False. It has a direct effect, in that the same amount of money provides greater utility to the poor than to the rich; but it also has an indirect effect, that it reduces the incentive for people to work in order to become rich.
So higher salaries for lower paid jobs automatically cause less incentive to work? I don't think so...
So yes, according to standard economic theory it makes sense to limit the personal accumulation of wealth.
- that is absolute lunacy.
Not really, it follows directly from classical microeconomics, as the diminishing value of money is empirically well-confirmed, under the assumption of utilitarianism. I'd challenge the utilitarian assumption if I were you and wanted to make a cogent argument.
In case of a wealthy person working actually means using his money and connections and all of his capabilities to produce more, so by limiting the amount of money he can earn you are limiting the usefulness of what he does.
It may be less useful than he thinks - others can do the very same thing, but they will get more utility from the same amount of discretionary income or an even lower one. Moreover, while there are certainly some unusually talented exceptions like e.g. Warren Buffet, it is fair to say that they are not the rule but that generally speaking very rich people are as replaceable and useful as anyone else. It is also implausible to assume that very rich people, as a tendency, work because they want to earn more money ("another dollar"). They have almost no incentive to do so because of the diminishing marginal utility of money. It's far more plausible to assume that, as a tendency, they work because they like their work. That's also the reason why Bill Gates has no problems with giving away much of his money. He likes to work with finance and on interesting projects, but he couldn't care less about personal gains.
There is no strong indication that becoming that rich is based on substantially more than (mostly) coincidence, based on being at the right place at the right time knowing the right people and other stochastic variables. That's why I don't trust any of those "My secret to financial success" books, they merely illustrate survivor bias mixed with a few truisms. Many rich people like to pretend that they 'made it' by their own intellect and skills, and I don't blame them because it would be kind of embarrassing to have all this money without any real achievement except for being an outlier of some probability distribution. I also don't want to say that none of them have any skills, some intelligence or smartness is certainly required to keep being wealthy and not being ripped off by others like e.g. lawyers (some rock stars lacked this intelligence, for instance), but I do think there is a tendency to overrate one's own contribution to financial success.
As for the claim that nobody should have that much money, it's true that from a utilitarian point of view according to standard economic theory transferring money from the very rich to the poor always increases overall utility in a society, because money has diminishing marginal value. So yes, according to standard economic theory it makes sense to limit the personal accumulation of wealth.
That being said, I can't blame anyone for keeping all his money, although Bill Gates is the perfect example that there is no reason to do so. He's not only willing to give away much of his unnecessary wealth, he even looks at the maximum 'bang for the bucks' when doing so, so kudos to him! Hopefully Jeff Bezos does the same.
In other words, is there a reason for me to install Kaspersky instead of Sophos or Bitdefender, which I both used in the past? (If you reply, please do NOT mention anything about US politics or Russia - thank you!)
One reason could be that Russia is effectively a dictatorship ruled by Putin and a few oligarchs, but still has a mighty military and thousands of nukes, and at the same time fosters some extreme right-wing nationalism to detract from domestic problems, so whenever Putin decides to retire to his Dacha outside of Moscow, some batshit-crazy ultranationalist could rise to power and control all those slowly rotting nukes.
Another reason could be the recent annexation of the Crimean Peninsula and the countless annoying Russian troll-bots on the Internet. They are annoying.
Yet another reason: The habits of slightly demented US senators. It's hard to change long-term habits.
More reasons: Democrats are currently trying to discredit the retarded Trump government, but repeating Trump's stupid tweets doesn't have enough of a desired effect since America's voters have apparently gone fully mental. So now they switched to this 'he's aiding the enemy' rhetorics, which of course only works if the Russians are enemies. It's counter-productive, but makes sense from their perspective. (Remember: Just before the Trump thing, everybody was bashing China's hacking efforts, which are also immense.)
Anyway, there are reasons over reasons. Some are better, some are worse.
Exactly. I have lived in 3 different countries in Northern and Southern Europe so far, and have never been robbed or mugged. Robbery is very rare in European cities. Pocket theft is more common. My only safeguard is to not carry a credit card with me, because these can be used without PIN number at some places. Instead, I carry a debit card that requires the PIN number for use, and as much cash as I need.
