The movie star may save a poor film from financial disaster, but the much more likely scenario is that a good film flops due to lack of a big name. That's why the big names are so valued - everyone is trying to avoid the latter scenario.
Not only that, but these people have connections commensurate with their salaries. The company's not only paying for whatever business talent they have, but also the network they bring with them.
In keeping with your movie analogy, if you hire Bob Smith right out of acting school instead of Tom Hanks, do you think Bob Smith will be able to call up top-notch directors and cinematographers and attract the best talent to work on the new movie? Wouldn't simply having Tom Hanks on board grease the skids for you with the movie studios and ensure wide distribution for your film? How much is that worth?
The end product might be no different had Tom Hanks or Bob Smith been hired. Maybe (probably) Bob Smith is a better actor. The difference is that chances are nobody ever will see the movie with Bob Smith, but a Tom Hanks movie is almost guaranteed to make money. It's about how much you're willing to risk.
I think the same thing, except that I really, really like the whole write-the-interface-as-a-document-then-manipulate-it style of GUI programming.
Compared to writing applications with some GUI toolkit, web programming is a piece of cake. It seems like the right way to do things...if only the scripting portion were a bit more advanced.
Imagine if javascript had a facility for opening sockets and writing files - developing an app with that system would be a dream.
Horse-drawn carriages are made by an intense effort of people applying their talents. And yet there is very little market for them.
The amount of effort you put into something is really irrelevant to what other people are willing to pay for it, because the amount of effort you put in no way affects what other people need.
Alexi is right, this sucks for people who want to write small programs and live off of the proceeds, because free software destroys the market for that. But it's nearly impossible to argue that free software is a detriment to society as a whole, because it drastically lowers the cost of doing other things with that software, thus creating wealth.
most PHP programmers never learn the right way of doing anything, and when they do, they feel like going back and redoing all their work......in a different language:-)
Fair warning, though, if you start wearing those glasses you may suddenly find yourself remarking how that women's shoes don't go with her outfit. ..
Or how Steve Jobs is the hottest guy on the face of the earth, because he's a technical AND artistic genius. I mean, just LOOK at how well the Mac works and how beautiful it is!
It may be a smaller number, but probably a much harder group to convince. A voting member has a much more personal stake in the company than someone who just bought the stock hoping to sell at a higher price.
If you were sitting on the board, and Microsoft came along with this offer, would you want to sell to them, lose your control over Yahoo's future, etc.?
Consider, however, that the government was set up not to work well, and that the "cut deals and make compromises" part was exactly what the founders were trying to avoid. Also, the direct election of Senators was not provided for in the original Constitution. The seventeenth amendment is responsible for this.
I think the Constitution was set up explicitly to block any progress and consolidation of power at the federal level. It worked wonderfully up until the civil war, when the federal government took on the role it has today and expanded ever since.
It's unfortunate that the U.S. Constitution was not written 130 years later, when slavery would likely no longer have been an issue, and consolidation of federal power would have been much more difficult.
Although, I'm sure no matter what you write, it happens anyway. Hence, the second amendment.
The mortgage analogy would be a good one, if the government operated in a remotely sane manner. The situation we're in now is more like this:
--- Sam has a mortgage that he pays a large interest on, such that the principle amount owed never goes down. He borrows money from a loan shark to buy a Cadillac, and loses two thirds of it on the way to the car dealer, and ends up with a used Ford Focus. On the way home, he stops by the bank to get a second mortgage on his house, in order to pay for his retarded diabetic daughter's medical expenses for the next year. He plans to do this every year, assuming the bank will keep letting him mortgage his house. So far, this has worked, because the value of his house has increased rapidly recently. However, the real-estate market is turning downward... ---
What does this have to do with the national debt? Well, absolutely nothing, because on the scale that the Federal government operates, there is no magic investment fund that the government puts its "extra" money into, and there cannot be. There are three things that a government can do with money: print more, remove some from circulation, and redistribute it. The first two directly affect the value of the individual dollar, so there is never any net gain or loss associated with manipulating a currency. (Hint - currency trading is a zero sum game, even when governments do it)
Redistribution of money through taxation and subsequent spending provides no net gain to the economy, unless you believe that the method of collection (taxation) and spending (Congress and Executive branch) are more efficient than the free market. (That may be true in some cases.)
