Hosting a picture of Muhammad on Wikileaks doesn't make a lot of sense because it's not actually an example of withheld information. Wikipedia offers several depictions of Muhammad. If you can find a thing on wikipedia with ease, it doesn't really need leaking.
And where I'm living, it's more than ten degrees Celsius above the historical average for this time of year. And none of this means anything, until we factor it into the global average. For what it's worth, November was the second warmest November on record according to the NOAA. It'll be interesting to see whether the anecdotal reports of a colder December reflect the true global mean, when that information is available.
202 trillion? I'd be quite interested to hear where that number comes from, if you don't mind. 20 Trillion I probably would have swallowed but 200 I'd like a source for.
Even if you're right, though, I think it's hardly a point that should give republicans leverage. We're going to disagree on this, but here it is: a lot of democrats think that liberal policies can actually decrease spending in the medium to long term. The health reform most liberals actually wanted is a good example; we figured that by taking the fat insurance company profits out of the equation, we'd actually save money which could be used to fund efficiency research and pilot programs, ultimately saving us even more money. Preventative care available to all would save us money both in the ER, and by increasing economic activity (keeping people from getting too sick to go to work).
Similar arguments can be made for infrastructure investment, resource efficiency (a.k.a. "Green" energy practices), freer immigration policies, and so on. I can get into some of those with you if you like, but I'd need to muster my thoughts on them before getting into it, so I'll leave it at health care for now.
See, it's not that liberals don't care about the debt, or don't see the seriousness of the debt predicament (although I'll admit, if that 202 trillion figure means anything, it's more serious than I realized). Often they believe that their policies are at least as effective at reducing the debt as their conservative counterparts (in the long term).
You know, I was halfway through a retort when I realized you were right. I was going to argue that the market doesn't always adequately price labor, especially at the high-end of the pay scale, and that extra taxes there would allow the government to create more jobs by correcting the exuberance with which executives assign each others' pay. But of course you're right- companies would simply pay their CEOs more, sacrificing however many plebes that would require.
You're correct. Well done, sir.
Forgive me if I'm about to say something dumb, it's been a while since econ 101.
losing 60k out of 240 looks bad because it's such a small scale example. If we start with a million jobs, and the government uses the 50% taxes to create 500,000 more jobs, and then uses the taxes on those jobs to create 250,000 more, and so on, ultimately the remainder will still be less than 120k. Even if we don't assume continual reinvestment all the way down the line, what's left over in government coffers doesn't exactly stay there, or the debt wouldn't keep climbing. It'll be spent on the social safety net, or on public works, and from there the money re-enters the market. If it's spent overseas, that's a different story, of course.
The pool of money available to consumers really shouldn't change significantly, and thus no jobs should be lost due to that. So I hold to what I said before: all the jobs subject to increased taxes will effectively pay less, but if the job already pays a certain amount, a lot of people find that acceptable in exchange for the jobs created. It's just another way of "spreading the wealth around", and that of course is why some people are in favor of it and others hate it.
Yes, maybe corporate taxation is a zero-sum game, jobswise, but listen- if Man A and Man B each make 120 Gs in their jobs, and I decide to tax them at %50 and use the proceeds to hire Man C at 120 Gs (60 after taxes now), then a job has been created. All the jobs effectively pay less, but if we're only increasing taxes on high-paying jobs, and by a manageable amount, I have no problem with this.
Personal tax increases can be used to create jobs, even if corporate tax increases can't. If I'm wrong, please explain why.
As others have pointed out, it's tough to judge mac prevalence from Steam statistics when steam doesn't offer much for mac users. "If you build it, they will come," but nobody's built it yet so those stats don't say too much (and yes I know it's a misquote).
An alternative statistic: 31 percent of students in college or university use macs on campus. Lets agree that this doesn't mean TOO much; I'm sure lots of those students have no interest in gaming, or have more powerful computers in addition to a low-powered mac laptop. On the other hand, students are a pretty good demographic as far as gaming goes, and so I'd have to say that 5% of people interested in gaming using macs is a low estimate. Probably 15% is a safe conservative guess, and we can expect that to grow modestly as time passes.
