Today we think of corruption as something like having our decisions swayed by outside money, bribes, special interests, nepotism, etc. But the meaning of the word corruption is broader than the modern usage. Corruption is also the word used for decay and putrefaction. So absolute power metaphorically causes your ideals to decay, your morals to decay, and putrefaction of the soul.
I think politics insists on having a tug of war contest. So if you try to win your tug of war by standing in the center and holding the middle of the rope you'll never accomplish anything, so the game show contestants running for office stake out extremists positions by default. Many of them then lose sight of the fact that the vast majority of the country is in between those extremes. So Bernie is a good counterbalance to Cruz.
The point of insurance, in the minds of insurance companies, is to create income for them. Monthly payments come in, zero payments go out. If there ever is a payment paid out then changes are made to prevent such future mistakes. It's honestly their way of thinking. In graduate school we worked hard on our student council to get health care for all of us, lots of long hours setting up student elections for it so they could vote on whether or not they were willing to add the fee, and so forth. We win the election, we select our insurance provider, and things go great for a year. But one baby was born with a heart defect that year and the damn insurance company declares that we're too expensive and they dropped us, leaving us back at square one. We were grad students, overall that's a pretty safe bet on the actuarial tables I would think, but because they had to pay out they refused to take anymore bets. It's an evil industry.
But we have so many examples of smaller government bodies having ineffectual oversight. In American everyone's paying attention to the presidential election but so few are worrying about who's getting elected to their local school board and city council. In California we've had several municipalities that went bankrupt or nearly so based upon just a few individuals controlling the money and investing it badly, or a few individuals making broad decisions about long term retirement benefits for city workers, all of those decisions having little public scrutiny, but at the California state level there are so many eyes within and without that it seems difficult to imagine those same problems occuring at that level, there's no single money manager with authority to screw it up. Meanwhile you can have a school board run for years as a virtual dictatorship.
Some of the most persistently corrupt governments are local governments. For example, in China the biggest corruption problems are with regional and local officials rather than with the central party. Larger governments get more scrutiny so that corruption is known publicly instead of being secret, local governments often don't even get local citizens to show up to vote and so end up being more easily controlled by special interests. Not saying that I'm all in favor of giant centralized governments but just that I don't think that increased size of government increases the amount of corruption.
Another example, look at many current multinational organizations which seem to have relatively low effectiveness or power. The UN, Interpol, etc. The ones that do seem to have reasonable amount of power tend to be economic (World Bank).
Yes, you can stop using so much of it. Conservation can work. Turn off your lights, get energy efficient appliances, stop commuting with just one person in the SUV, buy locally produced goods and food rather than having it shipped from the other side of the planet, and so forth. For larger groups or countries they can stop cutting down old growth forests and slashing and burning rainforests. It's like a friend who complains that he's got no money left at the end of the month even though he's got a new laptop and playstation, start cutting back so that expenses don't exceed the income instead of complaining that you can't grow the income.
"Making a living" on youtube sounds like a serious case of someone needing to get a real job. Honestly, treat youtube as side income and it starts to lower the amount of crap out there, like the 10 word announcement that shows up as a 10 minute video with half of that video being self promotion.
But the UI is so awful on Youtube that it is difficult to use. I subscribed to one channel feed, but keeping track of what you watched or not is cumbersome. Instead you see other things you might like since you watched episode 1, and it shows you a link for episode 12, episode 7, episode 93, and a video of a dancing goat. Even worse if you're not on a computer and are trying to use a smart tv of streaming device to do the same thing.
You can't really do this without moderators, and you won't really get good and unbiased moderators without paying them, and so the idea fails. Enforcing the rules is impractical. USENET used to be a lot like this, sitting on top of existing networks with dialup to bridge the networks or give access to groups not on a network, with the unwritten rule of keeping commerce to a minimum except in commerce specific groups. But then that died a twitching death when the internet became popular and it was completely overwhelmed by spam and ads. Any groups that were moderated felt overwhelmed just to do the moderation.
I find it too hard to get good information these days. Every topic has it's own separate forum or sets of competing forums, requiring separate accounts, and there's never any central one stop place to go to get an answer without being inundated with ads and trolls and wrong answers. The amount of data is higher than ever but actual information seems to be a scarcity on the information superhighway.
But just like slashdot it's very confusing about what it's really about. Is Vulkan a game publisher, a competing video hardware board, a graphics library, or what? I followed the links but still didn't figure it out. I could use the googles but at this point it's not worth the effort.
Don't think the lawyers are necessarily better or worse. Apple has the larger budget to spend on this one issue. The higher pay also does not mean that the government is stuck with the leftovers who couldn't find a better job; I have a friend who quit being a lawyer to join the FBI as an agent with much lower pay. Some people value public service.
