I happen to love playing EVE at 2M skill points. You are right that you will never be the guy in the carrier, but those carriers need fighter-bombers to control groups of drones in fleet ops. Tackling and Electronic Warfare are critical parts of group combat, and can be done successfully by new players.
My take on this is that you find fun where you make it. Because of the relative ease of specializing in EW, and the strength of EW, newbies have a wide open door in PvP.
I think the biggest thing is getting in with a good corp (which is not surprising, good clan selection in other MMORPG's is also important).
My newbie eve experience is about 90% fun right now (the extra 10% being Sisters of Eve humanitarian missions for raising faction).
What it does is infect the marketplace by rolling out a framework whereby your personal utility will be limited. If DRM burdened HD/BR doesn't sell, I feel confident that a less restrictive format WILL come and sell.
While I could generally care less about the medium through which my content is delivered, I do care that I can access it in the ways that I want. In a world with a robust DRM framework, my access WOULD be limited, so why would I be interested in supporting that framework? Even if it just "allows" me to use "enhanced" (burdened) content.
It's a matter of strategic interest.
It's the same reason why people vote for politicians they don't particularly care for, but who represent the team they cheer for.
> Radical changes, such as curtailing US/Chinese trade would be a Bad Thing (of the Great Depression variety).
The 2006 estimates of (X-I) represent 6.4% of our GDP (official exchange rate adjusted)*. Of which china is a fraction.
The sky is not falling (nor will it because of something like this).
I'm not suggesting that the GP's idea should be pursued, but it's a reasonable discussion point. Bringing up the Great Depression is, on the other hand, highly unreasonable. Those conditions really can't reoccur with an active Fed (reserve bank).
* figures whipped out of my calculator using the data from the cia online factbook.
It's the "all problems are perception problems" way of thinking. I think that is an awefully convenient answer to those who hold authority and make mistakes, and thus gets overly applied.
Certainly I see it again and again in governance, and in my workplace.
I upgraded my hardware in January and installed Gentoo as my primary OS. I figured if I could get a few old games to run under wine or cedega, I wouldn't have to dual-boot. And all my other software needs were more than taken care of by open source apps.
But my experience, specificly with guildwars, has been poor. Under wine, it worked poorly (that is, looked bad, but performed OK) if I did a specific patch to the source, so I bought a few months of cedega which claimed to support it. Under cedega, once I dug through the forums to find a configuration that worked, it ran, and was pretty, but performance was very poor (20fps) even at low graphics settings (and this is with a core2duo6600 and a nVidia8800gts).
Anyway, I've been happy with the switch, but dissappointed by having to dual boot for games. I really hoped that if I stayed off the cutting edge, I would be ok.
Highly offtopic but if you have an SLR, take your finger and fully extend it over the front lens and take some pictures. It's surprising how little it effects the picture (it is noticable). On the other hand, a small hair on the rear lens (the one inside the camera) can impact the picture as much as your finger up front.
Heh, my economics degree sits unused as I work for a living (little joke there).
However, there is some reading available for those with time.
Here is a paper that talks about some of the problems with picking firm employment/inflation ratios: http://www.nber.org/papers/W6518
And here is (IMO) the best model of what is going on, though clearly there isn't consensus about this that I have found in the economic community: http://papers.nber.org/papers/w5735
With specific regard to the wurbles problem as a metaphore for skilled employment in the US Market, you are holding all kinds of micro-level variables constant. For example, you can't just bump the wage of employees arbitrarily and assume that the same number of positions will be available. Wurble manufacturers are facing a real labor market with its own supply and demand, different elasticities and inefficiencies. Then, assuming infinitely elastic supply of employment and infinitely inelastic demand of employment, you make assumptions about the market pricing of wurbles (namely, that demand of wurbles is infinitely inelastic, and 100% of the wage increase is pushed into price).
Like I said, all of this is fine- a universal wage increase will very likely lead to some inflation (though not necessarily 100% of the wage increase will be translated). But it is not necessarily true, and people who haven't studied the results of relaxing assumptions of models can be easily mislead. A more relevant question would be "will raising the current minimum wage yeild an increase in inflation in the current American economy?"... I tend to think not, both because of the relative size of the minimum wage labor pool vs. size of the national labor pool, and the guess that the current labor market for the minimum wage segment is highly inefficient (this is a topic about economic migration of all things).
