I can fully appreciate that my posts were confusing and I apologize. Yes I'm gleefully picturing A.R. in hell where she is forced to play school marm to spoiled, entitled, rich young girls who are both poor writers and future adulterous harlots with rape fantasies (like her character Dominique). My reason for enjoying this notion is that I think A.R.'s writing was dull and beat to a pulp the dead horse of an idea that the fittest deserve to rule the world (don't they anyway?) and has now become something of a rallying point for many confused thinkers. It's delicious to think of A.R. suffering at the hands of people who are wealthy by no merit of their own and failing to be rewarded for her bland, redundant, and long-winded works. I also find it ironic and curious that A.R. would portray what some consider a rape as a positive sexual experience and wonder if might have been a fantasy of A.R. herself. Together it all tends to suggest that A.R. was herself a sadist or masochist or both. No, this post is not meant to espouse any political view. No, I don't like Ayn Rand. Yes, I'd take her shovel and give her a spoon. Or take her pen and give her a vicious spanking.
The second law of thermodynamics ("entropy shall always increase") broke the road, not some kid with a baseball or some misguided government policy. And sure, there may be some hidden consequences: hydrocarbons in the water supply, dead kittens and puppies in the now-speedy road, or those damned illegal immigrants getting paid to do honest work. I'm still glad the road's fixed. And no, I'm not going to buy a tin foil hat to ward off the bogeyman of "hidden consequences".
I find it peculiar that you are defending Ayn Rand in one post and damning assertive action in another. I'm not sure she'd approve.
I did not mean to imply that Rand was rich. I was alluding to the character Dominique in her book the Fountainhead, which I have actually read. Were I the Nefarious One, that is what I would do with A.R. as it seems enjoyably ironic torture: being forced to babysit for eternity a cadre of self-interested demon girls who actually enjoy abuse and humiliation and who cannot write either.
We don't need no cotton spinners! Let them wear silk!
I'll mourn the loss of textile-related jobs inasmuch as I'd like to see more folks employed here in the US, but these jobs still exist -- they're just being done in Pakistan or some other eastern country where poor folks are willing to do more for less. I do have a certain lack of sympathy for people who choose to be loom operators rather than studying hard and doing something a little more creative, but someone with a PHD is likely to have a certain lack of sympathy for me because I only studied hard enough to get a bachelor's degree.
Land does not a standard of living make. It's the little things that make for a standard of living. That King's life expectancy was probably 40 years and he'd be plagued with gout, dandruff, and diabetes for half of it. Today average life expectancy is 70-80 years on most industrialized countries and you can enjoy all manner of pills, drinks, food, and entertainment that King hadn't even dreamed of.
I heard she was a schoolteacher, working for shitty schoolteacher wages and being forced to grade third-rate writing by spoiled little rich girls with rape fantasies.
I too have seen long-neglected roads and Freeways repaved here in Los Angeles -- two lanes of Beverly Blvd from Hollywood to Silverlake were undriveable for years. If this costs me a few bucks in taxes, that's fine because I don't have to worry about the wheels coming off my car now.
It should also be noted that the US federal government's debt -- and taxes on rich folks -- were higher as a percentage of GDP immediately following WWII than at any other time in US history.
I bet Ray Kurzweil has something hooked up. If he doesn't, he's a sham. I for one welcome our late-night-texting-overlords.
Re:Glad I read this, I learned a few things
on
Occupy Flash?
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· Score: 2
That's one reason people will come to hate HTML5 in a few years, once they realize that the primary use of the canvas and audio tags will be to serve up poorly programmed advertisements.
Yep. Meet the new boss. Same as the old boss, only with a shittier programming language.
Re:As much as I hate flash..
on
Occupy Flash?
·
· Score: 1
Yeah! How are we gonna have chat roulette if flash goes away? I NEED MAH INTERWEB COCKS!
Re:As much as I hate flash..
on
Occupy Flash?
·
· Score: 1
Yes. mod parent up.
Re:Can we get rid of Java while we're at it?
on
Occupy Flash?
·
· Score: 1
Persian: But...! This is madness! Leonidas: [Kicks Persian down a hole]THIS. IS. PHP!!!!!!
