If it's in violation of company rules, it will be cold comfort that the IT department's policy was logically inconsistent with their behavior when he's fired.
The submitter is an intern, which means he's trying to build experience. Getting fired because he thinks he knows enough to except himself to the rules is a shitty way to kick off a resume. You make a good point about unauthorized software v. unauthorized hardware, though - he should look at the policy on that and if a new browser is in violation, he should just suck it up.
Again, monopolies are generally bad, but Google doesn't have to buy all the major labels. All they need is one. If they buy ONE of the "big four" and start offering sane licensing agreements that the world has been searching for (for both the content distributors AND the content producers), and start allowing their music to embrace this new possibility of distribution called the "Internet" (it's this fancy thing that's been around for a couple decades that none of the record labels like to acknowledge the existence of) other labels will simply have to follow suit or they will very quickly become irrelevant.
This is even a better case to make to the board than the one I quoted above - fight the music labels on their own turf by upping the stake of the people on whose backs the music industry profits. Surely the reward-to-risk ratio on this has got to be huge.
They can, and they do it all the time. Some people make entire careers of it. Like William Ackman, who successfully pestered the Target board into selling off Target National Bank, and unsuccessfully, to spin off the real estate holdings of Target into a holding company that would collect rent on existing stores. Why? Because he felt that there was too much risk in consumer receivables, and that the balance sheet undervalued the land holdings, respectively.
Google's duty to its shareholders is to make money, plain and simple. Shareholders have absolutely no reason to demand anything specific of Google if Google is making money, and they would have no ground to stand on making such demands.
Google's duty to its shareholders is to maximize shareholder value, not just make money, and they have a legitimate case to make that the risk of perpetual lawsuits from the music industry is greater than the opportunity cost of gobbling up all the players. As an inequality:
Profits from owning record industry - Purchase Price of music industry > Profits from investing elsewhere - Cost of perpetual litigation from music industry
The accuracy of that inequality may be difficult to prove or disprove, but that's why Google has a board of directors - to make that assessment. And that's why there are activist shareholders, to reality-check the board.
Google's system is obviously working. They are making money by the metric fucktonne. Why would they drastically alter the way they do business by performing a complete 180-degree turn in their policies and the ideas they've so strongly based themselves upon?
If they did, it would be because they think there's more benefit to it than benefit to not doing it, and it's at least worthy of discussion.
As I stated previously, I'm not going to play your game. You make a bunch of unsupported claims and then dare me to refute them, but place unnecessary restrictions on the facts I'm allowed to use. And, I might add, I'm willing to put my karma on the line to have this conversation, while you troll away as AC.
We agree on much. The problem is that too many conservatives and libertarians argue as if any tax cut will pay for itself or even increase revenues, and too many liberals argue as if any tax increase will increase revenues, some going as far as to predict linear revenue gains.
Linear revenue growth isn't realistic, however, I think that we're past the point where cutting taxes will spur growth in any appreciable manner and have been for a while. If you look at the cycle of money, money flows to/from households, the government and business. For there to be real growth in the economy, ultimately your going to be range-bound to encouraging growth in all three areas. I think the past decade did a lot towards shifting the flow of real, inflation-adjusted dollars into the pockets of businesses, while tax rates fell and the purchasing price of the dollar fell faster than wages grew. That is ultimately unsustainable.
Neither extreme is true, but it's nearly axiomatic that some form of the Laffer Curve is true. Few would argue that a tax rate increase from 99% to 100% will increase revenues, and a decrease from 1% to 0% will surely lessen them. In between those extremes, there's a valid debate about what the parabola looks like. Presumably, it varies different under different economic conditions. People (and corporations) are probably more prone to try to minimize tax exposure when times are hard, growth is slow, margins are slim or the future looks rocky.
