When it comes to reducing taxes, nothing is a scam if it is legal. Paying the lowest tax allowable by law is every citizen's duty to their country.
Too bad the IRS doesn't see it that way. They can rule a legal practice abusive after the fact and go after you still. While the particular practice discussed in this sub thread has nil chance of that happening, there are a lot of people facing huge tax penalties and jail time right now because they took your philosophy to heart.
The specific "damage" will naturally vary from industry to industry, in some there will be negligble damage. Any time you arbitrarily limit your employment pool by an employment nonspecific criteria you are reducing the pool of qualified and above applicants. On average, some of those excluded will have qualities not possessed by those remaining in the pool.
If your business is sweeping floors, then arbitrary reductions in the available employment pool probably isn't going to hurt you much if any. But there are few modern jobs where that will be true.
Re:Beyond the simulation of 'fighting while wounde
on
Games That Shoot Back
·
· Score: 1
In the real world there's always more than two options. In this situation I suspect those who have a natural aptitude for FPS games will learn more quickly than without the shocks, but for most people they will just stop playing.
Interestingly enough the equal pay drive has hurt them the most in this area. Now ideally it is equal pay for equal work, but as you've pointed out, on average women don't provide an equal amount of work.
Which means paying them the same is paying them more than what you would pay for a conmensurate amount of male labor.
This was balanced before by paying women less. Of course now you have lots of women who are unmarried and childless and contribute just as much as any man would. So it would be problematic to discriminate pay based solely on gender.
And with maternity leave laws and work place protections it makes it difficult to treat workers on a case by case basis (and one can argue that there are societal benefits to the creation of new workers, care of elderly parents, etc).
It's such a morass that I think the biggest mistake we've made is thinking we can legislate by fiat one set of rules for everyone.
I'd rather see workers and employers hash out work agreements themselves. People who do stupid stuff, like refuse to hire any women or pay them much less than what the work they contribute is worth will be at a disadvantage to employers to don't.
You're assuming that this unknown matter is uniform. If you pull out an olive have you explained the salad? No, but you do know more about it then before you pulled it out.
You seem to be under the impression that we know what dark matter is and isn't. Dark matter is postulated given gravitational effects that would arise from mass that we cannot detect, hence dark.
If it turns out that it is normal matter after all, and we just had trouble seeing it, we have still "discovered dark matter."
Another way of putting it would be, who killed the prime minister of Georgia? If it turns out later that it was an accident from a faulty space heater, did we find out who killed him? Just becuase we were expecting a who and got a what doesn't mean the question wasn't answered.
That's where the article started to lose me as well, just more pie in the sky dreaming about what would be cool with little basis in reality or what's in development. I mean I don't really care if stuff like this get's posted as a "news" story, but I do tire of the breathless copy that makes it sound like this stuff will be hitting shelves anytime now.
While I belive Sejnowski is absolutely correct that there's probably a lot worth investigating in the extracellular material, one possibility is that very long term memories are illusory.
Rarely are these long term memories of the same quality as very recent memories, and I don't just mean of strength, but that they are qualitatively different. That you no longer have access to what one might call witness memory, where if someone asks you questions about the event you can search the myriad details of the event to find the answer.
Given that the bulk of our early memories are lost over time, what's special about that handful of memories that we do hold onto and that are veridical? I suspect that most of this subset of retained memories are not the original memories but rather memories of the memories.
Personally, when I go over the longest memories I still hold onto, they are almost all experiences that I at some point either told someone else about, thought about, or had cause to remember at some point in the past. Each time you do this the memory is copied to other areas (whatever those might be, we still don't have a good grasp on this). And most of a given memory that I now have owes its features to the nature of the account I gave earlier.
For example say someone remembers the experience of riding on their grandmother's lap on a train when he goes to visit her at the age of three. Shortly after that he will have all sorts of specific stored information relating to that particular event. If the event is never revisited it will likely be almost entirely lost, but if several years later he tells someone else about the experience, a memory of the event recounted still many years further down the road would depend heavily on what exactly the person shared during that earlier recounting. That is, the person is no longer remembering the event, but rather recalling the earlier recounting.
