This whole scene is a mess. Big Labels have way too much control of what music people actually get exposed to, and the chances of making it anywhere without them are pretty slim.
From what I've been told by a few insiders, except in very rare circumstances, the big labels won't even talk to new musicians these days until they've already "made it."
It's easy to say "just start an indie band", but what matters is not how many indie bands there are out there, but how many indie music customers there are out there. It's the buyers that make the difference, not the artists, and unfortunately I have little faith in the mass of sheep.
The record labels do, though! If you've managed to sell, say, 30,000 albums, managing successful tours, and getting airplay on the indie stations, they'll be all over making you into the "next big thing." (Direct quote from some A&R flack: "I don't want to talk to you until you don't need me."
They're still pushing "360 deals" too...where they wind up controlling every aspect of your image in exchange for a cut of merchandising and ticket sells. They consider it a win/win.
Since the very first time I ever heard about global warming, the pro argument has been "The science is over. It's a fact. The sky's about to fall, and the only way we can hope to stop it is to roll back the industrial revolution. No, there's no time to debate...the experts all agree."
As far as I've been able to find out, that's been the standard approach since the fear-mongerers were trying to terrify us about global cooling back in the '70s.
I won't claim to have a clue about the "science" involved, which is why I don't pretend to have a right to an opinion about the value of the hypothesis either way.
I do know just a smidge about human nature, though. People who try to make a hard-sell by scaring me into making a rush decision are usually pushing a faulty product.
Don't get me wrong...I think it's absolutely stupid to be dumping poisons into our atmosphere and water supply. I'm just sick and tired of Chicken Little acting so aggressively to shout over anyone and everyone who suggests there just might be other possible explanations concerning why.
Right-wingers tend to be Fascists (in the historical, technical sense, not the neo-Nazi genocidal version that everyone thinks of when they see the word now) while Left-wingers tend to be Communists.
The disconnect is that you're trying to apply principles that work perfectly well in an anarchy to a society that is definitely not an anarchy.
"Society" is another illusion. Everyone lives in anarchy...it's just that most people pretend they don't. But I'm talking about a country like modern America, where people still have a few freedoms, and we at least pretend there's something resembling a free market.
Consider my comments to be prefaced with "if you break from the principles of anarchy, you will have to at least:".
Fair enough
The lack of anarchy limits the potential responses of employees who do not feel that a situation offered by an employer is fair. For example, they cannot then refuse to let that employer share in the infrastructure the employees have collectively chosen to build in their community.
That seems pretty reasonable. Since the employer presumably contributed his fair share, along with everyone else. Not to mention paying the salaries that let them contribute to that infrastructure in the first place. In a responsible anarchy, your neighbors wouldn't let you pull that kind of stunt either.
They do not have the option to plow up their front yards and farm instead.
Whose fault is that? (I know plenty of people with backyard gardens, BTW).
They do not have the option to run the crooks out of town, etc.
Sure they do. Just offer enough disincentives through the government. Raise their taxes and the minimum wage. Regulate every little detail until it just isn't worth staying.
This results in what's known as out-sourcing. Maybe you're familiar with the term?
Besides, if the working conditions are that bad, the employees are free to pool their resources, maybe get some investors, start their own company, and compete with Evil Sweatshop Corp.
Unless, of course, government regulations have made that effectively impossible.
Many of the measures I suggest might well become unnecessary if the many other sins were reversed tomorrow (including doing away with corporate charter). However, I hold out little hope of that happening in my lifetime, so the best hope is to balance the books by regulating those entities more closely.
Tighter regulations are only good except for two groups. 1) The giant companies which use them to stomp out little competitors who can't afford to comply and 2) The government bureaucrats employed to enforce them.
For the rest of us, they're nothing but a security blanket. The bad guys will either find a way around them or break them. The good guys didn't need them there in the first place.
This is the insidious, self-perpetuating vicious cycle of government. They create or invent a problem. The solution is to give them more power. Since actually solving the problem would mean giving up power, they make the problem worse. New solution? They need more power.
We already have way too many regulations. A better approach might be to clean up the legal snarl into something an average human being can understand, get rid of the really ridiculous nonsense, then actually enforce what's already in place.
Not that that's all that likely to happen, either. But we really need to stop this insane tumble into _1984_ (silly <u> tag).
Woz would be a better example, except that evidence suggests that as long as he could make a decent living at it, he would continue to design and be an advocate of ubiquitous computing.
But without Jobs' greed to actually push the product out the door, he'd probably still be happily employed at HP and tinkering in his garage in the evenings.
Had he started out independently wealthy, he probably would have done everything he did anyway even at no profit.
Maybe. Or he might have turned out to be just anot
As soon as you start talking about "society" or the "greater good" or any of those other groupthink fallacies, you're talking about collectivism.
The only point to "society" is to protect the individuals. It's impossible to do that after we start thinking of the individual as a member of a collective.
I'm guessing you're a hard line anarchist then?
I don't know about "hard-core," but yes. Ultimately, government's just an illusion. Just a bunch of bullying warlords who demand regular tribute in exchange for keeping people "safe."
It's gotten extremely sugar-coated over the centuries, and I'm not under any illusions about what would happen if we just eliminated government all at once. But I'm a strong believer in trimming it back to manageable dimensions, one step at a time.
Because your rather large umbrella would also cover such "collectivist" notions as laws and law enforcement.
