You meet "the one percent" quite frequently: your doctor, your accountant, your real estate agent, and maybe your plumber if he has a decent size business.
In fact, "the one percent" are probably 10-20% of the US population, because many people will have a "one percent" kind of income at some point in their careers.
Davos is a gathering of the ultra-rich and the ultra-powerful. When they talk about "fixing the planet", what they mean is policies that keep them in power and keep them wealthy.
Attending Davos is pretty much a sure sign that a politician, activist, or "philanthropist" can be trusted.
That gives the spooks a good idea as to who they should be investigating,
Not really. Anybody who actually has anything to hide would likely combine the strong cryptography with steganography.
Outlawing strong cryptography has no legitimate law enforcement function; people proposing it either are idiots, or they are intrinsically opposed to free societies. Take your pick which category "Sir" Omand is likely to be in.
According to The Bureau of Investigative Journalism, which reported his words from a talk he gave earlier this week, by this he meant things like physical observation, bugging rooms, and breaking into phones or computers. "You can say that will be more targeted but in terms of intrusion into personal privacy — collateral intrusion into privacy — we are likely to end up in an ethically worse position than we were before."
Well, that's because your sense of ethics is screwed up, not surprising given your line of work. The rest of us actually prefer that it cause you significant trouble to perform espionage and surveillance so that you actually have to target your limited resources to cases that matter, instead of going on fishing expeditions.
And from a purely practical point of view, banning strong encryption isn't going to help anyway because the only criminals and terrorists you are going to catch from relying on mandated weak encryption are fools. If you don't understand that, you are a fool yourself; if you do understand it, you are just a liar.
This is 100% correct, but it would also require people to be responsible for their own accounts, at least to some extent. There are some people that still use default passwords for their accounts, or easily guessable ones. And that's just the least of problems with individuals.
That isn't a problem with individuals, it's a problem with companies relying on passwords in the first place. Passwords by themselves are not secure, no matter how careful and knowledgeable the user may be in choosing them.
The truth is, no one, not providers, not consumers, not the Government, not anyone, regards computer security for the crime-lousy potential that it holds.
What people think of computer security is not relevant; things get fixed when the people capable of fixing it have an economic interest to do so. Right now, government effectively protects the entities responsible for poor security (mostly, corporations and the occasional end user) from paying the costs they impose on others. That needs to change.
though I would expect that they provide some administrative support in some form (perhaps in similar manner that the FSF does for many open source projects
What "administrative support" do you think the FSF provides for "many open source projects"? All they ever seem to want to do is for you to transfer your copyright to them based on bogus justifications.
As far as the R Project is concerned, I don't see them listed as benefactors or supporting institution:
Companies need to start putting their money where their mouth is and make changes.
Companies are profit maximizers. They aren't making changes because the current system doesn't cost them anything. They are never going to "put their money where their mouth is", and it is stupid to expect them to or even want them to.
The reason it doesn't cost them anything is because they are effectively immune from many forms of lawsuits, thanks to "the government".
A state run by a single party beholden to corporate interests and lobbyists and massively dependent on the tech industry. A state that is so incompetently run that it is teetering on the verge of bankruptcy, that its schools have dropped to the bottom, and that can't even solve its traffic gridlock. Cybersecurity legislation in California will do little more than exempt tech companies from any sort of liability and pour out massive amounts in government subsidies to big corporations for cybersecurity initiatives.
Real cybersecurity would require massively increasing the financial liability of corporations for any breach in security that causes their customers to lose money or waste time. For example, when a data breach at Home Depot causes banks to have to reissue credit cards, banks should be financially responsible to their customers for the many hours they have to waste on dealing with new credit card numbers, and Home Depot should be financially responsible to banks for all their resulting costs. If each of these data breaches cost corporations a few billion dollars, you'd be surprised how quickly security shapes up.
