If the US lowered their tax rate to be roughly equal with the jurisdictions companies are allowed to shift profits to, they would have no reason to shift those profits.
That's a nice idea in theory, but in practice the only tax rate any corporation is happy with is basically zero. Take Google in Ireland for example. Ireland's corporate tax rate is 12.5%. But Google doesn't want to pay that. So it uses the Double Irish and the Dutch Sandwich to dodge several billions owed, bringing Google's effective tax rate down to 2.4% (ie, only ~20% of the theoretical value). You really think that if the US lowered its above-the-line corporate tax rate to 12.5%, mega-corporations such as Apple wouldn't still be trying to think of ways to get out of paying the full rate?
It still has the most effective military on the planet.
An effective military is one that achieves political goals. By this standard, the US military has failed. It has not created a stable, democratic and unitary Iraqi State. It has not created "pacified" Afghanistan and enforced central authority.
It's possible that the most "effective" military is one that does not actually have to be used, but where the appearance of potential strength dissuades enemies from implementing action. In the late-1990s, and before the Bush II-era adventures into the Middle East and near-Asia, there was a lot of posturing about how a newer, leaner US military could intervene at relatively low financial cost using dramatically lower force numbers to implement rapid and enduring alterations in international balances of power and within States. The reality of the stalemate/withdrawal from Iraq and the escalating spread of the Afghan brushfire conflict into neighbouring States despite very high financial, materiel and troop costs has significantly weakened the global perception of the US military. Just as the Soviet military was considered quite effective *before* its Afghan quagmire...
His work with Apple(which obviously gooses the value of his stock holdings; but for which he doesn't get paid nearly what he easy could demand)
Yeah, about that famous "$1" salary that Jobs gets from Apple (a headliner news item he shares with other tech moguls). The purpose of drawing a low salary is to avoid paying the highest rate of 35% income tax and instead pay 15% capital gains on stock grants and qualified dividends. Steve Jobs is the 34th richest person in the U.S. and tied for 110th in the world with an estimated net worth at $5.5 billion (a respectable chunk of which comes from a 10 million stock grant from Apple in 2003 worth $3,350,600,000 today).
I always RTFA. The fact that you and I both seem to have read the same material, and are using the same language and grammer, yet are failing to communicate, is in a sense the essence of incommensurability in action. We are expressing different paradigms, which is ironic given the Polanyi-Kuhn comment. The fact that you say do not know who Polanyi or Kuhn were or what they said does not negate the fact that you used an argument very similar to theirs.
In your overly ornate categorical prescription of the "difference" between the reified 'Science' and 'Arts' as discrete and self-similar fields of human activity, you are conflating intentionality with ontology. You also ascribing a teleological direction to the "progress" of human activity, and authoring a moral judgement upon the "forces" that constrain "scientific progress" within medicine. Lastly, I suspect you are promulgating Polanyi-Kuhn incommensurablity between scientific paradigms, a notion that has many supporters, but also many detractors, and is in many areas orthogonal to your teleological framing. You fail to address the tension between these two theses. In short, your argument as presented, while possessing merit, does not produce a sufficient synthesis to derive a satisfactory conclusion especially when considering your moral focus.
"as much as 90 percent of the published medical information that doctors rely on is flawed"
I'm pretty sure there's a Sturgeon's Corollary out there someplace, where it is revealed that as each discipline begins to examine itself, it finds that the evolution of its episteme tends to approach Sturgeon's Revelation asymptotically.
Welcome to reality, where if you live long enough, everything you think you know *for sure* will turn out to be wrong. Or maybe just misguided. The real test is how you deal with new knowledge. Do you keep up and stay current, or do just relax and maintain an elaboration of a worldview and assumptions fundamentally frozen during your adolescence. Doctors are taught over and over in med school that what they are learning is provisional, rapidly changing, and contingent. Many fail to assimilate that important lesson, but many do not.
most people save them in Word documents on a shared drive, accessible by anyone in the institution and blatantly violating HIPAA
I've seen that happen. But you know what? You can make Word encrypt your docs quite securely with a single click. There's really no excuse for leaving world-readable docs lying about when it's so trivial to harden them.
Obviously there's regional variation for this. I'm also a med student who has worked in several hospitals, and I've yet to find one where HIPAA is *not* rigorously followed, even when this creates weird and novel situations. Such as when a white board for patient names, details, and staff assignments is visible to patient or public areas, and gets changed to entire list of last name's first two letters plus first initial. So everyone is Le or Je or Su or Ma, and basically it looks like the entire patient population is now Vietnamese.
