Gosh, only a lawyer could have the utter cluelessness about the real world and real people necessary to imagine that war has ever been, or ever will be, regulated by law.
Ah well, you may be right. I may have you confused with the OP flame. Most folks who want to "keep an eye" on corporations don't want to actually do it themselves, e.g. by not buying the products of companies they don't like, organizing boycotts, whatever, but by delegating the task to government.
I haven't tried any "rhetorical tricks." I may have made a mistake in exactly what you were saying, but I've tried to make my points straightforwardly, using logic clear to all and facts known to all. Winning an argument by "rhetorical tricks" isn't winning an argument at all. Might as well cheat at solitaire. Not my thing.
I LIKE government.
On what basis? Pure theory? Or have you actually tried less government, and found that it sucks? Problem is, most people typically form their theories about what kind and how much government is desirable on a purely theoretical plain, without making any use of, e.g. history and cross-cultural experience to find out, experimentally, what levels are desirable. The Law of Unintended Consequences then appears to severely bite their asses. I'm not saying you're one of those (yet!) but give me some good empirical evidence that government is other than a necessary evil, like not eating too much ice cream and getting proper exercise.
Why would I disagree with that? If you put that on a piece of paper, 95% of the American electorate would sign it.
I know. People are very fond of signing pieces of paper that state noble goals. And yet...when it comes to put principles into action, suddenly it's a different story. In practice people act as if they believe there is some high and far-off, superior organization that will rise above all the grubby Earthly limitations of the local organizations they know well, and it's that wonderful ueberorganization they should support with all their hearts.
In 100 AD, this was Rome, and in the Middle Ages, it was the Church and (indirectly) the Kingdom of Heaven. In Soviet Russia it was the Party. In mid-20th century America it could be the Church of Science, or Ecology, or the Green Party or crystal shamanism or any of a zillion smaller cults.
If only the lesson drawn from the fact that all known local organizations have major flaws that make them tools to use gingerly and rarely would be rationally generalized to make us equally skeptical of the utility of all larger organizations, including nation-state governments. Anyone who thinks small family firms are OK, medium-size corporations tend to be impersonal and problematic, large corporations tend to be agents of evil -- but the government, the largest of all, is sweet reason and altruism personified ought to have his mental self-consistency fuse replaced, because it's clearly shorted.
Oh dear. Well, maybe consider directional antennas. A high-gain Yagi should only be about 8 inches across at 700 MHz. Hopefully you could make it high enough gain so it only picks up your signals, but with sufficient beamwidth so you only have to point it in the general direction of your stage. Don't know if it would work, but it's a cheap first try at a solution.
Yeah, I got that. I would check out first whether something as cheap as a combination of filters and/or directional antennas might work. Seems a lot cheaper than completely retooling.
Well...how does your receiver distinguish between your 10 channels? Or between someone else's microphone of the same model across the street? There's probably some mechanism, no? So your receiver isn't going to pick up someone else's signal and think it's your own, yes? I'm guessing your problem is some kind of front-end overload in your receiver.
Off the top of my head, the cheapest solution is a filter to block their frequencies and pass your own, assuming they aren't exactly the same. If they are exactly the same, then maybe a high-gain directional antenna on the receiver pointed at the microphones. Either is a lot cheaper than thousands of dollars, but you need a radio engineer to make it work.
That sounds regrettable. I would be surprised if we did not increasingly find a certain amount of convergence, id est two different sequences of DNA that end up providing the same function in the organism's life. Surely the importance of natural selection in shaping organisms should guarantee that, to some extent.
In which case, function should continue to be the primary standard for classification, for which DNA homology serves as an excellent proxy.
The pain in England in the 1840s had zero to do with the class system -- that was merely one of Marx's appealing lies -- and everything to do with the severe dislocations that happen when you jump from an agrarian to an industrial economy.
Case in point: early factory schedules were 12-hour days, 6 days a week. Sounds brutal, doesn't it? And it is. But why would any thinking man set up a schedule like that? Not, as Marx and his fellow con-men would have you believe, because they are intrinsically evil upper-class exploiters who want to squeeze every drop out of the miserable proles slaving away for them. Indeed, any successful manager insists on having happy employees for the same reason any successful farmer insists on having happy horses in his barn: so they do good work for him.
