I remember pre USB, with my DIN keyboard and RS-232 mouse, parallel Epson compatible printer, 10 Base T ethernet and floppy drive. They all worked just fine.
Sure, unless you decided to use two printers at once, or wanted to use both a mouse and a Palm Pilot, or you wanted to plug in a Zip drive or something else that used a parallel floppy controller, and so on.
The predecessors worked fine as long as you had no more peripherals than ports and each used the proper port so there was no contention. It was particularly painful for devices that were not persistent - such as if you wanted to use the same port to connect two different devices at various times.
The people talking about self-driving cars taking away their "freedom" are afraid they'll no longer be able to drive 75 mph in a 55 mph zone, or run that red light, or tailgate that person who's got the sheer audacity to drive a few miles an hour under the speed limit when they need to get home to watch the game so close they leave paint on their bumper...!
The funny thing is that none of those situations is likely to be a problem in a world of completely autonomous vehicles:
1. We won't have stupid speed limits. If somebody sets a 25mph speed limit then EVERY car will crawl through the zone, there will be mass complaints, and the limit will get raised. Towns often set low limits to increase ticket revenue, but there won't be any tickets. Limits are often set for safety, but safety won't be an issue at any speed anybody would consider reasonable.
2. Tailgating and driving under the speed limit will also not happen. Cars will zoom along at uniform speed, and will pull aside before decellerating so as to not hold anybody else up.
3. There won't be any traffic lights, so nobody will have to run one. Cars probably won't even have to stop at intersections. First traffic flow will regulate so that there are never more cars approaching an intersection than can be handled (other roads will be used, roads will automatically turn into one way, cars will slow down or speed up to ensure uniform density, etc). Then at intersections either cars will cross in interleaved patterns (close your eyes!), or they'll just form traffic circles with slots for every car to merge into as they arrive.
Roads will be able to handle FAR more cars if they were autonomous, they will be far safer, and cars will be far more efficient. In general cars will tend to follow a very uniform speed from origin to destination with almost no application of brakes. Maintenance will also be vastly improved - cars don't need big engines when they don't spend more than 10 seconds per trip accelerating, and wear will be much lower. Cars will also be safer, because they'll all be properly maintained. While you're at work the car will go get itself fixed up, and cars simply won't operate if they're out of scheduled maintenance.
The whole of society will reorganize as well - no more parking lots for starters (at least not in their present form). All parking will be high-density (optimized for land vs structure cost based on location), and only generally located in the vicinity of stores. Most people also will not need larger cars - they'll just rent them when needed. No need to have a huge trunk when you can just summon a cargo car to drive your groceries home (load it up, watch it drive off, find it waiting when you get home). Oh, and the kids can take a car or cab to their friends house without the need for a parent to go along or drive a return leg empty. Cabs would make a lot more sense in general as they can have higher utilization and don't really need to park at all.
But that was what was meant by moving QA to the distro. In this case Red Hat basically circumvented the upstream release process entirely creating a new set of releases which met their own quality standards. Most distros can't afford to completely replicate the upstream release management for everything they distribute (or at least the important stuff).
The fact that many pay for RHEL basically (or just use it anyway via CentOS) speaks to the concerns people have about FOSS release management in general. If they trusted upstream maintainers to do the job right then Red Hat would go out of business.
Ah yeah, like kernel.org isn't trusted. Yes I know you said "distribution" but really now.
He wasn't talking about trusting that it didn't contain a trojan or something. By trust he meant vetted for quality.
It is a legitimate concern. The whole reason for having a release cycle is to have sufficient QA to prevent issues like this from happening. Distros provide that service - when Linus/Greg call a kernel done, they call it ready to start being tested. RHEL is still running 2.6 (albeit with backports).
Perhaps my instructors in college were as skilled in explaining comprehension as you are at making your argument then.
I just don't get what you're arguing over. Are there benefits from college beyond earnings potential? Certainly! Should we blame kids for doing what they're told to do by everybody they know? Certainly not! Those were the main points you brought up and I agree with them.
I think the solutions to the college loan problem are simple - stop handing out so many loans, and hand out scholarships instead (based primarily on merit, not need).
If you want personal enrichment, just audit some courses or something. You don't need to complete a full degree program to obtain personal enrichment. The diploma on your wall doesn't make you smarter, either. The only reason people are paying so much for diplomas is that employers don't really care if you're smart, they just want the diploma so the guy hiring you doesn't get fired if you don't turn out well.
I'm not really getting what you're disagreeing with.
I simply said that spending money is easy to justify when it is likely to make you money. I didn't say that spending money couldn't be justified when it won't make you money.
So let's say for the sake of argument that insurance companies didn't turn medical practice into medical industry. Are you saying that medical advances we see today simply wouldn't happen?
When did I say that?
I just said that modern medicine happened at the same time as medical insurance, so it is hard to know what the cost of modern medical care would be without insurance.
