It isnt nearly right, its completely wrong and only human ignorance would say it was 'nearly right'
No it was very much 100% wrong, nearly zero is not zero.
I suppose you're also absolutely opposed to teaching Newtonian mechanics to intro physics students, too -- right? I mean, after all, we now know it "was very much 100% wrong." Sure, relativistic effects are basically irrelevant at normal speeds, but "nearly zero is not zero." So, we need to revamp our physics curriculum and introduce full-blown Einsteinian space-time to our students immediately on their first day... who cares if they won't have the math to do much with it, or if they'll never be able to do a lab experiment in the physics classroom with sufficient precision to display relativistic effects? We know Newton was "100% wrong," so let's stop teaching our students that ignorant nonsense!
Of course, I'm being sarcastic here. Why do we still teach Newton when we know it's "wrong"? Because it's a good enough approximation for most purposes. Most of the measurements we take in everyday life will never require us to take relativistic effects into account, because most of our everyday measurement devices don't have sufficient precision to even show those effects at normal speeds. In effect, Newton's theories make sufficiently good predictions for everyday purposes, so we still teach them.
That's the point of science -- to make good predictions. We can now teach Newton to do physics at normal speeds in everyday life, but we have caveats that say, "If you're going too fast or if you're in an intense gravitational field or... well, you need a better model." Science is not about debates concerning the ultimate nature of reality; it's a tool.
And we do the exact same thing with the flat-earth model. We use maps all the time, which are generally projected onto a 2-D surface. All 2-D projections of the earth have flaws -- they either screw up distance or distort shapes or area in some way or whatever. And maybe that's an argument to use more globes and computer simulations of globes for students (since many map projections are very misleading)... but we still have little reason to worry about this when we're looking at a map of a small area unless we're firing long-distance projectiles or doing complicated surveying or something.
Science is a tool, and we use a model that has sufficient accuracy for the task. At one time, we didn't have sufficient tools or applications to worry about the curvature of the earth, so for scientific purposes it was irrelevant. The models weren't "100% wrong" -- they were merely sufficient for the necessary accuracy. Same thing with Newton.
Science is not concerned with questions about the ultimate nature of reality -- that's something for philosophy or religion or something. It's not really concerned with whether claims about that ultimate reality are "right" or "wrong" or whatever -- what matters is that we can have a sufficiently predictive mathematical model. For some purposes, the flat earth model was reasonably good... which -- as Azimov pointed out in the GP's link -- is why smart people made use of it for so long.
So 40-50% are unanimous, and those should be easy to predict.
Only if you can predict which decisions will be unanimous with 100% accuracy.
For the remainder, predict party line, and you will get an additional 30-40% right.
Let's assume we can predict the 45% or so of unanimous decisions of the past few years with 100% accuracy (a dubious assumption), so we have the other 55% to deal with. Even if we assume an incredibly simple model where 4 justices are solidly on each "side" and only one justice is consistently a swing vote (empirically not true), we still have to deal with predicting the roughly 1/3 of cases that have 8-1, 7-2, or 6-3 decisions. And in those cases, we'd have to be able to predict which side is the correct "party line" for each "side" (which seems like a dubious idea for cases decided 8-1 or 7-2, so could we really predict which side to even put the votes on?). And even if we exclude the possibility that these latter cases might involve dissenting pairings that cross "party lines" (these happen more often than you'd think -- you might see Scalia joining up with Ginsberg or Breyer or whoever in some cases -- but let's exclude that possibility under your simple "party line" model)... well, using stats for the breakdowns of the court in the past six terms from SCOTUSblog, I get a 37% prediction rate for individual justice votes in the non-unanimous decisions... using the basic idea of your model.
That only gets us up to about 65% accuracy overall... and that's assuming (1) we can identify and predict unanimous decisions with 100% accuracy, (2) we can clearly identify 4 justices who are in each "party" and one clear swing voter, (3) we can determine with perfect accuracy which ruling each "party" will favor in every case, and (4) we never have dissents that cross "party" boundaries.
And all of those assumptions are nowhere near true. Thus, your simplistic model is nowhere near feasible, and even if we could make it work very roughly, I think we'd be very lucky if we predicted much higher than 50% of justices' votes with it.
And you'd have a reasonable argument if we were only predicting affirmations vs. reversals. That's just a couple possible outcomes per case. But the model also predicts the votes of individual justices with over 70% accuracy... tens of thousands of them. Is it the best model ever? Probably not. But the results seem quite significant over such a large number of cases over 50 years... so it's something. You really think it's that easy to predict when a case will be unanimous vs. 8-1 or 7-2 or 6-3, and that you can predict the exact dissenters with 70% accuracy over tens of thousands of cases? It's not that easy.
Getting it 50% right it trivial. Getting a few votes 70% right is probably also easy. Getting 70% accuracy over thousands of votes though is not just like rolling a couple good dice rolls in a row.
Bear in mind, the model only gets it right 70% of the time, and a red-black roulette spin would get it right nearly 50% of the time.
Yes, and if we were talking about a handful or even a few dozen outcomes, 70% accuracy wouldn't be significant. But we're talking about 68,000 individual decisions of justices. If your roulette spin came up red 70% of the time over 68,000 spins, you'd be darn certain it was rigged. Besides, focusing on this one statistic is relatively meaningless -- a model that gets 70% correct could be simplistic and stupid, or it could have a tremendous amount of insight... that one number says nothing.
I wouldn't be surprised if the primary predictive trait used is simply to check the biases of each judge and then assume they will vote along those biases. Assuming conservative judges will vote conservative and liberal judges will vote liberal should give you a pretty good score right off the bat.
Only in a small minority of cases. Contrary to popular belief, most SCOTUS cases aren't highly politicized cases with a clear conservative/liberal divide. Most cases deal with rather technical issues of law which are much less susceptible to this sort of political analysis.
The Roberts Court, for example, has averaged 40-50% unanimous rulings in recent years (last year about 2/3 of rulings were unanimous). So, your idea of "assume conservative vote conservative, liberal vote liberal" would tell you nothing about maybe half of the cases that have come before the court in recent years. (Historically, I believe about 1/3 or so of rulings tend to be unanimous.)
And even with the closely divided cases, you have a problem. Of the 5-4 rulings (which in recent years have been only about 20-30% of the total rulings), about 1/4 to 1/3 of them don't divide up according to supposed "party lines."
In sum, I don't know what factors this model ends up using, but "conservative vs. liberal" is way too simplistic to predict the vast majority of SCOTUS rulings. If you could factor in detailed perspectives on law (which often have little to do with the stereotyped political spectrum), you might have something... but that would require a lot more work, particularly over the 50 years of rulings TFA deals with.
In fact, it looks like very much the same challenge: with most decisions being unanimous reversals, it seems only a small minority of those individual votes are votes to affirm the lower court decision.
Nope -- you just made the same error the GP did: extrapolating a false inference based on one year of data. It's true that last year had 2/3 unanimous rulings, but that was an outlier -- which I was mainly using to make a point about how the 5-4 rulings that make the news are not as common as we think.
In reality, the Roberts court has averaged maybe 40-50% unanimous rulings, but this is an outlier historically too. Over the 50 years TFA deals with, the unanimous rate is more like 30-40%, I think, maybe less.
So, no -- you can't just assume that 2/3 of votes are for unanimous reversals.
So, just as 'return "reverse";' is a 70+% accurate predictor of the overall court ruling in each case, the very same predictor will be somewhere around 70% accurate for each individual justice, for exactly the same reason.