That only means that the FSF has chosen the package for the mythical "GNU operating system". It's no different from Debian or RedHat making an "R" package. Well, it is different in that the original "GNU operating system" remained eternal vaporware and "the GNU operating system" now consists of a haphazard mix of relabeled and restricted Linux distributions created by others.
Unfortunately, the FSF has a nasty habit of implying that they deserve credit for software whose creation they had nothing to do with. Other GNU packages were created by forking projects with more permissive licenses and slapping a GNU license on it.
The FSF early on contributed some useful software, and the GNU project set out to create an OS. I also think the GPL is a useful license (but not the only useful free or open source software license). But the FSF and GNU were made largely obsolete by open source software, and as far as I can tell, they haven't done much actual work recently (but feel free to correct me if I'm wrong).
R does have lots of statistical packages available, some of which are not available for Python. But those are often for obsolete statistical methods. When it comes to modern statistics, i.e. large scale Bayesian methods, non-parametric methods, simulations, neural networks, etc., then R is quite deficient in good packages relative to Python. In part, the reason why R is deficient in such packages is because the R language itself is actually pretty poor.
For statistical analysis the only competitor I see for it is a mixture of ipython notebook + python statistical modules such as pandas, numpy, scipy, pymc, sklearn,statsmodel, pystan, etc.
Yes, and that combo is head and shoulders above R.
R was a great tool relative to other statistical computing tools until maybe a decade ago. It's still better than Matlab, but that's not saying much. There are better options these days, like for example SciPy with Pandas.
What I mean is that, any country which has no democracy has no workers' rights.
The idea that working conditions improve much due to government regulation is a fiction. Working conditions ("worker's rights") improve because workers have the freedom to walk away from bad jobs to better jobs.
The regulations you see in the EU/US are largely designed as barriers to entry, so that big corporations can keep enjoying oligopolies in their markets. The kind of regulations they write are such that they simply mirror what the market would be doing anyway, but imposing a large administrative overhead that only big companies can afford to pay.
This makes them more competitive than the EU/US, and our workers (who rightly expect decent treatment) will be out-competed by cheap labour from contries that abuse their workers. The result is unemployment in the West, and "slave"-labour in the East.
What a good little fascist and corporate whore you are. I mean that literally: that's pretty much the economic bullshit fascism was built on.
For one person maybe. Buying in bulk to afford to feed a FAMILY, no. The beans are cheaper, but enough fruits and vegetables to make a well balanced diet is not.
I see: small amounts of vegetables and fruits are cheap, but they get expensive in bulk? Are you insane or something?
And good luck getting kids to eat beans all day.
In different words: American kids are getting so fat because parents are lazy and stuff them full of fast food (which is, incidentally, cheap only because its components are so highly subsidized). And to fix that problem, you suggest that socialized medicine spend vast amounts of money to mutilate people's bodies (and incidentally provide tons of income to the medical and pharma industries).
If a device that fixes the problem is cheaper than the problems, it is worth it.
So you are saying is that we should implant vagus nerve stimulators because it's cheaper than proper nutrition? That is morally reprehensible and utterly disgusting even if it were true.
Well, if US policy made chinese-made consumer goods a bit more expensive because of sactions against Chinese censorship, it would probably also have a couple of implications for the US manufacuring business.
Oh, sure it would. It would mean that the 90% of Americans who don't work in manufacturing would be paying significantly more for goods (i.e. become significantly poorer) so that the 10% of Americans who do work in manufacturing are doing well.
Why bother with the complex and annoying trade excuse for this? Just tax everybody an extra 5% and then send an extra 50% to everybody who works in manufacturing. Surely, that will make the economy boom!
If China blocks US VPNs (our exports), why isn't the US considering blocking Chinese goods in return?
Because, fortunately, even the moron-in-chief seems to have more sense than that.
If nothing else, it is our own long-term best interests to force China to become more free, as it is the only thing that will prevent them winning a race-to-the-bottom competition on wages.