I would argue that corporations are likely to minimize tax exposure whenever possible, and while individual tax payers may be inclined to do so, they're a lot less adept at it. People might get more desperate during rough times, but it's not like they volunteer to pay more when they can afford it. The problem is, 28% of someone's $30,000 salary *means* more to them than 15% of a corporation's $250 million in earnings, yet the corporation is more likely NOT to pay $37.5 million than the guy who tries to skate on his $8,400 tax bill. (I used flat taxes for the sake of argument.) And maybe the corporation is going to reinvest the $37.5 million, or distribute it to shareholders, but is that more likely to affect the employees or the shareholder positively? For a typical individual shareholder, the bulk of whose holdings lie in retirement savings, that money won't recirculate for years.
So to have a rational, evidence-based tax policy, we need to start with
What is the purpose and goal of tax policy in the first place,
What does the Laffer Curve currently look like,
Where does today's tax policy put us on that curve (to the best of our knowledge), and
What net impact is this likely to have -- on the economy and on revenues?
Then you have to look at what the proper function of government is, and whether we're currently overstepping or falling short of that.
The problem with trying to have this discussion is that a lot of the people who are going to join in are going to be just noise, shouting their opinion based on their gut rather than actual fact. Even those who dedicate their whole lives to learning about political science and economics are unlikely to come to a consensus. This isn't to discount the value in seeking these answers - they're all very good questions - but I don't think there's any determinable answer.
Some of them might not even need a definite answer, like the question about the Laffer curve. If we can figure out which side of the apex of the parabola we're on (the question that directly follows), do we really need to know what the curve looks like? We know that the apex is in the ballpark of a 50% rate regardless, plus or minus a few points. It might be useful to know where exactly that apex lies, but as you said, that likely changes based on the situation and could be difficult to track. Can't we just make a rule of thumb that if you're worried about being too close, you probably
Senator obama voted for the bailouts, and can't wash his hands of them.
Agreed, but neither can the sitting members of the House and Senate who voted the same way. For many of those people to now label them "Obama's bailout" is political posturing at its ugliest, and does little to support their claim that their only interest is in fixing the budget.
Also, you are simply wrong that we would have a surplus currently without iraq and the bush tax cuts. The current deficits exceed the maximum possible savings from both combined. Granted, they are a large portion, but even the best number produced by a left wing group show them causing no more than half of the current deficits.
If that was what I claimed, I would agree. There's also the six years of uncontrolled spending unrelated to the Iraq war or the tax cuts, with nary a thought on how to pay for them. PAYGO expired in 2002, and it would have done a lot towards protecting the 2010 surplus projected in 2000. For the Congress sitting at the time to allow that to expire, and the party in majority at the time to now express outrage at the consequences of that action (as well as the run-up in spending), is at the very least misleading.
I'm no fan of Bush's budget management (or lack thereof), but his tax cuts -- especially those in `03 -- were exactly the right policy.
Bush's eight years began with the dot com bust followed by 9/11.
The dot-com bust was already well-underway by the time Bush was elected. Even so, prior to 9/11, we were seeing a tenuous recovery, and it was either the steps taken by Congress during the Clinton administration (since spending measures adopted in 2001 wouldn't take effect until 2002, and Clinton was president for the whole of 2000), steps taken by the Fed under Clinton and/or Bush, natural market forces, the $300 tax rebate or some combination of the four that was causing that. My money is on a combination, but the effects aren't distributed evenly. The tax rebate was simply a pre-mature distribution of the tax refunds that would have been due for the 2001 tax year, and its effects are dubious at best. Maybe the tax cuts were necessary in 2003, but that doesn't make them appropriate now.
The years from 2000 to 2003 saw declining federal revenues compounded by rising unemployment. Revenue increases from `03 to `06 were among the highest for any three-year period, and unemployment dropped consistently from `03 - `07. The rate of GDP growth more than doubled after `03. Capital gains revenues doubled over the next three years. Before the cuts, the CBO predicted them to increase only ~26% over that period.