We did just fine for hundreds of years without professional law enforcers. These days, I'm more scared of them than the terrorists and criminals they're supposed to be protecting us from.
Closer to the argument though, I am arguing that the INDIVIDUAL should be protected from exploitive practices of employers.
Again: where do you draw the line between exploitation and opportunity? Who gets to draw that line? It's no good to set up some sort of faceless bureaucracy that operates on some sort of giant McDonald's 3-ring binder set of rules. Each case must be decided on a case-by-case basis. Otherwise, you just get bloated wasteful programs like medicare (which is a shining example of government efficiency).
I contend that no one is more qualified to decide whether he's being exploited than the person doing the work. If he doesn't like it, then (in this country, at least) he's free to find another, better job or start his own business.
Do you honestly think that, say, Thomas Edison would have devoted all those years to steal the light bulb if he didn't expect to get rich off it?
If not, then we would have been using Tesla's fluorescent lighting much earlier. Or any of several other inventors would have done it (perhaps one of the people Edison had toiling away). That would have been more likely still if home tinkerers had shorter work hours and more hobby time.
There's absolutely nothing stopping people from doing that in this day and age. In America, at least. Except for an attachment to a much nicer life-style than we really need. Well, the brutal tax levels don't help. Or maybe just being stuck somewhere there are no jobs. Or maybe because they dropped out of high school and (after they had that magic birthday and were allowed to get a job) don't have any useful skills.
Granted, this isn't true right now. Given the state of the economy, everyone who's lucky enough to have a job should be thrilled to work extra hours to keep it. There are plenty of hungry people who would take your place in a heartbeat.
This is what happens when the government steps in and decides "You must pay people at least this much. You have to deal with unions. You have to make this percentage of high-risk home loans, because everyone deserves to own their own house. Oh, and, if you go bankrupt, don't worry about it: you're too big to fail."
Skipping right along:
Bill Gates was one of the greediest, nastiest businessmen I can think of in recent history. Pretty much completely ruthless and cut-throat. Do you really think the world would be better off if someone had stepped in back in the 80's and told him "It isn't fair for you to be making so much money. We're going to cap your income at $x. Anything above and beyond that goes to [the things his foundation is now supporting]"?
Emphatically YES! MS and it's antics have probably set PC technol
I feel obligated to mention that I lump myself into the "radical free-market zealot" category. Bush, Greenspan, and the other hypocritical neo-cons aren't anywhere in the ballpark.
Despite their lies about moving toward a free market, they (working with Congress) clamped down unprecedented levels of regulation over pretty much everybody. Surely most of the people reading this are at least vaguely familiar with SOX.
Sure, subsidizing certain corporations, lifting some of their limits, then selectively failing to enforce the rules that are left is a recipe for disaster. But it also only vaguely resembles a free market. Bush's original bail-out pretty much completely wiped out that resemblance.
Government creates problems. Then it gives itself the power to fix them. When it [inevitably] fails, it creates more problems and convinces people that the only possible solution is to give the government more power.
The real tragedy, in my mind, is that people keep falling for this cyclical scam.
Make it too expensive for the businesses to stay there, and those jobs go to places like...China.
So long as we treat "the economy" as an entity that has rights, sure.
I think we may be crossing up the way we're using terms. I think of "the economy" as a model that economists use to describe "the market." I think of "the market" as all human interactions.
Obviously, neither one of those concepts "has" any rights. But the individual people who make those interactions do. As long as they're interacting without coercion, we have a "free market."
If/when we figure out that the economy is a construct of society
Society is nothing more than a shared delusion. There's nothing but a bunch of individuals who've agreed to share certain conventions in order to live more-or-less peacefully together.
As soon as you start talking about "society" or the "greater good" or any of those other groupthink fallacies, you're talking about collectivism.
The only point to "society" is to protect the individuals. It's impossible to do that after we start thinking of the individual as a member of a collective.
and that it exists
The "economy" has no more existence in reality than "society."
solely to serve society's members
It sounds like we're thinking along the same lines, just from completely opposite points of view.
and never the other way around, that will not be the case.
I doubt there's a hard fast line, but defining one
First you admit that such a thing probably doesn't exist. Then you turn around and try to imagine it into existence.
will doubtlessly involve comparing the employee's value add vs. what they're paid.
That's exactly what employment agreements already do. Who's more qualified to decide what an employee's time is worth? The employee and his/her potential employer? Or some central government planning committee (or whatever it is you're hinting about)?
Consider, the GDP per capita has grown faster than inflation for the last 30 years (or more), so why is it that it now takes two full time incomes for a family to be at about the same place it was in the '60s with only one income?
There are lots of reasons for this. For the most part, I blame an almost Pavlovian consumerism. That's what drives the GDP, after all. OTOH, our standards of living (in terms of material wealth) are vastly higher than they were in the 60's.
The methods of calculating GDP and inflation (and unemployment) keep changing, too. Personally, I suspect there's more than a little accounting fraud going on.
The difference didn't just go POOF!, it goes into someone's pocket.
So what? People have to have an incentive in order to advance and improve everyone else's lives. That's why Communism does not work on a large scale.
Do you honestly think that, say, Thomas Edison would have devoted all those years to steal the light bulb if he didn't expect to get rich off it?
It's also worth considering that the company that enjoys all of the benefits of being in the U.S. can fairly be expected to pull it's own weight by benefiting our society.
