If everyone went by your logic, there wouldn't be any satellite TV. (If you're going to ask why, it's because everyone would take it for free, the company would go broke, and the satellites would stop transmitting.)
Not true. If you recall the days of the big analog dishes, there were plenty of channels anyone could view for free, because their business model didn't depend on subscription fees. This is still the case with "freeview" satellite in the UK, Australia, and New Zealand.
Piracy is only a problem when your business model depends on producing and broadcasting content first, and then praying people will pay for it later.
Do you see a problem with that, or do you just like freeloading?
I guess you think it's irrelevant that the people giving you the media for free are not legally authorized to give you that media for free?
Yes, I do think it's irrelevant.
When you look up a number, like the speed of light or the world population, do you worry about whether the source is "authorized" to give you that number for free -- because after all, a lot of effort went into determining that number, and it's stealing to take it without compensating them? Or do you figure that if they wanted that number to stay secret, they should've kept it to themselves?
In the case of pirated satellite TV, Dish Network didn't give you the codes to descramble HBO without a subscription; someone else did that. Why does that make you entitled to it for free?
Because Dish Network isn't the arbiter of what I'm entitled to do with my own equipment on my own property. I never asked them to send their signals through my air, I have no agreement with them, so why would I have any obligation to obey their rules regarding those signals?
You are claiming that central planning could theoretically provide more benefit in the long run, as if tollways (public or privately owned) couldn't do the same thing.
I doubt they could. We'd have a lot fewer roadways if they had to be built by private interests and paid for out of usage fees. We'd have a lot more property damage from fires if fire service were a private service provided only to paying customers (we tried that before). We'd have a lot more crime if police departments were replaced with private security guards.
Voluntary exchange produces value because both people profit - not true when government spends money and forcefully buys things for people on their behalf.
If people benefit from what the government has bought on their behalf, then yes, value is produced. Perhaps not as much value as if the money had been spent on something else, but if people were willing to do that, the government wouldn't have had to act anyway.
If people are unwilling to spend money, it means that prices are too high and need to come down. Wages need to come down, prices need to come down, so that savings and loans become more valuable.
It is what made the Great Depression last so long: wages being held artificially high (right from the start when Hoover told companies not to unemploy anyone or cut wages for exactly the reason you say), and prices being held artificially high, meaning no one could legally exchange for anything at market value.
Those are not at all the same as increasing government spending.
When you use that satellite signal, watch that downloaded movie, play that pirated game, etc., you're just filling that seat that was going to be empty anyway - but that does not entitle you to the media for free.
Right, that doesn't entitle you. What entitles you is the fact that someone is voluntarily giving you the media for free. (Or, in the case of pirated satellite TV, the fact that someone voluntarily gave you the device or codes that allow you free access.)
They may not have lost something, but he still isn't entitled to obtain the works of other's for free just because he wants it.
He's "entitled" in the same sense that he's entitled to take part in any other voluntary transaction. That doesn't obligate anyone to give him those works for free, but if anyone offers, he's entitled to take them up on that offer.
He isn't entitled to play those games nor do the publishers owe him to give their works to him for free.
Of course not, but he isn't asking the publishers to "give their works to him for free" in the first place. He's not getting them from the publishers! He's getting them from people on the internet who are quite happy to distribute those works for free.
If you can't afford something, you do without it. Copying the game isn't justifiable. Games aren't a necessity of life and he isn't going to die if he isn't able to buy and play every game released for the 360.
What, you think the only justifiable actions are the ones that are necessary for survival?
Who benefits from him "doing without" games that he can't afford? He obviously doesn't, and neither does the publisher. The publisher doesn't get his money in either scenario, but in one scenario he gets to enjoy the game, and in the other he doesn't. Lose-win is better than lose-lose, isn't it?
An artist puts on an exhibit and charges an entrance fee [...]
A movie theater plays some new movie. [...]
(And so on and so forth, as applied to DVDs and streaming video, games and other software, music, pirated satellite/cable tv, hacked cable modems, etc.)
Now hold on. The situations you put in parentheses are entirely different from the ones above! (Except for the last one.)
Space in an art gallery or movie theater is a limited resource. That's why land and buildings are owned, because the space can only be used in one way at a time. You can't fit all 6+ billion humans into an art gallery; you can fit a few hundred, maybe. Therefore, someone has to decide who gets to be inside, and that person is the owner.
The only reason an artist is entitled to charge for access to his exhibit is that he controls the physical property where the exhibit takes place. He can put whatever conditions he likes on allowing other people to set foot on his property.
Same with seats in a movie theater. The space is limited, and must be allocated somehow. Every additional person in the theater is an extra strain on the building materials and the HVAC system, and for every person who comes in, someone else can no longer come in.
But that's not the case with information. There is no limit on the number of people who can watch a certain movie, play a certain game, listen to a certain song, etc. Satellite TV is beamed onto your property whether you choose to decode it or not, and if you hook up an illegal decoder, you aren't taking away anyone else's ability to watch it.
Does it create more prosperity than if the people had used the dollars themselves?
Quite possibly, yes. For example, the money we spend on law enforcement has a greater effect on prosperity than if we all spent our share of that tax money on private security companies instead.
You are making quite the charge that government knows how to better spend money than the people do.
No, he isn't.
First, "how to better spend money" is vague and meaningless. If I have $300 to buy a new video card, and the government takes that money to pay for a tiny bit of highway, is that "better"? Not for me; video games make me happier than some road I may never drive on. But the segment of highway provides more economic benefit in the long run.
Second, it's not always a case of the government having better things to spend the money on than the private sector -- in the case of stimulus during a recession, it may be that the private sector is irrationally unwilling to spend money on anything. If you're trying to get the economy moving, spending money on not-so-good things is better than not spending money on great things.
So when someone finds something negative about the Bush administration, it is journalism.
No, not necessarily, but it is interesting that you'd assume I think that.
But when someone uncovers things about someone in the Obama administration, which causes enough controversy for him to resign (in the cover of darkness on a holiday weekend) that is right-wing hatemongering?
