The fact is, most Americans don't save because there is no financial incentive to save. Cash is a "hot potato" that needs to be spent and invested in -something- or else you take a guaranteed loss.
I have heard this a lot, but thinking about it now, I think low interest has little bearing on the average person's saving / spending habits. For people who are already saving, it probably changes the instruments they use to preserve their wealth, but I don't think the average person/family is living paycheck to paycheck because they are worried that the purchasing power of their money will not endure if they hang on to it. People get themselves into a position where they end up giving most of their pay to service debt, and I think this is very rarely if ever done because they are being smart and not holding onto the "hot potato" that is cash.
If your argument was correct, I think you would see fewer companies sitting on piles of cash. I also believe Japan has/had one of the worlds highest saving rates while interest rates there have been zero for decades.
Canada has begun to shift the focus from prevention to punishment, in keeping with the ideology of those in power. As this shift continues, and 'our gun laws get stricter in an attempt to quash gun violence' (actually in an attempt to appease frightened elderly shut ins who form most of the Conservatvie party's base), we will see more and more gun crime as root causes go ignored and the percentage of our population that has been in prison increases.
I scanned the AC's comment quickly, read the -1 as 1 and clicked the link. In the intervening half second before the new page loaded, my eye caught your NSFW comment. Thank you!
Bet you're a hoot at parties. I can only imagine how charming a fellow you are when someone uses the term "hacker" to refer to someone who breaks into computer systems.
That begs the question, how did this get onto the front page of slashdot in the first place?
There used to be an agreement called CAN-COPY or something like that where universities paid money to someone (not likely the authors of textbooks) in order to be able to have a fair use like system where you could copy a certain amount of a book for educational purposes. I remember it being no more than 1 chapter with a couple of other caveats. A few years ago, I taught a course where I distributed a photocopied chapter from another text to the students and (as best as I can tell) this was completely legal. The ability to copy parts of texts is much more important in the Arts I would think, where students are potentially given a collection of readings assembled from various sources.
Anyway, in the past couple of years, something has changed and the CAN-COPY agreement no longer exitsts. Whoever has been getting money out of universities for this has decided to ask for more money and more restrictions (I think) because there has been a good deal of complaining about the new copyright agreement, and a number of canadian universities, including my own, have pulled out of the agreement and stopped paying fees of any kind. There are now new rules about what we can and can't copy, but I don't know them. We were told that someone (again, whoever is trying to extort money from us) will now be monitoring the courses at our university in order to make sure we are not infringing their rights. One suggestion I have heard is that we should password protect any course materials we have online, so that outsiders are not able to view them and scan them for potential violations.
This is certainly not true in Canada. A visa student costs significantly more than a domestic since tuition is > 2x as much for an international student and this (at least in science/engineering) is paid by the supervisor.
A big reason there are so many international students is because we have a shortage of domestic students who want to go to grad school. Empty spots are filled up with foreigners.
Most retarded logic ever. Who knows if we are safe from monsters that live ion the other side of the moon and could swoop out and freeze us with their ice breath at any second. You can make up anything you want, but without evidence, or even a known mechanism for it, you are just talking out of your ass.
"there is not yet a general consensus on whether there is a real danger from mobile device radiation"
This is utter bullshit. As you say, there is a consensus among all non-nutjobs. A debate about whether low levels of non-ionizing EM are dangerous belongs in the same category in debates about the easter bunny or ghosts or something. It is pathetic the way media pretends there is a controversy. Some idiot at some point said "I don't understand this and it has radiation in its name, which i think is bad because I'm too dumb to understand the difference between electromagnetism and nuclear radiation". There is not controversy, there is not even a question.
PS. Guidelines are important because of heating; this is the only thing past standards address and if future standards address anything else, it is equivalent to changing the building code to make kids bedrooms ghost proof.
I have never understood why people give bottled water a hard time over other drinks.
First, filtering and bottling water can't be much less expensive for the company than mixing a small quanitity of corn syrup and flavoring with it and calling it pop.
Second, if I am thirsty, water is more valuable to me than pop is. I find pop disgusting and not thirst quenching. I suspect I'm not alone and that is why they are able to sometimes charge a small premium for water.
There are some places (like at my house) where tap water tastes fine and presumable is safe to drink, and I can see people arguing that it would be dumb for me to drink bottled water at home (I don't). At work though (a university), the tap water is (a) warm (b) cloudy (c) not tasty. The university has a policy (I think this is based on protests from the student union) of not selling bottled water because it is bad for the environment? so you can only buy pop or energy drinks or fruit drinks on campus. It seems a bit ridiculous to me that they won't sell water but will sell what is effectively water mixed with sugar or poison.
I like water more than any other drink. I don't own a resevoir or filtering equipment to it doesn't surprise me or bother me that I have to pay for it.
