I don't think people are too happy with the "golden eggs" that BP is laying.
so damaging the shareholder value does _nothing_ against the employees who screwed up.
The first problem is identifying who actually screwed up. Was it some worker who made a mistake and hit the wrong button or something? Or was it his manager who asked him to bypass some safety measure? Or perhaps the manager's manager who asked for unrealistic metrics while looking the other way on ethical violations? Or was it the manager's manager's manager who knew all this was going on and just didn't do anything?
How do you assign blame, and how do you prove it? Once you've figured that out, how do you punish them? Do you throw them in jail? I'm not opposed to it, but it doesn't help clean up the oil spill. You could fine them billions of dollars, but I don't think the individual employees have that money.
And here's the thing: when you get down to it, the shareholders invested in a company that was behaving unethically. It's the shareholder's investment that allows BP to function this way. When CEOs act unethically, they do it in the name of serving the shareholders. Don't the shareholders bear some responsibility? Isn't part of the problem that the "owners" of the company failed to ensure that their company was "doing the right thing?" I'm not sure that we should be seeking to punish shareholders, but I also don't see why they should take a pass.
As I see it, we have a systemic responsibility/blame problem. We love to blame people, but our system is explicitly set up to limit liability of anyone with wealth or power so that entrepreneurs won't be too risk-averse to build new business ventures. However, I think we've gone too far. The problems of the last decade have not been because people are not risk-averse enough.
People aren't investing their money, they're gambling it. Corporations cut corners and endanger lives to save a few bucks, creating situations where serious accidents become likely. When accidents occur, we let them off the hook. We say, "we shouldn't punish these corporations, because that will just hurt share holders!" and so not only do we not punish them, but we bail them out. I bet if we do go looking for an individual to blame, we'll get fed some low-level middle-management-type who was just passing along orders. Nothing will happen. Nothing will change.
Well it probably will happen. The thing is, newer/better screens are usually expensive, and so it makes sense to put them into smaller screens first. Smaller = cheaper, and these things often don't scale well.
When they've been making these screens for phones for a while, they'll get the tech down and then the price will come down. Then we'll see it on normal monitors.
if the guy with the most expensive servers and programmers money can buy is the only one who can profit though, the marketplace is now simply an oligopoly of the rich, not a place where the common investor can make his or her mark
I think this is a great explanation of why high frequency trading bothers people. It amounts to, If you have the connections and resources to create this super-fast setup, you can get a piece of everything without actually doing anything. You don't produce anything or provide any service. You just force yourself into the position of taking a cut of other people's business deals.
Over the long term, though, security should be better then... Flash, for example. You might disagree, but I figure that having multiple open-source implementations should be more secure than having a single closed-source implementation.
For starters, having multiple open source implementations means a more heterogeneous environment, decreasing the likelihood of a single vulnerability affecting everyone. Second real competition should keep the developers working hard to keep their browser secure. Finally, I'm among those who think that being open source probably means that the software is more secure, though I suppose that's a complicated issue on its own.
So yes, you're right. We'll probably see more vulnerabilities in the short term while everyone figures things out. Over time, though I think we'll be better off.
Congress continually operates on the notion that it can modify the risk gain relationship and expect people to keep doing things the same way they were doing them before.
I think the bigger problem is that Congress has become convinced that it must always modify the risk/gain relationships to benefit large businesses. You cite copyrights as a problem, and I think it's a good example. Copyrights aren't bad per se, but the laws are continually being modified to favor the large publishers, record companies, and movie studios without any regard for individual rights. It's out of balance.
Corporations are not just legal fictions, but "the corporation" as an idea and a law is a public institution.
Yes, and I think this is a good thing that people ought to keep in mind. This is a big part of the problem: Many "free market" people (not all, but perhaps most) argue against government interference with entities that only exist because of the government. People think that the government should not be empowered to interfere with the business of corporations even though, as you note, corporations are legal fictions created by the government to mitigate risk. Corporations do not have an inherent inalienable right to exist, let alone an inalienable right to profit.
