I came here to say this. A "data journalism" website sounds like nothing more than a new way to spin stories to some ideological bent while using "statistics" to seem more credible.
When he talks about eliminating inequality by bringing the top down, he doesn't mean bringing down the 1%ers like himself and Gates. He's talking about bringing down all the skilled workers in the top 5-10% down to the level of unskilled workers. This doesn't actually reduce income inequality (it actually makes it worse), so he's full of crap.
This has long been Greenspan's desire; it annoys him to no end that people who do things can aspire to salaries as high as lower-level banksters.
Exactly - this is the hidden progressive agenda in the entire "income equality" meme, to get rid of the middle class. Think of every effort supported in the past 40 years that was an attempt to get the very wealthy to pay more of their "fair share". In the end, what gets implemented always makes the middle class worse off, and doesn't really affect the very wealthy at all. The latest was the attempt to "go after" all those fat cats supposedly hiding their money in tax havens overseas. Google is still using the Bahamas to retain their fortunes, and so are many others. But the laws they passed have certainly screwed over the middle class workers. Again.
People need to stop buying into this rhetoric that politicians are going to help the middle class. The middle class is the biggest threat to their power.
...so you won't vote against the interests of the rich. It seems to have worked very well so far.
I don't think that means what you think it does. Somehow the very rich have managed to convince people that libertarian ideas are what the rich want, but you only ever see the very wealthy like Gates, Greenspan, Buffet and others supporting progressive agendas.
How does this "true communism" you speak of differ from the one that's been tried, and has failed over and over and over?
People make this claim all the time, but true communism is really very nice, but breaks down when the communist society grows to more than about 100-150 members. Capitalism scales up much better, but of course people look at the fascistic, heavily interventionist system used in the US today and think it's an example of "failed capitalism". Of course it's not capitalism at all, but in fact has the same issues that Communist Russia did - people at the top controlling everything, and distribution of resources is based on friendships and political alliances instead of the economic system that is supposed to be doing the allocation.
The question most here aren't asking is, what does society look like when there simply aren't jobs to do? It doesn't have to be a bad thing. The narrative that "one must work to have dignity and/or happiness" is nonsense pushed into the psyche of the ignorant from above.
No, it's not, not at all. It is actually very true. Happiness is derived from having meaningful activity to do, not from sitting around watching TV. Leisure time can only be appreciated as a reward for productive activity.
That said, the difference may be that the activities you enjoy may not necessarily need to be something that other people value, which is required in commerce. People can be artists, or tinkerers, gardeners or hackers. If they don't need to earn a living doing it, it won't matter that they are no good at it for many years, they won't be out on the street because they couldn't sell their paintings or their band couldn't get a record deal. If you're not desperate to bring home a paycheck, there is a lot of pleasurable work to do, but working toward some meaningful accomplishment really is required for dignity and/or happiness.
Having known a wide variety of Americans, I know of none that would work in the fields, a phenomenon that has also been seen in the news many times.
I submit your 'wide variety' is far less diverse than you imagine. Get out of your suburb.
I live and work in a different continent... I've known people that do three part-time jobs, or that work 80 hours a week and go to community college, or illegal immigrants from Bangledesh... I have not met a single American person that is willing to do the kind of work that migrant farm workers do.
There are plenty of Americans that do - not surprised you haven't met them since you live on a different continent. You're only meeting Americans that can afford to travel. In fact, I have done the same myself, except it was one full-time job, 1 part-time job, and a full-time load at a university.
Americans have always been hard workers. The problem is that it is no longer getting them much benefit.
Dude, that's what's awesome about it. Chinatown is awesome. So is Latino town. How boring would it be if everyone acted all Western European.
Oh, I agree with that (never been to Chinatown in SF, but Chinatown in DC is fun). But it's difficult to describe the difference between integrated cultures, like Chinatown, and isolated cultures, like we're starting to see. There are places here where I would probably enjoy shopping, but they make you feel unwelcome and there's no common language (I speak English, German, and some broken French but the clerks either don't understand any of them or pretend like they don't).
When I visit a foreign country, I at least make some attempt to follow the customs. If you're here in my country, you should at least make an effort to tolerate ours.
No, and the ACA eliminates the primary motive for snooping on your medical records: denying you coverage.
