I think it was a pervasive concept in Europe and the west too, until the Enlightenment. Apparently, China stil has a long way to go towards civilization.
Redhat is the main source of money and thus power in the linux world. That does not automatically mean that they got it right all the time. In fact, sometimes I think Redhat might have an interest to make Linux less simple and easy to understand, in order to sell their services and enterprise stuff.
Most other distributions have gone along with systemd because it is the path of least resistance. Arch has resisted for a while, but caved in last year. Arch's philosophy is to take upstream as plain-vanilla as possible, which makes sense. As more and more upstream packages rely on systemd, using an alternative is getting harder and harder. We'll see how long that holds.
I think it is a sign of Linux open-source vitality that some people try alternatives, and a bad sign for the original Unix philosophy, that systemd is so deeply engrained that it is hard to replace and is getting ever more deeply engrained in Linux distributions.
Once more open source proves to be effective for innovation. I'm surprised that Chiariglione still seams to believe that proprietary software is the only model for progress. I think reality has shown us, for quite a while now, that this is not the case. On the contrary. He seems stuck in the past.
Indeed, which is why I see the current US isolationism as beneficial for the world.
In the short term world trade will suffer and we'll all become a bit poorer, but in the long term, dismantling the US dominance over global trade is super!
Unchecked monopolies lead to concentration of power, and will lead to influencing the state sooner or later, leading to the ultimate corruption and disabling democratic processes.
One might regard that as a form of capitalism.
Another form of capitalism is the "market economy", which is actually what has made us succesful in the 20the century. Market economy relies on fair markets and fair competition.
Monopolies destroy market and fair competition, leading to disaster.
Due to the network effect that is hardly possible today.
Amazon is big enough to have a limited amount of Android fork for its own devices, that are kind of dedicated to accessing Amazon services. Other manufacturers are not in that position.
Just like it was 100% feasible to create a windows API clone (remember reactos?), it just wasn't practical, and MSFT had (and still has) a damanging monopoly for office software.
Now Google has gained an almost monopoly for the mobile market, which might be even more significant than any monopoly MSFT ever had. It is trying very hard to cement and even expand it.
It is clear that something must be done. People should not be so short sighted and believe that a Google monopoly won't be a problem.
Monopolies always lead to problems, too much concentration of power, and all the other problems that flow from that.
A free market economy can only function with healthy competition. For that reason, authorities in market econoies have always tried to prevent, or otherwise dissolve, monopolies.
If this would not be done, the company will become more powerful than the state, than the democratically chosen government, and corrupt it. It will end in fascism.
Income tax is progressive in most civilized states, for good reasons. Maybe applying a similar progression for companies would be beneficial. I see a number of benefits and justifications:
Larger companies get unfair advantages because of their power and influence. Progressive tax would offset the and create a more level playing field for all companies.
It would place a cap on companies size in and thus create more and smaller companies, resulting in more competition and this a more dynamic market.
Most things lose their value because we get used to them.
The more people exaggerate, using hyperboles and strong terms for nothing, the more those words will wear off.
Being at home in multiple cultures and languages, I find it interesting to see the much faster "recycling" of words and phrases in english than, e.g., in german. Somehow, the english/US culture seems to be more geared towards "selling" (not always literally w.r.t. goods, but also in trying to convey ideas to the public at large) and advertisement.
Thus, you see a fast inflation of the meaning of words in english, and a constant popping up of new words to recapture the original meaning of older words. It is kind of confusing and not very productive, IMHO.
German, in contrast (note that I'm not a native german speaker, just my outside observation), has a much lower pace of new words, and the meaning of existing words seems to wear off not so fast. Probably just a result of a more conservative and reserved culture.
Icelandic and finnish are even more conservative (as a language) and hardly have changed in the past 1000 years.
Trumps ideology has nothing to do with capitalism.
Only with protecting vested interests himself and of friends and loyalists, and of taking "revenge" by undoing everything, whether good or bad, that his predecessor has done.
