I probably even agree with you that regulation is needed to avoid large boom and bust cycles at the cost of overall efficiency.
Before the Fed there were no "large" boom and bust cycles, there were much smaller "corrections" of the market. The Fed then started attempting to fix "corrections" which would allow the market to over inflate and then burst causing a larger correction than would naturally occur. The large boom bust cycles are a byproduct of market manipulation by the Fed.
I'm not in the abolish the fed camp or in the gold standard camp, but having the Fed maintain a fixed interest rate and a fixed money supply (i.e. no printing extra money) regardless of emergencies in the market would do wonders for the economy.
You can't have a fixed interest rate and a fixed money supply. Pick either/or. We tried the fixed interest rate for several years in the later 70's. The result? Wild fluctuations in cost of credit-- rates flying between 17%, to 11%, up to 19% and back down to 10%. Yeah, that worked well.
They've got a tough job. I don't have such a problem with the interest rate control. What I have a problem with is them interfering in the free market when it's time for the bust cycle, and propping up failed institutions that should die. If they're too big to fail (and because of Credit Default Swaps, they definitely were, which is why we bailed them out) then they should have passed regulation to require capital requirements for all credit instruments, so that when Moody's downgraded a AAA rated security, there wasn't a sudden need for capital in the market to meet credit requirements.
Instead what we effectively had were institutions that were issuing credit all over the place, but didn't have any required reserve ratios. And like what happened to banks before the reserve ratio requirement, any word of insolvency would create a self-fulfilling prophecy. Had we required reserve ratios, we probably would have been saved from AIG, Lehman Brothers, etc.
But it's so hard to see this stuff coming. So easy in hindsight. However, now that we know this, the Fed should have passed regulatory measures to ensure this didn't happen again. Instead we just bailed them out with no requirement for better conduct in the future-- so the same thing that just happened can still happen again. We haven't fixed any of the systemic problems. And now there's even more encouragement to do the same thing in the future-- after all, they know we'll just bail them out if something happens.
FWIW, my uncle was recently diagnosed with a heart problem back in the UK, he was in hospital the same day, operated on within 2 days and back home 2 days later. The only real down-side was that he couldn't attend the wedding because of the US insurance costs.
And two weeks before the wedding, my mother was diagnosed with breast cancer. She opted to put off the operation-date offered (1 week after diagnosis) and wait until after the wedding. Since then she's been back and had her operation.
Cancer survival rates are 50% higher in the US than in the UK. Go look it up, the data is on NHS's website. NHS is not the rosy picture you think it is.
Only 15% of America is uninsured. We do not have a healthcare problem. You want to institute something that will remove the profit motive in the medical industry. Health is the next growth opportunity for the US, but not if there's no profit to be had. We've sequenced the human genome and you want to cut off any reason for a company to try to use that to find a cure for something. Then you'll probably want more government funding to universities.
That's for Federal student loans. You're capped at using $5k/year-$8k/year. If you can't pay off $25k within 10 years and you have a college education, then you're doing something wrong.
And why, pray tell, haven't the kids learned this critical thinking in high school? They've had 12 years and the schools aught to have been able to at least teach them to think correct by this time.
Turning the volume louder than the total of 0db demolishes your speakers
No it doesn't. A speaker gets a signal and that's all it needs. Loud signal has higher amplitude. The crackling you're hearing is your cheap sound card clipping.
The enemies did not "Increase in skill", as if they matured and became better fighters, they simply leveled up as you did. That's not adaptive AI:/
There are 2 things that need work in games-- AI and facial animations. It's been 10 years since UT99 and in UT3 the computer basically rolls a dice that determines if it's going to kill you. If it's going to kill you, it usually kills you on the first shot. Which never happens in real life. Something as simple as this, which would be so easy to get around, makes the game feel so cheap. Yes, I play with people online, but when there's only 3 and we need a 4th for iCTF, having a bot ruins the fun. Facial animations-- see Half Life 2, in my opinion. Even though the character animations themselves are a little stiff, the lipsyncing is top notch, and the Gman can display emotions such as confusion, malice, irritation, etc. Combined these all work together for a great suspension of disbelief.
Why should they care? They're acting in a completely logical fashion. Do whatever is best for you, because who cares about everyone else. In the end we all die anyway, so there's no reason I shouldn't do what's best for me to enjoy it while I can.
