PS: Your "all immigrants are poor and ignorant" bit makes you look racist and ignorant.
What would be funny, since I live in a 3rd world country, and my family is entirely composed of immigrants. The 1st generation was poor and ignorant, but managed to improve both things. The next two generations enriched a lot. Then my generation arrived, and lost everything due to pure idiocy, what brings us back to the "poor and ignorant" level, I guess. Now I'd love to emigrate to somewhere where a dish cleaner earns more than me, and that because in my country I'm seen as a "middle class" citizen (haha). Soooo, if you have a green card available, I'm up to it! Dish cleaning, there I go!!!;)
PS.: You're a troll, but an honest one. Either hell freeze over, or the world is really improving. Maybe both.:D
Let me try give you a concrete example: I do similar work to my dad. At my age my dad was able to support a family of several kids and buy a reasonable sized house. I live on my own and can only afford a much smaller place.
Have you tried subjecting yourself to the same level of technology and entertainment he afforded? You'd have a lot more money in your hands if you did, but I bet you'd think your life to be horrible.
Also in the older days usually only the male worked, now it takes two working professionals as a couple to be able to get a similar amount of household wealth. We get less "wealth" for the same amount of work, when intuitively it should be the opposite due to leaps in technology.
No, this is another question. Prices are set according to demand. Thus, if nowadays "a house" means "two persons earning salaries", while previously it meant "one person earning a salary", it's no wonder that sellers will sell for double the price. This is the intuitive answer, not the other way around. Besides, this extra money they receive doesn't stays stopped somewhere, it's spent on other things, what in turn means more people receiving better salaries, and getting out of the poverty line.
By the way, if purchasing a pre-build house is too expensive for you, no one is preventing you from purchasing an empty piece of land and building your house yourself on weekends. All the men in my family, in the three generations before mine, did it this way (my generation, on the other hand, is composed of a bunch of lazy ones, myself included, so we don't go this path). Result: they managed to build two or three houses for the price of one, then went to live in one of those and rent the other two.
You should read a little more carefully. Also, make sure you get all the way to the last paragraph; I directly addressed what happens when earnings are too low, which of course includes $0.
Sorry, but your whole argument makes no sense at all. There's no "these people" who are working more and getting less. The "these people" that in the 1950's worked 'n' hours to get service 'y', now are retired. They work zero hours to get service 'y'. And even if we take one that's still working, he works much less than 'n' hours to get service 'y'. In short: they moved up in the social ladder. The same applying to their sons. And to their grandsons. And maybe even their great-grandsons.
How about the "these people" who nowadays get this legally-existing, but fictional reality-wise, thing called "minimum wage"? Are they worse? No, they aren't. They're better. Better than what? Than what they were before. And what were they before, in, say, the 1950's? In the 1950's, they (or, rather, they immediate ancestors were) were most of the time extremely poor, unschooled workers living in the poorest rural areas of some extremely poor 3rd world country. People who earned way, way, WAY below the USA's 1950's "minimum" wage. Who managed, or their sons, or their grandsons, to finally emigrate to the USA. And who thus climbed the social ladder, becoming so prosperous in comparison to before, that they're now able to earn USA's "minimum" wage. In fifty years, they'll have climbed even more, and will be purchasing goods an services they today cannot even dream about.
All the while new people will have climbed to the level of entering the (then) "minimum" wage line, people for whom today's "minimum" US earners can only be seen as "rich".
If society was static, stratified, without any social mobility, you'd be correct. But it isn't. And since it isn't, the only valid historical analysis one can make is what happened to specific individuals over time. Only by averaging this information you can know whether things are becoming better or worse. Anything else is, at best, useless play with meaningless statistics.
The Austrian School was founded by Ludwig von Mises and (Nobel Prize Winner) F.A. Hayek, among others.
No, no. They're important in that they brought it to USA, but it's much older. The Austrian School was founded in the 1870's by Carl Menger. Mises and Hayek are respectively the 3rd and 4th generation of Austrian economists. Hayek studied under Mises, who studied under Böhm-Bawerk, who studied Menger (not under him though; by reading his works).
. . . minimum wage, by setting the earning level for the very lowest earning class of people who actually work within the system, places a hard line that cannot be crossed with regard to what such a worker can obtain within the system. You can't get below it, because you can't be paid less.
Of course you can. You can be paid $0. What minimum wage causes in fact is this: someone who would be able to earn $x, "x" being less than "minimum", is prohibited from doing so. So, he switches into earning what he's allowed: $0. Or, to be more realistic, into earning $x anyway, only illegally.
