Because environmentalists have never cared one whit about science.
The 70s they were predicting eminant ice age, now they're predicting global warming, in another 20 years it will be back to ice age.
Its always been about political ideology and controlling people- bending them to their will- and never about science. Even in the 1970s nuclear power was known to be safe.
Hell, a coal plant spreads more radioactivity than a nuclear plant. (Cause coal contains radioactive substances naturally.)
The bottom line is, what gives you the right to tell people how they have to run their restaurant? And to use violence to enforce it?
You quickly throw out the market, (and claim to understand economics? LOL!) but the reality is- if people preferred it, the restaurants were non-smoking.
Most people, however, don't feel the need to force others to comply with their whims, using violence. Unfortunately, those who do join the government.
"small"? The world has been under assault by these "small" (read socialist) people for the last 108 years... they've managed to murder 100 million people at least in that time period.
they are not getting some buro-cratic power-- they have been exercising the scyth arm for over a century.
Nobody complained when the nazis took over germany or publicly under soviet rule, but eventually both of these tyrannies were overthrown.
OH MY GOD! I am amazed at the level to which liberals talk about science while rejecting the very foundations of science. (Carbon is not bad. The payroll tax doesn't influence employers, it influences employees-- employees are the ones who pay the tax.)
What we lack is people who understand economics, or have any sense of history-- the "progressive" tax system is what is keeping people poor. A flat tax and no social security would have eliminated poverty in the US 50 years ago, and probably we'd have most of our manufacturing jobs still too...though environmentalist inspired regulation and rampant union violence might have been enough alone to drive it overseas.
The amazing thing to me is how much liberals talk about helping the poor (And conservatives talk about "freedom") while advocating policies that do the opposite, and attacking anyone who actually advocates what they claim to support....
I've long wondered if this was simply because these people have been so deluded that they thinkg up is down and left is right... or if they really actually have another agenda and these causes (poverty and freedom) are just excuses to advocate policies that they know make the problems worse.
The 19th century should have taught you all that socialism and communism will not decrease poverty and will ultimately result in the slaughter of millions of people... and yet you can't turn around without hearing some liberal talk about "global warming" and "externalities" without understanding the first bit of economics... and advocating totalitarian laws to bring about their "dictatorship of the proletariat".
You do not seem to have discussed any of the issues yourself, it might be pointed out. I think most everyone here would agree that the ban on light bulbs is a bad idea, but given some level of consensus that CO2 emissions are a problem, what to do about them?
Doubtless your answer would focus on the fact that there is no problem at all because the existence of an externality of some kind disagrees with your ideology.
You might even be right that there is no problem, because it's not an easy subject, but on the other hand, a number of scientists appear to indicate that there is a problem of some kind.
In any case, you started going off about communists and (in another thread) Nazis, so maybe we can call Godwin's law and leave it at that.
Speaking of voting people down, someone seems to have had a go at everything of mine they could get ahold of, including those completely unrelated to this discussion:
Why do so many people talk about "negative externalities" when they don't even understand basic economics? Its like some liberal ideological center picked up a phrase, told people some vague idea of what it meant, and then got people to advocate it as a justification for ideas whose economic underpinnings having nothing to do with what they think they do.
The bottom line is, your attempt to internalize externalities is proof that you don't know what you're talking about because externalities by definition cannot be internalized.
All this liberal economics is just like that last wave of liberal economics that resulted in 100 million deaths over the period from 1900-2000, only it isn't united under a common term like "socialism" or "communism" but it amounts to the same-- totalitarianism sold as being "good for you".
I understand the economics just fine, thanks, and one of the big proponents of the carbon tax is republican economist Greg Mankiw (see Pigou Club link).
If I were to respond in kind, I would say that libertarianism seems to be a willful ignorance of the very concept of a market externality, as understood by mainstream economics. Certainly, reasonable people can agree to disagree on what specific things constitute externalities in which cases, how bad they are, and what measures, if any, should be taken to correct them - and indeed if those corrective measures are worse than the problem they cure.
However, denying the very existence of factors that are not taken into consideration by a free market seems to be letting your beliefs get the better of reason. And comparing any government intervention with communism is a bit beyond the pale, really.
No, you don't understand economics, and you concede this point when you use the phrase "mainstream economics"... this is a common tactic of socialists to try and cover the fact that they are substituting political ideology for economics.
Economics is a science. ITs not uncommon for those who will not make a scientific argument to instead knock down strawmen, as you just have.
Of course, you threw out enough buzzwords that those who don't look too close will believe you made a counter argument.
What you might consider doing, if you don't agree with the economics, is point out the errors in my logic rather than continue to attack my understanding of economics (which is an awfully broad conclusion to reach from a few comments in any case, I might add). And included in that, for the sake of discussing the economics, is that CO2 emissions are in some way harmful, even if you don't happen to believe that.
The ironic thing is, the entity that causes the most pollution (in every country) is that countries government... and the entity causing the most energy waste is generally the government as well.
