But, if there are people trampled in a mad rush for the door, then that happened as a consequence of my actions, just as sure as if I had stood at the front and started shooting at the crowd.
Nonsense. If you're shooting at the crowd then people are dying because you shot them. That's direct culpability. If people get trampled in a mad rush for the door, you neither trampled them yourself nor forced anyone else to do so. The people who did the trampling are responsible for those deaths. If they had simply exited the theater in a calm and civilized manner—which is the correct response whether or not the fire is real—then no one would have gotten hurt. By lying about the existence of a fire you're responsible for disrupting the performance, nothing more. Blaming you for people being trampled is just scapegoating; they can't figure out who was actually responsible for those injuries given all the confusion so they lay it on you, even though nothing you did required or justified such a response.
... it's well understood that changing jobs too often looks bad on a resume.
"Looks bad on a résumé" is a far cry from "prevents you from having a bank account or traveling to other countries and taints not just you but your family, friends, and associates as well".
The problem is not some nebulous concept of "social credit" as a way to quantify someone's reputation within a specific context, like a credit score in the context of loans, but rather the fact that this particular form of "social credit" is backed by legal force in a regime which casts various natural human rights as revocable privileges.
Surely a command that the government itself shall not impede the free flow of ideas does not afford non-governmental combinations a refuge if they impose restraints upon that constitutionally guaranteed freedom. —Justice Black
No, when these so-called "restraints" take the form of speech that's exactly what it means. The First Amendment, like everything else in the Constitution, is binding on the government, not private actors. By taking this action the government is infringing on the freedom of speech, and thus violating the Constitution—full stop. This is not counterbalanced by the dubious argument that their target was somehow (according to the government) undermining a more expansive interpretation of freedom of speech than the one embodied in the Constitution. This judge is placing his personal philosophical views above the actual law.
Apparently you've never been to an organized astronomy event. "No white lights" is basic etiquette, to preserve everyone's night vision. You'll be asked to ensure that your headlights, back-up lights, and interior dome lights are all disabled before parking anywhere near the observing field. If you need to leave during the event the standard procedure is to have someone walk ahead of the vehicle with a red flashlight to guide you outside the area safely before you re-enable your vehicle's lights.
I believe you're not allowed to profit off of someone else's copyright
You believe incorrectly. The rule is that you aren't allowed to profit from copyright infringement. (Of course infringement without profit is also prohibited, but that's considered a lesser offense.) Training an AI on an image is not one of the things copyright law reserves for the copyright holder, and so does not constitute copyright infringement, whether or not it's done for profit.
Ignoring the "artificial" aspect for a moment, all they're really doing here is looking at the images other people have published and learning to recognize similar images. The idea that this would be prohibited by copyright law is absurd.
Bitcoin transactions can take up to half an hour to verify, making it pretty much useless for a brick and mortar retail.
You don't actually need to wait for the transaction to be confirmed. It only takes a few seconds to see that a valid transaction was uploaded. At that point the only risk is the buyer attempting to double-spend before the original transaction is confirmed, which is not easy to pull off, and if they do succeed at doing that you can track them down. For moderate-size transactions in a brick-and-mortar retail environment this is more than sufficient. Contrast with the risk of a credit card chargeback, which can occur months later and leaves the merchant very little recourse.
Waiting for confirmations is mainly needed for high-value transactions and certain digital deliveries where you either can't or don't wish to rely on more traditional means to deal with fraudulent payments.
The funny thing is that people think that 'patriarchy' will go away if you replace the men with women.
It will though, because then you'd have a matriarchy rather than a patriarchy. I'm not saying that this would be any better... but the term "patriarchy" does refer specifically to males being in charge. It comes from the Greek word patriarkhia meaning "ruling father".
Much like it's easier to keep your story straight when you're telling the truth.
At the amateur level, maybe. A well-thought-out and practiced lie, however, can easier to keep straight than the truth. Reality tends to be messy, and when people aren't deliberately trying to keep their story straight the details tend to get blurred. Stories that fit together unusually well often contain a fair bit of fiction—either deliberate deception or simple subconscious editing and rationalization.
