Surely an enterprise customer who buys XP now has made his own bed in terms of software support?
It's hardly a secret that support for XP is being discontinued, and if you're running a business you have to take responsibility for your purchasing decisions.
"[I]nput from the user, [..] storage of that input, and maybe some calculations along the way" describes almost any web-based application, and an awful lot of non-web-based applications. But big applications often have massive problems, budget overruns and enormous delays - whether they are private sector or public sector applications.
"Input", "storage" and "calculations" are not always the same. In a complicated project, all three are difficult and complicated.
Don't get me wrong - the exchange website was a fiasco at launch. But let's not pretend they messed up on "hello, world". They were trying to do something very difficult. They still made a mess of it, though.
I've replied to what I think is the substance of your post - the point regarding costs - in another reply below. Just for completeness, a couple of brief responses in relation to your other points:
Bullshit. The aim of these policies is to pad prosecutor conviction rates so they can appear "tough on crime". No prosecutor ever got reappointed, or reelected, because he released innocent people.
Personally, I think that elected prosecutors are a very poor choice, and I agree with you that they lead to over-zealous prosecutions (especially where the defendant has a high profile).
Sentencing discounts, however, are not necessarily related - they are offered in jurisdictions such as the UK, that don't have elected prosecutors.
I don't know whether elected prosecutors actually try to take advantage of plea bargaining in this way - I suspect that there's a countervailing influence because they want a big showy trial - but it might be the case. If they are, however, I think the solution is to get rid of elected prosecutors.
This much I agree with you on. The system wants to deprive us of our right to a trial.
There will always be innocent people who are convicted - either after a guilty plea or without. I'm not arguing that we should therefore be complacent, but I think that there are safeguards that can mitigate the additional risk to a satisfactory level - four reasonably common examples would be i) the right to see a lawyer for free; ii) judicial scrutiny of confessions; iii) a requirement for confessions to be in writing; and iv) the ability to retract a confession (the confession would then be evidence in the trial, but could be rebutted if, for example, there was evidence of coercion). Those are all fairly common, and, in my view, with all four safeguards the additional risk is reduced sufficiently for the trade-off to be a positive one.
Remember that (as detailed in my post below) removing incentives to plead guilty has negative consequences too, so there is a balance to be struck.
I would just make two short points, which I have set out below:
1. Net outcome The first is simple to the point of being obvious. If you can reduce the amount of money spent on a trial, all else being equal, that is an advantage. If someone if wrongly convicted that is a very large disadvantage. If you can mitigate the disadvantages - for example through free access to lawyers, judicial scrutiny of confessions, and appeals - so that you get a lot of small advantages with very few disadvantages, the net result can be strongly positive.
I would note here that, whether or not you accept your view that all good laws lead to economic gain (which, for the reasons set out below, I don't think I do) the resources of the justice system are not limitless, and so there are very real drawbacks to opposing cost-savings.
As you note, the vast majority of cases that end in conviction are disposed of by a guilty plea. If even a fraction of those were instead disposed of by trial, it would almost certainly mean significant increases in the average delay before trial, which means people being held in custody or subject to bail conditions for longer, the memory of witnesses decaying, and so forth.
I could list many more problems with putting more pressure on an overburdened system, but I don't think that there is any need. My point is just that removing incentives to plead guilty will have negative consequences, as well as the positive consequences that you note and the additional expense.
2. Economic appraisal
I don't think that I agree with your argument that a good law will have positive economic outcomes, and so no cost saving is necessary.
The first point is that there is a logical problem with the statement that "if the laws you are enforcing aren't paying for themselves, directly or indirectly, it's a bad law", in that it must assume some level of cost saving - you presumably aren't arguing that a good law will always pay for itself, regardless of the inefficiency of the justice system. How do you choose the benchmark level of efficiency? It will always be a value judgement - you are saying that you have chosen an appropriate balance between cost and safety of convictions. But you could always choose to be more cautious, and some of the laws of which you approve would then be "bad laws" because they would no longer pay for themselves.
The second point is that, more generally, I am not convinced that an economic analysis is really sufficient to judge the merit of different laws, especially when the cost of prosecution varies enormously. You would have to do the analysis to work it out, but I wouldn't be surprised if some crimes that pose very acute difficulties for the prosecutor - crimes against children or the mentally incapable, for example, or white-collar crimes that can require years of expensive expert analysis - might be on the "bad laws" side of your criterion, but I don't think that we should stop trying to punish criminals who choose to commit crimes that are unusually expensive to prosecute.
Not to mention some of the perverse outcomes that you could imagine - when do we judge whether a law is "bad"? Can laws go from being good, to bad, to good again as economic conditions change, because that changes the economic consequences of enforcement?
I agree to an extent. Plea bargaining in the sense you see on TV - "plead guity to the jaywalking or we seek the death penalty" - is, to my mind, coercion. I don't know to what extent that exists in reality, however.
On the other hand I don't see anything wrong with setting the sentencing guidelines on the assumption that there will be a trial, and then offering a reduction for an early plea. It's in nobody's interest to spend public money trying someone who is willing to plead guilty, and I don't think that there is anything objectionable in rewarding an early plea.
We should be astute to minimize false confessions, but that has to be balanced against the very large cost and time savings. To my mind, systems where an early plea is considered by the judge in mitigation strike a reasonable balance.