So is there anything wrong with our massive national debt? Well, let's think about what incentives it creates. Inflation is a major boon to anyone in a massive amount of debt, as devaluing the dollar will reduce the actual debt owed by the same percentage. So now that the U.S. owes a massive amount of money to foreign investors, you'll see a ridiculous inflationary monetary policy as the U.S. tries desperately not to default on those loans.
What this means is that for responsible citizens of the U.S. who would like to save money and become financially solvent, it's now an uphill battle, and the government is going to be working against them by devaluing every dollar they save.
And there's MORE good news. We'll also be taking money from people who make good decisions in order to bail out every jackass who doesn't read the terms of his ARM loan when buying the McMansion he can't hope to afford, and every real-estate agent and mortgage broker who take advantage of this jackass. This will stave off a small recession for a few years, until the next crisis arises, rinse, repeat, and the situation continues to snowball.
This ignores the coming crisis in the next twenty years when the baby boomers are of age to get all those nice social security and medicare benefits, when there is NO money for it.
The transfer of wealth from responsible people to wasteful spenders will continue in the form of inflation and vote-buying, and it will cripple the U.S. economy.
Re:NOT the same old entrenched politics
on
Has Ron Paul Quit?
·
· Score: 0
They wanted to go into Iraq to prove their pet theories about evangelical democracy
Not really. They went because they thought Saddam had, or was close to having, nuclear/chemical/bio weapons, and was likely to sell them to an unstable third party.
The whole "bringing democracy to the middle east" thing came later, after the WMD reason turned out to not to be true, and the administration didn't want to say, "Hey, we were wrong, but the consequences of our not acting on imperfect information would have been severe had we been right about the WMD."
Which is unfortunate, because the U.S. had plenty of real justification to remove Saddam, as he was in constant violation of the terms of the cease fire of the first gulf war.
Calling the war a "mistake" without evidence of wilfull deception by the Bush administration is kind of like saying that paying for car insurance during a year when you end up having no car accidents a "mistake." It's being cautious and acting on imperfect information.
Now, the way the rest of it was handled and the after-justifications that came out are the real problem. So, I can see it either way -- maybe we should get out soon or maybe we should stay and make sure at least some good comes out of the whole mess. I don't think you can answer that emphatically one way or another without the benefit of hindsight.
Yeah, show me where the software engineer's signature is from the guy who guarantees that the software won't kill anyone.
I guess it depends on what he means by rigorous, though. At least in most kinds of engineering the problems aren't unexplored, so you have some guidelines to work within that pretty much guarantee your building won't catch on fire.
But there's a huge difference between guaranteeing something will work and making something that pretty much works most of the time, we think. Comparing the two is slightly ridiculous.
Well, I don't really have a dog in this fight, but here's my experience:
GTK tried to do object oriented things in C, and the result is fairly ugly. This isn't a show-stopper, but the flexibility of QT just isn't there. Let's say I'd like a widget that works slightly differently than the default that either toolkit provides -- QT makes changing widgets through inheritance easy and elegant, not so in GTK.
GTK supports many, many programming languages, but only the most popular at any given time have language bindings that are up to date. This would be a plus for GTK, but there are QT bindings available too, so it's really a wash.
Distributing a compiled QT app is dead simple, you include three or four libraries and you're off to the races. GTK apps are a nightmare of libraries and config files that have to be structured just so. GTK is a pain in the ass in this regard, especially PyGTK.
QT runs beautifully on Windows, while GTK has a few bugs to iron out.