It's not on par with stores. Even the worst of the worst, gamestop, gave you more money than that unless they had a glut of a particular game. Before gamestop most used game stores could get you an even better deal; I remember things like selling for 25% and buying a used one for 50%.
Don't forget that you can only sell the game back for 10%, you are still not allowed to exercise your rights to give it to someone else as a gift or loan.
Gamers are that stupid. They key demographic for most game publishers, console or PC, are the younger people who only want to play what's currently popular. They don't save the game to replay later. They would never play it again because it's now old and therefore not cool. One of their friends declares "this week we're going to play MegaMechaShooter3000" and then they all go out to buy that. So that group would consider this to be a 10% discount.
But then you're stuck with store credit to a game publisher that sucks. There is resale value if only the game publishers did not try to prevent you from your right to resell the games. I believe this is the sole reason for DRM, they know they can't stop the pirates but they can stop the honest customer from selling or gifting that game. Online digital sales also keep the prices high as it costs them almost nothing to keep older games around, whereas in brick and mortar the games start dropping in price within the first month or two. People gush like fangirls at Steam sales but before Steam you'd see the same discounts only sooner. Even though it's cheaper for the publishers to deliver digitally than to manufacture the boxed edition they still sell for the same price. There's zero advantage to the customer financially with DRM. No customer with a brain should be praising the fact that they're getting screwed but that's what's happening.
I would never sell them back for that low, but I would give them away to people I know. I remember, before gamestop, when selling to some stores for 50% was common. I found some of my favorite games that way too.
Is he "dodging" taxes or putting his money where it can do more good? I put a lot of money into charities and it is absolutely not because it reduces taxes. If the only goal was to reduce taxes then charities are a very dumb way to do that because you spend so much more than you get back as a deduction. I treat the charitable deduction as a form of matching funds (charity gets $1 but I only spend $0.66 or so).
Slashdot Mirror
Welcome to Slashdot. Two drink minimum.
Today we think of corruption as something like having our decisions swayed by outside money, bribes, special interests, nepotism, etc. But the meaning of the word corruption is broader than the modern usage. Corruption is also the word used for decay and putrefaction. So absolute power metaphorically causes your ideals to decay, your morals to decay, and putrefaction of the soul.
I think politics insists on having a tug of war contest. So if you try to win your tug of war by standing in the center and holding the middle of the rope you'll never accomplish anything, so the game show contestants running for office stake out extremists positions by default. Many of them then lose sight of the fact that the vast majority of the country is in between those extremes. So Bernie is a good counterbalance to Cruz.
The point of insurance, in the minds of insurance companies, is to create income for them. Monthly payments come in, zero payments go out. If there ever is a payment paid out then changes are made to prevent such future mistakes. It's honestly their way of thinking. In graduate school we worked hard on our student council to get health care for all of us, lots of long hours setting up student elections for it so they could vote on whether or not they were willing to add the fee, and so forth. We win the election, we select our insurance provider, and things go great for a year. But one baby was born with a heart defect that year and the damn insurance company declares that we're too expensive and they dropped us, leaving us back at square one. We were grad students, overall that's a pretty safe bet on the actuarial tables I would think, but because they had to pay out they refused to take anymore bets. It's an evil industry.
But we have so many examples of smaller government bodies having ineffectual oversight. In American everyone's paying attention to the presidential election but so few are worrying about who's getting elected to their local school board and city council. In California we've had several municipalities that went bankrupt or nearly so based upon just a few individuals controlling the money and investing it badly, or a few individuals making broad decisions about long term retirement benefits for city workers, all of those decisions having little public scrutiny, but at the California state level there are so many eyes within and without that it seems difficult to imagine those same problems occuring at that level, there's no single money manager with authority to screw it up. Meanwhile you can have a school board run for years as a virtual dictatorship.
Some of the most persistently corrupt governments are local governments. For example, in China the biggest corruption problems are with regional and local officials rather than with the central party. Larger governments get more scrutiny so that corruption is known publicly instead of being secret, local governments often don't even get local citizens to show up to vote and so end up being more easily controlled by special interests. Not saying that I'm all in favor of giant centralized governments but just that I don't think that increased size of government increases the amount of corruption.
Another example, look at many current multinational organizations which seem to have relatively low effectiveness or power. The UN, Interpol, etc. The ones that do seem to have reasonable amount of power tend to be economic (World Bank).
The fund pays for charities too. They probably get a lot of pushback to have guilt-free income sources.
