Nonsense. If you don't think banks contribute to the economy, you should study some of the economies throughout history that haven't had a functioning banking system.
Banking is of critical importance to the functioning of the economy. The function of banks and bankers is to enable those people and businesses who can make use of money to employ people and make things to get the cash they need to hire those people and make those things. And that can't be done simply by handing out money to whoever asks, either. The function of banks is, essentially, to determine where money needs to go in the economy in order to generate maximum benefit -- which benefit is measured by maximum ability to generate revenue, which means maximum ability to provide people with things they think are of value.
Doing that effectively requires lots of very bright people, and lots of effort by those people. The fact that you don't see the value in their work just means that you don't understand the indirect effects of what they do. Note that I'm not saying they don't screw up, and that their screwups can't be just as impactful in a negative way as their good work does in a positive way. Actually, that's a good point... if they didn't contribute so much positive value, they wouldn't have so much influence that their screwups could do so much damage.
Basically, without bankers there would be no Wawa, and therefore no one at Wawa making sandwiches. More precisely, if there were no bankers, Wawa would still be a small family business with a handful of stores at best, because they'd have had to fund their growth out of profits rather than being able to borrow.
It is meaningless for the entity that mints money to "save" it.
You know the government doesn't create money, right? The Federal Reserve creates some, and the banks create the rest, via fractional reserve lending. So this part of your argument makes no sense. The Treasury department does mint the physical bills and coins used to represent the funds created by the Fed and the banks, but those represent a tiny fraction of the dollars in circulation, and the minting process doesn't create the value, just the physical tokens.
Also, the government borrows by selling treasury bonds. It pays down the debt by buying those bonds back (or, more often, by simply not issuing new bonds as the old ones mature and have to be paid off -- the debt is constantly being rolled over into new bonds). If it wanted to, the government absolutely could save money. If it bought back all of the outstanding bonds, that would get the debt to zero. It could then deposit any excess tax revenues with the Federal Reserve, which would lend them out to banks, just as it lends out the money it creates... but it wouldn't have to create any money to do it.
So, yes, the federal government could save money if it wanted to. There's nothing stopping it, and it would even earn interest on the savings.
Using SSL is ineffective, because the Chinese firewall active sends connection reset packets to disrupt your SSL connection.
It's worth pointing out that in most of the world Google already does all-SSL all the time. I don't know if you're right that the Chinese firewalls disrupt SSL, or if the Chinese firewalls play man-in-the-middle, but either way SSL doesn't really help when your opponent has that sort of resources.
Maybe. I don't think most people in Utah and Colorado use snow tires, though. Some do, certainly, especially those who live in the mountains and have to drive daily on steep roads that aren't well-traveled. The rest (including me) just drive carefully the ~20 days per year that it's bad. The Mountain West doesn't tend to have lots of persistent snow and ice -- it snows hard for a few days, then the sun is out for two or three weeks, usually. Not enough sun to melt all the snow, but enough to melt it off of roads that have been cleared by plows. By 3-4 days after a storm all of the roads are clear and dry, except for occasional patches of ice where snowmelt during the day freezes at night (and on colder days). Those patches are rare on highways because they're on raised roadbeds. They're common on residential streets, but you don't drive fast there anyway.
Where I work, if you comment out code rather than deleting it, you won't get past the code review, and you can't submit until the reviewer has signed off.
I live in Colorado, and have lived for most of my life in Utah. What I notice is that the first big snowstorm of every winter season causes a large number of slide-offs. After that, not so much. I think lots of people forget how to drive on snow and ice during the warm season. That and the real morons can't drive after the first snowstorm because their car is in the shop.
Is autobahn maintenance done by the states or the federal government? I haven't driven around Germany a great deal, but I've noticed some variation in the road quality which seems regional. It wouldn't be surprising if, say, Bavaria and Schwabia, took different approaches to road maintenance.
That is what happens in the US, so in some states the Interstates are much better-maintained than in others. The US federal government provides some funding for Interstate maintenance, but much of it comes from the states, and the states do all of the actual work (or contract it out).
I had to sign that I would be willing to take a loyalty oath as condition of employment (didn't have to actually take an oath, though).
This shit has been around (at least) since the last time right-wing crazies shit all over our civil liberties-- the "red scare."
