The problem is that even though they support Freedom and Liberty they don't support Liberalism.
That's not a problem in my opinion, it's a plus.
They're against big government, heavy taxes and heavy regulation.
Why shouldn't they be? With all of the government scandals these days, the IRS being prominent among them, why should we want more government? We have too much already if you ask me.
They tend to be individualists and not collectivists
The United States was founded on individualism, not collectivism. Have you ever wondered how a country that's only 237 years old came to be the most powerful and prosperous nation in recorded history? It wasn't Marxism or collectivism that made us wealthy and powerful, but individual initiative and Capitalism. Even the Chinese have abandoned Marxism for Capitalism. That should tell you all that you need to know about Marxism, collectivism and income redistribution (i.e. it doesn't work).
ergo they are right wing extremists (or something).
And we need more of them in this country and fewer acolytes of Liberalism with stars in their eyes and rocks in their heads.
Yes, but the Kochs don't support income redistribution through tax and spend government, so that makes them anathema to the progressive left. The progressives only tolerate liberal billionaires, like George Soros, who give them money and even then just to avoid biting the hand that feeds them and not because they actually believe that those billionaires and millionaires, even those whose donations they accept, should actually be allowed to retain their wealth.
Why would you pick Java or C++ when you could use a modern language like C#? It's fashionable around here for people to ignore.NET simply because it was spawned by Microsoft, but if you haven't even taken a look at.NET, you're really missing out on a very power programming language and development platform. If you care at all about object oriented programming or even if you don't (.NET has F# for functional programming and C# includes many functional programming features) you should give.NET serious consideration. For starters, take a look at the wiki comparison of C# and Java and you will see what I'm talking about.
It's difficult to compare accidental deaths to deaths with a clear and intentional human cause. The former is understandable if regrettable whereas the latter tends to arouse in people feelings of anger and a desire for revenge. So my own take on the issue is that people are willing to spend much more on vengeance and getting even than they are on preventing accidents or helping their fellow man, but that's just my opinion.
Probably not. Jumping the shark implies that the whole thing is finished, but there are clearly parts of Microsoft that have great value and could really shine if broken up into separate companies. However, as others on this thread have pointed out, the existing management and ownership structure at Microsoft makes breaking up a hard thing to do. Right off the bat the two largest shareholders, Gates and Ballmer, are practically unassailable in any conceivable proxy fight because together they still own a huge chunk of the outstanding shares. Microsoft is a classic example of a company where the whole is worth less than the sum of the parts.
All you need to do is find one exception and you've won. Removing a constraint makes that search easier.
If you want to try and find a counterexample, you'll have to start with values greater than 1000 because the conjecture has already been verified by exhaustion for all values of all six variables and exponents up to 1000 which is a fancy way of saying that brute force computation failed to find an easy counter example. There may still be one out there, but it might be so large that it would be computationally impractical to find it. On the other hand, the conjecture may be true in which case a brute force method cannot prove it because there's an infinite number of cases to check.
VHS movies used to cost alot when new also, way back when.
Indeed they did. In fact, it was this high cost that spawned the rental market for movies in the first place. At that time, most people weren't going to watch a film enough times to justify paying more than $20, and VHS tapes had no "extras", so it made sense to rent the film for 1 to 5 dollars instead (early 1980s dollars). As a teenager I worked in a video rental store and I can remember the store owner telling me that he paid $100+ for each of those tapes. One of the first VHS releases to break this trend was Top Gun which was priced at around $20-$30 when it was released. At the time that was an incredible bargain since most other films cost well over $50.00 if they could even be found offered for retail sale (remember that this was the early to mid 1980s so there were no downloads or even digital copies of films).
Yes, but can you use all five words and phrases in a new sentence? For example, how about this:
"When people are properly incentivized to diversify their experimental capital it can change the innovation curve towards a more social enterprise in synergy with the consumerization of IT."
Specially it's the parliament, which is elected by the people.
I wonder what percentage of the British population believes that Parliament is representing their interests well and voting with those concerns in mind? Here in the United States, only 11% of the population approves of the job that Congress is doing. That's a lot of unhappy people. What is the approval rating of Parliament? I'd be surprised if it's much higher.
The deficit has shrunk every year since the current administration took office, even the years when the Dems controlled Congress.
