I have several texts which cumulatively detail how to make pretty much every conventional explosive out there. They're called Organic Chemistry Text Books.
Still the best game i ever played. I remember thinking when i was a kid that it would be amazing if you could connect up loads of computers and play it as a real universe. Took them 20 years, but Eve is that game.
I'm in Norway (though currently in sweden on vacation). Nowhere is perfect, and there are a few annoying things. In no particular order:
1: Where i am in norway (trondheim) the shops are actually closed on sundays and there is no such thing as 24 hour supermarkets. You get used to it after 2 weeks and just go skiing instead of shopping.
2: The choice of food to buy in supermarkets is seriously restricted compared to the uk. Taken in conjunction with the sunday trading laws the place actually reminds me of england in the early 1980's. If you go to olso this will be less of a problem. Stockholm is better too, but none of them have the type of competitive supermarket culture the uk has.
3: Alcohol is a pain to buy. This is government mandated.
4: Everything is expensive. I just pay the money and don't think about it.
If you have friends over here i'd recommend you book a couple of weeks to go see them. Judge the place for yourself. Its a nice vacation if nothing else. If you're a city person you might not like it here - consider that London is 2.5 times the population of Norway. If you're a countryside person then consider that Norway is approx 1/13th the population of the UK and has 1.5 times the land area. It has real mountains too.
You don't say what you're doing at Uni, but norway currently has a serious science and engineering skills shortage (i don't know about sweden and finland). They are importing labour left right and centre. Visa's are easy and everyone really does speak english. Oh, if you feel guilty about leaving the UK to its problems then you'll feel a lot worse about what you have to do to climb the ladder there.
Our alcohol problems have a much deeper root - we've lost our balance between work and life. We work longer than other european societies (though are probably no more productive), takes less of our (already shorter) vacation time and commute further to go to work. We have completely lost our sense of community and all live in a hugely over-populated section of the country. All this in the pursuit of more money to fund a basically non-attainable lifestyle.
It doesn't take a genius to predict the result: we spend less time at home, have less time and energy for leisure activities and have considerably more stress. The easiest form of recreation is getting drunk and the consumer-led economy is more than happy to oblige us by providing cheap alcohol. It has little to do with how we view our children and everything to do with how little time we spend with them, and the examples we set them.
I left the UK and now live in scandinavia. My lifestyle is greatly improved. In complete contrast with the UK everyone goes home at 4pm and if you don't take all your vacation time people think you're strange. Currently the entire country is basically closed for business as EVERYONE is on easter vacation. I commute by bicycle, in common with almost everyone i know. Ok, so alcohol is government regulated (and insanely expensive) but i've come to view that as not such a bad thing as i drink a LOT less and am much healthier as a result.
I agree with much of what you say. The key point is that of proof, and frankly i think that is where many people get themselves lost. So Can not be proved to exist != proved to not exist is completely correct. Indeed, its my opinion that the belief that God does not exist actually is intrinsically the same (but opposite) as believing he does, and therefore requires pretty much the same leap of faith. This comes down to the fact that you cannot prove something false. You can only prove a positive, and then by extension that positive proves other things false. A good example is an alibi - try and think of a conclusive alibi which doesn't require you to prove you were somewhere else (the positive proof). Therefore the only true non-belief option is "i don't know". Both of the others are inherently religious (requiring belief), and are thus incompatible with scientific method.
> And the idea of a supernatural being guiding us and the world around us seems to speak very deeply to the human spirit.
Yes it does. And (from a non-believer, evolutionary standpoint) i suspect theres an excellent social anthropology project in there looking at how group beliefs (gods of volcanos, wind etc) influenced mankinds' evolution. Perhaps it was necessary evolutionary trait, bringing us together to form the primitive societies. Perhaps it still is, and we continue to refine our belief models accordingly. It would of course be difficult to convince believers that evolution genetically wired them to believe...
Frankly, this whole thing is a difficult area and its one i've covered many times with christian friends. Its a good area for debate, and (i'm told) an excellent test of faith if you can keep the conversation away from stupid Easter Bunny comments, and if everyone is willing to sensibly debate other viewpoints. Ultimately it comes down to what you see around you and how you rationalise it. A believer looks at the incredibly complex world around them and explains it via God, making (what science would call) a leap of faith to do so. Their reasons for making that leap are known only to themselves, and undoubtedly differ from person to person. I look at the world around me and think about what Shakespeare would say if he saw a mobile phone, what Abraham Lincoln would say if i drove up to his house in a ferrari, what Columbus would say to google maps. And it seems to me that in just the last 100 years so much has been explained by science that was previously the preserve of "God", that i just cannot see the hand of God in the world around me. Naturally though, my reasons for not believing are as personal as those of the believer.