Possibly, depending on the sort of "things", the nature of the "controversy", and the motivations of the people calling for his resignation. In this particular case, I think the answer is yes.
Perhaps because the video wasn't posted online until recently for privacy concerns? Or perhaps because the right people didn't know about it
Yes, that's exactly the problem: "the right people" are Fox commentators like Glenn Beck! The ideological agenda on the "opinion" side is what drives the selection of stories on the "news" side.
kind of like how Van Jones had his name on that 9/11 truther petition for all that time, but it wasn't an issue until someone doing real investigative journalism stumbled upon it?
But, I see there being a balance on MSNBC...have you ever seen Olbermann on there? My God, that man is as far left and ranting just as bad as some of the Fox far righters are.
You're missing the point if you think this is only about the "commentary" shows. Yes, all the news networks have opinion shows, and there's nothing wrong with that.
But Fox's "news" shows are chock full of ideological bias as well: they choose to report on events that aren't actually news, but were the subject of debate on the "opinion" shows the day before. For example, Glenn Beck decides to get outraged over a video of kids singing a song with a verse about Obama -- an event which took place several months earlier, during the previous school year, and which caused no controversy at the time -- and then the "news" anchors report on the sudden controversy which was fueled by their own network. They make their own news.
Fox may offer factual reporting during certain hours, but the choice of which stories to report on and how much time to devote to them offers just as much opportunity to promote their ideology.
The real question is is 'why'. Why would we implement this system?
Well, I brought it up in response to someone looking for a "fix" to piracy. This system eliminates piracy as well as the need to worry about piracy: you can't copy something that hasn't been written yet, and if you've already been paid for writing something, you don't need to care who copies it.
Wait, what's the point of the market, if not to fulfil needs as quickly as possible?
The market can only work if demand exists, i.e. if people know they want something and are willing to spend money on it.
In your hypothetical scenario, demand temporarily vanished: people stopped being willing to pay for the creation of new content (presumably because their desire for entertainment was satisfied by existing content).
Unlike gambling addicts, artists using copyrights aren't being a burden on society; they're merely offering a product that people have the option to buy.
On the contrary, I'd say they're more of a burden. Every copyrighted work that's released is a new restriction on speech, and every dollar of royalties that goes to a publisher is another dollar to be used lobbying for longer terms, harsher penalties, and more restrictions on technology.
Yeah, but as you well know, we don't need (or want) that much music. It turns out that interest in entertainment is similarly finite, as is the production of music.
Sure, but that finite amount is still beyond the ability of most people to pay. I don't necessarily want to hear all 10 million songs that iTunes has to offer, but a quick glance at any P2P user's shared folder will reveal that people commonly consume more entertainment than they could afford.
A friend of mine has around 60,000 songs in his collection (and as a music reviewer and DJ, he's not just collecting them to fill space): even if he could find them all on used CDs, that would still cost around $20,000. You can be sure he didn't, couldn't, and wouldn't spend that much on music. If he had no option to download those tracks for free, he'd end up listening to less music.
So, copy, copy, copy, copy without adding anything, copy, and parody (fair use)?
I didn't say they were art forms you'd like. But people do like them, and there is in fact artistic innovation going on there, even if you can't see it -- just as I'm sure there's artistic innovation going on in rap and country music that I can't see.
If you think mash-ups don't add anything, listen to Girl Talk. You may not like it but it's undeniably more than "copy, copy, copy".
And I didn't say anything about parodies. Editing an anime show to fit a song is not a parody and probably not fair use; neither is filming your own serious sequel to Star Wars, or compiling your own reference to the fictional world and characters of Harry Potter.
It would be, if you actually named something caused by copyright. From what I heard, each of these were from influence from big publishers, and indirectly due to the behaviour of pirates.
Anything "due to the behavior of pirates" is essentially caused by copyright, because copyright is what makes piracy both possible and problematic. Also, some of the restrictions I mentioned are enshrined in law (DMCA and AHRA).
Let's say, optimistically, that average time to create a movie was 12 months. Then, 4000 would require a funding time of 3 months, which would only be achievable for the most popular of the mainstream.
This doesn't add up. Funding time introduces bubbles (latency) into the pipeline, but it doesn't affect throughput: you'll end up with the same number of movies as if funding were instantaneous; you'll just get them 3 months later.
I should have expected that Verizon would come up with an 'unlimited' but capped at 5 GB plan. Guess it'll be the iPhone after all.
I really do want to be able to tether, because we occasionally travel and don't have WiFi access and I want to use the laptop. But I've survived this long without tethering, and a smart phone will be enough for light web browsing and email.
Light web browsing and email isn't going to come close to 5 GB per month. I use my G1 for email, web browsing, maps, RSS, Facebook, Twitter, and internet radio, and it adds up to less than 1 GB per month.
Yep. Australia have only been running preferential elections since 1918 and use it in all elections: federal, state and local government. What would we know, eh?
Driving a car every day doesn't make you a mechanic. You clearly don't know very much about the method your country uses to count votes. That's fine -- most Americans don't know much about plurality voting, and we've been using that for centuries -- but don't pretend you're an expert on IRV just because you live in a country that's been using IRV for a long time.
Elections in one US state (of unknown infrastructure quality) and a third world nation are obviously much more authorative.
Infrastructure quality has nothing to do with it, because these are mathematical properties of the voting system. The location doesn't matter; the ballots matter, and no matter where you count them, you'll reach the same bizarre, broken outcome.
What, precisely, is wrong with that?
It's proof that IRV doesn't let you vote your true preferences without penalty. Ranking someone higher can cause him to lose, and honestly putting your first choice first (instead of lying and putting him second) can end up throwing the election to your third choice.
If your second choice candidate's first choice vote is so poor that they're eliminated in a counting round, they deserved to go. They simply weren't very popular.
So it's better to elect a candidate who most voters think is worse than one of the losers? You think that's a reasonable way to count votes? I hope for your sake that you just haven't thought very hard about it, because that is totally screwed up.
Preferential systems encourage lots of parties to take part, so it's never the three corner contest you're fearful of.
