Someone who supports cronyism and big government spending is not a capitalist, no matter what they or others think. By definition
Whose definition?
Most things are difficult to define, but it is usually relatively straightforward to define what things are not. So, it is not capitalism when the government controls a significant (or all) means of production. That is easy to agree on. It is not socialism when most or all means of production are controlled by non-private interests. It is often therefore a lot easier to say when something is not capitalism or not socialism than it is to say when they are.
The current actions of government and "the market" can roughly be characterized by two major trends. One is the government meddling in the market, partly by increasing the size of the government and partly by directing and controlling it through, for example, by poring tax-payer money into various corporations. Another strong tendency in the current market is the formation of large and mega-large corporations.
Both of the two trends above are antithetical to the basic tenets of capitalism. Marx, for example, separates sharply capitalism and corporatism, and claims that capitalism will tend to evolve towards (something else, namely) corporatism.
So, are bankers who subsist on government subsidies capitalists? Clearly not. It is difficult to say what the are, but it is easy to see what they are not.
government is antithetical to capitalism
Government? I have said no such thing. Big government? Sure. Big government is defined in the amount that they spend, in other words, in what degree the means are controlled and used by the government. A capitalist will work to make the governments part of the market smaller, an non-capitalist will either not care or he will work towards making the governments part of the overall market bigger. Bush, as an example, was well on his way to double the size of the federal governments part of the market. That is non-capitalist behavior. In other words, Mr. Bush was not a supporter of capitalism. If he had been, he'd have worked on reducing the size of the government participation. He did not. Not even a little.
using your definition there are no real capitalists
There are on "real" anythings. There are people who pull towards this or that though. Bush pulled towards corporatism and cronyism, and he also pulled away from capitalism. Bush was therefore an anti-capitalist president. Just as an example. Obama is more of the same.
Libertarian-capitalist governments have been tried a few times and they rarely last more than a year before they collapse due to internal or external pressures
Sigh. Were you born as dumb as this or is your brain damage given to you with a blunt instrument. Your link to useful idiot is also insanely misplaced. You clearly didn't even understand what a useful idiot is.
But yes, everyone is something until they are not. A car is driving east until it turns around and is driving west. No matter how convinced it is of going east, if it is going west it is going west. Someone who supports cronyism and big government spending is not a capitalist, no matter what they or others think. By definition. Big government spending is the antithesis to capitalism, so supporting it is the opposite of supporting capitalism.
And, if you were to find what was actually not utterly mal-apropos to this, it is not something that is convenient, it is. Per definition.
Socialism involves government control of the places where people work, and taking care of most people's welfare
No, not really. And no, corruption is not the problem with the current economy, it is far more fundamental than that. We have simply stopped letting the market decide. We have all but abolished any sense of capitalism.
I am too. And they they would have stopped freaking out, or perhaps things would have gone really bad and they found that their freaking out was justified. So be it. The current economy needs a swift kick in the balls. It needs to fail badly. The current government actions are just prolonging the fall. More or less indefinitely. That is a bad idea since it increases the future burden. We need to take this on the chin now and then re-build as best we can afterwards. Sadly no politician is going to vote for that.
A lot of capitalism fans are in denial that their "team" is made of humans too
Sigh. What "team". There is no team. There are no capitalists. There is behavior. If you behave like a capitalist you are a capitalist. If you behave like a scientist you are scientific. If you behave like a cronyist, monopoly-loving corporatist you are in fact not a capitalist. Not any more than an astrologer or a psychologist is a scientist.
You are soooooo wrong. Big government + cronyism is the default steady state of capitalism
No, it is not. Once you have big government and cronyism you no longer have capitalism. You could argue that capitalism always degrades to big government and cronyism, but you can't say that that is what capitalism is. If you are right on the latter part, then all known systems of economic government always degrades to big government and cronyism.
Without the bailout, the actual functioning of the economy would be far worse than it is right now
How would the economy be worse off? Why? Please explain to me why it takes government doing socialist things to save a presumably capitalist economy. That makes no sense. Would some people be worse off? Absolutely, but we'd be back to growth. Borrowing hugely (which is what we actually did) to cover the terrors that were caused by over-borrowing and over-spending seems like an anti-solution.
