Neither, I think he means that around 49pct of the population is net recipient in dollars from Federal Government. They qualify all kinds of grants and programs and pay nothing in Federal Income taxes to support them. They will almost certainly receive more in benefits from SS and medicare than even the time value adjusted contributions to those programs they may make.
Regardless on your opinion the socialization of health care, social safety net programs, worker protections, and even thoughts on what is fair in terms progressive vs. flat taxation; Its really hard for me to understand how anybody thinks its moral, ethical, sustainable, and otherwise practical for nearly half the citizens of this country to have 0 or negative skin in the game.
A house can be an investment but it depends on prices
Anything can be an investment if you are thinking sufficiently short term. Would a desktop computer be an investment, maybe if think there is going to be a disruption in the memory market or something that might for a tiny window of time let you fetch slightly more on E-bay for it then you paid a week ago.
A house is more like that computer than it is like a lump of gold or share of common stock. Its an asset that depreciates and/or comes with a carrying cost. That house needs paint, landscape maintenance, MUST be heated in the winter even if unoccupied, etc. Now the land under the house is a different story. If the location has value fine. That is big problem this time around. People "invested" in the buildings, these stupid McMansion structures built on tiny parcels of recently sub-divided land in places that really don't offer allot in terms of residential value, they were good for agriculture (maybe) but there is little intrinsic value in a sub division built in the middle of nowhere because any place nearer to where others wanted to live was unfordable, with roads and infrastructure not adequate to service a population density that never existed there before the bubble.
That building cost lots, but it becomes worth LESS with each passing day, the land its on might be appreciating but it was never worth much to begin with and now its going to be very hard to aggregate enough of it to use it for other activities, so its not even marketable in some places.
Simple because government project would be so high risk otherwise nobody would accept them. When was the last time a major government IT project was on time, on budget, and met requirements?
I have to agree with you on this. I don't understand all the "their streaming content sucks" posts. I suspect one or both of the following is true.
1. These customers are not rating stuff they watch so they get the same recommendations over and over again having not provided the algorithm with any new feedback. Its a big library you actually need the recommendations to discover the gems or yes you will either never see 90% of whats there or get lost and frustrated wondering through all the crap, and there is a great deal of crap, and not in the one mans trash is another man's treasure, that is there too, but there is lots content I can't imagine anyone ever watches.
2. They are completely prejudiced against any content more than a few years old or not done by Hollywood's A-list types. In which case, yea they'd probably be happier shelling out from traditional cable premimum channels like HBO and services like Amazon offers which are more a la cart oriented, possibly Hulu.
No the judge should have issued the common sense ruling that, BT is not responsible for what someone else hosts on their server, that BT just routes IP packets from their clients to the Internet and back, and possibly provides some other services like mail and DNS. Now I can see if BT was hosting the news server we might say they have some obligation to police what people post there, but that is far as common sense takes it for me.
The judge should have told the plaintiffs look "If you have problem with this news site then you need to find out who runs it and sue them, not BT".
If the site is international and the host country won't do anything about it then yes the content cartel needs to get the legislatures to implement some nation wide Internet filtering, that is a legislative act, its not a judges place to legislate that ISPs need to start content filtering.
I feel you brother. The trouble is common sense went out the window along time ago when politicians and judges started issuing blanket decisions and broadly applying them without consulting either with a broad cross section of interested parties from all sides of the issue, or attempting to get information from parties that would be disinterested but still informed on the issues; we went off the cliff when people started re-electing them.
Democracy did die when people discovered they could vote themselves an little extra this or a little more that or simply to keep others out of their private sand box. The only solution now is others just how absurd some of these little edicts are by behaving absurdly.
If you want people to pay attention you have to tell them, "yep I turned off your facebook, because one of your friends could post a link to this news server where you might download a movie you haven't licensed properly.".... "Oh yes I do agree that is absurd, but the judge made me do it, and the badly written law lobbied for by some a-holes made him do it."... "Well I just do as I am told, I don't want get sued after all."....
Some how the general public has to be made to see its all insane. Most of them just are not forward thinking enough to realize someone else's problem might one day be their problem and there might be none left to help them if they don't make a stand and help others now. The only thing left is to be absurd and make these types of things everyone's problem right here and now.
