demand is (in all the models of which I'm aware) a strictly decreasing function of price and supply is a strictly increasing function of price.
Take a look at the theory of the Giffen good, wherein a price increase causes a demand increase.
Supposedly the theory would apply (as is the classic example) for me when I go to buy bread at the grocery store. The least-expensive bread goes stale too quickly for me, whereas more-expensive breads - which I use for the exact same purpose (and which taste similar, though of course not exactly the same) - do not... Of course there are limits. I won't buy any bread that is $4.00/loaf, but I do choose between loaves at $0.70/loaf and $1.00/loaf.
But then, in my case, it's not the higher price that causes me to buy the more expensive bread, it's the greater utility of longer-lasting bread. I don't care what people think when I buy bread. I would certainly buy the cheaper bread if it lasted just as long as more-expensive bread. Alternately, I would buy more expensive bread if it offers improved features: better taste, better texture, less crumbliness, better quality in the toaster, etc..
Hence, the question of whether Giffen goods really even exist...:-/ I think the best argument is for an expectations-augmented Giffen model. A rising price of a loaf of bread, at most, signals to me that there exists higher costs to put it on the shelf - which, if I predict the trend will continue, might cause me to buy more bread (and store some for the longer-term in my freezer). But otherwise, I can't think of any circumstances, outside of possible niche markets for luxury goods of conspicuousness (fur coats, Ferraris, etc.), in which the Giffen model would likely apply.
The problem is the classic confusion between demand and quantity demanded. Demand is the entire demand curve and supply is the entire supply curves.
I know it seems a little pedantic to quibble over terminology but when you start thinking like this you can end up with all sorts of nonsensical conclusions.
Oh, it's never pedantic (in my book) to quibble over terminology! Without a common language -- which includes the definitions of words -- between 2 parties, communication can't occur! I quibble over terminology all the time.:-)
I considered the "supply/demand" vs. "quantity supplied/demanded" for a moment in writing my post.
The reason I used a looser terminology was because I was writing with the/. audience in mind. I didn't think it would make any difference to my audience which perspective I chose. But you're right: there is very much a difference between "supply" and "quantity supplied" ("supply" refers to the range in the supply curve covering all possible prices, whereas "quantity supplied" refers to the specific amount of supply actually supplied at a particular price point).
Think of shifts in the curves. You also have to consider short-run Vs. medium run elasticities. You are correct, in a sense, in the short run, labor supply is relatively inelastic. Meaning that shift in demand causes fairly large changes in salary. But, in the long run people head off to other industries and the elasticity is greater and the change in salary moderates. At this point the wage rate is probably somewhere between the original wage rate and the "shock" wage rate.
This point leads into the broad question of "wage stickiness" in labor econ (and price stickiness, more generally, which is to say, price-inelasticity).
Your analysis is (generally) correct though. Wages don't change much in the short-run (which we might assume to be anything under 3 years), but over time (as the run length increases), you're quite right. Real wages of the manual-labor jobs that started becoming mechanized-away during the Industrial Revolution, such as working in textiles, strike me as among the best examples.
What you are talking about here is known as "wage stickiness".
Hmm...:) (I hadn't read to this quote when I wrote the above on wage stickiness)
Since you did a minor in Economics, I'd recommend a PBS series called "The Commanding Heights". It's not particularly germane to this discussion just really interesting. I'd wager that you're Canadian or British (because everybody in the US calls university "college"). So I suspect it will make your blood boil a little bit because it's flattering of Reagan and Thatcher.
Ha, I'll surprise you then quite a bit then here!
I'm from the U.S.; I just prefer the term "university" instead, because "college" is a term (usually) referring to a particular school in a university -- the College of Liberal Arts, College of Business, College of Engineering, etc.. But since I didn't just finish my education under the umbrella of the Lib. Arts school (where my CS dept. was located) -- I took an EE class, in the college of engineering -- it's improper to say I "went to college", because technically, I went to multiple colleges. But I went to one university... (actually, that's not true either, but that's a longer story... Anyway, I suppose I was being inconsistently-pedantic in my previous post.)
I'm also probably among the biggest fans of Milton Friedman (my political and political-economy views seem to match his about 95% of the time; I have (and have read) both of his most-popular books on my bookshelf; I remember studying his permanent-income hypothesis in my Monetary Policy course and finding it a sensible theory). So the economic policies of Reagan and That
There's will come a time when the supply of IT workers will match or exceed the demand.
Take an econ class. You don't even know how to use the terminology right.
I did a minor in Economics at university (major in CS. I'm a developer too), with pretty good marks, particularly in the introductory courses, where econo-jargon is defined. I don't see anything wrong with his statement.
You can have an available supply of IT workers exceeding the demand for IT workers. And, of course, when this happens, the price -- the wage rate -- of IT workers falls; too many workers chase too few jobs.
Now, in practice the wage rate of employed workers doesn't fall (usually, though the end of the dotcom boom was an exception) - their pay is generally regular. But unemployment for that worker group rises, so the *mean* wage rate of *all* workers - the unemployed plus the employed - decreases.
Fair point about Kent State (I wasn't aware that there were that many Nat'l Guard there, much less how many fired their weapons).
So, assuming (and this is a *huge* assumption, I admit, but I'm working with the statistics given) the entire U.S. military were tasked with invading U.S. cities and locking them down, say, under an act of martial law, and given "shoot on sight" orders for anybody who leaves their home during "unacceptable hours" (say, 7AM-7PM) -- given that the military has around 1m members, that's 333,333 soldiers willing to fire on Americans.
333k soldiers -- almost the population of Wyoming (around 509k) -- vs. the nation, with probably the majority of the rest willing to engage in less-violent (but still-repressive) complementary actions, such as locking people in detention camps, some forms of torture, and so on. With each group distributed evenly across all states, that comes out to the following state-by-state distribution:
So long as there must exist an interface between the user's hardware and their applications, and so long as both of those must be managed in a transparent, reliable way, there is a need for an OS.
Saying "we don't need an OS!" is like saying we don't need TCP/IP to use the Internet. It's completely ignorant.
Doing things for non-economic reasons doesn't make somebody a "bad" person. People do things for irrational, emotional reasons all the time. But economics very much applies to each of your examples, rational or not, emotionally-driven or not.
For example, you ask "where is the economy in giving birth to children?". How about a tax break? Same goes for getting married.
In playing cards, the economy is (at least) in making oneself happier by using their time in a way that improves their happiness more than some other way (that is, the opportunity cost of one activity vs. another is their marginal increase in happiness). Perhaps some money too, if the players are playing for money...
I could go on with your other examples (there are so many in educating children that many a graduate paper has been written on that very subject), but I think my point is clear...
Oh I know they do, as a matter of faith -- just as the President swears to uphold the Constitution of the United States as well.
Yet, I think the record is quite clear that no President (or at least, none starting with FDR) has really adhered to that sworn oath, be it Bush Jr, Clinton, Bush Sr, Reagan, Carter, and on and on down the line.
