The reason doctors are professionals and not just regular people is they have a legal and ethical obligation to do what is in the best health interests of the patient, not necessarily their best financial interests. In the UK they go so far as to employ the doctors directly by the NHS and then give them more money based on things like the number of patients they can get to quit smoking.
Governments are really the only entity that can reasonably assume control over people who actually shouldn't be employed. We shouldn't ever need police, or fire services, because if people just stopped committing crimes we wouldn't need police. If people actually did all the fire safety stuff they're told to there would be a lot less need for fire services. If people actually do what doctors say, quit smoking, take these vaccines etc. we'd need a lot less of them. By your reasoning all 3 of those groups love it when people light fire to malls with people inside or when there are mass shootings. The police have a huge crime to investigate, which keeps them employed for years, fire departments collect major overtime and doctors get a huge collection of patients. The reason the government runs these things is because they are the only ones who can pay people to try and put themselves out of a job, but provide some sort of guarantee that they won't actually be put out of a job.
In the US you don't want people in your office or clinic who don't have vaccines (because they may infect you, your staff, or other patients, including those who are too young to be vaccinated yet, or those too old to survive even mitigated disease because they're vaccinated), you don't want to have to do major work on people because they didn't get vaccines. Especially with insurance as it is in the US, do you want to be liable for someone who contracted whooping cough because you let non vaccinated people into your building?
Nasa budget process is inherently fucked. Everything they do lasts longer than an election cycle, and every party that comes into power changes plans and cancels half done projects, so everything costs too much, and no priority is every properly dealt with. That's not uncommon for any other country in the world with similarly large programmes. Nor is it really central to my point. Which is that they're designing a rocket to last for the next 30 years. It's better they don't fuck it up now, even if that means more upfront costs (and what big projects has the US government run that haven't run massively over budget in the last 20 years? Right, not very many, that's a budgeting game everyone who's playing it knows, and everyone on the outside thinks is a boondoggle).
All of NASA, and all government spending in general is very much about appealing to districts they think can be swung to the party in power, or rewarding loyal supporters. That applies as well to pakistan as it does to sweden, canada and the US. That doesn't mean the project isn't about building a rocket, but if you're going to spend 10 billion dollars that has to be spent somewhere.
I'm not against private space missions. But like everything else in the private sector, who's interests are they serving? Not mine. SpaceX who you seem fond of are competing with Lockheed for NASA money. Obviously you think they're doing a good job of it, and I don't disagree. But the requirements set out for the SLS are about double what anyone else has anywhere in the public pipeline, putting actually larger than the Saturn V, whereas the Falcon Heavy is more like half the size of the Saturn V, and the others are no where near. SLS was only proposed a couple of months ago, because the Constellation programme which started in what 2005 was canceled. See what I mean about new government, new priorities, old partially completed projects canceled? They are (optimistically) projecting 2017 for the SLS, which is only 5 years from now, so suddenly your 'ready in 2-3 years' isn't as much of an advantage is it? Yes, a private outfit benefits enormously from a consistency of vision that will last more than 5 years into a 15 year project (which is basically what happened to the constellation programme).
Right, because the government can only do one thing at a time.
Did you note that the president's new budget only adds $17,000 to your personal share of the national debt this year
er... ~900 billion dollar deficit, 313 million americans = 2875/person. If you want to count working age or whatever, you can double that since there's only about 157 million working age people in the US. Which is in no way 17k.
Are you talking about projected future liabilities maybe? Or the 10 year budget assumptions? Because those are basically nonsense numbers.
Why are you buying fighter jets that will last 30 years when you are not currently at war with russia or china?
There's no point in funding something to go into space you can't get there. Well ok, there is, once you're reasonably sure the vehicle will be available and how much exactly it will carry, but until that point, and even at that point, most of what you're doing is relatively cheap planning and talking about things not actually building.
A lot of government spending, especially this stuff, is long term planning and making sure future people have options. You don't want to decide 8 years from now you need ANOTHER space launch vehicle because this one is too small for something critical.
These rockets are supposed to be in service until about 2040. So what heavy materials and vehicles can you envision? Right. Lots. So there's a whole lot of space for 'when it's done we can do a lot of neat stuff'. That's just hard to fund more than a decade in the future.
about 25% of 360's and PS3's don't have internet. http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/28058/Study_PS3_Has_Highest_Percentage_Of_Connected_Consoles.php
But Xbox and PS3 still require updates to play new games, so you're getting system software via disks one way or another. Game updates, well, your game might just not work as well. But, a lot of the updates pushed are specifically about multiplayer or DLC anyway, and if you don't have internet you don't care about multiplayer or DLC.
The big thing is that the console makers have testing guidelines you have to meet for your game, and design requirements (non interactive loading screens can only be so long that kind of thing). They force you to do a lot first, or you don't get to sell your game with them. With the PC if you run out of money release what you have, use the money you make to patch in fixes and start the next one. That's a sad commentary on the business but these things happen.
And that protection only applies to statements made within the houses of parliament. As a practical matter is generally applied to politicians outside the buildings as as well, but legally they are only protected for statements made within the house.
It actually makes a fair bit of sense, Parliamentary sessions are matters of public record, but can have a lot of bitter personal squabbling in them, things you would say in private that couldn't be seriously considered slanderous (essentially treating someone accused of a crime as having committed said crime for example, especially in cases of bribery of other politicians) are given the protections of being private discourse while still showing off how the commons behave to the public that voted for them. It also means that in their capacity as MP they can accuse for example, Tony Blair, of being a war criminal who should be deported to the hague for trial, even when he is prime minister.
It also exempts them from state secrets acts in performance of their duties. Essentially if they know a state secret and disclose it as part of their job as an MP that is legal, even if they were not explicitly authorized to do so. A good example of the use of something like this would be Winston Churchill openly discussing classified british intelligence on german re-armament in the lead up to WW2. Another example is the revelation of classified programmes that have dodged some other parliamentary procedure (like budget oversight).
It's certainly an odd problem. You kind of saw it with DA2. the idea that you know what all of the different outcomes would be, even if you didn't pick them, so you're not missing out if you only play through once.
I guess that's good, especially in such a long game (or in an MMO where you're unlikely to role a second of the same character class, making exactly opposite decisions or something), but it does feel overdone. It's like they got so wrapped up in their own little teams telling their own little stories that they never sat back and thought 'what is this like to someone who sees the whole picture from the outside'.
Well that was the point of the technology, it (supposedly, I've never seen one) retains the same quality, but cuts power consumption by 70%, but they're about 1500 bucks for TV's that otherwise would have sold for under 1000.
It's not that it's inefficient or somehow knowingly wasted, it's that they for whatever reason did research to figure out a new way to do things that used less power. It's like saying incandescent light bulbs aren't inefficient, relative to something new they are less efficient in terms of light per watt, but we went the better part of a century where basically everyone made light bulbs the same, and that was just how they worked, there was no 'efficiency or inefficiency' about it.
Some games are interactive cinema, some are interactive worlds, some are freeform (i.e. sandbox), some are on rails.
You can't rail on super mario for being too linear. The whole point is that it's a linear experience. You can argue, correctly I think, that some games can be a bit too story, or a bit too open, or at least in some ways.
In Star wars, the old republic MMO you have this very concrete story line that runs *you* through all these planets and so on. That works well until the point where you hit level cap, and every other sith/jedi you see is a member of the small elite dark/jedi council, and you are into the actual business of an MMO which is the hampster wheel of gear progression and finding stuff to do every day. It's so linear to start, the entire thing, that when you get to level cap it's a jaring experience to not having 4 quests in your log for the next hub and somewhere to go.
