Why can't you just say Apple has the highest market value?
That's what your link says, after all. There's no column labeled "largeness" or "bigosity" in there. I don't get why anyone would want to redefine "large" to mean something completely unrelated to size. Is this some Freudian thing to do with penis envy? I honestly don't understand at all.
AH, thanks for the clarification. In other words Apple at one point was floating on a higher bubble!
As a native English speaker, I'm more used to people using "biggest" to reflect some measure that can be seen as physically largest, instead of a completely virtual market value. You could measure that by number of employees, number of square feet occupied by employees, or physical volume of product being shipped, or any other physical resource measurement, but I have rarely heard "expensive" equated with "big" before.
It seems at bit contrived... at first! However, on second thought, measuring "bigness" by "market value" is perfectly cromulent, and contains inherent truthiness. We've all heard about the reality distortion field, so it certainly makes sense in that context.
Content owners do have a right to make money from their content.
Really? OK, I'll make a movie that nobody wants to see, and nobody wants to buy, and spend my life's savings on it! Society will owe me money! Wooooohoooooo! I'm in the benjamins, baby!
Absolute statements are rarely correct. In Real Life [tm] a group of citizens have decided to permit certain types of unfair restriction of trade in order to achieve a greater good. But nobody has a "right" in the absolute, moral sense, to make money for painting a picture, recording noise, etc., etc. It is a contrived, fictious legal right meant to serve a purpose, and if it is not serving said purpose it then the law is unjust.
I didn't redirect the conversation from banker bonuses, no. Perhaps someone else in the thread did. I've worked about eighty hours this week already so I probably haven't tracked the conversation perfectly. I've also been working every day for the last twelve days straight, BTW, although obviously I take frequent slashdot breaks.
So, wait, what exactly did you say I was whining about again? Oh, yeah, about highly paid, overprivileged whiners! The same thing you're whining about, apparently. Except... I never once asked for your sympathy. I don't want or need it. And I've never asked for a taxpayer bailout either. And everyone in my company has taken a pay cut for the last two years (upper management, four years), and no bonuses for anyone in four years.
What was your point again? Bankers are ultra special luminous godlike people who should be paid extra even if they wreck the economy? I can't back that. The rest of us have to actually do a better job than we were hired to do, and the company has to earn more money than expected, if we want to earn bonus money.
I have been on call for 24 hours a day, 351 days a year, for the last twenty years or so. Is that what you are talking about? Because that level of stress is not even close to "inconceivable". It's not even unusual.
I doubt sincerely that any banker has ever worked as hard or seen as much stress as the illegal immigrants I see every day, who routinely work 10 hour shifts cutting rich mens' lawns for less than minimum wage. When an entire industry has gone around preaching Ayn Rand style "greed is good" heartlessness as a virtue for literally centuries, they can't realistically expect any sympathy for their own heartaches.
you meant we have a central authority decide what the value of one's labor is.
No, that's exactly what I'm objecting to, and it's exactly what you are defending.
In that system, the means of getting a high assessment is to have a lot of political pull.
Right. That's the current system. Which I am objecting to.
I gather you prefer this system because the values that you currently provide are either not very difficult or not very pleasing.
I don't understand that statement, but I guess that makes us even since you clearly haven't understood mine.
Today the US economic system is rigged. Connected players (like banksters) are disproportionately rewarded by government fiat (for example, TARP) when there is no overriding government interest (such as defense).
There is no longer a free and fair market - if there ever was - because the goal of market regulation has been changed. Government regulation is not being used primarily as a tool to assure a level playing field and secondarily to achieve goals desired by all citizens that are believed to be unattainable through the marketplace. Government regulatory powers are instead being used as a weapon to protect existing economic power bases and prevent social mobility.
Consider the topic of this thread; we have a system where highly privileged upper social classes (the banking elite, the dirty energy barons, etc.) are rewarded despite making spectacularly bad decisions, and the marketplace is actually prevented from punishing these same bad decisions.
Busboy, dishwasher, short-order cook, ditch digger, gas pumper, tireman, mechanic, gas station manager, rocket scientist, programmer, systems analyst, sysadmin, netadmin, net architect and currently group leader for R&D. There's four and a half years of college between the half-decade I spent in the gas station and the two years I spent working on ICBMs and the space shuttle, and I probably forgot something else somewhere in the sequence - I'm old. I left out unpaid and volunteer jobs.
But so what? I didn't claim my job was so hard I need to be paid handsomely for my inconceivable stress. My personal job history has no bearing, and anyway parenting is harder than any job I ever got paid for.
