You definitely have to use some common sense about it when purchasing from China. I've gotten some amazing prices on things. Many parts require a bit of sanding or finishing but I have legitimately gotten numerous things that were $50-300 for $3 or less plus a month shipping from China.
Of course I've also gotten fakes, crap that was 3d printed with horrible settings so that it was stringy low res plastic garbage that I'd throw in a trash bin if it came off my printer at home.
I'm not saying your wrong. It is very difficult to setup and maintain a secure email server, 15yrs ago setting up linux mail servers for small businesses who wanted private mail was a big part of my job. These are all almost certainly going to be spam zombies within a couple years.
All I'm saying is that the reasons to want to do it haven't changed. Putting all your data, even confidential business data, in the hands of a third party is one of the greatest crimes of spammers.
"That's not true... you can see the 25 in there and recognize that there is a 1/4th sitting in this number; 25 to 1/4 is one of the decimal to fraction conversions the schools drilled into students in the 3rd grade to instantly recognize - (How else would you remember what 25% means or that a quarter equals 25 cents?)."
Okay, yet again someone explaining the math as if anyone didn't understand it. Nobody is confused about the math. If nothing else at least acknowledge that it makes little to no sense to arbitrarily add an extra conversion to 100th's on every number instead of expressing the actual decimal place.
"Besides it is extremely unlikely one person has ever seen all the people in a small town"
They don't need to, they need to know how likely they are to bump into someone picked out of a hat when they go to the store. Something they can get a sense of intuitively in an analog fashion because they experience and calculate those probabilities every single day, thousands of times a day. Present it in that way and they will immediately start thinking of the right questions like realizing the time period matters, things which can impact the result like events that would cause people to be more likely to head to store at the time, specific factors that could make one person more likely to go to the store, the understanding some of those factors could be short lived and skew the value in a smaller sample set, etc.
That is the point, just like geometry, algebra, trig, etc people are walking around with super computing power in their brains. Doing the math is easy in that they are already intuitively doing it, connecting our formalized system with the trained neural chains patterns which already exist in their brains in more efficient in formats that directly relate to natural group counts. It isn't that we don't know they are all just different ways of writing the same value.
That's because nobody wants to fully explain the math or symbols being used. In most other areas of technology someone at some point gives a Rosetta stone tutorial which translates. Math is typically very simple, the more "advanced" the math, the more simple it usually is once you penetrate the code of the initiated it is hiding behind.
Okay, I see a lot of people missing the point here and a lot of people for who it is so obvious they can't explain it.
First, understanding how to move a decimal place does not mean doing so in tens with such frequency that it is automatic. Especially with large and small decimal numbers. It becomes very easy to be off by an order of magnitude as you get lost in a sea of zeros.
Second, percentages are used to express probability. They are not blind numbers on a page, to grasp them you must associate them with something. In the case of 4000 or 4500 the something can be just about anything you've interacted with that is a set of roughly 5000. Of course you can conceive of that, it's a small town. To say 1 in 4000 is comparable to one guy in a small town and 276 is comparable to a large church. How hard was that? 0.00025... ummm no, that isn't a number you actually encounter in life. All you can say about 0.00025 is that it is "really small" and out of context there is no definition or concept of how small. 25 in 100,000 is though, that is the change of a given dollar a middle class worker earns being the one he spent at the mexican place Friday or 25 people in a small city.
Yes, that is definitely an example of something that does not legitimately fall under the commerce clause. It is also an example of something that squarely falls in the same FDA exemption criteria as every other herbal remedy with a long established history of safe medicinal use.
But we already know the war on drugs, politics, and money are responsible for the blatant disregard of the law with regard to marijuana. This is two massive industries butting heads and your rights being trampled in the middle alongside any potential for free speech and free press. If they can alter data in flight... how do you even know if what your reading is what I wrote?
Almost every good in a retail store came from somewhere else. The sale the consumer is happening in the destination state and the state has every right to regulate it. If they pass a law requiring goods be produced within 24hrs of payment, it doesn't matter if that indirectly results the sales outlet having to do interstate shipments by plane instead of train.
The Constitution doesn't empower the states only the federal government. Are you suggesting that when you order from the penny's catalog at the desk that suddenly state sales tax and consumer protection laws don't apply? California's law applies to the data served to customers in California who receive that from an ISP which much have a state level incorporation to business in the state California has every right to dictate consumer protections on what is being delivered.
