We are asked from the outset to come up with a flawless system, to guarantee that things will work this way and not that, without mishap or error. If learning to live had to be done this way, then our apprenticeship would never end. Nor would the child ever learn to walk, nor the youngster to ride a bicycle.
This is a classic gripe I have with people inquiring or criticizing communism with me. They ask me to provide a perfect answer for every question they have, and when they can think of holes in my replies, they ask more. If I refuse to keep playing this game, they point this out as proof of an obviously poor-thought system.
Bebook is an e-reader that is capable of reading a vast amount of formats and has a lot of capability. What follows is my review of this product based on my own use and experience with it.
Bebook with a pen for comparison
So it’s been more than a month now since I bought my first e-reader, a Bebook. I was triggered to this purchase when a colleague brought in his Sony Reader to work and happened to bring it to the resident geek (me) to showoff. Needless to say I was blown away as to how far the technology had progressed and I knew immediately that I had to have one myself.
While my first contact with an e-reader was the Sony one which looks very spiffy, I knew I wasn’t going to get that one as I don’t like to support a company which treats its customers as criminals. Instead I looked around to see which system would fit my budget and be as open as possible, which means that it wouldn’t try to lock me in to their own stores and it could read as many formats as possible.
I was initially considering the Iliad but I gave it up due to the hight price tag, my other choice was between the Amazon kindle and the HanLin Ebook but I quickly turned down Amazon once I figured out that I would have to basically only read what I could buy from Amazon. HanLin with its wealth of supported formats and low cost was the obvious choice for me. Bebook is simply the brand of this model I chose as it comes from many different distributors.
So I bought mine for €325 (Which was a bit more expensive than the price displayed on the MobileRead wiki) from the main site for the product and to my surprise it was at my place in less than a week.
So now, after quite a bit of using it, I feel I can provide an informed review from my perspective.
Bebook displaying a pdf page
Reading in General
For someone who reads a lot, reading on the monitor screen is a bit of a pain. It’s not too comfortable for the eyes and it’s not very easy to read when you’re not at your desk. As I like to read on trips, outdoors and on the bed, using a laptop was out of the question. Not only is it not comfortable in all situations, but the battery barely lasts. Not only that, but with bright enough light, you can’t read at all.
The bebook (and anything based on e-ink and e-paper technology like all e-readers these days) allows you to carry a portable book which has most of the benefits of paper, like the ability to read it in the sun, lack of glare and portability and the added benefit of the gigantic amounts of space that are available for electronic storage.
For the casual or avid bookworms among us, it means that you have a book-sized device which can contain thousands of books and you can still read them as you would any other book.
Organization and Use
The books in your Bebook are organized in folders as per a normal hdd. Indeed, when you connect it to your machine, the contents are displayed as a normal USB drive which allows you to use the device without needing any special software or specific OS. The later fact, that I can use my Bebook on my GNU/Linux without any issues whatsoever is a very big plus for me.
Other than your folders and subfolders, the Bebook provides you the ability to look through the recent books you had opened so that you can easily return to what you were reading in case you were navigating elsewhere. And finally since you can put an SD card in, you have the ability to have multiple SD cards for multiple book collections (as if one 16Gb card wouldn’t be enough that is).
Displaying the Chapter Menu
Within books, if they are created properly, you have the capability to jump to chapters and subchapters. Most file formats other support such a function and this means that if you have a book with, say, multiple stories, you can easily use the navigation to jump to the exact one you wish.
As you read books, you have the capability to set electronic bookmarks which allow you to not only save a position you were in so that you can return to it if you need to go out (which is done automatically when you enter a book anyway) but you can also use them to mark specific locations in the book so that you can find the in the future (say to mark a good quote and such). Unfortunately at the moment it does not support highlighting or anything similar which would have been a very useful feature.
You have also various other capabilities like 3 levels of zoom and the ability to jump to the front and end of any book but these are not things you use very often in my experience.
