"1.7 million earned exactly the prevailing Federal minimum wage of $7.25 per hour. About 2.2 million had wages below the minimum.2 Together, these 3.8 million workers with wages at or below the Federal minimum made up 5.2 percent of all hourly-paid workers. "
"Although workers under age 25 represented only about one-fifth of hourly-paid workers, they made up about half of those paid the Federal minimum wage or less."
Trying to live on your own after college on minimum wage is hard. But even harder hit are those 50% of minimum wage earners who are over 25, and likely will not (or cannot) get higher paying jobs. Lack of education, disabilities, etc..
Would you rather have 2.5% of our workforce permanently earning a non-living wage, using various forms of welfare, or would you rather have the cost of some luxury goods (retail, restaurants, etc..) go up slightly, and those minimum wage workers paying more tax, buying more things, and generally helping to stimulate the economy?
I've always pictured after you 'pull the lever' to vote, out prints two copies of a one time use random number. Copy one you take, copy two has both the random number and the vote, and goes in a ballot box for recount purposes. The entire random number + vote list would be published online. You, and only you, could look at the list, find your number, and see if your vote was for candidate X.
If enough people started reporting "my vote was wrong", a recount of the physical printouts or investigation could occur. At no point does anyone know your one time use random number.
I wonder how well the Finn ed. model would work in a society with as much income and wealth inequality as the USA? Based on the BBC article you linked, it looks like it might still work fairly well. But I bet it wouldn't be as effective as it is in Finland.
Companies will not reinvest in themselves unless there is demand for more of whatever they make/provide. Trickle up is the only sensible economic strategy.
The average person would pay $12 a month, or about $145 a year, for online-only access to HBO content. But is that something HBO would be interested in? And is it really leaving money on the table?
HBO currently has about 29 million subscribers, and reportedly receives around $7 or $8 per subscriber per month. So HBO could, theoretically, get more per subscriber than it’s currently making.
But then the article stops quoting any facts and begins speculating about things like:
More importantly, it wouldn’t include the cost of sales, marketing, and support — and this is where HBO would really get screwed. Going direct to online customers by pitching HBO GO over-the-top would mean losing the support of its cable, satellite, and IPTV distributors. And since the Comcasts and the Time Warner Cables of the world are the top marketing channel for premium networks like HBO, it would be nearly impossible for HBO to make up for the loss of the cable provider’s marketing team or promotions.
Lets see... an additional ~4.5 dollars per subscriber, plus an unknown amount of additional subscribers (cord cutters), minus an unknown amount of people who would not sign up because their cable company didn't offer it. The only known figure here is 4.5 dollars x 29,000 million which is a gain of 1.3 billion dollars per month over current gross. Surely that would be enough money to handle sales, marketing, and support...
We phased out CFC's worldwide to combat ozone layer depletion. Oil and coal will be much tougher, but given that the US is the largest consumer, by far, of just about everything in the world, if we lead the charge we should be able to at least get things moving in the right direction.
If the US decides to not use oil / coal anymore, it will in fact change all the world's industrialized nations. For example, every overseas car manufacturer would scramble to design and build bio-diesel / electric cars. China and other production nations would scramble to sell us more solar / solar thermal / other alternative energy sources, etc..
If Saudi Arabia can no longer sell oil to the US, it is not like China will just magically be able to consume the billions of barrels that we no longer use. Oil producing nations will need to develop alternate sources of income, unless they want to wait around for the rest of the world to develop to the point where they can consume all the oil that the US is not.
And would it be impossible for us to just declare "30 years from now, no oil or coal"? It might not be as impossible as it seems: http://www.ted.com/talks/amory_lovins_on_winning_the_oil_endgame.html
What are you talking about? I work in IT for.edu and we host tons of stuff on Youtube. Lots of courses. And we aren't the only one.
https://www.youtube.com/user/PCCvideos
The only time we need something hosted inside or streamed from a vendor with a login is when it is copyrighted for limited class room use. That has nothing to do with schools and everything to do with draconian copyright from publishers.
If we didn't have to deal with craptastic licensing from course material created external to us (like some random documentary a teacher wants to show), we'd have everything on Youtube or likewise free to the public.
