I'm rather sure you don't know anything about the subject, but yes, breathing water is deadly. If you had to ask, I'd think you were rather silly.
For that matter, drinking too much water is also deadly. I think more than about a gallon a day is probably eventually fatal, but I don't know the exact amount. Every once in awhile you encounter news about some idiot who died from drinking too much water.
Even the things we need, we need in the correct amounts. Going outside those boundaries is, indeed, deadly. CO2 happens to be one where we are edging up toward the level where we don't know all the long-term effects, but the ones that we do know are quite unpleasant. (E.g., plants grown in an atmosphere that's high in CO2 appear to be low in protein.) Note that the amount of CO2 present is almost never the rate-limiting step in growth. So nothing gets any significant benefit out of increased CO2. (An exception occurs for the growers of ornamental plants. It's not beneficial to the plants, but it can be beneficial to the grower is there is SLIGHTLY more CO2 in the atmosphere where those plants are grown. You can get larger leaves and petals. They may not be as healthy or as strong, but they're larger, because the cost of extracting the CO2 from the air is lower.)
P.S.: This info about plants growing in atmospheres high in CO2 is based on general science articles. I am NOT an expert in the field.
Sorry, but Nitrogen is pollution only under extremely high pressures. CO2 is a poison (needed in small quantities to regulate breathing). Nitrogen is basically filler. Spacecraft with low pressure don't bother with Nitrogen, but they still need some CO2. Just not very much.
N.B.: Even plants can't absorb Nitrogen from the air. Only some bacteria have that capability.
CO2 output *IS* pollution. So counting it that way is fair.
Ask any veteran of WWII submarines, and they'll be surprised that you need to ask. CO2 is pollution.
We don't generally care much about it because it doesn't tend to concentrate, and because plants consume it as food. But they consume shit, too. We aren't plants.
Currently the world is producing more CO2 than is being consumed, and over time this means that the world is going to be like a WWII submarine that's hiding from a destroyer. Over time this becomes deadly.
P.S.: Plants don't like a really strong concentration of CO2 much more than you do. It does very bad things to them. Long before that, of course, the oceans will become more acidic than they've been in a very long time, and we can't predict all the consequences. But every single one that we can predict is bad.
This surely depends on exactly what you consider a subsidy. E.g., I count the presence of US troops in the Middle East as an oil subsidy, so I count oil as being heavily subsidized.
If you don't count that, then do you count all the money spent by the government to build and maintain the roads? If not, why not? (I can see an argument that some of that money isn't a subsidy, as it's only paying for things that would be needed even if gasoline engines didn't exist, but not most of it.)
If you don't count either of those, then I may agree with your figures, but I won't agree with your model.
N.B.: Arguing that the oil industry is heavily subsidized isn't an argument that the subsidy is too large. Our population couldn't be supported if we used horses and oxen for motive power. I do happen to feel that the subsidy is too large, but how large it should be is separate from (though dependent on) what counts as a subsidy.
Well, mono came out of Gnome, and also the push for it.
I'm not certain that it's being too paranoid to think it's deliberate sabotage. OTOH, the developers could just be arrogant pricks. One can't really tell, as the effect's the same.
FWIW, I minimize windows all the time, and almost never maximize them. OTOH, this does depend on having a task bar in a fixed place on the screen. Currently I have it at the bottom, and frequent applications bar on top. If they've removed these feature, I'll definitely be using something else. I might even switch back to KDE4 rather than put up with the garbage they're announcing. But presumably someone will release a patched version. Or maybe Trinity (KDE3) will actually start working. (Perhaps they're just having systems troubles, but I can't even apt-get the thing.) Or maybe I'll give LXDE a shot. Many people are saying nice things about it, and if they've removed the task bar, then even TWM would be better.
OTOH, this is just based on release announcements. It might not be quite a terrible as it sounds. But I'm certainly in no rush to try it.
I'm pretty sure that it's self-aware. I.e., it makes plans for what it wants to do to achieve goals and acts to implement them. And I'm pretty sure it's intelligent.
But currently its intelligence is limited to a few narrow fields. Expanding this is likely to be a non-trivial endeavor. (That said, I suspect that this is the way a General AI will evolve. But it's got a long way to go.)
