What are /r/gue's favorite Products & Services?

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Sure, there would still be piracy. You can never totally eliminate a black market.

However, I think there's at least some evidence out there that a large and valuable proportion of consumers are nonetheless willing to pay rather than pirate, especially when artists release a quality product at a reasonable price, and/or in some way that makes their release at least marginally more valuable than a pirated copy, in a way that makes it at least as easy to obtain as the pirated product, and are explicit about the fact that the consumers' money goes primarily towards the artist themselves, thereby enabling them to create more of the same. Radiohead, Trent Reznor, and Louie CK are notable examples, but even smaller independent artists have had success with such an approach.

So once again, art that society finds valuable will continue to be created by people who can figure out creative ways of selling it. Therefore artificially supporting the unjustifiedly high salaries of unnecessary middlemen, in order to continue making an increasingly unwanted distribution system available, is wasteful. Moreover I would argue that insofar as such middlemen's interest (i.e. profit) is nearly always divergent from those of the artist and consumer alike, allowing their rigid and outdated distribution systems to remain a dominant market force is affirmatively harmful to the artists' and consumers' shared interest in the creation and experience of the art form itself.

I'm sorry but I am simply unable to follow your logic there.

You are trying to say that religion is a science because people interpret it different ways. This is not completely different from what science does. Science constantly rewrites what science is. I also just flat out disagree with this:

>over which he claims no certainty.

The pope says what is moral or not. The pope says that abortion is wrong, so to a religious follower that is absolute truth. I don't really see how you can argue against that.

Ethics is not what I am talking about, ethics is a really different subject matter that does not use the scientific method. Science has data and quantifiable findings that explain phenomena. None of that has to do with how shitty it is to shoot a puppy. I can't use the scientific method to tell you how many times worse it is to kick a child than it is to hit a woman, it is not science.

Again that confusing rhetoric. You seem to be passing off modern science as making as much sense as acupuncture. Which is frankly just obscene. Science has a methodology that follows mathematics and logic, it is a process used to get closer to the truth. Acupuncture is just sort of something that people do because it seems to have good results. Completely irrelevant.

Sorry but you really seem steadfast in your distaste for science. You really pass off the amazing marvel that is modern science quickly without having much respect for what the scientific method actually is or what it has to do with what science actually is. I hate to be a jerk about this but you simply need to be more educated on what science actually is before you can make assertions like saying that ethics is science.

http://wiki.answers.com/Q/Why_is_ethics_called_a_normative_science

Pretty much every animal with a nervous system is risk averse. If you're going to appeal to evolution, you don't have to draw a conclusion that abandons rational thought. See Dan Kahneman's Thinking, Fast and Slow. And while sociality can be abandoned quite easily, abandoning risk aversion will just get you killed, which is to say it's not likely to happen.

Intelligence is malleable, not fixed. Carol Dweck's research is most famous in demonstrating this (see this article). The most important factors in intelligence is the number of hours of work put in and the quality of those hours. If you want anecdotal experiences, here's a reddit thread full of them (I'd pay particular attention to the comment about a guy and his twin brother).

Even without the research and anecdotal experience, something as simple as an application of Occam's Razor should lead you to the same conclusion. We all probably agree that the greatest contributors to a child's development are a combination of early childhood education, the quality of the parents, and the quality of the schools and teachers. Given that we all have experience with shitty teachers and parents and that should easily explain the variation we see, why would you have to resort to a superfluous genetic explanation?

[](/concede) that Universities sometimes combine lush cosmopolitanism with maximum utility, overturning the argument. Here's my anecdote:

[](/con)The University of Iowa flanks the eastern side of the Iowa River. The university campus, and the pentacrest, five granite structures at the core of the university, are located to the Northwest of Clinton and Washington streets. Moving away from the river, eastward past the bars and shops in the downtown area, one arrives within the working class neighborhoods of Iowa City. Coralville, on the other side of town, is more modern and has larger homes and the newer high school. Colleges, many of them being built long before the shift to suburban living, often exist in higher density, lower income areas. High density hosing areas exist near Northwestern University in Evanston (which lies well within the Chicago grid layout).

