Or for the fact that I have Back Turtle Neck envy.
I, too, wish the back of my neck were protected by a hard protective shell. It might provide protection from the objects people fling at me when I point out their orthographical errors.
"It's amazing how the coalition fed us the bullshit of historical consecutive surpluses and 'fiscal conservatism' but managed to DOUBLE the national debt to a trillion dollars in ten years."
Dude, were you asleep during high school economics? National Debt = Government (Public) Debt + Household & Business (Private) Debt. If the Coalition did one thing right (and it may very well be one of the few things), it's eliminate the public, i.e. Government debt. Which they did through, yes, consecutive surpluses and fiscal conservatism.
If the private sector wants to go and borrow bucketloads of money to buy cheap shit from Taiwan, that's not the government's fault. Or would you like the state to "direct" your spending via more taxes so that you don't increase the current account deficit? From there it would only a short hop to "directing" your internet usage.
the most rational decision would be the one that makes the most optimal trade
The most optimal? Is that like the most highest, most best, and so forth?
In the economists' sense, rationality is choosing the optimal option – all sub-optimal choices are irrational. Which is what GP Monnet has already said.
As far as your points regarding freedom and information go, I can't really understand how you read those arguments into the GP's post, so I'm not going to address them. The GP seems perfectly capable of defending himself at any rate, at least on the subject of economics.
Probably due to fragile egos about not being real scientists.
Yeah, because "Peace" and "Literature" are both much more scientific than Economics. It also doesn't seem to bother the judges from the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, who choose the winners in the fields of Chemistry, Physics, and.. err.. Economics. How about that.
Fastest rising
1. wer kennt wen -- social networking site (general)
2. juegos -- no freaking idea (no, I will not google it!)
3. facebook
4. schüler vz -- social networking site (schoolkids)
5. studi vz -- social networking site (students)
6. jappy -- social networking site (general)
7. youtube
8. yasni -- person search engine
9. obama -- a very tanned man (thanks, Berlusconi!)
10. euro 2008
Most Popular
1. ebay
2. youtube
3. wetter -- weather
4. gmx -- E-mail provider
5. google
6. video
7. wikipedia
8. web.de -- E-mail provider
9. bild -- German tabloid
10. telefonbuch -- telephone book
Also, Austria Fastest rising
1. teilchenbeschleuniger -- LHC
2. gina lisa -- contestant on Germany's next top model
3. peking 2008
4. euro 08
5. barack obama
6. schülerVZ
7. jÃrg haider -- Austrian right-wing pollie who died in a car crash, drunk off his nut, and was later discovered to be gay.
8. iphone
9. heath ledger
10. wahlkabine -- voting booth
Austrian most popular
1. youtube
2. wetter
3. google
4. orf -- Austrian TV Station
5. ebay
6. wikipedia
7. herold -- Austrian Yellow Pages
8. routenplaner -- route planner
9. immobilien -- houses/property
10. gmx
I notice that several countries have the term "google" in their top 10 google searches. WTF? Who goes to google and then types in "google"?
It is not the stuff we eat. It is the stuff our food eats
If we grow less stuff-to-eat so that we can grow more stuff-to-burn it comes out to the same thing, doesn't it?
I think the OP's point is that the South American version uses existing waste products rather than changing the production mix to produce more, well.. waste products.
If we were talking about something being sold, product differentiation would be one means of attempting to achieve some form of price discrimination.(1)
That part of the equation doesn't apply here (though it will to any of the car-analogies cropping up), but product differentiation is still a recognised way to build brand loyalty by creating (perceived) differences and thereby value.
People don't use Firefox and think "Gee, isn't Google great?" – that's the (a) reason for Chrome.
A further reason is that having R&D in your own company can have positive synergies (apologies for the buzzword, but it applies here) with other projects, which don't occur from simply supporting external development.
Those are mid-to-long-term strategic considerations, while combining the projects simply to save money would be rather more a short-term oriented decision. Which isn't necessarily a criticism.
(1) Price discrimination is the concept of charging each buyer the full extent of what he is willing to pay for a good, rather than the same price as everyone else. For example, school-children don't have much money to pay for cinema tickets, and wouldn't come if they had to pay adult prices. They're still willing to pay more than the costs they incur, though, so the cinema operators increase their profits by charging them less. You'll see it all around if you pay attention.
You do, if you've paid for the right to graze 10,000 sheep there. If the land can handle 20,000 sheep, and the land owner has sold these grazing rights thrice, who is at fault?
