Next time free enterprise puts a man on the moon, you let me know.
Part of the reason it hasn't happened yet is that there's nothing to be gained from putting another man on the moon right now. Most of the scientifically valuable data either has been gathered already or can be gathered by remote-controlled probes; and other uses for the moon (mining, colonization) are economically or technically infeasible right now.
Governments, on the other hand, are mostly free from such constraints. They can (for example) spend fantastic amounts of taxpayer money to send men to the Moon, just so they can gain bragging rights over a certain rival country.
I'm not denying that the manned Moon missions had value, by the way; I just think there were better ways to spend that money, including unmanned probes or other types of research. Once the benefits of sending a man to the Moon exceeded the costs, free enterprise would have done so, and more cheaply than NASA ever could.
Whenever there's only one person looking at the billboard, have its contents change subtly. For example, a character on the billboard could briefly glance at the viewer. Do it, Japan!
Despite all this I identify as pro choice without hesitation when it comes to rape, incest, medical risks, etc...
If you do believe that a fetus of a particular age is a full human being, then it's irrelevant how it came into existence. Rape and incest are hardly the fault of the fetus, are they?
As for medical risks, do you believe that it's OK in general to kill an innocent human being to save yourself? If not, why would abortion be any different (again, assuming you believe the fetus to be fully human)?
Just words? Why can't I publish slandering and libelous statements however and whenever I want?
You should be able to. Laws against slander and libel are inane, prone to abuse, and increasingly ineffective due to the existence of the internet.
What if I published a cooking recipe, told you it was the best, implied that it was safe, you cooked it up... and now you have the shits. Worse than that, you are hospitalized because you have another condition that was significantly complicated by my harmless and victimless haha-gave-you-the-shits prank.
Providing a faulty recipe may have been a mean and immoral thing to do, but who decided to follow the recipe? Who made the food, and who ate it? We are each responsible for our own actions; "he told me to do it" doesn't excuse anyone from that. Especially when the source is some random dude on the internet!
Now I'm not saying that anonymity is good or bad. I'm just saying that words aren't always harmless regardless of weather they are posted on the Internet or not.
Words have no power to harm or help anyone on their own. It's how the hearer reacts to them that's important.
Anyway, the genie of near-perfect anonymity is out of the bottle, and no amount of wishful thinking is going to put it back. Instead of wringing our hands over how anonymity makes certain undesirable things easier, we need to learn to live with it. That includes reexamining and rethinking laws made obsolete by anonymity, including slander/libel, "bad advice" (I don't know the legal term for it), and yes, copyright. The creator of Freenet has some insightful thoughts on the subject: http://freenetproject.org/philosophy.html
I'm not a fan of anarchy. I believe in the positive aspects of cooperative society.
Government is not cooperative; it is coercive, by definition. Anarchy, lacking such systematic coercion, is therefore a fuller form of "cooperative society" than are statist systems. Whether anarchy is desirable or achievable is another question, one which I would be happy to discuss.
I believe that those who take advantage of societal benefits are beholden to observe the rules of that society...
The rules we are discussing are not rules of "society", but of government. Governments are human institutions like any other; they have no special priviliges, and we are not bound to them any more than we are bound to the businesses we patronize.
...as long as the means are available to change the rules when necessary.
The (mostly illusory) chance for an individual to change the rules does not automatically make him beholden to those rules.
I believe that allowing people to act purely on their own moral code is asking for people to violate the rights of others.
Every human being chooses his own ends based on his own system of valuation. The existence of the "Law" does not change this: it is merely an additional external factor that each of us must incorporate into his own decisions as he sees fit.
There are many other factors that can influence human behavior, and there is no reason to conclude a priori that an absence of this particular set of factors would necessarily produce a more iniquitous or chaotic society.
I also believe that Heinlein can be lumped in the same pile as Rand -- take that as you wish.
I will take it for what it is: an empty statement.
When a law is abusive, it is the citizen's duty to protest and get the law changed.
Why? Where does this "duty" come from? To quote Heinlein (from "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress"):
I will accept the rules that you feel necessary to your freedom. I am free, no matter what rules surround me. If I find them tolerable, I tolerate them; if I find them too obnoxious, I break them. I am free because I know that I alone am morally responsible for everything I do.
It is perfectly logically consistent for a moral system to say that in the case of slavery social can't out way individual, but in other cases it can.
But it needs some justification for doing so! I could propose a system identical to utilitarianism, except that all weights are randomly assigned on Tuesdays. Such a system might be logically consistent, but it is surely unacceptably arbitrary!
