1) Things are godawful and everybody is suffering because of X.
2) Free-market / natural solutions start coming into place and the X situation begins to steadily improve.
3) In the course of improving, X strikes again in a way it used to when things were godawful, though the trend is still unambiguously positive.
4) Government steps in: WOAH!! X is **too important**! We can't let the free market handle this! Regulations begin.
5) Progress in terms of the X situation either slows down, halts, or even regresses.
What we have right now is hyperinflation due to rampant speculation.
I don't think that word means what you think it means.
Inflation is a term conflated to mean one of two things: 1) money supply increasing, or 2) prices of goods going up. In the case of #1, a greater money supply will exert pressures to bring the price of goods higher, because you have a larger amount of currency chasing the same amount of goods. Thus each unit of currency is worth less than it was before. In the case of #2, prices can go up for many reasons, only one of which is money supply increasing, but in any case, the net result is that the same unit of currency can purchase less than it did before. In either of the cases, the result of inflation is that the currency is worth *less*.
What you see in the case of bitcoin is that the currency is worth *more*. Each bitcoin will buy you more than it did before. So it's actually the exact opposite of inflation. If things were priced in terms of bitcoins, then at BTC = $500 USD, my rent would cost 5.8 bitcoins, whereas now at BTC = $900 USD, my rent would cost 3.2 bitcoins. You could call it deflation except that has an irrational negative connotation associated with it, and it's also a conflated term analogous to inflation: either 1) money supply decreases, or 2) prices go down. In either case the effect is that the currency is worth more, which is what supposedly happened here.
Well eventually, anything you need that's smaller than, say, a person, you could just print. Shoes, chairs, clothing, furniture with some assembly required, tools, etc. Maybe simple electronics? Depends how good the printers get. Everyone would print their own things individually. So manufacturing jobs that make those things will go down the drain. Of course you still need raw materials, those jobs would be safe.
I'm extremely impressed that 3d printers will be seen as the economic boon they actually will be, instead of the Luddite approach of crying that it will kill thousands of manufacturing jobs - which it will, of course, but that doesn't mean at all that it will be a net economic negative.
A p-value of 0.05 means that 1 in 20 results are false positives. This implies that 5% of all scientific papers with a p-value of 0.05 are false. However, applying some statistics, it might even be worse than that. Textual summary of that link:
Say 1000 hypotheses are tested, and that 10% are true - that is, 100 true hypotheses, and 900 false ones. If the false positive rate is 5%, then 45 of the 900 will end up true. Further, let's say there's a false negative rate of 10%. So of the 100 true hypotheses, 10 will be missed. That means after experimentation on all 1000 hypotheses, 135 true results will be found, out of which only 90 will actually be true. Also consider that usually only positive results are published. So the 1000 experiments yield 135 papers that are published, where 45/135, or 33%, are actually false!
This is a bit arbitrary in that it assumes 10% of all tested hypotheses are true. If this number is smaller, then this gets much worse. If the number is larger, then it gets better. But still it's quite an interesting indication.
What humanity needs is a severe revision of the whole peer review and publication method of doing science.
Just think of how many jobs will be lost by the closing of these prisons! Surely there must be something we can do to prevent this calamity from continuing. Maybe the government should subsidize crime to encourage more criminals so that these jobs are safe. Or make a bunch of things illegal that aren't, currently, to increase the incarceration rate. Cause more jobs = better economy as we all know.
... is the only 100% proven effective way to stop the spread of cooties! Finally someone is taking the necessary measures to rid our country of this abominable abomination. I for one am welcome our overlords for finally being those someones that think of the children.
The biggest problem is that they've managed to conflate "health insurance" with "managed health care". Obamacare is not a health insurance program. It's a managed health care program.
Insurance is very simply a way to redistribute risk. Let's say there's a 1% chance per year of having to undergo an operation that costs $10,000. A hypothetical "perfect insurance" policy would not change the expected amount I have to pay per year at all - it would cost exactly $100/year. That way, if I don't pay insurance, I have a 1% chance of paying $10,000 - expected cost = $100 - and if I do pay insurance, I have a 100% chance of paying $100 - expected cost = $100. The reason to get the insurance is simply to lower variance, or volatility - I'd prefer to pay $100 for sure than to take a chance and have to pay $10,000, which I might not be able to cover.
