but that's the point - you have to sacrifice *a lot* for endurance and versatility on the field. If all you do is sprint for 5 seconds every 3 minutes your training is tailored for that specific goal but you wont be as good at running and tackling and running and tackling for 5 minutes straight like in rugby, where there are very few interruptions. Assuming 1-10 stats, it's desirable to have a bunch of 8s and 9s in rugby, while at the same time in football it's better to have one or two 10s.
but that's the point - you have to sacrifice *a lot* for endurance and versatility on the field. If all you do is sprint for 5 seconds every 3 minutes your training is tailored for that specific goal but you wont be as good at running and tackling and running and tackling for 5 minutes straight like in rugby, where there are very few interruptions. Assuming 1-10 stats, it's desirable to have a bunch of 8s and 9s in rugby, while at the same time in football it's better to have one or two 10s.
But saying their ability to earn a living should suffer because of something not directly related to their skill as a musician seems wrong.
deal with it. Many people don't get awesome jobs because they are perceived as awkward or whatever by the HR drones, even if they have all the raw skills required. It happens daily and musicians are not some special breed of people.
haven't you overused heels by any chance? not that i am a runner, but people doing barefoot running say it's because heel running skips all the dampening effect provided by foot muscles/tendons+calf and the whole shock goes along the rigid bone straight to the knee. Soft heel in a shoe provides false sense of security but doesn't offset the lack of natural shock absorption. If you are barefoot on a hard stone floor, are you able to use heels at all? i know i don't, it fucking hurts and that tells me it's not how it's supposed to be done.
Rights were granted in the Constitution, and by the amendments to the Constitution.
not entirely true 'right to bear arms shall not be infringed' - in other words the constitution reminds the govt that the people have inherent right to be armed and reinforces that concept. The Bill of Rights is not a full list of rights granted by the govt. That would lead to the strange notion that the rights are at the mercy of bureaucrats and can be taken away with a stroke of a pen, and that things which are legit rights but are not on the list are not recognized as such. The govt is merely told to protect basic rights such as A, B, C and others not explicitly listed, in other words it gets the role of the protector of these rights, not the source of them.
if you are unable to think at the age of 20, it's too late for you either way. And if you think that you should not apply the concept of ROI to higher education at all, you are kidding yourself. If the costs are out of whack when compared to the returns, the wealth is squandered, end of story. More often than not you are better off reading few books or stuff on the internet.
who would be the person stopping the nut? The teacher who is the first to go to heaven? Petrified 3 foot tall children?
The core problem of this shitstorm is that people watch too much tear-jerking stuff on tv instead of looking at the hard numbers with an open mind. Mass shooting for all intents and purposes is a black swan, a statistical fluke, just like being hit by a lightning - the only difference is it looks 'better' in evening news. If you could spend billion dollars to reduce number of deaths among minors what would you do? Rationally you should look at the drownings in backyard pools and the car accidents before even thinking about looking at the gun issue (I know these classes of problems are not mutually exclusive but you get my point), because these are the low hanging fruits if you really want to get shit done.
So what you're saying is that Lanza would have done the same amount of damage as fast as he did without the use of a semi-automatic assault rifle?
is there a problem with firing a handgun 100 times in 10 minutes i don't know of? if i am not mistaken glocks can hold what, 17 bullets? and i imagine it's not that hard to aim in a small classroom. What about other methods? explosives? flammables?
'semi-automatic assault rifle' is an oxymoron Assault rifle = able to 'spray and pray', semi-auto is not it, quite the contrary
The US has almost double the rate of any other industrialized nation when it comes to gun related crime. The reasons for that are fairly simple: a) it's too easy to buy a gun, b) the cultural insanity that calls itself the "gun culture" has put weaponized assault on the forefront of everyone's mind.
c) much lower levels of social coherence than 'any other industrialized nation' d) dysfunctional neigborhoods occupied mostly by economically and educationally crippled minorities e) probably the most lucrative drug market on the planet
i'd argue that the 'gun culture' itself doesn't matter as much as the prevalent 'might makes right' attitude, classic american machismo. Hell, the US does that every day on the international level, why wouldn't the citizens?
i never went through marriage and divorce, but I can read just fine. Recently there was an outrage that the repubs refused to renew the Violence Against Women Act and on that occasion there was plenty of opportunity to become familiar with the finer details of the laws related to marriage, divorce and domestic violence.