Each time the right manages to get a bit more of this shit entrenched. Maybe this time will be the one or maybe 3 more of these right-wing police state takeovers
Yeah, those California universities are bastions of right-wing radicalism.
Like many Americans you seem to be unaware of what right and left wing really mean, and of the reality of the power structures in your country.
I understand exactly what they mean. The AC I responded to, not so much.
It isn't just a simple matter of teaching metric either. All these industries and their supporting industries must switch or provide parallel measures (of course, the old timers will stick to imperial in that case, since it's there too). That's very, very, very expensive both in material and time.
That sounds like something that will require a lot of work, and will require hiring a lot of people to do that work.
If only there was an unemployment problem in America...
So your solution is to make it worse?
This is just the common broken window fallacy. Adding jobs by reducing productivity doesn't work. If you reduce productivity and increase the number of workers needed to produce the same output, you increase the cost of whatever they're making, which increases the price, which reduces demand. End result: fewer jobs, not more.
The way to create jobs is to create new production, making stuff that wasn't being made before, either because it was made somewhere else, or because it was more expensive and you found a way to make it cheaper which increased demand, or because it didn't even exist before.
Otherwise, we could just solve the unemployment problem by breaking everyone's windows and hiring all the unemployed to replace them. Whenever the number of broken windows begins to dwindle, just break more.
Actually, going to the metric system would likely increase productivity by a non-trivial amount, in the long run. In the short run, though, it would be mildly harmful, depending on how aggressively it was enforced.
I had to sign that I would be willing to take a loyalty oath as condition of employment (didn't have to actually take an oath, though).
This shit has been around (at least) since the last time right-wing crazies shit all over our civil liberties-- the "red scare."
Each time the right manages to get a bit more of this shit entrenched. Maybe this time will be the one or maybe 3 more of these right-wing police state takeovers
Yeah, those California universities are bastions of right-wing radicalism.
What happens if terminator genes spread to non-GM plants, leading to most/all plants having no viable seeds?
It's only a problem if all of the plants gain the terminator genes at once, which is vanishingly unlikely. Otherwise, what happens is that the plants that get the terminator gene get immediately selected out of the gene pool.
Yeah, it's been a few years since I was discharged. The M243/M249 bit was a typo. I was a SAW gunner for a couple of years, so I know very well what it should be.
who can only carry on duty, don't take their firearm home, etc.
So, not like cops. Many departments require their officers to carry 24x7, and thanks to LEOSA, even those who don't have official direction/sanction can (and many do) carry concealed everywhere they go. Oh, and I've never heard of a police department in the US whose officers don't take their guns home.
Note that military M16 has select-fire which can choose between semi-automatic, 3 round burst, & full-automatic.
This is incorrect.
The most widely deployed version of the M16, the M16A2 had three positions on the selector switch: safe, semi-automatic and three-round burst. There is no full auto setting, because the US military has decided that except in the hands of highly-trained troops full auto wastes ammunition to no effect (note that this is not the case for real machine guns, like the M60 and M243, which also burn through the ammo but can use it much more effectively).
The M16A3 does have full auto rather than three-round burst, but it's used only by very small numbers of highly-trained troops. SEALs and such.
The new M16A4, now standard issue for the Marine Corps and some Army units, has safe, semi and three-round burst. No full auto.
No M16 variant has ever had a four-position selector switch, which is what would be needed to provide semi, three-round burst, full auto and a safety position.
They do not. Venezuela is screwed in terms of oil; they have some of the largest reserves in the Western Hemisphere, but no one is bringing in new technology or new investment to help them develop thier fields. The nationalization of the ExxonMobil assets was entirely a vote grab; Chavez bought the happiness of the poor voters by giving them cheap gas and energy, at the expense of long term economic destablization as they will eventually run out their current wells, and new ones can't be dug. Venezuela has no good excavation technology, it's all owned by the "mega-rich foreign corporations", and since Venezuela sucks as a place to do business, they're not coming to develop new fields. Chavez will pass in the next few months most likely, he has no good successor in place (none of his guys have the clout that he did, and they all comepte internally) and they're going to slide economically in the next decade when they run out of oil and refined gas. That will cause major upheaval in Venzuela, likely in the next decade but certainly in the next two, and the nationalization of the oil industry will be a direct contributor.
