Grade to a curve, and make every student able to see every page that any other student visits. If you go to gmail, then every other student will be able to see every email that you open. If a friend emails you the answer, then the entire test group will see that answer, and everyone will get the average mark. If they just look at, for example, the wikipedia page listing a formula, then only other students who are capable of applying it will get any benefit, and those students are probably able to find the formula themselves.
It's not wrong, but if you want to privately support something you don't do it via a third party. Facebook is like the most gossipy person you've ever met. If you agree with something someone says, but you want to do so privately, you tell that person, you don't tell the gossip who is going to tell everyone else. Sadly, some people still seem to be under the impression that Facebook is a private channel, in spite of repeated (mainstream) news stories to the contrary.
It depends on how you do it. My proposal is to set a threshold, say 50%, and say that all imports must be made by people earning this much of the minimum wage in the destination company, and with other regulations (environmental protection, working hours, and so on) scaled by the same amount. They can still make their iPads in China, but they'd have to pay the workers about $10K, instead of about $3.5K per year. Not a huge difference, but enough that it would bring some jobs back and (importantly) help increase the size of the market for reciprocal trade (it's hard to sell stuff to Foxconn workers, because they probably can't afford whatever you're selling). Each year, raise this level by a one percent.
Apple in the '90s got Steve Jobs, who had a vision of what computing should be, a big enough ego to be convinced that everyone should agree with him, and a reality distortion field to ensure that they did. Microsoft has... monkeyboy.
I learned to type with one hand when I broke my wrist aged 17 and had it in a cast for 8 weeks. I could just about use three fingers on my right hand, but quite clumsily and the cast kept banging on the desk. After that, I found that I ended up using my left hand for about 2/3 of the keys on the keyboard (so am completely incapable of typing on 'natural' keyboards).
I've often pondered getting a chorded keyboard, because I like the idea of being able to type while I walk. I often mentally compose articles while I'm out and about and then type them up when I get home - it would be nice to be able to jot them down in rough form while walking and then edit when I got home.
And if you want the real hardware, check on eBay for the accelerator boards that plug into old Macs. You can pick up a Mac from the required era for about $10 and the boards (which are a Lisp machine CPU, but nothing else) go for about $100-200 periodically. They basically relegate the 68000 to being an I/O coprocessor and take over the system. The later Lisp machines were Alphas, and these also periodically pop up for sale - they also have the advantage of being a lot smaller than the early ones...
There's also some other stuff. For example, the nuclear waste that you use to drive medical x-ray machines. Or the nuclear waste that is used to sterilise medical equipment. Not to mention the nuclear waste that is used to power betavoltaic and radiothermal generators for long-running applications.
Exactly. I've never seen a open source job advertised. On the other hand, I fairly regularly get sent adverts from people looking for a FreeBSD or LLVM developer, and there are lots of jobs around for Linux or *BSD admins. Looking for an open source job makes even less sense than looking for a 'Microsoft job' (which, actually, sounds like a euphemism).
Re:Such systems have been proposed before
on
The Zuckerberg Tax
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· Score: 1
Everyone with enough money to play at this level is a winner...
Do you mean that the stack frame has a pointer to a memory location that's placed on the heap, and said pointer is what's captured by the closure?
No, that would be silly. The stack frame contains a structure containing metadata about the variable, including a pointer to the variable. It also contains the variable. Both the pointer and the value are pretty much guaranteed to be in L1 cache, so access to them is fast. When you retain the block, the structure and the variable are copied onto the heap, and the forwarding pointer is updated. At this point, the access has a bit more overhead (and the copy operation also adds a bit).
In this case you also only pay for what you use, but more importantly you only pay for it when you use it, not when you might use it. The caller does not need modifying if the callee decides to keep the block after it returns. The Objective-C version solves the problem in the general case, while the C++ solution places an extra burden on the programmer and introduces a leaky abstraction. I could easily modify something that took an Objective-C block to run asynchronously or use lazy evaluation. Doing the same with C++ lambdas would require modifying every caller.
It also leads to the next interesting question: how many heap allocations do you use for this?
This is a good question. Currently, we use one structure per variable (for byref, as opposed to copied, variables - immutable variables are all shoved into the block structure). There is some possibility for optimisation there, but no one is working actively on it because it's very rarely the bottleneck (unlike C++ designers, compiler writers are expected to actually profile their code before optimising it).
Re:stock market is ok.. so mark-to-market
on
The Zuckerberg Tax
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· Score: 1
You know what a rebate is, right? It's not free money, it's a repayment of money that you've already paid. If your assets go up in value by $100 and you pay $10 in tax, then a year later your assets go down in value by $200, then you only get a rebate on the $10, you don't get $20 back. And, in the intervening year, the government has been able to invest the $10 in something that gives a return (well, in theory at least).
