Second, growing disparity between rich and poor is not necessarily bad. If you could wave a wand and improve the standard of living of the poor by 8x, but in the process make the rich 10x as rich, would you do so? If not, why not? Just because disparity would grow?
To begin with, until I could provide a certain minimum standard of living, I would oppose something that increased the wealth gap because it is wrong to adopt policies that provide additional luxury for those who already have more than they can use, while others go without enough food -- assuming alternative policies are available.
Beyond that, the proposition is a standard Chicago School bit of straw man nonsense. "If the universe were constructed completely differently than it is, would you still hold to your irrational principle?" It's a sad attempt to prove that the principles of the left are really just class envy. This is bull. I would oppose the hypothetical policy because whatever the apparent short-term benefit, I believe that in the long run increasing the disparity between rich and poor guarantees that the rich are going to have the power to reduce the poor to subsistence slavery. Period.
Third, by almost all objective standards, the amount and severity of poverty in the world has dropped significantly during the era of globalization. There is less starvation; infant mortality is lower; life expectancy is longer; there is less malnutrition. This is just silly. It's not silly because it can't possibly true, it's not even silly because it might not be true; it's silly because the author doesn't actually know whether it's true but feels compelled to assert it. He's likely quoting verbatim from some mass-media right-wing ideologue, who similarly said it with no actual knowledge to back it up. It's easy to find this sort of thing. It's also silly because it inevitably ignores any and all objective standards that don't fit the model. The amount and severity of child prostitution in Bangkok has almost certainly increased with globalism. The number of children who work unconscionable hours in slave conditions in Malaysia or Pakistan has certainly increased. The number of people slaughtered in ethnic and regional conflicts seems to be increasing with globalism. It's also silly because it asserts the primacy of cross-cultural "objective standards", thus conveniently erasing all culture-based standards. For most of human history, most children spent almost every moment in direct proximity to one or both of their parents. This is an "objective standard" that few in our culture even consider, even though it was true in America right up to WW I. Does the inevitable rise in world-wide juvenile delinquency in the wake of corporate globalism qualify as an objective standard of measure? (Meanwhile, now that a few Americans are asserting the need for society to accommodate parent involvement in child-rearing, there is a backlash from some childless-by-choice folks who resent being forced to subsidize the requirements of those horrible selfish parents.)
Finally, the places where things haven't improved correspond not to hotbeds of globalization, but to regimes so repressive or corrupt that global investment doesn't happen. Globalization has barely touched most of Africa or North Korea because no one will invest.
This is comically untrue. Check the "made in" on almost every common consumer good you own -- clothes, cars, toys, baby strollers. Indonesia, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Malaysia, Thailand, Mexico, and of course, the People's Republic of China. Do you know the going rate for 5 years of a child's labor in Pakistan? $100 to $200. (Multiplying it by 10 might increase the price of a soccer ball from 10 bucks to 10.20.) And if you happen to have a sadistic streak, you get to beat them mercilessly too. I suppose if you actually killed one you might get in trouble, if you weren't able to somehow cover it up as an on-the-job accident. "yes, well, he got run over by the shipping truck, you know." That's globalism at work: It gives corporations the ability to work with the powerful elites in developing nations to savage the poor, while earning obscene profits by selling the goods in the wealthy West.
George Soros "earned" a large amount of his money (perhaps most of his money) gambling in the international financial arbitrage business. At one point, he "earned" about a billion dollars in a couple of days by destabilizing the British Pound, costing the British people far more than he "earned" in the process.
Over and over, defenders of these market institutions try to explain why we need them -- they provide liquidity blah blah blah. But don't tell me the winners earn their money, anymore than someone who stands in line for 15 minutes to buy a lottery ticket earns their winnings.
Perhaps we do need these market institutions, but contrary to the blatherings of Friedman et al, they are not some sort of natural organism. They are human artifacts created to satisfy human needs. We ought to be able to tinker with them as we like in order to maximize the benefit they do for all of us, not the lucky few.
often the case when there is no conflict of interest for a document to link to another document (as in the case of researchers linking to other works in their field)
How drolly non-cynical. In fact, "citation inflation" is rife in the academic community: people cite their own papers, and they cite their colleagues' papers. Why not? It's free to cite your friends, it boosts their careers, and it's likely to result in a reciprocal citation.
Closely related is the practice of adding authors to your papers. I've seen CVs full of listings with six or more authors. It seems like a reasonable thing to do -- giving credit to everyone who helped you develop your ideas -- but what it really does is water down the value of the authorship, as suddenly a person who has only ever really participated in two or three meaningful projects has a CV with four pages of publications. (Or 8, or a dozen!)
Anti-aliasing removes that by band-limiting the signal in some way prior to sampling
You know, even though I took the related courses as an EE -- rather a long time ago -- I could never understand why people called these text-rendering techniques anti-aliasing: I mean, what the hell does prettying up the picture have to do with preventing frequency aliasing?
DUH! Text anti-aliasing techniques are just low-pass filters, which you would use to anti-alias a digital signal if you were interested in frequency analysis of the image.
Finally I get it. Thanks, markj02!
Although you maybe didn't need to be so smug about it.
If I were to submit a short story or a poem, no institution would dare to claim ownership. If I wrote a thoughtful essay, no institution would presume the right to sell it to a magazine. If I were to create a computer game, no institution would try to publish it.
Since this is all obvious on the face of it, it's clear that schools do not own their students' creations.
However, as someone further down the thread noted, the claim at Turnitin seems to apply to the content displayed on the website, not to the content submitted for review.
It's been already noted that when you cheat, you're hurting your classmates. It's worse than that though. When you cheat and get away with it, you're establishing a pattern of behaviour that you'll repeat long after you get out of college. You'll likely start out in positions for which you are unqualified, and, applying the same ethically-challenged principles to your professional life, rise through the corporate ranks sowing corruption and bitterness in your path, until finally you are able to manage a billion-dollar debacle like Enron.
When you cheat, you are hurting every living thing in the universe.
This whole area of law needs desperately to be rethought and rewritten. My son has a Harry Potter calendar. One of the paintings shows the kids in the boats heading across the lake to the school. On the transom of the boat is painted "Hogwarts". There is a TM symbol next to it! Try to suspend disbelief in the face of that.
When the lawyers are so afraid of infringement that the owners of the IP can't even use it properly, the law isn't protecting anybody.
While it seems to appeal to the intellectual side, and to forbear the sex-and-violence that drives most popular television, it's really just another take on death-porn. Yeah, there's the science and all, but mostly it's about horror and a perverted fascination with all the different ways serial killers can find to make their victims' deaths as ghastly as possible. And the sex and violence are all there -- they're just the subject of discourse, rather than display. You still get to titillate yourself thinking about that torture-rape.
Two decades ago, a friend of mine labeled this kind of stuff "anti-human trash".
The difficulty with paying the farmers "what the market will bear" is that this number is unpredictable and is subject to startling swings, thus making family farms a losing proposition. And anyway, what "market" are you talking about? Most farmers sell to a market dominated by a handful of gigantic corporations. If you somehow wormed around this fact, you would end up pricing some consumers out of the food market -- probably a bad idea.
The problem is not that there are subsidies, the problem is that the only socially desirable objective incorporated into the subsidies is a steady, reliable, affordable stream of calories. It should be possible to construct a system of subsidies directed towards sustainable agriculture and good nutrition.
I'm surprised at how few of these comments address at all the central problem of simulations: We don't know the answers to important questions about the detailed operations of the systems we're simulating.
Inevitably, these simulations will incorporate the ideological biases of whoever is funding the simulations. This is already a policy-making problem: politicians receive support for their agendae from models created by ideological think-tanks.
I do find it odd that most of the few comments that grasped this used leftist ideology as their example. Most such models are employed by people who assume as given the ideas of folk like Milton Friedman. Thus, hilarious results like "raising the minimum wage will cost X hundred thousand jobs".
The study of the economic behaviour of individuals falls under the academic auspices of sociology rather than economics. Economists, in the main, have contempt for sociologists, and so their models usually base everything on a comical expectation of human behaviour that begins with this critical (and ridiculous) assumption: free people in free markets act rationally to achieve their own satisfaction.
Unfortunately, no element of this assumption bears any relation to our reality:
1. We are not free, and we never can be. Physical reality and the demands of our neighbors will always constrain us, even if we espouse a philosophy in which we owe nothing to anyone.
