What should the browser do if a user requests the generated source while it is changing it? A built in feature needs to answer that question in an unambiguous way and the answer will inevitably make somebody unhappy. Fortunately, a user added feature doesn't face those problems:
It's me you are agreeing with regarding income on millions.
Anyway, if by optimism you mean significant equity exposure, I agree with you. If instead you mean basing your investment planning on 8-10% returns being likely, I don't. I'm not arguing that stock markets will do poorly(they will likely continue to be among the highest returning investments), I'm arguing that they aren't going to continue to do as well as they have done for the last 30 years. A big part of what Buffett is saying is that he has profited because he is very good at managing capital, but other people are getting better at it, so the profits are shrinking.
No doubt there are plenty of Microsofts and Googles to come, with return on capital that doesn't relate back to any existing business, but all of the business that is going to come from increasing standards of living around the world is going to be very similar to existing businesses. Another way of saying it is that I don't think that companies like GE and Proctor and Gamble can improve the way that they run their businesses over the next 25 or 50 years as much as they have in the last 25 or 50 years, and that they aren't going to be replaced by better businesses. I think profits will grow, but that profits as a percentage of revenues are going to be relatively flat, and in many cases, decline.
Imagine if liquid explosives aren't a credible threat, then the inspections are doing nothing to increase safety at all, no matter how cheap they are. Imagine.
8-10% might be a bit of an aggressive assumption for conservative investments. For the DOW to match last centuries growth in this century, it would have to close at 2,000,000 at the beginning of 2100(page 19, the whole thing is worth a read):
To hit 10% a year, the DOW would close at 24,000,000. One way to look at it is to ask, are things going to improve more this century than they improved last century, or less(the upside is that if they improve more, money will get less and less important, so it will be hard to miss out on).
The whole Malthusian folly comes into play, current projections can't really foresee radical future changes, but I don't think it is self evident that the progress made in the last 100 years will be repeated(especially in terms of things like resource extraction and farming, which saw enormous gains in productivity).
It looks to me that the biggest difference is that they are treated like a hardware vendor, whereas Microsoft is treated as an operating system vendor. So Apple is competing with Dell, and just happens to write lots of the software that they include with their systems.
If(when?) things reach the point where Apple hardware comprises a significant portion of the overall installed base, you will see people claiming that any OS upgrades that they sell separately from hardware need to be subjected to antitrust regulation.
I would think that you would be making a minimum that was more like $30,000 per million, after taxes. It's possible to make 4% (not adjusted for inflation) investing $5000 in the most boring bonds imaginable, so assuming 2% on $1000000 is just silly.
Yielding 4.86%. Great for tax free investments(Roth IRAs and the like), something with a bigger focus on municipal bonds is better for situations where you pay tax. For a millionaire, something like this:
would be pretty good(minimum investment is $100,000). 4.6% yield, much of that(maybe all of it, check the prospectus) exempt from federal taxes. There are others that provide income that is exempt from state and federal taxes:
Make some of it into an annuity and you could do even better, for a while.
Anyway, someone with 3 or 4 million dollars in the bank can afford to take much bigger risks than someone who *has* to work, which is more what I was talking about when I said 'do whatever you want with your life', not 'live your wildest dreams forever'. I shall endeavor to be more boringly specific in the future.
He doesn't have a billion dollars. He surely has several million in actual money, but the rest is paper.
Given that he has several million dollars that probably aren't going anywhere(which is enough money to do whatever you want for the rest of your life), why should he care more about what certain people think than he cares about having fun? So he can make sure that he is worth $2 billion on paper, and then 4?
I can see where it would be more fun to not put up with a bunch of inane questions from bloggers, but that isn't what you said.
There is an awful lot of Mississippi river upstream of Mississippi and it attracts people because it is a convenient place to get water, and then a convenient place to put the water when you are done with it.
Anyway, if you assume that the chemical in question has approximately the same molar mass as water, that means that 1 part per billion represents 1.8*10^-8 grams per mole of water, which is about 1 milligram per 55 million kilograms(liters) of water. A chemical that is 10 times heavier per mole than water, present at 100 parts per million represents 1 milligram per 55 liters of water. So in a very bad scenario, 3 liters of water might contain 1/2 milligram of drug, but that's at levels millions of times higher than the article is reporting.
