Taxes build the infrastructure (roads, schools, firehouses) that allow the markets to exist.
Taxes should not pay for all infrastructure, user fees should pay for some. Those roads for instance, they should be built and maintained with a user fee or tax on fuel, which we already pay when we get fuel. As for schools, firehouses, and some other things, property tax should pay for those.
What exactly is wrong with promoting a regional economy instead of depending on a complex web of corrupt globalist ties?
Corrupt local politicians with guns? As long as I'm not harming anyone the government should have no say in how I live. If I have to have government approval all I am is a slave.
Yes, I know, it's protectionism, it's nationalism. But until you're willing to declare that we should all be a one world Government, protecting your own country and its people from being sucked dry economically, is a virtue. And if you believe we should be a one world Government, you're asking for much bigger horrors than protectionism and nationalism.
I both believe in international trade and in supporting the local economy. I buy imported stuff as well as local produce, actually as a member of two local coops I support local farmers as much as I can buy buying as much food produced locally, which the coops buy from themselves. As for "world government" I believe in as little government as possible, national or world. Most politics should be local, except when it interfers with liberty.
I'm confused, are we only against protecting local markets when it's in the software/IT industry? It's bad that Europe is trying to place a duty on camera's made outside of Europe. It's good when the government takes action to prevent outsourcing software development, and Tech Suport to India and Brazil? What side of this issue am I supposed to be on?
In the case of tariffs, the EU is attempting to encourage local manufacturing and reduce trade imbalances
If the EU rally wanted to correct for a trade imbalance then what they need to do is get rid of the 100s of billions of euros in subsidies given to European farmers. Because of these subsidies food grown in Europe can be exported to third world nations and sold there retail for less than farmers there can grow food. That's a big reason the WTO meeting in Geneva fell apart in the summer of 2006. India walked out because first world nations, the EU, Japan, and the US wouldn't cut farm subsidies. India has literally thousands of farmers committing suicide because they can't compeat with farmers who collect hugh subsidies. Slashing US farm subsidies to $13 billion a year is "unacceptable," a Bush administration official said on Wednesday. All these tariffs are is protectionism.
whereas airline "security" is not about making flying safer, but about social engineering, making people more accepting of micro-management from a nanny state, and introducing the perception of safety even though everyone knows that it won't do a lick of good.
Yeap, our overseer lords want us all to believe the only way to keep safe is by having a nanny state. What they're really doing is a power grab, they want to tell people how to live, and if the people won't then force them to live the way they say.
It's probably because they've got all that extra space in them (where the cassette goes) that a digital camera just doesn't have . It doesn't take a large explosive to do a whole lot of damage on an airplane.
Well since the GP said "my camera is not" and doesn't say what it is the camera could very well be enough space for explosives. I could take my film camera as well as the lenses for it and pack enough C4, semtex, or another plastique to bring down an airplane. My biggest lenses, which isn't big, is large enough to hold half a pound of C4 hollowed out. With a ultra wide or super telephoto lenses I could pack a lot more in the lense. And that's lenses just for a 35mm slr.
auction. That means you can't shut down bidding with any of your bids, regardless of what they are -- because no one will see anyone's bids until the end. All bids are accepted, regardless of whether they beat the highest bid or not. When the auction ends, all bids for an item are examined, and the person who entered the highest bid is asked to pay the amount of the second-highest bid.
Ah, I don't recall you saying anything about a secret bid, though others did in other posts. I'd be more willing to accept the winning bidder only paying the second highest bid but only if everyone submits one sealed bid. However no online auctions I know of nor any of the auctions I've been to IRL have done this. And yes, I have been to auctions held in a physical location, the last one was an auction held by the US Customs.
If I could afford it I'd regularly or semi regularly attend more, buy low and sell high. Heck, if I could I'd even go to real estate auctions and bid on houses. Usually they are put up on auction either because of back taxes or foreclosures. In both cases the property is usually ransacked and damaged, so they sale low. With some tlc and fixups they can be put back on the market and sold for more than what was put into them. I knew someone who made a living do this.
Second, what happens if two people enter outrageous bids? The second-highest bid is still outrageous, and that means the highest bidder must pay an outrageous price. So entering an outrageous bid is very risky at best.
That only works with secret sealed bids, not when an auctioneer is in front calling out the highest bid so far and asking if another will bid higher. "I've got $100, any higher, will someone go higher?""Sure, I bid $1000!"
