This is true, but I think we let oligopolies off the hook. I remember in the 90s Microsoft's argument in their antitrust suit was that because Apple existed, they weren't a monopoly and that made things okay. Markets in generally are becoming less and less diverse, with a few major players in each industry. If Apple didn't have the unique culture and leadership that has made them so successful, I doubt they would apply the type of pressure they do. In a similar vein, if it weren't for Apple's unique business model, it would be unlikely that any tech company would even take a symbolic attempt to protect their customers privacy.
Microsoft, meanwhile, still thrives from PC royalties. Their strategy of demanding royalties for Android and Linux devices has seemed to work out for them, as has their foray into hardware which will likely hurt their long term partners. I don't see a 180 form previous regimes.
This post turned out pretty ramble-y and lacks focus. I apologize. I guess what I was originally getting at is that a little competition is hardly better than no competition. Look at the telecommunications industry as an example of why this is true. Diverse marketplaces are important, but our antitrust regulation is primarily concerned with monopoly while being okay with oligopoly. Once an oligopoly becomes rather stable, which is what seems to be happening in the tech industry, it more or less functions like a monopoly.
Huxley ended up changing his opinion on quite a bit later in life. Check out his super-socialist final novel, Island, as an example of his amended ideology.
That's not to say he didn't have some good points to be made in Brave New World, but it did come off as excessively conservative to the point of being anti-progress/Luddite.
At any rate, I would much rather live in the Brave New World than Oceania.
I don't see how anything you propose would improve the education system. While I don't agree with the OP's suggestion that an ambiguous improvement of early education will be some magic remedy for racism and racial inequality, I find it odd that your reaction to his suggestion is to rant about how unfairly the white man has been treated.
Furthermore, I don't believe children are taught that only black people were ever slaves. But it wouldn't be incorrect to teach them that only black people were legally enslaved in the United States. I would also contend that the "debts" of that enslavement were certainly not "wiped clean many times over with war, healing, and time." We've made a lot of progress in the latter half of the twentieth century and in the twenty-first century, but we have yet to arrive at a point where it isn't advantageous to be born white and disadvantageous to be born black in the United States.
Basically, despite your faux indignation and claim of victimhood, you're just being racist.
Even with a greater investment in early education, children from educated families will always have a leg up on their peers. There are also the problems of school funding being local (thereby ensuring that wealthy neighborhoods have better funded schools), but overall we spend enough on schools to expect better results.
I think it's easy to point out the problems in education but finding solutions is difficult. Your solution seems to be "provide more early education." That sounds great, but how do you execute such a task? Throwing money at such things rarely seems to work. If we keep the overall structure of education the same and just provide it with more resources, students overall may benefit, but students who have educated parents will still have such a great advantage over their peers that a disparity will still exist.
The only solution I've seen that seems to have real promise is to eliminate organizing classrooms by age. When I was in high school, there were low level classes that worked on adding and subtracting. Those are elementary skills but the school system did everything they could to avoid holding children back. We want kids graduated or out of the school system come the age of 18 no matter what. A better system would be to have a certain level of mastery required for kids to graduate, and they graduate at whatever age they achieve that mastery. Not all twelve year old kids are at the same level academically yet we lump them all in the same grade.
Racial inequality is certainly a problem in the U.S. and our poor education system only contributes to this problem, as you rightly point out. But we need more creative solutions than to "provide more early education." We need to provide better education, and that begins with rethinking the paradigm our education system is based upon.
People actually applauded? While your little anecdote is far too mundane to be totally fictitious, I don't believe the applause part and I also don't believe the "fine print so small you could not read it." Who doesn't know to look at the fine print on a coupon? And if the print was too small to read, how was the cashier able to read it?
The image of your fellow grocery patrons vigorously clapping in support of your heroic stand against a duplicitous coupon is comical.
This is true. I see a lot of kids these days who only use one media player: YouTube. It really doesn't make sense to them to use local storage for media files that are widely available on the internet. For them, local storage is for pictures, videos (that they shoot), games, and apps. When they're really into music they get a subscription to Apple's music streaming service or something similar. I'm pretty sure most kids wouldn't know what we're talking about when we say "MP3."
