I am sick to death of hearing low-watt right-wingers touting capitalism as a panacea for the world.
Well, if you're sick of hearing the opinions of other people Mr. Know It All, perhaps the internet isn't for you. I might suggest you move to North Korea, they don't do capitalism at ALL there and in fact, you probably won't get internet either, so you won't have to listen to anyone else. That way you kill two birds with one stone.
I like my broker. $0.005 cents per share per trade. Makes it a round penny after closing a transaction. So all I have to do is make 2 cents per trade...
Market is not zero sum game. Winners outnumber losers in long run.
WHAT???
I have some stock I want you to buy...
80% of day traders lose their money on the stock market. EVERYONE who invested since the year 2000 HAS NOT MADE MONEY on the stock market if they "bought and held", with the exception of a VERY few stocks.
The person who was going to sell shoes to the person who bought your widget. Because he paid $2 instead of $1, now he can't afford shoes, and the shoe salesman had one less sale.
Better yet, what happened to the economy with $150 gasoline? The energy corps made record profits. The saudis are happy. And the US economy collapsed.
If holding something for a minute is that risky, you shouldn't be buying it in the first place.
Holding something for several years or decades is also risky. Ask any Fannie Mae or Freddy Mac or GM or Citibank shareholder who bought 20 years ago.
Perhaps holding STOCK is generally risky. If you don't like it, don't trade.
Me, I'd rather hold stock for 5 or 10 minutes and make $20 (20 times a day) than try to fool myself into thinking I can predict the future. I can tell you the price of a stock right now - and usually I can tell you roughly where the price should be in a few minutes, over half the time. That's all I need to make money.
Someone want to calculate the minimum safe stopping distance of a wide-load truck laden with a 50-meter section of tower traveling at, let's say 45MPH without jackknifing or breaking the load restraints?
Usually when you're carrying several million dollars worth of equipment, it's a good idea to have someone in a car scout out the route ahead of time... just saying, you know, it's common sense?
The insurance policies should cover this damage - wait, they DID ship them with insurance, right?
The insurance companies, once they get fed up of paying for wrecked turbine parts and bridges, will start demanding competent drivers for the trucks, or they won't insure. Therefore the trucking companies will have a choice - deal with the union so they stop providing idiots who don't bother checking the height of their load and their maps, or they can pay the repairs out of their pockets.
We were so impressed with your patent description that our firm, Patent Trolls Inc, would like to offer you a position in our patent submission department.
They are offering you the chance to PURCHASE their labor spent scanning the books.
And as soon as someone decides to type up the contents of one of the books and put it online, what happens to their business model then? Or are they going to claim, like a certain museum in the UK, that although the copyright on the original work has expired, the copyright on their "scans" is brand new?
This is a dangerous idea, because it will either cost Amazon money since they won't be able to maintain their business model on expired works, or (the most likely scenario) the public domain will lose once again as courts end up deciding that this is a valid method to perpetuate copyright for all time, by making copies of your work the night before copyright expires.
Brake horse power and horse power are not the same. And brake horse power is more suited for diesel engines. Please refrain from comparing apples and oranges.
Those velcro tie thingies, you can get them for a couple bucks at any Office Depot. They're strong enough to hold huge wads of cables (like the ones from my 3 LCD monitors), yet easy enough to take off/change if you need to modify something.
But you aren't going to get performance similar to a gas vehicle until there are revolutionary breakthroughs in battery technology.
No, what you need is a revolutionary breakthrough in human psychology so that people finally accept that a car that does 10mph up a hill and 30mph on the flat is not a bad thing. That should be perfect to go to the shops/work. For everything else - mass public transit.
But our egos will not accept it. We like the freedom and privacy an automobile brings. The ability to cross a continent within a few days or so, if we wanted to, on just 5 or 6 tanks of gas. However when the oil finally starts to run low, and countries start hogging the bit that remains, only THEN will we realize that the noontide of our energy binge is over, and we have NO CHOICE but to accept a more modest, energy efficient lifestyle.
