I think you're looking into this from the wrong perspective. The thing is, thinking about Linux as if it were one operating system is simply wrong. If you think on that "Linux" thing as being just some inner piece of software used by operating systems (plural), then things become much easier to understand:
You have an OS called Windows XP. You have another OS called Ubuntu. Then another OS called MacOS X. Then another called Fedora. Then another called FreeBSD. And so on and so forth. All of them different OSes.
So, if your OS is, say, Ubuntu, and you want to run some piece of software, say, Firefox, you shouldn't ask whether it has a version that runs "in Linux", but whether it has a version that runs in Ubuntu. Because your OS isn't "Linux", it's Ubuntu.
And then it becomes easy. If it supports Ubuntu, you'll find in the manufacturer's website a file you can download, double click, and it'll be installed. Just like its Windows XP package. Or its MacOS X package.
If you think this is crazy, think again. MacOS X is also, roughly speaking, a distribution of NextStep. Many of the core components are the same, or very similar ones. But you won't find people complaining because a software available for MacOS X doesn't run unmodified in NextStep, or vice-versa. If it's available for both OSes, you just download the correct installer for the one you're using, and install it. If it is available only for one of them, you might get it working on the other, but it won't be a trivial thing to do.
And yes, the same goes for Windows. Suppose I'm still running Windows 95. A lot of software installer with those beautiful ".exe" extensions won't run. If the manufacturer doesn't provide a Windows 95 compatible version, I'm screwed. Is this something I should blame on Windows 95? No. So, why should I complain if I find a software that is labeled "for Slackware" when I'm not running Slackware? No reason at all.
Search for softwares compatible with your OS, and they'll be easy to install. Double-click easy in fact. Try to install something that wasn't designed for you, and it's anyone's guess whether you'll succeed or not. In any case, it's not the fault of either the software you downloaded, or of the OS you're running. It's you who are trying to do things you're not supposed to.
It's been some time since I read Pipes and I didn't remember some details, so I must make some corrections to my above post.
Actually, although Pipes recognizes pretty clearly the distinction between, on one side, the moderate religious Muslims, and on the other the radical authoritarian pseudo-religious political nuts we all despise, he doesn't like the term "Islamofascism", as what they pursue isn't a fascist regime proper.
Basically, fascism was/is always nationalistic, and bound to the concept of a totalitarian central government ruling society. What these guys pursue, on the contrary, is a kind of stateless internationalistic decentralized totalitarianism. Thus, not quite the same thing. Both authoritarian, both totalitarian, but in very different ways.
He has some suggestions for naming this thing, basically variations around the word "Islamist", "Militant Islam", "Militant Islamism" etc., but I don't think any of those sound right. "Islamofascism" might not be accurate, but I guess we'll have to stick to it for se simple lack of a better alternative.
The only thing that guy's an expert on is hating Arabs and Muslims. He's a radical, bigoted putz. Fuck him. No, he isn't. In all his articles he makes the distinction between Muslims proper and what he calls "Islamofascism", i.e., people who are de facto fascists (in the technical meaning of the word, not the liberal "swear word" version) and who use Islam as nothing more than an ideological wrapping for their (nonreligious) political goals.
There are nuts out there that pretend both things to be the same, but Pipes surely isn't among them.
I did no such thing. I just pointed out that the definition of free market only refers to the ability to set prices freely, nothing else. The government could require you to do all your contracts by wearing lederhosen and yodeling in Bavarian and it would still be a free market. This is price interference! Selling itself isn't an act free of costs. Neither is the government requiring you to do something free of cost. Thus, once the government requires you to do something before you can sell, your selling cost goes from 'x' to 'x+y'. And if your cost for selling a good goes up, this changes the minimum you can sell that good for, what means your whole price structure is changed. Indirect as it might be, this is still interference in your ability to freely set your prices.
Furthermore, the fact that people don't just hold you up at gunpoint and take your goods, and that the goods they barter with you generally don't kill you, is a result of government restrictions. The government itself holds me at gunpoint and takes my goods. Admittedly it does so arguing that by it being the one that does so is less costly to me than some random guy doing it, that by doing it in small amounts spread over time I suffer less, and that (on a democracy, at least) part of the money ends up being used in my benefit. But that doesn't change the nature of the relation: there's someone that is all powerful when compared to me, and he commands me. What means we have a line that goes from almost total command to almost none. Almost none is better than any other option, and this includes economic relations and exchanges.
Sure, governments don't need to do any of the other things, and personally I'd also prefer if they stopped doing some of them. But when they do engage in them, it's still a free market according to the standard definition. This you call "standard definition" is better called "Keynesian definition". Economics goes back hundreds of years, and just because one Economics school happens to be the most influential in your country, and thus the most quoted around, doesn't mean the technical definition it uses in its theories is being better than the more general one from which it was derived.
"Free market" refers only to the fact that people set prices freely. Nope. You err because you take "price" as being built upon "money", and worse, "money" as being only that is issued by a central bank. Neither of these two equalities is true.
In the first case, if I sell you one apple in exchange for two bananas, the price of the apple is two bananas. Thus, price without money.
In the second case, if my neighborhood stages a huge swap garage sale in which everyone attributes a number of "points" to the goods they want to let go, and they all exchange their goods based on those points, you have money outside of any central bank.
In both case, no government gets involved.
As for your other points, they can all be solved upon from a myriad of social constructs. For instance, except for the "protect property" function, all of them are in the realm of civil relations. And civil relations, in lots of places, eras and peoples, was managed by arbitration, custom an non-governmental religious authority. But it's surely true, and I must agree with you in this aspect, that nowadays governments use to take responsible for most of them.
What you want is libertarianism or anarcho-capitalism Nope, although I like both concepts, I find them unfeasible. My own preference is for minarchism. Taking from your list, I'd say that I believe a government must exist for enforcing contracts and protecting property, but not for the other aspects.
You're confusing free market economics with libertarianism. You're an economically naive libertarian, not an advocate of free markets.
Nope. This is simple. A "market" is what happens when a minimum of two individuals want to exchange what each produced. A "free market" is when they can proceed with the exchange without the interference of a 3rd party. The end.
Quite wrong. To free market evangelists, copyright is intellectual property and strict copyright enforcement protects private property.
Wrong. And I say that because I am a free market evangelist. For us, government must have no say on how the market works, i.e., on what people value, how much they value it, why they value it etc. Copyright is a a state-granted monopoly on, among other things, how you use your own property, by preventing your from using that book you purchased anyway you want together with that scanner of yours, printer of yours, DVD burner of yours etc. Thus it is, by definition, interference in the free workings of the market, and as such something we're opposed to.
Now, of course you'll find out there "free market evangelists" that aren't full blown free market evangelists, since they theorize their evangelism not on the "freedom of choice" principle, but on that of "social utility". In other words, utilitarians don't defend the free market by itself, but only as far as it's more useful than, say, central planning. Were someone to appear in front of them proving central planning was more useful to society, they'd defend it all the same. A proper free market evangelist, on the other hand, always places freedom in front, and would contend that even if central planning was in some sense "better" (whatever that means), it would still be a source of less freedom, thus something he'd be opposed to.
