This is the problem liberals (not really universally Democrats) have. They can't get their heads out of the Robin Hood concept and work out that people need jobs. Thus they figure, hey, the businesses and the fabulously wealthy individuals aren't of any consequence, take their money and give it to the poor so the poor can give it back to them!
The wealthy do not create jobs. That's your first incorrect assumption. As anyone who has ever worked for any business of any real size (>100 employees) will tell you, jobs are created by one of the following:
Expansion into new areas of business. This occurs infrequently at most companies, and is usually a panicked reaction to a lack of money from other areas. This is quite often followed by a reduction in jobs related to old areas of business.
Employees threatening to quit because of overwork.
Expansion into new locations. This occurs primarily in retail.
Small businesses as they ramp up to full employment.
That's it. Thus, on the whole, giving money to big businesses is pissing money away. They're not going to hire more people because they already have all the people they need to do the job. There's no incentive to hire.
The problem is when you raise taxes by, say, 20% on businesses, that's 20% less salary that can go out.
Incorrect. That's 20% less money that can go out to all sources—salary, suppliers, dividends, etc. Salary output is a fixed expense. Unless you are in a position to be able to lay people off (which is actually fairly unusual in business these days—most modern companies operate with as few employees as they can get away with, so if they lay anyone off, they have to stop producing something), you aren't going to cut that. So that means the money mostly gets cut from dividends and cash on hand.
The other problem--specific to taxing the fabulously wealthy individuals--is that fabulously wealthy individuals are consumers with more money.
Which they have because they do not spend it. Money added into the pockets of the people at the bottom gets spent because they have needs that they want to spend money on, but that they cannot currently pay for. This results in an immediate increase in money flowing into local businesses. In contrast, you can only usefully have so many toys, so most or all of the money added into the pockets of the people at the top gets invested, which disproportionately helps large corporations, and does almost nothing for local businesses.
Can you imagine a 90% tax on a CEO making $30 million? He'd keep $3 million... but that's okay, since his last tax rate was 30% and he was keeping $20M... he'll just raise his salary to $200 million! Take home $20M, but the business just got hit with $170M on its expense sheet... well better start laying off workers!
Fortunately, those people are not in charge of their salaries. The board of directors is. Besides, most of the income up in that range comes from capital gains, not from actual salaries. Tax capital gains as ordinary income, and you've fixed pretty much everything that is wrong with the U.S. economy and with the government's funding, and you have done so in such a way that the people involved cannot just bleed more money from the corporations without mostly taking it from other rich people. Put a dollar floor below which you continue to tax the gains at a lower rate so that people can still use the stock market to invest for retirement.
Every time you raise taxes, the economy bleeds wealth. Not just money, but actual productivity from labor.
Insofar as it represents friction, yes, a little bit. Not nearly as much as most people think, though. For the most part, you're just shifting productivity from one area to another. Whether this is good or not depends on whether you agree with the direction that jobs are shifting.
The problem is that the people on both ends try to minimize how much money trickles in each direction
With trickle-up economics, this is a non-issue. The people making goods set the price, you either buy them or you don't, and if you have more money, you're willing to spend more. So money injected at the bottom results in price hikes, and makes it up to the top just fine. And among the poor, this happens even faster, because there are things that they would buy if they had the money, but cannot because they do not. So injecting even small amounts of money into the bottom of the economy results in a significant trickle-up.
With trickle-down economics, the redistribution does not happen to any significant degree. The people at the top have no incentive to hire more people beyond the minimum necessary to do the job, so they don't. They have no incentive to pay more because no one else is paying enough of a premium to steal their workers. And the workers have a much harder time demanding more money than someone selling a product. Thus, the businesses tend to give the extra money to their investors instead of trickling it down to the workers. To the extent that this helps the workers' 401k plans, I suppose a little of it is trickling down, but not much. To the extent that this results in expansion of retail businesses to new locations or allows businesses to compete in new sectors, this creates jobs, which is sort-of a trickle down, but has minimal impact on people who are employed.
Either way, only a tiny fraction of the money injected at the top trickles down, whereas nearly all of the money injected at the bottom trickles up. And that's why giving tax breaks and credits to the poor is a much better way to stimulate the economy than any sort of corporate loans or tax breaks for businesses.
You, like many other people, are mistaking differences in newsworthiness for bias. Typical criteria for something being newsworthy are prominence, proximity, currency (other organizations covering it), timeliness, conflict, impact/human interest (e.g. people affected by it), and unusualness. When you look at the perceived differences you described, all of those so-called biases can be trivially explained away by fundamental differences in the relative newsworthiness of the stories as defined by these criteria.
More than that, I think, is that they were caught building the echo chamber. The conventional media has been very very cozy towards Democrats for quite a long time now and playing a downright shouting match over the heads of Republicans. You don't have to be blind to not see it, especially when you agree with them. But compare media coverage around Obama's Fast and Furious to Bush's Valerie Plame. Both put agents in harm's way, but only one scandal actually got one killed.
Agents are put into dangerous situations all the time. That doesn't make it news. What made the Valerie Plame scandal news is that it was an illegal disclosure of top secret information whose only plausible purpose was to silence a very vocal critic. We've seen similar levels of coverage for the whole Wikileaks situation under Obama, which is much more comparable.