I'm all for increasing spending on public R&D to create treatments that are royalty-free to US patients (or patients in countries that reciprocate or in the 3rd world). However, I doubt that those treatments would be any cheaper - they would just be paid for by taxes instead of patients. I think that is generally an improvement, but I don't for a moment think that the cost of clinical trials is going to be reduced simply by having the government pay for them, unless the government somehow compels doctors to participate in them (most of the clinical trial expense goes to compensating doctors).
and yet, a lot of people don't blink to pay for a CPA to do their taxes, or just buy turbotax. did you even think this through before posting?
He said that it is ridiculous that you should have to pay a company in order to file your taxes. You said that people do that all the time without blinking.
Perhaps you should consider that both of you could be correct. People do ridiculous things all the time, like posting non-sequiturs.
The people who make "food" generally understand that it is "food" and this checkbox can be ticked and the computer doesn't have to spend a lot of time thinking about it.
The problem is that it might be food in one county, and not food in another.
Is an handbag an untaxable article of clothing or a taxable household good? That varies by jurisdiction too. How about a decorative scarf, or a bikini?
Basically you end up with a two dimensional array with products on one axis and jurisdictions on the other, and one rate for each combination. Oh, and any of those jurisdictions can pass a new law at any time, giving notice in the local newspaper or whatever.
Sure, it gets done, but it is anything but simple, and I'm sure there are lots of mistakes.
I'm working on software designed for dealing with international shipments and that is another case of every jurisdiction doing things their own way. A single shipment can have multiple origins for a single item in the shipment for different agencies in the same destination country, because even individual agencies don't agree on the rules. Just try travelling to the US and bring along your pet and a bunch of bananas (and be sure to declare the K-40 inside it). Better hope your pet can eat bananas because they could be in quarantine for quite a while...
That's a great observation -- that the consumers of medical services never know the prices they are paying. That begs the question of whether or not this has always been the case. I would argue it didn't happen until after the insurance industry effectively took control of medicine as a practice and transforming it into an industry.
Well, keep in mind that modern medicine is a fairly modern phenomenon to begin with. Before insurance took off hospitals did not have all that much in the way of equipment, and doctors basically could operate out of a bag and some paper notes. It was a whole different world in terms of liability as well, and in terms of outcomes. People didn't die on life support, because there was no life support. There were also a lot more quacks around (insurance probably should be given credit for driving off most of those - they have medical professionals reviewing the charts and they have every incentive to call the police if they think they're paying for unnecessary treatment).
Medical bills just weren't that high in the first place back then. I suspect that people were more aware of what they were paying, since there weren't so many independent contractors/etc involved. However, people still got dragged into hospitals unconscious.
The modern healthcare system has a TON of things that cause prices to go up. You can't just fix one thing and expect anything to change. The whole system needs a bunch of reforms. However, increasing price visibility and uniformity is probably a major step in the right direction.
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If you've got what it takes to be a top-notice art director, and a college education is necessary to further that career, then by all means go for it. If you LIKE art directing but don't have what it takes, then don't waste your money.
I discourage people from studying engineering all the time for the same reasons. For the most part if you have what it takes to succeed you'll have scholarships thrown at you left and right anyway so you won't need to get into that much debt.
The issue isn't with the major per se, it is with unrealistic career plans.
And I don't like this idea, "It's your own fault you can't pay off your college loans, you chose the wrong major." That's just an excuse for a failed economic system.
Couldn't agree more with that, and I'm not suggesting that we should be blaming the students. They're just 18-year-old idiots who are following the advice of everybody they learned to trust, just like I did when I was their age. The advice givers are just telling the kids what worked for them, not realizing that the world they grew up in is not the same as the one that exists today.
The solution isn't to saddle kids with loans they can't pay and then punish them for taking them. The solution isn't to issue loans like that in the first place. Make money available based on aptitude, or turn them into scholarships (perhaps accepting such a scholarship results in an extra 10% income tax rate for the next 15 years or something if you want to make it more like a loan).
And by all means change the economic model so that kids don't have such high unemployment rates, or change the model so that you don't need a job to survive.
You're already taking for granted that education is either some form of personal entertainment on par with "watching movies", or else "a capital investment in your life". I understand that those are common ways of viewing it, but I find it bizarrely materialistic.
There are lots of things I'd love to do that I can't afford to do. Going into debt spending tens of thousands of dollars on entertainment, or enrichment, or being a better human, or whatever you want to call it is among them.
Capital investments are easy to justify, because they pay for themselves. If you make 100 widgets a month and sell them at a profit of $50 each, and spending $10k on a machine will let you make 1000 widgets a month and sell them at a profit of $200 each, then regardless of any other argument a $10k loan is something you can easily afford. On the other hand if you sell 100 widgets a month at $50 profit each, then a $10k loan to buy a nice painting for the office is something you have to think about.
I'm not saying that people should only go to college to make more money. I'm saying that if you don't have a good reason to expect to make lots of money in your future career, you should think twice about getting $100k in debt that you cannot ever discharge for any reason whatsoever.
And, exactly like the housing bubble, we seem to be blaming the schools and banks for the irresponsible behavior of the people taking out the loans.
I can sort-of see the argument with adults, but not with 18-year-olds.