2. Markets are not free, and they never can be. The balance and counterbalance of individual and institutional power and interests ensure that all markets at all times are under conditions in which neither producers nor consumers resemble the "ideal" agents in the model of a free market.
3. People are not rational, and they never can be. We are complicated animals full of competing impulses and very complex reasoning processes. Even if we were given perfect information, we would be unable to make perfect decisions; but we are given imperfect information, which is then distorted by powerful forces in ways sure to be NOT in our personal interest.
I suspect it would be hard to build a simulation that starts with the above premise and somehow leads to a world in which sugar by the shipload is combined with just enough starch to make it easily chewable, then colorfully packaged (with millions of dollars spent developing the color schemes and the inevitable cartoon characters), labeled a "cereal", presented as a part of a healthy breakfast, and finally purchased by adults to feed to their children (whom they adore).
However, what if we required that Captain Crunch be labeled as "candy" instead of "cereal", and that it include health warnings along the lines of: "Feeding this product to your children will rot their teeth and make them fat, and quite probably affect their ability to learn well in a school setting. This increases the chance that when they grow up they will be sickly, foolish, and poor, and that their own children will do even worse." In the real world, anyone proposing this would be denounced as some sort of communist. Since only a kook would even consider it, you're unlikely to find any simulator that would incorporate such a policy into its model. And, even if you did, the effects would be guesswork, because nobody knows how consumers would respond to such a message.
The dot-com thing went bust for the same reason pyramid schemes go bust, and for the same reason the stock market can't (in the long run) go up faster than the economy grows. Wealth isn't a bunch of bits in your bank's Oracle database. Wealth is real stuff. That might include services, but ultimately, you can't have more services than you have people to provide the services.
Dot-com is the future of all commerce, but you can't have more commerce than you have stuff, and it was quite clear to any rational human that the top dozen dot-coms would have needed to do almost ALL of the commerce in the world to justify their stock prices. Some day this will happen, unless we stop it -- consider how much of commerce is already completely in the hands of Wal-mart and Manpower -- but it couldn't happen overnight.
As to charging for what once was free, as everybody has known for at least 5 years, the real key is to have a workable system for charging very small amounts of money. The problem is not that people won't pay money to send ecards; the problem is that people won't pay more than 25 cents to send an ecard, and we don't have any system in place that doesn't cost more than that just to process a payment! It doesn't actually seem insurmountable to me, but I'm just a lowly developer.
The funniest thing about the Bell Curve is that the authors draw the wrong conclusions from their own data. Assuming that all of their analysis of the data were valid (it probably isn't, but don't get hung up on that) here are the primary claims and conclusions of the work:
a. Genetics accounts for 50 - 80% of the variability in intelligence.
b. People with IQs below 95 are much more likely to be criminals, to have accidents, to do second-rate work at whatever jobs they do, etc.
c. The genetic IQ bell curve for blacks is shifted to the left with respect to that for whites.
Therefore:
It is misguided to try to create equal opportunity on a racial basis -- blacks are just on average dumber, and on average, they're going to do less well. In fact, almost all policies to alleviate poverty are doomed to fail, because the poor are just too genetically inferior to profit from stuff like government preschools, prenatal health care, or whatever else.
HOWEVER: The huge leap in illogic happens when they fail to take into account the relationship of claims a and b. In fact, if 20% to 50% of the variability of IQ is environmental, then with appropriate intervention we can almost certainly shift almost the entire curve below 95 IQ up above that cutoff. Their own data strongly suggest that this would dramatically improve productivity while reducing crime, teen motherhood, health care costs & miscellaneous other social ills that derive from stupid people behaving stupidly.
Remember, I don't necessarily accept all of their analyses; I'm just pointing out that if their analyses are correct, their conclusions are ridiculous.
P.S. Yes, I know that it's a bit strange to talk about shifting a norm-referenced curve. There will always be approximately the same proportion of people below 95 IQ, but the meaning of 95 will change over the decades. Blah blah blah.
a true libertarian does not see any constitutional legality in the definition of a corporation today. It is my firm belief that all corporations are consisted of men, and these men should be held liable for what the corporation have done or will do.
Wow! This is the first time I've seen a libertarian take this stance. Starting from here, you and I could have an intelligent discussion about rights, ethics, and the future of humanity. We'd still disagree on most things, but at least we'd agree on the starting point. Lacking this understanding, most people who call themselves libertarians are really just apologists for the wealthy and powerful.
I had the opportunity to see the late Julian Simon debate Garrett Hardin (author of The Tragedy of the Commons). Interestingly, Simon claimed that he, too, had started out trying to prove one thing (that large populations were a bad thing -- it was part of some conservative agenda that he didn't explain in detail) and deciding the opposite (that growing populations bring wealth and comfort).
It wouldn't take a lot of research to rebut most of what Simon had to say. Here were two of his most extraordinary claims:
JS: Look at Birmingham, England. I was there decades ago and you could hardly breathe for the pollution. Now the air is clean.
Reality: The population of Britain was stable for most of the 20th century. At the time of the debate, the population of places like Birmingham had declined steeply, as Thatcher had destroyed the economies of the outlying parts of the nation. Britain had outsourced industrial production to the 3rd world (where green-types are powerless), leaving only the service jobs in London. Thus the pollution was happening elsewhere to support the comforts of life in London or Birmingham. Just as it happens elsewhere to support the comforts of life in Silicon Valley. (And let's not forget the child slaves who make most of our goods -- an inconveniently illegal policy here in the USA.)
JS: The average person in Hong Kong has more living space than Abraham Lincoln had growing up in the rural Midwest.
Reality: This statement is only meaningful if you share with Mr. Simon a particular values set, one that views the outdoors as hostile to human beings, and thus excludes as "living space" all of the space outside of the building in which Lincoln slept. Quite reminiscent of Secretary of the Interior Watt, who couldn't understand why anybody would want to go hiking. Of course, he supposedly also believed that God would be disappointed if we hadn't "used up" the bounty of the Earth by the time of the Rapture.
By taking the libertarian road, and privatizing all land,
By privatizing all the land, you've stripped 90 - 99% of the population of the right to enjoy that land -- a funny way to define liberty.
you're now give businesses and people a vested interest in keeping the value of the land high, not low.
No, you are giving businesses and people a vested interest in extracting the maximum possible number of dollars out of that land. If the way they can do this is by destroying the land, that's what they will do. Most libertarians and neocon or neolib economists just say "Bully for them," the theory being that the market has decided that the land is worth less than whatever we get from destroying the land.
I think this is silly, but it would take a book to debunk it. However, it's worth noting that the god of American libertarians, Thomas Jefferson, explicitly stated that the national interest in having a food supply superceded the property rights of individuals, and that property owners did not have the right to destroy the property's food-producing capacity.
Actually, most of those women had degrees in mathematics or physics - in some cases PhDs. Universities started admitting women (in very small numbers) to natural science classes as early as the 1880s. Certainly by the 1920s many women were graduating with degrees in mathematics. But very few of them were able to find employement in their fields of study, except as teachers - and mostly as elementary school teachers at that.
... and the reason they couldn't find employment in their fields of study was because it was assumed that, although they had somehow obtained their credentials, they were still inherently incapable of doing real academic work.
It's not really surprising that they weren't followed by a new generation of women. Until the 80's Comp Sci was more of a math discipline than anything else. If you weren't going to be an academic, there was no point in studying it. Real-life programming was mostly done by engineers who learned on the job, & few women ever went into engineering.
Ironically, in the early 90's (when I was teaching), I would get female engineering students who hated engineering. They were there because they had done well in high school math and science, and some advisor said, "Hey! the outlook for chemical engineers is great!" If they had been directed into Computer Science they'd have been much happier -- and had better job prospects, as it turns out -- but Comp Sci isn't actually IN the college of engineering, and the well-meaning counsellors were trying to smash the dominant paradigm by getting the girls into engineering.
Miscellaneous comments have referred to the women who did the ballistics programming on the ENIAC. One person noted that the work was left to women because it was considered "secretarial".
In fact, the women were not ordinary individuals, but were chosen for their mathematical aptitude. History largely ignored them. I read once that there was a big project reunion PR event, and none of them were invited, at least not until someone noticed and made a fuss.
