My favorite argument in favor of free will comes right out of Philosophy for Dummies:
We define "free will" as the grandparent does: "being able to affect the future via your own choices". Since believing whether humans have free will or not is a choice, we can conclude:
If humans don't have free will, it doesn't matter whether you believe we have free will or not, as that choice (the belief) can't affect the outcome of any events.
If humans do have free will, then your belief in that area matters. (For example, without free will, there's no point to morality, as the outcome of everything is pre-determined).
Conclusion: You might as well believe humans have free will (believing it is a plus if it's true, and doesn't affect anything if it's not true).
And our economic system requires them to screw over as many people as possible (including, of course, themselves in the long term), in the pursuit of ever-increasing profits.
However, even if we wanted to change the laws to curb corporate power, they've probably already grabbed enough power to block any attempt.
I think all we can do is wait until after the massive economic collapse that will ensue after the race to the bottom completes, and hope somebody learned enough to keep the rich in check for the next civilization cycle.
Corporations are required to try to violate the Social Contract, in their favor, as much as possible. We went and required them to increase profits forever, and there's only so much profit-increase you can get by legal / ethical means.
They can just kill the employees if they're given any trouble (unless the relevant employee finds a way to escape, on a ship at sea, where all communication is controlled by the employer). It's every executive's dream!
Big business owns the U.S. government. This is good for big business. Our officials' corporate masters would never allow our government to interfere with this type of profitable pursuit.
Corporations hate those pesky labor laws, they cut into the profits they are legally required to continuously increase.
Now they can go back to the old railroad days - if a worker dies on the job, just toss them out of the way! (Of course, nowadays, you'd expect the corp to bill the estate for body disposal).
The best we can hope for out of this is some blatant abuses that galvanize an anti-corporate movement (unless they already have so much power that they can't be stopped by regular people, by any means).
It doesn't matter to the company. If the ship gets stolen by (real) pirates, and everyone is killed, they'll just replace the workers, tow out a new ship, and keep going.
As long as the cost to repair / replace the ship occasionally is less than the extra profit they're making, they are obligated to continue.
Welcome to our corporate-controlled society - sleep well!
I've been a software developer for some years. Experience with that industry makes be believe that everything is the cheapest / shoddiest junk possible, regardless of price, cost, brand reputation, national origin, etc.
Of course, in the back of my mind I know that the race to the bottom hasn't affected actual physical goods as much as it's affected software. Still, I expect to get cheap crap regardless of what I buy, so I buy cheap:-)
Does Company A get itself sued, and have its legitimate proprietary code exposed...
FYI, publishing of the source is not necessary. The company can withdraw that version of SuperWidgetWare2005 from the market, then release a new version that does not contain any GPLed code.
The GPL will not be able to force anyone to reveal any source code. There's always the option of ceasing to distribute the infringing product.
The difference is: one is pro-consumer, one is anti-consumer.
The GPL is intended to protect the efforts of the "community" from theft by corporations, and (more importantly) to prevent a commercial developer (or anyone else) from making a closed-source fork of open-source code.
If it were possible to make closed-source changes to GPL'ed code, then some company could release a version with features that the community (who developed the base) can't use to improve the base product, or fix when it breaks.
The RIAA, on the other hand, is trying to keep consumers from using their music without paying, to keep their profits up. (I personally am against music piracy. However, I do see some legitimate reasons for song-swapping, such as a (time-limited!) "try before you buy", or getting a copy for your MP3 player / car / etc. of a CD that won't let you rip it, etc.)
Also, look at the ultimate goals. The FSF is pushing for a world where all software is Free for you to use, change, and improve. The entertainment industry is pushing for a world where all entertainment is pay-per-view.
Credit unions rock. Since they're nonprofit, they have incentive neither to nickel-and-dime you to death with fees, nor to act in consumer-unfriendly ways.
I personally have free interest-bearing checking and savings, decent free online banking, a 5.25% 30-year-fixed mortgage, and a 12%-fixed Visa card that doesn't raise my rate when I'm late on something else (check your credit card's T's&C's - I bet you'll find something like that).
The only restriction is that credit unions have to have a restricted field of membership (usually determined by employer), though you can get your employer to affiliate with a CU if they don't already (it shouldn't cost them anything).
