I don't really get why this levels thing would be useful if you didn't keep adjusting them to keep the number of levels fixed. The whole point of an idea like this would be to let people know where a machine stands with respect to what's currently available. If you just keep adding levels to the top, then they'll keep constantly changing and no one will know what's what.
Yea, I have a couple of questions for him. Who the heck is David Cobb? And of what political significance is the Green Party?
Should people vote for you only if they are happy investing a lot of time and effort engaging politics at a purely symbolic level? (If your run at the Presidency isn't purely symbolic, how do you account for your message that swing state voters should cast a ballot for Kerry?)
I don't get it. We have levels right now...we just don't call them "levels".
What's the point of adding another "level" of indirection in this process? Also, it's possible that you'll get manufacturers that try to exploit the interference between components. I have a crap processor and motherboard, so it should be in a level 3, but I've doubled the RAM and hard disk size expected for a level 3 machine, so it's actually a level 5 now. But run it up against any other level 5 machine, and it sucks.
Of course, we could solve this problem by creating a telephone book-sized standard that declares the minimum requirements necessary for each level. They'll have to settle on something that will flow along with time...the minimum requirements for a level 5 will change on a month-to-month basis. And then as people become dependent on this mindless system, and we get unethical manufacturers falsely advertising the levels of their hardware, we'll have to get Congress to start passing laws forbidding that kind of thing.
Actually, I'm starting to change my mind on this levels thing. If we work it right, we could snarl up major corporations and the government to the tune of billions of dollars and years of effort. Maybe if we distract them with this, they won't have time to keep messing up the important stuff in life.
Yea, you're right. This is no big deal...there's no sense in trying to minimize risks since they're already pretty low...it's good enough, right?
What the hell are you talking about? Chicken Little? Bad ATC is the number two reason airplanes do drop out of the sky after pilot error. And if you look at most cases of pilot error, bad ATC nearly always contributes to the errors that are ultimately assessed as the responsibility of the pilot.
Besides, even if I give you the benefit of the doubt, my requirements for airlines are slightly higher than simple survival. I want to do more than just land...I want to land: (1) on a runway, as opposed to in a corn field or a swamp, (2) at the destination declared on my ticket, and (3) on or ahead of the arrival time declared on my ticket. Anything less than that is unacceptable. You can't claim this isn't a big deal simply because, hey, most people will probably still make it out alive.
Congress should pass a law requiring them to repeal two old, stupid laws for every new one they enact. (That's Bill Maher's by the way--one of the political and comic thinkers of our time.)
If the framers had been able to predict what was going to happen, they'd have started a 4th branch of government, the sole purpose of which is to go through existing laws with the power to strike out the old, the irrelevant, the conflicting, and make it understandable so that the common citizen could actually understand the law well enough to abide by it without having to keep a $1000/hr lawyer on retainer.
Yes, I would willingly place my life in the hands of an application called Back Orifice.
I don't care how many hackers wrote it, and how godly their skills. I'm not getting on a plane that's even tenuously related to anything called Back Orifice. (One million marketers can't all be wrong about the significance of product naming.)
I rate this post +5 snarky. (That's a good thing.)
While I agree there's no magic bullet, at the same time, I like my air traffic control fault-tolerant, thank you. One missed maintenance cycle should not result in even the remotest possibility of planes dropping out of the air like moths near a zapper.
Actually, I'm also scared of a public health service because I know a bit about Canada's and the UK's. I used to work for GE Medical Systems on MRI machines, and I learned some interesting information about Canada at that time that didn't speak well to their health care system...not well at all.
It has plusses and minuses, but at least the private system trims the fat. Politicians want bloat.
Hmm...I dunno. My father worked at a blue-collar job for several years that had a seniority list, and the desirable shifts were awarded to the most senior guys. One day he was talking to some of the guys on the top of the list, many of whom were past retirement age but wouldn't retire...they said they couldn't afford the reduction in pay they'd receive if they retired and went on the pension instead.
Using one of the guys as an example, my dad asked him various questions and showed that once expenses were factored into it, he was making something like $30 extra a week working at that job. So he'd log 40 hours, at 68 years old, on a manual labor job when he could be sitting at home, for about $6 extra per day...less than a buck an hour. (That guy and a few others retired within the month.)
The moral of the story is, when it comes to money and work, people often experience a logical disconnect. We value the idea of hard work so much in this country that we never stop to think it could actually be more financially advantageous for us to not work in certain circumstances, especially when other personalities that we work with are involved. I'd say that a bid system like this could be used by hospitals to play on all these things and ultimately get nurses for less than market. For instance, if no one bids on a particular shift, does the pay rate start going up until someone does? I doubt it, but this could be a psychologically important difference to the bidding public. It'd give them incentive to band together a bit instead of simply getting in there to cut each others' throats.
Another thing that someone's already said in this discussion--cheapest isn't necessarily best, even in a case where the labor staff are all sufficiently skilled to do the job (I hope they're restricting bids to the existing nursing staff and not letting bums from the street come in and do a shift). Study after study has shown that productivity and pay rates are not linearly related. In some situations, a 10% pay bump makes no difference, in others it can result in a 50% increase in productivity. This situation should be studied to see what the case is for nursing.
