That's probably the difference - GSS is a survey of the general population, not the subset known as "voters". But, of course, some people are more likely to vote than others, and so we might expect to see attributes among "voters" that we don't see in the general population;)
Both uneducated and very highly educated people tend to be liberals; those in the middle tend to be conservatives.
Hmmm. You piqued my curiosity enough to go and look it up, and you're wrong. Looking at NORC's GSS data, there is no statistically significant correlation between education and political self-identification on the liberal-conservative axis, or between education and party affiliation.
Very true. I'd also point out that, while the Republican party is often perceived as being pro-business, which is mostly a fair assessment, there are also a great many mainstream conservatives who consider Hollywood and the entertainment industry to be a cesspool populated by moral degenerates - which, of course, it is;) - and therefore have no desire whatsoever to lift so much as a finger to help it.
Anyway, the long and the short of it is that this is one of those issues that doesn't break down neatly along party lines - there are good guys and bad guys in both major parties here, and the appropriate thing to do is to reward the good and punish the bad, regardless of which letter they have after their names.
Actually, my only point was to illustrate the absurdity of pinning blame for the current scheme on any particular "team", or to rely on another "team" to fix it. There are plenty of unclean hands on both sides of the aisle, and the only way to fix it is for people to put pressure on their own individual representatives.
Yes, it does make a huge difference, and you're a fool for buying into such an ingeniously self-fulfilling prophecy. You assume that writing won't change anything, so you don't write, and then you actually get pissed off when nothing changes. By encouraging people to think that nothing can change, you're worse than any K Street lobbyist when it comes to perpetuating the current system - you're not fixing anything with that attitude, you're making things worse.
But hey, enjoy the ride - I'm guessing you're the type who'd prefer the opportunity to sit back and tell us all "I told you so" when the system spirals down the crapper, rather than keeping it from spiraling down the crapper in the first place. And you'll have to pardon me if I don't jump on that bandwagon with you - I'd rather avoid the collapse of things than encourage it as you're doing. I'm funny that way, I guess.
If that's the case, you surely did play some small role. This is a good time to impress on everyone that nothing is more effective than calls or letters (on paper, dammit, not email) from constituents when it comes to influencing the course of Congress. If everyone sat down and wrote the occasional letter to their two senators and their congressman, things would be a lot different - no matter what their ostensible party affiliation is, nothing is more important to a politician than re-election, and if they get the idea that some policy position or another is endangering those prospects, they'll switch sides faster than you can change your socks. Count on it.
Keep up the pressure - drop a note in the mail encouraging Coleman to stick with this, and I'll do the same for mine.
Can It predict where to put the butterfly to stop them ?
It's not that finely-grained of a model yet, but the Japanese expect to influence the weather within the next few years by strategically placing Mothra....
In and of itself, that's not a solution, though. Someone has to go through and transcribe all that material in order to make it searchable, or else you're just making the computer a fancy microfilm projector - simply digitizing it doesn't solve the retrieval problems that microfilm has. And making all the microfilm and microfiche material out there searchable is a huge task - decades worth of work.
This is important as new methods of information storage and retrivial are developed; ease of use is a consideration.
Very true, but that doesn't help people right now, who are stuck working with existing systems of information storage and retrieval. Down the road, as digital archives become deeper and deeper, the problem will hopefully lessen. In the meantime, though, reality and potential are still barely on speaking terms;)
Several medical studies have shown that physicians that use medical online databases such as UpToDate, provide better patient care. The medical literature changes so quickly that many books are outdated before they are released to the public.
Here's the flip side, though - I agree that being up-to-date in fields like medicine (someone mentioned physics up above) is very important, but for fields that change a bit more slowly, keeping track of the bleeding edge is sometimes less important than having a sense of the full scope of the field.
