I strongly suspect that poor planning is a much more common cause of bad financial situations than catastrophic misfortune. You can never get rid of all the risk, but there are sensible precautions that most people can afford which greatly reduce it.
Yes people, please do have the self control not to be diagnosed with a debilitating illness, ever get laid off or have a slump in income, or have your house burned down when your neighbor shoots off fireworks that land on your roof...
This is why we have things like disability insurance, emergency savings, and homeowner's insurance. There are some people who genuinely can't afford a safety margin, or who get hit with catastrophies that exhaust their reasonable safety margins, but the vast majority of people can afford to prepare for misfortune, unless they dig themselves into debt by habitually living beyond their means.
There are other lighting technologies which don't polute the RF spectrum. If this bill passes, I would expect to see a resurgance in the market for gas lights, oil lamps, and limelights.
You can lose a trademark through dilution if you let it become generic, but what about if you don't use the trademark at all? Even before Apple's announcement, I expect almost anyone hearing the word "iPhone" would associate it much more strongly with Apple than with Cisco.
You have to wonder how much quicker it would be to load and unload a plane if there was zero carry-on
I suspect the time saved would be more than balanced out by the time spent waiting for your checked luggage to be dropped off and the time spend filing reports and such when the airline loses your luggage. I rarely check any luggage, and when I do I find myself spending longer at the baggage carosel than the time it took to get off the plane.
People will pay a heck of a lot more for HDTV sets. The main benefit of having an HD set is the ability to watch HD programming at full resolution. Therefore, people are willing to pay more to watch HD programming.
Reminds me of a Monty Python sketch where one of the characters was unable to say the letter "c" because of a trauma he had suffered as a sbhoolboy, so he used "b" instead. Midway through the sketch, it was pointed out to him that he could talk normally if he instead used "k" for "c".
That is true, as far as it goes. But oil is not the only source of energy. Other sources include coal, fission, solar, and geothermal. We've got more coal, a lot more Uranium 235, a heck of a lot more other fissibles (Thorium, U238 that can be bred into Plutonium, etc), and oodles more sunlight and internal heat of the Earth than we have oil.
It may also possible (IANA Petrochemical Engineer) that more energy efficient means of oil recovery from tar sands will be discovered (and since oil recovery from tar sands is currently cash-profitable without subsidies, I suspect tar sands oil is already energy-profitable) when the cost of oil goes up enough that investing in research in that area becomes worthwhile.
But none of that will help us when the heat death of the universe happens and there is no more useable energy anywhere.
That's not quite what I thought the grandparent post was saying. My read was that scientists should generate naive estimates in order to form a basis for discussing how the government should try to influence second-order effects. I don't agree with it because I think it over-emphasizes the role of goverment and ignores the effects of private action, but I don't think it's advocating dishonesty.
If you assume that we'll start using more efficient cars in the future, and take that into consideration when making your graph/paper/prediction/whatever, then it might make the looming crisis look less severe, meaning that people won't actually start using more efficient cars... and the crisis ends up being worse.
As economist Herb Stein observed, "If something can't go on forever, it won't."
There's a price at which conservation makes sense (which varies from person-to-person, and there's different prices for different degrees of conservation). There's a price at which extracting oil from tar sands makes sense. There's a price at which synthesis of oil from coal makes sense. There may be a price at which ethanol makes sense (I've heard conflicting reports over whether ethanol from corn is energy-profitable). There's a price at which electric cars (powered by fission, or from solar power) make sense.
There's billions of dollars to be made by guessing right about when and whether these price points will be hit, so investors are going to put a lot of effort into making intelligent guesses and acting on them at the appropriate times.
And don't forget Douglas "Wrong Way" Corrigan, who in 1935 left New York headed for California, but ended up in Ireland.
(While he claimed it was a mistake, it's believed that he probably meant to go to Ireland and filed a false flight plan after the FAA refused to approve him for a solo trans-Atlantic flight)
"All" is a very strong work. According to the wikipedia article on ClearChannel, they own about 1200 radio stations. According to the wikipedia article on radio stations in North America, there are 13,486 (10,989 not counting "educational FM stations") licensed radio stations in the United States.
That's the clever bit. See, since humans are generally the weak link in security setups (see Rubber Hose Cryptanalysis), the system doesn't show the information to any humans. In fact, it never leaves the sender's computer! It's transcribed directly into write-only memory.
