There are plenty of ways to incentivize workers to perform quality work.
Yes, there are... but that's not the point. For thousands of years whips were used to incentive workers. Most of our workforce spends 30 to 70 hours a week working for someone else who must then find ways to incentive his serfs... I mean employees. Efficiency isn't everything. This is also a quality of life issue. Besides, it is well known that people will work harder and be happier if they believe they have some type of ownership (even if it isn't corporate ownership).
Some companies do give shares to workers through an Employee Stock Ownership Plan, but that's probably not even the most effective way. (Joe knows that if he slacks off, it could hurt the company's reputation, but the impact to Joe is highly diluted because he only owns 0.00003% of the company.)
Primarily because he knows a vast majority of the shares are owned by outside entities, and he doesn't have anywhere near enough to have voting rights. Nor does any other employee, and they all know it. It is practically a useless token, and nobody is fooled. Oh, so they get a small bonus that fluctuates, mostly along with the entire market. Why should they care? They won't be with the company 10 or 20 years from now. Why take the risk that the disconnected C level officers aren't going to tank the company (intentionally or otherwise).
Worse, employees are rarely given stock. They're given "options" to buy stock. Most employees never exercise those options (which is rather intentional).
"owners" (stock holders) have no feel for their company, being wholly separated from the creation of their products and services. This doesn't lead to a better economy.
Actually, it does. If there's a sudden spike in demand for entwidgets, Entwidgets Inc. has an immediate need to raise capital for expansion. Investors notice this. Their collective insight tends to shift capital to precisely where it's needed most.
This only helps if a company jumps through regulatory hurdles and sells new stock. Sales of pre-existing stock may rise dramatically, but don't help the company one whit.
Besides, the bond market is perfectly capable of dealing with this. It might even be better at dealing with this than the stock market. It's one of the reasons why I haven't (yet) taken a dislike to corporate bonds. (Public bonds have become a joke due to terrible policy, but that's an entirely different matter.)
But outside investors will almost never give good advice for improving a company's internals. They won't give educated suggestions about what might be researched, They won't know how employees are abusing supplies, wasting thousands of man-hours twiddling their thumbs, or spying on customers. Most employees don't care because it's someone else's problem.
It doesn't matter if they live 3000 miles away and have never laid eyes on an entwidget factory.
It does matter, actually. Corporations, and their officers, have legal obligations to their shareholders to turn a profit. Since most shareholders are nowhere, nohow involved in the company itself, this has devolved into an ever growing pursuit of cutting costs at the expense of quality, employee pay, and work environment. Now Now Now. This quarter This quarter This quarter... Officers of big corps who try to play 10 years ahead (let alone 20 or 30) get removed by big investment firms who don't intend to invest more than a few months, and could care less about the long term viability of the company.
This is highly detrimental to the economy, and needs to be addressed somehow.
It's rather wonderful that a retired bus driver in Vermont can contribute an extra $800 toward his granddaughter's college tuition, because a sharp pension fund manager working on his behalf studied the LED light bulb industry and got a good feel fo
Yes, the market. Not society, and not real investors. We've permitted a market to develop that doesn't value real world results or true economy, only what money can be sucked out of it. Even if we need a market, we don't need one of this shape. If it's a necessary evil, then let's minimize the evil and maximize the good.
Context. You need to read context. Here, I'll help:
by StripedCow (776465) If the intent is to tax people on trade volume, then why not tax per volume traded?
Geez.
by gd2shoe (747932) Because volume can be pretty darn arbitrary. [etc]
Followed by more banter.
Based on the context, we're not discussing the 0.03% tax that the main article is talking about. We're jabbering about StripedCow's idea of taxing volume.
Please enjoy your +5 informative. It was given to you by mods who also did not follow context.
You're obviously a smart guy--as evidenced by your low id number...
Uh, thanks. But I've seen a number of true idiots with lower IDs, so it doesn't say much.;-)
... but I always cringe when sweeping generalizations are made about what will happen given changes to tax code...
Yeah, but Slashdot is optimized for sweeping generalizations. If you get too specific, then there are a near infinite number of people available to nit-pick, most of them of marginal intelligence. (Granted, there are a few real geniuses here.) Besides, this way all of us get to pretend to be experts at everything.
