In a sense, but economics generally deals with money-centric wealth rather than other forms of wealth. Moralism is an economics issue--the level of health care, for example, is both: the cost of any universal health care to society is expensive, and economically we're better off just sterilizing and/or executing the homeless and sick en masse; but there is a social cost to that plan. You can try to quantify these, but it's hard and they're mostly fuzzy concepts. Economics is usually restricted to a definition covering what you can index directly against money and workforce (things you can get solid numbers for).
Schools are a social topic. How do you design a school system properly? What's wrong with ours? Class size too big? Fundamental flaws with how subjects are taught? Problems with how we handle children? Or is quality declining because of bad parenting? Or because of some other aspect of our society? See, I can't just throw money at this, or do a cost-benefit analysis. It takes understanding of... a lot of crap. It's not a level of service thing at all.
Well, I want to get INTO politics. I don't play fair: I will publicly destroy your bullshit if you fuck with me. Things like Ehrlic running for governor of Maryland... the attack ads against him were that he didn't satisfy his promises to legalize slot machines, and that he tried to hire a "commercial business" to fix Baltimore City's schools.
I would have been on TV, giving speeches, talking about these attacks. Michael Bush, liberal asshole #1 here, was actually shooting down all of Ehrlic's bills JUST SO he could go out and complain that Ehrlic "Betrayed his constituents." Michael Bush, by doing so, was acting in the interest of politics and his own ability to garner votes and attack his opponents at the expense of his constituents: he was acting in direct opposition to the will of his constituents specifically to piss them off. Now eat it.
I would have been on TV giving a short, concise economics lesson. You want to fix a broken process? Hire a business process analyst to look at your system and figure out why it's broken. Pay them. Take the report they give you and fix it. Ehrlic hired a consultant to figure out wtf was wrong with the schools--do you expect him to go out and try to figure it out himself? I wouldn't vote for the idiot that would try that. Pay someone who does this for a friggin' career.
I don't know why our politicians play these games, taking the hits in public and looking for return fire. They won't call each other out on their shit. They shout their opinions loudly, in public, and say the other guy is an idiot; but they don't even respond to the other guy's idiocy, instead just pushing their own ideals and going "THIS IS RIGHT, IDIOT IS WRONG." Highlight their talking points ffs and debase them; or grab the guy and drag him into a public debate. Are you afraid he'll win? Then rethink your shit, you're doing it wrong.
That's part of why I want to get into politics. The other part is, like many people, I think I have some answers... at least some progress. I want to fix education (let's start teaching math with the Soroban...), fix the community, fix economics... I have ideas on these and I have discoveries I want to make, people I want to talk to, research I want to order done and have my advisers give me both the layman's analysis and the technical write-up. Tell me what I need to know to move shit forward and to fix the brokenness; and if you fuck with me, I will get on TV and destroy you because I'm too busy fixing shit to deal with your idiocy, little man.
Capital gains tax is an annoyance. Too high and you can't make money for retirement (this is why we have IRA and 401(k) where you don't pay it), too low and the higher income earners are paying less in capital gains than in income. Scale it like income tax and you start screwing up investment firms and playing hell with business. There are definite arguments against any sort of capital gains tax at all (it makes it a lot harder to do any kind of investing, which makes personal finances even worse), but again you have to deal with private citizens with 2 billion dollars to invest (at 7% gain?).
I considered William Donald Schaeffer a moderate. I don't consider John Kerry or Barack Obama a moderate--Barack maybe more than Kerry or Clinton (Hillary). I'm not sure about the Clintons these days... I still think Bill is a crook, and more liberal than I'd like, but I'm getting the distinct impression that Hillary isn't nearly on the same level as Bill, and makes him seem like a Republican schoolboy by comparison. Seems like she really wants to run to the left until she's far, far away (good, go, get, we don't want you here), but Bill is just left-leaning.
For what it's worth, I despise Obama's politics but--as much as I'd like to point out he's a fantastic con artist--I'm somewhat curious about the guy as a man. He's WRONG, for sure; but he seems to be trying to do something besides rob us all blind. He actually seems to be living in an internal moral struggle... can't tell. Did we actually elect a valid human being this time around?
I'm a dedicated fiscal conservative, but I think that's a center balance position. I don't think failing to pay for imperatives is "fiscally conservative," it's just stupid. We need to spend money. We need a military machine--ours may be inefficient and too big, but we shouldn't cut it out completely and have no defenses. We need some form of health care--I don't mean a full health care system, but at least free clinics, and we should go from there; let's piece it together with the cheapest, most gainful thing first, then decide where we stand. Social Security is a big drain--but we can't cut it off at the root and expect to not cause an economic disaster; any spin-down needs to be a controlled drop, and I have a rather well developed plan (that needs refinement) for that, but it will take 100 years at least (you can't speed it up, it can't be done).
Social conservative? I don't know. I don't get what "Social Conservative" means today. I think drugs create a huge economic drain and have a massive social tax. I think we need to control crime by social services--community centers, better education, things to empower people and to give them something to do and improve their lives. I support the death penalty--and I think the state needs to admit when it executes an innocent man, and heavily investigate why; but I also think that other things bring similar gains (non-death-penalty states have lower murder rates, yet when you ban the death penalty the state's murder rate increases? Something else is different about those states besides just not executing people).
Most of all, I think nobody has all the answers, and that isolationism isn't a strategy. Solon, Ohio has an excellent single stream recycling system; we should send representatives from Baltimore (or Maryland!) to Solon and learn everything about it. They should cooperate in helping us design a system like theirs, and design guidelines and recommendations--we should pay them for this service. We should ask Europe about their transportation system, and find out why it passes cars, pedestrians, and bikes all more efficiently than ours. We should go out into the world and work with people who know what the fuck they're doing. We should ask those non-death-penalty states what they did besides just banning the death penalty--examine their culture, their laws, public services, everything; figure out what we can encourage, what we can (sanely) legislate, and start rolling the good bits that fit with our culture in.
Economics is easy. It's social topics that I can't figure out.
This is exactly the kind of thing I don't want to deal with in a class on differential equations. Teach me math and shut up about the other professors' socialist tendencies and the evil red scare. Also stop babbling about evil capitalism and how we need socialized healthcare.
