"every time you pay the RIAA guys for a piece of music, God kills a kitten."
My neighborhood is almost overrun with those cute little %^#%^-ers. RIAA ftw.
I buy from Magnatune. No DRM. Quality music. 50% goes to the artist. Contributes music to ccMixter etc.
It seems to me that your reasoning leads inevitably to the conclusion that Magnatune (and the other few hundred labels like it) doesn't exist and will never exist.
(not a sarcastic one this time). My question is -- will Daily Show be $.99 an episode or something? That adds up to a whole cable bill at that point...
Talk about picking and choosing yr epochs. 1998 was the hottest year on record. Two things are frightening:
1. There has not been a significant cooling trend since then src. Ow. No downward movement since the hottest year on record.
2. Not only you, but people working for fairly mainstream publications cite this as some kind of refutation.
"I've been tracking the temperature since the middle of July and have noticed a significant cooling trend. What's up with that? This issue is so politicized no one can tell what the facts are!"
They do arise from a free state, yes. Why can't the invisible hand be trusted to correct their excesses? But who ever said it can't?
I just feel that in non-free markets it's pretty obvious that the invisible hand is not directing things. Visible ones are. I guess I can't tell which is the cart and which is the horse: do free transactions give rise to the uber-human wisdom of the invisible hand, or does the invisible hand gradually push us, apparently over the course of millenia, toward free society? Both of these possibilities are problematic for me.
I just have a libertarian streak and I deeply question it nowadays. Here and in a couple other places in this thread the question is not over the actual existence of a perfectly free market but the theoretical tenability of the Libertarian principle in light of a very important fact
Whatever happened up to now, the market is not presently free. There are established power centers, and they are using their power to make the market less-free whenever they can. As you said, they are stacking the deck so that resources do not accrue to them efficiently, based on the value they provide. Either
These power centers arose from a free market and are permanent, in which case I think libertarians have some explaining to do about how a once-free market could possibly "fail" in this way.
Or
These power centers are a fluctuation, and will be "corrected" away by market forces. Obviously, the problem is that market forces are not operative; as per the first point, the market is not presently free, so it is actually embedded/inherited power that is operative. So the correction may come (from some non-market-driven direction) or it may not.
Most of the less-analytical libertarians I've encountered fall back on a position like "well, the embedded power centers are not illegitimate; they acquired their wealth & power in "the market", even if you don't like the means by which they did it."
For that to be tenable it seems like one would need a historical moment to point to and say "the market was free right there and whatever arose out of that is fair game". I don't know that anyone has done that...
By "The market always starts off free" do you mean that each individual is born into a free market? I doubt that and don't accept it; people are born into specific historical contexts, and many are born into a situtation where their rights are not at all respected. Or do you mean there was once a "state of nature" and governments arose, and that's the whole problem?
If the latter, I have my own airtight response: governments arose in a free market didn't they? How is the creation of exploitive, coercive governments by actors in that once-free society different from the creation of exploitive, coercive corporations? Why is it that the invisible hand can be trusted to correct the (perceived) market failures, but not political failures?
Lots of cool replies in this thread. Every w98 box I've seen in the last 3 years or so has been in the home or office of someone who -- well, let's just say "series of tubes". I based "almost always" on this and stand corrected, sorta.
One thing I'd mention is that people running W98 for the various reasons posted in this thread aren't going to jump ship for Linux now that 98 is unsupported. So I actually think the gist of my point stands. I don't predict a significant 98-Lx migration.
A couple months ago I bought a 512M hard-disk out of a box from a guy and was able to boot W3.1. Awesome
i.e. why the hell is someone still using W98? Sorry -- I'm 100% in favor of penguin domination -- but the reason people are still using 98 is -- almost always -- because they're deathly afraid to touch their computers. Linux's (not-very-accurate) reputation as an OS that you have to touch all the time is not gonna cut it here.
And, in some respects, right. But it elicits the question: if freely-flowing, self-legitimizing information is the result not the cause, of an ideally-free market, what is the cause. Given that the market is non-free at the present time, how can it ever become free? It sometimes seems to me that the pure laissez-faire approach requires that one believe 1) The market is presently free; or 2) The market will never be free (for if it is not free now, the "invisible hand" of free-market activity is not operative)
The fact that governments do not create wealth strikes me as a truism. Like saying corporations do not secure the people's inalienable right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. That's not their job.
Wouldn't the whole libertarian question come down to: How can rights be secured while destroying the smallest possible amount of wealth? i.e. the minarchist question.
"Really, it isn't government that enables immense growth and control over the masses. It is technology".
An alternate theory: It is sorta government -- in the form of corporate personhood (esp. limited liability). The officers of a corporation are encouraged, via limited liability, to seek short-term rewards through grey (sometimes dark grey) ethical moves. If you could be personally bankrupted or put in jail for life b/c of illegal actions by corporations you held stock in, you'd probably step pretty cautiously into that water, and you'd probably take a longterm view of the meaning of "profit".
