I did, and you can see my response above. He makes a bunch of claims, but nowhere does he show anything actually happening. If taxation lowers productivity, show me the chart, with real numbers of real people making real transactions.
I've read the screed you linked to, it's bizarre, like timecube bizarre. It's just a bunch of assertions about how people behave when X and Y happen, without ever citing an example of it actually happening. It's all in his head, and utterly truthy and moralistic and "common sensical" without once dirtying itself with evidence.
Example: The argument that taxation and government spending decreases production depends on the assumption the the US tax system, in aggregate, is on the right side of the peak of the Laffer curve, which is what Hazlitt is essentially arguing in so many words, but at no time does he offer evidence that people are slacking in their production at higher rates of taxation. Obviously people will eventually, but where, and how is this affected by marginal tax rates? The highest earners were taxed over 90% on their highest bracket through the 1950s, and there was no "Atlas Shrugged" style revolt of investors and economic elites.
You also have to consider the opportunity cost; gobs of that money was going to Europe under the Marshall plan. If we didn't spend that money, would we have had a Soviet France, and Germany, and Italy threatening Britain? So many things to take into account, but no, Taxes are Evil and nothing could justify them.
Do you have any substantive response to the arguments? Can you demonstrate that their plan has "the opposite effect," and what does that mean? Does their plan cause deflation, because in general it's meant to intentionally induce inflation, and historically it succeeded. Does it cause an increase in unemployment, or decrease in real wages, or a decrease in liquidity, or interest rates, because none of these things happened historically.
I was thinking, if this whole mess had happened in 2002, and Bush had kept the Clinton budgets until that time, the war would probably make a lot of sense in strictly economic terms. Big outlay of cash, put people to work, borrow against future gains in resource control in the middle east. Woulda rocked, and Bush would have been lauded as a sort of genius that saved the economy, just like FDR. Being a spendy politician can pay off if you time it right, and being a austere one can too, as Clinton discovered.
they could have stopped the plan at any time and returned the money to the consumers.
Consumers? Maybe you mean the lenders, who didn't want their money back, they wanted the interest payments on the coupon and in their passbooks, because FDR was out BEGGING people to put their money back into banks so that the banks could put the money into paper to help re-liquify the economy. If you want a liquidity crisis and deflationary spiral, by all means stop government spending. In order for your argument to make sense you'd have to establish that the burden of the cost of the Boulder Dam was upon people who were in a position to consume more than the construction of the dam would have, and then furthermore that they would have indeed consumed, instead of simply hoarding the cash. With prices dropping throughout the country, and people hoarding cash due to the collapsing banking system, this is dubious.
I prefer eating the cake and paying for it later, which is what we did in the '30s, to eating the Iraq, er, cake and expecting the Chinese to loan us out of it because "Deficits don't matter", without considering what would happen if we actually DID need to borrow money for fiscal stimulus at some point.
The Krugman/Keynesian argument is that you have deficits when you need to stimulate the economy, and that you pay them back with higher taxes during cyclical upswings. For the last 8 years, while we were relatively flush, we haven't been paying back our debts, so now when we really need to borrow we're screwed.
I'm waiting for a 2 bedroom condo in LA to approach $300,000, but I get the idea:)
Everyone should read about the Japanese deflation, it was an absolute mess. It would appear that the Obama folks are taking Krugman's advice:
So never mind those long lists of reasons for Japan's slump. The answer to the country's immediate problems is simple: PRINT LOTS OF MONEY. But won't that be inflationary? Well, remember that the Bank of Japan is supposed to be impotent: if it prints more money, people will simply hoard it rather than save it. But printing money is only inflationary if people spend it, and if that spending exceeds the economy's capacity to produce. You cannot first argue that monetary policy is ineffective as a way to increase demand, then reject a proposal to print more money on the grounds that it will cause inflation.
Japan's problems were compounded by people saving and then not ever spending. I heard, anecdotally, that it wasn't unusual for people in average jobs to have the equivalent of over $100,000, or several multiples of a years salary in their savings account. Since there was deflation this made sense, since freezing your money into a purchase would cause it to lose value, but if people didn't spend, demand would never drive price appreciation, thus investments lose money, thus don't buy, thus investments lose money, thus don't buy...
The Hoover Dam was first proposed, by Hoover, granted, in 1922. His predecessor as President, Calvin Coolidge, signed the bill authorizing it in 1928; it was never a depression recovery project per se, the money had already been allocated before there was a Depression.
And does quite a bit of complaining about Django without completely demonstrating his point. I'm still foggy about his complete idea of what he believes the original interpretation of a "Controller" is, which is really the heart of the matter and where most people seem to disagree. His "model" of what MVC is is not explicated in his view, as represented by his blog post.
