One (1) new indoor mall has been built in the US in the last decade.
That's because, for whatever reason, people seem to prefer the new outdoor-style malls. I can name a half-dozen very large, upscale, trendy outdoor malls that have been built within driving range of me within the last five years. It's possible that they cost less than indoor malls, I suppose, but there's still a lot of money in them.
For a while I kept predicting that it was stupid to build outdoor malls, since I live in an area that gets quite cold and has a lot of snow in the winter, but people keep flocking to them in droves, even in the dead of winter.
We try pretty hard to make our products be available as widely as we can. That's our philosophy.
So, where's the Google Talk client for iOS?
There are many Google Talk clients for iOS. One of the many advantages of choosing a standard chat protocol (XMPP) for Google Talk is that Google doesn't have to create clients for every platform to make the product available there. Google's product is available on iOS.
Where is the scholarship for repletion who happened to have fucked up once? or take into account that person was also supporting a family and an alcoholic mother?
I have a very good friend who got in trouble with the law as a teenager, was basically ordered by the judge to join the Navy at age 17, did three years in the Navy before they "allowed" him to terminate his enlistment early (read: he was such a screwup they didn't want him), then ended up with a couple of felony drug convictions. By the time he got straight, he also had a semi-insane wife and two kids (twin boys), and was working full-time to support them, pay for a mortgage, etc. He took the GED and went to a local four-year community college, where his poor math and English skills put him in remedial courses (which increased his tuition). He continued working, a mixture of full-time and part-time, and supporting his family, while he went to school. Along the way his wife wigged out on him and he ended up alone with his (now three) boys. It took him about seven years, but he finished a BS in pure mathematics with a minor in CS, and was selected as outstanding graduate by the math faculty and strongly encouraged to continue on to get an MS and a PhD. He graduated with less than $4000 in student loans, and never received any scholarship money.
How? He worked hard. That's all.
Personally, I got math and CS degrees from the same four-year college with no debt at all (but without the other challenges he had). I did get academic tuition waivers for two years, based purely on my college GPA -- each year they sorted the applicants by GPA and gave waivers to the top n, so I had to maintain > 3.9 to be sure of getting my waivers, and I joined the US Air Force reserves to get the GI Bill (which I didn't actually need, as it turned out -- that was just spending money), and I worked part-time, first in the library tutoring math and later for the math department, writing math ed software for $7 per hour. By the time I graduated I had a pretty solid resume as well as a degree.
It can be done... lots and lots of people do it. You just have to want it.
Well, yes. I expect my computer to just work, I am entitled to that which I paid for. If Android can't just work then I have no reason to leave the Apple ecosystem.
So what will you do when your Apple device doesn't just work?
What are the fucking chances that the GPS knows better?
In a lot of cases... the chances are pretty good. People don't typically keep detailed logs of travel times on various routes and compare them regularly to see which is the more efficient. They just find a route that seems good and stick with it, with a strong tendency to favor simple routes.
The routing algorithms used by GPS devices and on-line services like Google Maps, however, are searching for the optimal route. Whether or not they find it depends on the accuracy of their data; they may not have good information about speed limits, much less what speeds vehicles actually use. But where they have good data available there's every reason to expect that they'll choose a route that is at least as good as that chosen by a human driver who knows the area well. And then there's the fact that they may have real-time traffic data available to them which the human driver does not.
Not true in general. Many income stocks don't have, and aren't expected to have, continual growth. They are expected to continue returning an acceptable profit, and to pay out solid dividends quarter after quarter, but that doesn't require growth, just a good business model.
Their dividends do need to keep up with inflation, but that's not growth, it's just staying in place. Not keeping pace with inflation means you're losing value in real terms. Inflation isn't a necessary feature of capitalist economies, but it's the norm with fiat currencies because it's hard to keep the real value of a currency constant and deflation generally causes more problems than inflation, so central banks deliberately choose fiscal policy that is slightly inflationary. Again, inflation has nothing to do with growth, though. It adds zeros to the dollar values over time, but those are just numbers. A company can hold basically constant in real value (share price and dividends) and be considered successful.
I'm not an economist either, but I recently read a good book called "Basic Economics", by Thomas Sowell, which explains all of the issues in easy-to-understand terms.
Capitalism doesn't require infinite growth. Our current situation appears to, but that's only because we've buried ourselves in so much debt that our only hope is to grow our way out of it.
We need to either drastically lower the hours for 'full time' work, while increasing wages to compensate, or stop being afraid of welfare and accept that everyone doesn't have to be employed, but still guaranteed housing, healthcare, and living expenses.
