Slashdot Mirror

Don't they make enough profit corporately that the increased wages make little impact on the overall profits, or are they too money-grubbing to really care?
I'm betting on the latter, personally.

Whole Foods has 91,000 employees. In their last year of independent operation, they had $15.7 billion in gross sales, $507 million net income (aka profit). That's $827 million before taxes, with $320 million in corporate income taxes, or 38.7%.

If you figure just half those 91,000 employees are wage slaves who used to work 30 hours a week, 50 hours/year, then increasing their pay from $10/hr to $15/hr would've resulted in (45,500 employees)*(1500 hours/yr)*($5/hr) = $341.25 million in additional wages. Payroll costs would have increased by an additional 7.65% (employer's fraction of Social Security and Medicare). Workers comp insurance for people involved in manual labor (warehousing and stocking) is typically around 5% of their wages. Assume the low-end employees didn't get any benefits.

So total cost of the $5 hourly wage increase would've been $384 million. That would've reduced income before taxes to $432 million, and net income after taxes to $271 million. Or 54% what it was before the wage increase.

If 3/4 of the employees were wage slaves earning the minimum, then these figures increase to $576 million in increased costs, reducing net income to $154 million, or just 30% what it was before the wage increase.

So you lose your bet. it would've made a huge impact on overall profits.

• Average profit margin (net income) for the grocery industry is just 2.85% of sales.
• Whole Foods was making a relatively stellar 3.2% profit.
• If half the workers got a $5/hr wage increase, that would've dropped to 1.7%.
• If 3/4 of the workers got a $5/hr increase, that would've dropped to 0.98%.

I think the main issue is that there are a lot of people living in the 5 boroughs who have been there all their life and are not the transient population that moved there for their 20s or even 30s who most likely are on the wealthier end of the spectrum (i.e. they appear fine to spend ridiculous amounts of money on rent and it is only increasing). The "lifers" of NYC have observed the cost of a 30-day metrocard go from $65 (circa 1998) to nearly double at $121 today. When you live in NYC, most people don't drive and completely rely on the bus/subway system MTA provides and thus is a necessity to get to work or school (yes, your high school might not be within walking distance or even the same borough and there is no school bus like the suburbs).

Subway ridership has increased over 35% in the same time frame of 1998-2018. During this time the MTA has mostly refreshed its rolling stock while doing some infrastructure improvements, which is good and obviously expensive. However, they've also reignited the 2nd Ave line work which is a major cost to the city and I suspect is the main financial drain and somewhat why it hasn't been explored in many decades. I can only imagine that it was started up again because someone ran a spreadsheet which showed that if they build this, they'll increase property values on the east side which means they can increase property taxes which means more revenue for the city. But how much of that is going back to the MTA?

I don't know the answers to this but I get the sense that budgets are somewhat getting driven by greed and the desire to further gentrify the boroughs rather than provide the best service for the people who have lived their all their lives. Simply saying "keep increasing the fare" is ignoring the needs of the majority of people that live in the city and won't move away after their few years of their "city living" experience.

(rant finished)

Sounds like they want to crack the Winograd Schema Challenge, i.e. questions with linguistic ambiguities that require the reader to resolve the ambiguities by referring to relevant background information: https://cs.nyu.edu/faculty/dav...

Number 3 would have no chances under the supreme court without a constitutional amendment, the reason the sawed off shotgun got rejected was because it wasn't useful in a war scenario.

The defendants were not represented at the USSC trial. The matter was referred back to the lower court for a determination but again, the defendants were not represented and by that time one was dead. The whole thing was a setup.

http://www.law.nyu.edu/sites/d...

If you applied the template of "what's in the health care/phamaceutical industry's best interests", the answer was always having a sick population. Following that, when people said there was no incentive to cure, only treat, they were called kooks.

Sure, OTOH, this company made a lot of money, and ultimately making money for the executives, even if it bankrupts the company, is the goal of the corporate leaders, i.e. the company (see private equity's "getting your bait back", and this Nobel Laureate's paper on bankruptcy for profit (PDF)). So, in terms of making huge scores for the executives, it can make sense in that context.

But make no mistake - it is most certainly in the health care / pharmaceutical industry's interests to treat, not cure.

Here's a non-paywall link to the story.

Yes, indeed, he is a professor of marketing and this is great marketing for his career! (Expect a forthcoming book by Fall).

