My point was that MS hasn't bothered to hotfix it because it doesn't affect their latest-gen OSes... even though some of the OSes it DOES affect are not yet EOLed.
Did you miss the part about this affecting OSes that are't yet EOLed (but will be in the next year or so)?
What? Maybe my metaphor was unclear. I'm not talking about power lines.
I'm talking about internet backbone... which includes satellite or trunk cable when it's used as backbone.
There's an astounding amount of assets that comprise internet backbone, and if we wanted a forked internet, we'd need all new backbone (or to purchase existing backbone) in order to prevent private interests from exerting control over some portion of the forked internet.
You either pay, or you don't have your little network anymore.
Or you run your wire to the next town, through four other towns to circle back to the other side of your town, and thus to your friend across town.
Or, you decide as a community not to let those people take your bits hostage, and vote to lay a public wire under Main Street.
And then you've got to have committee meetings, public hearings, bond measures passed, and politics as usual; meanwhile Ma Bell offers to lay the wire at their expense, thus sparing the town the need to pass a bond measure, and they have higher bandwidth and fewer nodes on almost any route you send your bits, and all you have to do is sign this little bitty exclusivity agreement.
That means that logically, the only way we can have a global information network that remains free and open is to have it designed, built, and run, entirely by machines.
And who designs, builds, and runs the machines?
It can be designed by people. It MUST be designed by people, or we won't have it in our lifetimes. Likely it will also need to be built by people.
But anyway, human-designed and -built systems can be free and open, as long as the design and buildout phases are done in a free and open manner. It's the operation of the system hat needs to be automated to prevent human interference.
And who's going to pay for the duplicate backbones, etc?
So what if the last mile, in dense areas, can be done by wireless? We still need backbones, there's no way we can wireless hop coast-to-coast and still have a usable internet. And forget international.
We have the same problem with internet that we have had with telephony for a century. It just doesn't pay to build out a competing infrastructure -- Ma Bell is good enough for most people.
I posted a generally polite response as to why so many of us think you're unstable, and how you could address that.
It was advice.
And instead of taking it like a man and considering whether or not there were valid points, you go off the deep end with another rant written in a style sure to make other continue to consider you, as I do, a complete loon.
Yea, you sure looked STUPID then, didn't you, trying to BLOCK ME FROM POSTING?
What are you talking about, you crazy cunt? Then, as now, you had no idea of how slashdot works.
It is about buying when the stuff is cheap and then holding long time (like many years long) and then selling when you need money (not when it's expensive, that's speculation.)
I'm sorry, that's so far off the mark it's not funny.
Joint stock corporations were founded entirely on the concept of speculation and risk. Stock markets do not exist a place to dump your money and hopefully have it grow until you need the cash.
Stock markets exist to provide liquid capital to ventures; what they offer the people providing that capital is the chance to make speculative profits and a diversification of risk. This is the fundamental purpose of stock exchanges.
Speed is indeed important, because it allows the investors (speculators) to properly evaluate and buy/sell stocks.
The problem is not that speed is important -- the problem is that a small group of people/firms have an advantage over all other people participating in the market, because not everyone has equal ability to trade at high speeds. This allows them to engage in rent-seeking behavior that is detrimental to the market at large.
It used to be that having a scoop (that is, useful information before anyone else) gave the biggest advantage to traders on the market. Then we banned insider trading, so people would all be acting on the same public information. Now, that scoop is less relevant for another reason -- you may make some profits off of information asymmetry, but the HFTs are going to take most of your profits simply because they can trade faster than you. They can undercut your put or overbid your ask, and make money on both sides because they see the transactions before they happen.
I think I got a bit off-track there; what you refer to is not investing in the stock market. It is investing in single companies, sectors, or funds. And even if this is what you do (like the original investors in joint-stock ventures), you should still seek to sell when the value of your stock is the highest weighed against the risk you find acceptable.
