The only difference in the US (Well, we also have no rules like that about notebooks.) is that we learn up to 12x12 instead.
Oh, and we studied 5 and 11 as special cases in addition to 10. (0 and 1 special cases don't really need 'studying', when you think about it.) 5 is just 'half 10', and 11 is just 'when multiplied by anything under 10, write the digit twice'. I.e., 7x11 is 7 twice, aka, 77.
(WRT to the 11 trick, we did need to learn 11x11 and 11x12, although the trick sorta works if you write the other number twice but start it on top of the second digit. I.e., 11x12 is 132, which is what you get if you write 12 on top of 12, and the 2 in the first 12 is on top of the 1 in the second 12, so it makes 3. This is really just a way of multiplying times ten, and then adding the original, when you think about it.)
You can count to 1023 on your fingers, using only two positions for each finger.
You can count much higher on your hands. There is, at minimum, eight position of each hand: Facing down, facing up, facing in, and facing out, and each of those straight or bent palmward. (You can also bend the other way, but that become awkward.)
So that, at minimum, adds 6 more bits to the fingers, for a total of 16 bits, aka 65535.
And that's assuming literal 'hands' for position. Once you start moving arms around, you can get higher. How many discrete positions are there for arm height? Same if you start using more than two positions for fingers. (Most can do three, but some of them are not very independent.)
What I recommend is that you start making bets you can count above 1023 using your hands, and even people here would probably fall for it.
I frankly was a little baffled at (47 x 75) Ã 25, and stared at it for five minutes to make sure I wasn't missing something. I thought for a second it perhaps meant divided by 0.25, which is a good way to trip people up (Although not with a calculator)...but, no.
I mean, seriously. A useful test is the ability to do that with a piece of paper. People who can't do it with a calculator, which is done by literally punching it in exactly as shown (And it doesn't even need the parens!) need to have their high school diploma revoked or something.
And, yeah, I worked it that way in my head also. And then checked with a calculator, just in case.
The only question I missed was the flipping triangle thing, and that's probably because I've literally done no geometry in over a decade and couldn't remember what the heck a 'vertex' was. If they'd said 'angle' I would have figured it out, but I thought maybe the vertex was the point it flipped around.
I love Newt's insanity. Putting completely aside the problem of child labor, what he apparently thinks is wrong with this country is there aren't enough laborers.
Yeah, Newt. Add to the workforce. And this time, be sure to add people who have absolutely no incentive or power to bargain over wages.
That will solve unemployment!
Republican #1: Hey, there's not enough jobs...let's do something so even more people are competing for them!
Republican #2: Okay, but only if it can be something no one wants.
Republican #3: And it needs to undo an entire century of progress.
Newt: Have I got the plan for you!
No kidding. Those hips seem a little...stabby...to me. Ouch.
I'm of the opinion that if you pull a piece of string between the two sides of the pelvis, it should not leave a gap between it and the body. Curved out? That's usual. Flat? Well, okay. Curved in? Uh, no, that's a little too thin.
Even assuming that you're right, women can only create standards of beauty that exist.
You want to argue that women create a natural hierarchy, fine, but that hierarchy in 99.999% of the US would be sizes 10 to 20, nicely covering the average size of 16.
Instead, the media makes it appears that it starts at 0 and runs to 8, making even thin women 'low' in the hierarchy, and resulting in average women so far off the charts that they end up with eating disorders.
If you want to argue that this is some sort of natural state, that still doesn't mean we should have people running around showing people, who blow the curve, as if they're normal. Maybe women who are larger will be 'behind' in some sort of imaginary competition, but that's not the same as not even in the normal realm of competition.
I mean, men arguable judge each other by their athletic ability, but we don't have magazines running around telling us we should be able to make 99% of free throws in basketball. Even the best 'average' guy falls short of that. But the scale of women's body is grossly miscalibrated, running around finding freaks of nature and/or impossible disciplined and unhealthy women.
This is, of course, assuming your premise is right, which I don't think it is.
What do you mean, 'allowed'? Manufacturers don't really sell anything to do it, but it's not 'locked' and people do indeed tweak the computer. Manufacturers do not in any way attempt to restrict reprogramming the computer, no.
Just like the manufacturers don't restrict you painting your windshield where you can't see out of it, or mounting pieces of rebar sticking ten feet out of the side of your car, or placing a giant spotlight on your hood to blind oncoming drivers.
However, there are usually specific laws about what sort of vehicle can be operated on the road, and those laws have nothing to with the manufacturers. (In fact, the manufacturers have to compile with those laws in order to sell the car.)
Some of the computer tweaking would violate the law, such as various emission rules, and the police could, in theory, have your car removed from the road because of that. (And some tweaking is just stupid. Do not under any circumstance tweak your cruise control. A broken cruise control is a good way to have your car randomly accelerate.)
Erm, people here appear to have confused jailbreaking with unlocking, which are two entirely separate things, although often unlocking requires jailbreaking.
No one's actually arguing they have the right to get out of any contact, or even to use their phone on another network.
Jailbreaking is just making it where you can run random software on the phone.
I have a jailbroken iPhone that is still locked to AT&T. (Although, technically, I'm out of my contact and I could unlock it, or, hell, demand AT&T unlock it.)
A software mod shouldn't even void the software warranty.
