Negative, Will Robinson. Government is complicit, but it is the oil producers who are pulling the strings - very large corporations and foreign governments, like Saudi Arabia.
Hyperbole does your arguments no favors. The concept of social justice has a rich and venerable body of research supporting it. Nowhere did I suggest that the total amount of wealth in society is irrelevant, but it is important to note that societal wealth does not preclude more equitable wealth distribution than we see in the US. Again, I refer you to the Scandinavian countries as evidence.
The difference between rich and poor, however, is indeed relevant. Grotesque economic disparities where one individual may be millions or even billions of times wealthier than another are genuine cause for concern, if not moral and ethical outrage.
The question we should ask is why our society maintains the social norm that it is possible to have happiness and contentment while our neighbors suffer. There are societies in which this is not an accepted norm; where it is not deemed moral or ethical to be happy or content so long as any among your fellow citizens suffer. Ironically, in the developed world the societies with these more compassionate values are the most secular, whereas the most religious (i.e. Christian) of the countries in the developed world - the US - exhibits the highest degree of callousness and disregard for the misfortune of others, despite the flatly contradictory moral proclamations and precepts of Christian faith.
Most people don't accumulate wealth, they spend it. That's part of the reason why the US is in such a hole right now - because people like living beyond their means.
It's virtually impossible to hoard money today, and certainly no one with any significant amount of wealth does so. The only way to actually hoard wealth is to withdraw it from the economy, and that means removing currency from circulation. Do you know anyone who keeps their savings at home in cash? I don't.
When money is put in the bank in a savings account, the bank invests it - that wealth still flows through the economy. So it's not hoarded. Money sunk into fixed assets like land, houses, buildings and yachts still isn't money under your mattress: you have to pay someone to build the house or the yacht or whatever, and that pumps money back into the economy. Those assets may not be productive in the way that using them to build a factory or start a business is productive, but it isn't hoarding either.
The issue that the posters are alluding to is social justice and economic equity. Whether you hoard or not, when title to wealth accumulates with individuals while leaving other people to live hand-to-mouth, then your society has started to lose its claim to being civilized.
So even though Bill Gates doesn't hoard his billions under his mattress but has instead invested them productively in the wider economy, and even though he's not a selfish sociopath like many wealthy folks in the plutocracy are, it nonetheless sucks that he has title to billions of dollars worth of property while there are children in our country who go to bed hungry and without health insurance. The existence of such inequality is not an indictment of Bill Gates, but an indictment of our society and our values - values that are represented in our government and its wealth-redistribution policies. Other folks have different values, with different government policies, and some are even worse. But some are better, as in Scandinavian countries for example, and as a consequence they don't have hungry children living a stone's throw from billionaires like we do.
Here's an idea: use the government's statistical valuation of a human life (it's fallen recently to $6.9 million according to the NY Post) as a conversion unit of these massive financial judgments.
So a judgment of over $800 million is tantamount to killing 100 people. This is not really that far fetched, since $800 million could be used to save the lives of far more than 100 people - within the US too, without even resorting to saving starving folks in developed countries.
So, convert this $800+ million charge to 100 counts of manslaughter - or better yet, murder, since it was willful and premeditated. Now, can we go after these mass-murders please?
The flaws and limitations of conventional economic theory have a hard time dealing with 21st Century business models and technologies. Marginal cost is the cost of producing one more unit of whatever it is you're making/selling. Marginal benefit, on the other side, is the utility you get out of buying one more unit of something. So if you're making pizza, for example, it costs a lot to make the first slice since you have to have all the ingredients and equipment, but it costs a lot less to make the 10th slice, since everything was already in place for the previous 9 slices. If you're buying slices, you get a lot of benefit (utility) out of the first slice, but unless you're an NFL linebacker that 10th slice probably isn't going to deliver the same benefit/utility as the previous slices, since you'll be getting full.
The math of conventional economics says that profit is maximized where marginal costs equals marginal benefit. It's a pretty handy rule. The problem with software is that the marginal cost of producing one more copy is basically zero - the first unit is expensive, but then it costs virtually nothing to produce unit 2 through unit 2 billion. So that means profit is maximized where... marginal benefit equals zero? Yup, when you put zeros into the math, the whole thing collapses.
Supply and demand are a whole other kettle of fish, but zero-cost products create similarly sticky problems for S&D models as well. There are good papers and books out there about OSS economics, if anyone is interested in learning more.
You could not be more right. You are your brain. Even more specifically, you are your frontal lobes. Damage those and you're not you. You can literally become a completely different person, even if you retain all of your functional capacities. "Soul" is a made-up idea, with thousands of years worth of bright folks conjuring convoluted arguments for its existence. But it's surplus to requirements. Take away the concept of 'soul', and there is no gap left requiring filling or answering to. Consciousness, on the other hand, is certainly a real phenomena, and it seems obvious it's an emergent property of complex brains, whether in humans or in any of a large number of other animals.