In my experience, the issue is with people less educated about HIPAA's constraints and permissible information sharing instead taking it as a blanket ban about discussing *anything* about a patient - even when in non-public areas and among a treatment team. In point of fact, the JHACO regs around patient identifying information and public discussion tend to be stricter than HIPAA when it comes to medical centers.
Really? So this might be a case where, say, a resistive screen option with, you know, pressure sensitivity levels and an accurate stylus might actually be a good thing and not the Work of the Devil as Steve Jobs and his acolytes have painted it.
I met Walter Day at the Mall of America in college and will say that in the few minutes I chatted with him he was the kindest and most honest person I have met.
Seriously? You chat with someone for a "few minutes" and decide they are the "kindest and most honest" person you've ever met? Do you only hang with sociopaths?
you find yourself in a randomly-generated 3D world. It's daytime. At night, monsters will pop out of the darkness and attack you. Your only hope of survival is to harvest resources from the world (wood, stone, etc.) and build a shelter and weapons to defend yourself.
What it showed the world is that the US only cares about trademarks when it's to their benefit.
This is true. I recall a few years ago when the EU's appellation rules were being enforced. There was an interview with a douchbag former VC wine Napa Valley "investor" who was "incensed" that the EU was restraining his trade by limiting what he could call his wine during export. Everything was going swimmingly until the EU winemaker, who had as usual been dumped on by the US interviewer and the douchbag for being some kind of crypto-socialist, produced a bottled wine variety with the appellation of "NAPA VALLEY" in huge letters, and in tiny letters "China", telling them he had bought it at a trade show a few weeks ago. Needless to say, the Napa Valley douchbag didn't think this was fair *at all*, and wanted a stop to this sort of thing.
American cars are seen very popular and often seen as the luxury alternative to cheap Chinese cars.
Unfortunately, most of the products of the US car industry are insufficiently fuel efficient to meet China's fuel economy standards. This means US cars have to be built as local Chinese/US ventures, which reduces the economic benefits. It's significant then, that the Chinese versions of US cars are able to economically meet and surpass China's fuel efficiency standards (5.7 L/100 Km)... unlike the domestic US versions when have relied on lax US governmental standards (8.7 L/100 Km) as an excuse to build cheaper, less technologically advanced machines. It's sad really - in a way the US's reliance on maintaining older tech standards through Government fiat (under the guise of the "free market") reminds me of how the British Empire stagnated from 1850 to 1914. Secure within the largest trading empire in history, it structured its trade to funnel through the island of Great Britain and protected its domestic firms against external competition and as a result they grew fat and weak and lazy. Outside the British Empire, the emerging powers of the United States and Germany were effectively locked out of this market. As a result, they had to compete by through lower prices and more advanced technology. By the time the UK realised what a situation it had got itself into, the UK balance of trade deficit amounted to 5% of its GDP (even with its economic embargoes), Germany had taken half of Europe and the United States was selling its superior products in every country in the world.
you don't need to simulate electrons in a semi-conductive material at specific temperatures in order to build a complete working emulator for an old computer.
That's a relatively trivial task. One stored-program computer emulating another stored-program computer is not that impressive, especially when you consider how remarkably similar both are in terms of materials, design and execution. We know how Turing Machines work. We don't know how DNA->RNA->Proteins>Tissue->Organs->Mind works.
To address just one of the fallacies in your comment, the huge gains in life expectancy over the past 150 years in the West have come about mainly because of the tireless and thankless efforts of sanitation engineers, moving sewage away from where it could kill lots of very young humans. Moore's Law does not apply to sewage engineering. Medicine and science have had a relatively minor effect on life expectancy.
All biology experiments so far seem to point to the fact that the DNA chain indeed contains all the information needed to build an organism.
Extraordinary claims demand extraordinary evidence. *Every* experiment? Really? Name some of the crucial ones? And while you're at it, here are some keywords that you may find useful in your searching: epigenetics, methylation, histones, maternal imprinting and morphogenesis.
Ignoring all the other bad statistics in this "study", this particular chart doesn't show that Iphoners "get more sex" than other phone brand owners. It says nothing about the quantity of sex. It merely says that at age 30, Iphoners are more promiscuous than other phone brand owners. Given that promiscuity is directly correlated with BMI, and inversely correlated with attractiveness, obviously we need to find out more about the weight and attractiveness of Iphoners compared to other phone brand owners.