Of course no one will offer that policy because they wouldn't make any money. So maybe they will charge $105 per year for the policy. This way they make $5 per year per customer. Of course they could try to offer $200 or $300/year for the policy. That way they'd make bucketloads of money and people might still pay depending on how they value lower volatility. Of course with such a dead-simple calculation, competition would rapidly bring the price pretty close to $100 + minimal cost of bookkeeping + some profit.
With that in mind, it's clear that a lot of the bullet points you listed don't make any sense in terms of this being an insurance policy. Note that I contend that the problem is not with the insurance, but comes from something much deeper, and this is an attempt to patch over the symptoms but not address the causes.
Insurers cannot discriminate based on on gender or pre-existing conditions Pre-existing conditions absolutely affect the probabilities of needing treatment. If there's an 80% chance that I'll need that $10,000/year operation, that insurance policy should cost $8,000. If you make it illegal to change your pricing based on actual facts that affect your business, then the price for the general population has to go up. I'm not sure about gender but it seems it would affect some things too, e.g. probability of getting breast cancer and probability of getting prostate cancer. Additional guarantees for the elderly, terminally ill, and chronically ill who currently struggle to receive health care under the earlier policy. Again all these things affect the probabilities which dictate the pricing. Of course, there could be an insurance policy where you get the insurance for 30 years, let's say, paying a pre-determined rate, such that even if you do get terminally or chronically ill they will continue to pay your now-increased medical expenses. Those costs could be factored into the probabilities such that it still ends up being profitable (i.e. people will do it). In this case insuring more long-term against long-term illness. But if you don't have any insurance, then you become terminally ill, it's unreasonable to expect someone to just pay for most of your medical expenses. Chronic conditions must be covered under insurance; (it is wrong to punish people just because they had a bad roll on life's dice, it is bad enough they need to live with the chronic condition, be it anything from a mental illness to cancer or Alzheimer's or whatever. Someday you may get your own bad roll of the dice.) See previous point.
The following would be more general free-market concerns, not specific to any one industry: Guaranteed medical insurance coverage for minors and young adults starting on their own. Not sure what guaranteed means. Should be up to the insurer whether they want to sell insurance to you. Minimum standards of insurance policies to avoid the near-worthless insurance some companies were providing Again this is up to the companies. If people are purchasing near-worthless insurance then that's on them.
Caps on the profit margins of insurance and also certain other medical co
Well, sort of. In any case, you need neither farming nor civilization to have food. Humans were hunter-gatherers before farmers. Thus YOUR INITIAL POST IS WRONG - YOU ARE DEFEATED - I HAVE WON AN ARGUMENT ON THE INTERNET! OH YES!
You are thinking too narrowly. Who says it has to be for currency? "I will fuck you if you give me food." Better if you imagine it conveyed with body language and grunts vs. english.
I don't know what people are getting upset about. It does resemble an insect in the way it flies. You never seen a fly repeatedly bash itself into a glass pane?
[uninformed opinion]. [lambasting of what I perceive the book to be saying without having read it]. [obviously incorrect statement that shows I didn't even read the summary fully]. [snide concluding sentence designed to make me feel better about what I already believe in].
With reasoning like this, one wonders why the government doesn't just give every citizen hundreds of thousands of dollars, so each person can then go on a huge spending spree, thus surely stimulating the economy by vastly increasing spending.
Oh god, the broken window fallacy. Spending is a terrible, terrible measure of economic activity. What actually makes people wealthy is producing things. Otherwise we could just destroy 10,000 cars and spend millions of dollars making new ones to replace them, every day, and be wealthy beyond our wildest dreams. Hint: it won't because all you're doing is wasting money re-creating cars you just destroyed.
The soul too, not just the ego. Then you will be happy.
It is now practicable for any human being to be totally free from malice and sorrow, the two fundamental elements which prevent one from being happy and harmless. Gone now are the days of having to assiduously practice humility and pacifism in an ultimately futile attempt to become free by transcending the opposites... the traditional and narrow path of denial and fantasy, negation and hallucination. A wide and wondrous path of blitheness and gaiety is now available for one who wishes to live the freedom of the actual.
Actual freedom is a tried and tested way of being happy and harmless in the world as it actually is... stripped of the veneer of normal reality or Greater Reality which is super-imposed by the psychological and/or psychic entity within the body. This entity is that feeling of identity which inhibits any freedom and sabotages every well-meant endeavour. Thus far one has had only two choices: being normal or being spiritual. Now there is a third alternative... and it supersedes any humanistic philosophical worldview and/or any mystical Altered State Of Consciousness.
