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genericid

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Commons Clause 8 years ago

If something is not free, it is not open source. The difference between free software and open source is one of ideology and philosophy. In practice, they're the same.

Please don't post unsubstantive comments to HN.

Sorry for that.

More importantly, please stop using HN primarily for political battle. That's destructive of the intellectual curiosity this site exists for, and we ban accounts that do it.

Unless you assume that writing something political always means engaging in a battle, I don't think I'm doing that.

Democracy is not a system, it's a principle. The principle that the people rules. Today's representative democracies apply that principle very imperfectly.

The rulers don't have to be particularily benevolent to promote the people's interests if their interests and the people's interests are the same.

Democracies elect idiots "who wreck it all" all the time. That is not the problem with monarchies. The problem with monarchies is that a monarch will promote the interests of the monarch, the nobility will promote the interests of the nobility. Only a democracy will promote the interests of everybody. That is true whether we talk about a state or a company.

In case of a failing business, an employee is free to vote with his feet at any moment, moreover if he is valuable specialist in a competitive market.

A non-democratic economy works for certain people under certain circumstances. That is simply not enough.

Equating democratic elections, the act of freely chosing how you run your society, to what amounts to fleeing a sinking ship is beyond ridiculous. So is calling the US a command economy.

Post-tax income is an irrelevant metric because higher taxes are compensated by the services they pay for. Our level of defense spending is not insignificant, yours is offensive. We don't need to outspend the rest of the world, we just need to convince Russia that invading the EU is not worth it.

I don't think Germans are happier than Americans because we take more opiates. Your claim that productivity (or, for that matter anything else) is more important than happiness is plain absurd. I prefer a good life over one that ends with me jumping off a bridge I built.

I'm a big believer that a business must have an owner.

Surely you are also a big believer that a country must have a king. If not, why not?

Words of my father: "a collective ownership of business is like life in family where a woman has 10 husbands, all trying to make love to her at the same time."

Quotations aren't even arguments if they come from famous people.

That is not a list of plants being built, it's a list of planned plants (for a broad definition of planned).

- 3 plants (Lünen, Profen and Niederaußem) have apparently been cancelled.

- The promoter of Kalkar-Appeldorn has applied for a permit

- The one of Stade has gotten one, but there is a lawsuit against that

- Datteln replaces a plant that was shut down in 2014, though the old plant only had about 1/3 of the power.

Meanwhile, coal power plants are being shut down without being replaced all the time.

Why would they ever voluntarily remove a game unless it had broken some kind of law?

Because they're bankrupt. Which they will eventually be, the only question is when.