I'd also be happier with this if bankruptcy were an option.
Ok, so some 18 year old does something stupid and ends up $100k in debt with no career options. What do you do now? Tell them to just go on welfare for the rest of their life (they're not going to bother working when you just garnish what little they make). If you get rid of the welfare option or garnish it, then they just turn to crime as it is the only way to obtain money and not have it garnished. So then you throw them in jail, and it costs you even more than the welfare did. What next - capital punishment for making a bad investment?
The problem is that we give kids the option to ruin their lives, and then we bombard them with messaging that it is the right option for them. Not every kid is going to benefit from a $100k education, but for whatever reason we feel every kid should have the option to decide that for themselves.
If these were ordinary commercial loans then the problem wouldn't exist, because nobody would loan the money in the first place. The reason for this is simple - for all the rhetoric that college is almost always the best option nobody will actually put their own money at risk so that some other kid can go to college, because they know that it isn't going to work out often enough.
Whether you're selfless or selfish, there really is no reason that you should support letting young people take huge risks such that if they fail you're going to end up supporting them for the rest of their lives.
I know a commercial artist who was making $80,000 a year designing textbooks. The publishing industry is a big industry, and there are lots of people like that.
I read in the papers about lots of uneducated people who make millions of dollars in the lottery every month. The lottery industry is a big industry, and there are lots of people like that.
So, clearly every 18 year old should go out and borrow $50k and spend it on lottery tickets.
Sure, some people study liberal arts and turn out well. Far more don't. Most aerospace engineers study, well, engineering.
Right, because there's no point in learning anything that won't increase your earning potential.
I have a steady income. I could easily see paying cash to take some courses that I think will personally enrich my life and not have any impact on my earnings. I also take vacations, watch movies, and so on. These are all discretionary expenses.
I would not borrow tens of thousands of dollars to do ANY of those things.
If you're taking a course for enrichment, then use your discretionary budget for doing so. Most 19 year olds have about $200 in that budget. If you're making a capital investment in your life, then you had BETTER consider how it will impact your earnings potential.
While I agree that lack of price sensitivity (inelastic demand) causes prices to rise in healthcare, I'm not sure I agree completely on the root cause.
Certainly the insurance system greatly contributes to price insensitivity. However, even if everybody just paid a la carte for medical care things would not improve unless consumers actually had the information needed to make rational choices.
For starters, most consumers don't see the first mention of costs until they're out of the hospital. If you purchase a service and only see the price AFTER the service is delivered, then there is NO opportunity to make a price-based decision.
Next, the average person has no idea how essential the service is. The guy wearing the white coat says they'll die if they don't get the service. Are they right? And even if they are right, that just makes pricing an even bigger problem (most would pay ANYTHING if their life was at stake).
There is little opportunity to compare prices. Hospitals don't publish them - and nobody actually pays the list prices anyway. The only people who have any opportunity to compare prices and shop around are insurers, which is why insurers pay LESS than those who pay cash. A common misconception is that you get a discount for paying cash. You do - but the discount is off of a list price that NOBODY pays - the insurers get an even steeper discount.
Often the opportunity to shop around doesn't even exist. Maybe if you need a hip replacement you could call around assuming anybody would even answer your questions. However, if you've had a heart attack you might not even be conscious when treatment decisions are made on your behalf.
The healthcare industry is overpriced for MANY reasons, and insurance is just one of them. Insurance isn't even insurance for the most part - it is just a buyers club for medical services.
Why exactly is it someone's right to borrow money and then not pay it back? If you borrowed it, you should have to pay it back.
So, there are two ways to look at this. Forgive the hyperbole and stereotypes.
Suppose I'm a heartless greedy conservative that is interested in absolutely nothing but minimizing my tax and interest payments. Some shmuck borrows too much money and will never be able to pay it back. The shmuck realizes that any money he ever earns will just be garnished before he even sees it, so he just quits working and goes on welfare, or starts robbing people and ends up in prison, or whatever. So now the bank is raising my interest rates because the shmuck didn't pay them, and my taxes are going up because the shmuck isn't paying his fair share of taxes, and my taxes are going up even more to either give the shmuck welfare payments or still more to lock him up in prison. That shmuck has no future at all, except as dead weight on society. So, instead I bribe my local congressman to pass a bankruptcy law. The shmuck still loses any savings he might have had and generally has his life ruined a little, but any wages he makes are his after declaring bankruptcy so he actually has incentive to work harder to restart his life, pay taxes, and stay out of prison. The bank still raises my interest rates a little, but now they have incentive to not loan money to shmucks in the first place which controls rates. My taxes are lower, and I can afford to pay for my new helicopter.
Suppose on the other hand I'm a bleeding heart liberal. Some poor soul was conned into signing an agreement he didn't understand by a bank that wanted to take advantage of him. So, we show the bank a thing or two and let the guy off, so that banks don't trick people into signing up for loans they can't afford. Of course, we still want them to loan to poor people within reason, so we do make the experience somewhat punitive on the debtors so that everybody doesn't just declare bankruptcy overnight.
