I used to own stock in the company that made spider goats.
When it was first announced I thought it was a great idea and would lead to a business producing a useful product. Spider silk is strong stuff which and would have many useful applications such as lightweight rope and lightweight body armor.
Although the goats made the spider silk proteins, the company never figured out the trick of making actual silk. Some process in the spinnerets of the spiders turns the proteins into silk, and the company was unable to reproduce this effect.
They sold off the IP for the process, and vanished into obscurity. I don't think anyone has figured out what the missing step was. (This was a couple of years ago - may have been solved since.)
I see nothing wrong with using animals in this way - as factories for producing useful products. The goats weren't mistreated (unlike chickens we raise for food). We do the same thing with other animals without the genetic engineering aspect - wool from sheep, for example.
Your mind contains a sophisticated goal setting mechanism (among other features).
To activate it, write down your goals for the day. If it's important to do X hours of work on a particular task, write that down.
It's important to write it out longhand - don't type it. No one knows why this is, but I suspect that writing things out longhand rehearses the goal in several sensory modes: you're speaking the words as you write, you're feeling the words as you write, and you're seeing the words as you write.
Goals should be present, positive, personal, and measurable.
Positive: positive logic. You can't say "I stop doing XXX" because the goal mechanism is a lower-order mechanism and can't do logical negatives. Say "I *do* xxx" instead.
Personal: Start the goal with "I", as in "I complete X hours of work".
Present: Phrase the goal in the present tense, as if you've already accomplished it. "Today I *do* X hours of work on XXX".
Measurable: Some way to determine that you're making progress. Writing "I purchase a new car" is less effective than "I set aside XXX dollars towards purchasing a car".
Tape the written goal to your screen and occasionally glance at it as you're working.
This works for all types of goals - short and long term. So long as they're doable and reasonable, writing them down engages your mental systems to make the outcome happen.
It will never work as a currency because it has built in deflation, which if you've taken ECON 200 you'll know is a really, really bad thing for an economy.
The funny thing about economics is that it's not scientific.
Sure, it uses math and all, in the manner that astrology uses math, but it's nothing more than feel-good storytelling.
In the case of inflation/deflation, there is no analytic theory which describes the situation - nothing based on conclusions from testable assumptions. It's all guesswork from historical evidence.
Don't believe me? Can you tell me the best value for inflation? If the answer is "it depends", then what does it depend on? Is the function strongly peaked or relatively flat? (IOW, is it important to hit the "best" value exactly, or can it be off by a little?) How much is too much?
Or how about the elephant in the room: how is inflation measured? (Does it include luxuries? Should it include gas prices?)
Here's the scoop, the part that your ECON 200 professor didn't teach you.
The economy is healthiest when people have the most choice. Not the greatest "number of choices" - that's different - but the most "choice" of what to do with their money.
Negative inflation encourages people to forego spending, because saving money gives you more spending power in the future. Positive inflation encourages people to spend, since their money will be worth less in the future. Both situations reduce choice by encouraging one action over another without regard to the merits.
Zero inflation is the point at which people will consider a purchase entirely on its merits, which is the point of maximum choice.
This thing about "a little positive inflation is good" is a fallacy. It encourages people to invest when they really don't want to. It forces people into financial markets which are, at their core, corrupt and unfair to the small investor.
The other thing about positive inflation is that it causes bubbles. Inflation is essentially the amount of money more than the total value of goods and services. The extra money goes somewhere, and because money tends to earn more money it forms "pools" in the economy. These pools are areas where the monetary value is greater than the actual value. The very definition of "bubble".
Positive inflation causes bubbles which eventually burst, positive inflation forces people to gamble with their money, and positive inflation is a hidden tax on the population.
Rather than parrot your religious teachings, take some time to think things through logically, as a scientist would.
You've been fed a load of crap. Stop repeating it.
US Productivity has been rising since the beginning.
Since 1970 it's more than doubled.
Productivity in the US is so high that if it were equally distributed, everyone could get $38,000 worth of stuff - every man, woman, and child in the country - and then do it again next year. And the year after that.
Our productivity is so high we're beginning to run out productive job slots. To take an example, the number of people needed in agriculture is vanishingly small compared to the number needed a hundred years ago. Machines now do most of the work.
We read about this all the time: Google's self-driving car will put professional drivers out of work, Watson will put many doctors out of work... the list goes on.
Our culture requires people to work in order to be valid members. We look down upon people receiving welfare, government aid, social security, and so on. The talk around Washington is that people on medicare are moochers! Let's get rid of it and make them pay their own way!
We've doubled productivity, yet we haven't reduced the time we're required to work - in our "race to the bottom" people are working longer hours for ever lowering wages. Sometimes people have to work 3 jobs just to get by.
The solution is to reduce the weekly workload of all employees. If we went to a 30-hour work week with overlapping days, we could eliminate unemployment and pay everyone a living wage. As productivity rises, we could cut the working hours even more.
If we were more like the French, people would have more leisure time to enjoy the fruits of a highly productive society.
Don't knock the French - they've got this "working for a living" thing figured out.
they should teach students in secondary school to be more "highly motivated". would make the college experience much more rewarding.
Motivation is the responsibility of the lecturer, not the student. You can't teach someone to be more motivated. Forcing someone to "tough it out" when things are boring is counterproductive, it's not the way we learn.
Motivation comes from two things: perceived value, and emotional content.
Courses which focus on theory and the abstract aspects of a subject are going to seem boring and pointless, while courses which incorporate a mix of theory and practical application in a way that's perceived as valuable will be more interesting.
So for example, an electronics course can focus on theory and problem solving - with long derivations at the start and the formula results at the end of each lecture. That would be boring, and requires a significant amount of "forced attention".
That same course could focus on hands-on projects, showing students that they could build things which they could actually use. Once a circuit is working, *then* explain why it works - filling in the knowledge gaps after the student has basic familiarity. That would be interesting, and follow more naturally the way humans learn.
That's perceived value; the other aspect is emotional content.