I think it's quite the opposite. By not ostracizing these people we insinuate they're espousing valid opinions rather than making clearly counter-factual claims such as racial superiority and Jewish conspiracies. I don't think they should face government censorship, but there's nothing wrong with social consequences for propogating hate. I fail to see how these social consequences could help rather than hurt their cause. They can play the "David vs. Goliath" card all they want, but I sincerely doubt anyone will sympathize with their plight.
But unlike Nazi Germany, our economy is actually doing quite well. Just because Trump ran a campaign that declared that the U.S. economy was spiraling down the drain doesn't make it so. When Germans in the 1930s were disappointed with the economy, it was because many of them were literally starving to death. Modern Americans who think our economy is doing poorly are detached from reality (most likely because they're stupid and don't know how to judge the veracity of whatever they read on the internet or hear on talk radio).
Apple already planned to start manufacturing more in the U.S. Like many other companies that are pulling out of China, it most likely had to do with the increase in automation. Cheap Chinese labor isn't worth so much when you mainly employ robots. Not to mention the Chinese economy has matured and their currency is worth more than it used to, so that benefit is diminished as well.
Furthermore, U.S. manufacturing is good PR, automated or not. Telling our doofus of a president about it is also a free way to get it all over the news and rake in sales from the half-wits who voted for him.
It really is a misconception rather than a lie. It's not really possible to have a formula to calculate unemployment without some faults. Still, a low unemployment rate implies the economy is probably doing pretty well.
You're intentionally conflating an irrelevant story with the healthcare system. When it comes to removing life support, there will always be controversy one way or the other and that has nothing to do with a single-payer healthcare system. The Terri Schiavo case was a similar one in the United States. Of course, you were probably well aware of your fallacy and that's why you posted AC.
While I agree that Trump's collusion with Russia is unacceptable, I feel your characterization is hyperbolic. This makes it easier for Trump and his supporters to dismiss criticism when the criticism is so exaggerated. I don't know if I'd call it treasonous--but they're certainly not the actions of a man fit to lead this country.
You clearly misunderstand what Obama did. He pushed a snowball down a mountain. By making the dismantling of Obamacare political suicide, he's made a single-payer system an inevitability. He didn't view the ACA as a perminant solution and neither did any of them Democrats who pushed it through congress. The fact remains that it's better than what previously existed and a step toward the only morally acceptable form of healthcare in a first world country, which is single-payer.
Following this analogy, I would compare Windows users to fast food junkies who occasionally sit down for a fancy meal at Big Boy. I guess that would make MacOS users the patrons of gourmet.
These comparisons won't fly around here since they don't involve cars.
Oh, please, this is a bunch of bullshit if I've ever heard it. We've all seen enough of these fatal shootings on video to know that 1) most of the victims of police shootings aren't actually armed and 2) after the officer issues their "order" they don't even wait a half second before unloading on the victim.
Too many police officers are just itching to kill someone--specifically, they're itching to kill black men. It's disingenuous to make excuses for them.
Since it isn't science no conclusion pushed by social 'science' has any validity at all, except perhaps by the laws of probability.
No, this is not what I'm saying. I don't believe that the scientific method is the only way to obtain knowledge, nor do I believe it's practical to apply it to all fields. Furthermore, a conclusion isn't valid or invalid. Validity just means that an argument is properly structured.
As for the rest of your post, your concerns with automation are probably misplaced because businesses were looking to automate as much as possible anyway. A small wage hike for the lowest paid workers probably won't spur any more automation than what's already occurring.
But those who buy/build homes and build factories are those who already have a decent chunk of capital themselves. What you're proposing is "trickle-down economics," and if your Econ-101 prof was teaching you that he deserves to be fired. Investments such as the ones listed do create more wealth and they will increase GDP, but that doesn't bring people out of poverty. The wealthy invest in the wealthy, because those are safe investments. In the long run, the standard of living may increase for the poorest dregs of society, but that generally means being able to buy more cheap junk at Wal-Mart even cheaper.
The problem is that, as the U.S. economy is currently structured, it's easy for money to get shifted from the bottom to the top, but it doesn't work the other way around. This is what happens when you break the progressive tax structure—the wealthy hoard a greater and greater percentage of the nation's wealth. This is the danger of using GDP as an absolute barometer of economic success. If the wealth is distributed too unevenly, the vast majority of the citizenry doesn't reap the benefits of living in a wealthy country.
