It's not coercion because no one is actively using force against you. No one is forcing you to do something, or avoid something. You are free to go your merry way. At most you can complain that they aren't acting on your behalf in a way that you would want, which is not the same thing as working against you. Enforced worker protections, such as forcing employers to hire union members, is coercion because it can't work without the government explicitly stepping in to override a voluntary transaction which would otherwise occur. If I'm not a union member, and you want to hire me, but can't because someone is explicitly preventing it, that is coercion. If I'm not a union member, and no one wants to hire me for their own personal reasons but could if they chose to, that is not coercion.
This doesn't mean we can't enforce false advertising laws, or other anti-fraud measures, because use of fraud puts me in a transaction I didn't agree to.
"foreign trade is ALWAYS about hiding fraud, theft, or coercion from the consumer". You really should avoid universal statments. Almost always at least provides some leeway. Your statment is assertion, with nothing to back it up. Foreign trade is USUALLY about maximising personal profit. That does NOT require fraud, theft, or coercion in order to occur. It's not theft from you if I hire someone who is cheaper, or buy from a cheaper provider, because I have no obligation whatsoever to act for your benefit. The only obligation I have is not to act against you.
Fine, I define useful as producing a net benefit for both parties to the trade. Safety and protection are aspects of whether it's a net benefit, but they are not the only factors. Trade, foreign or domestic, is almost ALWAYS safe, because it is based on voluntary transactions rather than coercion, unlike many of the governmental and worker protections you think highly of.
"The trade deficit is the value difference..." is incorrect. It is the monetary price difference. Value is a different concept, which is often conflated with price, but is much more important. Examine the subjective theory of value for instance. Although the definition of value is contested, this is one of the most popular definitions, and the one that makes the most sense to me.
"'Comparative advantage' is an mathematical artifact of those restrictions." prove it. I don't see where comparative advantage requires those assumptions you listed. Especially the third one, although it is mentioned in some simplified examples of comparative advantage. Comparative advantage can function even with out those assumptions, it just makes the examples more complicated.
You mention absolute advantage. Even with an absolute advantage in every way, it is provably the case that trade can still be useful. That is a fundamental part of comparative advantage. As long as there is at least one area where the advantage isn't as great as another, trade can benefit both parties.
No, it does NOT mean comparative advantage rules have broken down. Believe it or not, us buying more abroad just means that our money is worth more to foreigners than the objects they are selling, and the objects we are buying are worth more to us than the money being shelled out. That is all.
Buying things abroad increases the nations overall wealth. Wealth != money, and trade != a zero sum game. Complaining about a trade deficit is like complaining that I personally buy more physical goods than I produce. Panics about trade deficits require one to assume that some particular trend will continue indefinitely. It won't. There are always feedbacks. We currently don't produce nothing, and we will never produce nothing. We might, in the worst case, cease producing physical objects, but intangible services are still valuable to trade.
About 2/3 of drunk driving accidents involve a BAC of.14 or higher, and that most fatal accidents involve.17 or higher. It might surprise you that eating bread can make you appear to be over the legal limit according to the same breathalyzer referred to in the article, and lowering the limit will just make this sort of thing more common.
Having one beer, then driving somewhere 2 hours later does NOT make someone a threat to other drivers. Threat to others is the only justification for drunk driving laws.
So, perhaps people with bad hygiene also tend to have bad eating habits? That seems like a much more likely explanation than dental plaque directly affecting heart disease.
You are confusing me with fyngyrz. I'm not a fan of the lockinpicking interface used in some examples of the genre, but I was under the impression that you thought the idea of a VR interface was inherently bogus. I am NOT trying to defend the cyberspace hacking tools shown in games and movies, as I agree those are ridiculous. The basic concept of a VR interface being used while hacking is not. Note that I haven't read the books, and your complaint about the books may be more specific to their version of a VR interface than I realized.
my only real points were that a legitimate login interface may be subject to hacking while providing some of the visual information to the hacker that is intended for a legitimate user, and that some of what it may be doing is displaying raw data in a friendlier manner, without knowing how to interpret it. My examples were flawed, but I was trying to make the point that it could be displaying data without knowing that there was a vulnerability there. I believe there are many methods of breaking a system which work better if you observe the standard, legitimate interface first.
