What they don't get is no country can hemorrhage money in trade.
Actually, that's the basis of the Libertarian argument. If you have no trade barriers at all, and no government messing things up, then your trade is naturally limited to your production, that is, you can import as much as you export, because if you have nothing to export, you have no money with which to import anything. As such, want to import more? Ramp up your own internal production so as to have something others are interested in, then trade.
Notice that this isn't a zero-sum game as protectionists like to believe. As long as everyone is producing things, there's trade between everyone, so mutual wealth increases, after all, no one buys things they think are worth less than what they're selling in exchange, and this is valid for both sides in any trade agreement, so that whenever an exchange freely happens, both sides come out of it better than they were before.
Web apps never function properly unless I connect to the internet. How useless is that? I have to shut down my application whenever my mom needs to use the phone.
Heh, that made me nostalgic of the 1990's. My great-aunt yelling at me to end the call as somebody might be trying to call us. Almost all my Internet-ing being by e-mail because of that. And my quick connects through the day to send and receive POP3 emails with Pegasus Mail. Good times! (Not really, but hindsight-fueled nostalgia makes them feel so.)
Actually Socialism just means the workers own the means of production and get the lion's share of the benefits of their work
Sorry, but that's incorrect. I mentioned Distributism for a reason. If you'd like to know what is for the workers to actually own their means of production, in opposition to what socialists consider such ownership to be, I'd suggest you to familiarize yourself with it. One good introduction is Hillaire Belloc's "The Servile State", in which he shows how both Capitalism and Socialism (plus Fascism) are different historical developments arising from the same set of mistakes about human interaction. The book has two parts, the first of historical analysis, which is excellent, and the second of predictions about possible future developments that didn't materialize mostly due to technological developments he couldn't imagine. As it's out of copyright, you can find it easily on free ebook sites.
ALL capitalist systems have always had some form of regulation towards the good of the state or the good of the public
True. And evidently I'm summing up things a lot. The actual historical difference is that Social Democracy aims towards bringing forth Socialism through gradual reforms, step by step from within bourgeois morality rather than in opposition to it. Be as it may, this form of regulation has a different nature from that typical of Capitalism, and therefore it does actually count as a middle ground, since it's intended to be so.
Actually, the ability to accumulate the means of production goes back thousands of years: the nobles of many states did this routinely.
If you mean due to slavery, then yes, certainly. But that's more than control of the means of production, it includes control of the labor power itself, or to name it differently, absolute alienation. What characterizes Capitalism is the radical separation between means of production on the one hand, labor power on the other, and the dynamics of the relationship between both.
Consider, in that regards, that in pre-Capitalist societies it was uncommon for non-slaves to be pure laborers completely devoid of their own means of production. That did happen, but it was more usually the case that freemen were owners of their own means of production with which they then produced their own wealth. That causes a very different social stratification than the one characteristic of Capitalism proper.
One theme Belloc develops in his book, by the way, is the interesting late-Middle Ages' case of English serfs. The system of land ownership had developed in such a way over there that even they could be considered, for most practical purposes, as owner of their own means of production due to the existence of common lands that could be used by anyone and were outside the reach of nobility. It was the closing down of those lands and their possession by nobility during the Modern Age that created the mass of unemployed workers who then, when the Industrial Revolution began, became the first proletarians of the then new, actually Capitalist system of production. (And then Belloc goes on to analyze how that in turn gave rise to Socialism, and how both could be better understood as a deviation from what History could have been had the Medieval arrangement been allowed to develop further along the lines it had been going before being destroyed by Modern nobility.)
So, while in a way you're correct, they're scenarios too different to be directly comparable.
I'm not sure that makes much sense. Money itself isn't a means of production, it's a representation of the wealth that was produce by means of production. As such, it comes later in the productive causal chain, even if when it does appear it's then used for purposes such as accumulating even more means of production. By itself, though, it's incapable of being used for anything, a proof of which can be found in any country that went through hyperinflation. In those, the government decided it needed more money (rather than more production), and turned the printers up to eleven. End result? Lots and lots and LOTS of paper to represent the same limited amount of stuff, that didn't increase one iota, with the end result that stuff divided by amount of paper = every individual bit of stuff represented by more paper.
That's why Classic Liberals and Libertarians, who analyze this from the other pole, say money is subjective: because it's "worth" whatever people think it's worth, a sum of subjective evaluations. It makes things flow more smoothly, that's for sure, but were we to remove it from the picture entirely and we'd still get a market. A more cumbersome one in that exchanges would become more complex, but a market all the same. And one with accumulation of the means of production, were a Capitalist mindset running on top of this moneyless market.
They display 4k. Not sure what more features you want?
TVs have their color balance usually optimized for highlighting stuff that matters in movies, sports and stuff. Professional displays tend to be optimized for absurdly accurate colors, so that you can visually notice the difference between #A78B15 and #A88C14. They also tend to have a bigger colors range than normal displays have, being literally capable of showing many colors that exist in paper but most displays aren't capable of showing.
For most people those features aren't necessary, so it'd be nonsensical to pay for them. But for those who do work in color-heavy stuff such as desktop publishing of color-heavy magazines (think National Geographic Magazine), art books editing, professional CGI, movie making, complex photo editing, digital painting etc. this level of color precision is important and could be the difference between actually earning money or not. That alone can drive a display into the thousands of dollars.