Efficient market theory has one major tennet. Basically that the overall demanded return is directly proportional to the riskiness of an investment.
Risk is safe if you are able to engage in multiple non-correlated risks
Right, so doesn't this just mean that if you diversify your risky investments enough, you should be able to achieve the risk free rate of return, on average? If a higher return was possible, wouldn't the efficiency of the market drive it down to the risk free rate?
It would be nearly impossible to do a worse job managing Canada's finances than the Conservatives have. They cut budgets in areas they don't agree with ideologically under the guise of fiscal conservatism, but spend much much more money on their own ideological initiatives (prisons, more military spending), enriching themselves and their friends, advertising, tax breaks where they are not needed, etc.
The NDP can never form government, and we should be worried if it did, but mainly due to the ridiculous foreign policy that is somehow mainstream in their party: there are NDP members of parliament that want to boycott Israel, at least one signed a petition to open an inquiry into 9/11 suggesting that Bush did it, and I'm sure all kinds of other wacky stuff. Fiscally, there is no may that they could make us worse off than the Conservatives, and at least some of their spending might actuall help people that need it.
every odd number greater than 1 is the sum of at most five primes
Notice that no computers where involved in the proof — this is classical mathematical proof involving logical deductions rather than exhaustive search."
That would have been a pretty long "exhaustive search".
We have a government granted duopoly though, not a free market. In a free market, presumably the spectrum would be used at its full capacity, and priced as high as the market would bear.
Maybe the reason canada doesn't have a bandwidth problem is because Rogers and Bell gouge us so hard on pricing that nobody can afford to use the bandwidth they might like to with their mobile devices.
While I despise Harper as much as the rest (at least the majority) of Canadians, this story I think has more to do with the general setup of our government bureaucracy. In Canada, a significant role of government is to provide a kind of welfare for educated people by employing them do do effectively nothing but slow down the machinery of government. What this means is that when a decision must be made, or a request answered by government, instead of one person doing the job (even is it is a simple request for non-sensitive information), twenty people need to craft and vet the government's respose. In some political cases, it does have to do with message control, but more often than not, it has to do with creating twenty jobs.
I see your point and it makes sense, but I think I disagree.
When I read this last night, I thought I agreed with it and thought I would mod you up if I had the points. Then I went to the grocery store today. As a rule I eat pretty healthily but I routinely get some kind of sweets for after dinner. In the store today, some muffins caught my eye. They were average sized carrot muffins with a decent coating of icing on top. I was about to buy them when on a whim I checked the label. There were 550 calories in each muffin! Maybe everybody else already knew this, but I was blown away.
As much as I don't mind indulging in unhealthy things, I don't think its cool to have a 1100 calorie dessert (I would have eaten two for sure). What you wrote is correct in that I did make the "correct" choice and not buy the things, but I did chose what I prefer, which is not to make a pig out of myself.
What you are talking about are called gradients in MRI. There is also an RF magnetic field used for MR excitation. The gradients and the RF are not the reason you have to empty your pockets, it is the static field, which is orders of magnitude larger, and has the potential to dangerously accelerate metal objects towards the magent. In the absense of the static field, it would be no problem for bystanders / people around the magnet to have metal.
Patients should make known any metal they have on their body, eg. implants because this metal can be influenced by the static field and heated through eddy current effects from the RF field. The patient has to immersed in the static field for the MRI to work, so of course magnetic field cloaking would be irrelevant for them anyway.
I have published a number of papers in a particular Elsevier journal. When I submit papers, the editorial staff of this journal promptly replies with detailed reviews completed by knowledgable reviewers that in almost all cases have significantly improved the papers I have written (or occasionally prevented something stupid I did from being published at all). That same journal is one of the few that I regularly read for new advances in my field.
This is actually the first time I have ever heard something negative about Elsevier, but as a big company there are undoubtedly all kinds of things they do that some people don't like. Normally when thinking about a particular journal, I don't give much thought to who the publishing company is. Regardless, I will happily review other articles for the journal I publish in, because I appreciate the work others have done in reviewing my work, and I am happy that journal remains a source of high quality information about my field. I don't agree with Elsevier's behavior as described in the summary, but one often has to take the bad with the good.
Being a referee is part of being a scientist. Someone is taking the time to review your work and you are returning the favor. With a bit of luck, you also get an advance glimpse of some of the work that is being done in your area.
You're right of course, the Liberals largely destroyed themselves and the implosion really got started a long time ago. However, this didn't stop the Conservatives from doing everything they could to crush the Liberals into the ground. Infighting within the Liberal party, and taking for granted that their historical successes would continue into the future caused the party to implode. Harper wants to ensure that the now-crippled party will never re-emerge as anything more than a joke.
Slashdot Mirror
The fact is, most Americans don't save because there is no financial incentive to save. Cash is a "hot potato" that needs to be spent and invested in -something- or else you take a guaranteed loss.
