Time wasted? Ha!:) I taught myself object-oriented software engineering playing around on a MOO (MUD, Object Oriented). That's one of the reasons I was able to get myself more than $70k/yr straight out of college.
(disclaimer: it is also very possible to teach yourself software engineering the wrong way using MUDs and MOOs and such. Especially in a learn-by-example environment...)
Well, most people doing extensive cell-phoning while driving are not engaged in complicated parking-lot maneuvers, cone avoidance, et cetera. They're going straight. down. the highway. Sometimes traffic is tricky, sometimes less so. A few people are probably capable of cutting off a conversation if they are transitioning from straightforward driving such as that and something more complicated.
(Just a few thoughts on the matter, not advocacy for or against any particular regulation or lack thereof regarding cell phones and driving).
Oh, I don't doubt that there's a variety of things that can help bring about more Education that aren't the obvious things. And there's maybe possibly a potential that the iPhone program might perhaps possibly be one of them. Maybe.
But the university isn't always out to better education. Often they're out to better their prestige, or at their bottom line. And when you have a gimmick like "iPhone for every student!" and you get in the news and get attention and attract good and/or well-funded students away from other universities, when the Feds are contributing a substantial portion of your budget for it (one way or another, money being fungible and all) then it's not so very clearly a matter of "making Education better" either. There are many things do that are orthogonal to Education.
Heck, there are things that people-in-charge-of-universities do that are orthogonal to Education and towards the university's well-being as a whole. Like, for instance, one dean I knew of who really limiting admissions to the Business School* in an attempt to boost its ranking, without any benefit to either Education and dubious (or worse) benefit to the university as a whole, but with plenty of glitz and such for his own resume... which is very business-savvy, I guess, and a prime example of the Principal-Agent problem.... I digress, though.
(* shoving off most anyone who didn't make it into the economics program, ha)
Well, that depends on whether your goal was to have the Feds fund a really nice stadium, a brand-new library building full of Internets, a student body full of iPhones, and HD projectors in every classroom.... or simply providing young adults with an affordable high-quality college education. At a minimum it's not really proving that good at addressing Affordability.
because every time the cost goes up, the politicians go all "rising costs of education!!!" and give them more money.
My econ prof called it the "cookie monster" effect. Colleges go "Me want cookie!!!!" and spend $$$ on this, and super-fancy new buildings with HD video projectors in every classroom, and clubhouses for their sports teams, and what-not... om nom nom nom.... and, when they're done, there's another cookie there waiting for them! Rinse and repeat. Wonderful incentive structure there, no? Mmmmhmm....
US consumers pay more for these drugs because they can pay more and the drug-sellers know it and set their prices accordingly. (The idea is that these very high profits will lure more companies to do research and develop more and better drugs and that 20 years from now, when the patents all expire, we'll have more cool cheap drugs than we would if no one could charge that much.)
It's not just that. Money has three purposes: a medium of exchange, the obvious one, but also a unit of account and a store of value. With a fiat currency, if the government is reasonably responsible with it (insert cynical snickering here) then you can have a fairly stable store of value: decaying by 2-6% a year due to inflation, maybe, but that's reasonably predictable.
If you tie your money supply to something like a commodity, you tie it to the volatility in that commodity. Here's a random site with a graph of the real price of gold for 1975-2007. Do you really want to tie your currency to that? Even if you assume that some of that volatility would be limited because of gold taking a more central role in the economy, it's still ridiculous.
Even if you won't have another big gold rush to shock your economy, there are probably better ideas....
(Think that's bad? Some people who think our currency should be tied to oil.)
Cash is not necessarily easier. Large sums of money are not safe to carry around as cash, as they can be lost/stolen. You will have even less security from such theft/fraud than you would from a credit card (although potentially more-limited exposure). Monitoring how much cash you have on you becomes necessary. Retrieving cash from ATMs may be inconvenient (or, for certain more-convenient ATMs, involve a fee) while retrieving cash from a bank teller will probably be even less convenient (requiring you to visit the branch during banker's hours). Receiving and cashing paper checks instead of electronic direct deposits is definitely not convenient. Keeping track of change and small bills amongst your cash may become inconvenient, without change-purses or wallets which are designed for purses and handbags (not back-pockets).
