Crony capitalism is only inevitable if your government is both
1) for sale 2) capable of doing harm
Ideally, you'd have a limited government that can't break things too badly if they try (i.e. with constitutional limits on what they can do), and with controls against corruption.
This is urban authoritarianism everywhere. But the whole "the enemy of my enemy is my friend" mentality ("whoever can stop him is a good thing") is just playing into the hands of urban authoritarians: the problem isn't this policy or that policy, it's the idea of politicians generally who abuse their office to amass more power.
It is not okay for McGinn to do the things people are condemning Comcast for doing. Both of them are bad, and we should have neither, but voting for a lizard to stop the wrong lizard from winning is what keeps the lizards around.
So, in other words, it's one of the myriad patents where you take something people have been doing since Barney Rubble and add "... but on a COMPUTER!" at the end.
My battery life sucks because I'm in Washington, which could be generously described as RF hell. My phone has to dump more power than normal into the transmitter to keep contact with the towers.
I have a Galaxy Nexus at the moment which is having problems, and will need to replace it soon. My only real complaint about it (other than the crappy service from Sprint in my area) is the battery life. This thing seems to have the same size battery, but I understand that some phones will have "extended battery" cases available (where you buy a bigger battery and a new backplate that fits it). Will there be a thing like this for the Nexus 5?
There's that idea, though, that if you tax something you get less of it.
It's more correct to say that money only creates value when it changes hands; the point of a medium of exchange is to enable barter-by-proxy where everyone comes out better in the end. Since exchange of money for goods and services is the key activity that creates value in an economy, taxing it puts a damper on economic activity. (Suppose someone has a business idea that runs at a margin of 5%: I can make a widget for $10 that people would be glad to buy for $10.50. This would be a very profitable enterprise, making lots of people happy, without sales tax. It can't exist with sales tax.)
For that reason I think property taxes (on real property, not things like pencils and computers) are less dampening to the economy. If you tax private property ownership you get less of it, which would indeed drive up things like housing prices, but which would also encourage more unowned and public property. It would discourage the model where ten thousand people own a half-acre yard and encourage the model where they own a quarter-acre yard and there's a 2500 acre park by the neighborhood.
What would you say to a flat sales tax (or VAT or goods+services tax or similar) combined with a national income?
25% tax (or whatever) on everything, everyone gets a check for $thousands per year, which they can spend on ice cream, rent, food, or whatever else they please, replacing all other handout/welfare programs. It's been proposed by quite a few people.
I live in Washington DC and went to go buy some soup at a Vietnamese takeout place the other day.
The sales tax is 6% here, but it's 10% on food. (It's an "entertainment tax"). Fine, I knew about that. But the check didn't add up.
There's a nickel tax on plastic bags: the city claims that it's to protect the Anacostia River from being polluted with bags. (Nobody has ever considered trying to get the folks who live by the river in Southeast from throwing their damned bags into the streets.) But I knew about that too, and the check still didn't add up.
Turns out there is also a quarter tax on to-go containers of any kind, including the little thing my soup came in.
Meanwhile, the last time Massachusetts Ave. was paved, it was paved by Barney Rubble. So these soup taxes sure aren't going to anything useful.
A low-albedo coating would certainly help; you're unlikely to reflect enough energy to hurt the drone, but you can definitely minimize the heat absorbed.
The memory is specialized and very fast -- graphics memory is orders of magnitude faster than a SSD. We're getting 160 GB/sec from the memory on a K20.
Wouldn't people be somewhat less likely to do that, given that giving the keys to the car to the kid who just wrecked his tricycle seems like a bad idea?
What I'm wondering: how did they spend 600 million bucks on this?
I bought health insurance from an "exchange" a few years ago; I was between jobs and wanted gap coverage. I went to a website, ran a search, picked a plan, and enrolled -- it was pretty simple. The website didn't look that complicated, and I'm sure it didn't cost $600M or even $60M (and it worked). Now, maybe the government wants to do something a little more complicated, but $600M is roughly 10,000 developers' salaries for a year. What were they all doing?
