I thought that rich people created jobs for us poor lowly little peons!?!?!?!?!

He said it himself. Fucking hoarders!!

Do people think they have it in some mayonaisse jar buried in the back yard? No. That wealth is in the form of equities and a relatively small amount of tangible assets. It's impossible to have such wealth without having it invested in SOMETHING. Much of it is probably in Treasury notes. As long as the inflation rate is near zilch, they have no motivation whatsoever to do anything but own equities in established businesses that have global markets. Think "Microsoft stock." Where's the competition? Virtually nonexistent. As long as Gates is off-shoring jobs and getting rid of American software engineers, his wealth will continue to increase. NOBODY benefits more from government than Bill Gates. The product itself is intangible ... "intellectual property" ... the mere existence of which is totally dependent on legislative fiat and government police power. It's the very essense of "entitlement" ... a benefit derived from a legal fiction that has no reality in the Natural World.

I wouldn't say MS's software is any less tangible, in terms of value, than other products. Millions of lines of code created by thousands of software developers in a coordinated effort to create the most refined software that exists. (eg OpenOffice.org)

Sure it can be copied, but I don't think 'tangibility' should be considered a measure of worth. The Earth is tangible, but should that give anyone the inherent right to claim large parts of it, even though we were all born here.

The only tangible thing of value might be manual labor, but even that is a factor of physical ability, which some might lack for whatever reasons. It is also not well respected since machines now do a lot of labor for us.

So intellectual property seems to me like one of the best things to attach with a value, IMO.

"tangible property" is a legal term with a VERY specific and well-tested meaning.
http://legal-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/Tangible+property


The term "entitlement" also has a specific meaning ... and it's not as well-known since the propaganda machines have hammered the notion that it's (only) about Social Security and Medicare.

It turns out the those whose entire careers are focused on "entitlements" are, while spread all over the Earth, very concentrated in a specific location in New York City. Wall Street.

When it was suggested (by Biden?) that we refer to Social Security and Medicare as "earned benefits" instead of 'entitlements,' I applauded. That's because the history of mankind is rife with examples of entitlements ... virtually every predation and tyranny committed by 'Royalty' in mankind's history.

First, somehow the word 'liberal' was turned into a bad word by the conservatives, when clearly it is a positive term, by all objective, rational accounts.

Second, Now there are also people using the term improperly, claiming that they are liberal when really they are voting to keep the wealthy liberal with their money. I totally support liberal economics, since wealth distribution in favor of the already-rich is way outbalanced. But I would not call myself 'liberal' unless I were actually giving tons of my money away. I admit I can't do that now. I do call myself progressive.

Now there is a bunch of hubub about the word 'entitlement'. Looking at the definition, I do not understood why the word should have any negative connotations. I think, we should not allow cons to get away with changing the connotations of words.

Then it becomes ok for people who should be on the same side to lash at each other throats, that's just normal. Like I said it's upside down world.

You might say for me their intellectual property has a negative value.

I'm not sure what you are trying to say with your OpenOffice example...

OpenOffice started out as a proprietary office suite, Star Office, which as bought by Sun and turned into an open source project because Sun didn't have the developer resources they needed to compete with Microsoft. Oracle bought Sun and supported OpenOffice for a little while, but then they pissed off their development community by acting like they owned them so most of the developers left and formed LibreOffice. OpenOffice is moribund.

I'm a strong supporter of many sorts of intellectual property. Creative people ought to be paid for their work. When I buy art, I buy it from the artist. We've got paintings on our wall where I wrote a check directly to the artist. I've got compact disks and LP's I've purchased directly from the composers and musicians,

The sad thing about our corporate world is that corporations often get the money while the creative people starve. What's even worse, these corporations end up "owning" patents and copyrights on things they had no role in creating and use legal protections in ways that actively obstruct further advances in the arts, sciences, and technology.

The advantage of "copyleft" software licenses and Creative Commons copyrights is that nobody can ever use a creative person's work in a way that inhibits advancement of the arts and sciences. With these licenses if some corporate entity puts the squeeze on then creative people can simply go somewhere else and the work continues.

I'm sure I seem incredibly ignorant, but how do the developers of Python, PHP, and all the other open source stuff, make money? It seems that they tend to sue a lot. Is that their source of income? It seems they want money too, so they can't really claim to be above making money, but that they do it in the form of lawsuits, which is not my preferred method.