So, whether you're in it for yourself or out to help the poor, bankruptcy makes sense. What doesn't make sense is creating a whole class of people who have no incentive to be productive. It would be like telling a kid who is 5'1" and has only one leg that the only way they can get into college is to make the basketball team, so they should practice hard. Why would they bother?
What's goddamn unfair is that my tax dollars are going to bail out people who abandoned their communities in the name of financial gain, and through greed and stupidity, signed contracts they couldn't possibly honor.
...issued by financial services that needed to show a triple-digit growth rate on paper so that they could be used to justify big executive bonuses. If you're managing some big company pension the best way to get yourself a bonus is to show how you allowed the employer to contribute less to the pension by having a high growth rate. Never mind that when the market crashes all the employees lose their pensions - they don't ask you to return your bonus.
The real fun will be when all the pension funds start drying up in a decade due to the fact that all those evil hedge funds you hear about are one of the main things they invest in. If they invested in boring blue chips then heaven-forbid the employer would actually have to pay for the pensions they promise their workers, instead of funding it with promises of huge investment returns...
If you "take over" a community by buying it, it's yours.
That's what they said in Hawaii. Turns out it wasn't so...
Granted, not a perfect analogy - these are still individual homeowners. This sort of thing happens all over the US - it is just much more extreme in the bay area. Just one of the reasons I don't work there.
Honestly, I'm a big fan of federalism, but it really does create MAJOR problems for automation. I'm working on a software application that deals with international shipments and you have the exact same problem but on a national scale.
At any time some small African nation can issue a regulation, perhaps by sticking it in the classified section of the national newspaper or putting it on display in the national library or something, and make it effective in a week. The regulation can specify anything that you can communicate in the local written language. Now your fancy automated system will be out of compliance unless the logic is changed and deployed to production within a week.
Sure, there are better ways of solving the problem and worse ways of solving it, but no matter how you slice it there are a bazillion inconsistent rules that you need to follow. State sales tax is a great example of this. If it were just a matter of having a DB of 9-digit zip code vs tax rate it would just be a huge pile of work. However, in addition to the rate varying by location, the kinds of items it applies to also varies. So that means a zip code table for every item in your catalog, and then some means to update all those tables every time some local town council changes their mind on whether an umbrella is an article of clothing or a household good, and what exactly is and isn't an umbrella.
I love Livescribe, and I'm not even a student. If I were a student I'd REALLY love it - the thing seems like the perfect tool for note-taking.
I can type FAST. However, I doubt I'd ever want to take notes on a laptop or tablet. Sure, I could regurgitate words faster, but not being able to draw notes/etc at will with trivial effort would be a major shortcoming.
Livescribe lets you take notes and digitize them. The audio recording gives you context during review - I just make a mark if I think I missed something and go back and review.
If you're a student you should certainly try one out. I use the Echo. WiFi sync would be nice, but with 8GB of storage it really isn't essential - just plug the thing in once in a while.
The Nexus 4 CPU is indeed quite nice. It is much more responsive than my Nexus 10 (granted, the latter is still way better than any of the previous gen devices, and it has a lot more pixels to push around). Glad to hear they're keeping it up with the new Nexus 7.
The issue there is the publication of the blobs, which AOSP generally does for devices they officially support.
Cyanogenmod/etc already have scripts in their build instructions that use adb to pull all the blobs off of an already-working device so that they can avoid distributing them. Anybody who owns the device already has the blobs in the stock image.
The only real pain is when there is some major upgrade with new blobs. Usually in that case the new blobs just get posted on some warez site someplace so that the CM/etc don't have to redistribute them directly. However, you can still in theory flash back to stock, upgrade stock, then re-extract the new blobs.
All of this should still be unnecessary for Nexus devices, but it is still doable - you don't even have to find an exploit to root them.
ChromeOS isn't closed - well, no more than Android is. ChromeOS is actually based on Gentoo, believe it or not, so if anything the foundation is even more open.
However, in general everything in ChromeOS is web-based, and web-based apps in general don't have touchscreen UIs. I'm not sure that we'll ever see full Android-ChromeOS convergence. If we do, the result will be a platform that is actually much closer to the traditional Linux distro.
Wait, what? The chromebook pixel is fully touchscreen enabled, and ChromeOS fully supports touchscreen, including all of Google's native apps. Tell me this is some attempt at a bad joke?
I didn't say that ChromeOS wasn't touch-screen enabled, only that web-based apps in general don't have touchscreen UIs. Google's native apps supporting touchscreen was actually news to me, but when I'm browsing websites on Android from time to time I still run into sites that depend on mouseover for something, and that doesn't work with touchscreen (though it would work fine with the trackpad/ball if your device has one and the OS supplies a cursor).
I'm not really saying it can't be done, just that so far nobody really does it that way, perhaps a few Google apps aside.
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I remember pre USB, with my DIN keyboard and RS-232 mouse, parallel Epson compatible printer, 10 Base T ethernet and floppy drive. They all worked just fine.
Sure, unless you decided to use two printers at once, or wanted to use both a mouse and a Palm Pilot, or you wanted to plug in a Zip drive or something else that used a parallel floppy controller, and so on.
