Larry is developing a plantation, not a municipality, so comparing this paragon of capitalist initiative with - say - the rest of Maui County is invalid. Lanai Island Holdings, LLC is just another plantsite, no different in principle than the Oracle Corp HQ. So, he's investing just for himself and David M. Based on his expressed plans, I for the most part it works out. But, it's reasonably obvious that this is a hobbyist pursuit.
The rest of the County is home to a variety of people, companies, and competing interests, so it makes sense that infrastructure that serves their common good is held as public trusts. Quite a bit of the work is contracted out to private firms, particularly when it requires occasional use of capital equipment it doesn't make sense for the County to invest in. But, by and large, private ownership of utilities and other public services hasn't proved to be anyone efficient than public ownership. Running such enterprises pits maximizing public utility against maximizing private return on investment, and the public loses if/when rent seeking in the part of a private owner perverts the direction of public policy.
By design, the number of bitcoins will level out at 21 million, ergo deflationary. End of story (but not the arguments). As a short term salve for Argentine devs, bitcoin payment is better than nothing, but nothing more than yet another ephemeral method of flight from the peso.
Ultimately, Argentina's monetary problems will continue their traditional cycles until its social spending is ramped down to something its economy's surplus value can sustain. Given that the financing machinations haven't yet hit a wall too high to climb (as it almost did in the early 'aughts) and that it maintains an income stream to the mass of Argentines, I don't foresee a change in the general flow of the thing.
Australia says you're wrong. Many Aussies bitched a storm when the conservative Howard government said enough with the mass shootings and introduced wide ranging gun control. Now, they see the world didn't end, and you can still buy (most) firearms. Aussies attitudes aren't really that different from Americans, so I call BS on the other posts suggesting it's apple (pie) and oranges.
As for criminals and laws: 1) we have laws against murder, yet murders still occur. Thus, we shouldn't regulate murders? 2) criminal gun ownership is a dynamic process. Unlike law-abiding citizens, criminals engage in conduct which puts them in regular contact with the legal system. About 700k guns are recovered from US criminals annually. *If* the US required an adequate gun safe (like Oz), *if* current gun sales laws actually got enforced, and *if* there were adequate registration of sales, the main conduits for criminals' firearms would dry up: sales from gun shops, and thefts from homes.
It wouldn't surprise me if much of what the DPRK has put on display are mockups. A bit of craftsmanship and just enough engineering to keep the suckers from visibly shaking and flexing during a parade is a lot cheaper than the real thing, and does 90% of what you need a missile to do.
On the other hand, it's possible that the newer stuff are all custom one-offs. SCUDs they probably have an assembly line for. I'm not sure if they've really had enough launches to wring the bugs out of anything higher performance, a point at which they can freeze a design and say this is the definitive [cobert]Type-O-Dong[/cobert], model X.
Slashdotted? I happened to catch the story just as it went live, and hit the link to the service. After scrolling the map and getting a couple of updates: Database is down for maintenance. The front end may not be as high performance as the back... or it may have been coincidence.
And you have to remember that medical professionals are already reeling from a huge medical equipment tax courtesy of ObamaCare. One physical therapist told me of 14 medical centers that shut down because they couldn't handle the tax. And that's in Orange County. This area isn't exactly poor.
I call BS. That huge tax is 2.3%. The "14 medical centers" is an offhand rumor that doesn't pass the sniff test. In related news, a number of medical device manufacturers are blaming the device tax for their decisions to move existing and/or new plants overseas.... a tax that falls on all devices, regardless of where they're made. If Mr. Patrizio (or his Network World editor) don't like the PPACA, they can go to town. But, some research would have been nice.
Addressing the topic of the upcoming SCOTUS ruling first: the trend towards "patenting" human genes is bizarre. I'm sure there's a fine article out there providing a succinct case history, but it's nutty on the face of it. Using traditional standards, patenting a test to detect a genetic condition would hold water. Patenting the genetic condition makes as much sense as patenting an organ. Is there time for me to patent the human heart, if I come up with a new way of detecting it?
Regarding the parent comment: at first, patenting an artificially created sequence within a human gene seems patentable. However, I seriously doubt it could stand for long, since: a) if it is passed on to offspring, it becomes "natural", and any case law that developed to the contrary would be tantamount to Dred Scott, and b) unless the gene invoked non-organic chemistry, over time it would become difficult to determine whether an instance of the sequence were "licensed", or a natural mutation.
I wasn't commenting on AS in particular, but making a general statement (eg. because someone takes a plea doesn't mean they were guilty, and vs.). That said, your points are spot on.
