I'm free to use non-free or free software, and I like it. If you are true believer in freedom, then let me be. I'm smart enough to make the choice and responsible enough to accept the consequences.
I would mod you up, but I already commented in this article.
I have been working for the past 1 and 1/2 years on writing a game for mobile.
It is closed source.
Over the years I have contributed to several open source projects.
We worked extremely hard to make this a reality. Our customers are extremely happy with it. When someone purchases the game, they do it because to them, the value they are getting is higher than the value of the money they spent, otherwise they would not do it. Likewise, the value of the money is higher to us, than a single copy of the game. So everyone gets higher value in a voluntary exchange, there is 2 winners, and no loser.
So who the hell is Richard Stallman to tell me or my customers that we are doing something wrong? How the hell are we harming our customers, if they were being harmed, they would not buy the game. Only our customers have the right to decide if they are being harmed or not.
You know what is wrong and unethical: to interfere in a voluntary exchange between two people. That is restricting on both mine and my customer's freedom. I am glad that this extremism has not made it into legislation. The only exception to this would be if the transaction involved harming another person or his property which is not the case by simply selling a game.
...It makes sense in a world where the government subsidizes your health care...
I agree with everything you said, but I would like to clarify one thing:
The government does not pay for anything at all. They simply force their constituents to pay. They take from the private sector either by taxing, printing money (inflation) or borrowing and putting down the tax payer as the borrower. All they ever do is take from one pocket and put in the other.
It seems that we have been running out of addresses for 10 years or something and everyone has been talking about moving to IPv6 since the late ninteties ?
I am sure there is a limited range of numbers and the issue is real but also seems like fodder for sensationalist tech journal articles.
You are 100% correct. It was clear then and it is clear now how it will play out. All it takes is just a little analytic thinking:
We will never run out of IPv4 addresses. Yes, you read it right: NEVER.
What will happen is that as supply of IPv4 remains flat, and demand for it goes up, supply and demand laws kick in, and the price of an IPv4 address goes up. As prices go up, people sitting on unused addresses will start selling them, and people that need them will start buying them (This article is a good example). So the market will naturally redistribute IPv4 addresses from wasteful uses to more productive uses. This will also mean that there will ALWAYS be an IPv4 address for you to purchase if you want to pay the price, that is why I say we will never run out of IPv4 addresses.
There will be a point, where cost of an IPv4 address will be greater than the cost of switching to IPv6. This threshold will start happening for a few sectors first. My guess is Business to Business applications and back office services first. At some point cell phones too since there are so many. At some point, ISP will start offering an IPv6 only plan with some backward compatible proxy which would be cheaper than IPv4 plan for consumers with limitations. Web sites will want to be optimized for these consumers, and will start offering their content in both protocols. This will make IPv6 switch less and less costly as more content is available for it. Once enough consumers are in IPv6, web sites will start ignoring IPv4 altogether to save the cost of an IPv4 address.
Eventually, enough momentum will be gained by IPv6 that IPv4 will go the way of the typewriter, where it is available, but nobody cares.
This will be a smooth transition, no crisis, no armagedon, just free market pushing the change slowly and efficiently. This process will take years. No one is or should be in a rush to switch or panic, just switch when it is cost effective to do so.
I have been working on making a game for mobile myself (yes, shameless plug) and I can tell you first hand that making anything beyond tic tac toe on html5 for mobile is crazy talk.
Lets take one resource we heavily depend on: Oil. Suppose we deplete a significant amount of oil wells, what will happen? well laws of supply and demand kick in: as supply becomes shorter, the price of oil goes up. As the price of oil goes up, it will be used progressively less and less since alternatives become more and more attractive in comparison. The whole point of a prices in markets is that there the amount of buyers match the amount of suppliers. Through pricing, the market has a way to ration ALL resources efficiently. This effectively means that we WILL NEVER RUN OUT OF OIL, that we will simply use less of it as it becomes more scarce, but there will always be some available for those willing to pay the price. In fact, we use oil today not because it is the only way to power our cars, but only because it is the cheapest (most efficient).
Another thing they ignore is advances in technology. Take fracking for example, we can extract oil and natural gas from places we never could before. As technology improves, so does our ability to get more and more resources. All these models completely ignore the fact that we will come up with better and more efficient ways to get more resources.
The only thing that can and does stop this natural and efficient rationing of resources are governments.
