Face it, our advanced society has lost it’s personal integrity; oh yea, some still do, but those loving creatures are compromised into evil once they find the lust of control on their plate…

And speaking about the plate, all this becomes moot when what once is a bad IRA or a failed bank becomes a week in the hospital or a forever in the ground.

It’s not the economy, it’s the food…

http://www.dickdestiny.com/blog/2009/02/us-businessman-as-terrorist-looking.html

(A blogger laments on the Peanut Butter Scandal and beyond…)

Your argument is also begging the question; if it is possible to have regulators that are superbly talented, independent, toothed and muscular and capable of making hard decisions about innovation, then you unwittingly made the case for socialism, because what you described is not a regulator, but a gifted entrepreneur, which profits and loses in the market based on how well he can estimate and forecast!

If the Marxist fallacy that ‘freedom leads to monopoly and concentration’ was good theory, then – in a market with free entry, and little intervention as the web thankfully still is, Google by all means shouldn’t exist! Or GM, Ford and Chrysler wouldn’t be begging Washington for handouts while little Tesla Motors creeps in from outfield.

Anti-trust laws and agencies do not reach their stated goals, if anything, the state _creates_ monopolies, by protectionist measures, credit expansion which invariably go to politically favored constituents, and finally regulations such as the Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act, that wipes out small toymakers who can’t afford to pay 3rd party testing for all their toys, while Mattel just adds another red line to its budget and enjoys further protection from new competitors.

I’m gonna shut up now, and I’d just like to thank you for your amazing effort and generosity in getting this great distro out for all of us to use. Since I’ve installed Hardy I haven’t used anything else and it only gets better. Kudos to you and everybody at Canonical.

At least Mr. Shuttleworth wants (I hope so) to change the cultural conditions trough the wire. Open Source is the next step of mankind regarding to our globalised world. The developer is at the same time the consumer – It`s definetly a great great step into a ONE OPEN SOURCE SOCIETY let us be free and let us life in creativity and so on (now I`m tired).

“Uomo universale”

I’m not a fan of historically real socialism. Capitalism is more perspective system for development. The Socialism is designed like a Mainframe, the architecture of Capitalism is closer to networks. Time of mainframes has passed. Globalisation will be successful only at the network architecture of system. But Capitalism has one fundamental problem which brakes its further development. The scale of the project “Capitalism” and speed of changes occurring in it does not correspond to the limited possibilities of out-of-date “Operating System” on which base it is created. Initially “Operating System” has been developed under the architecture of Mainframes. The problem is aggravated with that its source codes are closed. Also timely modification becomes almost impossible. Below I will explain these statements.
The fact that the modern human society and the computer network are information systems allows a comparison to be made revealing a deep similarity between them. The key component of a computer network is the operation system with a nucleus containing algorithms and source data necessary for function and interaction of application programs. In the human society, the culture is an analog of the operation system. In its nucleus, the culture contains an ordered system of basic values determining the objective, not declared, morals and respective stereotypes of attitude to events occurring in both internal and outer worlds that manifest themselves in the human behavior in actual life situations. The nucleus of the Biblical culture dominating in the today’s society is for the most part a “closed source system” in which the tacit information quite often overrides the one proclaimed. It could be supposed that that was made in order to protect the “copyright” of developers and owners of “source codes” pursuing their lucrative purposes. It is known, however, that anything what is made by a human can be understood by another one. These “source codes” were revealed by a group of individuals named “Internal Predictor of USSR” in late 80′s.
Irrespective of their element base and programming languages, all types of closed source information systems have a considerable objective disadvantage: they loss the prediction stability in certain circumstances. Starting from a certain level of system complexity, the task of introducing changes into and maintaining the performance of the system becomes non-trivial. It is far from being simple to ensure coordinated actions of many people who often do not know each other, work at various places and speak different languages. The closed state of source codes or their fragments leads to the growth of conflicts inside the system and it begins to crumble. Quite often, emerging problems are mended using local “patches” that leads to greater complexity of the system with the loss of stability ending in final operation failure. Similarly to the algorithm described above, a culture based on principles of “esotericism” suffers the risk of collapse when the resources of the “initiates” are not sufficient to “patch the gaps”, that is, to solve problems as soon as they occur. The system eventually “falls” with the increase of the time pressure. Here, opposite to computer systems, one cannot really avoid unpredictable effects by just pushing the Reset Button.
Therefore, the new network culture is necessary for successful development of the project “Capitalism” with an open initial code. In Russia the kernel of such culture is developed, source texts are laid out in the Internet. Source texts can be downloaded from a site http://www.dotu.ru,then are compiled, installed, tested and use.

Igor Salmin

I think you spoke too much.