Note: I don't know whether the displays this article is talking about are of this kind. If they aren't then sure, the price is absurd. But if they are, then the price is actually pretty typical.
Capitalism (...) is merely a material value system which is inherent in every society
You're confusing Capitalism with commerce and free markets. They aren't the same thing.
To understand the difference it's important to understand what the word "capital" means. People tend to think it means "money", but that's an oversimplification. "Capital" is synonymous actually synonymous with "means of production", which in turn means all those things (the means) a person can use to create (produce) rent and wealth, specifically enough rent and wealth so as to survive and thrive.
A person without access to means of production cannot do much when left to themselves other than to pick (or steal) food and, if needed, distribute punches, kicks and worse things. So the person either manages to somehow obtain means of production of their own to then begin having a life worth living, or go to someone who does own means of production, shows themselves capable of working with them, and then asks to be allowed to use those means to produce wealth in exchange for keeping a slice of the wealth they created, the owner of the means of production keeping the difference.
That's the definition, and as a definition it's neutral. Things get interesting when, in light of it, you begin to look at how things are and, maybe, at how they ought to be.
What characterizes Capitalism is the idea that it's perfectly okay for some people to own means of production and for the majority of people to now own means of production, thus having to place themselves as workers under the orders of owners of the means. The owner (capitalist) can then use the wealth the workers produced for him so as to by even more means of production, becoming even more needed by workers who don't own means of production. Which in turn give him even more wealth with which to buy even more means of production, and so on and so forth.
That's the Capitalist ideal, and it's supported not only by the owners themselves, but by non-owners who believe themselves capable of eventually becoming owners of means of production in the same fashion, and by non-owners who don't believe themselves capable of that but who nonetheless have a comfortable enough life under it.
Socialism has a different take on the issue. Socialists think it unfair for the means of production to end up accumulated more and more in the hands of a few people, so they believe in an alternative system in which the means of production are owned by a government that takes care to spread the wealth produced by those means among the people in a roughly equal manner, the supposition being that in this way everyone together owns (through the government) the means of production.
Between both beliefs there are intermediate mixes, such as Social-Democracy, which believes in a managed form of Capitalism in which people are allowed to accumulate means of production, but are overseen by the government so as to not do bad things with the means they own.
And there are beliefs outside the line that goes from Capitalism to Socialism. One such is Distributism, which believes everyone should own their means of production individually, so that it'd neither accumulate in the hands of a few as happens in Capitalism, nor in the hands of state bureaucrats as happens in Socialism (and much less the hands of a mix of both).
As for markets, and free markets, they exist in all of the above (except for pure Socialism). As such, a free market activist can actually be aligned with any of them. And then we have the distinctions between the different pro-free-market schools of thought. Libertarianism, for example, is one such, and one more closely aligned with Capitalism, although not completely (a typical difference: Capitalism is okay with owners of means of production using the wealth they accumulate to buy laws favoring themselves against competitors, something Libertarianism is strongly opposed to).
So, while markets are indeed common to all human experience, Capitalism itself isn't. The ability to accumulate the means of production is fairly recent in historical terms, it has but a few centuries. Markets, in contrast, predate that by thousands of years. As such, it's useful to distinguish both.
you can pick up a 49" UHD TV at Costco or Best Buy for $300.
Do they have the same features? When you purchase a laptop, do you go to a store, see there's one for $200, another for $3k, then buy the $200 one thinking to yourself how you managed to just save $2,800 for a machine that's exactly as good as the other?
I read all those rules can be summed up as "talk about FreeBSD"; if you don't talk about FreeBSD, they question you why you're talking about anything other than FreeBSD; and if you insist on talking about non-FreeBSD stuff, you're out.
Seems fair to me. There are other places to talk about that stuff. Facebook, for instance.
As a non-American who never visited the US, I wholeheartedly agree.
Back in the early 2000's I was already a heavy buyer from early ebook sellers such as eReader and Fictionwise (which at some point purchased the former and merged with it). It was fantastic to be able to buy books without paying freight and waiting 3 months for them to arrive, even if all I could read them on was my desktop computer. Then came B&N, purchased Fictionwise, and eventually shut the site down, absorbing the ebook business into its own site.
That wouldn't have been a problem weren't for a single, small issue: US users were allowed to transfer their ebook libraries from their Fictionwise accounts to their B&N accounts. International customers were given the middle finger and told "download them before this date as they'll be gone forever afterwards".
I still have all of my 345 Fictionwise and eReader ebooks in my Calibre library, all properly backed up, with any DRMed titles cracked ages ago, and converted to both ePub and Mobi formats. But, my, was I pissed!
If I ever visit the US, and B&N is still around, I'll make sure to not buy from them.
PS: Something similar happened to eMusic. Worldwide reach for years, then suddenly US-only, with non-US customers losing access to their music libraries. So, yeah. They all deserve what they're getting.
I use the SIP to do research for the package I'm writing to automate my SIP which I'm writing using SIP. Thanks to the SIP my phone service is good and I don't need to use SIP to phone people.
That's what the abbr HTML tag is intended to solve. Evidently no one used it for anything remotely useful, but one can imagine text editors implementing them automatically from a dictionary and asking writers to select between the alternatives if there are several and the context doesn't make it clear which one should be the default.