This, of course, would wreak havoc with the current capital finance markets, but I wonder if that's a bad thing...
Yes, my libertarianism is only a streak, and my green streak is prolly just as big.
Another thing that I find in libertarian theory is the splintering of human life into discrete "transactions". Economic analysis is obviously powerful, but treating every aspect of society as a purchase seems incredibly reductive
In addition to having imperfect information (always having imperfect information) one must consider the fact that people don't always act in their rational self-interest. Which is to say, they don't always act economically
There's been a lot of persecution of religious people by secularists throughout history. Most recently, totalitarian Russia and China offer a plethora of examples.
The people who want to blame Exxon for Hurricane Katrina are obviously picking and choosing. As I understand it, though, scientists have a reliable measurement -- global mean surface temperature -- which shows a steady rise and which is not contradicted by local cooling. I like that scene in the Crichton book when a guy points to a cooling trend at a single weatherstation and says "there's your global warming".
For the free market to operate "correctly" (allocating money/resources to entities that generate value) its members must have access to good information about products -- their benefits and their costs. In the idealized theory, the market must have perfect information about products.
When the sources of information are so frequently corrupted by established power centers, how is there any home that efficient value-allocation will occur?
Wow; my first foe. You don't know anything about me or the other people who try to point things out to you. When you guess, you tend to be wrong about 80% of the time, as here. But you feel perfectly free to insult us/them rather than answer the points being made.
The only thing worse than a dumb ad hominem attack is a dumb ad hominem that doesn't even have its facts straight about the hominem in question. "Don't vote for John Kerry; he's just a typical short, hispanic California pinko."
I couldn't finish TFA because that verbiage is so awful: "not only allow you to consume media files on your home theater system, but also stream television content and display relevant advertisements from Google". For a more cluetrain-ish idea of what can be done with media, see getdemocracy. I am so sick of the "content industry" treating users like hamsters that run around the wheel and occasionally suck on the bottle of content they lovingly provide... Sorry, I'm in a bad mood now.
Slashdot Mirror
"every time you pay the RIAA guys for a piece of music, God kills a kitten." My neighborhood is almost overrun with those cute little %^#%^-ers. RIAA ftw.
I buy from Magnatune. No DRM. Quality music. 50% goes to the artist. Contributes music to ccMixter etc.
It seems to me that your reasoning leads inevitably to the conclusion that Magnatune (and the other few hundred labels like it) doesn't exist and will never exist.
If Dell didn't have a monopoly, we'd have to choose from among IBM Thinkpads, iBooks, HP Pavillions, and who-knows-what else.
(not a sarcastic one this time). My question is -- will Daily Show be $.99 an episode or something? That adds up to a whole cable bill at that point...
I'll just assume you're joking and move on.
Without all this DRM everywhere, I don't think we as a society would ever write another line of music. Ever.
Talk about picking and choosing yr epochs. 1998 was the hottest year on record. Two things are frightening:
1. There has not been a significant cooling trend since then src. Ow. No downward movement since the hottest year on record.
2. Not only you, but people working for fairly mainstream publications cite this as some kind of refutation.
"I've been tracking the temperature since the middle of July and have noticed a significant cooling trend. What's up with that? This issue is so politicized no one can tell what the facts are!"
lol.
Did that Norwegian communist Torvaltos guy every finish his Hurd kernel?
If we didn't have all this intellectual property everywhere, I feel very certain that we as a society would never write a line of code again.
They do arise from a free state, yes. Why can't the invisible hand be trusted to correct their excesses? But who ever said it can't?
I just feel that in non-free markets it's pretty obvious that the invisible hand is not directing things. Visible ones are. I guess I can't tell which is the cart and which is the horse: do free transactions give rise to the uber-human wisdom of the invisible hand, or does the invisible hand gradually push us, apparently over the course of millenia, toward free society? Both of these possibilities are problematic for me.
I just have a libertarian streak and I deeply question it nowadays. Here and in a couple other places in this thread the question is not over the actual existence of a perfectly free market but the theoretical tenability of the Libertarian principle in light of a very important fact
Whatever happened up to now, the market is not presently free. There are established power centers, and they are using their power to make the market less-free whenever they can. As you said, they are stacking the deck so that resources do not accrue to them efficiently, based on the value they provide. Either
These power centers arose from a free market and are permanent, in which case I think libertarians have some explaining to do about how a once-free market could possibly "fail" in this way.
Or
These power centers are a fluctuation, and will be "corrected" away by market forces. Obviously, the problem is that market forces are not operative; as per the first point, the market is not presently free, so it is actually embedded/inherited power that is operative. So the correction may come (from some non-market-driven direction) or it may not.