Oh if you're cued well enough you can remember all sorts of things from way back, but they are so fragmentary that it's probably just the distributed nature of memory that saves them from complete loss most of the time. There will always be a few bits and pieces floating around in there.
There's a lot of things people don't even think of doing because their hard drives would be far too small. Drives hold only a limited amount media (audio and video) even in the formats of today, let alone the formats of tomorrow. Don't get me wrong, you have an argument for a decent sized group of people, who really don't need more space for what they are doing now or even for what they might want to do in the next few years. But it's wrong to think that group includes almost everyone. There's a substantial number of people out there who feel constrained even by 400 GB disks, myself included.
Lol, you had me rolling there about the unless stuff spawned out of thin air comment. I kind of think that is their point. So when you say, well unless what you say happened actually happened, you're undoubtedly incorrect. Insight of the year there lol.
I understand it's intellectually convenient to say that an extreme probability is the same as certainty, but in the end it's not. There's all sorts of improbable scenarios that could explain the "facts" in a very different way. Kind of like that Cheppelle skit where the guy walks in on his wife bent down on Chappelle with her head bobbing. Out of all the times that happens in a given year, how many times is the wife faking it as part of a hidden camera gag?
Over the long run in our personal lives we have to go with the high probabilities, it's the optimal thing to do, but there's no need to stoop to the intellectually dishonest position of decreeing fact and fiction as if we were omniscient.
Re:Their called assets...
on
Wish Cancelled
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Any money that comes from the sale of the IP is money they don't have in their pocket right now.
Just because they don't have the money to finish it doesn't mean it wouldn't be worth something to someone else who does have the money to finish it/resolve the code or design problems.
This is the reason I'd say about half of all new businesses fail that could have ultimately been profitable. They just didn't start out with enough money to get the concern going.
Now I'm not saying that's the case with Wish, they might have tanked even had they finished it and made it to retail.
One of my neigbhors does this for a living, going in and purchasing the assets of business that go bust for pennies on the dollar. You still have to have an eye for the potential worth of the assets to get a good deal though.
You might have a point if the activity was innocous and one would only know that the activity should not be engaged in because someone tells you you should not.
Don't wear orange clothing in public. You have been warned.
Don't mention the previous administration in conversation with your neighbors.
Don't water your lawn next week.
I think you get the idea, shining lasers at aircraft as they approach an airport for landing shouldn't be something you have to tell someone not to do. Maybe he didn't watch the news that week, doesn't make him any less deserving of punishment, it would just make him seem like a little less of a complete fucktard.
The problem is can you name any government run businesses that meet your requirements? That don't get breaks of one sort or another? I'm not saying it's impossible, just that when you look at it historically it suggests you're better off just avoiding any state run enterprises in the first place to avoid the temptation and only allow the government to service itself.
Coops and nonprofits are the way to go to accomplish the goals that are often espoused by those wanting to set up a goverment run business of one sort or another. Of course as it is now those are pseudo goverment entities in that they get special breaks on taxes and other things that they really shouldn't.
There is only one way that evolution can end, and that is when a species goes extinct. You are confusing changes in selective pressure with evolution itself.
In fact it isn't unreasonable to argue just the opposite. By greatly reducing the selective pressures so that the majority of people who would not have successfully reproduced before can now do so you increase the variability within the population which speeds the pace of evolution and widens the potential branches.
If you were to narrow your argument greatly to the point that modern living makes it such that any single person randomly selected from the population would be less likely to survive in the world of our ancestors, you would be correct. But we don't, so it isn't really meaningful.
I'd guess that about half the population would view the benefits of pirated entertainment as being worth the cost of being cluck clucked at on message boards and being told what they are doing is wrong.
I suspect the percentage of people who would see the benefits of free music/movies outweighing say a 10-15% chance of doing jail time to be significantly lower.