Display and filetypes
The bebook supports quite a lot of filetypes for displaying content but I can’t say that at the moment any of them is perfect. To some degree I’ve discovered issues with most of them, but fortunately they are minor enough to not create a big issue with reading. I’ll list some of the types I’ve tried out and the various problems I’ve encountered.
PDF: A well constructed pdf ebook in displays perfectly and this is the reason why I use this format the most. With the Capability of Open Office to not only export documents to pdf format but also construct metadata such as chapters and comments, I have the ability to create documents for perfect reading pleasure ((I will write up a guide for this so stay tuned if you wish to see my method)) .
Reading in max zoom (landscape)
Unfortunately at this point PDF documents still have an annoying bug where differently formatted text is not displayed if it was not in the page the document opened. This means that If you open a document in a page with no bolded text and later on you find such a text in the document, you will instead be looking at a blank space. There is a workaround but we’re still waiting for the devs to fix this once and for all.
A thing that you should be aware about pdfs in Bebook however is that A4 pdfs (Which is what you will most likely download from non-ebook specific sites) will be displayed with very very small text size, which is practically unreadable. That is because Bebook tries to fit one page of text, into one page of the bebook shrinking the text as appropriate. This is why you need specially prepared pdf documents in order to read comfortably. If you are stuck with A4s however, you can still read them by making use of the the zooming function at maximum. You will need to hold the bebook in a landscape position but that’s all.
RTF: Many people in the fora swear by this format since it does not have the annoying disappearing bug as the pdfs do and you have many more options for zooming. However I do not prefer it since it has another bug which removes all empty lines (making paragraphs hard to distinguish), it does not display images and it does not support chapters.
Still, it’s the easiest format to create files for so it’s certain to remain popular.
Selecting among document types under lamp light
HTML: It is a great benefit that one can easily save a page from the internet into a native html document, tranfer it to his e-reader and then read it at his pleasure. I admit that a major reason why I selected the Hanlin model was that it could read html files without hassle and thus it would allow me to read my rss content on the go.
Of course it’s not without its share of problems. Bebook still has difficulties displaying apostrophes and some other special characters but not everywhere. Some documents I can read without any hassle at all. At the moment, html displaying still needs some ironing but they are generally readable.
FB2: This is a newer format pioneered by Russian science fiction fans. To this day, this is the one I’ve found to be displayed the best of all and giving the most features (many zoom levels, chapters, images and more). It would have been my choice of format but unfortunately it has a major disadvantage for me: I’ve yet to find a decent file converter and most instructions about it seem to be in Russian. As such, I only have to wait until it has matured a bit more and more options exist. Still, as a fan-initiated option, it is certain to get a lot of features that are useful for the reader.
EPUB: This is really what I’d like to use most, as it’s an open format which is aiming to become a standard for ebooks. As a result it has a lot of data included in its XML which can be made use of for the benefit of the reader and it’s certain to remain free from the interests of a corporations, unlike say pdf files.Unfortunately, for all those benefits, the parsing of epub files still needs work from the developers as it seems to have similar problems with html files. Special characters are screwed and text seems to acquire and lose empty spaces seemingly at random. Once this is fixed I’ll certainly start using it though as not only does it support a lot of features like fb2, but I also have an platform free open source convertor and excellent library software available.
Other Tidbits
Look ma. No hands!
Among other things, Bebook stands out for its amazing battery life. Due to the page display technology, no energy is required to display a page once it has been drawn. This means that as long as you don’t perform any functions with the device, it consumes no energy at all. And this is why the developer does not count the battery-life in hours but in page-turns, of which the Bebook can achieve over 9000 before it requires a recharge. Of course, with the pages holding less text than usual due to the size, this does not easily repressent normal books pages but from personal experience, I can say that that means usually about a month of constant use.
One of the things I love with having an e-reader is that I can actually read a book without using my hands. I simply lay it on my feet or blanket in a comfortable position and then I only need to use my arm to switch the page when I’ve finished. Compared to a normal book which you always have to keep in an open and upright position forcefully, this avoids getting tired after a while (as I know I do) from simply keeping your arm in a non-relaxed position.