You'll still get denied coverage if the treatment hasn't been through years of trials and millions of dollars to obtain the "blessing" of the funded-by-pharmaceutical-companies-FDA. That's pretty much always been the case, but now under the ADA it will have to go through a cost-benefit analysis by a board of bureaucrats that may decide it's too expensive, like the NIH does now.
Plus, the ACA by-passes the HIPAA rules that protect your medical records in a number of ways, including supplying access to at least 16 federal bureaucracies by default, ostensibly to ensure you are "complying" with their mandates.
90% accurate is useless as screening technique the false positives would be thousands of times the real positives and the false negatives are still significant.
Not a problem for the drug companies, that's exactly what they want. It's certainly not a problem with HPV screening, which has a 15% false-positive rate. But that's great for doctors, because then they can do the more invasive procedure "just to make sure".
Not that your suggestions are terribly unreasonable but you are kind of taking an axe (or chainsaw) to the USA's "Nation of immigrants" founding epic.
I don't see it that way at all. What he's complaining about is not immigrants coming to the US, it's the new phenomenon where they come here and isolate themselves instead of becoming part of the great Melting Pot. Immigrants are a wonderful boon to the US in general, but when they isolate themselves and refuse to assimilate with the US culture, they end up nothing more than a slice of their origin country on a carved-out section of US soil. And that creates conflicts. There have even been stories of "honor killings" by father's whose children simply tried to live like mainstream Americans.
Their solutions are not focused on getting higher paying jobs for the "99%." They are focused on lowering the amount they have to pay for their own talent.
Any time a company starts talking about deregulation and loosening immigration laws, it's french for "make our labor cheaper."
This, yes, this. Better education, yes, but Schmidt is just envious of Gates' success in turning a corporate drone curriculum into a national standard via Common Core. And deregulation, yes, but for energy and telecommunication? Those are the last industries that need deregulation, being natural monopolies. Deregulation of power companies (a natural monopoly) has been tried and was a massive failure. Frankly, I'm all in favor of looser immigration laws, but I suspect what Schmidt wants is more H1-B's, not more people that can compete for wages (and start their own companies) on a level playing field.
... We'll see if I end up eating cat food - but I don't think that's likely...
All Ralston Purina needs to do is change their package design and ads - then we'll see who's eating what! (Don't bet they won't.)
They could team up with Kraft and advertise some delish recipes for mac & cheese cat foot casserole!
Re: tired of the lack of progress on GIMP
on
Krita 2.8 Released
·
· Score: 1
No, GIMP is not what some people make it out to be. I'd rather use an old Paintshop Pro 6 release than anything GIMP related. And I would except Corel does a better job at screwing up their own products than any other company I've seen in ages.
Tell me about it. The one I've been using for years (because I just couldn't find any OSS that really worked for me) is Photo Impact. But then Corel bought the company (Ulead), and completely dumped PhotoImpact (after releasing a final version which seemed to involve just replacing ULead with Corel and introducing a few bugs), and started pushing Paintshop at their users. It is a far inferior product, even though they stripped some of the good features out of PhotoImpact and plopped them into Paintshop. They should have done the opposite.
Windows 8 does have Client Hyper-V for the business-oriented editions, but it does not include a free XP VM as Windows 7 did.
Hyper-V is surprisingly decent virtualization software, but it doesn't run on Windows 8, only Windows 8 Pro or higher, and it requires pretty modern same hardware virtualization support, which is entirely disabled on the low-to-mid-end Intel chips.
The specific legislation to which Alexander referred was unclear. Angela Canterbury, the policy director for the Project on Government Oversight, a watchdog group, said she was unaware of any such bill. Neither was Steve Aftergood, an intelligence policy analyst at the Federation of American Scientists.
But it is also a wholly undependable fiat currency. You can't turn a BitCoin back into electricity. And because so few control such a large percentage of the pool of Bitcoins, they most certainly control the volume of Bitcoins on the market.
Incorrect. Bitcoin is not fiat currency - there is no controlling legal authority declaring its legitimacy. And, no, the volume of Bitcoins in circulation is fixed by the protocol itself. There is no way to adjust that figure. Yes, highly capitalized individuals can mine Bitcoins better than those without the capital for specialized equipment and power, but that's a feature of all rare-earth commodities, and does not affect the ultimate limitations on the number of coins.
I was really interested in reading the linked article, but the author completely ruined the experience for me by quoting Ernesto Lynch. Why would a scientist use his public forum to promote such a guy? I suppose it's considered okay in most academic circles.
