Why would Rolling Stone be out? It depends on the article. For a Wikipedia article about Tom Petty, Rolling Stone seems like a reasonable resource for factual information. If the topic is campus rape, there are probably better resources and if the only source is Rolling Stone, that should raise alarm bells.
They retracted that article. Rolling Stone is so biased as to be useless as a news source anyway. It's also a niche magazine targeting pop music enthusiasts. But on facts, they are probably still reasonable most of the time.
Yup, I have a hiatal hernia, so while diet can help, my physiology will eventually give me esophageal cancer if I don't either take a PPI or have surgery. Even without the cancer, waking up every night with a mouth full of stomach acid and a constant pain in my eroded esophagus was getting old.
Surgery isn't healthy, either. If you have a hiatal hernia, you can go drug-free and get esophageal cancer, get surgery, or take a pill every morning. Guess which one I do?
Whether scarcity is real or not, we seem to have an evolved motivation when faced with competition - even creating some purely for fun when none is needed. Again, we can sit here and smell academic farts all day, but unless there is some evidence of a credible alternative to market-driven economies I'm going to not take alternatives too seriously.
I'd say that assuming the current advantage that humans hold over microorganisms to be permanent is also a wild guess. 4 kids might not be enough down the road a little.
It it too much to ask for a single example of this working at scale? It's a beautiful fiction, like Star Trek. In the meantime the prudent thing to do is assume that humans need to compete and remain competitive.
Yeah, it works - though I pity the poor dude who has to maintain all my magic tricks - VBA can be hard to debug because within Excel there are a lot of cases where it fails silently. I'd question the wisdom of micro-managing by spreadsheet, but it's not my company to run.
I'm not making any claims as to the worst thing ever - hell, I think I've personally done worse. We have a product that I program for. My boss, who is quite smart but is no programmer, likes to design her logic in Excel. I typically need to convert her spreadsheet work into a home-grown language that we use to give the machine instructions. Then, depending on the application, I need to do that translation again for the machine's GUI in c/c++.
To speed things up, one obvious step was to write a c library that could be called from both the home-grown machine language and the machine's GUI. So far, so good. The unholy part comes from writing an Excel macro to dump her logic out of the cells into a text file. The text file is then read into a Python script that uses a symbolic algebra library (sympy) to convert the Excel formulas into algebra and then dump them into c equations. It works surprisingly well for an awful kludge, and it saves me a buttload of time. The code is not as compact as it could be, but at the end of the day things are very easy to debug because the variable names and logic all match her spreadsheet exactly. I even have debug output that is meant to be pasted back into the spreadsheet where another macro puts that back in as inputs to verify that everything matches.
I got a call from a guy that I used to work with. He was an engineer who went for a lobotomy and came back as a manager at a company that I contract for. He knew that I was good at VBA and that I was contracting, and he had an idea to track and plan all engineering resource allocation in a half-billion dollar company through the use of Excel spreadsheets. Specifically, he envisioned a system where his master Excel sheet would burp out individual worksheets that each functional manager would fill out, then send back to him. He would then compile them all and run the analysis.
I tried to talk him out of it - first of all, there are off the shelf resource planning apps. Nope. Well, I could make you an intranet site. Nope. Hey, you guys shell out for Sharepoint - I could put together something using that. Nope. Excel. "The managers all know how to use it." Uh-huh.
So, I'm a contractor and I need the work... what the hell? I spend some time on it, and it was beautiful in its horrificness. Lots of delightful event-driven macros, changing things automatically as you copy or create sheets or change cell contents. It interfaced with Active Directory to get the list of engineering employees and contractors and their direct managers. I worked with HR to have the proper data fields filled in. It verified the integrity of the HR data in Active Directory. It even eventually lived on Sharepoint and did automaticy things when people opened and closed it. It churned through and made sure that everyone in the company was allocated to a project and that all the allocation numbers add up to 100%. It gave detailed analysis in pivot tables for pretty much anything that they wanted to see.
Anyway, I created this abortion, fixed a few bugs upon initial use and then didn't think about it again. The guy got fired for obvious reasons. Maybe a year or so after that, I was again contracting for this company and one of the other managers calls me into his office. I get there and he starts asking me questions about some error message he got in "my macro". I look at what the hell he's talking about, and to my horror THEY ARE STILL USING THIS THING. I showed him how to fix it and eventually taught the SharePoint admin how the damned thing worked so that he could support it.
So just think about that the next time you buy stock in a publicly traded company.