"In order to make money you need to be significantly better than the laymen that do it for free for their own enjoyment. "
In music that isn't so much the case. As long as you are at a professional level, (for example, can reproduce a well known song fairly well with your chosen instrument), what is most important next is market research followed by marketing skills.
Market research: Music is art. But not all art sells. If you have a certain style, go see other bands playing that style. Look at what sells and what isn't selling. The audience is the customer, and sometimes that means bowing to what an audience wants to hear. Self indulgent musicians who refuse to examine their music as a product won't sell as much as musicians who think they are 'true artists' who can't be bothered to tweak their music to make it more appealing.
Marketing yourself: Constant radio interviews, constant fan communication (facebook, twitter, etc..) , free samples and song downloads on lots of sites, getting to know music bloggers, etc.. and touring pretty much 300+ days a year.
I can understand that some of Paul's stated goals are attractive to people.
But what I can't understand is how anyone who considers themselves even remotely scientifically minded, would choose to support someone who is purely ideologically driven.
Why aren't we trying to support candidates that actually look at studies, facts, policies that have been field tested around the world, and then make decisions on those things instead of an ideology? It seems to me that unwavering ideology is just as dangerous as unwavering religious beliefs when it comes to policy decisions.
I think you also need to look at the demographics. Income inequality, percent of kids who's parents are considered below poverty levels, numbers of non-native english speaking students, etc... Large inner city schools / more populous states have unique challenges. Places like Montana and the Dakotas do not, or not to the same extent.
I'd also think it would be important to see early testing results. Like from Kindergarten. Perhaps California's kids, on average, start out lower.
I wasn't able to find any articles that I consider credible that talk about this small signal to noise ratio (when dealing with appropriate lengths of time). Do you know of any I could read?
"...the University can reduce its costs by outsourcing email. That in turn increases the amount that the people working for the university can pay themselves."
FTFY
Unless you can show that this actually results in lower student fees, which I doubt.
No one goes into education to get rich...I'll guarantee you that pay for every position in any Edu. is lower than private sector.
Education Institutions have mission statements, and they are actually followed. There are no secret meetings where faculty and admins are figuring out how to get themselves big bonuses or raises by sucking more money out of students. https://www.banweb.mtu.edu/pls/owa/strategic_plan.p_display
I recently was involved in moving our school's email to Google. It was done purely to free up time so that we could focus on making other student services better. The cost saving wasn't even calculated. When you are dealing with hundreds of thousands of accounts, email ceases to be a trivial workload to maintain.
It might mean that IT has enough money to hire a new programmer, or something like that, but it certainly doesn't mean any of us are getting raises...
4.5 hours might be a lot for a single user. Although you need to take into account all other internet use: patches, email, browsing, etc... It isn't just video.
Where 4.5 hours fails, is in multi-user connections. Especially internet savvy families. 2 kids, 2 parents and your down to 2.25 hours of video a day, assuming the kids watch cartoons on netflix and the parents watch something else. When I am over at relatives houses, it is more likely that the youngest kid watches a 30 minute cartoon, the older kid watches a 30 minute teen show, one parent watches something like mad men while cooking, the other parent watches some online news or a documentary while doing the laundry. So that is 3 hours right there. Then the kids go to bed and the parents want to watch 1 or two shows before bed. They are now over the cap.
No, you don't need network neutrality, you need competition...
Network neutrality is protected by the fact that literally anyone can go and get capacity from BT, and have it available pretty much anywhere in the UK - BT cannot impose limitations on your usage as a network provider, so they cannot force you to not be network neutral.
But as you seem to admit, what enables that competition is starting from a base of network neutrality.
I was curious and asked skeptical science to add your areas of concern to their site. This was the exchange.
John Cook john@skepticalscience.com
4:59 PM (16 minutes ago)
to me
High climate sensitivity (e.g. - 3 degrees warming for doubled CO2) isn't presumed, it's based on multiple lines of evidence: http://sks.to/sensitivity
rgbatduke is misrepresenting the state of the science.
On 04/05/2012, at 9:48 AM, Jason Whitener wrote:
> Name: Jason Whitener
> Message: If you have time to add to your site, would you please address issues brought up in the comment by rgbatduke (http://www.phy.duke.edu/~rgb/) in the slashdot discussion here:
>
> http://science.slashdot.org/story/12/05/02/0430231/last-bastion-for-climate-dissenters-crumbling
Would you please get in touch with skepticalscience.com, or other sites that attempt to explain these things in a more readable way for the layperson, and present your concerns?
