once created the value of a copy is pretty much zero

It's not the value that approaches zero, it's the Marginal Cost of producing one more unit. It doesn't cost anything to reproduce it, but if people will pay higher, then there is value. When you have an economic moat (less competition) or a monopoly, you can capture some of this value. (Think Telsa selling software upgrades to improve car performance - zero Marginal Cost, but high value) In Perfect Competition, prices approach or hit the Marginal Cost.

Other than that nitpicking, I agree with the rest of what you say. :-)

(1) The nameless model of reality I think is implied by "marginal cost of production is zero" simplifies away some essential aspects of reality (as explained by the late, great, RIP Manny Lehman model of "software evolution"). As the article points out, bug fixes and updates of the existing copy are necessary (to wit, IoT botnets), and in this model one never speaks about the continuing cost to maintaining the zeroth copy.

(2) The anticipated rejoinder to observation (1) is that, given the source, the end-users can do all maintenance, customization, and extension themselves. What we know about complexity (again, thanks, Manny) of any non-trivial application puts the lie to this.

(3) The anticipated rejoinder to observation (2) is existence proofs such as the Linux kernel. My reply to this rejoinder is that Linux is largely corporate-supported as a complement to the supporters products/services.

As you say, updates/fixes also cost. So do marketing, web infrastructure and so on.

It's usual in business to charge for utility and perceived value ("As much as the market can bear"), not for the cost of mechanical assembly/reproduction.

OP is correct that Apple has created a new(ish) distribution model. It was a gold-rush for a year or three, but has become extremely unfavourable to new product development.

But this has become a curation and discovery problem, not a distribution problem. Apple's 30% would be a lot more palatable if discovery and search worked better, if buyers could opt-in to a mailing list to support newsletters, cross-sales, and future sales, if sellers could set up trials - and so on.

None of this is likely because the App Store is an example of the first law of aggregation - be the feudal landowner, not the peasant smallholder.

The App Store is immensely profitable for Apple. The law of aggregation means that Apple has no serious incentive to make it better.

The App Store won't change now. Eventually the entire platform will collapse and be replaced by a new technology in a new market space. But I wouldn't bet on that happening within five years, and possibly not within ten. (My best guess would be somewhere between those two.)

Meanwhile it's still possible to do well selling app development as a service instead of apps as a product.

So while yes they may value the good at the price they're willing to pay, they view the "fair value" at much closer to the marginal cost.

It's important to note that this is a particular kind of value, a neo-classical definition. The Marxian one is independent of what people will pay for an item; for example, land, honor, titles of nobility etc. Have no value.

> As with all IP, once created the value of a copy is pretty much zero. It's a simple case of supply and demand, the supply is infinite so logically the price is zero.

Read in a certain way (e.g. use of value vis–à–vis price), this is super Marxian.

Luckily, philosophers do not believe in the fact that their different ideas actually compete with each other.

Besides this, Russia is a capitalist country. My apologies if you weren't stating that it wasn't.

I don't want to live in a country that is run exclusively by peasants. That happened, successfully, in russia. In the 1920s. And the result was not pretty.

Sure, russia is "capitalist" now. Capitalist means absolutely nothing in terms of philosophy. Its just a word used by marxists to express their annoyance with a vague concept that results in the creation of value (and they obviously have no problem with value, but the returns should absolutely, entirely, end up in the hands of the peasants, not some hokey dokey CEO. That aside, russia was not "capitalist" for a long time, and still suffers the consequences.

Specifically in the case of Russia, they have another big problem - which is the idea that they are still somehow the core of the USSR and have to restore that thing, instead of trying to fix their real issues.

People seem to forget that there are janitors at microsoft who drive ferraris. They took stock options over vacation time.

No, it didn't. The Leninist vanguard were not all (or even largely, especially at the highest ranks) peasants.

Even in feudal economies, peasants had individual or collective property interests in land (serfs and slaves might not, but those are different than peasants, and serfdom had been abolished in Russia generations before the Revolution.) Russian peasants at the time of the Revolution generally were individual landholders because of the recent breakup of collective ownership (other places similar reforms were implemented eventually led to most former peasants ending up as wage laborers as large capital interests bought up agrarian land, but that hadn't had time to happen yet in Russia, and the de-collectivization was still popular among peasants, which is probably a big factor in why peasants in Russia were seen as class enemies of the proletariat by the Bolsheviks; they were, if only tenuously and transitionally, essentially situated like members of the petit bourgeoisie.)