I could tell you a story that would make you weep, but in the interest of brevity let's just say that sometimes you are Igor and you just do what Dr. Frankenstein says.
Just come to the dark side - everything searchable in one place, high quality, no DRM so it works on all of your devices. If you lose it in the future you won't be upset.
I'm not sure what your proposal is. If you want efficiency - that is, people getting as much as possible for a given price and simultaneously providers getting as much as possible for a given product - then it's hard to beat a free market. Sometimes, like in healthcare, it is difficult or impossible to set up the conditions for an efficient free market. Sometimes the wild swings that free markets tend to have are unacceptable, as in food prices, so we moderate the market - accepting the decline in efficiency. As long as you have people choosing colleges and colleges choosing students and charging arbitrary amounts for tuition, you have a market - whether you like to call it that or not. I'm suggesting that we change the conditions of that market if we aren't happy with the current results - I said nothing of making it a "free" market. If you don't like to talk about markets, we can frame the discussion in terms of incentives instead.
While that's true, the summary makes it sound as if this is a moral rather than a simple economic choice. I could be misreading it, because as you say language is hard. But I think I have the context correct.
Presumably, a "college GED" would be for people who already learned the trade and just needed the paper to prove it. It wouldn't replace an apprenticeship, it would formalize it.
That's a fine ideal, and it probably works great for people who come from relatively affluent families with existing networks and support structures. There is also a huge need for professional training. "College" does not need to be exactly the same experience for everyone.
OK, but we have many non-theoretical markets that do a pretty good job at being efficient. I've heard some pretty good arguments about some industries, like health care, where it is claimed that it will never resemble a free market and so we should control supply and costs differently. I might buy that, but not for colleges.
The word "should" in the headline seems to imply a moral judgement. I don't see a moral case here - the different colleges are free to try different pricing schemes and see what the market bears. If the market isn't healthy enough to pick and choose winners, then lets concentrate on fixing the market.
Slashdot Mirror
Why would Rolling Stone be out? It depends on the article. For a Wikipedia article about Tom Petty, Rolling Stone seems like a reasonable resource for factual information. If the topic is campus rape, there are probably better resources and if the only source is Rolling Stone, that should raise alarm bells.
Still, from the point of view of a fact-collecting encyclopedia, it can be counted on as a reliable source of facts. Just not neutrality.
They retracted that article. Rolling Stone is so biased as to be useless as a news source anyway. It's also a niche magazine targeting pop music enthusiasts. But on facts, they are probably still reasonable most of the time.
Bias is one thing, inventing facts is another.
Common mistake. The US built the pedestal where the inscription is, not the French.
COGS has little direct correlation to what the market will bear.
No:
Yup, I have a hiatal hernia, so while diet can help, my physiology will eventually give me esophageal cancer if I don't either take a PPI or have surgery. Even without the cancer, waking up every night with a mouth full of stomach acid and a constant pain in my eroded esophagus was getting old.
If those work, they are cheaper as well. They don't work for me - I need all the acid to go away.
Surgery isn't healthy, either. If you have a hiatal hernia, you can go drug-free and get esophageal cancer, get surgery, or take a pill every morning. Guess which one I do?
Whether scarcity is real or not, we seem to have an evolved motivation when faced with competition - even creating some purely for fun when none is needed. Again, we can sit here and smell academic farts all day, but unless there is some evidence of a credible alternative to market-driven economies I'm going to not take alternatives too seriously.
I'd say that assuming the current advantage that humans hold over microorganisms to be permanent is also a wild guess. 4 kids might not be enough down the road a little.
It it too much to ask for a single example of this working at scale? It's a beautiful fiction, like Star Trek. In the meantime the prudent thing to do is assume that humans need to compete and remain competitive.
Yeah, it works - though I pity the poor dude who has to maintain all my magic tricks - VBA can be hard to debug because within Excel there are a lot of cases where it fails silently. I'd question the wisdom of micro-managing by spreadsheet, but it's not my company to run.
I'm not making any claims as to the worst thing ever - hell, I think I've personally done worse. We have a product that I program for. My boss, who is quite smart but is no programmer, likes to design her logic in Excel. I typically need to convert her spreadsheet work into a home-grown language that we use to give the machine instructions. Then, depending on the application, I need to do that translation again for the machine's GUI in c/c++.
