You try to keep the system as open as you can but by the very nature of governments there will be secrets and they will be abused. Still, it is better than putting all the power into the hands of the corporations and the top 1% which control the majority of the resources of the world.

Actually, in the USA, the number is less than 40%–closer to 1/3 than to a majority.

Of course, given their power they end up controlling the “watchers” far too much… we need a way to balance that.

Your understanding of the capture theory is just a little off. More below.

I am a whole lot less frightened of Ballmer and Hill and Shuttleworth and Buffett and Murdoch and all the other “1%”–put together–than I am of ONE IRS agent or federal regulator.

If I don’t like Steve Ballmer, I can be like Iozz and patronize Microsoft’s competitors and not use one item produced by that company; in effect, telling Mr. Ballmer to go to Hades, and there is not one thing he can do to me. If I were to only buy, say, System 76′s Ubuntu boxes, no power on earth can force me to purchase and/or install Windows 8 or MS Office 2013.

That goes for all the other “one percenters”–separately or together.

On the other hand, if I run afoul of an IRS agent or federal regulator, I can have my property taken, I can have my freedom taken by being confined to jail–possibly indefinitely, and, if push comes to shove, I can have my life taken. All together, the 1% have NONE of these powers–and nothing even remotely approaching these powers.

Regarding the “capture theory,” if government has the power to micro-manage everything you do (thus imposing very high costs) it make sense to expend some resources to induce regulators to “give you a pass” while enforcing the rules on your competitors. A successful capture reduces your costs–especially relative to competitors, providing you with an artificial–and unfair advantage.

In fact, regulations themselves favour big business over small business. A big firm can afford to hire their own bureaucrats to do nothing but push the paperwork to keep the government ones happy. A small firm cannot.

Thus, big firms have advantages they just would not have under a smaller government.

If it was we would not have the wealthiest corporations paying almost no taxes and being able to pollute and pushing their own goals to the detriment of the population.

Ironically, this is because of intervention–NOT a lack of it. Government intervenes to ostensibly prevent firms from riding roughshod over people, then turns a blind eye when favoured firms do it.

The Obama administration hasn’t even acknowledged, let alone prosecuted (as the law requires) the firms whose wind mills killed the eagles. If the eagles were killed by, say, industrial fans owned by a Tea Party group….

WalMart does have an excellent return policy. But they also have horrible pay… to the point where many of their workers are dependent on social safety nets. This means that you and I help to subsidize WalMart. This is insane. If they paid their workers reasonable amounts – if they were made to do so by regulations – then you and I would not be subsidizing a multi billion dollar company in the way that we do.

Um, this is not quite an accurate picture. Many of the Wal-Mart workers “dependent on social safety nets” are retirees collecting social security, and NOT single mothers with infants collecting AFDC and food stamps.

Forcing Wal-Mart (or any company) to pay more than people’s labour is worth is, sadly, NOT likely to reduce the social safety nets.

I used to help administer a social safety net run by my Church. Never was the answer to force employers–not even Church members–to pay more than the labour was worth. Rather, we reduced the welfare burden by helping others better manage the assets they had on hand, and to take action to make themselves more productive.

Those are things the market simply does not handle well. For those things I have no problem with the government stepping in to push regulations, oversight, and even direct funding. Now I am not naive enough to think the government will always (or even generally) do this well. But it will do it better than *nothing* doing this.

I tend to agree–in theory.

I suspect, though, the need for government intervention occurs far less often than many of us think!

One challenge with the US system, which is also a benefit, is no one person or group gets their way. So by design we end up with systems which are inefficient, poorly put together, filled with gaps and overlaps, etc. I would like to see people put their minds together to find solutions to those problems without putting too much power into the hands of the few. But no solution is going to be perfect here – there is a trade-off with the balance of powers and efficiency, and I do not want to lose the balance of power we have. Heck, given how much power corporations have in the government I want to see more of a balance.

Government has HUGE powers, so it makes sense to try to co-opt it.

Even with the fudge factor of Disney owning–and being the government of–many towns in central Florida, if they hate me, they have no power to do anything to me–as long as I stay off their property.

You try to keep the system as open as you can but by the very nature of governments there will be secrets and they will be abused. Still, it is better than putting all the power into the hands of the corporations and the top 1% which control the majority of the resources of the world.

Actually, in the USA, the number is less than 40%–closer to 1/3 than to a majority.

Of course, given their power they end up controlling the “watchers” far too much… we need a way to balance that.

Your understanding of the capture theory is just a little off. More below.

