Defunding them isn't the answer. You're approaching every problem with "Market Style" answers. But as the saying goes, when the only tool you have is a hammer every problem is a nail.
In business if something doesn't work you stop throwing money at it. That works great for businesses because they're only goal is profit. Gov't is trying to improve society as a whole. Profit matters, but so do things like quality of life, clean air, religious freedom. Gov't just plain has more balls in the air than business.
You hit on the answer though. The solution is change. I don't mean change in the namby-pamby touchy feely sense. I mean in the scientific sense. You form a hypothesis, try it, test, measure, and if it doesn't work you try again. What you don't do is throw up your hands in disgust, declare we've failed for all time and then give up and leave the rest to random chance and the good graces of the richest people in the world. I much prefer the gov't to the 'invisible hand'. At least occasionally I can see what the gov't is doing...
All that said The GOP isn't trying to defund the NLRB not because it isn't working, it's because they don't like what it's doing. They want to be able to seek profit without concern for quality of life. Unions get in the way of profit, since increased wages mean lower profits. If the NLRB looks useless it's only because 30 years of attacks on Unions combined with outsourcing manufacturing to second and third world countries w/o environmental regulations have weakened the labor force so much that a National Labor Board can't really hope to accomplish much...
You're local EPA can measure it's success in PPM of various pollutants. But we sorta forget that (which is odd, what with all the news of China's cities, or with the "Smog Days" in major American Cities).
Police measure crime rates. The Fed Reserve can measure economic growth. And the SEC can measure how much money was lost by investors on shoddy investments.
A bit more regulation before the housing bust woulda been nice. Anyone remember Glass-Seagal? As Liz Warren pointed out we had 50 years w/o a major bust until we repealed that...
I can hire a small accouting firm for less than a grand. If I've got $100k kicking around I was probably going to do that anyway.
OTOH, some of the projects that got funded and failed did so because the creators didn't really plan ahead and didn't think about how much stuff really costs. This might put the breaks on that. You know, after the kickstarter is done the people don't sign a suicide pack and drink kool-aid in jonestown. Most of them take the work they've produced and try to get it on Steam. That's how I got Valdis Story (one of the best Metroidvania games in years).
Sometimes it helps to have a little guidance. The gov't isn't always there to rain on your parade you know.
I'm planning a Crowd fund to fund some more development on a side project of mine, and if I hit $100k I'd be hiring a CPA anyway, if only to see how much of the money I can keep tax free.
As for a cost/benefit analysis is just a more formal review of the risks involved.
Besides, these rules don't kick in until $100k. My buddy's upcoming kickstarter to print a tiny run of a 15 page comic he's drawing isn't going to be affected. OTOH there's been a few high profile failures and it's be nice to get some of the artistic types to spend some time thinking about how much money they'll really need.
My point is that in the past you would have offered them training.
True though, I'm making some assumptions though about your political views because you're so harsh on people. I'm assuming your politically and economically conservative, and would be opposed to high taxes on the wealthy to train and educate people and support them while they receive that training and education. I'm also assuming you've bought into the 'Job Creator' narrative that says employers are responsible for creating livelihoods for employees and that this excuses the obscene wealth they've been granted. Sorta like how the kings treated serfs back in the day, only worse.
If my assumptions are wrong and you're in favor of the sorts of socialistic that correct for training then you're free to go on rejecting 95% of the candidates w/o a shred of guilt ( or more appropriately culpability).
OTOH, if you're thinking of yourself as a noble lord protecting your serfs then I wish you'd just drop that fantasy and admit all you're really after is winner take all with yourselves as the winners.
Actually you turn away 95% of ppl who send in resumes because 30 years of attacks on the middle class have let you be _way_ too picky with your candidates and to force people to pay to train themselves.
Self taught programmers aren't superior, they're just more desperate. They'll give you 20 hours of free labor a week to keep up. People are people. Your expectations are either a) unrealistic or b) only possible due to a warped labor market that exists to enrich a lucky few (re: 1%).
News flash, the vast majority of _all_ people are like that. Very few people are capable of being the sort of 'Rockstar' programmer you're pining for. And what's wrong with that? Is it just me, or do we as a society just have unrealistic expectations of people? If you can't work 70 hours a week banging out amazing code non-stop you're worthless as a human being just because somewhere out there is someone who can. We hold up what are essentially freaks of nature that don't need sleep as the norm and wonder why the rat race is getting so awful...
