He's an active practicing Mormon who wrote an article for a Mormon audience about how someone can't be a practicing Homosexual and dedicated to the Homosexual scene and also be dedicated to the Mormon church.
Presuming you know anything about the Mormon church, is there anything in that sentence you disagree with? His article was basically you can't serve two masters.
Of course, don't worry, the Feds via the FCC and Internet sales tax enforcement, etc... are working as fast as they can to impose their "planning" on it all for us.
And the most exchange rates at MtGOX are already back up to $200 after a big rally yesterday, so it's apparently correcting just fine for anyone who is looking to sell their bitcoins worth 10x or 100x what they used to be.
So yeah, Botcoins are subject to wild swings in exchange rates.
You seem to be under the impression that Directors actually run things. At most places, they're just placeholders for the major shareholders. The Directors at Netflix don't run the company, they just vote how the hedge fund managers tell them to vote. As long as they vote how the shareholders (i.e. owners) tell them to, why would they ever lose their position?
It's the company owners making the decisions. That's why you see shareholder agreements about how many directors each major shareholder is entitled to nominate, etc... Directors are just a way of sharing the proxy power around. Sure, some companies have owners that are also directors, but in many cases nowadays, it's just a prestigious side job where you get some input to the owners, not a management position where you make your own decisions.
Now they have a better Literacy, infant mortality and healthcare than the US.
Uhh... Bullshit? It always amazes me that so many people are willing to credulousness accept "statistics" like that from total propaganda. You probably also believed that the Soviet Union was a massive economic powerhouse for it's people in the 80s, right?
Hint: People don't take leaky boats and swim across oceans to get elsewhere because where they live is just too wonderful for them to handle. Try talking to someone who's actually lived in Cuba and then escaped.
Even better are all the white folks I've met in America who were born in Africa (South Africa, mostly).
They tend to be confused why certain people look at them oddly when they claim the title of African-American, even though it much more applies to them than to someone who happens to have dark skin and has no known relations in Africa...
So yeah, Steve Nash is technically the only "African-American" currently playing for the Lakers, using the "American" part loosely...
U.S. Banks typically use RSA ids for business accounts, but not personal accounts. I have three U.S. bank issued RSA fobs hanging from my keychain right now and a fourth at home.
The reason is that for personal accounts, the customer isn't very liable for fraud performed with their login, so they don't care enough to be inconvenienced.
For most business accounts, the business is liable for and fraud performed with their login, so enough of them demand better login security from the banks that they provide it as the default service.
Now, the dumbest thing U.S. banks do that I wish I could opt out of is the whole "security question" charade that basically inconveniences me while at the same time making my account _less_ secure. Now THAT'S annoying...
No, if you can't afford to pay someone on retainer, then you sell part of your contract rights to someone else who can enforce them.
It's not like a similar system didn't keep the peace and work fine in Iceland for hundreds of years until the Catholic church moved in, took over and started creating taxes based on property locations, after which the old system started fading away.
Maybe this is too obvious for you... but we're talking about a voluntary contract. If you don't have a mutually agreed enforcement provision, then you don't have a contract and you can both go your separate ways.
No one is forcing you to make the contract. It's called freedom.... you agree to what you agree to and don't agree to what you don't.
You add an enforcement mechanism to the contract. Something along the lines of, if you don't do your part, my criminal insurance firm Sharper Security get to come collect and your buddies at Gila River agree to let them collect.
Then, as long as Sharper Security and Gila River value their reputation for honoring contracts more than their desire for going to war against each other, our contract is enforced, even though we don't have a central authority to enforce it.
If you make a public bet with a buddy at work, why would you enter that contract if there isn't anyone who would ever enforce it? At least in part, it's because if one of you welshes, no one will want to deal with you in a similar manner in the future.
The submitter doesn't seem to get that maybe his daughter will prefer Barbie, Hello kitty, pink stuff and baking apps. There's a reason that stuff is marketed to little girls and it's not because someone made up a magical bias. Someone's been listening a bit too much to his "studies" professor and not enough to the reality around him. Just because he's lost in the pink stuff, doesn't mean she will be. Perhaps consider presenting her with some options and asking her what she's interested in?
