All kids. Sexual objectification of children necessarily hurts all kids, IMHO.
Even kids that don't EXIST? Exactly how do you "objectify" a cartoon? Personally, I disagree with the whole NT notion of "objectification". If you're willing to have sex with someone or something, that means you think they're a PERSON, not an OBJECT.
Hey, using that logic, why not allow fucking 2 year olds, huh? After all, who am I (or anyone) to decide anything?
Well, there's the argument that sex is primarily for procreation, and there's going to be a bit of a lack of that with a 2 year old. But a 12 year old?
Lowest common denominator ??? Just because some backwoods illiterate thinks it is okay, it must be!
I didn't say that either- but then again, you're using a biblical name- shall we examine the Bible, marrying away 12 year old girls?
So, lets not stop there, why not incest???? Who are you to say that's bad? Who gives the right to draw the line there???
Well, once again there's the procreation/genetic science angle. But beyond that, incest isn't that bad- the royal Pharaoh line in Egypt practiced it for 1500 years without a problem.
Why not have harems?
If a man is rich enough, why not indeed?
Why not do farm animals or other furry creatures?
If you think they're people enough to have sex with them, why should I say any different?
Who are we to draw the line anywhere???? Lets just see how perverse we can be, after all who is anyone to say it is wrong???
Well, you're arguing the slippery slope there, which is a logical fallacy in and of itself.
Is that what you're arguing for? Just curious how far down that slippery slope you're willing to take that argument.
Actually, despite it all,no I'm not. Personally, sex is for procreation and THAT IS IT as far as I'm concerned- mates where there is no chance of procreation, shouldn't be done, and certainly exploiting sex for pornography shouldn't be done. But neither, once you open the door to sex being for something else than procreation, can you label the men who do indulge in perversions as being anything other than God intended them to be.
And spreading child porn DOES harm someone, namely the kid in the picture
And in the case of a cartoon, it's reasonable to ask "what kid?".
Child abuse is one of the worse crimes upon society. I have little use for people who are into little kids.
Where I have a tendency to agree, I've got to repeat my question above: In a world where Zulu tribes believe that every menstruation is an abortion, where children as young as 12 get married, and where due to pollution and better nutrition precocious puberty can exist in a girl as young as 8, how the hell do you tell when childhood ends and adulthood begins? And who gave YOU the right to draw the line?
Nice to see people still miss the point. Whether you care to admit it or not, it's not normal to wank off to pics of underaged people. I personally lost interest in that more or less immediately upon turning 18.
And you can tell the difference between a 14-year-old with a pushup bra and a 19-year-old with a pushup bra exactly how? In a world where hormones in the drinking water and better access to good nutrition can lead to Precocious puberty and a 12 year old who looks like she's 20, how the hell do you tell?
Legally, of course, you're completely right. I'm just pointing out that your claim to have "lost interest in that more or less immediately upon turning 18" is somewhat suspect indeed. Also, your claim that it isn't "normal" is suspect given the normal ages of marriage in primitive cultures, which usually for women was upon the onset of menses, much younger than 18.
If you can't transfer shares of ownership, or transferring them is prohibitively expensive, then those shares of next to zero value.
Good. They should have next to zero value. The only reason you should EVER invest in a company or corporation is if you agree with the corporate charter and want to support jobs in your local community. There is NEVER any reason to invest in a corporation outside of your local community.
Also, believe it or not, shares of ownership are a perfectly legitimate, and generally a very good way of raising financial capital you otherwise wouldn't have access to.
Oh, it's perfectly legitimate alright- but it's a rotten way of raising financial capital, because it involves people who have *NO* interest in maintaining the corporate charter or good relations with the community or the workforce. Just because it's legitimate doesn't mean it's morally right.
I really hope you don't keep your money in a bank, either. You may be shocked or otherwise disappointed should you learn how one of those works.
I have been extremely disappointed since last August in learning that banks generally work by creating fake money that they don't have (fractional reserve banking). Since then, I've moved my money to an interest-free Islamic credit union, and am three months from paying off the last of my bank loans, and I will NEVER do business with those crooks again.
Do all of the innovation you like, but do it on your own dime. I will be deciding how best to spend the money in my pocket, thank you very much.
