To be protected by the third Geneva conventions you have to fulfil certain conditions. According to the United States those combatants taken by the United States in Afghanistan and Iraq do not meet those requirements. If you believe the United States assertion that these individuals when captured did not match the requirements of Article 4 of the Third Geneva convention then they must fall under the forth Geneva convention (unless the are medical personnel).
Here is where the problem comes in. While these individuals are not prisoners of war (at least if you believe the United States) they are protected by the conventions. Those conventions require that in all circumstance combatants who are not in the fight (those that have been captured even if they do not qualify as prisoners of war) be treated humanely, signatories of the Forth Geneva Convention are prohibited from murdering or otherwise injuring such individuals, holding such individuals hostage, committing outrages against the personal dignity of such individuals and from conducting sentences or undertaking executions of such individuals without previous judgement pronounced by a regularly constituted court, affording all the judicial guarantees which are recognized as indispensable by civilized peoples.
So the United States is probably in violation of the Forth Geneva Convention (which is very bad for their service men and women and their civilians because it justifies other belligerents suspending some of their obligations too). Indefinite lengthy detention without trial after the war is over (that is once the occupation begins) is one possible violation. In addition water boarding (and other such treatments) of suspects certainly violates the inhumane and degrading treatment prohibition and possibly the first prohibition on the inflicting of injury.
Worse however is the possibility that some of the detainees might be miss identified as a protected person under the Forth Geneva convention, when if fact they are a prisoner of war under the third. If any of the individuals held at Gitmo are "Inhabitants of a non-occupied territory, who on the approach of the enemy spontaneously take up arms to resist the invading forces, without having had time to form themselves into regular armed units, provided they carry arms openly and respect the laws and customs of war" they are prisoners of war. Now we come to the real problem, because if there is any doubt as to the status of these individuals then they must be treated as prisoners of war until a competent tribunal determines their status.
Competent tribunals are not being held, and the 'trials' of those deemed unlawful combatants that are being held do not meet the requirements of the forth convention. The United States is committing war crimes and not living up to its treaty requirements under the Geneva conventions.
Every nation ever has taken prisoners of war during a conflict, this is true. But the United States does not classify those held at Gitmo as prisoners of war. If it did, then it could hold them until the end of the war (which since Iraq is occupied is now). It could also try them for war crimes if they have committed any (no need for a civilian court there, just a fair one). However prisoners of war are not subject to the laws of the invading power. Alternatively it can consider them protected persons under the Forth Geneva convention, hold fair trials and convict the lot of them under it's own domestic laws (which since they are not prisoners of war they are now subject to), assuming in cases where there is some uncertainty a competent tribunal is convened to determine the status of the captive.
I wont buy from Ambrosia Software. Don't get me wrong, I like them, I think that they are good guys, but their copy protection scheme all but guarantees that when they go out of business you are completely screwed. Couple this with a crazy high price point for any of the old games I'm interested in and I just have no interest. If you told me that EV Nova could be bought for $10 with no copy protection they would have themselves a sale (I've played the demo and it looks very cool). However I know that they have in the past had a hard time making a profit and if they go under I have no guarantee that anything I purchase will work any more.
By publishing their work they have ceased to make it their product. It will eventually (one day) enter the public domain and become part of societies cultural heritage. In fact the very day it is published it is part of our cultural heritage and everyone has a right to access it. We made a deal with content makers however. They get a limited distribution monopoly as an incentive for them to make and publish their work.
If they don't provide a mechanism for their work to enter the public domain then what the hell is the point of the deal? They welched on it and you can hardly be surprised when members of society stop respecting their artificial monopoly.
Copy protection prevents a societies cultural heritage entering the public domain, or at least it is designed to. If software is released with copy protection then it should be a requirement that they either don't receive copyright protection on it or more realistically, that they must give an unprotected version of the software to some safe repository to ensure when the time comes it does enter the public domain.
Calculators are good, if you can already do the sum you want to do in your head.
I know that 1234+2345 is ball park 3500. If I grab my calculator and get something that is about 3500 I'm happy. The point of doing stuff without a calculator is so that you don't depend on it. It is way to easy to make a mistake using a calculator, and if you cant at least estimate the right answer then you have no way of knowing if you operated the calculator correctly.
This skill becomes even more important in physics later on, when you want to neglect terms but cant work out their exact contribution without solving the very problem you want to neglect them from.
A student should be able to ball park the square root of 10 in their head, or work out the sine of 0.1 radians, or estimate what the sum of some set of numbers is in their head because they can simplify the problem to the point that they know they have the right answer.
No but he can restrict your freedom of expression if you express yourself by swinging a battle-axe in a crowded mall. But if you want to go do it in a safer environment you can.
