I didn't say they were any good at doing what they claimed to do, but they make their money by convincing advertisers they're good enough. And for that, the more data the better, regardless of whether the user said they wanted to get rid of it.
Because their entire value proposition is helping advertisers in deciding what to sell people.
For example, if somebody is talking a lot about legalizing pot, advertisers will know that they'll have more luck selling Timothy Leary books, Bob Marley or Grateful Dead albums, and Che Guevara T-shirts than they will selling Glenn Beck books, Christian rock albums, and suits and ties.
After all, with outside-the-box thinking, we can proactively re-prioritize synergies to get cloud-based enterprise solutions that go viral in mobile social media.
Again, communism is a form of government, it is not an economic system.
The form of government in the USSR and Mao's China is correctly described as totalitarianism or dictatorship. Communism, on the other hand, is the model where everybody in the society pools everything they've produced together and can take as much as they need, a scaled up version of what families and some primitive tribes do.
What is the probability that a perfect coin will land either heads or tails? The probability is 1. What is the probability that it will land neither? The probability is 0. It's pretty simple.
Consider a situation where there are 3 people in isolation, Adam, Bob, and Charlie. Now, Adam can't produce food (for whatever reason) and is starving, Bob has produced a lot of extra food, and Charlie has just enough to eat and a gun. Now, if Bob willingly gives food to Adam, there's no moral quandary. But if Bob refuses to help, your options are (1) Charlie and/or Adam take food from Bob by force or stealth and give it to Adam, or (2) Adam starves to death.
You've said that "I see it as a completely immoral act to steal productivity of any individual and use it to subsidise any other individual, age, situation notwithstanding." In order to not violate your moral code, you would have to choose 2 (starvation), because all permutations of option 1 involve stealing Bob's productivity to subsidize Adam, and in our isolated society there's nothing else to fall back on.
My moral code, by contrast, says that keeping people alive trumps property rights, so in order to prevent Adam from starving it is unfortunate but necessary to somehow take the food from Bob and give it Adam. Since Charlie has the gun and thus is acting as the closest this little society has to a government, he's the one who has the easiest time in making this happen.
Some tips I'd add, as somebody on both sides of this problem: 5) Money counts. If you pay for quality as well as demanding quality, you'll get it. If you give people profit sharing, they'll try to create more profit. 6) Give your techies the same opportunities for bonuses, advancement, and prestige as other kinds of employees. If your company lavishes money and praise on its sales team and ignores the techies who've labored night and day to build the product that sales team sells, they'll grow resentful at best. 7) Give your techies opportunities to advance themselves in their profession. Send them to conferences, give them time to put into professional organizations relevant to their role, etc. 8) Make absolutely certain you keep on-call duties reasonable. If you have off-shore tech teams, take advantage of the time difference so that somebody can handle emergencies at all times without being up at 3 AM (e.g. have admins in the US responsible for 7 AM to 7 PM EST, and admins in India responsible for the other 12 hours which is roughly daytime there). At the very least, you should rotate front-line on-call duties among as large a group of people as you possibly can - 2 weeks of on-call is annoying but manageable, 1 week out of 3 or 24/7 is seriously painful. 9) Build cross-functional teams. Your techies should not be isolated in a corner, they should be interacting regularly with their users (for internal tools) or their sales and customer service teams (for products sold to the outside) so that they gain some direct knowledge of the effects of their work, and so the other teams don't think of the techies as a bunch of gnomes in a cave that come out with more bugs periodically. 10) When you ask extraordinary effort from your team, be there with them. For instance, if you expect your team to be in at 3 AM for a product launch, get there at 2:30 with coffee and whatever snacks they like. Even if you aren't actually adding much value, it definitely improves morale.
Point is, if you think that was bad, wait until you have 50 of those happening at the same time, which will make it way way worse.