"The contention that because the FCC claims they don't have the authority to enforce NN they cannot prevent the states from enacting the same regulation is not logically related."
The basis for the FCC having the authority to prevent the states from regulating is that their decision preempts the state regulation. If they lack the authority to regulate and therefore impose NN rules, their NN rules (whether for or against neutrality) do not carry the weight of law or preempt anything. The two are directly related.
"The Federal government may not be able to restrict your free speech rights, but that doesn't mean they have no power over the states attempts to do the same thing."
Assuming it falls under some other power which they do have you are correct. But the FCC is not the federal government, the FCC is a federal agency and is only empowered within their mandate. If they aren't granted a power by congress they don't have it. At least not legally.
How is this any different than buying items out of the catalog at IKEA and picking it up at the store when it arrives later? The products may be constructed across state or even national lines but the commerce is considered local, not inter-state and solidly falls under state authority. You don't get data from Google's server in say California, you get data from a network device just one hop away.
In this case with so many states already onboard the best path is to amend the Constitution and make the protections explicit. Thanks to a bunch of idiots monopolizing confirmation hearings with a bunch of discussion about unproven accusations a new supreme court justice was appointed who openly supports carriers not just throttling but altering information in flight. In other words, your carrier would be able to alter everything from the news to communications with your attorney, silently, and invisibly.
I agree on 2. Fear mongering definitely comes into it. Science fiction is a big influence. Nobody wants to produce an AI that becomes sentient and expands itself, taking over everything and eliminating mankind. That sort of thing.
Another simpler way to put it. Stocks don't have zero connection, they are just more like fantasy football leagues than sports betting.
Also, share price most definitely has an impact on the companies credit. Which for a company like AMD which has produced superior technology to Intel and needs to ramp up and expand to capitalize on it is a very big deal.
"The company you believe you're "investing in" has not seen anything from you. You give them no capital, no managerial expertise, no connections. You're an outsider, who is hoping that the company will do well enough to pay you a dividend in one form or another.
You may think you have an emotional connection to the company whose stock you hold, but it is completely imaginary."
That would be entirely true, if not for the others doing the same thing. As it is, there is some connection to the company. One, others buy and sell that stock believing it is connected to the company and their actions will revolve around assessment, earnings, and general events. Two, the board is elected by shareholders and is typically composed of shareholders. Three, executives at the company are often primarily compensated in stock. Last but not least, many companies have measures to tie employees interest into the stock performance. When you buy stock you aren't normally directly investing in the company, for that matter you aren't even usually investing in their future profits anymore because more and more companies aren't issuing dividends but you are making an investment in the performance of the company so long as others continue to believe so. Stock is no different than currency in this fashion.
"Your buying stocks on the market is just as much "nothing but a pure gambling" as shorting."
No there is a very big difference. When you buy stock you can hold on to that stock through ups and downs. When you short stock you have to know WHEN it is going to fall or your position will be closed and you will be forced to accept a loss at the worst moment. The only ones with enough capital to ensure they don't have to worry about that are large institutional investors.
Of course, if you already own the stock you have a reliable way to short it without this risk but isn't a short it is simply selling your shares and buying them back at the lower price. That is the legitimate way to "short" a stock.
So far three people have replied to me... and every one has replied with something to do with Musk and/or Tesla. My comment was about shorts, not Tesla or its CEO.
"Do you see Jeff Bezos bitching about shorts? Did Bill Gates whine about them, back in his day? How about Steve Jobs?"
That doesn't make him wrong. The matter really has nothing to do with Musk. Without insider knowledge shorts are nothing but pure gambling, they aren't needed for economic benefit, you can simply vote for the segments you believe will win and you've accomplished the same thing as shorts are meant to do and might do a better job of resisting the poison where an entire industry drops in share price as a consequence of just one company in it doing poorly.
