Yes, I recognize that - the question was really meant rhetorically, more as an exclamation than as a question. Apparently several people replying to my post thought I meant it as a surreptitious endorsement of intelligent design, which was not at all the case (as my posting history would indicate)!
I do find it remarkable that such *specific* triggers would develop randomly, though clear that such triggers would yield such large survival advantages that they would undoubtedly dominate once they evolved.
In any case, I thought it was quite an amazing adaptation as apparently did many other people. I wasn't trying to imply that I saw it as evidence of natural selection. I do think it would be very interesting to examine the genes that code for the particular toxins or neural triggering compounds and see what genes they are near and what the comparable region codes for in related species of fungus.
This is an entirely confused post. In fact, Liberalism is an ideology which holds liberty as the primary political value. This is what the phrase "liberal democracy" implies.
You are using the word Liberal to refer to a modern, far left wing ideology of moral relativism.
While the word "liberal" (little L) has commonly become associated in America with the Democratic party and a so-called "American liberal" philosophy, this still has nothing whatsoever to do with moral relativism. In any case, it should tell you something whenever you hear certain far right Republicans try to smear the words "liberal" and "liberalism" - it's clear what they oppose.
Liberalism is a good thing, and stands in firm opposition too totalitarianism. This doesn't mean supporting war or violence as a means to spread individual liberties (a concept which I find inherently flawed and self-defeating), as the current Republican administration does. And moral relativism is a useless philosophy - most mainstream political groups and figures would reject it.
In any case, I'm not sure why anyone would think that either Democrats or Republicans would be more in favor of a company like Yahoo doing business in China. Both parties are pragmatic and generally pro-business, and both parties have presidents who have encouraged trade with China. I gather that both parties hope that over time, doing business with China would lead to more of their people recognizing their basic human rights and demanding freedom from their own government. I generally think this is a better strategy than the "bomb them until they are 'free'" thing. Unless you are advocating economic isolationism?
The figures you cite are all far out of date. Joe DiMasi's studies from Tufts that came up with the $800M number go back quite a few years. For a variety of reasons, costs of R&D for NMEs have risen far, far faster than inflation. Please see more recent DiMasi research, as well as his peers from Tufts, and other NBER backed researchers - the $1.8M figure is much closer to most modern estimates, not based on data from the early 1980s.
Joe DiMasi is very well known in the field of health care economics. I have not heard anybody cast aspersions on him or his work as you are - not everybody agrees with his numbers, but you are suggesting he's being paid off by big pharma to inflate numbers. I would encourage you to post a reference to a real critique of his research if you're going to make claims like that rather than just make an ad hominem attack.
The fungus you refer to is mentioned in this article, which ironically was linked to from a past Slashdot story. They just call it an enslaver fungus, they don't actually name the species they are referring to.
But it sounds like this type of adaptive mechanism is more common than you would think. Quite amazing actually - how on earth would a parasite evolve the right chemical signal to trigger its host to jump into water or perch at the top of a tree? Very bizarre.
Graham (and Dodd and Warren Buffett) never said to ignore the market. They just say you shouldn't take what the market says as representative of anything more than the product of millions of manic, irrational people moving their capital around. This is the "Mr. Market" that Ben Graham writes of in the Intelligent Investor and in Security Analysis.
You are right, however, about buying when the market is being irrationally pessimistic and selling when the market is being irrationally optimistic is the best way to achieve superior returns. The trick is finding these situations. Some of Graham and Dodd's techniques still apply directly, many others have to be modified.
I'd recommend "Value Investing: From Graham to Buffett and Beyond" by Bruce Greenwald et. al. for a great, readable, modern take on value investing. Also the collected shareholder letters of Warren Buffett are great - I've bought the book twice, get partially through it, then some friend "borrows" it, and I never see it again.
Yes. According to Wikipedia, Sacha "Ali G" Baron-Cohen and Simon Baron-Cohen are cousins.
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Let's see, for starters, the stock market allows common people to own a piece of the capital stock of our nation's economy. You don't have to own an entire business to own a piece of one - this let's anybody with any assets whatsoever participate in our country's economic growth and grow and preserve wealth.
Your share of a company represents a claim on the residual income stream of a business after service of debt, capital expenditures and operating costs. There are plenty of cheap companies out there, from a discounted cash flow or EV/EBITDA multiple perspective.
Calling the market a Ponzi scheme because people invest their money in growth/dot-commish companies at exorbitant prices because they are the current media darlings, or being hyped by brokerage houses in an effort to generate churn is unreasonable. The problem is you see many people speculating (i.e. taking unreasonable bets based on insufficient informational advantage) rather than investing (purchasing undervalued assets that a prudent evaluator would expect to pay off over the longer term in income and price appreciation), and you now assume that this is what the market is all about.
Ummm, no, that is not what original intent means. Clearly there is a reason that a minimum salary level was set to be considered "salaried" for the purposes of the law, even if you are an executive of the company. This isn't a misinterpretation or overgeneralization of a constitution written hundreds of years ago, it is a straightforward reading of a law from the last few decades.