The predecessors worked fine as long as you had no more peripherals than ports and each used the proper port so there was no contention. It was particularly painful for devices that were not persistent - such as if you wanted to use the same port to connect two different devices at various times.
The people talking about self-driving cars taking away their "freedom" are afraid they'll no longer be able to drive 75 mph in a 55 mph zone, or run that red light, or tailgate that person who's got the sheer audacity to drive a few miles an hour under the speed limit when they need to get home to watch the game so close they leave paint on their bumper...!
The funny thing is that none of those situations is likely to be a problem in a world of completely autonomous vehicles:
1. We won't have stupid speed limits. If somebody sets a 25mph speed limit then EVERY car will crawl through the zone, there will be mass complaints, and the limit will get raised. Towns often set low limits to increase ticket revenue, but there won't be any tickets. Limits are often set for safety, but safety won't be an issue at any speed anybody would consider reasonable.
2. Tailgating and driving under the speed limit will also not happen. Cars will zoom along at uniform speed, and will pull aside before decellerating so as to not hold anybody else up.
3. There won't be any traffic lights, so nobody will have to run one. Cars probably won't even have to stop at intersections. First traffic flow will regulate so that there are never more cars approaching an intersection than can be handled (other roads will be used, roads will automatically turn into one way, cars will slow down or speed up to ensure uniform density, etc). Then at intersections either cars will cross in interleaved patterns (close your eyes!), or they'll just form traffic circles with slots for every car to merge into as they arrive.
Roads will be able to handle FAR more cars if they were autonomous, they will be far safer, and cars will be far more efficient. In general cars will tend to follow a very uniform speed from origin to destination with almost no application of brakes. Maintenance will also be vastly improved - cars don't need big engines when they don't spend more than 10 seconds per trip accelerating, and wear will be much lower. Cars will also be safer, because they'll all be properly maintained. While you're at work the car will go get itself fixed up, and cars simply won't operate if they're out of scheduled maintenance.
The whole of society will reorganize as well - no more parking lots for starters (at least not in their present form). All parking will be high-density (optimized for land vs structure cost based on location), and only generally located in the vicinity of stores. Most people also will not need larger cars - they'll just rent them when needed. No need to have a huge trunk when you can just summon a cargo car to drive your groceries home (load it up, watch it drive off, find it waiting when you get home). Oh, and the kids can take a car or cab to their friends house without the need for a parent to go along or drive a return leg empty. Cabs would make a lot more sense in general as they can have higher utilization and don't really need to park at all.
Oh, I fully get that.
But that was what was meant by moving QA to the distro. In this case Red Hat basically circumvented the upstream release process entirely creating a new set of releases which met their own quality standards. Most distros can't afford to completely replicate the upstream release management for everything they distribute (or at least the important stuff).
The fact that many pay for RHEL basically (or just use it anyway via CentOS) speaks to the concerns people have about FOSS release management in general. If they trusted upstream maintainers to do the job right then Red Hat would go out of business.
Ah yeah, like kernel.org isn't trusted. Yes I know you said "distribution" but really now.
He wasn't talking about trusting that it didn't contain a trojan or something. By trust he meant vetted for quality.
It is a legitimate concern. The whole reason for having a release cycle is to have sufficient QA to prevent issues like this from happening. Distros provide that service - when Linus/Greg call a kernel done, they call it ready to start being tested. RHEL is still running 2.6 (albeit with backports).
Perhaps my instructors in college were as skilled in explaining comprehension as you are at making your argument then.
I just don't get what you're arguing over. Are there benefits from college beyond earnings potential? Certainly! Should we blame kids for doing what they're told to do by everybody they know? Certainly not! Those were the main points you brought up and I agree with them.
I think the solutions to the college loan problem are simple - stop handing out so many loans, and hand out scholarships instead (based primarily on merit, not need).
If you want personal enrichment, just audit some courses or something. You don't need to complete a full degree program to obtain personal enrichment. The diploma on your wall doesn't make you smarter, either. The only reason people are paying so much for diplomas is that employers don't really care if you're smart, they just want the diploma so the guy hiring you doesn't get fired if you don't turn out well.
I'm not really getting what you're disagreeing with.
I simply said that spending money is easy to justify when it is likely to make you money. I didn't say that spending money couldn't be justified when it won't make you money.
So let's say for the sake of argument that insurance companies didn't turn medical practice into medical industry. Are you saying that medical advances we see today simply wouldn't happen?
When did I say that?
I just said that modern medicine happened at the same time as medical insurance, so it is hard to know what the cost of modern medical care would be without insurance.
I'm all for increasing spending on public R&D to create treatments that are royalty-free to US patients (or patients in countries that reciprocate or in the 3rd world). However, I doubt that those treatments would be any cheaper - they would just be paid for by taxes instead of patients. I think that is generally an improvement, but I don't for a moment think that the cost of clinical trials is going to be reduced simply by having the government pay for them, unless the government somehow compels doctors to participate in them (most of the clinical trial expense goes to compensating doctors).
and yet, a lot of people don't blink to pay for a CPA to do their taxes, or just buy turbotax. did you even think this through before posting?