They put a caviat and say: "if we continue consuming resources at the current pace". Completely overlooking the fact that markets would not allow the current pace to continue when scarcity increases. That is like saying: "If I continue climbing up this mountain at the current pace, I will get to space in a month"
As someone who is making a game myself I can say that the money is on mobile now. There are millions of people with what are essentially portable game devices, looking for something to kill time while commuting or waiting in lines. $60 is unrealistic, but $5 have the potential to get you thousands of purchases per month if you have something decent. This is particularly good for indi developers like myself, since capital investment is small in comparison to consoles, and there is already a whole cheap infrastructure in place to sell your game.
Someone is giving homeless people a legitimate simple job that they can do even while they sleep instead of handing them money for nothing. How dare you make a homeless person productive?
The reason there is a 15% capital gain only, is that if you own a company, you are already paying 35% corporate tax as the owner of the company.
I would be fine taxing capital gains the same as the rest of income, but only if you eliminate the corporate tax, otherwise you are double taxing. Consider this example:
Suppose a company profit is $100 per share. Then they have to pay 35% of that in corporate taxes, leaving only $65 for the shareholders. If they distribute that money in dividends or simply reinvest and becomes capital gain, the owner pays 15% of those $65, leaving the shareholder with only $55.25.
If you were to eliminate the corporate tax, then the company would distribute the full $100, and the shareholder would pay 15% of the $100.
From this example, it is clear that corporate taxes are not paid by corporations, but the shareholders, so saying they only pay 15% is very misleading.
Because all economist mentioned are Keynesian economists.
Browse around mises.org. Search for articles in 2003-2007, and it is obvious they saw it comming.
Here is one notable austrian economist. You would think politicians would be knocking at his door constantly to help them see. If you claim it was a fluke, here is another much more famous guy that follows austrian economy, that predicted every single recession since 83.
Heck, you can also predict the next recession, just spend a few hours reading on mises.org, they have courses for free.
I agree with the rest of your post, except for this bit.
How is this shit for Gnome, it is not like the Gnome project is entitled to this money in some way. They are receiving 25%, when they could very well be receiving 0. Canonical is actually being generous here by donating those 25%.
As you point out the banshee developers don't have any problem with this. But even if they did, they already gave written permission to do this (the license).
Canonical has the right to keep 100% of this money if they so desire. Rather than say that they got shitty 25%, be thankful they receive anything at all.
As opposed to central planners in governments. Yes, they are really smart, after all:
They keep the economy stable with no unemployment.
They spend money very carefully, and never waste a dime.
All the companies they run are solid and profitable.
They know how to keep us save, no major attack have been reported in the US in the past few decades.
Choose wisely what people need, for example they decided everyone should be a homeowner in 2000 and we are all so much happier for it.
</sarcasm>
Honestly, who do you think is going to make a smarter decision?
a) People spending their own hard earned money.
b) A bureaucrat thousands of miles away in Washington (depending where you live of course) spending other people's money.
or, is common roads, infrastructure and stuff like that too 'commie' for people like you?
the fact that the gov mismanages our funds has nothing to do with the fact that the funds are NEEDED to 'run society'.
I know I will be modded down, I don't care
Not only is it unnecessary for government to build roads, but they would actually work much better if it was the private sector doing them. For example, there would not be any traffic at all, and there would not be roads built that are never used. You would not pay for roads you don't use like you do today through taxes.
The same applies for many programs such as fire fighting, police, courts, education, national defense, charity and others
Murry Rothbard even wrote a whole book describing not only how the private sector would handle each one of these services but very logically explains why it would do a better job at it. The book is free for you to read or even listen to, you can get it in html, pdf or mp3 for free. Your specific example of roads is addressed in chapter 11
it is why we have courts. it is why we have government
Do you even for a second think that the court or goverment are going to punish Amazon and EveryDNS for banning wikileaks???. Government was likely the one pushing them to cut it off.
i fear my fellow man far more than i fear my government
Your fellow man does not lie, steal, sabotage, commit war crimes, kidnap, torture, tell you where you can go and what you can do, throw you in jail for victim less crimes or if you protest, keep anything it wants a secret, and forcibly take your money to do all this
Given that the printing press at the FED is in overdrive, it is very likely that the dollar will accelerate its decline in the next few years. Every dollar printed, does not create purchasing power, it simply dilutes the purchasing power of all the existing dollars out there.
Why do you link to BASE but not M1 or M2? M2, in particular, is a better representation of the money supply, and if you look at M2, you'd see that it doesn't look so ridiculous (although there is high growth). BASE is going up very fast to offset the reduction from the non-BASE parts of the money supply...