Mod parent up. It's been known since 2005 that Heilmann worked for the Stasi. The Left (his political party) even had a vote about whether to keep him or not when the issue arose; relatively obviously, the voted to keep him.
It probably won't stop the ill-informed/. crowd from dragging out some old cliches about Germany, socialists, leftists, Nazis and so forth, but it would be nice to have discussion of the actual issue.
Being "left" or "right" has nothing to do with whether you're fascist or not. Fascism is an expression of total authoritarianism, which it is perfectly possible to combine with an attitude of socialism. They're two separate axes on the political compass.
Note that on the above chart, Dr. Angela Merkel (current German chancellor) is, in fact, "right". She's just not as right as most other Western leaders, leading to the impression that she is, in fact, "left".
Lutz Heilmann is even further left (his Party is called "The Left"), and on the Authoritarian/Libertarian scale doubtlessly up nice and high.
Some of the replies to your question have been correct; many haven't.
The reason is that the USA Government does not have standardised records detailing which of their citizens lives where. That's pretty much it. Individual branches may have some information – one poster pointed out the Selective Service, in which the US Army tracks males eligible for drafting – but that's only for men. And it doesn't keep track of where they live. All the other branches each have their own little bits of information, but they're not combined into anything vaguely comprehensive.
This missing system drives social statisticians nuts, and causes problems like this, but, as one poster said, it's simply "a different mindset".
for the economy to continue growing and for the (interest-based) money system to remain viable, more and more of nature and human relationship must be monetized. For example, thirty years ago most meals were prepared at home; today some two-thirds are prepared outside, in restaurants or supermarket delis. A once unpaid function, cooking, has become a "service". And we are the richer for it. Right?
Another major engine of economic growth over the last three decades, child care, has also made us richer. We are now relieved of the burden of caring for our own children. We pay experts instead, who can do it much more efficiently.
There are a number of econometricians who have suggested alternative measure of welfare to the standard Gross Domestic Product; measures that would remain the same whether you and your neighbour both clean your own houses or whether you pay each other to do it. However, we're in the vast minority (even among economists), and it's unpleasant to accept that we have been systematically ignoring the contribution of women to the well-being of society by not counting the value of child-rearing, cooking, cleaning and so forth in our economic indicators. To say nothing of the ecological factors we also ignore. The indicator most people accept as an accurate representation of our economy, well, isn't. In my opinion, as an economist with specialisations in Environmental Economics and Economic & Social Statistics.
But I'm verging off topic: what I wanted to say in response to the text you posted is that the economy hasn't really been, growing through the monetarisation of activities we do in our spare time; we've just been gradually moving the activities from the "things we don't count" column to the "things we count" column. An economic downturn/recession/depression can reasonably be accepted to decrease activities in both of these columns; it would therefore not be so surprising if the development of FOSS and the submission of user content slows as people decide to spend their time satisfying their "deficiency needs" rather than self-actualising.
Okay, first off: economists do not believe that people do everything for money. Anyone who thinks that isn't an economist, or doesn't deserve to be, because they've thoroughly missed the point.(1)
Secondly: though I don't agree with this extremity of the author's view, his thrust bears consideration. The development of FOSS, if one were to order it on a hierarchy of needs – for example, Maslow's hierarchy of needs – is clearly not a key activity. I wouldn't even place it in the lowest three categories.(2) An economic downturn, OTOH, clearly strikes at an individual's job; his feelings of safety and security; perhaps even his sense of confidence (not uncommon after being laid off). And before you go about seeking esteem or self-actualisation by working on your quite-popular-but-not-profitable Firefox extension, you're going to spend a little bit more time working because you don't want to be the guy first on the list to be sacked.
So while I wouldn't go so far as to agree with Keen's argument that the development of FOSS and socially created content will stop, I'd certainly agree that an economic downturn would reduce it.
Cheers, Sapphon
(1) Andrew Keen, for the record, isn't an economist: he studied history and political science, according to the Wik.
(2) Excluding people who do it for a living, of course. But then it's not FOSS, which is what Keen is obviously talking about, even if he doesn't use the Slashdot-approved nomenclature.
the truly utilitarian thing to do would be to accurately map everyone's risks and tailor a prevention program just for them.
That would be true if (and only if) the net benefits of mapping out everyone's risks are higher than the benefits that could otherwhise be acheived with those same resources. The problem isn't the cost of prevention, it's know who needs to prevent against what.
