The problem is not your economic system, it is your political system, which allows itself to be corrupted by the wealthy.
Wealthy should try and corrupt the political system because it is a cheap way to get free money. It is the attribute of a failed political system that allows a process, where the wealthy are successful at this.
You are mixing quite a few things in your lengthy post, most importantly this: free money provided by the fed allowed the banks to gamble with the money in the first place. Free money, as in very cheap to pay back, because of artificially low interest rates. The fed is stealing your money, giving it to the rich and the rich gamble with it. The people working for the fed have subverted the system.
It's not the capitalism and it's not the lack of regulations over capitalism, it is absolutely one thing: corruption in the political system.
which one am I, let's see: I am a Canadian who is fed up with the Canadian 'health care' system enough, that I don't care about the taxes that I pay there and currently residing in Germany, where I can pay out of pocket for a health care system that actually works.
I believe US can do much better than Canada, but they have to provide competition to the private insurance companies, that's what public option is - competition to the insanely connected and rich insurance companies that don't pay what they promise to pay.
Germany has it right: you have public care for people who can't afford private care, but you have private care and you can chose to use it. I chose this over either Canadian or the US systems at this point.
a privilege? A business opportunity you mean. Vancouver is going to lose money, not make any during this event, I fail to see the upside given all the other crap surrounding the games. Those athletes are supposed to be amateurs, right? As in 'not professionals'. Ok, maybe there is one amateur there - the engineer who designed the luge track. Privilege? Sure, if you have enough dough to cough up, having a fools hope of making some more money.
disclaimer: I don't live in Vancouver, I don't watch Olympics or sports in general.
since it's likely there's popular consensus on that matter.
- precisely. Everyone shoul.. scratch that, must have weapons that can be used to take out an entire government (and part of the Wall street with it.) By the way, do I have to register in South Carolina as a 'subversive' group? (we are assembling here, on/. and I definitely discussing things that can be interpreted as ideas about violent removal of governments)
not that I disagree with you on the Constitution point, but is Constitution anything like a contract, which mortgage is? I don't think so. Did you put your signature on a piece of paper anywhere, agreeing to the terms of Constitution? I don't think so. If Constitution is like a mortgage, then a software EULA is like a mortgage. This just makes no sense.
I always wait for VShael (62735) to express his opinion, so I would know what mine is.
--
personally I never had an ipod, an iphone, an imac etc, never will have ipad, itouch, icrotch, ismack or icry. Then again, I don't own any mp3 players or phones with cameras.
That is silly, any language, whether it is action script or perl or c or whatever, that is embedded into a web page will have to be translated by the browser somehow or maybe compiled even into something resembling bytecode or maybe even native instruction set (unlikely, given the security problems around that.)
So who cares what language it is? Javascript is fine. I would not mind having other options but even then, you can always write in something else and then run through a translator from your language of choice into javascript.
Maybe what really SHOULD be done is that regardless of what the source code is, the HTML page would instead require some sort of base 64 encrypted byte code.
Now THAT would speed things up. But then you cross into the Java on the client realm I think. If the implementation was better, faster, then who really would mind?
1. "illegal stuff" - in this case it is not illegal stuff, it is very legal stuff that they are trying to make criminal. It is legal because your Constitution says it is legal. Peaceful assembly, freedom of speech, not incriminating yourself, none of those things can be described as 'illegal stuff', so your observation does not apply to this particular law.
2. It is very easy to see why there are more and more laws restating sort of the same argument: illegal to murder people, but also illegal to murder people who are under 18 for example. (I came up with this as an example, I don't know what US laws say about that.) But it is very easy to find rational explanations, in fact more than one to this phenomena.
a. A politician wants to be known as someone who is 'tough on crime', so he comes up with this nonsense, which is redundant. He knows that other laws cover it and that people support those other laws, so it is very easy to gain trust of the population if you come up with something, that basically says the same thing as something else, that is widely supported. There is no risk of going wrong there.
b. If there is an incident that already involves a crime and obviously is illegal, in many cases politicians will use that to come up with new laws, that are the same as other laws, that cover that crime already. Maybe this is done for the same reason as the point a above, or maybe it is just a knee jerk reaction, to show the population that politicians are paying attention and to put a check mark there - we have done something, we reacted, we do not look to the population as if we do not care.
c. Then there is this thing, you can add more laws and then some will stick to someone, who already has committed a crime. Some more punishment can be applied, fewer chances of early parole, etc.
d. The worst of all is this, and I think this is also happening: government consists of politicians, who want to stay in power and when economy goes bust for any reason, the people will become upset and they just might replace the politicians in power. So politicians want to reduce freedoms and ability of people to replace them. This is where the government wants to change the system to become the dictator government. Like Bush said: If this was a dictatorship it would be a heck of a lot easier... just as long as I am the dictator.
