So how long till Google drops this project too? I'm all for new approaches to code that runs in the browser, but I'm a bit hesitant to invest in any technology stack from a company with such a history of dropping projects.
Is there any sort of non-google dev community supporting Dart itself? Or is it completely dependent on Google at this point?
You say that it's the institution? Well, you know, better free your mind instead. You say you got a real solution? Well, you know, we'd all love to see the plan.
Three interesting assertions without an argument for any of them there.
But to the extent that your culture/values give you a (dis)advantage: that's good and right and just. Some approaches to living life are foolish, others are wise, and its completely appropriate for the wise to prosper while fools suffer. That's not anything you're born with, it comes from believing what people teach you. Best to get beyond that early in life, if success is your goal.
Paul Krugman said the opposite when a republican was president. Funny how that works.
Idiots aside, inflation will come when people start buying. Demand gives companies pricing power, and that with some lag gives wage inflation to match. This is all playing out very normally now for economic recovery (if slower than usual), with sales of durable goods leading the way.
Plus, I'm not so sure the Fed has been actually "printing money" (meaningfully increasing the money supply) in QE Infinity, because while they've bought about $2T of US treasuries, banks have in the same timeframe voluntarily deposited over $2T in excess reserves with the Fed. That's a new thing, and I'm not sure what to think of the Fed itself doing fractional reserve lending to the government. But in any case, you won't see any inflationary pressure from QE until the banks find something better to do with that money that leave it sitting at the Fed. When they do, watch out: unless the Fed brings reserve requirements up (which they could), I expect Carter years inflation once more. Not Zimbabwe, but a bad time to have a savings account.
Thought experiment. A company has a market cap of 20m, outstanding debts of 80k. The company then issues 10m in bonds for a stock buyback. Now they have a market cap of 10m with outstanding debts of 90k. Did the worth of the company drop in ½? I would say no. (Or they could go the other way and issue equity to pay off the debt.)
This never actually happens, is the thing - at least, not with any company large enough to matter to the financial press. Such shenanigans would be quite newsworthy. Companies do stock buybacks with excess cash as a marketing thing when they're trying to convince people the stock is undervalued (or to protect against hostile takeover - cash reserves entice takeover) , but it's a 5% thing at best. Very strange exchanges of stock for debt sort of like you describe do actually happen, but only as a last desperate attempt to get some investment capital: when no one will buy bonds from the company, they'll sometimes trade each share of common stock for a much less valuable share and a debenture, but that sort of stopped in the 80s). In any case, ideas about the "true worth" of a company are many and varied, but they're not the price you can actually buy the company for.
Yes, lower GDP growth sucks for everyone. That's why I happen to despise socialism - it comes at the cost of lower GDP growth (and lower technological progress), it's trading a fixed boost to standard of living for a reduction in the exponential growth of standard of living. Never good in the long run.
Yes, but having the confidence to actually go and do something useful is in itself a privilege. The reason so many (socially and economically) underprivileged kids fail at school is because others expect little of them, and they learn to expect little of themselves.
This just doesn't hold up in a society of "participation trophies" and valuing a child's self-esteem and confidence over everything else in school. We did that experiment. It solved none of society's ills. Time to admit it was a mistake and move all.
Also, can we please stop calling any advantage in part of one's character privilege? That's not what the word means. Everyone has a mix of good and bad, advantageous and disadvantageous qualities. If everyone is "privileged" as a result then the word is meaningless.
Whereas in the real world, it's the bankers who get the big bucks, and the guys who produce the actual value get made redundant while watching the value of their pension pot shrink year on year....
Yes, all systems have political corruption. Doesn't change my point that if you're contributing more than the next guy, it's only just that you get more in return. Not achieving justice in every case doesn't change what is and isn't just!
Even as hyperbole, that doesn't really stand up. Plenty of people have been saying this in politics for a while now. "It's OK to take money from The Evil Rich(TM) because none of them really earned it / they only got there due to privilege / etc". I think it's important to emphasize that making broad public policy based on simple stereotypes is foolish, and from your post I'm guessing you agree.
