All we really need is some coherent way to draw the line between the two, and it doesn't really matter what the line is.
Do we, really? People keep assuming that this is the case for all sorts of cases when I don't see why it should be so. See also, e.g., whether Pluto is "really a planet."
My alternative guess: the laws of nature don't care what clumps of stuff are "really" galaxies and which are "really" clusters, and all sorts of intermediate cases are possible. In this case, "galaxy" and "cluster" are best seen as radial categories with fuzzy boundaries: they have central cases that are the "best" example of properties that often occur together, but also all sorts of non-central examples that depart from those central cases in a bunch of ways, until you hit a bunch of gray examples where there's just no principled criterion to decide whether they fit into the category or not.
Prime example of radial categories: colors. There's a "focal" shade that's the center of the category; shades close to a focal one will be judged as being definitely that color; shades that are far from any focal shade will be ambiguous. None of this gives rise to a dispute as to what shade we're talking about, because shades are completely described by parameters that don't need to settle what discrete color category they belong to.
These sorts of radial categories are useful as long as we don't confuse them for concepts of the actual scientific theory, like spacetime or matter/energy.
Few scientists would claim to be discovering "objective truth", but instead "usefully predictive models". For examples, most partical physisists dislike the Standard Model, because intuitively it just feels wrong to have such a cluttered beastiary of "fundamental" particles - most hope it's not the "objective truth" (which one hopes is more elegant), but it remains the most useful, predictive model after decades of such dissatisfaction and puttering about with string theory.
And this is actually a great example of Feyerabend's attack on the philosophical notion of the "scientific method." Here we have scientists judging theories on aesthetic grounds. Classical philosophy of science can't account for this; you should always abandon a theory in favor of one that's more accurately predictive, even if you find the latter crassly inelegant. There should be no dissatisfaction with the best predictive theory you have; if you think it's "inelegant" you're being irrational, because that's just not a rational way to evaluate a theory.
Feyerabend, on the other hand, thinks that using elegance as a criterion is fair game, and that scientists may fruitfully hold on to predictively inferior theories because of their elegance. His account of the development of heliocentrism goes like that: because Galileo and his later followers held on to a theory that they liked despite its contemporary predictive inferiority, they were able to advance it enough to unseat the preceding theory. The defense of heliocentrism against its early flaws required decades' worth of advances in mechanics and optics.
Except science itself doesn't have any goals other than understanding what is actually going on.
That's how the scientistic ideologues see themselves, indeed, but it's just not true. I know this is going to be an unfair generalization, but there's enough truth to it to put it out: "science" at various points in history has been allied will all sorts of execrable social projects, like, the "White Man's Burden" and colonialism.
I think the other objection Feyerabend would have is that statements like "the goal of science is truth" are so vague so as to be trivial and worthless. All sorts of institutions ideologies are going to claim that what they believe in is quite simple truth and goodness and justice and progress and fluffy puppies.
extremely vague proposals about improving education and imposing a "separation of science and state," so that scientifically dogmatic people don't crowd out everybody else in the processes for evaluating and deciding what is best.
Indeed. Again, this is one of the weakest point in Feyerabend's philosophy. In fact, at some points in time he actually supported efforts to get creationism into school biology classes. Another "what the hell, hero" moment is his defense of the Church's treatment of Galileo.
But, you are arguing that the biggest problem with the ID crowd's efforts to get creationism into schoolbooks is that creationism is wrong; the "epistemological" dimension you are trying to bring into the discussion here. I think that the bigger problem is their politics; they're trying to break down the separation of church and state (as seen by the fact that they also work to get their "Christian nation" ideas into the textbooks).
Feyerabend was just as adamant about a separation of church and state as he was about science and state. His thinking about the political domain, however, was just incredibly naïve, IMO.
...the authority of science should only be accepted in as far as it improves our quality of life.
So long as we're arguing epistemology, how do we know it improves our quality of life? This seems circular, since the most obvious way to ask whether it improves our quality of life is to do some sort of scientific study about quality of life.
This actually gets to a central point about Feyerabend's philosophy, and his skeptical attacks on claims about the superiority of science. Feyerabend answers the common argument that science is superior because it produces "results" by pointing out that this is, quite like you say, a circular claim: science tends to produce the results that scientists want, when judged by their standards. If you have different goals or apply different standards, you might come to an equally high appreciation of, say, Voodoo.
What Feyerabend is doing here, IMO, is appealing to the fact-value distinction; questions about how much science improves our quality of life are fundamentally questions about value, which science cannot settle.
