I've studied economics long enough to say this with confidence: you're on the right track in some respects, but confused in others.
Socialists believe in the inherent dignity of individual man as the core tenet to a successful society. In this, they view government as a tool of the people, a necessary evil entrusted to deliver liberation to common man, often oppressed by those with power. Many Socialists question the role of government altogether, believing that the natural state of man is to live free from all forms of hierarchical rule.
I long ago defined for myself capitalism, socialism, and communism in *purely* economic terms, as follows:
* capitalism -- "An economic concept of civilization that is based on the private ownership (and control) of the means of production." (from the mises.org definition; the best one IMO). I define capitalism as "an economic system in which the factors (inputs) and results (outputs) of the economy are produced, owned, and managed by one or more private individuals, with minimal government involvement".
* socialism -- "government ownership of the means of production" (from the stormy.org definition). I define socialism as "an economic system in which the factors (inputs) and results (outputs) of the economy are produced, owned, and distributed by a government over which there may be any possible level of democratic control."
* communism -- "an economic theory or system based on the ownership of all property by the community as a whole; the final stage of socialism as formulated by Marx, Engels, Lenin and others characterized by a classless and stateless society and the equal distribution of economic goods" (from the northave.org definition). I define communism as "an economic system in which the factors (inputs) and results (outputs) of the economy are produced, owned, and managed by citizens of a community (hence the term "communism") collectively and equally, with minimal or no government involvement."
Socialism IS NOT Communism, although Communism certainly stems from socialist principles. This incorrect yet popular belief of many uneducated people, mainly in the US arose from certain agendas being forwarded under a fear of Communism.
True. Socialism requires government (see my definition, derived from Google's search, above); communism abolishes it. Under socialism, a government manages the economy for the presumed-too-stupid-to-do-so masses. Under communism, the people manage it absent the govn't, collectively. Wealth is owned and controlled equally by each individual under communism, but is owned and controlled collectively. Nobody has any more right than the other to use property (hence, you get things like the "Tragedy of the Commons" effect -- public property being overused, because nobody has incentive to care about it, unlike with private property).
Communism believes basically in rule of the proletariat, by force.
Yeah, the city government in Chicago weren't corrupt. And the corruption at our federal level is nothing compared to many county and city governments in Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana,... The corruption in Florida was so bad that we passed a 'Sunshine Law' to prevent out-of-the-public-eye meetings of government decision makers. There is some question as to whether three city councilmen are allowed to have breakfast together.
As a Chicagoan, yes, Chicago is, and has always been, extremely corrupt. Mayor Daley here deserves a hot fire poker jabbed in his eyes.
And that's the point the grandparent was making: the more limited and smaller the government is, the easier it is to watch. The easier it is to watch, the less-corrupt it can become, because the ratio of citizens' eyes to political actions rises.
Moreover, there's a point implicit in your own argument you're missing. The fact that corruption occurs at all levels of government, perhaps particularly as the level becomes increasingly-local (much of the problem is that we in the U.S. focus more on national politics now than state or local politics - thank you FDR and the New Deal), is why laws against corrupt politics become ever more stringent -- that is, as govn't corruption rises, we have more incentive to create laws against corrupt politics, and as government shrinks, it becomes easier to root out that corruption and determine the laws to be written against future ill political dealings (like your "Sunshine Law").
Our national politicians are pandering to corporate interests, but most of this is above board, "We worship your ability to earn money, let us kiss your ass." rather than actual corruption (aka pay-for-performance). As long as campaign contribution caps are not being violated, is it right to call this 'corruption'?
In broad terms, political corruption is the misuse of public office for private gain. All forms of government are susceptible in practice to political corruption. Degrees of corruption vary greatly, from minor uses of influence and patronage to do and return favours, to institutionalised bribery and beyond. The end-point of political corruption is kleptocracy, literally rule by thieves, where even the external pretence of honesty is abandoned.
Our politicians use their position to return favors for businesses. That is corruption, according to the above definition. The U.S., by this definition, in some ways could even be argued to be a kleptocracy -- there are points at which we don't even have a pretense of honesty in our government...
This is fascism, by definition
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Dutch Pass iPod Tax
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· Score: 2, Informative
Taxing the people for the benefit of industry? That is fascism, by definition: government and business working together (the U.S. military-industrial complex is another example).
Of course, fascism is easier in socialist nations, when you have a large, powerful, well-funded-by-already-high-taxes government to implement such fascist policy... A more-limited, smaller government is easier to watch over and thus, easier to prevent from doing such things...
Half of candidates we phone screen cannot give a convincing answer to "what is the different between a linked list and an array?"
You're kidding, right? I'm a senior at a 4th-rate CS school, and my GPA in the CS dept. isn't great. But even I can answer this question:
* Array: A fixed-size contiguous allocation of memory containing a number of bytes into which values may be stored. Often used to contain character strings, particularly in C and ASM.
* Linked list: A variably-sized data structure containing a set of interconnected nodes (which may be singly- or doubly-linked) containing a minimum of 2 items per node: the value of the data to be stored, and a pointer to the next node. Useful for creating a list into which nodes (and therefore, the values to be stored) may be inserted and deleted as necessary. Examples include the vector class of C++'s STL and Java.
There. Where's my job offer?:-) (actually, I already have a FT job lined-up, but am always open to other offers)
Well yeah, maybe in *engineering* companies. Google, Boeing, IBM, Microsoft, Cisco, etc.. Even then, it's hard to say.
But companies which view IT and engineering as a liability rather than a revenue stream -- i.e., financial services, healthcare, etc. -- those companies aren't going to let their geeks have any more say than necessary.
Look, this "population growth is a problem" myth has been around for decades. It's also wrong.
See the Julian Simon vs. Paul Ehrlich bet. Basic supply/demand theory suggests that if there is an increasing demand for a limited supply of resources, the price on those resources ought to rise, correct? This was the premise by which biologist Ehrlich made a bet with economist Simon -- that increasing population growth increases the demand on a limited set of resources, and thus the price of those resources will rise.
But Ehrlich was wrong. Prices of a basket of commodities in the bet decreased quite markedly over 10 years. Why? Technology and efficiency gains. Simon won the bet: prices of each of the 5 bet-on commodities fell, despite the population around the world rising over the same period.
Why do some enviros continue playing the overpopulation card? Who knows. Economic illiteracy and retardation, I guess. IMO, a a more-legitimate environmental challenge to solve is that of urban sprawl and the crowding-out effect it has on natural animal habitats... and those of air and water pollution...
Yours is the most paternalistic, "father knows best" bullshit post I've read in a long time.
Who decides who knows best? You? Steve Ballmer? President Bush?
Give me a break. The public, for all its stupidities and flaws and elections of people like Bush & Co., do a better job of understanding the world than you give it credit for, and it is partly for that reason that the U.S. has been such a stable and powerful nation over its 229 year history.
These breaches are inevitable. That's why, as I've said for a while, it doesn't really matter if an organization -- whether it's Google or the government -- promises to "do no evil".