This brings me to my main beef with HFTs. The entire purpose of stock investment, at its core, is to maximize your investment returns while minimizing the risk to your capital. If you owned a ship in the 1500s, you could be wiped out, financially, by a storm. If you owned a 1/16th share of 16 ships, a storm wiping out a single ship would reduce your returns, but you'd still have assets equivalent to 15/16 of a ship. So in exchange for reduced risks* on each single venture (a ship, in this example), you'd see slightly lower profits from successful ventures. Meanwhile, the people who initially sold those shares to the owners of the joint-stock ventures would have some amount of liquid capital, which they would use to build or acquire the ships, crews, etc, they promised. This was the primary purpose of the original joint-stock corporations -- provide capital to businesses by allowing people to invest at less than the full cost of the venture, and spread risk among investors.
Of course, HFTs take profits with very little risk... this is why they are bad, IMO, for the stock market. Stock markets are about trading risk for profits. HFTs reduce profits for risk-takers, thus making, in the long run, less capital available to risky ventures.
It's funny, though -- you never hear a HFT firm talk about assumption of risk, they only talk about providing liquidity. Liquidity benefits stock speculators, but it doesn't really benefit the actual businesses who produce goods and services and provide meaningful employment.
* discounting systemic risks, which apply to all individual ventures in a class -- and as such, are incidental to the concept of risk diversification within a class.
Who would sign a contract _without_ knowing all of this in advance?
That's not the problem. The real problem is the people who knew this in advance, but were unable to understand the implications.
I bought a home in 2003 -- my first house, as I'd finally decided to move to the burbs with my wife & start raising a family. I worked with three different mortgage brokers until I found the best mortgage for us.
Here are examples of some of the things I was told:
Don't worry about the interest rate after the first five years on this 5-1 ARM. You'll be selling at a HUGE profit before then.
You should buy the biggest house you can afford so you can maximize your profits when you sell. We calculate you can afford to spend 40% of your take-home on your mortgage, so we're willing to approve you for $X. 40% is pretty typical these days for people of your income.
If you get this 3-1 ARM, your monthly payment will only be $Y if you purchase a home of cost $Z. Let's go over your monthly budget so we can see how to get you into the house of your dreams with this mortgage.
The reason I give these examples is to show how easily people can be misled by mortgage brokers, how easy it is to get people to believe what they want to believe -- that they can afford a house and a mortgage that are both too much for them. Never mind the fact that so many people were hoodwinked into believing that the housing market would continue to boom forever.
So yeah, I read all the terms and decided on a 15-year fixed mortgage. But I think people like us are in the minority -- most people just don't have the math and logic skills necessary to solve this problem on their own.
Comment fail. Overuse of ALL-CAPS and bold typeface, it makes your post damn near unreadable.
Try it again, but try to write like a grown-up with something useful to say. Experience tells us that most people who shit all over our displays like you did have nothing to say -- they need the bold and all-caps to get attention, because their ideas themselves have little merit.
So please clean up your text, people like me might actually consider your ideas if it didn't look like an unstable person wrote them.
And, FWIW, I do think you're unstable, from exchanges we've had in the past, and from exchanges you've had with others. But that's not the point -- the point is no one will take you seriously (well, among those who still *might* take you seriously) if you write like a lunatic.
This is not a problem with humans ability to determine probability.
This is a known issue with probability-based decisions. I known I've seen a couple studies on the topic, I just can't find a cite right now.
But that's an interesting point on people not turning in other people when the punishment is too steep. Advances in detecting cheating, and more resources spent on detecting it, may make that issue insignificant compared to the chance of getting caught by the proctor. It's an interesting thought.
Your points are lacking. Why not make cheating impractical? It's pretty easy. It also has the advantage of making tests more comprehensive. Granted, you might have less of them because they wouldn't be as easy to score.
Emphasis mine.
I don't think it's as easy as you say. Otherwise, it would be done more often. It's expensive to write, administer, and grade more comprehensive exams. Given that most college classes only have 2 or 3 exams, would you really reduce the number of exams? And if fewer people are cheating, because it is impractical, then the benefit of cheating successfully increases.
you should look at how people have tried to apply these models to "prevent" filesharing. We're up to what, 2 million$?