Why, then, should members of the military behave any differently in their disregard to the objects of their oath?
By the count of the dead and wounded and the suffering of those who survive and those who saw the violence and lost those who they love.
About 10,000 people die per year in the U.S. because of a firearms-related cause.
However, about 40,000 people die per year due to automobile accidents. Should we ban the use of the automobile because 4 times as many people die from its use as from the use of firearms, which you claim are a "source of terror" in America?
250,000 die per year because ambulances can't arrive to the hospital on time. Conclude as you wish from this (hospital is too far away? roads are too crowded? ambulances should have more life-saving equipment on-board? all of the above?)
430,000 die per year due to smoking-related causes. Should we ban smoking, simply because people die from it?
And around 4,000 die in swimming pools. Should we ban swimming pools because people drown in them?
Try taking your economic rationality (if you've enabled it for this discussion) and considering the other, more-mundane reasons people die in the U.S., and put firearm-related deaths in perspective. There are a plenty of areas where bigger gains in human life loss-reduction can be made than in gun-related incidents. Don't pull the Bush-style "terrorism" approach out and inflate the horror of a problem when it, when compared to other issues, is really a pretty trivial issue (at least for now, in the case of terrorism. Individual gun ownership, however, is not a trend prone to increasingly-large spikes of deadliness over time, unlike terrorism. But that's a different debate...).
knives (not much of a ranged attack, much less lethal, very messy)
You obviously have never studied martial arts and have little familiarity with the practice of law enforcement.
Practitioners of these fields generally regard knives to be *more* dangerous in close-quarters than both handguns and (especially) long guns. They regard it as a guarantee that even an experienced hand-to-hand fighter will get cut in a knife-fight, whereas although it's still very dangerous, it's not regarded as certain that one will get shot when fighting at close range.
A single cut of a knife can kill a person if the cut is in the right place, particularly around the neck: cut the esophagus to prevent further breathing; cut an artery in the jugular on either side of the neck and the person will bleed to death. Cutting an artery elsewhere achieves the same goal: the inner-leg is one such place.
Knives can be extremely dangerous, and swords even moreso.
(Disclaimer: I'm not a cop. But I have several years practice in tang soo do, have dabbled in a couple other, similar styles, and used to read "Black Belt" magazine fairly-regularly.)
How many American soldiers would be willing to open fire on their hometown for any reason less than a full-blown foreign invasion? A lot less than 100%, I can guarantee.
That is why if the military would most likely assign soldiers to areas that are distant from their hometowns -- to minimize the emotional impact that soldiers would have.
Soldiers from red states would be sent to blue states, and vice-versa, in an attempt to leverage the cultural differences between the states as reason for fighting. Soldiers from Maryland and Vermont would be sent to Texas; Texans, to Maryland and Vermont. People from Illinois would fight people in Arizona; Californians would fight in Kansas. And so on.
Many of the soldiers in the U.S. military would doubtlessly raise objections to killing Americans. But to whom do they ultimately pledge allegiance: their countrymen, or the government? To the people they've sworn to defend, or to the people who provide them with their paycheck, their bread, their weapons, and their fellow soldiers, with whom they've each become lifelong "war buddies"?
Your emotional desire says the former. History and emotionless reasoning suggests the latter.
The resistance in Iraq and Afghanistan has access to automatic weaponry and rocketry. American civilians don't, and many advocates for the Second Amendment don't try to claim that anyone has a right to arms so powerful.
For adult individuals with no violent criminal history, who successfully pass a rigorous (as in, much more rigorous than getting a driver's license), anonymous test of mental competence, marksmanship, and responsibility towards the weapons' use and maintenance, and who are willing to renew this license periodically (say, annually), I do.
Hopefully, a large portion of them would either refuse or even defend the civilian population.
"Hopefully"? And just what, exactly, do you intend to do if the military fails to live up to this hopeful, idealistic expectation, in the absence of your own individually-owned armaments?
Obviously you, alone, won't defeat the entire U.S. military. But you, combined with tens of millions of other Americans, standing up against the military, might.
It is a long-term threat to American liberty that we have allowed the military to become many times more powerful than the people it normally defends... But that is the present state of things.
I'm shocked that the figure is so low; that there are less than 1,250 CS PhD candidates each year in a nation of 300,000,000 people.
I wouldn't expect it to be very high, given the simultaneously very-demanding and very-nerdy nature of being a CS PhD. But I would've guessed there are 5k-10k/year, at least... (then again, who have I met besides a CS professor who has a CS PhD? Er, nobody. But I don't live within 2,000 miles of Google's (or MSFT's) HQ...)
We combine blue-collar conservatism with white-collar leftism. The result is a mish-mash of totalitarian social views and socialist economics; it's sort of a new-wave domestic USSR. (We have the dubious distinction of having the first "universal" healthcare for children. OMG, THINK OF THE CHILDREN!! We also have U.N.-condemned police torture in Chicago. And then there's our world-famous political corruption; even third-world nations in Africa are familiar.)
We do still manage to get by with a flat 3% income tax rate, due to high property taxes and idiotic consumption taxes in Chicago (an "amusement tax"? a tax on sodas (including diet)? a tax on hot-dog vendors? Get bent.), although state and other municipal sales taxes are no worse here than elsewhere in the nation. We do this the same way President Bush does -- by having a budget deficit as red as the national flag of China.
Oh, and we ignore the hell out of East St. Louis, often proclaimed "a third-world city in a first-world nation".
2,500/day = 912,500/year dropping-out. This rate about 0.3% of the U.S. population dropping-out every year (at current population estimates).
But what number of students enter high school each year? PBS says 3 million students graduate this year. These are the students who make it; those who drop-out are the ones who don't make it. So, adding the 912,500/year that drop out, we're looking at an initial high school input of almost 4m students.
This back-of-the-envelope calculation suggests that roughly 3/4 of students are still graduating high school.
Not that this is a high bar of achievement by any means... No way.
But at least we who weren't slacker idiots will have plenty of people serving us burgers and fries, schlepping boxes in warehouses, driving taxis, digging swimming pools, mopping floors, etc.. (assuming these jobs aren't all taken over by robots, but given the slow progress of our robotic overlords in spite of various technologists' and futurists' predictions, I would bet current crap-job laborers will have secure employment (secure from automation, at least, though immigration is quite a different story) for at least another 25 years. Needless to say, I don't share Ray Kurzweil's optimism for "20,000 years of progress in the next 100 years"...)
Biggest false assumption is that without government there will be noone 'forcing' borders and tarrifs and what not onto you, and that is actually true for many of the things you blame on 'government interference'. I am not saying that governments do not interfer, but you are dead wrong to believe that if they'd stop their interference, that it would not be replaced by something that is likely even more interfering.
But (it appears) you are making a similar assumption: the standard assumption that in absence of government, a society descends into "warlordism" - rule by warlords. That is, if a government doesn't exist to enact some borders (like the U.S.-Mexico border), one or more people will do so instead.
