ataggart
While I may agree with this in the abstract, in practice most folks don't really know whether they're at that point. It also doesn't consider cumulative effects over time.
Bugs don't just affect application stability or user experience. A system that does not behave as designed/documented/expected is a system that will be more difficult to reason about and more difficult to safely change. This incidental complexity directly increases the cost of building new features in ways difficult to measure. Further, new features implemented by hacking around unfixed flaws will themselves be more difficult to reason about and more difficult to change, exacerbating the problem.
The larger the system grows over time, the more people working on it over time, the faster this incidental complexity problem grows over time. At a certain point, it's too expensive to not fix the bugs because of the increasingly high cost of building new features. At that point, folks start clamouring for a rewrite, and the cycle begins anew.
Relevant Christopher Hitchens: https://youtu.be/4Z2uzEM0ugY
173. If the machines are permitted to make all their own decisions, we can’t make any conjectures as to the results, because it is impossible to guess how such machines might behave. We only point out that the fate of the human race would be at the mercy of the machines. It might be argued that the human race would never be foolish enough to hand over all power to the machines. But we are suggesting neither that the human race would voluntarily turn power over to the machines nor that the machines would willfully seize power. What we do suggest is that the human race might easily permit itself to drift into a position of such dependence on the machines that it would have no practical choice but to accept all of the machines’ decisions. As society and the problems that face it become more and more complex and as machines become more and more intelligent, people will let machines make more and more of their decisions for them, simply because machine-made decisions will bring better results than man-made ones. Eventually a stage may be reached at which the decisions necessary to keep the system running will be so complex that human beings will be incapable of making them intelligently. At that stage the machines will be in effective control. People won’t be able to just turn the machine off, because they will be so dependent on them that turning them off would amount to suicide.
174. On the other hand it is possible that human control over the machines may be retained. In that case the average man may have control over certain private machines of his own, such as his car or his personal computer, but control over large systems of machines will be in the hands of a tiny elite — just as it is today, but with two differences. Due to improved techniques the elite will have greater control over the masses; and because human work will no longer be necessary the masses will be superfluous, a useless burden on the system. If the elite is ruthless they may simply decide to exterminate the mass of humanity. If they are humane they may use propaganda or other psychological or biological techniques to reduce the birth rate until the mass of humanity becomes extinct, leaving the world to the elite. Or, if the elite consists of softhearted liberals, they may decide to play the role of good shepherds to the rest of the human race. They will see to it that everyone’s physical needs are satisfied, that all children are raised under psychologically hygienic conditions, that everyone has a wholesome hobby to keep him busy, and that anyone who may become dissatisfied undergoes “treatment” to cure his “problem.” Of course, life will be so purposeless that people will have to be biologically or psychologically engineered either to remove their need for the power process or to make them “sublimate” their drive for power into some harmless hobby. These engineered human beings may be happy in such a society, but they most certainly will not be free. They will have been reduced to the status of domestic animals.
Apart from miscalculating the expected returns or mispricing the resulting goods and services, I'm having a hard time imagining a realistic scenario in which increased economic activity from a capital injection can result in increased tax revenue to the state but not increased interest revenue to the lender.
Unfortunately, manufacturers are prohibited from selling directly to consumers in many states. As usual, scratch below the surface of a "market failure", and you're likely to find some regulation getting in the way.
"[T]he English language... becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts."
Care to make your point here more clear?
Offering a lower price to consumers than your competition is not coercion against a competitor.
>Buying up necessary capital.
Offering a higher price to suppliers than your competition is not coercion against a competitor.
>Paying other companies to not deal with you
Entering into exclusive deals with other firms is not coercion against a competitor.
Since "free" in this context means absence of coercion against extant or would-be competitors, and since government regulatory efforts are a source of such anti-competitive coercion, unless one is concerned with firms sending hit squads against each other (which would more rightly be considered "crime"), the distinction isn't particularly useful.
(defn values-in [m ks]
(vals (select-keys m ks)))"The only thing that saves us from the bureaucracy is inefficiency. An efficient bureaucracy is the greatest threat to liberty."
[1] http://news.sciencemag.org/asiapacific/2013/08/activists-des...
[2] http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/2014/03/15/go...
"Indeed, a major source of objection to a free economy is precisely that it ... gives people what they want instead of what a particular group thinks they ought to want. Underlying most arguments against the free market is a lack of belief in freedom itself."
Sure, Apple can do with its platform what it wishes, but the arguments I see being put forth here are troubling. "The ignorant masses are making the 'wrong' choices for themselves, and we in our benevolent wisdom should substitute our preferences for theirs." Where does that sort of thinking end?
Except that's not what the paper says. It just notes that the decision-making process that goes on in people's heads doesn't just include the monetary cost (duh), and that when one option is "free" some other non-monetary factor is revealed (e.g., removing the mental cost of even having to do a cost/benefit analysis).
That said, I'm troubled by your notion that when people's actual behaviour does not conform to a model, the problem is with the people.
Unfortunately rayiner is neither, as a look at his comment history makes clear. His morality is just antithetical to yours and mine.
To paraphrase and invert an H.L. Mencken quote, it seems in any dispute between a citizen and the government, it is his instinct to side with the government; he is for all efforts to make men virtuous by law.
So, when it comes to state action, "net neutrality" will mean whatever the government says it means. Your definitions won't matter once the bill is passed and/or the regulatory interpretation is promulgated.
Only insofar as needed to protect the arresting officer from harm or to prevent the destruction of evidence.[1]