Feyerabend wanted these issues to be deal with "democratically" and in the way that maximized "freedom." He doesn't go into a lot of depth about what this means, limiting himself to extremely vague proposals about improving education and imposing a "separation of science and state," so that scientifically dogmatic people don't crowd out everybody else in the processes for evaluating and deciding what is best. The vagueness of his arguments here is one of the places where I think his philosophy is weakest.
What is this historical refutation of the scientific method of which you speak? The only way I can see to refute the scientific method would be to try it and see if it works, but that would be invalid because it would itself be employing the scientific method.
You really should read Feyerabend's Against Method carefully if you want to know. It's one of the greatest books written about science, even with all the questionable stuff in it. (Feyerabend was, in today's internet vocabulary, a bit of a troll, who often argued crazy claims that everybody else thought were unconceivable, partly for the lulz, but also partly because he thought this activity helped to increase our understanding. He also put forward all sorts of arguments that he didn't think through all the time, and would change his mind about stuff just as often.)
But to summarize: Feyerabend argues against claims that there is a scientific method that effectively prescribes how scientists should carry out their work and revise their beliefs by examining how it would apply in the case of Galileo. He finds that Galileo's evidence for the claim that the Earth moves around the sun, in contemporary terms, was refuted by the evidence.
However, Galileo and his successors insisted in arguing for it and researching heliocentrism despite the strong contemporary evidence against it, and by doing this, managed to strengthen their case until it became the stronger one. That is, the progress of astronomy was ultimately only possible because some people acted contrary to what philosophical pronouncements about scientific method would tell them to do. In that sense, adherence to the "scientific method" as prescribed by philosophers, would have prevented scientific progress. The only effective "scientific method" (and now I'm half paraphrasing, half interpreting, so somebody else who's read Feyerabend might disagree) would be what scientists in fact have done, and that's not a unitary, coherently formulated, ahistorical thing; it's a plurality of practices that are adopted opportunistically to suit the problems at hand (which in turn are historical products).
Well, actually, Feyerabend does at various equate science to voodoo and other systems of myth. However, the thing is that Feyerabend is not doing this to denigrate science, as the comparison to "voodoo" will be normally read. He in fact explicitly condemns the common practice of referring to "voodoo" as a stand-in for obscurantism and ignorance that can be dismissed out of hand:
Besides, ancient doctrines and "primitive" myths appear strange and nonsensical only because the information they contain is not known, or is distorted by philologists or anthropologists unfamiliar with the simplest physical, medial or astronomical knowledge. Voodoo, Dr Hesse's pièce de resistance, is a case in point. Nobody knows it, everybody uses it as a paradigm of backwardness of confusion. And yet Voodoo has a firm though still not sufficiently understood material basis, and a study of its manifestations can be used to enrich, and perhaps even to revise, our knowledge of physiology. [Against Method, pp. 35-36]
Feyerabend thinks that science and myth are very similar and are of comparable worth. (And note I said comparable, not "equal"; the point is that there are arguments about values that can be had in this regard.)
I'm happy with saying "nothing can be 100% proven" and calling 2+2 a theory.
2+2=4 is indeed a theory in the language of arithmetic, and provably so.
No, you're misreading that. There is such a thing as the theory whose sole non-logical axiom is 2+2=4, but that's not an interesting theory (what are you supposed to conclude from that axiom?).
"Arithmetic" is conventionally held to be any theory that's logically equivalent to Peano's axioms. 2+2=4, or more precisely SS0 + SS0 = SSSS0 (where S(x) stands for the number that's the successor of the number x; I omit parentheses where not needed), is a theorem of this theory. Abbreviated proof: x + 0 = x (axiom), x + Sy = S(x+y) (axiom), and thus, SS0 + SS0 = S(SS0 + S0) = SS(SS0 + 0) = SSSS0.
If they don't distribute part of that profit and have no plans to, its valueless. 1% of nothing is nothing.
You're leaving out the crucial fact that the company can be forced to distribute the profit. It requires a controlling stake in the company, which in turn, requires buying out current shareholders. This is one way you can reasonably expect a return from investing in the stock of a profitable company—some person, group of persons, or company pay you so that they can claim its profits.
Again, if a company has equity (its assets are more than its debts), then its stock is valuable, period, because the stock is absolutely necessary to claim the company's profits, and can be used to force such a claim. The rest is messy detail.
The purpose of a company is to make profit for it's investors.
Yes.
That profit is returned to the investors though dividends.
No, not necessarily. To the extent the investors can satisfy their demand for returns from the stock by selling it on the market, investors can get their returns that way, and thus don't have to demand a dividend.