While true it was too little and too late, the conditions of russian peasants at that time were still very serf-like. That and WWI defeat sparked the russian revolution, along with certain interest in the West to destabilize Russia.

The Leninist vanguard generally was not peasants, whether or not they were true Communists.

This is patently (excuse the pun) false. One of the largest economic texts it Capital by Karl Marx; in this book his only objective is to critique classical political economy, and by doing so set out what constitutes capitalism. It's not vague, Marx defines capitalism in very concrete terms. Her refers to the capitalist mode of production, which consists of production to maximise exchange value of commodities, the private ownership of social means of production, and the primacy of wage labour.

>and they obviously have no problem with value

This is false. Communists do have a problem with value, their qualm is with exchange value ruling production, which is almost a unique quality of capitalism. It results in shoddy goods, goods not made to be used, but to be exchanged in a money-commodity circuit.

>end up in the hands of the peasants

Not even Communists argue for this; the Communists argue for the means of production to be put into the hands of the people, who can, within themselves, elect leaders who are qualified for the task. This is democratic rule, rather than autocratic rule (which is what there is now) of a particular firm's productive capacity within an industry.

>russia was not "capitalist" for a long time, and still suffers the consequences.

You're right, it had the feudalist mode of production for that time. With the advent of the USSR, it had the state-capitalist mode of production. On what basis do I declare this? On the basis of Marx's definition of the capitalist mode of production.

>which is the idea that they are still somehow the core of the USSR and have to restore that thing, instead of trying to fix their real issues.

What issues are you talking about, in particular? I think the requirement to sell one's labour to a class of property owners is a rather big issue.

>People seem to forget that there are janitors at microsoft who drive ferraris.

That doesn't mean that they are not exploited; janitors driving Ferraris has nothing to do with the problems of capitalism.

I consider Marx a clown, and marxism is a clown fiesta, and "capitalism" is the cause they fight against. Of course it contains "meaning".

Communism, on the other hand, is at least a valid idea. Its by no means viable, because its in direct conflict with human nature, survival instincts, intrinsic properties of physics and a bunch of other issues, but as a concept, communism is kinda cool.

I'm not contesting that feudal lords were a thing. Certainly not in the middle ages. To what extent that was still the case around 1890 - I'm not sure. I wasn't around back then. I don't think feudalism is a thing in the present, at least not in central europe.

If you want to study this whole class system, Nietzsche does a lot better job of explaining is and is way less pathetic about it. "Morals as a concept are installed by rulers to keep their sheep in check, deal with it".

- Marxism and Communism may be closer to each other than anarchism and communism, but they are not the same thing. Marx called for a peasant uprising. He's just pissed about the fact that the value created by peasants ends up in the hands of their owners.

- There is no autocratic rule in the free world. France elected a "capitalist" in sarkozy because they were pissed with financials. Then they elected a socialist in whoever the current guy is. Now theyre pissed with financials. Next, they are electing either the lunatic Le Pen who claimed that ebola bombs should be dropped on romania because it would give them both valuable scientific data and eliminate a bunch of people that the world doesnt need.

- Germany is ruled by the two big parties for a long time now because they are so close to each other in ideas and anyone who deviates from the mainstream is called a nazi or an evil capitalist or some other hate inspiring nonsense that you can only vote for her.

- The US was very fucking sure about the fact that they would elect the wall streets darling. Everyone knew it. People didnt even cast their vote because obviously the orange one would not win. Now he did. And people seem to forget that that guy was elected. Hes a fucking moron with the potential for Hitler stardom, but people elected that guy. That was not wall street. That was people who voted for change. Now they dont get change and they get fucked over because the guy is in it for the money but they certainly got whom they voted for.

-You're right, it had the feudalist mode of production for that time. With the advent of the USSR, it had the state-capitalist mode of production. On what basis do I declare this? On the basis of Marx's definition of the capitalist mode of production.