QT's thread api is simple to use with the signal/slot mechanism providing an excellent way to pass data between threads and synchronize them. GTK's thread api is. ..not as nice.
And he tries for the flame war trifecta...NO GOOD! Oh, you hate to see that when they work so hard to prepare for the big game.
Still, two flame wars in one sentence is nothing to scoff at, which is why the artistic score will be high. However, the judges really wanted to see some sort of garbage collection vs. malloc/free or even an Intel/AMD mention. That could cost him the gold.
Let's see what the rest of the competitors have to offer.
And there's a limited amount of bandwidth. Phone networks are designed to handle normal peak usage, and usually not much more, or else they'd be a lot more expensive for everyone.
It's likely that if they lowered the price, the networks would be flooded in short order, and the messages would be delayed or not sent at all.
Finally, thanks to all of the teens out there who spend a ton of money on this crap, so that I may have my $20 pay as you go phone for emergencies. And thanks to the parents of those teens who pay all that credit card interest on the text messaging fees so that I can get free money from the credit card companies. You guys rock!
As for economic condition (never mind your statement which implies that the world history started when America was "invented"), things are not all that well in America at the moment, with a huge national debt (i.e. America borrows and borrows more and more money from other countries) that rises dramatically, government budget deficits that run in the billions of dollars, a plummeting dollar (it's now half the value as compared to the Euro than it was 8 years ago), and so on and so forth. It's only a matter of time before there'll be a 1930's collapse, and it might already have started.
And this is what happens when everyone pays for everyone else! Why do you think there's a huge national debt and the dollar is plummeting? It's because everyone here thinks they can vote themselves a free lunch, with no adverse effects. Those people are wrong.
There is an underlying reality (scarcity) that is reflected in free market prices. Ignoring that reality is what gets us into trouble. That's why we're in the mess we're in today.
The culture of the Scandinavian countries might be such that there is little to no abuse of the system when it's "free" for everyone. That's an exceptional case, however, and would be a complete disaster in the U.S.
In America, or so I heard, things are hunky-dory if you have money. But if something happens that breaks your bank, you go all the way to the bottom, with no-one to help you or share your cost.
That's simply not true. You might not here about the charities here and help available to those who need it, probably because it's not a nationalized system. But it still exists. Otherwise, people wouldn't be risking their lives to get over the border for the medical care and benefits we have.
Yes, let's provide a huge financial incentive for the next Bonzai Buddy or Realplayer Adware Edition to helpfully download songs for you that you might not have heard of and might "want."\
We Americans think that paying only our costs is cheaper than everyone helping to pay everyone's costs.
And we Americans are right. And we Americans have the entire world history and a whole bunch of economic theory to back that up, too.
When people don't pay directly for their own goods and services, they are more likely to use more than they otherwise would. This creates shortages in the short term, and higher overall prices in the long term. Witness what happened under Nixon's gas price controls in the 70's. Severe gasoline shortages and long waits for gas. When price controls were lifted, no more waits, and the price of gasoline went down.
In this situation we have a certain number of the population who want everyone else to pay for something they want. $5 sounds like no big deal, but in aggregate, that's a lot of money not going to other, much more useful things.
If you still believe that it's more efficient to spread costs around, you're free to start your own organization that does so. This is why insurance exists.
But I fail to see why I should have to pay money to support an organization thinks it deserves my money because other people are illegally copying what they're selling for way too high a price. If that's not extortion, nothing is.
"Meanwhile, nobody will subsidize the cable service that I want so the costs are mostly hidden from me and borne by others who wouldn't otherwise pay for it."
There, fixed that so it will make more sense to you.
Slashdot Mirror
The movie star may save a poor film from financial disaster, but the much more likely scenario is that a good film flops due to lack of a big name. That's why the big names are so valued - everyone is trying to avoid the latter scenario.
Not only that, but these people have connections commensurate with their salaries. The company's not only paying for whatever business talent they have, but also the network they bring with them.