I have looked at it. The **AA attempts to rein in filesharing, while wrongheaded IMO, have been effective to some degree. The cost of being caught is enough to be a disincentive to a lot of people.
Society's "cost" and the cost you attempt to put in something are entirely different things, thus trying to give people motivators away from an activity doesn't necessarily work, ever.
That does not make sense. Society's costs, even the labels' costs, are externialities to the pirate, and thus immaterial (from an economic standpoint) to the individual's decision to pirate or not pirate.
Whether or not you agree with the **AA's stance and the societal impact, the fact is that the model is applicable.
The main problem I see with your formula is that the terms are quite nebulous. Even if you could derive meaningful numbers for the terms, the average student doesn't. That calculation is done in a more ad-hoc way by each persons perception of the risks vs rewards.
True. Which is why behavioral psychology is becoming such an important part of microeconomics and other fields these days, and why I touched on the problems humans have with VLNs and VSNs and probability decisions.
You have several schisms of perception here. One is the perception of the value of a degree vs the value of the "education" that the degree represents. I think students VERY RIGHTLY value the degree over the education, because that is the value that our society puts on it.
Yes and no. It's hard to measure the value of the education behind the degree, but it's relatively easy to measure the value of the degree itself. So we measure one but not the other, which has led to having the actual degree being more important.
I will say that when I hire, a degree is not generally required -- however, it's a plus, as it shows that the applicant was able to achieve *something*. But when I interview for any position, I'm interested in problem-solving ability, social skills, general ethics, work ethic, determination, etc. A degree from an accredited institution should require all those general skills and more, or the ability to overcome a deficiency in any of them (except ethics -- there is no workaround for ethics).
The problem is that employers don't have the time to evaluate every candidate on the specific items. So they use a degree as an approximation -- it really is the education itself that employers value. The problem is that cheaters break the system, as they make the degree less useful a metric -- they devalue the education the degree represents.
Your example includes two factors -- the first being the extent of the punishment. The second, and more important to your example, is the risk of getting caught. The highway robbers *reduced* the risk of getting caught by killing their victims -- thus, given equivalent punishments, killing their victims became the better strategy. When the punishment for highway robbery was less severe, the importance of not getting caught was reduced.
This does not apply to cheating in the same manner, as cheating on more assignments increases the risk of getting caught, without impacting the level of punishment (if you get caught once or a dozen times, you still end up expelled -- so better to cheat minimally, or not at all, and not get caught).
The most likely outcome of increasing the punishment for cheating fits into the model I gave. If you increase the cost of cheating, some cheaters will devote more resources to cheating (reduce the risk of getting caught and increase the cost of cheating). Some cheaters will find it no longer beneficial to cheat, and will stop -- for these cheaters, the new risk*cost of getting caught is greater than the benefit of cheating.
Sure. Hordes of economists work on calculating the multiplier effect of public spending (Keynes being the first major one).
Read Joseph Stiglitz's work from the early 70s.
He also touches on it in Stiglitz & Bilmes, The Three Trillion Dollar War,, 2010.
Also: Miles, Myles & Preston, The Economics of Public Spending, 2003.
I'd also suggest reading articles by Barro and/or Krugman on the multiplier effect as it relates to our current spending.
Note that even non-Keynesians tend to recognize that there is a multiplicative effect on public spending, although there are some discrepancies on the estimated values.
And just think about it. When we spend a few hundred billion dollars on war materiel, what do we have to show for it at the end? When we spend the same on transportation infrastructure, education, etc, what do we have to show for it at the end?
I'm tired of reading these same truth-twisting canards.
The federal income tax does not exist in isolation. The total tax burden on individuals in the US is pretty equivalent for all income levels in the US, roughly 40-45% (when you include FICA, state income tax, property tax, sales tax, capital gains tax, etc).
Median household income in the USA is $50K but a typical married couple with 2 children and income less than $44K pay no federal income tax.
