So you never brush your teeth or wash yourself, since that kills bacteria? You never clean your bathroom or take antibiotics? You never swat at mosquitos or kill ants staging a home invasion? You never eat either? Or are you a scavenger? (Except even scavenging results in the small deaths of microscopic creatures.)
Valuing all life is an untenable position that simply cannot be put into practice. If you value life, an admirable tenet, you still have to decide which kinds of life to value. Just saying "I value all life in and of itself" shows that you haven't really considered the proposition.
I got into Go several years ago and was holding my own against gnu go in easily under a year. Then I logged on to Yahoo Games and lost every game except two, even when playing people with lower (chess-style) scores than mine and those who were too new to be ranked.
Sounds like a form of impairment testing, which is a pretty big win for everyone but has not been widely implemented. Employers who have used it found that it consistently reduced accidents, and employees like it since they don't have to pee in a cup--a demeaning and annoying procedure. It should also be cheaper for employers: even at a couple thousand bucks for the machine and software you used, the payoff in reduced accidents and mishaps along with not having to pay drug testing companies all the time means it'll pay for itself in a very short period of time.
It doesn't unfortunately seem like it's going to catch on anytime soon. Most companies haven't heard of it, and my guess is that most who have are waiting for it to gain a reputation before thinking about making the switch themselves.
My problem with this -- what in the health care bill actually improve things? At the small business where I work, our health insurance costs look to be increasing by 20-30% for our next contract.
Ah, but if you look at the history of the rhetoric surrounding the bill, you'll see that in the beginning there was indeed a lot of talk about reform to control costs, but long before the bill was proposed it shifted to providing coverage for more people.
I tend towards the libertarian in general, but I would have rather had a full on single payer plan over what we got...seems to be the absolute worst of both worlds.
I am in semi-agreement with you here. As a proponent of constitutional government, I believe it is up to each state to decide if it wants a single payer plan. It's been proposed in several states, most notably twice in California, where The Governator vetoed it both times. They ought to just make that a ballot proposition so he can't block it. I personally don't think it's a good idea, that allowing interstate insurance competition and tort reform would work more wonders, and that at the federal level it would be another blatant constitutional violation, but it also bugs me that the (presumed) majority of Californians who want it are being held back by a single (albeit very muscular) man.
Let's not forget the child, either. If an unwanted child is born, while the possibility exists that she will be offered up for adoption it's pretty rare. Chances are she'll either grow up with a mom who doesn't love her and sees her as a burden, or she might be abandoned or left in a home to be cared for by other people.
A life like that isn't going to be a whole lot of fun. I am personally against abortions except for extreme cases, which means that if I were faced with the choice myself I would choose not to do it, and would counsel others who asked me for my opinion likewise. You mentioned some of the very good reasons why there ought to be a legal, safe method for getting abortions, and that is why I believe that it should remain legal despite my personal objection.
One day the first kid's either going to ride off a cliff because they think they're safe, or lose the rock and go to pieces because they think they can't be safe without it.
Or, more likely, fall off the bike while holding the rock and get pissed at his parents for lying to him. The parents' solution to that is to develop a better, more magical protective item to give to the kid. One would hope the kid would be smart enough to realize this too is a ruse and won't really protect him.
Articles like this one are an important part of making that happen.
There will never be a good time for a major bank, energy or pharma company to collapse. That doesn't mean we'd be the better off for having such a presumably corrupt entity gone. I guess it boils down to whether you'd prefer to have sudden upheaval during a period of calm or some increased turbulence in an already bumpy ride. I prefer the latter. While it might make things worse in the short-term, lots of people are already fed up with the way big corporations are acting, so I think there will be more pushback from the populace if (when?) government tries to prop it up.
I understand that punitive damages are assigned to try to curb further abuse. Historically this has been limited to treble damages, though. Why $200 per infringement considered sane, let alone $750? Or does their argument rest on the "making available" principle?