Ah yes, the last blast of the blasted individualist- assuming that money that belongs to the FED and is lent to business/government is theirs merely because it's in their pocket. Or to put it in another way paraphrasing Christ- assuming that it's your head on the coin instead of Ceaser's.
Scientific advancement helps the entire species, so shouldn't the entire species pay for it?
Consumer electronics and automobile manufacturing have very little to do with R&D. They were, however, enabled by technology R&D that was largely funded in the US.
So basically, what you're saying is from the point of view of the common US citizen, the research is happening but the fruits of the research, those nice high paying factory jobs that built the middle class, are all going overseas.
As for profit, no one should care. What they should care about is results for the amount of money invested. R&D is not a ritual of essential purity that we do for its own sake, we do it because we are looking for advancements in capability.
Where I'm saying, that's completely the WRONG attitude to take, and when we take that attitude, we end up with a huge trade deficit.
In 1950, the US government spent slightly more on R&D than private organizations. Half a century later, that gap has grown so that privately funded R&D completely dwarfs government funded R&D. The US government does fund some basic science (and military) research that would not likely get done by the private sector, but even that research is being increasingly funded by private foundations with deep pockets. You might want to revisit your model of how most research gets funded. The US government invests a lot in research relative to places like the EU, but that research investment is a small fraction of a total research funding pie that is completely dominated by the US private sector.
My comment was based more on my observation of companies moving from true private funding to public, stock market based funding. I hadn't thought about private charity foundations funding research- but if that's what we're depending on for disruptive technologies to save the world, it's a pretty small pocket in comparison to $700 billion bailouts of the financial industry.
A topic of discussion in the EU is that due to their dependency on the private American research industry, research topics related to things local to Europe are relatively underfunded and European governments have shown little interest in making the required investment. We do not really need the US doing more research so much as we need the rest of the industrialized world doing as much productive research as the US.
What we really need is a better way to fund research at all. One that is cooperative, rather than competitive. One where the end point isn't a patent or a copyright, but rather an open source knowledge base that anybody can tap.
Yeah, we should go back to the good ol' dotcom days when turning a profit in 10 years was enough to get Wall Street dollars.
Every single dotcom I ever worked for went bankrupt within 6 months of IPO.
Fund what? There's R&D investment going on, It just isn't necessarily in new consumer products, but rather improving efficiency.
As in, moving factories to the third world to take advantage of lower standards of living.
Given the current economic climate, evolutionary new products from most big companies aren't going to help the bottom line.
The mistake there is focusing on the bottom line.
So instead spend the bulk of R&D money which is used on evolutionary development, and buy new software, training, and other systems to reduce costs - and maintain the smaller amount of risk captial investing in small companies hoping to strike the "next big thing."
Most of which won't be the next big thing anytime soon- so shouldn't we find a completely different method to fund them?
Economic recovery is going to come out of disruptive technology, and most Wall Street companies don't handle disruptive technology well. They prefer to adopt it buy buying stakes in small startups rather than trying to constantly redirect a monolithic organization.
And even then, it's usually a big mistake for a small startup to sell. I've seen WAY too many companies ruined by stock offerings to believe any different. A company should be owned ONLY by people who believe in what that company is attempting to do, not by people looking for the "next big thing" or profit merely for the sake of profit, and this goes doubly so for any investment in R&D, especially in disruptive tech.
Utter rubbish that can be easily disproven by the very numbers that Wall Street uses. The market prices on Wall Street, for example, are priced with a mathematical horizon that ranges from a couple years to a couple decades depending on the company we are talking about. And most derivatives and other financial contracts also have explicit performance horizons measured in much, much longer terms than "4 months". Obviously, Wall Street cares about and considers profitability explicitly on a much longer time horizon than you assert by their very actions when they have to actually put their money on the line.
In my experience, as soon as a company passes that first IPO, there's a HUGE amount of pressure brought to bear on R&D to make sure that no line item in any quarterly report is a money sink more than two quarters in a row. That's where my 4 month bottom line comes from.