Ok, disclaimer up front - i'm a research scientist and am currently godless, so to speak.
I also have problems reconciling science and faith. It does seem to me that a profound life-defining belief in something which cannot be proved to exist is incompatible with the scientific method of a rigorous and logical evaluation of evidence to arrive at a conclusion. However, i have many friends who do seem able to reconcile this, and despite their beliefs are (by any metric) excellent scientists. Apparently the logic goes something like - god created the earth/universe etc, and made it conform to a bunch of laws. We are discovering and understanding those laws to the best of our abilities, using the curiosity that god gave us. The use of scientific method provides us with the means to do it, and its ok because god doesn't intend us to live through eternity in the mud saying to each other "oh, god did that, we don't need to know about it".
> Maybe I'm biased because I live in Austin, but AMD chips
> to be FAR more prevalent than anything produced by IBM lately.
Thats cos IBM sells most of its cpus to the market where you buy a computer running AIX on 32 cpu cores, several terabytes of disk and a 3 year service contract to go with it. It might be that you aren't hanging around with the type of people who buy those?
Except they have a considerably longer life-span because it takes a lot of time and money to develop both new aircraft and new radar/air defence systems. So yes, 10 years ago it was "teh shit", and today it continues to be. The only difference is that a few high tech nations (mostly friends of the US anyway) can sometimes see it on radar now.
I work in what is now called the "alternative energy" sector - fuel cells etc, and we have similar problems. The lot of money to a small number of groups is evident here too, though to be fair to the funding bodies these are people who have a track record of providing a "return" on the investment. There is a sort of critical size effect though, and once a research group gets beyond a certain size it seems to lose focus and the output per person drops.
The bigger problem seems to be continuity of funding. You can get a grant for 1-3 year project, during which time you may or may not achieve something positive. But after the time is up, you are subject to the whims of the funding system again, and your chance of getting money to continue the project (even if it was wildly successful) is slim. You keep applying, and perhaps 3 years down the line you'll actually get the cash, but by then all the researchers on the project (and hence all the knowledge and experience) have gone and you're starting again from scratch. It also tends to lead to research group leaders having lots of money for specific windows of time, meaning that for 5 years they may need lots of lab space and stuff, and then within 6 months go to needing absolutely nothing cos they have no funding at all. The labs and equipment are then "lost" before the next set of funding ensues.
If the Gates foundation did something toward fixing this they'd get my vote.
Not read Dianetics, though some guy at a CoS stand in switzerland did try to sell me a copy after assessing my "stress levels" using what looked like a crudely made ohm meter (licking my fingers for better contact seemed to lower my resistance *cough* "stress levels" dramatically). I used to have a copy of "The Ethics of Scientology" though. It too was bloody hard going to read due to the long winded and deliberately obfuscating prose in which it was written. However, after struggling through i was forced into the conclusion that it was just a collection of ideas stolen from other major world religions and dressed up in long winded fancy language. It stands as the only book i've ever thrown in the bin.
> This debate about illegal sharing of music files seem to be stuck in a loop.
Undeniably.
> To use the convinience and advantages of modern technology should be limited to
> corporations only according to this brilliant logic.
Your argument is flawed, but i agree with your point. My grandma would call it "Having your cake AND eating it". The issue isn't really the copying of CD's and giving to friends (we used to do that with tapes anyway), its the scale of dissemination that the web allows. Perhaps the problem is that they never had to fight the war on principle because the technology held back wholescale copying. Now they're trying to fight using the principle, cos the technology has changed. Of course everyone has become accustomed to sharing and don't want to lose that "right" that they enjoyed before.
> The thing is, fair use is still the same.
An important point that many people are missing. Of course the context of how we use things has changed and they want to try to limit "fair use" accordingly.
> How do the record companies adjust their business model? Well, it is hard I know.
