Conservation of matter dictates that the pancakes are still there. Even if you ate them this just means that you moved them somewhere else (your stomach), but the pancakes do not cease to exist. Even after digestion if your stool is used as fertilizer to grow wheat for flour, corn for chickens to make eggs and grass and hay for cows to make milk, and the inorganic components are reprocessed into salt and baking soda, you can have pancakes again forever. Therefore "NP" (no pancakes) really has no meaning. Yeah, I have time to kill today.
Because we use abstraction instead of algorithms. The same type that lets us do 2nd order differential equations in our heads to put our hands in the path of a ball we intend to catch, without actually doing the math. Kinda hard to bind abstraction to a mathematical formula though.
If you used real Canadian maple syrup from real Maple trees instead of that artificial corn syrup crap the rest of the world calls "maple syrup" that tastes like dead beetles, then it really wouldn't matter if you got some on your bacon because everything tastes better with Maple Syrup.
When you are going hungry, I challenge you to eat a painting and see how nutritious it is.
I see it differently. I see it as there are people who are lazy - either physically or intellectually - and people who can motivate others to get them to do things for them. It's not a King's job to die in a battle, it's a soldier's. And with the right type of King, people will gladly give up even their lives. For a charismatic religious leader they are willing to blow themselves up - they think its for a god but really it's for politics and power in the name of a god. And people do this willingly. So while it's easy to cast leadership (and by extension, management) in a sinister light - they are simply harnessing the energy that is offered voluntarily by people to make them achieve things that they would not normally achieve.
Do you really think that global companies just happen? If it was so easy to make one - why isn't everyone doing it? No - global companies first make products that everyone could use because it makes all our lives simpler - be it toilet paper, toothpaste, headache pills or microchips. And secondly have a structure that contains talented leaders that manage to organize all the suppliers, all the factories and all the sales and distribution channels around the world towards a common goal - getting that product into the hands of as many people as possible, in exchange for as much money as possible.
There's nothing sinister about this. No one is forced to buy the products - but they are good products and people want them. Certainly before the large corporations products similar to these existed. You CAN wipe your ass with newspaper, like my grand-father used to do, instead of ultra-soft 10 ply whatever. You CAN bush your teeth with baking soda and tree bark. But then there are questions of product quality, and quality of life. You have to get the newspaper at least once a week and spend time cutting it up. You have to go out and strip the bark from trees. And you'd still have to go to the store anyway to buy baking soda. Much easier to buy a toothbrush and a couple tubes of toothpaste and a 12-pack of toilet paper every month or so, and just make the one trip to the store. Why? Because people are lazy.
While I agree that not all managers are smart, all of them should be, and some of them actually are. You can't dismiss an argument with a (n incorrect) generalization.
Seriously though I agree with you that a lack of accountability is what is driving the inequities in the system. The fact that shareholders, who are the (initial) investors, have absolutely no say in the day to day operation of the corporation but rather elect people to do this for them by proxy, opens the corporate assets to be pilfered for personal gain, just like the people's assets are pilfered by politicians. When access to a lot of money is too easy, that money is just going to disappear - people will find a way to transfer that wealth to themselves. Therefore in the corporate world you end up with a sort of inflation - because John Smith of ABC corporation decides to pay himself a million dollar salary, so Frank Green at Megacorp says "what? we're much bigger than ABC co, I deserve a bigger salary" and so he decides to pay himself a million and a half, and Bob White of OtherCorp sees this and says "well we're Megacorp's competitor and we gained 5% market share this year, I deserve at least a million three hundred", etc.
Just like Hollywood bends over backwards every year to make even more expensive movies, causing actors to demand even higher salaries, corporations suffer from inflation too. It's just human nature when money is cheap and easy to come by, and people (not market forces) are allowed to write their own paychecks.
Fact is, there is plenty wealth so that nobody has to live in poverty.
So in your fantasy world you see everyone at the top of the pyramid and no one at the bottom? There is no room, friend. There will always be people who achieve more with less. There will always be people who have more than most. That's just the way of the world. Resources such as wealth, brains, talent, are not uniform but scattered in clumps. Those who have it will guard it jealously from those who want to take it but don't know what to do with it. While I admit that the general "standard of living" can get better for the whole society, wealthy as well as poor - there will always be an elite class and a much larger jealous class. It was even this way in the Soviet Union, and I bet you Chairman Mao never lacked for food even when millions of Chinese were starving in the 1960's.
