In either case, the government can use the power of the purse to control the news outlet's actions. The distinction between taxes and licenses makes no difference to the power relationship between the BBC and its government.
We're both pessimistic about 21st century journalism so far, but with a difference.
I'm mostly pushing back against "Newspapers and conventional media are dying because NOBODY NEEDS THEM ANYMORE", combined with the reply to your post that "Twitter feeds and live blogs" provide a good substitute --- which I realize isn't your idea, but shaped my impression of it.
We do need newspapers and conventional media -- not the technologies themselves, but the investigative, call-you-on-your-bullshit spirit that made them a force to be reckoned with throughout the 20th century. And that attitude won't fit in 140 characters.
My solution sucks: wait. Wait for the lies, deceptions, secrets and rumors to start choking our society. Wait until people find bulldozers at their front lawn because nobody told them about the secret backroom deal the city council did with the land developer. Wait until children die by the millions, because nobody showed their parents what was medicine and what was quackery. Wait until the cops are shaking people down for protection money, but nobody can complain. Wait until we repeat our own lies to ourselves so completely that society howls and shrieks with amplifier feedback.
*Then* people will understand the value of good journalism, and be willing to pay for it. The only question is, will they be able to?
Wrong, wrong, wrong. You totally fail to understand the value of journalism. Yes, for simple obvious facts (there was a car crash on US 495 today), either citizen reporting or a professional journalist will do.
But that's not what journalism is for. Individual citizens, like governments and corporations, are happy to tell you what they want you to hear, and modern media gives them all a voice. But a journalist's job is to tell the world what they *don't* want you to hear. Governments, corporations, and citizens all lie and shade the truth to promote their own interests: it takes a full-time professional to sort it out.
If this doesn't tally with your own definition of journalism, that's because journalism, per se, is damn near extinct. You don't understand its value, because you've never seen it at work.
Hear, hear. I also proudly and gladly pay for the New York Times.
But here's the thing: most people think we're crazy, and with good reason. Most adults today are used to a world in which high-quality free news was as abundant as oxygen. Quite understandably they don't see a reason to pay for it. However, that free news was a non-renewable resource: TV and newspapers were burning through decades of capital they'd acquired by virtue of being local monopolies, in a new global communications environment they could not profit in.
But good news does have value, and people *will* be willing to pay for it once they see the value. But they'll need hard lessons to be convinced that good news is worth paying for. Massive government corruption, rampant institutionalized crime, and the emergence of skotocracy (I just made that up, it means "government by darkness") will eventually change their minds.
Sure, but if physics (and its applications in chemistry and engineering) didn't exist, your calculus class would consist of three future math majors and maybe a rather bewildered philosopher.
I'm a physics professor -- aka, The Reason You Take Calculus -- and I totally agree. I think all high schools should teach statistics as a mandatory 12th grade math class. Students who intend to go into technical fields (physics, chemistry, carpentry, metalworking) should take trigonometry, and nobody should take pre-calculus or calculus until college.
I'm a physics professor who teaches some similar classes, including a course on climate change for nonmajors. I also deal with a lot of students who take stats. Statistics is probably the most uniformly loathed class in every university. Neither its students nor its professors want to be there.
Your first job is to convince students that they need to know this material, not just because it's a requirement but because it's vital. Start your class off with some statistical disasters. Drugs that were approved without proper testing, which turned out to be useless or harmful; innocent people sent to jail via the prosecutor's fallacy; major ideas in the social sciences which turned out to be based on baloney statistics.
Your second job is to forget you're a mathematician. You've been trained to formally prove everything you say. Don't. These students will take "because I said so" as a legitimate explanation, and will never need to prove things on their own the way your other students will. Give them useful definitions, rules, and formulas, without the backstory. Tell them that common random events often have a bell-curve distribution, but do not prove the central limit theorem. Show them how and why to do a t-test, but don't show the PDF for a t-distribution or the equation for it.
Finally, be very careful with your attitude. It's easy for a specialist to conclude that because these students are untrained, they're stupid. But if you motivate them enough, you'll find that many are just as smart as the physics majors in your calc class. Some, you'll find, are not, but don't let the bad ones shape your impression of the class, or you'll lose the respect of the good ones.
You're missing the point. You're right that for a given sized bribe, the larger your salary the easier it is to hide it. But you can't give someone earning $800k the same bribe you'd offer someone making $80K -- you'll need a bribe probably 10 times bigger to make it worthwhile. And the bigger bribe will be harder to hide on a company's accounting books, harder to convert into cash, physically bulkier and harder to conceal, and difficult to spend without attracting attention.
