I wrote a review on Yelp once. It was very unfavorable towards what was probably the worst restaurant I have ever eaten at. The only other review was glowing (I'm assuming the restaurant owner wrote it). Yelp deleted my unfavorable review (which, I should add, contained no offensive material, obvious flames, or anything else that could warrant a deletion).
In short, this is a bad idea. A website that seems to get revenue from censorship bribes is not a sustainable enterprise (and yes, I realize I'm making a major assumption here).
More evidence that AT&T’s data network is head-and-shoulders above Verizon’s comes from Root Wireless, a start-up in Bellevue, Wash., that is developing software for consumers to install on their smartphones to do continuous network tests. This generates empirical data for consumers who “today are buried under opinions and advertising slogans,” said Paul Griff, the chief executive. Root Wireless has no business relationship with any carrier.
This year, Root Wireless ran 4.7 million tests on smartphones for each of the four major carriers, spread across seven metropolitan areas: Chicago, Dallas, Los Angeles/Orange County, New York, Seattle/Tacoma, the San Francisco Bay Area, and Washington. In every market, AT&T had faster average download speeds and had signal strength of 75 percent or better more frequently than did Verizon. (A Verizon spokesman declined to comment about these test results or those of Global Wireless Solutions.)
There is a poster here called PizzaAnalogyGuy whose gimmick involves making a pizza analogy in each post. Can we please get a pizza analogy about slicing pizza?
You're being ridiculous. In no way does Google provide the same ability to reconnect to old friends. Before social networking, most people did not have an internet presence. The vast majority of my friends who are on facebook have no other internet presence, and a google search would reveal only their facebook profile.
And if you're hosting an event, you don't want to have to enter 50 numbers in a text message in order to invite people whose participation is only marginally necessary. It's also nice being able to keep track of people with whom you've been acquainted in the past, but aren't close enough to for a phone call to be warranted.
For example, you may not be close enough to Mike to call or text, but with Facebook might cause you to say, "Oh, Mike is getting married. Maybe I should shoot him a note." Or, "Jim is moving. Maybe I'll drop by that going away party our common friend posted." It may not be the ideal tool for communicating with your closest friends and family, but it's great for keeping in touch with your fringe friends and acquaintances.
I will say, though, that if you don't have any real friends, and all of your are internet friends, facebook may not be as useful.
Except you couldn't reconnect with old friends whom you haven't seen for years using personal home pages. And you couldn't share events with your friends and have it automatically send them an email message using personal home pages. And you couldn't have a quick chat with an old friend in another state using personal home pages.
Well, technically the Salem witch trials was really just one family that hated another family, and abused major flaws in the legal, social, and religious environment of the time in order to have them gotten rid of. Burning witches was really the means, not the end. Same with McCarthyism.
In the case of child pr0n, the goal isn't really to get rid of a bunch of people under some silly pretext. In the former cases, it is humanity showing its evil side; in this case, it's humanity showing its stupid side.
There is a flaw in your argument. It clearly does not account for the fact that Microsoft is the devil incarnate. We need wild implications of Microsoft skulduggery, not your fancy "logic."
I don't know a whole lot about in-flight software, but I do know the FAA itself heavily regulates it. There are different "levels" of flight software and hardware, with varying degrees of documentation and testing required for each. In-flight navigation software is obviously the most critical, and the level of documentation and testing they do for that is insane. Back when I was working on my capstone project in college, I got to see a little bit of how Honeywell tests their displays, and it is orders of magnitude more thorough than what I've seen in corporate software wherein money actually changes hands. They even had to create their own proprietary operation system in order to pass muster with the FAA.
I'm not sure about where the FAA's flight plan software falls in, but I'm guessing that since it's not safety critical, and only an operational risk, it probably is fairly solid, but obviously not as solid as the safety-critical software.
I do think it's too soon to blame this on MS, though. We don't even know whether this was caused by a third party vendor, which vendors they use for the particular piece where the error occurred, or if this is even anybody else's fault but their own. I wouldn't be surprised if someone gets fired over this, though.
