New products are one of the prime motivators of demand.
That's quite simply nonsense. Standard micro explains exactly what creates demand, namely that the product offers utility to the buyer. In other words, it solves (or appears to solve) their problem. I'm hungry, so I'm now motivated to buy hamburger and eat it so I'm not hungry anymore. I don't like the color of my curtains, so I'm now in the market for new curtains. My car has a dent, so I'm now part of the demand for auto body repair services. I'd like to walk around with all my digital music, so I'm now going to consider buying an iPod.
And on the macro scale, we also know how to create demand: Give more cash to the people who are broke, because they will spend it right away on services and goods they've been putting off buying because they were broke.
The other part of the "uncertainty" explanation: It's nonsense. It always has been: to get profits, you have to take on risk, and risk by definition involves uncertainty about the outcome.
Pay Chinese workers Western wages? This would invalidate the entire idea of moving production to China. It would render millions of Chinese people unemployable - in favor of Western people. What's that called again?
A manufacturing boom in the United States with the attendant reduction in unemployment?
That's not the only effect of independents in open primaries. For instance, in the NH presidential primaries in 2000, there was Al Gore and Bill Bradley on the Democratic side and George W Bush and John McCain on the Republican side. Independents (myself included) were mostly divided between Bradley and McCain, and in the end mostly backed McCain on the theory that Gore would probably be significantly less damaging than Bush.
More to the point, in a very broad sense conservatives tend to be more approving of the use of deadly force. It's a tendency, not an absolute, of course: Some liberals really like the quite violent Che Guevera, some conservatives are quick to argue that Obama shouldn't have the power to kill US citizens without an indictment. But there is a real tendency that needs to be acknowledged - whenever a mass shooting occurs, a common liberal response is "If we'd just given counseling to the perp, he wouldn't have shot people", while a common conservative response is "If everyone else were also armed, we could have shot him before he did too much damage". When the issue is the death penalty, the common liberal response is "the conviction might be wrong, so let's stop the execution and leave him in prison" while the common conservative response is "he's clearly a bad man, let's take him out and be done with it". When the issue is war, liberals tend to be doves and conservatives tend to be hawks.
For what it's worth, the ACLU has publicly sided Chick-Fil-A on this one. (It's times like this when they demonstrate that they aren't shills for the Democrats, contrary to the beliefs of many die-hard Republicans.)
More to the point, anyone trying to claim a portion of the proceeds from every resale is just engaging in rent-seeking. You sold it, it's not yours anymore, and you should have no say in what they do with it after.
Here's the reasoning for that: From the point of view of the people controlling their budget, NASA's raison-d'etre is public relations for the United States. That science stuff is just a concession to all those eggheads who want to actually learn about stuff.
The previous method, back in the days before all this social networking stuff: Republicans tend to keep their shades drawn, even though they really don't have anything that would be worth hiding. Democrats ought to draw their shades, but don't.
Here's the basic story of the Great Depression, which is very similar to the story of the more recent financial crisis. 1. Times were good in the 1920's on Wall St. People could and did make good money trading stocks. 2. A bubble began to form, with financial companies willing to extend credit in order to buy stocks. For instance, you could buy a $1 stock for 10 cents and owe your banker for the other 90 cents. They were willing to do this because the stocks were constantly going up, so this was a good investment. 3. Of course, the stocks were going up because people were entering the market with only 10% of the value of the stock in hand, which meant they could pay 10 times what they previously could. 4. Eventually, somebody discovered that the underlying assets were worth, at most, 10% of what they were priced at in the market. When this became public knowledge, everyone tried to get out at the same time. 5. End result: Crash. And when one business crashes, their stock, which was considered good, is now worthless, so businesses holding their stock also crash, so it cascades through the system leaving things worse than if the Crimson Permanent Assurance had hit them.
Replace "stocks" with "mortgage backed securities", fast forward 70 years or so, and the same thing happened. It happens any time that a con man can successfully make worthless pieces of paper look like representations of valuable property. And yes, it could conceivably happen that the pieces of paper that say "One Dollar" on them will also become worthless - if it does, you want to have land and a team of people who will help you defend it.