For example, suppose the guy is willing to take a bribe equal to his annual salary. If he's paid $80K, that can be easily disposed of without leaving a trace: a bunch of fine dining, a high-end escort service, or a good coke habit. But $800K buys you *way* too much hookers and blow: to dispose of that kind of cash, you need to start buying things like boats, cars, and real estate, which are difficult to hide.
Re federal vs state spending: note also that a lot of the money that passes through state coffers is actually provided by the federal government, including health care, welfare, education, transportation, and public safety. I'm not sure whether those funds end up in the "federal" or "state" side of your breakdown, or whether they're double-counted, but it just emphasizes your point about how much the states rely on the federal government.
But as you also point out, it's not like the President is writing the checks himself. Bureaucracies are like chickens: if you chop the head off, the body keeps running for a good long time.
Meh. The legislative branch has been paralyzed since 2010, and it hasn't made much difference. If crippling Congress were a terrorist act, the Tea Party would be locked up in Gitmo.
One of the great things about a democracy is it's impossible to decapitate. You kill the top guy, or even the top 20 guys, and we'll just promote their subordinates for a few months, hold a special election, and we're back in business. It's a self-repairing system. There is no need to protect *anybody* in power: they're all expendable. As a practical matter, it's nice to have a secret service to protect the president, but that's just because replacing him every time he gets killed would be inconvenient.
The paranoid hyper-protectivism pushed by the American Enterprise Institute and Heritage Foundation reflects the fact that they don't actually believe in democracy. They believe that the man running the country is more important than the ideas he was elected to represent -- in short, they're fascists. They're such fascists, that they believe this even when they guy running the country is someone they hate. And one of the many, many problems with fascism is that fascists are really easy to terrorize. Just threaten the Supreme Leader, and they're in the palm of your hand.
In contrast, a true democracy is difficult to terrorize. You can threaten individual citizens, but there is no one person, no symbol or place of power, that you can destroy to bring it to its knees.
You don't pay the heads of powerful regulatory agencies big bucks because their job is difficult. You pay them well to ensure that they are difficult to bribe.
It's true that some of the corporations who'd stand to gain from bribing this guy can drop $800K like it's pocket change, but the larger the bribe, the harder it is to hide.
Assuming your story is true, it's awful. There are racist assholes everywhere, and you had the bad luck to have one as your professor, but hopefully this guy is the exception rather than the rule. Many American university administrations will come down very hard on overtly racist professors. You should have told him you would continue to do the bonus questions unless he tells you not to do so in writing. Then, after he's assigned your grade, go talk to a dean or the provost.
You, sir, are a racist asshole. I'm a college professor at a college that actively recruits Chinese students. I guess I missed the faculty meeting where they told us to never let Chinese students fail, because I fail them just as often as American students.
You're right, that these Chinese students have generally failed the Chinese university admission test. But a lot of Americans don't get SAT scores good enough to get into MIT either. The difference between the Chinese and American systems is that in the US, we have a broad range of institutions, with different expectations and admissions criteria, so if you don't get into MIT, there are other places you can go -- and many of them have lots of experience teaching students at your level, so you'll learn more than you would at MIT. In China, you either get into the top school in the nation, or you don't go to college.
The Chinese aren't washouts or entitled rich brats any more than American students are. They're coming here because they want the same things American students do: education that matches their talents, at a price they can afford. You worry about Chinese students applying pressure to colleges to avoid failure. I haven't seen it happen, but it's not a new thing: wealthy Americans have been trying this for centuries. And at a college with integrity, Chinese who want to bribe their way to a degree will have no more luck than the countless Americans who've tried it.
There's a pretty easy way to stop the university from doing that: in-state tuitions are usually low because the university is supported by state funding. Make it so they get a fixed amount *per* in-state student. So if in-state tuition is $12K and out-of-state is $30k, the state gives $18K per student, and the university has no incentive to recruit out-of-state.
If, on the other hand, the state is currently giving the university less than that $18k, then the state is using out-of-state students to subsidize cheap tuition for in-state students, and nobody in-state should be complaining that an out-of-state student is paying for your kid's education.
Don't we keep getting articles posted about how poor the US educational system is?
Key distinction: The US *grade school* educational system is awful. The US college/university system is excellent. It kinda has to be, to repair the intellectual shambles found in the average US high school graduate's head.
(Full disclosure: I'm a college professor, so I'm kinda biased.)