This is true, but I see that as just another way of hoarding money. It's just that some assets appreciate more than bank interest (real estate, stocks), or in the case of bonds they provide a higher interest rate. While this results in money creation, which is good, the money that's created stays with the wealthy. This is one of the reasons there's such a wealth disparity in the U.S.—when the wealthy do things to create more money, that money tends to stay at the top.
It works both ways. Those who praised the study last week were merely engaged in confirmation bias. Those who ignore the fact that inflation has outpaced low-end wages for decades, or try to formulate convoluted arguments as to why trying to curb this process is economically harmful, latched onto the original study without considering whether its conclusions were sound.
Also, your assumption that "social sciences" actually practice science may contribute to your confusion here. Social sciences combine logic, empiricism, mathematics, and speculation. They use several of the same tools scientists use, which leads many of their practitioners to believe they're actually engaged in a form of science, but this is decidedly not true. The word "science" is a misnomer when applied to these areas of study because they don't adhere to the scientific method, despite great posturing to make it appear as if they do. When we conflate social sciences with natural sciences we make the mistake of believing social science research to be more conclusive than it actually is.
This is why there are lies, damned lies, and statistics.
It seems that your skepticism is rooted in your own bias. When a study clashes with other research the first thing one should do is comb over the methodology and see if that explains the discrepancy. It appears as if the confirmation bias has mainly occurred on the end of the "mean-spirited Conservatives" and "clueless Libertarians" who were quick to latch onto a study that has clear methodological problems. One only has to read the section titled "Data" on page 13 of the study to realize that the study has severe limitations and broad conclusions cannot be pulled from it. More importantly, the paper's own conclusion (pgs. 34-39) states these methodological limitations and cautions against pulling a quick conclusion from it. As is always the case, journalists failed to understand the nuances here (as they always do when using academic work as sources) and reported it as conclusive evidence that minimum wage is ineffective.
Imposing a minimum wage that's greater than what results from an efficient market should result in higher pay but fewer workers.
This is where things get muddled. There's a difference between an optimally efficient market and an optimally efficient organization. An optimally efficient organization may do things like pay workers the least amount possible, avoid paying corporate taxes by moving assets to offshore accounts, and automating many jobs. Now, if many workers are give poverty wages, that may pad employment statistics but it certainly doesn't provide the market as a whole with an optimal solution. When people don't have much of a discretionary income they can't buy many things and they certainly can't take out loans (if you want an optimally efficient marketplace, you want people to be able to take out loans because loans are what create more money).
The problem with companies relocating money into offshore accounts to avoid taxes compounds this problem because their poverty-wage workers need welfare to provide them with healthcare, food supplements, and other aid such as childcare that they can't afford with their job. This problem is further compounded by the hoarding of liquid assets by executives. Without a strong progressive tax system (and all the many loopholes that allow one to avoid the intentions of our weak progressive tax system), those who make the most have such a surplus of liquid assets that most of them just sit in a bank account. While this looks good on paper, as the interest they gain increases the money supply, this surplus of money doesn't help the economy because it's not being exchanged on the marketplace. This is the problem with wage disparity. If executives made less and low-wage workers made more, then more money would be exchanged in the economy and it would create more wealth. It's a fallacy to assume that corporations and millionaires reinvest their excess profits. At some point one has all they need/want and excess wealth just gets hoarded in bank accounts.
Finally, when it comes to automating new jobs, this rarely (if ever) results in the remaining jobs reaping the benefits of the increased efficiency. The money saved goes to the top, to those executives who are already hoarding more money than they come close to spending.
The problem with a lot of the formulas you learn in introductory economics is they are based off assumptions. Furthermore, economics can make an abstraction of human life. What may look good on paper can be a miserable existence for many. I find economics to be an extremely interesting field that provides tools for evaluating systems that cannot be adequately assessed using science, but perspective is necessary when applying these ideas. Too often we can't see the forest for the trees.
I guess I'm demonstrably wrong if that's how you define generosity. I don't, especially when you consider how many billionaires form charities as tax shelters, how many companies use charities as marketing schemes, and how many charities exist as nothing but a business for those who run them.
Is it really generosity if there's no altruism? Selfish generosity is just selfishness.
Slashdot Mirror
Leaking embarrassing information about the president and leaking classified information are not the same things.
