Soo.. they say Amazon stifled competition.. but the parts of their contracts that they objected to were the "show us your other deals and give us the same deal" clauses that keeps prices consistent across retailers and prevents publishers from making sweetheart deals like they did with Apple. I don't see how that stifle's competition, per se.
Because this is price fixing.
I had a friend who is an independently published author. There are some e-book publishers that, on occasion, run sales: they will offer her book for, say 99 cents for a week as a promotion.
Amazon has a robot that trolls the web watching the price of e-books from competitors. If the robot finds a book offered for less than the Amazon price anywhere, at any time, Amazon will pull the book off of Amazon because their contract says nobody else is allowed to sell it for less.
These definitions do correctly and clearly state that socialism is about ownership of the means of production.
Definitions 1 and 2 are actually defining state socialism, which is indeed a subset of socialism (and, to be fair, is the type of socialism most people think of).
Here's the business dictionary, which says something similar but with the slightly wider definition "cooperative and/or government ownership": http://www.businessdictionary....
Definition three merely says where socialism lies in Marxist theory, but doesn't actually say what it is. (I'm no great fan of Marxist theory. It tends to degenerate into jargon that ends up being self-referential and not terribly enlightening; and in any case I think it's very clear that Marx has been proven wrong in his understanding of how societies actually work.)
I'm not sure what you mean by "at odds," since the IEEE Spectrum article doesn't even discuss energy payback time. Here's an article showing an energy payback time of 3.7 years for a typical home rooftop PV system, or 2 years for a slightly more efficient panel: http://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy04o... Graph 2 shows a panel produces 20 times more energy over the 30-year lifetime (which is the PV panel typical warranty) than the energy used to produce it and mount it on the roof.
That's roughly comparable to the values shown in other sources. Here's a review paper saying that the Energy Return on Investment (EROI) is from 8.7 to 34.2 (depending on things such as where it's located, and what technology is used): http://www.sciencedirect.com/s...
The IEEE article is a caution saying that the Chinese module manufacturers don't necessarily pay attention to the environmental effects of manufacturing. This is a problem with any manufacturing, though, not particular to solar panels. They export about 180 billion dollars worth of stuff to us every month, so if you're worried about the environmental impact of Chinese manufacturing, that's laudable, but solar panels aren't even one percent of that.
You're not particularly wrong. Stock ownership could be a route to socialism if it ended up merging the capitalist class (the people who own stock) with the worker class (the people who do the work). I remember a (satirical) science fiction story from back in the 50's pointing that out.
In America, at the moment, it doesn't happen to be going that direction. Most of the capital (that is, ownership of the physical means of production) is held by a relatively small proportion of the population. For example, just grabbing some numbers out of the internet, 10% of the population owns 75% of the wealth, and we can assume that for this 10% of the population, that ownership of wealth is in the form of investments in capital. And let me assure you, that ten percent are, for the most part, not the workers.
"Worker ownership of some, but a share significantly less than a 50%, of the means of production" would not be called socialism.
Great, that pretty much means that we've had socialism running as intended since the first IRA/401K.
If the only people who owned stocks were workers with IRAs, that might be true. But they're not. They're not even the majority of stock owners.
--again, I should point out that this is just the definition of what socialism is. Socialism is an economic model; it's about who owns (and more to the point, who controls) the engine of the economy (which was assumed to be the factories: the physical means of production).
Well, if the probability of a new person being converted is proportional to the number of people already converted, that is also an exponential process: dN/dT = k N.
Modern socialism is no longer the same as communism - (which is what the right-wing want it to remain).
Well, socialism was never actually identical with communism: communism was one particular subconstruction of socialism, but with a lot of other stuff that Marx added in with it because he (or Engles) thought it all fit together.
Modern socialism is the recognition that certain parts of industry perform better, and make more sense, when publicly owned, controlled or extremely tightly regulated for the public interest - (far more than 'normal' corporations) - such as healthcare/energy/infrastructure etc.. It's about recognising that there needs to be a balance between the extremes of communism/corporatism (oligarchy)/capitalism (which is about the absence of such rules), which many still consider 'socialism'.
That's interesting, separating "modern socialism" from what I guess you'd have to call "classic socialism"-- I'd be quite interested in seeing a citation to that definition.
Of course, until the world realises that a 'free-market' is a myth, (the basis of all markets is that of land, which has not been free for a LONG time), corporatism and capitalism will still have far too much power and influence over governments at the expense of civilization itself.
