you can't exactly derive the periodic table (which has no need to be memorized either), and spelling is too arbitrary to handle purely from a deriving set of rules (at least, english is, I don't know about other languages). Though deriving from general rules is helpful with spelling, especially with a background in, say, Latin, but in general there are too many exceptions for it to work reliably.
I have no idea how you would derive music or what the deriving principles are (though I do know it varies by culture, so I can't believe it's particularly objective), but grammar is derived every time people speak, we're just really good at it. you free form every sentence, you are not spouting pre-memorized rules or sentences most of the time. it's an excellent example of derivation, actually, since it's improvisational creation in real time.
but math, you don't need to memorize much in math to get by very well, thanks. See, the beauty of math is, it's pretty constant in how it works. the exceptions are very few and far between.. no dividing by zero, for example. learning the rules is far, far more important than the answers to a small subsection of simple problems. shit, you might as well learn "addition tables". that would sure be helpful, eh?
my statement may not have application *outside* of math, but in math, I stand by it. memorizing tables of precalculated numbers does not help you learn math. it helps you learn the answers to a few math problems, but it does not help you learn math any more than memorizing fluid flow frictional loss tables would make you a better engineer. It might make you more efficient at a single task, but you are not better off at *engineering* for having wasted time memorizing that information compared to someone who knows how to calculate it.
it's not "help" to give a kid work they are challenged by. it's basic education.
You know what my elementary school did with a core of us that were better at math than the other 8th graders? Gave us the pre-algebra books, sent us out in the hall, told us where the tests were, and gave us ten minutes at the end of class with the teacher in case we collectively could not figure something out.
we finished a year course in half a year by ourselves. It cost the school nothing: it got us out of a class that was dramatically behind us in math skills, and it was the best half year of math we ever had. we had a blast helping each other out and learning the stuff. we learned about working together in groups in ways never before possible with students who, academically, were not our peers. we learned JOY in learning. it was amazing.
oh, but we were "tracked", right? I bet all those other kids just felt horrible, because we were so much better at math than they were. but they had a full class period with the teacher's attention, and that attention was not split between those who needed instruction and those who needed stimulation. Would it have helped their performance or their self esteem to watch those of us who get the lessens the first time around sitting there reading books or acting out or whatever we'd have to do to survive the boredom while they struggled? How helpful would it have been to watch us get frustrated trying to help them figure out decimals the eighth time around? After they had already failed it four times straight, were they just "living up to expectations" when we left the classroom because they knew they were in the "dumb class"?
Again, it's bullshit. You ARE saying fuck the smart kids, just the same as if you just threw the slower ones in an accelerated course and said "sink or swim, kids". sure, the smart kids might get ok jobs later anyway, and they might be functional, but you robbed them of a love of learning in many ways, and you certainly trained them to be anti social when the whole institution that is supposed to train them is failing them utterly. That is not an acceptable result of education. Not even if allowing those with talent to shine to their full potential get their feelings hurt.
I suppose next you'll have to tell the athletic kids they can't run fast or shoot baskets well because it might make the rest of us feel inadequate.
Maybe, and this is insane but hear me out anyone, just MAYBE school should be celebrating everyone's gifts and helping kids understand they do not have to be the best at everything? Just maybe?
Bullshit. it only hurts your understanding of the principles to focus on the data, principles you need when you get beyond your memorization levels. learning how to figure out multiplication fast is infinitely more useful than simply memorizing a list of figures. Of course, over time, you will memorize some of the numbers. and the more you use them, the more you simply remember without calculating. so as far as calculating 9*5, within a fairly short period of time, there will be little difference between someone who memorized the list directly and someone who learned the principles and simply remembered through repetition.
the difference is, the one who learned the principles will always be better at working outside their memorized scope than the others. so maybe you have a few weeks or months where you might be slower at spitting out an answer to a basic math problem; that's not any kind of real problem the real problem is never getting beyond basic, rote memorization to a true understanding and even affinity for numbers. An affinity that I am pretty sure at this point is actively crushed out of more people than it needs to be. Not everyone will love math: but lots more can be good at it with effective teaching than currently are, IMHO.
and no table of results is ever going to make anyone love, or at least enjoy math, nor will it make them better at math in the long run.
I agree, though that is why I always hated science in school even though I loved science, because the answer was always "it's too complicated to explain"...
but multiplication is not one of those things. it's just adding *really fast*. there is no reason to make kids memorize lists of numbers. If you can memorize the list, you can figure it out.
what is this with people thinking 'learning the multiplication tables" = learning multiplication?