Hm, interesting -- if we're going to get Titans as an upgrade this is worth knowing. What are you doing on them? We're doing a computation that uses a lot of single-precision, somewhat less double precision, and occupies about 70% of the 6GB memory on each (they run in pairs).
Oh -- make sure you have the new drivers. I kept getting random crashes and it turns out that the old Linux Nvidia driver was at fault since it didn't really support them. I upgraded the drivers and everything was fine.
Snowden told us what the NSA's up to. I want to know what the rest of the clowns are doing. I hear the dulcet strains of Yakety Sax drifting down Pennsylvania Ave. from the White House, but bugger me with a cactus if I can figure out what they're doing in there.
A lot of compute applications are memory bandwidth limited, so single precision will give you only twice as many flop/sec as double.
There's another thing about the Titans, though: reliability.
I do lattice gauge theory computations on these cards. We've got a cluster of GTX480's that is a disaster: the damn things crash constantly. We're in the process of replacing them with Titans, which have been rock solid so far, as good as the cluster of K20's I also use. (They're also a bit faster than the K20's.) The 480's are especially bad, but I imagine the Titans are better than (say) GTX580's.
The Titan doesn't make that much sense as a high-end gaming card, but it makes a great deal of sense as a ghetto compute card for people who don't want to buy the K20's/K40's. (We've benchmarked a K40 and the Titan still beats it, but only barely.)
Slashdot Mirror
Can siblings marry now?
Incest is unethical because of the risk of inbreeding; a marriage between siblings with no biological children hurts nobody.
What about people who are already married?
Why not? Brazil ruled that a triad had a constitutional right to marry.
Children?
They aren't able to form binding contracts.
And the end result of government regulation of markets is the capture of the regulatory process by cronies every time.
When I lived in Arizona (beautiful place!), I explained this to folks as "We have enough daylight here already, why would we want to save any?"
Crony capitalism is only inevitable if your government is both
1) for sale
2) capable of doing harm
Ideally, you'd have a limited government that can't break things too badly if they try (i.e. with constitutional limits on what they can do), and with controls against corruption.
This is urban authoritarianism everywhere. But the whole "the enemy of my enemy is my friend" mentality ("whoever can stop him is a good thing") is just playing into the hands of urban authoritarians: the problem isn't this policy or that policy, it's the idea of politicians generally who abuse their office to amass more power.
It is not okay for McGinn to do the things people are condemning Comcast for doing. Both of them are bad, and we should have neither, but voting for a lizard to stop the wrong lizard from winning is what keeps the lizards around.
That's not a free market. That's crony capitalism, which is condemned in no uncertain terms by the free-market types.
This isn't a natural limit, it's one imposed by the law. Saying "Well, you can just move somewhere else" is never a justification for shitty laws.
Yes -- the volume control doesn't work and the screen is cracked.
I've thought about getting one of those USB power banks, actually. Probably will go ahead and do it soon.
So, in other words, it's one of the myriad patents where you take something people have been doing since Barney Rubble and add "... but on a COMPUTER!" at the end.
My battery life sucks because I'm in Washington, which could be generously described as RF hell. My phone has to dump more power than normal into the transmitter to keep contact with the towers.
I have a Galaxy Nexus at the moment which is having problems, and will need to replace it soon. My only real complaint about it (other than the crappy service from Sprint in my area) is the battery life. This thing seems to have the same size battery, but I understand that some phones will have "extended battery" cases available (where you buy a bigger battery and a new backplate that fits it). Will there be a thing like this for the Nexus 5?
The problem is that if you want public services you have to tax something.
There's that idea, though, that if you tax something you get less of it.
It's more correct to say that money only creates value when it changes hands; the point of a medium of exchange is to enable barter-by-proxy where everyone comes out better in the end. Since exchange of money for goods and services is the key activity that creates value in an economy, taxing it puts a damper on economic activity. (Suppose someone has a business idea that runs at a margin of 5%: I can make a widget for $10 that people would be glad to buy for $10.50. This would be a very profitable enterprise, making lots of people happy, without sales tax. It can't exist with sales tax.)