Similarly, people act like the government should have no right to refuse copyrights or patents, even though those two are inventions of the government. People complain about the government's attempts to regulate health insurance companies, even though those companies would not exist if not for federal subsidies. Getting back to the topic at hand, people complain that the government shouldn't interfere with the telecommunications companies (e.g. Verizon, Comcast) even though they often have government-enforced monopolies over whole areas.
All of this is comparable to the person who said, "keep your government hands off my Medicare." The media industry, the telecommunication industry, the health insurance industry-- these are all government industries. If you want to point out that these are already not "free market" industries, I won't disagree. Since these industries are propped up by the government, we should have no great objection to them being regulated and limited by the government. If you want to instead argue that government interference should be eliminated in some of these situations, we could have that argument too, but it would be long and complicated. I would be open to it.
But if you want to argue that the government has "no right" to intervene in markets, I won't entertain that argument for very long. If you start talking about government infringing on the "rights" of corporations, I'm going to roll my eyes at you.
Unfortunately I can't just install the stock Froyo on my Incredible for comparison. All the talk about Android being open, but you still can't install whatever you want.
Yeah, I'm becoming more and more convinced that there's some kind of psychological problem with businessmen today. It's almost as though they're intentionally trying to build an adversarial relationship with their customers.
Wrong because "free" speech has nothing to do with copyright or vice versa.
Copyright becomes a free speech issue when copyright holders are permitted to impinge on "fair use". If I can't copy copyrighted work for the purpose of private use, news reporting, education, or parody, then copyright holders can prevent me from saying all sorts of things.
Conclusion: Steve Jobs was right; flash doesn't belong on phones and I'm glad he is killing it, even if he is still an annoying control freak.
And that right there is the problem. Steve Jobs is an annoying control freak, but he's often right. It can be very hard to argue with "right" even when you don't like the messenger.
Nice if you're the IT guy and not just the user. Savvy users might still do something like have Gmail fetch their mail from another service, but not everyone is going to be eager to do that.
And compared to a tablet PC running a desktop OS the iPad is a toy chained to Apple
Wow. Somebody is touchy.
But the Kindle also has a deficient web browser good enough for many purposes, as does the Nook.
Here's the difference: I wouldn't buy a Kindle to be able to browse the web, but I wouldn't buy an iPad without the ability to browse the web. Maybe that's just me and my personal preferences, but the Kindle doesn't seem like it'd be a great browsing device, so even if I had one, I probably wouldn't use it for web browsing.
I've seen plenty of people use Outlook's "Rules", even some relatively non-technical people. One of the problems there is that mail servers (excepting Exchange) don't usually have good server-side filtering along with client-side configuration of that filtering.
I don't bother setting up client-side filtering on my personal email account because it only works if that client, and I don't always check my email from the same client.
I don't bother tagging my email because it's not something that's handled consistently and most of the time it's client-side only. So if I spend lots of time tagging my email and using those tags, and then I move to another client, those tags are all missing. Worse: if I delete my client's settings without backing up the tagging information, all that information simply goes away. Exchange allows categories (basically tags) to be stored on the server-side, but they're inaccessible by mail clients other than Outlook.
Also, I can't send tags. Like if I'm sending an email to my boss and I tag it as "budget", he doesn't get that tag when he receives that email. When he replies, the reply isn't tagged either. It's just not a very well thought out system.
Yeah, I got kind of sold on the "it's even better than the iPhone" Android hype and got myself an HTC Incredible. Now obviously this is a matter of personal needs and personal preference, but I now consider that purchase to be a mistake.
For one thing, and this is only the most blatant problem, the damned thing crashes all the time. It's not too bad, but I feel it vibrate in my pocket, and when I check the phone, it's rebooting. But all in all, it's a pretty minor problem.
The bigger problem, though more subtle, is that the UI design is kind of a mess. I don't mean "the GUI is not pretty", but that the user interaction is unclear. For example, calendar events pop up in the notification area, but if you clear that notification, you have not dismissed it; it will pop up again in a couple minutes. Or there's a "favorites" widget for your favorite contacts that notifies you when those contacts' Facebook status has been updated, but if you press on that notification, it immediately calls that contact.