The years 2000-2003 are something of a special case. The dot-com mess was correcting itself, but just as it was coming out of that, 9/11 cratered any hope of that, and in the wake of the economic impact of the attack, a host of accounting troubles at a bunch of companies (Kmart, Enron, Adelphia, Tyco, WorldCom to name a few) further eroded investors' faith in the companies they invested in, and employees' faith that they had any sort of job security. While doubling the growth rate is impressive, it helps that it was doubling from a low point.
It would have been possible to balance the budget after the Bush tax cuts, but neither he nor congress did anything to reign in spending.
Exactly my point. It's absolutely vital that we curtail spending - when faced with actually having to pay for it, and when it suits the political agenda of the Republicans - but it's "knee-jerk liberalism" to question unwise spending as the original decisions were being made?
I think it's disingenuous for today's conservatives to try to distance themselves from Bush when the rallying cry for many of these same people in 2004 was "it doesn't make sense to change horses in mid-stream." So maybe there's more information about Bush in hindsight, and they're re-evaluating that decision - but doesn't that make them flip-floppers? Because that's obviously the worst thing a person can do, is make a decision on the best information they have available at the time, and then admit later that their decision based on incomplete evidence wasn't optimal in the light of a more complete picture.
People who thought Kerry was a better candidate in 2004 - hell, even people who thought McCain was a better candidate in 2000 - were excoriated by the vicious rhetoric bandied about by the Republicans who supported Bush. I'm willing to listen to a reasoned argument, but until I see evidence that those attitudes have changed, I seriously question the ability of Republicans or those who continue to support them to separate reason from dogma.
If we ever want to see black ink again, we have to attack entitlement spending, corporate welfare, and redundant or counter-productive bureaucracies. Defense spending shouldn't be immune to cuts, and we sure as hell have to keep the feds from bailing out sinking states. That all still isn't sufficient to completely eliminate deficits, but it is necessary and it's a start.
That's a good case, but I would like to see order of operations - let's pop these corrections in the order they were pushed on: end state bailouts, attack corporate welfare, roll back redundant and counter-productive bureaucracy, cut unnecessary defense spending and only then get to work on entitlement overhaul.
Don't blame Bush and the Iraq War for the problems either, because obviously the current administration has no problems spending billions on war and "defending" America either.
Why the fuck not? You realize that had he not plundered the Treasury and engaged us in a ten-year (so far) imbroglio in the Middle East, we would be enjoying the second year of budget surplus, right? And that the first half of the bailout was already distributed and spent by the time Obama was even elected, much less took office? So no, I'm not going to play your bullshit game, asshat. If you want me to examine the actual facts, then I will.
Why are they wasting time with this? Isn't there a governmental shutdown deadline this Friday? Shouldn't they be working on the budget instead of killing time with small-fry legislation that goes nowhere?
Because, along with a $6 trillion package of budget cuts, they're forcing the President and the Senate's hand to block them. Then, when they don't get exactly what they want, they can go back to their bat-shit-crazy core constituency and claim that the "liberal menace" is preventing any substantive change in the way the government operates.
It just occurred to me: this is in violation of the Americans with Disabilities Act. It's a fine on being obese and smoking, but it only applies to the obese and/or smokers who are sick and thus drawing Medicaid support. That would be interesting to see in court.
Medicaid != Retirement distribution, so while it may save the Federal retirement trust in the long run, it doesn't do anything for the Medicaid program administered by the state of Arizona.
Also, I think you're not taking into account the people whose weight problems don't kill them immediately. Chronic heart disease, diabetes, operators waiting to take their call so they can bill Medicaid for Hoverounds...
Slashdot Mirror
If they were forced to sign it, then it was signed under duress and it's not enforceable. :)
In America that's true, but I have my doubts about China.
Good luck enforcing it.
Thanks!
Well within it, actually.
1.67E-13 is FAR larger than 2^-6E13. Stupid math.
After all, your margin of error is within +/- 1.67 x 10^-13
...neither TFA nor TFBlog tell you which it is. So...flip a coin.
