You are trying to invent a universe where undesired actions are never beneficial, where good deeds are inherently rewarded and no one need be prohibited from doing anything. You are describing a Leibnitzian best of all possible worlds, because "in the long run" universal rational self-interest will create an acceptable equilibrium.
Like J.M. Keynes said, "in the long run, we're all dead. Or as he also said, "markets can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent." The current wireless technology environment is a crystal-clear example of the problems of a completely bottom-up approach towards regulatory mechanisms, and it's one of the least damaging ones.
The fact is that banning whale oil makes whale oil more expensive, which incentivizes alternatives. Again, from a game theory perspective alone, it will be more beneficial to kill the whale (remembering that careers and lifetimes are finite, and that *scarcity creates value*) unless that cost is made greater than the cost of developing alternatives. It just *happened* that alternatives were developed to whale oil, there was nothing necessary about human history that made it necessarily the case, and it is only laws against poaching ivory that keep the market for ivory for exploding to such an extent that only the most desparate are willing to poach. (Do you think that deregulating the market for elephant ivory will result in an protecting the elephant? If so, you are possessed of a faith that I can only describe as religious.)
I invite you to spend time in a truly unregulated society, like many in the third world, before you wax too enthusiastically about it.
Going back to the original point, campaign finance reform essentially removes the inflationary pressures on the political process, because in any market where there is a competition between different agents for a limited resource (political loyalty), the agent that has more to offer will win. To turn an old phrase, one person/one vote has been supplanted by one dollar/one vote, and dollars are not distributed evenly or fairly.
The reason that any given legislator pretty much has to take the money, is that their competitors are taking the money. Elementary game theory: the only way to end the practice is to categorically stop everyone from taking the money.
Regulations against behavior such as this are needed when there is no incentive for voluntarily restraining oneself from that behavior, and in fact such restraint puts one in a competitive disadvantage. Viz: the original English child labor laws, which were put into effect at the behest of factory owners who wanted to end their practice of child labor, but simply could not afford to do so as long as thier competitors continued to use child labor.
Perhaps for some theoretical non-human scientist that has a consciousness structured so that all facts are always explicit, who can simultaneously sustain conscious awareness of every level of analysis, and then communicate this to their peers, the idea behind this statement might be true. But insofar as human science refers to knowledge possessed by humans, this statement is incorrect.
I don't want the people who work for me sorting through 50,000 emails instead of patiently researching issues and representing my interests. I want statesmen, not babysitters to handhold whiny emailers, wingnuts and black-helicopter-watchers.
Frankly, I'm of the opinion that we have too much democracy. That the question of the teaching about the origins of life, the nature of mental disease, and so forth is determined by popular sentiment rather than objective fact is a disaster. Look around - how much ear-time do you really want your representatives giving to the yahoos that populate this mudball?
I may be wrong and I'm not in a position to confirm at this time, but I believe that the avifile libraries play back windows media format files. The Windows media file format is documented and playback can be implemented across platforms. Unlike Sorenson-encoded Quick Time files. (One of the reasons I consider Apple more hostile to open computing than Microsoft is.)
Over 1/4 of the population of Mexico lives in Mexico City. With 24 million people officially, and an estimated 30 million unofficially, Mexico City is the largest city in the world. Its population is greater than that of many countries, or most US states.
As a rule, no. Software license terms are theoretically the same in Latin America as they are in the US. The Business Software Alliance, largely led by Microsoft, makes a decent living of busting large concerns for license violations (especially if they don't have very effective political friends) and forcing them to agreements that lock them into a vendor's solution for a while.
In practice, "piracy" is easier elsewhere, and intellectual property laws much weaker and poorly enforced.
Right now, I suspect a virtual flotilla of Microsoft VP's - maybe even executive staff - is heading to Mexico City to reverse this. Perhaps on an up-front level, touting benefits for Microsoft software, or perhaps on a more sub rosa level, with a few well-placed gifts, free vacations, computers etc. to important decision makers. (That is how all of industry works, not just Microsoft - ask any doctor how many of their family vacations were underwritten by pharmaceutical companies).
I hope that the government of the D.F. holds the line, but I am a little cynical.
Then why, oh why, is there more challenging and sophisticated art coming from government sponsored Europe than from private sector America? If simple outrage is your metric, remember that I am not calling for banning non-funded art. I am simply saying that the government's support of art is less oppressive than the enforcement of increasingly unteneble intellectual property laws, and is less undesireable than simple charity support of a dwindling supply of artists. There are plenty of so-called commercial artists who labor under far more censorious regimes than endowed arts or fellows do. And plenty of radical artists who do what they do without regard for either the market or the academies or anything else. These, especially the latter, would be unaffected by support of arts from the public sector.
