A "free" market is one without external controls, governmental or otherwise.
It is not that simple - there is more to it than that. From the Wikipedia entry Free Market (my emphasis added)
A free market is a market where the price of an item is arranged by the mutual consent of sellers and buyers, with the supply and demand of that item not being regulated by a government (see supply and demand); the opposite is a controlled market, where supply and price are set by a government.[1] However, while a free market necessitates that government does not regulate supply, demand, and prices, it also requires the traders themselves do not coerce or defraud each other, so that all trades are morally voluntary.[2]
In a free market, the only real negotiating point between buyers and sellers is price. If an acceptable price is offered, it is accpeted, regardless of the source, and with no strings attached. It is assumed that both the buyer and the seller are completely aware of the condition of the thing being sold. Government involvment extends to enforcing property rights, and nothing else.
The point I was trying to make (and I admit I did a poor job of it) is that simply saying 'A "free" market is one without external controls, governmental or otherwise.' is too vague to be of any real use. Laws agianst fraud, theft etc, by this simple definition, could be considered 'governmental controls' when in fact they are a practical necessity for a free market to exist. This is why there is a more precise definition for 'free market', economists realized a long time ago that it wasn't that simple.
Free markets are not very good at achieving wealth for anyone except whoever wrestles control of it.
The only way to take control of a free market is by force, usually government force. However, if force is used, then trades are not 'morally voluntary', price is no longer the sole negotiating point, and the free market no longer exists. With this understanding, we can rephrase your statement as. 'Wealth is almost always stolen, usually by government force. Free markets usually have the most wealth and are plundered first.'
Command economies never even come close - saying they can is like trying to get out of jail by quantum tunneling your way through the door. Sucess is only theoretical. As for the regulated market being the best, well, this only works if by 'regulated' you mean no theft, fraud or coersion allowed. Economic history, especially that of the last century or so, clearly shows that the best performing economies, both in total wealth and in average (mean, mode, doesn't matter) personal wealth, are those economies who come closest to the free market ideal. If your ideal is that there be total equality of wealth among all people, a free market is a poor choice. However, as the only way to achieve this is to eliminate property - which means soon there won't be anything at all - it is a poor argument against a free market.
Everyone uses a regulated market because no government has been able to avoid being used by greedy or power-hungry people for their own benefit. This has nothing to do with the productive potential of the economic system.
No, there is no fallacy. You just have no clue what the term 'free market' means.
A free market is in no wise incomaptible with laws agianst bringing a handgun to 'bargain' for lower prices - laws which of course would be government intervention.
About the only thing that you did get right is the fact that totally free markets do not exist. I wouldn't say that they can't, but it is rather unlikey. Just as world peace - an unlikely event - doesn't mean we should advocate total war, the fact that free makets are unlikely doesn't mean we should actively try to destroy them with stupid laws. Free markets are the best means of achieving wealth, both personal and collectively - isolated exceptions granted of course. We should try to get there - even if we know we won't quite make it.
Wisdom suggests that the ability to carry the malarial parasite must be in some way an advantage, or mosquitos would develop a resistance by themselves.
Wisdom would be wrong in this case, because the malarial parasite would have just as much a chance to develope ways around this resistance. The reason GM can work in this case is that the malarial parisite had no chance to evolve in parallel with the GM gene before it becomes fully functional.
Ok, I think I see where you are comming from. You are thinking high school. (most of those are physically adults already) Start thinking elementary school and middle school. The ages mentioned in the article were 11 and 9. I would bet that the study did not address high school sports either - chances are the results would have been different if they had. Oh, and I am assuming that you are talking about high school because running 12 miles a day is very bad for most people under the age of 15 or so. On the other hand, ask yourself, if there was no sports program available to you when you were running 12 miles a day, would you have been a couch potato, or would you have found some other activity to do?
Second point, The implication of the study is not that all kids get the same amount of exercise, but that for every kid who is getting a lot of exercise in school sports, there is another who is getting a lot of exercise doing other stuff. While this may not apply to high schools, what about elementary school?
The article did imply that they did have some other data-gathering other than the accelerometers - they compared activity level to their BMI. You can't measure a BMI with an accelerometer.
That said, there is no way to know from the article if any of this 'other' data was used in any way to calibrate the activity levels from the accelerometers, not to mention how accurate the calibration method was. They could have, they should have, but did they? Their actual research papers might say, but the article sure didn't.
Dang it, you read neither my post nor TFA. Physical education and physical exercise, in kids anyway, have almost nothing to do with each other. Physical exercise helps Stamina, sleep patterns, etc. However, physical education has no impact on physical exercise. I have never heard anywhere that physical education does any good other than to increase physical exercise. and the point of the study is that it doesn't even do that.
Let me repeat, physical exercise has many bennifits, physical education, in schools, has no impact on physical exercise.
