DeBeers itself already had a monopoly in the diamond market and they were the ones that were convincing people to buy diamonds for engagement rings, prior to that it wasn't a common practice at all.
Exactly.. they monopolize a completely artificial market that they themselves created. The product is a dowry in the form of a diamond, and they do not have a monopoly on dowries... just culturally "accepted" form.
if these 7 companies want to have agreements between them, fine - then where are the unions representing all 7 of these companies' tech workers
This is very relevant, and remember that true free market proponents are not against collective bargaining, just against government intervention that manipulates the power of these collectives artificially. Note that government intervention (such as the National Labor Relations Act) both increases the power of these collectives in some ways, while decreasing it in others.
The largest and most powerful unions existed before 1935, when the government started getting intimately involved. Many of those unions were very free-market in that they aggressively competed against each other for membership. Today, membership is enforced rather than competed for.
If they sign an agreement, though, they can introduce financial penalties to case 2 and 3 that reverse the outcomes.
Except that if the penalties are too steep, than neither can get out of it when a 3rd player comes in and takes advantage of not being limited by it. One of the companies will benefit from being in the agreement longer than the other, and may very well refuse to let the other out of it.
Great... so does that mean that if I've experienced a violent crime, I'm good for life?
Nope. You dont seem to understand probability.
Statistics don't work that way.
In the absence of any other evidence, and since the rate is small, we can use the poisson distribution.
If you are suggesting that there are factors that make specific people more or less likely to be involved in a violent crime.. I agree. But some people don't seem to understand that that means that there is an even greater reason for some people to carry a gun... they are in a high risk group, such as the restaurant owner that does a daily drop of lots of cash every night after closing.
Correct. FFT is used to compute the DFT. What was your point again?
FFT is probably not as efficient as a naive method, on general purpose hardware, in the case of small block sizes like what JPEG is based on (16 samples.)
You simply arent going to get an order-of-magnitude step improvement with FFT when N is small, but you have to pay the various overheads (non-linear memory access and the calculation of those pointers) anyways. This is similar to how optimized bubblesort beats the crap out of quicksort for very small lists, as quicksort has a lot of overhead (recursive calls, guessing a good pivot, etc..) that simply ends up not being justified for small N.
Lossy compression such as MP3, AAC, and according to TFS also video compression, are all fundamentally based on FFT (fast fourier transforms).
Actually, most (if not all?) of these lossy compression schemes are based on the discrete cosine transform, not the discrete fourier transform. That is definitely true for MP3 and AAC, and also true for JPEG which most video encoders probably use for key frames.
And 75,000 is 10% of 8,000,000? I think you might want to check the decimal places in your calculation. It's still under 1%.
Yes, under 1% per year.
So you have a 99% chance of avoiding a violent crime in 1 year.
So you have a 90% chance of avoiding a violent crime in 10 years.
So you have a 78% chance of avoiding a violent crime in 25 years.
So you have a 67% chance of avoiding a violent crime in 40 years.
So you have a 55% chance of avoiding a violent crime in 60 years.
They're talking about scanning arrestees instead of frisking them. If you're getting frisked, we're no longer talking about "law abiding citizens".
Yes, they have never frisked law abiding citizens. What were we thinking when we decided innocent until proven guilty.... the police should decide who is guilty and who isn't.
You've been lucky. I've witnessed a retail version of windows XP be refused activation after a hardware change. Calling microsoft was unproductive.
The retail licenses do not have activation limits, but do require phone activation after the 5th.
My guess is that this person activated on a new rig/setup, but then later on booted up an older rig/setup that had already been using the same license, flagging that license as violating. The only ways this can happen without an actual license violation is if the person upgraded some hardware, reactivated, but then later on downgraded back to the same original hardware; or the license is now being misused by others.
It may take a while, but eventually thieves making a business of this will see a vanishing return on stolen copper. A good "business man" in this case will move on to something else. Will it completely stop theft? No, but it is a start.
The theft of copper wasnt a problem until copper started becoming valuable, so the world has infrastructure where copper literally sits undefended. People go on about feeding families or drug problems, but thats not the reason for these thefts at all.
Mankind all over the planet requires obstacles (such as locks) to keep its people honest. Its human nature to scavenge valuable/useful things. A few years ago it was catalytic converters. 40 years ago it was hub caps.
You are right that there will be vanishing returns. Thats how markets work... It would require government regulations to perpetuate the cycle.
