I can relate to your concerns, but I don't think that OpenID threatens privacy the way you're worried about - in fact, I suspect that OpenID is being developed to preempt other closed-source, centralized ID services that could cause serious privacy problems if they became the standard.
As I understand it, you set up an ID server - possibly just a program running on your home computer - and you set it up to provide certain info to certain sites. I envision it operating sort of like a personal firewall. Sites connect to your server and you get prompted: "slashdot.org has requested the following information. Allow once, allow permanently or deny?"
The bottom line is that it allows you to share as much or as little information as you like with sites - which is pretty much what you do now. As far as I can tell, this is just an interface that makes it easier.
What I'm confused about is that if anyone can set up a server, then obviously we'll need blacklists about which servers to trust, and since any IP address can host a server, we're basically back to an IP blacklisting system, which has existed for years.
I'm not concerned about privacy invasion, but this does in a lot of ways remind me of the identd system of old, and its shortcomings.
There's something hilarious about even imagining sending faxes or modem transactions over VOIP. I mean, internet connections were originally hacks to allow us to send data over a voice network - VOIP is a sort of hack to allow us to send phone-like messages over the internet - but then you want to send data over the hack of the hack? Same thing with TTY - we're talking about allowing for a conversion of digital(tty text)->analog(tty modulations)->digital(VOIP data)->analog(voip audio rendered on the other side)->digital(text again). I mean, why not just send an IM over the existing data network?
I guess the concern is about reverse compatibility, but it seems like it'd be easier to just provide IP->Fax portals directly - at least then there's only one digital->analog->digital conversion going on.
It's a snob thing - the same way some photographers look down at people who use digital cameras, because "real" artists use film, not these digital toys that can make anyone's shots look good, or orchestras are pissed that people are using synthesized instruments for film scores now.
It's an interesting phenomenon in artistic circles. When technologies emerge that automate or facilitate making art, artists who use the old tools feel threatened. In a way it makes sense. If you spent years of your life perfecting your beatmatching technique and then learned that there was software that could detect BPM, so that any punk kid could automatically mix beatmatched audio files together seamlessly, you'd be pissed, and feel that your art form was being corrupted somehow.
Those people are attached to the past and its limitations. While some old tools offer a greater degree of creativity or expression in certain areas , they have serious limitations in others. There may be things one can do with a real paintbrush that can't be done in Photoshop, but there are also many, many forms of art that were impossible until Photoshop came along. To expect people to restrict their range of artistic expression for the sake of purity is both unfair and futile.
OK, I hate government just as much as you, but on this matter it seems like you don't really know what you're talking about.
You claim that tighter laws and enforcement against computer criminals will encourage computer crime by driving down the supply of willing "workers". While this may jive with your anarcho-capitalist theory, it just ain't true.
The entire point of the article was that hacking is prevalent because there isn't serious enforcement of the law. The author points out that criminals use insecure methods of communication, not even bothering to conceal themselves, because they're confident that the law won't touch them. If the governments in eastern europe cracked down on internet crime, and actively investigated and arrested computer criminals, many of the current participants would be scared out of the game, no longer confident that they're above the law. There is a threshold of risk beyond which very few people are willing to go, even for a huge reward, and this is even more true of a job that requires in-depth training and is inaccessible to the vast majority of people.
There are plenty of good reasons to oppose cyber-crime crackdowns, and I for one do, but the argument you're making in this case is naive to both the technical and economic realities of international computer crime.
Therefore, you need guns to the people's collective heads to make them live peacefully under a Marxist government.
You need guns to the people's collective heads to make them live peacefully under any government. That's like, the definition of government. An organization which has a monopoly on the use of force to impose its will (usually in the form of laws).
people are dissatisfied with their 'fair share' and always want more. Capitalism satisfies this basic need
Capitalism does not satisfy people's basic desire to have more, because property laws are central to the whole concept, and property laws are inherently about denying people things that they want or need.
If I want something my neighbor has, it's my natural impulse to take it from him. If I'm starving and have no money, I'll damn well steal some bread. Capitalism says that's a no-no, that my "fair share" of the world's resources is determined by how much money I have.
You seem to be claiming that a government that satisfies people's base desires will naturally succeed, and one that goes against them will fail. Both capitalism and communism, and in fact any system that isn't total primitive chaos, suppress some natural desires. No form of civilization can completely satisfy our basic desires, so we have to choose which ones are a priority. Do we want to live in a society where greed and conflict are the primary motivators, and where my wealth is based on how well I deprive others of theirs? Personally, I'd prefer a society where my labor benefits everyone, especially those who can use it most, and I can likewise always depend on support from my community.
I dont think there have been any 'free' communist societies.
Sure there have been. The Zapatistas have a communist economy and a democratic, aggressively egalitarian government. So do many indigenous groups in Mexico (see Atenco). Amish communities throughout the world take a communist approach to property (though they wouldn't use that word) and are governed democratically.
There have been many examples of anti-authoritarian communism, but we don't hear about them. I think the reason is obvious: Capitalism is central to the power structure of the west, and the idea that there could be an alternative that doesn't involve an evil dictator (or any government at all!) is very dangerous.
