Brigade did not provide their service either. A lender provides the service of lending money over a certain amount of time. This money is like a contractor paid by the hour, working at the borrower's service. Brigade should not be entitled to having that money back until that time has either elapsed or the borrower decides to alter the payments.
Another comparison would be me giving my wallet to a friend to buy something, then the wallet falls from his pocket into my landlord's hands, who declares this must be my next payment for rent. This does not sound fair.
> Brigade did not provide their service either. A lender provides the service of lending money over a certain amount of time. This money is like a contractor paid by the hour, working at the borrower's service. Brigade should not be entitled to having that money back until that time has either elapsed or the borrower decides to alter the payments.
That's not true. For comparison, many times a mortgage lender can call the loan at any time. The service of Brigade loaning the money had already happened.
> Another comparison would be me giving my wallet to a friend to buy something, then the wallet falls from his pocket into my landlord's hands, who declares this must be my next payment for rent. This does not sound fair.
A better comparison would be if your bank mailed a check every month to your mortgage lender, then suddenly sent a check for the exact remaining balance plus interest accrued.
If people stopped buying the proprietary version, manufacturers would make open products. They don't really care either way, they just make a bit more money with proprietary licenses.
I agree with supporting the ideals, but hitting a barrier in features and usability
You could reverse this and say that if open-source advocates would make usable products with features on par with commercial products, people would adopt them. There's a chicken-egg problem here.
People interested in these issues should read Working in Public by Eghbal, which is about open source culture and sociology. I just finished it.
The trouble is that the commercial products have marketing departments that aim to convince people that their feature set is the most important. So although open products have unique features of their own - including openness - people are likely to overlook them.
Why should he pay more? They signed a work contract. And if that contract says don't unionize, then maybe they shouldn't be surprised to be let go when they try that.
Capitalism says let people do what they want. If one guy undercuts all the others and says he's ready to do it on his own for cheap, let him, he's probably better at it anyway. This lets the other 9 figure out what they want to do, maybe launch a startup or whatever, there's no shortage of things that need fixing on this planet.
Capitalism lets people with money do what they want, and lets people without do what their masters want.
Also, "Yeah everybody that gets replaced by a machine can just found a startup" is probably the most irrealistic and oblivious thing I've read all week.
So as a libertarian I should be expected to pay taxes I don't want to pay AND build my own roads on my own? Should I also produce my own water? This is ridiculous. These things become impossible to do precisely because we're in this situation.
It would indeed be very hard, if WhatsApp's own claim that messages are encrypted end-to-end is true. Either way (and I disagree that this should be a separate discussion) all methods of global speech control are eventually used for evil.
So first off, I think "WhatsApp" is being used in two ways here. 1) is WhatsApp the company or the central server and the other 2) is the app on someone's phone. When people say end to end they mean from the WhatsApp app on someone's phone to the other WhatsApp app on another person's phone with no way WhatsApp the company can read the message.
So what I'm saying is it's easy for the app on people's phone to filter or block sharing misinformation, because the app can see what the data is just like your eyes using the app can see what the data is. I'd also be fairly surprised if WhatsApp the app re-uploaded every single shared video, I'd say it's more likely they share a link or hash and encrypt that link in the message (but that is just a guess).
To your second point.
All methods of global speech are eventually used for evil. All methods of communication are eventually used for evil, all methods of food preparation are eventually used for evil. There are some flaws in that argument.
Anyone who rigorously follows an ethical framework will eventually be lead to some conclusion(s) they dislike; utilitarianism is no guarantee of satisfaction.
An honest utilitarian would be willing to share their calculations, which would be interesting to see, though I am not sure how you'd balance the interests in the cases described above.
>Anyone who rigorously follows an ethical framework will eventually be lead to some conclusion(s) they dislike
I've fallen into this trap. It led me to realize that, like ideologies, all frameworks are flawed. Assuming otherwise leads to positions that are starved for empathy and compassion - and that are ultimately counterproductive.
