Well, admitting that they can do nothing and not being utterly hostile to smaller businesses (the kind that can't afford lobbyists and a full time legal department) might be a good starting point for the government. It's pretty expensive to hire people, never mind handle all the government aspects of running most businesses. Unless they're already large enough to be publicly traded and at that point, it's usually cheaper to offshore the expenses anyway. End result is still less jobs.
What happens when you start competing with mega-corp and they slap you with a random software patent lawsuit? That is if you refused their offer to buy you outright. Of course that might leave you better off but it'll put a stop to you producing wealth (in the form of great software) that actually benefits society.
Patents are another one of those well meaning pieces of government legislation. They're literally 'protection from competition'. Protect who from competition from who, well... That all depends on the size of your legal department/budget now doesn't it?
You were lucky. There quite a few printers come with toner cartridges containing an e-fuse. They start counting how many pages you've printed and refuse to print more unless you change it (or fake another e-fuse destruction).
What you refer to are symptoms more than causes. What is killing the economy is mostly the enormous barriers to wealth creation that the average individual (not the already super-rich) faces.
The clear path to prosperity in America used to be to start and run your own business (or help in doing so). There are enormous hindrances to doing such nowadays mainly rooted in the state. In most fields just meeting regulations for your businesses is cost-prohibitive, as is hiring people to help you run that business. Then there is the enormous advantages granted to mega-corps that cozy up to government in order to protect themselves from the kind of competition that smaller businesses could offer. If competing in a market requires a multi-million dollar legal department then you've just handed that market over to the mega-corps and deserve overpriced, shitty products and services that will result.
You can't regulate mega-corps out of their powers, they have the resources to find or even create their own loopholes. In most instances, they're actually the ones writing the regulation in the first place. What you end up doing with regulations is usually just killing any competition the bigger players might face. Fines don't mean anything to them. Jail is barely a hindrance, they just throw a convenient peon under the bus or buy their way out of it. Nationalizing maybe? Well, if handing the market to an entity that can legally force you to buy its product at whatever price it sets is your thing...
You want to see mega-corp suffer? Let them face their own inefficiency under threat of smaller, nimbler competitors.
I'm not sure... Your example implies threat of force. It's in your self-interest to prevent it of course but using force (or threat of it) to take what you want from someone else is not okay with Rand at all to begin with. I guess it falls back to the thugs example I gave earlier, only this time they'd be keeping the money for themselves.
It makes no difference if the thug wears a suit and hands you forms explaining how your assets are being commandeered or if he's holding a gun to your head or as per your example a pitchfork: You cannot take property from someone by force, threat or fraud, it has to be a willing exchange.
But self-gratification does not need to be material, which is the more common misconception I was trying to correct. The key point is a clear understanding of mutual benefit. The nature of that benefit is for the giver to decide. Giving selflessly is a 'sin' in Atlas Shrugged because it is perceived as self-destructive and offencive (even from the receiving end) or as Dagny puts it: "A trade where someone gains and someone loses is called a fraud."
To go back to my previous example, you don't actually give the homeless guy 20 bucks, you trade him that 20 bucks for how it makes you feel to do so.
On a personal note, I became a lot more generous once understood that. I'm not offended by the fact that I'm selfishly investing in my social environment: People who need my help still get my help but I also take my own benefit into account. For me, there is genuine value to a smile and a thank you. There's also the fact that people I help would be keener to help me which is potential return on the investment. Treating it as an investment also helps me spot leeches and allows me to be smarter about where I put in my resources.
The principles are the same as in finance: If you keep investing your resources in things that make no profit, you won't be spending them in the economy very long. If you make smart investments, you can keep investing a lot longer and also empower others to do the same.
I don't know if you've read Rand, but that's not quite what she says.
It is perfectly alright for one to help others according to Rand. The only condition is that you do it with consideration for your own benefit. The thing most people miss is that this benefit does *not* need to be material. You can help someone because it makes you feel good. That's entirely valid according to Randian principles on the condition that you value that good feeling more than the cost of said help. That is compatible with your Gandhi quote, btw.
