> But i notice a contradiction, you expect goverment to solve monopoly situations, and at the same time you critizise (sp?) the goverment intervention in farming.
There's no contradiction. I want the government to fix monopolies, because monopolies are bad (inefficient). I don't want the government to intervene in farming, because the market was working correctly when it put farmers out of business. Agricultural technology had advanced to the point where we needed fewer farmers to produce the same amount of food. Since we didn't all of a sudden need a lot of new food, the economy was correcting itself by causing the less efficient farmers operate at a loss. This was supposed to motivate them to find another area of employment, and was correct operation of the market. However, there happened to be a lot of inefficient farmers who lobbied the government into giving them subsidies, and this screwed everything up, resulting in, for example, farmers destroying their own crops in order to artificially decrease supply and raise prices.
> So you dont see a monopolist centralization trend in many areas? To increase profit margins, you start with upping effiency and the production process, first by tech innovation in most cases, then by centralizing and getting the benefits of high volume production, then it's time to have a go at the benefits and salaries.
There are such things as "natural monopolies", but there aren't too many. They occur when only one provider can operate at the maximum efficiency. You're talking about economies of scale, which sometimes cause the most efficient market structure to be an oligopoly, but never (historically) a monopoly. The efficiency of volume production is usually eroded by the inefficiency of the large corporate management structures to operate on such a large scale. Economists refer to this as "X-inefficiency", but I don't know why.
Your example of the car industry reducing benefits and salaries isn't a good one; the car industry in the U.S. has had a lot of problems, and the government inappropriately intervened (and still intervenes) in the market with tariffs on foreign imports. Protectionism is NEVER good for the economy.
> Monopolies happen everywhere, thats the nature of competition, you strive to be number one and to have as large market share as possible, preferably 100%, and every company that doesn't strive towards that goal is not maximizing shareholder value.
No, you're not striving toward 100% market share. You're striving toward maximum long-run profits. You don't really care about your market share as long as you can make money, but in less competitive markets (oligopolies, mainly), this often means having a large market share since price > marginal_cost. Capitalism produces monopolies when it's broken, and it's not broken in most cases. There are no monopolies or near-monopolies in the restaurant, car manufacturing, computer manufacturing, or dry cleaning industries. In very few cases, something bad can happen, and capitalism produces a monopoly able to sustain itself through either a natural monopoly situation (electric company), or through anticompetitive behavior (such as pricing below marginal cost). In these cases, the government usually either regulates the monopoly or does something else to fix the problem. It will almost always do _something_ to "fix" the issue if the country is democratic (though said something could of course be something stupid), because one of the few accurate economic principles most people seem to intuitively understand on their own is that "monopolies are bad".
> All this while overproduction crisis occasionally shock the economy. The business and stockmarket discussion could be a bit scrambled due to language issues, the word for business can be used in my language for both stock trading and making business deals, landing contracts and whatnot.
I didn't know English wasn't your native language, and I'm sorry for the confusion. You were correct, anyway; loo
IAANAL and this is not intended to be legal advice.
However, I think you should talk to a lawyer. I have personally worked on legal documents that allow a person to receive medical records about someone (HIPAA authorization). Hospitals look at those to see whom outside family is allowed to visit someone in the hospital.
As far as the "right to say what happens upon death", well, spouses don't have that power anyway. That's what a last will & testament is for. You name a person "executor" in your will, which allows that person to make decisions about your estate after you die, but only in accordance with the will.
I don't know anything about the health insurance thing, but afaik you're stuck with whatever contract they give. Unless you want a special regulation against the insurance companies, marriage won't help you, because the insurance companies will just specify, "opposite sex marriage" in the health insurance contracts. However, I don't think they would anyway, because there is no business reason. It's probably just inertia in drawing up the contracts that they don't recognize some special "same-sex partnership" in the contracts already.
By the way, I did this in a very red state, so I don't think state laws will be a problem.
They link to the Frontmotion MSI, so although it's not approved by Mozilla, they must think pretty highly of it. Also, please don't think my sibling poster's comment reflects the views of the entire open source community.
Not official from Mozilla, but well-maintained and not a hack. I wouldn't dismiss it because it's not "official"; the whole point of open-source is third parties being able to do things with the code.
My first-semester physics prof always phrased the question "a point mass will do x when these forces are applied to it." Problem with trying to apply kinematic analysis to life is that everything takes up space, so you'll never have a point mass.
Of course, if physics had a more sophisticated analysis that could deal with this problem, I obviously would have learned about in an introductory class.
> Things like the Phillips Curve [wikipedia.org] hold true for 30 years and then suddenly fall flat on their face so now it's not so much a curve as a movable line that can be placed anywhere automagically.