I'll give you that macs aren't built for gaming at all really, but it's pretty safe to say that the macs made two or three years from now will have the equipment they need to achieve good performance in today's games. They just tend to be a couple years behind the curve.
Personally I just built my own windows 7 machine because after five years on a mac, I was starting to miss gaming. But if more games had been mac compatible, I probably wouldn't have switched back.
I'm convinced that there's a market for games on the mac. Does it matter? would it be profitable to develop for? I don't know, maybe not. But it's not so minuscule a market as 5%.
The RIAA stops suing people, but continues keeping an eye on filesharers. People who are found not to distribute files get loyalty incentives like early listens to new albums, a couple free tracks every month, front-of-the-line privileges for concert tickets, all that kind of stuff. People who the RIAA does see distributing aren't punished, but they're locked out of all these cool little freebies.
It's a clearly imperfect idea, but while we're brainstorming here, why not consider an option that's all carrot and no stick? File sharing isn't going anywhere, astronomical damage awards or not. Maybe they can win back a few customers with the kind of rewards program every major retail operation has used for years?
That's what makes a college great. The exclusivity of any university is judged primarily by the amount of students it rejects.
- Dean Van Horne, Accepted(2006)
That's obviously what these schools are thinking, and they're eager to show off all the geniuses they had to reject this year. How else would we know that they are fancy and important?
Fuck 'em. Exclusivity is one thing, but it's entirely another to brag about how many dreams you crushed this year.
Inflation + unemployment generally characterize what's known as "stagflation". At this point we have to hope for increased productivity and hiring from businesses to reduce unemployment. I'm no economist, but given the investments in infrastructure and tax incentives over recent years, it seems reasonable to expect that hiring will increase.
Really, it's pretty unclear what's going to happen. Stagflation is a situation that nobody really knows how to fix.
It's also worth considering that some economists believe money supply changes are neutral in the long-term -- they don't actually affect inflation.
Does censorship limit the personal freedom of the censored, or increase the personal freedom of those who risked being exposed to material they deemed obscene? Maybe a little of both?
Does regulating and limiting monopolies impinge on the economic freedom of the largest company in it's field, or does it increase the economic freedom for smaller companies (or the personal or economic freedom of consumers)?
Do social safety nets increase the freedom of those who need them, or decrease the freedom of those who largely pay for them?
Does limiting pollution hinder the economic freedom of energy producers or increase the personal freedom of everyone else to breath cleaner air?
Maybe there are answers to these questions, and some of them are (in my opinion) fairly weak dichotomies. All the same, I don't think we can escape the fact that there is rarely a pure "freedom" option in any choice. These are choices that have to be made (there's no third option between "regulate pollutants" and "don't regulate pollutants") and somebody is usually going to be less free in either outcome.
I think the use of the word freedom in the political discourse sets up a false dichotomy. I don't think it's possible to be for freedom, even for a specific kind of freedom. It's probably possible to be for the freedoms of a specific group, though, and I think that's what people really mean when they say they're for "Freedom".
Nah, they just dropped the name "ATI" from their graphics cards. Previously, they released their graphics cards under the ATI brand, but I believe this release actually marks the retiring of the name.
The stimulus and the bank bailouts were unrelated, for the record. Also, do you have any citations for either
they spend several hundred thousand dollars per job to create a job that pays the worker $40k or so per year.
or
They also paid a lot to people in unemployment benefits and welfare, and a lot of those people are simply sitting back largely doing nothing until the government stops paying them for not working.
?
The analysis that I've heard, largely in the Economist and also the New Yorker, suggests that the stimulus was effective in saving jobs, increasing consumer spending, and creating infrastructure (though much of this latter work isn't yet finished).
If that's true, it's really amazing. Free would be too high a price for a review this poorly written.
