That assumes that you think that revenues are where they should be. It is quite possible that the problem is not on the spending side of the equation, but the revenue side.
The problem is always on the spending side. In order to maintain financial health, private citizens and organizations are required to spend less money than they take in. For some reason, "economists" such as yourself think this principle magically does not apply to governments.
Laugh all you want, but the fact is, such a game would not be banned in the US. Unless it involves kiddie porn or is directly and unequivocally written to incite real-world violence, our courts will not allow it to be prohibited.
That is one of the few aspects of our political system we can be genuinely proud of.
Interesting. I've often wondered what was supposed to be "homeopathic" about ColdEeze lozenges.
Apparently we needed a government agency to keep people from selling radium elixirs out of covered wagons at the county fair. Fine, whatever. But the present-day FDA, like other three-letter agencies such as the DEA, is just plain berserk with bureaucratic power. It's almost as if government agencies always attempt to expand their scope, or something.
However, as you can see from the popularity of Netflix streaming where the original compression quality ranges from awful to only marginally watchable, nobody much cares about quality.
I'll give you an example. A few years ago, Lennox (of the heating and A/C industry) , decided to dump their CEO, a fellow named Schjerven. He got a golden parachute of $52 million. That was 16% of Lennox's worth! This is not unusual.
So? Sell your Lennox stock if you don't think they're behaving rationally. That is, and should be, your sole remedy.
Executive compensation is a symptom of a larger problem: corporate governance in the US is really screwed up.
Translation: "Looks like a malignant melanoma... honey, do we have any cortisone ointment?"
Trying to normalize income distribution is the exact opposite of encouraging class warfare.
No, that pretty much is the definition of modern class warfare. Trying to enforce some misguided idea of "equality" just gets millions of people killed. You can't fool Dr. Darwin.
Real class warfare is what happened in the 19th century when French peasants started breaking out the guillotines, because the aristocracy thought they could get away with stealing everyone's money and forcing them into permanent wage slavery. You want to see a real "class war" then you let things keep going the way they have been going. Every country, even the overweight, lazy USA, is three missed meals away from revolution. That's a lesson the cash-steeped Republicans don't think they need to know anymore...
Yeeeaaah. Ahem. About those guillotines. See, the thing is, they're all owned by the nobility these days. Your friendly Democratic gun-control activists have done a yeoman's job at making sure that 1984 isn't going to be anything like 1789.
In the modern age, any attempt at a genuine revolution will be over before the first tweets go out.
What kills me is the idea that somehow executive compensation is necessarily going to trickle down into either increased share value or dividends.
What kills me is the idea that people somehow believe that "executive compensation" is more than 0.001% of the problem. This brand of thinking is known colloquially as "stomping piss ants while tigers are coming over the wall."
Trying to start a class war in America has never worked, isn't working now, and will never work. Journalists and pundits who push this "executive compensation" horse pucky are just playing into the hands of the politicians.
I especially liked the linked article, which claims 300,000+ ER visits were due to marijuana use over a certain period. Of course, there were almost 600,000 ER visits due to the use of pain relievers over the same period... so when do we launch a War on Tylenol?
It's interesting because lowballing Netscape would have been the biggest single mistake in the history of Microsoft, and possibly the whole software industry.
If true, it was a bigger fuckup on Gates's part than Gary Kildall's failure to close a deal with IBM in 1980.
Well if it were OBVIOUS then why was it not done before?
In a sane world, the standard for obviousness would involve the question, "Are either the teachings of the patent or a casual inspection of the device itself likely to be necessary to understand how to duplicate the device?"
If a patent is granted when the answer to this question is "no," then the patent system is not serving its original purpose as a means to disseminate useful information that would otherwise be locked up in trade secrets. The bargain is entirely on the patentholder's side -- he gets to stop the rest of the country from doing something obvious, just because he was the first to encounter a given problem and apply the most trivial immediate solution.
This policy would rule out stupid patents like this one, One-Click(tm), and virtually all other software and business method patents.
Probably 33% of Siri's utility right there, completely overlooked by everyone.
That remaining 67% is pretty important, it turns out. Google's voice-search app has been available for a long time on the iPhone as well, but it doesn't know what to do with Remind me to pick up lettuce at the grocery store or Wake me in two hours. (Also, and sadly typical of Google these days, its usability has degraded over time due to Google apparently hiring a team of monkeys on meth to maintain it, but that's neither here nor there.)
