Grad students make less, true, but postdocs typically get a bit more than that, closer to $20-25/hr. Not exactly stellar pay considering how many years you have to put in to qualify for a $20/hr job, but it's still better than what you'd get as a K-12 teacher.
If the government were searching or seizing the bank account, you would have a point. However as far as I can tell that isn't happening here. The fourth amendment does not protect you from having a business relationship with a corporation terminated, even involuntarily.
It's a bit regional I think, and mostly aligns with opinions on other issues. I've spent some time living in the southwest, and there is generally strong pro-police sentiment among conservative gun-owners in states like Arizona (and parts of Texas), largely due to their views on illegal immigration. If anything the prevailing sentiment in those areas is that the cops should be more militarized, fleets of drones with missiles and everything, and should be given more police-state-style powers to stop anyone at any time and ask for their documents.
I think there's a bit of similarity (though it's still not a perfect analogy) along one particular axis: a large portion of the public, in both cases, believes that not much is going to happen on a global scale anyway, so why take unilateral action. Sure, a world with no nuclear weapons might be great, but it'll never happen, so better keep our own. Similarly, sure, a world without runaway greenhouse gas emissions might be great, but China isn't going to stop and within a few decades will burn so much coal it'll swamp anything we do, so why unilaterally handicap our own industry when it won't matter?
That's somewhat different from visible, localized pollution like smog, where people see a differential benefit: if we clean up our particulate emissions and China doesn't, we get cities with cleaner air and they get gross haze, which we can then feel good about as a sign of our greater level of advancement and quality of life. But emitting less CO2 doesn't really give your local area a pollution advantage, because it's not a localized kind of pollution.
In a kind of theoretical sense that's true, but in practice the ownership theory of stock value only is really workable for large stockholders, who could actually force decisions to be made, such as selling off assets. If you own 100 shares of Google, you do have a claim on Google's assets if it's ever liquidated, but you have no ability to force the liquidation. Your theoretical claim may therefore be indefinitely deferred (even for a century or more), which greatly reduces its present value as a tangible commodity with intrinsic value.
For the foreseeable future, the only real value of Google shares that you can actually realize is the market value, i.e. what someone else is willing to pay for the stock. Apart from selling the stock on the stock market, for whatever someone is willing to pay you, there is really no practical way to turn 100 Google shares into anything else of value. So I view them as having mainly market value, with a weak, distant connection to something of intrinsic value.
Unfortunately, we're increasingly discovering that the European intelligence agencies are pretty strongly in bed with the US surveillance state, too. It's not 100% clear if the situation is quite as bad, but there is substantial evidence that the German, French, Danish, Swedish, etc. intelligence services are routinely helping each other out. There's some suspicion that they're even doing some jurisdiction-laundering through these arrangements: the NSA can spy on Germans because they're foreigners, and then shares data with German intelligence that German intelligence wouldn't be able to legally collect on their own citizens. And vice versa, e.g. Swedish intelligence has apparently been spying on Americans and sharing the info back with American intelligence.
I don't think anything involving a government producing things for its military can really be classed as "free market". There are different ways of structuring the production, some of which do have more market involvement than others. E.g. the USAF could produce its own equipment, it could bid some out to contractors, and it could use various processes for doing so. But with exactly one buyer, which is a government, and to make things worse a government's military arm (which introduces all kinds of clearance issues), it doesn't look a lot like a market.
Weirdly, some hippie, sex-loving, heterodox Hindu preacher's followers tried it in 1984, infecting 751 people in Oregon with salmonella. But it didn't kill anyone.
Their hope had been that everyone would stay home sick from the local elections, so they'd be able to vote in their preferred candidate.
That's precisely why Microsoft is opposing this order, not so much to avoid turning this particular data over, but because it may damage their European business. Microsoft has made a big marketing push in Europe trumpeting that their cloud products comply with EU data-protection laws, and this has been somewhat successful: several big companies and universities have signed up with Office 365 as their email/calendaring provider, in part because they were convinced that doing so is compatible with their obligations under EU law. Google in particular has usually not been in the running, because they can't or won't certify that data in Google Apps for Business is treated in accordance with European regulations, whereas Microsoft has been claiming that data in Office 365 is.
Yeah, same people generally. There was a period in English prescriptivist grammar when people authors of grammar books would attempt to "rationalize" the language, often using Latin as a model (other times just using rules of their own invention).
The claim that "he" rather than "they" is the correct gender-neutral singular personal pronoun is mainly an innovation of 19th-century grammarians, not traditional English usage. Prior to the 19th century, both constructions were in use, depending on the preference of the author. Nowadays, they are again both in use, after a brief interlude in which "singular they" suffered a decline in usage.
