most still have a strange aversion to some animals - don't know why.
"Monkey see, monkey do." Human beings are social animals. We are what we see other humans be, especially when young. The very young emulate parents, the older young emulate peers. Except, of course, for a few of us weirdos.
No, you'll be avoiding some tech that will be indespensible to modern life that we don't have yet.
My dad is one of those guys, he's 80. "I lived eighty years without a computer and cell phone and I don't need one now." My maternal grandfather was the same way about indoor plumbing! Even after my uncle installed a bathroom in Grandpa's house, Grandpa still used the outhouse.
I'm hopeful I haven't inherited the "get off my lawn" gene. At least I don't have a nice yard so far (and don't give a damn if someone walks on it)
If we've come this far in 40 years, where will we be in 40 more?
I'll be dead. At least I hope I'll be dead, I have no wish to live to be a hundred. Like my grandmother said at age 95, "I don't know why everybody wants to live to be a hundred. It ain't no fun bein' old."
But man, look at how far things have progressed. Forty years ago the pot was only 1/4th as potent (and 1/20th the price); there were no flat screen TVs, no microwave ovens, no VCRs, self-opening doors were brand new, there were no cell phones (not even pagers), no ABS or air bags in cars. The fastest computer in the world then was less powerful than an iPhone.
The difference in medical tech is really astounding. Medicine was PRIMITIVE back then -- I mean REALLY primitive. No CrystaLens implants, no soft contact lenses, no Viagra, no Naproxin, they used ether to put you under for surgery, no digital readouts of body functions.
I'm sure there are a lot of things I didn't have that I'd sorely miss if I didn't have them now that I haven't thought of. The wonders you guys will see in the next 40 years are as unimaginable as the internet was before it existed Here's a short science fiction story written in 1946 that AFAIK came closest to the internet, Murray Leinster's A Logic Named Joe. It's actually humorous seeing it from the 21st century.
I live in a sci-fi world with wonders nobody dreamed of when I was young.
Using 44kHz or 48kHz sampling, it means if you want to capture to 20kHz, your filter must "brickwall" in the 2-4kHz region between 20kHz and 22/24kHz. This is extremely hard to do
Huh? A simple bandpass filter does the trick. Higher sampling rate, higher frequency filter. You realize that there are radio frequency filters, which are far higher frequencies than sound?
The higher your sampling rate, the less aliasing you get. At 44.1 sample rate has only three data points to describe a 15 kHz wave's shape. That's not nearly enough. I'd guess that if you quadrupled the sampling rate (and raised the number of stored bits) you could sample an analog high quality studio-produced audio tape and nobody would be able to tell the difference between the two.
Well, I haven't bought a Microsoft product since XCP trashed Win 98 and I bought XP. But I bought a notebook with win 7; kinda hard to not buy a compuer without Windows unless you buy Apple. I'm not Microsoft's customer, Acer is, and there's little I can do about that.
What mostly keeps me away from Microsoft is I don't like their programming philosophies, their "our way or the highway" attitude. I like the way Linux lets me do what I want, how I want to do it, so Linux will be on the notebook after I get the main box back in shape (just upgraded from Kubuntu 9 to 11.1 and am having a few issues; I think something went wrong with the install).
disagree with your "corporatocracy" remark as this is an expansion of government power.
Not at all, It's government granting the corporations more power, not granting itself more power. And rather than "corporatocracy", I'd simply use the older term "plutocracy". Govenment power IS corporate power; our federal government is run by and for the corporate interests, and no one else's..
There are very few places where we still allow privately held legal monopolies.
Lets see, the gas company, the electric company, the water company, the ISP... probably well over a quarter of my income goes to monopolies.
Some utilities are owned by cities or counties, but most are corporate-owned. And yes, I agree that a telcom monopoliy is awful, but not a copyright (which should be a far more limited time, life+70 years is insane). I can listen to music without buying a CD, I can read a book or watch a movie without buying one -- they're available at the local library.