It's also important to note that we are coming out of the recession because of the stimulus not in spite of it
I'm not sure I buy this. The recession was declared to have been over by June 2009. That's two months after the stimulus package was passed. I have a hard time believing that it could have such a drastic effect in two months, which suggests to me that recovery was already happening. I won't go so far as to say the stimulus was a hindrance, but it certainly was not fiscally responsible when government is already up to its eyeballs in debt.
and that the folks at the bottom, you know the ones that actually create wealth, are still hard hit. The bills that folks tend to point to as fiscally irresponsible are probably the least of the problems. The biggest being the oversized DoD budget and tax cuts for the rich.
Tax cuts for the rich are demonstrably not the problem. The talk is all about letting the Bush tax cuts expire or not, and the fact of the matter is that it "costs" government more than twice as much to keep the cut for <$250k while letting >$250k expire than if the reverse is done. I didn't know this myself until I played with the New York Times' budget puzzle*. The projected numbers are:
<250k: $172 billion in 2015, $252 billion in 2030 >250k: $54 billion in 2015, $115 billion in 2030
You can certainly argue that a 2-3% hurts more when you have less to begin with, and if you're going to argue that only the Bush tax cuts for >$250k should sunset then that should be the basis. There are a hell of a lot more people in lower group, though, which is why letting the lower cuts alone expire will give the government more money.
I agree fully that DoD spending is out of control and accounts for a healthy chunk of the budget.
* I'd love to link it for you but Chrome doesn't let me paste links on/. Googling NYT budget puzzle will get you there, and I think it's a worthwhile exercise for everyone interested in these issues.
The past two jobs I worked at were both very small companies that I learned about through networking. I had little to no experience in the languages I'd be working with in each (ASP and ActionScript) yet the companies were small enough that both were willing to interview me. When they did I showed that I have a very solid theoretical foundation that lets me pick up new languages easily--we all know this; if you know the theory then the rest is just learning syntax and proving your ability to implement things.
The recession hit and I got laid off last November, and it's taken me until now to find a place that looks at more than the number of years I've worked with their favorite technologies. There's little more frustrating than knowing I'd be a great fit for the work a company is doing but can't even get an interview due to bad resume screening. The job market is such that a company can be picky, but I saw positions I applied for remain open for six months or more because no applicants had numbers that lined up with exactly what they wanted.
What I meant is that if you want more wood, you plant more trees. Steel can be melted down and reused, but that requires its removal from whatever it was used in before. New iron can be mined to make more steel, but that's a much more energy-intensive process than harvesting trees. Also, once iron is mined you have to expand the mine to get more, whereas trees can be farmed in the same spot.
It seems to me that the problem is that we have a political system that is not agnostic with respect to wealth. Thus, the gap creates a disadvantage to those without the resources to equally participate in the political process. And, the situation is self-reinforcing due to political involvement in the economic process.
You put it very clearly and succinctly. And your comments about the definition of "rich" are also very much on target.
How much of that accrued debt is due to necessary living expenses and how much is due to our society's deranged obsession with material wealth? I agree with you about what is happening. I just wonder if it was something that occurred out of necessity or our collective social dysfunction of materialism.
My initial reaction upon reading this was to lay most of the blame at the feet of materialism, but the more I think about it the harder it is for me to conclude anything. Materialism certainly plays a role, but I honestly don't know enough about how the credit industry got started to know if its main driver was "keeping up with the Joneses" or giving people the ability to purchase the devices which genuinely improve their quality of life that you originally alluded to. I hope one good thing that will come out of the current situation is that the cultural norms will shift to rely less on incurring debt and more on good budgeting and saving up to buy desired things--but then you run again into the shrinking savings problem.
Fairness is indeed a nebulous term, but I couldn't think of anything better. In this case I think you'd be hard-pressed to find anyone who thinks this way of doing things is fair, though you will find plenty of people to argue that my description of how new money filters in is wrong. I don't think I've ever heard an explanation of HOW it's wrong, but if you get enough people, especially people in the financial industry, saying that it is...well, argument from authority is quite accepted. The fact that many of them have a vested interest in keeping things the way they are is rarely touched upon.