As for the question asked to Kurzweil, more usefully phrased as 'will machines ever be conscious and self-aware'. The answer is almost certainly yes. But one thing always missing from these discussions is the issue of motivation. Machines will have to be programmed with motivations. Human beings are programmed by evolution not to ever sit still mentally, but to be continually driven, continually inquisitive, continually learning and exploring and seeking. Obviously any of our ancestors who were not so would have failed to find food or to reproduce. So we will have to create these drives as part of programming AI. Without them, a mind has no impetus and will simply sit and do nothing.
Note that humans can be rendered similarly inert with specific types of brain damage to primitive areas of the brain, such as the lymbic system. If you destroy the parts of a person's brain in charge of emotion, information loses all meaning and value, and can render them inert without rendering them unintelligent. Oliver Sacks describes several such cases in his various books.
Some caution is advised here. We play with programming emotions at our peril. An intelligent machine would be very useful, but an emotive one could be extremely hazardous. A hyperintelligent AI might be capable of taking over the world and wiping out humanity, but have no care or interest in doing so if it lacked emotion or some comparable mechanism for assigning value, meaning and importance to different pieces of information. But give it emotions, especially ones designed to mimic human behavior, like the drive to maximize self-interests like survival, and such a machine might indeed decide to wipe us out.
They have performed incredibly. And for the next ones, I recommend one simple upgrade: ostrich-feather dusters for the solar panels.
Seriously. Lack of a dusting mechanism was a pretty egregious oversight in my opinion. This is not the first time power loss from dust has been a threat to the Mars probes.
P/E ratio? This is the new economy, we don't even worry about having a business model, let alone ancient concepts like the P/E ratio. Yahoo has nine bazillion users, so it must be worth trillions. Not only does it have lots of users (which is all that really matters, dontcha know) it apparently even makes some money from somewhere - that must be worth an extra 2 or 3%.
Funny but true. Actual earnings really haven't mattered that much for the last 12-15 years because the economy has been driven by speculation riding on the back of ridiculously easy credit. Well the credit card finally got maxed out, and what happens? The trading price of everything collapses to something nearer its actual value - somewhere in the neighborhood of 1/3 to 1/2 of what speculative trading had inflated it to be.
It may be a convenient abstraction to say that a fair price of something is whatever someone is willing to pay, but it bears remembering that price =/= value. Sorry to all the neoclassical economics fans out there, but the value of things really is rooted in reality - it's not ALL a matter of perception. Recent events are the obvious case in point.
It's worth remembering that income tax is not in the Constitution. It was introduced to pay for the Civil War, if I recall correctly. The idea that people have an obligation to pay if they want government services is predicated upon how you view human rights and entitlements. In America, as much as we like to trumpet our bold stances on rights and entitlements, we're actually bringing up the rear among all developed nations.
In America we don't regard healthcare as a right. We don't regard quality education as a right. We don't regard income security is a right. There are things we DO regard as a right, such as the ability to own private property. There are things half the country thinks we should have rights for (marrying whoever you want, putting whatever chemicals in your body you please, deciding whether or not to reproduce), and the other half of the country thinks we shouldn't.
Welfare and income redistribution is only a bad thing if you think poor people don't have the right to anything - they don't have the right to income, quality of life, quality education, quality healthcare, etc, etc. This is a core American value: you're on your own. Grew up in a shithole neighborhood with no textbooks in the schools? Too bad, you're on your own. Got in a terrible car accident and lost your job and your house from bankruptcy? Too bad, you're on your own.
We complain loudly whenever we get an inkling that someone is benefiting from their government without contributing, even if they cannot afford to contribute - and even if relief from the burden of taxation would help give them the opportunity to climb out of the hole they're stuck in and make greater contributions later. If you want numbers, consider that the poorest 50% of US taxpayers - representing 150 million people - earn under $30,000/year and pay a total of $35 billion in federal income taxes. That's HALF the population of the country, and they contribute under 3% of the tax revenues that (supposedly) fund the federal budget. Would it be that hard to cut the federal budget by 3%? Yet imagine if you told 150 million Americans tomorrow, "read my lips - no more taxes!" Imagine the difference it would make.
The concept at play is what is a manageable burden. Paying $4,500 in taxes when you earn $30k/year is not a manageable burden. Paying $100 million in taxes when you earn $200 million a year is perfectly manageable, since you can live just fine on a mere $100 million. And for the 40 million below the poverty line (an unforgivable disgrace in the wealthiest country the world has ever seen), there IS NO burden that is manageable. That is why guys like Ralph Nader, the real advocates for the working class, have long proposed eliminating income tax entirely for everyone who earns below a certain amount (I think Nader's plan is below $100k/year).