Copyright is only defensible from the utilitarian perspective, via the argument you know of: "Who would want to write new books, write new musics, develop new medical drugs, create new software etc. without the system of patents and copyright protection? Think how bad society would be in that case!" A true free market evangelist doesn't care about any of this. He cares about the fact that, through copyright, government has another way to shape how you use your own property, i.e., to shape your behavior, to limit your freedom. This is what we'll always fight against.
I have no idea what you're talking about. Is this kind of nonsense common in philosophy? If so I consider myself lucky to have been exposed to it as little as possible.
Hehe, it is nonsense only if you take your assumptions as granted. For example, can you prove that there a world made of things outside of you? No, you cannot. At best you can assume there is one and work from there, but this is jumping to conclusions. If you don't want to do these jumps, if you don't want to introduce "beliefs" in science, even such a belief as "there is a world", then you cannot go around talking about "the world". You can only go around talking about what you perceive, because what you perceive isn't an assumption. To go from "this perception I call 'the world' works in such and such a way" to "the world itself, the one that exists beyond my perception, also works in such and such a way", is a long stretch, and anyone who wants to be rigorous cannot say so for serious without being very careful.
I'm aware of Kant's crusade to, essentially, destroy all human knowledge. I don't see why he should be taken seriously.
It's quite the opposite. Kant isn't about destroying our knowledge, he's about making extremely clear what the precise limits of our knowledge are. This is why all modern sciences are built around the concept of phenomena, not of things.
Notice: in Physics you don't talk about "physical things", you talk about "physical objects", about "physical phenomena". These are Kantian terms. A physical object is a mathematical construct we make by slicing our perception of "the world" and separating from perceived "things" the quantifiable aspects. A physicist won't talk about "warm" or "cold". These are perceptions. He'll talk about "temperature". And he's so comfortable talking about temperature that he goes talking about them even above the point it's so "hot" that not even atoms exist anymore to be shaken.
If you don't like Kantian science, if you want to talk about things, then you have to go back to the way science was made in the 16th century. What they did? They collected things and described them (say, flowers, or those funny stones that sometimes are found with figures of fish, plants and animals). And that's it. You cannot seek, so to speak, "behind" the things themselves as they are here and now and in your hands, for those hidden constructs such as "DNAs" or "molecules", and then go investigating these instead of the things themselves. For this operation to be possible, you must acknowledge the separation. The thing is one; the many phenomena you can "extract" from it are other, completely distinct.
And, this is important: one isn't "more real" than the other. Your perception is as much a phenomena as any of the many abstraction around it that the many different sciences research. All these different perspectives are granted citizenship, as neither is more important than the other, what grants to all sciences complete independence to do their own research, of what they see fit, as they see fit.
No, look, either you introduce sets or you don't, and if you do, then you have all the problems that Russel identified in set theory - sets that contain themselves, etc.
Do you remember, from when you studied set theory in high school, that you had the set of the natural numbers, the set of the integers, the set of the reals excluding zero, the other set that included zero, etc.? Didn't each of these sets "arbitrarily" throw certain numbers out? Well, if you can do it to certain numbers and classes of numbers, why can't you do it to certain sets and classes of sets? It's feasible, as much as the physics mathematics that say that if a certain result gives infinite somewhere, you can just assume the actual value is the bounding limit, renormalize, and proceed from there. Same goes for set theory: establish some limits, stick to them, and you're all good.
Re:Second person shooter
on
Second Person
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
A remember an ancient PC boxing game, from the VGA era, that had this feature. You could choose to see from the perspective of the guy you were punching. It was bizarre, but fun.
But what I'd like to see was an "herbivore person" game. The screen would be split vertically in the middle, one side showing your right, the other your left, both at exactly 90 degree. And the predators are near. Run!
I have to ask, why does Britain outlaw guns? What problem was there they were trying to solve?
You're way offtopic, eh? But I think there's a weird link between your question and TFA, in the form of an Hegelian piece of dialectics:
a) First, someone appeared with the thesis: "Guns kill people!!! Let's outlaw them!1!!11!1!"
b) Then the gun owners came with the antithesis, shooting their own foot with a well (mis)placed: "Guns don't kill people!!! People kill people!11!!!1!!"
c) Enters then the British government with a synthesis of its own: "You both are right!!! We must ban guns AND make people stop killing people!!! And what's the best way to accomplish this? To forbid everyone from seeing any violence at all, ever!!!111!1!"
And thus the lamb nation model is born. Next in line for implementation: violent movies, violent games, violent cartoons, violent books, violent news, textbooks mentioning violent events, people talking about violence in public...
Now, do you know what's most funny in all of this? The fact that this whole discussion is millennia old. In fact, Plato started the thing by criticize arts (such as theater) that depicted bad emotions by arguing that they increased the propensity of those watching them to emulate those same emotions. To which Aristotle countered with his wholly new concept of catharsis, saying that no, in fact the effect is the exact opposite, with those watching bad emotions in fiction feeling fulfilled with those and not pursuing them in real life.
2400 years later, we still didn't reach a conclusion. Go figure...
Sets aren't real, though. These distinctions would be arbitrary, and thus, exist only in our heads, not the universe (or the universe of ideas.) And, again, apprehending the sets is the same problem as inventing the ideas, so the question becomes meaningless - both outcomes are identical.
This isn't clear. Since Kant one cannot say that there's any Universe "in itself", at all, outside of our modes of perception, and thus anything we perceive as "a thing" cannot be said as being more than a "phenomenum", even "things" such as "a brain".
That said, as far as phenomena go one can clearly distinguish among them all on the basis of the the possibilities we perceive they have, which is what Husserl does in his phenomenology. For example, a drawer, taken as a single entity, has a given set of possibilities different from those of the other drawers, that allow you to distinguish it from them, from the whole cabinet, and from everything else. On the other hand, the cabinet with that drawer inserted has another set of possibilities, as has the shelf without any drawers. The same goes for, say, "elephant", "elephant in a beach", "big elephant in a beach on a summer", "big elephant in a beach in the summer of 1956", and so on and so forth. Taken to the extreme, this means that a phenomena can be seen as both an individual possessing such and such individualizing characteristics, as well as a part of a near infinite number of sets of possibilities ("essences"). Both are perceived as real, and we interact with phenomena as both, so it's perfectly valid, logically so, to take them as such.
If things stopped here it would already be pretty cool, but afterwards another philosopher, Zubiri, took Husserl's phenomenology and extended it in some even funnier ways by studying the "reality" phenomenum and trying to delimit it. Long story short: since the phenomena we deal with we can clearly place into two huge categories, those of the "real" and the "unreal", and furthermore we can clearly distinguish between levels of reality (the events in a movie are clearly less real than a news report, although not unreal, or the movie wouldn't exist at all), we can say precisely that "perception of reality" is our specific mode of perception. Thus, it's valid to talk about something being "real" or not even though we don't know at all whether anything at all is a "thing" or not.