Apparently you are blissfully unaware that the productivity of investments in those Japanese research cooperatives have markedly underperformed American private R&D, so what you are recommending is spending a lot more money to produce far fewer results. The problem with the government picking One True Research Project is that, like with all research, the odds are very high that they will actually be researching the wrong thing, and without a messy, uncoordinated, and diverse research ecosystem like you get with decentralized private R&D, progress tends to stall as what (in hindsight) is the correct research path becomes almost entirely ignored and defunded in favor of politically expedient or favored research topics. This ignores the issue that when you look at modern countries, in many important fields like medicine the majority of the world's research is private American R&D funding.
Can't tell that by the consumer electronics that actually hit the market though, can you. For instance, there isn't a single American TV factory anymore- Sony owned the last plant and they closed it. American car companies are on the rocks and haven't produced anything new in decades. Factories have been shut down nationwide, so where is all of this R&D going? Certainly NOT into new products- and I suspect strongly it isn't actually getting done at all, not when every project I've been on gets the chopping block if it doesn't ship in the 2nd quarter of development.
The germane point that you are furiously trying to remain ignorant of is that American private sector R&D is atypically productive in terms of producing useful advances, largely because they try so many different things and prune low-quality research paths so quickly. Government directed R&D projects, while producing some very important results on occasion, have a long history of relatively low productivity for the money spent no matter which government we are talking about. This is further complicated by the fact that governments only make the investments when convenient since they have no particular political motivation to do more research beyond grandstanding. I would like an explanation, for example, as to why the total R&D investment in the EU is a tiny fraction of American R&D despite having a larger economy and population, and how that oft-replicated result would be avoided this time.
The EU is largely "free market based" as well, with loads of stock markets. They suffer from the same short-sightedness you seem to in your next paragraph:
At the end of the day, I do not want to pay for research, I want to pay for productive results. There is nothing intrinsically good or worth funding about "research theater" if it is not producing results we can actually use with all due haste. Fast, results-oriented government research seems to require a palpable imminent threat to life and limb that the population at large recognizes, and battery manufacturing technology does not qualify.
And thus we're stuck with a bunch of solutions that only support the status quo. Nobody's willing t
Individual investors are not inherently impatient- but the SEC reporting schedule has a tendency to force businesses to report on their income quarterly- and if a project shows up as a dollar sink two quarters in a row, the investors are going to want a darn good reason why, as they rightly should when "investment" is seen as a means of earning a living.
That's where my four months came from anyway. I happen to disagree with investment as a method of gaining capital for R&D entirely for this reason.
But, your 5% "consumption tax on all stock transactions" intrigues me. Is this like a poorly implemented "capital gains tax?"
Well, for one, trades are NOT the way companies get capital for expansion- when you buy a stock, unless it's an IPO, the company doesn't get any of that price you paid for the stock- the guy you bought the stock from does.
So instead of a "capital gains" tax, it's a "market volatility" tax, which would encourage people to hold on to their stocks longer instead of jumping in and out at every opportunity.
I wonder where people get this idea that "Wall Street" is one monolithic individual, who is good friends with Mr. Corporation, and neither of their optometrists have prescribed them lenses to see more than 5 seconds into the future. There are plenty of rational people in business, because otherwise it is harder to stay in business longer than 4 months.
If there are plenty of rational people in business, how did Bernie Madoff stay in business so long? The answer is that the rational people in business don't get capital from Wall Street- they know that an IPO means letting the madness in. And so they stay small companies, private companies. The market itself is irrational, and yes, it's incredibly hard to be a market based business and stay in business more than 4 months. EVERY 4 months you've got to produce a report saying you are profitable (or even better yet, prove it with a dividend), or else the stockholders will either sue you or drive your stock price down, so that the next time you go to the market looking for capital, it won't be there.
And would taxing the main way companies get capital for expansion and R&D cause more research to happen, or less of it?
Well, that's the point isn't it? PROFITS should be used for expansion and R&D, not selling off pieces of ownership in the company. That is the RATIONAL way to do it. To go to the stock market for expansion/R&D capital is irrational.
No, I'm talking about mining the lead out of old landfills to make new lead-acid batteries. Or using algae to suck the carbon dioxide out of the air to make biodiesel. Or refining Lithium, copper, and salt out of seawater to make fresh drinking water & Lithium-ion batteries. Or the best yet- using cow waste to create fertilizer, flower pots, and electricity (that one was actually on Dirty Jobs).