More generally, a lot of the user interaction is hidden in context menus and under the menu button. It's sometimes unclear what hitting a given button will actually do. I feel like I'm constantly jumping through hoops to get the damned thing to do what I want.
To my mind, it doesn't matter "who did it first". The question is, right now, what's the best phone you can buy. As far as I'm concerned, the iPhone is it.
Can my app be performing tasks in the background while I'm using another application?
Yes. Apple has made it so that your entire application won't continue to run in the background, but that you can still have your application "performing tasks" (so long as it fits within the supported background "tasks").
From what I understand, Android does something similar. It's not crazy. It actually makes a whole hell of a lot of sense. If I'm reading an ebook, for example, I don't need to have my iPhone's system resources taken up trying to display a particular page that won't be displayed anyway because it's in the background. On a device with limited resources, it's better to suspend that whole application to free up resources.
So similarly with a browser, you don't need your browser actually trying to display web pages that aren't being displayed. All you need to do is enable background downloading. Downloading is pretty much the only thing that you actually want a browser to do in the background. Pretty much the only thing you want Skype to do in the background is receive calls. Pretty much the only thing you want Pandora to do in the background is download streaming audio and output it to the headphones-- you don't need Pandora to try to render album art that won't be displayed.
If you're the user and your server isn't doing a good enough job filtering junk mail, then you'll want junk filtering in the client. And regardless of that, you may want support for configuring your junk mail options in the client, such as marking messages as junk for bayesian analysis. Same basic idea for the rest of this stuff.
Part of the problem is that email itself isn't very well designed for how most of us currently use email. It's simple, which is nice, but it's not built to address complex filtering/tagging workflows.
Yeah, I don't know the data, but the economists and political theorists that I've read more or less accept that it's a trend, i.e. a free market is generally more efficient a lot of the time. Compared to...what??? "Other systems".
I think there is data of the normal soft-science sort, but I don't imagine you could come up with a very good controlled experiment.
All markets exist inside some kind of regulatory framework, even if it's only laws against fraud.
There are people on the pro-free-market side of things who have essentially claimed that even fraud should be legal. "Caveat emptor. The market will sort it out." Admittedly this is an extreme view, but supposedly even people like Alan Greenspan have privately voiced this opinion. Still, there are lots of people who are adamantly anti-regulation.
Regardless, the text you quotes was certainly not a "straw man" since it wasn't even talking about all that. I was just pointing out that there are situations where efficiency is not the chief concern-- not just to the point of requiring regulation, but even to the point where it'd be a very bad idea to privatize or allow a "free market". The example I chose for that was the police, and I think it's a pretty good one. Having a police force that optimized itself for efficiency and profit would run counter to the purpose for having police. It would certainly lead to abuse.
Being pro free market is no the same thing as being pro business.
I would agree with you, but there are certainly a lot of people out there who are pro-free-market and who see that position as necessarily pro-business.
The problem is if the government has too much of a presence...
Of course the problem is defining "too much of a presence".
A good example is car seats - statistically useless after age 2 but mandated to age 8 in my state at the behest of industry lobbyists.
I'm not sure that's "too much of a presence", since a state setting a mandate that "children below age X should be required to wear child safety seats" is fine (or at least I think it is). So the amount of "presence" is fine there, it's just the decision making (choosing the "age X") is off. I can't imagine strapping a 7 year-old into a child safety seat. If that law wasn't immediately repealed, it wasn't just because of lobbyists, it's because the people in your state have too many, "Won't somebody think of the CHILDREN!!!" parents.
Or do you think it's not fine for the state to set the requirement at all? I'd say driving around with a 1 year old outside of a child safety seat may as well be considered child endangerment.
Please do not make the all-to-common mistake of confusing capitalism with the free market.
