The language in which books are written is generally intended to form an overall narrative. It'd be exhausting and confusing to read an entire book of pithy one-liners. It's hardly a shock that lines chosen at random fail to stick in the mind. That doesn't mean that books cannot have memorable sentences in them, just that sentences chosen utterly at random are unlikely to be on that list.
When I said "it" when discussing capital in the GP, I meant "Capital Goods", not capital itself. As in: "Save [capital (usually in the form of money)] until you can buy capital goods." Or "borrow [capital (usually in the form of money] to buy capital goods." Etc. While this is syntactically unclear, it should have been apparent from context.
Of course I don't think capital itself appears out of thin air. I don't know why you believed I thought that way.
Firstly, if you didn't mean to be offensive, perhaps you should have avoided directly insulting my intelligence and education.
I had a much longer rant planned, but then I realized you misunderstand the nature of my objection to the economic understanding of the BtC designers. (And, to be fair to you, I didn't mention it in my original post.) I have no problem with the idea of an electronic currency of fixed, limited, pre-determined, supply. While unsuited as a national currency, (there's a reason every single modern economy uses fiat currency; though some economies do it better than others) it can, nonetheless, be a very useful tool, and the idea is certainly a worthy experiment in technology and economics. I merely believe that the particular expansion curve chosen was a stupid one. I believe that it ramped up too quickly, leveled off too soon, and the long-term increase in the supply is too low. A better-chosen curve would have struck a better balance between staving off deflation and inflation. (It started too quickly, and then became deflationary/economic growth limiting.) They were too optimistic about the uptake of BtC's, and did absolutely nothing to account for any kind of significant long-term growth in their use after the "intro" phase was complete. This is why the value of BtC's has been so unstable and deflating so much.
Now, on to my (now) shorter rant:
While a large portion of economics is indeed a large pile of untested bullshit, the same could be said about any branch of science. Just as we do not seriously question classic Newtonian mechanics as a useful model for predicting the behavior of masses, nobody seriously doubts things like the fundamental relationship of Supply and Demand (used as a general model.) Conversely, there are many unproven branches of physics (i.e. String Theory) for which the evidence is little stronger than the abstract theories produced by the egg-headed economist of your choice. We CAN do economic experiments to test theories (such experiments are done all the time at the micro level, and are also done at the macro level by central banks, although the results of those experiments take much longer and the results aren't usually very clear-cut.)
I ignore divisibility for the simple reason that I do not argue (as many BitCoin skeptics do) that BitCoins are illiquid simply due to the relatively high value of 1BtC. I know that is incorrect.
I ignore velocity (which is certainly a legitimate means of expanding an economy without increasing the supply of currency the economy is denominated in) because BitCoins have given us no reason to believe that their velocity will be higher than any other currency, (and reasons to think it would be lower, namely the lack of a functioning credit market.) and there is an upper bound to how much of an increase is possible. As a side-note, since the supply curve has leveled off too quickly, and will continue to get even flatter, almost ANY economic growth (over the small value of the BtC expansion curve) will have to come through velocity increases... that rather limits the total size of the economy, and therefore BtC adoption. The ability to adjust the money supply based on the current and expected size of the economy is why every modern economy uses fiat currency, although, as earlier mentioned, some do it better than others.
I don't know if you are one of the people that believe this (I'd like to think you aren't), but large increases in the value of a currency are NOT a good sign if you want it to be a viable currency. Increases ARE good if you are investing in said currency. A currency is most useful when it is STABLE, and, barring that, reasonably predictable and not severely deflating. That is, if you want a credit market at all. (Inflation of a steady doubling per year could theoretically be baked into interest rates, you can't do that with a currency deflating by a similar proportion, like BtC's did last year.) And the current intra-day volatility of several percent make it utt
Hmmm... I don't see any fawning going on here at all. Anonymous has done some worthy things, but I don't remember anybody on Slashdot arguing that their DDoS attacks should be legal. That's not to say that they haven't had some worthy targets... but that is different from approval of their methods.
