From TFA, the pings noted were actually 30 seconds apart. My last GPS reported speeds every second.
The GPS unit in question doesn't seem to be a GPS navigation system, but rather, a GPS tracker that the parents must have installed in order to be able to record the car's location. This would explain 30 second pings--the system is designed to tell you reasonably accurately where the car was located at various points in time.
I once many years ago went to Google HQ to interview for a part-time job. In the lobby, right above the receptionist's desk, they had a big scrolling LCD thingy that shows actual searches that have been sent to the search engine.
The list was censored so that nothing NSFW would pop up, of course, but it was far from perfect. So me and my friend got treated to a good one: "voir les culottes de filles."
ISP's should be legally obliged to advertise only what they actually offer. If you can only use half, then they can only advertise half with any burst capability added as a possible extra.
But nobody's saying that you can only use half. Everybody can get 100% in bursts, as long as the bursts are short and infrequent enough.
It comes down to the ratio of consumer last-mile bandwidth to ISP uplink bandwidth. So, for example, if the ISP sells 100 10Mbps connections to its customers apiece, and connects them to a 100Mbps uplink to the Internet, then they're running a 10:1 ratio. In that case, everybody can get the full 10Mbps in their peak bursts as long as those bursts don't add up to more than 10% of the time, and the customer's bursts don't overlap too much with others. In the worst case, however, where everybody tried to use the connection continuously 24/7, everybody would only get 10% of the peak ratio.
IMO, advertising the peak rate and a minimum guaranteed customers-to-uplink ratio would be a better description of what you're getting. It's not too difficult to explain to laypeople either: "This line provides the equivalent of a 10Mbps connection shared between 10 households."
I don't expect 24/7 full throughput. How about 72% for 24/7?
Residential ISPs provide connections that are designed for households where relatively short bursts of high activity alternate with longer periods of very low activity. It is correctly designed for that sort of application. Although more infrastructure would sure be good to increase the average speed everybody's getting, too much of it would just make the service too expensive for people who are not benefitting from the extra throughput.
If what you expect of residential ISP service is a guaranteed bandwidth level that you will saturate 24/7, you have bought the wrong service. You can buy something that provides that sort of service--but you're going to pay more.
"Actually 40K is my bi-weekly income, but I wanted to get a loan because my investments are returning higher than the loan interest rate."
That kind of thinking is one of the things that messed up the economy just recently. The assumption that future returns will be like recent returns--which when you get down to it, is equivalent to assuming that investments have no risk.
Finance 101: you must assume higher risks to achieve higher returns. If your friend's investments were returning higher than the loan interest rate, that means that his investments are riskier than the loan would be at that rate. Or put in a different way: if the source for the repayment of the loan would be the income from investments that return more than the loan, then the bank would do better to invest the money in the same stuff your friend is doing.
Also, the unavailability of non-Latin scripts hasn't hampered the flourishing of home-grown websites in India and China named in their many local languages - what makes the ICANN think this is even necessary?
And how exactly do you claim to know this? It certainly makes it difficult to market the website among the potential user base who have only a shaky command of the Latin alphabet.
ICANN just made another move to make everyday life on the internet slightly more difficult for many users, while making life for con artists, spammers, phishers, etc, much much easier (and more profitable).
Why do I get the feeling that there's a group of people affected by this change that you're not mentioning...
One big issue for many lower-educated Chinese is that the Latin script is as strange as Chinese characters to us. Of course you can look at the shape and recognise them, but that's it: the letters do not carry sounds to them.
Actually, many of them have problems even in the "look at the shape and recognize them" part. Spend some time looking at some of those "Engrish" websites featuring incorrect and/or nonsensical English in Asian countries, and you can spot this regularly: people mixing up "p" and "q", "b" and "d", "r" and "n", "t" and "f", "i" and "l", etc., because the shapes are similar.
Trying to remove universal access and Babylonize the internet under the fairly flimsy pretext of internationalization seems a very misplaced effort to me.
Your computer can almost certainly display Chinese and support the same text input methods that the Chinese do. Your browser, if it's a recent version, already implements Punycode. And nobody's stopping you from learning Chinese, you know. Or from hiring people who know it to browse the web for you and help you deal with Chinese-language sites with Chinese-character URLs.
In fact, what all these standards are doing is to make it possible for you to access the same websites as everybody else, that they're going to write in a foreign language anyway. It's not like they need your permission to use their language, you know.
