Common decency, maybe, though I suspect that you're allowing a subset to stereotype the whole. Common sense? "I'm motivated by profit! I have a product that is making me money if I just leave it alone! I'm going to close it down!" That's not sense, common or otherwise. By definition, sense helps you reason your way towards behaviors that lead to your goal.
I'm sure that, had we laid down and shut up, they would had been able to make more money off the closure of a thriving, albeit tiny portion of their portfolio. Their stock has been taking due to negative reputation, not because they couldn't find a way to make money off shutting the game down. That's what I meant by their common sense being motivated by greed.
It's not "greed." It's "enlightened self-interest." When people allow greed for the short-term to blind them to their long term self interest, they are not being enlightened.
Call it what you want. I don't see much of a difference. That sounds like semantics somebody tells themselves to help them get through the day. They're allowing short-term greed to motivate them to make
us lose out on our long-term investment. See, me being motivated by greed doesn't mean I, personally, have to pay the long-term costs of my short-term gains. The only way that would be true is if we all lived in our own little bubble dimension. I'm not immortal, if I made a billion dollars right now even if it cost the world 50 times that in 40 years, I'm still gold. I'm not even counting on being alive that long.
I'm not saying all people do this. I'm just saying that it'd be extremely naive to imagine a world where nobody ever did, and just kinda cross your fingers and hope that they wouldn't.
And, in the long run, unless you permit such people the reins of power to change the rules away from capitalism (as has happened frequently in the last 15 years, most notably with the increasing amounts of regulation that actually help established powerhouses become de facto monopolies by hiking cost-of-entry to ludicrous sums), it hurts those who so allow themselves to be blinded.
First, I don't care about sticking to one ideology, I only care about what works. That tends to be a moderated and mixed approach.
Second, I ain't sure what world you've been seeing where we've been moving 'away' from capitalism. We've been deregulating things that were regulated for the last 30 years. Labor laws and public support for labor support has been falling steadily. Call it a victory or a loss at your own discretion, but that's how it's been.
Third, again, wouldn't 'enlightened self interest' compel these 'established' interests to fight for said regulation. Again you're promoting a system that endorses a motivator (however grand you feel it is) then complaining about when the powerful use that motivator to do bad things. It's like you can recognize something is wrong, but you can't and won't blame the ideology, so you are arguing that we just need more of the ideology.
That's why I don't try to strive to 'cleave' to any one ideology and just look at what does or doesn't work, taking a scalpel to the problem where it's needed.
If deregulation in some areas, like the regulation that you claim stops businesses from starting up, can help, I'd be for it. You'd have to prove that it does, and I'd be skeptical that it does.
I'm typically skeptical of taking the advice of the players profiting from the advice, especially if said advice commonly makes everybody (and myself) else pay for it, and it's been these big players that you say are profiting from regulation constantly telling us to let them do whatever they want then hope unicorns and puppies explode out of it, so it
would be a tough sell, but I'm not closed to the idea.
But that said, even if you were able to convince me of that, it's not going to necessarily make me strive to some other ideological spectrum.
Fourth, why is it always cool when somebody with a lot of power uses their 'enlightened self interest' to promote themselves, but suddenly frowned on if say, I used my 'enlightened self interest' to band together with my peers to fight for a higher wage. Or to keep a game running that I liked and spend money on. Kinda the pot calling the kettle black a bit. Maybe my best tool in my arsenal
is cooperation and teamwork with my peers. Like what we're doing here, with NCSoft. I know for sure that if this effort to save this game was left up to any one man, it would had died on arrival.
Proper capitalism hasn't been in place in my living memory.
'Proper' capitalism hasn't been in place in anybody's living memory, because I don't think any of us here can truthfully claim to had been around in the 1800's.
It was closest when I was a small child in the 80s. Proper capitalism respects life, liberty, and property. Life is the property of those who bear it, and shall not be infringed unless they are using it to snuff out others'. Liberty is the freedom to choose to act as you will, so long as you do not use it to do violence or theft to another. Property is anything you produce through your own industry or obtain from another who gives it willingly. Generally, this is accomplished through trade, but it is within the rights of somebody to simply give away property and make it that of another (willing) recipient, as well.
Here you're mostly just trying to humanize unfeeling abstract concepts, and I'm not really buying it much. Capitalism isn't the smile of a baby, or the first tender kiss of two lovers on a warm spring morning. It's just an extremely complex social and mathematical system of processing resources. That's it. It's not your date, lover, best friend, mother, or son. It's a tool. If it needs to be tweaked, then do so. Capitalism doesn't 'respect' anything, because it's a tool. It can be used to motivate respect for human beings, and it can be used to screw them over, same with any laws or social constructs.
Secondly, property and rights are also human constructs that serve as a polite way to do business slightly less barbarically. They're in the same sort of boat as laws. Idealizing them and humanizing them like such makes you blind to their origins, uses and costs.