True enough. Which, of course is a big hole in capitalism- hard for a technology to progress if it can't find funding for research. Historically, of course, that hole has been filled by government funded war research, but what do you do if your war machine is already so technically advanced that the enemies aren't there to push technology further?
Thus, the idea of a tax on the ponzi scheme con game that is eating up 20% of our GDP.
Yeah, that might have an effect on the actual factory...depending on the technology that is. Seems to me the best power generation and storage tech actually uses more pollution than it creates. Which is something many companies forget in their EIS filings.
The reason US Companies didn't choose to manufacture this technology domestically is because Wall Street only cares about projects that turn a profit in 4 months.
The answer? Do away with Wall Street's drag on R&D, fund it directly. Or better yet, add a 5% consumption tax on all stock transactions to fund Japanese style industry research cooperatives.
The problem with OO and multi-core programming is that you never know what other process has a handle to the same object you do; same problem as procedural programming had with global variables when multitasking first came in.
Functional programming sidesteps this problem because largely there are no variables- only function calls with all data held somewhere on the function call stack, which means there's no chance of another process (with a different call stack) messing with your data.
Logo and LISP are the oldest functional languages. Scala, F#, Erlang, and Haskell are just modern corruptions of these originals.
As for their math abilities- I was doing recursive algorithms at 14 (long division), as well as advanced algebra. Are you saying that these "gifted" students won't have the ability to handle that, which is just about the limit of functional languages anyway (you're NOT going to be programming a non-iterative approach to calculus in any of the languages mentioned)?
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All kids. Sexual objectification of children necessarily hurts all kids, IMHO.
Even kids that don't EXIST? Exactly how do you "objectify" a cartoon? Personally, I disagree with the whole NT notion of "objectification". If you're willing to have sex with someone or something, that means you think they're a PERSON, not an OBJECT.
Hey, using that logic, why not allow fucking 2 year olds, huh? After all, who am I (or anyone) to decide anything?
Well, there's the argument that sex is primarily for procreation, and there's going to be a bit of a lack of that with a 2 year old. But a 12 year old?
Lowest common denominator ??? Just because some backwoods illiterate thinks it is okay, it must be!
I didn't say that either- but then again, you're using a biblical name- shall we examine the Bible, marrying away 12 year old girls?
So, lets not stop there, why not incest???? Who are you to say that's bad? Who gives the right to draw the line there???
Well, once again there's the procreation/genetic science angle. But beyond that, incest isn't that bad- the royal Pharaoh line in Egypt practiced it for 1500 years without a problem.
Why not have harems?
If a man is rich enough, why not indeed?
Why not do farm animals or other furry creatures?
If you think they're people enough to have sex with them, why should I say any different?
Who are we to draw the line anywhere???? Lets just see how perverse we can be, after all who is anyone to say it is wrong???
Well, you're arguing the slippery slope there, which is a logical fallacy in and of itself.
Is that what you're arguing for? Just curious how far down that slippery slope you're willing to take that argument.
Actually, despite it all,no I'm not. Personally, sex is for procreation and THAT IS IT as far as I'm concerned- mates where there is no chance of procreation, shouldn't be done, and certainly exploiting sex for pornography shouldn't be done. But neither, once you open the door to sex being for something else than procreation, can you label the men who do indulge in perversions as being anything other than God intended them to be.
And spreading child porn DOES harm someone, namely the kid in the picture
And in the case of a cartoon, it's reasonable to ask "what kid?".
Child abuse is one of the worse crimes upon society. I have little use for people who are into little kids.
Where I have a tendency to agree, I've got to repeat my question above: In a world where Zulu tribes believe that every menstruation is an abortion, where children as young as 12 get married, and where due to pollution and better nutrition precocious puberty can exist in a girl as young as 8, how the hell do you tell when childhood ends and adulthood begins? And who gave YOU the right to draw the line?
Is that with or without the growth hormone pollution from mankind?
Nice to see people still miss the point. Whether you care to admit it or not, it's not normal to wank off to pics of underaged people. I personally lost interest in that more or less immediately upon turning 18.
