As my professional psychologist collegues responded to your comment: "Where to start?"
There's a lot wrong with what you said. If you're interested in getting it right check out
Dickens, W., & Flynn, J. (2001) Heritability estimates versus large environmental effects: The IQ paradox resolved. Psychological Review, 108 (2), 346-349
and
Flynn, J. (1999). Searching for justice: The discovery of IQ gains over time. American Psychologist, 54(1), 5-20
I repeat: this was exactly the same test. That includes the testing environment, testing administrators, etc.
Legitimate psychologists aren't stupid. They have studied the Flynn effect extensively; they've considered any explanation you could come up with and many others with some of the best statistical methods seen in any of the sciences. Throughout all of that the Flynn effect has been pretty definitively laid at the feet of the person himself.
You could propose opinions and favorite explanations all you want, but there's no need: the matter has been formally and extensively studied, so such guesses are immediately obsolete.
"There is a correlation between that ability and intelligence, but it's nothing more than a correlation, so an increased IQ in a population over time could just as easily be due to changes in the tests themselves as changes in those being tested."
Actually, the Flynn effect, in which IQ scores have been increasing over the years, is observed with identical tests.
It absolutely represents a change in the people being tested, though there isn't agreement on what this change/means/.
I, and various people I know, on various platforms, had all sorts of troubles with Ekiga.
When it wasn't locking up or failing unexpectedly, it would occasionally halfway work by sending a random mix of video and/or audio channels. To begin an Ekiga session often meant ten minutes of calling and recalling until it randomly got enough channels going in the right directions to be acceptable.
Also, it's interface was just plain cruddy.
The Ekiga developers seemed to believe that these problems didn't exist, while users would report them on the mailing list and through bug reports to various distributions.
After waiting through version after version for these problems to be resolved, I finally got tired of pulling my hair out and moved on to telepathy/empathy, which works just about every time.
Oh yeah. Those rich person clubs are just full of people smart enough to make a ton of money but somehow stupid enough to just shove it in their mattresses.
In reality if the rich person wasn't spending money on this sort of thing he'd be investing it elsewhere, and possibly with even better results for the economy. Throw a little cash at a joyride and you may provide daily wages for a crew of ten. Invest the money in a business and the business might provide stable employment for a thousand.
No, it's not certain. It's a risk, and that's why it's nice to have rich people with money available to invest around.
Anyway, the point is, you're completely off in your attitude that the rich participate in the economy only through their rich person flings, and while it doesn't matter in this case it's possible that this misconception could lead to some wrong conclusions that do.
What do you think a corporation is? Where does one come from? Some organism that falls out of the sky, or perhaps a funny type of rock formation?
No, a corporation is an organization set up by individuals expressing their individual freedoms. Everything a corporation does is at the behest of individuals, and all of its successes or failures are tied back to those people.
In short a corporation will rightfully display many rights otherwise belonging to individuals because it is itself an expression of the rights of individuals.
In this case when you limit what a corporation can do--telling an ISP that it must do something--you effectually limit the rights of the individuals behind the corporation to go about their business as they fit. ALL restrictions are on individuals eventually.
You're living in a different world, picking and choosing among facts to support your foregone conclusions. Hopefully someday someone will catch you off guard and some legitimate information will get through. Maybe it will even change your mind.
Cuba's a fine example: the state of Cuban health care isn't nearly as simple and wonderful as you assert, though by picking and choosing through facts it's easy to see how you could be mislead into thinking that. After all, it's easy for governments to set up their systems to be so misleading.
But anyway, I'm not seeking to lay it out for you, as I know it's a fool's errand: you're deep enough into denial of reality that I wouldn't be able to reel you back in even if I cared to try. At the least it'd be nice if you kept it to yourself, though.
That 90% may THINK that ipv4 works so well, but that's because they don't know better. They hassle with programs trying to work around NAT and such, but they don't know it's the limitations of ipv4 that cause that. Then there's the potential of ipv6... who knows what new resources we'd have if ipv6's capabilities were available right now.
So the article summary tried to disprove the notion that you have nothing to worry about if you have nothing to hide by citing a case where a guy had something he had to hide?
It's a fair assumption that you would have little knowledge of economics, as that's the case for most people who call for spending increases as a means to shore up the economy. Congrats: you seem to be in the minority who understands his opinion in the context of an actual economic theory.
As for answering what you said, there's a good deal that can be done at the federal level to encourage domestic investment, especially in the form of lowering factors that discourage it. We could even go so far as to work to make the US something of a tax haven.
Unfortunately our representatives have indicated no interest in fixing anything fundamental. Reid even laid it out on the table, naming as a top priority that the legislation be understandable to the common man. Lord knows that's not going to happen through better economic education.
