My industry is 90% based in Los Angeles and New York. If I moved to a city in Mississippi, that would be fine for now, but if I lost that job I'd need to relocate, along with those costs.
Thus those cities never get a critical mass of jobs in my industry.
Poor schools are not the problem. Los Angeles and most of the Bay Area have horrible public schools in general. People either cherry pick the few quality independent school districts in expensive areas of town (like Beverly Hills) or send their kids to private schools.
1) Finland's total tax burden equals 44.1 percent of domestic income, and government spending is equivalent to 56.7 percent of domestic output. 2) Labor regulations are relatively rigid, and the non-salary cost of employing a worker is high.
have you seen the tax structure and government corruption in the United States?
Transparency International Corruption Perception Index for the USA is 74/100, for DRC it is 22/100, a rating that ranks it 154th out of 175 countries. Not quite the same thing.
...the DRC's level of economic freedom remains among the lowest in the world, still well within the "repressed" category. Inadequate institutions make the formation of a vibrant private sector difficult...
...An uncertain legal framework, conflicts with armed militias for control of eastern Congo's rich mineral deposits, endemic corruption, and a lack of transparency in government policy are long-term problems for the mining sector and the economy as a whole. Protection of property rights remains weak and dependent on a dysfunctional public administration and judicial system. Human rights abuses and banditry deter economic activity....
...Despite some progress, the regulatory environment still remains significantly burdensome. Minimum capital requirements to launch a company are about five times the level of average annual income. With development of a modern labor market lagging, the informal sector is the source of most employment. Prices are controlled and regulated by the government, which also subsidizes electricity...
...The Democratic Republic of Congo's average tariff rate is 11.0 percent. Bureaucratic and regulatory barriers impede the free flow of trade and discourage foreign direct investment....
The Democratic Republic of Congo remains plagued by wide-ranging conflict between government forces that historically have been backed by Angola, Namibia, and Zimbabwe and rebels supported by Uganda and Rwanda. Much of the eastern part of the country remains embroiled in conflict. In 2006, Joseph Kabila won the first multi-party election in 40 years. He was re-elected in December 2011 in a flawed and violent election. Rebel groups including the Lord's Resistance Army, M23, and the Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda remain active in the eastern regions. Renewed violence has led to massive population displacement and atrocities against civilians. The DRC continues to host the U.N.'s largest peacekeeping mission. Political instability, lack of transparency, and systematic corruption undermine economic growth.
17% of children 5-14 in the Democratic Republic of the Congo work. This is despite 67% attending school, and 16.2% of the children go to school and work.
The Democratic Republic of the Congo has ratified all key international conventions concerning child labor, including a minimum age to work of 16. But obviously it isn't enforced (if it is enforceable).
Children are required to attend school only up to age 15. This standard makes children who are 15 years of age who do not have an apprenticeship particularly vulnerable to the worst forms of child labor, as they are not required to be in school but are not legally permitted to work either
The market price for homes is determined almost entirely by how much people are willing to pay,
Housing prices are determined like all other market prices, by supply and demand.
Supply is artificially reduced with land-use regulation.
This study suggests that reducing land-use restrictions in New York, San Francisco and San Jose to the level of the US median city would expand their labor forces, boosting US GDP by 9.5%.
San Francisco is the city that seems the most crazy. Unlike Dubai and Hong Kong with plenty of 50+ story apartment buildings built recently, San Francisco has a 40-foot height limit on most of its housing stock, much of which was built before 1960 and not up to modern seismic standards.
We have to stop the money accumulation, the only thing this accomplishes is more money on the supply side. There's plenty already, we have more people who would love to invest in something sensible than there are sensible investments.
Investments are generally spent by the entities being invested in. Companies raise capital to spend it, not to sit on it.
But for that we need people to actually get money for working.
People do get paid money for working, but their salaries are largely based on their productivity. And productivity is largely based on skill (as well as capital equipment investment).
A ditch digger won't be paid much, because you go can purchase a mechanized ditch digger, but it has to be operated by someone who has the skills to use it (and it thus as productive as 20 people who only know how to use a shovel).
So any mature company that's already profitable should be able to ignore Wall Street entirely and just continue doing what it did before.
Except the company has a fiduciary responsibility to provide value to its shareholders (i.e. owners). When the stock tanks, the stockholders get mad, and the executives get fired.
The productivity increase certainly allows for most people to barely need to work at all; the socio-political system, not the productivity, is what impedes it.
However it is possible that the productivity increases are due to the socio-political system - productiviy growth has been far less in countries without high levels of market-based economics. See China before Mao's death versus after, for example.