I can't speak for every instance but shorts are commonly used by heavy hitters to manipulate the markets toward their interests such as institutional investors with a great deal of capital and heavy losses when AMD became better managed and produced superior technology to intel. Using connections to lots of market talking heads they spread FUD and using ridiculously deep pockets they drove the stock down over and over again triggering fear based sell off. The drops weren't consistent with the actual performance of the company or the technology nor where they consistent with the greater vote of the market. They stalled the stock for months between the $10-15 despite nothing but positive reality. Why? Easy, at $3/share they were shorting AMD to the tune of billions and used a bunch of smaller shorts in that range to offset the losses and hoped to create enough doubt in the market to break the stock.
There are ways shorts can work that would at least be equitable but as it stands all the rules around shorts mean they hurt normal investors while benefiting only massive ones. That isn't a free and competitive market.
"The fact that he has voiced net neutrality rules that run counter to the Constitution and amount to granting your carrier the authority to read and alter contracts and communications between you and others, including your attorney for instance, not even discussed. Instead we are supposed to support them on the basis of unproven allegations against a court justice in a country with a justice system which holds innocent until proven guilty in a court of law as its cornerstone."
Instead of demanding a bunch of lawyers ignore the principles of law and give them yet more reason under whatever joke of an investigation the FBI can do in a week... we could have focused on the real issue. The big issues that are actually likely to come before the courts.
The D's who have consistently been the party of tech forever are outraged at tech and claim the R's used it to take their election. They form an internet bill of rights and get people in arms about privacy (which is nothing new). But they mostly remain silent on net neutrality, his stance on the issue is in violation of several concerns of the bill of rights but the D's solidly distract you from that aspect of our supreme court nominee.
The R's attack net neutrality directly, the major funding in opposition is the big tech companies.
The result? Carriers of internet traffic who can not only throttle but alter everything down to documents communicated with your attorney on the wire. This is all the same team. Hell there is probably a backend deal to use "immigration reform" to bring back more not Hispanic but Asian H1B and similar in-sourced workers to compensate the tech companies and cost of business level agreements will be put in place with the carriers. The carriers aren't about trying to charge FB so much as they want to head off phone style regulations and unions like the telecoms have to interact with. How do you think verizon managed to own MCI for long without being considered a telco?
Slashdot Mirror
You definitely have to use some common sense about it when purchasing from China. I've gotten some amazing prices on things. Many parts require a bit of sanding or finishing but I have legitimately gotten numerous things that were $50-300 for $3 or less plus a month shipping from China.
Of course I've also gotten fakes, crap that was 3d printed with horrible settings so that it was stringy low res plastic garbage that I'd throw in a trash bin if it came off my printer at home.
I'm not saying your wrong. It is very difficult to setup and maintain a secure email server, 15yrs ago setting up linux mail servers for small businesses who wanted private mail was a big part of my job. These are all almost certainly going to be spam zombies within a couple years.
All I'm saying is that the reasons to want to do it haven't changed. Putting all your data, even confidential business data, in the hands of a third party is one of the greatest crimes of spammers.
So that your hosting provider doesn't have your data.
"That's not true... you can see the 25 in there and recognize that there is a 1/4th sitting in this number;
25 to 1/4 is one of the decimal to fraction conversions the schools drilled into students in the 3rd grade
to instantly recognize - (How else would you remember what 25% means or that a quarter equals 25 cents?)."
Okay, yet again someone explaining the math as if anyone didn't understand it. Nobody is confused about the math. If nothing else at least acknowledge that it makes little to no sense to arbitrarily add an extra conversion to 100th's on every number instead of expressing the actual decimal place.
"Besides it is extremely unlikely one person has ever seen all the people in
a small town"
They don't need to, they need to know how likely they are to bump into someone picked out of a hat when they go to the store. Something they can get a sense of intuitively in an analog fashion because they experience and calculate those probabilities every single day, thousands of times a day. Present it in that way and they will immediately start thinking of the right questions like realizing the time period matters, things which can impact the result like events that would cause people to be more likely to head to store at the time, specific factors that could make one person more likely to go to the store, the understanding some of those factors could be short lived and skew the value in a smaller sample set, etc.
That is the point, just like geometry, algebra, trig, etc people are walking around with super computing power in their brains. Doing the math is easy in that they are already intuitively doing it, connecting our formalized system with the trained neural chains patterns which already exist in their brains in more efficient in formats that directly relate to natural group counts. It isn't that we don't know they are all just different ways of writing the same value.