War industry employees should all work for subsistence wages
Then I wanna work for the other side! Wait, didn't that happen already in a previous war? I seem to remember a lot of "US" scientists with German and Italian sounding names...
Take away the profit-driven parts of the equation
Then start at the top, and shoot all the politicians. After all, no sane person WANTS a war. Until they are told they HAVE to go, or that God wants them to go, or it's their PATRIOTIC DUTY to go, or whatever lame sounding bullshit Kings and Presidents and Sultans and Imams have used since time immemorial to inflame a population towards war. But there's always a hidden agenda, and a secondary gain. Like having US troops on both sides of Iran. Or seizing the wealth of other nations. Or controlling trade. Or whatever.
Nah, since members of the "medical establishment" ARE ethical people, it doesn't matter what he says, we'll still treat him. However one can only hope he will be unconscious at the time:)
How are you going to evaluate a specialist if you elevate willful ignorance to a virtue?
That's an interesting question. Loaded, but interesting.
Let's see, the traditional means of evaluating a specialist in a society is by reputation and reference. Just like a good restaurant, usually you go there because other people go there. The herd is usually right. However in modern society there are all sorts of tricks that can skew this process, like monopolies or oligopolies, advertising (ie, he with the deepest pockets/most advertising dollars wins the greatest revenue, regardless of quality), etc. That's a good thinking person's question.
The loaded part is "willful ignorance". Do you claim to know everything about everything? Assuming you're not a physician, I am willing to state that I know much more about your own body, the one you have lived in all your life - than you do. Yet I know nothing about architecture. I know my house is built of concrete, wood and steel, but don't ask me exactly how much load one of the walls can take, or how many feet of snow my roof will stand. Does this make me "willfully ignorant"? I'm sure I could study and get a degree in architecture, but those 6 years or so I wouldn't be able to see patients and by the end of it, I'd have fallen pretty far behind in the medical field, too.
There are some basic skills that everyone needs - language, arithmetic, driving, budgeting, social interaction, etc. These are the skills that let us understand and communicate with the world effectively. However outside of these skills, most people are "willfully ignorant" of a hell of a lot of information. Some of us specialize in order to effectively help the rest, be it building houses, producing food or goods, saving lives, managing companies, etc. The rest - who choose or lack the ability to specialize - are stuck at menial tasks or manual labor.
The monetary side - it's the pharmaceutical and medical equipment corporations that have all the money. If you think otherwise then you are kidding yourself. I frankly don't know many ultra-rich doctors, and I certainly don't have a vast income from my medical practice. If you want to be rich, do NOT choose medicine as a career path. I might suggest law.
As for power over life and death - ridiculous. Some states allow abortion and/or active euthanasia, so I guess in some limited fashion some doctors can legally kill. However they are the minority and personally I want nothing to do with them. As for power over life - any doctor who thinks he has that power is on an ego trip. You apply your training that is derived from years of research (not done by you), and you hope that it works. Sometimes it does, and a dying patient benefits. Often it doesn't, and the patient dies. No doctor has ever been obliged to bring someone back to life on command because - we can't. Sometimes they're just too far gone.
Doctors have no power. In fact, that's the position we prefer nowadays. Gone are the days of the paternalist doctor who makes decisions for you. No, now it's all about patient autonomy and informed consent. I give you the information. YOU have the power. It's a neat trick, because now you can't sue me because you didn't follow my advice, or because you got that side effect that I told you you might get, or the thing we agreed could sometimes go wrong went wrong.
I certainly have more moral authority than an anonymous coward. But don't worry, sooner or later we ALL end up in an emergency department. We'll see what you think about "my field" when you're in the coronary care unit. Either that or cancer - it's just a matter of time.
so that other people are not able to blow up airliners
But "other people" have STILL managed to get weapons and explosives onto aircraft - even in the US. Fortunately they have almost all been undercover agents testing out how effective security is.