... and when people say "Way too much of our economy is tied into the stock market."
Yeah, but I'm not just parroting. I actually believe it. Whenever I hear "the economy" instead of "the stock market", I cringe. Companies make hiring, layoff, product development, supply logistics, and production plans (just to name a few) based on "the economy", meaning the stock market. They don't do so arbitrarily. It actually affects them, either directly, or through anticipation of competitors/suppliers/distributors reactions.
Things actually got worse when ETFs were introduced, tying the market closer together in artificial ways. Pull up any high volume stock and compare it to an ETF that tracks DOW Jones or S&P. Don't tell me that healthy markets do that.
And it's not just the stock market. For instance, the derivatives markets provided the environment (petri-dish) for the housing market bubble and bust. It would NOT have happened otherwise. Derivatives aren't inherently bad, but they provide an efficient way to tie things together that ought not move together. They make economies more complicated, and introduce systemic risk.
Economies adapt, as they are really just aspects of human desires and the activity people engage to fill those desires based on their tradeoffs or costs. Economies do not rely on any particular market.
I disagree. Economies adapt to the markets they have available to them. They are shaped by these markets. People optimize their actions based on costs and tradeoffs... but these in turn are often molded directly by the shape of the market, and not just the actions of other market participants.
Our markets aren't perfect, but if you started from scratch to devise a way for people to buy and sell fractional ownership of the enterprises that humans naturally create in order to efficiently meet consumer demands, you'd end up with something pretty similar to what we have now.
Ah, no. If most people were to start from scratch, it would eventually look much like what we've got now. I challenge the very notion of otherwise-uninvolved third parties owning stock in joint ventures under most conditions. Workers have no ownership of their work, and "owners" (stock holders) have no feel for their company, being wholly separated from the creation of their products and services. This doesn't lead to a better economy.
I'm still undecided about the bond market, but that's easier to defend than the stock market, I think.
And free markets have immense social value.
That's a particular brand of laced cool-aid that I won't partake of. It's optimized for the particular variation of capitalism that we've become fixated upon. We're so stuck on what is, that we will not try anything else, and cannot find anything better. Yes, it seems better than anything that's been tried, but we really haven't tried all that many types of capitalism.
Can you at least admit that the "financial sector" shouldn't be included in GDP? It is money that is sucked out of the economy... arguably (debatably) while "helping" other sectors maximize their efficiency.
They have lifted far more people out of poverty than any wealth-redistribution effort ever has.
HFT is not speculation. It is the exact opposite. HFTers are market makers, not speculators.
You're half-wrong here. Market makers like to be as quick as possible. There's nothing wrong with that. There are far too many non-market makers doing HFT speculatively. That is what's causing problems. Even market makers are participating in split second speculation activities, compounding the issue.
I don't like HFT. It makes me very uneasy. I don't believe it adds a net social value to the system. It adds liquidity at the cost of obscuring real price discovery, and causes bizarre, sometimes dangerous price movements. And yes, I do understand the difference between bids and asks.
No, it will encourage expensive shares only. The more expensive the share, the less tax paid by large investors. It will lock small investors out of more institutions.
Mod parent up. It's not the only problem, or the only solution. But it does make sense, is fair, and doesn't harm legitimate market operations.
Re:The profits have been competed away
on
Have We Hit Peak HFT?
·
· Score: 3, Informative
I believe we do need to address this somehow with regulations... but carefully. "Regulation arbitrage" is a very good term for the real complication here.
A company "worth" $1G may have 10k shares at large, or it may have 100k shares at large. If someone wants to buy $100 worth of a company, a tax per share is ludicrous.
Besides, a 0.03% tax is bad for everyone. It's a stupid "rich people are too rich" type of move. Way too much of our economy is tied into the stock market. Taxing it directly is only going to send ripples into the rest of the economy. Before we do anything like this, we first need to disentangle ourselves. (a long and painful process that very few are willing to consider for even a brief moment.)
