What are your thoughts on the computer security industry's current trend of staffing computer security professionals who look at industry best practices and security products to run down a checklist of actions? I often point out that many (approximately *all* that I've met) computer security professionals are big on password policy, anti-virus, patching, and the like, and *never* sit down to develop operational risk and threat models. In essence: what's going on in the industry with security as simple compliance (executing a prefabricated list of tactics) versus security as an organizational strategy (studying the field and selecting what tactics to apply, and where and how)?
If instead of $10,000,000 at a 1% profit we get $1,000,000 at a 1% profit, we're still charging both the cost of risk ($9,100,000) and the cost of operation (wages, etc., another $800,990); just the cost of risk falls ($189,109), and the profit margin falls ($9,901 from $99,010). Technically, you could take a 10% profit margin and charge $1,089,109, which is a lot less that $10,000,000.
In all likelihood, if your insurance premium dropped from $107/month to $10/month, you'd easily sign up for a lower deductible policy (why pay $800 for a cracked windshield when you can have a $0 glass deductible?), and end up spending $25-$35/month on $500,000 CSL, full coverage, vehicle replacement, and low deductibles. For less than a third of what you previously paid for insurance, you're covered for big lawsuits, medical injury, any damage, towing, and not just a total-out payment but a payment for a replacement (used, operational, low-enough risk for the insurance company to not fret over it failing and causing *another* claim) vehicle: the risk of sudden expenses goes away.
This might sound like a bunch of expense for no reason if you don't understand insurance: it's risk transfer. You're transferring your risk onto another insurer. If it's only 1% likely that you or anyone else will *ever* face these expenses, then the cost of that risk is 1% of the cost: if 1 in 100 people totals a car every year and the cost of replacement is $20,000, then the cost of insuring you for complete vehicle replacement is $200/year or under $17 per month--and that cost *replaces* your total-out risk, so if that's a $4/mo risk, then your insurance goes up by only $13/month to give you the vehicle replacement option. When you're thinking in terms of "I PROBABLY WON'T but COULD experience a $20,000 cost OR I could spend $13/month to make sure shit like that just doesn't happen to me ever," you tend to see how the extra $13/month might make sense. Even if it never pans out--it probably won't--it's $13.
From an economic standpoint, you could roll the savings into regular vehicle maintenance which you should have anyway but might be skimping on. Following a basic maintenance and inspection cycle reduces the risk of your vehicle failing in a way which generates a claim, so saves the insurer money, and helps keep those low rates. It also extends the life of the vehicle, saving *you* money in the long run. That saves a whole lot of labor building new vehicles, and moves your "buy a new $20,000 vehicle" expense to new markets. The insurer would likely look at a car with a $3,000 motor and opt to replace the motor instead of buy a new $20,000 car, even if the motor is higher than the total value of the car, if they expect the car to not continue generating claims; that means you can eventually sell that car to upgrade (on your own dime, not the insurer's), and the next guy buying a used car will save a bunch of money.
Lowering risk and making insurance incredibly cheap could easily benefit the insurer, benefit the customer, and drastically reduce the number of new cars manufactured.
The nature of internet wargarble is to completely ignore what's going on around them.
Most likely, the operator of a machine is responsible for that machine by law. We'll just move to no-fault insurance as in several current U.S. states; it's completely fucking retarded as-is, and only makes sense if the machines are not under the direct control of the owner. With cars self-driving, we can only establish fault when people are driving themselves, or when they've grossly neglected to maintain the machine.
Manufacturers are only liable for manufacturer defects. We expect a certain rate of defective behavior; if autonomous cars are less-defective than human drivers, we'll establish a baseline as such. Insurance is against industrial equipment malfunction. In case of gross manufacturer defect, the normal manufacturer liabilities come into play.
Citizen Dividend seem to be akin to state-guaranteed income for everyone.
It's a form of UBI, yes. A lot of people talk about handing out a fixed amount of money ($10,000/year) or funding the UBI from various taxes (a pure flat-tax system, carbon credits, a national sales tax); my Citizen's Dividend uses a general progressive system as today, and attaches a 17% flat tax to all taxable income (business and personal), which is then distributed evenly.
You are linking wice to the same impossible to understand spreadsheet
Sorry, I keep forgetting people can't understand the meaning of data even if the context is obvious. Those numbers are obviously tax computations on income. In particular, they're tax computations on the current take-home income after taxes compared to the take-home under a revised tax system including the Citizen's Dividend I outlined. Two-adult households have two Dividends (they're per-person) and, as stated at the top, dependents under 18 (children) of low-income families are eligible for public aid (food stamps, etc.); adults are essentially removed from the welfare system (except for naturalized Americans, who receive the Dividend as a non-refundable tax credit, and receive public aid if income is too low--this avoids any and all changes to the situation of immigrants who aren't workers, keeping the existing social safety net and not incentivising non-working immigration).