Imagine an auction that has a minimum allowed bid of $10, and you are willing to pay up to $150 to win. Imagine further that you make an outrageous $1,000,000 bid. If the second-highest bid was $100, you will pay $100. But if you had entered a $150 bid, you would still only pay $100 in that case. So what is the advantage of entering the $1,000,000 bid? Nothing. However, if the second-highest bid turns out to be $200, you'll have to pay $200 -- more than you wanted to pay.
Obviously then you waited too long to bid. Auctioneer: We have a minimum bid of $100, do I hear $100? Bidder 1: $100. Bidder 2: I bid $10,000. Bidder 2 wins and only pays $100.
Or even worse, if someone else makes a $900,000 bid (trying to do the same thing you are doing), then the second-highest bid was $900,000 -- that means you will have to pay $900,000 for an item that you wanted to pay no more than $150 for.
Yeap, Thomas Jefferson warned of corporate challenges to government:
"I hope we shall crush... in its birth the aristocracy of our moneyed corporations, which dare already to challenge our government to a trial of strength and bid defiance to the laws of our country."
Great quote. Sucks I don't have mod points today. Can you source it for me?
As I wrote above, under a system the winning bidder only pays the second highest amount there is an extreme reason to bid higher than you can pay, by bidding higher you shutdown bidding.
No, there is not. With eBay, if the starting bid was $100, and someone else has bid $101, and I then enter my maximum bid as $11,000, it won't display $11,000 as my real bid. It will enter a "real" bid of $102. If someone else then enters a maximum bid of $200, eBay would enter a bid for me of $201. And so on.
That may be the way it works on eBay but that's not how it works at live auctions. At a live auction you don't tell the auctioners what your max bid will be. Nor will they automatically raise your bid for you.
And as regards auction winners only paying the second highest bid, as I said if someone wants to they can easily shutdown bidding by bidding a ridiculus amount. And you haven't offered a rejoiner. All you say, down at the bottom of your post is that others already answered that, can you provide a link to these posts? I haven't come across any posts that says anything about what I bring up with high bids.
There's no way that all of the protocols and all of the standards that the Internet relies upon were built without Microsoft. And there's no way that the Internet would ever have been used by any business, government, or institution of higher learning before Microsoft made sure that every Wintel desktop would have a browser on it.
Hah, I saw businesses on the net before MS ever "discovered the web". Back then I even had more bookmarks for Gopher servers than web servers.
I'm a participant in the HTML Working Group [w3.org] and I can tell you that this is incorrect. You're thinking of XHTML2, not HTML 5. XHTML2 has the XML parser strictness and pages will fail to display if they're not well-formed. HTML 5 is going the complete opposite direction, assuming that people will code poorly and defining failure modes for browser vendors to follow when that happens.
Which is why html 5 is bad. Unlike xhtml which is supposed to force you to write valid code, html 5 encourages bad code. We'll end up with even more spagetti code.
How is seeking government regulation to strengthen a particular company's ability to do business not evil?
This will benefit many companies not just Google. By allowing open access any company can offer products and services using the airwaves. That is good not evil. What's evil is having only one company who controls what's available.
Why would a closed spectrum discourage innovation?
As someone else already answered, because it prevents others from creating things. If Ma Bell hadn't been required to allow devices other than their own, there wouldn't of been answering machines, faxes, or modems, and yes, I recall when 1200, heck, 300 baud modems were considered fast.
So they're basically buying a new market,and hoping to get enough other folks into to it to attract customers? Expensive and risky
Because there is demand for those airwaves, it isn't really risky. And if the buyer is required to offer those airwaves to others at wholesale prices, the price for the rights to those frequencies, won't be so high.
I know why we'd want it... but I don't undertsand it enough to know why Google would want it if they bought it.
Why would you plunk down a few billion to buy rights to something you have to let everyone use? I'm sure I'm missing something fundamental
Because it's another revenue source. Say I own the rights to the airwaves, but you come up with an application or device that uses those airwaves. I lease them to you, so you can run a business with you app or device. I can't do what you're doing, but you're lease payment goes to my bottomline.
Interesting. So, if a union goes on strike because of unsafe working conditions the scab replacements aren't being exploited? What if an independent board later determine that the working conditions were indeed hazardous. Were the scabs being exploited?