You must get core i5 or i7 and pay out the wazoo (to the tune of $1700+) for it or else you're stuck with core 2 duo's,
Well, I'm going to ignore the fact that a Core Duo or equiv AMD or basically any non-Atom level CPU from the past four years or so is ample for 99% of what most US college students use their PCs for (Word, EMail, YouTube, Facebook). The sad fact is that it doesn't really matter if the PC they're buying is $500 or $1,500 - they are (overwhelmingly) not paying directly for it. They are buying it out of loan funds, or parent funds. It's pretend money that doesn't really come due for *ever*. And on top of that, most campus bookstores or computer stores *want* to upsell the students on the most expensive PC possible to boost their margins, it's easy to see why a premium pricer like Apple features prominently within this market.
No, it's the popularity of "V-Cast", Verizon's mobile streaming T services. Verizon and Sprint push a huge quantity of data to their smartphone and featurephone users as plain old TV.
A US public radio show just ran a whole feature on Web 2.0 content farming. Wired also ran this piece on one of the main polluters, Demand Media, a while back, explaining how it uses algorithmically driven keyword generators that grab "hot" (ie, adclick revenue-generating) trends from, among others, source such as Google Trends, then farms out a skeleton of an article with the required keywords to an extremely poorly paid human whose job it is to string together acceptably human-readable inter-keyword verbiage to flesh out an "article".
You want to bet you never look in the wrong menu using the wrong mouse button when trying to perform tasks? I bet you do. Almost everyone does. It's just part of how people use computers these days and something we don't pay attention to.
Yes, a thousand times yes.
You know, sometimes I am looking for some spare keys. I often look in the wrong drawer first, before the right one.
This does not imply that a single drawer to hold everything is a more efficient solution.
Your argument for a single button overloaded to perform all selection and option tasks is nonsense.
Slashdot Mirror
If the US lowered their tax rate to be roughly equal with the jurisdictions companies are allowed to shift profits to, they would have no reason to shift those profits.
That's a nice idea in theory, but in practice the only tax rate any corporation is happy with is basically zero. Take Google in Ireland for example. Ireland's corporate tax rate is 12.5%. But Google doesn't want to pay that. So it uses the Double Irish and the Dutch Sandwich to dodge several billions owed, bringing Google's effective tax rate down to 2.4% (ie, only ~20% of the theoretical value). You really think that if the US lowered its above-the-line corporate tax rate to 12.5%, mega-corporations such as Apple wouldn't still be trying to think of ways to get out of paying the full rate?
Needs a re-install every year is part of "just works"
My ten-year-old XP install, still running happily on its original MB and cloned to several VMs, just works.
It still has the most effective military on the planet.
An effective military is one that achieves political goals. By this standard, the US military has failed. It has not created a stable, democratic and unitary Iraqi State. It has not created "pacified" Afghanistan and enforced central authority.
It's possible that the most "effective" military is one that does not actually have to be used, but where the appearance of potential strength dissuades enemies from implementing action. In the late-1990s, and before the Bush II-era adventures into the Middle East and near-Asia, there was a lot of posturing about how a newer, leaner US military could intervene at relatively low financial cost using dramatically lower force numbers to implement rapid and enduring alterations in international balances of power and within States. The reality of the stalemate/withdrawal from Iraq and the escalating spread of the Afghan brushfire conflict into neighbouring States despite very high financial, materiel and troop costs has significantly weakened the global perception of the US military. Just as the Soviet military was considered quite effective *before* its Afghan quagmire...
His work with Apple(which obviously gooses the value of his stock holdings; but for which he doesn't get paid nearly what he easy could demand)
Yeah, about that famous "$1" salary that Jobs gets from Apple (a headliner news item he shares with other tech moguls). The purpose of drawing a low salary is to avoid paying the highest rate of 35% income tax and instead pay 15% capital gains on stock grants and qualified dividends. Steve Jobs is the 34th richest person in the U.S. and tied for 110th in the world with an estimated net worth at $5.5 billion (a respectable chunk of which comes from a 10 million stock grant from Apple in 2003 worth $3,350,600,000 today).
I always RTFA. The fact that you and I both seem to have read the same material, and are using the same language and grammer, yet are failing to communicate, is in a sense the essence of incommensurability in action. We are expressing different paradigms, which is ironic given the Polanyi-Kuhn comment. The fact that you say do not know who Polanyi or Kuhn were or what they said does not negate the fact that you used an argument very similar to theirs.