You could eliminate the tax on half of all Americans and it would cost 5% of the bailout package. But somehow that wouldn't be 'fair'? Given the benefits that it would have on society, it just seems asinine to be so stubborn about a culturally specific notion of what constitutes 'fair'. In many other cultures, it is not considered fair for ANYONE to be poor. In Scandinavian cultures it is not morally, ethically or culturally acceptable to be contented and happy so long as your neighbors suffer. In America, we just say fuck 'em, they're on their own. That's why you see homeless people on Wiltshire in Beverley Hills.
What's ironic is that while America is largely a Christian nation (better than 50%), whose core espoused values are 1) The rich go to hell (Matthew 6), 2) Love thy neighbor as thyself, i.e. don't be selfish, we are - among Western nations - an extremely selfish, materialistic and wealth-oriented culture. Meanwhile, so-called 'socialist' countries not only work better by any conceivable practical metric (literacy rates, crime, health, whatever) but harbor much less selfish, much more compassionate cultures. Who's more evil, I wonder?
The reason why the economy is in the shitter and there's no affordable healthcare and our bridges are collapsing and our kids can't compete with children in Morocco on reading and math and 40 million people in the wealthiest country the world has ever seen live in poverty is because we don't pay enough taxes.
Now if you're rich, and you don't give a shit about other human beings or your country, then low taxes are great - for you. But if you're not a selfish pile of shit or you're not rich, then redistribution of wealth within society is important to you because you want to avoid all the problems listed above.
You may not like the government, but they're the only game in town when it comes to solving those problems. The proof is in Scandanavia. If you've got a better idea, we'd all love to hear it.
My guess is you're not voting on the economy, you're voting on a trump issue.
To hell with credit cards and plastic. This kind of danger is why I only use cash and keep all my money in a Washington Mutual bank account, where it's safe...
Your argument seems to hinge upon the notion that without shorting stocks would be overpriced, and that thanks to shorting they are not. I refer you to every financial bubble in the last century as proof that stocks are quite capable of becoming overpriced despite the best efforts of shorting to keep them 'fair'.
Shorting is just one component in an unhealthy trading system that has little to do with directing investment capital to those ventures with the greatest likelihood of being productive and profitable. Rather, the financial system has degenerated into a collection of gambling rings where high rollers lose and win fortunes trying to game the system.
The stock market was conceived in an era that long predated instant communication and the ubiquitous availability of information. It was originally intended to make capital available to enterprise, though of course there has always been a gambling element to it. But today, with instantaneous communication and information availability, there is no need for a trading market for those who simply wish to invest and divest capital in companies they believe to have strong prospects for profitability. The day trading and manipulation of stock prices and markets are now artifacts of an obsolete, dysfunctional system.
Had the financial markets collapsed in the recent crisis, and if the trading floors were to close permanently, then they would be easily replaced by direct investment with individual companies by individual and institutional investors with an actual interest in the productivity and profitability of the companies in question. In the end, our economy would probably be better off. And even if the system were slightly less efficient, the difference would simply be paid for out of the pockets of wealthy investors who currently clean up to the tune of $500 billion or more each year. Companies and their employees in the working and middle class would almost certainly be unaffected, or actually be better off in the final analysis.
There is simply too much money to be made to ever hope that we could close the world's financial markets to all but legitimate, long-term investment, but 99% of the people in the world would almost certainly be better off for it.
Shorting of all kinds should be banned. It is an abuse of the property rights that form the foundation of capitalism. As Adam Smith pointed out, it is only by accident that capitalism and free markets leverage self-interest to the benefit of others, and it is only under a narrow set of rules and conditions that they do so at all. Where these rules are broken, where markets are inefficient or failing, where the right to own something is abused - as in the instance of shorting, where individuals are deliberately investing in failure - the system does not generate net benefit for all. The system, in such instances, is broken. Shorting is no different than buying an insurance policy on a building you think is likely to collapse or catch fire: that investment does nothing to foster economic growth or redistribute wealth in a maximally productive way; it is an abuse of market inefficiency (in this case, lack of market information and transparency). Cashing in on market inefficiency is the antithesis of capitalism.
That optional, downloadable content would slow down the movie itself is just another extension of the two minutes of FBI warning I am forced to sit through when I play a DVD in a standard player.
That's why I still have an old-school Apex player that I bought online 8 years ago. A few clicks in the remote out of the box, as per online instructions, and voila - plays all regions, breaks all locked controls for all content, etc. Have a European DVD? No problem. FF or skip the warnings and trailers? No problem.