Pretty much by definition, it does. If individuals don't believe that its products will improve their lives, then they won't buy those products. If the employees are convinced they can successfully compete, they're free to quit and start their own business.
Well, until the government regulators get involved and the lobbyists start creating effective monopolies. Then all bets are off, and we wind up in this half-assed twisted version of capitalism we have today.
A corporation that offshores is deliberately trying to minimize it's contribu
Where do you draw the line between "sponging off" and "investing and providing opportunities?"
In that particular area of the country, those are some of the best jobs available without an advanced degree. For a lot of people, those are pretty much the only chances they have to be self-sufficient.
Make it too expensive for the businesses to stay there, and those jobs go to places like...China.
I really was mostly serious and honest. That's fairly standard, run-of-the-mill assembly line stuff.
It was an amalgam of 2 jobs. One was for a printing press called Quebecor World (their biggest clients are Sports Illustrated and Rolling Stone), the other for Mercury Marine (they do boat motors).
but if I don't work overtime then I am stuck with only... 'This is not nearly enough to support a family. My parents are farmers without jobs. They also do not have pensions.
'I also need to worry about getting married, which requires a lot of money. Therefore, I still push myself to continue working in spite of my exhaustion.
I've worked jobs that are much harder, just as repetitive, under comparable conditions, here in the U.S. I didn't have a choice about working overtime...if they needed me, I worked a 16 hour shift. Or I got fired. If I was dumb enough to lose a body part in the machinery, I'd have wound up fired. I didn't get a place to sleep (driving home was usually extremely dangerous, due to the exhaustion). They didn't feed me. I'd usually get 2 10 minute breaks in a 12 hour shift, but you never really knew.
(I know this is where I'm supposed to keep going with that, talking about trudging through snow, crawling through the muck, going barefoot, and how we all enjoyed it. That all happened, except for the barefoot, but most people probably won't really believe the basics).
With all that, there's no way I was making enough money to support a family. Much less save up for a marriage.
I'm sure there are "real" Chinese sweatshops that are absolute Hell-holes. This isn't even close. This is pretty close to the average life for a huge chunk of Americans.
Regardless of the working conditions, these people are there because they have needs and desires the same as the rest of us. They work there because there is no other work available, or the work that is available is even worse. That's the state that the majority of the world is in, and it won't be changed by any number of idealistic fools opining about the immorality of large corporations.
Exactly! These conditions really aren't all that bad. Much better than I'd actually expected. If enough people throw a big enough fit about this sort of thing, then the company just moves its operation, and these girls go back to...what? Prostitution? Starving to death? Selling body parts? Whatever it is, it's almost guaranteed to be worse.
Greenspan paid lip service to laissez faire and Ayn Rand. But he was a total hypocrite. His version of a "free market" still had the government controlling around 90% of it.
In reality, he was very firmly in the central-planning school of thought. When the bankers (et al) figured out loopholes in the regulations (which they always will), and the economy collapsed, he stabbed free market principles in the back and blamed them.
We haven't had anything even vaguely resembling a free market in this country since at least 1913. And there was only a vague resemblance before then.
Don't knock the free market until you've given it a chance.
I say that, because I was asking myself pretty much exactly those same questions just a few months back.
You want to learn OpenGL
You want to broaden your horizons to C++
Both are good goals, but they're also two distinctly different goals.
Pyglet is a simple python gaming library that is an excellent resource for learning OpenGL. You get all the goodness of python, yet you're using the same OpenGL calls you'd use in a "real" programming language. It probably isn't stable enough for production, but it's much faster to learn when you have the command interpreter and don't have to wait around for the compiler/linker.
There are other OpenGL implementations for python, but I had the best luck learning by using pyglet. Probably because it's very low level and doesn't hide implementation details like, say, SDL does.
The NeHe tutorials are good for what they are. Like other posters have mentioned, they're a little out of date, and the programming style isn't all that great. But they're good, quick examples of getting something set up and seeing results pretty much immediately. Which makes them a good place to start...as long as you remember the grain of salt.
I definitely share your pain when it comes to setting up things like the rendering context, the camera, etc, etc, etc. There are tons of options, the man pages were not written for the beginner. Again, as has been mentioned over and over, the Red Book is probably your best bet.
They shouldn't have convicted. If even one of them had understood jury nullification, they wouldn't have (or, at best, they'd have gotten a hung jury): at least one person claiming to be one of the jurors has posted on here that he wished he hadn't had to convict, and that he'd had the chance to try the cops. Acting like a jerk isn't justification for assault and battery (which is what the cops did to him).
The law is wrong. It is abusive, vague, and tyrannical. Police are supposed to be our servants, not the other way around. This case should have been nullified.
All that being said, he was really lucky to get out of an encounter like that alive. I read for too many stories about victims who were murdered by cops because they weren't respectful enough. Of course, those shootings get reviewed (by fellow cops) and are always found "justified."
Cops have gotten worse than the criminals they're supposed to be protecting us from.
According to a juror, when he did get into the car, another officer joined him, punched him in the face, and told him to get back out. He was trying to clarify conflicting orders. Even in the military, that's a get-out-of-jail free card.
Besides, why have we (Americans...I couldn't care less about how Canucks want to kowtow) let The Powers That Be that we let them push us around like this in the first place. Compliance laws are just another way for our Lords and Masters to deal with unruly serfs who don't submit quickly enough.