- OK with Rand: Giving 20 bucks to some homeless guy because you want to. - Not OK with Rand: Giving 20 bucks to some homeless guy because his condition somehow *entitles* him to your help. - Definitely NOT OK with Rand: Some thug(s) using force or threat of force to take that 20 bucks from you and handing it to an arbitrary group of bums they feels deserves your help. Typically as a selfish political strategy to maintain and increase that ability to use force.
They might make an exception... Given how much they screw you over per transaction (especially with the exchange rate), doing so on a $70M space-tourist invoice sure would net them a neat bundle.
How can you be sure the other party actually has the gold to back up their dollars?
If there is a confidence issue with their currency, you request ability to perform your own audit.
There is no way to force an unwilling government to actually hand over gold in exchange for dollars.
That is not at all the point. The point is that if a government starts inflating its currency and cheating you out of value, you can demand that audit to confirm, and stop accepting their phony currency if they fail at either. You can't force them to hand over the gold (except, you know, by using actual force), but they can't force you to accept their overinflated, poorly managed currency either. Then it becomes their problem that nobody wants to trade with them in exchange for that bogus currency.
The logistical, policy and administrative challenges you mention are there as *safeguards* against inflationary practices. Yes, I mean that if your economy does stupid things, you can't bail it out by just issuing more currency. The people who made poor investments get to experience consequences.
Well, if he actually earned that money (hey, it's possible), I don't see how this is a bad thing.
Sure there are plenty of bastards scamming their way into great wealth, but some actually become rich by providing goods or services that people are entirely willing and happy to pay for.
That's one of the arguments against fiat currencies, yes. There isn't material value backing them up, just the government's word that "we're good for it". Incidently, they go up in flames when the government backing them stops acting in a fiscally responsible way and attempt to monetize away their debt. See Zimbabwe or the Weimar republic (Germany) for historical examples and, without some very radical changes in current trends, most USD-backed currencies for future examples;)
If there is a need for the added productivity afforded by such software, people with that need will pay to have that software made (or improved to meet the specifics of their needs).
Apache was made despite the fact that people weren't forced by arbitrary government rules to pay for their copy. Companies paid developers to improve on it because they needed those improvements. They invested time and effort in making the software better because it benefits them. I'm not even arguing that they be forced to contribute their changes either (though I like the open-source model and it can exist *specifically* because there is protection for credit, not from copying). They may decide to pay programmers internally to build better software that benefits only themselves. That's a bigger investment though and a larger gamble as it relies on secrecy but it may be a valid business decision. In such a case, you try to protect it with NDA or some such, not copyright.
Regarding novels, movies and albums, I'm saying that your business model should focus on being paid to do work if that is the reason you are performing that work for. A band should be paid to climb up on a stage and give a good show. Not sit on their ass while government enforces the fact that they played that show once and should get money every time someone listens to a recording of it. Writing more songs is an investment, it means that people who liked your first show might be keen to pay again to watch you perform to those new songs you worked came up with.
But regardless of the business model, performing art is first and foremost a way to express yourself, do it because you enjoy it, not to make money. If people like what you do, you'll make money and that's a great bonus. It may afford you more time to put on your art. If you're quite good, you may even make a living out of it. What I'm saying is that you aren't *entitled* to the bonus. You're entitled to the credit.
Of course we have great works that may (likely) have never existed were it not for copyrights. Exploiting a bad law to reach great results does not justify that result. The fact that Nike shoes are great does not justify them using child labour (which is/was legal where they do/did it). I'd give up on Hollywood's ability to make Transformers 6 for the sake of proper copyright law, wouldn't you?;)
The way to solve that was to have 50 states and very little federal law thus creating competition among the states for population, which directly correlates with their tax revenues. Now that the federal government took over everything and made most of the states indentured servants, finding another country is the only real option left if you don't like your government's way of managing things.
That or they realized that every part they make could be clocked comparatively close to their high-end counterpart because their manufacturing process has improved. How are they going to justify making you pay that much more for the faster chip when yields mean that they cost the same to make as the lowest-end parts?