Instead of paying people based on their self-inflicted stress levels, imagine paying people based on value delivered to other human beings. Then garbage men and teachers would be paid more than anyone else, and bankers would make something far closer to minimum wage.
...it's horrible job with brutal hours and inconceivable stress...
Bullshit. Their stress is nothing compared to what we routinely ask soldiers, detectives, judges, and other people to do for a fraction of the pay. They hardly ever even get shot at, although that might change if the poor keep getting pushed up against the wall.
This bs pisses me off. Over privileged drones who voluntarily chose a career of gambling other people's money and got rewarded all out of proportion to their success want sympathy for their ulcers- fuck them. Go tell some single mother fry cook in a ghetto how hard their job is and see how hard she laughs.
I can't agree that adding words to a contract or other legal document is a legitimate way to increase one's understanding of it. I'm not going to be able to take seriously any argument based on that idea.
It seems to me that the clear intent of the framers and of the document is that the federal government's ability regulate should be restricted to regulations that can be equally applied across all individual states. Mandates for efficiency, which are a subset of mandates for minimum product quality (which the framers quite clearly supported) cannot be imposed only on a particular class, they must be uniform. It does not limit them in any other way unless you add something to the text - "general welfare" is pretty obviously intended to be a broad brush.
Today, of course, we have the pork-barrel-of-the-week legislation designed to benefit one particular corporation, community or industry at the expense of all others; clearly not what was intended by "uniform" and "general".
I disagree with that interpretation of the Constitution - the power to encourage progress in the useful arts and sciences through regulation is clearly included by the United States Constitution, Article One, Section 8, Clause 8 as well as in the preamble. Furthermore, water conservation is a military and political issue because of the situation with Mexico, and thus it falls under the federal government's mandate to provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure liberty. It doesn't mention gpf, sure, or toilets - but it also doesn't mention bullets, soldiers' hats, or grenades, even though those are equally clearly covered by the defense mandate. You can't expect the constitution to talk specifically by name about things that weren't conceived of at the time it was written.
However, I do see your point, and I admit the government could have achieved the same end (promoting innovation in waste and sanitation tech) by reforming intellectual property law and reforming the rigging of the economic system that prevents home-garage entrepreneurs from being able to compete with entrenched corporations. Right now, if you don't have a million bucks in venture capital, Kohler and their buddies will crush you with toilets mass produced in China; this situation prevents progress (in the absence of regulation, that is).
All that being said, I don't see Ron/Rand Paul's "business friendly" approach changing that problem any time soon. I respect their wish for less restriction of individual persons' rights, but until they strongly oppose corporate personhood their agenda is putting the cart before the horse. Corporations already have too many rights without corresponding responsibilities or accountability. Strip them of personhood first, then give people stronger rights - people have responsibilities (like jury duty, for one example) that corporations should not, and likewise corporations should not have any human rights.
And finally I still say Rand Paul doesn't know crap about toilets, and is grandstanding using false claims that play to ignorance, and it makes me respect him far less than his father. Ron Paul is more intellectually honest.
Rand Paul seems to throw in a little bit of Palin-esque stupidity on purpose to minimize GOP fear of him, and to not ostracize the part of the electorate that is scared of the fact that his father is often talking to them like intelligent adults.
Hmmm, interesting idea. He'd probably gather more than he'd lose with that strategy, since the Tea Party crowd is effectively leaderless. And he wouldn't be the first politician to play dumb on purpose.
I think I'll reserve judgment on this for now, but I'll certainly keep your comment in mind when I look at Rand Paul's activities in the future. Thanks!
The last time the US federal government mandated water efficiency improvements in toilets was, oh, the early 90s I think.
Prior to that, most toilets in the USA were 3.5 gallon per flush, and had been of the same design for around a hundred years. Many were even less efficient - I lived in a house with a five-gallon flush (which I replaced with a 1.6 gallon model) and I've heard of seven-gallon models.
Because private innovation had completely ceased in toilet design, and because of the United States' extremely forseeable water problems in the arid southwest (which involve not only US citizens but also Mexico; water is a political and national security issue in Central America) a coalition of legislators forced toilet installers and vendors to innovate by public law.
The toilet makers, despite having had literally years of warning that this would happen, did not invest in new designs until after the law passed. They then attempted to sell toilets that were designed for high flush volume refitted with low volume tanks. These toilets were horrible - they had to be flushed repeatedly in normal use, they clogged constantly, they were just awful.
Because the market rewards innovation that improves customer satisfaction, and nobody was buying replacement toilets because the new ones were known to be awful, innovation... happened. The 1.6 gallon per flush toilets are, today, cheap and effective.