GPL3 (and 2 to a lesser extent because it has loopholes) allows you to use and modify code, it protects your freedom. But it forces you to do so in the same altruistic manner that the person who gave you the code you are building on restricting another freedom. You are free to do with the code as you please, so long as if you distribute the code you grant others the same freedom. Hence you are free to distribute modified code, but the GPL prevents you from using that freedom to stop other people doing the same. The freedom to modify code overrides the freedom to distribute. It really isn't that complicated, I don't see why people keep getting confused by this.
Look, I'm happy to do away with corporate welfare and limited liability companies if that is what you want.
A curtailment of rights is only a curtailment of rights if those rights existed in the first place. You have a right to freedom of association. You can form a company. However, you are responsible for what that company does. A worker gets killed in an accident, YOU go to jail because you are responsible.
Unfortunately in order to organise big projects we need big entities, and these are hard to form. So we have a few options. We can rely on the ultra wealthy to fund large projects. This is what we used to do and progress is painfully slow. We can rely on government to collectively organise these big projects. This sometimes works and is even sometimes necessary (like for things like defence) but for many things it is woefully inefficient. We can construct a liability shield around an artificial entity called a limited liability company so that people are willing to form companies, this is a social contract between the people (through their government) and a subset of the citizens. Any approach bar the first is essentially a form of socialism. Socialism isn't always a bad thing.
The last option has worked pretty well, but it creates a major moral hazard, shareholders are protected from liability and are inclined to take risks. In addition corporations can become so large that they are able to have significant influence on the very government that allowed their existence. They become a kind of shareholders social welfare program, the limited liability shield allows them to become big, they use their wealth to influence the legal system protecting the company from legal consequences and this allows them to grow even bigger.
However, since the corporate entity is entirely artificial no ones rights are curtailed by restricting their actions, assuming that anyone who wants to can withdraw their capital from the company in a reasonable time. This is because the right to form corporations is a collectively assigned right with the sole purpose of increasing social welfare.
The situation is very similar to the situation with regards to copyright. There is no right to control the flow of information, regardless of who 'created it'. Society grants control of distribution to creators for the sole purpose of encouraging them to create. Copyrights sole justification for existing is that it is supposed to increase social welfare. It does curtail some citizens rights (like the right to access to your cultural heritage) but the creators rights are not curtailed because they can always opt out by putting their works in the public domain (or just not publishing them).
Since corporations don't have rights unless an individual is ultimately responsible for their actions, we can do whatever we like with them. The right to form or own a corporation or part of a corporation is entirely optional. You can have all the rights you are naturally entitled to if you are prepared to take responsibility for your actions and take society up on their offer of a liability shield. But if you do enter the social contract and form a limited liability company then you had better darn well accept the terms that come along with it. And if society decides to amend those terms later you have the choice of either withdrawing your capital, or accepting the new contract.
Bottom line, this isn't fascism or national socialism, or any other far right statist agenda. The existence of corporations themselves is statist, it is a form of socialism, just like copyright. I for one think if we are going to experiment with socialism (which don't get me wrong I'm happy to do), we should take great care to tightly regulate it so that it doesn't act against the best interests of the people it is supposed to be helping.
The reason it has to be a sequence is because I do not trust those in power to actually keep their word. If we do this 'all at the same time' then the powers that be will cheat.
Neither of us have the statistics on abuse of the H1b program. You only need a few instances of abuse to act as a threat to keep other employees in line. I'm glad that you are well treated by your employer, but that really isn't relevant. The fact that your cousin exists as a threat to other workers is sufficient on it's own.
Until recently it was not traditional to buy diamonds. They were not considered as aesthetically desirable compared with other stones (while they have always been more precious than the ones I listed I wanted a common stone to compare to). This culture was changed through marketing. That is why they are more desirable to women.
Buying diamonds are also an example of conspicuous consumption (because they are marketed that way). Part of the reason women want men to buy diamonds is because they are expensive. Heck they might even be a Veblen good! If there is any situation where marketing would pay off, it would be with a Veblen good.
Diamond was expensive in Rome because it was in short supply and because of transport costs. There aren't exactly a whole lot of diamond mines in Europe, but pearls are a bit easier to come by. You cannot compare the two situations other than to say supply does not meet demand in either case. If today diamond was mined and sold by multiple companies instead of supply being controlled by one chain the price would plummet, just as it would have in Rome if a route to diamond mines in Africa had suddenly been discovered.
The price of diamond in Rome was high, the price of diamond is high now. They are high for the same reason, supply is short. The reason supply is short is what has changed.
Marketing can be effective on it's own, but to survive in the long run it is desirable to combine it with other factors (like we have in the diamond market). Diamonds can be effectively marketed in part because they are an expensive luxury good.