Even an organization run by saints -- and no organization is run by saints -- can be breached.
I think you're mis-directing fault here.
If the Google founders say they intend to "do no evil", then does failing to secure their network sufficiently count as being evil? You and I agree that these breaches are inevitable, so the answer, I think, would be "no, unless they were extremely negligent about their security" (e.g. running a database server on unpatched Windows boxes without firewalls, etc.)...
So, instead, the evil must come from somewhere else. Like the attacker?:)
To clarify & summarize the above: just because they say "do no evil" doesn't mean that getting broken-into is "doing evil"...
Anyway, I agree w/ the rest of your post. Given the inevitable nature of break-ins, the amount of info companies collect should be *lessened*, not increased. Yet we see this w/ credit card companies -- the 3-digit CCV code on the back of the card, use of SSNs "for verification", and so forth. We see it at banks: checking government-issued IDs in order to open an account (this is actually a PATRIOT Act requirement, i.e. the fault of the government), and the same use of govn't-issued IDs just to buy something with a credit card at various shops. The slow-but-sure move towards biometrics. And so on. From a statistical standpoint, it's good to have more correlations like that, but it also means there's more data available to be stolen when those breeches happen, as the always, inevitably will.
What personal info is collected certainly must be encrypted, and that info should be as limited as possible. But as CPU speed and HDD space rises while the prices of both along with RAM drops, I doubt this is going to be the case in the future...
Actually, I would argue that OSS is about as free-market a system as any I know of (I say that as a personally *very* pro-free-market-minded person).
Sure, you might share your code with somebody else. But you still hold the copyright to the code, correct? So long as you hold the copyright to your code, that code is still *your* property. It is your private property which you're allowing somebody else to use, voluntarily.
OSS is no more communist than, say, a neighbor having a party on a warm summer afternoon, cooking up hamburgers and hotdogs and allowing everybody else to come into his yard, eat, play vollyball, and so on - perhaps for the optional contribution of one's own dish (Jello, casserole, rolls, brownies, etc.). It's very much a private, free-market exchange.
The only way things get confused is when govn't agencies start contributing code, such as the NSA's contributions to the Linux kernel. There you have an example of both privately-copywritten code from various individuals mingling with publicly-owned code written by the government (really, "the people", by way of tax money). That confuses things considerably. But the more code comes from private sources, the more of a zero-price (note: *not* zero-cost!) capitalist transaction it becomes. The kernel has become large enough that it's no longer a purely-private affair, but AFAIK, remains still largely one -- even from contributors in other nations.
So long as the private property rights of copyright law remain in place (because all of capitalism requires at least laws to protect the property rights of the property owners/creators/controllers; property rights are capitalism's bedrock foundation), I see no real contradiction between OSS and the capitalist economic system... Indeed, the GPL itself would be null and void without copyright law, i.e., in a system of communism.
That fact makes Microsoft's contention that "OSS is communist" considerably-harder. A load of BS, actually. They're just angry because they know in the long-run, they can't compete with a labor market which is willing to work for peanuts (at least for now; I'm not convinced it's a trend that can hold up very well once major players have been out-competed by "free labor").
Perhaps some OSS promoters are communists in their own ideology; many certainly seem to be, IME. Perhaps they even believe they are promoting communism by releasing OSS! IMO, howver, just the opposite would in fact be true...
(Communism, however, is a very bad idea. Actually, there have been very few instances of real ocmmunism in the world. What the world witnessed in Soviet Russia, East Germany, Maoist China, Vietnam, present-day North Korea, and so forth -- is, in actual governmental structure, socialism, not communism. Communism would exist absent (or at least mostly-so) of government; socialism, by its very definition, means that the govn't owns and controls the output of the economy -- that was (and is, in N. Korea's case, though even *they* are slowly liberalizing their economy) *precisely* the case found in those nations. And look where they wound up, and look at what they did to their people... Communism fails for the same reason socialism does though -- lack of incentive. That's the reason the 2 instances of communism I'm aware of -- early America, and certain villages in Maoist China -- failed so badly and starved people so horribly...)
"Google's only agenda is to get you where you want to be."
No, wrong. SO wrong. Google's agenda is to MAKE MONEY.
And Google does this by doing what, exactly? By getting you where you want to be, perhaps?
That is the very soul of their business; that is how they achieve their end-goal of making money. Without a quality service, Google wouldn't be even 1% as big as they are now. Just look at all the spam companies, ad-link pages, and so on -- these are companies which sell smoke up your skirt. And where are their owners?
They're merely providing for their families, not rolling in billions of dollars like Google's founders.
I do agree with the thrust of your argument though that eventually, Google's service quality will decline and the company as a whole will fall to some new competitor, in part because as a publicly-traded company, Sergey Brin and Larry Page will have a decreasing level of control over the company. That's often the way it goes.
Here's roughly the journalistic history regarding flying cars:
* Popular Mechanics (Popular Moronics?), circa 1950: "Flying cars in everybody's driveway by 1980!"
circa 1980: "Flying cars in everybody's driveway by 2000!"
circa 1997: "Flying cars in everybody's driveway by 2020!"
* Slashdot, circa 2000: "Flying cars in everybody's driveway by 2005!"
today, 2005: "Flying cars in everybody's driveway Real Soon Now!"
Uh huh, riiiiiight... and in 20 years, we'll have research bases on Mars and commercial space travel to the moon, I suppose? Oh wait, Popular Mechanics was saying we'd have those too in 2000. And futurists wonder why they aren't taken seriously...
BTW, did anybody actually *look* at the AirScooter? It has no windshield. No roof. No A/C. No radio. No whole-vehicle parachute in case the rotors fail. No storage space for even a briefcase, let alone a weekend's worth of gear. No space for passengers; no space to strap in a baby. Without such things, I absolutely guarantee you it will never be popular with the public, ever. Given its current design, it cannot ever be commercially-viable as private, daily-driver transportation. Its only hope is as a sport plane for the niche market that likes flying but doesn't want to spend a fortune doing it.
And, if you add such things, it adds to the weight, and guess what? Gain too much weight on the plane and eventually you need an FAA-approved pilot's license! Doh. Not to mention that the price of the vehicle increases (which isn't to say that the wealthy wouldn't adopt it first, getting over the hurdle of expensiveness, ushering in economies-of-scale and thereby lowering the cost of production such that more of us in the "masses" can afford them too -- most autos' safety systems have followed exactly this trend. But I don't think it's likely either).
Besides, it's a helicopter in its design (meaning it's exempt from the FAA's recently-implemented "FAA Sport Pilot and Light-Sport Aircraft Rule" on the basis of complexity). For those to ever be widely-used as personal vehicles, there needs to be considerable area around it for takeoff/landing, so the rotors don't kill people. Think you could land one in the width of a car lane in a parking garage? Given the 14' dia. rotors, I don't think so.