Oh, we can easily prevent the race to the bottom. In fact, you can do it yourself: just look at your paycheck in cents instead of dollars. See, now you are 100x richer! That's pretty much what your economic proposals amount to.
Do you exoect a former cable lobbyist as thr FCC chief to "enforce the law"?
I expect him to make the law in a way that is most favorable to corporations and then enforce that corporate-friendly law. And he can do that because morons like you keep electing people like Obama, people who say they want to protect consumers and the middle class, but who actually keep supporting big corporations with tax dollars. The biggest accomplishments of this administration, financial regulation, bailouts, stimulus packages, ACA, green energy, etc. have all been gigantic handouts to corporate America, and people like you keep voting these people into power because you delude yourself into thinking that the way to stop corporate cronyism is just electing the right politician who will finally take on corporate power.
Lewin's behavior may have been creepy and disgusting if the allegations turn out to be true. MIT is also fully within its rights to sever ties with Lewin for any reason.
But as far as I can tell, Lewin had no power over the student; the course was free and open, and participation was voluntary. There shouldn't be any legal case or any Title IX case here.
lets get the Gov't to enforce the law. It's our Government.
The government is enforcing the law, otherwise there would be lawsuits. What you simply don't want to face is that laws that were written under the pretense of giving you free stuff, and that dopes like you supported because you wanted free stuff, in reality ended up really giving free money to Verizon.
That is the predictable outcome every time a politician promises to give you better infrastructure, lower cost service, etc.: you end up overpaying somehow, and the extra money goes to corporations.
Your suggestion that some people should walk the fine line between starvation and satiety, feeling hungry most of the time in order to avoid offending your delicate sensibilities is absurd.
I claimed precisely the opposite, namely that going hungry is not going to work because, indeed, hunger is an irresistible drive. The misconception that you lose weight by going hungry is probably the single most common reason why people are overweight.
If you want to lose weight, what you have to do is change what you eat. Hunger is an irresistible drive, but there is no irresistible drive that forces you to stuff your face with french fries instead of broccoli.
Didn't you claim above that there wasn't significant variation in BMR between people?
No. What I claimed is that there is no significant difference in metabolism: that is, all people process food, use energy, and store fat in pretty much the same way. People obviously have wildly differing BMR. So what? What do you think that has to do with obesity? Where is the evidence that differences in BMR cause obesity?
If you just want to keep tsk tsking people for failing to ignore a fundamental biological drive, you'll want to avoid reading on the subject
I did a lot of reading on the subject because I actually used to be overweight. I used to have the same misconceptions you had, namely that you need to go hungry in order to lose weight. You don't. All you have to do is change what you eat. It's less fun to eat better foods, but it doesn't require significant willpower.
And I don't "tsk tsk" you. I find it sad when people stuff their faces with crap and wreck their bodies, completely unnecessarily.
Just a cursory googling for example brought up: Are Municipal Electricity Distribution Utilities Natural Monopolies?, Massimo Filippini, Annals of Public and Cooperative Economics Volume 69, Issue 2, pages 157â"174, June 1998, DOI: 10.1111/1467-8292.00077. Which points to that quite nicely. I.e. both natural monopoly and "permanent", i.e. have been so for a long time.
The fact that your paper from 1998 even still asks the question shows you that the question certainly wasn't settled by then, so clearly, the people who justified government monopolies based on "natural monopolies" prior to that must have lied according to the paper you yourself dragged up. (And the question hasn't been settle since either.)
Furthermore, the methodology used in that paper doesn't answer the question whether natural monopolies exist because it can only look at data generated under a highly regulatory regime rather than free market competition (and in a single country at that).
So you are of the opinion that in (for example) industries with large fixed investments such as water distribution, electrical distribution etc. that the most efficient use of resources would be to have multiple companies competing for the same customers?