The reason for the screw-up is because no one understood that industrial work was fundamentally different from farm work. On the farm, a 12-hour work day is totally normal, and so is the 6-day work week. But farm work is different from industrial work. It isn't nearly as intense. You do some chore, which may well be hard work, but then you take a break while you walk to the next chore, and then you do some light work, and then you stop for a meal, and then you shoot the shit with the neighbor, or your wife, and then you do some more work, and so forth. You technically work from dawn to dusk, but it's not continuously. It's not at all like standing in front of a mill machine working full speed continuously, without a second's inattention possible lest your fingers be cut off.
It took years, decades even, for people to realize that industrial work was fundamentally different from farm work, and needed a fundamentally different type of schedule, even a whole different way of life. (Another problem was the fact that even though you do the "same" work every day on a farm, it varies subtly all the time, so you don't generally risk repetitive-motion injuries. Obviously factories are different, but it took long years to realize that.)
In fact, a case can be made that social reformers, including Marx and his followers, substantially slowed the development of more workable (and humane) conditions in industrial work, because they distracted everybody with this tremendously seductive fantasy that the problem was the class system, not a lack of insight into the nature of industrial work, and that the solution was political struggle, and not time-and-motion studies, better insight into physiology, circadian rhythms, et cetera.
I agree. But I was not describing Marxism (or hardcore Marxists), but rather the great mass of followers who believe in Marxism, who yearn for it to be true so much they are willing to overlook its ghastly failures in practice.
What do you mean when you say "most are interested?" Who is "interested?" If you mean upper management is mostly interested in the salaries of upper management, well, duh. Similarly, line workers are mostly interested in the salaries of line workers. Everyone is, obviously, most interested in maximizing his own take-home pay, and operates within the company towards that end. In a successful company, it turns out that the best way to maximize your own take-home pay is to maximize the profit the company makes. And an unsuccessful company isn't a reasonable example of what typical surviving companies are like.
From everyone else, they're trying to get as much work as possible for as little pay as possible.
Again, you're unclear on who you mean by "they." But assuming you mean upper management, then, yeah, of course. And "everyone else" (middle management and line workers, I assume) is trying to get as much pay for as little work as possible. Like any demand and supply curve, they meet in the middle at some point and strike a bargain. What's your point? This is how the world works.
(1) A corporation has no power over you that you don't grant yourself. They can't apply physical force to you, or take your property from you, or imprison you, torture you, or kill you. The most they can do is eject you, or withhold payment for your services.
(2) You can join or leave a corporation at any time, for any reason or no reason. Not true of your typical nation, of course.
Societies are certainly not "more or less" democratic. Indeed, large democratic societies are quite rare in history, for the obvious reason that it is extremely difficult to run any large operation efficiently when you have to have every decision decided by a majority vote. Every large organization solves this problems by becoming at least slightly undemocratic, by e.g. creating an administration that makes decisions on a daily basis, which then gets its decisions (or even its existence) ratified or rejected by everybody in the organization every now and then.
What you call this ratification or rejection varies, of course. It could be called "the next election" (if you live in a democratic republic) or it could be called "the next revolution" if you live in an autocracy or dictatorship. With corporations, meaning firms, the ratification or rejection happens when people vote with their feet, so to speak. That is, if company management decides policy that no one working in the company likes, then they leave the company, and hey presto the policy is rejected. No company can survive without workers. Of course most big companies, like most big countries, now have intermediate levels of ratification to reduce the chances of big, violent changes. Instead of having regular elections or plebiscites, they have board meetings where stockholders vote.
The other difference, which is fairly minor, is that societies frequently mouth platitudes that suggest that everyone's opinion in a ratification process is equally important. One man, one vote, that kind of nonsense. It's nonsense because no organization can effectually function if it truly works that way. Obviously the majority of people are going to be wrong on any given issue (there being always more ways to be wrong than right), and only the more skilled and on-the-ball people will be right. The organization, to function, must put a higher priority on the opinions of the more competent of its members. How they do so varies tremendously. In a corporation, it's pretty open: there's a corporation heirarchy, and the higher up you go, proving yourself (supposedly) by your track record, the more your opinion matters. Societies are sometimes this open, with aristocracies, titles and honors of various types, both formal and informal. But they also spend a fair amount of effort trying to disguise the fact that some peoples' vote matters more than others, as it should, and must.
What you suggested is keeping a more critical eye on corporations than government. I suggested the reverse.
What kind of dangerous weirdo goes through life looking for a social organization worthy of their absolute trust?
Probably the type that unthinkingly assumes the nation-state is that organization. Tune in to the latest Democratic Presidential debate and you'll hear plenty from them.