Be honest: aren't you protesting merely out of a dogmatic opposition to anything funded by the public sector?
I don't expect a direct disbursement of "government checks to artists." I expect a system somewhat more analogous to that used by academics and scientists: that academies devoted to different disciplines are endowed to provide fellowships to people the are accepted by a peer review process, just like in the sciences and academia. I am talking about funding artists, not specific art works: if an artist has a critically recognized career, they get tenure etc. If you focus on the product, then you get into the business of the government funding specific and possibly objectionable works. I want to support the artist, not the particular work.
A lot of European countries fund art analogously, and to be frank, their artistic discourse is freer, more critical of the government, and more open that ours. The private sector is considerably more censorious, tends to micromanage more, and is frankly more political. Again, if you are starting from the a priori perspective that the government should do nothing, that everything should come from the private sector, then we are operating from different premises, and we are headed to a discussion that I am not interested in rehashing.
While private charitable contributions are helpful, they have never been enough even in the best of times to support artists. Now that the era of the tycoon with an interest in arts has been replaced by corporations owned by profit-sensitive shareholders, the private-sector support for the arts has dwindled from the era of the Carnagies and the Rockefellers. The new rich have no sense of noblesse oblige.
Most of the history of art came from public patronage. As did much of the history of science.
The government has not busy deciding what is art and what isn't, just like it doesn't have business saying what is science and what isn't. That is why they would fund peer reviewed agencies who disbursed stipends and fellowships.
The reason that government funding is the solution here is that the only way to make the "market" the solution is to enforce intellectual property, which is in my view a greater government intrusion. I do not subscribe to the view that you optimize freedom by reducing the government. I believe that the appropriate use of the public sector expands the number of options, frees people to take risks and explore, and can enhance freedom. I think that if the cost of failure is endurable poverty rather than total destitution, people will take more chances and progress results. If people are given an opportunity for an education before they have the money for it, they are freer than they would be if they were uneducated and untaxed. I do not intend to rehash this old argument against doctranaire libertarianism: insofar as I do believe there is an appropriate use for the government in many circumstances, I believe that this is one. Since you have the a priori perspective that no government is good government, we really have nothing to talk about.
Having worked in corporation/arts intersections, I have to say I have a lot more faith in a public sector approach. I have seen too many corporate foundations and endowments dry up instantly in a weak quarter to impress Wall Street (even if the company was profitable!) The private sector is incredibly unreliable for supporting anything that isn't profitable. In fact, getting rid of copyright law will itself benefit the private sector directly, as creative teams will have full access to existing content without worrying about royalties and the like. While it would be "nice" to think that the private sector would then turn around and support the arts, they usually are only "nice" for as long as it is comfortable.
I am unconvinced that this is a viable way to support artists. I would not, as an artist, want to make my livelihood and the well-being of my family depend on how many people of their own will decided to make a couple micropayments that they didn't have to make. Would you be willing to quit your job to do that? I wouldn't. I would, though, for a reasonable stipend.
Incidentally, I know several European countries have systems analogous to this one. It seems to do a much better job of supporting artists.
No, my solution would not make Brittney Spears rich. My solution would relegate Brittney Spears to the two-bit singing tavern wench she was meant to be. My solution would mean that Academies of Art, Music, etc, in a process involving peer review, would decide that some artists deserve a salary for their troubles. That works would be commissioned by private and public sector forces, and that performers would be paid to perform.
That is how great works were produced: by patronage, almost entirely from church (the income of which was essentially from a form of taxation) or the state.
The only answer I can think of is systematic government support of artists. Salaries. Artists are paid to *be artists.* The works that come out all go into the public domain. Additionally, other work can be commissioned, etc.
The alternatives to me are either 1. a draconian system of increasingly invasive copyright enforcement as new technologies make redistribution even easier all the time, or 2. artists starve, or worse, stop making art. I'd rather pay for artists up front in my taxes (with academies as job-sites, etc.) All in all, it seems like the least oppressive, most productive solution.
And then we will sap your precious bodily fluids, and make you the personal slave of Barney the Purple Dinosaur. Not to mention forcing you to compost.
We would have gotten away with it, too, if it weren't for you meddling kids.
It should be noted that no cell phone service provider guarantees constant receptiion anyway. If you are truly life-or-death on call, you should be by a land line.
The hate crime has special status because there is an implicit threat even to those who were not attacked or killed. The threat of violence with the ability and will to carry it out is defined as assault. When one demonstrates that will by attacking or killing someone, motivated by their membership in a particular group, then all people in that group are implicitly assaulted. It is these corollary victims that compound the injustice of the act and justify additional punishment.
You are unlikely to be killed for your money. When people get your money, robbers are almost universally inclined to leave you alone.