Re:Such systems have been proposed before
on
The Zuckerberg Tax
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· Score: 1
It's not hard to pick a diverse portfolio that always appreciates, given a sufficiently large amount of seed capital and a sufficiently long timespan. If you borrow against and reinvest only 50% of your initial capital, then you need something like the Great Depression (not the current recession, despite Fox's claims) before banks will start to call in your loans. If you invest broadly then you're insulated against individual failures and even if you only do as well as the average you'll do pretty well - even if you'd bought a lot at the peak of the bubble in 2000, you'd be making a profit again by 2005, and if you'd had enough liquidity then you'd have invested heavily immediately after the dip and done very well indeed once the market recovered (as in 50% profit on investments over a period of about 2 years).
Fine, then they can also own the liability. If the company folds and has debts, then the creditors can go after the shareholders for them. Oh, you don't want that after all?
In theory, yes. In practice, no. You see, the majority of that loan will be reinvested in a diverse portfolio. These will, on average, increase in value. They will then count towards collateral for the loan and allow you to borrow more. The interest on the loan will be close to the federal bond rate, while the increase in value of the investments will likely be 2-3 times this (unless the market is doing spectacularly badly, but even then you can take long-term positions that will increase enough eventually to cover the loan, unless civilisation collapses completely) so the amount of the loan can keep increasing, you can keep spending some of the money on it, and you never actually repay it.
Re:Such systems have been proposed before
on
The Zuckerberg Tax
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· Score: 1
A huge portion of my property taxes actually go to public schools, which is not infrastructure benefit directly from.
Do you not? I certainly benefit from the children of my neighbours receiving a decent education - it means that they are more likely to be contributing something to society (including taxes) when they grow up and not living on benefits or stealing stuff from me...
Re:Such systems have been proposed before
on
The Zuckerberg Tax
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· Score: 1
I guess the reducto ad absurdum is why not tax savings? If you've got $100.00 in the bank, why not tax you 15% every year on it?
I don't pay tax on savings, but I do pay tax on interest earned on savings at the same rate as income tax. So why should the equivalent of interest earned on stocks and shares be different?
Re:Such systems have been proposed before
on
The Zuckerberg Tax
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· Score: 2
The money to pay back the loan comes from another loan. I wrote a long explanation in another post, but the basic way it works is:
Borrow against existing assets.
Invest new loan in new assets that will appreciate in value.
Refinance loan + due interest with a new loan now backed by the larger asset pool.
Remove some money as cash.
Repeat
No shares need to be sold, and if the shares are increasing in value then the bank will just add the interest to the total that is due eventually. The loan may not ever actually need to be repaid - the bank can use the existence of the collateral to increase the amount it can borrow from the central bank, the borrower can use some of the money to buy things, and they're both happy.
Re:Ok so figure out a way to not screw other peopl
on
The Zuckerberg Tax
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· Score: 4, Insightful
The catch is that you can borrow to make other investments. The real problem with capitalism is that it is easy to make more money once you already have a lot of money, but much harder to make money when you start with nothing. If you have shares worth $1m in a low-risk low-return company, then you borrow $500k with them as collateral at a 4% interest rate. You then invest this in something with a 10% annual ROI, and after a year you've made $30K (more, by the way, than someone earning minimum wage in the USA makes from actually working).
This new investment is now worth $550k, and you owe $20k in interest. Now, you borrow $250k against this new investment and use $20K of that to pay the outstanding interest. Now you have $1,550,000 locked up in assets (assuming that your original $1m investment didn't gain any value) that you can't touch, $230k in liquid assets (i.e. cash), and $750K in liabilities. You have $230K more in liquid assets than when you started and $30k more in actual wealth. You've effectively cashed $200K out of the stock market, as well as making a profit of $30k. Since you have not sold any of these shares, however, you will still pay no tax. Even better, you can probably write off the $20k in interest as a loss, so this will reduce the amount of tax that you pay when you actually do realise some of your assets.
For extra fun, some financial institutions will offer special vehicles for doing exactly this. For example, they will sell you insurance against the shares decreasing in value, along with a loan backed by those shares with an offset facility. Effectively, you have now sold the shares to the bank. If the value of the shares goes down, then at the time of repayment the insurance will pay the difference. While the value goes up, the bank will just compound the interest against the total - you don't pay it, it just means that the loan total goes up and as long as the shares are of the same value as the loan it's fine. For example, if your $1m investment goes up by 10%, then the bank will add 10% to the paper value of the loan and give you 6% in cash, so you get $60k more to play with.