It does help to have solid evidence on your side, if the people you're trying to convince are the type to be persuaded by the evidence. If not, your skills as a debater will matter far more than whether you're right or wrong.
You can only "just raise prices" to whatever you want if you have a monopoly on a necessity.
It's actually just the opposite. If you have a monopoly then you're probably already setting the price to optimize revenues. In the absence of competition, cost isn't a factor in that optimal price; only the demand curve matters. If you raised the price above that optimal point then the drop in quantity sold would result in lower total revenues. In this situation any increase in costs can only come at the expense of that portion of your profits attributable to the monopoly. You can't just raise prices to pass costs along.
In the absence of a monopoly, the minimum viable price is determined by production costs and the amount of accounting profit needed (after adjusting for risk) to make the investment in the business worthwhile—in other words, the venture's opportunity cost. Anyone charging more than this will be undercut by competitors until prices approach the minimum. If production costs increase, that difference will come not from the business's profits, which are already approaching the minimum sustainable level thanks to competition, but rather from the prices paid by consumers for the same goods. There may also be substitution effects: consumers may switch to lower-quality, cheaper alternatives rather than pay higher prices. Either way, consumers are the ones paying most of the increased production costs.
Makes no sense.... funnily loose is not red underlined, seems my spelling correction accepts it somehow.
"Loose" and "loosing" are perfectly valid words—as in "the knot is loose" or "Mr. Burns deals with unwanted visitors by loosing his hounds." A spellchecker only flags words which aren't in the dictionary; it can't tell when you use the wrong word.
A minutes inconvenience (if that, even) is not depriving you of your liberty, unless you decide to escalate the issue.
It is, actually. At least for those few minutes. And the real metric to measure this by is not the few minutes they're claiming on average from those who meekly fall in line, but rather the amount of force they feel justified in using against those who do not.
Regardless, if I'm paying for a stream, why does it matter who I allow to use it? If that person hogs the stream and locks me out, that is no one's problem but mine. Either I change the password, or I buy another stream.
There you answered your own question. The assumption is that if you do not allow anyone else to use it, those other persons would have to buy another or their own stream.
No, that doesn't answer the question. Only one person is using the stream at a time. It shouldn't matter to Netflix who is paying for it. Apart from the two-stream minimum bundling, which is Neflix's own choice, they get paid the same whether the current subscriber pays for another stream or the other person buys their own. More importantly, Netflix's costs are exactly the same regardless of whether or not the people viewing the streams are related or live at the same address.
I suspect that if Netflix were stricter about sharing it would cause some shifts in exactly who is paying for the subscriptions and how many streams are associated with each account, but overall revenues would end up about the same. Some might pay more, as this study suggested, but that would be offset by others reducing or cancelling their current subscriptions.
My advice would be to forget about the "same household" rule and focus instead on the number of simultaneous streams, something which is easy for them to monitor and enforce. Perhaps offer a single-stream HD plan, as others have suggested, at a price somewhat more than half of the current two-stream basic plan (e.g. $6 for one stream, $8 for two, +$4 each additional stream) to help recover some of their fixed per-subscriber costs.
Pirate sites can make you feel dirty (it costs integrity)...
Frankly, giving money to anyone who endorses DRM and/or pushes for more expansive copyright laws and/or harsher punishments costs a lot more integrity. What you're referring to is simply not helping the publishers as much as they think they deserve—you're not costing them anything—whereas paying them will actively help them to harm others.
You could probably throw in "legality" as a fifth currency, though, somewhere between money and inconvenience but with more probabilistic overtones due to uneven enforcement. This is the one aspect which is almost always in the publisher's favor, but when the opposing side wins on money, convenience, time, and integrity, legality alone is unlikely to save them.
Lenders don't lend money under the expectation that they'll get all of it back. That's what interest is for: it's the cost of the money.
Interest is the cost of the money, but lenders would still charge interest even if they expected to get it all back. While a portion of the interest is based on the risk of default, most of it is simply time preference: money one can spend now is worth more (has a higher net present value) than the same amount of money at some future time.
And any and all of the first amendment can be removed via due process.
Following due process is a necessary but not sufficient condition to justify infringing someone's fundamental rights. If due process were sufficient on its own then the First Amendment would be worthless, along with the rest of the Bill of Rights. The legal process must not only be followed but must itself also be just, and the punishment proportional to the crime.
