No, as information professionals, we should be building tools that enable users to store and manage their data privately, without asking them to trust some anonymous system administrator. Allowing them to become complacent and implicitly accepting of remotely-hosted services does users and society as a whole a great disservice.
The call wasn't recorded and I did not get the person's name. I took clear notes and asked him to repeat that the Senator is in favor of "censoring" illegal content, which he confirmed.
The way he said "censor" really made my skin crawl - it was so pompous. Gillibrand's people were nice, fyi.
I asked twice if he had spoken with any constituents over the phone who support the bill and he confirmed twice that he had not.
But still, I am not a journalist and didn't plan to blog about this except that I was so shocked by the replies I got. Surely people who work the phones at these offices must assume that everything they say could end up "on the internet"?
If the past months are any indication, no news organization is interested in reporting anything remotely relating to SOPA (except maybe as a short piece to promote it as "the legislation that will stop piracy for good" and that anyone who opposes this is a criminal).
SOPA did not get any media coverage, and I'd be surprised if flippant comments made by an anonymous staffer changed that.
>The system isn’t up and running yet, but the idea is that users will receive free storage for their files by sharing some hard drive space and bandwidth with other users.
This is how Wuala works, if I understand correctly. And let's not forget AeroFS. While these products are somewhat similar, I absolutely love seeing apps of this nature (syncing distributed P2P) proliferate.
Agreed - I loved the concept, but couldn't get it to work the way I needed it to, even with the main dev's help. (It took weeks to sync a 50GB folder over a gigabit lan, it wouldn't properly recognize the folder if I rsync'd it first - it duplicated everything)
So I abandoned it for now, until such time that it got more mature and worked for me -- but I just visited the site a few days ago, and saw its still private beta.
Though looking again just now, I found the changelogs: http://support.aerofs.com/customer/portal/articles/240198-ae...
and it looks very relevant to my issue, so I may have to give it a try again!
I've been using it on my computers as well as with a friend for at least a few months now — it works pretty well. And it uses disk space only to store your own files plus those that others share with you, the same as Dropbox.
West Germanys post-war 'economic miracle' was largely guided by Austrian school economic thinking, while East Germany went the other way. This is the clearest A/B test ever devised of implementing two different economic strategies on a homogenous population. North/South Korea is also similar, but less so.
Most people don't even understand what the Austrian school actually says. That's not surprising, most people who comment on Marx have never opened his book, either.
For the record, it's based on the freedom to trade backed with strong rule of law using sound money. It also prescribes a lack of intervention by the government in the economy, mainly due to misallocation of productive resources and the likelihood of government intentionally or inadvertently creating monopolies that harm the consumer.
Probably the best introductory book on the subject is http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economics_in_One_Lesson - Economics in One Lesson by Henry Hazlitt. Even if you oppose the idea, it's good to read and understand the theories and supporting arguments properly.
For the record, West Germany abandoned this model during the 1960s and moved towards a more social democratic model, and the USA hasn't tried it since before the 1930s. The current economies of the west are nothing like an economy under Austrian principles, in the same way the Chinese economy is nothing like an economy under Marxist/Maoist principles.
>West Germanys post-war 'economic miracle' was largely guided by Austrian school economic thinking, while East Germany went the other way.
One of the most predictable things about Austrian advocates is their inability to conceive of alternatives beyond some kind of cartoon-stereotype Soviet command-economy. You seem to be aware of social democracy, so you are knowingly assuming a false dichotomy to make your point. I'd say it's even more intellectually dishonest when one considers that no one ever argues for a centrally-planned economy. At the very best, such a comparison holds no value today in evaluating Austrian-school thinking.
It's not my fault the East Germans chose the Soviet model so I hardly think it's fair to suggest I came up with a false dichotomy to prove a point.
One half of the country chose the soviet command economy model, the other half chose to pursue an Austrian model. One half did immeasurably better than the other half. Those are the facts.
You can compare and contrast post-war West Germany and Great Britain if you like - the latter made great strides towards a more socialist governance probably as a direct result of the largely increased Government functions during the war, and the rise of those who thought that centrally planned economies would do better.
The point of bringing up West Germany is that the country prospered as a result of the liberal economic policies introduced in the immediate post-war period, both absolutely and relative against their East German counterparts, although the differences were small in the early years. It would be foolish to suggest that this is entirely down to the policy choices - all growth from zero looks impressive - however, it certainly did no harm and a lot of good.
It also helped that a lot of money was poured into Western Germany with the Marshall plan while the Soviet Union took large parts of the industrial production machinery of Eastern Germany in retribution for the war.
The preconditions were so different I think the example doesn't really show anything.
The Marshall plan was a tiny drop in the ocean of capital needed to reconstruct the West German economy. At most you could consider it a bit of pump-priming.
The Marshall plan was also equally applied to other war-torn Western European nations which didn't experience the same growth.
I agree that you can't isolate a specific economic philosophy from the general population and culture - the German people have always been very engineering minded and hard working - but something very interesting happened to post-war Germany, and it's always a good idea to look at this (same as the Finnish school example) and see what might have contributed.