Throw in the that filtering costs almost certainly go up faster than the resulting purity and it isn't all that surprising that municipalities(and state level environmental agencies, and the EPA) aren't doing more.
The other side of it is harder, because any estimates about how much of drug X the average person consumes are going to be hand waving, and then the fraction that ends up in the sewer is even more hand waving. The less of it that is there to begin with, the harder it is to filter.
If you are really worried about it, there are home reverse osmosis systems, they are much more effective than carbon filters.
You don't even need to abolish the unions. All you need to do is to allow hiring outside the union contract, or at least under terms equal to or better than the union contract.
I wonder how seriously a judge would take the argument that union contracts represent a misappropriation of public funds by school boards.
My basic argument is that in the absence of good reasons to increase the scope of a system, it is better to leave the system as it is, because increasing the scope of the system increases the scope of the problems that will result from as yet unknown flaws in the system. So I don't think it is nonsensical to demand that changes to a system come with a clear picture of new costs and benefits that will come with the changes.
This does rely on the assumption that a system will have flaws. I wouldn't call that faith.
Also, I didn't intend my other reply to be insulting. It is am example of a situation where government documents would never be used in place of established trust, to demonstrate that documentation is being used in place of a trust relationship, so it needs to be evaluated in a similar way. This may be obvious to most people, I don't know. I've seen people say things about the reliability of documents that they would never say about the reliability of people though.
Where's your argument that they are obviously good? Do you check your wife's identification before you get into bed, or do you use some other trust mechanism?
How pervasive is the integration? Can a foreign official use your card to pull information from your home country's databases? Is that a desirable thing? The EU has a pretty good record on privacy stuff, so regardless of the level of integration, there are probably at least decent access limits built in.
Do you see any benefit in keeping people who don't show ID off of airplanes? If there isn't a benefit, then the checking of the IDs and the flights that are prevented give you a pretty lousy cost benefit ratio. The closest thing that I see to a benefit is that officials get to point at the security activities that they are engaged in, but I tend to be a bit cynical.
It *is* still possible to fly domestically in the US without showing identification.
By falsely obtained official documents, I don't mean stolen or forged documents, I mean documents that were obtained by escalation(the use of relatively easy to forge documents to obtain more official documents via legitimate channels), or bribery(people everywhere are way more corrupt than anybody would like). Good practices limit both, but you can't simply wave your hands in the air and make an institution(i.e., the body issuing the document) perfectly trustworthy. So documents are subject to both forgery and fraudulent obtainment. Again, a good system seeks to make both of these things difficult, but a system with humans in it will never be perfect. So the id is nothing more than a piece of paper that has a certain cost to obtain(and should not be trusted beyond that cost). Systems that increase the use of documents often paper over this. I think this is bad.
Note that I'm not saying that identification documents are useless, just that care should be taken when increasing reliance on them(and when increasing their scope and accessibility). Passports represent a reasonable compromise; they allow governments(which are simply institutions) to share information about the person the document was issued to. They are neither universally issued, nor universally respected, so the issuing government is able to increase the value of their passports by denying them to certain people(who they can't sufficiently verify), and the examining country can evaluate both the legitimacy the document itself and the practices of the issuing country when deciding whether to admit a traveler.
And the wife example is intended to be patently absurd. It illustrates a situation where relying on a document for identification doesn't make sense. The intent isn't to point out a potential misuse of really good identification, but to highlight the trust-surrogate nature of documents, and that they aren't absolutely reliable(with the hope that people buy in to the careful evaluation of that reliability and thereby reduce their tendency to want to rely on documents). So the overall idea is to get people to evaluate just how much they can trust a given document, based on the security features of the document and the organizational scrutiny and institutional reliability that went into the document, rather than accepting the document with zero thought(which is exactly what a spouse would *never* do).
Finally, "travelers" is probably a word. English is indeed that screwed up.
Would you be comfortable if your card was part of an integrated system that included Belgium and Germany? That's the situation the US faces(in 3 ways: laws vary from state to state, the geographic area involved is large, and the number of people that a unified system needs to support is large). I'm not trying to say whether you should be uncomfortable or not, just pointing out that there are differences to account for when making the comparison.