This can be accomplished in a number of ways including...
adjusting the cost/benefit weights
On what basis? Utilitarianism is about costs and benefits as they exist in the real world. You need some justification outside of utilitarianism for adjusting weights, and it needs to explain consistently why some weights are adjusted and some are not.
adding a infinity weight
I would argue that infinite weights cannot arise in nature according to strict utilitarianism, so you end up with the same problem as above.
incorporating multidimensional weights
I'm not sure how this invalidates the given assumption.
In fact this is what many practical systems do.
They do so only because certain conclusions are considered unacceptable. Thus they are twisted in such a way as to avoid those conclusions, and the resulting monstrosity is called "practical".
A utilitarian (which by the way I am not) would state that it is about balancing individual needs against social needs. Your argument would only hold if social needs always won out.
No. My argument was not that those outcomes would necessarily happen, but that, given your line of reasoning, they could happen if the cost/benefit anaylsis turned out a certain way.
A similar argument would be: if it were shown that certain types of slavery had a net benefit for society, would you support those types of slavery? A true utilitarian would, but I (and, I hope, many others) reject all forms of slavery regarless of whatever benefits they may have. Again, the argument does not hinge on whether the social benefits of slavery actually do outweight the costs.
Ironic that you would employ the slippery slope fallacy given your name.
I think the term you're looking for is reductio ad absurdum.
And what about people who don't finish their prescribed antibiotics treatments? Are we going to make a law about that? What about getting flu shots? Going to work with a cold?
People like you who use utilitarian arguments to justify encroachments of liberty should try following those arguments to their logical conclusions sometime. I think you'll find that you don't like where you end up.
Boiling this task down to a yea/nay vote for 535 people who have so many other issues they're supposed to be up-to-date on that many decisions go to whichever party can purchase more of the congressperson's ear time sounds like a recipe for disaster.
You've just described the problem with representative government in a nutshell.
That's why you always type "rm dirname" first, then double-check the dirname, then add the "-rf". Doesn't work on BSDs and Mac OS X (and maybe others), because you have to put rm's switches before the filename(s).
pushd and popd are better for that kind of thing. And you can get the same effect as 'cd -' by using pushd with no arguments: it swaps the top two dirs on the stack.
...many of whom were requiring pixel perfect across all browsers
I know this isn't your fault, but I just want to slap such people. The web is not intended to give content creators that level of control. And I for one sure as hell don't want it to, with all the idiots who think that 10pt light-grey-on-white fonts are really spiffy. If they want pixel-perfect, they can use PDFs.
Tell me about this "sound economy" I've never heard of it.
Not surprising if you live in the United States. Mostly what I mean is an economy with a stable currency and without artificially manipulated interest rates, which we haven't had since about 1913.
Not if they are keeping their money in their mattress because they fear the banks will fail.
Doing so effectively takes the money out of circulation, which causes deflation, which benefits creditors and therefore encourages lending.
What do you suppose we use instead? I've got news for you, gold and silver have no more inherent value than paper. Are you suggesting we go back to bartering?
Gold and silver have value outside their potential use as currency, not only in things like jewelry but also in electronics. It's irrelevant whether you consider these to be "intrinsic" to gold and silver; what matters is that people value them on their own, without a government mandate. You can't say the same about paper money; it doesn't even make good toilet paper.
Besides, you don't have to use gold as your currency's backing. You can use anything that has a stable value, or even a selection of multiple different goods. The important thing is that the value of money remain stable, which doesn't happen when the government has the ability to monkey around with the money supply to suit its own needs.
You forget that economics has a psychological aspect to it.
Shadows of Keynes' infamous "animal spirits", perhaps? While this is true to an extent, real factors far outweigh psychological ones in any sound economy.
During the depression, people were fearful to spend and loan out money.
During times of economic difficulty, people cut back on luxury items and other discretionary spending, which increases savings. But again, this is due to real economic factors, and is in fact beneficial to the economy: increased savings makes more funds available for investment.
The phenomenon you describe is actually what brought us out of the Great Depression; what put us in it in the first place was the Federal Reserve's policy of keeping interest rates artificially low, which created an unsustainable "bubble". What we think of as the Great Depression was actually a necessary and inevitable normalization of the economy, as all the bad investments encouraged by too-easy credit were swept away.
Our economy is a closed loop system that works because people believe in it. Without confidence in the system, it fails.
This is true insofar as it applies to our fiat monetary system, which requires that people use otherwise-worthless paper as a store of value. But it is not an inherent quality of a sound economy, which must be based on using real capital to produce real goods to satisfy real demand.
