I think you misunderstand the intent behind privatizing the accounts. Yes, I'm sure the investment market is drooling over the prospects of being able to siphon fees off that money, but that's not the point. The point is that privatizing the accounts changes the ownership of the accounts from the government to individual investors. In otherwords it takes away the money from the government (which can't keep it's hands off such a large pile of money) and gives it to the intended beneficiaries.
Also, some of the posts earlier in this thread obscure the fact that SS really has two problems: 1) circa 2018 the amount of benefits paid out will exceed the amount of payroll taxes collected annually. This isn't a huge crisis until: 2) circa 2040 the mythical SS surplus (kept in it's jackalope-like "lock box") will run out.
So while privatizing has real social and economic costs (some people will make bad investment decisions, financial services companies get to extract rent for managing the money, etc...) it does cure the fundamental agency problem created by the SS system as it exists today. As for the rest of the problems of privatization, there are ways to minimize or mitigate the risks (but not totally remove them).
Oh it's not all visual. It turns out that the sound of someone slapping their BlackBerry back into it's holster sounds a lot like someone reloading their pistol in Counter Strike. There was quite a while there where anytime someone holstered their BlackBerry my first instinctual thought was: "Awesome they're reloading! Time to frag!"
I don't know about your area, but in Dallas, we just got ours turned up by $3/month on the TV side of the equation. We're not quite ready to pitch Comcast overboard yet, but we're $3 closer.
Well, if you're going to get technical about it, this service is really properly called IP Telephony (which is the application; the thing you're actually doing) and not VoIP which is the just transport. But everyone just calls it VoIP anyway. Oh well.
1) Talk on my Vonage line while, 2) Playing CS or Enemy Territory, and 3) Listening to radio on the Internet
with no degredation in my service. Yes, when I'm hammering a big download quality can suffer but I've never had it go out completely as a result of bandwidth usage.
Your packet stream isn't (to the best of my knowledge) encrypted and it's using well known ports for SIP and the like. It ought to be relatively easy to figure out exactly who's using their competitors. Pretty neat competitive advantage; must be nice to be a monopoly.
Or, better yet, write a hardware abstraction layer/virtual machine host and then get that signed. Then run what ever you wanted on your new virtual non-DRM'ed machines.:)
What about (assuming the usb is big and fast enough) hosting an MMO client? Aren't people perennially complaining about griefers? If you could uniquely identify the key chain and it was required for game play, then you could ban the device if someone misbehaved badly enough. They'd have to buy another device to get back on and at say $50 a pop being a griefer would become an expensive proposition very quickly.
Plus it'd be pretty cool to take your "Dark Age of Evercrack Heroes Galaxy" addiction with you wherever you went.
Oh, and if you do decide to go greek, here's a tip: don't call it a "frat." It's fraternity. You wouldn't call your mother a moth or your country a...oh nevermind.
"what's to stop your employer from opening a programming shop in Bangalore and paying $7,500/year for the same job?"
An excellent question! What indeed? There are a lot of reasons not to send work overseas, but I'll just touch on two here: transaction costs and knowledge theory.
One of the reasons that companies exist is to reduce transaction costs in achieving a goal. If we assume the goal here is to develop software to a particular set of requirements, then one of the transaction costs involved in getting to that goal is the requirements discovery and specification. It's my experience that discovering and specifying requirements is a job that requires a lot of face-to-face interactions, meetings, document revisions, more meetings,... you get my drift. Attempting to perform this function correctly with a company that's in a time zone more than 13 hours different from your own is difficult to say the least. Not to mention that you now have to pay someone to be awake at night to interact with India, worry about security of your proprietary data, and travel occasionally to India just to keep things moving along. All of those things (and more) cost money and time (more money). So on the whole, you'd better be sure that the cash you're saving on compensation in the US more than makes up for the transaction costs of sending the work overseas.