Many lecturers present the information in a dry, matter-of-fact manner. This is also boring, and requires "forced attention".
Some lecturers, however, have an infectious enthusiasm for the subject. They laugh, tell jokes and amusing stories, and generally have fun with the subject. The students enjoy the lecture and the learning isn't an ordeal.
That's the emotional side of value. There are other types of emotional content, such as horror novels in literature, or the chemistry of explosives.
Teach the professors about motivation. You'll get a lot more effect for your efforts.
I've been taking online courses for two years(*), and my conclusion is: it's not the subject, it's the presentation.
I've come to the realization that college professors - even highly esteemed professors from highly esteemed universities - don't know much about the actual technique of teaching, nor of presentation.
Every course I've seen so far goes against the grain of how we learn, or has features which repel attention. Droning talk with hypnotic rhythm, no vocal variety, poor spacing and timing, and filled with pauses and disfluencies which put the student to sleep (Daphne Koller, Stanford). Tedious derivations with no initial apparent purpose and no apparent endpoint which go on and on, suddenly ending with simple result (Anant Agarwal, MIT). Pointless exercise and homework with no apparent relevance to the subject (Richard Buckland, UNSW). The list is endless.
People who give lectures for a living - public speakers, professional salesmen, life coaches, and so on - have this figured out. They *have* to, because their livelihood depends on it. Their presentation has to capture interest, have relevance, have value to the listener, and be easily understood.
College professors sing to a captive audience with no feedback. If students don't do well, it's because of the course content; or it's because the students are not "Stanford level" or whatever. Stanford is considered tough, but no one ever wonders whether it's because the quality of teaching is low. Colleges aren't rated highly when they can teach anyone, they are rated highly when they can only teach the top students.
The typical online course just videotapes a lecture and throws it up on the net with some homework and grading software. There is no rehearsal, no redoing of bloopers or flubs, nothing one would get in a professionally-made video. The homework is generally "one question per concept" and is often "get it right the first time". No room for experimentation, multiple practice, or exploration. No feedback or watching the professor run through an example.
They wonder why the attrition rate is so low, it's obvious.
It's because their methods are just bloody awful.
(Note: I've scored high 90's in each course so far. The material isn't that tough, if you've ever had a good professor you know how understanding is easy when well presented. Blaming the content or the student is a dodge - very little is difficult to understand if it is taught well.)
He's got lots of time-saving suggestions for tiny businesses; for example, contracting out the order-taking/boxing/mailing part of the business. There are companies that do this - send them the product, and they handle inventory and shipping.
1) Make up a quick website to sell your product - three pages or so: a front page, an "about" page, a "FAQ" page, and so on.
2) Make a page that purports to purchase the product, but doesn't actually make the sale. Have them enter their CC number, but don't actually "capture" the number; ie - don't store the number and don't make the purchase. (*)
3) When they hit "submit" present a page that says "we're having difficulties and can't do the purchase right now, we haven't charged (or stored) your CC number. We'll send an E-mail when we're back on line. (You'll only get 1 E-mail from us, and we don't put people on spam lists.)
4) Purchase some Google ad-words which relate to your product and link to the site.
5) Let this steep for a period of time (4 weeks, say) and count the potential purchases.
After the 4-week period, evaluate the response and see if it's worthwhile to go into business with this product.
(*) I'm told that this is legal, so long as you don't record the CC number.
Car software is not safety certified (as aircraft systems are)
Do you have evidence of that?
I suppose there might be a government agency to which one submits car software and gets sign-off, like we do for medical devices (FDA) and aircraft (FAA), but I've never heard of one.
You're right - I was talking off-the-cuff, and I don't know with certainty that there's no certification process or official agency that's responsible for the safety aspects of automotive software. I also don't know about European car standards, so there might be a system in place in France.
You posted for a reason, so do you know of an agency that will certify automobile software as safe? Are there procedures and specifications published somewhere?
The same thing happened to a driver in Oz awhile back.
Modern cars contain numerous independent systems which communicate using an internal bus. If one of those systems fails in a way such that it floods the bus with packets, no other system can get a message through.
If you happen to be on cruise-control at that time, there may be no way out of it. The signals from the steering-wheel computer [buttons] or brake won't get to the computer.
Here's some info that came from the Oz incident:
1) Modern cars don't have a direct key-switch - the computer starts and stops the engine. Turning the engine off is not guaranteed to stop the car. (This was tried in the Oz case.)
2) Some cars do not have direct shift capability; ie - it's "shift by wire": the shifter tells the computer what gear to be in. (Admittedly, I've never seen one, don't know if it's true.)
3) A driver is not strong enough to stop the car against the engine, especially since the engine can down-shift to get more power. Some "mythbusters"-style experimenters disagree with this statement, but their conclusions don't track with these incidents. Also, consider that the driver may be female, young, elderly, out-of-shape and otherwise incapable of braking with the full force of an "average" human driver.
I used to write the software for aircraft instruments, and one thing the hardware should always do is "fail safe". If you have a remote sensor such as a switch, in this case the brake light switch, you always have some mechanism to determine whether the wire is broken. If the remote sensor is on a communication bus, you always look for a "heartbeat" packet saying that the remote sensor is working properly. If something fails, the default action is to go out of cruise-control.
Car software is not safety certified (as aircraft systems are), and perhaps they should be. This will become more important as cars get smarter, and will be critical for self-driving cars.
Companies think the only way to make money is with subscriptions and monthly fees. And when their service reaches end of life and the server goes away, the functionality is lost.
If only they'd concentrate on making a good product, there'd be tons of innovative uses for the information.
I suppose it's the result of modern "cost accounting" practices.
How about a self-contained package which holds all of the wearer's medical records? (Yes, sort out the security issues first.)
How about continuous monitoring of heart rate, blood oxygenation, and temperature?
Rather than go to the doctor "with a fever", the doctor could tell if the fever was low-grade, "spiky", how long it has been going on, &c. Perhaps the specific fever character could be used to disambiguate between certain diseases. A patient could tell if the fever was only certain times of the day (allergic to something at work?) or in certain places.