Skyrim is an example of a bit too open. There *is* a plot there. But you can almost completely miss major portions of it, and you can't realistically see major plot differences without multiple play throughs of an easily 80 hour game. That *can* be good, but it's so big and vast that you have almost no sense of how alternate versions would play out (think the civil war story line that runs along with the rest of the game). And there's huge parts of the world you can easily miss (the giant underground area for example) even if you are spending a lot of time exploring. You might just find these little elevator you can't get into, which unlocks a whole other world, or just a room with a free sword, and you don't know differently, and you just move on, never knowing what you missed or what you could have done to find it.
Both of those are very nitpicky examples to try and be illustrative with current games. I think as an industry we have discovered that most of the time people want a compelling story or plot that they can play through, and that sort of sits on top of their playing in big open worlds. For every Skyrim or WoW or SWTOR that people have they also want some CoD's, some Uncharteds,and some Mass Effect's. There's room in the market for everything, and when you're competing for gamers time more than money you don't really want to sell them a game they can't play. You can bet big, and win, like skyrim, which is also the 5th in a series, but you could also bet big and have no one know who you are (Divinity II: Ego Draconis).
Cutting defence spending would actually make things worse, not better. The government, no matter the programme, is a giant mechanism to pay its own citizens money from other citizens. If you cut defence spending by 500 billion dollars that 500 billion dollars worth of people who now collect unemployment, income supplements etc. And there's no other jobs eagerly awaiting those people unfortunately, oh and all of the stuff they were working on no longer exists to try and sell to other people.
It seems odd, but governments should more or less do the exact opposite of the economy. When the economy is doing well they can trim spending and cut employment, since the private sector absorbs all of those people. And when the economy is doing badly they hire more people to do things to make up for lost jobs and because they're paying unemployment insurance anyway, you may as well pay people to actually do something.
The US deficit is only about 1 trillion USD. (Not debt, deficit), which is about 6%, but the economy is growing by about 3%, so the net is a 3% of GDP increase in relative debt. Even with debt 100% of GDP lots of countries have sustained themselves quite well for a long time with much higher debt than that, and the US deficit is a two fold product of unnecessary tax cuts and the economic downturn moving people from paying into the government to taking from in in the form of unemployment and various reduced income benefits they now qualify for. Raising taxes by 200 billion a year, and having 200 billion dollars worth of benefits no longer necessary due to those people working again suddenly puts your debt back to relatively shrinking. And even a few years of 3-4% economic growth shrinks the US debt as a percent of GDP a lot.
It's not spectacular, but overall the US debt situation really isn't that bad. The vast majority of debt is owed in your own currency, to your own people, and with a growing population and economy it doesn't take very long for things to get sorted out pretty well.
My raise taxes by 200 billion and cut spending by 200 billion is arbitrary, but not far off from raising taxes by 150 billion a year (i.e. clean up the tax code, considering you collect almost 3 trillion in taxes), cutting defence on foreign wars by their current 150 billion, cut medicare and medicaid expenses by everyone having health insurance, slightly reduce US regular defence spending and in not too long the situation is pretty good.
If you want to actually have any economic growth or job creation in the US you need publicly funded research. Those are the people who create industries that create jobs and who train the people who can lead those industries.
Are you sure? If you're in Japan right now, using 70% less power in any device makes a big difference, since they are still rationing power due to the tsunami. What's the crossover point on power cost vs hours watched (and lifetime of the device?). What about really big TV's that use ~300 watts of power (or more). You might have circuit or electrical issues with a device drawing that much power if you already have a computer or whatever.
I grant you, at 10-15 cents/kWh you're only looking at 15-20 bucks a year in energy on a 60 inch TV, but if you live in relatively remote places or the like power can be a lot more expensive.
In general it's not worth it for consumers, but at what point is it worth it? If you're a hospital in Japan, having displays use 70% less power (and that's 70% less you need to keep backups and reliability for) is probably worth double the price, but that's the business end of extreme. Now if you're paying 18 cent/kWh and the TV is only 30% more money, and you expect it to last 8 year, at 5 hours a day...
Again though, that's the problem, to actually be informed about it takes far too much work for most people, so they have nothing to market or sell very effectively from it.
Well that's just it, the Sony branded app/market place whatever has to be the defining feature of the phone. That might be Uncharted Androids 17 Drakes Reincarnated Cyborg Still Jumping, but if it will move units it will make money.
Exactly as I said, they aren't doing anything fundamentally innovative in hardware, they're buying hardware from other people. There's nothing wrong with that, but trying to run your own manufacturing business isn't a great plan. Finding innovative solutions to use the hardware, now that's useful. Sony makes the best LCD cameraphone sensors on the market. Who's phones are they in? Apples. Sony should be defining the standard for camera's in cell phones and the software that goes with it. Even if it's a samsung phone it should be a selling point that it has a sony camera, with sony software, and when the camera business is farmed off to some variant of TSMC Sony would still own the defining software for the cell phones. Interestingly, Microsoft sort of runs this one.
You just said 'why bother when i can get an app for whatever from the app store'. My point is, and I'm guessing they're thinking this on the back end, when you go for an App, for certain things it should be a Sony app that defines excellence. Whether that's for great games, game management, music on the Android, whatever, the experience of having something that says _company_name_here_ should leave customers remembering _company_name_here_ and wanting more.
An app can make the camera experience loads better, better software can make batteries last longer. Core display tech I don't think Sony has been into for a while, they just buy it from other people.
Again, there's nothing wrong with selling hardware, but right now what they're selling is basically a generic android that really doesn't add anything, and they're getting their butts kicked by Samsung doing it. And as time goes on hardware is going to be dumber and dumber, and real time networking will take over a lot of the hardware. So you have to make software that doesn't suck. And outside of their first party game developers, Sony software sucks.
And he's right. In the long term, and that might be another couple of generations, game consoles will be terminals, TV's were dumb terminals and need to be made smart, smartphones can't distinguish themselves from one another if they are all basically the same hardware and software.
Hardware is a bad business to be in. There is becoming less and less of a need for a lot of different foundries, sure there will be some world wide but they are, by and large, astronomically expensive and need to have multiple customers, this is your TSMC, Intel, AMD etc. Given that, Sony, along with everyone else, is buying from them. That means your differentiation comes from what you run on the hardware, not what the hardware is.
Sony *should* own some major portion of the mobile market place. But it doesn't. It has just another android phone basically x10. The PS vita should be *the* premium android phone right now. But it isn't. That's a software and a vision problem, not hardware problem. Because what does a Sony smartphone bring to the table with software?
Sony *should* have a secure, reliable network that people can trust to buy movies music and games on, and that will be up 'all the time' (within reason of course), and, given the PSN outages last year, that isn't the case.
The future for Sony is smart boxes that go with (or inside) dumb boxes, and link up to their smart software services. TV on demand, on your TV, or PS1, 2, 3 or 4 games, all over the net. That may mean running their own cloud backend. But it's still known hardware problems solved with engaging software that's better than the other guy, not shitty software with somehow innovative hardware, because there's not a lot to innovate on the hardware.