By comparison, a botched up operation is much less newsworthy. There were botched up operations in Afghanistan and Iraq on an ongoing basis during the Bush administration. Those didn't generally make news, or if they did, it was nothing more than "[x] Americans were killed in [location] today when a [details of incident]" sentence or two.
... compare coverage over Bush's "vacation presidency" from term to 9/11 and coverage over Obama's vacation days...
Obama's vacation days did not end in a disaster.
compare Haliburton scandals versus Solyndra scandals
Again, not similar. Haliburton was actively engaged in all sorts of dodgy behavior—charging for services that were not rendered, cutting corners on construction, etc.—that would probably have risen to the level of outright fraud. And VP Cheney was the company's CEO up until he joined Bush's ticket. Solyndra was just a poor investment. Obama had no ties to the company beyond the usual campaign contribution bribery that is typical of D.C. politicians. So only moderately newsworthy by comparison.
Obama's defense of warrantless wiretapping versus Bush's defense
Outside of Slashdot, I didn't see much coverage of this for either candidate, honestly.:-) That said, to the extent that there was a difference, this is unsurprising. The biggest defining factor of what is or is not news is timeliness. "We've started doing X" or "Somebody just caught us doing X" is inherently more newsworthy than "We're still doing X just like we have been for the past ten years", except perhaps if we recently said "We're not doing X". This is true for all values of X.
Hurricane Katrina versus Hurricane Sandy
At the federal level, they didn't botch handling of Sandy to nearly the same degree, and fewer things went wrong. Why were you expecting more criticism? Yes, there were mistakes, mainly in things like less-than-ideal hurricane warnings. That's a far cry from the complete failure to prepare that we saw in Katrina.
More importantly, the reason for the difference is that Obama put somebody in charge of FEMA who had actual emergency management experience (even crossing party lines—Fugate is a Republican), whereas Bush put a lawyer in charge. If you ask me, a poor decision leading to woeful lack of preparedness is sufficient reason to criticize.
Bush being blamed for high gas prices versus Obama getting a pass, the list
If you don't leave the decisions to the product designers, who are you going to leave them to? The only alternatives I can think of are:
Cell carriers. They will do everything possible to ensure that your experience is specific to their carrier, that your apps can't come with you, and that you will have to either buy new apps whenever you buy a new phone or pay a subscription fee every month for the privilege of running the Facebook app.
Government. Every government will have their own set of rules that all lag five years behind the state of the art, and thus will do absolutely nothing to protect you in practice, yet will get in your way constantly so that you feel secure.
Third-party antivirus companies. Every so often, your machine will become unbootable because they quarantined part of the OS. And everything will run slowly. And most users will still get infected by every piece of malware on the planet because they didn't pay their protection money.
The device designers are in the best position to make those decisions sanely, both because they are most familiar with the device and because they have the most to lose in terms of sales if they screw up. It is the responsibility of the public to push back when they cross the line and do something stupid—to keep them honest, so to speak.:-)
That said, for the 1-2%, I would certainly favor legislation to mandate that companies who lock down devices provide the owners of those devices (at no cost) with a means to compile/sign copies of software for their individual devices. It's a high enough bar to make it unlikely that my parents (for example) would do it, yet easy enough that it wouldn't prevent folks like us from tinkering. I don't see our government being clueful enough to pass such a law in the next century, but I would be in favor of it if they did.
Horses**t. Anything I do in the privacy of my home, assuming it leaves no evidence and does not affect or involve anyone else, is private, always has been, and should rightfully continue to be in the future unless I choose to make it public. Anyone who claims otherwise is probably in the business of violating someone's privacy.
You're half right. It's not about avoiding making decisions. It's about being afraid of making a dangerous decision without realizing it. Folks like you and me understand computers. We understand how our actions affect our experience. Most folks don't. And they don't want to. They don't want to think about whether opening that attachment will actually run some app on their machine that installs a keylogger and sends their credit card login information to a server in Croatia. They want their device to work for them, not against them, and as you yourself put it, they are notoriously unreliable at making good decisions about what is or is not a safe action. So for them, the only way to have a modicum of safety and comfort is to have less freedom.
What corporate control does is creates a responsible party that at least ostensibly should be able to make more informed decisions about what is and is not safe than your average non-programmer. This is not saying that it should not be possible for people who know what they are doing and truly understand the risks to get out from under that corporate control—it can be useful, even necessary at times—but rather that systems should be designed in such a way that it is really, really freaking obvious when you stray outside those lines. If you don't have to work at it, then straying outside those bounds becomes second nature, and people begin to take it for granted that what they're doing is safe even when it really isn't.
There's gravity on Mars. It's a little over a third of Earth norm. You would eventually lose your muscle tone, but not to the same degree or at the same rate that you would lose it in zero-g. Of course, the nine months getting there would be more problematic. (Yes, we could get people there faster, given enough fuel to slow down at the end, but it isn't clear whether we would bother.)
As a country, the US stopped giving a shit a very long time ago.
The U.S. general public has never cared about space exploration; the public has only cared about beating someone else. Want to get a team of U.S. astronauts on Mars by 2019? Convince the Chinese government to announce to the world that they intend to land humans on Mars by 2020.
I guarantee you that if the Chinese said they planned to establish permanent settlements on Mars in ten years, the U.S. government would move Heaven and Earth to get us there sooner, and they would succeed. Getting to Mars is easy. Convincing the bureaucrats that it is more important than building their little war machines to blow up countries with oil is hard.