Maybe the provision of the law doesn't make sense in some or even all cases, but it is an explicit and clear provision, not an overly broad or narrow reading influenced by centuries of social and linguistic change. Throwing out the phrase "original intent" doesn't mean "feel free to ignore provisions of a law that you don't think the writer really meant".
I know it's a joke, but actually, as far as I can tell, they are. In fact, it is probably illegal to salary somebody at $1 per year. In order to qualify for the "executive" or "professional" minimum wage exemptions to Federal minimum wage laws, you have to be salaried at a certain minimum level according to the Department of Labor. Admittedly, this minimum level is only $155 bucks a week, but it's more than $1 per year.
So while the vast majority of salaried professionals are exempt, it would seem that you can't just salary somebody at $1 per year and declare them exempt from minimum wage and overtime laws.
As far as I can see, this can only be legally accomplished by salarying the executive at the minimum level to qualify for minimum wage exemption, giving them checks, and having them refuse to deposit the checks. Or just ignore the law and assume that nobody would be silly enough to enforce it for multi-billionaires. States also have a myriad of laws regulating this stuff.
The grandparent poster makes several good points and you fail it by bringing Hitler into the argument, even in an oblique fashion. The point is that politicians and movie stars choose to live their lives in the limelight, whereas a private citizen doesn't. In this case, the notoriety of a private citizen who never used his real name in any public forum stands to adversely impact the business and personal lives of his parents, who have already suffered immensely due to what sounds like his untimely death.
I can sympathize with the parents here. And I think any reasonable person could. Just saying "sucks to be them" doesn't really feel right. Whether the nature of the legal remedy or the path they have pursued for recourse is right is a different question.
In the US, their only recourse would be under libel laws. But Germany has a different legal system with different social and legal standards for privacy. And in Germany, it is considered illegal to disclose the full identity of somebody in the light of accusing them of criminal acts in a public forum if they are not a public figure.
So should Wikipedia/the Wikimedia Foundation respect court rulings in Germany regarding content? What about rulings from other countries, whether free and democratic or much more oppressive? Where do you draw that line? Should they respect the ruling in this particular case due to the considerations of the parents and the serious harm that may be caused to several innocent people by the publication of this material, regardless of whether they should, in general, respect such rulings?
I don't think the answers to all these questions are clearcut. An encyclopedia inevitably will face questions of the definition of libel, the right to privacy, and so on in the society that it is published in. But what happens when an encyclopedia exists outside the context of any one society, like Wikipedia, and is edited by people from many cultures and many nations collaboratively, and can be accessed by all over the Internet?
One answer could be "let's just apply the American norms across the board, respect American law, and to hell with everything else". The problem then is that the Wikimedia Foundation can be seen as an outlaw organization in a mainstream European country like Germany (let's forget about places like Iran for now).
The strongest argument to me seems to be the common carrier argument - it is impossible for Wikipedia to police the edits made by every editor from every country, and in particular to ensure that said posts comply with the laws of their particular country of origin. If Germany has a problem with the content of that page, they should go after the Germans who posted it, over whom they have jurisdiction. If a non-German wrote it, and it's hosted in a non-German country, however, then I don't really see why Germany should have any jurisdiction whatsoever, just because a.de domain redirects to it and the Foundation associated with the "hosting" or common carrier site happens to have a German branch.
In the same vein, if such posts are outside of German jurisdiction, they shouldn't be referenceable in a German court as proof of anything with respect to a case involving the family's privacy rights.
I dunno... from what I've seen, jail time is a very effective deterrent for white collar criminals, which includes disgruntled sysadmin types. I knew a guy, a dentist, who got caught overbilling Medicaid and the state of New York decided to make an example of him. He ended up serving about 5 or 6 months at Rikers Island.
I'm pretty certain he never played any billing games again. And, most likely, no dentists who knew him ever did either.
I'm not saying I think he deserved 6 months at Rikers for the level of the crime. But I think the deterrent effect is real.
The tricky part is balancing that with a sense of proportion, fairness and justice. If 6 months at Rikers is also what somebody serves for a violent mugging that could have resulted in death, then the dentist's sentence is clearly not a fair or proportionate sentence. Maybe 4 or 5 weeks, just to put a healthy amount of fear into the guy, and not at Rikers Island with violent criminals off the streets of New York.
This is pretty simple - you don't need to be a lawyer to understand what's going on at SCO. See this article. SCO just raised a new round of PIPE financing. The private institutional investors (hedge funds, PIPE funds, banks, private equity firms, or whichever idiots bought into this dog of a deal) bought in with the understanding that SCO was going to file a renewed salvo of legal filings and lawsuits. If they didn't do that, they wouldn't have been able to raise the 10 million bucks.
SCO's quarterly cash flow statements tell a simple story: they are hemorrhaging several million bucks a quarter. Their latest quarterly filing with the SEC shows us that this company has dwindled in size by about half in the last year, shrinking their asset base to keep enough cash to stay afloat, with only about $10M in cash and marketable securities, vs. $30M a year prior to that. As of October 31st, they only had enough cash to get them through another 4-6 months of burn.
In short, they were getting perilously close to the red alert, DEFCON 1 phase of business failure, and they would have told these institutional investors anything to get that 10 million into the bank. And if they want anyone to shell out another 10 million in another 18 months when they start running low on cash again, they had better show that they're doing something with their court case.