HFT is a symptom of a deeply broken system. We need to really start to recognise that profit isn't all and long term stewardship of our instituitions and systems is key to our long term quality of live. For everyone.
Mostly true, but simplistic.
HFT is a symptom of a deeply broken system. It brings liquidity, which is good, but it has tended to move the market in unreasonable (and sometimes dangerous) ways. So many trades today are HFT versus HFT that it obscures the real markets. We've seen several clear instances where computers are terrible at predicting the real market values when the primary data they're competing against are the actions of other computers. HFT doesn't lead to good price discovery, it obscures it.
When talking about long-term stewardship of institutions, we really need to move away from unreasonable earnings expectations every quarter. When the focus of the market is on ever narrowing periods of time, corporations simply cannot properly invest in the future. Yes, some corporations are lead by unusual people who can leave market panic behind them and truly lead... but most companies are run by very smart idiots.
Ultimately, stock/commodity/bond markets are about profit. There is nothing inherently wrong with that. The question for the rest of us is: what is the social value? Wall Street has some social value, but it also has considerable social expense. Sometimes we forget that. We also tend to forget that "the markets" are still based upon similar principles that brought us the great depression. Yeah, they're more sophisticated now. Yes, there are "regulations" (occasionally enforced). But the market CANNOT bring prosperity by ignoring it, and letting it run on its own.
Stock/commodity/bond markets are not capitalism. They are merely outgrowths of one particular variation on capitalism. They're finicky, hard to properly balance, and break if you try to exert too much control.
Admissible, from the word Admit meaning to permit entry.
His choice to resume answering other questions made it admissible
No, it was made admissible when it was permitted to be entered as evidence. In other words, it was made admissible when the judge decided that it was.
Yes, I'm quibbling, but it is an important point. The law isn't a computer program running on some principle of physics. It is (unfortunately) a set of strongly worded guidelines interpreted by human beings. What the law is depends on what those in power decide that it is. What is "admissible" varies, not based on some impartial reality, but on what judges are willing to admit.
Ok, am I the only one that's considering the fact that this guy committed murder?
He was convicted of murder. We're only assuming that he actually did it. If the best argument they've got is "See! He wouldn't answer the question!", then they've got a pretty weak case. An unsympathetic jury can declare guilt, but their words do not create guilt.
I've never killed anyone. I don't intend to. If the cops ever accuse me of something heinousness, I certainly intend to exercise my constitutional rights. I'm dismayed that his fifth amendment right was curbed, not for his sake, but for mine, my friends, my neighbors, and all other innocent parties. That is what this conversation is about. Not one man, but all of us, yourself included.
Governments grant "rights" all the time. They do not grant God-given or natural rights, though. Admittedly, they are generally more interested in taking rights away.
No, unit tests are a good idea. They wouldn't be my first choice, but they're a good option when deciphering a particularly difficult project.
(1) It gets you to interact with the code. This is always a good idea when leaning how something behaves. Fiddle with it for a while and see if you can figure it out.
(2) The unit tests don't need to be particularly true to their original requirements to be useful. When you do eventually start making changes, the law-of-unintended-consequences comes into play. If you make a change and one of your unit tests starts failing, then it will give you a clue that things may be interacting in a way that you did not anticipate.
Computer simulations are a good place to start... but we're still a long way from having simulations that give great predictions. In order to model something, you must fully understand it. We don't. Any simulation we run is based upon our limited understanding, and cannot lead to new knowledge. They can help us prevent mistakes that we could have foreseen instead of discovering them through testing, but they cannot confirm that a given hypothesis has a basis in fact.
And you can't fMRI your way to predicting what a given experimental drug will do.
(I'm not advocating for animal testing, I'm just giving a reasoned counterpoint to your post.)
There are two ways to measure stupidity of ones decisions. The first is to disagree with ones actions. This can be a legitimate measure if the judging party has sufficient knowledge and experience. You're right in saying that most of our media and the general public really don't qualify to do so (unfortunately). The second is to disagree with the outcome. Based on outcome, I'd say the US government is psychotic. This either means that the legislative bodies as a whole are morons, or that they are too corrupt individually and too unwieldy as a group, or it means that the key leaders are idiots.