Your username suggests you are interested in econ, and I suspect classicly trained, so I'm sure you are aware of all of this.
The biggest problem with economics is that it gives cover to all kinds of crazy. That inflation is linked to wages is linked to NAIRU would suggest that the mid to late 90's could never exist. But it did exist, no doubt for a number of very complicated reasons which aren't captured in the standard models. Normally, when a reality doesn't fit a model, we trash (or extend) the model.
So I was pretty much done with the grandparent when he started talking "Wurbles". Increasing wages sometimes leads to inflation, and sometimes it doesn't.
Wurbles may help you get through econ 101, but they are dangerous tools to apply to "the real world" if your goal is understanding. Much too course of a model to apply cleanly to a discussion of an accused shortage of tech labor.
Are you kidding me? I'm a non-card carrying lefty, and I can't think of anyone I know (all my "leftish" freinds included) that don't count Ruby Ridge as a horrifying example of government abuse. I mean, it was a utterly terrible tragedy. Words fail me.
If you don't make claims about ideologies you seem to not understand, I'll make sure I don't spout off about why "rightist"s still votet neocon in 2004.
The Economist carries a hefty bias with it as well, thought it isn't Left or Right, but "free trade" (by which I mean reductions in limitations on capital mobility). Reading The Economist trash on proposed rules to attempt environmental impact equivilence can be just as annoying as watching Hume's condecension towards non-party line positions (and Hume is probably the best of the lot).
NPR has certain policy biases as well. I always know an election is looming when I hear a heartrending story on "poverty in the city". Still beats the hell out of network news though.
Now thats a little rough. Push the cops through training on the issue and give them a warning. If the behavior continues to happen, then you have a problem.
I understand "holding people to a higher standard", but they wrongfully arrested someone- it could have been a lot worse. I think it was 2004 where a deaf fellow in Detroit was killed by the cops because he wouldn't drop his "weapon" (rake) in the face of repeated threats (he was deaf). Save termination for cases that really deserve it.
Christianity has (and will continue to be) stretched in many different ways, all stemming from disagreements on the correctness of the bible. Translations are questionable, scripture inclusion and exclusion was a political process of the early church, some people reject the old testament, some people don't care for "Paulism", etc. etc.
I think your argument has a lot more weight if you are talking about Catholicism, as doctrine is defined as flowing downhill. But it is no coincidence that there are a large amount of "sects" which have differing interpretations of Christianity, all while being ostensibly "Christian" themselves. I don't really know of any protestant heretical belief's for example.:) Even inside Catholocism there are many doctrinal questions that are constantly being debated and changed.
On top of all of that, many Christians have no particular desire to codify their beliefs into law (thus forcing those beliefs on others), preferring that such morality is willfully practiced by adherents to the religion.
Christianity is almost as malleable as Buddhism. I would think that the only difference would be that the Christians claim the "truthfullness" of their documents while Buddhists are less concerned with the accuracy of scripture than with the message.
I don't think the grandparent was making any claims of values but rather political claims of what he supports legally (which are two very different things).
I apologize if my use of "armchair psychology" was construed as pejorative. I don't happen to buy into your opinion of their "motivations"- that is all.
FWIW, my understanding is that there was a high level of education and sophistication surrounding global terrorists. This probably differs among regional conflicts and roles within terrorist organizations. So yes, I see these guys sitting around tables and discussing top level strategy in the same way I see Cheney and Wolfowitz talking about "sending a message with Iraq" and drafting up more PNAC documents.
I do not claim that my assumptions about the motivating factors of terrorists are any more sound than your assumptions. I suppose that when we are out of Iraq for good (it's going to happen sooner or later), we'll have some evidence to support our hunches.
I think they want a global caliphate in the same way we want a global democracy, which is to say it may be a nice talking point, but the logistics of it just don't work.
I don't think this is a smokescreen. I don't think this is an active goal of the islamists. And I don't buy your armchair psychology.
Of course, you may be right, but the threat of a global caliphate is right up there with the threat of "The northern migration of killer bees", which is to say- insubstantial. Now, we face a much higher risk of terrorist violence out of these folks, and I don't mean to trivialize that, but largely we are targetted because we are in their back yard.