I have seen a real and serious bias towards online sources of information among college students lately. Which sounds okay at first blush, but if your bag is history, literature, art, politics, law, et cetera - there are important and valuable sources of information that just aren't available online because the databases only go back ten or fifteen years. Information that is still relevant and important is sitting and gathering dust, unused because it was written thirty or forty years ago, and it's not archived online anywhere. It's a real problem, in my opinion - the ease with which certain information is retrieved is causing people to forget that a great deal of important information is still out there that requires you to get up out of your chair and hit the stacks. Tell certain students that a particular piece isn't online, and that they'll just have to go to the bound journals and use the photocopier if they want to read it, and they look at you like you've got three heads. And heaven forfend it should not even be available in book form - tell them that this is a primary source, and they'll have to go pull it off the microfilm, and they look at you like you're a three-headed man who just stepped off a flying saucer and asked where to find the masturbatorium.
It's a real problem. Ease of use is going to replace in-depth scholarship if we're not careful about this...
An end user who doesn't care about rev "efficiency" won't care that the Corvette gets more done per rev, but WILL care that it's faster as a result.
Except that in the case of processors, there's precious little real world correlation between "efficiency" and performance. Apple and Moto have spent years now arguing that the G4 - and now the G5, I imagine - is more "efficient" than the PIV - I invite you to look up SPEC and other benchmark results to see which one is actually faster. That's what I mean by it not being meaningful to end-users - if you have a choice between two chips, one of which runs twice as fast for a given task, but half as "efficiently" as the other, which one will you choose?
"Efficiency" in cars is meaningful, because gas costs money, and less efficiency translates into more money. But there's no comparable concept in the world of CPUs. Take a processor that's less "efficient", but faster at running the needed code than another, and it becomes painfully clear that "efficiency" is a theoretical advantage at best, with no real meaning in the real world.
The longer pipeline helps them to ramp up speed, but at the cost of efficiency.
"Efficiency" of processors is not a meaningful concept to end-users, only raw speed. My little Saturn may be more "efficient" than a Ferrari Enzo, but it sure as hell isn't faster.
Listen, if I'm sitting in the catbird's seat at a major label, I wouldn't be punking these kids out about how filesharing hurts artists, I'd be showing them how the pros do it - legally.
You can have the kids work their way up through the industry, starting at the lowest level - "A&R Scumbag" - where the kids learn the proper way to snort coke from a stripper's ass. Eventually, they can work all the way up to "David Geffen" level, where they learn how to buy the requisite number of geriatric senators.
There are lots of things that adults can have that children can't - why is that one particularly bizarre? It's a logical result of the notion of in loco parentis - while you're in school, the school is acting in place of your parents, for legal purposes. And your parents certainly don't need a warrant to search your sock drawer or your bookbag.
Yeah, when I was in high school, I thought it sucked too. Then I graduated and got over it...
You forgot the not in restraint of trade part. Sometimes you do have the right to force other people to do business with you. Sometimes, not always.
How did not renting to you lessen competition, particularly in light of the fact that you almost surely had other options that you declined to exercise?
No, the bank has a legitimate reason to refuse you. Their purpose is not to restrict competition, that is merely a side-effect.
And the contractual obligations of your prospective landlord aren't a legitimate reason to refuse you? Why on earth not?
I think the relationship to monopolies and entry barriers is obvious. The land owner is a monopoly, and the inability to rent that store is an entry barrier.
That guy has a "monopoly" in the same sense that I have a "monopoly" on my own apartment building. I wouldn't rent to you, either - guess you'll have to go to the building next door. Or you would have had to go to the storefront three blocks away. Either way, I doubt this person owned all or most of the commercial property in the area.
Well, it was the only option which was acceptable to one of the key investors. So to a large extent, yes.
You should sue your investor - under this theory you're developing, he's more directly responsible for any restriction of competition than the landowner is. Actually, it's beginning to sound to me like your key investor was looking for an excuse to bail on you, and demanding that particular piece of real-estate - no, not the one across the street and down the block; that one, right there, next to the Blockbuster - was as good as any...
I showed that that is not always true. Sometimes you do have the right to force other people to do business with you.