If these issues with agw do exist, I'm assuming that climate scientists are well aware of them. If so, why do none of the popular layperson pro-agw sites attempt to address or explain them?
You know, that's only true as long as the majority of the US population keeps voting for the person who spends the most money...
Or,
You know, that's only true as long as the majority of the US population remains average
It is theoretically possible to vote ourselves out of this mess, but let's be realistic: the average person is going to remain.... well, average. "Spend the most" isn't a simple sentence. I think people aren't aware just how much impact that spending has on people's information sources. From fake think tanks, to entire news organizations, to hundreds and thousands of web sites and fake blogs each trying their hardest to be the #1 google hit for certain subjects.... it is very difficult to find an objective analysis of complex issues.
You have to be above average to remain well informed on policy issues and their true impact. That isn't going to change until we get the money out of elections.
There are stupid, opinionated liberals. There are also well-informed, open-minded liberals. There are stupid, opinionated conservatives. There are also well-informed, open-minded conservatives.
Well true, but what ratio for each? Given that every single congressman in the House elected during the Tea Party wave is openly against evolution, it seems that in this day and age, you can make a pretty good argument that most relevant conservatives in power are fairly ill-informed, at least about science.
Because they're the norm, so they're not newsworthy. It's far easier for a raving idiot to make the news than an average person.
If they are the norm, why are Republicans like Santorum allowed to make it so far in a presidential primary? Why are 100% of the Republicans in the current House against evolution?
Are the 'norm' mainly voting Democratic? I suppose they must be based on the anti-science view of the majority of the elected Republicans.
Slashdot Mirror
Fed Minimum Wage facts
"1.7 million earned exactly the prevailing Federal minimum wage of $7.25 per hour. About 2.2 million had wages below the minimum.2 Together, these 3.8 million workers with wages at or below the Federal minimum made up 5.2 percent of all hourly-paid workers. "
"Although workers under age 25 represented only about one-fifth of hourly-paid workers, they made up about half of those paid the Federal minimum wage or less."
Trying to live on your own after college on minimum wage is hard. But even harder hit are those 50% of minimum wage earners who are over 25, and likely will not (or cannot) get higher paying jobs. Lack of education, disabilities, etc..
Would you rather have 2.5% of our workforce permanently earning a non-living wage, using various forms of welfare, or would you rather have the cost of some luxury goods (retail, restaurants, etc..) go up slightly, and those minimum wage workers paying more tax, buying more things, and generally helping to stimulate the economy?
I've always pictured after you 'pull the lever' to vote, out prints two copies of a one time use random number. Copy one you take, copy two has both the random number and the vote, and goes in a ballot box for recount purposes. The entire random number + vote list would be published online. You, and only you, could look at the list, find your number, and see if your vote was for candidate X.
If enough people started reporting "my vote was wrong", a recount of the physical printouts or investigation could occur. At no point does anyone know your one time use random number.
Union Membership over Time
Without a fairly high percent of the workforce pushing for benefits, pay, and working conditions, all businesses race to the bottom.
I wonder what changed....
Union Membership over Time
I wonder how well the Finn ed. model would work in a society with as much income and wealth inequality as the USA? Based on the BBC article you linked, it looks like it might still work fairly well. But I bet it wouldn't be as effective as it is in Finland.
Curious: can you point to any real world examples of libertarian policies being implemented that resulted in a better society?
Companies will not reinvest in themselves unless there is demand for more of whatever they make/provide. Trickle up is the only sensible economic strategy.
From: http://techcrunch.com/2012/06/05/hbo-go-without-hbo/
The average person would pay $12 a month, or about $145 a year, for online-only access to HBO content. But is that something HBO would be interested in? And is it really leaving money on the table?
HBO currently has about 29 million subscribers, and reportedly receives around $7 or $8 per subscriber per month. So HBO could, theoretically, get more per subscriber than it’s currently making.