Choice Excerpts:
However most notably Robert Louis Kemp celebrates the work and wisdom on one which he quotes throughout his prose and cites credit beyond all the others, and that is God.
the wisdom on one? cites credit beyond all the others?
I have found nothing to contradict or state any opposing comments
?
Some more subtle examples: the reviewer lauds the book for containing... an index. In his conclusion, he states that inside the book, the author becomes a man.
I can't tell if this was all meant to obfuscate the fact that the review was written by a professional reviewer (in the vocational sense), or if it's a complex ploy to convince readers that this book is loved by (and therefore accessible to) stupid people.
I like the idea of having a game on the syllabus, definitely very forward thinking. My problem is with the choice of game.
Portal was short, and as the author states it's multi-platform and fairly cheap, which goes a long way toward making this kind of project feasible. But reading portal as a game of ideas is a real stretch. The comparison to Goffman's Presentation of Self is baffling when the game allows no genuine self-expression (it's completely linear) or self-portrayal (no dialogue options), the subjects of Goffman's book. It's a fun game with a single intriguing character, but it's as deep as a kiddie pool.
It would have made a lot more sense to start with interactive fiction- essentially, text-adventure games. IFArchive.org is a great place to start, and in no time you can find lots of innovative contest winners and other pieces expanding the genre. These are easy to play on any computer, they are of variable length and complexity, and they allow for an easier transition for students- the tools they use to analyze literature will be largely applicable.
All in all, this is a cool effort. But look into interactive fiction! It might surprise you how well the genre is suited to your project.
More importantly, the creation of games like these is war profiteering; the same profiteering that Blackwater, civilian contractors, and companies that produce ACU backpacks for school children participate in.
He even seems to suggest that movies like "The Hurt Locker" are war profiteering. Maybe he's right?
Slashdot Mirror
Hosting a picture of Muhammad on Wikileaks doesn't make a lot of sense because it's not actually an example of withheld information. Wikipedia offers several depictions of Muhammad. If you can find a thing on wikipedia with ease, it doesn't really need leaking.
Number one murder weapon - knife.
What the fucking fuck? Check your facts before you say stupid shit.
you listening, google? fix this.
And where I'm living, it's more than ten degrees Celsius above the historical average for this time of year. And none of this means anything, until we factor it into the global average. For what it's worth, November was the second warmest November on record according to the NOAA. It'll be interesting to see whether the anecdotal reports of a colder December reflect the true global mean, when that information is available.
202 trillion? I'd be quite interested to hear where that number comes from, if you don't mind. 20 Trillion I probably would have swallowed but 200 I'd like a source for.
Even if you're right, though, I think it's hardly a point that should give republicans leverage. We're going to disagree on this, but here it is: a lot of democrats think that liberal policies can actually decrease spending in the medium to long term. The health reform most liberals actually wanted is a good example; we figured that by taking the fat insurance company profits out of the equation, we'd actually save money which could be used to fund efficiency research and pilot programs, ultimately saving us even more money. Preventative care available to all would save us money both in the ER, and by increasing economic activity (keeping people from getting too sick to go to work).
Similar arguments can be made for infrastructure investment, resource efficiency (a.k.a. "Green" energy practices), freer immigration policies, and so on. I can get into some of those with you if you like, but I'd need to muster my thoughts on them before getting into it, so I'll leave it at health care for now.
See, it's not that liberals don't care about the debt, or don't see the seriousness of the debt predicament (although I'll admit, if that 202 trillion figure means anything, it's more serious than I realized). Often they believe that their policies are at least as effective at reducing the debt as their conservative counterparts (in the long term).
The Net Neutrality Coup
By: John Fund
Liberals like net neutrality.
Liberals funded research which supported net neutrality.
Liberals advocated for net neutrality.
In conclusion, as I have proven above, net neutrality is evil.
You know, I was halfway through a retort when I realized you were right. I was going to argue that the market doesn't always adequately price labor, especially at the high-end of the pay scale, and that extra taxes there would allow the government to create more jobs by correcting the exuberance with which executives assign each others' pay. But of course you're right- companies would simply pay their CEOs more, sacrificing however many plebes that would require.