And you can tell the difference between a 14-year-old with a pushup bra and a 19-year-old with a pushup bra exactly how? In a world where hormones in the drinking water and better access to good nutrition can lead to Precocious puberty and a 12 year old who looks like she's 20, how the hell do you tell?
Legally, of course, you're completely right. I'm just pointing out that your claim to have "lost interest in that more or less immediately upon turning 18" is somewhat suspect indeed. Also, your claim that it isn't "normal" is suspect given the normal ages of marriage in primitive cultures, which usually for women was upon the onset of menses, much younger than 18.
If you can't transfer shares of ownership, or transferring them is prohibitively expensive, then those shares of next to zero value.
Good. They should have next to zero value. The only reason you should EVER invest in a company or corporation is if you agree with the corporate charter and want to support jobs in your local community. There is NEVER any reason to invest in a corporation outside of your local community.
Also, believe it or not, shares of ownership are a perfectly legitimate, and generally a very good way of raising financial capital you otherwise wouldn't have access to.
Oh, it's perfectly legitimate alright- but it's a rotten way of raising financial capital, because it involves people who have *NO* interest in maintaining the corporate charter or good relations with the community or the workforce. Just because it's legitimate doesn't mean it's morally right.
I really hope you don't keep your money in a bank, either. You may be shocked or otherwise disappointed should you learn how one of those works.
I have been extremely disappointed since last August in learning that banks generally work by creating fake money that they don't have (fractional reserve banking). Since then, I've moved my money to an interest-free Islamic credit union, and am three months from paying off the last of my bank loans, and I will NEVER do business with those crooks again.
Do all of the innovation you like, but do it on your own dime. I will be deciding how best to spend the money in my pocket, thank you very much.
Ah yes, the last blast of the blasted individualist- assuming that money that belongs to the FED and is lent to business/government is theirs merely because it's in their pocket. Or to put it in another way paraphrasing Christ- assuming that it's your head on the coin instead of Ceaser's.
Scientific advancement helps the entire species, so shouldn't the entire species pay for it?
It isn't. It never was, and never will be. Profit isn't the end-all-be-all of decision making however, it just appears to be.
Consumer electronics and automobile manufacturing have very little to do with R&D. They were, however, enabled by technology R&D that was largely funded in the US.
So basically, what you're saying is from the point of view of the common US citizen, the research is happening but the fruits of the research, those nice high paying factory jobs that built the middle class, are all going overseas.
As for profit, no one should care. What they should care about is results for the amount of money invested. R&D is not a ritual of essential purity that we do for its own sake, we do it because we are looking for advancements in capability.
Where I'm saying, that's completely the WRONG attitude to take, and when we take that attitude, we end up with a huge trade deficit.
In 1950, the US government spent slightly more on R&D than private organizations. Half a century later, that gap has grown so that privately funded R&D completely dwarfs government funded R&D. The US government does fund some basic science (and military) research that would not likely get done by the private sector, but even that research is being increasingly funded by private foundations with deep pockets. You might want to revisit your model of how most research gets funded. The US government invests a lot in research relative to places like the EU, but that research investment is a small fraction of a total research funding pie that is completely dominated by the US private sector.
My comment was based more on my observation of companies moving from true private funding to public, stock market based funding. I hadn't thought about private charity foundations funding research- but if that's what we're depending on for disruptive technologies to save the world, it's a pretty small pocket in comparison to $700 billion bailouts of the financial industry.
A topic of discussion in the EU is that due to their dependency on the private American research industry, research topics related to things local to Europe are relatively underfunded and European governments have shown little interest in making the required investment. We do not really need the US doing more research so much as we need the rest of the industrialized world doing as much productive research as the US.
What we really need is a better way to fund research at all. One that is cooperative, rather than competitive. One where the end point isn't a patent or a copyright, but rather an open source knowledge base that anybody can tap.
Yeah, we should go back to the good ol' dotcom days when turning a profit in 10 years was enough to get Wall Street dollars.
Every single dotcom I ever worked for went bankrupt within 6 months of IPO.
Fund what? There's R&D investment going on, It just isn't necessarily in new consumer products, but rather improving efficiency.