The second link was meant to go to a long blog post; I mispasted.
I'm currently working on a book covering policy economics, culminating in a full conceptual description of the Citizen's Dividend. This conceptual description includes an analysis of the retail market; description of the United States Federal and State spending and taxes; funding strategy; transitional risks, costs, and strategies; direct impacts on incomes; indirect impacts on jobs; and the long-term effects of the plan (job stabilization, automatic growth with national wealth and GDP-per-capita, etc.). Basically, a step-by-step design of the policy, and not a bill to submit to Congress.
That will take some time and rattle some cages. I call out a lot of flaws in modern economic policies and economists's positions; I've had actual economists agree with me and armchair economists get hella salty, and of course nobody will let me into a Ph.D. program to refine and then formally defend anything new. I've taken to just talking up a few Ph.D. holders and college professors and bouncing insights off them, then validating their disagreements (if any)--sometimes they're right; surprisingly, most academics deal with new ways of thinking about a problem in their field by giving no direct comment, or asking a bunch of questions. Most *students* just claim they read something different in a book once, so you're obviously wrong (this is why you need to vet everything before publishing a book: if you say anything technically-incorrect, some group of idiots will take it as new, brilliant insights).
One of the main contention points is scientific versus engineering economics: Solow-Swan successfully measures an economy's growth in terms of technical progress separate from population growth, necessarily by analyzing the input factors of land (ore, mines, etc.), labor (worker time), and capital (machines, knowledge); while I describe land and capital as products and moderators of labor, thus labor as the single production input factor. A lot of people argue that their textbooks don't say anything about that; other people try to argue that businesses have some other expense (ignoring that the next expense is a supplier's labor plus profit margin); and still others are stuck on theories of value (I don't believe in value as a property of a thing) and Marxism, which is... hilarious. Seriously. Marxists have some argument about how we should move off labor and onto
Trump is good at persuasion and negotiation; it's part of business.
You're assuming the average person cares about policy details, facts, and logic... they don't...
The problem comes when you lay out facts and logic in short, concise form in front of someone people look to for leadership, and his only response is, "Uh, I don't believe that." You can get away with that to a very limited degree, even with the authority of popularity behind you; it's impossible to continue to look good when your attacks are cleanly parried and reversed.
Take Trump's talk about immigration, for example. Trump said we let hundreds of thousands of Muslim immigrants into this country, and "hundreds" of they and their children have been implicated in acts of terror. Pundits are yelling a lot of "No Mr. Trump, you're wrong and stupid," pointing out that the Orlando shooter's parents moved to America 25 years ago and he was born and raised American, so there's no sensible way to pre-screen this. Of course nobody buys into that.
We associate terrorism with murder.
In the United States, we have 4.9 murders per 100,000 people per year. Of 783,000 Muslim refugees from Afghanistan and Iran in the past 15 years, three (3) have been implicated in terrorism. Over 15 years, we've stocked 2.77 million Muslim immigrants and their children, including those refugees. If only 100 are implicated in terrorism, then any single full-blooded American is TWENTY TIMES as likely to be a murderer as one of these Americanized Muslims. Even if as many as 2,000 were implicated as terrorists--which even Trump hasn't claimed--that's still a lower rate of murderers among Muslim American immigrants than all other Americans.
You pull something like that. It puts Trump on the defensive. Now he has to say something about how a non-immigrant American is way more likely to murder you than a Muslim immigrant, but not really, because Islam; or he has to just claim whatever you just said isn't true, somehow. You pull out all your contorted logic *after* you put him on defense. Trump argued that Muslims don't turn in their own; the FBI says otherwise. This is where you pull out the logical argument that someone born and raised American for the whole 20 years of his life and radicalized over the Internet by out-of-country extremists isn't a threat we missed when his parents immigrated here.
You don't go in and say, "Let's think about this rationally: do you really believe there's a checkbox that says you plan to raise a child to be a fifth-column terrorist while you're here in America?" You quickly and sharply pull out facts-and-figures, something hard that will nudge him off-balance. Then, before he recovers, you hit him with every other proposition; the audience will just see a clown stumbling around on stage. If you start with something that doesn't solidly undermine his argument and force a response, you'll just get mocked for having a differing and sheltered opinion, and then *you* look stupid, which means no one's convinced you have a clue what's going on.