I never memorized the tables. I learned how to do the math, and calculated what I needed when I needed it. I learned subtracting the number from the multiple of ten gets you the multiple of nine, and twice got you to 8, and half was 5. I learned to just do the ones digit, and add it to the multiple of ten (doubled or tripled or...) to get multiple digit multiplication down.
learning the tables would have killed my ability. to this day I only memorize a small handful of formula and derive the rest as i need it. it might not be as fast for rote tasks, but it sure is a better way to do math.
Teach the process, not reams of data. reams of data have no value. every engineer knows that, because the reams of data are already in charts, tables, and databases you can refer to as needed. It's the basic interactions you need to understand, and some key points of data.
But then, being a math guy, you might not know much about engineering. many engineers never do any math. there is a chart for almost everything.
so "teaching the multiplication tables" is bullshit and a poor proxy for learning. "teaching how to multiply" is much better... and I would put forth is fun and engaging to young minds who like to learn tricks. But then, for things like unschooling to work, the presence of a guiding adult is key, and that adult has to be able to keep the kid engaged when the "aha" moments hit. that's a tall order. and to be there... well, you're probably not an engineer if you are unschooling your kids, cause you're out working all day...
You are saying you have to waste most of the time of a smart kid so dumb kids don't feel bad? Wow. that's really far thinking and progressive of you. So you're saying that basically, people who are good at stuff better not actually act like that, or those who are not will perform worse.
It's attitudes like that which make leaving school make sense, lots of sense. If it's only going to teach smart kids to stop acting so damn smart, it's worse than benign. It's evil.
There is no correlation between teaching a kid to do the best he/she can do and making them "spoiled brats". The words you are looking for is "empowered individuals". They are amazingly important people to have around, rather than apathetic misanthropes with too much intelligence and no respect at all for the world around them which has only shown them time and again that they are not welcome and they do not belong.
"Spoiled brats" get whatever they want all the time. Smart kids just get work that stimulates them and challenges them. Those are not the same thing, and your "wiser" friend has got you pretty well snowballed if you can't see a difference. I'm not saying through the slower kids to the wolves. but there are more answers to the question than simply "fuck the smart kids".
the student would determine when they were interested in those things, at least.
Hell.. waldorf schools don't even think you should start teaching reading until the 2nd grade, which is only 2 years behind the poster's unschooled kid here, and not many people can claim that waldorf educated kids are not prepared for life when they leave school.
I say this as a proud poppa of a 17 month old who can already recognize and point out about ten letters with no demands placed upon her to do so.. and I wouldn't be able to stand it if she were nine and unable to read. but there is plenty of indication that you can pick up these skills when needed pretty quickly, and there is little benefit or need to "cram" kids with stuff they aren't looking to learn for years and years and years.
If you sit down and boil all you retained out of 12 years of formal schooling down, I bet you'd fine you could have learned it all in a good year or two if you were interested and motivated to do so. the rest of that time is, for all intents, wasted time. That's the basic tenant of unschooling... kids learn best when they learn what they are interested in learning.
as I understand it, a key element of the approach is really "seeding" the house to stimulate the kid. there are multiple levels of "unschooling" from "we don't ever tell the kid to do anything and they can play video games all day" on up.
that said, I spent several years of my adult life playing video games all day. maybe I would have been better off having done so as a kid instead? hard to say.
because it's worth a lot more to me to learn stuff directly related to my business than it is to take the time to learn how to do business with linux. if I'm tired of maintaining software, why the heck would I want even harder to maintain software? I currently pay for it to be as easy as it is: I want to pay to make it even easier, not stop paying to make it harder.
re: lots of cash, "lots of cash" to an individual going through bankruptcy is a lot different than "lots of cash" to a large company. that's kind of the crux of the problem: very rich people can drive large companies into bankruptcy, avoid their obligations, and yet remain rich. That's a peversion, frankly. also that's why the company might need a loan even though the board or CEO has "lots of cash". or the govt might just be incentiving certain actions which, again, if you're going to actually follow through on it might not be such a big deal to take on the personal obligation.
my company has specifically avoided bradstreet and dunn because we have not historically taken on debt beyond the normal net 30 terms with vendors, we've been strictly cash otherwise. however having avoided that whole section of business I was also unaware of how other people actually use it, since no one asks if we even have a number except on very rare occasions. thanks for the lesson on that. I would say that the government at least shouldn't care about credit ratings so much: it should care about getting the results its paying for regardless of the financial rating of the company.
i'll concede it's pretty complicated and that I'm not informed enough to "fix it" though.. you make some good points that I'll need to think more about.