Eh that's the point of capitalism. People who fail at things go out of business, and others who don't fail as much replace them. Maybe this would have put Knight out of business. Great, then another company can fill that spot. Yet what happens if the government fails? They can just raise taxes or create money to cover the gap, thus making everybody else in the nation poorer.
Second surprise was actually bigger: we saw our AppleID and password going through this SSL communication. Yes, the clear text password... There can be a lot of good reason to send the password as cleartext, ssh does it for instance. But here, we dont see any reason for Apple to get our password.
Firstly, it means that Apple can replay our password using for instance our email also on many websites. Ok, Apple has no reason to do so. But what of intelligence agencies? Secondly, it also means that anyone capable of adding a certificate and able to proxify the communications can get user's AppleID and password, thus get access to iCloud accounts, backups, buy apps,....
I think the actual one is a step beyond yours - it's that they have no reason to keep costs down. If the budget gets too large, they can get allocated more money. If there isn't more money, they can raise taxes. If they can't raise taxes, they can create money by issuing bonds that unconditionally get bought by the Federal Reserve. There's no profit motive, so there's no reason to keep costs down. Thus everyone along the way can balloon expenses to either make themselves more important or make more money for themselves in the process. This means the ridiculous costs and operating procedures that you cite can exist and flourish in such an environment.
Note that this also tends to happen with huge corporations - they waste a lot of money - but they have a sharper limit than the government because they can't do the taxing & money-creation thing.
By definition, most programmers are not masters of software programming. So why is Daniel trying to compile a list that everybody will agree with? That would be a list of what every non-master programmer agrees a master programmer should know, which is different than a list of what a programmer should know to be a master programmer...
As for my approach, it would be to list those qualities which would make learning Javascript, XML, relational databases, etc., easy enough to do, by which I mean, those qualities which would allow a programmer to be able to self-teach himself these things, to the master level if his tasks require it. A master programmer doesn't have to know Objective-C or JavaScript, but he sure as heck better be able to learn how to effectively use them if he needs to.
Slashdot Mirror
Why are people still struggling with this? I mean, why is it so technically challenging? It's a simple concept and it's been around for years...
History of government regulation:
1) Things are godawful and everybody is suffering because of X.
2) Free-market / natural solutions start coming into place and the X situation begins to steadily improve.
3) In the course of improving, X strikes again in a way it used to when things were godawful, though the trend is still unambiguously positive.
4) Government steps in: WOAH!! X is **too important**! We can't let the free market handle this! Regulations begin.
5) Progress in terms of the X situation either slows down, halts, or even regresses.
What we have right now is hyperinflation due to rampant speculation.
I don't think that word means what you think it means.
Inflation is a term conflated to mean one of two things: 1) money supply increasing, or 2) prices of goods going up. In the case of #1, a greater money supply will exert pressures to bring the price of goods higher, because you have a larger amount of currency chasing the same amount of goods. Thus each unit of currency is worth less than it was before. In the case of #2, prices can go up for many reasons, only one of which is money supply increasing, but in any case, the net result is that the same unit of currency can purchase less than it did before. In either of the cases, the result of inflation is that the currency is worth *less*.
What you see in the case of bitcoin is that the currency is worth *more*. Each bitcoin will buy you more than it did before. So it's actually the exact opposite of inflation. If things were priced in terms of bitcoins, then at BTC = $500 USD, my rent would cost 5.8 bitcoins, whereas now at BTC = $900 USD, my rent would cost 3.2 bitcoins. You could call it deflation except that has an irrational negative connotation associated with it, and it's also a conflated term analogous to inflation: either 1) money supply decreases, or 2) prices go down. In either case the effect is that the currency is worth more, which is what supposedly happened here.
Python is one of those languages GP was talking about.
It's not really that far away. There is already technology to literally take a relatively small object, scan it, and then reproduce it exactly. Sure it's expensive as hell and really unwieldy at the moment, but technology always gets way cheaper over time.
Well eventually, anything you need that's smaller than, say, a person, you could just print. Shoes, chairs, clothing, furniture with some assembly required, tools, etc. Maybe simple electronics? Depends how good the printers get. Everyone would print their own things individually. So manufacturing jobs that make those things will go down the drain. Of course you still need raw materials, those jobs would be safe.
I'm extremely impressed that 3d printers will be seen as the economic boon they actually will be, instead of the Luddite approach of crying that it will kill thousands of manufacturing jobs - which it will, of course, but that doesn't mean at all that it will be a net economic negative.
