The point is that there is the difference between a job as a way to get something done, and a job just for the sake of paying some people. Both are a job, but one gets something done, the other is just a fancy way to redistribute wealth.

Then again, considering that half the private IT projects and probably three quarters of government ones are about as needed as the pyramids, it's probably no wonder that so many people on this site are unable to see the difference :p

Well, maybe not as we know it today, but the idea of building something useless, or which you don't really need, as a way to give a wage to the poor has been used before. E.g., the follies in the 19'th century.

What makes it effectively welfare from the point of view of the state is that you're not really getting anything you need either way. I mean, if you pay to have a bridge built over a river to relieve a busy ferry, you've bought something useful with that money. If you build a bridge in the middle of a field, just to pay some workers, that's really what you get when people don't want to just pay any loafer but still want to feed some unemployed who want to work.

What Imhotep as high priest came up with is hard to describe as anything else than a religious BS rationalization for why the pharaoh should do that. It wasn't jump from a mastaba tomb (simple rectangular house, so to speak, as a crypt) to pyramid AND the whole complex around it, but also a tradition that it's sorta bad luck to stop building SOMETHING at it. The great pyramid for example, because the Pharaoh still wasn't dead after a long time, ended up with tunnels dug under it to nowhere and stuff like that.

I like the idea, but I'd go even farther than that: Imhotep.

For a high priest of Ra, the guy wrote a thoroughly secular first medicine manual ever. As in, unlike even later texts from the same area, this guy doesn't do healing with prayers, amulets, etc, and just deals with stuff like washing and bandaging a wound, or extracting medicine from plants.

Also came up with an irrigation system that fed a whole lot of people.

And with the first pyramid. Though that actually doesn't do justice to his contribution to architecture. When you look at the complex of buildings around it, the guy was a frikken genius for that time. E.g., to support some tremendously heavy ceiling blocks, he used the first columns we know of in Egypt AND he figured out anchoring them to the walls for extra strength.

And actually he wrote the first manual of architecture too, which was used by Egyptians a long time after his death.

And arguably, if the pyramids were an early welfare system, in which people could volunteer to pull some blocks for a huge monument in exchange for a wage, this guy pretty much invented welfare.

And all that was happening in 2600 BC. I mean, even Hero was working in the Greek culture which was pretty scientific, and he had some giants on whose shoulders to stand. Imhotep was doing his stuff back when anything even resembling a scientific method OR philosophy wouldn't be discovered for another 2000 years.

It's really a shame that most people probably only know him as the magic-wielding undead villain of The Mummy. The guy really didn't deserve that.

I dunno, didn't we already have an article years ago about how those higher up the hierarchy tend to be more sociopathic? Well, here's the original link: Is Your Boss A Psychopath?

But anyway, if you have to ask "how much of an asshole does someone have to be to do X?" I think you'll find that there are big enough assholes to do just about anything. Especially in positions that involve money, power, or both. In fact it seems like even the drive to end up in a position with enough power to no longer have to give a damn about the peons around, is disproportionately higher in... exactly those who are sick and tired of having to fake giving a damn about those peons around them.

But at any rate, let's just say that goatse was a lightweight, compared to the kind of huge assholes you see in upper management ;)

Actually, here's another idea for where at least a part of those 8 billion are coming from. Now probably none of them accounts for 8 billion by itself, but I do believe it adds up.

1. Just the economy and more importantly how it impacted culture. In 1999 it was in the middle of a bubble, and everyone who got some of that money was flaunting it somehow. Buying stuff to show you can was expected.

Nowadays we're still on the tail curve of a depression, where a bunch of people lost their homes, unemployment is still very high, a bunch of people ARE having less disposable income (the median family income didn't follow the GDP per capita, so pretty much everyone south of the median is getting shafted) and most importantly this creates uncertainty for the future. It's looking like a lot less of a good idea to blow all your money on entertainment and luxuries when you're not sure if next year you'll be able to afford the essentials (medical care included) and/or keep your home.

A bunch of other industries are feeling the same pinch, so I fail to see why the RIAA would think they're exempt from it and should see the same income as at the apex of a bubble and of economic optimism, if it weren't for those pesky pirates.

2. Less free time for that entertainment. We just had a front page article yesterday about how overtime demanded is steadily climbing.

