Isn't everything ever made built from current or prior generations of components? How would one build something today made by components not themselves built until next year?
In my current laptop, my original battery started to bulge after two years. I walked into an Apple store, patiently waiting 30 minutes to see someone at the genius bar, and received my complimentary replacement battery. The replacement still works fine a year+ later.
TFA is down/offline but if Apple can replace it for cost, they can certainly replace it for free when it has a defect.
Really? So you invest in what's making money, for example, like a dirty coal power plant on the outskirts of a poor village, then use 1/10th the profit from that plant to combat asthma in that village?
Have you never noticed the "online bill pay" button on your bank's web site? It makes EFT payments to companies, but, if you want to send a payment to someone without an EFT account, most services will automatically cut and mail a physical check. Anyone who can get into your account and make an online payment can mail a check made out to whatever fake ID they have on hand, or whatever fake-ish company name they set up.
Business is a cuthroat enterprise. As such, there is a clear, and present advantage to shafting employees and keeping them ignorant with information control. If you can pay your people peanuts and get away with it, why on earth would you ever want them to know that they are getting shafted? Profit man! Profit! Its why you started the business!
Maybe you started the business because you wanted a good job and couldn't find anyone hiring?
There are people who don't believe a transaction is successful for them unless it hurts the other party. These people are never trying to establish long-term business relationships based on mutual success or respect. While some of these people may stay in business, I imagine they live their lives full of anger and high blood pressure. Meanwhile, I don't think they're actually doing any better than nice people, because the subset of customers that learn they are assholes will never buy from them again, the subset of suppliers that won't tolerate being treated like shit will walk from the account, and the subset of good employers that won't work in that environment quit. With lower volume, fewer bidders, and self-fullfilling-prophecy-good-for-nothing employees, the cycle continues.
My wife just negotiated working from home prior to being hired full-time at a very conservative (read old) company. She'd been a contractor with them for the past year, and worked from home then, but they don't let any full-time employees work from home. Except her, so far as we know. Why? It was really important to her and she was willing to walk if she didn't get it, and they knew she could have a new job in less than a day in this market for her position.
Is that favoritism? I really doubt they favor her more than their existing employees. It's just what mattered to her. She didn't push on the salary or the hours or the responsibilities, either, just the work location.
The agreement between employer and employee is a free-market deal, just the same as between the company and customer. I think employers that share your attitude that employees should accept what crumbs you give them (a.k.a. "bleed me dry" from the opposite perspective) find themselves out of business shortly, or using a revolving cast of unskilled workers that can never do the job right for their pay.
You're absolutely correct, and I agree with you on every single point. But quotas and affirmative action don't fix the problem.
A black kid goes to a substandard school in his neighborhood, and as a result isn't prepared for college.
You make the assumption that someone who doesn't get admitted to college without affirmative action is unprepared for college. UTexas, for a counter example, only admits about 45-50% of applicants - and while I can't find a source I think it's much lower for the school of engineering. Plenty of those qualified for college can't get in to the college of their choice. For a well-off family with a history of college that's fine - they'll just attend another school in a different city or state. But for someone struggling to break out of a poor neighborhood and poor school system, the local school may be the only affordable option. So UT should absolutely let some of those poor local kids in. The better-qualified kids will just attend college somewhere else.
So far I haven't even mentioned race - just a goal to break the cycle of poverty. But given that some people are poorer than others because of past institutional discrimination, society has an increased duty to break their cycle of poverty than it does for, say, someone who's just lazy.
FTA: "Also, they seem to hold a grudge against No Child Left Behind (NCLB), which holds teachers accountable and could be responsible for the increase in test scores."
I agree with them and you that NCLB holds teachers "accountable" and "could be responsible" for the test score changes, but not at all in the way they implied. Rather, NCLB holds teachers accountable not for how their students learn but how they can take standardized tests. Of course test scores rise, but I see no evidence even of correlation between test score increases and actual learning, much less any causation.
So the article is rather clearly biased. I wish it was labelled more clearly as an op ed piece.
A kids trying hes damndest and getting a B is better then a kid getting an easy A.
Since there's nothing better than an A, anyone who can get one easily doesn't deserve it? I think your plan would reward average by explicitly punishing excellence.
NCLB requires frequent testing to measure if students remain prepped at taking tests. IMO learning goes down when testing-or-you-don't-graduate-and-your-teacher-is-fired-and-your-school-is-defunded-and-closed goes up.