The situation the US faces right now, with corporatism out of control and a government that has had size-increase as its main goal since G. W. Bush took office, what is a capitalist to do? An ever-growing federal sector is a strong indication of a socialist (minded) state, and corporations growing "too large to fail" with the heads of the two intermingling on every golf course around, the US is in some trouble. Not as much as Europe mind you, but still in serious trouble. Perhaps it is time for the US population to look at what The Second Amendment was actually for and start using it on its politicians. I mean, that is actually what it is there for. They knew that when running for office. No grounds for protest once they are blindfolded and up against the wall.
Is that what they are complaining about, or are they complaining about the fact that when those "rich people" risked losing a lot of money on bad bank investments, the government came in and bailed them out with tax-payer money? Are these young, and somewhat dumb protesters, really understanding the fact that government giving tax-payer money to cronies and golf-buddies has nothing to do with capitalism and everything to do with big-government cronyist socialism?
What "free reign capitalism"? Where? The US hasn't been capitalist since well before Bush took office, and Bush made the US more socialist than Lenin did the Soviet Union. Big government paired with cronyism is not part of capitalism. It never was. Bush is one of the presidents who has presided over the greatest expansion of the Federal Government in US history. Obama is obviously not going to rectify that insane move.
The government using tax-payers money to shore up bad investments made by private investors (banks in this case) is not, has never been, and will never be capitalism. It is socialism. The US has been more socialist (on a Federal economic level) than capitalist for at least a decade or so.
You are? Since when was it capitalism that when an investor (or many) made failed investments, the government would jump in and cover their losses? The banks did badly. The "Capitalist" reaction to that, from the government should have been "OK. So what? Good luck". Instead the government took tax-payer money and started shoring up those failed investments. If it hadn't been for this government stupidity, which is 100% the opposite of capitalism, the crisis of 2008 would have been significantly worse, but essentially over before Christmas. In 2008. Due to government intervention funded by tax-payers, we'll pay for this for decades to come.
Shoring up the banks was socialism. Isn't that what the Wall Street protesters are protesting?
Honestly, I am almost close to preferring IE6 over Firefox these days. It is a monster. I run it on Win7/64, and I've seen this beast gobble ut a gig and a half of memory with 10-15 tabs open. That is with a Flash blocker, so it is only HTML and some related images. A gig and a half. Firefox starts consuming memory when it starts up, and it never stops. I only re-boot when I need to update the OS and I never log out. I also don't shut down the most used apps. IE9 and Chrome use a lot of memory both, but with limits. FF has no limits. It's a monster and it needs to be exterminated now.
It doesn't explain why it doesn't have a higher uptake in the world at large.
Thankfully that can also be explained by the IKEA effect. Open source software, to a huge degree, looks like it was put together by someone with only the vaguest idea of how it will actually be used. As with IKEA furniture, the "parents" have strong ideas on how to actually do it, and what the end result should look like and each discussion about this ends in a divorce and two parents hacking together semi-functional furniture in different houses. Mostly the parents gets religion at this point centered around how IKEA furniture should look and be used. While the parents are arguing the children are languishing in limbo an never really get any usable desk on which to do their homework.
There are exceptions to this, the Linux core for example, has a single parent mostly and is being managed dictatorially according to good IKEA furniture building practice. I wish I could say the same for any Linux GUI for example, or OO for that matter, and don't get me going on that bloated memory-leaking horror that is Firefox.
According to Google, more than 90% of users do not know that they can use search functionality in Windows. The majority of Windows (computer) users are barely able to distinguish between a document, a website, an email and an application, it is all a blur to them. The typical computer user thinks that if he drags the small icon from the URL bar in IE/Firefox/Chrome to his desktop he has "saved" the webpage to his computer, he doesn't know the difference between a link, a shortcut and a document.
Microsoft should attempt to make computers easier to use for these people, they are the vast majority of computer users. They need help. The fact that you get to click once more time than you would when starting Windows should not factor into that issue at all. As a power user you are able to make it work. It is optional after all.
I am not sure I agree that it is backwards compatibility Sun has been aiming for, it is more like forwards compatibility. Future Java should function on past JVMs. I am not sure that it is in anybody's interest to be that meticulous. Software should be forcefully updated regularly. Best way to do that is to break compatibility. Now, on the other hand, Microsoft in general have spent significant resources on backwards compatibility. More so than most, but with some very public divergences. Hell, you can still run DOS games on a completely different operating system (Win xxxx since Win2K is written from scratch with no DOS/Real Mode legacy).