Blood-oxygenation monitoring and heartrate could be used to diagnose sleep apnea, tell how much exercise the person is getting. Motion monitoring could diagnose sleep disorders.
A "Neurophone" is an ultrasonic transducer that uses bone conduction to present sounds to the inner ear.
How about a neurophone output?
The output could be spoken Siri-style messages, communication from the watch to the wearer would be inaudible to anyone else, there would be no need for a loudspeaker in the watch, or an earphone.
I've often wondered about the programmers who write these software packages.
The stereotype programmer is young, bright, scientific, idealistic, and concerned for global issues.
And yet, big companies have no problem staffing teams to write the software for predator drones, Carnivore, Total Information Awareness, and other packages which are used to violate human rights.
Where do these "programmers of dubious character" come from?
Many programmers say (when I ask) that they have high moral standards - more so than (they say) the average person. And yet, they work on all sorts of sketchy things.
Can anyone explain the disconnect? Is there a level of "bravery" associated with morality (ie - I'm against *this*, but not willing to lose my job over it)? Are moral arguments here (for example) just blowing smoke?
"His chilling statements, found on his Facebook page, portray a deeply intelligent and opinionated man, one who promotes gay rights and gun control, but whose mind has unraveled, likely due to mental illness, paranoia and possibly unresolved trauma, experts said Thursday."
He wasn't mentally ill before the incident, or when he was with the LAPD, but he is now that they want to catch him.
We've seen a number of these "I've got nothing to lose, I'm going out with a bang!" cases recently. What's with that? Has there always been spree killings, but weren't reported widely until recently? Has something changed in society?
(I've often wondered what Aaron Swartz could have done, assuming he believed his life was over & had a year or so of long-term scheming to plan something.)
In older times, movies were subject to censorship.
The history is long and involved, a struggle between powerful parties, but the long-and-short of it was that many state and local "censorship boards" would cut movie scenes which were below the community moral standards.
Predictably, this led to inconsistent views applied across wide geographic areas - censors bragging about how they had cut "the kiss" from "Gone With The Wind", and so on. ("You should be kissed and often, and by someone who knows how.")
The end result was a mess. No two areas saw the same movie, artists complained bitterly about the integrity of their vision, movie makers were discouraged from breaking new ground and so on.
Around the 1960s the movie industry adopted a saner approach: allow any movie to be made, and assign content ratings so that people know what to expect.
That put the decision of "what to see" in the hands of the individual viewer - it neatly sidesteps the conflicting viewpoints of community standards. Everyone gets the freedom to make their own decisions, there is no need for centralized control. Community standards are what the community chooses to see.
===================
Perhaps we should adopt a ratings standard for pornography. With computers and the internet, a ratings system should be straightforward; for example, with four levels of explicit and some attached categories for style.
The porn industry might welcome such a standard: it would help their customers better navigate the topics, and reduce accidental outrage. It would present a framework for automated control at a personal level; ie - parents can set the computer to prevent displaying sites/movies with certain ratings to the kids.
The only debate would be in assigning (and enforcing) the ratings.
With a clearly defined set of descriptions, that's a much simpler task than censoring the internet.
Just out of curiosity, how do you feel about Mastercard and Visa refusing to process donations to Wikileaks?
Cutting Wikileaks off from public support is effectively punishing them, but they have not been even accused [officially] of a crime.
Applying your ideas to the physical world: it is just as much a privilege to have your products on sale in a supermarket. The supermarket decides what they accept in their store, and if they don't like your product - or want to remove your product - they don't need anything like a warrant, or do they?
It's not that companies shouldn't be allowed to choose their vendors, it's that companies shouldn't be allowed to impose arbitrary rules, shouldn't be able to impose unjust prejudice, and shouldn't be able to engage in cronyism.
If I were a produce vendor, and if I could satisfy the supermarket's requirements for amount and quality, and if the supermarket had space and a need to display wares, then yes they should be required to display my produce. They should not be able to refuse my custom for any reason that they can't apply to all vendors.
It's a little different with Google, because Google has no space limitations and no product limitations, but the principle is the same.
They are not refusing a vendor because of a generic rule applied fairly and blindly to everyone.
By your logic, clubs should be able to prohibit women members, landlords don't have to rent to gay couples, and bars don't have to serve blacks.
Sounds to me like the Moon+ Reader author should sue LitRes for Unjust Enrichment.
Also, seriously: Google taking action on an illegal app without judicial oversight?
This should be handled in exactly the same way as law enforcement requests: show the warrant first. (Or in this case, the judgement against.)
Society is quickly descending into a feudal corporate arms race. These sorts of shenanigans should be stomped on with both feet. If you can't compete fairly, then you shouldn't be in business.
I thought the only essential needs were food, water and shelter.
That's true, along with air and sleep*.
Also, needs are defined in different ways depending on circumstance, with no consensus. Certainly food is a need, but is sunshine? We get vitamin D from sunshine, and diet can't make up for lack. Sex is a biological imperative, but can at any time be put off until later.
Needs also form a sort of "hierarchy", where once you are satisfied at a certain level, adding more at that level will gain you nothing. A company can't raise morale by making the bathroom even cleaner than it is - once the bathroom is "clean enough", extra work makes no appreciable difference. Once you have enough to eat, having more doesn't make you happier.
"Safety" is also a need, and depending on the school of thought it comes before or after food and water.
Once you have several layers of needs met, you reach the layer of "self actualization", which is loosely "the need to accomplish something".
That's what this proposal addresses - the need for people to better themselves, and to do something useful with their time.
This proposal is a good idea in many ways - ethically, economically, technically, environmentally. There's no down-side that I can see.
To take one example (economics), new businesses arise from innovation built on infrastructure. This type of infrastructure will foster an enormous boon in productivity, business, employment, and general well-being of people in the country.
In the same manner that the Interstate Highway System fostered economic progress by giving companies easy access to cheap product delivery.
