Your quotation of my post in no way logically leads to your response. I don't give a shit of the color of their skin is blue, white, purple or green, and I am obviously not a fascist (see my posting history). Oh, and you already lost the argument (as if you were smart enough to make one in the first place) by referencing Hitler entirely out of context. Congratulations, moron.
No, you are missing the entire point. The economics of insurance are based on the value provided by risk-pooling across many risk-averse persons (i.e. A1 in their utility function). Risk aversion on an individual scale becomes irrelevant when risk is pooled in large enough groupings, and the insurance company extracts rents.
The reason profits don't get driven down in the insurance industry is that the barriers to entry are huge, because you need access to very large pools of capital to make this sort of risk pooling feasible and attractive, and there are natural economies of scale built into the industry resulting in small players inevitably getting gobbled up by bigger players who will always be willing to buy at a premium. So in fact, it's a rather profitable industry structurally to entrenched participants.
This of course doesn't relate at all to gains to be made by purchasing stock in these companies. The EMH tells us that the market will inevitably price in the low-risk, high-reward attractiveness in this industry. Plenty of industries have inherently attractive structures (pharmaceutical companies, for example), but their stocks are priced accordingly by market forces, such that you generally can expect to earn the cost-of-equity-capital on these investments even though profitability will vary drastically (assuming you believe in the EMH, which I don't, but it's a decent first-order approximation).
[They] have the belief that white men are stupid and greedy.
That's rather ironic. If you read 419eater or any of the other "scam the scammer" sites out there, it's pretty clear who the stupid and greedy ones are in this game.
While I don't have too much respect for the intellect of the average American, the people who actually fall for these scams are probably the most stupid and greedy among our population, but they are a fraction of a percent of Americans. Most people have long since been trained to spot these things for what they are now and recognize that if it sounds too good to be true, then it probably is. The Internet is no different from the rest of life in that way.
The scammers, however, are too stupid to realize that if a scammee is asking for absurd, ridiculous acts to be documented on film, then the joke is almost certainly on the scammer.
I have pretty much no empathy for these people, no matter how poor they are or what adversity they have faced. They have turned to common thuggery to steal that which they feel entitled to, instead of trying to earn an honest living the way we, or our parents, or our grandparents who came from equally poor backgrounds in other parts of the world did. Every time a scammer dies a miserable death, baby Jesus smiles.
Until the entire continent of Africa learns a more constructive ethic of hard work and self-help, all the charity in the world won't help them.
Not only did the Romans consider the Greeks to be Greek, they would have thought it absurd to call a Greek "Roman". The Romans had a strange relationship with Greece - they admired the ancient teachings, the knowledge, the philosophy of Greek times, and often hired Greeks as teachers and tutors. At the same time, Romans of certain classes during the late Republic and early Imperium also looked down a bit at the Greeks as a softer, more hedonistic people.
As for your claim about there being no Greek empire ever, I suppose most people would say that Alexander the Great's Macedonian-seated empire was as close as it comes. It was certainly a pan-Hellenic empire, and thoroughly Greek in culture and outlook, though it didn't originate in any of the Greek city-states.
Beginning of the school year = more new PCs, on which people are still using the default browser.
I just started business school, and interestingly enough, our IT people actually forced us to install Firefox at Columbia. That kind of uptake is pretty damned impressive.
This guy has serious psychological issues - he constantly falls back to questioning his opponents' state of mental health and/or sexual practices. In fact, those seem to be his principle lines of argumentation.
I find that not just bizarre but kind of scary coming from a lawyer.
You missed the whole point - somebody did make the game and presented it to him. Did you RTFA? Anyway, it's a silly (academic lawyerly) debate, since nobody is trying to force the guy to fulfill a contract, they are just pointing out that he's generally a dick for making such a promise, even as part of an obviously semi-satirical writing, and then failing to live up to his side of the bargain, which is making a donation to charity.
This guy is one of the worst attorneys I've ever heard. He has no idea how to formulate a rational argument. I feel bad for anybody who hires this dimshit.
