The central part of the argument, referring to papers by Davis et. al., seems like batshit lunacy to me.
Davis et. al. ask the question, “Is advertising rational?” and come up with: “It is not so much the claims made by advertisers that are helpful, but the fact that they are willing to spend extravagant amounts of money on a product that is informative.”... what is a “screening mechanism” that will separate the sellers who believe their products to be of high quality from the deceptive sellers? The idea is to come up with some activity that is costly enough for low quality sellers that they won’t do it, but still affordable for high quality sellers. Advertising shows that a seller has the money to advertise (which they presumably got from customers, or from investors who thought the product was worth investing in), and believes that the product will earn enough repeat sales to justify the ad spending.
That's crazy talk. If that were true, advertising could just be a bunch of people burning money onscreen and saying "yeah, our stuff is so awesome we can do this with our spare cash". But what advertising really is (usually) is a bunch of scummy emotional ploys to make people feel deprived and needy of some product. Personally, I use any advertising I see as a signal of what not to buy: Banks, insurance, investment services, phones that advertise widely on TV always have the shittiest customer service (they must be so big they couldn't possibly care about me as a customer). As my friend says, "advertising is always a communication of the problems that company is trying to fix".
Advertising in general is just scummy shit to make people do what they don't want. Unfortunately Marti's argument falls apart by it being hinged on this insane "rational economy" assertion.
Perhaps more interesting is the memo that broke today from when HP was delisted fro the Dow Jones Industrial Average (having occurred last month):
"I hope that every HP employee took today's announcement personally," she said in the one-page internal memo on September 10. Calling HP's departure from the benchmark index it joined in 1997 a "blow to our brand," Whitman said the moved showed many people still harbored doubts about her turnaround plan. "We need to make every sale," she stressed in the memo, which was seen by Reuters. Whitman's urgency is easy to understand. Two years into what she has always described as a five-year effort, HP's sales and profits are still sliding and Wall Street is losing patience. The stock has fallen 17 percent in the past three months and is down more than half its value since 2010.
So Whitman has a turnaround plan which is clearly failing. This kind of "employees need to get more intense" plea is usually one of the last gasps of a failing company, IMO. Also notes that one her major moves was to throw executives out of their offices and into an open cube farm. So "rearranging the deck chairs" is quite literally part of what she's doing.
"Any idiot can solve 100-(20/(37-5)*100) especially if they have a calculator."
What are these slash and star things? How do I do parentheses on my calculator?
My point being: You're more right than you know. Even in a raw algebraic manipulation, reading & writing the individual symbols carefully is a required skill, and beyond the capacity of a surprising number of people. Given that grammar is frequently no longer taught or assessed in language courses, math class becomes the only place where careful attention to written detail is necessarily practiced.
"The Iron Law of Wages is a proposed law of economics that asserts that real wages always tend, in the long run, toward the minimum wage necessary to sustain the life of the worker."
Mostly true. But admittedly telling any non-American "our government is structured intentionally to stop working if anyone tries to use it to provide health care" makes us look like the crazy uncle at a family gathering.
"Since we cannot read minds, we cannot say who -- if anybody -- 'wants to shut down the government.' But we do know who had the option to keep the government running and chose not to. The money voted by the House of Representatives covered everything that the government does, except for ObamaCare."
No need to read minds, just read a newspaper like the conservative Washington Examiner from July when they were pushing for it as a GOP tactic, headline:
"Republicans are willing to shut down government to stop fraudulent Obamacare subsidies".
Acting like there's some question of who's to blame is ridiculous. In addition, we know that there are votes in the House to pass a full-funding bill right now but the GOP leadership won't allow the vote to occur. (See "discharge petition" in the House below):
I blew twenty-four mod points, came home from work, crashed my car, paid a thousand dollars, screamed at some people on the street, and made my girlfriend break up with me in order to fix that missing article.
I wish I could agree but I don't. The US government has crushed some fairly small-time players. They have the big players well in control (MS, Google, Facebook), and they aren't going anywhere (too many stakeholders, can't be moved or shut down the same way). This particular skirmish is win-win for the US government -- fewer choices for citizens, more people forced onto the big centralized systems they have full access/control to, proven threats to use against any future outliers.
No, they do not. What they now have under construction is a breeder reactor (delayed, startup currently hoped for around 2015). The breeder reactor's end-product is the seed that you can use in a thorium reactor. So if that first one gets finished and works, and then you construct a nationwide system of similar breeder reactors, and then you wait 40 more years, then you'll have the raw material to start up the actual thorium reactors. Maybe. If you're lucky. (See prior link.)