That logic is completely bogus. For example, imagine a scenario where the 70% reversals are unanimous, and the other 30% are all 5-4 rulings not to reverse. That would mean that 83.3% of votes were to reverse, and only 16.7% were to uphold... quite far from your 70% assumption. Or, to be more extreme, imagine a scenario where the 70% reversals are all 5-4, while the affirmations are all 9-0 unanimous. In that case, while 70% of rulings result in reversals, only 31% of votes were actually to reverse.
In sum, most decisions are NOT unanimous reversals, and the number of individual votes to reverse does NOT necessarily have much to do with the number of decisions to reverse.
For that matter, if I took a six-sided die and marked two sides "affirm" and the rest "reverse", I'd have a slightly less accurate predictor giving much less obvious predictions: it will correctly predict about two-thirds of the time, with incorrect predictions split between unexpected reversals and unexpected affirmations.
Wrong again! Assuming a 70% rate for reversals, if you took a 6-sided die and wrote "reverse" on ALL sides, you'd get a 70% accuracy rate for predictions.
But if you wrote reverse on only four sides, you'd get an accurate prediction from your die only about 56% of the time. Your die actually became much less accurate! (Even if you used a 10-sided die and wrote "affirm" on 3 sides, you'd only get 58% accuracy for predictions, much less than you'd get by writing "reverse" on all sides.)
Really -- if you're going to try to critique someone else's models on the basis of flawed stats, take some time to think about your own arguments and understand their numerical results.
70% accuracy is ridiculously low if you can get 73% accuracy *without* taking into consideration the records of each justice or any other kind of details.
First, your link only deals with the past court term. TFA deals with predicting cases back to 1953. Is your 73% stat valid for the entire past half century?
And even if it were, the algorithm is much more granular than that, predicting the way individual justices will vote. From TFA:
69.7% of the Courtâ(TM)s overall affirm and reverse decisions and correctly forecasts 70.9% of the votes of individual justices across 7,700 cases and more than 68,000 justice votes.
Also, before someone objects, please note that (contrary to popular belief) SCOTUS does not always vote 5-4 according to party lines. For instance, your own link notes that 2/3 of last year's opinions were UNANIMOUS. 5-4 decisions usually amount for only 25% of cases or so in recent years, and of those, usually a 1/3 or so don't divide up according to supposed "party line" votes.
So, I agree with you that simply predicting reverse/affirm at 70% accuracy may be easy, but predicting 68000 individual justice votes with similar accuracy might be a significantly greater challenge.
I would not have studied stats by choice, either. I'm damn glad I passed, but I core dumped 99.99% of it after passing. I haven't had a need for it since, so it was a complete waste of time and money.
"Complete waste"? I assume you at least retain some of the basic concepts, like knowing the difference between a mean and median, understanding the kind of stuff that goes into measuring whether something is significant, calculating a trend, etc. (even if you don't remember the specific methodologies for doing it). If the course was taught well, you presumably came away with at least some idea of how statistics and graphs can be misinterpreted and/or deliberately used to manipulate people -- which (to my mind) is an incredibly important life skill if you just want to read the newspaper.
Most people forget 90% or more of the details of most courses they take. (And usually they only retain that lost information if they are forced to use it again soon and frequently.) But that does mean that exposure to the concepts of that course can't have long-term effects on how you think in general.
I also wouldn't have studied much math, either, while in college. That was hammered into me, though, and it has proved itself to be completely useless to me as a software developer.
Once again -- part of the point is the larger impact on your thought process. Solving math problems often teaches a structured well-reasoned approach to problem-solving in general. If you're a developer, chances are that sort of thing comes naturally to you anyway, but for many people it doesn't.
My point is that my structured University degree was almost entirely worthless from a practical perspective. Anything of any value was learned on an as-needed basis.
You need to actually learn how to learn by yourself. You may be one of the minority of people who naturally seemed to be able to self-teach. (I am too.) But having spent many years teaching at various levels, I can tell you for certain that most people do NOT have good natural abilities for teaching themselves new skills in a rigorous fashion. At some point, they need to figure out how to do that, and being exposed to a variety of different types of thinking in different types of college courses is one way to pick up on the kinds of concepts needed to approach a broad variety of novel situations on your own... effectively, you learn how to deal with new material by first being guided through it in different areas. (I'm not at all arguing that various college courses are always the BEST way at doing that, but it's one of the effects.)
I kind of think about it like some of my relatives who grew up eating some small limited palate of relatively bland food -- relatively unseasoned meat and potatoes (or rice or whatever) every day for dinner. There's nothing inherently wrong with that, but they look at me as if I'm insane when I talk about some great new ethnic food I tried somewhere recently.
The point is that I too grew up in a household eating a pretty limited selection of food. But when I got to college, suddenly I was in a bigger city, and I found myself being dragged around to an Indian place or a Chinese place of a sushi place, and after a few years of that, I've developed a much broader appreciation of the possibilities of food. You could hand me a fridge stocked with random ingredients from the grocery store, and I can probably figure out some tasty things to make with it.
Now, is it possible to live only on a limited diet without much variety? Sure. And I'll admit that many of the things I still cook today on an everyday basis relate back to the flavor profiles of food when I grew up, maybe modified with a few spices or something. But being exposed to a lot of new things fundamentally changed me -- some of the new food I ate in college was boring, some I tasted horrible, some was way too spicy, and some I didn't like at first but came
That same data can also read 'Men, more willing to put up with pain' or 'Men, more curious and want to know what they may experience'
Perhaps the one thing more common than flawed social science experiments is Slashdot commenters who think they can find flaws but haven't actually read the paper or thought about it.
This "same data" really CAN'T be "read" that way: the researchers specifically asked the subjects to experience the shock FIRST (so we can't assume they were just curious). And that stage of the study specifically excluded those who weren't seriously offended by the shock (they only let people continue if they said they'd actually pay money not to be shocked again), so it's difficult to conclude that these guys were simply "more likely to put up with pain" since they also were specifically chosen for disliking it.
Now, there were some serious flaws with this study, and perhaps the data could be interpreted differently. But if we're going to sit around and be "back-seat researchers" critiquing what others have done, let's at least pay attention to what they did, rather than immediately assuming they are idiots and didn't try to control for some of the issues we wonder about.
Yes, you can. Even under our stupid rules (most of which violate the constitution), you can at least shout "Fire!" if there is a fire. If you falsely shout it and it causes a panic, then you can be punished. What you said was simply wrong.
If you want to really be a pedantic idiot, you *CAN* shout "Fire" if there is NOT a fire as well, even "under our stupid rules," assuming you have functioning vocal cords, are conscious and breathing, etc. The repercussions will just be different.
Seriously, you're being an ass here. The GP wasn't "simply wrong," he was giving a standard legal example that has all sorts of assumed IMPLIED conditions that are part of the standard scenario being invoked (no fire, functioning vocal cords, speaker is conscious, etc.). What GP meant was perfectly clear without your commentary. Language always includes lots of implied assumptions.
People who have enough of a passion for books to become professionals in the industry often do not understand just how little they mean to most of their customers, when it really comes down to it. Books may not be fungible by author, but entertainment overall is.
The question is -- why do you think Amazon needs to force these prices, then? If publishers are charging too much, people won't buy, and the publishers go out of business, making room for those with better pricing.
On the other hand, what if customers are willing to pay the extra $5 or $10 or $50 for a particular book? If the publisher is okay making money at the prices it selects, why do we need Amazon to intervene in the free market?