In theory if we could have a micro-voting system that accurately represented the values across all demographics then we would know what people consider important and could use that to guide the flow of money from one economy to the other.
Yes, that micro-voting is called "price"...and when people actually have to pay money rather than pushing a voting button, they tend to think more about what their vote means (i.e. "putting your money where your mouth is").
"Americans average 25.1 working hours per person in working age per week, but the Germans average 18.6 hours. The average American works 46.2 weeks per year, while the French average 40 weeks per year. Why do western Europeans work so much less than Americans? Recent work argues that these differences result from higher European tax rates, but the vast empirical labor supply literature suggests that tax rates can explain only a small amount of the differences in hours between the U.S. and Europe. Another popular view is that these differences are explained by long-standing European "culture," but Europeans worked more than Americans as late as the 1960s. In this paper, we argue that European labor market regulations, advocated by unions in declining European industries who argued "work less, work all" explain the bulk of the difference between the U.S. and Europe. These policies do not seem to have increased employment, but they may have had a more society-wide influence on leisure patterns because of a social multiplier where the returns to leisure increase as more people are taking longer vacations."
"Over the past four decades, depending on which of their measures one uses, the amount of time that working-age Americans are devoting to leisure activities has risen by 4-8 hours a week. (For somebody working 40 hours a week, that is equivalent to 5-10 weeks of extra holiday a year.) Nearly every category of American has more spare time: single or married, with or without children, both men and women. The only twist is that less educated (and thus poorer) Americans have done relatively better than more educated ones (see chart). And that is not just because unemployed high-school drop-outs have more free time on their hands. Less educated Americans with jobs - the overstretched middle class of political lore - do very well."
'm looking for him to help me not be so embarrassed about living in the most wealthy country on the planet while we lock the future of our nation down in college debt. It's stupid.
There are two alternatives: 1) End government lending for higher education or 2) lock the future of our nation down in higher taxes...
"America's overall image around the world remains largely positive. Across the nations surveyed (excluding the U.S.), a median of 69% hold a favorable opinion of the U.S., while just 24% express an unfavorable view."
HDR display comes closer to representing the luminance captured by imagers in the display. Today, linear light-level capture on imagers is crushed by a "gamma" function for transmission and display (Luminance out = code value ^ 2.4).
The gamma function inherently limits effective dynamic range to about 7 to 9 f-stops before you start to see banding between adjacent code values.
Alternative "electro-optic transfer functions" than gamma (such as SMPTE ST 2084 "perceptual quantizer" EOTF) can raise the effective dynamic range to 12-14 stops.
The increased dynamic range can be combined with high luminance displays in general that can do over 1000 cd/m^2. Today, most standard dynamic range programs are mastered at 100 cd/m^2 because of dynamic range limitations.
There are very few HDR displays shipping today (the Samsung JS9500 is one), but expect more to be announced at CES.
Meanwhile, other countries offer free (as in beer) University / College tuition to all students who qualify academically
Like France, where students have to sit for the bac when they are 18, a weeklong process that includes written and oral tests in everything from French literature to math to philosophy. And unlike the SAT, the bac is the sole factor that determines whether a French student will graduate from lycee; grades and extracurricular activities are not considered.
Despite this, at France's open-enrollment public universities, the dropout and failure rate after the first year is close to 50 percent.
Before sitting for the bac, at 15 your type of bac or whether you will go into vocational study is determined.
And although college being free in France, a higher percentage of American citizens are tertiary-educated.
Assuming a 2.6m viewing distance, you can see the full resolution of 480i with a 25" set. So yes, I believe that you can tell the difference between 480 lines and HD resolutions on a 40" set.
You may be able to "perceive" a difference between 720p and 1080p on a 40" set (through vernier acuity). But you are unlikely to be able to actually resolve details at the full resolution of 1080p on your 40" set unless your vision is much better than 20/20.
With 20/20 vision, you can identify a letter (such as "E") only with a subtended angle of 5 arc minutes or more.
40" with supposed "HD" which is really 720p half-HD? This the dark ages? Am I to be impressed with a resolution lower than the average cellphone?
At a typical TV viewing distance of 2.6m, you can only see the resolution of 720p with a 45" set or larger. For 1080p resolution, you would need a set of 68" or larger. For 2160p resolution, you need a set of 148" or larger.
Slashdot Mirror
My industry is 90% based in Los Angeles and New York. If I moved to a city in Mississippi, that would be fine for now, but if I lost that job I'd need to relocate, along with those costs.
Thus those cities never get a critical mass of jobs in my industry.