This is 2 different issues to me. First is unsafe working conditions. While as a Libertarian I generally don't like laws and regulations, I do support minimum safety standards. Then there's scabs, if there's enough work there's no need to be concerned about scabs. If there isn't enough work then the best way to change it is too create more jobs. Even in places with low employment, and therefore low wages, any job created helps those there. Jobs created create other jobs. Workers getting paid will spend the money they earn, be it on housing, food, or recreation. People willing and able to pay for housing means there's a market for houses, which creates a demand for construction workers. The workers need to eat creating demand for farmers to grow food, who may then hire farm workers. As more jobs are created, wages will rise. Employers will have to "bid" for employees thus paying them more, or giving them better benefits, as an inducement to work for them. With people getting paid more they spend more thus creating a cycle, more money creating more jobs, and with more jobs there's more money. It's not a zero sum game.
A person has to eat, if they're hungry enough they do about anything. Job or work conditions be damned(willingness to work and accept conditions). Taking advantage of this isn't exploitation?/shrug
See my last paragraph above. Or look at it another way. Especially in China most of those looking for work have come from rural areas, farms and such. Moving to the city they can get better pay than they were getting. However they still need to eat so those who stay on farms will see a rise in demand for food. Which translates into higher earnings potential.
If you live in the US, have you ever wondered why there are so many Mexican "illegal" aliens or immigrants? One reason is because of NAFTA and the massive subsidies the US government gives to US agribusinesses. With the billions of US taxpayer dollsrs given to these corporations, they are able to export food to Mexico and sale it there for less than Mexican farmers can grow food. This drives them off their farms. Once driven off farms they either go north and try to cross the US border, or they go into Mexican cities, which are already overflowing with exfarmers, driving those exfarmers north. It's a vicious cycle.
if the person willing to pay the most stonewalls by refusing to pay more than the second-highest bid, the seller has no better options, and thus should still accept the price (assuming it was higher than their minimum threshold). Why do you think this is unfair?
If this person keep stonewalling he or she's not willing to pay more. It's unfair when someone bids the highest but doesn't pay what they bid. If he or she knows s/he'll only have to pay the second highest bid amount all they'd have to do as soon as the first bid is made to bid an astromonical amount. Say a seller puts a minimum of $100 and the first bid is for $101. All someone else would have to do as soon as the first bid is made is to bid, say $10,000 or $100,000, or $1,000,000. They could do this because they know they'd never have to pay it and if the minimum is only $100 yet someone bids an astronomical amount no one else will bid.
By having the highest bidder only pay the second highest bid it's real easy to quickly shutdown all bidding.
On eBay, you type in a "maximum bid" of $100 for an item that has a starting price of $10 and no bids yet.
Why in the world would anyone say what their maximum bid is? And why would eBay ask for it, if eBay does?
Pay attention: I am not suggesting you bid higher than you are willing to pay. Contrary to what so many people here seem to think, there is absolutely no advantage to bidding higher than you are willing to pay in this system. (There are plenty of comments explaining why; there's no need for me to hash through it again.)
As I wrote above, under a system the winning bidder only pays the second highest amount there is an extreme reason to bid higher than you can pay, by bidding higher you shutdown bidding.
I want something different too. I dont want higher speed, I want more range. I want one or two megabits at 30 miles
Thirty miles is an alright start but I'd like at least 100 or 200 mile range. I love hiking and photography and would like to be able to upload, transmit my photos wirelessly to a server. While it may be possible to do so with a 30 mile range that would require a lot more tower transceivers.
If all commerce worked as you describe, the result would be that every purchase takes place at the highest price a buyer is willing to pay. Why should it be that way? There is the highest price a buyer is willing to pay, and the lowest price a seller is willing to accept. Why shouldn't the "fair market price" be somewhere in between those two values?
Not all commerce is an auction. At auctions only 1 or a small number of items are put on sale. Each item may be owned by a different person, who wants to get the best price they can. For large quantities of items a fixed retail store is more effiecent. The owner, seller, makes money by selling in quantity at 1 marked price. It would be expensive and tyme consuming for each item to be auctioned.
Is it not fair for the person willing to bid the highest to end up paying the second-highest bid, on the grounds that the seller cannot get a substantially higher bid through competition between buyers?
Generally no, whatever a person is willing to bid is what they should pay if they bid the highest. Don't bid higher than you're willing to pay!