Suppose you were trying to find a new job as a programmer. You go to a headhunter. You say you want at least $50/hour. The headhunter says, "Sorry, you can only charge $10/hour. No programmer is worth more than that. We did surveys and discovered that companies would ship labor to India and pay $10/hour for random programmers there, rather than pay more."
You object, and say that you want the headhunter to look for jobs on your terms. You have 20 years of experience, managed large project teams, and are personally responsible for the core code in some popular mathematical analysis package. Also, you don't live in a small village in India, you live in the middle of Manhattan and need a higher salary to live. "Doesn't matter," comes the reply, "No programmer is worth more than $10/hour."
Now imagine that headhunter is responsible for finding most people in the world their jobs. It doesn't matter who you are... but you're not allowed to charge more than $10/hour. It doesn't matter if your training and education would require you to make at least $20/hour or $50/hour or whatever to recoup those costs over a lifetime... it doesn't matter if you're actually better and the companies might be willing to pay $75/hour for you, if they could only find you. All that matter is the headhunter with the database monopoly on candidates says you can't get a salary of more than $10/hour.
You really think that system would lead to better quality work or give incentive for high quality work? You really think we should let the headhunter decide how you're allowed to market yourself? If you ask too much, you simply won't get a job. For books, why not let publishers choose? If they overcharge, the market will fix it... I can't understand why people want to defend Amazon's greedy monopolistic bullying.
There is no reason that any of these services need to be, or should be, bundled with "publishing". There are plenty of people offering these services, either per-page, or for an hourly rate. You can find them on any Freelancer website.
Do these NEED to be bundled? No. SHOULD they be? I don't know. That depends on the situation.
What I can tell you is that I care about good editing, consistent formatting, good writing, and an overall decent job in making a book. There may be loads of qualified people out there who can do these things as freelancers, but how do I know if the book I'm looking at to buy was edited by these qualified people, or by the author himself, who did a crappy job, or something in between?
Today, if I purchase a book from any number of reputable presses, I know exactly what to expect for these standards. Further, I know that many of these presses only accept quality vetted monographs for publication in the first place. I also know that the vast majority of books I want to buy (mostly specialized "academic" books) require a higher standard of care and expertise than average... and they may only sell a few thousand or even a few hundred copies, so they'll never even get put together for publication at a price of $10.
You want to live in a world without all that stuff? Fine. Let your books be done the way you want. But why does that justify you in saying it's okay for Amazon to bully publishers so it's no longer possible for anyone to make the kind of books I want? Obviously in many cases publishers are skimming money off the top. In the case of books I buy, the publisher often are losing money even when they charge $50 or more per book. (And yes, I know some of the people who run the backend of academic presses, so I'm not making this up.)
Why shouldn't someone who produces a product be able to decide its price? If we really want the market to be free and resolve unnecessary inefficiencies, then let customers decide, not Amazon. If customers only buy the $10 crap books from no-name press and self-publications, the publishers will naturally go out of business. If, on the other hand, customers are willing to pay $15 or $20 or $50 for a book -- for whatever reason -- why should Amazon be able to say the publisher can't charge that?
Why do you Americans put up with this awful service? Why is it legal for medical providers to behave in this way?
The answers to all your questions are complicated, because to understand why we have this completely screwed up system, you need to understand the entire history of health insurance in the U.S. for the past hundred years. Very few people know that story, and I myself didn't until a few years ago. But the short answer is that the original system had good intentions, but problems arose, so they put a legal "band-aid" on the problem, which led to other issues, so they put another "band-aid" on, and so on for decades. And in the past couple decades, costs have gone up exponentially, while insurance plans have become increasingly complicated. Almost all of these ideas were originally implemented with good intentions, but it has resulted in a truly dysfunctional system now.
I once went to a US hospital, I asked how much would it cost, they wouldn't tell me. I asked will it in the range of $100, or $1000, or $10,000 still wouldn't tell me.
How is any sane person meant to go into a contract without actually knowing even an approximate price.
THIS. With all the complaints about health care costs and clarity about insurance plans, the most fair and straightforward thing they could do is force doctors to give an estimate, like you'd get from any mechanic or painter or tradesman. Obviously this wouldn't quite be possible for complex procedures where quick decisions to do additional things are needed. But a general estimate or range, or maybe a list of "potentially necessary add-ons during complications" would make things so much clearer.
But that kind of reform would never pass, and not just because of the complexity -- doing this would reveal the true cost of care, it would show the gross disparities among charges at different hospitals, and it would make clear that all the "discounts" granted large insurers is just some weird kind of game where hospitals nominally charge often twice or three times as much as they actually expect to get paid, and the amounts are "adjusted" down by the insurance companies.
Healthcare costs are spiralling out of control in the US partly because we have a system where the true cost is hardly ever seen or paid by anyone, making it impossible for consumers to make choices or comparison shop in ways that could actually improve care and make the whole system more efficient.
We'll look back on Citizens United approximately the same way we now look back on Brown v Board of Education. As the product of a shameful period in our history.
I think you mean Plessy v. Ferguson, not Brown in your analogy, unless you mean that DEsegregation is "a product of a shameful period in our history."
It's not true. Research it online if you don't believe me, or just look at your credit report. Creditors report monthly balance and payment information, NOT carryover. So credit agencies receive no info on carryover. As long as you're showing a balance on your statement each month, it doesn't matter if you pay it off completely.
His loan officer told him his credit score would reflect more positively if he used only about 60% of his available credit line each month, and left 15 or 20 dollars per month in carryover balance, instead of paying off the entire balance each month.
Truth or bullshit?
I'm going to have to call BS on this one (speaking as someone with a credit score over 800 for quite a few years); I've never carried a balance on a credit card to get there.
First off, 60% credit utilization is too high. I haven't looked up the numbers recently, but there are people out there who game the system and have figured out near optimal values. The stats I remember seeing were more like no more than 25% of your credit line, and no more than 50% of the credit line on a given credit card. Don't quote me on those figures -- do your own research, but 60% sounds quite high. (Too high and you HURT your score.)
As for carrying a balance, that's completely bogus as long as the debt shows up on a statement. Look at an actual credit report -- all it shows are statement balances and payments. Carry over from month to month is NOT reported to credit agencies, so I don't know why people here are saying you should carry a balance.
It is critical that you do wait for the debt to show up on a statement, though. But you can then pay it off in full.
This loan officer is just trying to make a profit for the bank.
If you're really eager to pay interest to build up your score faster, do it sensibly and take out a small installment loan at a lower rate of interest than a credit card, and make regular payments for a while. Regular payments on an installment plan are much better to show your ability to handle a car loan, so you may qualify for lower rates.
But you can also just keep paying the credit cards in full every month... the score will inch upward over time, and once you take out the first car loan and make regular payments for a year or two, the score will go through the roof. If it were me, I'd skip the fancy expensive car for the first loan, and take out a more modest loan for a cheaper car... then in a couple years, the credit score will be high enough to get the best rates for a better car. You'll save a LOT of money in interest in the long run.
So I should have a much higher credit rating than someone who is constantly paying with credit cards in my opinion.
Not necessarily. There's a reason it's called a "credit" score, not a "cash" score. You need to be able to demonstrate that you can handle credit responsibly. Believe it or not, MOST people who pay cash all the time are forced to, because they don't have reliable enough income or reliable spending methods, and no one would give them a credit card, even if they applied (or certainly not a good one).
So, you need to prove to banks who might lend you money that IF you go into debt (or even have the possibility of going into debt, like having credit lines you don't necessarily use) that you will make regular payments and be able to handle the debt. Frankly, I'd view you as a risk too if you had no payment history. It's great that you pay in cash, but lots of other people do who aren't as responsible with you and would not be a good loan risk.