If automation had the effect you're predicting, we'd already be there. In the US right now, 9% of jobs are in manufacturing, 4% are in farming. So, 13% of people are needed to do what consumed effectively the entire population a hundred years ago. How is it that we don't have 80% unemployment right now?
We've moved from an agricultural economy to an industrial economy to a service and information economy. I look around my workplace and I see hundreds of people tapping on keyboards. None of them are making anything tangible; nothing that anyone can eat or drink or use to clothe or shelter themselves, neither directly nor indirectly -- and yet they're all gainfully employed. People are happily paying my employer for the output of their days of key-pressing.
What you misunderstand is the fundamental nature of an economy. An economy is just a method of allocating scarce resources. When some resources become abundant, they become unimportant to the economy -- even if they're still important to people. If food production becomes very inexpensive then food production becomes an activity conducted on a large scale by very few people, because that's all it can support -- but providing all of the transportation and other processes needed to efficiently deliver that food to my refrigerator takes a large number of people. This is exactly what has already happened in the industrialized world and is why we have more truck drivers and grocery store employees than we do farmers.
What happens when you automate other pieces of what currently employes people? Whatever was produced by those people, whether it's physical widgets or sophisticated production process plans becomes less scarce, and the people move on to other parts. What happens when you automate every part of the production of every good or service, meaning very small numbers of people are needed to oversee the operations? The rest of the people move on to doing something else that the machines can't do... perhaps simply by being machines. Maybe we'll move into a true service economy, where every job does nothing but provide direct service to other people. Perhaps we'll all be artists, musicians, authors, or massage therapists... or art critics, music reviewers, book editors or teachers of massage therapy.
The fact is that there will always be things that you can do for me that I want done, and vice versa. Even if nothing else is scarce, human labor is still going to be a limited quantity, and will still have value to other people. The labor spent overseeing the production of all of the physical goods needed for everyone may be miniscule, so it'll be a tiny and almost irrelevant portion of the economy (unless it stops working, in which case demand will make it important again -- markets handle that sort of thing extremely well), and the major trading of value will be in other activities. What they'll be is impossible to predict, but what we can safely say is that there will be something... human society has changed dramatically time and time again over the millenia, with technological progress creating fantastic labor savings, but labor has always invented some other place to go. There is no reason to expect that this time is any different.
At each transition, the change is hard on individuals whose jobs are subsumed by progress. That's unfortunate. But they learn new things (or not), and we collectively all get by, and are collectively all better off for the increased efficiency.
Logging every trivial exception with a full stack trace and parameters quickly bloats log files beyond the point of being useful.
Disk space is cheap. Any decent OS provides a very comprehensive suite of text searching and manipulation tools. If you can't find what you're looking for in a "bloated" log file, you need to learn how to use those tools. You can't look at what you don't log, but you can ignore what you do.
There's a non-obvious reason why a full stack trace is really valuable: It provides a sort of error "fingerprint". The same line of code might throw for different root causes (especially when it's library code throwing), but if two logged exceptions have the exact same trace, they're very likely two instance of the same error. You can set up automated monitoring of your log files to identify and count exceptions, categorizing them by stack trace. Have your monitoring system file a bug report for every unique trace, then let developers who analyze the problems indicate whether the error really represents a problem. If they determine it isn't, but it's not worth changing the code, let them close the bug and tell the monitoring system that that trace should not be re-filed or re-opened... unless its occurrence spikes, then the monitoring system should re-open the bug.
There is one exception-logging error I often see that really is a problem, though: There's almost never any reason to both log and throw the same exception. Throwing and logging results in the same exception showing up twice in the log, which is very confusing because there's rarely any way to be certain that the two traces are the same error.
Not a bad idea, but I'd say your proposed rates are too low by at least two orders of magnitude. $100 for a ten-year monopoly on something already ten years old? If you don't expect to make at least $10,000 from that over the next ten years ($1,000 per year), IMHO it clearly isn't worth renewing and ought to go into the public domain. I wouldn't consider $100 billion too much to ask for a 150-year monopoly (10 years free plus 14 10-year renewals).
For big media companies, I'd agree. But it's not that uncommon for an author, for example, to struggle for a decade or two before making it, and I think it's worth giving such small players an opportunity to hold onto their copyrights for a little longer for very little expense. I wanted to make that first renewal expensive enough that only works that have some chance of making money will be renewed, but to set the bar very low.
I wouldn't consider $100 billion too much to ask for a 150-year monopoly (10 years free plus 14 10-year renewals).