MVC is a pattern, not a set of rules, a coding style, house style, development framework, or development process. If you have three modules, one doing presentation, one doing state, and one mediating, you're doing MVC. What specific functions go where (is sorting on the model? is validation of this field in the view?) is specific to the problem domain.
This invention has already been invented and is marketed to the government, military and other clients. Perceptive Pixel also developed the interactive map John King would use to show election results; didn't you see the Daily Show?:)
What powers will this czar have, other than being the President's lobbyist to Congress to push their own agenda?
Isn't that enough? On the other hand, czars are important for bureaucratic rationalization: drug policy requires a lot of cooperation between federal law enforcement, state/local law enforcement, the medical system, foreign interdiction efforts etc. (assuming you accept drug control policy is rational, which it isn't. I think the idea of the drug tsar gives tsars a bad name. Aside from the original tsars, that is.)
The main problem with interdepartmental plenipotentiaries, or "Tsars" if you will, is they don't really have any authority: they're supposed to be the expert in the field and know more about how to do the job than anyone, but they're beholden to the existing baize cloth routine and can't make people do anything without the president's personal intervention. Even if Larry Lessig was a "Copyright Tsar," all he could do is talk shop with Obama about what should happen and then testify to congress a lot. He might have a voice in the appointment of FCC commissioners, and in copyright office policies, but he can always be overruled by a law.
Parent is not a troll. I don't agree that the administration is "compromised" by any of the appointments so far, but it's clear there are things you can do inside and things you can do outside, and there's no guarantee LL's skillset will work on the former.
On the other hand, there's all kinds of jobs the preznit can ask you to do, some policy-administrative-do stuff, like Secretary of Commerce, and some strictly advisory, like the the job Paul Volker got yesterday. In theory, you put "safe" people no one can complain about in the "do stuff" jobs, but you put the hair-burning crazies on the advisory boards to give you perspective. Lessig would be able contribute greatly leading an outside policy board.
I dunno, it seems that this knowledge is directly applicable to all kinds of serious real-world problems involving computer vision, particularly automated car driving (the Stanford connection might just be a coincidence, but there's a lot of overlap).
Mere mortals can play, just charge a reasonable rental rate to the production that hires you to shoot the show and you can probably pay off the whole package with one shoot.
If you charge your show $1k a day you'll be beating the book rate for an Arrflex by a significant amount and you'll have the rig paid off after one or two shows.
Of course, if you're a hobbyist, this is not your camera. Buy a Scarlett.
So you're saying my argument that the aspect ratio of a film doesn't have to have anything to do with how much information it contains?
I made no claims about the amount of information it contains, just that the pixel count isn't as meaningful for comparisons between camera systems, because of certain facts inheirent in Hidef workflows.
My friends used to argue for wide-screen formats because with a 4:3 aspect ratio, you lost visual information to either side of the visible area. Pan and scan technique, basically.
I'm talking cameras, you're talking projectors.
And NOW you come along and tell me that, yes, they DO cut off the top and bottom of the image to fit a particular aspect ratio. Hot damn!
NOWADAYS they do, either composing for a common topline or center, and exposing more of the film than they need for a 2.35. But before Super 35 and HiDef, movies were shot on formats that didn't expose extra negative area. There's really no way to tell if a film with full aperture hasn't been panned-and-scanned or just cropped off a larger negative. In any case, the closest approximation of the director's creative intent w/r/t composition is generally the going to be the letterboxed version.
For a modular system, I would have expected support of open or, at least, industry standards... Instead they went for a proprietary raw file format and popular but proprietary lens mounts.
Proprietary is the standard for the motion picture industry I'm afraid. Hell, Panavision invented their own lens mounts, and you can't even OWN a Panavision camera, they're rental only. Avid and Final Cut Pro continue their Kashmir-style range war over OMF/AAF/MXF with no end in sight, and don't even get me started on Pro Tools...
I have seen these rigs, and they're quite impressive. Soderberg shot "Che" with it, and though they've got some integration and workflow problems, it seems that they're on their way to demolishing the film industry as it is-- my GF is a DP and she and all her friends have been storming rental houses to get some time practicing with the gear so they can at least tell people they know how to use it. When everyone else is charging $70-$100K for something Red is selling for $15K, the writing is sorta on the wall. All RED has to do now is fill orders.
The horizontal resolution is the most important, because it is kept invariant among all the distribution channels. 16:9 and 4:3 teevee, 2.35 or 1.85 or 1.66 projection, they only cut off the top and bottom, never the sides. So the horizontal resolution becomes the best way to do an apples-to-apples comparison of an imager, since it's generally a given that what you're shooting is going to get cropped on the top and botto, but never on the sides.