The problem with Politifact, and in fact much of political reporting, is the cult of false equivalency. If they consistently portray politicians as liars and others as truth-tellers, then they'll be accused of partisanship and lose credibility. So the effect of this is that political figures who are regularly liars and only occasionally speak the truth end up looking no more dishonest than political figures who usually tell the truth but occasionally slip up.
We just had a new vendor selection at my employer and IOS was chosen because the comfort level with security and malware on the Android platform is lower.
Actually, what I can almost guarantee happened is that some executive with no technical background whatsoever said "I love my iPhone, it's so shiny!", and the bit about security and malware was made up to justify that.
Actually, a good portion of human activity can be explained by that simple phrase. In this case, it's about enforcing rules guaranteeing BT certain amounts of money.
I expect the government to follow its own laws. Is that too much to ask?
I also don't accept your tradeoffs. For example, every terrorist stopped by the FBI in the last decade was caught using policing powers they had before the Patriot Act was passed. We also know exactly how many terrorist attacks were stopped by the TSA, and the answer is 0. The facts don't add up to having to balance civil liberties with a risk of terrorism. Even if there was a balancing act required, I'd just point out that in 2001 3 times as many people died from drunk driving as terrorism, so I'm fine with accepting the risk of terrorist attacks in exchange for not being spied on by my government in what's supposed to be a free country.
Also, your mindset is exactly what's enabled every single modern totalitarian state. "Sure, we have to give up all control over our daily lives, but that's just to protect us from $EVIL." And I should point out that whatever $EVIL the government is (theoretically) protecting us from is best when it can't be seen, can't be defeated, and hides among us, so there's no chance of actually winning and allowing freedom to return.
The best government would be an enlightened despot, but there's no way to me sure your despot stays enlightened. Nor to ensure the succession.
A couple of ways other countries have historically handled those problems: 1. Keep the despot near the battle front. He'll be dead before he's no longer enlightened. 2. Always have a ridiculously long plan of succession and clear rules for how that line is decided. For instance, the Brits have a list of about 60 people in line to succeed Queen Elizabeth II if for some reason Prince Charles can't do so when the time comes. 3. Don't coddle your would-be despots. For example, the Spartans treated the sons of their kings not significantly differently from the sons of their regular citizens.
However, historically, most despotic systems run into the problem of starting out with fairly enlightened despots and trending towards really stupid despots, at which point a smart upstart overthrows the stupid despot and the cycle begins again.
This is an election year, I am sure that Mitt Romney will be happy to explain how he would never use his power to invalidate a decision of judiciary and prevent the Marshal's Service from going about their normal duties.
Of course, he'd by lying. Just like Obama was lying when he talked about restoring civil liberties. Once presidents have that kind of power, they never give it back.
It's more the difference between trying to stop a car at 600kph and a barge at 10kph. Sure, the barge is going a lot slower, but it's also a much bigger object and a lot harder to stop.
For the record, the only recreational drugs I've ever used are (a) caffeine and (b) alcohol, neither of them even close to excess.
If an employee is performing poorly, then I don't need to go testing the contents of his urine to find out why, I can just fire him. It's not my job to act as a DEA agent, a police officer, or a therapist, my job is to achieve maximum performance for my team.
On the one hand, algorithmic trading can screw up royally and cost hundreds of millions in a matter of hours. On the other hand, human traders can screw up royally and cost billions over a few months.
I'm not sure which is worse. And of course in combination they can crash national economies.
Are/Were companies doing this because it's cheaper than running a background check?
Some companies are doing this because they like to think of themselves as having control over their employees outside of work. It's the same impetus as drug testing: Sure your work performance might be great, but we don't want you if you smoke pot on the weekends or have an account on Fetlife or went to a political protest for a cause the company doesn't agree with.
Imagine this scenario if you will: B damaged A for $X, but B has a much more expensive and better legal team than A, so A loses. A is now forced to pay for B's lawyers, and is now bankrupt.
That's why in the US, it's the judge that gets to decide whether a case is frivolous and award attorney's fees accordingly.
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New products are one of the prime motivators of demand.