The difference was (in general), a liberal professor is willing to accept that you have a different viewpoint. They are willing to DEBATE you on it and give you equal time. They are willing to concede that you have good points and acknowledge them, they are willing to moderate their own positions and take your points on board when you bring up something they hadn't previously considered or that is argued well. I turned in several papers that argued completely contrary to the views I knew the professor held, and STILL got high grades because I argued my points well.
My experience with liberals in general is they're extremely defensive and oppressive; but then I live in Maryland. Teachers would give you bad grades because they didn't like your politics in some cases. People--students, facebookers, professors, anyone you meet in real life or online--will immediately start yapping over you if you start trying to explain an opposing view. The two key overruling points are when you've presented half an argument (which needs the other half to convey meaning) and they can stop you and twist your words IF they can shut you up; or when you start "winning" (that means something, but I'm not sure what) and they suddenly NEED to debase you because they don't know how to continue if they don't shut you up NOW.
Of course, watching Congress, all I see are politicians doing this from both ends. GOP and DNC are both assholes. In my personal experience, the republican side here is suppressed--they're quieter, and less hostile. They also argue less--due to being incapable of supporting their positions; whereas the democrats here try to argue via verbosity (a lot of words that don't actually prove a point, but fit well, sound consistent, and contain a lot of information), so they sound smart and it seems legit even if it's bullshit.
I like to think. Everyone hates me because my opinions both don't line up with theirs AND with any time to prepare and consider I can destroy everyone's arguments and present water-tight alternatives (not air-tight; nothing's perfect). Some people I know won't let me talk anymore, because the moment I can get a footing they lose, immediately. Babble a lot about nothing, start changing the topic quickly, assert that I don't know what I'm talking about before I get three words out... it's impressive, and looks (both from my viewpoint and everyone else's) like I'm clueless. One guy won't talk to me at all because I went revisionary--I re-examined prior conversations, answered all the questions, and one day kept up and destroyed him.
I can only assume that people like to take positions they don't understand. But then, you know. I argue economics, I actually understand economics--not by degree, but by my own study: I'm slowly building my own economics theory by observation, and constantly revising my own misconceptions. I read up on certain concepts (rent-seeking activities, etc.), balance things... it's hard, when you consider like... universities charging too much, versus government control (communism is bad, so is free market, and all our attempts to regulate this stuff have to account for the fact that we can't just let them do whatever AND we can't tell them how much they're allowed to charge, but we have to do SOMETHING... just handing them money doesn't work, either; and we've seen the student loan disaster). It's at the point where bona-fide economists sometimes think I'm actually an economics major, for a short time; but I have too much foundational knowledge missing. We still have interesting conversations.
People aren't thinking, at all. They take positions they don't understand, and they don't care to research... that takes work, and I guess maybe they're afraid they might be wrong? My positions have fluctuated wildly--from deep conservative to slightly liberal leaning, and now I'm oscillating near the center. I revise my position a lot; I argue with people one day,
Are you complaining that education exposes people to different points of view? Don't you find it interesting for example how a lifetime of delving into statistics can shape a persons worldview? Don't you find that relevant into shaping your own?
My professor would stop teaching and start going on a tirade against political views that didn't match up with his. Eventually he was forcefully removed... after very, very little. Note that this was high school, Statistics and Probability, and it took 2 months. The guy was a college professor as well; we hired him on to teach an advanced class. "Distance Learning" between two schools, a waste of high tech--I can see uses, but in our case it was combining a class size of 9 with a class size of 10; if you had 3 classes of 3 4 and 4 I'd say yes, we need this to offer the subject effectively. It took two people to run the class, to combine two classes... waste.
In any case, that was an extreme case. The class was sorely lacking in any valuable education in Statistics and Probability, and was basically a platform for political bullshit. Still, even worse is instructors who try to "expose you to their view" -- because you get 3 months of having piles of material taught to you, which are carefully selected to reflect and support a single political view, and demonize another. They're either wasting your time or carefully controlling the information flow to subtly insert ideals into your head.
The place for this shit is in a class or forum where you specifically sit down to examine varied viewpoints--it's called "Philosophy," but we've chosen to only label mental vacations as "Philosophy" in education. I am all for a full, doubly-biased philosophy forum. Start with an unbiased examination (right...), comparing things, advantages, disadvantages, what he said, what she said... then present material by liberal crazies and conservative nutjobs, presented by said nutjobs... and swap, presented by people who think this shit is bullshit. Let them rave, let them rant, let them foam at the mouth. You will be tested on this; I don't care what you believe, as long as you can bullshit your way through it.
I don't want to deal with politics platform teachers. Teach me math and computers and shut up. There's a class for all this other shit, roll it into gen-ed requirements.
It often IS Liberal Brainwashing. I had a professor that would stop teaching to non-sequitur into other shit. Statistics, wine consumption per country, what does this show... shows correlation between consumption of wine and reduced heart disease. WRONG BITCH: ALCOHOL, 'CAUSE I SAID SO. We argued he was wrong...
Yeah, bad teacher. Bad teacher continues, starts talking about marriage... and goes into a tirade about gay marriage, and how it's wrong, starts talking about sex with animals. One day he started on how family planning was important and abortion should be legal, something about statistics at first but then just a big opinion filabuster. About 80% of his gibberish was liberal party line typical shit.
I've had plenty of college teachers that taught subjects--MATH, particularly--and didn't wander out of their territory. I also had teachers that asserted conservative politics were best--with proof (political science teacher), and actually pretty decent because he was arguing a decent political theory that wasn't available in the US (it wasn't US Democrat or US Republican, or tied to any issues like Global Warming or Abortion or whatnot; mostly fiscal stuff). I've also had teachers that liked to filabuster about their particular partyline politics. I've also had teachers that slant their material to include partyline stuff, or like to lead irrelevant conversation that way and then jump back into class topics (often the moment they're challenged).
Overwhelmingly, though, the ones that are bleeding their shit into our education are liberals. Some of these people are damn smart; others are simply "educated" to the point that the topic they have major degrees in is all dogma (i.e. people explaining computers to me are WRONG, and I've made complete embarrassments of them when they challenged me in class on how computers actually worked, to the point that they went out to do independent research and came back shamed and, I hope, enlightened). It takes all kinds; bright people are both GOP and DNC, dumb assholes are both GOP and DNC. The flavor of their inane raving changes, but it's still inane raving.