Not to the same degree. Chipsets, BIOS etc fall within a much narrower spectrum than on the PC. On the PC the bus, the chipsets etc are all standardized, not so on ARM.
I really doubt ARM tablet designs will vary from each other so radically that it's impossible to write a common OS for them
They will not, but there are two issues here. On a PC you can throw in a bunch of extra stuff just to cover your bases, on a smaller platform, that is not as easy. I am sure there will come a time when it is not needed, but at the moment there is not much standardization. Just look at the problems OS vendors have getting their stuff done properly. Not even Apple can do it, and they control both hardware and software.
Wow, that is the clueless statement of the year. Windows server is a copy of something Apple has done? Really? What? Does Apple even have a server OS? The answer to that is clearly a big resounding "no" since, when Apple needed a huge server infrastructure to support their iCloud initiative, they turned to Microsoft and Amazon for help. You do know that iCloud is running on Windows and Azure, don't you?
no-one in ther right mind puts a Windows server up on the Internet where it can be attacked
You are, sadly, as ignorant, stupid and cool-aid drinking as is North Korea. He's in love with Redmond and you are in love with Linus. Neither of you are half-way rational or knowledgeable. Just dumb shills with nothing to offer.
Linux is fine for hobbyist stuff and some real work
You are either clueless or drunk on cool-aid, and I say that as someone who has been accused of being an MS shill a lot lately (just because I like WP7 a lot better than my iPhone). Linux is an excellent operating system for a wide variety of things. A huge portion of the WWW runs entirely on Linux, and that is saying something. Also, some of the virtualized stuff IBM does with Linux is astonishing.
I would never ever want a Mac server in my Data Center
And neither would Apple it seems, at least not for big stuff like their new Cloud platform, which runs on Azure (Windows) and AWS (Linux I presume, but do not know)
Slashdot Mirror
Anyone got the time?
I tried to, but since I knew when to tell you, I did not know where.
Someone who supports cronyism and big government spending is not a capitalist, no matter what they or others think. By definition
Whose definition?
Most things are difficult to define, but it is usually relatively straightforward to define what things are not. So, it is not capitalism when the government controls a significant (or all) means of production. That is easy to agree on. It is not socialism when most or all means of production are controlled by non-private interests. It is often therefore a lot easier to say when something is not capitalism or not socialism than it is to say when they are.
The current actions of government and "the market" can roughly be characterized by two major trends. One is the government meddling in the market, partly by increasing the size of the government and partly by directing and controlling it through, for example, by poring tax-payer money into various corporations. Another strong tendency in the current market is the formation of large and mega-large corporations.
Both of the two trends above are antithetical to the basic tenets of capitalism. Marx, for example, separates sharply capitalism and corporatism, and claims that capitalism will tend to evolve towards (something else, namely) corporatism.
So, are bankers who subsist on government subsidies capitalists? Clearly not. It is difficult to say what the are, but it is easy to see what they are not.
government is antithetical to capitalism
Government? I have said no such thing. Big government? Sure. Big government is defined in the amount that they spend, in other words, in what degree the means are controlled and used by the government. A capitalist will work to make the governments part of the market smaller, an non-capitalist will either not care or he will work towards making the governments part of the overall market bigger. Bush, as an example, was well on his way to double the size of the federal governments part of the market. That is non-capitalist behavior. In other words, Mr. Bush was not a supporter of capitalism. If he had been, he'd have worked on reducing the size of the government participation. He did not. Not even a little.
using your definition there are no real capitalists
There are on "real" anythings. There are people who pull towards this or that though. Bush pulled towards corporatism and cronyism, and he also pulled away from capitalism. Bush was therefore an anti-capitalist president. Just as an example. Obama is more of the same.
Libertarian-capitalist governments have been tried a few times and they rarely last more than a year before they collapse due to internal or external pressures
I'd love to see an example.
Sigh. Were you born as dumb as this or is your brain damage given to you with a blunt instrument. Your link to useful idiot is also insanely misplaced. You clearly didn't even understand what a useful idiot is.
But yes, everyone is something until they are not. A car is driving east until it turns around and is driving west. No matter how convinced it is of going east, if it is going west it is going west. Someone who supports cronyism and big government spending is not a capitalist, no matter what they or others think. By definition. Big government spending is the antithesis to capitalism, so supporting it is the opposite of supporting capitalism.