Revision of a model in the face of new data is how all sciences progress. Also, you mistate the new theory behind the Phillips Curve. In the short run, the tradeoff between inflation and unemployment still holds. In the long run, the Phillips Curve is a vertical line, but it can't be plotted anywhere; it must be plotted at the natural rate of unemployment. You have to get that number from empirical observations. You also have to get the speed of light in a vacuum from empirical observations.
What, exactly, are you saying? What do you mean when you say something "matters", or doesn't matter. Do you think that the number of people who think about a thing determines how much it "matters"?
To me, it matters whether Gates set back the computing industry a decade (not entirely sure, but I think he did), because it makes a difference in how I view the man, how I view his company, and perhaps whom I vote for. I don't care if other people disagree with me, and it doesn't bother me that most people are too ignorant to have an informed opinion about the issue. The majority of people are too ignorant to have an informed opinion about almost anything. It's convenient to know this, because it means you can safely ignore most people.
Like the subject line of another one of these posts, "you failed ECON 101". I got an A+, btw.
You use the most anti-capitalist markets in the United States (monopolies and farming) to bash capitalism. See a little problem there?
Monopolies are one of those things that "shouldn't happen". If they do happen, capitalism has failed in that market and the government needs to go in and do something. Capitalism isn't perfect, and if it creates a monopoly, the government needs to intervene and fix it or bad stuff will happen (like Microsoft, though copyright messes up capitalism too, but that's a separate issue).
Farming... oh god, farming. The government has been screwing up farming for a century, and it just realized it a few decades ago. I think your information is outdated; farmers don't destroy their crops on a large scale anymore afaik. In any case, U.S. farming is one of the least capitalistic markets in the country. It's been infected with sick government intervention due to farmers trying to avoid having to sell their farms and do something more useful.
Your complaint about "business and the stock markets" makes no sense. Those are different entities. Businesses make things. The stock market doesn't, but provides incentives for people to make things. It takes a relatively small amount of resources, so doesn't hurt much. A lot of people game the stock market trying to get rich quickly. Most of the time they end up poor instead because these people are stupid. So what?
> Except that they had a disabled plane and could not destroy the data before landing.
Uh, when the Chinese got on the plane, the guy he was hacking stuff up with an axe. If he didn't have anything better to do than go through the tertiary procedures that call for that, I think we're safe. Unless your talking about the airplane's general design, or the design of the equipment on the plane, rather than actual computer data, which is what we were talking about and which is appropriate for an on-topic discussion.
If you were being off-topic, then I'll agree with you that it is possible to recover the design of a plane from a smoldering wreck anyway. The British did that with crashed German aircraft in World War 2. Also, if they went the smoldering wreck route, the computer data might have survived. It was a lose-lose decision, of course, but I place enough value on human life that I'd rather see them live than "go down with the ship" to satisfy some perverse, anachronistic, and destructive honor code. I'm not saying that's why you feel the way you do, but it might be the reason some do.
I know the crew was in the Air Force. The hypothetical response being from the Army was to make it even more irrelevant, though perhaps that was indeed to subtle.
Well, I was being very vague. However, I'm of the opinion that the trade deficit is good for us. It's pretty cool that, with our trade with China, we value what we get (imports) as being worth 5 times what we give (export).
The Federal Reserve controls the amount of money in the economy through the discount rate and open market operations, so we really don't need to be worried about $64.3 billion leaving the country. We could even print more money if there were a real currency shortage, but that would be inflationary unless a LOT of money were leaving the country.
Money is just a stand-in to smooth transactions. It's paper, not gold, remember?
No, he didn't deserve a court marshall; no, he shouldn't have crashed the plane; and no, he didn't turn over top secrete information to the Chinese.
I don't know on what basis you're saying his orders "would have been" to crash into the ocean. Were you his commanding officer? (Cue reply saying something like, "I worked as a computer technician for the army, so I'm right and you're wrong!")
Let's consider this: Option 1: Crash the plane after destroying data. Soldiers die, expensive plane is destroyed, and Chinese get whatever info they can get from the plane by salvaging it from the ocean (yes, you can do that).
Option 2: Land the plane in China after destroying data. Soldiers live, expensive plane might be returned to the U.S. after Chinese study it (the plane was returned eventually).
>...undeclared enemy (which is China, and that's a topic in itself).
China is not an enemy. We buy a ton of stuff from them. They buy a ton of stuff from us. Our businesses have offices there. Our colleges have exchange programs with them.
Yeah, our diplomatic relations are a little bit strained over things like Taiwan, but we're nowhere near going to war with them. If you're a troll, shame on you. In any case, shame on the Slashdot editors for choosing this ignorant or trolling person's story.
Are you insane? It's better to have start WW3 than to swallow your jingoistic pride and have the crew land in China?