In your overly ornate categorical prescription of the "difference" between the reified 'Science' and 'Arts' as discrete and self-similar fields of human activity, you are conflating intentionality with ontology. You also ascribing a teleological direction to the "progress" of human activity, and authoring a moral judgement upon the "forces" that constrain "scientific progress" within medicine. Lastly, I suspect you are promulgating Polanyi-Kuhn incommensurablity between scientific paradigms, a notion that has many supporters, but also many detractors, and is in many areas orthogonal to your teleological framing. You fail to address the tension between these two theses. In short, your argument as presented, while possessing merit, does not produce a sufficient synthesis to derive a satisfactory conclusion especially when considering your moral focus.
"as much as 90 percent of the published medical information that doctors rely on is flawed"
I'm pretty sure there's a Sturgeon's Corollary out there someplace, where it is revealed that as each discipline begins to examine itself, it finds that the evolution of its episteme tends to approach Sturgeon's Revelation asymptotically.
Welcome to reality, where if you live long enough, everything you think you know *for sure* will turn out to be wrong. Or maybe just misguided. The real test is how you deal with new knowledge. Do you keep up and stay current, or do just relax and maintain an elaboration of a worldview and assumptions fundamentally frozen during your adolescence. Doctors are taught over and over in med school that what they are learning is provisional, rapidly changing, and contingent. Many fail to assimilate that important lesson, but many do not.
most people save them in Word documents on a shared drive, accessible by anyone in the institution and blatantly violating HIPAA
I've seen that happen. But you know what? You can make Word encrypt your docs quite securely with a single click. There's really no excuse for leaving world-readable docs lying about when it's so trivial to harden them.
Obviously there's regional variation for this. I'm also a med student who has worked in several hospitals, and I've yet to find one where HIPAA is *not* rigorously followed, even when this creates weird and novel situations. Such as when a white board for patient names, details, and staff assignments is visible to patient or public areas, and gets changed to entire list of last name's first two letters plus first initial. So everyone is Le or Je or Su or Ma, and basically it looks like the entire patient population is now Vietnamese.
In my experience, the issue is with people less educated about HIPAA's constraints and permissible information sharing instead taking it as a blanket ban about discussing *anything* about a patient - even when in non-public areas and among a treatment team. In point of fact, the JHACO regs around patient identifying information and public discussion tend to be stricter than HIPAA when it comes to medical centers.
1995's 3D Movie Maker - Nice UI, impressively fast realtime rendering, machinima... you know, for kids.
1995 also had MS VChat, which if you had a machine fast enough not to choke on it, gave you that whole Second Life avatar-ish vibe a decade early.
just look at the aptly named WinCE
Pretty much all the world's consumer GPS devices run as dedicated apps with custom skins on a WinCE backend. It's not a total disaster.
Really? So this might be a case where, say, a resistive screen option with, you know, pressure sensitivity levels and an accurate stylus might actually be a good thing and not the Work of the Devil as Steve Jobs and his acolytes have painted it.
I met Walter Day at the Mall of America in college and will say that in the few minutes I chatted with him he was the kindest and most honest person I have met.
Seriously? You chat with someone for a "few minutes" and decide they are the "kindest and most honest" person you've ever met? Do you only hang with sociopaths?
you find yourself in a randomly-generated 3D world. It's daytime. At night, monsters will pop out of the darkness and attack you. Your only hope of survival is to harvest resources from the world (wood, stone, etc.) and build a shelter and weapons to defend yourself.
So it's basically a Pitch Black video game?
What it showed the world is that the US only cares about trademarks when it's to their benefit.
This is true. I recall a few years ago when the EU's appellation rules were being enforced. There was an interview with a douchbag former VC wine Napa Valley "investor" who was "incensed" that the EU was restraining his trade by limiting what he could call his wine during export. Everything was going swimmingly until the EU winemaker, who had as usual been dumped on by the US interviewer and the douchbag for being some kind of crypto-socialist, produced a bottled wine variety with the appellation of "NAPA VALLEY" in huge letters, and in tiny letters "China", telling them he had bought it at a trade show a few weeks ago. Needless to say, the Napa Valley douchbag didn't think this was fair *at all*, and wanted a stop to this sort of thing.
Pot, meet kettle.
American cars are seen very popular and often seen as the luxury alternative to cheap Chinese cars.