Have you forgotten that in many places a single pot bust when you were 19 pretty much condemns you to the lowest manual labor which is now done by Jose for $4 an hour?
Have you forgotten that this is a global problem effecting pretty much every society on the planet?
as there is no incentive for employers to take measures to eliminate those risks
There was strong pressure to increase safety in the U.S because of worker compensation laws passed in 1908. Now thats not a law that says you must increase safety.. thats a law that says that you must compensate injured workers. The economics of it is what increased general safety. All other safety laws do not increase general safety, only specific safety failings where a worker cannot assess the real risks.
At this point, free-market types will argue that, if enough workers refuse to work for the risky jobs, there will be demand for an employer that actually takes measures to eliminate them, thus making a more competitive offer to prospective employees. Except that oftentimes the labor market does not work that way: usually the employer can afford not to hire someone, but that someone cannot afford to be unemployed. Doubly so in an economy with a high unemployment rate, and triply so for jobs that require little to no qualification
You dont have extended high unemployment in a free markets. See Hong Kong's history of unemployment. They have one of the best unemployment records in the world and its no coincidence that its the most free market. High unemployment is only sustainable under artificial constraints.
Hong Kong's worst unemployment rate in the past 30 years was 8.6%, and during that short period (the SARS epidemic) their currency actually deflated to compensate, with no harm to the economy. Meanwhile in America things like deflation are considered verboten, so the capital reserves that could be increasing in value and thus making it easier for startups and expansion are decreasing in value instead.. its crazy what we are doing to ourselves.
Hong Kong's unemployment has averaged only 3.77 percent over the past 30 years. The United States has not even seen a single year with unemployment rates as low as their 30 year average since 1968, 44 years ago. The danger in true free markets is not unemployment, its lack of unemployment. Unemployment seen is free markets is frictional rather than structural, and as such goes away quickly.
We have lots of legislation like that in my country and you can ask for whatever you want in whatever manner you want on top of the minimum.
Minimum what? Wage? Aha.
Brazil just decided that I must accept at a minimum an hourly rate that is greater than my regular rate ("overtime rate"), rather than that I might simply accept, for example, a piece rate.
This can only have a downward pressure on my regular rate. Thanks a lot.
We've had very low regulation periods (aka the 30s, 70s, 90s) and companies didn't use that to create jobs nor make the economy flourish but to ransack as much as they could.
You mention the 1930s, but that was a time of great instability in Brazil, with a revolution in 1930 and then a coup 7 years later.
Then you mention the 1970s, the period of Operation Condor and military dictatorships.
Then finally you mention the 1990s, which while removing the military dictatorship, only did so because hyperinflation was just kicking. Then you have the period of dual currencies, culminating in a great deflation of one while trying to stop the rapid inflation of the other.
Banks are not the champions of free market, and certainly not Americas. People are the champions of free market. Brazil does not seem to have had a period where a free market and stability existed together for any length of time. Remember that strong property rights and strong contract law go hand in hand with free markets, fostering trust that you develop is yours, and that agreements will be honored (one way or another.)
You see, as there is a competition in a labour market, without regulations like minimal wage or overtime pay the companies could just require workers to work more for less pay, because there would always be someone else to take the job.
Countries like Hong Kong seem to do OK with very few regulations, because their over-supply of workers induced more businesses to start up inevitably reducing that over-supply of workers. America was the same as they used to let anyone in the world come here, and by the millions per year they did. By the end of that period America had the most diverse and powerful economy on the planet.
Minimum wage is the most regressive employment regulation imaginable.
Slashdot Mirror
Admitting that they need an out clause is equal to admitting that they are not sustainable.
DeBeers itself already had a monopoly in the diamond market and they were the ones that were convincing people to buy diamonds for engagement rings, prior to that it wasn't a common practice at all.
Exactly.. they monopolize a completely artificial market that they themselves created. The product is a dowry in the form of a diamond, and they do not have a monopoly on dowries... just culturally "accepted" form.
if these 7 companies want to have agreements between them, fine - then where are the unions representing all 7 of these companies' tech workers
This is very relevant, and remember that true free market proponents are not against collective bargaining, just against government intervention that manipulates the power of these collectives artificially. Note that government intervention (such as the National Labor Relations Act) both increases the power of these collectives in some ways, while decreasing it in others.
