That's the way science works. You keep gathering more evidence and as it mounts you sometimes have to change your mind. The eventual goal is to tackle complex questions.
What makes a question complex? Evidence can be found for more than one possible answer. The world abounds in questions like that.
If evidence in principle can force you to change your mind, then why keep collecting it once you've made up your mind? There's two good reasons. One is that once you've collected a lot of evidence, you don't have to change your mind every time a bit of contradictory evidence comes up, as long as the balance of evidence weighs in a certain direction. For example this study looked for new neurons and didn't find any. The news media's poor understanding of science means they jump to the conclusion that there aren't any new neurons. But at this point in the evidence gathering it's more likely they didn't do a good job of looking for them.
The second reason is to learn to ask better questions. Thirty years ago we believed the brain was essentially static except for decay once you reached maturity. However at this point there is almost incontrovertible evidence that brain is far, far more plastic than we believed possible -- e.g. documented cases of epilepsy patients treated with a hemispherectomy regaining motor control of the affected body side. We assumed that this was because those patients grew new neurons, but if this finding holds up, we then have to ask: what is the mechanism of brain plasticity?
Or it may be that this finding describes the usual case but in unusual ones the brain can rewire itself with new neurons. We don't know yet, but the point was until we looked we didn't understand well enough to know what we don't know.
I just went around the house and all of the quartz wall clocks are within 1 minute of the atomic clock, after being set four months ago... Here's the thing though: all of these clocks are at least twenty years old. It's possible the norms for precision have dropped in recent years.
In my experience all these quartz china clocks run fast, some a few seconds and others gain a whole minute a week.
Gained relative to what? A line frequency synchronized mechanical clock?
I'm a watch geek; in my experience even the cheapest digital watches track an atomic synchronized clock to within seconds a month. Analog quartz watches are almost as good, although they will tend to drift just a bit more, but not so much that you really need to reset them except for daylight savings. Not unless you're really anal about having the sweep second hand exactly right. Battery powered quartz wall clocks might drift two minutes in six months.
If those salaries represent a significant fraction of the product's cost, the price should tend to drop, even for jeans made by different companies.
To see why do this thought experiment. Suppose nothing had changed; could Levis increase it's profits by raising the price on its jeans? It certainly would raise the per unit profit sold profit, but it would sell fewer jeans. The price represents what the manufacturer believes is the optimal compromise between unit profit and quantity sold.
Now if jeans were a generic commodity, the optimal price would drop if the per unit production price drops, representing a new optimal compromise between marginal profit and volume. The only caveat is that jeans aren't a pure commodity; a lot of their value is branding. Jeans of equivalent quality and styling from an unknown manufacturer cannot command the same prices as Levis, the same way that a Chinese-made quartz watch can't command the same price as a Rolex, even though it keeps better time. The price of an unique item can sometimes influence customer perceptions of value.
I've seen that with proprietary software. I worked for a company struggling to sell vertical market software at $500 per seat, a price chosen by the boss to make sales a "no-brainer" for buyers. Nonetheless the cost of selling was eating up our total revenue, leaving no money left to pay for development. I convinced him that we'd be better off raising our price to $1500 and selling fewer seats given our cost of sales. To my astonishment when we raised our prices sales took off, even though nothing else changed.
Try looking at a Google Maps satellite view of the Northeastern US vs. southern Britain, and you'll see the reason why. The power outages are caused by downed branches. The US is heavily wooded in comparison to southern Britain; go a few miles out of a major city and there is extensive tree cover. Britain, in comparison, looks largely denuded, a patchwork of fields. This is the legacy of centuries of wood burning followed by efforts to become food secure in WW2.
Another difference is in how the UK and the US do suburban streets. The UK houses tend to be set close to the street and have extensive back gardens; US suburban houses tend to have large front yards, often wooded. Also the US planning ideal from the mid 20th century is for a suburban street to be like a tree-lined tunnel. This was spoiled by the introduction of Dutch Elm disease in the 1950s, which denuded millions of acres of US suburb. Starting in the 1960s the dead American Elms were largely replaced by fast-growing Norway Maples. These are now very large trees, but Norway maples are particularly bad when it comes to dropping tree limbs in storms.
Actually power losses during storms are quite common in the US northeast. That's because our infrastructure is old. More recently electrified places use underground electric distribution, here the last mile is overwhelmingly carried on poles.
What's more installing and servicing overhead electric distribution is cheap; not just the labor but the materials. So the economic calculation, while not requiring god-like abilities, does involve a net present value calculation.
Well, you should do what a self-respecting nerd would do: make your own.
As for whether the price should be based on the marginal unit production cost, by that argument the price for proprietary software should be zero.