In America, men are forced to pay around 40% of their income to ex-wives, regardless of wrongdoing on the woman's parts (often called "no-fault" alimony). She could commit adultery and beat her husband or kids, and none of it will influence the court's decision. More shockingly still, a woman can simply accuse her husband of sexual or physical abuse (or simply express a fear of it) and instantly win a restraining order forcing him away from his home and children, without so much as a hearing. In fact, most divorce lawyers will advise a woman to do this, and those who do not can be sued for legal malpractice. And once she has the kids, the family court will be loath to enforce visitation rights for the father. All the mother has to do is ask.
With divorce on the rise -- today, more than 50% of all marriages in the U.S. result in divorce -- men's rights are being increasingly overlooked to the benefit of women. Consider this: statistically, the first person to file for divorce usually wins. While 70% of all divorces are initiated by women, 85 to 90% of custody awards go to the women.
Of course feminism is partly to blame. These days men can't treat their wives like shit and expect them to stay in a terrible marriage on the basis that they don't have any other options.
The problem is that often 'treating like shit' means 'i am bored', 'he works long hours and he's not around', 'he doesn't take me to restaurants anymore'. Do you really believe that all these divorces are because of legitimate 'treating like shit'? Besides women are not angels, they are humans of flesh and bone too. They initiate violence as much as men do, if not more (due to its perceived non-serious nature, there is no threat of real consequences above their heads), the only difference of any significance is they are usually physically weaker.
No, it really isn't. It just seems that way to you because you think the law should always side with you over the women you think you should have control over.
Yet it really is (and it doesn't affect me at all as i don't have any desire to marry nor control any woman, the inequality simply rubs me the wrong way) If the law was just, there would be nowhere near the current imbalance.
How often it's the male who gets the sole custody? 5% maybe? How many in case of females? How often it's the female who pays alimony/child support to the male? Next to never? How often it's the male who gets locked up by default in case of domestic violence because of the concept of 'predominant aggressor' enshrined by the DV laws? Why is that men are only approx 1% of are allowed to the shelters for DV victims?
Feminists are not anywhere close to being egalitarians because they dismiss men issues right off the bat. They don't want any competition turning attention away from their pet causes .
But this may be because often men are making more money than their wives
probably there is some amount of prejudice against women but it doesn't make that often repeated 77% claim true. There is no economic sense to overpay workers when cheaper alternatives are on the market, especially when everybody is whining how soulless companies cut expenses at all costs. The reality is that if you account for life choices (eg men are much more willing to accept longer commute times, more overtime etc) the difference becomes negligible. Lower skilled men are usually the first to go when the company they work for is in trouble so the man=breadwinner role is undermined especially on lower levels of society. On top of that women in general are better educated and constitute the majority of students, which is a problem, because (even ignoring the 'lousy deal for men' thing) really soon women will be unable to find a mate anywhere near their level and i don't think they will be happy with 'mediocre' males. I guess their frustration is bound to go to 11.
Here is the paradox though. Women's value on the dating market peaks at age 21. Men's peak value on the dating market is at age 36. So, after the divorce, men stand a much higher chance of finding a better mate than women do
that's not really a paradox. Evolution made us value women by their looks (~20 is the best time for pregnancy) and men by their possessions (ability to provide for their mate and their offspring). That shooting in the foot done by women who hastily initiate divorce out of boredom only to find themselves in an overcrowded market with much better competition might be caused by simple shortsightedness and rosy perception of their situation.