I agree with your first point. And I have no problem with globalising labour. If you are prepared to globalise everything else too. I don't mind competing with an Indian engineer if I can get food, electronics and software at Indian prices. Remove all tarrifs, and ensure there are no regional restrictions on any product and we can talk. But we will do labour last, not first. That being said we can certainly get rid of the H1b indentured servitude crap right away.
You are right, diamonds are more expensive than water because of marginal utility. But that is an absurd comparison to make for anything other than illustrating the concept of marginal utility. The question you should be asking is why is diamond more expensive than garnet, or quartz. The least useful thing we can do with either is make jewellery right? Yet one is far more expensive than the others. The reason is that supply is curtailed, and demand increased through marketing.
If demand cant be created by marketing then marketing wouldn't exist. Microsoft is competing with Apple who -do- have a monopoly (iTunes) and who are using that monopoly to keep out competition, and who have engaged in very effective marketing. The music player business is a good analogy, except DeBeers aren't Microsoft, they are Apple!
Government acting to correct a 'shortage' that isn't there to artificially lower the cost of labour is the very definition of a conspiracy.
I'm not sure what you are getting at with the diamond analogy (I'm not even sure it is an analogy). Diamonds are as expensive as they are for two reasons supply is tightly controlled by one company (DeBeers) and domain specific demand is created through marketing.
Your criticism is valid and I've addressed it in another post. I'm not an economist by trade and I sometimes use the wrong language and/or wrong term without sufficient qualification when I talk about fields I'm not familiar with. I've acknowledged this in other criticisms of my remark.
My first point should have said something like "in a functioning market for a good with sufficient price elasticity there is no such thing as a shortage".
I also made two implicit assumptions. First I believe that the engineering labour market is reasonably elastic. I don't think the lag time for getting new engineers would be very long. Of the seven people I graduate with from college (all excellent physicists and smart people with 2:1s or better) only two are working as an engineer or scientist. The rest are management consultants, actuaries, that kind of crap. If they could get double the pay they are getting now by switching to do engineering they could be retrained in a year. I also think that if this 'shortage' was as dire as it is being made out to be then the demand would steam roll the stickiness of the price of labour.
You are correct that there is a lag between increase in demand, and change in supply, but the supply of engineers is plenty elastic enough. There are plenty of engineering graduates working in the city for 5x what they can get as engineers who could retrain in a year to fill the 'shortage' if only it was worth their while. Even if the supply of skilled labour wasn't elastic the way you would tell that there was a shortage is that the cost of the good (in this case engineering labour) would go up. Even with the price stickiness of the labour market, the price of engineering labour should be rising fast and it isn't.
Your other point just compounds the matter further. If the 'shortage' was a result of the uncoolness of engineering, then wages would rise to compensate for this uncoolness. This is exactly the reason that unskilled workers like garbage men are comparatively well paid. There is no shortage because the price is not going up.
You are listing market failures or other conditions that are not present or not significant. If any of them were significant engineers and scientists would be paid far more than they are. Your correction to my language is accurate, but that was just laziness and a lack of experience talking about economics on my part, what I should have said was "in a functioning market there is no such thing as a shortage".
People going to college pick their major based on a number of different things. Are you seriously saying that if engineers earned six or seven figure salaries that smart people doing law degrees wouldn't switch to engineering?
I'm getting real tired of people who want to employ engineers (and their sock puppet politicians) continually screaming "Shortage!".
Japan has (by and large) a market economy. There is no such thing as a shortage in a market economy. If they want more people to do engineering, pay engineers more. You can bet the bank if engineers and scientists were paid football players or rock stars wages, then you wouldn't be able to move for people clamouring to be engineers and scientists.
What people mean when they say "there is a shortage of engineers" is "there is shortage of engineers prepared to do amazing work while being paid less than the idiot with the history of art major in middle management". Big surprise there.
If you are a real market liberal then you would also oppose copyright as government interference in the market. If you are going to hand someone a monopoly on something then you have every right to regulate transactions involving that monopoly however society deems best.
Now either you are one of those evil socialists yourself (it just so happens that you support corporate rather than social welfare) or a real market liberal. Which is it?
It is interesting that you mention DVDs since they are actually a good analogy. I don't agree with this law when applied to competative markets, but when you have a monopoly it is a very sensible law.
Microsoft bullies OEMs into charging everyone who buys a PC into buying a copy of Windows by charging OEMs per PC sold, not per PC with Windows sold. This is obviously anti-competative. They use the threat of denying access to the monopoly product to keep the OEMs in line.
Now the market for an individual DVD is also not competative. The makers of Slasher Movie X - the Reslashening don't compete with anyone for sales of this particular movie because it is illegal to distribute their product without a license. They also have a monopoly. And they also have the potential to abuse it. This is exactly the reason we need fair mandatory licensing for content.
