Welcome back to the world before the modern era, when the whole village remembers everything you said and did since you were born, and no one cares about your need to reinvent yourself.
You are not. You are entitled to try to produce a value-proposition with a customer, to negotiate a quid-pro-quo for your labor. It is up to you to come up with an effective business model given global realities, including the reality that, in Switzerland at least, the government is not going to limit the right of people to copy things. The rent-seeking involved is your demand that governments - globally - criminalize the copying of information.
There was a brief historical window in which information could be treated like a product, because of the difficulty in moving that information from one medium to the next. The medium was the actual product, and it still is. The information can not be, not anymore. You will have to adjust.
Personally? I think that the public/academic sector is best suited for creating useful software, and providing a living for artists and musicians, as well. With their output then being released into the public domain.
If it's of no value, then why is there a debate over the subject ? If it is of no value, then why do producers want protection from pirates ? If it is of no value, then why do pirates want to copy it ?
For 3, it has a value exactly equivalent to the cost of copying it: virtually zero. For you to demonstrate value, you would need to demonstrate a willingness to pay were it unavailable for free. Or, you do not understand the nature of the term, "value"
Officially, the Swiss government has decided that they have no more right to get paid for each copy of that software than I have to get paid for your reading my post. Finally, the legal understanding has caught up with material reality: you can no longer treat strings of numbers (which is what a digital file is) as "things" in the physical sense. Technology briefly created a period where you could treat music as a "thing," technology has ended that period.
But you think that "Americans" are the container that matters. Here's the truth: the wealthy want American labor to get cheaper. The idea that national unity can be relied upon to constrain the predatory instincts of capital (that's what we're talking about - capital) is a delusion.
Essentially, the economy is now global, and there is no sign of that going away. Trying to think you can retreat into Fortress America as if it were a magical, self-reliant, middle-class bio-dome is wishful thinking. For many Americans, thinking about the best interests of some Chinese, Indian, Brazilian and other peoples may be a lot more productive than thinking about the best interests of their wealthiest fellow Americans.
I think "don't worry, it's all OK" is a bigger problem than panic among geeks right now. Television has had an effect on at least two generations of children: look at the difference in the kind of academic rigor that could be expected of children before the television age with those after. All the use of these media technologies during core developmental years is essentially a huge, uncontrolled experiment on children.
If you look at the people who succeed in our society, it's generally those whose parents kept them away from a lot of this technology in those core years. I'm not a luddite - I like games and I like the internet, but I'm not whistling in the dark, either. Human attention is a complicated system..
Plus, you get rid of those immigrants, you also get rid of them as consumers. Considering that they are, on the whole, less eligible for benefits than non-immigrants, it actually makes things very slightly worse for everyone else. Oh, there would be a slight bump in pay for agricultural workers. (Which would make food more expensive, but I'd consider that a fair trade for fair pay.)
"Homo sapiens" doesn't have any socio-political agency. Groups of humans - nations, companies, organizations, religions, families - do. It isn't "homo sapiens" that will go into space, any more than "primates" or "vertebrates" will. It will be a specific group of people in specific social organizations, with specific cultural values, habits, ways of thinking, etc.
What if the people who go into space don't identify with the problems of those they leave behind? Perhaps much of humanity is like an abusive household, and the best thing to do is just leave.
Perhaps "humanity" is not the end-all, be-all category you think it is.
Money, in this case, stands for the opportunity cost for the skilled labor involved and for moving resources being used for other things to the colonization project. A lot of people currently working on treating cancer, finding new sources of energy, etc. would need to be put on project tract-housing-on-Mars.
I think it's worth doing, mind you. But don't just say it's just a matter of "money." Money is a stand-in for labor and resources.
Because chubby tech-geeks in their big chairs like to feel smug about how the Nanny State is taking away their time-travel-based rights to return to elementary school and get hit by a baseball, like God intended?
Granted, I am probably the first person to RTFA, but of course, despite the play to the aesthetics of outrage, the true story is less absurd, less dramatic:
1. the "ban" is temporary until they can find a better solution to the problem
2. the problem is not that the precious little angels might get hit by balls, it's that the play area is much too small, making accidents too likely.
But don't let me stop the hand-wringing. Carry on, carry on.
They don't have this information. It's a slippery-slope argument, albeit one turned around the wrong way.