Dividends are the simplest, most fail-proof mechanism that a profitable company can use to compensate its investors; all it requires is that the company pay its shareholders directly. However, if there is a liquid market for the stock, that values it in a reasonably efficient manner, then the market competes with dividends as a vehicle for realizing investors' gains.
If the market breaks down, that option disappears, and then investors must insist on dividends; this is why I say that dividends are the simplest and most fail-proof mechanism. But as long as the market's good enough, and the stock of profitable companies can be sold at a reasonable profit to the investor, then investors don't really need dividends.
It's not in the sense that no legal scam is taking place. But think about it-- you're buying something in the hopes that despite the fact no additional physical items will go to you, it will be worth more to someone else in the future. And why will he buy it? For the same reason. And he'll sell it to someone else for the same reason. And so on.
The crucial difference is that what you're trading is a legally recognized claim on the profits of a corporation—and corporations, unlike Ponzi schemes, can have a net profit. Ponzi schemes redistribute whatever money was put into them, no more, no less; enterprises create new goods or provide services, and in doing so often create wealth that did not exist before.
Stock market speculation does sometime take on an air that is similar to Ponzi schemes. But as long as (a) stocks entitle you to a share of the profits of the underlying corporations, (b) you invest in profitable enterprises, and (c) you pay reasonable prices for the stock, you can reasonably expect to profit from it in one way or another. Either the company will pay out its profits and you'll get your cash, or folks with enough money will buy you out to get a majority stake on the company and make it pay out the profits.
The stock of a profitable company is valuable, period.
1) Personally I see the dividend as the reason to invest at all, and as such it needs to pay out more than a bank account or you're stupid (?) since it's much riskier. Now people can of course pay more for the stock compared to the current earnings of the company because they assume earnings will improve in the future and hence give a reason to pay out a higher dividend by then.
No, the reason to invest in a company isn't the dividend. The reason to invest in a company is the profits. Stock is, fundamentally, a claim on the profits of a corporation (assets - debts). When those profits are paid out, whichever way they are paid out, shareholders are the ones entitled to receive them, in proportion to how many shares they have.
For it to make sense to make an investment, there must be a way to get your investment return. In the case of stocks, this can be (a) dividends, (b) capital gains from sale of the stock, (c) proceeds from liquidation of the corporation (rare).
As an investor, you should be indifferent to which of these alternate mechanisms is used to cash in your return, as long as you can maximize your return. This is why as long as you can cash in your share of the company's profits by selling your stock at a higher price than you bought it, you should not care about the company's dividend. If you cannot do that, then yeah, you would want a dividend.
Remember that divident (non)payment is not a permanent property of a stock; it is a policy that is set by the board of the corporation, and subject to change. We live in a market environment where the easiest, most convenient way to cash in on the success of the companies you invest in is to sell the stock; this is the reason why so many companies can get away without paying a dividend. If the market becomes very illiquid or inefficient, then a lot of companies would have to start paying a dividend to attract investors.
Why does someone have to be a "chump" to pay more for it?
Because they're not actually going to get any money outside of selling the stock to someone else (see also: "no dividends").
There is one tiny nugget of truth in this silly idea that one shouldn't invest in non-dividend stocks: even if a company is profitable, there'd be no point in making an investment in it if there was no way for the investor to collect on the profits. Investors who buy in at profitable prices must be compensated somehow.
In practice, the reason a company can get away without paying a dividend is pretty simple: the market is efficient and liquid enough that investors can cash in the company's profits over reasonable terms simply by selling the stock. If I'm a stockholder, as long as I can sell the stock at a profit whenever I want, why would I want or need a dividend? (Especially since the tax treatment of capital gains is better than dividends.)
Now, if the company's stock was illiquid over the long term, or the market systematically failed to value it as highly as it should, then investors would have insist on a dividend to get their investment returns. But as long as neither of those is the case, companies don't have to pay dividends to attract investors, and investors don't need to be paid dividends to cash in their returns.
I object to your assertion that these systems add liquidity. They consume as much as (if not more than) they add. They are executing orders as much as they are adding to the book.
And what's worse is that every time I look into these schemes, they seem to be predicated on detecting matching buy and sell offers quickly enough to get in between them before the market pairs them up. That is, the HFT only kicks in when a trade was going to happen anyway. That not only doesn't add liquidity, it assumes that the liquidity is already there.
Are there really any workflows left where film is the right choice, rather than just the status quo?
Well, for landscape photography, large format film is the clearly superior choice, though it's not obligatory. There are just no digital cameras that can match 4x5" transparency sheet film.
That really only works if the "goto" always happens at the end of the state (rather than conditionally somewhere in the middle). The state machines I've written tended to have quite a few states with that property.