This can give them a significant advantage over people who only trust 'official' sources of information.
Or a significant disadvantage, if their 'unofficial' sources are wrong. Deciding which sources to trust is part of an investor's job. The SEC is essentially "leveling the playing field" by neutralizing an advantage more skilled investors have over less skilled ones, and by doing so, eliminating an important feedback mechanism which would select for more accurate information about the market.
only accepting reviews posted by the app from the theater during... a showing
Please don't. The last thing we need is more people using their phones during the movie.
The ticket stub idea has merit. Unlike what Rotten Tomatoes is doing it wouldn't interfere with reviews based on screenings prior to the main theatrical release, which are a factor in deciding whether the film is worth seeing on its opening night.
As far as Paypal and MasterCard, should they be able to arbitrarily deny services to anyone, for any reason or none at all?
Yes; it's their system and they have the right to decide the terms of service. They are not your slaves, to be forced to provide services on your terms. The right answer here is to ensure that there are alternative payment systems available which they don't control.
Now, new research shows the same genetic alteration introduced into the girls' DNA, to a gene called CCR5, not only makes mice smarter, but also improves human brain recovery after stroke, and could be linked to greater success in school.
The alteration (deleting the CCR5 gene) makes mice smarter. Not the gene itself.
"the privilege" of speaking their mind in a public forum
We're talking about Pinterest and Facebook here. These are private forums. You can say whatever you'd like in an actual public forum, though of course no one is obligated to visit public forums or listen to what you have to say. Freedom of speech doesn't guarantee you an audience.
Since all that additional electricity consumption happens overnight, if every house has an EV then suddenly the peak electricity consumption period switches from mid-day to overnight.
So charge some of those EVs during the day instead and even out the load. Problem solved. Why do you assume EVs can only be charged overnight? They'll be charged whenever power is cheapest.
The problem here isn't "recursive code", it's "filled the memory". There's nothing wrong with recursion, used properly. All programs that contain loops without fixed upper bounds are recursive to some extent. It doesn't necessarily mean allocating from the stack, especially in languages designed with explicit tail-recursion as a first-class control structure. (Moreover, a "structured" loop with an alloca() call, or even malloc(), could easily have the same effect.)
Business taxes are levied against accounting profits, which in the long run are nothing more than the minimum rate of return necessary to justify the business's capital expenditures and risk. Economic profit, which takes opportunity cost into account, tends toward zero in a competitive market. When economic profit is less than zero the business is non-viable; that occurs well before the accounting profit is reduced to zero.
A marginal business may have a positive accounting profit, but if you tax part of that profit away you lower the return in investment to the point that it makes more sense to invest somewhere else instead, and the business closes. That reduces the supply, and reducing supply of a good results in an increase in price, all else being equal.
Obviously an individual producer can't just arbitrarily raise prices to generate more revenue, as they'd lose business to the competition. If you raise costs across the board, however, then they'll all either have to raise prices together or go out of business. Since costs have gone up for everyone they don't need to worry about being undercut, which is what was holding prices down before.
In general any business is going to have a standard expected accounting profit, after factoring in risk, which is based on the amount of capital involved and the time value of money (the interest rate). Imposing a tax does not change the amount of (after-tax) profit necessary to justify the capital expenditure of the business in the slightest. The tax comes out of the sum of the consumer surplus and producer surplus which lies between the actual market price and the price which would exist in the absence of competition. Of the two, in even a marginally competitive market, the consumer surplus will be by far the largest portion and thus it will be the consumer paying the majority of the tax. In the long run, rather than reducing the profit margin, the effect of taxing corporate profits appears as a combination of higher prices and more limited supply for whatever good or service the business produces. Those who still get the good pay more, and others who would have benefitted instead go without.
The exception is the rare case where a single supplier has an effective monopoly and the ability to set the market price as they please. In that situation the balance shifts toward producer surplus, so (to a point) increasing costs may not lead to correspondingly higher prices. Of course, the simpler solution would be to revoke the monopoly status which the government most likely granted in the first place.
