You seem to think that when people claim that "we" went to war for oil, that means that the US went to war for cheaper oil for its citizens. That is not what we mean.
Yes, yes it is what "you people" mean. How do I know this? Because all the time, I hear things like, "If greedy American consumers had to pay the *full cost* of bringing gasoline to the pump, they'd have to pay a lot more, because they'd have to pay for the massive military budget necessary to keep the cheap oil flowing." It's basically folk, unquestioned wisdom at this point, and the fundamental part about how environmentalists try to turn around allegations that "you support big government!"
If what is really meant by "war for oil" is "increasing the amount that defense contractors and oil companies make", hey, that's not an unreasonable claim -- but then, you have to admit that the military budget is not part of the "true cost" of oil, because it's not a necessary cost of making it available.
First, my anti-union views: unions are basically another attempt at cartelization of a production input -- labor. Plus, there's generally predicated on bad economics, specifically, the idea that by randomly impeding employers' operations, they can increase their compensation in the long term. The example I like to give is that of a grocery store that hikes prices just before you check out. Can that sustainably increase its profits? Of course not; they might snag a few people at first, but long term, it will just make people avoid that store unless it marks its prices down twice as much, knowing consumers will anticipate a price hike just before checkout. The way such a store appears to consumers, is the way unions appear to investors. Yes, randomly impeding their operations may have temporary gains, but long term it just makes them revise downward the value of union labor, or labor in pro-union areas, in new operations.
There's nothing wrong with "striking" in the sense of quitting en masse -- but that's not what people refer to when they talk of a "strike", which typically involves preventing them from hiring *other* people and otherwise continue operations, which is usually extremely easy since the workers were already being paid at market rates.
In my view, the way to eliminate the "need" for a union is to have a dynamic economy, in which switching jobs is painless and easy, and no one worries about being punished (through exposure to complex discrimination and labor laws) for bringing new jobs on the market. No one worries about whether grocery stores will do the above tactic to customers, precisely because it's so easy to switch. This is far more sustainable and scalable than turning every job into a last-stand battle of the workers against the capialists.
But back to the topic, the management problems are, in my view, ultimately derivative of legacy costs. When you have huge expenses not going into product value, which your competitors don't have, your best managers will be bid away.
Hehehe... let's try to leave Gladwell's article out of this. The blogosphere tore him a new one on that piece -- just check his crappy blog for his attempt to defend it.
But as for the substance of your claim, I don't see how it contradicts my position. The employer, we can agree, offered the company pension as a counterplan to the union pension, and the union accepted this as a valid substitution. Having a job-related pension was the union's idea. My point was that they could have simply used their clout to demand higher wages, and then applied that money to their own retirement accounts, held completely separately from the employer. No, the "Toledo area collective" plan doesn't count. That's still tied to Toledo area employment, with an added layer of unnecessary outside control.
I know it's obvious from context, but just to pre-empt a long lecture: the last statement should be "There are proper channels to go through, and the site shouldn't give that level of information that easily."
Wow, a lot of the responders were kind of beside the point, so let me sort through:
-No, there isn't necessarily a "marriage contract". -But, the law typically is specified so that by getting married, certain obligations attach. -Yes, adultery is legal in some places, BUT not others -Breach of contract isn't the same thing as breaking a law. -But, the website will typically have a policy against married users signing up. -But, and this is the most important, just because someone claims they're married to a user and want you to share information, doesn't mean you should believe them and comply. That was the point all along! There are proper channels to go through, and the site should give that level of information that easily.
Well, since you've admitted your biases, it's only fair that I admit I err on the anti-union side. As to your question:
So what's the real scoop on their pension issue, is it just BS or a consequence of poor management or is there something more to it?
This is a very good question. I wanted to know the answer myself for same reason you listed above: why agree to a pension without being able to monitor its funding status, and relying on future profitability? Why allow other creditors to have seniority to pensioners in collecting debt? (Since a pension is deferred compensation, and workers are senior to bondholders in payment of obligations, pensioners should always be senior, and credit ratings and lenders should always assume they'll be behind in line.) How can you assume no competitors will enter the market?
Unfortunately, it's hard to get reliable information on this, and I try as hard as possible to avoid "well they were just stupid"-type conclusions. I also can't read a financial statement from a corporation. But that's what every source confirms: GM promised an unfunded pension, predicated on future profitability, and the failure of GM was considered impossible. My best guess as to why it happened would be:
-stupidity on the part of unions, who refused to accept the possibility that their employer doesn't dictate its own profits. -malice on the part of management, who was willing to indulge this fantasy in exchange for valuable union concessions, knowing the union would have no leverage when the obligations came due. Likely arrogance about the possibility of competition.