Yes, technically power production is the problem - but surprisingly it correlates extremely closely to consumption, go figure. Sure, if we could switch to carbon-neutral electricity generation tomorrow that would go a long way towards mitigating the problem, but we can't.
The problem is that reducing consumption isn't likely to reduce emissions at all. Here's why: dirty power tends to also be cheap power. If you cut the country's power consumption, the power companies look at their usage and ask, "What capacity should we cut?" When they do, to the extent possible, they cut the most expensive power first.
The relatively clean natural-gas-based peaker plants are usually some of the most expensive. Nuclear power is up there. Next comes expansion plans for solar and wind power. Coal never makes the cut. So you'd have to cut huge swaths out of the power consumption (as in, determine the percentage of power you get from coal, subtract that from 100, and cut more than that) before you even begin to cut coal-based power production in most parts of the country, except to the extent that laws prevent that from being the case.
The only good way to reduce fossil-fuel-based power production is by mandating a reduction in fossil-fuel-based power production. That means A. stop approving permits for new construction of coal plants, B. reduce the duration of permits on continued operation of plants after their original design lifespan or stop approving them entirely, and C. set mandatory targets for the percentage of power that must come from clean energy sources by particular milestones.
There is one other way, of course—set limits on coal mining to artificially raise its price—but that would probably have other side effects that are less than desirable.
Either way, government action on the production side is the only way those sorts of changes will happen. Anything short of that is like politely asking the sun not to shine or the rain not to fall.
Sure, lighting is a minor piece of the pie, but if we can get a couple dozen such relatively minor fixes in place we'll actually be pretty far along towards solving the problem without resorting to really drastic endeavors. Moreover, the more we can reduce consumption the less new clean generating capacity we have to built, reducing the cost of that endeavor.
The problem is that we can't. Except for reduced consumption during the recent economic downturn, the power consumption of the U.S. has grown steadily and roughly linearly for at least the past thirty years. Even if every residential incandescent bulb were replaced by a fluorescent bulb overnight, you would only cause a one-year flat spot in that growth. Even if every residential light bulb were turned off permanently and consumed no power at all, it would only cause about a two-year flat spot. The big gains come from improving efficiency in things that take a lot of power—heating and cooling, manufacturing, transportation, etc., not from nickel-and-diming the folks who are using low-single-digit percentages of the nation's power.
At some point, it makes more sense to just mandate that dirty power production go away, and let the free market figure out how to do it....:-)
If my math is right, a person talking on the phone for an hour per day is only a little over 4 gigs per year at typical cell phone bitrates. Are you saying that it is unrealistic for the phone company to keep 12 gigabytes of storage per customer for three years? If not, then voice recording is not unrealistic.
Based on that, the fact that they aren't doing voice recording means there's something fundamentally wrong about doing so, and text messages should not be any different.
So while you are right that a standard Bluetooth profile (e.g. headset) doesn't require MFi licensing, which of these standard Bluetooth profiles would you use for your Hello World example?
Fair point, and I use halogens in most places anyway. However, for my bedside table lamp, I prefer a much warmer light, and because of the dimmer, it screams like a banshee if you put a CFL or LED bulb into it. So these days, I take advantage of a really cool trick: three-way bulbs are still available for sale. When I buy 50/100/150 watt three-way bulbs, the 50W side almost invariably blows first. The 100W side is wired to the center pin. Therefore, I have a steady supply of 100W incandescent bulbs. Reduce, reuse, recycle.:-D
In both those cases, though, there's a large entity that should be responsible, but isn't being held responsible:
For global warming, the power consumption is not the problem. The production methodology is the problem. If our power were produced 100% by solar and wind, with a superconducting grid, there would be basically no additional pollution caused by additional usage (ignoring any pollution caused by the manufacture of the power production and transmission hardware, but at some point in time, that becomes a sunk cost).
For plastic bags, it is the responsibility of the property owner to keep things clean. And so on. In both cases, the laws are trying to treat the symptom instead of the actual cause.
BTW, I can't say I've seen many plastic bags floating around Wal-Mart parking lots. Maybe you just live in an area where people suck.:-D
You're right about the cost of the bags being spread out across all of the merchandise, of course. But the numbers don't add up for most people. On average, that bag costs about four cents to the retailer. On average, a similarly sized trash bag costs about a quarter. So at about 16% reuse, the grocery bags end up being cheaper. My reuse percentages are at least that high, because I typically pick up plastic bags only when I'm carrying lots of small things and don't waste them on single items or on large items like milk or soda bottles. I certainly can't speak for others in that matter. (Admittedly, this minimal approach to bag consumption is directly correlated with the trend towards self-check registers at stores; baggers at stores tend to overbag; one could probably say, then, that my minimal consumption of plastic bags is caused by me being lazy, but I prefer to put a positive spin on it.)
Also, the factor of six cost difference between the "free" bags and the bags you actually buy in stores is largely because the actual trash bags are made of thicker plastic and have to be transported across the country inside cardboard boxes that add considerable weight and volume. When you add up the extra fuel burned as a result, even if only a couple of percent of those grocery bags are reused as trash bags, I would expect those anti-bag laws to have an overall negative impact on the environment as a whole. The impact just isn't as visible without the plastic bags floating in the streams, because you can't see global warming. And if you include the additional trash burden from the thicker bags and extra cardboard boxes, the negative impact should be even greater.