The idea of flying cars is damn seductive, but I greatly doubt it's ever going to "take off" in my lifetime (and I've got probably 60-80 years to go); there's too much inertia in the use of gas-powered, land-roaming automobiles and too many dangers and complexities that come with the use of flying cars to make them sufficiently idiot-proof for mass-consumption.
I think it's reasonable. Ideally-abominable, but in reality, reasonable.
With each new virus or worm, the number of possible matches for AV software increases by 1. I don't run AV software, but last I checked when I saw a copy running, there were something like 60,000 definitions. That's a *lot* of CPU time (even if the software doesn't check against every definition, which, since most AV software uses heuristics, it doesn't).
So viruses have become a fact of life, like it or not. Same goes for adware, on 9x/ME/NT/2k/XP/2k3 boxes, and that seems like a similar problem to virus/worm checking. Firewall? With broadband speeds rising, you've got an increasing number of packets coming in to check. And then there's spam-filtering. And IPSEC and SSL encryption (particularly in business).
These are things that all have to run basically in the background, and which these days ought to be on every machine. We have a case of increasing complexity running in the background. This ain't the days of DOS anymore kids; love it or hate it, the battle against crapware and maliciousness on the 'net has become a fact of life, and CPU time now has to be devoted to it.
Didn't people complain about how inefficient game engine code must have been getting back in 1996 or so, when 3D accelerators started making their way into the consumer market? Well, same thing now, except that we're dealing with the human nature to produce crap and destroy things.
Adding a second core isn't an efficiency improvement, and nor is it good for anybody if we're using it to combat crap. Actually, it's almost a classic case of the broken window fallacy... And yet, the reality is that this stuff will exist, so we must deal with it...
but it seems like you're implying the end-users must see ads and that's that.
I might've come off that way, but that wasn't my intention... Certainly the site operator can eat the costs, rather than his readers (that's how most individual's websites are run after all), because typically the cost is pretty low for a site with little traffic...
My post was mostly referring to corporate-information sites though -- newspaper or TV media sites, for example... Those, and heavily-trafficked sites (like Slashdot). Those sites have big-time bandwidth costs, server costs, etc., and somehow, those costs have to be recouped. Because they aren't going to eat the bills themselves, they're going to offload the costs onto their viewers, via ads or some form of micropayments or subscriptions (or personal information sales - register w/ the site, enter your name/address/etc. and receive junk mail and spam in return).
There is an oral contract between you and the restaurant in agreement to get food. When you order your sandwich, you're asking them to prepare you something of value and expend their valuable time.
Time is money and the ingredients for the sandwich cost money, therefore, you're a cost to them until you pay up. I would bet that the ordering of any food or drink constitutes an oral contract for a good (food) and service (food preparation).
IANAL, but it seems only fair (to all parties) that any private form of so-called "social contract" is nonsense.
I signed no contract saying that I would be bound to watch advertising in my browser or on TV. It's "just there", and until the advent of AdBlock and TiVo, I didn't have a say in the matter on most channels or most websites -- the advertising was rammed down my throat, and my only option was to flip the channel or find another, ad-free website.
But the fact is, TANSTAAFL. If you want "free" content, you'll have to *pay* for it somehow. PBS and NPR used to be basically ad-free, but now both have the occasional corporate sponsor, because people don't donate in quite sufficient-enough amounts to keep them afloat. Yet, they are still *mostly* ad-free. But if we wanted them totally ad-free, we have to pony up.
Same will go for our currently ad-supported websites. That's why I personally don't block the ads on sites I like, like Slashdot (though not The Economist, because they use ad.doubleclick.net, which shows up everywhere and it's far-easier to just block http://*.doubleclick.net/* than to make exceptions for each site). Sites I don't care about or which have craploads of ads (*looks at IGN*) -- sorry, you're gonna hit AdBlock.
Sooner or later, we'll have to find some other way to fund websites. Whether it'll be via advertisers' cleverness in getting around AdBlock (somehow) or via a system of micropayments or subscriptions (like with The Economist, Wall Street Journal, and other high-end newspapers and magazines), remains to be seen.
Although I didn't mention it, I also have the same trepidation about trusting the CIA, for the same reasons you describe. It's very difficult to trust an agency which primarily lies and kills people (even though IIRC, it was originally intended solely as an intelligence/spy agency, not an agency of active intervention in other countries' affairs, though, that charter clearly didn't last long). I don't know of any other well-organized source for economic info like that. Nationmaster is cool, but most of the economic stats they use there appear to comes from - you guessed it - the CIA World Factbook.:-/
Do you know if The Economist's online subscription gives access to their compilation of the raft of economic stats that the CIA does? (I've considered subscribing, and I was *thisclose* to subscribing last Sept. when they had their $30 off discount)...
I was in Savannah, the video presentation had an actor pretending to be its founder, James Edward Oglethorpe. The real Oglethorpe was a slave trader and showed no signs of contrition during his life. Yet the actor pronounced the hilarious line: "I now see that what I did was wrong. Savannah is much better as a free, multi-cultural town". This kind of revisionism would make Chairman Mao proud.
Indeed, that's a pretty funny (albeit sad) piece of revisionist history...
White Americans may like to sugar-coat their history but the rest of us prefer to confront ours no matter how bad.
Just FYI, that is a highly racist comment... (now, I'm a thick-skinned guy, so I'm not especially offended by it. I'm not offended by much of anything in terms of peoples' speech, online or otherwise...)
You're suggesting that "all X Americans do Y", where:
X = race Y = action
i.e., that "all white Americans sugar-coat their history" and that "all non-white Americans prefer their history unfiltered." It's a claim that all people of a given race (white people) do something.
But as most statistical surveys of any population will show, all people do *not* do whatever is suggested; not all whites like their history sugar-coated (though clearly many do), and not all non-whites like their history unfiltered (though many do).
Now, were you to say "[many or most] white Americans sugar-coat their history", that technically wouldn't be racist, b/c it allows for outlier white Americans who don't sugar-coat their history.
Basic statistics courses (combined with actual real-world data of a variety of surveys) refute pretty much all racist ideas, actually... (unless they're self-referential, e.g. "all caucasian people fit the caucasion race profile" or "all native Americans fit the native American race profile", etc.. But those are obviously worthless statistics!)
BTW, I'm with you on preferring unfiltered history... It's quite-obvious that America's history is littered with hundreds of years of slavery, and to this day has an undercurrent of racism that is rarely-discussed (out of politeness and prevention of racial violence, I suspect. Personally, I wish we could all have a nice, polite discussion of race amongst people of all races in the same room (kind of like you and I are doing here, really!). Maybe we could come to understand each other better, assuming we could all stay calm and open-minded on the subject. IME, it happens to a very-limited extent in some college communications classrooms, but for the time being, I just don't see it happening on a wider, national scale...:-( ).
I don't live in the south, so I guess I don't have the culture (??) to understand why they're so defensive of the confederacy, of their plantation-owners who owned slaves, etc., but for some reason, as my northern born & raised friends presently in the south tell me, they just don't like facing the fact that owning other people is a moral crime which was committed primarily by white Americans until the end of the Civil War.
