Another factor in all this, that I'm not positive the upper class really understands: If the middle class goes completely under, it takes the upper class with them, because the upper class's investment income depends ultimately on the consumer spending of everyone else.
Not sure this is true. The rich lend money to the government, which is charged with protecting the poor, and so must continue spending and borrowing. While they don't do as well in bad times, they do better RELATIVELY than the poor and middle class, as evinced by the last 5 years. This is the only measure that counts in the end.
Of course, the rich win both when times are good and when times are bad. They get rich faster when the middle class is getting richer too, but relatively, when the tide is lifting all boats, they are slowly losing their advantage. So, preventing that sort of thing is 'good' for them in the long run.
My (unasked for) view is that money is free speech. However, the AMOUNT of money is the VOLUME of free speech. So, everybody should be able to have free speech, as described by the first amendment. However, nobody should be able to drown out the free speech of others. So, the ability to donate should never be impeded, but the AMOUNT of money donated should be strictly controlled.
Sadly, the Supreme Court does not ask for my opinion.
We should just go back to hangings. It works for killing Nazis and war criminals.
Why not try burning at the stake? Why hide the barbarism? We should revel in it, put it on TV, let everybody know what our government is doing on their behalf. History has a few more we could try; why not crucifiction? That would undoubtedly act as a deterrent. Drawing and quartering? The most inventive I've heard of is the Blood Eagle.
Just putting people to sleep, like a beloved pet, seems to obscure the true horror.
The main argument I have against execution, however, is that a certain percentage of the executed are subsequently exonerated. Keeping them in jail for life, rather than on 'death row', is far cheaper (due to the extra expense of defending against the lawsuits, and the added security. Not to mention the use of rare drugs...), and has the added benefit of allowing these people who were wrongly convicted to be released when their innocence is determined. We can also use them as slaves while in jail.
PS I've never understood the vegetarian quip that more people would be vegetarians if they saw and/or participated in the process of butchering. Vegetarianism is a rather new fad, and until relatively recently most people WERE pretty involved in the butchering process and there was no mass avoidance of meat eating.
We are an aging society. The autonomous car phenomena has arrived just in time for that eventuality. The deaths and destruction due to elders driving past the time they are safe will be mostly eliminated by autonomous cars, either personally owned or taxis. I can't wait.
If you pick a subject like "Shakespeare" to contribute to, you'll get firehosed out of the building, because there are LOTS of experts on that topic. If you pick a subject like "The Ternary Numeral System" (like I did), which was contributed by a guy who didn't really have much feel for technical writing, nobody bothers you when you fix things up, add things, etc. They may come back and rewrite what you write, but you can contribute.
Wikipedia should be sponsored by tax dollars. It is clearly a global resource with a huge user base, and amazing potential. If there was some kind of token payment for hits to contributors, or for translators, they would have no problem getting the best and brightest to contribute and translate articles.
The theory requires no outside, God-like, observer, nor does it propose one. The point is that time is measured by "events" and "events" occur when the quantum states of two systems become entangled, but only to the systems that became entangled. To an "observer" that has not become entangled, a system is static and no event has occurred.
In the Copenhagen interpretation, one would say that according to the entangled observer the "wavefunction has collapsed" whereas according to the unentangled observer, it hasn't.
How can an observer know anything about it if he doesn't observe it, and thus become entangled?
So do most of the countries higher on that list (Zimbabwe, Bosnia, Libya, etc). That's because most countries in the world have significantly lower standard of living than the west. On the other hand, Australia, Japan and Singapore all spend a smaller percentage than the US, and none of their militaries can be considered "US-supported" unless you water-down that definition into meanginlessness. In fact, New Zealand, which does have almost no military, and relies almost exclusively on treaties for their defence, spends more than the US.
All that list goes to show is that government spending doesn't correlate very well with standard of living.
