"Really" is linguistic white noise. Twain once remarked that when he wrote, we went back and replaced all of his "really"s with "damn". Then his editor took all of those out, and his writing was as it should be.
In almost all cases in my writing, I've found that what I really meant (heh), was either "very" or "truly" (as is the case in this sentence).
Because it makes it easier for people to get along and not kill each other so much if they aren't always bickering over "my god can kick your god's ass!" type stuff.
For all the "religion is the cause of all wars" tripe you hear, most wars supposedly caused by religion are really clashes of culture, or more genuinely over resources and land. Religion is usually just the patina dressed up to justify it for the proles.
Yeah, thank God we had government to create the first system of gas stations. And fax machines. And telephones. And supermarkets. And...
Re:Why are we so surprized?
on
Incas Used Binary?
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
C.S. Lewis had a term for this: "snobbery of chronology". We, as a people, have a tendency to forget that people everywhere, always, are blindingly clever, and that the only reason we have, for example, cell phones, is that we have had a continuous line of development rather than one interrupted by plague, mass migration, etc.
Take a little while and study archaeo-astronomy and this becomes clear.
Yeah, they were meant to be sarcastic and silly (this is Slashdot after all). Perhaps I should have said Chicago tour guides, or bus drivers or something.
But you can't pin the "real word" / "complexity" argument on me. That goes both ways; just as there is complexity my model can't anticipate, there's complexity that the central control model cannot predict. The difference is that in my model, the complexity can be handled locally and on a small scale, i.e., by the individuals engaging in trade. In the central control model ALL of the complexity must be handled by a central authority.
And that's the basic libertarian problem. Insert previous provisos about externalities, moral costs, etc.
Yeah, that's an argument I've both made and heard. You can make the same case for Cuba. It's just that so often idiots talk about "exploitation" and "profiting on the backs of x" and it's B.S., but when a Chinese guy who's in prison for having protested the government sews together shoes that are then sold in the U.S., well, you get the picture.
I think you're correct in the sense that free trade does improve the quality of life of the average non-political prisoner Chinese citizen. It's just that in buying products from China I cannot help but support a true cause of evil and suffering in the world.
I don't know what the right answer is (a Slashdot first?)
Ahh, Slashdot. The home of the irrelevant truth. I'm not arguing that countries don't engage in trade restrictions, I'm arguing that according to game theory those decisions are contra bono.
Saying that the concept of free trade is "broken" because it's not always practiced is like saying that the idea of health is "broken" because people smoke. I don't "deny reality" to say that it is bad to smoke just because people do smoke.
Next item, crippled third world economies. So third world countries are better off without external investment? No need to take that any further.
By the way, you're right: the Bush steel import tariff's are asinine.
First of all, if anyone actually said business is about saving the world, then you were stupid for believing them. Of course its about making corporations rich! And let's not obfuscate things, it's about making individuals rich, stockholders specifically. Which is awesome! That means that they were able to present someone with a better alternative use for their dollars than anyone else at a moment in time.
Anyway, the whole free trade thing...I live in Texas. I'm tremendously concerned about:
<MASSIVE SMARM>
the orange grove picker jobs that have been exported to Florida
the snowmobile rental jobs farmed out to Colorado
the Chicago tourism jobs exported to Chicago...
Come to think of it, I'm a programmer living in Dallas. I'm very concerned about all of the IT jobs that have gone to Austin and Houston. Perhaps I'll petition my local government to restrict companies from farming out jobs to them.</MASSIVE SMARM>
Here's the point: I pursue those restrictive policies, and so Austin does too. Or Florida, or whatever. Of course, Florida wouldn't care about the orange grove jobs they'd lose to Texas, so they'd do something like Texas-produced steel, or something we specialize at, just like Chicago specializes (duh) in Chicago tourism.
To an economist, this is a real head shaker. This whole sequence I'm talking about is called reciprocity. It's a solved problem in game theory. The only people who argue about it are people who haven't read and understand the solution, i.e., 90% of the whole world, unfortuately.
Now that I've kind of dropped a nuke on this whole argument, I'm going to pull back a bit. There is such a thing as hidden costs in free trade. I obviously understand fundamentally that free trade is a Pareto optimal solution for nations, and yet, I don't think we should trade with China under certain circumstances. Why? Because the cost of goods carries a moral cost borne in production not represented by the price. If I buy a shirt from China, I'm not entirely sure it wasn't produced by PoliticalPrisonCo (motto: where products are made by people who think like Americans!) I'm open to the idea that that factor might exist elsewhere. I don't, however, see that factor in dealing with India.