If it's in violation of company rules, it will be cold comfort that the IT department's policy was logically inconsistent with their behavior when he's fired.
The submitter is an intern, which means he's trying to build experience. Getting fired because he thinks he knows enough to except himself to the rules is a shitty way to kick off a resume. You make a good point about unauthorized software v. unauthorized hardware, though - he should look at the policy on that and if a new browser is in violation, he should just suck it up.
Completely unrelated to the question of which technology should/does support education is the proximity of Minnesota to Wisconsin.
Completely unrelated to...pretty much anything, as far as I can tell. What point are you trying to make?
Must be running the 2.6.38 or 2.6.39 kernel.
I'm confused - is that in base-13?
It should at least break something at the end...so there's a BIG CRUNCH!
Thanks, I'll be here all weekend. Be sure to tip your waitstaff.
My bad.
Again, monopolies are generally bad, but Google doesn't have to buy all the major labels. All they need is one. If they buy ONE of the "big four" and start offering sane licensing agreements that the world has been searching for (for both the content distributors AND the content producers), and start allowing their music to embrace this new possibility of distribution called the "Internet" (it's this fancy thing that's been around for a couple decades that none of the record labels like to acknowledge the existence of) other labels will simply have to follow suit or they will very quickly become irrelevant.
This is even a better case to make to the board than the one I quoted above - fight the music labels on their own turf by upping the stake of the people on whose backs the music industry profits. Surely the reward-to-risk ratio on this has got to be huge.
Sorry, I didn't mean to discount this.
Shareholders cannot simply demand things.
They can, and they do it all the time. Some people make entire careers of it. Like William Ackman, who successfully pestered the Target board into selling off Target National Bank, and unsuccessfully, to spin off the real estate holdings of Target into a holding company that would collect rent on existing stores. Why? Because he felt that there was too much risk in consumer receivables, and that the balance sheet undervalued the land holdings, respectively.
Google's duty to its shareholders is to make money, plain and simple. Shareholders have absolutely no reason to demand anything specific of Google if Google is making money, and they would have no ground to stand on making such demands.
Google's duty to its shareholders is to maximize shareholder value, not just make money, and they have a legitimate case to make that the risk of perpetual lawsuits from the music industry is greater than the opportunity cost of gobbling up all the players. As an inequality:
Profits from owning record industry - Purchase Price of music industry > Profits from investing elsewhere - Cost of perpetual litigation from music industry
The accuracy of that inequality may be difficult to prove or disprove, but that's why Google has a board of directors - to make that assessment. And that's why there are activist shareholders, to reality-check the board.
Google's system is obviously working. They are making money by the metric fucktonne. Why would they drastically alter the way they do business by performing a complete 180-degree turn in their policies and the ideas they've so strongly based themselves upon?
If they did, it would be because they think there's more benefit to it than benefit to not doing it, and it's at least worthy of discussion.
....healthcare cameras dispose of YOU!
As I stated previously, I'm not going to play your game. You make a bunch of unsupported claims and then dare me to refute them, but place unnecessary restrictions on the facts I'm allowed to use. And, I might add, I'm willing to put my karma on the line to have this conversation, while you troll away as AC.
Go away, fuckwit.
We agree on much. The problem is that too many conservatives and libertarians argue as if any tax cut will pay for itself or even increase revenues, and too many liberals argue as if any tax increase will increase revenues, some going as far as to predict linear revenue gains.
Linear revenue growth isn't realistic, however, I think that we're past the point where cutting taxes will spur growth in any appreciable manner and have been for a while. If you look at the cycle of money, money flows to/from households, the government and business. For there to be real growth in the economy, ultimately your going to be range-bound to encouraging growth in all three areas. I think the past decade did a lot towards shifting the flow of real, inflation-adjusted dollars into the pockets of businesses, while tax rates fell and the purchasing price of the dollar fell faster than wages grew. That is ultimately unsustainable.
