logic without rationality and morality is insanity.
(rationality without logic has similar issues, and morality without rationality is a bomb waiting to go off, though sometimes a dud. broken morality + broken logic - rationality gets you militant religious fundamentalists conducting terrorist operations.)
the USA is, whatever it choses to name itself, a Plutocratic Beaurocracy running an Empire.
the government itself cannot shrink unless the nation breaks up into component parts. it is possible to reorganise it to make it less useless, but making it smaller doesn't help.
it does need to stop protecting companies from competition, yes, but stop and consider: the natural result of capitalisms is a monopoly. every. single. time. the only available counter force to this is government regulation.
the Problem is that governments have a bad habit of supporting entrenched predatory corporations over newly created ones, thus undermining their role as a counteracting force in favour of building themselves up as a contributing force towards that inevitable monopoly.
take a look at what actually does and doesn't work in the world and you find that almost without fail, the ones that Work are the ones that actually balance all the factors properly.
tossing out one extremist ideological idiocy for another one just gets you a string of revolts and revolutions. (not all of them armed and bloody, mind you) especially if the general public does not realise how extream the original position was, (and while no one's codified it to the best of my knowledge, the USA is an extremely plutocratic bureaucracy).
also, the more economic freedom you build into a national system, the more corporate monopolies you get abusing the public. the more freedom you restrict within the system, the more ideological abuse it suffers at the hands of incompetents in government more interested in votes and power than in running things properly. i'm sure you can see the issue.
that said, if you want a more friendly-to-the-people economy, stop trying to manage it at an imperial (i'm sorry, federal) level, forget the arbitrary nonsense that is the state level: run it at the city-region level. also give up on the horribly damaging idea that is free trade, even between those city-regions. in reality, all free trade does in entrench the dominant party in a given industry and destroy the capacity for competitors to arise in other areas where there would otherwise actually be demand for such.
(that said: export subsidies are always a suicidally stupid ideal, economically speaking. sure, subsidize start-up costs for an industry you want in your area, subsidise necessary things that would otherwise be too expensive for the local market to support, but the moment you start pumping money into making stuff that is demanded elsewhere, and that your own people do not benefit from, you are overspecialising and will find yourself in a massive hole when demand drops off due to other suppliers having similar ideas or a completely different product replacing what you were making.)
i'd always wondered about the logic behind that. it still has a lot of problems and it'd make more sense for the law to just say 'people and/or corporations' as applicable and where applicable, but still.
this does lead to a hilarious side effect:
there are a number of laws floating around in various countries (i am aware of such things in NZ and US law) where, wanting to refer specifically to actual, you know, People, rather than corporations, they have to specify 'real people'.
i figure the only reason they don't use the term 'human' is in case we encounter aliens or something. (it's debateable if an AI counts as a 'real person' or falls in the same slot as a corporation, for example.)
on the subject of corporate charters: once upon a time corporations had a specific end goal. once that goal was completed (and it was almost always something that could not be done by either the government or normal business) the corporation was wrapped up, it payed out to the investors and either it's parts were sold off or it defaulted into government ownership, depending on it's purpose.
(sometimes there was simply a time limit instead, i suppose)
that end goal was not, and should never have been, to generate profit for the shareholders. that was the How of it's function, not the Why. profits were a reward for work done well and used to facilitate the continuation of that work. they were not the goal of the corporation itself or it's charter, even if they were the goal of the individuals who made up that corporation.
somewhere along the way this thought seems to have been lost.
any corporation taking actions contrary to the goal it was created for (hint: game publishing companies? yeah, your charter should be to Publish Games. not make money for the shareholders. crap like DRM is undermining that.) in favour of lining the pockets of its shareholders should lose it's charter pretty much immediately. (how much more so those that undermine their ability to function to make the CEO rich when he retires.)
.... or at least, this is my understanding of things.
also, i cannot think of a single good reason why any corporation who's purpose is not moving things from one country to another should Ever be a multi-national. all that does is remove them from under the effective authority of the only limiters on their behaviour that exist.
there's a solution to that... but the USA's way past the point of being able to implement it. too bad they don't take advantage of the Reason they're allowed to have all those guns in circulation....
unfortunately, this likely simply leads to the department, and thus the tax payer, paying out when they pull this kinda stupid thing and get busted for it.