What makes you think that more would be written without copyright? And although I enjoy learning, what's wrong with entertainment? I probably read twenty novels for every nonfiction book I read.
Look, I would really like it if the government made it so that there were no poor people. Or hungry people. Or people that couldn't afford homes.
It would be nice as well if we all had a government-assured income so that in spite of an economic contraction that just means fewer workers are needed now and the unemployment is permanent that everyone would have enough money, housing and food. And entertainment.
Your straw man is on fire -- nobody's asking for that.
We haven't had a big economy-changing war for a long time and it clearly shows.
We had two in the last ten years, and they did in fact change the economy -- they destroyed it. Wars always do that (the exception was WWII; our rebuilding Europe moved a lot of money from Europe to here). WWI was great for the rich, according to my grandmother, who was 17 in 1920 (my grandfather fought in WWI), the only roar during the roaring twenties were the rich, everyone else was in pretty bad shape. And note that the Coolige-Hoover years that led to the Great Depression had the same governing mindset of the Bush years: deregulate, deregulate, deregulate, government is bad, worship the free market, let the bankers do any damned thing they want.
The Korean war led to the recession in the 1950s, which Eisenhower's Interstate Highway System project somewhat alleviated.
The Vietnam war left us with the "stagflation" of the 1970s, which only hurt the poor and middle class. It looks like Iraq and Afghanistan are likewise hurting only the poor and middle class.
There is a mistaken notion that the rich create wealth. They don't. The rich control and aggregate wealth, the poor and middle class create the wealth for the rich in their factories and programmer cubicles and recording studios and even behind the fry cook's grill. The Ford factory isn't Ford's wealth, the cars that come out of that factory are.
Most of the "welfare" the wealthy decry benefits the employer, not the worker. McDonalds and WalMart employees recieve food stamps, without which they couldn't afford to work for McDonalds or WalMart.
I see folks posting in messagebpards that they can't find qualified help. You would think a businessman would understand supply and demand -- if you can't find qualified workers, you're not offering enough of a wage. Raise the minimum wage high enough so a family can live on one and there would be very, fery few people on food stamps. The people creating wealth for the wealthy should not have to beg for food.
I'm talking about the payroll taxes that were temporarily reduced; the Republicans don't want those tax cuts to be extended, but they're for extending the Bush cuts.
Do you really think stock traders are going to stop trading stock because the tax on their income goes up? And that's exactly what it is, a tax on stck traders' incomes. tax them more and they'll have to work harder at it.
Notice that the capital gains tax is a tax on profits derived from selling stock, commodities, or a business. Higher capital gains taxes keeps a business owner from "cashing out" and selling his business to retire in Florida.
I don't mean to be difficult, but don't people have to *agree* to a 200% APR to have it applied?
When a poor man's car breaks down, he doesn't really have much of a choice; he has to get to work. There used to be laws against usary, but no longer.
also there needs to be some security to prevent the failure of banks that are lending at stupid rates from undermining the economy
Regulation is indeed needed. The banks need to be prevented from lending at stupid rates, whether stupidly high rates or stupidly low rates.
If you simplified the tax code, then those millionaires would not have those deductions and then they would have to pay something.
I'm all for removing ALL deductions, period. Why should a landlord get a mortgage interest deduction when the mortgage, taxes, and maintenance (plus his profit) are paid by his tenant, who gets no deduction at all? Why should a single parent with one kid pay more in taxes than a childless married couple earning the same amount? If your charitable contributions are a tax dodge, how is that in any way charity?
That or they will just move to some other country.
Let the unpatriotic bastards leave, and good riddance to them. They're parasites, and we're better off without them.
Sure, it may not be fair that one of them may make at least 1000 times more than I do
It is if they're paying 1000 times as much in taxes, but they're not.
