The United States has about six violent deaths per 100,000 residents.
Homicide, they noted, is the second leading cause of death among adolescents and young adults aged 15-24. The large majority of those homicides involve firearms.
OK, let's do the math. Let's assume that other countries have zero violent deaths per 100,000 and have a life expectancy of 80 years. Let's assume that all 6 per 100,000 deaths in the US happen at age 15. How much does that affect our life expectancy?
The life expectancy difference between the US and the top performer is 4 years for men and 5 years for women. The maximum possible effect of gun violence according to the statistics in this report is 0.0039 of those years.
The report's authors were particularly critical of the availability of guns
True enough, but it was because of their preconceived notions, not because the data in the study supports their view.
The thing is though that it wasn't a waste of money. We got a stinking big profit out of it.
You talking about AIG, or overall? If overall, citation needed. The thing with investing in a bunch of high risk plays is that the winners pay for the losers. That's why the promised return has to be so high.
Not only that but we saved a metric fuckton of money on things like pension insurance, deposit insurance and unemployment benefits that we would have had to pay out if they had gone tits up.
And we did not get the renewal that comes form letting failed companies go out of business. Same thing we didn't get when we bailed them out of bundling tranches of same-market debt in 1986. Spare the rod, spoil the child. Then the child does the exact same thing again.
The free market kills broken companies. That is a feature, not a bug.
Best get a hold of this prick and muzzle that shit. Otherwise, next time, we're going to use this story to whip up public support for letting you all burn to the ground.
people such as this who have no regard for others do not deserve any sympathy or regard from the rest of society.
I agree, but then why are you regarding them so much? Why are you spending so much of yourself on hating them? Why not just remove them from society and get on with your life? Why would you let them turn you into a killer? Why let them poison who you are?
It's like torturing terrorists when you don't get actionable intel; even if they genuinely deserve it, that's not the point. It's about what we subject ourselves to. We choose not to torture because torturing harms us, not because the sonofabitch doesn't deserve it.
We choose not to kill because killing is a nasty business, and is not necessary to achieve the goal of minimizing the rapist's ability to effect our world. Rather, it increases his effect on who we are. He does not deserve that power.
JSON, jQuery, and Node.js. Perl never brought to the table anything remotely like these.
I like both languages, and prefer others to either of them. Not trying to knock Javascript or blow sunshine up Perl's skirt, and I don't know if Baxter has a clue, but your statement is not correct. Perl's eval, CPAN, and mod_perl are the Perl equivalents, respectively. They do pretty much the exact same thing (except CPAN; it's actually *much* more extensive than jQuery, and has no equivalent in Javascript that I am familiar with). The only difference, as noted by many people already, is that the Javascript versions work consistently across web browsers, so their usage is more pervasive on the client side. Not necessarily better or worse based on that evidence alone, just more pervasive. Server side, there's a solid half decade of work ahead for Javascript to be in the same ballpark on infrastructure support as Perl.
This mean that all gun laws are for the explicit purpose of making law abiding citizens defenseless against criminals.
Definitely not explicit, maybe implicit. I would lean toward, "has the side effect of" and moderate "defenseless" to something more reasonable like "unable to wield one potent form of defensive force." Gun ownership rights advocates have the stereotyped image of being extremists; using polemics to support gun ownership reinforces the stereotype. It may be a good approach for whipping up the troops, but it may be counterproductive with people who are considering both sides.
Good guy or bad, own a gun and you start to feel power enough to turn into a thug.
The math doesn't support that statement. There are an estimated 43 - 55 million gun owning households in the US(*). If owning a gun made you a thug with, say, 10% likelihood, there'd be over 4 million thugs. Assuming the definition of thug involves some propensity for violent crime, we would see a much higher violent crime rate.
Our Constitution guarantees us a number of ways to work through government for change.
Yes, there are. There's even a little ditty to remember them by: Soap box, ballot box, jury box, ammo box.
The problem with protests is that by working around these methods,
Protest is the most elevated form of the first method we are supposed to use for change, as documented in The Constitution. The soap box is first because it is least injurious. The second box, electing officials based on their position on a single issue, constrains our ability to choose leaders based on their principles, their wisdom, their honesty, or other issues -- you get corrupt, polemic demagogues whipping people into a frenzy over wedge issues like abortion and gun control. The third box, petitioning the government for redress of grievances, weakens the public trust, especially if the predictable response from government is refusal to hear the petition for redress based on a decree of national security or lack of standing. The fourth box is revolution, which is extremely disruptive to the economic engine of the nation, and it kills people.