In any case, the mechanisms ultimately don't matter. If there's an overall nursing shortage, that's going to stay that way until they start offering more money on average. This bid system seems like a temporary fix unless they're actually able to convince a good subset of nurses that expecting things like time-and-a-half or double-time isn't reasonable.
This approach sounds like it was derived from some theoretical model you worked up in your head. Not to totally discount it, because certainly some of what you said is true. But the one that really tripped me up: "Instead of seeing your job go overseas, you can compete directly with Indian workers."
As if the minimum wage is why Indian workers are taking tech jobs! I hate to break it to you, man, but I know of *no one* in software (my industry) that is even close to flirting with minimum wage. In most cases the Indians working that same job are still clearing American minimum wage themselves after a wage reduction of 75%. The fact is, American workers could compete directly with Indians as it currently stands as far as minimum wage law is concerned...there are other reasons this competition can't happen, though.
Here's the real scoop. It costs the average US citizen more money to survive than the average Indian. We have more material things of a higher quality than they do, and the same goes for services. You like to be able to walk down the hall (apt) or upstairs (condo/house) and do your laundry in a machine that is reliable and won't break down. Indian families either use machines that break down constantly, do it by hand, and dryers don't exist in most families--everything is air-dried.
We have gone through an economic evolutionary cycle here in America that India will soon experience too. We realized in the 50s that certain purchases were no-brainers (washing machines), because they freed up enough of our time to do other things that actually paid for the cost of the item and then some. It's basic econ--everyone wins, and now there are new jobs for people that know how to make those items. If you look back at pre-Industrial Revolution homes in America, it took a lot of hours of manual labor every day to keep a house running, from looming your own material to preparing meals to washing clothes, etc. Now these are things we devote a fraction of our time to.
The problem at the moment is that India is positioned such that they'll enjoy maximal benefits of this swing and we're positioned so that we'll take maximum pain. It's just the way things work out sometimes.
But don't kid yourself into believing that Americans can compete with Indians any more than we can compete with illegal Mexican day workers that work for less than minimum wage. We're not about the give back the washing machines because the logic is still sound--they still save us more than they cost us in the long run. It's the short run that's causing the problems.
That's the thing that scares me about socializing health care...it becomes a political issue. Not that corporations are inherently better than government, but at least we know what moves corporations to action: money. The primary motivating factor of the government changes on a day-to-day basis. It's frightening to think about, but govt doesn't often care about money all that much.
That implies there is a lot of incredible evidence. Do you have any actual evidence (independent reports) to back this up or are you just repeating what other people tell you?
"[I]ncredible evidence"? You haven't exactly given me a charitable reading that presents my viewpoint in the best possible (or even the intended) light. If someone said to me that there's "some credible evidence" backing a particular conclusion, I would not take that to mean there's lots of incredible evidence and thus only a silly person would believe that conclusion. What I did intend to say was that, while my mind is open on exactly where the line should be drawn on this spectrum, I think the pro-gun lobby makes a better case for handguns than the anti-gun lobby makes against them.
In any case, it's controversial because it's one of those issues that's difficult to study--specifically, it's difficult to define controls in these studies that are acceptable to everyone. Plunging ahead, my thoughts on this issue are partially informed by simply comparing violent gun incidents (injuries and deaths due to the intentional violent use of firearms) in states that have conceal'n'carry (Texas, for example) to those that do not. I say "partially informed" because this statistic is specifically chosen to throw into sharp relief the benefit of conceal'n'carry laws, so it intentionally does not take into account injuries and deaths due to accidents or misuse, only those incidents involving a crime. The argument backing the pro-gun position says that criminals are less likely to attempt an aggravated crime of any kind if conceal'n'carry is allowed and there is a high enough percentage of citizens in the area that use it, and the facts seem to back this up.
I've heard several arguments from the anti-gun lobby that attempt to explain these numbers away, the most convincing of which (in my judgment) is the one having to do with population density. This argument contends that these statistics can only be extended to cover areas that have fairly low population densities; there's no reason to think that such laws would have a similar result in major metropolitan areas. I recognize that this argument does pose some serious questions to pro-gun people that would try to pass these laws in densely populated areas. However, this anti-gun argument has some problems of its own: (1) it seems to concede the point that conceal'n'carry laws are good for low population areas, yet this is rarely the position of the arguer in the face of such a concession, and (2) while we have no data that contradicts this anti-gun argument, neither do we have any that supports it; we've never actually tried conceal'n'carry in major metropolitan areas, so at its very best this argument is far from conclusive.
So the truly independent information I can find (state crime statistics) seems to support the pro-gun argument, at least applied to the proper populations. Even looking at biased information provided by sources intended to harm the pro-gun position, when that information is properly read, doesn't do much to contradict my conclusions. The statistics cited at the beginning of Michael Moore's Bowling for Columbine, when placed in a fair context (i.e., not the misleading context supplied by the movie) support the notion that strictly anti-gun countries fare no better than the United States [see section 6 of source, and in particular these two links referred to therein: 12].