One of my daughters loves pink, won't hardly wear any other color, loves dolls, loves fashion, but also plays games her slightly older brothers like with guns and bad guys because they're her main playmates. I say, "Quit trying to enforce your view of what your daughter _should_ like on her and let her pick her own interests!"
Anyway, Crayon Physics is a great game for kids learning science. My younger kids will sometimes take regular paper and do crayon physics on it now when they have to sit and wait somewhere.
Here's 2005 dollars per capita in government spending, from $4 Trillion to now over $10 Trillion. It's still very obvious that while revenue has gone up over time, spending has just gone up even more.
Still clearly shows that the problem isn't less revenue, it's way, way too much spending. In 2000 we spent 30% less than in 2011 in per capita 2005 dollars. You can't explain that away by anything other than we're experiencing massive spending increases that have no relation to anything but that the feds just want to spend more money.
Let's do a simple test to see if tax cuts are primarily responsible for the deficit. If they are, then the deficits must be a result of revenue decreasing over the years while spending stays the same, right?
Hmmm, seems pretty obvious that the issue is that spending has gone way up over time. While revenue hasn't quite kept up with the massive spending increases, it's also gone way up over time. So how can you blame tax cuts with a straight face? The fact is that federal government revenue went up after Reagan and Bush's "tax cuts". Congress just managed to spend even more money than they had before.
The people in D.C. think that if you plan to spend way more and then change your plan to increase spending not quite as much, that's a drastic cut.
Here's a modest proposal, how about we cut spending levels to what it was 10 or 20 years ago in the bad old days and then watch as the deficit magically turns into a massive surplus?
One problem with letting D.C. take more of our money is that they just spend it. They have an essentially unlimited list of things people would like them to spend our money on. At some point we have to put our foot down and say they're going to have to prioritize some of it.
Sadly, that doesn't seem to be going to happen anytime soon, since people are just arguing about how much of a spending increase we're going to have and where the extra money's going to be especially increased this year.
Obama said "elections have consequences, I won" after the 2008 elections while explaining to the House Republicans why he wasn't going to compromise with them nor consider any of their ideas.
The Democrats had control of the House and the Presidency and enough control of the Senate to pass any budget they wanted. (Only a majority vote needed for budget related matters.)
In 2010, the Democrats lost the House in a landslide and then forgot all about that "elections have consequences" idea while essentially refusing to do anything about the budget in the Senate anymore. The House at least passed budget bills, etc... The Democrats in the Senate didn't even want to attempt to negotiate and didn't want to even consider passing a budget, not even anything modeled on Obama's suggestions.
The Democrats have shown a zero willingness for "REAL compromise". They don't even want to have a discussion in the Senate at all about the budget, let alone actually pass a budget and then go into a conference debate with the House to reconcile the two competing budgets. Instead, they just ignore the law about being required to pass a budget every year.
At least the House Republicans have been willing to put their ideas on the table and send them to the Senate as bills. Can you show us any concrete proposal from the Senate Democrats in return? Any start at all to negotiating to fix the record deficit spending?
The 2012 voters decided to leave the House in the control of the Republicans and the Senate and Presidency in control of the Democrats. The House was put in the position of originating budgets and tax bills by the Constitution. They've done that many times and the Senate and the President have just ignored them.
At what point do you stop blaming the only branch of government actually actively sending the other folks proposals and notice that the other folks are completely unwilling to even come to the table to suggest or debate anything?
Their cut is that they give away your book to their customers, which makes their customers a little more likely to buy stuff from them in the future.
It becomes a loss leader for them. Sure, it costs them a tiny bit of hosting/bandwidth, but that's a rounding error compared to their customer acquisition/retention costs when people find out they can get an ebook free (or cheap) that Amazon sells for $X higher.
From their pricing page in the KDP license, section E:
35% Royalty: From time to time your book may be made available through other sales channels as part of a free promotion. It is important that Digital Books made available through the Program have promotions that are on par with free promotions of the same book in another sales channel. Therefore, if your Digital Book is available through another sales channel for free, we may also make it available for free. If we match a free promotion of your Digital Book somewhere else, your Royalty during that promotion will be zero. (Unlike under the 70% Royalty Option, if we match a price for your Digital Book that is above zero, it won't change the calculation of your Royalties indicated in C. above.)