Poor schools are not the problem. Los Angeles and most of the Bay Area have horrible public schools in general. People either cherry pick the few quality independent school districts in expensive areas of town (like Beverly Hills) or send their kids to private schools.
1) Finland's total tax burden equals 44.1 percent of domestic income, and government spending is equivalent to 56.7 percent of domestic output.
2) Labor regulations are relatively rigid, and the non-salary cost of employing a worker is high.
You should keep your files on the cloud...more efficient.
Maybe you should lay some fiber, because clearly there is a profitable opportunity being left on the table...
It is interesting to consider the components of the Dow Jones Industrial Index over time.
Some have stayed around forever (General Electric, since DJIA started in 1896). Some you may have never heard of (International Nickel, 1927-1959).
The majority of current DJIA components have only been in the index since 1991.
have you seen the tax structure and government corruption in the United States?
Transparency International Corruption Perception Index for the USA is 74/100, for DRC it is 22/100, a rating that ranks it 154th out of 175 countries. Not quite the same thing.
Foxconn has a plant in Plainfield, IL making HP computers.
Here is what is going on in DRC:
More info here.
Here is what one is dealing with in the DRC:
The Democratic Republic of Congo remains plagued by wide-ranging conflict between government forces that historically have been backed by Angola, Namibia, and Zimbabwe and rebels supported by Uganda and Rwanda. Much of the eastern part of the country remains embroiled in conflict. In 2006, Joseph Kabila won the first multi-party election in 40 years. He was re-elected in December 2011 in a flawed and violent election. Rebel groups including the Lord's Resistance Army, M23, and the Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda remain active in the eastern regions. Renewed violence has led to massive population displacement and atrocities against civilians. The DRC continues to host the U.N.'s largest peacekeeping mission. Political instability, lack of transparency, and systematic corruption undermine economic growth.
17% of children 5-14 in the Democratic Republic of the Congo work. This is despite 67% attending school, and 16.2% of the children go to school and work.
The Democratic Republic of the Congo has ratified all key international conventions concerning child labor, including a minimum age to work of 16. But obviously it isn't enforced (if it is enforceable).
Children are required to attend school only up to age 15. This standard makes children who are 15 years of age who do not have an apprenticeship particularly vulnerable to the worst forms of child labor, as they are not required to be in school but are not legally permitted to work either
More info here.
There are a number of automated metro systems capable of unattended train operation (UTO).
I've personally taken the ATL airport train, Paris Metro Line 14, the JFK AirTrain, and the Las Vegas Monorail.
The market price for homes is determined almost entirely by how much people are willing to pay,
Housing prices are determined like all other market prices, by supply and demand.
Supply is artificially reduced with land-use regulation.
This study suggests that reducing land-use restrictions in New York, San Francisco and San Jose to the level of the US median city would expand their labor forces, boosting US GDP by 9.5%.
San Francisco is the city that seems the most crazy. Unlike Dubai and Hong Kong with plenty of 50+ story apartment buildings built recently, San Francisco has a 40-foot height limit on most of its housing stock, much of which was built before 1960 and not up to modern seismic standards.
We have to stop the money accumulation, the only thing this accomplishes is more money on the supply side. There's plenty already, we have more people who would love to invest in something sensible than there are sensible investments.
Investments are generally spent by the entities being invested in. Companies raise capital to spend it, not to sit on it.
But for that we need people to actually get money for working.
People do get paid money for working, but their salaries are largely based on their productivity. And productivity is largely based on skill (as well as capital equipment investment).
A ditch digger won't be paid much, because you go can purchase a mechanized ditch digger, but it has to be operated by someone who has the skills to use it (and it thus as productive as 20 people who only know how to use a shovel).
So any mature company that's already profitable should be able to ignore Wall Street entirely and just continue doing what it did before.
Except the company has a fiduciary responsibility to provide value to its shareholders (i.e. owners). When the stock tanks, the stockholders get mad, and the executives get fired.
The productivity increase certainly allows for most people to barely need to work at all; the socio-political system, not the productivity, is what impedes it.
However it is possible that the productivity increases are due to the socio-political system - productiviy growth has been far less in countries without high levels of market-based economics. See China before Mao's death versus after, for example.
In theory if we could have a micro-voting system that accurately represented the values across all demographics then we would know what people consider important and could use that to guide the flow of money from one economy to the other.
Yes, that micro-voting is called "price"...and when people actually have to pay money rather than pushing a voting button, they tend to think more about what their vote means (i.e. "putting your money where your mouth is").