I like economic policy though.
Trump's entire argument against Bernie-style policies (e.g. a UBI) is funding: where do you get the money? I can actually tackle that (Bernie can't; he has undeveloped ideals with lots of holes, most of which are legitimately dangerous). This is a *huge* problem for Trump, because his entire line of debate would be undermined: for any attack he has, I can give a short and concrete answer.
Not only can I answer for funding problems, but I can also cite and control immigration risks, fanciful unemployment risks, and risks of diminishing the support of our existing system. My arguments for a Citizen's Dividend include that it establishes a basic standard-of-living and worker protection via a non-wage income stream, which avoids the job loss and reduction of consumer buying power cause
I wish they'd let citizens debate a stand-in and then give a pass or fail to debate presidential and congressional candidates. I like the argument about how Trump can't debate Bernie on policy, but Bernie can't debate Trump on finances (where is Bernie getting all this money?), because I can actually develop economic policy *and* show exactly where the money's coming from. I would break Trump in a policy debate and, honestly, sometimes I just want to crush *someone*.
You do realize that simply ends up being taxpayers footing the bill.
Most people think money is wealth, and don't believe in labor and production. They think you work for money, and don't think about where all the shit they're buying comes from (aside from "CHINA!").
You can't eat money, as much as everyone seems to want to.
Where I sit, it's always been the people I worked around. They had these fancy degrees and talked a lot about things like access controls, 2-factor authentication, and training the user to recognize phishing; since ~2008, I've rarely heard anyone talk about trust zones, threat models, risk analysis, or anything else beyond "turn on password complexity" and "patch the servers". That includes people with 15 years in the industry.
Infosec isn't a bad field, although most infosec people I meet are in the whitehat camp. You get people who are overly concerned with audits and compliance, and they don't build threat models; they get hacked and they say, "Well, our anti-virus didn't work! We have all the right stuff!" when all they have is a checklist of industry best practices and off-the-shelf products.
If you're going infosec, get yourself some penetration testing and some risk modeling training while you're in there. Operational risk management is huge.
This is a lot of philosophy and not a lot of economics. Let's all "do the right thing", even if it means 17,000,000 starving children, because not "doing the right thing" and getting food to all 17,000,000 of those starving children would leave a bad taste in our mouths. Blood on your hands is better than the knowledge that you didn't get to stroke your ego.
Slashdot is full of liberal-libertarian wargarble largely in the vein of "money is economy" and "we can solve all our problems by hurting the rich". Basically, the response to poor people suffering is to attack the rich for being too well-off, with no explanation of how that helps. That attitude is what drove me largely toward economics; the tax impacts (WageTax sheet) of my Citizen's Dividend pisses people off for not terrorizing the rich, even though the impact on the poor is massive. (Of course, the hyper-conservatives on Slashdot hate this, too, because hand-outs are bad.)
You'll notice the yammer here is about ending deficit spending (not always a bad thing: if your deficit is smaller than your debt grows by inflation, your debt is getting smaller) by accusing the rich of being drug addicts and then taking away their money. Rich people bad. Bad bad bad.
With over 100 billion dollars in the bank, I could hire a hundred thousand people... and pay them for five years. Then the whole system would collapse for lack of money to pay salaries, unless I started charging users for that, yeah.
Where do they get 10 million dollars of cash flow to pay all these salaries?
These companies have hundreds of billions of dollars in CASH
And how would it impact their cash flow if they started the War on Drugs--sorry, War on Secret Handshakes? Would their cash reserves dwindle until they could no longer operate, much less carry out a big censorship network for specific, highly-targeted contexts without impacting their non-terrorist users? Would they have to apply 4 times the advertising? Could they do it without charging users for search?
A lot of people see cash piles and turn continuous, on-going expenses into one-time costs, then claim patently-unsolvable problems are "trivial". Moderating content in the way suggested is roughly equivalent to perfect computer security.
It's not good intentions per se. The mode of thinking as a group and, really, in any context differs from the mode of thinking in any other context. Look at the UBI crowd (or any politicians), the Computer Science Primary Education crowd (or any educators), or any other group of people with a common ideal between them. The way an unaffiliated individual evaluates an ideal is *different* from the way the group evaluates it. Goals narrow and secondary impacts become invisible. Bad logic comes into play.
It's not a bad data point. We learn from tradition: we learn by reviewing what we've done. That's an important process.