As a result, you have that husserlian essences can be said to be zubirian real, constructing with both a phenomenological ontology, without any of this being arbitrary. Quite the opposite, this is precisely our mode of perception, and outside of it there is neither perception, nor any "thing in itself" that we can be aware off.
If Plato is like going from city A to B by passing a bridge, and Kant is all about blowing up the bridge, phenomenology vindicates Plato by kind of leaving A from the back door, circling the world, and still reaching B also kind of by its own back door. The end result is roughly the same, but the voyage is much more enriching.:-)
Similarly, surely introducing sets into ontology introduces all the paradoxes in set theory?
If you try to do it too hard, yes. But there's no need to do so. It's just a formal way to describe in a summary form what by its own nature isn't purely formal. After all, mathematics isn't 100% self consistent either (Godel), but that doesn't prevent us from using those bits and pieces of it that fit with the physical objects we manage to abstract from natural phenomena. The same goes for phenomenological essences via set theory: you don't need to dwell into "empty sets" and "sets of all sets" to efficiently deal with them.
Your solution involves the whole world making a wow in benefit of the very small subgroup of content producers. It's simply unfeasible. Human nature doesn't work that way.
The correct approach is the exact inverse, with content producers just stopping to care about pirates. There will always be people willing to consume from "official", "legit" sources, myself a prime example. Content producers must balance their production costs not towards the whole of humanity, but towards that percentage of it who will actually spent with them. The remaining people are simply irrelevant, at best serving as a cheap marketing means towards making those willing to spend aware of their products.
A lot of people worked very hard to make it in the first place. That has value, and to ignore that fact is ignorant. Sorry, but you make the wrong assumption when you say that something has value "because" much work was put into it. This is incorrect. Things don't "have" value. They receive value from those people who value them.
Let me give you one example. I'll guess you have some object that was given to you as a gift from someone you care a lot about. Even if this isn't the case, let's just suppose it is for the sake of my argument. If we suppose that things "have" value (in themselves), then how can you say this object, let's say, a watch, is more valuable than any other watch out there? That special person purchasing it for you didn't improve in the value that the watch "has", right?
Another example: if I go out with a $1 bill to purchase a newspaper, why does the exchange happen? Simply: because me and the seller regard what the other has as more valuable than what we have. If I or him thought the $1 bill had the same value of the newspaper, why would we bother exchanging? Wouldn't it be simpler for we to keep what we already had? Hence, I accept purchasing the newspaper because I think it's worth more than me keeping my $1 bill, and he accepts selling it to me because he thinks my $1 bill is worth more than he keeping the newspaper.
This is how economy works in the real world. Nothing "has" value. Things "get" value. And this value comes from elsewhere. It doesn't come from the "work" needed to produce them. Rather, it comes solely from the "utility" both the purchaser and the maker see in it.
And the fact is: as far as media goes, purchasers see less and less value in it as time goes by. That's the sole truth in this.
You are conveniently trying to apply some form of a non existing formula to products such as DVD's only because it suits you. It doesn't make any sense. It's not "because it suits me". In fact, I'm pretty uninterested in this kind of entertainment myself. I usually go see films on movie rooms, but I rarely like one enough to see it more than once, much less to wish to acquire a copy for myself. When I do like one, though, I usually go to the cinema more than once (I saw Spirited Away eight times, meaning I alone spent around $100 on it) then simply go out and purchased the DVD at a store when it's available. Same goes for music: most of the few ones I have I purchased at eMusic, the remaining come from legit CDs. In all of this, the only exception are some rare anime I'm interested in that haven't been release here in Brazil, or that have been released but in that pesky "think of the children!!!" censored form.
If you deny the creators their profit 2 things can happen:
1) No more DVD's will be created because it has become unprofitable business.
2) The creators will try and protect their DVD's through various copy protection systems, some of which will eventually invade your privacy to assure that protection.
You see, you lose in both cases. Actually, neither case is true. In fact, I have started a small movie studio. We haven't done anything yet, as the bureaucracy around here is overwhelming, not to mention expensive, but we have good plans for when that's sorted out. And guess what? I don't mind people copying whatever I produce. Because I know that there are tons of people out there that are just like me: they'll purchase what they like from the creator nevertheless. So much that I plan using the Pirate Bay as a means of official marketing distribution. I simply don't need to force my non-customers to become "customers" (emphatic quotes). I only need the number of watchers to grow to a big enough pool so that the number of voluntary payers is big enough to cover costs and provide some profit.
As you can see, I surely put my money where my mouth is. I don't believe in copyright, and I sure as hell live by this skepticism.
BTW, how do you feel about blog linkjacking? You know, when people take other peoples images and copy them to their blog surrounding them with adsense. That this look moral to you? Yes. I've even set up my sites, from my blog to the online political magazine I'm currently developing, to allow image hotlinking. Sure, I protect myself from the bandwidth cost by diverting these loads through CoralCDN, what might cause the images to load slowly to whoever is hotlinking. But other than that, I simply don't mind.
By the way: everything I myself write I put under a Creative Commons license that allows for profit usage.
What if a Fortune 500 company X takes your photos and uses it in a multi million dollar campaign, not even asking you for your permission. Are you going to be like "good for them, it's their right, it's only a digital copy"? I don't think so. So you thought wrong.:-)
But said company should be aware of the "share alike" clause in the license. If they use my things on something they do, I'm damn sure I'll use their derivative work one something I do.;-)
The air example is pretty much the worst example you can have since their is no one who is actually working on making air available, it's just there.
Quite the opposite. Imagine a DVD rip sitting in a hard disk somewhere, accessible through a torrent link. Using your own words: "There is no one who is actually working on making that DVD available, it's just there."
There was work employed in making the first copy of the movie. Million of dollars worth of work, usually. I wont deny it. But once the movie was finished, work stopped being employed in it. Since it's been completed, it's just "there", no additional work being employed in it. Just like air.
The wrong assumption intellectual content creators make is that they should be able to do something once, and keep earning money from it afterwards. Remove that assumption, replace it with one stating that intellectual content creation is no different a job than any other, thus that creators are entitled to earn money for doing their job while they are creating something, but no more afterwards, and the whole problem just goes away.
The problem is when people say it has zero worth (they don't want to pay) but they want it anyway.
No, it isn't. That's what the air example is about. People want air much, MUCH more than they want, say, music. But they aren't paying for it either. Simply because no matter how much you fill your lungs, there's still more air than lungs in the world.
Digital goods is the same. You could fill all hard disks in the world with thousands of copies of the same music, plus all DVD-Rs, and all memory cards, and there would still be an infinite supply of that same music available. Thus, a $0 value.
This isn't to mean that producers of intellectual content should do their work for free. They can obviously demand payment to make new content, and be paid by whoever wants that new content badly enough. But once said content is produced, once the original interested party paid the producer for his work, once said work as been digitized... then offer becomes infinite. And thus additional copies have their value decreased to $0.
That's the point really: the very first, original version has economic value, because there's no supply at all. All the derived copies of the original have no value, because they're in infinite supply.