Sorry to break it to you, but a "typical married couple with 2 children with income less than $44k" is far lower than the median on per capita income. Average household size in the US is only 2.59 people, so your connection between the "typical" family with two kids earning $44k to the median household is egregiously inapt.
Besides which, my point still holds. If you give that so-called "typical" family more cash, they will spend it and stimulate the economy. If you give the same cash to the top earners, it will not stimulate the economy.
We're not arguing about the way things are, we're arguing about the way they should be.
First, there is a misunderstanding on your part of the way things are:
So SUVs are light *trucks* you say...
I put it in quotes for a reason. "Light truck" is a different classification from "truck". "Light trucks" and
"trucks" have different CAFE standards.
Are you proposing we tier the licensing requirements even further, to match the CAFE classifications? Or are you suggesting we eliminate some of the CAFE classifications to match licensing standards?
Furthermore, licensing standards are handled on a state level, while CAFE requirements are federal. Do you propose each state implement its own CAFE requirements? Or that the federal government assume operating license responsibilities?
We are arguing both about they way things are, and the way they should be. Parent to my OP in the thread made an obvious error wrt vehicle classifications. I corrected this, then proposed my own preferred solution to the problem.
that sounds nice and all, but that's not a real world scenario or even close to.
It's not a scenario, it's a model. Any real-world scenario will fit into that model... and if not, the model, like any other, can be adjusted.
even if you believe you can detect cheating accurately, the reality will always prove otherwise.
Well, no shit. That's why there is a factor for risk of getting caught.
Also, "Severity of the crime" never, ever works. Ever. blowing it out of proportion to act as a deterrent only pisses people off and causes it's own set of problems.
Are you sure about that? Do you really believe that deterrent punishments have no effect on the likelihood of people to break the rules? Deterrent punishments work, to a certain extent. This is why people who believe they are anonymous or hidden will break rules they'd never break if they thought they'd be held accountable. If the punishment is severe, it may be resented, but it acts a deterrent. Whether the deterrence effect is significant enough to overcome the benefits of the behavior depends on the actual scenario.
The rest of your post also fits into my model. That online exam? Perfect example... easy to cheat, not likely to get caught... thus, people will cheat as it is less costly than actually doing the work required to honestly get a good grade.
None of this excuses people from cheating, but it calls into question the same thing again: that maybe a curriculum should be examined, the class should be examined, the teacher should be examined, and the class environment should be examined. Any of those or a combination of could lead to the answer.
Exactly. If your goal is to reduce cheating, you need to consider the factors that make cheating worthwhile to students... which is described by the equation I wrote out.
I think we're basically stating the same thing... but approaching it from different angles.
The main place where I think we differ is that you seem to assign the cause of cheating to the class environment. I assign it to the student, but the decision each student makes is influenced by many factors: their perceived reward from cheating, the punishment for getting caught, the risk of getting caught, etc.
to simply go after cheaters is putting a band-aid over the real problem.
I disagree. Some portion of students will cheat as long as (in theory):
[benefit of higher grade] - [cost of honestly achieving higher grade] > {[benefit of cheating] - [cost of cheating]} * [ risk of getting caught cheating] * [value of punishment for cheating].
The real problem is that people are lazy and want to get the best return for the smallest investment. This cannot be fixed, it is human nature.
So we tip the equation in favor of not cheating, by either/and
1. Making the punishment so extreme (expulsion) that even if the risk of getting caught is low, cheating is not a good idea. The problem with this approach is that as the risks of getting caught decrease, people dismiss the risk as zero. This is a known problem with how humans interpret probability and risk dealing with VLNs and VSNs. 2. Increasing the chance of being caught. This is a problem because of the costs involved, as well as an "arms race" between proctors and students.
Note that the equation is also affected by the fact that cheating has become easier, and thus cheaper. There is also a factor for personal inhibitions against cheating, but I'm not sure how to fit it into the model.
No, they are "light trucks", just like normal pickup trucks and passenger vans. Light trucks do not require a CDL in any state in the US.