Given that we have already been using the second and third methods, to no avail, and are loathe to resort to the fourth, an elevated form of the first method is exactly what is appropriate. The correcting mechanism is working perfectly, exactly as the people who were pushed all the way to the fourth box -- the founders of the nation -- documented them. The part of our nation that is causing the distortion is not We The People. We The People are doing exactly what we are supposed to be doing, and the engines of the political parties are driving down a different path. Protest is exactly the most responsible action in our current context.
Consider the consequences: If the leadership is responsive to protest, things change and maybe they get better or maybe they get worse and we have to correct again. If the leadership is not responsive, the public grows more unsettled and their propensity to use the other boxes increases. The way the public uses the second and third box will become more disruptive, and there will be a greater risk of people resorting to the fourth.
One great reason to support piracy is to weaken the profits of Hollywood and the news-entertainment media.
A fine example of using the soap box to advocate for disruptive change to a system that you feel has become distorted, and which you believe is unresponsive to less disruptive attempts to use the second and third boxes.
It seems natural, at least to some, to recoil in horror at the notion of fantasizing about homicide or mass homicide. I am reminded of a scene from Inglourious Basterds
Spoiler Alert
Near the end of the film, it shows Hitler and a bunch of Reich VIPs watching a movie of the death camps and laughing, and we, the audience, are meant to recoil in horror (and we do). In the very next scene, the heroes slaughter Hitler and the VIPs and Tarantino frames it as a comic scene, and it made me laugh at the slaughter.
So there I was, whipsawed from moral outrage at someone for laughing at mass homicide on film to laughing at mass homicide on film in a matter of seconds. Now, obviously, we all prefer to see Hitler & Friends killed than innocent victims of genocide, but the laughing at mass homicide switchback remains. And it was all happening within a work of cinematic art.
Tarantino shot a scene of people laughing at holocaust victims, and it is art. He shot a scene that causes us to laugh at mass homicide, and it is art. He juxtaposes those scenes, and it is poignant, incisive art. If we can laugh at mass homicide, and see laughing at the holocaust as art, it would be very challenging to objectively define the moral limits of art.
Horrible things are a part of the human condition. If we are to be free to know ourselves, our artists must be free to explore the darkest corners of our beings.
A point that would be valid, if any of these parties had experience with both launching space ships and starting small businesses and hence, an avenue for making such a comparison.
The expertise in these people is not investing in small businesses, it is risk management. That's what they study, their passion, the value they add. Their specialty is looking at potential investments of capital and making the best possible calculation of whether it will produce a return that justifies the risk. Their kind has a long and storied history of investing in highly unknown fields, including sending ships into the unkown to seek riches. Here is a good book on the topic.
But alas, these are all entities that tend to have a lot of experience in funding small businesses and not very much experience in spacecraft.
The people who are providing the funding in the case under consideration also have zero experience in spacecraft. Additionally, they are not specialists in risk management.
Obviously this is a public relations piece, and has been meticulous scrubbed to minimize the risk of losing votes through accidental candor. Still, if you look carefully, you can catch glimpses of the mindset in the way things are phrased and structured.
From page 14, here are the top five priority objectives:
Priority Objectives Top Five The following objectives capture the highest five priorities of the Administration in achieving the infor-mation sharing and safeguarding goals of this Strategy. 1. Align information sharing and safeguarding governance to foster better decisionmaking, performance, accountability, and implementation of the Strategy's goals. 2. Develop guidelines for information sharing and safeguarding agreements to address common requirements, including privacy, civil rights, and civil liberties, while still allowing flexibility to meet mission needs. 3. Adopt metadata standards to facilitate federated discovery, access, correlation, and monitoring across Federal networks and security domains. 4. Extend and implement the FICAM Roadmap across all security domains. 5. Implement removable media policies, processes and controls; provide timely audit capabilities of assets, vulnerabilities, and threats; establish programs, processes and techniques to deter, detect and disrupt insider threats; and share the management of risks, to enhance unclassified and classified information safeguarding efforts.
Notice anything different in the structure of the items? Here, I'll point out the one that is different:
2. Develop guidelines for information sharing and safeguarding agreements to address common requirements, including privacy, civil rights, and civil liberties, while still allowing flexibility to meet mission needs.