I'm not sure if you answered my questions or not. I am sure that it doesn't really matter, though. A reasoned, intellectual discussion about the subject answers plenty of questions that tend to get lost in the typical ideologically entrenched battles. So, progress towards some sort of understanding was made.
I'm glad to hear it. I come here for the same purpose.
The past three or four XKCD links I've seen have all had an AC replying with "best xkcd ever!"
Are you just one dude posting to all of these? Is it a new stupid meme? Or is it a bunch of people who are telling the truth but don't have nicks or are too lazy to sign in?
The gap is always there and is just the difference in the amount of money/assets each holds. There wouldn't be "rich" and "poor" without such a gap. The problem is that it is growing--the rich are continuing to get richer, and the not-rich are not. The middle class certainly benefits from technological advances as you wrote previously, and some genuinely poor people do too but to a lesser extent.
The system we have now, the one I sketched out in my original post, tends to further concentrate wealth around those who already have it. And since wealth usually confers power unto its holder, the rich also tend to have more political clout, which they can use to further ensure they keep getting more money, assets, and power. That might sound like it's out of scope here, but I don't think it is.
"Rich" today usually means you're at the helm of or very high up in a large corporation. In my working definitions, a millionaire, while certainly richer than I am, isn't part of the class to which I am referring. We'll call him "wealthy." "Rich" ought to be reserved for hundreds of millions of dollars and up.
The problem, as I see it, is that more of the middle class is doing little better than living paycheck to paycheck and paying down accrued debt. Those who actually have some savings may not realize it, but saving money in this country is a net loss--inflation outstrips the meager interest small money earns. You have to invest to make your money work for you, but it takes more initial money to be able to do that safely.
Most of this could happen anyway, and while I don't like it it doesn't strike me as inherently unfair. What does is what I originally posted about--the fact that new money, more valuable the earlier you get it, always goes to the rich first. By the time it gets to the average person, it's lagged behind the inflation it's caused and merely puts him about where he was before, as in "Thank God I got that raise! Now I can keep up with the bills and go out for a nice dinner now and then again." That same money, when first introduced, let some rich guy purchase, oh I don't know, oil futures. That new money bought the futures at the market price at a time when the market was not aware of new money. As the money filters in, the market learns that more money's around and raises its prices accordingly. Now the rich guy can sell the oil futures at the new equilibrium, having made money by the virtue of being first in line to borrow it when it was introduced.
I don't know how much or how little that unfairness has and does affect the overall situation, but I suspect that it is greater than you'd think after only a casual examination. I think I also repeated myself and possibly failed to answer your questions...
Actually, we do have fiat money by definition. That doesn't preclude our system from also being debt-based, which is a consequence of fractional reserve banking. New dollars are created by the Federal Reserve Bank, and those new dollars are lent to other banks. After a long chain of lending they reach the general populace.
When new dollars are created there is no new debt attached to them. Debt starts to accrue once the banks get hold of them because a bank is only required to maintain a fraction of the money it manages on-hand. So if I deposit $100 into the bank, they can lend $90 of that to someone else. If they deposit their $90, the bank can further lend $81 of that, then $72.90, and so on. The one thing that the post you quoted got right is that everyone paying back their debts at once results in a great shrinkage of the amount of dollars in existence. In practice, of course, this is astronomically unlikely.
Slashdot Mirror
So you never brush your teeth or wash yourself, since that kills bacteria?
You never clean your bathroom or take antibiotics?
You never swat at mosquitos or kill ants staging a home invasion?
You never eat either? Or are you a scavenger? (Except even scavenging results in the small deaths of microscopic creatures.)
Valuing all life is an untenable position that simply cannot be put into practice. If you value life, an admirable tenet, you still have to decide which kinds of life to value. Just saying "I value all life in and of itself" shows that you haven't really considered the proposition.
Also, how the fuck do you read his rights to a fucking lion with an antelope between his teeth?