What they need to do is implement an equivalently intelligent systems designer/coder. It will happen. At that point we'd better hope it wants the right things.
Train tracks are cheaper than roads for anything beyond a dirt track. There are, however, exceptions. The High Speed Rail tracks are considerably more expensive than the regular lines, and if you add in a third rail for electricity, then the fencing to keep people out and the lawyer bills increase a lot. Also, if you elevate them or underground them they also become a lot more expensive.
OTOH, buying the land isn't generally more than half the cost of a road. And maintenance on roads is significantly more expensive than maintenance on rails.
There are reasons why trolleys used to run down all the major streets of cities. They were cheap, efficient, and easily maintained. (Also they often replaced horse-cars which ran on rails so that the horses could pull more weight.)
That said, a rail system is not a COMPLETE transport system, which a car can be. Moving freight and passengers on the same load is quite complex, and then the freight needs to be unloaded. When the freight can be a load of groceries with eggs on top, this can get quite difficult, and is usually solved by having the passenger carry the freight, which doesn't work for anything bulky and heavy, and is always annoying. The traditional solution to this was to have the merchants deliver the merchandise, which meant they needed a private vehicle that ran on roads. So the rails were not a general replacement for roads.
P.S.: The major force acting to prevent passenger trains in the US is the private rail lines which carry freight. They have quite a powerful voice, as they own the rails and the right-of-way. Generally via a highly subsidized purchase via Congress, but occasionally via an outright gift from Congress.
Yeah, but I wonder what the current MTBF is. When you talk about an automated car, you're talking about something that's a lot more complex than either a computer OR a car. I'd expect a lot of failures during the first few iterations after it goes public. And I'm not even considering software problem, just hardware.
Admittedly, most of those failure could probably be handled by just having the driver take over and drive it to the shop. But that's not a good argument in favor of being an early adopter.
OTOH, I do agree that even right now they might well be better than the average driver. Just not as reliable.
That's a new one to me. I have heard complaints that many train systems would be uneconomical, in the sense that they'd never survive without some kind of subsidy.
What transit systems do we have that exist without subsidies?
What road systems do we have that exist without subsidies?
Sorry, but on multi-lane roads the left lane is not equivalent to a "passing lane" which is where a car is supposed to stay only a short amount of time during passing. These usually appear on three lane roads (one lane in each direction, and one in the center to facilitate passing) and are generally quite short chunks of road.
On freeways, the left lanes are for faster traffic, and the right lanes are for slower traffic.
On arterial roads, the left lane(s) are for traffic that plans to turn left, the right lane(s) are for traffic that's either planning to turn right, or to park, and no lane at all is intended for traffic that is going faster. Which lane is faster depends on the flow of traffic, and often it's the left lane that's the slow one. (Left hand turns can be a bear!)
And on two way roads, one lane in each direction, dotted dividing line, the lane in the other direction is for passing, and you had damned well better go as fast as is safe while you are doing it. You don't want to get stuck there.
Well, in California there's the "General Speed Law" which makes it illegal to drive at an unsafe speed... unsafe either for you or for other drivers.
But I think people are confusing two lane roads (one lane in each direction) with multi-lane roads in this argument, with some clearly meaning one and others probably meaning the other. Still, IIRC it *has* been held illegal to drive as the exact same speed as the vehicle in the adjacent lane on a divided road. I don't recall whether this applied if there were only two lanes, as the case I (sort of) remember involved a three lane road. (A freeway, actually.)
Also there have been cases where people were issued tickets for not driving above the legal speed limit in the left hand lane. The "General Speed Law" was cited as the reason. (That case was somewhat interesting, as the same officer first stopped the driver for going too fast in the right lane, and then for going too slow in the fast lane, in both cases conflicting with the general speed of the traffic in an unsafe manner.) You could, perhaps, have said that he should have issued tickets to all of the other fast drivers, but the judge didn't take that as a valid defense. (OTOH, this was back around 1970. Perhaps the rules have changed. But I don't think that's the way to bet.)
You left out one major purpose of the driver: To prevent vandalism. This is a major expense on bus lines, and of trucks that sit around unattended.
