cervesaebraciator gave the exact quote I was thinking of in one of his responses to you in this thread. There are several others, but I think you will find that that particular post makes my point.
You misunderstood what I said. I said I have not studied whether this issue is a good idea or a bad idea. That is, I have not spent the time to see whether or not the arguments made for doing this overcome my default belief that it is a mistake for the government to fiddle with the marketplace. I have spent some time looking at reasoning used to make the decisions in the first place.
You overlooked her assertion that the failure of the underwear bomber (or was it the tennis shoe bomber?) was evidence that the system worked, even though there were only two reasons he failed to blow up the plane, neither one of which involved anyone from her department. The two reasons were
1) the bomber was incompetent
2) the other passengers on the plane swarmed him as soon as they realized what he was up to
The second may not have been necessary because of the first one, but it ensured that he did not have a chance to correct his mistakes. Neither of these is any indication that the invasive procedures used to screen passengers was of any use in preventing the bombing of a plane.
There are reasons that someone started referring to her as Janet Incompetano (I no longer remember where I first came across that manner of referring to her).
Except that if you read the writings of some of the industrialists, and other opinion leaders, who were active in the organizations that led to the rise of public schools, you will see that they said that their motivation was almost exactly what the OP stated.
The public school system revolves around an industrial economy schedule because of the hours the parents were working at the time that public schooling became "standardized".
The problem with that logic is that at the time that public school hours became standardized most mothers did not work outside of the home. That is, while one of the parents was working during that 8-4 block there was still one parent available to care for the children. The other problem with your theory is that school hours do not actually match up well with the times that parents are out of the house due to their work schedule.
The argument is not mine, but it is the same basic argument which was the reason the Framers put the Postal Service in the Constitution. There is a certain logic to it and while I remain skeptical as to that logic there are places where the government intrudes its authority and spends its money that are more clearly at odds with good governance, and a healthy society, that this is an issue that can wait for another day. There is a lot of "low hanging fruit" still out there to address places where the government interferes in the market in ways that are more clearly harmful to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness that this is an issue which should be addressed later (although if people want to talk about it and attempt to address it, they should get their facts straight and address the reasons that others are going to use to defend it).
The Universal Service Fund was placed in the Telecommunications Act of 1996 (along with other provisions) to codify the changes that had been made subsequent to the breakup of AT&T. The Communications Act of 1934 called for: “rapid, efficient, Nation-wide, and world-wide wire and radio communication service with adequate facilities at reasonable charges” to “all the people of the United States.” This was paid for by AT&T charging extra for long distance service to subsidize rural service. So the concept and argument behind the USF goes back to the Communications Act of 1934. The reason I am talking about this issue is because if we are going to reach a correct decision about it, we need to address the arguments that will be used to defend it, not some straw man argument.
What you fail to realize is that while MPG tells you how many miles you get per gallon, a comparison of three or more different miles per gallon does not really tell you how much different the cost in dollars will be. If I know that car A uses 20 gallons for every 100 miles, (I am going to use $4 a gallon as the price of gas for this exercise, that number is chosen arbitrarily) I know that it will cost me $80 to travel 100 miles. Car B which uses 10 gallons for every 100 miles will only cost me $40 to travel that same distance, a $40 savings. Car C which uses 5 gallons of gas to travel 100 miles only saves me an additional $20 over car B for that same 100 miles. Using MPG Car A gets 5 MPG, Car B gets 10 MPG, and Car C gets 20 MPG. Until I do the actual math, using MPG Car C looks like it is way better than Car B, yet it saves me less in fuel over Car B than Car B saves me over Car A.
What you are not getting is that 40 MPG to 160 MPG looks like it will save you a lot of money, it gives most people the impression that it saves them more money than going from 5 MPG to 20 MPG. When in reality it saves them less. Heck, going from 40 MPG to Infinite MPG saves people less money than going from 5 MPG to 20 MPG.