I think you mean 0.0.0.0/0 as 0.0.0.0/32 would mean only the address 0 to most of us. I agree with you though considering almost any other address *might* get used to tunnel traffic or host news they must stop permitting access to the Internet.
Probably yes it is cheaper, after you apply the risk factor to the potential costs of a disaster. I know as rational self interested person if I operated a power plant I'd sure as hell want to eliminate the possibility of a company ending disaster by getting that spent fuel someplace mostly safe.
Do I care about the people living around my plant maybe or maybe not but I sure do care about the potential legal liability I face if I harm them; because that hurts me.
This is a case where badly designed regulation distorted the risk to potential cost ratio, which almost certainly did change behavior and in this case had negative consequences. This is what large/strong government proponents need to understand there are always unintended consequences. The onus on getting society to agree to regulation should be on the regulator. Its not good enough to say OMG if something is not done something else terrible might happen, you have to also be able show that you have done the system think and convince me that you have worked through the system thinking and are not creating other new problems; which might not be obvious at first.
If you can't do that than I am going to take well a weak/small government and allowing the market to solve the problems is likely the better approach. The market WILL solve the problem, optimally? perhaps not always but it will solve it and do so fairly.
He is no longer a dirt farmer, he is most likely doing an activity humans were not doing before or doing much less of before. Before the industrial revolution most people spent most of their time working in agriculture. Some people were producing metal works, constructing buildings, practicing law, manufacturing soft beds, elegant woven patterns in cloth of many colors, etc, and nobody was writing software.
Along comes the industrial revolution and all its labor saving devices. Suddenly you and I can afford to sleep in soft bed and wear something other black or dirt brown, and produce other things that we might want to have rather than need to have.
The key difference this time is that it *might* be the case we are nearing a point where machines can do everything we do outside of the purely creative. Which we can all do so people may have nothing to market to each other.
No the issue here is as usual to much regulation, and overly centralized regulation rather than two little. The regulation has created the entry barriers and made the market to little to function properly. Spectrum allocation should be in that hands of state and local municipalities, NOT the federal government.
Downside its likely nation wide cellular service with a single handset would be difficult, up side the customer would have a much more competitive market and lower costs for service around their home town.
Except in the situation you describe the consequences of not acting are well understood and imminent. In the climate change realty we face there is NO IMMINENT DANGER, just a longer term view of some potential outcomes; that we have been wrong about before.
The cautionary principle applies here. We don't know the consequences of dumping billions of tonnes of carbon emissions into our atmosphere so we should probably try and cut back on that; but its already happening and things have gone "ok" so far. On the other hand we don't know much about chemically altering our upper atmosphere to reflect energy away. Might not be so wise to fool with that until more modeling has been done.
Also we have an "energy crisis" last time I looked at the news paper. Perhaps reducing our access to the one truly "free" source of power we have is not such a great plan?
Only about 300 governments control almost 100 percent of the worlds livable land mass!
Clearly something must be done...
In all seriousness there probably is to much concentration of wealth in the hands of two few entities, that said its not as few as it first sounds in the context of other global hierarchies. We as a society would be served by taking the pain of letting some of these big firms fail, and they will fail without government loan grantees and bailouts. When they fail that wealth and power will get spread around to at least more hands than the single hand of the failed entity. Yes it might be very painful short term but long term its better, we must end the moral hazard.
Also I would point out many of these corporations are public and buy purchasing a few shares of voting stock you can probably have a lot more influence then you can have in international politics going the government route!
I agree in principle, the government should not be granting student loans, and I think that its involvement in that process is largely responsible for the current pricing. All that available money has created a huge market distortion that is unfair to students.
These things have to be phased out though, in the practical sense. Its not as if schools can re-price their services instantly to reflect the new lack of cheap and easy money in the hands of recent highschool grads. They have an entire expense structure around the existing revenue structure that has build up over the past two decades or more. What the government should do is leave the existing programs largely intact but reduce the percentage of the loan they back each year until lenders rates reflect the real risk and their are fewer takers. That will gradually force students to find other options and force schools to re-organize around lower prices, in slow way.