Absolutely. I'm in Michigan now too and there's still a waiting list on the Prius at local dealers, despite the ramp up in production and delivery. Sooner or later the demand gap will close, but it may still be a while yet. As for plug-ins, I think the real proof will be in the pudding. There is no PBEV on the market right now from a major automaker. When there is, it'll change everything. GM's EV-1 was a huge hit in LA when I lived there in the late 90s, and consumers were furious when they stopped making them.
If you ask me, this is just a ploy by Toyota to get the other automakers to doubt themselves a bit. It's a reverse psychology tactic from the market leader - it make perfect sense. At any rate, Toyota needs to stop dicking around and get its PBEVs into the US market and forget about self-competing, because if they wait until the Chevy volt and other EVs come out, they're not going to be on top of the market for long.
If taxes were lower and things not so expensive then it would be easier for people to have
single income families and also to have 3 to 4 or more kids, with much less needed immigration.
You assume women who have 3+ children 'plan' to do so. This is rarely the case in developed countries, even the US. Women in developed countries who have more than two children overwhelmingly do so regardless of the practical or economic implications. Usually, the explanation is either ignorance, religious belief or a combination of both. In the vast majority of instances, women who are well-educated and secular will not have more than 2 children. Look at the correlation between population growth, education and religion in any developed country and you will see the data support this. Much of your analysis is therefore moot - including the loony stuff about immigration and communism.
Umm, theatres play 24 frames a second, non-interlaced, nothing special. Not 60, not 120, 24. They've been doing it like so or decades and nobody says, wow this picture looks soo frigging jittery.
Film captures motion blur and has no scan lines - it renders a complete image each frame, which is a very close analogue of how the eye works. Mimicking this effect digitally with a device that uses scan lines is impossible. To look like anything even halfway decent requires the high refresh rates I mentioned in my post, which you also describe. Nevertheless, the effect is not perfect. No TV with scan lines looks as good as film projected in a theater. Some effects in DVD playback systems - especially projectors - can be implemented to deliberately mimic film a bit better, such as anti-chickenwire effects to blur the edges of scanlines together, etc, but I have not yet seen this done with Blu-Ray.
Blu-Ray mastering needs work, to my eye. Without motion blur, you need ultra-high refresh rates (up over 120fps) to keep progressive scan video - regardless of definition - from looking jittery. That's controlled by how the images are mastered from either film or digital stock, and by how well your TV can really play back the material.
To me, all Blu-Ray stuff I've seen so far looks like crisp newscam compared to a real cinema experience. DVD playback has actually come a long way in emulating cinematic effects, despite the lower res, so in some instances DVD doesn't just get the job done fine, it actually looks better in some ways than Blu-Ray.
There is nothing conclusive in either the article or in the paper it references. However, I agree that it would be fun if there was a little more informed speculation on this exciting stellar mystery and a little less of the "teh LENS is dirty LOLs!1!111" crap.
My money is on this being a stellar collision of some kind. I'm not knowledgeable enough to tell from the reference paper whether this has any of the signs of a GRB, but it could be a merger of a binary system, a merger of several neutron stars, or maybe even the final evaporation of a low-mass black hole.
The problem with your position is that your personal faith represents a comprehensive abandonment of everything that is substantively "Christian". You disagree with literal interpretations of the Bible, you don't believe any of the assertions it makes about the physical world, you view God metaphorically and non-anthropomorphically the way deists like Einstein and Spinoza viewed the notion - as a concept, not an entity - and you bandy about abstractions like "SPIRITUAL" and "the Word" that would certainly have gotten you killed for heresy or apostasy in prior centuries.
So I'm curious why you bother calling yourself a "Christ-follower" at all. Why not just be a deist or plain old agnostic who appreciates mysticism? One of Dennett's 'murkies' - people who love the mystery of faith, not the details. Then you wouldn't have to bother being annoyed by other Christians tarnishing a label you've chosen to share with them. Better to dump the label and be your own person, no?
It's not as simple as just gas mileage. The other major factor is resale value. The Prius is currently (and for several years) the leader in value-retention. I could sell my 8-month old Prius right now for sticker price. You simply cannot do that with a Chevy Malibu or a Ford Taurus.
So the calculus for the cost of owning the car depends entirely on what you plan to do with it afterwards. In my case, I'm financing my Prius and will sell it after 2-3 years and recover something like 1/2 to 2/3 of the sticker price. The total cost of ownership per month therefore ends up being lower than any other car of comparable quality/size/features.
If it was just about gas mileage, you'd be right. But it's more complicated than that. So you're wrong. Sorry!:P
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Negative, Will Robinson. Government is complicit, but it is the oil producers who are pulling the strings - very large corporations and foreign governments, like Saudi Arabia.
