There are people who genuinely believe that a "Women's Studies" degree, or an Anthropology degree, etc, will help them get a job and prosper, because they've been sold a bill of goods
"Sold" by who? My college didn't promise wealth from a Women's Study degree.
We could at least provide the level of information easily available to a car shopper, no?
"We" do. It's been in books and newspapers for over half a century. It's online these days. http://bit.ly/180oEsq
Then perhaps market corrections would happen before the absurd sort of bubble we have today!
It's questionable whether there even is a bubble. The vast majority of Americans graduate from college without large debts. You accumulate a large debt and have trouble repaying it if you (1) choose to go to an overpriced, elite school and (2) major in something useless. That's a small percentage of all majors, and they really only have themselves to blame.
It's unfair to expect someone to have the education to recognize they're being conned when it's the education system itself who are the con-men. Really, how are kids supposed to figure this out beforehand?
Fraud is fraud, and victim-blaming isn't appropriate.
You major in Women's Studies and you get a Women's Studies degree. You are told up-front how much it costs. There is tons of information on the kinds of careers you can take. Where is the fraud?
When the education system itself it lying to kids about the necessity and value of a given degree, that's pure Evil.
Oh, I agree: it's evil. And who is doing the lying? High school teachers, mostly in public schools, financed by tax dollars.
Ah, you're the kind who gives "libertarianism" a bad name.
I sure hope so! A "bad name" with people like you is an endorsement.
Don't learn R, learn Python instead. Like R, Python has tons of support for statistics, numerical computing, and machine learning, and pretty much whatever you want to do in R, you can do just as easily in Python (with matplotlib, SciPy, pandas, and a few other packages). Unlike R, Python is also widely used for general purpose programming as well.
That's true, but what does cost have to do with the price the consumer has to pay?
You can see the difference between cost and price by looking at the profit margin, which is public for all mobile operators. Net annual profit margin for Verizon is probably about 5% on average. Competition keeps it down in that range.
Nicely put, but this isn't the Web 2.0 bubble, this is the tuition bubble. Universities today (and a few students) seem to think it appropriate to charge $100k in tuition for degrees that in no way help you get a job after graduation, just make you a "well rounded individual".
They charge whatever people are willing to pay.
What most students (and parents, and potential employers) expect from a university is an affordable program that gives you the skills to begin a professional career upon graduation, or leads directly to law or med school (or possibly an MBA).
Choosing worthless and overpriced degrees is the responsibility of students and parents, not of universities.
The vast gap between what Universities do right now, and what (most) people want them to do,... while tenure stops being offered to actual professors) is a very painful economic bubble, one long overdue for popping.
The bubble will pop when students come to their senses. Until then, it remains worthwhile to charge inflated amounts for useless degrees.
How is that not reallistic? As long as you don't go over the limit, you are fine
I have subscribed to this kind of service in Europe: you will go over the limit and it will cost you dearly when you do. You're not reading the fine print (e.g. "vers mobiles").
By both actually. France regulates the number of providers. They wanted a 4th one so they had one.
So does the US. That's why we have four providers. What's your point?
They are forcing an incumbant (orange) to offer roaming while Free is building its network.
That's because Orange used to be a public utility and monopoly, before France deregulated it. Orange is, in effect, subsidizing those cheap free.fr plans. Again, what's your point?
If you are a big user, just take the 20 euro plan. I fail to see how this is a gimmick. It's about 1/4 of the price of my country.
I don't know what you mean by "my country". Do you mean the US?
I'd love to have such a cheap plan in my country.
Would you "love to have" the taxes, regulations, and obligations that go along with living in France? Because the whole thing comes as a package. You cannot have US-style taxes, salaries, and economic growth while at the same time having French-style subsidized prices and services.
Well, yes, obviously you are "thoroughly confused" if you don't think that going from a system without volume caps to a system with volume caps isn't a step backwards.
What's the catch? Can't we get a mobile plan for only 2 euros/month?
The catch is that you automatically switch to very expensive per MB/minute plans, so if you use it at all, you end up paying an arm and a leg. The EU 2 plan by free.fr is a gimmick, not a realistic plan.
And again, what is the point you're actually trying to make? Was free.fr a service created by regulation or by deregulation?
Ok what US MVNO offers 120 minutes of talk time (to France, the USA and 99 other destinations), unlimited SMS and 50 MB data for 2 euros/month? Free offers it in France
You mean this? http://mobile.free.fr/ I think your French is a little rusty, and those plans end up being a ton more expensive when all is said and done. Note that in Europe, the existence of these plans is a result of deregulation, not regulation.