Very quickly, and from within the safety of a vehicle.
Not in my experience.
I got into Go several years ago and was holding my own against gnu go in easily under a year. Then I logged on to Yahoo Games and lost every game except two, even when playing people with lower (chess-style) scores than mine and those who were too new to be ranked.
Sounds like a form of impairment testing, which is a pretty big win for everyone but has not been widely implemented. Employers who have used it found that it consistently reduced accidents, and employees like it since they don't have to pee in a cup--a demeaning and annoying procedure. It should also be cheaper for employers: even at a couple thousand bucks for the machine and software you used, the payoff in reduced accidents and mishaps along with not having to pay drug testing companies all the time means it'll pay for itself in a very short period of time.
It doesn't unfortunately seem like it's going to catch on anytime soon. Most companies haven't heard of it, and my guess is that most who have are waiting for it to gain a reputation before thinking about making the switch themselves.
Yeah, the Early Adoption Syndrome, where an early purchase means you're subject to a worse product at a higher cost, should apply universally, dammit!
Oh yeah? Well I started being eaten, and became...well it actually kind of sucks. Also I am typing this with my elbow stubs.
No no no, you all have it all wrong.
What was passed was certainly meaningful. What should be questioned is the use of the term "reform." That is supposed to have positive connotations.
My problem with this -- what in the health care bill actually improve things? At the small business where I work, our health insurance costs look to be increasing by 20-30% for our next contract.
Ah, but if you look at the history of the rhetoric surrounding the bill, you'll see that in the beginning there was indeed a lot of talk about reform to control costs, but long before the bill was proposed it shifted to providing coverage for more people.
I tend towards the libertarian in general, but I would have rather had a full on single payer plan over what we got...seems to be the absolute worst of both worlds.
I am in semi-agreement with you here. As a proponent of constitutional government, I believe it is up to each state to decide if it wants a single payer plan. It's been proposed in several states, most notably twice in California, where The Governator vetoed it both times. They ought to just make that a ballot proposition so he can't block it. I personally don't think it's a good idea, that allowing interstate insurance competition and tort reform would work more wonders, and that at the federal level it would be another blatant constitutional violation, but it also bugs me that the (presumed) majority of Californians who want it are being held back by a single (albeit very muscular) man.
This is an oft-repeated falsehood. What he advocates in reality is to treat gold and silver as legal tender in addition to the US dollar.
Let's not forget the child, either. If an unwanted child is born, while the possibility exists that she will be offered up for adoption it's pretty rare. Chances are she'll either grow up with a mom who doesn't love her and sees her as a burden, or she might be abandoned or left in a home to be cared for by other people.
A life like that isn't going to be a whole lot of fun. I am personally against abortions except for extreme cases, which means that if I were faced with the choice myself I would choose not to do it, and would counsel others who asked me for my opinion likewise. You mentioned some of the very good reasons why there ought to be a legal, safe method for getting abortions, and that is why I believe that it should remain legal despite my personal objection.
One day the first kid's either going to ride off a cliff because they think they're safe, or lose the rock and go to pieces because they think they can't be safe without it.
Or, more likely, fall off the bike while holding the rock and get pissed at his parents for lying to him. The parents' solution to that is to develop a better, more magical protective item to give to the kid. One would hope the kid would be smart enough to realize this too is a ruse and won't really protect him.
Articles like this one are an important part of making that happen.
Er...didn't Lieberman call Amazon like 3 hours before they dropped WL hosting? Of course it isn't ALL the US government, but it's playing a big role.
"That doesn't mean we WOULDN'T be the better off for having such a presumably corrupt entity gone."
Tricksy double negatives.
There will never be a good time for a major bank, energy or pharma company to collapse. That doesn't mean we'd be the better off for having such a presumably corrupt entity gone. I guess it boils down to whether you'd prefer to have sudden upheaval during a period of calm or some increased turbulence in an already bumpy ride. I prefer the latter. While it might make things worse in the short-term, lots of people are already fed up with the way big corporations are acting, so I think there will be more pushback from the populace if (when?) government tries to prop it up.