3. Competing with other forms of entertainment. You can see the movie industry and TV having the same problem. Less people are going to the movies when they can play WoW or TOR or whatever for a month instead. And it's not just games. Social networks for example also sink a heck of a lot of the time left after that overtime.

It's stuff that was still regarded as (borderline) stuff for socially dysfunctional nerds in 1999. The idea that if you play Ultima as an adult you're probably one of those 40 year old virgins living in mom's basement was flung around by many a lot more seriously than nowadays.

Internet access also was spotty and slow, and frankly there wasn't all that much to do on the Internet, compared to nowadays.

The whole culture was more favourable to sitting and listening to a record as a way to pass the time, while nowadays it's at best something you use as background music while doing something else. And not just while you sit at home but also...

3. Share of the MOBILE entertainment. Frankly there was not much more you could do in 1999 on the road than listen to some music on your walkman or CD player or, if you were really high tech, MP3 player. Sure, you could use a gameboy, but see again, a lot saw that as stuff just for kids, and it also didn't help that most of those mobile games WERE made for kids.

There was a lot of music bought just to have something to listen to while you're on the bus or train or plane.

Nowadays even kids have phones capable of doing much more than that, including again Internet stuff. That's got to mean less albums you need to buy just to keep from being bored out of your skull on the road.

Which in turn sets the stage for the next point...

4. A different culture among the youth. Which, honestly, was always a big target demographic there.

It used to be that music was a major topic in high school, and buying the same records that the rest of the lemmings were persuaded by marketing hype to buy, was the way to fit in. There were a lot of Britney Spears albums (chosen as an example because she had her first album in 1999) and whatnot bought just to fit in with the cool kids who were listening to Britney Spears.

And don't kid yourself if you were all counter-culture, the same applied there. There were a lot of The Cure and Sex Pistols albums sold to kids who wanted to fit in with the goth and respectively punk gang. We were so independent and defying convention and totally unlike the rest of the sheeple, and whatnot... that we bought the exact same clothes, music, etc, as a group we were trying to fit in. Yeah, different and independent my ass.

Nowadays even "hey, look what cutesy game I have on my iPhone" may well be a bigger topic. You CAN find other things to talk to the group that don't involve buying the same CDs they do.

5. Last, but probably the biggest factor, people ARE buying less music just because they're buying less PADDING.

Honestly, I can't think of many albums where I actually wanted or even liked every track. In fact, other than one or two, I'm drawing blanks. Try thinking about it yourself, and you'll probably get the same results.

Heck, even for the kids' culture reasons I was mentioning before, you didn't really need the whole effing album. Even if the cool gang were talking about that new Britney Spears album, chances are you'd only hear about the couple of songs that were all over the radio and TV, and nobody would mention 8 or 9 of the tracks on it.

But you had to buy a whole CD, didn't you? You'd pay for all those tracks even if they didn't interest you.

Nowadays people are buying just the tracks they want, and skip the rest of the filler, so obviously you see less tracks sold and at that for less money.

It's like if, dunno, imagine some dysfunctional imaginary country, let's call it Elbonia, where the bread bakers form a cartel and effectively enforced that you can only buy bread by the dozen loaves AND you're forbidden to give some of that to other people. Then one day this comes apart and you can again buy individual loaves or even halves. Don't you think they too would see their income plummet as people suddenly buy only as much bread as they need?

6. It IS sold cheaper.

At some point during my previous point you probably thought, "wait, you could buy singles too." Well, yes, but at a seriously higher price than a track on an album. Nowadays the industry is selling essentially singles at the price of a track on an album, and that is simply giving it away cheaper.

You just couldn't buy a single for 1$ unless maybe if it was second hand or something. Nowadays you can.

Heck, even for the tracks on a CD, a lot of CDs cost more than ten bucks or so, which is how much it would cost to get everything on them online.

So basically it strikes me as third degree mental retardation to sell stuff at half the price (actually even less), and then wonder what kind of thief made you get only half the money. I mean, seriously. Imagine if an individual person went to the police with a story boiling down to basically, "I started selling my bread at half price and, gosh darn it, even though I had baked as many loaves, at the end of the day I had made only half the money I made the previous day. There must be a bread thief around."

6. Even the elasticity of supply and demand won't really compensate for all of it, because frankly there is only a finite number of tracks that you can obsess about at a given time.