This is a very poor understanding of the Austrian method. What it actually does is to provide some very broad concepts which constitute what me might call a "metatheoretic framework". This framework, called "praxeology", is in turn used to develop theories about specific economic phenomena. And these theories can be falsified.
So, for example, using this Austrian methodology, the leading theorist of the school, Ludwig von Mises (who in fact gave the thing its name, "praxeology"), made an extensive list of very specific predictions on what would happen in any strongly planned economy that followed Marx' system, writing them in his book Socialism (available for download, so you can confirm for yourself). Note that this was just a few years after the 1917 Russian Revolution, before Lenin had had time to barely start implementing his projects, and without any factual feedback on what was happening in Russia. So, 70 years later, when the iron curtain fell and Western observers could go into the USSR and see things for themselves, not through Soviet propaganda, what did they find? That every single prediction made by Mises was fulfilled. He didn't miss the mark on any of them. As a result, one can say with confidence that the Austrian theory on the effects of socialist planning is, as far as we know, correct. Or, at least, "falsifiable, actually tested, and so far not yet falsified", to put it in a more popperian way.
But what about praxeology itself? Why can't it be falsified? Simply put, because it isn't a theory, nor is it meant to be taken as one. It's a tool. Roughly speaking, you could say that it serves, in Austrian theories, the same purpose served by mathematics in Physics. Can you falsify mathematics? No, because one does not "test" mathematics, one "uses" it to construct tests. Does it causes Physics theories to not be scientific? Of course not, because these theories (that in turn use mathematics) are testable. The same applies to praxeology. And let's not forget that both praxeology and mathematics have the same metatheoretical basis, logics, which for the same reason is never "tested", only "used".
Now, the problem in the text you linked is this: both its author and the person whom he mentions aren't talking about the precise same thing, and since neither know the correct way to clarify the discussion, each understands what the other is saying under the wrong assumption. So, both would profit a lot from studying some philosophy of science, as it helps to understand the differences between theories and metatheories. After all, if you take a metatheory as if it were a theory, as they both do, you end up talking nonsense, no matter whether you're "for" or "against" it.
I, personally, don't care either way. Until 2002 or so I was a huge Yahoo user. Now, except for some occasional visits to Flikr, and for being subscribed to some YahooGroups mailing lists, many of which I in fact was a subscriber of since it still was an independent company called eGroups, I hardly ever remember Yahoo exists. Now, if Microsoft were trying to acquire Google, then I'd worry. But the way things are, it acquiring Yahoo doesn't matter much.
What's more interesting is to note that these "no-Muhammad-images!!!" iconoclastic idiots are not followers of any traditional branch of Islam. If you look at centuries old Islamic books, in lots and lots and lots of them you'll find drawings of Muhammad and other people, meaning such drawings were never, ever forbidden.
In the end, these Islamic iconoclasts are roughly similar to those Christian Puritans who, finding mainstream Christianity too relaxed, invented tons of new, very strict rules that no one but themselves think everyone else must follow.
Keep both parties feedback hidden, until both have left feedback. Zero chance for retaliation. Problem solved.
This is how it's done on MercadoLivre, the Brazilian auction site purchased by eBay some years ago (but for some reason not integrated into the eBay ecosystem): both the buyer and the seller have 'x' days to rate each other and write comments explaining the reason for the rating; neither can see the rating received before both rated each other (or the timer has run out if one preferred not to rate, at which case the rating is automatically set as "neutral"); once both can see each other granted ratings and comments, they both have 'y' days to write a reply to their respective ratings/comments, so that 3rd parties can judge based on the whole set of rating, comment and reply (if any). IMHO, it works fairly well.
I don't know how the US version of eBay works, but if it really allows one side to see the other's rating/comment before requiring him to also rate/comment, it's utterly broken. For me, however, the proposed solution doesn't seem to make sense. Adopting MercadoLivre's system would have been better.
Yeah, that would actually make sense, you know, if you also had the right to own guided missiles and tanks. I mean, what are you going to do with your assault rifle against those?
I'm not American so I haven't studied the American Constitution as much as an (interested) American would, and in consequence what I say here might be wrong, but from what I've read on a lot of websites dealing with this 2nd Amendment issue, the actual meaning of the text is that any citizen, including group of citizens, is constitutionally allowed to own the same weapons used by the military at any given time, because otherwise the right of overthrowing the government would be effectively void, nothing more than dead letter.
And yes, this means grenades, machine guns, guided missiles, tanks etc., up to and including thermonuclear bombs. The notion that individuals owning weapons of mass destruction is too much of a risk was not part of the ideas of the Founding Fathers.