When you test the chips to find out what speed it can run at and you find your lowest grade bin almost empty*, what do you do? Lower the price to match your yields or cripple the high-end parts?
*Figuratively here, I don't think they drop in a bin.
"Any person who has a security clearance knows that he or she has an obligation to protect classified information and abide by the law,"
I would say the latter part trumps the former and a pretty good case could be made that spying on US citizens is illegal unless you change the constitution.
Revenu comes at the expense of resources (skill, time, materials, etc.). You should be fairly paid on the value of these resources (eg: the time you put in multiplied by your skill level). If your revenue stream involves you putting the resources up front for a result that can be duplicated at no cost, you're running a pretty insane gamble and your business model is invalid.
Credit is the one thing that allows you to gain some revenue from easily duplicated work. Be it simply because people like your work and are willing to compensate you for putting it up front or because they're willing to hire you to perform more work based on what they've seen so far.
Information, when copied at one's own cost, does not take that information away from the original owner. Credit, when taken, is taken away from the original owner. Your notion of intellectual property falls on its ass when you try to to equate it to material goods. Credit, however, maintains the same basic rules as physical property: Claiming it for yourself, even at your own cost, does take it away from the original owner.
I think the point here is that the design isn't broken because you *can* do so. The system will still be functional enough to allow someone with the right knowledge to fix it (remotely if need be) and in situations where this matters, people with the right knowledge are a phone call away and would not need to move to fix it.
If a linux box has a borked gconf, some dude across the world can make it magically boot a few minutes later. Not to mention that the user can only bork *his own gconf*. If a windows box has a borked registry, you need a human with some level of technical skill at the computer or to pay extra to have some sort of lights-out management built into the computer which is no excuse for poor design.
When two people have a conflict and fail to reach an agreement on their own, they can either:
1- give up (what he should have done) 2- use physical force (illegal and against libertarian principles) 3- seek arbitration (what he did)
Arbitration ruled in favor of his opponent, which is a bummer to him. There is no force involved here, and no government. WIPO is merely the assigned arbitrator in international domain disputes. ICANN has authority over the.com and.org domains, their assigned mediator for such a case is WIPO. ICANN is not a government, it is a corporation and it has the final word on its own TLDs.
He was trying to use the courts, which are a legitimate means of conflict resolution to libertarians. People make a big deal of WIPO, but the only reason why they're involved is the fact that they're the body in charge of arbitration (read, the people in charge of handling the court process) when the two parties are not in the same country. He didn't go crying to the UN or to government, he asked lawyers to take the case to court, which is entirely legitimate, from a libertarian perspective. I think he was wrong to do it, but he is consistent with his philosophy here. He lost the argument, bummer to him and not all that surprising... But he didn't cross his stated principles.
My point is that if the cost of being a devolving drooling idiot becomes zero, humanity will head that way. Our behavior and evolution usually boils down to a cost/benefit analysis.
Regardless of what happens, you need a way to promote accomplishment. I can be of a much different nature than financial success, but if your entire system has no meaningful (as in no consequences for failing at) ways to encourage personal growth, what you will end up with is a rapid destruction of whatever brought us to that Utopian state.
If there is no real cost to being a lazy, despicable idiot and no real advantage to being an active, curious and well balanced person the path of least resistance will ultimately prevail. Competition doesn't have to be about crushing rivals (even though it is often reduced to that due to the path of least resistance), it can merely be about wanting to reap the advantages of being better at whatever you do.
I'm hoping that a situation where labour becomes obsolete does not equate a situation where productive output becomes obsolete. If the shift makes us focus mostly on creative/intellectual output, fine, but there needs to be a benefit for being good at that and a cost for failing lest the progress of mankind come to a screeching halt. Also: The better the rewards for being productive, the less humans reproduce, something to keep in mind as long as we work with finite resources.
Slashdot Mirror
Wait, is the Knock-knock ARP?