That's quite simply nonsense. Standard micro explains exactly what creates demand, namely that the product offers utility to the buyer. In other words, it solves (or appears to solve) their problem. I'm hungry, so I'm now motivated to buy hamburger and eat it so I'm not hungry anymore. I don't like the color of my curtains, so I'm now in the market for new curtains. My car has a dent, so I'm now part of the demand for auto body repair services. I'd like to walk around with all my digital music, so I'm now going to consider buying an iPod.
And on the macro scale, we also know how to create demand: Give more cash to the people who are broke, because they will spend it right away on services and goods they've been putting off buying because they were broke.
The other part of the "uncertainty" explanation: It's nonsense. It always has been: to get profits, you have to take on risk, and risk by definition involves uncertainty about the outcome.
Pay Chinese workers Western wages? This would invalidate the entire idea of moving production to China. It would render millions of Chinese people unemployable - in favor of Western people. What's that called again?
A manufacturing boom in the United States with the attendant reduction in unemployment?
Also, jingoism and protectionism are significantly different concepts.
That's not the only effect of independents in open primaries. For instance, in the NH presidential primaries in 2000, there was Al Gore and Bill Bradley on the Democratic side and George W Bush and John McCain on the Republican side. Independents (myself included) were mostly divided between Bradley and McCain, and in the end mostly backed McCain on the theory that Gore would probably be significantly less damaging than Bush.
Sadly, it seems like we were probably right.
More to the point, in a very broad sense conservatives tend to be more approving of the use of deadly force. It's a tendency, not an absolute, of course: Some liberals really like the quite violent Che Guevera, some conservatives are quick to argue that Obama shouldn't have the power to kill US citizens without an indictment. But there is a real tendency that needs to be acknowledged - whenever a mass shooting occurs, a common liberal response is "If we'd just given counseling to the perp, he wouldn't have shot people", while a common conservative response is "If everyone else were also armed, we could have shot him before he did too much damage". When the issue is the death penalty, the common liberal response is "the conviction might be wrong, so let's stop the execution and leave him in prison" while the common conservative response is "he's clearly a bad man, let's take him out and be done with it". When the issue is war, liberals tend to be doves and conservatives tend to be hawks.
For what it's worth, the ACLU has publicly sided Chick-Fil-A on this one. (It's times like this when they demonstrate that they aren't shills for the Democrats, contrary to the beliefs of many die-hard Republicans.)
More to the point, anyone trying to claim a portion of the proceeds from every resale is just engaging in rent-seeking. You sold it, it's not yours anymore, and you should have no say in what they do with it after.
Here's the reasoning for that: From the point of view of the people controlling their budget, NASA's raison-d'etre is public relations for the United States. That science stuff is just a concession to all those eggheads who want to actually learn about stuff.
The previous method, back in the days before all this social networking stuff: Republicans tend to keep their shades drawn, even though they really don't have anything that would be worth hiding. Democrats ought to draw their shades, but don't.
Bake it into meat pies, of course.
Here's the basic story of the Great Depression, which is very similar to the story of the more recent financial crisis.
1. Times were good in the 1920's on Wall St. People could and did make good money trading stocks.
2. A bubble began to form, with financial companies willing to extend credit in order to buy stocks. For instance, you could buy a $1 stock for 10 cents and owe your banker for the other 90 cents. They were willing to do this because the stocks were constantly going up, so this was a good investment.
3. Of course, the stocks were going up because people were entering the market with only 10% of the value of the stock in hand, which meant they could pay 10 times what they previously could.
4. Eventually, somebody discovered that the underlying assets were worth, at most, 10% of what they were priced at in the market. When this became public knowledge, everyone tried to get out at the same time.
5. End result: Crash. And when one business crashes, their stock, which was considered good, is now worthless, so businesses holding their stock also crash, so it cascades through the system leaving things worse than if the Crimson Permanent Assurance had hit them.
Replace "stocks" with "mortgage backed securities", fast forward 70 years or so, and the same thing happened. It happens any time that a con man can successfully make worthless pieces of paper look like representations of valuable property. And yes, it could conceivably happen that the pieces of paper that say "One Dollar" on them will also become worthless - if it does, you want to have land and a team of people who will help you defend it.
