It also says "one of", which they could have just left out if they meant that the money went to multiple accounts. Regardless, triggering a red flag on 58 returns going to one account owner (as opposed to one account) is just as trivial.
According to the DOJ, Richardson admitted that the tax returns were prepared without the authorization of the 58 taxpayers listed on the tax returns. All of the returns directed that the IRS pay the money to one of Richardson's bank accounts.
I imagine a red flag was automatically triggered by the 58 returns going to one bank account. As a side note, I know people who write code for the Federal government that checks for irregularities like this and they do that for a living 40 hours a week, so if you're going to try to scam the IRS you have to be at least a little clever.
It's interesting that you didn't so much pull me up on whether copying is moral or not, rather you disagree that it's a right. I'm not really sure how you can disagree with that; it's a legally granted right. I mean, perhaps you don't believe that violating someone's rights isn't necessarily immoral, but disagreeing that it's a right in the first place doesn't seem sensible.
Eh... I was referring to an artists moral - not legal - rights... isn't that what this entire thread is about? Considering the title of this thread I thought that was clear.
Almost every single dollar made so far has been at the expense of someone else's hard work.
I'd argue that running a site like ThePirateBay requires significant work and provides value to its users. It would be just as silly to say Google has made every single dollar at the expense of someone else. Or that the yellow pages make their money at the expense other people...
It's the artists' right not to have their works copied
This is what it all boils down to and I wholeheartedly disagree.
First, your modified car analogy still doesn't make sense to me because it still doesn't overcome the fact that you're dealing with a physical piece of property that can't be duplicated for free. If you're timesharing a car (or any other physical property), what you're being "charged" for is the time you're renting the specific physical piece of property. Whether you joyride it or your friends joyride it, doesn't make any difference to the owner because you and only you are responsible for that specific car. If you return it late or damaged you're responsible regardless of if you lent the car to your friends or not. With physical property you can have accounting of ownership and responsibility. You can't do that with information.
The second part of your statement I take issue with is that people have the right to make a buck. That is simply false. Perhaps you meant people have the right to an opportunity to make money, but even that is false. There is no law that states any such thing and there are plenty of people who are in situations where they don't even have an opportunity to make money - who are they going to sue? Nobody, because their rights weren't violated. The constitution does protect your *physical* property.
If I have a copy of Word and I give a copy to my friend, how does that diminish the value of my copy? It doesn't. It may diminish the value to the author of Word, if he's trying to sell it, but not to me. Who's the "owner" of software? The license owner? The author? And that's the problem with physical analogies - they don't work because of one fundamental difference: you can not make physical copies at virtually no cost. If at some point in the future some genius invents a device that allows us to make copies of things for free, I would support people's right to do just that.
True but to be fair Apple did this because when OSX first came out, it wasn't nearly as popular as it is now and there were a lot of windows only apps people wanted to run. That's the same reason they invested in boot camp - to make the transition from windows to OSX easier. If OSX had the lead market share like Windows does now, I'm not so sure Apple would be as accommodating. Just look at how locked down the iPhone is w/respect to having to get all your media through iTunes.
The term script kiddies actually refers to people who don't do any programming, at all. They simply download a script someone else wrote and execute it, which requires 0 skill. It does not refer to people who write scripts.
For a single stolen item the police can charge both the thief for stealing and the buyer for purchasing stolen property, so I don't see how this is any different.
I'm against copyright law but this argument is flawed.
We are living in an era where skills/inclinations that i.t. requires are in high demand, and therefore we are in luck.
Society has always rewarded intelligence because working smarter has always equated to producing more whether it's using a wheel vs a sled or a farmer rotating his crops and irrigating his fields. Likewise, in earlier eras, those who knew how to read and do simple arithmetic were much better off than those who didn't, which was most of society (kind of like today where most people don't know how to write programs). Today's IT people might have been yesterday's scribes or accountants, who enjoyed benefits such as being part of the royal court and not having to pay taxes. My point is that intelligence has always been greatly rewarded because it's directly linked to productivity, so I disagree that IT workers are lucky that intelligence happens to be in high demand today.
Talent/inclination works differently than 'smart'. Cognitive powers does not have direct relevance to the inclinations you have - there are a lot of smart people, scientists too, who find i.t. work quite stressing, irritating and unbearable. and vice versa.
