To me an SJW is somebody who, for example, tells a woman that she can't be in favor of gamergate because she's a woman. Or at least, that's what a few SJWs have said to a few prominent feminists that are in favor of gamergate.
I think it's just more likely that the more popular candidates are more likely to receive campaign funding.
Think about it for a second: If you're an unknown, then who is going to fund your campaign? You can promise the world, but if nobody knows who the fuck you are, you aren't going to raise shit.
Now the Colorado elections obviously would be exceptions because most of the funding that the incumbents received was from out of state. The candidates weren't popular so much as their message (more gun control) was among various out of state entities, such as New York mayor Bloomberg, which is why they received more funding, yet still lost anyways.
Unless they're directly buying votes, then that remains true. I'm not sure why we're equating advertising dollars with votes, because they aren't the same thing.
Take for example the Colorado state senate recall election a few years back: 11 times the amount of money was spent lobbying in favor of the incumbents as there was for the newcomers, yet the incumbents lost anyways.
Larry Lessig found this out the hard way, he assumed (very stupidly I might add) that he could just buy votes for his mayday campaign. Instead he found out that every candidate he spent money on that won was already likely to win anyways, and the rest lost.
Problem is you can't really ignore it. Every time some professional victim comes around whining about how much their life sucks (which their life only sucks because they think it sucks -- ask any psychologist this question, they'll agree with me) then we start getting stupid laws that make everybody else bend over backwards for the professional victims.
Take for example all of the lawsuits against businesses for not complying with ADA rules, even when the supposed "victim" didn't even try to go the business they're suing.
Nobody is suggesting that, however the common argument against this is "well there might be an unknown, so we should dismiss this technology entirely and have it banned".
If we applied that reasoning to every new technology that ever came out, we'd still be in the stone age.
And, more to the point of your comment about medicine, medicine almost ALWAYS has unknown side effects, and likely will continue to be that way forever. However of you always dismissed the benefits because of those concerns, then our medicine would really suck right now.
Same applies to fracking, GMO food, and a lot of other technologies that the "natural is always better" religion always fights against. (And by the way, natural is almost never better.)
That explain your observation of an apparent link between supply and demand? It's a valid observation; it's built firmly on more fundamental economics that nobody has yet theorized, and those demonstrate its validity and explain its quirks.
Yes, it does, but what I'm getting at (and was trying to avoid making a lengthy post) is that uncontrollable circumstances can throw the models way off.
I think a better example, that doesn't bring competition into play, is right after 9/11 when the demand for American flags suddenly went up. Things like this aren't because the competition suddenly became less fashionable, it's because consumer desire had a sudden and drastic change.
While that change was instigated by a particular event, you can have things like that become triggered by no particular event at all, and happen "just because". Take for example, the recent "shabby chic" fad which has seen a slight rise in old, worn furniture instead of new furniture.
But yeah, either way, economics is indeed a science.
America isn't poorer than it was before, the funding could be had.. but I don't think most folks would want to make any sacrifices in order to free up money to fund truly large space programs.
As I mentioned, people making those sacrifices would do the opposite of what you're trying to achieve. If they did, that would mean that consumer spending goes down, and if consumer spending goes down, less people are making money, and if less people are making money, the government has reduced tax revenue. Remember, what people produce in America counts as GDP, and people don't produce if nobody buys.
Having said that, while it's true that the government today is taking in slightly less as a percentage of GDP, you've got to consider that the GDP is much greater now than it was in the late 60's, even after you adjust for inflation. In fact if you just adjust government revenue for inflation, then in terms of real dollars the government has twice the revenue today than it had in 1968, as you can see here:
And also if you look here, the government makes by far the most amount of its money from personal income taxes, which are heavily influenced by consumer spending:
And you know the biggest reason why we have a bigger GDP (and thus more government revenue) than we did back then? It's because we have better technology that makes us better producers. And before somebody argues anything about our population growing, I've got you covered there too:
Notice the GDP per capita (that is, GDP per person) has only risen since the 60's, and boy has it risen by a LOT. And again, that's due to individual people having better technology, which includes little things such as smartphones and other creature comforts that the OP was lamenting.