Wall Street Journal 2 months ago, some debate around it:
"Most but not all studies from several European nations with large databases and the ability to track health records have found that over the past 15 years or so, the counts of healthy men ages 18 to 25 have significantly decreased. This comes after a prominent study from the 1990s suggested that sperm count has decreased by half over the last half-century."
Administrators would be in charge of that, not teachers. The two are generally in opposition in any school system. For example, a big splashy technology buy generally helps some administrators' careers but not the teachers' (and is therefore pushed by the former and opposed by the latter).
"Yep. Thorium LFTR is the nuclear reactor of the future. Small, affordable, and by design will never have a runaway meltdown."
Reminder: Thorium reactors cannot be built for at least another 40 years at the most optimistic. (India's about halfway there since starting work in the 1950's.)
"According to replies given in Q&A in the Indian Parliament on two separate occasions, 19 August 2010 and 21 March 2012, large scale thorium deployment is only to be expected “3 – 4 decades after the commercial operation of fast breeder reactors with short doubling time”.[66][31] Full exploitation of India’s domestic thorium reserves will likely not occur until after the year 2050.[67]"
He supports gay marriage? The quote from the Snopes link is:
"I would never do (a commercial) with a homosexual family, not for lack of respect but because we don't agree with them. Ours is a classic family where the woman plays a fundamental role."
So: - He is on the record that "we don't agree" with "a homosexual family". - His "woman plays a fundamental role" is classic fundamentalist sexist BS. - The idea that kids don't choose homosexual parents is no different than the situation for heterosexual adoptions; it is an invalid and bigoted argument to make.
Slashdot Mirror
Like the U.S. Patent office? So the dogma becomes "give the clients whatever they want, because they pay the bills"?
"Sadly, we'll pay all the back-pay, so it's really just a free vacation for more federal workers."
Of the ones who are currently working for no pay. Like all the security at the capitol, etc.
No one's made any promise that currently-furloughed workers would get paid.
No one's getting a free vacation.
The central part of the argument, referring to papers by Davis et. al., seems like batshit lunacy to me.
Davis et. al. ask the question, “Is advertising rational?” and come up with: “It is not so much the claims made by advertisers that are helpful, but the fact that they are willing to spend extravagant amounts of money on a product that is informative.”... what is a “screening mechanism” that will separate the sellers who believe their products to be of high quality from the deceptive sellers? The idea is to come up with some activity that is costly enough for low quality sellers that they won’t do it, but still affordable for high quality sellers. Advertising shows that a seller has the money to advertise (which they presumably got from customers, or from investors who thought the product was worth investing in), and believes that the product will earn enough repeat sales to justify the ad spending.
That's crazy talk. If that were true, advertising could just be a bunch of people burning money onscreen and saying "yeah, our stuff is so awesome we can do this with our spare cash". But what advertising really is (usually) is a bunch of scummy emotional ploys to make people feel deprived and needy of some product. Personally, I use any advertising I see as a signal of what not to buy: Banks, insurance, investment services, phones that advertise widely on TV always have the shittiest customer service (they must be so big they couldn't possibly care about me as a customer). As my friend says, "advertising is always a communication of the problems that company is trying to fix".
Advertising in general is just scummy shit to make people do what they don't want. Unfortunately Marti's argument falls apart by it being hinged on this insane "rational economy" assertion.
Perhaps more interesting is the memo that broke today from when HP was delisted fro the Dow Jones Industrial Average (having occurred last month):
"I hope that every HP employee took today's announcement personally," she said in the one-page internal memo on September 10. Calling HP's departure from the benchmark index it joined in 1997 a "blow to our brand," Whitman said the moved showed many people still harbored doubts about her turnaround plan. "We need to make every sale," she stressed in the memo, which was seen by Reuters. Whitman's urgency is easy to understand. Two years into what she has always described as a five-year effort, HP's sales and profits are still sliding and Wall Street is losing patience. The stock has fallen 17 percent in the past three months and is down more than half its value since 2010.
http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/10/08/us-hp-restructuring-analysis-idUSBRE9970XL20131008
So Whitman has a turnaround plan which is clearly failing. This kind of "employees need to get more intense" plea is usually one of the last gasps of a failing company, IMO. Also notes that one her major moves was to throw executives out of their offices and into an open cube farm. So "rearranging the deck chairs" is quite literally part of what she's doing.
You might need to broaden your research. Finland vastly outperforms the U.S. in education, and they have the same summer vacation:
http://calendar.zoznam.sk/school-enfi.php
"other types of logic"
Skeptical, citation needed.
"Any idiot can solve 100-(20/(37-5)*100) especially if they have a calculator."
What are these slash and star things? How do I do parentheses on my calculator?