Better yet, the piracy state is the zero price point on the demand curve. Part of the trick is that the existence of the zero point in reality increases the slope of the curve, but not by the full value of the zero point aggregation.
<English>The sum of people that get the software for free is composed of some smaller portion of people that would otherwise pay for it, and a larger portion of people who would simply do without it. </English>
I'm sure that the BSA knows this. Whether or not and how accurately they work that into their statistics is anyone's guess.
Also consider that two people who were sentenced two years apart, Michael Milken (1990), and Mike Tyson (1992), both were sentenced to 10 years and served 3.
Michael Milken for securities fraud (understating the risk of junk bonds, basically), Mike Tyson for rape.
Our justice system has seriously out of whack penalties.
Artifical gravity: generate several micro-black holes, accelerate them in an annular confinement track to close to the speed of light. Their relativistic mass will rise, gravitational effects, etc. Gravity at your feet but not at your head, though.
Photon torpedoes: create a confinement structure that breaks on impact (duh!).
E-Z fusion: create two concentric confinement tracks. Run black holes in both of them exactly out of phase. This should create a focus at the center that could squeeze plasma to all hell.
Black hole drive: figure out some way to direct Hawking radiation;). The virtual half-particles will come out of nothingness, all in the same direction, propelling the ship forward. No thermodynamics problems, as the black hole is the energy source, created by pouring energy from somewhere else in the first place.
Just a few B.S. pop science ideas tossed off without having RTFA.
Because...as I said before...DSL does what I need it to do. You can't get any better than instant. The new stuff doesn't move a significant portion of the content I access from one column to another. 10x speed maybe, but not 2x.
I have to say...I've got DSL. Would I pay $10 more for twice the speed? Nope. I, like most people, I think, divide expectations into two categories: instant and "a while". I expect page loads to be instant, and I expect a video I'm downloading to take "a while". DSL delivers on these. So basically, the improvement only comes in "a while".
In that "a while", I go off and do other things, perhaps (gasp!) even leaving the computer for a while. That that will take 5 mintues rather than 10, or 30 seconds rather than a minute delivers very little value to me, and I think "good enough" might really crowd out "best" here.
Society today is as hierarchical, class-based, and inequitable as ever. Perhaps more so. The only reason people aren't storming the castles with pitchforks is that they're too busy watching TV. That's the scary part. Seems to me that things are just getting worse and worse, but nobody cares. Why should they?
Let's consider for a second that we're talking about a fricking video game console. If you really believe that because Microsoft has some influence over whether you can run Linux or install modchips on an XBox, Society today is as hierarchical, class-based, and inequitable as ever, perhaps more so, you're just fricking nuts. At least, you lack some real historical perspective. I think our generation (in the West) lacks real repression so we tend to blow trivial crap like this up to galactic proportions.
Oh and by the way, wealth is not "distributed", it is created. The sum of wealth today is more than 100 years ago. It had to come from somewhere, no matter how you cut up the pie.
I remember hearing a lecture on this very topic a couple of years ago. The main point was that as you proceeded westward across the U.S., the non-competes became less enforcable, until California non-competes are virtual oxymorons (Google the term).
I think that the idea of a non-compete is an idea that's going to fade away; it justn't seem intellectually tenable to me. It's certainly reasonable for a company to protect its trade secrets and intellectual property (don't mean to troll here), but labor mobility is a force of public interest (supports wages and other positive economic effects).
I'm what most people would consider a radical free marketer, but even I realize that certain agreements foul up the system by their very nature. For example, I should theoretically support the right of a worker to sell himself into slavery; after all, if it is his very own freedom, is it not his own freedom to sell? Obviously, this gums up the works very quickly and destroys the system. Kind of like Hofstader's self-destroying record - record player combo. Anyhow, I think non-competes may be a less extreme version of this.
Slashdot Mirror
I guess I'm the last good old boy standing who still sees "tranny" as short for "transmission".
I thought this a book about a gay Indian.
No, a beter question is "Name a year when Reagan proposed spending whose sum of digits is a natural cube!"
the man who increased our national debt more blah...blah...blah..
Ugh. This stuff drives me crazy.
Crack a book. Congress does the budget. Maybe the phrase "Congressional Budget" rings a bell?
A bag of helium the size of the Empire State building
Teddy Kennedy is working for NASA now?
The DivX-Box. Thank you ladies and gentlemen, I'll be here all week.