In any event, I said nothing about looking for absolute trust. What I assumed is that everyone looks for social organizations worthy of substantial (if not absolute) trust; to not do so is to be a complete antisocial and plan to live on a desert island eating bugs. What I said is that, a priori, I trust smaller organizations more than larger, and organizations that I can voluntarily join and leave more than those to which I am forced to belong by virtue of being born in a particular place and time.
If you want to set up a wireless network, or make radio calls across the country of any type, using your own equipment, for as low a price as your imagination and skill will allow, and completely free of anything but common-sense rules of courtesy, just go study a few weeks and get your own personal radio license. You don't have to whine because MegaCorp won't provide you with a plug-n-play radio communication system that retarded monkeys could use at a price you think is low enough. Do it yourself if you don't like their rules, or price. Think of it as "open source radio." It's been around for a hundred years already.
I wouldn't worry about it, unless you're planning on hooking up an RF amplifier to your mikes and broadcasting into the next county (which would be illegal for separate reasons anyway). Your widgets are probably broadcasting such a weak signal that it can't be picked up more than 100 feet away. So who's going to care if the frequency space you're using is now officially licensed to someone else? Nobody, unless you're so unlucky as to have a licensed user set up shop within 100 feet of your studio.
Er...this is a private venture, undertaken to make money (for Branson) and to have fun (for his customers). If these reasons are good enough for Branson and his customers, what business is it of yours or mine? Why should Branson be expected to compromise his goals, whatever they are, to address yours? You don't compromise yours to address his, do you?
I would also have thought that the question of whether you draw the phylogenetic tree according to genetic relationships or functional relationships is still open.
I mean, if organism X shares 92% of its DNA with Y and only 88% with Z, but lives and functions in its ecological niche more like Z than Y, how do you classify them all? Is X closer to Y or Z? I didn't think this question had been settled (assuming it ever can be) among the evolutionary biologists.
Geez, where do you read that into what I wrote? Did you miss the part where I pointed out the essential and equally valuable contribution of the folks who assemble cars, take out the trash, milk the cows, et cetera?
very few, if any, scientists are actually indispensable.
Well, the "if any" qualifier is inane. Obviously the giants in any field are indispensable, in the sense that without them their revolutions would be delayed until someone else like them turned up, and if they truly are unique (which admittedly seems impossible) then their revolutions will never occur at all.
But, yes, most scientists are, as the saying goes, button-sorters and bottle washers. But don't you look too much down your nose at those in the second and third rank. A certain amount of button sorting and bottle washing has to be done for the big ideas to get turned into practical applications that make our lives better.
Well, if you've taught science, maybe you can explain why we should expect a majority to do worse than average?
Read again what I wrote. Obviously I did not write that the majority should be expected to do "worse than average" (which is mathematically impossible). I wrote that the majority should be expected to do poorly on the scale that includes at the top the best in the field. That is true in any field. We should expect high-school kids running track to perform poorly compared to the field in the final heat of the Summer Olympics. We should expect your average person noodling around on the guitar to sound like a doofus compared to Eric Clapton. Generally, we do expect these things, in those kinds of fields, and we don't regard them as personal or systemic failures. No one is going around saying that, measured by NBA standards, the average high school kid sucks at basketball, so there must be something "wrong" with the American school phys. ed. system.
But we do get such inanity in science education, and that's my point.
Friend, a corporation is a miniature society. It's an organization of people that divides labor for the purpose of maximizing the welfare of all, subject to an agreed-upon heirarchical distribution scheme. (That is, the wealth it creates is not usually distributed equally.) Society is merely the largest possible corporation, in which we are all, whether we like it nor not, employed.
What you are saying is that the smaller organization we may voluntarily join (e.g. the corporations that employ us) should be policed by and subject to the larger organizations that we are a member of whether we like it or not (e.g. the country in which we are born).
Yeah, well, not by me. I prefer to choose with whom I associate, and to whom I listen. I most definitely do not like the idea of the largest possible organization of which I'm a member, like it or not, enforcing the ultimate rules of my life. I'm much happier if the rules are defined by a smaller organization that I voluntarily join, and which I can voluntarily leave if I don't like the rules.
In a free society, where the largest powerful organizations are much smaller than the entire country, I can find the corner of it that plays by the rules I like. I have choices. I can be mostly who I want to be. In your "social" society, I have no more choices. I have to be what the majority thinks I should be, act accordingly to their morality and expectations.
No thanks! I know my average fellow man too well to think it would be fun to allow him to dictate the terms of my life.