This would be the first time in a couple of years where I have seen complete and total unanimity in a Slashdot discussion with a non-trivial number of posts. (At least, posts I can view.)
And to confirm: Yes, this is an insanely stupid idea.
That would have required me mentioning an authority. I said that the designer had no understanding of economics. Not that he/she was ignorant of the writings of this or that particular set of economists or economic theory.
2) I didn't say deflation led to depression.
What I did say is that the use of BitCoins was going to be constrained by their inherently deflationary nature. As in, if acceptance of BitCoins rises, deflation will occur as demand increases. Expectation of that deflation encourages hoarding, which discourages their use, and therefore, acceptance. Geek Translation: BitCoins are stuck in a Deflation/Acceptance/Supply race condition.
3) Credit IS the lifeblood of modern economies.
Improvements in productivity, technology, agriculture, lifestyle, etc., all require access to capital. There are three ways to accrue capital: A) Save until you can buy it. While this sounds all wholesome and good, it makes, say, the expansion of a business, the research necessary to bring a new drug to market, or the purchase of an automobile required to transport yourself to a better job rather difficult. Puts you in kind of a Chicken and Egg problem without credit. (I can't make money until I buy/build X, but I can't buy/build X until I have money.) Therefore capital spending of all kinds would be reduced drastically. B) Borrow it. Bonds, banks, your buddy down the street, whatever. C) Acquire investors. Wow, is that expensive. Even the most brain-addled MBA can explain that selling a portion of your business is usually the most expensive way to raise money. There's a reason that companies rarely execute stock offerings past their IPO... You only sell stock to either execute an IPO (so your other investors can bail) or to raise money you cannot raise by borrowing it.
Just because a bunch of bankers lent out more money than they should have to unworthy borrowers at unsustainable rates does not mean credit is a bad thing.
BitCoins aren't really a scam. They are a perfectly valid currency, by any definition of the word. Few currencies these days are backed by anything, so that's not much of a criteria. And the supply of BitCoins is very tightly controlled; it's just done with an algorithm instead of a central bank.
However, the expansion curve was designed by somebody with utterly no understanding of economics, and the built-in deflation inherent that would come with expansion in BitCoin use guarantees they'll never become widespread for mainstream transactions because of widespread volatility in the exchange rate vs. stuff you actually want to buy. (You'd have to be utterly nucking futs to take out a loan in BitCoins... this kind of prevents a credit market. And credit is the lifeblood of any modern economy.) The volatility is important because the acceptance of BitCoins is, and will remain, too low, so knowing what kind of value you can get for your bitcoins in the real-world is not really possible.
I think BitCoins were poorly designed (from an economic standpoint), and will never be a serious form of payment for anyone NOT wanting to engage in currency speculation on the volatile rate, but for gambling, they totally make sense. That is, as long as they realize that their BitCoin exchange rate will be an additional element of their bet.
The only people that are going to care about uncompressed size are those that make movies and movie theaters (I'm assuming theaters use uncompressed files, but I honestly don't know.) And a move-maker or theater won't have any problem with it; a simple drive array is just fine to cope with the bandwidth demands.
Just as few (any?) consumers ever get their hands on uncompressed 1080p, so it will be with 4K.
Unless I did the math wrong, it's only triple the size... hardly an insurmountable problem; not even an order of magnitude.
Outright theft from shareholders is a crime. But having other considerations besides profit in mind is not. It may make you a poor director. It may make you unlikely to be nominated for another term. It may get you sued. But it won't get you put in prison, unless you commit an actual crime related to the breach (insider trading, insider dealing, etc.)
"They", in this case, refers specifically to AIG, not banks in general. AIG wasn't a bank, it was an insurance company. It wasn't a part of the general program where the Fed forced banks to borrow money; it was a separate bailout that occurred prior to the bank forced-capitalization program.