Presumably some way exists to deal with this, but no way that is currently being tried works. Historically it's been a difficult problem, which can be partially addressed only by so arranging things that nobody feels treated too unfairly. And this is quite difficult. This needs to be coupled with intensive conditioning against all forms of vandalism. In the 1950's this worked pretty well in the areas in which it was applied. (Of course, there was also an emphasis on re-use...not just recycling. No throwaway containers, e.g. To pick a particular example, Coke bottles were made of glass, and came with a hefty refundable deposit. About 1/10th of the price. You took them back, the store returned them to the company, which cleaned and sterilized them and then reused them.)
I think the way they're talking about fixing this is with an improved co-location mechanism, where the trader program operates as a co-routine of the market program.
Of course they'll still need faster computers...
(IIUC, what's actually going on is that the market program receives the requests to buy or sell, and then waits for awhile before it executes them. These "favored traders" get the info before it's official, figure out what to do, and then post their reactions while the regular customers are just finding out what the orders are. By using picosecond trades, they can post 1000 trades within the same microsecond. This makes it really difficult for the other traders to figure out what's going on...or maybe just blocks their access as if with a DOS attack. So the trades don't actually happen in a picosecond, they're just recorded as happening in a particular picosecond, so that a revised trade can be posted in the next picosecond.
But no guarantees, as this definitely isn't my specialty.)
This isn't a general corporate tax we're discussing here. This is a tax on an activity which appears harmful to productive business. You could think of it as a "corporate sin tax" if it makes you feel better, but that's not the real idea.
The actual question is "*Is* this activity really harmful?". Nobody seems to be claiming that it's beneficial, but some people are claiming that it isn't harmful. I, personally, think that it is harmful, and a time related tax on stock trades would be beneficial. I think such a tax already exists, and is called a capital gains tax. So what I think should be done is that the tax should be altered so that if you hold the stock for a short period of time before selling it, you pay an extremely high tax rate (up to 100% if you hold it for a minute, and even higher if you hold it for a shorter period of time. And, correspondingly, if you hold it for longer, then you pay a lower tax, extending until at, say, 5 years you don't pay any tax at all. Describe the tax as a smooth function of time. Since I've described the tax at two points, make it a linear function between 5 years and instantaneous. Possibly the tax should be negative if you hold the stock for longer than 5 years, but probably not. Still, that might have some advantages.
I agree that fixing Wall Street won't fix the entire problem. It's only one of the bugs in the system. But it *IS* one of them, and not a minor one.
To my mind the basic problem is the support of monopolies of various varieties. Just about the only one that I think deserves the support it gets is the trademark monopoly, and even that gets overdone at times.
FWIW, I believe that cities should have the right to override state laws, that states should have the right to override federal laws, etc., with very few exceptions. I think that political parties should have no formal recognition or benefits. Ditto for churches. And I believe that all elections should be, preferably, Condorcet voting, or, because that's too complicated to explain to most people, Instant Runoff Voting, which isn't quite as nearly fair, but is much easier to explain. And that all elections should have an indelible audit trail that is verifiable. I believe that the 10th amendment should be emphasized as the most important one, and that anything that the constitution doesn't explicitly permit should be forbidden to the federal government. (Well, that can't be taken literally. REALLY. It just can't. But there shouldn't be any of this "If you want the money for your highways, you must impose a 55 MPH speed limit" crap allowed. That and analogous arguments should be totally disallowed. If they want that restriction, then they must explicitly include it in the authorizing law.)
HOWEVER: One thing that should be absolutely clear is that none of the governments (federal, state, or local) should be allowed to discriminate on the basis of race, creed, or previous condiiton of servitude.
This is a difficult thing to support, because I also believe that the government should supply many social services. But what it boils down to is that there should be amendments authorizing those services. They shouldn't be allowed just because that should be one of the main purposes of the government. OTOH, this goes double for things like maintaining a standing army. Yes, we need to do that, but no, the constitution as it exists doesn't sufficiently authorize it. Perhaps it should be left to the states? Probably not. That would be likely to lead to another civil war. So what that really means is that the constitution needs to be properly amended. But just doing things that are illegal because they need doing, and then continuing to do them, because that's how we've done them isn't a good approach. Either go common law or do things by the book. And if it's common law, then what the law is written doesn't matter if the jury doesn't agree, and every jury should be instructed in that several times during the course of every trial.