Like it or not (most agree this is even ludicrously high), the original ticket issuer has set the fair market value for ticket.
And there you have the basic misperception of the Central Planners in a nutshell.
Central Planners can never set "fair market value." Consumers do that by voting with their wallets.
If they're willing, on average, to pay $1000 for a peanut, that's "fair market value." If they expect 1000 tons of peanuts for $1, that is "fair market value."
The seller can "set" whatever selling price he wants. If he sets it too high, people won't buy. If he sets it too low, "scalpers" will make up the difference. Consumers decide what they're willing to pay, and that's subject to change at a moment's notice, for any reason that appeals to the consumer.
That is why Central Planning and government regulation have always failed and will always fail. All the economists' rocket science computer models just cannot keep up with the chaotic dynamics of the free (in this case, black) market.
this is pretty obvious basic simple economics here.
I don't think "economics" means what you think it does.
is it really true that a lot people out there believe this anticompetitive bullshit is acceptable, even legal?
Acceptable only in that the alternatives are worse. Legal? Absolutely (well, I think it should be...if only because I don't want to waste my tax money on nonsense like this). They found loopholes in the regulations, exactly the same way "assholes" always will.
one would think all of this is obvious and simple conceptually
Obvious and simple solutions are usually wrong. Maybe it's time to re-take Econ 101, and pay attention this time. Actually, never mind. They're probably teaching the same tired, failed Keynesian BS that seems so obvious and simple from their ivory towers.
Go read some Murray Rothbard and get a dose of economics that are based upon reality.
i find it hard to believe so many of you think this is fair or legal or acceptable on any moral, legal, or philosophical basis
Life isn't fair. Ask any crack baby.
If this isn't legal, then it's an example of how nitwits have closed one loophole in the law and opened 3 others instead of letting the players in the market deal with the issue.
Acceptable? I hate scalpers as much as anyone. But this is actually a perfect example of why that "fixed pricing" model you seem to like so much completely falls apart in the face of reality.
Monopolies are illegal, except where they're legal.
i.e. When they've been sanctioned by the government. You know, that entity you trust so much to protect you.
They're even more insidious when you have government-sponsored duopolies, because then they can point at each other and say "See? There's our competition!"
Some examples "in reality" off the top of my head: water company, sewage company, power company, high speed internet providers, airports, and stadiums. I've been to places where the government owned all the liquor stores.
Want something that more closely resembles capitalism? Watch Wal-Mart move into a small town and wipe out pretty much all their "competition."
they will bubble and pop, they will be gouged, and the smaller players will be abused by larger players who take advantage of natural imperfections like in my example
Hmm...where do we see this happening? Oh, yeah. That's pretty much a perfect description of the modern (heavily regulated) American economy.
in other words, the most committed capitalist in this word, if they really understand the marketplace, wants to make sure the government is heavily involved in the marketplace.
Maybe we're talking different languages here. In my world, "free market" is a situation where you can buy and sell your private property as you wish, without a gun to your head. "Government" involvement is a gun to your head. As I understand it, what you're describing is part of the definition of "fascism"--you can "own" property, and buy and sell, but the government's going to tell you exactly how, when, and where.
Given those definitions, how do you fit the way you were using the terms "capitalist" and "marketplace?"
but we have unfortunately in this world certain idiots who don't think about reality, but instead have this moronically simplistic, almost religious idea about how the marketplace works. and, through their ideology and efforts, such as dismantling the depression era protections that led the bubbling and popping of the current economic malaise, we all suffer mightily for their stupidity
Actually, it's the arrogant, almost religious idea that some Central Planners can control how the market place works that has led us to where we are now. And that idea's what made the Depression bad in the first place (but that's a different discussion). Central Planners cannot possibly keep up with a dynamic marketplace. By the time they get 1 regulation in place, it's obsolete. They need 3 others to work around the loopholes they've just created. The people creating those regulations are the parasites who add absolutely no value...but they've managed to brainwash people like you into believing otherwise.
All these regulations serve 2 purposes:
They make the barrier for entry higher for any new potential competitors
They make people feel warm and cozy that Mother Government is protecting them from the Big, Bad, Evil Capitalist who wants to...do whatever horrible thing you can come up with.
What they specifically do not do is protect anyone.
No matter what, some "Asshole" will figure out a way to work around the regulations that you like so much. In case you weren't paying attention, that recently happened with a bunch of banks. When their scheme started crashing down around their ears, the government (the ones who were supposed to be protecting us from those assholes) decided to go ahead and pay top dollar for all the rotten "flour" (to stick with your analogy) they'd been storing up over the years...leaving us to pay the bill.
That is reality.
If the regulations weren't there in the first place, at least we'd watch what they're doing and expect to be cheated.
p.s. Please don't blather about George W. Bust and "free market de-regulation." That's a myth that he and Greenspan floated around to try to fool people who would actually like to try something that resembles a free market. He added more regulations than anyone since FDR...and they did absolutely no good to anyone except those "assholes" you're so worried about.
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This whole scene is a mess. Big Labels have way too much control of what music people actually get exposed to, and the chances of making it anywhere without them are pretty slim.
From what I've been told by a few insiders, except in very rare circumstances, the big labels won't even talk to new musicians these days until they've already "made it."
It's easy to say "just start an indie band", but what matters is not how many indie bands there are out there, but how many indie music customers there are out there. It's the buyers that make the difference, not the artists, and unfortunately I have little faith in the mass of sheep.
