Please everybody, stop using the M word so lightly. Monopoly is more about lack of free entry than market share. The Federal Reserve is a monopoly in issuing money. Google is not a monopoly in search engines.
And Windows 7 is really far better than Vista. I'm typing this on Ubuntu 9.04 alpha 3, but gotta give some credit for them for fixing that huge pile of Vista.
Ack, I wrote a careful well written response and accidentally hit 'Cancel'. Gah.
So, making long story short: don't know about overlap, but I do think that this discussion is about competing products in the market so an economic viewpoint is warranted; you make a good point about that common ground, it really is lacking, but its being worked on faster now with competition for the 'Linux on the desktop' thing going on.
He's absolutely right. The point of open source is freedom. People should be free to work on whatever distro suits your fancy. The market will decide which of them wins out the dominance in each of the 'sectors' be it a big one, like Desktop OS or really small like Studio64 and UbuntuStudio.
Freedom works, freedom's great, try to take it from us and you'll be shot.;-)
The problem is that any country so desperate for "respect" that seizes on nuclear armament as a road to that respect will likely get the same respect that you give a rabid dog with a nuclear weapon. And that tends to be pretty hard on all parties involved.
Oh, thanks for filling up such a blank in my knowledge. Someone ought to slap a +1 Informative there.
But it is very different from the 1913 tax in that it was levied to fund a war, and although it was not repealed when that ended - what a surprise! - it DID get repealed AND later considered unconstitutional; which it was was, since it was not apportioned among the several states on the basis of population as the Constitution mandates for direct taxes.
Americans have been paying a sizable chunk of their earnings to the government for a good 96 years now with new taxes churned out like flavors of ice cream. If there is an unfair comparison, this is it.
So tell me, how did the US do without income tax until 1913? Was the family death rate at 50% due to a lack of FDA to make sure they didn't buy poisoned food? Was the prison population more than half its capacity composed of non-violent drug offenders there due to Federal minimum sentencing laws? Was private education non-existent or worse than the complete fail of the 'Hold-all-children-behind' public monopoly?
Basically only the posting of roads is the non-foolish part of your post, and a 1% uniform non-protective tariff would be more than enough for the Federal gov't to cover the US in tarmac, if they could restrict their spending to their strictly limited and enumerated powers under the US Constitution.
I'm saying is, we'll never run out of _energy_, because as oil becomes scarce it will be so expensive to burn it, that alternatives will become profitable by comparison. Supply and demand. Always works.
Actually I dare say that were it not for governmental restrictions on nuclear generation and privileges afforded to US companies, oil would ALREADY be displaced by cleaner and more efficient technologies.
Good point. But I do disagree with you on two counts.
Firstly, population does not increase on its own, but only increases in production allow for this growth. To argue otherwise is to say that infant mortality will be at 0% even in the absence of food, shelter, medical care and sanitation. The fact that world population growth is declining and the biggest population booms were after periods of war (what is it good for?) or during Industrial Revolution-like times when productivity was steadily increasing.
Secondly, when demand increases but the supply remains unchanged prices go up, making sure that resources in limited supply will go to those who value it highest, i.e. whether there is a bigger demand (profit motive) for cars or skyscrapers to be made, and at the same time providing a big profit incentive for competitors to enter the market and offer lower prices, whether by devising substitute materials or more efficient methods of recycling on a molecular level.;-)
Therefore, the price system will still work whereas draconian population controls or authoritarian systems are bound to fail.
Other than that I'm fully in agreement with you as to that we NEED to get off this rock, since just one planet makes for lousy redundancy. Oh, and I'd have this left to private enterprise instead of government agencies.
First of all, ANY regulation implies an unfree market and therefore 'unhealthy' - obviously excluding the prohibition on violence, theft and fraud, which are NOT 'regulations' by their very nature as post facto laws, an important distinction. And oligopolies or cartels are inherently unstable without State coercion to secure them, a monopoly is characterized not by market share, but by the lack of free entry.
Moreover, this perfect information 'requirement' for markets to function is just as rubbish as the neoclassical and Chicago school's fetish for perfect competition. Both imperfect competition and knowledge are PRECISELY what makes markets not just better, but _exponentially_ better at coordinating dispersed and decentralized information.
Saying 'people say markets always have optimal outcomes' is absurd and a straw-man. The correct statement is that markets consistently provide _much_ better outcomes than regulation and central planning.