The fact is that while increasing the revenue is going to be needed to address our current issues, the reality is that we also have to cut programs, both entitlements and defense
What "entitlements" would you cut? Not SS or Medicaid, son, those were already paid for by separate taxes. Did you notice that Clinton took office with a deficit and left with a surplus? That's because he cut taxes on the poor and middle class, and spent government money on things that would increase hiring. The government is now broke because one in ten workers are not working. Put the unemployed to work and your deficit problem goes away; putting folks to work is how you increase government revenue..
We're in this deficit for three reasons: the Bush tax cuts that were supposed to increase hiring (stupid; an employer hires when he can sell more than he can produce, his taxes don't come into play at all); The high unemployment rate -- you don't have income taxes if you have no income; and most importantly, two VERY expensive wars. Now that Iraq is done and Afghanistan almost so, it's time to cut the defense budget drastically.
You'd like overseas income to be double-taxed, I suppose?
Why not? If I live in Illinois and work in Missouri I have to pay income tax to both Illinois and Missouri. Why shouldn't the rich be treated the same?
That's a problem with the overly-complicated tax code full of loopholes and deductions easily hidden in the tens of thousands of pages of IRS codes and regulations.
Yes, and it's a problem that needs fixing.
If you can make money without working, you're in different world than most people
How did you get the "making money without working"? To a stock trader, trading stock IS his job, just as hammering nails is a roofer's job, or running a restaraunt is a restaraunt owner's job. But the restaraunt owner and roofer are taxed at twice the rate of the stock trader.
Collectively, they don't really have enough money to make a dent in the federal debt
That doesn't mean they shouldn't be paying their fair share.
Capital gains are taxed at a lower rate to keep revenues high. That rate has been played with many times before
Yep, I remember Reagan cutting the Capital Gains Tax like it was yesterday. It unleashed an orgy of leveraged buyouts and takeovers, with workers getting laid off and hours cut so the sharks wouldn't dismantle the companies, sell the properties, and lay off all the workers. I worked at Disney at the time, and Disney was one of the takeover victims. Saving the company from speculators who wanted to buy it for its real estate was incredibly expensive, and Disney cut workers' hours. My and my then-wife's hours were cut from 40 per week to 30 per week.
No good whatever came from those cuts, and afaik that was the last time Capital Gains taxes were adjusted. They need to be adjusted back up to where they were before Reagan screwed us all.
Not nearly enough. For one thing, tha Glass-Stegal act's repeal was one of the causes of the economic meltdown. Do you really think that a 200% APR is in any way not usurious? Yet that's how much many of the payday loan places that the poor use charge.
Unfortunately, no one really knows what that point is. All I've gotten from them is "Wah! Rich people have more than we do!"
Then you obviously haven't been paying attention.
Really kinda sad considering that they are the 1% themselves when looked at from a worldly point of view.
The preacher at my church tried to make the same point, and he was wrong, too. I'm twice as rich as someone in Chicago who earns the same wage as me, because prices are twice as high there. When I was in Thailand in the USAF in 1974, it was a third world country with a median income of $1000 per year. But you could feed four in a nice restaraunt for less than a dollar, take a bus anywhere in the country for a nickle, rent a bungalow (woman included) for thirty bucks a month. In the US, my airman's salary made me a pauper, but if I'd had a year's worth of that salary in Thailand, I could have retired. If you made $1000 per year in Thailand you weren't poor, $1000 per year in the US and you were destitute. You simply can't determine wealth by the amount of dollars one has, because a dollar is worth different amounts in different places.
Simply being able to eat without working puts them there.
Boy, you sure swallow these 1%er tea party lies hook, line, and sinker, don't you? One in six Americans have problems with hunger. I went without food when I was young and poor. And you're going to blame the 9% unemployment rate on the people who can't find jobs? Son, that's close to insanity. It's Washington and Wall Street that keep people poor -- jobs are their job, and they're both falling down on that job.