The record labels do, though! If you've managed to sell, say, 30,000 albums, managing successful tours, and getting airplay on the indie stations, they'll be all over making you into the "next big thing." (Direct quote from some A&R flack: "I don't want to talk to you until you don't need me."
They're still pushing "360 deals" too...where they wind up controlling every aspect of your image in exchange for a cut of merchandising and ticket sells. They consider it a win/win.
<shrug> It's pretty much exactly the same straw man I've seen carted out for something like 30 years now.
Wish I had mod points. This is excellent.
Since the very first time I ever heard about global warming, the pro argument has been "The science is over. It's a fact. The sky's about to fall, and the only way we can hope to stop it is to roll back the industrial revolution. No, there's no time to debate...the experts all agree."
As far as I've been able to find out, that's been the standard approach since the fear-mongerers were trying to terrify us about global cooling back in the '70s.
I won't claim to have a clue about the "science" involved, which is why I don't pretend to have a right to an opinion about the value of the hypothesis either way.
I do know just a smidge about human nature, though. People who try to make a hard-sell by scaring me into making a rush decision are usually pushing a faulty product.
Don't get me wrong...I think it's absolutely stupid to be dumping poisons into our atmosphere and water supply. I'm just sick and tired of Chicken Little acting so aggressively to shout over anyone and everyone who suggests there just might be other possible explanations concerning why.
Radio stations pay licensing fees to be allowed to play those songs.
Right-wingers tend to be Fascists (in the historical, technical sense, not the neo-Nazi genocidal version that everyone thinks of when they see the word now) while Left-wingers tend to be Communists.
They're both just variants of Socialism.
The disconnect is that you're trying to apply principles that work perfectly well in an anarchy to a society that is definitely not an anarchy.
"Society" is another illusion. Everyone lives in anarchy...it's just that most people pretend they don't. But I'm talking about a country like modern America, where people still have a few freedoms, and we at least pretend there's something resembling a free market.
Consider my comments to be prefaced with "if you break from the principles of anarchy, you will have to at least:".
Fair enough
The lack of anarchy limits the potential responses of employees who do not feel that a situation offered by an employer is fair. For example, they cannot then refuse to let that employer share in the infrastructure the employees have collectively chosen to build in their community.
That seems pretty reasonable. Since the employer presumably contributed his fair share, along with everyone else. Not to mention paying the salaries that let them contribute to that infrastructure in the first place. In a responsible anarchy, your neighbors wouldn't let you pull that kind of stunt either.
They do not have the option to plow up their front yards and farm instead.
Whose fault is that? (I know plenty of people with backyard gardens, BTW).
They do not have the option to run the crooks out of town, etc.
Sure they do. Just offer enough disincentives through the government. Raise their taxes and the minimum wage. Regulate every little detail until it just isn't worth staying.
This results in what's known as out-sourcing. Maybe you're familiar with the term?
Besides, if the working conditions are that bad, the employees are free to pool their resources, maybe get some investors, start their own company, and compete with Evil Sweatshop Corp.
Unless, of course, government regulations have made that effectively impossible.
Many of the measures I suggest might well become unnecessary if the many other sins were reversed tomorrow (including doing away with corporate charter). However, I hold out little hope of that happening in my lifetime, so the best hope is to balance the books by regulating those entities more closely.
Tighter regulations are only good except for two groups. 1) The giant companies which use them to stomp out little competitors who can't afford to comply and 2) The government bureaucrats employed to enforce them.
For the rest of us, they're nothing but a security blanket. The bad guys will either find a way around them or break them. The good guys didn't need them there in the first place.
This is the insidious, self-perpetuating vicious cycle of government. They create or invent a problem. The solution is to give them more power. Since actually solving the problem would mean giving up power, they make the problem worse. New solution? They need more power.
We already have way too many regulations. A better approach might be to clean up the legal snarl into something an average human being can understand, get rid of the really ridiculous nonsense, then actually enforce what's already in place.
Not that that's all that likely to happen, either. But we really need to stop this insane tumble into _1984_ (silly <u> tag).
Woz would be a better example, except that evidence suggests that as long as he could make a decent living at it, he would continue to design and be an advocate of ubiquitous computing.
But without Jobs' greed to actually push the product out the door, he'd probably still be happily employed at HP and tinkering in his garage in the evenings.
Had he started out independently wealthy, he probably would have done everything he did anyway even at no profit.
Maybe. Or he might have turned out to be just anot
As soon as you start talking about "society" or the "greater good" or any of those other groupthink fallacies, you're talking about collectivism.
The only point to "society" is to protect the individuals. It's impossible to do that after we start thinking of the individual as a member of a collective.
I'm guessing you're a hard line anarchist then?
I don't know about "hard-core," but yes. Ultimately, government's just an illusion. Just a bunch of bullying warlords who demand regular tribute in exchange for keeping people "safe."
It's gotten extremely sugar-coated over the centuries, and I'm not under any illusions about what would happen if we just eliminated government all at once. But I'm a strong believer in trimming it back to manageable dimensions, one step at a time.
Because your rather large umbrella would also cover such "collectivist" notions as laws and law enforcement.
We did just fine for hundreds of years without professional law enforcers. These days, I'm more scared of them than the terrorists and criminals they're supposed to be protecting us from.
Closer to the argument though, I am arguing that the INDIVIDUAL should be protected from exploitive practices of employers.