You might feel you should have the right to life. But that's a really flexible concept, even then, because then you go on to talk about some exceptions to the right of life, such as defending yourself. That's because your right to life is a pleasantry we as a society give to each other to make society better to live in. It would behoove you though to realize that said right is only backed up in the same way as everything else; through bribery, diplomacy or force, and only exists as long as enough people say it does and have the ability to uphold it.
You might feel you have right to property, but what entitles you to the Earth? You say that you should have the right to things you 'produce' with your own industry, but at what point where you entitled to the materials you 'produced' with? Or the land needed to have space to produce it with. At some point down the economic chain somebody is getting something for nothing.
At some point you have people basically laying claim to things they don't own, telling everybody else that now I own this and you can't have it, then wanting compensation for use of resources that they just kind of said they own. Then smugly telling themselves they have a magical inherent 'right' to all this and the ability to reap everything sown on that land, to the point where people that didn't get to yell 'tag' on the whole of the earth, to make their daily bread, have to work that person's land because they have no other choice and no 'right' to anything that sustains their life.
That system is inherently flawed. You have a ruling caste that smugly tells everybody that they have a special 'right' to the proceeds of their work because they have a 'right' to do what they want with property. Knowing full well that their rights only exist as long as the community doesn't band together and lynch them.
But you know what? Again, I'm not interested in cleaving entirely to one system or another. If parts of capitalism work, if pretending that rights are important helps me get some of the things my own 'enlightened self interest' wants, if working to ensure some people who frankly are competition with me have a 'right' to property they claimed that nobody owned can still make all of us better off, I'm for it.
But I'm not for cleaving to this ideal even if it sinks me. My 'self interest' wouldn't allow it.
Swindling, theft, and deception-based "deals" meant to cost people more than they thought are all to be criminalized, as is extortion and violence (when the violence is not done in self-defense or defense of another). Basic rule for liberty: you can swing your fist however you want as long as you don't include my face in its path.
Yeah, but if you can swing your fist so hard it creates hurricanes, then you have more responsibility with your fists than previously thought, wouldn't you agree? If a man existed, as a thought experiment, that could swing his fist so hard that even if it didn't connect with your face, but created an air pressure difference strong enough that it could blow away an entire neighborhood, would you not have to amend your basic rule for liberty?
That's the state of the world, though, right now. And that's the state of the world as it always has been, and always will be. There are people who can 'swing' their 'fist' of money hard enough to damage those that they don't directly 'hit'. So once again a 'basic rule' or ideology that strives to solve all problems isn't something I want to cling too hard to.
You might think that people swinging their hurricane fists occurs in a victimless bubble, but reality rarely plays that out. Reality requires solutions that are more nuanced than "I'll do whatever I want and hope that my poisoning my portion of the river stays in my side of the river".
Nothing. Except, usually, the self-interest of the other. If you fear your partner is going to pull a stunt like this, you can include in your leasing contract clauses meant to prevent it, requiring adequate warning if the contract is not to be renewed or financial penalties to the one who leaves without giving adequate warning. But if you don't put those in, there's nothing that should be enforced by statute against it. You can't legislate morality; you can only teach it and hope that it will be learned. Failing that, you can only hope that social pressure will at least encourage it.
That's the thing though, putting your hands up and watching a murder and going "Can't legalize morality!" makes for a poor society quickly.
You misunderstand. The reason I, at least, am arguing is that I fear the well-intentioned sentiments of those talking about how the laws should be changed will lead to either preventing more MMOs from being created (out of fear of what the new laws will require) or, worse, lead to still more laws because "well, the auto industry/computer industry/whatever is not so different..."
Giving the code or an executable to the players for something they've paid for that they have no reason to keep secret due to it being buried is hardly an undue burden on an MMO creator. REALLY, NCSoft wouldn't have to had done anything but step back and not get in the way; Tony V's crew was well on its way to reverse engineering a lot of it anyways for the legal purposes of creating this webpage.
I ain't asking for NCSoft to do much in the way of work. Heck, most of us are willing to PAY EXTRA for this. There's a thread like every week of somebody being like "We should start a kickstarter for this!", even though there's nothing to buy yet.
Saying that a company should be 'free' to make a self destructing product only INVITES abuse, majorly. "We shouldn't burden them with the horrible task of making sure their ovens don't break down and leak poisonous gas! If we legislate that even less people will be willing to make ovens!".
When you craft laws, you give power to a third party. You are legalizing, ultimately, the use of violence to extort behavior. So you have to be very, very careful what laws you advocate, because every single law is an abridgement of a freedom. Yes, even good ones: the laws against theft abridge my freedom to simply walk into your house and take your computer for my personal use; the laws against battery and murder abridge my freedom to beat you up because I don't like what you're saying about capitalism.