See it yet? OK, I'll bold the section that makes this item uniquely structured:
2. Develop guidelines for information sharing and safeguarding agreements to address common requirements, including privacy, civil rights, and civil liberties, while still allowing flexibility to meet mission needs.
Nice -- it's the only one that says, Except when it would interfere with the mission. Isn't it fascinating that every other one of the top five points is just stated, but with civil liberties, privacy, and civil rights, they feel both compelled and uninhibited in adding, Except when it would interfere with the mission. They couldn't make it through one simple declaration that sometimes the rights of the citizens enumerated in The Constitution preempt the authority of government without adding, We don't really mean this one.
>> Velocity of money does not change significantly based on who is spending it.
> So you're claiming that velocity of money is pretty much the same for HFT traders and people who stick money in mattresses? It's not. Such things can differ by many orders of magnitude.
Yes, you are right, I was being shortsighted. I was only considering the comparison between buying a spaceship and operating a thousand small businesses. In that context, I'm guessing the velocity of money after the transaction is probably in the same rough range, but certainly any evidence that points strongly to a greater velocity on one side or the other should be considered in the whole transaction calculus. My broad generalization is not correct in all contexts.
It's worth noting here that nobody aside from the US government actually is building a billion dollar space ship. But plenty of people, even in today's poor lending environment, are loaning money to small businesses.
If I had a billion dollars, what small businesses am I to invest in that aren't already covered by hundreds of banks, similar numbers of VC firms, and at least tens of thousands of angel investors?
Another way to say this is, "Of the hundreds of banks, VC firms, and tens of thousands of angel investors, none of them think funding an asteroid harvesting spaceship is a better bet than funding small businesses." There may be very good reasons for them to feel that way, and it's not because big bets don't get made; Tesco just dropped two billion on Fresh & Easy. It went down, but it was still a more rational way to allocate resources than these.
The economy grew, faster and bigger than it did before and after his term The poverty level and the population in it shrunk. The avg family income grew.
Same is true of Clinton, but he did it while running a surplus instead of a massive deficit. Oh -- except the part about poverty -- Clinton didn't just shrink it, he set records for shrinking it.
Now, giving Clinton credit for the tech boom isn't fair, but failing to account for Reagan's reckless stimulus spending is equally inappropriate.
Basically nothing you said had anything to do with the 80's.
There is some truth to that -- we did start stimulating the top incomes before Reagan, as a result of failing to adjust the brackets for inflation, which caused them to start to eat into the entrepreneurial set, but Reagan did at least as much more on top of that.
Velocity of money does not change significantly based on who is spending it. Every transaction has subsequent transactions that support the economy, and they cancel out. The question is the efficiency of the transaction under consideration. Does that spaceship, a giant chunk of capital, a great heaping pile of allocated GDP, produce wealth as quickly as a thousand small businesses? (please be rigorous in your consideration of the definition of "produce wealth")
They weren't "given" money. They organized land, labor and capital in such a way as to create wealth for themselves, their partners/investors, employees and customers that would not otherwise have existed.
That's only perfeclty true if the system is perfectly efficient. If the system is biased against the wealthy, they get paid less than they earn. If it is biased in their favor, they get paid more than they earn. Both cases, interestingly, have occurred in the US within the past 70 years. Check the IRS SOI for back records on income concentration, then compare that to GDP per capita growth rate -- if we have increasing concentration and a decreasing growth rate, it would mean we are paying the wealthy more and getting less growth -- ie: inefficiently distorted in favor of the wealthy. For a second dimension along which to measure, check GDP per capita versus Gini of the world's nations. Here's my chart on PPC/Gini, and I've done the math with the SOI -- but don't take my word for it. Do the research yourself to confirm.
Velocity of money does not change significantly based on who is spending it. Every transaction has subsequent transactions that support the economy, and they cancel out. The question is the efficiency of the transaction under consideration. Does that spaceship, a giant chunk of capital, a great heaping pile of allocated GDP, produce wealth as quickly as a thousand small businesses? (please be rigorous in your consideration of the definition of "produce wealth")
There are asteroid-mining proposals backed by Larry Page and Eric Schmidt, various moon-mining proposals, and, announced just this month, a proposed moon-tourism venture.