AIG, was in a gigantic liquidity crisis and would have gone bankrupt in a couple of days due to inability to borrow money to pay the influx of claims from the Bear Stearns collapse, along with paying out on the default protection insurance they had written on $hitty mortgages. Nobody would lend money to them except for the feds.
The guy pushing for the suit, Hank Greenberg, wasn't in charge of AIG at the time of the bailout. He used to run AIG, and has a less-than-sterling reputation, but the shenanigans that caused AIG's collapse did not occur on his watch.
All that said, this is a steaming pile of bullshit. The alternative to the govt. bailout (now shown to have been a REALLY good idea, given how it's made money and prevented the next Great Depression) instant bankruptcy where the shareholders would have been left with 0%, instead of the 20% of the company they ended up with.
When you say "Dangerous Heavy Metals", I assume you are referring to the mercury used in CFLs. Well, it would probably be good for you to know that if you consider the proportion of the nation's electricity generated using coal, an incandescent bulb is responsible for the injection of far more mercury into the atmosphere than is contained in a CFL tube.
Internal parts aren't all there is to heavy metals.
Law firms aren't allowed to invent fictitious plaintiffs (or commit identity theft) in order to initiate lawsuits. (And there are very strict rules on recruiting named plaintiffs for class actions.) It may not be a fraud against the defendants (though probably is), but it can still be a fraud against the courts; that's completely separate from the actual merits (or lack thereof) of the case. Fraud against the court is something a lawyer does; normal fraud is something defendants get accused of doing.
The penalty for fraud against the court starts with monetary sanctions (in addition to getting your case dismissed), and can end with a recommendation for disbarment. (I don't know if a judge can impose jail time without a DA involved (like with contempt of court)... I doubt it.)
Did it occur to you that Thy/Thou, Shall/Shalt are archaic forms of usage, (well, "shall", only when used concurrently with "shalt") and therefore the fact that the usage is not literally correct is rather irrelevant? The point of the exercise "I'm going to humorously vaguely imitate the 10 commandments, as expressed in most English bibles" was met and it really doesn't matter that it's usage was not in keeping with rules that existed when those words were in common usage?
It's like going to a Ren Faire, and complaining that while the costumes are really good, they should have recruited more short people that look growth stunted, introduced more filth and stench and made more performers wear makeup imitating smallpox scarring. Reminding spectators that most people lived in squalor isn't the point of a Ren Faire... and adding archaic English words to a phrase isn't intended to be a treatise on centuries-old grammar.
BTW, News Flash: The "average English speaking individual" is, in fact, no longer concerned with split infinitives or split prepositions. As you pointed out, neither "ungrammatical" construct detracts from clarity, readability, or net value to communication, so modern speakers pretty much don't even notice them and/or use them themselves. Thou shan't call people on "grammatical errors" to annoyingly prove your loquacious facility with English usage whilst not engaged in an actual Trivia competition; some might consider it a bridge too far.
MPC was silly marketing gimmick, just like the more modern "Windows Vista Ready"; the specifications were so puny that almost every machine on the home market at the time met them. "Everyone's a Winner!" After all, a spec introduced by the PC industry is not going to be set to hurt anyone's feelings, or screw around with carefully-selected price-points.
I suppose there existed some machines that didn't meet the spec, but the target market for those was people so technically ignorant (i.e. the sort of crap advertised on late-night TV: Operators Are Standing By), they'd be surprised that they can't play CD's without a CD-ROM drive...
The purpose of MPC was more to remind people that these sort of things could be done with a PC and encourage them to purchase a PC; it was not, and did not, actually save people from buying an under-specc'd machine.
Companies want you to friend/fan their facebook because it's a way of continually feeding you information. Before facebook this would have been done through an e-mail list signup on the website... Instead of spamming you in one place, you get spammed in another; it's a distinction without a difference.
But that doesn't mean that companies do not also use their websites extensively and certainly facebook is no replacement at all for a dedicated company website, and they serve totally different purposes.