Re:Only "troubled" if you're not Lockheed Martin
on
The F-35 Story
·
· Score: 1
You have no idea what I'm talking about, criticizing, etc. How someone could fundamentally misread a comment, its intent, and its context so completely is amazing to me.
Early economists - Locke, Hume, Ricardo, Smith - were also philosophers. The more that economists become mere social scientists, the shallower their work became. My statement, more or less, is a critique of a kind of utilitarianism that is cast in economic terms.
The very , very last thing I am doing is advocating the military-industrial complex.
I'm not going to flaunt academic credentials, either, since if my point doesn't stand, the letters after my name won't change that. Nor will yours.
Do surgeons get paid "bonuses" for successful surgeries?
The incentive for success should be "continue to draw a paycheck, perhaps get a raise/promotion, and not get fired." That's what it is for most of the rest of us.
When you see who holds and manages those shares and who has voting rights, you'll understand just what a predicament we're in. You're asking the people who are sitting on the money to stop writing themselves checks. They won't.
Re:Only "troubled" if you're not Lockheed Martin
on
The F-35 Story
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Um, I'm being critical of the absolute reliance on economic values, for one thing. Though considering how over-the-top and melodramatic your speculations are, it's unsurprising that the critical tone of my post went past you.
You're wearing camouflage right now, as you read posts on the internet, aren't you?
Re:Only "troubled" if you're not Lockheed Martin
on
The F-35 Story
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
We live in the world of pure economics now, where the only real motivation that institutions believe matters is money. It's a self-fulfilling prophecy.
It is fascinating that the enemies of the US right now are those people who believe in something worthing killing and dying for that isn't money.
Except for executive chefs and an occasional sous-chef, cooking pays very badly. Even pastry chefs, sauciers, patissiers and the like make no more than about $10 per hour. Line cooks are minimum wage - at best. Which is why they are often undocumented workers.
At your entry level, you probably made more than most mid-to-late career cooks.
Slashdot Mirror
The stuff you do in college is going to be the exact stuff you'll wish you could toss into the memory hole later.
Welcome back to the world before the modern era, when the whole village remembers everything you said and did since you were born, and no one cares about your need to reinvent yourself.
You act as if you are entitled to make a profit.
You are not. You are entitled to try to produce a value-proposition with a customer, to negotiate a quid-pro-quo for your labor. It is up to you to come up with an effective business model given global realities, including the reality that, in Switzerland at least, the government is not going to limit the right of people to copy things. The rent-seeking involved is your demand that governments - globally - criminalize the copying of information.
There was a brief historical window in which information could be treated like a product, because of the difficulty in moving that information from one medium to the next. The medium was the actual product, and it still is. The information can not be, not anymore. You will have to adjust.
Personally? I think that the public/academic sector is best suited for creating useful software, and providing a living for artists and musicians, as well. With their output then being released into the public domain.
If it's of no value, then why is there a debate over the subject ?
If it is of no value, then why do producers want protection from pirates ?
If it is of no value, then why do pirates want to copy it ?
For 1 and 2, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent-seeking
For 3, it has a value exactly equivalent to the cost of copying it: virtually zero. For you to demonstrate value, you would need to demonstrate a willingness to pay were it unavailable for free. Or, you do not understand the nature of the term, "value"
That is the worst metaphor I have ever heard. I think I've been trolled. Well played.
Most of our bosses don't pay us for our code. They pay us to code, and when they stop paying us, we stop coding.
Officially, the Swiss government has decided that they have no more right to get paid for each copy of that software than I have to get paid for your reading my post. Finally, the legal understanding has caught up with material reality: you can no longer treat strings of numbers (which is what a digital file is) as "things" in the physical sense. Technology briefly created a period where you could treat music as a "thing," technology has ended that period.
But you think that "Americans" are the container that matters. Here's the truth: the wealthy want American labor to get cheaper. The idea that national unity can be relied upon to constrain the predatory instincts of capital (that's what we're talking about - capital) is a delusion.
Essentially, the economy is now global, and there is no sign of that going away. Trying to think you can retreat into Fortress America as if it were a magical, self-reliant, middle-class bio-dome is wishful thinking. For many Americans, thinking about the best interests of some Chinese, Indian, Brazilian and other peoples may be a lot more productive than thinking about the best interests of their wealthiest fellow Americans.
http://pediatrics.aappublications.org/content/126/2/214.full
Not that will really satisfy anyone, because it doesn't come to a conclusion you like.