I am a whole lot less frightened of Ballmer and Hill and Shuttleworth and Buffett and Murdoch and all the other “1%”–put together–than I am of ONE IRS agent or federal regulator.

If I don’t like Steve Ballmer, I can be like Iozz and patronize Microsoft’s competitors and not use one item produced by that company; in effect, telling Mr. Ballmer to go to Hades, and there is not one thing he can do to me. If I were to only buy, say, System 76′s Ubuntu boxes, no power on earth can force me to purchase and/or install Windows 8 or MS Office 2013.

That goes for all the other “one percenters”–separately or together.

On the other hand, if I run afoul of an IRS agent or federal regulator, I can have my property taken, I can have my freedom taken by being confined to jail–possibly indefinitely, and, if push comes to shove, I can have my life taken. All together, the 1% have NONE of these powers–and nothing even remotely approaching these powers.

Regarding the “capture theory,” if government has the power to micro-manage everything you do (thus imposing very high costs) it make sense to expend some resources to induce regulators to “give you a pass” while enforcing the rules on your competitors. A successful capture reduces your costs–especially relative to competitors, providing you with an artificial–and unfair advantage.

In fact, regulations themselves favour big business over small business. A big firm can afford to hire their own bureaucrats to do nothing but push the paperwork to keep the government ones happy. A small firm cannot.

Thus, big firms have advantages they just would not have under a smaller government.

If it was we would not have the wealthiest corporations paying almost no taxes and being able to pollute and pushing their own goals to the detriment of the population.

Ironically, this is because of intervention–NOT a lack of it. Government intervenes to ostensibly prevent firms from riding roughshod over people, then turns a blind eye when favoured firms do it.

The Obama administration hasn’t even acknowledged, let alone prosecuted (as the law requires) the firms whose wind mills killed the eagles. If the eagles were killed by, say, industrial fans owned by a Tea Party group….

WalMart does have an excellent return policy. But they also have horrible pay… to the point where many of their workers are dependent on social safety nets. This means that you and I help to subsidize WalMart. This is insane. If they paid their workers reasonable amounts – if they were made to do so by regulations – then you and I would not be subsidizing a multi billion dollar company in the way that we do.

Um, this is not quite an accurate picture. Many of the Wal-Mart workers “dependent on social safety nets” are retirees collecting social security, and NOT single mothers with infants collecting AFDC and food stamps.

Forcing Wal-Mart (or any company) to pay more than people’s labour is worth is, sadly, NOT likely to reduce the social safety nets.

I used to help administer a social safety net run by my Church. Never was the answer to force employers–not even Church members–to pay more than the labour was worth. Rather, we reduced the welfare burden by helping others better manage the assets they had on hand, and to take action to make themselves more productive.

So, yes, I think that is a part of why Roy does not want to have me back. In the first podcast he was polite but when he and I got into disagreements, for the most part his claims were simply not accurate. And perhaps just as bad, from his perspective, I was happy to fact check and point out where *I* had been wrong as well – and encouraged he and others to do their own fact checking (no fair just having me fact check myself).

Still, I think it would be fun. And Roy and Goblin disagree on things… so it is not as if it would ruin his show to have me disagree. It might cause him problems if he went too much on the offensive and tried to “ambush” me.

If you have not heard my time on his show, here it is (from this site, so I think it is OK to link to): http://techrights.org/2011/07/24/gnu-linux-macosx-by-michael-glasser-roy-schestowitz-and-goblin-on-techbytes OR http://techrights.org/?p=51511

Had not noticed he claimed it was “GNU/Linux Versus Mac OS X”. An interesting description of the show.

So the market works there – or at least largely does. But this just involves products and price. It excludes: how they treat their workers, how they treat their business partners, how they gain and abuse monopoly power, how they damage the environment, how they abuse human rights, how they accumulate wealth in disreputable ways, how they take risks with the public paying for their mistakes (banking and auto industries, for example), etc. It also excludes doing research that is hard to quantify the benefits and risks of – such as pushing our technology to get man to Mars and back. Neil deGrasse Tyson speaks a lot about that latter point. The government funding man going to the moon pushed technology and helped the country in many ways. We have lost our way with that.

Those are things the market simply does not handle well. For those things I have no problem with the government stepping in to push regulations, oversight, and even direct funding. Now I am not naive enough to think the government will always (or even generally) do this well. But it will do it better than *nothing* doing this.

