In a year of code maintenance and developement, my happiest time is removing lines of code. If I could somehow come up negative in a year, but still complete my enhancement lists, my felicity would know no bounds.
Unfortunately (or fortunately) we don't use SLOC measurements where I work, so I will only be able to feel good about eliminating complexity in small bites- one class at a time.
Vista will come when it comes, I just hope I get enough time with their final RC to adaquately test our products against it.
Relativism leaves you without tools to adequately judge the morality of any act. You end up incapable of objectively comparing the cultural codes or personal codes.
Far better to accept that there is a universal morality and then argue about where the lines are. At least then you can claim moral progress when wrongs such as slavery are left behind.
"Everytime you let your friend listen to your gramaphone without paying listening tax, your favorite bandleader will be unable to eat for a day."
Pay your listening tax.:) I guess its cool if they DRM everything up, as long as they leave a simple out so that we can enjoy our fair use rights; If they get rid of fair use, then maybe we'll start seeing constitutional attacks on the copyright regime again.
I believe that there is a male torso mesh and a female torso mesh. However, there is one torso texture (shared between both mesh's). The female mesh then gets the braw mesh overlaid (when you don armor, that mesh is replaced by the armor mesh, etc.).
I believe the mod in question just removes that bra mesh.
However, I haven't actually pointed nifscope at it or anything so I'm simply speculating. And admittedly, the speculation doesn't change the fundemental silliness of Jack's position.
I don't know... the only group that I think the Democrats could spin off would be the "Old Southern Democrats", and that would just move the party some to the left. This MAY be the way to go, but I don't really know for sure (a lot of people think it is, but then a lot of people want to cut out the lefish fringer's too). The DLC croud sure thinks that moderate triangulation is the answer, but they are much too... um... political for my tastes (I prefer policy to politics).
Regardless, if you break up "defection" into say two groups- voter defection and congressional defection (defection rates on elections and congressional measures, respectively) I think you have two different problems with two different solutions (I bring it up only to show that a differentiation exists).
I honestly could care less about congressional defection- that just means that you have a poor party whip. But voter defection is somewhat concerning to me, and I don't think you can say that splitting the party will make things better until you understand the nature of the voter defection rate.
In the 2004 election (a time where you would expect low defection, IMO), Republicans saw something like 5% and Democrats saw something like 10-12% (no source- I just remember seeing that in the CNN statistics pages). What was that split about? I'm guessing it is percieved "security", but I don't know. If that is the case, then cutting out a subsection of the base isn't going to help... that concern really transends the traditional Democratic splits.
I'll just leave it at that. I'm not a Democrat, but an interested observer.
If the original poster has any links discussing this theory, I would be interested in seeing them. That "Regan bankrupted the USSR" meme seems strong, and honestly, plausable. But I'm always interested in doing some armchair history theorizing.:)
Are you kidding me? The libertarian/God-Squad split of the party is huge. Reagan brought them all together in "The Big Tent", but Goldwater Conservatives, NeoCon's, Libertarian-Reps, and GodSquad all fall on different issues. Not to mention the corporatists.
It is not that the Republicans are a unified party, but they HAVE been much more pragmatic on issue trading amoung the base, and their rigid hierarchy does facilitate stronger voting and message discipline.
I think that the parties aren't different in their "unification", but in their corporate structure and hierarchy. That may be just semantics though.
696/96 around Novi is freaking crazy. I'm glad that I haven't had to commute that for a few years. 23 between 96 and Ann Arbor isn't any good either (and getting constantly worse). What I found more troubling than an extra 10 minutes on my commute, however, was that if things were NOT a parkinglot, the road was filled with jackholes- I mean, people driving really dangerously. I did find though, that as long as I was willing to give up that extra 10 minutes, I could get myself off the worst parts of the expressway and just take the plethora of rural routes between places like Novi-Brighton-Ann Arbor.
I finally fixed my problem permanently by moving 3 rural miles away from my workplace, so this is no longer an issue, but getting off the highway was a peaceful way to spend the commute.
