... vote by approval for a story. It's the ability to have multiple perspectives on a topic published. Ideally, by anyone, but failing that, a fairly representative set of perspectives.
Being able to vote stories up or down could be disastrous when popular opinion and the truth of the content aren't relevant. Are you worried about brown-nosing Obama stories? Obama's pretty popular right now. A press run via democracy might be less likely to publish stories critical of him (or of climate change, for that matter) than an independent press.
It's just like the current group of teachers. They don't care if they actually teach anything, and are upset when someone wants to make sure that the kids are able to read after graduating high school, as long as they get paid for pushing them forwards.
Nobody goes into teaching just to get paid. There's so many better ways to do that. Most people who do it -- as I can attest from firsthand process of going through an education program -- have a pretty wide streak of altruism. The system may grind their best efforts out of them, and like the rest of us, sometimes they're just trying to get through their day, but my observation is that apathy is pretty far from the default state.
How could they stand it if people wanted them to report negative stories about Obama and positive stories about Bush?
Suppose all press outlets were run democratically, plurality vote, right now.
Given the current popularity of Obama and unpopularity of Bush, how many news outlets do you think would be publishing stories critical of Obama and positively reviewing the policies of the Bush era?
Why, why, why do people get SO offended when you tell them they have to learn computers to be good at computers?
Because you're essentially attacking them.
What if I responded to you by saying: "I'm sorry, but if you don't understand how flatly attacking people's qualifications for their job is insulting and threatening, you shouldn't be having this discussion. You simply don't have the interpersonal skills to articulate this kind of thing in a manner that would be productive, let alone persuasive."
Get your dander up at all?
And please don't hide behind the "I was just stating a fact, if the shoe fits, wear it." There are lots of good ways to say what you're trying to get at that are probably even closer to the truth.
Which is that really don't have to learn *everything* about computers in order to be good at computers. It is certainly an underlying truth that the more you know, the better you are as a developer. But it's entirely possible to be a reasonably productive developer without knowing everything... as long as your abilities are matched to what you need to accomplish. And there's more or less a curve of task difficulty to go along with a curve of developer abilities.
I don't know very much about building compilers. Some people would say that makes me a mere dilettante of a software developer. That's a rash overstatement. It's absolutely true I would be a *better* developer if I knew more about these things, and certain problem domains would be more open to me, but there's a huge problem space that really doesn't require this knowledge. This works the other way, too: I probably know more about Linear Algebra and Discrete Mathematics than many developers and even some CS majors (studied Math in school) and I'm familiar with the Logic Programming paradigm (written full programs in Prolog). These things make me a better developer, particularly for some problem domains, but it certainly doesn't mean anyone who doesn't know these things is a simple hack.
I think implementing hashes and other primitives that are now part of libraries/languages falls in this category. Being able to implement them is certainly a *demonstration* that you've mastered certain skills. The contrapositive doesn't necessarily follow. Not ever having implemented them -- in particular because you've never had to -- doesn't necessarily imply that you lack the ability to solve that class of problem.
And in fact, it might demonstrate a certain stripe of wisdom: there's a limited amount of time and a pretty much infinite supply of problems. What do you spend time learning how to do?
It'll probably take a little time, but as more and more people see the high journalistic quality of papers and outlets like his relative to rags like the NYT and WaPo, the market will naturally take care of the latter papers.
Or, you know, if you're not sure you like Murdoch either, there's always USA Today.
I love a good IE or MS bash as much as the next person, but IE8 CSS support is vastly improved, bordering on satisfactory.
Bordering on satisfactory for 2004. One of the world's biggest software companies, billions and billions of dollars of resources has managed to finally... catch up to where everybody else was five years ago. In the meanwhile, there's going to be no canvas support, they've made changes with VML that make using it for Canvas and other things more difficult, they're missing web fonts and rounded borders. And why *are* they investing so much time in their own rendering engine just to play distant catch-up, when embedding one of their rather worthy competitors would be pretty easy? There's almost no other reason *except* that they plan to break standards in some way or another at some point.
It almost seems like they're earnestly trying to earn the goodwill of web developers back, but after letting IE 6 coast its broken state for over five years and then issuing half-measures for the last three, I don't think they deserve any kudos or trust yet. If they ever will.
They're not called Mormon Crickets because they're considered adherents to the faith, they're called Mormon Crickets because they're one of the fine local features the Mormons found waiting for them when they settled in Utah the mid 1800s. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miracle_of_the_Gulls .
Mormon Crickets are also not only not Mormons, they're not crickets either. They're shieldbacked katydids.
... and part-time Apple Fanboy, I actually do care. I hope the EFF hits Apple so hard their lawyers and management have headaches for a few years.
I generally use iTunes because I like it, but it may not always be my favorite, someone might produce something I like better. If that happens and they're willing to try to make it work with the iPod, what good reason is there for keeping them from doing so?
I do see that there are some potential copyright issues, particularly if the discussion is focused on pulling music in the device -> computer direction, rather than pushing it the computer -> device direction. But aside from that, there's nothing copyright oriented about interoperability with a portable music player.
In other words, our children and grandchildren should pay for technological advances that make our lives easier.
We're talking about R&D here. While with a lot of focus, some programs yield results in as little as 5-10 years (say, the US vs USSR space race), the benefits are much more likely to filter out over the course of your children's lives than they are to have any kind of near term benefit.
Whether you commit future generations to pay for that is another question, but this isn't short-sighted thinking.
How about we let individuals and businesses decide where they're going to put their R&D money
Individuals and businesses can do great things when investors are willing to look at longer windows and actually do R&D spending. Outside those windows, it's an open question. Waiting for private investment to do certain things is in some ways like waiting for evolution to invent the wheel.
Furthermore, there's some evidence that private R&D spending slumps when public R&D spending slumps, in particular when economic times are tough. R&D spending slumped between the mid-80s and mid-90s due to a drop-off in federal spending. Reports are that generally it's holding right now -- something you could attribute to an outlook of increases from the Obama administration, or even to increased spending by the Bush administration.
not some ivory-tower bureaucrats who are firmly removed from reality?
What evidence do you have that ivory-tower bureaucrats removed from reality are either (a) making the decisions or (b) tend to make bad ones?