This entire concept is idiotic. Device manufacturers only support software they provide, we know that, we're not stupid. (I mean, they don't even support allowed third party software. If a game from the App Store is crashing on your iPhone, Apple's not going to 'support' that.)
So if someone who has modified that has a software problem and go to them, the solution is for them to put the original software back on. And then check for the reported problem.
I don't know where this bullshit 'Of course they have the right to void the warranty' came from. If I get a laptop, and install Linux over the Windows 7 it came with, and I can't run their 'BIOS update' program or something...they are entirely within their rights to insist I run that under the system they provided. They aren't within their rights to start yammering about me having voided the warranty with my Linux install after I reinstall Windows 7 off the restore disks and it still doesn't work.
If device manufacturers just provide some sort of way to reset devices back to factory settings, or simply had a way to do it themselves, none of this would matter. They do not do this...but they should be required to, by law, if you came in and asked for it. (And then they should obviously be required to fix any software problems that existed after that point.)
Instead, because the software is so locked down, it's probably just as complicated to unjailbreak the thing as to jailbreak it, and because no one is 'supposed' to jailbreak anything, no device has any way to easily undo it. (A factory reset really should be built in.) Likewise, almost none of them bother to separate their data from their code...a factory reset should just replace all the system stuff and leave the data alone, in a correctly-designed system.
Device manufactures gave me a warranty, and they will support whatever those warranty terms covered, regardless of what I've been doing with it in the meantime, unless they can demonstrate the thing I want fixes is damage from my 'misuse'. Which is very unlikely, but hypothetically possible. If some custom firmware is causing iPhones to explode, Apple's within their rights to say 'Fuck that, we're not fixing it.'. Otherwise, no. They have to put things back to a known state, and then look at it.
There's an easy solution in this, and it's what companies have done forever:
Mark up the price of A to where it should be, but then include an instant rebate that you can use with proof of purchase of B. (Yes, that is technically a coupon for B, but it can be spun the other way. Or just go ahead and call it a coupon for B.)
Trying to rig it where people can't use something they buy except for one thing is insane.
Warranties cover both hardware and software, and no software change is irreversible.
It is entirely reasonable for manufactures to not support changed software, and it's entirely reasonable for them to point out that a hardware problem is due to software changes. For example, if you overclocked your phone and it overheated and burst the battery, they don't have to fix that.
However, they don't get to use software changes to get out of actual hardware defects, which I think everyone agrees. Where people fall down is trying to allow them to get out of software issues.
No. What they should be able to do is reset the damn device's software. Period. If you take it in because it's acting weird and it's jailbroken, they should have to hook it up and reset it. In fact, that should be an option in the device itself.
Yes, I know right now that's hard, but most of that is because they'd have to also jailbreak past their own protections.
Devices should not be locked like that. They should instead be required to have basically the same 'tainting' mechanism as the Linux kernel. You flip a switch to allow you to run unapproved software, but the device manufacturer reserves the right to flip the switch back or even reinstall everything to do any software support. They don't have to deal with your weird stuff, but they don't have to deal with it by simply undoing it.
And, whenever possible, you should be able to do that yourself.
Right now they're using jailbreaking to get out of their warranty. That should not be allowed.
What I find astonishing about Fukushima is learning that we've decided to keep nuclear waste in a manner that is not failsafe. That we need to actively cool.
That is possibly the most idiotic thing I've ever heard. It's not like it's an infinite amount of heat.
Spread it out, pour some iron on it, and put in some giant heat sinks or something.
Christ, it's like everyone is an idiot or something. 'Hey, this generates a set amount of heat per second, forever, and if it ever gets above a certain temperature it will melt through things.'. 'Herp derp, let's pump water past it. There's no way that could go wrong.' 'Maybe we could rig it where it just distributes the heat to the air or the ground or something, which would only fail if the sun started consuming the earth and heated the atmosphere up massively?' 'Nope, takes too much space. Water pump, that's the plan!'
I understand reactors having problems when shut down, but the waste? Seriously?
However, simple math showed that real (post inflation) real estate appreciation could not continue anywhere near the rates of the early/mid 2000's. Continued appreciation at that rate for a few more years would have resulted in housing prices so high that, at historical interest rates, virtually no one would have been able to buy their first house even if they spent 100% of their income on mortgage payments. Without new entrants into the market to (at least) replace those that die, the supply would quickly outstrip demand and housing prices would have to correct to some extent.
Oddly enough, I actually pointed this out at the time, despite knowing nothing at all about how the market was working or why it was happening. I just looked at history.
Housing has always, throughout human history, cost about two to four years worth of income. That is roughly what people are willing to pay. Taxes obviously change that a little. And loans made it easier to pay without savings, and maybe added a few years to the cost. But I refused to believe that rule of thumb had just somehow completely disappeared.
I could see possibly technology changing the proportion put towards basic needs, perhaps food gets cheaper so we're willing to spend more on houses...but food didn't get cheaper! And we didn't have inflation either. It was just, we'd all decided that somehow house prices were magical and should be as high as we could get them, and I had no idea what the hell was going on. I started warning people this was nonsense about 2006, and was very worried when my brother bought a house. (Luckily, he very sold it early enough.)
But that wasn't really my point. My point was that people were assured that housing could be an investment by everyone, and I'm not talking about the bubble. I'm talking about people who bought a house in 1985 or whenever, with the idea it would steadily beat inflation by a small amount.