The word you are looking for is totalitarianism. Socialists and Social Conservatives are just about the same in terms of their support for a free society. The difference between left and right is just which freedoms they don't want you to have.
That their operating system comes preinstalled on most hardware?
Seriously I've install DOS, Windows 3.11, Windows 95, 98 and XP (with SATA RAID support), and I've installed Gentoo, Ubuntu (Hardy and Gutsy), and Debian and they were all a monumental pain to get working (although Gentoo was king).
I'd be hard pushed to pick a winner in this catagory. It's like thermonuclear war, there are no winners, and Ubuntu probably loses the least. Windows is pretty far down in the getting hardware to work first time stakes.
This being said my comparison isn't really fair. I've not tried to install Vista yet, and I haven't installed Ubuntu anyhere other than on a virtual hard disk recently, so maybe Vista has made mind blowing improvements and Microsoft's offering has caught up.
Just because NSDAP put the word socialist in thier name, doesn't mean they were socialists. In fact if you want to put them anywhere on the capitalism/communist scale they were centrists by the standard of the day. NSDAP was a name intended to bring everyone in, because it had something that appealed to everybody. On the political right you had National and German. On the left Socialist Workers. The problem with NSDAP was that they were racist authoritarian nut jobs. Not that they were 'socialists'.
I don't think you understand what a free market is. Copyright is government interference. Government grants (government patronage) are also government interference. Both are the antithesis of the free market. I'm not against government interference, what I'm saying is that copyright is government messing around with the free market. If you are going to have government interfere with the free market you had better do it minimally to achieve the desired end.
You are the one proposing state control of entertainment through the copyright system because copyright IS state interference in the market. I happen to think that a little state intervention here is not a bad thing, just like government grants for scientists aren't a bad thing. They are an intervention in the free market though.
Society should do the absolute minimum necessary to support the number of artists it desires. If there aren't enough artists, we should strengthen copyright (I'm prepared to ignore how corrupt the system is for the moment). If we have a glut (which we do) then copyright should be normalised towards the free market.
And what university chair do Ernesto and Kirsty Bertarelli have? Business people are not the same as scientists, even if the business is science.
"The problem with copyright infringement, is you have s situation where a perfect market would allow us to spend 10%, and get 10% worth of enjoyment from the resulting music, but in fact we only spend 1% (or whatever) and the difference is made up by copyright infringement."
It seems to me you are plucking these numbers out of thin air, and I've no idea why one clause here leads to another. I've no idea what effect abolishing copyright would have on the music industry, but I would guess that we would go back to a system of patronage. I do know that reducing the length of copyright to 14 years probably wouldn't have a big impact.
Why if we get the same amount of music produced would only paying 1% for it be a bad thing? You seem to be suggesting that the bad thing about copyright is that we get music for cheap. I would argue that is not the case, the bad thing about copyright is exactly the opposite.
If we need more bankers and plumbers and less musicians then a system that provides us with this is not a net loss to society. I don't think you understand what a free market is.
If you and I enter into a contract you are darn right I expect to be paid. And for all my crappy coding skills people have paid me (in part) to write computer code.
But if we didn't enter into a contract before hand, I don't expect you to pay me for something I publish.
Copyright is a social contract. Society agrees to grant a limited monopoly, artists are able to make money selling their work. Artists, especially artists like Metallica, have abused that monopoly. While they might have legal protection, they have broken the spirit of the social contract and I feel no moral obligation to honor it.
No one has a right to profit from their labor. People have a right to profit from their labor if they agree before hand with someone that they will do X and get paid Y. People have a right to enter contracts. Now artists are part of a social contract called copyright, which grants them some control over reproduction of the results of their efforts to encourage them to undertake them. This benevolence on the part of society is being repeatedly abused by some artists and elements of the artistic industries.
I write crappy computer games in my spare time. I do not expect to be paid for it.
No one is saying musicians have to work for free. The market is saying what musicians do doesn't have much value. Just like the market says that the work of professional scientists like myself don't have much value.
Now you are suggesting that musicians should be able to enjoy the 'fruits of capitalism'. The obvious problem with that is that a true capitalist society has no copyright. You cant own an idea like you can a house. You cant own the distribution rights either. Society in it's benevolence grants artists certain rights under copyright to encourage the creation of art.
So the real question is, what is the minimum amount of messing around with the market we have to do in order to get artists making art. If we want more artists, we have to give more. But we have a glut of artists. We also have a system so corrupt that it is giving artists and distribution companies way more power than they need to further the arts.
This is why copyright needs drastic scaling back. People don't have an inherent right to produce art as a living, just like they don't have an inherent right to study science for a living. It just so happens that society thinks these things are important and are willing to subsidise people to do them. Science through grants, art through copyrights.
You look at the UK rich list I promise you there will be no practising scientists in the list either.
