New Leader Of UK's Green Party: Nuclear Power Is The Betamax Of The Energy World

[Confusious]

38. Three people have agreed with me so far on the betamax term

If you use an analogy, you should probably make sure your message is going to get across.

When I read the betamax analogy, and since I knew what betamax was, that was what came to mind.

You don't seem to want to accept that. You seem to think that I should have thought something else, even though I had the benefit of knowledge of what it was, how it worked.

You seem to think I have to adhere to her interpretation, nothing else is acceptable.

Seems rather authoritarian to me.

LUDDITES:

The industrial revolution started of with small factory owners, and only later got to the big factory owners. The luddites wanted to protect their interests, the making of textiles within the guild system.

As Ogilvie (2004) argues, the guilds negatively affected quality, skills, and innovation. Through what economists now call "rent-seeking" they imposed deadweight losses on the economy. Ogilvie says they generated no demonstrable positive externalities and notes that industry began to flourish only after the guilds faded away. Guilds persisted over the centuries because they redistributed resources to politically powerful merchants. On the other hand, Ogilvie agrees, guilds created "social capital" of shared norms, common information, mutual sanctions, and collective political action. This social capital benefited guild members, even as they hurt outsiders.

The guild system became a target of much criticism towards the end of the 18th century and the beginning of the 19th century. They were believed to oppose free trade and hinder technological innovation, technology transfer and business development. According to several accounts of this time, guilds became increasingly involved in simple territorial struggles against each other and against free practitioners of their arts.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guild

So really, we just replaced one master with another, not some high minded "freedum" with slavery. They also weren't "heros of the working class" most people were still peasants. They wanted to protect their privileges.

If anything, at that time, a "hero of the working class" was a freaking peasant.

PS. "do unto others' is the golden rule, and every civilization has had it own form. Egypt had a form, 1500 years before Confucius. "Now this is the command: Do to the doer to cause that he do thus to you."

PS. You're defending the scribes and handwritten books, when everyone could be reading, and learning, from books printed on a printing press.