But the reality is that there is no trust fund in any meaningful sense; there is a set of promises that will have to be redeemed by hurting someone or everyone at some point in the future.
There is a trust fund in as meaningful sense as you can make it.
Got money sitting a bank? What happens if that bank goes under?
To make that analogy accurate, try:
1. Take money from a friend and promise to pay it back later (we'll ignore the fact that you forcibly collect one amount from the friend and promise to pay a potentially different amount, most likely more, later).
2. Deposit the friend's money in a bank.
3. Borrow an equal amount from the bank, using the deposit as collateral (you can't withdraw the deposit without paying off the loan).
4. Spend the borrowed funds on hookers and blow.
Years later, when it comes time to pay the friend, how do you do it? Your bank deposits exactly equal your debts, so that nets out to zero.As long as you have a continually-increasing number of friends with whom you're doing this dance, you can use some of the money you get from new friends to pay off the old ones (which cuts into your hookers and blow budget, so you'll have to borrow that some other way). But if your stream of new friends begins to decline you'll find yourself in a situation where you don't have enough money from new friends to pay the old ones.
Hiding money/silver/gold in a vault/under a matress? What happens if someone steals it?
That isn't analogous at all. The SS trust fund doesn't have any hard assets, and if it did there's no one who could steal them.
And yet... even most of the poor do manage to purchase many of those luxuries, as well as to get enough calories to survive (and often to be overweight), and to keep the house warm, etc., etc. In addition, median square footage of home space per person is increasing, more people have automobiles, if older ones (this is primarily because cars last longer so the real price of older but functional vehicles has fallen)... it's hard to see in all of this that the standard of living has truly declined. Budgets are a bit tighter, but the reduced disposable income goes further.
...Which is exactly what you're doing here. You're giving the money to charity and receiving games as a thank you present, if you MUST think of it that way.
Games which run only on Windows. What good is that?
which means that public debt soaks up cash that would otherwise have been available for investment in the private sector.
Not really. People put their money in government debt when they're too scared to put it anywhere else. Someone who wants to invest in government debt would NOT invest in a risky startup if they didn't have the option to buy government bonds.
It's not an either-or decision on an individual investor basis, certainly. What actually happens is that a glut of "safe" instruments soaks up all of the safe-seeking money, meaning that other not-quite-as-safe investments (e.g. high-rated corporate bonds) must increase their rates of return to attract investment, and so on all the way up the chain of risk levels, up to where the startups are trying to attract funding. It's simple supply and demand, except in this case the supply is of capital and the price that gets adjusted is the rate of return for each class of investment. Increased demand, with fixed (or declining!) supply means higher prices.
High government debt causes higher costs of capital for startups... and for established businesses as well.
If you want evidence you need only look at the continual lowering of tax rates at the top of the scale, the shrinking real wages, and the jobless recovery.
Perhaps, but those don't tell the whole story. You also need to consider the effect of government debt, state and federal. That money must be obtained from someone, and where most of it comes from is American investors buying government bonds, which means that public debt soaks up cash that would otherwise have been available for investment in the private sector. Given that private sector startups are the source of new jobs (and that new jobs are the force that pushes up wages), public debt has a significant negative effect on job creation. The capital gains tax cuts do a little bit to offset that by motivating medium-term investing (medium-term because the gains need to be realized before the cuts expire) where most government bonds are longer-term, and by reducing taxes to enable more investment. Reduced top-end marginal also allow more capital to be invested. But both tax reductions also reduce tax revenues... which increases the debt.
This doesn't directly conflict with your point, but what it does mean is that increasing tax rates at the top of the scale is going to increase unemployment in the short term, which is going to continue driving down real wages (and, no, increasing the minimum wage won't fix that; it'll make it worse). This is what the "fiscal cliff" concern is all about. The cliff is an attempt at fiscal responsibility, which we absolutely, positively, must have, or public sector debt will continue sucking more and more wind out of the economy, making the situation worse and worse until we're all really screwed, but in the short term it's going to hammer everyone. And Lord help us if we're stupid enough to hike the tax rates and spend the "extra" income on more wealth transfers rather than using it to pay down the debt. We'll get contraction of GDP which effectively increases debt (absolute debt doesn't matter; what matters is debt relative to total production, for complicated reasons), making the situation dramatically worse.
I don't know that I agree that the rich are winning, given the weak markets, though the poor are certainly losing. Everybody is going to be losing, though, and it's because the poor have been voting for more bread and circuses while the rich have been lobbying not to pay for it and both have been winning their battles to a sufficient degree that we're all losing the war*.