1. In Soviet Russia, robot glides though YOU! 2. In Korea, robots only glide through old people's intestines. 3. How many Libraries of Congress can this robot hold in its internal memory? 4. So they can make mucus-gliding robots, but where's my flying car? 5. ??? 6. Profit!
In the current market, you have a large number of producers, and 2 buyers: Walmart and EB/Gamestop. How anyone can call this a free market is beyond me.
Last I checked, I can also buy games from Amazon, Target, the publisher's website, Fry's, OfficeDepot, OfficeMax, Staples, BestBuy, Costco, and local game and hobby stores. And there's no law against any other store starting to sell games as well. And if there is enough demand for games that none of the current game retailers will sell, someone will start selling those games.
Give individual schools broad authority to set curriculums, hire and retain teachers, choose textbooks, decide how to allocate available funds, etc.
But conversely, make schools directly accountable. Not to politicians or a centralized bureacracy, but to individual parents. The question posits that public schooling will continue for the forseeable future, but at least let parents pull their kids out of one public school and put them in a different one.
Re:Captain Obvious to the Resue!
on
How Ice Melts
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· Score: 1
Captain Obvious apparently knows not how to spell "Rescue".
Captain Obvious to the Resue!
on
How Ice Melts
·
· Score: 0
Remember that proceedural due process rights were greatly expanded by the Warren Court. While I think most of those expansanions are good policy (I would support most of them without reservation were they passed by a legislature), most of them weren't stricty justified by the text or by the information we have about the founders' intent.
Administrative warrants, for example, are constitutional (by strict textual interpretation) if they are issued "upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched".
You are correct that there are no full-out strict constructionists on the court. Rehnquist and Scalia are close, and Thomas is very close, but all of them to a certain extent are reluctant to alter settled precedent too radically (not that those three alone could do much even if they were willing). I suspect that Scalia in particular skews towards upholding precedent based on his personal views (I base this mostly on his decision on medical marajuana), but I haven't been watching the court closely enough to say for certain.
Um, the Kelo ruling wasn't a federalism question. The ruling was that using eminent domain to allow property developers to buy up land cheaply met the Fifth Amendment requirement of being "for public use", so long as it was plausible that the proposed development would slightly increase the tax base.
I don't know what the grandparent post wanted SCOTUS to rule, but I wanted them to rule that "for public use" meant "for public use".
Japan dealt with the oil embargo by invading the Dutch East Indies, which had large oil fields. Japan didn't do this before Pearl Harbor because they feared American intervention if they invaded European colonies, and their supply lines to the Dutch East Indies would have been extremely vulnerable to an American counterattack out of the Philipines.
So Japan decided to preempt the expected American intervention by first destroying most of the American Pacific Fleet in Pearl Harbor, then invading the Philipines. This then left their supply lines secure for an invasion of the Dutch East Indies.
In hindsight, it is questionable whether the US really would have intervened on behalf of a Dutch colony when we didn't intervene on behalf of the Netherlands themselves when they were invaded by Germany in 1940. But the Japanese considered US intervention likely enough that they were unwilling to risk it.
The reason the money supply is supposed to grow proportionally with the economy is to keep prices constant. This is a Monetarist concept; Keynsians like moderate inflation.
Deflation is not necessarily a good thing. Price is information, and deflation distorts that information as effectively as inflation does. Deflation also taxes debtors (by increasing the real values of their debts) as much as inflation taxes creditors by decreasing the real value of their savings.
Deflation also damages the liquidity of the economy, since if the deflation rate exceeds the real interest rate, the nominal interest rate would be below zero, and investors will simply sit on their gold, reducing the supply of credit and increasing real interest rates until the nominal rates are above zero.
Many economists blame the Depression largely on the Federal Reserve pursuing a deflationary policy following the 1929 stock market crash -- the Fed deliberately reduced the money supply by a third between 1929-33, and the resulting liquidity crunch drove the waves of bank failures. Similarly, lesser depressions occurred in the late 19th century simply because gold production couldn't keep pace with the economy, leading debtors whose deflated incomes left them unable to make payments to default on their loans, in many cases driving the banks under since the deflated value of the collateral often didn't cover the balance of the loan.
Slashdot Mirror
Head on over to USPTO.gov, and show me the invention that solves the energy crisis.
How about this?
You just need to find a way to harness the cat's kinetic energy in a usable form.
Introduction of mongooses to various islands, resulting in the decimation of native bird populations
IIRC, the mongooses killed a lot more than one bird out of ten.