In other words, they're largely a consumer facing version of IBM or HP. I'm sure they have, and could do more with the battery/chemicals business and so on, the backend may be boring tech but it can be useful. They can make TV's that use 70% less power for example. But pitching that to consumers requires informed consumers, and most of us, about most of the technology we use, aren't, or at least aren't informed enough for things like a TV that uses 70% less power, but costs 2x as much to even know if that's a worthwhile deal. They could, I suppose, choose to radically reinvest in something else, solar power, that kind of thing, but most of their innovation has been in content distribution (floppy disks, CD's, DVD's, Blu Ray, the whole gaming business etc.) and content delivery at that level is now a networking infrastructure problem.
I'm in canada, and different universities have different rules, some of which even apply to undergraduates. My guess is that harvard doesn't own a large chunk of facebook just because it was developed in their dorm, but YMMV.
I wasn't trying to do an exhaustive breakdown of IP rights in academia. That would be well outside my very narrow experience of universities in ontario (canada) and east of ontario, and I believe at some places you can negotiate this as part of your contract. The only time I was on a hiring committee no one asked, and I was student rep anyway, so if they did it might have been when I wasn't in the room.
Or get your ass hung out to try, because by even discussing the idea and how you would implement it when you leave work, you are violating your contract with the employer and they'll come after you afterwards if they think you have money they can win in a legal battle.
At least in academia most places let you separate your work on the side. If you want to use your work on the side as part of your research work well that's where you get into your situation. When they ask "what are you doing on our time" you have to say something.
When it comes to the question at hand, one option is to pitch the ideas to your employer. The other is to get a separate job, or ask to renegotiate that portion of your contract or move into a job within the company with a less restrictive contract. Expect that to come with a significant paycut though.
You actually run the risk, even asking the question, of implying you have an idea for a product on your current companies time, that you may be thinking about (even if not implementing), so if you leave they may claim that work was done on this project on their time, and you're in violation of their agreement, and they have ownership of some of your work. The question posed could be phrased as 'i have this great idea for a product, how do I get out of having to give my employer any money for it'.
The short answer is that while it's true students may be half asleep, left to do the work entirely on their own, most of them don't. Or at least not until it's too late. Even if the students only half pay attention, they are adding their own notes to the lectures, augmenting their copy of the powerpoint with what you say (fill in the blank power points work remarkably well, where the student fills in the answers during the lecture), but when it comes time to study the notes they're relearning the material, not learning from scratch.
It shouldn't surprise anyone that in a profession that is ~40% about your ability to lecture, you'd have a bunch of people who are good at giving lectures that students understand and find engaging. And those same people trying to completely change what they do doesn't always work. This guy, who is essentially researching experiments in teaching may be good at it because first, he's tried a few beginning steps and knows how to use that to control the classroom, even if he didn't realize it was important. Students might also like it because of the novelty of 'lets try this' or because what he did maps particularly well to the problem he's trying to solve. But trying to use twitter in a classroom needs to map to a particular problem you're trying to solve, trying to do ODE's where everyone starts tweeting about which DE they are isn't going to actually teach you anything about solving DE's. Tutorial exist to reinforce what is in lectures, not to replace them. Sometimes (especially in first year) there isn't much difference, because a lot of the lectures are just an effort to make sure everyone has the same background, since every province, state, country etc. are different.
The era of 'chalk' is mostly gone, but where it served a purpose it still does. If you're doing math, explaining what you're writing, why you're writing it, in a slow deliberate fashion is conveying that information.
Keep in mind that a large part of what universities are is accreditation bodies and places of research. The people who teach need to actually do this stuff on a day to day basis, and take time out from that to teach it. You need to make sure that everyone with a degree in CS, or who has taken 3rd year programming languages has gotten a particular experience. Sure, you can spend 36 hours watching lectures from some other universities, but how do you know what from that is important (no assignments after all), how do you demonstrate that you learned it? On your own trying to solve real problems you need to know what you're trying to use to solve a problem. It's been a while since I took programming languages, but I know what a logic language is enough to know if I have a problem to solve that might use it. A physicist may have vaguely heard something about what logic languages are, but has no actual sense of how to use a logic language to solve a problem (this sort of thing happens a lot to physicists because they're expected to be programmers, but then they get almost no formal training in CS, and so they don't know languages or algorithms or automated software testing well, all of which would be super handy). Yes, you *can* learn all of these things on your own, from wikipedia or from some videos, but you need to know what you're looking for. The great strength of wikipedia is that it immediately connects you to connected information, which also lets you get easily distracted. I'm not sure about the US, but at least in canada, our graduation rates and times are carefully monitored. If you aren't getting kids out the door in whatever average, I think it's about 4.5 years for 4 year programme, they start doing extra reviews of what you're up to and so on, and, eventually, if you can't reasonably get people completed on time, you can't take on students and your programme disappears. That's rare, because there are a lot of things you can do to fix it, and there's some fairly complicated analysis that goes into determining how a programme is doing.
scientists aren't business people either. The intricacies of managing the main contractors, the infrastructure base and the diplomatic exchanges that go with all the other space programmes in the world are best left to people who aren't scientists.
NASA was always about more than just shuttles and manned spaceflight. Those are, generally, relatively poor investments for the science you get out of them. Great PR, and broadly inspirational, but relatively inefficient actual science. NASA does communications satellites, telescopes, materials sciences, weather, the weather of the sun, general satellite management from all of those things, fundamental aeronautics research, etc. There's a lot more to what goes on that just pure science, and than the trolls misguided view that it's all about manned spaceflight. And, like anything, there's a legitimate desire to use the progamme to showoff expertise and build relationships internationally.
That might make it a pretty dreary work environment. That office party you throw for every 10th/100th product you sell, that christmas party, that free lunch fridays are all unnecessary to the core function of the business. So they'd be taxable benefits, so who would do any of it? Treat your employees like drones, and you get drones. Germany up until relatively recently even let bribes be a deductible business expense, because well, that's the cost of doing business a lot of places. I think you lose a competitive edge if you can't wine and dine other guys, and there really is a lot to be said for having semi-casual business discussions.
Don't get me wrong, I mentioned it because it is abused, but there's probably a legitimate case for business expenses to include treating your people and customers like more than just drones.
Jobs and Zuck will also own a large chunk of a different class of shares that the typical stock price. These special shares will have things like more voting rights, potentially pay a dividend or similar every year, they may (or may not, depending) be unlimited liability rather than traditional limited liability stocks and so on. I'm not quite sure how apple and facebook do (or will do) it, but this is pretty common for most big companies.
It's because of these different share classes that zuck will be able to give himself 60% of the voting power in the company, despite owning only about 25% of the value of the company.
Being the CEO of a company comes with a few perks too. That private jet the company owns? You're using it for business purposes, even if you're flying to florida for golfing, it's always part of your security/connectedness/etc. requirement, and because you're golfing with the CEO of another company it's business meeting, so it's not a taxable benefit since it is for work.
Over the years regulators have become less fond of the more archaic schemes, like rather than hiring you, they're contracting sir_sri management services, a wholly own subsidiary of Sri's Cayman Island management group, where Sri officially claims residence, so the housing, provided by the company, is a 'temporary residence' and for the use of any of Sir_Sri Management services employees who may be required to fulfill the terms of the contract (not disclosed), and they're families who may also have an expense account to deal with the temporary relocation from the Cayman islands. Oh and because you're only there temporarily, all your meals, and general housing services are also covered expenses*.
* a lot of this still happens a lot, justifiably so, on shorter term stuff.
The thrust of the article is actually about the privacy concerns the IRS has, and this is the sort of thing that can go wrong. So it is topical, if you look past the summary.