Re: "some sort of competition between airlines, banks and telcos"
regulating the heck out of corporations is the next best thing to actual competition for keeping the market stable and functioning (and unchecked competition without appropriate regulation can lead bad places too). right up until you run into the whole regulatory capture issue, of course. an annoying one that.
the whole 'regulate anything big enough to be a danger to the public' thing seems to have worked in NZ for the most part, at least. pretty much anything significant either has Lots of competition or Lots of regulation. unfortunately, all it takes is for the wrong idiot (as opposed to the right idiot. hehe.) to end up in power and we end up with the closest thing to copies of the US's stupid corporation-driven laws they think they can get away with... (not many at a time, and not as bad as those in the USA, but still there. )
Re: Re: Re: Jobs are a matter of the money supply and the supply is short.
i'd like to think this isn't Usually done intentionally (given how screwed up current 'standard' economic theory is it's entirely believable that this is mostly caused by ignorance and stupidity)
i will, however, admit that i'd be quite surprised if it hadn't been done deliberately at least once or twice.
also: silver standard's not a terrible plan... a Better plan, if you can properly streamline the beaurocracy (and really, the only way to do that for something the size of the USA is to devolve this to At Least the state level, city region's more useful) is to keep an actual record of all goods in circulation as being a function of time+materials (and do the same for those materials right down to the point where they were imported from a different region) and have your currency be representative of a percentage of That. probably borderline impossible, but even a partial attempt would be more useful than the current system which seems to amount to 'guess. adjust if economic consequences are sufficiently sub-optimal.'
Re: Re: Re: Re: Jobs are a matter of the money supply and the supply is short.
'something radical' like an actually rational tarrif system at a city-region level? (which does not in any way line up with sates and Certainly doesn't line up with the USA as a whole) designed entirely to allow for local industry to replace imports combined with breaking up the insane anti-growth engine that is the multinational (or even, on the scale of the USA, multi-state) corporation and realising that that any economy that relies entirely on exporting raw materials is horribly vulnerable to outside market fluctuations, and that 'outsourcing' (or, more accurately, exporting a chunk of your business) does very little to help the economy of the place you export To, and rips a large chunk OUT of the economy you export it From.
economic growth comes from the city-region replacing it's imports with locally produced products, allowing the money previously used for those imports to be used to import Other things. growth comes from the internal economy of the city region getting bigger. eventually you may well end up with higher costs than if you just imported the things in the first place, but you'll also have more income and better conditions. basically, you pay more, but in exchange get more, better, things that, while they cost more, cost a Smaller Percentage of your available wealth.
(poorly explained. go read 'the economy of cities' by Jane Jacobes. 'economyths' is good reading too. i forget the name of the author at the moment)
depends who's in power at the time, here. that's not actually the standard response.
NZ government =/= US government.
the country, and bureaucracy, is a lot smaller, parliament has only one house, is a lot smaller than the US equivalents, and, if memory serves, still gives us less people per representative... the party system has a much stronger lock on how MPs vote, sadly, but on the other hand, lobbyists have a LOT less. our biggest problem is that a lot of parties have a tendency to take ideology over reality when making decisions. and sadly Both our major parties have bought into the lie that is 'free trade', and National, the one currently in power, basically has as it's ideology 'line our pockets and be more compliant with the demands of the USA' (which basically means, the various large corporations).
hehe. even they won't quite go as far as trying to say we should build nuclear reactors though. ('we should not dismiss looking into the possibility as an option'is about as close as it gets), because for all that more people are less worried about the reactors themselves*, it's seen as one of those nationalistic things. 'we refused to cave on this despite the most powerful empire in the world pressuring us', added to the fact that the only political types who actively support such ideas on any level are seen to be somewhat in the pockets of the empire in question... yeah. not a popular idea.