Hum... My desire would be for a much stronger disincentive. Say a tax based on the inverse of the number of minutes you had held the stock. If you hold it for one minute, it's a 1% tax. If you hold it for an hour its 1/60% tax. If you hold it for a tenth of a second, it's a 10 % tax. If you hold it for a hundredth of a minute, it's a 100% tax. If you hold it for a mill-iminuite, it's a 1000% tax.
And if you hold it for 1000 minutes, it's a.0001% tax. But possibly this should be based around hours or days instead. I really believe that this "short-term investment" isn't properly investment at all, but merely gambling, and gambling which is destructive to the proper functioning of the stock market. If people want to gamble, let them do so, but divorce it totally from the useful functions of society, among which is a properly operating stock-market.
I don't know that I'd put the proportion of real abuse by administrators that low, but say it was. Then if you have 400 complaints, 10 of them are valid. That's enough to make the utility of Wikipedia questionable. It's high enough that experts in a field (just about any field) will feel that they're wasting their time to try to contribute. So they won't. Or, when they get a bit of experience, they'll stop.
As time goes on, I expect Wikipedia to become increasingly useless for anything by a small segment of popular culture. And it's because of political choices made within the organization.
That's not a problem, except that it means you need more disk space. And a moderation system.
The problem is that the moderators are rather limited, and articles should N E V E R be deleted. Given lower scores, so that they can be filtered out, but not deleted.
And the moderators should be the USERS of the system. Not the editors. And they shouldn't be allowed to choose which articles they moderate...they should be told they have the opportunity to moderate an article, asked if they want to, and if they do, given a random article that hasn't recently been moderated.
Also, articles should have multi-dimensional scoring. Accurate vs. Inaccurate, Technical vs. Easy, Useful vs. useless. And another choice in the first and third scales should be "I don't know enough to judge this article". One of the problems with Slashdot moderation is that it's one-dimensional (except for funny),
I think that Slashdot is a better framework than Wikipedia, though the request for citations is valid, the demand for them is stupid.
OTOH, it has been suggested that Wikipedia should be segregated into namespaces, so that identical words don't cause collisions when used in different contexts. This is both promising and dangerous. It's quite likely to cause more problems than it solves.
However, since Wikipedia seems irrevocably corrupted, it won't be wikipedia that needs to address this problem. That will be somebody else' job. One hopes the next try will be an improvement.
correction: Wikipedia was a public forum of knowledge written by people for people. Everyone, EVERYONE, had the right to edit it.
What you described is the way it used to be, while it was still trying to become important. Now it appears to be captive of a clique of opinionated power-trippers. This isn't the first report of abuse.
Wikipedia is still useful for non-controversial topics...but clearly one can't even predict what will be non-controversial.
No. Wikipedia shows why this particular structure of crowdsourcing won't work, and highlights certain problems that appear. Most of them would have been obvious if people had thought of them ahead of time, but they didn't.
I still believe that crowdsourcing is workable, but it needs to have an indelible audit trail. No article should be deleted, at least not unless you do the deletion based on lack of accesses. It also needs to have an ability for each visitor to comment on the accuracy of the article and the usefulness of it. But those need to be tacked to the particular version of the edit. Etc.
Probably there should be a limit on the number of edits than any one used can make based on the age and estimated reliability of the account, but the reliability shouldn't be based on the judgement of a small group of people, but rather on the change that their edits cause to the voted accuracy of articles that they edit.
And it would still probably be possible to game the system. But that's a start. Slashdot moderation isn't perfect, but it's a lot better than nothing.
Are you so sure they are rare? What proportion of them would you expect to notice?
Just considering things, I suspect that abuse is common, but that complaints are so much more common that accurate reports of it tend to ge swallowed in the noise.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm rather sure you don't know anything about the subject, but yes, breathing water is deadly. If you had to ask, I'd think you were rather silly.
For that matter, drinking too much water is also deadly. I think more than about a gallon a day is probably eventually fatal, but I don't know the exact amount. Every once in awhile you encounter news about some idiot who died from drinking too much water.