That may well be the case, but there is no way to know: where in history has a society existed without a government?. In any case, given that the behavior of government and warlords is to create artificial, political barriers, the question you must then ask yourself is this: what is the difference between government and a warlord?
Ostensibly, government -- western governments, and particularly the U.S. govn't -- is reigned-in by: 1) its design, in which there exists a separation of functional powers (legislative, judicial, and executive) and checks-and-balances between those powers, and 2) by the power of a voting public
But really, isn't this just another way of saying we have an elected body of warlords? Effectively, yes, it is.
So, to return to the main point. Would labor and capital be restricted by non-governmental actors in absence of government intervention? There firstly must be a reason why they would do this...
Undoubtedly there would be some people creating such restrictions. People would put up fences and walls and guard towers and such around the property they have either seized by force or purchased by trade, so other people would be unable to use it. People would either have to buy the rights to travel across the property, or go around it.
And this logical exploration leads to one reason why I am not an an-cap. Such behavior, in the long-run, leads to an inefficient outcome: imagine if you had to pay a toll to cross every piece of 1, 10, 100 acre property in the U.S.. It'd be a nightmare of either stop-and-go traffic, or a ridiculous amount of more-efficient toll infrastructure (like the I-Pass/EZ-Pass found in IL, NY, and several other states, but on a much more localized scale). You'd have millions of iterations of transaction costs and/or infrastructure costs that could be done-away with more efficiently by requiring takings for public use (as the U.S. Constitution allows, provided the individual is justly compensated) -- namely, the construction of a roadway usable by all citizens, funded either via taxes, or at least through the use of a less-common toll than the an-cap society would eventually impose.
Even if, in the an-cap society, a private entity decided to make a business of setting up private roads by buying up property from people and creating a tollway infrastructure much like we have here in IL, the evolution of such a business would be so slow (due to lack of capital) as to make non-useful headway as time progresses. And there is still the issue of that road-building entity dealing with homeowners in locations they require who won't sell for whatever reason (domain-squatting on the Internet is analogous to this).
No, it is vastly more-efficient, it seems to me, to bulldoze the occasional set of properties for what is very-clearly a public use: transportation and freedom of movement. Depending on the size and scope of the project, I tend to feel this way about infrastructure projects in general... (Wi-Fi, no. Roadways, yes. Electricity, phone lines, fiber, and cable TV? Maybe.)
So to tie this all back in with border disputes. In absence of government, would there be border disputes? Not to the scale to which I was speaking, i.e., coast-to-coast (again,
How can their be a law against that in a country that regards itself as free (Japan)?
Because Sony is a big, EEEEVIL corporation! Didn't you know? Capitalism is bad. Corporations are the devil. Everything should be like, free, like the trees and the flowers and the air, man.
Anarcho-capitalists and other right-libertarians have this fiction that the state somehow interferes with or frustrates capitalism.
What, government intervention *doesn't* hinder capitalism?
You obviously have never taken International Economics, or else you would have seen -- mathematically (it's simple algebra and Cartesian graphs) -- how a tariff raises the price of a product above its equilibrium level, causing a supply/demand imbalance. Indeed, this is true of any excise/sales/consumption tax.
You likewise don't understand the problem of price controls, in which a min/max price is set for a given product. Example? Gasoline in the 1970s. Price controls on gasoline resulted in the supply shocks that manifested the long lines at gas pumps Americans remember so well.
I could go on, but it is plain to see you don't understand economics. Your examples don't make economic sense, and they frankly aren't even coherent:
Both historically and functionally, capital created the modern nation-state, and capital would re-create the state it needed if it were abolished or diminished.
What? No. Government is a political body of people agreeing -- supposedly (because no group of people ever agrees 100% on anything) -- upon a standard set of laws and rules by which one group of men governs another group. Administering such a structure requires capital, sure (and the U.S. did so through massive deficit spending and loans in its inception). But the desire to organize a government at all comes prior to the capital, and that capital is extracted via taxation -- something that, in creating the government, the citizenry (or dictators) must consider and decide upon.
Intellectual property is one example - the creation of currency is another, as is the enforcement of national boundaries to maintain tiered labor markets.
Maintenance of tiered labor markets? Such border protections are a government creation, moron -- they are entirely antithetical to a free-market. In absence of government, i.e. given the existence of a pure free-market, you would not have a U.S.-Mexico border dispute, because no such border would exist: labor and capital would be free to move *unmolested* across what currently is defined as a political border... Instead, *government* border patrol asks you for your passport, asks you whether you are carrying any special fruits or vegetables, and might even search your car for drugs.
Border patrol, in fact, is a classic example of government intervention hampering capitalism's growth.
Modern liberals operate under the fiction that government is a boon to capitalism; the taxation (to say nothing of the effects of the regulations, opportunity costs, etc.) required to grow the government to the size such liberals deem necessary, however, ensure that government's growth crowds-out capitalism.
Now, I would argue (in contrast to the an-caps) that there are a certain few cases in which government provides some function of the economy better than the private market does.
The establishment and maintenance of a common currency is one of them. It's more efficient to carry around a single credit card that exchanges in the currency of USD than it is to carry stored-value cards for each vendor you visit, for example. (The same is true of paper currency.)
And the provision of law enforcement and a judicial system lends itself to needing a fair and impartial court; yet, when those tasked to such administration are hired by the highest-bidder, they have incentive to work only for those who pay them the most, to the detriment of the rest of the legal system's participants. Of course, you still have the problem of how to make the courts impartial when prosecuting a case against the government -- after all, it is the government that pays their salary... But arguably, the U.S. has done a reasonably-good job of this (due
Seriously folks. Aside from the fistfights, which are a law-enforcement matter of protecting one individual from another (which TFP indicates they failed to do - can you say "government failure", kids?), this is a good example of capitalism helping the poor.
What else should the homeless do: sit on their duffs waiting for a government handout? And that helps them get back to work *how*, exactly?
Having them buy PS3s on behalf of somebody else who doesn't want to wait in line to do so himself is an employment of otherwise unemployed labor. The businessman who employs them is seeking to turn a profit on reselling the PS3s because the demand far exceeds the supply of them. Welcome to Econ101.
I fail to see what the generally-leftist, economically-illiterate Slashdot crowd finds wrong with this picture, except for the notion that people actually have to -- GASP! -- *work* for a living (which the majority of the Slashdot crowd, being composed of high school and college students, do not do)...
Oh, oh, wait, I get it: this enterprising businessman is somehow "evil". He's "forcing" homeless proletariat to work for him (but how, exactly? It's a voluntary transaction! The homeless wouldn't work for him if they didn't get something out of it, and he likewise would not employ them if he could not turn a profit)... At least, these are the laughably-retarded arguments I expect to see...
Thats the biggest problem with our society, no one values experience, no one values wisdom gleaned from 25 years of doing the JOB.