When I first heard about pension problems affecting profitability, I was confused: aren't they funded in advance from a separate account? Well, they aren't.
Back in ancient times, the UAW would target ONE company for a strike, in order to get an agreement that could be used later as leverage with the others. Say what you like about the state of the auto industry today, but the tactic worked with great effect.
What? The auto industry in America today sucks *because* of those tactics. That goes against the claim of it working "to great effect". It's not going to seems so effective when there are defaults on pension promises.
Now, a lot of you are going to disagree with the claim of it being the unions' fault, and I'd like to make my case more in depth, but I'm not, because that whole issue is subsumed by another one: that tactic wouldn't work (at least as you've described it) *today* because of how much more dynamic the global economy is. When GM et. al were saddled with pension costs, it was a while before Japanese competitors without these costs could take advantage of their weakened position. Today, if you got a company to agree to something that hurt its profits that badly, there would be little lag time before someone else without that burden ran them out of business.
Unfortunately, the only way out of this I see is to require telcos treat data as source/destination-neutral.
Ha ha ha! Oh, that poor innocent farmer. Just wandering one day, he *happened* to find that some of his plants had a resistance to *precisely* the pests and environmental conditions he wanted them to have! Just must be a coincidence from *all* that experimentation he tries on his crops. (Cause we know how dynamic farmers can be... bitching and moaning about how they might actually have to plant something else or retrain if farm subsidies end.) What a seren-freakin-dipity.
Oh, you mean someone might have invested BILLIONS in developing something like that and made morons like him obsolete? No, it can't be! It's just those evil corporations trying to steal the innovative farming techniques from a guy who loses sleep about the prospect of the government not paying him to grow crops.
Yeah, I also don't think ANYONE should be allowed to profit from food. I mean, you're basically exploiting people's NEED for sustenance. Whatever happened to "need before greed"?
My reaction was, it doesn't matter if you're limited to the speed of light, or if it can provide additional encryption. It still has the benefit that you can send data without using the (limited) electromagnetic spectrum, or laying down lines, both of which are expensive markets to enter.
Actually, I heard that one old prank was to send postcards back and forth between major cities with simple, but cryptic sounding statements. For example:
"The birds rise at sundown. Where are the minnows?" "All is well, north of the river."
Supposedly, the government would see them and get suspicious, thinking they were coded messages.
I've also wondered: why doesn't someone test whether the government is reading emails? For example, have some guys plot an imaginary terrorist attack via unencrypted email and see if they get questioned. Leave physical corroborating evidence in case they follow up. (Make sure to document with several third parties first, so you can prove it's an experiment.)
Where is the it-just-works email encrytion for dummies?
I don't know, but it seems really... odd to me that:
1) Geeks really want such encryption to take off. 2) It shouldn't be that hard to implement. 3) Governments really, really, really don't want this to happen. (i.e. that everyone can efforlessly encrypt this well)
Sorry for not responding this weekend. I'd really like to give you an answer, and intend to. If the story is archived, would you like to continue via email?
"Citgo Petroleum Corporation or Citgo, a subsidiary of Petróleos de Venezuela S.A., the Venezuelan state-owned petroleum company"
"Petróleos de Venezuela, S.A. (PDVSA) is the Venezuelan state-owned petroleum company. It has activities in exploration, production, refining and exporting oil, as well as exploration and production of natural gas. PDVSA dominates the oil industry of Venezuela, the world's fifth largest oil exporter.
PDVSA purchased 50% of the United States gasoline brand Citgo from Southland Corporation in 1986 and the remainder in 1990."
So yeah... I think you can buy the "Chavez-Citgo link."
Now, that doesn't mean boycotting Citgo is a good idea. First of all, as my freak above pointed out, it simply redirects money to arguably worse governments that make money off oil. Second, oil companies actually sell to each other. If an Exxon station doesn't have enough while Citgo has too much, Exxon will buy up Citgo's and sell it, and they'll both be happy. (Sorry to put the damper on anyone's delusion about the nature of "competition" in a market economy.)
Due to the fungible nature of oil, it's really hard to boycott any one provider without a lot more coordination than you can hope to rally in this case.