Oh yea. Markets are completely anarchic and capricious just like that. Just take a look at Google. A much superior search engine still battling to dig Yahoo and Altavista out of their trenches.
Damn those market fundamentalists and their ludicrous 'invisible hand' which, to be honest, I'll only believe when I see it!
When even the World of Warcraft virtual world is using gold and silver as coin while the US is still on fiat-money-central-banking-fractional-reserve-pyramid-scheme, we need help. Seriously.
Solar panels need nasties to be built too, and many more of them are needed for producing the same energy. And how about shipping power plants around the country, as opposed to minute amounts of uranium to a bunch of dozen locations?
If, seen through the subsidy veil, it's cheaper to build, maintain and per watt produced than nuclear then great, if not, it's a waste of resources.
Yea. Take the risk for ONE well run and financed multi-megawatt reactor and substitute it to thousands of potential leaks/meltdowns/insert-your-disaster-here units.
Seriously, this retarded bias for 'decentralized energy' is getting ridiculous. I think if it were not for the US gov't scare of nuclear and resulting near shutdown of private enterprise in the industry we would have safer, cleaner and cheaper power.
Even that Greenpeace founder guy has come around to the fact that nuclear is a really good technology, even environment-wise.
Sorry for the strong language, caffeine induced, I believe.:-)
You're right, except for the fact that perfect competition does not exist. Which is fine really because imperfect competition is more than enough. Just means that neither profits nor prices will be driven ( in this case ) to zero.
OK, lets try this argument then: it's THEIR infrastructure. Nobody is forcing you to use their text services, so don't be their customer anymore.
This 'cost to produce' pricing argument is absolutely imbecile. Companies exist to make a profit. You think that infrastructure is 'put in place' and they forget about it? Capital needs to be replenished and that ( and R&D ) comes from profits.
If companies should be forced to charge texting 'at cost' and they can't pass on these costs to the consumers because competition would put them out of business, then you are simply handicapping the formation of capital which will lead to higher prices and worse service in the future.
Yet people were much happier listening to Rubinstein play Chopin in the radio than tone-deaf Aunt Gladys.;-)
And remember, with the advent of the radio there was many more people paying a much smaller 'fee', and yet the pie managed to get big enough even for the bloodsucking middle-monkeys.
Of course I support new, innovative and more profitable media distribution enterprises, which I think is what you meant by 'rebel actions to kill off monkeys in the middle', but you're playing theme and variations on the economic fallacy that 'machinery and technology destroys jobs'.
You are wrong. This fallacy of raw vs. net profits of enterprises has been refuted since the beginning of the 20th century by liberal theorists. If a company, say SpaceX, takes in a healthy profit, it is only because its successfully supplying a demand. Be sure that SpaceX will invest, not necessarily tons of money, but more importantly, more wisely and rationally than governments ever could, exactly because of their self-interest to make a buck.
It is the 'potentially democratic' governments that usually take people's money and put it into regulations and programs detrimental to society as a whole. It was no profit seeking corporation that brought us the H-bomb. It is government who pays landowners NOT to grow crops, and thereby reducing supply of food as a pitiful attempt to raise producers prices at the expense of a hungrier world. The US would have cleaner and more efficient nuclear power were it not for its government's stupidity in basically shutting down that industry, even the French etatists are a little more farsighted.
And while you praise the results of 'pure science' brought about by massive redistribution of money by governments, you are making the basic mistake of focusing only on what is to be seen, i.e. the outcome of this intervention, and you are ignoring what is not to be seen, namely, what other kinds of innovation and improvement in the standard of living that capital would have made possible if government hadn't seized it from individuals in the first place.
If I may be so bold as to recommend you a challenging read, take up Henry Hazlitt's 'Economics in one lesson' and give it whirl.
Slashdot Mirror
No, we DON'T NEED A NEW INTERNET! Stop pitching it, statist drones.
The internet works fine, and that's what the RIAA/MPAA/etc are trying to fix.
Yes, I was talking about monopoly.
The classical economists were correct to define it as the grant of exclusive right to a given trade by the sovereign.
'Contestability of monopolies' is a word game. If there are competitors on the market, then there isn't a monopoly to begin with.
Please everybody, stop using the M word so lightly. Monopoly is more about lack of free entry than market share. The Federal Reserve is a monopoly in issuing money. Google is not a monopoly in search engines.
