If the cable company dropped the Japanese channel from the package, and kept prices the same, then from what you're saying a tiny percentage of the package subscribers (less than 1%) would cancel, but their expenses go down by around 5% of revenue. That would be profitable.
But that implies the cable company is operating a charity for the Japanese channel, which I doubt. I suspect there are far more subscribers interested in the Japanese channel than you think, or the fees for the Japanese channel are much lower than you think. They should be in balance (plus the company's profit margin).
Too bad we don't know the actual numbers. It does seem like a case where splitting the package into 3 (Japanese, Mandarin, Cantonese) and charging something like 75% of the current price would be beneficial to everyone. The fact that they don't suggests that the fees paid by the cable company are not solely based on subscribers to the channel I guess.
Your list attempts to link humanities to some pretty broad concepts, but it's just words with nothing to back it up. That's the trouble with aphorisms that aren't viscerally true. For instance you can't say "without philosophy we wouldn't have logic" and expect many to agree, surely?
Dismissing humanities as useless is a failure to understand where we came from and how we got here.
I fully agree with that, but at the same time I recognize that "how we got here" is not "the only way we could have gotten here." I think that's the problem with your list.. you seem to think certain humanities and sequences of historical events were strictly necessary for the development of things like logic, beauty, architecture, science, etc. But most of that is happenstance.
Ah but there are only so many street corners, so NOT everybody is free to shout from the street corners.
Street corners are a choke point where lots of people pass by, so to amplify your message you stand there and shout and you are heard by many more people than if you were, say, standing in your own living room and shouting.
You are basically wanting to transition from free market management of resources to something else, without specifying what it is. Your physical ability to stand on the street corner as long as possible so your political opponent can't have it is not a sound basis for a system of government.
Iran certainly denounces violent Sunni Muslims who go around attacking Shias. But violent Shia Muslims who go around attacking Sunnis (or Christians, or Jews, or..) are great people just fighting for freedom and peace!
To save that much I'd need to be using about 100TB of storage, which is a fairly small filer for a business, but an insane amount for a home user.
That's an insane amount for most businesses too! I've helped some small business owning friends out with their computer needs before and they couldn't fill a 1 TB hard drive if they tried. One of them, a veterinarian, said he wanted to keep a copy of his xray images on Amazon S3 as an off-site backup. I thought ok that's going to be a lot of data. Total was around 60 GB for 8 years' worth of xrays. The database backup for his practice management software is about 3 GB compressed.
I think it's good that Hollywood has given up on original content. Not only are adaptations easier and more profitable, most of the time they are far better than original Hollywood movies. Other media typically doesn't rely on famous actors or flashy special effects to impress, so they are necessarily more interesting in content.
And whereas movies used to be longer than TV shows which were primarily episodic, now TV (serious TV anyway) is mostly plotted with full-season arcs. With the modern trend of binge watching, where you queue up a whole season of a show on Netflix or your DVR, movies are pretty much the shortest and shallowest form of entertainment around.
Protecting "democracy" would be the US protecting things it calls democracy for PR purposes but are not really democracy. "Protecting" democracy would be attacking true democracy where it exists. "Protecting" "democracy" would be attacking fake democracies that we call true democracies.
While I think all of those scare quotes are pretty dumb criticisms of the US (because none of war, democracy, and "democracy" are inherently good or bad), it's meta-appropriate because the US is confused about what democracy is. We apparently love democracy, but when people actually use the vote to do things they want that don't fit our preconceived notions of what's good then it's a fake democracy which is apparently bad.
Not only other countries, but in our own country, where you have popular referendums being overturned by courts and/or ignored by the government, because they hold the value of things like gay marriage (to take an example) as higher than democracy.
The environmentalists are a large part of the actual problem. They contribute a huge amount to the modern inflated costs of nuclear because of their delay tactics. You get an $8 billion loan, then spend 6 years in court fighting the same battles again and again at each step of the construction process, that adds a great deal to the cost.
