"We have met the enemy and they is us." Walt Kelly, Pogo.

In an appropriately titled, though very OT thread,
a whole bunch of people have been writing:

Said systems being composed of humans it is the humans
that bring the greed and fear (not forgetting the pride, envy, gluttony,
lust, vanity, anger and sloth) to the system.

shape-shifting,

And these rights when given to 'human citizens' [No equal rights for
Martians?] produce sweetness and light?

The problem is not in the stars but in ourselves.

One citizen should have more rights than the 10,000 employees and 100,000
shareholders (making up 110,000 citizens) in a corporation?

Gee, and I thought limiting a corporation's 'rights' to that of a citizen
was pretty good on the 'human citizen' side of the equation.

I move hubris and paranoia be added to the seven deadlies.

--
Nicholas O. Lindan, Cleveland, Ohio
Consulting Engineer:  Electronics; Informatics; Photonics.

...

jul1304 from Lloyd Erlick,

For all the world's disparagement of America, we really owe
a debt for the concept of 'separation of church and state'.
That has been a powerful lever for slowly prying freedom out
of the oppressors.

I think there could be a strong case made for the separation
of corporation and state. And indeed, the spurious
anthropomorphizing of the corporation should be reversed. As
the situation stands at present, the corporation is enabled
to display all the worst features of the person, such as
uncontrolled greed and self interrest, but none of the
positive features. Ordinary morality should apply as well.

regards,
--le

Well, perhaps not.  I'm neither an organizational genius, people person,
expert fund raiser, nor personally wealthy.  I can't drop $10k buying up
product in the hopes I can sell enough of it to not lose my shirt (which
I understand is the process behind the continued availability of Azo
paper -- Kodak continues to produce it, a batch at a time, solely on the
basis of orders by one private distributor who resells it to everyone
else who finds it irreplaceable).

Long term, this is likely to be the only way to keep film alive -- there
will come a day when Kodak, Agfa, and Fuji will get out of the film
business the way they got out of glass plates, dismantling the
capability to produce them even by special order, within the past decade
-- unless they can be shown enough profit to warrant maintaining both
the equipment and the expertise needed to continue maintaining and
operating it (even in a complete vacuum of new product development).

One form of profit in a world of mass production is to guarantee sale of
a complete production run.  A few years ago, I built and flew model
rockets (I quit when the rockets I wanted to fly conflicted with my
budget, Federal regulations, and the spectre of new regulation
post-9/11).  It was well known that Estes, who had, over a history of
more than forty years, discontinued more than a few types of model
rocket motor, would produce any discontinued type for which they still
had the tooling for anyone who would buy up a full day's production
(which was tens of thousands of units, I might add, at a factory dock
cost of about a dime a unit; model rocketry is a small hobby, and it
didn't happen much).

The same is true of Kodak, for products they're still capable of
producing (no glass plates, no more -- the machinery to do that job is
gone, either scrapped or sold to someone who isn't using it to make
photographic materials), though the quantities are probably even more
staggering -- but if we let the capability to produce a product die, if
the machines to coat and slit film to width, or the production lines
that make CD-4 or C-41 dye couplers or sensitizing dyes for silver
halide emulsions are ever scrapped, there will be no going back;
photography will be relegated to processes not much more advanced than
those Mathew Brady used in 1865, with hand coated wet or dry plates or
paper negatives, single-digit ISO speeds (if even that good), and
processing chemicals made from whatever we can scrounge from industrial
processes or natural materials.

So no, I'm not capable of starting a co-op to do volume purchasing and
maybe, just maybe, keep film production alive beyond the point where a
collapsing distribution network would kill the production.  But there
are people in this community who are capable.  Question is, do they see
the necessity, or will they, before it's too late?