Sort by "Public debt as % of GDP". That is the real list. Japan and Singapore are both higher (214%, 111%) than the US at 73.6%. If you use common sense when scanning the list, you see that most of the European nations are above us, and most of the developing world is below us. If you cherry pick, you miss that trend.
Regarding the debt, we are never in a debt crisis unless there is a Democrat in the white house. Then, suddenly, there appears to be a Debt crisis. "We are SPENDING our CHILDREN's MONEY! TRILLIONS of DOLLARS!". Sigh.
Debt is higher than it has been in a while, due mostly to the Financial Meltdown in 2008-2009. However, the deficit has gone down every year since Bush's last deficit of $1.4T, meaning we are borrowing less and less money. It is expected to be 68% of the Bush figure in 2013, and less than 1/2 of that in 2015. Meanwhile, GDP continues to increase every year.
The debt is bad yes. Other countries have bad debt too. The debt needs to be controlled. Risking default is not a way to control the debt, but amplify it.
US debt is 35th in a list of countries if you use Debt/GDP instead of absolute debt. It should be paid attention to, but there is really no need to panic. Projections of debt (by CBO) over the next 10 years are underwhelming. We are simply not in a crisis, at least because of debt.
The crisis is that we seem to be unable to get congress to do its job. That scares me.
Nothing else, even a shutdown or default is undermining the dollar worse than running $1+ trillion deficits.
And if we don't stop, the government shutdown will eventually become PERMANENT. How much will that cost the economy folks.
Oh, and might I add, that the Democrats are punks because all they do is kick the bucket down past the next election.
And the Republicans are punks because all they did was kick the bucket down past the next election?
Regarding the $17 Trillion in Debt, if you compare the US economy to other advanced nations by using Debt/GDP, we are 35th on a list, after Germany, Japan, Singapore, etc (Sort by public debt as % of GDP.) It is hardly a crisis. It is a way to scare people who can't add, which seems to be much of the Republican base.
Also, the can was only kicked into the next year, BEFORE the elections. So, we may see this Ted Cruz fundraiser held again. He is going on talk shows bragging about how he is doing what the american people want. Sigh. $24 billion dollars.It would be much cheaper to pay the republicans in congress a million dollars each to STFU.
I think the really annoying part of the recent crisis was where the House was actually willing to vote for the budget with no attempts to muck around with Obamacare, and it was solely about procedural rules being used to prevent this from happening by not bringing up this vote (and actively blocking the attempts of other people to bring it up - e.g. that amendment in House rules where they removed the ability of any member to call the vote when a bill runs into a deadlock).
Actually, it was Speaker Boehner's desire to keep his job as speaker. That was really the only reason it did not go to vote. Early on, he said heh would eventually bring it up for vote, he was just trying to bluff with a hand full of nothing and a mirror behind him.
I'm in the category of "fucking poor" and the lowest insurance quote I got from that awful website is 2.11x higher than what I'm paying now. So...probably nobody. I heard pregnant immigrant minority ex-convicts might get a bit of a savings though. I wish I was a pregnant immigrant minority ex-convict. They get all the breaks!
I don't know where you live, but where I live (california) Obamacare is substantially less than private insurance, particularly if you qualify for subsidies. The policies are much better too. Look at the lifetime cap on your current policy, and consider that I just had $750,000 dollars worth of surgery in 2012. Would your insurance have paid for that? Would you need to mortgage or sell your house, or declare bankruptcy to have it done? With Obamacare, there is no lifetime cap, and the yearly out of pocket caps are like $7,000. Also, after the surgery, when your current insurance company dropped you, would you be able to pay for follow up visits, chemotherapy, blood tests, etc?
How much does having your citizens not being able to afford medical care cost the economy?
Has anyone obtained affordable health care from Obamacare?
I was paying $1300 a month for COBRA. With Obamacare, it is $800. However, without Obamacare, I would NOT BE ABLE TO BUY INSURANCE when my cobra expires. So, I guess you could say it is a good deal for me.
How much does having your citizens not being able to afford medical care cost the economy?