Also, we must keep in mind that while it's fun to argue numbers and debate the applicability and meaning of statistics, there may be a more fundamental issue of Constitutional rights at play in this discussion. In other words, even if the statistics bear out that prevalent gun ownership is more dangerous, it might simply be the cost of exe
I think that weapons are a slightly different issue than tools. Weapons are specifically designed to hurt people--you can't do much else with a gun. Sure, you can do biathalons and shoot targets for fun and hunt...but these are recreational activities, diversions. This makes a slight distinction given the potential for harm due to misuse as opposed to a crowbar, which has a thousand legitimate, non-frivolous ("used in pursuit of diversions or hobbies") uses.
Keep in mind that I'm making this argument for all weapons, and I realize that there's a sliding scale of weaponry over which this argument applies to varying degrees. Specifically, I think it applies in proportion to the harm the weapon can cause. To illustrate the extreme example, I don't think anyone believes that average citizens should be allowed to carry around suitcase nukes or other weapons of mass destruction, privately own functioning tanks, have access to land mines, etc. Handguns, on the other hand, I think are on the side of this spectrum to which my above argument does not apply--there is some credible evidence that conceal'n'carry laws for handguns actually decrease the overall amount of harm done to people.
Clearly, somewhere on the spectrum between BB guns and nukes we have to draw the line, and I'll admit I'm not quite sure exactly where that line ought to be (high-powered rifles, semi-auto "assault" weapons, fully-auto "assault" weapons, dynamite...I'm not sure if it's ok for regular citizens to own these things because I haven't thought about it at a deep level yet, but until I do I'd err on the side of freedom until I'm convinced otherwise). In any case, the simple act of defining the spectrum to encompass all weapons from BB guns to nukes shows that, whatever your opinion on gun control, you and I are a lot closer than we are far apart.
"They", which is Us, get sufficiently fed up with break-ins and theft that we pass laws to reduce it.
I have two words for this argument: source, please. To my knowledge, these are politically expedient ways for do-nothing bureaucrats to show that they're "tough on crime." These laws actually have very little effect...in most cases where the police on the beat invoke them, they usually end up having to let the suspect go because they lack any real evidence. Except in the cases where they push it to the ridiculous extreme and try to prosecute the suspect for quite literally carrying some kind of tool. This, in the absence of any evidence whatsoever connecting that person to an actual crime, is a travesty of justice. So much for innocent until proven guilty, eh?
And crowsbars *are* outlawed in certain circumstances. Check your local.
Yes I know this. I thought I was picking a real-life example that was sufficiently absurd. Apparently not.
It's designed so that when the patrol officers grab a punk with pry bars out back of your house at 1 a.m., they've got something that'll stick on him immediately.
Again, these silly laws are politically expedient but useless. You may wish to familiarize yourself with the laws governing probable cause, because these would entitle police to detain such a suspect while they determined whether he was committing a crime. Again, if they find no other evidence to support such a hypothesis and the law is to be sensible, they'd have to let him go anyway.
Can it be abused? You bet! That's why you have lawyers and court overview as part of the system.
Courts exist to interpret and enforce the law equally for all people. There's some leeway in the interpretation, but they can't legislate from the bench--if a law says wire cutters are illegal and a cop arrested a tradesman for having wire cutters because of a personal grudge, the courts would have to support that action because it's on the law books. Of course, they could strike it down as being unconstitutional, which would be the sensible thing to do, but then the law wouldn't exist for anyone else, either. No, the courts do not exist to enforce silly laws subjectively. They exist to enforce sensible, Constitutional laws objectively (justice is blind, and all that).
I don't wish to be rude, but you sound rather young. Or live in a very nice area. In the latter case check to see if you have those laws and consider that they may well be part of the reason you've got such peace of mind.
Ah, the subtle ad hom! Haven't seen one of those try to sneak by in a while... In any case, these laws do not serve my peace of mind, they serve the peace of mind of lazy politicians that want to project a certain image without actually having to do anything. If you want to see how to deal with crime, look at what Guiliani did in New York. He certainly didn't push any laws like this through the legislature, so how do you account for his success?
Yes, exactly...to pick locks. That's why I'd want to own them. So what's wrong with that?
You're making the assumption that I'd pick the wrong locks, and therefore prohibit me from having them in the first place. Apparently, America to you is a place where I have to prove that I'm not going to break the law, and only then should I be allowed to do something. I live in a different place that gives its citizens the benefit of the doubt until they actually do something wrong.
This same assumption of yours could be make for glass cutters, screwdrivers, crowbars, bolt cutters, wrenches...where do we draw the line? Maybe we shouldn't sell circular saws to people since Dahmer used them to dismember his victims. We live in a free society. If I want to carry spray paint or wire cutters around in my pocket, I should be allowed to do that. Carrying something that has possibly useful, legal uses, in principle, should not be treated as a crime.
Now if you catch me doing something illegal with any of those things, prosecute, prosecute, prosecute. But by passing laws that we selectively enforce against thug-looking black kids but not middle-aged white tradesmen, we have not solved any problems at all. (The thug-looking black kid, by the way, was doing voluntary community work and spray painting the new equipment in the local playground, free of charge. The middle-aged white tradesman, on the other hand, was using his wire cutters to splice into his next door neighbor's cable. Just in case you were wondering...)