Again: where do you draw the line between exploitation and opportunity? Who gets to draw that line? It's no good to set up some sort of faceless bureaucracy that operates on some sort of giant McDonald's 3-ring binder set of rules. Each case must be decided on a case-by-case basis. Otherwise, you just get bloated wasteful programs like medicare (which is a shining example of government efficiency).
I contend that no one is more qualified to decide whether he's being exploited than the person doing the work. If he doesn't like it, then (in this country, at least) he's free to find another, better job or start his own business.
Do you honestly think that, say, Thomas Edison would have devoted all those years to steal the light bulb if he didn't expect to get rich off it?
If not, then we would have been using Tesla's fluorescent lighting much earlier. Or any of several other inventors would have done it (perhaps one of the people Edison had toiling away). That would have been more likely still if home tinkerers had shorter work hours and more hobby time.
There's absolutely nothing stopping people from doing that in this day and age. In America, at least. Except for an attachment to a much nicer life-style than we really need. Well, the brutal tax levels don't help. Or maybe just being stuck somewhere there are no jobs. Or maybe because they dropped out of high school and (after they had that magic birthday and were allowed to get a job) don't have any useful skills.
Granted, this isn't true right now. Given the state of the economy, everyone who's lucky enough to have a job should be thrilled to work extra hours to keep it. There are plenty of hungry people who would take your place in a heartbeat.
This is what happens when the government steps in and decides "You must pay people at least this much. You have to deal with unions. You have to make this percentage of high-risk home loans, because everyone deserves to own their own house. Oh, and, if you go bankrupt, don't worry about it: you're too big to fail."
Skipping right along:
Bill Gates was one of the greediest, nastiest businessmen I can think of in recent history. Pretty much completely ruthless and cut-throat. Do you really think the world would be better off if someone had stepped in back in the 80's and told him "It isn't fair for you to be making so much money. We're going to cap your income at $x. Anything above and beyond that goes to [the things his foundation is now supporting]"?
Emphatically YES! MS and it's antics have probably set PC technol
I feel obligated to mention that I lump myself into the "radical free-market zealot" category. Bush, Greenspan, and the other hypocritical neo-cons aren't anywhere in the ballpark.
Despite their lies about moving toward a free market, they (working with Congress) clamped down unprecedented levels of regulation over pretty much everybody. Surely most of the people reading this are at least vaguely familiar with SOX.
Sure, subsidizing certain corporations, lifting some of their limits, then selectively failing to enforce the rules that are left is a recipe for disaster. But it also only vaguely resembles a free market. Bush's original bail-out pretty much completely wiped out that resemblance.
Government creates problems. Then it gives itself the power to fix them. When it [inevitably] fails, it creates more problems and convinces people that the only possible solution is to give the government more power.
The real tragedy, in my mind, is that people keep falling for this cyclical scam.
Make it too expensive for the businesses to stay there, and those jobs go to places like...China.
So long as we treat "the economy" as an entity that has rights, sure.
I think we may be crossing up the way we're using terms. I think of "the economy" as a model that economists use to describe "the market." I think of "the market" as all human interactions.
Obviously, neither one of those concepts "has" any rights. But the individual people who make those interactions do. As long as they're interacting without coercion, we have a "free market."
If/when we figure out that the economy is a construct of society
Society is nothing more than a shared delusion. There's nothing but a bunch of individuals who've agreed to share certain conventions in order to live more-or-less peacefully together.
As soon as you start talking about "society" or the "greater good" or any of those other groupthink fallacies, you're talking about collectivism.
The only point to "society" is to protect the individuals. It's impossible to do that after we start thinking of the individual as a member of a collective.
and that it exists
The "economy" has no more existence in reality than "society."
solely to serve society's members
It sounds like we're thinking along the same lines, just from completely opposite points of view.
and never the other way around, that will not be the case.
I doubt there's a hard fast line, but defining one
First you admit that such a thing probably doesn't exist. Then you turn around and try to imagine it into existence.
will doubtlessly involve comparing the employee's value add vs. what they're paid.
That's exactly what employment agreements already do. Who's more qualified to decide what an employee's time is worth? The employee and his/her potential employer? Or some central government planning committee (or whatever it is you're hinting about)?
Consider, the GDP per capita has grown faster than inflation for the last 30 years (or more), so why is it that it now takes two full time incomes for a family to be at about the same place it was in the '60s with only one income?
There are lots of reasons for this. For the most part, I blame an almost Pavlovian consumerism. That's what drives the GDP, after all. OTOH, our standards of living (in terms of material wealth) are vastly higher than they were in the 60's.
The methods of calculating GDP and inflation (and unemployment) keep changing, too. Personally, I suspect there's more than a little accounting fraud going on.
The difference didn't just go POOF!, it goes into someone's pocket.
So what? People have to have an incentive in order to advance and improve everyone else's lives. That's why Communism does not work on a large scale.
Do you honestly think that, say, Thomas Edison would have devoted all those years to steal the light bulb if he didn't expect to get rich off it?
It's also worth considering that the company that enjoys all of the benefits of being in the U.S. can fairly be expected to pull it's own weight by benefiting our society.
Pretty much by definition, it does. If individuals don't believe that its products will improve their lives, then they won't buy those products. If the employees are convinced they can successfully compete, they're free to quit and start their own business.