And now it's 26 years later, the kids are gone, they're ready to sell their house and retire, and, oh, well, crap. They weren't trying to get in on any bubble, they just assumed, as everyone did, that the asset would slightly beat inflation.
But housing is actually a risk. The market is a risk. Investments are a risk or they wouldn't make any money!
We do not want people to 'risk' starving to death in their old age. Yes, at a certain point, with enough money, you can hypothetically spread the risk enough that it's unlikely that the entire thing would blow up, but if we offered that as a retirement option you just know we'd get half the people investing in gold or houses or tulip bulbs or something.
We really do need a minimum 'zero risk' savings vehicle that people have to keep. Nothing's stopping additional investment. The only reason people are pushing for such a option is they think they can get a good deal on tulip bulbs to sell to the rubes entering the market. Or make money on high-frequency tulip bulb trading.
Also, I think the housing crash has demonstrated that, under normal circumstances, we should forbid banks from making loans with the intent of selling them, period. Turns out, when you allow that, they make random loans to everyone, and then lie about said loans to sell them to others. Who knew?
Sorry, that was a little rude. I have no idea what you mean by 'my assertion'. If you're claiming the top 1% don't make eight times as much as they used to make, that is possibly true. But that was not really the point. The point was the dishonesty of the numbers.
Although you were rude first because I was rude to someone else, but I just get annoyed at people who run around talking about what percentage of human beings pay a certain percentage of taxes, like those two percentages are in any way related. (Did you know that 1% of the population pays 50% of all gas tax? Clearly, trucker's taxes are too high.) That is possibly the most annoying abuse of mathematics I've ever seen. (Did you know that 0.1% of people pay 100% of sales taxes for golf memberships?)
When you tax things, you do not expect the proportion of people paying the taxes to be evenly distributed unless the thing taxed is evenly distributed, and I think we all know that income is not. (In fact, the whole premise of talking about the top 1% is to deliberately pick an uneven distribution, so this is sorta inherently dishonest. A random sample of 1% of the population does, in fact, pay 1% of all income taxes.)
The rich do proportionally pay more than others, because we have a progressive tax system, but it's not fucking 1% vs. 40%. If taxes were inexplicably even, they'd be paying 20%
You've brought up a number of points where doing something so obviously good (giving away food) can actually be bad
Give a man a fish, and he eats for a day. Teach a man to fish, and he eats for a lifetime. Give everyone a fish every day, and soon no one is selling any fish and all the fishermen lose their jobs. (Luckily, they won't starve.)
The problem is that we want to feed the people who literally would not otherwise have food, and that wouldn't affect the market...but that's very hard to do without also feeding people who would normally have bought it.
And I don't mean rich people...poor people buy plenty of food. There's plenty of people who have to choose between food and power bills, and will indeed stand in line for free food so they can get both. But the second we give them some food instead of them buying something, we've undone the entire point of purchasing food to keep it off the market!
And it doesn't matter how or where this happens. We can say 'We should use it for school lunches', but, tada, those places normally bought off the market.
Perhaps we should just spend time trying to figure out how to store food perfectly, instead of worrying about expiring food we literally cannot hand out without undoing the point of paying people for it.
Remember, Warren Buffet's picks are included in the averages!
Yeah, this is what gets me every time I hear someone ramble about 'averages'.
I don't want old people who saved all their life not being thrown out on the streets because they aren't broke on average. I mean, people in this country are employed on average, I guess we can just stop worrying about that, and even get rid of unemployment insurance. The average human has one breast and one testicle.
Certainly, though, a Fed401(k) would be very popular with the bankers, investment houses, and corporations who get the money and benefit from the influx of money effectively forced by law into stocks.
Bingo. Social security or programs like that are actually how society to wants to do retirement. They're low gain because they're fucking low risk. That is how you should do your base retirement, so, you know, people don't lose all their money. (And nothing is stopping people from saving more in other places.)
The entire reason this idea exists is because the rich speculators want people's money in the market, so they have a chance to end up with some of it.
I actually do believe in personal investment accounts as an option to SS (at least in part) and with some limits and oversight. However, most people simply are not equipped to invest responsibly and they should not be doing so. The general population is, frankly, economically illiterate (as evidenced by the housing boom and the stock market crash of the early 2000s as two very recent object lessons).
There I must disagree with you. The housing crash was almost entirely due to circumstances that couldn't be foreseen by anyone even if they did pay attention.
But I suspect you and I think different things were 'the problem'. (It was not people lying on their mortgage, it was the complete and utter fuckup of the banks in inventing imaginary investment vehicles for the super-rich that had no basis in fact, and hence they were incentivized to, instead of making good loans, make as many bad ones as possible.)
Anyone individually losing their house, yes, probably should have had more information at some point, although I will argue that there's a reason that banks are not legally supposed to make loans they can't pay, and half the entire fucking bank industry should be in jail at this moment. But there are plenty of people who bought houses in, oh, 1990 as an investment, paid for them, and expected they'd go up in value and they could sell it and retire to Florida on their investment...and now the housing market is broken and their investment is worthless. It's hard to see what they did wrong except 'Invest in a specific type of thing that later had a bubble'.
