Ahhhh...that must be why you didn't describe any of those 7000 levels, since you would've felt bad about crushing any of my responses with your devastating logic and factual backup. I really appreciate the consideration.
That's why I qualified my statement (really loosely, I'll admit) with "socially-beneficial".
I don't think that just handing people money will be socially-beneficial. You might pay for them to go to school and get training/education (with their progress monitored, of course) - with the eventual hope that they will make good productive citizens (or at least have no excuse not to).
At the very least, the government could directly hire people to do some useful work which might not be cost-effective for private industry (keeping cities/parks/national reserves clean/monitored, help little ladies get groceries, etc). They'll work relatively inexpensively, but at a wage where they can actually make a living, get trained to have good work ethics while helping society out, etc. They'll spend most of the money they make trying to improve their own situation, which can only help the economy.
Of course, with the current societal attitude ("let'm go to hell - *I* don't wanna pay for anything"), this kind of thing will never happen.
I hope you mean by 'a socially-beneficial way' getting the poor jobs...
Yes, including paying for necessary training. Unfortunately, the most direct way of accomplishing this is for the government to hire people and/or pay for training. (Paying for training might just mean that the society foots the bill for a decent educational system.) And there seems to be a distinct lack of enthusiasm in the general public for paying the taxes necessary to finance this kind of activity (which I completely understand, since it sure feels like all the taxes that I pay at the moment are being wasted on rich and/or lazy people.)
I'm rather confused by your mention of diversity, however... If I'm fertilizing a corn field, I want corn... Your metaphor could use some work.
I didn't actually explicitly say that I was farming for a particular crop, although I will certainly take the blame for not making it that clear. I was actually just thinking more of a big area of plant life, like a forest. If you drop lots of fertilizer on such an area, you'll get a massive amount of growth (since you are basically providing a huge dose of food for the organisms at the bottom of the food chain). You don't necessarily have any control over what kind of growth, but the ecosystem will work out the balance itself over time.
Farming is more of a metaphor for a state-controlled economy, which I believe has been empirically determined to be impractical.
I certainly believe that, like an area of forest, it is much healther for there to be a great deal of diversity in the economy. It provides a much larger number of niches for the inhabitants, plus has the ability to respond to a larger range of problems than a more tightly-controlled economy/area of land.
They are deliberately -- let me say that again -- deliberately trying to precipitate a fiscal crisis as a means of eliminating programs that they can't confront politically; e.g., social security and medicare.
That seems more like a conspiracy theory. Unless the Republicans are supremely confident in their ability to manage the PR, if they are successful in destroying those programs, the resultant backlash would cause the Republican Party to cease to be a viable party in American politics for severel generations. (I suppose if they can get the Democrats to take the blame, then they might think it was worth it.)
So now, indeed, I would argue that a purpose of our government is to cycle money back from the wealthy elite down to the working class, like an aerator in a fish tank, to keep the whole system functioning happily. Of course it will all rise to the top again -- that's how the system works.
Actually, I love the fish tank metaphor. Instead of a "trickle down" economic theory, I believe in the "bubble up" economic policy - if you can get money into the hands of the poor (preferably in a socially-beneficial way rather than out-and-out welfare), then they will have a chance to dig themselves out of their economic situation, and in the meantime they'll be wanting to buy stuff, causing lots of demand, which in turn makes jobs, which will keep the economy chugging along, etc.
It's also like trying to make more plants grow in a field by adding fertilizer instead of giving individual plants direct shots of "Supergro" - you might not be able to control which plants grow up, but you'll sure have a ton of growth with huge amounts of diversity vs. a few really healthy plants. What do you think is better for a society?
I figure it's pretty useless to design an economic policy around the rich - almost no matter what you come up with (barring shooting them all & taking all their money), the rich have the resources to make it work out for themselves. So, when you design an economic policy for the general benefit of society (instead of just the few rich people), you can pretty much concentrate on ways to benefit the poor & middle-class, and let the rich fend for themselves.
