But can't you accept that it has musical and artistic value to people?
Erm, well, sure - in the same sense that I "accept" that cat shit might have food value to some people. But for those same people to expect me to join them in their delusion by agreeing that cat shit does indeed make a tasty and nutritious meal - that's really a bit much.
Well, you're just a glass-is-half-empty sort of person, aren't you?;)
But I'm not sure fission power is a viable alternative in today's political climate, although technologically/environmentally it's far better than almost anything else.
Perhaps, but we're not talking about a barrier that's inherently insurmountable - e.g., due to the laws of physics or whatever. Let gas hit $10 a gallon due to real scarcity, and the idea of electric cars plugged into fission generators will start looking mighty attractive to some of those people who currently object to nuclear power. Let it go to $20 a gallon, and that bandwagon will get somewhat larger still. And you don't have to do anything to encourage that switch, really - the economics drives the choices without any external intervention.
The drug I mentioned before my dad worked on was a simple modification of an existing class of compounds, very similar to the situation you describe. Whoops-it wasn't worth anything.
Does it always work out? Obviously not. But the fact that you and your father chose to pursue the lines of investigation that you did suggests that you thought they might potentially be productive lines of investigation. That is, despite the fact that it didn't work out, neither of you were exactly shooting in the dark, so to speak. I'm sure that along with the failed attempts you can name, you could probably think of at least one or two cases where derivatives were as effective or more effective than their predecessors, if you really put your mind to it;)
Depending on the technology in question, there may well not be alternatives.
We already know there are alternatives - it's just that at the moment, they aren't competitive, economically speaking. Like I said, Europe doesn't hold a patent on fission reactors.
R&D is not a fixed cost. You have no idea how much it is going to cost or how long it will take to develop that alternative, especially in the drug field.
Why are we imagining that my solution has to be some sui generis thing here? I have your work to build off of, and to serve as a benchmark for my own. The people who developed amoxicillin had a pretty good idea of how to proceed and how much it would cost, simply by looking at the development paths and costs of similar solutions - e.g., ampicillin.
You mean licenses the patents from European companies, buys the equipment from European companies, and hires experts and contractors from Europe to actually implement it all?
You forgot #4 - "use something else". Consider option 1 in light of that:
Pay $$$$ to use this idea
Either that's the cheapest alternative, or it isn't. But it's hardly the only alternative, so the price can't be truly extortionate - it has to be lower than what it costs me to use the pre-existing alternates, or I use those, save money, and I win. Even if it was the only alternative, your asking price still has to be lower than what it would cost for me to develop my own solution, or I'll develop my own, save money, and I win. Either way, I win.
It's a comparative measure - as long as the price of oil is lower than the alternatives, it'll be viable, no matter how expensive it is in absolute terms. That being said, change it to "when", if you want;)
In any case, whether some magic bullet comes along or not is really irrelevant. There are already alternatives to petroleum that are, at the moment, simply at a competitive disadvantage for one reason or another. Restructuring the current regulatory regime where appropriate - that is, by removing regulatory barriers to alternatives, rather than creating barriers for current technology - is very much a worthwhile exercise. And in any case, once the price of oil rises high enough, those alternatives will eventually become economically attractive in and of themselves. Even if one petroleum based unit of energy currently costs $X, and the alternative costs 10X, that alternative becomes viable the minute oil hits a price of $10X+1, with no need to monkey around with promoting or disparaging any technology.
I think you mean "Pay through the nose for the patented technology the Euros have discovered in the mean time."
Or "laughs riotously at the fact that the Euros spent a ton of money without coming up with a silver bullet." Either way. Not to mention that alternatives already exist - the Euros don't have a patent on nuclear reactors, for starters. The fact that they are currently economically unviable is a comparative measure - they are only unviable in comparison with petroleum, which means that at some point, the price of oil can/will rise to the point that alternatives that are currently unviable become viable.
Let's outsource all R&D to other places!
I don't think you understand how this works. If I, as a third-world country, want to make antibiotics, I don't have to wait for a native version of Alexander Fleming to spring up, and then start from scratch - I just have to read the literature thoughtfully provided by the real Alexander Fleming and his first-world successors. Nothing truly groundbreaking is going to stay secret for long, patent or not.
As non-renewable sources are depleted (or grow more expensive), it will be better to have an extra decade or so of development - not to be desperately scrambling for a solution.
Except that there are distinct advantages to being second in such a case. Let the Euros make the huge investment in R&D for feasible alternatives, while the US continues to enjoy cheap energy via petroleum. Then, if/when oil becomes economically infeasible, the US simply borrows whatever magic solution the Euros have discovered in the mean time.
Sometimes it's cheaper and easier to let someone else do the pioneering.
If not, why won't these arrests be thrown out of court?
They weren't arrested by US authorities, nor are they being prosecuted in US courts - the agencies that arrested them, presumably the RCMP and MI5, are not bound by the US constitution, and operate under the laws of their own nations, not those of the United States. Even if they were being extradited to the United States, the law is quite clear - non-resident aliens not within the United States and/or its territories and possesions are not entitled to the protections of the Bill of Rights, specifically, the Fourth Amendment.