For the purpose of defending a VR interface as a concept, let me try an analogy to a completely unrelated computer technology, image processing. Lots of programs know how to draw a jpg from my camera, but it is very difficult for them to interpret the information to make apropriate adjustments. Certain tools exist which the user may want to use, such as red eye removal, color correcting etc, but the program doesn't know that it should do those things. It knows how to do it, to the point that I may only have to hit a button, but it's simple for me to spot that it needs to be done, and difficult but possible for the software to make the same decisions. The software zooms in for me if I see an anomaly I want to edit, but it doesn't know the anomaly is there. It seems highly likely that it would be possible for an hacking interface to detect the presence of a firewall and show it to me, as well as showing me data, without it knowing what to do to break it.
What I think you're missing is visualization provided by the firewall being cracked. Assuming it's meant to be used in a legitimate matter at some point, and that visual interfaces are a handy device, it would be logical to expect the abstraction to be provided by the node, not by the device being used to interact with it. Think of it as a VR style sheet.
It's also not necessary for your interface to fully understand what the security you're seeing is. They just need to display what they are given, as well as perhaps adding some premade widgets to let you attempt to manipulate it. It would be easier to have a tool just display the data in a graphical form without actually understanding it than to make a tool which would know everything you need to do. For instance, perhaps you are sniffing traffic going into the firewall in some way. Color coding packets based on port might let you spot a pattern that the interface doesn't notice, which would indicate a possible exploit that you know about. Humans are MUCH better at pattern recognition than computers. Even if software could identify possible exploits, it would probably be better to have a user decide which of many options is more likely to work without raising an alarm, given additional knowledge not available to the machine. Finding out about a honeypot via offline interaction with employees for instance.
All that said, some of the details of Gibson's version may not make a lot of sense, but the concept is still plausible. I think the concept of FAST hacking to be foolish, but using a VR interface to implement a slow attempt when a VR interface is standard for computer interaction is perfectly reasonable.
"...before paying for what other countries have already paid for..." I believe income figures are reported pre-tax, so those other countries haven't paid for it yet either. At no point in the article or sources does it specify take-home pay or anything else along those lines.
As for the relative wealth issue, allow me to pull numbers out of my hat to show why looking at percentages of wealth isn't very meaningful. Assuming 2 countries with equal populations, let country A have the bottom 40% of the population owning 1% of the wealth, and country B have the bottom 40% owning 2% of it's wealth. If the amount of wealth in country A is 2.5 times the wealth in country B, then the people in country A, despite wealth being less evenly distributed, are materially better off than the people in country B. Even this can be misleading, but for full detail you have to rank every individual on income and show the income curve, which is not feasible.
I think he missed the mark when he called copy protection a features of SACD. Given that the public mostly doesn't care about the improved sound quality, they will suffer from the copy protection if they want to rip music onto their computer. Copy protection is NOT a way to encourage people to adopt a new standard.
Not necessarily. Since it's only been on the net, not in any MSM source, he may think it's best to not say anything about it and draw more attention to it. No idea if that's the actual reason, but it's a plausible one I think.
The HMO doesn't dictate what you can do, it limits what they will pay for you to have done. You're still free to go to any doctor you wish and pay for services. Since you claimed that you have to leave the country to pay for those services, that is an actual restriction. The HMO not acting on your behalf in the way you want isn't. One is explicitly preventing you from acting, one is choosing not to help you do something you'd like to without actually preventing it via force. There is a difference.
Here's the problem. The sole named source for the claim that Bush said that is Doug Thompson of CHB. Every other mention of that eventually goes back to the same source. He claims three unnamed individuals provided the information. Given the unreliability of CHB in the past, including making up sources out of whole cloth, it's not really a credible claim.
To deny someone the ability to entice a doctor with cash interferes with the doctor's rights. Of course, the legally enforce cabal known as the AMA contributes to the problem, by drastically reducing the supply of medical services. That's a problem caused by the government, not by the rich having money. In a truly free system, the AMA and a number of other organizations would exist, with the only legal enforcement being fraud if you falsly claim to be a member, or to have a certification from some particular group. But that would cut into their profits, and doesn't mesh with thier paternalistic instinct to protect people from themselves. For example, the resistance to making statins available OTC.