Ripping for archival or personal viewing is crass immoral and evil, but if we need to do it to make a buck it is holy and just
What about placing a disk on the Blu-Ray player, hitting play, then pointing a camera to a 4K TV and filming the video on there? That doesn't bypass any security measure as one isn't ripping the media nor breaking the DRM. Or does it?
I'm unaware of the strong worker protections. I know the Nazis didn't mind disrupting white workers' lives.
It's ambiguous for sure, but while some things became clearly worse, others became better, and the ones that did became better had a lot of approval. The main one seems to have been the almost certainty of having and keeping a job. This text seems to me to offer a balanced view. From our perspective definitely not a good situation by any means. From 1930's German workers' perspective though, not really bad.
In addition, there were initiatives to help families as long as they submitted to the Nazi program. My grandaunt used to tell me how her mother, for example, was repeatedly offered more food for the family and several other welfare benefits if she just accepted having a fourth child (she had 3), but she didn't want to hear any of that and remained with only three (she also did her best to keep her children from becoming nazis, so there's that too). It was all very weird, but in some way it worked and white Germans were, if not happy, at lest not unhappy.
Direct governmental oversight of industry doesn't seem to match with what I've read of German industry before about 1944
That's also ambiguous. Industrialists were frequently members of the Nazi party and very close to the Nazi leadership, so they received tons of benefits. On the other hand, they also were expected to do everything for the benefit of the Nazi program, and where they weren't doing it the Nazi government simply went in and nationalized the thing. So while formally there might not have been explicit rules and stuff for most of it, in practice there was. The Wikipedia article has more details on these movements, although not as detailed and with concrete examples I'd like to have.
Would someone care to tell me what they thing the left-wing policies of the NSDAP were?
Basically strong worker protections and a strong social safety net (both for whites only), plus direct governmental oversight of the industry. A good comparison point would be, let's say, the policies advocated in the UK by the Fabian Society in the early 1900's. Which, if you check the link, included eugenics.
I don't have anything at hand, but it was about France, not the US. It detailed changes in immigration policies there over the last few decades and the resulting social effects. I don't know whether any of it applies to the US or not.
The Nazi social and economic platform was left-wing
The idea that "right" equals laissez faire capitalism, less government, libertarianism or whatever is a very recent construct and has no historical worth. From your list, the only clear left-wing policy would be "strong social safety net". All the others were present on both sides.
America prides itself on being the great melting pot but 40 years of multi-culturalism has revealed that large ethnic immigration, like Europe is experiencing now, harms society.
I've seen studies showing that multiculturalism is indeed the problem, but with a caveat: "multiculturalism" understood as the specific policy the left began defending since a few decades of preserving cultures as they are by creating almost absolute barriers for meaningful cultural exchange, whose most recent example is the whole nonsense about "cultural appropriation". What this multiculturalism does is to create ghettos with invisible walls, and that in turn results in a permanente divide that only grow resentment and tribal identities.
Before those policies were enacted, the US and other countries did pretty well with immigration. Immigrants understood they were moving into another culture that expected them to fit, and tried their best to fit while preserving distinctive elements of their origin cultures, not the whole package. These elements in turn spread a little into the culture they moved in, resulting in a blend that for all practical purposes worked pretty well. It was a conservative mode of thinking that worked, and worked well.
The current model is the opposite of that, and its failures are showing more and more, and in even more dramatic ways.
No, they weren't. They defined themselves as a "third position" distinct from both right and left, adopting a few elements from one side, a few from the other, and adding stuff of their own to the mix. This is why the right calls them left, the left calls them right, the center considers them extremists in one direction or the other, and also why all three are wrong. The center is correct only insofar as nazis are extremists, but they're extremists in a direction that doesn't fit within the left-right spectrum.
Also, internally the Nazi Party had several subgroups, including a left wing, a right wing, a monarchist wing etc. At some point the right wing of the party decided the left wing was being too troublesome and killed them all. Afterwards the economic policies of the party, that were somewhat "balanced" from the perspective of the left-right axis of the time, turned markedly to the right. But contrary to what the current left wants to believe on the matter, that still didn't turn Nazism itself into a right wing movement.
Nazism was and remained first and foremost nazi-wing. Any attempt at reducing that wing so as to fit the left-right spectrum, be it into the left side of the spectrum, as conservatives and libertarians want to do, be it into the right side of the spectrum, as liberals and socialists want to do, is and will continue being incorrect and doomed to failure.
If there's one rule of thumb for how technology develops, it's that it follows S curves. Slow in the beginning, then absurdly fast in the main development phase, then slow again once most of it has been developed. That's how it went with industry, then computing, now biotechnology (we're beginning to enter the exponential part of the curve), and how it's going to be with Quantum computing once the threshold of industrial production of qubits is achieved.
So, if Quantum computing is currently at its "vacuum tube" stage, sure, it seems like things will still take a while. Once it gets into its Moore's law stage though, well...
And the thing is, we don't actually know whether we're close or not to that turning point. It might happen that next year someone will announce they have found a method to get as many qubits as needed to any application on a logarithmic scale of cost-per-qubits. Or it might take 40 more years of research before we get anywhere close to that. Who knows? One way or another, once it does enter the exponential stage, and begins being used for biotech research (protein folding is a Quantum system, so I imagine Quantum computers would be particularly good at it), my, things will change! And fast!
I'm kind of surprised that no-one has comprehensively doxxed Pai yet.