For that reason I think property taxes (on real property, not things like pencils and computers) are less dampening to the economy. If you tax private property ownership you get less of it, which would indeed drive up things like housing prices, but which would also encourage more unowned and public property. It would discourage the model where ten thousand people own a half-acre yard and encourage the model where they own a quarter-acre yard and there's a 2500 acre park by the neighborhood.
What would you say to a flat sales tax (or VAT or goods+services tax or similar) combined with a national income?
25% tax (or whatever) on everything, everyone gets a check for $thousands per year, which they can spend on ice cream, rent, food, or whatever else they please, replacing all other handout/welfare programs. It's been proposed by quite a few people.
Waiting for a madman to step into office?
I live in Washington DC and went to go buy some soup at a Vietnamese takeout place the other day.
The sales tax is 6% here, but it's 10% on food. (It's an "entertainment tax"). Fine, I knew about that. But the check didn't add up.
There's a nickel tax on plastic bags: the city claims that it's to protect the Anacostia River from being polluted with bags. (Nobody has ever considered trying to get the folks who live by the river in Southeast from throwing their damned bags into the streets.) But I knew about that too, and the check still didn't add up.
Turns out there is also a quarter tax on to-go containers of any kind, including the little thing my soup came in.
Meanwhile, the last time Massachusetts Ave. was paved, it was paved by Barney Rubble. So these soup taxes sure aren't going to anything useful.
Urban tax codes are ridiculous.
A low-albedo coating would certainly help; you're unlikely to reflect enough energy to hurt the drone, but you can definitely minimize the heat absorbed.
Dear James Cameron,
You might ring Barbra Streisand and ask her how this'll work out for you.
Love,
The Internet
The memory is specialized and very fast -- graphics memory is orders of magnitude faster than a SSD. We're getting 160 GB/sec from the memory on a K20.
Wouldn't people be somewhat less likely to do that, given that giving the keys to the car to the kid who just wrecked his tricycle seems like a bad idea?
What I'm wondering: how did they spend 600 million bucks on this?
I bought health insurance from an "exchange" a few years ago; I was between jobs and wanted gap coverage. I went to a website, ran a search, picked a plan, and enrolled -- it was pretty simple. The website didn't look that complicated, and I'm sure it didn't cost $600M or even $60M (and it worked). Now, maybe the government wants to do something a little more complicated, but $600M is roughly 10,000 developers' salaries for a year. What were they all doing?
Hm, interesting -- if we're going to get Titans as an upgrade this is worth knowing. What are you doing on them? We're doing a computation that uses a lot of single-precision, somewhat less double precision, and occupies about 70% of the 6GB memory on each (they run in pairs).
Oh -- make sure you have the new drivers. I kept getting random crashes and it turns out that the old Linux Nvidia driver was at fault since it didn't really support them. I upgraded the drivers and everything was fine.
Dear European,
Snowden told us what the NSA's up to. I want to know what the rest of the clowns are doing. I hear the dulcet strains of Yakety Sax drifting down Pennsylvania Ave. from the White House, but bugger me with a cactus if I can figure out what they're doing in there.
Can you please spy on my government and tell me what the hell they're up to these days? I have no clue, and they're certainly not telling.
Thanks,
An American
A lot of compute applications are memory bandwidth limited, so single precision will give you only twice as many flop/sec as double.
There's another thing about the Titans, though: reliability.
I do lattice gauge theory computations on these cards. We've got a cluster of GTX480's that is a disaster: the damn things crash constantly. We're in the process of replacing them with Titans, which have been rock solid so far, as good as the cluster of K20's I also use. (They're also a bit faster than the K20's.) The 480's are especially bad, but I imagine the Titans are better than (say) GTX580's.
The Titan doesn't make that much sense as a high-end gaming card, but it makes a great deal of sense as a ghetto compute card for people who don't want to buy the K20's/K40's. (We've benchmarked a K40 and the Titan still beats it, but only barely.)