There are degrees of "nowhere". If production is already optimal then moving subsidies from rural areas and moving them to all food production regardless of where it is grown wouldn't make any difference. I suspect it would make a difference.
Good point about encouraging over-supply. The same effect of encouraging over-supply could be gotten by directly subsidizing all food production. Then you would only subsidize food production instead of rural people in general, and you'd be subsidizing efficient food production instead of encouraging food production in inefficiently out-of-the-way places.
The post office does get money from the general public in the sense that prices everywhere are higher to support the uneconomic deliveries - the effect if the same as a tax even if the mechanism is different. Food production is insentivized by food prices. If food prices are not enough to insentivize food production, then food prices are too low and will increase to a sustainable level if subsidies are removed.
Subsidizing everyone living in the middle of nowhere in order that food can be grown doesn't make sense to me - as far as I can tell that can only decrease the efficiency of food production. In effect what it does is to have taxes subsidize food, but only if it is grown in the middle of nowhere. Remove the subsidies and food will still be grown because the demand is still there and it is inelastic (it won't decrease with increasing prices as everyone has to eat). What will happen, though, is that it will only be grown in the middle of nowhere if that is economically efficient. So the effect of removing subsidies from the middle of nowhere will be to increase the efficiency of food production by moving it to the places where it can be done most efficiently. It may also remove the indirect subsidy to food, though that could be corrected for either by directly subsidizing food (regardless of where it was grown) or by paying every American the difference, which they could then buy the more expensive food for. So the only net effect would be more efficient production of food.
The game has cinematic NPC interactions in the style of Mass Effect and Dragon Age. There are no text popups. An example of a quest in the empire has a father ask you to assassinate his politically inconvenient daughter. The interaction conveys non-verbally that he isn't very sure about his course of action. When you get to the daughter, you interact with her and at the end you can kill her or capture her. If you kill her you'll get paid, if you capture her and bring her to her father he is very happy that you didn't do as asked. In a way that is just a quest to go kill someone, but only in the same way that Lord of the Rings is a story about someone fetching a ring and throwing it into someplace.
Did the 9/11 attack make America more or less likely to engage in aggression? That works exactly the same way for other people too. Beating people up is great for you until you meet another aggressive person who will respond in kind. When you are beating a country or other big group of people up, there will be many people in that group who will be as egged on by that as Americans were by 9/11. It can still be a correct choice to engage in aggression, just know that it can be to the benefit of your enemies' cause to have you come around and kill them.
That helps, but it will still require powering up all the silicon you are using. In this apporach you only power up the part of the special-purpose silicon you need, but in return get much greater speed out of that piece of silicon. This is more power-efficient if you need some of what is on the chip.
LOL, "I did X, Y, Z, therefore I'm great and everyone else who didn't do X, Y and Z is an idiot and is unworthy." Everyone has the impulse to say that, and everyone has their own X, Y and Z. Then they become adults and realize it's all bullshit. It's not just that these people are different from you and you prefer the company of like-minded individuals, no no no, them being different equals them being worthless human beings you wouldn't deign to have anything to do with if you could help it. Perhaps at some point you'll come to appreciate that the definition of "idiot" is not "different from me".
University simply means high-end academic content. No one is begrudging you from choosing to buy lectures about something that interests you - in fact that's what everyone supports. I really doubt you can make someone a well-rounded individual by forcing them to sit through lectures and memorize facts for exams. Instead I think you can make someone decidedly less well rounded by putting them off going outside their field. I'll take a second of self-directed horizon expanding over any amount of force-fed material someone else thought appropriate. I don't support systems that kill the self-directed horizon expanding right out of people. Your muscles don't get strong by someone else moving them, and neither does a capacity like self-directed learning and motivation.
Did it ever occur to you that the police are in fact endangering themselves by being aggressive in situations that do not call for it? There is no police officer who is shot at "pretty much on a daily basis". Policing isn't even on the top 10 of most dangerous jobs: http://money.cnn.com/2005/08/26/pf/jobs_jeopardy/ The way to make police safe is by not issuing them guns and have them walk alone instead of in pairs. That way they will phone in for backup when they need it and they will not create dangerous situations or escalate situations that are already dangerous. It is aggressive police attitude that gets police killed because it creates dangerous situations. The public does not want to kill police, but if that were the case, that would have been a reality created by the police rather than a reality that was already out there.
Why are you attending a school that charges you to teach you a compulsory Race and Ethnicity class (which is bound to be 100% bullshit) when you came there for CS? It's like a car shop that requires you to buy theater tickets and sit through the performance when you come there to get you car fixed.
