There's a wide gulf between operating in secret, and not requiring explicit public input on every tiny step of the process. Would that work in any other organization?
Because most modern Western governments are republics, which means that they are institutions created ostensibly for the people to whom the people delegate the work of managing shared resources and other common civil issues...so that the people *don't* have to deal with all the details all the time. In essence, we contract out civil affairs to this organization whose day job it is to manage those affairs *for* us. I'm not contracting with a software company to build software, my delegate is doing that, and it's mostly between the delegate and the software company. I may later care about the overall success or failure of these types of contracts and demand a change in policy. I don't see why I need to be involved in every little detail between the government and the software developers.
There's nothing imaginary about IP. Or rather, it's just as imaginary as any other type of property. You may say that land or houses are more real than IP, but they are also just human conceptions and conveniences. All there really is is matter/energy and the space it occupies. Everything else is "imaginary". Well, we should really say "emergent", as that more properly describes what's going on. And it may be true that IP is not exactly the same kind of property as land, but land is not the same kind of property as a loan on a balancesheet, or a contract, or a person's body. Property is merely the idea that someone can have socially recognized control over some particular item in the universe. And we need not have government create the idea either. Musicians and programmers could, in a world without governments, still create the concept of IP, by refusing to release their products without insisting on contracts that stipulate the terms of further usage and distribution, just as landowners and blacksmiths would. The market may or may not be willing to put up with this. And the market may or may not be willing to put up with strict property laws on every piece of land (as many nations formerly did not).
There is a difference between physical property and intellectual property to be sure, the main one being that intellectual property can be copied ad infinitum and easily modified without depriving the source of the use of the property. These things must be taken into account, naturally.
However, your analogies aren't that strong. There is nothing natural about owning land. Really anybody could use parts of your land at different times for different uses. A household with a family or a set of roommates has a great deal of shared property where common usage frequently does not deprive one party of the value of the property (though it doesn't infrequently cause problems as well). So really what we have is a spectrum of mutual exclusivity, ranging from word on the street being impossible to control, to one's body, which simply cannot be shared in any capacity. I think it's hard to say that IP is fundamentally different from all other forms of property, without also needing to draw distinctions in traditional physical property that really often aren't relevant.
I'm not a fan of extremely restrictive IP laws and policies, but I can recognize the value of treating IP as a thing in need of protecting in some capacity, especially when it now can be sold and traded, and isn't just some excess product that people who aren't stuck farming all day have time to produce in their spare time. It's an industry and people need to be able to receive the benefits of the fruits of their labor, be it physical labor with bricks and widgets, or mental labor with software and music.
I don't see why IP law should be in a different category than other property, if you are in the strong property rights crowd. Of course, property rights must be defended either by the property-holder, or by a third party (the government, usually), so it's not surprising that the government is now heavily involved, as the government is also heavily involved in physical property rights.
I bet there would be. Most libertarians I've seen are just fine with property rights. In fact, strong property rights are needed because the concept of the commons is anti-thetical to the purely market-based approach that libertarianism requires.
Yes, it did. It was developed as a completely separate product from Windows starting in the late 80s. They hired people from DEC and worked with IBM. It was a serious project. Take some time to look into the architecture and you might learn some things.
You're not really making any arguments based on facts here, just railing out the same tired bullshit that Linux fanbois are so fond of. You clearly don't know anything about Windows NT's design, so it'd be best if you just stopped commenting.
It's generally a lot cheaper than other medical care. Go to a hospital and come back and complain to me about a 40 dollar copay at a psychologist's office.
All this technology doesn't spring forth magically. It exists and is produced under a massive global system of powerful institutions, and supply and distribution chains, to say nothing of systems of education and healthcare and food production to provide for all the people that make these things happen.
People aren't going to agree, and there will be enforcement in that case, be it from the government or some private army or posse of vigilantes. Personally, I'd rather have a republican government having a monopoly on enforcement than a multitude of private forces. We've had periods in history like that and usually they result in a lot of violence and social disorder.
> Classic example of what I was talking about. Roads have an obvious return on value (at least when people use them). The rest of your list doesn't. Some of those such as most of the "social welfare" programs, environmental regulations, and educational subsidies even have negative return. Where's defense and law enforcement? Firefighting?