An interesting pattern to note, though, is that most communist successes have been on small scales, and the larger the "community" gets (USSR for example), the more likely it is to fall under some kind of totalitarian control. In my opinion, the moral is that centralized power of any kind leads to oppression and corruption.
without government there would be no property laws
Yeah, cool, huh?:)
Property laws are necessary in societies where each person, including those in power, is motivated primarily by greed or selfishness. In societies like that, it goes without saying that strict property laws, as well as strict governance of other kinds (repressive police, brainwashing schools, etc.) are necessary.
It's partly a philosophical matter to believe that people aren't inherently selfish, but I think the progression of society so far shows that we are gradually becoming more community-minded and egalitarian, making the presence of centralized coercive authority more and more unwelcome. People may still be selfish, but we're at least realizing that the worst response to that problem is to take a handful of people and make them king of everyone else.
Any group of people who collectively set up rules to control themselves is a government.
If that's your definition of government, then I have to agree with you. But when I say government, I'm referring to an organization or group of people who "govern" the rest of society.
When we have created a society where we don't need to elect/appoint/crown a person or group of people to make decisions for the rest of us - when societies can make decisions for themselves through a rational, deliberate process - we will have eliminated government. This is known as anarchism - opposition to any authority or wielder of power - and many people believe it will be the next great step in human social evolution.
Consider history - humanity has a long tradition of progressively reducing the amount of authority any one person can have over everyone else. First, we eliminated the church as a ruler, then autocrats, and soon our crude "representative democracies" will meet the same fate - cast off as people organize themselves the way they want to live.
Re:Nothing inconvenient about the results
on
An Inconvenient Truth
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· Score: 1, Insightful
$15/gallon gas will cause the price of food to skyrocket.
Actually, it will cause the price of imported food to skyrocket, giving a tremendous market advantage to local farmers who produce food in smaller amounts and with less impact on the environment. Currently, the price of transporting food is low enough that giant industrial farm complexes which produce and ship vast quantities of food are the norm, and they have terrible environmental footprints due to inefficient energy use, mismanagement of pesticides, etc - and don't even get me started on industrial meat producers.
So yes, food prices would go up, but not as radically as some people claim. However, food quality would also go up, pollution would go down, and local economies would be much more stable since local farmers would actually be able to make money again.
rich people who can afford the increase in prices still living their lifestyle
Rich people have always been able to waste more resources, screw over more people, and generally fuck up the world more than poor people have - and as long as there are rich people, this will be the case. I agree that that's a problem, but it has nothing to do with whether we should make gas more expensive.
Government regulation = bad. Government = bad. But unfortunately, government regulation is pretty much the only tool we have available right now to prevent environmental destruction. I think we should eventually get rid of governments entirely, and that with a little work, we can build a society that's perfectly capable of taking care of the environment in an egalitarian, non-coercive way.
Until then, though, it's unacceptable to continue the suicidal path we're on now. There are a lot of people who will try to tell us that such-and-such threatens civilization. Terrorism, drugs, homosexuality, everyone wants to play that card, because when something really does threaten civilization, it means we have to drop everything and take care of that problem.
Terrorism does not threaten civilization. Drugs do not threaten civilization. Global warming really and truly does, and the only issue I can think of that supersedes its importance is the threat of nuclear war.
Your point that nanotech is a high-stakes business is well taken. Just as with biotech, we should not give in too easily to the temptation and excitement of new possibilities before we have evaluated the dangers and genuinely checked our assumptions.
However, in the spirit of brainstorming, it seems that if you create enough redundant and functionally diverse systems in the nanomachine to check itself out, and then destroy itself if it didn't check out correctly - mutations would become statistically impossible. A single bot being assembled in which all 15 self-validation/autodestruct mechanisms are broken is incredibly unlikely, even considering the number of mutations, and all that's needed is for one mechanism to function correctly to eliminate the problem.
Still, though - at this point we're talking about programming, and everyone knows that with programming comes bugs, one of the most common being the infinite loop, coincidentally:)
Hm, I guess - but then your system isn't automatic anymore. In order to realize that my shoes were a ripoff of your design, a human would have to look at both pairs and accuse me of "pirating" them. Either that, or a computer has to do some kind of fuzzy comparison for overall similarity to other objects - which isn't very practical from a resources standpoint.
Once a human brings a grievance, a hashing system would be useful in arbitrating the dispute (sort of like a copyright document), but then you get into a gray area...
Like, what if my shoes are a different color? What if they're similar, but I tweaked the sole thickness, or something? Not only is there no way for a computer to evaluate these differences, it's tricky territory for humans as well.
With a lot of people designing the same types of items with a limited design tool, it's inevitable that they'll come up with very similar designs sometimes. There's no better way to turn designers off than letting accusations of plagarism run wild, and putting them in fear of getting banned.
So I don't know - it seems that SL is running up against the exact same IP issues that we face in the real world, and the fact that their world is virtual doesn't make it any easier to manage.
That's an interesting idea, and I think it could be useful in some situations, but it wouldn't solve the problem of people ripping off your designs.