Simple moving money doesn't necessarily lead to economic growth, especially considering international trade where plenty of the money can end up moving overseas.
Lending markets provide a great deal of the capital required for economic expansion, and if as you say lower/middle class spending doesn't drop as much then it makes even more sense to move to prop up the lending markets. There are various "easy" tools available to accomplish this including further lowering of capital gains taxes and other positive and non-negative incentives.
Focus on keeping money moving and you'll be doing it at the expense of encouraging further growth. At best the moving money approach largely maintains the current state while in reality it lends itself to "leaks". Instead let's look to the future, restoring growth by encouraging investment.
And all that's not even considering that the current problem is centered in the lending markets... let's fix it at the source.
It's unfortunate that so many Americans share in that terribly oversimplified understanding of economics. It's a failure of our education system, I suppose, that people have such a vague understanding of how money works.
Tell me, what do you think "rich" people do with the money they don't spend? While the poor folks spend a larger proportion of their income, as you indicate, with plenty of it being skimmed off in taxes or heading overseas where the goods were produced, the more well off invest their money, providing capital that largely stays here in this country laying the foundation for further growth and wealth for everyone. Your point of view is completely backwards: it assumes "rich" people shove their money under their mattresses where it does no good for anyone when in fact their money is the investment that fuels our economy.
Remember: for better or worse credit is a vital part of our economy, and the capital to back credit doesn't come from purchases. It comes from investment, including deposits at banks.
But hey, let's address the good times of the 90s since the explanation is so simple. The 90s boom came about precisely because of enormous worker productivity gains as computers were better integrated into businesses. More productivity meant more efficiencies which meant (get ready for it) more available capital for growing industry and the economy.
See the connection? Our economy is best grown and supported through the availability of capital, whether it comes from increased efficiencies or through letting the "rich" invest more money, making it available for growth.
This notion that giving granny a couple more bucks to spend is the way to grow the economy is a flat out lie that appeals especially to granny and others who get a good feeling from the transfer of wealth.
You've hit the nail on the head by separating monopolies into abusive and non-abusive. That's a very important thing that plenty of people overlook: not only are monopolies not absolutely bad, but they're far more widespread than most people realize. Keep in mind that, for example, Lenovo has a monopoly on ThinkPads and Campbell's has a monopoly on Campbell's Soup.
But if you have a non-abusive monopoly, what's the harm? Why does it *need* to be broken up? In addition to the futility you identified, so long as a monopoly is not abusing its position, why is it a problem?
Monopolies are certainly still subject to market pricing. That a company has a monopoly on a product doesn't mean it can charge whatever it wants: at some price consumers will not pay. That side of the equation still holds.
Obviously you're talking about the other side of the equation, the price pressures brought about by competition. Well, the THREAT of competition is still there. If the company prices itself too high it will no longer be a monopoly, as other companies will see the opportunity to undercut the incumbent, breaking the monopoly. This limits the amount by which a monopolist can become abusive in a free market: only market inefficiencies can maintain the monopoly, and these days those inefficiencies are often pretty low, depending on the specific market.
So the key to it all is lowering these inefficiencies. Once they're low the market can largely police itself, letting "good" monopolies survive and punishing abusive monopolies with competition....which is where government comes in. These days artificial barriers to entry created by government, often with support of the existing companies, add tremendously to market inefficiencies. The best way we could approach dealing with monopolies is to get government out of business, promoting competition instead of standing in its way while legislating it forward at the same time.
But that wouldn't feed lawyers... the biggest inefficiency of them all.
Most libertarians I know would have no problem admitting that. Why prod for that answer when you could just ask?
But then you should look deeper and see what's under the greed. It doesn't simply end at "I don't want to pay for that." If that was the case you'd see libertarians stealing cars left and right and ripping off convenience stores without moral qualm. Instead you see libertarians proclaiming strong support for property rights and the value of contractual agreements, both matters where such support means the person will often end up having to pay for stuff.
Greed isn't a bad thing. Have you managed to amass any property or money at all? That's a shiny computer you're claiming to own. You greedy bastard; why didn't you given it away as soon as you acquired it?
No, the problem isn't greed but rather how one reacts to it. Further, the boogeyman of greed is one of the most used strawmen in lousy arguments. It's quite easy and politically expedient to speak of attacking greedy people instead of talking about the more meaty issues of where the money's to go.
That's not even getting into that libertarians don't want their money taken from them for reasons beyond simple wanting it for themselves.