His view is both utilitarian and short sighted. They don't always go together but they often do since there isn't time enough to work everything out from first principles.
Yes, that is certainly true and rather scary since people are quite short sighted and currently in a mood for doing things for the greater good while sacrificing individual freedoms.
Overall, your post is more a critic on investment in this period rather than against index funds. Except for the presence of tech, which I'm not sure is this bad for people willing to take measured risk.
>there's too much cash being printed
Agreed, but then why hold on to cash until the election rather than buy gold or similar?
Sure, I totally plan to return to the index when it seems to make sense so you're right, it's only a bad investment (imo) right now.
I have other investments in web entities (think reddit style aggregation sites) in niches that tend to do well in downturns. They're pretty much a very small fixed cost for me every month (spot instances on AWS ftw) and can be cut off at any time. I feel safe holding cash (and its deflation) because the profit from those is no longer seeding indexes but being stacked on my cash pile. Ideally keeping my overall cash from deflating.
I don't think you need to expand so much on the reason why you're opposed to this business model, it's all understood and well-documented. The usual argument against this sentiment is that it's difficult to establish clear legislation on it. See the very similar debates on planned obsolescence and right to repair.
> Such business model requires the corrupting the law to create completely artificial constraints
So what? As long as no such laws exist that's fine, and a corrupt country will get bigger problems anyway. The problem is that it's not true since constructors can increasingly rely on complexity: reverse-engineering is getting more and more complex (see recent iPhones).
Quite the opposite: the free market will deal with this just fine, giving a big penalty to companies that don't care enough. The government, on the other hand, imposes bad businesses, enables regulatory capture and has proven many times that it has no idea how to handle infosec. These white hat consultants aren't perfect but through competition they're still better than lobbied lawmakers.
The FDA made it mandatory for food manufacturers to list their ingredients on food they sell. Prior to these laws no food manufacturer was willing to do this freely, for fear of someone else stealing their recipe. But now consumers can make informed decisions and avoid foods that will give them severe, life threatening allergic reactions.
Every citizen who drives a motor vehicle must be issued a driver's licence by the state they reside in. This enables a minimum understanding of how a complex machine (the highway transportation system) works so that other drivers / participants of that system can use it safely. Without regulation, vehicle collisions would be rampant and the system would be far less stable.
Not all government regulation and oversight is bad.
I highly recommend reading the book "Click here to kill everybody" by Bruce Schneier [1]. Bruce has been in the cyber-security world for a long time now and is considered one of the world's foremost experts on cryptography and computer security. In this book he makes projections about the "internet of things (internet+)" and the security problems that will come with it. He strongly advocates for government oversight and legal reform in multiple areas.
> The FDA made it mandatory for food manufacturers to list their ingredients on food they sell
FDA still allows companies to hide ingredients under the guise of "natural flavors" and "artificial flavors". I hope you aren't allergic to one of those!
> Every citizen who drives a motor vehicle must be issued a driver's licence by the state they reside in. This enables a minimum understanding of how a complex machine (the highway transportation system) works so that other drivers / participants of that system can use it safely.
Free markets don't exist outside of textbooks and can't due to the complexities of social relations we have to deal with in the real world. It seems like you're suggesting a solution that can't ever work by merit of it being unable to exist.
Or perhaps to acknowledge that the assumptions about a free-market ignore the realities of human psychology, and thus a free-market inherently cannot exist because humans are not capable of producing a free market without regulation, and regulation is antithetical to a truly free market?
The idea is not that the free market will always produce perfect results and perfect goods. The idea is that the free market will produce better results at a faster pace with less unintended consequences than government intervention.
Government intervention rarely happens proactively, just as major market changes rarely happen proactively. Supplier failure on a large scale makes it apparent that change is necessary, and only then do changes follow, either from the top down by government intervention, or from the bottom up by the market.
Another comparison would be me giving my wallet to a friend to buy something, then the wallet falls from his pocket into my landlord's hands, who declares this must be my next payment for rent. This does not sound fair.