Just shows that Reaganomics got it part right -- if you keep giving more and more money to a smaller and smaller sliver of society, they will find things to spend it on. Unfortunately, not cost efficient things that trickle down to smaller businesses, entrepreneurs, and working people. They spend it on ever more gigantic toys. "Oooh, Larry, let's build a billion dollar spaceship!" Great. Too bad we don't have a thousand small businesses spending that money on labor, rent, stock, and taxes instead.
Instagram already showed us who they are on the inside. How they feel about their users. That they see them as cattle to be slaughtered and sold in whatever way most suits their customers, the advertisers. The only thing that has changed is they got caught and so they are going to hide their disdain for a while until this storm blows over.
It is not this policy that is unacceptable, it is their attitude. They have shown that they cannot be trusted, and it is our duty -- as the silent hand of the free market -- to put them out of business as a warning to others.
Delete your Instagram account, and never darken their door again.
The would-be decrypter says that it is a collection of single character abbreviations. If so, frequency analysis should back up the assertion. Here's the character frequency:
Every character used at least once, multiple Z's, X's, and Q's, and a pretty flat distribution. A set of abbreviated words would show a more spiky distribution, with peaks on the more common letters and dips on the less common.
Which walled gardens? More secure how? More secure than what?
If the walled garden does a better job of verifying the security than the collection of apps you are comparing it to, then you are right. But that is not an inherent characteristic of the walled garden model any more than it is of any other kind of collection of apps. The question is how strongly the selection process under consideration filters for security.
For example, F-Droid is a repository of Free and Open Source Android software. It is pretty much the opposite of a walled garden, and it is very possible that the F-Droid software is more secure than what is available on Google Play or the iTunes App Store.
The claim that walled gardens are inherently more secure is no more valid than the archaic and discarded notion that proprietary software is inherently more secure than Open Source. The same holds true for the operating system as for the marketplace, for the same reasons.
> "It's open source, just patch it yourself." > > If there ever was a sentence to describe the elitist attitude of open-source nerds, this is it.
If ever there was a post to capture the hubris of those who do not understand that we all must take control of our own information flows or be subjugated, this is it.
I wasn't contradicting you, or saying your idea is wrong. I was pointing out a subtle angle of tax policy that has to be included in the calculus. I took pains to make it clear that I don't think it is easy to tell whether it is good or bad for any of the stakeholders in the long run.
Yes, but it also scares off foreign investment.
That is true, but bear in mind that, holding all other things equal, the exact same amount of tax must exist somewhere. It can be friction on foreign investment, or on domestic investment, or on labor (call this "job creation" if you want), or on sales/consumption, or on property ownership, or whatever. The tax must fall somewhere, and it will be a friction on whatever you put it on. Observing, "If you put it on X, it will inhibit X" is not expository without measuring whether that would be better or worse than the alternative options.
It doesn't make any sense at all tax corporate profits when you could just as easily tax the income shareholders make from the profits, or capital gains in the event a corporation doesn't post dividends.
One angle that bears considering is that taxing corporate profits results in some of the tax incidence falling on foreign investors. If you only tax shareholder income and capital gains you don't get any money from foreigners (assuming those taxes are only assessed on citizens / residents). Not saying which side is better or worse for the US or the world in the long run -- my guess is if you enter into an agreement with the other major players so everyone suspends corporate taxes, it solves that part, but I haven't done the math -- just something to noodle on.
And frankly, every single one of us does it when we can get away with it, as well.
I don't. I just met with my accountant for my company's year end books and didn't do any of the things I knew I could get away with which were not legitimate. For example, I had a few thousand dollars worth of receipts that were non-business expenses but would have looked legit. I did not file them, because I am an honorable man.
pretty much everything we do is getting richer the rich
That's only true in the short run. In the long run, the inefficiency resulting from the distortion of economic incentives is hindering GDP growth, which ultimately reduces the income of rich and poor alike. The corruption is not only stealing from the poor, middle class, and upper middle class -- it is also stealing from the rich in the long run -- to line the pockets of today's benefactors of corruption. They are stealing even from their own future meta-selves.
Slashdot Mirror
The United States has about six violent deaths per 100,000 residents.
Homicide, they noted, is the second leading cause of death among adolescents and young adults aged 15-24. The large majority of those homicides involve firearms.
OK, let's do the math. Let's assume that other countries have zero violent deaths per 100,000 and have a life expectancy of 80 years. Let's assume that all 6 per 100,000 deaths in the US happen at age 15. How much does that affect our life expectancy?