There are not enough medical services available to treat everyone for everything. Rationing based on willingness to pay is NOT any less moral than any other rationing system.
They prevent you from going to someone in your own country who has the proper skills to trade your money for a procedure you want. Like it or not, that is an infrigement of your liberty. Why do they have the authority to force the doctor to not take private funds? Why do they have the authority to prevent you from offering money for better treatment?
Actually, the lancet studies were concerned with ALL deaths, not just direct causes. There are several criticisms of it on the linked page. The defenses seem pretty useless, as they consist of "It's good, cause we say so!" or "Other people are doing it this way!" without directly addressing the actual identified flaws. Mind you, the fact that the US uses a similar methodology when convenient is itself bad, but doesn't speak to the usefulness of this report. I think
Ronald Waldman, an epidemiologist at Columbia University who worked at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for many years, called the survey method "tried and true," and added that "this is the best estimate of mortality we have.
is more of an idictment of mortality studies in general than a defense of the study.
...or a removal of the regulation that has made the playing field uneven. Note that one solution is an excuse for bureaucrats to gain even more power for themselves, which they generally love to do, and the other requires them to give it up, which they generally loathe to do. Given that any further regulation will almost always act as positive feedback and justify even further regulation, I generally prefer weakening regulation rather than strengthening it.
Of course, established providers fight both solutions, but they almost always prefer further regulation to eliminating existing laws which they've already learned to work with. More regulation always increases bars to competition, so even if it's annoying to cope with it has a silver lining from their perspective.
Where, precisely, did the GP suggest consolidating power to the federal government? If anything, he argued for removing power from government across the board. I believe 'State' in "...mess of State intervention..." was used in a more general sense, not to refer to the states in the US. It's any easy habit to slip into reading political materials, but it can be confusing for people in the US who aren't as interested in political theory.
Something funny there... 2 candidates apparently gained less total money than the combination of all their $200+ donors, and have a negative percent on the money from donoations $200.
That's the one. I was short on time when I wrote the original post, so I didn't get around to looking it up. Binary voting methods are still subject to examining various criterion. I would argue that binary systems are merely special cases of ranked voting systems with only 2 ranks.
In any case, it's possible in approval voting to have a candidate who beats all other candidates in paired votes, but loses in the approval system. Say you have 3 candidates, 3 voters, and each voter in approval only disaproves of their least favorite candidate. Given actual pre-vote preferences (A,B,C),(A,B,C), and (B,C,A). A beats both B and C in 2 man races. In aproval votes, B is the only candidate with 3 votes and would win. This fails the Condorcet criterion.
I prefer approval to average voting due to simplicity. Average bothers me a bit, as it weights different people's votes differently. This is basically the way it can fail the Majority Criterion.
It's better put this way: Voting for someone ahead of your preferred candidate can alter who your candidate is in a runoff election against, and make it more likely for him to win. For instance, voting Green, Republican, Dem in an attempt to have the greens beat the dems when you know they won't beat the republicans.
Personally, I prefer approval voting. Losing monotonicity bothers me more than the flaws with approval. I don't recall the name of the criterion. Condorcet?
How is it fraud? There is no deception involved. They are making no claims, merely offering a lower price than their competitors. And even then, the customers have no obligation to shop local. You think it would be better if they did but that doesn't justify forcing them to do so. It is the customers choosing to shop elsewhere that is allowing your business to fall. They aren't putting you out of business, they are merely no longer supporting it. The business that is now out competing yours is not doing anything to you. Any regulation you want to put in to prevent it would be interference with the competing corporation or the customers. The only thing you actually have a legitimate right to do is change your own business practices.
Failure to help is not the same thing as causing harm. You appear to be conflating the 2 with the language you have chosen.
I'm not sure if this discussion will be very productive. I think we have belief systems that are partially based on incompatible axioms, so it will be difficult to come to any sort of rational agreement. We seem to agree that we want to be left alone, but if you don't agree with the above line about harm and failure to help, we are guaranteed to come to different outcomes on everything else.