Slashdot Mirror
But, if there are people trampled in a mad rush for the door, then that happened as a consequence of my actions, just as sure as if I had stood at the front and started shooting at the crowd.
Nonsense. If you're shooting at the crowd then people are dying because you shot them. That's direct culpability. If people get trampled in a mad rush for the door, you neither trampled them yourself nor forced anyone else to do so. The people who did the trampling are responsible for those deaths. If they had simply exited the theater in a calm and civilized manner—which is the correct response whether or not the fire is real—then no one would have gotten hurt. By lying about the existence of a fire you're responsible for disrupting the performance, nothing more. Blaming you for people being trampled is just scapegoating; they can't figure out who was actually responsible for those injuries given all the confusion so they lay it on you, even though nothing you did required or justified such a response.
... it's well understood that changing jobs too often looks bad on a resume.
"Looks bad on a résumé" is a far cry from "prevents you from having a bank account or traveling to other countries and taints not just you but your family, friends, and associates as well".
The problem is not some nebulous concept of "social credit" as a way to quantify someone's reputation within a specific context, like a credit score in the context of loans, but rather the fact that this particular form of "social credit" is backed by legal force in a regime which casts various natural human rights as revocable privileges.
Surely a command that the government itself shall not impede the free flow of ideas does not afford non-governmental combinations a refuge if they impose restraints upon that constitutionally guaranteed freedom. —Justice Black
No, when these so-called "restraints" take the form of speech that's exactly what it means. The First Amendment, like everything else in the Constitution, is binding on the government, not private actors. By taking this action the government is infringing on the freedom of speech, and thus violating the Constitution—full stop. This is not counterbalanced by the dubious argument that their target was somehow (according to the government) undermining a more expansive interpretation of freedom of speech than the one embodied in the Constitution. This judge is placing his personal philosophical views above the actual law.
Apparently you've never been to an organized astronomy event. "No white lights" is basic etiquette, to preserve everyone's night vision. You'll be asked to ensure that your headlights, back-up lights, and interior dome lights are all disabled before parking anywhere near the observing field. If you need to leave during the event the standard procedure is to have someone walk ahead of the vehicle with a red flashlight to guide you outside the area safely before you re-enable your vehicle's lights.
I believe you're not allowed to profit off of someone else's copyright
You believe incorrectly. The rule is that you aren't allowed to profit from copyright infringement. (Of course infringement without profit is also prohibited, but that's considered a lesser offense.) Training an AI on an image is not one of the things copyright law reserves for the copyright holder, and so does not constitute copyright infringement, whether or not it's done for profit.
Ignoring the "artificial" aspect for a moment, all they're really doing here is looking at the images other people have published and learning to recognize similar images. The idea that this would be prohibited by copyright law is absurd.
people who don't share American values
Welcoming immigrants is an American value.
Bitcoin transactions can take up to half an hour to verify, making it pretty much useless for a brick and mortar retail.
You don't actually need to wait for the transaction to be confirmed. It only takes a few seconds to see that a valid transaction was uploaded. At that point the only risk is the buyer attempting to double-spend before the original transaction is confirmed, which is not easy to pull off, and if they do succeed at doing that you can track them down. For moderate-size transactions in a brick-and-mortar retail environment this is more than sufficient. Contrast with the risk of a credit card chargeback, which can occur months later and leaves the merchant very little recourse.
Waiting for confirmations is mainly needed for high-value transactions and certain digital deliveries where you either can't or don't wish to rely on more traditional means to deal with fraudulent payments.
The funny thing is that people think that 'patriarchy' will go away if you replace the men with women.
It will though, because then you'd have a matriarchy rather than a patriarchy. I'm not saying that this would be any better... but the term "patriarchy" does refer specifically to males being in charge. It comes from the Greek word patriarkhia meaning "ruling father".
Much like it's easier to keep your story straight when you're telling the truth.
At the amateur level, maybe. A well-thought-out and practiced lie, however, can easier to keep straight than the truth. Reality tends to be messy, and when people aren't deliberately trying to keep their story straight the details tend to get blurred. Stories that fit together unusually well often contain a fair bit of fiction—either deliberate deception or simple subconscious editing and rationalization.