By the way, give credit where credit is due in Katrina: the Coast Guard actually did a fantastic job, rescuing thousands of people as soon as the storm had passed. They did a couple of very smart things: (1) They'd built an organization where people at the bottom rungs were given the authority and training to make intelligent decisions so they could act usefully when contact with commanders was interrupted, and (2) Top brass supported people throwing out rules that weren't actually solving the problem.
1. The reason they went through this kludge with the private insurance companies is that the private insurance companies would have never allowed a bill to pass that didn't include them continuing to exist. Obama believed (incorrectly) that he could buy their silence and a few Republican votes by making this thing use the private insurance industry rather than an entirely government-run option.
2. an HMO (standing for "health maintenance organization") is where a private insurance company tells those who buy into their plan "You can use these doctors, hospitals, and pharmacies, but in exchange we'll give you really cheap access to preventative care and generic drugs." It's in some ways a privately run version of the saner government-run plans like the UK NHS. However, HMOs also pull the same game as other private insurance plans, of spending a lot of money coming up with excuses for why they don't have to pay claims.
3. That's not everybody, just the conservatives (who make UK and Canadian Conservatives seem like bleeding-heart liberals by comparison). For a significant number of people who think that way, the real issue is that they believe (falsely) that the government is taking their money and giving it to urban black people who just spend it on drugs.
What's the good reason why the states couldn't handle this? Bear in mind, almost all current regulation of insurance markets comes from the states.
The main reason is that states like Connecticut are much more wealthy per capita than states like Mississippi, so this kind of thing is very workable and cheap for Connecticut and damn near impossible for Mississippi if done on a state level.
The kind of world I advocate is the world where everybody is so productive that they don't have a problem paying for their healthcare out of pocket, that's my preferred method, but I will never advocate a welfare world.
What do you do with those people who aren't that productive? Say, they're 6 years old, or 86 years old, or lost their leg an industrial accident, or are living with Alzheimers, or are mentally retarded? They can't pay for their own health care. That leaves only 2 options: (A) Somebody else pays their bill, or (B) they suffer and die. It sure seems like you're advocating option B.
Maybe this is just a different set of morals, but I'm not willing to let people die just so I get more stuff.
"There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old's life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs." - attributed to Paul Krugman
There's a lot of talk about how fragile society is, three meals away from the end of civilization and all that, but there's not a lot of evidence that civilization actually is fragile.
Well, here's some evidence: New Orleans, August 30, 2005, we came close to having a complete breakdown in civilized society. And that was with a disaster in 1 city and a whole lot of resources moving into the city to try to deal with it. In a matter of days, you had groups of armed people taking over particular neighborhoods, a bunch of murders (including some by policemen). Now imagine the same thing happening, but now civil authorities can't respond in an meaningful way.
Yes there are hard principles that say that when a ball is thrown into the air it comes back down in a basically parabolic arc, but when applied to a chaotic system such as subatomic particles (and electrons in particular), I believe their findings more "spongy".
Point being, you can understand general trends about a larger system without understanding exactly how each piece of the puzzle work.
The 1% should care because if recent history is a guide, anarchy tends to lead to communism.
Nonsense - if history is a guide, anarchy tends to lead to feudalism, with the feudal lords being the guys who are ruthless enough to just kill anybody who stands in their way of taking power. When it came down to feudal organizations (nobility, Vikings, etc) versus communal organizations (monasteries mostly) in the Dark Ages, the communists lost, repeatedly.
My argument is this: because they were going to have to ram it through against the wishes of all Republicans, the bill they ended up ramming through wasn't a "compromise", it was the bill they actually wanted. The talk about it being a "compromise" was in fact nonsense, because the only people they were compromising with was themselves.
If they'd wanted a public option, it would have been in the bill. It wasn't, so they didn't really want it.
All I did was pick an issue that was likely to have recent coverage, searched for transcripts of the coverage, and quoted the first paragraph, providing you with specific links so you could read the rest of the transcripts of that coverage. Explain what I skipped that mischaracterized the coverage.