I've seen some stats based on that okcupid data, that women have very skewed definition of 'average looking' where not-johnny-depp-level but still damn fine looking men, easily in top quintile, were considered merely so-so (yeah, selection bias of the site and what not, but stats of males were not as ridiculous). That might suggest that women often have an unrealistic image of reality and expectations, tend to overplay their hand in their prime time and get into the SOL situation past the peak, in their 30s. Yep, we live in interesting times.
Feminism is partially to blame. Many women feel entitled to good lives with plenty of thrill and whatnot so they simply dump their boring husbands who slave away 12hr/day to support the family (women initiate divorce in 70% of cases). Ever heard women saying men have it so good, they live their sweet patriarchical lives with obedient housewives, dinners every day, sex every evening and whatnot, yet whining that there are no good men willing to marry on the horizon? The truth is the marriage is an increasingly lousy deal for men. Due to decades of lobbying based on 'will somebody please think of the women', the law is heavily stacked against men, when they marry they are literally at the mercy of their wives. Wives are entitled to half of wealth just because, can get their husbands arrested on their word alone (domestic violence even if it didn't happen), in case of divorce get child custody (and have men by the balls if they ever want to see the children), child support and/or alimony (material situation of the man doesn't matter at all and he can be forced to pay more than he earns).
grep works just like most cli tools processing files: [command] [fluff] [files] i guess that's because it's easier to parse fixed parameters first and potentially unlimited list of input at the end.
no shit the browsers are not rock solid. They are ungodly complicated, probably 2nd only to games (which crash orders of magnitude more often) and they have to deal with copious amount of shoddy html and javascript all day long.
THOSE regulations are being thrown away one by one, since Reagan took power
care to name them? I don't think laws about fraud and theft were thrown away and they are enough to put criminals in jail.
given the blatant regulatory capture, why do you think any amount of the best laws possible could fix the problem? They won't help if the bureaucrats and the banksters pat each other's backs. Madoff has run his scheme for what, 10 years? Nobody in the SEC was interested in investigating the reports that something shady was going on. Yes, bloated contradictory code is meant to serve as a competitive advantage of the behemoths with huge legal teams and as a 'escape from jail' card. Keep it simple, stupid?
That's the reality of the web. People want to use css3, html5, svg, faster javascript and what not now, not in 1 year, maybe. I don't really pay too much attention to what companies want, if they had their way we'd be still using IE6.0
I always thought we should separate "money keeping" banks from "money investment" banks.
doesn't really matter. 1. The rest of the world doesn't have such rules. 2. The crisis originated in pure investment banks, one could argue that the diversification helped mixed banks survive.
my take is that it's the inflation biased economic policy is what gave way too much power to the financial system. Inflation means forcing all people to put money in the banks or whether they want it or not. You can't give vote of no confidence and not be fucked over by the inflation on your hard earned savings. Financial sector is supposed to service the real economy that does actual stuff people want but now it's the tail wagging the dog. Banks are the single point of failure and that's just a shitty design. They have everybody by the balls because they can whine all day long that without them the world will crash and burn. Yeah, i get that the inflation is supposed to encourage money flow and economic activiy, but i am not too convinced that the pros outweigh the cons.
I always felt like company taxes should be like personnal income taxes: the rate rise with the amount of income (notice I say income not profit or capital).
bad idea. income tax is on 100% sure money, you don't get periods of negative personal income. Company on the other hand can earn 1 million in one year and lose 1 million in another and it would suck if situation between 1/-1 was very different than 0/0. Same thing with capital gains, you have no guarantee you will always be in the black on your investment and the rate is lower to offset the possibility of disaster. If you want to judge the size of company (roughly proportional to income), what's preventing them from spinning off dozen of child companies? You can play whack-a-mole with big companies all day long, they have teams of lawyers who do nothing but figure out ways to go around such naive rules.