In keeping with your movie analogy, if you hire Bob Smith right out of acting school instead of Tom Hanks, do you think Bob Smith will be able to call up top-notch directors and cinematographers and attract the best talent to work on the new movie? Wouldn't simply having Tom Hanks on board grease the skids for you with the movie studios and ensure wide distribution for your film? How much is that worth?
The end product might be no different had Tom Hanks or Bob Smith been hired. Maybe (probably) Bob Smith is a better actor. The difference is that chances are nobody ever will see the movie with Bob Smith, but a Tom Hanks movie is almost guaranteed to make money. It's about how much you're willing to risk.
I think the same thing, except that I really, really like the whole write-the-interface-as-a-document-then-manipulate-it style of GUI programming.
Compared to writing applications with some GUI toolkit, web programming is a piece of cake. It seems like the right way to do things...if only the scripting portion were a bit more advanced.
Imagine if javascript had a facility for opening sockets and writing files - developing an app with that system would be a dream.
On Fry's wall in the Futurama movie:
"Family Guy: 12 Laughs a Year" calendar
Horse-drawn carriages are made by an intense effort of people applying their talents. And yet there is very little market for them.
The amount of effort you put into something is really irrelevant to what other people are willing to pay for it, because the amount of effort you put in no way affects what other people need.
Alexi is right, this sucks for people who want to write small programs and live off of the proceeds, because free software destroys the market for that. But it's nearly impossible to argue that free software is a detriment to society as a whole, because it drastically lowers the cost of doing other things with that software, thus creating wealth.
most PHP programmers never learn the right way of doing anything, and when they do, they feel like going back and redoing all their work... ...in a different language :-)
Fair warning, though, if you start wearing those glasses you may suddenly find yourself remarking how that women's shoes don't go with her outfit. . .
Or how Steve Jobs is the hottest guy on the face of the earth, because he's a technical AND artistic genius. I mean, just LOOK at how well the Mac works and how beautiful it is!
It may be a smaller number, but probably a much harder group to convince. A voting member has a much more personal stake in the company than someone who just bought the stock hoping to sell at a higher price.
If you were sitting on the board, and Microsoft came along with this offer, would you want to sell to them, lose your control over Yahoo's future, etc.?
I love what you wrote, very interesting stuff.
Consider, however, that the government was set up not to work well, and that the "cut deals and make compromises" part was exactly what the founders were trying to avoid. Also, the direct election of Senators was not provided for in the original Constitution. The seventeenth amendment is responsible for this.
I think the Constitution was set up explicitly to block any progress and consolidation of power at the federal level. It worked wonderfully up until the civil war, when the federal government took on the role it has today and expanded ever since.
It's unfortunate that the U.S. Constitution was not written 130 years later, when slavery would likely no longer have been an issue, and consolidation of federal power would have been much more difficult.
Although, I'm sure no matter what you write, it happens anyway. Hence, the second amendment.
The mortgage analogy would be a good one, if the government operated in a remotely sane manner. The situation we're in now is more like this:
---
Sam has a mortgage that he pays a large interest on, such that the principle amount owed never goes down. He borrows money from a loan shark to buy a Cadillac, and loses two thirds of it on the way to the car dealer, and ends up with a used Ford Focus. On the way home, he stops by the bank to get a second mortgage on his house, in order to pay for his retarded diabetic daughter's medical expenses for the next year. He plans to do this every year, assuming the bank will keep letting him mortgage his house. So far, this has worked, because the value of his house has increased rapidly recently. However, the real-estate market is turning downward...
---
What does this have to do with the national debt? Well, absolutely nothing, because on the scale that the Federal government operates, there is no magic investment fund that the government puts its "extra" money into, and there cannot be. There are three things that a government can do with money: print more, remove some from circulation, and redistribute it. The first two directly affect the value of the individual dollar, so there is never any net gain or loss associated with manipulating a currency. (Hint - currency trading is a zero sum game, even when governments do it)
Redistribution of money through taxation and subsequent spending provides no net gain to the economy, unless you believe that the method of collection (taxation) and spending (Congress and Executive branch) are more efficient than the free market. (That may be true in some cases.)
