Prediction markets reflect information that is known; they are not perfect crystal balls. They also fall victim to groupthink.
The best example is that the prediction markets predicted Hillary would win the Democratic nomination by a wide margin. Now the consensus is that it will be Obama by a wide margin.
The biggest contributors to real price inflation (in contrast to the BLS' cooked figures) are healthcare, education, and housing, all of which have been increasing at double-digit rates.
All three are labor-intensive. In addition to labor, housing is also dependent upon land values. Which brings up a saying by the people from India, "Buy gold and land because they're not making any more."
So there you have it. Everything is cheap now except for labor, gold, and land.
deafening buzz about this new search engine called Google
Funny thing about that buzz -- other search engines of the time had equal or better results, such as directhit/HotBot, which used click-throughs and dwell times to improve search results for subsequent users -- something Google is only now getting around to doing.
The U.S. military/industrial complex retains its medium of propaganda at taxpayer expense, thereby excluding candidates that would challenge its power.
biomedical pumps without moving partsThat should read "without rubbing parts". And even with that increased language precision, we still don't know the answer to the important question, which is whether this willow allow pumps "without fatiguing parts". (I suspect this will not be possible without biological-like microscopic self-healing.)
'Pali Research analyst Stacey Widlitz said the deal follows a trend of Hollywood studios selling directly to consumers and cutting out the middleman. "It's just a sign the studios feel... that another distribution channel is where they are choosing to go, and incrementally it hurts Blockbuster and Netflix," Widlitz said.'"
Either Stacey is full of it, or I'm missing something. I need a DFD (dataflow diagram).
How is iTunes cutting out the middleman? Wouldn't iTunes be the new middleman? Wouldn't iTunes be peer competition to Blockbuster and Netflix -- especially given their online forays?
Does "$1 million retention bonuses" sound like social promotion to anyone else?
It seems as though the insulation between corporate executives and shareholders has now reached a level equivalent to that between public school personnel and taxpayers.
P.S. I think Circuit City and Comp USA are merely the first casualties of the "bricks vs. clicks" debate that raged during the dot-com era. The bruising just started happening 8 years later than predicted, and even then starting out only in niche areas well-suited to e-commerce (as in NewEgg.com). Another niche is used bookstores -- bookfinder.com is dropping them like flies, but again, it's only a recent phenomenon.
Let's test out the Ron-Paul-offtopic-moderation here.
Going beyond technology and into politics, before the 20th century (really, before Marx), there was individualism, plus corporations were strictly limited by law in geography and lifespan. The 20th century had experiments in communism, nationalism, and capitalism gone amok. Now we realize our mistakes and are seeking out individualism once again, and have found a way to it in Ron Paul.
If you read that page's quote from Wozniak, he's talking about NTSC signals, not phosphors. It was an electronics hack. The Apple ][ didn't have completely randomly programmable colors for every pixel, which was a pain. On the other hand, you got what? -- 6 or 8, I don't remember because I was an Atari guy -- colors instead of just 4, which was the tradeoff. Atari graphics mode 8 (320x192) was similar -- and get this -- when Atari switched from the CTIA to the GTIA, the blue/green colors swapped! The original Jawbreaker, a Pac-Man rip-off, rendered as a green maze on machines with GTIA chips.
I do realize they still sell them, but are they $0.99 per song cheap?
I assume you're referring to 45's. Adjusting for inflation, $0.99 in 1979 (the year I bought the 45 of the song "Funkytown" at Woolco) would be, according the the BLS calculator, $2.87 today.
Around 1990, there were CD singles. Granted, they were intended to be replacements for 12" maxi-singles and not 45s, but they were $5. And the record companies killed them because they thought CD singles were "too cheap" -- that they were canibalizing the sales of CD albums.
The expectation of paying $0.99 per song is not based upon historical price trends, but rather upon the expectation that music should be free or at least cheap, which in turn was caused by the record companies withholding digital sales until just a few years ago.