But then the article stops quoting any facts and begins speculating about things like:
More importantly, it wouldn’t include the cost of sales, marketing, and support — and this is where HBO would really get screwed. Going direct to online customers by pitching HBO GO over-the-top would mean losing the support of its cable, satellite, and IPTV distributors. And since the Comcasts and the Time Warner Cables of the world are the top marketing channel for premium networks like HBO, it would be nearly impossible for HBO to make up for the loss of the cable provider’s marketing team or promotions.
Lets see... an additional ~4.5 dollars per subscriber, plus an unknown amount of additional subscribers (cord cutters), minus an unknown amount of people who would not sign up because their cable company didn't offer it. The only known figure here is 4.5 dollars x 29,000 million which is a gain of 1.3 billion dollars per month over current gross. Surely that would be enough money to handle sales, marketing, and support...
We phased out CFC's worldwide to combat ozone layer depletion. Oil and coal will be much tougher, but given that the US is the largest consumer, by far, of just about everything in the world, if we lead the charge we should be able to at least get things moving in the right direction.
If the US decides to not use oil / coal anymore, it will in fact change all the world's industrialized nations. For example, every overseas car manufacturer would scramble to design and build bio-diesel / electric cars. China and other production nations would scramble to sell us more solar / solar thermal / other alternative energy sources, etc..
If Saudi Arabia can no longer sell oil to the US, it is not like China will just magically be able to consume the billions of barrels that we no longer use. Oil producing nations will need to develop alternate sources of income, unless they want to wait around for the rest of the world to develop to the point where they can consume all the oil that the US is not.
And would it be impossible for us to just declare "30 years from now, no oil or coal"? It might not be as impossible as it seems: http://www.ted.com/talks/amory_lovins_on_winning_the_oil_endgame.html
What are you talking about? I work in IT for .edu and we host tons of stuff on Youtube. Lots of courses. And we aren't the only one.
https://www.youtube.com/user/PCCvideos
The only time we need something hosted inside or streamed from a vendor with a login is when it is copyrighted for limited class room use. That has nothing to do with schools and everything to do with draconian copyright from publishers.
If we didn't have to deal with craptastic licensing from course material created external to us (like some random documentary a teacher wants to show), we'd have everything on Youtube or likewise free to the public.
"In order to make money you need to be significantly better than the laymen that do it for free for their own enjoyment. "
In music that isn't so much the case. As long as you are at a professional level, (for example, can reproduce a well known song fairly well with your chosen instrument), what is most important next is market research followed by marketing skills.
Market research: Music is art. But not all art sells. If you have a certain style, go see other bands playing that style. Look at what sells and what isn't selling. The audience is the customer, and sometimes that means bowing to what an audience wants to hear. Self indulgent musicians who refuse to examine their music as a product won't sell as much as musicians who think they are 'true artists' who can't be bothered to tweak their music to make it more appealing.
Marketing yourself: Constant radio interviews, constant fan communication (facebook, twitter, etc..) , free samples and song downloads on lots of sites, getting to know music bloggers, etc.. and touring pretty much 300+ days a year.
I can understand that some of Paul's stated goals are attractive to people.
But what I can't understand is how anyone who considers themselves even remotely scientifically minded, would choose to support someone who is purely ideologically driven.
Why aren't we trying to support candidates that actually look at studies, facts, policies that have been field tested around the world, and then make decisions on those things instead of an ideology? It seems to me that unwavering ideology is just as dangerous as unwavering religious beliefs when it comes to policy decisions.
I think you also need to look at the demographics. Income inequality, percent of kids who's parents are considered below poverty levels, numbers of non-native english speaking students, etc... Large inner city schools / more populous states have unique challenges. Places like Montana and the Dakotas do not, or not to the same extent.
I'd also think it would be important to see early testing results. Like from Kindergarten. Perhaps California's kids, on average, start out lower.
Global Warming: Separating the noise from the signal
Separating Signal from Noise in Global Warming
Uncertainty, noise and the art of model-data comparison
I wasn't able to find any articles that I consider credible that talk about this small signal to noise ratio (when dealing with appropriate lengths of time). Do you know of any I could read?
"...the University can reduce its costs by outsourcing email. That in turn increases the amount that the people working for the university can pay themselves."
FTFY
Unless you can show that this actually results in lower student fees, which I doubt.
No one goes into education to get rich...I'll guarantee you that pay for every position in any Edu. is lower than private sector.