So get one. Apply for a card, buy some stuff you were planning to buy anyway, pay it off... costs you NOTHING. And you get a higher score on the credit rating game, for when you need it.
Yep -- this isn't rocket science. Get a credit card, use it to buy stuff, wait for the statement, and pay off immediately. You will pay no interest, but since you received a statement with a balance, your report will show records of credit utilization and regular payments. You might need to apply for a crappy card at first if you really have NO history, but just always pay it off every month. In a couple years, you will even be able to move up to a rewards card and earn money off of your credit card, all while paying no interest AND establishing a credit history.
So it's a big f-up, but I can totally understand how and why it happened.
Yeah, I suppose. Except for the part where you had a card declined, and you trusted the customer to provide authorization for the transaction.
I completely get the situation you're talking about -- i.e., where Apple is flagged as an "unusual large transaction," and the customer has to call their bank to clear it. But, as you noted, in that case you can often re-run the card in a few minutes and all is fine. At no point are you trusting the customer's word on ANYTHING -- from your perspective, the card didn't work, but they did some magic dance or sprinkled magic dust, and now the card does work... thus the transaction is authorized.
But here you're talking about a cashier denying a transaction and then manually authorizing it based on what a customer told them. This has a half-dozen red flags all over it. If you were this cashier, would you accept some other lame excuse? "My dog ate my checkbook, so I had to do a special money order thing-o, which didn't show up on my credit statement yet, so they froze everything, but I talked to the bank this morning, and they said it was all honky-dory, so please won't you accept my transaction?" If you wouldn't accept this load of crap from a customer, why would you trust that they called their bank and obtained "authorization"?
And if you'll accept that, I have a set of speakers in my van that I can sell you for 90% off retail. I have a catalog to show you what the "real price" is [wink, wink]. But I need cash now. Honest... I can even show you a nearby ATM where you can get some....
Netbooks are dead, but Ultrabooks are much better anyway
Meh -- the nomenclature is pretty much meaningless. I bought an "ultraportable" about 7 years ago, a "netbook" about 4 years ago, and a "ultrabook" last year. They all pretty much were smaller-than-usual laptops, they were all underpowered compared to standard size laptops when I bought them, and they all weigh pretty much the same thing. The only thing that has changed over time is that the prices have gone down, the value has gone up, and they're generally thinner (usually with slightly large screens). But they're basically the same market. Anyone declaring that "netbooks are dead" is just buying into a marketing ploy because everyone kept saying "netbooks are dead" in 2012. So now they're basically the same, just fewer of the ones with really tiny screens... but we call them "ultrabooks" because it sounds snazzier.
The concept is called planned obsolescence , and it has existed for as long as people have been buying things.
It may have existed for millennia, but until the past few decades it was commonly perceived as "cheating" someone out of money. The assumption 50 years ago was pretty much that anything you bought could and should be repaired, until so many parts fail that it doesn't make sense repair it anymore. I still own and use my mother's kitchen stand mixer, which is nearly 50 years old. I could say the same thing for a number of things that have been passed down to me and still work even though they were manufactured a couple generations ago. My grandmothers used to repair clothing rather than simply buying something new when a hole appeared.
Nowadays, we just expect that most things we buy will fall apart or wear out in a few years, but this is a radical departure from what the world was like 50 years ago or more.
The problem is that this is not just humans versus corporations/machine, this is human rights vs human rights. Free Speech Vs the Right to be Forgotten, why does the latter, which is no where codified, larger then the first which has been for centuries?
It isn't "larger." We've always accepted there must be some limits on free speech. In the U.S., you can't incite people to riot lawlessly, for example. In much of the EU, there are stronger restrictions, like not being able to publicly insult someone else's reputation (e.g. in Germany), an idea that goes back quite some time. (Even in the US, it used to be justification for a duel, a practice which I believe had its roots in medieval Germanic trial practices which could involve combat.)
This seemingly novel "right to be forgotten" is simply an extension of much older law like this in the EU, which prevented punishment for offenses after time has been served. (Ever read Les Miserables, for example, where Jean Valjean is supposed to go about for the rest of his life carrying a yellow card branding him as a convict for stealing a loaf of bread? That kind of crap was real, and reforms ere implemented to allow convicts to move on after time was served and they were "rehabilitated" -- they were essentially granted the right to have their past forgotten.)
So this isn't a new right, and it has been codified in various ways before. But even if it were, rights have to evolve with technology. Before the printing press, there was no reason for "freedom of the press," but after a century of governments trying to suppress it and control it, a movement to assert this right began in earnest in the 1600s, which we now accept to be a bedrock principle of law. But the right not to be publicly defamed is much older than that, so how do we adjudicate between these in the present case with Google?
I'm not saying that the EU ruling is actually workable right now, but your assertion that this is entirely new legal territory is demonstrably false.
You should do things considering that it may get put out there. Why should I not be able to know that someone I may be hiring makes bad decisions just because they dont want me to know they did something stupid?
First, because we've fought wars over the right to live our private lives without government or others tracking everything we do.
But if you need a stronger justification: because something may actually be false information, or it may present information in a misleading way. Lots of people are charged or arrested or whatever everyday and ultimately released because the allegations turned out to be false. But all those newspaper stories which are technically okay because they say "alleged" never go away, and since dropping charges rarely sells news as well as the initial outrage, newspapers and media often never even bother reporting that charged or were dropped (or never even filed) or the person was acquitted. Even if the newspaper prints something about that in a blurb on page 20, is your employer going to go through hundred of Google hits to find that, or just read the headline in the top links that you were accused of child abuse or whatever? (And by the way, just for one example, if you think false accusations of child abuse or neglect are rare, look up the stats -- child protection services in the U.S. removes something like 100,000 kids per year for allegations that ultimately turn out to be completely unsubstantiated... and that's not even counting the questionable cases.)
Your latter argument is poor, as there are already laws that work well at getting rid of libel/slander...
The standard for libel or slander is quite high in the U.S., particularly against a news media source. (It varies in other countries.) You basically need to show that a news source acted with "reckless disregard" for the truth, and often a few "alleged" adjectives serves as sufficient protection.
Vitamin B12 is only provided in animal derived proteins
By definition there is no vegetarian or vegan diet that is not deficient in B12.
By definition, the difference between a vegan and a vegetarian is that a vegetarian will consume animal derived products (including proteins), just not animals themselves. Hence your statement is correct for vegans, false for vegetarians.
Absolutely. Have a bad day, make one wrong judgment call, and see your livelihood vanish. Good luck getting another job.
Fired? Maybe not, unless this was a pattern of bad behavior. Suspended for a week or two? Yes, absolutely.
Where do you work, I wonder, that you believe people who have flaws, like we all do, should be treated like used tissues?
Just my opinion, but this goes beyond a minor "flaw" or a slight error in judgment. The guy had already shown his willingness to publicize his dissatisfaction by tweeting about a minor inconvenience, and this employee provided him with a much worse story to tell. Any person with common sense should have seen this as the potential for some seriously bad publicity.
There were many ways to handle this and defray the damage from the initial tweet, from a sincere apology and perhaps offer for free future tickets or upgrade (if the employee wanted to use kindness) or a response tweet thanking the customer for his feedback and also thanking all the other customers for following the rules (if the employee wanted to be passive aggressive but still make a point).
Escalating a minor disagreement with a customer into a public fight is just not a good idea, and employees who can't avoid that do deserve punishment. Customers can be jerks sometimes. Employees have a corporate image to uphold, though, and they need to aspire to a higher standard -- they're getting paid to be there. The customer was not.