Likewise, how many people selected, you know, highly rated stuff and lost all their money because the rating agencies were full of crap? (There's a union suing one of the rating agencies for an example that. They invested pensions in a AAA bond that the rating industry in one day decided to downgrade to 'crap', and they're like 'Wait, that's not supposed to be possible. You said this was a good investment, and you are legally supposed to be the expert. You can't make statements that are that wrong without some liability.'.) How, exactly, were random people supposed to know not to trust rating agencies?
The entire point of risk is that it is risky. If it is risky, there is a chance it will fail, and all the money will vanish. And it will, in fact, vanish into the pocket of other people in the market, which is why the rich really really really want people to move their money out of social security into the market.
The entire point of retirement savings is that it, or at least a bare minimum of it, is not supposed to be risky at all. It doesn't matter to starving people if it works on average.
Incidentally, who would like to see the market with high-frequency trading removed? It
And now the stupid fucks have show up comparing what percentage to income taxes is paid to what percentage of people pay them, two completely unrelated things.
Hey, asswipe. We don't tax people, you fucktard, we tax income. The reason the top 1% pay twice as much now is that they are making something like eight times the money, and taxes are lower.
You might also wonder why you appeared to be paying 100% of the property taxes on your house. That is because you are the owner of your house, and other people are not, and thus those others did not have to pay any taxes on it. Likewise, the top 1% are almost the only people making any fucking income above the poverty line, or even any money at all, so are, in fact, almost the only people paying income tax.
I know it's very strange and requires a basic concept of complicated ideas like 'Only people with things are required to pay taxes on those things. People do not have to pay taxes on imaginary things they don't have.', but maybe you can find someone to help you. Perhaps you could go to the library and explain you are one of the very stupid, and ask if they have programs to help you. Like a literacy program, but for your entire brain.
And there is more than enough if we'd put their rates back to where they were under Clinton, and stopped bailouts and war.
As everyone knows.
Without the idiotic policies of constant war and constant tax cuts and constant bailouts, we'd have a slightly increasing debt right now, during the recession (Yes, even with the stimulus), and one that went away once the economy got better. (Which means we'd have been much better off going into the economic collapse.)
Duh, I replied to your post, and then I realized that you mean you can't give it away during normal times.
The question is competition. You have to give it away in such a manner that is not competing with itself.
The easiest thing is to give it away in some starving country somewhere else. (Although, oddly, I've read about problems with exactly that in some poor countries...the West continually supplying free food screws up the area's ability to supply food to itself. How could any local farmer compete? The article I read said, basically, don't give them food, give them the ability to farm.)
As for locally, the best idea would be to somehow make that specific food obviously 'worse' than food sold. That is why I was suggesting simply sticking it in big tins without flavoring.
An alternate idea would be to make it taste bad. I know that sounds sorta silly, but it would seem to work. Alternately, color it very oddly.
Well, you can't actually give any away or even sell it - it has to be destroyed. Otherwise it will drag down the prices and the farmers will suffer just as much as if they overproduced in the first place.
That's why I was saying we only sell it when prices are high. Dragging down the price for food sorta happens automatically when you stop a famine.
But I get your point about the fact that in such circumstances farmers are probably already doing poorly, because the main reason that prices are high is that some crops failed. And dragging down the prices makes it worse. So we should have some sort of insurance for them.
Hrm, as we bought from them, after all, when prices were low...perhaps we could just now pay them the difference?
I.e, the market, on average, has 100 X, which costs $10 per X. One year, there's a surplus, and we have 150 X, which drives the price down to $6 per X. Or it would, except the government steps in and pays $8, and ends up with 40 extra. (The remaining 10 get used by the market anyway.)
Two years later, there's a drought, and there are only 30 X, prices are $20 per X, and it looks everyone is going to starve, and while those prices are twice as high, farmers are only selling a third as much to start with, so they're in trouble.
But, wait, the government steps in and sells enough of their stored X to drive the price down to $15 per X. Which is great for the people, but even worse for the farmers...except the government is paying the people it originally bought them from another $7 per X. (Which doesn't really entirely solve the problem for farmers, but it doesn't make it worse.)
Or...hell...we can just give a portion of the food back to the farmers. Literal 'food insurance'. You pay your dues in food each year, when disaster hits, you get some food back. Heh. (Or, more realistically, we give vouchers back, and they can sell those to people and companies that want a can.)
Indeed. I think an argument can be made that if the government is going to interfere in the market in that way...
...the best way is to simply have some sort of calculated 'average' price, and buy large amounts for stockpiling when the price dips below 80% or so (Which also has the added benefit of keeping prices from bottoming and farmers from going bankrupt, instead of stupid subsidies for doing nothing.), and sell when the price gets above 150%. (Which keeps everyone from starving by legitimately providing food for them to eat, instead of some weird price control or rationing gimmick.)
Those numbers are, obviously, completely off the top of my head. Probably instead we want some sort of Commission in the Department of Agriculture to actually have specific triggers.
And, of course, we'd now have supplies in the case of disaster and have 'government surplus' almost-expired stuff to sell cheaply or give to charities when disaster or famine didn't happen.
That lets the government act as a sort of buffer, and manages to leave the market completely alone when everything is fine, and is a good deal saner to paying people not to do things.
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The only difference in the US (Well, we also have no rules like that about notebooks.) is that we learn up to 12x12 instead.