I think the moral of the story is use DVI and it is perfectly fine. I have been using DVI with my old GeForce4 4200 for ages now and have never noticed any 2D blurriness, ghosting or anything. I just recently upgraded to a 7800 GT and likewise, no problems.
What Massachusetts does is essentially engage on behalf of consumers as a sort of collective agent. While you may think this is terrible, Massachusetts is one of the few states left in the union where an individual can actually get good health insurance by self-paying. Here in NY, the self-pay plans are all atrocious, the providers have terrible records of denying claims en masse, and your only choices are POS and HMO (i.e. bad and worse - the coverage sucks compared to BCBS/MA PPO Direct Pay). And an individual plan in MA, while expensive as hell, is still only 60% of the price of the best POS plan available here in New York.
As for "economic freedom", there's generally plenty of it in Massachusetts. It's an incredibly entrepreneurial state, with large tech and life sciences industry presence, a huge venture capital industry, lots of financial services companies, etc. I don't know what kind of economic freedom you mean, but I don't need the freedom to deal with abusive cell phone companies that aren't upfront about their terms or real costs, or health insurance providers that shit on me as an individual consumer because I'm not in a group plan with buying power.
I miss living in Massachusetts and would love to return at some point. If you don't like it, fine, don't go there.
HBO has produced The Sopranos (intense and amazing, especially the first few seasons), Sex in the City (though that may not be to everybody's taste, it is hard to not find it at least moderately amusing), Deadwood (perhaps the best show on TV), Rome (visually stunning, sweeping stories), etc.
I find HBO to be a better value and provide much more entertaining content than your average movie theater and obviously better than most TV. If that's not enough of an argument to pay for it, then I don't know what is.
You want to kill us because you went an built your health care, communication and tax systems around a aystem that we built and control, and you are now angry that you can't steal it away from us?
Well pardon me, but screw you buddy. If you chose to build your government systems that way, that's your business. If you didn't like our root servers, you were free to use your own DNS servers. If you didn't like our IP addressing scheme, you were free to use IPv6 and bridge to our system externally.
But you have absolutely zero right to tell us that you now want to control our root name servers just because you're now feeling queasy with the decisions you've made in the past.
No, my argument was that if they are renting space from a federal agency that is providing the equivalent of municipal services, then they are free to contract with said agency to provide said services instead of paying taxes to the city for services they aren't using.
And that the city needs to go to said federal agency, as the property owner, and negotiate fair payment for increased road traffic and any other real costs incurred.
Clearly they shouldn't be able to expect to use municipal services if the city/county isn't getting paid any taxes, that would be a rather inane argument. But the points the grandparent poster made were mostly already addressed in the article above or were effectively irrelevant (like schooling, which as I said before is paid for by residential property taxes anyway, since children go to school where their families live rather than where their parents work).
Uhhh... you missed the point entirely. These guys *were* worth that much to Yahoo. Just not to their previous employer. Not knowing the circumstances or details I can hardly comment on their decision's legality, but it seems pretty clear that their current employer must have been (A) treating them like shit (B) not giving them a big enough cut of the pie to incentivize them to stay and help sell the business instead of running off and looting the dev. team for Yahoo.
They may have broken a law, they may not have, but it's hard to be sympathetic for their employer. I have run a software development organization before, and keeping your employees happy is one of your paramount responsibilities. These guys clearly didn't understand basic software company management rules - keep your employees happy and loyal and keep your IP safe and secure are on the top of the list.
Google will have employees with kids who'll be in public school Which will be paid for by their parents property taxes wherever they live and has nothing to do with the office real estate Google uses.
employees who'll use the police and fire protection Which will be paid for by their property taxes, again. And when they are at work, this will be provided by NASA and passed through as a cost to Google as was clearly stated in one of the stories above. They aren't free riding.
water and sewer Again, see above. Paid for by Google to NASA. How NASA/Federal government compensates the locality if it connects to their sewer/water services is another issue, but presumably either (A) they don't connect to the local services or (B) they compensate the locality fairly for any use they make already and thus this is a non-issue.
local roads This is the only point with some legitimacy - the additional traffic and use of local roads nearby will present some extra cost to the locality. Presumably they should ask NASA/Google for compensation and force NASA/Google to pay for road expansions and repairs to local access roads that will be more heavily trafficed due to the new office park.