You might not, but the companies who actually want to hold onto their copyrights for that long would likely disagree. They'd bridle at my suggestion; they'd ridicule yours. Why do we care? Because they have enormous lobbying influence. Under my schedule Disney could still easily afford to hang onto Steamboat Willie for another 20-30 years, but after that it would start to get difficult, and then prohibitive. I think a proposal with fees like mine would allow big media companies to figure "well, okay, there's time to change this if we need to." Oh, and since I wouldn't propose that the new terms be applied to old copyrights, they'd really be saying "We can keep stuff for 100+ years if we need to"... BUT the cost would still be high enough that only the most lucrative copyrights would be extended.
It's an okay proposal. I think it could be significantly scaled back in terms of the fees and would work just as well, though. Merely having any elective renewal process would put an awful lot of stuff into the public domain, because most of what's published isn't worth anything at all a few years after it's released.
Also, percentage fees are too complicated. They require adding a big accounting exercise to the renewal process. Just go with an exponentially-increasing fixed fee. And to avoid enormous political opposition, I'd extend the number of renewals significantly. Push the max out to like 150 years -- but use the exponentially-increasing renewal fees to make that extremely expensive. I'd propose something like:
10-year initial copyright -- free and automatic. No registration required unless and until you need to enforce it in court. Renewals every 10 years (requiring registration at the first renewal), up to a maximum of 14 renewals, with a fee schedule something like: 100, 350, 1K, 4K, 12K, 43K, 150K, 490K, 1.6M, 5.5M, 18M, 62M, 210M, 700M (I picked $100 as the starting point, $1B as the total sum of all payments, solved for the value that made the series ax+...+ax^14 sum to 1B and then rounded the numbers for each year to make them less ugly). Heck, if it didn't arguably violate the "limited times" clause in the Constitution, there's no actual need to put any limit on the number of renewals... just have an accelerating fee schedule such that it eventually becomes impossible for anyone to maintain their renewals.
Okay, I'll admit I got distracted by the fun math. But the point is that you could go for longer total duration and smaller and less complicated fees, but as long as the fees eventually ramp up to extreme levels it'll ensure everything gets pushed into the public domain, and that almost everything gets there fairly quickly. As a practical matter, it's a good idea to create a structure which allows Disney to hang onto Mickey for a few decades yet, just to avoid that fight.
If you increase the minimum wage you may increase the income of some people, but you'll decrease the income of many as well -- to zero. There are two mechanisms that make this true.
First, an absolute one: If the marginal income to the business for employing a worker (what they business can take in by selling the results of that worker's efforts) is less than the minimum wage, then it makes more sense for the business to forego both the income and the expense, since they're a net negative. This isn't all that common, at least not where our current minimum wages are set, but it does happen. In particular, people who have some disabilities, particularly mental capacity, are often made completely unemployable by minimum wages. The more you increase the minimum wage, though, the more people you'll put out of work because the labor they're capable of just isn't worth the wage. Another common solution is to replace the workers with illegals which can be hired for less than minimum wage because they don't dare turn their bosses in for violating the wage laws.
Second, an incremental one: Raising the cost of labor reduces profitability. If it's too low, then it makes sense for the owners to take the money they have invested in the business and put it into another one that produces a better return, which results in 100% unemployment for that company's employees. A more common choice is to take action to restore profitability. There are basically two options: increase prices or increase productivity. Increasing prices is only possible if the competition is doing the same thing... and in the short term that is probably what would happen, but only for a while because some competitor would decide to invest in increased productivity instead. Increasing productivity generally involves one of two possibilities, making workers more productive by increasing their skills, or making them more productive by increasing automation, which usually means doing both. Both, however, tend to change the jobs that were formerly unskilled minimum-wage jobs into jobs requiring skilled labor -- and, even more importantly, they result in needing fewer workers to achieve the same output. End result: Some percentage of the minimum wage workers will lose their jobs. It's not uncommon that all of them lose their jobs. That's what's happening here: Apple is basically firing the low-wage Chinese workers currently producing their devices and replacing them with a much smaller number of highly-paid workers plus lots of machines.
The fact is that numerous studies in many countries around the world have shown time and again that minimum wages have the opposite of the intended effect. Increasing the price of labor reduces the demand for labor, which creates a labor surplus. It's no accident that the countries that have the highest minimum wages and the strongest job security laws have the highest unemployment rates. Economic theory says that's what you should expect, and in fact it's exactly what happens.
