He said setting a market rate. Using a market rate clearly implies letting the market set the rate. It does not imply setting an arbitrary rate.
Letting the market set the rate and "setting" a market rate are different things - but I'll agree that the statement is ambiguous. I was addressing the statement as if it were the state actively setting a rate somehow as opposed to setting up some kind of a market.
The problem of obtaining the water and paying whoever owns the water is already a solved problem.
The fact that we are having this discussion at all would seem to contradict you. There is not enough water in CA to satisfy demand at the moment. There is plenty of water in other places. There is certainly a problem here that is not solved.
We are only discussing how to divvy the water out.
A more accurate word would be "rationing". We are actively limiting a resources that has more demand than supply. I happen to agree with you and ShanghiBill that rationing by raising the price is the way to go, but I think we disagree about how hard this would be to get right. I don't live in CA, or anywhere within pipeline distance of CA - so my opinion does not really matter much in the end. But I can tell you that rationing purely based on price is going to muster a whole lot of people to fight politically.
Water demand can be very elastic when there are actual economic incentives. For anyone to say demand is inelastic shows just how wasteful we are with water in modern society.
I agree, but in the context of the conversation I was talking specifically about the demand of poor people. They probably are not huge users of water, and while their behavior can change a bit (flush the toilet less, take less showers, use disposable dishware, etc) - it's really not going to change overall water use much.
. If you want to help the poor, it is better to give them money directly, so they can spend it on something they actually want, rather that giving them an incentive to waste water or electricity or whatever.
Again, I think we largely agree. It's just that - if you take no other action, like your example of giving them money - the commodity price will increase and the poor will suffer a larger percentage of their income than everyone else. And we are talking about water, so there is a relatively inelastic demand here. Even if you don't think it will affect the poor that much, it is a concern that needs to be addressed or the market pricing route is a political dead end.
The side currently facing the laser is still going to out-gas slightly more than the side that just turned away from the laser. Net effect might be less for a spinning object, but it will still be an effect. Besides, no one says this has to work for every single piece of space debris. So what if it "only" reduced the problem by 10%?
What is the water source? The hundred thousand square miles of watershed? How would this work? There are probably thousands of "owners" across multiple states or even nations. You are acting like water rights are some simple issue that hasn't been contentious for the last 10,000 years or so.
Its not like California couldn't use the money. Its government is doing better than it was five years ago but it isn't exactly the most solvent state in the union.
So your answer is "the state", which makes it a tax. That's fine - I just want to be clear that we're talking about taxing water to solve a water crisis, which you may understand may not play well in all spheres of the political world.
What is top down about letting the price of water settle at whatever level is necessary to reduce consumption to a manageable level?
That is not what he suggested. He suggested "setting" a price for water. Letting the price of water float is a different idea that requires that private people be allowed to own and trade water. This has to be done carefully, and California screwed it up when they tried it with electricity.
The truth is that water rights are a very complicated issue. Water falls on a combination of private and public land. You obviously can't go full-libertarian and have downstream users at the full mercy of upstream landowners, and things get even dicier when multiple governments (or even nations) are involved. I think a quasi-market based approach (that starts as a tax) is the right way to go, but there are a lot of very complicated issues to slog through. And market based approaches to rationing are rarely kind to the poor.
Here is the problem. Blowing up or melting items does not work.
But if you heat up one side of an object, that side out-gasses or vaporizes and alters the orbit. Pick the side intelligently and you can slowly nudge stuff into a decaying orbit.
While I agree that this is probably the right thing to do, who gets this money? And how is the government setting some arbitrary price for a commodity to achieve some objective not a "top down" solution?
I was responding to your comment that you "distribute them throughout your life", not that you carry it around. One at home, one at work (no need for the car as you probably have an FM radio there). Anywhere you were going to stash headphones. Alkaline batteries last several years, so that shouldn't be an issue - in any event they are more likely to have many hours worth of charge left compared to your half-dead cell phone. If the cell towers go down, it will suck itself dry in no time flat unless you are smart enough to know this and put it in airplane mode.
If you are stopping by the dollar store to pick up a bunch of headphones for emergencies, then you might as well buy some cheap AM/FM radios instead along with a bunch of AA batteries and you'll be far better off. I've seen digitally-tuned radios complete with headphones for about $6 at the dollar stores, and they will go many hours on a battery, which doesn't need to be charged.
The problem is it shouldn't be impressive, it use to be called being a good parent.
Well, I think you went above and beyond a little by actually melting down rock:) I have some projects with the kids - those "science" kits from the teacher/parent store, Mindstorms, Hour of Code, that sort of thing... but melting rock in a forge is pretty hard core.
Add in that now with the internet you can quickly find out about things you have limited or no knowledge about and it is a lot easier than when I was little.
Indeed. The challenge now seems to be teaching the kids to vet information since it is now trivial to access. I'm struggling a bit with how to do this, but I think surfing the internet with them seems to be effective.