And the truth is... that particular job segment attracts liberals. Education is particularly idealistic anyway, and the ideals slant a certain way. You touch so many peoples' lives that it's hard to justify anything, you start thinking everyone is working so hard, the world is just unfair if anyone fails, and you can't let them fail... then you become a liberal, and start talking about how poor people should get paid by very rich people just because rich people don't need all that money, and what nonsense.
Obviously, extremely biased administration can build a school where the professors are overwhelmingly GOP sluts; same problem, different flavor. It does happen.
This is why I ran from Motorola's bull shit and moved to Samsung. Yes, Samsung phones eventually EOL; but they're decent anyway, whereas Motorola is trash that you wait for updates to more trash. An outdated Samsung Dart is a decent phone, even though it's slow and lacks RAM and has some funny version of Android (2.2) and won't get 3.1 any time soon.....
Sectors are 512 bytes long and tend to just flat out not read rather than giving one byte errors, so you get 2^4096 possible combinations, or a one with a gigabyte of zeros in front...
Those SPs should switch to LLCs. A SP is too much risk, and when it fails you will have your ass taken out of you and your house and car sold. Filing fee for an LLC is like $384 in my state, versus about $50 for a SP.
Some of today's rich people disgust me. Kudos to Buffett, one rich guy who isn't disgusting.
You FELL FOR IT! Did you know Warren Buffet can go pay for the Federal Debt--there's a link on their page--but he hasn't? He's called for the government to come get it from him. It's great marketing because it won't really happen. It'll be debated, but won't happen. He went out there to make himself look good, because what he said has no real meaning.
"Taxing the Rich" is really code, anyway. Here we are actually taxing "the rich," but often the argument hides the separation between "the rich" and "businesses." The past decade or two have centered around "Business as The Rich" politics: insurance companies, oil companies, Wal-Mart, etc, have the money we need to support everyone else. That sort of tax structure is really taxing "The Poor," because we just basically reduce the production capability of the economy--destroying wealth, thus reducing the availability of jobs. It seems that just in the past year or so we've moved to "People with Money as The Rich," possibly because the other model is better for setting up a political climate where, say, socialized healthcare seems viable (The Government will make those evil, rich insurance companies and health care providers pay for it, so it's okay), but I only see a huge blunder for that specific argument--I don't see how the politicians leveraged that political portrayal, so much as just stumbled along and cried until they got their way.
I'm more concerned with controlling businesses than taxing the shit out of them. The government needs to put dynamic but sensible market-driven controls on things like living expenses and tuition. The problem is this is extremely hard to work out. Full communism fails because we can't just dictate that a widget or an apartment or a year of tuition will cost so many dollars and expect shit to work; but full capitalism fails for the same reasons: college degrees are such an important commodity and instant money is so easy to get that tuition is "whatever the fuck we feel like charging" (and create a financial nightmare for students), while landlords raise prices when they think people with more money are willing to live there (regardless of actual operating expense--a $600 apt is a $1200 apt if someone will pay $1200 for it).
These kinds of activities are bad for the economy. Restricting landlords for example--say by strong tax incentives and strong tax penalties to create a big profit gap to jump--would put more money in the economy and lower the poverty line. Let's say a landlord company can operate reasonably at 15% rental income above operating expense--if it takes $100 to run, you can make $115. Isolate this to areas (say zip code) with limited grouping (maybe 3 plus remainder, i.e. you can have groups of 3 3 3 5 but not 3 3 3 6 or 3 3 4 4). The landlord will do class separation: he'll decide that these apartments are more expensive (profit) while these other apartments are less expensive, to keep the poor away from the middle class--trust me, they hate each other anyway.
Seems legit, right?
Except, at 15%, maybe the landlord has enough money to stave off odd fluctuations--and hell we have insurance for that, which is an operating expense--and to save up some coffers. Great, but what about buying that other building? Do we just give them back their interest in taxes? Then they won't care for a low-interest loan, and the banks will give high-interest loans to ream the government in the ass! Do we let them keep the interest as an expense? Then they can buy (and sell) a bunch of properties and run rent high, reaming their tenants! What about when they sell a building? Invest their money? Surely we can't cut that off their "expenses"--I'm not ready to commit to a "Your tenants share in your good investment strategy!" bill, if you can make 7.5% off your coffers then you can keep it on top of the 15% profits from rent.
It's complex. You don't want to dictate onerous shit onto businesses--or tax them to hell--but you can't let them run free. There are definite advantages to something like the above, or similar for college tuition (for books it's easy: mandate that all college courses must supply any graded material and allow the use of any text, thus previous editions or BETTER texts may be used). You have to not collapse or stall the busine
It's also notable that this is simplified: the corporation IPOs to raise capital, which is then used to run business interests. That means the IPO allows expansion, meaning more production, more jobs, more output. But that is complex and I'd like to ignore that part; it's not the point I want to make.
Did you think that IPO money just went nowhere? It goes into someone's hands. What do you think an IPO is for? Getting stock in the market to watch speculators play a game? It's for getting money into the corporation's coffers without taking a huge bank loan!
You missed out: company spent $100 dollars per share (or the founders founded or VCs invested in the company in the hope of receiving $100 per share) on getting people to do stuff. The stuff they did produced no useful output. Had the company not got them to do that most (or possibly all) of those people would have done other stuff....stuff which quite possibly would have produced useful output.
I don't want to deal with the extremely complex socio-economic arguments in an argument about whether the stock market makes money vanish or not. The stock market is not a place where money goes to die; it is a place where people go to gamble... or, not quite, more of a game of skill against risk. Risk is controllable, whereas in gambling it's stacked such that risk is fixed. Still, the model fits: you put money in, someone else puts money in, and the lot of you hope to get your hands in the pot when it's full of everyone else's money.
All of your arguments apply to the gambling industry as well: people show up, dump money in, and a few come out rich; most come out poor; and for the most part the bulk of the money goes to the casino. The casino produces no useful output (arguable: it provides valuable entertainment; however, the gambling aspect is damaging and most people aren't coming to spend $500 on the privilege of enjoying blackjack so much as they're coming with a fantasy that they'll make $5000 on blackjack).