2. Buy a Mac and never worry about crapware again.
Macs aren't immune from this problem. They're just better than PCs in this regard overall, but there's a handful of services and upgrades that Apple's always trying to push on you--the most notable are Quicktime Pro and Mobileme. They historically have done things like (a) cripple the regular Quicktime Player to push you into buying the Pro version, like by only allowing full-screen playing on Pro; (b) build a bunch of minor convenience features into their OS that can only be used if you have.Mac/Mobileme (e.g., Keychain synchronization).
In fact, it was a feminist that I know who prosed this question to me: if you have a person who actually enjoys doing housework, or even go so far as to say enjoys being dominated and kept as a slave. These people exist, they are not that hard to find. Now lets say that person is a woman. Hell lets say she is black, and her chosen mate is a white man. It may make people feel weird, but if the values that we hold dear are liberation, and choice. Then why can't a black woman be submissive to a white man? Because she is a woman? Because she is black? Because we think she should want something different?
The problem there is not that such a thing is impossible; the problem is that the context in which the claim is made can make it harder or easier to believe. You can be sure that back in the days of slavery, a lot of slaves would have told you that they were very happy to be slaves to such a nice master. But this is a context in which the state recognized no right for the slave to be free. How do you distinguish the slave who truly wanted to be a slave from the one who was lying about it? How do you distinguish the slave who truly, freely chose to be a slave for the rest of his days, from the one who never had any choice and simply stopped hoping for any more?
Going back to your friend's example, it's harder to believe the woman who genuinely and freely enjoys doing housework if she's internalized since childhood the expectation that housework is women's work. It's not that it's impossible that that woman exists, it's that we know that there are tons of women who have been raised to compromise on that issue, and we can't tell her apart from those. If we, however, remove the unequal gender acculturation, then it would be easy to take a face value the lady who says she enjoys doing the housework.
Also, you don't think the housing boom was caused by freely available cheap credit? Hell, while I was still in school, I was able to get a mortgage while I didn't even have a job! The mortgage payment was cheaper than rent!
Well, how were you able to make your rent, then? Could you reasonably be expected to continue to be able to make your rent for the next 7-10 years?
Assuming that the mortage payment you're talking about wasn't a variable rate (or worse, a teaser rate), it follows that you should have been at least just as able to make your mortgage payments, so this isn't by itself clear evidence of low lending standards.
Of course, we know that lending standards were indeed too low in recent years, but really, to demonstrate that in your case you need to focus on other aspects of the loan, like a super-low down payment,
'The rate for a 30-year mortgage is around 5%,' Lee said. 'Why should anyone have to pay 8.5%? The government has bailed out homeowners. It's bailed out big businesses. Why can't it also help students?' Not only that, federal student loans are the only loans in the nation that are largely non-dischargeable in bankruptcy, have no statutes of limitations, and can't be refinanced after consolidation, so Lee can forget about pulling a move out of the GM playbook. And unlike mortgages on million-dollar vacation homes, student loans have very limited tax detectability.
Mortgages and car loans are secured loans, where the property or car that is bought with them is pledged as collateral. This makes a big difference for the interest rates. Student loans just ain't so.
Anyway, I've heard complaints like this about student loan rates before, and I've always had the same basic response: you're barking up the wrong tree. You don't really want lower interest rates on student loans; you want the government to spend more on making higher education affordable for those who qualify for it. There's a bunch of countries out there where if you get admitted into a university, the government picks up the tuition bill, period. Those countries ain't richer than the USA.
Dividends, which is what you are talking about, have not been paid in years. All a stock is today is a percentage of the company, for instance if there are 500m shares of Microsoft and you own a share, you own 1/500,000,000 of Microsoft.
That doesn't really matter. The reason dividends aren't paid is because we have stock market that's liquid and efficient enough that stockholders can substitute capital gains for dividends. If the stock market was illiquid or inefficient, then the only way the stockholders could cash out the company's profits would be paying out dividends--and then dividends would be paid out.
Without dividends, all that is of interest to investors is the stock price increasing, and for that to happen, the company must report increases and logarithmic growth year after year, which is unsustainable in the long or even medium term.
You mean exponential growth, not logarithmic. You're making this more complicated than it needs to be; whether the growth is logarithmic or exponential is only a detail.
Basically, the only profit you can expect over the long term from a stock investment is whatever the long-term profit of the corporation turns out to be. No matter what numbers the company reports over the next few quarters, in the end, whether the corporation turns out to be a profitable venture will become evident over the long term. The management of an unprofitable corporation may try to disguise this over the short or medium terms, but they won't be able to do so forever. No matter how they behave over the short term, overvalued stocks will drop over the long term, and undervalued ones will rise.