Another loved feature is how I can now easily put down a book without having to worry about marking my page or accidentally closing it and losing my place. I can either simply put it down and know that when I pick it up, it will simply be waiting for me or, if I’m afraid of pushing a button accidentally, I simply press the key-lock button and put it in my pocket. I can’t explain how much I love that I don’t have to fold page corners or hunt for the bookmark.
Conclusion
For me the Bebook is a perfect tool, especially since I wish to read a lot of texts that already exist in free form online and see no reason to pay for something that is public domain. Add to that the number of interesting online essays that I come in contact with on a daily basis and for which I simply do not have the will to stay on the desk in order to read them, and you can see why it’s practical.
By choosing the Bebook among others, I now know that I can have access to literature without having to appease the manufacturer of my device. I can make use of the best format that fits me and if the original developers prove to slow in improving the firmware, I can simply move to free software alternative which already looks very promising.
Even though this was a generally expensive purchase, I haven’t regretted it for an instant. Each week I discover a new thing that I love about using an e-reader and it has already made me start reading much more.
Hopefully this review has given you a good impression of the device and all the benefits it can provide. If you are considering buying the same model as I have, then you can simply use my email address mail@dbzer0.com as a promo code to get a €25 discount. It’s a bit late now for a Christmas gift, but it would make a great gift (even to yourself) nonetheless.
Just as the wildebeest can scent a lion, the markets can scent the imminence of a recession. The prospect of a recession is the real cause of the panic. Once this happens, nothing can stop it. All the speeches, all the interest rate cuts, and all the handouts to the banks, will have no effect on the financial markets. They will see that the governments and central banks are afraid, and they will draw the necessary conclusions.
The rest of the article is interesting to see the Marxist perspective albeit a bit too propagandistic for my tastes. Still this quote was quite insightful.
In recent months, outsourcing one’s blog comments to a specialized comment engine has become quite trendy for many people. Of those specialized engines, two are gathering the most publicity, Intense Debate and Disqus. I jumped onto this comments outsourcing bandwagon about half a year ago and my choice was Intense Debate Comments (IDC from now on). Not only have I not regretted at all but I’ve become such a staunch evangelist for this system that I have made quite a few converts 🙂
So what is this post about? Well, yesterday, Friar Zero asked my via email why I preferred IDC over Disqus. The simple answer is that IDC was the one I stumbled onto first, quite randomly while using the Get Satisfaction support (GSFN from now). I discovered Disqus shortly after that but since I had already taken IDC for a ride, I saw no reason to start all over again and Disqus was not also using GSFN so as weird as it sounds, that was a major reason for me at the start.
But of course that’s not a proper reason and I think it’s time for me to actually write in detail why I preferred one over the other. And since I’m doing that, I thought I might as well make this my first meme and perhaps trigger others to explain for themselves why they use their current choice. This will hopefully create a body of opinions which might give bloggers enough information about each option from all sides of the argument, to make an informed decision.
So the rules of the Comment Wars meme are the following:
Declare which system you prefer and perhaps give a short history of your decision.
List the reasons of why you prefer you current system choice over the direct competitor (If you’re using IDC, your competitor is Disqus and the other way around).
(Optionally) list the reasons why you prefer your current system over your blog’s default comment system (WordPress, Blogger or Typepad most likely). If you’re still using your default system, instead list the reasons why you consider it superior to both IDC and Disqus.
Link to the person who tagged you for this meme.
Link to any other people who are using any third-party comment system of whom you care to know why they chose as they did. You can also link to any people who are still using the built-in comment system and you want to know why. Make sure to leave them a comment or send an email to inform them that they have been tagged.
So without further ado
Why I prefer Intense Debate over Disqus
Some Horrible Threading in Disqus
1. The threading looks and works much better
The original thing that drew me to IDC was the capability to have threaded comments and this is still the thing that breaks or makes the deal for me. IDC threads simply look natural, with the little arrow pointing to the reply below, with the reply being just a tad to the right (so as to allow a lot of threading before you run out of space) and where the end result just looks natural.