Apparently you know nothing about Keynesian economics [wikipedia.org]. I mean, if you're going to try to make such a failing argument, at least dress it up a little with some propaganda from von Mises or AEI.
I do know about Keynesian economics. That does nothing to address whether it is absurd to borrow money and say that makes you more productive. Of course it's a tautology, which makes it that much more ridiculous that GDP is being touted as something useful or relevant.
At any rate, even if you do buy into the GDP nonsense, you must necessarily admit that a return of spending back to normal levels will create an equal decline in GDP next summer. Even keeping spending at current levels will have a neutral, not positive, effect on GDP. Even if you buy that "this recession is over because we have positive GDP" nonsense, you must necessarily concede that without any intrinsic (non-government) growth in economic productivity, we will see negative GDP growth once again this summer.
And now you close with unsubstantiated innuendo, tawdry appeals to emotion, and not one shred of actual verifiable information? Look, I try to be patient, but this just exceeded my stupidity quota for the day. In the future could you at least try to form a cogent argument before wasting my time? I mean, is that really too much to ask?
This was very clever. You somehow managed to blindly ignore my entire argument and accuse me of ignoring the data. How about you actually point out what was wrong with what I said by providing a counterargument? Everything I wrote is falsifiable. Is the burden on me to go dig up a link, even though it is a well-established fact that the government is printing and devaluing US Dollars?
If you don't understand why, here's the deal (just a simplified overview as I understand it): Many banks were apparently not solvent. If the government did nothing and your bank went under, you may have essentially showed up at your bank one day to find your checking and savings accounts no longer existed. To this, many people respond, "But my money is FDIC insured!" However, the whole "FDIC insured" thing means that if the bank goes under, the government will take control of the bank, effectively socializing it completely, bail it out, and then sell it off. That's not really any better. To make matters worse, these large banks are fairly interconnected, which means if even a couple major banks were to go under, it would have caused problems for anyone who it owed money to, including all the other banks. Letting a company like CitiGroup go under would cause a chain reaction that would cause lots of other banks to go under.
When the FDIC siezes a bank, they sell the assets to another bank. The difference between the amount of deposits and what they are able to sell it for comes out of the DIF. That's better than wasting trillions of taxpayer dollars to effectively bail out executives and shareholders.
It is true that bondholders would take a haircut, but if that makes another bank go under, that bank also deserved to fail. In all likelihood, Citi and BofA were probably the only ones in immediate danger of failing. Even if we lose all of the big four, that's a lot of business for other banks to be rewarded with. It is true there would have probably been a disruption in lending for a time, but there was anyways. Small business lending is still dropping like a rock, and the entire mortage industry is currently monopolized by the GSEs. We didn't need the big four pillagers for that.
So ultimately, there were only two options here. Either (a) do some kind of bailout and keep our financial system going; or (b) let our entire financial system collapse, taking everyone's investments and bank accounts with it. Does anyone other than revolutionary anarchists really wish that we'd done option B?
Except it wouldn't have taken anybody's bank accounts with it, and the financial system clearly isn't working anyways. We are clearly screwed either way (after all, none of this even made the banks solvent. Right now, we're just pretending that they are.), so why let a bunch of marauding charlatans hold our entire country hostage at gunpoint? The only thing that we have obviously accomplished in this whole debacle is that the middle class has had 20% of their wealth wiped out by the federal reserve in just a year.
This isn't a partisan issue. Both the Bush administration and the Obama administration were involved in bailing the banks out, and it was because both recognized that it just needed to be done. No one really wanted to do it.
I wouldn't say that. Hank Paulson definitely wanted it to be done. He avoided losing a fortune by bailing out AIG. Geithner has been just as quick to kowtow to financial lobbyists, and his "we will maintain a strong dollar" nonsense has proven him to be either completely inept of a devious liar. Meanwhile, our lawmakers have been taking large bribes from various financial interests to keep the Fed's balance sheets secret from the American public, to allow them to lie about their own balance sheets, and to prevent FASB from disallowing shadow balance sheets. What is in the banks' interests is not necessarily in the American public's interests, and it doesn't take an anarchist to believe that. I believe banks should be forced to back up all deposits with cash or government paper, and that's not something an anarchist would say, is it?
