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But profit _is_ the driving force of human action. Doing anything voluntarily is by definition profitable, otherwise you wouldn't do it.


This smears out the definition of profit beyond usefulness.

I can pretty much guarantee hunter-gatherers hunt to not starve, children play for sheer joy, and nobody's thinking of profit.

There are better psychological/anthropological terms to apply to human drives than calling them "profitable". That's weird economist thinking, trying to bring everything under their purview.


Worse, it’s an attempt to get us to agree that humans only do things for profit, in order to advance an ideology and make our thought more malleable when an author turns around and starts writing about public policy and ethics applied to things that actually are about profit.

At least that’s what is going on when the schools of “thought” this kind of stuff comes from attempt it. This particular poster might not be. But usually it’s a cheap rhetorical trick, coming from folks who present themselves as simply following logic. Gross.


there's absolutely something wrong with the fruits of their labor though, which I am forced to use every day


not true at all, only socialists think that (I'm also from Europe where everybody and their dog's a socialist)


compared to what? most doctors never heard of Bayes rule


There are no core tenants of democracy other than majority rule. The actions you listed (with the exception of canceling elections) do not actually destroy the ability for the majority to rule. In fact, one common tactic of democratic states is to employ referendums for laws that infringe on the rights of a minority, thus shifting the moral blame onto the population when convenient.


No. If the majority wants to murder or deport all immigrants and seize their assets because “fuck ‘em”, there’s no way a Democracy can just shrug and call it “vox populi, vox dei”.

It might lose but it will have to put up a fight, legal or physical.


What is this “it” that might “lose”? A country is a homeland for a people. Democracy is an abstraction. “It” cannot fight or “lose” against the people of the nation. The people exist. Democracy is simply rule by a majority of those people.


To play by the rules is an implicit rule in any political/power system. There are consequences when a ruler practices tyranny.


> There are no core tenants of democracy other than majority rule.

Let's suppose you're right. We have a "democracy" that holds elections and whichever candidate gets the most votes wins, but there is no freedom of speech. Whoever is in office controls all the media, all private communications are monitored and lèse-majesté is a crime. Everything is a crime, in fact, and the law relies entirely on selective enforcement. By election day, opposition candidates with any chance of winning are always blood relatives of the incumbent. Deranged candidates with no chance of winning are ignored but independent candidates who start to gain any support are immediately executed for treason. Every year there is an election in which the people can choose between the incumbent, the incumbent's favored offspring (if any) and a selection of paste-eating loons who think Hitler is still alive, campaign on raising energy costs to help Hitler accelerate human extinction and never get any votes.

That isn't a democracy, it's the fig leaf dictatorships wear when they want to lie about being a democracy.


How about this music chord formation program with a virtual six-string guitar fret that I wrote back in 1999? https://github.com/capr/chordclopedia


wrong: source-available means you can look but you can't incorporate/change/copy-paste/get-inspired-by. "look at this wheel, learn but don't make your own". It's a travesty.


Don't you ever get inspired by reading good books? You can learn new tricks and apply them elsewhere, and it's much easier than actually contributing to a big open-source project.


Is that really how source-available works? I mean whos stopping me from screenshotting and using tesseract or some other OCR tool to get the actual no-bullshit source code


maybe because forcing people or companies (property of people) is wrong?


Are you familiar with the history of antitrust intervention and the laundry-list of real-life examples that proves you wrong?

https://competition-policy.ec.europa.eu/antitrust-and-cartel...


The phones are not property of Apple though.

The users should not be forced to run Apple approved applications.


We have been forcing people and companies into compliance of some sort since the dawn of civilization.


"forced" to block... seems like the only ones who can use force is them


Ya, can't square the two? Check this out: violence actually works, so should we beat our kids?


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