The worst thing that ever happened to me was that a bag with my wallet was stolen, which contained the debit card and about 15 Euro in cash. I went home and blocked the card, and that was it. Since then I've got into the habit of placing my bags in front of me on the table where I can see them all the time - thieves like to sneak them away from behind when you put them next to your chair, so don't do that.
AFAIK, chances are higher to become victim of fraud with fake skimmers on ATM, fake base stations for mobile payment, etc. than that your cash is stolen in a robbery, so at least for my area the premise of the question seems odd.
Your reply is not very satisfying or convincing to me. You come up with one site on the Internet for additional information - you could have just as well mentioned books or Wikipedia -, put a false dichotomy in my mouth and then mention a few cases which were either corrected by the very same media or are cases of deliberate and massive government-steered disinformation campaigns that are well-known, because they have been uncovered by the very same mass media you're criticizing.
I also cannot recommend "globalresearch" as an information source, for even just a cursory glance reveals that it is extremely opinionated and primarily based on copying news rather than gathering them. Even if you personally like it, it's important to realize that news aggregation sites like "globalresearch" would be nothing without the media and news agencies who actually employ journalists and have networks of correspondents.
Sometimes, people who 'flat out' support the media also may have a political agenda, the agenda of the status quo, neo-conservatives, current rule.
Here we go again, You're implying that either (i) major news outlets are systematically lying in some huge world-wide conspiracy, or (ii) somehow the truth supports status quo neo-conservative views more than other political views. Many people would probably subscribe to (ii) but I think that both (i) and (ii) are completely lunatic.
AC certainly doesn't express it in a politically correct way, but at least he has a point.
People who flat-out complain about the "media" tend to have a hidden political agenda - far right or far left or religious extremists, they all like to pick on the media in general for obvious reasons. They also consistently fail to name any alternative 'fringe news sources' that would be more reliable than comparing major news outlets. When you ask them, they either come up with nothing at all or with obviously ridiculous choices such as personal blogs, conspiracy sites, extremist radio hosts, etc. Yet they all have in common that they believe they are better informed than people who actually read newspapers. Don't support those lunatics!
Boy, calm down, that's nothing in comparison to the past. You should have been alive when the Cold War was raging... all those pesky US fake news outlets going against Prawda!
They have much more in common than they do differences.
You mean both are racist, fairly restrictive authoritarian regimes under oligarchic rule by the 1% with an expressed disdain for basic human rights who also wage aggressive wars from time to time and spend a large amount of their tax payers' money on the military and an absurdly overblown intelligence community? You might have a point there...
These are trolls, just ignore them. Russia has a special eye on Germany, not just for geostrategical reasons but also because due to his past Putin considers it somehow his home turf.
Well, it all depends on where you would prefer your data not to show up - in the hand of the GRU or FSB, or in the hand of the NSA or FBI? To be honest, judging from the past actions of the US and Russia, I would avoid antivirus software from those countries altogether. France and the UK are out of question, too, they have a long history of totalitarian surveillance measures. Maybe I'm wrong, but from all I've heard - endless discussions about the legality of government Trojans, etc. - I'd find it less likely that a German antivirus producer collude directly with government agencies. I'm sure there are even better choices if you care to look closely at the public discussion, laws, and the way intelligence agencies operate in other countries. Maybe some other European country?
The real problem is that antivirus software tends to be fairly insecure in itself, though, to the extent that some people have started to question whether it actually heightens security.:/
... or 1/8 l of red wine a day vs total abstinence. I've grown fairly skeptical over the years about these kind of studies, because they seem to go back and forth without any type of final conclusion in sight. Maybe I'm wrong this time and this is the last word on coffee. Then again, maybe not...;-)
No mainstream operating system has responsive GUIs under heavy load, especially not under heavy i/o load. GNU/Linux goes down very rapidly, Android is sluggish out of the box, and OSX have their spinning beachball of death. They are designed incorrectly.