No, the reason that money from urban taxpayers was used to pay people to live in rural areas (an oversimplification, but still useful for addressing the point you were making) is because urban taxpayers need somebody to live in those rural areas and produce the things (such as food) that cannot be easily produced in urban areas. This particular subsidy was created because it was recognized that the utility of the telephone system was much greater if just about everyone had one than if there were vast areas where no one had telephone service.
That being said, I am not convinced that it was a good idea in the first place and lean towards getting rid of it now. I haven't studied the issue, but my default philosophy about government spending says that this is a bad idea and I don't have any facts which convincingly counter that.
The problem is that the only way you know how far your car goes on a gallon of gas is if you measure it yourself. The mpg rating for a car is very dependent on how you drive. The purpose of giving mpg for a new car is so that it can be used as a comparison tool as to how much it will cost you to drive the car. Even your example that " the car has twice the utility per dollar spent on gasoline. So, for that reason, it also make sense to compare in miles/gallon." Except that if I am comparing more than two cars, the gp100m is more useful. It tells me how much more I will be saving on the car that gets better gas mileage and does a better job of putting that savings in a context that lets me balance it against other things. Once more, I get more value from going from a car that gets 10 mpg to a car that gets 20 mpg than I get from going from a car that gets 20 mpg to a car that gets 40 mpg, but using miles per gallon makes it seem like I am getting as much or more value in the second case. To extend the example, 80 mpg seems like a major improvement over 40 mpg and 160 mpg seems like and even greater improvement, but 80 mpg will only save me 1.25 gallons per 100 miles and 160 mpg will only save me 0.625 gallons per 100 miles. The cost to build a car that gets 80 mpg is much higher than the cost to build one that goes 40 mpg and 160 mpg even more (to the point that it is not practical to do so for a consumer car at this point in time). But in practical terms those increases are only incremental improvements. Going from 5 mpg to 10 mpg seems like an incremental improvement compared to 40 mpg to 80 mpg, when in fact it is the reverse 40 mpg to 80 mpg is an incremental improvement compared to 5 mpg to 10 mpg.
You obviously did not read the rest of my post, where I showed that you are wrong. Decreasing the amount of gasoline used to travel 100 miles from 10 gallons to 5 gallons is 2x better than reducing the amount of gasoline used from 5 gallons to 2.5 gallons.
You are missing his point. Since you apparently are someone who uses U.S. Standard Units, I will convert his point to those. It is easier to compare the gas efficiency of two cars if you use Gallons(Liters) per 100 Miles(Kilometers) than it is to do so using Miles(Kilometers) per Gallon(Liter). For example using mpg (or kpl) it appears that a vehicle that gets 40 mpg is as much better than a vehicle that gets 20 mpg as a vehicle that gets 20 mpg is better than one that gets 10 mpg. However, if you convert that the Gallons/100 Miles(gp100m) you discover that a vehicle which gets 10 mpg gets 10 gp100m, while a car that gets 20 mpg gets 5 gp100m and one that gets 40 mpg gets 2.5 gp100m. Meaning that you save 5 gallons per 100 miles traveled when you go from a vehicle which gets 10 mpg to one that gets 20 mpg, but you only save 2.5 gallons per 100 miles traveled when you go from a vehicle that gets 20 mpg to one that gets 40 mpg.
Understanding this makes clear how much it is costing us to make ever smaller incremental changes in improvements in gas usage by vehicles. Paying attention to that will allow us to more readily recognize when further improvements in fuel efficiency are not worth the cost. It is called the law of diminishing returns, a law to which we as a society pay too little attention.
The problem they are discussing, as pointed out by other people, is that when you look up a book on Amazon that is related to books you have already purchased, it is priced higher than when someone who has never purchased books related to that subject or genre looks it up (even if both of you look for the book at the same time).
Wow, because I do not automatically believe the Bolivian government when they say something that reflects badly on other countries, but supports an opinion of the way world politics works held by a conspiracy minded portion of slashdot readers, I get labeled a troll.
Apparently no one read the part where I stated that I don't know who is lying.