We had 3.5% positive GDP growth in the last quarter, which every credible economist attributes primarily to the stimulus package. After all, it's the first positive GDP we've seen in over a year, the best we've seen in more than two, and has broken us out of one of the deepest recessions in our history.
Looking at GDP in this context is useless. It's no different than me borrowing $10k, spending it, and saying I'm $10k more productive because I spend $10k more. It has no bearing on anybody's wellbeing.
It begins to become a little more clear when you back out direct government spending increases and the cash-for-clunkers debacle. Removing just those two government stimuli yields a negative GDP, meaning there was zero intrinsic economic growth in the third quarter.
At any rate, it seems that pretty much every financial analyst out there now is calling for a double-dip recession. And it's not just limited to rogue bloggers; CNBC analysts, who are usually perma-bulls, are starting to call for a double-dip recession. If and when that happens, we'll have made ourselves no better off by printing all that money, except our money will be worth even less and we'll be even harder pressed to manage a durable recovery due to even more wealth having been stripped from the middle class. But this is what we get when we listen to "credible" government-sponsored economists.
I think the real problem is that since nobody does this, they expect Amazon to do the legwork.
I don't think it's so much expecting Amazon to do the legwork, as not knowing there is legwork to be done. Out of curiosity, I just looked up use tax laws for the state in which I reside:
Use tax is imposed on tangible personal property brought into Arizona for storage, use, or consumption in the state when the seller did not collect tax on the sale of the property. The tax rates due are the same rates as for sales tax. Returns are to be filed on or before the 20th day of the month following the month in which the purchases were made.
That's news to me. Methinks documents like this could at least partially account for people not paying a use tax.
Really, Amazon should be obligated charge (a) taxes for the state where the buyer resides, or at least (b) charge taxes where the business is physically located. The company I am working on a project for does business in several countries, and they have to keep track of various taxes in each one, so it's not like it's impossible.
That is only true of they are not hiding all their losses off of the balance sheet, refusing to recognize them until years down the road, etc. In that case, they would need the government's help to sur....
And yes, Buffett did benefit from the bailouts... Not to mention Buffett recently tried to back Goldman's recent proposal to buy tax credits from Fannie Mae. He's not the boogeyman, but he's not the nice, friendly man with a sincere belief in capitalism that he is sometimes made out to be.
The alleged benefits of high frequency trading are way overblown. It wasn't until the last few years that it became prevalent, and I think it would be very difficult to argue that we're any better off with that "liquidity."
And the argument really falls apart when you look at which stocks are being traded. The algos all pile onto whichever stock is the worthless piece of paper du jour, leaving the bid/ask spreads on less popular stocks unaffected. CitiGroup and AIG already have enough liquidity.
Since when was it a crime to have a former CEO in charge of the US Treasury, who has an obvious financial interest in the firm's survival?
Since when was it a crime to be the exclusive market maker in CDS, after your two major competitors go out of business, giving you a completely risk-free profit on bit-ask spreads?
Since when was it a crime to upgrade a company whose stock offering you are underwriting?
Slashdot Mirror
I wrote a review on Yelp once. It was very unfavorable towards what was probably the worst restaurant I have ever eaten at. The only other review was glowing (I'm assuming the restaurant owner wrote it). Yelp deleted my unfavorable review (which, I should add, contained no offensive material, obvious flames, or anything else that could warrant a deletion).
In short, this is a bad idea. A website that seems to get revenue from censorship bribes is not a sustainable enterprise (and yes, I realize I'm making a major assumption here).
There is a poster here called PizzaAnalogyGuy whose gimmick involves making a pizza analogy in each post. Can we please get a pizza analogy about slicing pizza?
Duplicate posts about duplicate stories...
That's deep.
That's nothing. I couldn't even figure out the old meta-moderation system.
You're being ridiculous. In no way does Google provide the same ability to reconnect to old friends. Before social networking, most people did not have an internet presence. The vast majority of my friends who are on facebook have no other internet presence, and a google search would reveal only their facebook profile.