Yes, but the ratio of smart people who find i.t. work stressing to dumb people who find it stressing is far lower, so that does not prove your point. Likewise, an i.t. worker will have much higher odds of being successful switching careers to becoming an engineer, lawyer, chemist or doctor than someone who majored in psychiatry or Spanish. Yes, there are exceptions but it's true for most people.
And no - dont ever fall into the pit of thinking that 'because i am smart, i could make it' -> it does not work that way.
I think your opinion is wrong because smart people do tend to make it. Let's look at other professions that are in demand today besides IT: healthcare, engineering, mathematics, chemistry, physics, biology. All of these fields require a high level of intelligence. Additionally, the overall unemployment rate in 2010 was around 10% while for those with an associate's degree it was 7%, 5.4% for a bachelor's and less than 2% for a Doctoral degree. Again, a higher level of education generally requires a higher level of intelligence, so it seems that those who are more intelligent have an easier time finding work.
I will concede one point, however. It requires luck to be born in the right place and at the right time and the body you end up with, whether it's intelligence or good looks has a great impact on how successful you will be. But all of those things won't guarantee you success if you don't apply yourself.
If these algorithms are profitable they ultimately buy low and sell high, which is good for society. When you buy low, you're providing cash to those who need it most (therefore the willingness to sell low) and when you sell high, you provide the asset when it's needed most. Essentially, a profitable trader (computer or not) helps moderate markets by preventing them from going too low or too high, and pricing things correctly is important to society because resources are allocated by price. I know it's trendy to bash finance but it has an important function in society.
I wouldn't count AMD out just yet. They've delivered on combining the CPU and GPU and their integrated GPU is far more powerful than Intel's. Their CPUs are lacking but if they can catch up to Intel a bit, they already have all the other pieces in place and will be in a very strong position to compete, so I wouldn't count them out just yet.
Actually, yes. This is the new normal but it is only particularly painful now because we're transitioning into it and a lot of people will have to readjust their skill set before they can find work, which will be more difficult for older people but it is what it is. In the future, the unemployment rate will be lower because people will be better prepared and not because blue collar jobs will come back in demand.
The US has been in a bubble since the end of WW2 and the reason US workers have been making so much more than their foreign counterparts is because other countries were either recovering from catastrophe or were not developed yet. But the era of US workers not having to compete globally and thus being able to walk into a factory job with just a high school degree and earn a nice wage with benefits is over and no legislation in the world is going to bring those factory jobs back because if American companies are forced to hire locally and foreign companies are not, American companies will have far higher labor costs and will not be able to compete with foreign companies on price. It's not even a question of competing against other Western outsourcers anymore, it's a question of competing directly against Asian nations themselves and it's only going to get tougher. We lost our low-end manufacturing jobs but China is already starting to develop its own CPUs and airplanes and ultimately we will have to compete for jobs in high-end sectors, too.
Occupy Dallas has an online forum where people introduce themselves and one of the people wrote this:
Both of my grandfathers supported their families on a high school education. One was in public works maintaining local roads and the other sold valves. Their children went to college. They retired with benefits. http://occupydallas.org/tera
Just because this person's two grandfathers got by comfortably with a high school education, this person now feels wronged because she can't do the same. Someone must have screwed her out of that opportunity, because obviously it used to be there for her grandparents, right? Instead of protesting, she should be thankful that her grandparents got to live so well on a factory job while people outside the US lived in far worse conditions. Instead she protests that she can't do the same and I'm not just picking on this one person to be mean. A lot of the OWS gripes echo hers - that it used to be so much better. Well, of course it was because we were in a bubble.
It would be nice if life was hard only because there was some evil greedy person (or persons) because then there would be a way that we could live in some utopia where people didn't have to work so damn hard to make ends meet. But unfortunately that's not the case. Life is simply a bitch by nature because everything worth having requires damn hard work.
Yes, once you climb that ladder and get to the top you don't have to work as much, and yes, some people cheat their way to the top but that doesn't mean that most rich people didn't have to work extremely hard or sacrifice a lot to get where they are today.
Meanwhile, recent college grads haven't been able to get jobs regardless of their degree, because companies are only hiring people whoalready have jobs. Companies run by those aforementioned People With Money.