And, given how useful and accurate Google (or Bing, if that's your thing) is, there's no need to bother telling people what your website address is; Google knows it already and can tell anybody that wants it.
Yeah, there totally isn't any way to do anything on the internet without Facebook, Google, Apple, Microsoft, etc.
Except for: - Discussion forums, which exist for pretty much every single interest group imaginable - Places to post images - A whole spectrum of places to buy stuff, most of which AREN'T Amazon - Millions of blogs about every conceivable topic and viewpoint - Websites by companies providing information about what they sell - A way to interact with the government - Online banking - Research - A whole lot of stuff neither I, nor anybody else, has even thought up yet
And you can do all of those things without touching a single service or product sold by one of the big giants.
In conclusion... what on earth is he talking about?
If you read that Wikipedia table closer, you'll find that it directly, completely, utterly, contridicts that Nationmaster link you posted. The wikipedia table shows the US as having a higher murder rate than any other 1st-world western country. The "most murderous" 1st-World western country after the US is Finland, with a muder rate just a hair over half the US rate.
Perhaps that Nationmaster table isn't the "37 top murder countries"... instead it is the 37 they felt like posting data from.
Perhaps you should pay at least some tiny amount of attention before posting selectively-chosen statistics?
I think a lot of the confusion comes from calling this a "market". In a market you place "bets" on pork bellies, the S&P 500, the future value of the yen, whatever. Placing bets on the outcome of an indeterminate event (as opposed to the future price of an asset) is simple gambling, pure and simple.
I have no problem with gambling, but stop trying to pretend it's something different by calling it a "prediction market." You aren't buying or selling anything, you are gambling. Call a spade a spade.
That's a recipe for a traditional baguette. If you want your bread to not go stale in 12 hours or so, you'll want to add some fat (Olive Oil, Vegetable Oil, butter, lard, whatever) Sometimes it's nice to not to have to bake bread Every Single Day if you want to keep it on hand.
And why is "fresh yeast" better? Unless you want the yeasty taste of a sourdough (which is certainly no bad thing), instant, active dry, or cake-yeast is just fine. (I use vacuum-packed SAF-Instant purchased a pound at the time... keeps in the freezer as long as I need it to.)
On the whole, I agree with you. College is not a trade school. However, with the ready availability of Really Good online coursework, message forums, and used textbooks, one can get pretty much an entire undergraduate education, including all that really useful theoretical work, for little to no cost, besides time and an Internet connection. It might take longer, and you are going to have to rely on strangers on the internet to get questions answered, but I don't see the end result being that much different.
Graduate school, with the extensive interaction with professors, is another matter entirely..
I swear, these articles come out Every Freaking Year. Without fail.
Look: Yes, it is possible for a person to be crazily successful and have little to no formal education. Our history is replete with such stories. But in all likelihood, You Are Not One Of Those People.
A college degree is by no means a guarantee of ability, and the lack of a degree does not indicate a lack of ability. But study after study has shown (at least in the U.S) that degree holders, on average, make more money, are more likely to be employed, are more able to weather downturns, and have a higher net worth than those with less education.
An individual is not a statistic, but to fight against statistics is a gamble.
I'm not saying it's not an interesting, non-intuitive way of shelving goods. (At least its non-intuitive if you don't design DC's for a living) What I am saying is that it's not "the true key to Amazon's long-term success" like the summary stated. It wouldn't be an exaggeration to state that if Amazon had decided to organize their goods like a library, they'd have gone bankrupt a VERY long time ago. Pretty much EVERY retail-order DC of any size shelves goods this way, and has done so for quite some time; Amazon certainly wasn't the first.
What is a real shame is that Amazon HAS done very innovative and unique stuff with order assembly (bringing the items together in a multi-item order) in their warehouses, yet the article focused solely on the one thing that is utterly non-unique to Amazon.