Speaking as a 25 year-old developer and engineer (of some directory services) with a CS degree (who took a semester of mainframe - yes, *mainframe*, believe it or not - ASM) in a large company, for a combined (internship + post-undergrad FT work) almost 2 years, I will say that I see value in both education and experience, but I weight experience more heavily. Perhaps the best developer I've ever personally known (in his early 40s) never went to college either; he started out programming for a company in high school... [1]
But, when I look in job ads, I see a similar trend to what you describe: calls for more education than is necessary. I've seen ads looking for web developers with master's degrees in CS! You *so* totally don't need a master's in CS to do friggen' HTML, seriously...
At the other end of the education-vs-experience spectrum (and hitting me harder, generally), are calls for more experience. Even excluding senior developer job ads, I would guesstimate that only about 5% of ads for developers are looking for somebody with 0-2 years experience. Most are seeking 2-5 years experience, minimum. Most senior positions, predictably (and wisely, IMO), require at least 5 years' experience.
That puts inexperienced people like me in a catch-22: we need experience to get a job, but to get a job, we need experience. My internship was a workaround for this problem (cheap, limited-time summer labor for the company), and my employer liked my work enough to hire me FT.
At least you old fogeys can go back to school (potentially PT, so you can still work FT too) and pick up the sheepskin B.S. (really, just a high-minded certification) that employers seek. Granted, it won't be easy (going to school for 4 years in any "hard" major (science/math/engineering) never is), esp. if you have a family. But if you've saved much money at all in your >= 2 decades of working, at least you can (more-easily) afford it, and there's a fair chance your existing employer (if employed) will pick up part or all of the costs too. [2]
Us "kids" can't just decide to go get experience whenever we want (because who will hire us?), easy though it might seem from the perspective of a grizzled veteran...
On a different note, I primarily do C/C++ on Windows and C#/.NET these days. But I've varying levels of skill in mainframe ASM, JCL, COBOL, C, C++, Java (language and class libs), C#,.NET, VB, VBScript, BASIC, and Perl... And various shell-scripting languages (bash, sh, tcsh, csh, zsh, DOS batch scripts), but I don't count those as "real" programming languages (HTML and XML too, but those aren't programming languages at all, they're formatting/markup languages).
I'm teaching myself JSP at the moment, and considering Ruby... (Personally though, I prefer to know a small set of languages relatively-well, and know several more less-well. C++, Java, C#, and Perl are my strong points these days.) I comment my code and have been complimented numerous times (by both professionals and professors) on my commenting quality, and I generate documentation for various users of my code (developers, users, designers, management, etc.).
I like object repositories because they allow me to not re-invent the wheel for the 10,000th time, and get my code working sooner. Why waste tens or hundreds of hours writing yet-another implementation of an FTP client library when one already exists that has been tested more-thoroughly (by virtue of other people probably having used it in different scenarios, at least, if not more-formal testing procedures aren't used as well) that can be used in minutes? Unless you have some way to improve upon all the other libs out there, that is...
This latter problem of re-inventing the wheel is a trait I notice is common to lots of older developers, and I'm not s
Mankiw is right that an ignorant vote is worse than no vote at all.
To illustrate by way of hypothetical, ask yourself which is worse:
* Telling your boss that Windows ME is a better OS than Win2k, or telling him you don't know? (if you're in IT, this ought to be obvious, but which is better: to admit you don't know, and go research the subject, or tell your boss to invest in ME, thereby giving him the go-ahead to make a costly, stupid decision?)
* Telling people that global warming does (or does not) exist, when in fact you don't really know? (is it better to falsely claim knowledge, or is it better to study the situation and get closer to the data first?)
* Telling the police that a serial killer ran north past your house during his evasion, when in fact you don't know whether he went north or west (assuming he's being chased from the south)? i.e., what's worse: telling the police that he could be one of 2 different ways, or telling him he went one way (north) rather than the other way he might actually have gone (west)?
* (During the Cold War) Informing the President that Soviet Russia has launched its nukes at America, when in fact you haven't confirmed this by way of whatever procedure the military uses to confirm such things? (Imagine what would happen if the President acted on this false advice: he might return fire, only to learn later that Russia may not have launched in the first place!)
As Thomas Jefferson once said (to paraphrase), he who admits he does not know the answer is closer to the truth than he who falsely claims he does know it. Ignorance is preferable to error.
With that said, your vote -- by itself, as an individual -- is utterly irrelevant. Yes, political people, I said "irrelevant".
It is irrelevant because elections involve a binary outcome: either you win, or you do not. There is no "almost won". "Do or do not; there is no 'try'", as Yoda says. What does the binary outcome mean for you, the voter?
It means that unless all the votes returned result in a dead-even vote, and your vote is the sole deciding vote, your vote is lost among the other votes. Just another iteration in the count of votes for one side or another.
For example: say you have a district in which there are exactly 549,999 votes for the Republican, 549,999 votes for the Democrat. [1] In this case, your vote for a Republican would mean there are 550,000 Republican votes, and 549,999 Democrat votes. The Republican thus wins, and therefore, the outcome is the same as if the Democrats had not voted at all - they might as well have stayed at home eating Cheetos and banging their S.O.'s. The reverse is true if you vote for the Democrat.
However, no race is ever this razor-thin. Even the year 2000 Presidential race in Florida had a margin of 537 votes -- razor-thin, by state-level standards, yet still more than enough to mean that your vote in that margin has less than a 0.2% impact on the outcome (this assumes your vote is one of the votes in the 537 in the margin. But in this particular case, Floridians didn't decide the vote: the U.S. Supreme Court did).
Even in that race, if you voted Republican, your vote would've been 1 out of 537 in the margin. Had you not voted, there would have been 536 in the margin instead. That's still clearly more than enough to sway things to the GOP side. The Republicans win - with or without your vote.
So, why vote if your vote does not matter? *Individually*, it doesn't matter. It's irrational as an individual to vote. As an individual policy, voting is irrational and irrelevant *IF* your goal is to change the outcome of the election. [2]
However, as a *group* policy, it clearly makes a difference. The power of our electoral system lies not with your vote; it lies with your ability to persuade other people to vote the way you want them to... True political power is gained by convincing tho
Actually, I think that's something to do with Visual Studio. I've noticed exactly the same thing when using Visual Studio over Remote Desktop Connection via a VPN on an old slow machine (at my end): VS appears to redraw the entire contents of the editor window for every keystroke.
I've noticed this too. In fact, with VS2k3, I had a problem where after several hours, text would start getting mangled in the graphical blitting in the text area. It was as though VS2k3 was using DirectDraw to render the textbox (or maybe the whole app), or at least some graphical control rather than the standard textbox... This bug required me to restart VS2k3.
Blessedly, I haven't seen this in VS2k5.
Point is though, if VS2k3/2k5 does use a Direct* control as I suspect, then I believe ("believe", because I've never done DirectDraw, DirectX, etc. coding, but I have seen this in Java's AWT classes) the behavior will be like that of a graphical paint area: the whole area is redrawn every time it is updated... Anyway, that's my theory.:-)
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Take a look at the theory of the Giffen good, wherein a price increase causes a demand increase.