Another thing that has helped with exposing them to different thing is having my son in Cub Scouts.
I think this depends heavily on your local chapter. I was extremely unimpressed as a child, and my kids have not gotten into Girl Scouts/Cub Scouts - though there is of course still time.
The main issue is that no one seems to agree on what to measure. "Student performance" is too fuzzy. Does that mean "proficiency"? Well, that's straightforward. But then you have problems graduating students who never become proficient, and it points out just how unfair society is. No one likes that! No one has created a metric that gives all parties an artificial warm and fuzzy feeling for all parties, that is very true.
It was "commercially viable", but so were it's plethora of competitors. The clones took over the world (except for maybe education and the Mac's eventual niche markets).
Openly documented does not mean you were allowed to clone it. Compaq had to reverse engineer the PC BIOS using engineers who had never looked at the BIOS. These engineers wrote a spec that a separate set of engineers then had to implement. It was very costly and laborious and resulted in a landmark court victory for Compaq.
With my kids it has been let the schools teach what they can, then spend the time to actually really teach them things properly and fill in the large quantity of gaps left by teaching to the test.
Yes, for financial and social reasons we would like to use the public schools. The tradeoff is a whole lot of teaching at home.
The work you do with your kid is impressive! Keep it up!
If that is the reality, then we should change the system to reflect the reality. If we are, in effect, babysitting the kids then let's do it right. These kids are all of our problems when they "graduate" or otherwise leave school with no skill except going to prison.
The main thing I see in Atlanta is a poor incentive system that assumed teachers would be more honest than the population at large, which obviously was a shitty assumption.
At least the pediatrician is somewhat constrained by organizations which do (mostly) adhere to the scientific method. FDA drug trials, peer-reviewed articles, etc. But yeah, there is still a lot of guessing going on. To be fair, they can't really run a controlled experiment on an individual patient, so they have to do some guessing.
They didn't create an open platform - the platform was "opened" for them by Compaq, and IBM saw a threat. Microsoft, on the other hand, saw an opportunity and happily licensed their code to all comers.
Slashdot Mirror
He said setting a market rate. Using a market rate clearly implies letting the market set the rate. It does not imply setting an arbitrary rate.
Letting the market set the rate and "setting" a market rate are different things - but I'll agree that the statement is ambiguous. I was addressing the statement as if it were the state actively setting a rate somehow as opposed to setting up some kind of a market.
The problem of obtaining the water and paying whoever owns the water is already a solved problem.
The fact that we are having this discussion at all would seem to contradict you. There is not enough water in CA to satisfy demand at the moment. There is plenty of water in other places. There is certainly a problem here that is not solved.
We are only discussing how to divvy the water out.
A more accurate word would be "rationing". We are actively limiting a resources that has more demand than supply. I happen to agree with you and ShanghiBill that rationing by raising the price is the way to go, but I think we disagree about how hard this would be to get right. I don't live in CA, or anywhere within pipeline distance of CA - so my opinion does not really matter much in the end. But I can tell you that rationing purely based on price is going to muster a whole lot of people to fight politically.
Water demand can be very elastic when there are actual economic incentives. For anyone to say demand is inelastic shows just how wasteful we are with water in modern society.
I agree, but in the context of the conversation I was talking specifically about the demand of poor people. They probably are not huge users of water, and while their behavior can change a bit (flush the toilet less, take less showers, use disposable dishware, etc) - it's really not going to change overall water use much.
. If you want to help the poor, it is better to give them money directly, so they can spend it on something they actually want, rather that giving them an incentive to waste water or electricity or whatever.
Again, I think we largely agree. It's just that - if you take no other action, like your example of giving them money - the commodity price will increase and the poor will suffer a larger percentage of their income than everyone else. And we are talking about water, so there is a relatively inelastic demand here. Even if you don't think it will affect the poor that much, it is a concern that needs to be addressed or the market pricing route is a political dead end.
Since we are orbiting a sphere and not a circle, the calculations will be a tad more complex - but yes, that is the right idea.
The side currently facing the laser is still going to out-gas slightly more than the side that just turned away from the laser. Net effect might be less for a spinning object, but it will still be an effect. Besides, no one says this has to work for every single piece of space debris. So what if it "only" reduced the problem by 10%?
What is the water source? The hundred thousand square miles of watershed? How would this work? There are probably thousands of "owners" across multiple states or even nations. You are acting like water rights are some simple issue that hasn't been contentious for the last 10,000 years or so.
Its not like California couldn't use the money. Its government is doing better than it was five years ago but it isn't exactly the most solvent state in the union.
So your answer is "the state", which makes it a tax. That's fine - I just want to be clear that we're talking about taxing water to solve a water crisis, which you may understand may not play well in all spheres of the political world.
What is top down about letting the price of water settle at whatever level is necessary to reduce consumption to a manageable level?
That is not what he suggested. He suggested "setting" a price for water. Letting the price of water float is a different idea that requires that private people be allowed to own and trade water. This has to be done carefully, and California screwed it up when they tried it with electricity.
