Why are you talking about Kerala? That's not where the events of the story happened (Assam). I can probably find a US state with higher than average literacy level too, but it's meaningless for comparison.
Ironic how you've fell for misinformation in a discussion about misinformation.
GP was probably referring to studies such as this. But unfortunately, that does not support the idea that India is anywhere close to the US in education.
Twenty-one to 23 percent — or some 40 to 44 million of the 191 million
adults in this country — demonstrated skills in the lowest level of prose,
document, and quantitative proficiencies (Level 1).
Twenty-five percent of the respondents who performed in this level were immigrants
who may have been just learning to speak English. Nearly two-thirds of
those in Level 1 (62 percent) had terminated their education before
completing high school. A third were age 65 or older, and 26 percent had
physical, mental, or health conditions that kept them from participating fully
in work, school, housework, or other activities. Nineteen percent of the
respondents in Level 1 reported having visual difficulties that affect their
ability to read print.
Yes, new immigrants are unable to read English, but you wouldn't call them illiterate if they read in Spanish or Chinese instead. And a person can be a PhD in English literature and still lose their vision due to old age.
Meanwhile, the US is about 45% college graduates, to India's 4.5%.
GP was also talking about Kerala for some reason, which is not where the events of the story happened. That was actually in Assam, which is nowhere near Kerala, whether that's on the map or in education.
Honestly if you're terminated for a non-downsizing reason - and I'm including outsourcing in that - you've probably been a rather dreadful employee.
There are companies that outsource their entire software development department. Nobody but the execs have any control over that.
Besides, if you want to blame any single employee for outsourcing, why aren't you doing that for downsizing? They could've given 10000% and propped the company up even in a recession.
TSLA's valuation is predicated, even now, on making it through this challenging time and significantly growing and maintaining market share. This is never good if other participants are willing, nay practically required, to enter the market and sell below cost and have greater access to subsidies and favorable trade terms than you.
Who knew poorly-conceived regulation could be a double-edged sword?
That doesn't mean he gets to claim any kind of mandate from the American people, though, because the simple and unarguable fact is that most Americans didn't want him to be elected.
It's not an indisputable fact if only 61.4% of Americans voted, and nearly half of those voted for him.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not disagreeing with you, merely pointing out that the definition of efficiency commonly used in micro economics is not the same as an ordinary person's.
As far as Socialism goes, it does work in the short term, because everyone involved is ideologically motivated to make the new socialist state a success. This is why you see the USSR quickly catching up to the US after WWII, despite being a war-ravaged nation; or how China is still far ahead of India, despite having a pure Socialist economy until 1978. Over time, however, ideology gives way to greed and self-interest, and the bureaucrats start optimizing for themselves instead of the nation as a whole.
Though with the advance of AI, I think we will arrive at a point where we can build intelligent, non-self-interested actors. I wonder what the economy will look like when that happens?
I think the principle to apply here is that if you find yourself in a hole, first stop digging.
Government-backed loans are just free handouts to the banking industry. All the risks are on the government, and all the profit goes to banks. The first step to fix the situation is to stop doing that.
As for existing bad loans, taxpayers will pay regardless. Whether that's by paying it off directly, through social services for the graduates, or as you say making "the word of the U.S. government worthless".
Personally I favor #3. Anyone with a brain knows that if a deal that's too good to be true, it probably is. And this entire fiasco is exactly that for the banks. Besides, if the government goes bankrupt because it keeps taking on unfunded obligations, it's word will end up worthless anyways.
Capitalism (or more specifically, free markets) is a system that is efficient on the micro-level (for a certain definition of "efficient".) If the system evolves into a monopoly, however, the free market assumptions no longer hold, and the system is no longer efficient.
I don't think it can even be considered "efficient" when all of its assumptions hold. For example, in an "efficient" market for widget X with 100 suppliers, there is still the waste of creating 100 manufacturing infrastructures for each of the different suppliers. If every supplier has perfect information, then the super-rational solution is to have the lowest cost supplier create all the widgets, sell them at the market price, then share the profits with all the other suppliers.