The red flag might have been a single employee doing a particularly large (or small) number of returns or returns of the wrong general value, in a 2 day period. Granted at 59 returns it's 130k per return, but that would mean this guy happened upon 59 filings from the top 1% of wage earners (the top 1% in the US now is around 300k/year in income so for 2005 tax returns paying out 130k should be relatively rare, unless you work on those, and if you work on the ones with big money I'd expect you to get more scrutiny).
The article suggests but doesn't explicitly say he was caught because the SSN's he used were for single people, not married people and he was filing jointly or problems like that, so the automated tools caught some of it.
It also looks like they caught this on the 8th return, not the 59th. They only paid out on 7 claims, before they realized something was up.
Re:Such systems have been proposed before
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The Zuckerberg Tax
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As an employer, you don't have to cover the risk incurred by insuring a small (or large) number of employees, because that risk has been collectivized by the government.
It would save GM a shitload of money if the US government ran healthcare, and by extension it would enrich their shareholders. And the same argument applies to pensions. GM is paying a for profit company to provide health insurance to its workers, so they lose the value of the profit to someone else, and they have to pay it even when they're doing badly themselves. When the government runs it (as in civilized countries) the risk is aggregated around much larger pool, which reduces costs. Again, the pensions argument is the same way. Without various government pensions employers would have to pay more in benefits, which is agreeing to pay something 30 years from now. That's risky for them (and costs a lot in pension compliance). These are presented as plans to help the poor, because they do, but they help the rich more because they aren't on the hook for some unknown future expense that could happen to be astronomically expensive. The poor guy only benefits from government healthcare as the difference in cost between what he could get from private or government insurance. The rich guy benefits from that, *AND* the reduced long term liability, and the macro insurance of not having to pay for insurance if some jackass crashes planes into buildings and tanks the economy, or if his sales drop 40% this year.
On the first point we'll have to simply disagree. If a guy with a million dollar car has an accident the police basically always have to check because they need to verify things for insurance or whatever. If I hit a lamp post in my 1993 van no one cares. If you're celebrity you regularly need police protection (which can be expensive if you're moving around a lot) due to the risk of kidnap etc. Hell the CEO of netflix was complaining about that. Every time land owner needs to evict a tennant he's costing the legal system money. Every time he signs a contract that needs to be enforced (either via the police or courts) he's costing money.
Again, you're fundamentally misunderstanding the system. If you say 'we'll tax consumption but give the poor a rebate' and you break 'the poor' into 4 brackets, essentially the varying degrees of not rich and reduce their taxes each accordingly, you're into a graduated tax system which is what you have. It's also why taxing at the point of consumption is bad, because two people in the same income bracket may consume fuel differently, but you're disadvantaging one guy over the other because you're trying to reduce his consumption, but of course the poor have less money to invest in mobility, and now you're taking away more of it when they're trying to say, work.
And, as a practical matter, the point of taking part in a survey or study is to give up that privacy so that they can make products that better reflect how you use them. Without that data it is harder, if not impossible, to actually make better products. Google developers are not typical examples of how people use the internet.
We have this issue with games too. Trying to figure out who is a valid testing set is really hard. If I hand my game off to some 40 year old women I'll get different testing results than 20 year old men. Sometimes that just gives better testing results to have that diversity, sometimes you bias your game to feedback you like or feedback you don't.
With automated tools, and we have them in games, especially in the MMO business, you track everywhere people die, how often, if you can why, how much dps/healing/dmg whatever they do, package it all up and try and figure out what is causing people problems. The idea that you can map the data back ot a particular user isn't ideal, and I'm sure lots of users aren't all that fond of it (maybe less so in a game where the people who have the data are the ones making the game), but if you want to make a web browser you need to know how actual people use the web browser. The only way to do that is to have people voluntarily opt in, or to secretly track them. Secret tracking is bad (albeit better at producing honest data probably, no selection biases, no people trying to watch nature shows to game the nielsen ratings, sort of thing), so you're left with voluntary tracking. If they purely asked for volunteers then it would be saying 'your privacy is worth nothing' when compared to a 25 dollar amazon gift card. But I don't think that's fair. Google is saying 'thank you' for giving up this info so they can make a better browser. No amount of money is ever going to make everyone happy, and no matter how much money you have you can't just give it all away for nothing. If they paid 20k you'd have everyone under the sun signing up because that's a lot of money, and privacy is only worth so much compared to 20k, and people trying to game the system to get 20k multiple ways etc. This way, if 10% of users collect 10 amazon cards you're not out much overall, you don't need enforcement and you still get mostly decent data. Which is about all you can do.
Only if you could get a statistically significant sample size on a social network, which you can't, and their data points aren't meaningful right now anyway because they don't have enough to compare to to give an accurate assessment of relative happiness, discipline etc. If those mapped to directly quantifiable numbers, you could ask your friends what is the happiness of kids at this school, or what is the disciple number you could get data points, but then you'd still be better to get aggregate statistics.
Your social network only gives you the illusion of control, not actual control, and certainly not meaningful data. I'd be intrigued to know what you think you're getting in terms of a proper assessment of discipline or happiness, or how either of those necessarily maps to a good school. The army has fairly extreme discipline, but so do prisons. One is probably not an extreme you want, and could actually be detrimental. So how are you quantifying discipline, and on what scale to judge performance? A lack of discipline is distracting to students, sure, but then how much of that is school, teacher, particularly troublesome children, and how much of making them into little soldier boys or prisoners is just stifling them as human beings? Happiness is just a stupid metric all around. Children have no broader context to why they're in prison, I'm sorry, school, than 'I told you it's good for you and in the long run it will help'. They have no mechanism to gauge the validity of the last part, and they are expected to simply do what they're told like a little conformist. Or else something. They can hate a particular other student, they can hate being in school at all, or they can really like being a school that doesn't make them do any work and doesn't have any discipline and they get to play all day. You get basically nonsense answers. Lots of kids hate math, and most of them hate stats, but if you can't do stats you can't even figure out whether or not a particular piece of data is a valid measure of something. Kids being happy might mean they're not being challenged, not being taught the right things or might mean they actually like learning material as given to them.
I said nothing about exams, test scores are, by themselves not spectacular measures of anything. I suppose if a school has higher test scores than another it is always preferable to go there based on only that one statistic, simply because odds are your kid will get higher test scores too. Whatever your other measures, happiness, discipline or whatever, if they combine into test scores then the one with higher test scores has, by definition, a better aggregation of its sub parts. But the article itself is a mostly reasonable assessment about test scores in two cases. In the first case it's performing a comparison between test scores and parent education. You would expect better educated parents to produce better performing kids, so you want to find schools that outperform expectations, i.e. if you would expect kids to get 60 based on their parents, but those kids are scoring 70 then they are doing better than expected, which is outperforming, and therefore a good school. The second metric, test percentile growth, is that kids who come in at say, grade 2, haven't had that much of an influence from the school (2 or 3 of their 7 years of age), so lets say they are in the 50th percentile. If by grade 8 that school now has kids in to top quarter then those kids are improving (or smarter people moved into the neighbourhood and dumber ones moved out), which is outperforming beyond expectations.
On the first metric they used, a better evaluation would include the type and quality of degree involved. A bachelors in aerospace engineering from Caltech should be expected to produce smarter kids than a MBA in english from the university of phoenix.
The article is very 'parent' focused. Where should I put *my kid* to get my kid the best education. Trying to improve the whole system is a different problem, because if someone is moving up in a percentile, someone else is moving down, and there's going to be a lot of noise in the system. It's a related problem, but it is a bit messier.