He said that it is ridiculous that you should have to pay a company in order to file your taxes. You said that people do that all the time without blinking.
Perhaps you should consider that both of you could be correct. People do ridiculous things all the time, like posting non-sequiturs.
The people who make "food" generally understand that it is "food" and this checkbox can be ticked and the computer doesn't have to spend a lot of time thinking about it.
The problem is that it might be food in one county, and not food in another.
Is an handbag an untaxable article of clothing or a taxable household good? That varies by jurisdiction too. How about a decorative scarf, or a bikini?
Basically you end up with a two dimensional array with products on one axis and jurisdictions on the other, and one rate for each combination. Oh, and any of those jurisdictions can pass a new law at any time, giving notice in the local newspaper or whatever.
Sure, it gets done, but it is anything but simple, and I'm sure there are lots of mistakes.
I'm working on software designed for dealing with international shipments and that is another case of every jurisdiction doing things their own way. A single shipment can have multiple origins for a single item in the shipment for different agencies in the same destination country, because even individual agencies don't agree on the rules. Just try travelling to the US and bring along your pet and a bunch of bananas (and be sure to declare the K-40 inside it). Better hope your pet can eat bananas because they could be in quarantine for quite a while...
That's a great observation -- that the consumers of medical services never know the prices they are paying. That begs the question of whether or not this has always been the case. I would argue it didn't happen until after the insurance industry effectively took control of medicine as a practice and transforming it into an industry.
Well, keep in mind that modern medicine is a fairly modern phenomenon to begin with. Before insurance took off hospitals did not have all that much in the way of equipment, and doctors basically could operate out of a bag and some paper notes. It was a whole different world in terms of liability as well, and in terms of outcomes. People didn't die on life support, because there was no life support. There were also a lot more quacks around (insurance probably should be given credit for driving off most of those - they have medical professionals reviewing the charts and they have every incentive to call the police if they think they're paying for unnecessary treatment).
Medical bills just weren't that high in the first place back then. I suspect that people were more aware of what they were paying, since there weren't so many independent contractors/etc involved. However, people still got dragged into hospitals unconscious.
The modern healthcare system has a TON of things that cause prices to go up. You can't just fix one thing and expect anything to change. The whole system needs a bunch of reforms. However, increasing price visibility and uniformity is probably a major step in the right direction.
JOB SUMMARY ... Art directors are responsible for the visual style and images in magazines, newspapers, product packaging, and movie and television productions. They create the overall design and direct others who develop artwork or layouts. ...ENTRY-LEVEL EDUCATION ... Bachelor's degree ... 2010 MEDIAN PAY ... $80,630
If you've got what it takes to be a top-notice art director, and a college education is necessary to further that career, then by all means go for it. If you LIKE art directing but don't have what it takes, then don't waste your money.
I discourage people from studying engineering all the time for the same reasons. For the most part if you have what it takes to succeed you'll have scholarships thrown at you left and right anyway so you won't need to get into that much debt.
The issue isn't with the major per se, it is with unrealistic career plans.
And I don't like this idea, "It's your own fault you can't pay off your college loans, you chose the wrong major." That's just an excuse for a failed economic system.
Couldn't agree more with that, and I'm not suggesting that we should be blaming the students. They're just 18-year-old idiots who are following the advice of everybody they learned to trust, just like I did when I was their age. The advice givers are just telling the kids what worked for them, not realizing that the world they grew up in is not the same as the one that exists today.
The solution isn't to saddle kids with loans they can't pay and then punish them for taking them. The solution isn't to issue loans like that in the first place. Make money available based on aptitude, or turn them into scholarships (perhaps accepting such a scholarship results in an extra 10% income tax rate for the next 15 years or something if you want to make it more like a loan).
And by all means change the economic model so that kids don't have such high unemployment rates, or change the model so that you don't need a job to survive.
You're already taking for granted that education is either some form of personal entertainment on par with "watching movies", or else "a capital investment in your life". I understand that those are common ways of viewing it, but I find it bizarrely materialistic.
There are lots of things I'd love to do that I can't afford to do. Going into debt spending tens of thousands of dollars on entertainment, or enrichment, or being a better human, or whatever you want to call it is among them.
Capital investments are easy to justify, because they pay for themselves. If you make 100 widgets a month and sell them at a profit of $50 each, and spending $10k on a machine will let you make 1000 widgets a month and sell them at a profit of $200 each, then regardless of any other argument a $10k loan is something you can easily afford. On the other hand if you sell 100 widgets a month at $50 profit each, then a $10k loan to buy a nice painting for the office is something you have to think about.
I'm not saying that people should only go to college to make more money. I'm saying that if you don't have a good reason to expect to make lots of money in your future career, you should think twice about getting $100k in debt that you cannot ever discharge for any reason whatsoever.
And, exactly like the housing bubble, we seem to be blaming the schools and banks for the irresponsible behavior of the people taking out the loans.
I can sort-of see the argument with adults, but not with 18-year-olds.