Sure, we can outlaw lockpicks. I heard that one of the wire bristles from a street sweeping machine can be bent into a pretty fine lockpick. Should we outlaw stiff pieces of wire while we're at it? How about lighters? And what possible legal use could anyone have for a box cutter, or a Swiss Army knife?
I demand consistency in my laws. Consistency that says we better not outlaw a chunk of metal that's bent into a particular shape if there's a potentially useful purpose. Consistency in the enforcement of laws, too, meaning that we shouldn't pass laws with the expectation that everyone will break them, and we'll just cherry pick the "undesirables" (each authority figure can make up their own definition of this term, by the way) and hassle them.
What's funny about your attitude is that you think criminals can't get their hands on a good lockpick set. Well, I can't, because I'm law abiding. They can, though...just ask the next cop you see how many they've seen their department confiscate.
Yes, this became true in CA a few years ago as well. This seems sort of ridiculous to me...how can they outlaw lockpicks? They're just tools--it's like outlawing crowbars because they're afraid someone will use them for evil.
Anyway, in most states that have outlawed them, you can still get your hands on them by simply registering and passing the test to become a "licensed locksmith". This doesn't necessarily mean you have to hold yourself out as a business, either. It just means you passed some test and registered with the state so you can carry around your lockpick set. I've been thinking about doing this off and on, because in college I lived with a guy from Caltech for a summer, so I of course had a window into lockpicking as a result and it caught my interest.
Re:Surely you must be joking Mr Feynman
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Ah yes, it didn't take long to get the Feynman reference into this discussion. How I love/.!
Why not also consider "disambiguate the phase of the world line signifying the completion of a previous entity or action from the phase representing the commencement of a new entity or action"? Just a thought...I mean, if that's what you gotta do to keep emails from improperly being recognized as attachments, then that's what you gotta do, right?
I'm sure AMD just managed to land a few big accounts that bought a boatload of machines all at once during a week that Intel didn't have a big customer make a bulk purchase. Big deal. If you break down the granularity to a short enough time, I'm sure there's a lot of seconds that go by where AMD sold 0.00953 more machines than Intel did.
The point is that it is still interesting and worth debate, and has been for 900 years...
Well, I'll concede that it's interesting, but it's not worth debating from a serious epistemological standpoint. It is worth debating for sheer academics, just to understand Anselm's points and why they're no longer taken seriously as an argument for the existence of god.
Um... Got anything just a wee bit shorter? Or maybe some useful excerpts?
Well, that was for reference--the rest of my post is the wee bit shorter version.:-) To be fair to Rowe, though, it's about as short as philosophical tracts get...just over 9 pages in my text.
Okay, so you've just argued that the notion of "God", or in this case Anselm's "That than which nothing greater can be conceived" is incoherent. In doing so you've decided to disagree at the level of presupposition, and can now never have any meaningful argument with someone who considers the notion of "God" (and/or "that than which...") coherent, or even possibly so. Have fun.
You've got me just right, except that my argument is yet more sweeping than just addressing Anselm's definition of god. This is my semantic argument against god, and it applies to all such arguments for or against the existence of such a being. I usually hate arguing semantics, but in this case I feel it is justified because all such religious terminology is shrouded in mystery. What are the definitions of the following terms: god, heaven, hell, soul...does anyone agree? Is each religious person free to have their own conception of each of these terms? It seems so, to a great extent. Why is this not the case for other words? Why is it less acceptable when I apply the same standard of definition to a word like apple?
The point is, I may go around saying I believe in foo, but if I never define what foo is, all arguments regarding the existence of foo are rendered moot. If I provide a definition of foo that is vague beyond a certain limit, the definition ceases to be useful.
To throw this point into sharp relief with a somewhat contrived example, consider a similar context that highlights the extremes. If I were to go on speaking about a mathematical entity like force, let's call it faz, I could attribute all sorts of properties to it. Whereas force is a function of mass and acceleration, I could insist that faz is a function of time and charge. But, if I were unwilling to provide an actual formula that defines this entity explicitly in terms of these things, such as F=m*a, all such discussions about theories based on calculations involving faz would be nonsense.
To my way of thinking, religions that use words like god and soul are like physics theories that invoke faz in calculations but don't ever define it, or if they do define it, they define it mathematically in terms of other vague quantities, like "baz" and "shaz". It's all just circular nonsense that doesn't nail the thing down to anything concrete.
Like I said, I usually don't like engaging semantic arguments, but in this case I feel that what I'm up against requires it. The terms at issue, as far as I can tell, are literally meaningless...no one has yet been able to tell me or show me quite what they mean when they say soul or god, so there isn't much point in arguing about whether they exist or not. (Note that this doesn't even allow the argument to progress to whether they exist or not...it simply poses the question: what is it exactly that you are arguing exists? I think this is a valid question.)
Okay, that's fine. I happen to go with Sir Whilhelm Henry of Okham (or Occam whatever) and avoid multiplying entities unnecessarily. Of course, that has little to do with what Anselm is arguing about...
Oh, but my point had everything to do with Anselm. I was simp
I don't understand how, if you concede that your conception of god is that he's not of this physical universe but some metaphysical one, how "proof" enters into the discussion. There can be no proof of a metaphysical being...the very concept of proof is bound to our physical plane of existence.