I think you're right. Corporations do do some basic research. It makes sense that if a company gets to be sufficiently large, they start to have some of the same considerations that a government does of viewing things in a more large-scale way. They can do 100 risky things and if one of them pays off, that might be OK. A smaller company can't think like that or they will quickly go out of business. I still think that it is true that basic research is rarely a good investment for a company, even big ones. Bell Labs didn't benefit much from inventing the transistor, though the world at large certainly benefited. Basic research makes sense for governments because governments stand to enjoy full benefit from an idea that raises the whole world by a small amount. Such a thing is useless to a company - they need some way to funnel the benefit of an idea so that it comes to benefit them more so than their competitors. I think basic research is a good example to bring up in the context of the previous poster's question about something government can do better than companies when it comes to research.
Pretty much the entirety of basic modern physics and modern cryptography. Companies are happy to turn government science into products they can profit from, they are not happy to fund basic research. Yet basic research is what those products come from in a longer perspective. Companies only do the last step of research because it is only at the last step that it becomes clear what the profitable outcome is going to be.
Yes, IQ is more informative than an interview for gauging post-hiring performance in many jobs. Certainly you can come up with counterexamples - for example if you are choosing between 10 geniuses for which one gets to sweep the streets, then IQ won't be a useful guide to choose between them because all of their IQs are more than sufficient to do the job. You can also imagine a bunch of people with high IQ but who hate your company and compare it to a normal IQ person who wants to do well - an IQ test won't make the right choice in that case. However such cases are not ordinary, and on average an IQ test is better than an interview. People persist in doing interviews because they don't know or don't believe that this is the case. Naturally an IQ test and an interview should be better, though if I recall correctly the added benefit of also doing an interview is not very much. There is also the phenomenon of people giving out puzzles that might as well have been on an IQ test in an interview, effectively turning the interview into a poorly calibrated IQ test. Certainly many other things than IQ matter, it is just that IQ can be precisely measured while an interview is notoriously poor at coming up with any kind of reliable information about the applicant. We humans believe that we are good at teasing out the truth about each other, but we aren't.
IQ as a concept is based on all these specific abilities being correlated - which has been demonstrated over and over again for the last 100 years. That is why an IQ test can give you a single number even though it obviously does not test all the different ways that a human mind can perform. It is also why people on average get the same score on two IQ tests that don't seem to test the same thing at all (if those IQ tests are well constructed, that is).
There are no questions that cannot appear on an IQ test. The thing is just that if they are poor questions, such as questions about factual knowledge, then you are going to need many more questions to be equally confident about the result as you would be if you had asked better questions. So good IQ tests all look kind of similar because it has been determined statistically that those kinds of questions are the questions to ask to get high confidence in the accuracy of the result without asking too many questions. You could make an IQ test that looks nothing like an IQ test ordinarily does, it would just have to be really, really long, perhaps with hundreds or thousands of questions.
The point of IQ testing is not for you to know your IQ and feel good about it. The point is that it is an extremely cheap way to compare people that is quite reliable at detecting actual or latent capability - more so even than subject-specific skills testing. Amazingly, it is better to get a plumber with high IQ than one who demonstrates a verbal or written knowledge of actual plumbing assuming both have a plumbing education. People with no college degrees should be very happy about IQ testing in hiring.
You are correct that spreading an idea of "I succeed because of my IQ" can be harmful even if it is true. It can be harmful because it motivates both high-IQ and low-IQ (any-IQ, really) individuals to slack off, which will of course decrease their success compared to what they might otherwise have achieved. It is a interesting subject what you do with harmful truths in research. I support telling the truth, but I can see how someone else might not.
Then enter when no one is home. Suppose a band of criminals with assault weapons raid your home, but then they don't find what they were there for and leave. That would be a crime because of the negative impact on you, both psychological and material, not to mention the risk of life involved in something like that. The situation becomes no better just because it is the police doing it. There is a problem when the harm of the investigation surpasses that of the suspected crime - even if the police had got the right guy the guilty party didn't actually hurt any children.
It's a cautionary tale like one shop owner having his store burned down by the mafia because he didn't do what the mafia wanted. To the mafia it's about what happens when you don't do what they want. To reasonable people everywhere, it's a call to action that something is wrong in the neighborhood and that this sort of thing has to stop. The thing is that the police and politicians will never view themselves with the same critical eye that they turn to other people, so they are not equipped to realize when things are going downhill because of themselves.
Slashdot Mirror
There are degrees of "nowhere". If production is already optimal then moving subsidies from rural areas and moving them to all food production regardless of where it is grown wouldn't make any difference. I suspect it would make a difference.