Given that accurately mapping out every single person's risks is (currently) horrendously expensive, society would be much better off taking that same money and utilising it in other ways, for example:
- preventing against the most common illness/those with the most impact
- researching to reduce the cost of risk mapping
- simply investing it and using the benefits to treat whatever illnesses crop up.
every Western economy can afford universal medical care
Well, sure, if they cut all their other spending and/or ran a budget deficit.
I mean, I could live in a palace if I stopped spending money on food and/or took out a huge loan. But that's just unrealistic.
The fact is, scarcity does apply. It always applies. Otherwise every Government would just give their voters everything they want, and a bit more on top.
Please note: I'm not talking about basic medical health care for everyone. That is well within the abilities of every western government to provide. But in the context of this discussion we appear to be talking about the more rare, more expensive ailments – and covering those medical expenditures for everyone certainly isn't something western governments can do.
Even the Swedes, often a shining example of what a socialist-democratic state can achieve, have had to roll back their health cover in recent years. Ditto the Germans.
Even after reading the article, I'm still not sure if the authors are saying:
A) Given that research has been published, it is more likely to be false than not; or B) Given that research is false, it is more likely to be published than is the case for true research.
I mean, it says:
Dr Ioannidis made a splash three years ago by arguing, quite convincingly, that most published scientific research is wrong.
So, (Wrong Articles)/(Total Articles) = >=0.5, right? But the only figures I can find in the same article are:
Dr Ioannidis based his earlier argument... on a study of 49 papers... (H)e found that, within only a few years, almost a third of the papers had been refuted by other studies.
So.. "most" is now "less than one third"?
I'm somewhat alarmed that The Economist lets people who don't seem to grasp basic statistics write their articles.
So, how many Americans exactly have exercised their right to bear arms to protect themselves against the litany of civil rights curtailments instituted by their Government? Seems like a fairly empty right to me.
Besides, this content filter has no way of working: that 16-year-old who cracked the porn filter has had over a year to hone his elite skills; he's probably preparing a press release already.
Hello mods, let me disect this frog for you: the parent implied that s/he had developed an 'almost as good' alternative to a spelling patent. The quality of said alternative is to be seen in the misspellings of 'gett', 'arround', patentt', 'sligghtly', 'offf', 'ussed', 'simmilar', 'techniqque', and 'speling'.
Sheesh. Amazing who they let loose – I mean, lose – with mod points nowadays.
Slashdot Mirror
I, too, wish the back of my neck were protected by a hard protective shell. It might provide protection from the objects people fling at me when I point out their orthographical errors.
As it is, I rely on *ducks*
Dude, were you asleep during high school economics? National Debt = Government (Public) Debt + Household & Business (Private) Debt. If the Coalition did one thing right (and it may very well be one of the few things), it's eliminate the public, i.e. Government debt. Which they did through, yes, consecutive surpluses and fiscal conservatism.
If the private sector wants to go and borrow bucketloads of money to buy cheap shit from Taiwan, that's not the government's fault. Or would you like the state to "direct" your spending via more taxes so that you don't increase the current account deficit? From there it would only a short hop to "directing" your internet usage.
the most rational decision would be the one that makes the most optimal trade
The most optimal? Is that like the most highest, most best, and so forth?
In the economists' sense, rationality is choosing the optimal option – all sub-optimal choices are irrational. Which is what GP Monnet has already said.
As far as your points regarding freedom and information go, I can't really understand how you read those arguments into the GP's post, so I'm not going to address them. The GP seems perfectly capable of defending himself at any rate, at least on the subject of economics.
(For the record, I have read Adam Smith ^_^)
Only one way to block BitTorrent.
There, fixed that for you.
Probably due to fragile egos about not being real scientists.
Yeah, because "Peace" and "Literature" are both much more scientific than Economics. It also doesn't seem to bother the judges from the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, who choose the winners in the fields of Chemistry, Physics, and.. err.. Economics. How about that.
Fastest rising
1. wer kennt wen -- social networking site (general)
2. juegos -- no freaking idea (no, I will not google it!)
3. facebook
4. schüler vz -- social networking site (schoolkids)
5. studi vz -- social networking site (students)
6. jappy -- social networking site (general)
7. youtube
8. yasni -- person search engine
9. obama -- a very tanned man (thanks, Berlusconi!)