The deficits in individual years have shrunk, but the total national debt has continued to increase every single year. In other words, we're still spending more than we take in each and every year. It's a pretty lame excuse to say that you're better than previous administrations because you don't run up the balance on the credit card each year as much as they did. Meanwhile, the total amount owed is still increasing, albeit somewhat less quickly. That's a low standard and hardly what I'd call a "race to the top", as Obama is fond of saying.
The coupons and rebate checks can be considered the price of your privacy then. However, since the cards offer immediate discounts on selected in store items they're still worth carrying even if one forgoes the rebate checks and coupons. Alternatively, the coupons and rebates could be redirected to a UPS store box, but I doubt that they would be enough by themselves to cover the box fees for an individual.
Shrinking the National Debt? More still needs to be done, but this a good start. What we shouldn't do is go back to eating potato chips and drinking pop just when our pain at the gym of budget cuts is starting to pay off in the form of a smaller deficit waistline.
Does anyone actually provide their real name and address in exchange for a "loyalty" card? I have the cards, but I've never given anything for them and I always pay for my groceries in cash.
Another tactic that you might want to consider is deliberate seeding of misinformation about yourself into the advertising streams. For example using many false birthdates, occupations and wildly divergent incomes along with different plausible addresses, phone numbers, etc. I often use this technique, usually also with aliases, depending upon how important it is for the information to be accurate and usually it's not very important at all. Very few organizations actually require accurate information about you, so why be truthful when dealing with anyone else who feels like asking for it? If they insist on me providing them with something then Fake Name Generator is always ready to serve them plausible yet useless data whenever the need arises.
Everything about Big Data relies on the assumption that having more complete information allows a particular business to improve efficiency. For advertising and medicine, this is pretty obvious.
Training predictive agents on data sets, large and small, for the purpose of decision making is nothing new. These types of systems have been known in AI circles for decades now. The problem was and remains the relative inability of these systems to perform well on problems where the state of the system is non-deterministic or stochastic. The classic examples of predictive AIs were always in well understood areas with little randomness such as agriculture or medical diagnostics. However, many real world problems that people would like to solve are in fact stochastic, which makes them difficult to automate from a decision making standpoint. Having a larger data set isn't a panacea either. Indeed, a big problem with big data is that it assumes that more data is always better when in fact that's not necessarily true and especially not in problems that are stochastic or involve randomness. Predicting future prices on real world stock markets is a classic example of a stochastic problem that's hard to decide with Artificial Intelligence no matter how much data one has. Past performance at stock picking is no guarantee of future results, as the financial firms are fond of warning clients. Of course, that hasn't discouraged some people from spending millions of dollars trying to build these systems. It's telling that the high frequency traders rely not upon superior reasoning or decision making to beat the market but trading speeds that nobody else can match. That's the brute force way to win with computing (albeit at fractions of a penny per trade), but it still falls well short of a true predictive AI for the stock markets if indeed such a thing is even possible.
Capitalism is not about solving the world's problems, it's about making money by any means necessary.
You're right that Capitalism isn't about solving the world's problems, although it often does as a consequence, but neither is it strictly about "making money". Money is a means to an end but not an end onto itself so to "make money" is to be looking for a means to satisfy some other wants or needs. The system of capitalism, manifest in the aggregated results of economic decisions made by individuals living in the society, allows us to satisfy our wants and needs most efficiently and quickly. That is the Raison d'être, as the French would say, of Capitalism. Some people don't like the results, but that's not an argument against Capitalism so much as it's a disagreement with the lifestyle choices of others.
They were convinced 100% that shorting Tesla was a guaranteed win---in significant measure because they really believed their right-wing ideology.
Perhaps they were persuaded instead by the generally terrible track record of startup automobile companies in the United States? In recent decades almost every new car brand that wasn't founded by Ford, GM or Chrysler has ultimately failed. Remember the DeLorean Motor Company? BTW, I think that you have the wrong idea about hedge fund types. They're more like mercenaries who care for nothing and nobody besides their profits. These are the same guys who give money to every political candidate, in proportion to their chances of winning, regardless of party because they want the politicians, no matter who wins the election, to be beholden to them and their money. Would it surprise you to learn that Wall Street contributed substantial sums towards Obama's campaigns? Has it also escaped your notice that the Dodd-Frank reforms have gone essentially nowhere and that virtually nobody on Wall Street has been punished in any meaningful way for the financial crisis? Maybe there's a connection there?