I've worked at least a little with all of the major storage vendors, and pretty much the only knock I'll make against EMC is that they have so many different storage solutions that it's kind of hard to keep track of which is for what purpose. That said, some of these solutions do perform better (or at least are more straightforward to configure) than others, but in EMC's defense that's because a lot of these solutions came from fairly recent acquisitions.
Not quite. Although many times EMC uses Dell parts (sometimes even a whole Dell chassis,) it's not Dell that manufactures them (It's usually not EMC that does it either, rather the manufacturing usually gets done somewhere down the distribution chain.)
Anyways if I were to guess, I would say that Dell wants to better compete with HP by being able to offer high end storage that HP now has after acquiring 3Par.
It's indeed a science, just a tricky one because the subject often behaves in unexpected ways.
Take for example how supply and demand influence price. I.e. more supply means reduced price, more demand means increased price. And 90% of the time, that hold's true, but it's that 10% where it throws the models off, and the cause could be something fickle like masses of people arbitrarily decided that the product has gone out of style and they don't want it anymore no matter what price it is sold at.
A few other fields that most "economic science" detractors do in fact recognize as a sciences behave in a similar unpredictable manner, and for the same reasons. Take psychology or meteorology for example.
Bottom line is you can't just dismiss a field of study just because it is difficult to model.
You're reading ideology into a non-ideological comment.
Your comment was effectively 'it's a shame that we have smartphones, and it's because we didn't tax corporations enough'. That's an ideological argument for why you think the government should have more money than it already has. It also neglects that the government has by far more resources at its disposal today than it did back then.
The point I was trying to make is that a lot of great things were done during the race to the moon, but the average family didn't have the kind of possessions that we take for granted today. If everyone made do with what they had during that time period, there would be money to fund a more aggressive space program.
No, that wouldn't be the case at all. The government needs an economy to be able to fund itself, and the economy would be considerably weaker without the private sector having better technology. Technology of course being anything that makes your life simpler, i.e. every day things you need are cheaper and take less time to do.
If the private sector had less technology, then they'd also be producing less, meaning the GDP is much lower. Likewise, the government would be taxing a much smaller economy, and thus making less, and if the government made less, the potential for the space program would be massively reduced.
Besides, suppose we continued the lunar missions to this date, have you any idea how much that costs? It would have bankrupted us by now. The only way the space program can realistically continue is if either:
A) We figure out a way to make it profitable (i.e. there's a monetary incentive to explore space.) B) Going to space is considerably cheaper.
Right now though it's just a giant money sink.
The only thing I can say about the moon is that with the technology we have today compared to what we had back then, I would think we'd be able to get people on the moon for a heck of a lot less money. Why bother? I have no idea. Maybe as a stepping stone to Mars. Why go to Mars? No idea there either, but then again, why do so many people go mountain climbing?
The problem is, Mars is considerably more difficult, and repeated moon missions aren't going to make it any less difficult. What needs to happen is we need to figure out two things:
1) Make the process of escaping earth's gravity well cheaper or otherwise more efficient. 2) Interplanetary travel needs to take less time (currently we rely on gravity slingshotting to get anywhere, which makes the trip take a VERY long time compared to say a direct shot.)
The ISS research is a FAR more cost effective means of figuring out both of those than moon missions. Though you know who has been working really hard on making #1 more cost effective? Not NASA (their budget is huge, so they don't mind throwing wads of cash at it.)
It's actually two private firms that are so far making the best progress: Virgin Galactic (using a jumbo jet and rocket propulsion combination) and SpaceX (reusable booster rockets.) If we were still just leaving it up to the government, they wouldn't have much of an incentive to reduce costs. NASA and their contractors were dismissing both of these ideas until they were shown to be useful.
There is a possible method to address #2 but it came from experimentation on earth, not during space travel.
Not because of spinoffs (which never actually were spinoffs) like velcro or space pens, but because of the re-industrialization of the South that LBJ required of Kennedy to support the project (look at where all the Apollo era NASA centers are), because of the manufacturing and quality control techniques developed for the space program, and -- less directly -- because of the huge boost in the number of kids going into what's now called STEM because of the popularity of the program. Those kids led the personal computer revolution that led to all the other nice things.