70% Royalty: If we price-match your Digital Book, your Royalty will be:
The Royalty Rate indicated above, multiplied by the price at which we sell the Digital Book, less taxes and Delivery Costs, for sales to customers in the Available Sales Territories.
Royalty Rate x (Amazon price - taxes and Delivery Costs) = Royalty
By "price-match" we mean where we sell the Digital Book in one or more of the Available Sales Territories at a price (net of taxes) that is below the List Price to match a third party's sales price for any digital or physical edition of the Digital Book, or to match our sales price for any physical edition of the Digital Book, in any one of the Available Sales Territories.
So you get nothing when they price match to free, because 0 times anything is 0.
If Amazon discovers your ebook is available for cheaper (say, free...) they have the right under your contract with them to mark down your ebook to that price... and they will.
So not sure how the author's proposed model works, once Amazon discovers the free version, the paid version is going to be listed as free as well.
I could add lots more comments on this issue, but instead I'll just point readers to the same discussion from a year ago on slashdot, Is-There-a-Hearing-Aid-Price-Bubble, as there are plenty more comments there relating to government regulation and insurance 3rd party payers, etc...
I'll just toss in my own counter-example, contrasting price changes in elective surgery, like corrective vision surgery, seem to imply that the biggest part of the cost cause is the third party payers.
If you actually believe that, then you stand to make a huge profit on Helium in a decade, right? Just store up some helium, or buy some on the futures market and you can be rich!!!!
You'll show those evil capitalists who think the person who is willing to pay the highest price for something is the one who should get to use it how they want!
Or, you might note that the reason "75% of all Helium comes from a handful of gas wells in the US, where the helium content in natural gas is the highest." is because it's currently the cheapest to extract there, but that pretty much all the other natural gas wells are currently just wasting their Helium because it's not worth extracting, but if those "75%" ever fall off in production enough to make it worthwhile, they'll just pickup the slack and start capturing it at a slightly higher cost.
Have you ever considered WHY helium recycling isn't really economically profitable?
I'm trying to say this in the kindest way possible, but please stop using B.S. science conclusions to stop economic progress in the name of environmentalism just because your liberal friends have decided fracking is evil.
Correlation != Causation.
It sort of stands to reason that people looking to drill for methane would do it in locations where there is more methane available and close to the surface, doesn't it?
All your study says is that they found higher levels of methane near methane mining operations. Well, duh!
Let me give you a comparison using the same methodology: A study of sunlight found that higher concentrations of sunlight in the air were found near solar farms. Scientists conclude that solar farms cause sunlight to pollute the air. Of course, while people place solar farms with the intention of being near more sunlight, I'm sure you can't blame the solar farm for producing the sunlight for everyone else in the area....
Call us back when a study looks at pre-and post- fracking methane levels over time at the same wells, rather then taking a correlation and assuming causation.
Oh wait, the PA legislature already paid for a study like that on pre- and post- drilling sites and using control sites and "the research found no statistically significant increases in methane levels after drilling and no significant correlation to distance from drilling."
Wait, you're complaining about Romney's dog? What about Obama literally eating a dog???
Obviously your reaction isn't indicative of a typical American reaction, since all the post-debate polls showed Romney won hands down.
As for the VP debate, Biden spent most of his time trying to bully Ryan in order to distract from his lack of any ideas for the future and lack of any excuse for the Obama administration's failures.
Gee, sorry if I took "A lot of people (particularly I'm discussing western political leaders, but not just them) state as a matter of blind faith that markets are effective allocators of capital." as a negative comment toward using markets for allocating capital.
I mean, I can see where you could slide in saying that's not exactly what he meant, but you've got to admit that it's a reasonable default assumption. All I did was compare it to the most commonly advocated alternative. What else would you compare it to in order to decide if it's "effective" or not, if not an alternative method?