99994 * 80 = 7999520
6 * 15 = 90
90 + 7999520 = 7999610
7999610 / 100,000 = 79.9961
80 - 79.9961 = 0.0039
The life expectancy difference between the US and the top performer is 4 years for men and 5 years for women. The maximum possible effect of gun violence according to the statistics in this report is 0.0039 of those years.
The report's authors were particularly critical of the availability of guns
True enough, but it was because of their preconceived notions, not because the data in the study supports their view.
The thing is though that it wasn't a waste of money. We got a stinking big profit out of it.
You talking about AIG, or overall? If overall, citation needed. The thing with investing in a bunch of high risk plays is that the winners pay for the losers. That's why the promised return has to be so high.
Not only that but we saved a metric fuckton of money on things like pension insurance, deposit insurance and unemployment benefits that we would have had to pay out if they had gone tits up.
And we did not get the renewal that comes form letting failed companies go out of business. Same thing we didn't get when we bailed them out of bundling tranches of same-market debt in 1986. Spare the rod, spoil the child. Then the child does the exact same thing again.
The free market kills broken companies. That is a feature, not a bug.
Dear Financial Industry,
Best get a hold of this prick and muzzle that shit. Otherwise, next time, we're going to use this story to whip up public support for letting you all burn to the ground.
Warmest Regards,
The Society That Permits You To Exist
people such as this who have no regard for others do not deserve any sympathy or regard from the rest of society.
I agree, but then why are you regarding them so much? Why are you spending so much of yourself on hating them? Why not just remove them from society and get on with your life? Why would you let them turn you into a killer? Why let them poison who you are?
It's like torturing terrorists when you don't get actionable intel; even if they genuinely deserve it, that's not the point. It's about what we subject ourselves to. We choose not to torture because torturing harms us, not because the sonofabitch doesn't deserve it.
We choose not to kill because killing is a nasty business, and is not necessary to achieve the goal of minimizing the rapist's ability to effect our world. Rather, it increases his effect on who we are. He does not deserve that power.
JSON, jQuery, and Node.js. Perl never brought to the table anything remotely like these.
I like both languages, and prefer others to either of them. Not trying to knock Javascript or blow sunshine up Perl's skirt, and I don't know if Baxter has a clue, but your statement is not correct. Perl's eval, CPAN, and mod_perl are the Perl equivalents, respectively. They do pretty much the exact same thing (except CPAN; it's actually *much* more extensive than jQuery, and has no equivalent in Javascript that I am familiar with). The only difference, as noted by many people already, is that the Javascript versions work consistently across web browsers, so their usage is more pervasive on the client side. Not necessarily better or worse based on that evidence alone, just more pervasive. Server side, there's a solid half decade of work ahead for Javascript to be in the same ballpark on infrastructure support as Perl.
This mean that all gun laws are for the explicit purpose of making law abiding citizens defenseless against criminals.
Definitely not explicit, maybe implicit. I would lean toward, "has the side effect of" and moderate "defenseless" to something more reasonable like "unable to wield one potent form of defensive force." Gun ownership rights advocates have the stereotyped image of being extremists; using polemics to support gun ownership reinforces the stereotype. It may be a good approach for whipping up the troops, but it may be counterproductive with people who are considering both sides.
Good guy or bad, own a gun and you start to feel power enough to turn into a thug.
The math doesn't support that statement. There are an estimated 43 - 55 million gun owning households in the US(*). If owning a gun made you a thug with, say, 10% likelihood, there'd be over 4 million thugs. Assuming the definition of thug involves some propensity for violent crime, we would see a much higher violent crime rate.
* http://wiki.answers.com/Q/How_many_gun_owners_are_there_in_the_United_States_of_America
Our Constitution guarantees us a number of ways to work through government for change.
Yes, there are. There's even a little ditty to remember them by: Soap box, ballot box, jury box, ammo box.
The problem with protests is that by working around these methods,
Protest is the most elevated form of the first method we are supposed to use for change, as documented in The Constitution. The soap box is first because it is least injurious. The second box, electing officials based on their position on a single issue, constrains our ability to choose leaders based on their principles, their wisdom, their honesty, or other issues -- you get corrupt, polemic demagogues whipping people into a frenzy over wedge issues like abortion and gun control. The third box, petitioning the government for redress of grievances, weakens the public trust, especially if the predictable response from government is refusal to hear the petition for redress based on a decree of national security or lack of standing. The fourth box is revolution, which is extremely disruptive to the economic engine of the nation, and it kills people.