Free-markets aren't per se a "myth," but the things which make a market not free are such a very long list (of which governments are no means the most important) that in the real world they're something you actually see only in very limited circumstances.
I'm surprised you pick "land" as a restricting element-- land can be bought and sold. (It's mostly a driver in the agricultural economy, though, which is a very different model than the capital-driven factory economics that the 19th century economic theories address.) What kills free markets quickly is monopoly: once an entity has enough economic power to force others out of business, the markets stop being free.
AND there is no greater "ownership" for a worker than owning your own business.
Whether "owning your own business" is "worker ownership of the means of production" depends on what your business does: whether it produces things, or just sells things other people produced (if it just sells things, it's not "means of production"). It also depends on whether you employ other people to produce things-- in that case you,, as the business owner, are a capitalist, unless the people you employ are co-owners (in which case your business is a collective).
...The greatest form of "socialism" (using your definition)
Not "my" definition. I didn't invent the word. That's just the definition of the word.
is small business in a free economic market.
Yes, in general, the capitalist economic model works extremely well in the situation you posit: individually-owned small businesses in a free economic market, where the people who own each business are also the people who work in that business, and "small" in this case meaning no individual business large enough to drive the market.
In this case, where there really isn't any distinction between owners and workers, though, there isn't much need to distinguish capitalism from socialism. It's the case where production requires large investments in capital and factories with workers, that you have the 19th century conditions in which these economic terms were defined to make sense of.
Red Forman had it right. When someone creates or perpetuates a bad idea, you slap them upside the head and yell "Dumbass!"
The problem is that stupid people, and people with dumb ideas, really love that approach and will adopt it enthusiastically.
They have discovered that they can't convince people with logic and facts (because logic and facts don't support their stupid ideas in any way.). But slapping people and shouting "dumbass"? That is something that they can do! Repeatedly!
In general, you can safely assume that anybody who tries to shoot down an idea by "slapping people upside the head and yelling 'Dumbass'!" is stupid, and advancing a stupid idea.
Socialism always leads to collapse of the economy, as people figure out how to game the system. Because it hasn't collapsed everywhere yet, actually goes exactly to the article's premise.
That's an assertion that has been made un-falsifiable by weasel-wording. You could say the same thing about anything. Democracy. Speaking French. Taxing liquor sales.
"Democracy always leads to collapse of the economy, as people figure out how to game the system. Because it hasn't collapsed everywhere yet, actually goes exactly to the article's premise." What, some democracies haven't collapsed? That just proves my point!
Socialism is "for the collective, at the expense of individual liberty".
No.
Socialism is worker ownership of the means of production.
Most people today seem to have long since lost track of what socialism is actually defined as, but if you're going to be pedantic, be pedantic and correct.
it takes more energy to make a solar panel than the panel will get back in its lifetime.
This is the perfect example of a bad idea that just can't be killed. It may, possibly, have been true back in the '80s. It is not true now, and hasn't been true for a long time. Modern solar panels produce much more energy than the total energy used to manufacture them.
It's not the proximity of another moon that produces tidal forces. Just going around Saturn is enough to produce the stresses that induce heat.
Only if the orbit is eccentric. If there aren't other moons, viscoeleastic damping circularizes the orbit until the tidal heating disappears-- it's the other moons that perturb Europa's orbit to make it slightly eccentric, giving it the tidal forces that heat it.
Well then by the same logic you can't really see matter either. All you see is reflected photons.
Well, sure. But you see the photons reflected or emitted by the matter. On the other hand, you can't see photons reflected or emitted by a black hole, because black holes do not reflect or emit photons.
Yes there is. You're thinking of parallax, but what they are doing is interferometry, so they will be comparing the phase of radio signals received on opposite sides of the globe. That has to be done simultaneously.
You can't, of course, "see" a black hole, even with radio waves: a black hole is by definition what you can't see.(*)
What they are looking to image is the radio emissions from material falling into the black hole. You can't see the black hole itself. -- *footnote: Black holes do emit Hawking radiation, which in principle is detectable. But the peculiar property of Hawking radiation is that the smaller the black hole the more Hawking radiation. Only exceptionally tiny black holes emit enough to possibly detect-- a black hole ten micro meters across will emit just about the same amount of Hawking radiation as the microwave background.
Different observers see time passing at different rates, of course, and thus the rate of expansion is indeed observer dependent. But all of the observers still see the universe expanding.