I strongly suspect that poor planning is a much more common cause of bad financial situations than catastrophic misfortune. You can never get rid of all the risk, but there are sensible precautions that most people can afford which greatly reduce it.
Yes people, please do have the self control not to be diagnosed with a debilitating illness, ever get laid off or have a slump in income, or have your house burned down when your neighbor shoots off fireworks that land on your roof...
This is why we have things like disability insurance, emergency savings, and homeowner's insurance. There are some people who genuinely can't afford a safety margin, or who get hit with catastrophies that exhaust their reasonable safety margins, but the vast majority of people can afford to prepare for misfortune, unless they dig themselves into debt by habitually living beyond their means.
There are other lighting technologies which don't polute the RF spectrum. If this bill passes, I would expect to see a resurgance in the market for gas lights, oil lamps, and limelights.
You can lose a trademark through dilution if you let it become generic, but what about if you don't use the trademark at all? Even before Apple's announcement, I expect almost anyone hearing the word "iPhone" would associate it much more strongly with Apple than with Cisco.
You have to wonder how much quicker it would be to load and unload a plane if there was zero carry-on
I suspect the time saved would be more than balanced out by the time spent waiting for your checked luggage to be dropped off and the time spend filing reports and such when the airline loses your luggage. I rarely check any luggage, and when I do I find myself spending longer at the baggage carosel than the time it took to get off the plane.
People will pay a heck of a lot more for HDTV sets. The main benefit of having an HD set is the ability to watch HD programming at full resolution. Therefore, people are willing to pay more to watch HD programming.
Reminds me of a Monty Python sketch where one of the characters was unable to say the letter "c" because of a trauma he had suffered as a sbhoolboy, so he used "b" instead. Midway through the sketch, it was pointed out to him that he could talk normally if he instead used "k" for "c".
That is true, as far as it goes. But oil is not the only source of energy. Other sources include coal, fission, solar, and geothermal. We've got more coal, a lot more Uranium 235, a heck of a lot more other fissibles (Thorium, U238 that can be bred into Plutonium, etc), and oodles more sunlight and internal heat of the Earth than we have oil.
It may also possible (IANA Petrochemical Engineer) that more energy efficient means of oil recovery from tar sands will be discovered (and since oil recovery from tar sands is currently cash-profitable without subsidies, I suspect tar sands oil is already energy-profitable) when the cost of oil goes up enough that investing in research in that area becomes worthwhile.
But none of that will help us when the heat death of the universe happens and there is no more useable energy anywhere.
That's not quite what I thought the grandparent post was saying. My read was that scientists should generate naive estimates in order to form a basis for discussing how the government should try to influence second-order effects. I don't agree with it because I think it over-emphasizes the role of goverment and ignores the effects of private action, but I don't think it's advocating dishonesty.
That's also possible (already happening in the case of Ethanol producers). And the two possibilities are not mutually exclusive.
"When buying and selling are controlled by legistlation, the first things to be bought and sold are legislators." -- P.J. O'Rourke
Which just goes to show that there's a quote for everything.
If you assume that we'll start using more efficient cars in the future, and take that into consideration when making your graph/paper/prediction/whatever, then it might make the looming crisis look less severe, meaning that people won't actually start using more efficient cars ... and the crisis ends up being worse.
As economist Herb Stein observed, "If something can't go on forever, it won't."
There's a price at which conservation makes sense (which varies from person-to-person, and there's different prices for different degrees of conservation). There's a price at which extracting oil from tar sands makes sense. There's a price at which synthesis of oil from coal makes sense. There may be a price at which ethanol makes sense (I've heard conflicting reports over whether ethanol from corn is energy-profitable). There's a price at which electric cars (powered by fission, or from solar power) make sense.
There's billions of dollars to be made by guessing right about when and whether these price points will be hit, so investors are going to put a lot of effort into making intelligent guesses and acting on them at the appropriate times.
And don't forget Douglas "Wrong Way" Corrigan, who in 1935 left New York headed for California, but ended up in Ireland.
(While he claimed it was a mistake, it's believed that he probably meant to go to Ireland and filed a false flight plan after the FAA refused to approve him for a solo trans-Atlantic flight)
"All" is a very strong work. According to the wikipedia article on ClearChannel, they own about 1200 radio stations. According to the wikipedia article on radio stations in North America, there are 13,486 (10,989 not counting "educational FM stations") licensed radio stations in the United States.