That's always the problem with censorship systems.
For instance, is a picture that is clearly a depiction of Nick Clegg and David Cameron going at it while not showing any private parts qualify as adult content or political speech? How about if they aren't even engaged in sexual activity, but just depicted wearing drag? How about classic artwork, like "Liberty Leading the People", where a breast is clearly visible? How about smutty literature, like Harry Potter lemons, the Song of Soloman, or D.H. Lawrence?
The line isn't clear, and the answer is usually that the government hires some prude to decide for the rest of us what's ok and what's not.
As the mandate is to give money to private insurers, and not the government itself, it does not fall under the Constitutional definition of a legal tax.
The mandate says "If you don't buy private insurance, you are legally obligated to pay an extra $X to the government as part of your tax bill". It's not "If you don't buy private insurance, you have committed a crime which you can be tried and punished with a fine of up to $X". What Roberts said was that $X was a tax penalty, not a fine.
That's why it's not as clear-cut as you'd like to think. And remember that John Roberts isn't exactly what you'd call a flaming socialist liberal.
Not exactly. There's much more to that story. Here's another part of it:
After it became clear that the Republicans and a bunch of Blue Dog Democrats in the House were going to vote against it, Dennis Kucinich (D-OH 10) held out trying to put back in the public option. Obama personally took him on a trip on Air Force 1, and by the end of that trip Kucinich had changed his mind (theoretically, on the grounds that this was the best he could do now, but who really knows). Kucinich's district was then eliminated by the Republican-controlled Ohio legislature with nary a peep from the Democratic Party.
This was at the point when the Democrats could have shoved through any bill they wanted to, because the Republicans had already decided they were all voting against it in both the House and Senate.
Slashdot Mirror
I didn't say they were any good at doing what they claimed to do, but they make their money by convincing advertisers they're good enough. And for that, the more data the better, regardless of whether the user said they wanted to get rid of it.
Or on CNN, for that matter.
Because their entire value proposition is helping advertisers in deciding what to sell people.
For example, if somebody is talking a lot about legalizing pot, advertisers will know that they'll have more luck selling Timothy Leary books, Bob Marley or Grateful Dead albums, and Che Guevara T-shirts than they will selling Glenn Beck books, Christian rock albums, and suits and ties.
After all, with outside-the-box thinking, we can proactively re-prioritize synergies to get cloud-based enterprise solutions that go viral in mobile social media.
Again, communism is a form of government, it is not an economic system.
The form of government in the USSR and Mao's China is correctly described as totalitarianism or dictatorship. Communism, on the other hand, is the model where everybody in the society pools everything they've produced together and can take as much as they need, a scaled up version of what families and some primitive tribes do.
I'm a good programmer, but I still learn things about C++ after using it for *20* years.
That's ok, I think Bjarn Stroustrup has the same problem.
I realise it must have been a great trauma to you to have RMS jump through your window wielding a katana
Hey now, he only does that for defending himself against ninjas, and defending you against RIAA goons.
What is the probability that a perfect coin will land either heads or tails? The probability is 1. What is the probability that it will land neither? The probability is 0. It's pretty simple.
Not necessarily
And more importantly, there tends to be a confusion between the part in the chair and the part approximately 30 inches above it.
In Capitalist America, book reads you!
Here's a simplification of the problem.
Consider a situation where there are 3 people in isolation, Adam, Bob, and Charlie. Now, Adam can't produce food (for whatever reason) and is starving, Bob has produced a lot of extra food, and Charlie has just enough to eat and a gun. Now, if Bob willingly gives food to Adam, there's no moral quandary. But if Bob refuses to help, your options are (1) Charlie and/or Adam take food from Bob by force or stealth and give it to Adam, or (2) Adam starves to death.
You've said that "I see it as a completely immoral act to steal productivity of any individual and use it to subsidise any other individual, age, situation notwithstanding." In order to not violate your moral code, you would have to choose 2 (starvation), because all permutations of option 1 involve stealing Bob's productivity to subsidize Adam, and in our isolated society there's nothing else to fall back on.