It doesn't really matter what you declare this. I know that its not communism. Its never communism. But at what point do people accept that every time a country tried communism, everything went to shit? It clearly doesnt work. I mean it works for no one. No one achieves anything worthwhile in communism experiments. Not a single person. But a whole lot of them end up in gulags.

And I'm not saying that communism is bad. But the results that came out of communism are so spectacularly bad, EVERY SINGLE TIME, that trying again is unethical. People think that Hitler was a bad person, but Mao achieved thrice the kill count without even trying.

> What issues are you talking about, in particular? I think the requirement to sell one's labour to a class of property owners is a rather big issue.

I'm talking about the fact that Russia is ruled by a person that was formerly part of the KGB and really wants his big soviet union back - and backs it up by moves like blatantly annexing parts of other countries whenever possible. The baltic states are shitting their pants a lot, these days.

I don't feel particularly exploited, btw. We live in a very free world. If you don't want to sell your time, just don't do it. Start your own company. See how that goes. We are all capable of taking chances. Some win, some lose. Some don't even try. Somehow, those who are too weak, or preoccupied with other things, are blaming those who did try, for the fact that they have relatively easy lives.

I'm often confronted with the fact that I was "lucky" and only get to have such thoughts because I was lucky. The thing is, I was lucky. I was born in central europe. Thats already jackpot worthy. We constitute way less than 10% of the worlds population and live like gods by default. The worst of the worst hobo in germany is way better off than almost anyone in bangladesh.

And I was probably a lot luckier than that. Other circumstances.

But we are all really fucking lucky that in the past, some entrepreneurs were fed up with the fact that there was no running water and that water was always infested with mud and bacteria and doctors didnt think it was cool that 5 out of 7 babies died of the common cold. And they solved those problems. And became rich. If there had never been an option to become rich in the first place, how many of those guys would have pulled a Picasso instead and just painted? If you take away just 10% of the useful inventions made by people who only got ambitious because money, where would we be today instead?

If you can make the argument that the rich benefit from the peasants getting redistributed funds, you should also be capable to make the argument that the worst of the worst peasant today lives like a god, compared to the richest of the rich just 100 years ago. And thats not hyperbole. Travel back 100 years and tell the still reigning king of Germany just about the bottom tier technologies we have access to. I'm pretty sure they'd consider that blasphemy.

Markets are different from capitalism. The fact that you don't consider it a stage of human history is strange, as capitalism has origins in a series of historical events. The Wikipedia article on capitalism is very good for this.

>obfuscates that and tries to reason that there is some oppressive force, exhibited by a ruling class, over the peasantry

No, Marx talks about the bourgeoisie and the proletariat being the two classes which engage in struggle in our capitalist society. However class struggle is not unique to capitalism, it is, as Marx describes, the history of all struggle hitherto. Now there are other minor classes aside from these in society, as there were in Marx's time - the petit-bourgeoisie and the lumpenproletariat. However peasantry was largely used to describe the feudal mode of production.

>I don't think feudalism is a thing in the present, at least not in central europe.

Many parts of the world had not yet emerged from the feudal mode of production around Marx's time, and large swathes had not even seen large industry expansion. Even in Lenin's time, the functions of capital were not as developed in Russia as they were in other European nations (Germany and England being those leading the industrial revolution); in fact, Lenin split with his contemporaries on this, those opposed to him, the Mensheviks, believing that Russia had not reached capitalism yet, thus a revolution would be inappropriate and doomed to failure.

>"Morals as a concept are installed by rulers to keep their sheep in check, deal with it".

Marx also talks about the common forms of morality, family, justice etc. as bourgeois distinctions, as do his contemporaries such as Max Stirner and Bakunin.

>Marxism and Communism may be closer to each other than anarchism and communism

Marxism is not a form of society, it is a method of analysis, which originated in political economy but has since been carried over to various other fields, ranging from geography to literature. Communism implies an anarchist society, as Communism is to do away with rulers, including those rulers of land.

>There is no autocratic rule in the free world.

I was referring to the method of organisation within a company or firm, not how countries are organised. In terms of country political systems, those which are parliamentary democracies are, according to the Marxist analysis, bourgeois democracies, to perpetuate and ensure the survival of the flow of capital.

