Re:Winner: Counter-productive move of the year
on
WikiLeaks Under Fire
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· Score: 5, Insightful
There's no way to silence the truth directly anymore in this new medium. Indirect methods, however, like repeating a lie loudly and often enough, can still be effective.
Actually, the simplest way to "silence: the truth is to drown it in misinformation (one of the applications of the indirect methods you referred to). Once nobody can tell what the truth is, and what the lies are, then someone trying to hide the truth can breath a little easier.
Modern-day PR hacks are really good at this kind of thing, Third World repressive regimes are still learning how to do it effectively.
You know, I hear this argument all the time, but the person making the argument never points out that the pharmaceutical companies is making billions of dollars in PROFIT (after expenses), and a huge chunk of their expenses are in the form of advertising & marketing, NOT research and development.
Drug companies have HUMONGOUS profit margins. They can have a lot of their revenue taken away, still have a lot of money to do R&D, and still make a healthy profit.
You do know what Economics 101 says about companies that make a lot of profit, don't you? According to the Law of Supply & Demand, it means that they don't have enough competition.
Companies with "enough" competition will _barely_ break even (since they are forced to price their products to fight the competition), and they will still have to spend enough on R&D to keep up with the competition or they will be rendered obsolete. That kind of situation is what's best for the consumers, not so good for the owners of the companies.
To be more accurate, the motivation behind allowing patents is to encourage innovation. The mechanism by which patents do so is by stifling competition.
Oddly enough, I have never seen or heard of a peer-reviewed study which has supported the idea that you can encourage innovation by stifling competition. It seems to be counterintuitive to me, but IP-proponents repeat it like a mantra. Can someone point a reference to such a study?
The usual way: Federal Commissioners somehow accidentally let slip the id #s of their Swiss or Caiman Island bank accounts & money keeps showing up in those bank accounts after the Commissioners pass regulations which somehow incorporate ideas brought up in "casual" discussions with Comcast liasons. . . . Yes, I'm kidding. I hope.
If you're talking the probability of whether a truly confused person is "discovering something new", however, then that's going to be pretty low. Believing that such a person has stumbled across something that will shake the scientific world view is same sort of viewpoint that makes people think buying a few PowerBall lottery tickets is a great "investment", but with much worse odds.
What makes you think his economic policies are nuts? They worked pretty well for the U.S. (or at least better than the current economic policy is working) before the creation of the Federal Reserve, and unlike most of the candidates, he can back them up with logical arguments based on his studies of economics. Perhaps your only rationale for why they are "nuts" is because they represent such a big change from the existing views on economic policy?
If their only reason to believe that you beat puppies was a completely fabricated lie, and they didn't bother to see if it were actually true, then they're just being easily manipulated.
I think it's important to remember that the creative arts are a different kind of business than many others
No they're not. That's the incorrect assumption that keeps this stupid argument about "intellectual property" going.
"Being creative" is no different than providing any other sort of service. For most types of services, you get paid for what people think is the value of the provided service, at the time that you provide the service. Only the greedy want to get paid over and over for providing a single act of service.
I'm even further afield than you are - I consider myself a progressive, but the federal government has been ballooning so fast in size & power that it scares me, and in ways that don't even remotely fit what I (as a progressive) think a government should be doing for its citizens. I don't particularly agree with a lot of Paul's long-term views, but I really believe he'd be the best shock treatment for the society in the short-term. At the very least, I hope significant parts of his message creep back into the general public debate.
Your example just supports my point - the current situation between Bush & the Congress shows how effectively an uncooperative President can block the Congress from doing anything against the President's wishes. If you're an ideologue who wants to decrease the size of the federal government, who better to vote for than a candidate who seems likely to "block everything"?
His views only seem extreme until you realize exactly how far the Democratic & Republican parties have shifted their viewpoints toward "more federal power" over the last few decades or so.
A lot of people aren't interested in Paul's views for what he COULD do - it's for what he can stop OTHER people from doing that they're even remotely interested. And he doesn't need majority support in Congress to stop them from doing a lot of things - THEY would need a supermajority to get anything past them that he deemed unConstitutional.