There there is a childish person wining an election is not a surprise, given the fact that more and more adults are infantlle too. But that the GOP goes along with it this far is. Clearly a treason to their own principles, which (for any organization) usually means that the end is near.
Still we don't know, even if the driver was attacked, if the use of deadly fire was justified and in proportion. Most assaults do not deserve the death penalty, and most assaults or robberies (without firearms) do not result in death.
Which is why most civilized countries do not allow anyone to carry firearms. Yes there may be robberies, sometimes a stabbing, sometimes even with deadly consequences. But still the risks are much lower if only law enforcement have a moderate to light amount of firearms, the less the better.
All ads are subjective information at best, mostly pure lies, paid for by the buyers of any product that advertises. It is a horrible and immoral tax, wasting our time and money, in exchange for higher product prices (obviously, the marketing budget is paid for by the profit margins of the products).
All companies that live from advertisements, whether targeted or not, are "scum" in my book.
Everyone should avoid companies & brands that advertise more than average.
Non-profit consumer organizations should provide honest and transparent information on products, not the sellers and notorious liars.
Kind of. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... for a clarification and some background on how this came to be. Colbert was a french minister under Louis XIV in the 17th century.
I was part of a "strategy" group of our corporation. Over time, I found that it was not strategy we were doing, but merely translating and justifying the ideas of the top management.
Today, I'd call it propaganda instead of strategy: to "sell" gueswork and industry hypes to other parts of the organization.
Advertisements are exaggerated information at best, but often lies, are paid for by increasing product prices, a kind of tax that everyone of us has to pay as the advertisements budgets are paid by the advertisements and deducted from profits, i.e. in the end the consumer pays.
In addition, it is a time waster.
When it is not about product advertisement, like for politics, advertisements converts money into influence directly, i.e. money equals power. This is automatically at odds with a democracy ("one man one vote"), where each individual should have an equal weight, the rich should not have more weight.
Now they even start to undermine the democratic process.
Advertisements should be generally banned, or at least made 100% transparent. Don't think that advertisements enable free products such as this website, in the end we pay for it ourselves, just a bit indirectly. Taking quite a bit of collateral damage for granted (security issues, waste of time/screen, getting wrong incentives through lies, payment by the victims themselves).
As someone with a CS (and physics) degree that knows how to program, I have to say that I'm fed up with "computer scientists" that cannot program well, and think they're to good for that "low level" stuff.
Instead they produce power point slides, trying to tell computer programmers and projects how they should work at a detailed level, while they have never written a single line of code and contribute zero practical value to the company.
On the contrary, they come up with "one size fits all" standards and solutions, and force many projects into failure.
We need a standardized micropayments system. I'd be prepared to pay the equivalent of advertising proceeds per page view, directly through such a system.
Advertisements have reduced the need for such a system, and thus held up its development.
The more disruption to the web-advertising system, the sooner we'll see a working micropayments system.
People must be taught that they'd better pay a little bit directly and realize that "free" via advertising, isn't free at all.
Funding through advertising, in general, is wrong.
Advertising costs are recouperated via product prices, i.e. everyone who buys goods (such as food in supermarkets) pays a small extra cost to fund the advertising. I.e. everybody is funding a waste of time and resources, to provide false information to the population.
Advertising is like a tax that you cannot avoid. The proceeds of this tax are used to waste everyones time, and to exert bad influence over people, to make them buy things based on skewed information.
Indeed, advertisement is nothing else than misinforming people at their own expense. It is a scourge of society. The marketing budgets is part of "production cost" and in the end is paid by all consumers, like a tax you cannot avoid. For this taxation, we receive false information and are encouraged to act (mostly) against our own interests.
I'd rather just pay for stuff, honestly and up front, instead of this hidden cost that you almost cannot avoid.
Marketing is mostly a non-productive distraction for society as a whole, that brings nothing good. Drugs, for example, are also a non-productive distraction, but at least provide the consumer some pleasure (hopefully).