Well, admitting that they can do nothing and not being utterly hostile to smaller businesses (the kind that can't afford lobbyists and a full time legal department) might be a good starting point for the government. It's pretty expensive to hire people, never mind handle all the government aspects of running most businesses. Unless they're already large enough to be publicly traded and at that point, it's usually cheaper to offshore the expenses anyway. End result is still less jobs.
What happens when you start competing with mega-corp and they slap you with a random software patent lawsuit? That is if you refused their offer to buy you outright. Of course that might leave you better off but it'll put a stop to you producing wealth (in the form of great software) that actually benefits society.
Patents are another one of those well meaning pieces of government legislation. They're literally 'protection from competition'. Protect who from competition from who, well... That all depends on the size of your legal department/budget now doesn't it?
All of the media seem to be in a conspiracy to disengage peoples' brains from actually thinking about what they are reading.
Reading... ? That's how twitter and facebook work right? Because if it's more than 20 or so words, we're not interested.
You were lucky. There quite a few printers come with toner cartridges containing an e-fuse. They start counting how many pages you've printed and refuse to print more unless you change it (or fake another e-fuse destruction).
What you refer to are symptoms more than causes. What is killing the economy is mostly the enormous barriers to wealth creation that the average individual (not the already super-rich) faces.
The clear path to prosperity in America used to be to start and run your own business (or help in doing so). There are enormous hindrances to doing such nowadays mainly rooted in the state. In most fields just meeting regulations for your businesses is cost-prohibitive, as is hiring people to help you run that business. Then there is the enormous advantages granted to mega-corps that cozy up to government in order to protect themselves from the kind of competition that smaller businesses could offer. If competing in a market requires a multi-million dollar legal department then you've just handed that market over to the mega-corps and deserve overpriced, shitty products and services that will result.
You can't regulate mega-corps out of their powers, they have the resources to find or even create their own loopholes. In most instances, they're actually the ones writing the regulation in the first place. What you end up doing with regulations is usually just killing any competition the bigger players might face. Fines don't mean anything to them. Jail is barely a hindrance, they just throw a convenient peon under the bus or buy their way out of it. Nationalizing maybe? Well, if handing the market to an entity that can legally force you to buy its product at whatever price it sets is your thing...
You want to see mega-corp suffer? Let them face their own inefficiency under threat of smaller, nimbler competitors.
I'm not sure... Your example implies threat of force. It's in your self-interest to prevent it of course but using force (or threat of it) to take what you want from someone else is not okay with Rand at all to begin with. I guess it falls back to the thugs example I gave earlier, only this time they'd be keeping the money for themselves.
It makes no difference if the thug wears a suit and hands you forms explaining how your assets are being commandeered or if he's holding a gun to your head or as per your example a pitchfork: You cannot take property from someone by force, threat or fraud, it has to be a willing exchange.
But self-gratification does not need to be material, which is the more common misconception I was trying to correct. The key point is a clear understanding of mutual benefit. The nature of that benefit is for the giver to decide. Giving selflessly is a 'sin' in Atlas Shrugged because it is perceived as self-destructive and offencive (even from the receiving end) or as Dagny puts it: "A trade where someone gains and someone loses is called a fraud."
To go back to my previous example, you don't actually give the homeless guy 20 bucks, you trade him that 20 bucks for how it makes you feel to do so.
On a personal note, I became a lot more generous once understood that. I'm not offended by the fact that I'm selfishly investing in my social environment: People who need my help still get my help but I also take my own benefit into account. For me, there is genuine value to a smile and a thank you. There's also the fact that people I help would be keener to help me which is potential return on the investment. Treating it as an investment also helps me spot leeches and allows me to be smarter about where I put in my resources.
The principles are the same as in finance: If you keep investing your resources in things that make no profit, you won't be spending them in the economy very long. If you make smart investments, you can keep investing a lot longer and also empower others to do the same.
I don't know if you've read Rand, but that's not quite what she says.
It is perfectly alright for one to help others according to Rand. The only condition is that you do it with consideration for your own benefit. The thing most people miss is that this benefit does *not* need to be material. You can help someone because it makes you feel good. That's entirely valid according to Randian principles on the condition that you value that good feeling more than the cost of said help. That is compatible with your Gandhi quote, btw.