Or don't Canadian and Brittish courts care about search warrants?
The RCMP and MI5 undoubtedly conducted their own investigation, and didn't simply run off to arrest people just because NSA said so. During the course of that investigation, those agencies were bound by whatever laws were in effect in their respective nations. Canada does, IIRC, recognize an exclusionary rule similar to that of the United States, but the UK does not. IIRC, of course - detailed questions should be directed to qualified experts in the laws of those nations.;)
Or don't warrants apply in international law?
Not the way you apparently think they do, anyway. Had the subjects been American citizens, a warrant for any sort of extended surveillance would have been in order for the NSA, if there were plans to prosecute in the US. The RCMP and MI5 operate according whatever the laws of Canada and the UK say about warrants and surveillance.
Most importantly, click raise is still on, and significantly a large number of apps are poorly coded and raise when receiving focus rather than when receiving a click - that means draging your mouse across the desktop causes a cascade of windows hauling themselves up over everything else.
Normally I can sympathize with this sort of thing, but I have to tell you that I've never had that happen to me using mouse focus under Win2k. Not "rarely" or "once in a while" - never. Not once. Makes me wonder how the two of us can have such radically different experiences with it.
In all honesty though, why hasn't any UI had a check box under the mouse settings which says "Click here to have focus follow mouse."
Errr, well, I realize this is/. and all, and that Microsoft is therefore the Evil Empire, but actually the TweakUI add-on for Windows has a checkbox that says exactly that, and has for several years now.
The reason is that we know that people are not perfectly rational economic agents: they have limited information and they have limited resources to reason things through. So, people make suboptimal choices.
Fine, but that's always going to be true, no matter what you do - none of us are omniscient, after all. We make do with the information we have at hand, but you're not really talking about value-neutral information in the end anyway - "I don't like diamonds" is "information" of a sort, but not objective, factual information that assists anyone else in the decision to buy or not buy a diamond. It's a statement of your position, which, unless you're operating on the assumption that everyone cares what you think, is not particularly useful information when it comes to the decision to buy or not to buy.
Now, some of their suboptimal choices I don't care about, but other suboptimal choices also hurt me personally.
This would be a good place to show how someone else buying a diamond hurts you personally.
The ability to share information and to share reasoning in order to benefit each other is a fundamental aspect of human societies and human economic behavior (non zero-sum game)
But again, you're not sharing information or reasoning of the sort that is useful to others. Saying, for example, that buying diamonds is "lining the pockets of DeBeers" is one of those trivially true things that doesn't tell anyone they didn't already know. Buying a Big Mac? You're "lining the pockets" of McDonalds. But you already knew that, didn't you? Saying that buying diamonds contributes to "unnecessary" mining is a statement of opinion, not of fact - how can "unnecessary" be anything other than a subjective judgement?
That is, I'm saying, if you don't like big mining cartels, don't buy diamonds. I'm not telling you to dislike big mining cartels, I'm simply assuming you don't.
Why would you assume that people happen to share your values, particularly those people who have decided to go out and buy a diamond? It's all well and good to talk about the bad things that happen when people don't have all the available information, but when you talk about specific decisions, you really have no way of knowing what information those people have, nor what factors they considered in their decision, do you? Isn't it entirely possible that there exist people who have access to all the information you have, and yet still disagree with you? Isn't it just a touch arrogant to assume that if people had more information, they would agree with you, and that those who disagree with you lack some relevant information? Isn't it also possible that those who decide to buy diamonds have information that you lack, and therefore your decision is the suboptimal decision?
Same deal: if you want to attract frauds and thieves and if you want your image to be that of someone who has recently come into modest amounts of money, go ahead, show off; but you should be aware of what you are doing and what the consequences are.
Same deal: you're simply assuming that people who don't act in accordance with what you think is the optimal course are lacking information you have. But you have no way of knowing that. You don't know what you don't know, in the end.
To talk about "market value" in diamonds is a ridiculous notion - the concept doesn't apply.
If that were the case, you wouldn't be able to sell your diamonds at all. But you can, although the point has been raised that you probably won't get back what you paid for it. Which is true, but all that means is that diamonds are worth less in secondary markets than they are in the first instance. This is not unique to diamonds, as I said before.
Well, if that is your view, why don't you tell DeBeers and Jaguar not to advertise?
Because I'm perfectly happy allowing adults to work out their own interactions for themselves, without feeling the need to inject my own values into someone else's transactions.
I gave a much more specific argument than that.
Did you? Let's see - "If you demonstrate your ability to dispose of income by buying a diamond..."
...you are lining the pockets of the DeBeers cartel...
"I don't like DeBeers."
....contributing to unnecessary and destructive mining operations....
"I don't like mining."
If you demonstrate your ability to dispose of income by contribution to a charity, cultural or artistic cause, or to medical or scientific research, you may achieve some additional good.
"I like these other things instead. And so should you."
And so forth. Okay, the "you should too" bit is implied, but it's a fairly straightforward reading. And what are all those but your own subjective value judgments? "Giving your money to DeBeers is bad, because I say so. Giving your money to this other person is good, because I say so." Well, not to put too fine of a point on it, but who are you?