I agree to an extent. Plea bargaining in the sense you see on TV - "plead guity to the jaywalking or we seek the death penalty" - is, to my mind, blackmail. I don't know to what extent that exists in reality, however.
On the other hand I don't see anything wrong with setting the sentencing guidelines on the assumption that there will be a trial, and then offering a reduction for an early plea. It's in nobody's interest to spend public money trying someone who is willing to plead guilty, and I don't think that there is anything objectionable in rewarding an early plea.
We should be astute to minimize false confessions, but that has to be balanced against the very large cost and time savings. To my mind, systems where an early plea is considered by the judge in mitigation strike a reasonable balance.
As I explained before, the aim of these policies is not to try to secure convictions that otherwise would not be obtained (although obviously that will still sometimes occur). The aim is to avoid the expense of a lengthy trial.
For that reason, in many (if not most) jurisdictions, a sentence reduction will automatically be considered by the judge, whether there is agreement from the prosecutor or not. It doesn't matter what the particular cops want from you - it's a systemic policy, and the system wants to avoid trials.
That sentence is part of the rest of my post - it makes no sense to take it out of context and disagree with it alone.
Cops can be given authority to offer a deal by the prosecutor (not the judge - you won't even have been assigned a judge at this point). Alternatively, a person can be given credit by the judge in the absence of any deal, as outlined in my post.
I'm not sure that it's really that surprising that he confessed - most people who are convicted of crimes plead guilty.
You plead guilty right before the trial would start, if anything.
I'm sure that you're correct in relation to your jurisdiction, but in many (I suspect most) jurisdictions there's an opportunity to plead in advance of the trial, at an appearance specifically for that purpose.
This makes sense if you think about the point of allowing these discounts - saving time and cost. A pleading hearing is much cheaper than arranging a trial just for someone to plead guilty at the outset. (You can still do that, but you might not get such a significant discount on your sentence, since you had an earlier opportunity to plead guilty).
pleading guilty can get you a pretty hefty discount on your sentence
And you waive that discount by confessing to a law enforcement officer during an "interview". Because in that case, the court has sufficient evidence to convict you regardless of your plea.
Again, I'm sure that you are correct in relation to your jurisdiction, but that is not always the case - you can generally either i) agree a bargain with the prosecutor in which they agree to pursue lesser charges; or ii) use it in mitigation at trial (i.e. it will be considered by the judge, who will have guidelines saying that an X% reduction is appropriate where someone confessed at the earliest opportunity).
As above, that makes sense in terms of 'rewarding' people for saving as much time and expense on the part of the justice system as possible, and so it would be unusual to design a system that rewards people for waiting to plead guilty.
I'm not sure that it's really that surprising that he confessed - most people who are convicted of crimes plead guilty.
And that's not a ridiculous notion; if you did it and have been caught, pleading guilty can get you a pretty hefty discount on your sentence when compared to being convicted at trial. In particular, where, like here, the range of sentences is very wide, it might mean the certainty that you will not go to prison.
I agree with some of this - particularly your first paragraph - but in other parts you overstate the virtues of an unregulated market for wages. This is the biggest one I think:
After all, it is not the CEO's who own corporations, but the shareholders. As such, it is the shareholders who ultimately decide upon the pay of the CEO. If the owners of a company decide that it is in the company's best interest to entice the top executives with $x, there is absolutely nothing wrong with that.
This puts a very rosy tint on the situation. With very few exceptions, shareholders do not decide executive compensation - either the board, or an "independent" panel, does that. The compensation package might be voted on by shareholders, but that vote is normally advisory only. The vote regularly fails, but the pay packet is normally still awarded despite the owners of the company not approving of it.
Yes, in theory the shareholders could assert their authority by firing the board and replacing them. But if they did that the value of the company would plummet, which makes it a very unattractive way to hold the board to account.
I remember an article last year in the Economist looking at CEO compensation; the conclusion was that (i) CEO pay was not correlated with company performance, and (ii) failure of a company that you lead did not lead to lower compensation at the next company - even if it happened repeatedly - as long as you got out before it actually went insolvent.
I agree that a strict limit does not seem appropriate - but it's worth remembering, when considering possible changes, that the situation we have now leaves a lot to be desired. I would like to see, for example, more transparency over compensation (including bonuses and similar); more power for shareholders to rein in pay; and high pay being tied to longer-term future performance.
But nobody's advocating that the US should become like Venezuela. People are advocating that the US become, in some small respects, more like northern European countries. Pointing to Venezuela is a waste of time.
The divisibility only comes into play because there are fewer bitcoins, or a greater need/demand for them. As the value of the bitcoin grows, certain commodities/services will cost a whole lot less in terms of bitcoins. As far as I know, the divisibility only means I send you 0.0001 for something that used to cost 0.01 bitcoins. Perhaps at some stage, people will even come up with different "names" for the divisions. Kind of like a cent is 0.01 of a dollar.
But I can't really answer your question without knowing why you think this sudden jump in money supply is bad. These things happen, have happened, and could happen to a lot of the commodities and currencies out there. The question is, why must there be some sort of mechanism in place to dampen the effects of a sudden increase in money supply. That's why I asked, and eventually went off on a tangent.
I suppose it depends on what role you are imagining for Bitcoins. If they are a way to move money from one currency to another - broadly the role they have now - then maybe it doesn't matter. If your transactions are instantaneous then the value of your "exchange medium" isn't important.
