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Comment CNNIC (Score 1) 35

The paper points that CNNIC is under government control and should not be trusted as a CA, but the attack described does not involve any CNNIC wrongdoing: the rogue certificates were self-signed

That is nonsense to me. Indeed CA integrity should be questioned, but wrongdoing CA leaves trails, since a bad CA they issue is signed.

Comment Re:boom & bust of the free market (Score 1) 441

That's not even a minor problem. And glancing through several different presentations of free markets, it's not even a common assumption. The closely related mobility of factors is a fairly common factor (that is, if you don't like X, you can readily find Y to replace it) which can be broken by natural monopolies.

That is the initial neoclassic response to the problem of unemployment. The condition that there is no production fixed cost was added to the neoclassic theory later (Kenneth Arrow & Gérard Debreu). You can easily understand the problem: in neoclassic theory, demand and supply meet each other at the optimal point. But if there are fixed production costs, producers cannot stand adjustments that drop the market price below that cost.

As I said labor comes with a fixed cost, as it needs workers to stay alive and be renewed. Latest neoclassic theory therefore teach us that labor cannot be a free market. As a consequence a market that involves labor will be "tainted" by that problem too.

[if the labor market makes workers too poor, you get an overproduction crisis] But not in the real world.

Do you mean overproduction crisis do not happen, or that they are not caused by a weak demand?

Again, you're telling me how bad free markets are for a market that isn't even close to free. It'd really help, if you had experience with a free market.

I do not deny that some free market exist, and that neoclassic theory predicting maximum efficiency may have some ground there. Wholesale raw material market is an example. I just disagree with the idea that this theory can be applied to any market. Latest neoclassic economists themselves demonstrated it was not true.

Comment Re:boom & bust of the free market (Score 1) 441

I find it frustrating how people can blithely claim free markets are broken in all sorts of ways without actually showing even a single example beyond the well-known case of externalities.

There are other major problems. Free market theory assumes that producers have no fixed cost, which means their expenses would be zero if they produced nothing.

That breaks as soon as you introduce workers in the system. Maintaining workforce comes with a huge fixed cost. Workers must be paid enough to survive (food, shelter and health care), and since they die at some time, they must be renewed, which means new workers must be trained.

If you attempt to let the market invisible hand handle that, you may hit situations where your workers cannot survive and be trained, which is obviously a problem for producers. And moreover the worker is often also a consumer: if the labor market makes workers too poor, you get an overproduction crisis.

But I am just telling obvious things, as in real life, free labor markets do not exist in developed countries. Slavery and child labor ban are an obvious regulations, for instance. The point is that it introduce regulations in any market that involves labor.

Comment Re:Terror attacks (Score 1) 206

Well, press in France is not a free market, it is highly subsided by the government with the nice idea that press diversity is required for citizen to forge their own opinions.

Unfortunately the implementation is screwed, and a serious newspaper like Le Monde Diplomatique gets less money than Mickey's newspaper.

Comment Handle ODT files reasonably well (Score 5, Insightful) 70

The spoiler alter tells us both Google docs and MS Word Online "handle ODT files reasonably well".

Unfortunately the test is done in very simple files, and we all know that as document grow bigger and more complex, the ability to reasonably well transfer them from one software to another vanishes. But this should not be a surprise considering MS Word itself is unable to cope with big .doc files and will corrupt them at some time.

Comment Terror attacks (Score 5, Interesting) 206

Please do not use the terms "terror attacks" or "terrorism" for the murders at Charlie Hebdo. This is not terrorism, as french people are not afraid. Otherwise there would not have been millions in the streets, vulnerable to real terrorist attacks.

On the other hand, french journalists are afraid because they feel they could ne the next attacked, and their reports suggest terror is widespread, but it is a fake perception for the whole french society.

Comment Re:boom & bust of the free market (Score 1) 441

None of these are significant factors.

These are the factors introduced by the neoclassic economists, as conditions that let them demonstrate the free market are optimal.

If you call the factors unsignificant, it means you do not base your support of free market on their work. If you reject that theorical work, how can you tell in what situation free market are a good solution and when they are not? Is it just faith?

Comment Re:boom & bust of the free market (Score 1) 441

The practical problems of free market theory are not limited to externalities. It is quite insightful to actually read what the fathers of free market theory assumed in order to prove it had maximum efficiency.

Product should have no quality difference, only price. Buyers should be perfectly informed on the product. Producers should have no fixed costs (such as taking care of work force, for instance, here the externalities comes back). Buyers and sellers should be able to deal at any time... and I forget a few others conditions.

There are markets where all this stuff is not a nice theory that do no fit reality, but there are not so many.

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