I have heard this a lot, but thinking about it now, I think low interest has little bearing on the average person's saving / spending habits. For people who are already saving, it probably changes the instruments they use to preserve their wealth, but I don't think the average person/family is living paycheck to paycheck because they are worried that the purchasing power of their money will not endure if they hang on to it. People get themselves into a position where they end up giving most of their pay to service debt, and I think this is very rarely if ever done because they are being smart and not holding onto the "hot potato" that is cash.
If your argument was correct, I think you would see fewer companies sitting on piles of cash. I also believe Japan has/had one of the worlds highest saving rates while interest rates there have been zero for decades.
Canada has begun to shift the focus from prevention to punishment, in keeping with the ideology of those in power. As this shift continues, and 'our gun laws get stricter in an attempt to quash gun violence' (actually in an attempt to appease frightened elderly shut ins who form most of the Conservatvie party's base), we will see more and more gun crime as root causes go ignored and the percentage of our population that has been in prison increases.
I scanned the AC's comment quickly, read the -1 as 1 and clicked the link. In the intervening half second before the new page loaded, my eye caught your NSFW comment. Thank you!
Bet you're a hoot at parties. I can only imagine how charming a fellow you are when someone uses the term "hacker" to refer to someone who breaks into computer systems.
That begs the question, how did this get onto the front page of slashdot in the first place?
There used to be an agreement called CAN-COPY or something like that where universities paid money to someone (not likely the authors of textbooks) in order to be able to have a fair use like system where you could copy a certain amount of a book for educational purposes. I remember it being no more than 1 chapter with a couple of other caveats. A few years ago, I taught a course where I distributed a photocopied chapter from another text to the students and (as best as I can tell) this was completely legal. The ability to copy parts of texts is much more important in the Arts I would think, where students are potentially given a collection of readings assembled from various sources.
Anyway, in the past couple of years, something has changed and the CAN-COPY agreement no longer exitsts. Whoever has been getting money out of universities for this has decided to ask for more money and more restrictions (I think) because there has been a good deal of complaining about the new copyright agreement, and a number of canadian universities, including my own, have pulled out of the agreement and stopped paying fees of any kind. There are now new rules about what we can and can't copy, but I don't know them. We were told that someone (again, whoever is trying to extort money from us) will now be monitoring the courses at our university in order to make sure we are not infringing their rights. One suggestion I have heard is that we should password protect any course materials we have online, so that outsiders are not able to view them and scan them for potential violations.
The first person with a neck beard to board the plane will be greeted as you?
This is certainly not true in Canada. A visa student costs significantly more than a domestic since tuition is > 2x as much for an international student and this (at least in science/engineering) is paid by the supervisor.
A big reason there are so many international students is because we have a shortage of domestic students who want to go to grad school. Empty spots are filled up with foreigners.
Most retarded logic ever. Who knows if we are safe from monsters that live ion the other side of the moon and could swoop out and freeze us with their ice breath at any second. You can make up anything you want, but without evidence, or even a known mechanism for it, you are just talking out of your ass.
"there is not yet a general consensus on whether there is a real danger from mobile device radiation"
This is utter bullshit. As you say, there is a consensus among all non-nutjobs. A debate about whether low levels of non-ionizing EM are dangerous belongs in the same category in debates about the easter bunny or ghosts or something. It is pathetic the way media pretends there is a controversy. Some idiot at some point said "I don't understand this and it has radiation in its name, which i think is bad because I'm too dumb to understand the difference between electromagnetism and nuclear radiation". There is not controversy, there is not even a question.
PS. Guidelines are important because of heating; this is the only thing past standards address and if future standards address anything else, it is equivalent to changing the building code to make kids bedrooms ghost proof.
That is probably the best post I have ever read here. Extremely insightful and hilariously written. I was in tears laughing through most of it.
I have never understood why people give bottled water a hard time over other drinks.
First, filtering and bottling water can't be much less expensive for the company than mixing a small quanitity of corn syrup and flavoring with it and calling it pop.
Second, if I am thirsty, water is more valuable to me than pop is. I find pop disgusting and not thirst quenching. I suspect I'm not alone and that is why they are able to sometimes charge a small premium for water.
There are some places (like at my house) where tap water tastes fine and presumable is safe to drink, and I can see people arguing that it would be dumb for me to drink bottled water at home (I don't). At work though (a university), the tap water is (a) warm (b) cloudy (c) not tasty. The university has a policy (I think this is based on protests from the student union) of not selling bottled water because it is bad for the environment? so you can only buy pop or energy drinks or fruit drinks on campus. It seems a bit ridiculous to me that they won't sell water but will sell what is effectively water mixed with sugar or poison.
I like water more than any other drink. I don't own a resevoir or filtering equipment to it doesn't surprise me or bother me that I have to pay for it.