*(I'm not one of those people. the incredibly low risk of disaster does not outweigh the MASSIVE downside of if it does eventuate. tidal generators look more promising)
.... the 'will likely' bit was wrong, i believe, because NZ politics don't quite work that way.
the rest of it sounds exactly like how our politicians and media tend to put stuff anyway. it's in the future, there are no grantees, and they don't want to get sued into the ground if they're wrong and someone finds a way to make something absurd stick.
"Of course, other MPs will likely claim that this clearly doesn't apply to Parliament, which just shows the ridiculous double standard of such laws. " this bit hear just shows a lack of knowledge regarding NZ politics. the rest is pretty much what the debate on the issue looks like here.
the actual standard response for such laws from the MPs is usually something to the effect of 'well, it's up to the police to enforce these laws, or not, as appropriate' (which, i might add, usually pisses the cops off because it should NOT be their job to do anything other than actually enforce the law, not have to constantly make decisions that should be taking place at the level of parliament/the courts) or in this case 'that's why we have a tribunal, so that if you're falsely accused it can be sorted out'
(thing to remember: at tribunals, it's not an adversarial thing with lawyers arguing and trying to convince the judge. the cost of going to a tribunal is usually low and who pays how much of it is usually part of the resulting agreement. tribunals are negotiations between the two parties with an arbitrator present to help them reach an agreement, or force one if they can't.)
actually, if i remember rightly, and i may not, there's the whole three strikes bit, then it goes to a tribunal (can't remember if they can't cut you off without that or if it only goes there if challenged though), then if the tribunal fails to resolve the issue/one party appeals the ruling/one or both parties fail to follow through on the ruling of the tribunal, Then it goes to court.
at least, that's the usual process when there's a tribunal involved in the resolution process, and last i read the relevant documents there was.
On the post: Canadian Pharmacies React To US Gov't Taking $500 Million From Google Over Their Ads
Re:
(of course, starting several kilometres under ground, it's gonna take a lot of steps up to get to somewhere worth Being.)
On the post: Canadian Pharmacies React To US Gov't Taking $500 Million From Google Over Their Ads
Re: Re: Why are they cheaper in Canada
(rationality without logic has similar issues, and morality without rationality is a bomb waiting to go off, though sometimes a dud. broken morality + broken logic - rationality gets you militant religious fundamentalists conducting terrorist operations.)
On the post: Canadian Pharmacies React To US Gov't Taking $500 Million From Google Over Their Ads
Re: I thought we were in a capatalist society
the government itself cannot shrink unless the nation breaks up into component parts. it is possible to reorganise it to make it less useless, but making it smaller doesn't help.
it does need to stop protecting companies from competition, yes, but stop and consider: the natural result of capitalisms is a monopoly. every. single. time. the only available counter force to this is government regulation.
the Problem is that governments have a bad habit of supporting entrenched predatory corporations over newly created ones, thus undermining their role as a counteracting force in favour of building themselves up as a contributing force towards that inevitable monopoly.
On the post: Canadian Pharmacies React To US Gov't Taking $500 Million From Google Over Their Ads
Re: Re: Re: Thieves...
it doesn't actually work.
take a look at what actually does and doesn't work in the world and you find that almost without fail, the ones that Work are the ones that actually balance all the factors properly.
tossing out one extremist ideological idiocy for another one just gets you a string of revolts and revolutions. (not all of them armed and bloody, mind you) especially if the general public does not realise how extream the original position was, (and while no one's codified it to the best of my knowledge, the USA is an extremely plutocratic bureaucracy).
also, the more economic freedom you build into a national system, the more corporate monopolies you get abusing the public. the more freedom you restrict within the system, the more ideological abuse it suffers at the hands of incompetents in government more interested in votes and power than in running things properly. i'm sure you can see the issue.
that said, if you want a more friendly-to-the-people economy, stop trying to manage it at an imperial (i'm sorry, federal) level, forget the arbitrary nonsense that is the state level: run it at the city-region level. also give up on the horribly damaging idea that is free trade, even between those city-regions. in reality, all free trade does in entrench the dominant party in a given industry and destroy the capacity for competitors to arise in other areas where there would otherwise actually be demand for such.