Investment returns are only GDP growth plus whatever risk premium. If GDP growth slows by 1/3, overall investment income is going to drop by roughly 1/3, but you wouldn't expect salaries to drop by 1/3. When someone says "the evil rich are hollowing out the middle class", I figure he's selling something.
Individual companies can get up to all sorts of shenanigans (that's what makes investing as challenging as working). But if you bought $60k (or whatever it works out to be, but that's close) of a broad based stock fund more or less divided among all publically traded companies, then you do in fact own "your share" of US corporations, and there will be some tradeoff between earning and salary that you like as a result. There's no real barrier in America to doing just that, other than having different priorities in your life. More and more as a culture we're starting to understand that anyone can also be an owner, and actually doing that, than ever before. That's neat.
And for a corporation just like an individual, you must subtract, not add, debt to figure out worth. Man I wish someone had beat that into my head when I was in college!
This is the worst recession since the Great Depression, plus "QE Infinity" is a new thing sharply distorting many markets. You can't expect recovery to look normal. I believe that once we get some nice inflation going, and the Fed stops being the only real buyer of government debt, we'll come around very quickly to a normal recovery pattern.
In any case, it's worth noting that if the value of all publically traded companies were evenly distributed among all workers, each share would be roughly similar to a year's average income. If you really think capital has it better, it's just not that hard to save and invest 1 year's income over the course of the next several years. More and more people are doing that now, which I find the best long term answer to all of these questions: let most of us become both owners and workers, and see what people think then about the distribution.
Sure, in principle that's cool, but the idea of "inherent advantages" so oversimplifies people that it is itself an offensive stereotype IMO.
Almost everyone has a mix of some above-average qualities and some below-average qualities. Realizing that success lies in doing what you're good at, instead of what you enjoy, is the first of many sacrifices needed for earned success. If you happen to love what you happen to be good at, hey, nice for you: people should feel good about that sort of thing. Long term, I think most of us come around to enjoying what we're good at, eventually, in any case.
But saying that someone's success is unearned because of some "inherent advantages" is a very overused idea because of this. Take up a line of work where one's normal distribution of (dis)advantages gives a net benefit is normal, not privilege. And there are very few lines of work where you can get by merely on one thing that you were born with (like IQ, or very high natural testosterone levels, or whatever) without also needing a bunch of other qualities, which often are below normal.
Sure, there people with a very rare collection of "happened to be good at"s that all line up to give them a real advantage, but then by definition that's a very small pool of people, and not a useful stereotype.
I find the opposite. It's the pampered well-to-do who most often sound off in Universities about "privilege" and its evils. And, hey, the concept probably applies to such.
Its the false logic of "some people gain success through an unearned advantage, therefore all success is unearned" that is quite offensive to those who worked hard and sacrificed significantly to get where they are.
We can recognize that some have an unearned advantage while also recognizing that success comes to others in a very deserved way.
"Privilege" is a term used by those who feel they didn't earn what they have, that really offends those who have earned what they have. Sure, no one earned their IQ, and in that sense any direct benefits you get from IQ are a sort of privilege, but you really can't get very far on IQ alone, any more than you can on natural good looks or physical strength.
You have to actually go do something useful and productive with you gifts to be rewarded once you leave school (and you'll discover there's far more to a programming job than abstract problem-solving) - at which point, if you're contributing more than the next guy, it's only just that you get more in return.
What does "being held by corporations" mean? Do you mean that the debt burden of companies is low and the cash reserves of those who have them is high? That's what the bottom of a recession looks like: the companies simply don't see a way to invest for growth, and want to be sure that they make payroll if things get worse. Seems OK to me, but then I hate bailouts.
Or do you feel that a company with a danger-reserve of cash should just pay everyone a one-time bonus, and hope for the best? You certainly don't give raises which must be sustained when cashflow is at its worst, that way bankruptcy lies: you control every expense you can and hold your breath. But you can only hold your breath so long, and that's why recessions end - and raises follow the improving economy, they can't realistically lead it. Fortunately we're in the upswing now, and while this has been a savage recession and growth off the bottom is still quite slow, the direction is right.