*Speaking of metaphorical wars, the non-metaphorical wars have squeezed the budget even harder. Though it should be kept in mind that money spent on wars is primarily another form of wealth transfer, some to the rich, most to the poor. How to the poor? Over 50% of the military budget is ultimately personnel cost, and military personnel come overwhelmingly from the lower end of the economic scale. Of the remaining, nearly all goes to various defense contractors, where nearly all of it goes to personnel... though it also enriches the contractors, which are owned by the monied class. Oh, there's also a chunk that ends up going to foreign individuals and powers, but it's not that large.
But, in the US, our living standards have been decreasing for over a decade.
Cite? Preferably one that doesn't equate median real income with standard of living. It's necessary to consider the dramatic decrease in price of many goods that were formerly considered luxuries but are now within general reach.
With sufficiently-good location data, that could easily be addressed by using available map data (Google is extending the coverage of its building footprint data, for example) to identify people who are almost certainly indoors vs outdoors, and using those as references to help determine which to discard and which to use. Of course, location data indoors is often very poor, because GPS signals are badly attenuated -- but that is also a clue. Android also uses Wifi signal strength as well as GPS and cell network triangulation to refine position, which can make indoor location quite accurate, but as long as the barometric app can distinguish tell the source of the error margin reported on the location, that can be handled.
As for phones in cars, velocity is a good clue.
Finally, it could also be correlated with barometric data from weather stations.
There's no doubt that extracting really meaningful data from the torrent this app could generate is non-trivial, indeed finding ways to do it is almost certainly fodder for a good number of PhD theses, but I'm fairly confident it's within the power of advanced statistical analysis. It may take a few years to make it really good.
Exactly. Shopping locally is a matter of ethics, much like purchasing organic food. It's not so much that the product is different or better, although oftentimes it is. But you're supporting a business model that creates healthy communities rather than destroying them.
Bah, don't aggrandize your decisions; it's got nothing to do with "ethics". You pay higher prices and in return you get the goods, plus additional, non-physical benefits which has meaning to you, which is just fine -- that's how markets work. You're really (though probably not intentionally) implying that others who don't value the same things you do are wrong. By calling it an ethical question you're implying that they're not just wrong in a factual sense, either, but that they're acting immorally.
Of course, the OP did the same thing in the other direction, implying that those who value the intangible benefits of local goods are wrong and that his "market signal" is somehow more correct, or valid, or accurate, than yours. He, at least, didn't accuse those with different priorities of moral turpitude, however.
The fact is that both of you spend your money in the way that seems best to you, based on what's importan to you, and the markets respond accordingly, to serve both of you. Out of all of the many individual decisions emerges the approach of society as a whole, which trends one way for a while, then another.
get proper universal health care (instead of that bizarre bastardized system known as Obamacare, something only an American government could come up with)
We should adopt the core tenet of the Canadian health care system immediately: The federal government should get out and leave it up to the states, just as the Canadian provinces each run their own system. This would remove all of the opposition from the conservative states immediately. The "blue" states could then move forward unimpeded. Whether Canadian history would repeat, with the conservative states eventually joining as well, just as the more conservative Canadian provinces eventually did, remains to be seen.
Doesn't Facebook have something like Google+ circles? I thought they added that shortly after Google+ launched...
Anyway, on Google+ I handle this by defining some "topic" circles into which I place people who are annoying about certain topics. Then when I post about those things, I don't include those circles. It'd be nice if I could actually specify "everyone but these" rather than having to manually click the set of circles, but it only takes a second or two with the current UI.
Apple pulls a Google and says their new product is a "beta". Then, leave that label in place - for five years if necessary - while they get the bugs worked out.
In the context of mapping services, that might have been their best choice, even if it's not very Apple-like. The fact is that building a comprehensive, complete and accurate map of the world is a gargantuan job. It's the sort of task that can't be done quickly no matter how much money you throw at it (well, not for any amount of money that's remotely reasonable, anyway). Google has been at this for years, and there are still problems with Google's data. I submitted a fix last week (through Google MapMaker) to correct a biking path near my home, for example. And the reason that there are problems isn't that Google sucks, it's that the problem is fundamentally hard because of the enormous scale (the whole planet!) and because it changes, a lot.
Even worse, the only realistic way to find out where and how your data is bad is to throw it out to the world and get feedback. Beta would have been the right choice, while keeping the Google data-based Maps app around. Or maybe do a deal with Microsoft, since Bing Maps seems to have pretty good data and isn't even too far off from feature parity with Google. Of course, that's because Microsoft's been working on maps since 2005 or 2006. It takes a lot of time and a lot of work.