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To be protected by the third Geneva conventions you have to fulfil certain conditions. According to the United States those combatants taken by the United States in Afghanistan and Iraq do not meet those requirements. If you believe the United States assertion that these individuals when captured did not match the requirements of Article 4 of the Third Geneva convention then they must fall under the forth Geneva convention (unless the are medical personnel).
Here is where the problem comes in. While these individuals are not prisoners of war (at least if you believe the United States) they are protected by the conventions. Those conventions require that in all circumstance combatants who are not in the fight (those that have been captured even if they do not qualify as prisoners of war) be treated humanely, signatories of the Forth Geneva Convention are prohibited from murdering or otherwise injuring such individuals, holding such individuals hostage, committing outrages against the personal dignity of such individuals and from conducting sentences or undertaking executions of such individuals without previous judgement pronounced by a regularly constituted court, affording all the judicial guarantees which are recognized as indispensable by civilized peoples.
So the United States is probably in violation of the Forth Geneva Convention (which is very bad for their service men and women and their civilians because it justifies other belligerents suspending some of their obligations too). Indefinite lengthy detention without trial after the war is over (that is once the occupation begins) is one possible violation. In addition water boarding (and other such treatments) of suspects certainly violates the inhumane and degrading treatment prohibition and possibly the first prohibition on the inflicting of injury.
Worse however is the possibility that some of the detainees might be miss identified as a protected person under the Forth Geneva convention, when if fact they are a prisoner of war under the third. If any of the individuals held at Gitmo are "Inhabitants of a non-occupied territory, who on the approach of the enemy spontaneously take up arms to resist the invading forces, without having had time to form themselves into regular armed units, provided they carry arms openly and respect the laws and customs of war" they are prisoners of war. Now we come to the real problem, because if there is any doubt as to the status of these individuals then they must be treated as prisoners of war until a competent tribunal determines their status.
Competent tribunals are not being held, and the 'trials' of those deemed unlawful combatants that are being held do not meet the requirements of the forth convention. The United States is committing war crimes and not living up to its treaty requirements under the Geneva conventions.
Every nation ever has taken prisoners of war during a conflict, this is true. But the United States does not classify those held at Gitmo as prisoners of war. If it did, then it could hold them until the end of the war (which since Iraq is occupied is now). It could also try them for war crimes if they have committed any (no need for a civilian court there, just a fair one). However prisoners of war are not subject to the laws of the invading power. Alternatively it can consider them protected persons under the Forth Geneva convention, hold fair trials and convict the lot of them under it's own domestic laws (which since they are not prisoners of war they are now subject to), assuming in cases where there is some uncertainty a competent tribunal is convened to determine the status of the captive.
I wont buy from Ambrosia Software. Don't get me wrong, I like them, I think that they are good guys, but their copy protection scheme all but guarantees that when they go out of business you are completely screwed. Couple this with a crazy high price point for any of the old games I'm interested in and I just have no interest. If you told me that EV Nova could be bought for $10 with no copy protection they would have themselves a sale (I've played the demo and it looks very cool).
However I know that they have in the past had a hard time making a profit and if they go under I have no guarantee that anything I purchase will work any more.
By publishing their work they have ceased to make it their product. It will eventually (one day) enter the public domain and become part of societies cultural heritage. In fact the very day it is published it is part of our cultural heritage and everyone has a right to access it. We made a deal with content makers however. They get a limited distribution monopoly as an incentive for them to make and publish their work.
If they don't provide a mechanism for their work to enter the public domain then what the hell is the point of the deal? They welched on it and you can hardly be surprised when members of society stop respecting their artificial monopoly.
Copy protection prevents a societies cultural heritage entering the public domain, or at least it is designed to. If software is released with copy protection then it should be a requirement that they either don't receive copyright protection on it or more realistically, that they must give an unprotected version of the software to some safe repository to ensure when the time comes it does enter the public domain.
Calculators are good, if you can already do the sum you want to do in your head.
I know that 1234+2345 is ball park 3500. If I grab my calculator and get something that is about 3500 I'm happy. The point of doing stuff without a calculator is so that you don't depend on it. It is way to easy to make a mistake using a calculator, and if you cant at least estimate the right answer then you have no way of knowing if you operated the calculator correctly.
This skill becomes even more important in physics later on, when you want to neglect terms but cant work out their exact contribution without solving the very problem you want to neglect them from.
A student should be able to ball park the square root of 10 in their head, or work out the sine of 0.1 radians, or estimate what the sum of some set of numbers is in their head because they can simplify the problem to the point that they know they have the right answer.
Then you use a calculator to get it precisely.
No but he can restrict your freedom of expression if you express yourself by swinging a battle-axe in a crowded mall. But if you want to go do it in a safer environment you can.