You missed the part where I was saying IF.. IF.. IF the companies had taken money.. for instance, as a loan to clean up pollution... then this sort of thing could have been written in as a part of the repayment agreement.
I am not saying the government could just willy nilly impose these kinds of sanctions that had not be agreed upon in the first place. I hope you got that by the end of your response.
As for personally guaranteeing debts, I can say as the owner of a small company, if your stance is that you will never personally guarantee the debts of the company you run, then you wouldn't get very far in small business. Every time we have a line of credit with a vendor that's a clause of the agreement. Something similar for larger companies... obviously not for the full value of any damages or what have you, but certainly large enough sums to be motivational.. shouldn't be any problem for a company that intends to actually follow the rules it is agreeing to. If they do not, then why should the top earners profit from their deception?
There are reasons to do it of course. For instance, if I am a CEO who gets paid in stock value, and my company is given a grant or low interest low to, say, clean up the pollution we created, that would help out my stock value. Or, it would certainly reduce a liability and increase the valuation of the company, its profitability, whatever metric you want to use to determine by pay, it's a good thing typically. I could get good benefit signing such an agreement, if I do it in good faith. However, I can't then get a double benefit by taking the money and spending it on something else! That's what appears to happen now.
Now, I could as a small owner declare personal bankruptcy as well.. and if my company went down laden with massive debt, I would probably have to. But it's hard to go bankrupt with lots, and lots of cash. not impossible of course, but harder.
so perhaps initially the decisionmakers of larger companies may not be willing to expose themselves to the liabilities of the company. But it is done all the time in small business and I see no reason why it should stop simply because your decisions become so large that it involves the american taxpayer as a whole instead of just your vendors and clients...
I could see massive utility and savings trading in all of my software licenses, updates, hardware upgrades and lost time for a moderately beefy netbook and some subscription fees.
there is a ton of ifs in there: if data standards are universal, if I can download my own backup to store on another service, etc. But done right, why would I want to do spend thousands a year on software and hardware for my small business if I don't have to anymore? It's not like industrial espionage is a big concern to me.
Frankly, I lust for the day I can toss all my crap out the window and let someone else figure out how to maintain and improve services. online. Just let me know when it's done and stable. the time and expense of handling it all in shop is, frankly, a significant drain of time and resources outside of our core competence. I suspect many other small businesses are in the same boat.
fuck, edit would be nice. left a bit hanging. I don't know what the constitutional issues are with a federal drinking age being directly mandated, but regardless, they can make states fall in line simply by the pursestrings without needing direct federal law mandating a drinking age.
if the congress had authorized a loan to clean up pollution, for example, they could certainly demand repayment under any condition they like and specify in the leglislation in question. There is absolutely nothing in the constitution that makes this unconstitutional. it's called "providing for the general welfare of the united states". repayment is not a tax. In that respect, congress could give and take money pretty much as they see fit, as long as it is in terms of loans, or the satisfaction of a grant condition, and not a tax. And, oddly enough, they do use this power regularly. Such as withholding highway funds if drinking ages are not mandated: there my not be a federal drinking age, constitutionally (that, I'm not sure , but they sure as hell can make it attractive to do what they like without running afoul of constitutional problems.
They cannot, as you say, target a tax at Bob the CeO of GM. But they sure could, if they wished, require repayment of a loan should the terms of a loan be defaulted upon to be guaranteed by anyone they care to have sign on the dotted line. I have no idea if that's the case and I'm not advocating necessarily for targeting CEOs specifically.. not ruling it out either... just saying there are ways it could be done without running afoul of any constitutional rule against taxation.
If congress had not, however, given the company any deals to do cleanup involving loans or grants, then sure, they can't just tax Bob with a "You fucked up" personal tax. But then, I didn't say they could, perhaps I wasn't very clear but I did clearly note that IF they gave an entity money the terms of repayment are what allow them to get it back any way they like.. when they write the deal.
my last bit on the constitutional thing was a knee jerk reaction to a different conversation I had yesterday. Sorry to confuse the conversation here; you're right that it didn't really apply and wasn't very accurate to begin with. don't post angry;)
that's not true. the leglislative branch can dole out money for anything it likes. It can't make laws that give it sweeping new powers, but it does have power of the pursestrings, so if it gives you money it certainly has the right to tell you to give it back and under what conditions.