Slashdot Mirror
It isnt nearly right, its completely wrong and only human ignorance would say it was 'nearly right'
No it was very much 100% wrong, nearly zero is not zero.
I suppose you're also absolutely opposed to teaching Newtonian mechanics to intro physics students, too -- right? I mean, after all, we now know it "was very much 100% wrong." Sure, relativistic effects are basically irrelevant at normal speeds, but "nearly zero is not zero." So, we need to revamp our physics curriculum and introduce full-blown Einsteinian space-time to our students immediately on their first day... who cares if they won't have the math to do much with it, or if they'll never be able to do a lab experiment in the physics classroom with sufficient precision to display relativistic effects? We know Newton was "100% wrong," so let's stop teaching our students that ignorant nonsense!
Of course, I'm being sarcastic here. Why do we still teach Newton when we know it's "wrong"? Because it's a good enough approximation for most purposes. Most of the measurements we take in everyday life will never require us to take relativistic effects into account, because most of our everyday measurement devices don't have sufficient precision to even show those effects at normal speeds. In effect, Newton's theories make sufficiently good predictions for everyday purposes, so we still teach them.
That's the point of science -- to make good predictions. We can now teach Newton to do physics at normal speeds in everyday life, but we have caveats that say, "If you're going too fast or if you're in an intense gravitational field or... well, you need a better model." Science is not about debates concerning the ultimate nature of reality; it's a tool.
And we do the exact same thing with the flat-earth model. We use maps all the time, which are generally projected onto a 2-D surface. All 2-D projections of the earth have flaws -- they either screw up distance or distort shapes or area in some way or whatever. And maybe that's an argument to use more globes and computer simulations of globes for students (since many map projections are very misleading)... but we still have little reason to worry about this when we're looking at a map of a small area unless we're firing long-distance projectiles or doing complicated surveying or something.
Science is a tool, and we use a model that has sufficient accuracy for the task. At one time, we didn't have sufficient tools or applications to worry about the curvature of the earth, so for scientific purposes it was irrelevant. The models weren't "100% wrong" -- they were merely sufficient for the necessary accuracy. Same thing with Newton.
Science is not concerned with questions about the ultimate nature of reality -- that's something for philosophy or religion or something. It's not really concerned with whether claims about that ultimate reality are "right" or "wrong" or whatever -- what matters is that we can have a sufficiently predictive mathematical model. For some purposes, the flat earth model was reasonably good... which -- as Azimov pointed out in the GP's link -- is why smart people made use of it for so long.
Just ran some numbers, since I was curious
So 40-50% are unanimous, and those should be easy to predict.
Only if you can predict which decisions will be unanimous with 100% accuracy.
For the remainder, predict party line, and you will get an additional 30-40% right.
Let's assume we can predict the 45% or so of unanimous decisions of the past few years with 100% accuracy (a dubious assumption), so we have the other 55% to deal with. Even if we assume an incredibly simple model where 4 justices are solidly on each "side" and only one justice is consistently a swing vote (empirically not true), we still have to deal with predicting the roughly 1/3 of cases that have 8-1, 7-2, or 6-3 decisions. And in those cases, we'd have to be able to predict which side is the correct "party line" for each "side" (which seems like a dubious idea for cases decided 8-1 or 7-2, so could we really predict which side to even put the votes on?). And even if we exclude the possibility that these latter cases might involve dissenting pairings that cross "party lines" (these happen more often than you'd think -- you might see Scalia joining up with Ginsberg or Breyer or whoever in some cases -- but let's exclude that possibility under your simple "party line" model)... well, using stats for the breakdowns of the court in the past six terms from SCOTUSblog, I get a 37% prediction rate for individual justice votes in the non-unanimous decisions... using the basic idea of your model.
That only gets us up to about 65% accuracy overall... and that's assuming (1) we can identify and predict unanimous decisions with 100% accuracy, (2) we can clearly identify 4 justices who are in each "party" and one clear swing voter, (3) we can determine with perfect accuracy which ruling each "party" will favor in every case, and (4) we never have dissents that cross "party" boundaries.
And all of those assumptions are nowhere near true. Thus, your simplistic model is nowhere near feasible, and even if we could make it work very roughly, I think we'd be very lucky if we predicted much higher than 50% of justices' votes with it.
Getting it 50% right it trivial. Getting a few votes 70% right is probably also easy. Getting 70% accuracy over thousands of votes though is not just like rolling a couple good dice rolls in a row.
Bear in mind, the model only gets it right 70% of the time, and a red-black roulette spin would get it right nearly 50% of the time.
Yes, and if we were talking about a handful or even a few dozen outcomes, 70% accuracy wouldn't be significant. But we're talking about 68,000 individual decisions of justices. If your roulette spin came up red 70% of the time over 68,000 spins, you'd be darn certain it was rigged. Besides, focusing on this one statistic is relatively meaningless -- a model that gets 70% correct could be simplistic and stupid, or it could have a tremendous amount of insight... that one number says nothing.
I wouldn't be surprised if the primary predictive trait used is simply to check the biases of each judge and then assume they will vote along those biases. Assuming conservative judges will vote conservative and liberal judges will vote liberal should give you a pretty good score right off the bat.
Only in a small minority of cases. Contrary to popular belief, most SCOTUS cases aren't highly politicized cases with a clear conservative/liberal divide. Most cases deal with rather technical issues of law which are much less susceptible to this sort of political analysis.
The Roberts Court, for example, has averaged 40-50% unanimous rulings in recent years (last year about 2/3 of rulings were unanimous). So, your idea of "assume conservative vote conservative, liberal vote liberal" would tell you nothing about maybe half of the cases that have come before the court in recent years. (Historically, I believe about 1/3 or so of rulings tend to be unanimous.)
And even with the closely divided cases, you have a problem. Of the 5-4 rulings (which in recent years have been only about 20-30% of the total rulings), about 1/4 to 1/3 of them don't divide up according to supposed "party lines."
In sum, I don't know what factors this model ends up using, but "conservative vs. liberal" is way too simplistic to predict the vast majority of SCOTUS rulings. If you could factor in detailed perspectives on law (which often have little to do with the stereotyped political spectrum), you might have something... but that would require a lot more work, particularly over the 50 years of rulings TFA deals with.
In fact, it looks like very much the same challenge: with most decisions being unanimous reversals, it seems only a small minority of those individual votes are votes to affirm the lower court decision.
Nope -- you just made the same error the GP did: extrapolating a false inference based on one year of data. It's true that last year had 2/3 unanimous rulings, but that was an outlier -- which I was mainly using to make a point about how the 5-4 rulings that make the news are not as common as we think.
In reality, the Roberts court has averaged maybe 40-50% unanimous rulings, but this is an outlier historically too. Over the 50 years TFA deals with, the unanimous rate is more like 30-40%, I think, maybe less.
So, no -- you can't just assume that 2/3 of votes are for unanimous reversals.
So, just as 'return "reverse";' is a 70+% accurate predictor of the overall court ruling in each case, the very same predictor will be somewhere around 70% accurate for each individual justice, for exactly the same reason.
That logic is completely bogus. For example, imagine a scenario where the 70% reversals are unanimous, and the other 30% are all 5-4 rulings not to reverse. That would mean that 83.3% of votes were to reverse, and only 16.7% were to uphold... quite far from your 70% assumption. Or, to be more extreme, imagine a scenario where the 70% reversals are all 5-4, while the affirmations are all 9-0 unanimous. In that case, while 70% of rulings result in reversals, only 31% of votes were actually to reverse.
