I'll have to think about whether it's possible to destroy natural resources without deriving economic benefit.
How about
Starting a forest fire
Poisoning fish
Salting farmland
...
If you really think that any of these constitute an economic benefit EQUAL to all other uses that have the same outcome, then you really must be smoking crack.
You can definitely have increased efficiency without a machine. Taking the above examples, almost any course of action is more efficient than these. In the poisoning fish example, a more efficient method would be to catch a fish and eat it, rather than poisoning them.
The reason i keep giving simplistic examples is because when you make them more complex they very quickly become far too complex to solve. There is absolutely no way of precisely measuring the effects on a global scale without you saying "ahh, but what about...". But what I have done is show that there are systems which are very clearly not zero-sum, and very clearly have different efficiencies. Since you were proposing a universal relationship between resources and economy, that is all I had to do to falsify your claim.
I agree with you that there is no way to derive economic benefit without using natural resources, but I must stress that this in no way implies either your zero-sum relation or that there is no such thing as efficiency. I think you ought to start looking for an alternative world view.
The reason why they are different is because energy cannot be destroyed, it is always converted into something else. Natural resources, however, CAN be destroyed WITHOUT deriving any economic benefit. Since this is true, it is entirely posibble that our current economic position could be increased without decreasing natural resources by becomming more efficient.
Yes, my premise does not represent OUR economy. But i am not trying to represent OUR economy, I am trying to show that there is no particular reason to think that things should be zero sum.
Maybe they are positive sum, maybe they are negative sum. Perhaps, and it is very very unlikely, they are zero sum. Since it is in general very unlikely for a real life system to be exactly zero sum, the onus is on YOU to substantiate this claim. Not by ranting about cars, hamburgers, Lenovo and china, but by coming up with some actual measurable DATA that supports a zero sum claim.
But i get the impression that you are not in the least bit concerned about actually being factually correct nor about using words and phrases as they are generally understood.
You can go on about how thoughtless and corrupt the general populus is as much as you like, but it doesn't actually stregthen your case about economics one iota. Goodnight.
If you don't think it is then perhaps you should make an argument as why or how.
Simple. Suppose there are two families in the world. One family is very good at making bread (including growing the wheat and other ingredients) and the other is very good at building houses (built from the locally growing trees). If left on their own, one family would end up being cold, and the other would end up hungry. Both of them could be considered poor because of this. Not because they don't have money, money doesn't exist to them, but because they don't have access to things that would clearly improve the quality of their lives.
Now, an economist steps in and says to the two families "right, why doesn't family A cook family B food, in return for family B building a house for family A". So they do this, and end up both being slightly better off. The natural resources are left almost the same because the wheat grows every year (due to solar energy), as do the trees.
When it comes to a purely economic analysis, both families are better off and so it is not zero sum. If the natural resources are taken into account, some metric is required for measuring the importance of a few trees being cut down (which will grow back) against a famaily having warmth and shelter. Whilst this is somewhat arbitrary and dependent on someone's value judgements, since the enivronmental effect is negligible it would be sensible for the negative effect to be only slightly so. So overall, there is a net positive. Caused by an improved economic system.
It hasn't created any money, but then money is not always the metric that is used in measuring wealth, and would clearly be inappropriate in this case.
The argument was that the economy is not a zero sum process because if china got richer it would not have to be at the expense of US.
Yes, that was the original posters argument. Your argument on the other hand was about economic activity + natural resources being zero sum...which it isn't. I agree that the rise of china will most likely create a huge drain on natural resources. But that is merely a necessary condition for it being zero-sum, not a sufficient one.
In other words it's possible for all nations to get richer without bounds and not cause economic harm to other nations.
Of course, both of these statements are false. But their falsehood does NOT mean that it is zero-sum. Just because a number is not +infinity, it doesn't make it 0.
I have also seen similar arguments about individual wealth as if it was theoretically possible for every person to be a billionaire.
And most people in the developed world are billionaires in comparison to the people living a couple of hundred years ago. And this is due to economic and technological reasons. Even if you disagree with this, it doesn't mean it has anything to do with the initial argument. Just because you've had to witness an idiot arguing about wealth, it doesn't mean that every argument in the future will be with an idiot.
I think you are missing the point of what zero-sum means. You seem to be suggesting that you think it means that every good thing you do has at least some bad consequence to it. E.g. if you build solar panels then although you get nearly free electricity you have to use up other natural resources to create the panels. But that's not what zero-sum is about, it's about actually measuring these things, putting a value on them and adding them up.