The leading cause of Bankruptcy in the US is medical costs. The number of people who die in the US every year because they simply can't afford medical treatment is 45,000 (in 2009, more now I suspect). Older Americans can't start small businesses because they would lose their healthcare, which is typically provided by their job.
Under Bush, America was like a man who broke into his next door neighbor's house, killed the dad, and replaced him with another dad because he didn't like what the children were doing in the neighborhood.
Under Obama, America is like a man whose dog was run over, so he sits on a hill with a sniper rifle, shooting at cars driving by that might hit his new dog.
35% of our income goes to war.. American's are not so weird.. We are tired of frivolous spending and policing the world. We already pay a ton in taxes we don't need to pay 10% more because our federal government can't manage a budget. If they were a business they'd have gone belly up a long freaking time ago.
Everybody gets this wrong. A government is NOT a business. When we try to treat it as a business, we end up doing stupid things like trying to privatize social security.
The government is an organization that does the things business can't or won't do. It also protects us from these businesses, who would grind us up into soylent green if they were allowed to (and it made them a profit.)
I'm jealous... many a cow I've seen has a field for it's use... even sometimes a barn where they get to sleep & eat... curse my employer making me buy/rent my own place... not to mention not providing a bed!
Well, you could always sleep under your desk. I've seen that done, more than once.
Not once have I ever needed to write a sorting function or try to remember the differences in implementation of the different sort algorithms. It just isn't important.
However, you know the difference between a bubble sort and a quick sort, right? You don't need to be able to code them to understand when they might be useful, and when to apply them. That is the sort of knowledge that is important to have.
Being able to reproduce a qsort in C during an interview isn't required, I think. Knowing where to use it, how to set up the data structures: that is the skill I want people to have for a C programming job.
Short story. I used to work with a woman who was a fairly high paid programmer. She had a masters degree in CS from some university in Belgium. Unfortunately, she did not understand hash tables, their use, or the benefits. She did every programming job we gave her using linked lists. These lists were often thousands of elements long, and had short, unique text labels. There was a hash table facility built into the system library. We patiently helped her move her linked lists into using the hash table facility, but she persisted in using those damned linked lists on everything new. When you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Everybody who gets out of school in CS should understand the basics.
I'd be interested to know what line of work you do, programming wise. My experience tells me that a lot of programming that is being done is meant to be powerful and meant to be built quickly. Running quickly and with low tolerance for faults is a little less important because very few things are mission critical. While anathema to the academic, it demands a certain skill set, which is the ability to very quickly assimilate new arbitrary knowledge about libraries, software, and code, that the programmer hasn't seen before. The result is a fragile sort of knowledge that often lacks formality and granularity but is sufficient enough to accomplish a task very quickly.
This is actually quite interesting. I suspect that the requirement to build code that is maintainable is currently less important than being able to get something out there quickly. In my experience, that leads to programmers who copy code around the source base; who do 'micro fixes' rather than larger fixes that might lower overall costs; that write giant routines that work well but don't factor well; things like that. I'm no longer a programmer, but I remember when that sort of code was frowned upon. No longer; the important thing is to do it quickly, get it running, because the technology is changing such that you'll probably throw the whole thing out in a year or two. Why waste time on elegance when it is throw away? Everything is a demo these days.
Einstein was a musician for most of his life. That accounts for the increased thickness of the corpus callosum. Not sure about the size argument. Neanderthals had larger brains than we do.
The old joke: How do you tell the difference between an introverted programmer and an extroverted programmer? An introverted programmer looks at his shoes when he talks to you. An extroverted programmer looks at YOUR shoes when he talks to you.
Slashdot Mirror
And anybody who points it out gets modded down to 0. Sigh.
Another factor in all this, that I'm not positive the upper class really understands: If the middle class goes completely under, it takes the upper class with them, because the upper class's investment income depends ultimately on the consumer spending of everyone else.