Bulbs are only cheaper when all you're looking at is the immediate sticker price, which is precisely why legislation was needed.
By that same argument, we should pass laws that ban automobiles in favor of public transit. That's a fallacious argument because there are other costs beyond the economic cost that cannot be readily quantified. In the case of transit, that cost is the loss of free time spent while traveling. In the case of light bulbs, the extra cost is in reduced comfort—some people just don't like the light from CFLs. Neither of these is a quantifiable financial loss, but both are real effects.
The purpose of government is not to be a nanny state that thinks for you; legislation is not automatically called for every time you have a group of people who are too clueless to grasp a simple concept. The purpose of government is to protect the powerless from the powerful, and thus government should interfere in the free market only when a legitimate protective need necessitates doing so, and only to the minimum degree necessary to achieve that goal. The incandescent ban fell way, way on the other side of that line to the point of being downright silly, as though reducing consumer choice were a better way to improve the environment than oh, I don't know, adding restrictions on the use of high-pollution power production....
It's on the same order of absurdity as the plastic bag bans in California. Supposedly, one of the major reasons for those laws was the amount of plastic bags that ended up in rivers and creeks. So instead of fixing the real problem—the garbage crews who don't pick up all the bits of crap that fall out on the ground whenever they dump the cans into the trucks—they chose to punish everybody else by creating artificial scarcity of a useful tool. (And no, reusable bags are not a viable replacement. I can't use reusable bags as trash can liners. I can't use them to carry containers of berries home from the supermarket. I can't use them as packing material when I'm shipping something across the country. And so on.)
Laws can't fix clueless or careless, and when they try, they almost invariably do it wrong.
I think the milk is a bad analogy. It only affects the person consuming it, unlike low power light bulbs or leaded gasoline.
No, it's a actually a pretty good analogy. Light bulbs mostly affect the person using it, too. I mean sure, there's some slight externality in terms of power consumption on the grid, but there's a slight externality for somebody dying, too, in terns of the effect on society, on companies that the person previously bought stuff from, etc.
The major claimed externality for light bulbs—pollution—is pretty much bogus for two reasons. First, the impact of household lighting on power consumption is peanuts. In 2010, it was supposedly about 5% of total electricity consumption. So even if you cut it in half, you cut consumption by less than the projected increase in power consumption between 2011 and 2012. Congratulations. You made a "difference". In a year, that difference basically evaporates, because very little of the annual growth is caused by new households.
Second, residential light bulbs are very nearly irrelevant as far as pollution is concerned anyway. During the day on weekdays, when power usage is at its highest, people aren't home, for the most part, so they aren't using lights (and often aren't using them even if they are home). Businesses use lights, but they moved to fluorescent lights years ago for the cost savings. During the evening hours, when residential lighting is used most heavily, you're down in the base load territory, with much of your power coming from things like nuclear and hydroelectric power plants whose power output can't be reduced as easily—power that would simply be wasted if it isn't used. (This isn't true everywhere, of course, but it's true enough on average to make the environmental argument mostly moot.)
By contrast, moving to superconductive power grids would reduce power use by a high single-digit to low double-digit percentage, and would do so as an ongoing percentage of the total, no matter what the total is, and would reduce losses from both the base load and peak usage. That's a far more useful improvement than any consumer regulation ever could be.
I can pretty much guarantee you that zero people get past HR at any of the companies listed in the parent article without a BS. So yeah, you pretty much need a college degree.
I can think of four people I know who work for Apple (without degrees) who would beg to disagree with you. The companies that succeed are the ones that recognize that getting the right person for the job matters far more than any piece of paper. This is not to say that it is easy to get a job at any of those companies without a college degree, but I doubt it is impossible at any of them, even today.
The problem is, the only viable alternative is the stock market. Now, to scare you even further:
How is the entire stock market not a Ponzii scheme? It relies entirely on steadily increasing numbers of consumers to buy the goods, driving the sales growth that sustains all of those high P/E ratios. The whole system will eventually collapse in on itself, so every time I hear about a downturn in stocks, I wonder why everyone is panicking merely because it may or may not collapse sooner than anticipated....
See how much scarier it is when you look at the big picture instead of just a narrow part of it?
Not at all. Polling is a statistically valid methodology when you have random selection. Without random selection, there is no assurance that you are taking a representative sample.
What your comment fails to take into account is that different types of people are more likely to buy things through different channels. People who mostly buy through retail tend to be less tech savvy than people who mostly buy through Internet channels. Therefore, you would expect statistically significant differences in the product selections made by people who buy products through retail channels versus those who buy products online.
Also, the exposure to promotional campaigns is very different for people who buy online versus those who buy from retailers. Because retail purchasers are less likely to be tech savvy, they are more likely to ask for help in choosing a product. This means that they are more likely to be swayed by salespeople trying to sell the high-markup products and/or the products for which they get an extra sales commission kickback from the manufacturer, rather than buying the same products that an informed buyer might choose.
Extrapolating NPD's retail-only data to global sales would be akin to doing your polling by standing outside one particular supermarket in a single town and extrapolating the results to the whole state. If you did this, for example, in Berkeley, CA, you might decide that the California vote was going to be be split 50/50 between the Democrats and the Greens, whereas if you took a similar poll in Modoc County, you would call California for the Republicans. Both of these extrapolated results would be massively wrong.