AIR is basically like a redistributable type thing. Unless I'm mistaken, Microsoft does a similar thing with.NET and their other development tools. Similar also in concept to Java where there's a virtual machine to interpret your code.
You are right about standards being the way to go, but the point of creating any sort of redistributable/virtual machine concept is to provide consistency and continuity where there is a lack of standards. Flash has provided a pseudo/quasi standard means of delivering video and vector graphic animation to a desktop browser for years because there was a huge pissing contest going on between different browser factions and they offered poor support for audio and video and no way at all to connect with sockets and wildly different ways (or no way at all) to do things like rotate objects, blur things, or change the transparency of objects or work with vector graphics. To say it's "stupid" to use Flash for a website completely ignores the fact that Flash was either necessary or expedient to do things. Last time I checked, Youtube (you've heard of it, right?) and Vimeo still used Flash to display video for linux, osx, and windows platforms.
As for standards, what is the video standard for HTML5? Do I encode my videos as h.264? Or Ogg Vorbis? V8? Maybe they've sorted this out and I just haven't heard.
I think Adobe has been pretty forward-looking lately and is probably psyched to see an end to the constant updating of the Flash Player. I'm sure they spend a lot of money and energy on it and would love to see a standard evolve so they can get back to making really good tools like Photoshop and Premiere and Dreamweaver and After Effects and such.
Re:Glad I read this, I learned a few things
on
Occupy Flash?
·
· Score: 1
I'm all for killing Flash, but I worry about a couple of issues: * What about video support in HTML5? Aren't there still issues with the supported codecs? Doesn't H.264 require licensing fees or something? Aren't all the browser developers fighting over a standard? One thing Flash did amazingly well IMHO is to make publishing video much easier. Encode once, play in Flash player on all major browser (on the desktop at least) * Javascript as a language makes me sad. One defines classes using prototypes rather than classes. I much prefer the syntax and clarity of AS3 when I do OOP. I feel that the intent of the programmer is much clearer when using classes.
Taking an extra $30B from our top 1% will not really hurt them. The smoking crater metaphor is hardly appropriate. Taking $30B from the $2.5T corporate market (about 1.2%) is unlikely to hurt corporate america all that much. Hell, we could probably get about half of it by collecting some tax from Exxon, Google, GE, etc. End our foreign wars (kind of like Nixon got out of Vietnam) and thereby reduce defense spending from 4.7% to about 4% of GDP and save $120B each year.
That's $180B per year....which means we'd pay of the debt in something like uhhhhh....85 years (assuming no interest) ? *sigh*.
hmmmmmm....fair share? That's a tricky philosophical question. My immediate impulse is to suggest that it would be some kind of exponential function that is just enough to counteract the tendency of enormous fortunes to grow ever larger. Something akin to the physical formula for drag in a fluid -- initial movement is trivially easy but ultimately there is a terminal velocity. I think wealth past a certain point is absurd and pointless and doesn't benefit anyone. At the other end of the spectrum, even the poorest people would pay *some* tax. It's one kind of unfair to have one guy pay 50% and another guy 1%. It's a different kind of unfair for one guy to have 3 jobs and no home and another guy to have six residences simply because he's got a trust fund. Hard work should be rewarded. Hoarding should be discouraged.
In practice I know that kind of tax scheme would never fly. In practice, I would say we have to pay down our debt so let's take a bit of money from those who are comfortably afloat rather than creating a bigger homeless problem.
As for public education and its goals, I don't think Einstein's estimation of what people should understand is a fair metric. The guy made one of the greatest intuitive leaps ever in science so his estimation of what is easy to understand is likely to be skewed on the hard side.
I read Einstein's book when I was 17 while attending Little Rock Central High School and it didn't seem particularly difficult. LRCHS is not Andover or Exeter but it's making the people of Little Rock less stupid every day. I wonder what the cost per student is per year? Let's say it's $1000. People at this school learn things like reading and math and vocational skills.
At my "prestigious college" the average combined SAT score was 1380 so I would estimate that perhaps 50-75% of entrants could understand Einstein's book. Tuition there was $37,000 last year. People there learn the difference between Proust and EE Cummings. Some people write their senior thesis on baseball.