With drugs the bulk of the harms acrue to the user, and by their very nature they overwhelm the normal process of weighing relative benefits making users very resistant to penal disincentives.
Neither of those is true for people who download or distribute music/movies/software. The harms accrue to other people and they are in complete possession of their faculties to make reasoned decisions.
So someone who steals your identity, ruins your credit, has bill collectors constantly calling you and harrasing you as you try to get it fixed, they should be sent to counseling?
Saw trailer in theatre
on
Sin City Trailer
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
This weekend I saw the trailer at the theatre and at first the style really threw me off, especially with all the big name stars in there, you just don't expect them to be in something so edgy and stylistic.
This taps into another issue as well, after this initual round of major outsourcing a number of problems came out in the popular press about the downsides of outsourcing, but it would be a mistake to think that this anything more than a temporary setback. As the years go on the foreign labor pools will gain the experience to do the job as well or better than the people they replaced.
The day this is no longer an issue is the day that the world has evolved into a nearly homogenous global economy, something that is at least a century away. Until then there will be continual short term disruptions as outsourcable labor markets shift from one country to the next.
It does make once curious though what will happen when much of the population has little to offer in relationship to the massive amounts of goods and services that are produced. Scarcity is the mechanism that turns the cogs.
You have confused freedom with what one does with his or her freedom. Freedom being the right to use one's time, property and effort as one wishes. To suggest that proprietary software is evil uncovers the fanatical and unreasoned basis of your position. You should never have to resort to one color arguments that don't even really say anything other than scream that something is wrong.
And it's especially tragic when people of Stallman's statue adopt fanaticism instead of reasoned persuasion, especially given the many merits of open source software.
Re:Why not some mainstream fallacies?
on
Bad Science Awards
·
· Score: 1
Right you are, never knew that. Was one of those words that I just deduced the meaning from the context but turns out to have a much more technical meaning, thanks.
Slashdot Mirror
When it comes to reducing taxes, nothing is a scam if it is legal. Paying the lowest tax allowable by law is every citizen's duty to their country.
- 24-son-of-boss_x.htm
Too bad the IRS doesn't see it that way. They can rule a legal practice abusive after the fact and go after you still. While the particular practice discussed in this sub thread has nil chance of that happening, there are a lot of people facing huge tax penalties and jail time right now because they took your philosophy to heart.
For example:
http://www.usatoday.com/money/perfi/taxes/2005-03
The specific "damage" will naturally vary from industry to industry, in some there will be negligble damage. Any time you arbitrarily limit your employment pool by an employment nonspecific criteria you are reducing the pool of qualified and above applicants. On average, some of those excluded will have qualities not possessed by those remaining in the pool.
If your business is sweeping floors, then arbitrary reductions in the available employment pool probably isn't going to hurt you much if any. But there are few modern jobs where that will be true.
In the real world there's always more than two options. In this situation I suspect those who have a natural aptitude for FPS games will learn more quickly than without the shocks, but for most people they will just stop playing.
Interestingly enough the equal pay drive has hurt them the most in this area. Now ideally it is equal pay for equal work, but as you've pointed out, on average women don't provide an equal amount of work.
Which means paying them the same is paying them more than what you would pay for a conmensurate amount of male labor.
This was balanced before by paying women less. Of course now you have lots of women who are unmarried and childless and contribute just as much as any man would. So it would be problematic to discriminate pay based solely on gender.
And with maternity leave laws and work place protections it makes it difficult to treat workers on a case by case basis (and one can argue that there are societal benefits to the creation of new workers, care of elderly parents, etc).
It's such a morass that I think the biggest mistake we've made is thinking we can legislate by fiat one set of rules for everyone.
I'd rather see workers and employers hash out work agreements themselves. People who do stupid stuff, like refuse to hire any women or pay them much less than what the work they contribute is worth will be at a disadvantage to employers to don't.
Even if it only makes sense to me, at least it makes sense to someone.
You see the point? Just because what you were looking for was in a different category doesn't mean they can't be the same thing.
That's the problem with imprecision in our referents, but it's unavoidable at this stage of the game.
