What? Did you deliberately misunderstand the source you quoted?
A 2002 study by Capgemini found that more than half of the high-net-worth individuals in the U.S. were "new money," or self-made millionaires.
Your inference:
So 80+% of all millionaires in America are "new money".
Inherited money is declining as a share of wealth in the U.S., according to the study, accounting for less than 20% of high-net-worth individuals in 2002.
That's a share of wealth, not a percent of wealthy persons. It's also a misleading statement, since inflation and normal returns would lead to this anyway. If a 20-year old inherited 50,000 in 1950, and invested the whole thing, they'd likely be one of those so-called "self-made millionares" today.
the fact that sellers need to list something multiple times now on average is a bloody good signal that there's massive oversupply in that market, and the seller should try flogging something else.
That's not the only possibility. I'm sure increased supply on EBay is an issue for a lot of sellers, but there are at least three other distinct problems:
(1) Competition outside of EBay. EBay is no longer a market unto itself, the sellers there are in direct competition with other discount sellers and auction sites. I find that I can often do better by buying elsewhere.
(2) Visibility of product. I've noticed that EBay's search is no longer nearly as effective as it used to be. I tire quickly of paging through 200 items for the 2 or 3 listings that I'm looking for. Sellers have become very savvy in terms of making sure their product comes up in as many searches as possible, and this decreases the utility of search.
(3) The sheer volume of crap. It isn't about oversupply of goods that most would people actually want to buy, it's that the marketplace (not the market) is flooded with junk. I recently furnished a new condo, and looked to EBay for a lot of accessories. A colossal waste of time. Would you go to the dollar store to redecorate your kitchen?
So, what can EBay do to fix the problems?
I think the best thing they could do for themselves would be to fix their search engine. This would fix the problem of product visibility, the problem of good product dilution, and these would help solve the problem of shrinking market share for EBay.
Hedge funds are sometimes seen as the "smart money,'' and their managers hailed as market iconoclasts whose quirky, daring trading styles are central to their success. But some of the smartest traders are often beaten by an unlikely foe: the room full of man-high Hewlett-Packard computers that are the brain of AHL.
BS. Successful hedge fund managers do not have "quirky, daring trading styles." Every successful hedge fund out there has a set of metrics and a set of formulae that they apply in order to determine where there are inefficiencies in the market to take advantage of (for example, is biotech currently overvalued? Is the dollar undervalued? Damned if I know, but the mathematical geniuses running my hedge fund have a good idea.
Second, hedge fund managers rarely execute trades themselves. They hire traders to do that, apparently you didn't bother reading the article you linked to.
I know, you're linking to a NYTimes article (which you didn't bother citing in your directly quoted 2nd sentence).
2) If we let it fester, you might never know how quickly an infection of belief growst. Look at ID.
3) It gives everyone posting righteous indignance a sense of mental superiority that fuels the nerd ego-drive. That, my friend, is a source of 'free' energy.
And, given your nick 'Mr. Underbridge,' perhaps your grumpiness is due to the fact that you've been out-trolled by the editors, a cut to your own ego-drive?
Slashdot could test the food privately and release the results to the subscribers of this site. People want to know, and there is plenty of money in that.
There's also plenty of money in publishing falsehoods, and plenty of charlatans willing to take that easy money. What do you think all the industry-funded "independent organizations" are? And what's to keep the food inustry from changing its formulations slightly very often, and showing third-party test results to always be inaccurate?
It's not about 'expecting' the food industry to do it. It's about demanding the food industry do it, and making sure they do it right.
Re:Sounds like ripe targets for virus attacks
on
iPods at War
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
If the solders are picking up "cheap" cd's/dvd's, what are the chances they are also picking up "cheap" software?
For that matter, what's preventing them from picking up "cheap" prostitues and a raging case of typhoid or syphilus?
Are command/control systems isolated enough from the solders personal electronics to prevent virus infections?
If you're designing a program to be able to predict the inputs of another program based on the outputs of that program, sure. But once you call it "poker" you've got to use the rules of poker.
I think a more accurate statement for this person to make would've been: "The overwhelming complexity of poker makes it a difficult game to define in a way for a computer to be able to play effectively."
Nah, that's a cop-out. What's the source of the complexity? What makes poker a difficult game to define for a computer to play effectively is not the complexity of poker, but the duplicity of its opponents. Computers are not very good at learning when there is a good chance that any datum is false.