History 101. You must have snoozed through the lessons on Russia's and China's more recent history and the macroeconomic lessons to learn from such command economies...
Havok and the DX Physics are completely open and either party can use them, no proprietary api or licensing or anything silly. No hardware vendor controls what happens.
PhysX is not. It is controlled by Nvidia. Gosh, they wouldn't have financial motives to abuse this power would they? No of course not...
Nvidia lately seems to have been getting around the whole market segmentation issue by... paying off forum members in all the hot PC Hardware forums? Lately my favorite has been inundated with troll and fanboy posts proclaiming the wonders of PhysX (still waiting for a game where it actually adds anything) and the death of AMD/ATi.
Iran launches one at Isreal, in which case it is 100% Iran's fault. -Or- Isreal launches one at Iran, in which case it is 100% Iran's fault.
The logic there is amazing. For the record, I'm not trying to say that it's 100% Isreal's fault either. Just trying to point out that it's a bit more complicated that your statement seems to imply.
I suppose technically if Firefox were well designed a crashing extension/addon wouldn't crash the browser. Not sure if that's possible. Probably would require a huge rework. They need to anyways so that the UI doesn't freeze whenever a page is loading in the background (or foreground for that matter).
Even meta-moderation is flawed-- and (the way it was run previously) is the reason I never bothered. If I'm moderating the quality of posts coming from a user instead, and not his actual decisions for how to dish out mod points, then we're less likely to have issues like the following: So, imagine a meta-mod wingnut disagrees with a moderator's decision that a post was insightful, informative, etc-- particularly, because said post brings up a good point that meta-mod doesn't want people to know. So he meta-mods that the original moderator's modding was "bad modding" or whatever the radio-button was. This can particularly be a problem in political threads.
This way, the odds of a meta-mod getting a political post where he is likely to become unfair in his meta-modding (for the purpose of furthering his own agenda) are much fewer (perhaps we could even make it so that political meta-moding never occurs-- no meta-modding of posts in political threads). This way the meta-mod is only deciding whether or not the poster would be a good candidate to be given mod points. If he does not contribute much of use to the discussion, he probably shouldn't have moderating abilities.
This makes so much sense now that I think about. Kudos to CmdrTaco or whoever thought of this.
Who cares about huge profits. You worry about you. The profits are what is required to incentivize those that will work the 14 hour days, to do so. The shareholders elect who they think best fits the roll. If they think the CEO is being overpaid they can sell their shares. Or vote no on the retention bonus.
What is boils down to is grumbling jealous slashdotters that want a piece of the action without a piece of the labor. Again-- you worry about you. Taxing the corporations does nothing but make it more expensive to operate. If their profits are lower, they cannot consider hiring more people to expand their operations.
Tax the people getting the paychecks. Quit trying to flipping take over every single piece of society that hasn't been completely mauled by the government's hands yet.
Yawn. My netbook cost me $350 with $2 shipping, no tax, and a $25 2GB ram upgrade.
There is no Apple laptop anywhere near that price range. That used Apple you were about to say I should buy...it doesn't have 7h of battery life like this netbook gets me...with wireless on and brightness at lowest setting (inside so it's not a problem for me).
You would be rather surprised and intrigued by what you'll read.
In a nut shell, the evidence via ice core samples, tree growth rings, etc do show a correlation between increased global temperatures and carbon dioxide levels. However, it seems that the carbon dioxide levels increase about 40 to 50 years *after* the temperature increase.
Additionally, the archeological evidence coming to light now isn't that the naming of of Greenland by the vikings wasn't a propaganda triumph, but instead a quite literal statement. Interestingly enough, *farms* are being discovered under the glaciers.
Add to that the medieval grape and wine industry on the coastland of Greenland. Vineyards. Doing something like that would be absolutely impossible given the current climate.
Slashdot Mirror
I probably even agree with you that regulation is needed to avoid large boom and bust cycles at the cost of overall efficiency.
Before the Fed there were no "large" boom and bust cycles, there were much smaller "corrections" of the market. The Fed then started attempting to fix "corrections" which would allow the market to over inflate and then burst causing a larger correction than would naturally occur. The large boom bust cycles are a byproduct of market manipulation by the Fed.
I'm not in the abolish the fed camp or in the gold standard camp, but having the Fed maintain a fixed interest rate and a fixed money supply (i.e. no printing extra money) regardless of emergencies in the market would do wonders for the economy.