While it's worked well historically, Germany is slowly moving in the other direction, in part because students who take the "vocational" path have much higher unemployment rates and much lower lifetime earnings that students who take the "university" path, even those who choose a liberal arts university path. There's been a bit of a worry that Germany is training too many people for jobs that don't exist anymore, while it has a shortage of people with information-economy skills, especially engineering and technology. Part of it also relates to language skills; being fluent in reading/writing English is increasingly an asset, and the vocational track typically doesn't include things like foreign-language study, which are reserved for the universities.
You can't get the kinds of skills being talked about here through 1- or 2-year vocational programs, though. There is virtually no market for starting welders, because the low-end stuff has been automated or outsourced. What's in demand are people with at least 5+, preferably 10+ years of experience in specific high-skill niches. You can't pick those skills up by taking a year or two of classes at the local community college; you need a more involved apprenticeship program, or a career path where you start in an entry-level job and work your way up. But those entry-level jobs and apprenticeships are few and far between. A few unions provide some training paths (this is common among electricians), but those are way over-subscribed with long waiting lists, too.
In short, if you could magically take an 18-year-old high school graduate and make them a master welder through a 1-year vocational program, then yeah, they'd have their pick of jobs. But how do you do that?
It's also quite expensive to get licensed unless you come into commercial aviation from the Air Force, because of the training and flight-hours requirements. Total cost for equipment, flight time, instruction, certifications, etc. ends up being in the $30k-$50k range, and that expenditure only qualifies you for a regional-carrier job where you make the equivalent of $12-15/hr. It's not clear that's actually a better investment of tuition money than a 4-year state college degree would be.
Because there is so far no scientifically validated reason to think it's a health problem: the water is regularly tested at the point where it's drawn from the reservoir, to monitor the water quality, and it's of excellent quality. Water quality isn't some weird mystical thing that depends on what you personally find the right thing to do, but is measurable.
I think the particular problem with the U.S. is those con-men haven't been put out of business: there is still a whole slew of private companies getting their grubby hands into healthcare. And they are still profiteering from misleading people, providing substandard service, advertising things people don't need and/or that are quack bullshit, etc. There is regulation but the regulation has you dealing with insurance companies, for-profit health clinics, all sorts of nonsense.
I agree that an unregulated laissez-faire health market would be ridiculous, but the U.S.'s system is only slightly less ridiculous. I think we did it right in Scandinavia by just taking an axe to the whole sector of privatized medical care, replacing it with an efficient and much less complex state-run system.
The real costs of medical stuff (operations, hardware, medication, etc) has long since been lost to the bureaucrats.
I think that's how it should be, having medical services delivered in accordance with their needs rather than in accordance with market mechanisms and profits. But you need an actually compete system of health bureaucracy that is aiming to maximize outcomes for the country's citizens given the available budget. Not, as the U.S. seems to have, bureaucrats looking to profiteer for some insurance companies and biomed labs.
Here in the Nordic countries medical devices do not cost nearly as much as they do in the U.S., and that's because we have more and better bureaucracy, not because we have a free-market health system (in fact providing private healthcare is illegal).
That's why I hate fuckin' white people, and no longer am going to be forced by politically correct, inbred hick motherfuckers, who can't tell their bible from their asshole, to refrain from saying so publicly. "Oh you can't call me white trash, that's raaacciiiisssmmmm" the losers whine. Send 'em back to England or Italy or Portugal or whatever other shithole they came from.
Not with quite the same profile, though. For just the "academic game" part there are indeed plenty of alternatives, journals with high impact factors and other such metrics, well-respected within a field. What Nature and Science mainly have going for them is a bunch of media and science-popularizer attention as well, which is useful for people who want to build up a high profile for themselves. If you get your paper on evolutionary robotics into a robotics journal, you can get prestige, but if you get it into Nature you can be on CNN talking about our future robot overlords.
Either way would make it inconvenient for those wanting to follow the rules, but if they had treated it like a foreign currency at least the $200 gain exemption would have taken the burden of keeping records off of many purchases.
True, though it would've made it worse for people with large amounts. With this ruling, gains realized after >1 yr of holding bitcoin are taxed at capital-gains rates, while with the alternative ruling that bitcoin is currency, large gains would've been taxed at ordinary income rates (like forex-trading gains are).
To complicate things more, it looks like it might depend on whether you're calling from a mobile or landline. If you call from a landline, I think calling mobiles is still (much) more expensive. You can see that in the Skype rates, for example, because Skype originates its calls from landlines: Calling Finnish landlines from Skype is 0.04 EUR/min, while calling Finnish mobiles from Skype is 0.19 EUR/min (!).
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Grad students make less, true, but postdocs typically get a bit more than that, closer to $20-25/hr. Not exactly stellar pay considering how many years you have to put in to qualify for a $20/hr job, but it's still better than what you'd get as a K-12 teacher.