The money isn't disappearing though. The stock market is a zero sum game: any money you put in will come out, one way or another. You will leave with more or less. If you leave with less, someone leaves with more; if you leave with more, someone must leave with less. If you leave with the same amount you showed up with, it is guaranteed that every single person in the market besides you will also leave together with the sum total of every single cent they brought, but distributed differently amongst themselves.
Social economics are a different beast, and I direct you to Barack Obama's stupidity and just about every other politician's failed ideal of "improving the economy" by "creating jobs" in which we use tax money to pay people to build temples or dig holes and fill them back in again. Also see Orwell's discussions of economics, and the Parable of the Broken Window (because it explains this shit nicely, directly by going to a subtle and complex example that people will argue about with you because they're too short-sighted to understand the wider impact).
Dividends come from profits from doing business, and are new money injected into the market as a pay-out for holding a share in the company; they don't appear magically, there is a source (money comes from consumers) and a destination (shareholders). Splits just multiply the number of shares while dividing the price. Reverse splits multiply the price by dividing the shares. Trade commissions are a service cost that leaves the investor's money pile and goes into the broker's money pile.
Money is not created or destroyed here; it's only moved around.
Uh, if you IPO and nobody buys, you inject worthless stock valued at $100 in the market and nobody gives you $100 for it. Then you have $100 of stock that spirals to zero.
It's a net zero regarding money. Any money you put in from the outside is money added to the system, but it won't vanish in the system; it will ALWAYS move to someone else's hands. The first $100 you put in gets you $100 worth of stock, injects $100 of MONIES into the system, and puts that $100 in someone else's hands. As you and that someone pass it back and forth, unless it goes over $100 and is sold at that price, no new monies come into the market and nothing disappears. Money changes hands, or is eventually unavailable because it's pulled out.
Let's say that stock is now worth, say, $50. The guy you bought it from took his $100 out of the market, he no longer wants in this game. You put in $100, he took $100 out. Okay, that's zero. Now a new guy shows up, buys your stock for $50--he has to bring $50 to the table and put $50 in the market, so you get $50. YOU have lost $50.
Start at YOU=$100, IPO=$0.
BUY. YOU=$0, IPO=$100.
IPO LEAVE. You=$0.
At this point, you put $100 in and some IPO guy took $100 out. No loss. You're poor, he's rich.
THIRD PARTY APPEARS. INVESTOR=$50. YOU=$0.
INVESTOR BUY. YOU=$50. INVESTOR=$0.
Now you run away with your $50. There is $0 in the market again. The investor has a stock that spirals down to worthlessness and loses $50. You also lost $50. The guy who IPO'd gained $100. $50 + $50 = $100, zero sum.
The money doesn't vanish into the stock market. There are other players at the table. The money is changing hands. It's a bunch of people getting together and haggling over goods that they're just going to sell back to each other, hoping that they can sell off their goods and walk away at a point where everyone really, really wants the goods they've acquired for a cheap price. You buy it for $5 but then a day later everyone decides they'd rather have it, well tough shit it's $10 if you want it... then you walk away rich.
So, your argument is fallacious due to the undistributed middle. You could make an alternate argument that "The market when looked at as a closed system will always return a net positive equal to the IPO price." The IPO comes in, someone hands a bunch of money to the guy offering, and he walks off with a box of cash. The only thing lost is a paper that says "STOCK IN COMPANY," and when that paper spirals to zero I'm the one that has the money and who cares about the guy who has the paper?
Dot-com shows up IPO'd overvalued at $100. Shrewd investor spends $100. I: -$100; IPO: +$100. Total: $0.
Market frenzy overvalues dot-com at $350/share. Shrewd investor sells his stock to Sucker for $350. I:+$250. IPO:+$100. S:-$350. Total: $0
The IPO gained the company $100 per share. Investor spent $100, so he was down by $100. Then the value went up to $350. Investor sold, got $350, some other sucker went down by $350. The investor has made $250, as he just got $350 after giving $100 to the IPO. The IPO got $100. Suckerballs is at -$350 and if the stock drops to $250 and he sells then he's at -$100 and someone else has -$250 and a $250 valued stock, bringing the total value overall to... the value of the stock ($0 plus stock valued at $250).
If you ever add the value of stock to the value of money that's gone into and come out of the market, you find it always equates to zero. That doesn't mean that there's as much money floating around anymore... which, by the way, will adjust out. If you put $1000 monies in and buy $1000 stock, there's $1000 monies for people who IPO'd $1000 of stock, while the money injectors have $0 monies and $1000 of stock. If you pull that $1000 of monies out (the IPO holders are no longer interested--and neither is anyone else), then since nobody wants to buy your $1000 of stock, it becomes worth less--$500, $200, $100, $1. If it becomes worthless, you put in $1000 and $1000 came out; if someone buys it at $1, you are at -$999, they are at -$1, and $1000 has gone out. There is now a $1 share and $1 in the market.
Yes, but i'm just saying you can't TECHNICALLY stop it. The above would be extremely obvious. And an HTTP request length limit is fine; you'd basically be irritating an HTTP server just like an AJAX script, sending bits and pieces of chunked-up packets. Inefficient, but effective. This is a side channel attack, not an optimal low-latency high-throughput best-effort delivery system.
except that the port 80 stuff is easily configured with a scramble key and HTTP RQ legitimacy, with transport, etc. TCP packet comes to server, it gets encoded--the whole description of what it is. Client connects to client-end SOCKS proxy server [Proxy Client], [Proxy Client] makes http request that says "HTTP GET/index.html?session=ENCODEDSHIT HTTP/1.1 blahblahblah html head body (p)ENCODED ENCRYPTED DATA(/p) img src=fubar.gif MORE DATA COMING CHECK FUBAR.GIF" and then it "HTTP GET/fubar.gif HTTP/1.1" "HTTP POST/otherlinx.php" and so on. HAVE FUN, SHIT HEAD.
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In a sense, but economics generally deals with money-centric wealth rather than other forms of wealth. Moralism is an economics issue--the level of health care, for example, is both: the cost of any universal health care to society is expensive, and economically we're better off just sterilizing and/or executing the homeless and sick en masse; but there is a social cost to that plan. You can try to quantify these, but it's hard and they're mostly fuzzy concepts. Economics is usually restricted to a definition covering what you can index directly against money and workforce (things you can get solid numbers for).