Thus, any law forbidding you of owning these things, or even of forbidding you of carrying them wherever you want, is unconstitutional. What, sadly, doesn't mean much if no one is willing to fight for those rights to be upheld and stay valid.
Do you know how much it costs, per foot, to run an over head powerline? The enterance cost of power distribution is huge! A company would have to spend billions of dollars to develop and install a 2nd set of copper to run power to all the same places that the exiting power company's lines run to.
Well, to run these lines to all of them, yes. But we're talking about fully government-unrestricted competition. A company could start by building a power plant designed to compete on a small scale at a single location. Or be creative and do something else. In any case, either it would be economically feasible, meaning prices and profit the current power company have are way above what they should; or they are on the spot or near it, meaning no competition is necessary, maybe because the current power company fears it and isn't raising prices all it could. And what if it does increase prices absurdly over the night? Then we go back to case #1, in which building a new plant and competing is economically interesting.
Actual competition on one hand, resulting in lowering prices; or "virtual competition" due to fear of actual competition, resulting in prices already below what would make it an interesting market for competitors. In either case, it's the price that keeps offer and demand balanced. I really don't understand what is it that people see as "wrong" when they look at this.
The same with ISPs and roadways. I guess you'd propose that these new companies spend billions of dollars digging new power lines laying new data lines and roadways, just so that they can compete, it wouldn't happen and people would be horribly exploited.
Wait, wait. You must chose one or the other. Either providing power/networking/etc. is extremely profitable, meaning it costs little and can be sold for a lot, or it also costs a lot, and thus the profits aren't that huge in comparison. Now, in either case, it's still a matter of investing 'x' and recovering 'x' over some time, then profit afterwards. Why, exactly, wouldn't competitors be interested?
On the other hand, let's suppose, for the sake of argumentation, that you're correct, that neither new power lines aren't built, nor some other solution is developed (and yes, you underestimate the level of ingenuity the "profit motive" can leverage), and thus that electricity stays very, very expensive, in a true "natural monopoly" situation. Well, wouldn't that mean a lower amount of electricity being produced over a given period of time compared to what we have now? Now, where does electricity come from? Mostly from oil, coal, gas and nuclear sources, right? So, doesn't less electricity being consumed means a lower consumption of finite natural resources? In other words, the options we have in a free market of energy are either correct offer vs. demand prices due to creative competition, or a kind of forced nature preservation. I don't know about you, but whatever the outcome of such a move was, to me it still would seem like a win-win situation.
We could go into hospitals as that as the perennial examples against free market systems, but I am sure everyone has heard these
Er... I haven't. But from what I see here in Brazil, where we have a lot of both public-owned and private hospitals, the private ones are always better, and not too expensive. I pay $60/month for a private health plan, and I have access to all (yes, all) evidence-based treatments available to all known illnesses. Now, admittedly, the government has had some influence in this, as it has over time increased the minimum requirements private health plans must obey, all the while however failing miserably in making their own hospitals reach 10% of what it demands from private ones. Even so, though, the health plan companies manage to comply, and as they compete against each other for customers, their services improve, as do their hospitals.
But I have no precise idea on how the health system in the USA works, though. If you would be so kind as to explain I'd be thankful.
Do you know why we got away from the gold standard? Because it was one of the major causes of the Great Depression.
This makes no sense. Gold was the standard for, what, 10 thousand years? Why weren't "great depressions" a regular outcome then? Actually, the cause of the 1929 depression was Wilson's government granting loans at subsidized rates. That caused people to invest money on companies that seemed profitable, because their profit rate was above the fictional loan rate. The moment such subside wasn't sustainable anymore and had to stop, millions of people noticed that what they had in hands were in fact shares of profitless, bankrupt companies. The result is history.
It is also far less flexible than the monetary systems we use today such that an attempt to go back to it would cause a major deflation in the currency while skyrocketing the value of gold.
Not true. One argument against the gold standard is that it is in fact no more rigid than the current fiat money. In the end of the Roman Empire, for example, they created a bubble by issuing "new money" much like the FED does nowadays, but did so in ways compatible with a gold currency: by merging silver and other less valuable metals in coins, causing the number of coins to increase. Result: inflation (more coins in economy, but same amount of goods and services, means more coins to purchase the same goods and services) and recession.
In any case, it was less flexible than fiat money today is, and that's why you see in history a much less chaotic economy than what we've witnessed in 20th century. Flexibility is a problem, not a solution. It allows government to cause economy to move faster than it naturally could for a while, what is good for those living the expansion, but once the accelerated speed cannot be sustained anymore it comes the required slowdown, until equilibrium is reached again, what's horrible to those who experience it (and who are, usually, the same people who experienced the increase). A gold standard, allowing for less manipulation, blocks the accelerated development, but it also blocks the speed decrease. The end result is the same development, but under a linear and, thus, less exciting but also less painful, growth rate.