As a test, you may surf to this page to see how your system handles an embedded zip bomb. (Warning: Don't click this link unless you're willing to kill your browser session or even hard-reset your machine.)
No they haven't. At least not for everyone. On my Windows 7 machine every update consistently fails since they switched to bundled updates, and there is no technical means of recovering from this situation. I've tried absolutely everything you can imagine, every Microsoft and every 3rd party tool, except for reinstalling the whole operating system - the latter wouldn't be practical for me, because it would mean that I would have to manually reinstall hundreds of audio plugins (every second one with its own DRM scheme, and besides I'm going to buy a new machine soon anyway.
I cannot imagine how or why the maker of an operating system cannot invent a fix for their update problems. It doesn't help that each attempt of updating requires two restarts and takes an endless amount of time rolling back the update.
If it weren't for the audio software I'd surely get rid of Windows entirely, at the expense of never being able to play a top game anymore. I'm using GNU/Linux for work, of course, and never had any problems with it.
As far as I can see many Americans are worried about illegal NSA surveillance. I'll leave it open whether that's reasonable or unreasonable, but at least for those people it makes perfect sense not to run US antivirus software and instead use software from Russia, Romania, etc.
By the same token, my answer to the headline question is No. The only effect of giving source code to the US government is that it will be handed over to the NSA who will then analyze it for weaknesses. (I'm fairly confident that they already have done that will all antivirus software, though, so in the end it won't matter much. But anticipatory obedience is generally not a good way to deal with government wishes.)
The problem, in fact, is that there are "sides" in the first place.
It's an entirely artificial debate that only exists in the US, thanks to large investments in "anti-climate change" agendas. The debate doesn't exist anywhere else because in other parts of the world just take the opinions of the vast majority of scientists (> 95%) on a matter in order to make informed decisions.
In combination with half-hearted attempts of most politicians worldwide, the primary effect in the long run will be that global warming will continue to accelerate, though it slow down a little bit due to efforts of the rest of the world (as the US is pretty much alone regarding this topic), and that European countries and China will continue to be the world-wide leading manufacturers of green energy production whose relevance will increase whether there is man-made climate change or not.
My opinion is that the current US position is overall good for Europe, especially for Germany which is already leading in green energy technology. Regarding the US pseudo-discussion, well, what should I say, science has been right and science has been wrong, but it's retarded not to make your policy decisions on the basis of the current scientific consensus. There is a lot to discuss for laymen and politicians in terms of how to respond, but certainly not the scientific details.
However, in order for broken ideas to die, they must be challenged.
Sadly, that's false on the Internet.:( On the contrary, on the Internet broken ideas are perpetuated in echo chambers and by hobby nutjob groups, transformed in a long series of "Chinese whispers" and rumors into fake news, copied again from the same sites, and end up in the mind of poor conspiracy schmucks who then drive to Washington D.C. to kill the "Pizzagate" pedophiles, claim that 9/11 was an insider job, or threaten to kill the parents of the victims of the Sandy Hook massacre.
That being said, the Youtube filtering is maybe not about these isolated cases but more against widespread terror propaganda that e.g. shows how people are drenched in gasoline and burned alive like in the case of some ISIS videos. Millenials all across the world are attracted by ISIS propaganda to an astonishing degree. Many of them quickly change their minds when they come to Syria, but then it's usually too late.
'Extremism' is a relative term and has nothing to do with correctness.
Sure it's relative, but that doesn't mean that no clearcut set of criteria can be found. Someone is an extremist, for example, who intentionally instigates violence against noncombatant civilians and/or supports organizations on the UN 1267 Regime List and similar lists of terrorist organizations.
Even if you have problems with the lists, you should have no problem with marking anyone as an extremist who intentionally instigates violence against noncombatant civilians.
Slashdot Mirror
False. It has a direct effect, in that the same amount of money provides greater utility to the poor than to the rich; but it also has an indirect effect, that it reduces the incentive for people to work in order to become rich.
So higher salaries for lower paid jobs automatically cause less incentive to work? I don't think so...
So yes, according to standard economic theory it makes sense to limit the personal accumulation of wealth.
