[Corporations] will modify the healthcare system to favor themselves through government action.
Agree 100%. The more government is involved in economic decisions, the more corporations will try to insert themselves into the government to influence those economic decisions.
A slow drunk driver is not safer than a sober fast driver.
That's a question of fact, and requires empirical evidence.
There are all kinds of abilities, situations, conditions, and decisions that affect the safety of driving. It's quite likely that there are some drivers that can drive more safely at 0.08 BAC than another driver with BAC 0.00 that might be driving 5 mph over the speed limit, in the rain, distracted, and making aggressive maneuvers.
The reasons that alcohol impairment is generally punished more severely and strictly are (not an exhaustive list): 1. Alcohol consumption is perceived as more of a choice than being a generally bad driver (perhaps due to lack of practice or ability), or driving in the rain. 2. Some people just don't like alcohol, period. 3. Few people realize that 0.08 is actually quite a low BAC, and assume that 0.08 is "drunk" because politicians and prohibitionists say it is. 0.08 BAC is not anywhere close to drunk, even for casual social drinkers. I think if more people had a personal breathalyzer the limits would be higher, or graduated upward from a fairly minor offense. 4. BAC can be measured more objectively than general driving skill, reaction time, distraction level while driving, current level of impairment, or the general safety of road conditions (e.g. pouring rain and low visibility versus a few drops falling). 5. Alcohol can affect judgment, and the driver might be more likely to do other unsafe things, like speed.
Absent from this list is any serious difference in the safety between consuming a moderate amount of alcohol and other safety-reducing factors.
I'm not suggesting that it should be legal to drive drunk, but I do think the punishments should be graduated from a minor offense (about like a speeding ticket), and compounded if you're doing other unsafe things (like speeding). There's a big difference between someone who has a few pints and drives home slowly and as safely as they can, after the other traffic has died down; and someone who downs a bottle and goes the wrong way on the freeway at 100mph. They are not even in the same league, but the legal system treats them almost identically.
Right now I think it's just a bad situation because people don't even know what 0.08 is until they end up in jail. Lots of people have a few drinks after work or with dinner and then drive home, and some significant fraction of those people are over 0.08 and don't even know it.
As it is, I think the Murdochs are just upset that a REAL news group keeps them from controlling the news. They want power.
I don't think that criticism entirely makes sense -- normally something like that would be said of a declining (or stagnating) power. Fox News has ascended in power recently, and appears to still be on an upward trend.
There are plenty of things to criticize Fox News about, but I don't think jealousy is one of them.
The criticism of the BBC is that it has an unfair advantage in the UK marketplace for news, and that may lead to a single organization with too much control over the news -- which some people think has happened already.
Fox News doesn't have any advantage over others in the marketplace at all -- they don't even have a broadcasting license. They simply attract a lot of viewers.
Every major news outlet that I'm aware of has biases and journalistic integrity problems. They bury stories, leave important information out of stories, mislead, outright lie, don't research (or care about) the facts, strongly imply what they want you to believe when the facts are too flimsy to say it, etc. Or, my personal favorite "but critics say..." -- no, the reporter is saying it, but they just want to put their opinion on the news page.
Don't look at the problems only on one side. Next time there's a Dan Rather out there, we need to make sure that there are enough people with interest in discrediting his bad report and that they have a platform from which to speak. Otherwise, it'll just become a "well-known fact" that nobody will question.
I generally agree. I was imprecise, and I'm certainly not advocating any more safety nets at the federal level than we already have (I would much prefer they were entirely at the state level).
However, even within a family, helping someone is not always easy. Handing a family member cash is not always the best solution -- it's best to be very careful about exactly what you are encouraging them to do and how. One important point that socialists miss is that it's almost impossible for the government to do anything so personal, so they end up creating all the wrong incentives.
The flip side of a "secure" workforce is that people don't feel as much need to perform well at their current job.
If we can help them out, why not?
Because it's very difficult to isolate and help only those who need it without changing the overall incentives in the economy. A general unemployment benefit means that you're helping millionaires and poor people alike. We want the upper middle class to rely on saving for themselves and being as productive as they can; we only want to step in when someone is down and out.
At least in the US, I think that a safety net policy would work best if it was very well targeted (using some kind of means test), and strongly encouraged people to rise above the program as quickly as possible. I just don't think socialism works well in the US. Even if you think it works well somewhere else, it would be a disaster in the US.