There you go, plenty of rational explanations to this.
I have to do many estimates, and mine are within 10% error of actual time, then I add 30% on top of that, done.
Today a funny thing happened, I had to switch one implementation of web service call for a totally different one. At 1:16 I said I would be done in half an hour, after changing the build script, build properties, creating the client and switching the implementation in business logic, I sent the message that it was done. Then I looked at the clock, it was 1:46. So I told the other side, that instead of half an hour it took me 30 minutes.
Seriously though, take the task and divide it into smallest chunks that you know can be estimated, this would be close to reality, so add 30%. I can't add more than that, our competitors would get the project then. This method only works for projects that are similar to each other though.
For every doctor that leaves the profession, if the unions are gone, there will be an influx of 100 doctors, including immigrant doctors, who will enter the profession if the artificial limits are removed.
There should be only one limiting factor for someone to be a doctor: is this person successful as a doctor? This answers all questions, whether he is qualified and such.
Allowing real competition does not reduce supply, it increases the supply, improves quality and decreases prices. The problem with various members of society in general, is that the do not like competition, because it really can decrease pay in absolute numbers.
However abundance of resources / services does not hurt economy, what hurts economy is deficit. If there is real competition in all aspects of life, whether the nominative values of the money, that is earned is lower or not, the actual purchasing power will grow. That's economics, too bad nobody knows what it is anymore.
Oh, I am sure if pay was much much higher and hours were much shorter there would be many more people trying to get into the profession. However, if we learned anything from the dot-com era, is that when a profession is seen as very lucrative, huge numbers of people, who should never have tried getting into it, and who never would have tried under normal circumstances, because they don't really like doing it, will try getting in. It's about the money of-course, so there would be even more people in it. I submit to you that the signal to noise ratio would be even worse then.
I believe that the best way to decrease noise and increase signal is to provide very lucrative opportunity, but not to guarantee any outcome. Provide opportunity to make much more than what the average makes by working better. The only problem with this is that whoever measures 'better' should know what they are looking at. Provide ability to have real competition in the field, but this means you cannot guarantee outcomes for the mediocrity. This means that from my perspective unions are stifling competition (just like I indicated in my other comments, I believe that corporations colluding with governments, getting free money from governments and lobbying governments to create various regulations is stifling competition.)
If there is no competition, monopolies will take over and the outcomes will be known up-front. In those conditions there will be no way for someone to progress forward by competing hard, this will mean eventual stagnation and possibly even death.
You're alright, you're just following the Bush doctrine (you should know what that is, unless you are part of Palin's family. Which by the way, if you are, can you go back and double-tap, please?)
However, I believe that crash actually helps make your point. Let's expand the time line from your article to the present. We now have about 130,000 people dead in the USA from car crashes and 50 from airline crashes. There were some smaller crashes (the global list of all crashes is here http://www.planecrashinfo.com/ but it doesn't change the point. The ratio is truly stunning.
- more importantly, none of the airplane deaths in the US in the past 9 years had anything to do with airplanes.
A couple of failed attempts happened, but were stopped by passengers and crew members, no thanks to TSA.
Your best bet is to ban education and close libraries, and well, the internet is right out.
- what passes for education at this point is not much different from no education at all, and libraries will be gone once RIAA/MPAA are through with us. The internet is already censored in many places, more of that will come later.
I left out the link somehow, which I was trying to attach to the previous comment. There I explain my general understanding of how large private entities and government collude to screw the rest of the population by debasing our currency and by creating gigantic trade imbalances that will lead to collapse of developed nations economic systems. I don't see unions being very important to this process in and out on themselves, they are a symptom of a larger problem, they are not the cause. Symptom being that government intervention and regulations destroy competition, which decreases productivity and ability to keep sound monetary policies and trade balances.