Yea, you're like, totally wrong. See, this is the type of thing I'm talking about...you're obviously not interested in the truth, or you'd have researched the matter before commenting on it in such an authoritative way.
The fact is, the NRA did cancel all of its meetings out of respect for the Columbine incident. They were unable to cancel one meeting because state law dictates that if an organization wants to maintain its status in the state of Colorado, it must schedule an annual meeting that must not be changed 6 months prior to the date set and must include such-and-such board members, blah blah blah. The point is, they had to have that meeting if they wanted to maintain their charter in the state of Colorado, and Moore artfully cut most of Heston's speech at that event because he spent a great deal of time explaining why they'd cancelled their other events. Not to mention the fact that he cut that hatchet job in with a totally different speech, the cold dead hands one.
My advice is that no one should trust a single source for information, especially if that source is controversial. You should even go farther than that if possible--you should seek out the controversial points of view on the issues in which you agree with the mainstream, and you should seek out the mainstream and opposite controversial points of view for those issues on which you are on a side. I don't mean just know them so you can shoot them down, I mean truly try to understand those points of view. Just don't keep such an open mind your brains fall out.
Otherwise, you risk what has happened here...an embarrassing display of ignorance.
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I don't really get why this levels thing would be useful if you didn't keep adjusting them to keep the number of levels fixed. The whole point of an idea like this would be to let people know where a machine stands with respect to what's currently available. If you just keep adding levels to the top, then they'll keep constantly changing and no one will know what's what.
Yea, I have a couple of questions for him. Who the heck is David Cobb? And of what political significance is the Green Party?
Should people vote for you only if they are happy investing a lot of time and effort engaging politics at a purely symbolic level? (If your run at the Presidency isn't purely symbolic, how do you account for your message that swing state voters should cast a ballot for Kerry?)
I don't get it. We have levels right now...we just don't call them "levels".
What's the point of adding another "level" of indirection in this process? Also, it's possible that you'll get manufacturers that try to exploit the interference between components. I have a crap processor and motherboard, so it should be in a level 3, but I've doubled the RAM and hard disk size expected for a level 3 machine, so it's actually a level 5 now. But run it up against any other level 5 machine, and it sucks.
Of course, we could solve this problem by creating a telephone book-sized standard that declares the minimum requirements necessary for each level. They'll have to settle on something that will flow along with time...the minimum requirements for a level 5 will change on a month-to-month basis. And then as people become dependent on this mindless system, and we get unethical manufacturers falsely advertising the levels of their hardware, we'll have to get Congress to start passing laws forbidding that kind of thing.
Actually, I'm starting to change my mind on this levels thing. If we work it right, we could snarl up major corporations and the government to the tune of billions of dollars and years of effort. Maybe if we distract them with this, they won't have time to keep messing up the important stuff in life.
Yea, you're right. This is no big deal...there's no sense in trying to minimize risks since they're already pretty low...it's good enough, right?
What the hell are you talking about? Chicken Little? Bad ATC is the number two reason airplanes do drop out of the sky after pilot error. And if you look at most cases of pilot error, bad ATC nearly always contributes to the errors that are ultimately assessed as the responsibility of the pilot.
Besides, even if I give you the benefit of the doubt, my requirements for airlines are slightly higher than simple survival. I want to do more than just land...I want to land: (1) on a runway, as opposed to in a corn field or a swamp, (2) at the destination declared on my ticket, and (3) on or ahead of the arrival time declared on my ticket. Anything less than that is unacceptable. You can't claim this isn't a big deal simply because, hey, most people will probably still make it out alive.
Chicken Little, indeed.
Let's outlaw more stuff we don't understand.
Congress should pass a law requiring them to repeal two old, stupid laws for every new one they enact. (That's Bill Maher's by the way--one of the political and comic thinkers of our time.)
If the framers had been able to predict what was going to happen, they'd have started a 4th branch of government, the sole purpose of which is to go through existing laws with the power to strike out the old, the irrelevant, the conflicting, and make it understandable so that the common citizen could actually understand the law well enough to abide by it without having to keep a $1000/hr lawyer on retainer.
Yes, I would willingly place my life in the hands of an application called Back Orifice.
I don't care how many hackers wrote it, and how godly their skills. I'm not getting on a plane that's even tenuously related to anything called Back Orifice. (One million marketers can't all be wrong about the significance of product naming.)
I rate this post +5 snarky. (That's a good thing.)
While I agree there's no magic bullet, at the same time, I like my air traffic control fault-tolerant, thank you. One missed maintenance cycle should not result in even the remotest possibility of planes dropping out of the air like moths near a zapper.
Actually, I'm also scared of a public health service because I know a bit about Canada's and the UK's. I used to work for GE Medical Systems on MRI machines, and I learned some interesting information about Canada at that time that didn't speak well to their health care system...not well at all.
It has plusses and minuses, but at least the private system trims the fat. Politicians want bloat.
Hmm...I dunno. My father worked at a blue-collar job for several years that had a seniority list, and the desirable shifts were awarded to the most senior guys. One day he was talking to some of the guys on the top of the list, many of whom were past retirement age but wouldn't retire...they said they couldn't afford the reduction in pay they'd receive if they retired and went on the pension instead.