Not that the gold standard will come back. It won't. Politicians love the power fiat money gives them. If people have to endure an unending sequence of bubble/bursts cycles in consequence, why would they care? They stay in office for 4 or 8 years, which is usually less than what a full cycle takes. Thinking on the long term is not necessary. So they don't.
I mean, wouldn't it be liberating to wake up and get an electric bill for 50c/KW hour because of complete de-regulation of the electricity generation market?
Such a huge premium wouldn't attract new companies wishing to profit? More companies in the same market doesn't cause competition to increase? Increased competition doesn't cause prices to fall? Repeat the cycle some times and you'll reach the correct offer vs. demand price for electricity.
And how free I would feel when all those crappy last mile ISP's are bought out by the back bone owners and all of my traffic gets tiered, filtered, and over charged.
Wouldn't this suddenly turn wireless networks into a pretty attractive market, attracting new companies wishing to profit? The same argument above applies.
And just think about how cool it would be if the government got it's fat nose out of the way so that we could have 1 supreme software development company that could use it's control of the desktop market to crush any of those pesky competitors.
Wouldn't a deregulated market lack any IP protection? No IP protection means anyone would be able to copy and install any software anywhere. Same goes to reverse engineering. Without a government putting its fat nose on the way of the free market (by inventing these government-requiring institutions of copyrights and patents), any software company is a service provider company. So, no, it wouldn't happen.
Yeah, the combination of libertarian reduction of government ideals with the open market theory and the republican 'business first!' attitude... that would truly be an inspiring country.
Ah, but then, you see, if you're "pro-business" (in the sense of granting subsidies, imposing barriers, crafting anti-free-market laws etc.), then, simply put, you're not a libertarian. And vice-versa.
Don't get me wrong, I am all for the reduction of government in some arenas, but the idea of having a fire sale of all of the federal government's powers is not the way to do it. All that will result in is shifting power from the government to a small number of corporations. And corporations as we all know, can not be held accountable, have no morals, and have a responsibility only to the stock holders' investments.
By the way: in my opinion, a true libertarian must be against the limitation of liability that shareholders enjoy. The libertarian ideal of "free-market capitalism" only works when our freedom is counterbalanced by we having absolute responsibility for our actions. And you only get that, at the speculative market, once purchasing shares of a company links you, your well-being, your future, your destiny, to those of that company. At the prospect of you going on jail if the company commits a crime, even if you only own a single share. Do this, and you'll notice corporations becoming very good neighbors from day to night.
That doesn't mean that stealing from them is okay.
I've just copied your message, pasted it into a text file, and saved it to my hard disk. I have STOLEN YOUR INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY !!! Soooo, just for the sake of keeping our respective accounting records synchronized, could you please tell me by how many dollars I've diminished your property with my T-H-E-F-T act? Because, you see, on my book it says I'm exactly $0.00 richer.
To make things clear, an old meme: copyright infringement isn't theft.
My definition of desktop is any machine I use regularly through its GUI console. Maybe too broad, but it works for me.
Mine is a little more literal: it's any computer whose natural place, so to speak, is on the "top" of a "desk". If it's designed to be used while being carried around, or anywhere other than the top of a desk, then, and only then, it's not a "desk-top".
That hologram was created from temporal changes in the light captured (with guesstimates about the fields the light goes through), it didn't exist in the light.
The hologram that was obtained from temporal changes in the light captured is a fair approximation of the original one that existed (and still exists) in the it. Or, to be more precise, it is the same hologram, but with differing accidents.
Information in this case is an interpretation (or reification) of scientists parameters, light data, and correlation by computer into one hologram.
The information here is the recovering of qualitative (formal) realities constitutive of their quantifiable aspects. The fact that the same formal quality can be carried by completely different "materias", be it electromagnetic waves, mathematical formulas (including binary representation), imaginative representation, printed pictures etc., only further strengthens the perceived fact that forms, although only "interactive" while substances, are nevertheless independent from their carrying materia.
Information (such as hologram) doesn't exist outside the context of conscious systems able to interpret it. Light doesn't carry the information, the patterns are arising from temporal changes in light.
Information (such as holograms) are as much reality as the material substrate which carries them. Light is absolutely real, as is the information carried by it. The perceived patterns are the form, temporal changes in quantifiable electromagnetic fields are the matter, qualified light being the resulting ontological substance.