Environmentalists then point to the inflated costs they helped create and say "Seeeee, it's not economically viable! So we should stop researching new nuclear power designs too, it's a waste of time and money."
I just want a real accounting of Nuclear Power. I suspect that all the people who crunch the numbers for the value of nuclear, don't include the secondary impacts of digging it up, processing, and decommissioning. Nobody has to sit around and guard a used up solar panel for generations later.
Nobody has to guard these nuclear plants either, especially not at such great cost. How about this.. set up a webcam. Have a couple guys monitoring every decommissioned plant in the country. If they see someone bringing in enough construction equipment to start carrying big radioactive chunks of the plant offsite, then they call the local authorities to investigate.
If Nuclear power were such a great bang for the buck -- you'd think there would be a private company that could make a reactor without the government insuring them and backstopping them every step of the way.
Nuclear power is such a great bang for the buck. It's the lawsuits and regulations that make it expensive. Are they worth it? No I don't think so. They're a product of people's fear of radiation. Imagine how expensive cars would be if car manufacturers were liable for accidents. Why should anybody die in a car accident? There's no inherent reason cars have to be unsafe. If people were as scared of dying in car crashes as they are of dying of radiation, cars would have 10 feet of foam padding on the edges and be speed limited to 5mph. Then when they don't sell in the private market, people like you would be like "See? Cars are not commercially viable!"
I mean it's true to a point, but it's not really true because it falsely lumps all the artificial constraints in with the core product.
Is it an incorrect statement, or not? Isn't that of more import than who made the statement?
To me it seems reasonable to assume that retirees on fixed incomes will not be able to invest in solar panel upgrades for their homes. So their rates will go up to pay the younger and/or wealthier people who make that investment.
Ok, then you need to end the subsidies for fossil fuels as well, both the explicit ones (tax reductions, etc) as well as the implicit ones (not paying for pollution).
Implicit subsidies are bogus. Everybody gets implicit subsidies. Why do you want to single out power companies?
If you want to get all libertarian about this then let's REALLY make it a level playing field and have all the costs involved on the table.
That's a good idea, except I think your idea of "all the costs" goes beyond a libertarian view. After all, libertarians don't want to charge every person for breathing (polluting) or having children (increasing consumption).
Maybe to you, but I think it's a matter of impact. Why else is it legal to discriminate against non-protected groups? It's still wrong (to many people), but it's legal because people don't consider it a problem with high impact.
I think the reason is probably that common bullying doesn't look that bad when it's not happening to you. Verbal bullying is often quite funny to onlookers. Minor physical bullying looks like no big deal.. almost on the level of a prank.
Probably another factor with administrators is that, as adults, the kids all look like kids to them. The difference between a bully and a victim to an adult is much less than to the bully and the victim themselves.
That said, it's incomprehensible to me how a kid gets in trouble for standing up for himself to a bully. I just don't understand what's going through the administrators' minds. They are probably horrible people.
Assuming you meant "not serving" or whatever.. yeah why not? How big of an impact do you think it would have?
I don't think anybody would deny that anti-discrimination laws are an affront to personal freedom. The issue is balancing personal freedom against societal good. If we got rid of the laws and suddenly everybody stopped serving blacks, that would be bad for society. There was a time when many businesses would refuse to serve blacks. But today, if more like 4% (hypothetically) of businesses stop serving blacks, then who cares? That's nothing.
It's a lot like anti-terrorism laws. If they are actually stopping terrorist attacks often, then most people are okay with the government invading privacy and stuff like that. If terrorism dies down significantly, then suddenly people will say "Hey wait a minute, why are you reading all of our email, it's not accomplishing anything anymore?"
Anti-semitism in Europe is not mainstream but it is growing. Note that I said resurgence, not "it is mainstream." It's largely to do with Europe's growing Muslim population.