>But at what point do people accept that every time a country tried communism, everything went to shit?

It depends, some take this position, and others do not. Communism and its sisters, including syndicalism, took root, such as in revolutionary Spain in which 2 million people were engaged in large-scale worker unions, with no bureaucracy, all voluntarily engaging. Same is the case with the third French revolution, when Paris was split into 48 communes, each coordinating with regular meetings the affairs of the revolution.

I think you have an uncharitable view of Communism or similar ideologies, especially given the much changed nature of our world since those times of revolution in the early 20th and late 19th centuries. Don't you think it should be up to modern day Marxists and indeed leftists of any and all persuasions to find and fix those errors?

>I don't feel particularly exploited, btw. We live in a very free world. If you don't want to sell your time, just don't do it. Start your own company. See how that goes.

Whether you feel exploited or not is irrelevant. This can be attributed to commodity fetishism and false consciousness as elaborated by Engels. Most people (especially in developing countries) do not have the opportunity to move out of the situation of selling labour-power for a wage, and even if most people did, there are still those who must do it. Just as the answer in a feudal system isn't "make everyone a lord", the answer within capitalism isn't to make everyone a property owner. There is not sufficient property (in particular land capital) to do this, anyway. Capitalism also requires large amount of wage labour, which would not be possible if the whole world were self employed, and we would resort to a bourgeois commodity exchange economy. Those born to parents without any land will not have any land. This is unfair in my eyes.

>Somehow, those who are too weak, or preoccupied with other things, are blaming those who did try, for the fact that they have relatively easy lives.

Hard work does not give reward, at least not within capitalism. This can be shown by those people who not only take large risk but they work hard too, and they're still wage labourers. And what perpetuates this? The system of property ownership. This had been identified indeed as far back as Rousseau and propagated and identified by all those anarchists and Communists through the 19th century.

Further, we do not blame those who try, we blame those who, in contempt of the idea that every man is born equal and free, hold property for their own profits. It is possible to try and succeed without holding property.

>If there had never been an option to become rich in the first place, how many of those guys would have pulled a Picasso instead and just painted?

This is ridiculous. People generally want to follow their passions, you are forgetting that a lot of development in technology happened when capitalism wasn't about, and indeed the scientists and inventors worked only because they were not oppressed by the rule of wage labour. Oscar Wilde talks about this in his book The Soul of Man Under Socialism. Those great inventors of the past usually did not work for profit at all, they worked out of the flame lit by curiosity, only resorting to the force of work when they had no money - again as a result of capitalism only affording people good life if they own property.

>the worst peasant today lives like a god, compared to the richest of the rich just 100 years ago.

And that's still not good enough. Saying that conditions have improved is just like saying "well, it could be worse" - in other words, the fallacy of relative privation.

Who expects medicine to be free because they cost nothing to replicate?

The point is that it would be easier for people to digest the costs if they paid for development, not for the cost of producing the pills.

Let's say it costs $1B to produce a certain new type of medication. The company who developed it expects to sell about 100 million pills a year. The pills cost $0.01 to produce.

Sell the pills for $0.02 and for the first 10 years add a $20/pill 'development cost recuperation' charge, list it on the bill as such. The company gets a 200% R.O.I. on initial development, plus a 200% R.O.I on every pill sold.

Few people have problems with a company recovering their costs and making a decent profit. The problems start when the costs have been made back ten times over and they are still keeping the price high using the initial development costs as an excuse.

What I'm trying to say is that companies should adjust their business model to align with how people perceive the world, instead of trying to rewrite millions of years of evolution to fit their business model.

Why are services like Netflix and Spotify so popular ? Not because people suddenly changed their mind about paying for IP. Netflix and Spotify sell a service, and people accept that services cost money.

The true cost of bringing a drug to market - inclusive of the extensive research and development required, the failed candidates, the FDA testing and approval processes, etc. - is around $2,800,000,000.

And so, as the saying goes, the first pill costs $2.8B, the second pill costs $0.01. "People" only consider the $0.01 cost to produce the pills that they desire to take, and seem to easily ignore that initial $2.8B investment. This is why patent protection is so critical to the success of many industries, especially medical devices and pharmaceuticals.