The reason these require "large fixed investments" is not because there is a "natural monopoly" it is because power companies, electric companies, and municipal providers like it that way. Through regulatory capture, they have created high costs of entry. And people like you are cheering them on in how they screw over consumers and enjoy their monopoly rents.
The first two links cook up an arbitrary measure of "prosperity":
Legatum's Prosperity Index takes economic metrics into account, but also factors entrepreneurial opportunities and a host of other factors around quality of life and well-being
For the NYTimes article, note that even according to their numbers, the US lead in terms of median income is mainly shrinking relative to Norway and Canada, two countries with small populations and huge natural resources.
Other parts of the NYTimes article are just bogus comparisons. For example, "the poor" in Europe may nominally earn more than their US counterparts, but they still end up being economically far worse off after you account for non-income transfers.
I have looked into these various claims and studies over the years, and I can assure you they are bullshit, mostly created by people who are desperately trying to match economic data to their political prejudices.
But whether Europeans are doing better or worse than Americans isn't even the issue. The real issue is that Europe clearly does what you want, namely redistribute income; in particular, it redistributes income from people who make above average contributions to society to people who make below average contributions to society, and that is simply wrong.
Well, the only other thing you can gain is muscle, and gaining a pound of muscle takes a lot more calories than gaining a pound of fat (even though the caloric content of muscle is, of course, less than that of fat).
Slashdot Mirror
You meet "the one percent" quite frequently: your doctor, your accountant, your real estate agent, and maybe your plumber if he has a decent size business.
In fact, "the one percent" are probably 10-20% of the US population, because many people will have a "one percent" kind of income at some point in their careers.
People in the US reach a median net worth of around $84000 around age 50. Around retirement, median net worth is $170000.
If you expect to have a large positive net worth 5 years out of school, well, you need to change your expectations.
Davos is a gathering of the ultra-rich and the ultra-powerful. When they talk about "fixing the planet", what they mean is policies that keep them in power and keep them wealthy.
Attending Davos is pretty much a sure sign that a politician, activist, or "philanthropist" can be trusted.
Not really. Anybody who actually has anything to hide would likely combine the strong cryptography with steganography.
Outlawing strong cryptography has no legitimate law enforcement function; people proposing it either are idiots, or they are intrinsically opposed to free societies. Take your pick which category "Sir" Omand is likely to be in.
Well, that's because your sense of ethics is screwed up, not surprising given your line of work. The rest of us actually prefer that it cause you significant trouble to perform espionage and surveillance so that you actually have to target your limited resources to cases that matter, instead of going on fishing expeditions.
And from a purely practical point of view, banning strong encryption isn't going to help anyway because the only criminals and terrorists you are going to catch from relying on mandated weak encryption are fools. If you don't understand that, you are a fool yourself; if you do understand it, you are just a liar.
That isn't a problem with individuals, it's a problem with companies relying on passwords in the first place. Passwords by themselves are not secure, no matter how careful and knowledgeable the user may be in choosing them.
What people think of computer security is not relevant; things get fixed when the people capable of fixing it have an economic interest to do so. Right now, government effectively protects the entities responsible for poor security (mostly, corporations and the occasional end user) from paying the costs they impose on others. That needs to change.
What "administrative support" do you think the FSF provides for "many open source projects"? All they ever seem to want to do is for you to transfer your copyright to them based on bogus justifications.
As far as the R Project is concerned, I don't see them listed as benefactors or supporting institution:
http://www.r-project.org/found...
Furthermore, the R copyright hasn't even been transferred to the FSF, it's held by the R Foundation.
I think this confusion over R illustrates again how the FSF likes to misrepresent its contributions and significance.
Being associated with GNU and the FSF used to be a positive thing; these days, I think it's a net negative for any project.
Companies are profit maximizers. They aren't making changes because the current system doesn't cost them anything. They are never going to "put their money where their mouth is", and it is stupid to expect them to or even want them to.
The reason it doesn't cost them anything is because they are effectively immune from many forms of lawsuits, thanks to "the government".