And Windows 7 is really far better than Vista. I'm typing this on Ubuntu 9.04 alpha 3, but gotta give some credit for them for fixing that huge pile of Vista.
Ack, I wrote a careful well written response and accidentally hit 'Cancel'. Gah.
So, making long story short: don't know about overlap, but I do think that this discussion is about competing products in the market so an economic viewpoint is warranted; you make a good point about that common ground, it really is lacking, but its being worked on faster now with competition for the 'Linux on the desktop' thing going on.
:D
He's absolutely right. The point of open source is freedom. People should be free to work on whatever distro suits your fancy. The market will decide which of them wins out the dominance in each of the 'sectors' be it a big one, like Desktop OS or really small like Studio64 and UbuntuStudio.
Freedom works, freedom's great, try to take it from us and you'll be shot. ;-)
The problem is that any country so desperate for "respect" that seizes on nuclear armament as a road to that respect will likely get the same respect that you give a rabid dog with a nuclear weapon. And that tends to be pretty hard on all parties involved.
There, fixed that for you.
Oh, thanks for filling up such a blank in my knowledge. Someone ought to slap a +1 Informative there.
But it is very different from the 1913 tax in that it was levied to fund a war, and although it was not repealed when that ended - what a surprise! - it DID get repealed AND later considered unconstitutional; which it was was, since it was not apportioned among the several states on the basis of population as the Constitution mandates for direct taxes.
Americans have been paying a sizable chunk of their earnings to the government for a good 96 years now with new taxes churned out like flavors of ice cream. If there is an unfair comparison, this is it.
Sorry but authoritarian != far or any, for that matter, right. Fascist and Nazi governments were far left. National SOCIALISM, anyone?
I mean, interventionist Italy has just prohibited their citizens of eating foreign food in Rome.
Not exactly my idea of laissez-faire bunch.
Slashdot needs a "-1, Wrong" moderation option.
Definitely for your post there it does.
So tell me, how did the US do without income tax until 1913? Was the family death rate at 50% due to a lack of FDA to make sure they didn't buy poisoned food? Was the prison population more than half its capacity composed of non-violent drug offenders there due to Federal minimum sentencing laws? Was private education non-existent or worse than the complete fail of the 'Hold-all-children-behind' public monopoly?
Basically only the posting of roads is the non-foolish part of your post, and a 1% uniform non-protective tariff would be more than enough for the Federal gov't to cover the US in tarmac, if they could restrict their spending to their strictly limited and enumerated powers under the US Constitution.
Who financed the King of Spain? Yup, Spanish subjects.
I'm saying is, we'll never run out of _energy_, because as oil becomes scarce it will be so expensive to burn it, that alternatives will become profitable by comparison. Supply and demand. Always works.
Actually I dare say that were it not for governmental restrictions on nuclear generation and privileges afforded to US companies, oil would ALREADY be displaced by cleaner and more efficient technologies.
Good point. But I do disagree with you on two counts.
Firstly, population does not increase on its own, but only increases in production allow for this growth. To argue otherwise is to say that infant mortality will be at 0% even in the absence of food, shelter, medical care and sanitation. The fact that world population growth is declining and the biggest population booms were after periods of war (what is it good for?) or during Industrial Revolution-like times when productivity was steadily increasing.
Secondly, when demand increases but the supply remains unchanged prices go up, making sure that resources in limited supply will go to those who value it highest, i.e. whether there is a bigger demand (profit motive) for cars or skyscrapers to be made, and at the same time providing a big profit incentive for competitors to enter the market and offer lower prices, whether by devising substitute materials or more efficient methods of recycling on a molecular level. ;-)
Therefore, the price system will still work whereas draconian population controls or authoritarian systems are bound to fail.
Real-life example begging to differ
Check out the law of conservation of matter before spewing "sooner or later we'll exaust them (our resources)".
Other than that I'm fully in agreement with you as to that we NEED to get off this rock, since just one planet makes for lousy redundancy. Oh, and I'd have this left to private enterprise instead of government agencies.
20% == a bit
23,000% == a little bigger
First of all, ANY regulation implies an unfree market and therefore 'unhealthy' - obviously excluding the prohibition on violence, theft and fraud, which are NOT 'regulations' by their very nature as post facto laws, an important distinction. And oligopolies or cartels are inherently unstable without State coercion to secure them, a monopoly is characterized not by market share, but by the lack of free entry.