I could point to several posts I made when the 4S was announced (on other forums with other account names) mocking the idea behind Siri and speech recognition in general. I got my phone a couple of days ago, and I am singing a different tune now. Siri is unquestionably more useful than a simple voice-search app.
Siri is not "awesome" by any means... but, because it has a ridiculously good speech recognizer, and because its back end runs on a central server with every single instance of attempted usage available to the developers for refinement and curation, I believe it will indeed reach the "awesome" level eventually. Search is nowhere near the most important part of a system like this.
Unless you're Ferrari, you are not going to make a profit building 1000-2000 cars at once. Starting up a factory just to meet that kind of production target would be insane. The logical strategy would be to start with a contract manufacturer who could build that kind of volume for a reasonable (if inflated) price, then scale to mass production once you've got some money coming in and can gauge the market. At that point your 1000-2000 car-per-year factory investment is worthless to you.
Great, so we get rid of NIST, and now all fifty states get to maintain their own standard kilogram, current source, and atomic clock. That sounds really efficient.
Every time Ron Paul says something that makes sense at first, like ditching the Department of Education, it seems that he has to follow it up with something ridiculous, like the idea that public schools should be able to teach creationism. That, in turn, leads me to question my own judgment for giving him a moment's consideration.
It's interesting to read magazines like The Economist six months or so after they're published. You quickly get a feel for what's worth getting curious, outraged, or excited about, and what's not. Anything that's still important and relevant after six months is worth further consideration.
Obviously that approach doesn't scale all the way down to local news media, unless you want to wake up to the sound of bulldozers in your front yard. But on a national/international level, it saves a lot of time and angst.
Slashdot Mirror
If that wasn't the case, very few would ever buy a house, or a new car.
And how have those $750,000 houses been working out lately, for those people making $50,000/year?
That assumes that you think that revenues are where they should be. It is quite possible that the problem is not on the spending side of the equation, but the revenue side.
The problem is always on the spending side. In order to maintain financial health, private citizens and organizations are required to spend less money than they take in. For some reason, "economists" such as yourself think this principle magically does not apply to governments.
Laugh all you want, but the fact is, such a game would not be banned in the US. Unless it involves kiddie porn or is directly and unequivocally written to incite real-world violence, our courts will not allow it to be prohibited.
That is one of the few aspects of our political system we can be genuinely proud of.
In practice, the most common phrase heard on the unencrypted trunked radio system around here is "Call me on my cell."
Sigh. Like arguing with Creationists.
Interesting. I've often wondered what was supposed to be "homeopathic" about ColdEeze lozenges.
Apparently we needed a government agency to keep people from selling radium elixirs out of covered wagons at the county fair. Fine, whatever. But the present-day FDA, like other three-letter agencies such as the DEA, is just plain berserk with bureaucratic power. It's almost as if government agencies always attempt to expand their scope, or something.
No, the phrase they used implied no such thing. That is something that some people here are making up, for reasons that remain obscure.
Nobody asked about your political prejudices. Does bottled water prevent dehydration, or doesn't it?
Sounds like a recipe for really shitty art.
However, as you can see from the popularity of Netflix streaming where the original compression quality ranges from awful to only marginally watchable, nobody much cares about quality.
I'll give you an example. A few years ago, Lennox (of the heating and A/C industry) , decided to dump their CEO, a fellow named Schjerven. He got a golden parachute of $52 million. That was 16% of Lennox's worth! This is not unusual.
So? Sell your Lennox stock if you don't think they're behaving rationally. That is, and should be, your sole remedy.
Executive compensation is a symptom of a larger problem: corporate governance in the US is really screwed up.
Translation: "Looks like a malignant melanoma... honey, do we have any cortisone ointment?"
Trying to normalize income distribution is the exact opposite of encouraging class warfare.
No, that pretty much is the definition of modern class warfare. Trying to enforce some misguided idea of "equality" just gets millions of people killed. You can't fool Dr. Darwin.