A state run by a single party beholden to corporate interests and lobbyists and massively dependent on the tech industry. A state that is so incompetently run that it is teetering on the verge of bankruptcy, that its schools have dropped to the bottom, and that can't even solve its traffic gridlock. Cybersecurity legislation in California will do little more than exempt tech companies from any sort of liability and pour out massive amounts in government subsidies to big corporations for cybersecurity initiatives.
Real cybersecurity would require massively increasing the financial liability of corporations for any breach in security that causes their customers to lose money or waste time. For example, when a data breach at Home Depot causes banks to have to reissue credit cards, banks should be financially responsible to their customers for the many hours they have to waste on dealing with new credit card numbers, and Home Depot should be financially responsible to banks for all their resulting costs. If each of these data breaches cost corporations a few billion dollars, you'd be surprised how quickly security shapes up.
That only means that the FSF has chosen the package for the mythical "GNU operating system". It's no different from Debian or RedHat making an "R" package. Well, it is different in that the original "GNU operating system" remained eternal vaporware and "the GNU operating system" now consists of a haphazard mix of relabeled and restricted Linux distributions created by others.
Unfortunately, the FSF has a nasty habit of implying that they deserve credit for software whose creation they had nothing to do with. Other GNU packages were created by forking projects with more permissive licenses and slapping a GNU license on it.
The FSF early on contributed some useful software, and the GNU project set out to create an OS. I also think the GPL is a useful license (but not the only useful free or open source software license). But the FSF and GNU were made largely obsolete by open source software, and as far as I can tell, they haven't done much actual work recently (but feel free to correct me if I'm wrong).
R does have lots of statistical packages available, some of which are not available for Python. But those are often for obsolete statistical methods. When it comes to modern statistics, i.e. large scale Bayesian methods, non-parametric methods, simulations, neural networks, etc., then R is quite deficient in good packages relative to Python. In part, the reason why R is deficient in such packages is because the R language itself is actually pretty poor.
Yes, and that combo is head and shoulders above R.
R was a great tool relative to other statistical computing tools until maybe a decade ago. It's still better than Matlab, but that's not saying much. There are better options these days, like for example SciPy with Pandas.
The idea that working conditions improve much due to government regulation is a fiction. Working conditions ("worker's rights") improve because workers have the freedom to walk away from bad jobs to better jobs.
The regulations you see in the EU/US are largely designed as barriers to entry, so that big corporations can keep enjoying oligopolies in their markets. The kind of regulations they write are such that they simply mirror what the market would be doing anyway, but imposing a large administrative overhead that only big companies can afford to pay.
What a good little fascist and corporate whore you are. I mean that literally: that's pretty much the economic bullshit fascism was built on.
I see: small amounts of vegetables and fruits are cheap, but they get expensive in bulk? Are you insane or something?
In different words: American kids are getting so fat because parents are lazy and stuff them full of fast food (which is, incidentally, cheap only because its components are so highly subsidized). And to fix that problem, you suggest that socialized medicine spend vast amounts of money to mutilate people's bodies (and incidentally provide tons of income to the medical and pharma industries).
So you are saying is that we should implant vagus nerve stimulators because it's cheaper than proper nutrition? That is morally reprehensible and utterly disgusting even if it were true.
You are a sick human being.
Oh, sure it would. It would mean that the 90% of Americans who don't work in manufacturing would be paying significantly more for goods (i.e. become significantly poorer) so that the 10% of Americans who do work in manufacturing are doing well.
Why bother with the complex and annoying trade excuse for this? Just tax everybody an extra 5% and then send an extra 50% to everybody who works in manufacturing. Surely, that will make the economy boom!
Because, fortunately, even the moron-in-chief seems to have more sense than that.
Oh, we can easily prevent the race to the bottom. In fact, you can do it yourself: just look at your paycheck in cents instead of dollars. See, now you are 100x richer! That's pretty much what your economic proposals amount to.