You create some shoes and the server computes a hash of them. I rip your shoe design and change a single bit, pixel, or coordinate in the model, and then use the "modified" model to create my own shoes. A totally different hash is created. So not only have I ripped off your design, the server's hashing security system now actually reinforces my claim that my design is original.
SL is different from other games in that users are allowed to create objects - they're even encouraged to do so. If you can design an object, you can create it within the game, and everyone agrees that that's ok.
The problem is that people want to keep their designs secret, even while using them in the game. Obviously, this is impossible because in order to render the object, each SL client has to download the object's wireframe, textures, etc.
Most duping bugs are solved by securing data or fixing a bug on the server side, but that won't work in this situation because what's being copied is the same information the game client needs to display the game properly.
I think the thing that trips up anarcho-capitalism is a belief in an inherent difference between Government and Industry. In Western society today, there's a fairly clear division between what a government is (the guys who tax us, police us, send us to war, etc.) and what a corporation is (the guys who sell stuff to us, employ us, advertise to us, etc.).
The development of cartels illustrates an interesting situation where a private enterprise gradually gains more and more power until it becomes the de-facto government, even though it may still claim to be a private enterprise.
At what point does an organization shift from being a private business (which anarcho-capitalists love) to being a government (which anarcho-capitalists loathe)?
I'd love to hear an answer from an anarcho-capitalist, but I submit that in order to create a truly "voluntary" society, we must cultivate a strong tradition of resistance to any large power structure. We must develop a new cultural meme, social norm, whatever you want to call it, which says that any organization or structure which accumulates too much power must be dismantled. This obviously refers primarily to governments, but equally so to the monopolistic, overreaching companies who seek to control our lives with a zeal on par with any dictator.
It's hard to believe you're not trolling, since you're so aggressively and pointedly wrong - but I suspect you just haven't been following the story, or the situation is many developing countries.
it's something geeks can relate to a little better than starvation, typhoid and malaria. But [...] cheap computers are a hell of a long way down the list of needful things
It's true that there are many people who die of disease and starvation in the third world. Over a million are expected to die in central Africa alone this year. These people (especially those in Darfur right now) need food and medicine, badly. There are other people, however, who are not dying of starvation or disease at the moment, but are still quite poor, with few options for supporting themselves or improving their situation. Many villages are prosperous because of a single factory providing jobs, or a certain ecosystem providing enough food. They may be doing okay now, but if that factory closes, or that river gets over-fished, it's back to the starvation game.
These people need education, they need communication, they need the ability to learn independently and develop skills and connections that will make their community independently sustainable, instead of dependent on a tenuous and unreliable livelihood.
And yes, the laptops will be able to run on human power - no infrastructure necessary.
I think this discussion is just about played out, but I wanted to make one more point:
A company may not have to be concerned with whether it's workers can afford the product or service but they still had to be concerned about whether any anywhere can afford them.
This really is the position of many "pro-business" globalization advocates. They believe that even though irresponsible and exploitive behavior in poor countries doesn't affect their customers or their bottom line, companies will refrain from it because they realize that if enough companies exploit enough different regions, it will end up coming back around and harming all the the companies.
CEOs, while they may be very skilled in certain areas, are not that far-sighted or community-minded. You do not become a successful corporation by telling your stockholders "we decided not to exploit cheap overseas labor because we want to stabilize the international economy for all of us". Capitalism just doesn't seem to work that way. The fact is, CEOs in the US are realizing very rapidly that they can offshore their labor, manufacturing, and other unpleasant processes to areas where they will never (or at least very, very rarely) have to face the consequenses of their policies, be they industrial disasters, worker exploitation, anti-competitive dealings, etc. This is a CEO's dream, and one can hardly be surprised that they are taking advantage of it more and more everyday.
If you choose to put faith in the wisdom of giant organizations whose sole objective is profit-making to preserve a reasonable society, I guess that's your call. But to me, that's just as naive as trusting a power-hungry government to do the same.
the more diverse a local market is the less businesses can play one region against another
Maybe the term was confusing, but when I was talking about diverse local markets, I wasn't talking about "a bunch of diverse companies within a region", I was referring to how the many different regions in the world have different economic conditions and needs, and are therefore "diverse". The point was that if one region has a lower cost of living, companies will gravitate there, however the moment another region is cheaper, they'll move all their jobs to the latest cheap labor pool.
If wages are being driven to the lowest denominator then who can afford to buy what businesses sale?
People elsewhere. This, after all, is the whole point of globalization. Not only can a company make use of labor in whatever region it's cheapest and least regulated, they can take the fruits of that labor and retail it halfway across the globe in the region who will pay the most for it. The beasuty of globalization (for companies) is that they no longer need to worry about whether their employees will be able to afford what the company produces, because the company isn't selling to it's employees, it's selling to a totally different group of consumers.
Take a look at either China or India. The income of average workers is much higher
That may be true (or may not, but I'll assume it is), but it's obviously shortsighted to look only at the income figures to determine whether a country's standard of living is improving. How much can you buy with that new bigger salary? Is it more, or less due to inflation? How stable is your job now that more and more businesses with no vested interest in your community are dominating the community? How stable is your government now that it's caving to international business demands for poorer labor standards, less restrictions on corporate pollution, etc? How much more likely are you or your kids to die of cancer ever since those great-paying new factory jobs opened up down the street?