I know this because I've been installing toilets for decades at my house, my parents' house, and at several of my friends houses. I also have a close friend who does plumbing professionally; he has installed dozens if not hundreds of toilets.
But Rand Paul is using the perception that toilets are no good due to federal law (a partial truth at one time, but now completely untrue) as a political meme. He is, esentially, using a lie to drive his anti-regulatory agenda, which is particularly egregious since the regulations in question have actually worked to remedy a free market failure in a way that is beneficial to the USA as a nation. This sort of calculating misrepresentation is not something I have ever seen his father do. Furthermore, in the past Ron Paul has admitted it when he has made misjudgements - look at the evolution of his views on church, state, and sexuality, for a good example - and I've never seen Rand Paul do that.
Sorry about the long post, but since you're in Germany I figured you'd need the details to understand the context in which I was criticizing Rand Paul.
I have listened to Rand Paul on youtube several times and I was not ever impressed.
When he tries to tell me that low-flow toilets don't work, for example, I have to say "Really, Rand? How many have you installed? I've installed quite a few, and although they sure as hell didn't work the first two years after they were introduced, they work great now."
I can get a dirt cheap 1.6 gallon per flush toilet today that will flush more live lobsters at once than the five gallon flush it replaces. I can even get a 1.3 gallon per flush model that works for anyone who isn't morbidly obese or suffering from truly horrible bowel problems.
Their government doesn't have to compromise or reach consensus between ruling parties with vastly differing ideologies and goals.
Neither does ours. However, our government does have to reach consensus between 437 individual points of graft, corruption, incompetence and greed. Which takes a lot of work, especially with that incompetence thing.
Yeah, he asked for reports of injuries - claiming flat out that no such reports had been made - and now he's claiming that he actually asked for proof deaths occured.
You can't argue with the guy, he's either incapable of following his own arguments or just trolling.
Slashdot Mirror
Or be living after 2005...
https://www.google.com/search?q=adblock
Or, have the slashdot "disable ads" option available and checked...
I liked the Juggalo reference.
Why can't you just say Apple has the highest market value?
That's what your link says, after all. There's no column labeled "largeness" or "bigosity" in there. I don't get why anyone would want to redefine "large" to mean something completely unrelated to size. Is this some Freudian thing to do with penis envy? I honestly don't understand at all.
Too much truthiness in the Wall Street Journal for me, and not enough comics.
AH, thanks for the clarification. In other words Apple at one point was floating on a higher bubble!
As a native English speaker, I'm more used to people using "biggest" to reflect some measure that can be seen as physically largest, instead of a completely virtual market value. You could measure that by number of employees, number of square feet occupied by employees, or physical volume of product being shipped, or any other physical resource measurement, but I have rarely heard "expensive" equated with "big" before.
It seems at bit contrived... at first! However, on second thought, measuring "bigness" by "market value" is perfectly cromulent, and contains inherent truthiness. We've all heard about the reality distortion field, so it certainly makes sense in that context.
Neither Microsoft nor Apple are even in the top 100 largest companies in the world.
http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/global500/2011/
Cats seem very large to mice, I suppose, so we technical types tend to overestimate the power of tech companies.
Really? OK, I'll make a movie that nobody wants to see, and nobody wants to buy, and spend my life's savings on it! Society will owe me money! Wooooohoooooo! I'm in the benjamins, baby!
Absolute statements are rarely correct. In Real Life [tm] a group of citizens have decided to permit certain types of unfair restriction of trade in order to achieve a greater good. But nobody has a "right" in the absolute, moral sense, to make money for painting a picture, recording noise, etc., etc. It is a contrived, fictious legal right meant to serve a purpose, and if it is not serving said purpose it then the law is unjust.
No, I could tell just from the slashticle it was a complete waste of time.
If you really want to draw the hate mods you need to criticize nuclear power generation and make fun of Ayn Rand.
Powershell is a powerful CLI, but I can write useful pipelines with busybox faster.
http://busybox.net/downloads/BusyBox.html#commands
Because you don't like me? Sorry about that.
I only jumped on your head after you called me a whiner, y'know. I was ranting, not whining, and didn't care for the insult.
Still, go ye forth and have a good an' fruitful life.
I didn't redirect the conversation from banker bonuses, no. Perhaps someone else in the thread did. I've worked about eighty hours this week already so I probably haven't tracked the conversation perfectly. I've also been working every day for the last twelve days straight, BTW, although obviously I take frequent slashdot breaks.