It does help to have solid evidence on your side, if the people you're trying to convince are the type to be persuaded by the evidence. If not, your skills as a debater will matter far more than whether you're right or wrong.
You can only "just raise prices" to whatever you want if you have a monopoly on a necessity.
It's actually just the opposite. If you have a monopoly then you're probably already setting the price to optimize revenues. In the absence of competition, cost isn't a factor in that optimal price; only the demand curve matters. If you raised the price above that optimal point then the drop in quantity sold would result in lower total revenues. In this situation any increase in costs can only come at the expense of that portion of your profits attributable to the monopoly. You can't just raise prices to pass costs along.
In the absence of a monopoly, the minimum viable price is determined by production costs and the amount of accounting profit needed (after adjusting for risk) to make the investment in the business worthwhile—in other words, the venture's opportunity cost. Anyone charging more than this will be undercut by competitors until prices approach the minimum. If production costs increase, that difference will come not from the business's profits, which are already approaching the minimum sustainable level thanks to competition, but rather from the prices paid by consumers for the same goods. There may also be substitution effects: consumers may switch to lower-quality, cheaper alternatives rather than pay higher prices. Either way, consumers are the ones paying most of the increased production costs.
Makes no sense .... funnily loose is not red underlined, seems my spelling correction accepts it somehow.
"Loose" and "loosing" are perfectly valid words—as in "the knot is loose" or "Mr. Burns deals with unwanted visitors by loosing his hounds." A spellchecker only flags words which aren't in the dictionary; it can't tell when you use the wrong word.
A minutes inconvenience (if that, even) is not depriving you of your liberty, unless you decide to escalate the issue.
It is, actually. At least for those few minutes. And the real metric to measure this by is not the few minutes they're claiming on average from those who meekly fall in line, but rather the amount of force they feel justified in using against those who do not.
Regardless, if I'm paying for a stream, why does it matter who I allow to use it? If that person hogs the stream and locks me out, that is no one's problem but mine. Either I change the password, or I buy another stream.
There you answered your own question. The assumption is that if you do not allow anyone else to use it, those other persons would have to buy another or their own stream.
No, that doesn't answer the question. Only one person is using the stream at a time. It shouldn't matter to Netflix who is paying for it. Apart from the two-stream minimum bundling, which is Neflix's own choice, they get paid the same whether the current subscriber pays for another stream or the other person buys their own. More importantly, Netflix's costs are exactly the same regardless of whether or not the people viewing the streams are related or live at the same address.
I suspect that if Netflix were stricter about sharing it would cause some shifts in exactly who is paying for the subscriptions and how many streams are associated with each account, but overall revenues would end up about the same. Some might pay more, as this study suggested, but that would be offset by others reducing or cancelling their current subscriptions.
My advice would be to forget about the "same household" rule and focus instead on the number of simultaneous streams, something which is easy for them to monitor and enforce. Perhaps offer a single-stream HD plan, as others have suggested, at a price somewhat more than half of the current two-stream basic plan (e.g. $6 for one stream, $8 for two, +$4 each additional stream) to help recover some of their fixed per-subscriber costs.
Pirate sites can make you feel dirty (it costs integrity)...
Frankly, giving money to anyone who endorses DRM and/or pushes for more expansive copyright laws and/or harsher punishments costs a lot more integrity. What you're referring to is simply not helping the publishers as much as they think they deserve—you're not costing them anything—whereas paying them will actively help them to harm others.
You could probably throw in "legality" as a fifth currency, though, somewhere between money and inconvenience but with more probabilistic overtones due to uneven enforcement. This is the one aspect which is almost always in the publisher's favor, but when the opposing side wins on money, convenience, time, and integrity, legality alone is unlikely to save them.
Lenders don't lend money under the expectation that they'll get all of it back. That's what interest is for: it's the cost of the money.
Interest is the cost of the money, but lenders would still charge interest even if they expected to get it all back. While a portion of the interest is based on the risk of default, most of it is simply time preference: money one can spend now is worth more (has a higher net present value) than the same amount of money at some future time.
And any and all of the first amendment can be removed via due process.
