Riedquat

What are you disillusioned about? Having to work? What's wrong with that? And I'm also rather glad I live in a society that doesn't require too many people working on growing enough food, so that the rest of us can get on with other things. There are massive problems with it, but you're not looking at the right ones.

There's nothing inherently good about a risk-taking attitude over a cautious one. You need bits of both, depending upon the circumstances. And it's still holding up the most rewards for gambling a bit of money on someone else doing some good work that gives a lot of benefit than actually doing that work. If you can do well without having to do anything extradordinary then the wrong people are being rewarded. That's because they're not quite a monopoly on their own yet. You're a monopoly when you can afford to take a bit of a hit in order to put any upstart out of business. Supermarkets are still in competition, but against too few competitors to make any real difference.

Untrue I'm afraid. Already physical limits are starting to be hit - if we want significantly faster CPUs it's going to be a pretty significant approach rather than improving what we have. This is why more CPUs is starting to become common instead of much faster CPUs. Also, even if you get hugely super-duper fast machines all that means is that they can add together more numbers. It doesn't make them cleverer, just quicker (to do anything like a brain you've got to go massively parallel, and we're nowhere near that).

I thought there was a case or two against people for reverse engineering, or some new law, but I'll happily stand corrected. Some laws certainly make it easier, such as copyright laws, although it's not really the same as state collusion and there's at least a grain of truth in the argument that some degree of copyright protection is needed to make it worthwhile making an effort to produce anything. I think that the reason that it seems ironic is that often the issue is portrayed in too much black and white; the state is very much damned if it does and damned if it doesn't. It can help or hinder monopolies, and it's harder still to somehow get a balance between hindering monopoly without stifling smaller concerns. Anyone, state or individual, with enough clout has the power to make things both better or worse so it shouldn't really be viewed as an inherent property of the state. I hope that makes sense; reading back over it I'm not sure if it's anything more than an incoherent ramble.

I can't recall the details of specific examples but I think (and I have to emphasise that it's only "I think") that there are laws in place to prevent people from trying to reverse engineer software for any purpose, not just to pinch it. That would make it difficult, if not impossible, to work out how to make the best use of an OS that hasn't documented everything. You could also argue that being able to heavily restrict documentation availability plays into this (i.e. it's fine to sell very expensive documentation only to certain people who sign everything away).

Helped by state laws that could come down like a ton of bricks on anyone who tried to get around that.

You won't get any argument from me on that one. Bill Gates is one who never had anything particularly decent to offer but was very, very good at getting it pushed out anyway. That's the triumph of the system, where that usually wins over quality, hard work, and innovation (although I suppose you could argue that to start with peddling rubbish successfully takes hard work, but it's not the type that should be rewarded). Some others get started through genuinely decent efforts though, like James Dyson. What really annoys me is how having a lot of money and being good at playing the system gains much greater rewards than the likes of, say, Trevor Baylis.

And as I said, I'm not convinced by the accusations of deliberately developing sub-optimal compounds. The ageing population argument relies on spending a lot of money making a cure, not being able to sell as much of it as an ongoing treatment for a chronic disease, then having to spend a lot of money to come up with something new that people will simply start taking later in life. You may end up selling not many more pills (people will start taking them later, not necessarily for longer), and there' s a big extra chunk of risk and expense. Much safer to stick with what's making you lots of money right now. The whole system certainly does not lend itself towards providing the best medicine, and it doesn't need any deliberate conspiracy-sounding attempts to keep people ill enough to keep taking the drugs to do so. Doing a bit of good work simply doesn't pay in our society. That's its huge, fundamental flaw.

The same public who actually live on that street, who'll be by far the majority users of your average residential street. If it's not a significant through route then you're talking about making things a lot more awkward for a lot of people whilst benefitting exactly who? Anyway, I've never heard of any country doing that.

Some of them started off as hard-woking entrepreneurs.