You've just described the broken window fallacy. It amazes me that anyone actually believes it, but rational thinking about economics has been in short supply for many years now.
...isn't this the sort of attitude, accumulated, that resulted in Vista?
I don't know much about Vista, but I don't think the suckiness of Microsoft's products comes from their coders using too many external libraries. If anything, I'd expect just the opposite due to NIH syndrome.
Remember, including KitchenSinkLib in your project doesn't mean you actually have to use all of its functionality. It just means your program's binary will grow somewhat; and given how little of our hard disks and RAM are taken up by binaries themselves these days, it's a pretty minor concern in my opinion. How minor obviously depends on the circumstances, but I'd contend that it's better to err on the side of code re-use than on the side of small binaries.
Taking it a step further, a "Truly Free" economy is indistinguishable from the anarchy that exists in a power vacuum...
Partially correct. A "truly free" economy is known as anarchocapitalism, but it's not a "power vacuum": the power is just spread throughout society rather than concentrated in a single, central authority.
...and which quickly degrades into feudal warlordism.
Not necessarily. For example, look at Celtic Ireland c. 650-1650, or the medieval Icelandic Commonwealth.
Otherwise, what would prevent me from saying "I'll insure your house against hurricanes," taking all of the money for personal use, and abandoning everyone when the first hurricane came along? Or becoming the head of an established bank, taking everyone's deposits, and heading for the Cayman islands?
What prevents your hypothetical fraudlent insurer or banker from doing that right now, since there are countries without extradition treaties with the U.S.?
Be careful with your code libraries, and avoid bloat. If you're sorting a customer's web shopping basket, consider writing the sort yourself rather than including 200k worth of otherwise unused code. Even the lowly and properly-maligned bubble sort is better than that.
That may just be an example, but what modern progamming environment lacks a decent sorting algorithm, with "pluggable" comparison operators?
More generally, I'd warn against being too concerned with "bloat" coming from libraries unless you are specifically targeting resource-constrained environments. Memory is cheap, and every line of code you don't have to write is a line you will never waste time and brain power on, and a line in which you will never accidentally introduce a subtle bug.
Slashdot Mirror
Next time free enterprise puts a man on the moon, you let me know.
Part of the reason it hasn't happened yet is that there's nothing to be gained from putting another man on the moon right now. Most of the scientifically valuable data either has been gathered already or can be gathered by remote-controlled probes; and other uses for the moon (mining, colonization) are economically or technically infeasible right now.
Governments, on the other hand, are mostly free from such constraints. They can (for example) spend fantastic amounts of taxpayer money to send men to the Moon, just so they can gain bragging rights over a certain rival country.
I'm not denying that the manned Moon missions had value, by the way; I just think there were better ways to spend that money, including unmanned probes or other types of research. Once the benefits of sending a man to the Moon exceeded the costs, free enterprise would have done so, and more cheaply than NASA ever could.
Whenever there's only one person looking at the billboard, have its contents change subtly. For example, a character on the billboard could briefly glance at the viewer. Do it, Japan!
Despite all this I identify as pro choice without hesitation when it comes to rape, incest, medical risks, etc...
If you do believe that a fetus of a particular age is a full human being, then it's irrelevant how it came into existence. Rape and incest are hardly the fault of the fetus, are they?
As for medical risks, do you believe that it's OK in general to kill an innocent human being to save yourself? If not, why would abortion be any different (again, assuming you believe the fetus to be fully human)?
Just words? Why can't I publish slandering and libelous statements however and whenever I want?
You should be able to. Laws against slander and libel are inane, prone to abuse, and increasingly ineffective due to the existence of the internet.
What if I published a cooking recipe, told you it was the best, implied that it was safe, you cooked it up... and now you have the shits. Worse than that, you are hospitalized because you have another condition that was significantly complicated by my harmless and victimless haha-gave-you-the-shits prank.
Providing a faulty recipe may have been a mean and immoral thing to do, but who decided to follow the recipe? Who made the food, and who ate it? We are each responsible for our own actions; "he told me to do it" doesn't excuse anyone from that. Especially when the source is some random dude on the internet!
Now I'm not saying that anonymity is good or bad. I'm just saying that words aren't always harmless regardless of weather they are posted on the Internet or not.
Words have no power to harm or help anyone on their own. It's how the hearer reacts to them that's important.
