Another issue is how much responsibility handicapped people have versus business owners. Wheelchairs are ancient technology. Surely the advent of motorized wheelchairs should make ramp slope requirements more lenient. One day when we have stair climbing wheelchairs available, but not at 100% penetration, should the ramp requirement be completely scrapped?
Yes, because the free market ended "separate but equal." Oh, it didn't? Then I guess you are arguing that segregation is better for the US than not.
Depends what you mean. There's a difference between a private women's gym that doesn't allow men to join, and the government saying "men cannot join gyms."
Separate but equal is perfectly fair when it comes as a result of end user choice. Look at so-called "historically black colleges." Should they be shut down because they are unbalanced?
They created the high rise with stairs-only and are whining that adding an elevator to their walk-up is expensive. You had to think about that for every commercial building built in the last few generations.
The equivalent on the web is that any browser, regardless of its capabilities, can access the same html and css as any other browser.
What you're suggesting is that the actual content of the online stores has to become accessible. That's like saying every Barnes and Noble has to have a braille translation, in stock, of every single book they carry. It's just ridiculous.
Accessibility is there, it's up to screen reading software to make good on it. Equal opportunity, not equal outcome.
Perhaps because the technology is not quite there yet? You are talking about a screen reader that would be able to process a nightmarish mess of AJAX the same way that a human being does, then rewriting it in a way that is useful for a blind person. Are you familiar with that kind of technology, and could you perhaps send me some information about it?
Nobody would claim it's easy, or that a completely general solution would work. But come on. There are some major UI toolkits out there, Dojo, jquery, YUI, etc. Do screen readers even bother supporting those? Do they understand when a site was generated by Joomla or Drupal and say "Oh look this li is marked with this css class, this is clearly a menu?"
Nope. "Too much work." They want to put all of the burden on web developers. And of course the big screen readers largely don't support the standards that DO exist. Look up screen reader support for aural css for instance. It took years for screen readers to start supporting ARIA. They are lazy and don't innovate, bottom line.
Nobody is asking the web designers to make the blind see, the deaf hear.
Much of the problem with web accessibility is the low quality of screen reading software. How long did it take major screen readers to support stuff like ARIA? It's shameful.
Screen readers generally don't support aural css. Know why? They claim that web developers don't apply it properly so there's no point supporting it. Okaaay..
Screen readers for years and years complained about dynamic content, source order of content not matching screen order, etc. And you have these amazing open source browsers, on the other hand, that the screen readers could interact with, write plugins for, contribute patches for, etc.
Basically screen readers are not very innovative. Why isn't it easy to make a screen reader enter something like "news browsing mode" where it reads 5 headlines simultaneously in different voices and lets the user narrow in on the ones that sound interesting?
Okay forget innovation. How about simple developer friendliness? You'd think JAWS would say "If you're a developer, we will give you a free license to make sure your product works with ours." Guess what the reality is? Time limited demo that makes you reboot after like 1/2 hour.
I'm not sure but I think a big part of a punch is that you let your body fall forward slightly before punching. Your arm then trades momentum with your entire body. You may need to use your feet to get your body tipping forward initially.
Does this thing make you punch 17 times faster or does it give you 17 times the follow-through?
Halliburton did the cementing, then said hey it's wrong, then BP proceeded with drilling anyway, rather than redoing the cement. Halliburton didn't do the drilling so I don't see how you can blame them.
According to the Oil Spill Commission’s findings this week, Brian Morel, drilling engineer at BP, wrote an email to Brett Cocales, another BP engineer, as the drilling proceeded, saying: “Who cares, it’s done, end of story, we’ll probably be fine”. [...] At a hearing in July, BP’s well team leader, John Guide, explained the decision not to go with the software’s recommendations. “The model is – first of all, it’s not accurate all the time....I put very, very little faith in the model because it’s wrong a lot.”
BP still drilled with “no direct indicators of cement success” and no cement evaluation log, the Oil Spill commission said. The company conducted a separate negative pressure test, an oil engineering test designed to show whether the casing and cement would hold against significant pressure, and isolate potentially dangerous hydrocarbons.
The test was failed, but was – for an unexplained reason – deemed a “complete success” by both BP and rig owner Transocean at the time, a presentation on Monday said.