Look what happened when they deregulated banking (repeal of Glass-Stegall) -- the present economic "Great Recession". Look what happened when California deregulated electricity supplies -- blackouts and brownouts.
The idea of copyright is a strange holdover from medieval economics
Nope. Wikipedia:The Middle Ages (adjectival form: medieval, mediaeval or mediæval) is a periodization of European history from the 5th century to the 15th century.
Copyright was invented after the advent of the printing press and with wider public literacy. As a legal concept, its origins in Britain were from a reaction to printers' monopolies at the beginning of the eighteenth century.
The Queen of Anne statute in Britain was enacted fully three centuries after the medeval period. It protects authors from publishers (and publishers from other publishers), who wouldn't have to pay anyone for writing. Folks would still write without copyright, but not nearly as many. I can't see how abolishing copyright could be good for society, and you don't say how you think it would be.
to avoid the situation where an artist who composed a song loses the right to play it or is simply boned by the record label on royalties
Part of that boning is that under copyright law, phonorecords are automatically "works for hire" -- the label holds copyright.
Copyright is free, BTW, you don't have to pay anything or "register" your work.
Copyright is granted as soon as the work is "afficed in tangible form", but you can't sue anyone for infringing unless you've registered the work with the US Copyright office. The fee is $30.
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most still have a strange aversion to some animals - don't know why.
"Monkey see, monkey do." Human beings are social animals. We are what we see other humans be, especially when young. The very young emulate parents, the older young emulate peers. Except, of course, for a few of us weirdos.
dogs were used for hunting and protection plus they do form an emotional bond many times, cats are suited for controlling rodent populations
Cats also form an emotional bond many times.
I understand that dog is a delicacy in Korea, and Dog is enjoyed in southeast Asia. So I guess you could ask an Asian.
yeah no shit. I knew they had passed sanity about 3 exits back when I heard about their "sea kittens" campaign.
Sea kittens? Man, I just love catfish! Yum!
But tell PETA that the kittens are freshwater fish.
PETA, er, uh, that's People Eating Tasty Animals, right? I'm a member!
Yes, he does. Her name is Radio Shack EC-4004.
No, you'll be avoiding some tech that will be indespensible to modern life that we don't have yet.
My dad is one of those guys, he's 80. "I lived eighty years without a computer and cell phone and I don't need one now." My maternal grandfather was the same way about indoor plumbing! Even after my uncle installed a bathroom in Grandpa's house, Grandpa still used the outhouse.
I'm hopeful I haven't inherited the "get off my lawn" gene. At least I don't have a nice yard so far (and don't give a damn if someone walks on it)
If we've come this far in 40 years, where will we be in 40 more?
I'll be dead. At least I hope I'll be dead, I have no wish to live to be a hundred. Like my grandmother said at age 95, "I don't know why everybody wants to live to be a hundred. It ain't no fun bein' old."
But man, look at how far things have progressed. Forty years ago the pot was only 1/4th as potent (and 1/20th the price); there were no flat screen TVs, no microwave ovens, no VCRs, self-opening doors were brand new, there were no cell phones (not even pagers), no ABS or air bags in cars. The fastest computer in the world then was less powerful than an iPhone.
The difference in medical tech is really astounding. Medicine was PRIMITIVE back then -- I mean REALLY primitive. No CrystaLens implants, no soft contact lenses, no Viagra, no Naproxin, they used ether to put you under for surgery, no digital readouts of body functions.
I'm sure there are a lot of things I didn't have that I'd sorely miss if I didn't have them now that I haven't thought of. The wonders you guys will see in the next 40 years are as unimaginable as the internet was before it existed Here's a short science fiction story written in 1946 that AFAIK came closest to the internet, Murray Leinster's A Logic Named Joe. It's actually humorous seeing it from the 21st century.
I live in a sci-fi world with wonders nobody dreamed of when I was young.