You're thinking is far too limited. Environmental regulations have a positive return, but not in the same kind of direct way that the market cares about. If you have a sick population and depleted fisheries and land that can't be used due to pollution, that has a cost, a big cost, on society and the market. But these problems often take so long to manifest themselves and are so dilute, that the market will never be able to price them in. That's why we have this term "externality" to describe these types of things. Same with social welfare and education.
Defense, law enforcement and firefighting go in the "etc. etc." section.
> The number of "some people" which you refer to is currently the world's entire population. Every country on Earth shows increasing wealth building per capita, even in the worst off such as the ever popular example of Somalia. And increasing wealth is negatively correlated with population growth everywhere.
And that's great.
> Well, what else could do it? Greed isn't any more prevalent now than it was. How we do business hasn't really changed to favor the short-sighted. Government-based shielding of the private world from bad decisions is the big move.
There's a lot more money available, a lot more at stake, at lot more potential to exercise that greed in amazing ways.
You keep talking about this government-based shielding, but it actually only affects a small part of the market. Sure, big oil and big banking are doing well with government shielding, and nobody's happy about that. But many other businesses have no such shielding, and also have to pay the burden of regulation and litigation, all government-induced costs and restraints.
> I see you don't get it. There's all this free research going on. Why should businesses bother with R&D when they can get it for free?
I get it, I just don't have a problem with it. You say "why should businesses bother when they can get it for free" like it's a bad thing. I see it as a great thing. We use public money to create basic knowledge that can be used by the private sector to build products and improve people's lives and make some money in the process. I see that as a win-win, and a great investment on the part of the public sector. And unlike with private sector research, the results will not be encumbered with patents or hidden away as trade secrets.
I think we just have a fundamental disagreement about the validity of public institutions. You seem to think that the private sector can and should do everything and that anything it doesn't do isn't really worth it, based entirely on the motive of monetary transactions. I happen to think that the world is a bigger place than what can make money, and that some things are so disconnected and distributed that the only solution is a public sector one. Environmental protection is the big one. There's simply no sane way to price in environmental costs over the long-run using an entirely private sector, market-based approach. Some regulation and taxation will bring the externalities of the environment into the market, and the market will take care of the rest. Again, seems like a win-win to me.
Make no mistake, I am not at all happy about the way our big government is being run today. I don't think, however, destroying public institutions is the solution. That's throwing the baby out with the bath water.
"Worth doing" is not true. The real condition is that it must be able to insure cash flow. That is, it's worth having private parties pay for directly. Not everything falls into that category. The people who need it may not have any money (helping the poor and sick). There may be no one distinct party or set of parties that can or should pay for it under market conditions (taking care of the environment outside of some specific cases). The market is not a magic bullet. It's great and does a lot of awesome things very efficiently, but it can't do everything. And that's actually okay.
> There is the default reason - because it isn't worth doing.
This ends up being a circular argument. The private sector didn't do it because it wasn't worth doing. How do we know it wasn't worth doing? The private sector didn't do it. I happen to think that regulation to ensure a fair marketplace is worth doing, and the private sector by definition can't do it. That's one of many things.
> You have a reason you say that? I find it interesting how the people who laud the governments' ability to do things have a remarkable inability to argue the value of the things that government does.
Or you just have a remarkable inability to listen or care. Social welfare programs, environmental regulations, publicly funded research, education subsidies, rural electrification, roads, etc. etc. etc. It's a long list. I'm sure you'll come up with some contrived reason why the private sector would have done all of these things better, or why it's not really the government that's doing these things, or why the government is actually doing them so awfully, but we accept it because we are blind liberal idiots. I'm still happy to support these types of government operations...and also call out bad government (military aggression/MIC, corporate welfare, spying on citizens, the criminal "justice" system, bloated bureaucracies that could use quite a trim, congress, etc. etc.).
> Also government subsidies aren't always a net good. For example, your complaint that free markets don't solve "long term" problems. They solve the big problems like overpopulation and poverty.
Well, maybe if you had read my post, you'd see that I said that the private sector does some things really well and the public sector does some things really well, and it's in our best interest to use both where they have their strengths, rather than go for a one size fits all. So yes, I'm perfectly happy to agree with you that government subsidies don't always lead to good (ethanol, for one, and maybe even some loser green subsidies).
I don't think that the market actually solves overpopulation or poverty per se. It solves poverty for some people, but generally leaves a lot out in the cold, especially when there are other societal biases in play (and let's face it, there are and always will be and the market doesn't care). The market thrives on generating and exploiting abundance until the train runs out. An out of control population is great for a market (more workers, more markets, more money)...until the crash comes.