Except that it doesn't. I'm too lazy to look up California statutes at the moment, but taking Robinson-Patman as canonical for the moment, you get "...nothing herein contained shall prevent persons engaged in selling goods, wares, or merchandise in commerce from selecting their own customers in bona fide transactions and not in restraint of trade". (15 USC 13(a)) If they agree to do business with you, you can force them to provide you with the same terms that they provide others with, but unless you're a member of a protected class, businesses still retain the right to refuse service to people. Maybe you're thinking that you can demonstrate that "the effect of such discrimination may be substantially to lessen competition or tend to create a monopoly in any line of commerce", but I'm rather skeptical that you can show a substantial lessening of competition based on the non-existence of a purely imaginary video rental outlet - which is, after all, what you're putting forth.
Of course it did. That's the whole point. It may not have eliminated competition, but it certainly restricted it.
Well, there you go. I guess I can go to the bank on Monday and ask them to loan me a billion dollars to start my own automobile manufacturing company. And when they refuse me, I'll simply sue them for restricting competition in the automaking arena. I'll let you know how well your argument works for me.
That said, I don't plan on suing. Like I said, that would require way too much money.
The fact that you can't find anyone to take your case on a contingency basis should tell you something about its relative strength;)
Specifically, I said "Maybe we should do more to encourage people to open up their own businesses. Stopping monopolies from creating entry-barriers would be a good start."
But then you went on to post an anecdote that really didn't have much to do with monopolies or entry barriers that I can see. Was this storefront really your only option for rental property? Something makes me doubt it...
For instance, look at the Robinson-Patman act. If you sell a commodity to one person at one price, then you have to sell it to their competitors at that same price, unless you can justify the cost differences.
Of course, neither you nor your prospective landlord were engaging in interstate commerce when renting out a storefront, and so Robinson-Patman doesn't apply. Maybe you can find a state equivalent - lots of states have them - but then you're still looking at the burden of proving that refusing to rent that particular space to you served to restrict competition. Unless that's the only strip mall in the county, rotsa ruck...
I never said it was impossible. It's just expensive and hard. Too expensive and hard for any but the most determined or rich people to do.
I dont mind >15% VAT if it means low income gaps and low crime.
I doubt that there's any sort of correlation at all between crime and taxation - or if there is, it may very well be weakly negative. The UK has a 17.5% VAT and one of the highest crime rates in the world. Enjoy;)
Sure, it's what should be, and probably is, an unlawful agreement in restraint of free trade.
Huh? Having the right to ply your trade does not give you the right to rent that particular storefront. Go to the strip mall across the street or around the corner or whatever - I'm sure they'll be more than happy to have you if your plan is a good as you say.
I'm talking about thousands of DVDs, with hundreds of the same title. Columbia House doesn't allow that, and that in itself is a restraint on free trade.
See, I think you're confused about this whole restraint of trade thing. Just because you have the right to try to conduct a business of some sort, that doesn't give you the right to force other people to do business with you. Your main problem in suing everyone who declined to deal with you wouldn't be a lack of money, it would be a lack of a case that doesn't suck.
I'm just saying that the system itself discourages small businesses and competition. Between zoning laws and licensing issues, the things I've already mentioned and the many more that I haven't even brought up, it's very hard to compete with any large company. On top of that, most businesses utilize economies of scale. Without millions or even billions of dollars, or the connections to borrow it, you can't even think about competing.
Wow, it's almost like the 600,000 members of the NFIB don't even really exist. And the millions of people they employ. And the 40% of the US GDP produced by small business...
Building your own small business is hard work, but it's hardly impossible. It sounds to me like you hit one of the more minor speedbumps you were likely to encounter, and immediately threw up your hands and blamed the system for your failure to get off the ground. Did I miss anything?
Why should I be establishing anything? If you don't like tenure, it's your job to prove that it does more harm than good, not mine.
I'm responding to the affirmative claim that tenure is a good thing, on the whole. I disagree, and expect that such a claim ought to be easy enough to support if it is actually true. If you can't or won't support such a claim, so be it - it may be that you don't actually intend or desire to defend that thesis, perhaps.