It is crucially important what values you put on things. If you use energy, then you will find that as time progresses the sum remains the same, it is zero-sum. If you measure money in bank accounts then (assuming neither the banks nor the government insert more into the system) that also remains the same as time progresses, it too is a conserved quantity.
To return to your sentence, it claims that for every economic activity that we may assign a value to, it will have caused a depletion in 'natural resources'. More or less, I agree with that, however I disagree that the value is always equal and opposite. I hope you see by now that your sentence does not actually show that anything is zero-sum at all. The statement 'zero-sum' should imply that you are talking about measurable consequences.
Or maybe you do think there is some non-trivial and relevant measure to do with economic activity that is actually zero-sum, always. If so, then I would like to hear it.
What you say is correct only if you define the economy in terms of the total energy in the universe. I think you're probably on your own with that one. There are lots of different ways of measuring the wealth of people, as there are many ways of measuring the quality of peoples life. Unsurprisingly, none of them involve the total energy of the universe, basically because it would be both trivial (since it's conserved) and irrelevant (people don't give a shit). So to say that the economy is a zero sum game because there is conservation of energy is just plain ridiculous. Sorry.
As an aside, it is statements like yours, often involving bad definitions and attention to irrelevant details which makes the general population very wary of science.
Insightful? Surely you moderators have got to be joking. How can rehashing the well known fact that "businesses are there primarily to make money" be considered insightful? When you get rid of the hyperbole and rabble-rousing that is all you are left with, so I assume the insightful bit (in the eyes of moderators) is all the inaccurate and biased fluff round the edges.
For example, how has the price of your house got anything to do with your employer, let alone IBM? How does your employer affect how insurance companies operate? Basically it has nothing to do with it at all, and yet somehow this is to be considered insightful rather than off-topic/redundant/flaimbait.
It's not even as hard as that. The article mentions corporate acquisitions, but it is really not that difficult to find out which companies are about to acquire who since there are so many people within the M&A department of the bank who have access to this information including:
The IT department
cleaners
taxi drivers (overhearing conversations and delivering documents)
print room staff
secretaries
PA's
spouses of all these people.
And this isn't even including the employess of the companies themselves. It seems unlikely that someone wanting to make big money on the stock market would bother to spend huge amounts of money decrypting standard public key encyption when they could just befriend any of the above, or perhaps just steal their laptop.
I'm not really knowledgable in all this, but I always thought that central planning was how the communist countries of the twentieth century operated, but is not necesarily a part of Communism proper.
There doesn't seem to be a consensus on the definition of Capitalism, although it is "An economic and political system in which a country's trade and industry are controlled by private owners for profit, rather than by the state", according to the compact oxford english dictionary. In practice this usually means that people have more freedom to do what they want, but only in the case that capital is distributed more widely than the power in a political party. Don't get me wrong, i think that capitalism as it is practiced in most western countries does give people more choice, however it is not always part of the definition of Capitalism.
I realise though that even if I am correct, I am still probably being overly pedantic.:o)
I think what the parent was trying to say was roughly "Assuming that you know what is best for others and forcing that view onto them is evil. Communism assumes it knows what is best for its people and forces them to agree. Therefore communism is evil."
Now, if a democratic country assumes they know what is best for others and forces that view on others then by the above assumptions it might follow that they are evil, but it wouldn't necessarily follow that they are communist. The logical relation is in the other direction.
I agree, however it is true that discussions amongst the French politicians and civil servants are often set in the framework of "how do we prevent the American cultural invasion". If you are in charge of a library and want some money for it to be digitized, then a good strategy is to claim that google is attempting to wipe out french literature from the face of the earth, and that the only way to save our culture is to write a cheque to pay for our own digitisation.
The same thing happens in the OSS society. To get people to help the cause, you have to make it seem like the world of IT is about to collapse due to Microsoft/SCO/Patents/DRM/whatever.
So although you are right that it is a good thing in itself, it is still the case that it is a useful tactic for the libraries to play on the base fears of their patrons.
It depends on whether bandwidth advances outpace disc capacity advances. With HDTV and UHDTV on the horizon, content distributors may not have a problem filling up your pipe (so to speak) for some time to come.
With 33 megapixels at 60fps, that's quite a lot of bandwidth. AFAIK there are still some parts of england that can't even get affordable 512k, so it may be some time before they are getting Gb connections.
Human nature is such that we try to do the least amount of work to achieve maximum effect. Humans are essentially greedy.