Don't make me puke. Marx was a complete cynic, sponging off his women and dimwitted friends who suffered from the 19th century version of liberal white guilt while he filed the serial numbers off the most hackneyed cliches of the ages and presented it as his own "new" thought.
You can find the same lukewarm pap about the tides of history washing men about like corks, or about that awful dominance of money over morals, the cynicism of the ruling class, blah blah blah, in Imperial Roman political literature dated 50 AD -- or for that matter, going as far back as there are written records at all. Some ideas are just rooted in the human DNA and they recur automatically and mindlessly in each generation.
Das Kapital (actually a publishing failure, the far more readable The Communist Manifesto is what really made his fortune) remains on the best-seller lists for the same reason there will always be porn on the Internet. Not because it's a brilliant new idea, but because it appeals to the ancient primitive urges. In this case, the urge to believe that there's an evil conspiracy keeping you down, instead of your own lack of initiative, competence, or luck, and therefore if only society is reworked in this way or that we can all be wealthier than average and live a life of ease.
It's the same unquenchable yearning that keeps the idea of perpetual motion alive and kicking -- and drawing investors, and submitting patent applications -- 200 years after Clausius formulated the Second Law of Thermodynamics. It's the same gosh maybe it's true triumph of hope over rationality that keeps penis-pill spam alive, makes running cons, pyramid schemes and stock scams endlessly profitable, and keeps legions of lawyers and populist politicians employed and living in seaside mansions while you poor workin' stiffs down at mill scrimp on the kids' lunch money to send them a contribution.
Er...there is no way anyone who reads The Nation for more than a good laugh is going to see FIRE as anything other than a tool of the fascist-capitalist running dog oppressors.
It's like this every time kdawson takes a turn posting stuff to the front page. Wish he'd join up with his natural comrades at digg.com and take the tired rewarmed leftovers of 19th and 20th century politics away with him.
And some others would argue that the struggle against corporations -- against the organizations that let us wring ever more value from ever less labor -- is a cynical struggle to return humanity to living in caves and digging for roots to eat, a golden time when the folks with silver tongues and zero conscience (lawyers, politicians, and related rabble-rousers, the kind who dominate in high school) could always be on top, while socially-misfit four-eyed dweebs with good ideas -- the kind who found and manage successful private corporations today -- had to stand guard duty around the toilet pit on the midnight to dawn shift.
Yeah, I know. It's actually not that different out here. There seems to be some brutal cutthroat competition going on in that field. I actually know someone who ran a small ISP who was just driven out of business by being unable to match the phone companies' DSL pricing.
I looked into it once, but there are subtle issues with how far you are from the switching office. Plus my feeling is that this is a bit temporary, as the big boys fight over market share. Since they're sitting on piles of cash, they can afford to do a lot of loss-leading like this. Think MS introducing IE for free in the 90s to drive out Netscape. But I wonder what will happen when the market fight is over. Experience suggests quality and service will plummet, because they won't have brought in the cash necessary to do better. Like after a brutal fare war between airlines: afterwards, everyone's service goes to hell.
That's not a problem if you're willing to switch at that point, but I'm lazy, and I don't want to stay ahead of the curve, hopping between cheapest and best options. Since $49/month for Internet is basically just noise in my household budget (alas), I don't waste much time thinking about it.
Uh, wait a minute. First of all, a 12-19% drop in real cost over 6 years is a steep fall. Do you know any other service where that's happened? Check out the price of movie tickets, or haircuts, or (shudder) real estate and gasoline over the same period. I didn't say the real cost has plummeted like a stone, I just said it had fallen substantially. A 20% fall in real cost is substantial.
Furthermore, I don't see what the bandwidth cap has to do with my argument about the average bandwidth performance of connections. It's a shared bandwidth model, so the average performance has a lot more to do with average usage than it does with the cap, which I'd say only sets a limit on your peak performance.
For a long time I did some pinging about with a custom program I wrote to measure how the average bandwidth worked out with my connection. Not surprisingly, I found that the full-speed pipe was only available at times of the day when no one was typically home, and that (for example), just after dinner when everyone fired up the computer to read the news or download the latest MP3s the actual average bandwidth you'd get was substantially lower than the theoretical max (the cap).
Raising the cap modestly -- i.e. raising the theoretical maximum -- is probably just salesmanship. The real figure of merit for folks who are bandwidth hogs is average throughput. My experience is that it hasn't gotten substantially better, and may be worse. It doesn't sound like your experience is radically different, really.
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Gosh, only a lawyer could have the utter cluelessness about the real world and real people necessary to imagine that war has ever been, or ever will be, regulated by law.