Even the things we need, we need in the correct amounts. Going outside those boundaries is, indeed, deadly. CO2 happens to be one where we are edging up toward the level where we don't know all the long-term effects, but the ones that we do know are quite unpleasant. (E.g., plants grown in an atmosphere that's high in CO2 appear to be low in protein.) Note that the amount of CO2 present is almost never the rate-limiting step in growth. So nothing gets any significant benefit out of increased CO2. (An exception occurs for the growers of ornamental plants. It's not beneficial to the plants, but it can be beneficial to the grower is there is SLIGHTLY more CO2 in the atmosphere where those plants are grown. You can get larger leaves and petals. They may not be as healthy or as strong, but they're larger, because the cost of extracting the CO2 from the air is lower.)
P.S.: This info about plants growing in atmospheres high in CO2 is based on general science articles. I am NOT an expert in the field.
A good question but remember:
"A billion here, a billion there, after awhile it really adds up." -- Senator Dirksen (IIRC)
Sorry, but Nitrogen is pollution only under extremely high pressures. CO2 is a poison (needed in small quantities to regulate breathing). Nitrogen is basically filler. Spacecraft with low pressure don't bother with Nitrogen, but they still need some CO2. Just not very much.
N.B.: Even plants can't absorb Nitrogen from the air. Only some bacteria have that capability.
CO2 output *IS* pollution. So counting it that way is fair.
Ask any veteran of WWII submarines, and they'll be surprised that you need to ask. CO2 is pollution.
We don't generally care much about it because it doesn't tend to concentrate, and because plants consume it as food. But they consume shit, too. We aren't plants.
Currently the world is producing more CO2 than is being consumed, and over time this means that the world is going to be like a WWII submarine that's hiding from a destroyer. Over time this becomes deadly.
P.S.: Plants don't like a really strong concentration of CO2 much more than you do. It does very bad things to them. Long before that, of course, the oceans will become more acidic than they've been in a very long time, and we can't predict all the consequences. But every single one that we can predict is bad.
This surely depends on exactly what you consider a subsidy. E.g., I count the presence of US troops in the Middle East as an oil subsidy, so I count oil as being heavily subsidized.
If you don't count that, then do you count all the money spent by the government to build and maintain the roads? If not, why not? (I can see an argument that some of that money isn't a subsidy, as it's only paying for things that would be needed even if gasoline engines didn't exist, but not most of it.)
If you don't count either of those, then I may agree with your figures, but I won't agree with your model.
N.B.: Arguing that the oil industry is heavily subsidized isn't an argument that the subsidy is too large. Our population couldn't be supported if we used horses and oxen for motive power. I do happen to feel that the subsidy is too large, but how large it should be is separate from (though dependent on) what counts as a subsidy.
Well, mono came out of Gnome, and also the push for it.
I'm not certain that it's being too paranoid to think it's deliberate sabotage. OTOH, the developers could just be arrogant pricks. One can't really tell, as the effect's the same.
OK.
FWIW, I minimize windows all the time, and almost never maximize them.
OTOH, this does depend on having a task bar in a fixed place on the screen. Currently I have it at the bottom, and frequent applications bar on top. If they've removed these feature, I'll definitely be using something else. I might even switch back to KDE4 rather than put up with the garbage they're announcing. But presumably someone will release a patched version. Or maybe Trinity (KDE3) will actually start working. (Perhaps they're just having systems troubles, but I can't even apt-get the thing.) Or maybe I'll give LXDE a shot. Many people are saying nice things about it, and if they've removed the task bar, then even TWM would be better.
OTOH, this is just based on release announcements. It might not be quite a terrible as it sounds. But I'm certainly in no rush to try it.
You left out reading the documentation. If I had room for a second monitor, that's what would go there.
Define your terms!
I'm pretty sure that it's self-aware. I.e., it makes plans for what it wants to do to achieve goals and acts to implement them.
And I'm pretty sure it's intelligent.
But currently its intelligence is limited to a few narrow fields. Expanding this is likely to be a non-trivial endeavor. (That said, I suspect that this is the way a General AI will evolve. But it's got a long way to go.)