MOOCs exist to train cheap workers and (in the long run) to soak up gov't subsidies cheaply. Real learning is hard. It's a full time job. The assumption with a MOOC is the person is working a full time job already. Every real college I knew back in the day would politely tell students that they weren't gonna make it past year 2 while working full time. That's why we used to give students money while they went to school...
Life is stressful, and for many entertainment is a valve for that stress. It's not that poor people downloading the Hobbit or Game of Thrones are causing a loss of sale on one or the other, it's that with a little bit of that stress relived they're much less likely to make a snap purchase (which they can't afford) to relieve that stress.
When add the fact that one or two players in the economy owns all the media and that corporate profits by and large go to 1% of the populace then the **AA's of the world's stance makes sense. It doesn't matter _what_ you buy, they make money either way. But they need you _ready_ to buy.
Let me put it this way: If you want chicken but you've got steak, odds are good you'll settle for chicken. If you've got neither I can sell you chicken.
This is a guess I'm pulling out of my @$$, but they look pretty profitable to sell. Those screens can be had for $50 bucks in quantities of 1000 (let alone what Samsung buys) and they hardware's a cheap SOC. The entire thing's probably under $120 bucks and you can sell it for $250. That's a pretty sweet profit margin. It's kinda like how Android phones were outselling Windows 8 Phones because the sales reps got better bonuses. Amazon's going to push the product with the better margin.
As someone who knows a few ppl that are mentally ill, it's often acute. You're normal one day and crazy as a loon the next. It's a brain chemistry thing, but since it's not obviously visible it's tough to get it classified as a disability unless you're crazy all the time. If Club Fed's as nice as everyone on this thread is saying he's probably mentally ill and had an episode. If that's the case by the time he comes to his senses (3 months? A year?) the damage will be done, but he'll be lucid again so he won't be able to claim insanity. And "Temporary Insanity" goes over with judges about as well as you'd expect...
If that's the case I feel sorry for him. He'll spend the rest of his life in and out of trouble with the law. It's damn near impossible to meet parole conditions when you freak the hell out every few years...
the users will boot into the Android portion and forget about the broken Windows partition. You used to see this effect with AOL. They wrote custom Modem drivers for every modem they could get their hands on, and for years where the #1 choice for a lot of people because when the Windows Modem driver broke they could still connect to AOL.
Apple gets creamed by Wintel in that market space, so it's not really much surprise that there's no Apple tax. otoh, I'm looking at a Mac mini for some entry level Mac development I want to do porting my Firefox Plugin to IOS and almost cry. The Mac Mini all blinged out with an i7 and 16 gigs of ram will set me back almost a grand and doesn't compare that well with my 6 year old Athlon XP 3000+ and GT 240 (albeit with the DDR 5 on the 240). Comm'on Apple, at least run Street Fighter 4 at 60 fps and 1600x1050...
My bulbs have a 5 year warranty. If you're only getting 1000 hours at 8 hours a day that's 125 days. You're bulbs should still be in Warranty. Don't toss them, make the manufacturer replace them. If you have a Costco nearby they will take the return for you, regardless of when you bought it:)
It's about not having to upgrade the power grid to meet the increased demand from all the new users. There are just more people using power. We need to either generate more power or use less of it. Banning incandescents is one way to use less. There's also a big push for more power efficient set top boxes that was mentioned on/. a few days ago. Basically you're damned if you do or don't. If you don't use less power then you're going to start having brown outs or you're power bill is going to triple as we burn more oil to generate enough power to meet your needs.
The grandparent's point is that rather than throwing up our hands and saying "fark it!" we should be looking for solutions. I'm inclined to agree. The assumption is we're always broke, but I don't see a lot of evidence of that. What I do see is the 1% hoarding cash.
LED light bulbs have low cost and no flicker. If you need a specific lighting profile there's plenty of sites that'll sell it to you. I find it hard getting upset that incandescents are going away. It's not like we're going to pay for the power infrastructure to support them...
My understanding is America is a large part of what made the Middle East so extreme. We meddled in their politics to keep Communism from spreading and ended up putting some really awful people in power. Our relentless thirst for cheap oil doesn't help matters much either.
Because there are lots and lots of people in the South that do agree, but they're powerless because of gerrymandering and economic and political suppression.
It's not so much unity I'm concerned about, it's that they're a group of people that we as a society can help.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, the next time I'm feeling under the weather I'm sure the US Navy will be happy to send a helicopter to pick me up, right?
Defunding them isn't the answer. You're approaching every problem with "Market Style" answers. But as the saying goes, when the only tool you have is a hammer every problem is a nail.