As in, moving factories to the third world to take advantage of lower standards of living.
Given the current economic climate, evolutionary new products from most big companies aren't going to help the bottom line.
The mistake there is focusing on the bottom line.
So instead spend the bulk of R&D money which is used on evolutionary development, and buy new software, training, and other systems to reduce costs - and maintain the smaller amount of risk captial investing in small companies hoping to strike the "next big thing."
Most of which won't be the next big thing anytime soon- so shouldn't we find a completely different method to fund them?
Economic recovery is going to come out of disruptive technology, and most Wall Street companies don't handle disruptive technology well. They prefer to adopt it buy buying stakes in small startups rather than trying to constantly redirect a monolithic organization.
And even then, it's usually a big mistake for a small startup to sell. I've seen WAY too many companies ruined by stock offerings to believe any different. A company should be owned ONLY by people who believe in what that company is attempting to do, not by people looking for the "next big thing" or profit merely for the sake of profit, and this goes doubly so for any investment in R&D, especially in disruptive tech.
Utter rubbish that can be easily disproven by the very numbers that Wall Street uses. The market prices on Wall Street, for example, are priced with a mathematical horizon that ranges from a couple years to a couple decades depending on the company we are talking about. And most derivatives and other financial contracts also have explicit performance horizons measured in much, much longer terms than "4 months". Obviously, Wall Street cares about and considers profitability explicitly on a much longer time horizon than you assert by their very actions when they have to actually put their money on the line.
In my experience, as soon as a company passes that first IPO, there's a HUGE amount of pressure brought to bear on R&D to make sure that no line item in any quarterly report is a money sink more than two quarters in a row. That's where my 4 month bottom line comes from.
Apparently you are blissfully unaware that the productivity of investments in those Japanese research cooperatives have markedly underperformed American private R&D, so what you are recommending is spending a lot more money to produce far fewer results. The problem with the government picking One True Research Project is that, like with all research, the odds are very high that they will actually be researching the wrong thing, and without a messy, uncoordinated, and diverse research ecosystem like you get with decentralized private R&D, progress tends to stall as what (in hindsight) is the correct research path becomes almost entirely ignored and defunded in favor of politically expedient or favored research topics. This ignores the issue that when you look at modern countries, in many important fields like medicine the majority of the world's research is private American R&D funding.
Can't tell that by the consumer electronics that actually hit the market though, can you. For instance, there isn't a single American TV factory anymore- Sony owned the last plant and they closed it. American car companies are on the rocks and haven't produced anything new in decades. Factories have been shut down nationwide, so where is all of this R&D going? Certainly NOT into new products- and I suspect strongly it isn't actually getting done at all, not when every project I've been on gets the chopping block if it doesn't ship in the 2nd quarter of development.
The germane point that you are furiously trying to remain ignorant of is that American private sector R&D is atypically productive in terms of producing useful advances, largely because they try so many different things and prune low-quality research paths so quickly. Government directed R&D projects, while producing some very important results on occasion, have a long history of relatively low productivity for the money spent no matter which government we are talking about. This is further complicated by the fact that governments only make the investments when convenient since they have no particular political motivation to do more research beyond grandstanding. I would like an explanation, for example, as to why the total R&D investment in the EU is a tiny fraction of American R&D despite having a larger economy and population, and how that oft-replicated result would be avoided this time.
The EU is largely "free market based" as well, with loads of stock markets. They suffer from the same short-sightedness you seem to in your next paragraph:
At the end of the day, I do not want to pay for research, I want to pay for productive results. There is nothing intrinsically good or worth funding about "research theater" if it is not producing results we can actually use with all due haste. Fast, results-oriented government research seems to require a palpable imminent threat to life and limb that the population at large recognizes, and battery manufacturing technology does not qualify.
And thus we're stuck with a bunch of solutions that only support the status quo. Nobody's willing t
Which, once again, just proves that funding your company on investments is irrational- and will leave you falling behind on R&D.
You're absolutely correct about right of ownership- which is why the free market can't be trusted for innovation.
Individual investors are not inherently impatient- but the SEC reporting schedule has a tendency to force businesses to report on their income quarterly- and if a project shows up as a dollar sink two quarters in a row, the investors are going to want a darn good reason why, as they rightly should when "investment" is seen as a means of earning a living.