This is of course no different than what can be done with a hex editor on a binary. Somehow, being able to see the source code gives a lot of people the sense that they can do whatever they want with it. There has always been that mistaken notion that source code is the keys to the kingdom; for example, companies take great pains from letting their source code leak out, especially to their competitors. There are rarely secrets contained in source code (except for Microsoft's NSA backdoors), and if a competitor got it, more power to them wasting their time trying to reverse engineer it.
But there's something new contributing to this perception, which is the general disdain for copyrights these days. It's the record companies' fault, of course, for withholding sales of digital audio during the entire dot-com boom. Now they're struggling to sell singles for a fourth the price they were selling for 25 years ago, adjusting for inflation.
People think they have an entitlement to commercial music, and they think catching a glimpse of the source code gives them full rights.
I've had the pleasure of working on two "dream teams" in my career -- not really just software development teams, but entire organizations including management and marketing. Both eventually collapsed. In both cases, team members gained a lot of experience and were ripe to move out anyway, but hung on to the team longer than if there were no sense of belonging. Then, some catalyst enters from the outside. It's just as the article describes: The catalyst causes one person to leave, and then another person leaves because the team isn't as valuable anymore, and then everyone leaves because the team isn't worth anything anymore.
In one case, the catalyst was the company being sold. In the other case, it was near-criminal behavior of a newly added team member.
The UFO theorists (I try to keep an open mind, but I find the existence of UFOs less than probable due to lack of evidence) say that UFOs started visiting (or started visiting heavily) in the middle of the 20th century in response to the nuclear bombs going off. Perhaps someone more versed in science could tell us whether that or Hitler's speech at the 1936 Olympics is easier to detect from space.
If you follow what I wrote and the whole thread carefully, you'll see that I was in favor of what Reagan said and not what he did. Because Ron Paul supported what Reagan was saying before Reagan was elected, it's incongruent to be supportive of Ron Paul without being supportive of what Reagan said. If you don't like Ron Paul, then, yes, perhaps it is a waste of time to read what I write.
Labeling the Democrats "Communists" is of course hyperbole, but not by too much. Consider:
Woodrow Wilson (Democrat, 1913-1921)
Instituted the IRS
Instituted the Federal Reserve
Lead the U.S. into an unnecessary war (WWI), arbitrarily choosing the once-enemy British side over the German side
Jailed the producer of the movie "Spirit of 1776" because it portrayed the British as the enemy.
Created the League of Nations
FDR (Democrat, 1933-1945)
Used Wilson's IRS to fund the New Deal
Considered Stalin a close ally during the war, and tried to hide the closeness from the U.S. public
At the end of the war, Roosevelt gave away half of Europe to Stalin.
And then of course LBJ's Great Society and the Clintons' trading military secrets for Chinese campaign donations.
This is in stark contrast to the Party of Jefferson before 1900. Grover Cleveland was the last president from the Party of Jefferson. Whatever the Democratic Party became after 1900, it wasn't the libertarian Party of Jefferson. While an objective present-day international observer would not call it communist, a U.S. libertarian would know what is meant by the term.
Part of the e-mail exchange that I did not include was about the history of the two-party system.
The Federalist/Whig/Republican Party is the Party of Hamilton and represents central government and central banking. It is the antithesis of freedom. I call it the fascist party.
The Democratic Party was the Party of Jefferson and represented anti-Federalism and libertarianism. It got seduced by Communism at the turn of the century.
Thus, starting around 1900, the choice was between fascism and communism.
After WWII, the Republicans adopted a marketing strategy. To counter communism, they put on the cloak of the old Democratic Party, libertarianism/anti-Federalism, while secretly still being fascist/Federalist. It worked -- I was seduced, at least until 1998 when a lot of information started pouring onto the Internet. Even Ron Paul was seduced, as he campaigned for Reagan in 1976.
In 2000, the Republican Party started throwing off the cloak, and returned to naked power/fascism/Federalism.
A side note I forgot to mention -- the Democratic Party, which became the Communism Party around 1900, became the Party of Death around 1970.