(that said: export subsidies are always a suicidally stupid ideal, economically speaking. sure, subsidize start-up costs for an industry you want in your area, subsidise necessary things that would otherwise be too expensive for the local market to support, but the moment you start pumping money into making stuff that is demanded elsewhere, and that your own people do not benefit from, you are overspecialising and will find yourself in a massive hole when demand drops off due to other suppliers having similar ideas or a completely different product replacing what you were making.)
On the post: Canadian Pharmacies React To US Gov't Taking $500 Million From Google Over Their Ads
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Drug Companies
this does lead to a hilarious side effect:
there are a number of laws floating around in various countries (i am aware of such things in NZ and US law) where, wanting to refer specifically to actual, you know, People, rather than corporations, they have to specify 'real people'.
i figure the only reason they don't use the term 'human' is in case we encounter aliens or something. (it's debateable if an AI counts as a 'real person' or falls in the same slot as a corporation, for example.)
on the subject of corporate charters: once upon a time corporations had a specific end goal. once that goal was completed (and it was almost always something that could not be done by either the government or normal business) the corporation was wrapped up, it payed out to the investors and either it's parts were sold off or it defaulted into government ownership, depending on it's purpose.
(sometimes there was simply a time limit instead, i suppose)
that end goal was not, and should never have been, to generate profit for the shareholders. that was the How of it's function, not the Why. profits were a reward for work done well and used to facilitate the continuation of that work. they were not the goal of the corporation itself or it's charter, even if they were the goal of the individuals who made up that corporation.
somewhere along the way this thought seems to have been lost.
any corporation taking actions contrary to the goal it was created for (hint: game publishing companies? yeah, your charter should be to Publish Games. not make money for the shareholders. crap like DRM is undermining that.) in favour of lining the pockets of its shareholders should lose it's charter pretty much immediately. (how much more so those that undermine their ability to function to make the CEO rich when he retires.)
.... or at least, this is my understanding of things.
also, i cannot think of a single good reason why any corporation who's purpose is not moving things from one country to another should Ever be a multi-national. all that does is remove them from under the effective authority of the only limiters on their behaviour that exist.
On the post: Appeals Court: Arresting Guy For Filming Cops Was A Clear Violation Of Both 1st & 4th Amendments
Re: Re:
On the post: Appeals Court: Arresting Guy For Filming Cops Was A Clear Violation Of Both 1st & 4th Amendments
Re: Re:
On the post: AT&T Takes A Lesson From Banks: Will Now Charge You For Not Using Enough Long Distance
Re: "some sort of competition between airlines, banks and telcos"
the whole 'regulate anything big enough to be a danger to the public' thing seems to have worked in NZ for the most part, at least. pretty much anything significant either has Lots of competition or Lots of regulation. unfortunately, all it takes is for the wrong idiot (as opposed to the right idiot. hehe.) to end up in power and we end up with the closest thing to copies of the US's stupid corporation-driven laws they think they can get away with... (not many at a time, and not as bad as those in the USA, but still there. )
On the post: New Zealand ISP Boss Denounces Bad Copyright Law
Re: Re: Ah, The Greeks Have It
far more comes from milk though.
On the post: 'What Idiot Wrote The Patent That Might Invalidate Software Patents? Oh, Wait, That Was Me'
Re: Re: Re: Re:
On the post: First Year Associate Fired After Telling Partners He Had A 'Superior Legal Mind' Sues Firm For $77 Million
Re: Re: If he's willing to sue an employer, he's a bad risk.
On the post: Notch Comes Up With New Plan To Settle Trademark Dispute: Quake 3 Battle
Re: Re: everything should be settled like this
somehow, i think that would cheapen the effect :P
On the post: Funniest/Most Insightful Comments Of The Week At Techdirt
Re:
On the post: Funniest/Most Insightful Comments Of The Week At Techdirt
Re: Re: Re:
generally, those who don't take it seriously are those who's income depends on not taking it seriously.
those who don't have such vested interests care more about the truth, and generally do.