And that's, not surprisingly, why charitable giving "in lieu of gifts/flowers" is actually becoming more and more socially acceptable.
In the obituary pages, maybe, but if you'll glance upwards, you'll notice an article up above that details the emergence of a social circle that places value on the giving of wholly nonexistent (but expensive) gifts. You may think that foolish and wrong - it's obvious you do - but it's not your choice, and their choices are neither better or worse than yours, only different.
There's a reason those glossy utility charts and graphs in your intro to microeconomics text were unitless - personal desires are not an inherently quantifiable concept, and therefore the idea of comparing and ranking them by any means other than the gross tool of exchange value is a dead end.
Demonstrating that you have lots of money is a bad idea.
LOL. And that statement is a matter of objective, universal, no-two-ways-about-it truth, right?
If I could wave a magic wand, I would not eliminate Jaguars, I'd simply bring their pricing in line with functionally equivalent cars from other manufacturers.
That's effectively the same thing as waving a magic wand and eliminating them outright - people who buy Jaguars rather than Toyotas buy them because they're more expensive. Eliminate the price difference, and you've eliminated the thing that differentiates Jaguars from Toyotas in most people's minds.
Modern psychologists and economists are saying exactly that: choice not only has an economic cost associated with it, it also often makes people unhappy.
There is some question about how much choice consumers are comfortable with, but I don't think you'll get very far arguing that no choice at all is therefore the best outcome. The fact that people can feel overwhelmed when faced with a hundred different brands of toothpaste does not lead to the conclusion that one and only one brand is their preferred set of options.
Contrary to the very limited view you seem to have of humans and their social and economic interactions, I and everybody else has a lot more choices than whether to buy or not to buy.
Do you want to discuss economic interactions, or social interactions? Given that you seemed to be starting off with economic interactions, you really do have only two options - buy or don't buy. If you want to discuss social interactions, that's another ball of wax. As I said before, deconstruct away, but don't be surprised if most people don't react the way you think they "should".
Just like each of us has every right to spend our money any way we like, each of us also has every right to disapprove of, and publicly criticize, each other's spending decisions. It's a free country, and that applies to both spending and speech.
Of course, you can probably expect someone to exercise their freedom to point out that you're simply arguing that people should substitute your subjective values for their own currently held values, for no particular reason other than because you think they ought to. Why don't you instead adopt my values and preferences? I think you ought to do that, personally, although I suspect you'll react to that suggestion in much the same way as most people will tend to react to your suggestion that their values are somehow incorrect. You should definitely buy a diamond. And a Jaguar. You are failing to consider the social benefits of owning premium goods, and therefore your values are incorrect. Trust me.;)
Diamonds are routinely pitched as investment items akin to gold.
Caveat emptor. It's incumbent upon you to take responsibility for understanding and wisely choosing your own investments, whatever you choose to "invest" in, whether it's diamonds or gold or stock or carpet lint.
The diamond in my mother's engagement ring from 40-odd years ago is no different today than back then.
Yeah, but DeBeers does provide value in one sense. If I want to buy a particularly sparkly and flawless diamond, I can be reasonably sure that the gradations DeBeers assigns to its stones have some objective basis. Their reputation is all they have, and that reputation depends on it being so. Unless I'm a gemological expert myself, I pretty much have to take your word for it about the qualities of the diamond you're selling, which many people are loathe to do. More risk to me equals lower price for you - that's the way the ball bounces, whether it's diamonds or anything else.
That is, how much more are people willing to pay for an Apple rather than a non-name box, for a Dell rather than a non-name box, for a Jaguar rather than for an equally powerful Toyota, etc.
Jaguar = $X. Toyota = $Y. $X - $Y = something, I guess. Would you prefer that cars, gems, computers, et cetera, were all identical, all coming in plain white boxes marked "CAR", "GEM", "COMPUTER", and so forth? Really, you're coming perilously close to suggesting that less choice is better than more choice, and I have to admit that's a new one on me.;)
And like innumerable other manufacturers that sell their products for far more than equivalent no-name products, consumers should be aware what they are paying for: the brand name and the appearances.
You make it sound almost revelatory. Really, you're not alone in understanding this. But even if you are, so what? So what if people buy things for reasons you disapprove of? If I want to take all my money, pile it up in the yard, set it on fire, and use it to roast marshmallows, how on earth does that affect you that you feel compelled to lecture others about how to handle their own money? Would you listen to someone who suggested that you were foolish for not buying the latest fashions in clothes, cars, music, et cetera? How are your preferences any less subjective than that person's would be?
Many people, when they actually think about why diamonds cost as much as they do, will end up valuing them less. And, as far as I'm concerned, that's a good thing.
Why? Because you disapprove of how other people are spending their money?
Gems actually used to be scarce....They really are just selling a brand.
So what? So is Jaguar. So is Nike. So is McDonalds. So is Red Hat. You make it sound like some evil unique to diamonds, when in fact it's simply the way business is done by virtually any company you care to name.
The branding bit is standard corporate fare and people like me think the image should be deconstructed.