Amazing. Who knew? And here I thought everybody on stage was just good at projecting his voice. Thanks for the interesting view into another world.
Ah well, you may be right. I may have you confused with the OP flame. Most folks who want to "keep an eye" on corporations don't want to actually do it themselves, e.g. by not buying the products of companies they don't like, organizing boycotts, whatever, but by delegating the task to government.
I haven't tried any "rhetorical tricks." I may have made a mistake in exactly what you were saying, but I've tried to make my points straightforwardly, using logic clear to all and facts known to all. Winning an argument by "rhetorical tricks" isn't winning an argument at all. Might as well cheat at solitaire. Not my thing.
I LIKE government.
On what basis? Pure theory? Or have you actually tried less government, and found that it sucks? Problem is, most people typically form their theories about what kind and how much government is desirable on a purely theoretical plain, without making any use of, e.g. history and cross-cultural experience to find out, experimentally, what levels are desirable. The Law of Unintended Consequences then appears to severely bite their asses. I'm not saying you're one of those (yet!) but give me some good empirical evidence that government is other than a necessary evil, like not eating too much ice cream and getting proper exercise.
Why would I disagree with that? If you put that on a piece of paper, 95% of the American electorate would sign it.
I know. People are very fond of signing pieces of paper that state noble goals. And yet...when it comes to put principles into action, suddenly it's a different story. In practice people act as if they believe there is some high and far-off, superior organization that will rise above all the grubby Earthly limitations of the local organizations they know well, and it's that wonderful ueberorganization they should support with all their hearts.
In 100 AD, this was Rome, and in the Middle Ages, it was the Church and (indirectly) the Kingdom of Heaven. In Soviet Russia it was the Party. In mid-20th century America it could be the Church of Science, or Ecology, or the Green Party or crystal shamanism or any of a zillion smaller cults.
If only the lesson drawn from the fact that all known local organizations have major flaws that make them tools to use gingerly and rarely would be rationally generalized to make us equally skeptical of the utility of all larger organizations, including nation-state governments. Anyone who thinks small family firms are OK, medium-size corporations tend to be impersonal and problematic, large corporations tend to be agents of evil -- but the government, the largest of all, is sweet reason and altruism personified ought to have his mental self-consistency fuse replaced, because it's clearly shorted.
Oh dear. Well, maybe consider directional antennas. A high-gain Yagi should only be about 8 inches across at 700 MHz. Hopefully you could make it high enough gain so it only picks up your signals, but with sufficient beamwidth so you only have to point it in the general direction of your stage. Don't know if it would work, but it's a cheap first try at a solution.
Yeah, I got that. I would check out first whether something as cheap as a combination of filters and/or directional antennas might work. Seems a lot cheaper than completely retooling.
Well...how does your receiver distinguish between your 10 channels? Or between someone else's microphone of the same model across the street? There's probably some mechanism, no? So your receiver isn't going to pick up someone else's signal and think it's your own, yes? I'm guessing your problem is some kind of front-end overload in your receiver.
Off the top of my head, the cheapest solution is a filter to block their frequencies and pass your own, assuming they aren't exactly the same. If they are exactly the same, then maybe a high-gain directional antenna on the receiver pointed at the microphones. Either is a lot cheaper than thousands of dollars, but you need a radio engineer to make it work.
That sounds regrettable. I would be surprised if we did not increasingly find a certain amount of convergence, id est two different sequences of DNA that end up providing the same function in the organism's life. Surely the importance of natural selection in shaping organisms should guarantee that, to some extent.
In which case, function should continue to be the primary standard for classification, for which DNA homology serves as an excellent proxy.
The pain in England in the 1840s had zero to do with the class system -- that was merely one of Marx's appealing lies -- and everything to do with the severe dislocations that happen when you jump from an agrarian to an industrial economy.
Case in point: early factory schedules were 12-hour days, 6 days a week. Sounds brutal, doesn't it? And it is. But why would any thinking man set up a schedule like that? Not, as Marx and his fellow con-men would have you believe, because they are intrinsically evil upper-class exploiters who want to squeeze every drop out of the miserable proles slaving away for them. Indeed, any successful manager insists on having happy employees for the same reason any successful farmer insists on having happy horses in his barn: so they do good work for him.