The truth is that water rights are a very complicated issue. Water falls on a combination of private and public land. You obviously can't go full-libertarian and have downstream users at the full mercy of upstream landowners, and things get even dicier when multiple governments (or even nations) are involved. I think a quasi-market based approach (that starts as a tax) is the right way to go, but there are a lot of very complicated issues to slog through. And market based approaches to rationing are rarely kind to the poor.
Here is the problem. Blowing up or melting items does not work.
But if you heat up one side of an object, that side out-gasses or vaporizes and alters the orbit. Pick the side intelligently and you can slowly nudge stuff into a decaying orbit.
Set a market price for water. Problem solved.
While I agree that this is probably the right thing to do, who gets this money? And how is the government setting some arbitrary price for a commodity to achieve some objective not a "top down" solution?
I was responding to your comment that you "distribute them throughout your life", not that you carry it around. One at home, one at work (no need for the car as you probably have an FM radio there). Anywhere you were going to stash headphones. Alkaline batteries last several years, so that shouldn't be an issue - in any event they are more likely to have many hours worth of charge left compared to your half-dead cell phone. If the cell towers go down, it will suck itself dry in no time flat unless you are smart enough to know this and put it in airplane mode.
If they survive the nitrogen chamber, they must be Martians.
If you are stopping by the dollar store to pick up a bunch of headphones for emergencies, then you might as well buy some cheap AM/FM radios instead along with a bunch of AA batteries and you'll be far better off. I've seen digitally-tuned radios complete with headphones for about $6 at the dollar stores, and they will go many hours on a battery, which doesn't need to be charged.
No, fucktard, I typed the wrong number into the calculator.
The problem is it shouldn't be impressive, it use to be called being a good parent.
Well, I think you went above and beyond a little by actually melting down rock :) I have some projects with the kids - those "science" kits from the teacher/parent store, Mindstorms, Hour of Code, that sort of thing... but melting rock in a forge is pretty hard core.
Add in that now with the internet you can quickly find out about things you have limited or no knowledge about and it is a lot easier than when I was little.
Indeed. The challenge now seems to be teaching the kids to vet information since it is now trivial to access. I'm struggling a bit with how to do this, but I think surfing the internet with them seems to be effective.
Another thing that has helped with exposing them to different thing is having my son in Cub Scouts.
I think this depends heavily on your local chapter. I was extremely unimpressed as a child, and my kids have not gotten into Girl Scouts/Cub Scouts - though there is of course still time.
Sorry, yes, you are correct.
The main issue is that no one seems to agree on what to measure. "Student performance" is too fuzzy. Does that mean "proficiency"? Well, that's straightforward. But then you have problems graduating students who never become proficient, and it points out just how unfair society is. No one likes that! No one has created a metric that gives all parties an artificial warm and fuzzy feeling for all parties, that is very true.
It was "commercially viable", but so were it's plethora of competitors. The clones took over the world (except for maybe education and the Mac's eventual niche markets).
Openly documented does not mean you were allowed to clone it. Compaq had to reverse engineer the PC BIOS using engineers who had never looked at the BIOS. These engineers wrote a spec that a separate set of engineers then had to implement. It was very costly and laborious and resulted in a landmark court victory for Compaq.
Standardized testing as a grading mechanism for teachers doesn't fix anything.
I don't know if that is true or not, but I haven't seen teachers themselves propose an objective criteria for measuring their performance.
The responsibility of school is not to provide a supplement or replacement for bad parenting.
Reality disagrees with you.
With my kids it has been let the schools teach what they can, then spend the time to actually really teach them things properly and fill in the large quantity of gaps left by teaching to the test.
Yes, for financial and social reasons we would like to use the public schools. The tradeoff is a whole lot of teaching at home.
The work you do with your kid is impressive! Keep it up!
If that is the reality, then we should change the system to reflect the reality. If we are, in effect, babysitting the kids then let's do it right. These kids are all of our problems when they "graduate" or otherwise leave school with no skill except going to prison.
The main thing I see in Atlanta is a poor incentive system that assumed teachers would be more honest than the population at large, which obviously was a shitty assumption.
Yes, none of the numbers make any sense at all. That is, it's a perfect public education budget item.
At least the pediatrician is somewhat constrained by organizations which do (mostly) adhere to the scientific method. FDA drug trials, peer-reviewed articles, etc. But yeah, there is still a lot of guessing going on. To be fair, they can't really run a controlled experiment on an individual patient, so they have to do some guessing.
IBM once created an open platform
They didn't create an open platform - the platform was "opened" for them by Compaq, and IBM saw a threat. Microsoft, on the other hand, saw an opportunity and happily licensed their code to all comers.
Market share is not as important as "profit share". This is true for both device makers and App developers. Apple matters very much, with only 20% market share by unit but 89% by profit. On the app front, Apple paid out $10 billion to developers last year while Google paid out $7 billion.
So yes, they still are relevant.