On the post: E. Zachary Knight's Favorite Techdirt Posts Of The Week
Re: Re: Re: Jobs are a matter of the money supply and the supply is short.
i will, however, admit that i'd be quite surprised if it hadn't been done deliberately at least once or twice.
also: silver standard's not a terrible plan... a Better plan, if you can properly streamline the beaurocracy (and really, the only way to do that for something the size of the USA is to devolve this to At Least the state level, city region's more useful) is to keep an actual record of all goods in circulation as being a function of time+materials (and do the same for those materials right down to the point where they were imported from a different region) and have your currency be representative of a percentage of That. probably borderline impossible, but even a partial attempt would be more useful than the current system which seems to amount to 'guess. adjust if economic consequences are sufficiently sub-optimal.'
On the post: E. Zachary Knight's Favorite Techdirt Posts Of The Week
Re: Re: Re: Re: Jobs are a matter of the money supply and the supply is short.
economic growth comes from the city-region replacing it's imports with locally produced products, allowing the money previously used for those imports to be used to import Other things. growth comes from the internal economy of the city region getting bigger. eventually you may well end up with higher costs than if you just imported the things in the first place, but you'll also have more income and better conditions. basically, you pay more, but in exchange get more, better, things that, while they cost more, cost a Smaller Percentage of your available wealth.
(poorly explained. go read 'the economy of cities' by Jane Jacobes. 'economyths' is good reading too. i forget the name of the author at the moment)
On the post: Could New Zealand's Parliament Lose Its Internet Connection Under Its Own Three Strikes Law?
Re:
NZ government =/= US government.
the country, and bureaucracy, is a lot smaller, parliament has only one house, is a lot smaller than the US equivalents, and, if memory serves, still gives us less people per representative... the party system has a much stronger lock on how MPs vote, sadly, but on the other hand, lobbyists have a LOT less. our biggest problem is that a lot of parties have a tendency to take ideology over reality when making decisions. and sadly Both our major parties have bought into the lie that is 'free trade', and National, the one currently in power, basically has as it's ideology 'line our pockets and be more compliant with the demands of the USA' (which basically means, the various large corporations).
hehe. even they won't quite go as far as trying to say we should build nuclear reactors though. ('we should not dismiss looking into the possibility as an option'is about as close as it gets), because for all that more people are less worried about the reactors themselves*, it's seen as one of those nationalistic things. 'we refused to cave on this despite the most powerful empire in the world pressuring us', added to the fact that the only political types who actively support such ideas on any level are seen to be somewhat in the pockets of the empire in question... yeah. not a popular idea.
*(I'm not one of those people. the incredibly low risk of disaster does not outweigh the MASSIVE downside of if it does eventuate. tidal generators look more promising)
On the post: Could New Zealand's Parliament Lose Its Internet Connection Under Its Own Three Strikes Law?
Re: Re: Re:
the rest of it sounds exactly like how our politicians and media tend to put stuff anyway. it's in the future, there are no grantees, and they don't want to get sued into the ground if they're wrong and someone finds a way to make something absurd stick.
"Of course, other MPs will likely claim that this clearly doesn't apply to Parliament, which just shows the ridiculous double standard of such laws. " this bit hear just shows a lack of knowledge regarding NZ politics. the rest is pretty much what the debate on the issue looks like here.
the actual standard response for such laws from the MPs is usually something to the effect of 'well, it's up to the police to enforce these laws, or not, as appropriate' (which, i might add, usually pisses the cops off because it should NOT be their job to do anything other than actually enforce the law, not have to constantly make decisions that should be taking place at the level of parliament/the courts) or in this case 'that's why we have a tribunal, so that if you're falsely accused it can be sorted out'
(thing to remember: at tribunals, it's not an adversarial thing with lawyers arguing and trying to convince the judge. the cost of going to a tribunal is usually low and who pays how much of it is usually part of the resulting agreement. tribunals are negotiations between the two parties with an arbitrator present to help them reach an agreement, or force one if they can't.)
On the post: Could New Zealand's Parliament Lose Its Internet Connection Under Its Own Three Strikes Law?
Re: Re: Re:
at least, that's the usual process when there's a tribunal involved in the resolution process, and last i read the relevant documents there was.
On the post: Could New Zealand's Parliament Lose Its Internet Connection Under Its Own Three Strikes Law?
Re: Re:
silly techdirt randomly deciding it doesn't remember me anymore :S
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