Another problem with notion of a "living wage" is that it's generally discussed at a level necessary to provide for a family, but hardly anyone making minimum wage has a family. I can't find the links right now, but IIRC, 90+% of minimum wage earners are less than 25 years of age, and very few of those people have families. The median income for 25-34 year-olds is over 50K, over three times the minimum wage, and for 35-44 year-olds it's over 60K, 4X minimum wage. The vast majority of people who have families to support make far more than the minimum wage already -- which makes sense, because they've had years of work to accumulate skills which make them more valuable to employers.
The good thing is that increasing the minimum wage probably won't hurt families much, because their earners are already above that. Well, it might hurt them a little if it increases the cost of stuff they buy. The bad thing is that increasing minimum wage will put some younger people out of work, making it harder for the
Different incentives are needed for different people. Just as you wouldn't be very motivated to invest if you didn't get to defer the taxes and instead had to pay income tax on the money now, plus capital gains on the appreciation when you cash out, others might not be motivated by deferring income tax on current investments only to have to pay full income tax on it (and appreciation) when they sell -- and even if they would like the 401K-style deal, it probably doesn't make sense to give it to them. It's optimized for people who will be taking the money out eventually. The wealthy can often arrange to avoid ever cashing out their investments (well, you could too, but it's not likely to make sense for you).
If you can write readable, efficient, well-designed code, test it well, and do it reasonably quickly and without a lot of supervision, I'll hire you right now for some part-time work, at significantly more than $10 per hour. I don't care where you live; we can communicate over the Internet, and I'm sure I can find some way to pay you.
Do you hav 401k? Aren't you therefore an investor?
Nope. My 401(k) will be taxed as ordinary income when I go to withdraw from it. If I was an investor, it would be taxed as a capital gain.
You're investing either way.
And, if you prefer, you can choose to invest with after-tax dollars, and then when you take your money it's appreciation would be taxed as a capital gain. That's your choice.
My "good reason" for carrying a knife is that I might need to cut or pry something. I don't typically know in advance when I'm going to need it... but actually it's a rare day I don't pull the knife out for some reason.
But, then, I also think that "because I might need to stab someone to defend myself" is another perfectly valid reason for carrying a knife. I've never needed a weapon to defend myself, but it's a good idea to be prepared.
relying on ssl is not a good idea at all. All it takes is a man-in-the-middle attack with a fake cert and game over. Apparently the Iranians have done this to spy on people using gmail.
Which is why Chrome (and ChromeOS) now know what the valid Google root CAs are. I seem to recall and article that said Chrome also recently started notifying the user when certificates change "unexpectedly" (old cert is unexpired, new one is from a different CA, etc. -- I don't recall what the heuristics were), so there's also some protection for non-Google certs. You can also manually check the identify of the CA that issued the cert being used and verify that it hasn't changed. If you want to be really sure, write down the fingerprints of the certs of the sites you're going to visit before you go, and then check them yourself. You could also pare down the list of accepted CAs.
The only thing your correlation shows is that low population density means low crime.
Places with low population have high gun ownership and few gun laws. Places with high population had high crime so they instated tough gun laws.
Not true. If you look at cities by size and correlate them with violence you see that big cities in states with little gun control have lower crime rates, for one thing. There are various other measures that dispute your claim.
Its more likely this is actually modelling the passage of a new batch of guns through the criminal underworld.
I always find it hailarious that you in the states cite the ability to own firarms as something that keeps you safe when your obscenely high murder rate points to the opposite in my opinion.
Check Vermont, you fucking idiot. It has quite possibly the most relaxed gun laws in the country, and is always in the top 5 states for least amount of crime, and usually top 3 for least amount of murders.
That pattern goes far beyond Vermont, too. Look at the Brady Campaign rankings of states by gun laws, and you see an almost perfect correlation between strong gun laws and violence. The states with the least restrictive laws have the least violence. Now, that could be because places with lots of violence react by passing strong gun laws, but the studies on the effect of shall-issue concealed carry laws (laws that require the state to issue concealed carry permits to anyone who doesn't have a criminal record) shows a fairly clear and consistent, if small, decrease in the crime rate when more guns are on the street in the hands of law-abiding citizens.
My guess is that the explanation for the results of this study is gang warfare, a cycle of revenge killings fed and funded by the illegal drug trade. But I've believed for years that the biggest thing we could do to reduce violence in this country is to end the useless, ineffective and counterproductive war on drugs, and I like guns (I'm a concealed carry instructor), so it's not surprising that my view tracks closely with my opinions.
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One (1) new indoor mall has been built in the US in the last decade.
That's because, for whatever reason, people seem to prefer the new outdoor-style malls. I can name a half-dozen very large, upscale, trendy outdoor malls that have been built within driving range of me within the last five years. It's possible that they cost less than indoor malls, I suppose, but there's still a lot of money in them.