Also, what did Bush have to do with this? My understanding was that the lead officer on the plane made the decision to land in China. I could be wrong, but I won't accept I am unless you an cite a reliable source to the contrary.
The plane was CRASHING. It was going to land in China or crash China. Fortunately for us, the Chinese allowed the aircraft to land on one of their airbases. Unfortunately for the Chinese, the aircraft of the Chinese pilot was too damaged too land, and the pilot died.
This was a scary, international incident. There was blame on both sides, and we're _lucky_ it didn't start WW3. In case you don't know, world wars are generally considered Bad Things. WW1 and WW2 weren't like the Iraq "war" that's going on right now. There were drafts, rations, and shortages, and there would likely be again if there were a world war involving the U.S. and China.
> I can't think of many applications that wouldn't benefit from being 4 to 12 times faster.
Then you don't have a very good imagination. User interface code is often instantaneous on modern processors. There's no reason to make that code more instantaneous.
Analogies aren't logically sound anyway, so it's pointless to quibble about them. I really shouldn't use them, either.
What I meant to assert is that sex is orders of magnitude less important to health than diet or exercise. If I am correct, then it is not a significant hindrance to someone's overall health if they are completely non-functioning sexually. AFAIK, unices (the people) weren't known for dying young. If you can point to a reliable source saying they were, I'll have to reconsider my position.
Sex has probably does have some health benefits in addition to its more well known health risks. On the whole, it's probably positive for health unless your having sex with a lot of people, but any benefit is orders of magnitude smaller than the benefits of diet and exercise.
Your quote makes about as much sense as,
"Healthy workers are often the most productive workers, and the healthiest workers use ergonomically correct posture when lifting, in addition to having healthy eating and exercise habits."
It's still unclear whether Linux or OS X is #2; that article is from 2004, and both Linux and OS X have gained market share since then.
As far as servers, Linux is actually #3 after the combined market share of all UNIces. If you separate out OS X Server explicitly, Linux clearly wins, though.
If nothing else, measuring dopamine levels would be useful for comparison, although other psychological tests would probably be better since happiness can come from states of mind other than ecstacy.
Comparison is a problem in practice, but we're all the same species, so we all experience the same things. It is a problem only because of our current technology, so it's not a problem in the theory.
> Mill had the idea that the joy of being cultured was superior to that of merely being indulgent. I agree with him. The outcome of this is that I am more willing to eg. pay higher taxes for others' education than I am to pay for better TV (for all), which is what my untaxed money could have otherwise done. I am not saying that an educated mind should scale more highly, but that the quality of education (including self-education) rates more highly than that of not being educated; mundane indulgent happiness is as valuable in both, but the quality of having an educated mind is usually worth being unhappy for, at least to some degree.
I get a lot of "happiness" from learning things, although it's a change in happiness that happens over a long period of time. Others may be different, and while I might have an instinctive urge to look down on them, I maintain that their happiness, whatever it may be, is morally equal to mine. I disagree with Mill on this, as I noted earlier.
With regard to the specifics of T.V. and education, it is likely that both should be subsidized by the government. Many argue that an educated populace has spillover benefits to the rest of society; free broadcast T.V. certainly does because of the monopoly problems created by copyright.
> The point is that the acting utilitarian will find their behaviour to be optimal at a different point than the hedonist. Hedonism wasn't originally what it is now taken to be, BTW, but rather included as part of its justification that we take pleasure in doing good for others. If the utilitarian assumes all others to be hedonists, you'll get plenty of people acting similarly to how the couple do in The Gift of the Magi.
That's interesting about hedonism, and The Gift of the Magi is thought-provoking. I don't think anything like that would happen, though. The acting utilitarian will only find his behavior to be different from the rest of society if he is *not* the worst-off in that society. If he is the worst off, by the law of diminishing marginal returns, the best he can do for society's happiness is to increase his own. The person next-to-least worst off will not voluntarily redistribute his income to anyone other than that person who is worst off in society, and so on. All of this is happening simultaneousy, so if everyone has accurate and dynamically updated information, this would seem to be a paradise when voluntary income redistribution is considered.
Voluntary income redistribution wouldn't happen too much, though, because in a society of utilitarians-thinking-others-are-hedonist, the populace would probably elect representives supporting progressive taxation. Since they know about the inefficiencies of taxes, they themselves would ignore tax when considering their purchases. This would place their income at something close to what is socially optimum.
> Ah, but the utilitarian will, quite possibly favour fair trade when, if it weren't for their adherence to utilitarianism, they'd have bought something else. Also, although I get tired of the political bullshit, don't think that fair trade is ridiculous at all. If I choose to value the education of the poor, and the intrinsic quality of their work (which is what mades fair trade superior to simple money transfer), that is, in my view, an honourable decision. It isn't only the PC who choose fair trade.