That is true. To the owner, a) "home that has been trudged through and worn down" is not the same as "house as I left it". Similarly, b) "house in which I carry the option to, at no one's expenditure, re-enter" is not the same as "house from whence I must expel people (even with their cooperation) before re-entering".
However, there are other ways in which someone can use a house:
c) look at it
d) re-arrange some subatomic particles that the owner could not detect and would not care if he chose to detect.
Why are a) and b) costs, while c) and d) are not? The answer: the homeowner cares about the distinction in some but not others.
You can just as easily say that, to someone who produced a song X, "song X which no one has heard" is better than "song X which many have already heard" and therefore, for a third party to convert the former to the latter is not costless to the artist!
3) It's true that across finite possible uses, there must be some rule determining which uses are permissible. However, the same holds for all conflicts. That is, *any* time person A wants the state of the universe to be Z, while B wants not Z, there must be a rule determining who wins, i.e., who may get his way, or who may do what in bringing or preventing Z. There is exactly such a conflict between people over distribution of information, just as there is over property. The fact that one person wants information to be shared while another doesn't, does not imply that we should respect the former's desire. My point, all along, is that it doesn't imply the opposite either. The non-scarcity of information does not at all imply a resolution to that conflict.
This is why I keep claiming that the argument from scarcity is a category error: you're trying to resolve a conflict (between pro- and anti-IP camps) by saying there is no conflict. All attempts to do so will discover there really is a conflict.
Define "working system". The point of DRM is not to make copying impossible, or even very difficult, but to make it difficult *enough* and leave *enough* of a trail for law enforcement, that profit margins on the production of the content remain competitive with that in other industries. And it mostly seems to accomplish that.
Trite, but true. I recently had about a worst-case phishing attack. I bought something through PayPal, and then I got two emails "from Paypal" at almost exactly the same time. I even labled both emails as being related to the thing I was buying. But then when I looked at the link it was giving, the status bar indicated it was a different site from Paypal. And that's a pretty easy, completely accurate check.
So, even when I was *expecting* something from the spoofed site, at that exact time, *and* expecting to click on link within that email, it still didn't work, simply because I do something I do by habit anyway: check link targets before clicking. Which is virtually no effort.
All the proposed "solutions" to phishing rely, necessarily, on the user making some conscious effort to use it, even if that means simply heeding the "this is a phishing site" warning. (Particularly stupid are those who think that adding *another* authentication method to the real site will help. Remember, you can't control the phisher's fake site!) But if the user is going to put any effort at all, there are already two methods much easier than anything they can propose: check the target, and only load from bookmarks.
Good point, but remember that not all corporations are giant behemoths with an underworked legal department. In fact, the primary beneficiaries of the hated privileges of incorporation, are small businesses. Will UPS invoke the corporate veil to avoid a payout when one of their drivers hits you? No, because UPS can already afford it and they'd have to lose all assets for that to be relevant. Will an incorporated mom-and-pop business invoke the veil? Hell yes.
And I'm glad I don't live in yours. I'm glad *you* don't live in yours. If you really believed life was infinitely valuable in the sense that the GP was using the term, you'd never do anything that in any way increased the risk of anyone dying -- because such an act would have infinite cost.
Well, I would have been interested in hearing you out further on the house/information thing, but I appreciate the time and effort you've put into discussing IP with me, which is well beyond what others are willing to do.
FWIW, I freely admit I don't have a position on IP. I think it's a complicated issue on which people often get lazy in justification. I am equally critical of those who argue in favor of it, although on/. there are far more people willing to point out the flaws in such arguments.
The scarcity argument is often associated with its major exponent, Stephan Kinsella, who developed it in a journal paper. Posting here under the handle "Person", I believe I got him to admit the error. It's a long discussion, but I'd invite you to see the posts around October 11, 2006 12:56 PM. Please note his short fuse, and inability to read what I actually post.
Slashdot Mirror
You seem to think that when people claim that "we" went to war for oil, that means that the US went to war for cheaper oil for its citizens. That is not what we mean.
Yes, yes it is what "you people" mean. How do I know this? Because all the time, I hear things like, "If greedy American consumers had to pay the *full cost* of bringing gasoline to the pump, they'd have to pay a lot more, because they'd have to pay for the massive military budget necessary to keep the cheap oil flowing." It's basically folk, unquestioned wisdom at this point, and the fundamental part about how environmentalists try to turn around allegations that "you support big government!"
