So if the economy is depressed because the government is "printing money", why is inflation so low? (1.64% per year since 2008) Why isn't it 20% or higher as has been the case in other economic crises such as in Brazil or Argentina in the 1980s?
Furthermore, the move toward consolidation has more to do with deregulation, than with "government monopolies."--the exact opposite. Companies are sitting on so much money (because of lower tax rates, higher stock prices, etc), that it's easier for them to buy their competitors than to invest in their operations to get new customers. Which leads these companies to have even less of an incentive to invest in higher speed broadband, or offer better prices for their customers.
That was the whole point of Krugman's article.
You'd think that since they're asking for the top 10% to be their employees, Netflix would pay them salaries in the top 10%. I'm guessing they don't see it that way.
Speaking of bitcoin,
Krugman said "Bitcoin... is by design, a kind of virtual gold. And like gold, it can be mined: you can create new bitcoins, but only by solving very complex mathematical problems that require both a lot of computing power and a lot of electricity to run the computers. Hence the location in Iceland, which has cheap electricity from hydropower and an abundance of cold air to cool those furiously churning machines. Even so, a lot of real resources are being used to create virtual objects with no clear use."
In other words bitcoin mining is actually wasting electricity and adding to the carbon footprint, but not really adding value to anything. The object itself is entirely fictional and speculative. At least gold can be made into jewelry or used in electronics, what can you use bitcoin for, other than speculating on it's price?
And what I find ironic is that 200 years ago, there was no Federal Reserve, and any bank could print their own money. Yet somehow people opted to use the currency backed by the US govt. So in a sense we are mining our way back to the 17th century.
"the same people who are in the streets and protesting the lack of affordable housing are the ones who will file lawsuits and protest development that provides housing."
No, it's not the same people. For one thing, it's a class issue. The "liberals" who file those lawsuits, are seeking to protect their already valuable property because they like their nice 3 or 4 story town-homes for which they paid millions of dollars for. They also don't want to live next to a building full of 20-something partyers who stay up 'til 5am on Tuesday nights.
The other "liberals" protesting the buses are working-class and couldn't afford to live in denser construction anyway, since any new construction in SF would only be at the high-end, like luxury condos for those techie partyers.
In other words, they're not the same people. I'm sure a bunch of Wall St. investment bankers voted for Obama, which by no means implies they'd support affordable housing.
In other words, mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, and shouldn't right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed? Yet didn't the founding fathers say that when you suffer a long train of abuses and usurpations, it is our right, it is our duty, to throw off such oppression?
Whoever said Christianity is a religion of peace? Of course this is trite, but the biggest reason for Christianity's spread, especially among the kings and emperors of post-Roman Europe, was the fact that you could maim and kill at will in wars of conquest and still be forgiven for your sins and go to heaven. In addition, it allowed them to subjugate a mass of peasant serfs through the Church, instead of whips and chains.
In other words, a religion tailor-made for the United States.
In 2006, the Center for Constitutional Rights sued the federal government asking a federal court for an injunction to stop warrantless wiretapping and naming George W. Bush, the head of the NSA and the heads of other intelligence agencies as defendants. The case was dismissed in June of 2013 when the court agreed with the precedent set in two other cases, which basically said that Americans don’t even have the right to sue their government over its surveillance program, unless they can prove that their communications were intercepted.
In other words, you can't sue unless you can demonstrate irreparable personal harm from the spying program. Of course the NSA is never going to hand-over that information voluntarily.
But don't you see how wonderful freedom is. The point isn't that you have to be a chemist, financial analyst, or a mechanical engineer in order to function in a free society. It's that you're free to be any or all of those things.
Of course, in the real world, due to the atomized specialization of labor required to make the modern economy hum, it's ridiculous to expect an individual to posses a PhD in applied science just to function in society. That's what we pay other people to do, and why we need regulations more than ever.