For a while I kept predicting that it was stupid to build outdoor malls, since I live in an area that gets quite cold and has a lot of snow in the winter, but people keep flocking to them in droves, even in the dead of winter.
We try pretty hard to make our products be available as widely as we can. That's our philosophy.
So, where's the Google Talk client for iOS?
There are many Google Talk clients for iOS. One of the many advantages of choosing a standard chat protocol (XMPP) for Google Talk is that Google doesn't have to create clients for every platform to make the product available there. Google's product is available on iOS.
Where is the scholarship for repletion who happened to have fucked up once? or take into account that person was also supporting a family and an alcoholic mother?
I have a very good friend who got in trouble with the law as a teenager, was basically ordered by the judge to join the Navy at age 17, did three years in the Navy before they "allowed" him to terminate his enlistment early (read: he was such a screwup they didn't want him), then ended up with a couple of felony drug convictions. By the time he got straight, he also had a semi-insane wife and two kids (twin boys), and was working full-time to support them, pay for a mortgage, etc. He took the GED and went to a local four-year community college, where his poor math and English skills put him in remedial courses (which increased his tuition). He continued working, a mixture of full-time and part-time, and supporting his family, while he went to school. Along the way his wife wigged out on him and he ended up alone with his (now three) boys. It took him about seven years, but he finished a BS in pure mathematics with a minor in CS, and was selected as outstanding graduate by the math faculty and strongly encouraged to continue on to get an MS and a PhD. He graduated with less than $4000 in student loans, and never received any scholarship money.
How? He worked hard. That's all.
Personally, I got math and CS degrees from the same four-year college with no debt at all (but without the other challenges he had). I did get academic tuition waivers for two years, based purely on my college GPA -- each year they sorted the applicants by GPA and gave waivers to the top n, so I had to maintain > 3.9 to be sure of getting my waivers, and I joined the US Air Force reserves to get the GI Bill (which I didn't actually need, as it turned out -- that was just spending money), and I worked part-time, first in the library tutoring math and later for the math department, writing math ed software for $7 per hour. By the time I graduated I had a pretty solid resume as well as a degree.
It can be done... lots and lots of people do it. You just have to want it.
Well, yes. I expect my computer to just work, I am entitled to that which I paid for. If Android can't just work then I have no reason to leave the Apple ecosystem.
So what will you do when your Apple device doesn't just work?
http://www.forbes.com/sites/adriankingsleyhughes/2012/07/06/first-ios-malware-hits-app-store/
I didn't say "always".
Certainly, it depends on the data -- though the data will keep getting better.
What are the fucking chances that the GPS knows better?
In a lot of cases... the chances are pretty good. People don't typically keep detailed logs of travel times on various routes and compare them regularly to see which is the more efficient. They just find a route that seems good and stick with it, with a strong tendency to favor simple routes.
The routing algorithms used by GPS devices and on-line services like Google Maps, however, are searching for the optimal route. Whether or not they find it depends on the accuracy of their data; they may not have good information about speed limits, much less what speeds vehicles actually use. But where they have good data available there's every reason to expect that they'll choose a route that is at least as good as that chosen by a human driver who knows the area well. And then there's the fact that they may have real-time traffic data available to them which the human driver does not.
Not true in general. Many income stocks don't have, and aren't expected to have, continual growth. They are expected to continue returning an acceptable profit, and to pay out solid dividends quarter after quarter, but that doesn't require growth, just a good business model.
Their dividends do need to keep up with inflation, but that's not growth, it's just staying in place. Not keeping pace with inflation means you're losing value in real terms. Inflation isn't a necessary feature of capitalist economies, but it's the norm with fiat currencies because it's hard to keep the real value of a currency constant and deflation generally causes more problems than inflation, so central banks deliberately choose fiscal policy that is slightly inflationary. Again, inflation has nothing to do with growth, though. It adds zeros to the dollar values over time, but those are just numbers. A company can hold basically constant in real value (share price and dividends) and be considered successful.
I'm not an economist either, but I recently read a good book called "Basic Economics", by Thomas Sowell, which explains all of the issues in easy-to-understand terms.
Capitalism doesn't require infinite growth. Our current situation appears to, but that's only because we've buried ourselves in so much debt that our only hope is to grow our way out of it.
We need to either drastically lower the hours for 'full time' work, while increasing wages to compensate, or stop being afraid of welfare and accept that everyone doesn't have to be employed, but still guaranteed housing, healthcare, and living expenses.