Oh, and we studied 5 and 11 as special cases in addition to 10. (0 and 1 special cases don't really need 'studying', when you think about it.) 5 is just 'half 10', and 11 is just 'when multiplied by anything under 10, write the digit twice'. I.e., 7x11 is 7 twice, aka, 77.
(WRT to the 11 trick, we did need to learn 11x11 and 11x12, although the trick sorta works if you write the other number twice but start it on top of the second digit. I.e., 11x12 is 132, which is what you get if you write 12 on top of 12, and the 2 in the first 12 is on top of the 1 in the second 12, so it makes 3. This is really just a way of multiplying times ten, and then adding the original, when you think about it.)
That is, in fact, the opposite of cheating.
You can count to 1023 on your fingers, using only two positions for each finger.
You can count much higher on your hands. There is, at minimum, eight position of each hand: Facing down, facing up, facing in, and facing out, and each of those straight or bent palmward. (You can also bend the other way, but that become awkward.)
So that, at minimum, adds 6 more bits to the fingers, for a total of 16 bits, aka 65535.
And that's assuming literal 'hands' for position. Once you start moving arms around, you can get higher. How many discrete positions are there for arm height? Same if you start using more than two positions for fingers. (Most can do three, but some of them are not very independent.)
What I recommend is that you start making bets you can count above 1023 using your hands, and even people here would probably fall for it.
Uh, no.
The great recession is the results of a great many banks calculating risk very badly, and deciding to be absurdly over-leveraged while doing that.
I frankly was a little baffled at (47 x 75) Ã 25, and stared at it for five minutes to make sure I wasn't missing something. I thought for a second it perhaps meant divided by 0.25, which is a good way to trip people up (Although not with a calculator)...but, no.
I mean, seriously. A useful test is the ability to do that with a piece of paper. People who can't do it with a calculator, which is done by literally punching it in exactly as shown (And it doesn't even need the parens!) need to have their high school diploma revoked or something.
And, yeah, I worked it that way in my head also. And then checked with a calculator, just in case.
The only question I missed was the flipping triangle thing, and that's probably because I've literally done no geometry in over a decade and couldn't remember what the heck a 'vertex' was. If they'd said 'angle' I would have figured it out, but I thought maybe the vertex was the point it flipped around.
I love Newt's insanity. Putting completely aside the problem of child labor, what he apparently thinks is wrong with this country is there aren't enough laborers.
Yeah, Newt. Add to the workforce. And this time, be sure to add people who have absolutely no incentive or power to bargain over wages.
That will solve unemployment!
Republican #1: Hey, there's not enough jobs...let's do something so even more people are competing for them!
Republican #2: Okay, but only if it can be something no one wants.
Republican #3: And it needs to undo an entire century of progress.
Newt: Have I got the plan for you!
No kidding. Those hips seem a little...stabby...to me. Ouch.
I'm of the opinion that if you pull a piece of string between the two sides of the pelvis, it should not leave a gap between it and the body. Curved out? That's usual. Flat? Well, okay. Curved in? Uh, no, that's a little too thin.
Erm, no.
Even assuming that you're right, women can only create standards of beauty that exist.
You want to argue that women create a natural hierarchy, fine, but that hierarchy in 99.999% of the US would be sizes 10 to 20, nicely covering the average size of 16.
Instead, the media makes it appears that it starts at 0 and runs to 8, making even thin women 'low' in the hierarchy, and resulting in average women so far off the charts that they end up with eating disorders.
If you want to argue that this is some sort of natural state, that still doesn't mean we should have people running around showing people, who blow the curve, as if they're normal. Maybe women who are larger will be 'behind' in some sort of imaginary competition, but that's not the same as not even in the normal realm of competition.
I mean, men arguable judge each other by their athletic ability, but we don't have magazines running around telling us we should be able to make 99% of free throws in basketball. Even the best 'average' guy falls short of that. But the scale of women's body is grossly miscalibrated, running around finding freaks of nature and/or impossible disciplined and unhealthy women.
This is, of course, assuming your premise is right, which I don't think it is.
And it seems like there's something wrong with the hand on the hip.
What do you mean, 'allowed'? Manufacturers don't really sell anything to do it, but it's not 'locked' and people do indeed tweak the computer. Manufacturers do not in any way attempt to restrict reprogramming the computer, no.
Just like the manufacturers don't restrict you painting your windshield where you can't see out of it, or mounting pieces of rebar sticking ten feet out of the side of your car, or placing a giant spotlight on your hood to blind oncoming drivers.
However, there are usually specific laws about what sort of vehicle can be operated on the road, and those laws have nothing to with the manufacturers. (In fact, the manufacturers have to compile with those laws in order to sell the car.)
Some of the computer tweaking would violate the law, such as various emission rules, and the police could, in theory, have your car removed from the road because of that. (And some tweaking is just stupid. Do not under any circumstance tweak your cruise control. A broken cruise control is a good way to have your car randomly accelerate.)
Erm, people here appear to have confused jailbreaking with unlocking, which are two entirely separate things, although often unlocking requires jailbreaking.
No one's actually arguing they have the right to get out of any contact, or even to use their phone on another network.
Jailbreaking is just making it where you can run random software on the phone.
I have a jailbroken iPhone that is still locked to AT&T. (Although, technically, I'm out of my contact and I could unlock it, or, hell, demand AT&T unlock it.)
A software mod shouldn't even void the software warranty.