If they don't take any money from you, THEN the us gov has no power to garnish wages or the like, except perhaps if a previous arrangement had been broken and that was a term of that arrangement (I don't know what the pollution cleanup agreement was, but knowing about the superfund I imagine that the feds gave GM some money to help with it).
man, every time you turn around these days you hear about constitutional stuff totally misapplied. funny no one really cared when real consitutional issues like honoring treaties, habeas corpus or domestic spying were the norm. Now that it's not even a constitutional question it's all over the place. Funny stuff.
but if they never tell you the sex sucked, it will continue to suck until they get sick of it and cheat on you. It's a lot better to give and take constructive criticism.
Likewise you can acknowledge weight gain. Hopefully you can also acknowledge that it doesn't matter to you because you love your wife, right?
Small lies only mask problems. But you also have to understand your partner to be honest and open. For instance, when someone asks if something makes them look fat, they might really be asking "do you still find me attractive"? answering a question not asked is sometimes a good idea too when the truth is less than great.
it's an amazing level of difference in some cases. You can absolutely tell the difference if it were a blind test. I understand skepticism on the matter, but I would ask for a little slack in that I am not exagerrating at least in the case of the carrots I have sampled.
I have had organic carrots that taste like other carrots too: large scale prepackaged ones, typically. Maybe it's a freshness issue.
I agree on the taste thing: carrots in particular are a world of difference from "conventional" farmed cousins. They aren't even comparable.
I would wonder what the explanation is then? If you can taste the difference easily then there must be significant difference of some sort. One tastes more like water and one tastes more like carrot. If the more carrot-y one is not more "nutritionally dense" then what is the explanation?
I don't know the answer to that and that is not a rhetorical question.. does anyone have a theory?
in a situation such as Iran, when the government is not willing to cede power, nothing a voting booth can do will matter. They can say whatever they like, station people in the process any way they like, and whether it's paper or electronic matters not at all. And you cannot even go to publicly verifiable voting because the government will simply threaten and kill those that vote against them.
In a situation more like america's, where we have a long tradition of peaceful transitions of power, we could cede private voting and make electronic voting work. Or keep private voting and keep it on paper. but private electronic voting is far too easy to spoof.
Personally, I think we should go to public, electronic voting. I also think we should have a much more direct participation option as well (i.e. I become my own representative)... which would absolutely require electronic participation.
I think you misunderstand the point of colonizing other planets. It is not to save the earth. it is not to save all the people who live on earth. Those are separate issues.
it is simply to allow humanity in general to survive past one Extinction Level Event here on earth. We know they will happen. We need to be on other planets before it does, or collectively we are toast. Having at least some people offplanet to survive such an occurance makes sense if the continuation of the species is of any concern whatsoever to you, and being the only example of sentitent/technological life we have, I personally think we should preserve our species at least a little bit, regardless of how "screwed up" we are.
We still need to take care of the planet, sure. but colonizing other planets, even if we "fuck them up" when we get there, (which is pretty hard to do to an uninhabited ball of rock, but whatever) is necessary. Even if were the universe's worse "space parasite" and consumed all we touched, the universe is a big, big place. we could do that for quite awhile before it was a real problem.
But it's a trade off as well. Making voting anonymous and private allows a very significant vector for fraud, simply because you can't track any votes. So as long as the number of ballots counts is a reasonable percentage of the registered voters in an area (a list that contains ineligible and dead people and 20-50% people who will not show up to vote as well), fraud can be pretty hard to detect.
Non-anonymous voting brings coercion back as a possible problem, but it eliminates fraud to a large degree otherwise, since you can trace every vote back to a live person. I'm not worried about paying for votes.. if people want to sell votes, so be it... though the rest of your examples are very bothersome of course. But so is fraud.
So how to balance these two problems? is there a solution that solves both?
Slashdot Mirror
you can't exactly derive the periodic table (which has no need to be memorized either), and spelling is too arbitrary to handle purely from a deriving set of rules (at least, english is, I don't know about other languages). Though deriving from general rules is helpful with spelling, especially with a background in, say, Latin, but in general there are too many exceptions for it to work reliably.