If automation had the effect you're predicting, we'd already be there. In the US right now, 9% of jobs are in manufacturing, 4% are in farming. So, 13% of people are needed to do what consumed effectively the entire population a hundred years ago. How is it that we don't have 80% unemployment right now?
We've moved from an agricultural economy to an industrial economy to a service and information economy. I look around my workplace and I see hundreds of people tapping on keyboards. None of them are making anything tangible; nothing that anyone can eat or drink or use to clothe or shelter themselves, neither directly nor indirectly -- and yet they're all gainfully employed. People are happily paying my employer for the output of their days of key-pressing.
What you misunderstand is the fundamental nature of an economy. An economy is just a method of allocating scarce resources. When some resources become abundant, they become unimportant to the economy -- even if they're still important to people. If food production becomes very inexpensive then food production becomes an activity conducted on a large scale by very few people, because that's all it can support -- but providing all of the transportation and other processes needed to efficiently deliver that food to my refrigerator takes a large number of people. This is exactly what has already happened in the industrialized world and is why we have more truck drivers and grocery store employees than we do farmers.
What happens when you automate other pieces of what currently employes people? Whatever was produced by those people, whether it's physical widgets or sophisticated production process plans becomes less scarce, and the people move on to other parts. What happens when you automate every part of the production of every good or service, meaning very small numbers of people are needed to oversee the operations? The rest of the people move on to doing something else that the machines can't do... perhaps simply by being machines. Maybe we'll move into a true service economy, where every job does nothing but provide direct service to other people. Perhaps we'll all be artists, musicians, authors, or massage therapists... or art critics, music reviewers, book editors or teachers of massage therapy.
The fact is that there will always be things that you can do for me that I want done, and vice versa. Even if nothing else is scarce, human labor is still going to be a limited quantity, and will still have value to other people. The labor spent overseeing the production of all of the physical goods needed for everyone may be miniscule, so it'll be a tiny and almost irrelevant portion of the economy (unless it stops working, in which case demand will make it important again -- markets handle that sort of thing extremely well), and the major trading of value will be in other activities. What they'll be is impossible to predict, but what we can safely say is that there will be something... human society has changed dramatically time and time again over the millenia, with technological progress creating fantastic labor savings, but labor has always invented some other place to go. There is no reason to expect that this time is any different.
At each transition, the change is hard on individuals whose jobs are subsumed by progress. That's unfortunate. But they learn new things (or not), and we collectively all get by, and are collectively all better off for the increased efficiency.
Logging every trivial exception with a full stack trace and parameters quickly bloats log files beyond the point of being useful.
Disk space is cheap. Any decent OS provides a very comprehensive suite of text searching and manipulation tools. If you can't find what you're looking for in a "bloated" log file, you need to learn how to use those tools. You can't look at what you don't log, but you can ignore what you do.
There's a non-obvious reason why a full stack trace is really valuable: It provides a sort of error "fingerprint". The same line of code might throw for different root causes (especially when it's library code throwing), but if two logged exceptions have the exact same trace, they're very likely two instance of the same error. You can set up automated monitoring of your log files to identify and count exceptions, categorizing them by stack trace. Have your monitoring system file a bug report for every unique trace, then let developers who analyze the problems indicate whether the error really represents a problem. If they determine it isn't, but it's not worth changing the code, let them close the bug and tell the monitoring system that that trace should not be re-filed or re-opened... unless its occurrence spikes, then the monitoring system should re-open the bug.
There is one exception-logging error I often see that really is a problem, though: There's almost never any reason to both log and throw the same exception. Throwing and logging results in the same exception showing up twice in the log, which is very confusing because there's rarely any way to be certain that the two traces are the same error.
Flamebait? Really? Explaining the standard and well supported economic theory around artificial wage restrictions is flamebait?
Not a bad idea, but I'd say your proposed rates are too low by at least two orders of magnitude. $100 for a ten-year monopoly on something already ten years old? If you don't expect to make at least $10,000 from that over the next ten years ($1,000 per year), IMHO it clearly isn't worth renewing and ought to go into the public domain. I wouldn't consider $100 billion too much to ask for a 150-year monopoly (10 years free plus 14 10-year renewals).
For big media companies, I'd agree. But it's not that uncommon for an author, for example, to struggle for a decade or two before making it, and I think it's worth giving such small players an opportunity to hold onto their copyrights for a little longer for very little expense. I wanted to make that first renewal expensive enough that only works that have some chance of making money will be renewed, but to set the bar very low.
I wouldn't consider $100 billion too much to ask for a 150-year monopoly (10 years free plus 14 10-year renewals).