If what is really meant by "war for oil" is "increasing the amount that defense contractors and oil companies make", hey, that's not an unreasonable claim -- but then, you have to admit that the military budget is not part of the "true cost" of oil, because it's not a necessary cost of making it available.
Which is it?
First, my anti-union views: unions are basically another attempt at cartelization of a production input -- labor. Plus, there's generally predicated on bad economics, specifically, the idea that by randomly impeding employers' operations, they can increase their compensation in the long term. The example I like to give is that of a grocery store that hikes prices just before you check out. Can that sustainably increase its profits? Of course not; they might snag a few people at first, but long term, it will just make people avoid that store unless it marks its prices down twice as much, knowing consumers will anticipate a price hike just before checkout. The way such a store appears to consumers, is the way unions appear to investors. Yes, randomly impeding their operations may have temporary gains, but long term it just makes them revise downward the value of union labor, or labor in pro-union areas, in new operations.
There's nothing wrong with "striking" in the sense of quitting en masse -- but that's not what people refer to when they talk of a "strike", which typically involves preventing them from hiring *other* people and otherwise continue operations, which is usually extremely easy since the workers were already being paid at market rates.
In my view, the way to eliminate the "need" for a union is to have a dynamic economy, in which switching jobs is painless and easy, and no one worries about being punished (through exposure to complex discrimination and labor laws) for bringing new jobs on the market. No one worries about whether grocery stores will do the above tactic to customers, precisely because it's so easy to switch. This is far more sustainable and scalable than turning every job into a last-stand battle of the workers against the capialists.
But back to the topic, the management problems are, in my view, ultimately derivative of legacy costs. When you have huge expenses not going into product value, which your competitors don't have, your best managers will be bid away.
Hehehe ... let's try to leave Gladwell's article out of this. The blogosphere tore him a new one on that piece -- just check his crappy blog for his attempt to defend it.
But as for the substance of your claim, I don't see how it contradicts my position. The employer, we can agree, offered the company pension as a counterplan to the union pension, and the union accepted this as a valid substitution. Having a job-related pension was the union's idea. My point was that they could have simply used their clout to demand higher wages, and then applied that money to their own retirement accounts, held completely separately from the employer. No, the "Toledo area collective" plan doesn't count. That's still tied to Toledo area employment, with an added layer of unnecessary outside control.
I know it's obvious from context, but just to pre-empt a long lecture: the last statement should be "There are proper channels to go through, and the site shouldn't give that level of information that easily."
Wow, a lot of the responders were kind of beside the point, so let me sort through:
-No, there isn't necessarily a "marriage contract".
-But, the law typically is specified so that by getting married, certain obligations attach.
-Yes, adultery is legal in some places, BUT not others
-Breach of contract isn't the same thing as breaking a law.
-But, the website will typically have a policy against married users signing up.
-But, and this is the most important, just because someone claims they're married to a user and want you to share information, doesn't mean you should believe them and comply. That was the point all along! There are proper channels to go through, and the site should give that level of information that easily.
Well, since you've admitted your biases, it's only fair that I admit I err on the anti-union side. As to your question:
So what's the real scoop on their pension issue, is it just BS or a consequence of poor management or is there something more to it?
This is a very good question. I wanted to know the answer myself for same reason you listed above: why agree to a pension without being able to monitor its funding status, and relying on future profitability? Why allow other creditors to have seniority to pensioners in collecting debt? (Since a pension is deferred compensation, and workers are senior to bondholders in payment of obligations, pensioners should always be senior, and credit ratings and lenders should always assume they'll be behind in line.) How can you assume no competitors will enter the market?
Unfortunately, it's hard to get reliable information on this, and I try as hard as possible to avoid "well they were just stupid"-type conclusions. I also can't read a financial statement from a corporation. But that's what every source confirms: GM promised an unfunded pension, predicated on future profitability, and the failure of GM was considered impossible. My best guess as to why it happened would be:
-stupidity on the part of unions, who refused to accept the possibility that their employer doesn't dictate its own profits.
-malice on the part of management, who was willing to indulge this fantasy in exchange for valuable union concessions, knowing the union would have no leverage when the obligations came due. Likely arrogance about the possibility of competition.
When I first heard about pension problems affecting profitability, I was confused: aren't they funded in advance from a separate account? Well, they aren't.
Hope that helps.