The second reason it doesn't often make sense to send development work overseas is based on the knowledge theory of the firm. In a nutshell knowledge theory asserts that firms exist to facilitate sharing knoweledge in a trusted environment. Software development is really just the embodiment of specific knowledge into an automation process. It's tough to share knowledge with someone who's working when you want to be sleeping and vice versa. It's even tougher to do it when you've got to rely largely on electronic communication (instead of meat-space interaction) to transfer this knowledge from your head into the software via the outsource company.
Both transaction costs and problems with knowledge transfer (really just another transaction cost if you want to look at it broadly) are barriers to moving this kind of work overseas.
Joel's article is fabulous advice for new or soon-to-be CS majors. In particular:
1) Pay attention to your writing and public speaking skills. Even if you're not headed for a career in a big corporation these skills are _invaluable_.
2) I whole-heartedly agree with the suggestion for micro-economics, although I'm pretty sure that some of the concepts he mentioned, like NPV (net present value), are really probably covered in a basic finance course and not microeconomics. I'll disagree with his disparagement of linear algebra; it's a prerequisite for operations research and there are some very cool resource allocation problems that you can learn to solve in OR.
3) GET AN INTERNSHIP OR CO-OP!!!!!! A solid track record of previous employment in your field, more than anything else, is going to open doors for you after graduation. There are a lot of employers out there who'll be more than happy to have a bright motivated CS student working for them (and I don't mean fetching coffee). It also helped me because I was able to discover very early on what I _didn't_ want to be doing for 40+ hours a week and I was able to modify my course prior to graduation.
Good Luck!
Jared
Re:I used to live in Austin, and it's an 8-hour dr
on
The Super Superhighway
·
· Score: 1
Spoken like someone who's never actually driven on Texas' roads. Take Dallas for example. We already have an outer ring (I-635) and we're working on another (I-190). 635 is a daily mess and 190 isn't even finished yet and already it's getting super congested.
As I mentioned in a previous post, thanks to NAFTA congestion on I-35, the main North-South corridor for NAFTA traffic, is not only bad it's getting very dangerous.
Not only is congestion a problem, but road safety on 35 is a real concern as well. In the years since NAFTA 35 has become a fairly scary place to drive pretty much anywhere between San Antonio and Dallas.
Unfortunately you're incorrect. Expensing stock purchase programs is straight-forward and relatively easy. You know the values of all the variables; just go work the sums.
Expensing of stock _options_ on the other hand requires a bunch of guess work about what the stock might be worth when and if it's ever exercised. Guesswork that the company has a lot of leeway in deciding. The end result is another opportunity for financial statements to be come more confusing and for unscrupulous companies to manipulate their earnings.
Companies already disclose the amount of options they're granting/have outstanding and the market is already taking that into account in the stock price.
These rules are ridiculous because they're ostensibly about making financial statements more clear when in reality they're doing exactly the opposite. No one knows what the value of an option will be until the time that it's excerised. Until then any valuation of the option is just a guess.
I'm not sure, but I believe that it's an homage to _Aliens_ and the girl who piloted the drop craft. (Not a girlie-girl, btw) "Buckle up, we're in for some chop!"
Actually, typical GSM bands are 900, 1800, and 1900. T-Mobile provides GSM at 1900 in the US, and Cingular (as well as just acquired AT&T Wireless) use 850 in most markets to leverage their investment in their existing bandwidth. Cingular does provide 1900 in certain markets like NC and CA. There are no 900 or 1800 deployments in the US that I'm aware of.
I'm not an RF engineer, but I think you've got it backwards. I believe the rule of thumb is _lower_ Mhz = better building penetration and NLOS. If that's so, then the 850/900 phones would get much better coverage given the same tower footprints. (Any EE's care to comment?)
"The pressures of managing the rest of us must be tremendous."
You don't know the half of it. You can't imagine how stressful it is to keep you wage slaves, er workers, from wasting time on/.. Don't you know that Thanksgiving vacation doesn't start until tomorrow? GET BACK TO WORK!
Slashdot Mirror
I think you misunderstand the intent behind privatizing the accounts. Yes, I'm sure the investment market is drooling over the prospects of being able to siphon fees off that money, but that's not the point. The point is that privatizing the accounts changes the ownership of the accounts from the government to individual investors. In otherwords it takes away the money from the government (which can't keep it's hands off such a large pile of money) and gives it to the intended beneficiaries.