The reason for the screw-up is because no one understood that industrial work was fundamentally different from farm work. On the farm, a 12-hour work day is totally normal, and so is the 6-day work week. But farm work is different from industrial work. It isn't nearly as intense. You do some chore, which may well be hard work, but then you take a break while you walk to the next chore, and then you do some light work, and then you stop for a meal, and then you shoot the shit with the neighbor, or your wife, and then you do some more work, and so forth. You technically work from dawn to dusk, but it's not continuously. It's not at all like standing in front of a mill machine working full speed continuously, without a second's inattention possible lest your fingers be cut off.
It took years, decades even, for people to realize that industrial work was fundamentally different from farm work, and needed a fundamentally different type of schedule, even a whole different way of life. (Another problem was the fact that even though you do the "same" work every day on a farm, it varies subtly all the time, so you don't generally risk repetitive-motion injuries. Obviously factories are different, but it took long years to realize that.)
In fact, a case can be made that social reformers, including Marx and his followers, substantially slowed the development of more workable (and humane) conditions in industrial work, because they distracted everybody with this tremendously seductive fantasy that the problem was the class system, not a lack of insight into the nature of industrial work, and that the solution was political struggle, and not time-and-motion studies, better insight into physiology, circadian rhythms, et cetera.
I agree. But I was not describing Marxism (or hardcore Marxists), but rather the great mass of followers who believe in Marxism, who yearn for it to be true so much they are willing to overlook its ghastly failures in practice.
What do you mean when you say "most are interested?" Who is "interested?" If you mean upper management is mostly interested in the salaries of upper management, well, duh. Similarly, line workers are mostly interested in the salaries of line workers. Everyone is, obviously, most interested in maximizing his own take-home pay, and operates within the company towards that end. In a successful company, it turns out that the best way to maximize your own take-home pay is to maximize the profit the company makes. And an unsuccessful company isn't a reasonable example of what typical surviving companies are like.
From everyone else, they're trying to get as much work as possible for as little pay as possible.
Again, you're unclear on who you mean by "they." But assuming you mean upper management, then, yeah, of course. And "everyone else" (middle management and line workers, I assume) is trying to get as much pay for as little work as possible. Like any demand and supply curve, they meet in the middle at some point and strike a bargain. What's your point? This is how the world works.
No, the important differences are that:
(1) A corporation has no power over you that you don't grant yourself. They can't apply physical force to you, or take your property from you, or imprison you, torture you, or kill you. The most they can do is eject you, or withhold payment for your services.
(2) You can join or leave a corporation at any time, for any reason or no reason. Not true of your typical nation, of course.
Societies are certainly not "more or less" democratic. Indeed, large democratic societies are quite rare in history, for the obvious reason that it is extremely difficult to run any large operation efficiently when you have to have every decision decided by a majority vote. Every large organization solves this problems by becoming at least slightly undemocratic, by e.g. creating an administration that makes decisions on a daily basis, which then gets its decisions (or even its existence) ratified or rejected by everybody in the organization every now and then.
What you call this ratification or rejection varies, of course. It could be called "the next election" (if you live in a democratic republic) or it could be called "the next revolution" if you live in an autocracy or dictatorship. With corporations, meaning firms, the ratification or rejection happens when people vote with their feet, so to speak. That is, if company management decides policy that no one working in the company likes, then they leave the company, and hey presto the policy is rejected. No company can survive without workers. Of course most big companies, like most big countries, now have intermediate levels of ratification to reduce the chances of big, violent changes. Instead of having regular elections or plebiscites, they have board meetings where stockholders vote.
The other difference, which is fairly minor, is that societies frequently mouth platitudes that suggest that everyone's opinion in a ratification process is equally important. One man, one vote, that kind of nonsense. It's nonsense because no organization can effectually function if it truly works that way. Obviously the majority of people are going to be wrong on any given issue (there being always more ways to be wrong than right), and only the more skilled and on-the-ball people will be right. The organization, to function, must put a higher priority on the opinions of the more competent of its members. How they do so varies tremendously. In a corporation, it's pretty open: there's a corporation heirarchy, and the higher up you go, proving yourself (supposedly) by your track record, the more your opinion matters. Societies are sometimes this open, with aristocracies, titles and honors of various types, both formal and informal. But they also spend a fair amount of effort trying to disguise the fact that some peoples' vote matters more than others, as it should, and must.
What you suggested is keeping a more critical eye on corporations than government. I suggested the reverse.
What kind of dangerous weirdo goes through life looking for a social organization worthy of their absolute trust?
Probably the type that unthinkingly assumes the nation-state is that organization. Tune in to the latest Democratic Presidential debate and you'll hear plenty from them.
