Ranting to /dev/null

1) Really interesting thought. Took me a few readings to catch your gist (okay, I'm slow... so sue me! :-) ). I wish you'd fleshed out the thought more, as I'd like to see more of what you think here.

Maybe what we'll see is a destruction of the idea I hate: ownership of a building (thus paid for all the time) utilized a fraction of the time in a territorial way. Instead we'll see more full use of "facilities", people gathering together at all hours as they find time within their schedules, and a greater sharing of resources.

3) You know I've always hated your IP views on media ... I've thought you've sought out any argument you could to justify theft.

This is one of your more interesting arguments, because you take me back a long ways. I still remember the problem of buying "a song" (45rpm... but you still had to get the B-side when you bought the A-side) or buying the album (33 1/3rpm) ... and the cost-benefit analysis behind it. One hit wonders led you to the former, but really good groups justified investment in the latter.

But then we didn't have the choice of only taking what we wanted.

There were benefits to getting the collection... you found "hidden treasures", and you could find out who else was really into a particular group rather than just following their Top-40 activity.

Thanks for the pointer down memory lane. I still think it's a poor justification for theft!

5) No kidding!

And I obviously must think 2 years is about long enough to stay in one place. (I'm settled in Champaign, IL now.)

Looking forward to hearing your 2L thoughts!
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RDS

hit me up when you get back in town. i have orientation most of this week. but i can sneak out for a beer, or, beers.

Randy: With respect to the first, I just finished Society and Puritanism in Pre-Revolutionary England, which discusses, among other things, the Puritan's insistence upon not working on Sunday, an insistence almost unique among Protestants at the time, and all contemporary groups with Sabbatarian leanings can generally trace their lineage back to the Puritans. Especially interesting is that the other main Reformed traditions--Geneva and the Netherlands--aren't particularly Sabbatarian, and Calvin actually discussed moving the rest day to Thursday.

The author suggests that the move in England was t basically motivated by two things. First, it was part of the movement towards rejecting Roman Catholic saints days, which happened all over the place, and for which people could be punished if found working on them. Theologically, this was part of rejecting papist influences which were seen as both foreign interference in domestic affairs and attempts by the old regime to maintain its authority by restricting progress.

But Hill is really interested in the economics of the thing. In an agrarian society, saints' days weren't particularly problematic, for two reasons: 1) most people were seasonal agricultural laborers or permanently attached to someone's household, so missing a particular day of work didn't directly affect their day-to-day income, and 2) frequently there wasn't anything to do anyways, because agriculture lends itself to brief periods of intense labor followed by extended periods of not much, especially in the winter. But in a society shifting towards wage-labor and production, forbidding someone from working what could conceivably be more days out of the week than not means that that person can't actually feed his family on those days.

So if on one hand Sabbatarianism was intended to promote productive work six days a week, it was also intended to protect people from having to work all the time, as the growing industrialization even in the 16th and 17th centuries started pressuring people to do so.

3) I know we differ here, but my basic position is that intellectual property rights aren't really property "rights", they're civil privileges, and violating them may and under certain circumstances should be illegal, but theft it's not. It just occurred to me that we may simply be seeing the elimination of a market inefficiency from which some people had previously made a lot of money.

Additionally, it's worth pointing out that the concept of the "album" was not really an artistic concept to begin with. It arose as a response to technical realities. The length of the original LPs was chosen as being sufficiently long such that most classical performances would fit on a single two-sided disc. Pop performers realized they could charge more for an album than a single, so they started producing enough songs at a shot to fill the longer format. Doesn't mean they were any good, but there you go. Now with packaging completely atomized, there's no need to buy all the extra stuff--including the actual physical media, which can take up quite a bit of space.

I agree with you on the record companies' business model. While I like buying full albums, that's because in the realm of indie rock/pop, there's usually enough good songs to justify it. But if I liked the latest Billboard hits, then why would I buy anything other than those songs?