The sign of a truly great man is one who rises above his environment.
Indeed. But some would use that argument against, say, poor black people living in poverty-ridden areas, such as to say that their environment should have little bearing on their outcome in life; that is, that those black people are poor because they didn't try hard enough -- not because their schools were underfunded, because of poverty-aggravated gang violence, and so on.
So, the wholly politically-incorrect question to ask (at least, for a white guy like myself), if we hold that people should be equal under the law and in the eyes of society (and I believe this is an *extremely* worthwhile goal; the law *ought* to be color-blind, even if historically it hasn't been) is: do we blame both Jefferson and those poor blacks for fail
Sweden is quite socialist and is richer per capita than the US ($38 760 in Sweden to $36 620 in the US according to The Economist's World in 2005).
Do we have the same World in 2005 publication? Mine shows Sweden's GDP per head is $43,480 (page 89), the U.S.'s $41,530 (page 92). (Switzerland, a less-socialist nation than Sweden, but moreso than the U.S., beats both, with a per-capita GDP of $51,490).
Of course, looking at the CIA World Factbook, we find that the U.S. has a per-capita GDP of $37,800 (2003 estimate), vs. Sweden's $26,800, and Switzerland's $32,700. So the question is which source do we rely upon: the CIA, or the Economist Intelligence Unit (which compiles such data for The Economist)? IMO, that's a tough call. The Economist's figures are newer though, and I've never had any beefs with their figures, so I'm inclined to go by theirs...
(I am curious now how this discrepancy occurred... I greatly doubt GDP figures for each nation shot up so much that per-capita GDP in Switzerland rose by 60% in only 1 year!:-) My guess is that different methods of determining GDP were used, and the simple division of getting a per-capita figure produced such greatly-different values.)
I also think you may be confusing the modern day definition of socialism with Marxism.
I doubt it. I define socialism by strict economic definition, absent political/social influences. I define socialism as follows: "an economic system in which the factors (inputs) and results (outputs) of the economy are produced, owned, and distributed by a government over which there may be any possible level of democratic control."
Marxism is really the step of Marx's theory that deals with the workers of the world overthrowing the capitalist class and creating a classless, communist (i.e. wealth is owned and shared equally) economy.
America did awfully well under "socialist" Roosevelt in the 1930s. FDR's New Deal dragged America out of the Depression.
Also, it's worth noting that more-respectable economists (like Nobel prize-winning Milton Friedman) have made it mainstream thought -- mainstream enough to be taught in undergrad. Monetary Policy classes, at least -- that government mismanagement, primarily by the Federal Reserve, exacerbated the bank failures of 1929-1933, turning what would have been a severe recession into the Great Depression that we now know it as. See also Friedman's A Monetary History of the United States: 1867-1960, or any of his popular books (Capitalism and Freedom or Free to Choose).
It's a well-respected enough assessment that even Paul Krugman (whom you cite (below) and whom I'm not especially a fan of) is cited in the above AEI article (I admit they're a biased source, but any source in the social sciences is biased. In any case, the article is still worth reading) as noting "Nowadays, practically the whole spectrum of economists, from Milton Friedman leftward, agrees that the Great Depression was brought on by a collapse of effective demand, and that the Federal Reserve should have fought the slump with large injections of money."
Whether FDR's policies got us *out* of the govn'ts
"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal" - American slave owner
On the surface, it *is* hypocritical that Thomas Jefferson would say we are created equal (under the law), but own slaves.
But that was the society back then. That was the environment in which he lived (and after all, people *are* affected by the environments in which they live, are they not?).
Have you ever read books about Jefferson's life, or visited his Monticello home (now a walkable historical museum)? In those and there you will find that Jefferson actually *wanted* to free his slaves, and he wrote about the tragedy of slavery actually quite a bit, and in fact argued for the prohibition of slave-owning in the American territories. But he knew that if he freed his slaves, other, less-sympathetic people would capture them (even though they were legally-free) and treat them far-worse than Jefferson did. So he used his home as sort of a shelter for those lucky enough to make it into his custody. There are records at his home suggesting that his slaves actually were not hateful of Jefferson, unlike other slave-owners they had been with previously...
Jefferson is also well-known to have held the opinion that we should've sent all the black people back to Africa (a view now held with a derisive connotation), because in Jefferson's view, the racial conflicts were going to cause some nasty rifts in this country, because the abuses towards blacks were so bad. And he was quite right -- the slavery of America's past has basically torn this country in two, along racial lines, despite laws (notably the 1965 Civil Rights Act) to bandage up that bloody history.
Would sending blacks back to Africa have solved the problem? Not entirely (people would've complained from Africa about it), but at least had we done so in the 1700s or early 1800s there would've been a *lot* less violence and anger between whites and blacks as resulted from the events occurring since Jefferson's time... It would've prevented the entire chain of racist events our history shows from Jefferson's time to the present.
Not that any of this matters to somebody (like you) who would rather look ideally towards the reality of the past and criticize those who didn't have the comfortable environment of modern society or the convenience of 20/20 hindsight for doing things which in one time period were acceptable, but today are considered quite wrong...
Of course, in 100 or 200 years (assuming the human race survives that long), people will look back on things we've done, and say that we were wrong. Perhaps we are, but we don't know it now. Does that make us bad people? Hardly; people are imperfect - we do what we can with what we have in the time in which we live.
So why hypocritically apply such a standard to a somebody who is as indisputably a legendary historical figure as Thomas Jefferson -- as your quoting usage does?
There must doubtless be an unhappy influence on the manners of our people produced by the existence of slavery among us. The whole commerce between master and slave is a perpetual exercise of the most boisterous passions, the most unremitting despotism on the one part, and degrading submissions on the other....
But it is impossible to be temperate and to pursue this subject through the various considerations of policy, of morals, of history natural and civil. We must be contented to hope they will force their way into every one's mind. I think a change already perceptible, since the origin of the present revolution. The spirit of the master is abating, that of the slave rising from the dust, his condition mollifying, the way I hope preparing, under the auspices of heaven, for a total emancipation, and that this is disposed,
I'm sure I'll be modded down for this, but it ought to be said.
The current version of the GPL, which was last updated in 1991, fails to trigger the open source license if a company alters the code, but does not distribute its software through a CD or floppy disk...the [current] rule does not apply to companies that distribute software as a service, such as Google and eBay, or even dual-license companies like Sleepycat.
Um, whatever happened to the RMS view that the GPL makes software "free as in freedom"? This rule would effectively make that line "free as in free to not be free from paying the FSF!"
Here we see the dangerous crossroads between freedom-to-use software and the ability-to-sell software perspectives.
RMS & Moglen can choose the former, allowing more freedom for end-users, including commercial users. Or they can demand payment, at the expense of the end-user's freedom to use that money in some other way.