Heck, pure mathematicians who take *pride* in actively running down abstract pursuits that supposedly have no application -- we're talking about people who really are a best fit for the terms "ivory-tower" and "removed from reality" here -- almost inevitably find out their achievements end up having some practical use.
Strips of anarchism are often described as wanting to "get rid of government", but I find that they tend to define government a particular way. Basically, anarchists tend to want to maximize voluntary consent, and in their eyes, government is what you have when you have a ruling system that people are put under without voluntary consent.
Given that no one chooses the society they're born into and raised in, I don't know how you get to a place where you have a system that is based entirely on consent. Maybe some kind of world-citizenship choice where you can pick the society you want to be a part of when you reach a certain age? I don't know. I suppose that's more or less immigration... which obviously won't work smoothly for everyone for a wide variety of social and practical reasons.
I think it's actually inevitable: unless you choose the cabin in the wilderness route (and sometimes even then), you're going to be part of a society which makes some impositions on you. If you're lucky, you're part of a society that allows you to be a part of the conversation and decisions about what those impositions will be, and it's certainly fair to argue there should be fewer, but it's not particularly reasonable to expect there won't be any or that it's particularly unfair if most people decide on impositions you disagree with.
I think that's a problem that every ideology based on individual freedom is going to have, whether it's libertarian, socialist, or social democrat, or republican. I don't think it has a real solution.
I doesn't have a strict solution that's maximally unbounded, that's for sure. On the other hand, modern industrial democracies, whether social democrat or democratic republic, seem to have done a pretty decent job of providing a rising standard of living combined with a high if not unbounded level of personal freedom. I certainly don't think the balance is perfect, but it's hard for me to agree that we're as far away from it as either the pure libertarians (or the pure socialists, for that matter) seem to think we are.
See, I'm not even sure I get the problem with government loans. I'm not a libertarian, but I see the heart of libertarian philosophy as being against societal compulsions and, more particularly, the use of force by the state to back them up. A loan agreement doesn't involve these things: the state could borrow and lend freely without crossing that line.
(You could credibly argue that financial tools such as loans and insurance tend to inflate prices in such a way that everyone ends up almost forced to use them -- ie, if you don't, it's hard to participate in the markets where they're used. If you begin to accept the idea that economic necessity crosses the boundary into the realm where it constitutes a kind of force, however, market-focused libertarianism starts to get inconsistent very quickly.)
Heh. If a libertarian argues against something they benefit from, they're a hypocrite. If they argue against something they don't benefit from, they're selfish or stupid. There's really no way a libertarian can win, can they?
Certainly not if they're uttering phrases like "if they argue against something they don't benefit from, they're selfish." (I think you meant to put that with the "benefit" side of the sentence;)
Leaving aside that I think "selfishness" is a poorly expressed criticism of libertarianism, I'm simply saying your friend's actions didn't make sense to me under the philosophy as I understand it. Loans don't involve force even if the state's the lender. It's also my understanding there exist non-state lenders. Your friend may not have thought of these things (I had literally *no idea* student loans existed when I was choosing a school and thus passed up a chance to go to some pretty fine institutions), or perhaps your friend has other reasons for avoiding college. And I have a certain amount of respect for people who actually order their life around their political philosophies: I'm familiar with a guy who makes his entire life work without a social security # and personal bank account because of some of his political objections. And I guess I do certain things myself that probably make my life harder from some points of view in order to fit with my personal values. That's totally cool with me. My objections to libertarianism are largely grounded philosophical differences and anticipated social consequences.
He's far, far, far from one of the "rich wolves" in your sig,
The thinking behind the sig doesn't bar the sheep from agitating for the situation it expresses. It's the observation that if a social decision-making institution like a democracy has the problem that blocks can use their decision power to prey on others, if you move to a system where the mediating institutions are largely economic, you'll have the same problem, except instead of using votes, people will use wealth, because it will be the political currency instead of votes. It really doesn't depend on exactly who the wolves and the sheep are.
To state it plainly, the goal of venture capitalists is to invest money and make a return.
That's certainly one goal, but it's not the only goal for everyone involved. Some of them also find that it's more personally rewarding to chase particular technologies or personal stories that interest them. It makes some sense, too: once you have a certain amount of money, it makes a lot of sense that finding a certain meaning in your actions might be of higher personal utility than... more money. And being part of the story of real innovation that drives human productivity might be one choice.
This isn't to say that we should mandate this kind of behavior for VCs: it probably should remain their privilege to choose to chase profit alone if they wish (and some kinds of funds may *need* that focus), and some measure of good will come from that too. But I also think it's dangerous to reinforce the idea this should be their only focus, when by making different decisions, they might well be a part of driving real progress.
Venture capital seems pretty simple (invest in a company, make money if it succeeds) but mortgage lending is pretty simple, too
The thing about mortgage lending is that in its base iteration, it is in fact pretty safe. Particularly if you screen your loan recipients sensibly.
Venture capital in its base iteration is risky, even if you're smart and screen carefully, and I'm trying to imagine what in the world you can do to even give the appearance that you aren't likely to lose your money more than one time out of five. Securitization? I suppose you could issue stock in a fund with a portfolio of businesses. That's safer, but everyone knows the underlying business is still risky and you're a few extra bad risks or just strokes of bad luck from having your investment wiped out.
I suppose you could try to hedge negatively correlated successes. Or go IPO quick, pump the stock, get out.... but neither of these kinds of things would pose systemic risks, even if the later is a con.
I'm actually interested in ideas for how you could manipulate the system, but I can't think of any.
They just don't believe that government and society are the same thing.
Which is one of the problematic elements of the philosophy. By the time you have a sufficiently organized society -- even one that only does the main things libertarians claim they want it limited to -- you have something that's essentially government, even if it doesn't fit the concept of the modern state. In short, Libertarianism seems very much like it'd like to have society without any societal impositions, and it's pretty reasonable to doubt that's even possible.
Obviously you can have degrees to which a society imposes on its individual members, and I agree with the idea that it's worth working to minimize that. The problem is if you also want to curb the degree to which individuals can impose on each other, you have inevitable tension between those two principles. So far, I haven't seen a stripe of Libertarianism that acknowledges and engages that problem effectively.