Good point about encouraging over-supply. The same effect of encouraging over-supply could be gotten by directly subsidizing all food production. Then you would only subsidize food production instead of rural people in general, and you'd be subsidizing efficient food production instead of encouraging food production in inefficiently out-of-the-way places.
The post office does get money from the general public in the sense that prices everywhere are higher to support the uneconomic deliveries - the effect if the same as a tax even if the mechanism is different. Food production is insentivized by food prices. If food prices are not enough to insentivize food production, then food prices are too low and will increase to a sustainable level if subsidies are removed.
If you are a baker who hates flour, you'll have to tough it out or get creative. Same thing with farmers.
Subsidizing everyone living in the middle of nowhere in order that food can be grown doesn't make sense to me - as far as I can tell that can only decrease the efficiency of food production. In effect what it does is to have taxes subsidize food, but only if it is grown in the middle of nowhere. Remove the subsidies and food will still be grown because the demand is still there and it is inelastic (it won't decrease with increasing prices as everyone has to eat). What will happen, though, is that it will only be grown in the middle of nowhere if that is economically efficient. So the effect of removing subsidies from the middle of nowhere will be to increase the efficiency of food production by moving it to the places where it can be done most efficiently. It may also remove the indirect subsidy to food, though that could be corrected for either by directly subsidizing food (regardless of where it was grown) or by paying every American the difference, which they could then buy the more expensive food for. So the only net effect would be more efficient production of food.
I'm pretty sure that the per-capital cost of anything is 1. :)
The game has cinematic NPC interactions in the style of Mass Effect and Dragon Age. There are no text popups. An example of a quest in the empire has a father ask you to assassinate his politically inconvenient daughter. The interaction conveys non-verbally that he isn't very sure about his course of action. When you get to the daughter, you interact with her and at the end you can kill her or capture her. If you kill her you'll get paid, if you capture her and bring her to her father he is very happy that you didn't do as asked. In a way that is just a quest to go kill someone, but only in the same way that Lord of the Rings is a story about someone fetching a ring and throwing it into someplace.
How do you know that bus-crime is really much of a problem?
Great, get rid of the weigh stations and impose a gas tax.
I certainly don't approve of such actions, but how is a suicide attack cowardly? It's psychopathic and evil, but cowardly?
Did the 9/11 attack make America more or less likely to engage in aggression? That works exactly the same way for other people too. Beating people up is great for you until you meet another aggressive person who will respond in kind. When you are beating a country or other big group of people up, there will be many people in that group who will be as egged on by that as Americans were by 9/11. It can still be a correct choice to engage in aggression, just know that it can be to the benefit of your enemies' cause to have you come around and kill them.
That helps, but it will still require powering up all the silicon you are using. In this apporach you only power up the part of the special-purpose silicon you need, but in return get much greater speed out of that piece of silicon. This is more power-efficient if you need some of what is on the chip.
LOL, "I did X, Y, Z, therefore I'm great and everyone else who didn't do X, Y and Z is an idiot and is unworthy." Everyone has the impulse to say that, and everyone has their own X, Y and Z. Then they become adults and realize it's all bullshit. It's not just that these people are different from you and you prefer the company of like-minded individuals, no no no, them being different equals them being worthless human beings you wouldn't deign to have anything to do with if you could help it. Perhaps at some point you'll come to appreciate that the definition of "idiot" is not "different from me".
University simply means high-end academic content. No one is begrudging you from choosing to buy lectures about something that interests you - in fact that's what everyone supports. I really doubt you can make someone a well-rounded individual by forcing them to sit through lectures and memorize facts for exams. Instead I think you can make someone decidedly less well rounded by putting them off going outside their field. I'll take a second of self-directed horizon expanding over any amount of force-fed material someone else thought appropriate. I don't support systems that kill the self-directed horizon expanding right out of people. Your muscles don't get strong by someone else moving them, and neither does a capacity like self-directed learning and motivation.
Did it ever occur to you that the police are in fact endangering themselves by being aggressive in situations that do not call for it? There is no police officer who is shot at "pretty much on a daily basis". Policing isn't even on the top 10 of most dangerous jobs: http://money.cnn.com/2005/08/26/pf/jobs_jeopardy/ The way to make police safe is by not issuing them guns and have them walk alone instead of in pairs. That way they will phone in for backup when they need it and they will not create dangerous situations or escalate situations that are already dangerous. It is aggressive police attitude that gets police killed because it creates dangerous situations. The public does not want to kill police, but if that were the case, that would have been a reality created by the police rather than a reality that was already out there.