That's pretty blatant. Halliburton warned them, BP did their own separate test, which failed. Then they're like, oh well let's do it anyway! And you find a way to blame Halliburton in that?
Giving them $1 billion would not have solved their problem. They required a lot more than that.
Agreed. I'm just showing why calling it a gift is fully appropriate.
What pisses me off is you can give ANY business a $52 billion loan then only require a partial payback, and you know what, it's going to turn into a massively successful and profitable business because they got billions upon billions in free money. It's stupid and outrageously discriminatory. And why the hell did the unions get a share of the new company? They played as big a role in its failure as management, and management got nothing (rightly so). If you look at it proportionately, our government basically said "If you belong to this union, you get 1000x the benefit that other taxpayers will get." How can they even do that? It should be illegal.
Give? You might want to learn about exactly how a loan works. There's quite a difference between giving and lending.
That's wrong! There were two components to the bailout, a loan, which GM has already repaid, and a much larger equity purchase.
The gift aspect to the loan was that it was way below market rates, seeing as it was a company on the verge of bankruptcy with no hope of possibly repaying it except for the other component of the bailout.
The gift aspect of the equity purchase was more blatant. It's really a joke. At the time of the bailout, GM stock was worth less than $1/share. We could have bought the whole company for less than $1 billion. But instead we paid over $40 billion for a 60% stake. The breakeven price I've seen is over $130/share. But the IPO is priced way way lower than that. I mean, you see why that's being called a gift right??
You now have $50 cash and $12 worth of music for a total of $62 of value. You are now effectively $12 richer than you were since you have the music and you retained the $12.
If you bought the CD you would have $12 worth of music and $38 in cash for a total of $50 of value.
If you share it with 10 people who wouldn't have otherwise bought it, you have created $120 in value? I think I just solved the financial crisis. Free mp3s for everyone.
How did you come to that number? That number doesn't even include reasonable damages. The entire point is to make it so painful, the party will not want to do so again.
If they started regularly going after people and getting $50 - $100 per violation, it would stop. The fact that they don't have the resources to go after everybody for such a small return is their problem. It also shows that beyond a doubt the cost of the trial plus $100 outweighs the damage caused by the file sharers.
Without hard details it's impossible to say, but shorting something that you own or produce is a common way to reduce risk. Shorting securities that you also produce is totally fine. They're protecting themselves. If the securities start doing badly, volume will go down and they will make less money on the sales side. BUT they'll make a little money on the short side. Opposite is true as well. I don't see anything inherently immoral or criminal in that.
That is still insurance because you are paying a fixed amount to be insured against a variable amount. Rather than pooling risk over a group of people, you're pooling with yourself (future and past) over time.
How about we jail everybody at GM since they have NOT paid back their loan yet. AIG too. That makes a lot more sense than jailing people who have actually honored their responsibilities.
Seems like you're scapegoating the bankers. It's the borrowers who chose not to repay their loans, and it's the investors who piled up loads of money and said "Just give us more mortgages they're a safe investment." And the government who encouraged loans to low-income people. The bankers are just middle-men, and they got really screwed in case you missed the news. Several big-name banks and many small banks are just gone. Others had to sell stakes to the government. If that's some kind of get-rich scheme, it's a bad one. And if you think some individual bankers and mortgage officers got rich and are perfectly happy to be out of a job, that's misunderstanding the rich. You can't be rich enough to just get out of the game.
Really the whole financial crisis is a misdirection. The problem in our economy is that we have bad fundamentals. It's too expensive to do business in America so we're losing jobs overseas. I don't think that will change in the near future. We want growth like China but none of the consequences -- environmental, human rights, etc.
As much as I like blaming ills on politics, I don't think the economic mess is their fault. It's not the banks' fault either.
What happened was simply an unprecedented shift in financial priorities in the public. For decades, mortgages have been considered a fairly safe investment because people would "do anything" to save their homes. I still remember reading a few articles discussing the shock economists had that people were making their cell phone, credit card, and car payments, but letting their houses slip into foreclosure. Of course in hindsight it was kind of obvious - in the modern world you need those accessories far more than a house if you want to keep your job or get a new job.