Increasing the pay of everyone is no different than changing the exchange rate of the currency, IMO.
But either way, that money to increase pay (non-trivially) doesn't exist. What's the fair share of distributions of gross earnings between workers, owners, and the government? Corporate taxes are a different argument, but the remainder gets split about 80% workers, 20% owners in successful large companies, and 105% workers, -5% owners frequently happens in struggling small businesses, at least short term.
If it were 80% owners, 20% workers it would be an entirely different story - sure, just double workers pay, with a small sacrifice for owners that's probably a win in the long run. That's what already happened in the industrial revolution. We've gradually shifted all the way to the other 80/20. You can pay workers more by raising prices, but if all businesses do that, well, that's what inflation actually is most of the time (when the government isn't desperate).
Who calls our economy "free market"? The only free markets I see are the exchanges (commodities and stock exchanges), which are "free" in the important sense of "no government price fixing" (except a couple of agricultural commodities, but that's now rare), but still have plently of market regulations. The key is: the price isn't what's regulated, it's mostly fraud prevention and assurance that you can pay what you owe.
The labor market in America is still reasonably free, however - in this case these are workers in one of the highest paid fields in the world, complaining (legitimately, but still) that they should be paid still more. Much like professional athletes striking over salary caps - they may have a point, but they're still well paid.
Remember, total corporate profits in the US are less than 10% of total wages in the US. "Evil big corporations" are certainly paying as little as they can get away with, but there's not much slack there in the first place. It's not like, on average, we could be paid 20% more if our collective bosses was only more generous - that money just doesn't exist (and small companies are on far thinner margins here - making payroll is a monthly uncertainly for most).
Face it: the prospect of the slightest reduction in any aspect government power frightens you to your totalitarian heart. Any change must be bed to you, because that would mean less than total control. "Noooo! Freedom! Terrible, terrible freedom!"
Whatever happened to us? Other than the religious nuts, we used to be a nation that cherished freedom. Now so many left and right want to force one another to Live The Right Way.
Microsoft has no social network, nor any general browser habits tracking tied to your identity. Outlook.com will serve you ads based on the content of mail, but AFAIK that's it. MS doesn't track that you read this blog here, and searched for this term there, and shopped for this product over there, and put all that together with what videos you watch and your "real name please". So, yeah, I'd say that's better.
I suspect Apple is the same way, sans the web mail ads.
Kindly read the post you're replying to before parroting your favorite talking points.
It's silly to assume that the only positions I could have are "I want anarchy" or "I want extreme totalitarian government" (that's the fallacy of the excluded middle). I want less government than we have now, which in no way implies I want "no government". Further, the kind of "less government" I would most welcome would be the "intrusion into my daily life" kind, not the "roads, police, etc" kind.
Are you actually an "I want extreme totalitarian government" fellow, or does the above make your objection seem off-topic?
I can just see it. The politician is looking at a screenshot of Firefox being used to browse Silk Road, and asks an aid "what is this technology called", the aide, not knowing the context, replies "the.. Firefox web browser?"
Many countries ban TOR, and work actively to block it - this wouldn't be that strange if he was talking about TOR.
I thought an Amp was a Coulomb/s and the Coulomb was just a standardized, exact count of electrons. Shows what I know. At least now, we could do it that way.
They're getting cheap though, especially the Cree bulbs (at least, in my Home Depot).
The light color isn't quite right - not enough red, so it looks a bit too yellow. I guess that's inherent in "high efficiency", the lack of red, but still: close, but not perfect. Still, they're naturally dimmable, seem quite robust unlike the CFLs I've had detonate on me, come on fast, and are "good enough" for most things.
But I still want a couple of bulbs I can dim to firelight orange-red for watching the occasional movie or just setting the mood. I'm glad I still have that option.
Slashdot Mirror
So how long till Google drops this project too? I'm all for new approaches to code that runs in the browser, but I'm a bit hesitant to invest in any technology stack from a company with such a history of dropping projects.