I hope the country has the capital and the expertise to develop those new wells, because there's no way any foreign oil company or investor will even dream of getting involved.
I'm curious to see how this works out, because they do have the cash to pull this off if they don't fritter it away. The free market is great at finding and eliminating inefficiencies, but don't forget that profit is an inefficiency, too (especially in areas with natural monopolies or high barriers to entry: profit can inflate the price well beyond what bloated bureaucracy can).
Profit is not an inefficiency. In some ways it's a measure of systemic inefficiency, but more often it's a simple reflection of capital requirements and risk. Ventures which are capital-intensive and risky (like oil exploration) demand high profit margins to justify the investment needed.
Beside the risk that Venezuela won't re-invest in exploration, there's another economically-foolish aspect of their behavior. By selling their oil internally at below the international cost they're giving up the opportunity to acquire all of the foreign goods the price difference could buy. Yes, it lowers local cost of goods and travel, but inefficiently since it fails to incentivize economization, so less value is recovered than is lost.
Of course, what they're recovering is free, insofar as it would otherwise flow out of the country to the evicted oil companies. But that won't be true of the fruits of future oil exploration, even assuming it is funded and executed efficiently. Oh, and they've lost more foreign investment than just in the oil field. No one is going to be very interested in plowing money into Venezuelan enterprises which might later be taken. That won't affect every category of foreign investment, but it will affect many.
All in all, I think Venezuela's decision was at the very least highly risky and it will probably turn out to have been a bad one in the long run.
Copyright was meant to feed the auhors, not their heirs.
It wasn't meant to feed either. The purpose is to encourage publication of new works so they'll flow into the public domain and thereby promote progress in the useful arts and sciences. Feeding authors is the mechanism chosen to achieve that purpose, but if the purpose can be achieved without feeding authors, that's even better. Society has an interest in encouraging publication of new works. Feeding authors is the job of the authors.
I don't think it's a non-answer. I think it's the truth.
I work for Google, and the attitude expressed in that quote is pretty typical of the way people at Google think. The primary goal is to do something cool and world-changing, and the assumption is that if you do something sufficiently cool and world-changing there will be some way to make money off of it. If you think about it, that's pretty much what happened with Google's first product -- it got widely-used, got funded, moved off of Stanford and started spooling up as a real company before it really focused on figuring out how to generate revenue. And there were a number of false starts before they hit on the whole real-time auction for unobtrusive text ads idea.
People look at projects like Glass and self-driving cars and whatnot and ask "How do you plan to make money off of it?", and when the answer is "We haven't figured that out yet" people think that Google must be lying -- because clearly NO corporation would ever create any product without a clear plan of exactly how it will be monetized. Well, as far as I can tell, "We don't know yet" is both truthful and complete. There are probably a dozen vague ideas kicking around, but it's likely that's all they are.
Of course, everyone recognizes that eventually there has to be a way to make money, or the product will die, but Google is just fine with investing large amounts of money on R&D for ideas they don't yet know how to monetize. When a product moves beyond R&D to rolling out on a large scale, then it has to be pretty clear how the product will pay its way, but up until then "It's really cool and there ought to be some way to make money" is good enough.
Also, I think it should be pointed out that the "obvious" answer -- advertising -- isn't all that obvious. Google makes the vast majority of its revenues from advertising, but it is not, fundamentally, an advertising company. Google is a technology company that focuses on building (or acquiring and scaling) new technologies, and then looks for a way to make them generate revenues. If it turns out (as it often does for web-based products) that advertising is the way to make them pay, fine. And given Google's advertising infrastructure, advertising is the "go-to" option for how to monetize a new product. But it's not the only option, and it's not really even the preferred option.
Slashdot Mirror
Nonsense. If you don't think banks contribute to the economy, you should study some of the economies throughout history that haven't had a functioning banking system.
Banking is of critical importance to the functioning of the economy. The function of banks and bankers is to enable those people and businesses who can make use of money to employ people and make things to get the cash they need to hire those people and make those things. And that can't be done simply by handing out money to whoever asks, either. The function of banks is, essentially, to determine where money needs to go in the economy in order to generate maximum benefit -- which benefit is measured by maximum ability to generate revenue, which means maximum ability to provide people with things they think are of value.