The real question is whether the work was considered secretarial because women could do it, rather than the other way around. My own observation is that quality secretarial work requires an astonishing level of skill. Behind every 5-million-dollar-a-year executive is a 35K/year secretary who actually has most of the responsibility for doing the executive's work. I would argue that the general contempt for secretarial work derives from a general contempt for women and anything they do.
Anybody who has ever been in academia knows that the departments would collapse quickly and entirely without the cadre of highly-skilled and effective departmental secretaries.
Oh, here's a link to a pdf. It took more work than I had time for to locate a really complete history of the women on ENIAC. I did however find this slashlink to a glowing Jon Katz review of a book that claims to tell the whole ENIAC story.
As a grad student, I used to teach intro CS in the context of history, focussing on von neumann and turing, and especially the Enigma. Many engineering students were nonplussed by this approach; most non-engineering students seemed to think it was great.
There was talk in the department of creating a "great ideas in CS" course, but nothing ever came of it.
Keep in mind that if you get infected with HIV, you've got at least a good 7 years to a) pass the disease to someone else and b) produce offspring. With modern medice, a person infected with HIV can last what, a good 13 to 15 years? In many countries that's enough time for the HIV-infected offspring to produce their own HIV-infected offspring.
I've never run them myself, but I believe that computer models indicate that a quite small reproductive advantage will, over several generations, allow one trait to drive out another.
Thus, even though you are correct that many HIV casualties will be able to reproduce before they die, the fact that they will certainly produce fewer average offspring than similar individuals who are not affected dictates that the genes of the latter will come to rule the pool.
This doesn't even take into account the fact that an excessive fraction of the offspring of HIV-infected individuals will themselves die long before they get a chance to reproduce, either from HIV itself or from the miscellaneous misfortunes that disproportionately affect orphans.
the moment he bought it (NOT the moment he died as you insist) there would no longer be further profit in it unless the price came drastically down
Actually, what matters is the moment at which Mr. Gates no longer requires the therapy. If the therapy requires 2 years, that's how long others will go without. Unfortunately for your argument, my example was an extreme one meant to make the problem crystal clear. In the real world, there is an unending supply of people who can afford to pay much more than a particular therapy costs. New people get the disease every day.
The point is that there is no invisible hand when a company enjoys a monopoly. The economic theory of free markets suggests that in a free market the price of any good will sink to the marginal cost to the producer of creating an additional unit of that good. Why? Because if producer A won't sell it for that price, producer B will. After all, as long as their cost is being covered, they might as well. (Note that the theory supposes that there is a "reasonable profit" which any producer automatically includes in calculating the marginal cost of a product). In another time and place, I'd be happy to argue that there is no particular justice to that price either, but nevermind, I don't have to. Because in a monopoly there is no such pressure on producer A. So producer A can find a place on the demand curve that shuts out people who are willing and able to pay more than it costs the company to produce the good. These people aren't shut out because they aren't productive enough to fairly compensate the producer. They are shut out because the producer can make more money by restricting the good to a wealthier (or more desperate) population.
It takes great amounts of wealth and research to find new medicines, someone has to foot the bill.
Well, yes. But since the pharmaceutical companies receive monopolies, there is no connection at all between the cost of the research and the price of the drug. And if I were to suggest that patents should somehow link royalties to the cost of developing the therapy -- including amortizing the costs of dead-end research on other therapies -- you would denounce it as some sort of fiddling with the market. (Nevermind that these costs are largely overstated. I've seen several reports indicating that most pharmaceutical companies spend more money on marketing than on research.)
And it is pretty damn obvious how terribly intervention works: sure you can make it sound all nice, you can even claim that people have a *right* to the object of their desire (say medicine or whatever). But ever since the US government began coercing health care providers and invaded it, controling ever aspect of it they can get their grubby little hands on, it has been on the decline. Look back to the history of the US just before the government destoryed health care: ANYONE who had a decent job could afford good health insurance for a very reasonable sum.
You cannot demonstrate the truth of anything in that paragraph. It's run-of-the-mill "the government always screws up" political rhetoric. For whatever reasons, it's important for you to believe that it is true. In order to believe it, you must decide without evidence that the corporatization of the health care system is irrelevant, that the pharmaceutical monopolies are irrelevant, that the value of basic research done by the NIH is outweighed by whatever other inefficiencies you choose to blame on the government, that environmental factors that cause new and nasty diseases are irrelevant, that the evolution of antibiotic-resistant disease strains due to factory-farming techniques is irrelevant, etc. etc. etc.
(Back when the government regulated the telephone company anyone could afford a telephone, but few could afford very much long distance. After deregulation, pretty much anyone who could afford a telephone could afford as much long distance as they wanted, but lots of people could no longer afford telephone service. When I started college, my monthly phone service cost about 1.5 hours of minimum wage labor. Today, it costs about 5 hours of minimum wage labor.)
it is not the government's concern how people dispose of their "property" rights... based on principals and not pragmatics
The history of intellectual property is exactly about a balanced approach to principle and pragmatics. More than all other sorts of property, intellectual property is the invention of modern governments. It emerged both out of a sense of justice and a desire to encourage invention. Justice, however, is never an absolute thing. It is always about balance. Society (via government) grants the protection of intellectual propery. Society can put whatever conditions it chooses.
Again, imagine the world before the existence of intellectual property laws. Alice figures out a way to pump water out of the ground to fertilize her field. Her neighbor Bob notices and emulates the technique. Alice tells Bob he "owes" her 10% of his crop. Can you imagine Bob's response? He would laugh her out his yard. And if she went into the village demanding justice, she'd be driven out of town with stones.
I will state this unequivocally. If I fell ill, and if there were a known therapy, and if I could produce that therapy myself, I categorically deny the right of the originator of that therapy to hold my health and life hostage to an abstract principle. Any government that would defend such a principle would have abandoned me, and everyone else like me, and as such would have absolved me of any requirement to subjugate myself to its rules.
Beyond this simple thought experiment, the "principle" you espouse is not shared by very many people in our society, and has been explicitly rejected by our courts repeatedly. When slavery was made unconstitutional, the government revoked your right to enter into a contract in which you enslaved yourself. You apparently believe that those who did so put pragmatism over principle.
So don't invest in a dodgy bank. Don't invest in a bank at all, if you can't find one you trust.
The first problem with this philosophy is that it suggests there is some way to evaluate the quality of the decisions a bank's management is making, prior to its sudden collapse. There isn't.
The second problem is that it assumes that I can insulate myself from the gigantic social problems caused by bad management on the part of elites. There is nothing I could have done to prevent the trade center attacks, although it was crystal clear to me that there would be a price to pay -- in blood -- for our arrogant and selfish treatment of the rest of the world.
I just doubt that what they are doing has much to do with justice or reason or with benefiting the nation, but rather with retaining power.
I would largely agree with you. But I have the same opinion of the wealthy elite managers. It is a rather small fraction of their activity that benefits the rest of us. Most of their activity is deliberately geared towards making our lives worse.
So don't follow them. You aren't forced to work for stupid managers.
And I don't -- I'm part-owner of a small consulting business. I still might have to work WITH stupid managers. But again, I'm not talking about the particular circumstances of my life. I'm doing all right. I'm talking about the damage these people do to all of us, with their irresponsible "can do" laissez-faire me-first free-market neo-conservative neo-liberal free-trade globalize clearcut global-warming-needs-more-study yahoo lunacy. I've lost a whole lot of individual liberties in the last 4 months, and the reason I lost them was because some people were really mad at us because we were doing some things we really shouldn't have been doing, didn't need to be doing, and for most of us, weren't benefitting from doing. But we all pay the price.
Of course it could be worse. It could be World War I. That was modern management at its best. If only all those working class Brits and Frenchmen had quit their jobs and gone into business for themselves, they would not have had to follow their leaders into that bloody obscenity. Right.
I can work really hard to make an apple pie, but if I'm an incompetent cook, the pie will be burnt (and knowing my cooking probably inedible) - I've just worked hard to make a worthless pie. It's not quantity of labor that counts, but quality.
Hey, you were the one that introduced the idea that taxation is a matter of unmotivated, slothful people taking things from those hardworking wealth-creators. And we're not comparing the value of burnt pies to tasty pies. We're comparing the value of tasty pies to the value of marketing, packaging, employee supervision, and ownership of an oven.