As for segregation not making a comeback in the US, you must be joking. Well, I live in the South so perhaps there is more media coverage here than wherever you are. Every other story about education is tied to segregation. School vouchers = segregation. Charter schools = segregation. Neighborhood schools = segregation. Test score stats based on race = evidence of segregation.
Legalized slavery would be the prison work system. You know, the prison system, which is disproportionately black and Latino? Google "prison slavery" if you've never heard this argument.
If you honestly don't think I have a point I have to wonder why you bothered responding. Are you trying to feel superior or something? It's a really silly thing to say during a discussion.
Which is fine - as long as you realise those with the controversial views (who are free to act upon those views) are allowed to be challenged/boycotted for holding those views.
The problem is that your position is unfair because it treats people differently. "Bigots" are okay to discriminate against, even including forcing them to resign. But do you support the other party's right to discriminate against gays? To make anybody who publicly reveals their pro-gay feelings resign? Somehow I doubt it.
He wasn't just calling gay people inferior, he was trying to deny them the same rights straight people have.
People vote to take things away and deny things to people all the time. How many poor people vote to raise taxes on the rich?
Or do you think Rosa Parks should have given up her seat, in order to respect the bus company's freedom of expression?
No, not freedom of expression, but yes in principle I think discrimination is a person's choice and they have the right to do so. Now if it's a city bus, then no, I don't think the government has that right. The government should be fair and there should be equality before the law, but that should not extend to every individual. If I can discriminate in marriage (that's still ok right??), why can't I discriminate in who I hire or fire, i.e. picking the person I'm going to potentially spend as much time with as my wife?
Frankly, the large-scale problems with racism and discrimination are from a different time. I've never seen or experienced them and I don't think we need the same set of laws now for today's population as we did 60 years ago. Now, anti-discrimination laws are more harmful to freedom on principle than any help they provide.
You're rationalizing and it sounds really silly. Of course it's a similar situation, and the difference you point out is irrelevant. The whole thing is an example of how people (pretty much everyone) are willing to be tolerant to people they like and intolerant to people they don't like. Kind of like how gay rights activists like to point out that anti-gay Christians seem awfully willing to overlook sins like not "keeping the Sabbath day holy" but getting really angry about gays, which isn't even in the 10 commandments.
I mean... honestly.. do you believe what you're saying?
His private views about whether gays should be allowed freedom of association aren't so much a problem as the very real judgement and respect issues reflected in his actions.
If you actually believe in people's rights to have private views that are not acceptable to some, then you have to accept that they will take action based on those views. That's the whole point of having views and protecting people's non-mainstream opinions right?
I mean your rationale would be like saying "Yeah I totally support gay people having gay beliefs as long as they never act gay." Do you REALLY support people's right to be privately gay if they are never allowed to act gay??
It must be terrible being bigots on the wrong side of history.
The pendulum always keeps swinging.. it may be unimaginable to you, but social trends can change in a generation and what you think is bigoted today may be back in the mainstream tomorrow.
As examples, look at the counter-feminism movement here, the resurgence of anti-semitism in Europe, the increasing religious radicalization in Africa (both Muslim and Christian). Even stuff unrelated to bigotry... look at Russia annexing Crimea. Who would have thought they'd do that in this day and age with the exact same rationale as Hitler? It's pretty wild.
I think right here in America we're going to have de-facto segregated schools again within a generation. The people who insisted on forced busing and quotas will be the ones looking like bigots.
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Is that really possible?
If the cable company dropped the Japanese channel from the package, and kept prices the same, then from what you're saying a tiny percentage of the package subscribers (less than 1%) would cancel, but their expenses go down by around 5% of revenue. That would be profitable.
But that implies the cable company is operating a charity for the Japanese channel, which I doubt. I suspect there are far more subscribers interested in the Japanese channel than you think, or the fees for the Japanese channel are much lower than you think. They should be in balance (plus the company's profit margin).