Neither extreme is true, but it's nearly axiomatic that some form of the Laffer Curve is true. Few would argue that a tax rate increase from 99% to 100% will increase revenues, and a decrease from 1% to 0% will surely lessen them. In between those extremes, there's a valid debate about what the parabola looks like. Presumably, it varies different under different economic conditions. People (and corporations) are probably more prone to try to minimize tax exposure when times are hard, growth is slow, margins are slim or the future looks rocky.
I would argue that corporations are likely to minimize tax exposure whenever possible, and while individual tax payers may be inclined to do so, they're a lot less adept at it. People might get more desperate during rough times, but it's not like they volunteer to pay more when they can afford it. The problem is, 28% of someone's $30,000 salary *means* more to them than 15% of a corporation's $250 million in earnings, yet the corporation is more likely NOT to pay $37.5 million than the guy who tries to skate on his $8,400 tax bill. (I used flat taxes for the sake of argument.) And maybe the corporation is going to reinvest the $37.5 million, or distribute it to shareholders, but is that more likely to affect the employees or the shareholder positively? For a typical individual shareholder, the bulk of whose holdings lie in retirement savings, that money won't recirculate for years.
So to have a rational, evidence-based tax policy, we need to start with
Then you have to look at what the proper function of government is, and whether we're currently overstepping or falling short of that.
The problem with trying to have this discussion is that a lot of the people who are going to join in are going to be just noise, shouting their opinion based on their gut rather than actual fact. Even those who dedicate their whole lives to learning about political science and economics are unlikely to come to a consensus. This isn't to discount the value in seeking these answers - they're all very good questions - but I don't think there's any determinable answer.
Some of them might not even need a definite answer, like the question about the Laffer curve. If we can figure out which side of the apex of the parabola we're on (the question that directly follows), do we really need to know what the curve looks like? We know that the apex is in the ballpark of a 50% rate regardless, plus or minus a few points. It might be useful to know where exactly that apex lies, but as you said, that likely changes based on the situation and could be difficult to track. Can't we just make a rule of thumb that if you're worried about being too close, you probably
Senator obama voted for the bailouts, and can't wash his hands of them.
Agreed, but neither can the sitting members of the House and Senate who voted the same way. For many of those people to now label them "Obama's bailout" is political posturing at its ugliest, and does little to support their claim that their only interest is in fixing the budget.
Also, you are simply wrong that we would have a surplus currently without iraq and the bush tax cuts. The current deficits exceed the maximum possible savings from both combined. Granted, they are a large portion, but even the best number produced by a left wing group show them causing no more than half of the current deficits.
If that was what I claimed, I would agree. There's also the six years of uncontrolled spending unrelated to the Iraq war or the tax cuts, with nary a thought on how to pay for them. PAYGO expired in 2002, and it would have done a lot towards protecting the 2010 surplus projected in 2000. For the Congress sitting at the time to allow that to expire, and the party in majority at the time to now express outrage at the consequences of that action (as well as the run-up in spending), is at the very least misleading.
I'm no fan of Bush's budget management (or lack thereof), but his tax cuts -- especially those in `03 -- were exactly the right policy.
Bush's eight years began with the dot com bust followed by 9/11.
The dot-com bust was already well-underway by the time Bush was elected. Even so, prior to 9/11, we were seeing a tenuous recovery, and it was either the steps taken by Congress during the Clinton administration (since spending measures adopted in 2001 wouldn't take effect until 2002, and Clinton was president for the whole of 2000), steps taken by the Fed under Clinton and/or Bush, natural market forces, the $300 tax rebate or some combination of the four that was causing that. My money is on a combination, but the effects aren't distributed evenly. The tax rebate was simply a pre-mature distribution of the tax refunds that would have been due for the 2001 tax year, and its effects are dubious at best. Maybe the tax cuts were necessary in 2003, but that doesn't make them appropriate now.