And the capitalists are everyone who saves and invests. Which includes anyone who puts money in a bank.
Uhh, no. The capitalists -- at least the ones who matter -- are the few people who get to wield the power that the capital endows. It is the banker, not the saver, who decides to loan a ton of money to his brother-in-law to build too much office property during a real estate boom. It is the saver who gets screwed. Well, actually, because we decided to protect the saver by taxing the banks to create an insurance fund, it's all of us who get screwed, poor and rich alike. Except of course that the rich were paying themselves big salaries from the earnings on our savings while mismanaging the assets.
I doubt you or your fellow employees would have had jobs if not for that self-satisfied jerk.
Yes, and he wouldn't have had his wealth without our labor. What feature of the universe is it that makes you think this is a one-way street?
If you could have found a way to make a living without whatever it was that he contributed, then why didn't you do it.
Actually, I did. Immediately. And I felt really sorry for those who weren't as fortunate as I in their opportunities.
Michael Jordan made millions because millions of people tuned in to see his games, and buy his merchandise.
Umm.. yeah. And because we've instituted a whole bunch of laws that restrict other peoples' freedoms in order to ensure that Michael can be rewarded to the max. How much would he have earned if we didn't grant monopolies on broadcast frequencies? How much would he have earned if we didn't all pay for the justice system that enforces the NBA's monopoly on presenting the games via mass media? How much would he have earned if we hadn't extended the concept of "trademarking" (which originally protected consumers and craftsmen from shoddy counterfeits) to cover arbitrary branding, so that the Chicago Bulls could charge a tax on anyone who wanted to sell somebody a shirt that said Chicago Bulls on it? (Do you think that anyone supposes there is some association between that trademark and some standard of quality? Do you think the average Bulls fan cares whether the team or the league or the players gets a cut from the merchandise?) How much would he have earned if we insisted that celebrity endorsers are responsible for the claims they are making -- including the insinuated claims that wearing Air Jordans will let you Be Like Mike in some meaningful way?
Michael Jordan owes almost ALL of his wealth to the existence of a variety of legal and cultural institutions that permit him to translate his talent and his hard work into cash. The average nurse, on the other hand, who by almost anybody's definition -- including, I suspect, Michael Jordan's -- is doing more important and more valuable work than Michael Jordan, simply cannot leverage her value by employing mass media.
Taxing away the bulk of Michael Jordan's wealth to ensure that there are enough trained and talented nurses for all of us is not a moral dilemma for me.
I would argue that there is justice in rewarding those more able to create wealth with, well, wealth.
Our fundamental disagreement is on the question of who is creating the wealth. Just because someone is the CEO or owner of the company, doesn't mean that person created the wealth. The value of capital and management is determined by capitalists and managers. The value of labor is determined by a market, in which the suppliers are at a serious disadvantage -- they will shortly starve if they aren't working. Adam Smith, the god of free-market philosophers recognized this. He noted that it was fundamentally unjust, and recommended social remedies.
I haven't even touched on the whole question of defining wealth. Nurses don't create wealth. Perhaps we shouldn't pay them at all. Instead, let's go to an all-volunteer health-care system.
But the main point I was originally making was not that valuable people should not be rewarded. The point I was making is that there is no magical justice to the amount with which our system happens to reward them. I am sorry, but it is utterly transparent to me that Bill Gates has not contributed $100,000,000,000 worth of anything, tangible or intangible, to the rest of humanity. If I thought really hard, I might be able to identify a few people who had -- but I doubt if any of them were rich.
Having dealt personally with only a few CEOs, I don't have enough data to say. However, they must be doing something useful, otherwise there wouldn't be such intense competition to recruit them. If being a successful CEO was easy, CEOs would be a dime a dozen, and their salaries would be a lot lower.
This is an amusingly non-cynical point of view. I suspect you are less willing to assume that such wisdom underlies most of the other decisions made by authorities in our culture. For example, I expect you probably snickered appreciatively the first time you heard the line about, "Those men in Washington wouldn't be there if they didn't know what they were doing."
But that's just my speculation. In the meantime, consider the counter-evidence. What useful thing was it that the executives of Enron were doing? Chainsaw Al was heavily recruited and handsomely rewarded by Sunbeam, a company he promptly destroyed. AS CEO of Mattel, Jill Barad managed to make $4 billion in actual cash and $12 billion in shareholder equity disappear, for which she was rewarded with a package worth about 30 million dollars, plus $750000/year for the rest of her life. Etc. etc.
The first millionaire businessman I ever met didn't understand the difference between marginal costs and average costs. I don't mean that he was unfamiliar with the jargon, or with the curves that economists theorize about. He explicitly described his business tactics to me in a way that made it clear that he had never noticed the distinction.
The intense competition to recruit executives has a great deal to do with the fact that they are being recruited by other executives. Like almost everybody on earth, these people overvalue themselves and their work, but unlike almost everybody else, they have the power to act on their delusions.
If being a successful CEO was easy, CEOs would be a dime a dozen, and their salaries would be a lot lower.
This statement makes two assumptions, neither of which is demonstrable:
1. that the people paying the CEOs are wise.
2. that normal market forces apply.
I have not noticed any abundance of wisdom among the investment set or their manager priests. Actually, they seem to lead us from one folly to another, rarely learning anything from experience -- although the priests have become adept at protecting their individual interests in advance of the next catastrophe they bring to society.
Beyond that, as I noted above, the most fundamental principle of normal market forces does not apply. The assumption behind normal market forces is that the people paying are trying to minimize the amount they pay, while the people charging are trying to maximize the amount the charge. But when it comes to executive compensation, the more the Directors pay their CEO, the more they are likely to be able to earn in their own CEO jobs.
Since, once ensconced, the Directors have the default support of all the shareholder votes that DON'T get cast, they have almost free rein.
Beyond all that, it's worth asking whether the system itself is fundamentally broken, in the following way:
Part of why CEOs are paid such high salaries is because they are at the top of very large organizations. This means that a bad decision (like buying The Learning Company) can have very large consequences. So, nervous capitalists are easily persuaded by managers of the importance of buying the best CEO they can possibly afford. Maybe the solution to this is just to limit the size of corporations. This would reduce the size of the risk associated with a bad decision (and such decisions clearly happen anyway), and spread out the wealth among a larger number of managers. There are good reasons to want to reduce the size of risk.
Just because someone is poor doesn't mean they don't work hard, and just because someone is wealthy doesn't mean they do. The creation of wealth is a relatively mysterious thing, but the key piece of information is that in a capitalist society, the relative value of capital versus labor is not determined by some sort of meaningful market, it is determined by the capitalists. Actually, much of it is also determined by an intermediary caste of priests, the managers.
I worked for a super-capitalist once. At the point where he went from being just really rich to being super-rich, the 300 or so employees of his company -- without whom he simply could never have made his mega-fortune -- went from living paycheck-to-paycheck to living paycheck-to-paycheck while working for a smug, self-satisfied jerk.
We've created an economic system. It's fairly arbitrary, although it does seem to have certain "natural" characteristics. It is useful to us because it generates material wealth. It also, unfortunately, tends to aggregate most of the wealth amongst a small percentage of the population. There is no particular justice to this aggregation, it's just a side-effect of the system.
Whenever I hear someone arguing that stealing all that wealth from the people who created it will just make the wealth-creators opt out, I have to wonder: How come the wealth-creators weren't opting out when the average chief executive earned 10% of what he does now? Do you really suppose they would all up and quit, and could not be replaced, if we simply mandated that a corporation could not pay its CEO more than 20 times what it pays its janitors? What makes you think that? In your personal experience, are the CEOs of companies the most intelligent or talented or wise or useful people in those companies?
A question for practitioners: why would you want to use Perl over a flat file data set, rather than loading the data into Oracle and using professional data mining
The basic answer to this question is that the problems involved in sequence analysis are large, numerous and lucrative, which means it is economically feasible to develop specialized code rather than applying general data-mining. The most common algorithm used in sequence analysis, BLAST, requires preprocessing of the database into a particularly efficient data structure prior to running queries against it.
At least one company, Accelrys (formerly Genetics Computer Group) has developed a large scale Oracle solution that applies many standard bioinformatics algorithms to the entire Genbank database.