Deconstruct away, but it won't do you a bit of good. People like the effects of branding. It makes them happy to feel that they've got something special, rather than a big white box labeled "CAR", just like everyone else's. Even when they're on the outside looking in, it gives them something to aspire to, to pursue, an incentive to achieve. They buy a Jaguar or a diamond or a $3,000 Armani suit because of that little bit of psychological uplift they get from owning those things. Hey, maybe you're right - maybe people are living a lie by living that way, but they're happier that way, and they simply won't listen when you try to take that feeling away from them. They want to feel special, to feel different, no matter how illusory you find that to be. Sorry, but that's the truth - you're forever doomed to be the only enlightened one in the world;)
The cartel bit is arguably illegal and certainly contrary to free market principles.
Probably, but they've been pretty successful about insulating themselves against any enforcement, particularly since I see no signs that anyone is interested in making it stick by invading South Africa or whatever. In the end, you're always free to not buy diamonds, if you so wish, just as others are free to do so if they wish.
In my opinion, DeBeers's activities are economically and socially worthless or even harmful.
For better or for worse, societies and economies are not built around your personal preferences. You have the same choice everyone else has - to buy or not to buy. I reiterate one of my earlier points - if people didn't value diamonds as highly as DeBeers does, they simply wouldn't buy them. Whether or not you think they "should" value them that highly is neither here nor there - they do, and that's that. Your personal preferences are no more or less subjective than anyone else's, and arguing against people's subjective value preferences based on your own subjective value preferences amounts to precious little more than you announcing that your way is better just because you say so. It may make you feel better to say it, but don't expect anyone to take it particularly seriously.
But in the case of diamonds, we aren't talking about arbitrary psychological reasons...
Sure we are. DeBeers has done the same thing that innumerable other manufacturers have done, from Jaguar to Apple Computers to Miller beer - they've found a way to appeal to consumers by creating psychological responses attendant to their product. There's no physical quality to Kobe beef that makes it more appealing than pigs' feet, and yet people pay much, much more for Kobe than for a jar of pickled pigs' feet. A Jaguar doesn't do anything more, carwise, than does a Hyundai, and yet people pay five times more for a Jaguar than they do for a Hyundai. So why single out diamonds as being a particularly egregious example of things being sold beyond what we might call their value-in-the-absence-of-marketing?
Further, isn't a certain amount of marketing inevitable? If Hyundai makes a million cars, but doesn't tell anyone, they won't sell any of them. Can we then infer that, in the absence of marketing, a Hyundai is actually worthless? Can we further castigate Hyundai for artificially inflating the price above their value-in-the-absence-of-marketing of zero? Or is it that you object to diamonds in a way that you don't object to Jaguars or Hyundais or Macintoshes?;)
We can ask how much people would be paying for steak if it weren't for the Meat Producers of America marketing campaigns. The answer is: probably about the same as they are paying now--as you say, people just like the taste of meat.
Which leads one to wonder exactly what the point of marketing by meat producers is, if you're right. After all, you say their ROI is just about zero - worse than zero, really, since you say they're wasting money on advertising that does nothing for their business - and yet they apparently piss away millions each year promoting the sale of beef and pork and chicken. Why?
We can ask how much people would be paying for diamonds if it weren't for DeBeers marketing. The answer is: probably much less than they are paying now
A claim not borne out by the historical record, unfortunately. People have been spending obscene amounts of money for gems for thousands of years, despite the fact that "marketing" in the modern sense hardly existed. Gems have been highly prized throughout history, and therefore mostly been the exclusive province of the rich due to that. All DeBeers has done is bring that same cachet to the masses, along with the ability to actually realize it. Want a really nice diamond? You don't have to be the Duc d'Waffles or whatever any more, unlike in 1600 or so, thanks to the efforts of DeBeers, et al...
You won't get back what you paid when you sell your car, your clothes, your college textbooks, your stereo, your computer, or just about anything else you own. What else is new?
Yes, and my point is that they "value them as highly" for psychological reasons.
Fine, but this is trivially true of just about everything - people assign the values that they do to things for purely psychological reasons, no matter which thing it is we're discussing in particular. You could, if you wished, survive just fine on a steady diet of tofu, water, and nutritional supplements, but I'm willing to bet that you spend a little extra each week on food for somewhat subjective reasons.
Asking how much people would pay for diamonds if diamonds weren't seen as a token of esteem is somewhat like asking how much people would pay for steak if it wasn't tasty. "Not much" is the answer, but that doesn't really tell us anything we didn't already know - you've simply restated the observation that people won't pay as much for things that they don't like as much. They apparently like the taste of steak, arguments about what would happen if they didn't notwithstanding.
That doesn't change the fact that things actually do have a "use value": the concrete way in which a thing meets human needs.
Argue for that idea all you like, but I predict serious problems when you sit down and try to quantify such a thing. Exchange value is hardly the only way to value things, but it's the only way that's even remotely close to objective.
It's only through DeBeers' marketing and advertising genius combined with their iron control on supply of the market that people value diamonds as they do.