Unions are sometimes necessary, but often times are there only to serve union bosses as far as I am concerned. They are rarely about the benefit of the workers or the public. I was glad, for example, to see that unions trying to take over wallmart operations once in Quebec, once in Ontario caused wallmart to take a serious step in closing down the store and moving out. That is what I would were I wallmart, not that I believe that wallmart is a great corporation. I strongly believe that they are part of the incoming economic crash, but I do dislike the unions enough to get this feeling of uplifting, when I see someone standing up to what they believe is right, even if it is a giant corporation fighting a possible union and more importantly, the local government, who creates regulations that lead to anti-competitive behavior. That is what I see unions do in most cases: behave anti-competitively. This is what I see governments do. This is what I see corporations do by colluding with governments. I like it when anyone of them loses when they try to do that, no matter which side.
If you are trying to say that I believe that corporations should have rights equal to those of humans, you are totally off. Here is what I believe about governments and corporations in general.
I am against unions in the sense, that I am against being forced into a union and I am against unions trying to go over my head, as in government worker unions striking for a month in Toronto, so that we would have no garbage disposal for a month even though we were not allowed to just not pay the property taxes. We were not able to close two deals selling property, we were not able to get a building inspector in another property, all because government workers were on strike. So that is why I am against government workers being allowed to unionize.
I understand where unions can play a role: difficult working conditions under some manufacturers or resource developers for example, where people who work there feel cheated by the owners. The government has monopoly on various aspects of our rights, the rights of the normal people, not working for the government. Once government has monopoly over such aspects of our lives (like making it illegal for private entities to collect garbage for example), then these government employees should not be allowed to deny us the services we are paying for with the taxes.
In Toronto, after a month and a half of strikes by the government, no single person was reimbursed either money or time or any kind of suffering that they were caused by the actions of the government workers striking.
These are not the people who should be allowed to unionize, OR they should not be allowed to have such monopolistic powers over our day to day activities. Either provide the services that you are paid for by the taxes, or let me out of this insane taxing system so I can use private contractors to do the work I need.
Slashdot Mirror
None of that is capitalism, it is all cronyism.
The problem is not your economic system, it is your political system, which allows itself to be corrupted by the wealthy.
Wealthy should try and corrupt the political system because it is a cheap way to get free money. It is the attribute of a failed political system that allows a process, where the wealthy are successful at this.
You are mixing quite a few things in your lengthy post, most importantly this: free money provided by the fed allowed the banks to gamble with the money in the first place. Free money, as in very cheap to pay back, because of artificially low interest rates. The fed is stealing your money, giving it to the rich and the rich gamble with it. The people working for the fed have subverted the system.
It's not the capitalism and it's not the lack of regulations over capitalism, it is absolutely one thing: corruption in the political system.
which one am I, let's see: I am a Canadian who is fed up with the Canadian 'health care' system enough, that I don't care about the taxes that I pay there and currently residing in Germany, where I can pay out of pocket for a health care system that actually works.
I believe US can do much better than Canada, but they have to provide competition to the private insurance companies, that's what public option is - competition to the insanely connected and rich insurance companies that don't pay what they promise to pay.
Germany has it right: you have public care for people who can't afford private care, but you have private care and you can chose to use it. I chose this over either Canadian or the US systems at this point.
a privilege? A business opportunity you mean. Vancouver is going to lose money, not make any during this event, I fail to see the upside given all the other crap surrounding the games. Those athletes are supposed to be amateurs, right? As in 'not professionals'. Ok, maybe there is one amateur there - the engineer who designed the luge track. Privilege? Sure, if you have enough dough to cough up, having a fools hope of making some more money.
disclaimer:
I don't live in Vancouver, I don't watch Olympics or sports in general.
you are an idiot. I said base 64 so that binary bytecode could be transfered as part of an ascii page if necessary, that is all.
since it's likely there's popular consensus on that matter.
- precisely. Everyone shoul.. scratch that, must have weapons that can be used to take out an entire government (and part of the Wall street with it.) By the way, do I have to register in South Carolina as a 'subversive' group? (we are assembling here, on /. and I definitely discussing things that can be interpreted as ideas about violent removal of governments)
not that I disagree with you on the Constitution point, but is Constitution anything like a contract, which mortgage is? I don't think so. Did you put your signature on a piece of paper anywhere, agreeing to the terms of Constitution? I don't think so. If Constitution is like a mortgage, then a software EULA is like a mortgage. This just makes no sense.
I always wait for VShael (62735) to express his opinion, so I would know what mine is.
--
personally I never had an ipod, an iphone, an imac etc, never will have ipad, itouch, icrotch, ismack or icry. Then again, I don't own any mp3 players or phones with cameras.
That is silly, any language, whether it is action script or perl or c or whatever, that is embedded into a web page will have to be translated by the browser somehow or maybe compiled even into something resembling bytecode or maybe even native instruction set (unlikely, given the security problems around that.)