The idea of not taxing the increase in asset value until the assets are sold is that this value is not readily accessible. If someone buys a house for $250, and it goes up in value to $500k, then you can't expect them to pay 10-20% tax on this difference, because they are very likely not to have access to this kind of liquidity without selling the house. Worse, if you consider something like the property bubble of the last decade, someone may buy a house for $250k, see its value soar to to $500k, but then only be able to sell it for $200k when they need to move. Forcing them to pay the tax on the purely theoretical increase in value doesn't seem fair. In contrast, if the paper increase directly translates to an increase in their purchasing power, then it does. These loopholes mean that people can still get all of the benefits of selling their assets without actually selling them (and therefore without actually paying tax).
HINT: Police aren't paid for by Federal dollars - that's local levies, and the rich pay proportionally more based upon the value of their home.
But for the rich, the value of their home is proportionally less than their total assets. My house (of which I own a little more than half, and the bank owns the rest), is by about two orders of magnitude the most expensive thing that I own. In contrast, rich people tend to have most of their capital in stocks and shares and their home is a tiny fraction of their total wealth. Even the house that Bill Gates spend $50m on is a tiny fraction of the value of his Microsoft shares when he bought it.
The difference is, Facebook is openly evil. Their CEO describes their users as suckers and even nontechnical people like my mother know that you'd have to be an idiot to use Facebook. Google, in contrast, spends a lot of money persuading people that they're not evil, so people are actually surprised when they do something like this...
How many ships does the US have along the east coast of Africa right now to prevent piracy? And who benefits the most from the secured shipping lanes?
Actually, this one is a bit difficult to answer. The first obvious answer is the person who owns the ships. The second obvious answer is their customer, who uses the ships to transport goods to and from the USA. But the third obvious answer is the person who goes into Walmart and buys cheap goods that were transported in those ships. Then again, that person would probably have less of a need for cheap goods if transport costs were higher, reducing the incentive to produce things on one side of the world for consumption on the other...
That's my point. I don't actively follow ReactOS - I occasionally help them out with compiler support and read their announcements every six months or so - yet I know that the grandparent's assertion that they're not extending the Windows NT design is nonsense. He has obviously not read anything that the project has published in the last 10 years, yet still feels qualified to make claims about it.
My point is that all of the advantages of JavaScript in the example come from things that are not part of JavaScript. DOM and XMLHttpRequest are APIs that are not part of JavaScript, they are external to the language. The advantages of JavaScript are all things that are not related to the language.
Slashdot Mirror
There's one possible technical solution:
Grade to a curve, and make every student able to see every page that any other student visits. If you go to gmail, then every other student will be able to see every email that you open. If a friend emails you the answer, then the entire test group will see that answer, and everyone will get the average mark. If they just look at, for example, the wikipedia page listing a formula, then only other students who are capable of applying it will get any benefit, and those students are probably able to find the formula themselves.
It's not wrong, but if you want to privately support something you don't do it via a third party. Facebook is like the most gossipy person you've ever met. If you agree with something someone says, but you want to do so privately, you tell that person, you don't tell the gossip who is going to tell everyone else. Sadly, some people still seem to be under the impression that Facebook is a private channel, in spite of repeated (mainstream) news stories to the contrary.
It depends on how you do it. My proposal is to set a threshold, say 50%, and say that all imports must be made by people earning this much of the minimum wage in the destination company, and with other regulations (environmental protection, working hours, and so on) scaled by the same amount. They can still make their iPads in China, but they'd have to pay the workers about $10K, instead of about $3.5K per year. Not a huge difference, but enough that it would bring some jobs back and (importantly) help increase the size of the market for reciprocal trade (it's hard to sell stuff to Foxconn workers, because they probably can't afford whatever you're selling). Each year, raise this level by a one percent.
Apple in the '90s got Steve Jobs, who had a vision of what computing should be, a big enough ego to be convinced that everyone should agree with him, and a reality distortion field to ensure that they did. Microsoft has... monkeyboy.
I learned to type with one hand when I broke my wrist aged 17 and had it in a cast for 8 weeks. I could just about use three fingers on my right hand, but quite clumsily and the cast kept banging on the desk. After that, I found that I ended up using my left hand for about 2/3 of the keys on the keyboard (so am completely incapable of typing on 'natural' keyboards).
I've often pondered getting a chorded keyboard, because I like the idea of being able to type while I walk. I often mentally compose articles while I'm out and about and then type them up when I get home - it would be nice to be able to jot them down in rough form while walking and then edit when I got home.