Another way of saying that is that it discourages consumption. That doesn't sound so bad to me. It sounds like it would be great for savings, great for the environment, and I don't see any obvious downside.
Yes, I'm aware of economic theories that say consumption is great. Although I understand consumption can have a short-term positive effect, I have not been convinced that it's good in the long term.
It is a dangerous gamble when you consider the top 1% of the people hold over 90% of the money
Can you refer me to that statistic?
Regardless, it doesn't make much difference, because people aren't taxed on what they hold, they are taxed on their income.
these people can stop buying expensive things from this country, and the sales tax disappears from federal coffers
Stop buying what? Not food, because they have to eat like everyone else. So what you really mean is that they will stop buying consumer junk. Again, that doesn't sound so bad to me.
If you need more tax revenue, increase or decrease tax rates as necessary (yes, sometimes lower tax rates result in higher tax revenue). If you want taxation to be progressive, make a progressive consumption tax.
We, in the US, heavily tax production and do not tax consumption (very much). We even spend the social security surplus, which is supposedly a government savings program. And we're moving toward inflation which is, in effect, a tax on savings as well.
As much as I like the idea of free textbooks, there are two things that bother me:
1. Why are we calling them "open source"? All books are open source, by definition. They may not be free-as-in-freedom, and probably not even in digital form, but all the valuable parts are open source.
2. I don't really think free-as-in-freedom digital textbooks are that high of a priority. The analog versions are quite free. You can share them with a friend legally, and many people do. There are even institutions dedicated for this specific purpose. Additionally, books are quite cheap. I bought at least 5 books recently which would be considered textbooks (I just wanted to read them) and they probably averaged just over $20 including shipping. The average MSRP was probably around $120. Why so cheap? Because I'm willing to purchase a "like-new" book rather than a new book, and I might even be willing to (gasp) purchase one edition earlier than the most current. I'm also willing to wait a week for shipping.
So, it's not like knowledge is being held captive here. There's a complaint that public schools and college professors tend to do whatever the publishers tell them to do (Why not? It's not like they're spending their own money.), which is valid. However, does the presence of a free textbook really change matters?
Again, I like the idea of a free textbook, but I'm not sure it's really a big deal. Free software on phones is orders of magnitude more important.
I suppose the equation might be different in poor countries where the cost of printing is prohibitive. However, computers might also not be as available, so I still don't see a major difference.
jobs should be paid reciprocal to their shittiness
No, they should be paid according to supply and demand. Otherwise, we would have a surplus of people who bang their head against a wall and demand $50 an hour for it.
I'm going to go out on a limb and say that 2% unemployment is more healthy than 15% unemployment, because it means more people are being productive
No, it means more people receive a paycheck. Maybe in this case it means being more productive, too, but that is not adequately supported merely by the fact that they receive a paycheck.
Be careful of this type of reasoning, it's the same thing that's got the US into this education mess. First, they realized that people with HS diplomas are more successful, so they ensured that everyone could get a HS diploma by lowering the standards to essentially nothing (attendance, I suppose). Now, as should be no surprise, a HS diploma is worth close to nothing, so they are doing the same thing to college degrees.
With the lower standards, heavy subsidies, and lots of social encouragement, employers realize that a lot of people are graduating from college that aren't particularly desirable. Then, what, they'll only hire PhDs?
I think we'll see a point where smart people start to opt out of the education system sooner, merely because they don't want to wade through busywork (and spending money like crazy) until graduate school, where they can actually set themselves apart.
This is kind of an "unstoppable force meets unmovable object" problem. No matter how good of a teacher you are, a certain percentage of your students are going to be completely uninterested in the material, and there for some other reason (degree, parents want them to do something, thought it was a different topic and too lazy to change, etc).
Some teachers engage more students than others, of course, and I have no doubt that it's due in part to the effort of the teacher. But, at some point, there's a tradeoff between losing too many students from the class, and spending too much time pandering to those on-the-fence students to teach the real students.
# it has all of the fundamentals of programming (looping, flow control, data structures, variables, etc)
Looping is not fundamental to programming languages. It's an iterative construct that is not necessary in declarative languages -- and not necessary in most languages, actually.
Ok, I think I see what you're saying. I think you're talking about denormalization rather than transforming into a non-relational system.
Denormalization is the symptom of an imperfect separation between the physical and the logical layers. It's not (strictly speaking) non-relational, but it's perhaps bad logical design.
First, you have to strike out toward new things if you want to progress the world.
In this case, people are striking out towards things even older than SQL: key-value and graph database systems. Just because it has a new name doesn't make it new.