If you sell things, the production cost is just part of the costs you have to accrue. You have development and marketing costs too, and overhead. After all that you have to pay yourself. For low volume items the costs of these things is a big fraction of the retail cost.
Now if somebody just copied the idea, that's actually fair game under our system if it's not patented. But counterfeiting is freeloading on all the marketing costs by the original developer. And even if you don't think that is wrong, there is the fact that you are misrepresenting what you are selling to the consumer. The honest approach would be to reverse engineer the product and tell the consumer that you'd done so.
Depends on the management culture of your company, doesn't it?
It's not a universal thing that speaking your mind to a senior management is considered a good thing. There are cultures -- both national and corporate -- where bringing up ideas to senior people is seen as undermining the authority of management. I've worked in corporate cultures where expressing ideas is quite dangerous, and if such an expression drew management ire everyone was supposed to jump on the bandwagon ridiculing the unfortunate subordinate. Naturally I didn't choose to stay in such places long.
There are some companies where even accepting bad news from subordinates is viewed a sign of weakness. Naturally that's dysfunctional, but they often work by a kind of culture of passive aggression. Nobody likes to fail, so instead of information flowing up and direction flowing down, you get this thing where people get through the day by submissive posturing with subtly manipulative topspin. Like this testimony.
You could well believe that the place is utterly sterile; if you pick up a handful of dirt it'll have no visible or olfactory signs of life in it. To the naked senses it's just like opening the pack of desiccant silica that came with your camera. In the Atatcama trash and even toilet paper from hikers blows around for years -- archaeologists have even found pre-Columbian textiles there still intact after half a millenium. The only life visible there is within a few hundred meters of the ocean, fed by morning sea mists. The ranger stations put up mist nets there to collect precious drinking water.
But a few months after I was there, they had their first rain in over years. The friend I was visiting there told me that every square inch of the desert as far as the eye could see was carpeted in tiny flowers -- the floral scent was so intense it made her retch. If you want to see what it looks look at this Smithsonian article. Now imagine looking at a single square meter of that and finding thousands of tiny pollinating insects...
Life in the northern Atacama is adapted to periods of dry quiescence lasting for years, punctuated by brief, intense bouts of rain-triggered reproduction lasting only for days. But there's a huge difference between getting rain every five or six years and having no rain for hundreds of millions of years.
Well, timing is really everything in technology. Anyone can take things that have been done before and tweak them, but choosing the right time to do a particular thing is the difference between success and failure.
It's rare that the very first iteration of a thing to be made really takes off.
Do what a real developer does then; clone the repository. Browser access is a minor feature. As for not being able to communicate with projects except through a github account, that's the project's choice.
I never said it was a good thing. I'm just saying you can't make conclusions about the relationship of wages to labor participation rates.
Your example makes my point. Back in the 1950s "glory days" stay at home moms were the overwhelming norm. Today about 2/3s of women work as breadwinners. This makes it hard to compare participation rates from the 50s to today.
Now here's the slightly confusing bit about supply and demand in this context: you, as a worker, are a supplier. So supply and demand actually suggests the opposite effect of what you seem think. If wages were going up in the short term, then more people would enter the labor market.
That said, supply and demand curves only tell you this in the very short term; if there's an underlying change in the economy then the supply and demand curves shift, which is why market prices change.
Now to my very rudimentary Econ 101 level understanding, there are at least four possible explanations for reduced labor participation over a long period, none of which are mutually exclusive:
(1) effective wages have fallen;
(2) the supply curve has shifted because it costs workers more to participate;
(3) the demand curve has shifted because employers have got more efficient;
(4) regional/structural unemployment -- the jobs and wages are there but the right people aren't in the right place.
The only thing you can be certain of is that if participation rates have dropped at least one of these things is true. Any number from 0-3 of them could be false.
I'm not an economist, but I suspect we're seeing at least some increased efficiency in labor use by employers, particularly in the retail sector, which has adopted computerized scheduling rather than the traditional fixed-hour employment. I think we may also be seeing structural unemployment, where there are workers who can't find jobs and employers who can't find workers because the details don't match up (wrong place, wrong skill set).
But I kept what I consumed to a minimum and worked out regularly. Of course, like any diet, you have to keep up with it for it to keep the benefits. I fell off the diet while in grad school and gained it back and more.
You've basically told us what legions of studies have already told us: practically everything works but nothing consistently works for long.
Slashdot Mirror
Arguably this is the ethos that separates hacking from engineering: hacking involves opportunistically discovering problems to solve.
That's the way science works. You keep gathering more evidence and as it mounts you sometimes have to change your mind. The eventual goal is to tackle complex questions.
What makes a question complex? Evidence can be found for more than one possible answer. The world abounds in questions like that.