Where did I say that if you don't use the government to interfere with them, it would be ok for them to interfere with you? Both sides have a right to be free from interference, if and only if they respect that right in others.
Slashdot Mirror
It's not coercion because no one is actively using force against you. No one is forcing you to do something, or avoid something. You are free to go your merry way. At most you can complain that they aren't acting on your behalf in a way that you would want, which is not the same thing as working against you. Enforced worker protections, such as forcing employers to hire union members, is coercion because it can't work without the government explicitly stepping in to override a voluntary transaction which would otherwise occur. If I'm not a union member, and you want to hire me, but can't because someone is explicitly preventing it, that is coercion. If I'm not a union member, and no one wants to hire me for their own personal reasons but could if they chose to, that is not coercion.
This doesn't mean we can't enforce false advertising laws, or other anti-fraud measures, because use of fraud puts me in a transaction I didn't agree to.
"foreign trade is ALWAYS about hiding fraud, theft, or coercion from the consumer". You really should avoid universal statments. Almost always at least provides some leeway. Your statment is assertion, with nothing to back it up. Foreign trade is USUALLY about maximising personal profit. That does NOT require fraud, theft, or coercion in order to occur. It's not theft from you if I hire someone who is cheaper, or buy from a cheaper provider, because I have no obligation whatsoever to act for your benefit. The only obligation I have is not to act against you.
Fine, I define useful as producing a net benefit for both parties to the trade. Safety and protection are aspects of whether it's a net benefit, but they are not the only factors. Trade, foreign or domestic, is almost ALWAYS safe, because it is based on voluntary transactions rather than coercion, unlike many of the governmental and worker protections you think highly of.
"The trade deficit is the value difference..." is incorrect. It is the monetary price difference. Value is a different concept, which is often conflated with price, but is much more important. Examine the subjective theory of value for instance. Although the definition of value is contested, this is one of the most popular definitions, and the one that makes the most sense to me.
"'Comparative advantage' is an mathematical artifact of those restrictions." prove it. I don't see where comparative advantage requires those assumptions you listed. Especially the third one, although it is mentioned in some simplified examples of comparative advantage. Comparative advantage can function even with out those assumptions, it just makes the examples more complicated.
You mention absolute advantage. Even with an absolute advantage in every way, it is provably the case that trade can still be useful. That is a fundamental part of comparative advantage. As long as there is at least one area where the advantage isn't as great as another, trade can benefit both parties.
No, it does NOT mean comparative advantage rules have broken down. Believe it or not, us buying more abroad just means that our money is worth more to foreigners than the objects they are selling, and the objects we are buying are worth more to us than the money being shelled out. That is all.
Buying things abroad increases the nations overall wealth. Wealth != money, and trade != a zero sum game. Complaining about a trade deficit is like complaining that I personally buy more physical goods than I produce. Panics about trade deficits require one to assume that some particular trend will continue indefinitely. It won't. There are always feedbacks. We currently don't produce nothing, and we will never produce nothing. We might, in the worst case, cease producing physical objects, but intangible services are still valuable to trade.
About 2/3 of drunk driving accidents involve a BAC of .14 or higher, and that most fatal accidents involve .17 or higher. It might surprise you that eating bread can make you appear to be over the legal limit according to the same breathalyzer referred to in the article, and lowering the limit will just make this sort of thing more common.
Having one beer, then driving somewhere 2 hours later does NOT make someone a threat to other drivers. Threat to others is the only justification for drunk driving laws.
So, perhaps people with bad hygiene also tend to have bad eating habits? That seems like a much more likely explanation than dental plaque directly affecting heart disease.
You are confusing me with fyngyrz. I'm not a fan of the lockinpicking interface used in some examples of the genre, but I was under the impression that you thought the idea of a VR interface was inherently bogus. I am NOT trying to defend the cyberspace hacking tools shown in games and movies, as I agree those are ridiculous. The basic concept of a VR interface being used while hacking is not. Note that I haven't read the books, and your complaint about the books may be more specific to their version of a VR interface than I realized.
my only real points were that a legitimate login interface may be subject to hacking while providing some of the visual information to the hacker that is intended for a legitimate user, and that some of what it may be doing is displaying raw data in a friendlier manner, without knowing how to interpret it. My examples were flawed, but I was trying to make the point that it could be displaying data without knowing that there was a vulnerability there. I believe there are many methods of breaking a system which work better if you observe the standard, legitimate interface first.