My primary one I was eligible for by virtue of having worked for a large Business Machines company, but they cover a lot of other employers as well. My old one back in Ohio I got into by virtue of my grandmother working for Western Electric/AT&T/Lucent. Nowadays Telhio goes the more adventurous route of considering you eligible if you live, work, go to school or church in their Columbus suburb.
Re:Read the fine print for your savings and checki
on
Tracking Your Taxes
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· Score: 1
Real property ownership, and liens thereon (including the amount and the lienholder) are matters of public record. Therefore, whenever you get a mortgage, vendors (who I suppose pay people to watch changes at the county records office, or online) come out of the woodwork to sell you stuff.
The only problem I have with it is that most of them try to disguise the mailings as though they're coming from your lender (by printing the lender's name in prominent positions, and leaving their own name in the Fine Print).
Practically all of these offers I've ever gotten are from companies who are entirely unaffiliated with my credit union (they even say so in the Fine Print).
How are we expected to accomplish this once wealth concentrates to the point of having only super-rich and dirt-poor?
Put another way: Suppose I am working part-time minimum wage (the only jobs left after middle-class jobs are all offshored). I have a great business idea, and the will to take the risk and put in the work necessary to make it succeed.
Where am I supposed to get the capital?
Hint: If I line up a bunch of investors, then they own the company, not I, and so they reap the (lion's share of the) rewards. Will there be enough left for me to jump the gap to rich?
The purpose of taxation isn't to redistribute wealth, it's to fund the government.
Maybe, but some (many?) people feel that wealth needs to be redistributed somehow.
Under lassiez-faire capitalism, a heck of a lot more wealth flows "upward" than "downward". Over time, this could lead to a heavy concentration of wealth in the uppoer crust. There is another theory which says that this has already happened.
Are there any honest companies left who actually care about the end user? The little guy?
Yes. Some small businesses do care about selling a good product and/or providing quality service, at a fair price.
Once a company ends up with more than a certain number of investors, a majority of investors / controlling interest will be in it just for short-term profits. At this point, the company must act in a way I would term "antisocial", to preserve continuous profit increases.
This antisocial behavior includes lock-in, FUD, driving down product quality while not reducing price, moving to anti-consumer business models such as subscriptions, etc. (In fact, I would characterize anything that someone would describe as a "business model" as antisocial. Nobody ever describes selling a quality product with good service at a fair price as a "business model").
Note that I am not saying that all small businesses act ethically. I am saying that only small businesses (in terms of number of investors) can act ethically. Think of the degenerate case of a sole proprietorship (one investor) - that company will act with the ethics of its owner, a human, so it could conceivably cover the entire range of human ethics.
I had thought that it would be nice to create a generic tax-form-filling-out web app (with a tax-form-creation backend), designed for scalability and security, and open-source it.
That would be most of the "work", then it would be hard for the government to deny that it's possible (they'll never admit that they just don't want to piss off tax-industry campaign contributors).
It wouldn't be hard to design the Web equivalent of just filling out the paper forms (line X takes a user-input value, line Y is the difference between A and B, line Z is the table-lookup result of the line C value,...)
More than that, if you know you owe the government money you want to wait until the last filing date.
FYI, if you want the government to direct-debit the money from your bank account, you can also specify (on the tax return) the day you want them to do so, up to and including April 15th.
The effects of greed are more widely felt / seen in America, because of our economic system. We have (more or less) laissez-faire capitalism, and a stock market that's priced on profit growth rate (and is the source of most executive compensation).
This leads to businesses having a need to continually increase their profit growth rate, no matter how well they're doing currently. Eventually they run out of ways to do this by selling better products or providing better service, so they turn to "business models."
Because we like our laissez-faire system, regulation is not going to kick in until the problems get pretty severe. Also, we have this belief (perpetuated by big business, maybe?) that private industry can do anything better than the government. (The reality, of course, being that private industry can do anything cheaper than the government).
Either that belief (or lobbying by tax software companies) led to the project we're now complaining about: rather than the IRS developing an e-file website, let private companies do it.
You forget - businesses have no good reason to care whether identity theft and/or fraud is illegal in the target countries. If it's cheaper to move operations there (the best you could hope for is that company might consider losses due to activities that aren't illegal in the target country), the company must more operations there, for the short-term good of the shareholders.
