It's also worth a cool $1 million if you solve it, thanks to the Clay Mathematics Institute, because it's currently one of the top unsolved problems in all of mathematics as well as being the top unsolved problem in the more specialized computer science world.
And to give you an example of how awesome it would be if P=NP: You could (in theory at least) write a program that took a set of axioms and a hypothesis, and it could tell you reasonably quickly whether the hypothesis was something that could be proven using those set of axioms. Or for architecture and engineering, right now there are programs that can do a lot of the checking of whether a bridge design would collapse, but with this sort of program you could write something that says "design me a bridge that can take a 15-ton load". In short, it would revolutionize what sort of problems computers could solve for us.
However, I should point out that unlike a date, the computer scientists might actually succeed at figuring this one out.
Part of what the whole MySQL saga should be teaching open source devs is that open source projects controlled by a single for-profit company are usually a bad idea. The reason is that the for-profit company can be bought out or have other business changes which dramatically affect the project. It sounds like PostgreSQL got close to having the same problem, and as a db user I'm sure glad it extracted itself from that.
The fact this nonsense went on for months should be a red flag at the very least.
Why yes, yes it is. When a patently false claim (and given that every bit of evidence, both paper and witnesses, in existence demonstrates quite clearly that Barack Obama was born in Hawaii like he says, any claim to the contrary is patently false) gets repeated a lot, that indicates all sorts of things:
1. Someone has a lot to gain by making people believe the lie.
2. Whoever's telling the lie doesn't have to worry about losing their job for lying. In fact, their job security might well depend on telling the lie rather than refusing to tell it.
3. That people believe it means that they may be using it as an indicator for something else. For instance, if you grew up in an environment where non-white people were second-class citizens at best (and not infrequently killed for just that), you might have a hard time believing that a non-white person was a citizen with the same rights as you. And this is born out by the surveys which demonstrate that the "birthers" are overwhelmingly white, elderly, and from the southeastern US.
4. As a corollary to points 1 and 2, whoever has something to gain is well funded. This is not a grassroots effort, regardless of how it may appear.
The big lie of omission here is that AT&T doesn't just have an executive in the White House, they've been giving out bribes^Hcampaign contributions to about 75-80% of Congress as well as the president and a lot of other movers and shakers. That's what makes them immune to any sort of government interference. Their efforts completely bipartisan, because AT&T's only ideology is to make more money for AT&T.
We'll probably see him selling the NYT next after the great paywall failure.
That would be really impressive seeing as he doesn't own it. You're probably thinking of the Wall St Journal, which is a completely different publication.
Obviously it's impossible to prove beyond a shadow of a doubt why people don't do something.
Your WWII argument is easy to counter though: After the horrors of WWI, with millions of soldiers and civilians killed, and the unqualified surrender of one of the main sides, and the existence of new horrific chemical weapons, you might think that there was no hunger for a repeat. There were new parliamentary governments created in Spain, Germany, and Italy, with setups not totally different from Britain. But there was a repeat, in large part because the economic crises at the end of the 1920's created the perfect conditions for Fascists to take control in Spain, Germany, and Italy - desperate people are more willing to take big risks.
Compare that to now, where the current economic crises in Ireland and Greece have led to bailouts, in large part because Germany and France have their economic fortunes tied to those countries. Bailouts are bad, but less bad than wars.
The EU, for all its many faults, provides some big benefits that nobody sees.
The biggest one in my book is that the major countries in Europe no longer try to blow each other to smithereens. This could have happened without the EU, but historically speaking economic crisis led fairly directly to warfare in Europe, as desperate countries tried to capture by force the resources they needed to survive while other countries tried to take advantage of the perceived weakness of the countries in crisis. That in my book means that the EU did a better job of preserving peace than the League of Nations or the UN.
The next on the list would probably be that by using EU membership as a motivator, it's pushed the former Eastern Bloc countries that could very easily have turned into Putin-style regimes to become proper democracies. Read the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union to get an idea of the political importance of EU membership, and then consider what Romania, Bulgaria, Slovakia, Belarus, etc could easily have become without it.
It's definitely not the best possible way of governing, but it's doing much better than most everything else that's been tried. And its relative success is a big part of why some African governments have been pushing for similar sorts of organizations among their nations.