You can't have a fixed interest rate and a fixed money supply. Pick either/or. We tried the fixed interest rate for several years in the later 70's. The result? Wild fluctuations in cost of credit-- rates flying between 17%, to 11%, up to 19% and back down to 10%. Yeah, that worked well.
They've got a tough job. I don't have such a problem with the interest rate control. What I have a problem with is them interfering in the free market when it's time for the bust cycle, and propping up failed institutions that should die.
If they're too big to fail (and because of Credit Default Swaps, they definitely were, which is why we bailed them out) then they should have passed regulation to require capital requirements for all credit instruments, so that when Moody's downgraded a AAA rated security, there wasn't a sudden need for capital in the market to meet credit requirements.
Instead what we effectively had were institutions that were issuing credit all over the place, but didn't have any required reserve ratios. And like what happened to banks before the reserve ratio requirement, any word of insolvency would create a self-fulfilling prophecy. Had we required reserve ratios, we probably would have been saved from AIG, Lehman Brothers, etc.
But it's so hard to see this stuff coming. So easy in hindsight. However, now that we know this, the Fed should have passed regulatory measures to ensure this didn't happen again. Instead we just bailed them out with no requirement for better conduct in the future-- so the same thing that just happened can still happen again. We haven't fixed any of the systemic problems. And now there's even more encouragement to do the same thing in the future-- after all, they know we'll just bail them out if something happens.
Cognition will always be required to parse legal documents, among other things.
Some Engineering jobs will never be automated, either.
FWIW, my uncle was recently diagnosed with a heart problem back in the UK, he was in hospital the same day, operated on within 2 days and back home 2 days later. The only real down-side was that he couldn't attend the wedding because of the US insurance costs.
And two weeks before the wedding, my mother was diagnosed with breast cancer. She opted to put off the operation-date offered (1 week after diagnosis) and wait until after the wedding. Since then she's been back and had her operation.
Cancer survival rates are 50% higher in the US than in the UK. Go look it up, the data is on NHS's website. NHS is not the rosy picture you think it is.
Only 15% of America is uninsured. We do not have a healthcare problem.
You want to institute something that will remove the profit motive in the medical industry.
Health is the next growth opportunity for the US, but not if there's no profit to be had. We've sequenced the human genome and you want to cut off any reason for a company to try to use that to find a cure for something. Then you'll probably want more government funding to universities.
Pay your loan for 10 years... and the government will excuse the rest.
Some restrictions apply...
http://www.nextstudent.com/articles/student-loans-forgiven.asp
That's for Federal student loans. You're capped at using $5k/year-$8k/year. If you can't pay off $25k within 10 years and you have a college education, then you're doing something wrong.
And why, pray tell, haven't the kids learned this critical thinking in high school? They've had 12 years and the schools aught to have been able to at least teach them to think correct by this time.
Turning the volume louder than the total of 0db demolishes your speakers
No it doesn't. A speaker gets a signal and that's all it needs. Loud signal has higher amplitude.
The crackling you're hearing is your cheap sound card clipping.
Yep. I have no right to tell you otherwise. Other than defending my property because that's what's best for _me_.
The enemies did not "Increase in skill", as if they matured and became better fighters, they simply leveled up as you did. :/
That's not adaptive AI
There are 2 things that need work in games-- AI and facial animations. It's been 10 years since UT99 and in UT3 the computer basically rolls a dice that determines if it's going to kill you. If it's going to kill you, it usually kills you on the first shot. Which never happens in real life. Something as simple as this, which would be so easy to get around, makes the game feel so cheap. Yes, I play with people online, but when there's only 3 and we need a 4th for iCTF, having a bot ruins the fun.
Facial animations-- see Half Life 2, in my opinion. Even though the character animations themselves are a little stiff, the lipsyncing is top notch, and the Gman can display emotions such as confusion, malice, irritation, etc. Combined these all work together for a great suspension of disbelief.
A nice cold cup of frosty piss???
Welcome to New York.
Why should they care? They're acting in a completely logical fashion. Do whatever is best for you, because who cares about everyone else. In the end we all die anyway, so there's no reason I shouldn't do what's best for me to enjoy it while I can.
History 101.
You must have snoozed through the lessons on Russia's and China's more recent history and the macroeconomic lessons to learn from such command economies...