You're correct. Well done, sir.
Forgive me if I'm about to say something dumb, it's been a while since econ 101.
losing 60k out of 240 looks bad because it's such a small scale example. If we start with a million jobs, and the government uses the 50% taxes to create 500,000 more jobs, and then uses the taxes on those jobs to create 250,000 more, and so on, ultimately the remainder will still be less than 120k. Even if we don't assume continual reinvestment all the way down the line, what's left over in government coffers doesn't exactly stay there, or the debt wouldn't keep climbing. It'll be spent on the social safety net, or on public works, and from there the money re-enters the market. If it's spent overseas, that's a different story, of course.
The pool of money available to consumers really shouldn't change significantly, and thus no jobs should be lost due to that. So I hold to what I said before: all the jobs subject to increased taxes will effectively pay less, but if the job already pays a certain amount, a lot of people find that acceptable in exchange for the jobs created. It's just another way of "spreading the wealth around", and that of course is why some people are in favor of it and others hate it.
selling you the rope to hang them with. I guess they got wise.
The fact that you saw it means that it wasn't really an address to just a bunch of 6th graders
Yes, maybe corporate taxation is a zero-sum game, jobswise, but listen- if Man A and Man B each make 120 Gs in their jobs, and I decide to tax them at %50 and use the proceeds to hire Man C at 120 Gs (60 after taxes now), then a job has been created. All the jobs effectively pay less, but if we're only increasing taxes on high-paying jobs, and by a manageable amount, I have no problem with this.
Personal tax increases can be used to create jobs, even if corporate tax increases can't. If I'm wrong, please explain why.
As others have pointed out, it's tough to judge mac prevalence from Steam statistics when steam doesn't offer much for mac users. "If you build it, they will come," but nobody's built it yet so those stats don't say too much (and yes I know it's a misquote).
An alternative statistic: 31 percent of students in college or university use macs on campus. Lets agree that this doesn't mean TOO much; I'm sure lots of those students have no interest in gaming, or have more powerful computers in addition to a low-powered mac laptop. On the other hand, students are a pretty good demographic as far as gaming goes, and so I'd have to say that 5% of people interested in gaming using macs is a low estimate. Probably 15% is a safe conservative guess, and we can expect that to grow modestly as time passes.
I'll give you that macs aren't built for gaming at all really, but it's pretty safe to say that the macs made two or three years from now will have the equipment they need to achieve good performance in today's games. They just tend to be a couple years behind the curve.
Personally I just built my own windows 7 machine because after five years on a mac, I was starting to miss gaming. But if more games had been mac compatible, I probably wouldn't have switched back.
I'm convinced that there's a market for games on the mac. Does it matter? would it be profitable to develop for? I don't know, maybe not. But it's not so minuscule a market as 5%.
what on earth is a repluction?
The RIAA stops suing people, but continues keeping an eye on filesharers. People who are found not to distribute files get loyalty incentives like early listens to new albums, a couple free tracks every month, front-of-the-line privileges for concert tickets, all that kind of stuff. People who the RIAA does see distributing aren't punished, but they're locked out of all these cool little freebies.
It's a clearly imperfect idea, but while we're brainstorming here, why not consider an option that's all carrot and no stick? File sharing isn't going anywhere, astronomical damage awards or not. Maybe they can win back a few customers with the kind of rewards program every major retail operation has used for years?
That's what makes a college great. The exclusivity of any university is judged primarily by the amount of students it rejects.
- Dean Van Horne, Accepted(2006)
That's obviously what these schools are thinking, and they're eager to show off all the geniuses they had to reject this year. How else would we know that they are fancy and important?
Fuck 'em. Exclusivity is one thing, but it's entirely another to brag about how many dreams you crushed this year.
Inflation + unemployment generally characterize what's known as "stagflation". At this point we have to hope for increased productivity and hiring from businesses to reduce unemployment. I'm no economist, but given the investments in infrastructure and tax incentives over recent years, it seems reasonable to expect that hiring will increase.