Its very hard for me to swallow your thesis that any one of your listed crimes has a higher repetition than the others. I'm not saying you are wrong, but it isn't really intuitive enough to buy into without some kind of evidence.
I did look briefly for recidivism numbers, but all I could find were claims about high recidivism in property crimes (as opposed to violent crimes). Do you have info on this kind of thing, or are you shooting from the hip?
Somewhat unrelated, but more to topic, I don't think that data retention laws are going to do anything but make a lot of people unknowing criminals. I wonder what kind of logs exim retains for me? Perhaps I could become a criminal for not knowing.
Ya, I have a buddy who did this until quite recently, and his prosecutions had a lot more to do with meeting said predators at the pre-existing location than it did after-the-fact evidence extraction from hard drives (not that this wasn't done either).
Talk about a shitty job to have though... I'm glad there are people to do it, but it would creep me out.
I think the flatness thing is overdone, but we are certainly looking at structural changes in certain labor sectors (mine unfortunately). What I like about the above review is tries to put such changes in context of output and output growth over time. I'm not sure I agree with everything he says, but it is a good read.
The original poster is correct. I'm not sure if all states with sales tax have a use tax, but mine (MI) certainly does, and I would imagine many others do as well.
I kind of wish you could mod things as "incorrect", but I can see where that would have abuse problems.
Nothing personal to the AC, I'm "incorrect" all the damn time myself.:/
GDP measures output, which truly is not that relevant to what this guy is looking for. National Income numbers would be slightly more relevant to him.
It's honestly a little hard for me to understand how people can look at all the available data and come to any other conclusion than that we are facing a mixed outlook, so I'll just leave it at that.
Furthermore to those caveats, there are many places where a schoolteacher with 40 years experience and an MA earns more than that. (public schools, Michigan, in the examples that I am thinking about).
I get tired about hearing about "double taxation".
1. Ask Microsoft how badly those 1120 income taxes are hurting them. Once a company is large enough, paying income taxes is largely optional. The distinction about when to count taxes is arbitrary.
2. Yes, those shareholders pay taxes on those dividends. Then they take them and spend them. Oops, sales tax. They are TRIPLE taxed. Then they are taxed as revenue to the store who recieved them. WHOA! Quadruple tax!
3. If you are worried that much about distortionary effects of dividends and capgains, just do quarterly roll-ups on asset valuations. (note: This is crazy talk, but its the same kind of crazy as "don't tax dividends")
Taxes are distortionary not relative to the number of times a dollar gets taxed (and they get taxed constantly as they flow through the economy), but on the nature of the activity that is taxed.
Personally, I'm all for killing 1120 taxes and taxing ALL INCOME at the same levels- none of this labor/capital differentiation crap. But that isn't going to happen, while I fear our Republican overlords could fairly easily kill 1040 taxes on dividends.
If we want a truly nondistorting tax, tax rents. Tax land. Tax patents. Tax legal and medical bars. Pull out profits from service (heh- easier said than done) and tax profits from rents. Then the tax only changes the price, not the behavior.
I just don't like the double-taxation meme. It's not a useful way of thinking about taxation.
For those of us who are more concerned about the integrity of the elections than the outcome of the elections, this isn't about tinfoil hats at all.
Electronic voting systems allow for systematic subversion of the franchise, and while this can be dealt with (and is the subject of serious study by a number of professionals (see ACM RISK digest)), it seems from the outside that the companies who are handling this technology are more interested in maintaining full control of the intellectual property than ensuring a fair vote count. While their position is understandable, I don't think that open audits of voting systems would undermine their revenue model.
Regardless, this is serious news for folks who aren't partisans.
Regardless of moral obligations, they cannot abrogate their legal obligations. If you were a company, say one that didn't want to be "evil", and were considering doing business in a location that occaisionally did "evil" things under the cover of the law, then perhaps you shouldn't be doing business in that country.
WRT to IBM, they should have walked, or tried to subvert the regime and face the consequences.
I think that's a damn good argument, but I don't understand how you would expect google to not behave like Yahoo. When you go into a country, you operate under the law of that country. And furthermore, you know that going in.