So, wait, what exactly did you say I was whining about again? Oh, yeah, about highly paid, overprivileged whiners! The same thing you're whining about, apparently. Except... I never once asked for your sympathy. I don't want or need it. And I've never asked for a taxpayer bailout either. And everyone in my company has taken a pay cut for the last two years (upper management, four years), and no bonuses for anyone in four years.
What was your point again? Bankers are ultra special luminous godlike people who should be paid extra even if they wreck the economy? I can't back that. The rest of us have to actually do a better job than we were hired to do, and the company has to earn more money than expected, if we want to earn bonus money.
What exactly does "traders are always on" mean?
I have been on call for 24 hours a day, 351 days a year, for the last twenty years or so. Is that what you are talking about? Because that level of stress is not even close to "inconceivable". It's not even unusual.
I doubt sincerely that any banker has ever worked as hard or seen as much stress as the illegal immigrants I see every day, who routinely work 10 hour shifts cutting rich mens' lawns for less than minimum wage. When an entire industry has gone around preaching Ayn Rand style "greed is good" heartlessness as a virtue for literally centuries, they can't realistically expect any sympathy for their own heartaches.
No, that's exactly what I'm objecting to, and it's exactly what you are defending.
Right. That's the current system. Which I am objecting to.
I don't understand that statement, but I guess that makes us even since you clearly haven't understood mine.
Today the US economic system is rigged. Connected players (like banksters) are disproportionately rewarded by government fiat (for example, TARP) when there is no overriding government interest (such as defense).
There is no longer a free and fair market - if there ever was - because the goal of market regulation has been changed. Government regulation is not being used primarily as a tool to assure a level playing field and secondarily to achieve goals desired by all citizens that are believed to be unattainable through the marketplace. Government regulatory powers are instead being used as a weapon to protect existing economic power bases and prevent social mobility.
Consider the topic of this thread; we have a system where highly privileged upper social classes (the banking elite, the dirty energy barons, etc.) are rewarded despite making spectacularly bad decisions, and the marketplace is actually prevented from punishing these same bad decisions.
PS: Fatmouse rules.
Busboy, dishwasher, short-order cook, ditch digger, gas pumper, tireman, mechanic, gas station manager, rocket scientist, programmer, systems analyst, sysadmin, netadmin, net architect and currently group leader for R&D. There's four and a half years of college between the half-decade I spent in the gas station and the two years I spent working on ICBMs and the space shuttle, and I probably forgot something else somewhere in the sequence - I'm old. I left out unpaid and volunteer jobs.
But so what? I didn't claim my job was so hard I need to be paid handsomely for my inconceivable stress. My personal job history has no bearing, and anyway parenting is harder than any job I ever got paid for.
Instead of paying people based on their self-inflicted stress levels, imagine paying people based on value delivered to other human beings. Then garbage men and teachers would be paid more than anyone else, and bankers would make something far closer to minimum wage.
Bullshit. Their stress is nothing compared to what we routinely ask soldiers, detectives, judges, and other people to do for a fraction of the pay. They hardly ever even get shot at, although that might change if the poor keep getting pushed up against the wall.
This bs pisses me off. Over privileged drones who voluntarily chose a career of gambling other people's money and got rewarded all out of proportion to their success want sympathy for their ulcers- fuck them. Go tell some single mother fry cook in a ghetto how hard their job is and see how hard she laughs.
I can't agree that adding words to a contract or other legal document is a legitimate way to increase one's understanding of it. I'm not going to be able to take seriously any argument based on that idea.
It seems to me that the clear intent of the framers and of the document is that the federal government's ability regulate should be restricted to regulations that can be equally applied across all individual states. Mandates for efficiency, which are a subset of mandates for minimum product quality (which the framers quite clearly supported) cannot be imposed only on a particular class, they must be uniform. It does not limit them in any other way unless you add something to the text - "general welfare" is pretty obviously intended to be a broad brush.
Today, of course, we have the pork-barrel-of-the-week legislation designed to benefit one particular corporation, community or industry at the expense of all others; clearly not what was intended by "uniform" and "general".
Unlikely. The majority of people who actually pay for porn are probably watching at home on an unfiltered connection.
The freeloaders who watch at work, or on mommy and daddy's connection aren't paying. They are the ones that will be filtered.
I disagree with that interpretation of the Constitution - the power to encourage progress in the useful arts and sciences through regulation is clearly included by the United States Constitution, Article One, Section 8, Clause 8 as well as in the preamble. Furthermore, water conservation is a military and political issue because of the situation with Mexico, and thus it falls under the federal government's mandate to provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure liberty. It doesn't mention gpf, sure, or toilets - but it also doesn't mention bullets, soldiers' hats, or grenades, even though those are equally clearly covered by the defense mandate. You can't expect the constitution to talk specifically by name about things that weren't conceived of at the time it was written.