And if you're hosting an event, you don't want to have to enter 50 numbers in a text message in order to invite people whose participation is only marginally necessary. It's also nice being able to keep track of people with whom you've been acquainted in the past, but aren't close enough to for a phone call to be warranted.
For example, you may not be close enough to Mike to call or text, but with Facebook might cause you to say, "Oh, Mike is getting married. Maybe I should shoot him a note." Or, "Jim is moving. Maybe I'll drop by that going away party our common friend posted." It may not be the ideal tool for communicating with your closest friends and family, but it's great for keeping in touch with your fringe friends and acquaintances.
I will say, though, that if you don't have any real friends, and all of your are internet friends, facebook may not be as useful.
Except you couldn't reconnect with old friends whom you haven't seen for years using personal home pages. And you couldn't share events with your friends and have it automatically send them an email message using personal home pages. And you couldn't have a quick chat with an old friend in another state using personal home pages.
Get off my lawn.
Well, technically the Salem witch trials was really just one family that hated another family, and abused major flaws in the legal, social, and religious environment of the time in order to have them gotten rid of. Burning witches was really the means, not the end. Same with McCarthyism.
In the case of child pr0n, the goal isn't really to get rid of a bunch of people under some silly pretext. In the former cases, it is humanity showing its evil side; in this case, it's humanity showing its stupid side.
I am frome the 17th cenchurie, ande the worde is moste deffinetlie "scowers."
We can't afford to change all the signs. We spent all our wealth fighting marijuana, keeping out Mexicans, and building public basketball arenas.
Stop it with your "logic." Pragmatism is for communists, you communist!
There is a flaw in your argument. It clearly does not account for the fact that Microsoft is the devil incarnate. We need wild implications of Microsoft skulduggery, not your fancy "logic."
...and Iran was publishing bad flight plans. You know, to block undesirable traffic.
I don't know a whole lot about in-flight software, but I do know the FAA itself heavily regulates it. There are different "levels" of flight software and hardware, with varying degrees of documentation and testing required for each. In-flight navigation software is obviously the most critical, and the level of documentation and testing they do for that is insane. Back when I was working on my capstone project in college, I got to see a little bit of how Honeywell tests their displays, and it is orders of magnitude more thorough than what I've seen in corporate software wherein money actually changes hands. They even had to create their own proprietary operation system in order to pass muster with the FAA.
I'm not sure about where the FAA's flight plan software falls in, but I'm guessing that since it's not safety critical, and only an operational risk, it probably is fairly solid, but obviously not as solid as the safety-critical software.
I do think it's too soon to blame this on MS, though. We don't even know whether this was caused by a third party vendor, which vendors they use for the particular piece where the error occurred, or if this is even anybody else's fault but their own. I wouldn't be surprised if someone gets fired over this, though.
I do know about Keynesian economics. That does nothing to address whether it is absurd to borrow money and say that makes you more productive. Of course it's a tautology, which makes it that much more ridiculous that GDP is being touted as something useful or relevant.
At any rate, even if you do buy into the GDP nonsense, you must necessarily admit that a return of spending back to normal levels will create an equal decline in GDP next summer. Even keeping spending at current levels will have a neutral, not positive, effect on GDP. Even if you buy that "this recession is over because we have positive GDP" nonsense, you must necessarily concede that without any intrinsic (non-government) growth in economic productivity, we will see negative GDP growth once again this summer.
This was very clever. You somehow managed to blindly ignore my entire argument and accuse me of ignoring the data. How about you actually point out what was wrong with what I said by providing a counterargument? Everything I wrote is falsifiable. Is the burden on me to go dig up a link, even though it is a well-established fact that the government is printing and devaluing US Dollars?
When the FDIC siezes a bank, they sell the assets to another bank. The difference between the amount of deposits and what they are able to sell it for comes out of the DIF. That's better than wasting trillions of taxpayer dollars to effectively bail out executives and shareholders.