If they're going to evaluate it rationally, shouldn't it start with the authority actually being honest about potential side effects? I'm kind of tired of listing to the vaccines/vaccines/rah rah rah cheerleading. Give me real information, pre vaccination testing to limit problems, and a willingness to contraindicate where necessary.
I believe that in the very next sentence I clarified that the FDIC is, in fact, a federal agency (unlike FedEx).
It's a regulated corporations. That's what the 'C' stands for - yes, it's run by the federal government, but funded by private banks. Sort of like how Monsanto and the pharmaceutical companies now fund the FDA - not sure that's working out so good for the folks.
Good catch on the PDF - but I guess you missed all the references to "bail-in". A bail-in is exactly what happened in Cyprus. Not sure how you missed the term, because they used it so much.
What you should note about the excerpt above is that it is referring to the reconstituted, entity, created after the bail-in, bail-out, sell-off, and restructuring of the bankrupted entity. Sure, current depositors would have no incentive to run, the new entity is now solvent because the debt has already been written off.
The reason it gives people confidence is because it is the FEDERAL Depositors Insurance Corporation.
Is that why people pay so much more to send letters by FEDERAL Express rather than trusting the US Postal service to deliver important papers on time?
You say the bitcoin exchanges could set up the same kind of system, but why should anyone trust something set up by them? What, exactly, makes this insurance company any more reliable or trustworthy than the exchanges themselves?
I guess you haven't noticed how the federal government has sided with the private banks over and over again in recent years, huh? Now you think people are supposed to suddenly trust them to be on their side?
In fact, people are right to be skeptical about promises by the FDIC. We've already seen bank deposits being confiscated in the EU, and in fact the FDIC has contemplated plans to do something similar American depositors if they deem it "necessary". You might want to check out this PDF from the FDIC's website. Keep in mind that a depositor to a failed bank is considered an unsecured creditor in common law.
Slashdot Mirror
lies, damn lies and statistics
I came here to say this. A "data journalism" website sounds like nothing more than a new way to spin stories to some ideological bent while using "statistics" to seem more credible.
When he talks about eliminating inequality by bringing the top down, he doesn't mean bringing down the 1%ers like himself and Gates. He's talking about bringing down all the skilled workers in the top 5-10% down to the level of unskilled workers. This doesn't actually reduce income inequality (it actually makes it worse), so he's full of crap. This has long been Greenspan's desire; it annoys him to no end that people who do things can aspire to salaries as high as lower-level banksters.
Exactly - this is the hidden progressive agenda in the entire "income equality" meme, to get rid of the middle class. Think of every effort supported in the past 40 years that was an attempt to get the very wealthy to pay more of their "fair share". In the end, what gets implemented always makes the middle class worse off, and doesn't really affect the very wealthy at all. The latest was the attempt to "go after" all those fat cats supposedly hiding their money in tax havens overseas. Google is still using the Bahamas to retain their fortunes, and so are many others. But the laws they passed have certainly screwed over the middle class workers. Again.
People need to stop buying into this rhetoric that politicians are going to help the middle class. The middle class is the biggest threat to their power.
I don't think that means what you think it does. Somehow the very rich have managed to convince people that libertarian ideas are what the rich want, but you only ever see the very wealthy like Gates, Greenspan, Buffet and others supporting progressive agendas.
How does this "true communism" you speak of differ from the one that's been tried, and has failed over and over and over?
People make this claim all the time, but true communism is really very nice, but breaks down when the communist society grows to more than about 100-150 members. Capitalism scales up much better, but of course people look at the fascistic, heavily interventionist system used in the US today and think it's an example of "failed capitalism". Of course it's not capitalism at all, but in fact has the same issues that Communist Russia did - people at the top controlling everything, and distribution of resources is based on friendships and political alliances instead of the economic system that is supposed to be doing the allocation.
The question most here aren't asking is, what does society look like when there simply aren't jobs to do? It doesn't have to be a bad thing. The narrative that "one must work to have dignity and/or happiness" is nonsense pushed into the psyche of the ignorant from above.
No, it's not, not at all. It is actually very true. Happiness is derived from having meaningful activity to do, not from sitting around watching TV. Leisure time can only be appreciated as a reward for productive activity.
That said, the difference may be that the activities you enjoy may not necessarily need to be something that other people value, which is required in commerce. People can be artists, or tinkerers, gardeners or hackers. If they don't need to earn a living doing it, it won't matter that they are no good at it for many years, they won't be out on the street because they couldn't sell their paintings or their band couldn't get a record deal. If you're not desperate to bring home a paycheck, there is a lot of pleasurable work to do, but working toward some meaningful accomplishment really is required for dignity and/or happiness.