My biggest objection to programs that unify information and improve database access is that it encourages people to use them in situations where it isn't actually necessary, which then extends problems with that database access into situations where it shouldn't be necessary.
An example would be the treatment that travelers who show identification at airports in the US receive - they are treated as being more 'legitimate' than people who are unwilling or unable to show id, and then subjected to a lower average level of scrutiny. The problem with this is that the cursory checks performed on the id aren't going to detect forgeries or falsely obtained official identification, making the whole process a pointless waste of time.
Falsely obtained official identification also limit the usefulness of using any documentation to 'prove that you are actually you'. An entire system is limited in reliability by the least trustworthy bureaucrat working in it.
Finally, a sort of joking example: Would you expect your wife to sleep with an imposter who had documents proving they were you, or would you expect her to scoff at the documents? Training people to trust the documents in similar situations is scary; I wish I had a better argument against it.
I feel the need to point out that renting a movie on VHS and wasting money on VHS tapes aren't quite the same thing. Sure, the playback experience isn't nearly as nice, but the movie is still pretty much there at a cost of $2. Anybody that bought (new, un-discounted)tapes after DVD came out is a loon, but that's only a part of the group of people who waited to buy a DVD player.
Why are you assuming that he is talking about the difference between traditional publishing and web publishing? I read the comment(I even clicked through!) such that he would say the same exact thing if the user he is responding to had published a book that had been read by a few thousand people, but since that isn't the case he is arguing specifically about web exposure and what it means(not very much).
You did notice that the paragraph you cited is not talking directly about what you have published, right?
Slashdot Mirror
G-Archiver works in the other direction. The idea is to back up your Gmail account, not to back up to your Gmail account.
They are BLOCKING interpreted languages. Regardless of their motivation, there are lots of people who don't like this.
What should the browser do if a user requests the generated source while it is changing it? A built in feature needs to answer that question in an unambiguous way and the answer will inevitably make somebody unhappy. Fortunately, a user added feature doesn't face those problems:
https://www.squarefree.com/bookmarklets/webdevel.html#generated_source
It's me you are agreeing with regarding income on millions.
Anyway, if by optimism you mean significant equity exposure, I agree with you. If instead you mean basing your investment planning on 8-10% returns being likely, I don't. I'm not arguing that stock markets will do poorly(they will likely continue to be among the highest returning investments), I'm arguing that they aren't going to continue to do as well as they have done for the last 30 years. A big part of what Buffett is saying is that he has profited because he is very good at managing capital, but other people are getting better at it, so the profits are shrinking.
No doubt there are plenty of Microsofts and Googles to come, with return on capital that doesn't relate back to any existing business, but all of the business that is going to come from increasing standards of living around the world is going to be very similar to existing businesses. Another way of saying it is that I don't think that companies like GE and Proctor and Gamble can improve the way that they run their businesses over the next 25 or 50 years as much as they have in the last 25 or 50 years, and that they aren't going to be replaced by better businesses. I think profits will grow, but that profits as a percentage of revenues are going to be relatively flat, and in many cases, decline.
That is, you can't hijack a plane with a knife, but only if you think you can't:
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/section/1/story.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=10491291
Via:
http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2008/02/hijacking_in_ne.html
Imagine if liquid explosives aren't a credible threat, then the inspections are doing nothing to increase safety at all, no matter how cheap they are. Imagine.
Actually, I doubt you would have much luck insisting *any* technology was involved.
So, which is better, fat doctor or skinny doctor?
Don't forget the feeling of smug self-satisfaction.
8-10% might be a bit of an aggressive assumption for conservative investments. For the DOW to match last centuries growth in this century, it would have to close at 2,000,000 at the beginning of 2100(page 19, the whole thing is worth a read):
http://www.berkshirehathaway.com/letters/2007ltr.pdf
To hit 10% a year, the DOW would close at 24,000,000. One way to look at it is to ask, are things going to improve more this century than they improved last century, or less(the upside is that if they improve more, money will get less and less important, so it will be hard to miss out on).
The whole Malthusian folly comes into play, current projections can't really foresee radical future changes, but I don't think it is self evident that the progress made in the last 100 years will be repeated(especially in terms of things like resource extraction and farming, which saw enormous gains in productivity).