I understand that punitive damages are assigned to try to curb further abuse. Historically this has been limited to treble damages, though. Why $200 per infringement considered sane, let alone $750? Or does their argument rest on the "making available" principle?
IAObviouslyNAL
It's also important to note that we are coming out of the recession because of the stimulus not in spite of it
I'm not sure I buy this. The recession was declared to have been over by June 2009. That's two months after the stimulus package was passed. I have a hard time believing that it could have such a drastic effect in two months, which suggests to me that recovery was already happening. I won't go so far as to say the stimulus was a hindrance, but it certainly was not fiscally responsible when government is already up to its eyeballs in debt.
and that the folks at the bottom, you know the ones that actually create wealth, are still hard hit. The bills that folks tend to point to as fiscally irresponsible are probably the least of the problems. The biggest being the oversized DoD budget and tax cuts for the rich.
Tax cuts for the rich are demonstrably not the problem. The talk is all about letting the Bush tax cuts expire or not, and the fact of the matter is that it "costs" government more than twice as much to keep the cut for <$250k while letting >$250k expire than if the reverse is done. I didn't know this myself until I played with the New York Times' budget puzzle*. The projected numbers are:
<250k: $172 billion in 2015, $252 billion in 2030
>250k: $54 billion in 2015, $115 billion in 2030
You can certainly argue that a 2-3% hurts more when you have less to begin with, and if you're going to argue that only the Bush tax cuts for >$250k should sunset then that should be the basis. There are a hell of a lot more people in lower group, though, which is why letting the lower cuts alone expire will give the government more money.
I agree fully that DoD spending is out of control and accounts for a healthy chunk of the budget.
* I'd love to link it for you but Chrome doesn't let me paste links on /. Googling NYT budget puzzle will get you there, and I think it's a worthwhile exercise for everyone interested in these issues.
This is exactly what I ran into this year.
The past two jobs I worked at were both very small companies that I learned about through networking. I had little to no experience in the languages I'd be working with in each (ASP and ActionScript) yet the companies were small enough that both were willing to interview me. When they did I showed that I have a very solid theoretical foundation that lets me pick up new languages easily--we all know this; if you know the theory then the rest is just learning syntax and proving your ability to implement things.
The recession hit and I got laid off last November, and it's taken me until now to find a place that looks at more than the number of years I've worked with their favorite technologies. There's little more frustrating than knowing I'd be a great fit for the work a company is doing but can't even get an interview due to bad resume screening. The job market is such that a company can be picky, but I saw positions I applied for remain open for six months or more because no applicants had numbers that lined up with exactly what they wanted.
What I meant is that if you want more wood, you plant more trees. Steel can be melted down and reused, but that requires its removal from whatever it was used in before. New iron can be mined to make more steel, but that's a much more energy-intensive process than harvesting trees. Also, once iron is mined you have to expand the mine to get more, whereas trees can be farmed in the same spot.
Recyclable != renewable.
Not to mention, wood actually grows on trees. It's a renewable resource, unlike steel.
It seems to me that the problem is that we have a political system that is not agnostic with respect to wealth. Thus, the gap creates a disadvantage to those without the resources to equally participate in the political process. And, the situation is self-reinforcing due to political involvement in the economic process.
You put it very clearly and succinctly. And your comments about the definition of "rich" are also very much on target.
How much of that accrued debt is due to necessary living expenses and how much is due to our society's deranged obsession with material wealth? I agree with you about what is happening. I just wonder if it was something that occurred out of necessity or our collective social dysfunction of materialism.
My initial reaction upon reading this was to lay most of the blame at the feet of materialism, but the more I think about it the harder it is for me to conclude anything. Materialism certainly plays a role, but I honestly don't know enough about how the credit industry got started to know if its main driver was "keeping up with the Joneses" or giving people the ability to purchase the devices which genuinely improve their quality of life that you originally alluded to. I hope one good thing that will come out of the current situation is that the cultural norms will shift to rely less on incurring debt and more on good budgeting and saving up to buy desired things--but then you run again into the shrinking savings problem.