If a girlfriend is that suspicious all the time, it's probably time to get a new girlfriend. If she's that suspicious all the time for _good reason_, she's probably going to be getting a new boyfriend anytime soon.
Obviously, you haven't been running many nuclear reaction simulations - oops, I wasn't supposed to mention that online:-S
On a (slightly) more serious note, I bet a couple hundred simultaneous video-rendering jobs will bring your system to its knees. If you aren't taxing your system, then you haven't really been trying.
RTFA you'll see that it isn't actually a fusion reactor or reaction at all
If this guy truly built a Farnsworth fusor, then you're wrong - the fusor really is capable of creating nuclear fusion. People building these things have measured the neutrons to prove it.
The heart of the machine is some kind of electrode which uses energy from the fusion reaction itself to reinforce the electric field which is used to trigger the reaction (I guess by picking up energy from the energetic alpha particles & electrons between blasted out in all directions at really high energy levels from inside the electrode). Unfortunately, the reaction is not sustainable - the same effect which can force the deuterium together strongly enough to create fusion also prevents any _new_ fuel from entering from the outside of the field, thus causing the collapse of the reaction once all the fuel is consumed.
Farnsworth really was a genius at manipulating electric fields. It's too bad he died early, or he might've been able to figure out how to make his fusor practical.
Remember, there are people at the other end of this - artists.
Artists should be paid for providing a good or service, just like any other honest job. Paying them (or whoever has bought the copyright from them) repeatedly just because a particular piece of work is being copied over and over is legally-enforced welfare.
I find myself misreading all the time because my brain took in the first and last letter and read it as a word with similar spelling and length.
I'm not sure this is what you were saying or not, but for me, my brain kept on taking the last letter of each word, and trying to combine it with the first letter of the next word.
It's already integrated into the Shareaza P2P client (which also does Gnutella, Gnutella2 & Edonkey2000). In fact, it seemed to me that the Shareaza client was doing a better job at Bittorrent than the Bittorrent client...
Though, if we sent executives' jobs overseas, perhaps the overseas workers would send them back.
Hey, instead of sending the executive's jobs overseas, let's send the _executives_. After a few months, I bet those countries will pay _us_ a lot to take them back, especially after they've destroyed those countries' economies.
You forgot the most important criteria, at least from a public-policy perspective: is it good for your society? I think there's a pretty good argument that, for a given society, it isn't a good idea for large numbers of your citizens to suddenly lose their means of livelihood.
We were scarce, expensive, and worth our weight in gold.
Geez, if I knew I was worth my weight in gold, I wouldn't have gone on that diet...
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I have absolutely no dobut if musicians have less hope of making a living, there will be fewer musicians. Perhaps you don't care, and think 'good riddance' -- but that's not how I feel. I think we should protect and encourage art, and not just toss it all away so people can get stuff free.
I honestly disagree. I doubt that the number of musicians will decrease. Actually, I think the number of musicians will probably increase, since there will be less control over what they are allowed to play.
Granted, a lot of them will probably be be live bands mostly playing songs composed by someone else, but as long as they're not claiming they wrote the songs, it's an honest way of making a living. They might not be able to make megamillions, but they'll be able to make a reasonable living like any working stiff, by providing a service (playing music) in return for compensation.
There will still be big shows for big sponsors - it's good advertising (and if your ticket sales are good enough, it might even pay for itself). Heck, if the public thinks there's a music shortage, our representatives can use some of that taxpayer money they're currently wasting and pay composers to produce all kinds of popular stuff (i.e., commissions), thus giving money _directly_ to the artists (instead of to large non-music-producing corporations), and creating a large body of public-domain work that society can benefit from (I'm sure some people would consider this welfare for artists).
Music has been a basic part of cultures since mankind figured out how to hold a pitch with their voice, and long before copyright ever existed. The only thing copyright has done is allow a smaller number of people to control the mass distribution of certain creative works, allowing them to make money without having to produce continuously (unlike any normal job).
Re:hypocrisy, rhetoric: is it time for something n
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Jonny Cash, Ween, Marvin Gaye, The Clash, Brian Eno, Funkadelic, Charles Mingus and countless great people.