Using one of the guys as an example, my dad asked him various questions and showed that once expenses were factored into it, he was making something like $30 extra a week working at that job. So he'd log 40 hours, at 68 years old, on a manual labor job when he could be sitting at home, for about $6 extra per day...less than a buck an hour. (That guy and a few others retired within the month.)
The moral of the story is, when it comes to money and work, people often experience a logical disconnect. We value the idea of hard work so much in this country that we never stop to think it could actually be more financially advantageous for us to not work in certain circumstances, especially when other personalities that we work with are involved. I'd say that a bid system like this could be used by hospitals to play on all these things and ultimately get nurses for less than market. For instance, if no one bids on a particular shift, does the pay rate start going up until someone does? I doubt it, but this could be a psychologically important difference to the bidding public. It'd give them incentive to band together a bit instead of simply getting in there to cut each others' throats.
Another thing that someone's already said in this discussion--cheapest isn't necessarily best, even in a case where the labor staff are all sufficiently skilled to do the job (I hope they're restricting bids to the existing nursing staff and not letting bums from the street come in and do a shift). Study after study has shown that productivity and pay rates are not linearly related. In some situations, a 10% pay bump makes no difference, in others it can result in a 50% increase in productivity. This situation should be studied to see what the case is for nursing.
In any case, the mechanisms ultimately don't matter. If there's an overall nursing shortage, that's going to stay that way until they start offering more money on average. This bid system seems like a temporary fix unless they're actually able to convince a good subset of nurses that expecting things like time-and-a-half or double-time isn't reasonable.
This approach sounds like it was derived from some theoretical model you worked up in your head. Not to totally discount it, because certainly some of what you said is true. But the one that really tripped me up: "Instead of seeing your job go overseas, you can compete directly with Indian workers."
As if the minimum wage is why Indian workers are taking tech jobs! I hate to break it to you, man, but I know of *no one* in software (my industry) that is even close to flirting with minimum wage. In most cases the Indians working that same job are still clearing American minimum wage themselves after a wage reduction of 75%. The fact is, American workers could compete directly with Indians as it currently stands as far as minimum wage law is concerned...there are other reasons this competition can't happen, though.
Here's the real scoop. It costs the average US citizen more money to survive than the average Indian. We have more material things of a higher quality than they do, and the same goes for services. You like to be able to walk down the hall (apt) or upstairs (condo/house) and do your laundry in a machine that is reliable and won't break down. Indian families either use machines that break down constantly, do it by hand, and dryers don't exist in most families--everything is air-dried.
We have gone through an economic evolutionary cycle here in America that India will soon experience too. We realized in the 50s that certain purchases were no-brainers (washing machines), because they freed up enough of our time to do other things that actually paid for the cost of the item and then some. It's basic econ--everyone wins, and now there are new jobs for people that know how to make those items. If you look back at pre-Industrial Revolution homes in America, it took a lot of hours of manual labor every day to keep a house running, from looming your own material to preparing meals to washing clothes, etc. Now these are things we devote a fraction of our time to.
The problem at the moment is that India is positioned such that they'll enjoy maximal benefits of this swing and we're positioned so that we'll take maximum pain. It's just the way things work out sometimes.
But don't kid yourself into believing that Americans can compete with Indians any more than we can compete with illegal Mexican day workers that work for less than minimum wage. We're not about the give back the washing machines because the logic is still sound--they still save us more than they cost us in the long run. It's the short run that's causing the problems.
That's the thing that scares me about socializing health care...it becomes a political issue. Not that corporations are inherently better than government, but at least we know what moves corporations to action: money. The primary motivating factor of the government changes on a day-to-day basis. It's frightening to think about, but govt doesn't often care about money all that much.
"[I]ncredible evidence"? You haven't exactly given me a charitable reading that presents my viewpoint in the best possible (or even the intended) light. If someone said to me that there's "some credible evidence" backing a particular conclusion, I would not take that to mean there's lots of incredible evidence and thus only a silly person would believe that conclusion. What I did intend to say was that, while my mind is open on exactly where the line should be drawn on this spectrum, I think the pro-gun lobby makes a better case for handguns than the anti-gun lobby makes against them.
In any case, it's controversial because it's one of those issues that's difficult to study--specifically, it's difficult to define controls in these studies that are acceptable to everyone. Plunging ahead, my thoughts on this issue are partially informed by simply comparing violent gun incidents (injuries and deaths due to the intentional violent use of firearms) in states that have conceal'n'carry (Texas, for example) to those that do not. I say "partially informed" because this statistic is specifically chosen to throw into sharp relief the benefit of conceal'n'carry laws, so it intentionally does not take into account injuries and deaths due to accidents or misuse, only those incidents involving a crime. The argument backing the pro-gun position says that criminals are less likely to attempt an aggravated crime of any kind if conceal'n'carry is allowed and there is a high enough percentage of citizens in the area that use it, and the facts seem to back this up.