Fair trade implies that you are getting a worse deal and diminishing your own happiness. For this to be a good utilitarian decision, someone else must be benefitting more than you are harmed.
> It still leaves the problem of how to compare different people's happiness. Certainly, you can say simply "it should be democratic", but then you lose all moral content favouring eg. an educated mind (which may in fact be "unhappier", but "richer") which might (for example) cost more than more rubbish TV.
Well, if by democratic you mean,
For all x elementof People, for all y elementof people, Valueofthehappinessof(x) = Valueofthehappinessof(y),
then that is exactly how I would compare different peoples's happinesses. I can see no reason why the happiness of those with educated minds should be favored over the happiness of the ignorant. Indeed, if society did, the ignorant would be more likely to remain ignorant, because many ignorant people wish to be educated, but are put off by the cost of it.
> Trouble is: it isn't true, preferences are not always well-ordered in practice, and fails to take into account that other individuals might also be moral actors. For several people to be attempting to maximise world happiness, but assuming that the others are seeking to maximise their own personal happiness must lead to some interesting contradicitions.
I'm not exactly sure how to parse this. For one thing, I don't know how you're defining "moral". Are you using the utilitarian definition? That's pretty much mine, although I'm in the process of writing a huge paper where the culmination is an extended definition.
If you're talking about utilitarian morality, I don't think there's a contradiction here. If acting to make others happy makes a person happy, that's wonderful and his actions will lead to both his happiness and the happiness of others. Now, in the (*snicker*) "fair trade" (*snicker*) example you use, that's actually not moral acting. People who bias their purchases toward "fair trade" products are buying based on their own preferences just like anyone else. Most Jews buy and consume kosher food even though it is more expensive, while those who don't share their religion often don't get any extra value from knowing that the food has been blessed by a rabbi. Those who buy "fair trade" products believe that they are acting to support some of the host of left-wing causes, usually including protectionism. Those who understand economics know that buying "fair trade" products when they are more expensive or inferior diminishes the net happiness of the world, so they don't get value from knowing that American workers made it in an air conditioned facility with free Coke machines every 100 yards, or whatever.
> Granted, this is a valuable thing to do. You need to be careful, though: people habitually neglect opportunity costs, favouring the visible over the invisible. This is a big reason why the greatest freedom is superior to the greatest happiness, IMO. It is also a good reason why one should not always favour people getting what they want, although I would not, in most cases, stop them from doing so with their own resources. Freedom can allow solutions to emerge that may not always be as efficient as a centrally determined one in simple terms, but can allow for subtleties that the centrally determined solution would neglect.
You're basically arguing that people are sometimes irrational. I don't believe they're irrational very often, but, yeah, people sometimes act against their own self-interest. This makes the job of economists harder than it would otherwise be. I don't see how you get that we should favor freedom over happiness from people's irrationality. If I believed people were often irrational, I'd support the passage of laws to *restrict* people's freedoms, so as to stop them from doing things that hurt themselves and others! While I'm sure I disagree with you, because I think that the greatest possible happiness of mankind should be the goal of society, I don't exactly know what you mean by freedom. That word is so poorly defined in common use that without additional context, I can't figure out what type of
> Agreed. However, this is something that can never be done in practice. "Which is the greater happiness?", and "how much of happiness X is worth happiness Y?" are questions without consistent, non-arbitary answers.
For me, those two questions can only be answered by an individual himself, since only he knows what kinds of happiness are most important to this (and I know I'm not in Mill-land anymore by saying that:). Fortunately, this fact doesn't cause a problem in practice too much for two reasons:
1. People act to gain their own happiness, which in a very well-behaved argument means we don't need to do anything in that case except what makes ourselves happy.
2. When the market isn't perfect, statistics can be used to approximate the happiness lost or gained by spillover costs and benefits. For example, an economist might ask in a survey, "Would you be willing to pay an extra $500 in taxes per year in order to have a park in your neighborhood? If not, they may then ask, "What is the maximum amount in extra taxes per year you would pay to have a park in your neighborhood?"
So, while you can't get the actual figures in utils, you can get enough information out of people to do math with socially interesting results.
You appear to be misinformed. Copyright infringement is legally not theft. It is legally copyright infringement.
The two crimes have different penalties. If I recall correctly, because of the RIMPMAFIAA the penalties for copyright infringement are worse than the penalties for theft.
Slashdot Mirror
> But i notice a contradiction, you expect goverment to solve monopoly situations, and at the same time you critizise (sp?) the goverment intervention in farming.