More precisely, government can't have such absolute effects on people. It can't absolutely prevent people from screwing with each other, just as it can't absolutely prevent people from owning guns or absolutely prevent a minor from drinking. It can only provide influences with various degrees of "encouragement."
Libertarians want people to be free to pursue their own happiness, believing that people can decide what they personally want from life better than the government can mandate it, and they can pursue their chosen direction well so long as nobody stands in the way. Thus, libertarians call for a government to influence people, dissuading them from getting in each others' way.
A ban on gun ownership doesn't work with this motivation as gun ownership doesn't represent someone standing in anyone else's way. Quite the oppose: such a ban is the government standing in the potential owner's way without sufficient justification.
So what you're saying is he wants to do his darnedest to make sure there's less money to expand businesses, less money to hire new employees, less available capital to grow the economy, lower returns on investment, and less retirement certainty... then just hope for the best?
Good plan from his point of view: once we have to all beg the government for sustenance, those in power will have really nice positions.
You seem to be confusing libertarianism with anarchy.
Your comment talked about how the lack of government ended up being a bad thing... well of course it was! The markets that libertarians embrace rely on a functional legal system and other services of government to provide the foundation on which they operate. Then, libertarians spend all this time talking about the enforcement of rights, enforcement that would be provided by governments.
The solution to bad government is not no government, but a fixed government, one that keeps people from screwing with each other but largely stands out of their way, allowing people the freedom to make of themselves what they want.
Libertarians recognize this. The lack of a government is often as bad a failure as a bad one.
Whoever wrote this page is the internet version of a crazy old guy eating out of bins, mumbling and throwing cats at people who come too close. Good to see that Ron Paul has career options after he gets pounded in this election...
Many filesharing programs have those internal libraries. Maybe he wanted to put all of his mp3s in the same library and thought that adding them to the shared folder was the proper way.
isn't it just an extension of the number of bits in the address field? No. I'll leave it as an exercise to read up on what it really is, but IPv6 contains a number of rather fundamental features and fixes aside from increased number of addresses. These range from integrated security capabilities to interesting routing possibilities.
In fact, it's probably in good part due to these additional features that changeover is proving complicated.
To rephrase, why do we have SUVs today? Because people wanted them and the government didn't interfere, letting people do what they wanted to do with their own money.
Slashdot Mirror
As my professional psychologist collegues responded to your comment: "Where to start?"
There's a lot wrong with what you said. If you're interested in getting it right check out
Dickens, W., & Flynn, J. (2001) Heritability estimates versus large environmental effects: The IQ paradox resolved. Psychological Review, 108 (2), 346-349
and
Flynn, J. (1999). Searching for justice: The discovery of IQ gains over time. American Psychologist, 54(1), 5-20
I repeat: this was exactly the same test. That includes the testing environment, testing administrators, etc.
Legitimate psychologists aren't stupid. They have studied the Flynn effect extensively; they've considered any explanation you could come up with and many others with some of the best statistical methods seen in any of the sciences. Throughout all of that the Flynn effect has been pretty definitively laid at the feet of the person himself.
You could propose opinions and favorite explanations all you want, but there's no need: the matter has been formally and extensively studied, so such guesses are immediately obsolete.
"There is a correlation between that ability and intelligence, but it's nothing more than a correlation, so an increased IQ in a population over time could just as easily be due to changes in the tests themselves as changes in those being tested."
Actually, the Flynn effect, in which IQ scores have been increasing over the years, is observed with identical tests.
It absolutely represents a change in the people being tested, though there isn't agreement on what this change /means/.
Absurdly low capital gains tax rate encouraging risky behavior? What an absurd statement!
As if having a low tax rate made investors somehow ok with losing money through betting on riskier investments?
I, and various people I know, on various platforms, had all sorts of troubles with Ekiga.
When it wasn't locking up or failing unexpectedly, it would occasionally halfway work by sending a random mix of video and/or audio channels. To begin an Ekiga session often meant ten minutes of calling and recalling until it randomly got enough channels going in the right directions to be acceptable.
Also, it's interface was just plain cruddy.
The Ekiga developers seemed to believe that these problems didn't exist, while users would report them on the mailing list and through bug reports to various distributions.
After waiting through version after version for these problems to be resolved, I finally got tired of pulling my hair out and moved on to telepathy/empathy, which works just about every time.
Ekiga, as far as I am concerned, is the devil.
Oh yeah. Those rich person clubs are just full of people smart enough to make a ton of money but somehow stupid enough to just shove it in their mattresses.
In reality if the rich person wasn't spending money on this sort of thing he'd be investing it elsewhere, and possibly with even better results for the economy. Throw a little cash at a joyride and you may provide daily wages for a crew of ten. Invest the money in a business and the business might provide stable employment for a thousand.