You don't have to be hostile to be interesting. Words sometimes have different definitions to different people. Just because you favor some particular technical definition of the word "capitalism" doesn't make my usage wrong. If anything, my usage is more common; if you want to argue against common usage of words in favor of your arbitrarily chosen technical usage, you're fighting a losing battle. What's more, you'll notice that in the portion of my post that you're citing, I put "capitalism" in quotes, indicating that I wasn't necessarily talking about capitalism per se, but rather "capitalism" as the idea that people reference.
Very often, people use the term "capitalism" to reference a moral philosophy whereby "free markets" supposedly grant everyone exactly what they deserve so long as the government doesn't interfere. The definition of a "free market" is simply one in which the government doesn't interfere, and it is assumed to always be just in its effects. In this moral system, governmental interference is inherently an unjust action because it subverts the "free market".
If you want to get into a very strict definition of "capitalism", you're going to have to argue it out with a lot of people. It sounds like you just took an economics class and you're giving the definition that your professor advocated, but not even economists all use these terms the same way. The most agreed upon economic definition is vague: something to do with private ownership, free markets, and individual economic freedom. Resource allocation is determined by use of money and individual choice.
Similarly with "socialism": there's not an extremely clear definition. The general vague definition is that it has to do with governmental control, governmental choice, governmental planning. Resources are allocated by the government. Or if not explicitly "the government", then by some kind of public organization.
But all of this is a side issue. My point was this: Nobody would buy health insurance if it were not subsidized by the federal government. This is not an example of people being given free choice to spend their money how they like; it is an example of the government deciding to spend your money on health insurance. This is not an example Ayn-Rand-ian economic darwinism where health insurance companies are successful because they do a good job, but rather it's an example of the federal government propping up an entire industry that could not exist if people were given the economic freedom to make their own choices about how to spend their money. If you do not think that the government should be using your tax dollars to fund health care, then you should have been very unhappy with our health care system for several decades now.
I have an iPad, and though I like it pretty well, I have to say that I don't like it for reading books. Part of the reason is the display. It's strange because I'm completely comfortable using it to read long web page articles, but reading a novel on a lit screen rubs me the wrong way.
I have another complaint, though, which is arguable a stupid complaint but it's much harder to solve: I'm too easily distracted. If I'm trying to read a novel and I have a device in my hand that can browse the web, I might just go to one of my favorite websites for a minute or two to see what's going on. If my iPad beeps because I received an email, then I will immediately stop reading to see what email I just received. In short, when I tried reading a novel on my iPad, I couldn't get any reading done.
Now in both of these complaints, there's not really an inherent problem with the iPad. It just doesn't quite work for me. Still, I doubt I'm the only one who would have these complaints. Personally I've gone back to dead-tree distribution for my novels. I might consider a dedicated e-reader if it was cheap enough, and if I weren't concerned about the DRM.
We've allowed them to take control of the discussion to the point where it's conventional wisdom that this nonexistent entity called the "free-market" is good and government is bad.
Yes. The problem there is, they're not *exactly* flat-out wrong. A real free market is not necessarily absolutely "free", basically a situation where a consumer has real valid choices between multiple competing vendors. Very often, giving consumers real choice allows for greater economic efficiency than having any kind of central authority make economic choices for everyone.
There are a couple problems, though. First, very often, the vendors will seek to limit the choices of the consumers, thereby subverting the supposed "free-market forces". This is most obvious in cases where a monopoly or cartel is able to arbitrarily set prices for necessary goods, but it happens in other more subtle ways.
Second, though the "free market" is often more efficient, there may be cases where "efficiency" is not the chief concern. It can be "more efficient" to ignore safety standards in manufacturing. It can be "more efficient" for the police to simply arrest and jail whoever they think is guilty, without need of evidence or a trial.
I like free markets, but I'm also in favor of good government. The "free market" is a method we use to organize ourselves in order to produce cheap stuff, but "government" is a method we use to organize ourselves to ensure our lives have safety and justice.
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If BP is seized it will quit laying golden eggs.
I don't think people are too happy with the "golden eggs" that BP is laying.
so damaging the shareholder value does _nothing_ against the employees who screwed up.