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The reason doctors are professionals and not just regular people is they have a legal and ethical obligation to do what is in the best health interests of the patient, not necessarily their best financial interests. In the UK they go so far as to employ the doctors directly by the NHS and then give them more money based on things like the number of patients they can get to quit smoking.
Governments are really the only entity that can reasonably assume control over people who actually shouldn't be employed. We shouldn't ever need police, or fire services, because if people just stopped committing crimes we wouldn't need police. If people actually did all the fire safety stuff they're told to there would be a lot less need for fire services. If people actually do what doctors say, quit smoking, take these vaccines etc. we'd need a lot less of them. By your reasoning all 3 of those groups love it when people light fire to malls with people inside or when there are mass shootings. The police have a huge crime to investigate, which keeps them employed for years, fire departments collect major overtime and doctors get a huge collection of patients. The reason the government runs these things is because they are the only ones who can pay people to try and put themselves out of a job, but provide some sort of guarantee that they won't actually be put out of a job.
In the US you don't want people in your office or clinic who don't have vaccines (because they may infect you, your staff, or other patients, including those who are too young to be vaccinated yet, or those too old to survive even mitigated disease because they're vaccinated), you don't want to have to do major work on people because they didn't get vaccines. Especially with insurance as it is in the US, do you want to be liable for someone who contracted whooping cough because you let non vaccinated people into your building?
Nasa budget process is inherently fucked. Everything they do lasts longer than an election cycle, and every party that comes into power changes plans and cancels half done projects, so everything costs too much, and no priority is every properly dealt with. That's not uncommon for any other country in the world with similarly large programmes. Nor is it really central to my point. Which is that they're designing a rocket to last for the next 30 years. It's better they don't fuck it up now, even if that means more upfront costs (and what big projects has the US government run that haven't run massively over budget in the last 20 years? Right, not very many, that's a budgeting game everyone who's playing it knows, and everyone on the outside thinks is a boondoggle).
All of NASA, and all government spending in general is very much about appealing to districts they think can be swung to the party in power, or rewarding loyal supporters. That applies as well to pakistan as it does to sweden, canada and the US. That doesn't mean the project isn't about building a rocket, but if you're going to spend 10 billion dollars that has to be spent somewhere.
I'm not against private space missions. But like everything else in the private sector, who's interests are they serving? Not mine. SpaceX who you seem fond of are competing with Lockheed for NASA money. Obviously you think they're doing a good job of it, and I don't disagree. But the requirements set out for the SLS are about double what anyone else has anywhere in the public pipeline, putting actually larger than the Saturn V, whereas the Falcon Heavy is more like half the size of the Saturn V, and the others are no where near. SLS was only proposed a couple of months ago, because the Constellation programme which started in what 2005 was canceled. See what I mean about new government, new priorities, old partially completed projects canceled? They are (optimistically) projecting 2017 for the SLS, which is only 5 years from now, so suddenly your 'ready in 2-3 years' isn't as much of an advantage is it? Yes, a private outfit benefits enormously from a consistency of vision that will last more than 5 years into a 15 year project (which is basically what happened to the constellation programme).
Right, because the government can only do one thing at a time.
Did you note that the president's new budget only adds $17,000 to your personal share of the national debt this year
er... ~900 billion dollar deficit, 313 million americans = 2875/person. If you want to count working age or whatever, you can double that since there's only about 157 million working age people in the US. Which is in no way 17k.
Are you talking about projected future liabilities maybe? Or the 10 year budget assumptions? Because those are basically nonsense numbers.
Why are you buying fighter jets that will last 30 years when you are not currently at war with russia or china?
There's no point in funding something to go into space you can't get there. Well ok, there is, once you're reasonably sure the vehicle will be available and how much exactly it will carry, but until that point, and even at that point, most of what you're doing is relatively cheap planning and talking about things not actually building.
A lot of government spending, especially this stuff, is long term planning and making sure future people have options. You don't want to decide 8 years from now you need ANOTHER space launch vehicle because this one is too small for something critical.
These rockets are supposed to be in service until about 2040. So what heavy materials and vehicles can you envision? Right. Lots. So there's a whole lot of space for 'when it's done we can do a lot of neat stuff'. That's just hard to fund more than a decade in the future.
about 25% of 360's and PS3's don't have internet. http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/28058/Study_PS3_Has_Highest_Percentage_Of_Connected_Consoles.php
But Xbox and PS3 still require updates to play new games, so you're getting system software via disks one way or another. Game updates, well, your game might just not work as well. But, a lot of the updates pushed are specifically about multiplayer or DLC anyway, and if you don't have internet you don't care about multiplayer or DLC.
The big thing is that the console makers have testing guidelines you have to meet for your game, and design requirements (non interactive loading screens can only be so long that kind of thing). They force you to do a lot first, or you don't get to sell your game with them. With the PC if you run out of money release what you have, use the money you make to patch in fixes and start the next one. That's a sad commentary on the business but these things happen.
And that protection only applies to statements made within the houses of parliament. As a practical matter is generally applied to politicians outside the buildings as as well, but legally they are only protected for statements made within the house.
It actually makes a fair bit of sense, Parliamentary sessions are matters of public record, but can have a lot of bitter personal squabbling in them, things you would say in private that couldn't be seriously considered slanderous (essentially treating someone accused of a crime as having committed said crime for example, especially in cases of bribery of other politicians) are given the protections of being private discourse while still showing off how the commons behave to the public that voted for them. It also means that in their capacity as MP they can accuse for example, Tony Blair, of being a war criminal who should be deported to the hague for trial, even when he is prime minister.
It also exempts them from state secrets acts in performance of their duties. Essentially if they know a state secret and disclose it as part of their job as an MP that is legal, even if they were not explicitly authorized to do so. A good example of the use of something like this would be Winston Churchill openly discussing classified british intelligence on german re-armament in the lead up to WW2. Another example is the revelation of classified programmes that have dodged some other parliamentary procedure (like budget oversight).
It's certainly an odd problem. You kind of saw it with DA2. the idea that you know what all of the different outcomes would be, even if you didn't pick them, so you're not missing out if you only play through once.
I guess that's good, especially in such a long game (or in an MMO where you're unlikely to role a second of the same character class, making exactly opposite decisions or something), but it does feel overdone. It's like they got so wrapped up in their own little teams telling their own little stories that they never sat back and thought 'what is this like to someone who sees the whole picture from the outside'.
Well that was the point of the technology, it (supposedly, I've never seen one) retains the same quality, but cuts power consumption by 70%, but they're about 1500 bucks for TV's that otherwise would have sold for under 1000.
It's not that it's inefficient or somehow knowingly wasted, it's that they for whatever reason did research to figure out a new way to do things that used less power. It's like saying incandescent light bulbs aren't inefficient, relative to something new they are less efficient in terms of light per watt, but we went the better part of a century where basically everyone made light bulbs the same, and that was just how they worked, there was no 'efficiency or inefficiency' about it.
Some games are interactive cinema, some are interactive worlds, some are freeform (i.e. sandbox), some are on rails.
You can't rail on super mario for being too linear. The whole point is that it's a linear experience. You can argue, correctly I think, that some games can be a bit too story, or a bit too open, or at least in some ways.
In Star wars, the old republic MMO you have this very concrete story line that runs *you* through all these planets and so on. That works well until the point where you hit level cap, and every other sith/jedi you see is a member of the small elite dark/jedi council, and you are into the actual business of an MMO which is the hampster wheel of gear progression and finding stuff to do every day. It's so linear to start, the entire thing, that when you get to level cap it's a jaring experience to not having 4 quests in your log for the next hub and somewhere to go.