I think what you mean is efficient (or at the very worst lazy). I use Firefox (for example) because it allows me to do the least amount of work (measured in hand movements) to achieve the maximum effect. Does this make me greedy? I use a mechanical washing machine because it cleans my clothes well with the minimum amount of work. Does this make me greedy?
Perhaps you are one of those people who actually think that life is zero-sum and that it must be the case that every time i save myself some effort, someone else has to put in an equal amount of extra effort? Open source is good partly because it can be a more efficient form of production than conventional methods. This is why people other than/. whackos actually use it.
IF one day we humans change our intrinsic nature, open source model might well replace the current individualist/capitalist model.
But the OS itself is not really that important, it is usually neither sensitive nor valuable on desktop systems.
At worst you have to put the install cd's back in and perhaps reinstall some of the custom apps, at best you just revert to a backup image. This pales into insignificance when compared to losing your entire music collection, photo archive, email archive etc, or having someone take your bank passwords.
In the end it's a matter of priorities. The unix world is used to multi-user systems where the priority is to minimize the damage down to just single users. Since backing up data is quite cheap (in both time and money) on a large scale, the data can be kept safe easily. The desktop world however doesn't have to worry about multi-user security, and so their priority is to keep their own data safe. In most cases, Unix-like permissions do nothing to protect this. Whilst it is possible to do your accounts as one user, your games as another etc, the process of logging out and back in again can be very time consuming and is well beyond what the consumer is going to accept.
As far as i can tell, SELinux is very much on the right track. I really hope that it will be enforced as standard in major distributions soon, because if it is not, then I would not be at all surprised to see Microsoft beat Linux at its own game in the coming years. After all, whilst Windows security is bad, it is improving at a much faster rate than Linux, which doesn't seem to have brought much to the table in the last decade. (IMHO)
I very much agree about the NES thing re: quality. Me and eveyone else i knew with a games console also read a magazine for that format so they could find out which games were the best. There would only be about 1 or 2 games released per year that were good enough to not feel ripped off by the £40 price.
And regarding innovation, i think you are right too. It seemed like every game was the same old platformer, usually done later and with a lot less quality than the Nintendo releases.
It saddens me when people just can't appreciate that it is legitimate for others have different tastes. That modern games spend a larger budget on the graphics and physics IS a great selling point for many people. Many people prefer to have games based on reality rather than in abstract.
I don't really know about this, but wouldn't biometric data be easier to get by just copying the original? Fingerprints are easy, dna (in hair?) sounds easy. Retina? I don't know but i can imagine it being easy in 5-10 years time.
It seems to me like you need something far more secret than biometric data to keep your identity private. (In addition to a hash).
I think that most of the things you mention require a larger pipe rather than a faster processor. The applications that are processor intensive seem not to be mainstream. Whilst there will still be demand from some industries for faster chips, it will not come from home users, IMO. I think that consumers will be wanting smaller, less power hungry chips for embedded devices and fat connections.
OTOH, when we start getting monster video screens with huge resolutions, it will need a very hefty GPU to access it.
I'm a dirty mathematician that doesn't deal in proofs (aka theoretical physicist), although I went to a seminar given by an eminent prof. in maths on the nature of proof.
The talk was actually about why it doesn't have to be the case that really large numbers must satisfy the same rules as smaller computable numbers. This is based on Godel's proof that says something about it being impossible to know whether an axiomatic system is free of contradictions.
Anyway, he also touched on computer proofs. He was basically saying that (most) mathematicians do what they do because they enjoy creating and understanding logical structures. To some extent you neither create nor understand a computer proof and so it is intrinsically less interesting to a mathematician. Since the world of mathematics is driven mainly by what they find interesting, computer proofs haven't featured very highly in it.
However, it [sic] you are doing low-level real-time I/O where constants do matter, then C/ASM is probably the way to go.
So, as you imply yourself, a language can be measured by speed.
Most programmers would say that assembler loses out in each of your above criteria, yet it is still used for certain tasks. Why? Because it is quicker.
I agree overall with what you are saying, but the world isn't quite as simple as you make out.
Slashdot Mirror
How about
If you really think that any of these constitute an economic benefit EQUAL to all other uses that have the same outcome, then you really must be smoking crack.
You can definitely have increased efficiency without a machine. Taking the above examples, almost any course of action is more efficient than these. In the poisoning fish example, a more efficient method would be to catch a fish and eat it, rather than poisoning them.
The reason i keep giving simplistic examples is because when you make them more complex they very quickly become far too complex to solve. There is absolutely no way of precisely measuring the effects on a global scale without you saying "ahh, but what about...". But what I have done is show that there are systems which are very clearly not zero-sum, and very clearly have different efficiencies. Since you were proposing a universal relationship between resources and economy, that is all I had to do to falsify your claim.