Here in Brazil they did that to one politician who said he was in support of breaking net neutrality. As in, the very next day all his public data, including addresses, was already circulating, and some of the private data too. The guy quickly backtracked and said he was sorry because people "misunderstood" what he meant.
And when a grassroots movement began to emerge talking about organizing mas public manifestations of the kind that paralises huge cities, the ISPs pushing for it also decided it wiser to not go for it.
So! When are the US Internet users planning to begin interrupting all road traffic in New York City, Washington DC and every major city and State capital, plus all air travel on all major airports, plus the major commercial transportation hubs? The day of the vote and the whole month after that, until the FCC backtracks, right?
In short that the bill of rights is an awesome document
Well, that actually is pretty liberal. Not in the contemporaneous "freedom of speech isn't freedom to hate speech" nonsense, but in the actual liberal tradition of the Enlightenment movement of the 18th century. Back then the actual Conservatives were all pro-absolute-Monarchy and pro-religious-rules-in-everything, so they didn't think very highly of the principles in the Bill of Rights. Luckily for the US, most people with the power to decide were progressives.;-)
At the same time it is the murder of a human being
Well, that depends. The idea that killing a fetus is the same as killing a human being has always been a strong Catholic belief, supported by the Aristotelian notion that equated the soul with the metaphysical form of the body so that one cannot be really distinguished from the other. Protestants in contrast used to prefer to follow the Old Testament teaching according which killing a fetus is neither assassination nor manslaughter but, on the contrary, is at worst an aggression against the mother (not even the fetus, mind).
That changed in the 1970's, when the Conservative Catholic interpretation became mainstream among American Protestants and Evangelicals, but a few still stick to the former Protestant view that no, fetuses don't have souls, and that souls are joined to the body at birth.
It bothers me that anyone feels it is their place to get involved in someone else's marriage, and that in the end it is only to "protect" the word "marriage". Some called me liberal for that. I pointed out that over reaching "demandy" government is a liberal thing. They couldn't counter cause it is true.:P
True.:-) And the History of that is also interesting. Until 19th century marriage was something religion dealt with. There was some government recognition of whatever religions declared in that regards, with some restrictions here and there, but overall States were pretty hands off on the matter of who should be considered married to whom and under what circumstances.
Alas, by the second half of the century a movement of strongly pro-State-interference-on-the-matter grew among Protestants, until finally the former Conservative principle of non-interference was overcome and the US as a whole began determining that.
So in that I agree. Your decision was indeed Conservative. And of a Conservatism that goes way, way back!
Funnily enough though, that makes current Liberals more Conservative on that respect than most self-proclaimed Conservatives, which goes to show how ironic most of the current usages of these terms are.
I don't think you should be able to force anyone to make a cake or provide services to someone they do not wish to provide services too.
I agree as a general principle. There's a complication though in that, there's an argument for the fact that any open-to-the-public space is supported by taxes in the form of roads and other services, which in turn are paid for by all citizens, not only citizens aligned with those spaces like, and thus that citizens the establishment refuses to serve should either a) either be granted tax exemptions so as to compensate them for the diminished services they get in return for their tax payments, or b) have those establishments forced to provide them service due to their equal status as citizens.
IMHO "a" would be a better alternative than "b". But I also think anyone seriously discussing this, in either direction, is being utterly silly, with Liberals being the most silly of the bunch.:-)
The democrat party was pro-slavery long ago
Bringing that up isn't very accurate historically. I mean, sure, the parties themselves were as you describe, but parties don't have a life of their own, at any moment they're the sum total of th
I do see what is happening in the field. I see cities as a cancer upon this planet, and I see that the majority of people in those cities tend to be liberals. Another cancer upon this planet.
You do realize you're a liberal too, don't you? Modern conservatism is basically "delayed liberalism". Take almost any policy defended by conservatives today. Rewind the clock and check who defended it first. Almost invariably you'll find a liberal of some previous decade (or century) arguing for it against the conservatives of the age.
Proof: do you think that, let's say, women shouldn't vote and should have their husbands chosen for them by their parents? If you don't, then you're a 1st wave feminist, that is, at a minimum a 1930's liberal.
Eyeballing the issue I have the impression that conservatism and liberalism are on average 40 to 60 years apart. If this trend continue then we can look forward to 2070's conservatives defending current liberal notions about the environment, women role and transsexuality against whatever the then liberals will be for.
Conservatives got tired of the bullshit and kicked the neo-cons out
Conservatives didn't do that. Actual conservatives are well informed intellectuals who read, understand and apply the notions of actual conservative philosophers such as Burke, Mill, Tocqueville, Belloc, Chesterton, Kirk, Voegelin and others. Those actual conservatives were kicked to the curb too, and replaced by idiot savants who take their "conservatism" from Hannity, Coulter, Limbaugh, Jones and other idiot savants. And who are now so starved of actual conservatism that they end up even taking the neo-Fascism of Dugin's Fourth Position (through Breitbart and other sources influenced by t) as if it were a form of Conservatism, which it isn't.
The GOP isn't conservative. It's liberal with a "minus" sign in front. Both things are nowhere similar, at all.
Slashdot Mirror
What they don't get is no country can hemorrhage money in trade.
Actually, that's the basis of the Libertarian argument. If you have no trade barriers at all, and no government messing things up, then your trade is naturally limited to your production, that is, you can import as much as you export, because if you have nothing to export, you have no money with which to import anything. As such, want to import more? Ramp up your own internal production so as to have something others are interested in, then trade.