This also explains why drug companies refuse to develop life-saving drugs if the potential market for the drug is too small. In many cases, they would have to charge $1,000,000+ per treatment to break even. There are several medications on the market which, for the full course of treatment, cost around $300,000. This seems to be the upper limit in drug development, and insurance is willing to pay the price because one successful treatment will likely save them 10x that amount in the elimination of future care.

This is a recent (3/2/2017) article [1] on one such $300,000/year enzyme-based treatment for a rare disease which affects an estimated 5,000 to 10,000 people worldwide! Development of drugs for rare diseases has been a major problem for quite a while, with legislation on the matter dating back to 1983. However, it's apparent that it's still a problem.

And here is another article on yet another $300,000 treatment (see, there's that number again) to treat cystic fibrosis.

[1]: http://www.cnbc.com/2017/03/02/pompe-drug-lauded-by-trump-co...

[2]: https://www.statnews.com/pharmalot/2016/09/19/sarepta-duchen...

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_drug_development#Resea...

While it does makes sense that pharma r&d is expensive ,It's really hard to believe those numbers, specially that they always seem to change: first it was ~$700M/drug, than ~1.5B and now 2.8B ?

[1]: https://www.forbes.com/sites/matthewherper/2012/02/10/the-tr...

I'm sure many people would expect that, if they were perform the replication themselves using thier own equipment, as they do for software and media.

Making another 100mg of a medicine may cost essentially zero on a pharmaceutical plant, but you can sell the access to the plant.

Copying data is not just easy, but you have already bought the "factory equipment" needed for it, that is, a computer. Thus the drive to dumb down consumer computers (DRM) or move the essential things from users' possession so that they could not easily copy them (SaaS).

There is a large group pushing for Health Care to be free. This includes medicine.

Germany has arguably the best, but certainly the free-est (in the sense that you are free to choose which doctor to see and what kind of treatment to receive), universal healthcare system. The premiums of almost 40% of the adult population are very close to 0. They don't pay for that. Other folks do.

Enjoy those people voting for more free shit.

One can look at health care type spending as a cost, or an investment.

The cost argument generally boils down to "voting in free shit." From the point of view of those able to pay, it is free to those who aren't. From the point of view of those not paying, they see others getting wealthy, and able to get wealthy for their efforts and a productive, capable society.

The investment view boils down to demand, which also presents two ways:

One way is demand not backed by liquid dollars. People want and need stuff, but cannot participate in the markets for lack of buying power.

The other way is demand backed by liquid dollars, real, effective buying power.

The more of the non participating demand there is, and the more it goes unmet, that society experiences generally lower standard of living, instability, higher crime, etc.

We want real demand, people able to participate in the markets.

Investments in the people do that, which frees dollars for them to spend, and it improves their capability, improving on their ability to produce.

You may ask how an economy grows.

When people take risks and borrow, banks make new money as the risk is valued. The investments in people help to improve real demand, which lowers risk, increases success. Each success increases the money supply, and that increase is backed by the value created when the risk was taken.

In a very real sense, "free shit" is actually a smart investment everyone does benefit from, even those paying.

Forcing someone to pay for someone elses expenses is application of force. "For the greater good" is immoral. Read Harry Potter :D

The full, maxed-out tax burden of living in germany approaches 70%. Thats too much. It is immoral, and applies to people who make more than roughly 65k a year. Not a lot of money. And they get to keep 1/3rd of it.

People really really don't want to hear that, but the remote freelance economy is coming. Its just software engineers now. Maybe itll be mechanical engineers next. Finance people, really have no reason to be in offices either. Countries will lose the ability to trap us in their tax exploitation schemes and we will leave. I already do. Renegotiate or lose your productive work force.

People think germany cant fail. Germany is oh so great with its amazing education system. Volkswagen can't shit out more than 20 electric cars by 2020. It takes approximately one Elon to shit all over everything the German tech sector has achieved in 20 years.

Starting a company here? Absolutely not going to happen. Germany is a great place when you're poor.