Doing that effectively requires lots of very bright people, and lots of effort by those people. The fact that you don't see the value in their work just means that you don't understand the indirect effects of what they do. Note that I'm not saying they don't screw up, and that their screwups can't be just as impactful in a negative way as their good work does in a positive way. Actually, that's a good point... if they didn't contribute so much positive value, they wouldn't have so much influence that their screwups could do so much damage.
Basically, without bankers there would be no Wawa, and therefore no one at Wawa making sandwiches. More precisely, if there were no bankers, Wawa would still be a small family business with a handful of stores at best, because they'd have had to fund their growth out of profits rather than being able to borrow.
It is meaningless for the entity that mints money to "save" it.
You know the government doesn't create money, right? The Federal Reserve creates some, and the banks create the rest, via fractional reserve lending. So this part of your argument makes no sense. The Treasury department does mint the physical bills and coins used to represent the funds created by the Fed and the banks, but those represent a tiny fraction of the dollars in circulation, and the minting process doesn't create the value, just the physical tokens.
Also, the government borrows by selling treasury bonds. It pays down the debt by buying those bonds back (or, more often, by simply not issuing new bonds as the old ones mature and have to be paid off -- the debt is constantly being rolled over into new bonds). If it wanted to, the government absolutely could save money. If it bought back all of the outstanding bonds, that would get the debt to zero. It could then deposit any excess tax revenues with the Federal Reserve, which would lend them out to banks, just as it lends out the money it creates... but it wouldn't have to create any money to do it.
So, yes, the federal government could save money if it wanted to. There's nothing stopping it, and it would even earn interest on the savings.
And if your code base is small.
OTOH, if you have several million lines of code and you switch branches a dozen (or two dozen!) times per day... SVN is really painful.
Using SSL is ineffective, because the Chinese firewall active sends connection reset packets to disrupt your SSL connection.
It's worth pointing out that in most of the world Google already does all-SSL all the time. I don't know if you're right that the Chinese firewalls disrupt SSL, or if the Chinese firewalls play man-in-the-middle, but either way SSL doesn't really help when your opponent has that sort of resources.
Maybe. I don't think most people in Utah and Colorado use snow tires, though. Some do, certainly, especially those who live in the mountains and have to drive daily on steep roads that aren't well-traveled. The rest (including me) just drive carefully the ~20 days per year that it's bad. The Mountain West doesn't tend to have lots of persistent snow and ice -- it snows hard for a few days, then the sun is out for two or three weeks, usually. Not enough sun to melt all the snow, but enough to melt it off of roads that have been cleared by plows. By 3-4 days after a storm all of the roads are clear and dry, except for occasional patches of ice where snowmelt during the day freezes at night (and on colder days). Those patches are rare on highways because they're on raised roadbeds. They're common on residential streets, but you don't drive fast there anyway.
Where I work, if you comment out code rather than deleting it, you won't get past the code review, and you can't submit until the reviewer has signed off.
You can switch branches in SVN just fine.
And as a bonus you'll have time to go get a cup of coffee!
I live in Colorado, and have lived for most of my life in Utah. What I notice is that the first big snowstorm of every winter season causes a large number of slide-offs. After that, not so much. I think lots of people forget how to drive on snow and ice during the warm season. That and the real morons can't drive after the first snowstorm because their car is in the shop.
Is autobahn maintenance done by the states or the federal government? I haven't driven around Germany a great deal, but I've noticed some variation in the road quality which seems regional. It wouldn't be surprising if, say, Bavaria and Schwabia, took different approaches to road maintenance.
That is what happens in the US, so in some states the Interstates are much better-maintained than in others. The US federal government provides some funding for Interstate maintenance, but much of it comes from the states, and the states do all of the actual work (or contract it out).
I work for a California public college.
I had to sign that I would be willing to take a loyalty oath as condition of employment (didn't have to actually take an oath, though).
This shit has been around (at least) since the last time right-wing crazies shit all over our civil liberties-- the "red scare."
Each time the right manages to get a bit more of this shit entrenched. Maybe this time will be the one or maybe 3 more of these right-wing police state takeovers
Yeah, those California universities are bastions of right-wing radicalism.