The entire concept of light trucks as a classification is screwy. Because of a stupid loophole, it allows car manufacturers to avoid CAFE standards for passenger vehicles of a certain size.
I don't think the answer is to require a CDL for SUV drivers. I think the answer is to force drivers of those vehicles to internalize the societal costs associated with poor fuel economy (pollution, spending on "defense" required to keep our fuel supplies secure, etc). Say, a tax levied at time of registration that is inversely proportional to the fuel economy. Commercial vehicles would be exempt from the tax, or at least have a reduced tax.
Allow people to drive SUVs if they want... just make them pay out the nose for it.
The biggest flaw I see in my idea is that you'll have people getting commercial registrations for non-commercial vehicles, and it will be hard to prevent this.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, that was my point all along. Glad you caught on.
My point was that MS hasn't bothered to hotfix it because it doesn't affect their latest-gen OSes... even though some of the OSes it DOES affect are not yet EOLed.
Did you miss the part about this affecting OSes that are't yet EOLed (but will be in the next year or so)?
What? Maybe my metaphor was unclear. I'm not talking about power lines.
I'm talking about internet backbone... which includes satellite or trunk cable when it's used as backbone.
There's an astounding amount of assets that comprise internet backbone, and if we wanted a forked internet, we'd need all new backbone (or to purchase existing backbone) in order to prevent private interests from exerting control over some portion of the forked internet.
That's probably because you're using non-default settings on your browser so that you always see the actual hyperlink instead of the covertext...
Or you run your wire to the next town, through four other towns to circle back to the other side of your town, and thus to your friend across town.
Or, you decide as a community not to let those people take your bits hostage, and vote to lay a public wire under Main Street.
And then you've got to have committee meetings, public hearings, bond measures passed, and politics as usual; meanwhile Ma Bell offers to lay the wire at their expense, thus sparing the town the need to pass a bond measure, and they have higher bandwidth and fewer nodes on almost any route you send your bits, and all you have to do is sign this little bitty exclusivity agreement.
Hm, I feel like we've been down this road before.
And who designs, builds, and runs the machines?
It can be designed by people. It MUST be designed by people, or we won't have it in our lifetimes. Likely it will also need to be built by people.
But anyway, human-designed and -built systems can be free and open, as long as the design and buildout phases are done in a free and open manner. It's the operation of the system hat needs to be automated to prevent human interference.
And who's going to pay for the duplicate backbones, etc?
So what if the last mile, in dense areas, can be done by wireless? We still need backbones, there's no way we can wireless hop coast-to-coast and still have a usable internet. And forget international.
We have the same problem with internet that we have had with telephony for a century. It just doesn't pay to build out a competing infrastructure -- Ma Bell is good enough for most people.
So Windows doesn't give a flying fuck about any OS that's already EOLed or it's EOLing soon?
Who woulda thunk it?
What the hell do Blackberries have to do with this exploit? Do Blackberries even run Windows?
He who clicks an obfuscated link without viewing the source is an idiot.
When asshole meets idiot, pwnage ensues.
So I just want to say... haha.
I posted a generally polite response as to why so many of us think you're unstable, and how you could address that.
It was advice.
And instead of taking it like a man and considering whether or not there were valid points, you go off the deep end with another rant written in a style sure to make other continue to consider you, as I do, a complete loon.
What are you talking about, you crazy cunt? Then, as now, you had no idea of how slashdot works.
I'm sorry, that's so far off the mark it's not funny.
Joint stock corporations were founded entirely on the concept of speculation and risk. Stock markets do not exist a place to dump your money and hopefully have it grow until you need the cash.
Stock markets exist to provide liquid capital to ventures; what they offer the people providing that capital is the chance to make speculative profits and a diversification of risk. This is the fundamental purpose of stock exchanges.
Speed is indeed important, because it allows the investors (speculators) to properly evaluate and buy/sell stocks.
The problem is not that speed is important -- the problem is that a small group of people/firms have an advantage over all other people participating in the market, because not everyone has equal ability to trade at high speeds. This allows them to engage in rent-seeking behavior that is detrimental to the market at large.