Apple is currently engaging in the largest single share repurchase program in history [macrumors.com], which will put $60B USD into their investors' pockets by the end of 2015.
Apple financed the repurchase program by selling 17 billion dollars worth of short, medium and long term bonds. It was widely thought that this method was chosen, rather than repatriating cash held overseas, to avoid depletion of onshore cash reserves while at the same time further delaying the payment of income taxes on profits held overseas. It's interesting question whether or not Apple would be able to pay the bond coupons using that cash held overseas without incurring a tax liability. I presume that they wouldn't be able to, but even if they had to pay the coupons out of current after tax income the fact that a huge amount of cash remains on the balance sheet, albeit overseas and subject to tax if ever repatriated, strengthens Apple's financial situation vis-a-vis financing the share repurchase program entirely with cash.
If the 'limited decrypted version' they supposedly have contained child pornography why is he still not charged with a crime? Something seems fishy here.
If I had to guess I would say that they're interested not just in the outcome of this individual case but the particular details of how this case gets decided. Namely, they're trying to establish a useful precedent that may allow them to make an end run around the 5th amendment more easily in future cases.
This is basically the same tactic used in U.S. schools on the children now a days. You know, Billy said you did it, so why don't you tell us what you did.
They didn't invent that in the U.S. school system, it's basic interrogation 101. You always pit the subjects against each other by telling each of them that the other has already rated out so that each of them will tell their side of the story just to get back at the other for rating.
The problem with Solyndra was that the beancounters told the Obama administration it was a bad risk, and the administration pushed it through anyway to hilight their "green" agenda and to pay off a major campaign bundler.
And they expect us to believe that ObamaCare is going to save money? Do they take us for complete fools? I'm always amazed that progressives are able to claim with a straight face that ObamaCare will save money. These are the same people who have no retirement savings, don't understand basic economics and can't even balance their own f***king checkbook. They're either expert liars or too stupid to realize what bullshit is being spoon fed to them by the Obama administration. Either way, I neither want nor need their "help".
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The problem is that even though they support Freedom and Liberty they don't support Liberalism.
That's not a problem in my opinion, it's a plus.
They're against big government, heavy taxes and heavy regulation.
Why shouldn't they be? With all of the government scandals these days, the IRS being prominent among them, why should we want more government? We have too much already if you ask me.
They tend to be individualists and not collectivists
The United States was founded on individualism, not collectivism. Have you ever wondered how a country that's only 237 years old came to be the most powerful and prosperous nation in recorded history? It wasn't Marxism or collectivism that made us wealthy and powerful, but individual initiative and Capitalism. Even the Chinese have abandoned Marxism for Capitalism. That should tell you all that you need to know about Marxism, collectivism and income redistribution (i.e. it doesn't work).
ergo they are right wing extremists (or something).
And we need more of them in this country and fewer acolytes of Liberalism with stars in their eyes and rocks in their heads.
They call this being way right wing?
Yes, but the Kochs don't support income redistribution through tax and spend government, so that makes them anathema to the progressive left. The progressives only tolerate liberal billionaires, like George Soros, who give them money and even then just to avoid biting the hand that feeds them and not because they actually believe that those billionaires and millionaires, even those whose donations they accept, should actually be allowed to retain their wealth.
Why would you pick Java or C++ when you could use a modern language like C#? It's fashionable around here for people to ignore .NET simply because it was spawned by Microsoft, but if you haven't even taken a look at .NET, you're really missing out on a very power programming language and development platform. If you care at all about object oriented programming or even if you don't (.NET has F# for functional programming and C# includes many functional programming features) you should give .NET serious consideration. For starters, take a look at the wiki comparison of C# and Java and you will see what I'm talking about.
It's difficult to compare accidental deaths to deaths with a clear and intentional human cause. The former is understandable if regrettable whereas the latter tends to arouse in people feelings of anger and a desire for revenge. So my own take on the issue is that people are willing to spend much more on vengeance and getting even than they are on preventing accidents or helping their fellow man, but that's just my opinion.
Is this Microsoft's jumping the shark moment?
Probably not. Jumping the shark implies that the whole thing is finished, but there are clearly parts of Microsoft that have great value and could really shine if broken up into separate companies. However, as others on this thread have pointed out, the existing management and ownership structure at Microsoft makes breaking up a hard thing to do. Right off the bat the two largest shareholders, Gates and Ballmer, are practically unassailable in any conceivable proxy fight because together they still own a huge chunk of the outstanding shares. Microsoft is a classic example of a company where the whole is worth less than the sum of the parts.