Fairness is indeed a nebulous term, but I couldn't think of anything better. In this case I think you'd be hard-pressed to find anyone who thinks this way of doing things is fair, though you will find plenty of people to argue that my description of how new money filters in is wrong. I don't think I've ever heard an explanation of HOW it's wrong, but if you get enough people, especially people in the financial industry, saying that it is...well, argument from authority is quite accepted. The fact that many of them have a vested interest in keeping things the way they are is rarely touched upon.
I'm not sure if you answered my questions or not. I am sure that it doesn't really matter, though. A reasoned, intellectual discussion about the subject answers plenty of questions that tend to get lost in the typical ideologically entrenched battles. So, progress towards some sort of understanding was made.
I'm glad to hear it. I come here for the same purpose.
So it's a new meme. Yay.
Okay, I have to ask.
The past three or four XKCD links I've seen have all had an AC replying with "best xkcd ever!"
Are you just one dude posting to all of these?
Is it a new stupid meme?
Or is it a bunch of people who are telling the truth but don't have nicks or are too lazy to sign in?
Genuinely curious,
f
The gap is always there and is just the difference in the amount of money/assets each holds. There wouldn't be "rich" and "poor" without such a gap. The problem is that it is growing--the rich are continuing to get richer, and the not-rich are not. The middle class certainly benefits from technological advances as you wrote previously, and some genuinely poor people do too but to a lesser extent.
The system we have now, the one I sketched out in my original post, tends to further concentrate wealth around those who already have it. And since wealth usually confers power unto its holder, the rich also tend to have more political clout, which they can use to further ensure they keep getting more money, assets, and power. That might sound like it's out of scope here, but I don't think it is.
"Rich" today usually means you're at the helm of or very high up in a large corporation. In my working definitions, a millionaire, while certainly richer than I am, isn't part of the class to which I am referring. We'll call him "wealthy." "Rich" ought to be reserved for hundreds of millions of dollars and up.
The problem, as I see it, is that more of the middle class is doing little better than living paycheck to paycheck and paying down accrued debt. Those who actually have some savings may not realize it, but saving money in this country is a net loss--inflation outstrips the meager interest small money earns. You have to invest to make your money work for you, but it takes more initial money to be able to do that safely.
Most of this could happen anyway, and while I don't like it it doesn't strike me as inherently unfair. What does is what I originally posted about--the fact that new money, more valuable the earlier you get it, always goes to the rich first. By the time it gets to the average person, it's lagged behind the inflation it's caused and merely puts him about where he was before, as in "Thank God I got that raise! Now I can keep up with the bills and go out for a nice dinner now and then again." That same money, when first introduced, let some rich guy purchase, oh I don't know, oil futures. That new money bought the futures at the market price at a time when the market was not aware of new money. As the money filters in, the market learns that more money's around and raises its prices accordingly. Now the rich guy can sell the oil futures at the new equilibrium, having made money by the virtue of being first in line to borrow it when it was introduced.
I don't know how much or how little that unfairness has and does affect the overall situation, but I suspect that it is greater than you'd think after only a casual examination. I think I also repeated myself and possibly failed to answer your questions...
Actually, we do have fiat money by definition. That doesn't preclude our system from also being debt-based, which is a consequence of fractional reserve banking. New dollars are created by the Federal Reserve Bank, and those new dollars are lent to other banks. After a long chain of lending they reach the general populace.
When new dollars are created there is no new debt attached to them. Debt starts to accrue once the banks get hold of them because a bank is only required to maintain a fraction of the money it manages on-hand. So if I deposit $100 into the bank, they can lend $90 of that to someone else. If they deposit their $90, the bank can further lend $81 of that, then $72.90, and so on. The one thing that the post you quoted got right is that everyone paying back their debts at once results in a great shrinkage of the amount of dollars in existence. In practice, of course, this is astronomically unlikely.