Why are you attending a school that charges you to teach you a compulsory Race and Ethnicity class (which is bound to be 100% bullshit) when you came there for CS? It's like a car shop that requires you to buy theater tickets and sit through the performance when you come there to get you car fixed.
I think you're right. Corporations do do some basic research. It makes sense that if a company gets to be sufficiently large, they start to have some of the same considerations that a government does of viewing things in a more large-scale way. They can do 100 risky things and if one of them pays off, that might be OK. A smaller company can't think like that or they will quickly go out of business. I still think that it is true that basic research is rarely a good investment for a company, even big ones. Bell Labs didn't benefit much from inventing the transistor, though the world at large certainly benefited. Basic research makes sense for governments because governments stand to enjoy full benefit from an idea that raises the whole world by a small amount. Such a thing is useless to a company - they need some way to funnel the benefit of an idea so that it comes to benefit them more so than their competitors. I think basic research is a good example to bring up in the context of the previous poster's question about something government can do better than companies when it comes to research.
Pretty much the entirety of basic modern physics and modern cryptography. Companies are happy to turn government science into products they can profit from, they are not happy to fund basic research. Yet basic research is what those products come from in a longer perspective. Companies only do the last step of research because it is only at the last step that it becomes clear what the profitable outcome is going to be.
Yes, IQ is more informative than an interview for gauging post-hiring performance in many jobs. Certainly you can come up with counterexamples - for example if you are choosing between 10 geniuses for which one gets to sweep the streets, then IQ won't be a useful guide to choose between them because all of their IQs are more than sufficient to do the job. You can also imagine a bunch of people with high IQ but who hate your company and compare it to a normal IQ person who wants to do well - an IQ test won't make the right choice in that case. However such cases are not ordinary, and on average an IQ test is better than an interview. People persist in doing interviews because they don't know or don't believe that this is the case. Naturally an IQ test and an interview should be better, though if I recall correctly the added benefit of also doing an interview is not very much. There is also the phenomenon of people giving out puzzles that might as well have been on an IQ test in an interview, effectively turning the interview into a poorly calibrated IQ test. Certainly many other things than IQ matter, it is just that IQ can be precisely measured while an interview is notoriously poor at coming up with any kind of reliable information about the applicant. We humans believe that we are good at teasing out the truth about each other, but we aren't.
IQ as a concept is based on all these specific abilities being correlated - which has been demonstrated over and over again for the last 100 years. That is why an IQ test can give you a single number even though it obviously does not test all the different ways that a human mind can perform. It is also why people on average get the same score on two IQ tests that don't seem to test the same thing at all (if those IQ tests are well constructed, that is).
There are no questions that cannot appear on an IQ test. The thing is just that if they are poor questions, such as questions about factual knowledge, then you are going to need many more questions to be equally confident about the result as you would be if you had asked better questions. So good IQ tests all look kind of similar because it has been determined statistically that those kinds of questions are the questions to ask to get high confidence in the accuracy of the result without asking too many questions. You could make an IQ test that looks nothing like an IQ test ordinarily does, it would just have to be really, really long, perhaps with hundreds or thousands of questions.
I knew a guy who smoked and lived to be 100. Clearly smoking is good for you!
The point of IQ testing is not for you to know your IQ and feel good about it. The point is that it is an extremely cheap way to compare people that is quite reliable at detecting actual or latent capability - more so even than subject-specific skills testing. Amazingly, it is better to get a plumber with high IQ than one who demonstrates a verbal or written knowledge of actual plumbing assuming both have a plumbing education. People with no college degrees should be very happy about IQ testing in hiring.
You are correct that spreading an idea of "I succeed because of my IQ" can be harmful even if it is true. It can be harmful because it motivates both high-IQ and low-IQ (any-IQ, really) individuals to slack off, which will of course decrease their success compared to what they might otherwise have achieved. It is a interesting subject what you do with harmful truths in research. I support telling the truth, but I can see how someone else might not.
Then enter when no one is home. Suppose a band of criminals with assault weapons raid your home, but then they don't find what they were there for and leave. That would be a crime because of the negative impact on you, both psychological and material, not to mention the risk of life involved in something like that. The situation becomes no better just because it is the police doing it. There is a problem when the harm of the investigation surpasses that of the suspected crime - even if the police had got the right guy the guilty party didn't actually hurt any children.
It's a cautionary tale like one shop owner having his store burned down by the mafia because he didn't do what the mafia wanted. To the mafia it's about what happens when you don't do what they want. To reasonable people everywhere, it's a call to action that something is wrong in the neighborhood and that this sort of thing has to stop. The thing is that the police and politicians will never view themselves with the same critical eye that they turn to other people, so they are not equipped to realize when things are going downhill because of themselves.