Like many Americans you seem to be unaware of what right and left wing really mean, and of the reality of the power structures in your country.
I understand exactly what they mean. The AC I responded to, not so much.
It isn't just a simple matter of teaching metric either. All these industries and their supporting industries must switch or provide parallel measures (of course, the old timers will stick to imperial in that case, since it's there too). That's very, very, very expensive both in material and time.
That sounds like something that will require a lot of work, and will require hiring a lot of people to do that work. If only there was an unemployment problem in America...
So your solution is to make it worse?
This is just the common broken window fallacy. Adding jobs by reducing productivity doesn't work. If you reduce productivity and increase the number of workers needed to produce the same output, you increase the cost of whatever they're making, which increases the price, which reduces demand. End result: fewer jobs, not more.
The way to create jobs is to create new production, making stuff that wasn't being made before, either because it was made somewhere else, or because it was more expensive and you found a way to make it cheaper which increased demand, or because it didn't even exist before.
Otherwise, we could just solve the unemployment problem by breaking everyone's windows and hiring all the unemployed to replace them. Whenever the number of broken windows begins to dwindle, just break more.
Actually, going to the metric system would likely increase productivity by a non-trivial amount, in the long run. In the short run, though, it would be mildly harmful, depending on how aggressively it was enforced.
I work for a California public college.
I had to sign that I would be willing to take a loyalty oath as condition of employment (didn't have to actually take an oath, though).
This shit has been around (at least) since the last time right-wing crazies shit all over our civil liberties-- the "red scare."
Each time the right manages to get a bit more of this shit entrenched. Maybe this time will be the one or maybe 3 more of these right-wing police state takeovers
Yeah, those California universities are bastions of right-wing radicalism.
What happens if terminator genes spread to non-GM plants, leading to most/all plants having no viable seeds?
It's only a problem if all of the plants gain the terminator genes at once, which is vanishingly unlikely. Otherwise, what happens is that the plants that get the terminator gene get immediately selected out of the gene pool.
True, but not really relevant to my post.
The term assault rifle predates M16As and goes back to WWII.
Only in German.
But I fail to see the relevance to my post.
Yeah, it's been a few years since I was discharged. The M243/M249 bit was a typo. I was a SAW gunner for a couple of years, so I know very well what it should be.
Every M16 I fired in the military in the early 80's had a 3-position selector for: single-shot / 3-round-burst / full-auto
You're mis-remembering. All M16s have had a safe position, and none have had both burst and full auto.
who can only carry on duty, don't take their firearm home, etc.
So, not like cops. Many departments require their officers to carry 24x7, and thanks to LEOSA, even those who don't have official direction/sanction can (and many do) carry concealed everywhere they go. Oh, and I've never heard of a police department in the US whose officers don't take their guns home.
Note that military M16 has select-fire which can choose between semi-automatic, 3 round burst, & full-automatic.
This is incorrect.
The most widely deployed version of the M16, the M16A2 had three positions on the selector switch: safe, semi-automatic and three-round burst. There is no full auto setting, because the US military has decided that except in the hands of highly-trained troops full auto wastes ammunition to no effect (note that this is not the case for real machine guns, like the M60 and M243, which also burn through the ammo but can use it much more effectively).
The M16A3 does have full auto rather than three-round burst, but it's used only by very small numbers of highly-trained troops. SEALs and such.
The new M16A4, now standard issue for the Marine Corps and some Army units, has safe, semi and three-round burst. No full auto.
No M16 variant has ever had a four-position selector switch, which is what would be needed to provide semi, three-round burst, full auto and a safety position.
They do not. Venezuela is screwed in terms of oil; they have some of the largest reserves in the Western Hemisphere, but no one is bringing in new technology or new investment to help them develop thier fields. The nationalization of the ExxonMobil assets was entirely a vote grab; Chavez bought the happiness of the poor voters by giving them cheap gas and energy, at the expense of long term economic destablization as they will eventually run out their current wells, and new ones can't be dug. Venezuela has no good excavation technology, it's all owned by the "mega-rich foreign corporations", and since Venezuela sucks as a place to do business, they're not coming to develop new fields. Chavez will pass in the next few months most likely, he has no good successor in place (none of his guys have the clout that he did, and they all comepte internally) and they're going to slide economically in the next decade when they run out of oil and refined gas. That will cause major upheaval in Venzuela, likely in the next decade but certainly in the next two, and the nationalization of the oil industry will be a direct contributor.