If you are trying to design a currency, however, it's very important.
The direct problems are to things like futures, options and really any investments. Currency volatility makes all these unattractive. I'm sure it's possible to design around the problems, but you're still going to have increased complexity and uncertainty; both of those translate into higher charges. As an example, if I want to issue bonds in Bitcoins against a backdrop of possible swings in the value of Bitcoins, then I'm going to have to pay a higher rate on them as a result. That's a big problem.
The indirect problem is that uncertainty, in general, is bad for business. If you want to pay me in bitcoins, I'm going to charge you more, because the more bitcoins I have the more exposed I am to the risk of a sudden increase in the monetary base. For something very big the uncertainty might be completely fatal: if there are eventually 5 million "shadow" Bitcoins that aren't circulating, every transaction is made against the risk that someone controls a large number of them and can manipulate the price of the currency. Not a big problem for buying groceries, perhaps, but a very big problem if you're buying a chain of grocery stores.
On a side note. The "expansion" approach you suggested as an alternative has the major downside that only a specific subset of people get the influx of currency. They get the most 'benefit' out of it as the prices have not taken into account the extra currency in the market, and as the currency diffuses into the system, each subsequent entity gets less of that benefit until the prices stabilize. In the "division" approach as you call it, the benefits are first given to the hoarder. But remember, that hoarder lost the utility of that currency for all that time he hoarded it in order to somehow drive up the value, when he could have spent it in exchange for tangible goods/services.
You make it sound like they will just give money out - that's obviously not what happens. I accept though that it's not perfect; again I'm not claiming that Bitcoins are necessarily worse, just asking about what seems a disadvantage of their design.
Do note, though, that if someone has a pile of "shadow" Bitcoins then they can add to the money supply in exactly the same way. I may not like every decision made by central Governments, but a world where an investment bank controlled the money supply would be worse.
Those coins still belong to someone. If that person/group chose to not use those coins and have them sit idly and uselessly by, then that's their choice and their loss. The system will regulate itself. As hoarding grows, the value of the currency grows, and so incentive to spend increases.
I don't think this really answers my question. I understand that people are free not to spend their money.
However, if the value of bitcoins grows a great deal, in part due to the money supply shrinking, shouldn't we be worried that some of that money could suddenly come back?
The reason could be completely benign or it could be intentional manipulation. Either way, isn't it a danger of the "divisibility rather than expansion" approach?
Please can you honestly tell me your reasoning for wanting to control the money supply? You do realize that by controlling the money supply, you are effectively devaluing other peoples' money, that they earned. I say that, because no one will want or suggest for us to decrease the money supply. Frankly, I think a lot of people are just obsessed with it from years of listening to the Fed and politicians talking about influencing the economy, purchasing power, consumer spending, and who-knows-what-other-fancy-measure of the economy that they can pander to the public with.
I don't understand this. That I worry about one aspect of bitcoins doesn't mean I automatically support everything about the alternative.
I don't accept your assertions, but I'd rather not get sidetracked since I don't see the connection to my question about bitcoins.
Maybe I'm missing something, but isn't there a bit of a problem with relying on the divisibility of the bitcoin to deal with bitcoins having dropped out of circulation (as opposed to having been definitively destroyed)?
Imagine that a large proportion of bitcoins have stopped circulating. Isn't there a risk that lots of them could suddenly resurface, make some enormous purchases and increase the monetary supply significantly overnight?
I clicked through to that last link out of curiosity, and they describe the methodology that gets them to these:
Our map compares the five cheapest plans available on the market today to the five cheapest plans available on Obamacare’s exchanges.
For a professional healthcare commentator to present that as though it were a reasonable comparison is, frankly, dishonest. If insurers are free to offer anything, then some insurers will offer very cheap plans. But those plans are awful. They have huge deductibles, huge co-pay, high maximums, small networks and they're only available to people with no preexisting conditions and who don't show any risk factors after answering an extensive questionnaire. Comparing that to an Obamacare bronze plan and then announcing that "Obamacare is pushing rates up," without mentioning any differences between the plans, is dishonest.
And here's the rub: he's done it before. Avik Roy, the author of the piece, has done exactly the same thing before: back in May he pulled exactly the same trick and was called out for exactly the same disingenuous claims.
I'm not saying that everyone will get cheaper healthcare under Obamacare. I don't think anyone is saying that. But if you want to argue against it on price grounds you have to pick sensible comparisons. Every time I see these nonsense comparisons and disingenuous claims it strikes me that they are exactly the sort of things someone would say if they knew that, on a fair assessment, they were wrong.
Meanwhile in Brooklyn someone waits four hours for an ambulance. I suppose four hours is better than eight, although the reason he stopped waiting appears to be that he had died.
This isn't a feature of one health system or another - every system has problems like that; it's a result of living in the real world, without limitless resources. A system that had enough resources to avoid disruption at peak demand would be ludicrously over-provisioned 99% of the time. The perfect is the enemy of the good - try to build a system that never has capacity problems and you won't be able to afford even basic care.
Yes, the networks will be limited. That's a feature of private health insurance that exists because it means the insurance company can cut their rates. Private insurers used limited networks of doctors long before Obamacare came along. Will it be worse under Obamacare? Nobody knows yet, but it's ridiculous to claim that it will definitely make their coverage "near useless in most cases". That level of certainty when the data doesn't exist is normally a sign that someone is seeing what they want to see.