Use yours - which is going to be more profitable, a cure or a drug that people have to keep taking for years? The discussion has not been had (in a quick skim over the last few pages), all that's happened have been a couple of bald statements that they'd clean up. Such a statement does not make a discussion. It's not about deliberately developing sub-optimal drugs, it's about concentrating your efforts on what'll make you the most money. It's exactly the same reason why stuff is rarely built to last any more.

They get massively richer, the trickle-down effect makes everyone else slightly richer. Well, that's the theory, anyway. I (a) don't believe it, and ( don't find it tolerable even if it is true. It's, at best, throwing a few crumbs to your slaves whilst you grow fat ("Hey, they're not starving and they've got shelter!")

Probably not. What happens when people want back the deposits that have been leant out but the borrowers haven't paid them back. I think it's supposed to rely on "It'll all come out in the wash in the end, as long as you don't actually try to check that it will."

Spot on there. I've been amazed to sometimes hear people complaining that they can't afford to feed their kids fresh fruit and veg. Fruit can sometimes be a bit pricey but basic vegetables often seem ludicrously cheap. I suspect the real problem is that you can't just chuck them in the microwave.

Not if they improve it too much, to the point where patients don't need their drugs any more.

That is rather worrying, especially since it seems to be coupled to their traditional approach of making sure that their wealthy pals can still rake it in even if everyone else already seems to have been bled dry, but unfortunately most of the opposition to the cuts seems to come from people with a high-Labour ideology which doesn't seem to concern itself with the simple, hard reality of the economic situation.

I'm assuming that most of those come from the idiocy of the last decade or so where there was a ridiculous attitude of "Don't provide for cars and no-one will use them." I've always been puzzled as to how modern high-density developments seem to make such a mess of it compared to Victorian ones, probably without even managing greater density.

We'd be better off without banksters, but not without banks (I don't want to risk keeping my savings in a box under the bed). Their is a bit of an analogy - the inefficient self-serving rubbish that's wrecking the whole thing needs to be cut away ruthlessly, but totally wrecking the banks (again, separate from totally wrecking the vastly over-paid useless self-serving morons who run them) is about as good as wrecking the mines.

And the really depressing thing? It still looks like every other possible outcome of the election would've been even worse.

Which all seems to say that the idea of it is far worse than the reality of it. The human immune system has evolved to cope with far more than that, day in, day out. If people aren't falling ill from it all the time then even if it sounds unpleasant there's no risk worth thinking about. All those adverts saying "There are all these germs on your kitchen worktop!" Well, since I'm not always getting ill then I can only assume that it's telling me that having them there is harmless.

Although in general I agree with the overpopulation issue this isn't an example of it. Most streets too narrow for cars are simply too narrow for cars because they were designed and built before cars existed (or at least before they were at all common)., and will have to remain that way unless we want to knock down lots of perfectly good housing in order to replace it with wider roads and badly-designed, badly-built modern rubbish.

Everything is a bloody health risk. There's a one in a billion chance of you getting a slight rash from handling this product, shock, horror, must be banned, rethink everything! They've cried wolf and been far too paranoid for far too long for me to take anything seriously involving health and dangers. I'll continue ignoring them because almost certainly nothing will happen to me and I won't be worrying about it all the time (I'll just be worrying and getting worked up about everything else instead, things that actually matter and affect people's lives, like overpriced housing). It all sounds like yet another case of equating "There might just be a risk" with "This is definitely bloody dangerous."

Patents expire, they've cut R&D, and complain that the money is going to start drying up. Awww.

Hamish and Sibley both posting on that? I'd better not look at it if I want to keep my blood pressure down.

Of course it makes a huge difference! They've now got a big asset worth twice as much as it was! That's all that matters, don't you see? Next you'll be saying that everyone earning isn't twice as rich if their salary doubles, even though so has the price of everything. Anyway, think of all that extra money you can get by remortgaging - next you'll be telling me that that isn't simply borrowing a huge lot more than you could before, and borrowing == good. Some people even seem waste time thinking about paying that money back. Those dangerous fools, with their weird ideas about how that'll cost you more than just saving up for your holidays and tat, destroying the economy by in the long run wanting to be able to spend more on what they want and less on interest to the banksters.