Too bad we don't know the actual numbers. It does seem like a case where splitting the package into 3 (Japanese, Mandarin, Cantonese) and charging something like 75% of the current price would be beneficial to everyone. The fact that they don't suggests that the fees paid by the cable company are not solely based on subscribers to the channel I guess.
Your arrogance is astounding. STEM careers can allow you to live a decent lifestyle and lead a life worth living.
And what if, because of your race or gender, medicine has taken a very different approach to your body and your symptoms?
Don't tell that to the humanities majors who believe race and gender are artificial constructs invented by Dead White Males to oppress POCs and women.
Without classics we wouldn't have...
Your list attempts to link humanities to some pretty broad concepts, but it's just words with nothing to back it up. That's the trouble with aphorisms that aren't viscerally true. For instance you can't say "without philosophy we wouldn't have logic" and expect many to agree, surely?
Dismissing humanities as useless is a failure to understand where we came from and how we got here.
I fully agree with that, but at the same time I recognize that "how we got here" is not "the only way we could have gotten here." I think that's the problem with your list.. you seem to think certain humanities and sequences of historical events were strictly necessary for the development of things like logic, beauty, architecture, science, etc. But most of that is happenstance.
Frankly that sounds like the creationist argument for "equal time" in the science classroom.
Trouble is, when you set everybody at the same volume, you get a crap ton of noise and garbage.
Ah but there are only so many street corners, so NOT everybody is free to shout from the street corners.
Street corners are a choke point where lots of people pass by, so to amplify your message you stand there and shout and you are heard by many more people than if you were, say, standing in your own living room and shouting.
You are basically wanting to transition from free market management of resources to something else, without specifying what it is. Your physical ability to stand on the street corner as long as possible so your political opponent can't have it is not a sound basis for a system of government.
Iran certainly denounces violent Sunni Muslims who go around attacking Shias. But violent Shia Muslims who go around attacking Sunnis (or Christians, or Jews, or..) are great people just fighting for freedom and peace!
To save that much I'd need to be using about 100TB of storage, which is a fairly small filer for a business, but an insane amount for a home user.
That's an insane amount for most businesses too! I've helped some small business owning friends out with their computer needs before and they couldn't fill a 1 TB hard drive if they tried. One of them, a veterinarian, said he wanted to keep a copy of his xray images on Amazon S3 as an off-site backup. I thought ok that's going to be a lot of data. Total was around 60 GB for 8 years' worth of xrays. The database backup for his practice management software is about 3 GB compressed.
I think it's good that Hollywood has given up on original content. Not only are adaptations easier and more profitable, most of the time they are far better than original Hollywood movies. Other media typically doesn't rely on famous actors or flashy special effects to impress, so they are necessarily more interesting in content.
And whereas movies used to be longer than TV shows which were primarily episodic, now TV (serious TV anyway) is mostly plotted with full-season arcs. With the modern trend of binge watching, where you queue up a whole season of a show on Netflix or your DVR, movies are pretty much the shortest and shallowest form of entertainment around.
Protecting "democracy" would be the US protecting things it calls democracy for PR purposes but are not really democracy. "Protecting" democracy would be attacking true democracy where it exists. "Protecting" "democracy" would be attacking fake democracies that we call true democracies.
While I think all of those scare quotes are pretty dumb criticisms of the US (because none of war, democracy, and "democracy" are inherently good or bad), it's meta-appropriate because the US is confused about what democracy is. We apparently love democracy, but when people actually use the vote to do things they want that don't fit our preconceived notions of what's good then it's a fake democracy which is apparently bad.
Not only other countries, but in our own country, where you have popular referendums being overturned by courts and/or ignored by the government, because they hold the value of things like gay marriage (to take an example) as higher than democracy.
The environmentalists are a large part of the actual problem. They contribute a huge amount to the modern inflated costs of nuclear because of their delay tactics. You get an $8 billion loan, then spend 6 years in court fighting the same battles again and again at each step of the construction process, that adds a great deal to the cost.
