Oh Yabby, Yabby Yabby. I should do my homework?
““Apples first so called "golden age" was between 89-91. At that
stage, he had MS over a barrel.”
“He” left Apple in '85. He didn't return until '97.
“What Gates did was let anyone buy the closest thing to a Mac,
for the paltry price of 49.95$”. Dam'! How did I miss that sale? Which year did IBM give away free computers with every Microsoft OS purchased?
What an heroic story; how David with a paltry 90% market share took on and defeated the monstrously monopolistic Goliath Apple, which never achieved even half that much in it's entire history.
Don't let facts get in the way of a good story, Yabby.
“Now lets take Grim's philosophy. We'll go and deal with that evil
Mr Gates, confiscate 20 billion $ of his wealth and send the poorest
1 billion people a cheque for 20$ each. What would happen in the
real world? 20$ would buy them quite a bit of food each, they
would live it up, who can blame them?”
Live it up indeed. They could probably even give their starving children the first decent meal they had had in their entire lives.
But we don't approve of giving starving children a meal, do we Yabby? At least, not while our own children aren't starving, anyway. That would only exacerbate the overpopulation problem, and we certainly wouldn't want that.
Someone recently pointed out that if the entire human race lived in a single city at the density of say New York, the city would comfortably fit on Tasmania.
So remind me again, why is keeping the population down so important we should condone starving children to death?

CJ

Have been enjoying a mostly voyeuristic approach to this thread with Squeers, TBC and Grim providing wonderful riposte to the repetitive and stereotyping form of argument presented by Hume or Stern, ie, if you criticise capitalism you must be a commie.

Grim's possible outing of Stern as the rigid pom Col Rouge - Stern has yet to declare undying love for Maggie Thatcher, now that would be the final piece of evidence for me. Of course, now I have given warning to Stern not to mention Maggie-dearest, but I am betting it is only a matter of time... the real Col Rouge will not be able to restrain himself.

Stern - you'll like this because apparently it makes me a failure. (Egad!)
I don't own or drive a car - used to but decided I preferred not to (much less stress and expense).
So I catch the bus and walk. Walking, in particular, allows me the luxury of passing physically through my environment, as opposed to being cocooned inside a moving pod. And I'm not trying to prove anything here (I do ride in cars sometimes), except that I'm pleasing myself as to how I get around.

Squeers,

I have to go out shortly, but wanted to say that I've got something by Thorstein Veblen called "Pecuniary Emulation", which I'll chase up later. He posited that envy and hunger for esteem were the driving psychological spurs to economic success.

Hey Poirot, I have Veblun's 'theory of the leisure class' where he refutes the Austrian school's premise that the market is rational, and that consumers always buy things for rational reasons.
I found his arguments far more compelling than Mises, for instance, who basically refused to consider empirical evidence; preferring the 'purity' of mathematical formulae.
Observed facts just get in the way, really.
That sound in the background is Peter Hume, choking on his chicken sandwich.

“Col Rouge, is that you? Have you been reincarnated as the arse end of a boat? I had no idea you were so fond of the nanny state.”

As far as I know, Col rouge is entitled to post as and when he/she choose.

Re
As For “No, they (governments) just supply such things as old age pension, disability pension, unemployment assistance, rent assistance, New Enterprise Encentive schemes, hardship subsidies, farm assistance, exceptional circumstances assistance... But I agree, these are not acts of charity, are they? “

Obviously, in your case they could have spent more on spelling (“Encentive” Schemes)

Actually what government does is TAX people to pay other people, on a government selectively biased basis and spend more on administration and bureaucrats than is actually delivered in value to the recipients.

The most inefficient way possible. That’s “government for you”

Just like one famous politician said
"The larger the slice taken by government, the smaller the cake available for everyone."

“Did the Great Wall of China keep the rabbits out?”
That wall is ancient and was designed to keep people out
But we will all recall, the purpose of walls, in a collectivist context, has been to keep people imprisoned into the system which abuses them and many risked and sacrificed their lives to escape it, hardly a recommendation for collectivisim.

As for you being a collectivist or not, that does not matter, you are ranting against libertarian capitalism which has produced many of the innovations which benefit most people.

I really could not care about what you believe, other than it will be some form of government control of a collectivist nature and will be inferior to what free markets and free people can produce for themselves, without the nanny state ruling their every thought and action.

And when we talk about bringing that Chinese bamboo curtain down… you can thank Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger for getting that ball rolling (two politicians not known for their “collectivist” values).

*Oh Yabby, Yabby Yabby. I should do my homework?*

Yup Grim, you should! Until 1989, Apple was in fact
a larger company then Microsoft, with a larger market
cap. They were also years ahead of anyone with their
GUI and mouse and Apple Mac. The board got rid of
Jobs because despite all this, Apple Mac sales were
so poor and he was off spending money on other ventures.

What limited Apple from becoming the standard, as MS did
some 10 years later, was their greed, as voted on by consumers.
Years later they tried to change their big mistake by
licensing Apple clones, but it was too late. Windows had
become the standard. Apple could have achieved all that,
10 years earlier. Gates basically got rich, by giving
consumers a bargain.

*Someone recently pointed out that if the entire human race lived in a single city at the density of say New York, the city would comfortably fit on Tasmania*

Which of course has absolutaly nothing to do with the growing
population being unsustainable.

*But we don't approve of giving starving children a meal, do we Yabby?*

Grim, you are free to sell your computer to save another couple
of starving babies. As we all can see, you choose not to.

My point once again is that we need solutions to the growing human
population problem, or all questions of sustainability go clean
out the window. Clearly you don't even think that there is
a problem of a growing human population.