All you've done is assume the opposite truth -- that it's harmful to universities to instate a due process review for termination, as opposed to having a policy that allows unilateral termination.
No, I've provided counterexamples of how things are done elsewhere, and asked the very simple question of why academics are deserving of special protection above and beyond what the rest of us usually labor under. So far I've seen precious little defense of that proposition, that academics deserve more protection than everyone else, probably because when you phrase it like that, defending it becomes much less palatable to people - although that's exactly what it is, of course.
Then you wave your hands in the air about how businesses do it, without even demonstrating that this is a good thing for businesses, let alone universities.
I merely point out, as I said, that this is how the vast majority of the population conducts its business, and ask why academics ought to be entitled to more. I'm beginning to understand, as I also said, why people aren't particularly anxious to actually answer that question, but it's still hanging out there, unanswered, and possibly unanswerable...
In particular, academic researchers need a measure of insulation from political whim, in order to most effectively push the frontiers of research.
Right, fine - except that that's the issue in question, isn't it? You should be establishing that fact, not simply finding novel ways of restating the premise that "tenure is important" and then simply assuming the truth of it;)
Slashdot Mirror
That's probably the difference - GSS is a survey of the general population, not the subset known as "voters". But, of course, some people are more likely to vote than others, and so we might expect to see attributes among "voters" that we don't see in the general population ;)
Hmmm. You piqued my curiosity enough to go and look it up, and you're wrong. Looking at NORC's GSS data, there is no statistically significant correlation between education and political self-identification on the liberal-conservative axis, or between education and party affiliation.
Anyway, the long and the short of it is that this is one of those issues that doesn't break down neatly along party lines - there are good guys and bad guys in both major parties here, and the appropriate thing to do is to reward the good and punish the bad, regardless of which letter they have after their names.
Actually, my only point was to illustrate the absurdity of pinning blame for the current scheme on any particular "team", or to rely on another "team" to fix it. There are plenty of unclean hands on both sides of the aisle, and the only way to fix it is for people to put pressure on their own individual representatives.
I hate it when that happens - someone says what I was thinking of saying, only they say it about ten times better than I would have ;)
But hey, enjoy the ride - I'm guessing you're the type who'd prefer the opportunity to sit back and tell us all "I told you so" when the system spirals down the crapper, rather than keeping it from spiraling down the crapper in the first place. And you'll have to pardon me if I don't jump on that bandwagon with you - I'd rather avoid the collapse of things than encourage it as you're doing. I'm funny that way, I guess.
Keep up the pressure - drop a note in the mail encouraging Coleman to stick with this, and I'll do the same for mine.
My guess is that he's talking about the team that claims Senator Fritz Hollings (D-Disney), and therefore gave you this mess in the first place ;)
It's not that finely-grained of a model yet, but the Japanese expect to influence the weather within the next few years by strategically placing Mothra....
In and of itself, that's not a solution, though. Someone has to go through and transcribe all that material in order to make it searchable, or else you're just making the computer a fancy microfilm projector - simply digitizing it doesn't solve the retrieval problems that microfilm has. And making all the microfilm and microfiche material out there searchable is a huge task - decades worth of work.
Very true, but that doesn't help people right now, who are stuck working with existing systems of information storage and retrieval. Down the road, as digital archives become deeper and deeper, the problem will hopefully lessen. In the meantime, though, reality and potential are still barely on speaking terms ;)
Here's the flip side, though - I agree that being up-to-date in fields like medicine (someone mentioned physics up above) is very important, but for fields that change a bit more slowly, keeping track of the bleeding edge is sometimes less important than having a sense of the full scope of the field.