Given that we have already been using the second and third methods, to no avail, and are loathe to resort to the fourth, an elevated form of the first method is exactly what is appropriate. The correcting mechanism is working perfectly, exactly as the people who were pushed all the way to the fourth box -- the founders of the nation -- documented them. The part of our nation that is causing the distortion is not We The People. We The People are doing exactly what we are supposed to be doing, and the engines of the political parties are driving down a different path. Protest is exactly the most responsible action in our current context.
Consider the consequences: If the leadership is responsive to protest, things change and maybe they get better or maybe they get worse and we have to correct again. If the leadership is not responsive, the public grows more unsettled and their propensity to use the other boxes increases. The way the public uses the second and third box will become more disruptive, and there will be a greater risk of people resorting to the fourth.
One great reason to support piracy is to weaken the profits of Hollywood and the news-entertainment media.
A fine example of using the soap box to advocate for disruptive change to a system that you feel has become distorted, and which you believe is unresponsive to less disruptive attempts to use the second and third boxes.
It seems natural, at least to some, to recoil in horror at the notion of fantasizing about homicide or mass homicide. I am reminded of a scene from Inglourious Basterds
Spoiler Alert
Near the end of the film, it shows Hitler and a bunch of Reich VIPs watching a movie of the death camps and laughing, and we, the audience, are meant to recoil in horror (and we do). In the very next scene, the heroes slaughter Hitler and the VIPs and Tarantino frames it as a comic scene, and it made me laugh at the slaughter.
So there I was, whipsawed from moral outrage at someone for laughing at mass homicide on film to laughing at mass homicide on film in a matter of seconds. Now, obviously, we all prefer to see Hitler & Friends killed than innocent victims of genocide, but the laughing at mass homicide switchback remains. And it was all happening within a work of cinematic art.
Tarantino shot a scene of people laughing at holocaust victims, and it is art. He shot a scene that causes us to laugh at mass homicide, and it is art. He juxtaposes those scenes, and it is poignant, incisive art. If we can laugh at mass homicide, and see laughing at the holocaust as art, it would be very challenging to objectively define the moral limits of art.
Horrible things are a part of the human condition. If we are to be free to know ourselves, our artists must be free to explore the darkest corners of our beings.
A point that would be valid, if any of these parties had experience with both launching space ships and starting small businesses and hence, an avenue for making such a comparison.
The expertise in these people is not investing in small businesses, it is risk management. That's what they study, their passion, the value they add. Their specialty is looking at potential investments of capital and making the best possible calculation of whether it will produce a return that justifies the risk. Their kind has a long and storied history of investing in highly unknown fields, including sending ships into the unkown to seek riches. Here is a good book on the topic.
But alas, these are all entities that tend to have a lot of experience in funding small businesses and not very much experience in spacecraft.
The people who are providing the funding in the case under consideration also have zero experience in spacecraft. Additionally, they are not specialists in risk management.
Obviously this is a public relations piece, and has been meticulous scrubbed to minimize the risk of losing votes through accidental candor. Still, if you look carefully, you can catch glimpses of the mindset in the way things are phrased and structured.
From page 14, here are the top five priority objectives:
Priority Objectives
Top Five
The following objectives capture the highest five priorities of the Administration in achieving the infor-mation sharing and safeguarding goals of this Strategy.
1. Align information sharing and safeguarding governance to foster better decisionmaking, performance, accountability, and implementation of the Strategy's goals.
2. Develop guidelines for information sharing and safeguarding agreements to address common requirements, including privacy, civil rights, and civil liberties, while still allowing flexibility to meet mission needs.
3. Adopt metadata standards to facilitate federated discovery, access, correlation, and monitoring across Federal networks and security domains.
4. Extend and implement the FICAM Roadmap across all security domains.
5. Implement removable media policies, processes and controls; provide timely audit capabilities of assets, vulnerabilities, and threats; establish programs, processes and techniques to deter, detect and disrupt insider threats; and share the management of risks, to enhance unclassified and classified information safeguarding efforts.
Notice anything different in the structure of the items? Here, I'll point out the one that is different:
2. Develop guidelines for information sharing and safeguarding agreements to address common requirements, including privacy, civil rights, and civil liberties, while still allowing flexibility to meet mission needs.