I myself know an anarcho-capitalist that doesn't go to college because he can't fund it himself, and because he adamantly refuses to take federal aid as he would be taking far more than he has paid into the system with.
Presumably we're talking about a smart person here, given that Anarcho-capitalists tend to be smart (if somewhat blinkered). What about scholarships?
What's their objection to loans? They're a pretty big staple of standard capitalism, often allowing both parties to profit if they're done in good faith.
There's also a lot of education options that are considerably more affordable than, say, Stanford or Harvard. At the community/state college level, you can find options that are affordable enough to manage working part-time (full-time summers) and going to school.
All in all, I don't think that not wanting to take state-funded grants is a particularly strong excuse for avoiding college.
JSON's not always fatter. Particularly when you have information stored as child nodes rather than attribute nodes (one-many relationships rather than one-one relationships tend this way), XML can get fatter pretty quickly.
I suspect the JSON love has to do with the fact that if you're already working in Javascript, it's just more javascript, and there's zero mystery about how to work with it. Not that XML is rocket science, but with JSON, it's pretty much as easy as eval() if you trust the server.
Overall, I like what Steve Yegge had to say: "XML is better if you have more text and fewer tags. And JSON is better if you have more tags and less text." It's probably a little more complicated than that (the fatter/thinner issue is one, compression is another), but it's a decent heuristic.
FTA: A lot of JavaScript is forked. If the DOM is IE, use this version of the code, otherwise use this.
Not much of *Javascript* itself is forked. The *DOM* is quite thoroughly forked. One might even say forked over. But as other people have pointed out, Prototype and Dojo and jQuery and the like tend to mitigate that problem.
There's no plausible reason I've heard or can think of to regulate VCs more closely. They don't pose any systemic risk in the way that lending, derivatives, or insurance can. They're one manifestation of the big virtue in a sea of mixed issues with capitalism: entrepreneurship. If you lose, you lose your money, the business ceases to exist. If you win, you make money (potentially lots of money) creating and selling a viable business. That's it. No bailouts. Investors lose, people may lose jobs, but there's nothing else for anybody to do. All the arguments for regulation that make a certain amount of sense in other sectors tend don't seem to apply well here.
Heck, even if VCs for some reason COULD pose systemic risk, it's a small enough part of the economy (yearly less than what we're probably going to end up loaning to the auto industry) that it probably still wouldn't.
I disagree. It is forcing me to pay into something I may not want to pay into, that is not protecting my liberty, but "providing" for me and others. I believe this is prima facie immoral.
As long as you're starting with it as an axiom, it's pretty clear no one is going to change your mind.
I said it was below 20 percent, actually. So, yes.
You said below 20%, but it wasn't clear to me that you understood this IS the statutory rate, not the post-loophole effective rate. Between that and the fact that the 15% you mentioned is actually half that for most wage earners, I wanted to make sure we have a clear argument that most middle-class earners don't shoulder a tax rate around 40%. If you want to argue that 25-30% percent, or any percentage is too high -- and it seems you do -- then that's something else. Let's just not start with the assumption that most people's tax rates approach half their income.
Yes, it actually is.
You don't seem to have actually addressed the differences I pointed out.
You may want to consider the possibility that you are effectively philosophically colorblind on this matter. The differences I laid out are pretty clear and a very large portion of the population is able to see them.
Alternatively, on the off chance that you're a philosophical tetrachromat of some kind and it's the rest of us who can't see, you may want to consider using your gifts to come up with a more effective analogy that's readily grasped by the rest of us handicapped folks.
That is irrelevant. IT IS MINE.
Well, it's good to be in touch with the deepest roots of your social philosophy.
However, you may want to consider what "mine" even means. The fact is that property of any kind is a convenient fiction that exists only by the kind of social consensus you apparently eschew. It's a pretty good fiction, useful enough to protect... but it's not good enough to be the only pole of a social philosophy, however appealing that idea is to a certain side of human nature.
"Social agreements" that are FORCED UPON people without regard to their personal liberty are not social agreements at all.
There isn't really a way to avoid this. The only society which doesn't have this feature is one that operates on 100% consensus, and this doesn't happen with human beings. Every human society will have features some of its members don't like. The best you can do is to balance worthwhile principles which are important to that society.
There's no further effort involved: you just multiply the number of people. Instead of one mugger being hired by one community to rob one man, it's many muggers hired by a much larger community to rob many people.
Not just many people. *Everyone*. By exactly the same criteria. Including themselves. Is it really true that nothing about that strikes you as analogically strange?
Middle class people 15 percent off the top on payroll,
If you're self-employed, and if you want to get into a policy discussion on whether this particular structure helps or hinders entrepreneuership, I'm game for the topic -- I think there should be exceptions for new businesses. For existing profitable ones, it's effectively mandating participation in a public retirement program, partly from the employer, partly from the employee. This is also up for policy discussion, particularly the part where the money isn't used this way in practice but instead as a regressive tax, but it's not automatically an unmitigated evil, something that's particularly apparent in a time when private (and especially market-based) retirement mechanisms aren't working particularly well.
and then 25-28 percent in federal income taxes
Those are brackets, not actualy percentages you're citing. For example, what would you guess the effective overall federal tax rate might be for someone earning $50,000 in a year (that's right around the median, although the real wages of most men who work full time is generally below $45k)? 20% was an estimate you threw out, but it's not even 18%, though it's close (17.69%). The first $8k you make is taxed in the lowest bracket, the next 16k in the next lowest bracket, so someone making 50k doesn't even have half their income taxed in the tax bracket they'll be considered part of.
This is *before* you consider deductions and credits that may apply.
The Tax Foundation calculates somewhere around 30 percent nationally, but does not include the "hidden" taxes.
I'm not familiar enough to comment on this, but I'll say that I've seen the Tax Foundation engage in enough statistical chicanery that I don't think they can be trusted at face value. You're welcome to cite and perhaps I'll chew on what they have to say.
There is no significant difference. Let's use your language. Say you are in a large room with a bunch of your neighbors. One of them comes up to you with a gun and takes your wallet. We all agree that's wrong. How is it made better if everyone in the room votes for that man to come up to you with a gun and take your wallet? I had a vote, but I lost. It's just as wrong. It's the same thing.