This is true, but I think we let oligopolies off the hook. I remember in the 90s Microsoft's argument in their antitrust suit was that because Apple existed, they weren't a monopoly and that made things okay. Markets in generally are becoming less and less diverse, with a few major players in each industry. If Apple didn't have the unique culture and leadership that has made them so successful, I doubt they would apply the type of pressure they do. In a similar vein, if it weren't for Apple's unique business model, it would be unlikely that any tech company would even take a symbolic attempt to protect their customers privacy.
Microsoft, meanwhile, still thrives from PC royalties. Their strategy of demanding royalties for Android and Linux devices has seemed to work out for them, as has their foray into hardware which will likely hurt their long term partners. I don't see a 180 form previous regimes.
This post turned out pretty ramble-y and lacks focus. I apologize. I guess what I was originally getting at is that a little competition is hardly better than no competition. Look at the telecommunications industry as an example of why this is true. Diverse marketplaces are important, but our antitrust regulation is primarily concerned with monopoly while being okay with oligopoly. Once an oligopoly becomes rather stable, which is what seems to be happening in the tech industry, it more or less functions like a monopoly.
Huxley ended up changing his opinion on quite a bit later in life. Check out his super-socialist final novel, Island, as an example of his amended ideology.
That's not to say he didn't have some good points to be made in Brave New World, but it did come off as excessively conservative to the point of being anti-progress/Luddite.
At any rate, I would much rather live in the Brave New World than Oceania.
That's almost poetic. You came close to iambic pentameter.
I don't see how anything you propose would improve the education system. While I don't agree with the OP's suggestion that an ambiguous improvement of early education will be some magic remedy for racism and racial inequality, I find it odd that your reaction to his suggestion is to rant about how unfairly the white man has been treated.
Furthermore, I don't believe children are taught that only black people were ever slaves. But it wouldn't be incorrect to teach them that only black people were legally enslaved in the United States. I would also contend that the "debts" of that enslavement were certainly not "wiped clean many times over with war, healing, and time." We've made a lot of progress in the latter half of the twentieth century and in the twenty-first century, but we have yet to arrive at a point where it isn't advantageous to be born white and disadvantageous to be born black in the United States.
Basically, despite your faux indignation and claim of victimhood, you're just being racist.
Even with a greater investment in early education, children from educated families will always have a leg up on their peers. There are also the problems of school funding being local (thereby ensuring that wealthy neighborhoods have better funded schools), but overall we spend enough on schools to expect better results.
I think it's easy to point out the problems in education but finding solutions is difficult. Your solution seems to be "provide more early education." That sounds great, but how do you execute such a task? Throwing money at such things rarely seems to work. If we keep the overall structure of education the same and just provide it with more resources, students overall may benefit, but students who have educated parents will still have such a great advantage over their peers that a disparity will still exist.
The only solution I've seen that seems to have real promise is to eliminate organizing classrooms by age. When I was in high school, there were low level classes that worked on adding and subtracting. Those are elementary skills but the school system did everything they could to avoid holding children back. We want kids graduated or out of the school system come the age of 18 no matter what. A better system would be to have a certain level of mastery required for kids to graduate, and they graduate at whatever age they achieve that mastery. Not all twelve year old kids are at the same level academically yet we lump them all in the same grade.
Racial inequality is certainly a problem in the U.S. and our poor education system only contributes to this problem, as you rightly point out. But we need more creative solutions than to "provide more early education." We need to provide better education, and that begins with rethinking the paradigm our education system is based upon.
People actually applauded? While your little anecdote is far too mundane to be totally fictitious, I don't believe the applause part and I also don't believe the "fine print so small you could not read it." Who doesn't know to look at the fine print on a coupon? And if the print was too small to read, how was the cashier able to read it?
The image of your fellow grocery patrons vigorously clapping in support of your heroic stand against a duplicitous coupon is comical.
This is true. I see a lot of kids these days who only use one media player: YouTube. It really doesn't make sense to them to use local storage for media files that are widely available on the internet. For them, local storage is for pictures, videos (that they shoot), games, and apps. When they're really into music they get a subscription to Apple's music streaming service or something similar. I'm pretty sure most kids wouldn't know what we're talking about when we say "MP3."