It is, and they are all flailing around desperately trying to do it. However, i have little sympathy for an industry that has generally become complacent and paid for legislation to cement their steady income. It could perhaps be argued that they've backed themselves into a corner where the only stimulus for change has to come from an illegal threat.
> My personal view on fair use is much the same as my view on downloading - fine if you do it for
> yourself or with no intention of profiting from it, but bad if you attempt to sell it,
> whether through burnt DVDs in the market or using clips from films/pictures/music to bring
> people to your revenue generating website, and so on.
And this pretty much used to be the police attitude to copying CD's - arrest the guys selling out the back of a van but leave joe public alone. This was a largely agreeable status quo as only a limited number of guys could copy stuff, it cost money to do so, and a lot of folk would rather pay the full rate and get a decent quality inlay etc.
But in the broadband age the content producers are worried that everyone is able to download and it costs nothing. The music is the same whether you download an illegal version or a legal one, so there is therefore no compelling reason to pay. Its not that you are/aren't profiting, its that its so easy and free that everyone can do it. It therefore undermines their business model with the logical conclusion that with everyone downloading, no-one is paying. Now you could argue that this represents a flaw in their business model, but its still illegal.
I agree. But once you've stopped painting you still need to walk through the paint to get to the door (unless you papered over it too). And thats where many of us are now - we want to change, but we can't, so we have to hope that MS eventually produces the OS that we want. A bit like sitting and waiting for the paint to dry...
I'd agree that this isn't exactly the most balanced or objective of places where discussion of MS is concerned, and it also annoys me. In many ways though, the MS bashing is just people being unable to express themselves properly. In this instance, for example, what the MS bashers are trying to say is that whilst in principle it is a good thing that MS have changed their mind now, they have a past record of making similar announcements and then quietly sneaking the original idea through the back-door a couple of months later. Accordingly, the slashdot community is skeptical with respect to the real value of this announcement as MS have proven themselves untrustworthy in the past.
Its basically horses for courses - you use the OS which does what you want the best. This will inevitably be a trade-off between functionality, software compatibility, user friendliness and cost. I have a Windows XP desktop and a file-server/firewall etc running Fedora. I don't run Windows on the server cos it doesn't do what i want. The same is true for Linux on the desktop. So i mix and match according to my needs. I'm sure many others do the same, and look admiringly over the fence at the prettiness of OSX, or the stability of Linux, or the universality of software for Windows. But in the end, your computer must do what you want, and having a pretty OSX box or highly secure and stable Ubuntu desktop is pretty pointless if all the software you need to use runs only on Windows.
> As for the fuckheads, the university needs to SELL or SUBCONTRACT internet
> connections to the students and the dorms.
They actually did that to the phone systems in the university residences where i was (in the uk). Unfortunately the provider realised they had a lockin monopoly and charged extortionate rates accordingly. Indeed calls from landlines were so expensive that it was cheaper to buy a mobile (this was in the 90's). The system lasted one year and the university had to renegotiate the contract because so many people complained. What you are suggesting is essentially the same, and will have the same result: One supplier will get a monopoly and will screw students accordingly. This is unacceptable.
However, i do agree with your (poorly communicated) core point that the function of a university is to educate, not to provide a playground for students. However, the internet is a core tool of modern education, whether you like it or not. With lectures provided online, coursework submitted electronically and much practical and research work done via the internet, a connectionless student is at a severe educational disadvantage. In the 12 years since you (and i) went to university things have changed, and a dialup command-line connection is simply not enough. Nevertheless, i agree that it is not the duty of the university to be paying huge bandwidth charges for people to download music/movies etc, even if they come from a legal source. However, the solution here does not include subcontracting. I would remind you that the university is an ISP, and has all the legal obligations and rights that come with this. THEY can filter traffic and block services, and THEY can cut you off if you break their terms of service (and you have to sign them before you get a connection), so really the problem is that the universities are not writing and enforcing their own policies effectively.
> It will take another 25-50 years for this to sink into people's heads about how manners,
> conduct, personal space, and ethics CAN and DOES apply to cyberspace.
Does these good manners apply to you also? If so, i suggest you re-read your own post and make appropriate changes to your writing style. You can begin by redefining "good manners" to exclude poorly articulated ranting, the sweeping generalisation that everyone with more money than you is a "rich spoiled brat", and liberal use of the words "fucked", "fucking", "fuckheads" and "shit".
> I wonder if this is how the British Empire collapsed too.