What they need to do is implement an equivalently intelligent systems designer/coder. It will happen. At that point we'd better hope it wants the right things.
I won't drive because of my disabilities. And I don't think very highly of the fact that I was able to get a driver's license with my eyesight.
But I'm still not going to be an early adopter. That gives an old-fashioned meaning to bleeding edge. (Second or third release, though ...)
Train tracks are cheaper than roads for anything beyond a dirt track. There are, however, exceptions. The High Speed Rail tracks are considerably more expensive than the regular lines, and if you add in a third rail for electricity, then the fencing to keep people out and the lawyer bills increase a lot. Also, if you elevate them or underground them they also become a lot more expensive.
OTOH, buying the land isn't generally more than half the cost of a road. And maintenance on roads is significantly more expensive than maintenance on rails.
There are reasons why trolleys used to run down all the major streets of cities. They were cheap, efficient, and easily maintained. (Also they often replaced horse-cars which ran on rails so that the horses could pull more weight.)
That said, a rail system is not a COMPLETE transport system, which a car can be. Moving freight and passengers on the same load is quite complex, and then the freight needs to be unloaded. When the freight can be a load of groceries with eggs on top, this can get quite difficult, and is usually solved by having the passenger carry the freight, which doesn't work for anything bulky and heavy, and is always annoying. The traditional solution to this was to have the merchants deliver the merchandise, which meant they needed a private vehicle that ran on roads. So the rails were not a general replacement for roads.
P.S.: The major force acting to prevent passenger trains in the US is the private rail lines which carry freight. They have quite a powerful voice, as they own the rails and the right-of-way. Generally via a highly subsidized purchase via Congress, but occasionally via an outright gift from Congress.
Yeah, but I wonder what the current MTBF is. When you talk about an automated car, you're talking about something that's a lot more complex than either a computer OR a car. I'd expect a lot of failures during the first few iterations after it goes public. And I'm not even considering software problem, just hardware.
Admittedly, most of those failure could probably be handled by just having the driver take over and drive it to the shop. But that's not a good argument in favor of being an early adopter.
OTOH, I do agree that even right now they might well be better than the average driver. Just not as reliable.
That's a new one to me. I have heard complaints that many train systems would be uneconomical, in the sense that they'd never survive without some kind of subsidy.
What transit systems do we have that exist without subsidies?
What road systems do we have that exist without subsidies?
Sorry, but on multi-lane roads the left lane is not equivalent to a "passing lane" which is where a car is supposed to stay only a short amount of time during passing. These usually appear on three lane roads (one lane in each direction, and one in the center to facilitate passing) and are generally quite short chunks of road.
On freeways, the left lanes are for faster traffic, and the right lanes are for slower traffic.
On arterial roads, the left lane(s) are for traffic that plans to turn left, the right lane(s) are for traffic that's either planning to turn right, or to park, and no lane at all is intended for traffic that is going faster. Which lane is faster depends on the flow of traffic, and often it's the left lane that's the slow one. (Left hand turns can be a bear!)
And on two way roads, one lane in each direction, dotted dividing line, the lane in the other direction is for passing, and you had damned well better go as fast as is safe while you are doing it. You don't want to get stuck there.
There aren't just two cases.
Well, in California there's the "General Speed Law" which makes it illegal to drive at an unsafe speed ... unsafe either for you or for other drivers.
But I think people are confusing two lane roads (one lane in each direction) with multi-lane roads in this argument, with some clearly meaning one and others probably meaning the other. Still, IIRC it *has* been held illegal to drive as the exact same speed as the vehicle in the adjacent lane on a divided road. I don't recall whether this applied if there were only two lanes, as the case I (sort of) remember involved a three lane road. (A freeway, actually.)
Also there have been cases where people were issued tickets for not driving above the legal speed limit in the left hand lane. The "General Speed Law" was cited as the reason. (That case was somewhat interesting, as the same officer first stopped the driver for going too fast in the right lane, and then for going too slow in the fast lane, in both cases conflicting with the general speed of the traffic in an unsafe manner.) You could, perhaps, have said that he should have issued tickets to all of the other fast drivers, but the judge didn't take that as a valid defense. (OTOH, this was back around 1970. Perhaps the rules have changed. But I don't think that's the way to bet.)
