it has utterly failed to control HIV and has one of the highest AIDS rates in Africa.
Because level of corruption and/or education are the only factors in HIV spread. There have been dumber, more corrupt societies in the past which haven't had a problem with HIV infections because there was no HIV to spread.
There are other major problems. Free market theory assumes that producers have no fixed cost, which means their expenses would be zero if they produced nothing.
That's not even a minor problem. And glancing through several different presentations of free markets, it's not even a common assumption. The closely related mobility of factors is a fairly common factor (that is, if you don't like X, you can readily find Y to replace it) which can be broken by natural monopolies.
That breaks as soon as you introduce workers in the system. Maintaining workforce comes with a huge fixed cost. Workers must be paid enough to survive (food, shelter and health care), and since they die at some time, they must be renewed, which means new workers must be trained.
If you attempt to let the market invisible hand handle that, you may hit situations where your workers cannot survive and be trained, which is obviously a problem for producers. And moreover the worker is often also a consumer: if the labor market makes workers too poor, you get an overproduction crisis.
But not in the real world. Seems pretty silly to me to label something as a major problem when it doesn't actually manifest in the real world.
And I'll point out that there's plenty of non-market distortions such as dumping health care/insurance costs on employers that make workers more expensive and discourages the use of the market for handling labor needs that it is quite good at.
But I am just telling obvious things, as in real life, free labor markets do not exist in developed countries. Slavery and child labor ban are an obvious regulations, for instance. The point is that it introduce regulations in any market that involves labor.
Again, you're telling me how bad free markets are for a market that isn't even close to free. It'd really help, if you had experience with a free market.
Are you saying Africa is a prison? Are you saying that Africans are more likely to be criminals? Do you realize how that sounds?
Sure, it sounds to me like I'm dealing with an idiot. If a place is such a nirvana that you have to force people to stay, then that place happens to have the primary characteristic of a prison.
Again, you're not only wasting your time with these petty, childish arguments, you are also wasting my time. In an effort to expedite some genuine argument, I'll start. For me the money quote is this:
The practical problems of free market theory are not limited to externalities. It is quite insightful to actually read what the fathers of free market theory assumed in order to prove it had maximum efficiency.
Product should have no quality difference, only price. Buyers should be perfectly informed on the product. Producers should have no fixed costs (such as taking care of work force, for instance, here the externalities comes back). Buyers and sellers should be able to deal at any time... and I forget a few others conditions.
The claim here is that the model is invalid because they had to assume a lot of stuff, some which can't apply to a real world market with uncertainty. That is not the point of an ideal model. The point is to simplify real world models to the point that you have understandable models with understandable behavior and then use the understand of those simpler, ideal models to extrapolate back to the real world instances.
Even when such attempts deviate from the real world case, you can usually quantify the deviation or perturbation in terms of the model. Here, the only deviations that really matter are a) regulation, external forces that restrict the decisions or transaction-related costs, b) imperfect information of the participants in the market, and c) externalities and other things of value which are not priced on the market in question.
Free markets in the real world are ones where regulation is kept to a minimum and with open pricing and trade mechanisms. In other words, they are markets which are near the free market ideal in terms of the most important aspects of the free market definition. Sometimes externalities are another such deviation, if they choose to define free markets as excluding externalities.
The end result is that nearly free markets tend to share the same advantages of the ideal. They are close enough.
I find it frustrating how people can blithely claim free markets are broken in all sorts of ways without actually showing even a single example beyond the well-known case of externalities. Monopolies for example aren't automatically a bad thing as long as the monopoly doesn't have a way to permanent block entrants into the market - even natural monopolies don't have that.
Finally, as I've noted earlier, I have actual experience with these sorts of markets, such as stock markets, betting markets (both cash and reputation-based markets), and various MMO-based trading markets. These often allow you considerable insight into the trading behavior of everyone participating in the market. I've seen some pretty bizarre things go on.
What I haven't seen is a system that works better at pricing and distributing market goods and relevant market information. It's not faith, it is merely fact.