Yes, there were other candidates in both Peru and Vermont, but they were eliminated early on.
I mean, if you went to a video rental store, ordered a movie to rent, paid $10, and were given no clear time frame as to when you would receive the movie (without excluding the possibility of years in the future), would you order it?
The time frame is actually pretty clear: the producer promises to deliver the finished work within X months after funding is acquired. There's no set time frame for when it'll be funded, but I can watch the progress, and I can get the word out to speed things up. And if I'm that worried, I can insist on a refund if the project hasn't been started by a certain date.
And even then, people know that their $10 is not likely to make the difference between being made and not being made. Most will just wait until its made (if it's mainstream), or figure that it won't despite their contribution.
Interesting theory, but real world examples suggest otherwise: see political campaign contributions for one, and Sellaband for another. People have the option to pay as little as they want, but financial goals are still regularly met.
But that's terrible! What kind of a system allows us to starve periodically? Why would we willing cripple our culture so much? So we can freely download the scraps?
This is a *huge* problem for your system. You need to deal with it pronto.
It was an extreme example of a purely hypothetical problem. I don't think it's at all likely that nothing would get funded -- but if that were to happen, the situation would correct itself soon enough.
It's about as realistic as wondering what would happen if suddenly no one wanted to pay for a haircut. Barbers would lower their prices more and more, but no one would pay, and all the barbers would go out of business! Then people would get antsy and start offering to pay for haircuts, and eventually they'd offer enough to entice a barber to set up shop again.
Is that a failure of the market because we had no barbers for a while? No, it's an example of the market succeeding even in the face of unrealistic hurdles.
In reality, there's constant demand for new content. People aren't going to decide en masse every few months that the old stuff is good enough, then a few months later realize what fools they've been. At any moment, for every person who's content with the old stuff, there are other people who want something new and are willing to pay for it.
However, if you can find some artists to trial this system, you can happily do it under copyright. All they have to do is pledge to release under the public domain. If my concerns are overblown, and this system is indeed beneficial to both artists and consumers, then artists will have no qualms about using the system, and consumers will have no trouble investing in it.
That's a nice thought, but I think copyright is just too tempting for artists (gambling is fun, even if you lose in the long run) and consumers (buying something off the shelf is more convenient than paying for production, and at that moment you aren't thinking about the restrictions you'll face, or the content that isn't available because of copyright).
Copyright undeniably overproduces, but it works. Your system fatally underproduces.
That's a strange conclusion. It seems more likely that my system would produce an optimal amount: the amount people are willing to pay for, no more and no less.
What? Since when does buying equate to an "inability to enjoy"?
Ever since people only had a finite amount of money.
According to Wikipedia, there are over 10 million songs available on iTunes Music Store. Do you know anyone who has $10 million to spend on music?
Are you actually going to deny that requiring people to pay for the music, movies, software, etc. that they use doesn't put a significant cap on the amount they can use?
Politicians already promise to bribe voters with their own money and many dumb voters keep falling for that (they don't bother to use their brains to see whether it's good or bad in the long term or not).
This is just shortcutting the process, and you can ask for the money upfront.
You're assuming it's the politicians who would be doing the bribing -- rather than, say, the RIAA bribing people to vote for a candidate who will support their latest DMCA sequel.
For their stealth transition, we all need a central box, and then a box for every TV in the house!
And it still doesn't work with devices like dual-tuner TiVos. Even with a box, they can now only tune one channel at a time. As a result, I canceled my cable TV service and now get all my TV from the internet.
I was excited about these new "DCT" boxes I heard mentioned around the time of the switch. I thought they were some new thing that would decode all the digital channels and spit them out as analog again... but no. They're just cheap, bare bones cable boxes that still only output one channel at a time.
In what way does voting for a torture supporter further your interests in human rights? It just reinforces the perception of torture's popularity.
Maybe this is another language divide. See, here in America, "elections" are different from opinion polls.
We don't just publish the results and think "Hmm, 60 million votes for John Smith, what a popular fellow" and then continue on exactly as before. Over here, we actually use the results of our elections to decide who gets to be in government. Election outcomes have an effect on public policy. So if enough people vote for the less-torture candidate, we'll end up with less-torture policies.
That's how electing the less-torture candidate instead of the more-torture candidate furthers my opposed-to-torture interests.
Of course, electing someone is not the same as voting for them. As I've already explained, voting for the no-torture candidate can paradoxically lead to the election of the more-torture candidate, so my interests -- reducing actual torture, not just feeling smug -- are usually better served by voting for the less-torture candidate who can win, instead of the no-torture candidate who can't.
If enough of you actually voted for a candidate whose policies you like, instead of the corporate proto-fascists you believe are likely to win, you might actually elect them.
Uh huh. But as I've explained, it only makes sense if there actually are enough of us, all at once. If enough of us minus one vote for that candidate instead of our second choices, we'll end up electing someone who's worse than both: that means more torture, not less, and certainly not none. And how many people do you think will be willing to cast the same vote next time, after getting burned like that?
It might be a good idea for you to take notes on this, because it can happen in your election system too. It happened in Vermont (2009) and Peru (2006) using similar systems: people ranking their favorite candidate higher caused the second-choice candidate to lose and threw the election to the third-choice candidate.
Of course, if election outcomes don't matter in your country, maybe this doesn't matter either.
Can you briefly explain those two links, if you wouldn't mind?
Sure. Let's start with the Vermont link.
The biggest problem is described as point 1 under "The pathologies". Most voters with an opinion on Montroll vs. Kiss ranked wanted Montroll to win (4067 to 3477), and most voters with an opinion on Montroll vs. Wright also wanted Montroll to win (4597 to 3668). But according to IRV, Montroll didn't win -- he came in third.
That's an example of IRV failing the Condorcet criterion. If Montroll had run in an two-man election against either Kiss or Wright, he would've won, but in a three-man election, he came last because of IRV's quirks.