If that's the case, then the F-35 should (by your own argument) be a huge boon to technological advancement due to the sheer number of firms that are working on it. And again, if that's your only motivation, then who needs the space program when we've got tons of technology pork projects?
So long as fewer than 20% of every sentence uttered by the majority of the people in this country doesn't end with "dude" or "man" I don't think marijuana will be a problem.
Actually both of you are wrong or at least misleading (my guess is misleading for ideological reasons; i.e. you value government projects more than you value individual wealth in the form of better material goods that even the poor have access to better than at any other point in history.) The reality is that the US government is pulling in record revenue, but adjusted for percentage of GDP, it's at about 16.9%. The post WWII period was about 17.6%.
That's not a big enough change to take away moon landings. The reality is that the money you're lamenting going into stuff that everyday people actually want (why is this a bad thing, by the way?) is really going into pork projects, such as the F-35 (oh, and that $1.2 trillion figure only accounts for the contractual costs, the actual cost of the project itself is much higher than that even though it's not done yet.)
Even if it wasn't going into pork, and I don't know about you guys, but I much prefer a situation where I (and anybody else) is able to have nice things even if it means we put off manned space exploration for 50 years.
The reason why is simple: Going to the moon is nice and all, but when you spend a crapload of money on it just for the novelty of it, then it's somewhat pointless. I think the money is better spent finding a way to do it in a practical manner that is cheap enough that you can actually afford to put people other than the world's wealthiest (or an otherwise lucky select few) into space. Read: I don't care how you try to spin it, going to the moon is pointless if we can only send about 20 people there per lifetime. All that the 1960's moon landings did was prove the concept. Until it becomes practical from a cost perspective, then we still haven't truly reached the moon yet.
IMO the DMCA is overall a good thing (especially the safe harbor provision) but has two big flaws:
1) Anti-circumvention rules don't permit non-infringing use. 2) There's all of about zero restitution for fraudulent take down notices. (I.e. having somebody swear under penalty of perjury on your behalf is a really weak standard, and is often used to suppress youtube videos within their first four days of being posted, which is when they get the most views and ad revenue for those who post them.)
The problem is every time we've seen this happen, it's always backfired on whoever is trying it.
For example, when OS/2 added Win32 support, nobody wrote anything for OS/2 anymore. Why? Because it was easier to just write the Win32 program and just ignore OS/2.
Three years ago Google did the smart thing and pulled the reverse against Apple: They wrote an application framework that made it easy to port Android apps to iOS.
Besides, their "bridges" don't solve the number one problem with porting apps: Ongoing support costs. Initially porting the app is perhaps the least expensive part, so at best it solves "a" problem, but not "the" problem.
Why do you think major banking companies like Chase and Wells-Fargo pulled their WP apps even after they already had a working app? Because they no longer wanted to provide support services to a platform that didn't have enough users to justify spending any further money on.
Another problem you run into is that e.g. Android apps are going to be built with the Material Design Language, which uses lighter colors and depth perspective, and therefore doesn't at all mesh with the "Modern Design Language" which uses flat (i.e. zero depth) fisher-price colors and big ugly white on black text.
Eh Microsoft and the WP fan base have been predicting that every year for the last four years.
In fact, remember last year when Microsoft and its fans were constantly hitting blogs and twitter about how WP is the world's fastest growing platform? And how did that turn out?
As far as Microsoft's business software, every other smartphone platform integrates equally if not better than WP.
The only thing WP does better is integrate with an Xbox, which if you aren't a console game player and/or you otherwise don't own an xbox, then it's kind of irrelevant.
Slashdot Mirror
To me an SJW is somebody who, for example, tells a woman that she can't be in favor of gamergate because she's a woman. Or at least, that's what a few SJWs have said to a few prominent feminists that are in favor of gamergate.
I'll echo that. Brianna Wu is the worst of the worst when it comes to professional victims.