This rule will *clearly* stifle adoption of GPL'd software in the business world (because it costs more), and will quickly add another line on the Windows vs. Linux TCO reports Microsoft pays for (which some managers blindly believe).
Me? I'm undecided. On one hand, this seems like a dumb move. A fee shouldn't be charged from providing a service to people using GPLv3'd software; any fees should be imposed somewhere else in the license (e.g. "if you are a commercial user, then the source and binaries are not open or available to you without paying a fee, but for non-commercial and educational use, they are free", etc.).
OTOH, I think such a license is necessary, as it more-closely fits the purposes of business-world reality, while maintaining a clearly open-source license agreement. But I don't think it should be called the "GPL", or at least, some obvious, high-level distinction ought to be made. Call it the "Commercial GPL" or something...
Regardless, I don't know how the hell the FSF expects to enforce such a provision (except against companies which have already openly-stated they use OSS, or against companies whose disgruntled employees tip off the FSF -- which is really no different from the situation with the BSA today), but it'll be interesting to see them try.
In any case, I do know that when certain peoples' freedoms are taken away, meanwhile the proponent of the taking is claiming "free as in freedom!" or "we will help the (Iraqis|software users) be a freer people!", etc., that one ought to look with a critical eye towards that person and their claims. Freedom does not mean "free to have freedoms taken away."
Slashdot Mirror
Socialism requires government, by definition. Socialism, in its purest form, means that the government owns and controls the output of the economy. For example, the U.S. government now taxes away approx. 40-50% of Americans' income, in terms of explicit taxes and regulations -- thus, the U.S. govn't owns about 40-50% of the wealth of the nation, which means the U.S. is therefore 40-50% socialist.
I long ago defined for myself capitalism, socialism, and communism in *purely* economic terms, as follows:
* capitalism -- "An economic concept of civilization that is based on the private ownership (and control) of the means of production." (from the mises.org definition; the best one IMO). I define capitalism as "an economic system in which the factors (inputs) and results (outputs) of the economy are produced, owned, and managed by one or more private individuals, with minimal government involvement".
* socialism -- "government ownership of the means of production" (from the stormy.org definition). I define socialism as "an economic system in which the factors (inputs) and results (outputs) of the economy are produced, owned, and distributed by a government over which there may be any possible level of democratic control."
* communism -- "an economic theory or system based on the ownership of all property by the community as a whole; the final stage of socialism as formulated by Marx, Engels, Lenin and others characterized by a classless and stateless society and the equal distribution of economic goods" (from the northave.org definition). I define communism as "an economic system in which the factors (inputs) and results (outputs) of the economy are produced, owned, and managed by citizens of a community (hence the term "communism") collectively and equally, with minimal or no government involvement."
True. Socialism requires government (see my definition, derived from Google's search, above); communism abolishes it. Under socialism, a government manages the economy for the presumed-too-stupid-to-do-so masses. Under communism, the people manage it absent the govn't, collectively. Wealth is owned and controlled equally by each individual under communism, but is owned and controlled collectively. Nobody has any more right than the other to use property (hence, you get things like the "Tragedy of the Commons" effect -- public property being overused, because nobody has incentive to care about it, unlike with private property).
No, that is different. That is
Explain.
As a Chicagoan, yes, Chicago is, and has always been, extremely corrupt. Mayor Daley here deserves a hot fire poker jabbed in his eyes.
And that's the point the grandparent was making: the more limited and smaller the government is, the easier it is to watch. The easier it is to watch, the less-corrupt it can become, because the ratio of citizens' eyes to political actions rises.
Moreover, there's a point implicit in your own argument you're missing. The fact that corruption occurs at all levels of government, perhaps particularly as the level becomes increasingly-local (much of the problem is that we in the U.S. focus more on national politics now than state or local politics - thank you FDR and the New Deal), is why laws against corrupt politics become ever more stringent -- that is, as govn't corruption rises, we have more incentive to create laws against corrupt politics, and as government shrinks, it becomes easier to root out that corruption and determine the laws to be written against future ill political dealings (like your "Sunshine Law").
Yes. See the Wikipedia definition Google lists:
Our politicians use their position to return favors for businesses. That is corruption, according to the above definition. The U.S., by this definition, in some ways could even be argued to be a kleptocracy -- there are points at which we don't even have a pretense of honesty in our government...
Taxing the people for the benefit of industry? That is fascism, by definition: government and business working together (the U.S. military-industrial complex is another example).
Of course, fascism is easier in socialist nations, when you have a large, powerful, well-funded-by-already-high-taxes government to implement such fascist policy... A more-limited, smaller government is easier to watch over and thus, easier to prevent from doing such things...
Hillary: "We're going to take things away from you on behalf of the common good." (aye Comrade!)
Microsoft: "We're going to take raw sockets away from you on behalf of the common good."
WTF, they're equally detestable...
You're kidding, right? I'm a senior at a 4th-rate CS school, and my GPA in the CS dept. isn't great. But even I can answer this question:
* Array: A fixed-size contiguous allocation of memory containing a number of bytes into which values may be stored. Often used to contain character strings, particularly in C and ASM.
* Linked list: A variably-sized data structure containing a set of interconnected nodes (which may be singly- or doubly-linked) containing a minimum of 2 items per node: the value of the data to be stored, and a pointer to the next node. Useful for creating a list into which nodes (and therefore, the values to be stored) may be inserted and deleted as necessary. Examples include the vector class of C++'s STL and Java.
There. Where's my job offer?
Well yeah, maybe in *engineering* companies. Google, Boeing, IBM, Microsoft, Cisco, etc.. Even then, it's hard to say.
But companies which view IT and engineering as a liability rather than a revenue stream -- i.e., financial services, healthcare, etc. -- those companies aren't going to let their geeks have any more say than necessary.
Look, this "population growth is a problem" myth has been around for decades. It's also wrong.
See the Julian Simon vs. Paul Ehrlich bet. Basic supply/demand theory suggests that if there is an increasing demand for a limited supply of resources, the price on those resources ought to rise, correct? This was the premise by which biologist Ehrlich made a bet with economist Simon -- that increasing population growth increases the demand on a limited set of resources, and thus the price of those resources will rise.
But Ehrlich was wrong. Prices of a basket of commodities in the bet decreased quite markedly over 10 years. Why? Technology and efficiency gains. Simon won the bet: prices of each of the 5 bet-on commodities fell, despite the population around the world rising over the same period.
Why do some enviros continue playing the overpopulation card? Who knows. Economic illiteracy and retardation, I guess. IMO, a a more-legitimate environmental challenge to solve is that of urban sprawl and the crowding-out effect it has on natural animal habitats... and those of air and water pollution...
Yours is the most paternalistic, "father knows best" bullshit post I've read in a long time.
Who decides who knows best? You? Steve Ballmer? President Bush?
Give me a break. The public, for all its stupidities and flaws and elections of people like Bush & Co., do a better job of understanding the world than you give it credit for, and it is partly for that reason that the U.S. has been such a stable and powerful nation over its 229 year history.