When you say voluntary cooperation, you mean like a treaty between states where the agree what powers they reserve to themselves and those that other states have. Something like a "constitution"? So that pollution being created in one state, and contaminating the water of another one can be addressed? Or, poor safety practices in a rendering plant in Kansas, causing people in California to get sick, or even die, can be stopped? You mean those kinds of issues should be left up to individual states? I for one, welcome the "government's" nose being involved in those things.
Oh, you mean "ethical and competent election officials" like those in Florida, or Alabama right?
The fact is that "voter fraud" of the type you describe is a myth and in fact when someone is convicted of it, it usually involves someone with a felony conviction trying to exercise their right to vote.
" Over the past decade Texas has convicted 51 people of voter fraud, according the state's Attorney General Greg Abbott. Only four of those cases were for voter impersonation, the only type of voter fraud that voter ID laws prevent.
Nationwide that rate of voter impersonation is even lower.
Out of the 197 million votes cast for federal candidates between 2002 and 2005, only 40 voters were indicted for voter fraud, according to a Department of Justice study outlined during a 2006 Congressional hearing. Only 26 of those cases, or about.00000013 percent of the votes cast, resulted in convictions or guilty pleas. " http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/OTUS/voter-fraud-real-rare/story?id=17213376
And yet I'm sure you think having to wait 3 days to purchase a lethal weapon is a burdensome and onerous infringement on your 2nd amendment rights.
Gee, I wonder why? I'm sure billionaire oligarchs, and corrupt CCP members have no use for a new money laundering mechanism? (not to mention drug cartels and warlords)
I think the poster means Secretary of State for Defence. The difference being that unlike the American Secretary of Defense, the British secretary holds an elected office (in the case of Philip Hammond, representing Runnymede and Weybridge), and does not need Parliamentary approval to serve. His US counterpart needs Senate confirmation to serve.
So on the one hand due to executive incompetence, product quality suffers, sales go down and the stock tanks, then some CXX suggest cutting down on office space and having employees telecommute to save on overhead, then due to executive incompetence and marketing/sales trumping product design and innovation, sales go down, and the stock tanks. Now they say they need employees to come in to the (now non-existent) offices, yet something tells me that it's just another example of executive incompetence resulting in poor sales, bad products and the stock tanking.
"The classical education (what you're describing) is dead," for the 99% But I can assure you that elite private schools in NY and LA DON'T focus on standardized tests I guess the rulers do want their children to think (and take over).
"There you will see that despite blacks making up 13% of the population in the US, they are [arrested] for a significantly greater proportion of violent crime."
That's a more accurate statement. Also, what's more likely. people with higher melanin levels are more violent, or laws written by the majority population are biased against the minority population.
You're confusing cause and effect. Gerrymandering is an effect of the two-party system, not the cause.
For instance, Jeffrey D. Sachs attributes two-dominant parties in the US as a result of First-past the Post voting. "Members of Congress are elected in single-member districts according to the 'first-past-the-post' (FPTP) principle, meaning that the candidate with the plurality of votes is the winner of the congressional seat. The losing party or parties win no representation at all. The first-past-the-post election tends to produce a small number of major parties, perhaps just two, a principle known in political science as Duverger's Law. Smaller parties are trampled in first-past-the-post elections."
—Sachs, The Price of Civilization, 2011
Also known as: using the postal service(s) for illegal activity, innit. Arguably if Silk Road was truly underground and you had to know people who know people and use dead drops to get your molly, as opposed to, you know, fedex, DPR probably wouldn't be in jail now.
" It's really, really okay to just have a show be for entertainment and not for social engineering."
And this is Doctor Who you're talking about? Let's see, 1) he doesn't carry a gun, is a pacifist 2) is ostensibly an atheist. 3) is anti imperialist. In other words, Dr. Who is an old-fashioned liberal.
"The Mutants was one of the most blatant of the shows run, hitting targets such as race discrimination, colonisation and apartheid head on and is, at times pretty heavy going."
So there's already plenty of "social engineering" going on in Doctor Who. It's not just entertainment (it's produced by the BBC after-all)
"Bachiller polled in 18th place when she ran for a seat with the People’s Party (PP) in the last municipal elections. She replaced another councillor, Jesus Garcia Galvan, who had to resign his seat a month ago on account of charges of bribery and malfeasance in office."