The other government agency you can at least send a complaint to is whichever state government body is responsible for granting the monopoly (likely a public utilities commission). If you want to hit them in the pocketbook, losing their access to the state's market is a pretty big hit.
Oh, and if your commissioners and attorneys general aren't responsive, find out how they are selected / appointed / elected, and respond accordingly at election time.
ISPs have common-carrier protection, but not common-carrier responsibilities. This was part of the wonderful telecom "deregulation" that was pushed through in the late 1996 (with wild cheering from both Republicans and Democrats).
The quotes around the "deregulation" have to do with the fact that telecom has basically always been heavily regulated, and still is today. The regulations that were removed were the ones that the big telecom companies wanted to get rid of, pure and simple.
Actually, thanks to the completely misnamed USA PATRIOT Act, the US government doesn't even need a subpoena but instead can send a nice totalitarian-sounding "national security letter". The advantage of the NSL over a subpoena is that even if your corporate email provider wanted to fight the NSL, they couldn't do so legally because the recipient of an NSL is expressly forbidden to tell anybody about it, and that "anybody" includes a court of law. By contrast, if for some reason the corporate email provider wanted to stand up for its customers, it could attempt to quash the subpoena and argue its case in court.
There is absolutely nothing to justify privileged position of financial companies -- they don't do anything more difficult that a simple accountant does, yet they are allowed to control access to other people's resources and insist on reward that would be too high even if it was their own resources to begin with.
We agree on that at least. I think we just disagree with the solution.
My general goal would be to have the financial sector so heavily regulated as to be safe and boring. That way, so all the Monty Python jokes about accountants become accurate again, bankers would be competing with each other primarily with interest rates rather than arbitrary fees, and stockbrokers would be mostly in the business of selling financial advice to clients who wanted it. It would eliminate a lot of the jobs in finance, make the whole industry a lot less profitable, but would allow the good stuff it does actually continue to happen.
The whole point is not just to put these guys in another prison: If they're guilty of nothing, as they are in many cases, then the correct thing to do is to say "You're free to go. If you want, we'll set up travel arrangements back to your home. Please accept our humblest apologies, and $X for some reparations for what we put you through for no reason whatsoever. If you were tortured, we would like your help putting your torturers behind bars."
About the only piece of this that Barack Obama as president couldn't do without authorization from Congress is the reparations. Presidents can pardon people, they can tell the military to move somebody from point A to point B, he can definitely apologize to people, and he can direct his Attorney General to investigate possible war crimes.
WHY finances are complex and convoluted if their sole purpose in the society is resource management?
Well, there's the rub: Resource management is hard, because everyone more-or-less wants as much as possible while producing as little as possible. That leads them to want to take as much of other people's profits as possible while pushing any of their risks onto somebody else.
If you're talking about corporate accounting, then the reason that's hard is because corporate executives are motivated to lie about their earnings if they can get away with it in order to get raises and bonuses. If you're talking about stock trading, then any seller will try to describe their stock as better than it really is and any buyer will try to describe the stock as worse than it really is unless there's a way to independently verify it, and it's hard because not only are the liars everywhere but the prices are shifting around faster than most people can properly evaluate their holdings.
And so on. Note that I didn't say that we should ever trust these guys further than they can be easily thrown, just that many of them actually provide a real service to somebody.
And even people who ought to know what they're doing screw this stuff up: One of the many reasons Larry Summers pissed off a lot of people at Harvard was because he was screwing up the management of the endowment, and this is a guy who's a former Treasury Secretary and top-notch economist.
That's not entirely true, as satisfying as it would be.
If I'm, say, a college president with a background in history, charged with among other things managing a large endowment, I'm going to hire some folks who know what they're doing to handle the finances. I'll have them vetted and watched by the people in my college that understand economics and business and finance and stuff, but in the end I'm going to need a financial services provider to handle it. Same story goes for anybody inheriting huge sums of cash, or finds themselves suddenly incredibly wealthy because they're Steve Wozniak or something. They have to watch their financial services providers carefully, but they'd be idiots not to hire somebody to take care of it.
What that does mean is that Joe Schmoe doesn't need a full-service broker to manage his day-to-day trading, but those finance guys do provide real services to people.