4 years ago, you would have been fortunately right about this.
But not so anymore.
Take a look at the Dudley Hiibel case. Today, in America, you are effectively required by case law to carry some form of government ID.
Welcome to the Nazi police state that is Bush's America.
I think you're mis-directing fault here.
If the Google founders say they intend to "do no evil", then does failing to secure their network sufficiently count as being evil? You and I agree that these breaches are inevitable, so the answer, I think, would be "no, unless they were extremely negligent about their security" (e.g. running a database server on unpatched Windows boxes without firewalls, etc.)...
So, instead, the evil must come from somewhere else. Like the attacker?
To clarify & summarize the above: just because they say "do no evil" doesn't mean that getting broken-into is "doing evil"...
Anyway, I agree w/ the rest of your post. Given the inevitable nature of break-ins, the amount of info companies collect should be *lessened*, not increased. Yet we see this w/ credit card companies -- the 3-digit CCV code on the back of the card, use of SSNs "for verification", and so forth. We see it at banks: checking government-issued IDs in order to open an account (this is actually a PATRIOT Act requirement, i.e. the fault of the government), and the same use of govn't-issued IDs just to buy something with a credit card at various shops. The slow-but-sure move towards biometrics. And so on. From a statistical standpoint, it's good to have more correlations like that, but it also means there's more data available to be stolen when those breeches happen, as the always, inevitably will.
What personal info is collected certainly must be encrypted, and that info should be as limited as possible. But as CPU speed and HDD space rises while the prices of both along with RAM drops, I doubt this is going to be the case in the future...
Well, if that's true, then Slashdot might be a haven of some of the most intelligent people on Earth!
:)
Wait a minute......
Actually, I would argue that OSS is about as free-market a system as any I know of (I say that as a personally *very* pro-free-market-minded person).
Sure, you might share your code with somebody else. But you still hold the copyright to the code, correct? So long as you hold the copyright to your code, that code is still *your* property. It is your private property which you're allowing somebody else to use, voluntarily.
OSS is no more communist than, say, a neighbor having a party on a warm summer afternoon, cooking up hamburgers and hotdogs and allowing everybody else to come into his yard, eat, play vollyball, and so on - perhaps for the optional contribution of one's own dish (Jello, casserole, rolls, brownies, etc.). It's very much a private, free-market exchange.
The only way things get confused is when govn't agencies start contributing code, such as the NSA's contributions to the Linux kernel. There you have an example of both privately-copywritten code from various individuals mingling with publicly-owned code written by the government (really, "the people", by way of tax money). That confuses things considerably. But the more code comes from private sources, the more of a zero-price (note: *not* zero-cost!) capitalist transaction it becomes. The kernel has become large enough that it's no longer a purely-private affair, but AFAIK, remains still largely one -- even from contributors in other nations.
So long as the private property rights of copyright law remain in place (because all of capitalism requires at least laws to protect the property rights of the property owners/creators/controllers; property rights are capitalism's bedrock foundation), I see no real contradiction between OSS and the capitalist economic system... Indeed, the GPL itself would be null and void without copyright law, i.e., in a system of communism.
That fact makes Microsoft's contention that "OSS is communist" considerably-harder. A load of BS, actually. They're just angry because they know in the long-run, they can't compete with a labor market which is willing to work for peanuts (at least for now; I'm not convinced it's a trend that can hold up very well once major players have been out-competed by "free labor").
Perhaps some OSS promoters are communists in their own ideology; many certainly seem to be, IME. Perhaps they even believe they are promoting communism by releasing OSS! IMO, howver, just the opposite would in fact be true...
(Communism, however, is a very bad idea. Actually, there have been very few instances of real ocmmunism in the world. What the world witnessed in Soviet Russia, East Germany, Maoist China, Vietnam, present-day North Korea, and so forth -- is, in actual governmental structure, socialism, not communism. Communism would exist absent (or at least mostly-so) of government; socialism, by its very definition, means that the govn't owns and controls the output of the economy -- that was (and is, in N. Korea's case, though even *they* are slowly liberalizing their economy) *precisely* the case found in those nations. And look where they wound up, and look at what they did to their people... Communism fails for the same reason socialism does though -- lack of incentive. That's the reason the 2 instances of communism I'm aware of -- early America, and certain villages in Maoist China -- failed so badly and starved people so horribly...)
And Google does this by doing what, exactly? By getting you where you want to be, perhaps?
That is the very soul of their business; that is how they achieve their end-goal of making money. Without a quality service, Google wouldn't be even 1% as big as they are now. Just look at all the spam companies, ad-link pages, and so on -- these are companies which sell smoke up your skirt. And where are their owners?
They're merely providing for their families, not rolling in billions of dollars like Google's founders.
I do agree with the thrust of your argument though that eventually, Google's service quality will decline and the company as a whole will fall to some new competitor, in part because as a publicly-traded company, Sergey Brin and Larry Page will have a decreasing level of control over the company. That's often the way it goes.
Here's roughly the journalistic history regarding flying cars:
* Popular Mechanics (Popular Moronics?), circa 1950: "Flying cars in everybody's driveway by 1980!"
circa 1980: "Flying cars in everybody's driveway by 2000!"
circa 1997: "Flying cars in everybody's driveway by 2020!"
* Slashdot, circa 2000: "Flying cars in everybody's driveway by 2005!"
today, 2005: "Flying cars in everybody's driveway Real Soon Now!"
Uh huh, riiiiiight... and in 20 years, we'll have research bases on Mars and commercial space travel to the moon, I suppose? Oh wait, Popular Mechanics was saying we'd have those too in 2000. And futurists wonder why they aren't taken seriously...
BTW, did anybody actually *look* at the AirScooter? It has no windshield. No roof. No A/C. No radio. No whole-vehicle parachute in case the rotors fail. No storage space for even a briefcase, let alone a weekend's worth of gear. No space for passengers; no space to strap in a baby. Without such things, I absolutely guarantee you it will never be popular with the public, ever. Given its current design, it cannot ever be commercially-viable as private, daily-driver transportation. Its only hope is as a sport plane for the niche market that likes flying but doesn't want to spend a fortune doing it.
And, if you add such things, it adds to the weight, and guess what? Gain too much weight on the plane and eventually you need an FAA-approved pilot's license! Doh. Not to mention that the price of the vehicle increases (which isn't to say that the wealthy wouldn't adopt it first, getting over the hurdle of expensiveness, ushering in economies-of-scale and thereby lowering the cost of production such that more of us in the "masses" can afford them too -- most autos' safety systems have followed exactly this trend. But I don't think it's likely either).
Besides, it's a helicopter in its design (meaning it's exempt from the FAA's recently-implemented "FAA Sport Pilot and Light-Sport Aircraft Rule" on the basis of complexity). For those to ever be widely-used as personal vehicles, there needs to be considerable area around it for takeoff/landing, so the rotors don't kill people. Think you could land one in the width of a car lane in a parking garage? Given the 14' dia. rotors, I don't think so.