Perhaps, but ultimately we're all responsible for our own decisions. If you don't buy into the DeBeers marketing, as you're certainly free to choose, then nobody will force you to buy diamonds. If, on the other hand, your Auric Goldfinger-ish nature causes you to desire diamonds above all else, you can buy as many as you like - or as many as you can afford, anyway. But either way, who am I to begrudge you your choice, or to argue that you're somehow not capable of rationally deciding for yourself? Emotional blackmail or not, you don't have to see things their way, just because they say so.
Not that my wife gives a flying fuck about my uber-rational arguments, of course - sometimes it's easier to just go with the flow, no matter how dumb you think it might be. Trust me;)
The real value of diamonds is a small fraction of what they cost in the market.
The "real value" of any good or service is whatever you can get in exchange for it - any notion of intrinsic worth is a specious concept, as is any valuation other than exchange value. If people didn't value diamonds as highly as DeBeers does, they simply wouldn't buy them.
Slashdot Mirror
Erm, well, sure - in the same sense that I "accept" that cat shit might have food value to some people. But for those same people to expect me to join them in their delusion by agreeing that cat shit does indeed make a tasty and nutritious meal - that's really a bit much.
But I'm not sure fission power is a viable alternative in today's political climate, although technologically/environmentally it's far better than almost anything else.
Perhaps, but we're not talking about a barrier that's inherently insurmountable - e.g., due to the laws of physics or whatever. Let gas hit $10 a gallon due to real scarcity, and the idea of electric cars plugged into fission generators will start looking mighty attractive to some of those people who currently object to nuclear power. Let it go to $20 a gallon, and that bandwagon will get somewhat larger still. And you don't have to do anything to encourage that switch, really - the economics drives the choices without any external intervention.
The drug I mentioned before my dad worked on was a simple modification of an existing class of compounds, very similar to the situation you describe. Whoops-it wasn't worth anything.
Does it always work out? Obviously not. But the fact that you and your father chose to pursue the lines of investigation that you did suggests that you thought they might potentially be productive lines of investigation. That is, despite the fact that it didn't work out, neither of you were exactly shooting in the dark, so to speak. I'm sure that along with the failed attempts you can name, you could probably think of at least one or two cases where derivatives were as effective or more effective than their predecessors, if you really put your mind to it ;)
We already know there are alternatives - it's just that at the moment, they aren't competitive, economically speaking. Like I said, Europe doesn't hold a patent on fission reactors.
R&D is not a fixed cost. You have no idea how much it is going to cost or how long it will take to develop that alternative, especially in the drug field.
Why are we imagining that my solution has to be some sui generis thing here? I have your work to build off of, and to serve as a benchmark for my own. The people who developed amoxicillin had a pretty good idea of how to proceed and how much it would cost, simply by looking at the development paths and costs of similar solutions - e.g., ampicillin.
See previous comment.
Pay $$$$ to use this idea
Either that's the cheapest alternative, or it isn't. But it's hardly the only alternative, so the price can't be truly extortionate - it has to be lower than what it costs me to use the pre-existing alternates, or I use those, save money, and I win. Even if it was the only alternative, your asking price still has to be lower than what it would cost for me to develop my own solution, or I'll develop my own, save money, and I win. Either way, I win.
It's a comparative measure - as long as the price of oil is lower than the alternatives, it'll be viable, no matter how expensive it is in absolute terms. That being said, change it to "when", if you want ;)
In any case, whether some magic bullet comes along or not is really irrelevant. There are already alternatives to petroleum that are, at the moment, simply at a competitive disadvantage for one reason or another. Restructuring the current regulatory regime where appropriate - that is, by removing regulatory barriers to alternatives, rather than creating barriers for current technology - is very much a worthwhile exercise. And in any case, once the price of oil rises high enough, those alternatives will eventually become economically attractive in and of themselves. Even if one petroleum based unit of energy currently costs $X, and the alternative costs 10X, that alternative becomes viable the minute oil hits a price of $10X+1, with no need to monkey around with promoting or disparaging any technology.
Or "laughs riotously at the fact that the Euros spent a ton of money without coming up with a silver bullet." Either way. Not to mention that alternatives already exist - the Euros don't have a patent on nuclear reactors, for starters. The fact that they are currently economically unviable is a comparative measure - they are only unviable in comparison with petroleum, which means that at some point, the price of oil can/will rise to the point that alternatives that are currently unviable become viable.
Let's outsource all R&D to other places!
I don't think you understand how this works. If I, as a third-world country, want to make antibiotics, I don't have to wait for a native version of Alexander Fleming to spring up, and then start from scratch - I just have to read the literature thoughtfully provided by the real Alexander Fleming and his first-world successors. Nothing truly groundbreaking is going to stay secret for long, patent or not.
Except that there are distinct advantages to being second in such a case. Let the Euros make the huge investment in R&D for feasible alternatives, while the US continues to enjoy cheap energy via petroleum. Then, if/when oil becomes economically infeasible, the US simply borrows whatever magic solution the Euros have discovered in the mean time.
Sometimes it's cheaper and easier to let someone else do the pioneering.
Highly unlikely.
If not, why won't these arrests be thrown out of court?