I tend to think that our prior strategies of propping up secular authoritarians while encouraging isolation and international political structures was more effective. But then, Iran, Pakistan, and Afghanistan stand out as failures of such policy.
Ya, thats about what I would expect. It's difficult to get a real feal for how various non-income taxes figure into a given year because they generally get backed out of the AGI calc for at least the fed 1040, and often the state 1040's as well.
But I do suspect that a graph of tax-as-a-percentage-of-earned-income vs. earned-income would be a downward sloped curve between say 10K and 1,000K of earned-income.
It would be cool to see how things faired on the tails of that graph.
I wonder if Microsoft would have made this same decision (not backporting at least a skeleton DX10 to XP) if the DOJ antitrust case hadn't had the rug pulled out from underneath it.
In 2005, someone who earned 50K of regular income (W2) is taxed just under 7K. They are in the 25% margin and pay an effective 17%. They will have paid 4K for SS and medicare. Most localities don't tax income, so you are more likely just facing a state income tax of 3-6%, unless you live in FL or TX or someplace that doesn't have state 1040 income taxes. I suspect that "average locality tax" is skewed because of population density in large cities (which is going to heavily weight that average).
The degree to which you are effected by other taxes (real estate, vehicle registration, etc) offsets your federal liability, so its more complicated than just adding it up.
I don't know if that 50% number is reasonable for a 50K income (I suspect it is a little too high), though I would suspect that its reasonable for SOME income level, and the lower the income level, the higher the total average tax paid. US income taxes are about the only progressive tax we face. I don't know to what extent EITC would change this function at the low end. You could probably cook up a pretty cool graph of total-tax-liability to income... that would be pretty neat to see. Its hard to imagine how one-time taxes would be accounted for though- gift and estate taxes, etc.
That 50K number approximates the 2004 median household income (in 2004 dollars).
Current median household income $44,389 (http://www.census.gov/prod/2005pubs/p60-229.pdf)
Census data on income by quintile is available (http://www.census.gov/hhes/www/income/histinc/ine qtoc.html)
I only mention it because I suspect that "average" income is much higher due to skew from our top 1-5% of earners.
Frankly, class is probably more of a function of wealth than income, but income is probably a reasonable proxy for wealth anyway. I wish we could just say : "Middle class is the floor of the second quintile to the ceiling of the 4th", which would be 18K->84K (2001 in 2001 dollars) household income (that means ALL earners in the family).
So that guy's 150K puts him firmly in the upper class. I think there are a lot of people who are bringing in >100K who see themselves as "working stiffs" from who the government just "takes all my well deserved earnings". I think they lack perspective (admittedly, I am one).
Buy an electric razor and enjoy your buzz? I don't lease cars either.
Hell, with games like "Guildwars" out there, you can play your MMORPG _AND_ enjoy a fixed up front fee.
There are many ways you can choose to frontload costs, and pushing costs from periodical to fixed. This tends to be a good idea as services push a premium onto you... it's not bad, but if you can avoid it and have the cash to do it- why not?
Of course, everyone faces different decision matrices, but it's not like I need periodic expenses to offset revenue.:)
Is there such a thing as a DSLR with an electronic viewfinder? I'm a Canon guy, and AFAIK, none of the Canon's have that (certainly not the 3X0D's, 5D, 10D, 20D, 30D, or 1Ds. I don't think Nikon's do either. None of the Minolta DSLR's that _I_ have seen do, but I've only seen a few. And honestly, I haven't been in the market in the last 12 months.
Just because they have an LCD on the back for previewing, settings, histogram, etc. doesn't mean you can use it to shoot with.:)
Send it to the opinions/letters to the editor instead.
I'm not sure you will get any love out of those folks either (the editors). Deborah Howell (the Wapo Ombudsman) has a poor record when dealing with corrections(just google the name), and I've fealt that the Wapo in general hasn't been very good at publishings which run against their editorial bias (not left or right, just the collection of positions the editors have settled on).
Slashdot Mirror
I've had problems following conversations in teamspeak channels in the past, but this helped me. http://www.teamspeakoverlay.com/
I happen to love playing EVE at 2M skill points. You are right that you will never be the guy in the carrier, but those carriers need fighter-bombers to control groups of drones in fleet ops. Tackling and Electronic Warfare are critical parts of group combat, and can be done successfully by new players.