And here's another idea: most of the demand was artificially created by saturating the airwaves with a handful of songs and convincing kids that THESE tracks from THESE singers are the thing to have. The whole idea behind it is to have a handful and saturate the mindshare with them. If you do it with 10 times more songs, then each individual one is lost in a deluge of new stuff that you have no reason to pick one over another.

And more scarily for the music industry, unless they can tell you that THESE are the songs to have and saturate the mindshare with them, then you might go buy something from an indie musician and skip them completely.

The whole key to it working is that there's a dozen of new songs tops, often much less, that they can artificially manufacture the hype for and tell you to buy. If you try the same with two hundred new songs, none of them is on the air long enough to give you any particular reason to want exactly that one song. Or any of the others.

Briefly: perfectly elastic supply-demand economics can't exist in a market where the biggest driving factor is advertising, and you have the same finite and inelastic amount of marketing you can do. Sometimes if you give the songs for half the price, but fundamentally don't have the means to do twice the hype, you just sell the same number of hyped tracks and make half the money.

7. And here we come again to that aspect of competing with other entertainment. Only this time it's that marketing hype that's competing for time with it, and losing.

It's not just that people now spend more time surfing on their smartphone than listening to music on the train, or playing WOW instead of listening to the ol' vinyl at home, which I covered already. It's also that they spend less time looking at MTV or listening to the radio stations that were used to hype certain tracks to them, so they'll buy it. With TV viewing steadily declining in all that time, there are also less people watching MTV, and getting the idea which album they should they buy.

So in that marketing-driven market, not only the space and audience for marketing are inelastic and can't grow, they're actually shrinking. If they don't expect that to affect the bottom line, remind me WTH reality they live in.

Etc.

Basically, yes, their revenue shrank, but to blame all 8 billion on piracy is stupid.

Something like that. Though actually, i'd say it's not even just KNOWING the skillsets, but being used to doing certain things as a group.

It's something that's been known in the army for example for, oh, maybe a couple thousand years now: a legion of 5000 people acting as a group and already being used to act as a group, beats a horde of 10,000 uncoordinated barbarians any day, even if maybe individually they're better warriors.

Furthermore, that as long as a unit stays cohesive, it has a fighting chance, and when it lost cohesion it's pretty much already defeated. They just may or may not know it yet.

I wouldn't even necessarily write it under "being a better gamer". It's more just about the group. If everyone is used to the rest of the group acting in a certain way, and viceversa, essentially they've formed some group tactics. It doesn't even have to be stated, and in fact it's even better if you don't have to. You just already know that that guy will try to flank, that other guy prefers to keep the distance and snipe, etc, and most importantly you found SOME way to do all that, that SOMEHOW works. And that by itself will beat the same number of uncoordinated players, even if maybe individually they can aim better or react faster or whatever other "good player" criterion one may take.

And it's not just about "knowing" that that guy's skillset includes sniping, or that other guy can sneak around, which might still leave one wondering if they will. It's already being used to what each of those will do, and already being used to dash in a certain situation because you're already used that there's someone counter-sniping for you while you do that.

That said, if army taught me anything, I'd say that limiting their conclusions to "friends" is misleading. Sure, you want bonding between them and all, but ultimately what matters even more than friendship is exactly that being already trained to apply the same group tactics as a group. If I had to go to war and had to choose whether to entrust my life to my best buddy who can't tell a gun's butt from its muzzle, or to that guy I thought to be the biggest douchebag in the company, I'd pick the douchebag any day. Because friendship is grrreat, but already having the reflex to provide cover fire and when to provide it is better.

You clearly shouldnt be allowed anywhere near a computer if you think clicking add/remove, uninstall is a difficult feat.

The program itself is terrible but getting rid of it is ridiculously easy task.

I'm not up to date on the latest version of Symantec specifically, but I _do_ have experience with antiviruses which were about as easy to get rid of as an actual virus. Which is to say, not easy at all.

The most trivial example was an old McAffee, actually, which I installed on D: and apparently nobody at McAffee ever heard of people installing programs anywhere else than the default location. Because the first update (after I actually managed to make it update: let's just say that there were other things they had apparently never heard of, like people using a different browser) it installed an updated copy of itself in the default C:\Programs\ location, BUT left the old copy on D: also active and running, which slowed the computer majorly. Needless to say, uninstalling it also only uninstalled one of the copies, while leaving the other on the hard drive and still loaded all over the registry.

