Although community colleges are often low-cost,
it is hard to find one that
gives more than a 2-year degree. One of the reasons is that
private colleges, such as University of Phoenix, have
lobbied against it, since it would hurt their profits.
Please ignore my post above and mod it to oblivion.
After researching the claims in Kaufman's email, I'm now more
confused than ever. I had assumed Kaufman would be on the side of
the consumer, as he has in the past. Instead, unless I am reading it wrong, he is
on the side of the auto dealers!
The already-agreed new law has a deadline of 2018 and
seems to have a loophole
that would allow the auto makers to
weasel out of providing any meaningful information
by not requiring it to be revealing if it involves a "trade secret".
Voting "Yes", which would override the new law,
would set the deadline to 2015 and would not
have this loophole, as far as I can tell.
Don't take me at my word but research it yourself.
I am disappointed in Kaufman's misleading email and wonder if
he is
in cahoots with the auto dealer lobby.
(Sorry for all the caps, but voting is tomorrow, and there appears to be a serious issue here.)
I am far from expert on the proposal, and maybe I'm interpreting this wrong. But it seems there already is a
law agreed upon in July, and the "Right to Repair" question is a TRICK QUESTION that
replaces it with a WEAKER law, based
on my interpretation of this email I got from Massachusetts Representative Jay R. Kaufman.
He is recommending that voters LEAVE THE QUESTION BLANK. My interpretation
is that "Against" would defeat
the existing law, "For" would replace it with a weaker law, and "Blank"
would leave the existing stronger law intact.
Admittedly, after reading his rather vague email, I am very confused, and I wrote back for clarification.
But here it is:
Question 1: Right to Repair
The so-called "Right to Repair" issue was thoroughly studied by a legislative committees as it made its way through the legislative process during this past session. The proponents and opponents of this issue eventually reached a compromise during the summer, and this compromise became law in July. Unfortunately, one side has now backed out of the agreement that was negotiated -- not exactly an act of good faith! The Boston Globe, in a recent editorial, encouraged voters to simply not vote on Question 1. If 30% or less vote on this measure, the Legislature's action stands. I encourage you to just leave Question 1 blank.
Let me propose a radical idea to discuss: abolish the income tax and
replace it by a tax on net assets. I'm not proposing any particular
rate structure, but let me describe the general ideas.
Income tax has too many loopholes for the wealthy. For example, the
Facebook and Google CEOs pay themselves $1 per year, avoiding any income
tax and paying only the low capital gains rate when they occasionally
sell some stock to finance their lifestyles. The rest grows tax-free,
indefinitely, as their companies grow.
It seems to me that a fair tax would be based on a person's ability to
pay it. The ability to afford a tax is much more dependent on how much
wealth you have than how much income you make. Taxing the income of
someone who can barely make ends meet, preventing them from accumulating
any savings, doesn't seem beneficial for society overall.
It is much harder for a wealthy person to hide their assets than to
exploit income tax loopholes. Of course there will always be loopholes,
but most of the information regarding the ultra rich, for example, is
even public, otherwise it would not be possible to compile the Fortune
400 list.
The middle class is already subject to an asset (real estate) tax on
what, for most, is their primary asset, their home. So it's nothing
new, and although those who pay it don't enjoy doing so of course, it's
accepted and viewed as a necessary evil to finance their local
community. The real estate tax is actually very regressive â" the less
equity you have in your home, the higher percentage of that equity you
pay, since it is based on the home's value, not your equity in it. You
pay it even if your equity is negative (i.e. if the mortgage is
underwater)! If both real estate tax and income tax were replaced by a
net asset tax, it would seem to me to be much fairer.
One argument I've seen against an asset tax is that it would encourage
people not to accumulate wealth i.e. would encourage stagnation. I
disagree. A positive benefit of the real estate tax, for example, is
that it discourages the accumulation of property sitting idle, but
encourages the development and use of that property. Similarly, I would
imagine a net worth tax would encourage productive use of the money,
possibly even finally leading to that trickle-down job creation we hear
so much about.
And the 500000 stockholders who benefit from higher retirement income. And the 500000 consumers who benefit from lower prices.
It will be more like a handful of executives, already earning 500x the average worker's wage, giving themselves a raise. To whatever extent they can get away with, they will screw both retiree stockholders (less profits and dividends after they skim off of the top) and
consumers (prices won't go any lower if the market will bear it).
Another IRV-type (I think) system I've been curious about is called
"fractional voting". It seems relatively obscure
and apparently is not described on Wikipedia.