At this point the only country that I saw in any of the links admitting to denying passage was France. Spain admitted that they thought Snowden was on the plane but denies that they refused passage.
I have known for years that the overwhelming majority is in the propaganda arm of the Democratic Party and favors the expansion of government power. The only country which has acknowledged denying the right to cross its airspace is France (which makes sense since they were apparently aware that they were about to get hit with a revelation for spying in a fashion similar to that of the U.S.). I am sorry, I have yet to see any evidence that Spain or Portugal denied the Bolivian President the right to cross their airspace...and I can envision Morales deciding to make a bigger deal out of the French refusal by claiming that other countries had as well (especially if he was unaware of the French spying revelations). Of course, I can also see Spain and Italy going along with denying passage thinking there was good reason to since both the French and the U.S. were supporting the position.
However, as I said, the President of Bolivia does have a history of grandstanding.
I do not know if you have noticed, but the President of Bolivia also has power. And perhaps you failed to notice, but the essence of my post was that I do not trust any of the parties involved in this dispute enough to make a judgment as to who is lying. Although the French apology combined with recent revelations that they were doing the same thing as the U.S.'s NSA, suggests that at least the French were guilty as charged.
So, because the President of Bolivia is an individual, you will believe him over the spokesperson for another government (I am not sure if you have noticed, but all of the spokespeople for other governments are also individuals). Why should the head of one government be believed over the spokesperson for other governments?
In an article elsewhere in this thread we learn that in the same statement the Spanish Foreign Minister said that Spanish airspace was never closed to the Bolivian President's plane.
Hell, some countries even denied Bolivian presidents airspace [slashdot.org] when they thought Snowden was on the plane.
Correction: Bolivia claimed that some countries denied the Bolivian president permission to enter their airspace. Those countries have denied doing so. At this point I have seen no information which allows me to reach a conclusion as to which side is lying. I have greater distrust of the Bolivian government than I do of the other government's involved, but I cannot see a clear enough motivation for them to make this up to overcome my distrust of the other governments. Which leaves me to the conclusion I already stated: I don't know who is lying.
No, the invasion I am referring to was the invasion of Spain and southern France. The Crusades were merely a continuation of the battles which had been occurring between those who identified themselves as Christians and those who identified themselves as Muslims since the time of Mohammed. For most of that time, the Muslims were the aggressors.
Yes, Morsi really tried to move too fast, before he was able to install enough Islamists in enough high level positions in the army. Erdogan was much more patient than Morsi and only moved slowly towards Islamisation while he replaced leaders at all levels of the military with people who agreed more closely with his agenda. Morsi only had time to replace a few of the top leaders in the Egyptian Army. He had not yet had time to change the culture of the entire army.
On the other hand, military cultures are a funny thing and while Erdogan appears to have done a good job of converting the Turkish Army into something that is at least sympathetic to Islamisation of Turkey, there are certain constraints that armies face that may come back to bite him. Other constraints are why generals so often make such bad political leaders (although the rare exceptions are among the best in history).
W. was Cheney/Rumsfeld's sockpuppet; You don't think He decided to land on an aircraft carrier at sea, do you?:)
Actually, yes, I do think that W. decided to land on an aircraft carrier at sea. He was a fighter pilot in the Air National Guard and his father was a pretty good naval pilot during WWII. So, it seems pretty likely that the idea of landing on an aircraft carrier at sea would have been his (or at least one that he liked as soon as he heard it). The idea that one of the Bush's was anybody's puppet shows a very poor understanding of the history of the U.S., even for a conspiracy theorists. If your conspiracy theory was correct, the Bush's would be among the people running things, not mere puppets of other people. Rumsfeld and Cheney were courtiers that George W. Bush inherited from his father.
Really people you should spend a little time looking into the past of the people you think are puppets. If you want to create a credible conspiracy theory you really need to know more about the characters you picture as being the puppetmasters. Cheney and Rumsfeld were the sons of middle class men. It is possible that their children could rise to the role of puppetmasters, but there is no way that they were able to grab the levers of power away from the son of a man like George H. W. Bush.