I think it's just more likely that the more popular candidates are more likely to receive campaign funding.
Think about it for a second: If you're an unknown, then who is going to fund your campaign? You can promise the world, but if nobody knows who the fuck you are, you aren't going to raise shit.
Now the Colorado elections obviously would be exceptions because most of the funding that the incumbents received was from out of state. The candidates weren't popular so much as their message (more gun control) was among various out of state entities, such as New York mayor Bloomberg, which is why they received more funding, yet still lost anyways.
Unless they're directly buying votes, then that remains true. I'm not sure why we're equating advertising dollars with votes, because they aren't the same thing.
Take for example the Colorado state senate recall election a few years back: 11 times the amount of money was spent lobbying in favor of the incumbents as there was for the newcomers, yet the incumbents lost anyways.
Larry Lessig found this out the hard way, he assumed (very stupidly I might add) that he could just buy votes for his mayday campaign. Instead he found out that every candidate he spent money on that won was already likely to win anyways, and the rest lost.
Problem is you can't really ignore it. Every time some professional victim comes around whining about how much their life sucks (which their life only sucks because they think it sucks -- ask any psychologist this question, they'll agree with me) then we start getting stupid laws that make everybody else bend over backwards for the professional victims.
Take for example all of the lawsuits against businesses for not complying with ADA rules, even when the supposed "victim" didn't even try to go the business they're suing.
That would be unconstitutional then; the constitution specifically says that the Senate must approve it before the president can sign and ratify it.
Nobody is suggesting that, however the common argument against this is "well there might be an unknown, so we should dismiss this technology entirely and have it banned".
If we applied that reasoning to every new technology that ever came out, we'd still be in the stone age.
And, more to the point of your comment about medicine, medicine almost ALWAYS has unknown side effects, and likely will continue to be that way forever. However of you always dismissed the benefits because of those concerns, then our medicine would really suck right now.
Same applies to fracking, GMO food, and a lot of other technologies that the "natural is always better" religion always fights against. (And by the way, natural is almost never better.)
That explain your observation of an apparent link between supply and demand? It's a valid observation; it's built firmly on more fundamental economics that nobody has yet theorized, and those demonstrate its validity and explain its quirks.
Yes, it does, but what I'm getting at (and was trying to avoid making a lengthy post) is that uncontrollable circumstances can throw the models way off.
I think a better example, that doesn't bring competition into play, is right after 9/11 when the demand for American flags suddenly went up. Things like this aren't because the competition suddenly became less fashionable, it's because consumer desire had a sudden and drastic change.
While that change was instigated by a particular event, you can have things like that become triggered by no particular event at all, and happen "just because". Take for example, the recent "shabby chic" fad which has seen a slight rise in old, worn furniture instead of new furniture.
But yeah, either way, economics is indeed a science.
When it comes to treaties, the house of senate has to approve it, whereas the house of represenatives has no say in it.
Yes, T-Mobile has an unlimited 4g plan. It costs about $30 above the base plan, but it is unlimited.
America isn't poorer than it was before, the funding could be had.. but I don't think most folks would want to make any sacrifices in order to free up money to fund truly large space programs.
As I mentioned, people making those sacrifices would do the opposite of what you're trying to achieve. If they did, that would mean that consumer spending goes down, and if consumer spending goes down, less people are making money, and if less people are making money, the government has reduced tax revenue. Remember, what people produce in America counts as GDP, and people don't produce if nobody buys.
Having said that, while it's true that the government today is taking in slightly less as a percentage of GDP, you've got to consider that the GDP is much greater now than it was in the late 60's, even after you adjust for inflation. In fact if you just adjust government revenue for inflation, then in terms of real dollars the government has twice the revenue today than it had in 1968, as you can see here:
http://www.truthfulpolitics.co...
And also if you look here, the government makes by far the most amount of its money from personal income taxes, which are heavily influenced by consumer spending:
http://www.truthfulpolitics.co...
And you know the biggest reason why we have a bigger GDP (and thus more government revenue) than we did back then? It's because we have better technology that makes us better producers. And before somebody argues anything about our population growing, I've got you covered there too:
http://www.multpl.com/us-real-...