- that is absolute lunacy.
Not really, it follows directly from classical microeconomics, as the diminishing value of money is empirically well-confirmed, under the assumption of utilitarianism. I'd challenge the utilitarian assumption if I were you and wanted to make a cogent argument.
In case of a wealthy person working actually means using his money and connections and all of his capabilities to produce more, so by limiting the amount of money he can earn you are limiting the usefulness of what he does.
It may be less useful than he thinks - others can do the very same thing, but they will get more utility from the same amount of discretionary income or an even lower one. Moreover, while there are certainly some unusually talented exceptions like e.g. Warren Buffet, it is fair to say that they are not the rule but that generally speaking very rich people are as replaceable and useful as anyone else. It is also implausible to assume that very rich people, as a tendency, work because they want to earn more money ("another dollar"). They have almost no incentive to do so because of the diminishing marginal utility of money. It's far more plausible to assume that, as a tendency, they work because they like their work. That's also the reason why Bill Gates has no problems with giving away much of his money. He likes to work with finance and on interesting projects, but he couldn't care less about personal gains.
There is no strong indication that becoming that rich is based on substantially more than (mostly) coincidence, based on being at the right place at the right time knowing the right people and other stochastic variables. That's why I don't trust any of those "My secret to financial success" books, they merely illustrate survivor bias mixed with a few truisms. Many rich people like to pretend that they 'made it' by their own intellect and skills, and I don't blame them because it would be kind of embarrassing to have all this money without any real achievement except for being an outlier of some probability distribution. I also don't want to say that none of them have any skills, some intelligence or smartness is certainly required to keep being wealthy and not being ripped off by others like e.g. lawyers (some rock stars lacked this intelligence, for instance), but I do think there is a tendency to overrate one's own contribution to financial success.
As for the claim that nobody should have that much money, it's true that from a utilitarian point of view according to standard economic theory transferring money from the very rich to the poor always increases overall utility in a society, because money has diminishing marginal value. So yes, according to standard economic theory it makes sense to limit the personal accumulation of wealth.
That being said, I can't blame anyone for keeping all his money, although Bill Gates is the perfect example that there is no reason to do so. He's not only willing to give away much of his unnecessary wealth, he even looks at the maximum 'bang for the bucks' when doing so, so kudos to him! Hopefully Jeff Bezos does the same.
My 2 cents.
Okay, that's interesting info and perhaps reason for me as a software developer to avoid their products. Thanks!
[ ] Bitdefender Free
[ ] AVAST Free
[ ] AVG Free
[ ] Sophos Home (free)
In other words, is there a reason for me to install Kaspersky instead of Sophos or Bitdefender, which I both used in the past? (If you reply, please do NOT mention anything about US politics or Russia - thank you!)
That's exactly the reason why I use Linux for work and Windows only for gaming...
Maybe they should use sane defaults?
It's especially hard to run 10mph in a forest, with lots of flowers, plants and rivers in your way...
One reason could be that Russia is effectively a dictatorship ruled by Putin and a few oligarchs, but still has a mighty military and thousands of nukes, and at the same time fosters some extreme right-wing nationalism to detract from domestic problems, so whenever Putin decides to retire to his Dacha outside of Moscow, some batshit-crazy ultranationalist could rise to power and control all those slowly rotting nukes.
Another reason could be the recent annexation of the Crimean Peninsula and the countless annoying Russian troll-bots on the Internet. They are annoying.
Yet another reason: The habits of slightly demented US senators. It's hard to change long-term habits.
More reasons: Democrats are currently trying to discredit the retarded Trump government, but repeating Trump's stupid tweets doesn't have enough of a desired effect since America's voters have apparently gone fully mental. So now they switched to this 'he's aiding the enemy' rhetorics, which of course only works if the Russians are enemies. It's counter-productive, but makes sense from their perspective. (Remember: Just before the Trump thing, everybody was bashing China's hacking efforts, which are also immense.)
Anyway, there are reasons over reasons. Some are better, some are worse.