Meanwhile, the rest of the world will leave such matters to the professors of law where they belong.

1. Apple is held to a higher standard because of their huge profit margins. Typically 20%-25%, vs about 5%-8% for the rest of the consumer electronics industry (net margin). One would hope some of that cornucopia of money consumers hand Apple would be put to use improving working conditions and paying their subcontractors more.

2. Completely agreed that a lot the time this goes completely overboard. e.g. criticizing suicides at Foxconn, when Foxconn had a lower suicide rate than Americans of the same age group.

The outrageous thing here isn't that they mark things up - everyone does that. It's how much Apple marks things up. The average net markup for all products and all industries is about only about 6%-10% depending on how you measure it. Apple is consistently 20%+.

Trivially false. Gender identity is a result of hormonal action upon the brain, and that hormonal response necessarily happens as a separate process after the formation of the genitals. Please review the literature on the subject.

Let me get right on that. I think I left my copy right next to my textbook on phrenology.

Trivially false. Gender identity is a result of hormonal action upon the brain, and that hormonal response necessarily happens as a separate process after the formation of the genitals. Please review the literature on the subject.

Humans do not have exactly two genders. Humans have two sexes. Gender identity is a related but distinct phenomenon, and gender expression is a further topic. You've never bothered to do even the slightest bit of research on gender development. Why don't you start with this article, which gives an overview of current medical knowledge. If you have an argument with any research contained therein, please do be specific. This topic is actually fairly interesting from a neurobiological perspective, but having the conversation polluted by uninformed bigotry is, frankly, boring and ineffectual.

I'm always interested in the opinions of folks if any article, regardless of the media source, replaced Trump with Obama in the article.

[John]

What if Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton Had Swapped Genders?
"A restaging of the presidential debates with an actress playing Trump and an actor playing Clinton yielded surprising results. "

What if it were a motorcycle vs a pine tree? The staged results of our staged event to make a senseless "point" supporting our narrative and bias may SHOCK you!

I'm always interested in the opinions of folks if any article, regardless of the media source, replaced Trump with Obama in the article.

[John]

What if Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton Had Swapped Genders?
"A restaging of the presidential debates with an actress playing Trump and an actor playing Clinton yielded surprising results. "

To Catch A Predator is a ratings gambit much like the Dateline shows that catch contractors scamming the public.

Nonetheless, the format clearly catches the entrapped in situations that might be uncomfortable to explain.

Let's not be unscientific and bigoted, you're challenged enough as is.

Because it may affect the handful of delusional, who consider themselves one sex despite having the sex-organs of the other. Why should these people's preference be more important, than that of the rest of us?

Being transgender is not a delusion. It is actually a fairly normal part of human biology and gender expression. The article goes into a great deal of detail (with citations) about why the DSM classification is unhelpful, and about the origin and development of gender identity from a neurological perspective. Generally, gender identity is a product of hormonal influences on the brain, but the sex organs necessarily form before that happens, and the brain doesn't always set itself to the right gender when the hormones kick in.

This should be considered a normal part of human development. In denying fundamental biology, you create a systemic violence against the differently gendered. You deny transgender persons a right to their own identity, and teach them to be ashamed of themselves for being who they are. This results in mass suicide. But you still feel the need to defend yourself against these people.

What is it about trying to argue with biology and failing that makes the conservatives so eager to try it again? With the same arguments, even? If being transgender is a preference, maybe mi's thing is that they just haven't stumbled upon a skirt they really like. They could be one Prada bag away from a fabulous new lifestyle :)

Does anyone seriously think she's going to support Science when the evidence says that it's a mental illness, not just an opinion?

Just an opinion? What? I don't know what you've been reading, but why don't you give this a skim and then maybe you can speak a little more sensibly on the topic.

Many of them are parents who don't want to pay for their kids. And, of course, some people are just confused, like you are.

Wait, so wanting to help other people makes me confused? Okay, now I'm confused....

And your evidence that making college free leads to a "well-educated public means less crime and more economic output" is where exactly?

Decades of history. Look at Japan. Look at California prior to the 1970s. And so on. And various studies back up that statement, too.

Society only benefits from sending kids to college if the cost of college is small compared to the increased future earnings; when that is the case, student loans are the right mechanism to finance a college education. When that is not the case, "free" college education is harmful both to the kids and to society.

