I guess whether it works or not depends on what you define the problem to be. If one is after affordable housing and greater standard of living for everyone, the free market solution is the only viable option. If you specifically want to avoid gentrification, then some sort of intervention may be necessary, but will come, as you've noted, with its own consequences. I personally don't see anything inherently wrong with gentrification, if it's brought on by the free decisions of those in society. If, however, it is spawned by government interventionism, then it is almost certainly not the result of individuals demonstrating such preferences via action and, like all coercive things, should be done away with. However, being as the primary reason for gentrification is government intervention, if it is deemed that gentrification is bad, the most obvious solution would be to stop creating gentrification. :)

You do realize that social housing does nothing to solve the housing problem, right? It actually does a worse job of divvying out scarce resources. I can't tell if you are in favor of it or in opposition.

I'm referring strictly to property rights, not the current legal system.

Yeah, you'd think. But let's not forget that rights can be granted. For revenge porn to be a violation of property rights of one's digital likeness, it must be clear that permission was not granted. That said, I think there's a pretty reasonable expectation (no matter how foolish or naive) for compromising photographs not to be shared with anyone other than the intended recipient.

Oh, and one more thing:

We've made the mistake of conflating morality with legality in our society. By trying to outlaw everything that the masses feel is wrong, we remove personal responsibility from individuals to self govern. "It's legal," as we appear to agree, is poor grounds for deciding if something is moral or good. What we need is a return of principles, of private property rights, and the protection of such things. As I've stated before, revenge porn in many circumstances, is almost certainly a case of fraud--a violation of property rights--and should be treated as such.

And under whose authority are you or other pro-government individuals given the right to dictate what others' behavior should be? That's the idea behind property rights and freedom of contract: the individual gets to decide what he does up until the point that he infringes on someone else's rights. Without a litmus test for what's reasonable legislation, we inevitably end up with the sort of garbage society and government that we have today. I'm no constitutionalist and I agree those types are pretty ideological, but the the approach you seem to advocate lacks any semblance of reason or wisdom, as it has no safe guards and is a sitting duck, waiting to be exploited by those who can and will gain from it.

Personally, I think revenge porn is awful. But, since I subscribe to certain principles that say what is and is not allowable forms of intervention, I can't get behind the idea that it must be illegal. Once again, without such principles, we end up in exactly the sort of society that we have now. Please understand that the ideas you perpetuate have gotten us here.

Yeah, but I don't want to discourage such behavior too much; we all benefit from it. :) Ha, all jokes aside: absolutely.

It's a legitimate question: Where does one's rights stop and another's begin? Property rights are a core principle of libertarianism; while some of the posters do seem to default to, "I can do whatever I want," their rashness does not preclude the legitimacy of the rights of he who posted the revenge porn. The question must be answered: to whom does the image belong to? There is generic answer to that question, though: it depends entirely upon the agreement that the individuals made and the expectations of she (or he) who gave the images. If a girl is led to believe that any compromising photos she gives to her boyfriend will remain private and the boyfriend violates that, then the libertarian position would be that the boyfriend violated contract and must make things right. Also keep in mind that the boyfriend in such a scenario would not owe anything to the state, but to the person who he harmed; the goal is not punishment, but compensation for the harm done (although, placing a dollar amount on such things is challenging to say the least).

So, to sum up, please don't equate "I can do whatever I want" with libertarianism. :)

It's truly a matter of property rights. The question, ultimately, is: who owns the right to a photograph, even when it is "given" to someone else? If the photograph is exchanged under the presumption that it not be distributed, a violation of that agreement is fraudulent, although probably difficult to prove and thus, prosecute. Frankly, if copyright (and other private property rights) worked as intended, I think that would be a good way to handle such things.

I'm not sure about the constitutionality, but as far as right to contract and private property rights go, if said pornographic images were given under the express condition that they not be distributed, a violation of the contract would constitute a case for fraud. Of course, most people would make such an arrangement verbally, making it harder to prove in court. Ultimately, though, people need to be accountable for their own actions: if you don't want to be a "victim" of revenge porn, be careful about how you give it out and to whom. As bad as revenge porn is, unprincipled government intervention to fix the problem will almost certainly be worse.

Indeed, I am wrong. Clearly what I learned in school was wrong (not EE, obviously).

Whether or not the extra goody above 20k means anything or not is actually irrelevant. 192 kHz sample rate is still > 44.1 or 48, sonically. Consider a 16 kHz wave that is captured by 44.1: You don't even have three points to describe what that wave is supposed to look like; how can you possibly expect any sort of precision? It's the same with 24-bit vs 16-bit: the more bits you have, the less quantization error occurs. I'm confused why the information you quoted would possibly say that 24-bit/192 kHz would have slightly worse playback fidelity than 16-bit/44.1 kHz. What a load of garbage.

Price inelasticity causes a loss of far more jobs than price elasticity. What people don't seem to understand about elastic prices (both for goods/services and labor), is it's the market's method of redirecting resources to where society deems most satisfactory. No one wants to commute via horse and buggy, but instead prefer cars? Prices reflect that. To not allow such things to happen is foolish.

An unconditional minimum income is just another subsidy to those who don't work. If we deem that having people not work is a good thing, then yes, we should implement such a thing.

It seems that you are confused about two things:

First, it appears you believe that labor is relatively specific: that individuals, once trained in a career, have a very difficult time changing careers. This is simply not the case; only 27% of people work in a job related to their degree[1]. It is very common for people to get a degree in one thing and work in something unrelated; or, to work in one area for a while, then shift to something else later down the road. Personally, I received my education in a dying industry; it was hard to find jobs or make any real money, so I moved to a growing industry. I am better off because I can more easily make ends meet and the market is better off because consumers' desires have successfully reallocated one of the scarcest of all resources (labor) from an over-saturated industry to an under-saturated one.

Second, you claim that automation shifts the limiting factor of industrial output away from manpower and towards energy and other land factors. Again, this is not the case. Automation increases the productivity of labor, which is of course a scarce resource. Capital goods have existed since as far back as the human race. No society has ever experienced a lower standard of living due to the automation that capital goods provide. Society has not become worse off because the plow was invented or because computers become so affordable as to be an everyday appliance. Such tools have allowed for things that once took a great deal of time and labor to now take much less (or in some cases, no) time or labor; this simply frees up the labor to work on new problems that were once of too low a priority for society to direct resources towards.

It may very well be that there is a mythology of "justification through hard work," which is quite unfortunate. But such a belief is silly and trivially disproved. No one gets rich working 16 hours a day making the largest mud pie in the world (at least, not unless society deems such a thing useful). Lastly, the market economy is a system which responds dynamically to consumers' demands; by definition, the more efficient the market economy is, the better it is meeting the needs and wants of those involved. I so no reason why we would not want maximum effectiveness from such a system. The effectiveness *is* the end the system exists to achieve.

• [1] http://www.washingtonpost.com/....

I think the main point is that transactions are not a zero sum game. Surely the business man will try to make the greatest profit that hey can, and there is nothing wrong with that. (Especially when most of the great fortunes have come by selling at lower, not higher prices.)

When money is not circulating, price levels adjust accordingly; it has no net impact on the economy unless for some reason a shift happens very rapidly. Sometimes prices are not allowed to fall due to various government interventions; the solution is generally thought to require more interventions, but for some reason it's seldom thought that we could just remove the bad policies that prevent price elasticity (which is a very important component to the free market).