Ellison is not their landlord. Each homeowner on Lana'i owns his little quarter-acre plot of land with his house on it, and has all the property rights any other resident of Hawaii has. They just have a neighbor with a very very big yard.
Maybe when he reaches the top he'll buy the largest.
Greenland is not a good investment. There are some serious liability issues. "Mr. Ellison, over the past 50 years, meltwater runoff from your property has caused flooding in coastal cities worldwide. This makes you financially liable for the reconstruction of New York, Bangkok, Shanghai,...."
I am a Hawaiian (well, a haole who was born and raised there). It's definitely not the prettiest island in the chain: it's fairly low in elevation and sits in the rain shadow of Maui, so it's a bit dry and has fewer cool mountains and valleys and jungles than the other islands. But apparently the price was right...
There's a lot of missing the point here. It's not like the residents of Lana'i are now the chattel of some billionaire emperor-king. They still hold title to the land they own, they're still residents of the State of Hawaii. They just have a new neighbor who's got a *lot* more waterfront than they do.
Turning the land over to Hawaiian Homelands would be an option if it were owned by the State of Hawaii, but it isn't. It's owned by Castle and Cooke, a former agribusiness turned real estate corporation: Castle and Cooke is owned by billionaire David Murdock.
If you want to hand over Lana'i to the Hawaiians, you have three options: * Seize a billion-dollar asset from its legal owner (If you think you can do that without a decade-long legal battle, you don't know billionaire landowners.) * Spend a billion dollars of state money to buy it from its owner (As if Hawaii could afford that) * Ask the Hawaiians to pay the billion dollars to buy the property (As if they had the cash).
This is a perfect illustration of why indigenous repatriation is a political and economic nightmare. The people who now hold the land did nothing illegal to acquire it: any crime was committed by people long dead, so it's difficult to justify seizure. The situation's even worse in Hawaii: while many Native Americans had their land seized by force, in the case of Hawaii most of the land was sold to wealthy caucasians by the legitimate Hawaiian monarch at the time, all totally legal (if not very smart). No question the overthrow of the monarchy was illegal, but does that justify forcibly seizing land that was legally purchased prior to the overthrow?
Slashdot Mirror
In either case, the government can use the power of the purse to control the news outlet's actions. The distinction between taxes and licenses makes no difference to the power relationship between the BBC and its government.
We're both pessimistic about 21st century journalism so far, but with a difference.
I'm mostly pushing back against "Newspapers and conventional media are dying because NOBODY NEEDS THEM ANYMORE", combined with the reply to your post that "Twitter feeds and live blogs" provide a good substitute --- which I realize isn't your idea, but shaped my impression of it.
We do need newspapers and conventional media -- not the technologies themselves, but the investigative, call-you-on-your-bullshit spirit that made them a force to be reckoned with throughout the 20th century. And that attitude won't fit in 140 characters.
My solution sucks: wait. Wait for the lies, deceptions, secrets and rumors to start choking our society. Wait until people find bulldozers at their front lawn because nobody told them about the secret backroom deal the city council did with the land developer. Wait until children die by the millions, because nobody showed their parents what was medicine and what was quackery. Wait until the cops are shaking people down for protection money, but nobody can complain. Wait until we repeat our own lies to ourselves so completely that society howls and shrieks with amplifier feedback.
*Then* people will understand the value of good journalism, and be willing to pay for it. The only question is, will they be able to?
Wrong, wrong, wrong. You totally fail to understand the value of journalism. Yes, for simple obvious facts (there was a car crash on US 495 today), either citizen reporting or a professional journalist will do.
But that's not what journalism is for. Individual citizens, like governments and corporations, are happy to tell you what they want you to hear, and modern media gives them all a voice. But a journalist's job is to tell the world what they *don't* want you to hear. Governments, corporations, and citizens all lie and shade the truth to promote their own interests: it takes a full-time professional to sort it out.
If this doesn't tally with your own definition of journalism, that's because journalism, per se, is damn near extinct. You don't understand its value, because you've never seen it at work.
Hear, hear. I also proudly and gladly pay for the New York Times.
But here's the thing: most people think we're crazy, and with good reason. Most adults today are used to a world in which high-quality free news was as abundant as oxygen. Quite understandably they don't see a reason to pay for it. However, that free news was a non-renewable resource: TV and newspapers were burning through decades of capital they'd acquired by virtue of being local monopolies, in a new global communications environment they could not profit in.