Schools are a social topic. How do you design a school system properly? What's wrong with ours? Class size too big? Fundamental flaws with how subjects are taught? Problems with how we handle children? Or is quality declining because of bad parenting? Or because of some other aspect of our society? See, I can't just throw money at this, or do a cost-benefit analysis. It takes understanding of ... a lot of crap. It's not a level of service thing at all.
Well, I want to get INTO politics. I don't play fair: I will publicly destroy your bullshit if you fuck with me. Things like Ehrlic running for governor of Maryland... the attack ads against him were that he didn't satisfy his promises to legalize slot machines, and that he tried to hire a "commercial business" to fix Baltimore City's schools.
I would have been on TV, giving speeches, talking about these attacks. Michael Bush, liberal asshole #1 here, was actually shooting down all of Ehrlic's bills JUST SO he could go out and complain that Ehrlic "Betrayed his constituents." Michael Bush, by doing so, was acting in the interest of politics and his own ability to garner votes and attack his opponents at the expense of his constituents: he was acting in direct opposition to the will of his constituents specifically to piss them off. Now eat it.
I would have been on TV giving a short, concise economics lesson. You want to fix a broken process? Hire a business process analyst to look at your system and figure out why it's broken. Pay them. Take the report they give you and fix it. Ehrlic hired a consultant to figure out wtf was wrong with the schools--do you expect him to go out and try to figure it out himself? I wouldn't vote for the idiot that would try that. Pay someone who does this for a friggin' career.
I don't know why our politicians play these games, taking the hits in public and looking for return fire. They won't call each other out on their shit. They shout their opinions loudly, in public, and say the other guy is an idiot; but they don't even respond to the other guy's idiocy, instead just pushing their own ideals and going "THIS IS RIGHT, IDIOT IS WRONG." Highlight their talking points ffs and debase them; or grab the guy and drag him into a public debate. Are you afraid he'll win? Then rethink your shit, you're doing it wrong.
That's part of why I want to get into politics. The other part is, like many people, I think I have some answers... at least some progress. I want to fix education (let's start teaching math with the Soroban...), fix the community, fix economics... I have ideas on these and I have discoveries I want to make, people I want to talk to, research I want to order done and have my advisers give me both the layman's analysis and the technical write-up. Tell me what I need to know to move shit forward and to fix the brokenness; and if you fuck with me, I will get on TV and destroy you because I'm too busy fixing shit to deal with your idiocy, little man.
Federal benefits are also ass-expensive.
Capital gains tax is an annoyance. Too high and you can't make money for retirement (this is why we have IRA and 401(k) where you don't pay it), too low and the higher income earners are paying less in capital gains than in income. Scale it like income tax and you start screwing up investment firms and playing hell with business. There are definite arguments against any sort of capital gains tax at all (it makes it a lot harder to do any kind of investing, which makes personal finances even worse), but again you have to deal with private citizens with 2 billion dollars to invest (at 7% gain?).
I considered William Donald Schaeffer a moderate. I don't consider John Kerry or Barack Obama a moderate--Barack maybe more than Kerry or Clinton (Hillary). I'm not sure about the Clintons these days... I still think Bill is a crook, and more liberal than I'd like, but I'm getting the distinct impression that Hillary isn't nearly on the same level as Bill, and makes him seem like a Republican schoolboy by comparison. Seems like she really wants to run to the left until she's far, far away (good, go, get, we don't want you here), but Bill is just left-leaning.
For what it's worth, I despise Obama's politics but--as much as I'd like to point out he's a fantastic con artist--I'm somewhat curious about the guy as a man. He's WRONG, for sure; but he seems to be trying to do something besides rob us all blind. He actually seems to be living in an internal moral struggle... can't tell. Did we actually elect a valid human being this time around?
I'm not a fast writer. I ramble in written communication; I'm better at long-term, structured, organized reports, but I don't RAD them.
I'm a dedicated fiscal conservative, but I think that's a center balance position. I don't think failing to pay for imperatives is "fiscally conservative," it's just stupid. We need to spend money. We need a military machine--ours may be inefficient and too big, but we shouldn't cut it out completely and have no defenses. We need some form of health care--I don't mean a full health care system, but at least free clinics, and we should go from there; let's piece it together with the cheapest, most gainful thing first, then decide where we stand. Social Security is a big drain--but we can't cut it off at the root and expect to not cause an economic disaster; any spin-down needs to be a controlled drop, and I have a rather well developed plan (that needs refinement) for that, but it will take 100 years at least (you can't speed it up, it can't be done).
Social conservative? I don't know. I don't get what "Social Conservative" means today. I think drugs create a huge economic drain and have a massive social tax. I think we need to control crime by social services--community centers, better education, things to empower people and to give them something to do and improve their lives. I support the death penalty--and I think the state needs to admit when it executes an innocent man, and heavily investigate why; but I also think that other things bring similar gains (non-death-penalty states have lower murder rates, yet when you ban the death penalty the state's murder rate increases? Something else is different about those states besides just not executing people).
Most of all, I think nobody has all the answers, and that isolationism isn't a strategy. Solon, Ohio has an excellent single stream recycling system; we should send representatives from Baltimore (or Maryland!) to Solon and learn everything about it. They should cooperate in helping us design a system like theirs, and design guidelines and recommendations--we should pay them for this service. We should ask Europe about their transportation system, and find out why it passes cars, pedestrians, and bikes all more efficiently than ours. We should go out into the world and work with people who know what the fuck they're doing. We should ask those non-death-penalty states what they did besides just banning the death penalty--examine their culture, their laws, public services, everything; figure out what we can encourage, what we can (sanely) legislate, and start rolling the good bits that fit with our culture in.
Economics is easy. It's social topics that I can't figure out.
This is exactly the kind of thing I don't want to deal with in a class on differential equations. Teach me math and shut up about the other professors' socialist tendencies and the evil red scare. Also stop babbling about evil capitalism and how we need socialized healthcare.