>One half of the country chose the soviet command economy model, the other half chose to pursue an Austrian model. One half did immeasurably better than the other half. Those are the facts.
That fact doesn't validate Austrian-school-thinking — merely that it worked better than Soviet central-planning given the global political and economic environment at the time, which says almost nothing. And even if you're arguing merely in favor of increased economic liberalization, this comparison still holds no value because social democracy has nothing to do with central planning! The points don't even exist along a linear axis — they are apples and oranges. The debate all over the world right now is about how best to implement social democracy, and comparing those two extreme economic philosophies doesn't contribute anything at all. To pretend it does is disingenuous.
The worst thing about right-wing followers of Austrian school thinking is that they refuse to consider the social outcomes when "market freedom" is taken too far; they are bent on destroying society as it exists and recreating a weak image of it inside their economic framework. Even von Hayek himself acknowledged the need for a basic social support system. This type of thinking is highly simplified, almost always ideologically-applied, and extremely toxic to our social fabric.
Free-market austrian school is generally "hands-off, believe the price system".
I've generally seen the "not enough" argument in conjunction with Keynesian "government stimulus" (e.g., google "not enough stimulus" and the first half-dozen articles arguing that the recent $700B + stimulus was not big enough).
I haven't seen a similar corpus of arguments that the freenmarkets haven't worked because they weren't free enough. I think the chinese experiment opening up to capitalism is a great endorsement of additional freeing of markets "at the margin" increasing economic benefit.
I should clarify: I think the "stimulus not big enough" argument is fallacious. I think that government spending substitutes for private spending, rather than stimulating it. (e.g., dollars the government spends on tanks are not spent on goods desired by consumers. It may stimulate economic activity, but it reduces aggregate well-being.)
>I haven't seen a similar corpus of arguments that the freenmarkets haven't worked because they weren't free enough.
Well, then I'm glad to find someone else who isn't under the impression that continuing and intensifying de-regulation and privatization will somehow solve our present economic crisis.
Yeah I've noticed that too. Extreme types on both sides think this way. My favorites are the ones who swing from one to another. Lots of hard core right wingers started out as communists. David Horowitz comes to mind. PJ O'Rourke too, though he seems more sensible.
As I posted above, Economics in One Lesson by Henry Hazlitt is a simple, easy to read book that encapsulates most of the arguments put forth by the Austrian school.
It's a type of junk-economics which has been forced into public consciousness over the last 30-40 years, and which originated in the '30s with philosophers such as von Mises and von Hayek.
Read David Harvey's A Brief History of Neoliberalism (http://www.amazon.com/Brief-History-Neoliberalism-David-Harv...) for a stunning exposition of the social and economic crises that have developed around the world as a result of governments attempting to apply this philosophy.
The book seems interesting. But Neoliberal economists, even though they talk a lot about free markets, have a very different world view than that of Austrian economists. One example: Neoliberals promote treaties like NAFTA that allow the free flow of goods and capital between countries, but don't allow the free flow of people between countries.On the other hand, Austrian economists would insist on the importance of also letting people choose were they want to live and work. Furthermore, despite its name, NAFTA is not really about free trade. NAFTA is a huge set of regulations.
Neoliberalism is Austrian-school thinking put into practice; it's the best that governments can do given the economic and social realities of the day. People like Milton Friedman and other Chicago school economists drew heavily on the Austrians, and those Chicago school economists were directly advising developing nations from the '70s onward.
Responses like yours only reinforce my thesis: your philosophy can never be practiced successfully. Where it fails, the problem is only ever due to some sort of impurity or oversight in implementation. The market can never be "free enough".
If people actually saw what went on "free enough" would have been put to bed years ago. The Chicago boys were given free reign in Chile under Pinochet and nearly destroyed the country. They had to back off of their "free enough" goals to start the trend upwards again to be able to write their "The Chilean Miracle" propaganda piece [1].
If you're equating the Chicago school and the Austrian school, you don't know the first thing about either and you're not qualified to start the moronic, off-topic flame war about the subject you've gotten everyone into.
What really matters — the click-through rate that infolinks pays you to link the action verb in the sentence "Some incredibly special times were shared" to Scottrade.
Yes, you are. The fist symbolizes strength through solidarity and partnership, which is the only strategy that most Americans have for confronting consolidated corporate power.
>I suspect you don't actually know what everyone else on the site thinks.
Cool, thanks for that incredibly insightful observation, marshray.
The best part about your original question is that it can be answered provably in only one way — the one you want. So given your patronizing tone and thinly veiled elitism, I'll happily take the side of the argument that you would force me to prove through induction, for the simple satisfaction of calling you out.
The best part about your original question is that it can be answered provably in only one way
That did occur to me after I had asked the question, but I decided that there was still a sufficient spectrum of possible answers that I should keep the wording. For example:
"No you're not, I feel that way too."
"I used to feel that way too, but then it occurred to me... [useful discussion follows]"
"Who knows? But I think you're mistaken because... [useful discussion follows]"
No answers, in which case the number of votes on the question could be significant.
So given your patronizing tone and thinly veiled elitism, I'll happily take the side of the argument that you would force me to prove through induction, for the simple satisfaction of calling you out.
