Riedquat

That's about as sensible as saying a spacecraft is a failure of gravity. Actually, it's even less so. It's as sensible as saying that a spacecraft is a failure of the laws of physics.

The same is true of its value, and hence any wealth created by making it, otherwise all you've done is change one pile of bits of metal and plastic into a differently-shaped pile of bits of metal and plastic. Wether or not that creates any wealth or is just a waste of everyone's time and resources all ultimately depends on what you can do with that resulting pile.

You're asking that just because I'm saying "Look at the bigger picture in order to assess whether something or not is wealth creation"? That's just plain daft. Narrow it down to a small enough field and the activity of the bankers certainly was wealth creation - they did very well from it personally, and even if they hadn't been bailed out they would've stayed rich as a result if they'd left in time. If socialism is looking at the big picture and not ignoring consequences then I am one.

Which all come from building cars. No cars, no accident risk and traffic from them (also see point below). Not directly, but those non-direct results are what ultimately drives the fact that the creation of a car might create wealth - the final use to which the car is put. The car only has value to someone, value for which they are willing to pay, in order to drive. Hence if you're trying to assess the overall impact of the car's creation you need to consider wether having another car driving around costs more for everyone else than it benefits the driver. Creating something that imposes massive costs on everyone else isn't wealth creation, at least outside the small view of its manufacturer. When it comes to cars the benefits generally outweigh the costs, so building a car is wealth creation.

If they valued that more than employment those people involved wouldn't be doing a job in the first place, so stupid answer that I hope was sarcasm.

Failure of lots of businesses in the same market does, though.

Increased traffic / pollution / accident risk / use of resources that could've been used for something else. Your car creation may well be of net wealth creation but it'll certainly have some cost for some people.

I'd add "because it's not the cause", and then you've summed it up perfectly IMO. Cure the disease, not the symptoms please. Building is the latter, and with very unpleasant side-effects.

Hang on, why is everyone complaining? It's great that places like this can go for that much. Presumably it was much cheaper in the past, and going up to that is great! Think how much wealthier the owners are now! Or are you so selfish that you want to deny them that? Anyone wanting to deny homeowners a bit of well-earned cash are selfish and jealous, nothing more.

Everything that the public sector does could, in theory, be done by the private sector, and a lot of it is necessary (or at least highly desirable). From the nonsense I see from some posters that should immediately change them from being wealth drains to wealth creators, which is obviously nonsense. The result of transferring to the private sector, though, would be greater access (and influence) from those already with wealth. Get rid of state education, for example, and you'll have a lot more children with no education at all. Is that beneficial? Having to pay directly to get your rubbish taken away would result in rubbish piling up or even more flytipping. Having to pay directly for healthcare would result in being left to die if you're too poor to afford the treatment. Since educated, healthy people not living in a dump are beneficial to society as a whole then IMO both those services are valuable and so is having them provided by the state.

Possibly right, but there's more to life, and a country, than its economy. If the taxes are well spent then it's still a worthwhile thing to do. If it discourages parastic speculation and diverts money towards useful areas then it's a worthwhile thing to do.

Because the price in further damage to rural Britain is greater than any price reduction in houses IMO, and anyway, we don't even need the houses. There's enough housing already (in most places), it wasn't a shortage of housing that drove prices up. The "1% of land" figure is meaningless unless you honestly believe that the impact is non-existant beyond the physical location (and that'signoring extra land use required due to the additional infrastructure needed to support them). Otherwise living in a village surrounded by other houses may as well be the same as living in a city surrounded by them. I've lived in all sorts of different parts of the UK, and in general find my quality of life higher the lower the population density and development level. I find it very depressing flying over the UK at night, at least once you're south of Manchester. It really gives the impression that there's very little that isn't practically next door to a town. Right now I'm in a village near Penrith, and that's about as crowded as it can be without quality of life starting to go downhill as a result for me (although being a bank holiday weekend the even bigger than normal influx of tourists infesting the Lakes doesn't help).