Environmentalists then point to the inflated costs they helped create and say "Seeeee, it's not economically viable! So we should stop researching new nuclear power designs too, it's a waste of time and money."
I just want a real accounting of Nuclear Power. I suspect that all the people who crunch the numbers for the value of nuclear, don't include the secondary impacts of digging it up, processing, and decommissioning. Nobody has to sit around and guard a used up solar panel for generations later.
Nobody has to guard these nuclear plants either, especially not at such great cost. How about this.. set up a webcam. Have a couple guys monitoring every decommissioned plant in the country. If they see someone bringing in enough construction equipment to start carrying big radioactive chunks of the plant offsite, then they call the local authorities to investigate.
If Nuclear power were such a great bang for the buck -- you'd think there would be a private company that could make a reactor without the government insuring them and backstopping them every step of the way.
Nuclear power is such a great bang for the buck. It's the lawsuits and regulations that make it expensive. Are they worth it? No I don't think so. They're a product of people's fear of radiation. Imagine how expensive cars would be if car manufacturers were liable for accidents. Why should anybody die in a car accident? There's no inherent reason cars have to be unsafe. If people were as scared of dying in car crashes as they are of dying of radiation, cars would have 10 feet of foam padding on the edges and be speed limited to 5mph. Then when they don't sell in the private market, people like you would be like "See? Cars are not commercially viable!"
I mean it's true to a point, but it's not really true because it falsely lumps all the artificial constraints in with the core product.
They are bogus not because the concept doesn't exist but because the costs assigned to them are completely subjective.
For instance many people attribute some portion of the defense budget to be an oil subsidy. That's bogus.
You didn't answer the primary question.. everybody gets implicit subsidies, why do you want to single out power companies?
Is it an incorrect statement, or not? Isn't that of more import than who made the statement?
To me it seems reasonable to assume that retirees on fixed incomes will not be able to invest in solar panel upgrades for their homes. So their rates will go up to pay the younger and/or wealthier people who make that investment.
Ok, then you need to end the subsidies for fossil fuels as well, both the explicit ones (tax reductions, etc) as well as the implicit ones (not paying for pollution).
Implicit subsidies are bogus. Everybody gets implicit subsidies. Why do you want to single out power companies?
If you want to get all libertarian about this then let's REALLY make it a level playing field and have all the costs involved on the table.
That's a good idea, except I think your idea of "all the costs" goes beyond a libertarian view. After all, libertarians don't want to charge every person for breathing (polluting) or having children (increasing consumption).
If the only gas station around doesn't take American Express and that's my only card, that would also suck.
Maybe to you, but I think it's a matter of impact. Why else is it legal to discriminate against non-protected groups? It's still wrong (to many people), but it's legal because people don't consider it a problem with high impact.
I think the reason is probably that common bullying doesn't look that bad when it's not happening to you. Verbal bullying is often quite funny to onlookers. Minor physical bullying looks like no big deal.. almost on the level of a prank.
Probably another factor with administrators is that, as adults, the kids all look like kids to them. The difference between a bully and a victim to an adult is much less than to the bully and the victim themselves.
That said, it's incomprehensible to me how a kid gets in trouble for standing up for himself to a bully. I just don't understand what's going through the administrators' minds. They are probably horrible people.
Yeah pretty much, when it comes to public figures under pressure from the board they work for.
Public figures are rarely fired, they "step down." It's the same thing. Denying that is intellectually dishonest.
Assuming you meant "not serving" or whatever.. yeah why not? How big of an impact do you think it would have?
I don't think anybody would deny that anti-discrimination laws are an affront to personal freedom. The issue is balancing personal freedom against societal good. If we got rid of the laws and suddenly everybody stopped serving blacks, that would be bad for society. There was a time when many businesses would refuse to serve blacks. But today, if more like 4% (hypothetically) of businesses stop serving blacks, then who cares? That's nothing.