To pretend otherwise, i.e., to bifurcate reality into perception as the subjective epiphenomena of indirectly quantifiable parameters, as if these constituted the whole reality of an entity, is an arbitrary philosophical proposition itself devoid of objective evidence. A table isn't "in reality" just a set of organized atoms. A table is "in reality" a table, which happens to have a complex structure which includes a subset of measurable characteristics, one of which we call "atoms".
To be a "conscious system" is nothing more than to be an entity apt to perceive and actively interact with and over a broad range of non-quantifiable aspects of other entities, including but not limited to their direct and indirect formative universals.
Still think teens (in the US at least) have no money?
These are amazing numbers! Now I understand what it means for a country to be a third of the world's economy. Americans are really, REALLY rich... O_o
In any case, it's still enough to only purchase much less digital content than what they're able (in terms of available free time) and willing (due to marketing-driven desire) to consume. And this means they will pirate anyway, unless prices get low enough to properly balance supply and demand. There's no way around it.
Do we really only perceive biologists as madmen who want to do evil experients for the heck of it?
Why do you think a lot of research is being made on the subject of bio-ethics? It's easy to lose sight of the whole picture when you're shielded from the external world (i.e., from the valuations that comprise the whole of social interaction) by the four walls of a research institution. When that happens, it's even easier for the researcher to enter into a Milgram pattern of moral decay and, as every taboo is broken, go practicing more a more immoral and amoral research.
That's not to say biologists are in themselves evil, that would be stupid. Rather, what happens is just that they're human, and being human, as much subject to human defects as everyone else. And just look into history to see how far from small the list of these defects is. The key, thus, isn't to prevent biological research, but to prevent those defects from arising and taking the front line. And at the core, that's what SF works showing evil scientist are all about: not that science is evil, but that science is made by humans who can be evil.
Actually, race does not come down to those finer points, race isn't a real category. It is a made up class that people are assigned to.
Correct. And let's not forget that it's a very recent categorization. The whole notion comes from the 17th century biologists, and in itself it's just one among the many, many bogus theories developed at the time, which unfortunately became popular. Before then people were of course recognized as being from this or that nationality or ethnicity due to their appearance, but there hardly was any deep valuation linked to this. Even the "common knowledge" that at some point the Catholic Church seriously debated whether blacks had or hadn't souls is nothing more than urban legend, for at least three of the earliest Popes were black, and not only that, but all of them also canonized.
And let's not forget also that, as far as slavery goes, almost everyone is descendant of slaves, with the Europeans being all, with very few exceptions, descendants of tribes and whole peoples enslaved by, either the Greek, or the Romans, or the Nordic tribes, or depending on the case all of them in succession, with these guys also enslaving each other and even themselves all the time. Racists who love to look down on blacks because their ancestors were slaves should stop being idiots and look on the mirror and then, for consistency, down at themselves, for they're no exception to their own "rule". If anything, they were freed a little earlier, which is hardly something to be that proud of.
Steam doesn't offer a monthly subscription fee of any kind..You still purchase games.
You're correct, of course. Sorry for the wrong information. I had GameTap in mind, but for some reason ended up writing "Steam". Most probably a Freudian slip.;-)
Your reply is in line to what I'd have replied to the OP, but I find it interesting that it goes contrary to what you say in your linked journal article. There you criticize libertarian economics (wrongly, IMHO, because the evils you attribute to capitalism are in fact produced by state interference in the market), while in this message you used libertarian arguments.
I'd suggest you visit www.mises.org, search and read some articles on the subjects you mentioned in your journal (such as on what happened in the 1920's and in the 1980's), then download and start reading some of the fundamental libertarian books, such as Ludwig von Mises' seminal Human Action. I bet you'll change your mind on a number of subjects, even if not in all of them.
Oh we don't transport contraband across the border we provide trucks for both legal and illegal goods we simply don't pass judgment on those using the service.
This is a perfectly reasonable line of action. Why should some goods from abroad be tagged "illegal" by some clueless bureaucrat? I know what I want to buy. I don't need them to block me from purchasing what they dislike.
What if you spent five years working on a video game. You start selling the game and it's moderately popular so you start making 10K a month. Some one posts it on Pirate Bay then miraculously your revenue drops to 2K a month and you have to go back to working at Fries Electronics and you can't aford to make another video game. Is it still a victimless crime?