But in general, it just seems like Google will be pumping money into the local economy which will generate more property taxes and wealth for the city.
While this is all nice, the MTA isn't a corporation in the usual sense at all. It is a city government agency, subsidized and funded by the city of New York. This map was already created with taxpayer dollars. City agencies have a fiduciary responsibility to the citizens of their city, not to shareholders, and aim to make profits only to the extent that they should avoid inflicting unnecessary taxes on their citizens through waste or inefficiency.
This doesn't make any sense because making the map available to people in another format is a public good being performed by a private citizen. The MTA is actually hurting citizens of New York by imposing this undue burden on this fellow. There is really no defense for such behavior.
Physics is hard. Engineering is hard. There's no doubt about that. Clearly these subjects aren't for everybody. But they don't have to be made harder than they are by hostile professors who seem to want to drive people out of the field or single-handedly correct for the evils of grade inflation by those liberal arts profs. It is possible to find professors who do good research *and* value teaching - if teaching was emphasized more in graduate training and in recruitment of tenure-track professors, you can believe their skills would shape up real fast.
That has been the difference in my experience between being a physics undergrad and an MBA student. In B school, the professors actually seem to like teaching and go out of their way to explain things. Of course, you have to correct for about a 3x level of difficulty factor between corporate finance and quantum mechanics, but that still leaves a good 2x factor that can only be explained as shitty, hostile teaching by purely research focused professors.
And your statement is false in the case of most mammals, which produce relatively few offspring compared to most members of the animal kingdom. The fact that spiders and fish behave otherwise seems irrelevant to the argument at hand.
Did you have a point, or are you just looking for a strawman to fight with?
Because a philosopher doesn't rely on the scientific method to achieve philisophical insights, it makes them invalid? There's a world of difference between concrete facts about reality and the subjective nature of how you perceive the world. I think I'm free to make an analogy between faith and insanity without having to prove myself - you certainly don't have to agree with that opinion to acknowledge the rest of my argument.
No party can get elected in the US without some pandering to the Judeo-Christian agenda. Your statement makes the Democrats sound like a bunch of atheists. Unless you can offer proof that every one of those 55% are republicans, your statement is a gross exaggeration.
When I began my second paragraph with "Seriously,..." the implication was that I was kidding in the first - it was hyperbole intended to be humorous, I thought that was obvious.
But there is some truth to it of course - I can count the number of religious fundamentalist Democrats I've met on one hand.
And when did I say those 55% are atheists?!?! In fact, the majority of people I know are not atheists, but neither do they believe in the literal truth of the Bible (i.e. disbelieve scientific facts because they don't mesh with the Bible's narrative).
This is largely a function of Bush's personality and his foolish decisions to burn his party's bridges rather than just the fact that he is republican. What I mean by this is: Bush is in a position that few presidents in recent decades have had. His party controls both houses of Congress during a republican presidency. He is pushing this to the limit, throwing this in the faces of the democrats, refusing to compromise unless his own party starts to disaggree with him. He is failing to consider the future. The democrats will remember this slap in the face and the first chance they get, they will make life hell for the republicans. Unfortunately, it's the country as a whole that will suffer the most, since little will get done.
This I agree with entirely. Bush panders to the religious right far too strongly, and ignores moderates in his own party and the Democrats. Most Republicans I know (urban Republicans from New York, Massachusetts, Connecticut) bear very little in common with the religious right, and are not at all Biblical literalists. And in fact, the only things they seem to like about Bush are his tax policy and (in some cases) his aggressive foreign policy stance.
Steven Pinker presents a bunch of examples of sentences like this that follow strict grammatical rules but don't make sense in English in his book The Language Instinct, and relates it to the difficulty of dealing with ambiguous parsings of English sentences in computer language programs. A fascinating book, even if you don't agree with all of it.
Slashdot Mirror
Somebody didn't RTFA. The model was made out of oak, a rather difficult-to-combust wood.
It is true that their model was dry and this probably had something to do with their level of success.
As for your comment that it "never works" if your enemy is attacking in real boats, there is no basis for such a conclusion.