There's no contradiction. I want the government to fix monopolies, because monopolies are bad (inefficient). I don't want the government to intervene in farming, because the market was working correctly when it put farmers out of business. Agricultural technology had advanced to the point where we needed fewer farmers to produce the same amount of food. Since we didn't all of a sudden need a lot of new food, the economy was correcting itself by causing the less efficient farmers operate at a loss. This was supposed to motivate them to find another area of employment, and was correct operation of the market. However, there happened to be a lot of inefficient farmers who lobbied the government into giving them subsidies, and this screwed everything up, resulting in, for example, farmers destroying their own crops in order to artificially decrease supply and raise prices.
> So you dont see a monopolist centralization trend in many areas? To increase profit margins, you start with upping effiency and the production process, first by tech innovation in most cases, then by centralizing and getting the benefits of high volume production, then it's time to have a go at the benefits and salaries.
There are such things as "natural monopolies", but there aren't too many. They occur when only one provider can operate at the maximum efficiency. You're talking about economies of scale, which sometimes cause the most efficient market structure to be an oligopoly, but never (historically) a monopoly. The efficiency of volume production is usually eroded by the inefficiency of the large corporate management structures to operate on such a large scale. Economists refer to this as "X-inefficiency", but I don't know why.
Your example of the car industry reducing benefits and salaries isn't a good one; the car industry in the U.S. has had a lot of problems, and the government inappropriately intervened (and still intervenes) in the market with tariffs on foreign imports. Protectionism is NEVER good for the economy.
> Monopolies happen everywhere, thats the nature of competition, you strive to be number one and to have as large market share as possible, preferably 100%, and every company that doesn't strive towards that goal is not maximizing shareholder value.
No, you're not striving toward 100% market share. You're striving toward maximum long-run profits. You don't really care about your market share as long as you can make money, but in less competitive markets (oligopolies, mainly), this often means having a large market share since price > marginal_cost. Capitalism produces monopolies when it's broken, and it's not broken in most cases. There are no monopolies or near-monopolies in the restaurant, car manufacturing, computer manufacturing, or dry cleaning industries. In very few cases, something bad can happen, and capitalism produces a monopoly able to sustain itself through either a natural monopoly situation (electric company), or through anticompetitive behavior (such as pricing below marginal cost). In these cases, the government usually either regulates the monopoly or does something else to fix the problem. It will almost always do _something_ to "fix" the issue if the country is democratic (though said something could of course be something stupid), because one of the few accurate economic principles most people seem to intuitively understand on their own is that "monopolies are bad".
> All this while overproduction crisis occasionally shock the economy. The business and stockmarket discussion could be a bit scrambled due to language issues, the word for business can be used in my language for both stock trading and making business deals, landing contracts and whatnot.
I didn't know English wasn't your native language, and I'm sorry for the confusion. You were correct, anyway; loo
IAANAL and this is not intended to be legal advice.
However, I think you should talk to a lawyer. I have personally worked on legal documents that allow a person to receive medical records about someone (HIPAA authorization). Hospitals look at those to see whom outside family is allowed to visit someone in the hospital.
As far as the "right to say what happens upon death", well, spouses don't have that power anyway. That's what a last will & testament is for. You name a person "executor" in your will, which allows that person to make decisions about your estate after you die, but only in accordance with the will.
I don't know anything about the health insurance thing, but afaik you're stuck with whatever contract they give. Unless you want a special regulation against the insurance companies, marriage won't help you, because the insurance companies will just specify, "opposite sex marriage" in the health insurance contracts. However, I don't think they would anyway, because there is no business reason. It's probably just inertia in drawing up the contracts that they don't recognize some special "same-sex partnership" in the contracts already.
By the way, I did this in a very red state, so I don't think state laws will be a problem.
I found a Mozilla document about this issue.
_ Deployment
http://wiki.mozilla.org/Firefox:2.0_Institutional
They link to the Frontmotion MSI, so although it's not approved by Mozilla, they must think pretty highly of it. Also, please don't think my sibling poster's comment reflects the views of the entire open source community.
http://www.frontmotion.com/Firefox/
Not official from Mozilla, but well-maintained and not a hack. I wouldn't dismiss it because it's not "official"; the whole point of open-source is third parties being able to do things with the code.
My first-semester physics prof always phrased the question "a point mass will do x when these forces are applied to it." Problem with trying to apply kinematic analysis to life is that everything takes up space, so you'll never have a point mass.
Of course, if physics had a more sophisticated analysis that could deal with this problem, I obviously would have learned about in an introductory class.
> Things like the Phillips Curve [wikipedia.org] hold true for 30 years and then suddenly fall flat on their face so now it's not so much a curve as a movable line that can be placed anywhere automagically.
Revision of a model in the face of new data is how all sciences progress. Also, you mistate the new theory behind the Phillips Curve. In the short run, the tradeoff between inflation and unemployment still holds. In the long run, the Phillips Curve is a vertical line, but it can't be plotted anywhere; it must be plotted at the natural rate of unemployment. You have to get that number from empirical observations. You also have to get the speed of light in a vacuum from empirical observations.