I hope to study it more eventually, although I'd prefer if someone
more knowledgeable about voting systems could
provide an opinion. Two links are:
Fractional Voting for Presidential and Job Candidates and
Arrow's paradox and the fractional voting
system (PDF)
Gold chloride isn't exactly of "no value" - it is more expensive
than the gold it contains (about $100 per gram of gold content). And bacteria aren't needed; from the
wiki article it appears that simply
temperature-cycling it betwen >160C and >420C a few times
will remove the chlorine
and leave pure gold. In short, the purpose of this project is
artistic and/or political, possibly biologically interesting,
but not necessarily of practical value.
Somewhere I read it originated on Fark, so that might be indicative of the demographic that uses it. The comment following "This." has a high probability of being a lazy, ill-informed, immature gut reaction, so to me "This." provides a signal that I should judge it with appropriate skepticism.
In fact, because this has become accepted fact throughout the psychological and medical fields, they are adding official diagnosis of
Cannabis Withdrawal to the latest diagnostic standards (mind you, they are also dropping the terms Abuse and Dependence and moving to simply Substance Use Disorders, with a spectrum of No Diagnosis, Mild, Moderate, and Severe).
In fact, because this has become accepted fact throughout the psychological and medical fields, they are adding official diagnosis of
Caffeine Withdrawal to the latest diagnostic standards (mind you, they are also dropping the terms Abuse and Dependence and moving to simply Substance Use Disorders, with a spectrum of No Diagnosis, Mild, Moderate, and Severe).
It seems to me that the listed symptoms of Cannabis Withdrawal are less severe than
those of Caffeine Withdrawal.
I think this is a great project for students, because it will
let them develop and test simulations and other
algorithms for parallel computing without
tying up expensive "real" supercomputers. A bonus is that the
relatively slow speed may encourage techniques to make
such computations more efficient, with a corresponding
payoff when the algorithm is put onto the real thing.
You start the day, holding some stock. The market swings wildly up 10% down 20% and back up 15%.
Q. How much have you made/lost?
A. Nothing.
You still end the day with exactly the same stock you had at the start.
You still have to buy then sell the stock at some point. When you buy, it
might be for 10% more than the fair price, and when you sell it might
be 20% less. This is one of the reasons flash crashes are bad.
I think even more people believe their house cools down faster if they set
the A/C thermostat all the way down to the lowest temperature. And they
(e.g. my wife, my son) continue to do it even after you explain to them
repeatedly how a thermostat works.
No kidding. Although it wasn't reversed in Knight's case, there
have been many flash crashes that have been reversed, making
it so that profit is almost guaranteed for HF traders: good bets
go through and bad bets get reversed.
I was personally affected a couple of years ago. I had an outstanding
bid (limit order) on a stock at what I thought the stock
was worth, although significantly lower than the going price, so I
could pick it up in case there was a temporary drop due to negative news
or whatever. The "whatever" happened; my open order got filled by
HF traders
due to a flash crash they caused in that stock. I got a call from my
broker later in the day to tell me the SEC reversed the trades
during that flash crash, including mine.
So a few thousand dollars that by all rights should have been
mine went back to the HF traders.
Actually, I was wondering the opposite, which is how to recycle objects that you make. I would guess that typically
there will be significant waste as prototypes
are fine-tuned, as well as when whatever you make breaks or is no longer needed.
I hope the design software will make it easy to
incorporate the plastic's
recycle number in a triangle embossed somewhere on the
object, and even encourage it. My town's recycle
service requires that all
plastic objects have
this number on them. In the past they have refused to pick up non-container plastic
objects that don't have this number (when they notice it), such as a toy that stands out from
the rest.
One thing I've never understood is why these early computers
(apparently) used power-hungry standard vacuum tubes,
requiring huge cooling systems, rather than the vacuum tubes used
in portable radios.
In the 1930s/40s - not sure when - battery-operated radios
(portable for going to the beach, as well as non-portable
for people who had no electricity before rural electrification) were common. These had
vacuum tubes with a filament voltage of 1.1-1.5VDC at
maybe 50mA; the filament served as the cathode to conserve
power. The B+ battery was anywhere from 22.5V to 90V and,
because they were expensive, were expected to last a
long time. The tubes had numbers of the form 1xx,
like 1S5 (a pentode/diode).
So 2000 of these would use only about 150 watts for the
filaments, which is less than many modern desktops.
I don't have a number for the B+ power consumption.
I vaguely recall from a schematic I saw ages ago that there were
high-valued resistors, maybe around 10K-100K ohms, in series with some of the
plates in the low-level
signal circuits, so it might not have been very much. Maybe
someone else knows.
