331–340 of 357 posts
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To be fair: You do build lovely, functional houses in one of the most beautiful parts of Europe.
Some disagree: http://uglybelgianhouses.tumblr.com/
Well, if Parkinson's law is correct http://www.economist.com/node/14116121 and bureaucracies expand by 6% every year regardless of the amount of work, more and more of us will end up with useless jobs.
Another thought: the resistance to any corporate software that would considerably increase efficiency is explained by selfpreservation of the system.
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I was under the assumption that confiscation of private property was more widely condemned no matter what domain. Apparently not.
Patents aren't private property. They're a government-granted temporary monopoly. In the absence of government, there's still some notion of property, but no notion whatsoever of patents.
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I was under the assumption that confiscation of private property was more widely condemned no matter what domain. Apparently not.
Patents aren't private property. They're a government-granted temporary monopoly. In the absence of government, there's still some notion of property, but no notion whatsoever of patents.
Yes, they are. (Particularly, they are intangible personal property.)
> They're a government-granted temporary monopoly.
All "property" is government-granted monopoly in the control/use of some thing (sometimes dependent on a grant from another private party, but still ultimately government granted), concrete or abstract. Some are temporary (this is true of real and tangible personal property, too), some are permanent.
> In the absence of government, there's still some notion of property, but no notion whatsoever of patents.
Outside of government/legality, there's certainly still some notion that things, concrete and abstract, can belong to certain people such that it is wrong to "steal" them, and that certainly includes ideas. The particular details and names of particular classes of property are, of course, products of people, over time, spending time teasing out vague notions into more detailed sets of rules -- which, in the case of property rights, is something that tends to happen in the context of government (not always by government, but you don't even have developed philosophy of property rights without government existing to create a stable enough society for people to spend time writing rather than defending their immediate personal possessions and survival necessities.)
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I imagine you could purchase some sort of financial product that would pay out continuously to cover your taxes. Basically a perpetual annuity, with some wiggle room built in to account for changes in tax rates and property valuation. I don't know what a realistic rate would be for such a thing, but probably quite low. So you'd probably have to put in something like 50x your annual property tax payment.
While that would be cool, the concept of never owning your land smacks of feudalism. It's almost like we're sharecroppers to the government. Taxes are important, however, those taxes could be collected instead by taxing the consumption of necessary resources rather than just having the piece of ground. For example, fire protection -- it could be argued that the virtue of owning land itself doesn't necessarily require…
The problem being, of course, that fire has a habit of not staying put.
This kind of idea becomes even more ridiculous if you apply it to police service instead. Are they not going to arrest the criminals because the person didn't pay their quarterly police stipend? Do they get arrested after they step off the property, and the stolen goods just auctioned off?
There is a societal benefit to having these services, so therefore society as a whole is requested to pay.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Patents aren't private property. They're a government-granted temporary monopoly. In the absence of government, there's still some notion of property, but no notion whatsoever of patents.
> Patents aren't private property. Yes, they are. (Particularly, they are intangible personal property.) > They're a government-granted temporary monopoly. All "property" is government-granted monopoly in the control/use of some thing (sometimes dependent on a grant from another private party, but still ultimately government granted), concrete or abstract. Some are temporary (this is true of real and tangible persona…
Humans have an intrinsic idea of "property" that the legal idea is built upon. A two-year-old child understands the idea of "mine". People still own things when government is not present, they just have a harder time enforcing that ownership.
Patents, on the other hand, are an entirely governmental construct.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Patents aren't private property. They're a government-granted temporary monopoly. In the absence of government, there's still some notion of property, but no notion whatsoever of patents.
Thank you. I guess cash currency isn't really property either. It is backed by the "full faith and credit" of the government so it is like a IOU that the government requires you to accept to settle existing debts.
Edit: additionally, cash doesn't expire, while patents only last two decades.
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It's only been about a century since it was fair to assume that every educated person had read it. I think the fact that we wouldn't be able to use it as a textbook in schools today is a really bad sign.
Er - not so sure about Euclid being read widely as recently as 1913. Definitions of 'educated person' were very narrow then in England. 'Mechanics institutes' taught 'practical mechanics' far more than abstract geometry to working people. Euclid is a small part of mathematics, although a powerful example of logical reasoning. If I could encourage my Level 2 students to a level where they could read and understand (sa…
This text book of the Elements was first published in 1888, updated in 1900, and with reprints every year or two until (at least) 1915 http://openlibrary.org/books/OL24198679M/Text-book_of_Euclid....
I'll agree with thesis that it wasn't uncommon about 100 years ago as a standard text, and agree that that was about when it stopped being common.
If you read the preface to the 1888 version, you'll see: "From first to last we have kept in mind the undoubted fact that a very small proportion of those who study Elementary Geometry, and student it with profit, are destined to become mathematicians in any special sense; and that, to a large majority of students, Euclid is intended to serve not so much as a first lesson in mathematical reasoning, as the first, and sometimes the only, model of formal argument presented in an elementary education."
In the forward to the new edition, it again refers to "elementary teachers." According to http://www.educationengland.org.uk/history/chapter03.html "the Elementary School Code of 1860 had fixed the leaving age for elementary schools at 12." This is in the UK. I don't know if the teaching of the Elements only for upper and upper-middle class students, or if it included a wider range of students.