In any event, I said nothing about looking for absolute trust. What I assumed is that everyone looks for social organizations worthy of substantial (if not absolute) trust; to not do so is to be a complete antisocial and plan to live on a desert island eating bugs. What I said is that, a priori, I trust smaller organizations more than larger, and organizations that I can voluntarily join and leave more than those to which I am forced to belong by virtue of being born in a particular place and time.
Disagree? Let's hear why.
If you want to set up a wireless network, or make radio calls across the country of any type, using your own equipment, for as low a price as your imagination and skill will allow, and completely free of anything but common-sense rules of courtesy, just go study a few weeks and get your own personal radio license. You don't have to whine because MegaCorp won't provide you with a plug-n-play radio communication system that retarded monkeys could use at a price you think is low enough. Do it yourself if you don't like their rules, or price. Think of it as "open source radio." It's been around for a hundred years already.
I wouldn't worry about it, unless you're planning on hooking up an RF amplifier to your mikes and broadcasting into the next county (which would be illegal for separate reasons anyway). Your widgets are probably broadcasting such a weak signal that it can't be picked up more than 100 feet away. So who's going to care if the frequency space you're using is now officially licensed to someone else? Nobody, unless you're so unlucky as to have a licensed user set up shop within 100 feet of your studio.
Er...this is a private venture, undertaken to make money (for Branson) and to have fun (for his customers). If these reasons are good enough for Branson and his customers, what business is it of yours or mine? Why should Branson be expected to compromise his goals, whatever they are, to address yours? You don't compromise yours to address his, do you?
I would also have thought that the question of whether you draw the phylogenetic tree according to genetic relationships or functional relationships is still open.
I mean, if organism X shares 92% of its DNA with Y and only 88% with Z, but lives and functions in its ecological niche more like Z than Y, how do you classify them all? Is X closer to Y or Z? I didn't think this question had been settled (assuming it ever can be) among the evolutionary biologists.
Don't be too proud of your occupation
Geez, where do you read that into what I wrote? Did you miss the part where I pointed out the essential and equally valuable contribution of the folks who assemble cars, take out the trash, milk the cows, et cetera?
very few, if any, scientists are actually indispensable.
Well, the "if any" qualifier is inane. Obviously the giants in any field are indispensable, in the sense that without them their revolutions would be delayed until someone else like them turned up, and if they truly are unique (which admittedly seems impossible) then their revolutions will never occur at all.
But, yes, most scientists are, as the saying goes, button-sorters and bottle washers. But don't you look too much down your nose at those in the second and third rank. A certain amount of button sorting and bottle washing has to be done for the big ideas to get turned into practical applications that make our lives better.
Well, if you've taught science, maybe you can explain why we should expect a majority to do worse than average?
Read again what I wrote. Obviously I did not write that the majority should be expected to do "worse than average" (which is mathematically impossible). I wrote that the majority should be expected to do poorly on the scale that includes at the top the best in the field. That is true in any field. We should expect high-school kids running track to perform poorly compared to the field in the final heat of the Summer Olympics. We should expect your average person noodling around on the guitar to sound like a doofus compared to Eric Clapton. Generally, we do expect these things, in those kinds of fields, and we don't regard them as personal or systemic failures. No one is going around saying that, measured by NBA standards, the average high school kid sucks at basketball, so there must be something "wrong" with the American school phys. ed. system.
But we do get such inanity in science education, and that's my point.
Friend, a corporation is a miniature society. It's an organization of people that divides labor for the purpose of maximizing the welfare of all, subject to an agreed-upon heirarchical distribution scheme. (That is, the wealth it creates is not usually distributed equally.) Society is merely the largest possible corporation, in which we are all, whether we like it nor not, employed.
What you are saying is that the smaller organization we may voluntarily join (e.g. the corporations that employ us) should be policed by and subject to the larger organizations that we are a member of whether we like it or not (e.g. the country in which we are born).
Yeah, well, not by me. I prefer to choose with whom I associate, and to whom I listen. I most definitely do not like the idea of the largest possible organization of which I'm a member, like it or not, enforcing the ultimate rules of my life. I'm much happier if the rules are defined by a smaller organization that I voluntarily join, and which I can voluntarily leave if I don't like the rules.
In a free society, where the largest powerful organizations are much smaller than the entire country, I can find the corner of it that plays by the rules I like. I have choices. I can be mostly who I want to be. In your "social" society, I have no more choices. I have to be what the majority thinks I should be, act accordingly to their morality and expectations.
No thanks! I know my average fellow man too well to think it would be fun to allow him to dictate the terms of my life.