All you need to do is find one exception and you've won. Removing a constraint makes that search easier.
If you want to try and find a counterexample, you'll have to start with values greater than 1000 because the conjecture has already been verified by exhaustion for all values of all six variables and exponents up to 1000 which is a fancy way of saying that brute force computation failed to find an easy counter example. There may still be one out there, but it might be so large that it would be computationally impractical to find it. On the other hand, the conjecture may be true in which case a brute force method cannot prove it because there's an infinite number of cases to check.
VHS movies used to cost alot when new also, way back when.
Indeed they did. In fact, it was this high cost that spawned the rental market for movies in the first place. At that time, most people weren't going to watch a film enough times to justify paying more than $20, and VHS tapes had no "extras", so it made sense to rent the film for 1 to 5 dollars instead (early 1980s dollars). As a teenager I worked in a video rental store and I can remember the store owner telling me that he paid $100+ for each of those tapes. One of the first VHS releases to break this trend was Top Gun which was priced at around $20-$30 when it was released. At the time that was an incredible bargain since most other films cost well over $50.00 if they could even be found offered for retail sale (remember that this was the early to mid 1980s so there were no downloads or even digital copies of films).
Yes, but can you use all five words and phrases in a new sentence? For example, how about this:
"When people are properly incentivized to diversify their experimental capital it can change the innovation curve towards a more social enterprise in synergy with the consumerization of IT."
Bingo!
Specially it's the parliament, which is elected by the people.
I wonder what percentage of the British population believes that Parliament is representing their interests well and voting with those concerns in mind? Here in the United States, only 11% of the population approves of the job that Congress is doing. That's a lot of unhappy people. What is the approval rating of Parliament? I'd be surprised if it's much higher.
Or 3. They're incompetent. I'm leaning towards 2 and 3.
what exactly is a serious crime?
Whatever the governments says it is. They're the ones with the guns, remember?
The deficit has shrunk every year since the current administration took office, even the years when the Dems controlled Congress.
The deficits in individual years have shrunk, but the total national debt has continued to increase every single year. In other words, we're still spending more than we take in each and every year. It's a pretty lame excuse to say that you're better than previous administrations because you don't run up the balance on the credit card each year as much as they did. Meanwhile, the total amount owed is still increasing, albeit somewhat less quickly. That's a low standard and hardly what I'd call a "race to the top", as Obama is fond of saying.
The coupons and rebate checks can be considered the price of your privacy then. However, since the cards offer immediate discounts on selected in store items they're still worth carrying even if one forgoes the rebate checks and coupons. Alternatively, the coupons and rebates could be redirected to a UPS store box, but I doubt that they would be enough by themselves to cover the box fees for an individual.
So where is all the damned money going?
Shrinking the National Debt? More still needs to be done, but this a good start. What we shouldn't do is go back to eating potato chips and drinking pop just when our pain at the gym of budget cuts is starting to pay off in the form of a smaller deficit waistline.
Does anyone actually provide their real name and address in exchange for a "loyalty" card? I have the cards, but I've never given anything for them and I always pay for my groceries in cash.
Another tactic that you might want to consider is deliberate seeding of misinformation about yourself into the advertising streams. For example using many false birthdates, occupations and wildly divergent incomes along with different plausible addresses, phone numbers, etc. I often use this technique, usually also with aliases, depending upon how important it is for the information to be accurate and usually it's not very important at all. Very few organizations actually require accurate information about you, so why be truthful when dealing with anyone else who feels like asking for it? If they insist on me providing them with something then Fake Name Generator is always ready to serve them plausible yet useless data whenever the need arises.
Everything about Big Data relies on the assumption that having more complete information allows a particular business to improve efficiency. For advertising and medicine, this is pretty obvious.