You have outlined (almost exactly) my plans, I am also planning on a MacBook Pro (albeit not RSN)
I added "RSN" because I've been planning it for a long tyme. I don't work and am on disability. However my sister owes me a few thousand dollars, so I'm waiting for her to pay me.
Ah, I see the first link is to Canada Tibet Committee. I agree Tibetans are being exploited and persecuted by the Chinese. Because Tibetans aren't Chinese. The sovereign nation of Tibet was invaded and conquered by Mao's army in 1959. Free Tibet!. Now change "Chinese" to "United States" and the number of results increases from 1,160,000 to 1,770,000, an increase of more than 500,000. Does that mean there are more workers exploited in the US?
Walmart doesn't just buy from China to sale in the US, Walmart also has stores in China. In the not too distant future China will be Walmart's biggest market. It is partnering or buying Chinese retailers, Wal-Mart plots bid for Chinese retail giant. Chinese employees of Walmart are even unionizing.
Chinese who are employed in one of these factories make more than those who can't get a job at one
That doesn't mean they aren't being exploited. Work & safety conditions play a large part. Ask a coal miner.
You're right it doesn't mean they aren't being exploited, but if they are fighting to get those jobs I'd say they are very willing work and accept the work conditions, thus they aren't being exploited.
Maybe making suicide illegal somehow helps survivors such as insurance companies and creditors.
I don't know about all life insurance policies but some have clauses that if you kill yourself in the first X number of years the policy is forefitted, ie won't be paid. Creditors though have an interest in making sure the insurance was paid, so they can be paid.
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Taxes build the infrastructure (roads, schools, firehouses) that allow the markets to exist.
Taxes should not pay for all infrastructure, user fees should pay for some. Those roads for instance, they should be built and maintained with a user fee or tax on fuel, which we already pay when we get fuel. As for schools, firehouses, and some other things, property tax should pay for those.
FalconWhat exactly is wrong with promoting a regional economy instead of depending on a complex web of corrupt globalist ties?
Corrupt local politicians with guns? As long as I'm not harming anyone the government should have no say in how I live. If I have to have government approval all I am is a slave.
FalconYes, I know, it's protectionism, it's nationalism. But until you're willing to declare that we should all be a one world Government, protecting your own country and its people from being sucked dry economically, is a virtue. And if you believe we should be a one world Government, you're asking for much bigger horrors than protectionism and nationalism.
I both believe in international trade and in supporting the local economy. I buy imported stuff as well as local produce, actually as a member of two local coops I support local farmers as much as I can buy buying as much food produced locally, which the coops buy from themselves. As for "world government" I believe in as little government as possible, national or world. Most politics should be local, except when it interfers with liberty.
FalconI'm confused, are we only against protecting local markets when it's in the software/IT industry? It's bad that Europe is trying to place a duty on camera's made outside of Europe. It's good when the government takes action to prevent outsourcing software development, and Tech Suport to India and Brazil? What side of this issue am I supposed to be on?
No, it's all bad.
FalconIn the case of tariffs, the EU is attempting to encourage local manufacturing and reduce trade imbalances
If the EU rally wanted to correct for a trade imbalance then what they need to do is get rid of the 100s of billions of euros in subsidies given to European farmers. Because of these subsidies food grown in Europe can be exported to third world nations and sold there retail for less than farmers there can grow food. That's a big reason the WTO meeting in Geneva fell apart in the summer of 2006. India walked out because first world nations, the EU, Japan, and the US wouldn't cut farm subsidies. India has literally thousands of farmers committing suicide because they can't compeat with farmers who collect hugh subsidies. Slashing US farm subsidies to $13 billion a year is "unacceptable," a Bush administration official said on Wednesday. All these tariffs are is protectionism.
whereas airline "security" is not about making flying safer, but about social engineering, making people more accepting of micro-management from a nanny state, and introducing the perception of safety even though everyone knows that it won't do a lick of good.
Yeap, our overseer lords want us all to believe the only way to keep safe is by having a nanny state. What they're really doing is a power grab, they want to tell people how to live, and if the people won't then force them to live the way they say.
FalconIt's probably because they've got all that extra space in them (where the cassette goes) that a digital camera just doesn't have . It doesn't take a large explosive to do a whole lot of damage on an airplane.