In sum, most decisions are NOT unanimous reversals, and the number of individual votes to reverse does NOT necessarily have much to do with the number of decisions to reverse.
For that matter, if I took a six-sided die and marked two sides "affirm" and the rest "reverse", I'd have a slightly less accurate predictor giving much less obvious predictions: it will correctly predict about two-thirds of the time, with incorrect predictions split between unexpected reversals and unexpected affirmations.
Wrong again! Assuming a 70% rate for reversals, if you took a 6-sided die and wrote "reverse" on ALL sides, you'd get a 70% accuracy rate for predictions.
But if you wrote reverse on only four sides, you'd get an accurate prediction from your die only about 56% of the time. Your die actually became much less accurate! (Even if you used a 10-sided die and wrote "affirm" on 3 sides, you'd only get 58% accuracy for predictions, much less than you'd get by writing "reverse" on all sides.)
Really -- if you're going to try to critique someone else's models on the basis of flawed stats, take some time to think about your own arguments and understand their numerical results.
Sorry -- accidentally hit submit early. Obviously the main quote from TFA is only one sentence... the rest is my commentary.
70% accuracy is ridiculously low if you can get 73% accuracy *without* taking into consideration the records of each justice or any other kind of details.
First, your link only deals with the past court term. TFA deals with predicting cases back to 1953. Is your 73% stat valid for the entire past half century?
And even if it were, the algorithm is much more granular than that, predicting the way individual justices will vote. From TFA:
69.7% of the Courtâ(TM)s overall affirm and reverse decisions and correctly forecasts 70.9% of the votes of individual justices across 7,700 cases and more than 68,000 justice votes. Also, before someone objects, please note that (contrary to popular belief) SCOTUS does not always vote 5-4 according to party lines. For instance, your own link notes that 2/3 of last year's opinions were UNANIMOUS. 5-4 decisions usually amount for only 25% of cases or so in recent years, and of those, usually a 1/3 or so don't divide up according to supposed "party line" votes.
So, I agree with you that simply predicting reverse/affirm at 70% accuracy may be easy, but predicting 68000 individual justice votes with similar accuracy might be a significantly greater challenge.
I would not have studied stats by choice, either. I'm damn glad I passed, but I core dumped 99.99% of it after passing. I haven't had a need for it since, so it was a complete waste of time and money.
"Complete waste"? I assume you at least retain some of the basic concepts, like knowing the difference between a mean and median, understanding the kind of stuff that goes into measuring whether something is significant, calculating a trend, etc. (even if you don't remember the specific methodologies for doing it). If the course was taught well, you presumably came away with at least some idea of how statistics and graphs can be misinterpreted and/or deliberately used to manipulate people -- which (to my mind) is an incredibly important life skill if you just want to read the newspaper.
Most people forget 90% or more of the details of most courses they take. (And usually they only retain that lost information if they are forced to use it again soon and frequently.) But that does mean that exposure to the concepts of that course can't have long-term effects on how you think in general.
I also wouldn't have studied much math, either, while in college. That was hammered into me, though, and it has proved itself to be completely useless to me as a software developer.
Once again -- part of the point is the larger impact on your thought process. Solving math problems often teaches a structured well-reasoned approach to problem-solving in general. If you're a developer, chances are that sort of thing comes naturally to you anyway, but for many people it doesn't.
My point is that my structured University degree was almost entirely worthless from a practical perspective. Anything of any value was learned on an as-needed basis.
You need to actually learn how to learn by yourself. You may be one of the minority of people who naturally seemed to be able to self-teach. (I am too.) But having spent many years teaching at various levels, I can tell you for certain that most people do NOT have good natural abilities for teaching themselves new skills in a rigorous fashion. At some point, they need to figure out how to do that, and being exposed to a variety of different types of thinking in different types of college courses is one way to pick up on the kinds of concepts needed to approach a broad variety of novel situations on your own... effectively, you learn how to deal with new material by first being guided through it in different areas. (I'm not at all arguing that various college courses are always the BEST way at doing that, but it's one of the effects.)
I kind of think about it like some of my relatives who grew up eating some small limited palate of relatively bland food -- relatively unseasoned meat and potatoes (or rice or whatever) every day for dinner. There's nothing inherently wrong with that, but they look at me as if I'm insane when I talk about some great new ethnic food I tried somewhere recently.
The point is that I too grew up in a household eating a pretty limited selection of food. But when I got to college, suddenly I was in a bigger city, and I found myself being dragged around to an Indian place or a Chinese place of a sushi place, and after a few years of that, I've developed a much broader appreciation of the possibilities of food. You could hand me a fridge stocked with random ingredients from the grocery store, and I can probably figure out some tasty things to make with it.
Now, is it possible to live only on a limited diet without much variety? Sure. And I'll admit that many of the things I still cook today on an everyday basis relate back to the flavor profiles of food when I grew up, maybe modified with a few spices or something. But being exposed to a lot of new things fundamentally changed me -- some of the new food I ate in college was boring, some I tasted horrible, some was way too spicy, and some I didn't like at first but came
Yup, like the recent one about men not being able to 'be alone with their own thouhgs' [washingtonpost.com]..
Yeah, note it was already discussed here too.
That same data can also read 'Men, more willing to put up with pain' or 'Men, more curious and want to know what they may experience'
Perhaps the one thing more common than flawed social science experiments is Slashdot commenters who think they can find flaws but haven't actually read the paper or thought about it.
This "same data" really CAN'T be "read" that way: the researchers specifically asked the subjects to experience the shock FIRST (so we can't assume they were just curious). And that stage of the study specifically excluded those who weren't seriously offended by the shock (they only let people continue if they said they'd actually pay money not to be shocked again), so it's difficult to conclude that these guys were simply "more likely to put up with pain" since they also were specifically chosen for disliking it.
Now, there were some serious flaws with this study, and perhaps the data could be interpreted differently. But if we're going to sit around and be "back-seat researchers" critiquing what others have done, let's at least pay attention to what they did, rather than immediately assuming they are idiots and didn't try to control for some of the issues we wonder about.
Yes, you can. Even under our stupid rules (most of which violate the constitution), you can at least shout "Fire!" if there is a fire. If you falsely shout it and it causes a panic, then you can be punished. What you said was simply wrong.
If you want to really be a pedantic idiot, you *CAN* shout "Fire" if there is NOT a fire as well, even "under our stupid rules," assuming you have functioning vocal cords, are conscious and breathing, etc. The repercussions will just be different.
Seriously, you're being an ass here. The GP wasn't "simply wrong," he was giving a standard legal example that has all sorts of assumed IMPLIED conditions that are part of the standard scenario being invoked (no fire, functioning vocal cords, speaker is conscious, etc.). What GP meant was perfectly clear without your commentary. Language always includes lots of implied assumptions.
People who have enough of a passion for books to become professionals in the industry often do not understand just how little they mean to most of their customers, when it really comes down to it. Books may not be fungible by author, but entertainment overall is.
The question is -- why do you think Amazon needs to force these prices, then? If publishers are charging too much, people won't buy, and the publishers go out of business, making room for those with better pricing.
On the other hand, what if customers are willing to pay the extra $5 or $10 or $50 for a particular book? If the publisher is okay making money at the prices it selects, why do we need Amazon to intervene in the free market?
Suppose you were trying to find a new job as a programmer. You go to a headhunter. You say you want at least $50/hour. The headhunter says, "Sorry, you can only charge $10/hour. No programmer is worth more than that. We did surveys and discovered that companies would ship labor to India and pay $10/hour for random programmers there, rather than pay more."