One method involved building a knowledge base which generalized input so that patterns can be found and the grammar could be recovered.
What happens when up to half of the knowledge base is intentionally incorrect?
my company runs a (GPL and GNU/linux friendly) poker site and the last thing i am worried about is bots taking over humans in no-limit games. To win consistently against serious players an AI would need to be a LOT smarter than what the guys from Alberta have. It would need to have a serious grasp of human psychology. It might happen, eventually, but by then society might have changed so much that "money" might also be an obsolete concept...
You know, you could just turn off the "tell" indicator. It might help on your AI's bluffs.
To ensure that no one computer got lucky, each side was given the opportunity to play its opponent's hand after each deal.
Thereby eliminating one important premise of poker -- you don't know what hand an opponent was playing unless someone called the last bet. In terms of an algorhithm for the program to 'learn' based upon others' behavior, this means the program has a lot more information than a regular player would. Of course, it's possible to verify that this info isn't fed into the algorithm, but I'd be more impressed if the info wasn't available at all.
Also, why ensure that no one computer got lucky? Isn't that the point of playing several thousand hands of limit poker, to eliminate the effect of luck in the study? If it's necessary to normalize all the hands received by the players, then something else is wrong with the study. I'd like to see if the results differed, and how, when the hand repetition is removed.
well, from context one could assume that "the software uses algorithmic techniques known by mathematicians since the 70's" is not referring to knowing something "since" the future, and it's pretty rare to run across data storage algorithms from the 1870s or earlier
Sure, and from context, one could assume that 70's means '70s. That's the point I was making -- pedantry based on the apostrophe is wasted, since the context makes what the author intended absolutely clear.
Sure. But government is responsible for sifting through the wants and needs of the people, for prioritizing, for weighing what benefits some against what benefits some other.
I believe that any government who relies on the input of one quasi-organization ('these environmentalists', in this case) is not only asking to be taken advantage of, but is also likely to make poorly informed decisions.
The idea is that then the prioritization decisions are open to public scrutiny, whereas the recommendations of a single group may not be.
In my OP, I used 'governments' to denote the policy-makers of states -- in most cases, this (in theory) includes the people of those states.
What I meant, in general, was that this prioritization should be a public discussion/decision, not a panel recommendation. In the US, this is the theoretical process, and I think the 'shotgun approach' will work fine as long as those in power take the necessary steps of using the massive amounts of research out there to reach appropriate decisions.
Note that my current cynicism prevents me from believing that is what will happen -- what will happen is that any restrictions on corporate and personal activity will be nominal at best, and the damages will be off-shored (for lack of a better word). This is one reason why a lot of economists are convinced that manufacturing being moved off-shore is a net plus for the US -- the pollution is also moved off-shore. As long as the value we assign to the damage to the public good is greater than the loss associated with the loss of economic activity, we're doing fine.
Sorry for going off on a tangent -- but when you have ten thousand people you are beholden to telling you ten thousand different ways to act, it's your responsibility to determine which is the best course of action.
Not really -- it should be '70s' in all likelihood. The first apostrophe is to represent the missing "19", the second is to denote the possessive that is implied. The term "the 1970's" is a shortening of "the years of the decade we call the 1970s," or "the 1970s' years."
This gets messy, however, since the word 'years' is implied, and to say during the '70s' will make people wonder which 70 seconds you're talking about, and why it needs to be encapsulated with apostrophes -- is it an idiomatical 70 seconds? Kinda like the Biblical '40 days'?
For that matter, if you really want to get pedantic, what's the use of referencing the 70s at all if you're not going to bother denoting the scale? I mean, surely not mentioning that it's AD (or CE) is going to confuse people using other calendars... more so than misusing an apostrophe, right?
Along the same lines, it's just horrific that they'd abbreviate the decade anyway, how are we to know that the writer didn't intend the 1870s, or the 2070s even, if he happens to be living backwards in time?
Bah, there are grammatical rules, and it's great if everyone follows them, but really, it makes no difference if he spelled it 70's, '70s, or seventies (which is the proper spelling, btw).
Anyway, posting as a logged-in user actually reduces the number of modpoints that are wasted if the post is modded up to +5!
Thereby helping to solve the mod-point inflation issue I've seen many complain about.
The idea is that posting the text is normally useless in terms of the current discussion, and therefore mod points are wasted on it anyway. For archival purposes, it'll still be there whether the final moderation total is +1 or +5, and a nifty subject line like "Full article text" makes it really easy to find.