Oh, read the article. I unfortunately just did that now and you were right, the headline was very misleading as was suggested. My bad.
You're assuming that this unknown matter is uniform. If you pull out an olive have you explained the salad? No, but you do know more about it then before you pulled it out.
You seem to be under the impression that we know what dark matter is and isn't. Dark matter is postulated given gravitational effects that would arise from mass that we cannot detect, hence dark.
If it turns out that it is normal matter after all, and we just had trouble seeing it, we have still "discovered dark matter."
Another way of putting it would be, who killed the prime minister of Georgia? If it turns out later that it was an accident from a faulty space heater, did we find out who killed him? Just becuase we were expecting a who and got a what doesn't mean the question wasn't answered.
That's where the article started to lose me as well, just more pie in the sky dreaming about what would be cool with little basis in reality or what's in development. I mean I don't really care if stuff like this get's posted as a "news" story, but I do tire of the breathless copy that makes it sound like this stuff will be hitting shelves anytime now.
and why would you assume the poster was a male?
While I belive Sejnowski is absolutely correct that there's probably a lot worth investigating in the extracellular material, one possibility is that very long term memories are illusory.
Rarely are these long term memories of the same quality as very recent memories, and I don't just mean of strength, but that they are qualitatively different. That you no longer have access to what one might call witness memory, where if someone asks you questions about the event you can search the myriad details of the event to find the answer.
Given that the bulk of our early memories are lost over time, what's special about that handful of memories that we do hold onto and that are veridical? I suspect that most of this subset of retained memories are not the original memories but rather memories of the memories.
Personally, when I go over the longest memories I still hold onto, they are almost all experiences that I at some point either told someone else about, thought about, or had cause to remember at some point in the past. Each time you do this the memory is copied to other areas (whatever those might be, we still don't have a good grasp on this). And most of a given memory that I now have owes its features to the nature of the account I gave earlier.
For example say someone remembers the experience of riding on their grandmother's lap on a train when he goes to visit her at the age of three. Shortly after that he will have all sorts of specific stored information relating to that particular event. If the event is never revisited it will likely be almost entirely lost, but if several years later he tells someone else about the experience, a memory of the event recounted still many years further down the road would depend heavily on what exactly the person shared during that earlier recounting. That is, the person is no longer remembering the event, but rather recalling the earlier recounting.
Oh if you're cued well enough you can remember all sorts of things from way back, but they are so fragmentary that it's probably just the distributed nature of memory that saves them from complete loss most of the time. There will always be a few bits and pieces floating around in there.
Or that learning something twice is useful. It's rare for anyone to get that great a grasp on anything after just one time through.
The only meaning in life is that which we construct. Or so some of us believe.
There's a lot of things people don't even think of doing because their hard drives would be far too small. Drives hold only a limited amount media (audio and video) even in the formats of today, let alone the formats of tomorrow. Don't get me wrong, you have an argument for a decent sized group of people, who really don't need more space for what they are doing now or even for what they might want to do in the next few years. But it's wrong to think that group includes almost everyone. There's a substantial number of people out there who feel constrained even by 400 GB disks, myself included.
Lol, you had me rolling there about the unless stuff spawned out of thin air comment. I kind of think that is their point. So when you say, well unless what you say happened actually happened, you're undoubtedly incorrect. Insight of the year there lol.
I understand it's intellectually convenient to say that an extreme probability is the same as certainty, but in the end it's not. There's all sorts of improbable scenarios that could explain the "facts" in a very different way. Kind of like that Cheppelle skit where the guy walks in on his wife bent down on Chappelle with her head bobbing. Out of all the times that happens in a given year, how many times is the wife faking it as part of a hidden camera gag?
Over the long run in our personal lives we have to go with the high probabilities, it's the optimal thing to do, but there's no need to stoop to the intellectually dishonest position of decreeing fact and fiction as if we were omniscient.
Any money that comes from the sale of the IP is money they don't have in their pocket right now.