Supposedly the theory would apply (as is the classic example) for me when I go to buy bread at the grocery store. The least-expensive bread goes stale too quickly for me, whereas more-expensive breads - which I use for the exact same purpose (and which taste similar, though of course not exactly the same) - do not... Of course there are limits. I won't buy any bread that is $4.00/loaf, but I do choose between loaves at $0.70/loaf and $1.00/loaf.
But then, in my case, it's not the higher price that causes me to buy the more expensive bread, it's the greater utility of longer-lasting bread. I don't care what people think when I buy bread. I would certainly buy the cheaper bread if it lasted just as long as more-expensive bread. Alternately, I would buy more expensive bread if it offers improved features: better taste, better texture, less crumbliness, better quality in the toaster, etc..
Hence, the question of whether Giffen goods really even exist...
Oh, it's never pedantic (in my book) to quibble over terminology! Without a common language -- which includes the definitions of words -- between 2 parties, communication can't occur! I quibble over terminology all the time. :-)
/. audience in mind. I didn't think it would make any difference to my audience which perspective I chose. But you're right: there is very much a difference between "supply" and "quantity supplied" ("supply" refers to the range in the supply curve covering all possible prices, whereas "quantity supplied" refers to the specific amount of supply actually supplied at a particular price point).
I considered the "supply/demand" vs. "quantity supplied/demanded" for a moment in writing my post.
The reason I used a looser terminology was because I was writing with the
This point leads into the broad question of "wage stickiness" in labor econ (and price stickiness, more generally, which is to say, price-inelasticity).
Your analysis is (generally) correct though. Wages don't change much in the short-run (which we might assume to be anything under 3 years), but over time (as the run length increases), you're quite right. Real wages of the manual-labor jobs that started becoming mechanized-away during the Industrial Revolution, such as working in textiles, strike me as among the best examples.
Hmm... :) (I hadn't read to this quote when I wrote the above on wage stickiness)
Ha, I'll surprise you then quite a bit then here!
I'm from the U.S.; I just prefer the term "university" instead, because "college" is a term (usually) referring to a particular school in a university -- the College of Liberal Arts, College of Business, College of Engineering, etc.. But since I didn't just finish my education under the umbrella of the Lib. Arts school (where my CS dept. was located) -- I took an EE class, in the college of engineering -- it's improper to say I "went to college", because technically, I went to multiple colleges. But I went to one university... (actually, that's not true either, but that's a longer story... Anyway, I suppose I was being inconsistently-pedantic in my previous post.)
I'm also probably among the biggest fans of Milton Friedman (my political and political-economy views seem to match his about 95% of the time; I have (and have read) both of his most-popular books on my bookshelf; I remember studying his permanent-income hypothesis in my Monetary Policy course and finding it a sensible theory). So the economic policies of Reagan and That
I did a minor in Economics at university (major in CS. I'm a developer too), with pretty good marks, particularly in the introductory courses, where econo-jargon is defined. I don't see anything wrong with his statement.
You can have an available supply of IT workers exceeding the demand for IT workers. And, of course, when this happens, the price -- the wage rate -- of IT workers falls; too many workers chase too few jobs.
Now, in practice the wage rate of employed workers doesn't fall (usually, though the end of the dotcom boom was an exception) - their pay is generally regular. But unemployment for that worker group rises, so the *mean* wage rate of *all* workers - the unemployed plus the employed - decreases.
Fair point about Kent State (I wasn't aware that there were that many Nat'l Guard there, much less how many fired their weapons).
.Alabama 5,126 killing 10,251 non-killing
.Alaska 746 killing 1,493 non-killing
.Arizona 6,679 killing 13,358 non-killing
.Arkansas 3,125 killing 6,251 non-killing
.California 40,633 killing 81,266 non-killing
.Colorado 5,246 killing 10,493 non-killing
.Connecticut 3,948 killing 7,895 non-killing
.Delaware 949 killing 1,897 non-killing
.District of Columbia killing 619 1,238 non-killing
.Florida 20,006 killing 40,012 non-killing
.Georgia 10,203 killing 20,405 non-killing
.Hawaii 1,434 killing 2,868 non-killing
.Idaho 1,607 killing 3,214 non-killing
.Illinois 14,353 killing 28,707 non-killing
.Indiana 7,053 killing 14,107 non-killing
.Iowa 3,336 killing 6,672 non-killing
.Kansas 3,087 killing 6,173 non-killing
.Kentucky 4,693 killing 9,387 non-killing
.Louisiana 5,087 killing 10,174 non-killing
.Maine 1,486 killing 2,972 non-killing
.Maryland 6,298 killing 12,596 non-killing
.Massachusetts 7,196 killing 14,392 non-killing
.Michigan 11,382 killing 22,763 non-killing
.Minnesota 5,772 killing 11,544 non-killing
.Mississippi 3,285 killing 6,570 non-killing
.Missouri 6,523 killing 13,046 non-killing
.Montana 1,052 killing 2,104 non-killing
.Nebraska 1,978 killing 3,956 non-killing
.Nevada 2,716 killing 5,431 non-killing
.New Hampshire 1,473 killing 2,946 non-killing
.New Jersey 9,804 killing 19,608 non-killing
.New Mexico 2,169 killing 4,337 non-killing
.New York 21,653 killing 43,306 non-killing
.North Carolina 9,765 killing 19,530 non-killing
.North Dakota 716 killing 1,432 non-killing
.Ohio 12,892 killing 25,784 non-killing
.Oklahoma 3,990 killing 7,980 non-killing
.Oregon 4,095 killing 8,189 non-killing
.Pennsylvania 13,978 killing 27,956 non-killing
.Rhode Island 1,210 killing 2,420 non-killing
.South Carolina 4,785 killing 9,570 non-killing
.South Dakota 873 killing 1,745 non-killing
.Tennessee 6,706 killin
So, assuming (and this is a *huge* assumption, I admit, but I'm working with the statistics given) the entire U.S. military were tasked with invading U.S. cities and locking them down, say, under an act of martial law, and given "shoot on sight" orders for anybody who leaves their home during "unacceptable hours" (say, 7AM-7PM) -- given that the military has around 1m members, that's 333,333 soldiers willing to fire on Americans.
333k soldiers -- almost the population of Wyoming (around 509k) -- vs. the nation, with probably the majority of the rest willing to engage in less-violent (but still-repressive) complementary actions, such as locking people in detention camps, some forms of torture, and so on. With each group distributed evenly across all states, that comes out to the following state-by-state distribution:
So long as there must exist an interface between the user's hardware and their applications, and so long as both of those must be managed in a transparent, reliable way, there is a need for an OS.
Saying "we don't need an OS!" is like saying we don't need TCP/IP to use the Internet. It's completely ignorant.