See it yet? OK, I'll bold the section that makes this item uniquely structured:
2. Develop guidelines for information sharing and safeguarding agreements to address common requirements, including privacy, civil rights, and civil liberties, while still allowing flexibility to meet mission needs.
Nice -- it's the only one that says, Except when it would interfere with the mission. Isn't it fascinating that every other one of the top five points is just stated, but with civil liberties, privacy, and civil rights, they feel both compelled and uninhibited in adding, Except when it would interfere with the mission. They couldn't make it through one simple declaration that sometimes the rights of the citizens enumerated in The Constitution preempt the authority of government without adding, We don't really mean this one.
>> Velocity of money does not change significantly based on who is spending it.
> So you're claiming that velocity of money is pretty much the same for HFT traders and people who stick money in mattresses? It's not. Such things can differ by many orders of magnitude.
Yes, you are right, I was being shortsighted. I was only considering the comparison between buying a spaceship and operating a thousand small businesses. In that context, I'm guessing the velocity of money after the transaction is probably in the same rough range, but certainly any evidence that points strongly to a greater velocity on one side or the other should be considered in the whole transaction calculus. My broad generalization is not correct in all contexts.
It's worth noting here that nobody aside from the US government actually is building a billion dollar space ship. But plenty of people, even in today's poor lending environment, are loaning money to small businesses.
If I had a billion dollars, what small businesses am I to invest in that aren't already covered by hundreds of banks, similar numbers of VC firms, and at least tens of thousands of angel investors?
Another way to say this is, "Of the hundreds of banks, VC firms, and tens of thousands of angel investors, none of them think funding an asteroid harvesting spaceship is a better bet than funding small businesses." There may be very good reasons for them to feel that way, and it's not because big bets don't get made; Tesco just dropped two billion on Fresh & Easy. It went down, but it was still a more rational way to allocate resources than these.
The economy grew, faster and bigger than it did before and after his term
The poverty level and the population in it shrunk.
The avg family income grew.
Same is true of Clinton, but he did it while running a surplus instead of a massive deficit. Oh -- except the part about poverty -- Clinton didn't just shrink it, he set records for shrinking it.
Now, giving Clinton credit for the tech boom isn't fair, but failing to account for Reagan's reckless stimulus spending is equally inappropriate.
Basically nothing you said had anything to do with the 80's.
There is some truth to that -- we did start stimulating the top incomes before Reagan, as a result of failing to adjust the brackets for inflation, which caused them to start to eat into the entrepreneurial set, but Reagan did at least as much more on top of that.
Velocity of money does not change significantly based on who is spending it. Every transaction has subsequent transactions that support the economy, and they cancel out. The question is the efficiency of the transaction under consideration. Does that spaceship, a giant chunk of capital, a great heaping pile of allocated GDP, produce wealth as quickly as a thousand small businesses? (please be rigorous in your consideration of the definition of "produce wealth")
They weren't "given" money. They organized land, labor and capital in such a way as to create wealth for themselves, their partners/investors, employees and customers that would not otherwise have existed.
That's only perfeclty true if the system is perfectly efficient. If the system is biased against the wealthy, they get paid less than they earn. If it is biased in their favor, they get paid more than they earn. Both cases, interestingly, have occurred in the US within the past 70 years. Check the IRS SOI for back records on income concentration, then compare that to GDP per capita growth rate -- if we have increasing concentration and a decreasing growth rate, it would mean we are paying the wealthy more and getting less growth -- ie: inefficiently distorted in favor of the wealthy. For a second dimension along which to measure, check GDP per capita versus Gini of the world's nations. Here's my chart on PPC/Gini, and I've done the math with the SOI -- but don't take my word for it. Do the research yourself to confirm.
Velocity of money does not change significantly based on who is spending it. Every transaction has subsequent transactions that support the economy, and they cancel out. The question is the efficiency of the transaction under consideration. Does that spaceship, a giant chunk of capital, a great heaping pile of allocated GDP, produce wealth as quickly as a thousand small businesses? (please be rigorous in your consideration of the definition of "produce wealth")
There are asteroid-mining proposals backed by Larry Page and Eric Schmidt, various moon-mining proposals, and, announced just this month, a proposed moon-tourism venture.