If evidence in principle can force you to change your mind, then why keep collecting it once you've made up your mind? There's two good reasons. One is that once you've collected a lot of evidence, you don't have to change your mind every time a bit of contradictory evidence comes up, as long as the balance of evidence weighs in a certain direction. For example this study looked for new neurons and didn't find any. The news media's poor understanding of science means they jump to the conclusion that there aren't any new neurons. But at this point in the evidence gathering it's more likely they didn't do a good job of looking for them.
The second reason is to learn to ask better questions. Thirty years ago we believed the brain was essentially static except for decay once you reached maturity. However at this point there is almost incontrovertible evidence that brain is far, far more plastic than we believed possible -- e.g. documented cases of epilepsy patients treated with a hemispherectomy regaining motor control of the affected body side. We assumed that this was because those patients grew new neurons, but if this finding holds up, we then have to ask: what is the mechanism of brain plasticity?
Or it may be that this finding describes the usual case but in unusual ones the brain can rewire itself with new neurons. We don't know yet, but the point was until we looked we didn't understand well enough to know what we don't know.
Oh, come now, the OED currently has entries for over 170,000 words in English, and that's the best you can do? Wandought.
If it is heading toward you, you probably want to see shit.
I just went around the house and all of the quartz wall clocks are within 1 minute of the atomic clock, after being set four months ago... Here's the thing though: all of these clocks are at least twenty years old. It's possible the norms for precision have dropped in recent years.
In my experience all these quartz china clocks run fast, some a few seconds and others gain a whole minute a week.
Gained relative to what? A line frequency synchronized mechanical clock?
I'm a watch geek; in my experience even the cheapest digital watches track an atomic synchronized clock to within seconds a month. Analog quartz watches are almost as good, although they will tend to drift just a bit more, but not so much that you really need to reset them except for daylight savings. Not unless you're really anal about having the sweep second hand exactly right. Battery powered quartz wall clocks might drift two minutes in six months.
If those salaries represent a significant fraction of the product's cost, the price should tend to drop, even for jeans made by different companies.
To see why do this thought experiment. Suppose nothing had changed; could Levis increase it's profits by raising the price on its jeans? It certainly would raise the per unit profit sold profit, but it would sell fewer jeans. The price represents what the manufacturer believes is the optimal compromise between unit profit and quantity sold.
Now if jeans were a generic commodity, the optimal price would drop if the per unit production price drops, representing a new optimal compromise between marginal profit and volume. The only caveat is that jeans aren't a pure commodity; a lot of their value is branding. Jeans of equivalent quality and styling from an unknown manufacturer cannot command the same prices as Levis, the same way that a Chinese-made quartz watch can't command the same price as a Rolex, even though it keeps better time. The price of an unique item can sometimes influence customer perceptions of value.
I've seen that with proprietary software. I worked for a company struggling to sell vertical market software at $500 per seat, a price chosen by the boss to make sales a "no-brainer" for buyers. Nonetheless the cost of selling was eating up our total revenue, leaving no money left to pay for development. I convinced him that we'd be better off raising our price to $1500 and selling fewer seats given our cost of sales. To my astonishment when we raised our prices sales took off, even though nothing else changed.
Try looking at a Google Maps satellite view of the Northeastern US vs. southern Britain, and you'll see the reason why. The power outages are caused by downed branches. The US is heavily wooded in comparison to southern Britain; go a few miles out of a major city and there is extensive tree cover. Britain, in comparison, looks largely denuded, a patchwork of fields. This is the legacy of centuries of wood burning followed by efforts to become food secure in WW2.
Another difference is in how the UK and the US do suburban streets. The UK houses tend to be set close to the street and have extensive back gardens; US suburban houses tend to have large front yards, often wooded. Also the US planning ideal from the mid 20th century is for a suburban street to be like a tree-lined tunnel. This was spoiled by the introduction of Dutch Elm disease in the 1950s, which denuded millions of acres of US suburb. Starting in the 1960s the dead American Elms were largely replaced by fast-growing Norway Maples. These are now very large trees, but Norway maples are particularly bad when it comes to dropping tree limbs in storms.
Actually power losses during storms are quite common in the US northeast. That's because our infrastructure is old. More recently electrified places use underground electric distribution, here the last mile is overwhelmingly carried on poles.
What's more installing and servicing overhead electric distribution is cheap; not just the labor but the materials. So the economic calculation, while not requiring god-like abilities, does involve a net present value calculation.
Well, you should do what a self-respecting nerd would do: make your own.
As for whether the price should be based on the marginal unit production cost, by that argument the price for proprietary software should be zero.
If you sell things, the production cost is just part of the costs you have to accrue. You have development and marketing costs too, and overhead. After all that you have to pay yourself. For low volume items the costs of these things is a big fraction of the retail cost.