Notice that this isn't a zero-sum game as protectionists like to believe. As long as everyone is producing things, there's trade between everyone, so mutual wealth increases, after all, no one buys things they think are worth less than what they're selling in exchange, and this is valid for both sides in any trade agreement, so that whenever an exchange freely happens, both sides come out of it better than they were before.
Web apps never function properly unless I connect to the internet. How useless is that? I have to shut down my application whenever my mom needs to use the phone.
Heh, that made me nostalgic of the 1990's. My great-aunt yelling at me to end the call as somebody might be trying to call us. Almost all my Internet-ing being by e-mail because of that. And my quick connects through the day to send and receive POP3 emails with Pegasus Mail. Good times! (Not really, but hindsight-fueled nostalgia makes them feel so.)
Actually Socialism just means the workers own the means of production and get the lion's share of the benefits of their work
Sorry, but that's incorrect. I mentioned Distributism for a reason. If you'd like to know what is for the workers to actually own their means of production, in opposition to what socialists consider such ownership to be, I'd suggest you to familiarize yourself with it. One good introduction is Hillaire Belloc's "The Servile State", in which he shows how both Capitalism and Socialism (plus Fascism) are different historical developments arising from the same set of mistakes about human interaction. The book has two parts, the first of historical analysis, which is excellent, and the second of predictions about possible future developments that didn't materialize mostly due to technological developments he couldn't imagine. As it's out of copyright, you can find it easily on free ebook sites.
ALL capitalist systems have always had some form of regulation towards the good of the state or the good of the public
True. And evidently I'm summing up things a lot. The actual historical difference is that Social Democracy aims towards bringing forth Socialism through gradual reforms, step by step from within bourgeois morality rather than in opposition to it. Be as it may, this form of regulation has a different nature from that typical of Capitalism, and therefore it does actually count as a middle ground, since it's intended to be so.
Actually, the ability to accumulate the means of production goes back thousands of years: the nobles of many states did this routinely.
If you mean due to slavery, then yes, certainly. But that's more than control of the means of production, it includes control of the labor power itself, or to name it differently, absolute alienation. What characterizes Capitalism is the radical separation between means of production on the one hand, labor power on the other, and the dynamics of the relationship between both.
Consider, in that regards, that in pre-Capitalist societies it was uncommon for non-slaves to be pure laborers completely devoid of their own means of production. That did happen, but it was more usually the case that freemen were owners of their own means of production with which they then produced their own wealth. That causes a very different social stratification than the one characteristic of Capitalism proper.
One theme Belloc develops in his book, by the way, is the interesting late-Middle Ages' case of English serfs. The system of land ownership had developed in such a way over there that even they could be considered, for most practical purposes, as owner of their own means of production due to the existence of common lands that could be used by anyone and were outside the reach of nobility. It was the closing down of those lands and their possession by nobility during the Modern Age that created the mass of unemployed workers who then, when the Industrial Revolution began, became the first proletarians of the then new, actually Capitalist system of production. (And then Belloc goes on to analyze how that in turn gave rise to Socialism, and how both could be better understood as a deviation from what History could have been had the Medieval arrangement been allowed to develop further along the lines it had been going before being destroyed by Modern nobility.)
So, while in a way you're correct, they're scenarios too different to be directly comparable.
you have to include the production of new money
I'm not sure that makes much sense. Money itself isn't a means of production, it's a representation of the wealth that was produce by means of production. As such, it comes later in the productive causal chain, even if when it does appear it's then used for purposes such as accumulating even more means of production. By itself, though, it's incapable of being used for anything, a proof of which can be found in any country that went through hyperinflation. In those, the government decided it needed more money (rather than more production), and turned the printers up to eleven. End result? Lots and lots and LOTS of paper to represent the same limited amount of stuff, that didn't increase one iota, with the end result that stuff divided by amount of paper = every individual bit of stuff represented by more paper.
That's why Classic Liberals and Libertarians, who analyze this from the other pole, say money is subjective: because it's "worth" whatever people think it's worth, a sum of subjective evaluations. It makes things flow more smoothly, that's for sure, but were we to remove it from the picture entirely and we'd still get a market. A more cumbersome one in that exchanges would become more complex, but a market all the same. And one with accumulation of the means of production, were a Capitalist mindset running on top of this moneyless market.
They display 4k. Not sure what more features you want?
TVs have their color balance usually optimized for highlighting stuff that matters in movies, sports and stuff. Professional displays tend to be optimized for absurdly accurate colors, so that you can visually notice the difference between #A78B15 and #A88C14. They also tend to have a bigger colors range than normal displays have, being literally capable of showing many colors that exist in paper but most displays aren't capable of showing.
For most people those features aren't necessary, so it'd be nonsensical to pay for them. But for those who do work in color-heavy stuff such as desktop publishing of color-heavy magazines (think National Geographic Magazine), art books editing, professional CGI, movie making, complex photo editing, digital painting etc. this level of color precision is important and could be the difference between actually earning money or not. That alone can drive a display into the thousands of dollars.
Note: I don't know whether the displays this article is talking about are of this kind. If they aren't then sure, the price is absurd. But if they are, then the price is actually pretty typical.
Capitalism (...) is merely a material value system which is inherent in every society
You're confusing Capitalism with commerce and free markets. They aren't the same thing.