I'd argue it would be better to remove CIT entirely, tax owners, shareholders and employees instead, when the money leaves the abstract entity called 'company' to people of flesh and bone, who get to consume using that money. Companies can relocate with few strokes of a pen, good luck pinning them down. Chasing them is way too much effort than it's worth.
oh please, Greece was not tricked by Goldman to do anything. Greece wanted to do shady business with Goldman to hide the ugly truth about their finances to avoid the attention of the EU's eye of Sauron. Unhappy Sauron = smaller stream of free monies from the EU.
The more deregulation, the bigger the bubbles and the bigger the bust.
well not really. The number of laws on books grows exponentially with each passing year, if what you say is true we should be 100% safe long time ago. The thing is that you can't make the risk go away, it's always there. My take is that incentive structure is 100x more important than regulation. With broken incentives no amount of laws will prevent you from pathologies if the prize is shiny enough, because laws can be creatively circumvented with a big enough legal team and then you get the situation of the fox in the henhouse.
Individual players are too small to suspend the laws of economics for too long. They run out of their money fast, bubble pops and the reversal to the mean occurs. You have to have a serious govt support to blow a bubble of epic proportions. You need to have rock bottom interest rates in the name of economic growth and some regulation or govt backed entity that creates the perception the govt got your back. Fannie and Freddie with implied govt guarantees might not be responsible for the most toxic mortgages but they acted as a sink for the sludge so the incentive was 'give mortgages left and right to anybody with a pulse and resell, it's good business because with the govt backing the market can't fail'. The whole market was distorted by this notion, it doesn't matter if F&F was only 10%, 50% or 99%. Playing it safe meant you were throwing away money your competitors were getting instead. Unfortunately that perceived suspension of economic laws made possible by the govt involvement was not really a suspension, destructive potential energy cumulated in dark corners and waited for the first seam in a weak spot to unleash its power.
Meaningless red tape also concentrates marketshare in the hands of few behemoths, as smaller agile players can't compete with economies of scale in the context of compliance. If behemoths mismanage, you are back to an even bigger square one because they are even bigger than before. And lets not delude ourselves - 90% of the regulation in tens of thousands of pages long financial law is a feel good fluff. How many pages do you need to write don't steal, don't defraud, don't lie in financial statements, don't overleverage yourself like a retard?
THQ was 1billion dollar business just few years ago and now they are flirting with bankrupcy. As they say: The past is not an indicator of future performance.
just wait 1. up until WoW everything they touched turned into gold but the WoW cash cow will die sooner or later and the Warcraft franchise as a whole is burned out. MMOs do that to their universes, there is no story left to continue. 2. SC2, destined to be the king of esports, loses to the free-to-play contenders like LoL and DOTA and people are not that receptive to a game with a watered down content so 3 episodes stretched across few years can be made 50 bucks a pop. Also the RTS genre as a whole is not so hot in the eyes of the current generation of players. 3. D3 was hyped by the ActiBlizz PR machine as if it was the second coming of Christ, expectations were sky high but they didn't deliver and the game is pretty much a dud. Granted, it sold quite a lot copies on the name alone but a lot of people have burned themselves in the process and have learned that the Blizzard logo is not a stamp of stellar quality anymore. 4. Titan - god knows what that is
Few pillars supporting the whole thing and they don't look too healthy.
housing will be always expensive, because its price is relative to productivity (bid up war of interested parties because you have only so many good locations) gizmos - you can afford much more today than back then, don't delude yourself. Appliances are dirt cheap and every ghetto nigga can fancy himself the latest iphone with no problem. Also people didn't have the govt eating a healthy chunk of your income with various taxes: federal income tax, state income tax, payroll tax, sales tax, property tax,... so the bureaucrats can make life of brown people half the world away a blast and otherwise justify their existence full of shuffling paper nobody needs. Oppressed masses in feudal middle ages didn't have to pay as much as people today.