It doesn't become necessary for the government to step in and bail them out.
It only happens when you give government too much power and control so that the industry inevitably takes over the government regulatory body and then uses taxpayer's money for the bail out. Again, see Public Choice economics. This is all a well-understood process.
Slashdot Mirror
He's an active practicing Mormon who wrote an article for a Mormon audience about how someone can't be a practicing Homosexual and dedicated to the Homosexual scene and also be dedicated to the Mormon church.
Presuming you know anything about the Mormon church, is there anything in that sentence you disagree with? His article was basically you can't serve two masters.
This is all much ado about nothing.
Yeah, somebody seems to be confusing Anarchy with Spontaneous Order..
Of course, don't worry, the Feds via the FCC and Internet sales tax enforcement, etc... are working as fast as they can to impose their "planning" on it all for us.
And the most exchange rates at MtGOX are already back up to $200 after a big rally yesterday, so it's apparently correcting just fine for anyone who is looking to sell their bitcoins worth 10x or 100x what they used to be.
So yeah, Botcoins are subject to wild swings in exchange rates.
You seem to be under the impression that Directors actually run things. At most places, they're just placeholders for the major shareholders. The Directors at Netflix don't run the company, they just vote how the hedge fund managers tell them to vote. As long as they vote how the shareholders (i.e. owners) tell them to, why would they ever lose their position?
It's the company owners making the decisions. That's why you see shareholder agreements about how many directors each major shareholder is entitled to nominate, etc... Directors are just a way of sharing the proxy power around. Sure, some companies have owners that are also directors, but in many cases nowadays, it's just a prestigious side job where you get some input to the owners, not a management position where you make your own decisions.
Uhh... Bullshit? It always amazes me that so many people are willing to credulousness accept "statistics" like that from total propaganda. You probably also believed that the Soviet Union was a massive economic powerhouse for it's people in the 80s, right?
Hint: People don't take leaky boats and swim across oceans to get elsewhere because where they live is just too wonderful for them to handle. Try talking to someone who's actually lived in Cuba and then escaped.
Even better are all the white folks I've met in America who were born in Africa (South Africa, mostly).
They tend to be confused why certain people look at them oddly when they claim the title of African-American, even though it much more applies to them than to someone who happens to have dark skin and has no known relations in Africa...
So yeah, Steve Nash is technically the only "African-American" currently playing for the Lakers, using the "American" part loosely...
U.S. Banks typically use RSA ids for business accounts, but not personal accounts. I have three U.S. bank issued RSA fobs hanging from my keychain right now and a fourth at home.
The reason is that for personal accounts, the customer isn't very liable for fraud performed with their login, so they don't care enough to be inconvenienced.
For most business accounts, the business is liable for and fraud performed with their login, so enough of them demand better login security from the banks that they provide it as the default service.
Now, the dumbest thing U.S. banks do that I wish I could opt out of is the whole "security question" charade that basically inconveniences me while at the same time making my account _less_ secure. Now THAT'S annoying...
Funny.
Too bad the story is that all this happened two years ago... I guess that's what passes for news around here. He's been swear-free for a long time...
No, if you can't afford to pay someone on retainer, then you sell part of your contract rights to someone else who can enforce them.
It's not like a similar system didn't keep the peace and work fine in Iceland for hundreds of years until the Catholic church moved in, took over and started creating taxes based on property locations, after which the old system started fading away.
Maybe this is too obvious for you... but we're talking about a voluntary contract. If you don't have a mutually agreed enforcement provision, then you don't have a contract and you can both go your separate ways.
No one is forcing you to make the contract. It's called freedom.... you agree to what you agree to and don't agree to what you don't.
You add an enforcement mechanism to the contract. Something along the lines of, if you don't do your part, my criminal insurance firm Sharper Security get to come collect and your buddies at Gila River agree to let them collect.
Then, as long as Sharper Security and Gila River value their reputation for honoring contracts more than their desire for going to war against each other, our contract is enforced, even though we don't have a central authority to enforce it.
If you make a public bet with a buddy at work, why would you enter that contract if there isn't anyone who would ever enforce it? At least in part, it's because if one of you welshes, no one will want to deal with you in a similar manner in the future.