But advertisements, only lead to wrong pruchasing decisions and waste your time and money.
Advertisers evolve to target "consumers" ever more subtle, trying to influence them subconsiously.
I'm sure the targets will evolve defenses, as noone wants to be influences this way, and made to act against our own best interests, i.e. in the interests of companies instead of our own.
The more refined the advertisement methods become, the more people will start to distrust everything. Potentially this will have negative effects on society as a whole.
This type of influencing should be stopped and prevented.
If the majority would vote to abolish or diminsh protection of "intellectual property", there would be less money to produce profits and content.
Maybe we'll see less content, maybe we'll see less lobbying and laws being bought by the content industry, or less absurd amounts of money going into the pockets of a few.
I think humanity will find new ways of producing content for entertainment, it is not a law of nature that only monopolies and obscene amounts of profit can generate content that people want to watch.
Lets try and see what happens. Noone will die of hunger if there would be less entertainment available.
There is no reaons to be afraid of less profits for the content industry.
How would you calculate the "amount of automation" that would be the basis of taxation?!?
I think Bill Gates sees the problem with automation: 90-99% of us will be without work. What he doesn't see: this will mean that the economic system as we've known it for about 200 years now, will cease to exist.
The current elites and rich want to cling to the status quo, obviously, and come up with weird ideas that are wishful thinking IMHO.
I think the company, whose economic function is to organize work at a larger scale, might have to change fundamentally. A single person + an army of software/robots could replace entire 10000+ companies one day.
If anything, it is alcohol being accountable for a significant portion of total healthcare costs. Do we see any exorbitant sin taxes on alcohol in australia?
Slashdot Mirror
I think it was a pervasive concept in Europe and the west too, until the Enlightenment. Apparently, China stil has a long way to go towards civilization.
Redhat is the main source of money and thus power in the linux world. That does not automatically mean that they got it right all the time. In fact, sometimes I think Redhat might have an interest to make Linux less simple and easy to understand, in order to sell their services and enterprise stuff.
Most other distributions have gone along with systemd because it is the path of least resistance.
Arch has resisted for a while, but caved in last year.
Arch's philosophy is to take upstream as plain-vanilla as possible, which makes sense.
As more and more upstream packages rely on systemd, using an alternative is getting harder and harder.
We'll see how long that holds.
I think it is a sign of Linux open-source vitality that some people try alternatives, and a bad sign for the original Unix philosophy, that systemd is so deeply engrained that it is hard to replace and is getting ever more deeply engrained in Linux distributions.
Once more open source proves to be effective for innovation. I'm surprised that Chiariglione still seams to believe that proprietary software is the only model for progress. I think reality has shown us, for quite a while now, that this is not the case. On the contrary. He seems stuck in the past.
Indeed, which is why I see the current US isolationism as beneficial for the world.
In the short term world trade will suffer and we'll all become a bit poorer, but in the long term, dismantling the US dominance over global trade is super!
Unchecked monopolies lead to concentration of power, and will lead to influencing the state sooner or later, leading to the ultimate corruption and disabling democratic processes.
One might regard that as a form of capitalism.
Another form of capitalism is the "market economy", which is actually what has made us succesful in the 20the century. Market economy relies on fair markets and fair competition.
Monopolies destroy market and fair competition, leading to disaster.
But they don't mistrust them enough alas, and less so than the citizens of several other countries.
Due to the network effect that is hardly possible today.
Amazon is big enough to have a limited amount of Android fork for its own devices, that are kind of dedicated to accessing Amazon services. Other manufacturers are not in that position.
Just like it was 100% feasible to create a windows API clone (remember reactos?), it just wasn't practical, and MSFT had (and still has) a damanging monopoly for office software.
Now Google has gained an almost monopoly for the mobile market, which might be even more significant than any monopoly MSFT ever had. It is trying very hard to cement and even expand it.