Migrating large amounts of relational data to a new structure takes a very very long time.
That's true for any large amount of data. Relational data tends to be much more flexible, so this is less important than in, say, a hierarchical database where reorganization is not only incredibly expensive, but may be a prerequisite for even passable performance of some queries.
It's difficult to maintain the data integrity... and have acceptable performance
Again, not specific to relational database systems. It's much more difficult and expensive to maintain data integrity in a hierarchical system unless the constraint and the hierarchy are one and the same.
Most people who think this fall into one or more of the following categories: 1. They have specialized needs, very few queries, and don't expect to need more queries or ad-hoc queries later on. Because of this simplicity they have little use for SQL. 2. They need the other tools offered by an RDBMS, like backup/restore, atomicity, durability, etc., but for some reason don't want to use SQL (probably due to #1). 3. They have narrow complains about the language design of SQL, for instance the ugly natural language syntax that's inflexible and inconsistent. This leads to a general dislike of SQL. 4. They don't understand SQL or relational database theory, and would just prefer that it went away.
efficiently take two dimensional data, and return rows that all fit within the specified radius
Yeah, you're probably talking about the GiST generalized index access method, on top of which everything from spatial search like PostGIS to full text search have been implemented (FTS can also work on top of the GIN generalized index access method). I would recommend looking at PostGIS first, and if you have more specialized needs, you can use another thing build on GiST or build your own.
but that's not the only factor for me
Agreed, a database system is more than just the language. The language is a critical part, however.
Slashdot Mirror
At most 1 minute after I leave the editing page, either by saving or by closing the window
I don't think this is a good approach. Lots of people leave browser tabs open for indeterminate amounts of time as they move on to other tasks.
[Corporations] will modify the healthcare system to favor themselves through government action.
Agree 100%. The more government is involved in economic decisions, the more corporations will try to insert themselves into the government to influence those economic decisions.
A slow drunk driver is not safer than a sober fast driver.
That's a question of fact, and requires empirical evidence.
There are all kinds of abilities, situations, conditions, and decisions that affect the safety of driving. It's quite likely that there are some drivers that can drive more safely at 0.08 BAC than another driver with BAC 0.00 that might be driving 5 mph over the speed limit, in the rain, distracted, and making aggressive maneuvers.
The reasons that alcohol impairment is generally punished more severely and strictly are (not an exhaustive list):
1. Alcohol consumption is perceived as more of a choice than being a generally bad driver (perhaps due to lack of practice or ability), or driving in the rain.
2. Some people just don't like alcohol, period.
3. Few people realize that 0.08 is actually quite a low BAC, and assume that 0.08 is "drunk" because politicians and prohibitionists say it is. 0.08 BAC is not anywhere close to drunk, even for casual social drinkers. I think if more people had a personal breathalyzer the limits would be higher, or graduated upward from a fairly minor offense.
4. BAC can be measured more objectively than general driving skill, reaction time, distraction level while driving, current level of impairment, or the general safety of road conditions (e.g. pouring rain and low visibility versus a few drops falling).
5. Alcohol can affect judgment, and the driver might be more likely to do other unsafe things, like speed.
Absent from this list is any serious difference in the safety between consuming a moderate amount of alcohol and other safety-reducing factors.
I'm not suggesting that it should be legal to drive drunk, but I do think the punishments should be graduated from a minor offense (about like a speeding ticket), and compounded if you're doing other unsafe things (like speeding). There's a big difference between someone who has a few pints and drives home slowly and as safely as they can, after the other traffic has died down; and someone who downs a bottle and goes the wrong way on the freeway at 100mph. They are not even in the same league, but the legal system treats them almost identically.
Right now I think it's just a bad situation because people don't even know what 0.08 is until they end up in jail. Lots of people have a few drinks after work or with dinner and then drive home, and some significant fraction of those people are over 0.08 and don't even know it.
As it is, I think the Murdochs are just upset that a REAL news group keeps them from controlling the news. They want power.
I don't think that criticism entirely makes sense -- normally something like that would be said of a declining (or stagnating) power. Fox News has ascended in power recently, and appears to still be on an upward trend.
There are plenty of things to criticize Fox News about, but I don't think jealousy is one of them.
That's a separate argument.
The criticism of the BBC is that it has an unfair advantage in the UK marketplace for news, and that may lead to a single organization with too much control over the news -- which some people think has happened already.