I have no idea how you would derive music or what the deriving principles are (though I do know it varies by culture, so I can't believe it's particularly objective), but grammar is derived every time people speak, we're just really good at it. you free form every sentence, you are not spouting pre-memorized rules or sentences most of the time. it's an excellent example of derivation, actually, since it's improvisational creation in real time.
but math, you don't need to memorize much in math to get by very well, thanks. See, the beauty of math is, it's pretty constant in how it works. the exceptions are very few and far between.. no dividing by zero, for example. learning the rules is far, far more important than the answers to a small subsection of simple problems. shit, you might as well learn "addition tables". that would sure be helpful, eh?
my statement may not have application *outside* of math, but in math, I stand by it. memorizing tables of precalculated numbers does not help you learn math. it helps you learn the answers to a few math problems, but it does not help you learn math any more than memorizing fluid flow frictional loss tables would make you a better engineer. It might make you more efficient at a single task, but you are not better off at *engineering* for having wasted time memorizing that information compared to someone who knows how to calculate it.
because it would take my attention from the business of actually learning multiplication. and it would have made me hate it as well.
maybe i'd have gotten over it, sure, but it sure wouldn't have helped, and it could only have hurt.
it's not "help" to give a kid work they are challenged by. it's basic education.
You know what my elementary school did with a core of us that were better at math than the other 8th graders? Gave us the pre-algebra books, sent us out in the hall, told us where the tests were, and gave us ten minutes at the end of class with the teacher in case we collectively could not figure something out.
we finished a year course in half a year by ourselves. It cost the school nothing: it got us out of a class that was dramatically behind us in math skills, and it was the best half year of math we ever had. we had a blast helping each other out and learning the stuff. we learned about working together in groups in ways never before possible with students who, academically, were not our peers. we learned JOY in learning. it was amazing.
oh, but we were "tracked", right? I bet all those other kids just felt horrible, because we were so much better at math than they were. but they had a full class period with the teacher's attention, and that attention was not split between those who needed instruction and those who needed stimulation. Would it have helped their performance or their self esteem to watch those of us who get the lessens the first time around sitting there reading books or acting out or whatever we'd have to do to survive the boredom while they struggled? How helpful would it have been to watch us get frustrated trying to help them figure out decimals the eighth time around? After they had already failed it four times straight, were they just "living up to expectations" when we left the classroom because they knew they were in the "dumb class"?
Again, it's bullshit. You ARE saying fuck the smart kids, just the same as if you just threw the slower ones in an accelerated course and said "sink or swim, kids". sure, the smart kids might get ok jobs later anyway, and they might be functional, but you robbed them of a love of learning in many ways, and you certainly trained them to be anti social when the whole institution that is supposed to train them is failing them utterly. That is not an acceptable result of education. Not even if allowing those with talent to shine to their full potential get their feelings hurt.
I suppose next you'll have to tell the athletic kids they can't run fast or shoot baskets well because it might make the rest of us feel inadequate.
Maybe, and this is insane but hear me out anyone, just MAYBE school should be celebrating everyone's gifts and helping kids understand they do not have to be the best at everything? Just maybe?
Bullshit. it only hurts your understanding of the principles to focus on the data, principles you need when you get beyond your memorization levels. learning how to figure out multiplication fast is infinitely more useful than simply memorizing a list of figures. Of course, over time, you will memorize some of the numbers. and the more you use them, the more you simply remember without calculating. so as far as calculating 9*5, within a fairly short period of time, there will be little difference between someone who memorized the list directly and someone who learned the principles and simply remembered through repetition.
the difference is, the one who learned the principles will always be better at working outside their memorized scope than the others. so maybe you have a few weeks or months where you might be slower at spitting out an answer to a basic math problem; that's not any kind of real problem the real problem is never getting beyond basic, rote memorization to a true understanding and even affinity for numbers. An affinity that I am pretty sure at this point is actively crushed out of more people than it needs to be. Not everyone will love math: but lots more can be good at it with effective teaching than currently are, IMHO.
and no table of results is ever going to make anyone love, or at least enjoy math, nor will it make them better at math in the long run.
I agree, though that is why I always hated science in school even though I loved science, because the answer was always "it's too complicated to explain"...
but multiplication is not one of those things. it's just adding *really fast*. there is no reason to make kids memorize lists of numbers. If you can memorize the list, you can figure it out.
what is this with people thinking 'learning the multiplication tables" = learning multiplication?