So, the only two logical economic options are for intellectual producers to figure a way to be rewarded by either their effort in producing the first copy, or by some other means that don't revolve about being rewarded by additional copies. Contrary to standard commoditization of mass produced material goods, digitization offers no middle ground between the first, hugely valuable version of an intellectual production, and the infinitely available, zero valued copies that pop out of it, and intellectual producers must learn to deal with this fact.
if you really believe that anything that can be encoded digitally is somehow 'imaginary' and thus must be free for everyone
He said it, but it's imprecise. The important point is that supply of any specific, existing, digitalized intellectual content is, by definition, infinite. And infinite supply (or, in any case, a supply bigger than any demand) means the price goes down to $0. That's why you don't pay for the air you breath: there's more of it than breathers, hence air has no economic value and no price.
Arguing that intellectual producers should be paid doesn't change the basic economic equation of offer vs. demand. Believing it does, believing that "work employed to produce a thing" equals "thing produced has an economic value", with the shortcut that "work = value", is incurring in the same basic error that plagued and still plagues a huge amount of (bad) economic thinking.
An example of why this doesn't work: suppose you employ one year of your life making a huge block of cement. Once your block is done, you go around trying to sell it. If no one wishes to purchase it, then your whole year of work will have ended with a value of $0, no matter how much time, effort and, yes, money, you spent to make it.
In fact, the economic value of a thing doesn't come from whatever resources were spent on producing it. It comes from whatever other people are willing to spend on it. If people don't think it's worth enough to spend money on it, then its value is $0. And infinite offer has, as a general rule, this precise outcome: $0. Unless, and that's important, the seller/producer can "add value" (i.e., add something other people think is worth spending money on) to it.
That's it basically. You don't need philosophical reasons to declare that digitized goods "want to be free". Plain classic economics suffice to demonstrate that it already is free.
Likewise, giving me Amazon's search results for "council on foreign relations" is just about as lazy. Who's the lazy one who didn't click the very first links returned, eh?
Now, seriously: do you really expect me go to the trouble of browsing (offline) books to collect specific cases, write them down in a summary form, and post them here on a/. comment thread? Would you?
If you're that interested, purchase some books or google around. Linking to sources is the most effort I'll make, sorry if that doesn't please you.
One have to love people who don't read the provided links. Quoting:
"For more than a century ideological extremists at either end of the political spectrum have seized upon well-publicized incidents... to attack the Rockefeller family for the inordinate influence they claim we wield over American political and economic institutions. Some even believe we are part of a secret cabal working against the best interests of the United States, characterizing my family and me as 'internationalists' and of conspiring with others around the world to build a more integrated global political and economic structure - one world, if you will. If that's the charge, I stand guilty, and I am proud of it."
- David Rockefeller, "Memoirs" autobiography (2002, Random House publishers), page 405
The reason everything "suggested" in their bimonthly magazine, forums, conferences etc. starts being implemented by democrats and republicans alike is because they just happen to always like what they see there. In fact, it's pure coincidence, right?
The first step of any investigation is to ask yourself, no matter what happen, "cui bono?" (who benefits?). This will give you a good list of possible starting points, many of which false positives. The second step is to go around researching further evidence. And the CFR offers lots, and lots, and lots of evidence, all in the open.
A "conspiracy theory" ceases being a theory when there's hard documental evidence. It also ceases being a "conspiracy" at that. A conspiracy, by definition, is something that requires few people, all keeping secrets. There's nothing secret about the CFR. Just go to their own publications and read them.
By the way: if you want information on the specific Republican take on implementing the CFR's guidelines, a good source of information their own Project for the New American Century's website. PNAC was founded and has many CFR members.
Not enough, cause they still haven't impeached him, or you know, made ANY EFFORT TO REIGN HIM IN. In fact, they're the ones fighting tooth and nail to STOP the Democrats from preventing him from giving the telecoms retroactive immunity and whatnot.
Do you really think the democrats themselves don't want this power? Considering they're posed to be in the oval office coming next year?
Seriously, as long as both Democratic and Republican party leaders are members of the Council on Foreign Relations think tank as well as followers of its "suggested" policies, everything you Americans see happening on your Congress, Senate, Executive, Courts etc. that seems like divergence is actually hardly more than make believe.
The socialist societies you're referring to do not have properly working democracies. If those socialist societies had a proper direct democracy in the Roman style, or something like the modified democratic process that I have conceived, they would not be so vulnerable to the unilateral action that you describe.
Not really. The problem is that different people have different levels of proficiency on any given subject. And this means that, if you go for a fully inclusive, completely non-discriminatory collective decision on any topic, no matter which topic it is, you will never be able to pick the best option. As those with no clue pull the decisions towards what their lack of proficiency tells them, while those with excellent proficiency push it up towards an actually knowledgeable one, the resulting decision ends up being the median one. The long range result is that the lack of optimal decision making adds up over time, and a clear achievement difference develops between this system and other organizational models that favor placing power in the hands of whoever is best suited to handle it.
This was always pretty clear even for otherwise egalitarian socialists thinkers. And that's why, not wanting to follow the small bourgeoisie way of simply allowing each one to take his own decisions and deal with the consequences, all of them settled for a model where a small set of politically appointed leaders struggle to take all decisions on all important fields.
Does this centralized system work better than a full blown direct democracy one? Sure it does. But it has the problems of its own that I mentioned in my previous message: once you give power to someone, and this power isn't checked by competing power, that person will misuse it. It doesn't matter whether said power is of the bureaucratic or monopolistic types, the misuse ends up being the same.
The difference is, in a capitalist society, they don't even have to play lip service to the idea that their power was given to them by the population to serve its larger goals. They can just set fire to infrastructure and watch it burn, and we consider that "their right".
True, but if they do so, they bankrupt and end up as bad as those fucked up, after all, there are tons of competitors eager to take their place. So they must be careful not to be crazy. Those that become crazy discover very fast that they have also become poor.
As for Brazil, Brazil is poor because when foreigners are stripping your nation of all its wealth, it really doesn't fucking matter what political-economic system you use. You want to straighten your country out, start by shooting all the foreign capitalists in the head at the border, and you'll see things turn around quite quickly.
Except that it didn't happen this way. There's one thing about Brazil that makes it an interesting case study for American scholars, and anyone interested in studying the national power struggles that happened in the world since the 19th century. It's this: that both Brazil and USA were colonies of powerful European powers; both had roughly the same type of commerce with Europe at the same time during their respective colonial times, not to mention roughly the same size and natural resources; both obtained their independences from their respective European metropolis roughly at the same time; and at around their respective independences, both were poor and both had roughly the same total wealth.
And then both departed in the way they chose to handle their affairs. While at its founding USA chose do strongly decentralize their power, with its people adopting a strong self-relying, "don't mess in my personal affairs" way of life, Brazil chose centralization, with people developing a culture of government dependence to handle even their small daily activities.
The result? USA become rich and richer over time, with increased levels of productivity and a sustained increased in the wealth
I personally think internet services are too important to be left to the market, and should be provided by government free of restriction to all people, just like other essential services.