Without randomness, your results are no more statistically valid than the polls you see on random websites. At best, these give you some idea of the opinions of the people who visit those websites. At worst, they give you the opinion of the people who clicked on the poll. In no way can they be extrapolated usefully to the population of the world as a whole.
Although that's probably true for public-facing sites (I have no idea what databases those folks run, but I'd imagine any of their SQL-based databases rhyme with Boracle). But I think you're forgetting about all the internal project teams who are using those user-grade servers, the team that maintains the software for those user-grade servers, etc.
To the best of my recollection, I never said anything about the worst weather conditions. I said the worst vehicle that typically drives on the road, based on the entire range of speeds that are typical for the road. Driving in adverse weather is a different matter entirely and falls outside the range of things you can fully compensate for in the worst case. That said, as a driver, you are required by law to drive more slowly under conditions that would increase your stopping distance, which means that if you are driving at a speed where you are unable to stop between when the light turns yellow and when it turns red, you were driving at an unsafe speed and can be cited for it.
The vendor a business owner I know buys from has 200 employees (and according to the government qualifies as a small business), and his costs are going up because of the ACA. Guess what happens to the prices of the goods he buys from that vendor?
They go up. But it goes up just as much for that business owner's competition, and since people on the average should have more money in their pockets because of more people with health insurance, it should be roughly a wash, at least in the medium to long term.
And even though he only employs 20 people, he does provide health insurance, and those costs are going sharply up as insurance companies seek income to pay for the increased costs forced on them by the ACA.
Funny, that. The insurance companies kept telling everyone that if you required everyone to have insurance, the costs should go down. Instead, they're using it as an excuse to profit. And this is why for-profit healthcare is a bad idea. None of this would be happening if the Republicans had allowed the Democrats' original proposal to pass (single-payer with a public option). But no. They insisted on an individual mandate with for-profit insurance companies. And then immediately started campaigning against it. But I digress.
Slashdot Mirror
The wealthy do not create jobs. That's your first incorrect assumption. As anyone who has ever worked for any business of any real size (>100 employees) will tell you, jobs are created by one of the following:
That's it. Thus, on the whole, giving money to big businesses is pissing money away. They're not going to hire more people because they already have all the people they need to do the job. There's no incentive to hire.
Incorrect. That's 20% less money that can go out to all sources—salary, suppliers, dividends, etc. Salary output is a fixed expense. Unless you are in a position to be able to lay people off (which is actually fairly unusual in business these days—most modern companies operate with as few employees as they can get away with, so if they lay anyone off, they have to stop producing something), you aren't going to cut that. So that means the money mostly gets cut from dividends and cash on hand.
Which they have because they do not spend it. Money added into the pockets of the people at the bottom gets spent because they have needs that they want to spend money on, but that they cannot currently pay for. This results in an immediate increase in money flowing into local businesses. In contrast, you can only usefully have so many toys, so most or all of the money added into the pockets of the people at the top gets invested, which disproportionately helps large corporations, and does almost nothing for local businesses.
Fortunately, those people are not in charge of their salaries. The board of directors is. Besides, most of the income up in that range comes from capital gains, not from actual salaries. Tax capital gains as ordinary income, and you've fixed pretty much everything that is wrong with the U.S. economy and with the government's funding, and you have done so in such a way that the people involved cannot just bleed more money from the corporations without mostly taking it from other rich people. Put a dollar floor below which you continue to tax the gains at a lower rate so that people can still use the stock market to invest for retirement.
Insofar as it represents friction, yes, a little bit. Not nearly as much as most people think, though. For the most part, you're just shifting productivity from one area to another. Whether this is good or not depends on whether you agree with the direction that jobs are shifting.
The problem is that the people on both ends try to minimize how much money trickles in each direction
With trickle-up economics, this is a non-issue. The people making goods set the price, you either buy them or you don't, and if you have more money, you're willing to spend more. So money injected at the bottom results in price hikes, and makes it up to the top just fine. And among the poor, this happens even faster, because there are things that they would buy if they had the money, but cannot because they do not. So injecting even small amounts of money into the bottom of the economy results in a significant trickle-up.
With trickle-down economics, the redistribution does not happen to any significant degree. The people at the top have no incentive to hire more people beyond the minimum necessary to do the job, so they don't. They have no incentive to pay more because no one else is paying enough of a premium to steal their workers. And the workers have a much harder time demanding more money than someone selling a product. Thus, the businesses tend to give the extra money to their investors instead of trickling it down to the workers. To the extent that this helps the workers' 401k plans, I suppose a little of it is trickling down, but not much. To the extent that this results in expansion of retail businesses to new locations or allows businesses to compete in new sectors, this creates jobs, which is sort-of a trickle down, but has minimal impact on people who are employed.
Either way, only a tiny fraction of the money injected at the top trickles down, whereas nearly all of the money injected at the bottom trickles up. And that's why giving tax breaks and credits to the poor is a much better way to stimulate the economy than any sort of corporate loans or tax breaks for businesses.
You, like many other people, are mistaking differences in newsworthiness for bias. Typical criteria for something being newsworthy are prominence, proximity, currency (other organizations covering it), timeliness, conflict, impact/human interest (e.g. people affected by it), and unusualness. When you look at the perceived differences you described, all of those so-called biases can be trivially explained away by fundamental differences in the relative newsworthiness of the stories as defined by these criteria.