Right now, the most common intelligent traffic light has ground loops to detect when cars are at the intersection.
This is probably locale-dependent, but in the West and Mountain West, the most common intelligent traffic lights use cameras mounted on the support arm to detect the presence of traffic, not magnetic anomaly detectors under the road.
The interesting thing here is Googles' profit model is based on screwing with search results for money.
I'm surprised no one responded to this. Google explicitly does not "screw with" search results for money. Google's search results attempt to be the best they can based on what Google knows/guesses you're looking for, and based on what appears to be the best source of the relevant information. Google's business profit model is based on also showing you ads which it knows/guesses may be of interest to you, in the hope that you'll click on them (Google doesn't get paid unless you click on them). But the actual search results are not affected by the profit motive, except insofar as Google is motivated to make them as good as possible so you'll keep coming back.
Ah... okay. Yeah, that's pretty stupid. I find the information very interesting as well, and have managed to significantly increase my driving efficiency (without being obnoxious on the road).
Now this will just make describing the differences between java and javascript even more painful . . .:P
Painful? It's easy: The only thing the languages have in common is the first four letters of their names. Outside of that, they're completely unrelated -- any apparent similarities are just a result of their common heritage of C-like syntax.
If I were a customer and the helpline was a premium rate number, I would stop using that product, especially if I hadn't paid for it in the first place.
I think the company would be fine with that. The question is whether you would also start publicly trashing the product. The ideal here is to make those who need support but won't pay for it go elsewhere -- quietly.
Then it looks like you've given up your right to life, you piece of shit.
Wow, you'd take my right to life over a web forum post? I wouldn't say you lost yours unless you killed a bunch of people or tortured some kids to death or something similar.
I can get 5 miles per kWh pretty consistently, with very careful driving. 22... like I said, they must be driving mostly downhill. I'm sure the measurement is reasonably-accurate, but we don't know what they're doing to get it. Perhaps towing their car uphill and driving it down or something equally ridiculous.
Slashdot Mirror
But the reality is that there is no trust fund in any meaningful sense; there is a set of promises that will have to be redeemed by hurting someone or everyone at some point in the future.
There is a trust fund in as meaningful sense as you can make it.
Got money sitting a bank? What happens if that bank goes under?
To make that analogy accurate, try:
1. Take money from a friend and promise to pay it back later (we'll ignore the fact that you forcibly collect one amount from the friend and promise to pay a potentially different amount, most likely more, later).
2. Deposit the friend's money in a bank.
3. Borrow an equal amount from the bank, using the deposit as collateral (you can't withdraw the deposit without paying off the loan).
4. Spend the borrowed funds on hookers and blow.
Years later, when it comes time to pay the friend, how do you do it? Your bank deposits exactly equal your debts, so that nets out to zero.As long as you have a continually-increasing number of friends with whom you're doing this dance, you can use some of the money you get from new friends to pay off the old ones (which cuts into your hookers and blow budget, so you'll have to borrow that some other way). But if your stream of new friends begins to decline you'll find yourself in a situation where you don't have enough money from new friends to pay the old ones.
Hiding money/silver/gold in a vault/under a matress? What happens if someone steals it?
That isn't analogous at all. The SS trust fund doesn't have any hard assets, and if it did there's no one who could steal them.
But this is slashdot. Or it used to be.
And yet... even most of the poor do manage to purchase many of those luxuries, as well as to get enough calories to survive (and often to be overweight), and to keep the house warm, etc., etc. In addition, median square footage of home space per person is increasing, more people have automobiles, if older ones (this is primarily because cars last longer so the real price of older but functional vehicles has fallen)... it's hard to see in all of this that the standard of living has truly declined. Budgets are a bit tighter, but the reduced disposable income goes further.
...Which is exactly what you're doing here. You're giving the money to charity and receiving games as a thank you present, if you MUST think of it that way.
Games which run only on Windows. What good is that?
Or don't buy the games and give your money to a charity of your choice.
which means that public debt soaks up cash that would otherwise have been available for investment in the private sector.
Not really. People put their money in government debt when they're too scared to put it anywhere else. Someone who wants to invest in government debt would NOT invest in a risky startup if they didn't have the option to buy government bonds.
It's not an either-or decision on an individual investor basis, certainly. What actually happens is that a glut of "safe" instruments soaks up all of the safe-seeking money, meaning that other not-quite-as-safe investments (e.g. high-rated corporate bonds) must increase their rates of return to attract investment, and so on all the way up the chain of risk levels, up to where the startups are trying to attract funding. It's simple supply and demand, except in this case the supply is of capital and the price that gets adjusted is the rate of return for each class of investment. Increased demand, with fixed (or declining!) supply means higher prices.