Notice the GDP per capita (that is, GDP per person) has only risen since the 60's, and boy has it risen by a LOT. And again, that's due to individual people having better technology, which includes little things such as smartphones and other creature comforts that the OP was lamenting.
Where does Brocade come into this?
I've worked at least a little with all of the major storage vendors, and pretty much the only knock I'll make against EMC is that they have so many different storage solutions that it's kind of hard to keep track of which is for what purpose. That said, some of these solutions do perform better (or at least are more straightforward to configure) than others, but in EMC's defense that's because a lot of these solutions came from fairly recent acquisitions.
Not quite. Although many times EMC uses Dell parts (sometimes even a whole Dell chassis,) it's not Dell that manufactures them (It's usually not EMC that does it either, rather the manufacturing usually gets done somewhere down the distribution chain.)
Anyways if I were to guess, I would say that Dell wants to better compete with HP by being able to offer high end storage that HP now has after acquiring 3Par.
It's indeed a science, just a tricky one because the subject often behaves in unexpected ways.
Take for example how supply and demand influence price. I.e. more supply means reduced price, more demand means increased price. And 90% of the time, that hold's true, but it's that 10% where it throws the models off, and the cause could be something fickle like masses of people arbitrarily decided that the product has gone out of style and they don't want it anymore no matter what price it is sold at.
A few other fields that most "economic science" detractors do in fact recognize as a sciences behave in a similar unpredictable manner, and for the same reasons. Take psychology or meteorology for example.
Bottom line is you can't just dismiss a field of study just because it is difficult to model.
You're reading ideology into a non-ideological comment.
Your comment was effectively 'it's a shame that we have smartphones, and it's because we didn't tax corporations enough'. That's an ideological argument for why you think the government should have more money than it already has. It also neglects that the government has by far more resources at its disposal today than it did back then.
The point I was trying to make is that a lot of great things were done during the race to the moon, but the average family didn't have the kind of possessions that we take for granted today. If everyone made do with what they had during that time period, there would be money to fund a more aggressive space program.
No, that wouldn't be the case at all. The government needs an economy to be able to fund itself, and the economy would be considerably weaker without the private sector having better technology. Technology of course being anything that makes your life simpler, i.e. every day things you need are cheaper and take less time to do.
If the private sector had less technology, then they'd also be producing less, meaning the GDP is much lower. Likewise, the government would be taxing a much smaller economy, and thus making less, and if the government made less, the potential for the space program would be massively reduced.
Besides, suppose we continued the lunar missions to this date, have you any idea how much that costs? It would have bankrupted us by now. The only way the space program can realistically continue is if either:
A) We figure out a way to make it profitable (i.e. there's a monetary incentive to explore space.)
B) Going to space is considerably cheaper.
Right now though it's just a giant money sink.
The only thing I can say about the moon is that with the technology we have today compared to what we had back then, I would think we'd be able to get people on the moon for a heck of a lot less money. Why bother? I have no idea. Maybe as a stepping stone to Mars. Why go to Mars? No idea there either, but then again, why do so many people go mountain climbing?
The problem is, Mars is considerably more difficult, and repeated moon missions aren't going to make it any less difficult. What needs to happen is we need to figure out two things:
1) Make the process of escaping earth's gravity well cheaper or otherwise more efficient.
2) Interplanetary travel needs to take less time (currently we rely on gravity slingshotting to get anywhere, which makes the trip take a VERY long time compared to say a direct shot.)
The ISS research is a FAR more cost effective means of figuring out both of those than moon missions. Though you know who has been working really hard on making #1 more cost effective? Not NASA (their budget is huge, so they don't mind throwing wads of cash at it.)
It's actually two private firms that are so far making the best progress: Virgin Galactic (using a jumbo jet and rocket propulsion combination) and SpaceX (reusable booster rockets.) If we were still just leaving it up to the government, they wouldn't have much of an incentive to reduce costs. NASA and their contractors were dismissing both of these ideas until they were shown to be useful.
There is a possible method to address #2 but it came from experimentation on earth, not during space travel.