As for the learning specific sports, the only thing that I can't learn about any sport, without playing it, is how to play it. Everything else can be learned either by watching it, or talking to the players. I did not mean to imply that even this is useless, but to put it on the same level as chemistry is ridiculus. Almost anything I can gain from playing football I can gain from playing basketball instead. (eg. teamwork, social skills, new friendships etc.) Try to replace World history with calculus in the same way and it is a failure almost before you start. (What is the integral for the influences on the moderm world from the hellenic age, and what is it's derivitive to the hellenistic age? No cheating by looking at history facts now, start with only math theroms and formula!)
You didn't RTFA. The study in no way contradicts your experience. What it contradicts is the assumption that kids who engage in school sports get more exercise.
1) Phys Ed gives kids activity to expend energy. Studies show exercise helps not just the body but the mind.
Physical exercise gives those bennifits. You can get it in Phys Ed or some other way. The study results claim that kids do just that. They get it from one place or the other in a zero-sum fashion. Thus spending on Phys Ed is a complete waste.
2) Phys Ed encourages physical activity . . .
According to the study results this is wrong. Phys Ed does not encourage physical activity, it just changes when and where it occurs, and has no effect on how much there is.
I can learn plenty about Baseball, Basketball, Hockey, Football, etc. without playing any of them. The rest of your point 3 is just stupid. Exercise is important, the particular sport isn't.
Most of what you have said sounds good. Here is the trouble.
If school is there to help prepare our youth to be highly functional adults, learning to value physical fitness and activity is still an important thing to instill in the kiddies, not just for health but for general succes in life.
The whole point if the article is that school sports do not in fact increase activity (and I would assume physical fitness). So, If you in fact do want to teach kids to value physical fitness and activity, you will have to do something other than school sports.From TFA:
Professor Terence Wilkin, the programme director, said the amount of exercise children get was genetically set, and had nothing to do with access to sports facilities.
Try RTFA. The point of the article is that those kids who engage in school-related sports are less active at other times. This means that school sports has almost nothing to do with activity level in kids.
Since there is no corelation between school sports and exercise, then of course there will be no corelation between school sports and calories burned and BMI.
People who engage in sports and are in all other ways have the same activity of your average couch potato do burn more calories.
The whole point of the article was that the assumption that you made is not the case. Kids in school sports do not in other ways have the same activity level as their non-sports classmates.
i see.. maybe we should simply allow widespred practices like this to erode our language into a cesspool of illiteracy?
You are obviously not a linguist. Linguists study just this sort of thing. It turns out that just these sort of 'widespread practices' go on all the time in languages. They do not destroy languages. They create new ones, and extend old ones.
Your fear of 'a cesspool of illiteracy' is completely unfounded. It will not happen. You can stop the grammar nazi posts now.
The market only provides that to those who will pay
And for most of those things that cost something to make, giving it only to those who will pay is about the only way to ensure that they are still made at all.
The market didn't provide any of those necessities to you. You requisitioned them for yourself, deeming them to be fundamental to your well-being.
Markets generally make them available in far greater numbers, better variaty and quality than you could do so yourself. Stop complaining.
These things are mostly beside the point, the GP post meant that the government did not do anything specific for any of these things, and for most people they have been provided better than any government plan has ever done. Govenrment is often the worst solution, can you prove that this is not the case for Wi-Fi?
I'm sure they'd have gone over the possibility that they could be locking out legit reasons and have planned for it.
I read this as 'If I was in IT then I would have... and planned for it.' Since you would have, you assume they would have.
This puts you at least in the top 60-70% in IQ range. Those people in higher IQ ranges than you would have realised that those in the lower ranges, (the 60-70%) are not smart enough to have planned for or identified ALL legit reasons, (and sometimes ANY legit reasons...) Since 60% is greater than half, there is a good chance that they haven't gone over every possibility, nor planned very well for some of those that they did go over.
I've been burned before when I assumed that something obvious to me was also obvious to those in charge. Often they never had a clue.
The Term 'Capitalism' is used to describe things ranging from Laissez-faire to the 'other' golden rule - He who has the gold makes the rules. - Please clarify your use of the term. (this goes for the parent poster too!)
Two out of the three replies to my comment thought that I meant 40 cycles was enough per neuron. I guess I was not clear enough.
40 cycles is nowhere near enough. 40 inputs for a real neuron is small, and 40 cycles would barely let you sum the inputs. To heck with adjusting weights, you can't even run the thing in real-time. The AC I was replying to said that this could be simulated in software at break-neck speed. He is wrong.
back-propagation is a mathematical simplification of neurotransmitters.
