Communism is an ideology that hopes to establish a classless, stateless social organization, based on the batshit insane idea that if you pay everyone the same wage, they somehow will spontaneously all fill every needed occupation in society.
Why the hell would anyone want to spend 12 years in medical school if they can get the exact same quality of life by being a bad poet or a taxi driver? Okay, so you have a few people who are actually driven not at all by material concerns, but they want to be doctors out of the goodness of their heart. But why go through 12 years of school? Surely I can just read a book about homeopathy and still get the ego boost from helping people, even if it is less effective than modern medical science. But okay, let's set that aside and think that people will actually go through medical school and become honest-to-god medical doctors. A medical doctor by himself is not worth much. He needs equipment and the people who manufacture them, he needs drugs and the people who create them, he needs nurses, hospital beds, the people who wash the sheets and the bed pans. He needs a physical hospital and ambulances to drive patients there. He needs lab techs to analyze blood work and the people who make the chemicals that allow these analyses.
And he needs just the right amount of these people. There's no material incentive to pick one job over another, so people would naturally pick either the nobler or the cushier jobs. But what if you're late to the game? What if you end up having to be the guy who empties the bed pans and scrubs them down with disinfectant? Remember, in a "stateless" society, there's no one to actually force you to do this, and in a "classless" society, you must by definition be given the same wage and standard of living as everyone else. Now extrapolate from the very limited, microscopic sliver of the interconnected network of occupations that make up modern society. A lot of jobs are neither noble nor cushy. What would possess you to work in an iron mine to supply the steel scalpel for the doctor? Why would you be a sanitation worker at the sewage treatment plant?
That's communism as defined by you, and the reason it doesn't work isn't so much "people are selfish and greedy" but "why would you work with feces when that guy there stacks cans onto shelves?". It's pure infantile fantasy that doesn't look at "what's the best kind of society for human beings as they are" but "what's the best kind of human being for a society that is superficially egalitarian". Superficially because some jobs just are harder, more tiring, more disgusting than others. There can never be true egalitarianism between a doctor and the guy that empties bed pans, let alone a sewage worker and a journalist, unless you turn human beings into automatons who neither mind tedious work nor notice other people having less taxing jobs.
There's two solutions to this problem, and the first one is the de facto communism we've had the misfortune of experiencing from the early 20th century onwards. In fact, they called themselves not communist, but socialists on the way to communism sometime in the future when, presumably, we'd succeeded in turning people into automatons. Their solution to "Why do I have to root in shit for a living when that guy bakes cakes" is "Because we'll shoot you if you don't, and oh, by the way, you can't leave either because we'll shoot you then, too". You're legally required to work, doing whatever the state (socialism is communism without the "stateless" part) tells you to do. So how does the state know what to make you do, anyway? Ah, the miracle of central planning. Instead of supply and demand of goods dictated by market forces, socialist states (which lack market forces as everyone must have the same wages and living conditions and therefore nothing should ever be either scarce or overabundant) have planning committees that decide how much of everything everything needs. Imagine an accounting office that doesn't just have to d
And if at the turn of the last century, we'd gone for 'feed the street urchins' instead of spending money to educate them, I'm pretty sure we wouldn't even know what a laptop computer is.
We're not talking 'laptops to famine victims in sub-Saharan Africa', we're talking 'laptops to Vietnamese kids with no prospects for the future other than sewing sneakers for ten bucks a month'. So, you know, some of them will open their own sneaker factories and put Nike out of business.
Troll my ass.
Saying something completely untrue 'You can run Windows without a virus scanner for five minutes' is a troll.
Pointing out that he's perpetuating Ellen Feissian myths is not a troll.
But it is a dangerous way to be heading, trying to bully news people into submission.
Bully? 'You wrote crap about me, I'm not going to talk to you again.' is bullying?
It's not as if Google is an elected representative who has an obligation to talk to the press. And not even politicians should have to grant interviews to the National Enquirer.