Doing things for non-economic reasons doesn't make somebody a "bad" person. People do things for irrational, emotional reasons all the time. But economics very much applies to each of your examples, rational or not, emotionally-driven or not.
For example, you ask "where is the economy in giving birth to children?". How about a tax break? Same goes for getting married.
In playing cards, the economy is (at least) in making oneself happier by using their time in a way that improves their happiness more than some other way (that is, the opportunity cost of one activity vs. another is their marginal increase in happiness). Perhaps some money too, if the players are playing for money...
I could go on with your other examples (there are so many in educating children that many a graduate paper has been written on that very subject), but I think my point is clear...
Oh I know they do, as a matter of faith -- just as the President swears to uphold the Constitution of the United States as well.
Yet, I think the record is quite clear that no President (or at least, none starting with FDR) has really adhered to that sworn oath, be it Bush Jr, Clinton, Bush Sr, Reagan, Carter, and on and on down the line.
Why, then, should members of the military behave any differently in their disregard to the objects of their oath?
Where in my post did I say that the test would be administered by the government? Why couldn't private certification firms handle this task?
You merely *assumed* the testing would be performed by the government.
About 10,000 people die per year in the U.S. because of a firearms-related cause.
However, about 40,000 people die per year due to automobile accidents. Should we ban the use of the automobile because 4 times as many people die from its use as from the use of firearms, which you claim are a "source of terror" in America?
250,000 die per year because ambulances can't arrive to the hospital on time. Conclude as you wish from this (hospital is too far away? roads are too crowded? ambulances should have more life-saving equipment on-board? all of the above?)
430,000 die per year due to smoking-related causes. Should we ban smoking, simply because people die from it?
And around 4,000 die in swimming pools. Should we ban swimming pools because people drown in them?
Try taking your economic rationality (if you've enabled it for this discussion) and considering the other, more-mundane reasons people die in the U.S., and put firearm-related deaths in perspective. There are a plenty of areas where bigger gains in human life loss-reduction can be made than in gun-related incidents. Don't pull the Bush-style "terrorism" approach out and inflate the horror of a problem when it, when compared to other issues, is really a pretty trivial issue (at least for now, in the case of terrorism. Individual gun ownership, however, is not a trend prone to increasingly-large spikes of deadliness over time, unlike terrorism. But that's a different debate...).
You obviously have never studied martial arts and have little familiarity with the practice of law enforcement.
Practitioners of these fields generally regard knives to be *more* dangerous in close-quarters than both handguns and (especially) long guns. They regard it as a guarantee that even an experienced hand-to-hand fighter will get cut in a knife-fight, whereas although it's still very dangerous, it's not regarded as certain that one will get shot when fighting at close range.
A single cut of a knife can kill a person if the cut is in the right place, particularly around the neck: cut the esophagus to prevent further breathing; cut an artery in the jugular on either side of the neck and the person will bleed to death. Cutting an artery elsewhere achieves the same goal: the inner-leg is one such place.
Knives can be extremely dangerous, and swords even moreso.
(Disclaimer: I'm not a cop. But I have several years practice in tang soo do, have dabbled in a couple other, similar styles, and used to read "Black Belt" magazine fairly-regularly.)
That is why if the military would most likely assign soldiers to areas that are distant from their hometowns -- to minimize the emotional impact that soldiers would have.
Soldiers from red states would be sent to blue states, and vice-versa, in an attempt to leverage the cultural differences between the states as reason for fighting. Soldiers from Maryland and Vermont would be sent to Texas; Texans, to Maryland and Vermont. People from Illinois would fight people in Arizona; Californians would fight in Kansas. And so on.
Many of the soldiers in the U.S. military would doubtlessly raise objections to killing Americans. But to whom do they ultimately pledge allegiance: their countrymen, or the government? To the people they've sworn to defend, or to the people who provide them with their paycheck, their bread, their weapons, and their fellow soldiers, with whom they've each become lifelong "war buddies"?
Your emotional desire says the former. History and emotionless reasoning suggests the latter.
For adult individuals with no violent criminal history, who successfully pass a rigorous (as in, much more rigorous than getting a driver's license), anonymous test of mental competence, marksmanship, and responsibility towards the weapons' use and maintenance, and who are willing to renew this license periodically (say, annually), I do.
"Hopefully" ? And just what, exactly, do you intend to do if the military fails to live up to this hopeful, idealistic expectation, in the absence of your own individually-owned armaments?
Obviously you, alone, won't defeat the entire U.S. military. But you, combined with tens of millions of other Americans, standing up against the military, might.
It is a long-term threat to American liberty that we have allowed the military to become many times more powerful than the people it normally defends... But that is the present state of things.
I'm shocked that the figure is so low; that there are less than 1,250 CS PhD candidates each year in a nation of 300,000,000 people.
I wouldn't expect it to be very high, given the simultaneously very-demanding and very-nerdy nature of being a CS PhD. But I would've guessed there are 5k-10k/year, at least... (then again, who have I met besides a CS professor who has a CS PhD? Er, nobody. But I don't live within 2,000 miles of Google's (or MSFT's) HQ...)
We combine blue-collar conservatism with white-collar leftism. The result is a mish-mash of totalitarian social views and socialist economics; it's sort of a new-wave domestic USSR. (We have the dubious distinction of having the first "universal" healthcare for children. OMG, THINK OF THE CHILDREN!! We also have U.N.-condemned police torture in Chicago. And then there's our world-famous political corruption; even third-world nations in Africa are familiar.)
We do still manage to get by with a flat 3% income tax rate, due to high property taxes and idiotic consumption taxes in Chicago (an "amusement tax"? a tax on sodas (including diet)? a tax on hot-dog vendors? Get bent.), although state and other municipal sales taxes are no worse here than elsewhere in the nation. We do this the same way President Bush does -- by having a budget deficit as red as the national flag of China.
Oh, and we ignore the hell out of East St. Louis, often proclaimed "a third-world city in a first-world nation".
2,500/day = 912,500/year dropping-out. This rate about 0.3% of the U.S. population dropping-out every year (at current population estimates).
But what number of students enter high school each year? PBS says 3 million students graduate this year. These are the students who make it; those who drop-out are the ones who don't make it. So, adding the 912,500/year that drop out, we're looking at an initial high school input of almost 4m students.
This back-of-the-envelope calculation suggests that roughly 3/4 of students are still graduating high school.
Not that this is a high bar of achievement by any means... No way.
But at least we who weren't slacker idiots will have plenty of people serving us burgers and fries, schlepping boxes in warehouses, driving taxis, digging swimming pools, mopping floors, etc.. (assuming these jobs aren't all taken over by robots, but given the slow progress of our robotic overlords in spite of various technologists' and futurists' predictions, I would bet current crap-job laborers will have secure employment (secure from automation, at least, though immigration is quite a different story) for at least another 25 years. Needless to say, I don't share Ray Kurzweil's optimism for "20,000 years of progress in the next 100 years"...)