It used to be that having a scoop (that is, useful information before anyone else) gave the biggest advantage to traders on the market. Then we banned insider trading, so people would all be acting on the same public information. Now, that scoop is less relevant for another reason -- you may make some profits off of information asymmetry, but the HFTs are going to take most of your profits simply because they can trade faster than you. They can undercut your put or overbid your ask, and make money on both sides because they see the transactions before they happen.
I think I got a bit off-track there; what you refer to is not investing in the stock market. It is investing in single companies, sectors, or funds. And even if this is what you do (like the original investors in joint-stock ventures), you should still seek to sell when the value of your stock is the highest weighed against the risk you find acceptable.
This brings me to my main beef with HFTs. The entire purpose of stock investment, at its core, is to maximize your investment returns while minimizing the risk to your capital. If you owned a ship in the 1500s, you could be wiped out, financially, by a storm. If you owned a 1/16th share of 16 ships, a storm wiping out a single ship would reduce your returns, but you'd still have assets equivalent to 15/16 of a ship. So in exchange for reduced risks* on each single venture (a ship, in this example), you'd see slightly lower profits from successful ventures. Meanwhile, the people who initially sold those shares to the owners of the joint-stock ventures would have some amount of liquid capital, which they would use to build or acquire the ships, crews, etc, they promised. This was the primary purpose of the original joint-stock corporations -- provide capital to businesses by allowing people to invest at less than the full cost of the venture, and spread risk among investors.
Of course, HFTs take profits with very little risk... this is why they are bad, IMO, for the stock market. Stock markets are about trading risk for profits. HFTs reduce profits for risk-takers, thus making, in the long run, less capital available to risky ventures.
It's funny, though -- you never hear a HFT firm talk about assumption of risk, they only talk about providing liquidity. Liquidity benefits stock speculators, but it doesn't really benefit the actual businesses who produce goods and services and provide meaningful employment.
* discounting systemic risks, which apply to all individual ventures in a class -- and as such, are incidental to the concept of risk diversification within a class.
That's not the problem. The real problem is the people who knew this in advance, but were unable to understand the implications.
I bought a home in 2003 -- my first house, as I'd finally decided to move to the burbs with my wife & start raising a family. I worked with three different mortgage brokers until I found the best mortgage for us.
Here are examples of some of the things I was told:
Don't worry about the interest rate after the first five years on this 5-1 ARM. You'll be selling at a HUGE profit before then.
You should buy the biggest house you can afford so you can maximize your profits when you sell. We calculate you can afford to spend 40% of your take-home on your mortgage, so we're willing to approve you for $X. 40% is pretty typical these days for people of your income.
If you get this 3-1 ARM, your monthly payment will only be $Y if you purchase a home of cost $Z. Let's go over your monthly budget so we can see how to get you into the house of your dreams with this mortgage.
The reason I give these examples is to show how easily people can be misled by mortgage brokers, how easy it is to get people to believe what they want to believe -- that they can afford a house and a mortgage that are both too much for them. Never mind the fact that so many people were hoodwinked into believing that the housing market would continue to boom forever.
So yeah, I read all the terms and decided on a 15-year fixed mortgage. But I think people like us are in the minority -- most people just don't have the math and logic skills necessary to solve this problem on their own.
Comment fail. Overuse of ALL-CAPS and bold typeface, it makes your post damn near unreadable.
Try it again, but try to write like a grown-up with something useful to say. Experience tells us that most people who shit all over our displays like you did have nothing to say -- they need the bold and all-caps to get attention, because their ideas themselves have little merit.
So please clean up your text, people like me might actually consider your ideas if it didn't look like an unstable person wrote them.
And, FWIW, I do think you're unstable, from exchanges we've had in the past, and from exchanges you've had with others. But that's not the point -- the point is no one will take you seriously (well, among those who still *might* take you seriously) if you write like a lunatic.
This is a known issue with probability-based decisions. I known I've seen a couple studies on the topic, I just can't find a cite right now.