Funny, I did. Including a caveat that the analogy is a bit extreme doesn't make it any less inappropriate.
For crying out loud, he's using an historical example of human slavery as a rhetorical tool in a discussion about a web browser.
Apple did NOT rip off Konfabulator. Arlo Rose labors under the delusion that he invented desktop widgets, which he did not. DesktopX was out years before Konfabulator was even conceived.
Now, what other features did Apple rip off hapless developers? Spotlight? Exposé? The dock? The Finder?
He's not talking about Alien Resurrection. He's talking about Cameron's Aliens. You know, the one where the trained marines and the artificial Bishop all die and Ripley the space truck driver beats the alien.
Lance Henriksen (Bishop) wasn't even in Resurrection, which, unlike Firefly, was a complete POS.
By your logic, Ford should update all Model Ts with three-point seatbelts, ABS breaks, SRS airbags and GPS, cause by golly, you could hurt yourself or get lost without them.
It's great if a user just wants a computer to 'work', in the sense of sitting and humming in the corner.
It's not so great if you have, say, a digital camera or a scanner or an mp3 player, or, god forbid, view PDFs.
Yes, all those things are totally doable on Linux, but they don't work out of the box. It doesn't get any viruses or malware, but beyond simple web browsing and emails, it's useless to a casual user.
In fact Linux at least Mandriva) is easier to install than Windows (
unless things have improved a lot in XP).
Wow. One guy denigrating Linux by claiming you need to compile KDE, the other denigrates Windows installs while not having installed XP. Welcome to the year 2005.
Tiger runs circles around Windows, which runs circles around Linux - for 90% of computer users, that is.
In what 'features' is XP lagging behind Linux? Certainly not available software, hardware compatibility, or ease of use. Virtual desktops? SuperTux?
The directory structure of Linux is completely unintelligible to anyone unfamiliar with *nix architecture - for the life of me, I couldn't find the executable for Firefox after using the installer on Mandrake 10 (KDE). In Windows, it's in Program Files. In OSX it's in Applications. In Linux it's in... usr/bin, maybe? Doing a search outside my home folder froze the computer, so I had to manually jump through all those lovely three-letter abbreviations, finally finding it by dumb luck.
If a user-friendly distro of Linux makes something like figuring out how to launch installed programs a pain in the ass for someone fully computer-literate, it's NOWHERE near 'critical desktop mass'. Hell, Linux advocates have been declaring critical desktop mass for five years, and NO casual computer user I know has had positive experiences with any Linux distro since 2000 when the brouhaha first started. They're all back to Windows. No one I know who has worked with OSX prefers Windows for anything but gaming.
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Let's rephrase that definition:
Communism is an ideology that hopes to establish a classless, stateless social organization, based on the batshit insane idea that if you pay everyone the same wage, they somehow will spontaneously all fill every needed occupation in society.
Why the hell would anyone want to spend 12 years in medical school if they can get the exact same quality of life by being a bad poet or a taxi driver? Okay, so you have a few people who are actually driven not at all by material concerns, but they want to be doctors out of the goodness of their heart. But why go through 12 years of school? Surely I can just read a book about homeopathy and still get the ego boost from helping people, even if it is less effective than modern medical science. But okay, let's set that aside and think that people will actually go through medical school and become honest-to-god medical doctors. A medical doctor by himself is not worth much. He needs equipment and the people who manufacture them, he needs drugs and the people who create them, he needs nurses, hospital beds, the people who wash the sheets and the bed pans. He needs a physical hospital and ambulances to drive patients there. He needs lab techs to analyze blood work and the people who make the chemicals that allow these analyses.
And he needs just the right amount of these people. There's no material incentive to pick one job over another, so people would naturally pick either the nobler or the cushier jobs. But what if you're late to the game? What if you end up having to be the guy who empties the bed pans and scrubs them down with disinfectant? Remember, in a "stateless" society, there's no one to actually force you to do this, and in a "classless" society, you must by definition be given the same wage and standard of living as everyone else. Now extrapolate from the very limited, microscopic sliver of the interconnected network of occupations that make up modern society. A lot of jobs are neither noble nor cushy. What would possess you to work in an iron mine to supply the steel scalpel for the doctor? Why would you be a sanitation worker at the sewage treatment plant?