> And the notorious short sightedness of modern businesses can readily be explained by the incentives that governments provide for short term thinking such as "too big to fail", massive R&D subsidies that crowd out private funding, Keynesian-style economic strategies that reduce the risks of making bad decisions, and the various government incentives for creating various sorts of economic bubbles.
No, I just don't buy this in the general case. Government stimulus doesn't explain companies with no hope of a bail-out that go for cost-cutting and layoffs to improve next quarter's profits and shareholder returns. Short-sightedness is a fundamental feature of a free market by its very definition. It's reactive. It adjusts to the needs of the marketplace at the moment. A company cannot afford to spend 20 years doing research and then come out with a great product. Nobody will fund them for 20 years. They have to come out with a product now. And they have to keep making money, or else they go under. The long-term generally isn't profitable except for big firms (which by necessity there will only be few of) that can afford to have loss-leaders and similar mechanisms to gain marketshare or develop the next big thing without worrying about how to keep the lights on tomorrow. And firms certainly won't ever care about general environmental problems, because the issue is too broad. And firms are NOT going to care about what the Earth will be like in 100 years because of their pollution. How could the market eve
I have no problem with the government doing this. It points out, though, that the private sector is unwilling or unable to take on these tasks. That's not necessarily and indictment of the private sector either. I think that many economic systems have their strengths and weaknesses. Rather than insisting that one or the other can do everything, why not mix and match? The markets won't solve long-term environmental problems like AGW, but the public sector can. So let the public sector do it.
Those who insist that the private sector can and will (or already has) solved these kinds of problems are wrong. The private sector alone hasn't. Again, not necessarily an indictment of the private sector, but definitely an indictment of those libertarian types who think that a free market left along by government regulation and prodding would produce optimal outcomes for every problem facing civilization.
Slashdot Mirror
There's a wide gulf between operating in secret, and not requiring explicit public input on every tiny step of the process. Would that work in any other organization?
Because most modern Western governments are republics, which means that they are institutions created ostensibly for the people to whom the people delegate the work of managing shared resources and other common civil issues...so that the people *don't* have to deal with all the details all the time. In essence, we contract out civil affairs to this organization whose day job it is to manage those affairs *for* us. I'm not contracting with a software company to build software, my delegate is doing that, and it's mostly between the delegate and the software company. I may later care about the overall success or failure of these types of contracts and demand a change in policy. I don't see why I need to be involved in every little detail between the government and the software developers.
Not all of those 7 billion can do certain jobs.
C#'s var has nothing to do with JavaScript's var.
I think that's IE9, IE10, Chrome, Safari, Firefox.
setjmp()/longjmp() were good enough for my dad and daggone it, they're good enough for me!
There's nothing imaginary about IP. Or rather, it's just as imaginary as any other type of property. You may say that land or houses are more real than IP, but they are also just human conceptions and conveniences. All there really is is matter/energy and the space it occupies. Everything else is "imaginary". Well, we should really say "emergent", as that more properly describes what's going on. And it may be true that IP is not exactly the same kind of property as land, but land is not the same kind of property as a loan on a balancesheet, or a contract, or a person's body. Property is merely the idea that someone can have socially recognized control over some particular item in the universe. And we need not have government create the idea either. Musicians and programmers could, in a world without governments, still create the concept of IP, by refusing to release their products without insisting on contracts that stipulate the terms of further usage and distribution, just as landowners and blacksmiths would. The market may or may not be willing to put up with this. And the market may or may not be willing to put up with strict property laws on every piece of land (as many nations formerly did not).
There is a difference between physical property and intellectual property to be sure, the main one being that intellectual property can be copied ad infinitum and easily modified without depriving the source of the use of the property. These things must be taken into account, naturally.
However, your analogies aren't that strong. There is nothing natural about owning land. Really anybody could use parts of your land at different times for different uses. A household with a family or a set of roommates has a great deal of shared property where common usage frequently does not deprive one party of the value of the property (though it doesn't infrequently cause problems as well). So really what we have is a spectrum of mutual exclusivity, ranging from word on the street being impossible to control, to one's body, which simply cannot be shared in any capacity. I think it's hard to say that IP is fundamentally different from all other forms of property, without also needing to draw distinctions in traditional physical property that really often aren't relevant.