It's not. It still doesn't jibe, and most people are able to see that:
1) a social process where everyone has an input, where you have every opportunity to persuade your neighbors to accept your point of view, and where every decision can (and probably will) be revisited periodically
and
2) a lone actor simply employing force as a justification.
are not the same thing.
But here's the weird part: this is all even if you assume that for some reason, everybody's decided to pick on one person for the purposes of robbery. And in reality, in modern American society, it never plays out that way -- not even if you're an AIG finance wizard getting bonuses you have no business getting. The kind of social agreements we're talking about apply to *everybody*: when they vote that any individual is going to have to give 18% of their income to the treasury, they mean *every* individual in similar circumstances is going to have to give the same amount. And then that the disposition of that money will come under the same decision making process. I don't even know where to begin trying to construct a rhetorically equivalent mugging, but you know, maybe you've got more imagination than I do.
Small psychic distance between people has its problems as well as benefits, I think that's true. But I also think the idea that the secondary America fits the political stereotypical rural-urban dichotomy is problematic, and while Palin was able to manipulate a certain identity, I especially think that the idea that Sarah Palin accurately represents it is false. For one thing, there were no shortage of people from Wasilla who were ready to criticize her. That may be different from how the rest of the country responded to their idea with her, but the responses through the rest of the country were as much an artifact of the primary America media filters as anything else. There's also considerable indication that Palin had been living herself inside the primary America narrative herself for a while -- accounts of her run for mayor strongly suggest that she abandoned local policy-focused politics and instead brought in the national culture war narratives.
The sales tax costs would be a pain, and there'd be a slight negative economic impact from consumers or businesses having to absorb the additional costs of the tax itself, but life would probably go on for all that, and local businesses would be slightly more competitive with mail order, which might not be a bad thing.
The costs of compliance, on the other hand, could turn out to be nightmarish, and in particular, a situation where there's no competition between tax info service providers would be an outright disaster (and is effectively graft).
If something like this ever goes into effect nationally, it ought to mandate the states and other locales are responsible for providing compliance information in an open, automated, and free manner, and if they can't clear those costs with the additional tax revenue, they have no business pushing them onto the private sector to be duplicated and magnified in a thousand ways.
The average tax burden for Americans is -- just in direct taxes -- about 40 percent of our income.
Do you mean an arithmetic mean? If so, it probably doesn't mean anything useful about the tax burden for the general population, given the income (and therefore tax burden) distribution of the population. Also, please be sure to distinguish between statutory and effective rates -- they're often *very* different in this country.
The difference is that the "whining" that conservatives complained about was people wanting to be given something that was taken by force from someone else, whereas conservatives are "whining" about not being able to keep what actually belongs to them.
The other difference is that the conservatives in question often don't seem to be able to distinguish between the operation of a Representative Republic whose members choose to define a society which uses this level of taxation, and a mugger on the street taking the same sum from them.
None of this is to say that discussions on how tax money is used and how much is required are off limits. A well-operating society will probably have them continually. Just that glib comments that take a broad brush to the entire concept of taxation don't contribute much to understanding the issues involved.
Oh yes blame the hard working successful people for wanting to keep the fruits of their labor.
Very few people in this country advocate taking away the greater part of the fruits of any labor, with the potential exception of ill-gotten bonuses awarded to failed financial firms. Suggesting that taxation of any kind doesn't enable people to keep rewards for work or investment is an exaggeration tactic. If you want to argue about specific levels, that's always legit, but suggesting that a marginal difference on the order of 10% amounts to binary discussion about whether people should keep or lose the fruits of their labor is disingenuous, particularly in a society where, yes, we do have representation.
News flash for you: we are over taxed, this is not new we have been saying this for a long time.
This is 100% opinion, and it isn't shared by everyone. Personally, I think the current income tax levels are by and large reasonable, though I'd like to see the bottom income tax bracket be lower than the highest capital gains. There are others in higher income brackets than I who agree; Warren Buffet, among others, has made statements to this effect.
The government needs to stop funding things it was never meant to do in the first place; the war on drugs, welfare programs, rebuilding other countries, and the list goes on.
While I can agree that many of our recent policy decisions on this front -- and in particular the curbing of civil liberties -- have been blights, I can't agree that our government was never meant to be involved in those things, given that among the missions of the founding document one finds imperatives to "provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare."
The United States of America is not a democracy! It never has been a democracy!
This is often thrown around like it's a great insight when it's largely pedantry. Yes, I realize that formally there is a difference between a pure democracy and a representative republic. In common usage in the United States, when people say "Democracy" what they generally mean is a representative system combined with a body of defining law like the one we have. The United States IS a Democracy -- for constrained values of Democracy which the term quite certainly allows. We can make Venn diagrams if you like, but that might also be pedantry.
Our representatives are not Representing us any more
Your representatives may not be representing you, but it's quite possible they're by and large representing the constituency that elected them. This is one of the things that I find a bit amusing about the tea parties -- almost to a person, it doesn't seem occurred to them that perhaps the representation process has actually been working as intended, even if the current prevailing representation disagrees with them.
People are starting to wake up and see this, as the haze clears they look at their wallets and get angry. That is what the Tea Parties are about.
It's pretty much inarguable that the status of anybody's wallet at the moment has little to do with with emerging policy under protest, unless you're going to argue that the effects of government spending travel backwards in time. So what's the protest actually about?
Increased spending? Did you know that the budgeted federal outlays are on par with those of the first and last year of the Reagan administration? Is this over letting the tax rates for the top 5% of earners in the United States return to the levels where they obviously blighted and hamstrung the economy of the 1990s and having tax cuts for everybody else? Is it over actually attempting investment in American infrastructure when the private capital markets are in such a disarray due largely to private malfeasance and mismanagement that they can't do it?
It is one thing to suggest that there is current mismanagement of the both the crisis bailout and the stimulus (don't confuse them). Specific criticisms are apt (unless they're like Jinda
Slashdot Mirror
... vote by approval for a story. It's the ability to have multiple perspectives on a topic published. Ideally, by anyone, but failing that, a fairly representative set of perspectives.