Back in ancient times, the UAW would target ONE company for a strike, in order to get an agreement that could be used later as leverage with the others. Say what you like about the state of the auto industry today, but the tactic worked with great effect.
What? The auto industry in America today sucks *because* of those tactics. That goes against the claim of it working "to great effect". It's not going to seems so effective when there are defaults on pension promises.
Now, a lot of you are going to disagree with the claim of it being the unions' fault, and I'd like to make my case more in depth, but I'm not, because that whole issue is subsumed by another one: that tactic wouldn't work (at least as you've described it) *today* because of how much more dynamic the global economy is. When GM et. al were saddled with pension costs, it was a while before Japanese competitors without these costs could take advantage of their weakened position. Today, if you got a company to agree to something that hurt its profits that badly, there would be little lag time before someone else without that burden ran them out of business.
Unfortunately, the only way out of this I see is to require telcos treat data as source/destination-neutral.
Ha ha ha! Oh, that poor innocent farmer. Just wandering one day, he *happened* to find that some of his plants had a resistance to *precisely* the pests and environmental conditions he wanted them to have! Just must be a coincidence from *all* that experimentation he tries on his crops. (Cause we know how dynamic farmers can be ... bitching and moaning about how they might actually have to plant something else or retrain if farm subsidies end.) What a seren-freakin-dipity.
Oh, you mean someone might have invested BILLIONS in developing something like that and made morons like him obsolete? No, it can't be! It's just those evil corporations trying to steal the innovative farming techniques from a guy who loses sleep about the prospect of the government not paying him to grow crops.
Let me go get the violin...
Yeah, he's kind of slow like that. You should see him try to explain why it's ABSOLUTELY VITAL to refer to a price as a "price point".
That he doesn't exist.
*please mod informative, please mod informative*
And what's the record company's reason for working with them in the first place? Oh yeah ...
Forest? Nah, I just see a bunch of trees.
Yeah, I also don't think ANYONE should be allowed to profit from food. I mean, you're basically exploiting people's NEED for sustenance. Whatever happened to "need before greed"?
My reaction was, it doesn't matter if you're limited to the speed of light, or if it can provide additional encryption. It still has the benefit that you can send data without using the (limited) electromagnetic spectrum, or laying down lines, both of which are expensive markets to enter.
Actually, I heard that one old prank was to send postcards back and forth between major cities with simple, but cryptic sounding statements. For example:
"The birds rise at sundown. Where are the minnows?"
"All is well, north of the river."
Supposedly, the government would see them and get suspicious, thinking they were coded messages.
I've also wondered: why doesn't someone test whether the government is reading emails? For example, have some guys plot an imaginary terrorist attack via unencrypted email and see if they get questioned. Leave physical corroborating evidence in case they follow up. (Make sure to document with several third parties first, so you can prove it's an experiment.)
Where is the it-just-works email encrytion for dummies?
... odd to me that:
I don't know, but it seems really
1) Geeks really want such encryption to take off.
2) It shouldn't be that hard to implement.
3) Governments really, really, really don't want this to happen. (i.e. that everyone can efforlessly encrypt this well)
Is 3) or 1) working against 2)?
Sorry for not responding this weekend. I'd really like to give you an answer, and intend to. If the story is archived, would you like to continue via email?
Comments do not simply get moderated up or down, but have to be moderated with a chosen adjective, such as "insightful", "informative", "funny", etc
Yeah, it's not like you can just do an "overrated" or "underrated" that won't get reviewed.
Oh, wait...
But as you should probably know, the Chavez - Citgo link, is an urban myth.
There is such a thing as too much skepticism.
From the wiki:
"Citgo Petroleum Corporation or Citgo, a subsidiary of Petróleos de Venezuela S.A., the Venezuelan state-owned petroleum company"
"Petróleos de Venezuela, S.A. (PDVSA) is the Venezuelan state-owned petroleum company. It has activities in exploration, production, refining and exporting oil, as well as exploration and production of natural gas. PDVSA dominates the oil industry of Venezuela, the world's fifth largest oil exporter.
PDVSA purchased 50% of the United States gasoline brand Citgo from Southland Corporation in 1986 and the remainder in 1990."
So yeah... I think you can buy the "Chavez-Citgo link."
Now, that doesn't mean boycotting Citgo is a good idea. First of all, as my freak above pointed out, it simply redirects money to arguably worse governments that make money off oil. Second, oil companies actually sell to each other. If an Exxon station doesn't have enough while Citgo has too much, Exxon will buy up Citgo's and sell it, and they'll both be happy. (Sorry to put the damper on anyone's delusion about the nature of "competition" in a market economy.)