These are the problems that the Indias and Chinas of the world struggle with, and despite our best intentions, globalization is hurting the people - especially the poor people - who live there.
Don't get me wrong, I think government has every bit as much to do with the economic plight of people, both here in the US and in China and other developing countries. There are many domestic policies that could be executed better, and people should absolutely hold their governments accountable for inept and corrupt behavior.
I also agree that for the most part, globalization harms workers in poorer countries more than it harms those in developed countries. This is Slashdot, though, so I figure people are most concerned with how it affects them - and lets face it: for the most part globalization helps only one group of people significantly - bosses of multinational companies.
Workers in the west are already benefiting from the low costs of imported products
Yeah, we are, and stuff is still extremely expensive compared to many other regions. Prices may be falling, but they never have and never will fall anywhere near the level of poor nations, no matter what anyone's economic theory claims.
The factors which make American employees uncompetitive wage-wise are largely tied to local markets
I'm glad you brought up local markets, because the fact that they exist seems to elude many proponents of globalization. As long as there is significant diversity in local markets, multinational companies will be able to play regions against each other to get the cheapest labor. People, being not at all multi-national, and usually not even multi-city, do not have this privilege and will therefore be forced to accept lower and lower wages with fewer and fewer worker protections.
people are a commodity and the more you know, the more you're worth
What this means is that all (say) DBAs with a certain level of proficiency, all over the world, are worth the same. This may seem neat and clean, but it's actually a real problem. Although multinational corps may see the world as one big market, the world is not a vast homogenous pool of workers/consumers. There are many differences between regions, both econonic and cultural, that restrict who can work where, and for how much.
If, for example, you're not a native english speaker, you have far less access to US jobs, even if you study english hard as an adult (you'll still have an accent and probably trouble with grammar). Or, if you live somewhere where there's a high cost of living, you'll have no access to jobs which pay third-world wages (which will be almost all of them). These boundaries restrict who an employee can work for, but not who a corporation can employ.
The bottom line is that globalization gives tremendous power to the CEOs and bosses of companies, while leaving employees both in the developing world and the first world to fight it out for their scraps.
We are not talking about moving workers to local markets, but moving jobs to other places.
This is exactly the problem. In a globalized market, jobs can get up and move anywhere in the world at essentially no cost, but employees are still restricted by the high costs and difficulty of relocating themselves. This gives employers a tremendous upper hand, and reduces job-security to almost 0.
In 1997, Billy worked as a programmer in Austin, Texas. He worked for a local company, and they paid him enough to survive relatively comfortably in Austin. In 2006, the company realized that they could hire a similarly competent programmer in eastern Europe, and only have to pay enough for the programmer to survive relatively comfortably in eastern Europe. Billy cannot compete while living in Austin, because he could not survive on the wage being offered.
Great deal for the company, bad deal for Billy. It costs the company almost nothing to cut their costs by moving their programming jobs to eastern Europe, but it costs Billy a huge amount financially and emotionally to relocate to eastern Europe. Billy has been caught in a cost-of-living race to the bottom, and it's an inevitable consequence of globalization.
Companies generally don't give a fuck where their work gets done, as long as it gets done correctly and as cheaply as possible. People, on the other hand, care very much where they live - most people have deep cultural ties to a certain area, be it a neighborhood, country, or even continent, and even when they do move, it usually takes a long time to adjust and establish themselves in a new environment.
People shouldn't be forced to conform to the international market's whims of where they should be living at any moment, simply in order to keep their cost of living competitive.
Kill of only enough of them so that the cost of losing those customers is less than the cost of increasing the safety of your product, then that number of deaths is the obviously correct business decision to the typical corporation.
Not to mention killing non-customers! There's almost 0 disincentive for that. Bonus if they're poor people in the third world, your consumers aren't likely to know anyone living there.
I mean seriously - from a business standpoint, killing off your competitors' customers could even be seen as a profitable move!
I applaud any company and/or individual that moves towards green energy.
I too applaud anyone who makes genuine efforts to switch to "green energy" in order to reduce their impact on the environment. Even though these efforts may be imperfect, they are better than nothing.
However, there are many, many organizations who switch to "green energy" for another reason entirely - good publicity. This is called greenwashing, and it's often actually bad for the environment. Here's how it works: A company touts minor environmental policies (such as using electric cars or installing some solar panels) as evidence that their company is environmentally responsible, while ignoring environmental concerns in the majority of their business practices. The company's "green" image lessens the chance that the company will be held responsible for any environmental wrongs they commit.
A good example would be a coal company which issues press releases announcing their contributions to the Sierra Club while simultaneously poisoning entire towns with toxic runoff. Counterintuitively, their contribution is actually a negative thing for the environment, because it protects them from valid criticism of their destructive policies in the court of public opinion.
Slashdot Mirror
I can relate to your concerns, but I don't think that OpenID threatens privacy the way you're worried about - in fact, I suspect that OpenID is being developed to preempt other closed-source, centralized ID services that could cause serious privacy problems if they became the standard.