Another way of describing it: Sales guys, stock brokers, marketing people, managers, accountants, and a lot of other people are professional liars. They operate in an environment where people are constantly lying to them, and they in turn are constantly lying to others. When you're lying at least 40 hours a week, then lying to your friends, family, spouse, or children becomes a lot easier.
Engineers, scientists, etc by contrast are in an environment where attempts at lying will likely be caught very very quickly.
That's the wonderful thing about making predictions 10 or 20 years out: The predictor will never be called to account if the prediction fails to be accurate. Even better are those predictions about what will be possible in 50 years, because by the time the 50 years is done the person who made the prediction is either retired or dead.
The simple fact is that Hari Seldon doesn't exist, and thus any prediction beyond the next year or so is more or less complete BS. (This rule also goes for federal budget projections, so bear that in mind
And I support efforts to get to Mars, I just don't like BS predictions.
Why would you use up perfectly good bourbon on driving somewhere? I mean, this seems about as bright as the bumbling alchemist proudly announcing that he'd found a way to turn gold into lead.
You're right that I individually may not succeed at shooting you and then fighting off your friends/relatives/associates. But enough people will be trying to pull the same deal I just described that some of them will succeed and set themselves up as warlords.
My point is that no taxes leads to anarchy leads directly to petty warlords leads to a feudal or monarchical state. In other words, you can't get away from having a government. Even Somalia (brought up in a sister thread) isn't government-free - there are just several competing governments out there that fight over control of Mogadishu, but within their own territory they are effectively the government.
Actually, a significant number of my pregnant classmates got that way intentionally. For very stupid reasons (e.g. keeping an older boyfriend happy or cementing a marriage that began when he was 18 and she was 16 because she really wanted out of her parents' place), but intentionally.
There was one who didn't though. She was as naive as you describe, and was both pro-life and in no condition to raise a child. She told me later she miscarried, and I didn't entirely take her word on that but also didn't press the issue.
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It's also worth a cool $1 million if you solve it, thanks to the Clay Mathematics Institute, because it's currently one of the top unsolved problems in all of mathematics as well as being the top unsolved problem in the more specialized computer science world.
And to give you an example of how awesome it would be if P=NP: You could (in theory at least) write a program that took a set of axioms and a hypothesis, and it could tell you reasonably quickly whether the hypothesis was something that could be proven using those set of axioms. Or for architecture and engineering, right now there are programs that can do a lot of the checking of whether a bridge design would collapse, but with this sort of program you could write something that says "design me a bridge that can take a 15-ton load". In short, it would revolutionize what sort of problems computers could solve for us.
However, I should point out that unlike a date, the computer scientists might actually succeed at figuring this one out.
Part of what the whole MySQL saga should be teaching open source devs is that open source projects controlled by a single for-profit company are usually a bad idea. The reason is that the for-profit company can be bought out or have other business changes which dramatically affect the project. It sounds like PostgreSQL got close to having the same problem, and as a db user I'm sure glad it extracted itself from that.
The fact this nonsense went on for months should be a red flag at the very least.
Why yes, yes it is. When a patently false claim (and given that every bit of evidence, both paper and witnesses, in existence demonstrates quite clearly that Barack Obama was born in Hawaii like he says, any claim to the contrary is patently false) gets repeated a lot, that indicates all sorts of things:
1. Someone has a lot to gain by making people believe the lie.
2. Whoever's telling the lie doesn't have to worry about losing their job for lying. In fact, their job security might well depend on telling the lie rather than refusing to tell it.
3. That people believe it means that they may be using it as an indicator for something else. For instance, if you grew up in an environment where non-white people were second-class citizens at best (and not infrequently killed for just that), you might have a hard time believing that a non-white person was a citizen with the same rights as you. And this is born out by the surveys which demonstrate that the "birthers" are overwhelmingly white, elderly, and from the southeastern US.
4. As a corollary to points 1 and 2, whoever has something to gain is well funded. This is not a grassroots effort, regardless of how it may appear.
When first discovering the location, counterterrorism official Lou Costello said "Hey Abbottabad!"
The big lie of omission here is that AT&T doesn't just have an executive in the White House, they've been giving out bribes^Hcampaign contributions to about 75-80% of Congress as well as the president and a lot of other movers and shakers. That's what makes them immune to any sort of government interference. Their efforts completely bipartisan, because AT&T's only ideology is to make more money for AT&T.