Point 3 describes how the "spoiler" problem still exists under IRV. Most of the voters whose first choice was Wright (Republican) preferred Montroll (Democrat) over Kiss (Progressive). Kiss ended up winning. However, if those voters had lied about their preferences and ranked Montroll first, they could have stopped Kiss from winning, and ended up with their second choice instead of their third choice.
In other words, it's the same problem I complained about before, and IRV doesn't solve it.
In fact, IRV makes it worse, because it's harder to predict when a spoiler scenario will occur and adjust your vote accordingly. Look at the first table in the blue box: going by the first choice totals, Wright actually looks like the strongest candidate! Unlike most third-party supporters who can vote strategically because they know their party is unlikely to win, Wright voters in this election had no way to know that they'd be better off voting for their second choice.
That's an example of IRV failing the monotonicity criterion: ranking someone higher shouldn't decrease his chances of winning. This is also called out in point 6.
The Peru link basically shows the same problems. It wasn't actually an IRV election; it was a plurality election followed by runoffs, but that's what IRV simulates ("instant runoff"). The three main candidates were Humala, Garcia, and Flores; Garcia ended up winning.
First problem, Condorcet failure: Flores was eliminated in the first round, even though polling consistently showed Flores winning a head-to-head matchup against either Humala or Garcia.
Second problem, monotonicity failure: Anyone who preferred Humala over Flores, and both over Garcia, would've been better off voting for Flores in the first round instead of Humala. That would have caused Flores to win rather than Garcia. Voting their true preferences caused their least favored candidate to win, which is exactly what I warned against with third party voting.
Do you know of any better voting algorithms, such as Condorcet perhaps?
Condorcet is pretty damn good. Actually, Condorcet isn't an algorithm -- it's a criterion that some algorithms satisfy ("Condorcet methods"). My favorite is Schultze, which is used for internal elections by Wikimedia, Software in the Public Interest, Debian, Gentoo, Ubuntu, and many other organizations.
Approval voting is also fairly good, and much simpler, although it doesn't have rankings. You just use a plain old ballot and mark all the candidates you like, instead of your first choice, and then the winner is whoever was marked by the most voters. Range voting is a generalized version of approval voting that allows for rankings.
Why are you all so worried about voter intimidation?
I don't think voter intimidation is a realistic problem in America. Voter bribery, on the other hand, might be. Look at how many apathetic voters there are, even here on Slashdot ("Democrats and Republicans are the saaaaaame, man! Why even bother?"). How many of them would be willing to sell their votes? They're not using those votes anyway!
The system only fails because of people like you, who seem to think that change is impossible.
That's not what I said at all. Read the last paragraph of my parent post. Change is possible, but voting for a third party is not an effective way to achieve it.
It's hard, given the current electoral system, but it can happen. But if everyone acts like you do, you're right, change won't happen.
It's worse than that. Even if almost enough people to win "act like I do", change won't happen: if you convince enough people to switch from their second-choice major party to a third party that the major party loses, but not enough to make the third party win, then all you've done is give the election to the opposing major party -- you've made things worse.
Third party voting only works if you have a critical mass of people on your side. If you have even one person too few, you're shooting yourself in the foot.
Imagine a group of rats trying to push on an electrified door to reach some cheese. If one rat pushes on the door, he gets a shock, and the door doesn't move. If two rats push on the door, they both get a bigger shock, and the door still doesn't move. The door will only move if all the rats push, but if even one refuses, all that happens is the rest get bigger and bigger shocks. How likely do you think it is that they'll get the door to move, when they're punished more and more for every unsuccessful attempt as they get closer to their goal?
The problem is the system. Every drop of effort wasted on trying to get people to shoot themselves in the foot with third party votes is effort that could've been spent pushing for real change -- a voting method that wouldn't punish people for voting their true preferences.
And I get to say I actually did something to reduce the amount of evil in the world. I'll take that over a sentimental cliche any day.
(You know who else felt smug about doing what he believed in even though he was actually making things worse? George W. Bush. Just sayin'.;)
Hate to break it to you, but, we can indeed vote for our true preferences without penalty.
I hate to break it to you too, but IRV is seriously flawed (as is plurality + delayed runoff), and there are surprisingly common scenarios where voting your true preferences will work against you. Here are real-life examples from Vermont (2009) and Peru (2006). You're lucky it hasn't happened in Australia yet, but that doesn't mean it never will.
But it doesn't scale, imho. Everybody voting absentee in a district? Red flag.
In the state where I live, 37 of the 39 counties have nothing but absentee voting. You can go to the election office to drop off your ballot, but everyone gets a ballot weeks in advance.
On the other hand, that means we've already conceded the battle against this sort of voter intimidation/bribery. The thug can just watch you fill out the ballot. Hasn't been a problem in practice, though... yet.
Digital camera in the booth too often? (Some people are savvy enough to turn off the sounds, and some people are savvy enough to hide their camera. But most people are not.) Red flag. Game over.
I don't know about your camera, but mine is cleverly hidden inside my cell phone. Doesn't take much savvy to get one of those, and before long, almost everyone will have a 3+ megapixel camera in their pocket -- if we're not there already.
Hope you don't mind the edit, as it doesn't change the intent. If you're voting for an lesser evil, you're throwing your vote away by perpetuating the election of evil.
So, given a candidate who's more evil and a candidate who's less evil, you'd just as soon take the more evil one? You don't see a difference?
That's an odd sense of morality you have. Personally, I prefer to do what I can to reduce evil, bit by bit, rather than give up entirely just because I can't eliminate it all at once.
Luckily, my country has a modern preferential voting system so we're not prone to these prehistoric ballot box conundrums.
I gather from your comment history that you're Australian. If that's correct, you don't actually have a modern preferential voting system: you have IRV, which is subject to most of the same criticisms as our voting method, even though it seems on the surface as though you can vote your true preferences without penalty.
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If everyone went by your logic, there wouldn't be any satellite TV. (If you're going to ask why, it's because everyone would take it for free, the company would go broke, and the satellites would stop transmitting.)
Not true. If you recall the days of the big analog dishes, there were plenty of channels anyone could view for free, because their business model didn't depend on subscription fees. This is still the case with "freeview" satellite in the UK, Australia, and New Zealand.