This is exactly the type of project that centralized government should be doing - it promotes growth, increased productivity, jobs, and general welfare. It's of benefit to the people, and not pork directed to specific selected companies.
*I hope this doesn't read as snarky - that's not my intent.
Certified letters have to have the sender noted on the slip that you get from the post office. Sometimes the post office doesn't do this (I have to remind my postal carrier all the time), but if you return the slip with "WHO IS THE SENDER?" written on it then they will fill it out properly and redeliver it.
If the sender isn't someone you know, or with whom you have a business arrangement (and from whom you might be expecting such a letter), don't take delivery. Don't send it back "refused delivery", just don't go get it. You can claim that you were out of town, never got the note, never had time to get it, or otherwise had a legitimate excuse. They can't do anything unless they have proof of "notice of service", which means that they have proof that they contacted you for the suit.
A certified letter is proof of service (ie - you were served with the letter), and they can use this to file suit against you.
If you don't accept the letter, they have to hire someone to personally hand you the notice. This costs them money - in my area the sheriff charges $80 for serving letters. The sheriff will get to it "when he gets to it", which in practice means anywhere from 2 weeks to never.
(As a personal anecdote, some bank in NYC decided from their internal records that they had been paying my NH property taxes for the last 5 years, and "would I just enclose a check for this and send it back"? I never accepted any of their certified letters, and they couldn't be bothered to send a person out to deliver the notice personally. Eventually they gave up. I had cancelled checks going back 5 years, but couldn't convince them otherwise because "their records showed payments for the last 5 years.")
This is one way to deal with frivolous lawsuits. If the lawsuit is genuine, then these sorts of barriers won't matter and you can address the legitimate legal issues. If the lawsuit is genuine and is something that you should address, then they should have no problem sending you information in a regular letter, which isn't considered proof of service.
I know this advice will cause the real lawyers here to cringe and complain, but then again they don't have any good ways to block frivolous suits.
Fight fiercely, Harvard, Fight, fight, fight! Demonstrate to them our skill. Albeit they possess the might, Nonetheless we have the will. How we shall celebrate our victory, We shall invite the whole team up for tea (how jolly!) Hurl that spheroid down the field, and Fight, fight, fight!
Fight fiercely, Harvard, Fight, fight, fight! Impress them with our prowess, do! Oh, fellows, do not let the crimson down, Be of stout heart and thru. Come on, chaps, fight for Harvard's glorious name, Won't it be peachy if we win the game? (oh, goody!) Let's try not to injure them, but Fight, fight, fight! And do fight fiercely! Fight, fight, fight!
I just wanted to point out some really obvious things
There is an wide chasm between "Non compos mentis" and "mental health issues". Note that the 2nd term isn't "mental health disorder" it's "mental health issues".
How will "mental health issue" be defined for this purpose? Is a prescription for antidepressants sufficient for gun confiscation, or does it require a diagnosis of an actual disorder. Will a judge be involved in the ruling, or will the police make the determination? Will it be "confiscate first, check later"?
Will a doctor's word - patient "X" is on antidepressants - be sufficient for the police to come and confiscate arms? Will the confiscation last forever, or can a person be deemed "cured" and get their guns back? Will this cause people to hide real mental health issues for fear of having their property confiscated?
Many people with "mental health issues" have broken no law. This means the government will be taking away the rights of a group of people based on a warm-fuzzy "it seems like the right thing to do" attitude. We could just as easily restrict blacks from having firearms because blacks commit more crimes than whites in this country.
People make a lot of hay over the "social contract". It turns out that our ancestors made a social contract which was explicitly put down on paper and said that you could have your centralized government so long as the people can keep guns.
You cannot break that contract directly, you have to change the constitution to do it - that's the rules, and everyone has to abide by them. If you don't believe in the constitution, then the social contract is null and void, and we might as well do away with the federal government.
And where is state governance in all this? What if some states (Texas comes to mind) simply don't want to restrict gun control in this manner? The constitution explicitly states that the federal government can't take this right away.
And finally, you know that this will be abused by law enforcement to extreme levels. Cops will be grabbing guns off of everyone they see claiming "well, he looked like he had mental health issues". Prosecutors will dig up any thin hint of a mental health issue to justify keeping the guns, and no one will be able to get their property back - ever.
This whole issue is a train wreck waiting to happen. Especially since, given the statistics, it will cause more children to be hurt (on average) than relaxing restrictions.
I just now searched my browser history & couldn't find the message. (I'd love a Memex plugin for Firefox.)
My registrar gets.net domains through Verisign, which is a US company, and I believe that's the issue. They had a nice diagram showing ICANN -> Verisign -> (My Registrar) which shows the problem.
I believe the text also read something like "these agreements bind you to Verisign and ICANN", then went on to explain how Verisign is a US company, how the government could step in and do nasty things, you have agreed to this situation, &c. The note mentioned ".net" and ".com" domains.
The US is driving business away with a weighted stick.
People hold beliefs about other countries and people for a very long time; in many cases, long after the belief has had any meaning. For example, "the French surrendered", "Germans are Nazis", "Chinese products are crappy", "Japanese cars are like finely-tuned watches", and so on. Think of any nation and it comes with a satchel of beliefs held about its people.
The US is getting an odius reputation for business and tourism. The overall message we send is: "don't come to the US for anything". Businesses are leaving the US in droves, preferring to operate in more friendly areas.
When the US is known worldwide as "business unfriendly", it'll be nigh impossible to turn that around even if the situation changes.
This is what our government is doing for us. It's effect on productivity (and employment) is obvious.
(As a personal anecdote, I recently registered a.net domain, and the registrar (in France) had me click through a strongly worded message stating that the US could demand all sorts of privileges from the domain. Essentially, they stated that they could not guarantee my privacy or the safety of my data when registering a.net domain.)
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I used to own stock in the company that made spider goats.
When it was first announced I thought it was a great idea and would lead to a business producing a useful product. Spider silk is strong stuff which and would have many useful applications such as lightweight rope and lightweight body armor.