Agreed, 7.50 is baffling. Average expected cleanup costs alone are higher than that. Then there should be cash returned for the CD's origianl value. And there should be a punitive amount paid to an appropriate charity organization (like EFF, for example) of roughly an equal order of magnitude to set an example that an experienced music and technology company should know better.
I would guesstimate that this number is too low by about an order of magnitude.
As a serious driver, I agree 100%. However, when I was commuting in my M3 over an hour each day here in NYC, every time traffic got heavy or a road was shut down, I'd be in the car 4-5 hours in a day for a whole week straight until they sorted out whatever was screwed with the roads. By the 3rd or 4th day of this, your clutch foot ankle and shin ache massively and you are ready to shoot the first person that looks at you funny.
I don't love driving automatics, but only because these days I just drive on weekends, trips, and for fun. Commuting in heavy traffic day after day makes a manual incredibly impractical.
I can only assume Europeans don't have the same level of commuter traffic that we experience.
The problem is all these nifty unification-type theories only have observable, testable consequences at energy levels far, far beyond that we can produce in any earth-bound laboratory, and we haven't figured out any ways to observe cosmological effects that they might predict either (probably because those energy levels only happen in the early nanoseconds of the universe).
Unless and until somebody can work around that rather fundamental set of issues, it seems like these more aesthetically pleasing models of the universe that produce the same observable effects as the rather ugly hodge-podge we call the Standard Model are likely to remain in the realm of mental masturbation.
As soon as you realize all of this, pursuing further study in physics becomes rather unappealing, or at least it did to me. I look at most modern physics research and I am beyond underwhelmed by it. The only people reaching for the big questions are basically mathematicians and nobody really cares which flavor-of-the-day theory they generate next week because it has no meaningful consequences for the real world.
There are some unsolved physics problems but only a few of them have the potential (in my judgment) to change the way we view the universe, and those that do will require incredible intuitive leaps from what science currently offers in the way of explanatory tools. Oh, and few people seem to work on these hard questions and if you express an interest in working on them, expect to be treated like a quack.
"You evolutionists" means what exactly? I don't know any scientist who describes him or herself as an "evolutionist", this is a propaganda word used by theocratic fundamentalists who want to undermine the entire scientific method. There are two groups of people in this debate: those who believe in the scientific method, and those who don't. Those who do can have intelligent debates about the evidence, and those who don't have stooped to the lowest levels of mockery by draping their anti-scientific beliefs in the language of science to infiltrate school curricula.
There is essentially nothing any scientist can tell you about what happened before that "big bang". Or rather, before a few moments after the big bang.
So when you say that scientists stop there, all that means is they don't know what happened previously, or how it all got there, or anything about it. If you don't know anything about it for sure, and there is no way known to science to find out what happened there, then it becomes a matter of faith or belief. I'm not sure where you got the idea that many scientists don't share the beliefs that you describe as those of "intelligent Christians".
Just look for yourself. I'm sure he's well endowed, but there's nothing distractingly large about that bulge - you know, nothing John Holmes-style. Superman is still supposed to have the normal masculine anatomy, as far as I know, so having no bulge would be much weirder.
Yada yada yada. Again, you don't know anything about my background. You don't know crap about the circumstances I was brought up in. How somebody can make an ad hominem attack based on zero information is just beyond me. For several years, I attended some of the dingiest schools you can imagine, where I saw people beat and stab each other. They told me that I should forget about applying to Ivy League schools because nobody got into those colleges from this particular high school.
Nonetheless, I went to an Ivy League university. In college, I met people who had been through far worse circumstances than I ever did in my mostly lower middle class upbringing, and yet managed to turn into functional, successful people (one fellow I met there grew up in the ghetto, saw his father shoot and kill his mother, and ended up at one of the top law schools in the country).
In any case, it's nice to see that some people choose to believe your fate is determined for you by the circumstances of your birth, but I don't buy it because I've seen too many counterexamples. It may be nearly impossible to take the risks necessary to become a billionaire if you start with nothing, but that's a false standard of success. It's entirely plausible and not at all uncommon for somebody who starts with nothing to have a successful career, make more than enough money to live on, and provide their children with an environment that gives them all the opportunities in the world. I have seen dozens of examples of this among immigrant communities in the US.
So keep blathering about my ignorance if you want, but I am empirically correct and you are provably talking out of your ass about me, a person of whom you know nothing. The wielder of an ad hominem attack is almost always guaranteed to be the loser of an argument.
Your first claim is empirically false. Monopoly => 1 firm controls the market, and since there are factually quite a few large investment banks, and dozens if not hundreds of boutique banks, this is clearly not the case. As for starting new banks, if you lived here in New York, you would see that it happens with some frequency. I know several small investment banking firms that were started by successful bankers who left a bulge bracket firm and took their rolodex with them.
Cartel => implicit price fixing - while there may be isolated cases, true cartels are rarely stable from a game theoretic standpoint. The incentive to defect from cartel pricing and capture market share is too intense. If you knew investment bankers are top firms you would know these guys compete ruthlessly for deals. The idea that a long-lasting, stable cartel exists in such an industry is laughable. Hell, guys at the same firm can't even resist stabbing each other in the back half the time.