Fox News doesn't have any advantage over others in the marketplace at all -- they don't even have a broadcasting license. They simply attract a lot of viewers.
Every major news outlet that I'm aware of has biases and journalistic integrity problems. They bury stories, leave important information out of stories, mislead, outright lie, don't research (or care about) the facts, strongly imply what they want you to believe when the facts are too flimsy to say it, etc. Or, my personal favorite "but critics say..." -- no, the reporter is saying it, but they just want to put their opinion on the news page.
Don't look at the problems only on one side. Next time there's a Dan Rather out there, we need to make sure that there are enough people with interest in discrediting his bad report and that they have a platform from which to speak. Otherwise, it'll just become a "well-known fact" that nobody will question.
I generally agree. I was imprecise, and I'm certainly not advocating any more safety nets at the federal level than we already have (I would much prefer they were entirely at the state level).
However, even within a family, helping someone is not always easy. Handing a family member cash is not always the best solution -- it's best to be very careful about exactly what you are encouraging them to do and how. One important point that socialists miss is that it's almost impossible for the government to do anything so personal, so they end up creating all the wrong incentives.
eliminating the last bit of any notion that we actually live in a society of more than ...
There are multiple levels of government. Why do we need social safety nets run by the same people who can launch wars and print money?
It is a flexible, secure workforce.
The flip side of a "secure" workforce is that people don't feel as much need to perform well at their current job.
If we can help them out, why not?
Because it's very difficult to isolate and help only those who need it without changing the overall incentives in the economy. A general unemployment benefit means that you're helping millionaires and poor people alike. We want the upper middle class to rely on saving for themselves and being as productive as they can; we only want to step in when someone is down and out.
At least in the US, I think that a safety net policy would work best if it was very well targeted (using some kind of means test), and strongly encouraged people to rise above the program as quickly as possible. I just don't think socialism works well in the US. Even if you think it works well somewhere else, it would be a disaster in the US.
What am I uninformed about? Would you care to enlighten me?
Sales tax discourages spending.
Another way of saying that is that it discourages consumption. That doesn't sound so bad to me. It sounds like it would be great for savings, great for the environment, and I don't see any obvious downside.
Yes, I'm aware of economic theories that say consumption is great. Although I understand consumption can have a short-term positive effect, I have not been convinced that it's good in the long term.
It is a dangerous gamble when you consider the top 1% of the people hold over 90% of the money
Can you refer me to that statistic?
Regardless, it doesn't make much difference, because people aren't taxed on what they hold, they are taxed on their income.
these people can stop buying expensive things from this country, and the sales tax disappears from federal coffers
Stop buying what? Not food, because they have to eat like everyone else. So what you really mean is that they will stop buying consumer junk. Again, that doesn't sound so bad to me.
If you need more tax revenue, increase or decrease tax rates as necessary (yes, sometimes lower tax rates result in higher tax revenue). If you want taxation to be progressive, make a progressive consumption tax.
We, in the US, heavily tax production and do not tax consumption (very much). We even spend the social security surplus, which is supposedly a government savings program. And we're moving toward inflation which is, in effect, a tax on savings as well.
Masters in Political Science ... high degree holders just scraping by.
Universities are not vocational institutions.
Some academic pursuits have immediate value in a career, but political science is not one of them.
As much as I like the idea of free textbooks, there are two things that bother me:
1. Why are we calling them "open source"? All books are open source, by definition. They may not be free-as-in-freedom, and probably not even in digital form, but all the valuable parts are open source.
2. I don't really think free-as-in-freedom digital textbooks are that high of a priority. The analog versions are quite free. You can share them with a friend legally, and many people do. There are even institutions dedicated for this specific purpose. Additionally, books are quite cheap. I bought at least 5 books recently which would be considered textbooks (I just wanted to read them) and they probably averaged just over $20 including shipping. The average MSRP was probably around $120. Why so cheap? Because I'm willing to purchase a "like-new" book rather than a new book, and I might even be willing to (gasp) purchase one edition earlier than the most current. I'm also willing to wait a week for shipping.
So, it's not like knowledge is being held captive here. There's a complaint that public schools and college professors tend to do whatever the publishers tell them to do (Why not? It's not like they're spending their own money.), which is valid. However, does the presence of a free textbook really change matters?
Again, I like the idea of a free textbook, but I'm not sure it's really a big deal. Free software on phones is orders of magnitude more important.