Skyrim is an example of a bit too open. There *is* a plot there. But you can almost completely miss major portions of it, and you can't realistically see major plot differences without multiple play throughs of an easily 80 hour game. That *can* be good, but it's so big and vast that you have almost no sense of how alternate versions would play out (think the civil war story line that runs along with the rest of the game). And there's huge parts of the world you can easily miss (the giant underground area for example) even if you are spending a lot of time exploring. You might just find these little elevator you can't get into, which unlocks a whole other world, or just a room with a free sword, and you don't know differently, and you just move on, never knowing what you missed or what you could have done to find it.
Both of those are very nitpicky examples to try and be illustrative with current games. I think as an industry we have discovered that most of the time people want a compelling story or plot that they can play through, and that sort of sits on top of their playing in big open worlds. For every Skyrim or WoW or SWTOR that people have they also want some CoD's, some Uncharteds,and some Mass Effect's. There's room in the market for everything, and when you're competing for gamers time more than money you don't really want to sell them a game they can't play. You can bet big, and win, like skyrim, which is also the 5th in a series, but you could also bet big and have no one know who you are (Divinity II: Ego Draconis).
Cutting defence spending would actually make things worse, not better. The government, no matter the programme, is a giant mechanism to pay its own citizens money from other citizens. If you cut defence spending by 500 billion dollars that 500 billion dollars worth of people who now collect unemployment, income supplements etc. And there's no other jobs eagerly awaiting those people unfortunately, oh and all of the stuff they were working on no longer exists to try and sell to other people.
It seems odd, but governments should more or less do the exact opposite of the economy. When the economy is doing well they can trim spending and cut employment, since the private sector absorbs all of those people. And when the economy is doing badly they hire more people to do things to make up for lost jobs and because they're paying unemployment insurance anyway, you may as well pay people to actually do something.
The US deficit is only about 1 trillion USD. (Not debt, deficit), which is about 6%, but the economy is growing by about 3%, so the net is a 3% of GDP increase in relative debt. Even with debt 100% of GDP lots of countries have sustained themselves quite well for a long time with much higher debt than that, and the US deficit is a two fold product of unnecessary tax cuts and the economic downturn moving people from paying into the government to taking from in in the form of unemployment and various reduced income benefits they now qualify for. Raising taxes by 200 billion a year, and having 200 billion dollars worth of benefits no longer necessary due to those people working again suddenly puts your debt back to relatively shrinking. And even a few years of 3-4% economic growth shrinks the US debt as a percent of GDP a lot.
It's not spectacular, but overall the US debt situation really isn't that bad. The vast majority of debt is owed in your own currency, to your own people, and with a growing population and economy it doesn't take very long for things to get sorted out pretty well.
My raise taxes by 200 billion and cut spending by 200 billion is arbitrary, but not far off from raising taxes by 150 billion a year (i.e. clean up the tax code, considering you collect almost 3 trillion in taxes), cutting defence on foreign wars by their current 150 billion, cut medicare and medicaid expenses by everyone having health insurance, slightly reduce US regular defence spending and in not too long the situation is pretty good.
If you want to actually have any economic growth or job creation in the US you need publicly funded research. Those are the people who create industries that create jobs and who train the people who can lead those industries.
Are you sure? If you're in Japan right now, using 70% less power in any device makes a big difference, since they are still rationing power due to the tsunami. What's the crossover point on power cost vs hours watched (and lifetime of the device?). What about really big TV's that use ~300 watts of power (or more). You might have circuit or electrical issues with a device drawing that much power if you already have a computer or whatever.
I grant you, at 10-15 cents/kWh you're only looking at 15-20 bucks a year in energy on a 60 inch TV, but if you live in relatively remote places or the like power can be a lot more expensive.
In general it's not worth it for consumers, but at what point is it worth it? If you're a hospital in Japan, having displays use 70% less power (and that's 70% less you need to keep backups and reliability for) is probably worth double the price, but that's the business end of extreme. Now if you're paying 18 cent/kWh and the TV is only 30% more money, and you expect it to last 8 year, at 5 hours a day...
Again though, that's the problem, to actually be informed about it takes far too much work for most people, so they have nothing to market or sell very effectively from it.
Well that's just it, the Sony branded app/market place whatever has to be the defining feature of the phone. That might be Uncharted Androids 17 Drakes Reincarnated Cyborg Still Jumping, but if it will move units it will make money.
Exactly as I said, they aren't doing anything fundamentally innovative in hardware, they're buying hardware from other people. There's nothing wrong with that, but trying to run your own manufacturing business isn't a great plan. Finding innovative solutions to use the hardware, now that's useful. Sony makes the best LCD cameraphone sensors on the market. Who's phones are they in? Apples. Sony should be defining the standard for camera's in cell phones and the software that goes with it. Even if it's a samsung phone it should be a selling point that it has a sony camera, with sony software, and when the camera business is farmed off to some variant of TSMC Sony would still own the defining software for the cell phones. Interestingly, Microsoft sort of runs this one.
You just said 'why bother when i can get an app for whatever from the app store'. My point is, and I'm guessing they're thinking this on the back end, when you go for an App, for certain things it should be a Sony app that defines excellence. Whether that's for great games, game management, music on the Android, whatever, the experience of having something that says _company_name_here_ should leave customers remembering _company_name_here_ and wanting more.
An app can make the camera experience loads better, better software can make batteries last longer. Core display tech I don't think Sony has been into for a while, they just buy it from other people.
Again, there's nothing wrong with selling hardware, but right now what they're selling is basically a generic android that really doesn't add anything, and they're getting their butts kicked by Samsung doing it. And as time goes on hardware is going to be dumber and dumber, and real time networking will take over a lot of the hardware. So you have to make software that doesn't suck. And outside of their first party game developers, Sony software sucks.
And he's right. In the long term, and that might be another couple of generations, game consoles will be terminals, TV's were dumb terminals and need to be made smart, smartphones can't distinguish themselves from one another if they are all basically the same hardware and software.
Hardware is a bad business to be in. There is becoming less and less of a need for a lot of different foundries, sure there will be some world wide but they are, by and large, astronomically expensive and need to have multiple customers, this is your TSMC, Intel, AMD etc. Given that, Sony, along with everyone else, is buying from them. That means your differentiation comes from what you run on the hardware, not what the hardware is.
Sony *should* own some major portion of the mobile market place. But it doesn't. It has just another android phone basically x10. The PS vita should be *the* premium android phone right now. But it isn't. That's a software and a vision problem, not hardware problem. Because what does a Sony smartphone bring to the table with software?
Sony *should* have a secure, reliable network that people can trust to buy movies music and games on, and that will be up 'all the time' (within reason of course), and, given the PSN outages last year, that isn't the case.
The future for Sony is smart boxes that go with (or inside) dumb boxes, and link up to their smart software services. TV on demand, on your TV, or PS1, 2, 3 or 4 games, all over the net. That may mean running their own cloud backend. But it's still known hardware problems solved with engaging software that's better than the other guy, not shitty software with somehow innovative hardware, because there's not a lot to innovate on the hardware.