Although (/pro) The town where I grew up, has zero pawn shops within the city limits. There is no university near by to overturn many of the variables listed by ThreeHolePunch. The owners of a nearby pawn shop live within my hometown.

I feel that people with some measure of wealth are less likely to take (pawnshop-esque) risks regarding their wealth. We could say that investment is risky, for example, but that must assume the socio-economic factors that contribute to the type of risk taken. For example, my neighbors, a University of Chicago professor, Resturant chain owner/manager, partner at a downtown law firm, and my parents, who were both attorneys, would not likely partake in pawn-shopping. Since my dad has retired though he now day trades, with a group of neighborhood friends who share similar interests.

Ah, yes and no. I doesn't need to be material wealth, but it does have to be something. The ones that have nothing an are content more often than not feel like they have a whole lot. So they might look at some one that's richer in money and think: "I'm so happy I don't have to live my life working just to buy expensive things I don't need.", They still feel superior, and that makes them happy.

Yes, I won't deny it, some people actually don't care. But I think (and I don't know about any studies that confirms this, but there are other that shows similar things) that most people look to other for reassurance that they are doing the right thing and that they should be happy.

But then again, I could just argue that doing anything in the name of happiness is meaningless, My source is a video, so.., as almost nothing can really bring us out of our equilibrium, for more than a little while.

[](/con) And that is the prevalent attitude that is the root cause of "evil": that we can somehow ignore and render irrelevant our place in the grand scheme of life; that we are separate from the environment we live and breathe in; that all that matters is humanity and individuals without giving heed to the ecological context our precious economy is so desperately reliant on.

Who is losing out when two people engage in a voluntary, uncoerced trade? When the short-term gains of individuals are prioritized, the answer is, everyone not part of the deal.

Jared Diamond outlines a number of factors instrumental in the demise of civilizations in this talk, and the most relevant one to this issue is that when the actions of the elite decision-makers in a society are insulated from the consequences of their self-serving actions, sustainability is undermined and the civilization slides towards ruin.

The ever increasing complexity of life requires an ever more fine-tuned balance. In the context of humanity on earth, we are all the decision-makers in for our own short-term gains, and it will destroy us as a civilization if not a species.

When it comes down to it, good and evil are nothing but subjective constructs we learn from watching tv(or whatever your myth-delivery mechanism is). Very useful constructs for self-government and rule of law; not so useful for long-term global resource investment. For that, we need someone to make good decisions. That someone is a government.

> but point out a very slight and pedantic use of 'as a whole' rather than 'on the whole'.

Not that freedictionary.com needs to be the last word on things, but:

> as a whole: All parts or aspects considered; altogether

> on the whole: Considering everything; In most instances or cases

So either they are essentially synonymous, or my word choice infers that every sport should be considered together under the single rubric of "sports", where "on the whole" would imply that on an individual basis, most sports will bear out my proposition.

What is /r/gue for if not a little pedantry now and again? ;)

> And though it is slightly off topic, I would disagree that hooligans would go looking for violence elsewhere.

I am no expert on UK sociology, but does the word "chav" suffice to refute the point?

Well, there's very little new under the sun. Everything is stolen from somewhere else and remixed. The secret of success is to steal only the things which resonate deeply with you. That way you build a consistent new whole.

The internet is kinda magical. Here I am, sitting on my couch at 6 AM and discussing internet policy with someone literally from the other side of the planet.

I really should go to sleep now... Finally... But feel free to add me on Facebook and let's keep in touch :) https://www.facebook.com/elver

If you buy into Gary Taubes's low carbohydrate school of nutrition, then pasta and soda are equally bad for you. Sugar is cheap, and carbohydrates are essentially sugar.

I certainly can't eat more than a few servings of almonds a day, and picky kids definitely aren't going to.

There's not much incentive to develop free closed source software, but there's a huge incentive to develop free open source software: you can get help from other people, instead of doing all the work yourself. That's why big corporations devote significant resources to open source projects.

A similar principle can apply in science. A lot of research is hindered by patents; for details, see The Gridlock Economy by Michael Heller. Doing away with knowledge ownership reduces rewards (sometimes), but it also reduces costs.