> If he didn't commit to a crime, then he should have gone to trial, and made the prosecution make the case that he broke the law.
That's the theory. In theory, theory and practice are the same. In practice, they are not. In practice, when a defendant goes to trial, the stakes go up, way up: you're either going to walk, or the judge is going to impose a sentence more severe than the plea... and given Federal sentencing guidelines, that means *considerably* more severe. In addition, a defendant not of means is going to be at least broke, and likely deep in the hole.
Even down at the County level, that's why a lot of innocent people plead out. They can't afford to lose, can't afford to defend, and probably don't have anyone a judge/jury will believe to witness on their behalf. Instead, they do their six months plus years "in the system", plus a criminal record, rather than risk years in the can.
Corporate boards glad hand the execs for the same reason as boards and executives in utterly unrelated lines of large businesses hang together as a lobby if one is threatened by labor/regulation/public vilification that would help the others: class solidarity. They by-and-large see the interests of their peers as identical to their own, even when they're objectively not. An excellent recent example, fighting attempts by the US Federal government to bring the major banks to heal after they nearly dragged the world economy into a depression.
I've been using MailSteward on OSX. The starter version handles 15k or so entries using SQLite before it starts to bog, while the trade up is a front end to MySQL.
To be honest, the sort of libertarians that approve of executive pay pathologies - particularly in the US - are "libertarians" shilling for the man... the sort of folks who post on Megan McArdle's blog.
"Jealousy" eh? The mating call of libertarians whenever the subject of who's getting paid to do what comes up.
From hard won experience, I know that attempting to debate this directly with a lib is as productive as arguing with my cat about it pissing on a wall. So, strictly for others who may be listening:
The pay of top executives is usually determined by a supervisory board. Getting on a board doesn't require much work, in exchange for which members enjoy a number of benefits determined by executives. Getting onto and staying on boards in the first place requires staying in the good graces of company executives. Thus, a positive feedback loop occurs, resulting in executive pay and departure packages determined not by metrics that benefit the owners, but by friends doing each other favors.
It's usually very difficult for the diffuse class of owners to organize themselves to bring company executives to heel. What the Swiss have done is to make life a little bit easier for shareholders to exercise their rights.
Before Chu and Coble get too far into this propaganda exercise, they should educate themselves about the background for the culture they're presuming knowledge of:
If the terms of the Copyright Term Extension Act (CTEA) of 1998 were instead enacted in - say - 1920, a good portion of our current legacy of movies and music likely would not exist. Example: Walt Disney & company borrowed liberally from the works of the Brothers Grimm. If the brothers' estate had retained rights, would Walt been able to afford it? If the Grimm tales had become orphan works, with the rights holders unknown, would Walt have been able to proceed at all?
A caption from the linked article sums it up: "Opponents of genetic determinism argue that it ignores the effects of colonialism."
Within the US, at least, I believe that the on-going effects of 250 years of slavery, and an added 100 years of systematic segregation, still leave Americans as a group unable to divorce ourselves from their effects when trying to ascertain what - if any - biological basis there may be to the economic performance of southern Africans, and their diaspora in the US. There is such an ingrained belief that it's "their" fault, I don't think researchers are yet to the point to where their research can be trusted.
To be fair, you seem to be either 1) a doctrinaire right wing shill, or more charitably 2) not thinking through the economics business cases.
Charles Ponzi promised payouts on profits from an arbitrage business that did no actual arbitrage (i.e. a fraud).
Social Security works on the same assumption as most private retirement systems: money is invested in an economic entity, and payouts will come from future economic growth of that entity. Money invested with the US Government adds value by - in aggregate - providing an infrastructure within which profitable activity can occur, ideally leading to a larger tax base from which to pay future Social Security obligations.
As it has turned out, the economics work for Social Security, and based on demographic projections, will continue to... provided that hucksters in the private economy don't continue to destroy more value than we can create. The economics cannot work for a Ponzi scheme, by its very methodology.
Er did someone evolve an intelligent life-form in a lab from a lesser organism while I wasn't looking? I am all red in the face. I must have missed that monumental announcement.
That's very cute. And, you're not addressing what the parent said. In fact, you can go into a biology lab and watch evolution happen over the course of tens of thousands of generations of bacteria. Evolution at the level of virii and bacteria occurs quickly. The more complex the life form, the longer it takes for visually obvious symptoms of evolution. But, thanks to the fine focus provided by current genomic lab techniques, you can see signs of human evolution within historical times. No third arms or eleventh toes, sorry, but real change nevertheless.