The FED purposely stopped publishing the M3, so they are hiding much of the non-BASE parts of the money supply.
If you want, go with the True Money Supply as invented by Rothbard, which takes into account demand deposits and avoids double counts that the M3 does. You are right it is not quite as dramatic, but it is still telling. The BASE is what the FED produces essentially, at some point the fractional reserve will kick in and you will see the corresponding inflation of M3 and TMS.
One more thing:
Because as the dollar continues to lose value against gold at roughly 20% in the last 5 years (actually more like 10 years but that is not displayed on that web site), anyone getting 1.75% interest on a CD or 2.5% on a T-bill is an idiot.
Sure, until the gold bubble bursts. A CD or a T-bill has a lot less risk than gold.
They have been talking about the gold bubble since it was at 400, it is not even close to its peak in 1980 at $2000 adjusted for inflation. When people start saying gold can never go down just like they did with houses, that is when I will believe there is a bubble.
Quite to the contrary, T-bill are artificially expensive, propped up by a FED printing money to buy them, and chinese and japanese governments obsessed with buying them. But our deficit and obligations are just as bad or worse than Greece's. You want a bubble? we are living it, the T-bill bubble is the mother of all bubbles. Once it bursts, expect higher taxes (government can not borrow, so it must confiscate) and high inflation (government can not borrow, so it must print money). This incidentally is very bullish for gold.
Get this book if you want an entry level on how the economy works.
Buying from a vending machine is great for people like me. Getting gold from a dealer is a pain, they have high premiums, and you have to pay for shipping. A vending machine would hopefully eliminate some of the premium being paid for shipping and handling, as well as allow me to go locally.
What's the point of selling gold in a vending machine when no one is going to take a gold coin as currency?
Because as the dollar continues to lose value against gold at roughly 20% in the last 5 years (actually more like 10 years but that is not displayed on that web site), anyone getting 1.75% interest on a CD or 2.5% on a T-bill is an idiot.
Given that the printing press at the FED is in overdrive, it is very likely that the dollar will accelerate its decline in the next few years. Every dollar printed, does not create purchasing power, it simply dilutes the purchasing power of all the existing dollars out there.
A lot of us are seeing the writing on the wall for the dollar. If the premium is low enough, I will be a regular customer of these machines
If I own a megaphone, and I don't lend it to you because I don't agree with you, am I violating your free speech rights?
If I falsely scream FIRE in a theater, would I be exercising my free speech rights?
Any sensible person would answer no to both questions. So where is the limit? Murray Rothbard solved this cleanly by pointing out that free speech is not a right, rather, free speech is derived from, and limited by property rights. This is how he explained it in "For a new liberty"
In fact, there are no human rights that are separable from property rights. The human right of free speech is simply the property right to hire an assembly hall from the owners, or to own one oneself; the human right of a free press is the property right to buy materials and then print leaflets or books and to sell them to those who are willing to buy. There is no extra "right of free speech" or free press beyond the property rights we can enumerate in any given case. And furthermore, discovering and identifying the property rights involved will resolve any apparent conflicts of rights that may crop up.
Consider, for example, the classic example where liberals generally concede that a person's "right of freedom of speech" must be curbed in the name of the "public interest": Justice Holmes' famous dictum that no one has the right to cry "fire" falsely in a crowded theater. Holmes and his followers have used this illustration again and again to prove the supposed necessity for all rights to be relative and tentative rather than precise and absolute.
But the problem here is not that rights cannot be pushed too far, but that the whole case is discussed in terms of a vague and wooly "freedom of speech" rather than in terms of the rights of private property. Suppose we analyze the problem under the aspect of property rights. The fellow who brings on a riot by falsely shouting "fire" in a crowded theater is, necessarily, either the owner of the theater (or the owner's agent) or a paying patron. If he is the owner, then he has committed fraud on his customers. He has taken their money in exchange for a promise to put on a movie or play, and now, instead, he disrupts the show by falsely shouting "fire" and breaking up the performance. He has thus welshed on his contractual obligation, and has thereby stolen the property — the money — of his patrons and has violated their property rights.