This increase in standard of living is brought about by technology. Technology is driven by (cheap) energy. There are limits to our energy production, too. There's 40 years of oil left in the world, at current consumption levels. Less if you account for growth. China is adding demand to the equivalent of Australia, every year. You wonder why oil doesn't budge from $90-$100 a barrel anymore? Cheap oil is gone forever. People claim there's 200 years' worth of coal and maybe the same for natural gas - again at current levels of consumption. And once it's all burned - then what? The law of thermodynamics won't change, no matter how innovative we get. You cannot create energy out of thin air, and technology is not magical. Eventually we will run into the inefficiencies inherent in the laws of the universe and the price we will pay is quality of life and standard of living. And the poor will suffer much, much more than the rich.
The problem with talent is that the rate is set by your competitor - not by you. It's not how much is it worth to your company - it's how much is your competitor willing to pay. Certainly management is worth the value of the whole company, because the whole company would cease to exist without it. That's the difference really between line workers and management. You can pretty much be guaranteed homogenity across factory workers - their skills are largely dependent on culture and education of the society your company is in. Firing some and training up some others will result in pretty much the same productivity. But management talent is highly specialized and individual. Smart people are hard to come by.
I was with you up until you mentioned taxation. The problem is not one of insufficient income. Rather it's one of too much expenditure. Sure, raise taxes and tax the rich. Those dumb enough not to move or hide their assets will pay. But it will not solve the problem, when the next elected official comes in and decides to increase spending even more (because after all there is more money than ever coming in). All that will result is that the smart rich people will leave (or at least their assets will), the dumb rich people won't be so rich anymore, and Greece will still be drowning in debt, but with even less chance of recovery.
Governments around the world have fallen into the trap of thinking that they can spend forever without any consequences. While economic growth tended to mask any downside to these policies everything was fine. But now we are bumping into real limits. All the good land is already built on or farmed. All the nicest forests are already harvested. All the easy wells, dams, bridges and reservoirs are already built. Any further growth is either going to be very, very expensive or is going to put a lot of strain on existing resources. So every additional money spent by government is becoming less and less productive. That - without taking into account that the actual purchasing power of all fiat money is a shadow of what it used to be.
The "market" is paying less attention to Greece than the news media would have you believe. Other things like Bernanke's announcement of QE3 (sorry they call it accommodation now), increased productivity (+3.1%) and factory orders (+0.3%) have much more impact on the market than Greece. Have to buy now before printing-press driven inflation sends prices up even further, especially when the promise of more cheap money is on the horizon. But all the press sees is the "drama" in Greece. And of course this works in favor of the politicians since it gives them an excuse to transfer wealth from you and me a little more in the name of crisis prevention.
why not do something simple like cut upper management salary by 50%, and automatically save 3 or 5x right away.
And that way upper management will all quit and go work somewhere else, and the company won't have managers left (except of course the bad ones who can't go anywhere else). Believe it or not, management is actually an important part of a company. They don't just sit on their asses all day and tell people to get to work on time.
Yeah, he needs to learn that trading on "news" is possibly even worse than trading completely at random. Besides if you look at the past 13 years of the stock market, you are just as likely to make money in the next 5 years or so by buying stock as you are by selling it. The market has been jogging in place since 1998.
Sure, if you like to short stock. AMD can't seem to stop sucking for the past few years. They almost ate Intel's lunch, but he with the deepest pockets wins. Too bad that now they will take ATI with them if they go under.
Then they are doing it wrong. Everyone knows you put your bakery section in the front. There's nothing like walking into a store and being greeted by the smell of fresh bread.
This is just what Apple fans are empowering with their blind religious support of the company that can do no wrong, even when it does. I just don't understand why America is obsessed with giving so much money to this Chinese company.
In science, there are no extraordinary claims or burdens of proof.
Oh yes there are. Anything that deviates from established, reproducible, verifiable theory is an extra-ordinary claim. While once in a while such an earth-shattering discovery happens, it never contradicts the previous work but rather reinforces it and/or explains it in a different way. And the burden of proof is on the proponent of the new idea. If you suddenly go around claiming that black is white, you had better bring mathematical proof. Please don't attempt to teach someone with a doctorate in science about science.
If these questions puzzle you then you should continue studying theology and give up on science and rational thought altogether. Keeping an "open mind" is not the same as foolishly believing any random crap any random person says. If you make an extra-ordinary claim ("things are different"), you are the one with the burden of proof.
we can do a lot of things today that in the past had been viewed as impossible.
You are of course free to "believe" whatever you want. The universe cares not. Some things we only think are impossible and it turns out we were wrong. Other things are REALLY impossible. I challenge you to come back from the dead in 100 years and prove me wrong.
Slashdot Mirror
Conservation of matter dictates that the pancakes are still there. Even if you ate them this just means that you moved them somewhere else (your stomach), but the pancakes do not cease to exist. Even after digestion if your stool is used as fertilizer to grow wheat for flour, corn for chickens to make eggs and grass and hay for cows to make milk, and the inorganic components are reprocessed into salt and baking soda, you can have pancakes again forever. Therefore "NP" (no pancakes) really has no meaning. Yeah, I have time to kill today.