As I said before - I agree with the concept of deterrence. Aircraft are high profile, high value, potentially devastating weapons. They are choice targets in an asymmetric warfare system because you only need a handful of people to do the sort of damage that was done in 2001. That being said, I have watched my 14 year old daughter detained because she was wearing a necklace with a small design that resembles a pair of handcuffs. People have been thrown in jail for making inappropriate jokes about bombs - inappropriate, but JOKES nonetheless. And if you've ever flown through Atlanta, you will know just how snotty TSA workers can be. And you thought AIRLINES treated people like cattle.
I insist that there has to be a screening method that is as or more effective than getting mothers to pour soft drinks or baby milk into plastic bags.
If you don't want to be overcharged, learn a thing or two about your PC so you can fix it yourself.
Your comment goes against the very essence of civilization.
Why should I invest time and resources to turn myself into a "computer specialist", instead of using a means of wealth exchange "money" to hire a REAL specialist to do the job for me? Then I can continue to be good at MY special job - medicine - and have my needs met by a more efficient specialist, in terms of time and other resources.
Of course it all breaks down when a) the "specialist" in question is probably no more qualified than I am; and b) the "specialist" in question is actively trying to defraud me of my money or possessions.
It's no wonder that philosophers have been complaining ever since ancient Greece about the value of ethics and morals in a society. You just can't run one without them. Of course you can use other tactics - fear, oppression, etc to TRY to maintain order, but these are incredibly wasteful. History teaches us what always happens when you put a lot of power in the hands of just a few men.
Where it says "Assuming again a 90% accuracy, you are still wrongly intimidating well over 3500 people." I should add "per group of 35,000". 10% of 420 million passengers per year is 42 million people per year being harangued for no reason at all.
Slashdot Mirror
you shouldn't be a day trader.
It's risky. I didn't say I don't make money at it. My gains far outweigh my losses.
I am sick to death of hearing low-watt right-wingers touting capitalism as a panacea for the world.
Well, if you're sick of hearing the opinions of other people Mr. Know It All, perhaps the internet isn't for you. I might suggest you move to North Korea, they don't do capitalism at ALL there and in fact, you probably won't get internet either, so you won't have to listen to anyone else. That way you kill two birds with one stone.
Now go play with your blocks
I'd rather play with my stocks.
I like my broker. $0.005 cents per share per trade. Makes it a round penny after closing a transaction. So all I have to do is make 2 cents per trade...
How can there be valid contracts without any kind of human intervention, acknowledgement, confirmation or whatever?
Guess you've never taken money out of an ATM huh?
Do you REALLY need a cashier to stand in front of you, for the money to be valid?
Market is not zero sum game.
Winners outnumber losers in long run.
WHAT???
I have some stock I want you to buy...
80% of day traders lose their money on the stock market. EVERYONE who invested since the year 2000 HAS NOT MADE MONEY on the stock market if they "bought and held", with the exception of a VERY few stocks.
The person who was going to sell shoes to the person who bought your widget. Because he paid $2 instead of $1, now he can't afford shoes, and the shoe salesman had one less sale.
Better yet, what happened to the economy with $150 gasoline? The energy corps made record profits. The saudis are happy. And the US economy collapsed.
If holding something for a minute is that risky, you shouldn't be buying it in the first place.
Holding something for several years or decades is also risky. Ask any Fannie Mae or Freddy Mac or GM or Citibank shareholder who bought 20 years ago.
Perhaps holding STOCK is generally risky. If you don't like it, don't trade.
Me, I'd rather hold stock for 5 or 10 minutes and make $20 (20 times a day) than try to fool myself into thinking I can predict the future. I can tell you the price of a stock right now - and usually I can tell you roughly where the price should be in a few minutes, over half the time. That's all I need to make money.
Someone want to calculate the minimum safe stopping distance of a wide-load truck laden with a 50-meter section of tower traveling at, let's say 45MPH without jackknifing or breaking the load restraints?
Usually when you're carrying several million dollars worth of equipment, it's a good idea to have someone in a car scout out the route ahead of time... just saying, you know, it's common sense?
The insurance policies should cover this damage - wait, they DID ship them with insurance, right?