This is one of the reasons why the stock market is volatile in the short and medium term, but shows a definite long-term trend--because which of today's companies will turn out to be the ones that actually turn a profit over the next 20 years is very hard to predict, if at all possible.
But I'm not talking about day traders as a group, I'm talking about individuals.
Yes, and that's why your statement that the day trader provides a benefit to society if he profits is wrong. Modulo the long-term direction of the stock market, a day trader profits only because somebody else loses an equivalent amount of money. Day trading doesn't create real wealth; it only redistributes it.
For example, imagine that a terrorist poisons the water supply in order to kill millions of people, and then a doctor saves everyone by pouring an antidote into the water supply. I suppose you can argue that the terrorist-doctor group accomplished absolutely nothing in the aggregate, but that doesn't change the fact that the terrorist performed a destructive action and the doctor performed a productive action.
The terrorist actually destroyed some wealth, and the doctor actually created some. That is, the terrorist did some non-financial damage, and the doctor did some non-financial repair.
Remember, financial goods like money and stocks don't exist for their own sake; they exist only to help us procure non-financial goods. Money exists to facilitate trade; stocks exist to facilitate production. The measure of whether financial goods benefit society at large isn't whether individual actors profit; it's whether the market can provide more non-financial goods and services than it otherwise could. When the amount of financial goods grows much more quickly than the amount of non-financial goods that they can be traded for, we call that "inflation," not "everybody's wealthier."
Now, the stock market may be a zero-sum game in the sense that, at any given time, every stock has an owner. However, that owner can set the price of his stock at any level he wants. Just because one stock went down $1, that doesn't mean another stock has to go up $1. A day trader, just like a long term trader, has the ability to move those prices either closer to, or farther away from, the levels that they should be at. Those levels will determine which companies are able to raise money and which are not. That's certainly not a zero-sum game.
But I'm not arguing that the stock market is a zero-sum game--I'm arguing that day-trading is one (until you factor trading costs in, when it becomes a negative-sum game).
The long-term gains of the stock market come from real economic growth; holding a market basket of a stock market of an economy that grows over the long term is profitable in real terms because by the time you're due to cash out, the economy will have made a lot more actual, non-financial goods and services, and you will be able to trade your stock sales proceeds for more of those than you otherwise would have been able to. In the long term, this is what "profit" really means: being able to procure a larger share of the economy's non-financial goods.
To the extent that your stock market profits don't come from the actual long-term growth of the economy, then they must come from equivalent losses by other people. Day trading doesn't particularly contribute to creating real wealth, simply because day trading doesn't invest money over the time terms that it takes for it to be evident whether the economy has grown. Or, in other terms, day traders aren't really taking on the risk that a business will not create wealth--which is precisely the risk that investors are supposed to be rewarded for.
If a day trader makes a profit, then his behavior is providing a benefit to society.
Nope. The strongest statement you can make there is that if day traders as a group make a profit in the aggregate that also beats the market (and in a risk adjusted fashion, to boot), then their behavior is providing a benefit to society. If day trading is a zero-sum game relative to the market as a whole, so that one can obtain a return just as good with buy-and-hold, then they're just gambling.
That's the main thing I don't understand or appreciate about the stock market-- once the company sells stock, all subsequent sales and trades are between the old owner of the shares and the new owner-- the company is not significantly impacted.
Stock shares are claims on the company's profits. When you buy a stock you're buying a share of the company's profits, to be distributed at some unspecified (and possibly empty!) set of dates in the future, in unspecified amounts. Shares are worth something, even if only a little, as long as there is a non-zero probability that the company will pay out profits at some point in the future. That's really all that needs to be understood.
The only difference between initial investors and future investors is that the initial investors buy their share of the company's profits from the company itself, which then uses that money to finance its operations. People who buy from the initial investors are simply buying the right to get paid by the company in the future, which, again, is worth something as long as the company's hopes of turning a profit in the future do not completely vanish.
If you do that for a benchmark app then you are not really testing (just) the performance of the graphics hardware, so turning on that optimization without disclosing it is probably not really a fair comparison of the hardware. [...] In the real world, if the user wants high graphics performance and there are CPU cores doing nothing then like you said, offloading to them makes perfect sense.
But that just assumes that we really want to judge the performance of the graphics hardware in isolation, as opposed to judging it as part of a larger system that includes (a) the drivers, (b) the graphics library, and (c) the computer.
Suppose one graphics card manufacturer discovers that for most games that people play, there's more bang for the buck to be had in improving the CPU/GPU balancing approach than in increasing the pure GPU power, and invests their efforts accordingly into improving the drivers. Their competitor doesn't realize this, and put their effort into purely faster GPU. And assume that in practice, the first company's approach delivers slightly better performance than the second one's, and for a lower price to boot.