Is there any sort of non-google dev community supporting Dart itself? Or is it completely dependent on Google at this point?
You say that it's the institution? Well, you know, better free your mind instead.
You say you got a real solution? Well, you know, we'd all love to see the plan.
Three interesting assertions without an argument for any of them there.
But to the extent that your culture/values give you a (dis)advantage: that's good and right and just. Some approaches to living life are foolish, others are wise, and its completely appropriate for the wise to prosper while fools suffer. That's not anything you're born with, it comes from believing what people teach you. Best to get beyond that early in life, if success is your goal.
Paul Krugman said the opposite when a republican was president. Funny how that works.
Idiots aside, inflation will come when people start buying. Demand gives companies pricing power, and that with some lag gives wage inflation to match. This is all playing out very normally now for economic recovery (if slower than usual), with sales of durable goods leading the way.
Plus, I'm not so sure the Fed has been actually "printing money" (meaningfully increasing the money supply) in QE Infinity, because while they've bought about $2T of US treasuries, banks have in the same timeframe voluntarily deposited over $2T in excess reserves with the Fed. That's a new thing, and I'm not sure what to think of the Fed itself doing fractional reserve lending to the government. But in any case, you won't see any inflationary pressure from QE until the banks find something better to do with that money that leave it sitting at the Fed. When they do, watch out: unless the Fed brings reserve requirements up (which they could), I expect Carter years inflation once more. Not Zimbabwe, but a bad time to have a savings account.
Thought experiment. A company has a market cap of 20m, outstanding debts of 80k. The company then issues 10m in bonds for a stock buyback. Now they have a market cap of 10m with outstanding debts of 90k. Did the worth of the company drop in ½? I would say no. (Or they could go the other way and issue equity to pay off the debt.)
This never actually happens, is the thing - at least, not with any company large enough to matter to the financial press. Such shenanigans would be quite newsworthy. Companies do stock buybacks with excess cash as a marketing thing when they're trying to convince people the stock is undervalued (or to protect against hostile takeover - cash reserves entice takeover) , but it's a 5% thing at best. Very strange exchanges of stock for debt sort of like you describe do actually happen, but only as a last desperate attempt to get some investment capital: when no one will buy bonds from the company, they'll sometimes trade each share of common stock for a much less valuable share and a debenture, but that sort of stopped in the 80s). In any case, ideas about the "true worth" of a company are many and varied, but they're not the price you can actually buy the company for.
Yes, lower GDP growth sucks for everyone. That's why I happen to despise socialism - it comes at the cost of lower GDP growth (and lower technological progress), it's trading a fixed boost to standard of living for a reduction in the exponential growth of standard of living. Never good in the long run.
Yes, but having the confidence to actually go and do something useful is in itself a privilege. The reason so many (socially and economically) underprivileged kids fail at school is because others expect little of them, and they learn to expect little of themselves.
This just doesn't hold up in a society of "participation trophies" and valuing a child's self-esteem and confidence over everything else in school. We did that experiment. It solved none of society's ills. Time to admit it was a mistake and move all.
Also, can we please stop calling any advantage in part of one's character privilege? That's not what the word means. Everyone has a mix of good and bad, advantageous and disadvantageous qualities. If everyone is "privileged" as a result then the word is meaningless.
Whereas in the real world, it's the bankers who get the big bucks, and the guys who produce the actual value get made redundant while watching the value of their pension pot shrink year on year....
Yes, all systems have political corruption. Doesn't change my point that if you're contributing more than the next guy, it's only just that you get more in return. Not achieving justice in every case doesn't change what is and isn't just!
Said no one ever.
Even as hyperbole, that doesn't really stand up. Plenty of people have been saying this in politics for a while now. "It's OK to take money from The Evil Rich(TM) because none of them really earned it / they only got there due to privilege / etc". I think it's important to emphasize that making broad public policy based on simple stereotypes is foolish, and from your post I'm guessing you agree.
Investment returns are only GDP growth plus whatever risk premium. If GDP growth slows by 1/3, overall investment income is going to drop by roughly 1/3, but you wouldn't expect salaries to drop by 1/3. When someone says "the evil rich are hollowing out the middle class", I figure he's selling something.