Slashdot Mirror
reposting as well
but that's the point - you have to sacrifice *a lot* for endurance and versatility on the field. If all you do is sprint for 5 seconds every 3 minutes your training is tailored for that specific goal but you wont be as good at running and tackling and running and tackling for 5 minutes straight like in rugby, where there are very few interruptions. Assuming 1-10 stats, it's desirable to have a bunch of 8s and 9s in rugby, while at the same time in football it's better to have one or two 10s.
but that's the point - you have to sacrifice *a lot* for endurance and versatility on the field. If all you do is sprint for 5 seconds every 3 minutes your training is tailored for that specific goal but you wont be as good at running and tackling and running and tackling for 5 minutes straight like in rugby, where there are very few interruptions. Assuming 1-10 stats, it's desirable to have a bunch of 8s and 9s in rugby, while at the same time in football it's better to have one or two 10s.
But saying their ability to earn a living should suffer because of something not directly related to their skill as a musician seems wrong.
deal with it. Many people don't get awesome jobs because they are perceived as awkward or whatever by the HR drones, even if they have all the raw skills required. It happens daily and musicians are not some special breed of people.
haven't you overused heels by any chance? not that i am a runner, but people doing barefoot running say it's because heel running skips all the dampening effect provided by foot muscles/tendons+calf and the whole shock goes along the rigid bone straight to the knee. Soft heel in a shoe provides false sense of security but doesn't offset the lack of natural shock absorption.
If you are barefoot on a hard stone floor, are you able to use heels at all? i know i don't, it fucking hurts and that tells me it's not how it's supposed to be done.
Rights were granted in the Constitution, and by the amendments to the Constitution.
not entirely true
'right to bear arms shall not be infringed' - in other words the constitution reminds the govt that the people have inherent right to be armed and reinforces that concept.
The Bill of Rights is not a full list of rights granted by the govt. That would lead to the strange notion that the rights are at the mercy of bureaucrats and can be taken away with a stroke of a pen, and that things which are legit rights but are not on the list are not recognized as such. The govt is merely told to protect basic rights such as A, B, C and others not explicitly listed, in other words it gets the role of the protector of these rights, not the source of them.
if you are unable to think at the age of 20, it's too late for you either way.
And if you think that you should not apply the concept of ROI to higher education at all, you are kidding yourself. If the costs are out of whack when compared to the returns, the wealth is squandered, end of story. More often than not you are better off reading few books or stuff on the internet.
who would be the person stopping the nut? The teacher who is the first to go to heaven? Petrified 3 foot tall children?
The core problem of this shitstorm is that people watch too much tear-jerking stuff on tv instead of looking at the hard numbers with an open mind.
Mass shooting for all intents and purposes is a black swan, a statistical fluke, just like being hit by a lightning - the only difference is it looks 'better' in evening news.
If you could spend billion dollars to reduce number of deaths among minors what would you do? Rationally you should look at the drownings in backyard pools and the car accidents before even thinking about looking at the gun issue (I know these classes of problems are not mutually exclusive but you get my point), because these are the low hanging fruits if you really want to get shit done.
Aurora shooting? the perp used 100-round mag and it jammed.
So what you're saying is that Lanza would have done the same amount of damage as fast as he did without the use of a semi-automatic assault rifle?
is there a problem with firing a handgun 100 times in 10 minutes i don't know of? if i am not mistaken glocks can hold what, 17 bullets? and i imagine it's not that hard to aim in a small classroom.
What about other methods? explosives? flammables?
'semi-automatic assault rifle' is an oxymoron
Assault rifle = able to 'spray and pray', semi-auto is not it, quite the contrary
The US has almost double the rate of any other industrialized nation when it comes to gun related crime. The reasons for that are fairly simple: a) it's too easy to buy a gun, b) the cultural insanity that calls itself the "gun culture" has put weaponized assault on the forefront of everyone's mind.
c) much lower levels of social coherence than 'any other industrialized nation'
d) dysfunctional neigborhoods occupied mostly by economically and educationally crippled minorities
e) probably the most lucrative drug market on the planet
i'd argue that the 'gun culture' itself doesn't matter as much as the prevalent 'might makes right' attitude, classic american machismo. Hell, the US does that every day on the international level, why wouldn't the citizens?
i never went through marriage and divorce, but I can read just fine.