Suppose, on the other hand, that the shouter is a patron and not the owner. In that case, he is violating the property right of the owner [p. 44] as well as of the other guests to their paid-for performance. As a guest, he has gained access to the property on certain terms, including an obligation not to violate the owner's property or to disrupt the performance the owner is putting on. His malicious act, therefore, violates the property rights of the theater owner and of all the other patrons. There is no need, therefore, for individual rights to be restricted in the case of the false shouter of "fire." The rights of the individual are still absolute; but they are property rights. The fellow who maliciously cried "fire" in a crowded theater is indeed a criminal, but not because his so-called "right of free speech" must be pragmatically restricted on behalf of the "public good"; he is a criminal because he has clearly and obviously violated the property rights of another person.
Rackspace has a megaphone (the web site hosting), they can contract it out to anyone and put ANY terms they want. The other party is free to accept the contract or not. If they do, then they have to meet its requirements, if they don't, then Rackspace property rights have been violated and Rackspace has the right to stop lending its megaphone.
The single core idea of libertarians is that each person own his own body.
This implies that a person has the right to decide what to do with it. Things like drugs, prostitution, selling parts of your body (organs), should be decided by you and only you. The only thing a person can not do is infringe on someone else's property. Murder, assault, rape, slavery are considered a violation of someone else's property therefore they would be crimes. Murder being the ultimate crime.
This simple position solves this case consistently: he should have the right to decide for himself whether he wants to do this or not.
In fact, he should have the right to sell those organs, and give the proceeds to his family if he wants to. Allowing this would even have the nice effect of reducing organ theft/traffic by not making them so frustratingly scarce. It would also save lives
Unfortunately, in our society we do not own our bodies, the government claims ownership of part of it and feels it has the right to tell you what you can and cannot do with it. It feels entitled to tell you not to take drugs, to decide whether you can donate your organs and to whom, to tell you what you can eat and so on. All this while assuming you are an idiot and that it is doing it "for your own good" because they know better.
Between 2008 and the first quarter of 2009 there was a rally to the dollar. When compared to other currencies in the world, it went from 72 to 88 in the dolar index. This caused everything to drop in price in dollars. Since then, the US dollar has fallen sharply, fast enough to prevent improved technology from lowering costs. It has rebounded a little this year, but not because the dollar gained anything, but because the euro fell sharply.
But lets price it in something less erratic than the US dollar, euros or anything that comes out of a printing press. Lets price it in the most stable currency known to man: gold.
pricing the same 16GB in gold we get:
Q1 2008 0.006875 oz
Q1 2009 0.002777 oz
Q1 2010 0.002363 oz
As you can see, when priced in gold, you can see that flash has never really stopped going down in price. It simply slowed down probably due to some of the reasons explained in TFA.
It is not the cost of producing something that determines the price of something. It is supply and demand.
If that was the case, then no company would ever sell anything below the cost of production. Ask car companies, or any airline. Most of them were forced to sell below cost of production, and thus lose money in the past couple of years.
Now, if they sell something for well above the cost of production (where cost includes time), this signals other entrepreneurs to jump in so they can get in on the profit boat. Over time, the more entrepreneurs that jump in, the bigger the competition, the bigger the supply, forcing prices to come down.
Profits are an aberration, an imbalance between the value consumers give to a good and the cost of producing that good. It is profit itself the signal that tell entrepreneurs that more of this good should be produced. Loses are the same imbalance in the other way, and they signal to entrepreneurs that the things that are being used to produce something are more valuable elsewhere and they should stop wasting resources and produce less of the good that is losing money.
In a free market all profits and loses tend to disappear over time. That is why companies are forced to innovate in order to keep profits. There has to be some new products, or changes in consumer preferences to generate new profits and loses. The only thing that can (and does) prevent this is government intervention.
In a free market, DRM would not be an issue at all.
Think about it, every major DRM encumbered format has been broken in a matter of months. Some also died simply due to competition offering non DRM encumbered alternatives. DRM is fundamentally doomed to fail since it provides less value to people for higher costs, which is uneconomical. Witness Amazon's MP3 forcing Apple to kill DRM. Witness how easy is to watch encrypted DVD's in linux. DECE will fail for the same reasons, it wont be long before someone cracks it if it really becomes mainstream, so DECE is no significant threat to us.
The real problem is when government intervenes. Governments make stuff like DMCA and put people in jail for essentially enabling competition. DMCA and sw patents are the complete opposite of antitrust laws (not that I agree with antitrust either). They legally protect and enable monopolies. Government's schizophrenia would be laughable if we were not living with it. So aim your pitchforks at the right entity, at the violent force that coerces you into using this stuff and punishes anyone who might otherwise provide you with an alternative.
Slashdot Mirror
I can only hope more companies do the same.