If the government were searching or seizing the bank account, you would have a point. However as far as I can tell that isn't happening here. The fourth amendment does not protect you from having a business relationship with a corporation terminated, even involuntarily.
It's a bit regional I think, and mostly aligns with opinions on other issues. I've spent some time living in the southwest, and there is generally strong pro-police sentiment among conservative gun-owners in states like Arizona (and parts of Texas), largely due to their views on illegal immigration. If anything the prevailing sentiment in those areas is that the cops should be more militarized, fleets of drones with missiles and everything, and should be given more police-state-style powers to stop anyone at any time and ask for their documents.
I think you got your units mixed up: warm snot is a measure of temperature (can also be used as a measure of texture), not a measure of power.
I think there's a bit of similarity (though it's still not a perfect analogy) along one particular axis: a large portion of the public, in both cases, believes that not much is going to happen on a global scale anyway, so why take unilateral action. Sure, a world with no nuclear weapons might be great, but it'll never happen, so better keep our own. Similarly, sure, a world without runaway greenhouse gas emissions might be great, but China isn't going to stop and within a few decades will burn so much coal it'll swamp anything we do, so why unilaterally handicap our own industry when it won't matter?
That's somewhat different from visible, localized pollution like smog, where people see a differential benefit: if we clean up our particulate emissions and China doesn't, we get cities with cleaner air and they get gross haze, which we can then feel good about as a sign of our greater level of advancement and quality of life. But emitting less CO2 doesn't really give your local area a pollution advantage, because it's not a localized kind of pollution.
In a kind of theoretical sense that's true, but in practice the ownership theory of stock value only is really workable for large stockholders, who could actually force decisions to be made, such as selling off assets. If you own 100 shares of Google, you do have a claim on Google's assets if it's ever liquidated, but you have no ability to force the liquidation. Your theoretical claim may therefore be indefinitely deferred (even for a century or more), which greatly reduces its present value as a tangible commodity with intrinsic value.
For the foreseeable future, the only real value of Google shares that you can actually realize is the market value, i.e. what someone else is willing to pay for the stock. Apart from selling the stock on the stock market, for whatever someone is willing to pay you, there is really no practical way to turn 100 Google shares into anything else of value. So I view them as having mainly market value, with a weak, distant connection to something of intrinsic value.
Unfortunately, we're increasingly discovering that the European intelligence agencies are pretty strongly in bed with the US surveillance state, too. It's not 100% clear if the situation is quite as bad, but there is substantial evidence that the German, French, Danish, Swedish, etc. intelligence services are routinely helping each other out. There's some suspicion that they're even doing some jurisdiction-laundering through these arrangements: the NSA can spy on Germans because they're foreigners, and then shares data with German intelligence that German intelligence wouldn't be able to legally collect on their own citizens. And vice versa, e.g. Swedish intelligence has apparently been spying on Americans and sharing the info back with American intelligence.
I don't think anything involving a government producing things for its military can really be classed as "free market". There are different ways of structuring the production, some of which do have more market involvement than others. E.g. the USAF could produce its own equipment, it could bid some out to contractors, and it could use various processes for doing so. But with exactly one buyer, which is a government, and to make things worse a government's military arm (which introduces all kinds of clearance issues), it doesn't look a lot like a market.
Did you ever play tic-tac-toe?
Weirdly, some hippie, sex-loving, heterodox Hindu preacher's followers tried it in 1984, infecting 751 people in Oregon with salmonella. But it didn't kill anyone.
Their hope had been that everyone would stay home sick from the local elections, so they'd be able to vote in their preferred candidate.
That's precisely why Microsoft is opposing this order, not so much to avoid turning this particular data over, but because it may damage their European business. Microsoft has made a big marketing push in Europe trumpeting that their cloud products comply with EU data-protection laws, and this has been somewhat successful: several big companies and universities have signed up with Office 365 as their email/calendaring provider, in part because they were convinced that doing so is compatible with their obligations under EU law. Google in particular has usually not been in the running, because they can't or won't certify that data in Google Apps for Business is treated in accordance with European regulations, whereas Microsoft has been claiming that data in Office 365 is.
Yeah, same people generally. There was a period in English prescriptivist grammar when people authors of grammar books would attempt to "rationalize" the language, often using Latin as a model (other times just using rules of their own invention).
The claim that "he" rather than "they" is the correct gender-neutral singular personal pronoun is mainly an innovation of 19th-century grammarians, not traditional English usage. Prior to the 19th century, both constructions were in use, depending on the preference of the author. Nowadays, they are again both in use, after a brief interlude in which "singular they" suffered a decline in usage.
People who have one already aren't going to run out and just get a new one because it's new.
Apple's been pretty successful at making that happen with the iPhone, but I agree that it seems less likely with the iPad.