And, strangely enough since you're supporting NCLB, you've miscredited it to Clinton. It was a Bush II law, though Clinton had something vaguely similar but watered down early in his administration.
Affirmative action isn't intended to fix discrimination. Affirmative action is intended to fix the income gap caused by past discrimination. Fix that, and neighborhoods will integrate because the only way left to legally discriminate against anyone is via wealth. With integrated neighborhoods and (mostly) integrated schools and playmates, discrimination will (mostly) die away for that generation.
My house, I just bought, was built in the 1940s. The filed covenants are pretty rudimentary from modern standards - can't subdivide, house must be at least 750 sq ft and worth at least $9000 - but still in the paperwork I was given is the restriction that "negros and other non-whites" can't own or live on the property - except as a servant.
In the 40s, simply no one wanted to allow blacks to live anywhere but on the east side of town. Later when such covenants were voided, income disparity kept it that way. And with income disparity comes less time with parents/grandparents at home to help newborns get the jump start they need in education. Now the state closes schools that don't perform well - you guess it, in the "traditionally black" areas - so those kids end up getting bussed around further. Obviously there are some people so naturally gifted that they can succeed in any situation, and those people have "escaped" this cycle and do fine. But on average I don't think we've evened things up from institutional discrimination yet, so we still have to keep pushing on things to get them aligned.
The people who wrote and signed those original covenants are long dead and buried; not buying the house from its Nth owner because of that would have been pointless.
Also I'm posting to fix a mistaken moderation elsewhere in the thread.
Unless you propose to do away with non-cash payment methods, then every merchant that accepts credit will always price their products to cover those fees.
That means that all the people out there who continue to pay for things with cash subsidize those of us that use cards with cash-back programs. I get about half that "haircut" in checks in the mail and free hotels and airfare, and I run anything I can through credit cards that I pay off with no interest.
It's just terminology. Actually it's pretty similar to CSD or Conventional Subdivision Design, the term used for the car-only big-lawn suburban sprawl method of residential planning that - you guessed it - has only been around for 60-70 years or so.
IMO, the term "conventional" stands for "whatever most baby boomers prefer or accept". See also http://xkcd.com/988/.
So he filed legally binding documents without reading them through or investigating the consequences. Technically invalid DMCA's are supposed to be perjury...now his may have been accurate and he just decided 'this time' to call it back, but if we have this law it needs to have teeth against abuse.
Nothing about the DMCA was untrue - she was using his photo without permission. There's nothing in the law about knowing the consequences. In truth the consequences he disliked are GoDaddy's fault, not his, since they are the ones that pull down every site owned by an account if any one of them receive a DMCA notice for any content.
It doesn't seem like he did anything wrong, whatsoever.
$0.10 per piece has been my standard target price for Lego sets since the late 1990s, when I bought (legally) discounted sets at retailers post-holidays and resold the parts on eBay for profit. Only pieces with bulk bricks differ - those should be $0.03-0.04 per piece. Minifigs are more - $0.80-$1.00 each.
I don't see that prices have changed all that much. Sets usually run $0.10-0.13 per piece base price, $0.08 or so on clearance.
If insiders knew the company was going to go bankrupt the day they sold you stock (for $500) - e.g. they knew it was about to lose value but they sold anyway - then yes you should sue.
Equal information is required for both parties in a transaction or else the market isn't free. If you oppose this - and the underlying regulation it requires - then basically you support fraud - since that's the alternative.
(1) Buy "gas" at a gas station. (2) Engine seizes because "gas" was 50% water. (3) Shrug and say "oh well, that's the cost of doing business without regulation".???
IMO one good fit for government is to build infrastructure upon which commerce can flourish. Usually I think of this as roads, water, sewer, communications - places where to some extent or another a duplicate system has a large barrier to entry, but upon which duplicate, redundant companies can compete to distinguish themselves.
So then I have to wonder how basic research fits into this. If the research is done and paid for by private companies, then the government is already going to step in and restrict the market by giving that company patent opportunity as reward. So does government-funded research compete against private research firms (and thereby restrict competition), or does government-funded research made publicly available jump-start private business, growing the competitive market?