But (it appears) you are making a similar assumption: the standard assumption that in absence of government, a society descends into "warlordism" - rule by warlords. That is, if a government doesn't exist to enact some borders (like the U.S.-Mexico border), one or more people will do so instead.
That may well be the case, but there is no way to know: where in history has a society existed without a government?. In any case, given that the behavior of government and warlords is to create artificial, political barriers, the question you must then ask yourself is this: what is the difference between government and a warlord?
Ostensibly, government -- western governments, and particularly the U.S. govn't -- is reigned-in by:
1) its design, in which there exists a separation of functional powers (legislative, judicial, and executive) and checks-and-balances between those powers, and
2) by the power of a voting public
But really, isn't this just another way of saying we have an elected body of warlords? Effectively, yes, it is.
So, to return to the main point. Would labor and capital be restricted by non-governmental actors in absence of government intervention? There firstly must be a reason why they would do this...
Undoubtedly there would be some people creating such restrictions. People would put up fences and walls and guard towers and such around the property they have either seized by force or purchased by trade, so other people would be unable to use it. People would either have to buy the rights to travel across the property, or go around it.
And this logical exploration leads to one reason why I am not an an-cap. Such behavior, in the long-run, leads to an inefficient outcome: imagine if you had to pay a toll to cross every piece of 1, 10, 100 acre property in the U.S.. It'd be a nightmare of either stop-and-go traffic, or a ridiculous amount of more-efficient toll infrastructure (like the I-Pass/EZ-Pass found in IL, NY, and several other states, but on a much more localized scale). You'd have millions of iterations of transaction costs and/or infrastructure costs that could be done-away with more efficiently by requiring takings for public use (as the U.S. Constitution allows, provided the individual is justly compensated) -- namely, the construction of a roadway usable by all citizens, funded either via taxes, or at least through the use of a less-common toll than the an-cap society would eventually impose.
Even if, in the an-cap society, a private entity decided to make a business of setting up private roads by buying up property from people and creating a tollway infrastructure much like we have here in IL, the evolution of such a business would be so slow (due to lack of capital) as to make non-useful headway as time progresses. And there is still the issue of that road-building entity dealing with homeowners in locations they require who won't sell for whatever reason (domain-squatting on the Internet is analogous to this).
No, it is vastly more-efficient, it seems to me, to bulldoze the occasional set of properties for what is very-clearly a public use: transportation and freedom of movement. Depending on the size and scope of the project, I tend to feel this way about infrastructure projects in general... (Wi-Fi, no. Roadways, yes. Electricity, phone lines, fiber, and cable TV? Maybe.)
So to tie this all back in with border disputes. In absence of government, would there be border disputes? Not to the scale to which I was speaking, i.e., coast-to-coast (again,
Because Sony is a big, EEEEVIL corporation! Didn't you know? Capitalism is bad. Corporations are the devil. Everything should be like, free, like the trees and the flowers and the air, man.
Want a hit of my reefer dude?
What, government intervention *doesn't* hinder capitalism?
You obviously have never taken International Economics, or else you would have seen -- mathematically (it's simple algebra and Cartesian graphs) -- how a tariff raises the price of a product above its equilibrium level, causing a supply/demand imbalance. Indeed, this is true of any excise/sales/consumption tax.
You likewise don't understand the problem of price controls, in which a min/max price is set for a given product. Example? Gasoline in the 1970s. Price controls on gasoline resulted in the supply shocks that manifested the long lines at gas pumps Americans remember so well.
I could go on, but it is plain to see you don't understand economics. Your examples don't make economic sense, and they frankly aren't even coherent:
What? No. Government is a political body of people agreeing -- supposedly (because no group of people ever agrees 100% on anything) -- upon a standard set of laws and rules by which one group of men governs another group. Administering such a structure requires capital, sure (and the U.S. did so through massive deficit spending and loans in its inception). But the desire to organize a government at all comes prior to the capital, and that capital is extracted via taxation -- something that, in creating the government, the citizenry (or dictators) must consider and decide upon.
Maintenance of tiered labor markets? Such border protections are a government creation, moron -- they are entirely antithetical to a free-market. In absence of government, i.e. given the existence of a pure free-market, you would not have a U.S.-Mexico border dispute, because no such border would exist: labor and capital would be free to move *unmolested* across what currently is defined as a political border... Instead, *government* border patrol asks you for your passport, asks you whether you are carrying any special fruits or vegetables, and might even search your car for drugs.
Border patrol, in fact, is a classic example of government intervention hampering capitalism's growth.
Modern liberals operate under the fiction that government is a boon to capitalism; the taxation (to say nothing of the effects of the regulations, opportunity costs, etc.) required to grow the government to the size such liberals deem necessary, however, ensure that government's growth crowds-out capitalism.
Now, I would argue (in contrast to the an-caps) that there are a certain few cases in which government provides some function of the economy better than the private market does.
The establishment and maintenance of a common currency is one of them. It's more efficient to carry around a single credit card that exchanges in the currency of USD than it is to carry stored-value cards for each vendor you visit, for example. (The same is true of paper currency.)
And the provision of law enforcement and a judicial system lends itself to needing a fair and impartial court; yet, when those tasked to such administration are hired by the highest-bidder, they have incentive to work only for those who pay them the most, to the detriment of the rest of the legal system's participants. Of course, you still have the problem of how to make the courts impartial when prosecuting a case against the government -- after all, it is the government that pays their salary... But arguably, the U.S. has done a reasonably-good job of this (due
Seriously folks. Aside from the fistfights, which are a law-enforcement matter of protecting one individual from another (which TFP indicates they failed to do - can you say "government failure", kids?), this is a good example of capitalism helping the poor.
What else should the homeless do: sit on their duffs waiting for a government handout? And that helps them get back to work *how*, exactly?
Having them buy PS3s on behalf of somebody else who doesn't want to wait in line to do so himself is an employment of otherwise unemployed labor. The businessman who employs them is seeking to turn a profit on reselling the PS3s because the demand far exceeds the supply of them. Welcome to Econ101.
I fail to see what the generally-leftist, economically-illiterate Slashdot crowd finds wrong with this picture, except for the notion that people actually have to -- GASP! -- *work* for a living (which the majority of the Slashdot crowd, being composed of high school and college students, do not do)...
Oh, oh, wait, I get it: this enterprising businessman is somehow "evil". He's "forcing" homeless proletariat to work for him (but how, exactly? It's a voluntary transaction! The homeless wouldn't work for him if they didn't get something out of it, and he likewise would not employ them if he could not turn a profit)... At least, these are the laughably-retarded arguments I expect to see...