What do you do if someone anonymous posts made-up stories and/or photoshopped images about you? Or one of your "buddies" gets you good and sloshed & videotapes everything? Or another stupid celebrity gets a "private" sex tape stolen out of their home?
(I think these firms are a train wreck waiting to happen, but I think your response simplifies the problem too much.)
The fact that they get special permission, waivers & easements from the various municipalities to run that fiber through peoples' neighborhoods (including peoples' yards in some cases) is a subsidy in itself. If they were truly paying for everything, then they'd be writing checks to the people whose property they're tearing up to put that fiber in.
Well, they're capitalists. Although I think there's some "stick-it-to-the-man" in there.
If you want to talk about greed, maybe we should be talking about the people who believe they should be paid over and over for a "product" when they only did the work to create that product ONCE.
I haven't heard about too many craftspeople who insist on getting paid something _every time_ their product is resold, but that's pretty much what IP proponents are asking for.
Using the "information should be free" mantra to justify your unauthorized copying of songs (or whatever) is a bogus attempt to justify your selfish habit.
What about "it's no one's f*cking business what I choose to do with my own private property once I've purchased it"? (With the caveat of not causing other people harm, of course.)
The whole concept of "Intellectual Property" is an attempt at social engineering (trying to encourage innovation) by distorting market forces through legislation.
Are you willing to pay for all that, including the "oversight" part (which would be the first thing that someone is likely to try and cut when the budgets get tight)? Or are you one of those "I want the government to protect me, but I don't want to pay for it" whiners? Or maybe you believe we can just keep printing more money to pay for everything?
You know you're really playing with Darwin when you actually get USED to getting shocked by line current. I fell into that mode when I was fixing up all the outlets in my house. I was too lazy to set up a battery-powered lamp & work in the dark, so I did everything with the breakers still on. I kept on brushing the wires with my bare skin & getting shocked. After a dozen or so "d*mnit"s, I started ignoring the shocks & just doing the work.
Granted, I didn't actually grab any of the bare wire ends and hang on, but in retrospect it wasn't exactly the safest behavior to be following.
Not long after that, I tried testing a 220V outlet with the back of my hand & ended up punching myself in the face. Beauty of a black eye, and a great conversation starter:-)
See, that's an extension to the natural selection effect. Not only do stupid people remove themselves from the gene pool, but people who are too stupid to keep a wary eye out for stupid people are also removed from the gene pool. (Do I really need to add a sarcasm tag?)
I believe that the article is saying that the molecules seem to "seek" each other out in solution, over and above just randomly bumping into each other.
If you don't have capital, then you can't invest any capital, even if you have a really good idea. It would be to society's benefit for there to be some kind of process where such people can contribute their good idea to society & get a healthy reward. Patents are supposed to be a mechanism to accomplish this kind of thing, but seem to be more effective at retarding competition than providing any real encouragement for innovation. There ought to be an alternative.
Also, "risk" is a relative thing. Once you've passed the financial point where you can live comfortably without working, any money you're playing with above that is pretty much numbers on a spreadsheet as far as your "risk" is concerned. In addition, if you have enough capital, you'll diversify your risk across a range of likely prospects. If a small inventor wants to risk their "capital" in the hopes that they might be able to make it big, they have a fairly high probability of losing _everything_ and ending up being in deep debt, looking for a cheap apartment for their family, while they get a low-paying job to keep their head above water. "Rich" people might be risking a lot in terms of absolute dollar value, but from the psychological viewpoint, they're hardly risking anything at all compared to the small guy.
Frankly, I think you can have a healthy society even if public policy completely ignores what might be good for people who are already well-off. Rich people have the resources to adapt to almost any situation. Their only function in society is as a decision-making point for the resources that they have under their control, but that's not a benefit-to-society that couldn't be handled without them.
Also, allowing too much wealth concentration is dangerous to the society - the more the wealth is concentrated, the more the decision-making becomes biased in favor of the wealthy, and when it gets big enough it can be used to distort the decision-making of societal-mechanisms that are supposed to be ignoring such influence (i.e., legislators, regulators, law enforcement, etc.). The extreme case, of course, is the totalitarian countries like the old Soviet Union where the "State" owned almost everything, but there are also many historical examples of oligarchies, and nowadays large multinational corporations.