So googles decision had to take into account that they would be asked to comply with disclosure that was problematic.
I really think that they just added up their morals on one side, and stacks of dollar bills on the other side, and went with the green.
But I think your Red Cross analogy is really good. I'll try to think about it more.
While Clinton didn't balance the budget, I think it is fair to say that deficit growth was largely constrained at the end of the 90s. That these numbers piggybacked off of capital growth is something that should be taken into consideration.
Regardless of how serious we were about limiting the deficit THEN, we are certainly fairly cavalier about growing it NOW. (for we = America).
Moral relativism is alive and well for those who don't have to logicly defend their position.
My only comment is that it is google themselves who coined their "Do no Evil" maxim. They were the ones that brought morality into it. Is it amoral to support an entity which seeks to deny public information to people?
My thought is that just because censorship is a passive restriction (that is, it doesn't effect you until you attempt to obtain information that is denied) doesn't make it any less of a restriction, and that restriction seems to be a limitation on a autonomous action. So if limiting autonomy is amoral, which in a vaccuum, it would seem to be, then censorship is amoral, and supporting censorship is amoral.
This is mitigated by the fact that they tell people when they are being censored.
*shrug* I don't know- it seems fairly complicated to think through rigorously.
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... and many of them have built their nations on top of our oil. An unfortunate move, that. :)
In a year of code maintenance and developement, my happiest time is removing lines of code. If I could somehow come up negative in a year, but still complete my enhancement lists, my felicity would know no bounds.
Unfortunately (or fortunately) we don't use SLOC measurements where I work, so I will only be able to feel good about eliminating complexity in small bites- one class at a time.
Vista will come when it comes, I just hope I get enough time with their final RC to adaquately test our products against it.
Exactly! I was JUST pining about how we don't have any good inquisitions anymore. You see moral universalism IMPLIES torture.
Except it doesn't.
Moral philosophy and the restriction of autonomy are two orthogonal concepts.
(nothing to do with stem cells)
Relativism leaves you without tools to adequately judge the morality of any act. You end up incapable of objectively comparing the cultural codes or personal codes.
Far better to accept that there is a universal morality and then argue about where the lines are. At least then you can claim moral progress when wrongs such as slavery are left behind.
www.marriedtothesea.com
:) I guess its cool if they DRM everything up, as long as they leave a simple out so that we can enjoy our fair use rights; If they get rid of fair use, then maybe we'll start seeing constitutional attacks on the copyright regime again.
"Everytime you let your friend listen to your gramaphone without paying listening tax, your favorite bandleader will be unable to eat for a day."
Pay your listening tax.
I'm not sure that is precise.
I believe that there is a male torso mesh and a female torso mesh. However, there is one torso texture (shared between both mesh's). The female mesh then gets the braw mesh overlaid (when you don armor, that mesh is replaced by the armor mesh, etc.).
I believe the mod in question just removes that bra mesh.
However, I haven't actually pointed nifscope at it or anything so I'm simply speculating. And admittedly, the speculation doesn't change the fundemental silliness of Jack's position.
I don't know... the only group that I think the Democrats could spin off would be the "Old Southern Democrats", and that would just move the party some to the left. This MAY be the way to go, but I don't really know for sure (a lot of people think it is, but then a lot of people want to cut out the lefish fringer's too). The DLC croud sure thinks that moderate triangulation is the answer, but they are much too... um... political for my tastes (I prefer policy to politics).
Regardless, if you break up "defection" into say two groups- voter defection and congressional defection (defection rates on elections and congressional measures, respectively) I think you have two different problems with two different solutions (I bring it up only to show that a differentiation exists).
I honestly could care less about congressional defection- that just means that you have a poor party whip. But voter defection is somewhat concerning to me, and I don't think you can say that splitting the party will make things better until you understand the nature of the voter defection rate.