10. euro 2008
Most Popular
1. ebay
2. youtube
3. wetter -- weather
4. gmx -- E-mail provider
5. google
6. video
7. wikipedia
8. web.de -- E-mail provider
9. bild -- German tabloid
10. telefonbuch -- telephone book
Also, Austria
Fastest rising
1. teilchenbeschleuniger -- LHC
2. gina lisa -- contestant on Germany's next top model
3. peking 2008
4. euro 08
5. barack obama
6. schülerVZ
7. jÃrg haider -- Austrian right-wing pollie who died in a car crash, drunk off his nut, and was later discovered to be gay.
8. iphone
9. heath ledger
10. wahlkabine -- voting booth
Austrian most popular
1. youtube
2. wetter
3. google
4. orf -- Austrian TV Station
5. ebay
6. wikipedia
7. herold -- Austrian Yellow Pages
8. routenplaner -- route planner
9. immobilien -- houses/property
10. gmx
I notice that several countries have the term "google" in their top 10 google searches. WTF? Who goes to google and then types in "google"?
It is not the stuff we eat. It is the stuff our food eats
If we grow less stuff-to-eat so that we can grow more stuff-to-burn it comes out to the same thing, doesn't it?
I think the OP's point is that the South American version uses existing waste products rather than changing the production mix to produce more, well.. waste products.
Given the quality of American beer, I'm surprised they drank half of it before throwing it away.
If we were talking about something being sold, product differentiation would be one means of attempting to achieve some form of price discrimination.(1)
That part of the equation doesn't apply here (though it will to any of the car-analogies cropping up), but product differentiation is still a recognised way to build brand loyalty by creating (perceived) differences and thereby value.
People don't use Firefox and think "Gee, isn't Google great?" – that's the (a) reason for Chrome.
A further reason is that having R&D in your own company can have positive synergies (apologies for the buzzword, but it applies here) with other projects, which don't occur from simply supporting external development.
Those are mid-to-long-term strategic considerations, while combining the projects simply to save money would be rather more a short-term oriented decision. Which isn't necessarily a criticism.
(1) Price discrimination is the concept of charging each buyer the full extent of what he is willing to pay for a good, rather than the same price as everyone else. For example, school-children don't have much money to pay for cinema tickets, and wouldn't come if they had to pay adult prices. They're still willing to pay more than the costs they incur, though, so the cinema operators increase their profits by charging them less. You'll see it all around if you pay attention.
Where it will, again, be voted down. Democracy at work – yay!
Next story!
You do, if you've paid for the right to graze 10,000 sheep there. If the land can handle 20,000 sheep, and the land owner has sold these grazing rights thrice, who is at fault?
If I could give you some of the positive moderation from my comment, I would, but I'm afraid your quality answer will remain at Score: 1.
Thanks anyway! I appreciated the response :-)
Mod parent up. It's been known since 2005 that Heilmann worked for the Stasi. The Left (his political party) even had a vote about whether to keep him or not when the issue arose; relatively obviously, the voted to keep him.
It probably won't stop the ill-informed /. crowd from dragging out some old cliches about Germany, socialists, leftists, Nazis and so forth, but it would be nice to have discussion of the actual issue.
Being "left" or "right" has nothing to do with whether you're fascist or not. Fascism is an expression of total authoritarianism, which it is perfectly possible to combine with an attitude of socialism. They're two separate axes on the political compass.
Note that on the above chart, Dr. Angela Merkel (current German chancellor) is, in fact, "right". She's just not as right as most other Western leaders, leading to the impression that she is, in fact, "left".
Lutz Heilmann is even further left (his Party is called "The Left"), and on the Authoritarian/Libertarian scale doubtlessly up nice and high.
Some of the replies to your question have been correct; many haven't.
The reason is that the USA Government does not have standardised records detailing which of their citizens lives where. That's pretty much it. Individual branches may have some information – one poster pointed out the Selective Service, in which the US Army tracks males eligible for drafting – but that's only for men. And it doesn't keep track of where they live. All the other branches each have their own little bits of information, but they're not combined into anything vaguely comprehensive.
This missing system drives social statisticians nuts, and causes problems like this, but, as one poster said, it's simply "a different mindset".
There are a number of econometricians who have suggested alternative measure of welfare to the standard Gross Domestic Product; measures that would remain the same whether you and your neighbour both clean your own houses or whether you pay each other to do it. However, we're in the vast minority (even among economists), and it's unpleasant to accept that we have been systematically ignoring the contribution of women to the well-being of society by not counting the value of child-rearing, cooking, cleaning and so forth in our economic indicators. To say nothing of the ecological factors we also ignore.
The indicator most people accept as an accurate representation of our economy, well, isn't. In my opinion, as an economist with specialisations in Environmental Economics and Economic & Social Statistics.