Uh, no. That's not true at all, and by that, I mean that it is objectively false, rather than subjectively. Statistically, even small increases in college attendance result in large drops in crime rate. So even if the cost is high compared with the increased future earnings, society still benefits from sending kids to college, and so do the kids.

Ah, the knee-jerk response that "billionaire = conservative". Of course, that's nonsense; if anything, billionaires tilt slightly left [politico.com]. They pay negligible income tax, and even if they lost 99% of their money to the government, they'd still be wealthy.

Okay, let me restate that by replacing the word "billionaire" with "wealthy person". It is inarguable that the wealthy are substantially more likely to lean to the right than the poor and middle class.

Nope, sorry, I don't believe it. I only know of one significant study that makes that claim (Margolis), and it is wrong (in fact, I'd call it dishonest).

I would argue that the other studies are, in fact, dishonest, as they treat 100% of donations to churches as charitable giving despite the fact that only about 10-15% of those donations typically are used for programs that help the less fortunate, and the rest tends to go towards operations of the church, from which the donor typically benefits to some degree as a member, thus placing it at least to some degree into that whole "self-interest" category that you say isn't charity.

In any case, it's also irrelevant. Charity necessarily involves a personal element that you yourself just admitted the left is denying that element. So, whatever the left is doing, it's not charity.

*shrugs*. The way I see it, what matters is the result, not the approach. I don't disagree that charity involves a personal element, but I do disagree that campaigning for laws/policies/candidates that help the poor isn't a personal element. My comment about protesters earlier was not intended to imply that protests, letter writing, campaigning for office, etc. aren't useful tools, nor to imply that all of (or even the majority of) the protesters are bozos. Many of them are legitimately trying to help.

Yes, and that's what makes the left so utterly evil, namely the view that when people are successful, it is because stuff was "given" to them.

Okay, here's a challenge for you. Be born in a country that has no roads, no sewers, no clean running water, and become a billionaire. Or heck, start out poor in this country and become one. In theory, it can happen, but it is statistically a fluke. On average, people who become enormously wealthy started out at least moderately wealthy. People near the botto

Worried about what they are seeing you do, then let them see a whole bunch of stuff you do not do, why try to steam the flow of your privacy when you can deluge them with a flood http://www.cs.nyu.edu/trackmen... and https://adnauseam.io/. I am also thinking email games might be interesting to floor every possible channel with useless information, even all the spy vs spy stuff. Say an email game where one side plots to assassinate the president of Ameriganislav and the other plays as agents, trading emails with plots and encryption for the other side break, when side plotting the assasination and the other side trying to foil the plot a game to punish the professionally paranoid illegally spying on everyone with a flood of suggestive data to poison spy data bases, the game run from a web site.

So as many way as possible to generate false data at many, many mutliples of real data generated. A personal profile made totally meaningness and as a bonus the more you generate the more they must spend to store it. Double their data storage bill, triple it, how about increasing storage requirements hundreds of times over. Think of all the time, you are not on there internet but your computer could be, generating volumes of false empty data, hundreds of thousands of web visits you never went to, hundred of thousands of searches you never did, emails you never sent, your computer and software flooding marketers with empty data they have to pay to store.

That is not enough. You must also do exactly what they do in spy vs spy, scenarios, misinformation should be core for protecting your privacy as well as everyone else's. Two tools https://adnauseam.io/ to create a plethora of fake clicks to poison data bases and http://www.cs.nyu.edu/trackmen... to copy search data miners.

Never ever forget email, now it is wide open in the US and unfortunately you should never ever use ISP provided email any more, no mention of that and for good reason because yes the new law is akin to allowing the postal service to open and scam all snail mail, including packages.

So in every facet of human digital communications, digital misinformation apps are required to run in the background flooding bullshit invasions of privacy with bullshit digital data, orders of magnitude greater than what is actually produce by real people. No channel should be left untouched free of data miner toxins, poison their invasion of privacy, in the interim, whilst of course kicking the fuckers out of government who sold you privacy.

Try the TrackMeNot plugin: https://cs.nyu.edu/trackmenot/ and source at: https://github.com/vtoubiana/T...

It doesn't hide anything that you are doing, so the signal is still there, but it sure puts up a lot of noise. If you are technically minded, please consider improving the software / forking and trying different things.