The idea of flying cars is damn seductive, but I greatly doubt it's ever going to "take off" in my lifetime (and I've got probably 60-80 years to go); there's too much inertia in the use of gas-powered, land-roaming automobiles and too many dangers and complexities that come with the use of flying cars to make them sufficiently idiot-proof for mass-consumption.
I think it's reasonable. Ideally-abominable, but in reality, reasonable.
With each new virus or worm, the number of possible matches for AV software increases by 1. I don't run AV software, but last I checked when I saw a copy running, there were something like 60,000 definitions. That's a *lot* of CPU time (even if the software doesn't check against every definition, which, since most AV software uses heuristics, it doesn't).
So viruses have become a fact of life, like it or not. Same goes for adware, on 9x/ME/NT/2k/XP/2k3 boxes, and that seems like a similar problem to virus/worm checking. Firewall? With broadband speeds rising, you've got an increasing number of packets coming in to check. And then there's spam-filtering. And IPSEC and SSL encryption (particularly in business).
These are things that all have to run basically in the background, and which these days ought to be on every machine. We have a case of increasing complexity running in the background. This ain't the days of DOS anymore kids; love it or hate it, the battle against crapware and maliciousness on the 'net has become a fact of life, and CPU time now has to be devoted to it.
Didn't people complain about how inefficient game engine code must have been getting back in 1996 or so, when 3D accelerators started making their way into the consumer market? Well, same thing now, except that we're dealing with the human nature to produce crap and destroy things.
Adding a second core isn't an efficiency improvement, and nor is it good for anybody if we're using it to combat crap. Actually, it's almost a classic case of the broken window fallacy... And yet, the reality is that this stuff will exist, so we must deal with it...
I might've come off that way, but that wasn't my intention... Certainly the site operator can eat the costs, rather than his readers (that's how most individual's websites are run after all), because typically the cost is pretty low for a site with little traffic...
My post was mostly referring to corporate-information sites though -- newspaper or TV media sites, for example... Those, and heavily-trafficked sites (like Slashdot). Those sites have big-time bandwidth costs, server costs, etc., and somehow, those costs have to be recouped. Because they aren't going to eat the bills themselves, they're going to offload the costs onto their viewers, via ads or some form of micropayments or subscriptions (or personal information sales - register w/ the site, enter your name/address/etc. and receive junk mail and spam in return).
IANAL, but I suspect you're incorrect.
There is an oral contract between you and the restaurant in agreement to get food. When you order your sandwich, you're asking them to prepare you something of value and expend their valuable time.
Time is money and the ingredients for the sandwich cost money, therefore, you're a cost to them until you pay up. I would bet that the ordering of any food or drink constitutes an oral contract for a good (food) and service (food preparation).
IANAL, but it seems only fair (to all parties) that any private form of so-called "social contract" is nonsense.
I signed no contract saying that I would be bound to watch advertising in my browser or on TV. It's "just there", and until the advent of AdBlock and TiVo, I didn't have a say in the matter on most channels or most websites -- the advertising was rammed down my throat, and my only option was to flip the channel or find another, ad-free website.
But the fact is, TANSTAAFL. If you want "free" content, you'll have to *pay* for it somehow. PBS and NPR used to be basically ad-free, but now both have the occasional corporate sponsor, because people don't donate in quite sufficient-enough amounts to keep them afloat. Yet, they are still *mostly* ad-free. But if we wanted them totally ad-free, we have to pony up.
Same will go for our currently ad-supported websites. That's why I personally don't block the ads on sites I like, like Slashdot (though not The Economist, because they use ad.doubleclick.net, which shows up everywhere and it's far-easier to just block http://*.doubleclick.net/* than to make exceptions for each site). Sites I don't care about or which have craploads of ads (*looks at IGN*) -- sorry, you're gonna hit AdBlock.
Sooner or later, we'll have to find some other way to fund websites. Whether it'll be via advertisers' cleverness in getting around AdBlock (somehow) or via a system of micropayments or subscriptions (like with The Economist, Wall Street Journal, and other high-end newspapers and magazines), remains to be seen.
Thank you for that link. You just made my day a whole lot funnier. :)
Sounds reasonable to me. :)
:-/
Although I didn't mention it, I also have the same trepidation about trusting the CIA, for the same reasons you describe. It's very difficult to trust an agency which primarily lies and kills people (even though IIRC, it was originally intended solely as an intelligence/spy agency, not an agency of active intervention in other countries' affairs, though, that charter clearly didn't last long). I don't know of any other well-organized source for economic info like that. Nationmaster is cool, but most of the economic stats they use there appear to comes from - you guessed it - the CIA World Factbook.
Do you know if The Economist's online subscription gives access to their compilation of the raft of economic stats that the CIA does? (I've considered subscribing, and I was *thisclose* to subscribing last Sept. when they had their $30 off discount)...
Indeed, that's a pretty funny (albeit sad) piece of revisionist history...
Just FYI, that is a highly racist comment... (now, I'm a thick-skinned guy, so I'm not especially offended by it. I'm not offended by much of anything in terms of peoples' speech, online or otherwise...)
:-( ).
You're suggesting that "all X Americans do Y", where:
X = race
Y = action
i.e., that "all white Americans sugar-coat their history" and that "all non-white Americans prefer their history unfiltered." It's a claim that all people of a given race (white people) do something.
But as most statistical surveys of any population will show, all people do *not* do whatever is suggested; not all whites like their history sugar-coated (though clearly many do), and not all non-whites like their history unfiltered (though many do).
Now, were you to say "[many or most] white Americans sugar-coat their history", that technically wouldn't be racist, b/c it allows for outlier white Americans who don't sugar-coat their history.
Basic statistics courses (combined with actual real-world data of a variety of surveys) refute pretty much all racist ideas, actually... (unless they're self-referential, e.g. "all caucasian people fit the caucasion race profile" or "all native Americans fit the native American race profile", etc.. But those are obviously worthless statistics!)
BTW, I'm with you on preferring unfiltered history... It's quite-obvious that America's history is littered with hundreds of years of slavery, and to this day has an undercurrent of racism that is rarely-discussed (out of politeness and prevention of racial violence, I suspect. Personally, I wish we could all have a nice, polite discussion of race amongst people of all races in the same room (kind of like you and I are doing here, really!). Maybe we could come to understand each other better, assuming we could all stay calm and open-minded on the subject. IME, it happens to a very-limited extent in some college communications classrooms, but for the time being, I just don't see it happening on a wider, national scale...
I don't live in the south, so I guess I don't have the culture (??) to understand why they're so defensive of the confederacy, of their plantation-owners who owned slaves, etc., but for some reason, as my northern born & raised friends presently in the south tell me, they just don't like facing the fact that owning other people is a moral crime which was committed primarily by white Americans until the end of the Civil War.