You object, and say that you want the headhunter to look for jobs on your terms. You have 20 years of experience, managed large project teams, and are personally responsible for the core code in some popular mathematical analysis package. Also, you don't live in a small village in India, you live in the middle of Manhattan and need a higher salary to live. "Doesn't matter," comes the reply, "No programmer is worth more than $10/hour."
Now imagine that headhunter is responsible for finding most people in the world their jobs. It doesn't matter who you are... but you're not allowed to charge more than $10/hour. It doesn't matter if your training and education would require you to make at least $20/hour or $50/hour or whatever to recoup those costs over a lifetime... it doesn't matter if you're actually better and the companies might be willing to pay $75/hour for you, if they could only find you. All that matter is the headhunter with the database monopoly on candidates says you can't get a salary of more than $10/hour.
You really think that system would lead to better quality work or give incentive for high quality work? You really think we should let the headhunter decide how you're allowed to market yourself? If you ask too much, you simply won't get a job. For books, why not let publishers choose? If they overcharge, the market will fix it... I can't understand why people want to defend Amazon's greedy monopolistic bullying.
There is no reason that any of these services need to be, or should be, bundled with "publishing". There are plenty of people offering these services, either per-page, or for an hourly rate. You can find them on any Freelancer website.
Do these NEED to be bundled? No. SHOULD they be? I don't know. That depends on the situation. What I can tell you is that I care about good editing, consistent formatting, good writing, and an overall decent job in making a book. There may be loads of qualified people out there who can do these things as freelancers, but how do I know if the book I'm looking at to buy was edited by these qualified people, or by the author himself, who did a crappy job, or something in between?
Today, if I purchase a book from any number of reputable presses, I know exactly what to expect for these standards. Further, I know that many of these presses only accept quality vetted monographs for publication in the first place. I also know that the vast majority of books I want to buy (mostly specialized "academic" books) require a higher standard of care and expertise than average... and they may only sell a few thousand or even a few hundred copies, so they'll never even get put together for publication at a price of $10.
You want to live in a world without all that stuff? Fine. Let your books be done the way you want. But why does that justify you in saying it's okay for Amazon to bully publishers so it's no longer possible for anyone to make the kind of books I want? Obviously in many cases publishers are skimming money off the top. In the case of books I buy, the publisher often are losing money even when they charge $50 or more per book. (And yes, I know some of the people who run the backend of academic presses, so I'm not making this up.)
Why shouldn't someone who produces a product be able to decide its price? If we really want the market to be free and resolve unnecessary inefficiencies, then let customers decide, not Amazon. If customers only buy the $10 crap books from no-name press and self-publications, the publishers will naturally go out of business. If, on the other hand, customers are willing to pay $15 or $20 or $50 for a book -- for whatever reason -- why should Amazon be able to say the publisher can't charge that?
Why do you Americans put up with this awful service? Why is it legal for medical providers to behave in this way?
The answers to all your questions are complicated, because to understand why we have this completely screwed up system, you need to understand the entire history of health insurance in the U.S. for the past hundred years. Very few people know that story, and I myself didn't until a few years ago. But the short answer is that the original system had good intentions, but problems arose, so they put a legal "band-aid" on the problem, which led to other issues, so they put another "band-aid" on, and so on for decades. And in the past couple decades, costs have gone up exponentially, while insurance plans have become increasingly complicated. Almost all of these ideas were originally implemented with good intentions, but it has resulted in a truly dysfunctional system now.
I once went to a US hospital, I asked how much would it cost, they wouldn't tell me. I asked will it in the range of $100, or $1000, or $10,000 still wouldn't tell me.
How is any sane person meant to go into a contract without actually knowing even an approximate price.
THIS. With all the complaints about health care costs and clarity about insurance plans, the most fair and straightforward thing they could do is force doctors to give an estimate, like you'd get from any mechanic or painter or tradesman. Obviously this wouldn't quite be possible for complex procedures where quick decisions to do additional things are needed. But a general estimate or range, or maybe a list of "potentially necessary add-ons during complications" would make things so much clearer.
But that kind of reform would never pass, and not just because of the complexity -- doing this would reveal the true cost of care, it would show the gross disparities among charges at different hospitals, and it would make clear that all the "discounts" granted large insurers is just some weird kind of game where hospitals nominally charge often twice or three times as much as they actually expect to get paid, and the amounts are "adjusted" down by the insurance companies.
Healthcare costs are spiralling out of control in the US partly because we have a system where the true cost is hardly ever seen or paid by anyone, making it impossible for consumers to make choices or comparison shop in ways that could actually improve care and make the whole system more efficient.
We'll look back on Citizens United approximately the same way we now look back on Brown v Board of Education. As the product of a shameful period in our history.
I think you mean Plessy v. Ferguson, not Brown in your analogy, unless you mean that DEsegregation is "a product of a shameful period in our history."
It's not true. Research it online if you don't believe me, or just look at your credit report. Creditors report monthly balance and payment information, NOT carryover. So credit agencies receive no info on carryover. As long as you're showing a balance on your statement each month, it doesn't matter if you pay it off completely.
His loan officer told him his credit score would reflect more positively if he used only about 60% of his available credit line each month, and left 15 or 20 dollars per month in carryover balance, instead of paying off the entire balance each month.
Truth or bullshit?
I'm going to have to call BS on this one (speaking as someone with a credit score over 800 for quite a few years); I've never carried a balance on a credit card to get there.
First off, 60% credit utilization is too high. I haven't looked up the numbers recently, but there are people out there who game the system and have figured out near optimal values. The stats I remember seeing were more like no more than 25% of your credit line, and no more than 50% of the credit line on a given credit card. Don't quote me on those figures -- do your own research, but 60% sounds quite high. (Too high and you HURT your score.)
As for carrying a balance, that's completely bogus as long as the debt shows up on a statement. Look at an actual credit report -- all it shows are statement balances and payments. Carry over from month to month is NOT reported to credit agencies, so I don't know why people here are saying you should carry a balance.
It is critical that you do wait for the debt to show up on a statement, though. But you can then pay it off in full.
This loan officer is just trying to make a profit for the bank.
If you're really eager to pay interest to build up your score faster, do it sensibly and take out a small installment loan at a lower rate of interest than a credit card, and make regular payments for a while. Regular payments on an installment plan are much better to show your ability to handle a car loan, so you may qualify for lower rates.
But you can also just keep paying the credit cards in full every month... the score will inch upward over time, and once you take out the first car loan and make regular payments for a year or two, the score will go through the roof. If it were me, I'd skip the fancy expensive car for the first loan, and take out a more modest loan for a cheaper car... then in a couple years, the credit score will be high enough to get the best rates for a better car. You'll save a LOT of money in interest in the long run.
So I should have a much higher credit rating than someone who is constantly paying with credit cards in my opinion.
Not necessarily. There's a reason it's called a "credit" score, not a "cash" score. You need to be able to demonstrate that you can handle credit responsibly. Believe it or not, MOST people who pay cash all the time are forced to, because they don't have reliable enough income or reliable spending methods, and no one would give them a credit card, even if they applied (or certainly not a good one).
So, you need to prove to banks who might lend you money that IF you go into debt (or even have the possibility of going into debt, like having credit lines you don't necessarily use) that you will make regular payments and be able to handle the debt. Frankly, I'd view you as a risk too if you had no payment history. It's great that you pay in cash, but lots of other people do who aren't as responsible with you and would not be a good loan risk.