The problem with Politifact, and in fact much of political reporting, is the cult of false equivalency. If they consistently portray politicians as liars and others as truth-tellers, then they'll be accused of partisanship and lose credibility. So the effect of this is that political figures who are regularly liars and only occasionally speak the truth end up looking no more dishonest than political figures who usually tell the truth but occasionally slip up.
No, that's just the spin they're putting on it.
We just had a new vendor selection at my employer and IOS was chosen because the comfort level with security and malware on the Android platform is lower.
Actually, what I can almost guarantee happened is that some executive with no technical background whatsoever said "I love my iPhone, it's so shiny!", and the bit about security and malware was made up to justify that.
There are some people who's heads would explode if they ever admitted that the hippies were, in fact, right about this sort of thing.
"We want more money."
Actually, a good portion of human activity can be explained by that simple phrase. In this case, it's about enforcing rules guaranteeing BT certain amounts of money.
I expect the government to follow its own laws. Is that too much to ask?
I also don't accept your tradeoffs. For example, every terrorist stopped by the FBI in the last decade was caught using policing powers they had before the Patriot Act was passed. We also know exactly how many terrorist attacks were stopped by the TSA, and the answer is 0. The facts don't add up to having to balance civil liberties with a risk of terrorism. Even if there was a balancing act required, I'd just point out that in 2001 3 times as many people died from drunk driving as terrorism, so I'm fine with accepting the risk of terrorist attacks in exchange for not being spied on by my government in what's supposed to be a free country.
Also, your mindset is exactly what's enabled every single modern totalitarian state. "Sure, we have to give up all control over our daily lives, but that's just to protect us from $EVIL." And I should point out that whatever $EVIL the government is (theoretically) protecting us from is best when it can't be seen, can't be defeated, and hides among us, so there's no chance of actually winning and allowing freedom to return.
The best government would be an enlightened despot, but there's no way to me sure your despot stays enlightened. Nor to ensure the succession.
A couple of ways other countries have historically handled those problems:
1. Keep the despot near the battle front. He'll be dead before he's no longer enlightened.
2. Always have a ridiculously long plan of succession and clear rules for how that line is decided. For instance, the Brits have a list of about 60 people in line to succeed Queen Elizabeth II if for some reason Prince Charles can't do so when the time comes.
3. Don't coddle your would-be despots. For example, the Spartans treated the sons of their kings not significantly differently from the sons of their regular citizens.
However, historically, most despotic systems run into the problem of starting out with fairly enlightened despots and trending towards really stupid despots, at which point a smart upstart overthrows the stupid despot and the cycle begins again.
This is an election year, I am sure that Mitt Romney will be happy to explain how he would never use his power to invalidate a decision of judiciary and prevent the Marshal's Service from going about their normal duties.
Of course, he'd by lying. Just like Obama was lying when he talked about restoring civil liberties. Once presidents have that kind of power, they never give it back.
It's more the difference between trying to stop a car at 600kph and a barge at 10kph. Sure, the barge is going a lot slower, but it's also a much bigger object and a lot harder to stop.
For the record, the only recreational drugs I've ever used are (a) caffeine and (b) alcohol, neither of them even close to excess.
If an employee is performing poorly, then I don't need to go testing the contents of his urine to find out why, I can just fire him. It's not my job to act as a DEA agent, a police officer, or a therapist, my job is to achieve maximum performance for my team.
John Marshall has made his decision; now let him enforce it!
It's not a new problem: Any time the executive wants to flip off the judiciary, it can.
On the one hand, algorithmic trading can screw up royally and cost hundreds of millions in a matter of hours. On the other hand, human traders can screw up royally and cost billions over a few months.
I'm not sure which is worse. And of course in combination they can crash national economies.
Are/Were companies doing this because it's cheaper than running a background check?
Some companies are doing this because they like to think of themselves as having control over their employees outside of work. It's the same impetus as drug testing: Sure your work performance might be great, but we don't want you if you smoke pot on the weekends or have an account on Fetlife or went to a political protest for a cause the company doesn't agree with.
Imagine this scenario if you will: B damaged A for $X, but B has a much more expensive and better legal team than A, so A loses. A is now forced to pay for B's lawyers, and is now bankrupt.
That's why in the US, it's the judge that gets to decide whether a case is frivolous and award attorney's fees accordingly.