As I understand it, you set up an ID server - possibly just a program running on your home computer - and you set it up to provide certain info to certain sites. I envision it operating sort of like a personal firewall. Sites connect to your server and you get prompted: "slashdot.org has requested the following information. Allow once, allow permanently or deny?"
The bottom line is that it allows you to share as much or as little information as you like with sites - which is pretty much what you do now. As far as I can tell, this is just an interface that makes it easier.
What I'm confused about is that if anyone can set up a server, then obviously we'll need blacklists about which servers to trust, and since any IP address can host a server, we're basically back to an IP blacklisting system, which has existed for years.
I'm not concerned about privacy invasion, but this does in a lot of ways remind me of the identd system of old, and its shortcomings.
There's something hilarious about even imagining sending faxes or modem transactions over VOIP. I mean, internet connections were originally hacks to allow us to send data over a voice network - VOIP is a sort of hack to allow us to send phone-like messages over the internet - but then you want to send data over the hack of the hack? Same thing with TTY - we're talking about allowing for a conversion of digital(tty text)->analog(tty modulations)->digital(VOIP data)->analog(voip audio rendered on the other side)->digital(text again). I mean, why not just send an IM over the existing data network?
I guess the concern is about reverse compatibility, but it seems like it'd be easier to just provide IP->Fax portals directly - at least then there's only one digital->analog->digital conversion going on.
It's a snob thing - the same way some photographers look down at people who use digital cameras, because "real" artists use film, not these digital toys that can make anyone's shots look good, or orchestras are pissed that people are using synthesized instruments for film scores now.
It's an interesting phenomenon in artistic circles. When technologies emerge that automate or facilitate making art, artists who use the old tools feel threatened. In a way it makes sense. If you spent years of your life perfecting your beatmatching technique and then learned that there was software that could detect BPM, so that any punk kid could automatically mix beatmatched audio files together seamlessly, you'd be pissed, and feel that your art form was being corrupted somehow.
Those people are attached to the past and its limitations. While some old tools offer a greater degree of creativity or expression in certain areas , they have serious limitations in others. There may be things one can do with a real paintbrush that can't be done in Photoshop, but there are also many, many forms of art that were impossible until Photoshop came along. To expect people to restrict their range of artistic expression for the sake of purity is both unfair and futile.
OK, I hate government just as much as you, but on this matter it seems like you don't really know what you're talking about.
You claim that tighter laws and enforcement against computer criminals will encourage computer crime by driving down the supply of willing "workers". While this may jive with your anarcho-capitalist theory, it just ain't true.
The entire point of the article was that hacking is prevalent because there isn't serious enforcement of the law. The author points out that criminals use insecure methods of communication, not even bothering to conceal themselves, because they're confident that the law won't touch them. If the governments in eastern europe cracked down on internet crime, and actively investigated and arrested computer criminals, many of the current participants would be scared out of the game, no longer confident that they're above the law. There is a threshold of risk beyond which very few people are willing to go, even for a huge reward, and this is even more true of a job that requires in-depth training and is inaccessible to the vast majority of people.
There are plenty of good reasons to oppose cyber-crime crackdowns, and I for one do, but the argument you're making in this case is naive to both the technical and economic realities of international computer crime.
Therefore, you need guns to the people's collective heads to make them live peacefully under a Marxist government.
You need guns to the people's collective heads to make them live peacefully under any government. That's like, the definition of government. An organization which has a monopoly on the use of force to impose its will (usually in the form of laws).
people are dissatisfied with their 'fair share' and always want more. Capitalism satisfies this basic need
Capitalism does not satisfy people's basic desire to have more, because property laws are central to the whole concept, and property laws are inherently about denying people things that they want or need.
If I want something my neighbor has, it's my natural impulse to take it from him. If I'm starving and have no money, I'll damn well steal some bread. Capitalism says that's a no-no, that my "fair share" of the world's resources is determined by how much money I have.
You seem to be claiming that a government that satisfies people's base desires will naturally succeed, and one that goes against them will fail. Both capitalism and communism, and in fact any system that isn't total primitive chaos, suppress some natural desires. No form of civilization can completely satisfy our basic desires, so we have to choose which ones are a priority. Do we want to live in a society where greed and conflict are the primary motivators, and where my wealth is based on how well I deprive others of theirs? Personally, I'd prefer a society where my labor benefits everyone, especially those who can use it most, and I can likewise always depend on support from my community.
I dont think there have been any 'free' communist societies.
Sure there have been. The Zapatistas have a communist economy and a democratic, aggressively egalitarian government. So do many indigenous groups in Mexico (see Atenco). Amish communities throughout the world take a communist approach to property (though they wouldn't use that word) and are governed democratically.
There have been many examples of anti-authoritarian communism, but we don't hear about them. I think the reason is obvious: Capitalism is central to the power structure of the west, and the idea that there could be an alternative that doesn't involve an evil dictator (or any government at all!) is very dangerous.