This entire concept is idiotic. Device manufacturers only support software they provide, we know that, we're not stupid. (I mean, they don't even support allowed third party software. If a game from the App Store is crashing on your iPhone, Apple's not going to 'support' that.)
So if someone who has modified that has a software problem and go to them, the solution is for them to put the original software back on. And then check for the reported problem.
I don't know where this bullshit 'Of course they have the right to void the warranty' came from. If I get a laptop, and install Linux over the Windows 7 it came with, and I can't run their 'BIOS update' program or something...they are entirely within their rights to insist I run that under the system they provided. They aren't within their rights to start yammering about me having voided the warranty with my Linux install after I reinstall Windows 7 off the restore disks and it still doesn't work.
If device manufacturers just provide some sort of way to reset devices back to factory settings, or simply had a way to do it themselves, none of this would matter. They do not do this...but they should be required to, by law, if you came in and asked for it. (And then they should obviously be required to fix any software problems that existed after that point.)
Instead, because the software is so locked down, it's probably just as complicated to unjailbreak the thing as to jailbreak it, and because no one is 'supposed' to jailbreak anything, no device has any way to easily undo it. (A factory reset really should be built in.) Likewise, almost none of them bother to separate their data from their code...a factory reset should just replace all the system stuff and leave the data alone, in a correctly-designed system.
Device manufactures gave me a warranty, and they will support whatever those warranty terms covered, regardless of what I've been doing with it in the meantime, unless they can demonstrate the thing I want fixes is damage from my 'misuse'. Which is very unlikely, but hypothetically possible. If some custom firmware is causing iPhones to explode, Apple's within their rights to say 'Fuck that, we're not fixing it.'. Otherwise, no. They have to put things back to a known state, and then look at it.
There's an easy solution in this, and it's what companies have done forever:
Mark up the price of A to where it should be, but then include an instant rebate that you can use with proof of purchase of B. (Yes, that is technically a coupon for B, but it can be spun the other way. Or just go ahead and call it a coupon for B.)
Trying to rig it where people can't use something they buy except for one thing is insane.
Warranties cover both hardware and software, and no software change is irreversible.
It is entirely reasonable for manufactures to not support changed software, and it's entirely reasonable for them to point out that a hardware problem is due to software changes. For example, if you overclocked your phone and it overheated and burst the battery, they don't have to fix that.
However, they don't get to use software changes to get out of actual hardware defects, which I think everyone agrees. Where people fall down is trying to allow them to get out of software issues.
No. What they should be able to do is reset the damn device's software. Period. If you take it in because it's acting weird and it's jailbroken, they should have to hook it up and reset it. In fact, that should be an option in the device itself.
Yes, I know right now that's hard, but most of that is because they'd have to also jailbreak past their own protections.
Devices should not be locked like that. They should instead be required to have basically the same 'tainting' mechanism as the Linux kernel. You flip a switch to allow you to run unapproved software, but the device manufacturer reserves the right to flip the switch back or even reinstall everything to do any software support. They don't have to deal with your weird stuff, but they don't have to deal with it by simply undoing it.
And, whenever possible, you should be able to do that yourself.
Right now they're using jailbreaking to get out of their warranty. That should not be allowed.
What I find astonishing about Fukushima is learning that we've decided to keep nuclear waste in a manner that is not failsafe. That we need to actively cool.
That is possibly the most idiotic thing I've ever heard. It's not like it's an infinite amount of heat.
Spread it out, pour some iron on it, and put in some giant heat sinks or something.
Christ, it's like everyone is an idiot or something. 'Hey, this generates a set amount of heat per second, forever, and if it ever gets above a certain temperature it will melt through things.'. 'Herp derp, let's pump water past it. There's no way that could go wrong.' 'Maybe we could rig it where it just distributes the heat to the air or the ground or something, which would only fail if the sun started consuming the earth and heated the atmosphere up massively?' 'Nope, takes too much space. Water pump, that's the plan!'
I understand reactors having problems when shut down, but the waste? Seriously?
However, simple math showed that real (post inflation) real estate appreciation could not continue anywhere near the rates of the early/mid 2000's. Continued appreciation at that rate for a few more years would have resulted in housing prices so high that, at historical interest rates, virtually no one would have been able to buy their first house even if they spent 100% of their income on mortgage payments. Without new entrants into the market to (at least) replace those that die, the supply would quickly outstrip demand and housing prices would have to correct to some extent.
Oddly enough, I actually pointed this out at the time, despite knowing nothing at all about how the market was working or why it was happening. I just looked at history.
Housing has always, throughout human history, cost about two to four years worth of income. That is roughly what people are willing to pay. Taxes obviously change that a little. And loans made it easier to pay without savings, and maybe added a few years to the cost. But I refused to believe that rule of thumb had just somehow completely disappeared.
I could see possibly technology changing the proportion put towards basic needs, perhaps food gets cheaper so we're willing to spend more on houses...but food didn't get cheaper! And we didn't have inflation either. It was just, we'd all decided that somehow house prices were magical and should be as high as we could get them, and I had no idea what the hell was going on. I started warning people this was nonsense about 2006, and was very worried when my brother bought a house. (Luckily, he very sold it early enough.)
But that wasn't really my point. My point was that people were assured that housing could be an investment by everyone, and I'm not talking about the bubble. I'm talking about people who bought a house in 1985 or whenever, with the idea it would steadily beat inflation by a small amount.