I'm not a fan of extremely restrictive IP laws and policies, but I can recognize the value of treating IP as a thing in need of protecting in some capacity, especially when it now can be sold and traded, and isn't just some excess product that people who aren't stuck farming all day have time to produce in their spare time. It's an industry and people need to be able to receive the benefits of the fruits of their labor, be it physical labor with bricks and widgets, or mental labor with software and music.
I went and reread the article, and I think in this case, the farmer was in the wrong.
Funny, I consider the libertarians to be the trolls.
I don't see why IP law should be in a different category than other property, if you are in the strong property rights crowd. Of course, property rights must be defended either by the property-holder, or by a third party (the government, usually), so it's not surprising that the government is now heavily involved, as the government is also heavily involved in physical property rights.
I bet there would be. Most libertarians I've seen are just fine with property rights. In fact, strong property rights are needed because the concept of the commons is anti-thetical to the purely market-based approach that libertarianism requires.
A true taste of the libertarian utopia that we can all look forward to.
Yes, it did. It was developed as a completely separate product from Windows starting in the late 80s. They hired people from DEC and worked with IBM. It was a serious project. Take some time to look into the architecture and you might learn some things.
You're not really making any arguments based on facts here, just railing out the same tired bullshit that Linux fanbois are so fond of. You clearly don't know anything about Windows NT's design, so it'd be best if you just stopped commenting.
That may have been true for Windows 95/98, but NT was never based on DOS or really had anything to do with it.
Why is xkcd always obligatory? Can't people just post it because they think it might be relevant or funny? Is it actually required?
I can only read that as some sort of innuendo.
It's generally a lot cheaper than other medical care. Go to a hospital and come back and complain to me about a 40 dollar copay at a psychologist's office.
All this technology doesn't spring forth magically. It exists and is produced under a massive global system of powerful institutions, and supply and distribution chains, to say nothing of systems of education and healthcare and food production to provide for all the people that make these things happen.
People aren't going to agree, and there will be enforcement in that case, be it from the government or some private army or posse of vigilantes. Personally, I'd rather have a republican government having a monopoly on enforcement than a multitude of private forces. We've had periods in history like that and usually they result in a lot of violence and social disorder.
> Classic example of what I was talking about. Roads have an obvious return on value (at least when people use them). The rest of your list doesn't. Some of those such as most of the "social welfare" programs, environmental regulations, and educational subsidies even have negative return. Where's defense and law enforcement? Firefighting?
You're thinking is far too limited. Environmental regulations have a positive return, but not in the same kind of direct way that the market cares about. If you have a sick population and depleted fisheries and land that can't be used due to pollution, that has a cost, a big cost, on society and the market. But these problems often take so long to manifest themselves and are so dilute, that the market will never be able to price them in. That's why we have this term "externality" to describe these types of things. Same with social welfare and education.
Defense, law enforcement and firefighting go in the "etc. etc." section.
> The number of "some people" which you refer to is currently the world's entire population. Every country on Earth shows increasing wealth building per capita, even in the worst off such as the ever popular example of Somalia. And increasing wealth is negatively correlated with population growth everywhere.
And that's great.
> Well, what else could do it? Greed isn't any more prevalent now than it was. How we do business hasn't really changed to favor the short-sighted. Government-based shielding of the private world from bad decisions is the big move.
There's a lot more money available, a lot more at stake, at lot more potential to exercise that greed in amazing ways.
You keep talking about this government-based shielding, but it actually only affects a small part of the market. Sure, big oil and big banking are doing well with government shielding, and nobody's happy about that. But many other businesses have no such shielding, and also have to pay the burden of regulation and litigation, all government-induced costs and restraints.
> I see you don't get it. There's all this free research going on. Why should businesses bother with R&D when they can get it for free?
I get it, I just don't have a problem with it. You say "why should businesses bother when they can get it for free" like it's a bad thing. I see it as a great thing. We use public money to create basic knowledge that can be used by the private sector to build products and improve people's lives and make some money in the process. I see that as a win-win, and a great investment on the part of the public sector. And unlike with private sector research, the results will not be encumbered with patents or hidden away as trade secrets.
I think we just have a fundamental disagreement about the validity of public institutions. You seem to think that the private sector can and should do everything and that anything it doesn't do isn't really worth it, based entirely on the motive of monetary transactions. I happen to think that the world is a bigger place than what can make money, and that some things are so disconnected and distributed that the only solution is a public sector one. Environmental protection is the big one. There's simply no sane way to price in environmental costs over the long-run using an entirely private sector, market-based approach. Some regulation and taxation will bring the externalities of the environment into the market, and the market will take care of the rest. Again, seems like a win-win to me.