As for your comments about savings rates vs. credit card rates and the spreads reflected therein, the spread is there A) to reflect credit risk and B) because the spread is how banks generate revenues. People have tried to play games with these spreads before, such as in the S&L crisis in the 80s. In any case, if you look at bank's profit margins, they aren't anywhere near as high as your post suggests. And regardless, personal banking has very little to do with investment banking.
Finally, I don't know where you are paying $30 a month, but in no market that I'm aware of does that happen these days. I pay $0 a month for the privilege of having an account (i.e. presumably they make money on the differential between returns they get in the money market and the very low checking and savings account interest rates they pay).
Laws are prescriptive. Wikipedia is a purely descriptive source of information. When your book of laws says a law is "true", assuming it is enforced, then it is true. Just because one online source says something is true doesn't in any way make it so.
This argument has long since ceased to be interesting to me. Anybody who thinks Wikipedia is a perfectly reliable source of unbiased information is an idiot. Anybody who wants to ban or otherwise do away with Wikipedia and similar non-centralized repositories of information is a danger to free society. It says on the main page "Welcome to Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit." I think that's pretty clear and descriptive.
The rest of us will happily continue to use Wikipedia, because it's far, far faster and more efficient to refer to it than to compile your own consensus information from zillions of internet sources on every question you have on a daily basis. We will simply double check and cross reference before doing anything really important with the information contained therein, like say passing a law based on it, as we have been doing all along.
Funny, but historically Christians have done far more smiting of their enemies than Jews have. Jews generally don't take all the smiting stuff anywhere near as seriously as Christians do.
If these people create nothing of value, then why are people willing to pay them for it? This makes no sense from a basic economic perspective - if there are no gains from trade, why is trade occurring? Now you could try to argue that there are a small number of suppliers that engage in cartel price fixing, but that's hard to buy, there are many boutique investment banks and the like, and none of their services are cheap.
There is a reason for this. Entrepreneurs and executives *need* access to capital markets. They need private equity funds and public market access to grow their businesses. Banks bring trust, reputation, financial expertise and legal expertise to the table. Sure, I think fees for some transactions are too high, but you can always go to somebody else. The bank scrapes a couple percent off the top for each transaction. Really, is this so terrible for the value they provide? Most companies don't seem to think so. The reason they make so much money is that they do tons and tons of deals, and a few percent on the really big deals adds up to a lot of money.
Very funny, asshole. Did I say _everyone_ on any of those sites conforms to that description? No. I just said it's populated primarily by those types. Friendster is the way it is because it was first, and tended to pick up early adopter types and the people they know. Doesn't mean everybody fits a neat stereotype, and I never said they do. But by definition of the way a social networking site works, they are only useful if there are other people "like you" there for you to connect up with, so in fact *they*, not me, are the ones that tend to reinforce the stereotypes of their communities.
And as for MySpace - it looks like it's diversified quite a bit from what I saw there maybe 12 months ago looking at it today. Still a bit of that flavor, but a much more reasonable mix of people. But when I first went there, literally EVERY profile I saw fit the description in my original post and it left a very bad impression with me. I'm very tolerant of all sorts of different people, but I have little patience for that particular breed of illiterate moron that I referenced before.
Yeah, and they gits lotsa niggers and wops too. Slashdot: Paragon of free thinking and tolerance.
This fails to amuse me. Saying people are low class because they choose to conform to certain modes of speech, mannerism, and dress that suggest a lifestyle and priorities I find distasteful is not racism. Racism is about judging people based on factors they have no control over - the color of their skin and ethnic background. But if you say you won't judge people based on the choices they make about how they live their lives, then you are A) full of shit and B) abdicating your responsibility as an ethical human being to make judgments about the world around you.
I don't disagree entirely about the yuppies and hipsters. But it was said somewhat tongue in cheek as I tried to come up with a comparable stereotype for people on Friendster.
And say what you will about me (you anonymous fucktard), I'm apparently not the only one around here that looks at the profiles on MySpace and thinks the same things based on the other comments here.
Oh, and if you want to man up and call me an obnoxious prick, I suggest you post with a real account. Or else I'm just going to laugh at you and piss on your face.
I just don't get it. Myspace is Friendster, only instead of yuppies, hipsters, and college students, it's populated by complete morons. All my friends from college and high school are on Friendster and/or Facebook.com. MySpace gets the lowest-life, most guido New Jersey and Long Island trash people I've ever seen, the teenagers who are too dumb to know any better, and a couple of pervs I know in their later 20s who just go there to pick up on dumb 17 year old girls.
I actively choose not to be associated with MySpace. Why? Because it's about as low class as anything I could imagine. Call me an elitist yuppie, but I would never want to be caught with a profile on that site, until they manage to improve their image massively, i.e. get rid of the massive guido overload factor in their userbase.
Please reference the number of pics of dudes in sleeveless wifebeaters with muscle shots, tatties and gang slogans in their profile for evidence. So terribly classless.
At least Orkut had geek chic before it was overrun by the Brazilians.