"Provide by government" and "free of restrictions" are mutually exclusive terms. If the government provides something, it uses government reasoning to do so. Go look into any country where any such service is government distributed and you'll see what it means.
One example, from my country. Here in Brazil land lines were government controlled, under the same argument that "the right to communication is too important to be left to the market". The result after 20 years of this practice? Well, you would call to the state telephony service, request a line, be put into a queue, receive your line after 4 years (yes, FOUR), with a bill to be paid in easy monthly installment for 10 years (yes, TEN).
Then we had a right-wing government take office who stopped this bullshit and went around privatizing the system. The result? Now we can call one among many competing telephony companies, ask for a line, get it in one week, pay $35 for the installation (once, not for 120 months), and that's it.
Socialist thinking is beautiful on paper. But only on paper. Once you see what it cause in practice, you quickly realize that no, capitalism works better. And that it works better for a single reason: because having to earn your money by providing you a service, a businessman cannot afford providing a craptastic service or he'll go bankrupt A government, on the other hand, can always get away with anything. Why? Because, if something goes awfully wrong, the government doesn't need to earn your money from you by your voluntary decision, it can simple demand your money in the form of new taxes and be done with it (and with you).
In other words: a bureaucrat might be willing to distribute wealth, sure. But he will alway remember to distribute to himself first. It's human nature. Voluntary deals are better simply because you can switch from a bad partner to a better one with almost no effort. Switching from a bad bureaucracy to a good one, which isn't the same as merely switching parties in an election every 4 years, that's a much, much more difficult task. Almost impossible short from an actual revolution. And even if you go for a revolution as a way to switch bureaucracies, and it succeeds, you cannot be sure the new bureaucracy will be better than the older. History, unfortunately, has consistently shown that it is either the same, or worse. Getting a better one this way unfortunately never happened.
I am myself in favor of a "you only get charged for what you actually get".
Too true! Pay as you go models are better simply because they encourage the service provider to work diligently in improving its service so that you have every reason to maximize your usage of it, thus increasing the company's profit accordingly. Flat rate system work the other way, making the provider profit from providing as little as service possible, or if possible none at all.
My web hosting provider, NearlyFreeSpeech.net, is pay as you go. My remote backup storage provider, Amazon S3, is pay as you go. My land phone line and cell phone provider are both pay as you go, as are the water and power companies. The only valid exception to the rule I can think about health plans, as the cost of higher level treatments increase exponentially, not linearly, so it makes sense. But for anything else involving a linear curve, pay as you go is the best way to spend as little or as much as you want or can. Most important of all, it's fair, for you and your service provider.
So, if I had my way my broadband access provider would be too. Unfortunately, though, no broadband provider in my area offers a simple $x/GB model. In my ideal world that would be all they would charge for, at worst splitting the charge into a cheaper download rate and another, more expensive upload rate. But the connection speed itself wouldn't enter the equation, being simply the fastest allowed by my actual physical connection. After all, why cap my bandwidth if providing me as much bandwidth as possible would the best way for them to make sure I would consume all the bandwidth my heart desired? Why stop improving their backend, increasing the overall capacity, if that would only hinder my ability to consume as much as possible?
Alas, no, we're and will be stuck into this flat rate nonsense for yet a long time to come, suffering from all the "make them use less, less, LESS!!!" mentality that those companies have to follow to see increasing profits.
Do you want to see broadband providers and backbones drop the whole set of anti-net neutrality practices and discourses? Without the need of for any law? Simply make them drop the flat rate model and charge proportionally more from heavy users. It's as simple as that. Any other "solution" necessarily involves and requires overselling coupled to traffic shaping. There's no way around this.
Slashdot Mirror
I think you're looking into this from the wrong perspective. The thing is, thinking about Linux as if it were one operating system is simply wrong. If you think on that "Linux" thing as being just some inner piece of software used by operating systems (plural), then things become much easier to understand:
You have an OS called Windows XP. You have another OS called Ubuntu. Then another OS called MacOS X. Then another called Fedora. Then another called FreeBSD. And so on and so forth. All of them different OSes.
So, if your OS is, say, Ubuntu, and you want to run some piece of software, say, Firefox, you shouldn't ask whether it has a version that runs "in Linux", but whether it has a version that runs in Ubuntu. Because your OS isn't "Linux", it's Ubuntu.
And then it becomes easy. If it supports Ubuntu, you'll find in the manufacturer's website a file you can download, double click, and it'll be installed. Just like its Windows XP package. Or its MacOS X package.
If you think this is crazy, think again. MacOS X is also, roughly speaking, a distribution of NextStep. Many of the core components are the same, or very similar ones. But you won't find people complaining because a software available for MacOS X doesn't run unmodified in NextStep, or vice-versa. If it's available for both OSes, you just download the correct installer for the one you're using, and install it. If it is available only for one of them, you might get it working on the other, but it won't be a trivial thing to do.
And yes, the same goes for Windows. Suppose I'm still running Windows 95. A lot of software installer with those beautiful ".exe" extensions won't run. If the manufacturer doesn't provide a Windows 95 compatible version, I'm screwed. Is this something I should blame on Windows 95? No. So, why should I complain if I find a software that is labeled "for Slackware" when I'm not running Slackware? No reason at all.
Search for softwares compatible with your OS, and they'll be easy to install. Double-click easy in fact. Try to install something that wasn't designed for you, and it's anyone's guess whether you'll succeed or not. In any case, it's not the fault of either the software you downloaded, or of the OS you're running. It's you who are trying to do things you're not supposed to.
It's been some time since I read Pipes and I didn't remember some details, so I must make some corrections to my above post.
Actually, although Pipes recognizes pretty clearly the distinction between, on one side, the moderate religious Muslims, and on the other the radical authoritarian pseudo-religious political nuts we all despise, he doesn't like the term "Islamofascism", as what they pursue isn't a fascist regime proper.
Basically, fascism was/is always nationalistic, and bound to the concept of a totalitarian central government ruling society. What these guys pursue, on the contrary, is a kind of stateless internationalistic decentralized totalitarianism. Thus, not quite the same thing. Both authoritarian, both totalitarian, but in very different ways.
He has some suggestions for naming this thing, basically variations around the word "Islamist", "Militant Islam", "Militant Islamism" etc., but I don't think any of those sound right. "Islamofascism" might not be accurate, but I guess we'll have to stick to it for se simple lack of a better alternative.
There are nuts out there that pretend both things to be the same, but Pipes surely isn't among them.
In the first case, if I sell you one apple in exchange for two bananas, the price of the apple is two bananas. Thus, price without money.
In the second case, if my neighborhood stages a huge swap garage sale in which everyone attributes a number of "points" to the goods they want to let go, and they all exchange their goods based on those points, you have money outside of any central bank.
In both case, no government gets involved.