Using 44kHz or 48kHz sampling, it means if you want to capture to 20kHz, your filter must "brickwall" in the 2-4kHz region between 20kHz and 22/24kHz. This is extremely hard to do
Huh? A simple bandpass filter does the trick. Higher sampling rate, higher frequency filter. You realize that there are radio frequency filters, which are far higher frequencies than sound?
The higher your sampling rate, the less aliasing you get. At 44.1 sample rate has only three data points to describe a 15 kHz wave's shape. That's not nearly enough. I'd guess that if you quadrupled the sampling rate (and raised the number of stored bits) you could sample an analog high quality studio-produced audio tape and nobody would be able to tell the difference between the two.
Oh, BTW, the GP was joking.
Find an impeachable offense first.
Well, I haven't bought a Microsoft product since XCP trashed Win 98 and I bought XP. But I bought a notebook with win 7; kinda hard to not buy a compuer without Windows unless you buy Apple. I'm not Microsoft's customer, Acer is, and there's little I can do about that.
What mostly keeps me away from Microsoft is I don't like their programming philosophies, their "our way or the highway" attitude. I like the way Linux lets me do what I want, how I want to do it, so Linux will be on the notebook after I get the main box back in shape (just upgraded from Kubuntu 9 to 11.1 and am having a few issues; I think something went wrong with the install).
"That don't befront me, as long as I get my money next Friday."
Source: John Lee Hooker, "House Rent Boogie" (later covered by George Thorogood)
disagree with your "corporatocracy" remark as this is an expansion of government power.
Not at all, It's government granting the corporations more power, not granting itself more power. And rather than "corporatocracy", I'd simply use the older term "plutocracy". Govenment power IS corporate power; our federal government is run by and for the corporate interests, and no one else's..
There are very few places where we still allow privately held legal monopolies.
Lets see, the gas company, the electric company, the water company, the ISP... probably well over a quarter of my income goes to monopolies.
Some utilities are owned by cities or counties, but most are corporate-owned. And yes, I agree that a telcom monopoliy is awful, but not a copyright (which should be a far more limited time, life+70 years is insane). I can listen to music without buying a CD, I can read a book or watch a movie without buying one -- they're available at the local library.
What makes you think that more would be written without copyright? And although I enjoy learning, what's wrong with entertainment? I probably read twenty novels for every nonfiction book I read.
Look, I would really like it if the government made it so that there were no poor people. Or hungry people. Or people that couldn't afford homes.
It would be nice as well if we all had a government-assured income so that in spite of an economic contraction that just means fewer workers are needed now and the unemployment is permanent that everyone would have enough money, housing and food. And entertainment.
Your straw man is on fire -- nobody's asking for that.
We haven't had a big economy-changing war for a long time and it clearly shows.
We had two in the last ten years, and they did in fact change the economy -- they destroyed it. Wars always do that (the exception was WWII; our rebuilding Europe moved a lot of money from Europe to here). WWI was great for the rich, according to my grandmother, who was 17 in 1920 (my grandfather fought in WWI), the only roar during the roaring twenties were the rich, everyone else was in pretty bad shape. And note that the Coolige-Hoover years that led to the Great Depression had the same governing mindset of the Bush years: deregulate, deregulate, deregulate, government is bad, worship the free market, let the bankers do any damned thing they want.
The Korean war led to the recession in the 1950s, which Eisenhower's Interstate Highway System project somewhat alleviated.
The Vietnam war left us with the "stagflation" of the 1970s, which only hurt the poor and middle class. It looks like Iraq and Afghanistan are likewise hurting only the poor and middle class.
There is a mistaken notion that the rich create wealth. They don't. The rich control and aggregate wealth, the poor and middle class create the wealth for the rich in their factories and programmer cubicles and recording studios and even behind the fry cook's grill. The Ford factory isn't Ford's wealth, the cars that come out of that factory are.