We reached a time when people walked away from their mortgages for no reason than that their house had lost a lot of value. This 2nd type of foreclosure involved, I believe, richer and more educated people typically in very high value markets like California. They were simply taking advantage of the terms in their mortgage.
So the whole idea of housing as a safe investment flew out the window. People like you today are looking at banks and seem to me to be assuming they knew how bad and risky the loans were, and then fraudulently sold them off to investors to make a quick buck. It just doesn't make sense to me though. The banks lost a lot of money in this little adventure.
The other thing people tend to forget for some reason is the extreme gas price crisis that hit a bit before the mortgage mess. It had a big effect on housing values in "exurbs." I remember reading about people who started renting apartments near their jobs and living there during the week to avoid using too much gas. People's savings really suffered as increased transportation costs took their toll directly and indirectly by raising prices for food, clothes, and other essentials.
Really the only thing I blame on politicians is the reaction to the crisis. The bailouts and stimulus spending were disgusting. Equally disgusting has been Obama's hyperaggressive stance against business. He's "taking on" Wall Street and the evil banks, "looking for someone's ass to kick" in the energy industry, angry at greedy insurers/drug companies/hospitals, etc. It's un-American and stupid. Who starts insulting major components of our economy in an economic crisis?
Increasing the supply of doctors would require lowering the cost to train doctors; after all, if the wages for doctors drop and the cost to become a doctor does not, less people would pursue the profession and you'd end up back where we started.
There are several ways to lower the cost to train doctors. The most important is simply to increase the number and size of medical schools. The University of North Carolina medical school (near where I live) has a total enrollment of only 734 people. Each year, billions of dollars are spent on medical research programs at schools, and very little is spent on increasing the size of the program. In any other profession with very high salaries and very strong job demand, schools quickly ramp up capacity. Look at the size of computer science departments around the country, for instance.
Another issue is the time it takes to become a doctor in the US. In many other countries, the medical degree takes the place of an undergraduate degree, rather than following it. That cuts 4 years off the time plus a substantial amount of money and interest for undergrad student loans. And the foreign doctors we allow into the country pass the same board exams as our doctors, and perform just as well. So any argument about the undergrad degree affecting quality is moot.
It's important to look at the role of doctors' organizations like the AMA in accreditation of medical schools. How wise is it to have a private organization staffed by doctors controlling the supply of new doctors? There's a clear conflict of interest.
If he ends up with a massive medical bill it's only his fault and before he gets any help whatsoever he should declare bankruptcy and forego any chance of ever getting a loan to buy a house or start a business ever again because if the government pays his bills then that's just making you as a taxpayer an indentured servant.
I think prices would come down a lot with the application of some conservative principles to the medical industry, like promoting competition by increasing the supply of doctors (whose salaries are the #1 component of health care costs), providing easier (non-prescription) access to basic medication, allowing imports of drugs, etc.
Heh interesting. When the big corporations are "raping" developing countries and abusing human rights and all that, they are enriching themselves and America on the backs of the poor. It's even called neo-colonialism and American imperialism.
But when they screw up, they are inept, bumbling fools who just lose money all the time and have never contributed anything.
I have to say, at least Wall Street is paying back their loans. More than can be said for some other bailout recipients.
Not just genetics, either. Remember the story about strong magnetic fields causing a change in a person's standards of morality? Though just because it's a trend doesn't mean it's wrong. I think it's really interesting and frankly the whole "nurture" argument is kind of a dead end scientifically, since we can't do many experiments on people.
Don't confuse this question with the question of "freedom". You may not agree with the liberal view on taxation and government spending, but you're just plain mistaken if you think that liberals oppose freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom of association, and so on. Liberals strongly support those freedoms.
Liberals have a different idea of the balance of those freedoms. Look at Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer's comments on the Koran burning plan.
Liberals champion causes like expanding the definition of sexual harassment (speech), protecting certain minority groups more than others (speech, association), creating free speech limitation zones at places like abortion clinics, and so on.
I wouldn't say liberals are against those freedoms, but they definitely give them less weight than their general humanist values.
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Another issue is how much responsibility handicapped people have versus business owners. Wheelchairs are ancient technology. Surely the advent of motorized wheelchairs should make ramp slope requirements more lenient. One day when we have stair climbing wheelchairs available, but not at 100% penetration, should the ramp requirement be completely scrapped?