Individual companies can get up to all sorts of shenanigans (that's what makes investing as challenging as working). But if you bought $60k (or whatever it works out to be, but that's close) of a broad based stock fund more or less divided among all publically traded companies, then you do in fact own "your share" of US corporations, and there will be some tradeoff between earning and salary that you like as a result. There's no real barrier in America to doing just that, other than having different priorities in your life. More and more as a culture we're starting to understand that anyone can also be an owner, and actually doing that, than ever before. That's neat.
And for a corporation just like an individual, you must subtract, not add, debt to figure out worth. Man I wish someone had beat that into my head when I was in college!
This is the worst recession since the Great Depression, plus "QE Infinity" is a new thing sharply distorting many markets. You can't expect recovery to look normal. I believe that once we get some nice inflation going, and the Fed stops being the only real buyer of government debt, we'll come around very quickly to a normal recovery pattern.
In any case, it's worth noting that if the value of all publically traded companies were evenly distributed among all workers, each share would be roughly similar to a year's average income. If you really think capital has it better, it's just not that hard to save and invest 1 year's income over the course of the next several years. More and more people are doing that now, which I find the best long term answer to all of these questions: let most of us become both owners and workers, and see what people think then about the distribution.
Sure, in principle that's cool, but the idea of "inherent advantages" so oversimplifies people that it is itself an offensive stereotype IMO.
Almost everyone has a mix of some above-average qualities and some below-average qualities. Realizing that success lies in doing what you're good at, instead of what you enjoy, is the first of many sacrifices needed for earned success. If you happen to love what you happen to be good at, hey, nice for you: people should feel good about that sort of thing. Long term, I think most of us come around to enjoying what we're good at, eventually, in any case.
But saying that someone's success is unearned because of some "inherent advantages" is a very overused idea because of this. Take up a line of work where one's normal distribution of (dis)advantages gives a net benefit is normal, not privilege. And there are very few lines of work where you can get by merely on one thing that you were born with (like IQ, or very high natural testosterone levels, or whatever) without also needing a bunch of other qualities, which often are below normal.
Sure, there people with a very rare collection of "happened to be good at"s that all line up to give them a real advantage, but then by definition that's a very small pool of people, and not a useful stereotype.
I find the opposite. It's the pampered well-to-do who most often sound off in Universities about "privilege" and its evils. And, hey, the concept probably applies to such.
Its the false logic of "some people gain success through an unearned advantage, therefore all success is unearned" that is quite offensive to those who worked hard and sacrificed significantly to get where they are.
We can recognize that some have an unearned advantage while also recognizing that success comes to others in a very deserved way.
"Privilege" is a term used by those who feel they didn't earn what they have, that really offends those who have earned what they have. Sure, no one earned their IQ, and in that sense any direct benefits you get from IQ are a sort of privilege, but you really can't get very far on IQ alone, any more than you can on natural good looks or physical strength.
You have to actually go do something useful and productive with you gifts to be rewarded once you leave school (and you'll discover there's far more to a programming job than abstract problem-solving) - at which point, if you're contributing more than the next guy, it's only just that you get more in return.
What does "being held by corporations" mean? Do you mean that the debt burden of companies is low and the cash reserves of those who have them is high? That's what the bottom of a recession looks like: the companies simply don't see a way to invest for growth, and want to be sure that they make payroll if things get worse. Seems OK to me, but then I hate bailouts.
Or do you feel that a company with a danger-reserve of cash should just pay everyone a one-time bonus, and hope for the best? You certainly don't give raises which must be sustained when cashflow is at its worst, that way bankruptcy lies: you control every expense you can and hold your breath. But you can only hold your breath so long, and that's why recessions end - and raises follow the improving economy, they can't realistically lead it. Fortunately we're in the upswing now, and while this has been a savage recession and growth off the bottom is still quite slow, the direction is right.
Increasing the pay of everyone is no different than changing the exchange rate of the currency, IMO.
