Posted on 11/18/2012 5:36:57 AM PST by 1rudeboy
“Run for your life from any man who tells you that money is evil. That sentence is the leper’s bell of an approaching looter. So long as men live together on earth and need means to deal with one another—their only substitute, if they abandon money, is the muzzle of a gun.”
You beat me to it. Ayn Rand said this 60 years ago.
I said, "I thought that was good. You know, equality. Why SHOULD you make more?"
He stammered that he'd worked very hard for his degree and ... and ... and THAT'S DIFFERENT! Then he ended the discussion and later told my advisor to rein me in as I was "too political." I left the program shortly after, having developed an absolute hatred of humanities professors.
Our earliest agrarian forebears recognized the utility of harnessing oxen to pull carts and plow fields. If brute strength and exertion of labor were all there was to it, our ungulate brethren would have long since surpassed us.
No, that's not founded on reality. Windows has utilized existing open source code in it's evolution, btw. BSD networking, for example. Windows would never have existed if IBM hadn't published the BIOS source code (long before Windows), IMHO a stroke of competitive genius. The fabled competitive power of proprietary closed source is a myth long exploded. It only works for a few things, for a limited time. The required pace of innovation to fuel the continued sales of a software brand can not exist without a open marketplace of ideas, a marketplace which exists in the minds of people. Ultimately the premise of "intellectual property" asks us to control what people may think...how well do you think that turns out?
So Windows was never about the source code, it was about creating value in the mind of the consumer and a marketplace for the exchange of value. That was the product Microsoft created. There are enough people not served by the Microsoft paradigm that the open source approach has found a steady stream of adherents. Microsoft and other commercial software vendors have repeatedly have repeatedly attempted to poison the well in hopes of artificially inflating the value of their products but the reality is the sophistication and value of open source has managed to overcome all efforts to stuff the genie back into the bottle.
It worked long enough for Gates to make enough of a profit.
Cancer is a bad example. Only an iron bar is 100% cancer free. It is all about terminology. I’m fully aware about evils of socialism but what about basic workplace safety? It is considered a socialist feature, are you about to deny it as well?
P4L
Well, do you think it would be sufficient now for you to do the same? I think the particular path followed by Microsoft is unrepeatable, and that's not because we like open source OS. If you want to draw a lesson from the success of Microsoft, look at how they leveraged consumer marketing, brand licensing, and partnerships with manufacturers to outcompete everyone else (by all means possible, heheh). The sanctity of Windows source code was always just a unicorn. Plenty of smart folks not employed by Microsoft made a handsome living from understanding precisely how the code worked without having the source code in hand. They just had to waste time reverse engineering it. You must pay for that inefficiency though, and eventually enough folks (Microsoft included!) were willing to embrace the more efficient paradigm which is open source. That's because OPEN SOURCE was out-innovating CLOSED-SOURCE.
Haha, this is really silly for me to argue because Microsoft products are the bread-and-butter foundation of my current income. But ultimately it's unpleasant work when it's incredibly difficult to address deficiencies in dotNet framework whereas a similar problem with an equivalent Python library or LLVM (that is the incredible scope of dotNet) was probably fixed before I could find it, simply because people could fix it.
actually it’s not a failure of what passes itself for socialism. they have outer party workers, the proles, for 85-90% of the brute labor, and then 5-10% in the inner party to do the thinking and guard and apply the knowledge to get the brute labor to dothe tasks needed to make things.
but all the secrecy and hush-hush of the big brother state, combined with no real upside helping others with what you know, makes progress go very, very slow.
No. If your workplace is not safe then don’t work there. You would be no worse off than if the workplace didn’t exist. But if you feel that the benefits outweigh the risks then work there. It’s all about the freedom to choose. Are you going to say that workplaces are safe under a socialist system where people are just a means to an end. If one gets killed there are plenty more where that one came from. It is only in a capitalist system where worker safety is an issue.
I told her - assume for our discussion that I have tons of money, and I will give you and your laborers as much as you need. The only restriction I put on it is that you may only buy raw materials - steel, land, silicon - in their crudest forms. It is up to you to assemble these raw materials, with your laborers, to build the factory and make me my computer. She thought for a few seconds, and responded "but I can't - I don't know how. I need someone to tell me how to do it" And that is the heart of socialism's failure. For the true source of wealth is not brute labor, or even what you might call brute capital, but the mind. The mind creates new technologies, new products, new business models, new productivity enhancements, in short, everything that creates wealth. Labor or capital without a mind behind it is useless.That puts me in mind of the episode mentioned in an excellent book:During the run-up to our entry into WWII FDR, was desperate to get America ready to produce war materiel. He was afraid, for example, that Churchill was right about what would be done with the Royal Navy if Britain were to be forced to yield to Hitler. So he asked the one man he trusted to get such a vast project organized - Bernard Baruch. Whom he had learned to trust during WWI when, as under Secretary of the Navy he saw America fail to deliver any war materiel before Armistice Day. Baruch told FDR that he was too old for the job, and recommended Bill Knudsen - who had left Ford and joined a failing auto company in 1920, and built its low-price auto division into the success known, then and now, as Chevrolet. Having been told of the gravity of the situation, Knudsen became a “dollar-a-year” man getting industry organized for the task.
- Freedom's Forge:
- How American Business Produced Victory in World War II
Arthur HermanUnionist Walter Reuther showed up with a couple of men who he introduced as toolmakers, and argued for his demand that his union be given a factory and contracts for making aircraft engines. FDR was of course sympathetic. Knudsen “agreed,” and gave Reuther the blueprints for an obsolescent aircraft engine and told him to make it. A little later Reuther said the blueprints weren’t enough, that they needed to see the production line. Knudsen dismissed him out of hand, and explained that anyone who needed to be told how to do the job could not possibly organize others to do it efficiently.
Even that understates the difficulty of the problem which the leftists want to assume away. Apart from command mandates, the first problem is to determine what to build. The unionist wants that to be a given. But that can only be a given in a static, controlled economy - meaning, to the exclusion of progress.
I read a socialist-promoting book, provenance long forgotten, in which the author argued that a committee of workers could figure out whether to build steam or diesel locomotives. I laughed, because not only was the question of steam silly, but worrying about locomotives was so behind the times - we were figuring out personal computers, and there were those unionists, trapped in amber, worrying about locomotives! But if unionists ruled the world, we would never have gotten to the point of making locomotives at all - steam, or any other kind.
Capitalism is progressive, and unionism is reactionary. There is no other way to put it.
The thing about the profit motive is that it is very sensitive. Profit is the difference between income and expenses, and in most businesses both income and expenses are very much larger than the difference between them. The consequence is that profit can be extremely sensitive to small changes in either income or expense. And that makes the entrepreneur very aggressive in promoting income and in curbing expense. The entrepreneur can’t afford to have a nine-to-five attitude. Those that do, go out of business.
Just go away, this is a conversation for the enlightened.
Another restriction in the example would be the silicon wafer manufacturing facility has to be located in the PRC, right?
Can't grow cotton forever, my friend, no matter how much you long for those days.
ping
In Cambodia the Khmer Rouge targeted Professionals, such as doctors, lawyers and teachers, According to Robert D. Kaplan, "eyeglasses were as deadly as the yellow star" as they were seen as a sign of intellectualism...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khmer_Rouge
With that attitude you really don’t belong here.
What a Christian remark, bless you.
Spare me the self righteous indignation. You act like a jerk then get a response telling you that your attitude that Christians are unenlightened on a site run by a Christian means that you are acting like someone that does not belong here, is nothing more than a statement of fact.
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