On the other hand, Disqus threading, to me always looked ugly. Blocky comments which simply begun below and quite a bit indented which had the result of quickly running out of space. This became painfully obvious when I participated in a lengthy discussion through disqus and after the 13th reply, it stared becoming very annoying to continue (sample on the right)
On the contrary, in the Division by Zero, I’ve held a 30 deep-thread going without any major inconvenience. Granted, it helps that I have a variable width template (why waste screen real-estate) but it is mostly because of the way IDC conserves space and builds the thread.
It would be impossible to hold a 130-reply thread going without good layout and the fact that I did and it’s actually readable from a visitor’s point of view, is a major success.
The only thing missing (from both systems) is a way to connect a reply to the parent comment, but IDC already has the collapse thread function and I know they’re working on better solutions.
2. They seem to innovate in the correct direction
While both systems have taken a generally similar path in features, and even though IDC came later to the party, IDC seems much more full in features that Disqus. I’ve been seeing a lot of new features such as the recent ability to paginate comments in order to keep the page load fast, or the capability to keep your wordpress comments synced both ways with IDC.
I do not know what the recent innovations of Disqus have been to tell the truth as I don’t pay attention to them so I can’t really compare the relevant speed they advance. A quick look at their blog tells me they do provide a lot of good stuff as well but I get the impression that they are more interested in making more fancy features rather than strengthen and make the comments themselves as good and solid as possible.
3. Email notifications rock
By now, I’ve gotten email notifications for replies by both systems (and from builtin solutions) and I can safely say that IDC was the best for the following reasons.
They send a notification immediately after a reply is posted to a thread below your comment. That is, if you leave a comment and someone replies to it, you get a notification. If, after 3 days, someone replies to the reply to your comment, you are still notified, as this is continuing from a point you raised. I find this great to keep a conversation live and going ((It’s been a while since I got such a notification as I generally comment on my own blog where I get an email for everything. Last time I remember, this functionality was the case but it may have changed since)).
On the other side, Disqus seems to send notifications only every 30 minutes or so (thus some times passes before you get informed that you got a reply, and by then you might have gone to do something else) and then you only get notifications if someone responds directly to your comment. You don’t get informed if someone continues the discussion that you started.
The email notification includes your response to that comment as well, so you can immediately see the context of what they are replying to. This is quite important as it’s very often that I do not remember what I was saying at the time.
It allows you to reply by email. Granted, so does Disqus, but not the built-in systems.
This is more of a personal preference than anything else but it really made my day when I learned about it. To clarify, Automattic are the makers of WordPress, the Blogging software the Division by Zer0 stands on and, for me, is the best you can use. That IDC is now backed by the skills and expertise of those people gives me much optimism about the future.
And since WordPress is a Free Software, you never know, perhaps we’ll be able to convince the IDC people to finally liberate their code (it’s for their own good after all 😉 )
To tell you the truth, I can foresee Disqus being acquired by WordPress’ rival in the blogging battlefield: Blogger/Blogspot, or more accurately, Google. If this happens, things will get…interesting.
5. They use Get Satisfaction and their support guys are top-notch
GSFN has become one of my favourite places to seek support and it was actually how I came to discover IDC as I explained at the start. Their support guys are still active over there and they generally provide excellent support (although a few times I did go for weeks without solution). I’ve had issues which were reported only by me actually looked by a developer to find a solution very quickly. Although some times I really felt like pulling out my luxurious hair, eventually a solution was found and the than all was right in the world again. But no matter what, very rarely will you find a support person volunteer to help you scour your blog for possible problems just to make sure that everything is ok.
Unfortunately I do not know how quick the Disqus support is but the fact that they use their own support forum generally does not make me happy.
Another big benefit of GSFN is the ability to separate ideas from other support issues and get an idea of how many other people want the same idea to happen. Quite a few of the things I’ve proposed in the past have already been implemented and the devs generally pay attention to what their userbase asks for. This counts.