Now you run your pure GPU power benchmark, and lo and behold, the second company's card comes out on top, despite the fact that it produces inferior performance. In that case, if you ask me, you really should have designed a more realistic test that simulated the load that would be put on the whole computer system during a game or other actual use of the card.
This scenario is quite possibly hypothetical when it comes to graphics card, but things like this are already happening in the field of digital camera lens testing. Panasonic and Olympus' recent Micro Four Thirds system is designed to use lenses with quite large geometrical distortion and chromatic aberration, on the premise that these lens defects can be automatically and effectively corrected by the image processing software. The lenses, coupled with the intended software processing of the images, produce images with good resolution and less distortion and chromatic aberration than the older, optically-corrected designs. Some testers, however, have bypassed the intended software processing and attempted to evaluate the performance of the lenses in isolation, and gotten hung up on their "bad quality."
The point is that testing just the card (or just the lens) can be a very unfair comparison when the designers managed to think outside the box and create a system where the performance doesn't just come from the one component, but also from other pieces.
If I don't ask someone out, I don't get dates - It's that simple.
Well, not to put too a fine point to it, nobody's entitled to dates. You can't justify asshole behavior by saying that you have to be an asshole to get dates.
If women were more forward, I'd be less forward.
Unforwardness and unassertiveness by women is a problem, yes.
Of course, I don't go with the ambush proposition, so maybe you aren't talking about me.
Maybe. This shit is, to a large extent, context and statistics. As another poster said, if you get the context right, you can absolutely go ahead, and I of course have no context to judge you personally in this regard. Still, as a general rule, men fail to even think about the context in the first place.
There's a theme in feminist writing that deals with situations similar to this. The idea is that one common form of sexism is for people to disregard context when dealing with women. There are several examples:
Pick-up artists who teach courses on how to "get" women by using a set of fixed techniques or actions that only engage superficially with the targets. "Say X, do Y and don't do Z, and women will sleep with you."
Date rape apologists who go into elaborate discussions of hypothetical scenarios that they insist are not rape because of the woman's actions; "it's not rape because the woman did X (or did not do Y)". This way of framing the issues basically boils down to asking when is a man entitled to have sex with a woman, based on a superficial observation of what she says or does (and not on understanding whether she wants to have sex).
The present example, where men make advances on women without even thinking how the advance would look from the perspective of the woman who receives it, given that man's previous interactions with that woman (if any!).
In all cases, the men tend to focus obsessively on the concrete actions, without stopping to think about the contexts. It's a form of magical thinking: ask the girl out on a date and tell her she's pretty, and she will sleep with you; no attempt is made to understand any deeper the relationship between the actions and outcomes.
Why would I apologize for something that someone else has done? It wasn't my idea, I didn't encourage them to do it, nor was I aware of their intentions beforehand. So what do I have to apologize for? I had nothing to do with the situation.
Let's leave the word "apologize" out of this for a bit. In fact, let's leave the whole "blame" thing out of it for a bit. It simply is, as a general rule, good for you to understand why other people were offended by somebody's action, and to demonstrate that you understand. (And I mean genuinely demonstrate that you genuinely do understand; a lot of this shit, in practice, is not genuine in sympathy or genuine in understanding.)
A lot of third-party "apologies" come down to this. They're really a recognition, by A's part, that A understands that B offended C, and why C considers the act as an offense. They're not necessarily an admission of responsibility; they're just recognition of somebody's perspective on an incident. Demonstrating that you understand why somebody took offense to something is a pretty good way of deescalating a situation when somebody genuinely takes offense, and if you have some authority over the situation (like, being a conference organizer or mailing list admin), it helps people keep faith on your authority (though you may need to do more than just that in many situations).
Should I also be roaming the streets apologizing randomly to people for things which may have been done to them by other people with whom I am not associated?
No, nobody expects that. But oftentimes, somebody who your are associated with does something to offend somebody else that you are also associated with, and in many of those situations, it is appropriate and good to demonstrate that you understand the nature of the offense. There is no clear line that separates the cases where you really must do so and the cases that you absolutely don't have to, but showing yourself as being too concerned over that tends to mark you as a selfish asshole who's more interested in assigning blame than in getting along with people.
I don't shun or reject friends, family, coworkers, whomever, simply because they carelessly said something hurtful or offensive. But if they A) don't acknowledge what they said is problematic and B) refuse to apologize, I eventually will decide to remove myself from situations where I have to interact with them. That's what the issue seems to be here. Not merely that FOSS has issues with sexist jokes - western culture has an issue with sexist jokes - but that a movement which, to me, has connected itself with ideals of rights and equality isn't able or willing to apologize about them.