The largest and most powerful unions existed before 1935, when the government started getting intimately involved. Many of those unions were very free-market in that they aggressively competed against each other for membership. Today, membership is enforced rather than competed for.
Yeah, and while the people are waiting for this eventual collapse, what then? Oh, right, they're just screwed.
If they sign an agreement, though, they can introduce financial penalties to case 2 and 3 that reverse the outcomes.
Except that if the penalties are too steep, than neither can get out of it when a 3rd player comes in and takes advantage of not being limited by it. One of the companies will benefit from being in the agreement longer than the other, and may very well refuse to let the other out of it.
You're implying that it's better to have the potential to gain $50,000 million with high risk than $5,000 million with low risk.
I find it strange that you only enter 2 values into your prisoners dilemma.
Please let be subscribe to your "greatest fallacy" newsletter. Its got to be full of them!
Great... so does that mean that if I've experienced a violent crime, I'm good for life?
Nope. You dont seem to understand probability.
Statistics don't work that way.
In the absence of any other evidence, and since the rate is small, we can use the poisson distribution.
If you are suggesting that there are factors that make specific people more or less likely to be involved in a violent crime.. I agree. But some people don't seem to understand that that means that there is an even greater reason for some people to carry a gun... they are in a high risk group, such as the restaurant owner that does a daily drop of lots of cash every night after closing.
Correct. FFT is used to compute the DFT. What was your point again?
FFT is probably not as efficient as a naive method, on general purpose hardware, in the case of small block sizes like what JPEG is based on (16 samples.)
You simply arent going to get an order-of-magnitude step improvement with FFT when N is small, but you have to pay the various overheads (non-linear memory access and the calculation of those pointers) anyways. This is similar to how optimized bubblesort beats the crap out of quicksort for very small lists, as quicksort has a lot of overhead (recursive calls, guessing a good pivot, etc..) that simply ends up not being justified for small N.
Lossy compression such as MP3, AAC, and according to TFS also video compression, are all fundamentally based on FFT (fast fourier transforms).
Actually, most (if not all?) of these lossy compression schemes are based on the discrete cosine transform, not the discrete fourier transform. That is definitely true for MP3 and AAC, and also true for JPEG which most video encoders probably use for key frames.
0,5,10,5,0,-5,-10,-5,0
You can consider them as vectors, but normally they are considered complex numbers.
....
0 + 0i, 5 + 0i, 10 + 0i, 5 + 0i,
And 75,000 is 10% of 8,000,000? I think you might want to check the decimal places in your calculation. It's still under 1%.
Yes, under 1% per year.
So you have a 99% chance of avoiding a violent crime in 1 year.
So you have a 90% chance of avoiding a violent crime in 10 years.
So you have a 78% chance of avoiding a violent crime in 25 years.
So you have a 67% chance of avoiding a violent crime in 40 years.
So you have a 55% chance of avoiding a violent crime in 60 years.
Have you woken the fuck up yet?
The definition of border includes international airports. So nearly 100% of America.
They're talking about scanning arrestees instead of frisking them. If you're getting frisked, we're no longer talking about "law abiding citizens".
Yes, they have never frisked law abiding citizens. What were we thinking when we decided innocent until proven guilty.... the police should decide who is guilty and who isn't.
You've been lucky. I've witnessed a retail version of windows XP be refused activation after a hardware change. Calling microsoft was unproductive.
The retail licenses do not have activation limits, but do require phone activation after the 5th.
My guess is that this person activated on a new rig/setup, but then later on booted up an older rig/setup that had already been using the same license, flagging that license as violating. The only ways this can happen without an actual license violation is if the person upgraded some hardware, reactivated, but then later on downgraded back to the same original hardware; or the license is now being misused by others.
I think the specs say it'll run on 5v, which is four AA batteries.
Volts is not a unit of power.
Amps * Volts = Watts.
These things draw 2.5 watts. You might get half a day out of 4 alkaline AA's.
You will need a solar panel similar to one of these just to sustain it, as well as provide an adapter to covert to 5v.
..then multiply by 2 to get the real cost per hour in labor.
Mod parent up. The root of the problem here is our failed economy. All this copper theft and stuff is nothing more than symptoms of that.
Copper theft is a global problem, and has been so for long before the housing bubble burst.
Dont pretend that America is the problem just because you want to whine about its economy.