BTW, here's an advocacy piece for bringing the Elements back as part of the core curriculum - http://www.kysu.edu/NR/rdonlyres/0B03B73A-777B-4571-A554-7DE... .
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's only been about a century since it was fair to assume that every educated person had read it. I think the fact that we wouldn't be able to use it as a textbook in schools today is a really bad sign.
Er - not so sure about Euclid being read widely as recently as 1913. Definitions of 'educated person' were very narrow then in England. 'Mechanics institutes' taught 'practical mechanics' far more than abstract geometry to working people. Euclid is a small part of mathematics, although a powerful example of logical reasoning. If I could encourage my Level 2 students to a level where they could read and understand (sa…
I empathize with the difficulty of defining 'educated person.' As you rightly point out, there are different threads in what an "education" means. http://www.educationengland.org.uk/history/chapter03.html goes into the three main groups - 'public educators', 'industrial trainers', and 'old humanists' - which participated in that debate, ending "The curriculum which evolved during the 19th century was 'a compromise between all three groups, but with the industrial trainers predominant' (Williams 1961:142). This was 'damaging both to general education and to the new kinds of vocational training' (Williams 1961:143).
For purposes of this discussion, I think it's reasonable to refine the meaning of "educated person" specifically to "expected from someone who has graduated from a liberal arts college." I think this definition works for most of the last 500 years of having liberal arts colleges, up until the mid-1900s.
My definition specifically excludes religious and industrial education, which I think is appropriate for the intent.
Now, I noted that the Elements book I pointed to was meant for "elementary" students. I think that means up to age 12 or so. It's definitely no later than what the 1868 Taunton Report proposed:
> first-grade schools with a leaving age of 18 or 19 would provide a 'liberal education' - including Latin and Greek - to prepare upper and upper-middle class boys for the universities and the older professions;
(vs. second- and third-grade educations meant for the middle classes and lower.)
So the two pieces of evidence I have, for why someone in 1913 with a liberal arts education (an 'educated person') would have likely studied the Elements is first, the two forewords for a text book meant for 'elementary' students, and second, the number of reprintings of the text book, which implies that many were published.
I can now add more data points. In "THE RIVER WAR: An Account of the Reconquest of the Sudan" by Winston S. Churchill, 1902 edition, from http://www.gutenberg.org/files/4943/4943-h/4943-h.htm :
> The whole journey by rail from Merawi to Dakhesh occupied four days, whereas General Hunter with his flying column had taken eight—a fact which proves that, in certain circumstances which Euclid could not have foreseen, two sides of a triangle are together shorter than the third side.
Why would Churchill use this reference if the readers, educated in the mid- to late-1800s, are not expected to understand it?
There was a big debate in the UK in and around 1902 about the teaching of Euclid.
In Google Scholar's preview for "SOME RECENT DISCUSSION ON THE TEACHING OF MATHEMATICS", WW Beman - School Science and Mathematics, 1903 - Wiley Online Library "I may add that the address was given in full in the Educational Review for February, 1902. This discussion of the teaching of mathematics in England particularly with regard to the retention of Euclid as a test-book of geometry is by no means a new one." See also a letter in Nature http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/1902Natur..66..103S pointing out that Schopenhauer was also critical. And a 1903 Nature followup at http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/1903Natur..68R...7P saying "I WILL not deny that some reformers desire to abolish Euclid and establish another sequence of propositions in abstract geometry for schoolboys .. Two per cent. of schoolboys take to abstract reasoning as ducks take to water, and they ought not to be discouraged from the study of Euclid, but they and all the other boys ought to study geometry experimentally, logic entering into the study just as it enters into other parts of experimental physics. If the best modern books have a fault, it lies in the absurd assumption that an experimental sequence ought to have some connection with the Euclidean sequence."
In http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/3603959?uid=3738984&ui... I read a page from a 1901 paper for the Mathematical Gazette (London) saying "(ii) The question of the retention of Euclid as a text-book was again raised. It was urged with considerable force that our retention of a book discarded by other nations had at any rate a presumption against it, and that it was wrong to sacrifice the interests of education to the east of the examiner. (iii) More than one speaker pointed out that if the experimental or intuitional method of introducing the truths of Mathematics, and especially of Geometry, were used from the lowest classes of our schools upwards, the strictly deductive course would not lose but gain in effectiveness."
So, it looks like the end of the 1800s was the death-knell for Euclid's Elements, but it was in the UK where it hung around the longest, perhaps for another 20 years.
I disagree that the answer is moral and political and that the "ruling class" sat down to decide most people should work bullshit jobs. The phenomenon is more elegantly explained by pure economics: as less time is expended extracting resources and producing things, more energy is absorbed by the zero-sum, gimmicky game of selling and marketing them. To give credit where it's due, I first saw this credible argument on…
I've said this before in other contexts, but it doesn't have to be a conscious decision or conspiracy. A key concept from Physics that I wish was more widely understood by the populous at large is that of the "stable attractor". In chaotic systems you often get certain configurations which are locally stable, often highly stable, and they often attract more elements of the system into this configuration. It's a commo…
My only addition would be to note that insofar as the capitalist system has active support from powerful people, it is not merely a natural accumulator, it is, in a sense, intelligent, and perverting every aspect of our society into its own service.
Isn't ideology wonderful?