Agents are put into dangerous situations all the time. That doesn't make it news. What made the Valerie Plame scandal news is that it was an illegal disclosure of top secret information whose only plausible purpose was to silence a very vocal critic. We've seen similar levels of coverage for the whole Wikileaks situation under Obama, which is much more comparable.
By comparison, a botched up operation is much less newsworthy. There were botched up operations in Afghanistan and Iraq on an ongoing basis during the Bush administration. Those didn't generally make news, or if they did, it was nothing more than "[x] Americans were killed in [location] today when a [details of incident]" sentence or two.
Obama's vacation days did not end in a disaster.
Again, not similar. Haliburton was actively engaged in all sorts of dodgy behavior—charging for services that were not rendered, cutting corners on construction, etc.—that would probably have risen to the level of outright fraud. And VP Cheney was the company's CEO up until he joined Bush's ticket. Solyndra was just a poor investment. Obama had no ties to the company beyond the usual campaign contribution bribery that is typical of D.C. politicians. So only moderately newsworthy by comparison.
Outside of Slashdot, I didn't see much coverage of this for either candidate, honestly. :-) That said, to the extent that there was a difference, this is unsurprising. The biggest defining factor of what is or is not news is timeliness. "We've started doing X" or "Somebody just caught us doing X" is inherently more newsworthy than "We're still doing X just like we have been for the past ten years", except perhaps if we recently said "We're not doing X". This is true for all values of X.
At the federal level, they didn't botch handling of Sandy to nearly the same degree, and fewer things went wrong. Why were you expecting more criticism? Yes, there were mistakes, mainly in things like less-than-ideal hurricane warnings. That's a far cry from the complete failure to prepare that we saw in Katrina.
More importantly, the reason for the difference is that Obama put somebody in charge of FEMA who had actual emergency management experience (even crossing party lines—Fugate is a Republican), whereas Bush put a lawyer in charge. If you ask me, a poor decision leading to woeful lack of preparedness is sufficient reason to criticize.
If you don't leave the decisions to the product designers, who are you going to leave them to? The only alternatives I can think of are:
The device designers are in the best position to make those decisions sanely, both because they are most familiar with the device and because they have the most to lose in terms of sales if they screw up. It is the responsibility of the public to push back when they cross the line and do something stupid—to keep them honest, so to speak. :-)
That said, for the 1-2%, I would certainly favor legislation to mandate that companies who lock down devices provide the owners of those devices (at no cost) with a means to compile/sign copies of software for their individual devices. It's a high enough bar to make it unlikely that my parents (for example) would do it, yet easy enough that it wouldn't prevent folks like us from tinkering. I don't see our government being clueful enough to pass such a law in the next century, but I would be in favor of it if they did.
Horses**t. Anything I do in the privacy of my home, assuming it leaves no evidence and does not affect or involve anyone else, is private, always has been, and should rightfully continue to be in the future unless I choose to make it public. Anyone who claims otherwise is probably in the business of violating someone's privacy.
You're half right. It's not about avoiding making decisions. It's about being afraid of making a dangerous decision without realizing it. Folks like you and me understand computers. We understand how our actions affect our experience. Most folks don't. And they don't want to. They don't want to think about whether opening that attachment will actually run some app on their machine that installs a keylogger and sends their credit card login information to a server in Croatia. They want their device to work for them, not against them, and as you yourself put it, they are notoriously unreliable at making good decisions about what is or is not a safe action. So for them, the only way to have a modicum of safety and comfort is to have less freedom.
What corporate control does is creates a responsible party that at least ostensibly should be able to make more informed decisions about what is and is not safe than your average non-programmer. This is not saying that it should not be possible for people who know what they are doing and truly understand the risks to get out from under that corporate control—it can be useful, even necessary at times—but rather that systems should be designed in such a way that it is really, really freaking obvious when you stray outside those lines. If you don't have to work at it, then straying outside those bounds becomes second nature, and people begin to take it for granted that what they're doing is safe even when it really isn't.
There's gravity on Mars. It's a little over a third of Earth norm. You would eventually lose your muscle tone, but not to the same degree or at the same rate that you would lose it in zero-g. Of course, the nine months getting there would be more problematic. (Yes, we could get people there faster, given enough fuel to slow down at the end, but it isn't clear whether we would bother.)
Oh, so if I type my password, berzerk76, you'll only see stars? Awesome.
...
Dammit! Now I have to go and change all my passwords. You b**tard.
The U.S. general public has never cared about space exploration; the public has only cared about beating someone else. Want to get a team of U.S. astronauts on Mars by 2019? Convince the Chinese government to announce to the world that they intend to land humans on Mars by 2020.
I guarantee you that if the Chinese said they planned to establish permanent settlements on Mars in ten years, the U.S. government would move Heaven and Earth to get us there sooner, and they would succeed. Getting to Mars is easy. Convincing the bureaucrats that it is more important than building their little war machines to blow up countries with oil is hard.
The problem is that reducing consumption isn't likely to reduce emissions at all. Here's why: dirty power tends to also be cheap power. If you cut the country's power consumption, the power companies look at their usage and ask, "What capacity should we cut?" When they do, to the extent possible, they cut the most expensive power first.
The relatively clean natural-gas-based peaker plants are usually some of the most expensive. Nuclear power is up there. Next comes expansion plans for solar and wind power. Coal never makes the cut. So you'd have to cut huge swaths out of the power consumption (as in, determine the percentage of power you get from coal, subtract that from 100, and cut more than that) before you even begin to cut coal-based power production in most parts of the country, except to the extent that laws prevent that from being the case.