In any case, in the US, Ting and Family Mobile are pretty good deals. If you look around, you can find even cheaper plans, but I don't think it's worth bothering.
I am so done with those paid for corrupt scumbags, and it blows my mind how any person that can call themselves a republican can support these idiots and how scummy evil they really are.
Funny, that's how I feel about the Obama administration right now: the Obama administration has been engaging in massive crony capitalism since the beginning and screwing the American people left and right. And they are so good at propaganda that they can dress up massive rent-seeking legislation in a way that morons like you believe that they are actually getting a good deal. Tell me again how the trillions that disappeared in the hands of banks and Wall St, car companies, overextended home owners, and big military corporations under Obama are good for the people? Do you really think that taking $1000 out of your pocket and handing it to GM benefits anybody but GM?
Legislation can't just declare that power which the FCC already has (given to them by the 1934 act and by follow-on legislation) doesn't count, and they can't do such-and-such.
Sure it can declare that; that's how existing authorizations get modified and limited, through new legislation. Of course, it's questionable that the FCC ever had the authority in the first place.
This piece of shit is just kabuki theater. Nothing to see here.
What makes such legislation pointless is that Obama would veto it. Republicans need to wait until we get a Republican president do undo some of the damage done by Obama. Unfortunately, given the executive overreach precedents that Obama has set, Republicans will probably go much too far. The "piece of shit kabuki theater" is what President Obama has been treating the country to.
Sounds like a strawman to me. No one (except perhaps the anti-NN folks, like yourself) has proposed that throttling excessive usage goes against the tenets of NN.
But that's the point: rather than have the current system, where you end up with a mix of services and data volumes that work for most people (negotiated deals with Netflix and YouTube, occasional other video just squeezes through), "net neutrality" forces companies to come up with one-size-fits-all rules. In this case, that may well mean volume caps for all users.
It's going to get vetoed anyway, so why go through the exercise?
"Net neturality" is a lousy idea that's going to hurt Internet users for years to come, but it's going to take a Republican Congress and a Republican president to fix.
Well you could argue that while there are no roaming charges within the US, prices are much higher than in the EU.
You could argue that, but you would be wrong. You can get damned cheap cell phone service in the US if you're willing to go with an MVNO, just like in Europe. European cellular operators also have all sorts of hidden costs that you don't see when you simply go over to their web sites and look at their nominal prices. Finally, you have to put prices in relationship to take-home incomes, which are also considerably lower in Europe.
You're right: Europe is a great place to be rich. That's my point. Europe sticks it to professionals and the upper middle class, well-off wage earners. People with actual wealth have numerous ways of shielding it in Europe. The US is considerably more egalitarian, in part because the IRS is so draconian.
You could use the same argument within a single country. The average person only needs coverage in his home city, right? Why would roaming across France be free when you live in Paris?
Because the actual cost of roaming within a country is so low that it doesn't make much sense to account for it.
The actual cost of roaming between countries is a lot higher, so it does make sense to account for it and charge for it.
that a rational answer is "hell no, there's no reason to get your kids burdened with dealing with the US government and laws".
It does, namely that the US is far more aggressive on taxing its rich people than Europeans; all you need to do in Europe to escape taxation is move out of the country. Europe has such a high level of equality because most of the rich people have played musical chairs with residency and citizenship.
If they want to live in the US, it makes sense for them to become US citizens. If you're sure they don't want to live in the US, it makes sense for them not to become US citizens.
It really depends on whether you have more confidence in Europe or in the US in the long run. (Personally, despite all the things going wrong in the US, Europe is a basket case, but your views may differ.)
It's actually, the "open, reproducible science bill":
The bills, introduced by a mostly Republican cast of sponsors in both the House and the Senate, would require that EPA use only publicly available, reproducible data in writing regulations and seek to remake the membership and procedures of the agency’s science advisory panels.
One might think that the name "secret science bill" was dreamed up by a Democratic staffer intending to kill the bill, but that's actually the name Republicans gave the bill; Republicans really are bumbling idiots. If they had it called the "open, reproducible science bill", it would have stood a much better chance.
As to the content of the bill, there is a real problem with the EPA and other government agencies using immature science and irreproducible results as the basis of legislation, but that problem can't be fixed through new laws. The only way to reign in the EPA is to cut it down in size substantially or abolish it altogether and have state agencies deal with these issues.
You may not be aware that there is lots of openly expressed racism in Europe
I am quite aware of that. Nevertheless, the day-to-day experience of Italian psychology students with dark skin color is very different from that of Americans as a whole, making attempts to generalize the Italian results to American "white people" invalid.
I wasn't actually talking about private policing, but the medieval situation with river travel - lots of forts/castles put up to extract revenue from passing traffic.