It is clear that something must be done. People should not be so short sighted and believe that a Google monopoly won't be a problem.
Monopolies always lead to problems, too much concentration of power, and all the other problems that flow from that.
A free market economy can only function with healthy competition. For that reason, authorities in market econoies have always tried to prevent, or otherwise dissolve, monopolies.
If this would not be done, the company will become more powerful than the state, than the democratically chosen government, and corrupt it. It will end in fascism.
If Microsoft would behave like this and dominate 80% of the mobile market, just as it once dominated the Web with IE, people here would scream.
Somehow, Google with its historic "don't be evil" seems to have an unlimited amount of credit here.
Monopolies are always bad. Monopolies lead to power, and power corrupts, always.
Income tax is progressive in most civilized states, for good reasons. Maybe applying a similar progression for companies would be beneficial. I see a number of benefits and justifications:
Larger companies get unfair advantages because of their power and influence. Progressive tax would offset the and create a more level playing field for all companies.
It would place a cap on companies size in and thus create more and smaller companies, resulting in more competition and this a more dynamic market.
Most things lose their value because we get used to them.
The more people exaggerate, using hyperboles and strong terms for nothing, the more those words will wear off.
Being at home in multiple cultures and languages, I find it interesting to see the much faster "recycling" of words and phrases in english than, e.g., in german. Somehow, the english/US culture seems to be more geared towards "selling" (not always literally w.r.t. goods, but also in trying to convey ideas to the public at large) and advertisement.
Thus, you see a fast inflation of the meaning of words in english, and a constant popping up of new words to recapture the original meaning of older words. It is kind of confusing and not very productive, IMHO.
German, in contrast (note that I'm not a native german speaker, just my outside observation), has a much lower pace of new words, and the meaning of existing words seems to wear off not so fast. Probably just a result of a more conservative and reserved culture.
Icelandic and finnish are even more conservative (as a language) and hardly have changed in the past 1000 years.
It would not be cheaper if they had to pay the fair price for pollution waste management.
Unregulated markets are unfair markets, as much of the burden and real cost to mankind is shifted into the future or into other regions of the world.
Trumps ideology has nothing to do with capitalism.
Only with protecting vested interests himself and of friends and loyalists, and of taking "revenge" by undoing everything, whether good or bad, that his predecessor has done.
There there is a childish person wining an election is not a surprise, given the fact that more and more adults are infantlle too. But that the GOP goes along with it this far is. Clearly a treason to their own principles, which (for any organization) usually means that the end is near.
Still we don't know, even if the driver was attacked, if the use of deadly fire was justified and in proportion.
Most assaults do not deserve the death penalty, and most assaults or robberies (without firearms) do not result in death.
Which is why most civilized countries do not allow anyone to carry firearms.
Yes there may be robberies, sometimes a stabbing, sometimes even with deadly consequences.
But still the risks are much lower if only law enforcement have a moderate to light amount of firearms, the less the better.
All ads are subjective information at best, mostly pure lies, paid for by the buyers of any product that advertises. It is a horrible and immoral tax, wasting our time and money, in exchange for higher product prices (obviously, the marketing budget is paid for by the profit margins of the products).
All companies that live from advertisements, whether targeted or not, are "scum" in my book.
Everyone should avoid companies & brands that advertise more than average.
Non-profit consumer organizations should provide honest and transparent information on products, not the sellers and notorious liars.
Kind of. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... for a clarification and some background on how this came to be.
Colbert was a french minister under Louis XIV in the 17th century.
I was part of a "strategy" group of our corporation.
Over time, I found that it was not strategy we were doing, but merely translating and justifying the ideas of the top management.
Today, I'd call it propaganda instead of strategy: to "sell" gueswork and industry hypes to other parts of the organization.
Advertisements are exaggerated information at best, but often lies, are paid for by increasing product prices, a kind of tax that everyone of us has to pay as the advertisements budgets are paid by the advertisements and deducted from profits, i.e. in the end the consumer pays.
