to cable you are offering are not cable. No more than a bicycle is the same technology as a car or a train.
This is a very good example for other countries to follow.
Much as I love Norway, Norwegians and Nemi, Peru is the one leading the way on this. They got their first and are even mandating open source software for all government use.
I don't understand why this should be shouldered by the tax payer, or can't be handled by private providers.
Well the customers of the corporate version are still tax payers. It's the same people. The question is one of which will cost them less.
In the corporate version, cost = running costs + company profit.
In the publicly owned version,
cost = running costs.
The theory of capitalism is that competition drives down the running costs variable enough to balance out the profit part which is also limited by competition. This can be true.
But as stated previously, in a natural monopoly such as this, there is no real competition.
Now you can argue that it is not a natural monopoly, but you can't really argue that private ownership reduces costs without the competition.
It would be fair to say that the tax payer is "shouldering the burden" if the infrastructure benefits only a minority, but I think this is unlikely. Even the luddites will benefit from the fact that their society uses this infrastructure. So really, everyone pays one way or another, and what we really care about is what offers us the best price - private or public ownership.
Just to clear something up though - I've been using the term public ownership throughout, which some have taken to be synonymous with government management. It is not. There are two other options: One is that the government simply hires a private company. This preserves the competition aspect as private companies fight for the juicy contract. Two, is a community owned infrastructure.
There are difficulties to overcome with both to be sure, but they are certainly viable alternatives means to implement public ownership. It's dangerous to argue from pure theory. There are many successful examples of publicly owned infrastructure in many countries outside the USA.
I like your ability to swithc the perspective. You are right to highlight cable as being one means of providing the services people want from it.
However, you've switched the players in the competition game from competing companies to competing technologies. This is hardly a level playing field as the different technologies will vary in their suitability to different tasks and geographical locations, not to mention that costs will vary between them. Do we really think that cost per Gbps are magically the same between DSL, satellite and WiFi? Do we really think that cable will compete with Satellite in remote and disperse communities? Do we really think that WiFi will offer the bandwidth needed by a sprawing business precinct?
They are overlapping markets at present, but they are not the same markets - the products have differing attributes. You're saying there's only one manufacturer of chocolate, but that's okay, because there's only one manufacturer of cakes and cakes are not the same as chocolate.
To avoid the high costs of a monopoly on a necessity, we need either competition or public ownership. And as illustrated previously, competition is not possible in a natural monopoly such as this.
Just for reference, many modern countries have done very well for themselves with publicly owned utilities.
Yes, it does look like they are being treated well.
This is your home since April 2002. Note the view. Note the camera angle which suggests the photographer is already standing as far back as he can without getting the door frame in the picture.
This is where you sit and get asked the same questions every day. Note the subtle details such as the corner you sit in, the smaller chair you get, there's a one-way mirror not shown.
In that case, Cable provision is a natural monopoly and there is nothing to be gained by having it run by a private company (the theory of capitalism being based on competition), so it should be taken under public ownership.
Competing companies can sell services on the infrastructure if they like, but not access itself.
This would also lower the barrier of entry right down to the little local companies.
That kind of works. Essentially, you are doing development work on spec, in the hopes that they'll like it enough to pay you for it and using public pressure to encourage the patent holder to do so.
Personally, I can't see what's patentable about this idea though. Admittedly, I'm smart, but a plastic cradle for an iPod with a few widgets built in is non-obvious? I don't think so.
A further requirement for the patent system to work is that it should be open to challenge without enormous financial resources.
According to the designer's site, they believe that their product is not infringing on the patent, but can't afford the court case that would follow. Clearly this is a problem with the justice system.
That said, the designer states that he offered to sell the design to the patent holders so that his work would at least see the light of day. If his product is not infringing, then he would be better off selling it to someone who could afford the court case. Just for the principle.
I was not surprised at all to find the rooftops of the White House and nearby buildings masked.
Well they don't seem to have done 10 Downing street, the Houses of Parliament or my house.
If I believed that colouring the rooftop of a builiding in matt brown helped safeguard it in any way whatsoever, then I could be annoyed about that.;)
If you want a good book on Aliens, you could do worse than look Google for Screening the Sacred which isn't specifically focused on Sci-Fi but does contain a brilliant chapter on Alien / Aliens by Janice Hocker Rushing.
She also has another book called Projecting the Shadow: The Cyborg Hero in American Film. which is specifically sci-fi but predates the Matrix.
I definitely recommend anything by this woman for those who want genuine depth and insight.
Whether humans are still evolving in any significant way, and in what directions are interesting questions to think about
You just look at who are breeding the most. Ill-educated women are more likely to be economically deprived and are more likely to have children. We are currently selecting for unintelligent women who desire to have children at a young age.
This is only not true if the children of such women have a much increased mortaility rate. I don't believe this is the case. If preferences in mates diverged enough, then we could start getting seperate genetic groups (Eloi and Morlocks?) but I don't think that is the case either.
Slashdot Mirror
I remember my first history teacher discussing with us whether or not the Zimmerman Telegraph was a fake, generated to nudge the American people towards going to war.