Unfortunately, most of the products of the US car industry are insufficiently fuel efficient to meet China's fuel economy standards. This means US cars have to be built as local Chinese/US ventures, which reduces the economic benefits. It's significant then, that the Chinese versions of US cars are able to economically meet and surpass China's fuel efficiency standards (5.7 L/100 Km)... unlike the domestic US versions when have relied on lax US governmental standards (8.7 L/100 Km) as an excuse to build cheaper, less technologically advanced machines. It's sad really - in a way the US's reliance on maintaining older tech standards through Government fiat (under the guise of the "free market") reminds me of how the British Empire stagnated from 1850 to 1914. Secure within the largest trading empire in history, it structured its trade to funnel through the island of Great Britain and protected its domestic firms against external competition and as a result they grew fat and weak and lazy. Outside the British Empire, the emerging powers of the United States and Germany were effectively locked out of this market. As a result, they had to compete by through lower prices and more advanced technology. By the time the UK realised what a situation it had got itself into, the UK balance of trade deficit amounted to 5% of its GDP (even with its economic embargoes), Germany had taken half of Europe and the United States was selling its superior products in every country in the world.
you don't need to simulate electrons in a semi-conductive material at specific temperatures in order to build a complete working emulator for an old computer.
That's a relatively trivial task. One stored-program computer emulating another stored-program computer is not that impressive, especially when you consider how remarkably similar both are in terms of materials, design and execution. We know how Turing Machines work. We don't know how DNA->RNA->Proteins>Tissue->Organs->Mind works.
XKCD on extrapolation
life expectancy on track
To address just one of the fallacies in your comment, the huge gains in life expectancy over the past 150 years in the West have come about mainly because of the tireless and thankless efforts of sanitation engineers, moving sewage away from where it could kill lots of very young humans. Moore's Law does not apply to sewage engineering. Medicine and science have had a relatively minor effect on life expectancy.
All biology experiments so far seem to point to the fact that the DNA chain indeed contains all the information needed to build an organism.
Extraordinary claims demand extraordinary evidence. *Every* experiment? Really? Name some of the crucial ones? And while you're at it, here are some keywords that you may find useful in your searching: epigenetics, methylation, histones, maternal imprinting and morphogenesis.
Ignoring all the other bad statistics in this "study", this particular chart doesn't show that Iphoners "get more sex" than other phone brand owners. It says nothing about the quantity of sex. It merely says that at age 30, Iphoners are more promiscuous than other phone brand owners. Given that promiscuity is directly correlated with BMI, and inversely correlated with attractiveness, obviously we need to find out more about the weight and attractiveness of Iphoners compared to other phone brand owners.
You must get core i5 or i7 and pay out the wazoo (to the tune of $1700+) for it or else you're stuck with core 2 duo's,
Well, I'm going to ignore the fact that a Core Duo or equiv AMD or basically any non-Atom level CPU from the past four years or so is ample for 99% of what most US college students use their PCs for (Word, EMail, YouTube, Facebook). The sad fact is that it doesn't really matter if the PC they're buying is $500 or $1,500 - they are (overwhelmingly) not paying directly for it. They are buying it out of loan funds, or parent funds. It's pretend money that doesn't really come due for *ever*. And on top of that, most campus bookstores or computer stores *want* to upsell the students on the most expensive PC possible to boost their margins, it's easy to see why a premium pricer like Apple features prominently within this market.
No, it's the popularity of "V-Cast", Verizon's mobile streaming T services. Verizon and Sprint push a huge quantity of data to their smartphone and featurephone users as plain old TV.
A US public radio show just ran a whole feature on Web 2.0 content farming. Wired also ran this piece on one of the main polluters, Demand Media, a while back, explaining how it uses algorithmically driven keyword generators that grab "hot" (ie, adclick revenue-generating) trends from, among others, source such as Google Trends, then farms out a skeleton of an article with the required keywords to an extremely poorly paid human whose job it is to string together acceptably human-readable inter-keyword verbiage to flesh out an "article".
You want to bet you never look in the wrong menu using the wrong mouse button when trying to perform tasks? I bet you do. Almost everyone does. It's just part of how people use computers these days and something we don't pay attention to.
Yes, a thousand times yes.
You know, sometimes I am looking for some spare keys. I often look in the wrong drawer first, before the right one.
This does not imply that a single drawer to hold everything is a more efficient solution.
Your argument for a single button overloaded to perform all selection and option tasks is nonsense.
From a developer's perspective, iOS is the platform to beat.
Median iOS developer income per app: $682 per year.