Efficient market theory has one major tennet. Basically that the overall demanded return is directly proportional to the riskiness of an investment.
Risk is safe if you are able to engage in multiple non-correlated risks
Right, so doesn't this just mean that if you diversify your risky investments enough, you should be able to achieve the risk free rate of return, on average? If a higher return was possible, wouldn't the efficiency of the market drive it down to the risk free rate?
It would be nearly impossible to do a worse job managing Canada's finances than the Conservatives have. They cut budgets in areas they don't agree with ideologically under the guise of fiscal conservatism, but spend much much more money on their own ideological initiatives (prisons, more military spending), enriching themselves and their friends, advertising, tax breaks where they are not needed, etc.
The NDP can never form government, and we should be worried if it did, but mainly due to the ridiculous foreign policy that is somehow mainstream in their party: there are NDP members of parliament that want to boycott Israel, at least one signed a petition to open an inquiry into 9/11 suggesting that Bush did it, and I'm sure all kinds of other wacky stuff. Fiscally, there is no may that they could make us worse off than the Conservatives, and at least some of their spending might actuall help people that need it.
every odd number greater than 1 is the sum of at most five primes
Notice that no computers where involved in the proof — this is classical mathematical proof involving logical deductions rather than exhaustive search."
That would have been a pretty long "exhaustive search".
We have a government granted duopoly though, not a free market. In a free market, presumably the spectrum would be used at its full capacity, and priced as high as the market would bear.
Maybe the reason canada doesn't have a bandwidth problem is because Rogers and Bell gouge us so hard on pricing that nobody can afford to use the bandwidth they might like to with their mobile devices.
If you want to troll, at least use a proper expression for equality.
Thank you for this. I feel exactly the same way but could never have put it as well.
While I despise Harper as much as the rest (at least the majority) of Canadians, this story I think has more to do with the general setup of our government bureaucracy. In Canada, a significant role of government is to provide a kind of welfare for educated people by employing them do do effectively nothing but slow down the machinery of government. What this means is that when a decision must be made, or a request answered by government, instead of one person doing the job (even is it is a simple request for non-sensitive information), twenty people need to craft and vet the government's respose. In some political cases, it does have to do with message control, but more often than not, it has to do with creating twenty jobs.
I see your point and it makes sense, but I think I disagree.
When I read this last night, I thought I agreed with it and thought I would mod you up if I had the points. Then I went to the grocery store today. As a rule I eat pretty healthily but I routinely get some kind of sweets for after dinner. In the store today, some muffins caught my eye. They were average sized carrot muffins with a decent coating of icing on top. I was about to buy them when on a whim I checked the label. There were 550 calories in each muffin! Maybe everybody else already knew this, but I was blown away.
As much as I don't mind indulging in unhealthy things, I don't think its cool to have a 1100 calorie dessert (I would have eaten two for sure). What you wrote is correct in that I did make the "correct" choice and not buy the things, but I did chose what I prefer, which is not to make a pig out of myself.
What you are talking about are called gradients in MRI. There is also an RF magnetic field used for MR excitation. The gradients and the RF are not the reason you have to empty your pockets, it is the static field, which is orders of magnitude larger, and has the potential to dangerously accelerate metal objects towards the magent. In the absense of the static field, it would be no problem for bystanders / people around the magnet to have metal. Patients should make known any metal they have on their body, eg. implants because this metal can be influenced by the static field and heated through eddy current effects from the RF field. The patient has to immersed in the static field for the MRI to work, so of course magnetic field cloaking would be irrelevant for them anyway.
It's called monopoly.
I have published a number of papers in a particular Elsevier journal. When I submit papers, the editorial staff of this journal promptly replies with detailed reviews completed by knowledgable reviewers that in almost all cases have significantly improved the papers I have written (or occasionally prevented something stupid I did from being published at all). That same journal is one of the few that I regularly read for new advances in my field. This is actually the first time I have ever heard something negative about Elsevier, but as a big company there are undoubtedly all kinds of things they do that some people don't like. Normally when thinking about a particular journal, I don't give much thought to who the publishing company is. Regardless, I will happily review other articles for the journal I publish in, because I appreciate the work others have done in reviewing my work, and I am happy that journal remains a source of high quality information about my field. I don't agree with Elsevier's behavior as described in the summary, but one often has to take the bad with the good.
Being a referee is part of being a scientist. Someone is taking the time to review your work and you are returning the favor. With a bit of luck, you also get an advance glimpse of some of the work that is being done in your area.
You're right of course, the Liberals largely destroyed themselves and the implosion really got started a long time ago. However, this didn't stop the Conservatives from doing everything they could to crush the Liberals into the ground. Infighting within the Liberal party, and taking for granted that their historical successes would continue into the future caused the party to implode. Harper wants to ensure that the now-crippled party will never re-emerge as anything more than a joke.