Oh man, that's worthy of a spit take. This is Microsoft we're talking about, not a reformed heroin addict. Nothing has changed. This is classic embrace, extend, extinguish.
Why would they need/want to "embrace, extend, and extinguish" a platform that they themselves created?
Furthermore, what objectionable things has Microsoft done over the last decade?
Over the last decade, in what way has Microsoft been worse than Oracle/Sun or Apple? How does anything Microsoft has done compare to the major fuck up represented by Oracle/Sun's API copyright claims?
Seriously, I understand the Microsoft hatred; they badly misbehaved in the 90's, but that time has long since passed. They have lost their monopoly and they are struggling, and they are behaving accordingly.
Right, because the industry where a single company can make $40 billion in a quarter just doesn't have any money to advocate their interests.
We were talking about research, not advocacy. And your numbers are way off; total annual profits of all US and Canadian oil and gas producers are about $100 billion. That compares to over a trillion dollars the US government is spending on public schools, public universities, and research grants, all of which are dedicated to pushing the party line on climate change on the most impressionable members of society.
I don't see what's so "unthinkable" about it; Microsoft has been pretty honest and well-behaved when it comes to.NET since the start: they created open standards, made legal commitments not to assert any patents, and have supported Mono. That is... unlike that other company and its platform.
Okay, I present for my case the most recent IPCC report. It's peer reviewed, data published, methodology widely reviewed.
I have the IPCC report. It says "if you do nothing, then in the worst case, this will happen..." And to that I say: I can live with that, so let's do nothing. Lots of other people are saying the same thing.
Do you know how much computational power it takes to run climate models?
Why yes, as a matter of fact, I do!
Anyone with a desktop and GPU is not going to be able to replicate many of these models' results. You need supercomputers on the scale of the Top 500 to do that sort of thing
A GTX 1080 Ti has about 10 TFLOPS performance; that's what the Top 10 supercomputers in the world had 10 years ago, the kinds of supercomputers that a lot of climate models were developed and run on, and that most of the important predictions have been made with.
you idiot
You're welcome. Let me know if you have any other questions.
The 1% are a largely hereditary class of property owners.
Nope, sorry, you need to check up on that.. "The 1%" in common parlance refers to the top 1% income earners, about $200k and above for single earners, about $400k for families. That's professional salaries, not hereditary wealth.
Very few people can afford to own enough stock to matter. Your 401k is being eaten alive by fees. It is not a pension. It is not guaranteed or even likely to support you as you age.
This isn't about "401k's". Government retirement plans, life insurance, savings, they are all backed by the stock market ("institutional investors").
Nevertheless, if your 401k is "eaten by fees", you have made bad decisions. Maybe that's due to your general lack of financial literacy.
Your "logic" is flawed because it assumes that people aren't worth even the minimum wage.
The value of someone's work is determined by how much someone is willing to pay for it, nothing less and nothing more. It's pretty obvious that there are lots of people whose work isn't worth $15/h; that's particularly true for people just entering the workforce.
Even if you wanted to, you couldn't because you wouldn't be able to put in enough hours to make enough to have a place to sleep and food to eat.
People making below $15/h aren't elderly loners like you. They tend to be inexperienced, kids entering the workforce, spouses returning to work, etc. They live with parents, spouses, roommates. They only make minimum wage for a little while until they have learned some skills and become more valuable to the business.
The scientific consensus IS that humans are causing it.
I agree.
What politicians, ACs on/. and bloggers think is utter irrelevant.
And what scientists think is utterly irrelevant when it comes to deciding what to do about climate change. And, yes, doing nothing is a reasonable decision.
A useful tool for what? A minimum wage does a mix of a bunch of things: (1) it prices some labor out of the market,
We've just discussed why that's desirable. We don't want that market.
In what way is it "desirable" that a whole group of people cannot work? That's what "priced out of the market" means.
It also increases incomes of low-income segments. The majority of minimum wage earners have dependents.
Yes, but obviously, transferring money among low-income populations at best makes some low income people better off at the expense of others.
A steady rate of inflation is desirable because it devalues hoarded currency and thus encourages investment.
Well, whether it's desirable or not, it means that the minimum wage gains are inflated away.