Then you did a poor market research. You see: offline games can be pirated easily, don't expect generally underfunded teens not to pirate them. Online subscription-based games, on the other hand, not so much. On one extreme, WoW alone has 10 million paying players and counting, with just a few, almost empty pirate servers scattered here and there; on the other, Steam offers almost any game you might wish, all under a cheap monthly fee. And online free games, where your revenue comes from advertising and/or selling in-game items? Well, just look at the profits those South-Korean software-houses make. Some of those games have more than 25 million players.
But talking about children and teens again, I don't get it. Why do game and media companies focus so much on selling to people who have NO MONEY?!? For the typical teen, who only has a computer because his dad gave him one on Christmas, paying $50 on a game is most of the time impossible, period. I'm 30-years old and only now I'm starting to be in a position where spending $50 now and then on useless entertainment is becoming something I can do without a second thought.
If you're a lone developer really wanting to make money by selling offline games, I suggest you make something very casual-friendly (10 minute play time is ideal), playable by people in their 30s and 40s who aren't gamers (think the Solitaire or MineSweeper loving kind), and good enough to be picked up by something like RealArcade. It's convenient enough and, at $15 or $20, also cheap enough for its target audience. Two clicks, they have the game installed, Real has its share, and you have your money, everything with hardly any piracy at all, since those games are not what (poor) teens usually look for when they want to play something.
At this stage it's a no win situation so I personally look forward to all the music and movie studios closing their doors. Then people will really have something to complain about. I just hope there's enough mirrors to go around so people can see who to blame. The people running those companies will just move on to another industry it's the average person that watches the movies and listens to the music that will suffer.
As the fine folks of the Swedish Pirate Party have put it, the ease with which anyone can copy anything on the Internet has caused a dichotomy to develop between entertainment business, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, technological development and online privacy. For the entertainment business profits to remain as high as they were before the Internet developed the only long term solution is both for key technological developments to be blocked as well as for intrusive (and very exploitable) online surveillance laws targeting all citizens to be passed and enacted in as many countries and jurisdictions as possible. It's either this, or the entertainment business adapting to a lower revenue stream.
So, if our options are between and unencumbered technological developments, a free Internet, and no authoritarian surveillance society, with the downside of "music and movie studios closing", as you put it; or a strongly controlled technological landscape, a locked Internet with mandatory ISP content analysis, and government backed intrusive preemptive surveillance of online activities, with the upside of music and movie studios making tons of money; I know which one I prefer. What about you?
Slashdot Mirror
PS.: You're a troll, but an honest one. Either hell freeze over, or the world is really improving. Maybe both.
By the way, if purchasing a pre-build house is too expensive for you, no one is preventing you from purchasing an empty piece of land and building your house yourself on weekends. All the men in my family, in the three generations before mine, did it this way (my generation, on the other hand, is composed of a bunch of lazy ones, myself included, so we don't go this path). Result: they managed to build two or three houses for the price of one, then went to live in one of those and rent the other two.
How about the "these people" who nowadays get this legally-existing, but fictional reality-wise, thing called "minimum wage"? Are they worse? No, they aren't. They're better. Better than what? Than what they were before. And what were they before, in, say, the 1950's? In the 1950's, they (or, rather, they immediate ancestors were) were most of the time extremely poor, unschooled workers living in the poorest rural areas of some extremely poor 3rd world country. People who earned way, way, WAY below the USA's 1950's "minimum" wage. Who managed, or their sons, or their grandsons, to finally emigrate to the USA. And who thus climbed the social ladder, becoming so prosperous in comparison to before, that they're now able to earn USA's "minimum" wage. In fifty years, they'll have climbed even more, and will be purchasing goods an services they today cannot even dream about.
All the while new people will have climbed to the level of entering the (then) "minimum" wage line, people for whom today's "minimum" US earners can only be seen as "rich".
If society was static, stratified, without any social mobility, you'd be correct. But it isn't. And since it isn't, the only valid historical analysis one can make is what happened to specific individuals over time. Only by averaging this information you can know whether things are becoming better or worse. Anything else is, at best, useless play with meaningless statistics.
This is a very poor understanding of the Austrian method. What it actually does is to provide some very broad concepts which constitute what me might call a "metatheoretic framework". This framework, called "praxeology", is in turn used to develop theories about specific economic phenomena. And these theories can be falsified.
So, for example, using this Austrian methodology, the leading theorist of the school, Ludwig von Mises (who in fact gave the thing its name, "praxeology"), made an extensive list of very specific predictions on what would happen in any strongly planned economy that followed Marx' system, writing them in his book Socialism (available for download, so you can confirm for yourself). Note that this was just a few years after the 1917 Russian Revolution, before Lenin had had time to barely start implementing his projects, and without any factual feedback on what was happening in Russia. So, 70 years later, when the iron curtain fell and Western observers could go into the USSR and see things for themselves, not through Soviet propaganda, what did they find? That every single prediction made by Mises was fulfilled. He didn't miss the mark on any of them. As a result, one can say with confidence that the Austrian theory on the effects of socialist planning is, as far as we know, correct. Or, at least, "falsifiable, actually tested, and so far not yet falsified", to put it in a more popperian way.