Exactly. I have lived in 3 different countries in Northern and Southern Europe so far, and have never been robbed or mugged. Robbery is very rare in European cities. Pocket theft is more common. My only safeguard is to not carry a credit card with me, because these can be used without PIN number at some places. Instead, I carry a debit card that requires the PIN number for use, and as much cash as I need.
The worst thing that ever happened to me was that a bag with my wallet was stolen, which contained the debit card and about 15 Euro in cash. I went home and blocked the card, and that was it. Since then I've got into the habit of placing my bags in front of me on the table where I can see them all the time - thieves like to sneak them away from behind when you put them next to your chair, so don't do that.
AFAIK, chances are higher to become victim of fraud with fake skimmers on ATM, fake base stations for mobile payment, etc. than that your cash is stolen in a robbery, so at least for my area the premise of the question seems odd.
The bill is still a very bad idea, though. There are many areas of Internet security in which Russia and the US could and should peacefully cooperate.
Your reply is not very satisfying or convincing to me. You come up with one site on the Internet for additional information - you could have just as well mentioned books or Wikipedia -, put a false dichotomy in my mouth and then mention a few cases which were either corrected by the very same media or are cases of deliberate and massive government-steered disinformation campaigns that are well-known, because they have been uncovered by the very same mass media you're criticizing.
I also cannot recommend "globalresearch" as an information source, for even just a cursory glance reveals that it is extremely opinionated and primarily based on copying news rather than gathering them. Even if you personally like it, it's important to realize that news aggregation sites like "globalresearch" would be nothing without the media and news agencies who actually employ journalists and have networks of correspondents.
Sometimes, people who 'flat out' support the media also may have a political agenda, the agenda of the status quo, neo-conservatives, current rule.
Here we go again, You're implying that either (i) major news outlets are systematically lying in some huge world-wide conspiracy, or (ii) somehow the truth supports status quo neo-conservative views more than other political views. Many people would probably subscribe to (ii) but I think that both (i) and (ii) are completely lunatic.
AC certainly doesn't express it in a politically correct way, but at least he has a point.
People who flat-out complain about the "media" tend to have a hidden political agenda - far right or far left or religious extremists, they all like to pick on the media in general for obvious reasons. They also consistently fail to name any alternative 'fringe news sources' that would be more reliable than comparing major news outlets. When you ask them, they either come up with nothing at all or with obviously ridiculous choices such as personal blogs, conspiracy sites, extremist radio hosts, etc. Yet they all have in common that they believe they are better informed than people who actually read newspapers. Don't support those lunatics!
Boy, calm down, that's nothing in comparison to the past. You should have been alive when the Cold War was raging... all those pesky US fake news outlets going against Prawda!
They have much more in common than they do differences.
You mean both are racist, fairly restrictive authoritarian regimes under oligarchic rule by the 1% with an expressed disdain for basic human rights who also wage aggressive wars from time to time and spend a large amount of their tax payers' money on the military and an absurdly overblown intelligence community? You might have a point there...
These are trolls, just ignore them. Russia has a special eye on Germany, not just for geostrategical reasons but also because due to his past Putin considers it somehow his home turf.
Well, it all depends on where you would prefer your data not to show up - in the hand of the GRU or FSB, or in the hand of the NSA or FBI? To be honest, judging from the past actions of the US and Russia, I would avoid antivirus software from those countries altogether. France and the UK are out of question, too, they have a long history of totalitarian surveillance measures. Maybe I'm wrong, but from all I've heard - endless discussions about the legality of government Trojans, etc. - I'd find it less likely that a German antivirus producer collude directly with government agencies. I'm sure there are even better choices if you care to look closely at the public discussion, laws, and the way intelligence agencies operate in other countries. Maybe some other European country?
The real problem is that antivirus software tends to be fairly insecure in itself, though, to the extent that some people have started to question whether it actually heightens security. :/
... or 1/8 l of red wine a day vs total abstinence. I've grown fairly skeptical over the years about these kind of studies, because they seem to go back and forth without any type of final conclusion in sight. Maybe I'm wrong this time and this is the last word on coffee. Then again, maybe not... ;-)
No mainstream operating system has responsive GUIs under heavy load, especially not under heavy i/o load. GNU/Linux goes down very rapidly, Android is sluggish out of the box, and OSX have their spinning beachball of death. They are designed incorrectly.