Slashdot Mirror
cervesaebraciator gave the exact quote I was thinking of in one of his responses to you in this thread. There are several others, but I think you will find that that particular post makes my point.
You misunderstood what I said. I said I have not studied whether this issue is a good idea or a bad idea. That is, I have not spent the time to see whether or not the arguments made for doing this overcome my default belief that it is a mistake for the government to fiddle with the marketplace. I have spent some time looking at reasoning used to make the decisions in the first place.
The second may not have been necessary because of the first one, but it ensured that he did not have a chance to correct his mistakes. Neither of these is any indication that the invasive procedures used to screen passengers was of any use in preventing the bombing of a plane.
There are reasons that someone started referring to her as Janet Incompetano (I no longer remember where I first came across that manner of referring to her).
Except that if you read the writings of some of the industrialists, and other opinion leaders, who were active in the organizations that led to the rise of public schools, you will see that they said that their motivation was almost exactly what the OP stated.
The public school system revolves around an industrial economy schedule because of the hours the parents were working at the time that public schooling became "standardized".
The problem with that logic is that at the time that public school hours became standardized most mothers did not work outside of the home. That is, while one of the parents was working during that 8-4 block there was still one parent available to care for the children. The other problem with your theory is that school hours do not actually match up well with the times that parents are out of the house due to their work schedule.
The argument is not mine, but it is the same basic argument which was the reason the Framers put the Postal Service in the Constitution. There is a certain logic to it and while I remain skeptical as to that logic there are places where the government intrudes its authority and spends its money that are more clearly at odds with good governance, and a healthy society, that this is an issue that can wait for another day. There is a lot of "low hanging fruit" still out there to address places where the government interferes in the market in ways that are more clearly harmful to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness that this is an issue which should be addressed later (although if people want to talk about it and attempt to address it, they should get their facts straight and address the reasons that others are going to use to defend it).
The Universal Service Fund was placed in the Telecommunications Act of 1996 (along with other provisions) to codify the changes that had been made subsequent to the breakup of AT&T. The Communications Act of 1934 called for: “rapid, efficient, Nation-wide, and world-wide wire and radio communication service with adequate facilities at reasonable charges” to “all the people of the United States.” This was paid for by AT&T charging extra for long distance service to subsidize rural service. So the concept and argument behind the USF goes back to the Communications Act of 1934. The reason I am talking about this issue is because if we are going to reach a correct decision about it, we need to address the arguments that will be used to defend it, not some straw man argument.
What you fail to realize is that while MPG tells you how many miles you get per gallon, a comparison of three or more different miles per gallon does not really tell you how much different the cost in dollars will be. If I know that car A uses 20 gallons for every 100 miles, (I am going to use $4 a gallon as the price of gas for this exercise, that number is chosen arbitrarily) I know that it will cost me $80 to travel 100 miles. Car B which uses 10 gallons for every 100 miles will only cost me $40 to travel that same distance, a $40 savings. Car C which uses 5 gallons of gas to travel 100 miles only saves me an additional $20 over car B for that same 100 miles. Using MPG Car A gets 5 MPG, Car B gets 10 MPG, and Car C gets 20 MPG. Until I do the actual math, using MPG Car C looks like it is way better than Car B, yet it saves me less in fuel over Car B than Car B saves me over Car A.
What you are not getting is that 40 MPG to 160 MPG looks like it will save you a lot of money, it gives most people the impression that it saves them more money than going from 5 MPG to 20 MPG. When in reality it saves them less. Heck, going from 40 MPG to Infinite MPG saves people less money than going from 5 MPG to 20 MPG.
How do we know this "think tank" isn't just another sockpuppet of the Koch Brothers?
I don't know the name of the organizations sounds more like one of George Soros' sock puppets...and there are more of those then of the Koch Brothers.
No, the reason that money from urban taxpayers was used to pay people to live in rural areas (an oversimplification, but still useful for addressing the point you were making) is because urban taxpayers need somebody to live in those rural areas and produce the things (such as food) that cannot be easily produced in urban areas. This particular subsidy was created because it was recognized that the utility of the telephone system was much greater if just about everyone had one than if there were vast areas where no one had telephone service.