Of course it will. That's exactly what it does.
And how do you believe that is going to work? How do rich people ever interact with minimum wage workers? Rich people don't buy low-end products, and if companies reduce profits to pay higher wages, then rich people will simply invest in companies that don't operate in such an unprofitable market segment.
False. Workers can increase their spending when they are paid more, so it directly increases economic output.
The money that you redistribute to minimum wage earners comes from somewhere; someone else is not spending or investing it.
Do you have anything to say which is not immediately and trivially proven false?
Your "prove" that minimum wage helps workers in pretty much the same way people "prove" that perpetual motion machines work.
I just don't get the desire for 3D interfaces for turn based strategy games like this. The move from text-based interfaces (Empire, 1970's) to 2D GUIs (XConq 1980's, Civilization, 1990's) was reasonable and improved the game experience. But I find the 3D interfaces that Firaxis introduced in the 2000's really made things worse.
The true measure of scientific fact is how well it survives the opposition trying to disprove it. Given that the opposition to climate change has given up on producing data disproving that the Earth is getting warmer on aggregate
"The opposition" isn't getting any funding to produce opposing research.
and instead resorted to attacking it politically, I would say it's doing pretty well as scientific theories go.
The political attacks are about policy, not science. Personally, I don't care whether the average global temperatures will be a few degrees higher in 2100.
Yeah, it's not like evolution, gravity, or the shape of the planet is settled. There's no point in making decisions about life and determining public policy on those three items because just because there's "only" a consensus,
The only consensus we have on climate change is that in 2100, it will be a couple of degrees warmer, and that human emissions may contribute to this. That's it. Science has nothing to say about what we can or should do about it; that's a question of economics, values and preferences.
The data for reproducing climate model predictions and published research already should be fully released, and as a practical matter, archived. Here is a set of links:
So what is this other data that they are trying to rescue from Trump?
If there is data missing, then that should be published. The climate research community might also want to update their computational tools from the dusty Fortran decks to something more modern. Everybody should be able to reproduce climate models on a modern desktop computer with a GPU and check for themselves.
You can't do it solely through protectionism. But it can be a useful tool, in the right situation.
A useful tool for what? A minimum wage does a mix of a bunch of things: (1) it prices some labor out of the market, (2) it increases prices on goods and services for low-income segments, and (3) it may be inflationary. What it won't do is (a) redistribute more money from rich people to poor people, or (b) increase economic output.
People will not work for $0.00 so that you can make money.
Correct. They won't work at all. Which is why their wage is, in fact, $0. The saying "the minimum wage is $0" points out that minimum wage simply prices labor out of the market.
I'm sorry if that's a little too complex for you, but think about it a little more and you may still figure it out.
The thing is, work still needs to get done and the merchant class still wants to make money.
Yes, but it's not necessarily the same work that gets done. I may be willing to hire an inexperienced short order cook for $5 to sell cheap food to low income customers, but if you set the minimum wage to $15, I will change my business model to sell more upscale food. If that doesn't work, I will close my business and do something different, like retire and invest my money in the stock market.
how to pry money from the 1%'s hands and get the economy moving).
"The 1%" is your doctor, your lawyer, your professor, your architect, etc. They don't have particular political power.
And those rich corporations you hate? They are publicly traded. It's what backs everybody's retirement accounts, among other things. If you were to cut into their profits somehow (minimum wage won't manage to do that, but something else might), you'd mainly hurt retirees and the middle class.
The people you hate are the 0.01%, people worth $100 million+ and who made their money through crony capitalism and market manipulations; you know, people like Hillary Clinton and George Soros.
Sometimes protectionism isn't such a bad thing. Like when corporations are busy pushing wages to their absolute minimum regardless of the actual cost of living.
And what do you think happens when you impose protectionist measures? The cost of imports goes up and hence the cost of living. Ah, you say, but that creates American jobs and raises demand for American workers, hence increasing their wages! Correct, but what does that do? It increases the cost of living further.
You can't increase living standards or wealth through protectionism; attempts to do so are the economic equivalent of a perpetual motion machine.
buying shares -- is no different from saying "hey I think you make good widgets, I'll pay for the advertising and stuff like that if you bring the widget-making gear and we can go into business together, split the proceeds", except a bit further abstracted.