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Actually, the simplest way to "silence: the truth is to drown it in misinformation (one of the applications of the indirect methods you referred to). Once nobody can tell what the truth is, and what the lies are, then someone trying to hide the truth can breath a little easier.
Modern-day PR hacks are really good at this kind of thing, Third World repressive regimes are still learning how to do it effectively.
You know, I hear this argument all the time, but the person making the argument never points out that the pharmaceutical companies is making billions of dollars in PROFIT (after expenses), and a huge chunk of their expenses are in the form of advertising & marketing, NOT research and development.
Drug companies have HUMONGOUS profit margins. They can have a lot of their revenue taken away, still have a lot of money to do R&D, and still make a healthy profit.
You do know what Economics 101 says about companies that make a lot of profit, don't you? According to the Law of Supply & Demand, it means that they don't have enough competition.
Companies with "enough" competition will _barely_ break even (since they are forced to price their products to fight the competition), and they will still have to spend enough on R&D to keep up with the competition or they will be rendered obsolete. That kind of situation is what's best for the consumers, not so good for the owners of the companies.
To be more accurate, the motivation behind allowing patents is to encourage innovation. The mechanism by which patents do so is by stifling competition.
Oddly enough, I have never seen or heard of a peer-reviewed study which has supported the idea that you can encourage innovation by stifling competition. It seems to be counterintuitive to me, but IP-proponents repeat it like a mantra. Can someone point a reference to such a study?
The usual way: Federal Commissioners somehow accidentally let slip the id #s of their Swiss or Caiman Island bank accounts & money keeps showing up in those bank accounts after the Commissioners pass regulations which somehow incorporate ideas brought up in "casual" discussions with Comcast liasons.
.
.
.
Yes, I'm kidding. I hope.
If you're talking the probability of whether a truly confused person is "discovering something new", however, then that's going to be pretty low. Believing that such a person has stumbled across something that will shake the scientific world view is same sort of viewpoint that makes people think buying a few PowerBall lottery tickets is a great "investment", but with much worse odds.
What makes you think his economic policies are nuts? They worked pretty well for the U.S. (or at least better than the current economic policy is working) before the creation of the Federal Reserve, and unlike most of the candidates, he can back them up with logical arguments based on his studies of economics. Perhaps your only rationale for why they are "nuts" is because they represent such a big change from the existing views on economic policy?
If their only reason to believe that you beat puppies was a completely fabricated lie, and they didn't bother to see if it were actually true, then they're just being easily manipulated.
No they're not. That's the incorrect assumption that keeps this stupid argument about "intellectual property" going.
"Being creative" is no different than providing any other sort of service. For most types of services, you get paid for what people think is the value of the provided service, at the time that you provide the service. Only the greedy want to get paid over and over for providing a single act of service.
I'm even further afield than you are - I consider myself a progressive, but the federal government has been ballooning so fast in size & power that it scares me, and in ways that don't even remotely fit what I (as a progressive) think a government should be doing for its citizens. I don't particularly agree with a lot of Paul's long-term views, but I really believe he'd be the best shock treatment for the society in the short-term. At the very least, I hope significant parts of his message creep back into the general public debate.
Your example just supports my point - the current situation between Bush & the Congress shows how effectively an uncooperative President can block the Congress from doing anything against the President's wishes. If you're an ideologue who wants to decrease the size of the federal government, who better to vote for than a candidate who seems likely to "block everything"?
His views only seem extreme until you realize exactly how far the Democratic & Republican parties have shifted their viewpoints toward "more federal power" over the last few decades or so.
A lot of people aren't interested in Paul's views for what he COULD do - it's for what he can stop OTHER people from doing that they're even remotely interested. And he doesn't need majority support in Congress to stop them from doing a lot of things - THEY would need a supermajority to get anything past them that he deemed unConstitutional.
D'oh - that one completely slipped my mind.
What do you do if someone anonymous posts made-up stories and/or photoshopped images about you? Or one of your "buddies" gets you good and sloshed & videotapes everything? Or another stupid celebrity gets a "private" sex tape stolen out of their home?
(I think these firms are a train wreck waiting to happen, but I think your response simplifies the problem too much.)