Can you support your claims about the French "6th Republic" with any sources citing movements for creating a new constitution or dissolving the French state in favor of a new republic?
Sure, the fact that they're on version 5 already. The longest lived of their republics was 70 years and they're already on 54 years with the current one. I think the structural issues with French society will eventually put it over like high unemployment, overly strong public labor unions, and the usual divide between Left and Right. There's also the matter of the growing power of the EU which might in itself force adoption of a more favorable constitution, say as part of the absorption of France into the EU.
Plus, this constitution has issues, like the judicial part of the government being under the thumb of the executive part, and the inclusion of some pretty vapid environmentalism stuff.
For me, I get the feeling that the current French constitution was designed so that Charles de Gaulle could have an easy time of it. And that's why it's popular for a lot of new democracies. Because people are more concerned about getting stuff done right now (with them naturally in the driver's seat, of course) than about having a democracy that is viable over the long term.
You have to be nice in business in the US because the principals have money and generally no knowledge of technology.
And that's totally different from the rest of the world how? I remain amazed how so often people make a general observation about human behavior and then insist it only happens in the US and/or to rich people.
Rather the reason "nice" became a thing in the US is because it's easy to successfully sue for bad behavior of coworkers. If there's a pattern of harassing behavior (doesn't even need to be sexual in nature) and indications that the employer didn't try to stop the behavior (up to and including firing the employee doing the harassing), then the employer can be liable for the behavior of the employee.
I think that in turn is due to the relative success of the feminist movement in the US which has long had the "good ole boy network" in its sights.
There's no need to discuss the technological competence of rich people or what's in the water in the US.
Applying the colloquial criteria of "dead" to a language that remainedâ"however frozenâ"in widespread and specialized use over many centuries is a complete waste of time for the present discussion.
Aside from being highly relevant to the discussion at hand. Keep in mind the original assertion was:
It's pure hubris to think that scientists in the future are going to go along with our stupid names for stuff.
Yet here we are going along with Latin names for things even though Latin is a dead language whose practical uses now only extend to specialized scientific labeling and rituals for a particular religious sect.
One could argue that Perl is presently a near-dead language (it's evolution has become famously glacial) and then on this basis write a script routing all security advisories concerning Perl (such as DSA-2870-1 libyaml-libyaml-perl) straight into the round device.
One can argue the Moon is made of green cheese. The obvious rebuttals are 1) computer languages aren't languages, 2) unlike Latin, Perl is in widespread use as far as computer languages go, and 3) nobody argued that a language was dead on the basis of it remaining static over time.
the failure mode was the "E" in ESA. nukes in orbit are a non-starter in Europe. the people won't stand for it, and since they are paying for it, nukes are off the table for space probes. for ESA missions, that means solar or no mission.
And just as much resistance today as back when the Beagle 2 was being put together, right?
Nobody speaks it. The closest anyone comes is "church latin" a near variant used by the Roman Catholic Church. That's what makes latin a dead language.
It wouldn't. The images really are pretty detailed and more importantly, they have a model for why the images look the way they look.
Look at the last 20 seconds of this video which borrows from old simulations of the Beagle 2 probe deployment which folded out the solar panels in a particular order. The fold-out deployment shown in the video, if prematurely halted with two panels to go, exactly matches the image. I'd say that ten pixels are more than enough in this case. Plus, they've also imaged other parts of the system, parachute (suspected) and rear cover nearby - which lends credence to the probe landing successfully on the surface.
These are the factors introduced by the neoclassic economists, as conditions that let them demonstrate the free market are optimal.
Mathematical proofs are hard. The point here is that we can make close perturbations of something we already know has the desired behavior. Further, there's two other things to consider here. First, that we don't actually have anything better.
Much of the inefficiencies imposed on markets are excused on the basis of a good solution is not actually desired. For example, the classic rebuttal to concern about businesses going bankrupt because of bad policy decisions is that "We didn't really want those businesses anyway."