I'm going to need to more closely research the LiquidFeedback system. Their page isn't very clear, but they seem to be claiming to do something novel.
My current preference is a system I'm calling Smith-Approval. As with the Liquid system above, you don't just place candidates in order, but also separate them into approved and disproved groups. The approval ratings are then stored on the Condorcet matrix diagonal, and are used for breaking cycles within Smith groups. It's about as simple as a Condorcet system can get while still having a sane way to break cycles. (This was written for terseness. It really is an easy concept if spelled out.)
But in our age today, I don't think we'll be able to get any Condorcet method in place. It's just "to complicated for people to understand".
Actually, failure to vote for third parties is the primary reason they're able to get away with stuff like this. The whole "wasted vote" thing is probably the most damaging logical fallacy being used in politics right now...
Duverger's law: It's not so much a fallacy as it is a close cousin to the prisoner's dilemma. With enough prisoners--...ahem, voters, it becomes a near mathematical certainty.
Yes, vote for third party candidates when the Rs and Ds aren't very good. This doesn't solve much, because good third party candidates frequently don't run at all, knowing they can't win. What we really need is a different voting system that doesn't have as many problems. While I like Condorcet systems, Approval voting is a much easier sell.
Typically, everything under "--" is a signature. The signature is a snippet of text that the user chooses in advance and rarely has anything directly to do with the specific post it is attached to.
Yeah, I got that moron. Signatures are occasionally declarations of what a poster intends to do on the forum. A.sig like that could easily be a declaration that someone is going to start trolling for or against a "minority" group.
Also, someone with such as weak grasp of English as to not recognize the phrase "yes man/men" should not offer advice as to what constitutes a badly formed joke.
"Yes, men..." is a far more common phrase to start a sentence than "Yes-men". I took a left instead of a right. Sue me.
"Weak grasp of English"? Really? Maybe you're constantly surrounded by people who use the phrase "yes-men" all day long... but most of us aren't. Aside from particular business interactions, it really isn't a very common phrase. On the other hand, all of us ask questions. "Yes" is one of the two most common answers, and frequently starts sentences. Yes, that means it was an easy mistake to make.
Slashdot Mirror
There are plenty of ways to incentivize workers to perform quality work.
Yes, there are... but that's not the point. For thousands of years whips were used to incentive workers. Most of our workforce spends 30 to 70 hours a week working for someone else who must then find ways to incentive his serfs... I mean employees. Efficiency isn't everything. This is also a quality of life issue. Besides, it is well known that people will work harder and be happier if they believe they have some type of ownership (even if it isn't corporate ownership).
Some companies do give shares to workers through an Employee Stock Ownership Plan, but that's probably not even the most effective way. (Joe knows that if he slacks off, it could hurt the company's reputation, but the impact to Joe is highly diluted because he only owns 0.00003% of the company.)
Primarily because he knows a vast majority of the shares are owned by outside entities, and he doesn't have anywhere near enough to have voting rights. Nor does any other employee, and they all know it. It is practically a useless token, and nobody is fooled. Oh, so they get a small bonus that fluctuates, mostly along with the entire market. Why should they care? They won't be with the company 10 or 20 years from now. Why take the risk that the disconnected C level officers aren't going to tank the company (intentionally or otherwise).
Worse, employees are rarely given stock. They're given "options" to buy stock. Most employees never exercise those options (which is rather intentional).
"owners" (stock holders) have no feel for their company, being wholly separated from the creation of their products and services. This doesn't lead to a better economy.
Actually, it does. If there's a sudden spike in demand for entwidgets, Entwidgets Inc. has an immediate need to raise capital for expansion. Investors notice this. Their collective insight tends to shift capital to precisely where it's needed most.
This only helps if a company jumps through regulatory hurdles and sells new stock. Sales of pre-existing stock may rise dramatically, but don't help the company one whit.
Besides, the bond market is perfectly capable of dealing with this. It might even be better at dealing with this than the stock market. It's one of the reasons why I haven't (yet) taken a dislike to corporate bonds. (Public bonds have become a joke due to terrible policy, but that's an entirely different matter.)