My take on this is that you find fun where you make it. Because of the relative ease of specializing in EW, and the strength of EW, newbies have a wide open door in PvP.
I think the biggest thing is getting in with a good corp (which is not surprising, good clan selection in other MMORPG's is also important).
My newbie eve experience is about 90% fun right now (the extra 10% being Sisters of Eve humanitarian missions for raising faction).
What it does is infect the marketplace by rolling out a framework whereby your personal utility will be limited. If DRM burdened HD/BR doesn't sell, I feel confident that a less restrictive format WILL come and sell.
While I could generally care less about the medium through which my content is delivered, I do care that I can access it in the ways that I want. In a world with a robust DRM framework, my access WOULD be limited, so why would I be interested in supporting that framework? Even if it just "allows" me to use "enhanced" (burdened) content.
It's a matter of strategic interest.
It's the same reason why people vote for politicians they don't particularly care for, but who represent the team they cheer for.
> Radical changes, such as curtailing US/Chinese trade would be a Bad Thing (of the Great Depression variety).
The 2006 estimates of (X-I) represent 6.4% of our GDP (official exchange rate adjusted)*. Of which china is a fraction.
The sky is not falling (nor will it because of something like this).
I'm not suggesting that the GP's idea should be pursued, but it's a reasonable discussion point. Bringing up the Great Depression is, on the other hand, highly unreasonable. Those conditions really can't reoccur with an active Fed (reserve bank).
* figures whipped out of my calculator using the data from the cia online factbook.
It's the "all problems are perception problems" way of thinking. I think that is an awefully convenient answer to those who hold authority and make mistakes, and thus gets overly applied.
Certainly I see it again and again in governance, and in my workplace.
Ya, I don't think it was linear either. My id is pretty low and I'm pretty sure I signed up in 99 or 00.
The problem is still games.
I upgraded my hardware in January and installed Gentoo as my primary OS. I figured if I could get a few old games to run under wine or cedega, I wouldn't have to dual-boot. And all my other software needs were more than taken care of by open source apps.
But my experience, specificly with guildwars, has been poor. Under wine, it worked poorly (that is, looked bad, but performed OK) if I did a specific patch to the source, so I bought a few months of cedega which claimed to support it. Under cedega, once I dug through the forums to find a configuration that worked, it ran, and was pretty, but performance was very poor (20fps) even at low graphics settings (and this is with a core2duo6600 and a nVidia8800gts).
Anyway, I've been happy with the switch, but dissappointed by having to dual boot for games. I really hoped that if I stayed off the cutting edge, I would be ok.
re: "speck of dirt on a lens"
Highly offtopic but if you have an SLR, take your finger and fully extend it over the front lens and take some pictures. It's surprising how little it effects the picture (it is noticable). On the other hand, a small hair on the rear lens (the one inside the camera) can impact the picture as much as your finger up front.
Heh, my economics degree sits unused as I work for a living (little joke there).
However, there is some reading available for those with time.
Here is a paper that talks about some of the problems with picking firm employment/inflation ratios:
http://www.nber.org/papers/W6518
And here is (IMO) the best model of what is going on, though clearly there isn't consensus about this that I have found in the economic community:
http://papers.nber.org/papers/w5735
With specific regard to the wurbles problem as a metaphore for skilled employment in the US Market, you are holding all kinds of micro-level variables constant. For example, you can't just bump the wage of employees arbitrarily and assume that the same number of positions will be available. Wurble manufacturers are facing a real labor market with its own supply and demand, different elasticities and inefficiencies. Then, assuming infinitely elastic supply of employment and infinitely inelastic demand of employment, you make assumptions about the market pricing of wurbles (namely, that demand of wurbles is infinitely inelastic, and 100% of the wage increase is pushed into price).
Like I said, all of this is fine- a universal wage increase will very likely lead to some inflation (though not necessarily 100% of the wage increase will be translated). But it is not necessarily true, and people who haven't studied the results of relaxing assumptions of models can be easily mislead. A more relevant question would be "will raising the current minimum wage yeild an increase in inflation in the current American economy?"... I tend to think not, both because of the relative size of the minimum wage labor pool vs. size of the national labor pool, and the guess that the current labor market for the minimum wage segment is highly inefficient (this is a topic about economic migration of all things).