Its kinda the same issue with the immigration reform. The current system is f*&!^ed up. You can't just all of sudden shut the board though. The market can't respond instantly, well it can but nobody would like the results. There are American's willing to do farm work, but the market has been distorted for decades, the people willing to that work no longer live near the farms. They need time unwind their current situations and move back to the country. You can't commute an hour to and from the city to earn a berry pickers wage. These things take time. You have slowly turn the heat up on illegals, and let the labor cost rise gradually, giving citizens time to relocate, and producers time to provide housing and such for them.
So if you pay for "up to 5 GB" you are actually charged for "average use of anyone on the 5 GB plan", which is a lot less than 5 GB.
I am not so sure about this. Just about everyone I know with smart phone on ATT&T or Verizon is PAINFULLY aware of their data usage. These are not all technical people either. That leads me to conclude that the cap levels are set where they don't make sense for most consumers. There either to low and prevent people from using the tool the way they'd really like, or so impossibly high they you pay through the nose for something you'd never use and line the carriers pockets.
The market is not big enough. I really think we need more choice of carriers, even if that means the FCC has to cut up the bandwidth allocations more and the results are an inferior network over all. Right now the amount of pricing power these guys have is a bigger problem than the quality and availability of service.
Well I don't anyone should be legally compelled to have anything injected into them, well except perhaps after some criminal proceeded and due process. Should they be strongly advised that getting vaccinated is probably a good idea, yes, compelled? NEVER.
Its a violation of your right to be secure in your own person. Frankly anyone who can't see that hates freedom.
The total Android market is already bigger, and Droid related activities on are gravy for Google in terms of revenue generation, where the iPhone is Apple's red meat.
Had I been at the table I would said "Find Steve, if that is how you feel about it, you get your Nuclear War"
All Google has to do is hire small legion of programers to build droid apps. Google can afford that. Apple needs to monetize the software as part of their revenue strategy. Google would probably still gain enough from increased analytic information, search related marketing opportunities, and content distributions etc over the long term to make the investment worth while even if they utterly destroy the ability for anyone to charge money for "apps"..
Who is going want an iPhone, where they have to pay $2 for everything or deal with nagware, when they can get a cheaper droid device and a world a free high quality apps?
Apple certainly makes money in content distribution as well but can't exactly respond by making that iDevice exclusive either without cutting of the nose to spite the face.
Essentially by investing a another 5 Million or so Google can start a race to the bottom that will do what the Windows PC did to Apple pre OS X. Its just they don't because for now they think the stutus quo is more profitable for every one.
Kinda like having "Bills of Sale" for private auto transaction. You know where you pay they guy whatever you actually agreed to in cash, and then he writes some lesser value on the receipt so you don't get hit with the taxes.
I imagine lots of handwritten sheets of paper with signatures scrawled on them, saying something like.
I agree to extend Mr.{Insert Name} a loan of {insert value} to purchase my heap of {insert type of scrap metal, or other good} at no interest. The loan shall be originated at {now()} and is to be paid in full by {dateadd("m",now(),5)}.
Profit is what you get when people decide something of value is worth paying for.
If it isn't profitable, it won't happen.
Has it occurred to you that if its not profitable that maybe it should not happen? I mean the some posts up the thread were talking about Tsunami warnings.
My guess is the local cities and towns and large business in California, would probably decide to pay for that service and there are private entities who could provide it.
If market can't support an activity then why should humans engage in it?
If the plurality of people who live around you actually want the schools to do that, one, they should get it, and two, you should move. That is the whole point of making local politics local.
While I do think the government has an interest in making some investment in basic research, having all these little grants done under all this little departments is a stupid way to do it.
The rest of what those departments do, is stuff the federal government should never have been doing in the first place. I am all for this plan. I do think we might want to then consider (not necessarily do), debate anyway there merit of creating a national physics and research department that would make investments in science, and vet grant requests etc. That way we could at least have a clear understanding of what we are really investing in science and what sort of returns we are really getting for it.
I don't see the OWS crowd giving me a lot of indication they against rent seekers. I agree with you though the banks did indeed engage in lots of rent seeking behavior, and Congress did abdicate their responsibility to the good of nation and sold out the bankers.
I have no respect for rent seekers. They are the worst kind of thief.
Slashdot Mirror
License plates are an unwanted and un-needed violation of privacy and should never have been required.