Slashdot Mirror
The language in which books are written is generally intended to form an overall narrative. It'd be exhausting and confusing to read an entire book of pithy one-liners. It's hardly a shock that lines chosen at random fail to stick in the mind. That doesn't mean that books cannot have memorable sentences in them, just that sentences chosen utterly at random are unlikely to be on that list.
When I said "it" when discussing capital in the GP, I meant "Capital Goods", not capital itself. As in: "Save [capital (usually in the form of money)] until you can buy capital goods." Or "borrow [capital (usually in the form of money] to buy capital goods." Etc. While this is syntactically unclear, it should have been apparent from context.
Of course I don't think capital itself appears out of thin air. I don't know why you believed I thought that way.
Firstly, if you didn't mean to be offensive, perhaps you should have avoided directly insulting my intelligence and education.
I had a much longer rant planned, but then I realized you misunderstand the nature of my objection to the economic understanding of the BtC designers. (And, to be fair to you, I didn't mention it in my original post.) I have no problem with the idea of an electronic currency of fixed, limited, pre-determined, supply. While unsuited as a national currency, (there's a reason every single modern economy uses fiat currency; though some economies do it better than others) it can, nonetheless, be a very useful tool, and the idea is certainly a worthy experiment in technology and economics. I merely believe that the particular expansion curve chosen was a stupid one. I believe that it ramped up too quickly, leveled off too soon, and the long-term increase in the supply is too low. A better-chosen curve would have struck a better balance between staving off deflation and inflation. (It started too quickly, and then became deflationary/economic growth limiting.) They were too optimistic about the uptake of BtC's, and did absolutely nothing to account for any kind of significant long-term growth in their use after the "intro" phase was complete. This is why the value of BtC's has been so unstable and deflating so much.
Now, on to my (now) shorter rant:
While a large portion of economics is indeed a large pile of untested bullshit, the same could be said about any branch of science. Just as we do not seriously question classic Newtonian mechanics as a useful model for predicting the behavior of masses, nobody seriously doubts things like the fundamental relationship of Supply and Demand (used as a general model.) Conversely, there are many unproven branches of physics (i.e. String Theory) for which the evidence is little stronger than the abstract theories produced by the egg-headed economist of your choice. We CAN do economic experiments to test theories (such experiments are done all the time at the micro level, and are also done at the macro level by central banks, although the results of those experiments take much longer and the results aren't usually very clear-cut.)
I ignore divisibility for the simple reason that I do not argue (as many BitCoin skeptics do) that BitCoins are illiquid simply due to the relatively high value of 1BtC. I know that is incorrect.
I ignore velocity (which is certainly a legitimate means of expanding an economy without increasing the supply of currency the economy is denominated in) because BitCoins have given us no reason to believe that their velocity will be higher than any other currency, (and reasons to think it would be lower, namely the lack of a functioning credit market.) and there is an upper bound to how much of an increase is possible. As a side-note, since the supply curve has leveled off too quickly, and will continue to get even flatter, almost ANY economic growth (over the small value of the BtC expansion curve) will have to come through velocity increases... that rather limits the total size of the economy, and therefore BtC adoption. The ability to adjust the money supply based on the current and expected size of the economy is why every modern economy uses fiat currency, although, as earlier mentioned, some do it better than others.
I don't know if you are one of the people that believe this (I'd like to think you aren't), but large increases in the value of a currency are NOT a good sign if you want it to be a viable currency. Increases ARE good if you are investing in said currency. A currency is most useful when it is STABLE, and, barring that, reasonably predictable and not severely deflating. That is, if you want a credit market at all. (Inflation of a steady doubling per year could theoretically be baked into interest rates, you can't do that with a currency deflating by a similar proportion, like BtC's did last year.) And the current intra-day volatility of several percent make it utt
Hmmm... I don't see any fawning going on here at all. Anonymous has done some worthy things, but I don't remember anybody on Slashdot arguing that their DDoS attacks should be legal. That's not to say that they haven't had some worthy targets... but that is different from approval of their methods.