6. They integrate very well with WordPress
At the moment of speaking, the IDC wordpress plugin merges very well with the platform. Not only can you manage your comments in the same way as before (bulk moderation etc), but it also gives you some extra functionality, like the ability to reply to comments from within WordPress moderation or filter by author.
I won’t claim that the plugin is perfect as I have suffered quite a bit through it (I was testing it since the alpha) but I can safely say that for most people it should work flawlessly and if you have a problem they’ll be able to fix it for you quickly 😉
And with these six points, I finish my reasons on why I prefer IDC over disqus. Very shortly now, I’m going to present…
Why I prefer IDC over WordPress’ built-in comments
1. IDC has threading
As I said, this is a deal-maker for me. While wordpress can achieve threading with plugins and the newest 2.7 has it built-in by default, in my site it never looked nice and you could not thread more than once (or the theme broke and I couldn’t fix it). IDC worked out of the box, and much much better than I could ever imagine. Indeed, I was so impressed with the Threading capabilities of IDC that I could now change my Comment policy to allow discussions to flow much better.
2. Email Notifications
While wordpress can do this with plugins again, it doesn’t do email replies.
3. I can keep my site is less bloated
WordPress can indeed handle email notifications and threading and whatnot but all of these are extra code that needs CPU power to run and on a shared hosting like mine, every little bit counts. Granted, IDC hasn’t been the fastest kid on the block until now, but recently the devs put it on a diet and with some new comment organization features, they’ve made it much faster to load.
That means I can get all these functions and anything more the developers cook up, without having to worry about updating 3- or 4 different plugins which might break each other or slowdown the site.
Resolution
In my eyes, IDC is and will remain the better choice for most people who want something superior than what comes with the box. I’m certain that the competition with Disqus will remain heated but this only benefits us all in the long run
Below you will find a poll where you can vote, as a blogger or as a commenter, which system you prefer. If you take part in the meme, feel free to link here for others so that we may get a bigger view.
[poll id=”4″]
And finally, to tag some people to get some opinions and spread this meme. I’ve tried to tag a nice spread of systems to get various opinions on this.
The Barefoot Bum (who I know had IDC but removed it for the native blogger’s system) – Update: TBB is not interested in this meme, so I’m replacing him with…
This happened to me: my parents, old-time lefties, named me “Karl Marx” — they apparently thought it would not be a problem, as society seemed to be moving into a groovy, understanding time (late 60s). They, uh, thought small-mindedness was a transient cultural trait, as opposed to an enduring human characteristic, particularly among junior-high kids.
Boy, were they ever wrong! It took a few years, particularly because we — duh! — moved to rural Idaho in the interim, but around 5th grade the other kids figured it out, and I was cooked. History class was always brutal, and there are probably hundreds of school yearbooks with a hand-drawn bushy beard obscuring my face.
It got easier in high school, as it was kind of an edgy name, but at age 17 I rushed over to the county court and changed my name. I made my father pay the court fees, for obvious reasons.
This happened to me: my parents, old-time lefties, named me “Karl Marx” — they apparently thought it would not be a problem, as society seemed to be moving into a groovy, understanding time (late 60s). They, uh, thought small-mindedness was a transient cultural trait, as opposed to an enduring human characteristic, particularly among junior-high kids.
Boy, were they ever wrong! It took a few years, particularly because we — duh! — moved to rural Idaho in the interim, but around 5th grade the other kids figured it out, and I was cooked. History class was always brutal, and there are probably hundreds of school yearbooks with a hand-drawn bushy beard obscuring my face.
It got easier in high school, as it was kind of an edgy name, but at age 17 I rushed over to the county court and changed my name. I made my father pay the court fees, for obvious reasons.
On every tax form, university application, and — most humiliating — job or credit application, I am required to put “Karl Marx” as a previous name, for background checks. Thanks Mom & Dad!