I got approached by a recruiter the other week. I have 11 years of experience across a whole bunch of stuff. I make 200k+ a year contracting, for american companies who value their engineers. This recruiting lady calls me up, wants to recruit me. I play along just for fun. Tell her roughly what I'd consider. Goes back and forth. 3 calls. Comes back with a "salary matrix". Salary matrix says 11 years of experience gets lumped together with 6 years of experience and pays out 46k a year. Please.

Germany has a better standard of living? Completely agree. 100%. If you take a look at the entire population, I agree. But to me, personally, there are a lot of places that would love to have me, and shower me in tax rebates and decades of tax free living. They compete for me. And they are winning this fucking war. And I dont know what Germanyi s going to become once its alienated all its engineers.

What do all the blue collar folks do when the engineers are gone? I'm not sure. I'm not into politics. I really can't tell you. Only thing I can tell you is that they've lost me. And I really liked it here. But fucking me out of 70% of my money and then being told that I should be grateful for it has lost me. At least show some respect. Even if its for the greater good. You can still appreciate the people who make the greater good possible.

And yes, it is 70%. I have done the math. Income tax, social security that I will never benefit from, VAT on top of that and a myriad of smallish taxes and fees and shit amount to roughly that.

I understand that theres free education. And I benefitted from that. Sure. But if you assume that I'm going to pay ridiculous amounts of money for 50 years, by choice, just because I was born into a system that is the way it is, sorry, thats not going to happen. If you want to hold that I against me, I'm going to hold against the system that I was forced into military service, which is essentially slavery, and if anyone ever decides to drop a bomb onto germany, I'm expected to act as cannon fodder for the "military".

In fact, if we simply didn't change them and reprioritized our existing budget, it would begin to work nicely in the US.

As for fact, economics is not a hard science. Agreed.

Our own history is all we need to know here. Regular and consistent investment spending has a solid basis in history. It's as solid as many other ideas are.

We are left with value judgements. Frankly, I value a bit more basic security and stability more than I do a greater share of dollars earned. I am joined by a growing majority of Americans in these things too.

I don't care what you do. Seriously.

Here, cost and risk exposure is very high. While you may not like the amount your society costs, I can say the lack of sane health care policy, for one, here is something I dislike just as much.

I have just as much and just as valid cause for my advocacy as you do.

Did it all right, but someone got sick. I had two choices:

Let them die, or experience financial ruin. That is no fucking joke. A state of affairs faced by millions all the time here.

And I got forced there too. Let's just say others, who felt they needed more threw me under the bus. Other details do not need to be here.

Perspective, huh?

:D

Cheers! May we both somehow arrive at a more equitable place.

What I meant to say is that Keynesian economics is not the only form of economics out there. Even lots of economics folks blatantly deny that fact.

What a load of self-serving, B.S. Public tax-payer funded health care is not some form of slavery for everyone who pays their taxes and doesn't get sick. And considering the author of Harry Potter benefited greatly from both health care services and other public benefits while writing her books, I think you don't have a leg to stand on there.

More to the point, you don't like the system, you're free to leave Germany, or whatever other country. But if you want to stay, you gotta pay your taxes. It's not "immoral" it's just your decision. The big difference between Germany now, and East Germany of 40 years ago, is you actually can leave anytime you want.

The one thing I do have a problem with is that europe has managed to engineer its population into a situation in which the majority of folks are forced into positions where they can't move out of welfare even if they wanted to, in a reasonable fashion.

In my opinion, both healthcare and internet access have achieved utility status.

This sentence has a ton of negative connotations, so yes you did allude that it may be a bad thing. Sorry, had to call you out.

People were seeing doctors who were over-prescribing opiates, making them cheap and readily available. The DEA (federal Drug Enforcement Administration) cracked down and suddenly these highly addictive prescription opiates were severely constrained, which increased demand for cheap heroin.

Now heroin has replaced prescriptions as the cheap and readily available opiate.

Doctors, in general, are doctors because they wanted to be doctors. Some of them may be in it for the money, but if you are really in it for the money, you become a neurosurgeon at Johns Hopkins, not a primary care physician in Buttfuck, Idaho - where all the rural heroin epidemic victims are.