Of course, when the collective rewrites your brain using nanotech, it's a little harder to claim you volunteered...
The fact that they get special permission, waivers & easements from the various municipalities to run that fiber through peoples' neighborhoods (including peoples' yards in some cases) is a subsidy in itself. If they were truly paying for everything, then they'd be writing checks to the people whose property they're tearing up to put that fiber in.
They're capitalists.
Well, they're capitalists. Although I think there's some "stick-it-to-the-man" in there.
If you want to talk about greed, maybe we should be talking about the people who believe they should be paid over and over for a "product" when they only did the work to create that product ONCE.
I haven't heard about too many craftspeople who insist on getting paid something _every time_ their product is resold, but that's pretty much what IP proponents are asking for.
What about "it's no one's f*cking business what I choose to do with my own private property once I've purchased it"? (With the caveat of not causing other people harm, of course.)
The whole concept of "Intellectual Property" is an attempt at social engineering (trying to encourage innovation) by distorting market forces through legislation.
I wonder if they'll try and get the Swedish "Pirate" party all riled up to increase the headlines?
Are you willing to pay for all that, including the "oversight" part (which would be the first thing that someone is likely to try and cut when the budgets get tight)? Or are you one of those "I want the government to protect me, but I don't want to pay for it" whiners? Or maybe you believe we can just keep printing more money to pay for everything?
You know you're really playing with Darwin when you actually get USED to getting shocked by line current. I fell into that mode when I was fixing up all the outlets in my house. I was too lazy to set up a battery-powered lamp & work in the dark, so I did everything with the breakers still on. I kept on brushing the wires with my bare skin & getting shocked. After a dozen or so "d*mnit"s, I started ignoring the shocks & just doing the work.
:-)
Granted, I didn't actually grab any of the bare wire ends and hang on, but in retrospect it wasn't exactly the safest behavior to be following.
Not long after that, I tried testing a 220V outlet with the back of my hand & ended up punching myself in the face. Beauty of a black eye, and a great conversation starter
See, that's an extension to the natural selection effect. Not only do stupid people remove themselves from the gene pool, but people who are too stupid to keep a wary eye out for stupid people are also removed from the gene pool. (Do I really need to add a sarcasm tag?)
Use of telnet should be deprecated. It is, and always has been, a security risk.
I believe that the article is saying that the molecules seem to "seek" each other out in solution, over and above just randomly bumping into each other.
If you don't have capital, then you can't invest any capital, even if you have a really good idea. It would be to society's benefit for there to be some kind of process where such people can contribute their good idea to society & get a healthy reward. Patents are supposed to be a mechanism to accomplish this kind of thing, but seem to be more effective at retarding competition than providing any real encouragement for innovation. There ought to be an alternative.
Also, "risk" is a relative thing. Once you've passed the financial point where you can live comfortably without working, any money you're playing with above that is pretty much numbers on a spreadsheet as far as your "risk" is concerned. In addition, if you have enough capital, you'll diversify your risk across a range of likely prospects. If a small inventor wants to risk their "capital" in the hopes that they might be able to make it big, they have a fairly high probability of losing _everything_ and ending up being in deep debt, looking for a cheap apartment for their family, while they get a low-paying job to keep their head above water. "Rich" people might be risking a lot in terms of absolute dollar value, but from the psychological viewpoint, they're hardly risking anything at all compared to the small guy.
Frankly, I think you can have a healthy society even if public policy completely ignores what might be good for people who are already well-off. Rich people have the resources to adapt to almost any situation. Their only function in society is as a decision-making point for the resources that they have under their control, but that's not a benefit-to-society that couldn't be handled without them.
Also, allowing too much wealth concentration is dangerous to the society - the more the wealth is concentrated, the more the decision-making becomes biased in favor of the wealthy, and when it gets big enough it can be used to distort the decision-making of societal-mechanisms that are supposed to be ignoring such influence (i.e., legislators, regulators, law enforcement, etc.). The extreme case, of course, is the totalitarian countries like the old Soviet Union where the "State" owned almost everything, but there are also many historical examples of oligarchies, and nowadays large multinational corporations.
switchgrass, hemp, sugar cane, etc... - there are so many other potential biofuel/ethanol sources that would have a better yield than corn.