Although the goats made the spider silk proteins, the company never figured out the trick of making actual silk. Some process in the spinnerets of the spiders turns the proteins into silk, and the company was unable to reproduce this effect.
They sold off the IP for the process, and vanished into obscurity. I don't think anyone has figured out what the missing step was. (This was a couple of years ago - may have been solved since.)
I see nothing wrong with using animals in this way - as factories for producing useful products. The goats weren't mistreated (unlike chickens we raise for food). We do the same thing with other animals without the genetic engineering aspect - wool from sheep, for example.
Your mind contains a sophisticated goal setting mechanism (among other features).
To activate it, write down your goals for the day. If it's important to do X hours of work on a particular task, write that down.
It's important to write it out longhand - don't type it. No one knows why this is, but I suspect that writing things out longhand rehearses the goal in several sensory modes: you're speaking the words as you write, you're feeling the words as you write, and you're seeing the words as you write.
Goals should be present, positive, personal, and measurable.
Positive: positive logic. You can't say "I stop doing XXX" because the goal mechanism is a lower-order mechanism and can't do logical negatives. Say "I *do* xxx" instead.
Personal: Start the goal with "I", as in "I complete X hours of work".
Present: Phrase the goal in the present tense, as if you've already accomplished it. "Today I *do* X hours of work on XXX".
Measurable: Some way to determine that you're making progress. Writing "I purchase a new car" is less effective than "I set aside XXX dollars towards purchasing a car".
Tape the written goal to your screen and occasionally glance at it as you're working.
This works for all types of goals - short and long term. So long as they're doable and reasonable, writing them down engages your mental systems to make the outcome happen.
It will never work as a currency because it has built in deflation, which if you've taken ECON 200 you'll know is a really, really bad thing for an economy.
The funny thing about economics is that it's not scientific.
Sure, it uses math and all, in the manner that astrology uses math, but it's nothing more than feel-good storytelling.
In the case of inflation/deflation, there is no analytic theory which describes the situation - nothing based on conclusions from testable assumptions. It's all guesswork from historical evidence.
Don't believe me? Can you tell me the best value for inflation? If the answer is "it depends", then what does it depend on? Is the function strongly peaked or relatively flat? (IOW, is it important to hit the "best" value exactly, or can it be off by a little?) How much is too much?
Or how about the elephant in the room: how is inflation measured? (Does it include luxuries? Should it include gas prices?)
Here's the scoop, the part that your ECON 200 professor didn't teach you.
The economy is healthiest when people have the most choice. Not the greatest "number of choices" - that's different - but the most "choice" of what to do with their money.
Negative inflation encourages people to forego spending, because saving money gives you more spending power in the future. Positive inflation encourages people to spend, since their money will be worth less in the future. Both situations reduce choice by encouraging one action over another without regard to the merits.
Zero inflation is the point at which people will consider a purchase entirely on its merits, which is the point of maximum choice.
This thing about "a little positive inflation is good" is a fallacy. It encourages people to invest when they really don't want to. It forces people into financial markets which are, at their core, corrupt and unfair to the small investor.
The other thing about positive inflation is that it causes bubbles. Inflation is essentially the amount of money more than the total value of goods and services. The extra money goes somewhere, and because money tends to earn more money it forms "pools" in the economy. These pools are areas where the monetary value is greater than the actual value. The very definition of "bubble".
Positive inflation causes bubbles which eventually burst, positive inflation forces people to gamble with their money, and positive inflation is a hidden tax on the population.
Rather than parrot your religious teachings, take some time to think things through logically, as a scientist would.
You've been fed a load of crap. Stop repeating it.
US Productivity has been rising since the beginning.
Since 1970 it's more than doubled.
Productivity in the US is so high that if it were equally distributed, everyone could get $38,000 worth of stuff - every man, woman, and child in the country - and then do it again next year. And the year after that.
Our productivity is so high we're beginning to run out productive job slots. To take an example, the number of people needed in agriculture is vanishingly small compared to the number needed a hundred years ago. Machines now do most of the work.
We read about this all the time: Google's self-driving car will put professional drivers out of work, Watson will put many doctors out of work... the list goes on.
Our culture requires people to work in order to be valid members. We look down upon people receiving welfare, government aid, social security, and so on. The talk around Washington is that people on medicare are moochers! Let's get rid of it and make them pay their own way!
We've doubled productivity, yet we haven't reduced the time we're required to work - in our "race to the bottom" people are working longer hours for ever lowering wages. Sometimes people have to work 3 jobs just to get by.
The solution is to reduce the weekly workload of all employees. If we went to a 30-hour work week with overlapping days, we could eliminate unemployment and pay everyone a living wage. As productivity rises, we could cut the working hours even more.
If we were more like the French, people would have more leisure time to enjoy the fruits of a highly productive society.
Don't knock the French - they've got this "working for a living" thing figured out.
they should teach students in secondary school to be more "highly motivated". would make the college experience much more rewarding.
Motivation is the responsibility of the lecturer, not the student. You can't teach someone to be more motivated. Forcing someone to "tough it out" when things are boring is counterproductive, it's not the way we learn.
Motivation comes from two things: perceived value, and emotional content.
Courses which focus on theory and the abstract aspects of a subject are going to seem boring and pointless, while courses which incorporate a mix of theory and practical application in a way that's perceived as valuable will be more interesting.
So for example, an electronics course can focus on theory and problem solving - with long derivations at the start and the formula results at the end of each lecture. That would be boring, and requires a significant amount of "forced attention".
That same course could focus on hands-on projects, showing students that they could build things which they could actually use. Once a circuit is working, *then* explain why it works - filling in the knowledge gaps after the student has basic familiarity. That would be interesting, and follow more naturally the way humans learn.
That's perceived value; the other aspect is emotional content.
Many lecturers present the information in a dry, matter-of-fact manner. This is also boring, and requires "forced attention".
Some lecturers, however, have an infectious enthusiasm for the subject. They laugh, tell jokes and amusing stories, and generally have fun with the subject. The students enjoy the lecture and the learning isn't an ordeal.