"Really" is linguistic white noise. Twain once remarked that when he wrote, we went back and replaced all of his "really"s with "damn". Then his editor took all of those out, and his writing was as it should be.
In almost all cases in my writing, I've found that what I really meant (heh), was either "very" or "truly" (as is the case in this sentence).
Because it makes it easier for people to get along and not kill each other so much if they aren't always bickering over "my god can kick your god's ass!" type stuff.
So you would think. But it's not so. Man is just evil, regardless.
For all the "religion is the cause of all wars" tripe you hear, most wars supposedly caused by religion are really clashes of culture, or more genuinely over resources and land. Religion is usually just the patina dressed up to justify it for the proles.
Yeah, thank God we had government to create the first system of gas stations. And fax machines. And telephones. And supermarkets. And...
C.S. Lewis had a term for this: "snobbery of chronology". We, as a people, have a tendency to forget that people everywhere, always, are blindingly clever, and that the only reason we have, for example, cell phones, is that we have had a continuous line of development rather than one interrupted by plague, mass migration, etc. Take a little while and study archaeo-astronomy and this becomes clear.
Sorry, dude. I've heard horror stories like yours elsewhere. Maybe I should have picked another city.
;).
If it makes you feel any better, the dumbass Dallas city council also implemented a smoking ban just recently
Yeah, they were meant to be sarcastic and silly (this is Slashdot after all). Perhaps I should have said Chicago tour guides, or bus drivers or something.
But you can't pin the "real word" / "complexity" argument on me. That goes both ways; just as there is complexity my model can't anticipate, there's complexity that the central control model cannot predict. The difference is that in my model, the complexity can be handled locally and on a small scale, i.e., by the individuals engaging in trade. In the central control model ALL of the complexity must be handled by a central authority.
And that's the basic libertarian problem. Insert previous provisos about externalities, moral costs, etc.
Yeah, that's an argument I've both made and heard. You can make the same case for Cuba. It's just that so often idiots talk about "exploitation" and "profiting on the backs of x" and it's B.S., but when a Chinese guy who's in prison for having protested the government sews together shoes that are then sold in the U.S., well, you get the picture.
I think you're correct in the sense that free trade does improve the quality of life of the average non-political prisoner Chinese citizen. It's just that in buying products from China I cannot help but support a true cause of evil and suffering in the world.
I don't know what the right answer is (a Slashdot first?)
Congratulations. You've just defined reciprocity.
Ahh, Slashdot. The home of the irrelevant truth. I'm not arguing that countries don't engage in trade restrictions, I'm arguing that according to game theory those decisions are contra bono.
Saying that the concept of free trade is "broken" because it's not always practiced is like saying that the idea of health is "broken" because people smoke. I don't "deny reality" to say that it is bad to smoke just because people do smoke.
Next item, crippled third world economies. So third world countries are better off without external investment? No need to take that any further.
By the way, you're right: the Bush steel import tariff's are asinine.
Reciprocity with no downsides? Hardly. It's simply Pareto optimal, like I...<sigh/> said...
I, frankly, don't have the patience any more for free trade arguments. Free trade is to economists as evolution is to biologists.
By the way, didn't you just restate the same reservations I expressed about free markets?
First of all, if anyone actually said business is about saving the world, then you were stupid for believing them. Of course its about making corporations rich! And let's not obfuscate things, it's about making individuals rich, stockholders specifically. Which is awesome! That means that they were able to present someone with a better alternative use for their dollars than anyone else at a moment in time.
Anyway, the whole free trade thing...I live in Texas. I'm tremendously concerned about: <MASSIVE SMARM>
Come to think of it, I'm a programmer living in Dallas. I'm very concerned about all of the IT jobs that have gone to Austin and Houston. Perhaps I'll petition my local government to restrict companies from farming out jobs to them.</MASSIVE SMARM>
Here's the point: I pursue those restrictive policies, and so Austin does too. Or Florida, or whatever. Of course, Florida wouldn't care about the orange grove jobs they'd lose to Texas, so they'd do something like Texas-produced steel, or something we specialize at, just like Chicago specializes (duh) in Chicago tourism.
To an economist, this is a real head shaker. This whole sequence I'm talking about is called reciprocity. It's a solved problem in game theory. The only people who argue about it are people who haven't read and understand the solution, i.e., 90% of the whole world, unfortuately.