So get one. Apply for a card, buy some stuff you were planning to buy anyway, pay it off... costs you NOTHING. And you get a higher score on the credit rating game, for when you need it.
Yep -- this isn't rocket science. Get a credit card, use it to buy stuff, wait for the statement, and pay off immediately. You will pay no interest, but since you received a statement with a balance, your report will show records of credit utilization and regular payments. You might need to apply for a crappy card at first if you really have NO history, but just always pay it off every month. In a couple years, you will even be able to move up to a rewards card and earn money off of your credit card, all while paying no interest AND establishing a credit history.
So it's a big f-up, but I can totally understand how and why it happened.
Yeah, I suppose. Except for the part where you had a card declined, and you trusted the customer to provide authorization for the transaction.
I completely get the situation you're talking about -- i.e., where Apple is flagged as an "unusual large transaction," and the customer has to call their bank to clear it. But, as you noted, in that case you can often re-run the card in a few minutes and all is fine. At no point are you trusting the customer's word on ANYTHING -- from your perspective, the card didn't work, but they did some magic dance or sprinkled magic dust, and now the card does work... thus the transaction is authorized.
But here you're talking about a cashier denying a transaction and then manually authorizing it based on what a customer told them. This has a half-dozen red flags all over it. If you were this cashier, would you accept some other lame excuse? "My dog ate my checkbook, so I had to do a special money order thing-o, which didn't show up on my credit statement yet, so they froze everything, but I talked to the bank this morning, and they said it was all honky-dory, so please won't you accept my transaction?" If you wouldn't accept this load of crap from a customer, why would you trust that they called their bank and obtained "authorization"?
And if you'll accept that, I have a set of speakers in my van that I can sell you for 90% off retail. I have a catalog to show you what the "real price" is [wink, wink]. But I need cash now. Honest... I can even show you a nearby ATM where you can get some....
Netbooks are dead, but Ultrabooks are much better anyway
Meh -- the nomenclature is pretty much meaningless. I bought an "ultraportable" about 7 years ago, a "netbook" about 4 years ago, and a "ultrabook" last year. They all pretty much were smaller-than-usual laptops, they were all underpowered compared to standard size laptops when I bought them, and they all weigh pretty much the same thing. The only thing that has changed over time is that the prices have gone down, the value has gone up, and they're generally thinner (usually with slightly large screens). But they're basically the same market. Anyone declaring that "netbooks are dead" is just buying into a marketing ploy because everyone kept saying "netbooks are dead" in 2012. So now they're basically the same, just fewer of the ones with really tiny screens... but we call them "ultrabooks" because it sounds snazzier.
The concept is called planned obsolescence , and it has existed for as long as people have been buying things.
It may have existed for millennia, but until the past few decades it was commonly perceived as "cheating" someone out of money. The assumption 50 years ago was pretty much that anything you bought could and should be repaired, until so many parts fail that it doesn't make sense repair it anymore. I still own and use my mother's kitchen stand mixer, which is nearly 50 years old. I could say the same thing for a number of things that have been passed down to me and still work even though they were manufactured a couple generations ago. My grandmothers used to repair clothing rather than simply buying something new when a hole appeared.
Nowadays, we just expect that most things we buy will fall apart or wear out in a few years, but this is a radical departure from what the world was like 50 years ago or more.
The problem is that this is not just humans versus corporations/machine, this is human rights vs human rights. Free Speech Vs the Right to be Forgotten, why does the latter, which is no where codified, larger then the first which has been for centuries?
It isn't "larger." We've always accepted there must be some limits on free speech. In the U.S., you can't incite people to riot lawlessly, for example. In much of the EU, there are stronger restrictions, like not being able to publicly insult someone else's reputation (e.g. in Germany), an idea that goes back quite some time. (Even in the US, it used to be justification for a duel, a practice which I believe had its roots in medieval Germanic trial practices which could involve combat.)
This seemingly novel "right to be forgotten" is simply an extension of much older law like this in the EU, which prevented punishment for offenses after time has been served. (Ever read Les Miserables, for example, where Jean Valjean is supposed to go about for the rest of his life carrying a yellow card branding him as a convict for stealing a loaf of bread? That kind of crap was real, and reforms ere implemented to allow convicts to move on after time was served and they were "rehabilitated" -- they were essentially granted the right to have their past forgotten.)
So this isn't a new right, and it has been codified in various ways before. But even if it were, rights have to evolve with technology. Before the printing press, there was no reason for "freedom of the press," but after a century of governments trying to suppress it and control it, a movement to assert this right began in earnest in the 1600s, which we now accept to be a bedrock principle of law. But the right not to be publicly defamed is much older than that, so how do we adjudicate between these in the present case with Google?
I'm not saying that the EU ruling is actually workable right now, but your assertion that this is entirely new legal territory is demonstrably false.
You should do things considering that it may get put out there. Why should I not be able to know that someone I may be hiring makes bad decisions just because they dont want me to know they did something stupid?
First, because we've fought wars over the right to live our private lives without government or others tracking everything we do.
But if you need a stronger justification: because something may actually be false information, or it may present information in a misleading way. Lots of people are charged or arrested or whatever everyday and ultimately released because the allegations turned out to be false. But all those newspaper stories which are technically okay because they say "alleged" never go away, and since dropping charges rarely sells news as well as the initial outrage, newspapers and media often never even bother reporting that charged or were dropped (or never even filed) or the person was acquitted. Even if the newspaper prints something about that in a blurb on page 20, is your employer going to go through hundred of Google hits to find that, or just read the headline in the top links that you were accused of child abuse or whatever? (And by the way, just for one example, if you think false accusations of child abuse or neglect are rare, look up the stats -- child protection services in the U.S. removes something like 100,000 kids per year for allegations that ultimately turn out to be completely unsubstantiated... and that's not even counting the questionable cases.)
Your latter argument is poor, as there are already laws that work well at getting rid of libel/slander...
The standard for libel or slander is quite high in the U.S., particularly against a news media source. (It varies in other countries.) You basically need to show that a news source acted with "reckless disregard" for the truth, and often a few "alleged" adjectives serves as sufficient protection.
From the paper
Vitamin B12 is only provided in animal derived proteins
By definition there is no vegetarian or vegan diet that is not deficient in B12.
By definition, the difference between a vegan and a vegetarian is that a vegetarian will consume animal derived products (including proteins), just not animals themselves. Hence your statement is correct for vegans, false for vegetarians.
Absolutely. Have a bad day, make one wrong judgment call, and see your livelihood vanish. Good luck getting another job.
Fired? Maybe not, unless this was a pattern of bad behavior. Suspended for a week or two? Yes, absolutely.
Where do you work, I wonder, that you believe people who have flaws, like we all do, should be treated like used tissues?
Just my opinion, but this goes beyond a minor "flaw" or a slight error in judgment. The guy had already shown his willingness to publicize his dissatisfaction by tweeting about a minor inconvenience, and this employee provided him with a much worse story to tell. Any person with common sense should have seen this as the potential for some seriously bad publicity.
There were many ways to handle this and defray the damage from the initial tweet, from a sincere apology and perhaps offer for free future tickets or upgrade (if the employee wanted to use kindness) or a response tweet thanking the customer for his feedback and also thanking all the other customers for following the rules (if the employee wanted to be passive aggressive but still make a point).
Escalating a minor disagreement with a customer into a public fight is just not a good idea, and employees who can't avoid that do deserve punishment. Customers can be jerks sometimes. Employees have a corporate image to uphold, though, and they need to aspire to a higher standard -- they're getting paid to be there. The customer was not.