You don't think that these people (or people exactly like them) wouldn't have become popular w/o copyrights? They (and their parasites) might not have made as much money (and would've had to work harder), but the main reason their music became popular was because there was a big enough audience _ready_ to listen to their kind of music. They would've become popular even without copyright.
whole scene is really about encouraging the government to regulate communication
Actually, from reading the original comment, it sounds like he is in favor of allowing the recipients of the spam to discourage spamming, in particularly painful ways...
Huh? I was assuming that we _don't_ know how to do cryogenics yet, therefore everyone would have to be awake for the entire trip.
Yet no one has told me how to keep a closed ecosystem on a small scale maintainable for tens of thousands of years.
A city-sized spaceship (think LA-sized in surface area) isn't really all THAT small. I'm pretty sure that even with our current limited understanding of what makes up a complete ecosystem, we could put enough life onto a ship that size so that it would find its own equilibrium, including the humans on it (as long as the humans didn't kill all the other animals). You just need to make sure that the ship can generate/collect enough energy during the trip to take the place of the sun.
It seems easier just to evolve humans to avoid the need for an organic ecosystem.
As I said, I was trying to describe what would be possible with our current technology (even though building a ship that sized would require mind-boggling resources). Evolving ourselves beyond an organic ecosystem is not something we currently know how to do.
The distances we are talking about to even visit our nearest neighbor star are so wildly out of sync with human physiology (and mental adaptability) that I don't see any way we can expect current humans to make the journey.
With current technology (and taking into account that we don't know how to do cryogenics yet), about the only option we have for inter-solar travel is the construction of generation ships, about the size (and population) of a city. (I think a city-sized area/population would be large enough to help with the insanity & genetic issues.) It would have to contain a complete ecosystem (maybe several?), plus be completely repairable by the inhabitants.
Lord only knows what kind of culture you'd end up with by the time they reached their destination - if they're living on the inside of the ship where they can't see the stars, the bulk of the population might have difficult understanding the concept of space. Given the typical appetite of humans for self-destruction, they'll probably have destroyed their own society several times by the time they get to their destination, and will no longer be capable of operating the machinery necessary to finish their flight.
This decision still involves the control of _real_ property, rather than imaginary property (although I'm sure that the RIAA would be quite happy to argue from the viewpoint you are espousing however).
And if he DID do something like that, the RIAA could then bill the GOVERNMENT, claiming they "took private property for a public purpose". Fifth Amendment.
If the government did such a thing, I'm sure the 5th amendment would be applicable _if_ there was actually any property being taken.
Unfortunately for the complainants, information isn't really "property", and the government could rightfully point out that they didn't take anything with real value from the complainants, and their real problem is assuming that they had some "right" to make profit based on the control of information, instead of providing a good or service in response to demand like any "real" business does.
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Ahhhh...that must be why you didn't describe any of those 7000 levels, since you would've felt bad about crushing any of my responses with your devastating logic and factual backup. I really appreciate the consideration.
That's why I qualified my statement (really loosely, I'll admit) with "socially-beneficial".
I don't think that just handing people money will be socially-beneficial. You might pay for them to go to school and get training/education (with their progress monitored, of course) - with the eventual hope that they will make good productive citizens (or at least have no excuse not to).
At the very least, the government could directly hire people to do some useful work which might not be cost-effective for private industry (keeping cities/parks/national reserves clean/monitored, help little ladies get groceries, etc). They'll work relatively inexpensively, but at a wage where they can actually make a living, get trained to have good work ethics while helping society out, etc. They'll spend most of the money they make trying to improve their own situation, which can only help the economy.
Of course, with the current societal attitude ("let'm go to hell - *I* don't wanna pay for anything"), this kind of thing will never happen.
Yes, including paying for necessary training. Unfortunately, the most direct way of accomplishing this is for the government to hire people and/or pay for training. (Paying for training might just mean that the society foots the bill for a decent educational system.) And there seems to be a distinct lack of enthusiasm in the general public for paying the taxes necessary to finance this kind of activity (which I completely understand, since it sure feels like all the taxes that I pay at the moment are being wasted on rich and/or lazy people.)