He was a good teacher who did his best to equip his young pupils with the paranoia, mistrust and suspicion that we would need to survive in the adult world.
On a related note about the Zimmerman Telegram which the US got so antsy about, the gist of it was that they wanted Mexico to help them if they became at war with the US. It wasn't a declaration of aggression, more one of defensiveness.
Hold on a second - how hard would it be for Al Quaeda to send down a diver with a charge? You'd need some diving equipment and a boat with some sonar. Diving to depth is a skilled task, but so is flying a plane.
And it would be a target that cost billions of dollars without any loss of life. That would really be targeting the interests of US power-brokers.
Does the US have any major undersea pipes?
No, "Pardon, je ne comprends pas l'anglais" ;-)
ARGGGHHHHH!!!!
you can always go on tax strike.
It's getting harder to do this. With tax and national insurance being deducted direct from your wages before you get them, that cuts off a large avenue of protest. And the unemployed are dependent on benefits.
There is still council tax, but mostly it's the central government who are the enemy, not the councils. Doesn't meant that you can't effectively protest via the councils, but it would be nice to go to the source rather than by (semi-) innocent proxy.
Not disagreeing with you, just highlighting the changing nature of our relationship with the government. With direct debit everywhere and cash becoming obsolete and the banks increasingly complicit with the authorities, the government is increasingly indicating it's preference for people to express their discontent with violence. Not today, certainly, but I intend to live a long time and would like my children to live in a free world. Twenty years from now? Thirty? I doubt that tax protest will be possible. The government will free your assets / eliminate your credit with a few keystrokes. And by that point, you'll be using the system for everything down to catching a bus.
I know how it sounds, and it's increasingly off-topic, but I don't think I'm paranoid, just ten / twelve years premature.
I think multiple currencies are the only security against this.
This is true. But after all the financial contributions US companies made in getting the war started in the first place, don't you think they are entitled to a return on their investment?
Gah! I've just realized why the One ring was so important - it was Prior Art!
Erm..you're really citing a sitcom as evidence?
You have a point in theory, but if you'd seen it, I think you'd accept his reference. Drop the Dead Donkey was the best of the best. Written by and for intelligent people.
I once saw Haydn Gwynne (one of the main leads in the series) give a lecture on high comedy and it contained more insights than anything else I've ever read or seen on the subject.
And what unbiased source are you going to use to tell you whether or not your sources are unbiased?
You can't, but when an information source is surpressed then there is something there worth finding out.
I should point out that in this case however, the alledged reason for the seizing of the servers is to obtain an IP address of a poster. Therefore it is not obstensibly about censorship.
Q. Does a cow have a buddha nature?
A. Mu.
I haven't seen much this year. I started long ago when I was given the Fri Og Grusom collection and loved it.
I have noticed that by last year it wasn't quite as funny (and Nemi's breasts had tripled in size for some reason), but the old one's still make me laugh. Hmmm. Probably need to see it.
They got their first what? Oh wait you don't speak English. You mean "there".
Mange takk. Oh, vente - du snakker ikke norsk.
Idiot.
What about the argument that even natural monopolies will operate more efficiently if there is pressure from the shareholders to keep costs down (in order to increase the size of dividends paid to shareholders) ?
Well the cost savings will be passed on to the shareholders in the form of profit rather than on to the consumer in the form of reduced charges. That's the main problem. The secondary problem is that there are other ways to milk that profit than being a shareholder. Needless directorships, overly bloated management, etc. I once worked for a private company that had a manager for every two useful people. It was embarrasing watching them shuffle round pretending to have something to do. In theory, shareholders would limit this, but where the majority of shares are held by a small group, this can happen.
This is a good point and you put it better than another poster elsewhere, but there is still a flaw in it.
While there will be a mitigating factor from competing technologies, is it enough? My problems with it would be as follows:
So, I see what you're saying but I think my objections are well-founded. And as I said in my original post, by making the infrastructure a mere commodity, the barrier to entry is lowered down virtually to the 'mom and pop' level. This last, has to be a good thing for the customer
I don't think you understood my point. DSL, satellite and WiFi are not effective competition for each other. If I must, then a good analogy for what you are saying would be to argue that a monopoly on car manufacture is okay because there are also bikes and trains. They can be used for the same purpose (A to B), but to use your favourite word, the means are different. And you go so far as to criticise me for focusing on this means as if there is something wrong with doing so.
Sometimes people will need cars and a bike will not do; just as sometimes a customer needs cable and Wifi will not do. Because the markets are seperate, you will find that they have a very limited effect on lowering each other's prices. They are not effective competition.
There is a further flaw in how you see things as well. And that is that in relying on different technologies to enforce your competition, you are still restricting the number of players in the game. So we have satellite, cable and WiFi. Great - three fixed groups. It is not the fact that there are multiple players in a market that keep prices down, it is that new players can enter that market when the profits exceed the costs too much. A closed system, even with multiple competitors will ultimately collude to screw the customer.
It is only not a monopoly when there is competition on the same technology. The alternatives to cable you are offering are not cable. No more than a bicycle is the same technology as a car or a train.