In addition to being seduced by the Republican cloak of libertarianism, Ron Paul was also pro-life, so those two facts together made the Republican Party a better fit for him. After his failed bid for the presidency in 1988 as a Libertarian Party candidate, he realized he needed to run under one of the two major parties, and stuck with the Republican Party into which he was seduced in the 1970's.
In the presidential debates this year, Ron Paul keeps repeating how Eisenhower, Nixon, and even Bush claimed they were anti-war. Ron Paul is trying to tap into what Republican voters thought they were voting for in the past.
In response to an editorial Why the Ron Paul Campaign is Dangerous that created a lot of controversy on the Ron Paul fora, I had a lengthy e-mail exchange with the author (once I figured out that I had to obfuscate the phrase "Ron Paul" to get past his Comcast spam filter). A "small" portion of that e-mail exchange was about what you alluded to -- what people think in response to the brand name "Republican". The brand name "Republican" is supposed to have something substantial behind it, namely the party platform. Indeed, we find that Bush is not only opposed to traditional Republicanism -- his operatives rewrote the platform behind closed doors (without input from the delegates) at the 2000 RNC!
The e-mail excerpts are below:
Ron Paul isn't hijacking the party because he is closer to the 1996 Republican Party platform (and previous years) than any other Republican candidate. It was Bush and friends who hijacked the Republican Party in 2000. Here are some excerpts from the 1996 platform that are either missing in the 2000 platform, watered down, contradicted by other portions of the platform, or just ignored by Bush and ultimately removed in the 2004 platform:
We are the party of small, responsible and efficient government, joining our neighbors in cities and counties, rather than distant bureaucrats, to build a just society and caring communities. We therefore assert the power of the American people over government, rather than the other way around. Our agenda for change, profound and permanent change in the way government behaves, is based on the Tenth Amendment to the Constitution:
The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor
prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.
[...]
As a first step in reforming government, we support elimination of the Departments of Commerce, Housing and Urban Development, Education, and Energy, and the elimination, defunding or privatization of agencies which are obsolete, redundant, of limited value, or too regional in focus. Examples of agencies we seek to defund or to privatize are the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, and the Legal Services Corporation.
In addition, we support Republican-sponsored legislation that would require the original sponsor of proposed federal legislation to cite specific constitutional authority for the measure.
[...]
The unborn child has a fundamental individual right to life which cannot be infringed. We support a human life amendment to the Constitution and we endorse legislation to make clear that the Fourteenth Amendment's protections apply to unborn children.
This is the Republican Party that I grew up with and knew and loved. I stopped calling myself a Republican in 1999 because, among other reasons, Bush refused to commit to a litmus test for Supreme Court nominees.
Ron Paul worked to nominate Reagan over Ford in 1976. Ron Paul is the torchbearer of what Reagan stood for (although Reagan did not live up to his words).
After the Democratic Party became the Communist Party at the turn of the century and went on to dominate the first half of the century, the Republican Party responded by becoming the anti-Federalist Party after WWII. Ron Paul is trying to steer the Republican Party back toward those days of 1952-1996. That's getting back on track, not hijacking.
The main difference between Ron Paul and Reagan is foreign policy -- the Reagan Administration, in its fight against communism, armed the most radical elements of Afghanistan and created the Taliban, which of course ended up harboring Osama bin Laden. Ron Paul wishes for the U.S. to not repeat that mistake.
He would wait until age 18. Life expectancies are much longer now than then.
The urge to procreate has not changed. The endless schooling that people are now subjected to in the U.S. leads to pre-marital sex, which leads to weaker marriages, abuse of women, neglect of children, and decay of society.
39.5 inches in diameter -- not much larger than an exercise ball
When did exercise balls become the univerally known cultural unit of measurement? In the past, it would have been a yardstick, but alas that has given way to the tape measure. Actually, mentioning a yardstick would have been a tautology, and so wouldn't have even been mentioned. So really, it must be a matter of kids not knowing physical sizes due to playing with videogames instead of working with their hands. Or, rather, if there's any work to be done, it is to be done with an exercise ball.
Slashdot Mirror
The best example is that the prediction markets predicted Hillary would win the Democratic nomination by a wide margin. Now the consensus is that it will be Obama by a wide margin.