So you agree then that buying/selling shares and profiting from them is necessary and should be allowed. How about derivatives, options, and futures? How about insurance? Contracts of the form "I give you $x and you give me $y if some condition arises"? How about funds, where someone bundles a whole bunch of shares together and then sells shares in that bundle? I still don't see any consistent line between what you consider valid and invalid "unearned income".
The state declining to enforce certain arbitrary obligations between parties does not make the market not free.... Otherwise the unenforceability of contracts selling yourself into slavery or any of many other onerous terms considered to make many contracts unenforceable -- or the complete absence of a state to enforce the contracts at all -- would make a market "unfree".
State enforcement of contracts is not necessary for free markets or for enforceable contracts.
You were literally in the very last two sentences calling for international agreements. It's literally the very last two sentences. This isn't up for interpretation.
This is what I literally said: "it is something that requires international agreement." I'm not "calling for" international agreements, I am simply stating that such agreements are necessary.
If you openly admit your intentions are to simply kill/delay an initiative, all your advice about how to support the initiative is obviously bullshit.
I wasn't giving advice on supporting the initiative. I was pointing out that such initiatives (1) require international agreement for deployment, and (2) that such international agreements are hard to reach. Based on your response, you obviously agree with both points. And as a tax payer, I'm not willing to spend a dime on, say, orbital solar shields if it is politically impossible to ever deploy them.
Now who should we get to look over those research grant proposals? Maybe someone who knows what the fuck is going on? Like a scientist?
Funding for the DOE is proposed by the president and approved by Congress; that's who should look at it and that's who DOE scientists need to make a case to. If they can't do that convincingly, they should lose funding. That's how a democracy works.
And how to compare the impact per dollar spent per the various proposals? We barely have a clue.
And if those climate scientists can make a convincing argument to tax payers and their elected representatives, they can receive more funding. So far, they don't seem to have done a good job at making an argument. That is, while the majority of Americans think climate change is real, it doesn't rank in the top 10 issues for voters. And that's basically my attitude: it's real, but there are far more important issues to worry about and spend federal tax dollars on.
It is possible to make an unearned income from "investments", and I oppose that. If you "invest" by lending money at interest, that is an unearned income. If you "invest" by buying real estate and renting it out, that is unearned income. Anything where someone is paying you just because you own something they want to use; in one word, usury, in its original sense of "a fee for use". But if you "invest" by building a business (buying the equipment you need to do work, advertising to get customers, etc), that's earned income
And where is that new business owner going to get the money from for his new business? He might, of course, have inherited it. But if he hasn't, he needs to get it from someone else, a loan. And the money for that loan needs to come from somewhere. The person who gives him that money will want a share of the profit in return. And, voila, you have "unearned income" and capitalism.
If you disallow contracts of the form "I give you some money for a share of your profits in the future", by definition, you don't have a free market anymore. Furthermore, if you disallow such contracts, people have no incentive to lend money to businesses, and so the only people who can start new businesses are rich people. That really isn't particularly conducive to economic growth or fairness.
The original market proponents like Smith and Mill saw markets as (though they didn't have the term) a socialist thing, encouraging greater equality
And Smith was right: relative to the unfree economic systems of the time, free markets promoted greater equality. However, relative to the socialist ideal, free markets create more inequality, but they also create more wealth, for everybody.
Owning stock is not automatically collecting an unearned income. Not in the way lending at interest or renting out property are. I have no objection to companies being held by arbitrarily many parties instead of just one or a few, in fact that's a good way to make sure that capital is broadly distributed -- a socialist end.
If making income from investments isn't "unearned income", what exactly do you think is "unearned income" then? And why do you use the term differently from the way people like Sanders or Clinton use it?
Slashdot Mirror
Why would they need/want to "embrace, extend, and extinguish" a platform that they themselves created?
Furthermore, what objectionable things has Microsoft done over the last decade?
Over the last decade, in what way has Microsoft been worse than Oracle/Sun or Apple? How does anything Microsoft has done compare to the major fuck up represented by Oracle/Sun's API copyright claims?
Seriously, I understand the Microsoft hatred; they badly misbehaved in the 90's, but that time has long since passed. They have lost their monopoly and they are struggling, and they are behaving accordingly.