I do a lot of economics in my free time, and I often explain minimum wage and welfare as such: societies develop wealth by technical progress, with wealth representing the production per capita (often approximated by GDP-per-capita or simply "The amount of stuff available per person"); various strategies for minimum standards of living and social safety nets incur various costs per capita; the cost taken, thus, must not exceed a certain proportion of the total wealth, or the system destabilizes, the need increases, and poverty becomes rampant. Thus newer systems such as single-payer healthcare and UBI are good systems in sufficiently-wealthy economies where they're both viable and overall better than old systems; and old systems which are now defunct and have *always* carried a cost (harmful) were better than *all* viable alternatives during some prior period in which those economies were less-wealthy.
Maybe the author's grandchildren aren't in the best position to exploit his works. Maybe the author's children or otherwise his immediate family are in the best position to exploit his works. Books now get printed, sold online, and shipped around; the scifi revolution happened in the 70s, not in 1902, and authors were unable to keep up with the demand for new books. Brandon Sanderson can't keep up with the demands of his fanbase, even as other authors struggle to attract attention for themselves; the person most positioned to exploit Sanderson's work will be Brandon Sanderson, thanks to the Internet, the amount of free time people have (the 8-hour work day was uncommon until after WW2!), the interest in the material, the method of marketing, and so forth. We can compare the past to the present and validate the old arguments against the new to trace what has changed and decide if the changes matter.
I'm trying to sort out books that cover all the material in fewer pages, lower book cost, and appreciable organization. I'm finding that some books for things like programming language design or computer science cost $20 or $50 and have clearer, more concise explanations than 1,000-page McGraw Hill tomes that cost $348.
...I don't care to study compsci in college; I dropped out. I'm looking at my local college's curriculum and syllabus for each class, snagging my own books, and self-studying. This may be more or less efficient (I can *certainly* learn 4 years of material in 6 months's time; however some of these courses have a discussion format, which I can only approximateby myself, and so some insights will grind in a lot less smoothly). Mathematics is also a lot harder to self-teach in a high-quality manner; most material is college text and, as mentioned above, most college textbooks are hunks of shit.
Education incurs cognitive load. Bad education curriculum and bad materials increase cognitive load. Good study strategies decrease cognitive load. Approaching material using strong study methods--Cornell notes, SQW4R/OK4R study methods, self-testing, group discussion--increases the rate of learning and memorization while reducing cognitive load. Using better material decreases the cognitive load incurred by using those study methods (or not using any study methods). With better study strategies, better material, or both, education is faster and more successful.
In my Citizen's Dividend plan, I specify that the payment is not taxed as an income and is protected from garnishing and other attacks. Basically, the income is provided as the minimum means to live; if you get a job once you've moved into the hovel, we can take as much of your job money as we want and not drive you into the streets to rot. The strategic problem is then how much we can garnish without driving you to quit your job because it's just not worth working for so little benefit.
It seems reasonable for something which replaces welfare and minimum wage; and removing the reciprocating taxation (the Dividend is paid for by a tax, and taxing it as income is taxing tax money!) allows us to reduce the amount of taxes required to provide it (if we taxed it at, say, 20% in total (17% + 3% general effective taxes), then it'd have to be 21.25%; but then we'd be taxing at 24%, so 22.36%; it approaches somewhere between 23% and 23.5% dedicated tax as a funding source, whereas untaxed it only needs a 17% funding source).
That's an appeal to tradition. I posit that copyright works spread much faster, and exploiting the distribution of copyright happens at a much higher rate. Your works get old faster, and so terms should now be shorter. QED.
Business is way more complex than that. Human group behavior often appears as something simple, especially when it isn't. In business, this often produces an effect whereby everyone in a business has honest, benevolent intentions, and manages to build a shambling, evil empire; actual malicious intent and selfish greed are rare events, but common outcomes.
Coursera has, for a long time, been molding itself into a corporate service platform. In reorganization, aligning the business with its strategic goals would rightly include removing out-of-scope practices such as providing open, free online courses. The major failure in that model is in evaluating those practices in the context of their *impact* on the business, rather than on the business strategy: not thinking about how the world interacts with you or how your actions will be seen by the world leads to taking actions that upset the population.
There's a lot of middle-class radicalization and social justice warrior stuff going on in this summary. There's even a direct attack on colleges and professors ("Let's teach a course because it's good for my ego"--teachers are all selfish assholes, right?), as if the entire practice of teaching is a pox on society, while the practice of learning is something cherished and valuable.