Lest you be deterred by DNC shills who will loudly lie in response to such claims, here is an article in Time written as an apologia for the pro-choice crowd to explain away any purported racism on the part of Margaret Sanger. They give her every benefit of the doubt and spin every quote in her favor. Still, they have to admit:

That’s not to say that Sanger didn’t also make some deeply disturbing statements in support of eugenics, the now-discredited movement to improve the overall health and fitness of humankind through selective breeding. She did, and very publicly. In a 1921 article, she wrote that, “the most urgent problem today is how to limit and discourage the over-fertility of the mentally and physically defective.”

And her is a quote from that 1921 article written by Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger:

Birth Control propaganda is thus the entering wedge for the Eugenic educator. In answering the needs of these thousands upon thousands of submerged mothers, it is possible to use this interest as the foundation for education in prophylaxis, sexual hygiene, and infant welfare. The potential mother is to be shown that maternity need not be slavery but the most effective avenue toward self-development and self-realization. Upon this basis only may we improve the quality of the race.

There's no particular reason to pick just that quote. The whole thing is a pro-eugenics screed filled with racism and class-based breeding preferences.

In the limited space of the present paper, I have time only to touch upon some of the fundamental convictions that form the basis of our Birth Control propaganda, and which, as I think you must agree, indicate that the campaign for Birth Control is not merely of eugenic value, but is practically identical in ideal, with the final aims of Eugenics.

Time goes on to try to rehabilitate Sanger, trotting out Gloria Steinem to try to excuse her writings on eugenics as merely "the language of the day". But this is no temporal anachronism. She clearly views the mission of Planned Parenthood as reducing fertility among the "inferior races and classes". Again, here she is in her own words:

As an advocate of Birth Control, I wish to take advantage of the present opportunity to point out that the unbalance between the birth rate of the "unfit" and the "fit", admittedly the greatest present menace to civilization, can never be rectified by the inauguration of a cradle competition between these two classes. In this matter, the example of the inferior classes, the fertility of the feeble-minded, the mentally defective, the poverty-stricken classes, should not be held up for emulation to the mentally and physically fit though less fertile parents of the educated and well-to-do classes. On the contrary, the most urgent problem today is how to limit and discourage the over-fertility of the mentally and physically defective.

One can make any claims one would wish about Planned Parenthood and the value of abortion to women. But claiming that Margaret Sanger's motivations did not include the overtly racist philosophy of eugenics is unsupportable.

to keep your data safe from your ISP.
If you have to use Facebook, Google, Microsoft 10, be creative with any data use.
If an ISP, OS and social media want to collect data, let them collect pure fiction.
Maybe some Firefox add on can help with that? A constant stream of social media and web words been created?
TrackMeNot https://cs.nyu.edu/trackmenot/

Well, to me it seems really, really, stupid. Might sound like a good idea without thinking about the numbers but seriously a global warrant for anyone who searched for a specific name and to add even more stupid to that, variants of the name. I sure hope that name was globally unique, not many people have that though, I do and a fully appreciate how rare that is.

So goggle concedes this one, because the reward for a stupid question has always been a stupid answer. Not a unique name and taking into accounts variants, sure, not a problem, here are the, I don't know imagine a number between one thousand and one million, have fun and good luck with that. Think that's not likely to happen, sure goggle does 3.5 billion searches per day and even the tiniest percentage of that becomes a huge number.

Never to forget trackmenot http://www.cs.nyu.edu/trackmen..., hey trackmenot, did you go somewhere naughty and get me in trouble and new stuff like https://adnauseam.io/, hey adnauseam, did you click at naughty add, cheeky bugger. My computer makes more searches than I do, by an order of magnitude and adnauseam, well it clicks more ads than I do, by many, many, orders of magnitude (adnauseam helping to boost many web sites profits, I am suprised a lot of web sites have not be actively promoting that add on, even when asshats at google work to ban it on chrome https://www.bleepingcomputer.c..., spoilsports but of course https://github.com/dhowe/AdNau....

In the world of spy vs spy misinformation is often the most effective means of security (you can play to, another good example would be a fake file on your desktop with fake credit card details, passwords and information, they find it, take it and leave). How long before fame email tools turn up as well as a full range of other data base toxins (filling invasive databases with poisoned data creating false links eventually killing the database, actually dead in reality, requiring most of the data to be tossed and forced to start again).