Piracy is only a problem when your business model depends on producing and broadcasting content first, and then praying people will pay for it later.
Do you see a problem with that, or do you just like freeloading?
The problem is with your logic.
I guess you think it's irrelevant that the people giving you the media for free are not legally authorized to give you that media for free?
Yes, I do think it's irrelevant.
When you look up a number, like the speed of light or the world population, do you worry about whether the source is "authorized" to give you that number for free -- because after all, a lot of effort went into determining that number, and it's stealing to take it without compensating them? Or do you figure that if they wanted that number to stay secret, they should've kept it to themselves?
In the case of pirated satellite TV, Dish Network didn't give you the codes to descramble HBO without a subscription; someone else did that. Why does that make you entitled to it for free?
Because Dish Network isn't the arbiter of what I'm entitled to do with my own equipment on my own property. I never asked them to send their signals through my air, I have no agreement with them, so why would I have any obligation to obey their rules regarding those signals?
You are claiming that central planning could theoretically provide more benefit in the long run, as if tollways (public or privately owned) couldn't do the same thing.
I doubt they could. We'd have a lot fewer roadways if they had to be built by private interests and paid for out of usage fees. We'd have a lot more property damage from fires if fire service were a private service provided only to paying customers (we tried that before). We'd have a lot more crime if police departments were replaced with private security guards.
Voluntary exchange produces value because both people profit - not true when government spends money and forcefully buys things for people on their behalf.
If people benefit from what the government has bought on their behalf, then yes, value is produced. Perhaps not as much value as if the money had been spent on something else, but if people were willing to do that, the government wouldn't have had to act anyway.
If people are unwilling to spend money, it means that prices are too high and need to come down. Wages need to come down, prices need to come down, so that savings and loans become more valuable.
And then things will be even worse. See the paradox of thrift.
It is what made the Great Depression last so long: wages being held artificially high (right from the start when Hoover told companies not to unemploy anyone or cut wages for exactly the reason you say), and prices being held artificially high, meaning no one could legally exchange for anything at market value.
Those are not at all the same as increasing government spending.
When you use that satellite signal, watch that downloaded movie, play that pirated game, etc., you're just filling that seat that was going to be empty anyway - but that does not entitle you to the media for free.
Right, that doesn't entitle you. What entitles you is the fact that someone is voluntarily giving you the media for free. (Or, in the case of pirated satellite TV, the fact that someone voluntarily gave you the device or codes that allow you free access.)
CNN, however, does have a birther
Not anymore.
They may not have lost something, but he still isn't entitled to obtain the works of other's for free just because he wants it.
He's "entitled" in the same sense that he's entitled to take part in any other voluntary transaction. That doesn't obligate anyone to give him those works for free, but if anyone offers, he's entitled to take them up on that offer.
He isn't entitled to play those games nor do the publishers owe him to give their works to him for free.
Of course not, but he isn't asking the publishers to "give their works to him for free" in the first place. He's not getting them from the publishers! He's getting them from people on the internet who are quite happy to distribute those works for free.
If you can't afford something, you do without it. Copying the game isn't justifiable. Games aren't a necessity of life and he isn't going to die if he isn't able to buy and play every game released for the 360.
What, you think the only justifiable actions are the ones that are necessary for survival?
Who benefits from him "doing without" games that he can't afford? He obviously doesn't, and neither does the publisher. The publisher doesn't get his money in either scenario, but in one scenario he gets to enjoy the game, and in the other he doesn't. Lose-win is better than lose-lose, isn't it?
An artist puts on an exhibit and charges an entrance fee [...]
A movie theater plays some new movie. [...]
(And so on and so forth, as applied to DVDs and streaming video, games and other software, music, pirated satellite/cable tv, hacked cable modems, etc.)
Now hold on. The situations you put in parentheses are entirely different from the ones above! (Except for the last one.)
Space in an art gallery or movie theater is a limited resource. That's why land and buildings are owned, because the space can only be used in one way at a time. You can't fit all 6+ billion humans into an art gallery; you can fit a few hundred, maybe. Therefore, someone has to decide who gets to be inside, and that person is the owner.
The only reason an artist is entitled to charge for access to his exhibit is that he controls the physical property where the exhibit takes place. He can put whatever conditions he likes on allowing other people to set foot on his property.
Same with seats in a movie theater. The space is limited, and must be allocated somehow. Every additional person in the theater is an extra strain on the building materials and the HVAC system, and for every person who comes in, someone else can no longer come in.
But that's not the case with information. There is no limit on the number of people who can watch a certain movie, play a certain game, listen to a certain song, etc. Satellite TV is beamed onto your property whether you choose to decode it or not, and if you hook up an illegal decoder, you aren't taking away anyone else's ability to watch it.
Does it create more prosperity than if the people had used the dollars themselves?
Quite possibly, yes. For example, the money we spend on law enforcement has a greater effect on prosperity than if we all spent our share of that tax money on private security companies instead.
You are making quite the charge that government knows how to better spend money than the people do.
No, he isn't.
First, "how to better spend money" is vague and meaningless. If I have $300 to buy a new video card, and the government takes that money to pay for a tiny bit of highway, is that "better"? Not for me; video games make me happier than some road I may never drive on. But the segment of highway provides more economic benefit in the long run.
Second, it's not always a case of the government having better things to spend the money on than the private sector -- in the case of stimulus during a recession, it may be that the private sector is irrationally unwilling to spend money on anything. If you're trying to get the economy moving, spending money on not-so-good things is better than not spending money on great things.
So when someone finds something negative about the Bush administration, it is journalism.
No, not necessarily, but it is interesting that you'd assume I think that.
But when someone uncovers things about someone in the Obama administration, which causes enough controversy for him to resign (in the cover of darkness on a holiday weekend) that is right-wing hatemongering?
Possibly, depending on the sort of "things", the nature of the "controversy", and the motivations of the people calling for his resignation. In this particular case, I think the answer is yes.