I don't understand whether you mean the trivial statement that tail call elimination can only be done for tail calls, the confusing, seemingly contradictory idea that a finite state machine would need to keep a state "alive" beyond the point of the transition (you were talking about finite state machines, right?), or some third thing that I'm totally missing.
Also, I can't quite tell exactly what you mean by "end of the state" vs. "conditionally somewhere in the middle." You might not be making the mistake I'm about to point out, but just to make sure: you can tail call conditionally from the middle of a routine. Tail call just means that all that the caller does with the return value of the call is immediately return it to its own caller; that can happen in the middle of a routine (e.g., in if cond then return f(x) else whatever, the call to f is a tail call).
A very interesting idea though. It hadn't occurred to me to try to implement a state machine using a mutually-recursive web of routines.
It's standard practice in Scheme and other languages that insist on tail call optimization. As long as the people reading the code understand what a finite state machine is, the code tends to be extremely readable.
Goto provides for the natural expression of a state-machine. The most common example of that is in lexical analysis. [...] Some of the more dogmatic try to get around it by using a case statement in a loop (with an enumeration or something controlling the current state). But really the internal structure of the code flow there has nothing whatsoever to do with that loop, and artificially imposing that on it just obscures the state machine underneath.
And now you've just made a case for tail-call elimination, which turns each state into a function, and each state transition into a (syntactic) function call.
The left didn't care that we couldn't afford it as long as they got what they wanted by passing the healthcare bill.
Except that health care reform is intended to reduce the deficit over the long term, by curbing the rapid growth of health care costs over the long term.
Remember, there are all sorts of tax deductions and credits for health care. This means that the government sees comparatively little revenue from dollars that get spent on healthcare, which gets more and more expensive much faster than inflation. Also, sick people produce less, and growing numbers of uninsured or underinsured people means less revenue for the government.
The Congressional Budget Office says that health care reform increases the deficit over the next 10 years, but reduces it dramatically over the next 20. They're not necessarily right, but they're analyzing this deeper than the critics.
So the top result is World Net Daily, who cite a book called Shut Up, America!: The End of Free Speech as their source. This book is written by Brad O'Leary, and published by... wait for it... WND Books.
The second result cites the World Net Daily story as their source, but they claim to have done some extra work to verify it, by reading Sunstein's book Republic.com. I'm not about to go and check whether the quotes are accurate, but reportedly Sunstein later changed his mind—a concept that many people in the politisphere don't seem to understand.
The question that really addresses this wrong assertion is: Why has English become the lingua franka of the internet, and not say German, Spanish, French or Chinese? The answer is pretty simple: English (as opposed to German, French, Swedish etc. of the indo-germanic/latin root) is relatively simple to learn for anybody natively speaking indo-germanic/latin root language (really many people).
Um, no. It really comes down to the fact that the USA is the dominant international power, and that the previous power was England. As the_humeister points out, the fact that English colonization made the English language the lingua franca of India is really, really significant.
Your explanation also has the problem that, well, most people in the world don't speak a germanic or romance language natively.
Chinese on the other hand is anything but simple. People who do not speak it by far and large (in terms of percentage) will never be able to gain any substantial reading/writing proficiency in it, or pick it up drive-by style (as many do English).
Um, are you aware that Chinese has at various points been the lingua franca of the far east? Just like England and the USA's status as the global power in the last two centuries has led to global adoption of English, China's status as the dominant regional power in earlier, pre-globalized times led to adoption of its language.
It has nothing to do with "simplicity" (your judgement of which is quite likely illusory, while I'm at it). It's just geopolitics.
Who says the infrastructure needs be used efficiently?
My wallet does!
Besides, if there was more competition for last-mile connectivity, we'd have 10x the number of providers, meaning, 10x the infrastructure.
No, we'd have 10x the number of providers, each one with 0.1x the amount of infrastructure on average, for a total of 1x the infrastructure. It boils down to the fact that providers that can provide the same service level without using as much infrastructure will be able to outcompete the ones who overbuild.
Dude, this is not rocket science. A good ISP will observe how much bandwidth its users demand on the aggregate, and provide that much plus a bit extra on the uplinks. That way they can provide the bandwidth their users actually demand at the lowest possible cost. If the aggregate demand grows over time, then more capacity can be built when it crosses above a threshold.
The problem isn't overselling. The problem is monopolistic ISPs that have no incentive to provide the bandwidth that their customers demand, and thus deliberately run their networks badly.
Slashdot Mirror
All we really need is some coherent way to draw the line between the two, and it doesn't really matter what the line is.
Do we, really? People keep assuming that this is the case for all sorts of cases when I don't see why it should be so. See also, e.g., whether Pluto is "really a planet."