The difference was (in general), a liberal professor is willing to accept that you have a different viewpoint. They are willing to DEBATE you on it and give you equal time. They are willing to concede that you have good points and acknowledge them, they are willing to moderate their own positions and take your points on board when you bring up something they hadn't previously considered or that is argued well. I turned in several papers that argued completely contrary to the views I knew the professor held, and STILL got high grades because I argued my points well.
My experience with liberals in general is they're extremely defensive and oppressive; but then I live in Maryland. Teachers would give you bad grades because they didn't like your politics in some cases. People--students, facebookers, professors, anyone you meet in real life or online--will immediately start yapping over you if you start trying to explain an opposing view. The two key overruling points are when you've presented half an argument (which needs the other half to convey meaning) and they can stop you and twist your words IF they can shut you up; or when you start "winning" (that means something, but I'm not sure what) and they suddenly NEED to debase you because they don't know how to continue if they don't shut you up NOW.
Of course, watching Congress, all I see are politicians doing this from both ends. GOP and DNC are both assholes. In my personal experience, the republican side here is suppressed--they're quieter, and less hostile. They also argue less--due to being incapable of supporting their positions; whereas the democrats here try to argue via verbosity (a lot of words that don't actually prove a point, but fit well, sound consistent, and contain a lot of information), so they sound smart and it seems legit even if it's bullshit.
I like to think. Everyone hates me because my opinions both don't line up with theirs AND with any time to prepare and consider I can destroy everyone's arguments and present water-tight alternatives (not air-tight; nothing's perfect). Some people I know won't let me talk anymore, because the moment I can get a footing they lose, immediately. Babble a lot about nothing, start changing the topic quickly, assert that I don't know what I'm talking about before I get three words out ... it's impressive, and looks (both from my viewpoint and everyone else's) like I'm clueless. One guy won't talk to me at all because I went revisionary--I re-examined prior conversations, answered all the questions, and one day kept up and destroyed him.
I can only assume that people like to take positions they don't understand. But then, you know. I argue economics, I actually understand economics--not by degree, but by my own study: I'm slowly building my own economics theory by observation, and constantly revising my own misconceptions. I read up on certain concepts (rent-seeking activities, etc.), balance things... it's hard, when you consider like... universities charging too much, versus government control (communism is bad, so is free market, and all our attempts to regulate this stuff have to account for the fact that we can't just let them do whatever AND we can't tell them how much they're allowed to charge, but we have to do SOMETHING... just handing them money doesn't work, either; and we've seen the student loan disaster). It's at the point where bona-fide economists sometimes think I'm actually an economics major, for a short time; but I have too much foundational knowledge missing. We still have interesting conversations.
People aren't thinking, at all. They take positions they don't understand, and they don't care to research ... that takes work, and I guess maybe they're afraid they might be wrong? My positions have fluctuated wildly--from deep conservative to slightly liberal leaning, and now I'm oscillating near the center. I revise my position a lot; I argue with people one day,
Are you complaining that education exposes people to different points of view? Don't you find it interesting for example how a lifetime of delving into statistics can shape a persons worldview? Don't you find that relevant into shaping your own?
My professor would stop teaching and start going on a tirade against political views that didn't match up with his. Eventually he was forcefully removed... after very, very little. Note that this was high school, Statistics and Probability, and it took 2 months. The guy was a college professor as well; we hired him on to teach an advanced class. "Distance Learning" between two schools, a waste of high tech--I can see uses, but in our case it was combining a class size of 9 with a class size of 10; if you had 3 classes of 3 4 and 4 I'd say yes, we need this to offer the subject effectively. It took two people to run the class, to combine two classes ... waste.
In any case, that was an extreme case. The class was sorely lacking in any valuable education in Statistics and Probability, and was basically a platform for political bullshit. Still, even worse is instructors who try to "expose you to their view" -- because you get 3 months of having piles of material taught to you, which are carefully selected to reflect and support a single political view, and demonize another. They're either wasting your time or carefully controlling the information flow to subtly insert ideals into your head.
The place for this shit is in a class or forum where you specifically sit down to examine varied viewpoints--it's called "Philosophy," but we've chosen to only label mental vacations as "Philosophy" in education. I am all for a full, doubly-biased philosophy forum. Start with an unbiased examination (right...), comparing things, advantages, disadvantages, what he said, what she said ... then present material by liberal crazies and conservative nutjobs, presented by said nutjobs... and swap, presented by people who think this shit is bullshit. Let them rave, let them rant, let them foam at the mouth. You will be tested on this; I don't care what you believe, as long as you can bullshit your way through it.
I don't want to deal with politics platform teachers. Teach me math and computers and shut up. There's a class for all this other shit, roll it into gen-ed requirements.
It often IS Liberal Brainwashing. I had a professor that would stop teaching to non-sequitur into other shit. Statistics, wine consumption per country, what does this show ... shows correlation between consumption of wine and reduced heart disease. WRONG BITCH: ALCOHOL, 'CAUSE I SAID SO. We argued he was wrong...
Yeah, bad teacher. Bad teacher continues, starts talking about marriage ... and goes into a tirade about gay marriage, and how it's wrong, starts talking about sex with animals. One day he started on how family planning was important and abortion should be legal, something about statistics at first but then just a big opinion filabuster. About 80% of his gibberish was liberal party line typical shit.
I've had plenty of college teachers that taught subjects--MATH, particularly--and didn't wander out of their territory. I also had teachers that asserted conservative politics were best--with proof (political science teacher), and actually pretty decent because he was arguing a decent political theory that wasn't available in the US (it wasn't US Democrat or US Republican, or tied to any issues like Global Warming or Abortion or whatnot; mostly fiscal stuff). I've also had teachers that liked to filabuster about their particular partyline politics. I've also had teachers that slant their material to include partyline stuff, or like to lead irrelevant conversation that way and then jump back into class topics (often the moment they're challenged).
Overwhelmingly, though, the ones that are bleeding their shit into our education are liberals. Some of these people are damn smart; others are simply "educated" to the point that the topic they have major degrees in is all dogma (i.e. people explaining computers to me are WRONG, and I've made complete embarrassments of them when they challenged me in class on how computers actually worked, to the point that they went out to do independent research and came back shamed and, I hope, enlightened). It takes all kinds; bright people are both GOP and DNC, dumb assholes are both GOP and DNC. The flavor of their inane raving changes, but it's still inane raving.