My moral code, by contrast, says that keeping people alive trumps property rights, so in order to prevent Adam from starving it is unfortunate but necessary to somehow take the food from Bob and give it Adam. Since Charlie has the gun and thus is acting as the closest this little society has to a government, he's the one who has the easiest time in making this happen.
Some tips I'd add, as somebody on both sides of this problem:
5) Money counts. If you pay for quality as well as demanding quality, you'll get it. If you give people profit sharing, they'll try to create more profit.
6) Give your techies the same opportunities for bonuses, advancement, and prestige as other kinds of employees. If your company lavishes money and praise on its sales team and ignores the techies who've labored night and day to build the product that sales team sells, they'll grow resentful at best.
7) Give your techies opportunities to advance themselves in their profession. Send them to conferences, give them time to put into professional organizations relevant to their role, etc.
8) Make absolutely certain you keep on-call duties reasonable. If you have off-shore tech teams, take advantage of the time difference so that somebody can handle emergencies at all times without being up at 3 AM (e.g. have admins in the US responsible for 7 AM to 7 PM EST, and admins in India responsible for the other 12 hours which is roughly daytime there). At the very least, you should rotate front-line on-call duties among as large a group of people as you possibly can - 2 weeks of on-call is annoying but manageable, 1 week out of 3 or 24/7 is seriously painful.
9) Build cross-functional teams. Your techies should not be isolated in a corner, they should be interacting regularly with their users (for internal tools) or their sales and customer service teams (for products sold to the outside) so that they gain some direct knowledge of the effects of their work, and so the other teams don't think of the techies as a bunch of gnomes in a cave that come out with more bugs periodically.
10) When you ask extraordinary effort from your team, be there with them. For instance, if you expect your team to be in at 3 AM for a product launch, get there at 2:30 with coffee and whatever snacks they like. Even if you aren't actually adding much value, it definitely improves morale.
Point is, if you think that was bad, wait until you have 50 of those happening at the same time, which will make it way way worse.
By the way, give credit where credit is due in Katrina: the Coast Guard actually did a fantastic job, rescuing thousands of people as soon as the storm had passed. They did a couple of very smart things: (1) They'd built an organization where people at the bottom rungs were given the authority and training to make intelligent decisions so they could act usefully when contact with commanders was interrupted, and (2) Top brass supported people throwing out rules that weren't actually solving the problem.
1. The reason they went through this kludge with the private insurance companies is that the private insurance companies would have never allowed a bill to pass that didn't include them continuing to exist. Obama believed (incorrectly) that he could buy their silence and a few Republican votes by making this thing use the private insurance industry rather than an entirely government-run option.
2. an HMO (standing for "health maintenance organization") is where a private insurance company tells those who buy into their plan "You can use these doctors, hospitals, and pharmacies, but in exchange we'll give you really cheap access to preventative care and generic drugs." It's in some ways a privately run version of the saner government-run plans like the UK NHS. However, HMOs also pull the same game as other private insurance plans, of spending a lot of money coming up with excuses for why they don't have to pay claims.
3. That's not everybody, just the conservatives (who make UK and Canadian Conservatives seem like bleeding-heart liberals by comparison). For a significant number of people who think that way, the real issue is that they believe (falsely) that the government is taking their money and giving it to urban black people who just spend it on drugs.
What's the good reason why the states couldn't handle this? Bear in mind, almost all current regulation of insurance markets comes from the states.
The main reason is that states like Connecticut are much more wealthy per capita than states like Mississippi, so this kind of thing is very workable and cheap for Connecticut and damn near impossible for Mississippi if done on a state level.
The kind of world I advocate is the world where everybody is so productive that they don't have a problem paying for their healthcare out of pocket, that's my preferred method, but I will never advocate a welfare world.