So is there anything wrong with our massive national debt? Well, let's think about what incentives it creates. Inflation is a major boon to anyone in a massive amount of debt, as devaluing the dollar will reduce the actual debt owed by the same percentage. So now that the U.S. owes a massive amount of money to foreign investors, you'll see a ridiculous inflationary monetary policy as the U.S. tries desperately not to default on those loans.
What this means is that for responsible citizens of the U.S. who would like to save money and become financially solvent, it's now an uphill battle, and the government is going to be working against them by devaluing every dollar they save.
And there's MORE good news. We'll also be taking money from people who make good decisions in order to bail out every jackass who doesn't read the terms of his ARM loan when buying the McMansion he can't hope to afford, and every real-estate agent and mortgage broker who take advantage of this jackass. This will stave off a small recession for a few years, until the next crisis arises, rinse, repeat, and the situation continues to snowball.
This ignores the coming crisis in the next twenty years when the baby boomers are of age to get all those nice social security and medicare benefits, when there is NO money for it.
The transfer of wealth from responsible people to wasteful spenders will continue in the form of inflation and vote-buying, and it will cripple the U.S. economy.
They wanted to go into Iraq to prove their pet theories about evangelical democracy
Not really. They went because they thought Saddam had, or was close to having, nuclear/chemical/bio weapons, and was likely to sell them to an unstable third party.
The whole "bringing democracy to the middle east" thing came later, after the WMD reason turned out to not to be true, and the administration didn't want to say, "Hey, we were wrong, but the consequences of our not acting on imperfect information would have been severe had we been right about the WMD."
Which is unfortunate, because the U.S. had plenty of real justification to remove Saddam, as he was in constant violation of the terms of the cease fire of the first gulf war.
Calling the war a "mistake" without evidence of wilfull deception by the Bush administration is kind of like saying that paying for car insurance during a year when you end up having no car accidents a "mistake." It's being cautious and acting on imperfect information.
Now, the way the rest of it was handled and the after-justifications that came out are the real problem. So, I can see it either way -- maybe we should get out soon or maybe we should stay and make sure at least some good comes out of the whole mess. I don't think you can answer that emphatically one way or another without the benefit of hindsight.
8.81% of 100,000 is $8,810.
I think one of your numbers is wrong. But even at 1% with those housing prices, that's a large chunk of change.
Stop ruining arguments with all those facts. You're not going to get any responses that way.
Yeah, show me where the software engineer's signature is from the guy who guarantees that the software won't kill anyone.
I guess it depends on what he means by rigorous, though. At least in most kinds of engineering the problems aren't unexplored, so you have some guidelines to work within that pretty much guarantee your building won't catch on fire.
But there's a huge difference between guaranteeing something will work and making something that pretty much works most of the time, we think. Comparing the two is slightly ridiculous.
Well, I don't really have a dog in this fight, but here's my experience:
.not as nice.
GTK tried to do object oriented things in C, and the result is fairly ugly. This isn't a show-stopper, but the flexibility of QT just isn't there. Let's say I'd like a widget that works slightly differently than the default that either toolkit provides -- QT makes changing widgets through inheritance easy and elegant, not so in GTK.
GTK supports many, many programming languages, but only the most popular at any given time have language bindings that are up to date. This would be a plus for GTK, but there are QT bindings available too, so it's really a wash.
Distributing a compiled QT app is dead simple, you include three or four libraries and you're off to the races. GTK apps are a nightmare of libraries and config files that have to be structured just so. GTK is a pain in the ass in this regard, especially PyGTK.
QT runs beautifully on Windows, while GTK has a few bugs to iron out.