Personally, I think teaching 37 kids how to read and write and do basic math is a better investment of $37,000 than teaching smarty pants kids about retable alterpieces in the northern European renaissance. Imagine the literacy rate if all public schools were closed? *shudder*
I appreciate your reasonable response. It's a breath of fresh air. I hear you on some of your points and I disagree on others: * tax loopholes - i get the whole global argument, but this is ridiculous. I think we could tap a tiny bit of that $2.5 trillion in sales without scaring off too many jobs. * sure, investigate them all. put them on the hot seat. do it already. is it done yet? * no-bid contracts are bullshit -- especially when they are that big. "not many companies do what they do blah blah." i call shenanigans. what on earth was halliburton doing that no one else could do? space? nope. nuclear? nope. * education spending - pissing it away? i went to public school and then a prestigious college. I value my education and am grateful for it. I'd hardly call that pissing it away. And, personally, i like it when the guy working at Mcdonald's or the DMV is not a total idiot. Having an educated populace is an incredible privilege. Uneducated people are *such* a drag. * money != speech. they are two different things and we should all keep that in mind. cynical attitudes equating them lead to moral decay and corruption. * taxing the rich - suppose we take a mere 1% from all the US millionaires next year. With approximately 3 million US millionaires, that's 3,000,000 * $1,000,000 *.01 = $30 Billion. And, if those millionaires were shrewd enough to get a 3% return on their investments (which is not a lot) then they'd still keep their million in assets plus twice what we took from them in interest. 1% too much? OK take a bit less and include more people. Let's adopt the Reagan-era tax structure! The notion is simple, not simplistic. Your attempted refutation (which seems simplistic to me) doesn't provide any facts at all. Less rhetoric, more reason please.
No it's quite simple. I have $1M. I put it in a savings account. Presto! $30K or more per year (20% more than the median US income). As long as banks pay interest, money makes money. And the more you have, the more you make. 3% is a terrible investment, btw.
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I can fully appreciate that my posts were confusing and I apologize. Yes I'm gleefully picturing A.R. in hell where she is forced to play school marm to spoiled, entitled, rich young girls who are both poor writers and future adulterous harlots with rape fantasies (like her character Dominique). My reason for enjoying this notion is that I think A.R.'s writing was dull and beat to a pulp the dead horse of an idea that the fittest deserve to rule the world (don't they anyway?) and has now become something of a rallying point for many confused thinkers. It's delicious to think of A.R. suffering at the hands of people who are wealthy by no merit of their own and failing to be rewarded for her bland, redundant, and long-winded works. I also find it ironic and curious that A.R. would portray what some consider a rape as a positive sexual experience and wonder if might have been a fantasy of A.R. herself. Together it all tends to suggest that A.R. was herself a sadist or masochist or both. No, this post is not meant to espouse any political view. No, I don't like Ayn Rand. Yes, I'd take her shovel and give her a spoon. Or take her pen and give her a vicious spanking.
The second law of thermodynamics ("entropy shall always increase") broke the road, not some kid with a baseball or some misguided government policy. And sure, there may be some hidden consequences: hydrocarbons in the water supply, dead kittens and puppies in the now-speedy road, or those damned illegal immigrants getting paid to do honest work. I'm still glad the road's fixed. And no, I'm not going to buy a tin foil hat to ward off the bogeyman of "hidden consequences".
I find it peculiar that you are defending Ayn Rand in one post and damning assertive action in another. I'm not sure she'd approve.
I did not mean to imply that Rand was rich. I was alluding to the character Dominique in her book the Fountainhead, which I have actually read. Were I the Nefarious One, that is what I would do with A.R. as it seems enjoyably ironic torture: being forced to babysit for eternity a cadre of self-interested demon girls who actually enjoy abuse and humiliation and who cannot write either.
We don't need no cotton spinners! Let them wear silk!