Slashdot Mirror
Second, growing disparity between rich and poor is not necessarily bad. If you could wave a wand and improve the standard of living of the poor by 8x, but in the process make the rich 10x as rich, would you do so? If not, why not? Just because disparity would grow?
To begin with, until I could provide a certain minimum standard of living, I would oppose something that increased the wealth gap because it is wrong to adopt policies that provide additional luxury for those who already have more than they can use, while others go without enough food -- assuming alternative policies are available.
Beyond that, the proposition is a standard Chicago School bit of straw man nonsense. "If the universe were constructed completely differently than it is, would you still hold to your irrational principle?" It's a sad attempt to prove that the principles of the left are really just class envy. This is bull. I would oppose the hypothetical policy because whatever the apparent short-term benefit, I believe that in the long run increasing the disparity between rich and poor guarantees that the rich are going to have the power to reduce the poor to subsistence slavery. Period.
Third, by almost all objective standards, the amount and severity of poverty in the world has dropped significantly during the era of globalization. There is less starvation; infant mortality is lower; life expectancy is longer; there is less malnutrition.
This is just silly. It's not silly because it can't possibly true, it's not even silly because it might not be true; it's silly because the author doesn't actually know whether it's true but feels compelled to assert it. He's likely quoting verbatim from some mass-media right-wing ideologue, who similarly said it with no actual knowledge to back it up. It's easy to find this sort of thing.
It's also silly because it inevitably ignores any and all objective standards that don't fit the model. The amount and severity of child prostitution in Bangkok has almost certainly increased with globalism. The number of children who work unconscionable hours in slave conditions in Malaysia or Pakistan has certainly increased. The number of people slaughtered in ethnic and regional conflicts seems to be increasing with globalism.
It's also silly because it asserts the primacy of cross-cultural "objective standards", thus conveniently erasing all culture-based standards. For most of human history, most children spent almost every moment in direct proximity to one or both of their parents. This is an "objective standard" that few in our culture even consider, even though it was true in America right up to WW I. Does the inevitable rise in world-wide juvenile delinquency in the wake of corporate globalism qualify as an objective standard of measure? (Meanwhile, now that a few Americans are asserting the need for society to accommodate parent involvement in child-rearing, there is a backlash from some childless-by-choice folks who resent being forced to subsidize the requirements of those horrible selfish parents.)
Finally, the places where things haven't improved correspond not to hotbeds of globalization, but to regimes so repressive or corrupt that global investment doesn't happen. Globalization has barely touched most of Africa or North Korea because no one will invest.
This is comically untrue. Check the "made in" on almost every common consumer good you own -- clothes, cars, toys, baby strollers. Indonesia, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Malaysia, Thailand, Mexico, and of course, the People's Republic of China. Do you know the going rate for 5 years of a child's labor in Pakistan? $100 to $200. (Multiplying it by 10 might increase the price of a soccer ball from 10 bucks to 10.20.) And if you happen to have a sadistic streak, you get to beat them mercilessly too. I suppose if you actually killed one you might get in trouble, if you weren't able to somehow cover it up as an on-the-job accident. "yes, well, he got run over by the shipping truck, you know." That's globalism at work: It gives corporations the ability to work with the powerful elites in developing nations to savage the poor, while earning obscene profits by selling the goods in the wealthy West.
George Soros "earned" a large amount of his money (perhaps most of his money) gambling in the international financial arbitrage business. At one point, he "earned" about a billion dollars in a couple of days by destabilizing the British Pound, costing the British people far more than he "earned" in the process.
Over and over, defenders of these market institutions try to explain why we need them -- they provide liquidity blah blah blah. But don't tell me the winners earn their money, anymore than someone who stands in line for 15 minutes to buy a lottery ticket earns their winnings.
Perhaps we do need these market institutions, but contrary to the blatherings of Friedman et al, they are not some sort of natural organism. They are human artifacts created to satisfy human needs. We ought to be able to tinker with them as we like in order to maximize the benefit they do for all of us, not the lucky few.
often the case when there is no conflict of interest for a document to link to another document (as in the case of researchers linking to other works in their field)
How drolly non-cynical. In fact, "citation inflation" is rife in the academic community: people cite their own papers, and they cite their colleagues' papers. Why not? It's free to cite your friends, it boosts their careers, and it's likely to result in a reciprocal citation.
Closely related is the practice of adding authors to your papers. I've seen CVs full of listings with six or more authors. It seems like a reasonable thing to do -- giving credit to everyone who helped you develop your ideas -- but what it really does is water down the value of the authorship, as suddenly a person who has only ever really participated in two or three meaningful projects has a CV with four pages of publications. (Or 8, or a dozen!)
Anti-aliasing removes that by band-limiting the signal in some way prior to sampling
You know, even though I took the related courses as an EE -- rather a long time ago -- I could never understand why people called these text-rendering techniques anti-aliasing: I mean, what the hell does prettying up the picture have to do with preventing frequency aliasing?
DUH! Text anti-aliasing techniques are just low-pass filters, which you would use to anti-alias a digital signal if you were interested in frequency analysis of the image.
Finally I get it. Thanks, markj02!
Although you maybe didn't need to be so smug about it.
If I were to submit a short story or a poem, no institution would dare to claim ownership. If I wrote a thoughtful essay, no institution would presume the right to sell it to a magazine. If I were to create a computer game, no institution would try to publish it.
Since this is all obvious on the face of it, it's clear that schools do not own their students' creations.
However, as someone further down the thread noted, the claim at Turnitin seems to apply to the content displayed on the website, not to the content submitted for review.
It's been already noted that when you cheat, you're hurting your classmates. It's worse than that though. When you cheat and get away with it, you're establishing a pattern of behaviour that you'll repeat long after you get out of college. You'll likely start out in positions for which you are unqualified, and, applying the same ethically-challenged principles to your professional life, rise through the corporate ranks sowing corruption and bitterness in your path, until finally you are able to manage a billion-dollar debacle like Enron.
When you cheat, you are hurting every living thing in the universe.
This whole area of law needs desperately to be rethought and rewritten. My son has a Harry Potter calendar. One of the paintings shows the kids in the boats heading across the lake to the school. On the transom of the boat is painted "Hogwarts". There is a TM symbol next to it! Try to suspend disbelief in the face of that.
When the lawyers are so afraid of infringement that the owners of the IP can't even use it properly, the law isn't protecting anybody.
While it seems to appeal to the intellectual side, and to forbear the sex-and-violence that drives most popular television, it's really just another take on death-porn. Yeah, there's the science and all, but mostly it's about horror and a perverted fascination with all the different ways serial killers can find to make their victims' deaths as ghastly as possible. And the sex and violence are all there -- they're just the subject of discourse, rather than display. You still get to titillate yourself thinking about that torture-rape.
Two decades ago, a friend of mine labeled this kind of stuff "anti-human trash".
The difficulty with paying the farmers "what the market will bear" is that this number is unpredictable and is subject to startling swings, thus making family farms a losing proposition. And anyway, what "market" are you talking about? Most farmers sell to a market dominated by a handful of gigantic corporations. If you somehow wormed around this fact, you would end up pricing some consumers out of the food market -- probably a bad idea.
The problem is not that there are subsidies, the problem is that the only socially desirable objective incorporated into the subsidies is a steady, reliable, affordable stream of calories. It should be possible to construct a system of subsidies directed towards sustainable agriculture and good nutrition.
I'm surprised at how few of these comments address at all the central problem of simulations: We don't know the answers to important questions about the detailed operations of the systems we're simulating.
Inevitably, these simulations will incorporate the ideological biases of whoever is funding the simulations. This is already a policy-making problem: politicians receive support for their agendae from models created by ideological think-tanks.
I do find it odd that most of the few comments that grasped this used leftist ideology as their example. Most such models are employed by people who assume as given the ideas of folk like Milton Friedman. Thus, hilarious results like "raising the minimum wage will cost X hundred thousand jobs".
The study of the economic behaviour of individuals falls under the academic auspices of sociology rather than economics. Economists, in the main, have contempt for sociologists, and so their models usually base everything on a comical expectation of human behaviour that begins with this critical (and ridiculous) assumption: free people in free markets act rationally to achieve their own satisfaction.
Unfortunately, no element of this assumption bears any relation to our reality:
1. We are not free, and we never can be. Physical reality and the demands of our neighbors will always constrain us, even if we espouse a philosophy in which we owe nothing to anyone.