And if you want the real hardware, check on eBay for the accelerator boards that plug into old Macs. You can pick up a Mac from the required era for about $10 and the boards (which are a Lisp machine CPU, but nothing else) go for about $100-200 periodically. They basically relegate the 68000 to being an I/O coprocessor and take over the system. The later Lisp machines were Alphas, and these also periodically pop up for sale - they also have the advantage of being a lot smaller than the early ones...
There's also some other stuff. For example, the nuclear waste that you use to drive medical x-ray machines. Or the nuclear waste that is used to sterilise medical equipment. Not to mention the nuclear waste that is used to power betavoltaic and radiothermal generators for long-running applications.
I'd happily do this. Of course, I don't actually use Chrome, so after the extension was installed they wouldn't get very much useful information...
Chances are that their sudden exclusive use of Microsoft is just the tip of the iceberg.
Given that the company:
It seems that making poor decisions is something that they have experience with.
Exactly. I've never seen a open source job advertised. On the other hand, I fairly regularly get sent adverts from people looking for a FreeBSD or LLVM developer, and there are lots of jobs around for Linux or *BSD admins. Looking for an open source job makes even less sense than looking for a 'Microsoft job' (which, actually, sounds like a euphemism).
Everyone with enough money to play at this level is a winner...
Do you mean that the stack frame has a pointer to a memory location that's placed on the heap, and said pointer is what's captured by the closure?
No, that would be silly. The stack frame contains a structure containing metadata about the variable, including a pointer to the variable. It also contains the variable. Both the pointer and the value are pretty much guaranteed to be in L1 cache, so access to them is fast. When you retain the block, the structure and the variable are copied onto the heap, and the forwarding pointer is updated. At this point, the access has a bit more overhead (and the copy operation also adds a bit).
In this case you also only pay for what you use, but more importantly you only pay for it when you use it, not when you might use it. The caller does not need modifying if the callee decides to keep the block after it returns. The Objective-C version solves the problem in the general case, while the C++ solution places an extra burden on the programmer and introduces a leaky abstraction. I could easily modify something that took an Objective-C block to run asynchronously or use lazy evaluation. Doing the same with C++ lambdas would require modifying every caller.
It also leads to the next interesting question: how many heap allocations do you use for this?
This is a good question. Currently, we use one structure per variable (for byref, as opposed to copied, variables - immutable variables are all shoved into the block structure). There is some possibility for optimisation there, but no one is working actively on it because it's very rarely the bottleneck (unlike C++ designers, compiler writers are expected to actually profile their code before optimising it).
You know what a rebate is, right? It's not free money, it's a repayment of money that you've already paid. If your assets go up in value by $100 and you pay $10 in tax, then a year later your assets go down in value by $200, then you only get a rebate on the $10, you don't get $20 back. And, in the intervening year, the government has been able to invest the $10 in something that gives a return (well, in theory at least).
It's not hard to pick a diverse portfolio that always appreciates, given a sufficiently large amount of seed capital and a sufficiently long timespan. If you borrow against and reinvest only 50% of your initial capital, then you need something like the Great Depression (not the current recession, despite Fox's claims) before banks will start to call in your loans. If you invest broadly then you're insulated against individual failures and even if you only do as well as the average you'll do pretty well - even if you'd bought a lot at the peak of the bubble in 2000, you'd be making a profit again by 2005, and if you'd had enough liquidity then you'd have invested heavily immediately after the dip and done very well indeed once the market recovered (as in 50% profit on investments over a period of about 2 years).
The shareholders own the company
Fine, then they can also own the liability. If the company folds and has debts, then the creditors can go after the shareholders for them. Oh, you don't want that after all?
At some point you need to pay back that loan
In theory, yes. In practice, no. You see, the majority of that loan will be reinvested in a diverse portfolio. These will, on average, increase in value. They will then count towards collateral for the loan and allow you to borrow more. The interest on the loan will be close to the federal bond rate, while the increase in value of the investments will likely be 2-3 times this (unless the market is doing spectacularly badly, but even then you can take long-term positions that will increase enough eventually to cover the loan, unless civilisation collapses completely) so the amount of the loan can keep increasing, you can keep spending some of the money on it, and you never actually repay it.
A huge portion of my property taxes actually go to public schools, which is not infrastructure benefit directly from.
Do you not? I certainly benefit from the children of my neighbours receiving a decent education - it means that they are more likely to be contributing something to society (including taxes) when they grow up and not living on benefits or stealing stuff from me...
I guess the reducto ad absurdum is why not tax savings? If you've got $100.00 in the bank, why not tax you 15% every year on it?