Anyway, the genie of near-perfect anonymity is out of the bottle, and no amount of wishful thinking is going to put it back. Instead of wringing our hands over how anonymity makes certain undesirable things easier, we need to learn to live with it. That includes reexamining and rethinking laws made obsolete by anonymity, including slander/libel, "bad advice" (I don't know the legal term for it), and yes, copyright. The creator of Freenet has some insightful thoughts on the subject: http://freenetproject.org/philosophy.html
I'm not a fan of anarchy. I believe in the positive aspects of cooperative society.
Government is not cooperative; it is coercive, by definition. Anarchy, lacking such systematic coercion, is therefore a fuller form of "cooperative society" than are statist systems. Whether anarchy is desirable or achievable is another question, one which I would be happy to discuss.
I believe that those who take advantage of societal benefits are beholden to observe the rules of that society...
The rules we are discussing are not rules of "society", but of government. Governments are human institutions like any other; they have no special priviliges, and we are not bound to them any more than we are bound to the businesses we patronize.
...as long as the means are available to change the rules when necessary.
The (mostly illusory) chance for an individual to change the rules does not automatically make him beholden to those rules.
I believe that allowing people to act purely on their own moral code is asking for people to violate the rights of others.
Every human being chooses his own ends based on his own system of valuation. The existence of the "Law" does not change this: it is merely an additional external factor that each of us must incorporate into his own decisions as he sees fit.
There are many other factors that can influence human behavior, and there is no reason to conclude a priori that an absence of this particular set of factors would necessarily produce a more iniquitous or chaotic society.
I also believe that Heinlein can be lumped in the same pile as Rand -- take that as you wish.
I will take it for what it is: an empty statement.
When a law is abusive, it is the citizen's duty to protest and get the law changed.
Why? Where does this "duty" come from? To quote Heinlein (from "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress"):
I will accept the rules that you feel necessary to your freedom. I am free, no matter what rules surround me. If I find them tolerable, I tolerate them; if I find them too obnoxious, I break them. I am free because I know that I alone am morally responsible for everything I do.
It is perfectly logically consistent for a moral system to say that in the case of slavery social can't out way individual, but in other cases it can.
But it needs some justification for doing so! I could propose a system identical to utilitarianism, except that all weights are randomly assigned on Tuesdays. Such a system might be logically consistent, but it is surely unacceptably arbitrary!
This can be accomplished in a number of ways including...
adjusting the cost/benefit weights
On what basis? Utilitarianism is about costs and benefits as they exist in the real world. You need some justification outside of utilitarianism for adjusting weights, and it needs to explain consistently why some weights are adjusted and some are not.
adding a infinity weight
I would argue that infinite weights cannot arise in nature according to strict utilitarianism, so you end up with the same problem as above.
incorporating multidimensional weights
I'm not sure how this invalidates the given assumption.
In fact this is what many practical systems do.
They do so only because certain conclusions are considered unacceptable. Thus they are twisted in such a way as to avoid those conclusions, and the resulting monstrosity is called "practical".
A utilitarian (which by the way I am not) would state that it is about balancing individual needs against social needs. Your argument would only hold if social needs always won out.
No. My argument was not that those outcomes would necessarily happen, but that, given your line of reasoning, they could happen if the cost/benefit anaylsis turned out a certain way.
A similar argument would be: if it were shown that certain types of slavery had a net benefit for society, would you support those types of slavery? A true utilitarian would, but I (and, I hope, many others) reject all forms of slavery regarless of whatever benefits they may have. Again, the argument does not hinge on whether the social benefits of slavery actually do outweight the costs.
Ironic that you would employ the slippery slope fallacy given your name.
I think the term you're looking for is reductio ad absurdum.
And what about people who don't finish their prescribed antibiotics treatments? Are we going to make a law about that? What about getting flu shots? Going to work with a cold?
People like you who use utilitarian arguments to justify encroachments of liberty should try following those arguments to their logical conclusions sometime. I think you'll find that you don't like where you end up.
SHALL WE PLAY A GAME?
...why the largest slaughters of humans have been in the names of religious deities.
Not according to this.
Boiling this task down to a yea/nay vote for 535 people who have so many other issues they're supposed to be up-to-date on that many decisions go to whichever party can purchase more of the congressperson's ear time sounds like a recipe for disaster.
You've just described the problem with representative government in a nutshell.
smarts and hotness are inversly proportianal
Wow, you must be really hot...
That's why you always type "rm dirname" first, then double-check the dirname, then add the "-rf". Doesn't work on BSDs and Mac OS X (and maybe others), because you have to put rm's switches before the filename(s).
I can't tell whether you're being sarcastic, but just in case: pushd with no arguments swaps the top two dirs on the stack. Handy!
grep -r
pushd and popd are better for that kind of thing. And you can get the same effect as 'cd -' by using pushd with no arguments: it swaps the top two dirs on the stack.