The first problem is identifying who actually screwed up. Was it some worker who made a mistake and hit the wrong button or something? Or was it his manager who asked him to bypass some safety measure? Or perhaps the manager's manager who asked for unrealistic metrics while looking the other way on ethical violations? Or was it the manager's manager's manager who knew all this was going on and just didn't do anything?
How do you assign blame, and how do you prove it? Once you've figured that out, how do you punish them? Do you throw them in jail? I'm not opposed to it, but it doesn't help clean up the oil spill. You could fine them billions of dollars, but I don't think the individual employees have that money.
And here's the thing: when you get down to it, the shareholders invested in a company that was behaving unethically. It's the shareholder's investment that allows BP to function this way. When CEOs act unethically, they do it in the name of serving the shareholders. Don't the shareholders bear some responsibility? Isn't part of the problem that the "owners" of the company failed to ensure that their company was "doing the right thing?" I'm not sure that we should be seeking to punish shareholders, but I also don't see why they should take a pass.
As I see it, we have a systemic responsibility/blame problem. We love to blame people, but our system is explicitly set up to limit liability of anyone with wealth or power so that entrepreneurs won't be too risk-averse to build new business ventures. However, I think we've gone too far. The problems of the last decade have not been because people are not risk-averse enough.
People aren't investing their money, they're gambling it. Corporations cut corners and endanger lives to save a few bucks, creating situations where serious accidents become likely. When accidents occur, we let them off the hook. We say, "we shouldn't punish these corporations, because that will just hurt share holders!" and so not only do we not punish them, but we bail them out. I bet if we do go looking for an individual to blame, we'll get fed some low-level middle-management-type who was just passing along orders. Nothing will happen. Nothing will change.
Well it probably will happen. The thing is, newer/better screens are usually expensive, and so it makes sense to put them into smaller screens first. Smaller = cheaper, and these things often don't scale well.
When they've been making these screens for phones for a while, they'll get the tech down and then the price will come down. Then we'll see it on normal monitors.
if the guy with the most expensive servers and programmers money can buy is the only one who can profit though, the marketplace is now simply an oligopoly of the rich, not a place where the common investor can make his or her mark
I think this is a great explanation of why high frequency trading bothers people. It amounts to, If you have the connections and resources to create this super-fast setup, you can get a piece of everything without actually doing anything. You don't produce anything or provide any service. You just force yourself into the position of taking a cut of other people's business deals.
The bigger problem is using GDP as a measure of the economy.
Over the long term, though, security should be better then... Flash, for example. You might disagree, but I figure that having multiple open-source implementations should be more secure than having a single closed-source implementation.
For starters, having multiple open source implementations means a more heterogeneous environment, decreasing the likelihood of a single vulnerability affecting everyone. Second real competition should keep the developers working hard to keep their browser secure. Finally, I'm among those who think that being open source probably means that the software is more secure, though I suppose that's a complicated issue on its own.
So yes, you're right. We'll probably see more vulnerabilities in the short term while everyone figures things out. Over time, though I think we'll be better off.
Congress continually operates on the notion that it can modify the risk gain relationship and expect people to keep doing things the same way they were doing them before.
I think the bigger problem is that Congress has become convinced that it must always modify the risk/gain relationships to benefit large businesses. You cite copyrights as a problem, and I think it's a good example. Copyrights aren't bad per se, but the laws are continually being modified to favor the large publishers, record companies, and movie studios without any regard for individual rights. It's out of balance.
Corporations are not just legal fictions, but "the corporation" as an idea and a law is a public institution.
Yes, and I think this is a good thing that people ought to keep in mind. This is a big part of the problem: Many "free market" people (not all, but perhaps most) argue against government interference with entities that only exist because of the government. People think that the government should not be empowered to interfere with the business of corporations even though, as you note, corporations are legal fictions created by the government to mitigate risk. Corporations do not have an inherent inalienable right to exist, let alone an inalienable right to profit.