It's a trivially small effect, though, unless you're in a gravity well so deep you're poised on the edge of an event horizon, or moving at speeds that are a significant fraction of the speed of light.
...., and if we used an alternative voting system to avoid the spoiler effect, then we certainly would have voted in a candidate more people prefer.
That's the point: the vote counting methodology has to be changed to eliminate the spoiler effect. "If the other Republican, Democrat, third party, and independent candidates had a presence in the final election and in the debates," is not the issue. The spoiler effect is.
Look, here's the way the vote counting currently works: third candidates have to take votes away from one or both of the other candidates, and in fact, what happens is that they take votes away from the candidate that is most similar to them. So, with the current system, a third party is friendly-fire: it: always results in fewer votes for the candidate that the third party candidate most agrees with.
This has to be changed if third party candidates are to have any viabiliity.
Speaking of chemo and the UK. I was on a year of chemo, that almost killed me three times. I found out the rules for administering it in the UK were lax enough I would have been guaranteed killed by the chemo in the UK had I been on it the full year. But it sounds like they wouldn't have approved me for the full year, so I guess that explains why they are lax on blood tests for it since people don't get it. Yes, had I gotten cancer in the UK I would have been dead already, had they treated it or had they not treated it. In the US I was able to get "proper" treatment that worked.
Cancer survival rates in the UK are lower than those in the rest of Europe. But the rest of Europe also has socialized health care. Sweden's survival rate is the highest in the world. Should you attribute that to their socialized health care?
And it's not clear whether the UK has lower cancer survival rates than the U.S. or not, because the UK has a national database, while the US doesn't. So it turns out there aren't actually good statistics for the US cancer deaths, because there's isn't any central agency they get reported to. On the other hand, every cancer death in the UK gets recorded.
Slashdot Mirror
Soo.. they say Amazon stifled competition.. but the parts of their contracts that they objected to were the "show us your other deals and give us the same deal" clauses that keeps prices consistent across retailers and prevents publishers from making sweetheart deals like they did with Apple. I don't see how that stifle's competition, per se.
Because this is price fixing.
I had a friend who is an independently published author. There are some e-book publishers that, on occasion, run sales: they will offer her book for, say 99 cents for a week as a promotion.
Amazon has a robot that trolls the web watching the price of e-books from competitors. If the robot finds a book offered for less than the Amazon price anywhere, at any time, Amazon will pull the book off of Amazon because their contract says nobody else is allowed to sell it for less.
These definitions do correctly and clearly state that socialism is about ownership of the means of production.
Definitions 1 and 2 are actually defining state socialism , which is indeed a subset of socialism (and, to be fair, is the type of socialism most people think of).
Here's the business dictionary, which says something similar but with the slightly wider definition "cooperative and/or government ownership": http://www.businessdictionary....
Definition three merely says where socialism lies in Marxist theory, but doesn't actually say what it is. (I'm no great fan of Marxist theory. It tends to degenerate into jargon that ends up being self-referential and not terribly enlightening; and in any case I think it's very clear that Marx has been proven wrong in his understanding of how societies actually work.)
Well that seems to be at odds with what the IEEE found - http://spectrum.ieee.org/green...
I'm not sure what you mean by "at odds," since the IEEE Spectrum article doesn't even discuss energy payback time. Here's an article showing an energy payback time of 3.7 years for a typical home rooftop PV system, or 2 years for a slightly more efficient panel: http://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy04o... Graph 2 shows a panel produces 20 times more energy over the 30-year lifetime (which is the PV panel typical warranty) than the energy used to produce it and mount it on the roof.
That's roughly comparable to the values shown in other sources. Here's a review paper saying that the Energy Return on Investment (EROI) is from 8.7 to 34.2 (depending on things such as where it's located, and what technology is used): http://www.sciencedirect.com/s...
The IEEE article is a caution saying that the Chinese module manufacturers don't necessarily pay attention to the environmental effects of manufacturing. This is a problem with any manufacturing, though, not particular to solar panels. They export about 180 billion dollars worth of stuff to us every month, so if you're worried about the environmental impact of Chinese manufacturing, that's laudable, but solar panels aren't even one percent of that.
You're not particularly wrong. Stock ownership could be a route to socialism if it ended up merging the capitalist class (the people who own stock) with the worker class (the people who do the work). I remember a (satirical) science fiction story from back in the 50's pointing that out.