Well since the GP said "my camera is not" and doesn't say what it is the camera could very well be enough space for explosives. I could take my film camera as well as the lenses for it and pack enough C4, semtex, or another plastique to bring down an airplane. My biggest lenses, which isn't big, is large enough to hold half a pound of C4 hollowed out. With a ultra wide or super telephoto lenses I could pack a lot more in the lense. And that's lenses just for a 35mm slr.
Falconauction. That means you can't shut down bidding with any of your bids, regardless of what they are -- because no one will see anyone's bids until the end. All bids are accepted, regardless of whether they beat the highest bid or not. When the auction ends, all bids for an item are examined, and the person who entered the highest bid is asked to pay the amount of the second-highest bid.
Ah, I don't recall you saying anything about a secret bid, though others did in other posts. I'd be more willing to accept the winning bidder only paying the second highest bid but only if everyone submits one sealed bid. However no online auctions I know of nor any of the auctions I've been to IRL have done this. And yes, I have been to auctions held in a physical location, the last one was an auction held by the US Customs.
If I could afford it I'd regularly or semi regularly attend more, buy low and sell high. Heck, if I could I'd even go to real estate auctions and bid on houses. Usually they are put up on auction either because of back taxes or foreclosures. In both cases the property is usually ransacked and damaged, so they sale low. With some tlc and fixups they can be put back on the market and sold for more than what was put into them. I knew someone who made a living do this.
Second, what happens if two people enter outrageous bids? The second-highest bid is still outrageous, and that means the highest bidder must pay an outrageous price. So entering an outrageous bid is very risky at best.
That only works with secret sealed bids, not when an auctioneer is in front calling out the highest bid so far and asking if another will bid higher. "I've got $100, any higher, will someone go higher?" "Sure, I bid $1000!"
Imagine an auction that has a minimum allowed bid of $10, and you are willing to pay up to $150 to win. Imagine further that you make an outrageous $1,000,000 bid. If the second-highest bid was $100, you will pay $100. But if you had entered a $150 bid, you would still only pay $100 in that case. So what is the advantage of entering the $1,000,000 bid? Nothing. However, if the second-highest bid turns out to be $200, you'll have to pay $200 -- more than you wanted to pay.
Obviously then you waited too long to bid. Auctioneer: We have a minimum bid of $100, do I hear $100? Bidder 1: $100. Bidder 2: I bid $10,000. Bidder 2 wins and only pays $100.
Or even worse, if someone else makes a $900,000 bid (trying to do the same thing you are doing), then the second-highest bid was $900,000 -- that means you will have to pay $900,000 for an item that you wanted to pay no more than $150 for.
Again, you waited too long to bid, see above.
FalconYeap, Thomas Jefferson warned of corporate challenges to government: "I hope we shall crush ... in its birth the aristocracy of our moneyed corporations, which dare already to challenge our government to a trial of strength and bid defiance to the laws of our country."
Great quote. Sucks I don't have mod points today. Can you source it for me?
Corporate Accountability Project. Thomas Jefferson: On Central Banking.
I also found these on where TJ denounces corporate power:
FalconThomas Jefferson: Against Corporate Power, Thomas Jefferson's Dream. Ask.com has more.
As I wrote above, under a system the winning bidder only pays the second highest amount there is an extreme reason to bid higher than you can pay, by bidding higher you shutdown bidding.
No, there is not. With eBay, if the starting bid was $100, and someone else has bid $101, and I then enter my maximum bid as $11,000, it won't display $11,000 as my real bid. It will enter a "real" bid of $102. If someone else then enters a maximum bid of $200, eBay would enter a bid for me of $201. And so on.
That may be the way it works on eBay but that's not how it works at live auctions. At a live auction you don't tell the auctioners what your max bid will be. Nor will they automatically raise your bid for you.
And as regards auction winners only paying the second highest bid, as I said if someone wants to they can easily shutdown bidding by bidding a ridiculus amount. And you haven't offered a rejoiner. All you say, down at the bottom of your post is that others already answered that, can you provide a link to these posts? I haven't come across any posts that says anything about what I bring up with high bids.
FalconThere's no way that all of the protocols and all of the standards that the Internet relies upon were built without Microsoft. And there's no way that the Internet would ever have been used by any business, government, or institution of higher learning before Microsoft made sure that every Wintel desktop would have a browser on it.