Other than that, it’s just a family joke these days, and even my high-school classmates have tired of it at reunions.
The most common argument I hear when arguing for the exploitation theory with Anarcho-Capitalists is the concept of Risk which supports the idea that the Capitalist deserves a share of the profits, even though he is not putting any labour in, himself. The argument usually goes somehow like this.
Me: ‘The Worker is being exploited because he’s not receiving the full results of his labour’
AnCap: ‘The Capitalist deserves part of the profit because he took the risk with his capital to start the company. If the company fails, the Capitalist has lost his money.If the company does well, he deserves to be rewarded for taking such a risk’
As I have to deal with this a lot, I think it might be worth writing my objections to the concept and how it does not counter the exploitation theory.
Risk does not exist once the Return of Investment has been made
We start on the situation where the Capitalist has wealth but not yet bought any means of production. He decides on a venture that he assumes will be able to make a profit and builds a factory to produce the product. At this point, we assume that his risk is that he might have judged wrongly and there might actually not be any margin for profit so he will end up not making up his investment on the factory.
Lets assume however that he was right and the new company does make a profit. This profit of course comes from taking part of the surplus value created by the workers and our Capitalist would claim that this is warranted since he deserves to make back his investment.
But the Capitalist will not stop there. When ROI has been made, and all his investment has been returned to him in the form of profit over time, the capitalist will continue to exploit the workers in order to continue making more money, over his initial investment. At this point, this exploitation cannot be claimed to be justified because of the risk, as there is no more “risk” to speak of. Even if the company were to go under, the Capitalist will leave with as much wealth as he came in.
You may claim that the Capitalist is worse off because he has not grown any richer from this venture and because present wealth is of more value than future wealth, then he has come out at a loss. Fine, I say, how much money does the capitalist deserves before the factory passes over to the workers? Two times his investment? Five? Ten? Of course for the Capitalist, the answer is that it is never enough. Any wealth the company makes is deserved because of the initial “risk”.
But any worker can see how absurd this is. The profit the capitalist has taken over the years from all the workers of the factory has paid the initial investment many times over, but the worker still does not own anything. Even though the workers have done all the work to make this company productive, they do not deserve to own it at any point simply because the capitalist was the one who had the money at the start.
The worker is taking a risk as well
Apologists of risk like to point out that the worker is not taking any risk at all, and this is why his wage is reduced. If the company fails, only the capitalist has lost any money (which as I pointed out above, will not be true after a while) while the worker can simply go out and find another job, keeping all the money he made from wages.
But how true is that? Does the worker really not take any risk? Of course he does. First of all, the worker is usually paid at the end of the month for the work he put during. If a company is facing financial troubles then it’s quite probable that wages might be pushed back one or more months during which the workers must use their savings to survive. They will be pressured to do this “for the good of the company”.If the company ends up failing after all, the workers have now lost their wage(s). That is a risk. The AnCap will claim that this is illegal and so on but the worker will not get paid either if the capitalist goes to jail. This very real and practical risk of the worker is never rewarded like the risk the Capitalist takes.
But that’s not the only loss the worker has. He might have moved areas simply because he wanted to get this job. He might have left a more secure job in favour of the new one which failed, and any number of other risk factors. None of these are worth reward by AnCap thiking however, as the only thing that counts is the chance of the capitalist losing his investment.
The reward is big, the risk is low.
The AnCap will claim that the Capitalist deserves huge rewards simply because he’s the one taking the huge risks. But if these risks are so large why doesn’t the capitalist share them in order to avoid stressing himself? Why does he not allow the workers to share the risk (which they already do anyway). The answer of course is because the rewards are much much higher than the risk which is generally low. We’re not talking about gambling here where you have, say, 1 in 36 chances to make 36 times your money. We’re talking about a situation where “market research” allows you to foresee where the ball will go to (and you have something like 1 in 10 chance to judge that incorrectly) and where the reward has no upper limit.