A hate crime is distinct because it is also an act of communication to others in the target group (and I - as well as the courts - believe that a non-white person who attacks a white person on the basis of their race is committing a hate crime) - in addition to the direct attack on the individual as a target, the act threatens other individuals in the target group. If I am gay, and three people in my community have been attacked for being gay, then I am being directly menaced (essentially, assaulted - it can be seen as an act of assault on all people in the target group), while if I am attacked for having cut someone off in the freeway, there isn't really an implicit message being sent to people who cut other people off on a freeway. That is the nature of the hate crime.
In the market place (which is how we "get rid of" a corporation) my one vote is my one dollar, which competes with your 5 dollars and someone else's thousand dollars. That means that if that one person "voted" for a corporation to continue to exist, our "vote" against it would be meaningless. And all a corporation need to do to continue to exist is get enough "votes" to be profitable. It is easier to participate in the political process and effect political change (especially at the local city/county/school district level) as an individual than it is to modify corporate behaviour. The problem is that most of the crowd here is so wrapped up in their work-lives, that they never actually bother to look into how the public sector works.
The rational thing to do is to let the markeyt decide. With ogg being BSD licenced, the choice they will make is clear in my mind.
This makes no sense. "The market" is just an abstraction about people's individual choices. You don't "let" the market do anything, you make your choices based on the constraints you find yourself in (how much money you have, your sense of urgency and need to decide quickly, your ethics and morals, and the total impression - most of it irrational - created by the good or service), and if that choice is available to others as information and data, you become part of "the market."
Treating the "market" as a ding an sich is up there with saying that "evolution will decide who lives and dies," another persistant tautology. Not to mention the fact that using Ogg Vorbis or the mp3 algorithm are both, for all practical purposes if not legal ones, free, and so the metaphor of the market isn't even completely apt.
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Like J.M. Keynes said, "in the long run, we're all dead. Or as he also said, "markets can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent." The current wireless technology environment is a crystal-clear example of the problems of a completely bottom-up approach towards regulatory mechanisms, and it's one of the least damaging ones.
The fact is that banning whale oil makes whale oil more expensive, which incentivizes alternatives. Again, from a game theory perspective alone, it will be more beneficial to kill the whale (remembering that careers and lifetimes are finite, and that *scarcity creates value*) unless that cost is made greater than the cost of developing alternatives. It just *happened* that alternatives were developed to whale oil, there was nothing necessary about human history that made it necessarily the case, and it is only laws against poaching ivory that keep the market for ivory for exploding to such an extent that only the most desparate are willing to poach. (Do you think that deregulating the market for elephant ivory will result in an protecting the elephant? If so, you are possessed of a faith that I can only describe as religious.)
I invite you to spend time in a truly unregulated society, like many in the third world, before you wax too enthusiastically about it.
Going back to the original point, campaign finance reform essentially removes the inflationary pressures on the political process, because in any market where there is a competition between different agents for a limited resource (political loyalty), the agent that has more to offer will win. To turn an old phrase, one person/one vote has been supplanted by one dollar/one vote, and dollars are not distributed evenly or fairly.
As far as the "gotta compete" excuse, it isn't an excuse: it's a fact of the market. If campaign spending didn't work, people wouldn't do it.
Regulations against behavior such as this are needed when there is no incentive for voluntarily restraining oneself from that behavior, and in fact such restraint puts one in a competitive disadvantage. Viz: the original English child labor laws, which were put into effect at the behest of factory owners who wanted to end their practice of child labor, but simply could not afford to do so as long as thier competitors continued to use child labor.
Perhaps for some theoretical non-human scientist that has a consciousness structured so that all facts are always explicit, who can simultaneously sustain conscious awareness of every level of analysis, and then communicate this to their peers, the idea behind this statement might be true. But insofar as human science refers to knowledge possessed by humans, this statement is incorrect.
Frankly, I'm of the opinion that we have too much democracy. That the question of the teaching about the origins of life, the nature of mental disease, and so forth is determined by popular sentiment rather than objective fact is a disaster. Look around - how much ear-time do you really want your representatives giving to the yahoos that populate this mudball?
I may be wrong and I'm not in a position to confirm at this time, but I believe that the avifile libraries play back windows media format files. The Windows media file format is documented and playback can be implemented across platforms. Unlike Sorenson-encoded Quick Time files. (One of the reasons I consider Apple more hostile to open computing than Microsoft is.)
Over 1/4 of the population of Mexico lives in Mexico City. With 24 million people officially, and an estimated 30 million unofficially, Mexico City is the largest city in the world. Its population is greater than that of many countries, or most US states.
What good do you think US antitrust legislation is in Mexico?
In practice, "piracy" is easier elsewhere, and intellectual property laws much weaker and poorly enforced.