In America, at the moment, it doesn't happen to be going that direction. Most of the capital (that is, ownership of the physical means of production) is held by a relatively small proportion of the population. For example, just grabbing some numbers out of the internet, 10% of the population owns 75% of the wealth, and we can assume that for this 10% of the population, that ownership of wealth is in the form of investments in capital. And let me assure you, that ten percent are, for the most part, not the workers.
"Worker ownership of some, but a share significantly less than a 50%, of the means of production" would not be called socialism.
Great, that pretty much means that we've had socialism running as intended since the first IRA/401K.
If the only people who owned stocks were workers with IRAs, that might be true. But they're not. They're not even the majority of stock owners.
--again, I should point out that this is just the definition of what socialism is. Socialism is an economic model; it's about who owns (and more to the point, who controls) the engine of the economy (which was assumed to be the factories: the physical means of production).
Well, if the probability of a new person being converted is proportional to the number of people already converted, that is also an exponential process:
dN/dT = k N.
Modern socialism is no longer the same as communism - (which is what the right-wing want it to remain).
Well, socialism was never actually identical with communism: communism was one particular subconstruction of socialism, but with a lot of other stuff that Marx added in with it because he (or Engles) thought it all fit together.
Modern socialism is the recognition that certain parts of industry perform better, and make more sense, when publicly owned, controlled or extremely tightly regulated for the public interest - (far more than 'normal' corporations) - such as healthcare/energy/infrastructure etc.. It's about recognising that there needs to be a balance between the extremes of communism/corporatism (oligarchy)/capitalism (which is about the absence of such rules), which many still consider 'socialism'.
That's interesting, separating "modern socialism" from what I guess you'd have to call "classic socialism"-- I'd be quite interested in seeing a citation to that definition.
Of course, until the world realises that a 'free-market' is a myth, (the basis of all markets is that of land, which has not been free for a LONG time), corporatism and capitalism will still have far too much power and influence over governments at the expense of civilization itself.
Free-markets aren't per se a "myth," but the things which make a market not free are such a very long list (of which governments are no means the most important) that in the real world they're something you actually see only in very limited circumstances.
I'm surprised you pick "land" as a restricting element-- land can be bought and sold. (It's mostly a driver in the agricultural economy, though, which is a very different model than the capital-driven factory economics that the 19th century economic theories address.) What kills free markets quickly is monopoly: once an entity has enough economic power to force others out of business, the markets stop being free.
That's the definition of socialism, yes.
AND there is no greater "ownership" for a worker than owning your own business.
Whether "owning your own business" is "worker ownership of the means of production" depends on what your business does: whether it produces things, or just sells things other people produced (if it just sells things, it's not "means of production"). It also depends on whether you employ other people to produce things-- in that case you,, as the business owner, are a capitalist, unless the people you employ are co-owners (in which case your business is a collective).
...The greatest form of "socialism" (using your definition)
Not "my" definition. I didn't invent the word. That's just the definition of the word.
is small business in a free economic market.
Yes, in general, the capitalist economic model works extremely well in the situation you posit: individually-owned small businesses in a free economic market, where the people who own each business are also the people who work in that business, and "small" in this case meaning no individual business large enough to drive the market.
In this case, where there really isn't any distinction between owners and workers, though, there isn't much need to distinguish capitalism from socialism. It's the case where production requires large investments in capital and factories with workers, that you have the 19th century conditions in which these economic terms were defined to make sense of.
Red Forman had it right. When someone creates or perpetuates a bad idea, you slap them upside the head and yell "Dumbass!"
The problem is that stupid people, and people with dumb ideas, really love that approach and will adopt it enthusiastically.
They have discovered that they can't convince people with logic and facts (because logic and facts don't support their stupid ideas in any way.). But slapping people and shouting "dumbass"? That is something that they can do! Repeatedly!
In general, you can safely assume that anybody who tries to shoot down an idea by "slapping people upside the head and yelling 'Dumbass'!" is stupid, and advancing a stupid idea.
Y = 1/(X-1) doesn't look like an exponential to me.
If each person who is convinced goes on to convince N others, this is exponential growth.
Socialism always leads to collapse of the economy, as people figure out how to game the system. Because it hasn't collapsed everywhere yet, actually goes exactly to the article's premise.
That's an assertion that has been made un-falsifiable by weasel-wording. You could say the same thing about anything. Democracy. Speaking French. Taxing liquor sales.
"Democracy always leads to collapse of the economy, as people figure out how to game the system. Because it hasn't collapsed everywhere yet, actually goes exactly to the article's premise." What, some democracies haven't collapsed? That just proves my point!