I've heard several arguments from the anti-gun lobby that attempt to explain these numbers away, the most convincing of which (in my judgment) is the one having to do with population density. This argument contends that these statistics can only be extended to cover areas that have fairly low population densities; there's no reason to think that such laws would have a similar result in major metropolitan areas. I recognize that this argument does pose some serious questions to pro-gun people that would try to pass these laws in densely populated areas. However, this anti-gun argument has some problems of its own: (1) it seems to concede the point that conceal'n'carry laws are good for low population areas, yet this is rarely the position of the arguer in the face of such a concession, and (2) while we have no data that contradicts this anti-gun argument, neither do we have any that supports it; we've never actually tried conceal'n'carry in major metropolitan areas, so at its very best this argument is far from conclusive.
So the truly independent information I can find (state crime statistics) seems to support the pro-gun argument, at least applied to the proper populations. Even looking at biased information provided by sources intended to harm the pro-gun position, when that information is properly read, doesn't do much to contradict my conclusions. The statistics cited at the beginning of Michael Moore's Bowling for Columbine, when placed in a fair context (i.e., not the misleading context supplied by the movie) support the notion that strictly anti-gun countries fare no better than the United States [see section 6 of source, and in particular these two links referred to therein: 1 2].
Also, we must keep in mind that while it's fun to argue numbers and debate the applicability and meaning of statistics, there may be a more fundamental issue of Constitutional rights at play in this discussion. In other words, even if the statistics bear out that prevalent gun ownership is more dangerous, it might simply be the cost of exe
I think that weapons are a slightly different issue than tools. Weapons are specifically designed to hurt people--you can't do much else with a gun. Sure, you can do biathalons and shoot targets for fun and hunt...but these are recreational activities, diversions. This makes a slight distinction given the potential for harm due to misuse as opposed to a crowbar, which has a thousand legitimate, non-frivolous ("used in pursuit of diversions or hobbies") uses.
Keep in mind that I'm making this argument for all weapons, and I realize that there's a sliding scale of weaponry over which this argument applies to varying degrees. Specifically, I think it applies in proportion to the harm the weapon can cause. To illustrate the extreme example, I don't think anyone believes that average citizens should be allowed to carry around suitcase nukes or other weapons of mass destruction, privately own functioning tanks, have access to land mines, etc. Handguns, on the other hand, I think are on the side of this spectrum to which my above argument does not apply--there is some credible evidence that conceal'n'carry laws for handguns actually decrease the overall amount of harm done to people.
Clearly, somewhere on the spectrum between BB guns and nukes we have to draw the line, and I'll admit I'm not quite sure exactly where that line ought to be (high-powered rifles, semi-auto "assault" weapons, fully-auto "assault" weapons, dynamite...I'm not sure if it's ok for regular citizens to own these things because I haven't thought about it at a deep level yet, but until I do I'd err on the side of freedom until I'm convinced otherwise). In any case, the simple act of defining the spectrum to encompass all weapons from BB guns to nukes shows that, whatever your opinion on gun control, you and I are a lot closer than we are far apart.
Yes, exactly...to pick locks. That's why I'd want to own them. So what's wrong with that?
You're making the assumption that I'd pick the wrong locks, and therefore prohibit me from having them in the first place. Apparently, America to you is a place where I have to prove that I'm not going to break the law, and only then should I be allowed to do something. I live in a different place that gives its citizens the benefit of the doubt until they actually do something wrong.
This same assumption of yours could be make for glass cutters, screwdrivers, crowbars, bolt cutters, wrenches...where do we draw the line? Maybe we shouldn't sell circular saws to people since Dahmer used them to dismember his victims. We live in a free society. If I want to carry spray paint or wire cutters around in my pocket, I should be allowed to do that. Carrying something that has possibly useful, legal uses, in principle, should not be treated as a crime.
Now if you catch me doing something illegal with any of those things, prosecute, prosecute, prosecute. But by passing laws that we selectively enforce against thug-looking black kids but not middle-aged white tradesmen, we have not solved any problems at all. (The thug-looking black kid, by the way, was doing voluntary community work and spray painting the new equipment in the local playground, free of charge. The middle-aged white tradesman, on the other hand, was using his wire cutters to splice into his next door neighbor's cable. Just in case you were wondering...)
Sure, we can outlaw lockpicks. I heard that one of the wire bristles from a street sweeping machine can be bent into a pretty fine lockpick. Should we outlaw stiff pieces of wire while we're at it? How about lighters? And what possible legal use could anyone have for a box cutter, or a Swiss Army knife?
I demand consistency in my laws. Consistency that says we better not outlaw a chunk of metal that's bent into a particular shape if there's a potentially useful purpose. Consistency in the enforcement of laws, too, meaning that we shouldn't pass laws with the expectation that everyone will break them, and we'll just cherry pick the "undesirables" (each authority figure can make up their own definition of this term, by the way) and hassle them.
What's funny about your attitude is that you think criminals can't get their hands on a good lockpick set. Well, I can't, because I'm law abiding. They can, though...just ask the next cop you see how many they've seen their department confiscate.
Yes, this became true in CA a few years ago as well. This seems sort of ridiculous to me...how can they outlaw lockpicks? They're just tools--it's like outlawing crowbars because they're afraid someone will use them for evil.