Nah, in that case there were third parties involved - we didn't shoot ourselves in the foot (though arguably we may have assisted in the act). In this case the US is implementing a divide and conquer approach on itself - its purely a domestic issue. However, for those of us who live abroad, i would like to recollect the wise words of Napolean - "Never interrupt your enemy whilst he is making a mistake."
Its the same approach western countries have been applying to overseas aid for decades. "We'll give you this heap of money every year IF you do some stuff that we want". The stuff they want of course, is trade concessions. And, after a few years continuation of the yearly aid involves some inflation of the "IF" clause. Pretty standard, even though its thinly veiled extortion.
In all cases the problem is how government and business mixes, because they should at least try to maintain some semblance of separation. For foreign stuff they will usually try to claim its for the benefit of both local and american "industry" in a general sense, rather than for the benefit of just one specific company (even if its a lie people don't tend to notice cos it happens abroad, or they ignore it cos they get cheap products as a result). In this case though, the extortion is domestic, with a specific private industry leveraging their business goals onto public institutions via manipulation of federal legislation. Having industry write the laws they want in this way doesn't just undermine the basic concepts of democracy and accountability, it leads long term to a stagnant and non-competitive economy (cos the big industries write laws to stifle competition). In that sense it is actually not in the general interests of industry to be able to write their own laws, because it will lead to even the law-writing industry being uncompetitive on the international stage.
Slashdot Mirror
I have several texts which cumulatively detail how to make pretty much every conventional explosive out there. They're called Organic Chemistry Text Books.
Still the best game i ever played. I remember thinking when i was a kid that it would be amazing if you could connect up loads of computers and play it as a real universe. Took them 20 years, but Eve is that game.
1: Where i am in norway (trondheim) the shops are actually closed on sundays and there is no such thing as 24 hour supermarkets. You get used to it after 2 weeks and just go skiing instead of shopping.
2: The choice of food to buy in supermarkets is seriously restricted compared to the uk. Taken in conjunction with the sunday trading laws the place actually reminds me of england in the early 1980's. If you go to olso this will be less of a problem. Stockholm is better too, but none of them have the type of competitive supermarket culture the uk has.
3: Alcohol is a pain to buy. This is government mandated.
4: Everything is expensive. I just pay the money and don't think about it.
If you have friends over here i'd recommend you book a couple of weeks to go see them. Judge the place for yourself. Its a nice vacation if nothing else. If you're a city person you might not like it here - consider that London is 2.5 times the population of Norway. If you're a countryside person then consider that Norway is approx 1/13th the population of the UK and has 1.5 times the land area. It has real mountains too.
You don't say what you're doing at Uni, but norway currently has a serious science and engineering skills shortage (i don't know about sweden and finland). They are importing labour left right and centre. Visa's are easy and everyone really does speak english. Oh, if you feel guilty about leaving the UK to its problems then you'll feel a lot worse about what you have to do to climb the ladder there.
It doesn't take a genius to predict the result: we spend less time at home, have less time and energy for leisure activities and have considerably more stress. The easiest form of recreation is getting drunk and the consumer-led economy is more than happy to oblige us by providing cheap alcohol. It has little to do with how we view our children and everything to do with how little time we spend with them, and the examples we set them.
I left the UK and now live in scandinavia. My lifestyle is greatly improved. In complete contrast with the UK everyone goes home at 4pm and if you don't take all your vacation time people think you're strange. Currently the entire country is basically closed for business as EVERYONE is on easter vacation. I commute by bicycle, in common with almost everyone i know. Ok, so alcohol is government regulated (and insanely expensive) but i've come to view that as not such a bad thing as i drink a LOT less and am much healthier as a result.
I agree with much of what you say. The key point is that of proof, and frankly i think that is where many people get themselves lost. So Can not be proved to exist != proved to not exist is completely correct. Indeed, its my opinion that the belief that God does not exist actually is intrinsically the same (but opposite) as believing he does, and therefore requires pretty much the same leap of faith. This comes down to the fact that you cannot prove something false. You can only prove a positive, and then by extension that positive proves other things false. A good example is an alibi - try and think of a conclusive alibi which doesn't require you to prove you were somewhere else (the positive proof). Therefore the only true non-belief option is "i don't know". Both of the others are inherently religious (requiring belief), and are thus incompatible with scientific method.