Again, what we're dealing with isn't God-centric creation or not, but dogma and magic wand waving v. what is observed to be occurring. It may be that a Christian God caused the HIV to arise and target gays, or it may have been outhouse (bad) luck, but the observed mechanism was still evolution.
In all fairness, within the standards of the/. community, "god-tard" is a term of art, rather than a sign of bigotry and narrow-mindedness. The frustration level when dealing with people who do not seem to be arguing in good faith on teaching evolution is high, and gets higher the longer it continues and morphs.
I believe the core issue the Texas Board and their fellow travelers struggle with isn't with scientific evidence of a particular theory, but rather the conclusions that some choose to draw from that evidence. A child's perception of God and Nature is necessarily challenged as he matures. Some resolve that struggle by denying God, some by denying what is discovered during study of God's creation.
The majority of the Texas board seem to be the latter.
Re family size, this used to be true, but no longer. Mexican women in Mexico are down to 2.1 children per, and 2.4 per in the US. The US rate is down 23% from 1990.
The way this submission is crafted invites a flame war, but ok, let's tackle it.
The submitter is evidently not aware that the vast majority of international students pay full freight and then some when they attend a US school. So, in the small picture, that's why US universities market to them, at a time when US students are having difficulty ponying up (for a variety of reasons), and state legislatures are cutting funding for the public institutions.
Bigger picture, yes, we're educating the competition, but we're also familiarizing the next world elite with US culture much as the British used to, making the world ever more US-centric. Given the economics for the schools, believe me, these students are going to come. So, we might as well make it easier for them to stay AFTER we've educated them, and thus allow them to add value to the US (culturally, economically) over the long run. If we create the brains, why encourage them drain back out into the world?
Speaking of ESL writers, as a native Anglophone it's interesting to see developers whose native languages are Swedish and Portuguese communicating so smoothly in a third language. Linus, in particular, would pass my Turning Test for a native speaker. If you can type a grammatically correct blue streak in English idioms, you're practically ready to edit Webster's. He must have had a lot of practice.
Slashdot Mirror
Larry is developing a plantation, not a municipality, so comparing this paragon of capitalist initiative with - say - the rest of Maui County is invalid. Lanai Island Holdings, LLC is just another plantsite, no different in principle than the Oracle Corp HQ. So, he's investing just for himself and David M. Based on his expressed plans, I for the most part it works out. But, it's reasonably obvious that this is a hobbyist pursuit.
The rest of the County is home to a variety of people, companies, and competing interests, so it makes sense that infrastructure that serves their common good is held as public trusts. Quite a bit of the work is contracted out to private firms, particularly when it requires occasional use of capital equipment it doesn't make sense for the County to invest in. But, by and large, private ownership of utilities and other public services hasn't proved to be anyone efficient than public ownership. Running such enterprises pits maximizing public utility against maximizing private return on investment, and the public loses if/when rent seeking in the part of a private owner perverts the direction of public policy.
By design, the number of bitcoins will level out at 21 million, ergo deflationary. End of story (but not the arguments). As a short term salve for Argentine devs, bitcoin payment is better than nothing, but nothing more than yet another ephemeral method of flight from the peso.
Ultimately, Argentina's monetary problems will continue their traditional cycles until its social spending is ramped down to something its economy's surplus value can sustain. Given that the financing machinations haven't yet hit a wall too high to climb (as it almost did in the early 'aughts) and that it maintains an income stream to the mass of Argentines, I don't foresee a change in the general flow of the thing.
Australia says you're wrong. Many Aussies bitched a storm when the conservative Howard government said enough with the mass shootings and introduced wide ranging gun control. Now, they see the world didn't end, and you can still buy (most) firearms. Aussies attitudes aren't really that different from Americans, so I call BS on the other posts suggesting it's apple (pie) and oranges.
As for criminals and laws: 1) we have laws against murder, yet murders still occur. Thus, we shouldn't regulate murders? 2) criminal gun ownership is a dynamic process. Unlike law-abiding citizens, criminals engage in conduct which puts them in regular contact with the legal system. About 700k guns are recovered from US criminals annually. *If* the US required an adequate gun safe (like Oz), *if* current gun sales laws actually got enforced, and *if* there were adequate registration of sales, the main conduits for criminals' firearms would dry up: sales from gun shops, and thefts from homes.
It wouldn't surprise me if much of what the DPRK has put on display are mockups. A bit of craftsmanship and just enough engineering to keep the suckers from visibly shaking and flexing during a parade is a lot cheaper than the real thing, and does 90% of what you need a missile to do.