But good news does have value, and people *will* be willing to pay for it once they see the value. But they'll need hard lessons to be convinced that good news is worth paying for. Massive government corruption, rampant institutionalized crime, and the emergence of skotocracy (I just made that up, it means "government by darkness") will eventually change their minds.
But will it be too late?
That's a distinction without a difference.
Sure, but if physics (and its applications in chemistry and engineering) didn't exist, your calculus class would consist of three future math majors and maybe a rather bewildered philosopher.
I'm a physics professor -- aka, The Reason You Take Calculus -- and I totally agree. I think all high schools should teach statistics as a mandatory 12th grade math class. Students who intend to go into technical fields (physics, chemistry, carpentry, metalworking) should take trigonometry, and nobody should take pre-calculus or calculus until college.
I'm a physics professor who teaches some similar classes, including a course on climate change for nonmajors. I also deal with a lot of students who take stats. Statistics is probably the most uniformly loathed class in every university. Neither its students nor its professors want to be there.
Your first job is to convince students that they need to know this material, not just because it's a requirement but because it's vital. Start your class off with some statistical disasters. Drugs that were approved without proper testing, which turned out to be useless or harmful; innocent people sent to jail via the prosecutor's fallacy; major ideas in the social sciences which turned out to be based on baloney statistics.
Your second job is to forget you're a mathematician. You've been trained to formally prove everything you say. Don't. These students will take "because I said so" as a legitimate explanation, and will never need to prove things on their own the way your other students will. Give them useful definitions, rules, and formulas, without the backstory. Tell them that common random events often have a bell-curve distribution, but do not prove the central limit theorem. Show them how and why to do a t-test, but don't show the PDF for a t-distribution or the equation for it.
Finally, be very careful with your attitude. It's easy for a specialist to conclude that because these students are untrained, they're stupid. But if you motivate them enough, you'll find that many are just as smart as the physics majors in your calc class. Some, you'll find, are not, but don't let the bad ones shape your impression of the class, or you'll lose the respect of the good ones.
You're missing the point. You're right that for a given sized bribe, the larger your salary the easier it is to hide it. But you can't give someone earning $800k the same bribe you'd offer someone making $80K -- you'll need a bribe probably 10 times bigger to make it worthwhile. And the bigger bribe will be harder to hide on a company's accounting books, harder to convert into cash, physically bulkier and harder to conceal, and difficult to spend without attracting attention.
For example, suppose the guy is willing to take a bribe equal to his annual salary. If he's paid $80K, that can be easily disposed of without leaving a trace: a bunch of fine dining, a high-end escort service, or a good coke habit. But $800K buys you *way* too much hookers and blow: to dispose of that kind of cash, you need to start buying things like boats, cars, and real estate, which are difficult to hide.
I agree that it's wrong to judge this idea based on your opinion of Heritage and AEI.
It is, however, quite appropriate to judge the AEI and Heritage based on the stupidity of ideas like this one.
Re federal vs state spending: note also that a lot of the money that passes through state coffers is actually provided by the federal government, including health care, welfare, education, transportation, and public safety. I'm not sure whether those funds end up in the "federal" or "state" side of your breakdown, or whether they're double-counted, but it just emphasizes your point about how much the states rely on the federal government.
But as you also point out, it's not like the President is writing the checks himself. Bureaucracies are like chickens: if you chop the head off, the body keeps running for a good long time.
Meh. The legislative branch has been paralyzed since 2010, and it hasn't made much difference. If crippling Congress were a terrorist act, the Tea Party would be locked up in Gitmo.
One of the great things about a democracy is it's impossible to decapitate. You kill the top guy, or even the top 20 guys, and we'll just promote their subordinates for a few months, hold a special election, and we're back in business. It's a self-repairing system. There is no need to protect *anybody* in power: they're all expendable. As a practical matter, it's nice to have a secret service to protect the president, but that's just because replacing him every time he gets killed would be inconvenient.
The paranoid hyper-protectivism pushed by the American Enterprise Institute and Heritage Foundation reflects the fact that they don't actually believe in democracy. They believe that the man running the country is more important than the ideas he was elected to represent -- in short, they're fascists. They're such fascists, that they believe this even when they guy running the country is someone they hate. And one of the many, many problems with fascism is that fascists are really easy to terrorize. Just threaten the Supreme Leader, and they're in the palm of your hand.
In contrast, a true democracy is difficult to terrorize. You can threaten individual citizens, but there is no one person, no symbol or place of power, that you can destroy to bring it to its knees.
You don't pay the heads of powerful regulatory agencies big bucks because their job is difficult. You pay them well to ensure that they are difficult to bribe.