That's simply not true. There are many industries that are snapping up recent college grads. The STEM grads have little difficulty finding a job and healthcare is doing very well also. At the high end some petro chemical engineers are getting six figures out of college. But don't take my word for it, search google and you'll find the numbers. Of course the catch is that STEM degrees require damn hard work. Another interesting fact is that unemployment decreases consistently with education. The national unemployment rate is 9.8%, while the rate for those with an Associate's degree is 7%. For a Bachelor's degree it goes
I am one of those people who dislikes the Tea Party and OWS and I don't call them idiotic because I dislike them, I dislike them because I think they're idiotic. Let's start with the Tea Party. Tying the debt ceiling to budget negotiations and then not compromising by an inch and voluntarily walking to the brink of default is extreme and idiotic. We borrowed the money, we spent it, and now we need to pay it back. Period.
I've read a lot of the OWS stories and a lot of them really do sound like "I don't have money but other people have money, that's unfair!" . I've read a lot of their stories on CNN and most (not all) are in the situation they're in because they made stupid choices in life, and yes, paying through the nose for a degree that isn't worth it comes up a lot. What a lot of OWS supporters don't seem to realize is that one of the effects of the financial bubble, which they're so angry about, is that it caused the unemployment rate to *artificially* be low but they seem to think that the golden years were a "normal" and if only those financial people didn't mess it up, they could still be earning easy money. If you do someone a favor for a very long time, then they forget it's a favor and when you stop doing them the favor, instead of thanking you, they even get angry with you. China and India have been the true 99% because they work far more for what they get in return while the US has been the 1% of the world. Ironically, now that things have shifted and Chinese and Indian workers are getting a bigger slice of the pie, OWS people are out in the streets. Like I said, the previous situation was a bubble and not the normal.
Of course there are exceptions and not every OWS person is a lazy bum nor is every Tea Party member an extremist. My point is I don't label them idiots in order to silence them. I truly believe a lot of them are dangerous idiots and that's why I denounce them at every chance I get.
On a positive note, these two idiot groups seem to be on opposite ends of the spectrum, so hopefully they will cancel each other out and we'll get something reasonable in the middle.
Americans hate bailouts because they're unfair. When I started grad school I had two job offers and one of them was from my school. I decided to work for my school even though they paid 30% less because they waived tuition for employees. Had I known that student loan terms were going to be softened or the debt even forgiven, I would have chosen differently. Not holding people up to the terms of their contracts not only rewards irresponsible behavior but it is also punishes responsible behavior.
His point is that the financial crisis destroyed confidence and froze spending. Markets tend to overreact on both the up and down sides and too little confidence can be just as harmful as too much.
Everything is relative. If you compare what they've achieved since the dot-com pop against what Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Baidu, Amazon, eBay, Alibaba etc. have achieved, Yahoo simply comes up far short. As for "cherry-picking", I didn't pick some arbitrary period of quarters. I picked the most recent ones.
Seriously, what is Yahoo's future? Which areas do you see them growing in? Where are they leaders? This is why people don't want to invest in Yahoo and its stock price is performing so poorly.
Let's look at their net income for the past 4 quarters:
129.60 -- 142.65 -- 210.44 -- 294.09
Their income is consistently decreasing and if they continue on the same path, it won't be long before they do start losing money. There is also no reason to believe that they will not continue on the same path they have been for the past decade.
The fact that the guy lost $2 billion is not good in any way for UBS. You seem to be arguing that it's a good thing that this guy bet on a different direction but the direction is irrelevant, it's the magnitude that's astonishing. Traders are not allowed to put so much capital on the line, the fact that he was able to invest so much capital almost certainly means that fraud was involved. Kerviel, Leeson and others all forged papers or electronic records to perpetrate their fraud. The usual formula is they start with a bet, lose their capital, hide the losses, and double their bet. Rinse and repeat.
All banks have systems in place that are supposed to prevent this from happening. The fact that this guy was able to circumvent those systems shows that UBS does not have a good risk management system in place.
Slashdot Mirror
It also says "one of", which they could have just left out if they meant that the money went to multiple accounts. Regardless, triggering a red flag on 58 returns going to one account owner (as opposed to one account) is just as trivial.