But what about praxeology itself? Why can't it be falsified? Simply put, because it isn't a theory, nor is it meant to be taken as one. It's a tool. Roughly speaking, you could say that it serves, in Austrian theories, the same purpose served by mathematics in Physics. Can you falsify mathematics? No, because one does not "test" mathematics, one "uses" it to construct tests. Does it causes Physics theories to not be scientific? Of course not, because these theories (that in turn use mathematics) are testable. The same applies to praxeology. And let's not forget that both praxeology and mathematics have the same metatheoretical basis, logics, which for the same reason is never "tested", only "used".
Now, the problem in the text you linked is this: both its author and the person whom he mentions aren't talking about the precise same thing, and since neither know the correct way to clarify the discussion, each understands what the other is saying under the wrong assumption. So, both would profit a lot from studying some philosophy of science, as it helps to understand the differences between theories and metatheories. After all, if you take a metatheory as if it were a theory, as they both do, you end up talking nonsense, no matter whether you're "for" or "against" it.
What's more interesting is to note that these "no-Muhammad-images!!!" iconoclastic idiots are not followers of any traditional branch of Islam. If you look at centuries old Islamic books, in lots and lots and lots of them you'll find drawings of Muhammad and other people, meaning such drawings were never, ever forbidden.
In the end, these Islamic iconoclasts are roughly similar to those Christian Puritans who, finding mainstream Christianity too relaxed, invented tons of new, very strict rules that no one but themselves think everyone else must follow.
I don't know how the US version of eBay works, but if it really allows one side to see the other's rating/comment before requiring him to also rate/comment, it's utterly broken. For me, however, the proposed solution doesn't seem to make sense. Adopting MercadoLivre's system would have been better.
And yes, this means grenades, machine guns, guided missiles, tanks etc., up to and including thermonuclear bombs. The notion that individuals owning weapons of mass destruction is too much of a risk was not part of the ideas of the Founding Fathers.
Thus, any law forbidding you of owning these things, or even of forbidding you of carrying them wherever you want, is unconstitutional. What, sadly, doesn't mean much if no one is willing to fight for those rights to be upheld and stay valid.
Actual competition on one hand, resulting in lowering prices; or "virtual competition" due to fear of actual competition, resulting in prices already below what would make it an interesting market for competitors. In either case, it's the price that keeps offer and demand balanced. I really don't understand what is it that people see as "wrong" when they look at this.
On the other hand, let's suppose, for the sake of argumentation, that you're correct, that neither new power lines aren't built, nor some other solution is developed (and yes, you underestimate the level of ingenuity the "profit motive" can leverage), and thus that electricity stays very, very expensive, in a true "natural monopoly" situation. Well, wouldn't that mean a lower amount of electricity being produced over a given period of time compared to what we have now? Now, where does electricity come from? Mostly from oil, coal, gas and nuclear sources, right? So, doesn't less electricity being consumed means a lower consumption of finite natural resources? In other words, the options we have in a free market of energy are either correct offer vs. demand prices due to creative competition, or a kind of forced nature preservation. I don't know about you, but whatever the outcome of such a move was, to me it still would seem like a win-win situation.Er... I haven't. But from what I see here in Brazil, where we have a lot of both public-owned and private hospitals, the private ones are always better, and not too expensive. I pay $60/month for a private health plan, and I have access to all (yes, all) evidence-based treatments available to all known illnesses. Now, admittedly, the government has had some influence in this, as it has over time increased the minimum requirements private health plans must obey, all the while however failing miserably in making their own hospitals reach 10% of what it demands from private ones. Even so, though, the health plan companies manage to comply, and as they compete against each other for customers, their services improve, as do their hospitals.
But I have no precise idea on how the health system in the USA works, though. If you would be so kind as to explain I'd be thankful.
In any case, it was less flexible than fiat money today is, and that's why you see in history a much less chaotic economy than what we've witnessed in 20th century. Flexibility is a problem, not a solution. It allows government to cause economy to move faster than it naturally could for a while, what is good for those living the expansion, but once the accelerated speed cannot be sustained anymore it comes the required slowdown, until equilibrium is reached again, what's horrible to those who experience it (and who are, usually, the same people who experienced the increase). A gold standard, allowing for less manipulation, blocks the accelerated development, but it also blocks the speed decrease. The end result is the same development, but under a linear and, thus, less exciting but also less painful, growth rate.