It is true that bondholders would take a haircut, but if that makes another bank go under, that bank also deserved to fail. In all likelihood, Citi and BofA were probably the only ones in immediate danger of failing. Even if we lose all of the big four, that's a lot of business for other banks to be rewarded with. It is true there would have probably been a disruption in lending for a time, but there was anyways. Small business lending is still dropping like a rock, and the entire mortage industry is currently monopolized by the GSEs. We didn't need the big four pillagers for that.
Except it wouldn't have taken anybody's bank accounts with it, and the financial system clearly isn't working anyways. We are clearly screwed either way (after all, none of this even made the banks solvent. Right now, we're just pretending that they are.), so why let a bunch of marauding charlatans hold our entire country hostage at gunpoint? The only thing that we have obviously accomplished in this whole debacle is that the middle class has had 20% of their wealth wiped out by the federal reserve in just a year.
I wouldn't say that. Hank Paulson definitely wanted it to be done. He avoided losing a fortune by bailing out AIG. Geithner has been just as quick to kowtow to financial lobbyists, and his "we will maintain a strong dollar" nonsense has proven him to be either completely inept of a devious liar. Meanwhile, our lawmakers have been taking large bribes from various financial interests to keep the Fed's balance sheets secret from the American public, to allow them to lie about their own balance sheets, and to prevent FASB from disallowing shadow balance sheets. What is in the banks' interests is not necessarily in the American public's interests, and it doesn't take an anarchist to believe that. I believe banks should be forced to back up all deposits with cash or government paper, and that's not something an anarchist would say, is it?
Looking at GDP in this context is useless. It's no different than me borrowing $10k, spending it, and saying I'm $10k more productive because I spend $10k more. It has no bearing on anybody's wellbeing.
It begins to become a little more clear when you back out direct government spending increases and the cash-for-clunkers debacle. Removing just those two government stimuli yields a negative GDP, meaning there was zero intrinsic economic growth in the third quarter.
At any rate, it seems that pretty much every financial analyst out there now is calling for a double-dip recession. And it's not just limited to rogue bloggers; CNBC analysts, who are usually perma-bulls, are starting to call for a double-dip recession. If and when that happens, we'll have made ourselves no better off by printing all that money, except our money will be worth even less and we'll be even harder pressed to manage a durable recovery due to even more wealth having been stripped from the middle class. But this is what we get when we listen to "credible" government-sponsored economists.
How about a state it's shipping from?
What Amazon should be obligated to do is not necessarily the same as what Amazon is currently obligated to do.
I don't think it's so much expecting Amazon to do the legwork, as not knowing there is legwork to be done. Out of curiosity, I just looked up use tax laws for the state in which I reside:
That's news to me. Methinks documents like this could at least partially account for people not paying a use tax.
Really, Amazon should be obligated charge (a) taxes for the state where the buyer resides, or at least (b) charge taxes where the business is physically located. The company I am working on a project for does business in several countries, and they have to keep track of various taxes in each one, so it's not like it's impossible.
That is only true of they are not hiding all their losses off of the balance sheet, refusing to recognize them until years down the road, etc. In that case, they would need the government's help to sur....
Come to think of it, you have a good point...
Buffett is a Democrat.
And yes, Buffett did benefit from the bailouts... Not to mention Buffett recently tried to back Goldman's recent proposal to buy tax credits from Fannie Mae. He's not the boogeyman, but he's not the nice, friendly man with a sincere belief in capitalism that he is sometimes made out to be.
The alleged benefits of high frequency trading are way overblown. It wasn't until the last few years that it became prevalent, and I think it would be very difficult to argue that we're any better off with that "liquidity."
And the argument really falls apart when you look at which stocks are being traded. The algos all pile onto whichever stock is the worthless piece of paper du jour, leaving the bid/ask spreads on less popular stocks unaffected. CitiGroup and AIG already have enough liquidity.
THIS
The SEC had been tipped off on this scam at least three years before it "surfaced."
Since when was it a crime to have a former CEO in charge of the US Treasury, who has an obvious financial interest in the firm's survival?
Since when was it a crime to be the exclusive market maker in CDS, after your two major competitors go out of business, giving you a completely risk-free profit on bit-ask spreads?
Since when was it a crime to upgrade a company whose stock offering you are underwriting?