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Yes, I recognize that - the question was really meant rhetorically, more as an exclamation than as a question. Apparently several people replying to my post thought I meant it as a surreptitious endorsement of intelligent design, which was not at all the case (as my posting history would indicate)!
I do find it remarkable that such *specific* triggers would develop randomly, though clear that such triggers would yield such large survival advantages that they would undoubtedly dominate once they evolved.
In any case, I thought it was quite an amazing adaptation as apparently did many other people. I wasn't trying to imply that I saw it as evidence of natural selection. I do think it would be very interesting to examine the genes that code for the particular toxins or neural triggering compounds and see what genes they are near and what the comparable region codes for in related species of fungus.
This is an entirely confused post. In fact, Liberalism is an ideology which holds liberty as the primary political value. This is what the phrase "liberal democracy" implies.
You are using the word Liberal to refer to a modern, far left wing ideology of moral relativism.
While the word "liberal" (little L) has commonly become associated in America with the Democratic party and a so-called "American liberal" philosophy, this still has nothing whatsoever to do with moral relativism. In any case, it should tell you something whenever you hear certain far right Republicans try to smear the words "liberal" and "liberalism" - it's clear what they oppose.
Liberalism is a good thing, and stands in firm opposition too totalitarianism. This doesn't mean supporting war or violence as a means to spread individual liberties (a concept which I find inherently flawed and self-defeating), as the current Republican administration does. And moral relativism is a useless philosophy - most mainstream political groups and figures would reject it.
In any case, I'm not sure why anyone would think that either Democrats or Republicans would be more in favor of a company like Yahoo doing business in China. Both parties are pragmatic and generally pro-business, and both parties have presidents who have encouraged trade with China. I gather that both parties hope that over time, doing business with China would lead to more of their people recognizing their basic human rights and demanding freedom from their own government. I generally think this is a better strategy than the "bomb them until they are 'free'" thing. Unless you are advocating economic isolationism?
The figures you cite are all far out of date. Joe DiMasi's studies from Tufts that came up with the $800M number go back quite a few years. For a variety of reasons, costs of R&D for NMEs have risen far, far faster than inflation. Please see more recent DiMasi research, as well as his peers from Tufts, and other NBER backed researchers - the $1.8M figure is much closer to most modern estimates, not based on data from the early 1980s.
Joe DiMasi is very well known in the field of health care economics. I have not heard anybody cast aspersions on him or his work as you are - not everybody agrees with his numbers, but you are suggesting he's being paid off by big pharma to inflate numbers. I would encourage you to post a reference to a real critique of his research if you're going to make claims like that rather than just make an ad hominem attack.
The fungus you refer to is mentioned in this article, which ironically was linked to from a past Slashdot story. They just call it an enslaver fungus, they don't actually name the species they are referring to.
But it sounds like this type of adaptive mechanism is more common than you would think. Quite amazing actually - how on earth would a parasite evolve the right chemical signal to trigger its host to jump into water or perch at the top of a tree? Very bizarre.
Graham (and Dodd and Warren Buffett) never said to ignore the market. They just say you shouldn't take what the market says as representative of anything more than the product of millions of manic, irrational people moving their capital around. This is the "Mr. Market" that Ben Graham writes of in the Intelligent Investor and in Security Analysis.
You are right, however, about buying when the market is being irrationally pessimistic and selling when the market is being irrationally optimistic is the best way to achieve superior returns. The trick is finding these situations. Some of Graham and Dodd's techniques still apply directly, many others have to be modified.
I'd recommend "Value Investing: From Graham to Buffett and Beyond" by Bruce Greenwald et. al. for a great, readable, modern take on value investing. Also the collected shareholder letters of Warren Buffett are great - I've bought the book twice, get partially through it, then some friend "borrows" it, and I never see it again.
Yes. According to Wikipedia, Sacha "Ali G" Baron-Cohen and Simon Baron-Cohen are cousins.
Let's see, for starters, the stock market allows common people to own a piece of the capital stock of our nation's economy. You don't have to own an entire business to own a piece of one - this let's anybody with any assets whatsoever participate in our country's economic growth and grow and preserve wealth.
Your share of a company represents a claim on the residual income stream of a business after service of debt, capital expenditures and operating costs. There are plenty of cheap companies out there, from a discounted cash flow or EV/EBITDA multiple perspective.
Calling the market a Ponzi scheme because people invest their money in growth/dot-commish companies at exorbitant prices because they are the current media darlings, or being hyped by brokerage houses in an effort to generate churn is unreasonable. The problem is you see many people speculating (i.e. taking unreasonable bets based on insufficient informational advantage) rather than investing (purchasing undervalued assets that a prudent evaluator would expect to pay off over the longer term in income and price appreciation), and you now assume that this is what the market is all about.
Ummm, no, that is not what original intent means. Clearly there is a reason that a minimum salary level was set to be considered "salaried" for the purposes of the law, even if you are an executive of the company. This isn't a misinterpretation or overgeneralization of a constitution written hundreds of years ago, it is a straightforward reading of a law from the last few decades.