So really her nomination had more to do with the scandals of another Councillor, than with PC.
I bet the people who buy $6,000 tickets to see TED talks in person won't be sending their kids to the new model of schools they're proposing. The rich will still go to fancy prep schools, with small class sizes, highly qualified teachers, individual tutoring, beautiful facilities, broad-ranging curricula --- and where even the dumbest kids will be groomed to be multimillionaire managers (no one there being prepared for the "janitor" career track). Meanwhile, they want to tell the rest of us to stick our kids on the "obedient peon" track, herded and managed to be profitable slaves for the kids of the super-wealthy (and make them a nice return on investment from new for-profit schools).
Exactly! It still amazes me how the solution to our eduction "problem" seems to be to deprive the public of qualified teachers, by for instance, cutting their salaries, and "optimizing" class sizes. And who are the number one proponents of these solutions: people for whom their own children must have the best of the best, and can easily afford to pay for it. Isn't it amazing how the kids of rich people never seem to work in blue-collar professions, even if they're idiots. They still manage to make it into Ivy League schools.
Elite private schools tend to use more progressive methods of eduction where children are allowed to "explore" their world through a boutique education suited to their individualized learning style, and students tend to excel academically even though some receive intensive individual hands-on tutoring
Middle-class students are herded into mediocre schools where moderately qualified teachers try to do the best they can and difficult students receive some special attention.
While lower-class or working class students are left to fend for themselves and indeed have difficulty with basic concepts and struggle with academics, while teachers try to keep kids from killing each other while punching the clock.
But from your post you assume that these qualities are innate and that a student's socio-economic background doesn't matter in how well students do academically. In other words, if kids truly had the support they needed to fully realize their abilities from an early age (read: $$$$) you wouldn't need to carve out some kind of "gifted" education for a select group of people.
Slashdot Mirror
So if the economy is depressed because the government is "printing money", why is inflation so low? (1.64% per year since 2008) Why isn't it 20% or higher as has been the case in other economic crises such as in Brazil or Argentina in the 1980s? Furthermore, the move toward consolidation has more to do with deregulation, than with "government monopolies."--the exact opposite. Companies are sitting on so much money (because of lower tax rates, higher stock prices, etc), that it's easier for them to buy their competitors than to invest in their operations to get new customers. Which leads these companies to have even less of an incentive to invest in higher speed broadband, or offer better prices for their customers. That was the whole point of Krugman's article.
Cost of the Iraq War: > $2,000 billion or 100 years of welfare cuts.
You'd think that since they're asking for the top 10% to be their employees, Netflix would pay them salaries in the top 10%. I'm guessing they don't see it that way.
Speaking of bitcoin, Krugman said "Bitcoin... is by design, a kind of virtual gold. And like gold, it can be mined: you can create new bitcoins, but only by solving very complex mathematical problems that require both a lot of computing power and a lot of electricity to run the computers. Hence the location in Iceland, which has cheap electricity from hydropower and an abundance of cold air to cool those furiously churning machines. Even so, a lot of real resources are being used to create virtual objects with no clear use."
In other words bitcoin mining is actually wasting electricity and adding to the carbon footprint, but not really adding value to anything. The object itself is entirely fictional and speculative. At least gold can be made into jewelry or used in electronics, what can you use bitcoin for, other than speculating on it's price?
And what I find ironic is that 200 years ago, there was no Federal Reserve, and any bank could print their own money. Yet somehow people opted to use the currency backed by the US govt. So in a sense we are mining our way back to the 17th century.