But outside investors will almost never give good advice for improving a company's internals. They won't give educated suggestions about what might be researched, They won't know how employees are abusing supplies, wasting thousands of man-hours twiddling their thumbs, or spying on customers. Most employees don't care because it's someone else's problem.
It doesn't matter if they live 3000 miles away and have never laid eyes on an entwidget factory.
It does matter, actually. Corporations, and their officers, have legal obligations to their shareholders to turn a profit. Since most shareholders are nowhere, nohow involved in the company itself, this has devolved into an ever growing pursuit of cutting costs at the expense of quality, employee pay, and work environment. Now Now Now. This quarter This quarter This quarter... Officers of big corps who try to play 10 years ahead (let alone 20 or 30) get removed by big investment firms who don't intend to invest more than a few months, and could care less about the long term viability of the company.
This is highly detrimental to the economy, and needs to be addressed somehow.
It's rather wonderful that a retired bus driver in Vermont can contribute an extra $800 toward his granddaughter's college tuition, because a sharp pension fund manager working on his behalf studied the LED light bulb industry and got a good feel fo
But to the topic, a 0.03% tax on the dollar value of the transaction IS a tax on volume.
Volume
The number of shares, bonds or contracts traded for a security or on a whole exchange for a given period.
Volume is a well defined market term. It is entirely independent from price. Please don't make things up.
Yes, the market. Not society, and not real investors. We've permitted a market to develop that doesn't value real world results or true economy, only what money can be sucked out of it. Even if we need a market, we don't need one of this shape. If it's a necessary evil, then let's minimize the evil and maximize the good.
Thank you for proving that reading comprehension isn't entirely dead on the Internet. I was losing hope.
People conflate "rich people" with "anything that happens on the stock market". And any tax introduced will grow over time, and never go away.
by StripedCow (776465)
If the intent is to tax people on trade volume, then why not tax per volume traded? Geez.
by gd2shoe (747932)
Because volume can be pretty darn arbitrary. [etc]
Followed by more banter.
Based on the context, we're not discussing the 0.03% tax that the main article is talking about. We're jabbering about StripedCow's idea of taxing volume.
Please enjoy your +5 informative. It was given to you by mods who also did not follow context.
You're obviously a smart guy--as evidenced by your low id number...
Uh, thanks. But I've seen a number of true idiots with lower IDs, so it doesn't say much. ;-)
... but I always cringe when sweeping generalizations are made about what will happen given changes to tax code...
Yeah, but Slashdot is optimized for sweeping generalizations. If you get too specific, then there are a near infinite number of people available to nit-pick, most of them of marginal intelligence. (Granted, there are a few real geniuses here.) Besides, this way all of us get to pretend to be experts at everything.
... and when people say "Way too much of our economy is tied into the stock market."
Yeah, but I'm not just parroting. I actually believe it. Whenever I hear "the economy" instead of "the stock market", I cringe. Companies make hiring, layoff, product development, supply logistics, and production plans (just to name a few) based on "the economy", meaning the stock market. They don't do so arbitrarily. It actually affects them, either directly, or through anticipation of competitors/suppliers/distributors reactions.
Things actually got worse when ETFs were introduced, tying the market closer together in artificial ways. Pull up any high volume stock and compare it to an ETF that tracks DOW Jones or S&P. Don't tell me that healthy markets do that.
And it's not just the stock market. For instance, the derivatives markets provided the environment (petri-dish) for the housing market bubble and bust. It would NOT have happened otherwise. Derivatives aren't inherently bad, but they provide an efficient way to tie things together that ought not move together. They make economies more complicated, and introduce systemic risk.
Economies adapt, as they are really just aspects of human desires and the activity people engage to fill those desires based on their tradeoffs or costs. Economies do not rely on any particular market.
I disagree. Economies adapt to the markets they have available to them. They are shaped by these markets. People optimize their actions based on costs and tradeoffs... but these in turn are often molded directly by the shape of the market, and not just the actions of other market participants.