More than that, the whole thing seems just to be invented from nothing in order to criticise the developers. The link they refer to as their proof simply doesn't show that the $600m was all spent on healthcare.gov - it may have been the cost of setting up all the IT infrastructure behind the ACA.
The null hypothesis is that the journals have sufficiently good review processes to avoid publishing papers with obvious and fatal flaws. If you submit a paper with obvious and fatal flaws and it is published, that hypothesis is not true. It's proof by counter-example, and no control is required for it to be valid.
I'm sorry you have a reading comprehension problem, but what does that have to do with the government being unable to manage money and providing healthcare as it is and then GIVING it ALL of health care. If cost is a concern, what's the flipping reasoning? If "money paid" vs. "out of pocket" is a concern than putting ANYTHING in the governments hands is bad.
I suspect that he didn't respond to that point because it's a strawman. It might be a good point if the GP had really admitted that the current state of healthcare proves the government can't be trusted - but he didn't, so it's not.
In fact, your argument is incoherent. You said before that the GP's comment "[t]he US spends more tax dollars on health care than any of the top 10 nations that have actual national health care systems... while not providing any healthcare" proves that the US Government cannot manage health spending. For that to make sense you would have to believe that the current US healthcare system is Government-run; but you are worried about it becoming Government-run, so obviously you don't.
There are also significant additional costs in dealing with counterfeit goods, which make them impractical unless there are ridiculous margins on the goods being counterfeit...
Counterfeit goods can't be marginally cheaper than the originals, they have to be a lot cheaper or people won't consider them. There is always a risk of being caught. There is less economies of scale, both in the production and distribution. Distribution is harder as legit retailers wont touch them, you need to use back channels that will demand a bigger cut.
So the definition of unreasonable margins would be the point at which it becomes profitable to counterfeit, even considering all these things... It's quite telling that the only things which get counterfeit are items priced massively higher than similar items from other brands.
Just to be clear, I wasn't saying that the cost of production only needs to be marginally lower, I'm saying that the marginal cost of production needs to be lower - "marginal cost" refers to the cost of producing an additional copy once you have produced X copies already (so doesn't include costs like R&D, design etc). My point is that since counterfeiters don't incur any of these costs, any product that has significant "set-up costs" - whether that's designing a beautiful product or researching a clever technical solution - is vulnerable to counterfeiting, because the counterfeiter can make a profit selling at prices where the original producer would make a loss.
I think your definition of unreasonable margins is problematic because it gives rise to some odd situations. Let me give two examples. 1. Company A spends $1bn on research to invent a drug that cures the common cold. The drug design is a stroke of genius, but very cheap to produce. Is it therefore unreasonable for Company A to price it at a level that allows it to recoup its $1bn before its patent expires, even though that will make counterfeiting economically viable? 2. Company B makes desirable electronics, with lots of effort spent getting the design and the UI just so. They make a reasonable profit and counterfeiting is low. One day there’s a media frenzy about “Bit coins” and “Tor” and how you can buy things over the internet completely untraceably, and overnight their products start being widely counterfeited. They are making the same desirable products at the same profit margin as before, but by your logic the cost just became unreasonable – can that be right?
I think that the point is that the real loss was the expected value of the orange harvest.
Expectations are irrelevant, so there are no real losses.
An accountant will include expectations (positive or negative) in drawing up accounts, and there is a good reason: if you don't, it doesn't reflect reality - expectations do have value. Imagine that you have a token that carries a 50% chance to win $1,000,000. At the moment all have have is an expectation - but I'm guessing you wouldn't sell it for $5. Alternatively, imagine that two people have those tokens; Person A has his token stolen one second before the prize draw; Person B has his token stolen one second after. If expectations have no value, then Person A has lost nothing but Person B may have lost $1,000,000. That surely can't be right.
You can, of course, discount expectations (see below), so you don't have to count them at the full potential value.
but I don't see why loss should be limited to things that are physical.
Because saying you're harmed because you 'lost' something intangible seems rather absurd to me. Strangers walking down the sidewalk could just decide to randomly give me money, and indeed, I may be able to do something to cause that to happen, but I am not harmed simply because it does not happen.
The point here is that the value of an expectation depends on the probability of its occurring. I don't know where you live, but here strangers don't just give money away in the street. The probability is very close to 0, so it has almost 0 expectation value. But you could turn this on its head; imagine that there is a street where rich strangers do give away money to most passers-by. Then, if you walked down the street you would probably make some money, and there would be an expectation value.
If we apply this to the real-world example that was raised earlier, in the case of the orange farmer there is a certain chance, of the blossoms becoming fruit and therefore valuable. That's the farmer's expectation, and it is in itself valuable (that it is valuable is indisputable - there are futures markets where people pay cash for exactly this sort of expectation). If you destroy his fields you haven't destroyed any fruit, but you have destroyed his expectation of having some.
I think that the point is that the real loss was the expected value of the orange harvest. Obviously the blossoms existed, but they don't have much (any?) sale value in and of themselves. I'm sure some people would say that he never actually had the orange harvest, but I don't see why loss should be limited to things that are physical.
Slashdot Mirror
Surely an enterprise customer who buys XP now has made his own bed in terms of software support?