According to the DOJ, Richardson admitted that the tax returns were prepared without the authorization of the 58 taxpayers listed on the tax returns. All of the returns directed that the IRS pay the money to one of Richardson's bank accounts.
I imagine a red flag was automatically triggered by the 58 returns going to one bank account. As a side note, I know people who write code for the Federal government that checks for irregularities like this and they do that for a living 40 hours a week, so if you're going to try to scam the IRS you have to be at least a little clever.
It's interesting that you didn't so much pull me up on whether copying is moral or not, rather you disagree that it's a right. I'm not really sure how you can disagree with that; it's a legally granted right. I mean, perhaps you don't believe that violating someone's rights isn't necessarily immoral, but disagreeing that it's a right in the first place doesn't seem sensible.
Eh ... I was referring to an artists moral - not legal - rights ... isn't that what this entire thread is about? Considering the title of this thread I thought that was clear.
Almost every single dollar made so far has been at the expense of someone else's hard work.
I'd argue that running a site like ThePirateBay requires significant work and provides value to its users. It would be just as silly to say Google has made every single dollar at the expense of someone else. Or that the yellow pages make their money at the expense other people ...
It's the artists' right not to have their works copied
This is what it all boils down to and I wholeheartedly disagree.
First, your modified car analogy still doesn't make sense to me because it still doesn't overcome the fact that you're dealing with a physical piece of property that can't be duplicated for free. If you're timesharing a car (or any other physical property), what you're being "charged" for is the time you're renting the specific physical piece of property. Whether you joyride it or your friends joyride it, doesn't make any difference to the owner because you and only you are responsible for that specific car. If you return it late or damaged you're responsible regardless of if you lent the car to your friends or not. With physical property you can have accounting of ownership and responsibility. You can't do that with information.
The second part of your statement I take issue with is that people have the right to make a buck. That is simply false. Perhaps you meant people have the right to an opportunity to make money, but even that is false. There is no law that states any such thing and there are plenty of people who are in situations where they don't even have an opportunity to make money - who are they going to sue? Nobody, because their rights weren't violated. The constitution does protect your *physical* property.
If I have a copy of Word and I give a copy to my friend, how does that diminish the value of my copy? It doesn't. It may diminish the value to the author of Word, if he's trying to sell it, but not to me. Who's the "owner" of software? The license owner? The author? And that's the problem with physical analogies - they don't work because of one fundamental difference: you can not make physical copies at virtually no cost. If at some point in the future some genius invents a device that allows us to make copies of things for free, I would support people's right to do just that.
They wrote a php to c++ source code transformer - https://github.com/facebook/hiphop-php
If everyone did that, what do you think would happen to the caps?
True but to be fair Apple did this because when OSX first came out, it wasn't nearly as popular as it is now and there were a lot of windows only apps people wanted to run. That's the same reason they invested in boot camp - to make the transition from windows to OSX easier. If OSX had the lead market share like Windows does now, I'm not so sure Apple would be as accommodating. Just look at how locked down the iPhone is w/respect to having to get all your media through iTunes.
The term script kiddies actually refers to people who don't do any programming, at all. They simply download a script someone else wrote and execute it, which requires 0 skill. It does not refer to people who write scripts.
For a single stolen item the police can charge both the thief for stealing and the buyer for purchasing stolen property, so I don't see how this is any different.
I'm against copyright law but this argument is flawed.
We are living in an era where skills/inclinations that i.t. requires are in high demand, and therefore we are in luck.
Society has always rewarded intelligence because working smarter has always equated to producing more whether it's using a wheel vs a sled or a farmer rotating his crops and irrigating his fields. Likewise, in earlier eras, those who knew how to read and do simple arithmetic were much better off than those who didn't, which was most of society (kind of like today where most people don't know how to write programs). Today's IT people might have been yesterday's scribes or accountants, who enjoyed benefits such as being part of the royal court and not having to pay taxes. My point is that intelligence has always been greatly rewarded because it's directly linked to productivity, so I disagree that IT workers are lucky that intelligence happens to be in high demand today.
Talent/inclination works differently than 'smart'. Cognitive powers does not have direct relevance to the inclinations you have - there are a lot of smart people, scientists too, who find i.t. work quite stressing, irritating and unbearable. and vice versa.