As for your other points, they can all be solved upon from a myriad of social constructs. For instance, except for the "protect property" function, all of them are in the realm of civil relations. And civil relations, in lots of places, eras and peoples, was managed by arbitration, custom an non-governmental religious authority. But it's surely true, and I must agree with you in this aspect, that nowadays governments use to take responsible for most of them. What you want is libertarianism or anarcho-capitalism Nope, although I like both concepts, I find them unfeasible. My own preference is for minarchism. Taking from your list, I'd say that I believe a government must exist for enforcing contracts and protecting property, but not for the other aspects.
Now, of course you'll find out there "free market evangelists" that aren't full blown free market evangelists, since they theorize their evangelism not on the "freedom of choice" principle, but on that of "social utility". In other words, utilitarians don't defend the free market by itself, but only as far as it's more useful than, say, central planning. Were someone to appear in front of them proving central planning was more useful to society, they'd defend it all the same. A proper free market evangelist, on the other hand, always places freedom in front, and would contend that even if central planning was in some sense "better" (whatever that means), it would still be a source of less freedom, thus something he'd be opposed to.
Copyright is only defensible from the utilitarian perspective, via the argument you know of: "Who would want to write new books, write new musics, develop new medical drugs, create new software etc. without the system of patents and copyright protection? Think how bad society would be in that case!" A true free market evangelist doesn't care about any of this. He cares about the fact that, through copyright, government has another way to shape how you use your own property, i.e., to shape your behavior, to limit your freedom. This is what we'll always fight against.
Hehe, it is nonsense only if you take your assumptions as granted. For example, can you prove that there a world made of things outside of you? No, you cannot. At best you can assume there is one and work from there, but this is jumping to conclusions. If you don't want to do these jumps, if you don't want to introduce "beliefs" in science, even such a belief as "there is a world", then you cannot go around talking about "the world". You can only go around talking about what you perceive, because what you perceive isn't an assumption. To go from "this perception I call 'the world' works in such and such a way" to "the world itself, the one that exists beyond my perception, also works in such and such a way", is a long stretch, and anyone who wants to be rigorous cannot say so for serious without being very careful.
It's quite the opposite. Kant isn't about destroying our knowledge, he's about making extremely clear what the precise limits of our knowledge are. This is why all modern sciences are built around the concept of phenomena, not of things.
Notice: in Physics you don't talk about "physical things", you talk about "physical objects", about "physical phenomena". These are Kantian terms. A physical object is a mathematical construct we make by slicing our perception of "the world" and separating from perceived "things" the quantifiable aspects. A physicist won't talk about "warm" or "cold". These are perceptions. He'll talk about "temperature". And he's so comfortable talking about temperature that he goes talking about them even above the point it's so "hot" that not even atoms exist anymore to be shaken.
If you don't like Kantian science, if you want to talk about things, then you have to go back to the way science was made in the 16th century. What they did? They collected things and described them (say, flowers, or those funny stones that sometimes are found with figures of fish, plants and animals). And that's it. You cannot seek, so to speak, "behind" the things themselves as they are here and now and in your hands, for those hidden constructs such as "DNAs" or "molecules", and then go investigating these instead of the things themselves. For this operation to be possible, you must acknowledge the separation. The thing is one; the many phenomena you can "extract" from it are other, completely distinct.
And, this is important: one isn't "more real" than the other. Your perception is as much a phenomena as any of the many abstraction around it that the many different sciences research. All these different perspectives are granted citizenship, as neither is more important than the other, what grants to all sciences complete independence to do their own research, of what they see fit, as they see fit.
Do you remember, from when you studied set theory in high school, that you had the set of the natural numbers, the set of the integers, the set of the reals excluding zero, the other set that included zero, etc.? Didn't each of these sets "arbitrarily" throw certain numbers out? Well, if you can do it to certain numbers and classes of numbers, why can't you do it to certain sets and classes of sets? It's feasible, as much as the physics mathematics that say that if a certain result gives infinite somewhere, you can just assume the actual value is the bounding limit, renormalize, and proceed from there. Same goes for set theory: establish some limits, stick to them, and you're all good.
A remember an ancient PC boxing game, from the VGA era, that had this feature. You could choose to see from the perspective of the guy you were punching. It was bizarre, but fun.
:-)
But what I'd like to see was an "herbivore person" game. The screen would be split vertically in the middle, one side showing your right, the other your left, both at exactly 90 degree. And the predators are near. Run!
Now that would be different.
a) First, someone appeared with the thesis: "Guns kill people!!! Let's outlaw them!1!!11!1!"
b) Then the gun owners came with the antithesis, shooting their own foot with a well (mis)placed: "Guns don't kill people!!! People kill people!11!!!1!!"
c) Enters then the British government with a synthesis of its own: "You both are right!!! We must ban guns AND make people stop killing people!!! And what's the best way to accomplish this? To forbid everyone from seeing any violence at all, ever!!!111!1!"
And thus the lamb nation model is born. Next in line for implementation: violent movies, violent games, violent cartoons, violent books, violent news, textbooks mentioning violent events, people talking about violence in public...
Now, do you know what's most funny in all of this? The fact that this whole discussion is millennia old. In fact, Plato started the thing by criticize arts (such as theater) that depicted bad emotions by arguing that they increased the propensity of those watching them to emulate those same emotions. To which Aristotle countered with his wholly new concept of catharsis, saying that no, in fact the effect is the exact opposite, with those watching bad emotions in fiction feeling fulfilled with those and not pursuing them in real life.
2400 years later, we still didn't reach a conclusion. Go figure...
That said, as far as phenomena go one can clearly distinguish among them all on the basis of the the possibilities we perceive they have, which is what Husserl does in his phenomenology. For example, a drawer, taken as a single entity, has a given set of possibilities different from those of the other drawers, that allow you to distinguish it from them, from the whole cabinet, and from everything else. On the other hand, the cabinet with that drawer inserted has another set of possibilities, as has the shelf without any drawers. The same goes for, say, "elephant", "elephant in a beach", "big elephant in a beach on a summer", "big elephant in a beach in the summer of 1956", and so on and so forth. Taken to the extreme, this means that a phenomena can be seen as both an individual possessing such and such individualizing characteristics, as well as a part of a near infinite number of sets of possibilities ("essences"). Both are perceived as real, and we interact with phenomena as both, so it's perfectly valid, logically so, to take them as such.
If things stopped here it would already be pretty cool, but afterwards another philosopher, Zubiri, took Husserl's phenomenology and extended it in some even funnier ways by studying the "reality" phenomenum and trying to delimit it. Long story short: since the phenomena we deal with we can clearly place into two huge categories, those of the "real" and the "unreal", and furthermore we can clearly distinguish between levels of reality (the events in a movie are clearly less real than a news report, although not unreal, or the movie wouldn't exist at all), we can say precisely that "perception of reality" is our specific mode of perception. Thus, it's valid to talk about something being "real" or not even though we don't know at all whether anything at all is a "thing" or not.
As a result, you have that husserlian essences can be said to be zubirian real, constructing with both a phenomenological ontology, without any of this being arbitrary. Quite the opposite, this is precisely our mode of perception, and outside of it there is neither perception, nor any "thing in itself" that we can be aware off.