Recently there was an outrage that the repubs refused to renew the Violence Against Women Act and on that occasion there was plenty of opportunity to become familiar with the finer details of the laws related to marriage, divorce and domestic violence.
quick google:
http://www.askmen.com/daily/austin_60/92_fashion_style.html
In America, men are forced to pay around 40% of their income to ex-wives, regardless of wrongdoing on the woman's parts (often called "no-fault" alimony). She could commit adultery and beat her husband or kids, and none of it will influence the court's decision. More shockingly still, a woman can simply accuse her husband of sexual or physical abuse (or simply express a fear of it) and instantly win a restraining order forcing him away from his home and children, without so much as a hearing. In fact, most divorce lawyers will advise a woman to do this, and those who do not can be sued for legal malpractice.
And once she has the kids, the family court will be loath to enforce visitation rights for the father. All the mother has to do is ask.
With divorce on the rise -- today, more than 50% of all marriages in the U.S. result in divorce -- men's rights are being increasingly overlooked to the benefit of women. Consider this: statistically, the first person to file for divorce usually wins. While 70% of all divorces are initiated by women, 85 to 90% of custody awards go to the women.
not that i care
Of course feminism is partly to blame. These days men can't treat their wives like shit and expect them to stay in a terrible marriage on the basis that they don't have any other options.
The problem is that often 'treating like shit' means 'i am bored', 'he works long hours and he's not around', 'he doesn't take me to restaurants anymore'. Do you really believe that all these divorces are because of legitimate 'treating like shit'?
Besides women are not angels, they are humans of flesh and bone too. They initiate violence as much as men do, if not more (due to its perceived non-serious nature, there is no threat of real consequences above their heads), the only difference of any significance is they are usually physically weaker.
No, it really isn't. It just seems that way to you because you think the law should always side with you over the women you think you should have control over.
Yet it really is
(and it doesn't affect me at all as i don't have any desire to marry nor control any woman, the inequality simply rubs me the wrong way)
If the law was just, there would be nowhere near the current imbalance.
How often it's the male who gets the sole custody? 5% maybe? How many in case of females?
How often it's the female who pays alimony/child support to the male? Next to never?
How often it's the male who gets locked up by default in case of domestic violence because of the concept of 'predominant aggressor' enshrined by the DV laws?
Why is that men are only approx 1% of are allowed to the shelters for DV victims?
Feminists are not anywhere close to being egalitarians because they dismiss men issues right off the bat. They don't want any competition turning attention away from their pet causes .
But this may be because often men are making more money than their wives
probably there is some amount of prejudice against women but it doesn't make that often repeated 77% claim true. There is no economic sense to overpay workers when cheaper alternatives are on the market, especially when everybody is whining how soulless companies cut expenses at all costs. The reality is that if you account for life choices (eg men are much more willing to accept longer commute times, more overtime etc) the difference becomes negligible.
Lower skilled men are usually the first to go when the company they work for is in trouble so the man=breadwinner role is undermined especially on lower levels of society. On top of that women in general are better educated and constitute the majority of students, which is a problem, because (even ignoring the 'lousy deal for men' thing) really soon women will be unable to find a mate anywhere near their level and i don't think they will be happy with 'mediocre' males. I guess their frustration is bound to go to 11.
Here is the paradox though. Women's value on the dating market peaks at age 21. Men's peak value on the dating market is at age 36. So, after the divorce, men stand a much higher chance of finding a better mate than women do
that's not really a paradox. Evolution made us value women by their looks (~20 is the best time for pregnancy) and men by their possessions (ability to provide for their mate and their offspring). That shooting in the foot done by women who hastily initiate divorce out of boredom only to find themselves in an overcrowded market with much better competition might be caused by simple shortsightedness and rosy perception of their situation.