One challenge with the US system, which is also a benefit, is no one person or group gets their way. So by design we end up with systems which are inefficient, poorly put together, filled with gaps and overlaps, etc. I would like to see people put their minds together to find solutions to those problems without putting too much power into the hands of the few. But no solution is going to be perfect here – there is a trade-off with the balance of powers and efficiency, and I do not want to lose the balance of power we have. Heck, given how much power corporations have in the government I want to see more of a balance.

I would love to be on his podcast again and discuss Linux and open source topics with him. He likes to think of me as anti-Linux and against open source… and ignorant of it. So fine… have me on, stack the deck with some questions he think will embarrass me, and then we can have fact-checking of both of our comments and claims. Would be fun and good for ratings.

So thought Piers Morgan when he had young conservative columnist Ben Shapiro on his show to debate gun control. It turned out that Shapiro is a Harvard-trained lawyer with a doctorate who spent a lot of time studying Morgan’s views, arguments and tactics, and practicing how to counter them.

Setting up an ambush, only to have your target thoroughly kick your backside, does not help ratings!

You definitely can’t read, and by your other replies, I can see you have the logical abilities of a mouse, so I think I’m leaving the conversation here. It’s not about the topic, anyway.

Have a nice day.

HAHAHAHAHAHA! HOHOHOHOHOHOHOHO! HEEHEEHEEHEEHEEHEEHEE!

(Drying tears of laughter from eyes)

This is HILARIOUS! A person who doesn’t know the meaning of phrases like “slave labour” or “crony capitalism” telling me that I cannot read.

Has a “kettle and pot” quality about it, no?

Let’s take the right to bear arms to an extreme and allow everyone to have dirty bombs, nukes, weaponized anthrax, etc. After all, what could go wrong?

Well, not everybody!

While I have issues with both President Bush fils and President Obama, I think they’re trustworthy enough to not abuse NBC weapons. Iran’s leader Ahmadinejad, not so much!

More seriously, it’s legal to own an Uzi (a REAL assault weapon!) in Tel Aviv–yet the crime rate is lower than in similar-sized American cities like Boston.

And, to bring the topic back, the reason I trust Ballmer and Hill and Shuttleworth isn’t that they’re supersaints (they’re no better than normal people, but they’re no worse either!), but that consumers are smart enough to make the market punish them–severely–if they were to produce too-shoddy products at too-high prices. In the last few years, I’ve witnessed the market do just that–often.

Do I make sense?

Oh, take a look at comp.os.linux.advocacy, the name calling is extreme.

Right now there is someone running around calling me a “psychopath” because I do not accept his view that there was a video shown in 1990 on a government owned network which showed explosives being planted in the Twin Towers as it was made in 1969. You see, in his mind all copies of the video have been removed from libraries and there are no known copies of this video existing from any VCR collection or at any TV station that showed it. More than that, somehow all references to this video have been removed from the copies of TV Guides from the year (he gave the name of the show – but it was never listed or discussed in the TV Guide). This is just the tip of the iceberg. But because I will not accept his claims I am a “psychopath” in his mind.

It is amusing to watch.

You remind me of an experience I had:

Some years ago, when I was a finance professor, a construction worker approached me to ask for advice on where to invest his money. Specifically, he wanted to know which stocks he had heard about that I thought were hot. When I told him he was better off investing in an S&P 500 Index fund to minimize risk and get a decent return. He became upset, telling me that I didn’t know finance.

I just shrugged and let him gamble away his money. Every so often afterward, I would needle him about his gambling habit.

As Martin Luther said about Satan, the best way to beat him is to laugh at him….

I believe there is a good place for regulation and oversight and rules to balance the system – and accept that those rules will never be perfect.

To which I must raise the question, “Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?” “Who watches the watchers?”

You try to keep the system as open as you can but by the very nature of governments there will be secrets and they will be abused. Still, it is better than putting all the power into the hands of the corporations and the top 1% which control the majority of the resources of the world. Of course, given their power they end up controlling the "watchers" far too much… we need a way to balance that.

I would submit that, for the most part, a firm’s customers and competitors do a pretty good job of overseeing that firm. Note that I said, “for the most part”–there are people who are jerks, and we all act like jerks at one time or another. In those cases, outside pressure may be needed.