No, it's not certain. It's a risk, and that's why it's nice to have rich people with money available to invest around.
Anyway, the point is, you're completely off in your attitude that the rich participate in the economy only through their rich person flings, and while it doesn't matter in this case it's possible that this misconception could lead to some wrong conclusions that do.
What do you think a corporation is? Where does one come from? Some organism that falls out of the sky, or perhaps a funny type of rock formation?
No, a corporation is an organization set up by individuals expressing their individual freedoms. Everything a corporation does is at the behest of individuals, and all of its successes or failures are tied back to those people.
In short a corporation will rightfully display many rights otherwise belonging to individuals because it is itself an expression of the rights of individuals.
In this case when you limit what a corporation can do--telling an ISP that it must do something--you effectually limit the rights of the individuals behind the corporation to go about their business as they fit. ALL restrictions are on individuals eventually.
You're living in a different world, picking and choosing among facts to support your foregone conclusions. Hopefully someday someone will catch you off guard and some legitimate information will get through. Maybe it will even change your mind.
Cuba's a fine example: the state of Cuban health care isn't nearly as simple and wonderful as you assert, though by picking and choosing through facts it's easy to see how you could be mislead into thinking that. After all, it's easy for governments to set up their systems to be so misleading.
But anyway, I'm not seeking to lay it out for you, as I know it's a fool's errand: you're deep enough into denial of reality that I wouldn't be able to reel you back in even if I cared to try. At the least it'd be nice if you kept it to yourself, though.
They vary market by market.
All three of the markets I've lived in, Louisiana, Texas, and Virginia, saw port blocking.
Additionally, service in Virginia was just plain terrible.
Wow. Just... wow.
That 90% may THINK that ipv4 works so well, but that's because they don't know better. They hassle with programs trying to work around NAT and such, but they don't know it's the limitations of ipv4 that cause that. Then there's the potential of ipv6... who knows what new resources we'd have if ipv6's capabilities were available right now.
So the article summary tried to disprove the notion that you have nothing to worry about if you have nothing to hide by citing a case where a guy had something he had to hide?
Brilliant!
It's a fair assumption that you would have little knowledge of economics, as that's the case for most people who call for spending increases as a means to shore up the economy. Congrats: you seem to be in the minority who understands his opinion in the context of an actual economic theory.
As for answering what you said, there's a good deal that can be done at the federal level to encourage domestic investment, especially in the form of lowering factors that discourage it. We could even go so far as to work to make the US something of a tax haven.
Unfortunately our representatives have indicated no interest in fixing anything fundamental. Reid even laid it out on the table, naming as a top priority that the legislation be understandable to the common man. Lord knows that's not going to happen through better economic education.
Simple moving money doesn't necessarily lead to economic growth, especially considering international trade where plenty of the money can end up moving overseas.
Lending markets provide a great deal of the capital required for economic expansion, and if as you say lower/middle class spending doesn't drop as much then it makes even more sense to move to prop up the lending markets. There are various "easy" tools available to accomplish this including further lowering of capital gains taxes and other positive and non-negative incentives.
Focus on keeping money moving and you'll be doing it at the expense of encouraging further growth. At best the moving money approach largely maintains the current state while in reality it lends itself to "leaks". Instead let's look to the future, restoring growth by encouraging investment.
And all that's not even considering that the current problem is centered in the lending markets... let's fix it at the source.
It's unfortunate that so many Americans share in that terribly oversimplified understanding of economics. It's a failure of our education system, I suppose, that people have such a vague understanding of how money works.
Tell me, what do you think "rich" people do with the money they don't spend? While the poor folks spend a larger proportion of their income, as you indicate, with plenty of it being skimmed off in taxes or heading overseas where the goods were produced, the more well off invest their money, providing capital that largely stays here in this country laying the foundation for further growth and wealth for everyone. Your point of view is completely backwards: it assumes "rich" people shove their money under their mattresses where it does no good for anyone when in fact their money is the investment that fuels our economy.
Remember: for better or worse credit is a vital part of our economy, and the capital to back credit doesn't come from purchases. It comes from investment, including deposits at banks.
But hey, let's address the good times of the 90s since the explanation is so simple. The 90s boom came about precisely because of enormous worker productivity gains as computers were better integrated into businesses. More productivity meant more efficiencies which meant (get ready for it) more available capital for growing industry and the economy.
See the connection? Our economy is best grown and supported through the availability of capital, whether it comes from increased efficiencies or through letting the "rich" invest more money, making it available for growth.