Also, some of the posts earlier in this thread obscure the fact that SS really has two problems:
1) circa 2018 the amount of benefits paid out will exceed the amount of payroll taxes collected annually. This isn't a huge crisis until:
2) circa 2040 the mythical SS surplus (kept in it's jackalope-like "lock box") will run out.
So while privatizing has real social and economic costs (some people will make bad investment decisions, financial services companies get to extract rent for managing the money, etc...) it does cure the fundamental agency problem created by the SS system as it exists today. As for the rest of the problems of privatization, there are ways to minimize or mitigate the risks (but not totally remove them).
What's really sad is that I had no problem at all instantly conjuring up exactly what each of those sounds like. *sigh*
Oh it's not all visual. It turns out that the sound of someone slapping their BlackBerry back into it's holster sounds a lot like someone reloading their pistol in Counter Strike. There was quite a while there where anytime someone holstered their BlackBerry my first instinctual thought was: "Awesome they're reloading! Time to frag!"
I don't know about your area, but in Dallas, we just got ours turned up by $3/month on the TV side of the equation. We're not quite ready to pitch Comcast overboard yet, but we're $3 closer.
Well, if you're going to get technical about it, this service is really properly called IP Telephony (which is the application; the thing you're actually doing) and not VoIP which is the just transport. But everyone just calls it VoIP anyway. Oh well.
By way of comparison, I often:
1) Talk on my Vonage line while,
2) Playing CS or Enemy Territory, and
3) Listening to radio on the Internet
with no degredation in my service. Yes, when I'm hammering a big download quality can suffer but I've never had it go out completely as a result of bandwidth usage.
Your packet stream isn't (to the best of my knowledge) encrypted and it's using well known ports for SIP and the like. It ought to be relatively easy to figure out exactly who's using their competitors. Pretty neat competitive advantage; must be nice to be a monopoly.
Heh...did you read about your $3/month increase yet?
Couldn't you just create a new account?
Or, better yet, write a hardware abstraction layer/virtual machine host and then get that signed. Then run what ever you wanted on your new virtual non-DRM'ed machines. :)
"What's the market for this anyway."
What about (assuming the usb is big and fast enough) hosting an MMO client? Aren't people perennially complaining about griefers? If you could uniquely identify the key chain and it was required for game play, then you could ban the device if someone misbehaved badly enough. They'd have to buy another device to get back on and at say $50 a pop being a griefer would become an expensive proposition very quickly.
Plus it'd be pretty cool to take your "Dark Age of Evercrack Heroes Galaxy" addiction with you wherever you went.
Oh come on, it was a joke! ;)
Oh, and if you do decide to go greek, here's a tip: don't call it a "frat." It's fraternity. You wouldn't call your mother a moth or your country a...oh nevermind.
"what's to stop your employer from opening a programming shop in Bangalore and paying $7,500/year for the same job?"
... you get my drift. Attempting to perform this function correctly with a company that's in a time zone more than 13 hours different from your own is difficult to say the least. Not to mention that you now have to pay someone to be awake at night to interact with India, worry about security of your proprietary data, and travel occasionally to India just to keep things moving along. All of those things (and more) cost money and time (more money). So on the whole, you'd better be sure that the cash you're saving on compensation in the US more than makes up for the transaction costs of sending the work overseas.
An excellent question! What indeed? There are a lot of reasons not to send work overseas, but I'll just touch on two here: transaction costs and knowledge theory.
One of the reasons that companies exist is to reduce transaction costs in achieving a goal. If we assume the goal here is to develop software to a particular set of requirements, then one of the transaction costs involved in getting to that goal is the requirements discovery and specification. It's my experience that discovering and specifying requirements is a job that requires a lot of face-to-face interactions, meetings, document revisions, more meetings,
The second reason it doesn't often make sense to send development work overseas is based on the knowledge theory of the firm. In a nutshell knowledge theory asserts that firms exist to facilitate sharing knoweledge in a trusted environment. Software development is really just the embodiment of specific knowledge into an automation process. It's tough to share knowledge with someone who's working when you want to be sleeping and vice versa. It's even tougher to do it when you've got to rely largely on electronic communication (instead of meat-space interaction) to transfer this knowledge from your head into the software via the outsource company.