The only good way to reduce fossil-fuel-based power production is by mandating a reduction in fossil-fuel-based power production. That means A. stop approving permits for new construction of coal plants, B. reduce the duration of permits on continued operation of plants after their original design lifespan or stop approving them entirely, and C. set mandatory targets for the percentage of power that must come from clean energy sources by particular milestones.
There is one other way, of course—set limits on coal mining to artificially raise its price—but that would probably have other side effects that are less than desirable.
Either way, government action on the production side is the only way those sorts of changes will happen. Anything short of that is like politely asking the sun not to shine or the rain not to fall.
The problem is that we can't. Except for reduced consumption during the recent economic downturn, the power consumption of the U.S. has grown steadily and roughly linearly for at least the past thirty years. Even if every residential incandescent bulb were replaced by a fluorescent bulb overnight, you would only cause a one-year flat spot in that growth. Even if every residential light bulb were turned off permanently and consumed no power at all, it would only cause about a two-year flat spot. The big gains come from improving efficiency in things that take a lot of power—heating and cooling, manufacturing, transportation, etc., not from nickel-and-diming the folks who are using low-single-digit percentages of the nation's power.
At some point, it makes more sense to just mandate that dirty power production go away, and let the free market figure out how to do it.... :-)
I was assuming a more modest 28 kbps CDMA quality.
If my math is right, a person talking on the phone for an hour per day is only a little over 4 gigs per year at typical cell phone bitrates. Are you saying that it is unrealistic for the phone company to keep 12 gigabytes of storage per customer for three years? If not, then voice recording is not unrealistic.
Based on that, the fact that they aren't doing voice recording means there's something fundamentally wrong about doing so, and text messages should not be any different.
What you're describing would be a better fit for Bluetooth LE and the Core Bluetooth Framework.
Fair point, and I use halogens in most places anyway. However, for my bedside table lamp, I prefer a much warmer light, and because of the dimmer, it screams like a banshee if you put a CFL or LED bulb into it. So these days, I take advantage of a really cool trick: three-way bulbs are still available for sale. When I buy 50/100/150 watt three-way bulbs, the 50W side almost invariably blows first. The 100W side is wired to the center pin. Therefore, I have a steady supply of 100W incandescent bulbs. Reduce, reuse, recycle. :-D
In both those cases, though, there's a large entity that should be responsible, but isn't being held responsible:
BTW, I can't say I've seen many plastic bags floating around Wal-Mart parking lots. Maybe you just live in an area where people suck. :-D
You're right about the cost of the bags being spread out across all of the merchandise, of course. But the numbers don't add up for most people. On average, that bag costs about four cents to the retailer. On average, a similarly sized trash bag costs about a quarter. So at about 16% reuse, the grocery bags end up being cheaper. My reuse percentages are at least that high, because I typically pick up plastic bags only when I'm carrying lots of small things and don't waste them on single items or on large items like milk or soda bottles. I certainly can't speak for others in that matter. (Admittedly, this minimal approach to bag consumption is directly correlated with the trend towards self-check registers at stores; baggers at stores tend to overbag; one could probably say, then, that my minimal consumption of plastic bags is caused by me being lazy, but I prefer to put a positive spin on it.)
Also, the factor of six cost difference between the "free" bags and the bags you actually buy in stores is largely because the actual trash bags are made of thicker plastic and have to be transported across the country inside cardboard boxes that add considerable weight and volume. When you add up the extra fuel burned as a result, even if only a couple of percent of those grocery bags are reused as trash bags, I would expect those anti-bag laws to have an overall negative impact on the environment as a whole. The impact just isn't as visible without the plastic bags floating in the streams, because you can't see global warming. And if you include the additional trash burden from the thicker bags and extra cardboard boxes, the negative impact should be even greater.
But I digress.
By that same argument, we should pass laws that ban automobiles in favor of public transit. That's a fallacious argument because there are other costs beyond the economic cost that cannot be readily quantified. In the case of transit, that cost is the loss of free time spent while traveling. In the case of light bulbs, the extra cost is in reduced comfort—some people just don't like the light from CFLs. Neither of these is a quantifiable financial loss, but both are real effects.
The purpose of government is not to be a nanny state that thinks for you; legislation is not automatically called for every time you have a group of people who are too clueless to grasp a simple concept. The purpose of government is to protect the powerless from the powerful, and thus government should interfere in the free market only when a legitimate protective need necessitates doing so, and only to the minimum degree necessary to achieve that goal. The incandescent ban fell way, way on the other side of that line to the point of being downright silly, as though reducing consumer choice were a better way to improve the environment than oh, I don't know, adding restrictions on the use of high-pollution power production....
It's on the same order of absurdity as the plastic bag bans in California. Supposedly, one of the major reasons for those laws was the amount of plastic bags that ended up in rivers and creeks. So instead of fixing the real problem—the garbage crews who don't pick up all the bits of crap that fall out on the ground whenever they dump the cans into the trucks—they chose to punish everybody else by creating artificial scarcity of a useful tool. (And no, reusable bags are not a viable replacement. I can't use reusable bags as trash can liners. I can't use them to carry containers of berries home from the supermarket. I can't use them as packing material when I'm shipping something across the country. And so on.)