Don't make me puke. Marx was a complete cynic, sponging off his women and dimwitted friends who suffered from the 19th century version of liberal white guilt while he filed the serial numbers off the most hackneyed cliches of the ages and presented it as his own "new" thought.
You can find the same lukewarm pap about the tides of history washing men about like corks, or about that awful dominance of money over morals, the cynicism of the ruling class, blah blah blah, in Imperial Roman political literature dated 50 AD -- or for that matter, going as far back as there are written records at all. Some ideas are just rooted in the human DNA and they recur automatically and mindlessly in each generation.
Das Kapital (actually a publishing failure, the far more readable The Communist Manifesto is what really made his fortune) remains on the best-seller lists for the same reason there will always be porn on the Internet. Not because it's a brilliant new idea, but because it appeals to the ancient primitive urges. In this case, the urge to believe that there's an evil conspiracy keeping you down, instead of your own lack of initiative, competence, or luck, and therefore if only society is reworked in this way or that we can all be wealthier than average and live a life of ease.
It's the same unquenchable yearning that keeps the idea of perpetual motion alive and kicking -- and drawing investors, and submitting patent applications -- 200 years after Clausius formulated the Second Law of Thermodynamics. It's the same gosh maybe it's true triumph of hope over rationality that keeps penis-pill spam alive, makes running cons, pyramid schemes and stock scams endlessly profitable, and keeps legions of lawyers and populist politicians employed and living in seaside mansions while you poor workin' stiffs down at mill scrimp on the kids' lunch money to send them a contribution.
Er...there is no way anyone who reads The Nation for more than a good laugh is going to see FIRE as anything other than a tool of the fascist-capitalist running dog oppressors.
It's like this every time kdawson takes a turn posting stuff to the front page. Wish he'd join up with his natural comrades at digg.com and take the tired rewarmed leftovers of 19th and 20th century politics away with him.
And some others would argue that the struggle against corporations -- against the organizations that let us wring ever more value from ever less labor -- is a cynical struggle to return humanity to living in caves and digging for roots to eat, a golden time when the folks with silver tongues and zero conscience (lawyers, politicians, and related rabble-rousers, the kind who dominate in high school) could always be on top, while socially-misfit four-eyed dweebs with good ideas -- the kind who found and manage successful private corporations today -- had to stand guard duty around the toilet pit on the midnight to dawn shift.
Gosh, you could benefit from a basic class in economics.
Yeah, I know. It's actually not that different out here. There seems to be some brutal cutthroat competition going on in that field. I actually know someone who ran a small ISP who was just driven out of business by being unable to match the phone companies' DSL pricing.
I looked into it once, but there are subtle issues with how far you are from the switching office. Plus my feeling is that this is a bit temporary, as the big boys fight over market share. Since they're sitting on piles of cash, they can afford to do a lot of loss-leading like this. Think MS introducing IE for free in the 90s to drive out Netscape. But I wonder what will happen when the market fight is over. Experience suggests quality and service will plummet, because they won't have brought in the cash necessary to do better. Like after a brutal fare war between airlines: afterwards, everyone's service goes to hell.
That's not a problem if you're willing to switch at that point, but I'm lazy, and I don't want to stay ahead of the curve, hopping between cheapest and best options. Since $49/month for Internet is basically just noise in my household budget (alas), I don't waste much time thinking about it.
Uh, wait a minute. First of all, a 12-19% drop in real cost over 6 years is a steep fall. Do you know any other service where that's happened? Check out the price of movie tickets, or haircuts, or (shudder) real estate and gasoline over the same period. I didn't say the real cost has plummeted like a stone, I just said it had fallen substantially. A 20% fall in real cost is substantial.
Furthermore, I don't see what the bandwidth cap has to do with my argument about the average bandwidth performance of connections. It's a shared bandwidth model, so the average performance has a lot more to do with average usage than it does with the cap, which I'd say only sets a limit on your peak performance.
For a long time I did some pinging about with a custom program I wrote to measure how the average bandwidth worked out with my connection. Not surprisingly, I found that the full-speed pipe was only available at times of the day when no one was typically home, and that (for example), just after dinner when everyone fired up the computer to read the news or download the latest MP3s the actual average bandwidth you'd get was substantially lower than the theoretical max (the cap).
Raising the cap modestly -- i.e. raising the theoretical maximum -- is probably just salesmanship. The real figure of merit for folks who are bandwidth hogs is average throughput. My experience is that it hasn't gotten substantially better, and may be worse. It doesn't sound like your experience is radically different, really.