It never ceases to amaze me how people are so willing to put guns and violence behind their political ideologies. This is probably because they don't realize that is what they are doing-- but every law is backed up by a guy holding a gun and pointing it at someone who breaks it.
ARe you willing to go to someone's house, and take his incandescent light bulbs and shoot him if he resists? You think that's Moral?
Cause that's what this law does, and it is no more moral if you advocate someone else doing it even if you are unwilling to do it yourself.
Typical, government will stick a gun in people's face just to make them be "politically correct". Nevermind the consequences (or the chicks who will no longer hatch because the heat source that powers the incubators is no longer around... or the farmer who goes out of business because he can't afford to buy thousands of new incubators... etc.)
Government is a disease masquerading as its own cure.
Steve's a nice guy and I enjoy reading his rants, but there's one thing he's wrong about: Amazon. A horrible, horrible company, where bright engineers are managed by horrible horrible idiots and nothing is done very well... Amazon doesn't believe in having engineers do management so they hire people with no skills other than asskissing (its the most political work environment I've ever seen) to manage engineers-- thus you have the joyful experience of having someone who knows absolutely nothing about programming telling you that you're doing something wrong based on a misunderstanding of something he overheard someone else say about a whole other programming language.
There are a few decent engineers who make it thru the incompetance filter (amazon calls this "Raising the bar") and become managers, and obviously steve wored for one. But the vast majority of people managing engineers at Amazon are non-engineers. And the managers managers are even worse- paper pushers whose primary goal is their own personal advancement-- not the product, not the quality of the work and certainly not hte profitability of the company.
Because I worked there, and I saw first hand the way that company is run. I've worked for a wide variety of companies, including what is now HP and Microsoft, a number of startups and a number of medium sized companies. I'd rank Amazon as the worst company I've worked for, and even Microsoft was a bit better (there's on startup between the two in the rankings for the suckiest environments).
Amazon is a very employee hostile place- all advancement is due to politics. Unless you have a good manager (and there are a few, mostly engineer who have been there a very long time) you can't advance unless you play really vicious politics-- and I mean, sabotaging others work kind of vicious. The people they bring in as managers (because they claim engineers don't want to be managers) are people who have no management skill.
I may have had one of the worst- his only training was in "criminal justice" and he clearly thought he was a prison guard... he'd regularly chew out the whole team for failing to do things that he didn't even understand weren't our responsibility (or in once case something we had actually done, but some other manager had told him we hadn't and of course he knew absolutely nothing about software so he had no way of knowing whether we'd done it or not.)
Maybe microsoft is that bad now- it was heading in this direction when I worked there...but Amazon was the worst place I ever worked. (And I worked for an educational startup where all of management was gradeschool teachers who also didn't understand technology and treated us like grade schoolers... and this company had trouble making payroll... but being belittled is much better than being verbally abused in my book.)
I worked there as well. Like any company, I think it really depends on your team/organization. I've heard horror stories about certain orgs at Amazon and nothing but glowing reviews for others. Perhaps you had a terrible time on your team under a specific manager - others could have had the opposite experience.
These are not "cybersquatters". Octo and Part are generic terms.
One of the domains I own is a combination of a word that means "software" and another word that means "place you like to go". I got it for a developers site... and then after I got it I discovered that there was an italian maker of luxury goods whose trademark is that word - apparently the combination of these two english words makes another word completely in italian.
Am I cybersquatting? I've considered selling this domain to them because its much better than the one that they are currently using. If I sell it to them, then they will be getting a better domain at a price that they think is fair (or they wouldn't be buying it).
Some may say I'm being opportunistic and this is wrong- well, I say that my intent was elsewhere and this was a surprise coincidence... but that my intent isnt' really relevant. If I'd registered the name then I have perfect rights to it-- after all if they'd wanted it, why didn't they register it? If I register it and several years later they decide they want it-- what gives them the right to demand that I give it to them for free?
Finally, the truth is that I didn't register this domain, I bought it at auction. so, what's to say what a fair price is?
The idea that these people are "cybersquatters" is an idea of entitlement-- its based on the false notion that you somehow have a right to domain names, even though you didn't register them when they were free.
This is false. Domain names are an open territory- if you think of it and register it, its yours. If you later realize you should have registered it, then its you're error, not the error of the preson who did register it.
They arent' scamming you, they are asking for compensation for the risk they took in registering it. If hte price they ask is higher than the value of the domain (and if you have foo.com then foo.cn isn't really that valuable, is it?) then just don't buy it and let the owner of foo.cn use it for whatever they want.... why should you care?
If they are using a domain to pretend to be you-- then that would be one thing, and that's what cybersquatting really means.
But domain speculation, like real estate speculation, is a perfectly legitimate activity. Where does one get the idea that all names of a certain category should belong to them even though they couldn't be bothered to register them?