Hah, I saw businesses on the net before MS ever "discovered the web". Back then I even had more bookmarks for Gopher servers than web servers.
FalconI'm a participant in the HTML Working Group [w3.org] and I can tell you that this is incorrect. You're thinking of XHTML2, not HTML 5. XHTML2 has the XML parser strictness and pages will fail to display if they're not well-formed. HTML 5 is going the complete opposite direction, assuming that people will code poorly and defining failure modes for browser vendors to follow when that happens.
Which is why html 5 is bad. Unlike xhtml which is supposed to force you to write valid code, html 5 encourages bad code. We'll end up with even more spagetti code.
Falconand believe that communism would be viable, with enough effort
Funny, if you don't like governments, well most of them, why would you like the biggest government?
I'm sure that many people would like to have a completely free spectrum
Under communism, there would be no free spectrum. The government would own it all.
which anyone could use for their devices.
Nobody would own devices, any devices that existed would be owned by government.
FalconHow is seeking government regulation to strengthen a particular company's ability to do business not evil?
This will benefit many companies not just Google. By allowing open access any company can offer products and services using the airwaves. That is good not evil. What's evil is having only one company who controls what's available.
FalconWhy would a closed spectrum discourage innovation?
As someone else already answered, because it prevents others from creating things. If Ma Bell hadn't been required to allow devices other than their own, there wouldn't of been answering machines, faxes, or modems, and yes, I recall when 1200, heck, 300 baud modems were considered fast.
FalconSo they're basically buying a new market,and hoping to get enough other folks into to it to attract customers? Expensive and risky
Because there is demand for those airwaves, it isn't really risky. And if the buyer is required to offer those airwaves to others at wholesale prices, the price for the rights to those frequencies, won't be so high.
FalconI know why we'd want it... but I don't undertsand it enough to know why Google would want it if they bought it.
Why would you plunk down a few billion to buy rights to something you have to let everyone use? I'm sure I'm missing something fundamental
Because it's another revenue source. Say I own the rights to the airwaves, but you come up with an application or device that uses those airwaves. I lease them to you, so you can run a business with you app or device. I can't do what you're doing, but you're lease payment goes to my bottomline.
FalconInteresting. So, if a union goes on strike because of unsafe working conditions the scab replacements aren't being exploited? What if an independent board later determine that the working conditions were indeed hazardous. Were the scabs being exploited?
This is 2 different issues to me. First is unsafe working conditions. While as a Libertarian I generally don't like laws and regulations, I do support minimum safety standards. Then there's scabs, if there's enough work there's no need to be concerned about scabs. If there isn't enough work then the best way to change it is too create more jobs. Even in places with low employment, and therefore low wages, any job created helps those there. Jobs created create other jobs. Workers getting paid will spend the money they earn, be it on housing, food, or recreation. People willing and able to pay for housing means there's a market for houses, which creates a demand for construction workers. The workers need to eat creating demand for farmers to grow food, who may then hire farm workers. As more jobs are created, wages will rise. Employers will have to "bid" for employees thus paying them more, or giving them better benefits, as an inducement to work for them. With people getting paid more they spend more thus creating a cycle, more money creating more jobs, and with more jobs there's more money. It's not a zero sum game.
A person has to eat, if they're hungry enough they do about anything. Job or work conditions be damned(willingness to work and accept conditions). Taking advantage of this isn't exploitation? /shrug
See my last paragraph above. Or look at it another way. Especially in China most of those looking for work have come from rural areas, farms and such. Moving to the city they can get better pay than they were getting. However they still need to eat so those who stay on farms will see a rise in demand for food. Which translates into higher earnings potential.
If you live in the US, have you ever wondered why there are so many Mexican "illegal" aliens or immigrants? One reason is because of NAFTA and the massive subsidies the US government gives to US agribusinesses. With the billions of US taxpayer dollsrs given to these corporations, they are able to export food to Mexico and sale it there for less than Mexican farmers can grow food. This drives them off their farms. Once driven off farms they either go north and try to cross the US border, or they go into Mexican cities, which are already overflowing with exfarmers, driving those exfarmers north. It's a vicious cycle.
Falconif the person willing to pay the most stonewalls by refusing to pay more than the second-highest bid, the seller has no better options, and thus should still accept the price (assuming it was higher than their minimum threshold). Why do you think this is unfair?