Not sure this is true. The rich lend money to the government, which is charged with protecting the poor, and so must continue spending and borrowing. While they don't do as well in bad times, they do better RELATIVELY than the poor and middle class, as evinced by the last 5 years. This is the only measure that counts in the end.
Of course, the rich win both when times are good and when times are bad. They get rich faster when the middle class is getting richer too, but relatively, when the tide is lifting all boats, they are slowly losing their advantage. So, preventing that sort of thing is 'good' for them in the long run.
My (unasked for) view is that money is free speech. However, the AMOUNT of money is the VOLUME of free speech. So, everybody should be able to have free speech, as described by the first amendment. However, nobody should be able to drown out the free speech of others. So, the ability to donate should never be impeded, but the AMOUNT of money donated should be strictly controlled.
Sadly, the Supreme Court does not ask for my opinion.
We should just go back to hangings. It works for killing Nazis and war criminals.
Why not try burning at the stake? Why hide the barbarism? We should revel in it, put it on TV, let everybody know what our government is doing on their behalf. History has a few more we could try; why not crucifiction? That would undoubtedly act as a deterrent. Drawing and quartering? The most inventive I've heard of is the Blood Eagle.
Just putting people to sleep, like a beloved pet, seems to obscure the true horror.
The main argument I have against execution, however, is that a certain percentage of the executed are subsequently exonerated. Keeping them in jail for life, rather than on 'death row', is far cheaper (due to the extra expense of defending against the lawsuits, and the added security. Not to mention the use of rare drugs...), and has the added benefit of allowing these people who were wrongly convicted to be released when their innocence is determined. We can also use them as slaves while in jail.
PS I've never understood the vegetarian quip that more people would be vegetarians if they saw and/or participated in the process of butchering. Vegetarianism is a rather new fad, and until relatively recently most people WERE pretty involved in the butchering process and there was no mass avoidance of meat eating.
History of venegarianism
I'm not a vegetarian, but I know there is a long history of vegetarianism in India. However, I did not know about the history in Greece.
If you are using hardware or services provided by your employer, your data is not private and you should have no expectations of such privacy.
You have no expectation of privacy, period. Facebook? Credit services?
We are an aging society. The autonomous car phenomena has arrived just in time for that eventuality. The deaths and destruction due to elders driving past the time they are safe will be mostly eliminated by autonomous cars, either personally owned or taxis. I can't wait.
If you pick a subject like "Shakespeare" to contribute to, you'll get firehosed out of the building, because there are LOTS of experts on that topic. If you pick a subject like "The Ternary Numeral System" (like I did), which was contributed by a guy who didn't really have much feel for technical writing, nobody bothers you when you fix things up, add things, etc. They may come back and rewrite what you write, but you can contribute.
Wikipedia should be sponsored by tax dollars. It is clearly a global resource with a huge user base, and amazing potential. If there was some kind of token payment for hits to contributors, or for translators, they would have no problem getting the best and brightest to contribute and translate articles.
The theory requires no outside, God-like, observer, nor does it propose one. The point is that time is measured by "events" and "events" occur when the quantum states of two systems become entangled, but only to the systems that became entangled. To an "observer" that has not become entangled, a system is static and no event has occurred.
In the Copenhagen interpretation, one would say that according to the entangled observer the "wavefunction has collapsed" whereas according to the unentangled observer, it hasn't.
How can an observer know anything about it if he doesn't observe it, and thus become entangled?
So do most of the countries higher on that list (Zimbabwe, Bosnia, Libya, etc). That's because most countries in the world have significantly lower standard of living than the west. On the other hand, Australia, Japan and Singapore all spend a smaller percentage than the US, and none of their militaries can be considered "US-supported" unless you water-down that definition into meanginlessness. In fact, New Zealand, which does have almost no military, and relies almost exclusively on treaties for their defence, spends more than the US.
All that list goes to show is that government spending doesn't correlate very well with standard of living.