My point being: You're more right than you know. Even in a raw algebraic manipulation, reading & writing the individual symbols carefully is a required skill, and beyond the capacity of a surprising number of people. Given that grammar is frequently no longer taught or assessed in language courses, math class becomes the only place where careful attention to written detail is necessarily practiced.
Absolutely.
I give you the Iron Law of Wages:
"The Iron Law of Wages is a proposed law of economics that asserts that real wages always tend, in the long run, toward the minimum wage necessary to sustain the life of the worker."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_law_of_wages
Mostly true. But admittedly telling any non-American "our government is structured intentionally to stop working if anyone tries to use it to provide health care" makes us look like the crazy uncle at a family gathering.
"Since we cannot read minds, we cannot say who -- if anybody -- 'wants to shut down the government.' But we do know who had the option to keep the government running and chose not to. The money voted by the House of Representatives covered everything that the government does, except for ObamaCare."
No need to read minds, just read a newspaper like the conservative Washington Examiner from July when they were pushing for it as a GOP tactic, headline:
"Republicans are willing to shut down government to stop fraudulent Obamacare subsidies".
http://washingtonexaminer.com/morning-examiner-republicans-are-willing-to-shut-down-government-to-stop-fraudulent-obamacare-subsidies/article/2533356
Acting like there's some question of who's to blame is ridiculous. In addition, we know that there are votes in the House to pass a full-funding bill right now but the GOP leadership won't allow the vote to occur. (See "discharge petition" in the House below):
http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/10/05/us-usa-fiscal-idUSBRE98N11220131005
That's "a spelling error".
I blew twenty-four mod points, came home from work, crashed my car, paid a thousand dollars, screamed at some people on the street, and made my girlfriend break up with me in order to fix that missing article.
I wish I could agree but I don't. The US government has crushed some fairly small-time players. They have the big players well in control (MS, Google, Facebook), and they aren't going anywhere (too many stakeholders, can't be moved or shut down the same way). This particular skirmish is win-win for the US government -- fewer choices for citizens, more people forced onto the big centralized systems they have full access/control to, proven threats to use against any future outliers.
I fear that I'm developing Alzheimer's, because I can't tell if this thread has been Godwin'd or not.
And I don't spend time on any of them.
What a piece of shit. Go work for Yahoo or something.
Ah, crazy right-wing rants replete with misspellings. Now I can start my day.
No, they do not. What they now have under construction is a breeder reactor (delayed, startup currently hoped for around 2015). The breeder reactor's end-product is the seed that you can use in a thorium reactor. So if that first one gets finished and works, and then you construct a nationwide system of similar breeder reactors, and then you wait 40 more years, then you'll have the raw material to start up the actual thorium reactors. Maybe. If you're lucky. (See prior link.)
Wall Street Journal 2 months ago, some debate around it:
"Most but not all studies from several European nations with large databases and the ability to track health records have found that over the past 15 years or so, the counts of healthy men ages 18 to 25 have significantly decreased. This comes after a prominent study from the 1990s suggested that sperm count has decreased by half over the last half-century."
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323394504578607641775723354.html
Administrators would be in charge of that, not teachers. The two are generally in opposition in any school system. For example, a big splashy technology buy generally helps some administrators' careers but not the teachers' (and is therefore pushed by the former and opposed by the latter).
"Yep. Thorium LFTR is the nuclear reactor of the future. Small, affordable, and by design will never have a runaway meltdown."
Reminder: Thorium reactors cannot be built for at least another 40 years at the most optimistic. (India's about halfway there since starting work in the 1950's.)
"According to replies given in Q&A in the Indian Parliament on two separate occasions, 19 August 2010 and 21 March 2012, large scale thorium deployment is only to be expected “3 – 4 decades after the commercial operation of fast breeder reactors with short doubling time”.[66][31] Full exploitation of India’s domestic thorium reserves will likely not occur until after the year 2050.[67]"
Link.
The truth is short, clear, and depressing.
It's a problem that we should definitely help people with, and not incarcerate them over.
But this argument that it's a disease is bullshit propaganda and needs to be ejected.
"if they changed to a gay couple fencing with spaghettis.. it might be brilliant marketing."
Here you go... 2009 advertisement from their competitor Bertolli:
http://youtu.be/IOQYv66CptE
He supports gay marriage? The quote from the Snopes link is:
"I would never do (a commercial) with a homosexual family, not for lack of respect but because we don't agree with them. Ours is a classic family where the woman plays a fundamental role."
So:
- He is on the record that "we don't agree" with "a homosexual family".
- His "woman plays a fundamental role" is classic fundamentalist sexist BS.
- The idea that kids don't choose homosexual parents is no different than the situation for heterosexual adoptions; it is an invalid and bigoted argument to make.
Well, admittedly the word "scan" is nowhere in there, even the part you boldfaced.