Of course higher-power tubes might be needed to drive the I/O such as
relays etc., but it seems the main logic circuitry could have
been relatively low power.
It appears that this unit requires that the sheets be affixed or
neatly tucked in at the bottom of the bed. In that
case, making it by hand is just as fast if not faster. (Although if you don't have a
partner to help, you do have to make the effort of walking around to the other side of
the bed once to pull the other side up.)
It doesn't look like it would work when the covers are pulled
completely off. That's the only case where making a bed takes a little bit of time.
They don't say how this affects changing the sheets and pillowcases.
If the pillows are attached to the bed by a cord, I imagine that
task would be harder.
Finally, it's not clear that you should make your bed:
http://www.healthandsoul.com/germ-hotspot-countdown-part-2.html "dust
mites need humidity levels of above 50%. They will find it impossible
to survive in the aridity found in an unmade bed. Made beds are said to
give them the moisture that they need to survive." I'm having trouble convincing my g/f, though.
Interesting that he married her right after the IPO.
This puts an objective value on his non-marital (pre-marital?) assets, which she
presumably therefore wouldn't share in case of divorce. Combine that with his
$1/year salary (presumably to avoid any tax other than 15% capital gains),
and her half of community property grows at $0.50/year. If she works, she
might end up owing him money if they divorce!
Disclaimer: IANAL and certainly not a divorce lawyer. Please correct me if
I am wrong, which I probably am.
Actually, the first remote control was invented by Tesla in 1898
(U.S. Patent 613,809). He used it to remotely flash lights on a
boat, amazing an audience. Eugene Polley specialized it to
"for a TV". Sort of like many modern inventions consist of
an earlier idea + "on the internet". (OK maybe not that simple
but I thought I'd toss it in for a good troll...)
I hope the "certain infections" they mention doesn't imply antibiotics.
Until a year or
so ago, you could buy antibiotics without a prescription in Mexico.
They changed the law to make a prescription required, because too many
people were entering the hospital with antibiotic-resistant infections
caused by their overuse for virtually any ailment by people who
didn't know better.
(I found this out in Mexico last year when I developed a real skin
infection - cellulitis - from walking barefoot on the beach. At first I was annoyed that they changed the law, since I
had to pay a doctor $50 to make a house call to my hotel room to get a
prescription, but in retrospect I can see the point.)
AIUI, the notion that information can't be transferred faster
than the speed of light is based on the fact that it would violate causality.
Not exactly. There is no explicit
"causality" assumption in the
no-signaling theorem. The only assumption is the Hilbert space
model for quantum mechanics. Of course that model can
be questioned, but countless experiments have indicated that
it holds to an extreme degree of accuracy. For an
informal overview see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No-communication_theorem
Slashdot Mirror
Although community colleges are often low-cost, it is hard to find one that gives more than a 2-year degree. One of the reasons is that private colleges, such as University of Phoenix, have lobbied against it, since it would hurt their profits.
Reference: University of Phoenix' plot to corner the cheap education market
Implement an (enforced) every-other-car merge rule at each entry point. Wouldn't that solve the problem?
Yes, it is outpatient, but it can cost $45,000 to replace the battery.
Please ignore my post above and mod it to oblivion.
After researching the claims in Kaufman's email, I'm now more confused than ever. I had assumed Kaufman would be on the side of the consumer, as he has in the past. Instead, unless I am reading it wrong, he is on the side of the auto dealers!
The already-agreed new law has a deadline of 2018 and seems to have a loophole that would allow the auto makers to weasel out of providing any meaningful information by not requiring it to be revealing if it involves a "trade secret".
Voting "Yes", which would override the new law, would set the deadline to 2015 and would not have this loophole, as far as I can tell.
Don't take me at my word but research it yourself. I am disappointed in Kaufman's misleading email and wonder if he is in cahoots with the auto dealer lobby.
(Sorry for all the caps, but voting is tomorrow, and there appears to be a serious issue here.)
I am far from expert on the proposal, and maybe I'm interpreting this wrong. But it seems there already is a law agreed upon in July, and the "Right to Repair" question is a TRICK QUESTION that replaces it with a WEAKER law, based on my interpretation of this email I got from Massachusetts Representative Jay R. Kaufman.
He is recommending that voters LEAVE THE QUESTION BLANK. My interpretation is that "Against" would defeat the existing law, "For" would replace it with a weaker law, and "Blank" would leave the existing stronger law intact.