In addition, it is a time waster.
When it is not about product advertisement, like for politics, advertisements converts money into influence directly, i.e. money equals power. This is automatically at odds with a democracy ("one man one vote"), where each individual should have an equal weight, the rich should not have more weight.
Now they even start to undermine the democratic process.
Advertisements should be generally banned, or at least made 100% transparent. Don't think that advertisements enable free products such as this website, in the end we pay for it ourselves, just a bit indirectly. Taking quite a bit of collateral damage for granted (security issues, waste of time/screen, getting wrong incentives through lies, payment by the victims themselves).
As someone with a CS (and physics) degree that knows how to program, I have to say that I'm fed up with "computer scientists" that cannot program well, and think they're to good for that "low level" stuff.
Instead they produce power point slides, trying to tell computer programmers and projects how they should work at a detailed level, while they have never written a single line of code and contribute zero practical value to the company.
On the contrary, they come up with "one size fits all" standards and solutions, and force many projects into failure.
We need a standardized micropayments system. I'd be prepared to pay the equivalent of advertising proceeds per page view, directly through such a system.
Advertisements have reduced the need for such a system, and thus held up its development.
The more disruption to the web-advertising system, the sooner we'll see a working micropayments system.
People must be taught that they'd better pay a little bit directly and realize that "free" via advertising, isn't free at all.
Funding through advertising, in general, is wrong.
Advertising costs are recouperated via product prices, i.e. everyone who buys goods (such as food in supermarkets) pays a small extra cost to fund the advertising. I.e. everybody is funding a waste of time and resources, to provide false information to the population.
Advertising is like a tax that you cannot avoid. The proceeds of this tax are used to waste everyones time, and to exert bad influence over people, to make them buy things based on skewed information.
Indeed, advertisement is nothing else than misinforming people at their own expense. It is a scourge of society.
The marketing budgets is part of "production cost" and in the end is paid by all consumers, like a tax you cannot avoid.
For this taxation, we receive false information and are encouraged to act (mostly) against our own interests.
I'd rather just pay for stuff, honestly and up front, instead of this hidden cost that you almost cannot avoid.
Marketing is mostly a non-productive distraction for society as a whole, that brings nothing good.
Drugs, for example, are also a non-productive distraction, but at least provide the consumer some pleasure (hopefully).
But advertisements, only lead to wrong pruchasing decisions and waste your time and money.
Advertisers evolve to target "consumers" ever more subtle, trying to influence them subconsiously.
I'm sure the targets will evolve defenses, as noone wants to be influences this way, and made to act against our own best interests, i.e. in the interests of companies instead of our own.
The more refined the advertisement methods become, the more people will start to distrust everything.
Potentially this will have negative effects on society as a whole.
This type of influencing should be stopped and prevented.
If the majority would vote to abolish or diminsh protection of "intellectual property", there would be less money to produce profits and content.
Maybe we'll see less content, maybe we'll see less lobbying and laws being bought by the content industry, or less absurd amounts of money going into the pockets of a few.
I think humanity will find new ways of producing content for entertainment, it is not a law of nature that only monopolies and obscene amounts of profit can generate content that people want to watch.
Lets try and see what happens. Noone will die of hunger if there would be less entertainment available.
There is no reaons to be afraid of less profits for the content industry.
How would you calculate the "amount of automation" that would be the basis of taxation?!?
I think Bill Gates sees the problem with automation: 90-99% of us will be without work.
What he doesn't see: this will mean that the economic system as we've known it for about 200 years now, will cease to exist.
The current elites and rich want to cling to the status quo, obviously, and come up with weird ideas that are wishful thinking IMHO.
I think the company, whose economic function is to organize work at a larger scale, might have to change fundamentally.
A single person + an army of software/robots could replace entire 10000+ companies one day.
If anything, it is alcohol being accountable for a significant portion of total healthcare costs.
Do we see any exorbitant sin taxes on alcohol in australia?