I hope that the government of the D.F. holds the line, but I am a little cynical.
Be honest: aren't you protesting merely out of a dogmatic opposition to anything funded by the public sector?
Apologies for the lost tag.
A lot of European countries fund art analogously, and to be frank, their artistic discourse is freer, more critical of the government, and more open that ours. The private sector is considerably more censorious, tends to micromanage more, and is frankly more political. Again, if you are starting from the a priori perspective that the government should do nothing, that everything should come from the private sector, then we are operating from different premises, and we are headed to a discussion that I am not interested in rehashing.
While private charitable contributions are helpful, they have never been enough even in the best of times to support artists. Now that the era of the tycoon with an interest in arts has been replaced by corporations owned by profit-sensitive shareholders, the private-sector support for the arts has dwindled from the era of the Carnagies and the Rockefellers. The new rich have no sense of noblesse oblige.
Should public and school libraries also go unfunded? After all, they carry literature that is certain to offend most everyone.
The government has not busy deciding what is art and what isn't, just like it doesn't have business saying what is science and what isn't. That is why they would fund peer reviewed agencies who disbursed stipends and fellowships.
The reason that government funding is the solution here is that the only way to make the "market" the solution is to enforce intellectual property, which is in my view a greater government intrusion. I do not subscribe to the view that you optimize freedom by reducing the government. I believe that the appropriate use of the public sector expands the number of options, frees people to take risks and explore, and can enhance freedom. I think that if the cost of failure is endurable poverty rather than total destitution, people will take more chances and progress results. If people are given an opportunity for an education before they have the money for it, they are freer than they would be if they were uneducated and untaxed. I do not intend to rehash this old argument against doctranaire libertarianism: insofar as I do believe there is an appropriate use for the government in many circumstances, I believe that this is one. Since you have the a priori perspective that no government is good government, we really have nothing to talk about.
Having worked in corporation/arts intersections, I have to say I have a lot more faith in a public sector approach. I have seen too many corporate foundations and endowments dry up instantly in a weak quarter to impress Wall Street (even if the company was profitable!) The private sector is incredibly unreliable for supporting anything that isn't profitable. In fact, getting rid of copyright law will itself benefit the private sector directly, as creative teams will have full access to existing content without worrying about royalties and the like. While it would be "nice" to think that the private sector would then turn around and support the arts, they usually are only "nice" for as long as it is comfortable.
Incidentally, I know several European countries have systems analogous to this one. It seems to do a much better job of supporting artists.
That is how great works were produced: by patronage, almost entirely from church (the income of which was essentially from a form of taxation) or the state.
The alternatives to me are either 1. a draconian system of increasingly invasive copyright enforcement as new technologies make redistribution even easier all the time, or 2. artists starve, or worse, stop making art. I'd rather pay for artists up front in my taxes (with academies as job-sites, etc.) All in all, it seems like the least oppressive, most productive solution.
We would have gotten away with it, too, if it weren't for you meddling kids.
It should be noted that no cell phone service provider guarantees constant receptiion anyway. If you are truly life-or-death on call, you should be by a land line.
The hate crime has special status because there is an implicit threat even to those who were not attacked or killed. The threat of violence with the ability and will to carry it out is defined as assault. When one demonstrates that will by attacking or killing someone, motivated by their membership in a particular group, then all people in that group are implicitly assaulted. It is these corollary victims that compound the injustice of the act and justify additional punishment.
A hate crime is distinct because it is also an act of communication to others in the target group (and I - as well as the courts - believe that a non-white person who attacks a white person on the basis of their race is committing a hate crime) - in addition to the direct attack on the individual as a target, the act threatens other individuals in the target group. If I am gay, and three people in my community have been attacked for being gay, then I am being directly menaced (essentially, assaulted - it can be seen as an act of assault on all people in the target group), while if I am attacked for having cut someone off in the freeway, there isn't really an implicit message being sent to people who cut other people off on a freeway. That is the nature of the hate crime.
In the market place (which is how we "get rid of" a corporation) my one vote is my one dollar, which competes with your 5 dollars and someone else's thousand dollars. That means that if that one person "voted" for a corporation to continue to exist, our "vote" against it would be meaningless. And all a corporation need to do to continue to exist is get enough "votes" to be profitable. It is easier to participate in the political process and effect political change (especially at the local city/county/school district level) as an individual than it is to modify corporate behaviour. The problem is that most of the crowd here is so wrapped up in their work-lives, that they never actually bother to look into how the public sector works.
Treating the "market" as a ding an sich is up there with saying that "evolution will decide who lives and dies," another persistant tautology. Not to mention the fact that using Ogg Vorbis or the mp3 algorithm are both, for all practical purposes if not legal ones, free, and so the metaphor of the market isn't even completely apt.