Admittedly, after reading his rather vague email, I am very confused, and I wrote back for clarification. But here it is:
Let me propose a radical idea to discuss: abolish the income tax and replace it by a tax on net assets. I'm not proposing any particular rate structure, but let me describe the general ideas.
Income tax has too many loopholes for the wealthy. For example, the Facebook and Google CEOs pay themselves $1 per year, avoiding any income tax and paying only the low capital gains rate when they occasionally sell some stock to finance their lifestyles. The rest grows tax-free, indefinitely, as their companies grow.
It seems to me that a fair tax would be based on a person's ability to pay it. The ability to afford a tax is much more dependent on how much wealth you have than how much income you make. Taxing the income of someone who can barely make ends meet, preventing them from accumulating any savings, doesn't seem beneficial for society overall.
It is much harder for a wealthy person to hide their assets than to exploit income tax loopholes. Of course there will always be loopholes, but most of the information regarding the ultra rich, for example, is even public, otherwise it would not be possible to compile the Fortune 400 list.
The middle class is already subject to an asset (real estate) tax on what, for most, is their primary asset, their home. So it's nothing new, and although those who pay it don't enjoy doing so of course, it's accepted and viewed as a necessary evil to finance their local community. The real estate tax is actually very regressive â" the less equity you have in your home, the higher percentage of that equity you pay, since it is based on the home's value, not your equity in it. You pay it even if your equity is negative (i.e. if the mortgage is underwater)! If both real estate tax and income tax were replaced by a net asset tax, it would seem to me to be much fairer.
One argument I've seen against an asset tax is that it would encourage people not to accumulate wealth i.e. would encourage stagnation. I disagree. A positive benefit of the real estate tax, for example, is that it discourages the accumulation of property sitting idle, but encourages the development and use of that property. Similarly, I would imagine a net worth tax would encourage productive use of the money, possibly even finally leading to that trickle-down job creation we hear so much about.
It will be more like a handful of executives, already earning 500x the average worker's wage, giving themselves a raise. To whatever extent they can get away with, they will screw both retiree stockholders (less profits and dividends after they skim off of the top) and consumers (prices won't go any lower if the market will bear it).
Another IRV-type (I think) system I've been curious about is called "fractional voting". It seems relatively obscure and apparently is not described on Wikipedia. I hope to study it more eventually, although I'd prefer if someone more knowledgeable about voting systems could provide an opinion. Two links are: Fractional Voting for Presidential and Job Candidates and Arrow's paradox and the fractional voting system (PDF)
Why is this urgent? Answer: "The research is pressing because rapid [Arctic] warming is attracting more vessels, tourists and mining operators."
Gold chloride isn't exactly of "no value" - it is more expensive than the gold it contains (about $100 per gram of gold content). And bacteria aren't needed; from the wiki article it appears that simply temperature-cycling it betwen >160C and >420C a few times will remove the chlorine and leave pure gold. In short, the purpose of this project is artistic and/or political, possibly biologically interesting, but not necessarily of practical value.
Somewhere I read it originated on Fark, so that might be indicative of the demographic that uses it. The comment following "This." has a high probability of being a lazy, ill-informed, immature gut reaction, so to me "This." provides a signal that I should judge it with appropriate skepticism.
In fact, because this has become accepted fact throughout the psychological and medical fields, they are adding official diagnosis of Caffeine Withdrawal to the latest diagnostic standards (mind you, they are also dropping the terms Abuse and Dependence and moving to simply Substance Use Disorders, with a spectrum of No Diagnosis, Mild, Moderate, and Severe).
It seems to me that the listed symptoms of Cannabis Withdrawal are less severe than those of Caffeine Withdrawal.
I think this is a great project for students, because it will let them develop and test simulations and other algorithms for parallel computing without tying up expensive "real" supercomputers. A bonus is that the relatively slow speed may encourage techniques to make such computations more efficient, with a corresponding payoff when the algorithm is put onto the real thing.
You still have to buy then sell the stock at some point. When you buy, it might be for 10% more than the fair price, and when you sell it might be 20% less. This is one of the reasons flash crashes are bad.
I think even more people believe their house cools down faster if they set the A/C thermostat all the way down to the lowest temperature. And they (e.g. my wife, my son) continue to do it even after you explain to them repeatedly how a thermostat works.
"...we can guide them toward areas of value for users and their businesses..." = we can charge you money
. "To that end, ...we will require you to work with us directly..." =
therefore, we will charge you money
No kidding. Although it wasn't reversed in Knight's case, there have been many flash crashes that have been reversed, making it so that profit is almost guaranteed for HF traders: good bets go through and bad bets get reversed.