"the same people who are in the streets and protesting the lack of affordable housing are the ones who will file lawsuits and protest development that provides housing." No, it's not the same people. For one thing, it's a class issue. The "liberals" who file those lawsuits, are seeking to protect their already valuable property because they like their nice 3 or 4 story town-homes for which they paid millions of dollars for. They also don't want to live next to a building full of 20-something partyers who stay up 'til 5am on Tuesday nights. The other "liberals" protesting the buses are working-class and couldn't afford to live in denser construction anyway, since any new construction in SF would only be at the high-end, like luxury condos for those techie partyers. In other words, they're not the same people. I'm sure a bunch of Wall St. investment bankers voted for Obama, which by no means implies they'd support affordable housing.
In other words, mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, and shouldn't right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed? Yet didn't the founding fathers say that when you suffer a long train of abuses and usurpations, it is our right, it is our duty, to throw off such oppression?
It's about time someone disrupted Google. I think a VC might just throw $100mil their way, don't you?
Whoever said Christianity is a religion of peace? Of course this is trite, but the biggest reason for Christianity's spread, especially among the kings and emperors of post-Roman Europe, was the fact that you could maim and kill at will in wars of conquest and still be forgiven for your sins and go to heaven. In addition, it allowed them to subjugate a mass of peasant serfs through the Church, instead of whips and chains. In other words, a religion tailor-made for the United States.
In 2006, the Center for Constitutional Rights sued the federal government asking a federal court for an injunction to stop warrantless wiretapping and naming George W. Bush, the head of the NSA and the heads of other intelligence agencies as defendants. The case was dismissed in June of 2013 when the court agreed with the precedent set in two other cases, which basically said that Americans don’t even have the right to sue their government over its surveillance program, unless they can prove that their communications were intercepted. In other words, you can't sue unless you can demonstrate irreparable personal harm from the spying program. Of course the NSA is never going to hand-over that information voluntarily.
Well.. I'm pretty sure you can't mirror the BBC using Netflix.
I think this answers your question: The Paranoid Style in American Politics
But don't you see how wonderful freedom is. The point isn't that you have to be a chemist, financial analyst, or a mechanical engineer in order to function in a free society. It's that you're free to be any or all of those things. Of course, in the real world, due to the atomized specialization of labor required to make the modern economy hum, it's ridiculous to expect an individual to posses a PhD in applied science just to function in society. That's what we pay other people to do, and why we need regulations more than ever.
When you say voluntary cooperation, you mean like a treaty between states where the agree what powers they reserve to themselves and those that other states have. Something like a "constitution"? So that pollution being created in one state, and contaminating the water of another one can be addressed? Or, poor safety practices in a rendering plant in Kansas, causing people in California to get sick, or even die, can be stopped? You mean those kinds of issues should be left up to individual states? I for one, welcome the "government's" nose being involved in those things.
" Over the past decade Texas has convicted 51 people of voter fraud, according the state's Attorney General Greg Abbott. Only four of those cases were for voter impersonation, the only type of voter fraud that voter ID laws prevent. .00000013 percent of the votes cast, resulted in convictions or guilty pleas. "
Nationwide that rate of voter impersonation is even lower.
Out of the 197 million votes cast for federal candidates between 2002 and 2005, only 40 voters were indicted for voter fraud, according to a Department of Justice study outlined during a 2006 Congressional hearing. Only 26 of those cases, or about
http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/OTUS/voter-fraud-real-rare/story?id=17213376
And yet I'm sure you think having to wait 3 days to purchase a lethal weapon is a burdensome and onerous infringement on your 2nd amendment rights.
Gee, I wonder why? I'm sure billionaire oligarchs, and corrupt CCP members have no use for a new money laundering mechanism? (not to mention drug cartels and warlords)
I think the poster means Secretary of State for Defence. The difference being that unlike the American Secretary of Defense, the British secretary holds an elected
office (in the case of Philip Hammond, representing Runnymede and Weybridge), and does not need Parliamentary approval to serve. His US counterpart needs Senate confirmation to serve.
So on the one hand due to executive incompetence, product quality suffers, sales go down and the stock tanks, then some CXX suggest cutting down on office space and having employees telecommute to save on overhead, then due to executive incompetence and marketing/sales trumping product design and innovation, sales go down, and the stock tanks. Now they say they need employees to come in to the (now non-existent) offices, yet something tells me that it's just another example of executive incompetence resulting in poor sales, bad products and the stock tanking.