Yes, because the free market ended "separate but equal." Oh, it didn't? Then I guess you are arguing that segregation is better for the US than not.
Depends what you mean. There's a difference between a private women's gym that doesn't allow men to join, and the government saying "men cannot join gyms."
Separate but equal is perfectly fair when it comes as a result of end user choice. Look at so-called "historically black colleges." Should they be shut down because they are unbalanced?
The guy who gets a paycheck working for Ferrari won just as much as the guy getting a paycheck from Toyota.
That means anybody with a grudge can bring down a noncompliant business that put "good faith" into it but didn't make it 100%.
What a free society we live in today, it makes me real proud.
They created the high rise with stairs-only and are whining that adding an elevator to their walk-up is expensive. You had to think about that for every commercial building built in the last few generations.
The equivalent on the web is that any browser, regardless of its capabilities, can access the same html and css as any other browser.
What you're suggesting is that the actual content of the online stores has to become accessible. That's like saying every Barnes and Noble has to have a braille translation, in stock, of every single book they carry. It's just ridiculous.
Accessibility is there, it's up to screen reading software to make good on it. Equal opportunity, not equal outcome.
Perhaps because the technology is not quite there yet? You are talking about a screen reader that would be able to process a nightmarish mess of AJAX the same way that a human being does, then rewriting it in a way that is useful for a blind person. Are you familiar with that kind of technology, and could you perhaps send me some information about it?
Nobody would claim it's easy, or that a completely general solution would work. But come on. There are some major UI toolkits out there, Dojo, jquery, YUI, etc. Do screen readers even bother supporting those? Do they understand when a site was generated by Joomla or Drupal and say "Oh look this li is marked with this css class, this is clearly a menu?"
Nope. "Too much work." They want to put all of the burden on web developers. And of course the big screen readers largely don't support the standards that DO exist. Look up screen reader support for aural css for instance. It took years for screen readers to start supporting ARIA. They are lazy and don't innovate, bottom line.
Nobody is asking the web designers to make the blind see, the deaf hear.
Much of the problem with web accessibility is the low quality of screen reading software. How long did it take major screen readers to support stuff like ARIA? It's shameful.
Screen readers generally don't support aural css. Know why? They claim that web developers don't apply it properly so there's no point supporting it. Okaaay..
Screen readers for years and years complained about dynamic content, source order of content not matching screen order, etc. And you have these amazing open source browsers, on the other hand, that the screen readers could interact with, write plugins for, contribute patches for, etc.
Basically screen readers are not very innovative. Why isn't it easy to make a screen reader enter something like "news browsing mode" where it reads 5 headlines simultaneously in different voices and lets the user narrow in on the ones that sound interesting?
Okay forget innovation. How about simple developer friendliness? You'd think JAWS would say "If you're a developer, we will give you a free license to make sure your product works with ours." Guess what the reality is? Time limited demo that makes you reboot after like 1/2 hour.
I'm not sure but I think a big part of a punch is that you let your body fall forward slightly before punching. Your arm then trades momentum with your entire body. You may need to use your feet to get your body tipping forward initially.
Does this thing make you punch 17 times faster or does it give you 17 times the follow-through?
Halliburton did the cementing, then said hey it's wrong, then BP proceeded with drilling anyway, rather than redoing the cement. Halliburton didn't do the drilling so I don't see how you can blame them.
According to the Oil Spill Commission’s findings this week, Brian Morel, drilling engineer at BP, wrote an email to Brett Cocales, another BP engineer, as the drilling proceeded, saying: “Who cares, it’s done, end of story, we’ll probably be fine”. ...I put very, very little faith in the model because it’s wrong a lot.”
[...]
At a hearing in July, BP’s well team leader, John Guide, explained the decision not to go with the software’s recommendations. “The model is – first of all, it’s not accurate all the time.
BP still drilled with “no direct indicators of cement success” and no cement evaluation log, the Oil Spill commission said. The company conducted a separate negative pressure test, an oil engineering test designed to show whether the casing and cement would hold against significant pressure, and isolate potentially dangerous hydrocarbons.
The test was failed, but was – for an unexplained reason – deemed a “complete success” by both BP and rig owner Transocean at the time, a presentation on Monday said.