Slashdot Mirror
What are your thoughts on the computer security industry's current trend of staffing computer security professionals who look at industry best practices and security products to run down a checklist of actions? I often point out that many (approximately *all* that I've met) computer security professionals are big on password policy, anti-virus, patching, and the like, and *never* sit down to develop operational risk and threat models. In essence: what's going on in the industry with security as simple compliance (executing a prefabricated list of tactics) versus security as an organizational strategy (studying the field and selecting what tactics to apply, and where and how)?
It would most likely severely trim down the automaker industry and act as a huge boon to insurance.
It doesn't exactly work that way.
If instead of $10,000,000 at a 1% profit we get $1,000,000 at a 1% profit, we're still charging both the cost of risk ($9,100,000) and the cost of operation (wages, etc., another $800,990); just the cost of risk falls ($189,109), and the profit margin falls ($9,901 from $99,010). Technically, you could take a 10% profit margin and charge $1,089,109, which is a lot less that $10,000,000.
In all likelihood, if your insurance premium dropped from $107/month to $10/month, you'd easily sign up for a lower deductible policy (why pay $800 for a cracked windshield when you can have a $0 glass deductible?), and end up spending $25-$35/month on $500,000 CSL, full coverage, vehicle replacement, and low deductibles. For less than a third of what you previously paid for insurance, you're covered for big lawsuits, medical injury, any damage, towing, and not just a total-out payment but a payment for a replacement (used, operational, low-enough risk for the insurance company to not fret over it failing and causing *another* claim) vehicle: the risk of sudden expenses goes away.
This might sound like a bunch of expense for no reason if you don't understand insurance: it's risk transfer. You're transferring your risk onto another insurer. If it's only 1% likely that you or anyone else will *ever* face these expenses, then the cost of that risk is 1% of the cost: if 1 in 100 people totals a car every year and the cost of replacement is $20,000, then the cost of insuring you for complete vehicle replacement is $200/year or under $17 per month--and that cost *replaces* your total-out risk, so if that's a $4/mo risk, then your insurance goes up by only $13/month to give you the vehicle replacement option. When you're thinking in terms of "I PROBABLY WON'T but COULD experience a $20,000 cost OR I could spend $13/month to make sure shit like that just doesn't happen to me ever," you tend to see how the extra $13/month might make sense. Even if it never pans out--it probably won't--it's $13.
From an economic standpoint, you could roll the savings into regular vehicle maintenance which you should have anyway but might be skimping on. Following a basic maintenance and inspection cycle reduces the risk of your vehicle failing in a way which generates a claim, so saves the insurer money, and helps keep those low rates. It also extends the life of the vehicle, saving *you* money in the long run. That saves a whole lot of labor building new vehicles, and moves your "buy a new $20,000 vehicle" expense to new markets. The insurer would likely look at a car with a $3,000 motor and opt to replace the motor instead of buy a new $20,000 car, even if the motor is higher than the total value of the car, if they expect the car to not continue generating claims; that means you can eventually sell that car to upgrade (on your own dime, not the insurer's), and the next guy buying a used car will save a bunch of money.
Lowering risk and making insurance incredibly cheap could easily benefit the insurer, benefit the customer, and drastically reduce the number of new cars manufactured.
The nature of internet wargarble is to completely ignore what's going on around them.
Most likely, the operator of a machine is responsible for that machine by law. We'll just move to no-fault insurance as in several current U.S. states; it's completely fucking retarded as-is, and only makes sense if the machines are not under the direct control of the owner. With cars self-driving, we can only establish fault when people are driving themselves, or when they've grossly neglected to maintain the machine.
Manufacturers are only liable for manufacturer defects. We expect a certain rate of defective behavior; if autonomous cars are less-defective than human drivers, we'll establish a baseline as such. Insurance is against industrial equipment malfunction. In case of gross manufacturer defect, the normal manufacturer liabilities come into play.
Citizen Dividend seem to be akin to state-guaranteed income for everyone.
It's a form of UBI, yes. A lot of people talk about handing out a fixed amount of money ($10,000/year) or funding the UBI from various taxes (a pure flat-tax system, carbon credits, a national sales tax); my Citizen's Dividend uses a general progressive system as today, and attaches a 17% flat tax to all taxable income (business and personal), which is then distributed evenly.