I'm free to use non-free or free software, and I like it. If you are true believer in freedom, then let me be. I'm smart enough to make the choice and responsible enough to accept the consequences.
I would mod you up, but I already commented in this article.
I have been working for the past 1 and 1/2 years on writing a game for mobile. It is closed source.
Over the years I have contributed to several open source projects.
We worked extremely hard to make this a reality. Our customers are extremely happy with it. When someone purchases the game, they do it because to them, the value they are getting is higher than the value of the money they spent, otherwise they would not do it. Likewise, the value of the money is higher to us, than a single copy of the game. So everyone gets higher value in a voluntary exchange, there is 2 winners, and no loser.
So who the hell is Richard Stallman to tell me or my customers that we are doing something wrong? How the hell are we harming our customers, if they were being harmed, they would not buy the game. Only our customers have the right to decide if they are being harmed or not.
You know what is wrong and unethical: to interfere in a voluntary exchange between two people. That is restricting on both mine and my customer's freedom. I am glad that this extremism has not made it into legislation. The only exception to this would be if the transaction involved harming another person or his property which is not the case by simply selling a game.
...It makes sense in a world where the government subsidizes your health care...
I agree with everything you said, but I would like to clarify one thing:
The government does not pay for anything at all. They simply force their constituents to pay. They take from the private sector either by taxing, printing money (inflation) or borrowing and putting down the tax payer as the borrower. All they ever do is take from one pocket and put in the other.
This of course only makes your case stronger.
It seems that we have been running out of addresses for 10 years or something and everyone has been talking about moving to IPv6 since the late ninteties ? I am sure there is a limited range of numbers and the issue is real but also seems like fodder for sensationalist tech journal articles.
You are 100% correct. It was clear then and it is clear now how it will play out. All it takes is just a little analytic thinking: We will never run out of IPv4 addresses. Yes, you read it right: NEVER.
What will happen is that as supply of IPv4 remains flat, and demand for it goes up, supply and demand laws kick in, and the price of an IPv4 address goes up. As prices go up, people sitting on unused addresses will start selling them, and people that need them will start buying them (This article is a good example). So the market will naturally redistribute IPv4 addresses from wasteful uses to more productive uses. This will also mean that there will ALWAYS be an IPv4 address for you to purchase if you want to pay the price, that is why I say we will never run out of IPv4 addresses.
There will be a point, where cost of an IPv4 address will be greater than the cost of switching to IPv6. This threshold will start happening for a few sectors first. My guess is Business to Business applications and back office services first. At some point cell phones too since there are so many. At some point, ISP will start offering an IPv6 only plan with some backward compatible proxy which would be cheaper than IPv4 plan for consumers with limitations. Web sites will want to be optimized for these consumers, and will start offering their content in both protocols. This will make IPv6 switch less and less costly as more content is available for it. Once enough consumers are in IPv6, web sites will start ignoring IPv4 altogether to save the cost of an IPv4 address.
Eventually, enough momentum will be gained by IPv6 that IPv4 will go the way of the typewriter, where it is available, but nobody cares.
This will be a smooth transition, no crisis, no armagedon, just free market pushing the change slowly and efficiently. This process will take years. No one is or should be in a rush to switch or panic, just switch when it is cost effective to do so.
Besides, most popular apps on mobile devices are fetching information from websites anyway
The top grossing apps are without question games
I have been working on making a game for mobile myself (yes, shameless plug) and I can tell you first hand that making anything beyond tic tac toe on html5 for mobile is crazy talk.
You are not required to give money to C4L in order to sign.
Nor are you required to agree to everything they stand for.
If you want the TSA scrapped, sign or even call your representative, and then move on with your life without C4L.
No, he only has an issue with it because he finally got accosted like the rest of us.
Senator Paul has been complaining and fighting against TSA abuses for years along with his father. He did not just started having an issue with them.
Economics, that is why.
Lets take one resource we heavily depend on: Oil. Suppose we deplete a significant amount of oil wells, what will happen? well laws of supply and demand kick in: as supply becomes shorter, the price of oil goes up. As the price of oil goes up, it will be used progressively less and less since alternatives become more and more attractive in comparison. The whole point of a prices in markets is that there the amount of buyers match the amount of suppliers. Through pricing, the market has a way to ration ALL resources efficiently. This effectively means that we WILL NEVER RUN OUT OF OIL, that we will simply use less of it as it becomes more scarce, but there will always be some available for those willing to pay the price. In fact, we use oil today not because it is the only way to power our cars, but only because it is the cheapest (most efficient).