Ah, no. If most people were to start from scratch, it would eventually look much like what we've got now. I challenge the very notion of otherwise-uninvolved third parties owning stock in joint ventures under most conditions. Workers have no ownership of their work, and "owners" (stock holders) have no feel for their company, being wholly separated from the creation of their products and services. This doesn't lead to a better economy.
I'm still undecided about the bond market, but that's easier to defend than the stock market, I think.
That's a particular brand of laced cool-aid that I won't partake of. It's optimized for the particular variation of capitalism that we've become fixated upon. We're so stuck on what is, that we will not try anything else, and cannot find anything better. Yes, it seems better than anything that's been tried, but we really haven't tried all that many types of capitalism.
Can you at least admit that the "financial sector" shouldn't be included in GDP? It is money that is sucked out of the economy... arguably (debatably) while "helping" other sectors maximize their efficiency.
As you go on to imply... that's not saying much.
You're half-wrong here. Market makers like to be as quick as possible. There's nothing wrong with that. There are far too many non-market makers doing HFT speculatively. That is what's causing problems. Even market makers are participating in split second speculation activities, compounding the issue.
I don't like HFT. It makes me very uneasy. I don't believe it adds a net social value to the system. It adds liquidity at the cost of obscuring real price discovery, and causes bizarre, sometimes dangerous price movements. And yes, I do understand the difference between bids and asks.
No, it will encourage expensive shares only. The more expensive the share, the less tax paid by large investors. It will lock small investors out of more institutions.
Mod parent up. It's not the only problem, or the only solution. But it does make sense, is fair, and doesn't harm legitimate market operations.
I believe we do need to address this somehow with regulations... but carefully. "Regulation arbitrage" is a very good term for the real complication here.
Because volume can be pretty darn arbitrary.
A company "worth" $1G may have 10k shares at large, or it may have 100k shares at large. If someone wants to buy $100 worth of a company, a tax per share is ludicrous.
Besides, a 0.03% tax is bad for everyone. It's a stupid "rich people are too rich" type of move. Way too much of our economy is tied into the stock market. Taxing it directly is only going to send ripples into the rest of the economy. Before we do anything like this, we first need to disentangle ourselves. (a long and painful process that very few are willing to consider for even a brief moment.)
Mostly true, but simplistic.
HFT is a symptom of a deeply broken system. It brings liquidity, which is good, but it has tended to move the market in unreasonable (and sometimes dangerous) ways. So many trades today are HFT versus HFT that it obscures the real markets. We've seen several clear instances where computers are terrible at predicting the real market values when the primary data they're competing against are the actions of other computers. HFT doesn't lead to good price discovery, it obscures it.
When talking about long-term stewardship of institutions, we really need to move away from unreasonable earnings expectations every quarter. When the focus of the market is on ever narrowing periods of time, corporations simply cannot properly invest in the future. Yes, some corporations are lead by unusual people who can leave market panic behind them and truly lead... but most companies are run by very smart idiots.
Ultimately, stock/commodity/bond markets are about profit. There is nothing inherently wrong with that. The question for the rest of us is: what is the social value? Wall Street has some social value, but it also has considerable social expense. Sometimes we forget that. We also tend to forget that "the markets" are still based upon similar principles that brought us the great depression. Yeah, they're more sophisticated now. Yes, there are "regulations" (occasionally enforced). But the market CANNOT bring prosperity by ignoring it, and letting it run on its own.
Stock/commodity/bond markets are not capitalism. They are merely outgrowths of one particular variation on capitalism. They're finicky, hard to properly balance, and break if you try to exert too much control.
Admissible, from the word Admit meaning to permit entry.
No, it was made admissible when it was permitted to be entered as evidence. In other words, it was made admissible when the judge decided that it was.
Yes, I'm quibbling, but it is an important point. The law isn't a computer program running on some principle of physics. It is (unfortunately) a set of strongly worded guidelines interpreted by human beings. What the law is depends on what those in power decide that it is. What is "admissible" varies, not based on some impartial reality, but on what judges are willing to admit.
Ok, am I the only one that's considering the fact that this guy committed murder?
He was convicted of murder. We're only assuming that he actually did it. If the best argument they've got is "See! He wouldn't answer the question!", then they've got a pretty weak case. An unsympathetic jury can declare guilt, but their words do not create guilt.