Perhaps because the video wasn't posted online until recently for privacy concerns? Or perhaps because the right people didn't know about it
Yes, that's exactly the problem: "the right people" are Fox commentators like Glenn Beck! The ideological agenda on the "opinion" side is what drives the selection of stories on the "news" side.
kind of like how Van Jones had his name on that 9/11 truther petition for all that time, but it wasn't an issue until someone doing real investigative journalism stumbled upon it?
By "someone doing real investigative journalism", do you perhaps mean Glenn Beck and right-wing bloggers?
And maybe I am forgetful, but I don't recall their two big news programs running that video (Special Report, The Fox Report). Perhaps they did.
Sounds like you're forgetting quite a bit. For clips, see this Daily Show video (starting around 6:45).
But, I see there being a balance on MSNBC...have you ever seen Olbermann on there? My God, that man is as far left and ranting just as bad as some of the Fox far righters are.
You're missing the point if you think this is only about the "commentary" shows. Yes, all the news networks have opinion shows, and there's nothing wrong with that.
But Fox's "news" shows are chock full of ideological bias as well: they choose to report on events that aren't actually news, but were the subject of debate on the "opinion" shows the day before. For example, Glenn Beck decides to get outraged over a video of kids singing a song with a verse about Obama -- an event which took place several months earlier, during the previous school year, and which caused no controversy at the time -- and then the "news" anchors report on the sudden controversy which was fueled by their own network. They make their own news.
Fox may offer factual reporting during certain hours, but the choice of which stories to report on and how much time to devote to them offers just as much opportunity to promote their ideology.
The real question is is 'why'. Why would we implement this system?
Well, I brought it up in response to someone looking for a "fix" to piracy. This system eliminates piracy as well as the need to worry about piracy: you can't copy something that hasn't been written yet, and if you've already been paid for writing something, you don't need to care who copies it.
Wait, what's the point of the market, if not to fulfil needs as quickly as possible?
The market can only work if demand exists, i.e. if people know they want something and are willing to spend money on it.
In your hypothetical scenario, demand temporarily vanished: people stopped being willing to pay for the creation of new content (presumably because their desire for entertainment was satisfied by existing content).
Unlike gambling addicts, artists using copyrights aren't being a burden on society; they're merely offering a product that people have the option to buy.
On the contrary, I'd say they're more of a burden. Every copyrighted work that's released is a new restriction on speech, and every dollar of royalties that goes to a publisher is another dollar to be used lobbying for longer terms, harsher penalties, and more restrictions on technology.
Yeah, but as you well know, we don't need (or want) that much music. It turns out that interest in entertainment is similarly finite, as is the production of music.
Sure, but that finite amount is still beyond the ability of most people to pay. I don't necessarily want to hear all 10 million songs that iTunes has to offer, but a quick glance at any P2P user's shared folder will reveal that people commonly consume more entertainment than they could afford.
A friend of mine has around 60,000 songs in his collection (and as a music reviewer and DJ, he's not just collecting them to fill space): even if he could find them all on used CDs, that would still cost around $20,000. You can be sure he didn't, couldn't, and wouldn't spend that much on music. If he had no option to download those tracks for free, he'd end up listening to less music.
So, copy, copy, copy, copy without adding anything, copy, and parody (fair use)?
I didn't say they were art forms you'd like. But people do like them, and there is in fact artistic innovation going on there, even if you can't see it -- just as I'm sure there's artistic innovation going on in rap and country music that I can't see.
If you think mash-ups don't add anything, listen to Girl Talk. You may not like it but it's undeniably more than "copy, copy, copy".
And I didn't say anything about parodies. Editing an anime show to fit a song is not a parody and probably not fair use; neither is filming your own serious sequel to Star Wars, or compiling your own reference to the fictional world and characters of Harry Potter.
It would be, if you actually named something caused by copyright. From what I heard, each of these were from influence from big publishers, and indirectly due to the behaviour of pirates.
Anything "due to the behavior of pirates" is essentially caused by copyright, because copyright is what makes piracy both possible and problematic. Also, some of the restrictions I mentioned are enshrined in law (DMCA and AHRA).
Let's say, optimistically, that average time to create a movie was 12 months. Then, 4000 would require a funding time of 3 months, which would only be achievable for the most popular of the mainstream.
This doesn't add up. Funding time introduces bubbles (latency) into the pipeline, but it doesn't affect throughput: you'll end up with the same number of movies as if funding were instantaneous; you'll just get them 3 months later.
Wait, what? Why does
I should have expected that Verizon would come up with an 'unlimited' but capped at 5 GB plan. Guess it'll be the iPhone after all.
I really do want to be able to tether, because we occasionally travel and don't have WiFi access and I want to use the laptop. But I've survived this long without tethering, and a smart phone will be enough for light web browsing and email.
Light web browsing and email isn't going to come close to 5 GB per month. I use my G1 for email, web browsing, maps, RSS, Facebook, Twitter, and internet radio, and it adds up to less than 1 GB per month.
Yep. Australia have only been running preferential elections since 1918 and use it in all elections: federal, state and local government. What would we know, eh?
Driving a car every day doesn't make you a mechanic. You clearly don't know very much about the method your country uses to count votes. That's fine -- most Americans don't know much about plurality voting, and we've been using that for centuries -- but don't pretend you're an expert on IRV just because you live in a country that's been using IRV for a long time.
Elections in one US state (of unknown infrastructure quality) and a third world nation are obviously much more authorative.
Infrastructure quality has nothing to do with it, because these are mathematical properties of the voting system. The location doesn't matter; the ballots matter, and no matter where you count them, you'll reach the same bizarre, broken outcome.
What, precisely, is wrong with that?
It's proof that IRV doesn't let you vote your true preferences without penalty. Ranking someone higher can cause him to lose, and honestly putting your first choice first (instead of lying and putting him second) can end up throwing the election to your third choice.
If your second choice candidate's first choice vote is so poor that they're eliminated in a counting round, they deserved to go. They simply weren't very popular.
So it's better to elect a candidate who most voters think is worse than one of the losers? You think that's a reasonable way to count votes? I hope for your sake that you just haven't thought very hard about it, because that is totally screwed up.