And now it's 26 years later, the kids are gone, they're ready to sell their house and retire, and, oh, well, crap. They weren't trying to get in on any bubble, they just assumed, as everyone did, that the asset would slightly beat inflation.
But housing is actually a risk. The market is a risk. Investments are a risk or they wouldn't make any money!
We do not want people to 'risk' starving to death in their old age. Yes, at a certain point, with enough money, you can hypothetically spread the risk enough that it's unlikely that the entire thing would blow up, but if we offered that as a retirement option you just know we'd get half the people investing in gold or houses or tulip bulbs or something.
We really do need a minimum 'zero risk' savings vehicle that people have to keep. Nothing's stopping additional investment. The only reason people are pushing for such a option is they think they can get a good deal on tulip bulbs to sell to the rubes entering the market. Or make money on high-frequency tulip bulb trading.
Also, I think the housing crash has demonstrated that, under normal circumstances, we should forbid banks from making loans with the intent of selling them, period. Turns out, when you allow that, they make random loans to everyone, and then lie about said loans to sell them to others. Who knew?
Sorry, that was a little rude. I have no idea what you mean by 'my assertion'. If you're claiming the top 1% don't make eight times as much as they used to make, that is possibly true. But that was not really the point. The point was the dishonesty of the numbers.
Although you were rude first because I was rude to someone else, but I just get annoyed at people who run around talking about what percentage of human beings pay a certain percentage of taxes, like those two percentages are in any way related. (Did you know that 1% of the population pays 50% of all gas tax? Clearly, trucker's taxes are too high.) That is possibly the most annoying abuse of mathematics I've ever seen. (Did you know that 0.1% of people pay 100% of sales taxes for golf memberships?)
When you tax things, you do not expect the proportion of people paying the taxes to be evenly distributed unless the thing taxed is evenly distributed, and I think we all know that income is not. (In fact, the whole premise of talking about the top 1% is to deliberately pick an uneven distribution, so this is sorta inherently dishonest. A random sample of 1% of the population does, in fact, pay 1% of all income taxes.)
The rich do proportionally pay more than others, because we have a progressive tax system, but it's not fucking 1% vs. 40%. If taxes were inexplicably even, they'd be paying 20%
Hey, moron, did you read that page?
Try looking at this table.
In 1980, the top 1% paid 34.47% of their reported income in taxes.
In 2009, the top 1% paid 24.01% of their reported income in taxes.
Wow, look at that. Right there on the page you gave. They are currently paying a rate that is 70% of what they paid in 1980.
So, if they are paying a lower percentage, why are they now paying 36.73% of total income taxes instead of 19.05%?
Well, because they used to make 8.5% of all money, and now make 17% of all money, that's why.
(And their actual income is a hell of a lot higher, thanks to various abuses of the tax code and corporate resources.)
You've brought up a number of points where doing something so obviously good (giving away food) can actually be bad
Give a man a fish, and he eats for a day. Teach a man to fish, and he eats for a lifetime. Give everyone a fish every day, and soon no one is selling any fish and all the fishermen lose their jobs. (Luckily, they won't starve.)
The problem is that we want to feed the people who literally would not otherwise have food, and that wouldn't affect the market...but that's very hard to do without also feeding people who would normally have bought it.
And I don't mean rich people...poor people buy plenty of food. There's plenty of people who have to choose between food and power bills, and will indeed stand in line for free food so they can get both. But the second we give them some food instead of them buying something, we've undone the entire point of purchasing food to keep it off the market!
And it doesn't matter how or where this happens. We can say 'We should use it for school lunches', but, tada, those places normally bought off the market.
Perhaps we should just spend time trying to figure out how to store food perfectly, instead of worrying about expiring food we literally cannot hand out without undoing the point of paying people for it.
Remember, Warren Buffet's picks are included in the averages!
Yeah, this is what gets me every time I hear someone ramble about 'averages'.
I don't want old people who saved all their life not being thrown out on the streets because they aren't broke on average. I mean, people in this country are employed on average, I guess we can just stop worrying about that, and even get rid of unemployment insurance. The average human has one breast and one testicle.
Certainly, though, a Fed401(k) would be very popular with the bankers, investment houses, and corporations who get the money and benefit from the influx of money effectively forced by law into stocks.
Bingo. Social security or programs like that are actually how society to wants to do retirement. They're low gain because they're fucking low risk. That is how you should do your base retirement, so, you know, people don't lose all their money. (And nothing is stopping people from saving more in other places.)
The entire reason this idea exists is because the rich speculators want people's money in the market, so they have a chance to end up with some of it.
I actually do believe in personal investment accounts as an option to SS (at least in part) and with some limits and oversight. However, most people simply are not equipped to invest responsibly and they should not be doing so. The general population is, frankly, economically illiterate (as evidenced by the housing boom and the stock market crash of the early 2000s as two very recent object lessons).
There I must disagree with you. The housing crash was almost entirely due to circumstances that couldn't be foreseen by anyone even if they did pay attention.
But I suspect you and I think different things were 'the problem'. (It was not people lying on their mortgage, it was the complete and utter fuckup of the banks in inventing imaginary investment vehicles for the super-rich that had no basis in fact, and hence they were incentivized to, instead of making good loans, make as many bad ones as possible.)