(Speaking in general here, not to the original poster since he didn't express much of an opinion, other than to misuse the word cybersquatter)
As the author pointed out, the domain was registered five days after his site launched. The domain was registered in bad faith. The owner is now soliciting the author for an offer on the domain name. According to Wikipedia, cybersquatting is 'registering, trafficking in, or using a domain name with bad-faith intent to profit from the goodwill of a trademark belonging to someone else.'
Agreed. Whats being missed here is this:
Registering a domain you think will be profitable in the future : enterprising.
Registering a variation of a domain that someone else just registered because you think you might be able to extort some $ out of them : rotten. No cookie for you.
According to the law and from the perspective of the business world, what Mr. Li & co. are doing is perfectly fine, no one would disagree. You call it 'legitimate', and I think that's a fair description.
Obviously, though, you'll notice that a lot of people don't like what they're doing. I personally wouldn't go so far as to call it 'unethical', but I know that I definitely don't agree with what they do, since on a number of levels it strikes me as wrong.
The legal framework surrounding the purchase and ownership of domain names was ultimately established by fiat. The model we have is not a sacred construction that fell out of an economics textbook. It was chosen to represent some idea of how we thought domain name ownership should be handled. We didn't know how the domain name market was going to evolve. How could we? It was a radically new idea with little precedent. The closest thing we had was our model for physical real-estate, and so that's roughly what we adopted, in an attempt to make it a fair system.
Early on, though, we realized that our model didn't quite match up to the expectation of fairness we had for our system, and when a legal framework fails to match our conception of how things should work, we revise it, and we do so with more laws. The major law that came out of this was the Anticybersquatting act, and though it was drafted largely as a result of corporate interest, it represents our belief that something was wrong with the framework we had set up. (If I'm going to build a McDonald's, you have to move your lemonade stand off the piece of real estate labeled MCDONALDS in big bold letters...on every map ever printed.)
When you say that Mr. Li isn't a cybersquatter, even though it is grossly obvious he fits that definition (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anticybersquatting_Consumer_Pro...), whether you agree with it or not, it leads me to believe that you have a problem with anyone being labeled a 'cybersquatter', on the basis that there is nothing inherently wrong with the act of cybersquatting.
The problem people have with Thomas Li and octopart.cn, is not that he desires to own a domain name that somebody else might want. It's that, rather than engage in some type of productive behavior, Mr. Li has seized upon a opportunity to make a little money entirely at the expense of the Octopart company. His behavior is counterproductive. It is of benefit to no one (except himself). He has created, in effect, a potential loss for Octopart, and now he is offering them the ability to avoid that loss. The key point here is that he has created a loss opportunity, and no real gain for anyone. Of course, he has the potential to gain money for himself, but in the long tradition of ill-gotten gains, people really won't like him for it, because he won't be receiving money in exchange for some positive output he's created, he'll be receiving ransom money in order to not make something worse.
We see a similar thing happening in the parking of domain names on a massive scale. Mass parking occurs when an entrepreneur buys up thousands of domains, on the cheap---since most of them haven't been registered---and then sets up dummy search pages and advertisements on each of them. He never puts original content on these sites. With judicious use of SEO tricks, he can still get them to pop up in your Google search, even though nobody in their right mind would ever link there or even want to visit there in the first place. Do parked domains actually add value for the consumer? Not likely. At best they simply rearrange or add vestigial segments to the plumbing of the internet. If I search for "sony tv" and the first ten results are WALMART.COM and the last one is TARGET.COM, my search isn't any better than if the first result was Wal-Mart and the second was Target. All Wal-Mart's done is increase the probability that I visit their site before I visit Target's...which may improve their market share, but actually degrades my experience as a consumer. You'll notice what we have going on is, again, a transfer of wealth, and not a creation thereof.
The practice of mass domain name parking must make some people a lot of money, but I don't think that anyone believes this is a desirable feature for the internet to have.
(Historically, these types of 'transactions' are frowned upon. If I'm a pirate and I capture your ship, I just got a lot richer, but the net effect on society is negative, since much work has been expended without the creation of wealth, and now much more work in the future will have to be expended on defense, which, short of economic stimulus and R&D, also fails to create wealth. This is why industrialized societies don't like war, or theft, or raiding, or vikings, bandits, bank and train robbers, burglars, pirates, muggers, hijackers, and highwaymen. Their acts are always lucrative for a small number of people at the severe expense of everyone else. Wouldn't you rather someone spend all day planning a building instead of a robbery?)
>With judicious use of SEO tricks, he can still get them to pop up in your Google search, even though nobody in their right mind would ever link there or even want to visit there in the first place.
The 70s they were predicting eminant ice age, now they're predicting global warming, in another 20 years it will be back to ice age.
Its always been about political ideology and controlling people- bending them to their will- and never about science. Even in the 1970s nuclear power was known to be safe.
Hell, a coal plant spreads more radioactivity than a nuclear plant. (Cause coal contains radioactive substances naturally.)