The biggest contributors to real price inflation (in contrast to the BLS' cooked figures) are healthcare, education, and housing, all of which have been increasing at double-digit rates.
All three are labor-intensive. In addition to labor, housing is also dependent upon land values. Which brings up a saying by the people from India, "Buy gold and land because they're not making any more."
So there you have it. Everything is cheap now except for labor, gold, and land.
The U.S. military/industrial complex retains its medium of propaganda at taxpayer expense, thereby excluding candidates that would challenge its power.
biomedical pumps without moving partsThat should read "without rubbing parts". And even with that increased language precision, we still don't know the answer to the important question, which is whether this willow allow pumps "without fatiguing parts". (I suspect this will not be possible without biological-like microscopic self-healing.)
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
How is iTunes cutting out the middleman? Wouldn't iTunes be the new middleman? Wouldn't iTunes be peer competition to Blockbuster and Netflix -- especially given their online forays?
It seems as though the insulation between corporate executives and shareholders has now reached a level equivalent to that between public school personnel and taxpayers.
P.S. I think Circuit City and Comp USA are merely the first casualties of the "bricks vs. clicks" debate that raged during the dot-com era. The bruising just started happening 8 years later than predicted, and even then starting out only in niche areas well-suited to e-commerce (as in NewEgg.com). Another niche is used bookstores -- bookfinder.com is dropping them like flies, but again, it's only a recent phenomenon.
Going beyond technology and into politics, before the 20th century (really, before Marx), there was individualism, plus corporations were strictly limited by law in geography and lifespan. The 20th century had experiments in communism, nationalism, and capitalism gone amok. Now we realize our mistakes and are seeking out individualism once again, and have found a way to it in Ron Paul.
If you read that page's quote from Wozniak, he's talking about NTSC signals, not phosphors. It was an electronics hack. The Apple ][ didn't have completely randomly programmable colors for every pixel, which was a pain. On the other hand, you got what? -- 6 or 8, I don't remember because I was an Atari guy -- colors instead of just 4, which was the tradeoff. Atari graphics mode 8 (320x192) was similar -- and get this -- when Atari switched from the CTIA to the GTIA, the blue/green colors swapped! The original Jawbreaker, a Pac-Man rip-off, rendered as a green maze on machines with GTIA chips.
Around 1990, there were CD singles. Granted, they were intended to be replacements for 12" maxi-singles and not 45s, but they were $5. And the record companies killed them because they thought CD singles were "too cheap" -- that they were canibalizing the sales of CD albums.
The expectation of paying $0.99 per song is not based upon historical price trends, but rather upon the expectation that music should be free or at least cheap, which in turn was caused by the record companies withholding digital sales until just a few years ago.
This is of course no different than what can be done with a hex editor on a binary. Somehow, being able to see the source code gives a lot of people the sense that they can do whatever they want with it. There has always been that mistaken notion that source code is the keys to the kingdom; for example, companies take great pains from letting their source code leak out, especially to their competitors. There are rarely secrets contained in source code (except for Microsoft's NSA backdoors), and if a competitor got it, more power to them wasting their time trying to reverse engineer it.
But there's something new contributing to this perception, which is the general disdain for copyrights these days. It's the record companies' fault, of course, for withholding sales of digital audio during the entire dot-com boom. Now they're struggling to sell singles for a fourth the price they were selling for 25 years ago, adjusting for inflation.
People think they have an entitlement to commercial music, and they think catching a glimpse of the source code gives them full rights.
In one case, the catalyst was the company being sold. In the other case, it was near-criminal behavior of a newly added team member.
The UFO theorists (I try to keep an open mind, but I find the existence of UFOs less than probable due to lack of evidence) say that UFOs started visiting (or started visiting heavily) in the middle of the 20th century in response to the nuclear bombs going off. Perhaps someone more versed in science could tell us whether that or Hitler's speech at the 1936 Olympics is easier to detect from space.
Sounds like they reinvented the Atari 800/Commodore 64, i.e. the Personal Computer as opposed to the PC.