This is absurd of course. Nobody has perfect information and nobody would distribute their profits, but it does illustrate the limits of the model.
This also shows how Socialism can become more efficient than Capitalism in some cases. The government can become the lowest cost supplier, set the price it thinks should be the market price, then divide profits amongst everyone. This saves on capital, because production infrastructure is built once rather than 100 times.
Doing this properly is extremely hard of course, which is why we don't see many successful Socialist countries.
Every development project that I've ever seen that ran into trouble had the same thing in common: over promising what they can deliver.
That is what Agile methodologies (such as Scrum) are supposed to fix. Simply put: it doesn't promise anything. Stakeholders come up with an ordered list of work to do, and the engineers will work on them in order. Don't like what's getting done? Change the order. Want it done faster? Add more people, but don't expect to see improvements until a few months down the line.
The problem, as explained in the article, is that most people embrace all of the procedures, like playing games with "points" and doing daily stand-ups, but completely miss the whole idea of adapting the procedure to the situation.
It makes complete sense as a proof of concept, deployed in a location that doesn't require more power. When it's demonstrated to work and work safely, then they can think about scaling up.
On average, college grads are doing great, much better than high school graduates, even when you account for the increased cost. But averages don't paint the whole picture. The minority that don't succeed are indebted forever, which is the problem.
As someone who doesn't live in New Hampshire, I wouldn't mind them actually taking over the state. If they turn it into a failed state, then it'll serve as an warning to everyone else. If by some miracle they do succeed, we can just copy what they did. It's a win-win situation for those of us not involved.
The problem is politics lagging far behind technology. Fewer people than ever before are required to produce everything we need. Low skilled labor has been almost completely replaced by machines. The demand is still there for highly skilled labor that the machines are unable to do (for now), but people cannot do that work without the equivalent of a college education.
The rational (and humane) response is to provide that education to as many people as possible, so that a maximum number of people can learn to do high skilled labor. The successful ones can then pay taxes and make it possible for the next generation to do the same.
The irrational response is to make that education extremely risky or financially unreachable. This ensures the least amount of people will become highly skilled and all of the tax burden falls on the remaining few.
So how did we end up with the irrational response? Because selfishness and shortsightedness. Nobody wants to pay for something they themselves won't directly benefit from, so they create rhetoric such as "individual responsibility" and "self-sufficiency" to justify screwing over the less fortunate.
The reality is, financial success is a combination of hard work, natural talent and luck. The latter two aren't something people can change. Punishing people for failing doesn't prevent others from also failing, nor does it improve your own well-being in any way, except perhaps as entertainment for the sadistic-minded.
Having a huge chunk of the populace living in poverty only makes things worse for everyone else. It creates crime, increases welfare costs, reduces the nation's economic competitiveness, makes politics all that much dumber, and in the worst case, triggers a shift towards either socialism or totalitarianism (because, well, the capitalist democracy isn't working for them).
We tried that, up until the seventies you could get rid of federa! College debt by declaring bankruptcy, millions did it, and the taxpayers got sick of paying for others college educatiins. The current system is a reaction to what you describe when it was the policy.
Yeah, and now you have college grads stuck in the poverty trap and soaking up welfare instead. Great solution.
You're talking like there's no Chinese open source devs. Some of them may support the Chinese government, while others may be against spying in general.
If you only work with people who agree with you on every political topic, you'll be forever working alone.
You won't be saying that when you run into the real mafia.
Law enforcement takes a tiny cut of your taxes by comparison and they don't murder people for not paying taxes. Now if you really hate having money go towards your own protection, you should try moving to a country without decent law enforcement, such as Somalia.
Slashdot Mirror
My car has no Bluetooth, so that's a non-starter.
Why are you talking about Kerala? That's not where the events of the story happened (Assam). I can probably find a US state with higher than average literacy level too, but it's meaningless for comparison.
GP was probably referring to studies such as this. But unfortunately, that does not support the idea that India is anywhere close to the US in education.