It's hardly a secret that support for XP is being discontinued, and if you're running a business you have to take responsibility for your purchasing decisions.
"[I]nput from the user, [..] storage of that input, and maybe some calculations along the way" describes almost any web-based application, and an awful lot of non-web-based applications. But big applications often have massive problems, budget overruns and enormous delays - whether they are private sector or public sector applications.
"Input", "storage" and "calculations" are not always the same. In a complicated project, all three are difficult and complicated.
Don't get me wrong - the exchange website was a fiasco at launch. But let's not pretend they messed up on "hello, world". They were trying to do something very difficult. They still made a mess of it, though.
I've replied to what I think is the substance of your post - the point regarding costs - in another reply below. Just for completeness, a couple of brief responses in relation to your other points:
Bullshit. The aim of these policies is to pad prosecutor conviction rates so they can appear "tough on crime". No prosecutor ever got reappointed, or reelected, because he released innocent people.
Personally, I think that elected prosecutors are a very poor choice, and I agree with you that they lead to over-zealous prosecutions (especially where the defendant has a high profile).
Sentencing discounts, however, are not necessarily related - they are offered in jurisdictions such as the UK, that don't have elected prosecutors.
I don't know whether elected prosecutors actually try to take advantage of plea bargaining in this way - I suspect that there's a countervailing influence because they want a big showy trial - but it might be the case. If they are, however, I think the solution is to get rid of elected prosecutors.
This much I agree with you on. The system wants to deprive us of our right to a trial.
There will always be innocent people who are convicted - either after a guilty plea or without. I'm not arguing that we should therefore be complacent, but I think that there are safeguards that can mitigate the additional risk to a satisfactory level - four reasonably common examples would be i) the right to see a lawyer for free; ii) judicial scrutiny of confessions; iii) a requirement for confessions to be in writing; and iv) the ability to retract a confession (the confession would then be evidence in the trial, but could be rebutted if, for example, there was evidence of coercion). Those are all fairly common, and, in my view, with all four safeguards the additional risk is reduced sufficiently for the trade-off to be a positive one.
Remember that (as detailed in my post below) removing incentives to plead guilty has negative consequences too, so there is a balance to be struck.
I would just make two short points, which I have set out below:
1. Net outcome
The first is simple to the point of being obvious. If you can reduce the amount of money spent on a trial, all else being equal, that is an advantage. If someone if wrongly convicted that is a very large disadvantage. If you can mitigate the disadvantages - for example through free access to lawyers, judicial scrutiny of confessions, and appeals - so that you get a lot of small advantages with very few disadvantages, the net result can be strongly positive.
I would note here that, whether or not you accept your view that all good laws lead to economic gain (which, for the reasons set out below, I don't think I do) the resources of the justice system are not limitless, and so there are very real drawbacks to opposing cost-savings.
As you note, the vast majority of cases that end in conviction are disposed of by a guilty plea. If even a fraction of those were instead disposed of by trial, it would almost certainly mean significant increases in the average delay before trial, which means people being held in custody or subject to bail conditions for longer, the memory of witnesses decaying, and so forth.
I could list many more problems with putting more pressure on an overburdened system, but I don't think that there is any need. My point is just that removing incentives to plead guilty will have negative consequences, as well as the positive consequences that you note and the additional expense.
2. Economic appraisal
I don't think that I agree with your argument that a good law will have positive economic outcomes, and so no cost saving is necessary.
The first point is that there is a logical problem with the statement that "if the laws you are enforcing aren't paying for themselves, directly or indirectly, it's a bad law", in that it must assume some level of cost saving - you presumably aren't arguing that a good law will always pay for itself, regardless of the inefficiency of the justice system. How do you choose the benchmark level of efficiency? It will always be a value judgement - you are saying that you have chosen an appropriate balance between cost and safety of convictions. But you could always choose to be more cautious, and some of the laws of which you approve would then be "bad laws" because they would no longer pay for themselves.
The second point is that, more generally, I am not convinced that an economic analysis is really sufficient to judge the merit of different laws, especially when the cost of prosecution varies enormously. You would have to do the analysis to work it out, but I wouldn't be surprised if some crimes that pose very acute difficulties for the prosecutor - crimes against children or the mentally incapable, for example, or white-collar crimes that can require years of expensive expert analysis - might be on the "bad laws" side of your criterion, but I don't think that we should stop trying to punish criminals who choose to commit crimes that are unusually expensive to prosecute.
Not to mention some of the perverse outcomes that you could imagine - when do we judge whether a law is "bad"? Can laws go from being good, to bad, to good again as economic conditions change, because that changes the economic consequences of enforcement?
I agree to an extent. Plea bargaining in the sense you see on TV - "plead guity to the jaywalking or we seek the death penalty" - is, to my mind, coercion. I don't know to what extent that exists in reality, however.
On the other hand I don't see anything wrong with setting the sentencing guidelines on the assumption that there will be a trial, and then offering a reduction for an early plea. It's in nobody's interest to spend public money trying someone who is willing to plead guilty, and I don't think that there is anything objectionable in rewarding an early plea.
We should be astute to minimize false confessions, but that has to be balanced against the very large cost and time savings. To my mind, systems where an early plea is considered by the judge in mitigation strike a reasonable balance.