Companies need more forward thinking leaders, but when CEO's get golden parachutes while driving companies into bankruptcy, it doesn't happen.

It's called 'corporate looting' or 'bankrupty for profit'. The (nobel laureate - or at least it equivalent in economics) husband of the current Federal Reserve (US central bank) chief co-authored a paper about it.(PDF)

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/sci...
https://www.theguardian.com/me...
And from NYU http://steinhardt.nyu.edu/apps...

You sure? Are you sure you're not also biased, then? Should we just give up and embrace whatever personality/cargo/political cult gets us off?

A few quick searches to see if I was even close in my assumption.

The author of the businessweek text has a degree in zoology and 'science journalism'.
http://www.businessinsider.com... ..and her twitter suggests a distinct political bias all of its own
https://twitter.com/linzasaur

Pia Dietze has a major in psychology and focused on what? Yup. 'Class relations' etc.. To be fair, this looks like her phd thesis, at least based on this.. (scroll down or txt search for dietze)
https://psych.nyu.edu/programs... (note the reference to eric knowles in her bio)

https://psych.nyu.edu/knowles/
I think that pretty much sums him up in terms of his bias.

My bias was on the right track. More progressives looking to play with numbers to justfy whining about rich people

You sure? Are you sure you're not also biased, then? Should we just give up and embrace whatever personality/cargo/political cult gets us off?

A few quick searches to see if I was even close in my assumption.

The author of the businessweek text has a degree in zoology and 'science journalism'.
http://www.businessinsider.com... ..and her twitter suggests a distinct political bias all of its own
https://twitter.com/linzasaur

Pia Dietze has a major in psychology and focused on what? Yup. 'Class relations' etc.. To be fair, this looks like her phd thesis, at least based on this.. (scroll down or txt search for dietze)
https://psych.nyu.edu/programs... (note the reference to eric knowles in her bio)

https://psych.nyu.edu/knowles/
I think that pretty much sums him up in terms of his bias.

My bias was on the right track. More progressives looking to play with numbers to justfy whining about rich people

In homes where both spouses work, the woman still ends up with more than the fair share of housework. Additionally, people who say that lifetime earnings are the same after adjusting for things like fewer years worked because of child and family responsibilities miss the point - overall earnings still are less, so less savings, etc. Caring for aged parents falls mostly to the woman - another financial hit, and emotionally and physically draining. And the more kids, the less equally the housework and child rearing is shared.

So, debate it all you want, but you're still wrong. The gender pay gap exists, and life actually gives us a pretty good controlled experiment, where the only variable is gender - the person stays the same in all other respects. Someone transitioning from female to male makes the same as their male peers. Someone transitioning from male to female makes less than other males or females.

Transsexuals’ experiences working both as men and as women can be framed as a kind of experiment that illuminates the subtle ways that gender differences and gender inequality are socially produced in the workplace. While transsexuals have the same human capital and pre-labor market gender socialization after their gender transitions, their workplace experiences often change radically.

Existing autobiographical and scholarly research demonstrates that for many MTFs, becoming women brings a loss of authority and pay, as well as workplace harassment and, in many cases, termination (e.g. Bolin 1988; Griggs 1998; McCloskey 1999; Schilt 2006a).

On the other hand, for many FTMs, becoming men can bring an increase in workplace authority, reward, and respect, as well as new job opportunities and promotions (e.g. Griggs 1998; Schilt 2006a, 2006b). Transsexuals’ before and after workplace experiences, then, can help make the hidden processes that produce workplace gender inequality visible.

And then there's this.

So you know exactly what you do, you become an internet actor, 'it's not lying, it's creating many false profiles'. Basically poison their databases by creating abstract false information about yourself all over the internet. Run stuff like this http://www.cs.nyu.edu/trackmen.... It creates chaos in their databases. Computers are really great a tracking information and keeping records, they are even better at creating false information to flood relational databases with false connections that generate even more bad data. Rather than going nuts protecting your privacy, have fun creating a world of marketing illusion around yourself. Politically be a democrat/republican/libertarian/green independent. Simultaneously like and hate every imaginable product. Run multiple interconnected identities, with different background stories for each.