Seriously, though, by then it will be someone else's problem, the best I can do is recommend to the company that they do what's best in the long term as I see it (which is a near-full migration). The hard part is showing how it's cheaper, which is based on projections of expenses 3-5 years down the road -- not easy to make the case without concrete examples.
For most departments, MS Office is the major dependency precluding a migration. For Art & Production, there's graphic art software. For back-office departments (accounting, HR) there's proprietary software that is currently Windows-only (though the developer has been promising a Linux build of the client for ages).
Would they seriously be able to handle a change to Linux as long as they keep Office?
Sure. Even running WinXP, the users are locked down tightly. We're talking personnel file reprimands for allowing windows update to run without written authorization. They're used to not being allowed to touch anything, so there's no beef when things they aren't allowed to touch are changed.
If that's the case, wouldn't you just use Crossover Office and keep your exisiting Office licenses instead of buying Office for Linux?
Our licenses are done on an biennial basis (MS's ha-ha "Open License" program) -- there's no license to keep, as long as the timing is done properly.
What these environmentalists need to do is build a priority management system. This shotgun approach has got to end. They are going to have to decide if global warming is worse than water shortages, if nuclear power is worse than coal, etc.
Horseshit. What these governments need to do is build a priority management system -- and actually make it work.
'These environmentalists' are not a cohesive group with a hierarchical decision-making system. Asking 'them' to decide what's best for everyone and not bother us until they come up with the best course of action is a little simplistic, and the truth is that a lot of the issues are inter-related and therefore impossible to simply prioritize. This is especially true for the environmental scientists on the ground, since their knowledge is necessarily focused on a small subject area.
It's the role of governments, not environmental scientists, to determine these priorities and courses of action based on the best information available. Asking someone else to do it for you is passing the buck.
That said, there is a problem with the shotgun approach -- in order for it to work, the people in power must have both the ability and the will to establish what is most important to their nations and their people, and then to act on it. History tells us that this is a rare combination, and recent history tells me that this is a laughable thought.
All you have to do is install OpenOffice on the users computers and then work on one task at a time. After all the files/procedures are converted you would then switch them to Linux.
Which means decreased productivity in the short-term, which we can't afford. Staff is already working at near 100%, this change-over would mean either hiring new staff in the interim (never gonna happen, too expensive) or accepting that the work isn't going to get done when it needs to be (isn't gonna happen either, the work NEEDS to be done on time -- this is in periodical publishing, where a missed deadline == massive losses). It's all the staff can do to keep their heads above water, they regularly work 16-hour days two weeks of the month just to get copy to press.
Besides if it is really that patched together it may just very well be time to start rewriting stuff so it's easier to maintain.
Maintenance is far cheaper than redevelopment, in this case -- we need IT support staff here for urgent issue management anyway, they have time between crises (usually) to do the regular maintenance required.
Also, another note re: moving users over to OO: It's taken the better part of two decades to get a lot of the users to the point at which they can use Office effectively, and a lot of that is based on them just memorizing mouse click sets, there is no actual understanding of what they are doing. These are people with incredible specialized knowledge and contacts in their fields who cannot easily be replaced by more tech-savvy staff. Getting them to use OO and memorize new clicksets would be a nightmare for them, a nightmare for the training staff, and a nightmare for the IT support staff -- and very expensive in terms of lost labor time and extra support hours.
If there was no biofuel, the fuel consumers would be forced to change their lifestyles. The way things are, we won't, and the starvation toll is going to rise accordingly. Currently, it stands at 27000
[sarcasm]Gee, what part of Manifest Destiny and Social Darwinism don't you understand? It's our right to out-compete those uneducated, destitute villagers that are too stupid to move out of their sub-par ecological and economical countries.[/sarcasm]
I totally agree with you.
The fact of the matter is that we've grown too accustomed to the use of a finite resource for a basic need (energy), which has allowed the world population to grow beyond the planet's capacity to support all the population's needs. Now faced with having to maintain the system without input, something's gotta give in order for use to reach equilibrium, or even stability. There are three possible outcomes:
(1) Population reduction through war, famine, etc.
(2) Technological and use advances that enable greater and/or more efficient production of foodstuffs and biofuels.
(3) Voluntary reduction of consumption by those at the high end of the scale.