A p-value of 0.05 means that 1 in 20 results are false positives. This implies that 5% of all scientific papers with a p-value of 0.05 are false. However, applying some statistics, it might even be worse than that. Textual summary of that link:
Say 1000 hypotheses are tested, and that 10% are true - that is, 100 true hypotheses, and 900 false ones. If the false positive rate is 5%, then 45 of the 900 will end up true. Further, let's say there's a false negative rate of 10%. So of the 100 true hypotheses, 10 will be missed. That means after experimentation on all 1000 hypotheses, 135 true results will be found, out of which only 90 will actually be true. Also consider that usually only positive results are published. So the 1000 experiments yield 135 papers that are published, where 45/135, or 33%, are actually false!
This is a bit arbitrary in that it assumes 10% of all tested hypotheses are true. If this number is smaller, then this gets much worse. If the number is larger, then it gets better. But still it's quite an interesting indication.
What humanity needs is a severe revision of the whole peer review and publication method of doing science.
Just think of how many jobs will be lost by the closing of these prisons! Surely there must be something we can do to prevent this calamity from continuing. Maybe the government should subsidize crime to encourage more criminals so that these jobs are safe. Or make a bunch of things illegal that aren't, currently, to increase the incarceration rate. Cause more jobs = better economy as we all know.
... is the only 100% proven effective way to stop the spread of cooties! Finally someone is taking the necessary measures to rid our country of this abominable abomination. I for one am welcome our overlords for finally being those someones that think of the children.
The biggest problem is that they've managed to conflate "health insurance" with "managed health care". Obamacare is not a health insurance program. It's a managed health care program.
Insurance is very simply a way to redistribute risk. Let's say there's a 1% chance per year of having to undergo an operation that costs $10,000. A hypothetical "perfect insurance" policy would not change the expected amount I have to pay per year at all - it would cost exactly $100/year. That way, if I don't pay insurance, I have a 1% chance of paying $10,000 - expected cost = $100 - and if I do pay insurance, I have a 100% chance of paying $100 - expected cost = $100. The reason to get the insurance is simply to lower variance, or volatility - I'd prefer to pay $100 for sure than to take a chance and have to pay $10,000, which I might not be able to cover.
Of course no one will offer that policy because they wouldn't make any money. So maybe they will charge $105 per year for the policy. This way they make $5 per year per customer. Of course they could try to offer $200 or $300/year for the policy. That way they'd make bucketloads of money and people might still pay depending on how they value lower volatility. Of course with such a dead-simple calculation, competition would rapidly bring the price pretty close to $100 + minimal cost of bookkeeping + some profit.
With that in mind, it's clear that a lot of the bullet points you listed don't make any sense in terms of this being an insurance policy. Note that I contend that the problem is not with the insurance, but comes from something much deeper, and this is an attempt to patch over the symptoms but not address the causes.
Insurers cannot discriminate based on on gender or pre-existing conditions Pre-existing conditions absolutely affect the probabilities of needing treatment. If there's an 80% chance that I'll need that $10,000/year operation, that insurance policy should cost $8,000. If you make it illegal to change your pricing based on actual facts that affect your business, then the price for the general population has to go up. I'm not sure about gender but it seems it would affect some things too, e.g. probability of getting breast cancer and probability of getting prostate cancer.
Additional guarantees for the elderly, terminally ill, and chronically ill who currently struggle to receive health care under the earlier policy. Again all these things affect the probabilities which dictate the pricing. Of course, there could be an insurance policy where you get the insurance for 30 years, let's say, paying a pre-determined rate, such that even if you do get terminally or chronically ill they will continue to pay your now-increased medical expenses. Those costs could be factored into the probabilities such that it still ends up being profitable (i.e. people will do it). In this case insuring more long-term against long-term illness. But if you don't have any insurance, then you become terminally ill, it's unreasonable to expect someone to just pay for most of your medical expenses.
Chronic conditions must be covered under insurance; (it is wrong to punish people just because they had a bad roll on life's dice, it is bad enough they need to live with the chronic condition, be it anything from a mental illness to cancer or Alzheimer's or whatever. Someday you may get your own bad roll of the dice.) See previous point.
The following would be more general free-market concerns, not specific to any one industry:
Guaranteed medical insurance coverage for minors and young adults starting on their own. Not sure what guaranteed means. Should be up to the insurer whether they want to sell insurance to you.