I agree to an extent. Plea bargaining in the sense you see on TV - "plead guity to the jaywalking or we seek the death penalty" - is, to my mind, blackmail. I don't know to what extent that exists in reality, however.
On the other hand I don't see anything wrong with setting the sentencing guidelines on the assumption that there will be a trial, and then offering a reduction for an early plea. It's in nobody's interest to spend public money trying someone who is willing to plead guilty, and I don't think that there is anything objectionable in rewarding an early plea.
We should be astute to minimize false confessions, but that has to be balanced against the very large cost and time savings. To my mind, systems where an early plea is considered by the judge in mitigation strike a reasonable balance.
As I explained before, the aim of these policies is not to try to secure convictions that otherwise would not be obtained (although obviously that will still sometimes occur). The aim is to avoid the expense of a lengthy trial.
For that reason, in many (if not most) jurisdictions, a sentence reduction will automatically be considered by the judge, whether there is agreement from the prosecutor or not. It doesn't matter what the particular cops want from you - it's a systemic policy, and the system wants to avoid trials.
That sentence is part of the rest of my post - it makes no sense to take it out of context and disagree with it alone.
Cops can be given authority to offer a deal by the prosecutor (not the judge - you won't even have been assigned a judge at this point). Alternatively, a person can be given credit by the judge in the absence of any deal, as outlined in my post.
I'm not sure that it's really that surprising that he confessed - most people who are convicted of crimes plead guilty.
You plead guilty right before the trial would start, if anything.
I'm sure that you're correct in relation to your jurisdiction, but in many (I suspect most) jurisdictions there's an opportunity to plead in advance of the trial, at an appearance specifically for that purpose.
This makes sense if you think about the point of allowing these discounts - saving time and cost. A pleading hearing is much cheaper than arranging a trial just for someone to plead guilty at the outset. (You can still do that, but you might not get such a significant discount on your sentence, since you had an earlier opportunity to plead guilty).
pleading guilty can get you a pretty hefty discount on your sentence
And you waive that discount by confessing to a law enforcement officer during an "interview". Because in that case, the court has sufficient evidence to convict you regardless of your plea.
Again, I'm sure that you are correct in relation to your jurisdiction, but that is not always the case - you can generally either i) agree a bargain with the prosecutor in which they agree to pursue lesser charges; or ii) use it in mitigation at trial (i.e. it will be considered by the judge, who will have guidelines saying that an X% reduction is appropriate where someone confessed at the earliest opportunity).
As above, that makes sense in terms of 'rewarding' people for saving as much time and expense on the part of the justice system as possible, and so it would be unusual to design a system that rewards people for waiting to plead guilty.
I'm not sure that it's really that surprising that he confessed - most people who are convicted of crimes plead guilty.
And that's not a ridiculous notion; if you did it and have been caught, pleading guilty can get you a pretty hefty discount on your sentence when compared to being convicted at trial. In particular, where, like here, the range of sentences is very wide, it might mean the certainty that you will not go to prison.
I agree with some of this - particularly your first paragraph - but in other parts you overstate the virtues of an unregulated market for wages. This is the biggest one I think:
After all, it is not the CEO's who own corporations, but the shareholders. As such, it is the shareholders who ultimately decide upon the pay of the CEO. If the owners of a company decide that it is in the company's best interest to entice the top executives with $x, there is absolutely nothing wrong with that.
This puts a very rosy tint on the situation. With very few exceptions, shareholders do not decide executive compensation - either the board, or an "independent" panel, does that. The compensation package might be voted on by shareholders, but that vote is normally advisory only. The vote regularly fails, but the pay packet is normally still awarded despite the owners of the company not approving of it.
Yes, in theory the shareholders could assert their authority by firing the board and replacing them. But if they did that the value of the company would plummet, which makes it a very unattractive way to hold the board to account.
I remember an article last year in the Economist looking at CEO compensation; the conclusion was that (i) CEO pay was not correlated with company performance, and (ii) failure of a company that you lead did not lead to lower compensation at the next company - even if it happened repeatedly - as long as you got out before it actually went insolvent.
I agree that a strict limit does not seem appropriate - but it's worth remembering, when considering possible changes, that the situation we have now leaves a lot to be desired. I would like to see, for example, more transparency over compensation (including bonuses and similar); more power for shareholders to rein in pay; and high pay being tied to longer-term future performance.
But nobody's advocating that the US should become like Venezuela. People are advocating that the US become, in some small respects, more like northern European countries. Pointing to Venezuela is a waste of time.
The divisibility only comes into play because there are fewer bitcoins, or a greater need/demand for them. As the value of the bitcoin grows, certain commodities/services will cost a whole lot less in terms of bitcoins. As far as I know, the divisibility only means I send you 0.0001 for something that used to cost 0.01 bitcoins. Perhaps at some stage, people will even come up with different "names" for the divisions. Kind of like a cent is 0.01 of a dollar.
But I can't really answer your question without knowing why you think this sudden jump in money supply is bad. These things happen, have happened, and could happen to a lot of the commodities and currencies out there. The question is, why must there be some sort of mechanism in place to dampen the effects of a sudden increase in money supply. That's why I asked, and eventually went off on a tangent.
I suppose it depends on what role you are imagining for Bitcoins. If they are a way to move money from one currency to another - broadly the role they have now - then maybe it doesn't matter. If your transactions are instantaneous then the value of your "exchange medium" isn't important.