Having known a wide variety of Americans, I know of none that would work in the fields, a phenomenon that has also been seen in the news many times.
I submit your 'wide variety' is far less diverse than you imagine. Get out of your suburb.
I live and work in a different continent... I've known people that do three part-time jobs, or that work 80 hours a week and go to community college, or illegal immigrants from Bangledesh... I have not met a single American person that is willing to do the kind of work that migrant farm workers do.
There are plenty of Americans that do - not surprised you haven't met them since you live on a different continent. You're only meeting Americans that can afford to travel. In fact, I have done the same myself, except it was one full-time job, 1 part-time job, and a full-time load at a university.
Americans have always been hard workers. The problem is that it is no longer getting them much benefit.
what the fuck does it world know about coding?
Insightful. For some, maybe informative too.
Dude, that's what's awesome about it. Chinatown is awesome. So is Latino town. How boring would it be if everyone acted all Western European.
Oh, I agree with that (never been to Chinatown in SF, but Chinatown in DC is fun). But it's difficult to describe the difference between integrated cultures, like Chinatown, and isolated cultures, like we're starting to see. There are places here where I would probably enjoy shopping, but they make you feel unwelcome and there's no common language (I speak English, German, and some broken French but the clerks either don't understand any of them or pretend like they don't).
When I visit a foreign country, I at least make some attempt to follow the customs. If you're here in my country, you should at least make an effort to tolerate ours.
No, and the ACA eliminates the primary motive for snooping on your medical records: denying you coverage.
You'll still get denied coverage if the treatment hasn't been through years of trials and millions of dollars to obtain the "blessing" of the funded-by-pharmaceutical-companies-FDA. That's pretty much always been the case, but now under the ADA it will have to go through a cost-benefit analysis by a board of bureaucrats that may decide it's too expensive, like the NIH does now.
Plus, the ACA by-passes the HIPAA rules that protect your medical records in a number of ways, including supplying access to at least 16 federal bureaucracies by default, ostensibly to ensure you are "complying" with their mandates.
90% accurate is useless as screening technique the false positives would be thousands of times the real positives and the false negatives are still significant.
Not a problem for the drug companies, that's exactly what they want. It's certainly not a problem with HPV screening, which has a 15% false-positive rate. But that's great for doctors, because then they can do the more invasive procedure "just to make sure".
Not that your suggestions are terribly unreasonable but you are kind of taking an axe (or chainsaw) to the USA's "Nation of immigrants" founding epic.
I don't see it that way at all. What he's complaining about is not immigrants coming to the US, it's the new phenomenon where they come here and isolate themselves instead of becoming part of the great Melting Pot. Immigrants are a wonderful boon to the US in general, but when they isolate themselves and refuse to assimilate with the US culture, they end up nothing more than a slice of their origin country on a carved-out section of US soil. And that creates conflicts. There have even been stories of "honor killings" by father's whose children simply tried to live like mainstream Americans.
Their solutions are not focused on getting higher paying jobs for the "99%." They are focused on lowering the amount they have to pay for their own talent.
Any time a company starts talking about deregulation and loosening immigration laws, it's french for "make our labor cheaper."
This, yes, this. Better education, yes, but Schmidt is just envious of Gates' success in turning a corporate drone curriculum into a national standard via Common Core. And deregulation, yes, but for energy and telecommunication? Those are the last industries that need deregulation, being natural monopolies. Deregulation of power companies (a natural monopoly) has been tried and was a massive failure. Frankly, I'm all in favor of looser immigration laws, but I suspect what Schmidt wants is more H1-B's, not more people that can compete for wages (and start their own companies) on a level playing field.
Eric Schmidt likes to lie........don't believe anything from his mouth!!
Oh, come, come, that cannot be true. I think what you mean is "he lies when the truth will do."
... We'll see if I end up eating cat food - but I don't think that's likely...
All Ralston Purina needs to do is change their package design and ads - then we'll see who's eating what! (Don't bet they won't.)
They could team up with Kraft and advertise some delish recipes for mac & cheese cat foot casserole!
No, GIMP is not what some people make it out to be. I'd rather use an old Paintshop Pro 6 release than anything GIMP related. And I would except Corel does a better job at screwing up their own products than any other company I've seen in ages.