Similarly, people act like the government should have no right to refuse copyrights or patents, even though those two are inventions of the government. People complain about the government's attempts to regulate health insurance companies, even though those companies would not exist if not for federal subsidies. Getting back to the topic at hand, people complain that the government shouldn't interfere with the telecommunications companies (e.g. Verizon, Comcast) even though they often have government-enforced monopolies over whole areas.
All of this is comparable to the person who said, "keep your government hands off my Medicare." The media industry, the telecommunication industry, the health insurance industry-- these are all government industries. If you want to point out that these are already not "free market" industries, I won't disagree. Since these industries are propped up by the government, we should have no great objection to them being regulated and limited by the government. If you want to instead argue that government interference should be eliminated in some of these situations, we could have that argument too, but it would be long and complicated. I would be open to it.
But if you want to argue that the government has "no right" to intervene in markets, I won't entertain that argument for very long. If you start talking about government infringing on the "rights" of corporations, I'm going to roll my eyes at you.
Yes, I see what you mean now. Thanks.
Unfortunately I can't just install the stock Froyo on my Incredible for comparison. All the talk about Android being open, but you still can't install whatever you want.
But if you create a simple and consistent business model, how will all those executives justify their exorbitant salaries?
Yeah, I'm becoming more and more convinced that there's some kind of psychological problem with businessmen today. It's almost as though they're intentionally trying to build an adversarial relationship with their customers.
I wasn't "comparing a Droid to an Incredible". I was comparing a Droid Incredible to an iPhone.
Wrong because "free" speech has nothing to do with copyright or vice versa.
Copyright becomes a free speech issue when copyright holders are permitted to impinge on "fair use". If I can't copy copyrighted work for the purpose of private use, news reporting, education, or parody, then copyright holders can prevent me from saying all sorts of things.
Conclusion: Steve Jobs was right; flash doesn't belong on phones and I'm glad he is killing it, even if he is still an annoying control freak.
And that right there is the problem. Steve Jobs is an annoying control freak, but he's often right. It can be very hard to argue with "right" even when you don't like the messenger.
Nice if you're the IT guy and not just the user. Savvy users might still do something like have Gmail fetch their mail from another service, but not everyone is going to be eager to do that.
And compared to a tablet PC running a desktop OS the iPad is a toy chained to Apple
Wow. Somebody is touchy.
But the Kindle also has a deficient web browser good enough for many purposes, as does the Nook.
Here's the difference: I wouldn't buy a Kindle to be able to browse the web, but I wouldn't buy an iPad without the ability to browse the web. Maybe that's just me and my personal preferences, but the Kindle doesn't seem like it'd be a great browsing device, so even if I had one, I probably wouldn't use it for web browsing.
I've seen plenty of people use Outlook's "Rules", even some relatively non-technical people. One of the problems there is that mail servers (excepting Exchange) don't usually have good server-side filtering along with client-side configuration of that filtering.
I don't bother setting up client-side filtering on my personal email account because it only works if that client, and I don't always check my email from the same client.
I don't bother tagging my email because it's not something that's handled consistently and most of the time it's client-side only. So if I spend lots of time tagging my email and using those tags, and then I move to another client, those tags are all missing. Worse: if I delete my client's settings without backing up the tagging information, all that information simply goes away. Exchange allows categories (basically tags) to be stored on the server-side, but they're inaccessible by mail clients other than Outlook.
Also, I can't send tags. Like if I'm sending an email to my boss and I tag it as "budget", he doesn't get that tag when he receives that email. When he replies, the reply isn't tagged either. It's just not a very well thought out system.
I won't argue with you.
Yeah, I got kind of sold on the "it's even better than the iPhone" Android hype and got myself an HTC Incredible. Now obviously this is a matter of personal needs and personal preference, but I now consider that purchase to be a mistake.
For one thing, and this is only the most blatant problem, the damned thing crashes all the time. It's not too bad, but I feel it vibrate in my pocket, and when I check the phone, it's rebooting. But all in all, it's a pretty minor problem.