- OK with Rand: Giving 20 bucks to some homeless guy because you want to.
- Not OK with Rand: Giving 20 bucks to some homeless guy because his condition somehow *entitles* him to your help.
- Definitely NOT OK with Rand: Some thug(s) using force or threat of force to take that 20 bucks from you and handing it to an arbitrary group of bums they feels deserves your help. Typically as a selfish political strategy to maintain and increase that ability to use force.
They might make an exception... Given how much they screw you over per transaction (especially with the exchange rate), doing so on a $70M space-tourist invoice sure would net them a neat bundle.
How can you be sure the other party actually has the gold to back up their dollars?
If there is a confidence issue with their currency, you request ability to perform your own audit.
There is no way to force an unwilling government to actually hand over gold in exchange for dollars.
That is not at all the point. The point is that if a government starts inflating its currency and cheating you out of value, you can demand that audit to confirm, and stop accepting their phony currency if they fail at either. You can't force them to hand over the gold (except, you know, by using actual force), but they can't force you to accept their overinflated, poorly managed currency either. Then it becomes their problem that nobody wants to trade with them in exchange for that bogus currency.
The logistical, policy and administrative challenges you mention are there as *safeguards* against inflationary practices. Yes, I mean that if your economy does stupid things, you can't bail it out by just issuing more currency. The people who made poor investments get to experience consequences.
Well, if he actually earned that money (hey, it's possible), I don't see how this is a bad thing.
Sure there are plenty of bastards scamming their way into great wealth, but some actually become rich by providing goods or services that people are entirely willing and happy to pay for.
That's one of the arguments against fiat currencies, yes. There isn't material value backing them up, just the government's word that "we're good for it". Incidently, they go up in flames when the government backing them stops acting in a fiscally responsible way and attempt to monetize away their debt. See Zimbabwe or the Weimar republic (Germany) for historical examples and, without some very radical changes in current trends, most USD-backed currencies for future examples ;)
If there is a need for the added productivity afforded by such software, people with that need will pay to have that software made (or improved to meet the specifics of their needs).
Apache was made despite the fact that people weren't forced by arbitrary government rules to pay for their copy. Companies paid developers to improve on it because they needed those improvements. They invested time and effort in making the software better because it benefits them. I'm not even arguing that they be forced to contribute their changes either (though I like the open-source model and it can exist *specifically* because there is protection for credit, not from copying). They may decide to pay programmers internally to build better software that benefits only themselves. That's a bigger investment though and a larger gamble as it relies on secrecy but it may be a valid business decision. In such a case, you try to protect it with NDA or some such, not copyright.
Regarding novels, movies and albums, I'm saying that your business model should focus on being paid to do work if that is the reason you are performing that work for. A band should be paid to climb up on a stage and give a good show. Not sit on their ass while government enforces the fact that they played that show once and should get money every time someone listens to a recording of it. Writing more songs is an investment, it means that people who liked your first show might be keen to pay again to watch you perform to those new songs you worked came up with.
But regardless of the business model, performing art is first and foremost a way to express yourself, do it because you enjoy it, not to make money. If people like what you do, you'll make money and that's a great bonus. It may afford you more time to put on your art. If you're quite good, you may even make a living out of it. What I'm saying is that you aren't *entitled* to the bonus. You're entitled to the credit.
Of course we have great works that may (likely) have never existed were it not for copyrights. Exploiting a bad law to reach great results does not justify that result. The fact that Nike shoes are great does not justify them using child labour (which is/was legal where they do/did it). I'd give up on Hollywood's ability to make Transformers 6 for the sake of proper copyright law, wouldn't you? ;)
The way to solve that was to have 50 states and very little federal law thus creating competition among the states for population, which directly correlates with their tax revenues. Now that the federal government took over everything and made most of the states indentured servants, finding another country is the only real option left if you don't like your government's way of managing things.