That's true, but the thing is, the nature of power is that, if it exists to take, somebody will and already has. If I don't give this power to this 'third party' then I'm basically giving it to somebody else.
In this case I'm saying 'building a product that can self destruct at any moment no matter how much of my own obligations I meet' is one of those powers that I don't feel NCSoft has proven themselves worthy of wielding, in the same way that you're saying "Killing people I don't like isn't a power that I or you should wield".
The fact that I am a moral man who would not do these things does not change that I do not have the freedom, legally, to do them thanks to those laws.
Again I agree. I just don't have the faith in people that they're all moral enough people they don't need those laws. Does that make sense? Maybe if 100% of people were you and didn't murder, we wouldn't need such a law. But I don't feel we live in a reality where people can't harm each other, legally, right now, with money. So I'm against letting them do that willy-nilly.
In order, however, to optimize productivity, one must not remove the freedoms to perform productive behaviors. Because theft, extortion, violence, and murder are detrimental to productivity, optimal law discourages or prohibits them. But the kinds of laws that would arise from the sentiments I see here would hinder productive, honest people in the name of preventing "hardship."
Optimizing who's productivity? Ultimately you're gonna have to balance one person's productivity against another. Me having thousands of dollars vanish overnight from this game harmed my productivity. Should I only care about NCSoft's needs?
These actions, again, don't take place in a vacuum. NCSoft's actions didn't take place in a bubble dimension where they have no impact on others.
Why then should I only be concerned with their 'productivity'? Is that in my personal enlightened self interest?
It is up to us as private citizens and members of the business community (whether customers or otherwise) to police good and bad treatment and caretaking of customers and consumer products. We do this as customers by choosing where to spend our money, and as citizens by bringing awareness and scrutiny onto those who act poorly (in this case, NCSoft). As producers, we actively strive to come up with better models and test them by doing business under them, and getting our customers to spread the word about us and hopefully proving the superiority of our methods.
All else is destructive, and thus to be shunned.
That's all well and good when it works. But for every City of Heroes, there's a Tabula Rasa and Auto Assault where this happened and nothing came for it because the community that you're relying on to 'police' the world wasn't capable of it.
I didn't see NCSoft suffer a darn thing from that, aside from the litigation with Garriott, which only then happened because they forged his resignation letter.
So you're basically saying that social justice only matters in cases where it harms a well enough organized base? Does it only matter when it effects 'my' community but isn't a problem with it effects 'theirs'?
This is why I fully support the efforts to destroy NCSoft in a PR battle, to put pressure on them to act as we wish through the court of public opinion, and to find agencies who might take over the product in a fair and legal way if we can persuade NCSoft to cut their losses. We are their customers, and they have angered us. We are well within our rights to scream it to the world so that all know of NCSoft's bad treatment of its customers. That's the market at work. It is why I am against legal action, however; what they have done is bad behavior, socially and economically, and should be punished in those courts. It is not against the rigid laws of ownership, and we should not tamper with those in this fashion. Simply refuse to do business with those who use these ownership models if you truly find them untenable. Otherwise, go in knowing the risks you take.
You're basically betting on a world where good outcomes only happen basically once in a while. And increasingly so as movers and shakers like the RIAA counter your ability to complain about them. If NCSoft was big and powerful enough of a company, it wouldn't be probably too hard for them to put this forum underground and demolish its support. I don't particularly care for that.
Boycotts have been, historically unsuccessful throughout history. This is a rare case, a mixture of a large enough tight knit community and a weak enough corporate entity. And we're still, honestly, losing. I have hope, but I'll have to admit that hope is largely optimism.
We shouldn't have to boycott every time a company decides there's an acceptable amount of cyanide to put in their hamburgers. Such idiocy should be just straight up illegal.
Again, I'm not advocating for a blanket 'everything is illegal' law, like you seem to think I am.
PR fights to change the minds of those who choose what ownership models to use, and even opening your own company to try out your superior models of ownership, are good. Trying to do it through the courts and the legislative process is bad, because your ideas are untested and cannot be brought into competition with other models for testing if you enforce them as laws from on high. If, in testing, your ideas work, you will not need to impose them as laws; others will adopt them out of that "base greed" you despise, because it gets more customers and thus more profits. By not imposing them as laws, you leave room for still others to try out still newer things, and succeed or fail on their merits, and the successful ones will likewise be mimicked.
I'm sorry, but that sounds a lot like "We should stick our junk in a beehive to see if it works out or not". I think there are definitely some things that are stupid or wrong enough we don't have to 'test out' alternative to.
This is swarm intelligence at work, and it is the ONLY way societies have ever advanced. When autocratic law stifled such innovation, it nonetheless happened...just in what were called "black markets" and "forbidden research."
I think if we have to have a 'swarm' intelligence to tell us that letting somebody close up something that you've invested so much money into on a whim like this is bad for customers, then we are doomed as a species to stupid ourselves off the face of the planet.