I've seen some stats based on that okcupid data, that women have very skewed definition of 'average looking' where not-johnny-depp-level but still damn fine looking men, easily in top quintile, were considered merely so-so (yeah, selection bias of the site and what not, but stats of males were not as ridiculous). That might suggest that women often have an unrealistic image of reality and expectations, tend to overplay their hand in their prime time and get into the SOL situation past the peak, in their 30s.
Yep, we live in interesting times.
Feminism is partially to blame. Many women feel entitled to good lives with plenty of thrill and whatnot so they simply dump their boring husbands who slave away 12hr/day to support the family (women initiate divorce in 70% of cases).
Ever heard women saying men have it so good, they live their sweet patriarchical lives with obedient housewives, dinners every day, sex every evening and whatnot, yet whining that there are no good men willing to marry on the horizon? The truth is the marriage is an increasingly lousy deal for men. Due to decades of lobbying based on 'will somebody please think of the women', the law is heavily stacked against men, when they marry they are literally at the mercy of their wives.
Wives are entitled to half of wealth just because, can get their husbands arrested on their word alone (domestic violence even if it didn't happen), in case of divorce get child custody (and have men by the balls if they ever want to see the children), child support and/or alimony (material situation of the man doesn't matter at all and he can be forced to pay more than he earns).
grep works just like most cli tools processing files: [command] [fluff] [files]
i guess that's because it's easier to parse fixed parameters first and potentially unlimited list of input at the end.
-h, --no-filename suppress the prefixing filename on output
besides, nobody ever needs to know in which file the grepped phrase is located, right?
no shit the browsers are not rock solid. They are ungodly complicated, probably 2nd only to games (which crash orders of magnitude more often) and they have to deal with copious amount of shoddy html and javascript all day long.
THOSE regulations are being thrown away one by one, since Reagan took power
care to name them? I don't think laws about fraud and theft were thrown away and they are enough to put criminals in jail.
given the blatant regulatory capture, why do you think any amount of the best laws possible could fix the problem? They won't help if the bureaucrats and the banksters pat each other's backs. Madoff has run his scheme for what, 10 years? Nobody in the SEC was interested in investigating the reports that something shady was going on.
Yes, bloated contradictory code is meant to serve as a competitive advantage of the behemoths with huge legal teams and as a 'escape from jail' card. Keep it simple, stupid?
That's the reality of the web. People want to use css3, html5, svg, faster javascript and what not now, not in 1 year, maybe.
I don't really pay too much attention to what companies want, if they had their way we'd be still using IE6.0
I always thought we should separate "money keeping" banks from "money investment" banks.
doesn't really matter. 1. The rest of the world doesn't have such rules. 2. The crisis originated in pure investment banks, one could argue that the diversification helped mixed banks survive.
my take is that it's the inflation biased economic policy is what gave way too much power to the financial system. Inflation means forcing all people to put money in the banks or whether they want it or not. You can't give vote of no confidence and not be fucked over by the inflation on your hard earned savings. Financial sector is supposed to service the real economy that does actual stuff people want but now it's the tail wagging the dog. Banks are the single point of failure and that's just a shitty design. They have everybody by the balls because they can whine all day long that without them the world will crash and burn.
Yeah, i get that the inflation is supposed to encourage money flow and economic activiy, but i am not too convinced that the pros outweigh the cons.
I always felt like company taxes should be like personnal income taxes: the rate rise with the amount of income (notice I say income not profit or capital).
bad idea. income tax is on 100% sure money, you don't get periods of negative personal income. Company on the other hand can earn 1 million in one year and lose 1 million in another and it would suck if situation between 1/-1 was very different than 0/0. Same thing with capital gains, you have no guarantee you will always be in the black on your investment and the rate is lower to offset the possibility of disaster.
If you want to judge the size of company (roughly proportional to income), what's preventing them from spinning off dozen of child companies? You can play whack-a-mole with big companies all day long, they have teams of lawyers who do nothing but figure out ways to go around such naive rules.