I expect him to make the law in a way that is most favorable to corporations and then enforce that corporate-friendly law. And he can do that because morons like you keep electing people like Obama, people who say they want to protect consumers and the middle class, but who actually keep supporting big corporations with tax dollars. The biggest accomplishments of this administration, financial regulation, bailouts, stimulus packages, ACA, green energy, etc. have all been gigantic handouts to corporate America, and people like you keep voting these people into power because you delude yourself into thinking that the way to stop corporate cronyism is just electing the right politician who will finally take on corporate power.
Lewin's behavior may have been creepy and disgusting if the allegations turn out to be true. MIT is also fully within its rights to sever ties with Lewin for any reason.
But as far as I can tell, Lewin had no power over the student; the course was free and open, and participation was voluntary. There shouldn't be any legal case or any Title IX case here.
The government is enforcing the law, otherwise there would be lawsuits. What you simply don't want to face is that laws that were written under the pretense of giving you free stuff, and that dopes like you supported because you wanted free stuff, in reality ended up really giving free money to Verizon.
That is the predictable outcome every time a politician promises to give you better infrastructure, lower cost service, etc.: you end up overpaying somehow, and the extra money goes to corporations.
I claimed precisely the opposite, namely that going hungry is not going to work because, indeed, hunger is an irresistible drive. The misconception that you lose weight by going hungry is probably the single most common reason why people are overweight.
If you want to lose weight, what you have to do is change what you eat. Hunger is an irresistible drive, but there is no irresistible drive that forces you to stuff your face with french fries instead of broccoli.
No. What I claimed is that there is no significant difference in metabolism: that is, all people process food, use energy, and store fat in pretty much the same way. People obviously have wildly differing BMR. So what? What do you think that has to do with obesity? Where is the evidence that differences in BMR cause obesity?
I did a lot of reading on the subject because I actually used to be overweight. I used to have the same misconceptions you had, namely that you need to go hungry in order to lose weight. You don't. All you have to do is change what you eat. It's less fun to eat better foods, but it doesn't require significant willpower.
And I don't "tsk tsk" you. I find it sad when people stuff their faces with crap and wreck their bodies, completely unnecessarily.
The fact that your paper from 1998 even still asks the question shows you that the question certainly wasn't settled by then, so clearly, the people who justified government monopolies based on "natural monopolies" prior to that must have lied according to the paper you yourself dragged up. (And the question hasn't been settle since either.)
Furthermore, the methodology used in that paper doesn't answer the question whether natural monopolies exist because it can only look at data generated under a highly regulatory regime rather than free market competition (and in a single country at that).
The reason these require "large fixed investments" is not because there is a "natural monopoly" it is because power companies, electric companies, and municipal providers like it that way. Through regulatory capture, they have created high costs of entry. And people like you are cheering them on in how they screw over consumers and enjoy their monopoly rents.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S...
The first two links cook up an arbitrary measure of "prosperity":
For the NYTimes article, note that even according to their numbers, the US lead in terms of median income is mainly shrinking relative to Norway and Canada, two countries with small populations and huge natural resources.
Other parts of the NYTimes article are just bogus comparisons. For example, "the poor" in Europe may nominally earn more than their US counterparts, but they still end up being economically far worse off after you account for non-income transfers.
I have looked into these various claims and studies over the years, and I can assure you they are bullshit, mostly created by people who are desperately trying to match economic data to their political prejudices.
But whether Europeans are doing better or worse than Americans isn't even the issue. The real issue is that Europe clearly does what you want, namely redistribute income; in particular, it redistributes income from people who make above average contributions to society to people who make below average contributions to society, and that is simply wrong.
Well, the only other thing you can gain is muscle, and gaining a pound of muscle takes a lot more calories than gaining a pound of fat (even though the caloric content of muscle is, of course, less than that of fat).