I'll mourn the loss of textile-related jobs inasmuch as I'd like to see more folks employed here in the US, but these jobs still exist -- they're just being done in Pakistan or some other eastern country where poor folks are willing to do more for less. I do have a certain lack of sympathy for people who choose to be loom operators rather than studying hard and doing something a little more creative, but someone with a PHD is likely to have a certain lack of sympathy for me because I only studied hard enough to get a bachelor's degree.
Land does not a standard of living make. It's the little things that make for a standard of living. That King's life expectancy was probably 40 years and he'd be plagued with gout, dandruff, and diabetes for half of it. Today average life expectancy is 70-80 years on most industrialized countries and you can enjoy all manner of pills, drinks, food, and entertainment that King hadn't even dreamed of.
Britain: What the hell? This IT-and-jobs game is tough.
Apple: ALL YOUR JOBS ARE NOW BELONG TO US. KEKEKEKEKEKEKE!!
Mod parents up.
I heard she was a schoolteacher, working for shitty schoolteacher wages and being forced to grade third-rate writing by spoiled little rich girls with rape fantasies.
I too have seen long-neglected roads and Freeways repaved here in Los Angeles -- two lanes of Beverly Blvd from Hollywood to Silverlake were undriveable for years. If this costs me a few bucks in taxes, that's fine because I don't have to worry about the wheels coming off my car now.
It should also be noted that the US federal government's debt -- and taxes on rich folks -- were higher as a percentage of GDP immediately following WWII than at any other time in US history.
Kurzweil's a meme now? DANG! I guess he's finally achieved immortality. The singularity has passed.
I bet Ray Kurzweil has something hooked up. If he doesn't, he's a sham. I for one welcome our late-night-texting-overlords.
That's one reason people will come to hate HTML5 in a few years, once they realize that the primary use of the canvas and audio tags will be to serve up poorly programmed advertisements.
Yep. Meet the new boss. Same as the old boss, only with a shittier programming language.
Yeah! How are we gonna have chat roulette if flash goes away? I NEED MAH INTERWEB COCKS!
Yes. mod parent up.
Persian: But...! This is madness!
Leonidas: [Kicks Persian down a hole]THIS. IS. PHP!!!!!!
AIR is basically like a redistributable type thing. Unless I'm mistaken, Microsoft does a similar thing with .NET and their other development tools. Similar also in concept to Java where there's a virtual machine to interpret your code.
You are right about standards being the way to go, but the point of creating any sort of redistributable/virtual machine concept is to provide consistency and continuity where there is a lack of standards. Flash has provided a pseudo/quasi standard means of delivering video and vector graphic animation to a desktop browser for years because there was a huge pissing contest going on between different browser factions and they offered poor support for audio and video and no way at all to connect with sockets and wildly different ways (or no way at all) to do things like rotate objects, blur things, or change the transparency of objects or work with vector graphics. To say it's "stupid" to use Flash for a website completely ignores the fact that Flash was either necessary or expedient to do things. Last time I checked, Youtube (you've heard of it, right?) and Vimeo still used Flash to display video for linux, osx, and windows platforms.
As for standards, what is the video standard for HTML5? Do I encode my videos as h.264? Or Ogg Vorbis? V8? Maybe they've sorted this out and I just haven't heard.
I think Adobe has been pretty forward-looking lately and is probably psyched to see an end to the constant updating of the Flash Player. I'm sure they spend a lot of money and energy on it and would love to see a standard evolve so they can get back to making really good tools like Photoshop and Premiere and Dreamweaver and After Effects and such.
I'm all for killing Flash, but I worry about a couple of issues:
* What about video support in HTML5? Aren't there still issues with the supported codecs? Doesn't H.264 require licensing fees or something? Aren't all the browser developers fighting over a standard? One thing Flash did amazingly well IMHO is to make publishing video much easier. Encode once, play in Flash player on all major browser (on the desktop at least)
* Javascript as a language makes me sad. One defines classes using prototypes rather than classes. I much prefer the syntax and clarity of AS3 when I do OOP. I feel that the intent of the programmer is much clearer when using classes.
You win.
Taking an extra $30B from our top 1% will not really hurt them. The smoking crater metaphor is hardly appropriate.