Both transaction costs and problems with knowledge transfer (really just another transaction cost if you want to look at it broadly) are barriers to moving this kind of work overseas.
Joel's article is fabulous advice for new or soon-to-be CS majors. In particular:
1) Pay attention to your writing and public speaking skills. Even if you're not headed for a career in a big corporation these skills are _invaluable_.
2) I whole-heartedly agree with the suggestion for micro-economics, although I'm pretty sure that some of the concepts he mentioned, like NPV (net present value), are really probably covered in a basic finance course and not microeconomics. I'll disagree with his disparagement of linear algebra; it's a prerequisite for operations research and there are some very cool resource allocation problems that you can learn to solve in OR.
3) GET AN INTERNSHIP OR CO-OP!!!!!! A solid track record of previous employment in your field, more than anything else, is going to open doors for you after graduation. There are a lot of employers out there who'll be more than happy to have a bright motivated CS student working for them (and I don't mean fetching coffee). It also helped me because I was able to discover very early on what I _didn't_ want to be doing for 40+ hours a week and I was able to modify my course prior to graduation.
Good Luck!
Jared
Spoken like someone who's never actually driven on Texas' roads. Take Dallas for example. We already have an outer ring (I-635) and we're working on another (I-190). 635 is a daily mess and 190 isn't even finished yet and already it's getting super congested.
As I mentioned in a previous post, thanks to NAFTA congestion on I-35, the main North-South corridor for NAFTA traffic, is not only bad it's getting very dangerous.
Not only is congestion a problem, but road safety on 35 is a real concern as well. In the years since NAFTA 35 has become a fairly scary place to drive pretty much anywhere between San Antonio and Dallas.
Unfortunately you're incorrect. Expensing stock purchase programs is straight-forward and relatively easy. You know the values of all the variables; just go work the sums.
Expensing of stock _options_ on the other hand requires a bunch of guess work about what the stock might be worth when and if it's ever exercised. Guesswork that the company has a lot of leeway in deciding. The end result is another opportunity for financial statements to be come more confusing and for unscrupulous companies to manipulate their earnings.
Companies already disclose the amount of options they're granting/have outstanding and the market is already taking that into account in the stock price.
These rules are ridiculous because they're ostensibly about making financial statements more clear when in reality they're doing exactly the opposite. No one knows what the value of an option will be until the time that it's excerised. Until then any valuation of the option is just a guess.
I'm not sure, but I believe that it's an homage to _Aliens_ and the girl who piloted the drop craft. (Not a girlie-girl, btw) "Buckle up, we're in for some chop!"
Boosting Engineering, Science, and Technology: http://www.bestinc.org/MVC/
Future City: http://www.futurecity.org/
Actually, typical GSM bands are 900, 1800, and 1900. T-Mobile provides GSM at 1900 in the US, and Cingular (as well as just acquired AT&T Wireless) use 850 in most markets to leverage their investment in their existing bandwidth. Cingular does provide 1900 in certain markets like NC and CA. There are no 900 or 1800 deployments in the US that I'm aware of.
I'm not an RF engineer, but I think you've got it backwards. I believe the rule of thumb is _lower_ Mhz = better building penetration and NLOS. If that's so, then the 850/900 phones would get much better coverage given the same tower footprints. (Any EE's care to comment?)
They also swapped the processor out. Went from TI to Intel.
Anybody want to play hucka-bucka-beanstalk? Hey, that's a neat access card, I've got one just like it!
"The pressures of managing the rest of us must be tremendous."
/.. Don't you know that Thanksgiving vacation doesn't start until tomorrow? GET BACK TO WORK!
You don't know the half of it. You can't imagine how stressful it is to keep you wage slaves, er workers, from wasting time on
Now, where did I leave my putter?