Hyperbole does your arguments no favors. The concept of social justice has a rich and venerable body of research supporting it. Nowhere did I suggest that the total amount of wealth in society is irrelevant, but it is important to note that societal wealth does not preclude more equitable wealth distribution than we see in the US. Again, I refer you to the Scandinavian countries as evidence.
The difference between rich and poor, however, is indeed relevant. Grotesque economic disparities where one individual may be millions or even billions of times wealthier than another are genuine cause for concern, if not moral and ethical outrage.
The question we should ask is why our society maintains the social norm that it is possible to have happiness and contentment while our neighbors suffer. There are societies in which this is not an accepted norm; where it is not deemed moral or ethical to be happy or content so long as any among your fellow citizens suffer. Ironically, in the developed world the societies with these more compassionate values are the most secular, whereas the most religious (i.e. Christian) of the countries in the developed world - the US - exhibits the highest degree of callousness and disregard for the misfortune of others, despite the flatly contradictory moral proclamations and precepts of Christian faith.
Most people don't accumulate wealth, they spend it. That's part of the reason why the US is in such a hole right now - because people like living beyond their means.
It's virtually impossible to hoard money today, and certainly no one with any significant amount of wealth does so. The only way to actually hoard wealth is to withdraw it from the economy, and that means removing currency from circulation. Do you know anyone who keeps their savings at home in cash? I don't.
When money is put in the bank in a savings account, the bank invests it - that wealth still flows through the economy. So it's not hoarded. Money sunk into fixed assets like land, houses, buildings and yachts still isn't money under your mattress: you have to pay someone to build the house or the yacht or whatever, and that pumps money back into the economy. Those assets may not be productive in the way that using them to build a factory or start a business is productive, but it isn't hoarding either.
The issue that the posters are alluding to is social justice and economic equity. Whether you hoard or not, when title to wealth accumulates with individuals while leaving other people to live hand-to-mouth, then your society has started to lose its claim to being civilized.
So even though Bill Gates doesn't hoard his billions under his mattress but has instead invested them productively in the wider economy, and even though he's not a selfish sociopath like many wealthy folks in the plutocracy are, it nonetheless sucks that he has title to billions of dollars worth of property while there are children in our country who go to bed hungry and without health insurance. The existence of such inequality is not an indictment of Bill Gates, but an indictment of our society and our values - values that are represented in our government and its wealth-redistribution policies. Other folks have different values, with different government policies, and some are even worse. But some are better, as in Scandinavian countries for example, and as a consequence they don't have hungry children living a stone's throw from billionaires like we do.
Here's an idea: use the government's statistical valuation of a human life (it's fallen recently to $6.9 million according to the NY Post) as a conversion unit of these massive financial judgments.
So a judgment of over $800 million is tantamount to killing 100 people. This is not really that far fetched, since $800 million could be used to save the lives of far more than 100 people - within the US too, without even resorting to saving starving folks in developed countries.
So, convert this $800+ million charge to 100 counts of manslaughter - or better yet, murder, since it was willful and premeditated. Now, can we go after these mass-murders please?
/kidding. Well, half anyway...
The flaws and limitations of conventional economic theory have a hard time dealing with 21st Century business models and technologies. Marginal cost is the cost of producing one more unit of whatever it is you're making/selling. Marginal benefit, on the other side, is the utility you get out of buying one more unit of something. So if you're making pizza, for example, it costs a lot to make the first slice since you have to have all the ingredients and equipment, but it costs a lot less to make the 10th slice, since everything was already in place for the previous 9 slices. If you're buying slices, you get a lot of benefit (utility) out of the first slice, but unless you're an NFL linebacker that 10th slice probably isn't going to deliver the same benefit/utility as the previous slices, since you'll be getting full.
The math of conventional economics says that profit is maximized where marginal costs equals marginal benefit. It's a pretty handy rule. The problem with software is that the marginal cost of producing one more copy is basically zero - the first unit is expensive, but then it costs virtually nothing to produce unit 2 through unit 2 billion. So that means profit is maximized where ... marginal benefit equals zero? Yup, when you put zeros into the math, the whole thing collapses.
Supply and demand are a whole other kettle of fish, but zero-cost products create similarly sticky problems for S&D models as well. There are good papers and books out there about OSS economics, if anyone is interested in learning more.
You could not be more right. You are your brain. Even more specifically, you are your frontal lobes. Damage those and you're not you. You can literally become a completely different person, even if you retain all of your functional capacities. "Soul" is a made-up idea, with thousands of years worth of bright folks conjuring convoluted arguments for its existence. But it's surplus to requirements. Take away the concept of 'soul', and there is no gap left requiring filling or answering to. Consciousness, on the other hand, is certainly a real phenomena, and it seems obvious it's an emergent property of complex brains, whether in humans or in any of a large number of other animals.