You cannot say what you said about Russia and what you’ve felt in 2000/2001.. Yes for sure people may have told you that their pains were due to Russian Communism! Of Course! the Russian Gov and the US told them that!..
well You did not (I said did not because may since you ve written this text you ve search about what is really communism I means its real fundamental principles. and you ve understood that The Real Communism has never been applied in Russia or any other big country.) understand what communism and socialism really are.

to simplify everything you may consider the aim of each system : capitalism is money or profit.. and communism is society. You spoke about Railways. just look what happend in the UK. you spoke about power plan. just look in Europe. they what to ‘open to the concurrency” the market of electric power. But in that aim they had to ask to the public society to increase the price from less than 1€/KWh (in France for example) to around 6€/KWh. because at less than 1€/KWh no concurrence is possible. So can’t blame public society!
I’ve still not told that during all this public powered era (which is still not ended) EU was on the top in research for renewable energy (wind mill, hydrogen cell, nuclear fusion..)

just look at what you’re promoting open source and community.. why do we develop free softwares? for money? no. to be competitve? no. to reach 30% of the market? no. for us? YES! for all of us. to get the software we want away from any economic reason or lobbiyng (maybe a little in fact). this enter in the ideals of primitive socialism. and as you can see decision are taken by a central power which is independent from Canonical.
Well now just consider Canonical is a State and Ubuntu a public company and you’ll get an idea of socialism society

I Can’t tell you how it is in a socialist country because i don’t know. and anyone can tell you.
But we ve seen that capitalism fails too often. Why do you (not only you) refuse socialism? You don’t know what it is! We all don’t know how it looks like! It’s just because you’re scared!
Remember your mother: ‘Don’t say No before you tasted’

regulated capitalism is just like Brussels sprout with ketchup.

[Sorry for my broken English]

Free market capitalism I can completely agree is devoid of justice. The legal system is completely in favor of those who can afford to pay the cost of lawyers, law advice etc. Under capitalism no-one is equal before the law. The rich and famous get away with crimes that “average” people would get thrown in jail for years for, simply getting off with a slap on the wrist. Which is complete and utter bull-shit. Due to the out of control nature of capitalism money has increased peoples ability to gain power and manipulate the government and law making agencies of this government to such a degree that anything short of a revolution will not be able to “reform” it along with all of its crooked, corrupt, and otherwise incompetent organisms. Evidence of this can be seen quite clearly in recent news. Over 300 civil “servants” in Illinois have been found guilty and/or charged with corruption, slander, etc including the man who was trying to sell obama’s chair in the senate. Strangely he has no connection whatsoever to obama…weird. The corruption present in the government and civil service is so deep that it can never be reversed, or fought, corporations are too deeply entrenched and invested to ever be completely removed without a major revolution and re-structuring of society.

Perhaps when we see the “Great depression” life style return to average americans they will open their eyes as they did in the early 1900s and a real working class movement will begin, and the government will be completely rebuilt to embody the interests and goals of workers, farmers, and average Americans across this country. So in a way I hope this crisis goes on and on, and drags on and on for decades (which it could, it has in the past look at the great depression, it wasn’t just from 1933-39, but went well into 1940′s until nearly the end of the second world war and the increase in production that gave it that spike). Oh and folks don’t count on the government to start massive public works programs to re-vitalize the economy, because it didn’t really work all that well in the 30′s actually, what actually got the US out of the great depression was not the public works projects, it was wwII. So what is in store for the US now? The capitalists need a WWIII to get themselves out of this mess, so who is willing to sign up for the draft? Be the first on your block to come home in a pine-wood box!

I agree with Mark that capitalism must be regulated by competent regulators who are detached from commercial interests. However, well-intended but poorly conceived regulation helped us get into this mess. The regulators were trying to perform social engineering, to create an ownership society. The regulators in this case were finessed by short-sighted free market players. Governments are not skilled at upgrading economic systems, they are not designers. The regulators did not follow competent design practices in creating their regulations, they did not understand the incentives their new rules would create. How can we ever be sure that regulators can maintain the code of Capitalism? The system has become too large and complex, the rules too poorly enforced. There is too much spaghetti code and design processes are weak.

So who has the ability to design a better economic system? I like the goal of direct democracy, of skilled participant designers. For example, Donohue’s ideas about ‘open source values’, those are good lessons learned about participative design. To add to his concept of values, I think we can also learn from the open source design process, think of the systematic processes followed when a community creates a software product to replace a legacy system. We can start with core structures that are known to work, consider lessons learned by the failed past systems, improve the theory of operations, add new and better methods, find sponsors to help implement the new system incrementally, encourage early adoption of the new system by people who are motivated by enlightened self-interest (a desire to improve the system and world they live in), then allow the best ideas to freely emerge.

Like any open source system, a new economic system may need to be a parallel system for a time, until it is working well enough to ‘take over’ many of the functions of the previous system.

Maybe better regulation of capitalism is a good stop-gap measure, but I believe we really do need a new economic system alternative. Not capitalism, socialism, or any other -ism that has been tried in the past. Our conditions have never existed before, our needs are unprecedented, we need a new hybrid system with some innovative features.