Why do people spend money when they can get something much better free?

This is something that I find very puzzling. I do understand why somebody might wish to buy a diamond, rather than a cubic zirconium - even though it takes an expert to tell the difference, and the subjective experience is identical (well, not quite, because you can have a much bigger cubic zirconium for much less), and there's the benefit of being certain that you haven't bought a blood diamond, the reason people buy them is precisely because they are expensive. De Beers has spent a fortune in marketing, and the world's diamond miners ensure that diamonds only trickle into the market so the price can be kept high.

Do people buy software because it's expensive, though? Is there really some social benefit in announcing that you've been ripped-off? I don't see it.

Many, many, years ago Hewlett-Packard had an e-mail server. Quite a good one. It needed upgrading to deal, but it was basically sound, it was also popular, and sold quite well. However, HP decided to throw the product (HPmail) away. This was simply because, by so doing, they could get a deal with Microsoft to pay much, much less for their software licenses. This was before the days of Linux, and before the days of Apple's OS/X, so, as they saw it, they didn't have much choice, other than to use Microsoft's desktop. It does explain why there aren't many companies offering competitors to Microsoft exchange, though.

However, as everybody knows, well, everybody technical, you don't need exchange at all. You can give your users Outlook as their client, if they really want that, rather than the better solution of Mail on a Mac (much, much cheaper to support, much more reliable, much faster and much easier to use, of course - so, actually, hugely cheaper in terms of ROI an TCO), but use Linux, free, instead of exchange and have a much faster system.

Also, we know from Edward Snowden, even with a firewall, your exchange server is an open book, a complete security disaster, if you worry about security at all, you'd certainly not have one.

Are there any kickbacks? Do IT people who manage to get their employers to buy Exchange get any money or other inducements from the distributors or from Microsoft?

I'd truly like to know, because it's important to know from a governance perspective. A company is obliged, under governance, to make the best use of company assets - paying for an inferior product is poor governance. If this happens, or has happened, a company is also in danger of prosecution under the UK bribery act - if it has any offices in the UK.

The pharmaceutical industry has paid thousands of millions of dollars in fines, over the past few years, for bribing doctors, hospitals, psychiatrists, chemists and others to promote their drugs and force expensive, and often inferior, drugs on us.

Is it likely that the IT industry is completely free of this sort of thing?

Should investment companies or funds be allowed to vote as shareholders?

This is a philosophical question, with implications for jurisprudence. A company is given the status of a corporation (from 'corpus' a body) in the legal fiction that it is an independent agent that can, like human beings, own things and enter into contracts. One question, raised in the 'Unity of the Mind' (ISBN: 9780312120177) is whether there is such a thing as a 'group mind', that would mean that, like Hobbes Leviathan, companies would be genuine agents. This question is connected, but different.

If you own shares in a company, you, as an owner, can influence the direction the company takes by voting at general meetings. That's what that sense of 'ownership' means. If, though, you buy shares in a fund, an investment trust, say, then you're buying a company that buys companies. You're effectively authorising the fund to act as your proxy when voting as a shareholder for the companies that it has bought.

So far so ordinary. The effect this has, though, is to take the control of companies away from direct human control. If most of the shares of a company are owned by other companies, then the directors of the company no longer need to appeal to all their shareholders in order to achieve what they want, they only have to convince the few people, who have the effective proxies from thousands, that it is in their interest.

That's where the temptation to corruption arises. Instead of the stock market helping companies become more open and effective because they are controlled by the will of many shareholders, instead, a few individual humans, who don't own any of the shares themselves, but make a living out of charging those they hold shares for in proxy, make the decisions, because only a few of them are the shareholders.

So the power of these institutional investors tempts companies to court them, rather than the actual shareholders. Instead of needing to, for example, make the company more environmentally friendly, in the interests of many shareholders, they can simply take one person out to expensive lunches or, if they're less scrupulous, bribe directly with money, an not bother.

If voting shares could only be held by natural people, not corporations, investment companies could still make money from owning shares, but the distortion of the control of companies by companies would be avoided. Not completely, because institutional investors could still manipulate companies by taking rewards for buying or selling shares, but this would be less dangerous as there'd still be individual stock holders to prevent the corporation from acting wrongly.

If you see corporations not as legal fictions, but as actual entities, with the same rights and power as individuals, then none of this is a problem.

There is, though, the problem that, since they are not individuals, companies cannot be put in prison. The sanctions open to controlling people are missing.

If you hold that companies should only be owned (in the sense of controlling ownership) by natural persons the danger that rogue companies pose to humanity, by, for example, turning a country into a corporate plutocracy by bribing the governments to act in the interests of the companies, rather than natural human owners, is much reduced.

Art, performance, composition and work - thoughts after watching 'Tim's Vermeer'

A fascinating film. If X -> Z and Y -> Z is X <-> Y?

That's the question. If it is, then Vermeer used almost exactly the same optical equipment. I wasn't convinced before, but, now, it'd take some amazing evidence to convince me that Vermeer didn't.

I warmed to Tim over the film and, somehow, it is necessary (and fun) to watch the film to get the full picture, so to speak.

With Beethoven, you don't get the conductor and orchestra modestly saying that they'd just 'copied his composition' - rather you admire the performance.

Before today, I thought that performance art was a load of tosh. I've now seen Tim perform a work of visual art that really was a magnificent performance - almost like watching Beethoven's 5th being performed.

It reinforces, too, the point that the value of money is not that it brings leisure. For years there was the question about what people would do if there was no 'need to work' for money... but the question was mistaken. We have a need to work, that's far more fundamental than doing it for the money. Yes, of course, one needs money to live - but it was a persistent illusion that that was the reason for work.

The real motivation for work is delight in the work itself. It's been known a long time - karma yoga is the 'yoga of work'. It's proven by the massive amount of hard work that's produced wikipaedia - all of it done for no monetary reward. It's shown too by open source software being so much better than software that's written commercially.

Eliot could have been talking about the rediscovery of work:

“We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.”

What will we do with all the 'leisure time' that computers, machines, robots and the like bring us? We'll work.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt3089388/