I'd also be happier with this if bankruptcy were an option.
Ok, so some 18 year old does something stupid and ends up $100k in debt with no career options. What do you do now? Tell them to just go on welfare for the rest of their life (they're not going to bother working when you just garnish what little they make). If you get rid of the welfare option or garnish it, then they just turn to crime as it is the only way to obtain money and not have it garnished. So then you throw them in jail, and it costs you even more than the welfare did. What next - capital punishment for making a bad investment?
The problem is that we give kids the option to ruin their lives, and then we bombard them with messaging that it is the right option for them. Not every kid is going to benefit from a $100k education, but for whatever reason we feel every kid should have the option to decide that for themselves.
If these were ordinary commercial loans then the problem wouldn't exist, because nobody would loan the money in the first place. The reason for this is simple - for all the rhetoric that college is almost always the best option nobody will actually put their own money at risk so that some other kid can go to college, because they know that it isn't going to work out often enough.
Whether you're selfless or selfish, there really is no reason that you should support letting young people take huge risks such that if they fail you're going to end up supporting them for the rest of their lives.
I know a commercial artist who was making $80,000 a year designing textbooks. The publishing industry is a big industry, and there are lots of people like that.
I read in the papers about lots of uneducated people who make millions of dollars in the lottery every month. The lottery industry is a big industry, and there are lots of people like that.
So, clearly every 18 year old should go out and borrow $50k and spend it on lottery tickets.
Sure, some people study liberal arts and turn out well. Far more don't. Most aerospace engineers study, well, engineering.
Right, because there's no point in learning anything that won't increase your earning potential.
I have a steady income. I could easily see paying cash to take some courses that I think will personally enrich my life and not have any impact on my earnings. I also take vacations, watch movies, and so on. These are all discretionary expenses.
I would not borrow tens of thousands of dollars to do ANY of those things.
If you're taking a course for enrichment, then use your discretionary budget for doing so. Most 19 year olds have about $200 in that budget. If you're making a capital investment in your life, then you had BETTER consider how it will impact your earnings potential.
While I agree that lack of price sensitivity (inelastic demand) causes prices to rise in healthcare, I'm not sure I agree completely on the root cause.
Certainly the insurance system greatly contributes to price insensitivity. However, even if everybody just paid a la carte for medical care things would not improve unless consumers actually had the information needed to make rational choices.
For starters, most consumers don't see the first mention of costs until they're out of the hospital. If you purchase a service and only see the price AFTER the service is delivered, then there is NO opportunity to make a price-based decision.
Next, the average person has no idea how essential the service is. The guy wearing the white coat says they'll die if they don't get the service. Are they right? And even if they are right, that just makes pricing an even bigger problem (most would pay ANYTHING if their life was at stake).
There is little opportunity to compare prices. Hospitals don't publish them - and nobody actually pays the list prices anyway. The only people who have any opportunity to compare prices and shop around are insurers, which is why insurers pay LESS than those who pay cash. A common misconception is that you get a discount for paying cash. You do - but the discount is off of a list price that NOBODY pays - the insurers get an even steeper discount.
Often the opportunity to shop around doesn't even exist. Maybe if you need a hip replacement you could call around assuming anybody would even answer your questions. However, if you've had a heart attack you might not even be conscious when treatment decisions are made on your behalf.
The healthcare industry is overpriced for MANY reasons, and insurance is just one of them. Insurance isn't even insurance for the most part - it is just a buyers club for medical services.
Why exactly is it someone's right to borrow money and then not pay it back? If you borrowed it, you should have to pay it back.
So, there are two ways to look at this. Forgive the hyperbole and stereotypes.
Suppose I'm a heartless greedy conservative that is interested in absolutely nothing but minimizing my tax and interest payments. Some shmuck borrows too much money and will never be able to pay it back. The shmuck realizes that any money he ever earns will just be garnished before he even sees it, so he just quits working and goes on welfare, or starts robbing people and ends up in prison, or whatever. So now the bank is raising my interest rates because the shmuck didn't pay them, and my taxes are going up because the shmuck isn't paying his fair share of taxes, and my taxes are going up even more to either give the shmuck welfare payments or still more to lock him up in prison. That shmuck has no future at all, except as dead weight on society. So, instead I bribe my local congressman to pass a bankruptcy law. The shmuck still loses any savings he might have had and generally has his life ruined a little, but any wages he makes are his after declaring bankruptcy so he actually has incentive to work harder to restart his life, pay taxes, and stay out of prison. The bank still raises my interest rates a little, but now they have incentive to not loan money to shmucks in the first place which controls rates. My taxes are lower, and I can afford to pay for my new helicopter.
Suppose on the other hand I'm a bleeding heart liberal. Some poor soul was conned into signing an agreement he didn't understand by a bank that wanted to take advantage of him. So, we show the bank a thing or two and let the guy off, so that banks don't trick people into signing up for loans they can't afford. Of course, we still want them to loan to poor people within reason, so we do make the experience somewhat punitive on the debtors so that everybody doesn't just declare bankruptcy overnight.