What point are you trying to make?
As for private policing, look up the Pinkertons.
Again, is there some sort of point or argument you're trying to make?
For the HOA - it's a micro-government. It can pass laws and enforce them without the consent of the owners of the homes,
That is absolutely incorrect. An HOA does not have governmental powers. It cannot "pass laws" and it cannot "enforce them"; it is a civil, private, non-governmental organization with voluntary members, and the limits on power that that implies.
short of them selling and moving away. On a country scale that would be equivalent to fleeing the country.
Even if your belief that an HOA is like a government were not factually false, that is still a huge difference: selling your home and moving into a different HOA is easy, fleeing the country is not. That is one reason why even government should follow the subsidiarity principle.
As for the pollution of the 19th and 20th century, well, they were actually generally better off with the pollution than they would have been without the industry. Which is what I'm trying to get at.
You are still making arbitrary judgments for the country as a whole.
"The problem is that your "proposals" are nothing more than wishful thinking." Then why does it get your goat so much?
Because they don't work, and because entire societies have destroyed themselves in pursuit of your false and unworkable solutions.
Just because I disagree with you doesn't mean I'm not a libertarian. Like I said before, even I disclaimed that I'm a 'moderate' libertarian, which means that I don't agree with the party 100%.
As I was saying: the issue is not that we disagree on individual policies. You fail to be a libertarian because you justify policies based on reasoning about groups of people and what is best for them; that is a progressive viewpoint, not a libertarian. The libertarian viewpoint starts with the right of individuals to make choices. Whether those choices produce good or bad outcomes for those individuals, or what groups you divide society into, is irrelevant.
Slashdot Mirror
"Sold" by who? My college didn't promise wealth from a Women's Study degree.
"We" do. It's been in books and newspapers for over half a century. It's online these days. http://bit.ly/180oEsq
It's questionable whether there even is a bubble. The vast majority of Americans graduate from college without large debts. You accumulate a large debt and have trouble repaying it if you (1) choose to go to an overpriced, elite school and (2) major in something useless. That's a small percentage of all majors, and they really only have themselves to blame.
http://lmgtfy.com/?q=salary+by...
You major in Women's Studies and you get a Women's Studies degree. You are told up-front how much it costs. There is tons of information on the kinds of careers you can take. Where is the fraud?
Oh, I agree: it's evil. And who is doing the lying? High school teachers, mostly in public schools, financed by tax dollars.
I sure hope so! A "bad name" with people like you is an endorsement.
Don't learn R, learn Python instead. Like R, Python has tons of support for statistics, numerical computing, and machine learning, and pretty much whatever you want to do in R, you can do just as easily in Python (with matplotlib, SciPy, pandas, and a few other packages). Unlike R, Python is also widely used for general purpose programming as well.
You can see the difference between cost and price by looking at the profit margin, which is public for all mobile operators. Net annual profit margin for Verizon is probably about 5% on average. Competition keeps it down in that range.
They charge whatever people are willing to pay.
Choosing worthless and overpriced degrees is the responsibility of students and parents, not of universities.
The bubble will pop when students come to their senses. Until then, it remains worthwhile to charge inflated amounts for useless degrees.
The second law of thermodynamics says nothing about information, only about entropy. And it isn't so much a "law" as a "postulate".
I have subscribed to this kind of service in Europe: you will go over the limit and it will cost you dearly when you do. You're not reading the fine print (e.g. "vers mobiles").
So does the US. That's why we have four providers. What's your point?
That's because Orange used to be a public utility and monopoly, before France deregulated it. Orange is, in effect, subsidizing those cheap free.fr plans. Again, what's your point?
I don't know what you mean by "my country". Do you mean the US?
Would you "love to have" the taxes, regulations, and obligations that go along with living in France? Because the whole thing comes as a package. You cannot have US-style taxes, salaries, and economic growth while at the same time having French-style subsidized prices and services.
Next question?
Well, yes, obviously you are "thoroughly confused" if you don't think that going from a system without volume caps to a system with volume caps isn't a step backwards.
The catch is that you automatically switch to very expensive per MB/minute plans, so if you use it at all, you end up paying an arm and a leg. The EU 2 plan by free.fr is a gimmick, not a realistic plan.
And again, what is the point you're actually trying to make? Was free.fr a service created by regulation or by deregulation?
You mean this? http://mobile.free.fr/ I think your French is a little rusty, and those plans end up being a ton more expensive when all is said and done. Note that in Europe, the existence of these plans is a result of deregulation, not regulation.
In any case, in the US, Ting and Family Mobile are pretty good deals. If you look around, you can find even cheaper plans, but I don't think it's worth bothering.