I never memorized the tables. I learned how to do the math, and calculated what I needed when I needed it. I learned subtracting the number from the multiple of ten gets you the multiple of nine, and twice got you to 8, and half was 5. I learned to just do the ones digit, and add it to the multiple of ten (doubled or tripled or...) to get multiple digit multiplication down.
learning the tables would have killed my ability. to this day I only memorize a small handful of formula and derive the rest as i need it. it might not be as fast for rote tasks, but it sure is a better way to do math.
Teach the process, not reams of data. reams of data have no value. every engineer knows that, because the reams of data are already in charts, tables, and databases you can refer to as needed. It's the basic interactions you need to understand, and some key points of data.
But then, being a math guy, you might not know much about engineering. many engineers never do any math. there is a chart for almost everything.
so "teaching the multiplication tables" is bullshit and a poor proxy for learning. "teaching how to multiply" is much better... and I would put forth is fun and engaging to young minds who like to learn tricks. But then, for things like unschooling to work, the presence of a guiding adult is key, and that adult has to be able to keep the kid engaged when the "aha" moments hit. that's a tall order. and to be there... well, you're probably not an engineer if you are unschooling your kids, cause you're out working all day...
"Worse than benign" wasn't very clear. I meant to say "it's not just a benign waste of time".
Your comment makes no sense whatsoever.
You are saying you have to waste most of the time of a smart kid so dumb kids don't feel bad? Wow. that's really far thinking and progressive of you. So you're saying that basically, people who are good at stuff better not actually act like that, or those who are not will perform worse.
It's attitudes like that which make leaving school make sense, lots of sense. If it's only going to teach smart kids to stop acting so damn smart, it's worse than benign. It's evil.
There is no correlation between teaching a kid to do the best he/she can do and making them "spoiled brats". The words you are looking for is "empowered individuals". They are amazingly important people to have around, rather than apathetic misanthropes with too much intelligence and no respect at all for the world around them which has only shown them time and again that they are not welcome and they do not belong.
"Spoiled brats" get whatever they want all the time. Smart kids just get work that stimulates them and challenges them. Those are not the same thing, and your "wiser" friend has got you pretty well snowballed if you can't see a difference. I'm not saying through the slower kids to the wolves. but there are more answers to the question than simply "fuck the smart kids".
the student would determine when they were interested in those things, at least.
Hell.. waldorf schools don't even think you should start teaching reading until the 2nd grade, which is only 2 years behind the poster's unschooled kid here, and not many people can claim that waldorf educated kids are not prepared for life when they leave school.
I say this as a proud poppa of a 17 month old who can already recognize and point out about ten letters with no demands placed upon her to do so.. and I wouldn't be able to stand it if she were nine and unable to read. but there is plenty of indication that you can pick up these skills when needed pretty quickly, and there is little benefit or need to "cram" kids with stuff they aren't looking to learn for years and years and years.
If you sit down and boil all you retained out of 12 years of formal schooling down, I bet you'd fine you could have learned it all in a good year or two if you were interested and motivated to do so. the rest of that time is, for all intents, wasted time. That's the basic tenant of unschooling... kids learn best when they learn what they are interested in learning.
as I understand it, a key element of the approach is really "seeding" the house to stimulate the kid. there are multiple levels of "unschooling" from "we don't ever tell the kid to do anything and they can play video games all day" on up.
that said, I spent several years of my adult life playing video games all day. maybe I would have been better off having done so as a kid instead? hard to say.
because it's worth a lot more to me to learn stuff directly related to my business than it is to take the time to learn how to do business with linux. if I'm tired of maintaining software, why the heck would I want even harder to maintain software? I currently pay for it to be as easy as it is: I want to pay to make it even easier, not stop paying to make it harder.
re: lots of cash, "lots of cash" to an individual going through bankruptcy is a lot different than "lots of cash" to a large company. that's kind of the crux of the problem: very rich people can drive large companies into bankruptcy, avoid their obligations, and yet remain rich. That's a peversion, frankly. also that's why the company might need a loan even though the board or CEO has "lots of cash". or the govt might just be incentiving certain actions which, again, if you're going to actually follow through on it might not be such a big deal to take on the personal obligation.
my company has specifically avoided bradstreet and dunn because we have not historically taken on debt beyond the normal net 30 terms with vendors, we've been strictly cash otherwise. however having avoided that whole section of business I was also unaware of how other people actually use it, since no one asks if we even have a number except on very rare occasions. thanks for the lesson on that. I would say that the government at least shouldn't care about credit ratings so much: it should care about getting the results its paying for regardless of the financial rating of the company.
i'll concede it's pretty complicated and that I'm not informed enough to "fix it" though.. you make some good points that I'll need to think more about.