We were talking about research, not advocacy. And your numbers are way off; total annual profits of all US and Canadian oil and gas producers are about $100 billion. That compares to over a trillion dollars the US government is spending on public schools, public universities, and research grants, all of which are dedicated to pushing the party line on climate change on the most impressionable members of society.
I don't see what's so "unthinkable" about it; Microsoft has been pretty honest and well-behaved when it comes to .NET since the start: they created open standards, made legal commitments not to assert any patents, and have supported Mono. That is... unlike that other company and its platform.
Sure they do, in the same way that unions of various forms do. But they aren't the billionaire plutocrats that "rsilvergun" is spreading FUD about.
I have the IPCC report. It says "if you do nothing, then in the worst case, this will happen..." And to that I say: I can live with that, so let's do nothing. Lots of other people are saying the same thing.
Now, what do you have?
The scientific consensus only says "if you want to keep temperature increases below X, you need to reduce carbon emissions to Y".
Scientists have no legitimacy determining what consequences society is willing to live with, or how we go about reducing carbon emissions.
Why yes, as a matter of fact, I do!
A GTX 1080 Ti has about 10 TFLOPS performance; that's what the Top 10 supercomputers in the world had 10 years ago, the kinds of supercomputers that a lot of climate models were developed and run on, and that most of the important predictions have been made with.
You're welcome. Let me know if you have any other questions.
Nope, sorry, you need to check up on that.. "The 1%" in common parlance refers to the top 1% income earners, about $200k and above for single earners, about $400k for families. That's professional salaries, not hereditary wealth.
This isn't about "401k's". Government retirement plans, life insurance, savings, they are all backed by the stock market ("institutional investors").
Nevertheless, if your 401k is "eaten by fees", you have made bad decisions. Maybe that's due to your general lack of financial literacy.
The value of someone's work is determined by how much someone is willing to pay for it, nothing less and nothing more. It's pretty obvious that there are lots of people whose work isn't worth $15/h; that's particularly true for people just entering the workforce.
People making below $15/h aren't elderly loners like you. They tend to be inexperienced, kids entering the workforce, spouses returning to work, etc. They live with parents, spouses, roommates. They only make minimum wage for a little while until they have learned some skills and become more valuable to the business.
I agree.
And what scientists think is utterly irrelevant when it comes to deciding what to do about climate change. And, yes, doing nothing is a reasonable decision.
In what way is it "desirable" that a whole group of people cannot work? That's what "priced out of the market" means.
Yes, but obviously, transferring money among low-income populations at best makes some low income people better off at the expense of others.
Well, whether it's desirable or not, it means that the minimum wage gains are inflated away.
And how do you believe that is going to work? How do rich people ever interact with minimum wage workers? Rich people don't buy low-end products, and if companies reduce profits to pay higher wages, then rich people will simply invest in companies that don't operate in such an unprofitable market segment.
The money that you redistribute to minimum wage earners comes from somewhere; someone else is not spending or investing it.
Your "prove" that minimum wage helps workers in pretty much the same way people "prove" that perpetual motion machines work.
I just don't get the desire for 3D interfaces for turn based strategy games like this. The move from text-based interfaces (Empire, 1970's) to 2D GUIs (XConq 1980's, Civilization, 1990's) was reasonable and improved the game experience. But I find the 3D interfaces that Firaxis introduced in the 2000's really made things worse.
"The opposition" isn't getting any funding to produce opposing research.
The political attacks are about policy, not science. Personally, I don't care whether the average global temperatures will be a few degrees higher in 2100.
The only consensus we have on climate change is that in 2100, it will be a couple of degrees warmer, and that human emissions may contribute to this. That's it. Science has nothing to say about what we can or should do about it; that's a question of economics, values and preferences.
The data for reproducing climate model predictions and published research already should be fully released, and as a practical matter, archived. Here is a set of links:
http://www.realclimate.org/ind...
So what is this other data that they are trying to rescue from Trump?
If there is data missing, then that should be published. The climate research community might also want to update their computational tools from the dusty Fortran decks to something more modern. Everybody should be able to reproduce climate models on a modern desktop computer with a GPU and check for themselves.