It looks to me that the biggest difference is that they are treated like a hardware vendor, whereas Microsoft is treated as an operating system vendor. So Apple is competing with Dell, and just happens to write lots of the software that they include with their systems.
If(when?) things reach the point where Apple hardware comprises a significant portion of the overall installed base, you will see people claiming that any OS upgrades that they sell separately from hardware need to be subjected to antitrust regulation.
I would think that you would be making a minimum that was more like $30,000 per million, after taxes. It's possible to make 4% (not adjusted for inflation) investing $5000 in the most boring bonds imaginable, so assuming 2% on $1000000 is just silly.
Not the most boring bonds imaginable(but close):
http://finance.yahoo.com/q?s=VBMFX
Yielding 4.86%. Great for tax free investments(Roth IRAs and the like), something with a bigger focus on municipal bonds is better for situations where you pay tax. For a millionaire, something like this:
http://finance.yahoo.com/q?s=vwlux&d=t
would be pretty good(minimum investment is $100,000). 4.6% yield, much of that(maybe all of it, check the prospectus) exempt from federal taxes. There are others that provide income that is exempt from state and federal taxes:
http://biz.yahoo.com/p/fam/vanguard.html
Make some of it into an annuity and you could do even better, for a while.
Anyway, someone with 3 or 4 million dollars in the bank can afford to take much bigger risks than someone who *has* to work, which is more what I was talking about when I said 'do whatever you want with your life', not 'live your wildest dreams forever'. I shall endeavor to be more boringly specific in the future.
He doesn't have a billion dollars. He surely has several million in actual money, but the rest is paper.
Given that he has several million dollars that probably aren't going anywhere(which is enough money to do whatever you want for the rest of your life), why should he care more about what certain people think than he cares about having fun? So he can make sure that he is worth $2 billion on paper, and then 4?
I can see where it would be more fun to not put up with a bunch of inane questions from bloggers, but that isn't what you said.
It should be "You can't eat your urinal cake and have it too." because you can carry it around all day and then, at the end of the day, eat it.
There is an awful lot of Mississippi river upstream of Mississippi and it attracts people because it is a convenient place to get water, and then a convenient place to put the water when you are done with it.
Anyway, if you assume that the chemical in question has approximately the same molar mass as water, that means that 1 part per billion represents 1.8*10^-8 grams per mole of water, which is about 1 milligram per 55 million kilograms(liters) of water. A chemical that is 10 times heavier per mole than water, present at 100 parts per million represents 1 milligram per 55 liters of water. So in a very bad scenario, 3 liters of water might contain 1/2 milligram of drug, but that's at levels millions of times higher than the article is reporting.
Throw in the that filtering costs almost certainly go up faster than the resulting purity and it isn't all that surprising that municipalities(and state level environmental agencies, and the EPA) aren't doing more.
The other side of it is harder, because any estimates about how much of drug X the average person consumes are going to be hand waving, and then the fraction that ends up in the sewer is even more hand waving. The less of it that is there to begin with, the harder it is to filter.
If you are really worried about it, there are home reverse osmosis systems, they are much more effective than carbon filters.
That doesn't help with the step where a bunch of what goes into people goes into the toilet.
You don't even need to abolish the unions. All you need to do is to allow hiring outside the union contract, or at least under terms equal to or better than the union contract.
I wonder how seriously a judge would take the argument that union contracts represent a misappropriation of public funds by school boards.
My basic argument is that in the absence of good reasons to increase the scope of a system, it is better to leave the system as it is, because increasing the scope of the system increases the scope of the problems that will result from as yet unknown flaws in the system. So I don't think it is nonsensical to demand that changes to a system come with a clear picture of new costs and benefits that will come with the changes.
This does rely on the assumption that a system will have flaws. I wouldn't call that faith.
Also, I didn't intend my other reply to be insulting. It is am example of a situation where government documents would never be used in place of established trust, to demonstrate that documentation is being used in place of a trust relationship, so it needs to be evaluated in a similar way. This may be obvious to most people, I don't know. I've seen people say things about the reliability of documents that they would never say about the reliability of people though.
Where's your argument that they are obviously good? Do you check your wife's identification before you get into bed, or do you use some other trust mechanism?
Inaction at least has parsimony on its side.