Second, I've actually worked with nearly free markets, and they have very interesting and effective dynamics. I think the libel concerning such markets comes from people who have never actually worked with such a market before and who are ignorant of how such markets actually operate.
Lets completely eliminate checks and balances in the system.
The whole reason for the grandparent's proposition exists because executive branch already has too much power. The checks and balances are not checking and balancing enough. I think he's overshooting, but the legislative branch needs to be exerting more control over what's going on.
There is a school of thought in comparative politics called "American Exceptionalism" -- in this case, meaning that the U.S. Constitution is exceptional in that it only works in the US -- other places that have tried using the American model, with the strong executive; end up devolving into dictatorships.
I have my own school of thought, namely, that most places claimed to implement a US style system don't. And it's worth noting that the executive branch wasn't that strong for more than half the history of the US. Given the problems the US currently has with executive branch over-reach, perhaps a strong executive branch doesn't work in the US either!
Believe it or not, is it actually the 5th Republic French Constitution (the DeGaulle constitution) that has proven the most successful in bringing democracy to democratizing nations.
I don't. But that's because France is well on its way to a 6th Republic.
I also see you gloss over the fact that the ESA doesn't have reliable access to plutonium 238. This alone kills the case for using RTG technology since the alternatives to plutonium 238 (such as cobalt 60 or tritium) are much more massive per unit of power produced and thus, far less competitive with solar power.
Slashdot Mirror
it has utterly failed to control HIV and has one of the highest AIDS rates in Africa.
Because level of corruption and/or education are the only factors in HIV spread. There have been dumber, more corrupt societies in the past which haven't had a problem with HIV infections because there was no HIV to spread.
America has a huge debt to China which can crash the American economy at any instant.
Unless that debt doesn't have this capability, of course.
I guess that's why you'd have a linguist do it instead.
There are other major problems. Free market theory assumes that producers have no fixed cost, which means their expenses would be zero if they produced nothing.
That's not even a minor problem. And glancing through several different presentations of free markets, it's not even a common assumption. The closely related mobility of factors is a fairly common factor (that is, if you don't like X, you can readily find Y to replace it) which can be broken by natural monopolies.
That breaks as soon as you introduce workers in the system. Maintaining workforce comes with a huge fixed cost. Workers must be paid enough to survive (food, shelter and health care), and since they die at some time, they must be renewed, which means new workers must be trained.
If you attempt to let the market invisible hand handle that, you may hit situations where your workers cannot survive and be trained, which is obviously a problem for producers. And moreover the worker is often also a consumer: if the labor market makes workers too poor, you get an overproduction crisis.
But not in the real world. Seems pretty silly to me to label something as a major problem when it doesn't actually manifest in the real world.
And I'll point out that there's plenty of non-market distortions such as dumping health care/insurance costs on employers that make workers more expensive and discourages the use of the market for handling labor needs that it is quite good at.
But I am just telling obvious things, as in real life, free labor markets do not exist in developed countries. Slavery and child labor ban are an obvious regulations, for instance. The point is that it introduce regulations in any market that involves labor.
Again, you're telling me how bad free markets are for a market that isn't even close to free. It'd really help, if you had experience with a free market.
Are you saying Africa is a prison? Are you saying that Africans are more likely to be criminals? Do you realize how that sounds?
Sure, it sounds to me like I'm dealing with an idiot. If a place is such a nirvana that you have to force people to stay, then that place happens to have the primary characteristic of a prison.
Do prisons become better places to live by forcing people to live there? No.
Politicians are mostly sociopaths and psychopaths.
He already said "people". It's only a particular affectation of modern times that humanity doesn't strongly manifest these negative traits.
The practical problems of free market theory are not limited to externalities. It is quite insightful to actually read what the fathers of free market theory assumed in order to prove it had maximum efficiency.
Product should have no quality difference, only price. Buyers should be perfectly informed on the product. Producers should have no fixed costs (such as taking care of work force, for instance, here the externalities comes back). Buyers and sellers should be able to deal at any time... and I forget a few others conditions.