Now that I've kind of dropped a nuke on this whole argument, I'm going to pull back a bit. There is such a thing as hidden costs in free trade. I obviously understand fundamentally that free trade is a Pareto optimal solution for nations, and yet, I don't think we should trade with China under certain circumstances. Why? Because the cost of goods carries a moral cost borne in production not represented by the price. If I buy a shirt from China, I'm not entirely sure it wasn't produced by PoliticalPrisonCo (motto: where products are made by people who think like Americans!) I'm open to the idea that that factor might exist elsewhere. I don't, however, see that factor in dealing with India.
Better yet, the piracy state is the zero price point on the demand curve. Part of the trick is that the existence of the zero point in reality increases the slope of the curve, but not by the full value of the zero point aggregation.
<English>The sum of people that get the software for free is composed of some smaller portion of people that would otherwise pay for it, and a larger portion of people who would simply do without it. </English>
I'm sure that the BSA knows this. Whether or not and how accurately they work that into their statistics is anyone's guess.
Also consider that two people who were sentenced two years apart, Michael Milken (1990), and Mike Tyson (1992), both were sentenced to 10 years and served 3.
Michael Milken for securities fraud (understating the risk of junk bonds, basically), Mike Tyson for rape.
Our justice system has seriously out of whack penalties.
Ask Bram? I'm so stoked!
Shoot 'em down boys....
;). The virtual half-particles will come out of nothingness, all in the same direction, propelling the ship forward. No thermodynamics problems, as the black hole is the energy source, created by pouring energy from somewhere else in the first place.
Artifical gravity: generate several micro-black holes, accelerate them in an annular confinement track to close to the speed of light. Their relativistic mass will rise, gravitational effects, etc. Gravity at your feet but not at your head, though.
Photon torpedoes: create a confinement structure that breaks on impact (duh!).
E-Z fusion: create two concentric confinement tracks. Run black holes in both of them exactly out of phase. This should create a focus at the center that could squeeze plasma to all hell.
Black hole drive: figure out some way to direct Hawking radiation
Just a few B.S. pop science ideas tossed off without having RTFA.
Guns responsible for murder, cars responsible for accidents, tractors responsible for farming.
Because...as I said before...DSL does what I need it to do. You can't get any better than instant. The new stuff doesn't move a significant portion of the content I access from one column to another. 10x speed maybe, but not 2x.
I have to say...I've got DSL. Would I pay $10 more for twice the speed? Nope. I, like most people, I think, divide expectations into two categories: instant and "a while". I expect page loads to be instant, and I expect a video I'm downloading to take "a while". DSL delivers on these. So basically, the improvement only comes in "a while".
In that "a while", I go off and do other things, perhaps (gasp!) even leaving the computer for a while. That that will take 5 mintues rather than 10, or 30 seconds rather than a minute delivers very little value to me, and I think "good enough" might really crowd out "best" here.
Hang on a second...let's get real.
Society today is as hierarchical, class-based, and inequitable as ever. Perhaps more so. The only reason people aren't storming the castles with pitchforks is that they're too busy watching TV. That's the scary part. Seems to me that things are just getting worse and worse, but nobody cares. Why should they?
Let's consider for a second that we're talking about a fricking video game console. If you really believe that because Microsoft has some influence over whether you can run Linux or install modchips on an XBox, Society today is as hierarchical, class-based, and inequitable as ever, perhaps more so, you're just fricking nuts. At least, you lack some real historical perspective. I think our generation (in the West) lacks real repression so we tend to blow trivial crap like this up to galactic proportions.
Oh and by the way, wealth is not "distributed", it is created. The sum of wealth today is more than 100 years ago. It had to come from somewhere, no matter how you cut up the pie.
I remember hearing a lecture on this very topic a couple of years ago. The main point was that as you proceeded westward across the U.S., the non-competes became less enforcable, until California non-competes are virtual oxymorons (Google the term).
I think that the idea of a non-compete is an idea that's going to fade away; it justn't seem intellectually tenable to me. It's certainly reasonable for a company to protect its trade secrets and intellectual property (don't mean to troll here), but labor mobility is a force of public interest (supports wages and other positive economic effects).
I'm what most people would consider a radical free marketer, but even I realize that certain agreements foul up the system by their very nature. For example, I should theoretically support the right of a worker to sell himself into slavery; after all, if it is his very own freedom, is it not his own freedom to sell? Obviously, this gums up the works very quickly and destroys the system. Kind of like Hofstader's self-destroying record - record player combo. Anyhow, I think non-competes may be a less extreme version of this.