2. Markets are not free, and they never can be. The balance and counterbalance of individual and institutional power and interests ensure that all markets at all times are under conditions in which neither producers nor consumers resemble the "ideal" agents in the model of a free market.
3. People are not rational, and they never can be. We are complicated animals full of competing impulses and very complex reasoning processes. Even if we were given perfect information, we would be unable to make perfect decisions; but we are given imperfect information, which is then distorted by powerful forces in ways sure to be NOT in our personal interest.
I suspect it would be hard to build a simulation that starts with the above premise and somehow leads to a world in which sugar by the shipload is combined with just enough starch to make it easily chewable, then colorfully packaged (with millions of dollars spent developing the color schemes and the inevitable cartoon characters), labeled a "cereal", presented as a part of a healthy breakfast, and finally purchased by adults to feed to their children (whom they adore).
However, what if we required that Captain Crunch be labeled as "candy" instead of "cereal", and that it include health warnings along the lines of: "Feeding this product to your children will rot their teeth and make them fat, and quite probably affect their ability to learn well in a school setting. This increases the chance that when they grow up they will be sickly, foolish, and poor, and that their own children will do even worse." In the real world, anyone proposing this would be denounced as some sort of communist. Since only a kook would even consider it, you're unlikely to find any simulator that would incorporate such a policy into its model. And, even if you did, the effects would be guesswork, because nobody knows how consumers would respond to such a message.
The dot-com thing went bust for the same reason pyramid schemes go bust, and for the same reason the stock market can't (in the long run) go up faster than the economy grows. Wealth isn't a bunch of bits in your bank's Oracle database. Wealth is real stuff. That might include services, but ultimately, you can't have more services than you have people to provide the services.
Dot-com is the future of all commerce, but you can't have more commerce than you have stuff, and it was quite clear to any rational human that the top dozen dot-coms would have needed to do almost ALL of the commerce in the world to justify their stock prices. Some day this will happen, unless we stop it -- consider how much of commerce is already completely in the hands of Wal-mart and Manpower -- but it couldn't happen overnight.
As to charging for what once was free, as everybody has known for at least 5 years, the real key is to have a workable system for charging very small amounts of money. The problem is not that people won't pay money to send ecards; the problem is that people won't pay more than 25 cents to send an ecard, and we don't have any system in place that doesn't cost more than that just to process a payment! It doesn't actually seem insurmountable to me, but I'm just a lowly developer.
The funniest thing about the Bell Curve is that the authors draw the wrong conclusions from their own data. Assuming that all of their analysis of the data were valid (it probably isn't, but don't get hung up on that) here are the primary claims and conclusions of the work:
a. Genetics accounts for 50 - 80% of the variability in intelligence.
b. People with IQs below 95 are much more likely to be criminals, to have accidents, to do second-rate work at whatever jobs they do, etc.
c. The genetic IQ bell curve for blacks is shifted to the left with respect to that for whites.
Therefore:
It is misguided to try to create equal opportunity on a racial basis -- blacks are just on average dumber, and on average, they're going to do less well. In fact, almost all policies to alleviate poverty are doomed to fail, because the poor are just too genetically inferior to profit from stuff like government preschools, prenatal health care, or whatever else.
HOWEVER: The huge leap in illogic happens when they fail to take into account the relationship of claims a and b. In fact, if 20% to 50% of the variability of IQ is environmental, then with appropriate intervention we can almost certainly shift almost the entire curve below 95 IQ up above that cutoff. Their own data strongly suggest that this would dramatically improve productivity while reducing crime, teen motherhood, health care costs & miscellaneous other social ills that derive from stupid people behaving stupidly.
Remember, I don't necessarily accept all of their analyses; I'm just pointing out that if their analyses are correct, their conclusions are ridiculous.
P.S.
Yes, I know that it's a bit strange to talk about shifting a norm-referenced curve. There will always be approximately the same proportion of people below 95 IQ, but the meaning of 95 will change over the decades. Blah blah blah.
a true libertarian does not see any constitutional legality in the definition of a corporation today. It is my firm belief that all corporations are consisted of men, and these men should be held liable for what the corporation have done or will do.
Wow! This is the first time I've seen a libertarian take this stance. Starting from here, you and I could have an intelligent discussion about rights, ethics, and the future of humanity. We'd still disagree on most things, but at least we'd agree on the starting point. Lacking this understanding, most people who call themselves libertarians are really just apologists for the wealthy and powerful.
I had the opportunity to see the late Julian Simon debate Garrett Hardin (author of The Tragedy of the Commons). Interestingly, Simon claimed that he, too, had started out trying to prove one thing (that large populations were a bad thing -- it was part of some conservative agenda that he didn't explain in detail) and deciding the opposite (that growing populations bring wealth and comfort).
It wouldn't take a lot of research to rebut most of what Simon had to say. Here were two of his most extraordinary claims:
JS: Look at Birmingham, England. I was there decades ago and you could hardly breathe for the pollution. Now the air is clean.
Reality: The population of Britain was stable for most of the 20th century. At the time of the debate, the population of places like Birmingham had declined steeply, as Thatcher had destroyed the economies of the outlying parts of the nation. Britain had outsourced industrial production to the 3rd world (where green-types are powerless), leaving only the service jobs in London. Thus the pollution was happening elsewhere to support the comforts of life in London or Birmingham. Just as it happens elsewhere to support the comforts of life in Silicon Valley. (And let's not forget the child slaves who make most of our goods -- an inconveniently illegal policy here in the USA.)
JS: The average person in Hong Kong has more living space than Abraham Lincoln had growing up in the rural Midwest.
Reality: This statement is only meaningful if you share with Mr. Simon a particular values set, one that views the outdoors as hostile to human beings, and thus excludes as "living space" all of the space outside of the building in which Lincoln slept. Quite reminiscent of Secretary of the Interior Watt, who couldn't understand why anybody would want to go hiking. Of course, he supposedly also believed that God would be disappointed if we hadn't "used up" the bounty of the Earth by the time of the Rapture.
By taking the libertarian road, and privatizing all land,
By privatizing all the land, you've stripped 90 - 99% of the population of the right to enjoy that land -- a funny way to define liberty.
you're now give businesses and people a vested interest in keeping the value of the land high, not low.
No, you are giving businesses and people a vested interest in extracting the maximum possible number of dollars out of that land. If the way they can do this is by destroying the land, that's what they will do. Most libertarians and neocon or neolib economists just say "Bully for them," the theory being that the market has decided that the land is worth less than whatever we get from destroying the land.
I think this is silly, but it would take a book to debunk it. However, it's worth noting that the god of American libertarians, Thomas Jefferson, explicitly stated that the national interest in having a food supply superceded the property rights of individuals, and that property owners did not have the right to destroy the property's food-producing capacity.
Actually, most of those women had degrees in mathematics or physics - in some cases PhDs. Universities started admitting women (in very small numbers) to natural science classes as early as the 1880s. Certainly by the 1920s many women were graduating with degrees in mathematics. But very few of them were able to find employement in their fields of study, except as teachers - and mostly as elementary school teachers at that.
... and the reason they couldn't find employment in their fields of study was because it was assumed that, although they had somehow obtained their credentials, they were still inherently incapable of doing real academic work.
It's not really surprising that they weren't followed by a new generation of women. Until the 80's Comp Sci was more of a math discipline than anything else. If you weren't going to be an academic, there was no point in studying it. Real-life programming was mostly done by engineers who learned on the job, & few women ever went into engineering.
Ironically, in the early 90's (when I was teaching), I would get female engineering students who hated engineering. They were there because they had done well in high school math and science, and some advisor said, "Hey! the outlook for chemical engineers is great!" If they had been directed into Computer Science they'd have been much happier -- and had better job prospects, as it turns out -- but Comp Sci isn't actually IN the college of engineering, and the well-meaning counsellors were trying to smash the dominant paradigm by getting the girls into engineering.
Miscellaneous comments have referred to the women who did the ballistics programming on the ENIAC. One person noted that the work was left to women because it was considered "secretarial".
In fact, the women were not ordinary individuals, but were chosen for their mathematical aptitude. History largely ignored them. I read once that there was a big project reunion PR event, and none of them were invited, at least not until someone noticed and made a fuss.