Labeling the Democrats "Communists" is of course hyperbole, but not by too much. Consider:
- Woodrow Wilson (Democrat, 1913-1921)
- Instituted the IRS
- Instituted the Federal Reserve
- Lead the U.S. into an unnecessary war (WWI), arbitrarily choosing the once-enemy British side over the German side
- Jailed the producer of the movie "Spirit of 1776" because it portrayed the British as the enemy.
- Created the League of Nations
- FDR (Democrat, 1933-1945)
- Used Wilson's IRS to fund the New Deal
- Considered Stalin a close ally during the war, and tried to hide the closeness from the U.S. public
- At the end of the war, Roosevelt gave away half of Europe to Stalin.
And then of course LBJ's Great Society and the Clintons' trading military secrets for Chinese campaign donations.This is in stark contrast to the Party of Jefferson before 1900. Grover Cleveland was the last president from the Party of Jefferson. Whatever the Democratic Party became after 1900, it wasn't the libertarian Party of Jefferson. While an objective present-day international observer would not call it communist, a U.S. libertarian would know what is meant by the term.
Part of the e-mail exchange that I did not include was about the history of the two-party system.
The Federalist/Whig/Republican Party is the Party of Hamilton and represents central government and central banking. It is the antithesis of freedom. I call it the fascist party.
The Democratic Party was the Party of Jefferson and represented anti-Federalism and libertarianism. It got seduced by Communism at the turn of the century.
Thus, starting around 1900, the choice was between fascism and communism.
After WWII, the Republicans adopted a marketing strategy. To counter communism, they put on the cloak of the old Democratic Party, libertarianism/anti-Federalism, while secretly still being fascist/Federalist. It worked -- I was seduced, at least until 1998 when a lot of information started pouring onto the Internet. Even Ron Paul was seduced, as he campaigned for Reagan in 1976.
In 2000, the Republican Party started throwing off the cloak, and returned to naked power/fascism/Federalism.
A side note I forgot to mention -- the Democratic Party, which became the Communism Party around 1900, became the Party of Death around 1970.
In addition to being seduced by the Republican cloak of libertarianism, Ron Paul was also pro-life, so those two facts together made the Republican Party a better fit for him. After his failed bid for the presidency in 1988 as a Libertarian Party candidate, he realized he needed to run under one of the two major parties, and stuck with the Republican Party into which he was seduced in the 1970's.
In the presidential debates this year, Ron Paul keeps repeating how Eisenhower, Nixon, and even Bush claimed they were anti-war. Ron Paul is trying to tap into what Republican voters thought they were voting for in the past.
The e-mail excerpts are below:
Ron Paul isn't hijacking the party because he is closer to the 1996 Republican Party platform (and previous years) than any other Republican candidate. It was Bush and friends who hijacked the Republican Party in 2000. Here are some excerpts from the 1996 platform that are either missing in the 2000 platform, watered down, contradicted by other portions of the platform, or just ignored by Bush and ultimately removed in the 2004 platform:
This is the Republican Party that I grew up with and knew and loved. I stopped calling myself a Republican in 1999 because, among other reasons, Bush refused to commit to a litmus test for Supreme Court nominees.
Ron Paul worked to nominate Reagan over Ford in 1976. Ron Paul is the torchbearer of what Reagan stood for (although Reagan did not live up to his words).
After the Democratic Party became the Communist Party at the turn of the century and went on to dominate the first half of the century, the Republican Party responded by becoming the anti-Federalist Party after WWII. Ron Paul is trying to steer the Republican Party back toward those days of 1952-1996. That's getting back on track, not hijacking.
The main difference between Ron Paul and Reagan is foreign policy -- the Reagan Administration, in its fight against communism, armed the most radical elements of Afghanistan and created the Taliban, which of course ended up harboring Osama bin Laden. Ron Paul wishes for the U.S. to not repeat that mistake.
Ron Paul is the
Can we moderate this story "Troll"?
Handcuffs and batons are torture, too. Tasers don't torture people, police do.
See Schoolhouse Rock.