Another thing they ignore is advances in technology. Take fracking for example, we can extract oil and natural gas from places we never could before. As technology improves, so does our ability to get more and more resources. All these models completely ignore the fact that we will come up with better and more efficient ways to get more resources.
The only thing that can and does stop this natural and efficient rationing of resources are governments.
They put a caviat and say: "if we continue consuming resources at the current pace". Completely overlooking the fact that markets would not allow the current pace to continue when scarcity increases. That is like saying: "If I continue climbing up this mountain at the current pace, I will get to space in a month"
As someone who is making a game myself I can say that the money is on mobile now. There are millions of people with what are essentially portable game devices, looking for something to kill time while commuting or waiting in lines. $60 is unrealistic, but $5 have the potential to get you thousands of purchases per month if you have something decent. This is particularly good for indi developers like myself, since capital investment is small in comparison to consoles, and there is already a whole cheap infrastructure in place to sell your game.
Ohhhhh noooooo.
Someone is giving homeless people a legitimate simple job that they can do even while they sleep instead of handing them money for nothing. How dare you make a homeless person productive?
MUST TAG tackyexploitation.
The reason there is a 15% capital gain only, is that if you own a company, you are already paying 35% corporate tax as the owner of the company.
I would be fine taxing capital gains the same as the rest of income, but only if you eliminate the corporate tax, otherwise you are double taxing. Consider this example:
Suppose a company profit is $100 per share. Then they have to pay 35% of that in corporate taxes, leaving only $65 for the shareholders. If they distribute that money in dividends or simply reinvest and becomes capital gain, the owner pays 15% of those $65, leaving the shareholder with only $55.25.
If you were to eliminate the corporate tax, then the company would distribute the full $100, and the shareholder would pay 15% of the $100.
From this example, it is clear that corporate taxes are not paid by corporations, but the shareholders, so saying they only pay 15% is very misleading.
Because all economist mentioned are Keynesian economists. Browse around mises.org. Search for articles in 2003-2007, and it is obvious they saw it comming. Here is one notable austrian economist. You would think politicians would be knocking at his door constantly to help them see. If you claim it was a fluke, here is another much more famous guy that follows austrian economy, that predicted every single recession since 83. Heck, you can also predict the next recession, just spend a few hours reading on mises.org, they have courses for free.
Sure, the deal sounds like shit for Gnome...
I agree with the rest of your post, except for this bit.
How is this shit for Gnome, it is not like the Gnome project is entitled to this money in some way. They are receiving 25%, when they could very well be receiving 0. Canonical is actually being generous here by donating those 25%.
As you point out the banshee developers don't have any problem with this. But even if they did, they already gave written permission to do this (the license).
Canonical has the right to keep 100% of this money if they so desire. Rather than say that they got shitty 25%, be thankful they receive anything at all.
Because consumers are stupid - that's why.
As opposed to central planners in governments. Yes, they are really smart, after all:
</sarcasm>
Honestly, who do you think is going to make a smarter decision?
a) People spending their own hard earned money.
b) A bureaucrat thousands of miles away in Washington (depending where you live of course) spending other people's money.
or, is common roads, infrastructure and stuff like that too 'commie' for people like you?
the fact that the gov mismanages our funds has nothing to do with the fact that the funds are NEEDED to 'run society'.
I know I will be modded down, I don't care
Not only is it unnecessary for government to build roads, but they would actually work much better if it was the private sector doing them. For example, there would not be any traffic at all, and there would not be roads built that are never used. You would not pay for roads you don't use like you do today through taxes.
The same applies for many programs such as fire fighting, police, courts, education, national defense, charity and others
Murry Rothbard even wrote a whole book describing not only how the private sector would handle each one of these services but very logically explains why it would do a better job at it. The book is free for you to read or even listen to, you can get it in html, pdf or mp3 for free. Your specific example of roads is addressed in chapter 11
it is why we have courts. it is why we have government
Do you even for a second think that the court or goverment are going to punish Amazon and EveryDNS for banning wikileaks???. Government was likely the one pushing them to cut it off.
i fear my fellow man far more than i fear my government
Your fellow man does not lie, steal, sabotage, commit war crimes, kidnap, torture, tell you where you can go and what you can do, throw you in jail for victim less crimes or if you protest, keep anything it wants a secret, and forcibly take your money to do all this
You are fearing the wrong guy
This is exactly what happens to politicians like Bush and Obama, they get power, and they become villains.