> And the idea of a supernatural being guiding us and the world around us seems to speak very deeply to the human spirit.
Yes it does. And (from a non-believer, evolutionary standpoint) i suspect theres an excellent social anthropology project in there looking at how group beliefs (gods of volcanos, wind etc) influenced mankinds' evolution. Perhaps it was necessary evolutionary trait, bringing us together to form the primitive societies. Perhaps it still is, and we continue to refine our belief models accordingly. It would of course be difficult to convince believers that evolution genetically wired them to believe...
Frankly, this whole thing is a difficult area and its one i've covered many times with christian friends. Its a good area for debate, and (i'm told) an excellent test of faith if you can keep the conversation away from stupid Easter Bunny comments, and if everyone is willing to sensibly debate other viewpoints. Ultimately it comes down to what you see around you and how you rationalise it. A believer looks at the incredibly complex world around them and explains it via God, making (what science would call) a leap of faith to do so. Their reasons for making that leap are known only to themselves, and undoubtedly differ from person to person. I look at the world around me and think about what Shakespeare would say if he saw a mobile phone, what Abraham Lincoln would say if i drove up to his house in a ferrari, what Columbus would say to google maps. And it seems to me that in just the last 100 years so much has been explained by science that was previously the preserve of "God", that i just cannot see the hand of God in the world around me. Naturally though, my reasons for not believing are as personal as those of the believer.
I also have problems reconciling science and faith. It does seem to me that a profound life-defining belief in something which cannot be proved to exist is incompatible with the scientific method of a rigorous and logical evaluation of evidence to arrive at a conclusion. However, i have many friends who do seem able to reconcile this, and despite their beliefs are (by any metric) excellent scientists. Apparently the logic goes something like - god created the earth/universe etc, and made it conform to a bunch of laws. We are discovering and understanding those laws to the best of our abilities, using the curiosity that god gave us. The use of scientific method provides us with the means to do it, and its ok because god doesn't intend us to live through eternity in the mud saying to each other "oh, god did that, we don't need to know about it".
You mean like "studying"?
> to be FAR more prevalent than anything produced by IBM lately.
Thats cos IBM sells most of its cpus to the market where you buy a computer running AIX on 32 cpu cores, several terabytes of disk and a 3 year service contract to go with it. It might be that you aren't hanging around with the type of people who buy those?
Except they have a considerably longer life-span because it takes a lot of time and money to develop both new aircraft and new radar/air defence systems. So yes, 10 years ago it was "teh shit", and today it continues to be. The only difference is that a few high tech nations (mostly friends of the US anyway) can sometimes see it on radar now.
....and it seems the US is the happiest nation in the world.
The bigger problem seems to be continuity of funding. You can get a grant for 1-3 year project, during which time you may or may not achieve something positive. But after the time is up, you are subject to the whims of the funding system again, and your chance of getting money to continue the project (even if it was wildly successful) is slim. You keep applying, and perhaps 3 years down the line you'll actually get the cash, but by then all the researchers on the project (and hence all the knowledge and experience) have gone and you're starting again from scratch. It also tends to lead to research group leaders having lots of money for specific windows of time, meaning that for 5 years they may need lots of lab space and stuff, and then within 6 months go to needing absolutely nothing cos they have no funding at all. The labs and equipment are then "lost" before the next set of funding ensues.
If the Gates foundation did something toward fixing this they'd get my vote.
http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/02/05/1734208
I'm now reading Malleus Maleficarum (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malleus_Maleficarum). The similarities are startling.
Undeniably.
> To use the convinience and advantages of modern technology should be limited to
> corporations only according to this brilliant logic.
Your argument is flawed, but i agree with your point. My grandma would call it "Having your cake AND eating it". The issue isn't really the copying of CD's and giving to friends (we used to do that with tapes anyway), its the scale of dissemination that the web allows. Perhaps the problem is that they never had to fight the war on principle because the technology held back wholescale copying. Now they're trying to fight using the principle, cos the technology has changed. Of course everyone has become accustomed to sharing and don't want to lose that "right" that they enjoyed before.
> The thing is, fair use is still the same.
An important point that many people are missing. Of course the context of how we use things has changed and they want to try to limit "fair use" accordingly.
> How do the record companies adjust their business model? Well, it is hard I know.