Training predictive agents on data sets, large and small, for the purpose of decision making is nothing new. These types of systems have been known in AI circles for decades now. The problem was and remains the relative inability of these systems to perform well on problems where the state of the system is non-deterministic or stochastic. The classic examples of predictive AIs were always in well understood areas with little randomness such as agriculture or medical diagnostics. However, many real world problems that people would like to solve are in fact stochastic, which makes them difficult to automate from a decision making standpoint. Having a larger data set isn't a panacea either. Indeed, a big problem with big data is that it assumes that more data is always better when in fact that's not necessarily true and especially not in problems that are stochastic or involve randomness. Predicting future prices on real world stock markets is a classic example of a stochastic problem that's hard to decide with Artificial Intelligence no matter how much data one has. Past performance at stock picking is no guarantee of future results, as the financial firms are fond of warning clients. Of course, that hasn't discouraged some people from spending millions of dollars trying to build these systems. It's telling that the high frequency traders rely not upon superior reasoning or decision making to beat the market but trading speeds that nobody else can match. That's the brute force way to win with computing (albeit at fractions of a penny per trade), but it still falls well short of a true predictive AI for the stock markets if indeed such a thing is even possible.
Capitalism is not about solving the world's problems, it's about making money by any means necessary.
You're right that Capitalism isn't about solving the world's problems, although it often does as a consequence, but neither is it strictly about "making money". Money is a means to an end but not an end onto itself so to "make money" is to be looking for a means to satisfy some other wants or needs. The system of capitalism, manifest in the aggregated results of economic decisions made by individuals living in the society, allows us to satisfy our wants and needs most efficiently and quickly. That is the Raison d'être, as the French would say, of Capitalism. Some people don't like the results, but that's not an argument against Capitalism so much as it's a disagreement with the lifestyle choices of others.
They were convinced 100% that shorting Tesla was a guaranteed win---in significant measure because they really believed their right-wing ideology.
Perhaps they were persuaded instead by the generally terrible track record of startup automobile companies in the United States? In recent decades almost every new car brand that wasn't founded by Ford, GM or Chrysler has ultimately failed. Remember the DeLorean Motor Company? BTW, I think that you have the wrong idea about hedge fund types. They're more like mercenaries who care for nothing and nobody besides their profits. These are the same guys who give money to every political candidate, in proportion to their chances of winning, regardless of party because they want the politicians, no matter who wins the election, to be beholden to them and their money. Would it surprise you to learn that Wall Street contributed substantial sums towards Obama's campaigns? Has it also escaped your notice that the Dodd-Frank reforms have gone essentially nowhere and that virtually nobody on Wall Street has been punished in any meaningful way for the financial crisis? Maybe there's a connection there?
Apple is currently engaging in the largest single share repurchase program in history [macrumors.com], which will put $60B USD into their investors' pockets by the end of 2015.
Apple financed the repurchase program by selling 17 billion dollars worth of short, medium and long term bonds. It was widely thought that this method was chosen, rather than repatriating cash held overseas, to avoid depletion of onshore cash reserves while at the same time further delaying the payment of income taxes on profits held overseas. It's interesting question whether or not Apple would be able to pay the bond coupons using that cash held overseas without incurring a tax liability. I presume that they wouldn't be able to, but even if they had to pay the coupons out of current after tax income the fact that a huge amount of cash remains on the balance sheet, albeit overseas and subject to tax if ever repatriated, strengthens Apple's financial situation vis-a-vis financing the share repurchase program entirely with cash.
If the 'limited decrypted version' they supposedly have contained child pornography why is he still not charged with a crime? Something seems fishy here.
If I had to guess I would say that they're interested not just in the outcome of this individual case but the particular details of how this case gets decided. Namely, they're trying to establish a useful precedent that may allow them to make an end run around the 5th amendment more easily in future cases.
Forgot to take your medication today?
This is basically the same tactic used in U.S. schools on the children now a days. You know, Billy said you did it, so why don't you tell us what you did.
They didn't invent that in the U.S. school system, it's basic interrogation 101. You always pit the subjects against each other by telling each of them that the other has already rated out so that each of them will tell their side of the story just to get back at the other for rating.
That's not the question. The problem is not getting paid at all in spite of a promise.
To quote the character of Yuri Orlov from Lord of War , "The second rule of gun-running is always ensure you have a foolproof way of getting paid."
The problem with Solyndra was that the beancounters told the Obama administration it was a bad risk, and the administration pushed it through anyway to hilight their "green" agenda and to pay off a major campaign bundler.
And they expect us to believe that ObamaCare is going to save money? Do they take us for complete fools? I'm always amazed that progressives are able to claim with a straight face that ObamaCare will save money. These are the same people who have no retirement savings, don't understand basic economics and can't even balance their own f***king checkbook. They're either expert liars or too stupid to realize what bullshit is being spoon fed to them by the Obama administration. Either way, I neither want nor need their "help".