Education Institutions have mission statements, and they are actually followed. There are no secret meetings where faculty and admins are figuring out how to get themselves big bonuses or raises by sucking more money out of students.
https://www.banweb.mtu.edu/pls/owa/strategic_plan.p_display
I recently was involved in moving our school's email to Google. It was done purely to free up time so that we could focus on making other student services better. The cost saving wasn't even calculated. When you are dealing with hundreds of thousands of accounts, email ceases to be a trivial workload to maintain.
It might mean that IT has enough money to hire a new programmer, or something like that, but it certainly doesn't mean any of us are getting raises...
4.5 hours might be a lot for a single user. Although you need to take into account all other internet use: patches, email, browsing, etc... It isn't just video.
Where 4.5 hours fails, is in multi-user connections. Especially internet savvy families. 2 kids, 2 parents and your down to 2.25 hours of video a day, assuming the kids watch cartoons on netflix and the parents watch something else. When I am over at relatives houses, it is more likely that the youngest kid watches a 30 minute cartoon, the older kid watches a 30 minute teen show, one parent watches something like mad men while cooking, the other parent watches some online news or a documentary while doing the laundry. So that is 3 hours right there. Then the kids go to bed and the parents want to watch 1 or two shows before bed. They are now over the cap.
No, you don't need network neutrality, you need competition...
Network neutrality is protected by the fact that literally anyone can go and get capacity from BT, and have it available pretty much anywhere in the UK - BT cannot impose limitations on your usage as a network provider, so they cannot force you to not be network neutral.
But as you seem to admit, what enables that competition is starting from a base of network neutrality.
I was curious and asked skeptical science to add your areas of concern to their site. This was the exchange.
John Cook john@skepticalscience.com
4:59 PM (16 minutes ago)
to me
High climate sensitivity (e.g. - 3 degrees warming for doubled CO2) isn't presumed, it's based on multiple lines of evidence:
http://sks.to/sensitivity
rgbatduke is misrepresenting the state of the science.
On 04/05/2012, at 9:48 AM, Jason Whitener wrote:
> Name: Jason Whitener
> Message: If you have time to add to your site, would you please address issues brought up in the comment by rgbatduke (http://www.phy.duke.edu/~rgb/) in the slashdot discussion here:
>
> http://science.slashdot.org/story/12/05/02/0430231/last-bastion-for-climate-dissenters-crumbling
Would you please get in touch with skepticalscience.com, or other sites that attempt to explain these things in a more readable way for the layperson, and present your concerns?
If these issues with agw do exist, I'm assuming that climate scientists are well aware of them. If so, why do none of the popular layperson pro-agw sites attempt to address or explain them?
Why would you have both sickbeard and coachpotato? Aren't they basically the same thing? I use sickbeard and it finds everyone I want.
Darn slashdot filter.
I meant to type legal does not equal moral.
Legal moral
You know, that's only true as long as the majority of the US population keeps voting for the person who spends the most money...
Or,
You know, that's only true as long as the majority of the US population remains average
It is theoretically possible to vote ourselves out of this mess, but let's be realistic: the average person is going to remain.... well, average. "Spend the most" isn't a simple sentence. I think people aren't aware just how much impact that spending has on people's information sources. From fake think tanks, to entire news organizations, to hundreds and thousands of web sites and fake blogs each trying their hardest to be the #1 google hit for certain subjects.... it is very difficult to find an objective analysis of complex issues.
You have to be above average to remain well informed on policy issues and their true impact. That isn't going to change until we get the money out of elections.
Chicken v. egg situation though.
There are stupid, opinionated liberals. There are also well-informed, open-minded liberals.
There are stupid, opinionated conservatives. There are also well-informed, open-minded conservatives.
Well true, but what ratio for each? Given that every single congressman in the House elected during the Tea Party wave is openly against evolution, it seems that in this day and age, you can make a pretty good argument that most relevant conservatives in power are fairly ill-informed, at least about science.
Because they're the norm, so they're not newsworthy. It's far easier for a raving idiot to make the news than an average person.
If they are the norm, why are Republicans like Santorum allowed to make it so far in a presidential primary? Why are 100% of the Republicans in the current House against evolution?
Are the 'norm' mainly voting Democratic? I suppose they must be based on the anti-science view of the majority of the elected Republicans.