Being able to vote stories up or down could be disastrous when popular opinion and the truth of the content aren't relevant. Are you worried about brown-nosing Obama stories? Obama's pretty popular right now. A press run via democracy might be less likely to publish stories critical of him (or of climate change, for that matter) than an independent press.
It's just like the current group of teachers. They don't care if they actually teach anything, and are upset when someone wants to make sure that the kids are able to read after graduating high school, as long as they get paid for pushing them forwards.
Nobody goes into teaching just to get paid. There's so many better ways to do that. Most people who do it -- as I can attest from firsthand process of going through an education program -- have a pretty wide streak of altruism. The system may grind their best efforts out of them, and like the rest of us, sometimes they're just trying to get through their day, but my observation is that apathy is pretty far from the default state.
How could they stand it if people wanted them to report negative stories about Obama and positive stories about Bush?
Suppose all press outlets were run democratically, plurality vote, right now.
Given the current popularity of Obama and unpopularity of Bush, how many news outlets do you think would be publishing stories critical of Obama and positively reviewing the policies of the Bush era?
Why, why, why do people get SO offended when you tell them they have to learn computers to be good at computers?
Because you're essentially attacking them.
What if I responded to you by saying: "I'm sorry, but if you don't understand how flatly attacking people's qualifications for their job is insulting and threatening, you shouldn't be having this discussion. You simply don't have the interpersonal skills to articulate this kind of thing in a manner that would be productive, let alone persuasive."
Get your dander up at all?
And please don't hide behind the "I was just stating a fact, if the shoe fits, wear it." There are lots of good ways to say what you're trying to get at that are probably even closer to the truth.
Which is that really don't have to learn *everything* about computers in order to be good at computers. It is certainly an underlying truth that the more you know, the better you are as a developer. But it's entirely possible to be a reasonably productive developer without knowing everything... as long as your abilities are matched to what you need to accomplish. And there's more or less a curve of task difficulty to go along with a curve of developer abilities.
I don't know very much about building compilers. Some people would say that makes me a mere dilettante of a software developer. That's a rash overstatement. It's absolutely true I would be a *better* developer if I knew more about these things, and certain problem domains would be more open to me, but there's a huge problem space that really doesn't require this knowledge. This works the other way, too: I probably know more about Linear Algebra and Discrete Mathematics than many developers and even some CS majors (studied Math in school) and I'm familiar with the Logic Programming paradigm (written full programs in Prolog). These things make me a better developer, particularly for some problem domains, but it certainly doesn't mean anyone who doesn't know these things is a simple hack.
I think implementing hashes and other primitives that are now part of libraries/languages falls in this category. Being able to implement them is certainly a *demonstration* that you've mastered certain skills. The contrapositive doesn't necessarily follow. Not ever having implemented them -- in particular because you've never had to -- doesn't necessarily imply that you lack the ability to solve that class of problem.
And in fact, it might demonstrate a certain stripe of wisdom: there's a limited amount of time and a pretty much infinite supply of problems. What do you spend time learning how to do?
That's who.
It'll probably take a little time, but as more and more people see the high journalistic quality of papers and outlets like his relative to rags like the NYT and WaPo, the market will naturally take care of the latter papers.
Or, you know, if you're not sure you like Murdoch either, there's always USA Today.
I love a good IE or MS bash as much as the next person, but IE8 CSS support is vastly improved, bordering on satisfactory.
Bordering on satisfactory for 2004. One of the world's biggest software companies, billions and billions of dollars of resources has managed to finally... catch up to where everybody else was five years ago. In the meanwhile, there's going to be no canvas support, they've made changes with VML that make using it for Canvas and other things more difficult, they're missing web fonts and rounded borders. And why *are* they investing so much time in their own rendering engine just to play distant catch-up, when embedding one of their rather worthy competitors would be pretty easy? There's almost no other reason *except* that they plan to break standards in some way or another at some point.
It almost seems like they're earnestly trying to earn the goodwill of web developers back, but after letting IE 6 coast its broken state for over five years and then issuing half-measures for the last three, I don't think they deserve any kudos or trust yet. If they ever will.
Even in browsers where the support is great, CSS has its problems when it comes to layout. There are some things broken in the spec.
It's a fantastic tool, I'd rather have it than not, but sometimes, tables are a better tool, and they'll likely remain that way.
... Discuss." ;)
They're not called Mormon Crickets because they're considered adherents to the faith, they're called Mormon Crickets because they're one of the fine local features the Mormons found waiting for them when they settled in Utah the mid 1800s. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miracle_of_the_Gulls .
Mormon Crickets are also not only not Mormons, they're not crickets either. They're shieldbacked katydids.
They're also cannibals.
And polygamists.
... and part-time Apple Fanboy, I actually do care. I hope the EFF hits Apple so hard their lawyers and management have headaches for a few years.
I generally use iTunes because I like it, but it may not always be my favorite, someone might produce something I like better. If that happens and they're willing to try to make it work with the iPod, what good reason is there for keeping them from doing so?
I do see that there are some potential copyright issues, particularly if the discussion is focused on pulling music in the device -> computer direction, rather than pushing it the computer -> device direction. But aside from that, there's nothing copyright oriented about interoperability with a portable music player.
In other words, our children and grandchildren should pay for technological advances that make our lives easier.
We're talking about R&D here. While with a lot of focus, some programs yield results in as little as 5-10 years (say, the US vs USSR space race), the benefits are much more likely to filter out over the course of your children's lives than they are to have any kind of near term benefit.
Whether you commit future generations to pay for that is another question, but this isn't short-sighted thinking.
How about we let individuals and businesses decide where they're going to put their R&D money
Individuals and businesses can do great things when investors are willing to look at longer windows and actually do R&D spending. Outside those windows, it's an open question. Waiting for private investment to do certain things is in some ways like waiting for evolution to invent the wheel.
Furthermore, there's some evidence that private R&D spending slumps when public R&D spending slumps, in particular when economic times are tough.
R&D spending slumped between the mid-80s and mid-90s due to a drop-off in federal spending. Reports are that generally it's holding right now -- something you could attribute to an outlook of increases from the Obama administration, or even to increased spending by the Bush administration.
not some ivory-tower bureaucrats who are firmly removed from reality?