Just because they don't have the money to finish it doesn't mean it wouldn't be worth something to someone else who does have the money to finish it/resolve the code or design problems.
This is the reason I'd say about half of all new businesses fail that could have ultimately been profitable. They just didn't start out with enough money to get the concern going.
Now I'm not saying that's the case with Wish, they might have tanked even had they finished it and made it to retail.
One of my neigbhors does this for a living, going in and purchasing the assets of business that go bust for pennies on the dollar. You still have to have an eye for the potential worth of the assets to get a good deal though.
You might have a point if the activity was innocous and one would only know that the activity should not be engaged in because someone tells you you should not.
Don't wear orange clothing in public. You have been warned.
Don't mention the previous administration in conversation with your neighbors.
Don't water your lawn next week.
I think you get the idea, shining lasers at aircraft as they approach an airport for landing shouldn't be something you have to tell someone not to do. Maybe he didn't watch the news that week, doesn't make him any less deserving of punishment, it would just make him seem like a little less of a complete fucktard.
The problem is can you name any government run businesses that meet your requirements? That don't get breaks of one sort or another? I'm not saying it's impossible, just that when you look at it historically it suggests you're better off just avoiding any state run enterprises in the first place to avoid the temptation and only allow the government to service itself.
Coops and nonprofits are the way to go to accomplish the goals that are often espoused by those wanting to set up a goverment run business of one sort or another. Of course as it is now those are pseudo goverment entities in that they get special breaks on taxes and other things that they really shouldn't.
There is only one way that evolution can end, and that is when a species goes extinct. You are confusing changes in selective pressure with evolution itself.
In fact it isn't unreasonable to argue just the opposite. By greatly reducing the selective pressures so that the majority of people who would not have successfully reproduced before can now do so you increase the variability within the population which speeds the pace of evolution and widens the potential branches.
If you were to narrow your argument greatly to the point that modern living makes it such that any single person randomly selected from the population would be less likely to survive in the world of our ancestors, you would be correct. But we don't, so it isn't really meaningful.
I'd guess that about half the population would view the benefits of pirated entertainment as being worth the cost of being cluck clucked at on message boards and being told what they are doing is wrong.
I suspect the percentage of people who would see the benefits of free music/movies outweighing say a 10-15% chance of doing jail time to be significantly lower.
With drugs the bulk of the harms acrue to the user, and by their very nature they overwhelm the normal process of weighing relative benefits making users very resistant to penal disincentives.
Neither of those is true for people who download or distribute music/movies/software. The harms accrue to other people and they are in complete possession of their faculties to make reasoned decisions.
So someone who steals your identity, ruins your credit, has bill collectors constantly calling you and harrasing you as you try to get it fixed, they should be sent to counseling?
This weekend I saw the trailer at the theatre and at first the style really threw me off, especially with all the big name stars in there, you just don't expect them to be in something so edgy and stylistic.
This taps into another issue as well, after this initual round of major outsourcing a number of problems came out in the popular press about the downsides of outsourcing, but it would be a mistake to think that this anything more than a temporary setback. As the years go on the foreign labor pools will gain the experience to do the job as well or better than the people they replaced.
The day this is no longer an issue is the day that the world has evolved into a nearly homogenous global economy, something that is at least a century away. Until then there will be continual short term disruptions as outsourcable labor markets shift from one country to the next.
It does make once curious though what will happen when much of the population has little to offer in relationship to the massive amounts of goods and services that are produced. Scarcity is the mechanism that turns the cogs.
You have confused freedom with what one does with his or her freedom. Freedom being the right to use one's time, property and effort as one wishes. To suggest that proprietary software is evil uncovers the fanatical and unreasoned basis of your position. You should never have to resort to one color arguments that don't even really say anything other than scream that something is wrong.
And it's especially tragic when people of Stallman's statue adopt fanaticism instead of reasoned persuasion, especially given the many merits of open source software.
Right you are, never knew that. Was one of those words that I just deduced the meaning from the context but turns out to have a much more technical meaning, thanks.