The real question is whether the work was considered secretarial because women could do it, rather than the other way around. My own observation is that quality secretarial work requires an astonishing level of skill. Behind every 5-million-dollar-a-year executive is a 35K/year secretary who actually has most of the responsibility for doing the executive's work. I would argue that the general contempt for secretarial work derives from a general contempt for women and anything they do.
Anybody who has ever been in academia knows that the departments would collapse quickly and entirely without the cadre of highly-skilled and effective departmental secretaries.
Oh, here's a link to a pdf. It took more work than I had time for to locate a really complete history of the women on ENIAC. I did however find this slashlink to a glowing Jon Katz review of a book that claims to tell the whole ENIAC story.
As a grad student, I used to teach intro CS in the context of history, focussing on von neumann and turing, and especially the Enigma. Many engineering students were nonplussed by this approach; most non-engineering students seemed to think it was great.
There was talk in the department of creating a "great ideas in CS" course, but nothing ever came of it.
Keep in mind that if you get infected with HIV, you've got at least a good 7 years to a) pass the disease to someone else and b) produce offspring. With modern medice, a person infected with HIV can last what, a good 13 to 15 years? In many countries that's enough time for the HIV-infected offspring to produce their own HIV-infected offspring.
I've never run them myself, but I believe that computer models indicate that a quite small reproductive advantage will, over several generations, allow one trait to drive out another.
Thus, even though you are correct that many HIV casualties will be able to reproduce before they die, the fact that they will certainly produce fewer average offspring than similar individuals who are not affected dictates that the genes of the latter will come to rule the pool.
This doesn't even take into account the fact that an excessive fraction of the offspring of HIV-infected individuals will themselves die long before they get a chance to reproduce, either from HIV itself or from the miscellaneous misfortunes that disproportionately affect orphans.
the moment he bought it (NOT the moment he died as you insist) there would no longer be further profit in it unless the price came drastically down
... based on principals and not pragmatics
Actually, what matters is the moment at which Mr. Gates no longer requires the therapy. If the therapy requires 2 years, that's how long others will go without. Unfortunately for your argument, my example was an extreme one meant to make the problem crystal clear. In the real world, there is an unending supply of people who can afford to pay much more than a particular therapy costs. New people get the disease every day.
The point is that there is no invisible hand when a company enjoys a monopoly. The economic theory of free markets suggests that in a free market the price of any good will sink to the marginal cost to the producer of creating an additional unit of that good. Why? Because if producer A won't sell it for that price, producer B will. After all, as long as their cost is being covered, they might as well. (Note that the theory supposes that there is a "reasonable profit" which any producer automatically includes in calculating the marginal cost of a product). In another time and place, I'd be happy to argue that there is no particular justice to that price either, but nevermind, I don't have to. Because in a monopoly there is no such pressure on producer A. So producer A can find a place on the demand curve that shuts out people who are willing and able to pay more than it costs the company to produce the good. These people aren't shut out because they aren't productive enough to fairly compensate the producer. They are shut out because the producer can make more money by restricting the good to a wealthier (or more desperate) population.
It takes great amounts of wealth and research to find new medicines, someone has to foot the bill.
Well, yes. But since the pharmaceutical companies receive monopolies, there is no connection at all between the cost of the research and the price of the drug. And if I were to suggest that patents should somehow link royalties to the cost of developing the therapy -- including amortizing the costs of dead-end research on other therapies -- you would denounce it as some sort of fiddling with the market. (Nevermind that these costs are largely overstated. I've seen several reports indicating that most pharmaceutical companies spend more money on marketing than on research.)
And it is pretty damn obvious how terribly intervention works: sure you can make it sound all nice, you can even claim that people have a *right* to the object of their desire (say medicine or whatever). But ever since the US government began coercing health care providers and invaded it, controling ever aspect of it they can get their grubby little hands on, it has been on the decline. Look back to the history of the US just before the government destoryed health care: ANYONE who had a decent job could afford good health insurance for a very reasonable sum.
You cannot demonstrate the truth of anything in that paragraph. It's run-of-the-mill "the government always screws up" political rhetoric. For whatever reasons, it's important for you to believe that it is true. In order to believe it, you must decide without evidence that the corporatization of the health care system is irrelevant, that the pharmaceutical monopolies are irrelevant, that the value of basic research done by the NIH is outweighed by whatever other inefficiencies you choose to blame on the government, that environmental factors that cause new and nasty diseases are irrelevant, that the evolution of antibiotic-resistant disease strains due to factory-farming techniques is irrelevant, etc. etc. etc.
(Back when the government regulated the telephone company anyone could afford a telephone, but few could afford very much long distance. After deregulation, pretty much anyone who could afford a telephone could afford as much long distance as they wanted, but lots of people could no longer afford telephone service. When I started college, my monthly phone service cost about 1.5 hours of minimum wage labor. Today, it costs about 5 hours of minimum wage labor.)
it is not the government's concern how people dispose of their "property" rights
The history of intellectual property is exactly about a balanced approach to principle and pragmatics. More than all other sorts of property, intellectual property is the invention of modern governments. It emerged both out of a sense of justice and a desire to encourage invention. Justice, however, is never an absolute thing. It is always about balance. Society (via government) grants the protection of intellectual propery. Society can put whatever conditions it chooses.
Again, imagine the world before the existence of intellectual property laws. Alice figures out a way to pump water out of the ground to fertilize her field. Her neighbor Bob notices and emulates the technique. Alice tells Bob he "owes" her 10% of his crop. Can you imagine Bob's response? He would laugh her out his yard. And if she went into the village demanding justice, she'd be driven out of town with stones.
I will state this unequivocally. If I fell ill, and if there were a known therapy, and if I could produce that therapy myself, I categorically deny the right of the originator of that therapy to hold my health and life hostage to an abstract principle. Any government that would defend such a principle would have abandoned me, and everyone else like me, and as such would have absolved me of any requirement to subjugate myself to its rules.
Beyond this simple thought experiment, the "principle" you espouse is not shared by very many people in our society, and has been explicitly rejected by our courts repeatedly. When slavery was made unconstitutional, the government revoked your right to enter into a contract in which you enslaved yourself. You apparently believe that those who did so put pragmatism over principle.
So don't invest in a dodgy bank. Don't invest in a bank at all, if you can't find one you trust.
The first problem with this philosophy is that it suggests there is some way to evaluate the quality of the decisions a bank's management is making, prior to its sudden collapse. There isn't.
The second problem is that it assumes that I can insulate myself from the gigantic social problems caused by bad management on the part of elites. There is nothing I could have done to prevent the trade center attacks, although it was crystal clear to me that there would be a price to pay -- in blood -- for our arrogant and selfish treatment of the rest of the world.
I just doubt that what they are doing has much to do with justice or reason or with benefiting the nation, but rather with retaining power.
I would largely agree with you. But I have the same opinion of the wealthy elite managers. It is a rather small fraction of their activity that benefits the rest of us. Most of their activity is deliberately geared towards making our lives worse.
So don't follow them. You aren't forced to work for stupid managers.
And I don't -- I'm part-owner of a small consulting business. I still might have to work WITH stupid managers. But again, I'm not talking about the particular circumstances of my life. I'm doing all right. I'm talking about the damage these people do to all of us, with their irresponsible "can do" laissez-faire me-first free-market neo-conservative neo-liberal free-trade globalize clearcut global-warming-needs-more-study yahoo lunacy. I've lost a whole lot of individual liberties in the last 4 months, and the reason I lost them was because some people were really mad at us because we were doing some things we really shouldn't have been doing, didn't need to be doing, and for most of us, weren't benefitting from doing. But we all pay the price.
Of course it could be worse. It could be World War I. That was modern management at its best. If only all those working class Brits and Frenchmen had quit their jobs and gone into business for themselves, they would not have had to follow their leaders into that bloody obscenity. Right.
I can work really hard to make an apple pie, but if I'm an incompetent cook, the pie will be burnt (and knowing my cooking probably inedible) - I've just worked hard to make a worthless pie. It's not quantity of labor that counts, but quality.
Hey, you were the one that introduced the idea that taxation is a matter of unmotivated, slothful people taking things from those hardworking wealth-creators. And we're not comparing the value of burnt pies to tasty pies. We're comparing the value of tasty pies to the value of marketing, packaging, employee supervision, and ownership of an oven.