You left out one major purpose of the driver: To prevent vandalism. This is a major expense on bus lines, and of trucks that sit around unattended.
Presumably some way exists to deal with this, but no way that is currently being tried works. Historically it's been a difficult problem, which can be partially addressed only by so arranging things that nobody feels treated too unfairly. And this is quite difficult. This needs to be coupled with intensive conditioning against all forms of vandalism. In the 1950's this worked pretty well in the areas in which it was applied. (Of course, there was also an emphasis on re-use...not just recycling. No throwaway containers, e.g. To pick a particular example, Coke bottles were made of glass, and came with a hefty refundable deposit. About 1/10th of the price. You took them back, the store returned them to the company, which cleaned and sterilized them and then reused them.)
I think the way they're talking about fixing this is with an improved co-location mechanism, where the trader program operates as a co-routine of the market program.
Of course they'll still need faster computers...
(IIUC, what's actually going on is that the market program receives the requests to buy or sell, and then waits for awhile before it executes them. These "favored traders" get the info before it's official, figure out what to do, and then post their reactions while the regular customers are just finding out what the orders are. By using picosecond trades, they can post 1000 trades within the same microsecond. This makes it really difficult for the other traders to figure out what's going on...or maybe just blocks their access as if with a DOS attack. So the trades don't actually happen in a picosecond, they're just recorded as happening in a particular picosecond, so that a revised trade can be posted in the next picosecond.
But no guarantees, as this definitely isn't my specialty.)
This isn't a general corporate tax we're discussing here. This is a tax on an activity which appears harmful to productive business. You could think of it as a "corporate sin tax" if it makes you feel better, but that's not the real idea.
The actual question is "*Is* this activity really harmful?". Nobody seems to be claiming that it's beneficial, but some people are claiming that it isn't harmful. I, personally, think that it is harmful, and a time related tax on stock trades would be beneficial. I think such a tax already exists, and is called a capital gains tax. So what I think should be done is that the tax should be altered so that if you hold the stock for a short period of time before selling it, you pay an extremely high tax rate (up to 100% if you hold it for a minute, and even higher if you hold it for a shorter period of time. And, correspondingly, if you hold it for longer, then you pay a lower tax, extending until at, say, 5 years you don't pay any tax at all. Describe the tax as a smooth function of time. Since I've described the tax at two points, make it a linear function between 5 years and instantaneous. Possibly the tax should be negative if you hold the stock for longer than 5 years, but probably not. Still, that might have some advantages.
I agree that fixing Wall Street won't fix the entire problem. It's only one of the bugs in the system. But it *IS* one of them, and not a minor one.
To my mind the basic problem is the support of monopolies of various varieties. Just about the only one that I think deserves the support it gets is the trademark monopoly, and even that gets overdone at times.
FWIW, I believe that cities should have the right to override state laws, that states should have the right to override federal laws, etc., with very few exceptions. I think that political parties should have no formal recognition or benefits. Ditto for churches. And I believe that all elections should be, preferably, Condorcet voting, or, because that's too complicated to explain to most people, Instant Runoff Voting, which isn't quite as nearly fair, but is much easier to explain. And that all elections should have an indelible audit trail that is verifiable. I believe that the 10th amendment should be emphasized as the most important one, and that anything that the constitution doesn't explicitly permit should be forbidden to the federal government. (Well, that can't be taken literally. REALLY. It just can't. But there shouldn't be any of this "If you want the money for your highways, you must impose a 55 MPH speed limit" crap allowed. That and analogous arguments should be totally disallowed. If they want that restriction, then they must explicitly include it in the authorizing law.)
HOWEVER: One thing that should be absolutely clear is that none of the governments (federal, state, or local) should be allowed to discriminate on the basis of race, creed, or previous condiiton of servitude.