I don't pay tax on savings, but I do pay tax on interest earned on savings at the same rate as income tax. So why should the equivalent of interest earned on stocks and shares be different?
No shares need to be sold, and if the shares are increasing in value then the bank will just add the interest to the total that is due eventually. The loan may not ever actually need to be repaid - the bank can use the existence of the collateral to increase the amount it can borrow from the central bank, the borrower can use some of the money to buy things, and they're both happy.
The catch is that you can borrow to make other investments. The real problem with capitalism is that it is easy to make more money once you already have a lot of money, but much harder to make money when you start with nothing. If you have shares worth $1m in a low-risk low-return company, then you borrow $500k with them as collateral at a 4% interest rate. You then invest this in something with a 10% annual ROI, and after a year you've made $30K (more, by the way, than someone earning minimum wage in the USA makes from actually working).
This new investment is now worth $550k, and you owe $20k in interest. Now, you borrow $250k against this new investment and use $20K of that to pay the outstanding interest. Now you have $1,550,000 locked up in assets (assuming that your original $1m investment didn't gain any value) that you can't touch, $230k in liquid assets (i.e. cash), and $750K in liabilities. You have $230K more in liquid assets than when you started and $30k more in actual wealth. You've effectively cashed $200K out of the stock market, as well as making a profit of $30k. Since you have not sold any of these shares, however, you will still pay no tax. Even better, you can probably write off the $20k in interest as a loss, so this will reduce the amount of tax that you pay when you actually do realise some of your assets.
For extra fun, some financial institutions will offer special vehicles for doing exactly this. For example, they will sell you insurance against the shares decreasing in value, along with a loan backed by those shares with an offset facility. Effectively, you have now sold the shares to the bank. If the value of the shares goes down, then at the time of repayment the insurance will pay the difference. While the value goes up, the bank will just compound the interest against the total - you don't pay it, it just means that the loan total goes up and as long as the shares are of the same value as the loan it's fine. For example, if your $1m investment goes up by 10%, then the bank will add 10% to the paper value of the loan and give you 6% in cash, so you get $60k more to play with.
The idea of not taxing the increase in asset value until the assets are sold is that this value is not readily accessible. If someone buys a house for $250, and it goes up in value to $500k, then you can't expect them to pay 10-20% tax on this difference, because they are very likely not to have access to this kind of liquidity without selling the house. Worse, if you consider something like the property bubble of the last decade, someone may buy a house for $250k, see its value soar to to $500k, but then only be able to sell it for $200k when they need to move. Forcing them to pay the tax on the purely theoretical increase in value doesn't seem fair. In contrast, if the paper increase directly translates to an increase in their purchasing power, then it does. These loopholes mean that people can still get all of the benefits of selling their assets without actually selling them (and therefore without actually paying tax).
HINT: Police aren't paid for by Federal dollars - that's local levies, and the rich pay proportionally more based upon the value of their home.
But for the rich, the value of their home is proportionally less than their total assets. My house (of which I own a little more than half, and the bank owns the rest), is by about two orders of magnitude the most expensive thing that I own. In contrast, rich people tend to have most of their capital in stocks and shares and their home is a tiny fraction of their total wealth. Even the house that Bill Gates spend $50m on is a tiny fraction of the value of his Microsoft shares when he bought it.
The difference is, Facebook is openly evil. Their CEO describes their users as suckers and even nontechnical people like my mother know that you'd have to be an idiot to use Facebook. Google, in contrast, spends a lot of money persuading people that they're not evil, so people are actually surprised when they do something like this...
How many ships does the US have along the east coast of Africa right now to prevent piracy? And who benefits the most from the secured shipping lanes?
Actually, this one is a bit difficult to answer. The first obvious answer is the person who owns the ships. The second obvious answer is their customer, who uses the ships to transport goods to and from the USA. But the third obvious answer is the person who goes into Walmart and buys cheap goods that were transported in those ships. Then again, that person would probably have less of a need for cheap goods if transport costs were higher, reducing the incentive to produce things on one side of the world for consumption on the other...
That's my point. I don't actively follow ReactOS - I occasionally help them out with compiler support and read their announcements every six months or so - yet I know that the grandparent's assertion that they're not extending the Windows NT design is nonsense. He has obviously not read anything that the project has published in the last 10 years, yet still feels qualified to make claims about it.
My point is that all of the advantages of JavaScript in the example come from things that are not part of JavaScript. DOM and XMLHttpRequest are APIs that are not part of JavaScript, they are external to the language. The advantages of JavaScript are all things that are not related to the language.