Well, until the government regulators get involved and the lobbyists start creating effective monopolies. Then all bets are off, and we wind up in this half-assed twisted version of capitalism we have today.
A corporation that offshores is deliberately trying to minimize it's contribu
Where do you draw the line between "sponging off" and "investing and providing opportunities?"
In that particular area of the country, those are some of the best jobs available without an advanced degree. For a lot of people, those are pretty much the only chances they have to be self-sufficient.
Make it too expensive for the businesses to stay there, and those jobs go to places like...China.
Heh. Nice.
I really was mostly serious and honest. That's fairly standard, run-of-the-mill assembly line stuff.
It was an amalgam of 2 jobs. One was for a printing press called Quebecor World (their biggest clients are Sports Illustrated and Rolling Stone), the other for Mercury Marine (they do boat motors).
but if I don't work overtime then I am stuck with only ... 'This is not nearly enough to support a family. My parents are farmers without jobs. They also do not have pensions.
'I also need to worry about getting married, which requires a lot of money. Therefore, I still push myself to continue working in spite of my exhaustion.
I've worked jobs that are much harder, just as repetitive, under comparable conditions, here in the U.S. I didn't have a choice about working overtime...if they needed me, I worked a 16 hour shift. Or I got fired. If I was dumb enough to lose a body part in the machinery, I'd have wound up fired. I didn't get a place to sleep (driving home was usually extremely dangerous, due to the exhaustion). They didn't feed me. I'd usually get 2 10 minute breaks in a 12 hour shift, but you never really knew.
(I know this is where I'm supposed to keep going with that, talking about trudging through snow, crawling through the muck, going barefoot, and how we all enjoyed it. That all happened, except for the barefoot, but most people probably won't really believe the basics).
With all that, there's no way I was making enough money to support a family. Much less save up for a marriage.
I'm sure there are "real" Chinese sweatshops that are absolute Hell-holes. This isn't even close. This is pretty close to the average life for a huge chunk of Americans.
Regardless of the working conditions, these people are there because they have needs and desires the same as the rest of us. They work there because there is no other work available, or the work that is available is even worse. That's the state that the majority of the world is in, and it won't be changed by any number of idealistic fools opining about the immorality of large corporations.
Exactly! These conditions really aren't all that bad. Much better than I'd actually expected. If enough people throw a big enough fit about this sort of thing, then the company just moves its operation, and these girls go back to...what? Prostitution? Starving to death? Selling body parts? Whatever it is, it's almost guaranteed to be worse.
I *hate* this misconception.
Greenspan paid lip service to laissez faire and Ayn Rand. But he was a total hypocrite. His version of a "free market" still had the government controlling around 90% of it.
In reality, he was very firmly in the central-planning school of thought. When the bankers (et al) figured out loopholes in the regulations (which they always will), and the economy collapsed, he stabbed free market principles in the back and blamed them.
We haven't had anything even vaguely resembling a free market in this country since at least 1913. And there was only a vague resemblance before then.
Don't knock the free market until you've given it a chance.
I say that, because I was asking myself pretty much exactly those same questions just a few months back.
Both are good goals, but they're also two distinctly different goals.
Pyglet is a simple python gaming library that is an excellent resource for learning OpenGL. You get all the goodness of python, yet you're using the same OpenGL calls you'd use in a "real" programming language. It probably isn't stable enough for production, but it's much faster to learn when you have the command interpreter and don't have to wait around for the compiler/linker.
There are other OpenGL implementations for python, but I had the best luck learning by using pyglet. Probably because it's very low level and doesn't hide implementation details like, say, SDL does.
The NeHe tutorials are good for what they are. Like other posters have mentioned, they're a little out of date, and the programming style isn't all that great. But they're good, quick examples of getting something set up and seeing results pretty much immediately. Which makes them a good place to start...as long as you remember the grain of salt.
I definitely share your pain when it comes to setting up things like the rendering context, the camera, etc, etc, etc. There are tons of options, the man pages were not written for the beginner. Again, as has been mentioned over and over, the Red Book is probably your best bet.
Learning C++ is (really) a different question. I can't recommend the C++ FAQ Lite highly enough. You can find their recommendations at http://www.parashift.com/c++-faq-lite/how-to-learn-cpp.html
They shouldn't have convicted. If even one of them had understood jury nullification, they wouldn't have (or, at best, they'd have gotten a hung jury): at least one person claiming to be one of the jurors has posted on here that he wished he hadn't had to convict, and that he'd had the chance to try the cops. Acting like a jerk isn't justification for assault and battery (which is what the cops did to him).
The law is wrong. It is abusive, vague, and tyrannical. Police are supposed to be our servants, not the other way around. This case should have been nullified.
All that being said, he was really lucky to get out of an encounter like that alive. I read for too many stories about victims who were murdered by cops because they weren't respectful enough. Of course, those shootings get reviewed (by fellow cops) and are always found "justified."
Cops have gotten worse than the criminals they're supposed to be protecting us from.
The travesty is that so few people know about and understand the power (and responsibility) of jury nullification.
According to a juror, when he did get into the car, another officer joined him, punched him in the face, and told him to get back out. He was trying to clarify conflicting orders. Even in the military, that's a get-out-of-jail free card.
Besides, why have we (Americans...I couldn't care less about how Canucks want to kowtow) let The Powers That Be that we let them push us around like this in the first place. Compliance laws are just another way for our Lords and Masters to deal with unruly serfs who don't submit quickly enough.