What evidence do you have that ivory-tower bureaucrats removed from reality are either (a) making the decisions or (b) tend to make bad ones?
Heck, pure mathematicians who take *pride* in actively running down abstract pursuits that supposedly have no application -- we're talking about people who really are a best fit for the terms "ivory-tower" and "removed from reality" here -- almost inevitably find out their achievements end up having some practical use.
Strips of anarchism are often described as wanting to "get rid of government", but I find that they tend to define government a particular way. Basically, anarchists tend to want to maximize voluntary consent, and in their eyes, government is what you have when you have a ruling system that people are put under without voluntary consent.
Given that no one chooses the society they're born into and raised in, I don't know how you get to a place where you have a system that is based entirely on consent. Maybe some kind of world-citizenship choice where you can pick the society you want to be a part of when you reach a certain age? I don't know. I suppose that's more or less immigration... which obviously won't work smoothly for everyone for a wide variety of social and practical reasons.
I think it's actually inevitable: unless you choose the cabin in the wilderness route (and sometimes even then), you're going to be part of a society which makes some impositions on you. If you're lucky, you're part of a society that allows you to be a part of the conversation and decisions about what those impositions will be, and it's certainly fair to argue there should be fewer, but it's not particularly reasonable to expect there won't be any or that it's particularly unfair if most people decide on impositions you disagree with.
I think that's a problem that every ideology based on individual freedom is going to have, whether it's libertarian, socialist, or social democrat, or republican. I don't think it has a real solution.
I doesn't have a strict solution that's maximally unbounded, that's for sure. On the other hand, modern industrial democracies, whether social democrat or democratic republic, seem to have done a pretty decent job of providing a rising standard of living combined with a high if not unbounded level of personal freedom. I certainly don't think the balance is perfect, but it's hard for me to agree that we're as far away from it as either the pure libertarians (or the pure socialists, for that matter) seem to think we are.
Government loans. Not "loans." I'm talking FAFSA.
See, I'm not even sure I get the problem with government loans. I'm not a libertarian, but I see the heart of libertarian philosophy as being against societal compulsions and, more particularly, the use of force by the state to back them up. A loan agreement doesn't involve these things: the state could borrow and lend freely without crossing that line.
(You could credibly argue that financial tools such as loans and insurance tend to inflate prices in such a way that everyone ends up almost forced to use them -- ie, if you don't, it's hard to participate in the markets where they're used. If you begin to accept the idea that economic necessity crosses the boundary into the realm where it constitutes a kind of force, however, market-focused libertarianism starts to get inconsistent very quickly.)
Heh. If a libertarian argues against something they benefit from, they're a hypocrite. If they argue against something they don't benefit from, they're selfish or stupid. There's really no way a libertarian can win, can they?
Certainly not if they're uttering phrases like "if they argue against something they don't benefit from, they're selfish." (I think you meant to put that with the "benefit" side of the sentence ;)
Leaving aside that I think "selfishness" is a poorly expressed criticism of libertarianism, I'm simply saying your friend's actions didn't make sense to me under the philosophy as I understand it. Loans don't involve force even if the state's the lender. It's also my understanding there exist non-state lenders. Your friend may not have thought of these things (I had literally *no idea* student loans existed when I was choosing a school and thus passed up a chance to go to some pretty fine institutions), or perhaps your friend has other reasons for avoiding college. And I have a certain amount of respect for people who actually order their life around their political philosophies: I'm familiar with a guy who makes his entire life work without a social security # and personal bank account because of some of his political objections. And I guess I do certain things myself that probably make my life harder from some points of view in order to fit with my personal values. That's totally cool with me. My objections to libertarianism are largely grounded philosophical differences and anticipated social consequences.
He's far, far, far from one of the "rich wolves" in your sig,
The thinking behind the sig doesn't bar the sheep from agitating for the situation it expresses. It's the observation that if a social decision-making institution like a democracy has the problem that blocks can use their decision power to prey on others, if you move to a system where the mediating institutions are largely economic, you'll have the same problem, except instead of using votes, people will use wealth, because it will be the political currency instead of votes. It really doesn't depend on exactly who the wolves and the sheep are.
To state it plainly, the goal of venture capitalists is to invest money and make a return.
That's certainly one goal, but it's not the only goal for everyone involved. Some of them also find that it's more personally rewarding to chase particular technologies or personal stories that interest them. It makes some sense, too: once you have a certain amount of money, it makes a lot of sense that finding a certain meaning in your actions might be of higher personal utility than... more money. And being part of the story of real innovation that drives human productivity might be one choice.
This isn't to say that we should mandate this kind of behavior for VCs: it probably should remain their privilege to choose to chase profit alone if they wish (and some kinds of funds may *need* that focus), and some measure of good will come from that too. But I also think it's dangerous to reinforce the idea this should be their only focus, when by making different decisions, they might well be a part of driving real progress.
Venture capital seems pretty simple (invest in a company, make money if it succeeds) but mortgage lending is pretty simple, too
The thing about mortgage lending is that in its base iteration, it is in fact pretty safe. Particularly if you screen your loan recipients sensibly.
Venture capital in its base iteration is risky, even if you're smart and screen carefully, and I'm trying to imagine what in the world you can do to even give the appearance that you aren't likely to lose your money more than one time out of five. Securitization? I suppose you could issue stock in a fund with a portfolio of businesses. That's safer, but everyone knows the underlying business is still risky and you're a few extra bad risks or just strokes of bad luck from having your investment wiped out.
I suppose you could try to hedge negatively correlated successes. Or go IPO quick, pump the stock, get out.... but neither of these kinds of things would pose systemic risks, even if the later is a con.
I'm actually interested in ideas for how you could manipulate the system, but I can't think of any.
They just don't believe that government and society are the same thing.
Which is one of the problematic elements of the philosophy. By the time you have a sufficiently organized society -- even one that only does the main things libertarians claim they want it limited to -- you have something that's essentially government, even if it doesn't fit the concept of the modern state. In short, Libertarianism seems very much like it'd like to have society without any societal impositions, and it's pretty reasonable to doubt that's even possible.