Sure, some countries hand out opioids more freely than others, but in spain, Codeine is prescription free. Walk into a pharmacy, say you want codeine, you get codeine. I don't see an opioid epidemic in spain. If ease of access was the driving factor behind opioid abuse, spain should be all about opioid abuse. Codeine may not be the most potent opioid in the universe, but it is what it is.

I think its the surgery thing. Because if you fuck up your spine and are in perpetual pain and also cant work anymore which just makes the problem worse because then you cant even afford the morphine, maybe taking the morphine isnt such a bad idea.

You're not seeing it in Europe because you don't have a gigantic portion of your population that's unemployed like we do. (Our official unemployment numbers are complete lies.)

Assuming that people kinda decide to just do drugs because despair is a bit ridiculous. Theres always a reason to do drugs. Almost noone was born an addict, and if you reason that those addictions originated at doctors appointments (prescribed medicine), it was probably not some kind of recreational turned addict thing.

Or are you trying to argue that its the national sport of rural folks to go to their local doctor and check the opioid menu for the flavour of the month opioid to shoot up their vein because they're out of a job and feel despair about it? That sounds a bit far-fetched.

What makes it a fundamental human right? The fact that it says so in the constitution of some countries doesn't make it a fundamental human right.

Is it a fundamental human right like the fact that you can think whatever you want? Because thats a god given ability that nobody can take away. Healthcare is just a modern luxury. You might call it necessary, but healthcare didnt really exist even 60 years ago. People died of really silly little things just 60 years ago. What makes it fundamental?

Yeah, the world sucks in many ways. Good thing we haven't lost our will to fight that.

>Healthcare is just a modern luxury.

Oh your kid was born with cancer and you're poor? Tough luck, no "luxurious" healthcare for you!

>You might call it necessary, but healthcare didnt really exist even 60 years ago. People died of really silly little things just 60 years ago.

And 60 years from now, even fewer people are going to die from really silly little things. What isn't a right now, might become a right in the future. We would call that called progress.

>What makes it fundamental?

Because our evolved brains can contemplate the morality of our actions. A world where health care is a fundamental right is _MORE MORAL_ than a world without.

Rights, laws, rules, the constitution, etc are all abstract ideas that we created to serve us. We get to change them at any point to make them more in line with modern expectations.

>exactly how much healthcare access is a right.

Its not that hard to make a distinction between cancer and catching a cold. Pretty much all laws take into account intent, credibility, reasonable justification and other vague ill-defined criteria.

>what if the required resources are not available in the same amount any more?

Based on available funds, the codified law would be either stricter or looser on the qualifying criteria.

>Are people's rights now violated,

Yes, they would be.

>and if so, by whom?

You should be able to sue the party given the task of dispensing healthcare and make your argument.

No one is saying you need a free ride here, they're saying if you pay your taxes, you should have access the same as for education, or water, or public roads.

There's a saying about "a man knowing the price of everything and the value of nothing", that you might want to consider. By the way, if your toilet-as-a-service is always magically clean, nice smelling and stocked with a never-ending supply of toilet paper, I might very well be interested :)

Water allows you to live. Should the water company raise the price to €1000/liter ?

If the software took you 5 years and €1M to produce, I as a customer will balk at any cost-plus price as my expected business value of using the software is say only €0.5M. But if you spread your costs over a hundred customers by copying (and maybe servicing) the same software, you can charge €0.1M from 100 customers, giving you €9M profit after your expense, and allowing each customer to derive around €0.4M business value. The value for both the producing and consuming side of the software was significantly increased simply by copying some bits :)

Then we don't have to discuss which price is fair. Maybe some of them want to sell water at 1k/litre. Others won't. The market will figure it out.

This is price fixing. If microsoft and apple collude to fix the price of an engineer, you outcry. If you discuss what utilities should cost, prices fixed by monopolies is somehow ok.

That's why politics doesn't work. Not a lot of people have the balls to vote on principles instead of what they want for themselves.

And we don't have water utilities at all - I have my own well and septic system. Like all my neighbors. So in a sense there are many water companies?

If utilities are operated not for profit but as a form of charity, pricing of their services should be determined by how much they need to charge in order to stay in business (as low as possible). -> that makes arguing over pricing based on value irrelevant.

Anyway, agreed.