In other words, they're largely a consumer facing version of IBM or HP. I'm sure they have, and could do more with the battery/chemicals business and so on, the backend may be boring tech but it can be useful. They can make TV's that use 70% less power for example. But pitching that to consumers requires informed consumers, and most of us, about most of the technology we use, aren't, or at least aren't informed enough for things like a TV that uses 70% less power, but costs 2x as much to even know if that's a worthwhile deal. They could, I suppose, choose to radically reinvest in something else, solar power, that kind of thing, but most of their innovation has been in content distribution (floppy disks, CD's, DVD's, Blu Ray, the whole gaming business etc.) and content delivery at that level is now a networking infrastructure problem.
I'm in canada, and different universities have different rules, some of which even apply to undergraduates. My guess is that harvard doesn't own a large chunk of facebook just because it was developed in their dorm, but YMMV.
I wasn't trying to do an exhaustive breakdown of IP rights in academia. That would be well outside my very narrow experience of universities in ontario (canada) and east of ontario, and I believe at some places you can negotiate this as part of your contract. The only time I was on a hiring committee no one asked, and I was student rep anyway, so if they did it might have been when I wasn't in the room.
Or get your ass hung out to try, because by even discussing the idea and how you would implement it when you leave work, you are violating your contract with the employer and they'll come after you afterwards if they think you have money they can win in a legal battle.
At least in academia most places let you separate your work on the side. If you want to use your work on the side as part of your research work well that's where you get into your situation. When they ask "what are you doing on our time" you have to say something.
When it comes to the question at hand, one option is to pitch the ideas to your employer. The other is to get a separate job, or ask to renegotiate that portion of your contract or move into a job within the company with a less restrictive contract. Expect that to come with a significant paycut though.
You actually run the risk, even asking the question, of implying you have an idea for a product on your current companies time, that you may be thinking about (even if not implementing), so if you leave they may claim that work was done on this project on their time, and you're in violation of their agreement, and they have ownership of some of your work. The question posed could be phrased as 'i have this great idea for a product, how do I get out of having to give my employer any money for it'.
The short answer is that while it's true students may be half asleep, left to do the work entirely on their own, most of them don't. Or at least not until it's too late. Even if the students only half pay attention, they are adding their own notes to the lectures, augmenting their copy of the powerpoint with what you say (fill in the blank power points work remarkably well, where the student fills in the answers during the lecture), but when it comes time to study the notes they're relearning the material, not learning from scratch.
It shouldn't surprise anyone that in a profession that is ~40% about your ability to lecture, you'd have a bunch of people who are good at giving lectures that students understand and find engaging. And those same people trying to completely change what they do doesn't always work. This guy, who is essentially researching experiments in teaching may be good at it because first, he's tried a few beginning steps and knows how to use that to control the classroom, even if he didn't realize it was important. Students might also like it because of the novelty of 'lets try this' or because what he did maps particularly well to the problem he's trying to solve. But trying to use twitter in a classroom needs to map to a particular problem you're trying to solve, trying to do ODE's where everyone starts tweeting about which DE they are isn't going to actually teach you anything about solving DE's. Tutorial exist to reinforce what is in lectures, not to replace them. Sometimes (especially in first year) there isn't much difference, because a lot of the lectures are just an effort to make sure everyone has the same background, since every province, state, country etc. are different.
The era of 'chalk' is mostly gone, but where it served a purpose it still does. If you're doing math, explaining what you're writing, why you're writing it, in a slow deliberate fashion is conveying that information.
Keep in mind that a large part of what universities are is accreditation bodies and places of research. The people who teach need to actually do this stuff on a day to day basis, and take time out from that to teach it. You need to make sure that everyone with a degree in CS, or who has taken 3rd year programming languages has gotten a particular experience. Sure, you can spend 36 hours watching lectures from some other universities, but how do you know what from that is important (no assignments after all), how do you demonstrate that you learned it? On your own trying to solve real problems you need to know what you're trying to use to solve a problem. It's been a while since I took programming languages, but I know what a logic language is enough to know if I have a problem to solve that might use it. A physicist may have vaguely heard something about what logic languages are, but has no actual sense of how to use a logic language to solve a problem (this sort of thing happens a lot to physicists because they're expected to be programmers, but then they get almost no formal training in CS, and so they don't know languages or algorithms or automated software testing well, all of which would be super handy). Yes, you *can* learn all of these things on your own, from wikipedia or from some videos, but you need to know what you're looking for. The great strength of wikipedia is that it immediately connects you to connected information, which also lets you get easily distracted. I'm not sure about the US, but at least in canada, our graduation rates and times are carefully monitored. If you aren't getting kids out the door in whatever average, I think it's about 4.5 years for 4 year programme, they start doing extra reviews of what you're up to and so on, and, eventually, if you can't reasonably get people completed on time, you can't take on students and your programme disappears. That's rare, because there are a lot of things you can do to fix it, and there's some fairly complicated analysis that goes into determining how a programme is doing.
Being able to pause a
scientists aren't business people either. The intricacies of managing the main contractors, the infrastructure base and the diplomatic exchanges that go with all the other space programmes in the world are best left to people who aren't scientists.
NASA was always about more than just shuttles and manned spaceflight. Those are, generally, relatively poor investments for the science you get out of them. Great PR, and broadly inspirational, but relatively inefficient actual science. NASA does communications satellites, telescopes, materials sciences, weather, the weather of the sun, general satellite management from all of those things, fundamental aeronautics research, etc. There's a lot more to what goes on that just pure science, and than the trolls misguided view that it's all about manned spaceflight. And, like anything, there's a legitimate desire to use the progamme to showoff expertise and build relationships internationally.
That might make it a pretty dreary work environment. That office party you throw for every 10th/100th product you sell, that christmas party, that free lunch fridays are all unnecessary to the core function of the business. So they'd be taxable benefits, so who would do any of it? Treat your employees like drones, and you get drones. Germany up until relatively recently even let bribes be a deductible business expense, because well, that's the cost of doing business a lot of places. I think you lose a competitive edge if you can't wine and dine other guys, and there really is a lot to be said for having semi-casual business discussions.
Don't get me wrong, I mentioned it because it is abused, but there's probably a legitimate case for business expenses to include treating your people and customers like more than just drones.
Jobs and Zuck will also own a large chunk of a different class of shares that the typical stock price. These special shares will have things like more voting rights, potentially pay a dividend or similar every year, they may (or may not, depending) be unlimited liability rather than traditional limited liability stocks and so on. I'm not quite sure how apple and facebook do (or will do) it, but this is pretty common for most big companies.
It's because of these different share classes that zuck will be able to give himself 60% of the voting power in the company, despite owning only about 25% of the value of the company.
Being the CEO of a company comes with a few perks too. That private jet the company owns? You're using it for business purposes, even if you're flying to florida for golfing, it's always part of your security/connectedness/etc. requirement, and because you're golfing with the CEO of another company it's business meeting, so it's not a taxable benefit since it is for work.
Over the years regulators have become less fond of the more archaic schemes, like rather than hiring you, they're contracting sir_sri management services, a wholly own subsidiary of Sri's Cayman Island management group, where Sri officially claims residence, so the housing, provided by the company, is a 'temporary residence' and for the use of any of Sir_Sri Management services employees who may be required to fulfill the terms of the contract (not disclosed), and they're families who may also have an expense account to deal with the temporary relocation from the Cayman islands. Oh and because you're only there temporarily, all your meals, and general housing services are also covered expenses*.
* a lot of this still happens a lot, justifiably so, on shorter term stuff.
The thrust of the article is actually about the privacy concerns the IRS has, and this is the sort of thing that can go wrong. So it is topical, if you look past the summary.