Taking $30B from the $2.5T corporate market (about 1.2%) is unlikely to hurt corporate america all that much. Hell, we could probably get about half of it by collecting some tax from Exxon, Google, GE, etc.
End our foreign wars (kind of like Nixon got out of Vietnam) and thereby reduce defense spending from 4.7% to about 4% of GDP and save $120B each year.
That's $180B per year....which means we'd pay of the debt in something like uhhhhh....85 years (assuming no interest) ? *sigh*.
hmmmmmm....fair share? That's a tricky philosophical question. My immediate impulse is to suggest that it would be some kind of exponential function that is just enough to counteract the tendency of enormous fortunes to grow ever larger. Something akin to the physical formula for drag in a fluid -- initial movement is trivially easy but ultimately there is a terminal velocity. I think wealth past a certain point is absurd and pointless and doesn't benefit anyone. At the other end of the spectrum, even the poorest people would pay *some* tax. It's one kind of unfair to have one guy pay 50% and another guy 1%. It's a different kind of unfair for one guy to have 3 jobs and no home and another guy to have six residences simply because he's got a trust fund. Hard work should be rewarded. Hoarding should be discouraged.
In practice I know that kind of tax scheme would never fly. In practice, I would say we have to pay down our debt so let's take a bit of money from those who are comfortably afloat rather than creating a bigger homeless problem.
As for public education and its goals, I don't think Einstein's estimation of what people should understand is a fair metric. The guy made one of the greatest intuitive leaps ever in science so his estimation of what is easy to understand is likely to be skewed on the hard side.
I read Einstein's book when I was 17 while attending Little Rock Central High School and it didn't seem particularly difficult. LRCHS is not Andover or Exeter but it's making the people of Little Rock less stupid every day. I wonder what the cost per student is per year? Let's say it's $1000. People at this school learn things like reading and math and vocational skills.
At my "prestigious college" the average combined SAT score was 1380 so I would estimate that perhaps 50-75% of entrants could understand Einstein's book. Tuition there was $37,000 last year. People there learn the difference between Proust and EE Cummings. Some people write their senior thesis on baseball.
Personally, I think teaching 37 kids how to read and write and do basic math is a better investment of $37,000 than teaching smarty pants kids about retable alterpieces in the northern European renaissance. Imagine the literacy rate if all public schools were closed? *shudder*
Let me guess: You *didn't* make an extra $10k this year?
No worries about the quip. Yeah, let's give it a rest. My arms are tired from all the hand-waving.
I appreciate your reasonable response. It's a breath of fresh air. I hear you on some of your points and I disagree on others: .01 = $30 Billion. And, if those millionaires were shrewd enough to get a 3% return on their investments (which is not a lot) then they'd still keep their million in assets plus twice what we took from them in interest. 1% too much? OK take a bit less and include more people. Let's adopt the Reagan-era tax structure! The notion is simple, not simplistic. Your attempted refutation (which seems simplistic to me) doesn't provide any facts at all. Less rhetoric, more reason please.
* tax loopholes - i get the whole global argument, but this is ridiculous. I think we could tap a tiny bit of that $2.5 trillion in sales without scaring off too many jobs.
* sure, investigate them all. put them on the hot seat. do it already. is it done yet?
* no-bid contracts are bullshit -- especially when they are that big. "not many companies do what they do blah blah." i call shenanigans. what on earth was halliburton doing that no one else could do? space? nope. nuclear? nope.
* education spending - pissing it away? i went to public school and then a prestigious college. I value my education and am grateful for it. I'd hardly call that pissing it away. And, personally, i like it when the guy working at Mcdonald's or the DMV is not a total idiot. Having an educated populace is an incredible privilege. Uneducated people are *such* a drag.
* money != speech. they are two different things and we should all keep that in mind. cynical attitudes equating them lead to moral decay and corruption.
* taxing the rich - suppose we take a mere 1% from all the US millionaires next year. With approximately 3 million US millionaires, that's 3,000,000 * $1,000,000 *
No it's quite simple. I have $1M. I put it in a savings account. Presto! $30K or more per year (20% more than the median US income). As long as banks pay interest, money makes money. And the more you have, the more you make. 3% is a terrible investment, btw.