Sure, if you were Joe Average and didn't know jack shit about computers, you might think that the uninstall worked and your computer is now free of the buggy antivirus... it just keeps being slow and making your browser act weirdly for some completely other reason. But if you knew enough to at least look at what services are running, you'd discover that it was a more like James Bond: you may think you got rid of him, but he's still around to ruin your party ;)

But generally, given that these things are in a race to the bottom with the actual malware to get loaded even more invisible, at an even lower level, and take over even more functions than an actual virus, it should come as no surprise if the ARE more obnoxious than an actual virus, slow the computer down more than an actual virus, cause more network traffic than an actual virus, and occasionally are also harder to remove than an actual virus.

Bullshit. Sorry, there is no nice way to put it, but the scare mongering was pure, weapons-grade bullshit.

The REAL problems with any actual critical systems had been readily apparent to any company who would do any kind of forecasting or planning or had any contracts (including any loans given or taken) extending into the future. Even something as non-critical as import-export companies for packaging, or travel agencies or whatever, I know people actually working for them and they were aware at the very least in January 1999 (though most even earlier,) when forecast data or contracts extending in the next year started having problems. I actually know people working for such companies and NONE were waiting for the hype to convince them. As soon as the first report showed up as "uh, it says we'll achieve our goals if we get, uh, minus two thousand dollars a month in sales until 1900", some boss said, "fix the fucking thing NOW."

Meanwhile things were hyped as needing an urgent fix, that had no problem whatsoever. Network CABLES and speakers were hyped as Y2K Compliant, when, seriously, they didn't even have a calendar in them or anything. Scammers made off with billions from the rest of the economy, in upgrades for things that didn't need upgrading, and replacements for things that didn't need replacing.

THAT was what the shameless hype did: help some scammers milk the rest of the economy of money that would have been better spent elsewhere. Anyone who took part in spreading that scare, THAT is what they helped achieve: help some parasites loot the rest of society.

And it didn't even stop there. Things were hyped as going to bring civilization down, like street lights or car electronics which (especially in 1999) didn't even hold the date anywhere and had no use for it, AND which nobody could afford to just yank out and replace wholesale. Yet hordes of shameless snake oil vendors and their PR toadies were hammering non-stop on the idea that OMG, unless your city is blowing its whole budget on their snake oil, come next year all car traffic will halt, airplanes will come crashing down from the sky, and apparently grocery stores will stay closed because everyone is too stupid to figure they still need to go to work if their electronic watch locks up in 2000. It was stuff that wasn't going to get "fixed", not just because it wasn't broken in the first place, but also because nobody was rich AND retarded enough to yank out and replace every single streetlight control module like that. The hype just kept people's fears high, and even tried to amplify them some more, just in case it results in some sale anyway, although chances were 99% that it wouldn't.

The shameless snake oil vendors and the idiots who helped them spread the panic, were NOT actually doing anyone any problem. In fact if it were a just world, we'd put that kind of parasites out of our collective misery and be better off for it.

I think you're rigorously applying the laws of physics to a supernatural being. Mind you I don't accept at all the idea that the universe is 6k years old, but if we start at the assumption that it was created 6k years ago by an entity capable of such a feat, it's hardly a stretch to think the same entity created all the stars with light already having radiated outwards so that distant stars could be visible right away. Seems sort of silly to bother creating stars otherwise.

Well, if I needed to rationalize something like that, yeah, I'd go with creating light in transit too. But, believe it or not, there ARE people who argue for a 6000 light year universe, and find the darndest rationalizations for it. E.g., some really weird gravity lensing that just makes it look like some galaxy is 10 billion light-years away, when it's less than 6000 light-years away.

Not all Christians, mind you, and (I like to think) not even a majority, but such people DO exist and my point merely was: "and we let even THOSE vote." :p

That's actually a new one for me. There are two reasons I've generally heard for why Xmas is Dec 25:

1. That's actually his birthday. Not my favorite theory, but it's not out of the question.

The problem is that nobody has a frikken clue when it happened. The only gospel author that gives us any indirect clues was Luke, and that one points actually at a date waaay off from Xmas. For the rest of the gang, including Paul, Matthew, Mark and John, basically they don't seem to give a fuck about when Jesus was born. (In fact, Mark, the earliest gospel writer, doesn't even mention anything at all about Jesus before he met John The Baptist.) What mattered for them was when he died and got resurrected. That was the big event for Christians, not the birth.