Your quotation of my post in no way logically leads to your response. I don't give a shit of the color of their skin is blue, white, purple or green, and I am obviously not a fascist (see my posting history). Oh, and you already lost the argument (as if you were smart enough to make one in the first place) by referencing Hitler entirely out of context. Congratulations, moron.
No, you are missing the entire point. The economics of insurance are based on the value provided by risk-pooling across many risk-averse persons (i.e. A1 in their utility function). Risk aversion on an individual scale becomes irrelevant when risk is pooled in large enough groupings, and the insurance company extracts rents.
The reason profits don't get driven down in the insurance industry is that the barriers to entry are huge, because you need access to very large pools of capital to make this sort of risk pooling feasible and attractive, and there are natural economies of scale built into the industry resulting in small players inevitably getting gobbled up by bigger players who will always be willing to buy at a premium. So in fact, it's a rather profitable industry structurally to entrenched participants.
This of course doesn't relate at all to gains to be made by purchasing stock in these companies. The EMH tells us that the market will inevitably price in the low-risk, high-reward attractiveness in this industry. Plenty of industries have inherently attractive structures (pharmaceutical companies, for example), but their stocks are priced accordingly by market forces, such that you generally can expect to earn the cost-of-equity-capital on these investments even though profitability will vary drastically (assuming you believe in the EMH, which I don't, but it's a decent first-order approximation).
[They] have the belief that white men are stupid and greedy.
That's rather ironic. If you read 419eater or any of the other "scam the scammer" sites out there, it's pretty clear who the stupid and greedy ones are in this game.
While I don't have too much respect for the intellect of the average American, the people who actually fall for these scams are probably the most stupid and greedy among our population, but they are a fraction of a percent of Americans. Most people have long since been trained to spot these things for what they are now and recognize that if it sounds too good to be true, then it probably is. The Internet is no different from the rest of life in that way.
The scammers, however, are too stupid to realize that if a scammee is asking for absurd, ridiculous acts to be documented on film, then the joke is almost certainly on the scammer.
I have pretty much no empathy for these people, no matter how poor they are or what adversity they have faced. They have turned to common thuggery to steal that which they feel entitled to, instead of trying to earn an honest living the way we, or our parents, or our grandparents who came from equally poor backgrounds in other parts of the world did. Every time a scammer dies a miserable death, baby Jesus smiles.
Until the entire continent of Africa learns a more constructive ethic of hard work and self-help, all the charity in the world won't help them.
Not only did the Romans consider the Greeks to be Greek, they would have thought it absurd to call a Greek "Roman". The Romans had a strange relationship with Greece - they admired the ancient teachings, the knowledge, the philosophy of Greek times, and often hired Greeks as teachers and tutors. At the same time, Romans of certain classes during the late Republic and early Imperium also looked down a bit at the Greeks as a softer, more hedonistic people.
As for your claim about there being no Greek empire ever, I suppose most people would say that Alexander the Great's Macedonian-seated empire was as close as it comes. It was certainly a pan-Hellenic empire, and thoroughly Greek in culture and outlook, though it didn't originate in any of the Greek city-states.
Beginning of the school year = more new PCs, on which people are still using the default browser.
I just started business school, and interestingly enough, our IT people actually forced us to install Firefox at Columbia. That kind of uptake is pretty damned impressive.
This guy has serious psychological issues - he constantly falls back to questioning his opponents' state of mental health and/or sexual practices. In fact, those seem to be his principle lines of argumentation.
I find that not just bizarre but kind of scary coming from a lawyer.
You missed the whole point - somebody did make the game and presented it to him. Did you RTFA? Anyway, it's a silly (academic lawyerly) debate, since nobody is trying to force the guy to fulfill a contract, they are just pointing out that he's generally a dick for making such a promise, even as part of an obviously semi-satirical writing, and then failing to live up to his side of the bargain, which is making a donation to charity.
What a fucknut.
This guy is one of the worst attorneys I've ever heard. He has no idea how to formulate a rational argument. I feel bad for anybody who hires this dimshit.