Not because of spinoffs (which never actually were spinoffs) like velcro or space pens, but because of the re-industrialization of the South that LBJ required of Kennedy to support the project (look at where all the Apollo era NASA centers are), because of the manufacturing and quality control techniques developed for the space program, and -- less directly -- because of the huge boost in the number of kids going into what's now called STEM because of the popularity of the program. Those kids led the personal computer revolution that led to all the other nice things.
If that's the case, then the F-35 should (by your own argument) be a huge boon to technological advancement due to the sheer number of firms that are working on it. And again, if that's your only motivation, then who needs the space program when we've got tons of technology pork projects?
Editing mistake, meant to remove the "doesn't".
So long as fewer than 20% of every sentence uttered by the majority of the people in this country doesn't end with "dude" or "man" I don't think marijuana will be a problem.
Actually both of you are wrong or at least misleading (my guess is misleading for ideological reasons; i.e. you value government projects more than you value individual wealth in the form of better material goods that even the poor have access to better than at any other point in history.) The reality is that the US government is pulling in record revenue, but adjusted for percentage of GDP, it's at about 16.9%. The post WWII period was about 17.6%.
That's not a big enough change to take away moon landings. The reality is that the money you're lamenting going into stuff that everyday people actually want (why is this a bad thing, by the way?) is really going into pork projects, such as the F-35 (oh, and that $1.2 trillion figure only accounts for the contractual costs, the actual cost of the project itself is much higher than that even though it's not done yet.)
Even if it wasn't going into pork, and I don't know about you guys, but I much prefer a situation where I (and anybody else) is able to have nice things even if it means we put off manned space exploration for 50 years.
The reason why is simple: Going to the moon is nice and all, but when you spend a crapload of money on it just for the novelty of it, then it's somewhat pointless. I think the money is better spent finding a way to do it in a practical manner that is cheap enough that you can actually afford to put people other than the world's wealthiest (or an otherwise lucky select few) into space. Read: I don't care how you try to spin it, going to the moon is pointless if we can only send about 20 people there per lifetime. All that the 1960's moon landings did was prove the concept. Until it becomes practical from a cost perspective, then we still haven't truly reached the moon yet.
IMO the DMCA is overall a good thing (especially the safe harbor provision) but has two big flaws:
1) Anti-circumvention rules don't permit non-infringing use.
2) There's all of about zero restitution for fraudulent take down notices. (I.e. having somebody swear under penalty of perjury on your behalf is a really weak standard, and is often used to suppress youtube videos within their first four days of being posted, which is when they get the most views and ad revenue for those who post them.)
The problem is every time we've seen this happen, it's always backfired on whoever is trying it.
For example, when OS/2 added Win32 support, nobody wrote anything for OS/2 anymore. Why? Because it was easier to just write the Win32 program and just ignore OS/2.
Three years ago Google did the smart thing and pulled the reverse against Apple: They wrote an application framework that made it easy to port Android apps to iOS.
Besides, their "bridges" don't solve the number one problem with porting apps: Ongoing support costs. Initially porting the app is perhaps the least expensive part, so at best it solves "a" problem, but not "the" problem.
Why do you think major banking companies like Chase and Wells-Fargo pulled their WP apps even after they already had a working app? Because they no longer wanted to provide support services to a platform that didn't have enough users to justify spending any further money on.
Another problem you run into is that e.g. Android apps are going to be built with the Material Design Language, which uses lighter colors and depth perspective, and therefore doesn't at all mesh with the "Modern Design Language" which uses flat (i.e. zero depth) fisher-price colors and big ugly white on black text.
Eh Microsoft and the WP fan base have been predicting that every year for the last four years.
In fact, remember last year when Microsoft and its fans were constantly hitting blogs and twitter about how WP is the world's fastest growing platform? And how did that turn out?
As far as Microsoft's business software, every other smartphone platform integrates equally if not better than WP.
The only thing WP does better is integrate with an Xbox, which if you aren't a console game player and/or you otherwise don't own an xbox, then it's kind of irrelevant.
I'll agree to that.