In the 2004 election (a time where you would expect low defection, IMO), Republicans saw something like 5% and Democrats saw something like 10-12% (no source- I just remember seeing that in the CNN statistics pages). What was that split about? I'm guessing it is percieved "security", but I don't know. If that is the case, then cutting out a subsection of the base isn't going to help... that concern really transends the traditional Democratic splits.
I'll just leave it at that. I'm not a Democrat, but an interested observer.
If the original poster has any links discussing this theory, I would be interested in seeing them. That "Regan bankrupted the USSR" meme seems strong, and honestly, plausable. But I'm always interested in doing some armchair history theorizing. :)
Are you kidding me? The libertarian/God-Squad split of the party is huge. Reagan brought them all together in "The Big Tent", but Goldwater Conservatives, NeoCon's, Libertarian-Reps, and GodSquad all fall on different issues. Not to mention the corporatists.
It is not that the Republicans are a unified party, but they HAVE been much more pragmatic on issue trading amoung the base, and their rigid hierarchy does facilitate stronger voting and message discipline.
I think that the parties aren't different in their "unification", but in their corporate structure and hierarchy. That may be just semantics though.
696/96 around Novi is freaking crazy. I'm glad that I haven't had to commute that for a few years. 23 between 96 and Ann Arbor isn't any good either (and getting constantly worse). What I found more troubling than an extra 10 minutes on my commute, however, was that if things were NOT a parkinglot, the road was filled with jackholes- I mean, people driving really dangerously. I did find though, that as long as I was willing to give up that extra 10 minutes, I could get myself off the worst parts of the expressway and just take the plethora of rural routes between places like Novi-Brighton-Ann Arbor.
I finally fixed my problem permanently by moving 3 rural miles away from my workplace, so this is no longer an issue, but getting off the highway was a peaceful way to spend the commute.
Its very hard for me to swallow your thesis that any one of your listed crimes has a higher repetition than the others. I'm not saying you are wrong, but it isn't really intuitive enough to buy into without some kind of evidence.
I did look briefly for recidivism numbers, but all I could find were claims about high recidivism in property crimes (as opposed to violent crimes). Do you have info on this kind of thing, or are you shooting from the hip?
Somewhat unrelated, but more to topic, I don't think that data retention laws are going to do anything but make a lot of people unknowing criminals. I wonder what kind of logs exim retains for me? Perhaps I could become a criminal for not knowing.
Ya, I have a buddy who did this until quite recently, and his prosecutions had a lot more to do with meeting said predators at the pre-existing location than it did after-the-fact evidence extraction from hard drives (not that this wasn't done either).
Talk about a shitty job to have though... I'm glad there are people to do it, but it would creep me out.
On that whole "Friedman flat thing", I liked this review:
0 60221.pdf
http://uclaforecast.com/reviews/Leamer_FlatWorld_
I think the flatness thing is overdone, but we are certainly looking at structural changes in certain labor sectors (mine unfortunately). What I like about the above review is tries to put such changes in context of output and output growth over time. I'm not sure I agree with everything he says, but it is a good read.
The original poster is correct. I'm not sure if all states with sales tax have a use tax, but mine (MI) certainly does, and I would imagine many others do as well.
:/
I kind of wish you could mod things as "incorrect", but I can see where that would have abuse problems.
Nothing personal to the AC, I'm "incorrect" all the damn time myself.
What an odd use of the english language.
Better than bad does not equal good.
Trend analysis can be beneficial, but I don't think it would impact someone looking for a job (or even just hoping for better negotiating position).
obSimpsons:
"but it comes with a free frogurt"
"that's good!"
"but the frogurt is also cursed"
"that's bad!"
GDP measures output, which truly is not that relevant to what this guy is looking for. National Income numbers would be slightly more relevant to him.
It's honestly a little hard for me to understand how people can look at all the available data and come to any other conclusion than that we are facing a mixed outlook, so I'll just leave it at that.
Furthermore to those caveats, there are many places where a schoolteacher with 40 years experience and an MA earns more than that. (public schools, Michigan, in the examples that I am thinking about).
Every time I look at the construction workers or landscapers working in the rain, I'm happy I went into technology (not IT, but close enough).