However, I do see your point, and I admit the government could have achieved the same end (promoting innovation in waste and sanitation tech) by reforming intellectual property law and reforming the rigging of the economic system that prevents home-garage entrepreneurs from being able to compete with entrenched corporations. Right now, if you don't have a million bucks in venture capital, Kohler and their buddies will crush you with toilets mass produced in China; this situation prevents progress (in the absence of regulation, that is).
All that being said, I don't see Ron/Rand Paul's "business friendly" approach changing that problem any time soon. I respect their wish for less restriction of individual persons' rights, but until they strongly oppose corporate personhood their agenda is putting the cart before the horse. Corporations already have too many rights without corresponding responsibilities or accountability. Strip them of personhood first, then give people stronger rights - people have responsibilities (like jury duty, for one example) that corporations should not, and likewise corporations should not have any human rights.
And finally I still say Rand Paul doesn't know crap about toilets, and is grandstanding using false claims that play to ignorance, and it makes me respect him far less than his father. Ron Paul is more intellectually honest.
I was not interested in owning this device until I read your post.
Hmmm, interesting idea. He'd probably gather more than he'd lose with that strategy, since the Tea Party crowd is effectively leaderless. And he wouldn't be the first politician to play dumb on purpose.
I think I'll reserve judgment on this for now, but I'll certainly keep your comment in mind when I look at Rand Paul's activities in the future. Thanks!
The last time the US federal government mandated water efficiency improvements in toilets was, oh, the early 90s I think.
Prior to that, most toilets in the USA were 3.5 gallon per flush, and had been of the same design for around a hundred years. Many were even less efficient - I lived in a house with a five-gallon flush (which I replaced with a 1.6 gallon model) and I've heard of seven-gallon models.
Because private innovation had completely ceased in toilet design, and because of the United States' extremely forseeable water problems in the arid southwest (which involve not only US citizens but also Mexico; water is a political and national security issue in Central America) a coalition of legislators forced toilet installers and vendors to innovate by public law.
The toilet makers, despite having had literally years of warning that this would happen, did not invest in new designs until after the law passed. They then attempted to sell toilets that were designed for high flush volume refitted with low volume tanks. These toilets were horrible - they had to be flushed repeatedly in normal use, they clogged constantly, they were just awful.
Because the market rewards innovation that improves customer satisfaction, and nobody was buying replacement toilets because the new ones were known to be awful, innovation... happened. The 1.6 gallon per flush toilets are, today, cheap and effective.
I know this because I've been installing toilets for decades at my house, my parents' house, and at several of my friends houses. I also have a close friend who does plumbing professionally; he has installed dozens if not hundreds of toilets.
But Rand Paul is using the perception that toilets are no good due to federal law (a partial truth at one time, but now completely untrue) as a political meme. He is, esentially, using a lie to drive his anti-regulatory agenda, which is particularly egregious since the regulations in question have actually worked to remedy a free market failure in a way that is beneficial to the USA as a nation. This sort of calculating misrepresentation is not something I have ever seen his father do. Furthermore, in the past Ron Paul has admitted it when he has made misjudgements - look at the evolution of his views on church, state, and sexuality, for a good example - and I've never seen Rand Paul do that.
Sorry about the long post, but since you're in Germany I figured you'd need the details to understand the context in which I was criticizing Rand Paul.
Kucinich and Paul because they have principles that transcend party loyalty and they are not for sale.
Dean because he was the first Internet-savvy candidate, and has been the man behind the Democratic curtain for a long time now.
Al Franken because although his spoken delivery is awful, in written media the man is both funny and insightful.
I have listened to Rand Paul on youtube several times and I was not ever impressed.
When he tries to tell me that low-flow toilets don't work, for example, I have to say "Really, Rand? How many have you installed? I've installed quite a few, and although they sure as hell didn't work the first two years after they were introduced, they work great now."
I can get a dirt cheap 1.6 gallon per flush toilet today that will flush more live lobsters at once than the five gallon flush it replaces. I can even get a 1.3 gallon per flush model that works for anyone who isn't morbidly obese or suffering from truly horrible bowel problems.
Neither does ours. However, our government does have to reach consensus between 437 individual points of graft, corruption, incompetence and greed. Which takes a lot of work, especially with that incompetence thing.
Yeah, he asked for reports of injuries - claiming flat out that no such reports had been made - and now he's claiming that he actually asked for proof deaths occured.
You can't argue with the guy, he's either incapable of following his own arguments or just trolling.