As for the question asked to Kurzweil, more usefully phrased as 'will machines ever be conscious and self-aware'. The answer is almost certainly yes. But one thing always missing from these discussions is the issue of motivation. Machines will have to be programmed with motivations. Human beings are programmed by evolution not to ever sit still mentally, but to be continually driven, continually inquisitive, continually learning and exploring and seeking. Obviously any of our ancestors who were not so would have failed to find food or to reproduce. So we will have to create these drives as part of programming AI. Without them, a mind has no impetus and will simply sit and do nothing.
Note that humans can be rendered similarly inert with specific types of brain damage to primitive areas of the brain, such as the lymbic system. If you destroy the parts of a person's brain in charge of emotion, information loses all meaning and value, and can render them inert without rendering them unintelligent. Oliver Sacks describes several such cases in his various books.
Some caution is advised here. We play with programming emotions at our peril. An intelligent machine would be very useful, but an emotive one could be extremely hazardous. A hyperintelligent AI might be capable of taking over the world and wiping out humanity, but have no care or interest in doing so if it lacked emotion or some comparable mechanism for assigning value, meaning and importance to different pieces of information. But give it emotions, especially ones designed to mimic human behavior, like the drive to maximize self-interests like survival, and such a machine might indeed decide to wipe us out.
Safely assume? You mean like we can safely assume metric-to-imperial units conversions will be done properly?
They have performed incredibly. And for the next ones, I recommend one simple upgrade: ostrich-feather dusters for the solar panels.
Seriously. Lack of a dusting mechanism was a pretty egregious oversight in my opinion. This is not the first time power loss from dust has been a threat to the Mars probes.
It's on the surface of fucking Mars, dude, if it was a ham sandwich you could call it a spacecraft.
P/E ratio? This is the new economy, we don't even worry about having a business model, let alone ancient concepts like the P/E ratio. Yahoo has nine bazillion users, so it must be worth trillions. Not only does it have lots of users (which is all that really matters, dontcha know) it apparently even makes some money from somewhere - that must be worth an extra 2 or 3%.
Funny but true. Actual earnings really haven't mattered that much for the last 12-15 years because the economy has been driven by speculation riding on the back of ridiculously easy credit. Well the credit card finally got maxed out, and what happens? The trading price of everything collapses to something nearer its actual value - somewhere in the neighborhood of 1/3 to 1/2 of what speculative trading had inflated it to be.
It may be a convenient abstraction to say that a fair price of something is whatever someone is willing to pay, but it bears remembering that price =/= value. Sorry to all the neoclassical economics fans out there, but the value of things really is rooted in reality - it's not ALL a matter of perception. Recent events are the obvious case in point.
It's worth remembering that income tax is not in the Constitution. It was introduced to pay for the Civil War, if I recall correctly. The idea that people have an obligation to pay if they want government services is predicated upon how you view human rights and entitlements. In America, as much as we like to trumpet our bold stances on rights and entitlements, we're actually bringing up the rear among all developed nations.
In America we don't regard healthcare as a right. We don't regard quality education as a right. We don't regard income security is a right. There are things we DO regard as a right, such as the ability to own private property. There are things half the country thinks we should have rights for (marrying whoever you want, putting whatever chemicals in your body you please, deciding whether or not to reproduce), and the other half of the country thinks we shouldn't.
Welfare and income redistribution is only a bad thing if you think poor people don't have the right to anything - they don't have the right to income, quality of life, quality education, quality healthcare, etc, etc. This is a core American value: you're on your own. Grew up in a shithole neighborhood with no textbooks in the schools? Too bad, you're on your own. Got in a terrible car accident and lost your job and your house from bankruptcy? Too bad, you're on your own.
We complain loudly whenever we get an inkling that someone is benefiting from their government without contributing, even if they cannot afford to contribute - and even if relief from the burden of taxation would help give them the opportunity to climb out of the hole they're stuck in and make greater contributions later. If you want numbers, consider that the poorest 50% of US taxpayers - representing 150 million people - earn under $30,000/year and pay a total of $35 billion in federal income taxes. That's HALF the population of the country, and they contribute under 3% of the tax revenues that (supposedly) fund the federal budget. Would it be that hard to cut the federal budget by 3%? Yet imagine if you told 150 million Americans tomorrow, "read my lips - no more taxes!" Imagine the difference it would make.
The concept at play is what is a manageable burden. Paying $4,500 in taxes when you earn $30k/year is not a manageable burden. Paying $100 million in taxes when you earn $200 million a year is perfectly manageable, since you can live just fine on a mere $100 million. And for the 40 million below the poverty line (an unforgivable disgrace in the wealthiest country the world has ever seen), there IS NO burden that is manageable. That is why guys like Ralph Nader, the real advocates for the working class, have long proposed eliminating income tax entirely for everyone who earns below a certain amount (I think Nader's plan is below $100k/year).