If you're that concerned, you should just restrict it to friends only while they're considering you, then change it back once they hire you (or not).
"It doesn't matter even if you're right."
What, exactly, are you saying? What do you mean when you say something "matters", or doesn't matter. Do you think that the number of people who think about a thing determines how much it "matters"?
To me, it matters whether Gates set back the computing industry a decade (not entirely sure, but I think he did), because it makes a difference in how I view the man, how I view his company, and perhaps whom I vote for. I don't care if other people disagree with me, and it doesn't bother me that most people are too ignorant to have an informed opinion about the issue. The majority of people are too ignorant to have an informed opinion about almost anything. It's convenient to know this, because it means you can safely ignore most people.
Like the subject line of another one of these posts, "you failed ECON 101". I got an A+, btw.
... oh god, farming. The government has been screwing up farming for a century, and it just realized it a few decades ago. I think your information is outdated; farmers don't destroy their crops on a large scale anymore afaik. In any case, U.S. farming is one of the least capitalistic markets in the country. It's been infected with sick government intervention due to farmers trying to avoid having to sell their farms and do something more useful.
You use the most anti-capitalist markets in the United States (monopolies and farming) to bash capitalism. See a little problem there?
Monopolies are one of those things that "shouldn't happen". If they do happen, capitalism has failed in that market and the government needs to go in and do something. Capitalism isn't perfect, and if it creates a monopoly, the government needs to intervene and fix it or bad stuff will happen (like Microsoft, though copyright messes up capitalism too, but that's a separate issue).
Farming
Your complaint about "business and the stock markets" makes no sense. Those are different entities. Businesses make things. The stock market doesn't, but provides incentives for people to make things. It takes a relatively small amount of resources, so doesn't hurt much. A lot of people game the stock market trying to get rich quickly. Most of the time they end up poor instead because these people are stupid. So what?
> Except that they had a disabled plane and could not destroy the data before landing.
Uh, when the Chinese got on the plane, the guy he was hacking stuff up with an axe. If he didn't have anything better to do than go through the tertiary procedures that call for that, I think we're safe. Unless your talking about the airplane's general design, or the design of the equipment on the plane, rather than actual computer data, which is what we were talking about and which is appropriate for an on-topic discussion.
If you were being off-topic, then I'll agree with you that it is possible to recover the design of a plane from a smoldering wreck anyway. The British did that with crashed German aircraft in World War 2. Also, if they went the smoldering wreck route, the computer data might have survived. It was a lose-lose decision, of course, but I place enough value on human life that I'd rather see them live than "go down with the ship" to satisfy some perverse, anachronistic, and destructive honor code. I'm not saying that's why you feel the way you do, but it might be the reason some do.
I know the crew was in the Air Force. The hypothetical response being from the Army was to make it even more irrelevant, though perhaps that was indeed to subtle.
Well, I was being very vague. However, I'm of the opinion that the trade deficit is good for us. It's pretty cool that, with our trade with China, we value what we get (imports) as being worth 5 times what we give (export).
The Federal Reserve controls the amount of money in the economy through the discount rate and open market operations, so we really don't need to be worried about $64.3 billion leaving the country. We could even print more money if there were a real currency shortage, but that would be inflationary unless a LOT of money were leaving the country.
Money is just a stand-in to smooth transactions. It's paper, not gold, remember?
Wow ... just ... wow.
No, he didn't deserve a court marshall; no, he shouldn't have crashed the plane; and no, he didn't turn over top secrete information to the Chinese.
I don't know on what basis you're saying his orders "would have been" to crash into the ocean. Were you his commanding officer? (Cue reply saying something like, "I worked as a computer technician for the army, so I'm right and you're wrong!")
Let's consider this:
Option 1: Crash the plane after destroying data. Soldiers die, expensive plane is destroyed, and Chinese get whatever info they can get from the plane by salvaging it from the ocean (yes, you can do that).
Option 2: Land the plane in China after destroying data. Soldiers live, expensive plane might be returned to the U.S. after Chinese study it (the plane was returned eventually).
Me, I'm going with Option 2.
> ...undeclared enemy (which is China, and that's a topic in itself).
China is not an enemy. We buy a ton of stuff from them. They buy a ton of stuff from us. Our businesses have offices there. Our colleges have exchange programs with them.
Yeah, our diplomatic relations are a little bit strained over things like Taiwan, but we're nowhere near going to war with them. If you're a troll, shame on you. In any case, shame on the Slashdot editors for choosing this ignorant or trolling person's story.
Are you insane? It's better to have start WW3 than to swallow your jingoistic pride and have the crew land in China?