I think "don't worry, it's all OK" is a bigger problem than panic among geeks right now. Television has had an effect on at least two generations of children: look at the difference in the kind of academic rigor that could be expected of children before the television age with those after. All the use of these media technologies during core developmental years is essentially a huge, uncontrolled experiment on children.
If you look at the people who succeed in our society, it's generally those whose parents kept them away from a lot of this technology in those core years. I'm not a luddite - I like games and I like the internet, but I'm not whistling in the dark, either. Human attention is a complicated system..
Plus, you get rid of those immigrants, you also get rid of them as consumers. Considering that they are, on the whole, less eligible for benefits than non-immigrants, it actually makes things very slightly worse for everyone else. Oh, there would be a slight bump in pay for agricultural workers. (Which would make food more expensive, but I'd consider that a fair trade for fair pay.)
Then who is "we?"
"Homo sapiens" doesn't have any socio-political agency. Groups of humans - nations, companies, organizations, religions, families - do. It isn't "homo sapiens" that will go into space, any more than "primates" or "vertebrates" will. It will be a specific group of people in specific social organizations, with specific cultural values, habits, ways of thinking, etc.
That is what I object to: the lazy use of "we."
What "we?"
What if the people who go into space don't identify with the problems of those they leave behind? Perhaps much of humanity is like an abusive household, and the best thing to do is just leave.
Perhaps "humanity" is not the end-all, be-all category you think it is.
Money, in this case, stands for the opportunity cost for the skilled labor involved and for moving resources being used for other things to the colonization project. A lot of people currently working on treating cancer, finding new sources of energy, etc. would need to be put on project tract-housing-on-Mars.
I think it's worth doing, mind you. But don't just say it's just a matter of "money." Money is a stand-in for labor and resources.
Because chubby tech-geeks in their big chairs like to feel smug about how the Nanny State is taking away their time-travel-based rights to return to elementary school and get hit by a baseball, like God intended?
Granted, I am probably the first person to RTFA, but of course, despite the play to the aesthetics of outrage, the true story is less absurd, less dramatic:
1. the "ban" is temporary until they can find a better solution to the problem
2. the problem is not that the precious little angels might get hit by balls, it's that the play area is much too small, making accidents too likely.
But don't let me stop the hand-wringing. Carry on, carry on.
They don't have this information. It's a slippery-slope argument, albeit one turned around the wrong way.
You have no idea what I'm talking about, criticizing, etc. How someone could fundamentally misread a comment, its intent, and its context so completely is amazing to me.
Early economists - Locke, Hume, Ricardo, Smith - were also philosophers. The more that economists become mere social scientists, the shallower their work became. My statement, more or less, is a critique of a kind of utilitarianism that is cast in economic terms.
The very , very last thing I am doing is advocating the military-industrial complex.
I'm not going to flaunt academic credentials, either, since if my point doesn't stand, the letters after my name won't change that. Nor will yours.
http://www.alfiekohn.org/books/pbr.htm
Do surgeons get paid "bonuses" for successful surgeries?
The incentive for success should be "continue to draw a paycheck, perhaps get a raise/promotion, and not get fired." That's what it is for most of the rest of us.
When you see who holds and manages those shares and who has voting rights, you'll understand just what a predicament we're in. You're asking the people who are sitting on the money to stop writing themselves checks. They won't.
Um, I'm being critical of the absolute reliance on economic values, for one thing. Though considering how over-the-top and melodramatic your speculations are, it's unsurprising that the critical tone of my post went past you.
You're wearing camouflage right now, as you read posts on the internet, aren't you?
We live in the world of pure economics now, where the only real motivation that institutions believe matters is money. It's a self-fulfilling prophecy.
It is fascinating that the enemies of the US right now are those people who believe in something worthing killing and dying for that isn't money.
Minimum wage?
Except for executive chefs and an occasional sous-chef, cooking pays very badly. Even pastry chefs, sauciers, patissiers and the like make no more than about $10 per hour. Line cooks are minimum wage - at best. Which is why they are often undocumented workers.
At your entry level, you probably made more than most mid-to-late career cooks.
I suspect if engineers, plumbers and cooks were all paid roughly equally, we'd have more competence in all three fields.