High government debt causes higher costs of capital for startups... and for established businesses as well.
If you want evidence you need only look at the continual lowering of tax rates at the top of the scale, the shrinking real wages, and the jobless recovery.
Perhaps, but those don't tell the whole story. You also need to consider the effect of government debt, state and federal. That money must be obtained from someone, and where most of it comes from is American investors buying government bonds, which means that public debt soaks up cash that would otherwise have been available for investment in the private sector. Given that private sector startups are the source of new jobs (and that new jobs are the force that pushes up wages), public debt has a significant negative effect on job creation. The capital gains tax cuts do a little bit to offset that by motivating medium-term investing (medium-term because the gains need to be realized before the cuts expire) where most government bonds are longer-term, and by reducing taxes to enable more investment. Reduced top-end marginal also allow more capital to be invested. But both tax reductions also reduce tax revenues... which increases the debt.
This doesn't directly conflict with your point, but what it does mean is that increasing tax rates at the top of the scale is going to increase unemployment in the short term, which is going to continue driving down real wages (and, no, increasing the minimum wage won't fix that; it'll make it worse). This is what the "fiscal cliff" concern is all about. The cliff is an attempt at fiscal responsibility, which we absolutely, positively, must have, or public sector debt will continue sucking more and more wind out of the economy, making the situation worse and worse until we're all really screwed, but in the short term it's going to hammer everyone. And Lord help us if we're stupid enough to hike the tax rates and spend the "extra" income on more wealth transfers rather than using it to pay down the debt. We'll get contraction of GDP which effectively increases debt (absolute debt doesn't matter; what matters is debt relative to total production, for complicated reasons), making the situation dramatically worse.
I don't know that I agree that the rich are winning, given the weak markets, though the poor are certainly losing. Everybody is going to be losing, though, and it's because the poor have been voting for more bread and circuses while the rich have been lobbying not to pay for it and both have been winning their battles to a sufficient degree that we're all losing the war*.
*Speaking of metaphorical wars, the non-metaphorical wars have squeezed the budget even harder. Though it should be kept in mind that money spent on wars is primarily another form of wealth transfer, some to the rich, most to the poor. How to the poor? Over 50% of the military budget is ultimately personnel cost, and military personnel come overwhelmingly from the lower end of the economic scale. Of the remaining, nearly all goes to various defense contractors, where nearly all of it goes to personnel... though it also enriches the contractors, which are owned by the monied class. Oh, there's also a chunk that ends up going to foreign individuals and powers, but it's not that large.
But, in the US, our living standards have been decreasing for over a decade.
Cite? Preferably one that doesn't equate median real income with standard of living. It's necessary to consider the dramatic decrease in price of many goods that were formerly considered luxuries but are now within general reach.
No, vertical location is about an order of magnitude less precise than horizontal location.
With sufficiently-good location data, that could easily be addressed by using available map data (Google is extending the coverage of its building footprint data, for example) to identify people who are almost certainly indoors vs outdoors, and using those as references to help determine which to discard and which to use. Of course, location data indoors is often very poor, because GPS signals are badly attenuated -- but that is also a clue. Android also uses Wifi signal strength as well as GPS and cell network triangulation to refine position, which can make indoor location quite accurate, but as long as the barometric app can distinguish tell the source of the error margin reported on the location, that can be handled.
As for phones in cars, velocity is a good clue.
Finally, it could also be correlated with barometric data from weather stations.
There's no doubt that extracting really meaningful data from the torrent this app could generate is non-trivial, indeed finding ways to do it is almost certainly fodder for a good number of PhD theses, but I'm fairly confident it's within the power of advanced statistical analysis. It may take a few years to make it really good.
So people using Facebook shouldn't be stressed out by oversharing then.
Exactly. Shopping locally is a matter of ethics, much like purchasing organic food. It's not so much that the product is different or better, although oftentimes it is. But you're supporting a business model that creates healthy communities rather than destroying them.
Bah, don't aggrandize your decisions; it's got nothing to do with "ethics". You pay higher prices and in return you get the goods, plus additional, non-physical benefits which has meaning to you, which is just fine -- that's how markets work. You're really (though probably not intentionally) implying that others who don't value the same things you do are wrong. By calling it an ethical question you're implying that they're not just wrong in a factual sense, either, but that they're acting immorally.
Of course, the OP did the same thing in the other direction, implying that those who value the intangible benefits of local goods are wrong and that his "market signal" is somehow more correct, or valid, or accurate, than yours. He, at least, didn't accuse those with different priorities of moral turpitude, however.