How pervasive is the integration? Can a foreign official use your card to pull information from your home country's databases? Is that a desirable thing? The EU has a pretty good record on privacy stuff, so regardless of the level of integration, there are probably at least decent access limits built in.
Do you see any benefit in keeping people who don't show ID off of airplanes? If there isn't a benefit, then the checking of the IDs and the flights that are prevented give you a pretty lousy cost benefit ratio. The closest thing that I see to a benefit is that officials get to point at the security activities that they are engaged in, but I tend to be a bit cynical.
It *is* still possible to fly domestically in the US without showing identification.
By falsely obtained official documents, I don't mean stolen or forged documents, I mean documents that were obtained by escalation(the use of relatively easy to forge documents to obtain more official documents via legitimate channels), or bribery(people everywhere are way more corrupt than anybody would like). Good practices limit both, but you can't simply wave your hands in the air and make an institution(i.e., the body issuing the document) perfectly trustworthy. So documents are subject to both forgery and fraudulent obtainment. Again, a good system seeks to make both of these things difficult, but a system with humans in it will never be perfect. So the id is nothing more than a piece of paper that has a certain cost to obtain(and should not be trusted beyond that cost). Systems that increase the use of documents often paper over this. I think this is bad.
Note that I'm not saying that identification documents are useless, just that care should be taken when increasing reliance on them(and when increasing their scope and accessibility). Passports represent a reasonable compromise; they allow governments(which are simply institutions) to share information about the person the document was issued to. They are neither universally issued, nor universally respected, so the issuing government is able to increase the value of their passports by denying them to certain people(who they can't sufficiently verify), and the examining country can evaluate both the legitimacy the document itself and the practices of the issuing country when deciding whether to admit a traveler.
And the wife example is intended to be patently absurd. It illustrates a situation where relying on a document for identification doesn't make sense. The intent isn't to point out a potential misuse of really good identification, but to highlight the trust-surrogate nature of documents, and that they aren't absolutely reliable(with the hope that people buy in to the careful evaluation of that reliability and thereby reduce their tendency to want to rely on documents). So the overall idea is to get people to evaluate just how much they can trust a given document, based on the security features of the document and the organizational scrutiny and institutional reliability that went into the document, rather than accepting the document with zero thought(which is exactly what a spouse would *never* do).
Finally, "travelers" is probably a word. English is indeed that screwed up.
Would you be comfortable if your card was part of an integrated system that included Belgium and Germany? That's the situation the US faces(in 3 ways: laws vary from state to state, the geographic area involved is large, and the number of people that a unified system needs to support is large). I'm not trying to say whether you should be uncomfortable or not, just pointing out that there are differences to account for when making the comparison.
My biggest objection to programs that unify information and improve database access is that it encourages people to use them in situations where it isn't actually necessary, which then extends problems with that database access into situations where it shouldn't be necessary.
An example would be the treatment that travelers who show identification at airports in the US receive - they are treated as being more 'legitimate' than people who are unwilling or unable to show id, and then subjected to a lower average level of scrutiny. The problem with this is that the cursory checks performed on the id aren't going to detect forgeries or falsely obtained official identification, making the whole process a pointless waste of time.
Falsely obtained official identification also limit the usefulness of using any documentation to 'prove that you are actually you'. An entire system is limited in reliability by the least trustworthy bureaucrat working in it.
Finally, a sort of joking example: Would you expect your wife to sleep with an imposter who had documents proving they were you, or would you expect her to scoff at the documents? Training people to trust the documents in similar situations is scary; I wish I had a better argument against it.
http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/000574.html
I feel the need to point out that renting a movie on VHS and wasting money on VHS tapes aren't quite the same thing. Sure, the playback experience isn't nearly as nice, but the movie is still pretty much there at a cost of $2. Anybody that bought (new, un-discounted)tapes after DVD came out is a loon, but that's only a part of the group of people who waited to buy a DVD player.
Are you going to watch them, or was the idea to save $100 that you wouldn't have otherwise spent?
Why are you assuming that he is talking about the difference between traditional publishing and web publishing? I read the comment(I even clicked through!) such that he would say the same exact thing if the user he is responding to had published a book that had been read by a few thousand people, but since that isn't the case he is arguing specifically about web exposure and what it means(not very much).
You did notice that the paragraph you cited is not talking directly about what you have published, right?