You could eliminate the tax on half of all Americans and it would cost 5% of the bailout package. But somehow that wouldn't be 'fair'? Given the benefits that it would have on society, it just seems asinine to be so stubborn about a culturally specific notion of what constitutes 'fair'. In many other cultures, it is not considered fair for ANYONE to be poor. In Scandinavian cultures it is not morally, ethically or culturally acceptable to be contented and happy so long as your neighbors suffer. In America, we just say fuck 'em, they're on their own. That's why you see homeless people on Wiltshire in Beverley Hills.
What's ironic is that while America is largely a Christian nation (better than 50%), whose core espoused values are 1) The rich go to hell (Matthew 6), 2) Love thy neighbor as thyself, i.e. don't be selfish, we are - among Western nations - an extremely selfish, materialistic and wealth-oriented culture. Meanwhile, so-called 'socialist' countries not only work better by any conceivable practical metric (literacy rates, crime, health, whatever) but harbor much less selfish, much more compassionate cultures. Who's more evil, I wonder?
The reason why the economy is in the shitter and there's no affordable healthcare and our bridges are collapsing and our kids can't compete with children in Morocco on reading and math and 40 million people in the wealthiest country the world has ever seen live in poverty is because we don't pay enough taxes.
Now if you're rich, and you don't give a shit about other human beings or your country, then low taxes are great - for you. But if you're not a selfish pile of shit or you're not rich, then redistribution of wealth within society is important to you because you want to avoid all the problems listed above.
You may not like the government, but they're the only game in town when it comes to solving those problems. The proof is in Scandanavia. If you've got a better idea, we'd all love to hear it.
My guess is you're not voting on the economy, you're voting on a trump issue.
Greenspan just confessed before Congress to being shocked to discover that after 40 years of blind devotion, he's lost his faith in free markets here
When all of your thinking and all of your models are based on false assumptions, ALL your data is going to be spurious.
To hell with credit cards and plastic. This kind of danger is why I only use cash and keep all my money in a Washington Mutual bank account, where it's safe...
Funny how often "Country First" seems to involve stealing, lying, and trampling all over democracy, law, equality, justice and the Constitution...
Your argument seems to hinge upon the notion that without shorting stocks would be overpriced, and that thanks to shorting they are not. I refer you to every financial bubble in the last century as proof that stocks are quite capable of becoming overpriced despite the best efforts of shorting to keep them 'fair'.
Shorting is just one component in an unhealthy trading system that has little to do with directing investment capital to those ventures with the greatest likelihood of being productive and profitable. Rather, the financial system has degenerated into a collection of gambling rings where high rollers lose and win fortunes trying to game the system.
The stock market was conceived in an era that long predated instant communication and the ubiquitous availability of information. It was originally intended to make capital available to enterprise, though of course there has always been a gambling element to it. But today, with instantaneous communication and information availability, there is no need for a trading market for those who simply wish to invest and divest capital in companies they believe to have strong prospects for profitability. The day trading and manipulation of stock prices and markets are now artifacts of an obsolete, dysfunctional system.
Had the financial markets collapsed in the recent crisis, and if the trading floors were to close permanently, then they would be easily replaced by direct investment with individual companies by individual and institutional investors with an actual interest in the productivity and profitability of the companies in question. In the end, our economy would probably be better off. And even if the system were slightly less efficient, the difference would simply be paid for out of the pockets of wealthy investors who currently clean up to the tune of $500 billion or more each year. Companies and their employees in the working and middle class would almost certainly be unaffected, or actually be better off in the final analysis.
There is simply too much money to be made to ever hope that we could close the world's financial markets to all but legitimate, long-term investment, but 99% of the people in the world would almost certainly be better off for it.
Shorting of all kinds should be banned. It is an abuse of the property rights that form the foundation of capitalism. As Adam Smith pointed out, it is only by accident that capitalism and free markets leverage self-interest to the benefit of others, and it is only under a narrow set of rules and conditions that they do so at all. Where these rules are broken, where markets are inefficient or failing, where the right to own something is abused - as in the instance of shorting, where individuals are deliberately investing in failure - the system does not generate net benefit for all. The system, in such instances, is broken. Shorting is no different than buying an insurance policy on a building you think is likely to collapse or catch fire: that investment does nothing to foster economic growth or redistribute wealth in a maximally productive way; it is an abuse of market inefficiency (in this case, lack of market information and transparency). Cashing in on market inefficiency is the antithesis of capitalism.
That optional, downloadable content would slow down the movie itself is just another extension of the two minutes of FBI warning I am forced to sit through when I play a DVD in a standard player.