Neither, I think he means that around 49pct of the population is net recipient in dollars from Federal Government. They qualify all kinds of grants and programs and pay nothing in Federal Income taxes to support them. They will almost certainly receive more in benefits from SS and medicare than even the time value adjusted contributions to those programs they may make.
Regardless on your opinion the socialization of health care, social safety net programs, worker protections, and even thoughts on what is fair in terms progressive vs. flat taxation; Its really hard for me to understand how anybody thinks its moral, ethical, sustainable, and otherwise practical for nearly half the citizens of this country to have 0 or negative skin in the game.
A house can be an investment but it depends on prices
Anything can be an investment if you are thinking sufficiently short term. Would a desktop computer be an investment, maybe if think there is going to be a disruption in the memory market or something that might for a tiny window of time let you fetch slightly more on E-bay for it then you paid a week ago.
A house is more like that computer than it is like a lump of gold or share of common stock. Its an asset that depreciates and/or comes with a carrying cost. That house needs paint, landscape maintenance, MUST be heated in the winter even if unoccupied, etc. Now the land under the house is a different story. If the location has value fine. That is big problem this time around. People "invested" in the buildings, these stupid McMansion structures built on tiny parcels of recently sub-divided land in places that really don't offer allot in terms of residential value, they were good for agriculture (maybe) but there is little intrinsic value in a sub division built in the middle of nowhere because any place nearer to where others wanted to live was unfordable, with roads and infrastructure not adequate to service a population density that never existed there before the bubble.
That building cost lots, but it becomes worth LESS with each passing day, the land its on might be appreciating but it was never worth much to begin with and now its going to be very hard to aggregate enough of it to use it for other activities, so its not even marketable in some places.
Simple because government project would be so high risk otherwise nobody would accept them. When was the last time a major government IT project was on time, on budget, and met requirements?
I have to agree with you on this. I don't understand all the "their streaming content sucks" posts. I suspect one or both of the following is true.
1. These customers are not rating stuff they watch so they get the same recommendations over and over again having not provided the algorithm with any new feedback. Its a big library you actually need the recommendations to discover the gems or yes you will either never see 90% of whats there or get lost and frustrated wondering through all the crap, and there is a great deal of crap, and not in the one mans trash is another man's treasure, that is there too, but there is lots content I can't imagine anyone ever watches.
2. They are completely prejudiced against any content more than a few years old or not done by Hollywood's A-list types. In which case, yea they'd probably be happier shelling out from traditional cable premimum channels like HBO and services like Amazon offers which are more a la cart oriented, possibly Hulu.
No the judge should have issued the common sense ruling that, BT is not responsible for what someone else hosts on their server, that BT just routes IP packets from their clients to the Internet and back, and possibly provides some other services like mail and DNS. Now I can see if BT was hosting the news server we might say they have some obligation to police what people post there, but that is far as common sense takes it for me.
The judge should have told the plaintiffs look "If you have problem with this news site then you need to find out who runs it and sue them, not BT".
If the site is international and the host country won't do anything about it then yes the content cartel needs to get the legislatures to implement some nation wide Internet filtering, that is a legislative act, its not a judges place to legislate that ISPs need to start content filtering.
I feel you brother. The trouble is common sense went out the window along time ago when politicians and judges started issuing blanket decisions and broadly applying them without consulting either with a broad cross section of interested parties from all sides of the issue, or attempting to get information from parties that would be disinterested but still informed on the issues; we went off the cliff when people started re-electing them.
Democracy did die when people discovered they could vote themselves an little extra this or a little more that or simply to keep others out of their private sand box. The only solution now is others just how absurd some of these little edicts are by behaving absurdly.
If you want people to pay attention you have to tell them, "yep I turned off your facebook, because one of your friends could post a link to this news server where you might download a movie you haven't licensed properly." .... "Oh yes I do agree that is absurd, but the judge made me do it, and the badly written law lobbied for by some a-holes made him do it." ... "Well I just do as I am told, I don't want get sued after all." ....
Some how the general public has to be made to see its all insane. Most of them just are not forward thinking enough to realize someone else's problem might one day be their problem and there might be none left to help them if they don't make a stand and help others now. The only thing left is to be absurd and make these types of things everyone's problem right here and now.
I think you mean 0.0.0.0/0 as 0.0.0.0/32 would mean only the address 0 to most of us. I agree with you though considering almost any other address *might* get used to tunnel traffic or host news they must stop permitting access to the Internet.