Preferential systems encourage lots of parties to take part, so it's never the three corner contest you're fearful of.
Yes, there were other candidates in both Peru and Vermont, but they were eliminated early on.
I mean, if you went to a video rental store, ordered a movie to rent, paid $10, and were given no clear time frame as to when you would receive the movie (without excluding the possibility of years in the future), would you order it?
The time frame is actually pretty clear: the producer promises to deliver the finished work within X months after funding is acquired. There's no set time frame for when it'll be funded, but I can watch the progress, and I can get the word out to speed things up. And if I'm that worried, I can insist on a refund if the project hasn't been started by a certain date.
And even then, people know that their $10 is not likely to make the difference between being made and not being made. Most will just wait until its made (if it's mainstream), or figure that it won't despite their contribution.
Interesting theory, but real world examples suggest otherwise: see political campaign contributions for one, and Sellaband for another. People have the option to pay as little as they want, but financial goals are still regularly met.
But that's terrible! What kind of a system allows us to starve periodically? Why would we willing cripple our culture so much? So we can freely download the scraps?
This is a *huge* problem for your system. You need to deal with it pronto.
It was an extreme example of a purely hypothetical problem. I don't think it's at all likely that nothing would get funded -- but if that were to happen, the situation would correct itself soon enough.
It's about as realistic as wondering what would happen if suddenly no one wanted to pay for a haircut. Barbers would lower their prices more and more, but no one would pay, and all the barbers would go out of business! Then people would get antsy and start offering to pay for haircuts, and eventually they'd offer enough to entice a barber to set up shop again.
Is that a failure of the market because we had no barbers for a while? No, it's an example of the market succeeding even in the face of unrealistic hurdles.
In reality, there's constant demand for new content. People aren't going to decide en masse every few months that the old stuff is good enough, then a few months later realize what fools they've been. At any moment, for every person who's content with the old stuff, there are other people who want something new and are willing to pay for it.
However, if you can find some artists to trial this system, you can happily do it under copyright. All they have to do is pledge to release under the public domain. If my concerns are overblown, and this system is indeed beneficial to both artists and consumers, then artists will have no qualms about using the system, and consumers will have no trouble investing in it.
That's a nice thought, but I think copyright is just too tempting for artists (gambling is fun, even if you lose in the long run) and consumers (buying something off the shelf is more convenient than paying for production, and at that moment you aren't thinking about the restrictions you'll face, or the content that isn't available because of copyright).
Copyright undeniably overproduces, but it works. Your system fatally underproduces.
That's a strange conclusion. It seems more likely that my system would produce an optimal amount: the amount people are willing to pay for, no more and no less.
What? Since when does buying equate to an "inability to enjoy"?
Ever since people only had a finite amount of money.
According to Wikipedia, there are over 10 million songs available on iTunes Music Store. Do you know anyone who has $10 million to spend on music?
Are you actually going to deny that requiring people to pay for the music, movies, software, etc. that they use doesn't put a significant cap on the amount they can use?
Politicians already promise to bribe voters with their own money and many dumb voters keep falling for that (they don't bother to use their brains to see whether it's good or bad in the long term or not).
This is just shortcutting the process, and you can ask for the money upfront.
You're assuming it's the politicians who would be doing the bribing -- rather than, say, the RIAA bribing people to vote for a candidate who will support their latest DMCA sequel.
For their stealth transition, we all need a central box, and then a box for every TV in the house!
And it still doesn't work with devices like dual-tuner TiVos. Even with a box, they can now only tune one channel at a time. As a result, I canceled my cable TV service and now get all my TV from the internet.
I was excited about these new "DCT" boxes I heard mentioned around the time of the switch. I thought they were some new thing that would decode all the digital channels and spit them out as analog again... but no. They're just cheap, bare bones cable boxes that still only output one channel at a time.
In what way does voting for a torture supporter further your interests in human rights? It just reinforces the perception of torture's popularity.
Maybe this is another language divide. See, here in America, "elections" are different from opinion polls.
We don't just publish the results and think "Hmm, 60 million votes for John Smith, what a popular fellow" and then continue on exactly as before. Over here, we actually use the results of our elections to decide who gets to be in government. Election outcomes have an effect on public policy. So if enough people vote for the less-torture candidate, we'll end up with less-torture policies.
That's how electing the less-torture candidate instead of the more-torture candidate furthers my opposed-to-torture interests.
Of course, electing someone is not the same as voting for them. As I've already explained, voting for the no-torture candidate can paradoxically lead to the election of the more-torture candidate, so my interests -- reducing actual torture, not just feeling smug -- are usually better served by voting for the less-torture candidate who can win, instead of the no-torture candidate who can't.
If enough of you actually voted for a candidate whose policies you like, instead of the corporate proto-fascists you believe are likely to win, you might actually elect them.
Uh huh. But as I've explained, it only makes sense if there actually are enough of us, all at once. If enough of us minus one vote for that candidate instead of our second choices, we'll end up electing someone who's worse than both: that means more torture, not less, and certainly not none. And how many people do you think will be willing to cast the same vote next time, after getting burned like that?
It might be a good idea for you to take notes on this, because it can happen in your election system too. It happened in Vermont (2009) and Peru (2006) using similar systems: people ranking their favorite candidate higher caused the second-choice candidate to lose and threw the election to the third-choice candidate.
Of course, if election outcomes don't matter in your country, maybe this doesn't matter either.
Can you briefly explain those two links, if you wouldn't mind?
Sure. Let's start with the Vermont link.
The biggest problem is described as point 1 under "The pathologies". Most voters with an opinion on Montroll vs. Kiss ranked wanted Montroll to win (4067 to 3477), and most voters with an opinion on Montroll vs. Wright also wanted Montroll to win (4597 to 3668). But according to IRV, Montroll didn't win -- he came in third.
That's an example of IRV failing the Condorcet criterion. If Montroll had run in an two-man election against either Kiss or Wright, he would've won, but in a three-man election, he came last because of IRV's quirks.