That's pretty blatant. Halliburton warned them, BP did their own separate test, which failed. Then they're like, oh well let's do it anyway! And you find a way to blame Halliburton in that?
Giving them $1 billion would not have solved their problem. They required a lot more than that.
Agreed. I'm just showing why calling it a gift is fully appropriate.
What pisses me off is you can give ANY business a $52 billion loan then only require a partial payback, and you know what, it's going to turn into a massively successful and profitable business because they got billions upon billions in free money. It's stupid and outrageously discriminatory. And why the hell did the unions get a share of the new company? They played as big a role in its failure as management, and management got nothing (rightly so). If you look at it proportionately, our government basically said "If you belong to this union, you get 1000x the benefit that other taxpayers will get." How can they even do that? It should be illegal.
Give? You might want to learn about exactly how a loan works. There's quite a difference between giving and lending.
That's wrong! There were two components to the bailout, a loan, which GM has already repaid, and a much larger equity purchase.
The gift aspect to the loan was that it was way below market rates, seeing as it was a company on the verge of bankruptcy with no hope of possibly repaying it except for the other component of the bailout.
The gift aspect of the equity purchase was more blatant. It's really a joke. At the time of the bailout, GM stock was worth less than $1/share. We could have bought the whole company for less than $1 billion. But instead we paid over $40 billion for a 60% stake. The breakeven price I've seen is over $130/share. But the IPO is priced way way lower than that. I mean, you see why that's being called a gift right??
You now have $50 cash and $12 worth of music for a total of $62 of value. You are now effectively $12 richer than you were since you have the music and you retained the $12.
If you bought the CD you would have $12 worth of music and $38 in cash for a total of $50 of value.
If you share it with 10 people who wouldn't have otherwise bought it, you have created $120 in value? I think I just solved the financial crisis. Free mp3s for everyone.
You've got to hand it to the RIAA lawyers for truly excellent jury selection skills.
How did you come to that number? That number doesn't even include reasonable damages. The entire point is to make it so painful, the party will not want to do so again.
If they started regularly going after people and getting $50 - $100 per violation, it would stop. The fact that they don't have the resources to go after everybody for such a small return is their problem. It also shows that beyond a doubt the cost of the trial plus $100 outweighs the damage caused by the file sharers.
Without hard details it's impossible to say, but shorting something that you own or produce is a common way to reduce risk. Shorting securities that you also produce is totally fine. They're protecting themselves. If the securities start doing badly, volume will go down and they will make less money on the sales side. BUT they'll make a little money on the short side. Opposite is true as well. I don't see anything inherently immoral or criminal in that.
That is still insurance because you are paying a fixed amount to be insured against a variable amount. Rather than pooling risk over a group of people, you're pooling with yourself (future and past) over time.
How about we jail everybody at GM since they have NOT paid back their loan yet. AIG too. That makes a lot more sense than jailing people who have actually honored their responsibilities.
GM, Fannie, Freddie. I'm not sure how AIG is doing, I think they're pretty far in the hole still. But the investment banks have really been paying up.
Seems like you're scapegoating the bankers. It's the borrowers who chose not to repay their loans, and it's the investors who piled up loads of money and said "Just give us more mortgages they're a safe investment." And the government who encouraged loans to low-income people. The bankers are just middle-men, and they got really screwed in case you missed the news. Several big-name banks and many small banks are just gone. Others had to sell stakes to the government. If that's some kind of get-rich scheme, it's a bad one. And if you think some individual bankers and mortgage officers got rich and are perfectly happy to be out of a job, that's misunderstanding the rich. You can't be rich enough to just get out of the game.
Really the whole financial crisis is a misdirection. The problem in our economy is that we have bad fundamentals. It's too expensive to do business in America so we're losing jobs overseas. I don't think that will change in the near future. We want growth like China but none of the consequences -- environmental, human rights, etc.
As much as I like blaming ills on politics, I don't think the economic mess is their fault. It's not the banks' fault either.
What happened was simply an unprecedented shift in financial priorities in the public. For decades, mortgages have been considered a fairly safe investment because people would "do anything" to save their homes. I still remember reading a few articles discussing the shock economists had that people were making their cell phone, credit card, and car payments, but letting their houses slip into foreclosure. Of course in hindsight it was kind of obvious - in the modern world you need those accessories far more than a house if you want to keep your job or get a new job.