I think yours is a really useful comment here, and I will try to build upon it.
Complaints about sexism tend to come down to a few components that you've identified here:
Many men act in a manner that shows that they don't understand that women have a different perspective to them.
While some of these men will understand and take responsibility when called on it, many more will in fact show themselves unwilling to understand women's perspective, or worse, go on the attack.
This comment and this one are perfect examples of the first point, where the posters completely fail to understand how women usually perceive being asked out by men. There are a few excellent responses here, here, here and here, which try to help the original poster put himself in the woman's shoes and understand how he would be seen if he were to make an advance on the woman without an appropriate context. He'd be one of dozens of men who signal an interest on nothing more than the fact that she's got breasts and a vagina, a good proportion of which are pushy and aggressive when they are turned down.
Now, this really just ought to be common sense, but if you want to have a productive interaction with somebody else you have to understand their point of view and accommodate it. That means that you're not supposed have things go exclusively your way at the expense of the other; you're supposed help the other person to get what they want in exchange for you getting what you want. Failure to abide by this norm gets you called names like "asshole."
It also just ought to be common sense that if you say something that offends somebody else and they complain about it, well, you might have failed to understand that person's point of view, and that you ought to at the very least demonstrate some effort to understand why they were offended. Of course that only goes so far (some people truly do take offense too easily), and you may judge that you don't have anything to apologize for, but you ought to at least act like you care about how other people think, and that you're not entitled to offend others. Hell, by effectively and sympathetically summarizing why the other person felt offended at what you did or said, you actually gain face among people who are not assholes. You come across somebody who's interested in taking responsibility for the effects of their actions even when some of those effects are unintended. People who are genuinely and justifiably offended tend to be satisfied when you act this way; people who are unjustifiably offended don't, but they tend to end up looking worse.
Again, all of this ought to just be common sense, part of the unwritten "How not to be an Asshole" manual. But the problem is that men are brought up to regularly be assholes to women, pure and simple, while women are brought up to allow men to get away with it. That is what institution
Asking someone out with no prior indication of interest is obnoxious. It's not sexist, but it's annoying.
So what about the fact that such a big number of men feel entitled to do ask women out with no prior indication of interest? You don't think that's institutional sexism that men are expected and encouraged to act in a manner that systematically annoys women?
To paraphrase: keep that political bullshit out of here. Code. Or don't.
Well, if men were equally expected to keep all their men's locker room bullshit out of it, and just "code or don't," then that would be a fair deal. As it stands, women are expected to keep their "political bullshit" out of there while the men don't face any consequences for treating them like shit.
Consider the recent turmoil after the Iranian election; twitter contained almost as much information as the big news outlets (who were, in some cases, reporting what was on twitter).
Yeah, and about 10x as much bullshit and false rumors. Your point being?
Slashdot Mirror
The GPS unit in question doesn't seem to be a GPS navigation system, but rather, a GPS tracker that the parents must have installed in order to be able to record the car's location. This would explain 30 second pings--the system is designed to tell you reasonably accurately where the car was located at various points in time.
I once many years ago went to Google HQ to interview for a part-time job. In the lobby, right above the receptionist's desk, they had a big scrolling LCD thingy that shows actual searches that have been sent to the search engine.
The list was censored so that nothing NSFW would pop up, of course, but it was far from perfect. So me and my friend got treated to a good one: "voir les culottes de filles."
But nobody's saying that you can only use half. Everybody can get 100% in bursts, as long as the bursts are short and infrequent enough.
It comes down to the ratio of consumer last-mile bandwidth to ISP uplink bandwidth. So, for example, if the ISP sells 100 10Mbps connections to its customers apiece, and connects them to a 100Mbps uplink to the Internet, then they're running a 10:1 ratio. In that case, everybody can get the full 10Mbps in their peak bursts as long as those bursts don't add up to more than 10% of the time, and the customer's bursts don't overlap too much with others. In the worst case, however, where everybody tried to use the connection continuously 24/7, everybody would only get 10% of the peak ratio.
IMO, advertising the peak rate and a minimum guaranteed customers-to-uplink ratio would be a better description of what you're getting. It's not too difficult to explain to laypeople either: "This line provides the equivalent of a 10Mbps connection shared between 10 households."
Residential ISPs provide connections that are designed for households where relatively short bursts of high activity alternate with longer periods of very low activity. It is correctly designed for that sort of application. Although more infrastructure would sure be good to increase the average speed everybody's getting, too much of it would just make the service too expensive for people who are not benefitting from the extra throughput.