Point 3 describes how the "spoiler" problem still exists under IRV. Most of the voters whose first choice was Wright (Republican) preferred Montroll (Democrat) over Kiss (Progressive). Kiss ended up winning. However, if those voters had lied about their preferences and ranked Montroll first, they could have stopped Kiss from winning, and ended up with their second choice instead of their third choice.
In other words, it's the same problem I complained about before, and IRV doesn't solve it.
In fact, IRV makes it worse, because it's harder to predict when a spoiler scenario will occur and adjust your vote accordingly. Look at the first table in the blue box: going by the first choice totals, Wright actually looks like the strongest candidate! Unlike most third-party supporters who can vote strategically because they know their party is unlikely to win, Wright voters in this election had no way to know that they'd be better off voting for their second choice.
That's an example of IRV failing the monotonicity criterion: ranking someone higher shouldn't decrease his chances of winning. This is also called out in point 6.
The Peru link basically shows the same problems. It wasn't actually an IRV election; it was a plurality election followed by runoffs, but that's what IRV simulates ("instant runoff"). The three main candidates were Humala, Garcia, and Flores; Garcia ended up winning.
First problem, Condorcet failure: Flores was eliminated in the first round, even though polling consistently showed Flores winning a head-to-head matchup against either Humala or Garcia.
Second problem, monotonicity failure: Anyone who preferred Humala over Flores, and both over Garcia, would've been better off voting for Flores in the first round instead of Humala. That would have caused Flores to win rather than Garcia. Voting their true preferences caused their least favored candidate to win, which is exactly what I warned against with third party voting.
Do you know of any better voting algorithms, such as Condorcet perhaps?
Condorcet is pretty damn good. Actually, Condorcet isn't an algorithm -- it's a criterion that some algorithms satisfy ("Condorcet methods"). My favorite is Schultze, which is used for internal elections by Wikimedia, Software in the Public Interest, Debian, Gentoo, Ubuntu, and many other organizations.
Approval voting is also fairly good, and much simpler, although it doesn't have rankings. You just use a plain old ballot and mark all the candidates you like, instead of your first choice, and then the winner is whoever was marked by the most voters. Range voting is a generalized version of approval voting that allows for rankings.
Why are you all so worried about voter intimidation?
I don't think voter intimidation is a realistic problem in America. Voter bribery, on the other hand, might be. Look at how many apathetic voters there are, even here on Slashdot ("Democrats and Republicans are the saaaaaame, man! Why even bother?"). How many of them would be willing to sell their votes? They're not using those votes anyway!
The system only fails because of people like you, who seem to think that change is impossible.
That's not what I said at all. Read the last paragraph of my parent post. Change is possible, but voting for a third party is not an effective way to achieve it.
It's hard, given the current electoral system, but it can happen. But if everyone acts like you do, you're right, change won't happen.
It's worse than that. Even if almost enough people to win "act like I do", change won't happen: if you convince enough people to switch from their second-choice major party to a third party that the major party loses, but not enough to make the third party win, then all you've done is give the election to the opposing major party -- you've made things worse.
Third party voting only works if you have a critical mass of people on your side. If you have even one person too few, you're shooting yourself in the foot.
Imagine a group of rats trying to push on an electrified door to reach some cheese. If one rat pushes on the door, he gets a shock, and the door doesn't move. If two rats push on the door, they both get a bigger shock, and the door still doesn't move. The door will only move if all the rats push, but if even one refuses, all that happens is the rest get bigger and bigger shocks. How likely do you think it is that they'll get the door to move, when they're punished more and more for every unsuccessful attempt as they get closer to their goal?
The problem is the system. Every drop of effort wasted on trying to get people to shoot themselves in the foot with third party votes is effort that could've been spent pushing for real change -- a voting method that wouldn't punish people for voting their true preferences.
Won't work.
3) Thug looks at your picture and verification code.
4) Thug goes online and sees that your ballot wasn't entered.
5) Broken legs!
I get to say I voted for a party I believe in.
And I get to say I actually did something to reduce the amount of evil in the world. I'll take that over a sentimental cliche any day.
(You know who else felt smug about doing what he believed in even though he was actually making things worse? George W. Bush. Just sayin'. ;)
Hate to break it to you, but, we can indeed vote for our true preferences without penalty.
I hate to break it to you too, but IRV is seriously flawed (as is plurality + delayed runoff), and there are surprisingly common scenarios where voting your true preferences will work against you. Here are real-life examples from Vermont (2009) and Peru (2006). You're lucky it hasn't happened in Australia yet, but that doesn't mean it never will.
But it doesn't scale, imho. Everybody voting absentee in a district? Red flag.
In the state where I live, 37 of the 39 counties have nothing but absentee voting. You can go to the election office to drop off your ballot, but everyone gets a ballot weeks in advance.
On the other hand, that means we've already conceded the battle against this sort of voter intimidation/bribery. The thug can just watch you fill out the ballot. Hasn't been a problem in practice, though... yet.
Digital camera in the booth too often? (Some people are savvy enough to turn off the sounds, and some people are savvy enough to hide their camera. But most people are not.) Red flag. Game over.
I don't know about your camera, but mine is cleverly hidden inside my cell phone. Doesn't take much savvy to get one of those, and before long, almost everyone will have a 3+ megapixel camera in their pocket -- if we're not there already.
Hope you don't mind the edit, as it doesn't change the intent. If you're voting for an lesser evil, you're throwing your vote away by perpetuating the election of evil.
So, given a candidate who's more evil and a candidate who's less evil, you'd just as soon take the more evil one? You don't see a difference?
That's an odd sense of morality you have. Personally, I prefer to do what I can to reduce evil, bit by bit, rather than give up entirely just because I can't eliminate it all at once.
Luckily, my country has a modern preferential voting system so we're not prone to these prehistoric ballot box conundrums.
I gather from your comment history that you're Australian. If that's correct, you don't actually have a modern preferential voting system: you have IRV, which is subject to most of the same criticisms as our voting method, even though it seems on the surface as though you can vote your true preferences without penalty.