Minimum standards of insurance policies to avoid the near-worthless insurance some companies were providing Again this is up to the companies. If people are purchasing near-worthless insurance then that's on them. Caps on the profit margins of insurance and also certain other medical co
There's always the good ol' electric universe theory.
Well, sort of. In any case, you need neither farming nor civilization to have food. Humans were hunter-gatherers before farmers. Thus YOUR INITIAL POST IS WRONG - YOU ARE DEFEATED - I HAVE WON AN ARGUMENT ON THE INTERNET! OH YES!
You are thinking too narrowly. Who says it has to be for currency? "I will fuck you if you give me food." Better if you imagine it conveyed with body language and grunts vs. english.
I don't know what people are getting upset about. It does resemble an insect in the way it flies. You never seen a fly repeatedly bash itself into a glass pane?
[uninformed opinion]. [lambasting of what I perceive the book to be saying without having read it]. [obviously incorrect statement that shows I didn't even read the summary fully]. [snide concluding sentence designed to make me feel better about what I already believe in].
Hahaha. Yes, exactly.
With reasoning like this, one wonders why the government doesn't just give every citizen hundreds of thousands of dollars, so each person can then go on a huge spending spree, thus surely stimulating the economy by vastly increasing spending.
Oh god, the broken window fallacy. Spending is a terrible, terrible measure of economic activity. What actually makes people wealthy is producing things. Otherwise we could just destroy 10,000 cars and spend millions of dollars making new ones to replace them, every day, and be wealthy beyond our wildest dreams. Hint: it won't because all you're doing is wasting money re-creating cars you just destroyed.
It is now practicable for any human being to be totally free from malice and sorrow, the two fundamental elements which prevent one from being happy and harmless. Gone now are the days of having to assiduously practice humility and pacifism in an ultimately futile attempt to become free by transcending the opposites ... the traditional and narrow path of denial and fantasy, negation and hallucination. A wide and wondrous path of blitheness and gaiety is now available for one who wishes to live the freedom of the actual.
... stripped of the veneer of normal reality or Greater Reality which is super-imposed by the psychological and/or psychic entity within the body. This entity is that feeling of identity which inhibits any freedom and sabotages every well-meant endeavour. Thus far one has had only two choices: being normal or being spiritual. Now there is a third alternative ... and it supersedes any humanistic philosophical worldview and/or any mystical Altered State Of Consciousness.
Actual freedom is a tried and tested way of being happy and harmless in the world as it actually is
Eh that's the point of capitalism. People who fail at things go out of business, and others who don't fail as much replace them. Maybe this would have put Knight out of business. Great, then another company can fill that spot. Yet what happens if the government fails? They can just raise taxes or create money to cover the gap, thus making everybody else in the nation poorer.
No.
Second surprise was actually bigger: we saw our AppleID and password going through this SSL communication. Yes, the clear text password... There can be a lot of good reason to send the password as cleartext, ssh does it for instance. But here, we dont see any reason for Apple to get our password.
....
Firstly, it means that Apple can replay our password using for instance our email also on many websites. Ok, Apple has no reason to do so. But what of intelligence agencies? Secondly, it also means that anyone capable of adding a certificate and able to proxify the communications can get user's AppleID and password, thus get access to iCloud accounts, backups, buy apps,
Unfortunately, in the process of confirming the origin of martian meteorites, the rover ran over a martian cat.
I think the actual one is a step beyond yours - it's that they have no reason to keep costs down. If the budget gets too large, they can get allocated more money. If there isn't more money, they can raise taxes. If they can't raise taxes, they can create money by issuing bonds that unconditionally get bought by the Federal Reserve. There's no profit motive, so there's no reason to keep costs down. Thus everyone along the way can balloon expenses to either make themselves more important or make more money for themselves in the process. This means the ridiculous costs and operating procedures that you cite can exist and flourish in such an environment.
Note that this also tends to happen with huge corporations - they waste a lot of money - but they have a sharper limit than the government because they can't do the taxing & money-creation thing.
By definition, most programmers are not masters of software programming. So why is Daniel trying to compile a list that everybody will agree with? That would be a list of what every non-master programmer agrees a master programmer should know, which is different than a list of what a programmer should know to be a master programmer...
As for my approach, it would be to list those qualities which would make learning Javascript, XML, relational databases, etc., easy enough to do, by which I mean, those qualities which would allow a programmer to be able to self-teach himself these things, to the master level if his tasks require it. A master programmer doesn't have to know Objective-C or JavaScript, but he sure as heck better be able to learn how to effectively use them if he needs to.