An interesting pattern to note, though, is that most communist successes have been on small scales, and the larger the "community" gets (USSR for example), the more likely it is to fall under some kind of totalitarian control. In my opinion, the moral is that centralized power of any kind leads to oppression and corruption.
without government there would be no property laws
:)
Yeah, cool, huh?
Property laws are necessary in societies where each person, including those in power, is motivated primarily by greed or selfishness. In societies like that, it goes without saying that strict property laws, as well as strict governance of other kinds (repressive police, brainwashing schools, etc.) are necessary.
It's partly a philosophical matter to believe that people aren't inherently selfish, but I think the progression of society so far shows that we are gradually becoming more community-minded and egalitarian, making the presence of centralized coercive authority more and more unwelcome. People may still be selfish, but we're at least realizing that the worst response to that problem is to take a handful of people and make them king of everyone else.
Any group of people who collectively set up rules to control themselves is a government.
If that's your definition of government, then I have to agree with you. But when I say government, I'm referring to an organization or group of people who "govern" the rest of society.
When we have created a society where we don't need to elect/appoint/crown a person or group of people to make decisions for the rest of us - when societies can make decisions for themselves through a rational, deliberate process - we will have eliminated government. This is known as anarchism - opposition to any authority or wielder of power - and many people believe it will be the next great step in human social evolution.
Consider history - humanity has a long tradition of progressively reducing the amount of authority any one person can have over everyone else. First, we eliminated the church as a ruler, then autocrats, and soon our crude "representative democracies" will meet the same fate - cast off as people organize themselves the way they want to live.
$15/gallon gas will cause the price of food to skyrocket.
Actually, it will cause the price of imported food to skyrocket, giving a tremendous market advantage to local farmers who produce food in smaller amounts and with less impact on the environment. Currently, the price of transporting food is low enough that giant industrial farm complexes which produce and ship vast quantities of food are the norm, and they have terrible environmental footprints due to inefficient energy use, mismanagement of pesticides, etc - and don't even get me started on industrial meat producers.
So yes, food prices would go up, but not as radically as some people claim. However, food quality would also go up, pollution would go down, and local economies would be much more stable since local farmers would actually be able to make money again.
rich people who can afford the increase in prices still living their lifestyle
Rich people have always been able to waste more resources, screw over more people, and generally fuck up the world more than poor people have - and as long as there are rich people, this will be the case. I agree that that's a problem, but it has nothing to do with whether we should make gas more expensive.
Government regulation = bad. Government = bad. But unfortunately, government regulation is pretty much the only tool we have available right now to prevent environmental destruction. I think we should eventually get rid of governments entirely, and that with a little work, we can build a society that's perfectly capable of taking care of the environment in an egalitarian, non-coercive way.
Until then, though, it's unacceptable to continue the suicidal path we're on now. There are a lot of people who will try to tell us that such-and-such threatens civilization. Terrorism, drugs, homosexuality, everyone wants to play that card, because when something really does threaten civilization, it means we have to drop everything and take care of that problem.
Terrorism does not threaten civilization. Drugs do not threaten civilization. Global warming really and truly does, and the only issue I can think of that supersedes its importance is the threat of nuclear war.
Your point that nanotech is a high-stakes business is well taken. Just as with biotech, we should not give in too easily to the temptation and excitement of new possibilities before we have evaluated the dangers and genuinely checked our assumptions.
:)
However, in the spirit of brainstorming, it seems that if you create enough redundant and functionally diverse systems in the nanomachine to check itself out, and then destroy itself if it didn't check out correctly - mutations would become statistically impossible. A single bot being assembled in which all 15 self-validation/autodestruct mechanisms are broken is incredibly unlikely, even considering the number of mutations, and all that's needed is for one mechanism to function correctly to eliminate the problem.
Still, though - at this point we're talking about programming, and everyone knows that with programming comes bugs, one of the most common being the infinite loop, coincidentally
Hm, I guess - but then your system isn't automatic anymore. In order to realize that my shoes were a ripoff of your design, a human would have to look at both pairs and accuse me of "pirating" them. Either that, or a computer has to do some kind of fuzzy comparison for overall similarity to other objects - which isn't very practical from a resources standpoint.
Once a human brings a grievance, a hashing system would be useful in arbitrating the dispute (sort of like a copyright document), but then you get into a gray area...
Like, what if my shoes are a different color? What if they're similar, but I tweaked the sole thickness, or something? Not only is there no way for a computer to evaluate these differences, it's tricky territory for humans as well.
With a lot of people designing the same types of items with a limited design tool, it's inevitable that they'll come up with very similar designs sometimes. There's no better way to turn designers off than letting accusations of plagarism run wild, and putting them in fear of getting banned.
So I don't know - it seems that SL is running up against the exact same IP issues that we face in the real world, and the fact that their world is virtual doesn't make it any easier to manage.
That's an interesting idea, and I think it could be useful in some situations, but it wouldn't solve the problem of people ripping off your designs.
You create some shoes and the server computes a hash of them. I rip your shoe design and change a single bit, pixel, or coordinate in the model, and then use the "modified" model to create my own shoes. A totally different hash is created. So not only have I ripped off your design, the server's hashing security system now actually reinforces my claim that my design is original.