Your username suggests you are interested in econ, and I suspect classicly trained, so I'm sure you are aware of all of this.
The biggest problem with economics is that it gives cover to all kinds of crazy. That inflation is linked to wages is linked to NAIRU would suggest that the mid to late 90's could never exist. But it did exist, no doubt for a number of very complicated reasons which aren't captured in the standard models. Normally, when a reality doesn't fit a model, we trash (or extend) the model.
So I was pretty much done with the grandparent when he started talking "Wurbles". Increasing wages sometimes leads to inflation, and sometimes it doesn't.
Wurbles may help you get through econ 101, but they are dangerous tools to apply to "the real world" if your goal is understanding. Much too course of a model to apply cleanly to a discussion of an accused shortage of tech labor.
Are you kidding me? I'm a non-card carrying lefty, and I can't think of anyone I know (all my "leftish" freinds included) that don't count Ruby Ridge as a horrifying example of government abuse. I mean, it was a utterly terrible tragedy. Words fail me.
If you don't make claims about ideologies you seem to not understand, I'll make sure I don't spout off about why "rightist"s still votet neocon in 2004.
The Economist carries a hefty bias with it as well, thought it isn't Left or Right, but "free trade" (by which I mean reductions in limitations on capital mobility). Reading The Economist trash on proposed rules to attempt environmental impact equivilence can be just as annoying as watching Hume's condecension towards non-party line positions (and Hume is probably the best of the lot).
NPR has certain policy biases as well. I always know an election is looming when I hear a heartrending story on "poverty in the city". Still beats the hell out of network news though.
If it saved me (or my kid) from paying on all those externalities from pollution?
hell yes.
...is to build investor confidence?
Wow, and here I thought it was a regulatory agency, not a marketing agency.
Now thats a little rough. Push the cops through training on the issue and give them a warning. If the behavior continues to happen, then you have a problem.
I understand "holding people to a higher standard", but they wrongfully arrested someone- it could have been a lot worse. I think it was 2004 where a deaf fellow in Detroit was killed by the cops because he wouldn't drop his "weapon" (rake) in the face of repeated threats (he was deaf). Save termination for cases that really deserve it.
Bah.
:) Even inside Catholocism there are many doctrinal questions that are constantly being debated and changed.
Christianity has (and will continue to be) stretched in many different ways, all stemming from disagreements on the correctness of the bible. Translations are questionable, scripture inclusion and exclusion was a political process of the early church, some people reject the old testament, some people don't care for "Paulism", etc. etc.
I think your argument has a lot more weight if you are talking about Catholicism, as doctrine is defined as flowing downhill. But it is no coincidence that there are a large amount of "sects" which have differing interpretations of Christianity, all while being ostensibly "Christian" themselves. I don't really know of any protestant heretical belief's for example.
On top of all of that, many Christians have no particular desire to codify their beliefs into law (thus forcing those beliefs on others), preferring that such morality is willfully practiced by adherents to the religion.
Christianity is almost as malleable as Buddhism. I would think that the only difference would be that the Christians claim the "truthfullness" of their documents while Buddhists are less concerned with the accuracy of scripture than with the message.
I don't think the grandparent was making any claims of values but rather political claims of what he supports legally (which are two very different things).
I apologize if my use of "armchair psychology" was construed as pejorative. I don't happen to buy into your opinion of their "motivations"- that is all.
FWIW, my understanding is that there was a high level of education and sophistication surrounding global terrorists. This probably differs among regional conflicts and roles within terrorist organizations. So yes, I see these guys sitting around tables and discussing top level strategy in the same way I see Cheney and Wolfowitz talking about "sending a message with Iraq" and drafting up more PNAC documents.
I do not claim that my assumptions about the motivating factors of terrorists are any more sound than your assumptions. I suppose that when we are out of Iraq for good (it's going to happen sooner or later), we'll have some evidence to support our hunches.
Sorry, I don't buy it.
I think they want a global caliphate in the same way we want a global democracy, which is to say it may be a nice talking point, but the logistics of it just don't work.
I don't think this is a smokescreen. I don't think this is an active goal of the islamists. And I don't buy your armchair psychology.