Because we use abstraction instead of algorithms. The same type that lets us do 2nd order differential equations in our heads to put our hands in the path of a ball we intend to catch, without actually doing the math. Kinda hard to bind abstraction to a mathematical formula though.
That tag line has been gone for a few months. Just FYI.
If you used real Canadian maple syrup from real Maple trees instead of that artificial corn syrup crap the rest of the world calls "maple syrup" that tastes like dead beetles, then it really wouldn't matter if you got some on your bacon because everything tastes better with Maple Syrup.
It's written and painted and sung.
When you are going hungry, I challenge you to eat a painting and see how nutritious it is.
I see it differently. I see it as there are people who are lazy - either physically or intellectually - and people who can motivate others to get them to do things for them. It's not a King's job to die in a battle, it's a soldier's. And with the right type of King, people will gladly give up even their lives. For a charismatic religious leader they are willing to blow themselves up - they think its for a god but really it's for politics and power in the name of a god. And people do this willingly. So while it's easy to cast leadership (and by extension, management) in a sinister light - they are simply harnessing the energy that is offered voluntarily by people to make them achieve things that they would not normally achieve.
Do you really think that global companies just happen? If it was so easy to make one - why isn't everyone doing it? No - global companies first make products that everyone could use because it makes all our lives simpler - be it toilet paper, toothpaste, headache pills or microchips. And secondly have a structure that contains talented leaders that manage to organize all the suppliers, all the factories and all the sales and distribution channels around the world towards a common goal - getting that product into the hands of as many people as possible, in exchange for as much money as possible.
There's nothing sinister about this. No one is forced to buy the products - but they are good products and people want them. Certainly before the large corporations products similar to these existed. You CAN wipe your ass with newspaper, like my grand-father used to do, instead of ultra-soft 10 ply whatever. You CAN bush your teeth with baking soda and tree bark. But then there are questions of product quality, and quality of life. You have to get the newspaper at least once a week and spend time cutting it up. You have to go out and strip the bark from trees. And you'd still have to go to the store anyway to buy baking soda. Much easier to buy a toothbrush and a couple tubes of toothpaste and a 12-pack of toilet paper every month or so, and just make the one trip to the store. Why? Because people are lazy.
While I agree that not all managers are smart, all of them should be, and some of them actually are. You can't dismiss an argument with a (n incorrect) generalization.
Then don't invest in corporations.
Seriously though I agree with you that a lack of accountability is what is driving the inequities in the system. The fact that shareholders, who are the (initial) investors, have absolutely no say in the day to day operation of the corporation but rather elect people to do this for them by proxy, opens the corporate assets to be pilfered for personal gain, just like the people's assets are pilfered by politicians. When access to a lot of money is too easy, that money is just going to disappear - people will find a way to transfer that wealth to themselves. Therefore in the corporate world you end up with a sort of inflation - because John Smith of ABC corporation decides to pay himself a million dollar salary, so Frank Green at Megacorp says "what? we're much bigger than ABC co, I deserve a bigger salary" and so he decides to pay himself a million and a half, and Bob White of OtherCorp sees this and says "well we're Megacorp's competitor and we gained 5% market share this year, I deserve at least a million three hundred", etc.
Just like Hollywood bends over backwards every year to make even more expensive movies, causing actors to demand even higher salaries, corporations suffer from inflation too. It's just human nature when money is cheap and easy to come by, and people (not market forces) are allowed to write their own paychecks.
Why is it lame?
Because the shark question has not been considered. I would fucking pay extra taxes to see space-time ripping laser sharks.
Fact is, there is plenty wealth so that nobody has to live in poverty.
So in your fantasy world you see everyone at the top of the pyramid and no one at the bottom? There is no room, friend. There will always be people who achieve more with less. There will always be people who have more than most. That's just the way of the world. Resources such as wealth, brains, talent, are not uniform but scattered in clumps. Those who have it will guard it jealously from those who want to take it but don't know what to do with it. While I admit that the general "standard of living" can get better for the whole society, wealthy as well as poor - there will always be an elite class and a much larger jealous class. It was even this way in the Soviet Union, and I bet you Chairman Mao never lacked for food even when millions of Chinese were starving in the 1960's.
This increase in standard of living is brought about by technology. Technology is driven by (cheap) energy. There are limits to our energy production, too. There's 40 years of oil left in the world, at current consumption levels. Less if you account for growth. China is adding demand to the equivalent of Australia, every year. You wonder why oil doesn't budge from $90-$100 a barrel anymore? Cheap oil is gone forever. People claim there's 200 years' worth of coal and maybe the same for natural gas - again at current levels of consumption. And once it's all burned - then what? The law of thermodynamics won't change, no matter how innovative we get. You cannot create energy out of thin air, and technology is not magical. Eventually we will run into the inefficiencies inherent in the laws of the universe and the price we will pay is quality of life and standard of living. And the poor will suffer much, much more than the rich.