That's why I still have an old-school Apex player that I bought online 8 years ago. A few clicks in the remote out of the box, as per online instructions, and voila - plays all regions, breaks all locked controls for all content, etc. Have a European DVD? No problem. FF or skip the warnings and trailers? No problem.
Absolutely. I'm in Michigan now too and there's still a waiting list on the Prius at local dealers, despite the ramp up in production and delivery. Sooner or later the demand gap will close, but it may still be a while yet. As for plug-ins, I think the real proof will be in the pudding. There is no PBEV on the market right now from a major automaker. When there is, it'll change everything. GM's EV-1 was a huge hit in LA when I lived there in the late 90s, and consumers were furious when they stopped making them.
If you ask me, this is just a ploy by Toyota to get the other automakers to doubt themselves a bit. It's a reverse psychology tactic from the market leader - it make perfect sense. At any rate, Toyota needs to stop dicking around and get its PBEVs into the US market and forget about self-competing, because if they wait until the Chevy volt and other EVs come out, they're not going to be on top of the market for long.
If taxes were lower and things not so expensive then it would be easier for people to have single income families and also to have 3 to 4 or more kids, with much less needed immigration.
You assume women who have 3+ children 'plan' to do so. This is rarely the case in developed countries, even the US. Women in developed countries who have more than two children overwhelmingly do so regardless of the practical or economic implications. Usually, the explanation is either ignorance, religious belief or a combination of both. In the vast majority of instances, women who are well-educated and secular will not have more than 2 children. Look at the correlation between population growth, education and religion in any developed country and you will see the data support this. Much of your analysis is therefore moot - including the loony stuff about immigration and communism.
Umm, theatres play 24 frames a second, non-interlaced, nothing special. Not 60, not 120, 24. They've been doing it like so or decades and nobody says, wow this picture looks soo frigging jittery.
Film captures motion blur and has no scan lines - it renders a complete image each frame, which is a very close analogue of how the eye works. Mimicking this effect digitally with a device that uses scan lines is impossible. To look like anything even halfway decent requires the high refresh rates I mentioned in my post, which you also describe. Nevertheless, the effect is not perfect. No TV with scan lines looks as good as film projected in a theater. Some effects in DVD playback systems - especially projectors - can be implemented to deliberately mimic film a bit better, such as anti-chickenwire effects to blur the edges of scanlines together, etc, but I have not yet seen this done with Blu-Ray.
Blu-Ray mastering needs work, to my eye. Without motion blur, you need ultra-high refresh rates (up over 120fps) to keep progressive scan video - regardless of definition - from looking jittery. That's controlled by how the images are mastered from either film or digital stock, and by how well your TV can really play back the material.
To me, all Blu-Ray stuff I've seen so far looks like crisp newscam compared to a real cinema experience. DVD playback has actually come a long way in emulating cinematic effects, despite the lower res, so in some instances DVD doesn't just get the job done fine, it actually looks better in some ways than Blu-Ray.
There is nothing conclusive in either the article or in the paper it references. However, I agree that it would be fun if there was a little more informed speculation on this exciting stellar mystery and a little less of the "teh LENS is dirty LOLs!1!111" crap.
My money is on this being a stellar collision of some kind. I'm not knowledgeable enough to tell from the reference paper whether this has any of the signs of a GRB, but it could be a merger of a binary system, a merger of several neutron stars, or maybe even the final evaporation of a low-mass black hole.
Any other ideas?
The problem with your position is that your personal faith represents a comprehensive abandonment of everything that is substantively "Christian". You disagree with literal interpretations of the Bible, you don't believe any of the assertions it makes about the physical world, you view God metaphorically and non-anthropomorphically the way deists like Einstein and Spinoza viewed the notion - as a concept, not an entity - and you bandy about abstractions like "SPIRITUAL" and "the Word" that would certainly have gotten you killed for heresy or apostasy in prior centuries.
So I'm curious why you bother calling yourself a "Christ-follower" at all. Why not just be a deist or plain old agnostic who appreciates mysticism? One of Dennett's 'murkies' - people who love the mystery of faith, not the details. Then you wouldn't have to bother being annoyed by other Christians tarnishing a label you've chosen to share with them. Better to dump the label and be your own person, no?
It's not as simple as just gas mileage. The other major factor is resale value. The Prius is currently (and for several years) the leader in value-retention. I could sell my 8-month old Prius right now for sticker price. You simply cannot do that with a Chevy Malibu or a Ford Taurus.
So the calculus for the cost of owning the car depends entirely on what you plan to do with it afterwards. In my case, I'm financing my Prius and will sell it after 2-3 years and recover something like 1/2 to 2/3 of the sticker price. The total cost of ownership per month therefore ends up being lower than any other car of comparable quality/size/features.
If it was just about gas mileage, you'd be right. But it's more complicated than that. So you're wrong. Sorry! :P