That being said, I am not convinced that it was a good idea in the first place and lean towards getting rid of it now. I haven't studied the issue, but my default philosophy about government spending says that this is a bad idea and I don't have any facts which convincingly counter that.
The problem is that the only way you know how far your car goes on a gallon of gas is if you measure it yourself. The mpg rating for a car is very dependent on how you drive. The purpose of giving mpg for a new car is so that it can be used as a comparison tool as to how much it will cost you to drive the car. Even your example that " the car has twice the utility per dollar spent on gasoline. So, for that reason, it also make sense to compare in miles/gallon." Except that if I am comparing more than two cars, the gp100m is more useful. It tells me how much more I will be saving on the car that gets better gas mileage and does a better job of putting that savings in a context that lets me balance it against other things. Once more, I get more value from going from a car that gets 10 mpg to a car that gets 20 mpg than I get from going from a car that gets 20 mpg to a car that gets 40 mpg, but using miles per gallon makes it seem like I am getting as much or more value in the second case. To extend the example, 80 mpg seems like a major improvement over 40 mpg and 160 mpg seems like and even greater improvement, but 80 mpg will only save me 1.25 gallons per 100 miles and 160 mpg will only save me 0.625 gallons per 100 miles. The cost to build a car that gets 80 mpg is much higher than the cost to build one that goes 40 mpg and 160 mpg even more (to the point that it is not practical to do so for a consumer car at this point in time). But in practical terms those increases are only incremental improvements. Going from 5 mpg to 10 mpg seems like an incremental improvement compared to 40 mpg to 80 mpg, when in fact it is the reverse 40 mpg to 80 mpg is an incremental improvement compared to 5 mpg to 10 mpg.
You obviously did not read the rest of my post, where I showed that you are wrong. Decreasing the amount of gasoline used to travel 100 miles from 10 gallons to 5 gallons is 2x better than reducing the amount of gasoline used from 5 gallons to 2.5 gallons.
You are missing his point. Since you apparently are someone who uses U.S. Standard Units, I will convert his point to those. It is easier to compare the gas efficiency of two cars if you use Gallons(Liters) per 100 Miles(Kilometers) than it is to do so using Miles(Kilometers) per Gallon(Liter). For example using mpg (or kpl) it appears that a vehicle that gets 40 mpg is as much better than a vehicle that gets 20 mpg as a vehicle that gets 20 mpg is better than one that gets 10 mpg. However, if you convert that the Gallons/100 Miles(gp100m) you discover that a vehicle which gets 10 mpg gets 10 gp100m, while a car that gets 20 mpg gets 5 gp100m and one that gets 40 mpg gets 2.5 gp100m. Meaning that you save 5 gallons per 100 miles traveled when you go from a vehicle which gets 10 mpg to one that gets 20 mpg, but you only save 2.5 gallons per 100 miles traveled when you go from a vehicle that gets 20 mpg to one that gets 40 mpg.
Understanding this makes clear how much it is costing us to make ever smaller incremental changes in improvements in gas usage by vehicles. Paying attention to that will allow us to more readily recognize when further improvements in fuel efficiency are not worth the cost. It is called the law of diminishing returns, a law to which we as a society pay too little attention.
The problem they are discussing, as pointed out by other people, is that when you look up a book on Amazon that is related to books you have already purchased, it is priced higher than when someone who has never purchased books related to that subject or genre looks it up (even if both of you look for the book at the same time).
Wow, because I do not automatically believe the Bolivian government when they say something that reflects badly on other countries, but supports an opinion of the way world politics works held by a conspiracy minded portion of slashdot readers, I get labeled a troll.
Apparently no one read the part where I stated that I don't know who is lying.
Perhaps you did not read my original post where I stated: "I don't know who is lying."