If Plato is like going from city A to B by passing a bridge, and Kant is all about blowing up the bridge, phenomenology vindicates Plato by kind of leaving A from the back door, circling the world, and still reaching B also kind of by its own back door. The end result is roughly the same, but the voyage is much more enriching.
Ontologically, you could have something like this:
At the top, the Absolute, including both the inconceivables and the conceivables.
The conceivables as a subset of the Absolute.
The possibles as a subset of the conceivables.
The mathematical proofs as a subset of the possibles.
The correct mathematical proofs as a subset of the mathematical proofs.
The possibilities of concrete existence as a subset of the correct mathematical proofs.
The multiverse (quantum manyworlds hypothesis) as a subset of the possibilities of concrete existence.
This concrete universe of ours a a subset of the multiverse.
And so on and so forth.
Hence, no, Platonism is far from collapsed. Although, sure, this version has a "bigger" ontology than Plato's original one.
Your solution involves the whole world making a wow in benefit of the very small subgroup of content producers. It's simply unfeasible. Human nature doesn't work that way.
The correct approach is the exact inverse, with content producers just stopping to care about pirates. There will always be people willing to consume from "official", "legit" sources, myself a prime example. Content producers must balance their production costs not towards the whole of humanity, but towards that percentage of it who will actually spent with them. The remaining people are simply irrelevant, at best serving as a cheap marketing means towards making those willing to spend aware of their products.
Let me give you one example. I'll guess you have some object that was given to you as a gift from someone you care a lot about. Even if this isn't the case, let's just suppose it is for the sake of my argument. If we suppose that things "have" value (in themselves), then how can you say this object, let's say, a watch, is more valuable than any other watch out there? That special person purchasing it for you didn't improve in the value that the watch "has", right?
Another example: if I go out with a $1 bill to purchase a newspaper, why does the exchange happen? Simply: because me and the seller regard what the other has as more valuable than what we have. If I or him thought the $1 bill had the same value of the newspaper, why would we bother exchanging? Wouldn't it be simpler for we to keep what we already had? Hence, I accept purchasing the newspaper because I think it's worth more than me keeping my $1 bill, and he accepts selling it to me because he thinks my $1 bill is worth more than he keeping the newspaper.
This is how economy works in the real world. Nothing "has" value. Things "get" value. And this value comes from elsewhere. It doesn't come from the "work" needed to produce them. Rather, it comes solely from the "utility" both the purchaser and the maker see in it.
And the fact is: as far as media goes, purchasers see less and less value in it as time goes by. That's the sole truth in this.
1) No more DVD's will be created because it has become unprofitable business.
2) The creators will try and protect their DVD's through various copy protection systems, some of which will eventually invade your privacy to assure that protection.
You see, you lose in both cases. Actually, neither case is true. In fact, I have started a small movie studio. We haven't done anything yet, as the bureaucracy around here is overwhelming, not to mention expensive, but we have good plans for when that's sorted out. And guess what? I don't mind people copying whatever I produce. Because I know that there are tons of people out there that are just like me: they'll purchase what they like from the creator nevertheless. So much that I plan using the Pirate Bay as a means of official marketing distribution. I simply don't need to force my non-customers to become "customers" (emphatic quotes). I only need the number of watchers to grow to a big enough pool so that the number of voluntary payers is big enough to cover costs and provide some profit.
As you can see, I surely put my money where my mouth is. I don't believe in copyright, and I sure as hell live by this skepticism. BTW, how do you feel about blog linkjacking? You know, when people take other peoples images and copy them to their blog surrounding them with adsense. That this look moral to you? Yes. I've even set up my sites, from my blog to the online political magazine I'm currently developing, to allow image hotlinking. Sure, I protect myself from the bandwidth cost by diverting these loads through CoralCDN, what might cause the images to load slowly to whoever is hotlinking. But other than that, I simply don't mind.
By the way: everything I myself write I put under a Creative Commons license that allows for profit usage. What if a Fortune 500 company X takes your photos and uses it in a multi million dollar campaign, not even asking you for your permission. Are you going to be like "good for them, it's their right, it's only a digital copy"? I don't think so. So you thought wrong.
But said company should be aware of the "share alike" clause in the license. If they use my things on something they do, I'm damn sure I'll use their derivative work one something I do.
There was work employed in making the first copy of the movie. Million of dollars worth of work, usually. I wont deny it. But once the movie was finished, work stopped being employed in it. Since it's been completed, it's just "there", no additional work being employed in it. Just like air.
The wrong assumption intellectual content creators make is that they should be able to do something once, and keep earning money from it afterwards. Remove that assumption, replace it with one stating that intellectual content creation is no different a job than any other, thus that creators are entitled to earn money for doing their job while they are creating something, but no more afterwards, and the whole problem just goes away.
No, it isn't. That's what the air example is about. People want air much, MUCH more than they want, say, music. But they aren't paying for it either. Simply because no matter how much you fill your lungs, there's still more air than lungs in the world.
Digital goods is the same. You could fill all hard disks in the world with thousands of copies of the same music, plus all DVD-Rs, and all memory cards, and there would still be an infinite supply of that same music available. Thus, a $0 value.
This isn't to mean that producers of intellectual content should do their work for free. They can obviously demand payment to make new content, and be paid by whoever wants that new content badly enough. But once said content is produced, once the original interested party paid the producer for his work, once said work as been digitized... then offer becomes infinite. And thus additional copies have their value decreased to $0.
That's the point really: the very first, original version has economic value, because there's no supply at all. All the derived copies of the original have no value, because they're in infinite supply.
So, the only two logical economic options are for intellectual producers to figure a way to be rewarded by either their effort in producing the first copy, or by some other means that don't revolve about being rewarded by additional copies. Contrary to standard commoditization of mass produced material goods, digitization offers no middle ground between the first, hugely valuable version of an intellectual production, and the infinitely available, zero valued copies that pop out of it, and intellectual producers must learn to deal with this fact.
Arguing that intellectual producers should be paid doesn't change the basic economic equation of offer vs. demand. Believing it does, believing that "work employed to produce a thing" equals "thing produced has an economic value", with the shortcut that "work = value", is incurring in the same basic error that plagued and still plagues a huge amount of (bad) economic thinking.
An example of why this doesn't work: suppose you employ one year of your life making a huge block of cement. Once your block is done, you go around trying to sell it. If no one wishes to purchase it, then your whole year of work will have ended with a value of $0, no matter how much time, effort and, yes, money, you spent to make it.
In fact, the economic value of a thing doesn't come from whatever resources were spent on producing it. It comes from whatever other people are willing to spend on it. If people don't think it's worth enough to spend money on it, then its value is $0. And infinite offer has, as a general rule, this precise outcome: $0. Unless, and that's important, the seller/producer can "add value" (i.e., add something other people think is worth spending money on) to it.
That's it basically. You don't need philosophical reasons to declare that digitized goods "want to be free". Plain classic economics suffice to demonstrate that it already is free.
Now, seriously: do you really expect me go to the trouble of browsing (offline) books to collect specific cases, write them down in a summary form, and post them here on a
If you're that interested, purchase some books or google around. Linking to sources is the most effort I'll make, sorry if that doesn't please you.