If what you expect of residential ISP service is a guaranteed bandwidth level that you will saturate 24/7, you have bought the wrong service. You can buy something that provides that sort of service--but you're going to pay more.
That kind of thinking is one of the things that messed up the economy just recently. The assumption that future returns will be like recent returns--which when you get down to it, is equivalent to assuming that investments have no risk.
Finance 101: you must assume higher risks to achieve higher returns. If your friend's investments were returning higher than the loan interest rate, that means that his investments are riskier than the loan would be at that rate. Or put in a different way: if the source for the repayment of the loan would be the income from investments that return more than the loan, then the bank would do better to invest the money in the same stuff your friend is doing.
And how exactly do you claim to know this? It certainly makes it difficult to market the website among the potential user base who have only a shaky command of the Latin alphabet.
Why do I get the feeling that there's a group of people affected by this change that you're not mentioning...
Actually, many of them have problems even in the "look at the shape and recognize them" part. Spend some time looking at some of those "Engrish" websites featuring incorrect and/or nonsensical English in Asian countries, and you can spot this regularly: people mixing up "p" and "q", "b" and "d", "r" and "n", "t" and "f", "i" and "l", etc., because the shapes are similar.
Your computer can almost certainly display Chinese and support the same text input methods that the Chinese do. Your browser, if it's a recent version, already implements Punycode. And nobody's stopping you from learning Chinese, you know. Or from hiring people who know it to browse the web for you and help you deal with Chinese-language sites with Chinese-character URLs.
In fact, what all these standards are doing is to make it possible for you to access the same websites as everybody else, that they're going to write in a foreign language anyway. It's not like they need your permission to use their language, you know.
Macs aren't immune from this problem. They're just better than PCs in this regard overall, but there's a handful of services and upgrades that Apple's always trying to push on you--the most notable are Quicktime Pro and Mobileme. They historically have done things like (a) cripple the regular Quicktime Player to push you into buying the Pro version, like by only allowing full-screen playing on Pro; (b) build a bunch of minor convenience features into their OS that can only be used if you have .Mac/Mobileme (e.g., Keychain synchronization).
The problem there is not that such a thing is impossible; the problem is that the context in which the claim is made can make it harder or easier to believe. You can be sure that back in the days of slavery, a lot of slaves would have told you that they were very happy to be slaves to such a nice master. But this is a context in which the state recognized no right for the slave to be free. How do you distinguish the slave who truly wanted to be a slave from the one who was lying about it? How do you distinguish the slave who truly, freely chose to be a slave for the rest of his days, from the one who never had any choice and simply stopped hoping for any more?
Going back to your friend's example, it's harder to believe the woman who genuinely and freely enjoys doing housework if she's internalized since childhood the expectation that housework is women's work. It's not that it's impossible that that woman exists, it's that we know that there are tons of women who have been raised to compromise on that issue, and we can't tell her apart from those. If we, however, remove the unequal gender acculturation, then it would be easy to take a face value the lady who says she enjoys doing the housework.
Well, how were you able to make your rent, then? Could you reasonably be expected to continue to be able to make your rent for the next 7-10 years?
Assuming that the mortage payment you're talking about wasn't a variable rate (or worse, a teaser rate), it follows that you should have been at least just as able to make your mortgage payments, so this isn't by itself clear evidence of low lending standards.
Of course, we know that lending standards were indeed too low in recent years, but really, to demonstrate that in your case you need to focus on other aspects of the loan, like a super-low down payment,
...except that student loan rates are variable, and thus your rates are subject to being reset over time.
Mortgages and car loans are secured loans, where the property or car that is bought with them is pledged as collateral. This makes a big difference for the interest rates. Student loans just ain't so.
Anyway, I've heard complaints like this about student loan rates before, and I've always had the same basic response: you're barking up the wrong tree. You don't really want lower interest rates on student loans; you want the government to spend more on making higher education affordable for those who qualify for it. There's a bunch of countries out there where if you get admitted into a university, the government picks up the tuition bill, period. Those countries ain't richer than the USA.
That doesn't really matter. The reason dividends aren't paid is because we have stock market that's liquid and efficient enough that stockholders can substitute capital gains for dividends. If the stock market was illiquid or inefficient, then the only way the stockholders could cash out the company's profits would be paying out dividends--and then dividends would be paid out.
You mean exponential growth, not logarithmic. You're making this more complicated than it needs to be; whether the growth is logarithmic or exponential is only a detail.