Following due process is a necessary but not sufficient condition to justify infringing someone's fundamental rights. If due process were sufficient on its own then the First Amendment would be worthless, along with the rest of the Bill of Rights. The legal process must not only be followed but must itself also be just, and the punishment proportional to the crime.
This can give them a significant advantage over people who only trust 'official' sources of information.
Or a significant disadvantage, if their 'unofficial' sources are wrong. Deciding which sources to trust is part of an investor's job. The SEC is essentially "leveling the playing field" by neutralizing an advantage more skilled investors have over less skilled ones, and by doing so, eliminating an important feedback mechanism which would select for more accurate information about the market.
only accepting reviews posted by the app from the theater during ... a showing
Please don't. The last thing we need is more people using their phones during the movie.
The ticket stub idea has merit. Unlike what Rotten Tomatoes is doing it wouldn't interfere with reviews based on screenings prior to the main theatrical release, which are a factor in deciding whether the film is worth seeing on its opening night.
As far as Paypal and MasterCard, should they be able to arbitrarily deny services to anyone, for any reason or none at all?
Yes; it's their system and they have the right to decide the terms of service. They are not your slaves, to be forced to provide services on your terms. The right answer here is to ensure that there are alternative payment systems available which they don't control.
Now, new research shows the same genetic alteration introduced into the girls' DNA, to a gene called CCR5, not only makes mice smarter, but also improves human brain recovery after stroke, and could be linked to greater success in school.
The alteration (deleting the CCR5 gene) makes mice smarter. Not the gene itself.
"the privilege" of speaking their mind in a public forum
We're talking about Pinterest and Facebook here. These are private forums. You can say whatever you'd like in an actual public forum, though of course no one is obligated to visit public forums or listen to what you have to say. Freedom of speech doesn't guarantee you an audience.
Since all that additional electricity consumption happens overnight, if every house has an EV then suddenly the peak electricity consumption period switches from mid-day to overnight.
So charge some of those EVs during the day instead and even out the load. Problem solved. Why do you assume EVs can only be charged overnight? They'll be charged whenever power is cheapest.
The problem here isn't "recursive code", it's "filled the memory". There's nothing wrong with recursion, used properly. All programs that contain loops without fixed upper bounds are recursive to some extent. It doesn't necessarily mean allocating from the stack, especially in languages designed with explicit tail-recursion as a first-class control structure. (Moreover, a "structured" loop with an alloca() call, or even malloc(), could easily have the same effect.)
Business taxes are levied against accounting profits, which in the long run are nothing more than the minimum rate of return necessary to justify the business's capital expenditures and risk. Economic profit, which takes opportunity cost into account, tends toward zero in a competitive market. When economic profit is less than zero the business is non-viable; that occurs well before the accounting profit is reduced to zero.
A marginal business may have a positive accounting profit, but if you tax part of that profit away you lower the return in investment to the point that it makes more sense to invest somewhere else instead, and the business closes. That reduces the supply, and reducing supply of a good results in an increase in price, all else being equal.
Obviously an individual producer can't just arbitrarily raise prices to generate more revenue, as they'd lose business to the competition. If you raise costs across the board, however, then they'll all either have to raise prices together or go out of business. Since costs have gone up for everyone they don't need to worry about being undercut, which is what was holding prices down before.
In general any business is going to have a standard expected accounting profit, after factoring in risk, which is based on the amount of capital involved and the time value of money (the interest rate). Imposing a tax does not change the amount of (after-tax) profit necessary to justify the capital expenditure of the business in the slightest. The tax comes out of the sum of the consumer surplus and producer surplus which lies between the actual market price and the price which would exist in the absence of competition. Of the two, in even a marginally competitive market, the consumer surplus will be by far the largest portion and thus it will be the consumer paying the majority of the tax. In the long run, rather than reducing the profit margin, the effect of taxing corporate profits appears as a combination of higher prices and more limited supply for whatever good or service the business produces. Those who still get the good pay more, and others who would have benefitted instead go without.
The exception is the rare case where a single supplier has an effective monopoly and the ability to set the market price as they please. In that situation the balance shifts toward producer surplus, so (to a point) increasing costs may not lead to correspondingly higher prices. Of course, the simpler solution would be to revoke the monopoly status which the government most likely granted in the first place.