On the other hand, it's possible that the newer stuff are all custom one-offs. SCUDs they probably have an assembly line for. I'm not sure if they've really had enough launches to wring the bugs out of anything higher performance, a point at which they can freeze a design and say this is the definitive [cobert]Type-O-Dong[/cobert], model X.
As an employee of a medical device company 2.3% of our income is huge. Its almost our entire R&D fund (3.0% currently).
With industry average gross profit margins around 65% and operating margins around 14%, I believe there are funds available to cover the tax.
Slashdotted? I happened to catch the story just as it went live, and hit the link to the service. After scrolling the map and getting a couple of updates: Database is down for maintenance. The front end may not be as high performance as the back... or it may have been coincidence.
TFA was fine, until the writer threw this in:
And you have to remember that medical professionals are already reeling from a huge medical equipment tax courtesy of ObamaCare. One physical therapist told me of 14 medical centers that shut down because they couldn't handle the tax. And that's in Orange County. This area isn't exactly poor.
I call BS. That huge tax is 2.3%. The "14 medical centers" is an offhand rumor that doesn't pass the sniff test. In related news, a number of medical device manufacturers are blaming the device tax for their decisions to move existing and/or new plants overseas.... a tax that falls on all devices, regardless of where they're made. If Mr. Patrizio (or his Network World editor) don't like the PPACA, they can go to town. But, some research would have been nice.
Addressing the topic of the upcoming SCOTUS ruling first: the trend towards "patenting" human genes is bizarre. I'm sure there's a fine article out there providing a succinct case history, but it's nutty on the face of it. Using traditional standards, patenting a test to detect a genetic condition would hold water. Patenting the genetic condition makes as much sense as patenting an organ. Is there time for me to patent the human heart, if I come up with a new way of detecting it?
Regarding the parent comment: at first, patenting an artificially created sequence within a human gene seems patentable. However, I seriously doubt it could stand for long, since: a) if it is passed on to offspring, it becomes "natural", and any case law that developed to the contrary would be tantamount to Dred Scott, and b) unless the gene invoked non-organic chemistry, over time it would become difficult to determine whether an instance of the sequence were "licensed", or a natural mutation.
I wasn't commenting on AS in particular, but making a general statement (eg. because someone takes a plea doesn't mean they were guilty, and vs.). That said, your points are spot on.
> If he didn't commit to a crime, then he should have gone to trial, and made the prosecution make the case that he broke the law.
That's the theory. In theory, theory and practice are the same. In practice, they are not. In practice, when a defendant goes to trial, the stakes go up, way up: you're either going to walk, or the judge is going to impose a sentence more severe than the plea... and given Federal sentencing guidelines, that means *considerably* more severe. In addition, a defendant not of means is going to be at least broke, and likely deep in the hole.
Even down at the County level, that's why a lot of innocent people plead out. They can't afford to lose, can't afford to defend, and probably don't have anyone a judge/jury will believe to witness on their behalf. Instead, they do their six months plus years "in the system", plus a criminal record, rather than risk years in the can.
Corporate boards glad hand the execs for the same reason as boards and executives in utterly unrelated lines of large businesses hang together as a lobby if one is threatened by labor/regulation/public vilification that would help the others: class solidarity. They by-and-large see the interests of their peers as identical to their own, even when they're objectively not. An excellent recent example, fighting attempts by the US Federal government to bring the major banks to heal after they nearly dragged the world economy into a depression.
I've been using MailSteward on OSX. The starter version handles 15k or so entries using SQLite before it starts to bog, while the trade up is a front end to MySQL.
To be honest, the sort of libertarians that approve of executive pay pathologies - particularly in the US - are "libertarians" shilling for the man... the sort of folks who post on Megan McArdle's blog.
"Jealousy" eh? The mating call of libertarians whenever the subject of who's getting paid to do what comes up.
From hard won experience, I know that attempting to debate this directly with a lib is as productive as arguing with my cat about it pissing on a wall. So, strictly for others who may be listening:
The pay of top executives is usually determined by a supervisory board. Getting on a board doesn't require much work, in exchange for which members enjoy a number of benefits determined by executives. Getting onto and staying on boards in the first place requires staying in the good graces of company executives. Thus, a positive feedback loop occurs, resulting in executive pay and departure packages determined not by metrics that benefit the owners, but by friends doing each other favors.
It's usually very difficult for the diffuse class of owners to organize themselves to bring company executives to heel. What the Swiss have done is to make life a little bit easier for shareholders to exercise their rights.