Obviously you can have degrees to which a society imposes on its individual members, and I agree with the idea that it's worth working to minimize that. The problem is if you also want to curb the degree to which individuals can impose on each other, you have inevitable tension between those two principles. So far, I haven't seen a stripe of Libertarianism that acknowledges and engages that problem effectively.
I myself know an anarcho-capitalist that doesn't go to college because he can't fund it himself, and because he adamantly refuses to take federal aid as he would be taking far more than he has paid into the system with.
Presumably we're talking about a smart person here, given that Anarcho-capitalists tend to be smart (if somewhat blinkered). What about scholarships?
What's their objection to loans? They're a pretty big staple of standard capitalism, often allowing both parties to profit if they're done in good faith.
There's also a lot of education options that are considerably more affordable than, say, Stanford or Harvard. At the community/state college level, you can find options that are affordable enough to manage working part-time (full-time summers) and going to school.
All in all, I don't think that not wanting to take state-funded grants is a particularly strong excuse for avoiding college.
JSON's not always fatter. Particularly when you have information stored as child nodes rather than attribute nodes (one-many relationships rather than one-one relationships tend this way), XML can get fatter pretty quickly.
I suspect the JSON love has to do with the fact that if you're already working in Javascript, it's just more javascript, and there's zero mystery about how to work with it. Not that XML is rocket science, but with JSON, it's pretty much as easy as eval() if you trust the server.
Overall, I like what Steve Yegge had to say: "XML is better if you have more text and fewer tags. And JSON is better if you have more tags and less text." It's probably a little more complicated than that (the fatter/thinner issue is one, compression is another), but it's a decent heuristic.
FTA: A lot of JavaScript is forked. If the DOM is IE, use this version of the code, otherwise use this.
Not much of *Javascript* itself is forked. The *DOM* is quite thoroughly forked. One might even say forked over. But as other people have pointed out, Prototype and Dojo and jQuery and the like tend to mitigate that problem.
There's no plausible reason I've heard or can think of to regulate VCs more closely. They don't pose any systemic risk in the way that lending, derivatives, or insurance can. They're one manifestation of the big virtue in a sea of mixed issues with capitalism: entrepreneurship. If you lose, you lose your money, the business ceases to exist. If you win, you make money (potentially lots of money) creating and selling a viable business. That's it. No bailouts. Investors lose, people may lose jobs, but there's nothing else for anybody to do. All the arguments for regulation that make a certain amount of sense in other sectors tend don't seem to apply well here.
Heck, even if VCs for some reason COULD pose systemic risk, it's a small enough part of the economy (yearly less than what we're probably going to end up loaning to the auto industry) that it probably still wouldn't.
I disagree. It is forcing me to pay into something I may not want to pay into, that is not protecting my liberty, but "providing" for me and others. I believe this is prima facie immoral.
As long as you're starting with it as an axiom, it's pretty clear no one is going to change your mind.
I said it was below 20 percent, actually. So, yes.
You said below 20%, but it wasn't clear to me that you understood this IS the statutory rate, not the post-loophole effective rate. Between that and the fact that the 15% you mentioned is actually half that for most wage earners, I wanted to make sure we have a clear argument that most middle-class earners don't shoulder a tax rate around 40%. If you want to argue that 25-30% percent, or any percentage is too high -- and it seems you do -- then that's something else. Let's just not start with the assumption that most people's tax rates approach half their income.
Yes, it actually is.
You don't seem to have actually addressed the differences I pointed out.
You may want to consider the possibility that you are effectively philosophically colorblind on this matter. The differences I laid out are pretty clear and a very large portion of the population is able to see them.
Alternatively, on the off chance that you're a philosophical tetrachromat of some kind and it's the rest of us who can't see, you may want to consider using your gifts to come up with a more effective analogy that's readily grasped by the rest of us handicapped folks.
That is irrelevant. IT IS MINE.
Well, it's good to be in touch with the deepest roots of your social philosophy.
However, you may want to consider what "mine" even means. The fact is that property of any kind is a convenient fiction that exists only by the kind of social consensus you apparently eschew. It's a pretty good fiction, useful enough to protect... but it's not good enough to be the only pole of a social philosophy, however appealing that idea is to a certain side of human nature.
"Social agreements" that are FORCED UPON people without regard to their personal liberty are not social agreements at all.
There isn't really a way to avoid this. The only society which doesn't have this feature is one that operates on 100% consensus, and this doesn't happen with human beings. Every human society will have features some of its members don't like. The best you can do is to balance worthwhile principles which are important to that society.
There's no further effort involved: you just multiply the number of people. Instead of one mugger being hired by one community to rob one man, it's many muggers hired by a much larger community to rob many people.
Not just many people. *Everyone*. By exactly the same criteria. Including themselves. Is it really true that nothing about that strikes you as analogically strange?
Middle class people 15 percent off the top on payroll,
If you're self-employed, and if you want to get into a policy discussion on whether this particular structure helps or hinders entrepreneuership, I'm game for the topic -- I think there should be exceptions for new businesses. For existing profitable ones, it's effectively mandating participation in a public retirement program, partly from the employer, partly from the employee. This is also up for policy discussion, particularly the part where the money isn't used this way in practice but instead as a regressive tax, but it's not automatically an unmitigated evil, something that's particularly apparent in a time when private (and especially market-based) retirement mechanisms aren't working particularly well.
and then 25-28 percent in federal income taxes
Those are brackets, not actualy percentages you're citing. For example, what would you guess the effective overall federal tax rate might be for someone earning $50,000 in a year (that's right around the median, although the real wages of most men who work full time is generally below $45k)? 20% was an estimate you threw out, but it's not even 18%, though it's close (17.69%). The first $8k you make is taxed in the lowest bracket, the next 16k in the next lowest bracket, so someone making 50k doesn't even have half their income taxed in the tax bracket they'll be considered part of.
This is *before* you consider deductions and credits that may apply.
The Tax Foundation calculates somewhere around 30 percent nationally, but does not include the "hidden" taxes.
I'm not familiar enough to comment on this, but I'll say that I've seen the Tax Foundation engage in enough statistical chicanery that I don't think they can be trusted at face value. You're welcome to cite and perhaps I'll chew on what they have to say.