Most of the less-analytical libertarians I've encountered fall back on a position like "well, the embedded power centers are not illegitimate; they acquired their wealth & power in "the market", even if you don't like the means by which they did it."
For that to be tenable it seems like one would need a historical moment to point to and say "the market was free right there and whatever arose out of that is fair game". I don't know that anyone has done that...
By "The market always starts off free" do you mean that each individual is born into a free market? I doubt that and don't accept it; people are born into specific historical contexts, and many are born into a situtation where their rights are not at all respected. Or do you mean there was once a "state of nature" and governments arose, and that's the whole problem?
If the latter, I have my own airtight response: governments arose in a free market didn't they? How is the creation of exploitive, coercive governments by actors in that once-free society different from the creation of exploitive, coercive corporations? Why is it that the invisible hand can be trusted to correct the (perceived) market failures, but not political failures?
Lots of cool replies in this thread. Every w98 box I've seen in the last 3 years or so has been in the home or office of someone who -- well, let's just say "series of tubes". I based "almost always" on this and stand corrected, sorta.
One thing I'd mention is that people running W98 for the various reasons posted in this thread aren't going to jump ship for Linux now that 98 is unsupported. So I actually think the gist of my point stands. I don't predict a significant 98-Lx migration.
A couple months ago I bought a 512M hard-disk out of a box from a guy and was able to boot W3.1. Awesome
i.e. why the hell is someone still using W98? Sorry -- I'm 100% in favor of penguin domination -- but the reason people are still using 98 is -- almost always -- because they're deathly afraid to touch their computers. Linux's (not-very-accurate) reputation as an OS that you have to touch all the time is not gonna cut it here.
And, in some respects, right. But it elicits the question: if freely-flowing, self-legitimizing information is the result not the cause, of an ideally-free market, what is the cause. Given that the market is non-free at the present time, how can it ever become free? It sometimes seems to me that the pure laissez-faire approach requires that one believe 1) The market is presently free; or 2) The market will never be free (for if it is not free now, the "invisible hand" of free-market activity is not operative)
The fact that governments do not create wealth strikes me as a truism. Like saying corporations do not secure the people's inalienable right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. That's not their job.
Wouldn't the whole libertarian question come down to: How can rights be secured while destroying the smallest possible amount of wealth? i.e. the minarchist question.
Please mod up
"Really, it isn't government that enables immense growth and control over the masses. It is technology".
An alternate theory: It is sorta government -- in the form of corporate personhood (esp. limited liability). The officers of a corporation are encouraged, via limited liability, to seek short-term rewards through grey (sometimes dark grey) ethical moves. If you could be personally bankrupted or put in jail for life b/c of illegal actions by corporations you held stock in, you'd probably step pretty cautiously into that water, and you'd probably take a longterm view of the meaning of "profit".
This, of course, would wreak havoc with the current capital finance markets, but I wonder if that's a bad thing...
Response to MC by professional climatologist. Summary: He's not right.
Yes, my libertarianism is only a streak, and my green streak is prolly just as big.
Another thing that I find in libertarian theory is the splintering of human life into discrete "transactions". Economic analysis is obviously powerful, but treating every aspect of society as a purchase seems incredibly reductive
In addition to having imperfect information (always having imperfect information) one must consider the fact that people don't always act in their rational self-interest. Which is to say, they don't always act economically
There's been a lot of persecution of religious people by secularists throughout history. Most recently, totalitarian Russia and China offer a plethora of examples.
The people who want to blame Exxon for Hurricane Katrina are obviously picking and choosing. As I understand it, though, scientists have a reliable measurement -- global mean surface temperature -- which shows a steady rise and which is not contradicted by local cooling. I like that scene in the Crichton book when a guy points to a cooling trend at a single weatherstation and says "there's your global warming".
For the free market to operate "correctly" (allocating money/resources to entities that generate value) its members must have access to good information about products -- their benefits and their costs. In the idealized theory, the market must have perfect information about products.
When the sources of information are so frequently corrupted by established power centers, how is there any home that efficient value-allocation will occur?
Wow; my first foe. You don't know anything about me or the other people who try to point things out to you. When you guess, you tend to be wrong about 80% of the time, as here. But you feel perfectly free to insult us/them rather than answer the points being made.
The only thing worse than a dumb ad hominem attack is a dumb ad hominem that doesn't even have its facts straight about the hominem in question. "Don't vote for John Kerry; he's just a typical short, hispanic California pinko."
I couldn't finish TFA because that verbiage is so awful: "not only allow you to consume media files on your home theater system, but also stream television content and display relevant advertisements from Google". For a more cluetrain-ish idea of what can be done with media, see getdemocracy. I am so sick of the "content industry" treating users like hamsters that run around the wheel and occasionally suck on the bottle of content they lovingly provide... Sorry, I'm in a bad mood now.