For the purpose of defending a VR interface as a concept, let me try an analogy to a completely unrelated computer technology, image processing. Lots of programs know how to draw a jpg from my camera, but it is very difficult for them to interpret the information to make apropriate adjustments. Certain tools exist which the user may want to use, such as red eye removal, color correcting etc, but the program doesn't know that it should do those things. It knows how to do it, to the point that I may only have to hit a button, but it's simple for me to spot that it needs to be done, and difficult but possible for the software to make the same decisions. The software zooms in for me if I see an anomaly I want to edit, but it doesn't know the anomaly is there. It seems highly likely that it would be possible for an hacking interface to detect the presence of a firewall and show it to me, as well as showing me data, without it knowing what to do to break it.
Does this clarify what I was thinking?
What I think you're missing is visualization provided by the firewall being cracked. Assuming it's meant to be used in a legitimate matter at some point, and that visual interfaces are a handy device, it would be logical to expect the abstraction to be provided by the node, not by the device being used to interact with it. Think of it as a VR style sheet.
It's also not necessary for your interface to fully understand what the security you're seeing is. They just need to display what they are given, as well as perhaps adding some premade widgets to let you attempt to manipulate it. It would be easier to have a tool just display the data in a graphical form without actually understanding it than to make a tool which would know everything you need to do. For instance, perhaps you are sniffing traffic going into the firewall in some way. Color coding packets based on port might let you spot a pattern that the interface doesn't notice, which would indicate a possible exploit that you know about. Humans are MUCH better at pattern recognition than computers. Even if software could identify possible exploits, it would probably be better to have a user decide which of many options is more likely to work without raising an alarm, given additional knowledge not available to the machine. Finding out about a honeypot via offline interaction with employees for instance.
All that said, some of the details of Gibson's version may not make a lot of sense, but the concept is still plausible. I think the concept of FAST hacking to be foolish, but using a VR interface to implement a slow attempt when a VR interface is standard for computer interaction is perfectly reasonable.
"...before paying for what other countries have already paid for..." I believe income figures are reported pre-tax, so those other countries haven't paid for it yet either. At no point in the article or sources does it specify take-home pay or anything else along those lines.
As for the relative wealth issue, allow me to pull numbers out of my hat to show why looking at percentages of wealth isn't very meaningful. Assuming 2 countries with equal populations, let country A have the bottom 40% of the population owning 1% of the wealth, and country B have the bottom 40% owning 2% of it's wealth. If the amount of wealth in country A is 2.5 times the wealth in country B, then the people in country A, despite wealth being less evenly distributed, are materially better off than the people in country B. Even this can be misleading, but for full detail you have to rank every individual on income and show the income curve, which is not feasible.
They're available for free from the Baen Free Library as well.
I think he missed the mark when he called copy protection a features of SACD. Given that the public mostly doesn't care about the improved sound quality, they will suffer from the copy protection if they want to rip music onto their computer. Copy protection is NOT a way to encourage people to adopt a new standard.
Not necessarily. Since it's only been on the net, not in any MSM source, he may think it's best to not say anything about it and draw more attention to it. No idea if that's the actual reason, but it's a plausible one I think.
The HMO doesn't dictate what you can do, it limits what they will pay for you to have done. You're still free to go to any doctor you wish and pay for services. Since you claimed that you have to leave the country to pay for those services, that is an actual restriction. The HMO not acting on your behalf in the way you want isn't. One is explicitly preventing you from acting, one is choosing not to help you do something you'd like to without actually preventing it via force. There is a difference.
Here's the problem. The sole named source for the claim that Bush said that is Doug Thompson of CHB. Every other mention of that eventually goes back to the same source. He claims three unnamed individuals provided the information. Given the unreliability of CHB in the past, including making up sources out of whole cloth, it's not really a credible claim.