Havok and the DX Physics are completely open and either party can use them, no proprietary api or licensing or anything silly. No hardware vendor controls what happens.
PhysX is not. It is controlled by Nvidia. Gosh, they wouldn't have financial motives to abuse this power would they? No of course not...
Nvidia lately seems to have been getting around the whole market segmentation issue by ... paying off forum members in all the hot PC Hardware forums? Lately my favorite has been inundated with troll and fanboy posts proclaiming the wonders of PhysX (still waiting for a game where it actually adds anything) and the death of AMD/ATi.
Iran launches one at Isreal, in which case it is 100% Iran's fault.
-Or-
Isreal launches one at Iran, in which case it is 100% Iran's fault.
The logic there is amazing. For the record, I'm not trying to say that it's 100% Isreal's fault either. Just trying to point out that it's a bit more complicated that your statement seems to imply.
http://www.president.ir/en/?ArtID=10114
China has not and will not become militarily aggressive. They are 100% economically focused.
Iran? Uh....not so much.
not sure what dimension you guys are living in but my tv has both width, height, AND depth. Already 3d.
I suppose technically if Firefox were well designed a crashing extension/addon wouldn't crash the browser. Not sure if that's possible. Probably would require a huge rework. They need to anyways so that the UI doesn't freeze whenever a page is loading in the background (or foreground for that matter).
This is good!
Even meta-moderation is flawed-- and (the way it was run previously) is the reason I never bothered. If I'm moderating the quality of posts coming from a user instead, and not his actual decisions for how to dish out mod points, then we're less likely to have issues like the following:
So, imagine a meta-mod wingnut disagrees with a moderator's decision that a post was insightful, informative, etc-- particularly, because said post brings up a good point that meta-mod doesn't want people to know. So he meta-mods that the original moderator's modding was "bad modding" or whatever the radio-button was. This can particularly be a problem in political threads.
This way, the odds of a meta-mod getting a political post where he is likely to become unfair in his meta-modding (for the purpose of furthering his own agenda) are much fewer (perhaps we could even make it so that political meta-moding never occurs-- no meta-modding of posts in political threads). This way the meta-mod is only deciding whether or not the poster would be a good candidate to be given mod points. If he does not contribute much of use to the discussion, he probably shouldn't have moderating abilities.
This makes so much sense now that I think about. Kudos to CmdrTaco or whoever thought of this.
Uh, yeah, pretty sure it's only hurting you dude....
Tablet PC. Check, and mate. Now king me!
wait...kinging is for checkers...I'm confused....
Yeah. But tabs at the top in the bar is awesome. Why did nobody ever think of that before?
Who cares about huge profits. You worry about you. The profits are what is required to incentivize those that will work the 14 hour days, to do so. The shareholders elect who they think best fits the roll. If they think the CEO is being overpaid they can sell their shares. Or vote no on the retention bonus.
What is boils down to is grumbling jealous slashdotters that want a piece of the action without a piece of the labor. Again-- you worry about you. Taxing the corporations does nothing but make it more expensive to operate. If their profits are lower, they cannot consider hiring more people to expand their operations.
Tax the people getting the paychecks. Quit trying to flipping take over every single piece of society that hasn't been completely mauled by the government's hands yet.
If Chrome manages to "end" IE's existence, how are we as consumers helped?
Uh, Microsoft is forced to make IE worth using? Duh...
Yawn. My netbook cost me $350 with $2 shipping, no tax, and a $25 2GB ram upgrade.
There is no Apple laptop anywhere near that price range. That used Apple you were about to say I should buy...it doesn't have 7h of battery life like this netbook gets me...with wireless on and brightness at lowest setting (inside so it's not a problem for me).
I'd suggest reading a bit of:
Kicking the Sacred Cow
by James P Hogan.
You would be rather surprised and intrigued by what you'll read.
In a nut shell, the evidence via ice core samples, tree growth rings, etc do show a correlation between increased global temperatures and carbon dioxide levels.
However, it seems that the carbon dioxide levels increase about 40 to 50 years *after* the temperature increase.
Additionally, the archeological evidence coming to light now isn't that the naming of of Greenland by the vikings wasn't a propaganda triumph, but instead a quite literal statement. Interestingly enough, *farms* are being discovered under the glaciers.
Add to that the medieval grape and wine industry on the coastland of Greenland. Vineyards. Doing something like that would be absolutely impossible given the current climate.