That's the emotional side of value. There are other types of emotional content, such as horror novels in literature, or the chemistry of explosives.
Teach the professors about motivation. You'll get a lot more effect for your efforts.
I've been taking online courses for two years(*), and my conclusion is: it's not the subject, it's the presentation.
I've come to the realization that college professors - even highly esteemed professors from highly esteemed universities - don't know much about the actual technique of teaching, nor of presentation.
Every course I've seen so far goes against the grain of how we learn, or has features which repel attention. Droning talk with hypnotic rhythm, no vocal variety, poor spacing and timing, and filled with pauses and disfluencies which put the student to sleep (Daphne Koller, Stanford). Tedious derivations with no initial apparent purpose and no apparent endpoint which go on and on, suddenly ending with simple result (Anant Agarwal, MIT). Pointless exercise and homework with no apparent relevance to the subject (Richard Buckland, UNSW). The list is endless.
People who give lectures for a living - public speakers, professional salesmen, life coaches, and so on - have this figured out. They *have* to, because their livelihood depends on it. Their presentation has to capture interest, have relevance, have value to the listener, and be easily understood.
College professors sing to a captive audience with no feedback. If students don't do well, it's because of the course content; or it's because the students are not "Stanford level" or whatever. Stanford is considered tough, but no one ever wonders whether it's because the quality of teaching is low. Colleges aren't rated highly when they can teach anyone, they are rated highly when they can only teach the top students.
The typical online course just videotapes a lecture and throws it up on the net with some homework and grading software. There is no rehearsal, no redoing of bloopers or flubs, nothing one would get in a professionally-made video. The homework is generally "one question per concept" and is often "get it right the first time". No room for experimentation, multiple practice, or exploration. No feedback or watching the professor run through an example.
They wonder why the attrition rate is so low, it's obvious.
It's because their methods are just bloody awful.
(Note: I've scored high 90's in each course so far. The material isn't that tough, if you've ever had a good professor you know how understanding is easy when well presented. Blaming the content or the student is a dodge - very little is difficult to understand if it is taught well.)
I first read about this in the book "The Four Hour Work Week" by Tim Ferriss.
He's got lots of time-saving suggestions for tiny businesses; for example, contracting out the order-taking/boxing/mailing part of the business. There are companies that do this - send them the product, and they handle inventory and shipping.
1) Make up a quick website to sell your product - three pages or so: a front page, an "about" page, a "FAQ" page, and so on.
2) Make a page that purports to purchase the product, but doesn't actually make the sale. Have them enter their CC number, but don't actually "capture" the number; ie - don't store the number and don't make the purchase. (*)
3) When they hit "submit" present a page that says "we're having difficulties and can't do the purchase right now, we haven't charged (or stored) your CC number. We'll send an E-mail when we're back on line. (You'll only get 1 E-mail from us, and we don't put people on spam lists.)
4) Purchase some Google ad-words which relate to your product and link to the site.
5) Let this steep for a period of time (4 weeks, say) and count the potential purchases.
After the 4-week period, evaluate the response and see if it's worthwhile to go into business with this product.
(*) I'm told that this is legal, so long as you don't record the CC number.
Car software is not safety certified (as aircraft systems are)
Do you have evidence of that?
I suppose there might be a government agency to which one submits car software and gets sign-off, like we do for medical devices (FDA) and aircraft (FAA), but I've never heard of one.
You're right - I was talking off-the-cuff, and I don't know with certainty that there's no certification process or official agency that's responsible for the safety aspects of automotive software. I also don't know about European car standards, so there might be a system in place in France.
You posted for a reason, so do you know of an agency that will certify automobile software as safe? Are there procedures and specifications published somewhere?
The same thing happened to a driver in Oz awhile back.
Modern cars contain numerous independent systems which communicate using an internal bus. If one of those systems fails in a way such that it floods the bus with packets, no other system can get a message through.
If you happen to be on cruise-control at that time, there may be no way out of it. The signals from the steering-wheel computer [buttons] or brake won't get to the computer.
Here's some info that came from the Oz incident:
1) Modern cars don't have a direct key-switch - the computer starts and stops the engine. Turning the engine off is not guaranteed to stop the car. (This was tried in the Oz case.)
2) Some cars do not have direct shift capability; ie - it's "shift by wire": the shifter tells the computer what gear to be in. (Admittedly, I've never seen one, don't know if it's true.)
3) A driver is not strong enough to stop the car against the engine, especially since the engine can down-shift to get more power. Some "mythbusters"-style experimenters disagree with this statement, but their conclusions don't track with these incidents. Also, consider that the driver may be female, young, elderly, out-of-shape and otherwise incapable of braking with the full force of an "average" human driver.
I used to write the software for aircraft instruments, and one thing the hardware should always do is "fail safe". If you have a remote sensor such as a switch, in this case the brake light switch, you always have some mechanism to determine whether the wire is broken. If the remote sensor is on a communication bus, you always look for a "heartbeat" packet saying that the remote sensor is working properly. If something fails, the default action is to go out of cruise-control.
Car software is not safety certified (as aircraft systems are), and perhaps they should be. This will become more important as cars get smarter, and will be critical for self-driving cars.
I agree completely.
Companies think the only way to make money is with subscriptions and monthly fees. And when their service reaches end of life and the server goes away, the functionality is lost.
If only they'd concentrate on making a good product, there'd be tons of innovative uses for the information.
I suppose it's the result of modern "cost accounting" practices.
How about a self-contained package which holds all of the wearer's medical records? (Yes, sort out the security issues first.)
How about continuous monitoring of heart rate, blood oxygenation, and temperature?
Rather than go to the doctor "with a fever", the doctor could tell if the fever was low-grade, "spiky", how long it has been going on, &c. Perhaps the specific fever character could be used to disambiguate between certain diseases. A patient could tell if the fever was only certain times of the day (allergic to something at work?) or in certain places.