Really, it's pretty unclear what's going to happen. Stagflation is a situation that nobody really knows how to fix.
It's also worth considering that some economists believe money supply changes are neutral in the long-term -- they don't actually affect inflation.
Does censorship limit the personal freedom of the censored, or increase the personal freedom of those who risked being exposed to material they deemed obscene? Maybe a little of both?
Does regulating and limiting monopolies impinge on the economic freedom of the largest company in it's field, or does it increase the economic freedom for smaller companies (or the personal or economic freedom of consumers)?
Do social safety nets increase the freedom of those who need them, or decrease the freedom of those who largely pay for them?
Does limiting pollution hinder the economic freedom of energy producers or increase the personal freedom of everyone else to breath cleaner air?
Maybe there are answers to these questions, and some of them are (in my opinion) fairly weak dichotomies. All the same, I don't think we can escape the fact that there is rarely a pure "freedom" option in any choice. These are choices that have to be made (there's no third option between "regulate pollutants" and "don't regulate pollutants") and somebody is usually going to be less free in either outcome.
I think the use of the word freedom in the political discourse sets up a false dichotomy. I don't think it's possible to be for freedom, even for a specific kind of freedom. It's probably possible to be for the freedoms of a specific group, though, and I think that's what people really mean when they say they're for "Freedom".
Nah, they just dropped the name "ATI" from their graphics cards. Previously, they released their graphics cards under the ATI brand, but I believe this release actually marks the retiring of the name.
So... don't tell us not to withhold our rare-earth minerals, because if you do, we'll withhold out rare-earth minerals?
that we let Governor General William Shatner slip through our fingers
they spend several hundred thousand dollars per job to create a job that pays the worker $40k or so per year.
or
They also paid a lot to people in unemployment benefits and welfare, and a lot of those people are simply sitting back largely doing nothing until the government stops paying them for not working.
?
The analysis that I've heard, largely in the Economist and also the New Yorker, suggests that the stimulus was effective in saving jobs, increasing consumer spending, and creating infrastructure (though much of this latter work isn't yet finished).
You're not expressing a fact, just the opinion of a simpleton.
Choice Excerpts:
However most notably Robert Louis Kemp celebrates the work and wisdom on one which he quotes throughout his prose and cites credit beyond all the others, and that is God.
the wisdom on one? cites credit beyond all the others?
I have found nothing to contradict or state any opposing comments
?
Some more subtle examples: the reviewer lauds the book for containing... an index. In his conclusion, he states that inside the book, the author becomes a man.
I can't tell if this was all meant to obfuscate the fact that the review was written by a professional reviewer (in the vocational sense), or if it's a complex ploy to convince readers that this book is loved by (and therefore accessible to) stupid people.
I like the idea of having a game on the syllabus, definitely very forward thinking. My problem is with the choice of game.
Portal was short, and as the author states it's multi-platform and fairly cheap, which goes a long way toward making this kind of project feasible. But reading portal as a game of ideas is a real stretch. The comparison to Goffman's Presentation of Self is baffling when the game allows no genuine self-expression (it's completely linear) or self-portrayal (no dialogue options), the subjects of Goffman's book. It's a fun game with a single intriguing character, but it's as deep as a kiddie pool.
It would have made a lot more sense to start with interactive fiction- essentially, text-adventure games. IFArchive.org is a great place to start, and in no time you can find lots of innovative contest winners and other pieces expanding the genre. These are easy to play on any computer, they are of variable length and complexity, and they allow for an easier transition for students- the tools they use to analyze literature will be largely applicable.
All in all, this is a cool effort. But look into interactive fiction! It might surprise you how well the genre is suited to your project.
More importantly, the creation of games like these is war profiteering; the same profiteering that Blackwater, civilian contractors, and companies that produce ACU backpacks for school children participate in.
He even seems to suggest that movies like "The Hurt Locker" are war profiteering. Maybe he's right?