I guess you could say 0^0 = 1, for sufficiently large values of 0. :)
I think the moral of the story is use DVI and it is perfectly fine. I have been using DVI with my old GeForce4 4200 for ages now and have never noticed any 2D blurriness, ghosting or anything. I just recently upgraded to a 7800 GT and likewise, no problems.
What Massachusetts does is essentially engage on behalf of consumers as a sort of collective agent. While you may think this is terrible, Massachusetts is one of the few states left in the union where an individual can actually get good health insurance by self-paying. Here in NY, the self-pay plans are all atrocious, the providers have terrible records of denying claims en masse, and your only choices are POS and HMO (i.e. bad and worse - the coverage sucks compared to BCBS/MA PPO Direct Pay). And an individual plan in MA, while expensive as hell, is still only 60% of the price of the best POS plan available here in New York.
As for "economic freedom", there's generally plenty of it in Massachusetts. It's an incredibly entrepreneurial state, with large tech and life sciences industry presence, a huge venture capital industry, lots of financial services companies, etc. I don't know what kind of economic freedom you mean, but I don't need the freedom to deal with abusive cell phone companies that aren't upfront about their terms or real costs, or health insurance providers that shit on me as an individual consumer because I'm not in a group plan with buying power.
I miss living in Massachusetts and would love to return at some point. If you don't like it, fine, don't go there.
HBO has produced The Sopranos (intense and amazing, especially the first few seasons), Sex in the City (though that may not be to everybody's taste, it is hard to not find it at least moderately amusing), Deadwood (perhaps the best show on TV), Rome (visually stunning, sweeping stories), etc.
I find HBO to be a better value and provide much more entertaining content than your average movie theater and obviously better than most TV. If that's not enough of an argument to pay for it, then I don't know what is.
You want to kill us because you went an built your health care, communication and tax systems around a aystem that we built and control, and you are now angry that you can't steal it away from us?
Well pardon me, but screw you buddy. If you chose to build your government systems that way, that's your business. If you didn't like our root servers, you were free to use your own DNS servers. If you didn't like our IP addressing scheme, you were free to use IPv6 and bridge to our system externally.
But you have absolutely zero right to tell us that you now want to control our root name servers just because you're now feeling queasy with the decisions you've made in the past.
No, my argument was that if they are renting space from a federal agency that is providing the equivalent of municipal services, then they are free to contract with said agency to provide said services instead of paying taxes to the city for services they aren't using.
And that the city needs to go to said federal agency, as the property owner, and negotiate fair payment for increased road traffic and any other real costs incurred.
Clearly they shouldn't be able to expect to use municipal services if the city/county isn't getting paid any taxes, that would be a rather inane argument. But the points the grandparent poster made were mostly already addressed in the article above or were effectively irrelevant (like schooling, which as I said before is paid for by residential property taxes anyway, since children go to school where their families live rather than where their parents work).
Uhhh... you missed the point entirely. These guys *were* worth that much to Yahoo. Just not to their previous employer. Not knowing the circumstances or details I can hardly comment on their decision's legality, but it seems pretty clear that their current employer must have been (A) treating them like shit (B) not giving them a big enough cut of the pie to incentivize them to stay and help sell the business instead of running off and looting the dev. team for Yahoo.
They may have broken a law, they may not have, but it's hard to be sympathetic for their employer. I have run a software development organization before, and keeping your employees happy is one of your paramount responsibilities. These guys clearly didn't understand basic software company management rules - keep your employees happy and loyal and keep your IP safe and secure are on the top of the list.
Google will have employees with kids who'll be in public school
Which will be paid for by their parents property taxes wherever they live and has nothing to do with the office real estate Google uses.
employees who'll use the police and fire protection
Which will be paid for by their property taxes, again. And when they are at work, this will be provided by NASA and passed through as a cost to Google as was clearly stated in one of the stories above. They aren't free riding.
water and sewer
Again, see above. Paid for by Google to NASA. How NASA/Federal government compensates the locality if it connects to their sewer/water services is another issue, but presumably either (A) they don't connect to the local services or (B) they compensate the locality fairly for any use they make already and thus this is a non-issue.
local roads
This is the only point with some legitimacy - the additional traffic and use of local roads nearby will present some extra cost to the locality. Presumably they should ask NASA/Google for compensation and force NASA/Google to pay for road expansions and repairs to local access roads that will be more heavily trafficed due to the new office park.