Socialism is "for the collective, at the expense of individual liberty".
No.
Socialism is worker ownership of the means of production.
Most people today seem to have long since lost track of what socialism is actually defined as, but if you're going to be pedantic, be pedantic and correct.
it takes more energy to make a solar panel than the panel will get back in its lifetime.
This is the perfect example of a bad idea that just can't be killed. It may, possibly, have been true back in the '80s. It is not true now, and hasn't been true for a long time. Modern solar panels produce much more energy than the total energy used to manufacture them.
Look up "energy payback time".
It's not the proximity of another moon that produces tidal forces. Just going around Saturn is enough to produce the stresses that induce heat.
Only if the orbit is eccentric. If there aren't other moons, viscoeleastic damping circularizes the orbit until the tidal heating disappears-- it's the other moons that perturb Europa's orbit to make it slightly eccentric, giving it the tidal forces that heat it.
What do they mean by 'nearby'?
They mean, in our solar system rather than in a solar system a hundred light years away.
Well then by the same logic you can't really see matter either. All you see is reflected photons.
Well, sure. But you see the photons reflected or emitted by the matter. On the other hand, you can't see photons reflected or emitted by a black hole, because black holes do not reflect or emit photons.
There is no need for "at once".
Yes there is. You're thinking of parallax, but what they are doing is interferometry, so they will be comparing the phase of radio signals received on opposite sides of the globe. That has to be done simultaneously.
You can't, of course, "see" a black hole, even with radio waves: a black hole is by definition what you can't see.(*)
What they are looking to image is the radio emissions from material falling into the black hole. You can't see the black hole itself.
--
*footnote: Black holes do emit Hawking radiation, which in principle is detectable. But the peculiar property of Hawking radiation is that the smaller the black hole the more Hawking radiation. Only exceptionally tiny black holes emit enough to possibly detect-- a black hole ten micro meters across will emit just about the same amount of Hawking radiation as the microwave background.
Different observers see time passing at different rates, of course, and thus the rate of expansion is indeed observer dependent. But all of the observers still see the universe expanding.
It's a trivially small effect, though, unless you're in a gravity well so deep you're poised on the edge of an event horizon, or moving at speeds that are a significant fraction of the speed of light.
...., and if we used an alternative voting system to avoid the spoiler effect, then we certainly would have voted in a candidate more people prefer.
That's the point: the vote counting methodology has to be changed to eliminate the spoiler effect. "If the other Republican, Democrat, third party, and independent candidates had a presence in the final election and in the debates," is not the issue. The spoiler effect is.
Look, here's the way the vote counting currently works: third candidates have to take votes away from one or both of the other candidates, and in fact, what happens is that they take votes away from the candidate that is most similar to them. So, with the current system, a third party is friendly-fire: it: always results in fewer votes for the candidate that the third party candidate most agrees with.
This has to be changed if third party candidates are to have any viabiliity.
The US has carried a constant debt since the US Civil War. Debt is literally what makes the world go round.
If by "literally" you mean "figuratively,"
I'm surprised this one isn't tagged "What could possibly go wrong?"
That's right. And the mathematics I was taught in grade school was wrong, too. Correctly:
2.3 is less than 2.6, but
2 is fewer than 3.
https://xkcd.com/1576/
Yes, it seems dumb to put the data in some weird non-standard film-based format.
Books. Those last.
Speaking of chemo and the UK. I was on a year of chemo, that almost killed me three times. I found out the rules for administering it in the UK were lax enough I would have been guaranteed killed by the chemo in the UK had I been on it the full year.
But it sounds like they wouldn't have approved me for the full year, so I guess that explains why they are lax on blood tests for it since people don't get it. Yes, had I gotten cancer in the UK I would have been dead already, had they treated it or had they not treated it. In the US I was able to get "proper" treatment that worked.
Cancer survival rates in the UK are lower than those in the rest of Europe. But the rest of Europe also has socialized health care. Sweden's survival rate is the highest in the world. Should you attribute that to their socialized health care?
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/health/news/11891554/UK-cancer-survival-worst-in-western-Europe.html
And it's not clear whether the UK has lower cancer survival rates than the U.S. or not, because the UK has a national database, while the US doesn't. So it turns out there aren't actually good statistics for the US cancer deaths, because there's isn't any central agency they get reported to. On the other hand, every cancer death in the UK gets recorded.