I agree with you that there is no way to derive economic benefit without using natural resources, but I must stress that this in no way implies either your zero-sum relation or that there is no such thing as efficiency. I think you ought to start looking for an alternative world view.
The reason why they are different is because energy cannot be destroyed, it is always converted into something else. Natural resources, however, CAN be destroyed WITHOUT deriving any economic benefit. Since this is true, it is entirely posibble that our current economic position could be increased without decreasing natural resources by becomming more efficient.
Maybe they are positive sum, maybe they are negative sum. Perhaps, and it is very very unlikely, they are zero sum. Since it is in general very unlikely for a real life system to be exactly zero sum, the onus is on YOU to substantiate this claim. Not by ranting about cars, hamburgers, Lenovo and china, but by coming up with some actual measurable DATA that supports a zero sum claim.
But i get the impression that you are not in the least bit concerned about actually being factually correct nor about using words and phrases as they are generally understood.
You can go on about how thoughtless and corrupt the general populus is as much as you like, but it doesn't actually stregthen your case about economics one iota. Goodnight.
Simple. Suppose there are two families in the world. One family is very good at making bread (including growing the wheat and other ingredients) and the other is very good at building houses (built from the locally growing trees). If left on their own, one family would end up being cold, and the other would end up hungry. Both of them could be considered poor because of this. Not because they don't have money, money doesn't exist to them, but because they don't have access to things that would clearly improve the quality of their lives.
Now, an economist steps in and says to the two families "right, why doesn't family A cook family B food, in return for family B building a house for family A". So they do this, and end up both being slightly better off. The natural resources are left almost the same because the wheat grows every year (due to solar energy), as do the trees. When it comes to a purely economic analysis, both families are better off and so it is not zero sum. If the natural resources are taken into account, some metric is required for measuring the importance of a few trees being cut down (which will grow back) against a famaily having warmth and shelter. Whilst this is somewhat arbitrary and dependent on someone's value judgements, since the enivronmental effect is negligible it would be sensible for the negative effect to be only slightly so. So overall, there is a net positive. Caused by an improved economic system.
It hasn't created any money, but then money is not always the metric that is used in measuring wealth, and would clearly be inappropriate in this case.
Yes, that was the original posters argument. Your argument on the other hand was about economic activity + natural resources being zero sum...which it isn't. I agree that the rise of china will most likely create a huge drain on natural resources. But that is merely a necessary condition for it being zero-sum, not a sufficient one.
Of course, both of these statements are false. But their falsehood does NOT mean that it is zero-sum. Just because a number is not +infinity, it doesn't make it 0.
I have also seen similar arguments about individual wealth as if it was theoretically possible for every person to be a billionaire.
And most people in the developed world are billionaires in comparison to the people living a couple of hundred years ago. And this is due to economic and technological reasons. Even if you disagree with this, it doesn't mean it has anything to do with the initial argument. Just because you've had to witness an idiot arguing about wealth, it doesn't mean that every argument in the future will be with an idiot.
It is crucially important what values you put on things. If you use energy, then you will find that as time progresses the sum remains the same, it is zero-sum. If you measure money in bank accounts then (assuming neither the banks nor the government insert more into the system) that also remains the same as time progresses, it too is a conserved quantity.
To return to your sentence, it claims that for every economic activity that we may assign a value to, it will have caused a depletion in 'natural resources'. More or less, I agree with that, however I disagree that the value is always equal and opposite. I hope you see by now that your sentence does not actually show that anything is zero-sum at all. The statement 'zero-sum' should imply that you are talking about measurable consequences.
Or maybe you do think there is some non-trivial and relevant measure to do with economic activity that is actually zero-sum, always. If so, then I would like to hear it.
As an aside, it is statements like yours, often involving bad definitions and attention to irrelevant details which makes the general population very wary of science.
For example, how has the price of your house got anything to do with your employer, let alone IBM? How does your employer affect how insurance companies operate? Basically it has nothing to do with it at all, and yet somehow this is to be considered insightful rather than off-topic/redundant/flaimbait.
Simply amazing.
- The IT department
- cleaners
- taxi drivers (overhearing conversations and delivering documents)
- print room staff
- secretaries
- PA's
- spouses of all these people.