As a test, you may surf to this page to see how your system handles an embedded zip bomb. (Warning: Don't click this link unless you're willing to kill your browser session or even hard-reset your machine.)
Microsoft patched the hole
No they haven't. At least not for everyone. On my Windows 7 machine every update consistently fails since they switched to bundled updates, and there is no technical means of recovering from this situation. I've tried absolutely everything you can imagine, every Microsoft and every 3rd party tool, except for reinstalling the whole operating system - the latter wouldn't be practical for me, because it would mean that I would have to manually reinstall hundreds of audio plugins (every second one with its own DRM scheme, and besides I'm going to buy a new machine soon anyway.
I cannot imagine how or why the maker of an operating system cannot invent a fix for their update problems. It doesn't help that each attempt of updating requires two restarts and takes an endless amount of time rolling back the update.
If it weren't for the audio software I'd surely get rid of Windows entirely, at the expense of never being able to play a top game anymore. I'm using GNU/Linux for work, of course, and never had any problems with it.
What on earth has a domain to do with that? Since when does anyone need a domain to host content?
As far as I can see many Americans are worried about illegal NSA surveillance. I'll leave it open whether that's reasonable or unreasonable, but at least for those people it makes perfect sense not to run US antivirus software and instead use software from Russia, Romania, etc.
By the same token, my answer to the headline question is No. The only effect of giving source code to the US government is that it will be handed over to the NSA who will then analyze it for weaknesses. (I'm fairly confident that they already have done that will all antivirus software, though, so in the end it won't matter much. But anticipatory obedience is generally not a good way to deal with government wishes.)
What does this have to do with left vs right? I just don't get this demented US debate.
The problem, in fact, is that there are "sides" in the first place.
It's an entirely artificial debate that only exists in the US, thanks to large investments in "anti-climate change" agendas. The debate doesn't exist anywhere else because in other parts of the world just take the opinions of the vast majority of scientists (> 95%) on a matter in order to make informed decisions.
In combination with half-hearted attempts of most politicians worldwide, the primary effect in the long run will be that global warming will continue to accelerate, though it slow down a little bit due to efforts of the rest of the world (as the US is pretty much alone regarding this topic), and that European countries and China will continue to be the world-wide leading manufacturers of green energy production whose relevance will increase whether there is man-made climate change or not.
My opinion is that the current US position is overall good for Europe, especially for Germany which is already leading in green energy technology. Regarding the US pseudo-discussion, well, what should I say, science has been right and science has been wrong, but it's retarded not to make your policy decisions on the basis of the current scientific consensus. There is a lot to discuss for laymen and politicians in terms of how to respond, but certainly not the scientific details.
However, in order for broken ideas to die, they must be challenged.
Sadly, that's false on the Internet. :( On the contrary, on the Internet broken ideas are perpetuated in echo chambers and by hobby nutjob groups, transformed in a long series of "Chinese whispers" and rumors into fake news, copied again from the same sites, and end up in the mind of poor conspiracy schmucks who then drive to Washington D.C. to kill the "Pizzagate" pedophiles, claim that 9/11 was an insider job, or threaten to kill the parents of the victims of the Sandy Hook massacre.
That being said, the Youtube filtering is maybe not about these isolated cases but more against widespread terror propaganda that e.g. shows how people are drenched in gasoline and burned alive like in the case of some ISIS videos. Millenials all across the world are attracted by ISIS propaganda to an astonishing degree. Many of them quickly change their minds when they come to Syria, but then it's usually too late.
'Extremism' is a relative term and has nothing to do with correctness.
Sure it's relative, but that doesn't mean that no clearcut set of criteria can be found. Someone is an extremist, for example, who intentionally instigates violence against noncombatant civilians and/or supports organizations on the UN 1267 Regime List and similar lists of terrorist organizations.
Even if you have problems with the lists, you should have no problem with marking anyone as an extremist who intentionally instigates violence against noncombatant civilians.