I've never killed anyone. I don't intend to. If the cops ever accuse me of something heinousness, I certainly intend to exercise my constitutional rights. I'm dismayed that his fifth amendment right was curbed, not for his sake, but for mine, my friends, my neighbors, and all other innocent parties. That is what this conversation is about. Not one man, but all of us, yourself included.
Governments grant "rights" all the time. They do not grant God-given or natural rights, though. Admittedly, they are generally more interested in taking rights away.
No, unit tests are a good idea. They wouldn't be my first choice, but they're a good option when deciphering a particularly difficult project.
(1) It gets you to interact with the code. This is always a good idea when leaning how something behaves. Fiddle with it for a while and see if you can figure it out.
(2) The unit tests don't need to be particularly true to their original requirements to be useful. When you do eventually start making changes, the law-of-unintended-consequences comes into play. If you make a change and one of your unit tests starts failing, then it will give you a clue that things may be interacting in a way that you did not anticipate.
Computer simulations are a good place to start... but we're still a long way from having simulations that give great predictions. In order to model something, you must fully understand it. We don't. Any simulation we run is based upon our limited understanding, and cannot lead to new knowledge. They can help us prevent mistakes that we could have foreseen instead of discovering them through testing, but they cannot confirm that a given hypothesis has a basis in fact.
And you can't fMRI your way to predicting what a given experimental drug will do.
(I'm not advocating for animal testing, I'm just giving a reasoned counterpoint to your post.)
There are two ways to measure stupidity of ones decisions. The first is to disagree with ones actions. This can be a legitimate measure if the judging party has sufficient knowledge and experience. You're right in saying that most of our media and the general public really don't qualify to do so (unfortunately). The second is to disagree with the outcome. Based on outcome, I'd say the US government is psychotic. This either means that the legislative bodies as a whole are morons, or that they are too corrupt individually and too unwieldy as a group, or it means that the key leaders are idiots.
I'm going to need to more closely research the LiquidFeedback system. Their page isn't very clear, but they seem to be claiming to do something novel.
My current preference is a system I'm calling Smith-Approval. As with the Liquid system above, you don't just place candidates in order, but also separate them into approved and disproved groups. The approval ratings are then stored on the Condorcet matrix diagonal, and are used for breaking cycles within Smith groups. It's about as simple as a Condorcet system can get while still having a sane way to break cycles. (This was written for terseness. It really is an easy concept if spelled out.)
But in our age today, I don't think we'll be able to get any Condorcet method in place. It's just "to complicated for people to understand".
Duverger's law: It's not so much a fallacy as it is a close cousin to the prisoner's dilemma. With enough prisoners--...ahem, voters, it becomes a near mathematical certainty.
Yes, vote for third party candidates when the Rs and Ds aren't very good. This doesn't solve much, because good third party candidates frequently don't run at all, knowing they can't win. What we really need is a different voting system that doesn't have as many problems. While I like Condorcet systems, Approval voting is a much easier sell.
Actually, the hyphen is non-optional. Hyphens prevent ambiguity.
(Yes, there was no comma there. It's the Internet. Commas are frequently treated as optional. Hyphens too, apparently.)
Typically, everything under "--" is a signature. The signature is a snippet of text that the user chooses in advance and rarely has anything directly to do with the specific post it is attached to.
Yeah, I got that moron. Signatures are occasionally declarations of what a poster intends to do on the forum. A .sig like that could easily be a declaration that someone is going to start trolling for or against a "minority" group.
Also, someone with such as weak grasp of English as to not recognize the phrase "yes man/men" should not offer advice as to what constitutes a badly formed joke.
"Yes, men..." is a far more common phrase to start a sentence than "Yes-men". I took a left instead of a right. Sue me.
"Weak grasp of English"? Really? Maybe you're constantly surrounded by people who use the phrase "yes-men" all day long... but most of us aren't. Aside from particular business interactions, it really isn't a very common phrase. On the other hand, all of us ask questions. "Yes" is one of the two most common answers, and frequently starts sentences. Yes, that means it was an easy mistake to make.