Credit card / debit card / check card transactions also have benefits in that they can provide you with an electronic auditing trail of exactly where you spent your money. (Quicken. Mint. MS Moneys.) This can be very convenient.
Re:This is a huge amount of work
on
Linux 2.6.27 Out
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
If you suggested that every single change to the codebase be reviewed by multiple developers in a traditional proprietary software development house you would be, rightly, laughed at. There simply isn't the resources.
Where I work, it's called "pair programming".
(If two programmers is enough to count as "multiple". Also, bug fixes are supposed to get an additional diff check.)
If you do it right, you not only save time by not-writing bugs you don't have to fix later, but you can also avoid wasting all sorts of time (writing the feature wrong, going down paths that could lead to disaster, or spinning your wheels and banging your head when you can't figure out something stupid like feeding rrdtool deltas when it expects raw counters...), and you can bring new developers up to speed on a code base very very quickly.
This is not capitalism - by influencing the market (especially so heavily) and giving money to institutions just because they're 'a huge part of the economy' we gave up capitalism.
We messed up before that - when the government decided that they wanted Fannie Mae to subsidize home ownership for all sorts of people, even lower-income types. Remember those good old intelligent progressive Clinton-era policymakers? And bad money drives out the good. We're just lucky more banks weren't overzealously subprime.
So our solution to a government-market-intervention failure is MORE INTERVENTION! Yay us! P.S. Obama will make everything better with his anti-free-trade policies and assorted miscellaneous subsidies to politically favored industries and assorted other intervention! (Alternatively, McCain will make it all better with... i got nothin', sorry.)
And the government who did their best to subsidize and encourage it!
Remember? It was back in the Clinton era, and there was a Fannie Mae accounting scandal, and in lieu of the serious reforms they were like "oh yeah yeah we'll be Nice instead and try to extend home ownership to even more Americans, even lower-incme ones!" Yay Subprime!
And, of course, bad money drives out the good. We're lucky there were as many responsible or quasi-responsible banks as there were.
And three cheers for two candidates (four candidates?) who don't know one thing between them about how to actually manage an economy.*
(* Try not to! Trying to get Reality to conform to your will is likely to make it worse.)
If you'd even glanced at TFA you'd realize that the two benefits of the liquids they're talking about are a) lighter than mercury and easier to launch, and b) Ionic, so that they won't evaporate.
So where's the explanation of why it's good and useful enough (and infrequently-enough abused) that it hasn't been banned from the get-go?
Now, it's not the horriblest thing in the world to ban it, but one must consider the price of doing so. Naked shorts provide the market with additional liquidity. When it's not being abused, this is useful.
The problem is we don't need SOCIALLY RESPONSIBLE investment funds, we need socially responsible INVESTMENT funds. Social responsibility should be something a well run fund has a philosophy and strategy for, like any other aspect of investment. It shouldn't be left to specialists.
I considered a "socially repsonsible" investment fund at one point. Then I realized the thing had pathetic returns, and figured the world would be better off with me investing in broad market ETFs and donating some money to useful charities.
And, assuming you're not going to be taking it out for another 10-40 years, it's a good, safe investment vehicle indeed. Buy stock now! (and in the future, regularly, with a fixed amount monthly, and take advantage of dollar cost averaging!)
This one is portable, and also makes phone calls and surfs the Web on its own (you don't need to lug things back to your desk). And it'll work off regular UPCs.
There is always demand for good, smart computer science people. (I graduated a much smaller university with a B.S. in C.S. not two years ago, and got a starting salary close to $75k. Of course, I had some nice little internships to get me Experience, and I'm darned good.) And he's been sitting at Stanford University, which has a bit of a reputation as a very nice school. Apparently if you're Smart (and privelleged+etc) Enough to get into Stanford, there's a good chance that employers are also likely to think you're good enough to be hired.*
(*N.B. This assessment of fitness for hiring may, or may not, be based on and/or accurately reflect your actual skills.)
If He is able, but not willing
Then He is malevolent.