I think it's quite the opposite. By not ostracizing these people we insinuate they're espousing valid opinions rather than making clearly counter-factual claims such as racial superiority and Jewish conspiracies. I don't think they should face government censorship, but there's nothing wrong with social consequences for propogating hate. I fail to see how these social consequences could help rather than hurt their cause. They can play the "David vs. Goliath" card all they want, but I sincerely doubt anyone will sympathize with their plight.
I see you are well versed in logic and a student of culture. I envy your wit.
But unlike Nazi Germany, our economy is actually doing quite well. Just because Trump ran a campaign that declared that the U.S. economy was spiraling down the drain doesn't make it so. When Germans in the 1930s were disappointed with the economy, it was because many of them were literally starving to death. Modern Americans who think our economy is doing poorly are detached from reality (most likely because they're stupid and don't know how to judge the veracity of whatever they read on the internet or hear on talk radio).
Apple already planned to start manufacturing more in the U.S. Like many other companies that are pulling out of China, it most likely had to do with the increase in automation. Cheap Chinese labor isn't worth so much when you mainly employ robots. Not to mention the Chinese economy has matured and their currency is worth more than it used to, so that benefit is diminished as well.
Furthermore, U.S. manufacturing is good PR, automated or not. Telling our doofus of a president about it is also a free way to get it all over the news and rake in sales from the half-wits who voted for him.
It really is a misconception rather than a lie. It's not really possible to have a formula to calculate unemployment without some faults. Still, a low unemployment rate implies the economy is probably doing pretty well.
You're intentionally conflating an irrelevant story with the healthcare system. When it comes to removing life support, there will always be controversy one way or the other and that has nothing to do with a single-payer healthcare system. The Terri Schiavo case was a similar one in the United States. Of course, you were probably well aware of your fallacy and that's why you posted AC.
While I agree that Trump's collusion with Russia is unacceptable, I feel your characterization is hyperbolic. This makes it easier for Trump and his supporters to dismiss criticism when the criticism is so exaggerated. I don't know if I'd call it treasonous--but they're certainly not the actions of a man fit to lead this country.
You clearly misunderstand what Obama did. He pushed a snowball down a mountain. By making the dismantling of Obamacare political suicide, he's made a single-payer system an inevitability. He didn't view the ACA as a perminant solution and neither did any of them Democrats who pushed it through congress. The fact remains that it's better than what previously existed and a step toward the only morally acceptable form of healthcare in a first world country, which is single-payer.
Linux users: the vegans of the computing world.
Following this analogy, I would compare Windows users to fast food junkies who occasionally sit down for a fancy meal at Big Boy. I guess that would make MacOS users the patrons of gourmet.
These comparisons won't fly around here since they don't involve cars.
Oh, please, this is a bunch of bullshit if I've ever heard it. We've all seen enough of these fatal shootings on video to know that 1) most of the victims of police shootings aren't actually armed and 2) after the officer issues their "order" they don't even wait a half second before unloading on the victim.
Too many police officers are just itching to kill someone--specifically, they're itching to kill black men. It's disingenuous to make excuses for them.
Since it isn't science no conclusion pushed by social 'science' has any validity at all, except perhaps by the laws of probability.
No, this is not what I'm saying. I don't believe that the scientific method is the only way to obtain knowledge, nor do I believe it's practical to apply it to all fields. Furthermore, a conclusion isn't valid or invalid. Validity just means that an argument is properly structured.
As for the rest of your post, your concerns with automation are probably misplaced because businesses were looking to automate as much as possible anyway. A small wage hike for the lowest paid workers probably won't spur any more automation than what's already occurring.
But those who buy/build homes and build factories are those who already have a decent chunk of capital themselves. What you're proposing is "trickle-down economics," and if your Econ-101 prof was teaching you that he deserves to be fired. Investments such as the ones listed do create more wealth and they will increase GDP, but that doesn't bring people out of poverty. The wealthy invest in the wealthy, because those are safe investments. In the long run, the standard of living may increase for the poorest dregs of society, but that generally means being able to buy more cheap junk at Wal-Mart even cheaper.
The problem is that, as the U.S. economy is currently structured, it's easy for money to get shifted from the bottom to the top, but it doesn't work the other way around. This is what happens when you break the progressive tax structure—the wealthy hoard a greater and greater percentage of the nation's wealth. This is the danger of using GDP as an absolute barometer of economic success. If the wealth is distributed too unevenly, the vast majority of the citizenry doesn't reap the benefits of living in a wealthy country.