GPL3 (and 2 to a lesser extent because it has loopholes) allows you to use and modify code, it protects your freedom. But it forces you to do so in the same altruistic manner that the person who gave you the code you are building on restricting another freedom. You are free to do with the code as you please, so long as if you distribute the code you grant others the same freedom. Hence you are free to distribute modified code, but the GPL prevents you from using that freedom to stop other people doing the same. The freedom to modify code overrides the freedom to distribute. It really isn't that complicated, I don't see why people keep getting confused by this.
Look, I'm happy to do away with corporate welfare and limited liability companies if that is what you want.
A curtailment of rights is only a curtailment of rights if those rights existed in the first place. You have a right to freedom of association. You can form a company. However, you are responsible for what that company does. A worker gets killed in an accident, YOU go to jail because you are responsible.
Unfortunately in order to organise big projects we need big entities, and these are hard to form. So we have a few options. We can rely on the ultra wealthy to fund large projects. This is what we used to do and progress is painfully slow. We can rely on government to collectively organise these big projects. This sometimes works and is even sometimes necessary (like for things like defence) but for many things it is woefully inefficient. We can construct a liability shield around an artificial entity called a limited liability company so that people are willing to form companies, this is a social contract between the people (through their government) and a subset of the citizens. Any approach bar the first is essentially a form of socialism. Socialism isn't always a bad thing.
The last option has worked pretty well, but it creates a major moral hazard, shareholders are protected from liability and are inclined to take risks. In addition corporations can become so large that they are able to have significant influence on the very government that allowed their existence. They become a kind of shareholders social welfare program, the limited liability shield allows them to become big, they use their wealth to influence the legal system protecting the company from legal consequences and this allows them to grow even bigger.
However, since the corporate entity is entirely artificial no ones rights are curtailed by restricting their actions, assuming that anyone who wants to can withdraw their capital from the company in a reasonable time. This is because the right to form corporations is a collectively assigned right with the sole purpose of increasing social welfare.
The situation is very similar to the situation with regards to copyright. There is no right to control the flow of information, regardless of who 'created it'. Society grants control of distribution to creators for the sole purpose of encouraging them to create. Copyrights sole justification for existing is that it is supposed to increase social welfare. It does curtail some citizens rights (like the right to access to your cultural heritage) but the creators rights are not curtailed because they can always opt out by putting their works in the public domain (or just not publishing them).
Since corporations don't have rights unless an individual is ultimately responsible for their actions, we can do whatever we like with them. The right to form or own a corporation or part of a corporation is entirely optional. You can have all the rights you are naturally entitled to if you are prepared to take responsibility for your actions and take society up on their offer of a liability shield. But if you do enter the social contract and form a limited liability company then you had better darn well accept the terms that come along with it. And if society decides to amend those terms later you have the choice of either withdrawing your capital, or accepting the new contract.
Bottom line, this isn't fascism or national socialism, or any other far right statist agenda. The existence of corporations themselves is statist, it is a form of socialism, just like copyright. I for one think if we are going to experiment with socialism (which don't get me wrong I'm happy to do), we should take great care to tightly regulate it so that it doesn't act against the best interests of the people it is supposed to be helping.
The reason it has to be a sequence is because I do not trust those in power to actually keep their word. If we do this 'all at the same time' then the powers that be will cheat.
Neither of us have the statistics on abuse of the H1b program. You only need a few instances of abuse to act as a threat to keep other employees in line. I'm glad that you are well treated by your employer, but that really isn't relevant. The fact that your cousin exists as a threat to other workers is sufficient on it's own.
Until recently it was not traditional to buy diamonds. They were not considered as aesthetically desirable compared with other stones (while they have always been more precious than the ones I listed I wanted a common stone to compare to). This culture was changed through marketing. That is why they are more desirable to women.
Buying diamonds are also an example of conspicuous consumption (because they are marketed that way). Part of the reason women want men to buy diamonds is because they are expensive. Heck they might even be a Veblen good! If there is any situation where marketing would pay off, it would be with a Veblen good.
Diamond was expensive in Rome because it was in short supply and because of transport costs. There aren't exactly a whole lot of diamond mines in Europe, but pearls are a bit easier to come by. You cannot compare the two situations other than to say supply does not meet demand in either case. If today diamond was mined and sold by multiple companies instead of supply being controlled by one chain the price would plummet, just as it would have in Rome if a route to diamond mines in Africa had suddenly been discovered.
The price of diamond in Rome was high, the price of diamond is high now. They are high for the same reason, supply is short. The reason supply is short is what has changed.
Marketing can be effective on it's own, but to survive in the long run it is desirable to combine it with other factors (like we have in the diamond market). Diamonds can be effectively marketed in part because they are an expensive luxury good.