Basically, the only profit you can expect over the long term from a stock investment is whatever the long-term profit of the corporation turns out to be. No matter what numbers the company reports over the next few quarters, in the end, whether the corporation turns out to be a profitable venture will become evident over the long term. The management of an unprofitable corporation may try to disguise this over the short or medium terms, but they won't be able to do so forever. No matter how they behave over the short term, overvalued stocks will drop over the long term, and undervalued ones will rise.
This is one of the reasons why the stock market is volatile in the short and medium term, but shows a definite long-term trend--because which of today's companies will turn out to be the ones that actually turn a profit over the next 20 years is very hard to predict, if at all possible.
Yes, and that's why your statement that the day trader provides a benefit to society if he profits is wrong. Modulo the long-term direction of the stock market, a day trader profits only because somebody else loses an equivalent amount of money. Day trading doesn't create real wealth; it only redistributes it.
The terrorist actually destroyed some wealth, and the doctor actually created some. That is, the terrorist did some non-financial damage, and the doctor did some non-financial repair.
Remember, financial goods like money and stocks don't exist for their own sake; they exist only to help us procure non-financial goods. Money exists to facilitate trade; stocks exist to facilitate production. The measure of whether financial goods benefit society at large isn't whether individual actors profit; it's whether the market can provide more non-financial goods and services than it otherwise could. When the amount of financial goods grows much more quickly than the amount of non-financial goods that they can be traded for, we call that "inflation," not "everybody's wealthier."
But I'm not arguing that the stock market is a zero-sum game--I'm arguing that day-trading is one (until you factor trading costs in, when it becomes a negative-sum game).
The long-term gains of the stock market come from real economic growth; holding a market basket of a stock market of an economy that grows over the long term is profitable in real terms because by the time you're due to cash out, the economy will have made a lot more actual, non-financial goods and services, and you will be able to trade your stock sales proceeds for more of those than you otherwise would have been able to. In the long term, this is what "profit" really means: being able to procure a larger share of the economy's non-financial goods.
To the extent that your stock market profits don't come from the actual long-term growth of the economy, then they must come from equivalent losses by other people. Day trading doesn't particularly contribute to creating real wealth, simply because day trading doesn't invest money over the time terms that it takes for it to be evident whether the economy has grown. Or, in other terms, day traders aren't really taking on the risk that a business will not create wealth--which is precisely the risk that investors are supposed to be rewarded for.
Nope. The strongest statement you can make there is that if day traders as a group make a profit in the aggregate that also beats the market (and in a risk adjusted fashion, to boot), then their behavior is providing a benefit to society. If day trading is a zero-sum game relative to the market as a whole, so that one can obtain a return just as good with buy-and-hold, then they're just gambling.
Stock shares are claims on the company's profits. When you buy a stock you're buying a share of the company's profits, to be distributed at some unspecified (and possibly empty!) set of dates in the future, in unspecified amounts. Shares are worth something, even if only a little, as long as there is a non-zero probability that the company will pay out profits at some point in the future. That's really all that needs to be understood.
The only difference between initial investors and future investors is that the initial investors buy their share of the company's profits from the company itself, which then uses that money to finance its operations. People who buy from the initial investors are simply buying the right to get paid by the company in the future, which, again, is worth something as long as the company's hopes of turning a profit in the future do not completely vanish.
But that just assumes that we really want to judge the performance of the graphics hardware in isolation, as opposed to judging it as part of a larger system that includes (a) the drivers, (b) the graphics library, and (c) the computer.
Suppose one graphics card manufacturer discovers that for most games that people play, there's more bang for the buck to be had in improving the CPU/GPU balancing approach than in increasing the pure GPU power, and invests their efforts accordingly into improving the drivers. Their competitor doesn't realize this, and put their effort into purely faster GPU. And assume that in practice, the first company's approach delivers slightly better performance than the second one's, and for a lower price to boot.
Now you run your pure GPU power benchmark, and lo and behold, the second company's card comes out on top, despite the fact that it produces inferior performance. In that case, if you ask me, you really should have designed a more realistic test that simulated the load that would be put on the whole computer system during a game or other actual use of the card.
This scenario is quite possibly hypothetical when it comes to graphics card, but things like this are already happening in the field of digital camera lens testing. Panasonic and Olympus' recent Micro Four Thirds system is designed to use lenses with quite large geometrical distortion and chromatic aberration, on the premise that these lens defects can be automatically and effectively corrected by the image processing software. The lenses, coupled with the intended software processing of the images, produce images with good resolution and less distortion and chromatic aberration than the older, optically-corrected designs. Some testers, however, have bypassed the intended software processing and attempted to evaluate the performance of the lenses in isolation, and gotten hung up on their "bad quality."