But that's an interesting point on people not turning in other people when the punishment is too steep. Advances in detecting cheating, and more resources spent on detecting it, may make that issue insignificant compared to the chance of getting caught by the proctor. It's an interesting thought.
Emphasis mine.
I don't think it's as easy as you say. Otherwise, it would be done more often. It's expensive to write, administer, and grade more comprehensive exams. Given that most college classes only have 2 or 3 exams, would you really reduce the number of exams? And if fewer people are cheating, because it is impractical, then the benefit of cheating successfully increases.
I have looked at it. The **AA attempts to rein in filesharing, while wrongheaded IMO, have been effective to some degree. The cost of being caught is enough to be a disincentive to a lot of people.
That does not make sense. Society's costs, even the labels' costs, are externialities to the pirate, and thus immaterial (from an economic standpoint) to the individual's decision to pirate or not pirate.
Whether or not you agree with the **AA's stance and the societal impact, the fact is that the model is applicable.
True. Which is why behavioral psychology is becoming such an important part of microeconomics and other fields these days, and why I touched on the problems humans have with VLNs and VSNs and probability decisions.
Yes and no. It's hard to measure the value of the education behind the degree, but it's relatively easy to measure the value of the degree itself. So we measure one but not the other, which has led to having the actual degree being more important.
:).
I will say that when I hire, a degree is not generally required -- however, it's a plus, as it shows that the applicant was able to achieve *something*. But when I interview for any position, I'm interested in problem-solving ability, social skills, general ethics, work ethic, determination, etc. A degree from an accredited institution should require all those general skills and more, or the ability to overcome a deficiency in any of them (except ethics -- there is no workaround for ethics).
The problem is that employers don't have the time to evaluate every candidate on the specific items. So they use a degree as an approximation -- it really is the education itself that employers value. The problem is that cheaters break the system, as they make the degree less useful a metric -- they devalue the education the degree represents.
In your case, that's probably a good thing
Sure. I made no value judgment on it.
But, given that your goal as an educator is to ensure that your students who graduate are well-educated, then it is a problem.
The students who cheat get the diploma, but not the education.
Your example includes two factors -- the first being the extent of the punishment. The second, and more important to your example, is the risk of getting caught. The highway robbers *reduced* the risk of getting caught by killing their victims -- thus, given equivalent punishments, killing their victims became the better strategy. When the punishment for highway robbery was less severe, the importance of not getting caught was reduced.
This does not apply to cheating in the same manner, as cheating on more assignments increases the risk of getting caught, without impacting the level of punishment (if you get caught once or a dozen times, you still end up expelled -- so better to cheat minimally, or not at all, and not get caught).
The most likely outcome of increasing the punishment for cheating fits into the model I gave. If you increase the cost of cheating, some cheaters will devote more resources to cheating (reduce the risk of getting caught and increase the cost of cheating). Some cheaters will find it no longer beneficial to cheat, and will stop -- for these cheaters, the new risk*cost of getting caught is greater than the benefit of cheating.
Sure. Hordes of economists work on calculating the multiplier effect of public spending (Keynes being the first major one).
Read Joseph Stiglitz's work from the early 70s.
He also touches on it in Stiglitz & Bilmes, The Three Trillion Dollar War,, 2010.
Also: Miles, Myles & Preston, The Economics of Public Spending, 2003.
I'd also suggest reading articles by Barro and/or Krugman on the multiplier effect as it relates to our current spending.
Note that even non-Keynesians tend to recognize that there is a multiplicative effect on public spending, although there are some discrepancies on the estimated values.
And just think about it. When we spend a few hundred billion dollars on war materiel, what do we have to show for it at the end? When we spend the same on transportation infrastructure, education, etc, what do we have to show for it at the end?
The federal income tax does not exist in isolation. The total tax burden on individuals in the US is pretty equivalent for all income levels in the US, roughly 40-45% (when you include FICA, state income tax, property tax, sales tax, capital gains tax, etc).
