tc

I got to write half of it in Scheme, which probably means that I deployed more Scheme runtime than anybody else on the planet.

Bastiat articulated the Broken Window Fallacy in 1850, and here we are 159 years later shredding perfectly good cars to 'create jobs.' It certainly seems like some good ideas can't be repeated often enough.

One of the challenges of abstracting this layer is that who sells the product still adds or subtracts value from the purchasing experience because of those mundane details (shipping speed, reliability, returns, etc.).

There are various ways of dealing with this. Amazon [1] is already active in this space using what you might call the "user review" model combined with enforcing some exacting standards on their vendors. Already having a huge channel of course made it easier for Amazon to get vendors to accept this.

[1] Incidentally, I've never thought that Amazon did a great job with sorting products within its general categories, so I always search instead. But I do wonder, how many more people would window-shop at Amazon if their sorted product catalog was more interesting?

A deontological person can still practice triage. Without more information (such as published policies, prior agreements, patient consent, etc.) it is hard to say if the question is even really a moral dilemma. If you are standing on the street and two people get hit by a bus, deciding which one to help is not a question of morality. By helping either, or both, you are acting morally, and perhaps even supererogatorily. Deciding whether or not you should go kick them while they're down, though, is a moral question. It would be moral (though not particularly praiseworthy) to refrain from doing so, and it would be clearly immoral to kick them.

Interestingly, Catholics actually believe in the idea of a moral safe harbor. That is, if you've given serious and reasonable consideration to a moral question, and act in accordance with your earnest conclusion, then you will be held blameless regardless of the ultimate righteousness of the action.

And, believe it or not, those people working in foreign sweatshops want you to buy their products. They work there because that factory job provides higher pay and a generally safer work environment than the rice-paddy (or wherever) they otherwise would have been working. I think they would find it a bit patronizing and naïve if you were to tell them they should leave those jobs behind. To people in poor countries, a job at a factory is part of the path to a better life. For the country itself, it is part of the path to industrialization and prosperity.

Also remember that just because you could make something better, it doesn't necessarily follow that you must to act morally. Much of a rational notion of morality involves avoiding acts that cause harm to others or that violate the person or the free will of other individuals. All acts are not only moral or immoral. Some actions are supererogatory -- morally praiseworthy but not morally necessary.

Being firmly in the deontological camp (rationalist ethics) myself, though, I would recommend you check out Kant, Nagel, and the many advocates of the non-aggression principle (pick your author). I believe our intrinsic notions of morality are mostly deontological, which makes some sense as non-aggression and other subforms of the school allow a person to act morally with local information, rather than requiring global knowledge for every act, as much of utilitarianism requires in the final analysis.

If you would kill one innocent person because you thought that action might save five innocent people, though, then you are probably (and unfortunately) a utilitarian. Do consider both sides though.

Too often, I think, we judge 'harmful' by the impossible standard of "could I imagine things being better if I could force others to do things exactly my way" rather than "would we be better off if they didn't exist at all."

So that is to say, sure, if a company is actually causing a harm, in the legal sense of the word (committing fraud, breaking contracts, etc.), then they should have to pay restitution for that. That's what the law is for. Not to second-guess how companies could better serve their customers.

We may just be disagreeing to disagree at this point. I'll let you have the last word here.

Regulation of this sort is the same as partial nationalization, and has the same effect to a measured degree. When people anticipate that the returns on their winning bets will be 'moderated,' or that they will have to set business policies for the 'greater good,' they will in the future make less risky bets or put less capital at risk.

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

[Edited]

There is nothing natural about a monopoly (or in this case, oligopoly) ordained by government. And that is the problem that should be addressed directly. Current government policies create an absurd amount of artificial spectrum scarcity.

Edit: Obviously I wasn't clear here -- I should have been straightforward rather than going with a clever turn of phrase. I meant to say, as a point of accepted definition, that government-granted monopolies are not 'natural monopolies.' Natural monopolies are monopolies that occur 'naturally' in the market because of conditions or extreme capital requirements.

As for violating regulations, please find for me the regulation that they have violated. It seems to me that their present sin consists of doing something unpopular.

I know this isn't going to be a terribly popular point here, because, well, we all do want to get our way. But just consider how much you'd like to find yourself on the receiving end of one of these letters.

("Give me six lines from the hand of the most honest man, and I will find in them a reason to hang him!")

-- Cardinal de Richelieu, Mirame

Years ago Linux desktop usage was a bit of a drag. But at the time, Windows servers were so much worse that as an integrated system, you were still net ahead.

Now that my printers, scanners, and peripherals have all worked without hassle for years there isn't even a trade off. Rather, I shake my head while watching people fight with driver wizard CDs.

[1] Note that I didn't say a service to foreign people.

If this really is a new discovery, what would astound me is how easily everyone else must have given up.

[1] Not that it would take anything away from this guy, who did it at 16 with limited resources and probably without regard to existing research.