They would send you one bill for services rendered and another bill (or check) for your mandatory wealth transfer to the poor (or payment from the rich).
It helps to have a Confucian society, where leaders (of government and business) are taught to be benevolently paternalistic, and workers to obey. Dirigisme just loves that kind of environment, and industrialization is not exactly rocket science as long as you have a culture amenable to central control.
There is an argument to be made that people who contribute something to the common good ought to receive a commensurate reward; eg, if Britney Spears contributes a concert valued at one millon dollars, it would be fair for her to receive back the same value of goods and services; and as both parties to any such trade are made better off than they were before, Britney is led, as if by an invisible hand, to make a net contribution to the welfare of society.
You and I agree that it would be virtuous and admirable if Britney were to increase her net contribution by giving away some of her profits, and surely people are well advised to debate such principles and (more importantly) apply them to their own lives. But, what right do we have to legislate charity? (That's not a rhetorical question.)
It would be interesting to plot percentile distributions of world income (per person, per year; PPP adjusted) for each year of the past fifty. I don't think we'd find much to complain about, except perhaps that the the bottom quintile had not advanced by enough. Whole countries have industrialized in that time, but no rich country of 1950 has returned to its old peasant villages (so as to offset the gains). The next fifty years promise equality as never before, as China and India (cross your fingers) grow.
The prices of land and labor vary wildly between markets. (You can't ship a parcel of African land to Manhattan, and even when laborers in low-wage markets can manage to cross borders they often prefer to remain at home.) Those are significant inputs to just about every business activity. The exceptions prove the rule: microprocessors, for example, cost the same everywhere.
But let's go back: the problem with the other origin of the "good," of the good as the man of resentment has imagined it for himself, demands some conclusion. That lambs are annoyed at the great predatory birds is not a strange thing, and it provides no reason for holding anything against these large birds of prey, because they snatch away small lambs. And if the lambs say among themselves "These predatory birds are evil—and whoever is least like a predatory bird—and especially who is like its opposite, a lamb—shouldn't that animal be good?" there is nothing to find fault with in this setting up of an ideal, except for the fact that the birds of prey might look down with a little mockery and perhaps say to themselves "We are not at all annoyed with these good lambs—we even love them. Nothing is tastier than a tender lamb."
To demand that strength does not express itself as strength, that it must not consist of a will to overpower, a will to throw down, a will to rule, a thirst for enemies and opposition and triumph—that is as unreasonable as to demand that weakness express itself as strength. A quantum of force is just such a quantum of drive, will, action--indeed, it is nothing but these drives, willing, and actions in themselves—and it cannot appear as anything else except through the seduction of language (and the fundamental errors of reason petrified in it), which understands and misunderstands all action as conditioned by something which causes actions, by a "Subject."
In fact, in just the same way as people separate lightning from its flash and take the latter as an action, as the effect of a subject, which is called lightning, so popular morality separates strength from the manifestations of that strength, as if behind the strong person there is an indifferent substrate, which is free to manifest strength or not. But there is no such substrate, there is no "being" behind the doing, acting, becoming. "The doer" is merely invented after the fact—the act is everything. People basically duplicate the event: when they see lightning, well, that is an action of an action: they set up the same event first as the cause and then again as its effect.
Natural scientists are no better when they say "Force moves, force causes" and so on—our entire scientific knowledge, for all its coolness, its freedom from feelings, still remains exposed to the seductions of language and has not gotten rid of the changelings foisted on it, the "Subject" (the atom, for example, is such a changeling, like the Kantian "Thing in itself"): it's no wonder that the repressed, secretly smouldering feelings of rage and hate use this belief for themselves and, in fact, maintain a faith in nothing more strongly than in the idea that the strong are free to be weak and predatory birds are free to be lambs—and in so doing, they arrogate to themselves the right to blame the birds of prey for being birds of prey...
When the oppressed, the downtrodden, the conquered say to each other, with the vengeful cunning of the powerless, "Let us be different from evil people, namely, good! And that man is good who does not overpower, who hurts no one, who does not attack, who does not retaliate, who hands revenge over to God, who keeps himself hidden, as we do, who avoids all evil and demands little from life in general—like us, the patient, humble, and upright"—what that amounts to, coolly expressed and without bias, is essentially nothing more than "We weak people are merely weak. It's good if we do nothing, because we are not strong enough."
But this bitter state, this shrewdness of the lowest ranks, which even insects possess (for in great danger they stand as if they were dead in order not to do "too much"), has, thanks to the counterfeiting and self-deception of powerlessness, dressed
You might be interested to watch this. These OLPC laptops are simply Mr Kay's "Dynabooks" with (heh) inferior software. And they are cheaper than the textbooks they replace.
If a fork is longer than six inches, let's call it a "frark." That's all objective and scientific, right? Or maybe we should set the bar at five inches?
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You can take somebody's money because... it is advantageous for you to do so? (Isn't there a word for people who do that?)
They would send you one bill for services rendered and another bill (or check) for your mandatory wealth transfer to the poor (or payment from the rich).
It helps to have a Confucian society, where leaders (of government and business) are taught to be benevolently paternalistic, and workers to obey. Dirigisme just loves that kind of environment, and industrialization is not exactly rocket science as long as you have a culture amenable to central control.
Whatever she may have, Ms. Hilton has contributed more to the common good (pace Smith's invisible hand) than you and I ever will.
There is an argument to be made that people who contribute something to the common good ought to receive a commensurate reward; eg, if Britney Spears contributes a concert valued at one millon dollars, it would be fair for her to receive back the same value of goods and services; and as both parties to any such trade are made better off than they were before, Britney is led, as if by an invisible hand, to make a net contribution to the welfare of society.
You and I agree that it would be virtuous and admirable if Britney were to increase her net contribution by giving away some of her profits, and surely people are well advised to debate such principles and (more importantly) apply them to their own lives. But, what right do we have to legislate charity? (That's not a rhetorical question.)
It would be interesting to plot percentile distributions of world income (per person, per year; PPP adjusted) for each year of the past fifty. I don't think we'd find much to complain about, except perhaps that the the bottom quintile had not advanced by enough. Whole countries have industrialized in that time, but no rich country of 1950 has returned to its old peasant villages (so as to offset the gains). The next fifty years promise equality as never before, as China and India (cross your fingers) grow.
The figure is 1-2 billion people living on $1-2/day, adjusted for purchasing power.
The prices of land and labor vary wildly between markets. (You can't ship a parcel of African land to Manhattan, and even when laborers in low-wage markets can manage to cross borders they often prefer to remain at home.) Those are significant inputs to just about every business activity. The exceptions prove the rule: microprocessors, for example, cost the same everywhere.
But while we're discussing Nietzsche, why not read his Genealology of Morals:
You might be interested to watch this. These OLPC laptops are simply Mr Kay's "Dynabooks" with (heh) inferior software. And they are cheaper than the textbooks they replace.
They could have auctioned a 'limited edition' until their production came up to full speed.
Linux's device mapper can snapshot a block device, which you can then write to your backup medium of choice.
If a fork is longer than six inches, let's call it a "frark." That's all objective and scientific, right? Or maybe we should set the bar at five inches?
cat list-of-important-files | cpio -o | gzip | split -b $DVD_BYTES
For extra credit, xor all blocks together and burn the result.
Swap devices are intended to hold long-inactive pages, like those of a stopped process. They are NOT "virtual memory."