I didn't actually explicitly say that I was farming for a particular crop, although I will certainly take the blame for not making it that clear. I was actually just thinking more of a big area of plant life, like a forest. If you drop lots of fertilizer on such an area, you'll get a massive amount of growth (since you are basically providing a huge dose of food for the organisms at the bottom of the food chain). You don't necessarily have any control over what kind of growth, but the ecosystem will work out the balance itself over time.
Farming is more of a metaphor for a state-controlled economy, which I believe has been empirically determined to be impractical.
I certainly believe that, like an area of forest, it is much healther for there to be a great deal of diversity in the economy. It provides a much larger number of niches for the inhabitants, plus has the ability to respond to a larger range of problems than a more tightly-controlled economy/area of land.
That seems more like a conspiracy theory. Unless the Republicans are supremely confident in their ability to manage the PR, if they are successful in destroying those programs, the resultant backlash would cause the Republican Party to cease to be a viable party in American politics for severel generations. (I suppose if they can get the Democrats to take the blame, then they might think it was worth it.)
Actually, I love the fish tank metaphor. Instead of a "trickle down" economic theory, I believe in the "bubble up" economic policy - if you can get money into the hands of the poor (preferably in a socially-beneficial way rather than out-and-out welfare), then they will have a chance to dig themselves out of their economic situation, and in the meantime they'll be wanting to buy stuff, causing lots of demand, which in turn makes jobs, which will keep the economy chugging along, etc.
It's also like trying to make more plants grow in a field by adding fertilizer instead of giving individual plants direct shots of "Supergro" - you might not be able to control which plants grow up, but you'll sure have a ton of growth with huge amounts of diversity vs. a few really healthy plants. What do you think is better for a society?
I figure it's pretty useless to design an economic policy around the rich - almost no matter what you come up with (barring shooting them all & taking all their money), the rich have the resources to make it work out for themselves. So, when you design an economic policy for the general benefit of society (instead of just the few rich people), you can pretty much concentrate on ways to benefit the poor & middle-class, and let the rich fend for themselves.
If a girlfriend is that suspicious all the time, it's probably time to get a new girlfriend. If she's that suspicious all the time for _good reason_, she's probably going to be getting a new boyfriend anytime soon.
Obviously, you haven't been running many nuclear reaction simulations - oops, I wasn't supposed to mention that online :-S
On a (slightly) more serious note, I bet a couple hundred simultaneous video-rendering jobs will bring your system to its knees. If you aren't taxing your system, then you haven't really been trying.
I vote to have it written in Brainfuck (http://www.muppetlabs.com/~breadbox/bf). A simpler language makes a program easier to read, right?
Heh...I consider dying "early" to be before you got everything you wanted to get done in your life done. Needless to say, lots of people die "early".
If this guy truly built a Farnsworth fusor, then you're wrong - the fusor really is capable of creating nuclear fusion. People building these things have measured the neutrons to prove it.
The heart of the machine is some kind of electrode which uses energy from the fusion reaction itself to reinforce the electric field which is used to trigger the reaction (I guess by picking up energy from the energetic alpha particles & electrons between blasted out in all directions at really high energy levels from inside the electrode). Unfortunately, the reaction is not sustainable - the same effect which can force the deuterium together strongly enough to create fusion also prevents any _new_ fuel from entering from the outside of the field, thus causing the collapse of the reaction once all the fuel is consumed.
Farnsworth really was a genius at manipulating electric fields. It's too bad he died early, or he might've been able to figure out how to make his fusor practical.
Artists should be paid for providing a good or service, just like any other honest job. Paying them (or whoever has bought the copyright from them) repeatedly just because a particular piece of work is being copied over and over is legally-enforced welfare.
Time to throw another hard disk platter on the barbie!
I'm not sure this is what you were saying or not, but for me, my brain kept on taking the last letter of each word, and trying to combine it with the first letter of the next word.
Mabye you colud aalwys aabehilptze the mddile of the wdors?