And this isn't even including the employess of the companies themselves. It seems unlikely that someone wanting to make big money on the stock market would bother to spend huge amounts of money decrypting standard public key encyption when they could just befriend any of the above, or perhaps just steal their laptop.There doesn't seem to be a consensus on the definition of Capitalism, although it is "An economic and political system in which a country's trade and industry are controlled by private owners for profit, rather than by the state", according to the compact oxford english dictionary. In practice this usually means that people have more freedom to do what they want, but only in the case that capital is distributed more widely than the power in a political party. Don't get me wrong, i think that capitalism as it is practiced in most western countries does give people more choice, however it is not always part of the definition of Capitalism.
I realise though that even if I am correct, I am still probably being overly pedantic. :o)
I think what the parent was trying to say was roughly "Assuming that you know what is best for others and forcing that view onto them is evil. Communism assumes it knows what is best for its people and forces them to agree. Therefore communism is evil."
Now, if a democratic country assumes they know what is best for others and forces that view on others then by the above assumptions it might follow that they are evil, but it wouldn't necessarily follow that they are communist. The logical relation is in the other direction.
The same thing happens in the OSS society. To get people to help the cause, you have to make it seem like the world of IT is about to collapse due to Microsoft/SCO/Patents/DRM/whatever.
So although you are right that it is a good thing in itself, it is still the case that it is a useful tactic for the libraries to play on the base fears of their patrons.
America is returning to the fold then ;-)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Window_tax
With 33 megapixels at 60fps, that's quite a lot of bandwidth. AFAIK there are still some parts of england that can't even get affordable 512k, so it may be some time before they are getting Gb connections.
I think what you mean is efficient (or at the very worst lazy). I use Firefox (for example) because it allows me to do the least amount of work (measured in hand movements) to achieve the maximum effect. Does this make me greedy? I use a mechanical washing machine because it cleans my clothes well with the minimum amount of work. Does this make me greedy?
Perhaps you are one of those people who actually think that life is zero-sum and that it must be the case that every time i save myself some effort, someone else has to put in an equal amount of extra effort? Open source is good partly because it can be a more efficient form of production than conventional methods. This is why people other than /. whackos actually use it.
IF one day we humans change our intrinsic nature, open source model might well replace the current individualist/capitalist model.
Yawn.
At worst you have to put the install cd's back in and perhaps reinstall some of the custom apps, at best you just revert to a backup image. This pales into insignificance when compared to losing your entire music collection, photo archive, email archive etc, or having someone take your bank passwords.
In the end it's a matter of priorities. The unix world is used to multi-user systems where the priority is to minimize the damage down to just single users. Since backing up data is quite cheap (in both time and money) on a large scale, the data can be kept safe easily. The desktop world however doesn't have to worry about multi-user security, and so their priority is to keep their own data safe. In most cases, Unix-like permissions do nothing to protect this. Whilst it is possible to do your accounts as one user, your games as another etc, the process of logging out and back in again can be very time consuming and is well beyond what the consumer is going to accept.
As far as i can tell, SELinux is very much on the right track. I really hope that it will be enforced as standard in major distributions soon, because if it is not, then I would not be at all surprised to see Microsoft beat Linux at its own game in the coming years. After all, whilst Windows security is bad, it is improving at a much faster rate than Linux, which doesn't seem to have brought much to the table in the last decade. (IMHO)
And regarding innovation, i think you are right too. It seemed like every game was the same old platformer, usually done later and with a lot less quality than the Nintendo releases.
It saddens me when people just can't appreciate that it is legitimate for others have different tastes. That modern games spend a larger budget on the graphics and physics IS a great selling point for many people. Many people prefer to have games based on reality rather than in abstract.
It seems to me like you need something far more secret than biometric data to keep your identity private. (In addition to a hash).
OTOH, when we start getting monster video screens with huge resolutions, it will need a very hefty GPU to access it.
...would have been better.
I would guess that with similar tools, a scientist is capable of doing many more experiments than a robot.
The talk was actually about why it doesn't have to be the case that really large numbers must satisfy the same rules as smaller computable numbers. This is based on Godel's proof that says something about it being impossible to know whether an axiomatic system is free of contradictions.
Anyway, he also touched on computer proofs. He was basically saying that (most) mathematicians do what they do because they enjoy creating and understanding logical structures. To some extent you neither create nor understand a computer proof and so it is intrinsically less interesting to a mathematician. Since the world of mathematics is driven mainly by what they find interesting, computer proofs haven't featured very highly in it.
So, as you imply yourself, a language can be measured by speed.
Most programmers would say that assembler loses out in each of your above criteria, yet it is still used for certain tasks. Why? Because it is quicker.
I agree overall with what you are saying, but the world isn't quite as simple as you make out.
...it's just vapourware.