Just shows that Reaganomics got it part right -- if you keep giving more and more money to a smaller and smaller sliver of society, they will find things to spend it on. Unfortunately, not cost efficient things that trickle down to smaller businesses, entrepreneurs, and working people. They spend it on ever more gigantic toys. "Oooh, Larry, let's build a billion dollar spaceship!" Great. Too bad we don't have a thousand small businesses spending that money on labor, rent, stock, and taxes instead.
Instagram already showed us who they are on the inside. How they feel about their users. That they see them as cattle to be slaughtered and sold in whatever way most suits their customers, the advertisers. The only thing that has changed is they got caught and so they are going to hide their disdain for a while until this storm blows over.
It is not this policy that is unacceptable, it is their attitude. They have shown that they cannot be trusted, and it is our duty -- as the silent hand of the free market -- to put them out of business as a warning to others.
Delete your Instagram account, and never darken their door again.
The would-be decrypter says that it is a collection of single character abbreviations. If so, frequency analysis should back up the assertion. Here's the character frequency:
A:9, B:3, C:3, D:6, E:5, F:6, G:6, H:8, I:4, J:5, K:8, L:3, M:4, N:10, O:7, P:7, Q:6, R:9, S:2, T:5, U:4, V:2, W:2, X:4, Y:3, Z:4
Every character used at least once, multiple Z's, X's, and Q's, and a pretty flat distribution. A set of abbreviated words would show a more spiky distribution, with peaks on the more common letters and dips on the less common.
Walled gardens are inherently more secure
Which walled gardens? More secure how? More secure than what?
If the walled garden does a better job of verifying the security than the collection of apps you are comparing it to, then you are right. But that is not an inherent characteristic of the walled garden model any more than it is of any other kind of collection of apps. The question is how strongly the selection process under consideration filters for security.
For example, F-Droid is a repository of Free and Open Source Android software. It is pretty much the opposite of a walled garden, and it is very possible that the F-Droid software is more secure than what is available on Google Play or the iTunes App Store.
The claim that walled gardens are inherently more secure is no more valid than the archaic and discarded notion that proprietary software is inherently more secure than Open Source. The same holds true for the operating system as for the marketplace, for the same reasons.
> "It's open source, just patch it yourself."
>
> If there ever was a sentence to describe the elitist attitude of open-source nerds, this is it.
If ever there was a post to capture the hubris of those who do not understand that we all must take control of our own information flows or be subjugated, this is it.
I wasn't contradicting you, or saying your idea is wrong. I was pointing out a subtle angle of tax policy that has to be included in the calculus. I took pains to make it clear that I don't think it is easy to tell whether it is good or bad for any of the stakeholders in the long run.
Yes, but it also scares off foreign investment.
That is true, but bear in mind that, holding all other things equal, the exact same amount of tax must exist somewhere. It can be friction on foreign investment, or on domestic investment, or on labor (call this "job creation" if you want), or on sales/consumption, or on property ownership, or whatever. The tax must fall somewhere, and it will be a friction on whatever you put it on. Observing, "If you put it on X, it will inhibit X" is not expository without measuring whether that would be better or worse than the alternative options.
It doesn't make any sense at all tax corporate profits when you could just as easily tax the income shareholders make from the profits, or capital gains in the event a corporation doesn't post dividends.
One angle that bears considering is that taxing corporate profits results in some of the tax incidence falling on foreign investors. If you only tax shareholder income and capital gains you don't get any money from foreigners (assuming those taxes are only assessed on citizens / residents). Not saying which side is better or worse for the US or the world in the long run -- my guess is if you enter into an agreement with the other major players so everyone suspends corporate taxes, it solves that part, but I haven't done the math -- just something to noodle on.
And frankly, every single one of us does it when we can get away with it, as well.
I don't. I just met with my accountant for my company's year end books and didn't do any of the things I knew I could get away with which were not legitimate. For example, I had a few thousand dollars worth of receipts that were non-business expenses but would have looked legit. I did not file them, because I am an honorable man.
Don't project your own dickishness onto others.
pretty much everything we do is getting richer the rich
That's only true in the short run. In the long run, the inefficiency resulting from the distortion of economic incentives is hindering GDP growth, which ultimately reduces the income of rich and poor alike. The corruption is not only stealing from the poor, middle class, and upper middle class -- it is also stealing from the rich in the long run -- to line the pockets of today's benefactors of corruption. They are stealing even from their own future meta-selves.