The question is how much are they worth.
The problem with talent is that the rate is set by your competitor - not by you. It's not how much is it worth to your company - it's how much is your competitor willing to pay. Certainly management is worth the value of the whole company, because the whole company would cease to exist without it. That's the difference really between line workers and management. You can pretty much be guaranteed homogenity across factory workers - their skills are largely dependent on culture and education of the society your company is in. Firing some and training up some others will result in pretty much the same productivity. But management talent is highly specialized and individual. Smart people are hard to come by.
I was with you up until you mentioned taxation. The problem is not one of insufficient income. Rather it's one of too much expenditure. Sure, raise taxes and tax the rich. Those dumb enough not to move or hide their assets will pay. But it will not solve the problem, when the next elected official comes in and decides to increase spending even more (because after all there is more money than ever coming in). All that will result is that the smart rich people will leave (or at least their assets will), the dumb rich people won't be so rich anymore, and Greece will still be drowning in debt, but with even less chance of recovery.
Governments around the world have fallen into the trap of thinking that they can spend forever without any consequences. While economic growth tended to mask any downside to these policies everything was fine. But now we are bumping into real limits. All the good land is already built on or farmed. All the nicest forests are already harvested. All the easy wells, dams, bridges and reservoirs are already built. Any further growth is either going to be very, very expensive or is going to put a lot of strain on existing resources. So every additional money spent by government is becoming less and less productive. That - without taking into account that the actual purchasing power of all fiat money is a shadow of what it used to be.
China probably already has copies of the "classified work".
more than 50% of whom are collecting a check for parasitic employment in a comically bloated public sector of a dead economy
The German economy is not a dead economy. Oh wait, what?
The "market" is paying less attention to Greece than the news media would have you believe. Other things like Bernanke's announcement of QE3 (sorry they call it accommodation now), increased productivity (+3.1%) and factory orders (+0.3%) have much more impact on the market than Greece. Have to buy now before printing-press driven inflation sends prices up even further, especially when the promise of more cheap money is on the horizon. But all the press sees is the "drama" in Greece. And of course this works in favor of the politicians since it gives them an excuse to transfer wealth from you and me a little more in the name of crisis prevention.
why not do something simple like cut upper management salary by 50%, and automatically save 3 or 5x right away.
And that way upper management will all quit and go work somewhere else, and the company won't have managers left (except of course the bad ones who can't go anywhere else). Believe it or not, management is actually an important part of a company. They don't just sit on their asses all day and tell people to get to work on time.
Yeah, he needs to learn that trading on "news" is possibly even worse than trading completely at random. Besides if you look at the past 13 years of the stock market, you are just as likely to make money in the next 5 years or so by buying stock as you are by selling it. The market has been jogging in place since 1998.
Sure, if you like to short stock. AMD can't seem to stop sucking for the past few years. They almost ate Intel's lunch, but he with the deepest pockets wins. Too bad that now they will take ATI with them if they go under.
Then they are doing it wrong. Everyone knows you put your bakery section in the front. There's nothing like walking into a store and being greeted by the smell of fresh bread.
This is just what Apple fans are empowering with their blind religious support of the company that can do no wrong, even when it does. I just don't understand why America is obsessed with giving so much money to this Chinese company.
No! Being seen as being "cool" (but not actually being cool) is more important than a phone that actually works!
In science, there are no extraordinary claims or burdens of proof.
Oh yes there are. Anything that deviates from established, reproducible, verifiable theory is an extra-ordinary claim. While once in a while such an earth-shattering discovery happens, it never contradicts the previous work but rather reinforces it and/or explains it in a different way. And the burden of proof is on the proponent of the new idea. If you suddenly go around claiming that black is white, you had better bring mathematical proof. Please don't attempt to teach someone with a doctorate in science about science.
The coolest thing you own is probably your ice maker.
(Valve game releases * quality of valve games)/ sqrt(1-bloatedness of steam^2)+ Gamespot Rating of Skyrim
If these questions puzzle you then you should continue studying theology and give up on science and rational thought altogether. Keeping an "open mind" is not the same as foolishly believing any random crap any random person says. If you make an extra-ordinary claim ("things are different"), you are the one with the burden of proof.
we can do a lot of things today that in the past had been viewed as impossible.
You are of course free to "believe" whatever you want. The universe cares not. Some things we only think are impossible and it turns out we were wrong. Other things are REALLY impossible. I challenge you to come back from the dead in 100 years and prove me wrong.