This notion that giving granny a couple more bucks to spend is the way to grow the economy is a flat out lie that appeals especially to granny and others who get a good feeling from the transfer of wealth.
You've hit the nail on the head by separating monopolies into abusive and non-abusive. That's a very important thing that plenty of people overlook: not only are monopolies not absolutely bad, but they're far more widespread than most people realize. Keep in mind that, for example, Lenovo has a monopoly on ThinkPads and Campbell's has a monopoly on Campbell's Soup.
...which is where government comes in. These days artificial barriers to entry created by government, often with support of the existing companies, add tremendously to market inefficiencies. The best way we could approach dealing with monopolies is to get government out of business, promoting competition instead of standing in its way while legislating it forward at the same time.
But if you have a non-abusive monopoly, what's the harm? Why does it *need* to be broken up? In addition to the futility you identified, so long as a monopoly is not abusing its position, why is it a problem?
Monopolies are certainly still subject to market pricing. That a company has a monopoly on a product doesn't mean it can charge whatever it wants: at some price consumers will not pay. That side of the equation still holds.
Obviously you're talking about the other side of the equation, the price pressures brought about by competition. Well, the THREAT of competition is still there. If the company prices itself too high it will no longer be a monopoly, as other companies will see the opportunity to undercut the incumbent, breaking the monopoly. This limits the amount by which a monopolist can become abusive in a free market: only market inefficiencies can maintain the monopoly, and these days those inefficiencies are often pretty low, depending on the specific market.
So the key to it all is lowering these inefficiencies. Once they're low the market can largely police itself, letting "good" monopolies survive and punishing abusive monopolies with competition.
But that wouldn't feed lawyers... the biggest inefficiency of them all.
Well yeah.
Most libertarians I know would have no problem admitting that. Why prod for that answer when you could just ask?
But then you should look deeper and see what's under the greed. It doesn't simply end at "I don't want to pay for that." If that was the case you'd see libertarians stealing cars left and right and ripping off convenience stores without moral qualm. Instead you see libertarians proclaiming strong support for property rights and the value of contractual agreements, both matters where such support means the person will often end up having to pay for stuff.
Greed isn't a bad thing. Have you managed to amass any property or money at all? That's a shiny computer you're claiming to own. You greedy bastard; why didn't you given it away as soon as you acquired it?
No, the problem isn't greed but rather how one reacts to it. Further, the boogeyman of greed is one of the most used strawmen in lousy arguments. It's quite easy and politically expedient to speak of attacking greedy people instead of talking about the more meaty issues of where the money's to go.
That's not even getting into that libertarians don't want their money taken from them for reasons beyond simple wanting it for themselves.
More precisely, government can't have such absolute effects on people. It can't absolutely prevent people from screwing with each other, just as it can't absolutely prevent people from owning guns or absolutely prevent a minor from drinking. It can only provide influences with various degrees of "encouragement."
Libertarians want people to be free to pursue their own happiness, believing that people can decide what they personally want from life better than the government can mandate it, and they can pursue their chosen direction well so long as nobody stands in the way. Thus, libertarians call for a government to influence people, dissuading them from getting in each others' way.
A ban on gun ownership doesn't work with this motivation as gun ownership doesn't represent someone standing in anyone else's way. Quite the oppose: such a ban is the government standing in the potential owner's way without sufficient justification.
So no, not like being able to own guns.
The cute thing is how you made a bunch of incorrect assumptions about my point of view.
Yours is one of those comments that says far more about the commenter than about the subject.
So what you're saying is he wants to do his darnedest to make sure there's less money to expand businesses, less money to hire new employees, less available capital to grow the economy, lower returns on investment, and less retirement certainty... then just hope for the best?
Good plan from his point of view: once we have to all beg the government for sustenance, those in power will have really nice positions.
You seem to be confusing libertarianism with anarchy.
Your comment talked about how the lack of government ended up being a bad thing... well of course it was! The markets that libertarians embrace rely on a functional legal system and other services of government to provide the foundation on which they operate. Then, libertarians spend all this time talking about the enforcement of rights, enforcement that would be provided by governments.
The solution to bad government is not no government, but a fixed government, one that keeps people from screwing with each other but largely stands out of their way, allowing people the freedom to make of themselves what they want.
Libertarians recognize this. The lack of a government is often as bad a failure as a bad one.
Many filesharing programs have those internal libraries. Maybe he wanted to put all of his mp3s in the same library and thought that adding them to the shared folder was the proper way.
In fact, it's probably in good part due to these additional features that changeover is proving complicated.
To rephrase, why do we have SUVs today? Because people wanted them and the government didn't interfere, letting people do what they wanted to do with their own money.
Thank god we're putting a stop to that!