Sort by "Public debt as % of GDP". That is the real list. Japan and Singapore are both higher (214%, 111%) than the US at 73.6%. If you use common sense when scanning the list, you see that most of the European nations are above us, and most of the developing world is below us. If you cherry pick, you miss that trend.
Regarding the debt, we are never in a debt crisis unless there is a Democrat in the white house. Then, suddenly, there appears to be a Debt crisis. "We are SPENDING our CHILDREN's MONEY! TRILLIONS of DOLLARS!". Sigh.
Debt is higher than it has been in a while, due mostly to the Financial Meltdown in 2008-2009. However, the deficit has gone down every year since Bush's last deficit of $1.4T, meaning we are borrowing less and less money. It is expected to be 68% of the Bush figure in 2013, and less than 1/2 of that in 2015. Meanwhile, GDP continues to increase every year.
The debt is bad yes. Other countries have bad debt too. The debt needs to be controlled. Risking default is not a way to control the debt, but amplify it.
US debt is 35th in a list of countries if you use Debt/GDP instead of absolute debt. It should be paid attention to, but there is really no need to panic. Projections of debt (by CBO) over the next 10 years are underwhelming. We are simply not in a crisis, at least because of debt.
The crisis is that we seem to be unable to get congress to do its job. That scares me.
$17 trillion in debt....
Nothing else, even a shutdown or default is undermining the dollar worse than running $1+ trillion deficits.
And if we don't stop, the government shutdown will eventually become PERMANENT. How much will that cost the economy folks.
Oh, and might I add, that the Democrats are punks because all they do is kick the bucket down past the next election.
And the Republicans are punks because all they did was kick the bucket down past the next election?
Regarding the $17 Trillion in Debt, if you compare the US economy to other advanced nations by using Debt/GDP, we are 35th on a list, after Germany, Japan, Singapore, etc (Sort by public debt as % of GDP.) It is hardly a crisis. It is a way to scare people who can't add, which seems to be much of the Republican base.
Also, the can was only kicked into the next year, BEFORE the elections. So, we may see this Ted Cruz fundraiser held again. He is going on talk shows bragging about how he is doing what the american people want. Sigh. $24 billion dollars.It would be much cheaper to pay the republicans in congress a million dollars each to STFU.
I think the really annoying part of the recent crisis was where the House was actually willing to vote for the budget with no attempts to muck around with Obamacare, and it was solely about procedural rules being used to prevent this from happening by not bringing up this vote (and actively blocking the attempts of other people to bring it up - e.g. that amendment in House rules where they removed the ability of any member to call the vote when a bill runs into a deadlock).
Actually, it was Speaker Boehner's desire to keep his job as speaker. That was really the only reason it did not go to vote. Early on, he said heh would eventually bring it up for vote, he was just trying to bluff with a hand full of nothing and a mirror behind him.
I'm in the category of "fucking poor" and the lowest insurance quote I got from that awful website is 2.11x higher than what I'm paying now. So...probably nobody. I heard pregnant immigrant minority ex-convicts might get a bit of a savings though. I wish I was a pregnant immigrant minority ex-convict. They get all the breaks!
I don't know where you live, but where I live (california) Obamacare is substantially less than private insurance, particularly if you qualify for subsidies. The policies are much better too. Look at the lifetime cap on your current policy, and consider that I just had $750,000 dollars worth of surgery in 2012. Would your insurance have paid for that? Would you need to mortgage or sell your house, or declare bankruptcy to have it done? With Obamacare, there is no lifetime cap, and the yearly out of pocket caps are like $7,000. Also, after the surgery, when your current insurance company dropped you, would you be able to pay for follow up visits, chemotherapy, blood tests, etc?
How much does having your citizens not being able to afford medical care cost the economy?
Has anyone obtained affordable health care from Obamacare?
I was paying $1300 a month for COBRA. With Obamacare, it is $800. However, without Obamacare, I would NOT BE ABLE TO BUY INSURANCE when my cobra expires. So, I guess you could say it is a good deal for me.