That sounds about right.
I hope the country has the capital and the expertise to develop those new wells, because there's no way any foreign oil company or investor will even dream of getting involved.
I'm curious to see how this works out, because they do have the cash to pull this off if they don't fritter it away. The free market is great at finding and eliminating inefficiencies, but don't forget that profit is an inefficiency, too (especially in areas with natural monopolies or high barriers to entry: profit can inflate the price well beyond what bloated bureaucracy can).
Profit is not an inefficiency. In some ways it's a measure of systemic inefficiency, but more often it's a simple reflection of capital requirements and risk. Ventures which are capital-intensive and risky (like oil exploration) demand high profit margins to justify the investment needed.
Beside the risk that Venezuela won't re-invest in exploration, there's another economically-foolish aspect of their behavior. By selling their oil internally at below the international cost they're giving up the opportunity to acquire all of the foreign goods the price difference could buy. Yes, it lowers local cost of goods and travel, but inefficiently since it fails to incentivize economization, so less value is recovered than is lost.
Of course, what they're recovering is free, insofar as it would otherwise flow out of the country to the evicted oil companies. But that won't be true of the fruits of future oil exploration, even assuming it is funded and executed efficiently. Oh, and they've lost more foreign investment than just in the oil field. No one is going to be very interested in plowing money into Venezuelan enterprises which might later be taken. That won't affect every category of foreign investment, but it will affect many.
All in all, I think Venezuela's decision was at the very least highly risky and it will probably turn out to have been a bad one in the long run.
So while the ChromeBooks are limted to online now
I bought both of mine at Best Buy. Had to drive to another city, though. Six of the seven Best Buy stores within 30 miles of me were sold out.
Copyright was meant to feed the auhors, not their heirs.
It wasn't meant to feed either. The purpose is to encourage publication of new works so they'll flow into the public domain and thereby promote progress in the useful arts and sciences. Feeding authors is the mechanism chosen to achieve that purpose, but if the purpose can be achieved without feeding authors, that's even better. Society has an interest in encouraging publication of new works. Feeding authors is the job of the authors.
I'm sure you've seen this, but for anyone who hasn't: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hxmbbtuRszA
Probably my favorite non-answer answer of 2012.
I don't think it's a non-answer. I think it's the truth.
I work for Google, and the attitude expressed in that quote is pretty typical of the way people at Google think. The primary goal is to do something cool and world-changing, and the assumption is that if you do something sufficiently cool and world-changing there will be some way to make money off of it. If you think about it, that's pretty much what happened with Google's first product -- it got widely-used, got funded, moved off of Stanford and started spooling up as a real company before it really focused on figuring out how to generate revenue. And there were a number of false starts before they hit on the whole real-time auction for unobtrusive text ads idea.
People look at projects like Glass and self-driving cars and whatnot and ask "How do you plan to make money off of it?", and when the answer is "We haven't figured that out yet" people think that Google must be lying -- because clearly NO corporation would ever create any product without a clear plan of exactly how it will be monetized. Well, as far as I can tell, "We don't know yet" is both truthful and complete. There are probably a dozen vague ideas kicking around, but it's likely that's all they are.
Of course, everyone recognizes that eventually there has to be a way to make money, or the product will die, but Google is just fine with investing large amounts of money on R&D for ideas they don't yet know how to monetize. When a product moves beyond R&D to rolling out on a large scale, then it has to be pretty clear how the product will pay its way, but up until then "It's really cool and there ought to be some way to make money" is good enough.
Also, I think it should be pointed out that the "obvious" answer -- advertising -- isn't all that obvious. Google makes the vast majority of its revenues from advertising, but it is not, fundamentally, an advertising company. Google is a technology company that focuses on building (or acquiring and scaling) new technologies, and then looks for a way to make them generate revenues. If it turns out (as it often does for web-based products) that advertising is the way to make them pay, fine. And given Google's advertising infrastructure, advertising is the "go-to" option for how to monetize a new product. But it's not the only option, and it's not really even the preferred option.