This would be the first time in a couple of years where I have seen complete and total unanimity in a Slashdot discussion with a non-trivial number of posts. (At least, posts I can view.)
And to confirm: Yes, this is an insanely stupid idea.
I meant to type: "I didn't say Deflation led to Depression"
Damn Slashdot's lack of an edit button!
1) I didn't appeal to authority.
That would have required me mentioning an authority. I said that the designer had no understanding of economics. Not that he/she was ignorant of the writings of this or that particular set of economists or economic theory.
2) I didn't say deflation led to depression.
What I did say is that the use of BitCoins was going to be constrained by their inherently deflationary nature. As in, if acceptance of BitCoins rises, deflation will occur as demand increases. Expectation of that deflation encourages hoarding, which discourages their use, and therefore, acceptance. Geek Translation: BitCoins are stuck in a Deflation/Acceptance/Supply race condition.
3) Credit IS the lifeblood of modern economies.
Improvements in productivity, technology, agriculture, lifestyle, etc., all require access to capital. There are three ways to accrue capital:
A) Save until you can buy it. While this sounds all wholesome and good, it makes, say, the expansion of a business, the research necessary to bring a new drug to market, or the purchase of an automobile required to transport yourself to a better job rather difficult. Puts you in kind of a Chicken and Egg problem without credit. (I can't make money until I buy/build X, but I can't buy/build X until I have money.) Therefore capital spending of all kinds would be reduced drastically.
B) Borrow it. Bonds, banks, your buddy down the street, whatever.
C) Acquire investors. Wow, is that expensive. Even the most brain-addled MBA can explain that selling a portion of your business is usually the most expensive way to raise money. There's a reason that companies rarely execute stock offerings past their IPO... You only sell stock to either execute an IPO (so your other investors can bail) or to raise money you cannot raise by borrowing it.
Just because a bunch of bankers lent out more money than they should have to unworthy borrowers at unsustainable rates does not mean credit is a bad thing.
BitCoins aren't really a scam. They are a perfectly valid currency, by any definition of the word. Few currencies these days are backed by anything, so that's not much of a criteria. And the supply of BitCoins is very tightly controlled; it's just done with an algorithm instead of a central bank.
However, the expansion curve was designed by somebody with utterly no understanding of economics, and the built-in deflation inherent that would come with expansion in BitCoin use guarantees they'll never become widespread for mainstream transactions because of widespread volatility in the exchange rate vs. stuff you actually want to buy. (You'd have to be utterly nucking futs to take out a loan in BitCoins... this kind of prevents a credit market. And credit is the lifeblood of any modern economy.) The volatility is important because the acceptance of BitCoins is, and will remain, too low, so knowing what kind of value you can get for your bitcoins in the real-world is not really possible.
I think BitCoins were poorly designed (from an economic standpoint), and will never be a serious form of payment for anyone NOT wanting to engage in currency speculation on the volatile rate, but for gambling, they totally make sense. That is, as long as they realize that their BitCoin exchange rate will be an additional element of their bet.
The only people that are going to care about uncompressed size are those that make movies and movie theaters (I'm assuming theaters use uncompressed files, but I honestly don't know.) And a move-maker or theater won't have any problem with it; a simple drive array is just fine to cope with the bandwidth demands.
Just as few (any?) consumers ever get their hands on uncompressed 1080p, so it will be with 4K.
Unless I did the math wrong, it's only triple the size... hardly an insurmountable problem; not even an order of magnitude.
Outright theft from shareholders is a crime. But having other considerations besides profit in mind is not. It may make you a poor director. It may make you unlikely to be nominated for another term. It may get you sued. But it won't get you put in prison, unless you commit an actual crime related to the breach (insider trading, insider dealing, etc.)
"They", in this case, refers specifically to AIG, not banks in general. AIG wasn't a bank, it was an insurance company. It wasn't a part of the general program where the Fed forced banks to borrow money; it was a separate bailout that occurred prior to the bank forced-capitalization program.