Before Chu and Coble get too far into this propaganda exercise, they should educate themselves about the background for the culture they're presuming knowledge of:
If the terms of the Copyright Term Extension Act (CTEA) of 1998 were instead enacted in - say - 1920, a good portion of our current legacy of movies and music likely would not exist. Example: Walt Disney & company borrowed liberally from the works of the Brothers Grimm. If the brothers' estate had retained rights, would Walt been able to afford it? If the Grimm tales had become orphan works, with the rights holders unknown, would Walt have been able to proceed at all?
A caption from the linked article sums it up: "Opponents of genetic determinism argue that it ignores the effects of colonialism."
Within the US, at least, I believe that the on-going effects of 250 years of slavery, and an added 100 years of systematic segregation, still leave Americans as a group unable to divorce ourselves from their effects when trying to ascertain what - if any - biological basis there may be to the economic performance of southern Africans, and their diaspora in the US. There is such an ingrained belief that it's "their" fault, I don't think researchers are yet to the point to where their research can be trusted.
To be fair, you seem to be either 1) a doctrinaire right wing shill, or more charitably 2) not thinking through the economics business cases.
Charles Ponzi promised payouts on profits from an arbitrage business that did no actual arbitrage (i.e. a fraud).
Social Security works on the same assumption as most private retirement systems: money is invested in an economic entity, and payouts will come from future economic growth of that entity. Money invested with the US Government adds value by - in aggregate - providing an infrastructure within which profitable activity can occur, ideally leading to a larger tax base from which to pay future Social Security obligations.
As it has turned out, the economics work for Social Security, and based on demographic projections, will continue to... provided that hucksters in the private economy don't continue to destroy more value than we can create. The economics cannot work for a Ponzi scheme, by its very methodology.
Er did someone evolve an intelligent life-form in a lab from a lesser organism while I wasn't looking? I am all red in the face. I must have missed that monumental announcement.
That's very cute. And, you're not addressing what the parent said. In fact, you can go into a biology lab and watch evolution happen over the course of tens of thousands of generations of bacteria. Evolution at the level of virii and bacteria occurs quickly. The more complex the life form, the longer it takes for visually obvious symptoms of evolution. But, thanks to the fine focus provided by current genomic lab techniques, you can see signs of human evolution within historical times. No third arms or eleventh toes, sorry, but real change nevertheless.
Again, what we're dealing with isn't God-centric creation or not, but dogma and magic wand waving v. what is observed to be occurring. It may be that a Christian God caused the HIV to arise and target gays, or it may have been outhouse (bad) luck, but the observed mechanism was still evolution.
In all fairness, within the standards of the /. community, "god-tard" is a term of art, rather than a sign of bigotry and narrow-mindedness. The frustration level when dealing with people who do not seem to be arguing in good faith on teaching evolution is high, and gets higher the longer it continues and morphs.
I believe the core issue the Texas Board and their fellow travelers struggle with isn't with scientific evidence of a particular theory, but rather the conclusions that some choose to draw from that evidence. A child's perception of God and Nature is necessarily challenged as he matures. Some resolve that struggle by denying God, some by denying what is discovered during study of God's creation.
The majority of the Texas board seem to be the latter.
Re family size, this used to be true, but no longer. Mexican women in Mexico are down to 2.1 children per, and 2.4 per in the US. The US rate is down 23% from 1990.
About 24% of international students have their fees paid primarily by domestic scholarships. You can get some raw data at the IIE.
The way this submission is crafted invites a flame war, but ok, let's tackle it.
The submitter is evidently not aware that the vast majority of international students pay full freight and then some when they attend a US school. So, in the small picture, that's why US universities market to them, at a time when US students are having difficulty ponying up (for a variety of reasons), and state legislatures are cutting funding for the public institutions.
Bigger picture, yes, we're educating the competition, but we're also familiarizing the next world elite with US culture much as the British used to, making the world ever more US-centric. Given the economics for the schools, believe me, these students are going to come. So, we might as well make it easier for them to stay AFTER we've educated them, and thus allow them to add value to the US (culturally, economically) over the long run. If we create the brains, why encourage them drain back out into the world?
Orange? Whoa. Fortunately, the case should be easy enough to strip down for a re-spray.
Yes, I'm aware of that.
Speaking of ESL writers, as a native Anglophone it's interesting to see developers whose native languages are Swedish and Portuguese communicating so smoothly in a third language. Linus, in particular, would pass my Turning Test for a native speaker. If you can type a grammatically correct blue streak in English idioms, you're practically ready to edit Webster's. He must have had a lot of practice.