Real class warfare is what happened in the 19th century when French peasants started breaking out the guillotines, because the aristocracy thought they could get away with stealing everyone's money and forcing them into permanent wage slavery. You want to see a real "class war" then you let things keep going the way they have been going. Every country, even the overweight, lazy USA, is three missed meals away from revolution. That's a lesson the cash-steeped Republicans don't think they need to know anymore...
Yeeeaaah. Ahem. About those guillotines. See, the thing is, they're all owned by the nobility these days. Your friendly Democratic gun-control activists have done a yeoman's job at making sure that 1984 isn't going to be anything like 1789.
In the modern age, any attempt at a genuine revolution will be over before the first tweets go out.
What kills me is the idea that somehow executive compensation is necessarily going to trickle down into either increased share value or dividends.
What kills me is the idea that people somehow believe that "executive compensation" is more than 0.001% of the problem. This brand of thinking is known colloquially as "stomping piss ants while tigers are coming over the wall."
Trying to start a class war in America has never worked, isn't working now, and will never work. Journalists and pundits who push this "executive compensation" horse pucky are just playing into the hands of the politicians.
See??! Marijuana causes memory loss!
I especially liked the linked article, which claims 300,000+ ER visits were due to marijuana use over a certain period. Of course, there were almost 600,000 ER visits due to the use of pain relievers over the same period... so when do we launch a War on Tylenol?
It's interesting because lowballing Netscape would have been the biggest single mistake in the history of Microsoft, and possibly the whole software industry.
If true, it was a bigger fuckup on Gates's part than Gary Kildall's failure to close a deal with IBM in 1980.
So now it's no longer "just a knob."
Well if it were OBVIOUS then why was it not done before?
In a sane world, the standard for obviousness would involve the question, "Are either the teachings of the patent or a casual inspection of the device itself likely to be necessary to understand how to duplicate the device?"
If a patent is granted when the answer to this question is "no," then the patent system is not serving its original purpose as a means to disseminate useful information that would otherwise be locked up in trade secrets. The bargain is entirely on the patentholder's side -- he gets to stop the rest of the country from doing something obvious, just because he was the first to encounter a given problem and apply the most trivial immediate solution.
This policy would rule out stupid patents like this one, One-Click(tm), and virtually all other software and business method patents.
Why not?
That remaining 67% is pretty important, it turns out. Google's voice-search app has been available for a long time on the iPhone as well, but it doesn't know what to do with Remind me to pick up lettuce at the grocery store or Wake me in two hours. (Also, and sadly typical of Google these days, its usability has degraded over time due to Google apparently hiring a team of monkeys on meth to maintain it, but that's neither here nor there.)
I could point to several posts I made when the 4S was announced (on other forums with other account names) mocking the idea behind Siri and speech recognition in general. I got my phone a couple of days ago, and I am singing a different tune now. Siri is unquestionably more useful than a simple voice-search app.
Siri is not "awesome" by any means... but, because it has a ridiculously good speech recognizer, and because its back end runs on a central server with every single instance of attempted usage available to the developers for refinement and curation, I believe it will indeed reach the "awesome" level eventually. Search is nowhere near the most important part of a system like this.
Unless you're Ferrari, you are not going to make a profit building 1000-2000 cars at once. Starting up a factory just to meet that kind of production target would be insane. The logical strategy would be to start with a contract manufacturer who could build that kind of volume for a reasonable (if inflated) price, then scale to mass production once you've got some money coming in and can gauge the market. At that point your 1000-2000 car-per-year factory investment is worthless to you.
Great, so we get rid of NIST, and now all fifty states get to maintain their own standard kilogram, current source, and atomic clock. That sounds really efficient.
Every time Ron Paul says something that makes sense at first, like ditching the Department of Education, it seems that he has to follow it up with something ridiculous, like the idea that public schools should be able to teach creationism. That, in turn, leads me to question my own judgment for giving him a moment's consideration.
It's interesting to read magazines like The Economist six months or so after they're published. You quickly get a feel for what's worth getting curious, outraged, or excited about, and what's not. Anything that's still important and relevant after six months is worth further consideration.
Obviously that approach doesn't scale all the way down to local news media, unless you want to wake up to the sound of bulldozers in your front yard. But on a national/international level, it saves a lot of time and angst.
That's great. Now, thanks to the "toymaker" and others like him, their services are no longer needed.
ROFL. Yes, there's an "implied hidden cost" for deadweight middlemen like Penguin.