I'd argue it would be better to remove CIT entirely, tax owners, shareholders and employees instead, when the money leaves the abstract entity called 'company' to people of flesh and bone, who get to consume using that money. Companies can relocate with few strokes of a pen, good luck pinning them down. Chasing them is way too much effort than it's worth.
oh please, Greece was not tricked by Goldman to do anything. Greece wanted to do shady business with Goldman to hide the ugly truth about their finances to avoid the attention of the EU's eye of Sauron. Unhappy Sauron = smaller stream of free monies from the EU.
The more deregulation, the bigger the bubbles and the bigger the bust.
well not really. The number of laws on books grows exponentially with each passing year, if what you say is true we should be 100% safe long time ago. The thing is that you can't make the risk go away, it's always there.
My take is that incentive structure is 100x more important than regulation. With broken incentives no amount of laws will prevent you from pathologies if the prize is shiny enough, because laws can be creatively circumvented with a big enough legal team and then you get the situation of the fox in the henhouse.
Individual players are too small to suspend the laws of economics for too long. They run out of their money fast, bubble pops and the reversal to the mean occurs. You have to have a serious govt support to blow a bubble of epic proportions. You need to have rock bottom interest rates in the name of economic growth and some regulation or govt backed entity that creates the perception the govt got your back.
Fannie and Freddie with implied govt guarantees might not be responsible for the most toxic mortgages but they acted as a sink for the sludge so the incentive was 'give mortgages left and right to anybody with a pulse and resell, it's good business because with the govt backing the market can't fail'. The whole market was distorted by this notion, it doesn't matter if F&F was only 10%, 50% or 99%. Playing it safe meant you were throwing away money your competitors were getting instead.
Unfortunately that perceived suspension of economic laws made possible by the govt involvement was not really a suspension, destructive potential energy cumulated in dark corners and waited for the first seam in a weak spot to unleash its power.
Meaningless red tape also concentrates marketshare in the hands of few behemoths, as smaller agile players can't compete with economies of scale in the context of compliance. If behemoths mismanage, you are back to an even bigger square one because they are even bigger than before. And lets not delude ourselves - 90% of the regulation in tens of thousands of pages long financial law is a feel good fluff. How many pages do you need to write don't steal, don't defraud, don't lie in financial statements, don't overleverage yourself like a retard?
THQ was 1billion dollar business just few years ago and now they are flirting with bankrupcy.
As they say: The past is not an indicator of future performance.
just wait
1. up until WoW everything they touched turned into gold but the WoW cash cow will die sooner or later and the Warcraft franchise as a whole is burned out. MMOs do that to their universes, there is no story left to continue.
2. SC2, destined to be the king of esports, loses to the free-to-play contenders like LoL and DOTA and people are not that receptive to a game with a watered down content so 3 episodes stretched across few years can be made 50 bucks a pop. Also the RTS genre as a whole is not so hot in the eyes of the current generation of players.
3. D3 was hyped by the ActiBlizz PR machine as if it was the second coming of Christ, expectations were sky high but they didn't deliver and the game is pretty much a dud. Granted, it sold quite a lot copies on the name alone but a lot of people have burned themselves in the process and have learned that the Blizzard logo is not a stamp of stellar quality anymore.
4. Titan - god knows what that is
Few pillars supporting the whole thing and they don't look too healthy.
housing will be always expensive, because its price is relative to productivity (bid up war of interested parties because you have only so many good locations) ... so the bureaucrats can make life of brown people half the world away a blast and otherwise justify their existence full of shuffling paper nobody needs.
gizmos - you can afford much more today than back then, don't delude yourself. Appliances are dirt cheap and every ghetto nigga can fancy himself the latest iphone with no problem.
Also people didn't have the govt eating a healthy chunk of your income with various taxes: federal income tax, state income tax, payroll tax, sales tax, property tax,
Oppressed masses in feudal middle ages didn't have to pay as much as people today.
if you want to link to some specific moment in youtube clip, add timestamp to the url in the following format: #t=XmY (X minutes Y seconds, though seconds alone work too)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4BgkCUbeuck#t=0m9
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y9g7H0-NelI#t=0m50