I suppose the equation might be different in poor countries where the cost of printing is prohibitive. However, computers might also not be as available, so I still don't see a major difference.
it'll be rushed
Really? Is that one of your primary concerns about the game? That it won't have spent enough time under development?
jobs should be paid reciprocal to their shittiness
No, they should be paid according to supply and demand. Otherwise, we would have a surplus of people who bang their head against a wall and demand $50 an hour for it.
I'm going to go out on a limb and say that 2% unemployment is more healthy than 15% unemployment, because it means more people are being productive
No, it means more people receive a paycheck. Maybe in this case it means being more productive, too, but that is not adequately supported merely by the fact that they receive a paycheck.
Be careful of this type of reasoning, it's the same thing that's got the US into this education mess. First, they realized that people with HS diplomas are more successful, so they ensured that everyone could get a HS diploma by lowering the standards to essentially nothing (attendance, I suppose). Now, as should be no surprise, a HS diploma is worth close to nothing, so they are doing the same thing to college degrees.
With the lower standards, heavy subsidies, and lots of social encouragement, employers realize that a lot of people are graduating from college that aren't particularly desirable. Then, what, they'll only hire PhDs?
I think we'll see a point where smart people start to opt out of the education system sooner, merely because they don't want to wade through busywork (and spending money like crazy) until graduate school, where they can actually set themselves apart.
This is kind of an "unstoppable force meets unmovable object" problem. No matter how good of a teacher you are, a certain percentage of your students are going to be completely uninterested in the material, and there for some other reason (degree, parents want them to do something, thought it was a different topic and too lazy to change, etc).
Some teachers engage more students than others, of course, and I have no doubt that it's due in part to the effort of the teacher. But, at some point, there's a tradeoff between losing too many students from the class, and spending too much time pandering to those on-the-fence students to teach the real students.
# it has all of the fundamentals of programming (looping, flow control, data structures, variables, etc)
Looping is not fundamental to programming languages. It's an iterative construct that is not necessary in declarative languages -- and not necessary in most languages, actually.
But it is fast. Very fast.
That's interesting. The SQLite website has some very old and very bad benchmarks, so I don't know much about the current performance characteristics.
I'm a little skeptical that it is faster in a wide range of cases, but if it's faster for most of your queries, I suppose that's all that matters.
Ok, I think I see what you're saying. I think you're talking about denormalization rather than transforming into a non-relational system.
Denormalization is the symptom of an imperfect separation between the physical and the logical layers. It's not (strictly speaking) non-relational, but it's perhaps bad logical design.
to change those massive relational databases into formats that can be reported on
Change them into what? Key value stores? Graphs? Motion is not necessarily progress.
First, you have to strike out toward new things if you want to progress the world.
In this case, people are striking out towards things even older than SQL: key-value and graph database systems. Just because it has a new name doesn't make it new.
You cannot easily add new fields to a table
Some database systems make this easy.
Migrating large amounts of relational data to a new structure takes a very very long time.
That's true for any large amount of data. Relational data tends to be much more flexible, so this is less important than in, say, a hierarchical database where reorganization is not only incredibly expensive, but may be a prerequisite for even passable performance of some queries.
It's difficult to maintain the data integrity... and have acceptable performance
Again, not specific to relational database systems. It's much more difficult and expensive to maintain data integrity in a hierarchical system unless the constraint and the hierarchy are one and the same.
So, I'd like to have a standardized SQL syntax.
The only way that will happen is if people stop using MySQL and SQLite. Those are the two worst offenders when it comes to standard violations.
I always wonder what they think is wrong with it.
Most people who think this fall into one or more of the following categories:
1. They have specialized needs, very few queries, and don't expect to need more queries or ad-hoc queries later on. Because of this simplicity they have little use for SQL.
2. They need the other tools offered by an RDBMS, like backup/restore, atomicity, durability, etc., but for some reason don't want to use SQL (probably due to #1).
3. They have narrow complains about the language design of SQL, for instance the ugly natural language syntax that's inflexible and inconsistent. This leads to a general dislike of SQL.
4. They don't understand SQL or relational database theory, and would just prefer that it went away.
efficiently take two dimensional data, and return rows that all fit within the specified radius
Yeah, you're probably talking about the GiST generalized index access method, on top of which everything from spatial search like PostGIS to full text search have been implemented (FTS can also work on top of the GIN generalized index access method). I would recommend looking at PostGIS first, and if you have more specialized needs, you can use another thing build on GiST or build your own.
but that's not the only factor for me
Agreed, a database system is more than just the language. The language is a critical part, however.