The fact is that both of you spend your money in the way that seems best to you, based on what's importan to you, and the markets respond accordingly, to serve both of you. Out of all of the many individual decisions emerges the approach of society as a whole, which trends one way for a while, then another.
get proper universal health care (instead of that bizarre bastardized system known as Obamacare, something only an American government could come up with)
We should adopt the core tenet of the Canadian health care system immediately: The federal government should get out and leave it up to the states, just as the Canadian provinces each run their own system. This would remove all of the opposition from the conservative states immediately. The "blue" states could then move forward unimpeded. Whether Canadian history would repeat, with the conservative states eventually joining as well, just as the more conservative Canadian provinces eventually did, remains to be seen.
Doesn't Facebook have something like Google+ circles? I thought they added that shortly after Google+ launched...
Anyway, on Google+ I handle this by defining some "topic" circles into which I place people who are annoying about certain topics. Then when I post about those things, I don't include those circles. It'd be nice if I could actually specify "everyone but these" rather than having to manually click the set of circles, but it only takes a second or two with the current UI.
I would think you could do the same on FB.
Apple pulls a Google and says their new product is a "beta". Then, leave that label in place - for five years if necessary - while they get the bugs worked out.
In the context of mapping services, that might have been their best choice, even if it's not very Apple-like. The fact is that building a comprehensive, complete and accurate map of the world is a gargantuan job. It's the sort of task that can't be done quickly no matter how much money you throw at it (well, not for any amount of money that's remotely reasonable, anyway). Google has been at this for years, and there are still problems with Google's data. I submitted a fix last week (through Google MapMaker) to correct a biking path near my home, for example. And the reason that there are problems isn't that Google sucks, it's that the problem is fundamentally hard because of the enormous scale (the whole planet!) and because it changes, a lot.
Even worse, the only realistic way to find out where and how your data is bad is to throw it out to the world and get feedback. Beta would have been the right choice, while keeping the Google data-based Maps app around. Or maybe do a deal with Microsoft, since Bing Maps seems to have pretty good data and isn't even too far off from feature parity with Google. Of course, that's because Microsoft's been working on maps since 2005 or 2006. It takes a lot of time and a lot of work.
Right now, the most common intelligent traffic light has ground loops to detect when cars are at the intersection.
This is probably locale-dependent, but in the West and Mountain West, the most common intelligent traffic lights use cameras mounted on the support arm to detect the presence of traffic, not magnetic anomaly detectors under the road.
The interesting thing here is Googles' profit model is based on screwing with search results for money.
I'm surprised no one responded to this. Google explicitly does not "screw with" search results for money. Google's search results attempt to be the best they can based on what Google knows/guesses you're looking for, and based on what appears to be the best source of the relevant information. Google's business profit model is based on also showing you ads which it knows/guesses may be of interest to you, in the hope that you'll click on them (Google doesn't get paid unless you click on them). But the actual search results are not affected by the profit motive, except insofar as Google is motivated to make them as good as possible so you'll keep coming back.
Ah... okay. Yeah, that's pretty stupid. I find the information very interesting as well, and have managed to significantly increase my driving efficiency (without being obnoxious on the road).
Is it really more merciful to keep them locked up for the rest of their lives? Or are you saying they should just be released?
Now this will just make describing the differences between java and javascript even more painful . . . :P
Painful? It's easy: The only thing the languages have in common is the first four letters of their names. Outside of that, they're completely unrelated -- any apparent similarities are just a result of their common heritage of C-like syntax.
If I were a customer and the helpline was a premium rate number, I would stop using that product, especially if I hadn't paid for it in the first place.
I think the company would be fine with that. The question is whether you would also start publicly trashing the product. The ideal here is to make those who need support but won't pay for it go elsewhere -- quietly.
Then it looks like you've given up your right to life, you piece of shit.
Wow, you'd take my right to life over a web forum post? I wouldn't say you lost yours unless you killed a bunch of people or tortured some kids to death or something similar.
It's not meaningless since you can't seem to refute it or prove its lack or relevance...
Well, not if you can't be bothered to read past the first sentence.
I can get 5 miles per kWh pretty consistently, with very careful driving. 22... like I said, they must be driving mostly downhill. I'm sure the measurement is reasonably-accurate, but we don't know what they're doing to get it. Perhaps towing their car uphill and driving it down or something equally ridiculous.
Maybe I'm odd then in that wanting to continue to have sex with my marital partner far outweighs the temptation to have sex with someone else.
Not odd at all, in fact very normal. But if you let yourself get very emotionally involved with someone else, you might find that changes.