Why do you link to BASE but not M1 or M2? M2, in particular, is a better representation of the money supply, and if you look at M2, you'd see that it doesn't look so ridiculous (although there is high growth). BASE is going up very fast to offset the reduction from the non-BASE parts of the money supply...
The FED purposely stopped publishing the M3, so they are hiding much of the non-BASE parts of the money supply.
If you want, go with the True Money Supply as invented by Rothbard, which takes into account demand deposits and avoids double counts that the M3 does. You are right it is not quite as dramatic, but it is still telling. The BASE is what the FED produces essentially, at some point the fractional reserve will kick in and you will see the corresponding inflation of M3 and TMS.
One more thing:
Sure, until the gold bubble bursts. A CD or a T-bill has a lot less risk than gold.
They have been talking about the gold bubble since it was at 400, it is not even close to its peak in 1980 at $2000 adjusted for inflation. When people start saying gold can never go down just like they did with houses, that is when I will believe there is a bubble.
Quite to the contrary, T-bill are artificially expensive, propped up by a FED printing money to buy them, and chinese and japanese governments obsessed with buying them. But our deficit and obligations are just as bad or worse than Greece's. You want a bubble? we are living it, the T-bill bubble is the mother of all bubbles. Once it bursts, expect higher taxes (government can not borrow, so it must confiscate) and high inflation (government can not borrow, so it must print money). This incidentally is very bullish for gold.
Get this book if you want an entry level on how the economy works.
Buying from a vending machine is great for people like me. Getting gold from a dealer is a pain, they have high premiums, and you have to pay for shipping. A vending machine would hopefully eliminate some of the premium being paid for shipping and handling, as well as allow me to go locally.
What's the point of selling gold in a vending machine when no one is going to take a gold coin as currency?
Because as the dollar continues to lose value against gold at roughly 20% in the last 5 years (actually more like 10 years but that is not displayed on that web site), anyone getting 1.75% interest on a CD or 2.5% on a T-bill is an idiot.
Given that the printing press at the FED is in overdrive, it is very likely that the dollar will accelerate its decline in the next few years. Every dollar printed, does not create purchasing power, it simply dilutes the purchasing power of all the existing dollars out there.
A lot of us are seeing the writing on the wall for the dollar. If the premium is low enough, I will be a regular customer of these machines
If I own a megaphone, and I don't lend it to you because I don't agree with you, am I violating your free speech rights?
If I falsely scream FIRE in a theater, would I be exercising my free speech rights?
Any sensible person would answer no to both questions. So where is the limit? Murray Rothbard solved this cleanly by pointing out that free speech is not a right, rather, free speech is derived from, and limited by property rights. This is how he explained it in "For a new liberty"
In fact, there are no human rights that are separable from property rights. The human right of free speech is simply the property right to hire an assembly hall from the owners, or to own one oneself; the human right of a free press is the property right to buy materials and then print leaflets or books and to sell them to those who are willing to buy. There is no extra "right of free speech" or free press beyond the property rights we can enumerate in any given case. And furthermore, discovering and identifying the property rights involved will resolve any apparent conflicts of rights that may crop up.
Consider, for example, the classic example where liberals generally concede that a person's "right of freedom of speech" must be curbed in the name of the "public interest": Justice Holmes' famous dictum that no one has the right to cry "fire" falsely in a crowded theater. Holmes and his followers have used this illustration again and again to prove the supposed necessity for all rights to be relative and tentative rather than precise and absolute.
But the problem here is not that rights cannot be pushed too far, but that the whole case is discussed in terms of a vague and wooly "freedom of speech" rather than in terms of the rights of private property. Suppose we analyze the problem under the aspect of property rights. The fellow who brings on a riot by falsely shouting "fire" in a crowded theater is, necessarily, either the owner of the theater (or the owner's agent) or a paying patron. If he is the owner, then he has committed fraud on his customers. He has taken their money in exchange for a promise to put on a movie or play, and now, instead, he disrupts the show by falsely shouting "fire" and breaking up the performance. He has thus welshed on his contractual obligation, and has thereby stolen the property — the money — of his patrons and has violated their property rights.