To understand the difference it's important to understand what the word "capital" means. People tend to think it means "money", but that's an oversimplification. "Capital" is synonymous actually synonymous with "means of production", which in turn means all those things (the means) a person can use to create (produce) rent and wealth, specifically enough rent and wealth so as to survive and thrive.
A person without access to means of production cannot do much when left to themselves other than to pick (or steal) food and, if needed, distribute punches, kicks and worse things. So the person either manages to somehow obtain means of production of their own to then begin having a life worth living, or go to someone who does own means of production, shows themselves capable of working with them, and then asks to be allowed to use those means to produce wealth in exchange for keeping a slice of the wealth they created, the owner of the means of production keeping the difference.
That's the definition, and as a definition it's neutral. Things get interesting when, in light of it, you begin to look at how things are and, maybe, at how they ought to be.
What characterizes Capitalism is the idea that it's perfectly okay for some people to own means of production and for the majority of people to now own means of production, thus having to place themselves as workers under the orders of owners of the means. The owner (capitalist) can then use the wealth the workers produced for him so as to by even more means of production, becoming even more needed by workers who don't own means of production. Which in turn give him even more wealth with which to buy even more means of production, and so on and so forth.
That's the Capitalist ideal, and it's supported not only by the owners themselves, but by non-owners who believe themselves capable of eventually becoming owners of means of production in the same fashion, and by non-owners who don't believe themselves capable of that but who nonetheless have a comfortable enough life under it.
Socialism has a different take on the issue. Socialists think it unfair for the means of production to end up accumulated more and more in the hands of a few people, so they believe in an alternative system in which the means of production are owned by a government that takes care to spread the wealth produced by those means among the people in a roughly equal manner, the supposition being that in this way everyone together owns (through the government) the means of production.
Between both beliefs there are intermediate mixes, such as Social-Democracy, which believes in a managed form of Capitalism in which people are allowed to accumulate means of production, but are overseen by the government so as to not do bad things with the means they own.
And there are beliefs outside the line that goes from Capitalism to Socialism. One such is Distributism, which believes everyone should own their means of production individually, so that it'd neither accumulate in the hands of a few as happens in Capitalism, nor in the hands of state bureaucrats as happens in Socialism (and much less the hands of a mix of both).
As for markets, and free markets, they exist in all of the above (except for pure Socialism). As such, a free market activist can actually be aligned with any of them. And then we have the distinctions between the different pro-free-market schools of thought. Libertarianism, for example, is one such, and one more closely aligned with Capitalism, although not completely (a typical difference: Capitalism is okay with owners of means of production using the wealth they accumulate to buy laws favoring themselves against competitors, something Libertarianism is strongly opposed to).
So, while markets are indeed common to all human experience, Capitalism itself isn't. The ability to accumulate the means of production is fairly recent in historical terms, it has but a few centuries. Markets, in contrast, predate that by thousands of years. As such, it's useful to distinguish both.
you can pick up a 49" UHD TV at Costco or Best Buy for $300.
Do they have the same features? When you purchase a laptop, do you go to a store, see there's one for $200, another for $3k, then buy the $200 one thinking to yourself how you managed to just save $2,800 for a machine that's exactly as good as the other?
Well, let's look at some of what is written:
I read all those rules can be summed up as "talk about FreeBSD"; if you don't talk about FreeBSD, they question you why you're talking about anything other than FreeBSD; and if you insist on talking about non-FreeBSD stuff, you're out.
Seems fair to me. There are other places to talk about that stuff. Facebook, for instance.
B&N was always shit.
As a non-American who never visited the US, I wholeheartedly agree.
Back in the early 2000's I was already a heavy buyer from early ebook sellers such as eReader and Fictionwise (which at some point purchased the former and merged with it). It was fantastic to be able to buy books without paying freight and waiting 3 months for them to arrive, even if all I could read them on was my desktop computer. Then came B&N, purchased Fictionwise, and eventually shut the site down, absorbing the ebook business into its own site.
That wouldn't have been a problem weren't for a single, small issue: US users were allowed to transfer their ebook libraries from their Fictionwise accounts to their B&N accounts. International customers were given the middle finger and told "download them before this date as they'll be gone forever afterwards".
I still have all of my 345 Fictionwise and eReader ebooks in my Calibre library, all properly backed up, with any DRMed titles cracked ages ago, and converted to both ePub and Mobi formats. But, my, was I pissed!
If I ever visit the US, and B&N is still around, I'll make sure to not buy from them.
PS: Something similar happened to eMusic. Worldwide reach for years, then suddenly US-only, with non-US customers losing access to their music libraries. So, yeah. They all deserve what they're getting.
I use the SIP to do research for the package I'm writing to automate my SIP which I'm writing using SIP. Thanks to the SIP my phone service is good and I don't need to use SIP to phone people.
That's what the abbr HTML tag is intended to solve. Evidently no one used it for anything remotely useful, but one can imagine text editors implementing them automatically from a dictionary and asking writers to select between the alternatives if there are several and the context doesn't make it clear which one should be the default.
Ripping for archival or personal viewing is crass immoral and evil, but if we need to do it to make a buck it is holy and just
What about placing a disk on the Blu-Ray player, hitting play, then pointing a camera to a 4K TV and filming the video on there? That doesn't bypass any security measure as one isn't ripping the media nor breaking the DRM. Or does it?