The red flag might have been a single employee doing a particularly large (or small) number of returns or returns of the wrong general value, in a 2 day period. Granted at 59 returns it's 130k per return, but that would mean this guy happened upon 59 filings from the top 1% of wage earners (the top 1% in the US now is around 300k/year in income so for 2005 tax returns paying out 130k should be relatively rare, unless you work on those, and if you work on the ones with big money I'd expect you to get more scrutiny).
The article suggests but doesn't explicitly say he was caught because the SSN's he used were for single people, not married people and he was filing jointly or problems like that, so the automated tools caught some of it.
It also looks like they caught this on the 8th return, not the 59th. They only paid out on 7 claims, before they realized something was up.
As an employer, you don't have to cover the risk incurred by insuring a small (or large) number of employees, because that risk has been collectivized by the government.
It would save GM a shitload of money if the US government ran healthcare, and by extension it would enrich their shareholders. And the same argument applies to pensions. GM is paying a for profit company to provide health insurance to its workers, so they lose the value of the profit to someone else, and they have to pay it even when they're doing badly themselves. When the government runs it (as in civilized countries) the risk is aggregated around much larger pool, which reduces costs. Again, the pensions argument is the same way. Without various government pensions employers would have to pay more in benefits, which is agreeing to pay something 30 years from now. That's risky for them (and costs a lot in pension compliance). These are presented as plans to help the poor, because they do, but they help the rich more because they aren't on the hook for some unknown future expense that could happen to be astronomically expensive. The poor guy only benefits from government healthcare as the difference in cost between what he could get from private or government insurance. The rich guy benefits from that, *AND* the reduced long term liability, and the macro insurance of not having to pay for insurance if some jackass crashes planes into buildings and tanks the economy, or if his sales drop 40% this year.
On the first point we'll have to simply disagree. If a guy with a million dollar car has an accident the police basically always have to check because they need to verify things for insurance or whatever. If I hit a lamp post in my 1993 van no one cares. If you're celebrity you regularly need police protection (which can be expensive if you're moving around a lot) due to the risk of kidnap etc. Hell the CEO of netflix was complaining about that. Every time land owner needs to evict a tennant he's costing the legal system money. Every time he signs a contract that needs to be enforced (either via the police or courts) he's costing money.
Again, you're fundamentally misunderstanding the system. If you say 'we'll tax consumption but give the poor a rebate' and you break 'the poor' into 4 brackets, essentially the varying degrees of not rich and reduce their taxes each accordingly, you're into a graduated tax system which is what you have. It's also why taxing at the point of consumption is bad, because two people in the same income bracket may consume fuel differently, but you're disadvantaging one guy over the other because you're trying to reduce his consumption, but of course the poor have less money to invest in mobility, and now you're taking away more of it when they're trying to say, work.
And, as a practical matter, the point of taking part in a survey or study is to give up that privacy so that they can make products that better reflect how you use them. Without that data it is harder, if not impossible, to actually make better products. Google developers are not typical examples of how people use the internet.
We have this issue with games too. Trying to figure out who is a valid testing set is really hard. If I hand my game off to some 40 year old women I'll get different testing results than 20 year old men. Sometimes that just gives better testing results to have that diversity, sometimes you bias your game to feedback you like or feedback you don't.
With automated tools, and we have them in games, especially in the MMO business, you track everywhere people die, how often, if you can why, how much dps/healing/dmg whatever they do, package it all up and try and figure out what is causing people problems. The idea that you can map the data back ot a particular user isn't ideal, and I'm sure lots of users aren't all that fond of it (maybe less so in a game where the people who have the data are the ones making the game), but if you want to make a web browser you need to know how actual people use the web browser. The only way to do that is to have people voluntarily opt in, or to secretly track them. Secret tracking is bad (albeit better at producing honest data probably, no selection biases, no people trying to watch nature shows to game the nielsen ratings, sort of thing), so you're left with voluntary tracking. If they purely asked for volunteers then it would be saying 'your privacy is worth nothing' when compared to a 25 dollar amazon gift card. But I don't think that's fair. Google is saying 'thank you' for giving up this info so they can make a better browser. No amount of money is ever going to make everyone happy, and no matter how much money you have you can't just give it all away for nothing. If they paid 20k you'd have everyone under the sun signing up because that's a lot of money, and privacy is only worth so much compared to 20k, and people trying to game the system to get 20k multiple ways etc. This way, if 10% of users collect 10 amazon cards you're not out much overall, you don't need enforcement and you still get mostly decent data. Which is about all you can do.
Only if you could get a statistically significant sample size on a social network, which you can't, and their data points aren't meaningful right now anyway because they don't have enough to compare to to give an accurate assessment of relative happiness, discipline etc. If those mapped to directly quantifiable numbers, you could ask your friends what is the happiness of kids at this school, or what is the disciple number you could get data points, but then you'd still be better to get aggregate statistics.
Your social network only gives you the illusion of control, not actual control, and certainly not meaningful data. I'd be intrigued to know what you think you're getting in terms of a proper assessment of discipline or happiness, or how either of those necessarily maps to a good school. The army has fairly extreme discipline, but so do prisons. One is probably not an extreme you want, and could actually be detrimental. So how are you quantifying discipline, and on what scale to judge performance? A lack of discipline is distracting to students, sure, but then how much of that is school, teacher, particularly troublesome children, and how much of making them into little soldier boys or prisoners is just stifling them as human beings? Happiness is just a stupid metric all around. Children have no broader context to why they're in prison, I'm sorry, school, than 'I told you it's good for you and in the long run it will help'. They have no mechanism to gauge the validity of the last part, and they are expected to simply do what they're told like a little conformist. Or else something. They can hate a particular other student, they can hate being in school at all, or they can really like being a school that doesn't make them do any work and doesn't have any discipline and they get to play all day. You get basically nonsense answers. Lots of kids hate math, and most of them hate stats, but if you can't do stats you can't even figure out whether or not a particular piece of data is a valid measure of something. Kids being happy might mean they're not being challenged, not being taught the right things or might mean they actually like learning material as given to them.
I said nothing about exams, test scores are, by themselves not spectacular measures of anything. I suppose if a school has higher test scores than another it is always preferable to go there based on only that one statistic, simply because odds are your kid will get higher test scores too. Whatever your other measures, happiness, discipline or whatever, if they combine into test scores then the one with higher test scores has, by definition, a better aggregation of its sub parts. But the article itself is a mostly reasonable assessment about test scores in two cases. In the first case it's performing a comparison between test scores and parent education. You would expect better educated parents to produce better performing kids, so you want to find schools that outperform expectations, i.e. if you would expect kids to get 60 based on their parents, but those kids are scoring 70 then they are doing better than expected, which is outperforming, and therefore a good school. The second metric, test percentile growth, is that kids who come in at say, grade 2, haven't had that much of an influence from the school (2 or 3 of their 7 years of age), so lets say they are in the 50th percentile. If by grade 8 that school now has kids in to top quarter then those kids are improving (or smarter people moved into the neighbourhood and dumber ones moved out), which is outperforming beyond expectations.
On the first metric they used, a better evaluation would include the type and quality of degree involved. A bachelors in aerospace engineering from Caltech should be expected to produce smarter kids than a MBA in english from the university of phoenix.
The article is very 'parent' focused. Where should I put *my kid* to get my kid the best education. Trying to improve the whole system is a different problem, because if someone is moving up in a percentile, someone else is moving down, and there's going to be a lot of noise in the system. It's a related problem, but it is a bit messier.