In business if something doesn't work you stop throwing money at it. That works great for businesses because they're only goal is profit. Gov't is trying to improve society as a whole. Profit matters, but so do things like quality of life, clean air, religious freedom. Gov't just plain has more balls in the air than business.
You hit on the answer though. The solution is change. I don't mean change in the namby-pamby touchy feely sense. I mean in the scientific sense. You form a hypothesis, try it, test, measure, and if it doesn't work you try again. What you don't do is throw up your hands in disgust, declare we've failed for all time and then give up and leave the rest to random chance and the good graces of the richest people in the world. I much prefer the gov't to the 'invisible hand'. At least occasionally I can see what the gov't is doing...
All that said The GOP isn't trying to defund the NLRB not because it isn't working, it's because they don't like what it's doing. They want to be able to seek profit without concern for quality of life. Unions get in the way of profit, since increased wages mean lower profits. If the NLRB looks useless it's only because 30 years of attacks on Unions combined with outsourcing manufacturing to second and third world countries w/o environmental regulations have weakened the labor force so much that a National Labor Board can't really hope to accomplish much...
You're local EPA can measure it's success in PPM of various pollutants. But we sorta forget that (which is odd, what with all the news of China's cities, or with the "Smog Days" in major American Cities).
Police measure crime rates. The Fed Reserve can measure economic growth. And the SEC can measure how much money was lost by investors on shoddy investments.
A bit more regulation before the housing bust woulda been nice. Anyone remember Glass-Seagal? As Liz Warren pointed out we had 50 years w/o a major bust until we repealed that...
I can hire a small accouting firm for less than a grand. If I've got $100k kicking around I was probably going to do that anyway.
OTOH, some of the projects that got funded and failed did so because the creators didn't really plan ahead and didn't think about how much stuff really costs. This might put the breaks on that. You know, after the kickstarter is done the people don't sign a suicide pack and drink kool-aid in jonestown. Most of them take the work they've produced and try to get it on Steam. That's how I got Valdis Story (one of the best Metroidvania games in years).
Sometimes it helps to have a little guidance. The gov't isn't always there to rain on your parade you know.
I'm planning a Crowd fund to fund some more development on a side project of mine, and if I hit $100k I'd be hiring a CPA anyway, if only to see how much of the money I can keep tax free.
As for a cost/benefit analysis is just a more formal review of the risks involved.
Besides, these rules don't kick in until $100k. My buddy's upcoming kickstarter to print a tiny run of a 15 page comic he's drawing isn't going to be affected. OTOH there's been a few high profile failures and it's be nice to get some of the artistic types to spend some time thinking about how much money they'll really need.
My point is that in the past you would have offered them training.
True though, I'm making some assumptions though about your political views because you're so harsh on people. I'm assuming your politically and economically conservative, and would be opposed to high taxes on the wealthy to train and educate people and support them while they receive that training and education. I'm also assuming you've bought into the 'Job Creator' narrative that says employers are responsible for creating livelihoods for employees and that this excuses the obscene wealth they've been granted. Sorta like how the kings treated serfs back in the day, only worse.
If my assumptions are wrong and you're in favor of the sorts of socialistic that correct for training then you're free to go on rejecting 95% of the candidates w/o a shred of guilt ( or more appropriately culpability).
OTOH, if you're thinking of yourself as a noble lord protecting your serfs then I wish you'd just drop that fantasy and admit all you're really after is winner take all with yourselves as the winners.
Actually you turn away 95% of ppl who send in resumes because 30 years of attacks on the middle class have let you be _way_ too picky with your candidates and to force people to pay to train themselves.
Self taught programmers aren't superior, they're just more desperate. They'll give you 20 hours of free labor a week to keep up. People are people. Your expectations are either a) unrealistic or b) only possible due to a warped labor market that exists to enrich a lucky few (re: 1%).
News flash, the vast majority of _all_ people are like that. Very few people are capable of being the sort of 'Rockstar' programmer you're pining for. And what's wrong with that? Is it just me, or do we as a society just have unrealistic expectations of people? If you can't work 70 hours a week banging out amazing code non-stop you're worthless as a human being just because somewhere out there is someone who can. We hold up what are essentially freaks of nature that don't need sleep as the norm and wonder why the rat race is getting so awful...
but do they have anything (under $1000) for those of us who don't wear contacts?
but the cat videos look _amazing_ in 4k.