I was personally affected a couple of years ago. I had an outstanding bid (limit order) on a stock at what I thought the stock was worth, although significantly lower than the going price, so I could pick it up in case there was a temporary drop due to negative news or whatever. The "whatever" happened; my open order got filled by HF traders due to a flash crash they caused in that stock. I got a call from my broker later in the day to tell me the SEC reversed the trades during that flash crash, including mine. So a few thousand dollars that by all rights should have been mine went back to the HF traders.
The little guy can't win.
Actually, I was wondering the opposite, which is how to recycle objects that you make. I would guess that typically there will be significant waste as prototypes are fine-tuned, as well as when whatever you make breaks or is no longer needed.
I hope the design software will make it easy to incorporate the plastic's recycle number in a triangle embossed somewhere on the object, and even encourage it. My town's recycle service requires that all plastic objects have this number on them. In the past they have refused to pick up non-container plastic objects that don't have this number (when they notice it), such as a toy that stands out from the rest.
I don't have a problem with this business model - it seems interesting and I hope it works.
However, I hate it when people use the word "donation" to mean a mandatory payment. A donation is a voluntary gift.
One thing I've never understood is why these early computers (apparently) used power-hungry standard vacuum tubes, requiring huge cooling systems, rather than the vacuum tubes used in portable radios.
In the 1930s/40s - not sure when - battery-operated radios (portable for going to the beach, as well as non-portable for people who had no electricity before rural electrification) were common. These had vacuum tubes with a filament voltage of 1.1-1.5VDC at maybe 50mA; the filament served as the cathode to conserve power. The B+ battery was anywhere from 22.5V to 90V and, because they were expensive, were expected to last a long time. The tubes had numbers of the form 1xx, like 1S5 (a pentode/diode).
So 2000 of these would use only about 150 watts for the filaments, which is less than many modern desktops. I don't have a number for the B+ power consumption. I vaguely recall from a schematic I saw ages ago that there were high-valued resistors, maybe around 10K-100K ohms, in series with some of the plates in the low-level signal circuits, so it might not have been very much. Maybe someone else knows.
Of course higher-power tubes might be needed to drive the I/O such as relays etc., but it seems the main logic circuitry could have been relatively low power.
It appears that this unit requires that the sheets be affixed or neatly tucked in at the bottom of the bed. In that case, making it by hand is just as fast if not faster. (Although if you don't have a partner to help, you do have to make the effort of walking around to the other side of the bed once to pull the other side up.)
It doesn't look like it would work when the covers are pulled completely off. That's the only case where making a bed takes a little bit of time.
They don't say how this affects changing the sheets and pillowcases. If the pillows are attached to the bed by a cord, I imagine that task would be harder.
Finally, it's not clear that you should make your bed: http://www.healthandsoul.com/germ-hotspot-countdown-part-2.html "dust mites need humidity levels of above 50%. They will find it impossible to survive in the aridity found in an unmade bed. Made beds are said to give them the moisture that they need to survive." I'm having trouble convincing my g/f, though.
This puts an objective value on his non-marital (pre-marital?) assets, which she presumably therefore wouldn't share in case of divorce. Combine that with his $1/year salary (presumably to avoid any tax other than 15% capital gains), and her half of community property grows at $0.50/year. If she works, she might end up owing him money if they divorce!
Disclaimer: IANAL and certainly not a divorce lawyer. Please correct me if I am wrong, which I probably am.
Actually, the first remote control was invented by Tesla in 1898 (U.S. Patent 613,809). He used it to remotely flash lights on a boat, amazing an audience. Eugene Polley specialized it to "for a TV". Sort of like many modern inventions consist of an earlier idea + "on the internet". (OK maybe not that simple but I thought I'd toss it in for a good troll...)
Until a year or so ago, you could buy antibiotics without a prescription in Mexico. They changed the law to make a prescription required, because too many people were entering the hospital with antibiotic-resistant infections caused by their overuse for virtually any ailment by people who didn't know better.
(I found this out in Mexico last year when I developed a real skin infection - cellulitis - from walking barefoot on the beach. At first I was annoyed that they changed the law, since I had to pay a doctor $50 to make a house call to my hotel room to get a prescription, but in retrospect I can see the point.)
Not exactly. There is no explicit "causality" assumption in the no-signaling theorem. The only assumption is the Hilbert space model for quantum mechanics. Of course that model can be questioned, but countless experiments have indicated that it holds to an extreme degree of accuracy. For an informal overview see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No-communication_theorem