At this point the only country that I saw in any of the links admitting to denying passage was France. Spain admitted that they thought Snowden was on the plane but denies that they refused passage.
I have known for years that the overwhelming majority is in the propaganda arm of the Democratic Party and favors the expansion of government power. The only country which has acknowledged denying the right to cross its airspace is France (which makes sense since they were apparently aware that they were about to get hit with a revelation for spying in a fashion similar to that of the U.S.). I am sorry, I have yet to see any evidence that Spain or Portugal denied the Bolivian President the right to cross their airspace...and I can envision Morales deciding to make a bigger deal out of the French refusal by claiming that other countries had as well (especially if he was unaware of the French spying revelations). Of course, I can also see Spain and Italy going along with denying passage thinking there was good reason to since both the French and the U.S. were supporting the position.
However, as I said, the President of Bolivia does have a history of grandstanding.
I do not know if you have noticed, but the President of Bolivia also has power. And perhaps you failed to notice, but the essence of my post was that I do not trust any of the parties involved in this dispute enough to make a judgment as to who is lying. Although the French apology combined with recent revelations that they were doing the same thing as the U.S.'s NSA, suggests that at least the French were guilty as charged.
So, because the President of Bolivia is an individual, you will believe him over the spokesperson for another government (I am not sure if you have noticed, but all of the spokespeople for other governments are also individuals). Why should the head of one government be believed over the spokesperson for other governments?
In an article elsewhere in this thread we learn that in the same statement the Spanish Foreign Minister said that Spanish airspace was never closed to the Bolivian President's plane.
Hell, some countries even denied Bolivian presidents airspace [slashdot.org] when they thought Snowden was on the plane.
Correction: Bolivia claimed that some countries denied the Bolivian president permission to enter their airspace. Those countries have denied doing so. At this point I have seen no information which allows me to reach a conclusion as to which side is lying. I have greater distrust of the Bolivian government than I do of the other government's involved, but I cannot see a clear enough motivation for them to make this up to overcome my distrust of the other governments. Which leaves me to the conclusion I already stated: I don't know who is lying.
No, the invasion I am referring to was the invasion of Spain and southern France. The Crusades were merely a continuation of the battles which had been occurring between those who identified themselves as Christians and those who identified themselves as Muslims since the time of Mohammed. For most of that time, the Muslims were the aggressors.
Yes, Morsi really tried to move too fast, before he was able to install enough Islamists in enough high level positions in the army. Erdogan was much more patient than Morsi and only moved slowly towards Islamisation while he replaced leaders at all levels of the military with people who agreed more closely with his agenda. Morsi only had time to replace a few of the top leaders in the Egyptian Army. He had not yet had time to change the culture of the entire army.
On the other hand, military cultures are a funny thing and while Erdogan appears to have done a good job of converting the Turkish Army into something that is at least sympathetic to Islamisation of Turkey, there are certain constraints that armies face that may come back to bite him. Other constraints are why generals so often make such bad political leaders (although the rare exceptions are among the best in history).
W. was Cheney/Rumsfeld's sockpuppet; You don't think He decided to land on an aircraft carrier at sea, do you? :)
Actually, yes, I do think that W. decided to land on an aircraft carrier at sea. He was a fighter pilot in the Air National Guard and his father was a pretty good naval pilot during WWII. So, it seems pretty likely that the idea of landing on an aircraft carrier at sea would have been his (or at least one that he liked as soon as he heard it). The idea that one of the Bush's was anybody's puppet shows a very poor understanding of the history of the U.S., even for a conspiracy theorists. If your conspiracy theory was correct, the Bush's would be among the people running things, not mere puppets of other people. Rumsfeld and Cheney were courtiers that George W. Bush inherited from his father.
Really people you should spend a little time looking into the past of the people you think are puppets. If you want to create a credible conspiracy theory you really need to know more about the characters you picture as being the puppetmasters. Cheney and Rumsfeld were the sons of middle class men. It is possible that their children could rise to the role of puppetmasters, but there is no way that they were able to grab the levers of power away from the son of a man like George H. W. Bush.