My alternative guess: the laws of nature don't care what clumps of stuff are "really" galaxies and which are "really" clusters, and all sorts of intermediate cases are possible. In this case, "galaxy" and "cluster" are best seen as radial categories with fuzzy boundaries: they have central cases that are the "best" example of properties that often occur together, but also all sorts of non-central examples that depart from those central cases in a bunch of ways, until you hit a bunch of gray examples where there's just no principled criterion to decide whether they fit into the category or not.
Prime example of radial categories: colors. There's a "focal" shade that's the center of the category; shades close to a focal one will be judged as being definitely that color; shades that are far from any focal shade will be ambiguous. None of this gives rise to a dispute as to what shade we're talking about, because shades are completely described by parameters that don't need to settle what discrete color category they belong to.
These sorts of radial categories are useful as long as we don't confuse them for concepts of the actual scientific theory, like spacetime or matter/energy.
Assange is being accused of "sex by surprise" [...]
No he's not. This "sex by surprise" stuff is some shit his lawyers made up. Do your fucking research before running off your mouth.
Few scientists would claim to be discovering "objective truth", but instead "usefully predictive models". For examples, most partical physisists dislike the Standard Model, because intuitively it just feels wrong to have such a cluttered beastiary of "fundamental" particles - most hope it's not the "objective truth" (which one hopes is more elegant), but it remains the most useful, predictive model after decades of such dissatisfaction and puttering about with string theory.
And this is actually a great example of Feyerabend's attack on the philosophical notion of the "scientific method." Here we have scientists judging theories on aesthetic grounds. Classical philosophy of science can't account for this; you should always abandon a theory in favor of one that's more accurately predictive, even if you find the latter crassly inelegant. There should be no dissatisfaction with the best predictive theory you have; if you think it's "inelegant" you're being irrational, because that's just not a rational way to evaluate a theory.
Feyerabend, on the other hand, thinks that using elegance as a criterion is fair game, and that scientists may fruitfully hold on to predictively inferior theories because of their elegance. His account of the development of heliocentrism goes like that: because Galileo and his later followers held on to a theory that they liked despite its contemporary predictive inferiority, they were able to advance it enough to unseat the preceding theory. The defense of heliocentrism against its early flaws required decades' worth of advances in mechanics and optics.
Except science itself doesn't have any goals other than understanding what is actually going on.
That's how the scientistic ideologues see themselves, indeed, but it's just not true. I know this is going to be an unfair generalization, but there's enough truth to it to put it out: "science" at various points in history has been allied will all sorts of execrable social projects, like, the "White Man's Burden" and colonialism.
I think the other objection Feyerabend would have is that statements like "the goal of science is truth" are so vague so as to be trivial and worthless. All sorts of institutions ideologies are going to claim that what they believe in is quite simple truth and goodness and justice and progress and fluffy puppies.
extremely vague proposals about improving education and imposing a "separation of science and state," so that scientifically dogmatic people don't crowd out everybody else in the processes for evaluating and deciding what is best.
Be careful what you wish for.
Indeed. Again, this is one of the weakest point in Feyerabend's philosophy. In fact, at some points in time he actually supported efforts to get creationism into school biology classes. Another "what the hell, hero" moment is his defense of the Church's treatment of Galileo.
But, you are arguing that the biggest problem with the ID crowd's efforts to get creationism into schoolbooks is that creationism is wrong; the "epistemological" dimension you are trying to bring into the discussion here. I think that the bigger problem is their politics; they're trying to break down the separation of church and state (as seen by the fact that they also work to get their "Christian nation" ideas into the textbooks).
Feyerabend was just as adamant about a separation of church and state as he was about science and state. His thinking about the political domain, however, was just incredibly naïve, IMO.
...the authority of science should only be accepted in as far as it improves our quality of life.
So long as we're arguing epistemology, how do we know it improves our quality of life? This seems circular, since the most obvious way to ask whether it improves our quality of life is to do some sort of scientific study about quality of life.
This actually gets to a central point about Feyerabend's philosophy, and his skeptical attacks on claims about the superiority of science. Feyerabend answers the common argument that science is superior because it produces "results" by pointing out that this is, quite like you say, a circular claim: science tends to produce the results that scientists want, when judged by their standards. If you have different goals or apply different standards, you might come to an equally high appreciation of, say, Voodoo.
What Feyerabend is doing here, IMO, is appealing to the fact-value distinction; questions about how much science improves our quality of life are fundamentally questions about value, which science cannot settle.