To speed things up, one obvious step was to write a c library that could be called from both the home-grown machine language and the machine's GUI. So far, so good. The unholy part comes from writing an Excel macro to dump her logic out of the cells into a text file. The text file is then read into a Python script that uses a symbolic algebra library (sympy) to convert the Excel formulas into algebra and then dump them into c equations. It works surprisingly well for an awful kludge, and it saves me a buttload of time. The code is not as compact as it could be, but at the end of the day things are very easy to debug because the variable names and logic all match her spreadsheet exactly. I even have debug output that is meant to be pasted back into the spreadsheet where another macro puts that back in as inputs to verify that everything matches.
Should I sell this as a product? :)
OK...
I got a call from a guy that I used to work with. He was an engineer who went for a lobotomy and came back as a manager at a company that I contract for. He knew that I was good at VBA and that I was contracting, and he had an idea to track and plan all engineering resource allocation in a half-billion dollar company through the use of Excel spreadsheets. Specifically, he envisioned a system where his master Excel sheet would burp out individual worksheets that each functional manager would fill out, then send back to him. He would then compile them all and run the analysis.
I tried to talk him out of it - first of all, there are off the shelf resource planning apps. Nope. Well, I could make you an intranet site. Nope. Hey, you guys shell out for Sharepoint - I could put together something using that. Nope. Excel. "The managers all know how to use it." Uh-huh.
So, I'm a contractor and I need the work... what the hell? I spend some time on it, and it was beautiful in its horrificness. Lots of delightful event-driven macros, changing things automatically as you copy or create sheets or change cell contents. It interfaced with Active Directory to get the list of engineering employees and contractors and their direct managers. I worked with HR to have the proper data fields filled in. It verified the integrity of the HR data in Active Directory. It even eventually lived on Sharepoint and did automaticy things when people opened and closed it. It churned through and made sure that everyone in the company was allocated to a project and that all the allocation numbers add up to 100%. It gave detailed analysis in pivot tables for pretty much anything that they wanted to see.
Anyway, I created this abortion, fixed a few bugs upon initial use and then didn't think about it again. The guy got fired for obvious reasons. Maybe a year or so after that, I was again contracting for this company and one of the other managers calls me into his office. I get there and he starts asking me questions about some error message he got in "my macro". I look at what the hell he's talking about, and to my horror THEY ARE STILL USING THIS THING. I showed him how to fix it and eventually taught the SharePoint admin how the damned thing worked so that he could support it.
So just think about that the next time you buy stock in a publicly traded company.
Also, I hate VBA.
I could tell you a story that would make you weep, but in the interest of brevity let's just say that sometimes you are Igor and you just do what Dr. Frankenstein says.
Just come to the dark side - everything searchable in one place, high quality, no DRM so it works on all of your devices. If you lose it in the future you won't be upset.
I'm not sure what your proposal is. If you want efficiency - that is, people getting as much as possible for a given price and simultaneously providers getting as much as possible for a given product - then it's hard to beat a free market. Sometimes, like in healthcare, it is difficult or impossible to set up the conditions for an efficient free market. Sometimes the wild swings that free markets tend to have are unacceptable, as in food prices, so we moderate the market - accepting the decline in efficiency. As long as you have people choosing colleges and colleges choosing students and charging arbitrary amounts for tuition, you have a market - whether you like to call it that or not. I'm suggesting that we change the conditions of that market if we aren't happy with the current results - I said nothing of making it a "free" market. If you don't like to talk about markets, we can frame the discussion in terms of incentives instead.
While that's true, the summary makes it sound as if this is a moral rather than a simple economic choice. I could be misreading it, because as you say language is hard. But I think I have the context correct.
Fair enough - same spirit. It doesn't need to be called a "college GED".
Presumably, a "college GED" would be for people who already learned the trade and just needed the paper to prove it. It wouldn't replace an apprenticeship, it would formalize it.
I'm legitimately interested in how you think improving the efficiency of a market would hurt the poor. Just kind of guide me there.
That's a fine ideal, and it probably works great for people who come from relatively affluent families with existing networks and support structures. There is also a huge need for professional training. "College" does not need to be exactly the same experience for everyone.
OK, but we have many non-theoretical markets that do a pretty good job at being efficient. I've heard some pretty good arguments about some industries, like health care, where it is claimed that it will never resemble a free market and so we should control supply and costs differently. I might buy that, but not for colleges.
The word "should" in the headline seems to imply a moral judgement. I don't see a moral case here - the different colleges are free to try different pricing schemes and see what the market bears. If the market isn't healthy enough to pick and choose winners, then lets concentrate on fixing the market.