The bigger problem, though more subtle, is that the UI design is kind of a mess. I don't mean "the GUI is not pretty", but that the user interaction is unclear. For example, calendar events pop up in the notification area, but if you clear that notification, you have not dismissed it; it will pop up again in a couple minutes. Or there's a "favorites" widget for your favorite contacts that notifies you when those contacts' Facebook status has been updated, but if you press on that notification, it immediately calls that contact.
More generally, a lot of the user interaction is hidden in context menus and under the menu button. It's sometimes unclear what hitting a given button will actually do. I feel like I'm constantly jumping through hoops to get the damned thing to do what I want.
To my mind, it doesn't matter "who did it first". The question is, right now, what's the best phone you can buy. As far as I'm concerned, the iPhone is it.
Can my app be performing tasks in the background while I'm using another application?
Yes. Apple has made it so that your entire application won't continue to run in the background, but that you can still have your application "performing tasks" (so long as it fits within the supported background "tasks").
From what I understand, Android does something similar. It's not crazy. It actually makes a whole hell of a lot of sense. If I'm reading an ebook, for example, I don't need to have my iPhone's system resources taken up trying to display a particular page that won't be displayed anyway because it's in the background. On a device with limited resources, it's better to suspend that whole application to free up resources.
So similarly with a browser, you don't need your browser actually trying to display web pages that aren't being displayed. All you need to do is enable background downloading. Downloading is pretty much the only thing that you actually want a browser to do in the background. Pretty much the only thing you want Skype to do in the background is receive calls. Pretty much the only thing you want Pandora to do in the background is download streaming audio and output it to the headphones-- you don't need Pandora to try to render album art that won't be displayed.
If you're the user and your server isn't doing a good enough job filtering junk mail, then you'll want junk filtering in the client. And regardless of that, you may want support for configuring your junk mail options in the client, such as marking messages as junk for bayesian analysis. Same basic idea for the rest of this stuff.
Part of the problem is that email itself isn't very well designed for how most of us currently use email. It's simple, which is nice, but it's not built to address complex filtering/tagging workflows.
Yeah, I don't know the data, but the economists and political theorists that I've read more or less accept that it's a trend, i.e. a free market is generally more efficient a lot of the time. Compared to...what??? "Other systems".
I think there is data of the normal soft-science sort, but I don't imagine you could come up with a very good controlled experiment.
All markets exist inside some kind of regulatory framework, even if it's only laws against fraud.
There are people on the pro-free-market side of things who have essentially claimed that even fraud should be legal. "Caveat emptor. The market will sort it out." Admittedly this is an extreme view, but supposedly even people like Alan Greenspan have privately voiced this opinion. Still, there are lots of people who are adamantly anti-regulation.
Regardless, the text you quotes was certainly not a "straw man" since it wasn't even talking about all that. I was just pointing out that there are situations where efficiency is not the chief concern-- not just to the point of requiring regulation, but even to the point where it'd be a very bad idea to privatize or allow a "free market". The example I chose for that was the police, and I think it's a pretty good one. Having a police force that optimized itself for efficiency and profit would run counter to the purpose for having police. It would certainly lead to abuse.
Being pro free market is no the same thing as being pro business.
I would agree with you, but there are certainly a lot of people out there who are pro-free-market and who see that position as necessarily pro-business.
The problem is if the government has too much of a presence...
Of course the problem is defining "too much of a presence".
A good example is car seats - statistically useless after age 2 but mandated to age 8 in my state at the behest of industry lobbyists.
I'm not sure that's "too much of a presence", since a state setting a mandate that "children below age X should be required to wear child safety seats" is fine (or at least I think it is). So the amount of "presence" is fine there, it's just the decision making (choosing the "age X") is off. I can't imagine strapping a 7 year-old into a child safety seat. If that law wasn't immediately repealed, it wasn't just because of lobbyists, it's because the people in your state have too many, "Won't somebody think of the CHILDREN!!!" parents.
Or do you think it's not fine for the state to set the requirement at all? I'd say driving around with a 1 year old outside of a child safety seat may as well be considered child endangerment.
Please do not make the all-to-common mistake of confusing capitalism with the free market.