So who cares what language it is? Javascript is fine. I would not mind having other options but even then, you can always write in something else and then run through a translator from your language of choice into javascript.
Maybe what really SHOULD be done is that regardless of what the source code is, the HTML page would instead require some sort of base 64 encrypted byte code.
Now THAT would speed things up. But then you cross into the Java on the client realm I think. If the implementation was better, faster, then who really would mind?
1. "illegal stuff" - in this case it is not illegal stuff, it is very legal stuff that they are trying to make criminal. It is legal because your Constitution says it is legal. Peaceful assembly, freedom of speech, not incriminating yourself, none of those things can be described as 'illegal stuff', so your observation does not apply to this particular law.
2. It is very easy to see why there are more and more laws restating sort of the same argument: illegal to murder people, but also illegal to murder people who are under 18 for example. (I came up with this as an example, I don't know what US laws say about that.) But it is very easy to find rational explanations, in fact more than one to this phenomena.
a. A politician wants to be known as someone who is 'tough on crime', so he comes up with this nonsense, which is redundant. He knows that other laws cover it and that people support those other laws, so it is very easy to gain trust of the population if you come up with something, that basically says the same thing as something else, that is widely supported. There is no risk of going wrong there.
b. If there is an incident that already involves a crime and obviously is illegal, in many cases politicians will use that to come up with new laws, that are the same as other laws, that cover that crime already. Maybe this is done for the same reason as the point a above, or maybe it is just a knee jerk reaction, to show the population that politicians are paying attention and to put a check mark there - we have done something, we reacted, we do not look to the population as if we do not care.
c. Then there is this thing, you can add more laws and then some will stick to someone, who already has committed a crime. Some more punishment can be applied, fewer chances of early parole, etc.
d. The worst of all is this, and I think this is also happening: government consists of politicians, who want to stay in power and when economy goes bust for any reason, the people will become upset and they just might replace the politicians in power. So politicians want to reduce freedoms and ability of people to replace them. This is where the government wants to change the system to become the dictator government. Like Bush said: If this was a dictatorship it would be a heck of a lot easier ... just as long as I am the dictator.
There you go, plenty of rational explanations to this.
You jest, I actually know a girl who used to believe that the Moon shines its own light. She was willing to put up a fight to prove her point too.
Your comment sparked an interest and I just couldn't resist replying.
I have to do many estimates, and mine are within 10% error of actual time, then I add 30% on top of that, done.
Today a funny thing happened, I had to switch one implementation of web service call for a totally different one. At 1:16 I said I would be done in half an hour, after changing the build script, build properties, creating the client and switching the implementation in business logic, I sent the message that it was done. Then I looked at the clock, it was 1:46. So I told the other side, that instead of half an hour it took me 30 minutes.
Seriously though, take the task and divide it into smallest chunks that you know can be estimated, this would be close to reality, so add 30%. I can't add more than that, our competitors would get the project then. This method only works for projects that are similar to each other though.
You are talking about doctors' unions I suppose?
For every doctor that leaves the profession, if the unions are gone, there will be an influx of 100 doctors, including immigrant doctors, who will enter the profession if the artificial limits are removed.
There should be only one limiting factor for someone to be a doctor: is this person successful as a doctor? This answers all questions, whether he is qualified and such.
Allowing real competition does not reduce supply, it increases the supply, improves quality and decreases prices. The problem with various members of society in general, is that the do not like competition, because it really can decrease pay in absolute numbers.
However abundance of resources / services does not hurt economy, what hurts economy is deficit. If there is real competition in all aspects of life, whether the nominative values of the money, that is earned is lower or not, the actual purchasing power will grow. That's economics, too bad nobody knows what it is anymore.
but I think the bigger danger is that he gets up to go to the bathroom
- yes, that's the biggest danger in the office, when that guy goes to the bathroom.
that's not a Troll, that was clever.
Didn't you see what the parent did to the grand parent? Grand parent drew first, then parent responded with a more precise comment.
I think grand parent is dead now, Jim, killed by the AC.
sorry, meant to say 'with terrorists', not with 'airplanes' obviously.
Oh, I am sure if pay was much much higher and hours were much shorter there would be many more people trying to get into the profession. However, if we learned anything from the dot-com era, is that when a profession is seen as very lucrative, huge numbers of people, who should never have tried getting into it, and who never would have tried under normal circumstances, because they don't really like doing it, will try getting in. It's about the money of-course, so there would be even more people in it. I submit to you that the signal to noise ratio would be even worse then.