Also, what did Bush have to do with this? My understanding was that the lead officer on the plane made the decision to land in China. I could be wrong, but I won't accept I am unless you an cite a reliable source to the contrary.
The plane was CRASHING. It was going to land in China or crash China. Fortunately for us, the Chinese allowed the aircraft to land on one of their airbases. Unfortunately for the Chinese, the aircraft of the Chinese pilot was too damaged too land, and the pilot died.
This was a scary, international incident. There was blame on both sides, and we're _lucky_ it didn't start WW3. In case you don't know, world wars are generally considered Bad Things. WW1 and WW2 weren't like the Iraq "war" that's going on right now. There were drafts, rations, and shortages, and there would likely be again if there were a world war involving the U.S. and China.
> I can't think of many applications that wouldn't benefit from being 4 to 12 times faster.
Then you don't have a very good imagination. User interface code is often instantaneous on modern processors. There's no reason to make that code more instantaneous.
Analogies aren't logically sound anyway, so it's pointless to quibble about them. I really shouldn't use them, either.
What I meant to assert is that sex is orders of magnitude less important to health than diet or exercise. If I am correct, then it is not a significant hindrance to someone's overall health if they are completely non-functioning sexually. AFAIK, unices (the people) weren't known for dying young. If you can point to a reliable source saying they were, I'll have to reconsider my position.
Umm ... no.
Sex has probably does have some health benefits in addition to its more well known health risks. On the whole, it's probably positive for health unless your having sex with a lot of people, but any benefit is orders of magnitude smaller than the benefits of diet and exercise.
Your quote makes about as much sense as,
"Healthy workers are often the most productive workers, and the healthiest workers use ergonomically correct posture when lifting, in addition to having healthy eating and exercise habits."
http://www.idc.com/getdoc.jsp?containerId=prUS2007 4406
http://www.macobserver.com/article/2004/08/11.2.sh tml
It's still unclear whether Linux or OS X is #2; that article is from 2004, and both Linux and OS X have gained market share since then.
As far as servers, Linux is actually #3 after the combined market share of all UNIces. If you separate out OS X Server explicitly, Linux clearly wins, though.
> I don't think that it's comparable.
If nothing else, measuring dopamine levels would be useful for comparison, although other psychological tests would probably be better since happiness can come from states of mind other than ecstacy.
Comparison is a problem in practice, but we're all the same species, so we all experience the same things. It is a problem only because of our current technology, so it's not a problem in the theory.
> Mill had the idea that the joy of being cultured was superior to that of merely being indulgent. I agree with him. The outcome of this is that I am more willing to eg. pay higher taxes for others' education than I am to pay for better TV (for all), which is what my untaxed money could have otherwise done. I am not saying that an educated mind should scale more highly, but that the quality of education (including self-education) rates more highly than that of not being educated; mundane indulgent happiness is as valuable in both, but the quality of having an educated mind is usually worth being unhappy for, at least to some degree.
I get a lot of "happiness" from learning things, although it's a change in happiness that happens over a long period of time. Others may be different, and while I might have an instinctive urge to look down on them, I maintain that their happiness, whatever it may be, is morally equal to mine. I disagree with Mill on this, as I noted earlier.
With regard to the specifics of T.V. and education, it is likely that both should be subsidized by the government. Many argue that an educated populace has spillover benefits to the rest of society; free broadcast T.V. certainly does because of the monopoly problems created by copyright.
> The point is that the acting utilitarian will find their behaviour to be optimal at a different point than the hedonist. Hedonism wasn't originally what it is now taken to be, BTW, but rather included as part of its justification that we take pleasure in doing good for others. If the utilitarian assumes all others to be hedonists, you'll get plenty of people acting similarly to how the couple do in The Gift of the Magi.
That's interesting about hedonism, and The Gift of the Magi is thought-provoking. I don't think anything like that would happen, though. The acting utilitarian will only find his behavior to be different from the rest of society if he is *not* the worst-off in that society. If he is the worst off, by the law of diminishing marginal returns, the best he can do for society's happiness is to increase his own. The person next-to-least worst off will not voluntarily redistribute his income to anyone other than that person who is worst off in society, and so on. All of this is happening simultaneousy, so if everyone has accurate and dynamically updated information, this would seem to be a paradise when voluntary income redistribution is considered.
Voluntary income redistribution wouldn't happen too much, though, because in a society of utilitarians-thinking-others-are-hedonist, the populace would probably elect representives supporting progressive taxation. Since they know about the inefficiencies of taxes, they themselves would ignore tax when considering their purchases. This would place their income at something close to what is socially optimum.