No. Correct me if I am wrong, but back-propagation works by comparing the output of the whole net to the desired output, and tweeking the weights one layer at a time back up the net. In real brains, neurotransmitters either do not travel up the chain more than one neuron, or they simply signal all neurons physically close, whether they are connected by synapses or not. (like a hormone) Further, since real brains are recurrent networks (they have lots of internal feedback loops), 'back' doesn't mean much.
As far as I know, brains do not use back-propagation at all. Each neuron changes it's own weights based on things like timing of inputs vs output, and various neurotransmitters present.
If all you want are more neural nets like we have been doing then sure - back-propagation algorithms matter. That does not seem to be the goal here though.
Slashdot Mirror
It is not that simple - there is more to it than that. From the Wikipedia entry Free Market (my emphasis added)
In a free market, the only real negotiating point between buyers and sellers is price. If an acceptable price is offered, it is accpeted, regardless of the source, and with no strings attached. It is assumed that both the buyer and the seller are completely aware of the condition of the thing being sold. Government involvment extends to enforcing property rights, and nothing else.
The point I was trying to make (and I admit I did a poor job of it) is that simply saying 'A "free" market is one without external controls, governmental or otherwise.' is too vague to be of any real use. Laws agianst fraud, theft etc, by this simple definition, could be considered 'governmental controls' when in fact they are a practical necessity for a free market to exist. This is why there is a more precise definition for 'free market', economists realized a long time ago that it wasn't that simple.
The only way to take control of a free market is by force, usually government force. However, if force is used, then trades are not 'morally voluntary', price is no longer the sole negotiating point, and the free market no longer exists. With this understanding, we can rephrase your statement as. 'Wealth is almost always stolen, usually by government force. Free markets usually have the most wealth and are plundered first.'
Command economies never even come close - saying they can is like trying to get out of jail by quantum tunneling your way through the door. Sucess is only theoretical. As for the regulated market being the best, well, this only works if by 'regulated' you mean no theft, fraud or coersion allowed. Economic history, especially that of the last century or so, clearly shows that the best performing economies, both in total wealth and in average (mean, mode, doesn't matter) personal wealth, are those economies who come closest to the free market ideal. If your ideal is that there be total equality of wealth among all people, a free market is a poor choice. However, as the only way to achieve this is to eliminate property - which means soon there won't be anything at all - it is a poor argument against a free market.
Everyone uses a regulated market because no government has been able to avoid being used by greedy or power-hungry people for their own benefit. This has nothing to do with the productive potential of the economic system.
T
A free market is in no wise incomaptible with laws agianst bringing a handgun to 'bargain' for lower prices - laws which of course would be government intervention.
About the only thing that you did get right is the fact that totally free markets do not exist. I wouldn't say that they can't, but it is rather unlikey. Just as world peace - an unlikely event - doesn't mean we should advocate total war, the fact that free makets are unlikely doesn't mean we should actively try to destroy them with stupid laws. Free markets are the best means of achieving wealth, both personal and collectively - isolated exceptions granted of course. We should try to get there - even if we know we won't quite make it.
T
Wisdom would be wrong in this case, because the malarial parasite would have just as much a chance to develope ways around this resistance. The reason GM can work in this case is that the malarial parisite had no chance to evolve in parallel with the GM gene before it becomes fully functional.
T
Ok, I think I see where you are comming from. You are thinking high school. (most of those are physically adults already) Start thinking elementary school and middle school. The ages mentioned in the article were 11 and 9. I would bet that the study did not address high school sports either - chances are the results would have been different if they had. Oh, and I am assuming that you are talking about high school because running 12 miles a day is very bad for most people under the age of 15 or so. On the other hand, ask yourself, if there was no sports program available to you when you were running 12 miles a day, would you have been a couch potato, or would you have found some other activity to do?
Second point, The implication of the study is not that all kids get the same amount of exercise, but that for every kid who is getting a lot of exercise in school sports, there is another who is getting a lot of exercise doing other stuff. While this may not apply to high schools, what about elementary school?
T
The article did imply that they did have some other data-gathering other than the accelerometers - they compared activity level to their BMI. You can't measure a BMI with an accelerometer.
That said, there is no way to know from the article if any of this 'other' data was used in any way to calibrate the activity levels from the accelerometers, not to mention how accurate the calibration method was. They could have, they should have, but did they? Their actual research papers might say, but the article sure didn't.
T
Dang it, you read neither my post nor TFA. Physical education and physical exercise, in kids anyway, have almost nothing to do with each other. Physical exercise helps Stamina, sleep patterns, etc. However, physical education has no impact on physical exercise. I have never heard anywhere that physical education does any good other than to increase physical exercise. and the point of the study is that it doesn't even do that.
Let me repeat, physical exercise has many bennifits, physical education, in schools, has no impact on physical exercise.