Maybe the provision of the law doesn't make sense in some or even all cases, but it is an explicit and clear provision, not an overly broad or narrow reading influenced by centuries of social and linguistic change. Throwing out the phrase "original intent" doesn't mean "feel free to ignore provisions of a law that you don't think the writer really meant".
I know it's a joke, but actually, as far as I can tell, they are. In fact, it is probably illegal to salary somebody at $1 per year. In order to qualify for the "executive" or "professional" minimum wage exemptions to Federal minimum wage laws, you have to be salaried at a certain minimum level according to the Department of Labor. Admittedly, this minimum level is only $155 bucks a week, but it's more than $1 per year.
So while the vast majority of salaried professionals are exempt, it would seem that you can't just salary somebody at $1 per year and declare them exempt from minimum wage and overtime laws.
As far as I can see, this can only be legally accomplished by salarying the executive at the minimum level to qualify for minimum wage exemption, giving them checks, and having them refuse to deposit the checks. Or just ignore the law and assume that nobody would be silly enough to enforce it for multi-billionaires. States also have a myriad of laws regulating this stuff.
The grandparent poster makes several good points and you fail it by bringing Hitler into the argument, even in an oblique fashion. The point is that politicians and movie stars choose to live their lives in the limelight, whereas a private citizen doesn't. In this case, the notoriety of a private citizen who never used his real name in any public forum stands to adversely impact the business and personal lives of his parents, who have already suffered immensely due to what sounds like his untimely death.
.de domain redirects to it and the Foundation associated with the "hosting" or common carrier site happens to have a German branch.
I can sympathize with the parents here. And I think any reasonable person could. Just saying "sucks to be them" doesn't really feel right. Whether the nature of the legal remedy or the path they have pursued for recourse is right is a different question.
In the US, their only recourse would be under libel laws. But Germany has a different legal system with different social and legal standards for privacy. And in Germany, it is considered illegal to disclose the full identity of somebody in the light of accusing them of criminal acts in a public forum if they are not a public figure.
So should Wikipedia/the Wikimedia Foundation respect court rulings in Germany regarding content? What about rulings from other countries, whether free and democratic or much more oppressive? Where do you draw that line? Should they respect the ruling in this particular case due to the considerations of the parents and the serious harm that may be caused to several innocent people by the publication of this material, regardless of whether they should, in general, respect such rulings?
I don't think the answers to all these questions are clearcut. An encyclopedia inevitably will face questions of the definition of libel, the right to privacy, and so on in the society that it is published in. But what happens when an encyclopedia exists outside the context of any one society, like Wikipedia, and is edited by people from many cultures and many nations collaboratively, and can be accessed by all over the Internet?
One answer could be "let's just apply the American norms across the board, respect American law, and to hell with everything else". The problem then is that the Wikimedia Foundation can be seen as an outlaw organization in a mainstream European country like Germany (let's forget about places like Iran for now).
The strongest argument to me seems to be the common carrier argument - it is impossible for Wikipedia to police the edits made by every editor from every country, and in particular to ensure that said posts comply with the laws of their particular country of origin. If Germany has a problem with the content of that page, they should go after the Germans who posted it, over whom they have jurisdiction. If a non-German wrote it, and it's hosted in a non-German country, however, then I don't really see why Germany should have any jurisdiction whatsoever, just because a
In the same vein, if such posts are outside of German jurisdiction, they shouldn't be referenceable in a German court as proof of anything with respect to a case involving the family's privacy rights.
I dunno... from what I've seen, jail time is a very effective deterrent for white collar criminals, which includes disgruntled sysadmin types. I knew a guy, a dentist, who got caught overbilling Medicaid and the state of New York decided to make an example of him. He ended up serving about 5 or 6 months at Rikers Island.
I'm pretty certain he never played any billing games again. And, most likely, no dentists who knew him ever did either.
I'm not saying I think he deserved 6 months at Rikers for the level of the crime. But I think the deterrent effect is real.
The tricky part is balancing that with a sense of proportion, fairness and justice. If 6 months at Rikers is also what somebody serves for a violent mugging that could have resulted in death, then the dentist's sentence is clearly not a fair or proportionate sentence. Maybe 4 or 5 weeks, just to put a healthy amount of fear into the guy, and not at Rikers Island with violent criminals off the streets of New York.
This is pretty simple - you don't need to be a lawyer to understand what's going on at SCO. See this article. SCO just raised a new round of PIPE financing. The private institutional investors (hedge funds, PIPE funds, banks, private equity firms, or whichever idiots bought into this dog of a deal) bought in with the understanding that SCO was going to file a renewed salvo of legal filings and lawsuits. If they didn't do that, they wouldn't have been able to raise the 10 million bucks.
SCO's quarterly cash flow statements tell a simple story: they are hemorrhaging several million bucks a quarter. Their latest quarterly filing with the SEC shows us that this company has dwindled in size by about half in the last year, shrinking their asset base to keep enough cash to stay afloat, with only about $10M in cash and marketable securities, vs. $30M a year prior to that. As of October 31st, they only had enough cash to get them through another 4-6 months of burn.
In short, they were getting perilously close to the red alert, DEFCON 1 phase of business failure, and they would have told these institutional investors anything to get that 10 million into the bank. And if they want anyone to shell out another 10 million in another 18 months when they start running low on cash again, they had better show that they're doing something with their court case.