You missed the part where I was saying IF.. IF.. IF the companies had taken money.. for instance, as a loan to clean up pollution... then this sort of thing could have been written in as a part of the repayment agreement.
I am not saying the government could just willy nilly impose these kinds of sanctions that had not be agreed upon in the first place. I hope you got that by the end of your response.
As for personally guaranteeing debts, I can say as the owner of a small company, if your stance is that you will never personally guarantee the debts of the company you run, then you wouldn't get very far in small business. Every time we have a line of credit with a vendor that's a clause of the agreement. Something similar for larger companies... obviously not for the full value of any damages or what have you, but certainly large enough sums to be motivational.. shouldn't be any problem for a company that intends to actually follow the rules it is agreeing to. If they do not, then why should the top earners profit from their deception?
There are reasons to do it of course. For instance, if I am a CEO who gets paid in stock value, and my company is given a grant or low interest low to, say, clean up the pollution we created, that would help out my stock value. Or, it would certainly reduce a liability and increase the valuation of the company, its profitability, whatever metric you want to use to determine by pay, it's a good thing typically. I could get good benefit signing such an agreement, if I do it in good faith. However, I can't then get a double benefit by taking the money and spending it on something else! That's what appears to happen now.
Now, I could as a small owner declare personal bankruptcy as well.. and if my company went down laden with massive debt, I would probably have to. But it's hard to go bankrupt with lots, and lots of cash. not impossible of course, but harder.
so perhaps initially the decisionmakers of larger companies may not be willing to expose themselves to the liabilities of the company. But it is done all the time in small business and I see no reason why it should stop simply because your decisions become so large that it involves the american taxpayer as a whole instead of just your vendors and clients...
I could see massive utility and savings trading in all of my software licenses, updates, hardware upgrades and lost time for a moderately beefy netbook and some subscription fees.
there is a ton of ifs in there: if data standards are universal, if I can download my own backup to store on another service, etc. But done right, why would I want to do spend thousands a year on software and hardware for my small business if I don't have to anymore? It's not like industrial espionage is a big concern to me.
Frankly, I lust for the day I can toss all my crap out the window and let someone else figure out how to maintain and improve services. online. Just let me know when it's done and stable. the time and expense of handling it all in shop is, frankly, a significant drain of time and resources outside of our core competence. I suspect many other small businesses are in the same boat.
fuck, edit would be nice. left a bit hanging. I don't know what the constitutional issues are with a federal drinking age being directly mandated, but regardless, they can make states fall in line simply by the pursestrings without needing direct federal law mandating a drinking age.
if the congress had authorized a loan to clean up pollution, for example, they could certainly demand repayment under any condition they like and specify in the leglislation in question. There is absolutely nothing in the constitution that makes this unconstitutional. it's called "providing for the general welfare of the united states". repayment is not a tax. In that respect, congress could give and take money pretty much as they see fit, as long as it is in terms of loans, or the satisfaction of a grant condition, and not a tax. And, oddly enough, they do use this power regularly. Such as withholding highway funds if drinking ages are not mandated: there my not be a federal drinking age, constitutionally (that, I'm not sure , but they sure as hell can make it attractive to do what they like without running afoul of constitutional problems.
They cannot, as you say, target a tax at Bob the CeO of GM. But they sure could, if they wished, require repayment of a loan should the terms of a loan be defaulted upon to be guaranteed by anyone they care to have sign on the dotted line. I have no idea if that's the case and I'm not advocating necessarily for targeting CEOs specifically.. not ruling it out either... just saying there are ways it could be done without running afoul of any constitutional rule against taxation.
If congress had not, however, given the company any deals to do cleanup involving loans or grants, then sure, they can't just tax Bob with a "You fucked up" personal tax. But then, I didn't say they could, perhaps I wasn't very clear but I did clearly note that IF they gave an entity money the terms of repayment are what allow them to get it back any way they like.. when they write the deal.
my last bit on the constitutional thing was a knee jerk reaction to a different conversation I had yesterday. Sorry to confuse the conversation here; you're right that it didn't really apply and wasn't very accurate to begin with. don't post angry ;)
that's not true. the leglislative branch can dole out money for anything it likes. It can't make laws that give it sweeping new powers, but it does have power of the pursestrings, so if it gives you money it certainly has the right to tell you to give it back and under what conditions.