This is true, but I see that as just another way of hoarding money. It's just that some assets appreciate more than bank interest (real estate, stocks), or in the case of bonds they provide a higher interest rate. While this results in money creation, which is good, the money that's created stays with the wealthy. This is one of the reasons there's such a wealth disparity in the U.S.—when the wealthy do things to create more money, that money tends to stay at the top.
It works both ways. Those who praised the study last week were merely engaged in confirmation bias. Those who ignore the fact that inflation has outpaced low-end wages for decades, or try to formulate convoluted arguments as to why trying to curb this process is economically harmful, latched onto the original study without considering whether its conclusions were sound.
Also, your assumption that "social sciences" actually practice science may contribute to your confusion here. Social sciences combine logic, empiricism, mathematics, and speculation. They use several of the same tools scientists use, which leads many of their practitioners to believe they're actually engaged in a form of science, but this is decidedly not true. The word "science" is a misnomer when applied to these areas of study because they don't adhere to the scientific method, despite great posturing to make it appear as if they do. When we conflate social sciences with natural sciences we make the mistake of believing social science research to be more conclusive than it actually is.
This is why there are lies, damned lies, and statistics.
It seems that your skepticism is rooted in your own bias. When a study clashes with other research the first thing one should do is comb over the methodology and see if that explains the discrepancy. It appears as if the confirmation bias has mainly occurred on the end of the "mean-spirited Conservatives" and "clueless Libertarians" who were quick to latch onto a study that has clear methodological problems. One only has to read the section titled "Data" on page 13 of the study to realize that the study has severe limitations and broad conclusions cannot be pulled from it. More importantly, the paper's own conclusion (pgs. 34-39) states these methodological limitations and cautions against pulling a quick conclusion from it. As is always the case, journalists failed to understand the nuances here (as they always do when using academic work as sources) and reported it as conclusive evidence that minimum wage is ineffective.
Imposing a minimum wage that's greater than what results from an efficient market should result in higher pay but fewer workers.
This is where things get muddled. There's a difference between an optimally efficient market and an optimally efficient organization. An optimally efficient organization may do things like pay workers the least amount possible, avoid paying corporate taxes by moving assets to offshore accounts, and automating many jobs. Now, if many workers are give poverty wages, that may pad employment statistics but it certainly doesn't provide the market as a whole with an optimal solution. When people don't have much of a discretionary income they can't buy many things and they certainly can't take out loans (if you want an optimally efficient marketplace, you want people to be able to take out loans because loans are what create more money).
The problem with companies relocating money into offshore accounts to avoid taxes compounds this problem because their poverty-wage workers need welfare to provide them with healthcare, food supplements, and other aid such as childcare that they can't afford with their job. This problem is further compounded by the hoarding of liquid assets by executives. Without a strong progressive tax system (and all the many loopholes that allow one to avoid the intentions of our weak progressive tax system), those who make the most have such a surplus of liquid assets that most of them just sit in a bank account. While this looks good on paper, as the interest they gain increases the money supply, this surplus of money doesn't help the economy because it's not being exchanged on the marketplace. This is the problem with wage disparity. If executives made less and low-wage workers made more, then more money would be exchanged in the economy and it would create more wealth. It's a fallacy to assume that corporations and millionaires reinvest their excess profits. At some point one has all they need/want and excess wealth just gets hoarded in bank accounts.
Finally, when it comes to automating new jobs, this rarely (if ever) results in the remaining jobs reaping the benefits of the increased efficiency. The money saved goes to the top, to those executives who are already hoarding more money than they come close to spending.
The problem with a lot of the formulas you learn in introductory economics is they are based off assumptions. Furthermore, economics can make an abstraction of human life. What may look good on paper can be a miserable existence for many. I find economics to be an extremely interesting field that provides tools for evaluating systems that cannot be adequately assessed using science, but perspective is necessary when applying these ideas. Too often we can't see the forest for the trees.
A democracy with universal healthcare = a generous society.
I guess I'm demonstrably wrong if that's how you define generosity. I don't, especially when you consider how many billionaires form charities as tax shelters, how many companies use charities as marketing schemes, and how many charities exist as nothing but a business for those who run them.
Is it really generosity if there's no altruism? Selfish generosity is just selfishness.