Is that coming from a "no tax at all" point of view, or just a problem with the level of tax? Tax reduction in some areas and increases in others can be used to reward investment in desirable areas, i.e. genuine investment instead of parasitic speculation. Would the UK be in a better state if capital gains tax on housing was vastly greater?

No (and that's despite renting due to prices being too high), even if I believed that was the cause of high prices.

Take a painting. Scribble over part of it. "Well, it's only 5% of it that's scribbled on." Besides, I was under the impression that the prevailing opinion on here was that there isn't a shortage of houses and that stupid high prices were much more the result of over-supply of credit to fools.

Isn't that protectionism, with all the problems that results in? Although having legal minimum working conditions here but no restrictions on buying products from elsewhere that don't have the same conditions is very much double standards.

Sounds like they want to have their cake and eat it. If they want you to stay in then they shouldn't make things so uncertain for you, certainly not without some degree of compensation. Otherwise I'd up sticks out of spite, even with the inconvenience and hassle and preferring to stay.

No, it's not because you're doing most of the labour yourself in that situation. Using the recipe to make your own bread is more comparable to having a fairly high-level model and description and then having to program and test that yourself, or perhaps having some source code but having to re-implement it in a different language. It's just bloody daft to expect everyone to have to share their own labours without any control even if those labours don't produce anything physical. Hence it is exactly the same as taking away everything you physically produce as long as you're given new raw materials in return. The only difference is that a successful IP idea can produce much more product (not infinte because, at least with software, it eventually becomes redundant and you need to do some more work).

Fair enough, but no copyright for IP is the equivalent of, at best, taking the bread from the baker whether he wants to sell it or not and leaving him some flour and yeast to make some more bread (no net loss other than the labour spent making the bread). The only difference is the amount of product that the labour can produce. The free software argument is not that. It's the baker up the road making his bread as normal but then happily giving it away to anyone who wants it, although anyone who uses the bread to make anything else has to do the same. The baker still has to pay for his raw materials (I suppose they may get given to him), but the free software programmer has had to pay for his hardware too. If he's lucky he might be able to persuade some people to pay him to deliver the bread to him.

For as long as you're happy working for free (or at least with an indirect barter-type approach - you'll hopefully get something you need from someone else using the same approach). And it relies on enough people wanting what you also want. Anyway, I don't think making it difficuly or impossible to be able to financially benefit from mental labours is better for all. It's the equivalent of expecting everything else to be only sold for the cost of materials. "No people in prison" isn't part of the argument - it's a step on the road to just saying "eliminate crime by legalising everything."

No, the GPL licence relies on copyright to make it work. It's just the price of the GPL product, except that it's a non-cash price. Your choice of product for what you're prepared to pay, same as any more common pay cash get product deal.

All the "special rules" are are saying that "My work from my effort, my decision on who gets to use it", which seems perfectly reasonable. Certainly more reasonable than "My work from my effort but I'm effectively barred from getting any reward for that effort other than a warm glow because as soon as I give it to one person for whatever I may as well have given it to everyone for nothing." It certainly devalues intellectual work compared with physical work, even if the effort is the same.

So because some people are willing to give away their work others should have to?

Because of regulation that prevents them from being as ruthless as possible in order to eliminate the competition. Right, so an already existing market with already existing products, although admittedly I don't really know what business OS alternatives at the time were like. But the business market was just his first one, and after that all the other ones I mentioned with the same, or similar product, ultimately leading to Windows being seen everywhere in markets where other companies used to have other products, sometimes better ones. The Acorns I used at school were much less of a pain than DOS or Win3.1 that I think was the equivalent MS offering at the time, for example. I'm sure Apple users would say something similar yet it didn't stop MS successfully targetting and dominating their market either.

Every other computer at the time. IIRC it was the time when there were plenty of things such as Apples and BBC Bs and Commodore 64s and probably loads of others I can't remember, all used to varying different degrees in homes, schools, and businesses. Bill Gates managed to persuade more people that they should be part of that market, and that his software was the one to use for it. He did nothing innovative, but was very good at getting in to and expanding what already existed.