Most refutations of the "problem of evil" in religion would aim for this one, arguing that, in fact, allowing the presence of evil effectively achieves a greater level of that desirable stuff (the promotion of which would be considered "benevolent") than preventing all evil would. Consider, in particular, the value of Free Will and people making their own decisions. Under this system, people making good decisions of their own and striving to overcome the evil in the world around them, is part of that "benevolent stuff", whereas people who are forced into doing all 'good' things all the time (because they are mindless puppets and their actions are not their own) would be a hollow imitation of what is "good" (except in the most extreme forms of fundamentalism).
It does depend on what people consider "good" and "evil", though. Those with a sufficiently self-centered or hedonistic approach might, for instance, consider any impediment to their personal ideas of what they want (money, power, pleasure, etc) to be an exhibit of "evil", even if this deprivation serves some absolute moral good (in a system of moral goodness -- God's -- that they do not recognize). If that is the case, then God will probably always seem malevolent to them.
Slashdot Mirror
Not part of the Third World? Which is it then - allied with the Soviets in the Second World or allied with the US in the First? :P
Fluoridation of the water, bad idea? Do you have stock invested in dental companies? Why do you hate our childrens' teeth?
(disclaimer: it is also very possible to teach yourself software engineering the wrong way using MUDs and MOOs and such. Especially in a learn-by-example environment...)
And I'm not sure why you feel donating money towards making some rich guys $200,000 car/planes is a particularly worthy cause.
(Just a few thoughts on the matter, not advocacy for or against any particular regulation or lack thereof regarding cell phones and driving).
Oh, I don't doubt that there's a variety of things that can help bring about more Education that aren't the obvious things. And there's maybe possibly a potential that the iPhone program might perhaps possibly be one of them. Maybe.
But the university isn't always out to better education. Often they're out to better their prestige, or at their bottom line. And when you have a gimmick like "iPhone for every student!" and you get in the news and get attention and attract good and/or well-funded students away from other universities, when the Feds are contributing a substantial portion of your budget for it (one way or another, money being fungible and all) then it's not so very clearly a matter of "making Education better" either. There are many things do that are orthogonal to Education.
Heck, there are things that people-in-charge-of-universities do that are orthogonal to Education and towards the university's well-being as a whole. Like, for instance, one dean I knew of who really limiting admissions to the Business School* in an attempt to boost its ranking, without any benefit to either Education and dubious (or worse) benefit to the university as a whole, but with plenty of glitz and such for his own resume... which is very business-savvy, I guess, and a prime example of the Principal-Agent problem.... I digress, though.
(* shoving off most anyone who didn't make it into the economics program, ha)
Well, that depends on whether your goal was to have the Feds fund a really nice stadium, a brand-new library building full of Internets, a student body full of iPhones, and HD projectors in every classroom.... or simply providing young adults with an affordable high-quality college education. At a minimum it's not really proving that good at addressing Affordability.
because every time the cost goes up, the politicians go all "rising costs of education!!!" and give them more money. My econ prof called it the "cookie monster" effect. Colleges go "Me want cookie!!!!" and spend $$$ on this, and super-fancy new buildings with HD video projectors in every classroom, and clubhouses for their sports teams, and what-not... om nom nom nom.... and, when they're done, there's another cookie there waiting for them! Rinse and repeat. Wonderful incentive structure there, no? Mmmmhmm....
US consumers pay more for these drugs because they can pay more and the drug-sellers know it and set their prices accordingly. (The idea is that these very high profits will lure more companies to do research and develop more and better drugs and that 20 years from now, when the patents all expire, we'll have more cool cheap drugs than we would if no one could charge that much.)
It's not just that. Money has three purposes: a medium of exchange, the obvious one, but also a unit of account and a store of value. With a fiat currency, if the government is reasonably responsible with it (insert cynical snickering here) then you can have a fairly stable store of value: decaying by 2-6% a year due to inflation, maybe, but that's reasonably predictable.