...many of whom were requiring pixel perfect across all browsers
I know this isn't your fault, but I just want to slap such people. The web is not intended to give content creators that level of control. And I for one sure as hell don't want it to, with all the idiots who think that 10pt light-grey-on-white fonts are really spiffy. If they want pixel-perfect, they can use PDFs.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Icelandic_commonwealth
Tell me about this "sound economy" I've never heard of it.
Not surprising if you live in the United States. Mostly what I mean is an economy with a stable currency and without artificially manipulated interest rates, which we haven't had since about 1913.
Not if they are keeping their money in their mattress because they fear the banks will fail.
Doing so effectively takes the money out of circulation, which causes deflation, which benefits creditors and therefore encourages lending.
What do you suppose we use instead? I've got news for you, gold and silver have no more inherent value than paper. Are you suggesting we go back to bartering?
Gold and silver have value outside their potential use as currency, not only in things like jewelry but also in electronics. It's irrelevant whether you consider these to be "intrinsic" to gold and silver; what matters is that people value them on their own, without a government mandate. You can't say the same about paper money; it doesn't even make good toilet paper.
Besides, you don't have to use gold as your currency's backing. You can use anything that has a stable value, or even a selection of multiple different goods. The important thing is that the value of money remain stable, which doesn't happen when the government has the ability to monkey around with the money supply to suit its own needs.
You forget that economics has a psychological aspect to it.
Shadows of Keynes' infamous "animal spirits", perhaps? While this is true to an extent, real factors far outweigh psychological ones in any sound economy.
During the depression, people were fearful to spend and loan out money.
During times of economic difficulty, people cut back on luxury items and other discretionary spending, which increases savings. But again, this is due to real economic factors, and is in fact beneficial to the economy: increased savings makes more funds available for investment.
The phenomenon you describe is actually what brought us out of the Great Depression; what put us in it in the first place was the Federal Reserve's policy of keeping interest rates artificially low, which created an unsustainable "bubble". What we think of as the Great Depression was actually a necessary and inevitable normalization of the economy, as all the bad investments encouraged by too-easy credit were swept away.
Our economy is a closed loop system that works because people believe in it. Without confidence in the system, it fails.
This is true insofar as it applies to our fiat monetary system, which requires that people use otherwise-worthless paper as a store of value. But it is not an inherent quality of a sound economy, which must be based on using real capital to produce real goods to satisfy real demand.
You've just described the broken window fallacy. It amazes me that anyone actually believes it, but rational thinking about economics has been in short supply for many years now.
...isn't this the sort of attitude, accumulated, that resulted in Vista?
I don't know much about Vista, but I don't think the suckiness of Microsoft's products comes from their coders using too many external libraries. If anything, I'd expect just the opposite due to NIH syndrome.
Remember, including KitchenSinkLib in your project doesn't mean you actually have to use all of its functionality. It just means your program's binary will grow somewhat; and given how little of our hard disks and RAM are taken up by binaries themselves these days, it's a pretty minor concern in my opinion. How minor obviously depends on the circumstances, but I'd contend that it's better to err on the side of code re-use than on the side of small binaries.
Taking it a step further, a "Truly Free" economy is indistinguishable from the anarchy that exists in a power vacuum...
Partially correct. A "truly free" economy is known as anarchocapitalism, but it's not a "power vacuum": the power is just spread throughout society rather than concentrated in a single, central authority.
...and which quickly degrades into feudal warlordism.
Not necessarily. For example, look at Celtic Ireland c. 650-1650, or the medieval Icelandic Commonwealth.
Otherwise, what would prevent me from saying "I'll insure your house against hurricanes," taking all of the money for personal use, and abandoning everyone when the first hurricane came along? Or becoming the head of an established bank, taking everyone's deposits, and heading for the Cayman islands?
What prevents your hypothetical fraudlent insurer or banker from doing that right now, since there are countries without extradition treaties with the U.S.?
Be careful with your code libraries, and avoid bloat. If you're sorting a customer's web shopping basket, consider writing the sort yourself rather than including 200k worth of otherwise unused code. Even the lowly and properly-maligned bubble sort is better than that.
That may just be an example, but what modern progamming environment lacks a decent sorting algorithm, with "pluggable" comparison operators?
More generally, I'd warn against being too concerned with "bloat" coming from libraries unless you are specifically targeting resource-constrained environments. Memory is cheap, and every line of code you don't have to write is a line you will never waste time and brain power on, and a line in which you will never accidentally introduce a subtle bug.