> Ah, but the utilitarian will, quite possibly favour fair trade when, if it weren't for their adherence to utilitarianism, they'd have bought something else. Also, although I get tired of the political bullshit, don't think that fair trade is ridiculous at all. If I choose to value the education of the poor, and the intrinsic quality of their work (which is what mades fair trade superior to simple money transfer), that is, in my view, an honourable decision. It isn't only the PC who choose fair trade.
Fair trade implies that you are getting a worse deal and diminishing your own happiness. For this to be a good utilitarian decision, someone else must be benefitting more than you are harmed.
> It still leaves the problem of how to compare different people's happiness. Certainly, you can say simply "it should be democratic", but then you lose all moral content favouring eg. an educated mind (which may in fact be "unhappier", but "richer") which might (for example) cost more than more rubbish TV.
Well, if by democratic you mean,
For all x elementof People, for all y elementof people, Valueofthehappinessof(x) = Valueofthehappinessof(y),
then that is exactly how I would compare different peoples's happinesses. I can see no reason why the happiness of those with educated minds should be favored over the happiness of the ignorant. Indeed, if society did, the ignorant would be more likely to remain ignorant, because many ignorant people wish to be educated, but are put off by the cost of it.
> Trouble is: it isn't true, preferences are not always well-ordered in practice, and fails to take into account that other individuals might also be moral actors. For several people to be attempting to maximise world happiness, but assuming that the others are seeking to maximise their own personal happiness must lead to some interesting contradicitions.
I'm not exactly sure how to parse this. For one thing, I don't know how you're defining "moral". Are you using the utilitarian definition? That's pretty much mine, although I'm in the process of writing a huge paper where the culmination is an extended definition.
If you're talking about utilitarian morality, I don't think there's a contradiction here. If acting to make others happy makes a person happy, that's wonderful and his actions will lead to both his happiness and the happiness of others. Now, in the (*snicker*) "fair trade" (*snicker*) example you use, that's actually not moral acting. People who bias their purchases toward "fair trade" products are buying based on their own preferences just like anyone else. Most Jews buy and consume kosher food even though it is more expensive, while those who don't share their religion often don't get any extra value from knowing that the food has been blessed by a rabbi. Those who buy "fair trade" products believe that they are acting to support some of the host of left-wing causes, usually including protectionism. Those who understand economics know that buying "fair trade" products when they are more expensive or inferior diminishes the net happiness of the world, so they don't get value from knowing that American workers made it in an air conditioned facility with free Coke machines every 100 yards, or whatever.
> Granted, this is a valuable thing to do. You need to be careful, though: people habitually neglect opportunity costs, favouring the visible over the invisible. This is a big reason why the greatest freedom is superior to the greatest happiness, IMO. It is also a good reason why one should not always favour people getting what they want, although I would not, in most cases, stop them from doing so with their own resources. Freedom can allow solutions to emerge that may not always be as efficient as a centrally determined one in simple terms, but can allow for subtleties that the centrally determined solution would neglect.
You're basically arguing that people are sometimes irrational. I don't believe they're irrational very often, but, yeah, people sometimes act against their own self-interest. This makes the job of economists harder than it would otherwise be. I don't see how you get that we should favor freedom over happiness from people's irrationality. If I believed people were often irrational, I'd support the passage of laws to *restrict* people's freedoms, so as to stop them from doing things that hurt themselves and others! While I'm sure I disagree with you, because I think that the greatest possible happiness of mankind should be the goal of society, I don't exactly know what you mean by freedom. That word is so poorly defined in common use that without additional context, I can't figure out what type of
In "point 1", "argument" should be "market".
> Agreed. However, this is something that can never be done in practice. "Which is the greater happiness?", and "how much of happiness X is worth happiness Y?" are questions without consistent, non-arbitary answers.
:). Fortunately, this fact doesn't cause a problem in practice too much for two reasons:
For me, those two questions can only be answered by an individual himself, since only he knows what kinds of happiness are most important to this (and I know I'm not in Mill-land anymore by saying that
1. People act to gain their own happiness, which in a very well-behaved argument means we don't need to do anything in that case except what makes ourselves happy.
2. When the market isn't perfect, statistics can be used to approximate the happiness lost or gained by spillover costs and benefits. For example, an economist might ask in a survey, "Would you be willing to pay an extra $500 in taxes per year in order to have a park in your neighborhood? If not, they may then ask, "What is the maximum amount in extra taxes per year you would pay to have a park in your neighborhood?"
So, while you can't get the actual figures in utils, you can get enough information out of people to do math with socially interesting results.
You appear to be misinformed. Copyright infringement is legally not theft. It is legally copyright infringement.
The two crimes have different penalties. If I recall correctly, because of the RIMPMAFIAA the penalties for copyright infringement are worse than the penalties for theft.
Note to potential sibling posters:
This man is obviously a troll or an idiot. In either case, please ignore him.