They weren't arrested by US authorities, nor are they being prosecuted in US courts - the agencies that arrested them, presumably the RCMP and MI5, are not bound by the US constitution, and operate under the laws of their own nations, not those of the United States. Even if they were being extradited to the United States, the law is quite clear - non-resident aliens not within the United States and/or its territories and possesions are not entitled to the protections of the Bill of Rights, specifically, the Fourth Amendment.
Or don't Canadian and Brittish courts care about search warrants?
The RCMP and MI5 undoubtedly conducted their own investigation, and didn't simply run off to arrest people just because NSA said so. During the course of that investigation, those agencies were bound by whatever laws were in effect in their respective nations. Canada does, IIRC, recognize an exclusionary rule similar to that of the United States, but the UK does not. IIRC, of course - detailed questions should be directed to qualified experts in the laws of those nations. ;)
Or don't warrants apply in international law?
Not the way you apparently think they do, anyway. Had the subjects been American citizens, a warrant for any sort of extended surveillance would have been in order for the NSA, if there were plans to prosecute in the US. The RCMP and MI5 operate according whatever the laws of Canada and the UK say about warrants and surveillance.
Normally I can sympathize with this sort of thing, but I have to tell you that I've never had that happen to me using mouse focus under Win2k. Not "rarely" or "once in a while" - never. Not once. Makes me wonder how the two of us can have such radically different experiences with it.
Errr, well, I realize this is /. and all, and that Microsoft is therefore the Evil Empire, but actually the TweakUI add-on for Windows has a checkbox that says exactly that, and has for several years now.
Tweak UI for XP
TweakUI for 2k and prior versions
I've noticed ;)
The reason is that we know that people are not perfectly rational economic agents: they have limited information and they have limited resources to reason things through. So, people make suboptimal choices.
Fine, but that's always going to be true, no matter what you do - none of us are omniscient, after all. We make do with the information we have at hand, but you're not really talking about value-neutral information in the end anyway - "I don't like diamonds" is "information" of a sort, but not objective, factual information that assists anyone else in the decision to buy or not buy a diamond. It's a statement of your position, which, unless you're operating on the assumption that everyone cares what you think, is not particularly useful information when it comes to the decision to buy or not to buy.
Now, some of their suboptimal choices I don't care about, but other suboptimal choices also hurt me personally.
This would be a good place to show how someone else buying a diamond hurts you personally.
The ability to share information and to share reasoning in order to benefit each other is a fundamental aspect of human societies and human economic behavior (non zero-sum game)
But again, you're not sharing information or reasoning of the sort that is useful to others. Saying, for example, that buying diamonds is "lining the pockets of DeBeers" is one of those trivially true things that doesn't tell anyone they didn't already know. Buying a Big Mac? You're "lining the pockets" of McDonalds. But you already knew that, didn't you? Saying that buying diamonds contributes to "unnecessary" mining is a statement of opinion, not of fact - how can "unnecessary" be anything other than a subjective judgement?
That is, I'm saying, if you don't like big mining cartels, don't buy diamonds. I'm not telling you to dislike big mining cartels, I'm simply assuming you don't.
Why would you assume that people happen to share your values, particularly those people who have decided to go out and buy a diamond? It's all well and good to talk about the bad things that happen when people don't have all the available information, but when you talk about specific decisions, you really have no way of knowing what information those people have, nor what factors they considered in their decision, do you? Isn't it entirely possible that there exist people who have access to all the information you have, and yet still disagree with you? Isn't it just a touch arrogant to assume that if people had more information, they would agree with you, and that those who disagree with you lack some relevant information? Isn't it also possible that those who decide to buy diamonds have information that you lack, and therefore your decision is the suboptimal decision?
Same deal: if you want to attract frauds and thieves and if you want your image to be that of someone who has recently come into modest amounts of money, go ahead, show off; but you should be aware of what you are doing and what the consequences are.
Same deal: you're simply assuming that people who don't act in accordance with what you think is the optimal course are lacking information you have. But you have no way of knowing that. You don't know what you don't know, in the end.
To talk about "market value" in diamonds is a ridiculous notion - the concept doesn't apply.
If that were the case, you wouldn't be able to sell your diamonds at all. But you can, although the point has been raised that you probably won't get back what you paid for it. Which is true, but all that means is that diamonds are worth less in secondary markets than they are in the first instance. This is not unique to diamonds, as I said before.
Because I'm perfectly happy allowing adults to work out their own interactions for themselves, without feeling the need to inject my own values into someone else's transactions.
I gave a much more specific argument than that.
Did you? Let's see - "If you demonstrate your ability to dispose of income by buying a diamond..."
"I don't like DeBeers."
"I don't like mining."
If you demonstrate your ability to dispose of income by contribution to a charity, cultural or artistic cause, or to medical or scientific research, you may achieve some additional good.
"I like these other things instead. And so should you."
And so forth. Okay, the "you should too" bit is implied, but it's a fairly straightforward reading. And what are all those but your own subjective value judgments? "Giving your money to DeBeers is bad, because I say so. Giving your money to this other person is good, because I say so." Well, not to put too fine of a point on it, but who are you?
And that's, not surprisingly, why charitable giving "in lieu of gifts/flowers" is actually becoming more and more socially acceptable.