SL is different from other games in that users are allowed to create objects - they're even encouraged to do so. If you can design an object, you can create it within the game, and everyone agrees that that's ok.
The problem is that people want to keep their designs secret, even while using them in the game. Obviously, this is impossible because in order to render the object, each SL client has to download the object's wireframe, textures, etc.
Most duping bugs are solved by securing data or fixing a bug on the server side, but that won't work in this situation because what's being copied is the same information the game client needs to display the game properly.
I think the thing that trips up anarcho-capitalism is a belief in an inherent difference between Government and Industry. In Western society today, there's a fairly clear division between what a government is (the guys who tax us, police us, send us to war, etc.) and what a corporation is (the guys who sell stuff to us, employ us, advertise to us, etc.).
The development of cartels illustrates an interesting situation where a private enterprise gradually gains more and more power until it becomes the de-facto government, even though it may still claim to be a private enterprise.
At what point does an organization shift from being a private business (which anarcho-capitalists love) to being a government (which anarcho-capitalists loathe)?
I'd love to hear an answer from an anarcho-capitalist, but I submit that in order to create a truly "voluntary" society, we must cultivate a strong tradition of resistance to any large power structure. We must develop a new cultural meme, social norm, whatever you want to call it, which says that any organization or structure which accumulates too much power must be dismantled. This obviously refers primarily to governments, but equally so to the monopolistic, overreaching companies who seek to control our lives with a zeal on par with any dictator.
It's hard to believe you're not trolling, since you're so aggressively and pointedly wrong - but I suspect you just haven't been following the story, or the situation is many developing countries.
it's something geeks can relate to a little better than starvation, typhoid and malaria. But [...] cheap computers are a hell of a long way down the list of needful things
It's true that there are many people who die of disease and starvation in the third world. Over a million are expected to die in central Africa alone this year. These people (especially those in Darfur right now) need food and medicine, badly. There are other people, however, who are not dying of starvation or disease at the moment, but are still quite poor, with few options for supporting themselves or improving their situation. Many villages are prosperous because of a single factory providing jobs, or a certain ecosystem providing enough food. They may be doing okay now, but if that factory closes, or that river gets over-fished, it's back to the starvation game.
These people need education, they need communication, they need the ability to learn independently and develop skills and connections that will make their community independently sustainable, instead of dependent on a tenuous and unreliable livelihood.
And yes, the laptops will be able to run on human power - no infrastructure necessary.
No, Donny, these men are nihilists, there's nothing to be afraid of.
reminds me of my dream of using the quake engine to replacee xplorer.
Been done (a long time ago).
http://www.cs.unm.edu/~dlchao/flake/doom/
I think this discussion is just about played out, but I wanted to make one more point:
A company may not have to be concerned with whether it's workers can afford the product or service but they still had to be concerned about whether any anywhere can afford them.
This really is the position of many "pro-business" globalization advocates. They believe that even though irresponsible and exploitive behavior in poor countries doesn't affect their customers or their bottom line, companies will refrain from it because they realize that if enough companies exploit enough different regions, it will end up coming back around and harming all the the companies.
CEOs, while they may be very skilled in certain areas, are not that far-sighted or community-minded. You do not become a successful corporation by telling your stockholders "we decided not to exploit cheap overseas labor because we want to stabilize the international economy for all of us". Capitalism just doesn't seem to work that way. The fact is, CEOs in the US are realizing very rapidly that they can offshore their labor, manufacturing, and other unpleasant processes to areas where they will never (or at least very, very rarely) have to face the consequenses of their policies, be they industrial disasters, worker exploitation, anti-competitive dealings, etc. This is a CEO's dream, and one can hardly be surprised that they are taking advantage of it more and more everyday.
If you choose to put faith in the wisdom of giant organizations whose sole objective is profit-making to preserve a reasonable society, I guess that's your call. But to me, that's just as naive as trusting a power-hungry government to do the same.
the more diverse a local market is the less businesses can play one region against another
Maybe the term was confusing, but when I was talking about diverse local markets, I wasn't talking about "a bunch of diverse companies within a region", I was referring to how the many different regions in the world have different economic conditions and needs, and are therefore "diverse". The point was that if one region has a lower cost of living, companies will gravitate there, however the moment another region is cheaper, they'll move all their jobs to the latest cheap labor pool.
If wages are being driven to the lowest denominator then who can afford to buy what businesses sale?
People elsewhere. This, after all, is the whole point of globalization. Not only can a company make use of labor in whatever region it's cheapest and least regulated, they can take the fruits of that labor and retail it halfway across the globe in the region who will pay the most for it. The beasuty of globalization (for companies) is that they no longer need to worry about whether their employees will be able to afford what the company produces, because the company isn't selling to it's employees, it's selling to a totally different group of consumers.
Take a look at either China or India. The income of average workers is much higher
That may be true (or may not, but I'll assume it is), but it's obviously shortsighted to look only at the income figures to determine whether a country's standard of living is improving. How much can you buy with that new bigger salary? Is it more, or less due to inflation? How stable is your job now that more and more businesses with no vested interest in your community are dominating the community? How stable is your government now that it's caving to international business demands for poorer labor standards, less restrictions on corporate pollution, etc? How much more likely are you or your kids to die of cancer ever since those great-paying new factory jobs opened up down the street?