The point is that testing just the card (or just the lens) can be a very unfair comparison when the designers managed to think outside the box and create a system where the performance doesn't just come from the one component, but also from other pieces.
Well, not to put too a fine point to it, nobody's entitled to dates. You can't justify asshole behavior by saying that you have to be an asshole to get dates.
Unforwardness and unassertiveness by women is a problem, yes.
Maybe. This shit is, to a large extent, context and statistics. As another poster said, if you get the context right, you can absolutely go ahead, and I of course have no context to judge you personally in this regard. Still, as a general rule, men fail to even think about the context in the first place.
There's a theme in feminist writing that deals with situations similar to this. The idea is that one common form of sexism is for people to disregard context when dealing with women. There are several examples:
In all cases, the men tend to focus obsessively on the concrete actions, without stopping to think about the contexts. It's a form of magical thinking: ask the girl out on a date and tell her she's pretty, and she will sleep with you; no attempt is made to understand any deeper the relationship between the actions and outcomes.
Let's leave the word "apologize" out of this for a bit. In fact, let's leave the whole "blame" thing out of it for a bit. It simply is, as a general rule, good for you to understand why other people were offended by somebody's action, and to demonstrate that you understand. (And I mean genuinely demonstrate that you genuinely do understand; a lot of this shit, in practice, is not genuine in sympathy or genuine in understanding.)
A lot of third-party "apologies" come down to this. They're really a recognition, by A's part, that A understands that B offended C, and why C considers the act as an offense. They're not necessarily an admission of responsibility; they're just recognition of somebody's perspective on an incident. Demonstrating that you understand why somebody took offense to something is a pretty good way of deescalating a situation when somebody genuinely takes offense, and if you have some authority over the situation (like, being a conference organizer or mailing list admin), it helps people keep faith on your authority (though you may need to do more than just that in many situations).
No, nobody expects that. But oftentimes, somebody who your are associated with does something to offend somebody else that you are also associated with, and in many of those situations, it is appropriate and good to demonstrate that you understand the nature of the offense. There is no clear line that separates the cases where you really must do so and the cases that you absolutely don't have to, but showing yourself as being too concerned over that tends to mark you as a selfish asshole who's more interested in assigning blame than in getting along with people.
I think yours is a really useful comment here, and I will try to build upon it.
Complaints about sexism tend to come down to a few components that you've identified here:
This comment and this one are perfect examples of the first point, where the posters completely fail to understand how women usually perceive being asked out by men. There are a few excellent responses here, here, here and here, which try to help the original poster put himself in the woman's shoes and understand how he would be seen if he were to make an advance on the woman without an appropriate context. He'd be one of dozens of men who signal an interest on nothing more than the fact that she's got breasts and a vagina, a good proportion of which are pushy and aggressive when they are turned down.
Now, this really just ought to be common sense, but if you want to have a productive interaction with somebody else you have to understand their point of view and accommodate it. That means that you're not supposed have things go exclusively your way at the expense of the other; you're supposed help the other person to get what they want in exchange for you getting what you want. Failure to abide by this norm gets you called names like "asshole."
It also just ought to be common sense that if you say something that offends somebody else and they complain about it, well, you might have failed to understand that person's point of view, and that you ought to at the very least demonstrate some effort to understand why they were offended. Of course that only goes so far (some people truly do take offense too easily), and you may judge that you don't have anything to apologize for, but you ought to at least act like you care about how other people think, and that you're not entitled to offend others. Hell, by effectively and sympathetically summarizing why the other person felt offended at what you did or said, you actually gain face among people who are not assholes. You come across somebody who's interested in taking responsibility for the effects of their actions even when some of those effects are unintended. People who are genuinely and justifiably offended tend to be satisfied when you act this way; people who are unjustifiably offended don't, but they tend to end up looking worse.
Again, all of this ought to just be common sense, part of the unwritten "How not to be an Asshole" manual. But the problem is that men are brought up to regularly be assholes to women, pure and simple, while women are brought up to allow men to get away with it. That is what institution
So what about the fact that such a big number of men feel entitled to do ask women out with no prior indication of interest? You don't think that's institutional sexism that men are expected and encouraged to act in a manner that systematically annoys women?
Well, if men were equally expected to keep all their men's locker room bullshit out of it, and just "code or don't," then that would be a fair deal. As it stands, women are expected to keep their "political bullshit" out of there while the men don't face any consequences for treating them like shit.
Yeah, and about 10x as much bullshit and false rumors. Your point being?