Most of the "welfare" the wealthy decry benefits the employer, not the worker. McDonalds and WalMart employees recieve food stamps, without which they couldn't afford to work for McDonalds or WalMart.
I see folks posting in messagebpards that they can't find qualified help. You would think a businessman would understand supply and demand -- if you can't find qualified workers, you're not offering enough of a wage. Raise the minimum wage high enough so a family can live on one and there would be very, fery few people on food stamps. The people creating wealth for the wealthy should not have to beg for food.
I'm talking about the payroll taxes that were temporarily reduced; the Republicans don't want those tax cuts to be extended, but they're for extending the Bush cuts.
he not only proposed it, it was enacted.
Do you really think stock traders are going to stop trading stock because the tax on their income goes up? And that's exactly what it is, a tax on stck traders' incomes. tax them more and they'll have to work harder at it.
Notice that the capital gains tax is a tax on profits derived from selling stock, commodities, or a business. Higher capital gains taxes keeps a business owner from "cashing out" and selling his business to retire in Florida.
I don't mean to be difficult, but don't people have to *agree* to a 200% APR to have it applied?
When a poor man's car breaks down, he doesn't really have much of a choice; he has to get to work. There used to be laws against usary, but no longer.
also there needs to be some security to prevent the failure of banks that are lending at stupid rates from undermining the economy
Regulation is indeed needed. The banks need to be prevented from lending at stupid rates, whether stupidly high rates or stupidly low rates.
If you simplified the tax code, then those millionaires would not have those deductions and then they would have to pay something.
I'm all for removing ALL deductions, period. Why should a landlord get a mortgage interest deduction when the mortgage, taxes, and maintenance (plus his profit) are paid by his tenant, who gets no deduction at all? Why should a single parent with one kid pay more in taxes than a childless married couple earning the same amount? If your charitable contributions are a tax dodge, how is that in any way charity?
That or they will just move to some other country.
Let the unpatriotic bastards leave, and good riddance to them. They're parasites, and we're better off without them.
Sure, it may not be fair that one of them may make at least 1000 times more than I do
It is if they're paying 1000 times as much in taxes, but they're not.
The fact is that while increasing the revenue is going to be needed to address our current issues, the reality is that we also have to cut programs, both entitlements and defense
What "entitlements" would you cut? Not SS or Medicaid, son, those were already paid for by separate taxes. Did you notice that Clinton took office with a deficit and left with a surplus? That's because he cut taxes on the poor and middle class, and spent government money on things that would increase hiring. The government is now broke because one in ten workers are not working. Put the unemployed to work and your deficit problem goes away; putting folks to work is how you increase government revenue..
We're in this deficit for three reasons: the Bush tax cuts that were supposed to increase hiring (stupid; an employer hires when he can sell more than he can produce, his taxes don't come into play at all);
The high unemployment rate -- you don't have income taxes if you have no income; and most importantly, two VERY expensive wars. Now that Iraq is done and Afghanistan almost so, it's time to cut the defense budget drastically.
You'd like overseas income to be double-taxed, I suppose?
Why not? If I live in Illinois and work in Missouri I have to pay income tax to both Illinois and Missouri. Why shouldn't the rich be treated the same?
That's a problem with the overly-complicated tax code full of loopholes and deductions easily hidden in the tens of thousands of pages of IRS codes and regulations.
Yes, and it's a problem that needs fixing.
If you can make money without working, you're in different world than most people
How did you get the "making money without working"? To a stock trader, trading stock IS his job, just as hammering nails is a roofer's job, or running a restaraunt is a restaraunt owner's job. But the restaraunt owner and roofer are taxed at twice the rate of the stock trader.
Collectively, they don't really have enough money to make a dent in the federal debt
That doesn't mean they shouldn't be paying their fair share.