The claim here is that the model is invalid because they had to assume a lot of stuff, some which can't apply to a real world market with uncertainty. That is not the point of an ideal model. The point is to simplify real world models to the point that you have understandable models with understandable behavior and then use the understand of those simpler, ideal models to extrapolate back to the real world instances.
Even when such attempts deviate from the real world case, you can usually quantify the deviation or perturbation in terms of the model. Here, the only deviations that really matter are a) regulation, external forces that restrict the decisions or transaction-related costs, b) imperfect information of the participants in the market, and c) externalities and other things of value which are not priced on the market in question.
Free markets in the real world are ones where regulation is kept to a minimum and with open pricing and trade mechanisms. In other words, they are markets which are near the free market ideal in terms of the most important aspects of the free market definition. Sometimes externalities are another such deviation, if they choose to define free markets as excluding externalities.
The end result is that nearly free markets tend to share the same advantages of the ideal. They are close enough.
I find it frustrating how people can blithely claim free markets are broken in all sorts of ways without actually showing even a single example beyond the well-known case of externalities. Monopolies for example aren't automatically a bad thing as long as the monopoly doesn't have a way to permanent block entrants into the market - even natural monopolies don't have that.
Finally, as I've noted earlier, I have actual experience with these sorts of markets, such as stock markets, betting markets (both cash and reputation-based markets), and various MMO-based trading markets. These often allow you considerable insight into the trading behavior of everyone participating in the market. I've seen some pretty bizarre things go on.
What I haven't seen is a system that works better at pricing and distributing market goods and relevant market information. It's not faith, it is merely fact.
Right, it's faith, I won't discuss it.
When you're ready to stop behaving like a petulant child, I'll be here.
Can you support your claims about the French "6th Republic" with any sources citing movements for creating a new constitution or dissolving the French state in favor of a new republic?
Sure, the fact that they're on version 5 already. The longest lived of their republics was 70 years and they're already on 54 years with the current one. I think the structural issues with French society will eventually put it over like high unemployment, overly strong public labor unions, and the usual divide between Left and Right. There's also the matter of the growing power of the EU which might in itself force adoption of a more favorable constitution, say as part of the absorption of France into the EU. Plus, this constitution has issues, like the judicial part of the government being under the thumb of the executive part, and the inclusion of some pretty vapid environmentalism stuff.
For me, I get the feeling that the current French constitution was designed so that Charles de Gaulle could have an easy time of it. And that's why it's popular for a lot of new democracies. Because people are more concerned about getting stuff done right now (with them naturally in the driver's seat, of course) than about having a democracy that is viable over the long term.
No, blaming a small sliver like feminism is just taking a potshot.
Well, that and multi-culturalism.
In the US it's the overarching Christian philosophy of don't talk negatively about our idols and beliefs, or we'll throw you out of the tribe.
Except that it's not. And the US isn't the only country with Christian philosophy.
You have to be nice in business in the US because the principals have money and generally no knowledge of technology.
And that's totally different from the rest of the world how? I remain amazed how so often people make a general observation about human behavior and then insist it only happens in the US and/or to rich people.
Rather the reason "nice" became a thing in the US is because it's easy to successfully sue for bad behavior of coworkers. If there's a pattern of harassing behavior (doesn't even need to be sexual in nature) and indications that the employer didn't try to stop the behavior (up to and including firing the employee doing the harassing), then the employer can be liable for the behavior of the employee.
I think that in turn is due to the relative success of the feminist movement in the US which has long had the "good ole boy network" in its sights.
There's no need to discuss the technological competence of rich people or what's in the water in the US.
Applying the colloquial criteria of "dead" to a language that remainedâ"however frozenâ"in widespread and specialized use over many centuries is a complete waste of time for the present discussion.
Aside from being highly relevant to the discussion at hand. Keep in mind the original assertion was:
It's pure hubris to think that scientists in the future are going to go along with our stupid names for stuff.