The source is on github: https://github.com/vtoubiana/TrackMeNot

How It Works
TrackMeNot runs in Firefox and Chrome as a low-priority background process that periodically issues randomized search-queries to popular search engines, e.g., AOL, Yahoo!, Google, and Bing. It hides users' actual search trails in a cloud of 'ghost' queries, significantly increasing the difficulty of aggregating such data into accurate or identifying user profiles...To better simulate user behavior TrackMeNot uses a dynamic query mechanism to 'evolve' each client (uniquely) over time, parsing the results of its searches for 'logical' future query terms with which to replace those already used.

More info at: http://www.cs.nyu.edu/trackmen...

3.5x sales isn't unreasonable. Same range as banks.

http://pages.stern.nyu.edu/~ad...

But then you probably have no idea what you're talking about.

It's not like they'd go after people just for googling Pr3ssur3 c00kers and f3rt1lizers in the same day (google it if you're brave)

I'm running the TrackMeNot browser extension on 6 different computers in the house, it automatically Googles (and Bings and Baidus and Yahoos) for terms like that 24/7. No knocks at the door yet but NSA must think I'm operating some kind of Ebil Muslin Safehouse.

I don't believe the Great Flood was a myth. The "world" at that time was centered around the Euphrates river. Going by the description in some of the clay tablets, it would seem that someone upstream may have decided to destroy a natural dam out of revenge right when the mountain snow was melting in Spring (The Epic of Gilgamesh). That would have unleased a torrent of water 40x that of normal, and led to up to 11 feet of mud being deposited on the lower plains.

http://www.globalsecurity.org/...

https://newrepublic.com/articl...

The layout of some of these clay tablets looks like someone invented the spreadsheet before the computer:
http://isaw.nyu.edu/exhibition...

http://isaw.nyu.edu/exhibition...

They even invented a tablet with round corners before Apple:

https://s-media-cache-ak0.pini...

I don't believe the Great Flood was a myth. The "world" at that time was centered around the Euphrates river. Going by the description in some of the clay tablets, it would seem that someone upstream may have decided to destroy a natural dam out of revenge right when the mountain snow was melting in Spring (The Epic of Gilgamesh). That would have unleased a torrent of water 40x that of normal, and led to up to 11 feet of mud being deposited on the lower plains.

http://www.globalsecurity.org/...

https://newrepublic.com/articl...

The layout of some of these clay tablets looks like someone invented the spreadsheet before the computer:
http://isaw.nyu.edu/exhibition...

http://isaw.nyu.edu/exhibition...

They even invented a tablet with round corners before Apple:

https://s-media-cache-ak0.pini...

Have a look at TrackMeNot. It sits in the background cluttering up your "search history" full of randomized searches, with the intention that your real searches get lost in the noise, and any search history being stored about you becomes less useful. There's an option to have it include all kinds of fun terms that are supposedly on NSA/DHS watchlists.

TrackMeNot is a browser-extension for Firefox and Chrome that sends semi-random search requests to several search engines with the goal of disrupting this sort of tracking. Well, it's more aimed at preventing commercial entities from creating an accurate picture of your web-browsing habits, but it probably adds some noise to the intelligence gathering too. By default it pulls random keywords from newspaper headlines, but you can configure it to use (or avoid) certain keywords, as well as tweak the frequency of the requests. It runs automatically in the background whenever your browser is open.

TrackMeNot isn't really useful in hiding your behavior; it just throws in spurious data that makes legitimate data look less accurate. It's really aimed more at devaluing marketing databases with the (admittedly vain) hope that they'll give up on the whole thing ;-)

Note: it does use extra CPU cycles and bandwidth, so if you are constrained in either this tool may not be for you. Also, tweak the timing of those search requests carefully or the search engines might blacklist you as a bot. Having said that, I've been using this plug-in for several years now and it's rarely caused me any problems.

Re AC and the "Perhaps a browser plugin could be developed that does occasional random searches in the background."
trackmenot https://cs.nyu.edu/trackmenot/ "... actual web searches, lost in a cloud of false leads"

Previously, Google would not have been able to sell a new stock of "just" (Internet Search Only) Google, or for any of their individual projects, it was all one thing.

Actually, that is categorically not true. A company can create a "tracking" stock for a subsidiary or even a business function (like search), as long as it was willing to break out the reporting of that function.

The problem is that tracking stocks are not generally favored anymore by the street and probably wouldn't really work anyhow with the current Google structure (where Larry and Sergey have super-voting rights) as such a tracking stock would suffer the same albatross as GOOGL vs GOOG.