I believe that the best way to decrease noise and increase signal is to provide very lucrative opportunity, but not to guarantee any outcome. Provide opportunity to make much more than what the average makes by working better. The only problem with this is that whoever measures 'better' should know what they are looking at. Provide ability to have real competition in the field, but this means you cannot guarantee outcomes for the mediocrity. This means that from my perspective unions are stifling competition (just like I indicated in my other comments, I believe that corporations colluding with governments, getting free money from governments and lobbying governments to create various regulations is stifling competition.)
If there is no competition, monopolies will take over and the outcomes will be known up-front. In those conditions there will be no way for someone to progress forward by competing hard, this will mean eventual stagnation and possibly even death.
You're alright, you're just following the Bush doctrine (you should know what that is, unless you are part of Palin's family. Which by the way, if you are, can you go back and double-tap, please?)
However, I believe that crash actually helps make your point. Let's expand the time line from your article to the present. We now have about 130,000 people dead in the USA from car crashes and 50 from airline crashes. There were some smaller crashes (the global list of all crashes is here http://www.planecrashinfo.com/ but it doesn't change the point. The ratio is truly stunning.
- more importantly, none of the airplane deaths in the US in the past 9 years had anything to do with airplanes.
A couple of failed attempts happened, but were stopped by passengers and crew members, no thanks to TSA.
Your best bet is to ban education and close libraries, and well, the internet is right out.
- what passes for education at this point is not much different from no education at all, and libraries will be gone once RIAA/MPAA are through with us. The internet is already censored in many places, more of that will come later.
If a man is alone in a forest with no woman nearby to hear him...
And he expresses an opinion.
Is he still wrong?
if he is married, then he is permanently wrong.
First +5 Redundant? You must be new here, the entire premise of /. is based on that score.
Also I have seen those types of scores here many times over. +5 Troll? Please, how about -1 Insightful.
I could really care less who fights for what place - you could care less, but can you try not to?
I left out the link somehow, which I was trying to attach to the previous comment. There I explain my general understanding of how large private entities and government collude to screw the rest of the population by debasing our currency and by creating gigantic trade imbalances that will lead to collapse of developed nations economic systems. I don't see unions being very important to this process in and out on themselves, they are a symptom of a larger problem, they are not the cause. Symptom being that government intervention and regulations destroy competition, which decreases productivity and ability to keep sound monetary policies and trade balances.
Unions are sometimes necessary, but often times are there only to serve union bosses as far as I am concerned. They are rarely about the benefit of the workers or the public. I was glad, for example, to see that unions trying to take over wallmart operations once in Quebec, once in Ontario caused wallmart to take a serious step in closing down the store and moving out. That is what I would were I wallmart, not that I believe that wallmart is a great corporation. I strongly believe that they are part of the incoming economic crash, but I do dislike the unions enough to get this feeling of uplifting, when I see someone standing up to what they believe is right, even if it is a giant corporation fighting a possible union and more importantly, the local government, who creates regulations that lead to anti-competitive behavior. That is what I see unions do in most cases: behave anti-competitively. This is what I see governments do. This is what I see corporations do by colluding with governments. I like it when anyone of them loses when they try to do that, no matter which side.
If you are trying to say that I believe that corporations should have rights equal to those of humans, you are totally off. Here is what I believe about governments and corporations in general.
I am against unions in the sense, that I am against being forced into a union and I am against unions trying to go over my head, as in government worker unions striking for a month in Toronto, so that we would have no garbage disposal for a month even though we were not allowed to just not pay the property taxes. We were not able to close two deals selling property, we were not able to get a building inspector in another property, all because government workers were on strike. So that is why I am against government workers being allowed to unionize.
I understand where unions can play a role: difficult working conditions under some manufacturers or resource developers for example, where people who work there feel cheated by the owners. The government has monopoly on various aspects of our rights, the rights of the normal people, not working for the government. Once government has monopoly over such aspects of our lives (like making it illegal for private entities to collect garbage for example), then these government employees should not be allowed to deny us the services we are paying for with the taxes.
In Toronto, after a month and a half of strikes by the government, no single person was reimbursed either money or time or any kind of suffering that they were caused by the actions of the government workers striking.
These are not the people who should be allowed to unionize, OR they should not be allowed to have such monopolistic powers over our day to day activities. Either provide the services that you are paid for by the taxes, or let me out of this insane taxing system so I can use private contractors to do the work I need.