But I'm verging off topic: what I wanted to say in response to the text you posted is that the economy hasn't really been, growing through the monetarisation of activities we do in our spare time; we've just been gradually moving the activities from the "things we don't count" column to the "things we count" column. An economic downturn/recession/depression can reasonably be accepted to decrease activities in both of these columns; it would therefore not be so surprising if the development of FOSS and the submission of user content slows as people decide to spend their time satisfying their "deficiency needs" rather than self-actualising.
Okay, first off: economists do not believe that people do everything for money. Anyone who thinks that isn't an economist, or doesn't deserve to be, because they've thoroughly missed the point.(1)
Economists believe people do things because of utility. You can call it "happiness", or "units of feel-good", or whatever, but that's what it's all about. ;-)
However, since it's hard to define a unit of warm fuzziness that works for everyone, we use a proxy: money. Why? Because it's convenient, that's all. So please discard your clichéd, prejudiced notion of economists. We"re all about making people happy
Secondly: though I don't agree with this extremity of the author's view, his thrust bears consideration. The development of FOSS, if one were to order it on a hierarchy of needs – for example, Maslow's hierarchy of needs – is clearly not a key activity. I wouldn't even place it in the lowest three categories.(2) An economic downturn, OTOH, clearly strikes at an individual's job; his feelings of safety and security; perhaps even his sense of confidence (not uncommon after being laid off). And before you go about seeking esteem or self-actualisation by working on your quite-popular-but-not-profitable Firefox extension, you're going to spend a little bit more time working because you don't want to be the guy first on the list to be sacked.
So while I wouldn't go so far as to agree with Keen's argument that the development of FOSS and socially created content will stop, I'd certainly agree that an economic downturn would reduce it.
Cheers,
Sapphon
(1) Andrew Keen, for the record, isn't an economist: he studied history and political science, according to the Wik.
(2) Excluding people who do it for a living, of course. But then it's not FOSS, which is what Keen is obviously talking about, even if he doesn't use the Slashdot-approved nomenclature.
That would be true if (and only if) the net benefits of mapping out everyone's risks are higher than the benefits that could otherwhise be acheived with those same resources. The problem isn't the cost of prevention, it's know who needs to prevent against what.
Given that accurately mapping out every single person's risks is (currently) horrendously expensive, society would be much better off taking that same money and utilising it in other ways, for example:
- preventing against the most common illness/those with the most impact
- researching to reduce the cost of risk mapping
- simply investing it and using the benefits to treat whatever illnesses crop up.
Well, sure, if they cut all their other spending and/or ran a budget deficit.
I mean, I could live in a palace if I stopped spending money on food and/or took out a huge loan. But that's just unrealistic.
The fact is, scarcity does apply. It always applies. Otherwise every Government would just give their voters everything they want, and a bit more on top.
Please note: I'm not talking about basic medical health care for everyone. That is well within the abilities of every western government to provide. But in the context of this discussion we appear to be talking about the more rare, more expensive ailments – and covering those medical expenditures for everyone certainly isn't something western governments can do.
Even the Swedes, often a shining example of what a socialist-democratic state can achieve, have had to roll back their health cover in recent years. Ditto the Germans.
You can't save everyone from everything.
Even after reading the article, I'm still not sure if the authors are saying:
A) Given that research has been published, it is more likely to be false than not; or
B) Given that research is false, it is more likely to be published than is the case for true research.
I mean, it says:
So, (Wrong Articles)/(Total Articles) = >=0.5, right?
But the only figures I can find in the same article are:
So.. "most" is now "less than one third"?
I'm somewhat alarmed that The Economist lets people who don't seem to grasp basic statistics write their articles.
There, fixed that for you :-)
So, how many Americans exactly have exercised their right to bear arms to protect themselves against the litany of civil rights curtailments instituted by their Government? Seems like a fairly empty right to me.
Besides, this content filter has no way of working: that 16-year-old who cracked the porn filter has had over a year to hone his elite skills; he's probably preparing a press release already.
Ah, no, see that was just our touring cricket team of the Shane Warne era. Sorry about that.
"Insightful"?
Hello mods, let me disect this frog for you: the parent implied that s/he had developed an 'almost as good' alternative to a spelling patent. The quality of said alternative is to be seen in the misspellings of 'gett', 'arround', patentt', 'sligghtly', 'offf', 'ussed', 'simmilar', 'techniqque', and 'speling'.
Sheesh. Amazing who they let loose – I mean, lose – with mod points nowadays.
You'd certainly hope so.