And the truth is... that particular job segment attracts liberals. Education is particularly idealistic anyway, and the ideals slant a certain way. You touch so many peoples' lives that it's hard to justify anything, you start thinking everyone is working so hard, the world is just unfair if anyone fails, and you can't let them fail ... then you become a liberal, and start talking about how poor people should get paid by very rich people just because rich people don't need all that money, and what nonsense.
Obviously, extremely biased administration can build a school where the professors are overwhelmingly GOP sluts; same problem, different flavor. It does happen.
This is why I ran from Motorola's bull shit and moved to Samsung. Yes, Samsung phones eventually EOL; but they're decent anyway, whereas Motorola is trash that you wait for updates to more trash. An outdated Samsung Dart is a decent phone, even though it's slow and lacks RAM and has some funny version of Android (2.2) and won't get 3.1 any time soon.....
Sectors are 512 bytes long and tend to just flat out not read rather than giving one byte errors, so you get 2^4096 possible combinations, or a one with a gigabyte of zeros in front...
How is it described as operating?
Those SPs should switch to LLCs. A SP is too much risk, and when it fails you will have your ass taken out of you and your house and car sold. Filing fee for an LLC is like $384 in my state, versus about $50 for a SP.
Some of today's rich people disgust me. Kudos to Buffett, one rich guy who isn't disgusting.
You FELL FOR IT! Did you know Warren Buffet can go pay for the Federal Debt--there's a link on their page--but he hasn't? He's called for the government to come get it from him. It's great marketing because it won't really happen. It'll be debated, but won't happen. He went out there to make himself look good, because what he said has no real meaning.
Eh, there's no conservatives. Everyone is nuts.
"Taxing the Rich" is really code, anyway. Here we are actually taxing "the rich," but often the argument hides the separation between "the rich" and "businesses." The past decade or two have centered around "Business as The Rich" politics: insurance companies, oil companies, Wal-Mart, etc, have the money we need to support everyone else. That sort of tax structure is really taxing "The Poor," because we just basically reduce the production capability of the economy--destroying wealth, thus reducing the availability of jobs. It seems that just in the past year or so we've moved to "People with Money as The Rich," possibly because the other model is better for setting up a political climate where, say, socialized healthcare seems viable (The Government will make those evil, rich insurance companies and health care providers pay for it, so it's okay), but I only see a huge blunder for that specific argument--I don't see how the politicians leveraged that political portrayal, so much as just stumbled along and cried until they got their way.
I'm more concerned with controlling businesses than taxing the shit out of them. The government needs to put dynamic but sensible market-driven controls on things like living expenses and tuition. The problem is this is extremely hard to work out. Full communism fails because we can't just dictate that a widget or an apartment or a year of tuition will cost so many dollars and expect shit to work; but full capitalism fails for the same reasons: college degrees are such an important commodity and instant money is so easy to get that tuition is "whatever the fuck we feel like charging" (and create a financial nightmare for students), while landlords raise prices when they think people with more money are willing to live there (regardless of actual operating expense--a $600 apt is a $1200 apt if someone will pay $1200 for it).
These kinds of activities are bad for the economy. Restricting landlords for example--say by strong tax incentives and strong tax penalties to create a big profit gap to jump--would put more money in the economy and lower the poverty line. Let's say a landlord company can operate reasonably at 15% rental income above operating expense--if it takes $100 to run, you can make $115. Isolate this to areas (say zip code) with limited grouping (maybe 3 plus remainder, i.e. you can have groups of 3 3 3 5 but not 3 3 3 6 or 3 3 4 4). The landlord will do class separation: he'll decide that these apartments are more expensive (profit) while these other apartments are less expensive, to keep the poor away from the middle class--trust me, they hate each other anyway.
Seems legit, right?
Except, at 15%, maybe the landlord has enough money to stave off odd fluctuations--and hell we have insurance for that, which is an operating expense--and to save up some coffers. Great, but what about buying that other building? Do we just give them back their interest in taxes? Then they won't care for a low-interest loan, and the banks will give high-interest loans to ream the government in the ass! Do we let them keep the interest as an expense? Then they can buy (and sell) a bunch of properties and run rent high, reaming their tenants! What about when they sell a building? Invest their money? Surely we can't cut that off their "expenses"--I'm not ready to commit to a "Your tenants share in your good investment strategy!" bill, if you can make 7.5% off your coffers then you can keep it on top of the 15% profits from rent.
It's complex. You don't want to dictate onerous shit onto businesses--or tax them to hell--but you can't let them run free. There are definite advantages to something like the above, or similar for college tuition (for books it's easy: mandate that all college courses must supply any graded material and allow the use of any text, thus previous editions or BETTER texts may be used). You have to not collapse or stall the busine
IPO @ $100
Person 1 Net: $-100
Corporation doing IPO: +$100
Sale @ $50
Sale @ $75
Bankruptcy
System Net: $0
Fixed that for you.
It's also notable that this is simplified: the corporation IPOs to raise capital, which is then used to run business interests. That means the IPO allows expansion, meaning more production, more jobs, more output. But that is complex and I'd like to ignore that part; it's not the point I want to make.
Did you think that IPO money just went nowhere? It goes into someone's hands. What do you think an IPO is for? Getting stock in the market to watch speculators play a game? It's for getting money into the corporation's coffers without taking a huge bank loan!
System Net: $0
Money and wealth are two different metrics.
You missed out: company spent $100 dollars per share (or the founders founded or VCs invested in the company in the hope of receiving $100 per share) on getting people to do stuff. The stuff they did produced no useful output. Had the company not got them to do that most (or possibly all) of those people would have done other stuff....stuff which quite possibly would have produced useful output.
I don't want to deal with the extremely complex socio-economic arguments in an argument about whether the stock market makes money vanish or not. The stock market is not a place where money goes to die; it is a place where people go to gamble... or, not quite, more of a game of skill against risk. Risk is controllable, whereas in gambling it's stacked such that risk is fixed. Still, the model fits: you put money in, someone else puts money in, and the lot of you hope to get your hands in the pot when it's full of everyone else's money.