While it's worked well historically, Germany is slowly moving in the other direction, in part because students who take the "vocational" path have much higher unemployment rates and much lower lifetime earnings that students who take the "university" path, even those who choose a liberal arts university path. There's been a bit of a worry that Germany is training too many people for jobs that don't exist anymore, while it has a shortage of people with information-economy skills, especially engineering and technology. Part of it also relates to language skills; being fluent in reading/writing English is increasingly an asset, and the vocational track typically doesn't include things like foreign-language study, which are reserved for the universities.
You can't get the kinds of skills being talked about here through 1- or 2-year vocational programs, though. There is virtually no market for starting welders, because the low-end stuff has been automated or outsourced. What's in demand are people with at least 5+, preferably 10+ years of experience in specific high-skill niches. You can't pick those skills up by taking a year or two of classes at the local community college; you need a more involved apprenticeship program, or a career path where you start in an entry-level job and work your way up. But those entry-level jobs and apprenticeships are few and far between. A few unions provide some training paths (this is common among electricians), but those are way over-subscribed with long waiting lists, too.
In short, if you could magically take an 18-year-old high school graduate and make them a master welder through a 1-year vocational program, then yeah, they'd have their pick of jobs. But how do you do that?
It's also quite expensive to get licensed unless you come into commercial aviation from the Air Force, because of the training and flight-hours requirements. Total cost for equipment, flight time, instruction, certifications, etc. ends up being in the $30k-$50k range, and that expenditure only qualifies you for a regional-carrier job where you make the equivalent of $12-15/hr. It's not clear that's actually a better investment of tuition money than a 4-year state college degree would be.
Because there is so far no scientifically validated reason to think it's a health problem: the water is regularly tested at the point where it's drawn from the reservoir, to monitor the water quality, and it's of excellent quality. Water quality isn't some weird mystical thing that depends on what you personally find the right thing to do, but is measurable.
I think the particular problem with the U.S. is those con-men haven't been put out of business: there is still a whole slew of private companies getting their grubby hands into healthcare. And they are still profiteering from misleading people, providing substandard service, advertising things people don't need and/or that are quack bullshit, etc. There is regulation but the regulation has you dealing with insurance companies, for-profit health clinics, all sorts of nonsense.
I agree that an unregulated laissez-faire health market would be ridiculous, but the U.S.'s system is only slightly less ridiculous. I think we did it right in Scandinavia by just taking an axe to the whole sector of privatized medical care, replacing it with an efficient and much less complex state-run system.
The real costs of medical stuff (operations, hardware, medication, etc) has long since been lost to the bureaucrats.
I think that's how it should be, having medical services delivered in accordance with their needs rather than in accordance with market mechanisms and profits. But you need an actually compete system of health bureaucracy that is aiming to maximize outcomes for the country's citizens given the available budget. Not, as the U.S. seems to have, bureaucrats looking to profiteer for some insurance companies and biomed labs.
Here in the Nordic countries medical devices do not cost nearly as much as they do in the U.S., and that's because we have more and better bureaucracy, not because we have a free-market health system (in fact providing private healthcare is illegal).
That's why I hate fuckin' white people, and no longer am going to be forced by politically correct, inbred hick motherfuckers, who can't tell their bible from their asshole, to refrain from saying so publicly. "Oh you can't call me white trash, that's raaacciiiisssmmmm" the losers whine. Send 'em back to England or Italy or Portugal or whatever other shithole they came from.
Different people reformatting the code with their preferred beautifier isn't a particularly useful exercise, though.
Not with quite the same profile, though. For just the "academic game" part there are indeed plenty of alternatives, journals with high impact factors and other such metrics, well-respected within a field. What Nature and Science mainly have going for them is a bunch of media and science-popularizer attention as well, which is useful for people who want to build up a high profile for themselves. If you get your paper on evolutionary robotics into a robotics journal, you can get prestige, but if you get it into Nature you can be on CNN talking about our future robot overlords.
Either way would make it inconvenient for those wanting to follow the rules, but if they had treated it like a foreign currency at least the $200 gain exemption would have taken the burden of keeping records off of many purchases.
True, though it would've made it worse for people with large amounts. With this ruling, gains realized after >1 yr of holding bitcoin are taxed at capital-gains rates, while with the alternative ruling that bitcoin is currency, large gains would've been taxed at ordinary income rates (like forex-trading gains are).
To complicate things more, it looks like it might depend on whether you're calling from a mobile or landline. If you call from a landline, I think calling mobiles is still (much) more expensive. You can see that in the Skype rates, for example, because Skype originates its calls from landlines: Calling Finnish landlines from Skype is 0.04 EUR/min, while calling Finnish mobiles from Skype is 0.19 EUR/min (!).