MOOCs exist to train cheap workers and (in the long run) to soak up gov't subsidies cheaply. Real learning is hard. It's a full time job. The assumption with a MOOC is the person is working a full time job already. Every real college I knew back in the day would politely tell students that they weren't gonna make it past year 2 while working full time. That's why we used to give students money while they went to school...
Life is stressful, and for many entertainment is a valve for that stress. It's not that poor people downloading the Hobbit or Game of Thrones are causing a loss of sale on one or the other, it's that with a little bit of that stress relived they're much less likely to make a snap purchase (which they can't afford) to relieve that stress.
When add the fact that one or two players in the economy owns all the media and that corporate profits by and large go to 1% of the populace then the **AA's of the world's stance makes sense. It doesn't matter _what_ you buy, they make money either way. But they need you _ready_ to buy.
Let me put it this way: If you want chicken but you've got steak, odds are good you'll settle for chicken. If you've got neither I can sell you chicken.
Isn't it obvious?
This is a guess I'm pulling out of my @$$, but they look pretty profitable to sell. Those screens can be had for $50 bucks in quantities of 1000 (let alone what Samsung buys) and they hardware's a cheap SOC. The entire thing's probably under $120 bucks and you can sell it for $250. That's a pretty sweet profit margin. It's kinda like how Android phones were outselling Windows 8 Phones because the sales reps got better bonuses. Amazon's going to push the product with the better margin.
As someone who knows a few ppl that are mentally ill, it's often acute. You're normal one day and crazy as a loon the next. It's a brain chemistry thing, but since it's not obviously visible it's tough to get it classified as a disability unless you're crazy all the time. If Club Fed's as nice as everyone on this thread is saying he's probably mentally ill and had an episode. If that's the case by the time he comes to his senses (3 months? A year?) the damage will be done, but he'll be lucid again so he won't be able to claim insanity. And "Temporary Insanity" goes over with judges about as well as you'd expect...
If that's the case I feel sorry for him. He'll spend the rest of his life in and out of trouble with the law. It's damn near impossible to meet parole conditions when you freak the hell out every few years...
It's $9275 in dog money.
the users will boot into the Android portion and forget about the broken Windows partition. You used to see this effect with AOL. They wrote custom Modem drivers for every modem they could get their hands on, and for years where the #1 choice for a lot of people because when the Windows Modem driver broke they could still connect to AOL.
What about the Hip Hippos?
Apple gets creamed by Wintel in that market space, so it's not really much surprise that there's no Apple tax. otoh, I'm looking at a Mac mini for some entry level Mac development I want to do porting my Firefox Plugin to IOS and almost cry. The Mac Mini all blinged out with an i7 and 16 gigs of ram will set me back almost a grand and doesn't compare that well with my 6 year old Athlon XP 3000+ and GT 240 (albeit with the DDR 5 on the 240). Comm'on Apple, at least run Street Fighter 4 at 60 fps and 1600x1050...
I've seen JavaScript heavy sites that make my i7 laptop's extra fans kick on...
My bulbs have a 5 year warranty. If you're only getting 1000 hours at 8 hours a day that's 125 days. You're bulbs should still be in Warranty. Don't toss them, make the manufacturer replace them. If you have a Costco nearby they will take the return for you, regardless of when you bought it :)
It's about not having to upgrade the power grid to meet the increased demand from all the new users. There are just more people using power. We need to either generate more power or use less of it. Banning incandescents is one way to use less. There's also a big push for more power efficient set top boxes that was mentioned on /. a few days ago. Basically you're damned if you do or don't. If you don't use less power then you're going to start having brown outs or you're power bill is going to triple as we burn more oil to generate enough power to meet your needs.
The grandparent's point is that rather than throwing up our hands and saying "fark it!" we should be looking for solutions. I'm inclined to agree. The assumption is we're always broke, but I don't see a lot of evidence of that. What I do see is the 1% hoarding cash.
LED light bulbs have low cost and no flicker. If you need a specific lighting profile there's plenty of sites that'll sell it to you. I find it hard getting upset that incandescents are going away. It's not like we're going to pay for the power infrastructure to support them...
My understanding is America is a large part of what made the Middle East so extreme. We meddled in their politics to keep Communism from spreading and ended up putting some really awful people in power. Our relentless thirst for cheap oil doesn't help matters much either.
Because there are lots and lots of people in the South that do agree, but they're powerless because of gerrymandering and economic and political suppression.
It's not so much unity I'm concerned about, it's that they're a group of people that we as a society can help.