All of your arguments apply to the gambling industry as well: people show up, dump money in, and a few come out rich; most come out poor; and for the most part the bulk of the money goes to the casino. The casino produces no useful output (arguable: it provides valuable entertainment; however, the gambling aspect is damaging and most people aren't coming to spend $500 on the privilege of enjoying blackjack so much as they're coming with a fantasy that they'll make $5000 on blackjack).
The money isn't disappearing though. The stock market is a zero sum game: any money you put in will come out, one way or another. You will leave with more or less. If you leave with less, someone leaves with more; if you leave with more, someone must leave with less. If you leave with the same amount you showed up with, it is guaranteed that every single person in the market besides you will also leave together with the sum total of every single cent they brought, but distributed differently amongst themselves.
Social economics are a different beast, and I direct you to Barack Obama's stupidity and just about every other politician's failed ideal of "improving the economy" by "creating jobs" in which we use tax money to pay people to build temples or dig holes and fill them back in again. Also see Orwell's discussions of economics, and the Parable of the Broken Window (because it explains this shit nicely, directly by going to a subtle and complex example that people will argue about with you because they're too short-sighted to understand the wider impact).
Dividends come from profits from doing business, and are new money injected into the market as a pay-out for holding a share in the company; they don't appear magically, there is a source (money comes from consumers) and a destination (shareholders). Splits just multiply the number of shares while dividing the price. Reverse splits multiply the price by dividing the shares. Trade commissions are a service cost that leaves the investor's money pile and goes into the broker's money pile.
Money is not created or destroyed here; it's only moved around.
Uh, if you IPO and nobody buys, you inject worthless stock valued at $100 in the market and nobody gives you $100 for it. Then you have $100 of stock that spirals to zero.
It's a net zero regarding money. Any money you put in from the outside is money added to the system, but it won't vanish in the system; it will ALWAYS move to someone else's hands. The first $100 you put in gets you $100 worth of stock, injects $100 of MONIES into the system, and puts that $100 in someone else's hands. As you and that someone pass it back and forth, unless it goes over $100 and is sold at that price, no new monies come into the market and nothing disappears. Money changes hands, or is eventually unavailable because it's pulled out.
Let's say that stock is now worth, say, $50. The guy you bought it from took his $100 out of the market, he no longer wants in this game. You put in $100, he took $100 out. Okay, that's zero. Now a new guy shows up, buys your stock for $50--he has to bring $50 to the table and put $50 in the market, so you get $50. YOU have lost $50.
Start at YOU=$100, IPO=$0.
BUY. YOU=$0, IPO=$100.
IPO LEAVE. You=$0.
At this point, you put $100 in and some IPO guy took $100 out. No loss. You're poor, he's rich.
THIRD PARTY APPEARS. INVESTOR=$50. YOU=$0.
INVESTOR BUY. YOU=$50. INVESTOR=$0.
Now you run away with your $50. There is $0 in the market again. The investor has a stock that spirals down to worthlessness and loses $50. You also lost $50. The guy who IPO'd gained $100. $50 + $50 = $100, zero sum.
The money doesn't vanish into the stock market. There are other players at the table. The money is changing hands. It's a bunch of people getting together and haggling over goods that they're just going to sell back to each other, hoping that they can sell off their goods and walk away at a point where everyone really, really wants the goods they've acquired for a cheap price. You buy it for $5 but then a day later everyone decides they'd rather have it, well tough shit it's $10 if you want it... then you walk away rich.
So, your argument is fallacious due to the undistributed middle. You could make an alternate argument that "The market when looked at as a closed system will always return a net positive equal to the IPO price." The IPO comes in, someone hands a bunch of money to the guy offering, and he walks off with a box of cash. The only thing lost is a paper that says "STOCK IN COMPANY," and when that paper spirals to zero I'm the one that has the money and who cares about the guy who has the paper?
Dot-com shows up IPO'd overvalued at $100. Shrewd investor spends $100. I: -$100; IPO: +$100. Total: $0.
Market frenzy overvalues dot-com at $350/share. Shrewd investor sells his stock to Sucker for $350. I:+$250. IPO:+$100. S:-$350. Total: $0
The IPO gained the company $100 per share. Investor spent $100, so he was down by $100. Then the value went up to $350. Investor sold, got $350, some other sucker went down by $350. The investor has made $250, as he just got $350 after giving $100 to the IPO. The IPO got $100. Suckerballs is at -$350 and if the stock drops to $250 and he sells then he's at -$100 and someone else has -$250 and a $250 valued stock, bringing the total value overall to ... the value of the stock ($0 plus stock valued at $250).
If you ever add the value of stock to the value of money that's gone into and come out of the market, you find it always equates to zero. That doesn't mean that there's as much money floating around anymore... which, by the way, will adjust out. If you put $1000 monies in and buy $1000 stock, there's $1000 monies for people who IPO'd $1000 of stock, while the money injectors have $0 monies and $1000 of stock. If you pull that $1000 of monies out (the IPO holders are no longer interested--and neither is anyone else), then since nobody wants to buy your $1000 of stock, it becomes worth less--$500, $200, $100, $1. If it becomes worthless, you put in $1000 and $1000 came out; if someone buys it at $1, you are at -$999, they are at -$1, and $1000 has gone out. There is now a $1 share and $1 in the market.
Zero sum.
Yes, but i'm just saying you can't TECHNICALLY stop it. The above would be extremely obvious. And an HTTP request length limit is fine; you'd basically be irritating an HTTP server just like an AJAX script, sending bits and pieces of chunked-up packets. Inefficient, but effective. This is a side channel attack, not an optimal low-latency high-throughput best-effort delivery system.
except that the port 80 stuff is easily configured with a scramble key and HTTP RQ legitimacy, with transport, etc. TCP packet comes to server, it gets encoded--the whole description of what it is. Client connects to client-end SOCKS proxy server [Proxy Client], [Proxy Client] makes http request that says "HTTP GET /index.html?session=ENCODEDSHIT HTTP/1.1 blahblahblah html head body (p)ENCODED ENCRYPTED DATA(/p) img src=fubar.gif MORE DATA COMING CHECK FUBAR.GIF" and then it "HTTP GET /fubar.gif HTTP/1.1" "HTTP POST /otherlinx.php" and so on. HAVE FUN, SHIT HEAD.