You might not, but the companies who actually want to hold onto their copyrights for that long would likely disagree. They'd bridle at my suggestion; they'd ridicule yours. Why do we care? Because they have enormous lobbying influence. Under my schedule Disney could still easily afford to hang onto Steamboat Willie for another 20-30 years, but after that it would start to get difficult, and then prohibitive. I think a proposal with fees like mine would allow big media companies to figure "well, okay, there's time to change this if we need to." Oh, and since I wouldn't propose that the new terms be applied to old copyrights, they'd really be saying "We can keep stuff for 100+ years if we need to"... BUT the cost would still be high enough that only the most lucrative copyrights would be extended.
This is a good proposal.
It's an okay proposal. I think it could be significantly scaled back in terms of the fees and would work just as well, though. Merely having any elective renewal process would put an awful lot of stuff into the public domain, because most of what's published isn't worth anything at all a few years after it's released.
Also, percentage fees are too complicated. They require adding a big accounting exercise to the renewal process. Just go with an exponentially-increasing fixed fee. And to avoid enormous political opposition, I'd extend the number of renewals significantly. Push the max out to like 150 years -- but use the exponentially-increasing renewal fees to make that extremely expensive. I'd propose something like:
10-year initial copyright -- free and automatic. No registration required unless and until you need to enforce it in court. Renewals every 10 years (requiring registration at the first renewal), up to a maximum of 14 renewals, with a fee schedule something like: 100, 350, 1K, 4K, 12K, 43K, 150K, 490K, 1.6M, 5.5M, 18M, 62M, 210M, 700M (I picked $100 as the starting point, $1B as the total sum of all payments, solved for the value that made the series ax+...+ax^14 sum to 1B and then rounded the numbers for each year to make them less ugly). Heck, if it didn't arguably violate the "limited times" clause in the Constitution, there's no actual need to put any limit on the number of renewals... just have an accelerating fee schedule such that it eventually becomes impossible for anyone to maintain their renewals.
Okay, I'll admit I got distracted by the fun math. But the point is that you could go for longer total duration and smaller and less complicated fees, but as long as the fees eventually ramp up to extreme levels it'll ensure everything gets pushed into the public domain, and that almost everything gets there fairly quickly. As a practical matter, it's a good idea to create a structure which allows Disney to hang onto Mickey for a few decades yet, just to avoid that fight.
If you increase the minimum wage you may increase the income of some people, but you'll decrease the income of many as well -- to zero. There are two mechanisms that make this true.
First, an absolute one: If the marginal income to the business for employing a worker (what they business can take in by selling the results of that worker's efforts) is less than the minimum wage, then it makes more sense for the business to forego both the income and the expense, since they're a net negative. This isn't all that common, at least not where our current minimum wages are set, but it does happen. In particular, people who have some disabilities, particularly mental capacity, are often made completely unemployable by minimum wages. The more you increase the minimum wage, though, the more people you'll put out of work because the labor they're capable of just isn't worth the wage. Another common solution is to replace the workers with illegals which can be hired for less than minimum wage because they don't dare turn their bosses in for violating the wage laws.
Second, an incremental one: Raising the cost of labor reduces profitability. If it's too low, then it makes sense for the owners to take the money they have invested in the business and put it into another one that produces a better return, which results in 100% unemployment for that company's employees. A more common choice is to take action to restore profitability. There are basically two options: increase prices or increase productivity. Increasing prices is only possible if the competition is doing the same thing... and in the short term that is probably what would happen, but only for a while because some competitor would decide to invest in increased productivity instead. Increasing productivity generally involves one of two possibilities, making workers more productive by increasing their skills, or making them more productive by increasing automation, which usually means doing both. Both, however, tend to change the jobs that were formerly unskilled minimum-wage jobs into jobs requiring skilled labor -- and, even more importantly, they result in needing fewer workers to achieve the same output. End result: Some percentage of the minimum wage workers will lose their jobs. It's not uncommon that all of them lose their jobs. That's what's happening here: Apple is basically firing the low-wage Chinese workers currently producing their devices and replacing them with a much smaller number of highly-paid workers plus lots of machines.
The fact is that numerous studies in many countries around the world have shown time and again that minimum wages have the opposite of the intended effect. Increasing the price of labor reduces the demand for labor, which creates a labor surplus. It's no accident that the countries that have the highest minimum wages and the strongest job security laws have the highest unemployment rates. Economic theory says that's what you should expect, and in fact it's exactly what happens.
