On 1/2/2011 12:50 PM, Warp wrote:
> Patrick Elliott<sel### [at] npgcablecom>  wrote:
>> Mind, top down solutions do have one benefit... Eventually the effect is
>> to actually land more and more of the people who where *not* in the
>> category being discussed in the same boat, until nearly everyone is
>> equally poor, uneducated, and prospect-less. We see that starting to
>> happen too now, in the US. And, obviously, you no longer need "racial"
>> equality opportunity laws, if everyone is screwed equally by the system
>> anyway, and the problem is purely one of *no one* having good schools,
>> college, or any chance at a job paying more than poverty levels.
>
>    One could even make the argument that a society actually *benefits* on
> the whole in the long term from inequality (in terms of education, job
> opportunities and such), from some people being part of an "elite".
>
In point of fact, it only does so to a point, then you get a sort of 
striation, where neither the top or the bottom progress.

>    Why? Because not everybody can be an astrophysicist, an electronics
> engineer, a surgeon, or the CEO of a multi-billion dollar company. We
> need people who make and cause progress (the "elite"), and we need people
> who make that progress possible (the "workers"), and we need people to
> direct and lead other people (the "bosses").
>
True, the problem of course being that just because person X was a 
genius at Y, doesn't mean that X's children, with all the opportunities 
and money, will either a) apply themselves to being that good at 
anything, or b) won't be a total idiot, while person Z's kids, who have 
no money, no schooling, etc. might not have been far better. This isn't 
just a hypothetical either, it happens all the damn time, its just hard 
to see, if the resources for the guy that *should have* been elite 
consists of the stuff taken from the local trash can, while the village 
idiot can hire 50 people, slightly smarter than himself, to make a 
small, mediocre, improvement in something.

>    If everybody is forced to always stand on the same line as everybody
> else, that will stagnate and inhibit progress. The brilliant people are
> actually stopped from achieving innovation because they are forced to
> stand back. No matter how "unfair" it might be, but some people just are
> naturally more talented, intelligent and capable than others. This is just
> a fact of life and we have to live with it. Rather than complain about how
> unfair this is, the society as a whole benefits if these "elite" people are
> given the opportunity to thrive, to innovate, to drive progress. Moreover,
> they should actually been given incentive (eg. monetary) to do so.
>
>    This is the reason why I think pure socialism is bad for a society:
> In pure socialism nobody owns anything, and the government forces everybody
> to the same line. This stagnates progress and removes incentive for
> people to improve because there is no reward. While pure capitalism
> might be bad for other reasons, it at least motivates and rewards
> innovation (so the best solution might be somewhere in-between the two
> extremes).
>
Might be? Pure capitalism is what Microsoft tries to exist in. We know 
what their products look like. lol Seriously though, *pure* anything 
engenders stupidity. In the case of economics, pure socialism leaves you 
without incentives. Capitalism, on the other hand, in its pure form, 
rewards those that grab up as much as possible, discourages innovation, 
since any true innovation could badly screw someone's business plans 
(especially if it was someone else's), formation of monopolies, to 
prevent such competition, refusal to implement new ideas at all, since 
the basic cost of doing it would cut into existing profits, and the 
*profit* is more important than improving the products, and when they 
are improved, its flash and window dressing. Change the color, the 
shape, etc., but never *ever* invest in *new*. Only competition forces 
that to happen, and then only if the company with the original company 
can't just buy up something, then bury it in a closet for 50 years.

By some estimates, the nearly totally free system we have in the US may 
be leaving us 50 years *behind* where we should have been, precisely 
because of the, "I refuse to spend the money to adopt this, and hurt my 
billion dollar bonus at the end of the year, and the people buying form 
me won't know the difference anyway." Its even one of the libertardian 
arguments, which goes like, "You don't need limits of controls, because 
everyone should be able to figure out if we are robbing them blind, 
poisoning them, selling them crap!", while ignoring the basic fact that 
this *only* works if you a) have perfect information, and/or b) can 100% 
trust the people giving you information about the products. Since you 
don't have (a), and half the information sources on the market are 
*paid* to *inform* you about the products, or gloss over inconvenient 
details, you are left with the companies forcing each other to compete, 
and that only happens if someone else is standing behind them with a 
damn club.

The result, when they don't, is things like the oil industry, which is 
beholden to one single massive foreign corp to decide who gets the oil 
*they themselves* pumped out of the ground, or *worse* the insurance 
industry, which literally has a sort of convention every year, where 
everyone in it sits around a table, without the guy with the club, and 
goes, "Heh, what can we do to make more money, for less actual service 
this year!"

>    Things like government-imposed hiring and enrollment quotas fail for
> that same reason, because while trying to fight perceived discrimination,
> as a side-effect some of the truly brilliant people might get shunned.
> Granted, actual discrimination can shun brilliant people among the group
> of people being discriminated against, but hiring quotas are not the
> solution to that problem. They only cause more problems than they solve.
>
You really need to examine just how badly "pure capitalism", and lack of 
government intervention *does* fail. Hint: Somalia is often quoted as a 
Libertarian paradise, as a joke. No government to speak of, no 
regulation on anything, in theory, businesses could have *everything* 
they ever wanted. Well, they would have to hire their own cops, build 
their own jails, make laws for their properties as to what was and 
wasn't legal, prevent theft, rape, murder, drug dealing, etc. Oh, and 
somehow set up something to protect their products, so someone couldn't 
just steal them and sell identical stuff some place else. Oh, yeah, and, 
at some point, keep people from discriminating for, often, even stupider 
reasons than sex, or race. If only we already *had* something that did 
that sort of thing...

Everyone seems to be able to say what *isn't* the solution. Oddly, none 
of them can ever give a clear, workable, or even testable, solution that 
*will* solve the problem.

-- 
void main () {

     if version = "Vista" {
       call slow_by_half();
       call DRM_everything();
     }
     call functional_code();
   }
   else
     call crash_windows();
}

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