The value of what they have done is simply to provide more transparency about their businesses to the street and provide more deck chairs for potential C-level googlers that might want to defect. That's actually good value, but has nothing to do with being able to issue a stock for part of their business.

Worse still, it's more work that won't improve outcomes as there's a lack of good evidence to support that individualizing learning styles does any good. There are studies that have found negative results.

This is just like the programs to give students a laptop, a tablet, or something else that's supposed to be great for education but won't result in any significant changes. It's made to sound nice and fancy so that schools will spend millions of dollars on it and who would want to question funding something to improve education?

The only answer is to actively poison you data with things like 'Track Me Not' https://cs.nyu.edu/trackmenot/. Plus false information in social media (obviously good not bad false information), run public and private social media and public real name, private only a nick name close friends and some family members know. It is way easier to poison undesirable information about you than to get rid of it. So don't forget a specific junk mail web site as a trial period for new registers and have fun with fictitious family members and addresses and contact details.

Reality is, want better privacy than manage your own social media, use ISP email, start looking into encryption (something singles can be slack on but families should most definitely not be) and when it comes to minors keep them will clear of corporate invasive perversion, there are sick people in there and they should not be trusted with you children's comings and goings nor what means are most effective at manipulating them.

The high degree of privacy invasion is not just about targeting ads at you the reflect past interests but also monitoring which adds you can be most influenced by, so they can more readily suck you into buying highly profitable crap products.

Here is an article from Vice of all places about this research, from June http://motherboard.vice.com/re...

Research paper here: http://cs.nyu.edu/~zaremba/doc...

Also, a funny video demonstrating the rudimental nature of nintendo ds brain training pattern recognition: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

"Me and my parents correlate, because without them, I wouldn't be here."

"I was meticulous about falling off a cliff."

"Mrs. Morrow stimulated the soup."

No, these aren't machine translations, they're human translations. This is what happens when you teach people a foreign language according to associationistic principles (traditional classroom foreign language teaching, AKA "grammar translation"). The learners know what they're saying isn't what a native speaker would say but it's grammatically correct even if it doesn't mean what the speaker wants it to. The main problem is that for language to acquire meaning, it has to be situated, it requires context, purpose, and intent.

Now show me a machine translation system that isn't associationistic, can "read" a situation and understands what the speakers mean to say (pragmatically) rather than what their individual words in combination mean (sematically). When you've done that, you've successfuly created human-like AI, i.e. a machine that can appropriately answer Winograd schemas http://www.cs.nyu.edu/davise/p... and knows that constructions like, "Colourless green ideas sleep furiously" are meaningless.

I bet people will have a lot of fun with Microsoft's translator.

Mathematically, Einstein breaks with the tradition dating back to Euclid (and which is inflicted on high-school students even today!), and employs instead the non-Euclidean geometry developed by Riemann. Einstein's equations are highly nonlinear, which is why traditionally-trained mathematicians find them so difficult to solve.

In the 1980's a very different approach, known as string theory, became popular: here the fundamental constituents of matter are not point-like particles but rather tiny (Planck-scale) closed and open strings. In this theory, the space-time manifold does not exist as an objective physical reality; rather, space-time is a derived concept, an approximation valid only on large length scales (where ``large'' means ``much larger than 10^-33 centimeters''!).

As Althusser rightly commented, ``Lacan finally gives Freud's thinking the scientific concepts that it requires''. More recently, Lacan's topologie du sujet has been applied fruitfully to cinema criticism and to the psychoanalysis of AIDS. In mathematical terms, Lacan is here pointing out that the first homology group of the sphere is trivial, while those of the other surfaces are profound; and this homology is linked with the connectedness or disconnectedness of the surface after one or more cuts.

from the summary:

Now Kimberly Hefling reports that for-profit colleges who are not producing graduates capable of paying off their student loans could soon stand to lose access to federal student-aid programs.

A secret about those private "not for profit" colleges which the Department of Education exempted from that regulation. They are for profit. Huge profits. The distinction is not that these institutions do not earn profits, but rather that they are exempt from business taxes on those profits and the income accrues to the administration and faculty instead of to business owners.

So I had a friend in college who worked part-time in the payroll office and had access to the campus salary database. From her dorm room. So one evening she asks if I want to know what any of my professors make. Looked them all up. In 2014 dollars the mid-level salary for recently-tenured faculty was about $300,000 / year. Deans, provosts and presidents made much more.