It is no wonder then that the Capitalist takes “risks” and doesn’t want to share those “risks” with anyone. If I am in a casino and I have 1 in 10 chance to not make 10 times my bet, then we’re not talking about risk anymore, especially not when I can simply put 10 different bets and assure that whatever happens, I’ll get out much 90 times wealthier.
Of course, the real risk in this situation does not fall on the capitalist, it falls on the system as a whole. Because when such a chance opens, every capitalist jumps onto the table and bets. And since only 1 in 10 can ever lose money, the casino soon runs out of money and goes bust. Replace “casino” with economy and you basically have the reality of a capitalist crisis.
“If the risk was low, then the workers would take it themselves.”
The AnCap of course will counter my above point as such: ‘Well, if the risk is so low, why don’t you take it yourself then? The fact that the workers don’t band together to pool the resources and take the risk is proof that they do not want it and that it’s not as low as you claim.’
The reason why workers do not take the risk themselves is that the capital that is required to have such a low risk is far beyond their capabilities to save. The known low risk investments have already been claimed and the Capitalist who owns them will request far more than the workers can ever accumulate through labour. The not so well known investments require money to simply discover them. Without this market research, your chances in the capitalist roulette are not 10 in 1 anymore but 1 in 10, and unlike the capitalist, you only ever have one chance to bet.
The only chance the worker or a cooperative then is left with, is to stumble upon an opportunity which has not been tapped already and thus the cost to enter it is low enough. This is how almost all recent self-made capitalists achieved it, from Bill Gates, to Steve Jobs to Larry Page. But this is about as practical for the majority of workers as is playing the lottery.
To get back to our casino example. Imagine a casino where the minimum chip costs as much as a well-off worker can make in a lifetime. Not only that, but if you have enough money, you may be able to bribe the croupier to tell you where the ball will land. When you win, you get paid with the money of people who are not playing. A well-off worker would be hard pressed to simply afford the minimum bet and even then he will still not have enough to bribe the croupier.
Epilogue
I hope I have provided you some arguments on why the candy of “risk” that the Capitalist will use at every opportunity is flawed. For me, this does not even begin to defeat the theory of exploitation as the the risks of capitalism are negatively proportional to the Capital one has.
I will leave you finally, with one quote from the Barefoot Bum who helped me round out this piece
If risk is all-important, why can’t the people get together and spread out the risk, instead of concentrating the risk in some capitalists, and allowing them to have tremendous power as a reward for taking risks?
That’s basically what socialism does: Take all of these differentials — risk, surplus value, political power, etc. — and spread them out to all the people, instead of concentrating them.
If it was a good thing to take political power concentrated in the king or the oligarchy and spread it out among the people in a democracy, why shouldn’t it be a good thing to take economic power concentrated in the capitalist oligarchy and spread it out to the people?
Mr Jones was lucky enough to have acquired his little estate and farm before the nuclear war ravaged the world’s ecosystem and made the surrounding area into a brutal desert. His land managed to survive due to his luck, being on top of an undergound river and far from any major cities.
Mr Jones and his family was however left to fend on their own. They couldn’t toil the whole farm of course but they could certainly feed themselves and raise some animals.
With civilization destroyed as we know it, along with the major productive capabilities, slavery once again become the norm. Slavers quickly rounded up people who could not defend themselves and gave them away in exchange for food and other products. Eventually some dared the desert in a caravan, losing a few slaves in the process and reached his farm. Mr Jones became the proud owner of slaves.
He didn’t have to do much to maintain them. He simply made them build a shack for themselves and every day he would send them out to the fields to work the land, tend the animals or build new items in the workshop that he could sell to the slavers. He and his family would supervise them to avoid them making weapons to attack them or conspiring with each other.
This situation was very profitable to Mr Jones and soon his little farm had become an oasis of civilization. “The last bastion” he liked to call it. He became very wealthy through trading with caravans who came to his land for food which now he had ample due to his new productive force. He got more slaves and even got some slaves who got extra benefits and policed the others. All was going perfectly.