Feyerabend wanted these issues to be deal with "democratically" and in the way that maximized "freedom." He doesn't go into a lot of depth about what this means, limiting himself to extremely vague proposals about improving education and imposing a "separation of science and state," so that scientifically dogmatic people don't crowd out everybody else in the processes for evaluating and deciding what is best. The vagueness of his arguments here is one of the places where I think his philosophy is weakest.
What is this historical refutation of the scientific method of which you speak? The only way I can see to refute the scientific method would be to try it and see if it works, but that would be invalid because it would itself be employing the scientific method.
You really should read Feyerabend's Against Method carefully if you want to know. It's one of the greatest books written about science, even with all the questionable stuff in it. (Feyerabend was, in today's internet vocabulary, a bit of a troll, who often argued crazy claims that everybody else thought were unconceivable, partly for the lulz, but also partly because he thought this activity helped to increase our understanding. He also put forward all sorts of arguments that he didn't think through all the time, and would change his mind about stuff just as often.)
But to summarize: Feyerabend argues against claims that there is a scientific method that effectively prescribes how scientists should carry out their work and revise their beliefs by examining how it would apply in the case of Galileo. He finds that Galileo's evidence for the claim that the Earth moves around the sun, in contemporary terms, was refuted by the evidence.
However, Galileo and his successors insisted in arguing for it and researching heliocentrism despite the strong contemporary evidence against it, and by doing this, managed to strengthen their case until it became the stronger one. That is, the progress of astronomy was ultimately only possible because some people acted contrary to what philosophical pronouncements about scientific method would tell them to do. In that sense, adherence to the "scientific method" as prescribed by philosophers, would have prevented scientific progress. The only effective "scientific method" (and now I'm half paraphrasing, half interpreting, so somebody else who's read Feyerabend might disagree) would be what scientists in fact have done, and that's not a unitary, coherently formulated, ahistorical thing; it's a plurality of practices that are adopted opportunistically to suit the problems at hand (which in turn are historical products).
Besides, ancient doctrines and "primitive" myths appear strange and nonsensical only because the information they contain is not known, or is distorted by philologists or anthropologists unfamiliar with the simplest physical, medial or astronomical knowledge. Voodoo, Dr Hesse's pièce de resistance, is a case in point. Nobody knows it, everybody uses it as a paradigm of backwardness of confusion. And yet Voodoo has a firm though still not sufficiently understood material basis, and a study of its manifestations can be used to enrich, and perhaps even to revise, our knowledge of physiology. [Against Method, pp. 35-36]
Feyerabend thinks that science and myth are very similar and are of comparable worth. (And note I said comparable, not "equal"; the point is that there are arguments about values that can be had in this regard.)
I'm happy with saying "nothing can be 100% proven" and calling 2+2 a theory.
2+2=4 is indeed a theory in the language of arithmetic, and provably so.
No, you're misreading that. There is such a thing as the theory whose sole non-logical axiom is 2+2=4, but that's not an interesting theory (what are you supposed to conclude from that axiom?).
"Arithmetic" is conventionally held to be any theory that's logically equivalent to Peano's axioms. 2+2=4, or more precisely SS0 + SS0 = SSSS0 (where S(x) stands for the number that's the successor of the number x; I omit parentheses where not needed), is a theorem of this theory. Abbreviated proof: x + 0 = x (axiom), x + Sy = S(x+y) (axiom), and thus, SS0 + SS0 = S(SS0 + S0) = SS(SS0 + 0) = SSSS0.
Since the blog talking about the cloud has seemingly dissipated, I have to wonder what a "Cloud Based OS" even would mean, if that's even a thing.
Yeah, it sounds really nebulous.
If they don't distribute part of that profit and have no plans to, its valueless. 1% of nothing is nothing.
You're leaving out the crucial fact that the company can be forced to distribute the profit. It requires a controlling stake in the company, which in turn, requires buying out current shareholders. This is one way you can reasonably expect a return from investing in the stock of a profitable company—some person, group of persons, or company pay you so that they can claim its profits.
Again, if a company has equity (its assets are more than its debts), then its stock is valuable, period, because the stock is absolutely necessary to claim the company's profits, and can be used to force such a claim. The rest is messy detail.
The purpose of a company is to make profit for it's investors.
Yes.
That profit is returned to the investors though dividends.
No, not necessarily. To the extent the investors can satisfy their demand for returns from the stock by selling it on the market, investors can get their returns that way, and thus don't have to demand a dividend.
Dividends are the simplest, most fail-proof mechanism that a profitable company can use to compensate its investors; all it requires is that the company pay its shareholders directly. However, if there is a liquid market for the stock, that values it in a reasonably efficient manner, then the market competes with dividends as a vehicle for realizing investors' gains.