Make no mistake, I am not at all happy about the way our big government is being run today. I don't think, however, destroying public institutions is the solution. That's throwing the baby out with the bath water.
"Worth doing" is not true. The real condition is that it must be able to insure cash flow. That is, it's worth having private parties pay for directly. Not everything falls into that category. The people who need it may not have any money (helping the poor and sick). There may be no one distinct party or set of parties that can or should pay for it under market conditions (taking care of the environment outside of some specific cases). The market is not a magic bullet. It's great and does a lot of awesome things very efficiently, but it can't do everything. And that's actually okay.
> There is the default reason - because it isn't worth doing.
This ends up being a circular argument. The private sector didn't do it because it wasn't worth doing. How do we know it wasn't worth doing? The private sector didn't do it. I happen to think that regulation to ensure a fair marketplace is worth doing, and the private sector by definition can't do it. That's one of many things.
> You have a reason you say that? I find it interesting how the people who laud the governments' ability to do things have a remarkable inability to argue the value of the things that government does.
Or you just have a remarkable inability to listen or care. Social welfare programs, environmental regulations, publicly funded research, education subsidies, rural electrification, roads, etc. etc. etc. It's a long list. I'm sure you'll come up with some contrived reason why the private sector would have done all of these things better, or why it's not really the government that's doing these things, or why the government is actually doing them so awfully, but we accept it because we are blind liberal idiots. I'm still happy to support these types of government operations...and also call out bad government (military aggression/MIC, corporate welfare, spying on citizens, the criminal "justice" system, bloated bureaucracies that could use quite a trim, congress, etc. etc.).
> Also government subsidies aren't always a net good. For example, your complaint that free markets don't solve "long term" problems. They solve the big problems like overpopulation and poverty.
Well, maybe if you had read my post, you'd see that I said that the private sector does some things really well and the public sector does some things really well, and it's in our best interest to use both where they have their strengths, rather than go for a one size fits all. So yes, I'm perfectly happy to agree with you that government subsidies don't always lead to good (ethanol, for one, and maybe even some loser green subsidies).
I don't think that the market actually solves overpopulation or poverty per se. It solves poverty for some people, but generally leaves a lot out in the cold, especially when there are other societal biases in play (and let's face it, there are and always will be and the market doesn't care). The market thrives on generating and exploiting abundance until the train runs out. An out of control population is great for a market (more workers, more markets, more money)...until the crash comes.
> And the notorious short sightedness of modern businesses can readily be explained by the incentives that governments provide for short term thinking such as "too big to fail", massive R&D subsidies that crowd out private funding, Keynesian-style economic strategies that reduce the risks of making bad decisions, and the various government incentives for creating various sorts of economic bubbles.
No, I just don't buy this in the general case. Government stimulus doesn't explain companies with no hope of a bail-out that go for cost-cutting and layoffs to improve next quarter's profits and shareholder returns. Short-sightedness is a fundamental feature of a free market by its very definition. It's reactive. It adjusts to the needs of the marketplace at the moment. A company cannot afford to spend 20 years doing research and then come out with a great product. Nobody will fund them for 20 years. They have to come out with a product now. And they have to keep making money, or else they go under. The long-term generally isn't profitable except for big firms (which by necessity there will only be few of) that can afford to have loss-leaders and similar mechanisms to gain marketshare or develop the next big thing without worrying about how to keep the lights on tomorrow. And firms certainly won't ever care about general environmental problems, because the issue is too broad. And firms are NOT going to care about what the Earth will be like in 100 years because of their pollution. How could the market eve
I have no problem with the government doing this. It points out, though, that the private sector is unwilling or unable to take on these tasks. That's not necessarily and indictment of the private sector either. I think that many economic systems have their strengths and weaknesses. Rather than insisting that one or the other can do everything, why not mix and match? The markets won't solve long-term environmental problems like AGW, but the public sector can. So let the public sector do it.
Those who insist that the private sector can and will (or already has) solved these kinds of problems are wrong. The private sector alone hasn't. Again, not necessarily an indictment of the private sector, but definitely an indictment of those libertarian types who think that a free market left along by government regulation and prodding would produce optimal outcomes for every problem facing civilization.