I hope this has made my point clearer.
This is a very good example for other countries to follow.
:)
Much as I love Norway, Norwegians and Nemi, Peru is the one leading the way on this. They got their first and are even mandating open source software for all government use.
Still, great to see the Vikings joining in.
I don't understand why this should be shouldered by the tax payer, or can't be handled by private providers.
Well the customers of the corporate version are still tax payers. It's the same people. The question is one of which will cost them less.
In the corporate version,
cost = running costs + company profit.
In the publicly owned version,
cost = running costs.
The theory of capitalism is that competition drives down the running costs variable enough to balance out the profit part which is also limited by competition. This can be true.
But as stated previously, in a natural monopoly such as this, there is no real competition.
Now you can argue that it is not a natural monopoly, but you can't really argue that private ownership reduces costs without the competition.
It would be fair to say that the tax payer is "shouldering the burden" if the infrastructure benefits only a minority, but I think this is unlikely. Even the luddites will benefit from the fact that their society uses this infrastructure. So really, everyone pays one way or another, and what we really care about is what offers us the best price - private or public ownership.
Just to clear something up though - I've been using the term public ownership throughout, which some have taken to be synonymous with government management. It is not. There are two other options: One is that the government simply hires a private company. This preserves the competition aspect as private companies fight for the juicy contract. Two, is a community owned infrastructure.
There are difficulties to overcome with both to be sure, but they are certainly viable alternatives means to implement public ownership. It's dangerous to argue from pure theory. There are many successful examples of publicly owned infrastructure in many countries outside the USA.
I like your ability to swithc the perspective. You are right to highlight cable as being one means of providing the services people want from it.
However, you've switched the players in the competition game from competing companies to competing technologies. This is hardly a level playing field as the different technologies will vary in their suitability to different tasks and geographical locations, not to mention that costs will vary between them. Do we really think that cost per Gbps are magically the same between DSL, satellite and WiFi? Do we really think that cable will compete with Satellite in remote and disperse communities? Do we really think that WiFi will offer the bandwidth needed by a sprawing business precinct?
They are overlapping markets at present, but they are not the same markets - the products have differing attributes. You're saying there's only one manufacturer of chocolate, but that's okay, because there's only one manufacturer of cakes and cakes are not the same as chocolate.
To avoid the high costs of a monopoly on a necessity, we need either competition or public ownership. And as illustrated previously, competition is not possible in a natural monopoly such as this.
Just for reference, many modern countries have done very well for themselves with publicly owned utilities.
Yes, it does look like they are being treated well.
This is your home since April 2002. Note the view. Note the camera angle which suggests the photographer is already standing as far back as he can without getting the door frame in the picture.
This is where you sit and get asked the same questions every day. Note the subtle details such as the corner you sit in, the smaller chair you get, there's a one-way mirror not shown.
This is how they question you.
The above, is what we know about.
In that case, Cable provision is a natural monopoly and there is nothing to be gained by having it run by a private company (the theory of capitalism being based on competition), so it should be taken under public ownership.
Competing companies can sell services on the infrastructure if they like, but not access itself.
This would also lower the barrier of entry right down to the little local companies.
That kind of works. Essentially, you are doing development work on spec, in the hopes that they'll like it enough to pay you for it and using public pressure to encourage the patent holder to do so.
Personally, I can't see what's patentable about this idea though. Admittedly, I'm smart, but a plastic cradle for an iPod with a few widgets built in is non-obvious? I don't think so.
A further requirement for the patent system to work is that it should be open to challenge without enormous financial resources.
According to the designer's site, they believe that their product is not infringing on the patent, but can't afford the court case that would follow. Clearly this is a problem with the justice system.
That said, the designer states that he offered to sell the design to the patent holders so that his work would at least see the light of day. If his product is not infringing, then he would be better off selling it to someone who could afford the court case. Just for the principle.
I was not surprised at all to find the rooftops of the White House and nearby buildings masked.
;)
Well they don't seem to have done 10 Downing street, the Houses of Parliament or my house.
If I believed that colouring the rooftop of a builiding in matt brown helped safeguard it in any way whatsoever, then I could be annoyed about that.
I can see my house from here!
If you want a good book on Aliens, you could do worse than look Google for Screening the Sacred which isn't specifically focused on Sci-Fi but does contain a brilliant chapter on Alien / Aliens by Janice Hocker Rushing.
She also has another book called Projecting the Shadow: The Cyborg Hero in American Film. which is specifically sci-fi but predates the Matrix.
I definitely recommend anything by this woman for those who want genuine depth and insight.
Whether humans are still evolving in any significant way, and in what directions are interesting questions to think about
You just look at who are breeding the most. Ill-educated women are more likely to be economically deprived and are more likely to have children. We are currently selecting for unintelligent women who desire to have children at a young age.
This is only not true if the children of such women have a much increased mortaility rate. I don't believe this is the case. If preferences in mates diverged enough, then we could start getting seperate genetic groups (Eloi and Morlocks?) but I don't think that is the case either.