Anyway, in most states that have outlawed them, you can still get your hands on them by simply registering and passing the test to become a "licensed locksmith". This doesn't necessarily mean you have to hold yourself out as a business, either. It just means you passed some test and registered with the state so you can carry around your lockpick set. I've been thinking about doing this off and on, because in college I lived with a guy from Caltech for a summer, so I of course had a window into lockpicking as a result and it caught my interest.
Ah yes, it didn't take long to get the Feynman reference into this discussion. How I love /.!
Yea...that doesn't even make sense. They ought to be doing earplug tests.
Eh? Eh? Am I right or what people?
Eh?
Why not also consider "disambiguate the phase of the world line signifying the completion of a previous entity or action from the phase representing the commencement of a new entity or action"? Just a thought...I mean, if that's what you gotta do to keep emails from improperly being recognized as attachments, then that's what you gotta do, right?
Well, ctrl+shift+tab reverses the order of tab traversal. Or, you could use the earlier suggestion someone had of using ctrl+pgup and ctrl+pgdn.
Come on, man...this is firefox! Nothing is impossible! :-)
I'm sure AMD just managed to land a few big accounts that bought a boatload of machines all at once during a week that Intel didn't have a big customer make a bulk purchase. Big deal. If you break down the granularity to a short enough time, I'm sure there's a lot of seconds that go by where AMD sold 0.00953 more machines than Intel did.
Not as a slam against AMD--I like options.
Well, I'll concede that it's interesting, but it's not worth debating from a serious epistemological standpoint. It is worth debating for sheer academics, just to understand Anselm's points and why they're no longer taken seriously as an argument for the existence of god.
Well, that was for reference--the rest of my post is the wee bit shorter version. :-) To be fair to Rowe, though, it's about as short as philosophical tracts get...just over 9 pages in my text.
You've got me just right, except that my argument is yet more sweeping than just addressing Anselm's definition of god. This is my semantic argument against god, and it applies to all such arguments for or against the existence of such a being. I usually hate arguing semantics, but in this case I feel it is justified because all such religious terminology is shrouded in mystery. What are the definitions of the following terms: god, heaven, hell, soul...does anyone agree? Is each religious person free to have their own conception of each of these terms? It seems so, to a great extent. Why is this not the case for other words? Why is it less acceptable when I apply the same standard of definition to a word like apple?
The point is, I may go around saying I believe in foo, but if I never define what foo is, all arguments regarding the existence of foo are rendered moot. If I provide a definition of foo that is vague beyond a certain limit, the definition ceases to be useful.
To throw this point into sharp relief with a somewhat contrived example, consider a similar context that highlights the extremes. If I were to go on speaking about a mathematical entity like force, let's call it faz, I could attribute all sorts of properties to it. Whereas force is a function of mass and acceleration, I could insist that faz is a function of time and charge. But, if I were unwilling to provide an actual formula that defines this entity explicitly in terms of these things, such as F=m*a, all such discussions about theories based on calculations involving faz would be nonsense.
To my way of thinking, religions that use words like god and soul are like physics theories that invoke faz in calculations but don't ever define it, or if they do define it, they define it mathematically in terms of other vague quantities, like "baz" and "shaz". It's all just circular nonsense that doesn't nail the thing down to anything concrete.
Like I said, I usually don't like engaging semantic arguments, but in this case I feel that what I'm up against requires it. The terms at issue, as far as I can tell, are literally meaningless...no one has yet been able to tell me or show me quite what they mean when they say soul or god, so there isn't much point in arguing about whether they exist or not. (Note that this doesn't even allow the argument to progress to whether they exist or not...it simply poses the question: what is it exactly that you are arguing exists? I think this is a valid question.)
Oh, but my point had everything to do with Anselm. I was simp
I don't understand how, if you concede that your conception of god is that he's not of this physical universe but some metaphysical one, how "proof" enters into the discussion. There can be no proof of a metaphysical being...the very concept of proof is bound to our physical plane of existence.
I think atheism is usually associated with I do not know. Your belief system might be called apathetism. :)
Yea, you're like, totally wrong. See, this is the type of thing I'm talking about...you're obviously not interested in the truth, or you'd have researched the matter before commenting on it in such an authoritative way.
The fact is, the NRA did cancel all of its meetings out of respect for the Columbine incident. They were unable to cancel one meeting because state law dictates that if an organization wants to maintain its status in the state of Colorado, it must schedule an annual meeting that must not be changed 6 months prior to the date set and must include such-and-such board members, blah blah blah. The point is, they had to have that meeting if they wanted to maintain their charter in the state of Colorado, and Moore artfully cut most of Heston's speech at that event because he spent a great deal of time explaining why they'd cancelled their other events. Not to mention the fact that he cut that hatchet job in with a totally different speech, the cold dead hands one.
My advice is that no one should trust a single source for information, especially if that source is controversial. You should even go farther than that if possible--you should seek out the controversial points of view on the issues in which you agree with the mainstream, and you should seek out the mainstream and opposite controversial points of view for those issues on which you are on a side. I don't mean just know them so you can shoot them down, I mean truly try to understand those points of view. Just don't keep such an open mind your brains fall out.
Otherwise, you risk what has happened here...an embarrassing display of ignorance.