In the obituary pages, maybe, but if you'll glance upwards, you'll notice an article up above that details the emergence of a social circle that places value on the giving of wholly nonexistent (but expensive) gifts. You may think that foolish and wrong - it's obvious you do - but it's not your choice, and their choices are neither better or worse than yours, only different.
There's a reason those glossy utility charts and graphs in your intro to microeconomics text were unitless - personal desires are not an inherently quantifiable concept, and therefore the idea of comparing and ranking them by any means other than the gross tool of exchange value is a dead end.
Demonstrating that you have lots of money is a bad idea.
LOL. And that statement is a matter of objective, universal, no-two-ways-about-it truth, right?
Well, thanks for demonstrating my point, anyway ;)
That's effectively the same thing as waving a magic wand and eliminating them outright - people who buy Jaguars rather than Toyotas buy them because they're more expensive. Eliminate the price difference, and you've eliminated the thing that differentiates Jaguars from Toyotas in most people's minds.
Modern psychologists and economists are saying exactly that: choice not only has an economic cost associated with it, it also often makes people unhappy.
There is some question about how much choice consumers are comfortable with, but I don't think you'll get very far arguing that no choice at all is therefore the best outcome. The fact that people can feel overwhelmed when faced with a hundred different brands of toothpaste does not lead to the conclusion that one and only one brand is their preferred set of options.
Contrary to the very limited view you seem to have of humans and their social and economic interactions, I and everybody else has a lot more choices than whether to buy or not to buy.
Do you want to discuss economic interactions, or social interactions? Given that you seemed to be starting off with economic interactions, you really do have only two options - buy or don't buy. If you want to discuss social interactions, that's another ball of wax. As I said before, deconstruct away, but don't be surprised if most people don't react the way you think they "should".
Just like each of us has every right to spend our money any way we like, each of us also has every right to disapprove of, and publicly criticize, each other's spending decisions. It's a free country, and that applies to both spending and speech.
Of course, you can probably expect someone to exercise their freedom to point out that you're simply arguing that people should substitute your subjective values for their own currently held values, for no particular reason other than because you think they ought to. Why don't you instead adopt my values and preferences? I think you ought to do that, personally, although I suspect you'll react to that suggestion in much the same way as most people will tend to react to your suggestion that their values are somehow incorrect. You should definitely buy a diamond. And a Jaguar. You are failing to consider the social benefits of owning premium goods, and therefore your values are incorrect. Trust me. ;)
Caveat emptor. It's incumbent upon you to take responsibility for understanding and wisely choosing your own investments, whatever you choose to "invest" in, whether it's diamonds or gold or stock or carpet lint.
The diamond in my mother's engagement ring from 40-odd years ago is no different today than back then.
Yeah, but DeBeers does provide value in one sense. If I want to buy a particularly sparkly and flawless diamond, I can be reasonably sure that the gradations DeBeers assigns to its stones have some objective basis. Their reputation is all they have, and that reputation depends on it being so. Unless I'm a gemological expert myself, I pretty much have to take your word for it about the qualities of the diamond you're selling, which many people are loathe to do. More risk to me equals lower price for you - that's the way the ball bounces, whether it's diamonds or anything else.
Jaguar = $X. Toyota = $Y. $X - $Y = something, I guess. Would you prefer that cars, gems, computers, et cetera, were all identical, all coming in plain white boxes marked "CAR", "GEM", "COMPUTER", and so forth? Really, you're coming perilously close to suggesting that less choice is better than more choice, and I have to admit that's a new one on me. ;)
And like innumerable other manufacturers that sell their products for far more than equivalent no-name products, consumers should be aware what they are paying for: the brand name and the appearances.
You make it sound almost revelatory. Really, you're not alone in understanding this. But even if you are, so what? So what if people buy things for reasons you disapprove of? If I want to take all my money, pile it up in the yard, set it on fire, and use it to roast marshmallows, how on earth does that affect you that you feel compelled to lecture others about how to handle their own money? Would you listen to someone who suggested that you were foolish for not buying the latest fashions in clothes, cars, music, et cetera? How are your preferences any less subjective than that person's would be?
Many people, when they actually think about why diamonds cost as much as they do, will end up valuing them less. And, as far as I'm concerned, that's a good thing.
Why? Because you disapprove of how other people are spending their money?
Gems actually used to be scarce....They really are just selling a brand.
So what? So is Jaguar. So is Nike. So is McDonalds. So is Red Hat. You make it sound like some evil unique to diamonds, when in fact it's simply the way business is done by virtually any company you care to name.
The branding bit is standard corporate fare and people like me think the image should be deconstructed.
Deconstruct away, but it won't do you a bit of good. People like the effects of branding. It makes them happy to feel that they've got something special, rather than a big white box labeled "CAR", just like everyone else's. Even when they're on the outside looking in, it gives them something to aspire to, to pursue, an incentive to achieve. They buy a Jaguar or a diamond or a $3,000 Armani suit because of that little bit of psychological uplift they get from owning those things. Hey, maybe you're right - maybe people are living a lie by living that way, but they're happier that way, and they simply won't listen when you try to take that feeling away from them. They want to feel special, to feel different, no matter how illusory you find that to be. Sorry, but that's the truth - you're forever doomed to be the only enlightened one in the world ;)
The cartel bit is arguably illegal and certainly contrary to free market principles.