I'm also biased because I use MS, and it is a pleasure to work with. Everyone I've met who develops in MS environment seems very happy, and with every release of Visual Studio it becomes more pleasant. With upmost respect for the other 95% (I'm sure MS development is now a tiny niche) it seems like opensource developers tend to be a little cranky, which might have something to do with the tools they use. Just a silly personal hypothesis of mine, which might not be true. Anyway, I hope MS isn't going anywhere. I also don't know how people can dislike Bill Gates, he's an awkward nerd just like me. Sure, he hires foreign labor at low wages, but I'd like to know what companies of that size don't do that.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guido_van_Rossum

Bill Gates is a shark.

My happy place was writing code for 6502 processors. I think that was Bill Gates' happy place too. But then IBM screwed up everything when they selected the 8088 processor for their PC.

I've been cranky ever since.

Gates was cranky too but he bought a Quick and Dirty Operating System from Seattle Computer Products, had it reworked into something that would run on IBM's hideous "Personal Computer," and the rest is history.

Thankfully the age of the x86 is ending.

This is the most popular processor in the world now:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARM_architecture

People are beginning to realize once you've got gcc running on your hardware, whatever it is, however elegantly RISC or deeply x86 twisted it is, then the world is yours. Apple figured it out, Google figured it out, and now Microsoft is trying to catch up.

Pity the poor serfs who are asked to make Windows portable, but not so portable that it competes with the flagship x86 Windows 8.

Last edited Thu Sep 20, 2012, 09:33 AM - Edit history (2)

When all the other kids were partying in high school, I was in the basement programming in machine language on an Apple IIe and created some pretty cool stuff; however, while I was focusing on that, the rest of the world became interested in higher level languages.

It took me a really long time to understand object oriented languages. They seemed like such a needless abstraction when I could do anything I wanted in machine language. So anyway, now my mindset has changed, finally, and I am finding endless work, that needs to be done, using the resources VS makes available. Whatever gets the job done. So I sheepishly admit that the processor is now a distant memory to me, and all I really look at is the finished product. Regardless of the processor, understanding how code like SQL, Ling, C#, JS, CSS, and everything else, is all I can fit in my brain.

If at any point anyone would have offered me work writing code in machine language, I might be doing it today. Still nobody will hire me really, I do not know tech speak, programming is all I've done all my life yet I've never been able to work with another programmer. I actually moved to California when I was 21 hoping Apple wold hire me (so naive of me). That was a laugh. Instead I realized the whole world is full of sharks. I still am not accustomed to that fact, so I just delve into my projects to escape reality.

Guillotining greedy people is like trying end pet overpopulation by killing animals in a shelter.

Doesn't work, will always be more greedy people behind them.

You have to change the thinking of the people that cause the problem. Not the rich ones, but the ones that allow it to happen.

And now we have quit training the police force that has murdered 51 Americans that were training them, and Al Qaeda is still causing painful losses, just mounted an operation on a highly secure base in Afghanistan.

They aren't at all impressed by our display of deadly force.

It's really tough to kill an idea with overwhelming force in a civilized world, but you can subvert it, go around it, divert it, absorb it, because they have already shown their strategy. The problem is finding enough people willing to do what is necessary while being purchased by your opponents, even though that might be their only salvation.

On the other hand, if they were to look our their office some morning, and see a guillotine sitting out by that big statue of the bull. Or maybe someone removes the bull some night, shows up the next day with free steak samples advertising the new "Investment Banker Prime...".

Given how many scared, powerless people have probably died early as a result of these bastard's actions it is high time to stop it.

they've worked HARD for this mountain of money. They have freedumbs and bootstraps, so why should they be expected to DO SOCIALISM or COMMUNISM? After all, those things are bad. I'm not sure how, but I know to my core they're bad. Whatever happened to the good old American value of looting and peonage and knowing God loves YOU because He made you RICH (usually BORN RICH). Why should you be expected to share, when you've EARNED all your money, BUILT YOUR HEDGE FUND YOURSELF, prayed harder than the layabouts? Why do you have to SUFFER, because other people DON'T WANT TO WORK?

so they create jobs - in China.

Three orders of magnitude ... but who's counting.

getting to $110 is impossible. If you have $100 million, getting to $110 million is inevitable. Don't know who said this, but it is certainly true.

Which is never.

I noticed long ago that Republican live on fear. They have been telling us the "job creators" are afriad to create jobs. However, 400 families hold 1/8 of the nation's wealth, and they are getting better for them, whatever their party affiliation. Tell us again, Republicans, how poor the economy is.

And bitching about how "hard" regulation has made it is to make an honest buck in their industries...

Asshats.