I don't know the answer to this. Obviously if the research is defense- or injury-recovery-related then someone can shout "national security!" or "think of the troops!" and get it funded by the feds. I just wish there was a way to quantify the return on basic research paid for by the government then given away. ("But," you say, "sometimes basic research has no immediate return. That's why it's called basic research and that's why few companies bother with it any more." Good point.) Is there a way to restrict free usage to companies that pay U.S. taxes and grow the U.S. economy as other countries do with their research, or is that even desired? Any thoughts?
>> There is no right to healthcare contrary to what you and others say. If you want healthcare, you pay for it.
If there's no fundamental human right to healthcare, food, and shelter, then there's no fundamental human right to free speech, or association, or any of the those other negative rights that are meaningless when you're dead.
Tea Partiers want the social safety net slashed (because they think that's the source of most wasteful government spending) and then the savings used to eliminate the deficit and lower taxes on the middle class.
Occupiers want taxes for the rich jacked up (because they think that's the source of the deficit) and then the income used to beef up the social safety net and lower taxes on the middle class.
The only thing I think both groups agree upon is that middle class taxes are too high, but I don't think either group would compromise to find a funding source for that tax cut, since their other goals are almost completely opposite.
I've had several invites to Google+ but haven't created an account, not specifically because of the real name policy but because of Google's ToS.
I started using Google products many years ago, and some of them I use anonymously. I have a film review blog on blogspot, for example, where I sometimes review films with violence and nudity, and sometimes I use bad words. (No one reads it; it's just for me to remember things.) I don't want that blog associated with my real name since I do some stuff in politics.
If Google publicized how they wanted to keep each of their products separate, where we could use some publicly and some privately and no information would be shared, then I would create a Google+ account. But that's not what they've done at all. No, instead, they change their ToS and talk about how they want to share data between all their products, so I (and my friends?) might get advertisements based on things I did on another product, even if I did so under a pseudonym.
Sorry, Google, but NO. Just NO.
That said, I have a Facebook account to keep up with friends and family since (for the most part) that's what they use, and I can either do so or be a hermit. But I only created it last year, and I started out knowing it's attached to my real name and anything might get released to the public. Google's fault is that I already used them in other ways before they created their social network, something that doesn't apply to Facebook.
Slashdot Mirror
Isn't everything ever made built from current or prior generations of components? How would one build something today made by components not themselves built until next year?
In my current laptop, my original battery started to bulge after two years. I walked into an Apple store, patiently waiting 30 minutes to see someone at the genius bar, and received my complimentary replacement battery. The replacement still works fine a year+ later.
TFA is down/offline but if Apple can replace it for cost, they can certainly replace it for free when it has a defect.
Really? So you invest in what's making money, for example, like a dirty coal power plant on the outskirts of a poor village, then use 1/10th the profit from that plant to combat asthma in that village?
How exactly is that charity?
You can put it on everybody's resume!
Like your reputation once your account starts recommending Xtenz to all your contacts?
Have you never noticed the "online bill pay" button on your bank's web site? It makes EFT payments to companies, but, if you want to send a payment to someone without an EFT account, most services will automatically cut and mail a physical check. Anyone who can get into your account and make an online payment can mail a check made out to whatever fake ID they have on hand, or whatever fake-ish company name they set up.
Business is a cuthroat enterprise. As such, there is a clear, and present advantage to shafting employees and keeping them ignorant with information control. If you can pay your people peanuts and get away with it, why on earth would you ever want them to know that they are getting shafted? Profit man! Profit! Its why you started the business!
Maybe you started the business because you wanted a good job and couldn't find anyone hiring?
There are people who don't believe a transaction is successful for them unless it hurts the other party. These people are never trying to establish long-term business relationships based on mutual success or respect. While some of these people may stay in business, I imagine they live their lives full of anger and high blood pressure. Meanwhile, I don't think they're actually doing any better than nice people, because the subset of customers that learn they are assholes will never buy from them again, the subset of suppliers that won't tolerate being treated like shit will walk from the account, and the subset of good employers that won't work in that environment quit. With lower volume, fewer bidders, and self-fullfilling-prophecy-good-for-nothing employees, the cycle continues.
My wife just negotiated working from home prior to being hired full-time at a very conservative (read old) company. She'd been a contractor with them for the past year, and worked from home then, but they don't let any full-time employees work from home. Except her, so far as we know. Why? It was really important to her and she was willing to walk if she didn't get it, and they knew she could have a new job in less than a day in this market for her position.
Is that favoritism? I really doubt they favor her more than their existing employees. It's just what mattered to her. She didn't push on the salary or the hours or the responsibilities, either, just the work location.