Slashdot Mirror
I did, and you can see my response above. He makes a bunch of claims, but nowhere does he show anything actually happening. If taxation lowers productivity, show me the chart, with real numbers of real people making real transactions.
I've read the screed you linked to, it's bizarre, like timecube bizarre. It's just a bunch of assertions about how people behave when X and Y happen, without ever citing an example of it actually happening. It's all in his head, and utterly truthy and moralistic and "common sensical" without once dirtying itself with evidence.
Example: The argument that taxation and government spending decreases production depends on the assumption the the US tax system, in aggregate, is on the right side of the peak of the Laffer curve, which is what Hazlitt is essentially arguing in so many words, but at no time does he offer evidence that people are slacking in their production at higher rates of taxation. Obviously people will eventually, but where, and how is this affected by marginal tax rates? The highest earners were taxed over 90% on their highest bracket through the 1950s, and there was no "Atlas Shrugged" style revolt of investors and economic elites.
You also have to consider the opportunity cost; gobs of that money was going to Europe under the Marshall plan. If we didn't spend that money, would we have had a Soviet France, and Germany, and Italy threatening Britain? So many things to take into account, but no, Taxes are Evil and nothing could justify them.
Do you have any substantive response to the arguments? Can you demonstrate that their plan has "the opposite effect," and what does that mean? Does their plan cause deflation, because in general it's meant to intentionally induce inflation, and historically it succeeded. Does it cause an increase in unemployment, or decrease in real wages, or a decrease in liquidity, or interest rates, because none of these things happened historically.
I was thinking, if this whole mess had happened in 2002, and Bush had kept the Clinton budgets until that time, the war would probably make a lot of sense in strictly economic terms. Big outlay of cash, put people to work, borrow against future gains in resource control in the middle east. Woulda rocked, and Bush would have been lauded as a sort of genius that saved the economy, just like FDR. Being a spendy politician can pay off if you time it right, and being a austere one can too, as Clinton discovered.
Consumers? Maybe you mean the lenders, who didn't want their money back, they wanted the interest payments on the coupon and in their passbooks, because FDR was out BEGGING people to put their money back into banks so that the banks could put the money into paper to help re-liquify the economy. If you want a liquidity crisis and deflationary spiral, by all means stop government spending. In order for your argument to make sense you'd have to establish that the burden of the cost of the Boulder Dam was upon people who were in a position to consume more than the construction of the dam would have, and then furthermore that they would have indeed consumed, instead of simply hoarding the cash. With prices dropping throughout the country, and people hoarding cash due to the collapsing banking system, this is dubious.
I prefer eating the cake and paying for it later, which is what we did in the '30s, to eating the Iraq, er, cake and expecting the Chinese to loan us out of it because "Deficits don't matter", without considering what would happen if we actually DID need to borrow money for fiscal stimulus at some point.
The Krugman/Keynesian argument is that you have deficits when you need to stimulate the economy, and that you pay them back with higher taxes during cyclical upswings. For the last 8 years, while we were relatively flush, we haven't been paying back our debts, so now when we really need to borrow we're screwed.
I'm waiting for a 2 bedroom condo in LA to approach $300,000, but I get the idea :)
Everyone should read about the Japanese deflation, it was an absolute mess. It would appear that the Obama folks are taking Krugman's advice:
Japan's problems were compounded by people saving and then not ever spending. I heard, anecdotally, that it wasn't unusual for people in average jobs to have the equivalent of over $100,000, or several multiples of a years salary in their savings account. Since there was deflation this made sense, since freezing your money into a purchase would cause it to lose value, but if people didn't spend, demand would never drive price appreciation, thus investments lose money, thus don't buy, thus investments lose money, thus don't buy...
Time to take that savings and buy a house. No, seriously, have you seen prices lately?
Saving is good, but too much saving, and you get deflation and a Japanese-style "lost decade" recession.
The Hoover Dam was first proposed, by Hoover, granted, in 1922. His predecessor as President, Calvin Coolidge, signed the bill authorizing it in 1928; it was never a depression recovery project per se, the money had already been allocated before there was a Depression.
Contra Amity "You're all a bunch of whiners" Shlaes, who's work has been effectively discredited by anyone who cared to think about it for five minutes.
The Hubble is clearly a vital strategic initiative in the Star War on Christmas.
Badum-bum, Try the veal.
And does quite a bit of complaining about Django without completely demonstrating his point. I'm still foggy about his complete idea of what he believes the original interpretation of a "Controller" is, which is really the heart of the matter and where most people seem to disagree. His "model" of what MVC is is not explicated in his view, as represented by his blog post.