So, whether you're in it for yourself or out to help the poor, bankruptcy makes sense. What doesn't make sense is creating a whole class of people who have no incentive to be productive. It would be like telling a kid who is 5'1" and has only one leg that the only way they can get into college is to make the basketball team, so they should practice hard. Why would they bother?
What's goddamn unfair is that my tax dollars are going to bail out people who abandoned their communities in the name of financial gain, and through greed and stupidity, signed contracts they couldn't possibly honor.
...issued by financial services that needed to show a triple-digit growth rate on paper so that they could be used to justify big executive bonuses. If you're managing some big company pension the best way to get yourself a bonus is to show how you allowed the employer to contribute less to the pension by having a high growth rate. Never mind that when the market crashes all the employees lose their pensions - they don't ask you to return your bonus.
The real fun will be when all the pension funds start drying up in a decade due to the fact that all those evil hedge funds you hear about are one of the main things they invest in. If they invested in boring blue chips then heaven-forbid the employer would actually have to pay for the pensions they promise their workers, instead of funding it with promises of huge investment returns...
If you "take over" a community by buying it, it's yours.
That's what they said in Hawaii. Turns out it wasn't so...
Granted, not a perfect analogy - these are still individual homeowners. This sort of thing happens all over the US - it is just much more extreme in the bay area. Just one of the reasons I don't work there.
Even worse for sales tax rates...many small cities are too small for their own zip code (intended only for assisting the post office, not the IRS)
That was why I said 9-digit. The 5-digit ones are useless. You basically need to resolve down to the individual address.
50 states worth of independent regulations
Honestly, I'm a big fan of federalism, but it really does create MAJOR problems for automation. I'm working on a software application that deals with international shipments and you have the exact same problem but on a national scale.
At any time some small African nation can issue a regulation, perhaps by sticking it in the classified section of the national newspaper or putting it on display in the national library or something, and make it effective in a week. The regulation can specify anything that you can communicate in the local written language. Now your fancy automated system will be out of compliance unless the logic is changed and deployed to production within a week.
Sure, there are better ways of solving the problem and worse ways of solving it, but no matter how you slice it there are a bazillion inconsistent rules that you need to follow. State sales tax is a great example of this. If it were just a matter of having a DB of 9-digit zip code vs tax rate it would just be a huge pile of work. However, in addition to the rate varying by location, the kinds of items it applies to also varies. So that means a zip code table for every item in your catalog, and then some means to update all those tables every time some local town council changes their mind on whether an umbrella is an article of clothing or a household good, and what exactly is and isn't an umbrella.
I love Livescribe, and I'm not even a student. If I were a student I'd REALLY love it - the thing seems like the perfect tool for note-taking.
I can type FAST. However, I doubt I'd ever want to take notes on a laptop or tablet. Sure, I could regurgitate words faster, but not being able to draw notes/etc at will with trivial effort would be a major shortcoming.
Livescribe lets you take notes and digitize them. The audio recording gives you context during review - I just make a mark if I think I missed something and go back and review.
If you're a student you should certainly try one out. I use the Echo. WiFi sync would be nice, but with 8GB of storage it really isn't essential - just plug the thing in once in a while.
The Nexus 4 CPU is indeed quite nice. It is much more responsive than my Nexus 10 (granted, the latter is still way better than any of the previous gen devices, and it has a lot more pixels to push around). Glad to hear they're keeping it up with the new Nexus 7.
The issue there is the publication of the blobs, which AOSP generally does for devices they officially support.
Cyanogenmod/etc already have scripts in their build instructions that use adb to pull all the blobs off of an already-working device so that they can avoid distributing them. Anybody who owns the device already has the blobs in the stock image.
The only real pain is when there is some major upgrade with new blobs. Usually in that case the new blobs just get posted on some warez site someplace so that the CM/etc don't have to redistribute them directly. However, you can still in theory flash back to stock, upgrade stock, then re-extract the new blobs.
All of this should still be unnecessary for Nexus devices, but it is still doable - you don't even have to find an exploit to root them.
ChromeOS isn't closed - well, no more than Android is. ChromeOS is actually based on Gentoo, believe it or not, so if anything the foundation is even more open.
However, in general everything in ChromeOS is web-based, and web-based apps in general don't have touchscreen UIs. I'm not sure that we'll ever see full Android-ChromeOS convergence. If we do, the result will be a platform that is actually much closer to the traditional Linux distro.
Wait, what? The chromebook pixel is fully touchscreen enabled, and ChromeOS fully supports touchscreen, including all of Google's native apps. Tell me this is some attempt at a bad joke?
I didn't say that ChromeOS wasn't touch-screen enabled, only that web-based apps in general don't have touchscreen UIs. Google's native apps supporting touchscreen was actually news to me, but when I'm browsing websites on Android from time to time I still run into sites that depend on mouseover for something, and that doesn't work with touchscreen (though it would work fine with the trackpad/ball if your device has one and the OS supplies a cursor).
I'm not really saying it can't be done, just that so far nobody really does it that way, perhaps a few Google apps aside.