Not that the gold standard will come back. It won't. Politicians love the power fiat money gives them. If people have to endure an unending sequence of bubble/bursts cycles in consequence, why would they care? They stay in office for 4 or 8 years, which is usually less than what a full cycle takes. Thinking on the long term is not necessary. So they don't.
Now, back to the real world...
To make things clear, an old meme: copyright infringement isn't theft.
To pretend otherwise, i.e., to bifurcate reality into perception as the subjective epiphenomena of indirectly quantifiable parameters, as if these constituted the whole reality of an entity, is an arbitrary philosophical proposition itself devoid of objective evidence. A table isn't "in reality" just a set of organized atoms. A table is "in reality" a table, which happens to have a complex structure which includes a subset of measurable characteristics, one of which we call "atoms".
To be a "conscious system" is nothing more than to be an entity apt to perceive and actively interact with and over a broad range of non-quantifiable aspects of other entities, including but not limited to their direct and indirect formative universals.
In any case, it's still enough to only purchase much less digital content than what they're able (in terms of available free time) and willing (due to marketing-driven desire) to consume. And this means they will pirate anyway, unless prices get low enough to properly balance supply and demand. There's no way around it.
That's not to say biologists are in themselves evil, that would be stupid. Rather, what happens is just that they're human, and being human, as much subject to human defects as everyone else. And just look into history to see how far from small the list of these defects is. The key, thus, isn't to prevent biological research, but to prevent those defects from arising and taking the front line. And at the core, that's what SF works showing evil scientist are all about: not that science is evil, but that science is made by humans who can be evil.
Sometimes, to the extreme.
And let's not forget also that, as far as slavery goes, almost everyone is descendant of slaves, with the Europeans being all, with very few exceptions, descendants of tribes and whole peoples enslaved by, either the Greek, or the Romans, or the Nordic tribes, or depending on the case all of them in succession, with these guys also enslaving each other and even themselves all the time. Racists who love to look down on blacks because their ancestors were slaves should stop being idiots and look on the mirror and then, for consistency, down at themselves, for they're no exception to their own "rule". If anything, they were freed a little earlier, which is hardly something to be that proud of.
Your reply is in line to what I'd have replied to the OP, but I find it interesting that it goes contrary to what you say in your linked journal article. There you criticize libertarian economics (wrongly, IMHO, because the evils you attribute to capitalism are in fact produced by state interference in the market), while in this message you used libertarian arguments.
I'd suggest you visit www.mises.org, search and read some articles on the subjects you mentioned in your journal (such as on what happened in the 1920's and in the 1980's), then download and start reading some of the fundamental libertarian books, such as Ludwig von Mises' seminal Human Action. I bet you'll change your mind on a number of subjects, even if not in all of them.
But talking about children and teens again, I don't get it. Why do game and media companies focus so much on selling to people who have NO MONEY?!? For the typical teen, who only has a computer because his dad gave him one on Christmas, paying $50 on a game is most of the time impossible, period. I'm 30-years old and only now I'm starting to be in a position where spending $50 now and then on useless entertainment is becoming something I can do without a second thought.
If you're a lone developer really wanting to make money by selling offline games, I suggest you make something very casual-friendly (10 minute play time is ideal), playable by people in their 30s and 40s who aren't gamers (think the Solitaire or MineSweeper loving kind), and good enough to be picked up by something like RealArcade. It's convenient enough and, at $15 or $20, also cheap enough for its target audience. Two clicks, they have the game installed, Real has its share, and you have your money, everything with hardly any piracy at all, since those games are not what (poor) teens usually look for when they want to play something.As the fine folks of the Swedish Pirate Party have put it, the ease with which anyone can copy anything on the Internet has caused a dichotomy to develop between entertainment business, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, technological development and online privacy. For the entertainment business profits to remain as high as they were before the Internet developed the only long term solution is both for key technological developments to be blocked as well as for intrusive (and very exploitable) online surveillance laws targeting all citizens to be passed and enacted in as many countries and jurisdictions as possible. It's either this, or the entertainment business adapting to a lower revenue stream.
So, if our options are between and unencumbered technological developments, a free Internet, and no authoritarian surveillance society, with the downside of "music and movie studios closing", as you put it; or a strongly controlled technological landscape, a locked Internet with mandatory ISP content analysis, and government backed intrusive preemptive surveillance of online activities, with the upside of music and movie studios making tons of money; I know which one I prefer. What about you?