And the capitalists are everyone who saves and invests. Which includes anyone who puts money in a bank.
Uhh, no. The capitalists -- at least the ones who matter -- are the few people who get to wield the power that the capital endows. It is the banker, not the saver, who decides to loan a ton of money to his brother-in-law to build too much office property during a real estate boom. It is the saver who gets screwed. Well, actually, because we decided to protect the saver by taxing the banks to create an insurance fund, it's all of us who get screwed, poor and rich alike. Except of course that the rich were paying themselves big salaries from the earnings on our savings while mismanaging the assets.
I doubt you or your fellow employees would have had jobs if not for that self-satisfied jerk.
Yes, and he wouldn't have had his wealth without our labor. What feature of the universe is it that makes you think this is a one-way street?
If you could have found a way to make a living without whatever it was that he contributed, then why didn't you do it.
Actually, I did. Immediately. And I felt really sorry for those who weren't as fortunate as I in their opportunities.
Michael Jordan made millions because millions of people tuned in to see his games, and buy his merchandise.
Umm.. yeah. And because we've instituted a whole bunch of laws that restrict other peoples' freedoms in order to ensure that Michael can be rewarded to the max. How much would he have earned if we didn't grant monopolies on broadcast frequencies? How much would he have earned if we didn't all pay for the justice system that enforces the NBA's monopoly on presenting the games via mass media? How much would he have earned if we hadn't extended the concept of "trademarking" (which originally protected consumers and craftsmen from shoddy counterfeits) to cover arbitrary branding, so that the Chicago Bulls could charge a tax on anyone who wanted to sell somebody a shirt that said Chicago Bulls on it? (Do you think that anyone supposes there is some association between that trademark and some standard of quality? Do you think the average Bulls fan cares whether the team or the league or the players gets a cut from the merchandise?) How much would he have earned if we insisted that celebrity endorsers are responsible for the claims they are making -- including the insinuated claims that wearing Air Jordans will let you Be Like Mike in some meaningful way?
Michael Jordan owes almost ALL of his wealth to the existence of a variety of legal and cultural institutions that permit him to translate his talent and his hard work into cash. The average nurse, on the other hand, who by almost anybody's definition -- including, I suspect, Michael Jordan's -- is doing more important and more valuable work than Michael Jordan, simply cannot leverage her value by employing mass media.
Taxing away the bulk of Michael Jordan's wealth to ensure that there are enough trained and talented nurses for all of us is not a moral dilemma for me.
I would argue that there is justice in rewarding those more able to create wealth with, well, wealth.
Our fundamental disagreement is on the question of who is creating the wealth. Just because someone is the CEO or owner of the company, doesn't mean that person created the wealth. The value of capital and management is determined by capitalists and managers. The value of labor is determined by a market, in which the suppliers are at a serious disadvantage -- they will shortly starve if they aren't working. Adam Smith, the god of free-market philosophers recognized this. He noted that it was fundamentally unjust, and recommended social remedies.
I haven't even touched on the whole question of defining wealth. Nurses don't create wealth. Perhaps we shouldn't pay them at all. Instead, let's go to an all-volunteer health-care system.
But the main point I was originally making was not that valuable people should not be rewarded. The point I was making is that there is no magical justice to the amount with which our system happens to reward them. I am sorry, but it is utterly transparent to me that Bill Gates has not contributed $100,000,000,000 worth of anything, tangible or intangible, to the rest of humanity. If I thought really hard, I might be able to identify a few people who had -- but I doubt if any of them were rich.
Having dealt personally with only a few CEOs, I don't have enough data to say. However, they must be doing something useful, otherwise there wouldn't be such intense competition to recruit them. If being a successful CEO was easy, CEOs would be a dime a dozen, and their salaries would be a lot lower.
This is an amusingly non-cynical point of view. I suspect you are less willing to assume that such wisdom underlies most of the other decisions made by authorities in our culture. For example, I expect you probably snickered appreciatively the first time you heard the line about, "Those men in Washington wouldn't be there if they didn't know what they were doing."
But that's just my speculation. In the meantime, consider the counter-evidence. What useful thing was it that the executives of Enron were doing? Chainsaw Al was heavily recruited and handsomely rewarded by Sunbeam, a company he promptly destroyed. AS CEO of Mattel, Jill Barad managed to make $4 billion in actual cash and $12 billion in shareholder equity disappear, for which she was rewarded with a package worth about 30 million dollars, plus $750000/year for the rest of her life. Etc. etc.
The first millionaire businessman I ever met didn't understand the difference between marginal costs and average costs. I don't mean that he was unfamiliar with the jargon, or with the curves that economists theorize about. He explicitly described his business tactics to me in a way that made it clear that he had never noticed the distinction.
The intense competition to recruit executives has a great deal to do with the fact that they are being recruited by other executives. Like almost everybody on earth, these people overvalue themselves and their work, but unlike almost everybody else, they have the power to act on their delusions.
If being a successful CEO was easy, CEOs would be a dime a dozen, and their salaries would be a lot lower.
This statement makes two assumptions, neither of which is demonstrable:
1. that the people paying the CEOs are wise.
2. that normal market forces apply.
I have not noticed any abundance of wisdom among the investment set or their manager priests. Actually, they seem to lead us from one folly to another, rarely learning anything from experience -- although the priests have become adept at protecting their individual interests in advance of the next catastrophe they bring to society.
Beyond that, as I noted above, the most fundamental principle of normal market forces does not apply. The assumption behind normal market forces is that the people paying are trying to minimize the amount they pay, while the people charging are trying to maximize the amount the charge. But when it comes to executive compensation, the more the Directors pay their CEO, the more they are likely to be able to earn in their own CEO jobs.
Since, once ensconced, the Directors have the default support of all the shareholder votes that DON'T get cast, they have almost free rein.
Beyond all that, it's worth asking whether the system itself is fundamentally broken, in the following way:
Part of why CEOs are paid such high salaries is because they are at the top of very large organizations. This means that a bad decision (like buying The Learning Company) can have very large consequences. So, nervous capitalists are easily persuaded by managers of the importance of buying the best CEO they can possibly afford. Maybe the solution to this is just to limit the size of corporations. This would reduce the size of the risk associated with a bad decision (and such decisions clearly happen anyway), and spread out the wealth among a larger number of managers. There are good reasons to want to reduce the size of risk.
Just because someone is poor doesn't mean they don't work hard, and just because someone is wealthy doesn't mean they do. The creation of wealth is a relatively mysterious thing, but the key piece of information is that in a capitalist society, the relative value of capital versus labor is not determined by some sort of meaningful market, it is determined by the capitalists. Actually, much of it is also determined by an intermediary caste of priests, the managers.
I worked for a super-capitalist once. At the point where he went from being just really rich to being super-rich, the 300 or so employees of his company -- without whom he simply could never have made his mega-fortune -- went from living paycheck-to-paycheck to living paycheck-to-paycheck while working for a smug, self-satisfied jerk.
We've created an economic system. It's fairly arbitrary, although it does seem to have certain "natural" characteristics. It is useful to us because it generates material wealth. It also, unfortunately, tends to aggregate most of the wealth amongst a small percentage of the population. There is no particular justice to this aggregation, it's just a side-effect of the system.
Whenever I hear someone arguing that stealing all that wealth from the people who created it will just make the wealth-creators opt out, I have to wonder: How come the wealth-creators weren't opting out when the average chief executive earned 10% of what he does now? Do you really suppose they would all up and quit, and could not be replaced, if we simply mandated that a corporation could not pay its CEO more than 20 times what it pays its janitors? What makes you think that? In your personal experience, are the CEOs of companies the most intelligent or talented or wise or useful people in those companies?
A question for practitioners: why would you want to use Perl over a flat file data set, rather than loading the data into Oracle and using professional data mining
The basic answer to this question is that the problems involved in sequence analysis are large, numerous and lucrative, which means it is economically feasible to develop specialized code rather than applying general data-mining. The most common algorithm used in sequence analysis, BLAST, requires preprocessing of the database into a particularly efficient data structure prior to running queries against it.
At least one company, Accelrys (formerly Genetics Computer Group) has developed a large scale Oracle solution that applies many standard bioinformatics algorithms to the entire Genbank database.
If I can just have a third set of teeth, I promisepromisepromise I will take good care of them and floss and brush and stuff pleasepleaseplease.