That's because nobody wants to fully explain the math or symbols being used. In most other areas of technology someone at some point gives a Rosetta stone tutorial which translates. Math is typically very simple, the more "advanced" the math, the more simple it usually is once you penetrate the code of the initiated it is hiding behind.
Okay, I see a lot of people missing the point here and a lot of people for who it is so obvious they can't explain it.
First, understanding how to move a decimal place does not mean doing so in tens with such frequency that it is automatic. Especially with large and small decimal numbers. It becomes very easy to be off by an order of magnitude as you get lost in a sea of zeros.
Second, percentages are used to express probability. They are not blind numbers on a page, to grasp them you must associate them with something. In the case of 4000 or 4500 the something can be just about anything you've interacted with that is a set of roughly 5000. Of course you can conceive of that, it's a small town. To say 1 in 4000 is comparable to one guy in a small town and 276 is comparable to a large church. How hard was that? 0.00025... ummm no, that isn't a number you actually encounter in life. All you can say about 0.00025 is that it is "really small" and out of context there is no definition or concept of how small. 25 in 100,000 is though, that is the change of a given dollar a middle class worker earns being the one he spent at the mexican place Friday or 25 people in a small city.
Yes, that is definitely an example of something that does not legitimately fall under the commerce clause. It is also an example of something that squarely falls in the same FDA exemption criteria as every other herbal remedy with a long established history of safe medicinal use.
But we already know the war on drugs, politics, and money are responsible for the blatant disregard of the law with regard to marijuana. This is two massive industries butting heads and your rights being trampled in the middle alongside any potential for free speech and free press. If they can alter data in flight... how do you even know if what your reading is what I wrote?
Almost every good in a retail store came from somewhere else. The sale the consumer is happening in the destination state and the state has every right to regulate it. If they pass a law requiring goods be produced within 24hrs of payment, it doesn't matter if that indirectly results the sales outlet having to do interstate shipments by plane instead of train.
The Constitution doesn't empower the states only the federal government. Are you suggesting that when you order from the penny's catalog at the desk that suddenly state sales tax and consumer protection laws don't apply? California's law applies to the data served to customers in California who receive that from an ISP which much have a state level incorporation to business in the state California has every right to dictate consumer protections on what is being delivered.
Spread this far and wide.
"The contention that because the FCC claims they don't have the authority to enforce NN they cannot prevent the states from enacting the same regulation is not logically related."
The basis for the FCC having the authority to prevent the states from regulating is that their decision preempts the state regulation. If they lack the authority to regulate and therefore impose NN rules, their NN rules (whether for or against neutrality) do not carry the weight of law or preempt anything. The two are directly related.
"The Federal government may not be able to restrict your free speech rights, but that doesn't mean they have no power over the states attempts to do the same thing."
Assuming it falls under some other power which they do have you are correct. But the FCC is not the federal government, the FCC is a federal agency and is only empowered within their mandate. If they aren't granted a power by congress they don't have it. At least not legally.
How is this any different than buying items out of the catalog at IKEA and picking it up at the store when it arrives later? The products may be constructed across state or even national lines but the commerce is considered local, not inter-state and solidly falls under state authority. You don't get data from Google's server in say California, you get data from a network device just one hop away.
In this case with so many states already onboard the best path is to amend the Constitution and make the protections explicit. Thanks to a bunch of idiots monopolizing confirmation hearings with a bunch of discussion about unproven accusations a new supreme court justice was appointed who openly supports carriers not just throttling but altering information in flight. In other words, your carrier would be able to alter everything from the news to communications with your attorney, silently, and invisibly.
The last people you should do this for are the military... of any nation.
Considering that magic could be some odd quantum property I don't see what difference it makes.
I agree on 2. Fear mongering definitely comes into it. Science fiction is a big influence. Nobody wants to produce an AI that becomes sentient and expands itself, taking over everything and eliminating mankind. That sort of thing.
Another simpler way to put it. Stocks don't have zero connection, they are just more like fantasy football leagues than sports betting.
Also, share price most definitely has an impact on the companies credit. Which for a company like AMD which has produced superior technology to Intel and needs to ramp up and expand to capitalize on it is a very big deal.
"The company you believe you're "investing in" has not seen anything from you. You give them no capital, no managerial expertise, no connections. You're an outsider, who is hoping that the company will do well enough to pay you a dividend in one form or another.