Agreed, 7.50 is baffling. Average expected cleanup costs alone are higher than that. Then there should be cash returned for the CD's origianl value. And there should be a punitive amount paid to an appropriate charity organization (like EFF, for example) of roughly an equal order of magnitude to set an example that an experienced music and technology company should know better.
I would guesstimate that this number is too low by about an order of magnitude.
As a serious driver, I agree 100%. However, when I was commuting in my M3 over an hour each day here in NYC, every time traffic got heavy or a road was shut down, I'd be in the car 4-5 hours in a day for a whole week straight until they sorted out whatever was screwed with the roads. By the 3rd or 4th day of this, your clutch foot ankle and shin ache massively and you are ready to shoot the first person that looks at you funny.
I don't love driving automatics, but only because these days I just drive on weekends, trips, and for fun. Commuting in heavy traffic day after day makes a manual incredibly impractical.
I can only assume Europeans don't have the same level of commuter traffic that we experience.
The problem is all these nifty unification-type theories only have observable, testable consequences at energy levels far, far beyond that we can produce in any earth-bound laboratory, and we haven't figured out any ways to observe cosmological effects that they might predict either (probably because those energy levels only happen in the early nanoseconds of the universe).
Unless and until somebody can work around that rather fundamental set of issues, it seems like these more aesthetically pleasing models of the universe that produce the same observable effects as the rather ugly hodge-podge we call the Standard Model are likely to remain in the realm of mental masturbation.
As soon as you realize all of this, pursuing further study in physics becomes rather unappealing, or at least it did to me. I look at most modern physics research and I am beyond underwhelmed by it. The only people reaching for the big questions are basically mathematicians and nobody really cares which flavor-of-the-day theory they generate next week because it has no meaningful consequences for the real world.
There are some unsolved physics problems but only a few of them have the potential (in my judgment) to change the way we view the universe, and those that do will require incredible intuitive leaps from what science currently offers in the way of explanatory tools. Oh, and few people seem to work on these hard questions and if you express an interest in working on them, expect to be treated like a quack.
"You evolutionists" means what exactly? I don't know any scientist who describes him or herself as an "evolutionist", this is a propaganda word used by theocratic fundamentalists who want to undermine the entire scientific method. There are two groups of people in this debate: those who believe in the scientific method, and those who don't. Those who do can have intelligent debates about the evidence, and those who don't have stooped to the lowest levels of mockery by draping their anti-scientific beliefs in the language of science to infiltrate school curricula.
There is essentially nothing any scientist can tell you about what happened before that "big bang". Or rather, before a few moments after the big bang.
So when you say that scientists stop there, all that means is they don't know what happened previously, or how it all got there, or anything about it. If you don't know anything about it for sure, and there is no way known to science to find out what happened there, then it becomes a matter of faith or belief. I'm not sure where you got the idea that many scientists don't share the beliefs that you describe as those of "intelligent Christians".
Just look for yourself. I'm sure he's well endowed, but there's nothing distractingly large about that bulge - you know, nothing John Holmes-style. Superman is still supposed to have the normal masculine anatomy, as far as I know, so having no bulge would be much weirder.
Yada yada yada. Again, you don't know anything about my background. You don't know crap about the circumstances I was brought up in. How somebody can make an ad hominem attack based on zero information is just beyond me. For several years, I attended some of the dingiest schools you can imagine, where I saw people beat and stab each other. They told me that I should forget about applying to Ivy League schools because nobody got into those colleges from this particular high school.
Nonetheless, I went to an Ivy League university. In college, I met people who had been through far worse circumstances than I ever did in my mostly lower middle class upbringing, and yet managed to turn into functional, successful people (one fellow I met there grew up in the ghetto, saw his father shoot and kill his mother, and ended up at one of the top law schools in the country).
In any case, it's nice to see that some people choose to believe your fate is determined for you by the circumstances of your birth, but I don't buy it because I've seen too many counterexamples. It may be nearly impossible to take the risks necessary to become a billionaire if you start with nothing, but that's a false standard of success. It's entirely plausible and not at all uncommon for somebody who starts with nothing to have a successful career, make more than enough money to live on, and provide their children with an environment that gives them all the opportunities in the world. I have seen dozens of examples of this among immigrant communities in the US.
So keep blathering about my ignorance if you want, but I am empirically correct and you are provably talking out of your ass about me, a person of whom you know nothing. The wielder of an ad hominem attack is almost always guaranteed to be the loser of an argument.
Your first claim is empirically false. Monopoly => 1 firm controls the market, and since there are factually quite a few large investment banks, and dozens if not hundreds of boutique banks, this is clearly not the case. As for starting new banks, if you lived here in New York, you would see that it happens with some frequency. I know several small investment banking firms that were started by successful bankers who left a bulge bracket firm and took their rolodex with them.
Cartel => implicit price fixing - while there may be isolated cases, true cartels are rarely stable from a game theoretic standpoint. The incentive to defect from cartel pricing and capture market share is too intense. If you knew investment bankers are top firms you would know these guys compete ruthlessly for deals. The idea that a long-lasting, stable cartel exists in such an industry is laughable. Hell, guys at the same firm can't even resist stabbing each other in the back half the time.