And, if you were to find what was actually not utterly mal-apropos to this, it is not something that is convenient, it is. Per definition.
Socialism involves government control of the places where people work, and taking care of most people's welfare
No, not really. And no, corruption is not the problem with the current economy, it is far more fundamental than that. We have simply stopped letting the market decide. We have all but abolished any sense of capitalism.
sure many of the holders would have freaked out
I am too. And they they would have stopped freaking out, or perhaps things would have gone really bad and they found that their freaking out was justified. So be it. The current economy needs a swift kick in the balls. It needs to fail badly. The current government actions are just prolonging the fall. More or less indefinitely. That is a bad idea since it increases the future burden. We need to take this on the chin now and then re-build as best we can afterwards. Sadly no politician is going to vote for that.
A lot of capitalism fans are in denial that their "team" is made of humans too
Sigh. What "team". There is no team. There are no capitalists. There is behavior. If you behave like a capitalist you are a capitalist. If you behave like a scientist you are scientific. If you behave like a cronyist, monopoly-loving corporatist you are in fact not a capitalist. Not any more than an astrologer or a psychologist is a scientist.
You are soooooo wrong. Big government + cronyism is the default steady state of capitalism
No, it is not. Once you have big government and cronyism you no longer have capitalism. You could argue that capitalism always degrades to big government and cronyism, but you can't say that that is what capitalism is. If you are right on the latter part, then all known systems of economic government always degrades to big government and cronyism.
Without the bailout, the actual functioning of the economy would be far worse than it is right now
How would the economy be worse off? Why? Please explain to me why it takes government doing socialist things to save a presumably capitalist economy. That makes no sense. Would some people be worse off? Absolutely, but we'd be back to growth. Borrowing hugely (which is what we actually did) to cover the terrors that were caused by over-borrowing and over-spending seems like an anti-solution.
Why do you think a socialist society would give you a cut of anything. Could you give an example of when and where that happened?
The situation the US faces right now, with corporatism out of control and a government that has had size-increase as its main goal since G. W. Bush took office, what is a capitalist to do? An ever-growing federal sector is a strong indication of a socialist (minded) state, and corporations growing "too large to fail" with the heads of the two intermingling on every golf course around, the US is in some trouble. Not as much as Europe mind you, but still in serious trouble. Perhaps it is time for the US population to look at what The Second Amendment was actually for and start using it on its politicians. I mean, that is actually what it is there for. They knew that when running for office. No grounds for protest once they are blindfolded and up against the wall.
complaining that a bunch of rich people are rich
Is that what they are complaining about, or are they complaining about the fact that when those "rich people" risked losing a lot of money on bad bank investments, the government came in and bailed them out with tax-payer money? Are these young, and somewhat dumb protesters, really understanding the fact that government giving tax-payer money to cronies and golf-buddies has nothing to do with capitalism and everything to do with big-government cronyist socialism?
free reign capitalism is
What "free reign capitalism"? Where? The US hasn't been capitalist since well before Bush took office, and Bush made the US more socialist than Lenin did the Soviet Union. Big government paired with cronyism is not part of capitalism. It never was. Bush is one of the presidents who has presided over the greatest expansion of the Federal Government in US history. Obama is obviously not going to rectify that insane move.
The government using tax-payers money to shore up bad investments made by private investors (banks in this case) is not, has never been, and will never be capitalism. It is socialism. The US has been more socialist (on a Federal economic level) than capitalist for at least a decade or so.
you're basically protesting capitalism.
You are? Since when was it capitalism that when an investor (or many) made failed investments, the government would jump in and cover their losses? The banks did badly. The "Capitalist" reaction to that, from the government should have been "OK. So what? Good luck". Instead the government took tax-payer money and started shoring up those failed investments. If it hadn't been for this government stupidity, which is 100% the opposite of capitalism, the crisis of 2008 would have been significantly worse, but essentially over before Christmas. In 2008. Due to government intervention funded by tax-payers, we'll pay for this for decades to come.
Shoring up the banks was socialism. Isn't that what the Wall Street protesters are protesting?
Honestly, I am almost close to preferring IE6 over Firefox these days. It is a monster. I run it on Win7/64, and I've seen this beast gobble ut a gig and a half of memory with 10-15 tabs open. That is with a Flash blocker, so it is only HTML and some related images. A gig and a half. Firefox starts consuming memory when it starts up, and it never stops. I only re-boot when I need to update the OS and I never log out. I also don't shut down the most used apps. IE9 and Chrome use a lot of memory both, but with limits. FF has no limits. It's a monster and it needs to be exterminated now.