There is no significant difference. Let's use your language. Say you are in a large room with a bunch of your neighbors. One of them comes up to you with a gun and takes your wallet. We all agree that's wrong. How is it made better if everyone in the room votes for that man to come up to you with a gun and take your wallet? I had a vote, but I lost. It's just as wrong. It's the same thing.
It's not. It still doesn't jibe, and most people are able to see that:
1) a social process where everyone has an input, where you have every opportunity to persuade your neighbors to accept your point of view, and where every decision can (and probably will) be revisited periodically
and
2) a lone actor simply employing force as a justification.
are not the same thing.
But here's the weird part: this is all even if you assume that for some reason, everybody's decided to pick on one person for the purposes of robbery. And in reality, in modern American society, it never plays out that way -- not even if you're an AIG finance wizard getting bonuses you have no business getting. The kind of social agreements we're talking about apply to *everybody*: when they vote that any individual is going to have to give 18% of their income to the treasury, they mean *every* individual in similar circumstances is going to have to give the same amount. And then that the disposition of that money will come under the same decision making process. I don't even know where to begin trying to construct a rhetorically equivalent mugging, but you know, maybe you've got more imagination than I do.
Small psychic distance between people has its problems as well as benefits, I think that's true. But I also think the idea that the secondary America fits the political stereotypical rural-urban dichotomy is problematic, and while Palin was able to manipulate a certain identity, I especially think that the idea that Sarah Palin accurately represents it is false. For one thing, there were no shortage of people from Wasilla who were ready to criticize her. That may be different from how the rest of the country responded to their idea with her, but the responses through the rest of the country were as much an artifact of the primary America media filters as anything else. There's also considerable indication that Palin had been living herself inside the primary America narrative herself for a while -- accounts of her run for mayor strongly suggest that she abandoned local policy-focused politics and instead brought in the national culture war narratives.
The sales tax costs would be a pain, and there'd be a slight negative economic impact from consumers or businesses having to absorb the additional costs of the tax itself, but life would probably go on for all that, and local businesses would be slightly more competitive with mail order, which might not be a bad thing.
The costs of compliance, on the other hand, could turn out to be nightmarish, and in particular, a situation where there's no competition between tax info service providers would be an outright disaster (and is effectively graft).
If something like this ever goes into effect nationally, it ought to mandate the states and other locales are responsible for providing compliance information in an open, automated, and free manner, and if they can't clear those costs with the additional tax revenue, they have no business pushing them onto the private sector to be duplicated and magnified in a thousand ways.
The average tax burden for Americans is -- just in direct taxes -- about 40 percent of our income.
Do you mean an arithmetic mean? If so, it probably doesn't mean anything useful about the tax burden for the general population, given the income (and therefore tax burden) distribution of the population. Also, please be sure to distinguish between statutory and effective rates -- they're often *very* different in this country.
The difference is that the "whining" that conservatives complained about was people wanting to be given something that was taken by force from someone else, whereas conservatives are "whining" about not being able to keep what actually belongs to them.
The other difference is that the conservatives in question often don't seem to be able to distinguish between the operation of a Representative Republic whose members choose to define a society which uses this level of taxation, and a mugger on the street taking the same sum from them.
None of this is to say that discussions on how tax money is used and how much is required are off limits. A well-operating society will probably have them continually. Just that glib comments that take a broad brush to the entire concept of taxation don't contribute much to understanding the issues involved.
Oh yes blame the hard working successful people for wanting to keep the fruits of their labor.
Very few people in this country advocate taking away the greater part of the fruits of any labor, with the potential exception of ill-gotten bonuses awarded to failed financial firms. Suggesting that taxation of any kind doesn't enable people to keep rewards for work or investment is an exaggeration tactic. If you want to argue about specific levels, that's always legit, but suggesting that a marginal difference on the order of 10% amounts to binary discussion about whether people should keep or lose the fruits of their labor is disingenuous, particularly in a society where, yes, we do have representation.
News flash for you: we are over taxed, this is not new we have been saying this for a long time.
This is 100% opinion, and it isn't shared by everyone. Personally, I think the current income tax levels are by and large reasonable, though I'd like to see the bottom income tax bracket be lower than the highest capital gains. There are others in higher income brackets than I who agree; Warren Buffet, among others, has made statements to this effect.
The government needs to stop funding things it was never meant to do in the first place; the war on drugs, welfare programs, rebuilding other countries, and the list goes on.
While I can agree that many of our recent policy decisions on this front -- and in particular the curbing of civil liberties -- have been blights, I can't agree that our government was never meant to be involved in those things, given that among the missions of the founding document one finds imperatives to "provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare."
The United States of America is not a democracy! It never has been a democracy!
This is often thrown around like it's a great insight when it's largely pedantry. Yes, I realize that formally there is a difference between a pure democracy and a representative republic. In common usage in the United States, when people say "Democracy" what they generally mean is a representative system combined with a body of defining law like the one we have. The United States IS a Democracy -- for constrained values of Democracy which the term quite certainly allows. We can make Venn diagrams if you like, but that might also be pedantry.
Our representatives are not Representing us any more
Your representatives may not be representing you, but it's quite possible they're by and large representing the constituency that elected them. This is one of the things that I find a bit amusing about the tea parties -- almost to a person, it doesn't seem occurred to them that perhaps the representation process has actually been working as intended, even if the current prevailing representation disagrees with them.
People are starting to wake up and see this, as the haze clears they look at their wallets and get angry. That is what the Tea Parties are about.
It's pretty much inarguable that the status of anybody's wallet at the moment has little to do with with emerging policy under protest, unless you're going to argue that the effects of government spending travel backwards in time. So what's the protest actually about?
Increased spending? Did you know that the budgeted federal outlays are on par with those of the first and last year of the Reagan administration? Is this over letting the tax rates for the top 5% of earners in the United States return to the levels where they obviously blighted and hamstrung the economy of the 1990s and having tax cuts for everybody else? Is it over actually attempting investment in American infrastructure when the private capital markets are in such a disarray due largely to private malfeasance and mismanagement that they can't do it?
It is one thing to suggest that there is current mismanagement of the both the crisis bailout and the stimulus (don't confuse them). Specific criticisms are apt (unless they're like Jinda