Speaking as a 25 year-old developer and engineer (of some directory services) with a CS degree (who took a semester of mainframe - yes, *mainframe*, believe it or not - ASM) in a large company, for a combined (internship + post-undergrad FT work) almost 2 years, I will say that I see value in both education and experience, but I weight experience more heavily. Perhaps the best developer I've ever personally known (in his early 40s) never went to college either; he started out programming for a company in high school... [1]
.NET, VB, VBScript, BASIC, and Perl... And various shell-scripting languages (bash, sh, tcsh, csh, zsh, DOS batch scripts), but I don't count those as "real" programming languages (HTML and XML too, but those aren't programming languages at all, they're formatting/markup languages).
But, when I look in job ads, I see a similar trend to what you describe: calls for more education than is necessary. I've seen ads looking for web developers with master's degrees in CS! You *so* totally don't need a master's in CS to do friggen' HTML, seriously...
At the other end of the education-vs-experience spectrum (and hitting me harder, generally), are calls for more experience. Even excluding senior developer job ads, I would guesstimate that only about 5% of ads for developers are looking for somebody with 0-2 years experience. Most are seeking 2-5 years experience, minimum. Most senior positions, predictably (and wisely, IMO), require at least 5 years' experience.
That puts inexperienced people like me in a catch-22: we need experience to get a job, but to get a job, we need experience. My internship was a workaround for this problem (cheap, limited-time summer labor for the company), and my employer liked my work enough to hire me FT.
At least you old fogeys can go back to school (potentially PT, so you can still work FT too) and pick up the sheepskin B.S. (really, just a high-minded certification) that employers seek. Granted, it won't be easy (going to school for 4 years in any "hard" major (science/math/engineering) never is), esp. if you have a family. But if you've saved much money at all in your >= 2 decades of working, at least you can (more-easily) afford it, and there's a fair chance your existing employer (if employed) will pick up part or all of the costs too. [2]
Us "kids" can't just decide to go get experience whenever we want (because who will hire us?), easy though it might seem from the perspective of a grizzled veteran...
On a different note, I primarily do C/C++ on Windows and C#/.NET these days. But I've varying levels of skill in mainframe ASM, JCL, COBOL, C, C++, Java (language and class libs), C#,
I'm teaching myself JSP at the moment, and considering Ruby... (Personally though, I prefer to know a small set of languages relatively-well, and know several more less-well. C++, Java, C#, and Perl are my strong points these days.) I comment my code and have been complimented numerous times (by both professionals and professors) on my commenting quality, and I generate documentation for various users of my code (developers, users, designers, management, etc.).
I like object repositories because they allow me to not re-invent the wheel for the 10,000th time, and get my code working sooner. Why waste tens or hundreds of hours writing yet-another implementation of an FTP client library when one already exists that has been tested more-thoroughly (by virtue of other people probably having used it in different scenarios, at least, if not more-formal testing procedures aren't used as well) that can be used in minutes? Unless you have some way to improve upon all the other libs out there, that is...
This latter problem of re-inventing the wheel is a trait I notice is common to lots of older developers, and I'm not s
Mankiw is right that an ignorant vote is worse than no vote at all.
To illustrate by way of hypothetical, ask yourself which is worse:
* Telling your boss that Windows ME is a better OS than Win2k, or telling him you don't know? (if you're in IT, this ought to be obvious, but which is better: to admit you don't know, and go research the subject, or tell your boss to invest in ME, thereby giving him the go-ahead to make a costly, stupid decision?)
* Telling people that global warming does (or does not) exist, when in fact you don't really know? (is it better to falsely claim knowledge, or is it better to study the situation and get closer to the data first?)
* Telling the police that a serial killer ran north past your house during his evasion, when in fact you don't know whether he went north or west (assuming he's being chased from the south)? i.e., what's worse: telling the police that he could be one of 2 different ways, or telling him he went one way (north) rather than the other way he might actually have gone (west)?
* (During the Cold War) Informing the President that Soviet Russia has launched its nukes at America, when in fact you haven't confirmed this by way of whatever procedure the military uses to confirm such things? (Imagine what would happen if the President acted on this false advice: he might return fire, only to learn later that Russia may not have launched in the first place!)
As Thomas Jefferson once said (to paraphrase), he who admits he does not know the answer is closer to the truth than he who falsely claims he does know it. Ignorance is preferable to error.
With that said, your vote -- by itself, as an individual -- is utterly irrelevant. Yes, political people, I said "irrelevant".
It is irrelevant because elections involve a binary outcome: either you win, or you do not. There is no "almost won". "Do or do not; there is no 'try'", as Yoda says. What does the binary outcome mean for you, the voter?
It means that unless all the votes returned result in a dead-even vote, and your vote is the sole deciding vote, your vote is lost among the other votes. Just another iteration in the count of votes for one side or another.
For example: say you have a district in which there are exactly 549,999 votes for the Republican, 549,999 votes for the Democrat. [1] In this case, your vote for a Republican would mean there are 550,000 Republican votes, and 549,999 Democrat votes. The Republican thus wins, and therefore, the outcome is the same as if the Democrats had not voted at all - they might as well have stayed at home eating Cheetos and banging their S.O.'s. The reverse is true if you vote for the Democrat.
However, no race is ever this razor-thin. Even the year 2000 Presidential race in Florida had a margin of 537 votes -- razor-thin, by state-level standards, yet still more than enough to mean that your vote in that margin has less than a 0.2% impact on the outcome (this assumes your vote is one of the votes in the 537 in the margin. But in this particular case, Floridians didn't decide the vote: the U.S. Supreme Court did).
Even in that race, if you voted Republican, your vote would've been 1 out of 537 in the margin. Had you not voted, there would have been 536 in the margin instead. That's still clearly more than enough to sway things to the GOP side. The Republicans win - with or without your vote.
So, why vote if your vote does not matter? *Individually*, it doesn't matter. It's irrational as an individual to vote. As an individual policy, voting is irrational and irrelevant *IF* your goal is to change the outcome of the election. [2]
However, as a *group* policy, it clearly makes a difference. The power of our electoral system lies not with your vote; it lies with your ability to persuade other people to vote the way you want them to... True political power is gained by convincing tho
No *American* coder would ever do anything malicious to the American government! Only them damn furriners!
*cues Team America theme song*
"AMERRRICUUUH! FUCK YEAH!!"
Visual Studio on Windows in Parallels on OSX? You're living my dream! Where's your Kool-Aid, and do you mind if I take a swig? :-)
(Seriously, if I had the money, I'd get myself a MacBook and do the same thing. Alas, I will probably wait until my Toshiba finally dies...)
I've noticed this too. In fact, with VS2k3, I had a problem where after several hours, text would start getting mangled in the graphical blitting in the text area. It was as though VS2k3 was using DirectDraw to render the textbox (or maybe the whole app), or at least some graphical control rather than the standard textbox... This bug required me to restart VS2k3.
Blessedly, I haven't seen this in VS2k5.
Point is though, if VS2k3/2k5 does use a Direct* control as I suspect, then I believe ("believe", because I've never done DirectDraw, DirectX, etc. coding, but I have seen this in Java's AWT classes) the behavior will be like that of a graphical paint area: the whole area is redrawn every time it is updated... Anyway, that's my theory.