You need to get out more. Go to the Opera.
It doesn't explain why it doesn't have a higher uptake in the world at large.
Thankfully that can also be explained by the IKEA effect. Open source software, to a huge degree, looks like it was put together by someone with only the vaguest idea of how it will actually be used. As with IKEA furniture, the "parents" have strong ideas on how to actually do it, and what the end result should look like and each discussion about this ends in a divorce and two parents hacking together semi-functional furniture in different houses. Mostly the parents gets religion at this point centered around how IKEA furniture should look and be used. While the parents are arguing the children are languishing in limbo an never really get any usable desk on which to do their homework.
There are exceptions to this, the Linux core for example, has a single parent mostly and is being managed dictatorially according to good IKEA furniture building practice. I wish I could say the same for any Linux GUI for example, or OO for that matter, and don't get me going on that bloated memory-leaking horror that is Firefox.
Oh yeah... Microsoft killed the VM and moved back about a decade!
Really? And from where did you get that idea? Did some bimbo you banged in the back of your van tell you?
Apple migrated from Class Mac OS to OS X (A full rebuild of the OS) and most of the Classic Apps still worked
Do they work on the iPad? So, what's your point? Perhaps you are just dumb?
According to Google, more than 90% of users do not know that they can use search functionality in Windows. The majority of Windows (computer) users are barely able to distinguish between a document, a website, an email and an application, it is all a blur to them. The typical computer user thinks that if he drags the small icon from the URL bar in IE/Firefox/Chrome to his desktop he has "saved" the webpage to his computer, he doesn't know the difference between a link, a shortcut and a document.
Microsoft should attempt to make computers easier to use for these people, they are the vast majority of computer users. They need help. The fact that you get to click once more time than you would when starting Windows should not factor into that issue at all. As a power user you are able to make it work. It is optional after all.
I am not sure I agree that it is backwards compatibility Sun has been aiming for, it is more like forwards compatibility. Future Java should function on past JVMs. I am not sure that it is in anybody's interest to be that meticulous. Software should be forcefully updated regularly. Best way to do that is to break compatibility. Now, on the other hand, Microsoft in general have spent significant resources on backwards compatibility. More so than most, but with some very public divergences. Hell, you can still run DOS games on a completely different operating system (Win xxxx since Win2K is written from scratch with no DOS/Real Mode legacy).
But this is true for PCs as well
Not to the same degree. Chipsets, BIOS etc fall within a much narrower spectrum than on the PC. On the PC the bus, the chipsets etc are all standardized, not so on ARM.
I really doubt ARM tablet designs will vary from each other so radically that it's impossible to write a common OS for them
They will not, but there are two issues here. On a PC you can throw in a bunch of extra stuff just to cover your bases, on a smaller platform, that is not as easy. I am sure there will come a time when it is not needed, but at the moment there is not much standardization. Just look at the problems OS vendors have getting their stuff done properly. Not even Apple can do it, and they control both hardware and software.
Wow, that is the clueless statement of the year. Windows server is a copy of something Apple has done? Really? What? Does Apple even have a server OS? The answer to that is clearly a big resounding "no" since, when Apple needed a huge server infrastructure to support their iCloud initiative, they turned to Microsoft and Amazon for help. You do know that iCloud is running on Windows and Azure, don't you?
no-one in ther right mind puts a Windows server up on the Internet where it can be attacked
You are, sadly, as ignorant, stupid and cool-aid drinking as is North Korea. He's in love with Redmond and you are in love with Linus. Neither of you are half-way rational or knowledgeable. Just dumb shills with nothing to offer.
Linux is fine for hobbyist stuff and some real work
You are either clueless or drunk on cool-aid, and I say that as someone who has been accused of being an MS shill a lot lately (just because I like WP7 a lot better than my iPhone). Linux is an excellent operating system for a wide variety of things. A huge portion of the WWW runs entirely on Linux, and that is saying something. Also, some of the virtualized stuff IBM does with Linux is astonishing.
I would never ever want a Mac server in my Data Center
And neither would Apple it seems, at least not for big stuff like their new Cloud platform, which runs on Azure (Windows) and AWS (Linux I presume, but do not know)