The insurance companies, once they get fed up of paying for wrecked turbine parts and bridges, will start demanding competent drivers for the trucks, or they won't insure. Therefore the trucking companies will have a choice - deal with the union so they stop providing idiots who don't bother checking the height of their load and their maps, or they can pay the repairs out of their pockets.
This is how capitalism is SUPPOSED to work.
Dear Sir Taco,
We were so impressed with your patent description that our firm, Patent Trolls Inc, would like to offer you a position in our patent submission department.
Project Gutenberg?
They are offering you the chance to PURCHASE their labor spent scanning the books.
And as soon as someone decides to type up the contents of one of the books and put it online, what happens to their business model then? Or are they going to claim, like a certain museum in the UK, that although the copyright on the original work has expired, the copyright on their "scans" is brand new?
This is a dangerous idea, because it will either cost Amazon money since they won't be able to maintain their business model on expired works, or (the most likely scenario) the public domain will lose once again as courts end up deciding that this is a valid method to perpetuate copyright for all time, by making copies of your work the night before copyright expires.
So Amazon is going to be so nice as to offer us the chance to PURCHASE what actually belongs in the public domain? Wow. I am impressed and excited.
"Luminous beings are we, not this crude matter." - Yoda
Brake horse power and horse power are not the same. And brake horse power is more suited for diesel engines. Please refrain from comparing apples and oranges.
Your tax dollars at work. Go go US gov't!
Those velcro tie thingies, you can get them for a couple bucks at any Office Depot. They're strong enough to hold huge wads of cables (like the ones from my 3 LCD monitors), yet easy enough to take off/change if you need to modify something.
But you aren't going to get performance similar to a gas vehicle until there are revolutionary breakthroughs in battery technology.
No, what you need is a revolutionary breakthrough in human psychology so that people finally accept that a car that does 10mph up a hill and 30mph on the flat is not a bad thing. That should be perfect to go to the shops/work. For everything else - mass public transit.
But our egos will not accept it. We like the freedom and privacy an automobile brings. The ability to cross a continent within a few days or so, if we wanted to, on just 5 or 6 tanks of gas. However when the oil finally starts to run low, and countries start hogging the bit that remains, only THEN will we realize that the noontide of our energy binge is over, and we have NO CHOICE but to accept a more modest, energy efficient lifestyle.
War industry employees should all work for subsistence wages
Then I wanna work for the other side! Wait, didn't that happen already in a previous war? I seem to remember a lot of "US" scientists with German and Italian sounding names...
Take away the profit-driven parts of the equation
Then start at the top, and shoot all the politicians. After all, no sane person WANTS a war. Until they are told they HAVE to go, or that God wants them to go, or it's their PATRIOTIC DUTY to go, or whatever lame sounding bullshit Kings and Presidents and Sultans and Imams have used since time immemorial to inflame a population towards war. But there's always a hidden agenda, and a secondary gain. Like having US troops on both sides of Iran. Or seizing the wealth of other nations. Or controlling trade. Or whatever.
Man...I hope you never get sick....
Nah, since members of the "medical establishment" ARE ethical people, it doesn't matter what he says, we'll still treat him. However one can only hope he will be unconscious at the time :)
How are you going to evaluate a specialist if you elevate willful ignorance to a virtue?
That's an interesting question. Loaded, but interesting.
Let's see, the traditional means of evaluating a specialist in a society is by reputation and reference. Just like a good restaurant, usually you go there because other people go there. The herd is usually right. However in modern society there are all sorts of tricks that can skew this process, like monopolies or oligopolies, advertising (ie, he with the deepest pockets/most advertising dollars wins the greatest revenue, regardless of quality), etc. That's a good thinking person's question.
The loaded part is "willful ignorance". Do you claim to know everything about everything? Assuming you're not a physician, I am willing to state that I know much more about your own body, the one you have lived in all your life - than you do. Yet I know nothing about architecture. I know my house is built of concrete, wood and steel, but don't ask me exactly how much load one of the walls can take, or how many feet of snow my roof will stand. Does this make me "willfully ignorant"? I'm sure I could study and get a degree in architecture, but those 6 years or so I wouldn't be able to see patients and by the end of it, I'd have fallen pretty far behind in the medical field, too.