You may think you have an emotional connection to the company whose stock you hold, but it is completely imaginary."
That would be entirely true, if not for the others doing the same thing. As it is, there is some connection to the company. One, others buy and sell that stock believing it is connected to the company and their actions will revolve around assessment, earnings, and general events. Two, the board is elected by shareholders and is typically composed of shareholders. Three, executives at the company are often primarily compensated in stock. Last but not least, many companies have measures to tie employees interest into the stock performance. When you buy stock you aren't normally directly investing in the company, for that matter you aren't even usually investing in their future profits anymore because more and more companies aren't issuing dividends but you are making an investment in the performance of the company so long as others continue to believe so. Stock is no different than currency in this fashion.
"Your buying stocks on the market is just as much "nothing but a pure gambling" as shorting."
No there is a very big difference. When you buy stock you can hold on to that stock through ups and downs. When you short stock you have to know WHEN it is going to fall or your position will be closed and you will be forced to accept a loss at the worst moment. The only ones with enough capital to ensure they don't have to worry about that are large institutional investors.
Of course, if you already own the stock you have a reliable way to short it without this risk but isn't a short it is simply selling your shares and buying them back at the lower price. That is the legitimate way to "short" a stock.
So far three people have replied to me... and every one has replied with something to do with Musk and/or Tesla. My comment was about shorts, not Tesla or its CEO.
"Do you see Jeff Bezos bitching about shorts? Did Bill Gates whine about them, back in his day? How about Steve Jobs?"
That doesn't make him wrong. The matter really has nothing to do with Musk. Without insider knowledge shorts are nothing but pure gambling, they aren't needed for economic benefit, you can simply vote for the segments you believe will win and you've accomplished the same thing as shorts are meant to do and might do a better job of resisting the poison where an entire industry drops in share price as a consequence of just one company in it doing poorly.
I can't speak for every instance but shorts are commonly used by heavy hitters to manipulate the markets toward their interests such as institutional investors with a great deal of capital and heavy losses when AMD became better managed and produced superior technology to intel. Using connections to lots of market talking heads they spread FUD and using ridiculously deep pockets they drove the stock down over and over again triggering fear based sell off. The drops weren't consistent with the actual performance of the company or the technology nor where they consistent with the greater vote of the market. They stalled the stock for months between the $10-15 despite nothing but positive reality. Why? Easy, at $3/share they were shorting AMD to the tune of billions and used a bunch of smaller shorts in that range to offset the losses and hoped to create enough doubt in the market to break the stock.
There are ways shorts can work that would at least be equitable but as it stands all the rules around shorts mean they hurt normal investors while benefiting only massive ones. That isn't a free and competitive market.
Both but he is not wrong.
"The fact that he has voiced net neutrality rules that run counter to the Constitution and amount to granting your carrier the authority to read and alter contracts and communications between you and others, including your attorney for instance, not even discussed. Instead we are supposed to support them on the basis of unproven allegations against a court justice in a country with a justice system which holds innocent until proven guilty in a court of law as its cornerstone."
Instead of demanding a bunch of lawyers ignore the principles of law and give them yet more reason under whatever joke of an investigation the FBI can do in a week... we could have focused on the real issue. The big issues that are actually likely to come before the courts.
The D's who have consistently been the party of tech forever are outraged at tech and claim the R's used it to take their election. They form an internet bill of rights and get people in arms about privacy (which is nothing new). But they mostly remain silent on net neutrality, his stance on the issue is in violation of several concerns of the bill of rights but the D's solidly distract you from that aspect of our supreme court nominee.
The R's attack net neutrality directly, the major funding in opposition is the big tech companies.
The result? Carriers of internet traffic who can not only throttle but alter everything down to documents communicated with your attorney on the wire. This is all the same team. Hell there is probably a backend deal to use "immigration reform" to bring back more not Hispanic but Asian H1B and similar in-sourced workers to compensate the tech companies and cost of business level agreements will be put in place with the carriers. The carriers aren't about trying to charge FB so much as they want to head off phone style regulations and unions like the telecoms have to interact with. How do you think verizon managed to own MCI for long without being considered a telco?
I love this plan. For the first time every open source proponents push a movement to close source something!
agreed