Tell me about it. The one I've been using for years (because I just couldn't find any OSS that really worked for me) is Photo Impact. But then Corel bought the company (Ulead), and completely dumped PhotoImpact (after releasing a final version which seemed to involve just replacing ULead with Corel and introducing a few bugs), and started pushing Paintshop at their users. It is a far inferior product, even though they stripped some of the good features out of PhotoImpact and plopped them into Paintshop. They should have done the opposite.
RT is dead.
Long live Surface 2 with Windows RT 8.1!
Your guarantee is invalid. I still have XP on a VM for running one thing: Rebirth.
Well ReBirth is now free software, and there are ways to run it on Windows 7.
Windows 8 does have Client Hyper-V for the business-oriented editions, but it does not include a free XP VM as Windows 7 did.
Hyper-V is surprisingly decent virtualization software, but it doesn't run on Windows 8, only Windows 8 Pro or higher, and it requires pretty modern same hardware virtualization support, which is entirely disabled on the low-to-mid-end Intel chips.
I don't know why Republicans hate Clinton so much, he pushed their policies more than any president since Reagan.
Well that's really not saying much, considering that only includes ONE president for ONE term...
FTFA:
The specific legislation to which Alexander referred was unclear. Angela Canterbury, the policy director for the Project on Government Oversight, a watchdog group, said she was unaware of any such bill. Neither was Steve Aftergood, an intelligence policy analyst at the Federation of American Scientists.
But it is also a wholly undependable fiat currency. You can't turn a BitCoin back into electricity. And because so few control such a large percentage of the pool of Bitcoins, they most certainly control the volume of Bitcoins on the market.
Incorrect. Bitcoin is not fiat currency - there is no controlling legal authority declaring its legitimacy. And, no, the volume of Bitcoins in circulation is fixed by the protocol itself. There is no way to adjust that figure. Yes, highly capitalized individuals can mine Bitcoins better than those without the capital for specialized equipment and power, but that's a feature of all rare-earth commodities, and does not affect the ultimate limitations on the number of coins.
I was really interested in reading the linked article, but the author completely ruined the experience for me by quoting Ernesto Lynch. Why would a scientist use his public forum to promote such a guy? I suppose it's considered okay in most academic circles.
If they're going to evaluate it rationally, shouldn't it start with the authority actually being honest about potential side effects? I'm kind of tired of listing to the vaccines/vaccines/rah rah rah cheerleading. Give me real information, pre vaccination testing to limit problems, and a willingness to contraindicate where necessary.
I know you're being sarcastic, but this actually works. Drug companies have found that including very bad potential side-effects of a drug can make the advertising more effective. So maybe they should carefully list all the possible adverse reactions to vaccinations to get more people to get them.
I believe that in the very next sentence I clarified that the FDIC is, in fact, a federal agency (unlike FedEx).
It's a regulated corporations. That's what the 'C' stands for - yes, it's run by the federal government, but funded by private banks. Sort of like how Monsanto and the pharmaceutical companies now fund the FDA - not sure that's working out so good for the folks.
Good catch on the PDF - but I guess you missed all the references to "bail-in". A bail-in is exactly what happened in Cyprus. Not sure how you missed the term, because they used it so much.
What you should note about the excerpt above is that it is referring to the reconstituted, entity, created after the bail-in, bail-out, sell-off, and restructuring of the bankrupted entity. Sure, current depositors would have no incentive to run, the new entity is now solvent because the debt has already been written off.
The reason it gives people confidence is because it is the FEDERAL Depositors Insurance Corporation.
Is that why people pay so much more to send letters by FEDERAL Express rather than trusting the US Postal service to deliver important papers on time?
You say the bitcoin exchanges could set up the same kind of system, but why should anyone trust something set up by them? What, exactly, makes this insurance company any more reliable or trustworthy than the exchanges themselves?
Maybe because they are NOT run by the federal government?
I guess you haven't noticed how the federal government has sided with the private banks over and over again in recent years, huh? Now you think people are supposed to suddenly trust them to be on their side?
In fact, people are right to be skeptical about promises by the FDIC. We've already seen bank deposits being confiscated in the EU, and in fact the FDIC has contemplated plans to do something similar American depositors if they deem it "necessary". You might want to check out this PDF from the FDIC's website. Keep in mind that a depositor to a failed bank is considered an unsecured creditor in common law.