The submitter doesn't seem to get that maybe his daughter will prefer Barbie, Hello kitty, pink stuff and baking apps. There's a reason that stuff is marketed to little girls and it's not because someone made up a magical bias. Someone's been listening a bit too much to his "studies" professor and not enough to the reality around him. Just because he's lost in the pink stuff, doesn't mean she will be. Perhaps consider presenting her with some options and asking her what she's interested in?
One of my daughters loves pink, won't hardly wear any other color, loves dolls, loves fashion, but also plays games her slightly older brothers like with guns and bad guys because they're her main playmates. I say, "Quit trying to enforce your view of what your daughter _should_ like on her and let her pick her own interests!"
Anyway, Crayon Physics is a great game for kids learning science. My younger kids will sometimes take regular paper and do crayon physics on it now when they have to sit and wait somewhere.
ok, 2005 dollars per capita.... federal government revenue has almost doubled. Has it ever been higher? Sure. Over time, has it been increasing, not decreasing? Yeah.
Here's 2005 dollars per capita in government spending, from $4 Trillion to now over $10 Trillion. It's still very obvious that while revenue has gone up over time, spending has just gone up even more.
Still clearly shows that the problem isn't less revenue, it's way, way too much spending. In 2000 we spent 30% less than in 2011 in per capita 2005 dollars. You can't explain that away by anything other than we're experiencing massive spending increases that have no relation to anything but that the feds just want to spend more money.
Let's do a simple test to see if tax cuts are primarily responsible for the deficit. If they are, then the deficits must be a result of revenue decreasing over the years while spending stays the same, right?
Compare US Federal Revenue over time, which has gone from 22% of GDP to 34% of GDP with US Federal Spending over time which has gone steadily upward.
Hmmm, seems pretty obvious that the issue is that spending has gone way up over time. While revenue hasn't quite kept up with the massive spending increases, it's also gone way up over time. So how can you blame tax cuts with a straight face? The fact is that federal government revenue went up after Reagan and Bush's "tax cuts". Congress just managed to spend even more money than they had before.
The people in D.C. think that if you plan to spend way more and then change your plan to increase spending not quite as much, that's a drastic cut.
Here's a modest proposal, how about we cut spending levels to what it was 10 or 20 years ago in the bad old days and then watch as the deficit magically turns into a massive surplus?
One problem with letting D.C. take more of our money is that they just spend it. They have an essentially unlimited list of things people would like them to spend our money on. At some point we have to put our foot down and say they're going to have to prioritize some of it.
Sadly, that doesn't seem to be going to happen anytime soon, since people are just arguing about how much of a spending increase we're going to have and where the extra money's going to be especially increased this year.
Obama said "elections have consequences, I won" after the 2008 elections while explaining to the House Republicans why he wasn't going to compromise with them nor consider any of their ideas.
The Democrats had control of the House and the Presidency and enough control of the Senate to pass any budget they wanted. (Only a majority vote needed for budget related matters.)
In 2010, the Democrats lost the House in a landslide and then forgot all about that "elections have consequences" idea while essentially refusing to do anything about the budget in the Senate anymore. The House at least passed budget bills, etc... The Democrats in the Senate didn't even want to attempt to negotiate and didn't want to even consider passing a budget, not even anything modeled on Obama's suggestions.
The Democrats have shown a zero willingness for "REAL compromise". They don't even want to have a discussion in the Senate at all about the budget, let alone actually pass a budget and then go into a conference debate with the House to reconcile the two competing budgets. Instead, they just ignore the law about being required to pass a budget every year.
At least the House Republicans have been willing to put their ideas on the table and send them to the Senate as bills. Can you show us any concrete proposal from the Senate Democrats in return? Any start at all to negotiating to fix the record deficit spending?
The 2012 voters decided to leave the House in the control of the Republicans and the Senate and Presidency in control of the Democrats. The House was put in the position of originating budgets and tax bills by the Constitution. They've done that many times and the Senate and the President have just ignored them.