Anyone individually losing their house, yes, probably should have had more information at some point, although I will argue that there's a reason that banks are not legally supposed to make loans they can't pay, and half the entire fucking bank industry should be in jail at this moment. But there are plenty of people who bought houses in, oh, 1990 as an investment, paid for them, and expected they'd go up in value and they could sell it and retire to Florida on their investment...and now the housing market is broken and their investment is worthless. It's hard to see what they did wrong except 'Invest in a specific type of thing that later had a bubble'.
Likewise, how many people selected, you know, highly rated stuff and lost all their money because the rating agencies were full of crap? (There's a union suing one of the rating agencies for an example that. They invested pensions in a AAA bond that the rating industry in one day decided to downgrade to 'crap', and they're like 'Wait, that's not supposed to be possible. You said this was a good investment, and you are legally supposed to be the expert. You can't make statements that are that wrong without some liability.'.) How, exactly, were random people supposed to know not to trust rating agencies?
The entire point of risk is that it is risky. If it is risky, there is a chance it will fail, and all the money will vanish. And it will, in fact, vanish into the pocket of other people in the market, which is why the rich really really really want people to move their money out of social security into the market.
The entire point of retirement savings is that it, or at least a bare minimum of it, is not supposed to be risky at all. It doesn't matter to starving people if it works on average.
Incidentally, who would like to see the market with high-frequency trading removed? It
And now the stupid fucks have show up comparing what percentage to income taxes is paid to what percentage of people pay them, two completely unrelated things.
Hey, asswipe. We don't tax people, you fucktard, we tax income. The reason the top 1% pay twice as much now is that they are making something like eight times the money, and taxes are lower.
You might also wonder why you appeared to be paying 100% of the property taxes on your house. That is because you are the owner of your house, and other people are not, and thus those others did not have to pay any taxes on it. Likewise, the top 1% are almost the only people making any fucking income above the poverty line, or even any money at all, so are, in fact, almost the only people paying income tax.
I know it's very strange and requires a basic concept of complicated ideas like 'Only people with things are required to pay taxes on those things. People do not have to pay taxes on imaginary things they don't have.', but maybe you can find someone to help you. Perhaps you could go to the library and explain you are one of the very stupid, and ask if they have programs to help you. Like a literacy program, but for your entire brain.
And there is more than enough if we'd put their rates back to where they were under Clinton, and stopped bailouts and war. As everyone knows.
Without the idiotic policies of constant war and constant tax cuts and constant bailouts, we'd have a slightly increasing debt right now, during the recession (Yes, even with the stimulus), and one that went away once the economy got better. (Which means we'd have been much better off going into the economic collapse.)
When the hell did a computer become a 'converged device'?
Duh, I replied to your post, and then I realized that you mean you can't give it away during normal times.
The question is competition. You have to give it away in such a manner that is not competing with itself.
The easiest thing is to give it away in some starving country somewhere else. (Although, oddly, I've read about problems with exactly that in some poor countries...the West continually supplying free food screws up the area's ability to supply food to itself. How could any local farmer compete? The article I read said, basically, don't give them food, give them the ability to farm.)
As for locally, the best idea would be to somehow make that specific food obviously 'worse' than food sold. That is why I was suggesting simply sticking it in big tins without flavoring.
An alternate idea would be to make it taste bad. I know that sounds sorta silly, but it would seem to work. Alternately, color it very oddly.
Well, you can't actually give any away or even sell it - it has to be destroyed. Otherwise it will drag down the prices and the farmers will suffer just as much as if they overproduced in the first place.
That's why I was saying we only sell it when prices are high. Dragging down the price for food sorta happens automatically when you stop a famine.
But I get your point about the fact that in such circumstances farmers are probably already doing poorly, because the main reason that prices are high is that some crops failed. And dragging down the prices makes it worse. So we should have some sort of insurance for them.
Hrm, as we bought from them, after all, when prices were low...perhaps we could just now pay them the difference?
I.e, the market, on average, has 100 X, which costs $10 per X. One year, there's a surplus, and we have 150 X, which drives the price down to $6 per X. Or it would, except the government steps in and pays $8, and ends up with 40 extra. (The remaining 10 get used by the market anyway.)
Two years later, there's a drought, and there are only 30 X, prices are $20 per X, and it looks everyone is going to starve, and while those prices are twice as high, farmers are only selling a third as much to start with, so they're in trouble.
But, wait, the government steps in and sells enough of their stored X to drive the price down to $15 per X. Which is great for the people, but even worse for the farmers...except the government is paying the people it originally bought them from another $7 per X. (Which doesn't really entirely solve the problem for farmers, but it doesn't make it worse.)
Or...hell...we can just give a portion of the food back to the farmers. Literal 'food insurance'. You pay your dues in food each year, when disaster hits, you get some food back. Heh. (Or, more realistically, we give vouchers back, and they can sell those to people and companies that want a can.)
Indeed. I think an argument can be made that if the government is going to interfere in the market in that way...
Those numbers are, obviously, completely off the top of my head. Probably instead we want some sort of Commission in the Department of Agriculture to actually have specific triggers.
And, of course, we'd now have supplies in the case of disaster and have 'government surplus' almost-expired stuff to sell cheaply or give to charities when disaster or famine didn't happen.
That lets the government act as a sort of buffer, and manages to leave the market completely alone when everything is fine, and is a good deal saner to paying people not to do things.