That or they realized that every part they make could be clocked comparatively close to their high-end counterpart because their manufacturing process has improved. How are they going to justify making you pay that much more for the faster chip when yields mean that they cost the same to make as the lowest-end parts?
When you test the chips to find out what speed it can run at and you find your lowest grade bin almost empty*, what do you do? Lower the price to match your yields or cripple the high-end parts?
*Figuratively here, I don't think they drop in a bin.
"Any person who has a security clearance knows that he or she has an obligation to protect classified information and abide by the law,"
I would say the latter part trumps the former and a pretty good case could be made that spying on US citizens is illegal unless you change the constitution.
Revenu comes at the expense of resources (skill, time, materials, etc.). You should be fairly paid on the value of these resources (eg: the time you put in multiplied by your skill level). If your revenue stream involves you putting the resources up front for a result that can be duplicated at no cost, you're running a pretty insane gamble and your business model is invalid.
Credit is the one thing that allows you to gain some revenue from easily duplicated work. Be it simply because people like your work and are willing to compensate you for putting it up front or because they're willing to hire you to perform more work based on what they've seen so far.
Information, when copied at one's own cost, does not take that information away from the original owner. Credit, when taken, is taken away from the original owner. Your notion of intellectual property falls on its ass when you try to to equate it to material goods. Credit, however, maintains the same basic rules as physical property: Claiming it for yourself, even at your own cost, does take it away from the original owner.
sudo echo "server:/share /location nfs 0 0" >> /etc/fstab
I think the point here is that the design isn't broken because you *can* do so. The system will still be functional enough to allow someone with the right knowledge to fix it (remotely if need be) and in situations where this matters, people with the right knowledge are a phone call away and would not need to move to fix it.
If a linux box has a borked gconf, some dude across the world can make it magically boot a few minutes later. Not to mention that the user can only bork *his own gconf*.
If a windows box has a borked registry, you need a human with some level of technical skill at the computer or to pay extra to have some sort of lights-out management built into the computer which is no excuse for poor design.
When two people have a conflict and fail to reach an agreement on their own, they can either:
1- give up (what he should have done)
2- use physical force (illegal and against libertarian principles)
3- seek arbitration (what he did)
Arbitration ruled in favor of his opponent, which is a bummer to him. There is no force involved here, and no government. WIPO is merely the assigned arbitrator in international domain disputes. ICANN has authority over the .com and .org domains, their assigned mediator for such a case is WIPO. ICANN is not a government, it is a corporation and it has the final word on its own TLDs.
He was trying to use the courts, which are a legitimate means of conflict resolution to libertarians. People make a big deal of WIPO, but the only reason why they're involved is the fact that they're the body in charge of arbitration (read, the people in charge of handling the court process) when the two parties are not in the same country. He didn't go crying to the UN or to government, he asked lawyers to take the case to court, which is entirely legitimate, from a libertarian perspective. I think he was wrong to do it, but he is consistent with his philosophy here. He lost the argument, bummer to him and not all that surprising... But he didn't cross his stated principles.
My point is that if the cost of being a devolving drooling idiot becomes zero, humanity will head that way. Our behavior and evolution usually boils down to a cost/benefit analysis.
Regardless of what happens, you need a way to promote accomplishment. I can be of a much different nature than financial success, but if your entire system has no meaningful (as in no consequences for failing at) ways to encourage personal growth, what you will end up with is a rapid destruction of whatever brought us to that Utopian state.
If there is no real cost to being a lazy, despicable idiot and no real advantage to being an active, curious and well balanced person the path of least resistance will ultimately prevail. Competition doesn't have to be about crushing rivals (even though it is often reduced to that due to the path of least resistance), it can merely be about wanting to reap the advantages of being better at whatever you do.
I'm hoping that a situation where labour becomes obsolete does not equate a situation where productive output becomes obsolete. If the shift makes us focus mostly on creative/intellectual output, fine, but there needs to be a benefit for being good at that and a cost for failing lest the progress of mankind come to a screeching halt. Also: The better the rewards for being productive, the less humans reproduce, something to keep in mind as long as we work with finite resources.