The years from 2000 to 2003 saw declining federal revenues compounded by rising unemployment. Revenue increases from `03 to `06 were among the highest for any three-year period, and unemployment dropped consistently from `03 - `07. The rate of GDP growth more than doubled after `03. Capital gains revenues doubled over the next three years. Before the cuts, the CBO predicted them to increase only ~26% over that period.
The years 2000-2003 are something of a special case. The dot-com mess was correcting itself, but just as it was coming out of that, 9/11 cratered any hope of that, and in the wake of the economic impact of the attack, a host of accounting troubles at a bunch of companies (Kmart, Enron, Adelphia, Tyco, WorldCom to name a few) further eroded investors' faith in the companies they invested in, and employees' faith that they had any sort of job security. While doubling the growth rate is impressive, it helps that it was doubling from a low point.
It would have been possible to balance the budget after the Bush tax cuts, but neither he nor congress did anything to reign in spending.
Exactly my point. It's absolutely vital that we curtail spending - when faced with actually having to pay for it, and when it suits the political agenda of the Republicans - but it's "knee-jerk liberalism" to question unwise spending as the original decisions were being made?
I think it's disingenuous for today's conservatives to try to distance themselves from Bush when the rallying cry for many of these same people in 2004 was "it doesn't make sense to change horses in mid-stream." So maybe there's more information about Bush in hindsight, and they're re-evaluating that decision - but doesn't that make them flip-floppers? Because that's obviously the worst thing a person can do, is make a decision on the best information they have available at the time, and then admit later that their decision based on incomplete evidence wasn't optimal in the light of a more complete picture.
People who thought Kerry was a better candidate in 2004 - hell, even people who thought McCain was a better candidate in 2000 - were excoriated by the vicious rhetoric bandied about by the Republicans who supported Bush. I'm willing to listen to a reasoned argument, but until I see evidence that those attitudes have changed, I seriously question the ability of Republicans or those who continue to support them to separate reason from dogma.
If we ever want to see black ink again, we have to attack entitlement spending, corporate welfare, and redundant or counter-productive bureaucracies. Defense spending shouldn't be immune to cuts, and we sure as hell have to keep the feds from bailing out sinking states. That all still isn't sufficient to completely eliminate deficits, but it is necessary and it's a start.
That's a good case, but I would like to see order of operations - let's pop these corrections in the order they were pushed on: end state bailouts, attack corporate welfare, roll back redundant and counter-productive bureaucracy, cut unnecessary defense spending and only then get to work on entitlement overhaul.
Don't blame Bush and the Iraq War for the problems either, because obviously the current administration has no problems spending billions on war and "defending" America either.
Why the fuck not? You realize that had he not plundered the Treasury and engaged us in a ten-year (so far) imbroglio in the Middle East, we would be enjoying the second year of budget surplus, right? And that the first half of the bailout was already distributed and spent by the time Obama was even elected, much less took office? So no, I'm not going to play your bullshit game, asshat. If you want me to examine the actual facts, then I will.
Why are they wasting time with this? Isn't there a governmental shutdown deadline this Friday? Shouldn't they be working on the budget instead of killing time with small-fry legislation that goes nowhere?
Because, along with a $6 trillion package of budget cuts, they're forcing the President and the Senate's hand to block them. Then, when they don't get exactly what they want, they can go back to their bat-shit-crazy core constituency and claim that the "liberal menace" is preventing any substantive change in the way the government operates.
It just occurred to me: this is in violation of the Americans with Disabilities Act. It's a fine on being obese and smoking, but it only applies to the obese and/or smokers who are sick and thus drawing Medicaid support. That would be interesting to see in court.
This is nothing. You should see our county sheriff.
Because Medicaid exists outside the bounds in which the market operates.
Medicaid != Retirement distribution, so while it may save the Federal retirement trust in the long run, it doesn't do anything for the Medicaid program administered by the state of Arizona. Also, I think you're not taking into account the people whose weight problems don't kill them immediately. Chronic heart disease, diabetes, operators waiting to take their call so they can bill Medicaid for Hoverounds...