AIG, was in a gigantic liquidity crisis and would have gone bankrupt in a couple of days due to inability to borrow money to pay the influx of claims from the Bear Stearns collapse, along with paying out on the default protection insurance they had written on $hitty mortgages. Nobody would lend money to them except for the feds.
The guy pushing for the suit, Hank Greenberg, wasn't in charge of AIG at the time of the bailout. He used to run AIG, and has a less-than-sterling reputation, but the shenanigans that caused AIG's collapse did not occur on his watch.
All that said, this is a steaming pile of bullshit. The alternative to the govt. bailout (now shown to have been a REALLY good idea, given how it's made money and prevented the next Great Depression) instant bankruptcy where the shareholders would have been left with 0%, instead of the 20% of the company they ended up with.
When you say "Dangerous Heavy Metals", I assume you are referring to the mercury used in CFLs. Well, it would probably be good for you to know that if you consider the proportion of the nation's electricity generated using coal, an incandescent bulb is responsible for the injection of far more mercury into the atmosphere than is contained in a CFL tube.
Internal parts aren't all there is to heavy metals.
Law firms aren't allowed to invent fictitious plaintiffs (or commit identity theft) in order to initiate lawsuits. (And there are very strict rules on recruiting named plaintiffs for class actions.) It may not be a fraud against the defendants (though probably is), but it can still be a fraud against the courts; that's completely separate from the actual merits (or lack thereof) of the case. Fraud against the court is something a lawyer does; normal fraud is something defendants get accused of doing.
The penalty for fraud against the court starts with monetary sanctions (in addition to getting your case dismissed), and can end with a recommendation for disbarment. (I don't know if a judge can impose jail time without a DA involved (like with contempt of court)... I doubt it.)
Did it occur to you that Thy/Thou, Shall/Shalt are archaic forms of usage, (well, "shall", only when used concurrently with "shalt") and therefore the fact that the usage is not literally correct is rather irrelevant? The point of the exercise "I'm going to humorously vaguely imitate the 10 commandments, as expressed in most English bibles" was met and it really doesn't matter that it's usage was not in keeping with rules that existed when those words were in common usage?
It's like going to a Ren Faire, and complaining that while the costumes are really good, they should have recruited more short people that look growth stunted, introduced more filth and stench and made more performers wear makeup imitating smallpox scarring. Reminding spectators that most people lived in squalor isn't the point of a Ren Faire... and adding archaic English words to a phrase isn't intended to be a treatise on centuries-old grammar.
BTW, News Flash: The "average English speaking individual" is, in fact, no longer concerned with split infinitives or split prepositions. As you pointed out, neither "ungrammatical" construct detracts from clarity, readability, or net value to communication, so modern speakers pretty much don't even notice them and/or use them themselves. Thou shan't call people on "grammatical errors" to annoyingly prove your loquacious facility with English usage whilst not engaged in an actual Trivia competition; some might consider it a bridge too far.
MPC was silly marketing gimmick, just like the more modern "Windows Vista Ready"; the specifications were so puny that almost every machine on the home market at the time met them. "Everyone's a Winner!" After all, a spec introduced by the PC industry is not going to be set to hurt anyone's feelings, or screw around with carefully-selected price-points.
I suppose there existed some machines that didn't meet the spec, but the target market for those was people so technically ignorant (i.e. the sort of crap advertised on late-night TV: Operators Are Standing By), they'd be surprised that they can't play CD's without a CD-ROM drive...
The purpose of MPC was more to remind people that these sort of things could be done with a PC and encourage them to purchase a PC; it was not, and did not, actually save people from buying an under-specc'd machine.
Companies want you to friend/fan their facebook because it's a way of continually feeding you information. Before facebook this would have been done through an e-mail list signup on the website... Instead of spamming you in one place, you get spammed in another; it's a distinction without a difference.