One have to love people who don't read the provided links. Quoting:
... to attack the Rockefeller family for the inordinate influence they claim we wield over American political and economic institutions. Some even believe we are part of a secret cabal working against the best interests of the United States, characterizing my family and me as 'internationalists' and of conspiring with others around the world to build a more integrated global political and economic structure - one world, if you will. If that's the charge, I stand guilty, and I am proud of it."
"For more than a century ideological extremists at either end of the political spectrum have seized upon well-publicized incidents
- David Rockefeller, "Memoirs" autobiography (2002, Random House publishers), page 405
PS.: Amazon is your friend.
The reason everything "suggested" in their bimonthly magazine, forums, conferences etc. starts being implemented by democrats and republicans alike is because they just happen to always like what they see there. In fact, it's pure coincidence, right?
The first step of any investigation is to ask yourself, no matter what happen, "cui bono?" (who benefits?). This will give you a good list of possible starting points, many of which false positives. The second step is to go around researching further evidence. And the CFR offers lots, and lots, and lots of evidence, all in the open.
A "conspiracy theory" ceases being a theory when there's hard documental evidence. It also ceases being a "conspiracy" at that. A conspiracy, by definition, is something that requires few people, all keeping secrets. There's nothing secret about the CFR. Just go to their own publications and read them.
By the way: if you want information on the specific Republican take on implementing the CFR's guidelines, a good source of information their own Project for the New American Century's website. PNAC was founded and has many CFR members.
Seriously, as long as both Democratic and Republican party leaders are members of the Council on Foreign Relations think tank as well as followers of its "suggested" policies, everything you Americans see happening on your Congress, Senate, Executive, Courts etc. that seems like divergence is actually hardly more than make believe.
Not really. The problem is that different people have different levels of proficiency on any given subject. And this means that, if you go for a fully inclusive, completely non-discriminatory collective decision on any topic, no matter which topic it is, you will never be able to pick the best option. As those with no clue pull the decisions towards what their lack of proficiency tells them, while those with excellent proficiency push it up towards an actually knowledgeable one, the resulting decision ends up being the median one. The long range result is that the lack of optimal decision making adds up over time, and a clear achievement difference develops between this system and other organizational models that favor placing power in the hands of whoever is best suited to handle it.
This was always pretty clear even for otherwise egalitarian socialists thinkers. And that's why, not wanting to follow the small bourgeoisie way of simply allowing each one to take his own decisions and deal with the consequences, all of them settled for a model where a small set of politically appointed leaders struggle to take all decisions on all important fields.
Does this centralized system work better than a full blown direct democracy one? Sure it does. But it has the problems of its own that I mentioned in my previous message: once you give power to someone, and this power isn't checked by competing power, that person will misuse it. It doesn't matter whether said power is of the bureaucratic or monopolistic types, the misuse ends up being the same.
True, but if they do so, they bankrupt and end up as bad as those fucked up, after all, there are tons of competitors eager to take their place. So they must be careful not to be crazy. Those that become crazy discover very fast that they have also become poor.
Except that it didn't happen this way. There's one thing about Brazil that makes it an interesting case study for American scholars, and anyone interested in studying the national power struggles that happened in the world since the 19th century. It's this: that both Brazil and USA were colonies of powerful European powers; both had roughly the same type of commerce with Europe at the same time during their respective colonial times, not to mention roughly the same size and natural resources; both obtained their independences from their respective European metropolis roughly at the same time; and at around their respective independences, both were poor and both had roughly the same total wealth.
And then both departed in the way they chose to handle their affairs. While at its founding USA chose do strongly decentralize their power, with its people adopting a strong self-relying, "don't mess in my personal affairs" way of life, Brazil chose centralization, with people developing a culture of government dependence to handle even their small daily activities.
The result? USA become rich and richer over time, with increased levels of productivity and a sustained increased in the wealth
One example, from my country. Here in Brazil land lines were government controlled, under the same argument that "the right to communication is too important to be left to the market". The result after 20 years of this practice? Well, you would call to the state telephony service, request a line, be put into a queue, receive your line after 4 years (yes, FOUR), with a bill to be paid in easy monthly installment for 10 years (yes, TEN).
Then we had a right-wing government take office who stopped this bullshit and went around privatizing the system. The result? Now we can call one among many competing telephony companies, ask for a line, get it in one week, pay $35 for the installation (once, not for 120 months), and that's it.
Socialist thinking is beautiful on paper. But only on paper. Once you see what it cause in practice, you quickly realize that no, capitalism works better. And that it works better for a single reason: because having to earn your money by providing you a service, a businessman cannot afford providing a craptastic service or he'll go bankrupt A government, on the other hand, can always get away with anything. Why? Because, if something goes awfully wrong, the government doesn't need to earn your money from you by your voluntary decision, it can simple demand your money in the form of new taxes and be done with it (and with you).
In other words: a bureaucrat might be willing to distribute wealth, sure. But he will alway remember to distribute to himself first. It's human nature. Voluntary deals are better simply because you can switch from a bad partner to a better one with almost no effort. Switching from a bad bureaucracy to a good one, which isn't the same as merely switching parties in an election every 4 years, that's a much, much more difficult task. Almost impossible short from an actual revolution. And even if you go for a revolution as a way to switch bureaucracies, and it succeeds, you cannot be sure the new bureaucracy will be better than the older. History, unfortunately, has consistently shown that it is either the same, or worse. Getting a better one this way unfortunately never happened.
My web hosting provider, NearlyFreeSpeech.net, is pay as you go. My remote backup storage provider, Amazon S3, is pay as you go. My land phone line and cell phone provider are both pay as you go, as are the water and power companies. The only valid exception to the rule I can think about health plans, as the cost of higher level treatments increase exponentially, not linearly, so it makes sense. But for anything else involving a linear curve, pay as you go is the best way to spend as little or as much as you want or can. Most important of all, it's fair, for you and your service provider.
So, if I had my way my broadband access provider would be too. Unfortunately, though, no broadband provider in my area offers a simple $x/GB model. In my ideal world that would be all they would charge for, at worst splitting the charge into a cheaper download rate and another, more expensive upload rate. But the connection speed itself wouldn't enter the equation, being simply the fastest allowed by my actual physical connection. After all, why cap my bandwidth if providing me as much bandwidth as possible would the best way for them to make sure I would consume all the bandwidth my heart desired? Why stop improving their backend, increasing the overall capacity, if that would only hinder my ability to consume as much as possible?
Alas, no, we're and will be stuck into this flat rate nonsense for yet a long time to come, suffering from all the "make them use less, less, LESS!!!" mentality that those companies have to follow to see increasing profits.
Do you want to see broadband providers and backbones drop the whole set of anti-net neutrality practices and discourses? Without the need of for any law? Simply make them drop the flat rate model and charge proportionally more from heavy users. It's as simple as that. Any other "solution" necessarily involves and requires overselling coupled to traffic shaping. There's no way around this.