I believe that history has shown that (3) will not happen -- time and again, we've seen that the top consumers will allow the poorest to suffer greatly without making adjustments to alleviate the suffering. The problem with outcome (2) is that it just holds off the problem a little longer -- raising the cap only helps until we're pushing the supportable population limits again, then we're faced with the same problem.
So the end result, then: war and famine (not necessarily in that order).
One other note -- in the end, population equilibrium will not end starvation and famine. The hope is that we will have sufficient economic and political stability to distribute food in a manner to alleviate the worst of the suffering.
Slashdot Mirror
Your inference:
That's a share of wealth, not a percent of wealthy persons. It's also a misleading statement, since inflation and normal returns would lead to this anyway. If a 20-year old inherited 50,000 in 1950, and invested the whole thing, they'd likely be one of those so-called "self-made millionares" today.
(1) Competition outside of EBay. EBay is no longer a market unto itself, the sellers there are in direct competition with other discount sellers and auction sites. I find that I can often do better by buying elsewhere.
(2) Visibility of product. I've noticed that EBay's search is no longer nearly as effective as it used to be. I tire quickly of paging through 200 items for the 2 or 3 listings that I'm looking for. Sellers have become very savvy in terms of making sure their product comes up in as many searches as possible, and this decreases the utility of search.
(3) The sheer volume of crap. It isn't about oversupply of goods that most would people actually want to buy, it's that the marketplace (not the market) is flooded with junk. I recently furnished a new condo, and looked to EBay for a lot of accessories. A colossal waste of time. Would you go to the dollar store to redecorate your kitchen?
So, what can EBay do to fix the problems?
I think the best thing they could do for themselves would be to fix their search engine. This would fix the problem of product visibility, the problem of good product dilution, and these would help solve the problem of shrinking market share for EBay.
Second, hedge fund managers rarely execute trades themselves. They hire traders to do that, apparently you didn't bother reading the article you linked to.
I know, you're linking to a NYTimes article (which you didn't bother citing in your directly quoted 2nd sentence).
1) It's funny. Laugh.
2) If we let it fester, you might never know how quickly an infection of belief growst. Look at ID.
3) It gives everyone posting righteous indignance a sense of mental superiority that fuels the nerd ego-drive. That, my friend, is a source of 'free' energy.
And, given your nick 'Mr. Underbridge,' perhaps your grumpiness is due to the fact that you've been out-trolled by the editors, a cut to your own ego-drive?
It's not about 'expecting' the food industry to do it. It's about demanding the food industry do it, and making sure they do it right.
Yes.
Well, it's not poker then.
If you're designing a program to be able to predict the inputs of another program based on the outputs of that program, sure. But once you call it "poker" you've got to use the rules of poker.
What happens when up to half of the knowledge base is intentionally incorrect?
Or they learn a very expensive lesson.
Also, why ensure that no one computer got lucky? Isn't that the point of playing several thousand hands of limit poker, to eliminate the effect of luck in the study? If it's necessary to normalize all the hands received by the players, then something else is wrong with the study. I'd like to see if the results differed, and how, when the hand repetition is removed.
Why thanks, but I think the early troll modder mistook it for a fp troll, the mod was slapped on before the joke was completed...
Sure. But government is responsible for sifting through the wants and needs of the people, for prioritizing, for weighing what benefits some against what benefits some other.
I believe that any government who relies on the input of one quasi-organization ('these environmentalists', in this case) is not only asking to be taken advantage of, but is also likely to make poorly informed decisions.
The idea is that then the prioritization decisions are open to public scrutiny, whereas the recommendations of a single group may not be.
In my OP, I used 'governments' to denote the policy-makers of states -- in most cases, this (in theory) includes the people of those states.
What I meant, in general, was that this prioritization should be a public discussion/decision, not a panel recommendation. In the US, this is the theoretical process, and I think the 'shotgun approach' will work fine as long as those in power take the necessary steps of using the massive amounts of research out there to reach appropriate decisions.
Note that my current cynicism prevents me from believing that is what will happen -- what will happen is that any restrictions on corporate and personal activity will be nominal at best, and the damages will be off-shored (for lack of a better word). This is one reason why a lot of economists are convinced that manufacturing being moved off-shore is a net plus for the US -- the pollution is also moved off-shore. As long as the value we assign to the damage to the public good is greater than the loss associated with the loss of economic activity, we're doing fine.
Sorry for going off on a tangent -- but when you have ten thousand people you are beholden to telling you ten thousand different ways to act, it's your responsibility to determine which is the best course of action.