It's a lot like anti-terrorism laws. If they are actually stopping terrorist attacks often, then most people are okay with the government invading privacy and stuff like that. If terrorism dies down significantly, then suddenly people will say "Hey wait a minute, why are you reading all of our email, it's not accomplishing anything anymore?"
Yes, anti-feminism is a mainstream movement, e.g. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/new...
Anti-semitism in Europe is not mainstream but it is growing. Note that I said resurgence, not "it is mainstream." It's largely to do with Europe's growing Muslim population.
As for segregation not making a comeback in the US, you must be joking. Well, I live in the South so perhaps there is more media coverage here than wherever you are. Every other story about education is tied to segregation. School vouchers = segregation. Charter schools = segregation. Neighborhood schools = segregation. Test score stats based on race = evidence of segregation.
Legalized slavery would be the prison work system. You know, the prison system, which is disproportionately black and Latino? Google "prison slavery" if you've never heard this argument.
If you honestly don't think I have a point I have to wonder why you bothered responding. Are you trying to feel superior or something? It's a really silly thing to say during a discussion.
Which is fine - as long as you realise those with the controversial views (who are free to act upon those views) are allowed to be challenged/boycotted for holding those views.
The problem is that your position is unfair because it treats people differently. "Bigots" are okay to discriminate against, even including forcing them to resign. But do you support the other party's right to discriminate against gays? To make anybody who publicly reveals their pro-gay feelings resign? Somehow I doubt it.
He wasn't just calling gay people inferior, he was trying to deny them the same rights straight people have.
People vote to take things away and deny things to people all the time. How many poor people vote to raise taxes on the rich?
Or do you think Rosa Parks should have given up her seat, in order to respect the bus company's freedom of expression?
No, not freedom of expression, but yes in principle I think discrimination is a person's choice and they have the right to do so. Now if it's a city bus, then no, I don't think the government has that right. The government should be fair and there should be equality before the law, but that should not extend to every individual. If I can discriminate in marriage (that's still ok right??), why can't I discriminate in who I hire or fire, i.e. picking the person I'm going to potentially spend as much time with as my wife?
Frankly, the large-scale problems with racism and discrimination are from a different time. I've never seen or experienced them and I don't think we need the same set of laws now for today's population as we did 60 years ago. Now, anti-discrimination laws are more harmful to freedom on principle than any help they provide.
You're rationalizing and it sounds really silly. Of course it's a similar situation, and the difference you point out is irrelevant. The whole thing is an example of how people (pretty much everyone) are willing to be tolerant to people they like and intolerant to people they don't like. Kind of like how gay rights activists like to point out that anti-gay Christians seem awfully willing to overlook sins like not "keeping the Sabbath day holy" but getting really angry about gays, which isn't even in the 10 commandments.
I mean... honestly.. do you believe what you're saying?
His private views about whether gays should be allowed freedom of association aren't so much a problem as the very real judgement and respect issues reflected in his actions.
If you actually believe in people's rights to have private views that are not acceptable to some, then you have to accept that they will take action based on those views. That's the whole point of having views and protecting people's non-mainstream opinions right?
I mean your rationale would be like saying "Yeah I totally support gay people having gay beliefs as long as they never act gay." Do you REALLY support people's right to be privately gay if they are never allowed to act gay??
It must be terrible being bigots on the wrong side of history.
The pendulum always keeps swinging.. it may be unimaginable to you, but social trends can change in a generation and what you think is bigoted today may be back in the mainstream tomorrow.
As examples, look at the counter-feminism movement here, the resurgence of anti-semitism in Europe, the increasing religious radicalization in Africa (both Muslim and Christian). Even stuff unrelated to bigotry... look at Russia annexing Crimea. Who would have thought they'd do that in this day and age with the exact same rationale as Hitler? It's pretty wild.
I think right here in America we're going to have de-facto segregated schools again within a generation. The people who insisted on forced busing and quotas will be the ones looking like bigots.