But Mr. Jones was still distraught. Before the war, the concept of slavery was abhorent to all but now he was the owner of all these people. But what could he do? If he didn’t buy them, the slavers would have simply let them die in the desert to cut their losses. And since he bought them with wealth he produced with the sweat of his back, shouldn’t they make up for his loss? And anyway, he wasn’t a cruel master at all. Almost no whipping.
But he still did not like it, something was gnawing his conscience when the thought of slavery enterred his mind. It was at this point that he bought an old book from one of the caravans which explained a lot of nice concepts. Liberty, justice, human rights. It was written by some Von Mises person.
All of this struck a chord with Mr. Jones. This was the solution he was looking to his moral issues with slavery. He knew in his gut that liberty was a unalienable human right that he shouldn’t have taken away from those people. How could he have been so blind? If he didn’t make up for this, he wouldn’t be able to live with himself.
So the very next day, he gathered all his slaves and made an announcement. ‘I grant you all your freedom’ he proclaimed after a short rhetoric introduction. ‘I have looked into my heart and discovered that it is not fair that I take away your human right to liberty through force. From now on, you are free to leave at any point you wish. If you do wish to remain here, you’re welcome as I will need some workers to take the place of those who leave.’ Now it was time to show how magnanimus he had become. ‘I will first of all give all of you some extra money to repay for the time as slaves, We can use bottlecaps for that since noone can make new ones anymore. If you decide to work for me, I will pay you all 100bc per month.’
And so, Mr Jones freed his slaves and his conscience. Finally he could rest certain he was not denying anyone’s right. He of course had to make them pay rent to stay on his land and he thought that 50bc per person was a good enough price. He also made his food quite affordable to them, it came to just about 40bc per month per person which even left people 10bc to save and sometime buy one of the products of his workshop.
He know he made the right decision almost immediately. Everyone decided to stay and work for him voluntarily! Nobody decided to dare the desert and that just proves how good an offer he had made to them. He could now not worry about supervising them at all and he could simply sit in his home and enjoy life. The products and well deserved profits were coming on their own now.
Everyone was free and doing what they chose to. The free market had thriumphed at last.
To all new commenters (of which I’ve been getting a lot recently) I would like to make a suggestion. You have probably noticed that I have a javascript based comment system ((Actually, you can still comment even if you have javascript deactivated, but it doesn’t thread and so you get comments very disconnected)) and there’s a lot of threading going on. This is very useful for longwinded conversations where many points are discussed at once but it has the problem that it’s not as easy to find when you’ve been replied to.
The solution to that exists. When you comment, you have the option of providing your email address, which I notice that most people do not fill in, I guess because of concerns about spamming. That’s not a problem in itself but I wanted to point out the benefit you have when you do provide it. Mainly that you get email notification about new replies to your own comments.
The way it works is this: If you’ve filled in an email address, whenever someone responds to a comment you made directly, by using the “post reply” button directly under your comment (not the one in the end of the comment list), an email is dispatched to your address informing you that someone replied to your comment and also quoting what you had said (to jolt your memory).
At this point, you can follow the provided link which takes you immediately to the new comment, so that you may reply directly, or you can reply by simply replying to the email itself (that is, no need to visit the site at all). ((The later option is still a bit flaky sometimes but in general it should work.))
The biggest advantage thus is that you can continue in the conversation without having to take any extra action by yourself like subscribing to the comment RSS or visiting repeatedly to check if any new replies have been posted. It allows makes the discussion to progress faster and more intensely (pun intended)
There is also one side benefit to providing an email address in that if there is something wrong (as was the case when the “see more replies” link broke) I can send you a direct email to inform you that no, your comment is not lost or deleted (as many assumed) and I’m working on fixing the problem.
So that’s all, if you can, I would ask you to provide an email address so that you don’t lose track of the conversation and you can easily continue without having to scour through the comments.
I’m aware that you may have a valid concern about providing the email that I have not considered and perhaps we can find a workaround. So if you still do not wish to use it, I’d love to hear why.
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