But in general, it just seems like Google will be pumping money into the local economy which will generate more property taxes and wealth for the city.
While this is all nice, the MTA isn't a corporation in the usual sense at all. It is a city government agency, subsidized and funded by the city of New York. This map was already created with taxpayer dollars. City agencies have a fiduciary responsibility to the citizens of their city, not to shareholders, and aim to make profits only to the extent that they should avoid inflicting unnecessary taxes on their citizens through waste or inefficiency.
This doesn't make any sense because making the map available to people in another format is a public good being performed by a private citizen. The MTA is actually hurting citizens of New York by imposing this undue burden on this fellow. There is really no defense for such behavior.
Physics is hard. Engineering is hard. There's no doubt about that. Clearly these subjects aren't for everybody. But they don't have to be made harder than they are by hostile professors who seem to want to drive people out of the field or single-handedly correct for the evils of grade inflation by those liberal arts profs. It is possible to find professors who do good research *and* value teaching - if teaching was emphasized more in graduate training and in recruitment of tenure-track professors, you can believe their skills would shape up real fast.
That has been the difference in my experience between being a physics undergrad and an MBA student. In B school, the professors actually seem to like teaching and go out of their way to explain things. Of course, you have to correct for about a 3x level of difficulty factor between corporate finance and quantum mechanics, but that still leaves a good 2x factor that can only be explained as shitty, hostile teaching by purely research focused professors.
And your statement is false in the case of most mammals, which produce relatively few offspring compared to most members of the animal kingdom. The fact that spiders and fish behave otherwise seems irrelevant to the argument at hand.
Obviously you must be a scholar of linguistics. Thanks for sharing your insights.
Did you have a point, or are you just looking for a strawman to fight with?
Because a philosopher doesn't rely on the scientific method to achieve philisophical insights, it makes them invalid? There's a world of difference between concrete facts about reality and the subjective nature of how you perceive the world. I think I'm free to make an analogy between faith and insanity without having to prove myself - you certainly don't have to agree with that opinion to acknowledge the rest of my argument.
This is extreme hyperbole.
No party can get elected in the US without some pandering to the Judeo-Christian agenda. Your statement makes the Democrats sound like a bunch of atheists. Unless you can offer proof that every one of those 55% are republicans, your statement is a gross exaggeration.
When I began my second paragraph with "Seriously,
But there is some truth to it of course - I can count the number of religious fundamentalist Democrats I've met on one hand.
And when did I say those 55% are atheists?!?! In fact, the majority of people I know are not atheists, but neither do they believe in the literal truth of the Bible (i.e. disbelieve scientific facts because they don't mesh with the Bible's narrative).
This is largely a function of Bush's personality and his foolish decisions to burn his party's bridges rather than just the fact that he is republican. What I mean by this is: Bush is in a position that few presidents in recent decades have had. His party controls both houses of Congress during a republican presidency. He is pushing this to the limit, throwing this in the faces of the democrats, refusing to compromise unless his own party starts to disaggree with him. He is failing to consider the future. The democrats will remember this slap in the face and the first chance they get, they will make life hell for the republicans. Unfortunately, it's the country as a whole that will suffer the most, since little will get done.
This I agree with entirely. Bush panders to the religious right far too strongly, and ignores moderates in his own party and the Democrats. Most Republicans I know (urban Republicans from New York, Massachusetts, Connecticut) bear very little in common with the religious right, and are not at all Biblical literalists. And in fact, the only things they seem to like about Bush are his tax policy and (in some cases) his aggressive foreign policy stance.
He doesn't represent a monopoly slice of the industry? Okay, but he is the head of one of the members of a cartel of 4 companies.
Can you explain how that invalidates my argument?
Steven Pinker presents a bunch of examples of sentences like this that follow strict grammatical rules but don't make sense in English in his book The Language Instinct, and relates it to the difficulty of dealing with ambiguous parsings of English sentences in computer language programs. A fascinating book, even if you don't agree with all of it.