"The classical education (what you're describing) is dead," for the 99% But I can assure you that elite private schools in NY and LA DON'T focus on standardized tests
I guess the rulers do want their children to think (and take over).
"There you will see that despite blacks making up 13% of the population in the US, they are [arrested] for a significantly greater proportion
of violent crime."
That's a more accurate statement. Also, what's more likely. people with higher melanin levels are more violent, or laws written
by the majority population are biased against the minority population.
You're confusing cause and effect. Gerrymandering is an effect of the two-party system, not the cause.
For instance, Jeffrey D. Sachs attributes two-dominant parties in the US as a result of First-past the Post voting. "Members of Congress are elected in single-member districts according to the 'first-past-the-post' (FPTP) principle, meaning that the candidate with the plurality of votes is the winner of the congressional seat. The losing party or parties win no representation at all. The first-past-the-post election tends to produce a small number of major parties, perhaps just two, a principle known in political science as Duverger's Law. Smaller parties are trampled in first-past-the-post elections."
—Sachs, The Price of Civilization, 2011
Also known as: using the postal service(s) for illegal activity, innit.
Arguably if Silk Road was truly underground and you had to know people who know people and use
dead drops to get your molly, as opposed to, you know, fedex, DPR probably wouldn't be in jail now.
" It's really, really okay to just have a show be for entertainment and not for social engineering."
And this is Doctor Who you're talking about? Let's see, 1) he doesn't carry a gun, is a pacifist 2) is ostensibly an atheist. 3) is anti imperialist. In other words, Dr. Who is an old-fashioned liberal.
"The Mutants was one of the most blatant of the shows run, hitting targets such as race discrimination, colonisation and apartheid head on and is, at times pretty heavy going."
So there's already plenty of "social engineering" going on in Doctor Who. It's not just entertainment (it's produced by the BBC after-all)
I RTFA.
"Bachiller polled in 18th place when she ran for a seat with the People’s Party (PP) in the last municipal elections. She replaced another councillor, Jesus Garcia Galvan, who had to resign his seat a month ago on account of charges of bribery and malfeasance in office."
So really her nomination had more to do with the scandals of another Councillor, than with PC.
I bet the people who buy $6,000 tickets to see TED talks in person won't be sending their kids to the new model of schools they're proposing. The rich will still go to fancy prep schools, with small class sizes, highly qualified teachers, individual tutoring, beautiful facilities, broad-ranging curricula --- and where even the dumbest kids will be groomed to be multimillionaire managers (no one there being prepared for the "janitor" career track). Meanwhile, they want to tell the rest of us to stick our kids on the "obedient peon" track, herded and managed to be profitable slaves for the kids of the super-wealthy (and make them a nice return on investment from new for-profit schools).
Exactly! It still amazes me how the solution to our eduction "problem" seems to be to deprive the public of qualified teachers, by for instance, cutting their salaries, and "optimizing" class sizes. And who are the number one proponents of these solutions: people for whom their own children must have the best of the best, and can easily afford to pay for it. Isn't it amazing how the kids of rich people never seem to work in blue-collar professions, even if they're idiots. They still manage to make it into Ivy League schools.
Silly, we already have that system of education.
Elite private schools tend to use more progressive methods of eduction where children are allowed to "explore" their world through a boutique education suited to their individualized learning style, and students tend to excel academically even though some receive intensive individual hands-on tutoring
Middle-class students are herded into mediocre schools where moderately qualified teachers try to do the best they can and difficult students receive some special attention.
While lower-class or working class students are left to fend for themselves and indeed have difficulty with basic concepts and struggle with academics, while teachers try to keep kids from killing each other while punching the clock.
But from your post you assume that these qualities are innate and that a student's socio-economic background doesn't matter in how well students do academically. In other words, if kids truly had the support they needed to fully realize their abilities from an early age (read: $$$$) you wouldn't need to carve out some kind of "gifted" education for a select group of people.