What do you do with those people who aren't that productive? Say, they're 6 years old, or 86 years old, or lost their leg an industrial accident, or are living with Alzheimers, or are mentally retarded? They can't pay for their own health care. That leaves only 2 options: (A) Somebody else pays their bill, or (B) they suffer and die. It sure seems like you're advocating option B.
Maybe this is just a different set of morals, but I'm not willing to let people die just so I get more stuff.
"There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old's life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs." - attributed to Paul Krugman
There's a lot of talk about how fragile society is, three meals away from the end of civilization and all that, but there's not a lot of evidence that civilization actually is fragile.
Well, here's some evidence: New Orleans, August 30, 2005, we came close to having a complete breakdown in civilized society. And that was with a disaster in 1 city and a whole lot of resources moving into the city to try to deal with it. In a matter of days, you had groups of armed people taking over particular neighborhoods, a bunch of murders (including some by policemen). Now imagine the same thing happening, but now civil authorities can't respond in an meaningful way.
Yes there are hard principles that say that when a ball is thrown into the air it comes back down in a basically parabolic arc, but when applied to a chaotic system such as subatomic particles (and electrons in particular), I believe their findings more "spongy".
Point being, you can understand general trends about a larger system without understanding exactly how each piece of the puzzle work.
The 1% should care because if recent history is a guide, anarchy tends to lead to communism.
Nonsense - if history is a guide, anarchy tends to lead to feudalism, with the feudal lords being the guys who are ruthless enough to just kill anybody who stands in their way of taking power. When it came down to feudal organizations (nobility, Vikings, etc) versus communal organizations (monasteries mostly) in the Dark Ages, the communists lost, repeatedly.
My argument is this: because they were going to have to ram it through against the wishes of all Republicans, the bill they ended up ramming through wasn't a "compromise", it was the bill they actually wanted. The talk about it being a "compromise" was in fact nonsense, because the only people they were compromising with was themselves.
If they'd wanted a public option, it would have been in the bill. It wasn't, so they didn't really want it.
All I did was pick an issue that was likely to have recent coverage, searched for transcripts of the coverage, and quoted the first paragraph, providing you with specific links so you could read the rest of the transcripts of that coverage. Explain what I skipped that mischaracterized the coverage.
That's always the problem with censorship systems.
For instance, is a picture that is clearly a depiction of Nick Clegg and David Cameron going at it while not showing any private parts qualify as adult content or political speech? How about if they aren't even engaged in sexual activity, but just depicted wearing drag? How about classic artwork, like "Liberty Leading the People", where a breast is clearly visible? How about smutty literature, like Harry Potter lemons, the Song of Soloman, or D.H. Lawrence?
The line isn't clear, and the answer is usually that the government hires some prude to decide for the rest of us what's ok and what's not.
As the mandate is to give money to private insurers, and not the government itself, it does not fall under the Constitutional definition of a legal tax.
The mandate says "If you don't buy private insurance, you are legally obligated to pay an extra $X to the government as part of your tax bill". It's not "If you don't buy private insurance, you have committed a crime which you can be tried and punished with a fine of up to $X". What Roberts said was that $X was a tax penalty, not a fine.
That's why it's not as clear-cut as you'd like to think. And remember that John Roberts isn't exactly what you'd call a flaming socialist liberal.
Not exactly. There's much more to that story. Here's another part of it:
After it became clear that the Republicans and a bunch of Blue Dog Democrats in the House were going to vote against it, Dennis Kucinich (D-OH 10) held out trying to put back in the public option. Obama personally took him on a trip on Air Force 1, and by the end of that trip Kucinich had changed his mind (theoretically, on the grounds that this was the best he could do now, but who really knows). Kucinich's district was then eliminated by the Republican-controlled Ohio legislature with nary a peep from the Democratic Party.
This was at the point when the Democrats could have shoved through any bill they wanted to, because the Republicans had already decided they were all voting against it in both the House and Senate.