Subsidized college loans have created a glut of education dollars and "not-for-profit" educators are raking them in. They are not opposed to earning huge profits themselves, the just do not want competition from other colleges which are run as business. So they lobbied Arne Duncan to enact a regulation which, for no legitimate rationale, applies only their competition.

Don't believe me? Universities try to keep this information locked away tightly but occasionally it leaks out. Here, for, example, is what Treasury Secretary Jack Lew received as severence pay from New York University:

President Obama’s nominee to lead the Treasury Department, Jacob J. Lew, got a $685,000 severance payment when he left a top post at New York University in 2006 to take a job at Citigroup.

NYU is a private "non-profit". And, as that link indicates, as such they receive additional benefits from the federal government beyond tax exemption.

Odd. You're careful about the "claiming" caveat when discussing religions, but not those other groups. Consider Jerry Thompson: http://dlib.nyu.edu/undercover...

This is a real pity for the TM community. This is not the first chip with transactional memory support in hardware: The Sun Rock was announced to have hardware TM support, and the IBM Blue Gene/Q Compute chip also supports it. Unlike other proposals for unbounded transactional memory, all these systems employ Hybrid Transactional Memory (ref, ref, ref), in which restricted hardware transactions are designed to correctly coexist with unbounded software transactions, so a software transaction can be started in case a hardware transaction fails for some unavoidable issue (such as lack of cache size or associativity to hold speculative data from the transaction, not because of a conflict). Note that, in any case, very large transactions should arguably be very uncommon, since they would significantly reduce performance (similar to very large critical sections protected by locks).

The problem with the hardware implementation of transactional memory is that they are not simply a new set of instructions which are independent from the rest of the processor. HTM implies multiple aspects, including multiversioning caching for speculative data; allowing for the commit of speculative (transactional) instructions, which could be later rolled back (note that in any other speculative operation such as instructions after branch prediction, the speculation is always resolved before instruction commits because the branch commits earlier); a tight integration with the coherence protocol (see LogTM-SE for an alternative to this very last issue, but still...); a mechanism to support atomic commits in presence of coherence invalidations... From the point of view of processor verification, this is a complete nightmare because these new "extensions" basically impact the complete processor pipeline and coherence protocol, and verifying that every single instruction and data structure behaves as expected in isolation does not guarantee that they will operate correctly in presence of multiple transactions (and non-transactional conflicting code) in multiple cores. There are some formal studies such as this or this, and the IBM people discuss the verification of their Blue Gene TM system in this paper (paywalled).

As some others commented before, the nature of the "bug" has not been disclosed. However, since it seems to be easy to reproduce systematically, I would expect it to be related to incorrect speculative data handling in a single transaction (or something similar), rather than races between multiple transactions.

Regarding the alternatives, Intel cannot simply remove these instructions opcodes because previous code would fail. I assume that the patch will make all hardware transactions fail on startup, with an specific error (EAX bit 1 indicates if the transaction can succeed on a retry; setting this flag to 0 should trigger a software transaction). In such case, execution continues at the fallback routine indicated in the XBEGIN instruction, which should begin a software transaction. Effectively, this will be similar to a software TM (STM) with additional overheads (starting the hardware transaction and aborting it; detecting conflicts with nonexistent hardware transactions) that would make it slower than a pure STM implementation.

When the "get random nonsense published" prank war hit physics, it's no surprise it was a string theory journal that fell for it.

Are you referring to Sokal? http://www.physics.nyu.edu/sokal/transgress_v2/transgress_v2_singlefile.html/

That wasn't published in a string theory journal.

While I'm not the biggest fan of ST, I'm not aware of any prank publications in a refereed physics journal, and neither are the first three pages of a search.

What do your think of Fergus et all paper : Intriguing properties of neural networks. Is this a phenomenon you came across before?

If you take all the people with traits you don't like, and murder them

Whoa! Wait a minute — you don't have to murder anyone (unless you need a scapegoat to explain your regime's failures to your citizens). You can simply discourage (or outright block) them from procreating.

Organizations like "Planned Parenthood" were created for that exact purpose — and I'm quoting from their founder — "to assist the race toward the elimination of the unfit". Not that you'd find this bit of info on the organization's Wikipedia page...