As for your comments about savings rates vs. credit card rates and the spreads reflected therein, the spread is there A) to reflect credit risk and B) because the spread is how banks generate revenues. People have tried to play games with these spreads before, such as in the S&L crisis in the 80s. In any case, if you look at bank's profit margins, they aren't anywhere near as high as your post suggests. And regardless, personal banking has very little to do with investment banking.
Finally, I don't know where you are paying $30 a month, but in no market that I'm aware of does that happen these days. I pay $0 a month for the privilege of having an account (i.e. presumably they make money on the differential between returns they get in the money market and the very low checking and savings account interest rates they pay).
Laws are prescriptive. Wikipedia is a purely descriptive source of information. When your book of laws says a law is "true", assuming it is enforced, then it is true. Just because one online source says something is true doesn't in any way make it so.
This argument has long since ceased to be interesting to me. Anybody who thinks Wikipedia is a perfectly reliable source of unbiased information is an idiot. Anybody who wants to ban or otherwise do away with Wikipedia and similar non-centralized repositories of information is a danger to free society. It says on the main page "Welcome to Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit." I think that's pretty clear and descriptive.
The rest of us will happily continue to use Wikipedia, because it's far, far faster and more efficient to refer to it than to compile your own consensus information from zillions of internet sources on every question you have on a daily basis. We will simply double check and cross reference before doing anything really important with the information contained therein, like say passing a law based on it, as we have been doing all along.
Funny, but historically Christians have done far more smiting of their enemies than Jews have. Jews generally don't take all the smiting stuff anywhere near as seriously as Christians do.
If these people create nothing of value, then why are people willing to pay them for it? This makes no sense from a basic economic perspective - if there are no gains from trade, why is trade occurring? Now you could try to argue that there are a small number of suppliers that engage in cartel price fixing, but that's hard to buy, there are many boutique investment banks and the like, and none of their services are cheap.
There is a reason for this. Entrepreneurs and executives *need* access to capital markets. They need private equity funds and public market access to grow their businesses. Banks bring trust, reputation, financial expertise and legal expertise to the table. Sure, I think fees for some transactions are too high, but you can always go to somebody else. The bank scrapes a couple percent off the top for each transaction. Really, is this so terrible for the value they provide? Most companies don't seem to think so. The reason they make so much money is that they do tons and tons of deals, and a few percent on the really big deals adds up to a lot of money.
Very funny, asshole. Did I say _everyone_ on any of those sites conforms to that description? No. I just said it's populated primarily by those types. Friendster is the way it is because it was first, and tended to pick up early adopter types and the people they know. Doesn't mean everybody fits a neat stereotype, and I never said they do. But by definition of the way a social networking site works, they are only useful if there are other people "like you" there for you to connect up with, so in fact *they*, not me, are the ones that tend to reinforce the stereotypes of their communities.
And as for MySpace - it looks like it's diversified quite a bit from what I saw there maybe 12 months ago looking at it today. Still a bit of that flavor, but a much more reasonable mix of people. But when I first went there, literally EVERY profile I saw fit the description in my original post and it left a very bad impression with me. I'm very tolerant of all sorts of different people, but I have little patience for that particular breed of illiterate moron that I referenced before.
Yeah, and they gits lotsa niggers and wops too. Slashdot: Paragon of free thinking and tolerance.
This fails to amuse me. Saying people are low class because they choose to conform to certain modes of speech, mannerism, and dress that suggest a lifestyle and priorities I find distasteful is not racism. Racism is about judging people based on factors they have no control over - the color of their skin and ethnic background. But if you say you won't judge people based on the choices they make about how they live their lives, then you are A) full of shit and B) abdicating your responsibility as an ethical human being to make judgments about the world around you.
I don't disagree entirely about the yuppies and hipsters. But it was said somewhat tongue in cheek as I tried to come up with a comparable stereotype for people on Friendster.
And say what you will about me (you anonymous fucktard), I'm apparently not the only one around here that looks at the profiles on MySpace and thinks the same things based on the other comments here.
Oh, and if you want to man up and call me an obnoxious prick, I suggest you post with a real account. Or else I'm just going to laugh at you and piss on your face.
I just don't get it. Myspace is Friendster, only instead of yuppies, hipsters, and college students, it's populated by complete morons. All my friends from college and high school are on Friendster and/or Facebook.com. MySpace gets the lowest-life, most guido New Jersey and Long Island trash people I've ever seen, the teenagers who are too dumb to know any better, and a couple of pervs I know in their later 20s who just go there to pick up on dumb 17 year old girls.
I actively choose not to be associated with MySpace. Why? Because it's about as low class as anything I could imagine. Call me an elitist yuppie, but I would never want to be caught with a profile on that site, until they manage to improve their image massively, i.e. get rid of the massive guido overload factor in their userbase.
Please reference the number of pics of dudes in sleeveless wifebeaters with muscle shots, tatties and gang slogans in their profile for evidence. So terribly classless.
At least Orkut had geek chic before it was overrun by the Brazilians.