This is exactly why it's the responsibility of people who know about the concept to spread it as far and as wide as we can.
The "jury of our peers" is the last defense Americans have against a government that's pretty much turned into a police state.
Like it or not (most agree this is even ludicrously high), the original ticket issuer has set the fair market value for ticket.
And there you have the basic misperception of the Central Planners in a nutshell.
Central Planners can never set "fair market value." Consumers do that by voting with their wallets.
If they're willing, on average, to pay $1000 for a peanut, that's "fair market value." If they expect 1000 tons of peanuts for $1, that is "fair market value."
The seller can "set" whatever selling price he wants. If he sets it too high, people won't buy. If he sets it too low, "scalpers" will make up the difference. Consumers decide what they're willing to pay, and that's subject to change at a moment's notice, for any reason that appeals to the consumer.
That is why Central Planning and government regulation have always failed and will always fail. All the economists' rocket science computer models just cannot keep up with the chaotic dynamics of the free (in this case, black) market.
I think he's talking about those governments that murdered 162,000,000 of their own citizens.
Yeah, that's who I want defending me from the asshole who wants to sell me flour. Or concert tickets.
this is pretty obvious basic simple economics here.
I don't think "economics" means what you think it does.
is it really true that a lot people out there believe this anticompetitive bullshit is acceptable, even legal?
Acceptable only in that the alternatives are worse. Legal? Absolutely (well, I think it should be...if only because I don't want to waste my tax money on nonsense like this). They found loopholes in the regulations, exactly the same way "assholes" always will.
one would think all of this is obvious and simple conceptually
Obvious and simple solutions are usually wrong. Maybe it's time to re-take Econ 101, and pay attention this time. Actually, never mind. They're probably teaching the same tired, failed Keynesian BS that seems so obvious and simple from their ivory towers.
Go read some Murray Rothbard and get a dose of economics that are based upon reality.
i find it hard to believe so many of you think this is fair or legal or acceptable on any moral, legal, or philosophical basis
Life isn't fair. Ask any crack baby.
If this isn't legal, then it's an example of how nitwits have closed one loophole in the law and opened 3 others instead of letting the players in the market deal with the issue.
Acceptable? I hate scalpers as much as anyone. But this is actually a perfect example of why that "fixed pricing" model you seem to like so much completely falls apart in the face of reality.
Monopolies are illegal, except where they're legal.
i.e. When they've been sanctioned by the government. You know, that entity you trust so much to protect you.
They're even more insidious when you have government-sponsored duopolies, because then they can point at each other and say "See? There's our competition!"
Some examples "in reality" off the top of my head: water company, sewage company, power company, high speed internet providers, airports, and stadiums. I've been to places where the government owned all the liquor stores.
Want something that more closely resembles capitalism? Watch Wal-Mart move into a small town and wipe out pretty much all their "competition."
they will bubble and pop, they will be gouged, and the smaller players will be abused by larger players who take advantage of natural imperfections like in my example
Hmm...where do we see this happening? Oh, yeah. That's pretty much a perfect description of the modern (heavily regulated) American economy.
in other words, the most committed capitalist in this word, if they really understand the marketplace, wants to make sure the government is heavily involved in the marketplace.
Maybe we're talking different languages here. In my world, "free market" is a situation where you can buy and sell your private property as you wish, without a gun to your head. "Government" involvement is a gun to your head. As I understand it, what you're describing is part of the definition of "fascism"--you can "own" property, and buy and sell, but the government's going to tell you exactly how, when, and where.
Given those definitions, how do you fit the way you were using the terms "capitalist" and "marketplace?"
but we have unfortunately in this world certain idiots who don't think about reality, but instead have this moronically simplistic, almost religious idea about how the marketplace works. and, through their ideology and efforts, such as dismantling the depression era protections that led the bubbling and popping of the current economic malaise, we all suffer mightily for their stupidity
Actually, it's the arrogant, almost religious idea that some Central Planners can control how the market place works that has led us to where we are now. And that idea's what made the Depression bad in the first place (but that's a different discussion). Central Planners cannot possibly keep up with a dynamic marketplace. By the time they get 1 regulation in place, it's obsolete. They need 3 others to work around the loopholes they've just created. The people creating those regulations are the parasites who add absolutely no value...but they've managed to brainwash people like you into believing otherwise.
All these regulations serve 2 purposes:
What they specifically do not do is protect anyone.
No matter what, some "Asshole" will figure out a way to work around the regulations that you like so much. In case you weren't paying attention, that recently happened with a bunch of banks. When their scheme started crashing down around their ears, the government (the ones who were supposed to be protecting us from those assholes) decided to go ahead and pay top dollar for all the rotten "flour" (to stick with your analogy) they'd been storing up over the years...leaving us to pay the bill.
That is reality.
If the regulations weren't there in the first place, at least we'd watch what they're doing and expect to be cheated.
p.s. Please don't blather about George W. Bust and "free market de-regulation." That's a myth that he and Greenspan floated around to try to fool people who would actually like to try something that resembles a free market. He added more regulations than anyone since FDR...and they did absolutely no good to anyone except those "assholes" you're so worried about.
Not in this state. Not only is it pretty much impossible to get a 3rd party candidate onto a ballot, you aren't allowed to write in a response.
When I tried to raise a fuss, I was just told that no one else was running, so move along please.