Yes, you can stop using so much of it. Conservation can work. Turn off your lights, get energy efficient appliances, stop commuting with just one person in the SUV, buy locally produced goods and food rather than having it shipped from the other side of the planet, and so forth. For larger groups or countries they can stop cutting down old growth forests and slashing and burning rainforests. It's like a friend who complains that he's got no money left at the end of the month even though he's got a new laptop and playstation, start cutting back so that expenses don't exceed the income instead of complaining that you can't grow the income.
"Making a living" on youtube sounds like a serious case of someone needing to get a real job. Honestly, treat youtube as side income and it starts to lower the amount of crap out there, like the 10 word announcement that shows up as a 10 minute video with half of that video being self promotion.
Did they play a middle C at any time? I have a copyright on middle C.
But the UI is so awful on Youtube that it is difficult to use. I subscribed to one channel feed, but keeping track of what you watched or not is cumbersome. Instead you see other things you might like since you watched episode 1, and it shows you a link for episode 12, episode 7, episode 93, and a video of a dancing goat. Even worse if you're not on a computer and are trying to use a smart tv of streaming device to do the same thing.
You can't really do this without moderators, and you won't really get good and unbiased moderators without paying them, and so the idea fails. Enforcing the rules is impractical. USENET used to be a lot like this, sitting on top of existing networks with dialup to bridge the networks or give access to groups not on a network, with the unwritten rule of keeping commerce to a minimum except in commerce specific groups. But then that died a twitching death when the internet became popular and it was completely overwhelmed by spam and ads. Any groups that were moderated felt overwhelmed just to do the moderation.
I find it too hard to get good information these days. Every topic has it's own separate forum or sets of competing forums, requiring separate accounts, and there's never any central one stop place to go to get an answer without being inundated with ads and trolls and wrong answers. The amount of data is higher than ever but actual information seems to be a scarcity on the information superhighway.
We had MUDs in the good old days, better than the MMOs and just as addictive.
The picture shows something larger than the room I had in a Japanese hotel. Toilet had to be angled into the corner in order to fit.
But just like slashdot it's very confusing about what it's really about. Is Vulkan a game publisher, a competing video hardware board, a graphics library, or what? I followed the links but still didn't figure it out. I could use the googles but at this point it's not worth the effort.
I suspect Scalia would have backed Apple's arguments.
Don't think the lawyers are necessarily better or worse. Apple has the larger budget to spend on this one issue. The higher pay also does not mean that the government is stuck with the leftovers who couldn't find a better job; I have a friend who quit being a lawyer to join the FBI as an agent with much lower pay. Some people value public service.
I saw it and I think I have the default settings.
Did you not see Monty Python's the Meaning of Life? The scene where the condemned prisoner chooses his own means of execution?
It's not on par with stores. Even the worst of the worst, gamestop, gave you more money than that unless they had a glut of a particular game. Before gamestop most used game stores could get you an even better deal; I remember things like selling for 25% and buying a used one for 50%.
Don't forget that you can only sell the game back for 10%, you are still not allowed to exercise your rights to give it to someone else as a gift or loan.
Gamers are that stupid. They key demographic for most game publishers, console or PC, are the younger people who only want to play what's currently popular. They don't save the game to replay later. They would never play it again because it's now old and therefore not cool. One of their friends declares "this week we're going to play MegaMechaShooter3000" and then they all go out to buy that. So that group would consider this to be a 10% discount.
But then you're stuck with store credit to a game publisher that sucks. There is resale value if only the game publishers did not try to prevent you from your right to resell the games. I believe this is the sole reason for DRM, they know they can't stop the pirates but they can stop the honest customer from selling or gifting that game. Online digital sales also keep the prices high as it costs them almost nothing to keep older games around, whereas in brick and mortar the games start dropping in price within the first month or two. People gush like fangirls at Steam sales but before Steam you'd see the same discounts only sooner. Even though it's cheaper for the publishers to deliver digitally than to manufacture the boxed edition they still sell for the same price. There's zero advantage to the customer financially with DRM. No customer with a brain should be praising the fact that they're getting screwed but that's what's happening.
Basically you have right of second sale, but apparently the game publishers aren't prevented from trying to undermine that right.
I would never sell them back for that low, but I would give them away to people I know. I remember, before gamestop, when selling to some stores for 50% was common. I found some of my favorite games that way too.
Is he "dodging" taxes or putting his money where it can do more good? I put a lot of money into charities and it is absolutely not because it reduces taxes. If the only goal was to reduce taxes then charities are a very dumb way to do that because you spend so much more than you get back as a deduction. I treat the charitable deduction as a form of matching funds (charity gets $1 but I only spend $0.66 or so).