Here's the story of a woman who worked for the sheriff's office in Pender County, NC. Her boss, the sheriff, fired her after finding out she was living with a man she was not married to. Apparently this is still illegal in NC (sad, but beside the point, I guess; because of at-will employment, even if it were not illegal, he could still have fired her, simply for not approving of the behavior).
I've got a great procmail script for resume handling:
:0 /dev/null
Seriously, since I'm always jobhunting, I always thought it would be good to have software that cataloged return email addresses from people who sent in applications for a particular position. This would enable the HR person to, with the press of a button, shoot off a "fuck you, we hired someone else" email to all of them.
This is because of the way our stock market is structured, and the fact that those at the top are largely compensated in stock options.
The price of a share of stock represents the potential for earnings growth in the future. Therefore, to keep the share price going up, your earnings must keep growing at an ever-increasing rate.
Mature businesses that have decent profits could give some of that profit back to shareholders in the form of dividends (and some, of course, do). So it could be good for an individual investor to have a steady-state profitable company. However, execs are in it to keep the share price going up (since they have a discount on the shares, through the options).
Unless or until there are some restrictions on stock option compensation for executives (e.g. long required holding periods, heavy capital-gains taxes for stuff held for a short term with the rate reducing as time goes on, etc.), expect this short-term-profit-increase-at-all-costs mentality to continue.
Slashdot Mirror
We define "free will" as the grandparent does: "being able to affect the future via your own choices". Since believing whether humans have free will or not is a choice, we can conclude:
If humans don't have free will, it doesn't matter whether you believe we have free will or not, as that choice (the belief) can't affect the outcome of any events.
If humans do have free will, then your belief in that area matters. (For example, without free will, there's no point to morality, as the outcome of everything is pre-determined).
Conclusion: You might as well believe humans have free will (believing it is a plus if it's true, and doesn't affect anything if it's not true).
However, even if we wanted to change the laws to curb corporate power, they've probably already grabbed enough power to block any attempt.
I think all we can do is wait until after the massive economic collapse that will ensue after the race to the bottom completes, and hope somebody learned enough to keep the rich in check for the next civilization cycle.
Why would the company care? As long as they can replace the people and stuff for less than it costs to be subject to labor laws, they're ahead.
They can just kill the employees if they're given any trouble (unless the relevant employee finds a way to escape, on a ship at sea, where all communication is controlled by the employer). It's every executive's dream!
Big business owns the U.S. government. This is good for big business. Our officials' corporate masters would never allow our government to interfere with this type of profitable pursuit.
Corporations hate those pesky labor laws, they cut into the profits they are legally required to continuously increase.
Now they can go back to the old railroad days - if a worker dies on the job, just toss them out of the way! (Of course, nowadays, you'd expect the corp to bill the estate for body disposal).
The best we can hope for out of this is some blatant abuses that galvanize an anti-corporate movement (unless they already have so much power that they can't be stopped by regular people, by any means).
Nobody else involved will be American citizens, so U.S. taxes will not apply.
The corporation itself only has to pay tax on profits, and it's easy to use accounting tricks to understate your profit.
As long as the cost to repair / replace the ship occasionally is less than the extra profit they're making, they are obligated to continue.
Welcome to our corporate-controlled society - sleep well!
Of course, in the back of my mind I know that the race to the bottom hasn't affected actual physical goods as much as it's affected software. Still, I expect to get cheap crap regardless of what I buy, so I buy cheap :-)
The GPL will not be able to force anyone to reveal any source code. There's always the option of ceasing to distribute the infringing product.
The GPL is intended to protect the efforts of the "community" from theft by corporations, and (more importantly) to prevent a commercial developer (or anyone else) from making a closed-source fork of open-source code.
If it were possible to make closed-source changes to GPL'ed code, then some company could release a version with features that the community (who developed the base) can't use to improve the base product, or fix when it breaks.
The RIAA, on the other hand, is trying to keep consumers from using their music without paying, to keep their profits up. (I personally am against music piracy. However, I do see some legitimate reasons for song-swapping, such as a (time-limited!) "try before you buy", or getting a copy for your MP3 player / car / etc. of a CD that won't let you rip it, etc.)
Also, look at the ultimate goals. The FSF is pushing for a world where all software is Free for you to use, change, and improve. The entertainment industry is pushing for a world where all entertainment is pay-per-view.