The agreement between employer and employee is a free-market deal, just the same as between the company and customer. I think employers that share your attitude that employees should accept what crumbs you give them (a.k.a. "bleed me dry" from the opposite perspective) find themselves out of business shortly, or using a revolving cast of unskilled workers that can never do the job right for their pay.
You're absolutely correct, and I agree with you on every single point. But quotas and affirmative action don't fix the problem.
A black kid goes to a substandard school in his neighborhood, and as a result isn't prepared for college.
You make the assumption that someone who doesn't get admitted to college without affirmative action is unprepared for college. UTexas, for a counter example, only admits about 45-50% of applicants - and while I can't find a source I think it's much lower for the school of engineering. Plenty of those qualified for college can't get in to the college of their choice. For a well-off family with a history of college that's fine - they'll just attend another school in a different city or state. But for someone struggling to break out of a poor neighborhood and poor school system, the local school may be the only affordable option. So UT should absolutely let some of those poor local kids in. The better-qualified kids will just attend college somewhere else.
So far I haven't even mentioned race - just a goal to break the cycle of poverty. But given that some people are poorer than others because of past institutional discrimination, society has an increased duty to break their cycle of poverty than it does for, say, someone who's just lazy.
FTA: "Also, they seem to hold a grudge against No Child Left Behind (NCLB), which holds teachers accountable and could be responsible for the increase in test scores."
I agree with them and you that NCLB holds teachers "accountable" and "could be responsible" for the test score changes, but not at all in the way they implied. Rather, NCLB holds teachers accountable not for how their students learn but how they can take standardized tests. Of course test scores rise, but I see no evidence even of correlation between test score increases and actual learning, much less any causation.
So the article is rather clearly biased. I wish it was labelled more clearly as an op ed piece.
A kids trying hes damndest and getting a B is better then a kid getting an easy A.
Since there's nothing better than an A, anyone who can get one easily doesn't deserve it? I think your plan would reward average by explicitly punishing excellence.
NCLB requires frequent testing to measure if students remain prepped at taking tests. IMO learning goes down when testing-or-you-don't-graduate-and-your-teacher-is-fired-and-your-school-is-defunded-and-closed goes up.
And, strangely enough since you're supporting NCLB, you've miscredited it to Clinton. It was a Bush II law, though Clinton had something vaguely similar but watered down early in his administration.
Every soldier who dies of thirst is one less solder who can die from the latest missile technology.
I'd think arms dealers would be highly supportive of water purifiers.
Were headphones banned, I would start wearing earplugs. And look for another job.
Affirmative action isn't intended to fix discrimination. Affirmative action is intended to fix the income gap caused by past discrimination. Fix that, and neighborhoods will integrate because the only way left to legally discriminate against anyone is via wealth. With integrated neighborhoods and (mostly) integrated schools and playmates, discrimination will (mostly) die away for that generation.
My house, I just bought, was built in the 1940s. The filed covenants are pretty rudimentary from modern standards - can't subdivide, house must be at least 750 sq ft and worth at least $9000 - but still in the paperwork I was given is the restriction that "negros and other non-whites" can't own or live on the property - except as a servant.
In the 40s, simply no one wanted to allow blacks to live anywhere but on the east side of town. Later when such covenants were voided, income disparity kept it that way. And with income disparity comes less time with parents/grandparents at home to help newborns get the jump start they need in education. Now the state closes schools that don't perform well - you guess it, in the "traditionally black" areas - so those kids end up getting bussed around further. Obviously there are some people so naturally gifted that they can succeed in any situation, and those people have "escaped" this cycle and do fine. But on average I don't think we've evened things up from institutional discrimination yet, so we still have to keep pushing on things to get them aligned.
The people who wrote and signed those original covenants are long dead and buried; not buying the house from its Nth owner because of that would have been pointless.
Also I'm posting to fix a mistaken moderation elsewhere in the thread.
Unless you propose to do away with non-cash payment methods, then every merchant that accepts credit will always price their products to cover those fees.
That means that all the people out there who continue to pay for things with cash subsidize those of us that use cards with cash-back programs. I get about half that "haircut" in checks in the mail and free hotels and airfare, and I run anything I can through credit cards that I pay off with no interest.
It's just terminology. Actually it's pretty similar to CSD or Conventional Subdivision Design, the term used for the car-only big-lawn suburban sprawl method of residential planning that - you guessed it - has only been around for 60-70 years or so.