We don't have government sponsored scarcity working for us like Doctors or Lawyers, but then, we can get out of school a few years before them too.
Tech is a fine field to work in, even if it isn't necessarily exceptional.
I get tired about hearing about "double taxation".
1. Ask Microsoft how badly those 1120 income taxes are hurting them. Once a company is large enough, paying income taxes is largely optional. The distinction about when to count taxes is arbitrary.
2. Yes, those shareholders pay taxes on those dividends. Then they take them and spend them. Oops, sales tax. They are TRIPLE taxed. Then they are taxed as revenue to the store who recieved them. WHOA! Quadruple tax!
3. If you are worried that much about distortionary effects of dividends and capgains, just do quarterly roll-ups on asset valuations. (note: This is crazy talk, but its the same kind of crazy as "don't tax dividends")
Taxes are distortionary not relative to the number of times a dollar gets taxed (and they get taxed constantly as they flow through the economy), but on the nature of the activity that is taxed.
Personally, I'm all for killing 1120 taxes and taxing ALL INCOME at the same levels- none of this labor/capital differentiation crap. But that isn't going to happen, while I fear our Republican overlords could fairly easily kill 1040 taxes on dividends.
If we want a truly nondistorting tax, tax rents. Tax land. Tax patents. Tax legal and medical bars. Pull out profits from service (heh- easier said than done) and tax profits from rents. Then the tax only changes the price, not the behavior.
I just don't like the double-taxation meme. It's not a useful way of thinking about taxation.
For those of us who are more concerned about the integrity of the elections than the outcome of the elections, this isn't about tinfoil hats at all.
Electronic voting systems allow for systematic subversion of the franchise, and while this can be dealt with (and is the subject of serious study by a number of professionals (see ACM RISK digest)), it seems from the outside that the companies who are handling this technology are more interested in maintaining full control of the intellectual property than ensuring a fair vote count. While their position is understandable, I don't think that open audits of voting systems would undermine their revenue model.
Regardless, this is serious news for folks who aren't partisans.
Regardless of moral obligations, they cannot abrogate their legal obligations. If you were a company, say one that didn't want to be "evil", and were considering doing business in a location that occaisionally did "evil" things under the cover of the law, then perhaps you shouldn't be doing business in that country.
WRT to IBM, they should have walked, or tried to subvert the regime and face the consequences.
I think that's a damn good argument, but I don't understand how you would expect google to not behave like Yahoo. When you go into a country, you operate under the law of that country. And furthermore, you know that going in.
So googles decision had to take into account that they would be asked to comply with disclosure that was problematic.
I really think that they just added up their morals on one side, and stacks of dollar bills on the other side, and went with the green.
But I think your Red Cross analogy is really good. I'll try to think about it more.
You can always look at the bottom line: http://www.publicdebt.treas.gov/opd/opdhisto4.htm
While Clinton didn't balance the budget, I think it is fair to say that deficit growth was largely constrained at the end of the 90s. That these numbers piggybacked off of capital growth is something that should be taken into consideration.
Regardless of how serious we were about limiting the deficit THEN, we are certainly fairly cavalier about growing it NOW. (for we = America).
Moral relativism is alive and well for those who don't have to logicly defend their position.
My only comment is that it is google themselves who coined their "Do no Evil" maxim. They were the ones that brought morality into it. Is it amoral to support an entity which seeks to deny public information to people?
My thought is that just because censorship is a passive restriction (that is, it doesn't effect you until you attempt to obtain information that is denied) doesn't make it any less of a restriction, and that restriction seems to be a limitation on a autonomous action. So if limiting autonomy is amoral, which in a vaccuum, it would seem to be, then censorship is amoral, and supporting censorship is amoral.
This is mitigated by the fact that they tell people when they are being censored.
*shrug* I don't know- it seems fairly complicated to think through rigorously.
"Move to China" is hardly insightful. Maybe we can get rid of EVERYONE who has different opinions. How exciting.
Your point on the ethics of profit are reasonable, though. Wouldn't discussion be more fun if it was all constructive?