That's communism as defined by you, and the reason it doesn't work isn't so much "people are selfish and greedy" but "why would you work with feces when that guy there stacks cans onto shelves?". It's pure infantile fantasy that doesn't look at "what's the best kind of society for human beings as they are" but "what's the best kind of human being for a society that is superficially egalitarian". Superficially because some jobs just are harder, more tiring, more disgusting than others. There can never be true egalitarianism between a doctor and the guy that empties bed pans, let alone a sewage worker and a journalist, unless you turn human beings into automatons who neither mind tedious work nor notice other people having less taxing jobs.
There's two solutions to this problem, and the first one is the de facto communism we've had the misfortune of experiencing from the early 20th century onwards. In fact, they called themselves not communist, but socialists on the way to communism sometime in the future when, presumably, we'd succeeded in turning people into automatons. Their solution to "Why do I have to root in shit for a living when that guy bakes cakes" is "Because we'll shoot you if you don't, and oh, by the way, you can't leave either because we'll shoot you then, too". You're legally required to work, doing whatever the state (socialism is communism without the "stateless" part) tells you to do. So how does the state know what to make you do, anyway? Ah, the miracle of central planning. Instead of supply and demand of goods dictated by market forces, socialist states (which lack market forces as everyone must have the same wages and living conditions and therefore nothing should ever be either scarce or overabundant) have planning committees that decide how much of everything everything needs. Imagine an accounting office that doesn't just have to d
And if at the turn of the last century, we'd gone for 'feed the street urchins' instead of spending money to educate them, I'm pretty sure we wouldn't even know what a laptop computer is.
We're not talking 'laptops to famine victims in sub-Saharan Africa', we're talking 'laptops to Vietnamese kids with no prospects for the future other than sewing sneakers for ten bucks a month'. So, you know, some of them will open their own sneaker factories and put Nike out of business.
Notice: please review your sentences before hitting 'Submit'. The last two sound like Zero Wing.
Troll my ass. Saying something completely untrue 'You can run Windows without a virus scanner for five minutes' is a troll. Pointing out that he's perpetuating Ellen Feissian myths is not a troll.
Funny, I did. Including a caveat that the analogy is a bit extreme doesn't make it any less inappropriate. For crying out loud, he's using an historical example of human slavery as a rhetorical tool in a discussion about a web browser.
Blah blah Konfabulator blah.
Apple did NOT rip off Konfabulator. Arlo Rose labors under the delusion that he invented desktop widgets, which he did not. DesktopX was out years before Konfabulator was even conceived.
Now, what other features did Apple rip off hapless developers? Spotlight? Exposé? The dock? The Finder?
"I can't play a movie trailer" "Compile mplayer or switch distributions" Well, that does it. Linux just hit critical desktop mass.
He's not talking about Alien Resurrection. He's talking about Cameron's Aliens. You know, the one where the trained marines and the artificial Bishop all die and Ripley the space truck driver beats the alien. Lance Henriksen (Bishop) wasn't even in Resurrection, which, unlike Firefly, was a complete POS.
By your logic, Ford should update all Model Ts with three-point seatbelts, ABS breaks, SRS airbags and GPS, cause by golly, you could hurt yourself or get lost without them.
It's great if a user just wants a computer to 'work', in the sense of sitting and humming in the corner. It's not so great if you have, say, a digital camera or a scanner or an mp3 player, or, god forbid, view PDFs. Yes, all those things are totally doable on Linux, but they don't work out of the box. It doesn't get any viruses or malware, but beyond simple web browsing and emails, it's useless to a casual user.
In Finland? I think you'd be somewhat disappointed. The Swedish Bikini team is not a pan-Scandinavian phenomenon.