Indeed. But some would use that argument against, say, poor black people living in poverty-ridden areas, such as to say that their environment should have little bearing on their outcome in life; that is, that those black people are poor because they didn't try hard enough -- not because their schools were underfunded, because of poverty-aggravated gang violence, and so on.
So, the wholly politically-incorrect question to ask (at least, for a white guy like myself), if we hold that people should be equal under the law and in the eyes of society (and I believe this is an *extremely* worthwhile goal; the law *ought* to be color-blind, even if historically it hasn't been) is: do we blame both Jefferson and those poor blacks for fail
Do we have the same World in 2005 publication? Mine shows Sweden's GDP per head is $43,480 (page 89), the U.S.'s $41,530 (page 92). (Switzerland, a less-socialist nation than Sweden, but moreso than the U.S., beats both, with a per-capita GDP of $51,490).
:-) My guess is that different methods of determining GDP were used, and the simple division of getting a per-capita figure produced such greatly-different values.)
Of course, looking at the CIA World Factbook, we find that the U.S. has a per-capita GDP of $37,800 (2003 estimate), vs. Sweden's $26,800, and Switzerland's $32,700. So the question is which source do we rely upon: the CIA, or the Economist Intelligence Unit (which compiles such data for The Economist)? IMO, that's a tough call. The Economist's figures are newer though, and I've never had any beefs with their figures, so I'm inclined to go by theirs...
(I am curious now how this discrepancy occurred... I greatly doubt GDP figures for each nation shot up so much that per-capita GDP in Switzerland rose by 60% in only 1 year!
I doubt it. I define socialism by strict economic definition, absent political/social influences. I define socialism as follows: "an economic system in which the factors (inputs) and results (outputs) of the economy are produced, owned, and distributed by a government over which there may be any possible level of democratic control."
Marxism is really the step of Marx's theory that deals with the workers of the world overthrowing the capitalist class and creating a classless, communist (i.e. wealth is owned and shared equally) economy.
That's hardly a universal view.
There is debate among economists about the truth of that belief. I don't subscribe to most Austrian economic theory, but here's another critique of the claim. (The author is an Austrian, but he cites 3 neoclassical economists on the subject as well, lending somewhat more credibility...)
Also, it's worth noting that more-respectable economists (like Nobel prize-winning Milton Friedman) have made it mainstream thought -- mainstream enough to be taught in undergrad. Monetary Policy classes, at least -- that government mismanagement, primarily by the Federal Reserve, exacerbated the bank failures of 1929-1933, turning what would have been a severe recession into the Great Depression that we now know it as. See also Friedman's A Monetary History of the United States: 1867-1960, or any of his popular books (Capitalism and Freedom or Free to Choose).
It's a well-respected enough assessment that even Paul Krugman (whom you cite (below) and whom I'm not especially a fan of) is cited in the above AEI article (I admit they're a biased source, but any source in the social sciences is biased. In any case, the article is still worth reading) as noting "Nowadays, practically the whole spectrum of economists, from Milton Friedman leftward, agrees that the Great Depression was brought on by a collapse of effective demand, and that the Federal Reserve should have fought the slump with large injections of money."
Whether FDR's policies got us *out* of the govn'ts
On the surface, it *is* hypocritical that Thomas Jefferson would say we are created equal (under the law), but own slaves.
But that was the society back then. That was the environment in which he lived (and after all, people *are* affected by the environments in which they live, are they not?).
Have you ever read books about Jefferson's life, or visited his Monticello home (now a walkable historical museum)? In those and there you will find that Jefferson actually *wanted* to free his slaves, and he wrote about the tragedy of slavery actually quite a bit, and in fact argued for the prohibition of slave-owning in the American territories. But he knew that if he freed his slaves, other, less-sympathetic people would capture them (even though they were legally-free) and treat them far-worse than Jefferson did. So he used his home as sort of a shelter for those lucky enough to make it into his custody. There are records at his home suggesting that his slaves actually were not hateful of Jefferson, unlike other slave-owners they had been with previously...
Jefferson is also well-known to have held the opinion that we should've sent all the black people back to Africa (a view now held with a derisive connotation), because in Jefferson's view, the racial conflicts were going to cause some nasty rifts in this country, because the abuses towards blacks were so bad. And he was quite right -- the slavery of America's past has basically torn this country in two, along racial lines, despite laws (notably the 1965 Civil Rights Act) to bandage up that bloody history.
Would sending blacks back to Africa have solved the problem? Not entirely (people would've complained from Africa about it), but at least had we done so in the 1700s or early 1800s there would've been a *lot* less violence and anger between whites and blacks as resulted from the events occurring since Jefferson's time... It would've prevented the entire chain of racist events our history shows from Jefferson's time to the present.
Not that any of this matters to somebody (like you) who would rather look ideally towards the reality of the past and criticize those who didn't have the comfortable environment of modern society or the convenience of 20/20 hindsight for doing things which in one time period were acceptable, but today are considered quite wrong...
Of course, in 100 or 200 years (assuming the human race survives that long), people will look back on things we've done, and say that we were wrong. Perhaps we are, but we don't know it now. Does that make us bad people? Hardly; people are imperfect - we do what we can with what we have in the time in which we live.
So why hypocritically apply such a standard to a somebody who is as indisputably a legendary historical figure as Thomas Jefferson -- as your quoting usage does?
I'll leave you with this quote of Jefferson's commentary on slavery:
Um, whatever happened to the RMS view that the GPL makes software "free as in freedom"? This rule would effectively make that line "free as in free to not be free from paying the FSF!"
Here we see the dangerous crossroads between freedom-to-use software and the ability-to-sell software perspectives.
RMS & Moglen can choose the former, allowing more freedom for end-users, including commercial users. Or they can demand payment, at the expense of the end-user's freedom to use that money in some other way.
This rule will *clearly* stifle adoption of GPL'd software in the business world (because it costs more), and will quickly add another line on the Windows vs. Linux TCO reports Microsoft pays for (which some managers blindly believe).
Me? I'm undecided. On one hand, this seems like a dumb move. A fee shouldn't be charged from providing a service to people using GPLv3'd software; any fees should be imposed somewhere else in the license (e.g. "if you are a commercial user, then the source and binaries are not open or available to you without paying a fee, but for non-commercial and educational use, they are free", etc.).
OTOH, I think such a license is necessary, as it more-closely fits the purposes of business-world reality, while maintaining a clearly open-source license agreement. But I don't think it should be called the "GPL", or at least, some obvious, high-level distinction ought to be made. Call it the "Commercial GPL" or something...
Regardless, I don't know how the hell the FSF expects to enforce such a provision (except against companies which have already openly-stated they use OSS, or against companies whose disgruntled employees tip off the FSF -- which is really no different from the situation with the BSA today), but it'll be interesting to see them try.
In any case, I do know that when certain peoples' freedoms are taken away, meanwhile the proponent of the taking is claiming "free as in freedom!" or "we will help the (Iraqis|software users) be a freer people!", etc., that one ought to look with a critical eye towards that person and their claims. Freedom does not mean "free to have freedoms taken away."