IMO, the term "conventional" stands for "whatever most baby boomers prefer or accept". See also http://xkcd.com/988/.
So he filed legally binding documents without reading them through or investigating the consequences. Technically invalid DMCA's are supposed to be perjury...now his may have been accurate and he just decided 'this time' to call it back, but if we have this law it needs to have teeth against abuse.
Nothing about the DMCA was untrue - she was using his photo without permission. There's nothing in the law about knowing the consequences. In truth the consequences he disliked are GoDaddy's fault, not his, since they are the ones that pull down every site owned by an account if any one of them receive a DMCA notice for any content.
It doesn't seem like he did anything wrong, whatsoever.
$0.10 per piece has been my standard target price for Lego sets since the late 1990s, when I bought (legally) discounted sets at retailers post-holidays and resold the parts on eBay for profit. Only pieces with bulk bricks differ - those should be $0.03-0.04 per piece. Minifigs are more - $0.80-$1.00 each.
I don't see that prices have changed all that much. Sets usually run $0.10-0.13 per piece base price, $0.08 or so on clearance.
If insiders knew the company was going to go bankrupt the day they sold you stock (for $500) - e.g. they knew it was about to lose value but they sold anyway - then yes you should sue.
Equal information is required for both parties in a transaction or else the market isn't free. If you oppose this - and the underlying regulation it requires - then basically you support fraud - since that's the alternative.
(1) Buy "gas" at a gas station.
(2) Engine seizes because "gas" was 50% water.
(3) Shrug and say "oh well, that's the cost of doing business without regulation".???
IMO one good fit for government is to build infrastructure upon which commerce can flourish. Usually I think of this as roads, water, sewer, communications - places where to some extent or another a duplicate system has a large barrier to entry, but upon which duplicate, redundant companies can compete to distinguish themselves.
So then I have to wonder how basic research fits into this. If the research is done and paid for by private companies, then the government is already going to step in and restrict the market by giving that company patent opportunity as reward. So does government-funded research compete against private research firms (and thereby restrict competition), or does government-funded research made publicly available jump-start private business, growing the competitive market?
I don't know the answer to this. Obviously if the research is defense- or injury-recovery-related then someone can shout "national security!" or "think of the troops!" and get it funded by the feds. I just wish there was a way to quantify the return on basic research paid for by the government then given away. ("But," you say, "sometimes basic research has no immediate return. That's why it's called basic research and that's why few companies bother with it any more." Good point.) Is there a way to restrict free usage to companies that pay U.S. taxes and grow the U.S. economy as other countries do with their research, or is that even desired? Any thoughts?
>> There is no right to healthcare contrary to what you and others say. If you want healthcare, you pay for it.
If there's no fundamental human right to healthcare, food, and shelter, then there's no fundamental human right to free speech, or association, or any of the those other negative rights that are meaningless when you're dead.
Tea Partiers want the social safety net slashed (because they think that's the source of most wasteful government spending) and then the savings used to eliminate the deficit and lower taxes on the middle class.
Occupiers want taxes for the rich jacked up (because they think that's the source of the deficit) and then the income used to beef up the social safety net and lower taxes on the middle class.
The only thing I think both groups agree upon is that middle class taxes are too high, but I don't think either group would compromise to find a funding source for that tax cut, since their other goals are almost completely opposite.
I've had several invites to Google+ but haven't created an account, not specifically because of the real name policy but because of Google's ToS.
I started using Google products many years ago, and some of them I use anonymously. I have a film review blog on blogspot, for example, where I sometimes review films with violence and nudity, and sometimes I use bad words. (No one reads it; it's just for me to remember things.) I don't want that blog associated with my real name since I do some stuff in politics.
If Google publicized how they wanted to keep each of their products separate, where we could use some publicly and some privately and no information would be shared, then I would create a Google+ account. But that's not what they've done at all. No, instead, they change their ToS and talk about how they want to share data between all their products, so I (and my friends?) might get advertisements based on things I did on another product, even if I did so under a pseudonym.
Sorry, Google, but NO. Just NO.
That said, I have a Facebook account to keep up with friends and family since (for the most part) that's what they use, and I can either do so or be a hermit. But I only created it last year, and I started out knowing it's attached to my real name and anything might get released to the public. Google's fault is that I already used them in other ways before they created their social network, something that doesn't apply to Facebook.