If they don't take any money from you, THEN the us gov has no power to garnish wages or the like, except perhaps if a previous arrangement had been broken and that was a term of that arrangement (I don't know what the pollution cleanup agreement was, but knowing about the superfund I imagine that the feds gave GM some money to help with it).
man, every time you turn around these days you hear about constitutional stuff totally misapplied. funny no one really cared when real consitutional issues like honoring treaties, habeas corpus or domestic spying were the norm. Now that it's not even a constitutional question it's all over the place. Funny stuff.
that's never the reason for bad sex. good sex doesn't even need a penis.
but if they never tell you the sex sucked, it will continue to suck until they get sick of it and cheat on you. It's a lot better to give and take constructive criticism.
Likewise you can acknowledge weight gain. Hopefully you can also acknowledge that it doesn't matter to you because you love your wife, right?
Small lies only mask problems. But you also have to understand your partner to be honest and open. For instance, when someone asks if something makes them look fat, they might really be asking "do you still find me attractive"? answering a question not asked is sometimes a good idea too when the truth is less than great.
it's an amazing level of difference in some cases. You can absolutely tell the difference if it were a blind test. I understand skepticism on the matter, but I would ask for a little slack in that I am not exagerrating at least in the case of the carrots I have sampled.
I have had organic carrots that taste like other carrots too: large scale prepackaged ones, typically. Maybe it's a freshness issue.
I agree on the taste thing: carrots in particular are a world of difference from "conventional" farmed cousins. They aren't even comparable.
I would wonder what the explanation is then? If you can taste the difference easily then there must be significant difference of some sort. One tastes more like water and one tastes more like carrot. If the more carrot-y one is not more "nutritionally dense" then what is the explanation?
I don't know the answer to that and that is not a rhetorical question.. does anyone have a theory?
It also states that it did not look at the impact of pesticide usage.
in a situation such as Iran, when the government is not willing to cede power, nothing a voting booth can do will matter. They can say whatever they like, station people in the process any way they like, and whether it's paper or electronic matters not at all. And you cannot even go to publicly verifiable voting because the government will simply threaten and kill those that vote against them.
In a situation more like america's, where we have a long tradition of peaceful transitions of power, we could cede private voting and make electronic voting work. Or keep private voting and keep it on paper. but private electronic voting is far too easy to spoof.
Personally, I think we should go to public, electronic voting. I also think we should have a much more direct participation option as well (i.e. I become my own representative)... which would absolutely require electronic participation.
it's called research rather than developement because when you do research, you don't know if your research is going to be useful or not.
That is why private money prefers surer bets, of which there is usually enough to justify investment in preference to actual research.
I think you misunderstand the point of colonizing other planets. It is not to save the earth. it is not to save all the people who live on earth. Those are separate issues.
it is simply to allow humanity in general to survive past one Extinction Level Event here on earth. We know they will happen. We need to be on other planets before it does, or collectively we are toast. Having at least some people offplanet to survive such an occurance makes sense if the continuation of the species is of any concern whatsoever to you, and being the only example of sentitent/technological life we have, I personally think we should preserve our species at least a little bit, regardless of how "screwed up" we are.
We still need to take care of the planet, sure. but colonizing other planets, even if we "fuck them up" when we get there, (which is pretty hard to do to an uninhabited ball of rock, but whatever) is necessary. Even if were the universe's worse "space parasite" and consumed all we touched, the universe is a big, big place. we could do that for quite awhile before it was a real problem.
But it's a trade off as well. Making voting anonymous and private allows a very significant vector for fraud, simply because you can't track any votes. So as long as the number of ballots counts is a reasonable percentage of the registered voters in an area (a list that contains ineligible and dead people and 20-50% people who will not show up to vote as well), fraud can be pretty hard to detect.
Non-anonymous voting brings coercion back as a possible problem, but it eliminates fraud to a large degree otherwise, since you can trace every vote back to a live person. I'm not worried about paying for votes.. if people want to sell votes, so be it... though the rest of your examples are very bothersome of course. But so is fraud.
So how to balance these two problems? is there a solution that solves both?