I have seen a real and serious bias towards online sources of information among college students lately. Which sounds okay at first blush, but if your bag is history, literature, art, politics, law, et cetera - there are important and valuable sources of information that just aren't available online because the databases only go back ten or fifteen years. Information that is still relevant and important is sitting and gathering dust, unused because it was written thirty or forty years ago, and it's not archived online anywhere. It's a real problem, in my opinion - the ease with which certain information is retrieved is causing people to forget that a great deal of important information is still out there that requires you to get up out of your chair and hit the stacks. Tell certain students that a particular piece isn't online, and that they'll just have to go to the bound journals and use the photocopier if they want to read it, and they look at you like you've got three heads. And heaven forfend it should not even be available in book form - tell them that this is a primary source, and they'll have to go pull it off the microfilm, and they look at you like you're a three-headed man who just stepped off a flying saucer and asked where to find the masturbatorium.
It's a real problem. Ease of use is going to replace in-depth scholarship if we're not careful about this...
Except that in the case of processors, there's precious little real world correlation between "efficiency" and performance. Apple and Moto have spent years now arguing that the G4 - and now the G5, I imagine - is more "efficient" than the PIV - I invite you to look up SPEC and other benchmark results to see which one is actually faster. That's what I mean by it not being meaningful to end-users - if you have a choice between two chips, one of which runs twice as fast for a given task, but half as "efficiently" as the other, which one will you choose?
"Efficiency" in cars is meaningful, because gas costs money, and less efficiency translates into more money. But there's no comparable concept in the world of CPUs. Take a processor that's less "efficient", but faster at running the needed code than another, and it becomes painfully clear that "efficiency" is a theoretical advantage at best, with no real meaning in the real world.
Guess I'll just start recording and collecting commercials...
"Efficiency" of processors is not a meaningful concept to end-users, only raw speed. My little Saturn may be more "efficient" than a Ferrari Enzo, but it sure as hell isn't faster.
You can have the kids work their way up through the industry, starting at the lowest level - "A&R Scumbag" - where the kids learn the proper way to snort coke from a stripper's ass. Eventually, they can work all the way up to "David Geffen" level, where they learn how to buy the requisite number of geriatric senators.
Yeah, when I was in high school, I thought it sucked too. Then I graduated and got over it...
How did not renting to you lessen competition, particularly in light of the fact that you almost surely had other options that you declined to exercise?
No, the bank has a legitimate reason to refuse you. Their purpose is not to restrict competition, that is merely a side-effect.
And the contractual obligations of your prospective landlord aren't a legitimate reason to refuse you? Why on earth not?
I think the relationship to monopolies and entry barriers is obvious. The land owner is a monopoly, and the inability to rent that store is an entry barrier.
That guy has a "monopoly" in the same sense that I have a "monopoly" on my own apartment building. I wouldn't rent to you, either - guess you'll have to go to the building next door. Or you would have had to go to the storefront three blocks away. Either way, I doubt this person owned all or most of the commercial property in the area.
Well, it was the only option which was acceptable to one of the key investors. So to a large extent, yes.
You should sue your investor - under this theory you're developing, he's more directly responsible for any restriction of competition than the landowner is. Actually, it's beginning to sound to me like your key investor was looking for an excuse to bail on you, and demanding that particular piece of real-estate - no, not the one across the street and down the block; that one, right there, next to the Blockbuster - was as good as any...
Except that it doesn't. I'm too lazy to look up California statutes at the moment, but taking Robinson-Patman as canonical for the moment, you get "...nothing herein contained shall prevent persons engaged in selling goods, wares, or merchandise in commerce from selecting their own customers in bona fide transactions and not in restraint of trade". (15 USC 13(a)) If they agree to do business with you, you can force them to provide you with the same terms that they provide others with, but unless you're a member of a protected class, businesses still retain the right to refuse service to people. Maybe you're thinking that you can demonstrate that "the effect of such discrimination may be substantially to lessen competition or tend to create a monopoly in any line of commerce", but I'm rather skeptical that you can show a substantial lessening of competition based on the non-existence of a purely imaginary video rental outlet - which is, after all, what you're putting forth.
Of course it did. That's the whole point. It may not have eliminated competition, but it certainly restricted it.