Twenty-one to 23 percent — or some 40 to 44 million of the 191 million adults in this country — demonstrated skills in the lowest level of prose, document, and quantitative proficiencies (Level 1).
Twenty-five percent of the respondents who performed in this level were immigrants who may have been just learning to speak English. Nearly two-thirds of those in Level 1 (62 percent) had terminated their education before completing high school. A third were age 65 or older, and 26 percent had physical, mental, or health conditions that kept them from participating fully in work, school, housework, or other activities. Nineteen percent of the respondents in Level 1 reported having visual difficulties that affect their ability to read print.
Yes, new immigrants are unable to read English, but you wouldn't call them illiterate if they read in Spanish or Chinese instead. And a person can be a PhD in English literature and still lose their vision due to old age.
Meanwhile, the US is about 45% college graduates, to India's 4.5%.
GP was also talking about Kerala for some reason, which is not where the events of the story happened. That was actually in Assam, which is nowhere near Kerala, whether that's on the map or in education.
Honestly if you're terminated for a non-downsizing reason - and I'm including outsourcing in that - you've probably been a rather dreadful employee.
There are companies that outsource their entire software development department. Nobody but the execs have any control over that.
Besides, if you want to blame any single employee for outsourcing, why aren't you doing that for downsizing? They could've given 10000% and propped the company up even in a recession.
A lot of people work 60-80 hours a week. They might be getting $100k, but their hourly earning is less than $60k @ 40 hours a week.
TSLA's valuation is predicated, even now, on making it through this challenging time and significantly growing and maintaining market share. This is never good if other participants are willing, nay practically required, to enter the market and sell below cost and have greater access to subsidies and favorable trade terms than you.
Who knew poorly-conceived regulation could be a double-edged sword?
Most people didn't vote for Clinton either. Apathy always wins by a huge margin.
That doesn't mean he gets to claim any kind of mandate from the American people, though, because the simple and unarguable fact is that most Americans didn't want him to be elected.
It's not an indisputable fact if only 61.4% of Americans voted, and nearly half of those voted for him.
Guess Crunchyroll's going to get kicked out of the EU. They're over 90% Japanese.
An easy fix is to do what Airbnb does: don't release ratings until both sides have rated.
Banned from Uber?
Hello Lyft.
I don't see the problem. Anyone 2 stars or above is a decent date.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not disagreeing with you, merely pointing out that the definition of efficiency commonly used in micro economics is not the same as an ordinary person's.
As far as Socialism goes, it does work in the short term, because everyone involved is ideologically motivated to make the new socialist state a success. This is why you see the USSR quickly catching up to the US after WWII, despite being a war-ravaged nation; or how China is still far ahead of India, despite having a pure Socialist economy until 1978. Over time, however, ideology gives way to greed and self-interest, and the bureaucrats start optimizing for themselves instead of the nation as a whole.
Though with the advance of AI, I think we will arrive at a point where we can build intelligent, non-self-interested actors. I wonder what the economy will look like when that happens?
I think the principle to apply here is that if you find yourself in a hole, first stop digging.
Government-backed loans are just free handouts to the banking industry. All the risks are on the government, and all the profit goes to banks. The first step to fix the situation is to stop doing that.
As for existing bad loans, taxpayers will pay regardless. Whether that's by paying it off directly, through social services for the graduates, or as you say making "the word of the U.S. government worthless".
Personally I favor #3. Anyone with a brain knows that if a deal that's too good to be true, it probably is. And this entire fiasco is exactly that for the banks. Besides, if the government goes bankrupt because it keeps taking on unfunded obligations, it's word will end up worthless anyways.
Capitalism (or more specifically, free markets) is a system that is efficient on the micro-level (for a certain definition of "efficient".) If the system evolves into a monopoly, however, the free market assumptions no longer hold, and the system is no longer efficient.
I don't think it can even be considered "efficient" when all of its assumptions hold. For example, in an "efficient" market for widget X with 100 suppliers, there is still the waste of creating 100 manufacturing infrastructures for each of the different suppliers. If every supplier has perfect information, then the super-rational solution is to have the lowest cost supplier create all the widgets, sell them at the market price, then share the profits with all the other suppliers.