Sorry to break it to you, but a "typical married couple with 2 children with income less than $44k" is far lower than the median on per capita income. Average household size in the US is only 2.59 people, so your connection between the "typical" family with two kids earning $44k to the median household is egregiously inapt.
Besides which, my point still holds. If you give that so-called "typical" family more cash, they will spend it and stimulate the economy. If you give the same cash to the top earners, it will not stimulate the economy.
First, there is a misunderstanding on your part of the way things are:
I put it in quotes for a reason. "Light truck" is a different classification from "truck". "Light trucks" and "trucks" have different CAFE standards.
Are you proposing we tier the licensing requirements even further, to match the CAFE classifications? Or are you suggesting we eliminate some of the CAFE classifications to match licensing standards?
Furthermore, licensing standards are handled on a state level, while CAFE requirements are federal. Do you propose each state implement its own CAFE requirements? Or that the federal government assume operating license responsibilities?
We are arguing both about they way things are, and the way they should be. Parent to my OP in the thread made an obvious error wrt vehicle classifications. I corrected this, then proposed my own preferred solution to the problem.
It's not a scenario, it's a model. Any real-world scenario will fit into that model... and if not, the model, like any other, can be adjusted.
Well, no shit. That's why there is a factor for risk of getting caught.
Are you sure about that? Do you really believe that deterrent punishments have no effect on the likelihood of people to break the rules? Deterrent punishments work, to a certain extent. This is why people who believe they are anonymous or hidden will break rules they'd never break if they thought they'd be held accountable. If the punishment is severe, it may be resented, but it acts a deterrent. Whether the deterrence effect is significant enough to overcome the benefits of the behavior depends on the actual scenario.
The rest of your post also fits into my model. That online exam? Perfect example... easy to cheat, not likely to get caught... thus, people will cheat as it is less costly than actually doing the work required to honestly get a good grade.
Exactly. If your goal is to reduce cheating, you need to consider the factors that make cheating worthwhile to students... which is described by the equation I wrote out.
I think we're basically stating the same thing... but approaching it from different angles.
The main place where I think we differ is that you seem to assign the cause of cheating to the class environment. I assign it to the student, but the decision each student makes is influenced by many factors: their perceived reward from cheating, the punishment for getting caught, the risk of getting caught, etc.
I disagree. Some portion of students will cheat as long as (in theory):
[benefit of higher grade] - [cost of honestly achieving higher grade] > {[benefit of cheating] - [cost of cheating]} * [ risk of getting caught cheating] * [value of punishment for cheating].
The real problem is that people are lazy and want to get the best return for the smallest investment. This cannot be fixed, it is human nature.
So we tip the equation in favor of not cheating, by either/and
1. Making the punishment so extreme (expulsion) that even if the risk of getting caught is low, cheating is not a good idea. The problem with this approach is that as the risks of getting caught decrease, people dismiss the risk as zero. This is a known problem with how humans interpret probability and risk dealing with VLNs and VSNs.
2. Increasing the chance of being caught. This is a problem because of the costs involved, as well as an "arms race" between proctors and students.
Note that the equation is also affected by the fact that cheating has become easier, and thus cheaper. There is also a factor for personal inhibitions against cheating, but I'm not sure how to fit it into the model.
PS. sorry for the messy formula.
No, they are "light trucks", just like normal pickup trucks and passenger vans. Light trucks do not require a CDL in any state in the US.
The entire concept of light trucks as a classification is screwy. Because of a stupid loophole, it allows car manufacturers to avoid CAFE standards for passenger vehicles of a certain size.
I don't think the answer is to require a CDL for SUV drivers. I think the answer is to force drivers of those vehicles to internalize the societal costs associated with poor fuel economy (pollution, spending on "defense" required to keep our fuel supplies secure, etc). Say, a tax levied at time of registration that is inversely proportional to the fuel economy. Commercial vehicles would be exempt from the tax, or at least have a reduced tax.
Allow people to drive SUVs if they want... just make them pay out the nose for it.
The biggest flaw I see in my idea is that you'll have people getting commercial registrations for non-commercial vehicles, and it will be hard to prevent this.