As for the learning specific sports, the only thing that I can't learn about any sport, without playing it, is how to play it. Everything else can be learned either by watching it, or talking to the players. I did not mean to imply that even this is useless, but to put it on the same level as chemistry is ridiculus. Almost anything I can gain from playing football I can gain from playing basketball instead. (eg. teamwork, social skills, new friendships etc.) Try to replace World history with calculus in the same way and it is a failure almost before you start. (What is the integral for the influences on the moderm world from the hellenic age, and what is it's derivitive to the hellenistic age? No cheating by looking at history facts now, start with only math theroms and formula!)
T
You didn't RTFA. The study in no way contradicts your experience. What it contradicts is the assumption that kids who engage in school sports get more exercise.
T
No. It did not say or imply this. Please go re-RTFA.
T
Hate to nitpick, but corn syrup in all of its forms is not a by-product.
T
According to the study results this is wrong. Phys Ed does not encourage physical activity, it just changes when and where it occurs, and has no effect on how much there is.
I can learn plenty about Baseball, Basketball, Hockey, Football, etc. without playing any of them. The rest of your point 3 is just stupid. Exercise is important, the particular sport isn't.
T
The whole point if the article is that school sports do not in fact increase activity (and I would assume physical fitness). So, If you in fact do want to teach kids to value physical fitness and activity, you will have to do something other than school sports.From TFA:
T
Try RTFA. The point of the article is that those kids who engage in school-related sports are less active at other times. This means that school sports has almost nothing to do with activity level in kids.
Since there is no corelation between school sports and exercise, then of course there will be no corelation between school sports and calories burned and BMI.
The whole point of the article was that the assumption that you made is not the case. Kids in school sports do not in other ways have the same activity level as their non-sports classmates.
T
You are obviously not a linguist. Linguists study just this sort of thing. It turns out that just these sort of 'widespread practices' go on all the time in languages. They do not destroy languages. They create new ones, and extend old ones.
Your fear of 'a cesspool of illiteracy' is completely unfounded. It will not happen. You can stop the grammar nazi posts now.
T
Markets generally make them available in far greater numbers, better variaty and quality than you could do so yourself. Stop complaining.
These things are mostly beside the point, the GP post meant that the government did not do anything specific for any of these things, and for most people they have been provided better than any government plan has ever done. Govenrment is often the worst solution, can you prove that this is not the case for Wi-Fi?
T
I checked, you apparently did not. China is second on the list, at about 1/8 of the USA.
Just note, the US official military budget is over 18% of china's GDP. There is no way that china outspends the US.
T
I read this as 'If I was in IT then I would have ... and planned for it.' Since you would have, you assume they would have.
This puts you at least in the top 60-70% in IQ range. Those people in higher IQ ranges than you would have realised that those in the lower ranges, (the 60-70%) are not smart enough to have planned for or identified ALL legit reasons, (and sometimes ANY legit reasons...) Since 60% is greater than half, there is a good chance that they haven't gone over every possibility, nor planned very well for some of those that they did go over.
I've been burned before when I assumed that something obvious to me was also obvious to those in charge. Often they never had a clue.
T
And with only 1% population growth per year, we can hit that number in about 1000 years. Exponential growth is a funny thing.
T
The Term 'Capitalism' is used to describe things ranging from Laissez-faire to the 'other' golden rule - He who has the gold makes the rules. - Please clarify your use of the term. (this goes for the parent poster too!)
T
Ever try to 'hang out' at the local military base?
T
In KDE (kubuntu) this can be changed. You have the choice of several menues when you click the desktop. (do nothing is the default...)
T
Two out of the three replies to my comment thought that I meant 40 cycles was enough per neuron. I guess I was not clear enough.
40 cycles is nowhere near enough. 40 inputs for a real neuron is small, and 40 cycles would barely let you sum the inputs. To heck with adjusting weights, you can't even run the thing in real-time. The AC I was replying to said that this could be simulated in software at break-neck speed. He is wrong.
T
The chips proposed would probably be able to run faster than real-time. Far fewer neurons at far faster speeds. Does that help answer your question?
T
No. Correct me if I am wrong, but back-propagation works by comparing the output of the whole net to the desired output, and tweeking the weights one layer at a time back up the net. In real brains, neurotransmitters either do not travel up the chain more than one neuron, or they simply signal all neurons physically close, whether they are connected by synapses or not. (like a hormone) Further, since real brains are recurrent networks (they have lots of internal feedback loops), 'back' doesn't mean much.
T
A 2.0GHz dual-core CPU running 2^20 neurons in the net at 100Hz gets about 40 clock cycles per neuron per cycle...Somebody check my math please.
T
As far as I know, brains do not use back-propagation at all. Each neuron changes it's own weights based on things like timing of inputs vs output, and various neurotransmitters present.
If all you want are more neural nets like we have been doing then sure - back-propagation algorithms matter. That does not seem to be the goal here though.
T