Now if somebody just copied the idea, that's actually fair game under our system if it's not patented. But counterfeiting is freeloading on all the marketing costs by the original developer. And even if you don't think that is wrong, there is the fact that you are misrepresenting what you are selling to the consumer. The honest approach would be to reverse engineer the product and tell the consumer that you'd done so.
Depends on the management culture of your company, doesn't it?
It's not a universal thing that speaking your mind to a senior management is considered a good thing. There are cultures -- both national and corporate -- where bringing up ideas to senior people is seen as undermining the authority of management. I've worked in corporate cultures where expressing ideas is quite dangerous, and if such an expression drew management ire everyone was supposed to jump on the bandwagon ridiculing the unfortunate subordinate. Naturally I didn't choose to stay in such places long.
There are some companies where even accepting bad news from subordinates is viewed a sign of weakness. Naturally that's dysfunctional, but they often work by a kind of culture of passive aggression. Nobody likes to fail, so instead of information flowing up and direction flowing down, you get this thing where people get through the day by submissive posturing with subtly manipulative topspin. Like this testimony.
You could well believe that the place is utterly sterile; if you pick up a handful of dirt it'll have no visible or olfactory signs of life in it. To the naked senses it's just like opening the pack of desiccant silica that came with your camera. In the Atatcama trash and even toilet paper from hikers blows around for years -- archaeologists have even found pre-Columbian textiles there still intact after half a millenium. The only life visible there is within a few hundred meters of the ocean, fed by morning sea mists. The ranger stations put up mist nets there to collect precious drinking water.
But a few months after I was there, they had their first rain in over years. The friend I was visiting there told me that every square inch of the desert as far as the eye could see was carpeted in tiny flowers -- the floral scent was so intense it made her retch. If you want to see what it looks look at this Smithsonian article. Now imagine looking at a single square meter of that and finding thousands of tiny pollinating insects...
Life in the northern Atacama is adapted to periods of dry quiescence lasting for years, punctuated by brief, intense bouts of rain-triggered reproduction lasting only for days. But there's a huge difference between getting rain every five or six years and having no rain for hundreds of millions of years.
Even the driest desert on Earth is far from dry.
Well, timing is really everything in technology. Anyone can take things that have been done before and tweak them, but choosing the right time to do a particular thing is the difference between success and failure.
It's rare that the very first iteration of a thing to be made really takes off.
Do what a real developer does then; clone the repository. Browser access is a minor feature. As for not being able to communicate with projects except through a github account, that's the project's choice.
That is one of the most poorly thought out rants I've seen here, at least in recent memory.
The more you respond the more it costs the people paying for you, so be my guest.
It's good to be suspicious of any news that riles people up. But sometimes things do happen that rile people up.
No, not a spy, a paid troll. I'd never mistake you for a spy. It take balls to be a spy.
Thank you for your contribution, Ivan.
Reuters reported this too. They had a reporter at the event,
I never said it was a good thing. I'm just saying you can't make conclusions about the relationship of wages to labor participation rates.
Your example makes my point. Back in the 1950s "glory days" stay at home moms were the overwhelming norm. Today about 2/3s of women work as breadwinners. This makes it hard to compare participation rates from the 50s to today.
Now here's the slightly confusing bit about supply and demand in this context: you, as a worker, are a supplier. So supply and demand actually suggests the opposite effect of what you seem think. If wages were going up in the short term, then more people would enter the labor market.
That said, supply and demand curves only tell you this in the very short term; if there's an underlying change in the economy then the supply and demand curves shift, which is why market prices change.
Now to my very rudimentary Econ 101 level understanding, there are at least four possible explanations for reduced labor participation over a long period, none of which are mutually exclusive:
(1) effective wages have fallen;
(2) the supply curve has shifted because it costs workers more to participate;
(3) the demand curve has shifted because employers have got more efficient;
(4) regional/structural unemployment -- the jobs and wages are there but the right people aren't in the right place.
The only thing you can be certain of is that if participation rates have dropped at least one of these things is true. Any number from 0-3 of them could be false.
I'm not an economist, but I suspect we're seeing at least some increased efficiency in labor use by employers, particularly in the retail sector, which has adopted computerized scheduling rather than the traditional fixed-hour employment. I think we may also be seeing structural unemployment, where there are workers who can't find jobs and employers who can't find workers because the details don't match up (wrong place, wrong skill set).
You can't call FUD without references.
This isn't hypocrisy. This is a change of opinion.
For many people, there is no distinction. This is what is behind public distrust of science.
But I kept what I consumed to a minimum and worked out regularly. Of course, like any diet, you have to keep up with it for it to keep the benefits. I fell off the diet while in grad school and gained it back and more.
You've basically told us what legions of studies have already told us: practically everything works but nothing consistently works for long.