At what point do you stop blaming the only branch of government actually actively sending the other folks proposals and notice that the other folks are completely unwilling to even come to the table to suggest or debate anything?
Their cut is that they give away your book to their customers, which makes their customers a little more likely to buy stuff from them in the future.
It becomes a loss leader for them. Sure, it costs them a tiny bit of hosting/bandwidth, but that's a rounding error compared to their customer acquisition/retention costs when people find out they can get an ebook free (or cheap) that Amazon sells for $X higher.
From their pricing page in the KDP license, section E:
So you get nothing when they price match to free, because 0 times anything is 0.
If Amazon discovers your ebook is available for cheaper (say, free...) they have the right under your contract with them to mark down your ebook to that price... and they will.
So not sure how the author's proposed model works, once Amazon discovers the free version, the paid version is going to be listed as free as well.
You are exactly correct.
I could add lots more comments on this issue, but instead I'll just point readers to the same discussion from a year ago on slashdot, Is-There-a-Hearing-Aid-Price-Bubble, as there are plenty more comments there relating to government regulation and insurance 3rd party payers, etc...
I'll just toss in my own counter-example, contrasting price changes in elective surgery, like corrective vision surgery, seem to imply that the biggest part of the cost cause is the third party payers.
If you actually believe that, then you stand to make a huge profit on Helium in a decade, right? Just store up some helium, or buy some on the futures market and you can be rich!!!!
You'll show those evil capitalists who think the person who is willing to pay the highest price for something is the one who should get to use it how they want!
Or, you might note that the reason "75% of all Helium comes from a handful of gas wells in the US, where the helium content in natural gas is the highest." is because it's currently the cheapest to extract there, but that pretty much all the other natural gas wells are currently just wasting their Helium because it's not worth extracting, but if those "75%" ever fall off in production enough to make it worthwhile, they'll just pickup the slack and start capturing it at a slightly higher cost.
Have you ever considered WHY helium recycling isn't really economically profitable?
I'm trying to say this in the kindest way possible, but please stop using B.S. science conclusions to stop economic progress in the name of environmentalism just because your liberal friends have decided fracking is evil.
Correlation != Causation.
It sort of stands to reason that people looking to drill for methane would do it in locations where there is more methane available and close to the surface, doesn't it?
All your study says is that they found higher levels of methane near methane mining operations. Well, duh!
Let me give you a comparison using the same methodology:
A study of sunlight found that higher concentrations of sunlight in the air were found near solar farms. Scientists conclude that solar farms cause sunlight to pollute the air.
Of course, while people place solar farms with the intention of being near more sunlight, I'm sure you can't blame the solar farm for producing the sunlight for everyone else in the area....
Call us back when a study looks at pre-and post- fracking methane levels over time at the same wells, rather then taking a correlation and assuming causation.
Oh wait, the PA legislature already paid for a study like that on pre- and post- drilling sites and using control sites and "the research found no statistically significant increases in methane levels after drilling and no significant correlation to distance from drilling."
Wait, you're complaining about Romney's dog? What about Obama literally eating a dog???
Obviously your reaction isn't indicative of a typical American reaction, since all the post-debate polls showed Romney won hands down.
As for the VP debate, Biden spent most of his time trying to bully Ryan in order to distract from his lack of any ideas for the future and lack of any excuse for the Obama administration's failures.
Gee, sorry if I took "A lot of people (particularly I'm discussing western political leaders, but not just them) state as a matter of blind faith that markets are effective allocators of capital." as a negative comment toward using markets for allocating capital.
I mean, I can see where you could slide in saying that's not exactly what he meant, but you've got to admit that it's a reasonable default assumption. All I did was compare it to the most commonly advocated alternative. What else would you compare it to in order to decide if it's "effective" or not, if not an alternative method?
That, I can agree with. :)
Fortunately, it's a self-correcting problem as fools are parted from their money. Sort of a virtuous cycle of creation/destruction.
It doesn't become necessary for the government to step in and bail them out.
It only happens when you give government too much power and control so that the industry inevitably takes over the government regulatory body and then uses taxpayer's money for the bail out. Again, see Public Choice economics. This is all a well-understood process.