How much does having your citizens not being able to afford medical care cost the economy?
The leading cause of Bankruptcy in the US is medical costs. The number of people who die in the US every year because they simply can't afford medical treatment is 45,000 (in 2009, more now I suspect). Older Americans can't start small businesses because they would lose their healthcare, which is typically provided by their job.
The economic cost is really incalculable
Heritage? Really? They haven't done anything except shill for the right since 2000.
I won't say anything about dailycaller.com. Just look at their front page for an overview of how impartial they are.
Here is a more impartial view.
Under Bush, America was like a man who broke into his next door neighbor's house, killed the dad, and replaced him with another dad because he didn't like what the children were doing in the neighborhood.
Under Obama, America is like a man whose dog was run over, so he sits on a hill with a sniper rifle, shooting at cars driving by that might hit his new dog.
35% of our income goes to war.. American's are not so weird.. We are tired of frivolous spending and policing the world. We already pay a ton in taxes we don't need to pay 10% more because our federal government can't manage a budget. If they were a business they'd have gone belly up a long freaking time ago.
Everybody gets this wrong. A government is NOT a business. When we try to treat it as a business, we end up doing stupid things like trying to privatize social security.
The government is an organization that does the things business can't or won't do. It also protects us from these businesses, who would grind us up into soylent green if they were allowed to (and it made them a profit.)
I'm jealous... many a cow I've seen has a field for it's use... even sometimes a barn where they get to sleep & eat... curse my employer making me buy/rent my own place... not to mention not providing a bed!
Well, you could always sleep under your desk. I've seen that done, more than once.
Not once have I ever needed to write a sorting function or try to remember the differences in implementation of the different sort algorithms. It just isn't important.
However, you know the difference between a bubble sort and a quick sort, right? You don't need to be able to code them to understand when they might be useful, and when to apply them. That is the sort of knowledge that is important to have.
Being able to reproduce a qsort in C during an interview isn't required, I think. Knowing where to use it, how to set up the data structures: that is the skill I want people to have for a C programming job.
Short story. I used to work with a woman who was a fairly high paid programmer. She had a masters degree in CS from some university in Belgium. Unfortunately, she did not understand hash tables, their use, or the benefits. She did every programming job we gave her using linked lists. These lists were often thousands of elements long, and had short, unique text labels. There was a hash table facility built into the system library. We patiently helped her move her linked lists into using the hash table facility, but she persisted in using those damned linked lists on everything new. When you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Everybody who gets out of school in CS should understand the basics.
I'd be interested to know what line of work you do, programming wise. My experience tells me that a lot of programming that is being done is meant to be powerful and meant to be built quickly. Running quickly and with low tolerance for faults is a little less important because very few things are mission critical. While anathema to the academic, it demands a certain skill set, which is the ability to very quickly assimilate new arbitrary knowledge about libraries, software, and code, that the programmer hasn't seen before. The result is a fragile sort of knowledge that often lacks formality and granularity but is sufficient enough to accomplish a task very quickly.
This is actually quite interesting. I suspect that the requirement to build code that is maintainable is currently less important than being able to get something out there quickly. In my experience, that leads to programmers who copy code around the source base; who do 'micro fixes' rather than larger fixes that might lower overall costs; that write giant routines that work well but don't factor well; things like that. I'm no longer a programmer, but I remember when that sort of code was frowned upon. No longer; the important thing is to do it quickly, get it running, because the technology is changing such that you'll probably throw the whole thing out in a year or two. Why waste time on elegance when it is throw away? Everything is a demo these days.
Einstein was a musician for most of his life. That accounts for the increased thickness of the corpus callosum. Not sure about the size argument. Neanderthals had larger brains than we do.
The old joke:
How do you tell the difference between an introverted programmer and an extroverted programmer?
An introverted programmer looks at his shoes when he talks to you.
An extroverted programmer looks at YOUR shoes when he talks to you.