Another problem with notion of a "living wage" is that it's generally discussed at a level necessary to provide for a family, but hardly anyone making minimum wage has a family. I can't find the links right now, but IIRC, 90+% of minimum wage earners are less than 25 years of age, and very few of those people have families. The median income for 25-34 year-olds is over 50K, over three times the minimum wage, and for 35-44 year-olds it's over 60K, 4X minimum wage. The vast majority of people who have families to support make far more than the minimum wage already -- which makes sense, because they've had years of work to accumulate skills which make them more valuable to employers.
The good thing is that increasing the minimum wage probably won't hurt families much, because their earners are already above that. Well, it might hurt them a little if it increases the cost of stuff they buy. The bad thing is that increasing minimum wage will put some younger people out of work, making it harder for the
Death and taxes.
I wasn't aware that there were large uninvested cash reserves. Do you have a reference?
Different incentives are needed for different people. Just as you wouldn't be very motivated to invest if you didn't get to defer the taxes and instead had to pay income tax on the money now, plus capital gains on the appreciation when you cash out, others might not be motivated by deferring income tax on current investments only to have to pay full income tax on it (and appreciation) when they sell -- and even if they would like the 401K-style deal, it probably doesn't make sense to give it to them. It's optimized for people who will be taking the money out eventually. The wealthy can often arrange to avoid ever cashing out their investments (well, you could too, but it's not likely to make sense for you).
If you can write readable, efficient, well-designed code, test it well, and do it reasonably quickly and without a lot of supervision, I'll hire you right now for some part-time work, at significantly more than $10 per hour. I don't care where you live; we can communicate over the Internet, and I'm sure I can find some way to pay you.
Do you hav 401k? Aren't you therefore an investor?
Nope. My 401(k) will be taxed as ordinary income when I go to withdraw from it. If I was an investor, it would be taxed as a capital gain.
You're investing either way.
And, if you prefer, you can choose to invest with after-tax dollars, and then when you take your money it's appreciation would be taxed as a capital gain. That's your choice.
My "good reason" for carrying a knife is that I might need to cut or pry something. I don't typically know in advance when I'm going to need it... but actually it's a rare day I don't pull the knife out for some reason.
But, then, I also think that "because I might need to stab someone to defend myself" is another perfectly valid reason for carrying a knife. I've never needed a weapon to defend myself, but it's a good idea to be prepared.
relying on ssl is not a good idea at all. All it takes is a man-in-the-middle attack with a fake cert and game over. Apparently the Iranians have done this to spy on people using gmail.
Which is why Chrome (and ChromeOS) now know what the valid Google root CAs are. I seem to recall and article that said Chrome also recently started notifying the user when certificates change "unexpectedly" (old cert is unexpired, new one is from a different CA, etc. -- I don't recall what the heuristics were), so there's also some protection for non-Google certs. You can also manually check the identify of the CA that issued the cert being used and verify that it hasn't changed. If you want to be really sure, write down the fingerprints of the certs of the sites you're going to visit before you go, and then check them yourself. You could also pare down the list of accepted CAs.
The only thing your correlation shows is that low population density means low crime.
Places with low population have high gun ownership and few gun laws. Places with high population had high crime so they instated tough gun laws.
Not true. If you look at cities by size and correlate them with violence you see that big cities in states with little gun control have lower crime rates, for one thing. There are various other measures that dispute your claim.
Of MSNBC's race card.
Its more likely this is actually modelling the passage of a new batch of guns through the criminal underworld.
I always find it hailarious that you in the states cite the ability to own firarms as something that keeps you safe when your obscenely high murder rate points to the opposite in my opinion.
Check Vermont, you fucking idiot. It has quite possibly the most relaxed gun laws in the country, and is always in the top 5 states for least amount of crime, and usually top 3 for least amount of murders.
That pattern goes far beyond Vermont, too. Look at the Brady Campaign rankings of states by gun laws, and you see an almost perfect correlation between strong gun laws and violence. The states with the least restrictive laws have the least violence. Now, that could be because places with lots of violence react by passing strong gun laws, but the studies on the effect of shall-issue concealed carry laws (laws that require the state to issue concealed carry permits to anyone who doesn't have a criminal record) shows a fairly clear and consistent, if small, decrease in the crime rate when more guns are on the street in the hands of law-abiding citizens.
My guess is that the explanation for the results of this study is gang warfare, a cycle of revenge killings fed and funded by the illegal drug trade. But I've believed for years that the biggest thing we could do to reduce violence in this country is to end the useless, ineffective and counterproductive war on drugs, and I like guns (I'm a concealed carry instructor), so it's not surprising that my view tracks closely with my opinions.
Now we know where security is on the list of priorities in Linux... its just a minor issue
Now we know where reading comprehension is on the list of priorities in Linux haters.