It's already integrated into the Shareaza P2P client (which also does Gnutella, Gnutella2 & Edonkey2000). In fact, it seemed to me that the Shareaza client was doing a better job at Bittorrent than the Bittorrent client...
Hey, instead of sending the executive's jobs overseas, let's send the _executives_. After a few months, I bet those countries will pay _us_ a lot to take them back, especially after they've destroyed those countries' economies.
You forgot the most important criteria, at least from a public-policy perspective: is it good for your society? I think there's a pretty good argument that, for a given society, it isn't a good idea for large numbers of your citizens to suddenly lose their means of livelihood.
Geez, if I knew I was worth my weight in gold, I wouldn't have gone on that diet...
I honestly disagree. I doubt that the number of musicians will decrease. Actually, I think the number of musicians will probably increase, since there will be less control over what they are allowed to play.
Granted, a lot of them will probably be be live bands mostly playing songs composed by someone else, but as long as they're not claiming they wrote the songs, it's an honest way of making a living. They might not be able to make megamillions, but they'll be able to make a reasonable living like any working stiff, by providing a service (playing music) in return for compensation.
There will still be big shows for big sponsors - it's good advertising (and if your ticket sales are good enough, it might even pay for itself). Heck, if the public thinks there's a music shortage, our representatives can use some of that taxpayer money they're currently wasting and pay composers to produce all kinds of popular stuff (i.e., commissions), thus giving money _directly_ to the artists (instead of to large non-music-producing corporations), and creating a large body of public-domain work that society can benefit from (I'm sure some people would consider this welfare for artists).
Music has been a basic part of cultures since mankind figured out how to hold a pitch with their voice, and long before copyright ever existed. The only thing copyright has done is allow a smaller number of people to control the mass distribution of certain creative works, allowing them to make money without having to produce continuously (unlike any normal job).
You don't think that these people (or people exactly like them) wouldn't have become popular w/o copyrights? They (and their parasites) might not have made as much money (and would've had to work harder), but the main reason their music became popular was because there was a big enough audience _ready_ to listen to their kind of music. They would've become popular even without copyright.
Actually, from reading the original comment, it sounds like he is in favor of allowing the recipients of the spam to discourage spamming, in particularly painful ways...
Huh? I was assuming that we _don't_ know how to do cryogenics yet, therefore everyone would have to be awake for the entire trip.
A city-sized spaceship (think LA-sized in surface area) isn't really all THAT small. I'm pretty sure that even with our current limited understanding of what makes up a complete ecosystem, we could put enough life onto a ship that size so that it would find its own equilibrium, including the humans on it (as long as the humans didn't kill all the other animals). You just need to make sure that the ship can generate/collect enough energy during the trip to take the place of the sun.
As I said, I was trying to describe what would be possible with our current technology (even though building a ship that sized would require mind-boggling resources). Evolving ourselves beyond an organic ecosystem is not something we currently know how to do.
With current technology (and taking into account that we don't know how to do cryogenics yet), about the only option we have for inter-solar travel is the construction of generation ships, about the size (and population) of a city. (I think a city-sized area/population would be large enough to help with the insanity & genetic issues.) It would have to contain a complete ecosystem (maybe several?), plus be completely repairable by the inhabitants.
Lord only knows what kind of culture you'd end up with by the time they reached their destination - if they're living on the inside of the ship where they can't see the stars, the bulk of the population might have difficult understanding the concept of space. Given the typical appetite of humans for self-destruction, they'll probably have destroyed their own society several times by the time they get to their destination, and will no longer be capable of operating the machinery necessary to finish their flight.
This decision still involves the control of _real_ property, rather than imaginary property (although I'm sure that the RIAA would be quite happy to argue from the viewpoint you are espousing however).
If the government did such a thing, I'm sure the 5th amendment would be applicable _if_ there was actually any property being taken.
Unfortunately for the complainants, information isn't really "property", and the government could rightfully point out that they didn't take anything with real value from the complainants, and their real problem is assuming that they had some "right" to make profit based on the control of information, instead of providing a good or service in response to demand like any "real" business does.