Probably, but they've been pretty successful about insulating themselves against any enforcement, particularly since I see no signs that anyone is interested in making it stick by invading South Africa or whatever. In the end, you're always free to not buy diamonds, if you so wish, just as others are free to do so if they wish.
In my opinion, DeBeers's activities are economically and socially worthless or even harmful.
For better or for worse, societies and economies are not built around your personal preferences. You have the same choice everyone else has - to buy or not to buy. I reiterate one of my earlier points - if people didn't value diamonds as highly as DeBeers does, they simply wouldn't buy them. Whether or not you think they "should" value them that highly is neither here nor there - they do, and that's that. Your personal preferences are no more or less subjective than anyone else's, and arguing against people's subjective value preferences based on your own subjective value preferences amounts to precious little more than you announcing that your way is better just because you say so. It may make you feel better to say it, but don't expect anyone to take it particularly seriously.
Sure we are. DeBeers has done the same thing that innumerable other manufacturers have done, from Jaguar to Apple Computers to Miller beer - they've found a way to appeal to consumers by creating psychological responses attendant to their product. There's no physical quality to Kobe beef that makes it more appealing than pigs' feet, and yet people pay much, much more for Kobe than for a jar of pickled pigs' feet. A Jaguar doesn't do anything more, carwise, than does a Hyundai, and yet people pay five times more for a Jaguar than they do for a Hyundai. So why single out diamonds as being a particularly egregious example of things being sold beyond what we might call their value-in-the-absence-of-marketing?
Further, isn't a certain amount of marketing inevitable? If Hyundai makes a million cars, but doesn't tell anyone, they won't sell any of them. Can we then infer that, in the absence of marketing, a Hyundai is actually worthless? Can we further castigate Hyundai for artificially inflating the price above their value-in-the-absence-of-marketing of zero? Or is it that you object to diamonds in a way that you don't object to Jaguars or Hyundais or Macintoshes? ;)
We can ask how much people would be paying for steak if it weren't for the Meat Producers of America marketing campaigns. The answer is: probably about the same as they are paying now--as you say, people just like the taste of meat.
Which leads one to wonder exactly what the point of marketing by meat producers is, if you're right. After all, you say their ROI is just about zero - worse than zero, really, since you say they're wasting money on advertising that does nothing for their business - and yet they apparently piss away millions each year promoting the sale of beef and pork and chicken. Why?
We can ask how much people would be paying for diamonds if it weren't for DeBeers marketing. The answer is: probably much less than they are paying now
A claim not borne out by the historical record, unfortunately. People have been spending obscene amounts of money for gems for thousands of years, despite the fact that "marketing" in the modern sense hardly existed. Gems have been highly prized throughout history, and therefore mostly been the exclusive province of the rich due to that. All DeBeers has done is bring that same cachet to the masses, along with the ability to actually realize it. Want a really nice diamond? You don't have to be the Duc d'Waffles or whatever any more, unlike in 1600 or so, thanks to the efforts of DeBeers, et al...
You won't get back what you paid when you sell your car, your clothes, your college textbooks, your stereo, your computer, or just about anything else you own. What else is new?
Fine, but this is trivially true of just about everything - people assign the values that they do to things for purely psychological reasons, no matter which thing it is we're discussing in particular. You could, if you wished, survive just fine on a steady diet of tofu, water, and nutritional supplements, but I'm willing to bet that you spend a little extra each week on food for somewhat subjective reasons.
Asking how much people would pay for diamonds if diamonds weren't seen as a token of esteem is somewhat like asking how much people would pay for steak if it wasn't tasty. "Not much" is the answer, but that doesn't really tell us anything we didn't already know - you've simply restated the observation that people won't pay as much for things that they don't like as much. They apparently like the taste of steak, arguments about what would happen if they didn't notwithstanding.
Yeah, I haven't found anyone who will pay me to fuck them either. Maybe those DeBeers guys can offer me some marketing tips. ;)
Argue for that idea all you like, but I predict serious problems when you sit down and try to quantify such a thing. Exchange value is hardly the only way to value things, but it's the only way that's even remotely close to objective.
Perhaps, but ultimately we're all responsible for our own decisions. If you don't buy into the DeBeers marketing, as you're certainly free to choose, then nobody will force you to buy diamonds. If, on the other hand, your Auric Goldfinger-ish nature causes you to desire diamonds above all else, you can buy as many as you like - or as many as you can afford, anyway. But either way, who am I to begrudge you your choice, or to argue that you're somehow not capable of rationally deciding for yourself? Emotional blackmail or not, you don't have to see things their way, just because they say so.
Not that my wife gives a flying fuck about my uber-rational arguments, of course - sometimes it's easier to just go with the flow, no matter how dumb you think it might be. Trust me ;)
The "real value" of any good or service is whatever you can get in exchange for it - any notion of intrinsic worth is a specious concept, as is any valuation other than exchange value. If people didn't value diamonds as highly as DeBeers does, they simply wouldn't buy them.