I agree with your first point. And I have no problem with globalising labour. If you are prepared to globalise everything else too. I don't mind competing with an Indian engineer if I can get food, electronics and software at Indian prices. Remove all tarrifs, and ensure there are no regional restrictions on any product and we can talk. But we will do labour last, not first. That being said we can certainly get rid of the H1b indentured servitude crap right away.
You are right, diamonds are more expensive than water because of marginal utility. But that is an absurd comparison to make for anything other than illustrating the concept of marginal utility. The question you should be asking is why is diamond more expensive than garnet, or quartz. The least useful thing we can do with either is make jewellery right? Yet one is far more expensive than the others. The reason is that supply is curtailed, and demand increased through marketing.
If demand cant be created by marketing then marketing wouldn't exist. Microsoft is competing with Apple who -do- have a monopoly (iTunes) and who are using that monopoly to keep out competition, and who have engaged in very effective marketing. The music player business is a good analogy, except DeBeers aren't Microsoft, they are Apple!
Or you could pay more...
Government acting to correct a 'shortage' that isn't there to artificially lower the cost of labour is the very definition of a conspiracy.
I'm not sure what you are getting at with the diamond analogy (I'm not even sure it is an analogy). Diamonds are as expensive as they are for two reasons supply is tightly controlled by one company (DeBeers) and domain specific demand is created through marketing.
Your criticism is valid and I've addressed it in another post. I'm not an economist by trade and I sometimes use the wrong language and/or wrong term without sufficient qualification when I talk about fields I'm not familiar with. I've acknowledged this in other criticisms of my remark.
My first point should have said something like "in a functioning market for a good with sufficient price elasticity there is no such thing as a shortage".
I also made two implicit assumptions. First I believe that the engineering labour market is reasonably elastic. I don't think the lag time for getting new engineers would be very long. Of the seven people I graduate with from college (all excellent physicists and smart people with 2:1s or better) only two are working as an engineer or scientist. The rest are management consultants, actuaries, that kind of crap. If they could get double the pay they are getting now by switching to do engineering they could be retrained in a year. I also think that if this 'shortage' was as dire as it is being made out to be then the demand would steam roll the stickiness of the price of labour.
You are correct that there is a lag between increase in demand, and change in supply, but the supply of engineers is plenty elastic enough. There are plenty of engineering graduates working in the city for 5x what they can get as engineers who could retrain in a year to fill the 'shortage' if only it was worth their while. Even if the supply of skilled labour wasn't elastic the way you would tell that there was a shortage is that the cost of the good (in this case engineering labour) would go up. Even with the price stickiness of the labour market, the price of engineering labour should be rising fast and it isn't.
Your other point just compounds the matter further. If the 'shortage' was a result of the uncoolness of engineering, then wages would rise to compensate for this uncoolness. This is exactly the reason that unskilled workers like garbage men are comparatively well paid. There is no shortage because the price is not going up.
You are listing market failures or other conditions that are not present or not significant. If any of them were significant engineers and scientists would be paid far more than they are. Your correction to my language is accurate, but that was just laziness and a lack of experience talking about economics on my part, what I should have said was "in a functioning market there is no such thing as a shortage".
People going to college pick their major based on a number of different things. Are you seriously saying that if engineers earned six or seven figure salaries that smart people doing law degrees wouldn't switch to engineering?
I'm getting real tired of people who want to employ engineers (and their sock puppet politicians) continually screaming "Shortage!".
Japan has (by and large) a market economy. There is no such thing as a shortage in a market economy. If they want more people to do engineering, pay engineers more. You can bet the bank if engineers and scientists were paid football players or rock stars wages, then you wouldn't be able to move for people clamouring to be engineers and scientists.
What people mean when they say "there is a shortage of engineers" is "there is shortage of engineers prepared to do amazing work while being paid less than the idiot with the history of art major in middle management". Big surprise there.
If you are a real market liberal then you would also oppose copyright as government interference in the market. If you are going to hand someone a monopoly on something then you have every right to regulate transactions involving that monopoly however society deems best.
Now either you are one of those evil socialists yourself (it just so happens that you support corporate rather than social welfare) or a real market liberal. Which is it?
It is interesting that you mention DVDs since they are actually a good analogy. I don't agree with this law when applied to competative markets, but when you have a monopoly it is a very sensible law.
Microsoft bullies OEMs into charging everyone who buys a PC into buying a copy of Windows by charging OEMs per PC sold, not per PC with Windows sold. This is obviously anti-competative. They use the threat of denying access to the monopoly product to keep the OEMs in line.
Now the market for an individual DVD is also not competative. The makers of Slasher Movie X - the Reslashening don't compete with anyone for sales of this particular movie because it is illegal to distribute their product without a license. They also have a monopoly. And they also have the potential to abuse it. This is exactly the reason we need fair mandatory licensing for content.