If the market breaks down, that option disappears, and then investors must insist on dividends; this is why I say that dividends are the simplest and most fail-proof mechanism. But as long as the market's good enough, and the stock of profitable companies can be sold at a reasonable profit to the investor, then investors don't really need dividends.
It's not in the sense that no legal scam is taking place. But think about it-- you're buying something in the hopes that despite the fact no additional physical items will go to you, it will be worth more to someone else in the future. And why will he buy it? For the same reason. And he'll sell it to someone else for the same reason. And so on.
The crucial difference is that what you're trading is a legally recognized claim on the profits of a corporation—and corporations, unlike Ponzi schemes, can have a net profit. Ponzi schemes redistribute whatever money was put into them, no more, no less; enterprises create new goods or provide services, and in doing so often create wealth that did not exist before.
Stock market speculation does sometime take on an air that is similar to Ponzi schemes. But as long as (a) stocks entitle you to a share of the profits of the underlying corporations, (b) you invest in profitable enterprises, and (c) you pay reasonable prices for the stock, you can reasonably expect to profit from it in one way or another. Either the company will pay out its profits and you'll get your cash, or folks with enough money will buy you out to get a majority stake on the company and make it pay out the profits.
The stock of a profitable company is valuable, period.
1) Personally I see the dividend as the reason to invest at all, and as such it needs to pay out more than a bank account or you're stupid (?) since it's much riskier. Now people can of course pay more for the stock compared to the current earnings of the company because they assume earnings will improve in the future and hence give a reason to pay out a higher dividend by then.
No, the reason to invest in a company isn't the dividend. The reason to invest in a company is the profits. Stock is, fundamentally, a claim on the profits of a corporation (assets - debts). When those profits are paid out, whichever way they are paid out, shareholders are the ones entitled to receive them, in proportion to how many shares they have.
For it to make sense to make an investment, there must be a way to get your investment return. In the case of stocks, this can be (a) dividends, (b) capital gains from sale of the stock, (c) proceeds from liquidation of the corporation (rare).
As an investor, you should be indifferent to which of these alternate mechanisms is used to cash in your return, as long as you can maximize your return. This is why as long as you can cash in your share of the company's profits by selling your stock at a higher price than you bought it, you should not care about the company's dividend. If you cannot do that, then yeah, you would want a dividend.
Remember that divident (non)payment is not a permanent property of a stock; it is a policy that is set by the board of the corporation, and subject to change. We live in a market environment where the easiest, most convenient way to cash in on the success of the companies you invest in is to sell the stock; this is the reason why so many companies can get away without paying a dividend. If the market becomes very illiquid or inefficient, then a lot of companies would have to start paying a dividend to attract investors.
Why does someone have to be a "chump" to pay more for it?
Because they're not actually going to get any money outside of selling the stock to someone else (see also: "no dividends").
There is one tiny nugget of truth in this silly idea that one shouldn't invest in non-dividend stocks: even if a company is profitable, there'd be no point in making an investment in it if there was no way for the investor to collect on the profits. Investors who buy in at profitable prices must be compensated somehow.
In practice, the reason a company can get away without paying a dividend is pretty simple: the market is efficient and liquid enough that investors can cash in the company's profits over reasonable terms simply by selling the stock. If I'm a stockholder, as long as I can sell the stock at a profit whenever I want, why would I want or need a dividend? (Especially since the tax treatment of capital gains is better than dividends.)
Now, if the company's stock was illiquid over the long term, or the market systematically failed to value it as highly as it should, then investors would have insist on a dividend to get their investment returns. But as long as neither of those is the case, companies don't have to pay dividends to attract investors, and investors don't need to be paid dividends to cash in their returns.
I object to your assertion that these systems add liquidity. They consume as much as (if not more than) they add. They are executing orders as much as they are adding to the book.
And what's worse is that every time I look into these schemes, they seem to be predicated on detecting matching buy and sell offers quickly enough to get in between them before the market pairs them up. That is, the HFT only kicks in when a trade was going to happen anyway. That not only doesn't add liquidity, it assumes that the liquidity is already there.
Where would the profit be in buying a declining stock?
It's called short selling stock.
I think you're missing an important detail here.
If you can find a way to reduce bid-ask spreads without this kind of stuff, then I'll agree. Until then, I can't join the chorus of detractors.
It reduces the bid-ask spread by getting in between people who would have traded anyway, and giving each a worse deal. No benefit there.
D-76 is a developer, not a process.
LOL yes. I was collapsing from a lack of sleep when I wrote that. ;)
...thus the need for strong coffee?
Well, for landscape photography, large format film is the clearly superior choice, though it's not obligatory. There are just no digital cameras that can match 4x5" transparency sheet film.