Of course, you may be right, but the threat of a global caliphate is right up there with the threat of "The northern migration of killer bees", which is to say- insubstantial. Now, we face a much higher risk of terrorist violence out of these folks, and I don't mean to trivialize that, but largely we are targetted because we are in their back yard.
I tend to think that our prior strategies of propping up secular authoritarians while encouraging isolation and international political structures was more effective. But then, Iran, Pakistan, and Afghanistan stand out as failures of such policy.
the average is around 34%
Ya, thats about what I would expect. It's difficult to get a real feal for how various non-income taxes figure into a given year because they generally get backed out of the AGI calc for at least the fed 1040, and often the state 1040's as well.
But I do suspect that a graph of tax-as-a-percentage-of-earned-income vs. earned-income would be a downward sloped curve between say 10K and 1,000K of earned-income.
It would be cool to see how things faired on the tails of that graph.
I wonder if Microsoft would have made this same decision (not backporting at least a skeleton DX10 to XP) if the DOJ antitrust case hadn't had the rug pulled out from underneath it.
In 2005, someone who earned 50K of regular income (W2) is taxed just under 7K. They are in the 25% margin and pay an effective 17%. They will have paid 4K for SS and medicare. Most localities don't tax income, so you are more likely just facing a state income tax of 3-6%, unless you live in FL or TX or someplace that doesn't have state 1040 income taxes. I suspect that "average locality tax" is skewed because of population density in large cities (which is going to heavily weight that average).
The degree to which you are effected by other taxes (real estate, vehicle registration, etc) offsets your federal liability, so its more complicated than just adding it up.
I don't know if that 50% number is reasonable for a 50K income (I suspect it is a little too high), though I would suspect that its reasonable for SOME income level, and the lower the income level, the higher the total average tax paid. US income taxes are about the only progressive tax we face. I don't know to what extent EITC would change this function at the low end. You could probably cook up a pretty cool graph of total-tax-liability to income... that would be pretty neat to see. Its hard to imagine how one-time taxes would be accounted for though- gift and estate taxes, etc.
That 50K number approximates the 2004 median household income (in 2004 dollars).
e qtoc.html)
Current median household income $44,389 (http://www.census.gov/prod/2005pubs/p60-229.pdf)
Census data on income by quintile is available (http://www.census.gov/hhes/www/income/histinc/in
I only mention it because I suspect that "average" income is much higher due to skew from our top 1-5% of earners.
Frankly, class is probably more of a function of wealth than income, but income is probably a reasonable proxy for wealth anyway. I wish we could just say : "Middle class is the floor of the second quintile to the ceiling of the 4th", which would be 18K->84K (2001 in 2001 dollars) household income (that means ALL earners in the family).
So that guy's 150K puts him firmly in the upper class. I think there are a lot of people who are bringing in >100K who see themselves as "working stiffs" from who the government just "takes all my well deserved earnings". I think they lack perspective (admittedly, I am one).
Buy an electric razor and enjoy your buzz? I don't lease cars either.
:)
Hell, with games like "Guildwars" out there, you can play your MMORPG _AND_ enjoy a fixed up front fee.
There are many ways you can choose to frontload costs, and pushing costs from periodical to fixed. This tends to be a good idea as services push a premium onto you... it's not bad, but if you can avoid it and have the cash to do it- why not?
Of course, everyone faces different decision matrices, but it's not like I need periodic expenses to offset revenue.
Is there such a thing as a DSLR with an electronic viewfinder? I'm a Canon guy, and AFAIK, none of the Canon's have that (certainly not the 3X0D's, 5D, 10D, 20D, 30D, or 1Ds. I don't think Nikon's do either. None of the Minolta DSLR's that _I_ have seen do, but I've only seen a few. And honestly, I haven't been in the market in the last 12 months.
:)
Just because they have an LCD on the back for previewing, settings, histogram, etc. doesn't mean you can use it to shoot with.
Send it to the opinions/letters to the editor instead.
I'm not sure you will get any love out of those folks either (the editors). Deborah Howell (the Wapo Ombudsman) has a poor record when dealing with corrections(just google the name), and I've fealt that the Wapo in general hasn't been very good at publishings which run against their editorial bias (not left or right, just the collection of positions the editors have settled on).
I worry for American Journalism.