Laws can't fix clueless or careless, and when they try, they almost invariably do it wrong.
No, it's a actually a pretty good analogy. Light bulbs mostly affect the person using it, too. I mean sure, there's some slight externality in terms of power consumption on the grid, but there's a slight externality for somebody dying, too, in terns of the effect on society, on companies that the person previously bought stuff from, etc.
The major claimed externality for light bulbs—pollution—is pretty much bogus for two reasons. First, the impact of household lighting on power consumption is peanuts. In 2010, it was supposedly about 5% of total electricity consumption. So even if you cut it in half, you cut consumption by less than the projected increase in power consumption between 2011 and 2012. Congratulations. You made a "difference". In a year, that difference basically evaporates, because very little of the annual growth is caused by new households.
Second, residential light bulbs are very nearly irrelevant as far as pollution is concerned anyway. During the day on weekdays, when power usage is at its highest, people aren't home, for the most part, so they aren't using lights (and often aren't using them even if they are home). Businesses use lights, but they moved to fluorescent lights years ago for the cost savings. During the evening hours, when residential lighting is used most heavily, you're down in the base load territory, with much of your power coming from things like nuclear and hydroelectric power plants whose power output can't be reduced as easily—power that would simply be wasted if it isn't used. (This isn't true everywhere, of course, but it's true enough on average to make the environmental argument mostly moot.)
By contrast, moving to superconductive power grids would reduce power use by a high single-digit to low double-digit percentage, and would do so as an ongoing percentage of the total, no matter what the total is, and would reduce losses from both the base load and peak usage. That's a far more useful improvement than any consumer regulation ever could be.
I can think of four people I know who work for Apple (without degrees) who would beg to disagree with you. The companies that succeed are the ones that recognize that getting the right person for the job matters far more than any piece of paper. This is not to say that it is easy to get a job at any of those companies without a college degree, but I doubt it is impossible at any of them, even today.
The fact that HR has final say over hiring decisions should tell him everything he needs to know about the bureaucratic hell he dodged.
The problem is, the only viable alternative is the stock market. Now, to scare you even further:
How is the entire stock market not a Ponzii scheme? It relies entirely on steadily increasing numbers of consumers to buy the goods, driving the sales growth that sustains all of those high P/E ratios. The whole system will eventually collapse in on itself, so every time I hear about a downturn in stocks, I wonder why everyone is panicking merely because it may or may not collapse sooner than anticipated....
See how much scarier it is when you look at the big picture instead of just a narrow part of it?
Not at all. Polling is a statistically valid methodology when you have random selection. Without random selection, there is no assurance that you are taking a representative sample.
What your comment fails to take into account is that different types of people are more likely to buy things through different channels. People who mostly buy through retail tend to be less tech savvy than people who mostly buy through Internet channels. Therefore, you would expect statistically significant differences in the product selections made by people who buy products through retail channels versus those who buy products online.
Also, the exposure to promotional campaigns is very different for people who buy online versus those who buy from retailers. Because retail purchasers are less likely to be tech savvy, they are more likely to ask for help in choosing a product. This means that they are more likely to be swayed by salespeople trying to sell the high-markup products and/or the products for which they get an extra sales commission kickback from the manufacturer, rather than buying the same products that an informed buyer might choose.
Extrapolating NPD's retail-only data to global sales would be akin to doing your polling by standing outside one particular supermarket in a single town and extrapolating the results to the whole state. If you did this, for example, in Berkeley, CA, you might decide that the California vote was going to be be split 50/50 between the Democrats and the Greens, whereas if you took a similar poll in Modoc County, you would call California for the Republicans. Both of these extrapolated results would be massively wrong.
Without randomness, your results are no more statistically valid than the polls you see on random websites. At best, these give you some idea of the opinions of the people who visit those websites. At worst, they give you the opinion of the people who clicked on the poll. In no way can they be extrapolated usefully to the population of the world as a whole.
Although that's probably true for public-facing sites (I have no idea what databases those folks run, but I'd imagine any of their SQL-based databases rhyme with Boracle). But I think you're forgetting about all the internal project teams who are using those user-grade servers, the team that maintains the software for those user-grade servers, etc.
Apple is using it (in their Server OS, anyway), so that's one big Postgres-using prospective employer that's worth noting.
As for other Open Source databases, there's also Ingres and all the various NoSQL databases.
To the best of my recollection, I never said anything about the worst weather conditions. I said the worst vehicle that typically drives on the road, based on the entire range of speeds that are typical for the road. Driving in adverse weather is a different matter entirely and falls outside the range of things you can fully compensate for in the worst case. That said, as a driver, you are required by law to drive more slowly under conditions that would increase your stopping distance, which means that if you are driving at a speed where you are unable to stop between when the light turns yellow and when it turns red, you were driving at an unsafe speed and can be cited for it.
They go up. But it goes up just as much for that business owner's competition, and since people on the average should have more money in their pockets because of more people with health insurance, it should be roughly a wash, at least in the medium to long term.
Funny, that. The insurance companies kept telling everyone that if you required everyone to have insurance, the costs should go down. Instead, they're using it as an excuse to profit. And this is why for-profit healthcare is a bad idea. None of this would be happening if the Republicans had allowed the Democrats' original proposal to pass (single-payer with a public option). But no. They insisted on an individual mandate with for-profit insurance companies. And then immediately started campaigning against it. But I digress.