Yet here we are going along with Latin names for things even though Latin is a dead language whose practical uses now only extend to specialized scientific labeling and rituals for a particular religious sect.
One could argue that Perl is presently a near-dead language (it's evolution has become famously glacial) and then on this basis write a script routing all security advisories concerning Perl (such as DSA-2870-1 libyaml-libyaml-perl) straight into the round device.
One can argue the Moon is made of green cheese. The obvious rebuttals are 1) computer languages aren't languages, 2) unlike Latin, Perl is in widespread use as far as computer languages go, and 3) nobody argued that a language was dead on the basis of it remaining static over time.
the failure mode was the "E" in ESA. nukes in orbit are a non-starter in Europe. the people won't stand for it, and since they are paying for it, nukes are off the table for space probes. for ESA missions, that means solar or no mission.
And just as much resistance today as back when the Beagle 2 was being put together, right?
Except it's not really using a *dead* language
Nobody speaks it. The closest anyone comes is "church latin" a near variant used by the Roman Catholic Church. That's what makes latin a dead language.
It wouldn't. The images really are pretty detailed and more importantly, they have a model for why the images look the way they look.
Look at the last 20 seconds of this video which borrows from old simulations of the Beagle 2 probe deployment which folded out the solar panels in a particular order. The fold-out deployment shown in the video, if prematurely halted with two panels to go, exactly matches the image. I'd say that ten pixels are more than enough in this case. Plus, they've also imaged other parts of the system, parachute (suspected) and rear cover nearby - which lends credence to the probe landing successfully on the surface.
These are the factors introduced by the neoclassic economists, as conditions that let them demonstrate the free market are optimal.
Mathematical proofs are hard. The point here is that we can make close perturbations of something we already know has the desired behavior. Further, there's two other things to consider here. First, that we don't actually have anything better.
Much of the inefficiencies imposed on markets are excused on the basis of a good solution is not actually desired. For example, the classic rebuttal to concern about businesses going bankrupt because of bad policy decisions is that "We didn't really want those businesses anyway."
Second, I've actually worked with nearly free markets, and they have very interesting and effective dynamics. I think the libel concerning such markets comes from people who have never actually worked with such a market before and who are ignorant of how such markets actually operate.
Keep in mind that the point here is to find geological markers. You won't be digging up a running Beowulf cluster.
we use latin words to be unambiguous
We could use plenty of other schemes to get the same effect without having to use a dead language. The grand parent's point remains.
there is no way to tell what additional factors, natural or manmade, may influence the hypothetical future geological record.
Except through the usual tools of science and reason.
Lets completely eliminate checks and balances in the system.
The whole reason for the grandparent's proposition exists because executive branch already has too much power. The checks and balances are not checking and balancing enough. I think he's overshooting, but the legislative branch needs to be exerting more control over what's going on.
There is a school of thought in comparative politics called "American Exceptionalism" -- in this case, meaning that the U.S. Constitution is exceptional in that it only works in the US -- other places that have tried using the American model, with the strong executive; end up devolving into dictatorships.
I have my own school of thought, namely, that most places claimed to implement a US style system don't. And it's worth noting that the executive branch wasn't that strong for more than half the history of the US. Given the problems the US currently has with executive branch over-reach, perhaps a strong executive branch doesn't work in the US either!
Believe it or not, is it actually the 5th Republic French Constitution (the DeGaulle constitution) that has proven the most successful in bringing democracy to democratizing nations.
I don't. But that's because France is well on its way to a 6th Republic.
Sorry, it's already playing dead. You'll need to ship up new batteries before this dog learns any new tricks.
I also see you gloss over the fact that the ESA doesn't have reliable access to plutonium 238. This alone kills the case for using RTG technology since the alternatives to plutonium 238 (such as cobalt 60 or tritium) are much more massive per unit of power produced and thus, far less competitive with solar power.
They're aspects of my Linux system.
They both can run under Windows as well. Thus, they aren't aspects of a particular OS.