Funny, that's how I feel about the Obama administration right now: the Obama administration has been engaging in massive crony capitalism since the beginning and screwing the American people left and right. And they are so good at propaganda that they can dress up massive rent-seeking legislation in a way that morons like you believe that they are actually getting a good deal. Tell me again how the trillions that disappeared in the hands of banks and Wall St, car companies, overextended home owners, and big military corporations under Obama are good for the people? Do you really think that taking $1000 out of your pocket and handing it to GM benefits anybody but GM?
Sure it can declare that; that's how existing authorizations get modified and limited, through new legislation. Of course, it's questionable that the FCC ever had the authority in the first place.
What makes such legislation pointless is that Obama would veto it. Republicans need to wait until we get a Republican president do undo some of the damage done by Obama. Unfortunately, given the executive overreach precedents that Obama has set, Republicans will probably go much too far. The "piece of shit kabuki theater" is what President Obama has been treating the country to.
But that's the point: rather than have the current system, where you end up with a mix of services and data volumes that work for most people (negotiated deals with Netflix and YouTube, occasional other video just squeezes through), "net neutrality" forces companies to come up with one-size-fits-all rules. In this case, that may well mean volume caps for all users.
It's going to get vetoed anyway, so why go through the exercise?
"Net neturality" is a lousy idea that's going to hurt Internet users for years to come, but it's going to take a Republican Congress and a Republican president to fix.
You could argue that, but you would be wrong. You can get damned cheap cell phone service in the US if you're willing to go with an MVNO, just like in Europe. European cellular operators also have all sorts of hidden costs that you don't see when you simply go over to their web sites and look at their nominal prices. Finally, you have to put prices in relationship to take-home incomes, which are also considerably lower in Europe.
Correct. So, market consolidation and increased concentration lowers costs.
Yes, and when costs got lower, it wasn't worth accounting for them anymore and they disappeared. All without government regulation.
You're right: Europe is a great place to be rich. That's my point. Europe sticks it to professionals and the upper middle class, well-off wage earners. People with actual wealth have numerous ways of shielding it in Europe. The US is considerably more egalitarian, in part because the IRS is so draconian.
Because the actual cost of roaming within a country is so low that it doesn't make much sense to account for it.
The actual cost of roaming between countries is a lot higher, so it does make sense to account for it and charge for it.
It does, namely that the US is far more aggressive on taxing its rich people than Europeans; all you need to do in Europe to escape taxation is move out of the country. Europe has such a high level of equality because most of the rich people have played musical chairs with residency and citizenship.
If they want to live in the US, it makes sense for them to become US citizens. If you're sure they don't want to live in the US, it makes sense for them not to become US citizens.
It really depends on whether you have more confidence in Europe or in the US in the long run. (Personally, despite all the things going wrong in the US, Europe is a basket case, but your views may differ.)
It's actually, the "open, reproducible science bill":
http://news.sciencemag.org/env...
One might think that the name "secret science bill" was dreamed up by a Democratic staffer intending to kill the bill, but that's actually the name Republicans gave the bill; Republicans really are bumbling idiots. If they had it called the "open, reproducible science bill", it would have stood a much better chance.
As to the content of the bill, there is a real problem with the EPA and other government agencies using immature science and irreproducible results as the basis of legislation, but that problem can't be fixed through new laws. The only way to reign in the EPA is to cut it down in size substantially or abolish it altogether and have state agencies deal with these issues.
I am quite aware of that. Nevertheless, the day-to-day experience of Italian psychology students with dark skin color is very different from that of Americans as a whole, making attempts to generalize the Italian results to American "white people" invalid.
What point are you trying to make?
Again, is there some sort of point or argument you're trying to make?
That is absolutely incorrect. An HOA does not have governmental powers. It cannot "pass laws" and it cannot "enforce them"; it is a civil, private, non-governmental organization with voluntary members, and the limits on power that that implies.
Even if your belief that an HOA is like a government were not factually false, that is still a huge difference: selling your home and moving into a different HOA is easy, fleeing the country is not. That is one reason why even government should follow the subsidiarity principle.
You are still making arbitrary judgments for the country as a whole.
Because they don't work, and because entire societies have destroyed themselves in pursuit of your false and unworkable solutions.
As I was saying: the issue is not that we disagree on individual policies. You fail to be a libertarian because you justify policies based on reasoning about groups of people and what is best for them; that is a progressive viewpoint, not a libertarian. The libertarian viewpoint starts with the right of individuals to make choices. Whether those choices produce good or bad outcomes for those individuals, or what groups you divide society into, is irrelevant.