If you are trying to design a currency, however, it's very important.
The direct problems are to things like futures, options and really any investments. Currency volatility makes all these unattractive. I'm sure it's possible to design around the problems, but you're still going to have increased complexity and uncertainty; both of those translate into higher charges. As an example, if I want to issue bonds in Bitcoins against a backdrop of possible swings in the value of Bitcoins, then I'm going to have to pay a higher rate on them as a result. That's a big problem.
The indirect problem is that uncertainty, in general, is bad for business. If you want to pay me in bitcoins, I'm going to charge you more, because the more bitcoins I have the more exposed I am to the risk of a sudden increase in the monetary base. For something very big the uncertainty might be completely fatal: if there are eventually 5 million "shadow" Bitcoins that aren't circulating, every transaction is made against the risk that someone controls a large number of them and can manipulate the price of the currency. Not a big problem for buying groceries, perhaps, but a very big problem if you're buying a chain of grocery stores.
On a side note. The "expansion" approach you suggested as an alternative has the major downside that only a specific subset of people get the influx of currency. They get the most 'benefit' out of it as the prices have not taken into account the extra currency in the market, and as the currency diffuses into the system, each subsequent entity gets less of that benefit until the prices stabilize. In the "division" approach as you call it, the benefits are first given to the hoarder. But remember, that hoarder lost the utility of that currency for all that time he hoarded it in order to somehow drive up the value, when he could have spent it in exchange for tangible goods/services.
You make it sound like they will just give money out - that's obviously not what happens. I accept though that it's not perfect; again I'm not claiming that Bitcoins are necessarily worse, just asking about what seems a disadvantage of their design.
Do note, though, that if someone has a pile of "shadow" Bitcoins then they can add to the money supply in exactly the same way. I may not like every decision made by central Governments, but a world where an investment bank controlled the money supply would be worse.
Those coins still belong to someone. If that person/group chose to not use those coins and have them sit idly and uselessly by, then that's their choice and their loss. The system will regulate itself. As hoarding grows, the value of the currency grows, and so incentive to spend increases.
I don't think this really answers my question. I understand that people are free not to spend their money.
However, if the value of bitcoins grows a great deal, in part due to the money supply shrinking, shouldn't we be worried that some of that money could suddenly come back?
The reason could be completely benign or it could be intentional manipulation. Either way, isn't it a danger of the "divisibility rather than expansion" approach?
Please can you honestly tell me your reasoning for wanting to control the money supply? You do realize that by controlling the money supply, you are effectively devaluing other peoples' money, that they earned. I say that, because no one will want or suggest for us to decrease the money supply. Frankly, I think a lot of people are just obsessed with it from years of listening to the Fed and politicians talking about influencing the economy, purchasing power, consumer spending, and who-knows-what-other-fancy-measure of the economy that they can pander to the public with.
I don't understand this. That I worry about one aspect of bitcoins doesn't mean I automatically support everything about the alternative.
I don't accept your assertions, but I'd rather not get sidetracked since I don't see the connection to my question about bitcoins.
Maybe I'm missing something, but isn't there a bit of a problem with relying on the divisibility of the bitcoin to deal with bitcoins having dropped out of circulation (as opposed to having been definitively destroyed)?
Imagine that a large proportion of bitcoins have stopped circulating. Isn't there a risk that lots of them could suddenly resurface, make some enormous purchases and increase the monetary supply significantly overnight?
I clicked through to that last link out of curiosity, and they describe the methodology that gets them to these:
Our map compares the five cheapest plans available on the market today to the five cheapest plans available on Obamacare’s exchanges.
For a professional healthcare commentator to present that as though it were a reasonable comparison is, frankly, dishonest. If insurers are free to offer anything, then some insurers will offer very cheap plans. But those plans are awful. They have huge deductibles, huge co-pay, high maximums, small networks and they're only available to people with no preexisting conditions and who don't show any risk factors after answering an extensive questionnaire. Comparing that to an Obamacare bronze plan and then announcing that "Obamacare is pushing rates up," without mentioning any differences between the plans, is dishonest.
And here's the rub: he's done it before. Avik Roy, the author of the piece, has done exactly the same thing before: back in May he pulled exactly the same trick and was called out for exactly the same disingenuous claims.
I'm not saying that everyone will get cheaper healthcare under Obamacare. I don't think anyone is saying that. But if you want to argue against it on price grounds you have to pick sensible comparisons. Every time I see these nonsense comparisons and disingenuous claims it strikes me that they are exactly the sort of things someone would say if they knew that, on a fair assessment, they were wrong.
Meanwhile in Brooklyn someone waits four hours for an ambulance. I suppose four hours is better than eight, although the reason he stopped waiting appears to be that he had died.
This isn't a feature of one health system or another - every system has problems like that; it's a result of living in the real world, without limitless resources. A system that had enough resources to avoid disruption at peak demand would be ludicrously over-provisioned 99% of the time. The perfect is the enemy of the good - try to build a system that never has capacity problems and you won't be able to afford even basic care.
Yes, the networks will be limited. That's a feature of private health insurance that exists because it means the insurance company can cut their rates. Private insurers used limited networks of doctors long before Obamacare came along. Will it be worse under Obamacare? Nobody knows yet, but it's ridiculous to claim that it will definitely make their coverage "near useless in most cases". That level of certainty when the data doesn't exist is normally a sign that someone is seeing what they want to see.