And even later, some people like Origen argued that it was a barbarian custom to celebrate the birthday, and Christians shouldn't do that.

At any rate, by 200 AD there were like a dozen dates proposed, and none in December.

2. Usurpation of pagan winter solstice festivals such as Saturnalia, Sol Invictus, etc.

While it might or might not have played a role later in the adoption and acceptance of that particular date -- as opposed to the dozen or so calculations which were discarded -- it wasn't even mentioned in the rationalizations actually written for it.

Really, those guys were taking over a pagan sun-related celebration all right, but it was the spring equinox actually. They already had from Philo that the world must have been created on the spring equinox, i.e., on 25 March (by the Julian calendar at the time.) So now a bunch of them, when they started actually doing chronologies for Jesus, wanted to basically have neatly exact thousands of years, as fits a Son Of God. So Jesus actually had to die on the 25'th of March too, even if it meant calculating Easter wrong for the whole decade around the possible year for it, and at that be CONCEIVED on the 25'th of March too. Incidentally, he also had to be exactly 40 years from conception at his death, because 40 is such a holy number to God (starting from Moses' life being neatly 3 periods of 40 years each, and going through LOTS of stuff where 40 was impoirtant from the OT. At any rate, his life had to be an exact number of years, and nail the equinox day twice at that, because that's how a perfect God would do it. (Some originally wanted him born on that date, but later they switched to conception.)

So then if you add exactly 9 months to the 25th March, you get the 25th December. Again, the notion that Jesus could be born even a day late or early, never occured to anyone. I mean, come on, someone as awesome and perfect as God wouldn't have an imperfectly timed birth, right? :p

Again, actually I believe that for the larger mass of believers, taking over the Saturnalia and birthday of Sol Invictus, may have made it more palatable and more popular than competing chronologies. So I wouldn't call that flat-out wrong. But the obsessive Jesus-fanboys writing those perfect chronologies for Jesus didn't seem to actually give a damn about that date. They were obsessed with the spring equinox as a perfect day and anniversary of the world creation.

Well, there are even there a few competing calculations, like in De Pascha Computus, which actually goes for 28 instead of 25. The rationale being that if the world has been created on the 25'th, then the 4th day when the Sun is created would be the 28'th of March, and Jesus being the new Sun of creation would have to be conceived on that anniversary of the creation of the sun, rather than the creation of the Earth.

But, same general idea. What they were fascinated with was really the spring equinox.

Well, yes, the idea certainly didn't originate with Russel, and is in fact as old as we have a written record. Before Yeats, we had for example Michel de Montaigne in the 15'th century which argued and justified that, "it turns out that nothing is so firmly believed as whatever we know least about, and that no persons are more sure of themselves than those who tell us tall stories" That's someone pretty much explicitly statind Dunning-Kruger effect, centuries before Dunning and Kruger. And he in turn was quoting from Plato's Critias, who says, "the inexperience and utter ignorance of his hearers about any subject is a great assistance to him who has to speak of it", which isn't exactly Dunning-Kruger, but is actually even more on topic for explaining why politicians get away with economically-impossible promises and other complete BS. And that's, you know, Plato, 5'th century BC.

Well, while you may be right about the cases which are actually about investing money, you probably also realize that it was just an analogy. It's supposed to illustrate something from domain X, via something that the other party knows from domain Y. The two won't be and fundamentally can't be identical in all aspects, or it's not even an analogy any more, it becomes just an identity.

Basically the only thing that's really equivalent with letting people vote for politicians is... letting people vote for politicians. But that doesn't help much with illustrating it, unless you already understand it in the first place. Illustrating a political choice by comparison with a technology investment, is kinda like comparing computers to cars. Of course they won't be identical.