You are linking wice to the same impossible to understand spreadsheet
Sorry, I keep forgetting people can't understand the meaning of data even if the context is obvious. Those numbers are obviously tax computations on income. In particular, they're tax computations on the current take-home income after taxes compared to the take-home under a revised tax system including the Citizen's Dividend I outlined. Two-adult households have two Dividends (they're per-person) and, as stated at the top, dependents under 18 (children) of low-income families are eligible for public aid (food stamps, etc.); adults are essentially removed from the welfare system (except for naturalized Americans, who receive the Dividend as a non-refundable tax credit, and receive public aid if income is too low--this avoids any and all changes to the situation of immigrants who aren't workers, keeping the existing social safety net and not incentivising non-working immigration).
The second link was meant to go to a long blog post; I mispasted.
I'm currently working on a book covering policy economics, culminating in a full conceptual description of the Citizen's Dividend. This conceptual description includes an analysis of the retail market; description of the United States Federal and State spending and taxes; funding strategy; transitional risks, costs, and strategies; direct impacts on incomes; indirect impacts on jobs; and the long-term effects of the plan (job stabilization, automatic growth with national wealth and GDP-per-capita, etc.). Basically, a step-by-step design of the policy, and not a bill to submit to Congress.
That will take some time and rattle some cages. I call out a lot of flaws in modern economic policies and economists's positions; I've had actual economists agree with me and armchair economists get hella salty, and of course nobody will let me into a Ph.D. program to refine and then formally defend anything new. I've taken to just talking up a few Ph.D. holders and college professors and bouncing insights off them, then validating their disagreements (if any)--sometimes they're right; surprisingly, most academics deal with new ways of thinking about a problem in their field by giving no direct comment, or asking a bunch of questions. Most *students* just claim they read something different in a book once, so you're obviously wrong (this is why you need to vet everything before publishing a book: if you say anything technically-incorrect, some group of idiots will take it as new, brilliant insights).
One of the main contention points is scientific versus engineering economics: Solow-Swan successfully measures an economy's growth in terms of technical progress separate from population growth, necessarily by analyzing the input factors of land (ore, mines, etc.), labor (worker time), and capital (machines, knowledge); while I describe land and capital as products and moderators of labor, thus labor as the single production input factor. A lot of people argue that their textbooks don't say anything about that; other people try to argue that businesses have some other expense (ignoring that the next expense is a supplier's labor plus profit margin); and still others are stuck on theories of value (I don't believe in value as a property of a thing) and Marxism, which is... hilarious. Seriously. Marxists have some argument about how we should move off labor and onto
Trump is good at persuasion and negotiation; it's part of business.
You're assuming the average person cares about policy details, facts, and logic... they don't...
The problem comes when you lay out facts and logic in short, concise form in front of someone people look to for leadership, and his only response is, "Uh, I don't believe that." You can get away with that to a very limited degree, even with the authority of popularity behind you; it's impossible to continue to look good when your attacks are cleanly parried and reversed.
Take Trump's talk about immigration, for example. Trump said we let hundreds of thousands of Muslim immigrants into this country, and "hundreds" of they and their children have been implicated in acts of terror. Pundits are yelling a lot of "No Mr. Trump, you're wrong and stupid," pointing out that the Orlando shooter's parents moved to America 25 years ago and he was born and raised American, so there's no sensible way to pre-screen this. Of course nobody buys into that.
We associate terrorism with murder.
In the United States, we have 4.9 murders per 100,000 people per year. Of 783,000 Muslim refugees from Afghanistan and Iran in the past 15 years, three (3) have been implicated in terrorism. Over 15 years, we've stocked 2.77 million Muslim immigrants and their children, including those refugees. If only 100 are implicated in terrorism, then any single full-blooded American is TWENTY TIMES as likely to be a murderer as one of these Americanized Muslims. Even if as many as 2,000 were implicated as terrorists--which even Trump hasn't claimed--that's still a lower rate of murderers among Muslim American immigrants than all other Americans.
You pull something like that. It puts Trump on the defensive. Now he has to say something about how a non-immigrant American is way more likely to murder you than a Muslim immigrant, but not really, because Islam; or he has to just claim whatever you just said isn't true, somehow. You pull out all your contorted logic *after* you put him on defense. Trump argued that Muslims don't turn in their own; the FBI says otherwise. This is where you pull out the logical argument that someone born and raised American for the whole 20 years of his life and radicalized over the Internet by out-of-country extremists isn't a threat we missed when his parents immigrated here.
You don't go in and say, "Let's think about this rationally: do you really believe there's a checkbox that says you plan to raise a child to be a fifth-column terrorist while you're here in America?" You quickly and sharply pull out facts-and-figures, something hard that will nudge him off-balance. Then, before he recovers, you hit him with every other proposition; the audience will just see a clown stumbling around on stage. If you start with something that doesn't solidly undermine his argument and force a response, you'll just get mocked for having a differing and sheltered opinion, and then *you* look stupid, which means no one's convinced you have a clue what's going on.