Well, there you go. I guess I can go to the bank on Monday and ask them to loan me a billion dollars to start my own automobile manufacturing company. And when they refuse me, I'll simply sue them for restricting competition in the automaking arena. I'll let you know how well your argument works for me.
That said, I don't plan on suing. Like I said, that would require way too much money.
The fact that you can't find anyone to take your case on a contingency basis should tell you something about its relative strength ;)
Specifically, I said "Maybe we should do more to encourage people to open up their own businesses. Stopping monopolies from creating entry-barriers would be a good start."
But then you went on to post an anecdote that really didn't have much to do with monopolies or entry barriers that I can see. Was this storefront really your only option for rental property? Something makes me doubt it...
Of course, neither you nor your prospective landlord were engaging in interstate commerce when renting out a storefront, and so Robinson-Patman doesn't apply. Maybe you can find a state equivalent - lots of states have them - but then you're still looking at the burden of proving that refusing to rent that particular space to you served to restrict competition. Unless that's the only strip mall in the county, rotsa ruck...
I never said it was impossible. It's just expensive and hard. Too expensive and hard for any but the most determined or rich people to do.
When did anyone say it was supposed to be easy?
I doubt that there's any sort of correlation at all between crime and taxation - or if there is, it may very well be weakly negative. The UK has a 17.5% VAT and one of the highest crime rates in the world. Enjoy ;)
Huh? Having the right to ply your trade does not give you the right to rent that particular storefront. Go to the strip mall across the street or around the corner or whatever - I'm sure they'll be more than happy to have you if your plan is a good as you say.
I'm talking about thousands of DVDs, with hundreds of the same title. Columbia House doesn't allow that, and that in itself is a restraint on free trade.
See, I think you're confused about this whole restraint of trade thing. Just because you have the right to try to conduct a business of some sort, that doesn't give you the right to force other people to do business with you. Your main problem in suing everyone who declined to deal with you wouldn't be a lack of money, it would be a lack of a case that doesn't suck.
I'm just saying that the system itself discourages small businesses and competition. Between zoning laws and licensing issues, the things I've already mentioned and the many more that I haven't even brought up, it's very hard to compete with any large company. On top of that, most businesses utilize economies of scale. Without millions or even billions of dollars, or the connections to borrow it, you can't even think about competing.
Wow, it's almost like the 600,000 members of the NFIB don't even really exist. And the millions of people they employ. And the 40% of the US GDP produced by small business...
Building your own small business is hard work, but it's hardly impossible. It sounds to me like you hit one of the more minor speedbumps you were likely to encounter, and immediately threw up your hands and blamed the system for your failure to get off the ground. Did I miss anything?
I'm responding to the affirmative claim that tenure is a good thing, on the whole. I disagree, and expect that such a claim ought to be easy enough to support if it is actually true. If you can't or won't support such a claim, so be it - it may be that you don't actually intend or desire to defend that thesis, perhaps.
All you've done is assume the opposite truth -- that it's harmful to universities to instate a due process review for termination, as opposed to having a policy that allows unilateral termination.
No, I've provided counterexamples of how things are done elsewhere, and asked the very simple question of why academics are deserving of special protection above and beyond what the rest of us usually labor under. So far I've seen precious little defense of that proposition, that academics deserve more protection than everyone else, probably because when you phrase it like that, defending it becomes much less palatable to people - although that's exactly what it is, of course.
Then you wave your hands in the air about how businesses do it, without even demonstrating that this is a good thing for businesses, let alone universities.
I merely point out, as I said, that this is how the vast majority of the population conducts its business, and ask why academics ought to be entitled to more. I'm beginning to understand, as I also said, why people aren't particularly anxious to actually answer that question, but it's still hanging out there, unanswered, and possibly unanswerable...
Oh? Do they have the right to do otherwise, if they see fit? If so, what are you complaining about if they should decide to do so?
Right, fine - except that that's the issue in question, isn't it? You should be establishing that fact, not simply finding novel ways of restating the premise that "tenure is important" and then simply assuming the truth of it ;)