Capital gains are taxed at a lower rate to keep revenues high. That rate has been played with many times before
Yep, I remember Reagan cutting the Capital Gains Tax like it was yesterday. It unleashed an orgy of leveraged buyouts and takeovers, with workers getting laid off and hours cut so the sharks wouldn't dismantle the companies, sell the properties, and lay off all the workers. I worked at Disney at the time, and Disney was one of the takeover victims. Saving the company from speculators who wanted to buy it for its real estate was incredibly expensive, and Disney cut workers' hours. My and my then-wife's hours were cut from 40 per week to 30 per week.
No good whatever came from those cuts, and afaik that was the last time Capital Gains taxes were adjusted. They need to be adjusted back up to where they were before Reagan screwed us all.
Oddly enough, the wealthy are already taxed
As it turns out, according to the IRS and ABC News,1,470 American millionaires paid no federal income tax in 2009. Nearly 100,000 millionaires pay lower tax rates than middle class, and capital gains (gambling on the stock market and commodity futures) has half the tax rate as a working person's income tax. Funny how your tea party was all against repealing the Bush tax cuts for the rich, but against the Obama tax cuts for the middle class.
banks are already regulated
Not nearly enough. For one thing, tha Glass-Stegal act's repeal was one of the causes of the economic meltdown. Do you really think that a 200% APR is in any way not usurious? Yet that's how much many of the payday loan places that the poor use charge.
Unfortunately, no one really knows what that point is. All I've gotten from them is "Wah! Rich people have more than we do!"
Then you obviously haven't been paying attention.
Really kinda sad considering that they are the 1% themselves when looked at from a worldly point of view.
The preacher at my church tried to make the same point, and he was wrong, too. I'm twice as rich as someone in Chicago who earns the same wage as me, because prices are twice as high there. When I was in Thailand in the USAF in 1974, it was a third world country with a median income of $1000 per year. But you could feed four in a nice restaraunt for less than a dollar, take a bus anywhere in the country for a nickle, rent a bungalow (woman included) for thirty bucks a month. In the US, my airman's salary made me a pauper, but if I'd had a year's worth of that salary in Thailand, I could have retired. If you made $1000 per year in Thailand you weren't poor, $1000 per year in the US and you were destitute. You simply can't determine wealth by the amount of dollars one has, because a dollar is worth different amounts in different places.
Simply being able to eat without working puts them there.
Boy, you sure swallow these 1%er tea party lies hook, line, and sinker, don't you? One in six Americans have problems with hunger. I went without food when I was young and poor. And you're going to blame the 9% unemployment rate on the people who can't find jobs? Son, that's close to insanity. It's Washington and Wall Street that keep people poor -- jobs are their job, and they're both falling down on that job.
You might want to educate yourself.
Look what happened when they deregulated banking (repeal of Glass-Stegall) -- the present economic "Great Recession". Look what happened when California deregulated electricity supplies -- blackouts and brownouts.
The idea of copyright is a strange holdover from medieval economics
Nope. Wikipedia:The Middle Ages (adjectival form: medieval, mediaeval or mediæval) is a periodization of European history from the 5th century to the 15th century.
Copyright was invented after the advent of the printing press and with wider public literacy. As a legal concept, its origins in Britain were from a reaction to printers' monopolies at the beginning of the eighteenth century.
The Queen of Anne statute in Britain was enacted fully three centuries after the medeval period. It protects authors from publishers (and publishers from other publishers), who wouldn't have to pay anyone for writing. Folks would still write without copyright, but not nearly as many. I can't see how abolishing copyright could be good for society, and you don't say how you think it would be.
They should make copyrights non-transferable too
Agreed.
to avoid the situation where an artist who composed a song loses the right to play it or is simply boned by the record label on royalties
Part of that boning is that under copyright law, phonorecords are automatically "works for hire" -- the label holds copyright.
Copyright is free, BTW, you don't have to pay anything or "register" your work.
Copyright is granted as soon as the work is "afficed in tangible form", but you can't sue anyone for infringing unless you've registered the work with the US Copyright office. The fee is $30.