But either way, that money to increase pay (non-trivially) doesn't exist. What's the fair share of distributions of gross earnings between workers, owners, and the government? Corporate taxes are a different argument, but the remainder gets split about 80% workers, 20% owners in successful large companies, and 105% workers, -5% owners frequently happens in struggling small businesses, at least short term.
If it were 80% owners, 20% workers it would be an entirely different story - sure, just double workers pay, with a small sacrifice for owners that's probably a win in the long run. That's what already happened in the industrial revolution. We've gradually shifted all the way to the other 80/20. You can pay workers more by raising prices, but if all businesses do that, well, that's what inflation actually is most of the time (when the government isn't desperate).
Who calls our economy "free market"? The only free markets I see are the exchanges (commodities and stock exchanges), which are "free" in the important sense of "no government price fixing" (except a couple of agricultural commodities, but that's now rare), but still have plently of market regulations. The key is: the price isn't what's regulated, it's mostly fraud prevention and assurance that you can pay what you owe.
The labor market in America is still reasonably free, however - in this case these are workers in one of the highest paid fields in the world, complaining (legitimately, but still) that they should be paid still more. Much like professional athletes striking over salary caps - they may have a point, but they're still well paid.
Remember, total corporate profits in the US are less than 10% of total wages in the US. "Evil big corporations" are certainly paying as little as they can get away with, but there's not much slack there in the first place. It's not like, on average, we could be paid 20% more if our collective bosses was only more generous - that money just doesn't exist (and small companies are on far thinner margins here - making payroll is a monthly uncertainly for most).
I get that confused too, the mantissa being close and all. What's a few orders of magnitude between friends.
Face it: the prospect of the slightest reduction in any aspect government power frightens you to your totalitarian heart. Any change must be bed to you, because that would mean less than total control. "Noooo! Freedom! Terrible, terrible freedom!"
Whatever happened to us? Other than the religious nuts, we used to be a nation that cherished freedom. Now so many left and right want to force one another to Live The Right Way.
Microsoft has no social network, nor any general browser habits tracking tied to your identity. Outlook.com will serve you ads based on the content of mail, but AFAIK that's it. MS doesn't track that you read this blog here, and searched for this term there, and shopped for this product over there, and put all that together with what videos you watch and your "real name please". So, yeah, I'd say that's better.
I suspect Apple is the same way, sans the web mail ads.
Kindly read the post you're replying to before parroting your favorite talking points.
It's silly to assume that the only positions I could have are "I want anarchy" or "I want extreme totalitarian government" (that's the fallacy of the excluded middle). I want less government than we have now, which in no way implies I want "no government". Further, the kind of "less government" I would most welcome would be the "intrusion into my daily life" kind, not the "roads, police, etc" kind.
Are you actually an "I want extreme totalitarian government" fellow, or does the above make your objection seem off-topic?
I can just see it. The politician is looking at a screenshot of Firefox being used to browse Silk Road, and asks an aid "what is this technology called", the aide, not knowing the context, replies "the .. Firefox web browser?"
Many countries ban TOR, and work actively to block it - this wouldn't be that strange if he was talking about TOR.
Great site! This one looks awesome for mood lighting: http://www.1000bulbs.com/product/7624/IN-L4080.html?tid=pacc
I've been looking for sub-40-watt bulbs with a standard base forever, rather than having to mess with a dimmer.
Well said!
I thought an Amp was a Coulomb/s and the Coulomb was just a standardized, exact count of electrons. Shows what I know. At least now, we could do it that way.
Good plan. Now if only we had a reference force ...
They're getting cheap though, especially the Cree bulbs (at least, in my Home Depot).
The light color isn't quite right - not enough red, so it looks a bit too yellow. I guess that's inherent in "high efficiency", the lack of red, but still: close, but not perfect. Still, they're naturally dimmable, seem quite robust unlike the CFLs I've had detonate on me, come on fast, and are "good enough" for most things.
But I still want a couple of bulbs I can dim to firelight orange-red for watching the occasional movie or just setting the mood. I'm glad I still have that option.