There's nothing wrong with that. I'm just saying that a monopoly that is not maximising its profits acts in a charitable way. Either by choice or by force. Kinda irrelevant.

The only reason they are selling the CD's for too much money is because there is no competition due to a government-granted temporary monopoly. The scarcity on that market it completely artificial.

I think a lot of these relationships are very adversarial and people, companies included, don't have much of a choice in the absence of a wide reaching and binding understanding.

Thank you for proving my point: if it's scarce (only one company can make it) it has value. So the argument that the value comes from 'what it allows you to do' (not die) is bogus. Water allows you to survive so if utility determined the prices water would be extremely valuable, but it isn't.

$1000 water is ridiculous, but I'll bet that if I drop you in the middle of the desert, after 24 hours you'd be willing to pay $1000 for a liter of water. Yet it's the same water, you need it to survive wether you're in middle of the desert or at home. Clearly utility has nothing to do with value.

On the other hand, if I could do so, I'd just beat you up or worse and take that water. Which is what ends up happening when you see instances of piracy and IP violations around the world.

Eventually pricing also has to take into account, the point at which robbing you would not be worth the hassle for me, and we'd all be better off conducting a transaction. For example, GoG and Steam in the video game business.

In theory that is what copyright does. If you make some software, you have a copyright on that software, but (unlike patents) not a copyright on any software that does the same thing. So if your total revenue is more than twice what it would cost to re-develop the same software then some other developer should do the math and go into competition with you. You, knowing that, would charge lower prices to begin with to avoid having to split the market with them.

The classical problem with this in Hollywood is that the big studios bought up all the distribution to lock out new competitors, which breaks that mechanism. You still see them trying to do this with cable TV set top boxes and so on. This is also similar to Microsoft's traditional game, but doesn't apply to most other software, which actually has quite vigorous competition.

The problem with what Apple is doing is that it breaks it the other way. Instead of companies leveraging a separate monopoly to thwart their own competitors, Apple is leveraging their App Store monopoly to siphon revenue that rightly belongs to the app developers. With the result that app developers make less than they ought to, which means that useful apps that ought to exist now don't because making them is not profitable against Apple's restrictions.

And the initial price you pay can't merely cover the cost of research, testing, development, production, supply chain profits, transportation, and meager profits for the business, but it has to extend to maintenance, updates, warranty coverage, returns, replacements, etc. Maintaining software is a continual battle, especially if the software is going to be implemented in an extremely segmented market (Android and the thousands of versions in the wild, personal computers with thousands of makes and models of graphics cards, drivers, chipsets, libraries, etc.).

Developing and testing software updates, which are expected weekly and free of charge, isn't only an Apple thing. And they weren't the first to start it.

That's why I believe everyone should print their own counterfeit money:

• printing money for yourself does not deprive anyone else of their money, just like "stealing" a copy of a book, film, or piece of software does not deprive anyone else of their copy

• money (which is just pretty looking paper) has essentially no intrinsic value, just like a copy of a book, film, or piece of software (which are just bits)

The OP is exactly right: the only reason money has "value" today is because the supply is being artificially restricted: the value of a copy is pretty much zero. It's a simple case of supply and demand, because with counterfeiting, the supply is infinite so logically the price should be zero.

> The IP industry is trying to sell toilets on a pay-per-flush basis and then acts all surprised when people don't accept this and see no ethical problems with piracy.

Same with the banking industry.

TFA specifically calls out the assumption that a one off (essentially micro) payment entitles you to lifetime updates and I think that is a very fair criticism.

The cost of copying is not related to value.

But you'll gladly pay the plumbers hourly wage and material costs.

Most people, quite sensibly, don't want to pay a programmer's or airplane engineer's hourly wage.

Then what is ?

If you could somehow bundle your apps for free as part of the service and get a cut from that, I don't think people would have a problem at all with software. But I don't think most of the telcos are interested in that approach.

Never say never. Years ago, the answer would have seemed to be an obvious" hell no", but these days with X-as-a-service it really seems like a lot of people would be perfectly happy to pay a per-use fee for their toilet as long as that means they never have to pay an upfront fee to have it installed or repaired. Just look at all the people happy to pay a recurring fee for Photoshop.