MVC is a pattern, not a set of rules, a coding style, house style, development framework, or development process. If you have three modules, one doing presentation, one doing state, and one mediating, you're doing MVC. What specific functions go where (is sorting on the model? is validation of this field in the view?) is specific to the problem domain.
IMHO
This invention has already been invented and is marketed to the government, military and other clients. Perceptive Pixel also developed the interactive map John King would use to show election results; didn't you see the Daily Show? :)
Oh, I get it. But honestly I can't think of a shorter way of expressing the concept of a "baize cloth routine."
Elaborate "self-aggrandizing language"
Isn't that enough? On the other hand, czars are important for bureaucratic rationalization: drug policy requires a lot of cooperation between federal law enforcement, state/local law enforcement, the medical system, foreign interdiction efforts etc. (assuming you accept drug control policy is rational, which it isn't. I think the idea of the drug tsar gives tsars a bad name. Aside from the original tsars, that is.)
The main problem with interdepartmental plenipotentiaries, or "Tsars" if you will, is they don't really have any authority: they're supposed to be the expert in the field and know more about how to do the job than anyone, but they're beholden to the existing baize cloth routine and can't make people do anything without the president's personal intervention. Even if Larry Lessig was a "Copyright Tsar," all he could do is talk shop with Obama about what should happen and then testify to congress a lot. He might have a voice in the appointment of FCC commissioners, and in copyright office policies, but he can always be overruled by a law.
Parent is not a troll. I don't agree that the administration is "compromised" by any of the appointments so far, but it's clear there are things you can do inside and things you can do outside, and there's no guarantee LL's skillset will work on the former.
On the other hand, there's all kinds of jobs the preznit can ask you to do, some policy-administrative-do stuff, like Secretary of Commerce, and some strictly advisory, like the the job Paul Volker got yesterday. In theory, you put "safe" people no one can complain about in the "do stuff" jobs, but you put the hair-burning crazies on the advisory boards to give you perspective. Lessig would be able contribute greatly leading an outside policy board.
Well sure, if you want to guarantee it'll be called "Solaris" (if history is any guide).
But seriously, sounds like a great idea.
I dunno, it seems that this knowledge is directly applicable to all kinds of serious real-world problems involving computer vision, particularly automated car driving (the Stanford connection might just be a coincidence, but there's a lot of overlap).
Mere mortals can play, just charge a reasonable rental rate to the production that hires you to shoot the show and you can probably pay off the whole package with one shoot.
If you charge your show $1k a day you'll be beating the book rate for an Arrflex by a significant amount and you'll have the rig paid off after one or two shows.
Of course, if you're a hobbyist, this is not your camera. Buy a Scarlett.
I made no claims about the amount of information it contains, just that the pixel count isn't as meaningful for comparisons between camera systems, because of certain facts inheirent in Hidef workflows.
I'm talking cameras, you're talking projectors.
NOWADAYS they do, either composing for a common topline or center, and exposing more of the film than they need for a 2.35. But before Super 35 and HiDef, movies were shot on formats that didn't expose extra negative area. There's really no way to tell if a film with full aperture hasn't been panned-and-scanned or just cropped off a larger negative. In any case, the closest approximation of the director's creative intent w/r/t composition is generally the going to be the letterboxed version.
We have the Hague Invasion Act for this sort of thing, silly.
Ahem. It would be "That's no moon..."
Why would I need the University of Illinois to give me a certificate when Thawte can be so much cheaper.... OIC.
For a modular system, I would have expected support of open or, at least, industry standards ... Instead they went for a proprietary raw file format and popular but proprietary lens mounts.
Proprietary is the standard for the motion picture industry I'm afraid. Hell, Panavision invented their own lens mounts, and you can't even OWN a Panavision camera, they're rental only. Avid and Final Cut Pro continue their Kashmir-style range war over OMF/AAF/MXF with no end in sight, and don't even get me started on Pro Tools...
I have seen these rigs, and they're quite impressive. Soderberg shot "Che" with it, and though they've got some integration and workflow problems, it seems that they're on their way to demolishing the film industry as it is-- my GF is a DP and she and all her friends have been storming rental houses to get some time practicing with the gear so they can at least tell people they know how to use it. When everyone else is charging $70-$100K for something Red is selling for $15K, the writing is sorta on the wall. All RED has to do now is fill orders.
The horizontal resolution is the most important, because it is kept invariant among all the distribution channels. 16:9 and 4:3 teevee, 2.35 or 1.85 or 1.66 projection, they only cut off the top and bottom, never the sides. So the horizontal resolution becomes the best way to do an apples-to-apples comparison of an imager, since it's generally a given that what you're shooting is going to get cropped on the top and botto, but never on the sides.