That really only works if the "goto" always happens at the end of the state (rather than conditionally somewhere in the middle). The state machines I've written tended to have quite a few states with that property.
I don't understand whether you mean the trivial statement that tail call elimination can only be done for tail calls, the confusing, seemingly contradictory idea that a finite state machine would need to keep a state "alive" beyond the point of the transition (you were talking about finite state machines, right?), or some third thing that I'm totally missing.
Also, I can't quite tell exactly what you mean by "end of the state" vs. "conditionally somewhere in the middle." You might not be making the mistake I'm about to point out, but just to make sure: you can tail call conditionally from the middle of a routine. Tail call just means that all that the caller does with the return value of the call is immediately return it to its own caller; that can happen in the middle of a routine (e.g., in if cond then return f(x) else whatever, the call to f is a tail call).
A very interesting idea though. It hadn't occurred to me to try to implement a state machine using a mutually-recursive web of routines.
It's standard practice in Scheme and other languages that insist on tail call optimization. As long as the people reading the code understand what a finite state machine is, the code tends to be extremely readable.
Goto provides for the natural expression of a state-machine. The most common example of that is in lexical analysis. [...] Some of the more dogmatic try to get around it by using a case statement in a loop (with an enumeration or something controlling the current state). But really the internal structure of the code flow there has nothing whatsoever to do with that loop, and artificially imposing that on it just obscures the state machine underneath.
And now you've just made a case for tail-call elimination, which turns each state into a function, and each state transition into a (syntactic) function call.
The left didn't care that we couldn't afford it as long as they got what they wanted by passing the healthcare bill.
Except that health care reform is intended to reduce the deficit over the long term, by curbing the rapid growth of health care costs over the long term.
Remember, there are all sorts of tax deductions and credits for health care. This means that the government sees comparatively little revenue from dollars that get spent on healthcare, which gets more and more expensive much faster than inflation. Also, sick people produce less, and growing numbers of uninsured or underinsured people means less revenue for the government.
The Congressional Budget Office says that health care reform increases the deficit over the next 10 years, but reduces it dramatically over the next 20. They're not necessarily right, but they're analyzing this deeper than the critics.
So the top result is World Net Daily, who cite a book called Shut Up, America!: The End of Free Speech as their source. This book is written by Brad O'Leary, and published by... wait for it... WND Books.
The second result cites the World Net Daily story as their source, but they claim to have done some extra work to verify it, by reading Sunstein's book Republic.com. I'm not about to go and check whether the quotes are accurate, but reportedly Sunstein later changed his mind—a concept that many people in the politisphere don't seem to understand.
The question that really addresses this wrong assertion is: Why has English become the lingua franka of the internet, and not say German, Spanish, French or Chinese? The answer is pretty simple: English (as opposed to German, French, Swedish etc. of the indo-germanic/latin root) is relatively simple to learn for anybody natively speaking indo-germanic/latin root language (really many people).
Um, no. It really comes down to the fact that the USA is the dominant international power, and that the previous power was England. As the_humeister points out, the fact that English colonization made the English language the lingua franca of India is really, really significant.
Your explanation also has the problem that, well, most people in the world don't speak a germanic or romance language natively.
Chinese on the other hand is anything but simple. People who do not speak it by far and large (in terms of percentage) will never be able to gain any substantial reading/writing proficiency in it, or pick it up drive-by style (as many do English).
Um, are you aware that Chinese has at various points been the lingua franca of the far east? Just like England and the USA's status as the global power in the last two centuries has led to global adoption of English, China's status as the dominant regional power in earlier, pre-globalized times led to adoption of its language.
It has nothing to do with "simplicity" (your judgement of which is quite likely illusory, while I'm at it). It's just geopolitics.
Who says the infrastructure needs be used efficiently?
My wallet does!
Besides, if there was more competition for last-mile connectivity, we'd have 10x the number of providers, meaning, 10x the infrastructure.
No, we'd have 10x the number of providers, each one with 0.1x the amount of infrastructure on average, for a total of 1x the infrastructure. It boils down to the fact that providers that can provide the same service level without using as much infrastructure will be able to outcompete the ones who overbuild.
Dude, this is not rocket science. A good ISP will observe how much bandwidth its users demand on the aggregate, and provide that much plus a bit extra on the uplinks. That way they can provide the bandwidth their users actually demand at the lowest possible cost. If the aggregate demand grows over time, then more capacity can be built when it crosses above a threshold.
The problem isn't overselling. The problem is monopolistic ISPs that have no incentive to provide the bandwidth that their customers demand, and thus deliberately run their networks badly.