This is simply not true. If it was we would not have the wealthiest corporations paying almost no taxes and being able to pollute and pushing their own goals to the detriment of the population. Look at the industrial revolution when there were fewer regulations. Look at Texas recently and the plant that blew up in the face of no inspections (not that I am suggesting inspections and regulations stop all such things – they do not). Look at our food supply – even with regulations it has become quite bad… better regulations would make it better and improve health. Look at health care itself – the current situation is based on people getting insurance from their job which ties them to their jobs… or having to find insurance on their own, which can be pretty much impossible if you have per-existing conditions. Not all regulations make sense… not all social safety net programs make sense – but we are far better off with them than without.

If I buy a Toshiba Windows box from Wal-Mart, and something goes wrong, the odds are high that I could contact either Toshiba, Wal-Mart, or Microsoft, or all of them–locally or their HQ–and that problem would be fixed to my satisfaction–quickly. I know this because I have bought many items from all three firms, and my experience with each has been good.

WalMart does have an excellent return policy. But they also have horrible pay… to the point where many of their workers are dependent on social safety nets. This means that you and I help to subsidize WalMart. This is insane. If they paid their workers reasonable amounts – if they were made to do so by regulations – then you and I would not be subsidizing a multi billion dollar company in the way that we do. Also, if you look at the tech industry their customer satisfaction ratings tend to be quite low… with Apple leading the pack and most others being far behind.

On the other hand, I have had many experiences with the US government that went sour, which required me to ask members of Congress or other high government officials for help in resolving them. I think I can honestly say that not many of them have been resolved to my satisfaction, and, without those contacts, even that record would be worse.

I have had problems with government agencies and corporations. Heck, just last week spend *hours* on the phone with Tracfone and they still ended up ripping me off badly. I am looking for another low-price option, but it is not as if it is only governments are incompetent.

Am I making sense?

Yes… which does not imply I agree.

I believe there is a good place for regulation and oversight and rules to balance the system – and accept that those rules will never be perfect.

To which I must raise the question, “Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?” “Who watches the watchers?”

I would submit that, for the most part, a firm’s customers and competitors do a pretty good job of overseeing that firm. Note that I said, “for the most part”–there are people who are jerks, and we all act like jerks at one time or another. In those cases, outside pressure may be needed.

If I buy a Toshiba Windows box from Wal-Mart, and something goes wrong, the odds are high that I could contact either Toshiba, Wal-Mart, or Microsoft, or all of them–locally or their HQ–and that problem would be fixed to my satisfaction–quickly. I know this because I have bought many items from all three firms, and my experience with each has been good.

On the other hand, I have had many experiences with the US government that went sour, which required me to ask members of Congress or other high government officials for help in resolving them. I think I can honestly say that not many of them have been resolved to my satisfaction, and, without those contacts, even that record would be worse.

Am I making sense?

I would love to be on his podcast again and discuss Linux and open source topics with him. He likes to think of me as anti-Linux and against open source… and ignorant of it. So fine… have me on, stack the deck with some questions he think will embarrass me, and then we can have fact-checking of both of our comments and claims. Would be fun and good for ratings.

I continue to give Roy *major* kudos for allowing people to express such opinions on his site. That shows a level of character not always seen by people running sites.

Roy seems smart enough to realize that passionate comments tend to bring about hits, which can be a good thing.

One of the reasons that Corporations are evil and love slave labour is that they are investor-driven rather than consumer-driven.

Actually, you haven’t proven they love slave labour.

Those who’ve done the research know that slave labour is VERY bad for business. There is a reason why the free-soil north ran economic circles around the slave-state south.

About 25 years ago, Australia de-regulated the banks. The banks, which were customer-driven up to that point, began to amalgamate into large corporations that attracted lots of investment interest.

Not everything that is called “deregulation” is that in fact. For example, what the State of California called “deregulating the utility industry” was in fact an *increase* in regulation, because the State set prices to a level below what it cost power companies to produce. The result was a series of “rolling brownouts” denying power except to the “important people.”

Further, during what President Obama called “a lack of regulation” in the financial industry, US businesses had to hire legions of lawyers and accountants to fill out the paperwork required by the Sarbanes Oxley and other laws–and their attendant regulations–which came to pass over the previous decade or so.

I understand that Australia’s “deregulation” was similar in nature.

Ballmer’s investors don’t care about security problems in Windows which cost money to fix. They just want big profits and the river of gold to continue.

To be fair to you, there is some truths in this claim. However, this isn’t quite accurate, either.

Have you considered that the very desire for “big profits and the river of gold” *forces* investors to care?

If I had a computer with an OS that simply did not work, I would ditch that OS and get another one–possibly the computer, too. There are more than 300 alternatives to the OS–and dozens of computer brands.