That's where my four months came from anyway. I happen to disagree with investment as a method of gaining capital for R&D entirely for this reason.
But, your 5% "consumption tax on all stock transactions" intrigues me. Is this like a poorly implemented "capital gains tax?"
Well, for one, trades are NOT the way companies get capital for expansion- when you buy a stock, unless it's an IPO, the company doesn't get any of that price you paid for the stock- the guy you bought the stock from does.
So instead of a "capital gains" tax, it's a "market volatility" tax, which would encourage people to hold on to their stocks longer instead of jumping in and out at every opportunity.
I wonder where people get this idea that "Wall Street" is one monolithic individual, who is good friends with Mr. Corporation, and neither of their optometrists have prescribed them lenses to see more than 5 seconds into the future. There are plenty of rational people in business, because otherwise it is harder to stay in business longer than 4 months.
If there are plenty of rational people in business, how did Bernie Madoff stay in business so long? The answer is that the rational people in business don't get capital from Wall Street- they know that an IPO means letting the madness in. And so they stay small companies, private companies. The market itself is irrational, and yes, it's incredibly hard to be a market based business and stay in business more than 4 months. EVERY 4 months you've got to produce a report saying you are profitable (or even better yet, prove it with a dividend), or else the stockholders will either sue you or drive your stock price down, so that the next time you go to the market looking for capital, it won't be there.
And would taxing the main way companies get capital for expansion and R&D cause more research to happen, or less of it?
Well, that's the point isn't it? PROFITS should be used for expansion and R&D, not selling off pieces of ownership in the company. That is the RATIONAL way to do it. To go to the stock market for expansion/R&D capital is irrational.
No, I'm talking about mining the lead out of old landfills to make new lead-acid batteries. Or using algae to suck the carbon dioxide out of the air to make biodiesel. Or refining Lithium, copper, and salt out of seawater to make fresh drinking water & Lithium-ion batteries. Or the best yet- using cow waste to create fertilizer, flower pots, and electricity (that one was actually on Dirty Jobs).
That's the problem with labels sometimes.
True enough. Which, of course is a big hole in capitalism- hard for a technology to progress if it can't find funding for research. Historically, of course, that hole has been filled by government funded war research, but what do you do if your war machine is already so technically advanced that the enemies aren't there to push technology further?
Thus, the idea of a tax on the ponzi scheme con game that is eating up 20% of our GDP.
Yeah, that might have an effect on the actual factory...depending on the technology that is. Seems to me the best power generation and storage tech actually uses more pollution than it creates. Which is something many companies forget in their EIS filings.
The reason US Companies didn't choose to manufacture this technology domestically is because Wall Street only cares about projects that turn a profit in 4 months. The answer? Do away with Wall Street's drag on R&D, fund it directly. Or better yet, add a 5% consumption tax on all stock transactions to fund Japanese style industry research cooperatives.
Depends on how overclocked the server got, I suppose.
The grandparent post is a good reason not to write run-on sentences on slashdot.
I remember using Pocket Scheme on Windows CE for X10 access- and I'd have a tendency to agree.
The problem with OO and multi-core programming is that you never know what other process has a handle to the same object you do; same problem as procedural programming had with global variables when multitasking first came in.
Functional programming sidesteps this problem because largely there are no variables- only function calls with all data held somewhere on the function call stack, which means there's no chance of another process (with a different call stack) messing with your data.
Logo and LISP are the oldest functional languages. Scala, F#, Erlang, and Haskell are just modern corruptions of these originals. As for their math abilities- I was doing recursive algorithms at 14 (long division), as well as advanced algebra. Are you saying that these "gifted" students won't have the ability to handle that, which is just about the limit of functional languages anyway (you're NOT going to be programming a non-iterative approach to calculus in any of the languages mentioned)?
That level of recursion could screw up anyone!!!!
Thus my mention of Scala and Erlang, which run just fine in Linux, and F#, which is actually part of Visual Studio 2008.
Dr Dobbs Journal suggests that just such a paradigm shift is around the corner, based on OO's inability to handle multi-core processing properly.