"Americans average 25.1 working hours per person in working age per week, but the Germans average 18.6 hours. The average American works 46.2 weeks per year, while the French average 40 weeks per year. Why do western Europeans work so much less than Americans? Recent work argues that these differences result from higher European tax rates, but the vast empirical labor supply literature suggests that tax rates can explain only a small amount of the differences in hours between the U.S. and Europe. Another popular view is that these differences are explained by long-standing European "culture," but Europeans worked more than Americans as late as the 1960s. In this paper, we argue that European labor market regulations, advocated by unions in declining European industries who argued "work less, work all" explain the bulk of the difference between the U.S. and Europe. These policies do not seem to have increased employment, but they may have had a more society-wide influence on leisure patterns because of a social multiplier where the returns to leisure increase as more people are taking longer vacations."
Full paper here.
"Over the past four decades, depending on which of their measures one uses, the amount of time that working-age Americans are devoting to leisure activities has risen by 4-8 hours a week. (For somebody working 40 hours a week, that is equivalent to 5-10 weeks of extra holiday a year.) Nearly every category of American has more spare time: single or married, with or without children, both men and women. The only twist is that less educated (and thus poorer) Americans have done relatively better than more educated ones (see chart). And that is not just because unemployed high-school drop-outs have more free time on their hands. Less educated Americans with jobs - the overstretched middle class of political lore - do very well."
(From this article in 2006.)
Mainland China has 30 nuclear power reactors in operation, 24 under construction, and more about to start construction.
China is planning to get to 200 GWe nuclear by 2030 and 400 GWe nuclear by 2050 (about 20% and 40% of current electrical power generation).
No, that is not 100%, but a substantial chunk.
'm looking for him to help me not be so embarrassed about living in the most wealthy country on the planet while we lock the future of our nation down in college debt. It's stupid.
There are two alternatives: 1) End government lending for higher education or 2) lock the future of our nation down in higher taxes...
Aberdeenshire and Grampian attracted
1.62 million visitors in 2011.
Palm Springs attracts around 1.5 million visitors, and it is adjacent to the San Gorgonio Pass Wind Farm, with over 3000 wind turbines!
Outside of the USA, the USA doesn't have a great image.
Pew polls say that you are wrong.
"America's overall image around the world remains largely positive. Across the nations surveyed (excluding the U.S.), a median of 69% hold a favorable opinion of the U.S., while just 24% express an unfavorable view."
Don't confuse HDR photography with HDR display.
HDR display comes closer to representing the luminance captured by imagers in the display. Today, linear light-level capture on imagers is crushed by a "gamma" function for transmission and display (Luminance out = code value ^ 2.4).
The gamma function inherently limits effective dynamic range to about 7 to 9 f-stops before you start to see banding between adjacent code values.
Alternative "electro-optic transfer functions" than gamma (such as SMPTE ST 2084 "perceptual quantizer" EOTF) can raise the effective dynamic range to 12-14 stops.
The increased dynamic range can be combined with high luminance displays in general that can do over 1000 cd/m^2. Today, most standard dynamic range programs are mastered at 100 cd/m^2 because of dynamic range limitations.
There are very few HDR displays shipping today (the Samsung JS9500 is one), but expect more to be announced at CES.
Meanwhile, other countries offer free (as in beer) University / College tuition to all students who qualify academically
Like France, where students have to sit for the bac when they are 18, a weeklong process that includes written and oral tests in everything from French literature to math to philosophy. And unlike the SAT, the bac is the sole factor that determines whether a French student will graduate from lycee; grades and extracurricular activities are not considered.
Despite this, at France's open-enrollment public universities, the dropout and failure rate after the first year is close to 50 percent.
Before sitting for the bac, at 15 your type of bac or whether you will go into vocational study is determined.
And although college being free in France, a higher percentage of American citizens are tertiary-educated.
Assuming a 2.6m viewing distance, you can see the full resolution of 480i with a 25" set. So yes, I believe that you can tell the difference between 480 lines and HD resolutions on a 40" set.
You may be able to "perceive" a difference between 720p and 1080p on a 40" set (through vernier acuity). But you are unlikely to be able to actually resolve details at the full resolution of 1080p on your 40" set unless your vision is much better than 20/20.
With 20/20 vision, you can identify a letter (such as "E") only with a subtended angle of 5 arc minutes or more.
40" with supposed "HD" which is really 720p half-HD? This the dark ages? Am I to be impressed with a resolution lower than the average cellphone?
At a typical TV viewing distance of 2.6m, you can only see the resolution of 720p with a 45" set or larger. For 1080p resolution, you would need a set of 68" or larger. For 2160p resolution, you need a set of 148" or larger.