I like economic policy though.
Trump's entire argument against Bernie-style policies (e.g. a UBI) is funding: where do you get the money? I can actually tackle that (Bernie can't; he has undeveloped ideals with lots of holes, most of which are legitimately dangerous). This is a *huge* problem for Trump, because his entire line of debate would be undermined: for any attack he has, I can give a short and concrete answer.
Not only can I answer for funding problems, but I can also cite and control immigration risks, fanciful unemployment risks, and risks of diminishing the support of our existing system. My arguments for a Citizen's Dividend include that it establishes a basic standard-of-living and worker protection via a non-wage income stream, which avoids the job loss and reduction of consumer buying power cause
I wish they'd let citizens debate a stand-in and then give a pass or fail to debate presidential and congressional candidates. I like the argument about how Trump can't debate Bernie on policy, but Bernie can't debate Trump on finances (where is Bernie getting all this money?), because I can actually develop economic policy *and* show exactly where the money's coming from. I would break Trump in a policy debate and, honestly, sometimes I just want to crush *someone*.
You do realize that simply ends up being taxpayers footing the bill.
Most people think money is wealth, and don't believe in labor and production. They think you work for money, and don't think about where all the shit they're buying comes from (aside from "CHINA!").
You can't eat money, as much as everyone seems to want to.
High-treason is defined in the U.S. Constitution and is punished by execution.
If he's incompetent, the President should dismiss him from his post. (Executive)
If he's lying, Congress can impeach him.
Being so severely wrong so often is hazardous to your health.
Where I sit, it's always been the people I worked around. They had these fancy degrees and talked a lot about things like access controls, 2-factor authentication, and training the user to recognize phishing; since ~2008, I've rarely heard anyone talk about trust zones, threat models, risk analysis, or anything else beyond "turn on password complexity" and "patch the servers". That includes people with 15 years in the industry.
Infosec isn't a bad field, although most infosec people I meet are in the whitehat camp. You get people who are overly concerned with audits and compliance, and they don't build threat models; they get hacked and they say, "Well, our anti-virus didn't work! We have all the right stuff!" when all they have is a checklist of industry best practices and off-the-shelf products.
If you're going infosec, get yourself some penetration testing and some risk modeling training while you're in there. Operational risk management is huge.
This is a lot of philosophy and not a lot of economics. Let's all "do the right thing", even if it means 17,000,000 starving children, because not "doing the right thing" and getting food to all 17,000,000 of those starving children would leave a bad taste in our mouths. Blood on your hands is better than the knowledge that you didn't get to stroke your ego.
Now, what the hell is it doing on /.?
Slashdot is full of liberal-libertarian wargarble largely in the vein of "money is economy" and "we can solve all our problems by hurting the rich". Basically, the response to poor people suffering is to attack the rich for being too well-off, with no explanation of how that helps. That attitude is what drove me largely toward economics; the tax impacts (WageTax sheet) of my Citizen's Dividend pisses people off for not terrorizing the rich, even though the impact on the poor is massive. (Of course, the hyper-conservatives on Slashdot hate this, too, because hand-outs are bad.)
You'll notice the yammer here is about ending deficit spending (not always a bad thing: if your deficit is smaller than your debt grows by inflation, your debt is getting smaller) by accusing the rich of being drug addicts and then taking away their money. Rich people bad. Bad bad bad.
Yeah but they're all just IT, not computer science, so nothing interesting to me.
IT people are the fast food workers of the future.
With over 100 billion dollars in the bank, I could hire a hundred thousand people ... and pay them for five years. Then the whole system would collapse for lack of money to pay salaries, unless I started charging users for that, yeah.
Where do they get 10 million dollars of cash flow to pay all these salaries?
These companies have hundreds of billions of dollars in CASH
And how would it impact their cash flow if they started the War on Drugs--sorry, War on Secret Handshakes? Would their cash reserves dwindle until they could no longer operate, much less carry out a big censorship network for specific, highly-targeted contexts without impacting their non-terrorist users? Would they have to apply 4 times the advertising? Could they do it without charging users for search?
A lot of people see cash piles and turn continuous, on-going expenses into one-time costs, then claim patently-unsolvable problems are "trivial". Moderating content in the way suggested is roughly equivalent to perfect computer security.
They seem to have a lot of IT stuff but not Computer Science stuff. Kind of boring.
Holy shit this is legit and created by governors as enacted law.