Blood-oxygenation monitoring and heartrate could be used to diagnose sleep apnea, tell how much exercise the person is getting. Motion monitoring could diagnose sleep disorders.
A "Neurophone" is an ultrasonic transducer that uses bone conduction to present sounds to the inner ear.
How about a neurophone output?
The output could be spoken Siri-style messages, communication from the watch to the wearer would be inaudible to anyone else, there would be no need for a loudspeaker in the watch, or an earphone.
I've often wondered about the programmers who write these software packages.
The stereotype programmer is young, bright, scientific, idealistic, and concerned for global issues.
And yet, big companies have no problem staffing teams to write the software for predator drones, Carnivore, Total Information Awareness, and other packages which are used to violate human rights.
Where do these "programmers of dubious character" come from?
Many programmers say (when I ask) that they have high moral standards - more so than (they say) the average person. And yet, they work on all sorts of sketchy things.
Can anyone explain the disconnect? Is there a level of "bravery" associated with morality (ie - I'm against *this*, but not willing to lose my job over it)? Are moral arguments here (for example) just blowing smoke?
Apropos the gun control debate, note that the media is starting to paint Christopher Dorner with mental illness.
In particular, this quote from The Daily News:
"His chilling statements, found on his Facebook page, portray a deeply intelligent and opinionated man, one who promotes gay rights and gun control, but whose mind has unraveled, likely due to mental illness, paranoia and possibly unresolved trauma, experts said Thursday."
He wasn't mentally ill before the incident, or when he was with the LAPD, but he is now that they want to catch him.
We've seen a number of these "I've got nothing to lose, I'm going out with a bang!" cases recently. What's with that? Has there always been spree killings, but weren't reported widely until recently? Has something changed in society?
(I've often wondered what Aaron Swartz could have done, assuming he believed his life was over & had a year or so of long-term scheming to plan something.)
In older times, movies were subject to censorship.
The history is long and involved, a struggle between powerful parties, but the long-and-short of it was that many state and local "censorship boards" would cut movie scenes which were below the community moral standards.
Predictably, this led to inconsistent views applied across wide geographic areas - censors bragging about how they had cut "the kiss" from "Gone With The Wind", and so on. ("You should be kissed and often, and by someone who knows how.")
The end result was a mess. No two areas saw the same movie, artists complained bitterly about the integrity of their vision, movie makers were discouraged from breaking new ground and so on.
Around the 1960s the movie industry adopted a saner approach: allow any movie to be made, and assign content ratings so that people know what to expect.
That put the decision of "what to see" in the hands of the individual viewer - it neatly sidesteps the conflicting viewpoints of community standards. Everyone gets the freedom to make their own decisions, there is no need for centralized control. Community standards are what the community chooses to see.
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Perhaps we should adopt a ratings standard for pornography. With computers and the internet, a ratings system should be straightforward; for example, with four levels of explicit and some attached categories for style.
The porn industry might welcome such a standard: it would help their customers better navigate the topics, and reduce accidental outrage. It would present a framework for automated control at a personal level; ie - parents can set the computer to prevent displaying sites/movies with certain ratings to the kids.
The only debate would be in assigning (and enforcing) the ratings.
With a clearly defined set of descriptions, that's a much simpler task than censoring the internet.
Just out of curiosity, how do you feel about Mastercard and Visa refusing to process donations to Wikileaks?
Cutting Wikileaks off from public support is effectively punishing them, but they have not been even accused [officially] of a crime.
Applying your ideas to the physical world: it is just as much a privilege to have your products on sale in a supermarket. The supermarket decides what they accept in their store, and if they don't like your product - or want to remove your product - they don't need anything like a warrant, or do they?
It's not that companies shouldn't be allowed to choose their vendors, it's that companies shouldn't be allowed to impose arbitrary rules, shouldn't be able to impose unjust prejudice, and shouldn't be able to engage in cronyism.
If I were a produce vendor, and if I could satisfy the supermarket's requirements for amount and quality, and if the supermarket had space and a need to display wares, then yes they should be required to display my produce. They should not be able to refuse my custom for any reason that they can't apply to all vendors.
It's a little different with Google, because Google has no space limitations and no product limitations, but the principle is the same.
They are not refusing a vendor because of a generic rule applied fairly and blindly to everyone.
By your logic, clubs should be able to prohibit women members, landlords don't have to rent to gay couples, and bars don't have to serve blacks.
That's the difference.
Sounds to me like the Moon+ Reader author should sue LitRes for Unjust Enrichment.
Also, seriously: Google taking action on an illegal app without judicial oversight?
This should be handled in exactly the same way as law enforcement requests: show the warrant first. (Or in this case, the judgement against.)
Society is quickly descending into a feudal corporate arms race. These sorts of shenanigans should be stomped on with both feet. If you can't compete fairly, then you shouldn't be in business.
I thought the only essential needs were food, water and shelter.
That's true, along with air and sleep*.
Also, needs are defined in different ways depending on circumstance, with no consensus. Certainly food is a need, but is sunshine? We get vitamin D from sunshine, and diet can't make up for lack. Sex is a biological imperative, but can at any time be put off until later.
Needs also form a sort of "hierarchy", where once you are satisfied at a certain level, adding more at that level will gain you nothing. A company can't raise morale by making the bathroom even cleaner than it is - once the bathroom is "clean enough", extra work makes no appreciable difference. Once you have enough to eat, having more doesn't make you happier.
"Safety" is also a need, and depending on the school of thought it comes before or after food and water.
Once you have several layers of needs met, you reach the layer of "self actualization", which is loosely "the need to accomplish something".
That's what this proposal addresses - the need for people to better themselves, and to do something useful with their time.
This proposal is a good idea in many ways - ethically, economically, technically, environmentally. There's no down-side that I can see.
To take one example (economics), new businesses arise from innovation built on infrastructure. This type of infrastructure will foster an enormous boon in productivity, business, employment, and general well-being of people in the country.
In the same manner that the Interstate Highway System fostered economic progress by giving companies easy access to cheap product delivery.