The average consumer is not stupid. I suspect that he or she would be no more willing to stick to a product that isn’t worth what was paid any more than I would.

A case in point is Internet Explorer. Microsoft got sloppy in maintaining its quality, and within a year of start-up, Mozilla Firefox took 25% of the market away from Microsoft.

Linux has done similar things to Microsoft Windows over the last few years–but to a lesser degree. There is a reason that Red Hat’s revenues are in the billions of dollars, and SuSE’s and Canonical’s are in the hundreds of millions of dollars.

There is a saying in the business world: Satisfy the customer or the market will punish you.

While nobody is perfect by any stretch of the imagination, it seems clear that Microsoft, Apple, and Linux’ big three (for grins and giggles, I’ll include Google ) all do a pretty good job of satisfying their customers.

Ballmer will continue to out-source to third-world countries with cheap labour

You have a problem with hiring people in developing countries, because…? Don’t they have a right to sell to people in rich nations, too?

Look, if a Bangladeshi girl who produces $1.00 in value per hour is propelled to the “1%” in her home country by getting paid $.15 per hour, then it seems that hiring her makes perfect sense–and seems to me to be a GOOD thing–for employer, worker and consumer.

But if she only produces ten cents of value per hour then it makes no sense to employ her.

Why damn businesspeople for buying products with the best quality at the lowest prices? We consumers do it all the time.

More seriously, most US businesses don’t outsource just because labour is cheap. In fact, in many cases labour is cheap because there isn’t enough capital for labour to be more productive. Rather, businesses “outsource” more because increasing regulation is making getting US labour and other inputs too expensive.

Have you seen a copy of the Code of Federal Regulations, recently? It is so large, that it would fill the library of a small city. Even the Federal Register, which document just the changes in the CFR, takes up literally YARDS of shelf space. By the way, the volume of regulations have doubled over the last five years.

His customers are just a bunch of ‘marks’ that supply the loot to keep the whole scheme rolling.

Consumers are NOT stupid–and assuming otherwise is a big, costly mistake!

Have a nice day.

You forgot the customary “In My Humble Opinion”. Despite your last sentence making no sense (fortunately, there’s a lot of fantasy going at schools; literature is precisely about that…), you think your opinion on children and sex is so clear and absolute, that any other opinion is “inexcusable”, unimaginable, pure abomination, probably. Well, I agree with Stalman on this.

OK, I rarely post links here, but someone shared this with me on FaceBook today (good timing)… and I figured it might help you to understand just some of the problems with supporting Stallman’s views on this issue: http://www.sexpertslounge.com/2013/05/20/porn-vs-reality
The reality is Stallman supports a form of sexual abuse (not necessarily physical sexual abuse, though he is unclear on some forms of that, but psychological abuse). Abusing children is never OK. Advocating for putting children in abusive situations is never OK. This is more than "my humble opinion", this is basic morality.

Right now there is someone running around calling me a “psychopath” because I do not accept his view that there was a video shown in 1990 on a government owned network which showed explosives being planted in the Twin Towers as it was made in 1969. You see, in his mind all copies of the video have been removed from libraries and there are no known copies of this video existing from any VCR collection or at any TV station that showed it. More than that, somehow all references to this video have been removed from the copies of TV Guides from the year (he gave the name of the show – but it was never listed or discussed in the TV Guide). This is just the tip of the iceberg. But because I will not accept his claims I am a “psychopath” in his mind.

It is amusing to watch.

As far as your comments on porn: you speak of it as “fantasy” and not as being harmful to block it from kids… and you speak of it in private homes and not public schools.

Let’s take Stallman’s views and see what happens if we follow them: a child is raped and, perhaps, the attackers are adjudicated in the legal system. But the video is “out there”. Uncensored. In public schools. In the very school that this child goes to. Now this child is being victimized over and over and over all in the name of some insane ideas of what it means to be “free”. It is completely unacceptable and grotesque and unacceptable. There can be no excuse for this. Even without that extreme, Stallman advocates putting kids in the position to be subjected to images of porn of all sorts in what is *supposed* to be a safe environment. He advocates for a form of child abuse. Again, no amount of pointing fingers at the US and its sometimes over-stated concerns with sexuality can excuse this. None.

Granted, we have seen things improve, overall, but much of that improvement came from collective bargaining and regulations. We saw at least a possible consequence of reduced regulation and oversight in Texas recently (though it cannot be proved it was a 1:1 correlation, of course). Still, I believe there is a good place for regulation and oversight and rules to balance the system – and accept that those rules will never be perfect.