Probably yes it is cheaper, after you apply the risk factor to the potential costs of a disaster. I know as rational self interested person if I operated a power plant I'd sure as hell want to eliminate the possibility of a company ending disaster by getting that spent fuel someplace mostly safe.
Do I care about the people living around my plant maybe or maybe not but I sure do care about the potential legal liability I face if I harm them; because that hurts me.
This is a case where badly designed regulation distorted the risk to potential cost ratio, which almost certainly did change behavior and in this case had negative consequences. This is what large/strong government proponents need to understand there are always unintended consequences. The onus on getting society to agree to regulation should be on the regulator. Its not good enough to say OMG if something is not done something else terrible might happen, you have to also be able show that you have done the system think and convince me that you have worked through the system thinking and are not creating other new problems; which might not be obvious at first.
If you can't do that than I am going to take well a weak/small government and allowing the market to solve the problems is likely the better approach. The market WILL solve the problem, optimally? perhaps not always but it will solve it and do so fairly.
He is no longer a dirt farmer, he is most likely doing an activity humans were not doing before or doing much less of before. Before the industrial revolution most people spent most of their time working in agriculture. Some people were producing metal works, constructing buildings, practicing law, manufacturing soft beds, elegant woven patterns in cloth of many colors, etc, and nobody was writing software.
Along comes the industrial revolution and all its labor saving devices. Suddenly you and I can afford to sleep in soft bed and wear something other black or dirt brown, and produce other things that we might want to have rather than need to have.
The key difference this time is that it *might* be the case we are nearing a point where machines can do everything we do outside of the purely creative. Which we can all do so people may have nothing to market to each other.
No the issue here is as usual to much regulation, and overly centralized regulation rather than two little. The regulation has created the entry barriers and made the market to little to function properly. Spectrum allocation should be in that hands of state and local municipalities, NOT the federal government.
Downside its likely nation wide cellular service with a single handset would be difficult, up side the customer would have a much more competitive market and lower costs for service around their home town.
Except in the situation you describe the consequences of not acting are well understood and imminent. In the climate change realty we face there is NO IMMINENT DANGER, just a longer term view of some potential outcomes; that we have been wrong about before.
The cautionary principle applies here. We don't know the consequences of dumping billions of tonnes of carbon emissions into our atmosphere so we should probably try and cut back on that; but its already happening and things have gone "ok" so far. On the other hand we don't know much about chemically altering our upper atmosphere to reflect energy away. Might not be so wise to fool with that until more modeling has been done.
Also we have an "energy crisis" last time I looked at the news paper. Perhaps reducing our access to the one truly "free" source of power we have is not such a great plan?
No WPA2? How old is the kit you have most people using? like 7+ years?
how much do they do they cost compared to Intel/AMD CPUs of similar performance?
Depends on where you live and what 10 year old PCs go for at your local garage sales.
Only about 300 governments control almost 100 percent of the worlds livable land mass!
Clearly something must be done...
In all seriousness there probably is to much concentration of wealth in the hands of two few entities, that said its not as few as it first sounds in the context of other global hierarchies. We as a society would be served by taking the pain of letting some of these big firms fail, and they will fail without government loan grantees and bailouts. When they fail that wealth and power will get spread around to at least more hands than the single hand of the failed entity. Yes it might be very painful short term but long term its better, we must end the moral hazard.
Also I would point out many of these corporations are public and buy purchasing a few shares of voting stock you can probably have a lot more influence then you can have in international politics going the government route!
I agree in principle, the government should not be granting student loans, and I think that its involvement in that process is largely responsible for the current pricing. All that available money has created a huge market distortion that is unfair to students.
These things have to be phased out though, in the practical sense. Its not as if schools can re-price their services instantly to reflect the new lack of cheap and easy money in the hands of recent highschool grads. They have an entire expense structure around the existing revenue structure that has build up over the past two decades or more. What the government should do is leave the existing programs largely intact but reduce the percentage of the loan they back each year until lenders rates reflect the real risk and their are fewer takers. That will gradually force students to find other options and force schools to re-organize around lower prices, in slow way.