It's not good intentions per se. The mode of thinking as a group and, really, in any context differs from the mode of thinking in any other context. Look at the UBI crowd (or any politicians), the Computer Science Primary Education crowd (or any educators), or any other group of people with a common ideal between them. The way an unaffiliated individual evaluates an ideal is *different* from the way the group evaluates it. Goals narrow and secondary impacts become invisible. Bad logic comes into play.
It's not a bad data point. We learn from tradition: we learn by reviewing what we've done. That's an important process.
I do a lot of economics in my free time, and I often explain minimum wage and welfare as such: societies develop wealth by technical progress, with wealth representing the production per capita (often approximated by GDP-per-capita or simply "The amount of stuff available per person"); various strategies for minimum standards of living and social safety nets incur various costs per capita; the cost taken, thus, must not exceed a certain proportion of the total wealth, or the system destabilizes, the need increases, and poverty becomes rampant. Thus newer systems such as single-payer healthcare and UBI are good systems in sufficiently-wealthy economies where they're both viable and overall better than old systems; and old systems which are now defunct and have *always* carried a cost (harmful) were better than *all* viable alternatives during some prior period in which those economies were less-wealthy.
Maybe the author's grandchildren aren't in the best position to exploit his works. Maybe the author's children or otherwise his immediate family are in the best position to exploit his works. Books now get printed, sold online, and shipped around; the scifi revolution happened in the 70s, not in 1902, and authors were unable to keep up with the demand for new books. Brandon Sanderson can't keep up with the demands of his fanbase, even as other authors struggle to attract attention for themselves; the person most positioned to exploit Sanderson's work will be Brandon Sanderson, thanks to the Internet, the amount of free time people have (the 8-hour work day was uncommon until after WW2!), the interest in the material, the method of marketing, and so forth. We can compare the past to the present and validate the old arguments against the new to trace what has changed and decide if the changes matter.
I'm trying to sort out books that cover all the material in fewer pages, lower book cost, and appreciable organization. I'm finding that some books for things like programming language design or computer science cost $20 or $50 and have clearer, more concise explanations than 1,000-page McGraw Hill tomes that cost $348.
Education incurs cognitive load. Bad education curriculum and bad materials increase cognitive load. Good study strategies decrease cognitive load. Approaching material using strong study methods--Cornell notes, SQW4R/OK4R study methods, self-testing, group discussion--increases the rate of learning and memorization while reducing cognitive load. Using better material decreases the cognitive load incurred by using those study methods (or not using any study methods). With better study strategies, better material, or both, education is faster and more successful.
In my Citizen's Dividend plan, I specify that the payment is not taxed as an income and is protected from garnishing and other attacks. Basically, the income is provided as the minimum means to live; if you get a job once you've moved into the hovel, we can take as much of your job money as we want and not drive you into the streets to rot. The strategic problem is then how much we can garnish without driving you to quit your job because it's just not worth working for so little benefit.
It seems reasonable for something which replaces welfare and minimum wage; and removing the reciprocating taxation (the Dividend is paid for by a tax, and taxing it as income is taxing tax money!) allows us to reduce the amount of taxes required to provide it (if we taxed it at, say, 20% in total (17% + 3% general effective taxes), then it'd have to be 21.25%; but then we'd be taxing at 24%, so 22.36%; it approaches somewhere between 23% and 23.5% dedicated tax as a funding source, whereas untaxed it only needs a 17% funding source).
That's an appeal to tradition. I posit that copyright works spread much faster, and exploiting the distribution of copyright happens at a much higher rate. Your works get old faster, and so terms should now be shorter. QED.
Business is way more complex than that. Human group behavior often appears as something simple, especially when it isn't. In business, this often produces an effect whereby everyone in a business has honest, benevolent intentions, and manages to build a shambling, evil empire; actual malicious intent and selfish greed are rare events, but common outcomes.
Coursera has, for a long time, been molding itself into a corporate service platform. In reorganization, aligning the business with its strategic goals would rightly include removing out-of-scope practices such as providing open, free online courses. The major failure in that model is in evaluating those practices in the context of their *impact* on the business, rather than on the business strategy: not thinking about how the world interacts with you or how your actions will be seen by the world leads to taking actions that upset the population.
There's a lot of middle-class radicalization and social justice warrior stuff going on in this summary. There's even a direct attack on colleges and professors ("Let's teach a course because it's good for my ego"--teachers are all selfish assholes, right?), as if the entire practice of teaching is a pox on society, while the practice of learning is something cherished and valuable.