It is, and they are all flailing around desperately trying to do it. However, i have little sympathy for an industry that has generally become complacent and paid for legislation to cement their steady income. It could perhaps be argued that they've backed themselves into a corner where the only stimulus for change has to come from an illegal threat.
> yourself or with no intention of profiting from it, but bad if you attempt to sell it,
> whether through burnt DVDs in the market or using clips from films/pictures/music to bring
> people to your revenue generating website, and so on.
And this pretty much used to be the police attitude to copying CD's - arrest the guys selling out the back of a van but leave joe public alone. This was a largely agreeable status quo as only a limited number of guys could copy stuff, it cost money to do so, and a lot of folk would rather pay the full rate and get a decent quality inlay etc.
But in the broadband age the content producers are worried that everyone is able to download and it costs nothing. The music is the same whether you download an illegal version or a legal one, so there is therefore no compelling reason to pay. Its not that you are/aren't profiting, its that its so easy and free that everyone can do it. It therefore undermines their business model with the logical conclusion that with everyone downloading, no-one is paying. Now you could argue that this represents a flaw in their business model, but its still illegal.
...just the legit licensed ones they're talking about or *all* Windows PC's?
I agree. But once you've stopped painting you still need to walk through the paint to get to the door (unless you papered over it too). And thats where many of us are now - we want to change, but we can't, so we have to hope that MS eventually produces the OS that we want. A bit like sitting and waiting for the paint to dry...
But thats the US. Different cultures, different bribes.
Well I, for another, do not.
> connections to the students and the dorms.
They actually did that to the phone systems in the university residences where i was (in the uk). Unfortunately the provider realised they had a lockin monopoly and charged extortionate rates accordingly. Indeed calls from landlines were so expensive that it was cheaper to buy a mobile (this was in the 90's). The system lasted one year and the university had to renegotiate the contract because so many people complained. What you are suggesting is essentially the same, and will have the same result: One supplier will get a monopoly and will screw students accordingly. This is unacceptable.
However, i do agree with your (poorly communicated) core point that the function of a university is to educate, not to provide a playground for students. However, the internet is a core tool of modern education, whether you like it or not. With lectures provided online, coursework submitted electronically and much practical and research work done via the internet, a connectionless student is at a severe educational disadvantage. In the 12 years since you (and i) went to university things have changed, and a dialup command-line connection is simply not enough. Nevertheless, i agree that it is not the duty of the university to be paying huge bandwidth charges for people to download music/movies etc, even if they come from a legal source. However, the solution here does not include subcontracting. I would remind you that the university is an ISP, and has all the legal obligations and rights that come with this. THEY can filter traffic and block services, and THEY can cut you off if you break their terms of service (and you have to sign them before you get a connection), so really the problem is that the universities are not writing and enforcing their own policies effectively.
> It will take another 25-50 years for this to sink into people's heads about how manners,
> conduct, personal space, and ethics CAN and DOES apply to cyberspace.
Does these good manners apply to you also? If so, i suggest you re-read your own post and make appropriate changes to your writing style. You can begin by redefining "good manners" to exclude poorly articulated ranting, the sweeping generalisation that everyone with more money than you is a "rich spoiled brat", and liberal use of the words "fucked", "fucking", "fuckheads" and "shit".
You won't find that in any of the systems.
Nah, in that case there were third parties involved - we didn't shoot ourselves in the foot (though arguably we may have assisted in the act). In this case the US is implementing a divide and conquer approach on itself - its purely a domestic issue. However, for those of us who live abroad, i would like to recollect the wise words of Napolean - "Never interrupt your enemy whilst he is making a mistake."
In all cases the problem is how government and business mixes, because they should at least try to maintain some semblance of separation. For foreign stuff they will usually try to claim its for the benefit of both local and american "industry" in a general sense, rather than for the benefit of just one specific company (even if its a lie people don't tend to notice cos it happens abroad, or they ignore it cos they get cheap products as a result). In this case though, the extortion is domestic, with a specific private industry leveraging their business goals onto public institutions via manipulation of federal legislation. Having industry write the laws they want in this way doesn't just undermine the basic concepts of democracy and accountability, it leads long term to a stagnant and non-competitive economy (cos the big industries write laws to stifle competition). In that sense it is actually not in the general interests of industry to be able to write their own laws, because it will lead to even the law-writing industry being uncompetitive on the international stage.