1200/10989 = 0.109
11% != 100%
That's the clever bit. See, since humans are generally the weak link in security setups (see Rubber Hose Cryptanalysis), the system doesn't show the information to any humans. In fact, it never leaves the sender's computer! It's transcribed directly into write-only memory.
1. In Soviet Russia, robot glides though YOU!
2. In Korea, robots only glide through old people's intestines.
3. How many Libraries of Congress can this robot hold in its internal memory?
4. So they can make mucus-gliding robots, but where's my flying car?
5. ???
6. Profit!
In the current market, you have a large number of producers, and 2 buyers: Walmart and EB/Gamestop. How anyone can call this a free market is beyond me.
Last I checked, I can also buy games from Amazon, Target, the publisher's website, Fry's, OfficeDepot, OfficeMax, Staples, BestBuy, Costco, and local game and hobby stores. And there's no law against any other store starting to sell games as well. And if there is enough demand for games that none of the current game retailers will sell, someone will start selling those games.
Give individual schools broad authority to set curriculums, hire and retain teachers, choose textbooks, decide how to allocate available funds, etc.
But conversely, make schools directly accountable. Not to politicians or a centralized bureacracy, but to individual parents. The question posits that public schooling will continue for the forseeable future, but at least let parents pull their kids out of one public school and put them in a different one.
Captain Obvious apparently knows not how to spell "Rescue".
Step 1: Ice gets warmer.
Step 2: Warm ice turns into liquid water.
What's not to understand?
Remember that proceedural due process rights were greatly expanded by the Warren Court. While I think most of those expansanions are good policy (I would support most of them without reservation were they passed by a legislature), most of them weren't stricty justified by the text or by the information we have about the founders' intent.
Administrative warrants, for example, are constitutional (by strict textual interpretation) if they are issued "upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched".
You are correct that there are no full-out strict constructionists on the court. Rehnquist and Scalia are close, and Thomas is very close, but all of them to a certain extent are reluctant to alter settled precedent too radically (not that those three alone could do much even if they were willing). I suspect that Scalia in particular skews towards upholding precedent based on his personal views (I base this mostly on his decision on medical marajuana), but I haven't been watching the court closely enough to say for certain.
Um, the Kelo ruling wasn't a federalism question. The ruling was that using eminent domain to allow property developers to buy up land cheaply met the Fifth Amendment requirement of being "for public use", so long as it was plausible that the proposed development would slightly increase the tax base.
I don't know what the grandparent post wanted SCOTUS to rule, but I wanted them to rule that "for public use" meant "for public use".
Japan dealt with the oil embargo by invading the Dutch East Indies, which had large oil fields. Japan didn't do this before Pearl Harbor because they feared American intervention if they invaded European colonies, and their supply lines to the Dutch East Indies would have been extremely vulnerable to an American counterattack out of the Philipines.
So Japan decided to preempt the expected American intervention by first destroying most of the American Pacific Fleet in Pearl Harbor, then invading the Philipines. This then left their supply lines secure for an invasion of the Dutch East Indies.
In hindsight, it is questionable whether the US really would have intervened on behalf of a Dutch colony when we didn't intervene on behalf of the Netherlands themselves when they were invaded by Germany in 1940. But the Japanese considered US intervention likely enough that they were unwilling to risk it.
The reason the money supply is supposed to grow proportionally with the economy is to keep prices constant. This is a Monetarist concept; Keynsians like moderate inflation.
Deflation is not necessarily a good thing. Price is information, and deflation distorts that information as effectively as inflation does. Deflation also taxes debtors (by increasing the real values of their debts) as much as inflation taxes creditors by decreasing the real value of their savings.
Deflation also damages the liquidity of the economy, since if the deflation rate exceeds the real interest rate, the nominal interest rate would be below zero, and investors will simply sit on their gold, reducing the supply of credit and increasing real interest rates until the nominal rates are above zero.
Many economists blame the Depression largely on the Federal Reserve pursuing a deflationary policy following the 1929 stock market crash -- the Fed deliberately reduced the money supply by a third between 1929-33, and the resulting liquidity crunch drove the waves of bank failures. Similarly, lesser depressions occurred in the late 19th century simply because gold production couldn't keep pace with the economy, leading debtors whose deflated incomes left them unable to make payments to default on their loans, in many cases driving the banks under since the deflated value of the collateral often didn't cover the balance of the loan.