And here an important difference is that while you might leave fundamental physics research to private initiative to sort out, in politics you HAVE to decide and organize some things, because leaving them to whoever has the money tends to end up very badly every single time. E.g., history shows that time and time again, if you let someone else do the policing and army as they see fit, you end up at best with a dictatorship and at worst with a civil war. Outside of the deranged delusions of Anarcho-Capitalists, privatizing the state's monopoly on violence, doesn't work and never did. From Sulla and Caesar to contemporary Somalia, whenever someone had an army that was reasonably "theirs", they started a bid for totalitarian power with it, and that often went through a civil war too. So you can't really wait for private initiative to sort out the army and police. You have to decide something at state level, and that involves making people vote... for stuff they don't really understand, and don't know they don't understand.

Big bang has nothing to do with it. According to Genesis 1:14-19:

14. And God said, âoeLet there be lights in the expanse of the sky to separate the day from the night, and let them serve as signs to mark seasons and days and years,

15. and let them be lights in the expanse of the sky to give light on the earth.â And it was so.

16. God made two great lightsâ"the greater light to govern the day and the lesser light to govern the night. He also made the stars.

17. God set them in the expanse of the sky to give light on the earth,

18. to govern the day and the night, and to separate light from darkness. And God saw that it was good.

19. And there was evening, and there was morningâ"the fourth day.

The stars were created on the 4'th day of creation, about 3 days after the Earth itself. Hence if Earth is no older than 6000 years, the stars themselves cannot be older than 6000 years. Any light we receive today CANNOT have started more than 6000 years ago. Hence, If the speed of light didn't change, everything we see must be within a 6000 light year radius.

Mind you, technically the Bible also doesn't say that the creation was 6000 years ago. There's a different reason why everyone calculated about 6000 years old in the 3'rd century, and in the 11'th century, and in the 18'th century, now it's still about 6000 years.

The reason is basically that the idiots want to have a rapture any day now, instead of dealing with the rest of their lives. And they wanted a rapture any day now at just about any point in the history of Christianity.

So the reasoning which appears IIRC around the 2'nd-3'rd century is basically this: God worked for 6 days, and the 7'th day was God's day. And for God it is said that 1000 years are like a day. Hence it makes sense (bear in mind that these are not scientists, but theologians, so get used to pulling stuff out of the ass and handwaving it as making sense to them therefore being true) that the world from that point on would be based on the same 6+1 pattern, with 6000 years of toil and hardship, and the 7'th "day" of 1000 years being God's reign on Earth.

So they're not actually doing some real maths to get that 6000 years, but fudge the numbers to get the 6000 they want.

There's a lot of false accuracy involved. Think: there are 28 generations between David and Jesus in Matthew, a generation is 40 years, therefore there are EXACTLY 1120 years between Jesus and David. Down to the day. No, seriously, the reason we got Xmas on 25 December was because a 3rd century lemming added generations with such amazing accuracy as to get precision down to the day between Jesus's birth and the creation of Earth, which had already been postulated by Philo to have happened on a spring equinox. The thought of error bars and human reproduction not being that predictable, tends to not occur to these people.

And there's a lot of generously applying Flannagan's Finagling Factor, i.e., "That quantity which, when multiplied by, divided by, added to, or subtracted from the answer you got, gives you the answer you should have gotten."

Because that's basically what it's about. it's not about actually calculating an unknown result, but about fudging the maths to give them the result they already decided they want. One which says that their precious judgment day will come any day now.

The first problem is that most people just aren't knowledgeable of advanced theory and precedents in any domain. That's not to say they're "dumb" or "stupid", just that they don't know everything, because nobody can know everything.

Basically, unless you're a physicist, imagine that you had to pick which form of energy supply should you back for interstellar travel. Should we pursue producing anti-matter (which can store incredibly much energy, but is so ridiculously ineffective to produce that we'll need several breakthroughs before it's even feasible to use like in Star Trek) or should we go with micro-black-holes and Hawking radiation, basically harnessing the incredible energy released as a small enough black hole evaporates? Both actually pack the same joules per kilogram, because at the end of it, both will have converted mess into energy as per e=mc^2. Maybe the black hole promises a bit less losses.

But anyway, imagine you had to vote on which of the two should get a trillion dollars in research grants to get us off this piece of rock before some mass extinction event gets us.

Now that's not to say that you're dumb or anything. You're a smart and educated person, and perfectly capable of rational thought and logical decisions. But unless you're a physicist, you won't know enough to understand what the choices are, much less to pick the best. They get a physicist proponent of each of the two to explain until they're blue in the face, but chances are even after a year you still won't know enough to make an informed choice.