We reached a time when people walked away from their mortgages for no reason than that their house had lost a lot of value. This 2nd type of foreclosure involved, I believe, richer and more educated people typically in very high value markets like California. They were simply taking advantage of the terms in their mortgage.
So the whole idea of housing as a safe investment flew out the window. People like you today are looking at banks and seem to me to be assuming they knew how bad and risky the loans were, and then fraudulently sold them off to investors to make a quick buck. It just doesn't make sense to me though. The banks lost a lot of money in this little adventure.
The other thing people tend to forget for some reason is the extreme gas price crisis that hit a bit before the mortgage mess. It had a big effect on housing values in "exurbs." I remember reading about people who started renting apartments near their jobs and living there during the week to avoid using too much gas. People's savings really suffered as increased transportation costs took their toll directly and indirectly by raising prices for food, clothes, and other essentials.
Really the only thing I blame on politicians is the reaction to the crisis. The bailouts and stimulus spending were disgusting. Equally disgusting has been Obama's hyperaggressive stance against business. He's "taking on" Wall Street and the evil banks, "looking for someone's ass to kick" in the energy industry, angry at greedy insurers/drug companies/hospitals, etc. It's un-American and stupid. Who starts insulting major components of our economy in an economic crisis?
Increasing the supply of doctors would require lowering the cost to train doctors; after all, if the wages for doctors drop and the cost to become a doctor does not, less people would pursue the profession and you'd end up back where we started.
There are several ways to lower the cost to train doctors. The most important is simply to increase the number and size of medical schools. The University of North Carolina medical school (near where I live) has a total enrollment of only 734 people. Each year, billions of dollars are spent on medical research programs at schools, and very little is spent on increasing the size of the program. In any other profession with very high salaries and very strong job demand, schools quickly ramp up capacity. Look at the size of computer science departments around the country, for instance.
Another issue is the time it takes to become a doctor in the US. In many other countries, the medical degree takes the place of an undergraduate degree, rather than following it. That cuts 4 years off the time plus a substantial amount of money and interest for undergrad student loans. And the foreign doctors we allow into the country pass the same board exams as our doctors, and perform just as well. So any argument about the undergrad degree affecting quality is moot.
It's important to look at the role of doctors' organizations like the AMA in accreditation of medical schools. How wise is it to have a private organization staffed by doctors controlling the supply of new doctors? There's a clear conflict of interest.
If he ends up with a massive medical bill it's only his fault and before he gets any help whatsoever he should declare bankruptcy and forego any chance of ever getting a loan to buy a house or start a business ever again because if the government pays his bills then that's just making you as a taxpayer an indentured servant.
I think prices would come down a lot with the application of some conservative principles to the medical industry, like promoting competition by increasing the supply of doctors (whose salaries are the #1 component of health care costs), providing easier (non-prescription) access to basic medication, allowing imports of drugs, etc.
Heh interesting. When the big corporations are "raping" developing countries and abusing human rights and all that, they are enriching themselves and America on the backs of the poor. It's even called neo-colonialism and American imperialism.
But when they screw up, they are inept, bumbling fools who just lose money all the time and have never contributed anything.
I have to say, at least Wall Street is paying back their loans. More than can be said for some other bailout recipients.
Not just genetics, either. Remember the story about strong magnetic fields causing a change in a person's standards of morality? Though just because it's a trend doesn't mean it's wrong. I think it's really interesting and frankly the whole "nurture" argument is kind of a dead end scientifically, since we can't do many experiments on people.
Don't confuse this question with the question of "freedom". You may not agree with the liberal view on taxation and government spending, but you're just plain mistaken if you think that liberals oppose freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom of association, and so on. Liberals strongly support those freedoms.
Liberals have a different idea of the balance of those freedoms. Look at Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer's comments on the Koran burning plan.
Liberals champion causes like expanding the definition of sexual harassment (speech), protecting certain minority groups more than others (speech, association), creating free speech limitation zones at places like abortion clinics, and so on.
I wouldn't say liberals are against those freedoms, but they definitely give them less weight than their general humanist values.