Due to the fungible nature of oil, it's really hard to boycott any one provider without a lot more coordination than you can hope to rally in this case.
Thank you for your response.
Regarding your 1) and 2):
That is true. To the owner, a) "home that has been trudged through and worn down" is not the same as "house as I left it". Similarly, b) "house in which I carry the option to, at no one's expenditure, re-enter" is not the same as "house from whence I must expel people (even with their cooperation) before re-entering".
However, there are other ways in which someone can use a house:
c) look at it
d) re-arrange some subatomic particles that the owner could not detect and would not care if he chose to detect.
Why are a) and b) costs, while c) and d) are not? The answer: the homeowner cares about the distinction in some but not others.
You can just as easily say that, to someone who produced a song X, "song X which no one has heard" is better than "song X which many have already heard" and therefore, for a third party to convert the former to the latter is not costless to the artist!
3) It's true that across finite possible uses, there must be some rule determining which uses are permissible. However, the same holds for all conflicts. That is, *any* time person A wants the state of the universe to be Z, while B wants not Z, there must be a rule determining who wins, i.e., who may get his way, or who may do what in bringing or preventing Z. There is exactly such a conflict between people over distribution of information, just as there is over property. The fact that one person wants information to be shared while another doesn't, does not imply that we should respect the former's desire. My point, all along, is that it doesn't imply the opposite either. The non-scarcity of information does not at all imply a resolution to that conflict.
This is why I keep claiming that the argument from scarcity is a category error: you're trying to resolve a conflict (between pro- and anti-IP camps) by saying there is no conflict. All attempts to do so will discover there really is a conflict.
Define "working system". The point of DRM is not to make copying impossible, or even very difficult, but to make it difficult *enough* and leave *enough* of a trail for law enforcement, that profit margins on the production of the content remain competitive with that in other industries. And it mostly seems to accomplish that.
Trite, but true. I recently had about a worst-case phishing attack. I bought something through PayPal, and then I got two emails "from Paypal" at almost exactly the same time. I even labled both emails as being related to the thing I was buying. But then when I looked at the link it was giving, the status bar indicated it was a different site from Paypal. And that's a pretty easy, completely accurate check.
So, even when I was *expecting* something from the spoofed site, at that exact time, *and* expecting to click on link within that email, it still didn't work, simply because I do something I do by habit anyway: check link targets before clicking. Which is virtually no effort.
All the proposed "solutions" to phishing rely, necessarily, on the user making some conscious effort to use it, even if that means simply heeding the "this is a phishing site" warning. (Particularly stupid are those who think that adding *another* authentication method to the real site will help. Remember, you can't control the phisher's fake site!) But if the user is going to put any effort at all, there are already two methods much easier than anything they can propose: check the target, and only load from bookmarks.
So, let me get this straight: *don't* execute him, but *do* make him work in an inner city school?
Does your parenting advice include "*don't* let your daughter become a sex object, but *do* make her work at Hooters"?
Good point, but remember that not all corporations are giant behemoths with an underworked legal department. In fact, the primary beneficiaries of the hated privileges of incorporation, are small businesses. Will UPS invoke the corporate veil to avoid a payout when one of their drivers hits you? No, because UPS can already afford it and they'd have to lose all assets for that to be relevant. Will an incorporated mom-and-pop business invoke the veil? Hell yes.
And I'm glad I don't live in yours. I'm glad *you* don't live in yours. If you really believed life was infinitely valuable in the sense that the GP was using the term, you'd never do anything that in any way increased the risk of anyone dying -- because such an act would have infinite cost.
Well, I would have been interested in hearing you out further on the house/information thing, but I appreciate the time and effort you've put into discussing IP with me, which is well beyond what others are willing to do.
/. there are far more people willing to point out the flaws in such arguments.
FWIW, I freely admit I don't have a position on IP. I think it's a complicated issue on which people often get lazy in justification. I am equally critical of those who argue in favor of it, although on
The scarcity argument is often associated with its major exponent, Stephan Kinsella, who developed it in a journal paper. Posting here under the handle "Person", I believe I got him to admit the error. It's a long discussion, but I'd invite you to see the posts around October 11, 2006 12:56 PM. Please note his short fuse, and inability to read what I actually post.