Its kinda the same issue with the immigration reform. The current system is f*&!^ed up. You can't just all of sudden shut the board though. The market can't respond instantly, well it can but nobody would like the results. There are American's willing to do farm work, but the market has been distorted for decades, the people willing to that work no longer live near the farms. They need time unwind their current situations and move back to the country. You can't commute an hour to and from the city to earn a berry pickers wage. These things take time. You have slowly turn the heat up on illegals, and let the labor cost rise gradually, giving citizens time to relocate, and producers time to provide housing and such for them.
So if you pay for "up to 5 GB" you are actually charged for "average use of anyone on the 5 GB plan", which is a lot less than 5 GB.
I am not so sure about this. Just about everyone I know with smart phone on ATT&T or Verizon is PAINFULLY aware of their data usage. These are not all technical people either. That leads me to conclude that the cap levels are set where they don't make sense for most consumers. There either to low and prevent people from using the tool the way they'd really like, or so impossibly high they you pay through the nose for something you'd never use and line the carriers pockets.
The market is not big enough. I really think we need more choice of carriers, even if that means the FCC has to cut up the bandwidth allocations more and the results are an inferior network over all. Right now the amount of pricing power these guys have is a bigger problem than the quality and availability of service.
Well I don't anyone should be legally compelled to have anything injected into them, well except perhaps after some criminal proceeded and due process. Should they be strongly advised that getting vaccinated is probably a good idea, yes, compelled? NEVER.
Its a violation of your right to be secure in your own person. Frankly anyone who can't see that hates freedom.
The total Android market is already bigger, and Droid related activities on are gravy for Google in terms of revenue generation, where the iPhone is Apple's red meat.
Had I been at the table I would said "Find Steve, if that is how you feel about it, you get your Nuclear War"
All Google has to do is hire small legion of programers to build droid apps. Google can afford that. Apple needs to monetize the software as part of their revenue strategy. Google would probably still gain enough from increased analytic information, search related marketing opportunities, and content distributions etc over the long term to make the investment worth while even if they utterly destroy the ability for anyone to charge money for "apps"..
Who is going want an iPhone, where they have to pay $2 for everything or deal with nagware, when they can get a cheaper droid device and a world a free high quality apps?
Apple certainly makes money in content distribution as well but can't exactly respond by making that iDevice exclusive either without cutting of the nose to spite the face.
Essentially by investing a another 5 Million or so Google can start a race to the bottom that will do what the Windows PC did to Apple pre OS X. Its just they don't because for now they think the stutus quo is more profitable for every one.
Kinda like having "Bills of Sale" for private auto transaction. You know where you pay they guy whatever you actually agreed to in cash, and then he writes some lesser value on the receipt so you don't get hit with the taxes.
I imagine lots of handwritten sheets of paper with signatures scrawled on them, saying something like.
I agree to extend Mr.{Insert Name} a loan of {insert value} to purchase my heap of {insert type of scrap metal, or other good} at no interest. The loan shall be originated at {now()} and is to be paid in full by {dateadd("m",now(),5)}.
Profit is what you get when people decide something of value is worth paying for.
If it isn't profitable, it won't happen.
Has it occurred to you that if its not profitable that maybe it should not happen? I mean the some posts up the thread were talking about Tsunami warnings.
My guess is the local cities and towns and large business in California, would probably decide to pay for that service and there are private entities who could provide it.
If market can't support an activity then why should humans engage in it?
Umm one of the *many* reasons Ford's model-T was so successful was it performed very well on poor roads, like existing wagon trails and such.
If the plurality of people who live around you actually want the schools to do that, one, they should get it, and two, you should move. That is the whole point of making local politics local.
While I do think the government has an interest in making some investment in basic research, having all these little grants done under all this little departments is a stupid way to do it.
The rest of what those departments do, is stuff the federal government should never have been doing in the first place. I am all for this plan. I do think we might want to then consider (not necessarily do), debate anyway there merit of creating a national physics and research department that would make investments in science, and vet grant requests etc. That way we could at least have a clear understanding of what we are really investing in science and what sort of returns we are really getting for it.
I don't see the OWS crowd giving me a lot of indication they against rent seekers. I agree with you though the banks did indeed engage in lots of rent seeking behavior, and Congress did abdicate their responsibility to the good of nation and sold out the bankers.
I have no respect for rent seekers. They are the worst kind of thief.