This is exactly the type of project that centralized government should be doing - it promotes growth, increased productivity, jobs, and general welfare. It's of benefit to the people, and not pork directed to specific selected companies.
*I hope this doesn't read as snarky - that's not my intent.
You shouldn't have accepted the certified letter.
Certified letters have to have the sender noted on the slip that you get from the post office. Sometimes the post office doesn't do this (I have to remind my postal carrier all the time), but if you return the slip with "WHO IS THE SENDER?" written on it then they will fill it out properly and redeliver it.
If the sender isn't someone you know, or with whom you have a business arrangement (and from whom you might be expecting such a letter), don't take delivery. Don't send it back "refused delivery", just don't go get it. You can claim that you were out of town, never got the note, never had time to get it, or otherwise had a legitimate excuse. They can't do anything unless they have proof of "notice of service", which means that they have proof that they contacted you for the suit.
A certified letter is proof of service (ie - you were served with the letter), and they can use this to file suit against you.
If you don't accept the letter, they have to hire someone to personally hand you the notice. This costs them money - in my area the sheriff charges $80 for serving letters. The sheriff will get to it "when he gets to it", which in practice means anywhere from 2 weeks to never.
(As a personal anecdote, some bank in NYC decided from their internal records that they had been paying my NH property taxes for the last 5 years, and "would I just enclose a check for this and send it back"? I never accepted any of their certified letters, and they couldn't be bothered to send a person out to deliver the notice personally. Eventually they gave up. I had cancelled checks going back 5 years, but couldn't convince them otherwise because "their records showed payments for the last 5 years.")
This is one way to deal with frivolous lawsuits. If the lawsuit is genuine, then these sorts of barriers won't matter and you can address the legitimate legal issues. If the lawsuit is genuine and is something that you should address, then they should have no problem sending you information in a regular letter, which isn't considered proof of service.
I know this advice will cause the real lawyers here to cringe and complain, but then again they don't have any good ways to block frivolous suits.
Fight fiercely, Harvard, Fight, fight, fight!
Demonstrate to them our skill.
Albeit they possess the might,
Nonetheless we have the will.
How we shall celebrate our victory,
We shall invite the whole team up for tea (how jolly!)
Hurl that spheroid down the field, and Fight, fight, fight!
Fight fiercely, Harvard,
Fight, fight, fight!
Impress them with our prowess, do!
Oh, fellows, do not let the crimson down,
Be of stout heart and thru.
Come on, chaps, fight for Harvard's glorious name,
Won't it be peachy if we win the game? (oh, goody!)
Let's try not to injure them, but Fight, fight, fight!
And do fight fiercely! Fight, fight, fight!
(by Tom Lehrer)
Ah, Chu... we hardly knew ye.
I just wanted to point out some really obvious things
There is an wide chasm between "Non compos mentis" and "mental health issues". Note that the 2nd term isn't "mental health disorder" it's "mental health issues".
How will "mental health issue" be defined for this purpose? Is a prescription for antidepressants sufficient for gun confiscation, or does it require a diagnosis of an actual disorder. Will a judge be involved in the ruling, or will the police make the determination? Will it be "confiscate first, check later"?
Will a doctor's word - patient "X" is on antidepressants - be sufficient for the police to come and confiscate arms? Will the confiscation last forever, or can a person be deemed "cured" and get their guns back? Will this cause people to hide real mental health issues for fear of having their property confiscated?
Many people with "mental health issues" have broken no law. This means the government will be taking away the rights of a group of people based on a warm-fuzzy "it seems like the right thing to do" attitude. We could just as easily restrict blacks from having firearms because blacks commit more crimes than whites in this country.
People make a lot of hay over the "social contract". It turns out that our ancestors made a social contract which was explicitly put down on paper and said that you could have your centralized government so long as the people can keep guns.
You cannot break that contract directly, you have to change the constitution to do it - that's the rules, and everyone has to abide by them. If you don't believe in the constitution, then the social contract is null and void, and we might as well do away with the federal government.
And where is state governance in all this? What if some states (Texas comes to mind) simply don't want to restrict gun control in this manner? The constitution explicitly states that the federal government can't take this right away.
And finally, you know that this will be abused by law enforcement to extreme levels. Cops will be grabbing guns off of everyone they see claiming "well, he looked like he had mental health issues". Prosecutors will dig up any thin hint of a mental health issue to justify keeping the guns, and no one will be able to get their property back - ever.
This whole issue is a train wreck waiting to happen. Especially since, given the statistics, it will cause more children to be hurt (on average) than relaxing restrictions.
I just now searched my browser history & couldn't find the message. (I'd love a Memex plugin for Firefox.)
My registrar gets .net domains through Verisign, which is a US company, and I believe that's the issue. They had a nice diagram showing ICANN -> Verisign -> (My Registrar) which shows the problem.
I believe the text also read something like "these agreements bind you to Verisign and ICANN", then went on to explain how Verisign is a US company, how the government could step in and do nasty things, you have agreed to this situation, &c. The note mentioned ".net" and ".com" domains.
The US is driving business away with a weighted stick.
People hold beliefs about other countries and people for a very long time; in many cases, long after the belief has had any meaning. For example, "the French surrendered", "Germans are Nazis", "Chinese products are crappy", "Japanese cars are like finely-tuned watches", and so on. Think of any nation and it comes with a satchel of beliefs held about its people.
The US is getting an odius reputation for business and tourism. The overall message we send is: "don't come to the US for anything". Businesses are leaving the US in droves, preferring to operate in more friendly areas.
When the US is known worldwide as "business unfriendly", it'll be nigh impossible to turn that around even if the situation changes.
This is what our government is doing for us. It's effect on productivity (and employment) is obvious.
(As a personal anecdote, I recently registered a .net domain, and the registrar (in France) had me click through a strongly worded message stating that the US could demand all sorts of privileges from the domain. Essentially, they stated that they could not guarantee my privacy or the safety of my data when registering a .net domain.)