Moreover, this perfect information 'requirement' for markets to function is just as rubbish as the neoclassical and Chicago school's fetish for perfect competition. Both imperfect competition and knowledge are PRECISELY what makes markets not just better, but _exponentially_ better at coordinating dispersed and decentralized information.
Saying 'people say markets always have optimal outcomes' is absurd and a straw-man. The correct statement is that markets consistently provide _much_ better outcomes than regulation and central planning.
Oh yea. Markets are completely anarchic and capricious just like that. Just take a look at Google. A much superior search engine still battling to dig Yahoo and Altavista out of their trenches.
Damn those market fundamentalists and their ludicrous 'invisible hand' which, to be honest, I'll only believe when I see it!
[/sarcasm]
When even the World of Warcraft virtual world is using gold and silver as coin while the US is still on fiat-money-central-banking-fractional-reserve-pyramid-scheme, we need help. Seriously.
Soon the dollar won't buy anything, let alone electronics. I wouldn't worry about it.
Solar panels need nasties to be built too, and many more of them are needed for producing the same energy. And how about shipping power plants around the country, as opposed to minute amounts of uranium to a bunch of dozen locations?
If, seen through the subsidy veil, it's cheaper to build, maintain and per watt produced than nuclear then great, if not, it's a waste of resources.
Yea. Take the risk for ONE well run and financed multi-megawatt reactor and substitute it to thousands of potential leaks/meltdowns/insert-your-disaster-here units.
Seriously, this retarded bias for 'decentralized energy' is getting ridiculous. I think if it were not for the US gov't scare of nuclear and resulting near shutdown of private enterprise in the industry we would have safer, cleaner and cheaper power.
Even that Greenpeace founder guy has come around to the fact that nuclear is a really good technology, even environment-wise.
Sorry for the strong language, caffeine induced, I believe. :-)
You're right, except for the fact that perfect competition does not exist. Which is fine really because imperfect competition is more than enough. Just means that neither profits nor prices will be driven ( in this case ) to zero.
OK, lets try this argument then: it's THEIR infrastructure. Nobody is forcing you to use their text services, so don't be their customer anymore.
This 'cost to produce' pricing argument is absolutely imbecile. Companies exist to make a profit. You think that infrastructure is 'put in place' and they forget about it? Capital needs to be replenished and that ( and R&D ) comes from profits.
If companies should be forced to charge texting 'at cost' and they can't pass on these costs to the consumers because competition would put them out of business, then you are simply handicapping the formation of capital which will lead to higher prices and worse service in the future.
Yet people were much happier listening to Rubinstein play Chopin in the radio than tone-deaf Aunt Gladys. ;-)
And remember, with the advent of the radio there was many more people paying a much smaller 'fee', and yet the pie managed to get big enough even for the bloodsucking middle-monkeys.
Of course I support new, innovative and more profitable media distribution enterprises, which I think is what you meant by 'rebel actions to kill off monkeys in the middle', but you're playing theme and variations on the economic fallacy that 'machinery and technology destroys jobs'.
You are wrong. This fallacy of raw vs. net profits of enterprises has been refuted since the beginning of the 20th century by liberal theorists. If a company, say SpaceX, takes in a healthy profit, it is only because its successfully supplying a demand. Be sure that SpaceX will invest, not necessarily tons of money, but more importantly, more wisely and rationally than governments ever could, exactly because of their self-interest to make a buck.
It is the 'potentially democratic' governments that usually take people's money and put it into regulations and programs detrimental to society as a whole. It was no profit seeking corporation that brought us the H-bomb. It is government who pays landowners NOT to grow crops, and thereby reducing supply of food as a pitiful attempt to raise producers prices at the expense of a hungrier world. The US would have cleaner and more efficient nuclear power were it not for its government's stupidity in basically shutting down that industry, even the French etatists are a little more farsighted.
And while you praise the results of 'pure science' brought about by massive redistribution of money by governments, you are making the basic mistake of focusing only on what is to be seen, i.e. the outcome of this intervention, and you are ignoring what is not to be seen, namely, what other kinds of innovation and improvement in the standard of living that capital would have made possible if government hadn't seized it from individuals in the first place.
If I may be so bold as to recommend you a challenging read, take up Henry Hazlitt's 'Economics in one lesson' and give it whirl.