There are some basic skills that everyone needs - language, arithmetic, driving, budgeting, social interaction, etc. These are the skills that let us understand and communicate with the world effectively. However outside of these skills, most people are "willfully ignorant" of a hell of a lot of information. Some of us specialize in order to effectively help the rest, be it building houses, producing food or goods, saving lives, managing companies, etc. The rest - who choose or lack the ability to specialize - are stuck at menial tasks or manual labor.
That's the way civilization is.
The monetary side - it's the pharmaceutical and medical equipment corporations that have all the money. If you think otherwise then you are kidding yourself. I frankly don't know many ultra-rich doctors, and I certainly don't have a vast income from my medical practice. If you want to be rich, do NOT choose medicine as a career path. I might suggest law.
As for power over life and death - ridiculous. Some states allow abortion and/or active euthanasia, so I guess in some limited fashion some doctors can legally kill. However they are the minority and personally I want nothing to do with them. As for power over life - any doctor who thinks he has that power is on an ego trip. You apply your training that is derived from years of research (not done by you), and you hope that it works. Sometimes it does, and a dying patient benefits. Often it doesn't, and the patient dies. No doctor has ever been obliged to bring someone back to life on command because - we can't. Sometimes they're just too far gone.
Doctors have no power. In fact, that's the position we prefer nowadays. Gone are the days of the paternalist doctor who makes decisions for you. No, now it's all about patient autonomy and informed consent. I give you the information. YOU have the power. It's a neat trick, because now you can't sue me because you didn't follow my advice, or because you got that side effect that I told you you might get, or the thing we agreed could sometimes go wrong went wrong.
I certainly have more moral authority than an anonymous coward. But don't worry, sooner or later we ALL end up in an emergency department. We'll see what you think about "my field" when you're in the coronary care unit. Either that or cancer - it's just a matter of time.
so that other people are not able to blow up airliners
But "other people" have STILL managed to get weapons and explosives onto aircraft - even in the US. Fortunately they have almost all been undercover agents testing out how effective security is.
As I said before - I agree with the concept of deterrence. Aircraft are high profile, high value, potentially devastating weapons. They are choice targets in an asymmetric warfare system because you only need a handful of people to do the sort of damage that was done in 2001. That being said, I have watched my 14 year old daughter detained because she was wearing a necklace with a small design that resembles a pair of handcuffs. People have been thrown in jail for making inappropriate jokes about bombs - inappropriate, but JOKES nonetheless. And if you've ever flown through Atlanta, you will know just how snotty TSA workers can be. And you thought AIRLINES treated people like cattle.
I insist that there has to be a screening method that is as or more effective than getting mothers to pour soft drinks or baby milk into plastic bags.
If you don't want to be overcharged, learn a thing or two about your PC so you can fix it yourself.
Your comment goes against the very essence of civilization.
Why should I invest time and resources to turn myself into a "computer specialist", instead of using a means of wealth exchange "money" to hire a REAL specialist to do the job for me? Then I can continue to be good at MY special job - medicine - and have my needs met by a more efficient specialist, in terms of time and other resources.
Of course it all breaks down when a) the "specialist" in question is probably no more qualified than I am; and b) the "specialist" in question is actively trying to defraud me of my money or possessions.
It's no wonder that philosophers have been complaining ever since ancient Greece about the value of ethics and morals in a society. You just can't run one without them. Of course you can use other tactics - fear, oppression, etc to TRY to maintain order, but these are incredibly wasteful. History teaches us what always happens when you put a lot of power in the hands of just a few men.
addendum - I shouldn't have hit submit yet sorry
Where it says "Assuming again a 90% accuracy, you are still wrongly intimidating well over 3500 people." I should add "per group of 35,000". 10% of 420 million passengers per year is 42 million people per year being harangued for no reason at all.