No because the sale would have had to occur in the place that it is illegal
2,095 karma · joined April 11, 2013
FWIW, Microsoft has a much higher profit margin than Apple.
It's because they did not choose to pay for the books; they were forced to pay and they would not have done so if the lawsuit had not fallen this way.
If you are not sure why this is different from "they paid for pirated books (as if it were a transaction)", then this may reflect a lack of awareness of how fair exchange and trust both function in a society.
I've always dreamed of making a tool to help visualize this. It would likely be very dramatic.
As I understand it, you are arguing that if the system was inherently good, then others would try to replicate it. I would then counter with if we had a good system, why should it be destroyed?
We have been able to reach enormous heights thanks to government funding, and no other system could have replicated that success. In every scenario where government funding is eliminated, the level of research progress goes down. As long as you understand that, then you can stand by your statements, but do not fool yourself into thinking we will continue making as much research progress as we have been for the last several decades.
See my other comment on the likelihood that any corporation would want to pay for basic science. When would any company choose to fund something that would not guarantee a return on investment? It goes against the nature of the goals of a corporation. I would love to know of for-profit examples of this. I'm sure there are a few, but I doubt there are many.
The ROI is not positive because there is no guarantee basic science will lead to any money-making outcome. That's not how basic science works and it is never how it worked, but basic science is absolutely crucial for advancing tech. If you can convince shareholders that it is e.g. worth investigating unusual crystal structures with no intended product in mind then people will gladly share some grants with you to edit so you can work some of that magic. It's just not feasible, no company would pay for that, but sometimes it leads to important discoveries that change the game.
And I only mentioned endowments because the parent of my comment did, but again, the important point is that endowments are not intended to entirely fund the research machine, and never will.
2) Very few schools have endowments that are large enough to support current faculty research costs; even Harvard can only support all research off their endowment for about a year.
3) Endowments are now taxed, so they will have even less available for research.
You say this like it is a bad thing, which confuses me
For what it's worth, I learned how to balance a checkbook in fifth grade. My child is not old enough for me to know the curriculum these days but my impression based on talking to my younger colleagues is that it seems to have stopped being taught around the mid-00s. It's hard not to pay attention to something like that--we spent a week with fake money, buying things and having to balance it out. It was fun.
We had a unit (~3 weeks) focused on critical thinking in my seventh grade english class. I do not know for sure if that is still taught the same way. Honestly it is hard to say how widespread it is beyond anecdotal evidence like this because every state has different standards.
Social media runs rampant with a form of skepticism, but I would call that closer to paranoia than critical thinking, and I don't think it's really being helpful in the same way.