More than that, the whole thing seems just to be invented from nothing in order to criticise the developers. The link they refer to as their proof simply doesn't show that the $600m was all spent on healthcare.gov - it may have been the cost of setting up all the IT infrastructure behind the ACA.
No, but that's a completely different point and has nothing to do with a lack of a control. There would still be no control group (or need for one).
What would you like to control for?
The null hypothesis is that the journals have sufficiently good review processes to avoid publishing papers with obvious and fatal flaws. If you submit a paper with obvious and fatal flaws and it is published, that hypothesis is not true. It's proof by counter-example, and no control is required for it to be valid.
"The reasoning is"
I'm sorry you have a reading comprehension problem, but what does that have to do with the government being unable to manage money and providing healthcare as it is and then GIVING it ALL of health care. If cost is a concern, what's the flipping reasoning? If "money paid" vs. "out of pocket" is a concern than putting ANYTHING in the governments hands is bad.
I suspect that he didn't respond to that point because it's a strawman. It might be a good point if the GP had really admitted that the current state of healthcare proves the government can't be trusted - but he didn't, so it's not.
In fact, your argument is incoherent. You said before that the GP's comment "[t]he US spends more tax dollars on health care than any of the top 10 nations that have actual national health care systems... while not providing any healthcare" proves that the US Government cannot manage health spending. For that to make sense you would have to believe that the current US healthcare system is Government-run; but you are worried about it becoming Government-run, so obviously you don't.
There are also significant additional costs in dealing with counterfeit goods, which make them impractical unless there are ridiculous margins on the goods being counterfeit...
Counterfeit goods can't be marginally cheaper than the originals, they have to be a lot cheaper or people won't consider them.
There is always a risk of being caught.
There is less economies of scale, both in the production and distribution.
Distribution is harder as legit retailers wont touch them, you need to use back channels that will demand a bigger cut.
So the definition of unreasonable margins would be the point at which it becomes profitable to counterfeit, even considering all these things... It's quite telling that the only things which get counterfeit are items priced massively higher than similar items from other brands.
Just to be clear, I wasn't saying that the cost of production only needs to be marginally lower, I'm saying that the marginal cost of production needs to be lower - "marginal cost" refers to the cost of producing an additional copy once you have produced X copies already (so doesn't include costs like R&D, design etc). My point is that since counterfeiters don't incur any of these costs, any product that has significant "set-up costs" - whether that's designing a beautiful product or researching a clever technical solution - is vulnerable to counterfeiting, because the counterfeiter can make a profit selling at prices where the original producer would make a loss.
I think your definition of unreasonable margins is problematic because it gives rise to some odd situations. Let me give two examples.
1. Company A spends $1bn on research to invent a drug that cures the common cold. The drug design is a stroke of genius, but very cheap to produce. Is it therefore unreasonable for Company A to price it at a level that allows it to recoup its $1bn before its patent expires, even though that will make counterfeiting economically viable?
2. Company B makes desirable electronics, with lots of effort spent getting the design and the UI just so. They make a reasonable profit and counterfeiting is low. One day there’s a media frenzy about “Bit coins” and “Tor” and how you can buy things over the internet completely untraceably, and overnight their products start being widely counterfeited. They are making the same desirable products at the same profit margin as before, but by your logic the cost just became unreasonable – can that be right?
I think that the point is that the real loss was the expected value of the orange harvest.
Expectations are irrelevant, so there are no real losses.
An accountant will include expectations (positive or negative) in drawing up accounts, and there is a good reason: if you don't, it doesn't reflect reality - expectations do have value. Imagine that you have a token that carries a 50% chance to win $1,000,000. At the moment all have have is an expectation - but I'm guessing you wouldn't sell it for $5. Alternatively, imagine that two people have those tokens; Person A has his token stolen one second before the prize draw; Person B has his token stolen one second after. If expectations have no value, then Person A has lost nothing but Person B may have lost $1,000,000. That surely can't be right.
You can, of course, discount expectations (see below), so you don't have to count them at the full potential value.
but I don't see why loss should be limited to things that are physical.
Because saying you're harmed because you 'lost' something intangible seems rather absurd to me. Strangers walking down the sidewalk could just decide to randomly give me money, and indeed, I may be able to do something to cause that to happen, but I am not harmed simply because it does not happen.
The point here is that the value of an expectation depends on the probability of its occurring. I don't know where you live, but here strangers don't just give money away in the street. The probability is very close to 0, so it has almost 0 expectation value. But you could turn this on its head; imagine that there is a street where rich strangers do give away money to most passers-by. Then, if you walked down the street you would probably make some money, and there would be an expectation value.
If we apply this to the real-world example that was raised earlier, in the case of the orange farmer there is a certain chance, of the blossoms becoming fruit and therefore valuable. That's the farmer's expectation, and it is in itself valuable (that it is valuable is indisputable - there are futures markets where people pay cash for exactly this sort of expectation). If you destroy his fields you haven't destroyed any fruit, but you have destroyed his expectation of having some.
I think that the point is that the real loss was the expected value of the orange harvest. Obviously the blossoms existed, but they don't have much (any?) sale value in and of themselves. I'm sure some people would say that he never actually had the orange harvest, but I don't see why loss should be limited to things that are physical.