We'll probably see him selling the NYT next after the great paywall failure.
That would be really impressive seeing as he doesn't own it. You're probably thinking of the Wall St Journal, which is a completely different publication.
There's just one problem with curing leprosy: bloody do-gooders.
Obviously it's impossible to prove beyond a shadow of a doubt why people don't do something.
Your WWII argument is easy to counter though: After the horrors of WWI, with millions of soldiers and civilians killed, and the unqualified surrender of one of the main sides, and the existence of new horrific chemical weapons, you might think that there was no hunger for a repeat. There were new parliamentary governments created in Spain, Germany, and Italy, with setups not totally different from Britain. But there was a repeat, in large part because the economic crises at the end of the 1920's created the perfect conditions for Fascists to take control in Spain, Germany, and Italy - desperate people are more willing to take big risks.
Compare that to now, where the current economic crises in Ireland and Greece have led to bailouts, in large part because Germany and France have their economic fortunes tied to those countries. Bailouts are bad, but less bad than wars.
Thanks for the correction, much obliged. Although, as you point out, this actually strengthens my argument.
The EU, for all its many faults, provides some big benefits that nobody sees.
The biggest one in my book is that the major countries in Europe no longer try to blow each other to smithereens. This could have happened without the EU, but historically speaking economic crisis led fairly directly to warfare in Europe, as desperate countries tried to capture by force the resources they needed to survive while other countries tried to take advantage of the perceived weakness of the countries in crisis. That in my book means that the EU did a better job of preserving peace than the League of Nations or the UN.
The next on the list would probably be that by using EU membership as a motivator, it's pushed the former Eastern Bloc countries that could very easily have turned into Putin-style regimes to become proper democracies. Read the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union to get an idea of the political importance of EU membership, and then consider what Romania, Bulgaria, Slovakia, Belarus, etc could easily have become without it.
It's definitely not the best possible way of governing, but it's doing much better than most everything else that's been tried. And its relative success is a big part of why some African governments have been pushing for similar sorts of organizations among their nations.
The other government agency you can at least send a complaint to is whichever state government body is responsible for granting the monopoly (likely a public utilities commission). If you want to hit them in the pocketbook, losing their access to the state's market is a pretty big hit.
Oh, and if your commissioners and attorneys general aren't responsive, find out how they are selected / appointed / elected, and respond accordingly at election time.
ISPs have common-carrier protection, but not common-carrier responsibilities. This was part of the wonderful telecom "deregulation" that was pushed through in the late 1996 (with wild cheering from both Republicans and Democrats).
The quotes around the "deregulation" have to do with the fact that telecom has basically always been heavily regulated, and still is today. The regulations that were removed were the ones that the big telecom companies wanted to get rid of, pure and simple.
Actually, thanks to the completely misnamed USA PATRIOT Act, the US government doesn't even need a subpoena but instead can send a nice totalitarian-sounding "national security letter". The advantage of the NSL over a subpoena is that even if your corporate email provider wanted to fight the NSL, they couldn't do so legally because the recipient of an NSL is expressly forbidden to tell anybody about it, and that "anybody" includes a court of law. By contrast, if for some reason the corporate email provider wanted to stand up for its customers, it could attempt to quash the subpoena and argue its case in court.
1) What works in Star Trek: TNG cannot be relied upon to work in real life.
Sokath, his eyes uncovered!
If he's paid as badly as most security guards are, it's safe to say that he's judgment-proof.
There is absolutely nothing to justify privileged position of financial companies -- they don't do anything more difficult that a simple accountant does, yet they are allowed to control access to other people's resources and insist on reward that would be too high even if it was their own resources to begin with.
We agree on that at least. I think we just disagree with the solution.
My general goal would be to have the financial sector so heavily regulated as to be safe and boring. That way, so all the Monty Python jokes about accountants become accurate again, bankers would be competing with each other primarily with interest rates rather than arbitrary fees, and stockbrokers would be mostly in the business of selling financial advice to clients who wanted it. It would eliminate a lot of the jobs in finance, make the whole industry a lot less profitable, but would allow the good stuff it does actually continue to happen.
Yes, it is his fault.