You don't have to be hostile to be interesting. Words sometimes have different definitions to different people. Just because you favor some particular technical definition of the word "capitalism" doesn't make my usage wrong. If anything, my usage is more common; if you want to argue against common usage of words in favor of your arbitrarily chosen technical usage, you're fighting a losing battle. What's more, you'll notice that in the portion of my post that you're citing, I put "capitalism" in quotes, indicating that I wasn't necessarily talking about capitalism per se, but rather "capitalism" as the idea that people reference.
Very often, people use the term "capitalism" to reference a moral philosophy whereby "free markets" supposedly grant everyone exactly what they deserve so long as the government doesn't interfere. The definition of a "free market" is simply one in which the government doesn't interfere, and it is assumed to always be just in its effects. In this moral system, governmental interference is inherently an unjust action because it subverts the "free market".
If you want to get into a very strict definition of "capitalism", you're going to have to argue it out with a lot of people. It sounds like you just took an economics class and you're giving the definition that your professor advocated, but not even economists all use these terms the same way. The most agreed upon economic definition is vague: something to do with private ownership, free markets, and individual economic freedom. Resource allocation is determined by use of money and individual choice.
Similarly with "socialism": there's not an extremely clear definition. The general vague definition is that it has to do with governmental control, governmental choice, governmental planning. Resources are allocated by the government. Or if not explicitly "the government", then by some kind of public organization.
But all of this is a side issue. My point was this: Nobody would buy health insurance if it were not subsidized by the federal government. This is not an example of people being given free choice to spend their money how they like; it is an example of the government deciding to spend your money on health insurance. This is not an example Ayn-Rand-ian economic darwinism where health insurance companies are successful because they do a good job, but rather it's an example of the federal government propping up an entire industry that could not exist if people were given the economic freedom to make their own choices about how to spend their money. If you do not think that the government should be using your tax dollars to fund health care, then you should have been very unhappy with our health care system for several decades now.
I have an iPad, and though I like it pretty well, I have to say that I don't like it for reading books. Part of the reason is the display. It's strange because I'm completely comfortable using it to read long web page articles, but reading a novel on a lit screen rubs me the wrong way.
I have another complaint, though, which is arguable a stupid complaint but it's much harder to solve: I'm too easily distracted. If I'm trying to read a novel and I have a device in my hand that can browse the web, I might just go to one of my favorite websites for a minute or two to see what's going on. If my iPad beeps because I received an email, then I will immediately stop reading to see what email I just received. In short, when I tried reading a novel on my iPad, I couldn't get any reading done.
Now in both of these complaints, there's not really an inherent problem with the iPad. It just doesn't quite work for me. Still, I doubt I'm the only one who would have these complaints. Personally I've gone back to dead-tree distribution for my novels. I might consider a dedicated e-reader if it was cheap enough, and if I weren't concerned about the DRM.
But you don't have to listen to any of it. Or you could just listen to the two you want. What's the problem?
We've allowed them to take control of the discussion to the point where it's conventional wisdom that this nonexistent entity called the "free-market" is good and government is bad.
Yes. The problem there is, they're not *exactly* flat-out wrong. A real free market is not necessarily absolutely "free", basically a situation where a consumer has real valid choices between multiple competing vendors. Very often, giving consumers real choice allows for greater economic efficiency than having any kind of central authority make economic choices for everyone.
There are a couple problems, though. First, very often, the vendors will seek to limit the choices of the consumers, thereby subverting the supposed "free-market forces". This is most obvious in cases where a monopoly or cartel is able to arbitrarily set prices for necessary goods, but it happens in other more subtle ways.
Second, though the "free market" is often more efficient, there may be cases where "efficiency" is not the chief concern. It can be "more efficient" to ignore safety standards in manufacturing. It can be "more efficient" for the police to simply arrest and jail whoever they think is guilty, without need of evidence or a trial.
I like free markets, but I'm also in favor of good government. The "free market" is a method we use to organize ourselves in order to produce cheap stuff, but "government" is a method we use to organize ourselves to ensure our lives have safety and justice.