It's true that some of the corporations who'd stand to gain from bribing this guy can drop $800K like it's pocket change, but the larger the bribe, the harder it is to hide.
Assuming your story is true, it's awful. There are racist assholes everywhere, and you had the bad luck to have one as your professor, but hopefully this guy is the exception rather than the rule. Many American university administrations will come down very hard on overtly racist professors. You should have told him you would continue to do the bonus questions unless he tells you not to do so in writing. Then, after he's assigned your grade, go talk to a dean or the provost.
You, sir, are a racist asshole. I'm a college professor at a college that actively recruits Chinese students. I guess I missed the faculty meeting where they told us to never let Chinese students fail, because I fail them just as often as American students.
You're right, that these Chinese students have generally failed the Chinese university admission test. But a lot of Americans don't get SAT scores good enough to get into MIT either. The difference between the Chinese and American systems is that in the US, we have a broad range of institutions, with different expectations and admissions criteria, so if you don't get into MIT, there are other places you can go -- and many of them have lots of experience teaching students at your level, so you'll learn more than you would at MIT. In China, you either get into the top school in the nation, or you don't go to college.
The Chinese aren't washouts or entitled rich brats any more than American students are. They're coming here because they want the same things American students do: education that matches their talents, at a price they can afford. You worry about Chinese students applying pressure to colleges to avoid failure. I haven't seen it happen, but it's not a new thing: wealthy Americans have been trying this for centuries. And at a college with integrity, Chinese who want to bribe their way to a degree will have no more luck than the countless Americans who've tried it.
There's a pretty easy way to stop the university from doing that: in-state tuitions are usually low because the university is supported by state funding. Make it so they get a fixed amount *per* in-state student. So if in-state tuition is $12K and out-of-state is $30k, the state gives $18K per student, and the university has no incentive to recruit out-of-state.
If, on the other hand, the state is currently giving the university less than that $18k, then the state is using out-of-state students to subsidize cheap tuition for in-state students, and nobody in-state should be complaining that an out-of-state student is paying for your kid's education.
(Correction: I should have said American K-12 is awful, not just grade school.)
Key distinction: The US *grade school* educational system is awful. The US college/university system is excellent. It kinda has to be, to repair the intellectual shambles found in the average US high school graduate's head.
(Full disclosure: I'm a college professor, so I'm kinda biased.)
Ellison is not their landlord. Each homeowner on Lana'i owns his little quarter-acre plot of land with his house on it, and has all the property rights any other resident of Hawaii has. They just have a neighbor with a very very big yard.
Greenland is not a good investment. There are some serious liability issues. "Mr. Ellison, over the past 50 years, meltwater runoff from your property has caused flooding in coastal cities worldwide. This makes you financially liable for the reconstruction of New York, Bangkok, Shanghai, ...."
I am a Hawaiian (well, a haole who was born and raised there). It's definitely not the prettiest island in the chain: it's fairly low in elevation and sits in the rain shadow of Maui, so it's a bit dry and has fewer cool mountains and valleys and jungles than the other islands. But apparently the price was right...
There's a lot of missing the point here. It's not like the residents of Lana'i are now the chattel of some billionaire emperor-king. They still hold title to the land they own, they're still residents of the State of Hawaii. They just have a new neighbor who's got a *lot* more waterfront than they do.
Turning the land over to Hawaiian Homelands would be an option if it were owned by the State of Hawaii, but it isn't. It's owned by Castle and Cooke, a former agribusiness turned real estate corporation: Castle and Cooke is owned by billionaire David Murdock.
If you want to hand over Lana'i to the Hawaiians, you have three options:
* Seize a billion-dollar asset from its legal owner (If you think you can do that without a decade-long legal battle, you don't know billionaire landowners.)
* Spend a billion dollars of state money to buy it from its owner (As if Hawaii could afford that)
* Ask the Hawaiians to pay the billion dollars to buy the property (As if they had the cash).
This is a perfect illustration of why indigenous repatriation is a political and economic nightmare. The people who now hold the land did nothing illegal to acquire it: any crime was committed by people long dead, so it's difficult to justify seizure. The situation's even worse in Hawaii: while many Native Americans had their land seized by force, in the case of Hawaii most of the land was sold to wealthy caucasians by the legitimate Hawaiian monarch at the time, all totally legal (if not very smart). No question the overthrow of the monarchy was illegal, but does that justify forcibly seizing land that was legally purchased prior to the overthrow?
Lanai *was* a corporate farm for most of the 20th century.