Yes, but the ratio of smart people who find i.t. work stressing to dumb people who find it stressing is far lower, so that does not prove your point. Likewise, an i.t. worker will have much higher odds of being successful switching careers to becoming an engineer, lawyer, chemist or doctor than someone who majored in psychiatry or Spanish. Yes, there are exceptions but it's true for most people.
And no - dont ever fall into the pit of thinking that 'because i am smart, i could make it' -> it does not work that way.
I think your opinion is wrong because smart people do tend to make it. Let's look at other professions that are in demand today besides IT: healthcare, engineering, mathematics, chemistry, physics, biology. All of these fields require a high level of intelligence. Additionally, the overall unemployment rate in 2010 was around 10% while for those with an associate's degree it was 7%, 5.4% for a bachelor's and less than 2% for a Doctoral degree. Again, a higher level of education generally requires a higher level of intelligence, so it seems that those who are more intelligent have an easier time finding work.
I will concede one point, however. It requires luck to be born in the right place and at the right time and the body you end up with, whether it's intelligence or good looks has a great impact on how successful you will be. But all of those things won't guarantee you success if you don't apply yourself.
If these algorithms are profitable they ultimately buy low and sell high, which is good for society. When you buy low, you're providing cash to those who need it most (therefore the willingness to sell low) and when you sell high, you provide the asset when it's needed most. Essentially, a profitable trader (computer or not) helps moderate markets by preventing them from going too low or too high, and pricing things correctly is important to society because resources are allocated by price. I know it's trendy to bash finance but it has an important function in society.
You've obviously never watched MacGyver
The blades would be clean but you'd still have shit scattered all over the place
WHOOSH. Those mistakes were intentional read the post he replied to.
It's not. In fact, it's EXACTLY the same. They're trying to charge 2 different people for the EXACTLY SAME THING.
I wouldn't count AMD out just yet. They've delivered on combining the CPU and GPU and their integrated GPU is far more powerful than Intel's. Their CPUs are lacking but if they can catch up to Intel a bit, they already have all the other pieces in place and will be in a very strong position to compete, so I wouldn't count them out just yet.
So, the post-bubble situation is normal?
Actually, yes. This is the new normal but it is only particularly painful now because we're transitioning into it and a lot of people will have to readjust their skill set before they can find work, which will be more difficult for older people but it is what it is. In the future, the unemployment rate will be lower because people will be better prepared and not because blue collar jobs will come back in demand.
The US has been in a bubble since the end of WW2 and the reason US workers have been making so much more than their foreign counterparts is because other countries were either recovering from catastrophe or were not developed yet. But the era of US workers not having to compete globally and thus being able to walk into a factory job with just a high school degree and earn a nice wage with benefits is over and no legislation in the world is going to bring those factory jobs back because if American companies are forced to hire locally and foreign companies are not, American companies will have far higher labor costs and will not be able to compete with foreign companies on price. It's not even a question of competing against other Western outsourcers anymore, it's a question of competing directly against Asian nations themselves and it's only going to get tougher. We lost our low-end manufacturing jobs but China is already starting to develop its own CPUs and airplanes and ultimately we will have to compete for jobs in high-end sectors, too.
Occupy Dallas has an online forum where people introduce themselves and one of the people wrote this:
Both of my grandfathers supported their families on a high school education. One was in public works maintaining local roads and the other sold valves. Their children went to college. They retired with benefits. http://occupydallas.org/tera
Just because this person's two grandfathers got by comfortably with a high school education, this person now feels wronged because she can't do the same. Someone must have screwed her out of that opportunity, because obviously it used to be there for her grandparents, right? Instead of protesting, she should be thankful that her grandparents got to live so well on a factory job while people outside the US lived in far worse conditions. Instead she protests that she can't do the same and I'm not just picking on this one person to be mean. A lot of the OWS gripes echo hers - that it used to be so much better. Well, of course it was because we were in a bubble.
It would be nice if life was hard only because there was some evil greedy person (or persons) because then there would be a way that we could live in some utopia where people didn't have to work so damn hard to make ends meet. But unfortunately that's not the case. Life is simply a bitch by nature because everything worth having requires damn hard work. Yes, once you climb that ladder and get to the top you don't have to work as much, and yes, some people cheat their way to the top but that doesn't mean that most rich people didn't have to work extremely hard or sacrifice a lot to get where they are today.