I'm unaware of the strong worker protections. I know the Nazis didn't mind disrupting white workers' lives.
It's ambiguous for sure, but while some things became clearly worse, others became better, and the ones that did became better had a lot of approval. The main one seems to have been the almost certainty of having and keeping a job. This text seems to me to offer a balanced view. From our perspective definitely not a good situation by any means. From 1930's German workers' perspective though, not really bad.
In addition, there were initiatives to help families as long as they submitted to the Nazi program. My grandaunt used to tell me how her mother, for example, was repeatedly offered more food for the family and several other welfare benefits if she just accepted having a fourth child (she had 3), but she didn't want to hear any of that and remained with only three (she also did her best to keep her children from becoming nazis, so there's that too). It was all very weird, but in some way it worked and white Germans were, if not happy, at lest not unhappy.
Direct governmental oversight of industry doesn't seem to match with what I've read of German industry before about 1944
That's also ambiguous. Industrialists were frequently members of the Nazi party and very close to the Nazi leadership, so they received tons of benefits. On the other hand, they also were expected to do everything for the benefit of the Nazi program, and where they weren't doing it the Nazi government simply went in and nationalized the thing. So while formally there might not have been explicit rules and stuff for most of it, in practice there was. The Wikipedia article has more details on these movements, although not as detailed and with concrete examples I'd like to have.
Would someone care to tell me what they thing the left-wing policies of the NSDAP were?
Basically strong worker protections and a strong social safety net (both for whites only), plus direct governmental oversight of the industry. A good comparison point would be, let's say, the policies advocated in the UK by the Fabian Society in the early 1900's. Which, if you check the link, included eugenics.
I think you're painting too rosy a picture of how things used to be.
For immigrants they were quite bad, and still are, but my comment wasn't about that, it was about cultural effects at large.
Can you site some of these studies?
I don't have anything at hand, but it was about France, not the US. It detailed changes in immigration policies there over the last few decades and the resulting social effects. I don't know whether any of it applies to the US or not.
And now right wingers openly march with swastikas and Nazi slogans.
No. Now nazis openly march with swastikas and Nazi slogans. Here's a topic you can study so as to better understand how this works.
The Nazi social and economic platform was left-wing
The idea that "right" equals laissez faire capitalism, less government, libertarianism or whatever is a very recent construct and has no historical worth. From your list, the only clear left-wing policy would be "strong social safety net". All the others were present on both sides.
America prides itself on being the great melting pot but 40 years of multi-culturalism has revealed that large ethnic immigration, like Europe is experiencing now, harms society.
I've seen studies showing that multiculturalism is indeed the problem, but with a caveat: "multiculturalism" understood as the specific policy the left began defending since a few decades of preserving cultures as they are by creating almost absolute barriers for meaningful cultural exchange, whose most recent example is the whole nonsense about "cultural appropriation". What this multiculturalism does is to create ghettos with invisible walls, and that in turn results in a permanente divide that only grow resentment and tribal identities.
Before those policies were enacted, the US and other countries did pretty well with immigration. Immigrants understood they were moving into another culture that expected them to fit, and tried their best to fit while preserving distinctive elements of their origin cultures, not the whole package. These elements in turn spread a little into the culture they moved in, resulting in a blend that for all practical purposes worked pretty well. It was a conservative mode of thinking that worked, and worked well.
The current model is the opposite of that, and its failures are showing more and more, and in even more dramatic ways.
The Nazis were left wing as well.
No, they weren't. They defined themselves as a "third position" distinct from both right and left, adopting a few elements from one side, a few from the other, and adding stuff of their own to the mix. This is why the right calls them left, the left calls them right, the center considers them extremists in one direction or the other, and also why all three are wrong. The center is correct only insofar as nazis are extremists, but they're extremists in a direction that doesn't fit within the left-right spectrum.
Also, internally the Nazi Party had several subgroups, including a left wing, a right wing, a monarchist wing etc. At some point the right wing of the party decided the left wing was being too troublesome and killed them all. Afterwards the economic policies of the party, that were somewhat "balanced" from the perspective of the left-right axis of the time, turned markedly to the right. But contrary to what the current left wants to believe on the matter, that still didn't turn Nazism itself into a right wing movement.
Nazism was and remained first and foremost nazi-wing. Any attempt at reducing that wing so as to fit the left-right spectrum, be it into the left side of the spectrum, as conservatives and libertarians want to do, be it into the right side of the spectrum, as liberals and socialists want to do, is and will continue being incorrect and doomed to failure.
Don't hold your breath.
If there's one rule of thumb for how technology develops, it's that it follows S curves. Slow in the beginning, then absurdly fast in the main development phase, then slow again once most of it has been developed. That's how it went with industry, then computing, now biotechnology (we're beginning to enter the exponential part of the curve), and how it's going to be with Quantum computing once the threshold of industrial production of qubits is achieved.
So, if Quantum computing is currently at its "vacuum tube" stage, sure, it seems like things will still take a while. Once it gets into its Moore's law stage though, well...
And the thing is, we don't actually know whether we're close or not to that turning point. It might happen that next year someone will announce they have found a method to get as many qubits as needed to any application on a logarithmic scale of cost-per-qubits. Or it might take 40 more years of research before we get anywhere close to that. Who knows? One way or another, once it does enter the exponential stage, and begins being used for biotech research (protein folding is a Quantum system, so I imagine Quantum computers would be particularly good at it), my, things will change! And fast!