If you tie your money supply to something like a commodity, you tie it to the volatility in that commodity. Here's a random site with a graph of the real price of gold for 1975-2007. Do you really want to tie your currency to that? Even if you assume that some of that volatility would be limited because of gold taking a more central role in the economy, it's still ridiculous. Even if you won't have another big gold rush to shock your economy, there are probably better ideas....
(Think that's bad? Some people who think our currency should be tied to oil.)
Yes! And isn't it nice to know that your WaMu bank account* is safe? Unlike, say, your WaMu stock.
(*Now a JPMorgan Chase bank account. Safe up to $100,000 - er, I mean, $250,000.)
Credit card / debit card / check card transactions also have benefits in that they can provide you with an electronic auditing trail of exactly where you spent your money. (Quicken. Mint. MS Moneys.) This can be very convenient.
Where I work, it's called "pair programming".
(If two programmers is enough to count as "multiple". Also, bug fixes are supposed to get an additional diff check.)
If you do it right, you not only save time by not-writing bugs you don't have to fix later, but you can also avoid wasting all sorts of time (writing the feature wrong, going down paths that could lead to disaster, or spinning your wheels and banging your head when you can't figure out something stupid like feeding rrdtool deltas when it expects raw counters...), and you can bring new developers up to speed on a code base very very quickly.
We messed up before that - when the government decided that they wanted Fannie Mae to subsidize home ownership for all sorts of people, even lower-income types. Remember those good old intelligent progressive Clinton-era policymakers? And bad money drives out the good. We're just lucky more banks weren't overzealously subprime.
So our solution to a government-market-intervention failure is MORE INTERVENTION! Yay us! P.S. Obama will make everything better with his anti-free-trade policies and assorted miscellaneous subsidies to politically favored industries and assorted other intervention! (Alternatively, McCain will make it all better with... i got nothin', sorry.)
Remember? It was back in the Clinton era, and there was a Fannie Mae accounting scandal, and in lieu of the serious reforms they were like "oh yeah yeah we'll be Nice instead and try to extend home ownership to even more Americans, even lower-incme ones!" Yay Subprime!
And, of course, bad money drives out the good. We're lucky there were as many responsible or quasi-responsible banks as there were. And three cheers for two candidates (four candidates?) who don't know one thing between them about how to actually manage an economy.*
(* Try not to! Trying to get Reality to conform to your will is likely to make it worse.)
If you'd even glanced at TFA you'd realize that the two benefits of the liquids they're talking about are a) lighter than mercury and easier to launch, and b) Ionic, so that they won't evaporate.
Now, it's not the horriblest thing in the world to ban it, but one must consider the price of doing so. Naked shorts provide the market with additional liquidity. When it's not being abused, this is useful.
blamemoses.
I considered a "socially repsonsible" investment fund at one point. Then I realized the thing had pathetic returns, and figured the world would be better off with me investing in broad market ETFs and donating some money to useful charities.
Are those percentages adjusted for inflation?
Whee.
This one is portable, and also makes phone calls and surfs the Web on its own (you don't need to lug things back to your desk). And it'll work off regular UPCs.
(*N.B. This assessment of fitness for hiring may, or may not, be based on and/or accurately reflect your actual skills.)
Most refutations of the "problem of evil" in religion would aim for this one, arguing that, in fact, allowing the presence of evil effectively achieves a greater level of that desirable stuff (the promotion of which would be considered "benevolent") than preventing all evil would. Consider, in particular, the value of Free Will and people making their own decisions. Under this system, people making good decisions of their own and striving to overcome the evil in the world around them, is part of that "benevolent stuff", whereas people who are forced into doing all 'good' things all the time (because they are mindless puppets and their actions are not their own) would be a hollow imitation of what is "good" (except in the most extreme forms of fundamentalism).
It does depend on what people consider "good" and "evil", though. Those with a sufficiently self-centered or hedonistic approach might, for instance, consider any impediment to their personal ideas of what they want (money, power, pleasure, etc) to be an exhibit of "evil", even if this deprivation serves some absolute moral good (in a system of moral goodness -- God's -- that they do not recognize). If that is the case, then God will probably always seem malevolent to them.
(Anyone know any good Customer Support types, or good Perl developers? i can split the referral bonus! :)