Now worse yet, imagine that it's not just YOU who gets a vote, but also that hippie chick who only heard of "quantum" in some bogus quantum chi crystal pendants she wears. And that dude who actually believes that the universe is less than 6000 years old and less than 6000 light years across, because the bible says so. Yeah, I wouldn't rely on him to estimate the amount of energy for star travel correctly, when he literally believes that everything is three million times closer than the scientists think. And millions of other woefully unqualified people.

You probably see how the result of that vote will be no closer to picking the right one, than flipping a coin.

And those are probably the worst, because, quoth Bertrand Russell, "[i]The fundamental cause of the trouble is that in the modern world the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt.[/i]" YOU, if you're not a physicist, and are all that smart and educated, will probably realize, "wait, why are they asking me? I don't know enough to judge that." Whereas the guy who thinks "quantum" is the mystical force in his new crystal pendants he bought from some dodgy site, will actually be more likely to think he knows enough about it.

In effect, it's just Dunning-Kruger in action. The less you actually know, the more you'll grossly overestimate what you know.

And it's really getting worse for topics where everyone thinks they know something about, like economics. You'll find very few people who actually understand what, say, Keynesian vs Austrian School economics say. Or to what extent they even make testable predictions. Or to what extent they were ever actually tested.

But you'll find a LOT of people who think they know EXACTLY which theory will fix the economy, and furthermore, which candidate has the best grip on it, and exactly what they should do differently about it too.

And that, in a nutshell, is the problem with letting people vote on it.

Actually, that's just for the choice of leaders.

IMHO the real advantage functioning democracies have are in the balances and checks on those leaders' powers. Because basically you're not better off with a genius leader, if he only uses that genius just to get more power for himself and suppress any possible threats to his rule. And those balances and checks tend to be the first to go in a dictatorship.

The problem with economic theory is that it is based on a _perfect_ world. It's just handwaved that, uh, well, it works close enough in the real world.

Among the assumptions that are necessary to have most of that shiny-happy outcome for everything -- and I mean, really, necessary, as once you have a margin of error, real world starts to happen -- are such gems as:

- many manufacturers of perfectly homogenous and fungible products. Which works well if you're buying orange juice, but less well when your brand of pneumonia is only sensitive to the latest patented antibiotic.

- zero (or negligible) entry and exit barriers. This is in fact needed both for the previous one, as well as to prevent collusion. In a market where it costs nothing to enter or to exit if it didn't work, you can't form a cartel to regulate the price of bread, because someone else will then start making bread anyway and undercut you. This assumption is increasingly false in the real world, with entry barriers in some domains being in the many billions range. No, really, try starting a CPU manufacturing company.

- perfectly informed buyers. To have any chance that the market punishes behaviours X, Y and Z, or even rewards fine differences in quality, basically all (or the vast majority) of buyers must know that stuff. Again, this is not only getting to be very false, but most corporations actively work through marketing and PR to make sure that you care more about their beer making you cool than whether beer X actually tastes better than beer Y.

- perfectly rational everyone, including buyers and sellers. Which already is false in the case discussed here. Perfectly rational buyers would buy her music because the genuinely like them more than some other music, not just because they heard she died.

- no externalities. An assumption which may be mostly correct for music, but is also something that produced barely breathable smog and other problem at the times it was basically true.

- perfectly elastic supply and demand mechanics. Which sadly was only really true up to the start of the 20'th century. The Great Depression arguably happened when we ran into a domain where things started to be inelastic.

Etc.

What I'm getting at is that while this kind of thing makes for a great BS libertarian rhetoric, it is very much divorced from reality. In the perfect world used in such economic theory, monopolies are impossible, in the real world they are a fact of life. In the perfect world used in such economic theory, collusion isn't viable, in the real world there are real cases where for example a bunch of big pharma companies agreed to not undercut each other. In that ideal world you couldn't make money by recommending that other people invest in the same imploding dot-com that you're selling your shares in, because buyers would already be informed, but in the real world it actually happened. Etc.

If you were a really merciless investor, you'd also know that, and factor it in. E.g., you'd know that if you make ten millions and then have to pay a million to PR to whitewash your image, then, meh, being an asshole actually paid.

And in the end, that's the real difference between those who actually know how to abuse an imperfect market, and idealist nerds who think the world works like in perfect-world BS propaganda.