This is a difficult thing to support, because I also believe that the government should supply many social services. But what it boils down to is that there should be amendments authorizing those services. They shouldn't be allowed just because that should be one of the main purposes of the government. OTOH, this goes double for things like maintaining a standing army. Yes, we need to do that, but no, the constitution as it exists doesn't sufficiently authorize it. Perhaps it should be left to the states? Probably not. That would be likely to lead to another civil war. So what that really means is that the constitution needs to be properly amended. But just doing things that are illegal because they need doing, and then continuing to do them, because that's how we've done them isn't a good approach. Either go common law or do things by the book. And if it's common law, then what the law is written doesn't matter if the jury doesn't agree, and every jury should be instructed in that several times during the course of every trial.
Hum...
My desire would be for a much stronger disincentive. Say a tax based on the inverse of the number of minutes you had held the stock. If you hold it for one minute, it's a 1% tax. If you hold it for an hour its 1/60% tax. If you hold it for a tenth of a second, it's a 10 % tax. If you hold it for a hundredth of a minute, it's a 100% tax. If you hold it for a mill-iminuite, it's a 1000% tax.
And if you hold it for 1000 minutes, it's a .0001% tax. But possibly this should be based around hours or days instead. I really believe that this "short-term investment" isn't properly investment at all, but merely gambling, and gambling which is destructive to the proper functioning of the stock market. If people want to gamble, let them do so, but divorce it totally from the useful functions of society, among which is a properly operating stock-market.
I don't know that I'd put the proportion of real abuse by administrators that low, but say it was. Then if you have 400 complaints, 10 of them are valid. That's enough to make the utility of Wikipedia questionable. It's high enough that experts in a field (just about any field) will feel that they're wasting their time to try to contribute. So they won't. Or, when they get a bit of experience, they'll stop.
As time goes on, I expect Wikipedia to become increasingly useless for anything by a small segment of popular culture. And it's because of political choices made within the organization.
That's not a problem, except that it means you need more disk space. And a moderation system.
The problem is that the moderators are rather limited, and articles should N E V E R be deleted. Given lower scores, so that they can be filtered out, but not deleted.
And the moderators should be the USERS of the system. Not the editors. And they shouldn't be allowed to choose which articles they moderate...they should be told they have the opportunity to moderate an article, asked if they want to, and if they do, given a random article that hasn't recently been moderated.
Also, articles should have multi-dimensional scoring. Accurate vs. Inaccurate, Technical vs. Easy, Useful vs. useless. And another choice in the first and third scales should be "I don't know enough to judge this article". One of the problems with Slashdot moderation is that it's one-dimensional (except for funny),
I think that Slashdot is a better framework than Wikipedia, though the request for citations is valid, the demand for them is stupid.
OTOH, it has been suggested that Wikipedia should be segregated into namespaces, so that identical words don't cause collisions when used in different contexts. This is both promising and dangerous. It's quite likely to cause more problems than it solves.
However, since Wikipedia seems irrevocably corrupted, it won't be wikipedia that needs to address this problem. That will be somebody else' job. One hopes the next try will be an improvement.
correction:
Wikipedia was a public forum of knowledge written by people for people.
Everyone, EVERYONE, had the right to edit it.
What you described is the way it used to be, while it was still trying to become important. Now it appears to be captive of a clique of opinionated power-trippers. This isn't the first report of abuse.
Wikipedia is still useful for non-controversial topics...but clearly one can't even predict what will be non-controversial.
No. Wikipedia shows why this particular structure of crowdsourcing won't work, and highlights certain problems that appear. Most of them would have been obvious if people had thought of them ahead of time, but they didn't.
I still believe that crowdsourcing is workable, but it needs to have an indelible audit trail. No article should be deleted, at least not unless you do the deletion based on lack of accesses. It also needs to have an ability for each visitor to comment on the accuracy of the article and the usefulness of it. But those need to be tacked to the particular version of the edit. Etc.
Probably there should be a limit on the number of edits than any one used can make based on the age and estimated reliability of the account, but the reliability shouldn't be based on the judgement of a small group of people, but rather on the change that their edits cause to the voted accuracy of articles that they edit.
And it would still probably be possible to game the system. But that's a start. Slashdot moderation isn't perfect, but it's a lot better than nothing.
Are you so sure they are rare? What proportion of them would you expect to notice?
Just considering things, I suspect that abuse is common, but that complaints are so much more common that accurate reports of it tend to ge swallowed in the noise.