QT's thread api is simple to use with the signal/slot mechanism providing an excellent way to pass data between threads and synchronize them. GTK's thread api is. .
And he tries for the flame war trifecta...NO GOOD! Oh, you hate to see that when they work so hard to prepare for the big game.
Still, two flame wars in one sentence is nothing to scoff at, which is why the artistic score will be high. However, the judges really wanted to see some sort of garbage collection vs. malloc/free or even an Intel/AMD mention. That could cost him the gold.
Let's see what the rest of the competitors have to offer.
You've just described virtual memory and processes with their own virtual address space.
Unless I'm missing something.
And there's a limited amount of bandwidth. Phone networks are designed to handle normal peak usage, and usually not much more, or else they'd be a lot more expensive for everyone.
It's likely that if they lowered the price, the networks would be flooded in short order, and the messages would be delayed or not sent at all.
Finally, thanks to all of the teens out there who spend a ton of money on this crap, so that I may have my $20 pay as you go phone for emergencies. And thanks to the parents of those teens who pay all that credit card interest on the text messaging fees so that I can get free money from the credit card companies. You guys rock!
As for economic condition (never mind your statement which implies that the world history started when America was "invented"), things are not all that well in America at the moment, with a huge national debt (i.e. America borrows and borrows more and more money from other countries) that rises dramatically, government budget deficits that run in the billions of dollars, a plummeting dollar (it's now half the value as compared to the Euro than it was 8 years ago), and so on and so forth. It's only a matter of time before there'll be a 1930's collapse, and it might already have started.
And this is what happens when everyone pays for everyone else! Why do you think there's a huge national debt and the dollar is plummeting? It's because everyone here thinks they can vote themselves a free lunch, with no adverse effects. Those people are wrong.
There is an underlying reality (scarcity) that is reflected in free market prices. Ignoring that reality is what gets us into trouble. That's why we're in the mess we're in today.
The culture of the Scandinavian countries might be such that there is little to no abuse of the system when it's "free" for everyone. That's an exceptional case, however, and would be a complete disaster in the U.S.
In America, or so I heard, things are hunky-dory if you have money. But if something happens that breaks your bank, you go all the way to the bottom, with no-one to help you or share your cost.
That's simply not true. You might not here about the charities here and help available to those who need it, probably because it's not a nationalized system. But it still exists. Otherwise, people wouldn't be risking their lives to get over the border for the medical care and benefits we have.
Dude, you totally ripped off Alanis Morrisette, the most rockin' Canadian former TV star ever, which is really Ironic.
Yes, let's provide a huge financial incentive for the next Bonzai Buddy or Realplayer Adware Edition to helpfully download songs for you that you might not have heard of and might "want."\
We Americans think that paying only our costs is cheaper than everyone helping to pay everyone's costs.
And we Americans are right. And we Americans have the entire world history and a whole bunch of economic theory to back that up, too.
When people don't pay directly for their own goods and services, they are more likely to use more than they otherwise would. This creates shortages in the short term, and higher overall prices in the long term. Witness what happened under Nixon's gas price controls in the 70's. Severe gasoline shortages and long waits for gas. When price controls were lifted, no more waits, and the price of gasoline went down.
In this situation we have a certain number of the population who want everyone else to pay for something they want. $5 sounds like no big deal, but in aggregate, that's a lot of money not going to other, much more useful things.
If you still believe that it's more efficient to spread costs around, you're free to start your own organization that does so. This is why insurance exists.
But I fail to see why I should have to pay money to support an organization thinks it deserves my money because other people are illegally copying what they're selling for way too high a price. If that's not extortion, nothing is.
I'd use mine to search for the winning Slurm can.
Finally someone else who sees (or hears) through the Beatlemania hype. Thank you for that post.
"Meanwhile, nobody will subsidize the cable service that I want so the costs are mostly hidden from me and borne by others who wouldn't otherwise pay for it."
There, fixed that so it will make more sense to you.
And if it doesn't work, we should do it again!