This is absurd of course. Nobody has perfect information and nobody would distribute their profits, but it does illustrate the limits of the model.
This also shows how Socialism can become more efficient than Capitalism in some cases. The government can become the lowest cost supplier, set the price it thinks should be the market price, then divide profits amongst everyone. This saves on capital, because production infrastructure is built once rather than 100 times.
Doing this properly is extremely hard of course, which is why we don't see many successful Socialist countries.
Every development project that I've ever seen that ran into trouble had the same thing in common: over promising what they can deliver.
That is what Agile methodologies (such as Scrum) are supposed to fix. Simply put: it doesn't promise anything. Stakeholders come up with an ordered list of work to do, and the engineers will work on them in order. Don't like what's getting done? Change the order. Want it done faster? Add more people, but don't expect to see improvements until a few months down the line.
The problem, as explained in the article, is that most people embrace all of the procedures, like playing games with "points" and doing daily stand-ups, but completely miss the whole idea of adapting the procedure to the situation.
It makes complete sense as a proof of concept, deployed in a location that doesn't require more power. When it's demonstrated to work and work safely, then they can think about scaling up.
On average, college grads are doing great, much better than high school graduates, even when you account for the increased cost. But averages don't paint the whole picture. The minority that don't succeed are indebted forever, which is the problem.
As someone who doesn't live in New Hampshire, I wouldn't mind them actually taking over the state. If they turn it into a failed state, then it'll serve as an warning to everyone else. If by some miracle they do succeed, we can just copy what they did. It's a win-win situation for those of us not involved.
Any plausible student loan bailout will be funded by the taxpayers, not the financial industry.
Now why would that be? Just change the law and let those loans be dischargeable by bankruptcy after 10 years.
The problem is politics lagging far behind technology. Fewer people than ever before are required to produce everything we need. Low skilled labor has been almost completely replaced by machines. The demand is still there for highly skilled labor that the machines are unable to do (for now), but people cannot do that work without the equivalent of a college education.
The rational (and humane) response is to provide that education to as many people as possible, so that a maximum number of people can learn to do high skilled labor. The successful ones can then pay taxes and make it possible for the next generation to do the same.
The irrational response is to make that education extremely risky or financially unreachable. This ensures the least amount of people will become highly skilled and all of the tax burden falls on the remaining few.
So how did we end up with the irrational response? Because selfishness and shortsightedness. Nobody wants to pay for something they themselves won't directly benefit from, so they create rhetoric such as "individual responsibility" and "self-sufficiency" to justify screwing over the less fortunate.
The reality is, financial success is a combination of hard work, natural talent and luck. The latter two aren't something people can change. Punishing people for failing doesn't prevent others from also failing, nor does it improve your own well-being in any way, except perhaps as entertainment for the sadistic-minded.
Having a huge chunk of the populace living in poverty only makes things worse for everyone else. It creates crime, increases welfare costs, reduces the nation's economic competitiveness, makes politics all that much dumber, and in the worst case, triggers a shift towards either socialism or totalitarianism (because, well, the capitalist democracy isn't working for them).
We tried that, up until the seventies you could get rid of federa! College debt by declaring bankruptcy, millions did it, and the taxpayers got sick of paying for others college educatiins. The current system is a reaction to what you describe when it was the policy.
Yeah, and now you have college grads stuck in the poverty trap and soaking up welfare instead. Great solution.
It wasn't even his software. Most of the commits were from another guy.
You're talking like there's no Chinese open source devs. Some of them may support the Chinese government, while others may be against spying in general.
If you only work with people who agree with you on every political topic, you'll be forever working alone.
You won't be saying that when you run into the real mafia.
Law enforcement takes a tiny cut of your taxes by comparison and they don't murder people for not paying taxes. Now if you really hate having money go towards your own protection, you should try moving to a country without decent law enforcement, such as Somalia.