The word you are looking for is totalitarianism. Socialists and Social Conservatives are just about the same in terms of their support for a free society. The difference between left and right is just which freedoms they don't want you to have.
That their operating system comes preinstalled on most hardware?
Seriously I've install DOS, Windows 3.11, Windows 95, 98 and XP (with SATA RAID support), and I've installed Gentoo, Ubuntu (Hardy and Gutsy), and Debian and they were all a monumental pain to get working (although Gentoo was king).
I'd be hard pushed to pick a winner in this catagory. It's like thermonuclear war, there are no winners, and Ubuntu probably loses the least. Windows is pretty far down in the getting hardware to work first time stakes.
This being said my comparison isn't really fair. I've not tried to install Vista yet, and I haven't installed Ubuntu anyhere other than on a virtual hard disk recently, so maybe Vista has made mind blowing improvements and Microsoft's offering has caught up.
Just because NSDAP put the word socialist in thier name, doesn't mean they were socialists. In fact if you want to put them anywhere on the capitalism/communist scale they were centrists by the standard of the day. NSDAP was a name intended to bring everyone in, because it had something that appealed to everybody. On the political right you had National and German. On the left Socialist Workers. The problem with NSDAP was that they were racist authoritarian nut jobs. Not that they were 'socialists'.
I don't think you understand what a free market is. Copyright is government interference. Government grants (government patronage) are also government interference. Both are the antithesis of the free market. I'm not against government interference, what I'm saying is that copyright is government messing around with the free market. If you are going to have government interfere with the free market you had better do it minimally to achieve the desired end.
You are the one proposing state control of entertainment through the copyright system because copyright IS state interference in the market. I happen to think that a little state intervention here is not a bad thing, just like government grants for scientists aren't a bad thing. They are an intervention in the free market though.
Society should do the absolute minimum necessary to support the number of artists it desires. If there aren't enough artists, we should strengthen copyright (I'm prepared to ignore how corrupt the system is for the moment). If we have a glut (which we do) then copyright should be normalised towards the free market.
And what university chair do Ernesto and Kirsty Bertarelli have? Business people are not the same as scientists, even if the business is science.
"The problem with copyright infringement, is you have s situation where a perfect market would allow us to spend 10%, and get 10% worth of enjoyment from the resulting music, but in fact we only spend 1% (or whatever) and the difference is made up by copyright infringement."
It seems to me you are plucking these numbers out of thin air, and I've no idea why one clause here leads to another. I've no idea what effect abolishing copyright would have on the music industry, but I would guess that we would go back to a system of patronage. I do know that reducing the length of copyright to 14 years probably wouldn't have a big impact.
Why if we get the same amount of music produced would only paying 1% for it be a bad thing? You seem to be suggesting that the bad thing about copyright is that we get music for cheap. I would argue that is not the case, the bad thing about copyright is exactly the opposite.
If we need more bankers and plumbers and less musicians then a system that provides us with this is not a net loss to society. I don't think you understand what a free market is.
If you and I enter into a contract you are darn right I expect to be paid. And for all my crappy coding skills people have paid me (in part) to write computer code.
But if we didn't enter into a contract before hand, I don't expect you to pay me for something I publish.
Copyright is a social contract. Society agrees to grant a limited monopoly, artists are able to make money selling their work. Artists, especially artists like Metallica, have abused that monopoly. While they might have legal protection, they have broken the spirit of the social contract and I feel no moral obligation to honor it.
No one has a right to profit from their labor. People have a right to profit from their labor if they agree before hand with someone that they will do X and get paid Y. People have a right to enter contracts. Now artists are part of a social contract called copyright, which grants them some control over reproduction of the results of their efforts to encourage them to undertake them. This benevolence on the part of society is being repeatedly abused by some artists and elements of the artistic industries.
I write crappy computer games in my spare time. I do not expect to be paid for it.
No one is saying musicians have to work for free. The market is saying what musicians do doesn't have much value. Just like the market says that the work of professional scientists like myself don't have much value.
Now you are suggesting that musicians should be able to enjoy the 'fruits of capitalism'. The obvious problem with that is that a true capitalist society has no copyright. You cant own an idea like you can a house. You cant own the distribution rights either. Society in it's benevolence grants artists certain rights under copyright to encourage the creation of art.
So the real question is, what is the minimum amount of messing around with the market we have to do in order to get artists making art. If we want more artists, we have to give more. But we have a glut of artists. We also have a system so corrupt that it is giving artists and distribution companies way more power than they need to further the arts.
This is why copyright needs drastic scaling back. People don't have an inherent right to produce art as a living, just like they don't have an inherent right to study science for a living. It just so happens that society thinks these things are important and are willing to subsidise people to do them. Science through grants, art through copyrights.
You look at the UK rich list I promise you there will be no practising scientists in the list either.