But that doesn't mean that companies do not also use their websites extensively and certainly facebook is no replacement at all for a dedicated company website, and they serve totally different purposes.
And, given how useful and accurate Google (or Bing, if that's your thing) is, there's no need to bother telling people what your website address is; Google knows it already and can tell anybody that wants it.
Yeah, there totally isn't any way to do anything on the internet without Facebook, Google, Apple, Microsoft, etc.
Except for:
- Discussion forums, which exist for pretty much every single interest group imaginable
- Places to post images
- A whole spectrum of places to buy stuff, most of which AREN'T Amazon
- Millions of blogs about every conceivable topic and viewpoint
- Websites by companies providing information about what they sell
- A way to interact with the government
- Online banking
- Research
- A whole lot of stuff neither I, nor anybody else, has even thought up yet
And you can do all of those things without touching a single service or product sold by one of the big giants.
In conclusion... what on earth is he talking about?
If you read that Wikipedia table closer, you'll find that it directly, completely, utterly, contridicts that Nationmaster link you posted. The wikipedia table shows the US as having a higher murder rate than any other 1st-world western country. The "most murderous" 1st-World western country after the US is Finland, with a muder rate just a hair over half the US rate.
Perhaps that Nationmaster table isn't the "37 top murder countries"... instead it is the 37 they felt like posting data from.
Perhaps you should pay at least some tiny amount of attention before posting selectively-chosen statistics?
I think a lot of the confusion comes from calling this a "market". In a market you place "bets" on pork bellies, the S&P 500, the future value of the yen, whatever. Placing bets on the outcome of an indeterminate event (as opposed to the future price of an asset) is simple gambling, pure and simple.
I have no problem with gambling, but stop trying to pretend it's something different by calling it a "prediction market." You aren't buying or selling anything, you are gambling. Call a spade a spade.
That's a recipe for a traditional baguette. If you want your bread to not go stale in 12 hours or so, you'll want to add some fat (Olive Oil, Vegetable Oil, butter, lard, whatever) Sometimes it's nice to not to have to bake bread Every Single Day if you want to keep it on hand.
And why is "fresh yeast" better? Unless you want the yeasty taste of a sourdough (which is certainly no bad thing), instant, active dry, or cake-yeast is just fine. (I use vacuum-packed SAF-Instant purchased a pound at the time... keeps in the freezer as long as I need it to.)
On the whole, I agree with you. College is not a trade school. However, with the ready availability of Really Good online coursework, message forums, and used textbooks, one can get pretty much an entire undergraduate education, including all that really useful theoretical work, for little to no cost, besides time and an Internet connection. It might take longer, and you are going to have to rely on strangers on the internet to get questions answered, but I don't see the end result being that much different.
Graduate school, with the extensive interaction with professors, is another matter entirely..
I swear, these articles come out Every Freaking Year. Without fail.
Look: Yes, it is possible for a person to be crazily successful and have little to no formal education. Our history is replete with such stories. But in all likelihood, You Are Not One Of Those People.
A college degree is by no means a guarantee of ability, and the lack of a degree does not indicate a lack of ability. But study after study has shown (at least in the U.S) that degree holders, on average, make more money, are more likely to be employed, are more able to weather downturns, and have a higher net worth than those with less education.
An individual is not a statistic, but to fight against statistics is a gamble.
I'm not saying it's not an interesting, non-intuitive way of shelving goods. (At least its non-intuitive if you don't design DC's for a living) What I am saying is that it's not "the true key to Amazon's long-term success" like the summary stated. It wouldn't be an exaggeration to state that if Amazon had decided to organize their goods like a library, they'd have gone bankrupt a VERY long time ago. Pretty much EVERY retail-order DC of any size shelves goods this way, and has done so for quite some time; Amazon certainly wasn't the first.
What is a real shame is that Amazon HAS done very innovative and unique stuff with order assembly (bringing the items together in a multi-item order) in their warehouses, yet the article focused solely on the one thing that is utterly non-unique to Amazon.