This gets messy, however, since the word 'years' is implied, and to say during the '70s' will make people wonder which 70 seconds you're talking about, and why it needs to be encapsulated with apostrophes -- is it an idiomatical 70 seconds? Kinda like the Biblical '40 days'?
For that matter, if you really want to get pedantic, what's the use of referencing the 70s at all if you're not going to bother denoting the scale? I mean, surely not mentioning that it's AD (or CE) is going to confuse people using other calendars... more so than misusing an apostrophe, right?
Along the same lines, it's just horrific that they'd abbreviate the decade anyway, how are we to know that the writer didn't intend the 1870s, or the 2070s even, if he happens to be living backwards in time?
Bah, there are grammatical rules, and it's great if everyone follows them, but really, it makes no difference if he spelled it 70's, '70s, or seventies (which is the proper spelling, btw).
The idea is that posting the text is normally useless in terms of the current discussion, and therefore mod points are wasted on it anyway. For archival purposes, it'll still be there whether the final moderation total is +1 or +5, and a nifty subject line like "Full article text" makes it really easy to find.
Seriously, though, by then it will be someone else's problem, the best I can do is recommend to the company that they do what's best in the long term as I see it (which is a near-full migration). The hard part is showing how it's cheaper, which is based on projections of expenses 3-5 years down the road -- not easy to make the case without concrete examples.
See comment 15948718
an increased risk of loss of data.
Burma Shave.
See Comment 15948695Another layer of inefficiency and
See Comment 15948676
Of complexity, but also adds
This concept just adds another layer
Sure. Even running WinXP, the users are locked down tightly. We're talking personnel file reprimands for allowing windows update to run without written authorization. They're used to not being allowed to touch anything, so there's no beef when things they aren't allowed to touch are changed.
Our licenses are done on an biennial basis (MS's ha-ha "Open License" program) -- there's no license to keep, as long as the timing is done properly.
'These environmentalists' are not a cohesive group with a hierarchical decision-making system. Asking 'them' to decide what's best for everyone and not bother us until they come up with the best course of action is a little simplistic, and the truth is that a lot of the issues are inter-related and therefore impossible to simply prioritize. This is especially true for the environmental scientists on the ground, since their knowledge is necessarily focused on a small subject area.
It's the role of governments, not environmental scientists, to determine these priorities and courses of action based on the best information available. Asking someone else to do it for you is passing the buck.
That said, there is a problem with the shotgun approach -- in order for it to work, the people in power must have both the ability and the will to establish what is most important to their nations and their people, and then to act on it. History tells us that this is a rare combination, and recent history tells me that this is a laughable thought.
Maintenance is far cheaper than redevelopment, in this case -- we need IT support staff here for urgent issue management anyway, they have time between crises (usually) to do the regular maintenance required.
Also, another note re: moving users over to OO: It's taken the better part of two decades to get a lot of the users to the point at which they can use Office effectively, and a lot of that is based on them just memorizing mouse click sets, there is no actual understanding of what they are doing. These are people with incredible specialized knowledge and contacts in their fields who cannot easily be replaced by more tech-savvy staff. Getting them to use OO and memorize new clicksets would be a nightmare for them, a nightmare for the training staff, and a nightmare for the IT support staff -- and very expensive in terms of lost labor time and extra support hours.
I totally agree with you.
The fact of the matter is that we've grown too accustomed to the use of a finite resource for a basic need (energy), which has allowed the world population to grow beyond the planet's capacity to support all the population's needs. Now faced with having to maintain the system without input, something's gotta give in order for use to reach equilibrium, or even stability. There are three possible outcomes:
(1) Population reduction through war, famine, etc.
(2) Technological and use advances that enable greater and/or more efficient production of foodstuffs and biofuels.
(3) Voluntary reduction of consumption by those at the high end of the scale.
I believe that history has shown that (3) will not happen -- time and again, we've seen that the top consumers will allow the poorest to suffer greatly without making adjustments to alleviate the suffering. The problem with outcome (2) is that it just holds off the problem a little longer -- raising the cap only helps until we're pushing the supportable population limits again, then we're faced with the same problem.
So the end result, then: war and famine (not necessarily in that order).
One other note -- in the end, population equilibrium will not end starvation and famine. The hope is that we will have sufficient economic and political stability to distribute food in a manner to alleviate the worst of the suffering.