If this person keep stonewalling he or she's not willing to pay more. It's unfair when someone bids the highest but doesn't pay what they bid. If he or she knows s/he'll only have to pay the second highest bid amount all they'd have to do as soon as the first bid is made to bid an astromonical amount. Say a seller puts a minimum of $100 and the first bid is for $101. All someone else would have to do as soon as the first bid is made is to bid, say $10,000 or $100,000, or $1,000,000. They could do this because they know they'd never have to pay it and if the minimum is only $100 yet someone bids an astronomical amount no one else will bid.
By having the highest bidder only pay the second highest bid it's real easy to quickly shutdown all bidding.
On eBay, you type in a "maximum bid" of $100 for an item that has a starting price of $10 and no bids yet.
Why in the world would anyone say what their maximum bid is? And why would eBay ask for it, if eBay does?
Pay attention: I am not suggesting you bid higher than you are willing to pay. Contrary to what so many people here seem to think, there is absolutely no advantage to bidding higher than you are willing to pay in this system. (There are plenty of comments explaining why; there's no need for me to hash through it again.)
As I wrote above, under a system the winning bidder only pays the second highest amount there is an extreme reason to bid higher than you can pay, by bidding higher you shutdown bidding.
FalconI want something different too. I dont want higher speed, I want more range. I want one or two megabits at 30 miles
Thirty miles is an alright start but I'd like at least 100 or 200 mile range. I love hiking and photography and would like to be able to upload, transmit my photos wirelessly to a server. While it may be possible to do so with a 30 mile range that would require a lot more tower transceivers.
FalconIf all commerce worked as you describe, the result would be that every purchase takes place at the highest price a buyer is willing to pay. Why should it be that way? There is the highest price a buyer is willing to pay, and the lowest price a seller is willing to accept. Why shouldn't the "fair market price" be somewhere in between those two values?
Not all commerce is an auction. At auctions only 1 or a small number of items are put on sale. Each item may be owned by a different person, who wants to get the best price they can. For large quantities of items a fixed retail store is more effiecent. The owner, seller, makes money by selling in quantity at 1 marked price. It would be expensive and tyme consuming for each item to be auctioned.
Is it not fair for the person willing to bid the highest to end up paying the second-highest bid, on the grounds that the seller cannot get a substantially higher bid through competition between buyers?
Generally no, whatever a person is willing to bid is what they should pay if they bid the highest. Don't bid higher than you're willing to pay!
FalconYou have outlined (almost exactly) my plans, I am also planning on a MacBook Pro (albeit not RSN)
I added "RSN" because I've been planning it for a long tyme. I don't work and am on disability. However my sister owes me a few thousand dollars, so I'm waiting for her to pay me.
FalconA quick google turns up 1.1 million links for the phrase "chinese exploited workers"
Ah, I see the first link is to Canada Tibet Committee. I agree Tibetans are being exploited and persecuted by the Chinese. Because Tibetans aren't Chinese. The sovereign nation of Tibet was invaded and conquered by Mao's army in 1959. Free Tibet!. Now change "Chinese" to "United States" and the number of results increases from 1,160,000 to 1,770,000, an increase of more than 500,000. Does that mean there are more workers exploited in the US?
Go take a gander at Frontline's Is Wal-Mart good for America video
Walmart doesn't just buy from China to sale in the US, Walmart also has stores in China. In the not too distant future China will be Walmart's biggest market. It is partnering or buying Chinese retailers, Wal-Mart plots bid for Chinese retail giant. Chinese employees of Walmart are even unionizing.
Chinese who are employed in one of these factories make more than those who can't get a job at one
That doesn't mean they aren't being exploited. Work & safety conditions play a large part. Ask a coal miner.
You're right it doesn't mean they aren't being exploited, but if they are fighting to get those jobs I'd say they are very willing work and accept the work conditions, thus they aren't being exploited.
FalconMaybe making suicide illegal somehow helps survivors such as insurance companies and creditors.
I don't know about all life insurance policies but some have clauses that if you kill yourself in the first X number of years the policy is forefitted, ie won't be paid. Creditors though have an interest in making sure the insurance was paid, so they can be paid.
FalconBut then I remembered that suicide is considered a crime in some, if not most of, western countries (like mine, Spain). Too late.
If you killed yourself, you'd deprive Franco of that pleasure.
FalconI DO have problems with software patents. Software should not be patented, neither should business methods.
Falcon