To deny someone the ability to entice a doctor with cash interferes with the doctor's rights. Of course, the legally enforce cabal known as the AMA contributes to the problem, by drastically reducing the supply of medical services. That's a problem caused by the government, not by the rich having money. In a truly free system, the AMA and a number of other organizations would exist, with the only legal enforcement being fraud if you falsly claim to be a member, or to have a certification from some particular group. But that would cut into their profits, and doesn't mesh with thier paternalistic instinct to protect people from themselves. For example, the resistance to making statins available OTC.
There are not enough medical services available to treat everyone for everything. Rationing based on willingness to pay is NOT any less moral than any other rationing system.
They prevent you from going to someone in your own country who has the proper skills to trade your money for a procedure you want. Like it or not, that is an infrigement of your liberty. Why do they have the authority to force the doctor to not take private funds? Why do they have the authority to prevent you from offering money for better treatment?
...or a removal of the regulation that has made the playing field uneven. Note that one solution is an excuse for bureaucrats to gain even more power for themselves, which they generally love to do, and the other requires them to give it up, which they generally loathe to do. Given that any further regulation will almost always act as positive feedback and justify even further regulation, I generally prefer weakening regulation rather than strengthening it.
Of course, established providers fight both solutions, but they almost always prefer further regulation to eliminating existing laws which they've already learned to work with. More regulation always increases bars to competition, so even if it's annoying to cope with it has a silver lining from their perspective.
Where, precisely, did the GP suggest consolidating power to the federal government? If anything, he argued for removing power from government across the board. I believe 'State' in "...mess of State intervention..." was used in a more general sense, not to refer to the states in the US. It's any easy habit to slip into reading political materials, but it can be confusing for people in the US who aren't as interested in political theory.
Something funny there... 2 candidates apparently gained less total money than the combination of all their $200+ donors, and have a negative percent on the money from donoations $200.
That's the one. I was short on time when I wrote the original post, so I didn't get around to looking it up. Binary voting methods are still subject to examining various criterion. I would argue that binary systems are merely special cases of ranked voting systems with only 2 ranks.
In any case, it's possible in approval voting to have a candidate who beats all other candidates in paired votes, but loses in the approval system. Say you have 3 candidates, 3 voters, and each voter in approval only disaproves of their least favorite candidate. Given actual pre-vote preferences (A,B,C),(A,B,C), and (B,C,A). A beats both B and C in 2 man races. In aproval votes, B is the only candidate with 3 votes and would win. This fails the Condorcet criterion.
I prefer approval to average voting due to simplicity. Average bothers me a bit, as it weights different people's votes differently. This is basically the way it can fail the Majority Criterion.
It's better put this way: Voting for someone ahead of your preferred candidate can alter who your candidate is in a runoff election against, and make it more likely for him to win. For instance, voting Green, Republican, Dem in an attempt to have the greens beat the dems when you know they won't beat the republicans.
Personally, I prefer approval voting. Losing monotonicity bothers me more than the flaws with approval. I don't recall the name of the criterion. Condorcet?
How is it fraud? There is no deception involved. They are making no claims, merely offering a lower price than their competitors. And even then, the customers have no obligation to shop local. You think it would be better if they did but that doesn't justify forcing them to do so. It is the customers choosing to shop elsewhere that is allowing your business to fall. They aren't putting you out of business, they are merely no longer supporting it. The business that is now out competing yours is not doing anything to you. Any regulation you want to put in to prevent it would be interference with the competing corporation or the customers. The only thing you actually have a legitimate right to do is change your own business practices.
Failure to help is not the same thing as causing harm. You appear to be conflating the 2 with the language you have chosen.
I'm not sure if this discussion will be very productive. I think we have belief systems that are partially based on incompatible axioms, so it will be difficult to come to any sort of rational agreement. We seem to agree that we want to be left alone, but if you don't agree with the above line about harm and failure to help, we are guaranteed to come to different outcomes on everything else.
Where did I say that if you don't use the government to interfere with them, it would be ok for them to interfere with you? Both sides have a right to be free from interference, if and only if they respect that right in others.