These are the problems that the Indias and Chinas of the world struggle with, and despite our best intentions, globalization is hurting the people - especially the poor people - who live there.
Don't get me wrong, I think government has every bit as much to do with the economic plight of people, both here in the US and in China and other developing countries. There are many domestic policies that could be executed better, and people should absolutely hold their governments accountable for inept and corrupt behavior.
I also agree that for the most part, globalization harms workers in poorer countries more than it harms those in developed countries. This is Slashdot, though, so I figure people are most concerned with how it affects them - and lets face it: for the most part globalization helps only one group of people significantly - bosses of multinational companies.
Workers in the west are already benefiting from the low costs of imported products
Yeah, we are, and stuff is still extremely expensive compared to many other regions. Prices may be falling, but they never have and never will fall anywhere near the level of poor nations, no matter what anyone's economic theory claims.
The factors which make American employees uncompetitive wage-wise are largely tied to local markets
I'm glad you brought up local markets, because the fact that they exist seems to elude many proponents of globalization. As long as there is significant diversity in local markets, multinational companies will be able to play regions against each other to get the cheapest labor. People, being not at all multi-national, and usually not even multi-city, do not have this privilege and will therefore be forced to accept lower and lower wages with fewer and fewer worker protections.
people are a commodity and the more you know, the more you're worth
What this means is that all (say) DBAs with a certain level of proficiency, all over the world, are worth the same. This may seem neat and clean, but it's actually a real problem. Although multinational corps may see the world as one big market, the world is not a vast homogenous pool of workers/consumers. There are many differences between regions, both econonic and cultural, that restrict who can work where, and for how much.
If, for example, you're not a native english speaker, you have far less access to US jobs, even if you study english hard as an adult (you'll still have an accent and probably trouble with grammar). Or, if you live somewhere where there's a high cost of living, you'll have no access to jobs which pay third-world wages (which will be almost all of them). These boundaries restrict who an employee can work for, but not who a corporation can employ.
The bottom line is that globalization gives tremendous power to the CEOs and bosses of companies, while leaving employees both in the developing world and the first world to fight it out for their scraps.
We are not talking about moving workers to local markets, but moving jobs to other places.
This is exactly the problem. In a globalized market, jobs can get up and move anywhere in the world at essentially no cost, but employees are still restricted by the high costs and difficulty of relocating themselves. This gives employers a tremendous upper hand, and reduces job-security to almost 0.
In 1997, Billy worked as a programmer in Austin, Texas. He worked for a local company, and they paid him enough to survive relatively comfortably in Austin. In 2006, the company realized that they could hire a similarly competent programmer in eastern Europe, and only have to pay enough for the programmer to survive relatively comfortably in eastern Europe. Billy cannot compete while living in Austin, because he could not survive on the wage being offered.
Great deal for the company, bad deal for Billy. It costs the company almost nothing to cut their costs by moving their programming jobs to eastern Europe, but it costs Billy a huge amount financially and emotionally to relocate to eastern Europe. Billy has been caught in a cost-of-living race to the bottom, and it's an inevitable consequence of globalization.
Companies generally don't give a fuck where their work gets done, as long as it gets done correctly and as cheaply as possible. People, on the other hand, care very much where they live - most people have deep cultural ties to a certain area, be it a neighborhood, country, or even continent, and even when they do move, it usually takes a long time to adjust and establish themselves in a new environment.
People shouldn't be forced to conform to the international market's whims of where they should be living at any moment, simply in order to keep their cost of living competitive.
Kill of only enough of them so that the cost of losing those customers is less than the cost of increasing the safety of your product, then that number of deaths is the obviously correct business decision to the typical corporation.
Not to mention killing non-customers! There's almost 0 disincentive for that. Bonus if they're poor people in the third world, your consumers aren't likely to know anyone living there.
I mean seriously - from a business standpoint, killing off your competitors' customers could even be seen as a profitable move!
grass-fed (yummy) or corn-fed
You forgot "cement-fed" - most cows eat a crazy mix of corn, manure, and cement (not sure why, but it's true).
I applaud any company and/or individual that moves towards green energy.
I too applaud anyone who makes genuine efforts to switch to "green energy" in order to reduce their impact on the environment. Even though these efforts may be imperfect, they are better than nothing.
However, there are many, many organizations who switch to "green energy" for another reason entirely - good publicity. This is called greenwashing, and it's often actually bad for the environment. Here's how it works: A company touts minor environmental policies (such as using electric cars or installing some solar panels) as evidence that their company is environmentally responsible, while ignoring environmental concerns in the majority of their business practices. The company's "green" image lessens the chance that the company will be held responsible for any environmental wrongs they commit.
A good example would be a coal company which issues press releases announcing their contributions to the Sierra Club while simultaneously poisoning entire towns with toxic runoff. Counterintuitively, their contribution is actually a negative thing for the environment, because it protects them from valid criticism of their destructive policies in the court of public opinion.