It may take a while, but eventually thieves making a business of this will see a vanishing return on stolen copper. A good "business man" in this case will move on to something else. Will it completely stop theft? No, but it is a start.
The theft of copper wasnt a problem until copper started becoming valuable, so the world has infrastructure where copper literally sits undefended. People go on about feeding families or drug problems, but thats not the reason for these thefts at all.
Mankind all over the planet requires obstacles (such as locks) to keep its people honest. Its human nature to scavenge valuable/useful things. A few years ago it was catalytic converters. 40 years ago it was hub caps.
You are right that there will be vanishing returns. Thats how markets work... It would require government regulations to perpetuate the cycle.
Have you forgotten that in many places a single pot bust when you were 19 pretty much condemns you to the lowest manual labor which is now done by Jose for $4 an hour?
Have you forgotten that this is a global problem effecting pretty much every society on the planet?
How many times have you seen people upgrade a perfectly functional computer, for no reason other than that something a little faster is on the market?
Outside of my PC gaming geek circle.. never.
Maybe you should get out and meet people.
as there is no incentive for employers to take measures to eliminate those risks
There was strong pressure to increase safety in the U.S because of worker compensation laws passed in 1908. Now thats not a law that says you must increase safety.. thats a law that says that you must compensate injured workers. The economics of it is what increased general safety. All other safety laws do not increase general safety, only specific safety failings where a worker cannot assess the real risks.
At this point, free-market types will argue that, if enough workers refuse to work for the risky jobs, there will be demand for an employer that actually takes measures to eliminate them, thus making a more competitive offer to prospective employees. Except that oftentimes the labor market does not work that way: usually the employer can afford not to hire someone, but that someone cannot afford to be unemployed. Doubly so in an economy with a high unemployment rate, and triply so for jobs that require little to no qualification
You dont have extended high unemployment in a free markets. See Hong Kong's history of unemployment. They have one of the best unemployment records in the world and its no coincidence that its the most free market. High unemployment is only sustainable under artificial constraints.
Hong Kong's worst unemployment rate in the past 30 years was 8.6%, and during that short period (the SARS epidemic) their currency actually deflated to compensate, with no harm to the economy. Meanwhile in America things like deflation are considered verboten, so the capital reserves that could be increasing in value and thus making it easier for startups and expansion are decreasing in value instead.. its crazy what we are doing to ourselves.
Hong Kong's unemployment has averaged only 3.77 percent over the past 30 years. The United States has not even seen a single year with unemployment rates as low as their 30 year average since 1968, 44 years ago. The danger in true free markets is not unemployment, its lack of unemployment. Unemployment seen is free markets is frictional rather than structural, and as such goes away quickly.
We have lots of legislation like that in my country and you can ask for whatever you want in whatever manner you want on top of the minimum.
Minimum what? Wage? Aha.
Brazil just decided that I must accept at a minimum an hourly rate that is greater than my regular rate ("overtime rate"), rather than that I might simply accept, for example, a piece rate.
This can only have a downward pressure on my regular rate. Thanks a lot.
We've had very low regulation periods (aka the 30s, 70s, 90s) and companies didn't use that to create jobs nor make the economy flourish but to ransack as much as they could.
You mention the 1930s, but that was a time of great instability in Brazil, with a revolution in 1930 and then a coup 7 years later.
Then you mention the 1970s, the period of Operation Condor and military dictatorships.
Then finally you mention the 1990s, which while removing the military dictatorship, only did so because hyperinflation was just kicking. Then you have the period of dual currencies, culminating in a great deflation of one while trying to stop the rapid inflation of the other.
Banks are not the champions of free market, and certainly not Americas. People are the champions of free market. Brazil does not seem to have had a period where a free market and stability existed together for any length of time. Remember that strong property rights and strong contract law go hand in hand with free markets, fostering trust that you develop is yours, and that agreements will be honored (one way or another.)
No, you are free to ask for more.
But not free to negotiate how.
You see, as there is a competition in a labour market, without regulations like minimal wage or overtime pay the companies could just require workers to work more for less pay, because there would always be someone else to take the job.
Countries like Hong Kong seem to do OK with very few regulations, because their over-supply of workers induced more businesses to start up inevitably reducing that over-supply of workers. America was the same as they used to let anyone in the world come here, and by the millions per year they did. By the end of that period America had the most diverse and powerful economy on the planet.
Minimum wage is the most regressive employment regulation imaginable.