Did this guy ever write anything that needed to be fast or realtime?
How can you be here and not know who ESR is?
I'm kind of surprised that no-one has comprehensively doxxed Pai yet.
Here in Brazil they did that to one politician who said he was in support of breaking net neutrality. As in, the very next day all his public data, including addresses, was already circulating, and some of the private data too. The guy quickly backtracked and said he was sorry because people "misunderstood" what he meant.
And when a grassroots movement began to emerge talking about organizing mas public manifestations of the kind that paralises huge cities, the ISPs pushing for it also decided it wiser to not go for it.
So! When are the US Internet users planning to begin interrupting all road traffic in New York City, Washington DC and every major city and State capital, plus all air travel on all major airports, plus the major commercial transportation hubs? The day of the vote and the whole month after that, until the FCC backtracks, right?
Right?
In short that the bill of rights is an awesome document
Well, that actually is pretty liberal. Not in the contemporaneous "freedom of speech isn't freedom to hate speech" nonsense, but in the actual liberal tradition of the Enlightenment movement of the 18th century. Back then the actual Conservatives were all pro-absolute-Monarchy and pro-religious-rules-in-everything, so they didn't think very highly of the principles in the Bill of Rights. Luckily for the US, most people with the power to decide were progressives. ;-)
At the same time it is the murder of a human being
Well, that depends. The idea that killing a fetus is the same as killing a human being has always been a strong Catholic belief, supported by the Aristotelian notion that equated the soul with the metaphysical form of the body so that one cannot be really distinguished from the other. Protestants in contrast used to prefer to follow the Old Testament teaching according which killing a fetus is neither assassination nor manslaughter but, on the contrary, is at worst an aggression against the mother (not even the fetus, mind).
That changed in the 1970's, when the Conservative Catholic interpretation became mainstream among American Protestants and Evangelicals, but a few still stick to the former Protestant view that no, fetuses don't have souls, and that souls are joined to the body at birth.
It bothers me that anyone feels it is their place to get involved in someone else's marriage, and that in the end it is only to "protect" the word "marriage". Some called me liberal for that. I pointed out that over reaching "demandy" government is a liberal thing. They couldn't counter cause it is true. :P
True. :-) And the History of that is also interesting. Until 19th century marriage was something religion dealt with. There was some government recognition of whatever religions declared in that regards, with some restrictions here and there, but overall States were pretty hands off on the matter of who should be considered married to whom and under what circumstances.
Alas, by the second half of the century a movement of strongly pro-State-interference-on-the-matter grew among Protestants, until finally the former Conservative principle of non-interference was overcome and the US as a whole began determining that.
So in that I agree. Your decision was indeed Conservative. And of a Conservatism that goes way, way back!
Funnily enough though, that makes current Liberals more Conservative on that respect than most self-proclaimed Conservatives, which goes to show how ironic most of the current usages of these terms are.
I don't think you should be able to force anyone to make a cake or provide services to someone they do not wish to provide services too.
I agree as a general principle. There's a complication though in that, there's an argument for the fact that any open-to-the-public space is supported by taxes in the form of roads and other services, which in turn are paid for by all citizens, not only citizens aligned with those spaces like, and thus that citizens the establishment refuses to serve should either a) either be granted tax exemptions so as to compensate them for the diminished services they get in return for their tax payments, or b) have those establishments forced to provide them service due to their equal status as citizens.
IMHO "a" would be a better alternative than "b". But I also think anyone seriously discussing this, in either direction, is being utterly silly, with Liberals being the most silly of the bunch. :-)
The democrat party was pro-slavery long ago
Bringing that up isn't very accurate historically. I mean, sure, the parties themselves were as you describe, but parties don't have a life of their own, at any moment they're the sum total of th
I do see what is happening in the field. I see cities as a cancer upon this planet, and I see that the majority of people in those cities tend to be liberals. Another cancer upon this planet.
You do realize you're a liberal too, don't you? Modern conservatism is basically "delayed liberalism". Take almost any policy defended by conservatives today. Rewind the clock and check who defended it first. Almost invariably you'll find a liberal of some previous decade (or century) arguing for it against the conservatives of the age.
Proof: do you think that, let's say, women shouldn't vote and should have their husbands chosen for them by their parents? If you don't, then you're a 1st wave feminist, that is, at a minimum a 1930's liberal.
Eyeballing the issue I have the impression that conservatism and liberalism are on average 40 to 60 years apart. If this trend continue then we can look forward to 2070's conservatives defending current liberal notions about the environment, women role and transsexuality against whatever the then liberals will be for.
Conservatives got tired of the bullshit and kicked the neo-cons out
Conservatives didn't do that. Actual conservatives are well informed intellectuals who read, understand and apply the notions of actual conservative philosophers such as Burke, Mill, Tocqueville, Belloc, Chesterton, Kirk, Voegelin and others. Those actual conservatives were kicked to the curb too, and replaced by idiot savants who take their "conservatism" from Hannity, Coulter, Limbaugh, Jones and other idiot savants. And who are now so starved of actual conservatism that they end up even taking the neo-Fascism of Dugin's Fourth Position (through Breitbart and other sources influenced by t) as if it were a form of Conservatism, which it isn't.
The GOP isn't conservative. It's liberal with a "minus" sign in front. Both things are nowhere similar, at all.