The whole point is not just to put these guys in another prison: If they're guilty of nothing, as they are in many cases, then the correct thing to do is to say "You're free to go. If you want, we'll set up travel arrangements back to your home. Please accept our humblest apologies, and $X for some reparations for what we put you through for no reason whatsoever. If you were tortured, we would like your help putting your torturers behind bars."
About the only piece of this that Barack Obama as president couldn't do without authorization from Congress is the reparations. Presidents can pardon people, they can tell the military to move somebody from point A to point B, he can definitely apologize to people, and he can direct his Attorney General to investigate possible war crimes.
WHY finances are complex and convoluted if their sole purpose in the society is resource management?
Well, there's the rub: Resource management is hard, because everyone more-or-less wants as much as possible while producing as little as possible. That leads them to want to take as much of other people's profits as possible while pushing any of their risks onto somebody else.
If you're talking about corporate accounting, then the reason that's hard is because corporate executives are motivated to lie about their earnings if they can get away with it in order to get raises and bonuses. If you're talking about stock trading, then any seller will try to describe their stock as better than it really is and any buyer will try to describe the stock as worse than it really is unless there's a way to independently verify it, and it's hard because not only are the liars everywhere but the prices are shifting around faster than most people can properly evaluate their holdings.
And so on. Note that I didn't say that we should ever trust these guys further than they can be easily thrown, just that many of them actually provide a real service to somebody.
And even people who ought to know what they're doing screw this stuff up: One of the many reasons Larry Summers pissed off a lot of people at Harvard was because he was screwing up the management of the endowment, and this is a guy who's a former Treasury Secretary and top-notch economist.
That's not entirely true, as satisfying as it would be.
If I'm, say, a college president with a background in history, charged with among other things managing a large endowment, I'm going to hire some folks who know what they're doing to handle the finances. I'll have them vetted and watched by the people in my college that understand economics and business and finance and stuff, but in the end I'm going to need a financial services provider to handle it. Same story goes for anybody inheriting huge sums of cash, or finds themselves suddenly incredibly wealthy because they're Steve Wozniak or something. They have to watch their financial services providers carefully, but they'd be idiots not to hire somebody to take care of it.
What that does mean is that Joe Schmoe doesn't need a full-service broker to manage his day-to-day trading, but those finance guys do provide real services to people.
Another way of describing it: Sales guys, stock brokers, marketing people, managers, accountants, and a lot of other people are professional liars. They operate in an environment where people are constantly lying to them, and they in turn are constantly lying to others. When you're lying at least 40 hours a week, then lying to your friends, family, spouse, or children becomes a lot easier.
Engineers, scientists, etc by contrast are in an environment where attempts at lying will likely be caught very very quickly.
That's the wonderful thing about making predictions 10 or 20 years out: The predictor will never be called to account if the prediction fails to be accurate. Even better are those predictions about what will be possible in 50 years, because by the time the 50 years is done the person who made the prediction is either retired or dead.
The simple fact is that Hari Seldon doesn't exist, and thus any prediction beyond the next year or so is more or less complete BS. (This rule also goes for federal budget projections, so bear that in mind
And I support efforts to get to Mars, I just don't like BS predictions.
"many economists", "according to some UCLA dudes" ...
You know, when smart economists make a comment like that, they want their names attached to it. Is there some sort of study you can link here?
Why would you use up perfectly good bourbon on driving somewhere? I mean, this seems about as bright as the bumbling alchemist proudly announcing that he'd found a way to turn gold into lead.
You're right that I individually may not succeed at shooting you and then fighting off your friends/relatives/associates. But enough people will be trying to pull the same deal I just described that some of them will succeed and set themselves up as warlords.
My point is that no taxes leads to anarchy leads directly to petty warlords leads to a feudal or monarchical state. In other words, you can't get away from having a government. Even Somalia (brought up in a sister thread) isn't government-free - there are just several competing governments out there that fight over control of Mogadishu, but within their own territory they are effectively the government.
Actually, a significant number of my pregnant classmates got that way intentionally. For very stupid reasons (e.g. keeping an older boyfriend happy or cementing a marriage that began when he was 18 and she was 16 because she really wanted out of her parents' place), but intentionally.
There was one who didn't though. She was as naive as you describe, and was both pro-life and in no condition to raise a child. She told me later she miscarried, and I didn't entirely take her word on that but also didn't press the issue.