I personally have free interest-bearing checking and savings, decent free online banking, a 5.25% 30-year-fixed mortgage, and a 12%-fixed Visa card that doesn't raise my rate when I'm late on something else (check your credit card's T's&C's - I bet you'll find something like that).
The only restriction is that credit unions have to have a restricted field of membership (usually determined by employer), though you can get your employer to affiliate with a CU if they don't already (it shouldn't cost them anything).
My primary one I was eligible for by virtue of having worked for a large Business Machines company, but they cover a lot of other employers as well. My old one back in Ohio I got into by virtue of my grandmother working for Western Electric/AT&T/Lucent. Nowadays Telhio goes the more adventurous route of considering you eligible if you live, work, go to school or church in their Columbus suburb.
The only problem I have with it is that most of them try to disguise the mailings as though they're coming from your lender (by printing the lender's name in prominent positions, and leaving their own name in the Fine Print).
Practically all of these offers I've ever gotten are from companies who are entirely unaffiliated with my credit union (they even say so in the Fine Print).
Perhaps that is easier to enforce than enforcing the reporting of illegal income; perhaps it isn't.
Put another way: Suppose I am working part-time minimum wage (the only jobs left after middle-class jobs are all offshored). I have a great business idea, and the will to take the risk and put in the work necessary to make it succeed.
Where am I supposed to get the capital?
Hint: If I line up a bunch of investors, then they own the company, not I, and so they reap the (lion's share of the) rewards. Will there be enough left for me to jump the gap to rich?
Under lassiez-faire capitalism, a heck of a lot more wealth flows "upward" than "downward". Over time, this could lead to a heavy concentration of wealth in the uppoer crust. There is another theory which says that this has already happened.
Once a company ends up with more than a certain number of investors, a majority of investors / controlling interest will be in it just for short-term profits. At this point, the company must act in a way I would term "antisocial", to preserve continuous profit increases.
This antisocial behavior includes lock-in, FUD, driving down product quality while not reducing price, moving to anti-consumer business models such as subscriptions, etc. (In fact, I would characterize anything that someone would describe as a "business model" as antisocial. Nobody ever describes selling a quality product with good service at a fair price as a "business model").
Note that I am not saying that all small businesses act ethically. I am saying that only small businesses (in terms of number of investors) can act ethically. Think of the degenerate case of a sole proprietorship (one investor) - that company will act with the ethics of its owner, a human, so it could conceivably cover the entire range of human ethics.
That would be most of the "work", then it would be hard for the government to deny that it's possible (they'll never admit that they just don't want to piss off tax-industry campaign contributors).
It wouldn't be hard to design the Web equivalent of just filling out the paper forms (line X takes a user-input value, line Y is the difference between A and B, line Z is the table-lookup result of the line C value, ...)
This leads to businesses having a need to continually increase their profit growth rate, no matter how well they're doing currently. Eventually they run out of ways to do this by selling better products or providing better service, so they turn to "business models."
Because we like our laissez-faire system, regulation is not going to kick in until the problems get pretty severe. Also, we have this belief (perpetuated by big business, maybe?) that private industry can do anything better than the government. (The reality, of course, being that private industry can do anything cheaper than the government).
Either that belief (or lobbying by tax software companies) led to the project we're now complaining about: rather than the IRS developing an e-file website, let private companies do it.
Laws requiring data protection, or restricting offshoring in any way, hurt the Bottom Line, so they will never be allowed to pass.
You forget - businesses have no good reason to care whether identity theft and/or fraud is illegal in the target countries. If it's cheaper to move operations there (the best you could hope for is that company might consider losses due to activities that aren't illegal in the target country), the company must more operations there, for the short-term good of the shareholders.
The price of a share of stock represents the potential for earnings growth in the future. Therefore, to keep the share price going up, your earnings must keep growing at an ever-increasing rate.
Mature businesses that have decent profits could give some of that profit back to shareholders in the form of dividends (and some, of course, do). So it could be good for an individual investor to have a steady-state profitable company. However, execs are in it to keep the share price going up (since they have a discount on the shares, through the options).
Unless or until there are some restrictions on stock option compensation for executives (e.g. long required holding periods, heavy capital-gains taxes for stuff held for a short term with the rate reducing as time goes on, etc.), expect this short-term-profit-increase-at-all-costs mentality to continue.