A useful tool for what? A minimum wage does a mix of a bunch of things: (1) it prices some labor out of the market, (2) it increases prices on goods and services for low-income segments, and (3) it may be inflationary. What it won't do is (a) redistribute more money from rich people to poor people, or (b) increase economic output.
Correct. They won't work at all. Which is why their wage is, in fact, $0. The saying "the minimum wage is $0" points out that minimum wage simply prices labor out of the market.
I'm sorry if that's a little too complex for you, but think about it a little more and you may still figure it out.
Yes, but it's not necessarily the same work that gets done. I may be willing to hire an inexperienced short order cook for $5 to sell cheap food to low income customers, but if you set the minimum wage to $15, I will change my business model to sell more upscale food. If that doesn't work, I will close my business and do something different, like retire and invest my money in the stock market.
"The 1%" is your doctor, your lawyer, your professor, your architect, etc. They don't have particular political power.
And those rich corporations you hate? They are publicly traded. It's what backs everybody's retirement accounts, among other things. If you were to cut into their profits somehow (minimum wage won't manage to do that, but something else might), you'd mainly hurt retirees and the middle class.
The people you hate are the 0.01%, people worth $100 million+ and who made their money through crony capitalism and market manipulations; you know, people like Hillary Clinton and George Soros.
And what do you think happens when you impose protectionist measures? The cost of imports goes up and hence the cost of living. Ah, you say, but that creates American jobs and raises demand for American workers, hence increasing their wages! Correct, but what does that do? It increases the cost of living further.
You can't increase living standards or wealth through protectionism; attempts to do so are the economic equivalent of a perpetual motion machine.
No matter what laws you pass, the minimum wage is always zero.
That is, the effect of minimum wages is simply to keep some people from getting jobs at all. Of course historically, that was the point.
Except... people and funds do disclose this. Big institutions and funds often are required to.
Why don't you cut the ad hominems and instead provide some data, facts, and sound analysis?
So you agree then that buying/selling shares and profiting from them is necessary and should be allowed. How about derivatives, options, and futures? How about insurance? Contracts of the form "I give you $x and you give me $y if some condition arises"? How about funds, where someone bundles a whole bunch of shares together and then sells shares in that bundle? I still don't see any consistent line between what you consider valid and invalid "unearned income".
State enforcement of contracts is not necessary for free markets or for enforceable contracts.
This is what I literally said: "it is something that requires international agreement." I'm not "calling for" international agreements, I am simply stating that such agreements are necessary.
I wasn't giving advice on supporting the initiative. I was pointing out that such initiatives (1) require international agreement for deployment, and (2) that such international agreements are hard to reach. Based on your response, you obviously agree with both points. And as a tax payer, I'm not willing to spend a dime on, say, orbital solar shields if it is politically impossible to ever deploy them.
Funding for the DOE is proposed by the president and approved by Congress; that's who should look at it and that's who DOE scientists need to make a case to. If they can't do that convincingly, they should lose funding. That's how a democracy works.
And if those climate scientists can make a convincing argument to tax payers and their elected representatives, they can receive more funding. So far, they don't seem to have done a good job at making an argument. That is, while the majority of Americans think climate change is real, it doesn't rank in the top 10 issues for voters. And that's basically my attitude: it's real, but there are far more important issues to worry about and spend federal tax dollars on.
And where is that new business owner going to get the money from for his new business? He might, of course, have inherited it. But if he hasn't, he needs to get it from someone else, a loan. And the money for that loan needs to come from somewhere. The person who gives him that money will want a share of the profit in return. And, voila, you have "unearned income" and capitalism.
If you disallow contracts of the form "I give you some money for a share of your profits in the future", by definition, you don't have a free market anymore. Furthermore, if you disallow such contracts, people have no incentive to lend money to businesses, and so the only people who can start new businesses are rich people. That really isn't particularly conducive to economic growth or fairness.
And Smith was right: relative to the unfree economic systems of the time, free markets promoted greater equality. However, relative to the socialist ideal, free markets create more inequality, but they also create more wealth, for everybody.
If making income from investments isn't "unearned income", what exactly do you think is "unearned income" then? And why do you use the term differently from the way people like Sanders or Clinton use it?