Suppose, on the other hand, that the shouter is a patron and not the owner. In that case, he is violating the property right of the owner [p. 44] as well as of the other guests to their paid-for performance. As a guest, he has gained access to the property on certain terms, including an obligation not to violate the owner's property or to disrupt the performance the owner is putting on. His malicious act, therefore, violates the property rights of the theater owner and of all the other patrons. There is no need, therefore, for individual rights to be restricted in the case of the false shouter of "fire." The rights of the individual are still absolute; but they are property rights. The fellow who maliciously cried "fire" in a crowded theater is indeed a criminal, but not because his so-called "right of free speech" must be pragmatically restricted on behalf of the "public good"; he is a criminal because he has clearly and obviously violated the property rights of another person.
Rackspace has a megaphone (the web site hosting), they can contract it out to anyone and put ANY terms they want. The other party is free to accept the contract or not. If they do, then they have to meet its requirements, if they don't, then Rackspace property rights have been violated and Rackspace has the right to stop lending its megaphone.
The single core idea of libertarians is that each person own his own body.
This implies that a person has the right to decide what to do with it. Things like drugs, prostitution, selling parts of your body (organs), should be decided by you and only you. The only thing a person can not do is infringe on someone else's property. Murder, assault, rape, slavery are considered a violation of someone else's property therefore they would be crimes. Murder being the ultimate crime.
This simple position solves this case consistently: he should have the right to decide for himself whether he wants to do this or not.
In fact, he should have the right to sell those organs, and give the proceeds to his family if he wants to. Allowing this would even have the nice effect of reducing organ theft/traffic by not making them so frustratingly scarce. It would also save lives
Unfortunately, in our society we do not own our bodies, the government claims ownership of part of it and feels it has the right to tell you what you can and cannot do with it. It feels entitled to tell you not to take drugs, to decide whether you can donate your organs and to whom, to tell you what you can eat and so on. All this while assuming you are an idiot and that it is doing it "for your own good" because they know better.
Between 2008 and the first quarter of 2009 there was a rally to the dollar. When compared to other currencies in the world, it went from 72 to 88 in the dolar index. This caused everything to drop in price in dollars. Since then, the US dollar has fallen sharply, fast enough to prevent improved technology from lowering costs. It has rebounded a little this year, but not because the dollar gained anything, but because the euro fell sharply.
But lets price it in something less erratic than the US dollar, euros or anything that comes out of a printing press. Lets price it in the most stable currency known to man: gold.
pricing the same 16GB in gold we get:
Q1 2008 0.006875 oz
Q1 2009 0.002777 oz
Q1 2010 0.002363 oz
As you can see, when priced in gold, you can see that flash has never really stopped going down in price. It simply slowed down probably due to some of the reasons explained in TFA.
It is not the cost of producing something that determines the price of something. It is supply and demand.
If that was the case, then no company would ever sell anything below the cost of production. Ask car companies, or any airline. Most of them were forced to sell below cost of production, and thus lose money in the past couple of years.
Now, if they sell something for well above the cost of production (where cost includes time), this signals other entrepreneurs to jump in so they can get in on the profit boat. Over time, the more entrepreneurs that jump in, the bigger the competition, the bigger the supply, forcing prices to come down.
Profits are an aberration, an imbalance between the value consumers give to a good and the cost of producing that good. It is profit itself the signal that tell entrepreneurs that more of this good should be produced. Loses are the same imbalance in the other way, and they signal to entrepreneurs that the things that are being used to produce something are more valuable elsewhere and they should stop wasting resources and produce less of the good that is losing money.
In a free market all profits and loses tend to disappear over time. That is why companies are forced to innovate in order to keep profits. There has to be some new products, or changes in consumer preferences to generate new profits and loses. The only thing that can (and does) prevent this is government intervention.
In a free market, DRM would not be an issue at all.
Think about it, every major DRM encumbered format has been broken in a matter of months. Some also died simply due to competition offering non DRM encumbered alternatives. DRM is fundamentally doomed to fail since it provides less value to people for higher costs, which is uneconomical. Witness Amazon's MP3 forcing Apple to kill DRM. Witness how easy is to watch encrypted DVD's in linux. DECE will fail for the same reasons, it wont be long before someone cracks it if it really becomes mainstream, so DECE is no significant threat to us.
The real problem is when government intervenes. Governments make stuff like DMCA and put people in jail for essentially enabling competition. DMCA and sw patents are the complete opposite of antitrust laws (not that I agree with antitrust either). They legally protect and enable monopolies. Government's schizophrenia would be laughable if we were not living with it. So aim your pitchforks at the right entity, at the violent force that coerces you into using this stuff and punishes anyone who might otherwise provide you with an alternative.