Meanwhile, recent college grads haven't been able to get jobs regardless of their degree, because companies are only hiring people whoalready have jobs. Companies run by those aforementioned People With Money.
That's simply not true. There are many industries that are snapping up recent college grads. The STEM grads have little difficulty finding a job and healthcare is doing very well also. At the high end some petro chemical engineers are getting six figures out of college. But don't take my word for it, search google and you'll find the numbers. Of course the catch is that STEM degrees require damn hard work. Another interesting fact is that unemployment decreases consistently with education. The national unemployment rate is 9.8%, while the rate for those with an Associate's degree is 7%. For a Bachelor's degree it goes
I am one of those people who dislikes the Tea Party and OWS and I don't call them idiotic because I dislike them, I dislike them because I think they're idiotic. Let's start with the Tea Party. Tying the debt ceiling to budget negotiations and then not compromising by an inch and voluntarily walking to the brink of default is extreme and idiotic. We borrowed the money, we spent it, and now we need to pay it back. Period.
I've read a lot of the OWS stories and a lot of them really do sound like "I don't have money but other people have money, that's unfair!" . I've read a lot of their stories on CNN and most (not all) are in the situation they're in because they made stupid choices in life, and yes, paying through the nose for a degree that isn't worth it comes up a lot. What a lot of OWS supporters don't seem to realize is that one of the effects of the financial bubble, which they're so angry about, is that it caused the unemployment rate to *artificially* be low but they seem to think that the golden years were a "normal" and if only those financial people didn't mess it up, they could still be earning easy money. If you do someone a favor for a very long time, then they forget it's a favor and when you stop doing them the favor, instead of thanking you, they even get angry with you. China and India have been the true 99% because they work far more for what they get in return while the US has been the 1% of the world. Ironically, now that things have shifted and Chinese and Indian workers are getting a bigger slice of the pie, OWS people are out in the streets. Like I said, the previous situation was a bubble and not the normal.
Of course there are exceptions and not every OWS person is a lazy bum nor is every Tea Party member an extremist. My point is I don't label them idiots in order to silence them. I truly believe a lot of them are dangerous idiots and that's why I denounce them at every chance I get.
On a positive note, these two idiot groups seem to be on opposite ends of the spectrum, so hopefully they will cancel each other out and we'll get something reasonable in the middle.
Americans hate bailouts because they're unfair. When I started grad school I had two job offers and one of them was from my school. I decided to work for my school even though they paid 30% less because they waived tuition for employees. Had I known that student loan terms were going to be softened or the debt even forgiven, I would have chosen differently. Not holding people up to the terms of their contracts not only rewards irresponsible behavior but it is also punishes responsible behavior.
His point is that the financial crisis destroyed confidence and froze spending. Markets tend to overreact on both the up and down sides and too little confidence can be just as harmful as too much.
Everything is relative. If you compare what they've achieved since the dot-com pop against what Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Baidu, Amazon, eBay, Alibaba etc. have achieved, Yahoo simply comes up far short. As for "cherry-picking", I didn't pick some arbitrary period of quarters. I picked the most recent ones.
Seriously, what is Yahoo's future? Which areas do you see them growing in? Where are they leaders? This is why people don't want to invest in Yahoo and its stock price is performing so poorly.
Let's look at their net income for the past 4 quarters:
129.60 -- 142.65 -- 210.44 -- 294.09
Their income is consistently decreasing and if they continue on the same path, it won't be long before they do start losing money. There is also no reason to believe that they will not continue on the same path they have been for the past decade.
The fact that the guy lost $2 billion is not good in any way for UBS. You seem to be arguing that it's a good thing that this guy bet on a different direction but the direction is irrelevant, it's the magnitude that's astonishing. Traders are not allowed to put so much capital on the line, the fact that he was able to invest so much capital almost certainly means that fraud was involved. Kerviel, Leeson and others all forged papers or electronic records to perpetrate their fraud. The usual formula is they start with a bet, lose their capital, hide the losses, and double their bet. Rinse and repeat.
All banks have systems in place that are supposed to prevent this from happening. The fact that this guy was able to circumvent those systems shows that UBS does not have a good risk management system in place.