Oh, there's plenty of reason, but that's not the point. You're showing the exact example of the circular reasoning I'm trying to expose. How do they know the trees were that old? Do they have historical records? You can't just say, ah, it works in this tiny range, must work exactly this way for the long range. I just had a kid under a year ago. He doubled in weight in about a year or so. I guess, according to you, he's going to be a fucking giant at 20, right?
I'm thinking I should go do my experiment and embarass a lot of people.
Okay... fine, dollars posited were given in nominal terms. In that case, it was a waste. Now let's say the dollars posited were given in real terms (i.e., year 2005 dollars). In that case, it was a waste.
You're right that inflation needs to be a factor in calculations, but it really wasn't relevant to this particular example.
I actually have an upcoming paper on this topic, but I don't know where to submit it. I basically flesh out the idea that you could make a return from research, even if you gave it away for free, by speculating in the markets you distort. Say your research unveils an energy source that makes oil obsolete. You could make up research costs by shorting the stock of anyone heavily invested in selling oil. Of course, the paper goes into much more detail. Any idea what the best site to submit it to where it would reach the most people and the most people who would be interested in it?
(Btw, like the other guy suggested, this is kind of tangential since the person I was responding to was taking the odd position of saying that gov. funding is corrupting without explaining any alternate funding method.)
When you say something is "not profitable" what you really mean is "consumers don't want it." PLEASE READ THE FOLLOWING ANALAYSIS BEFORE YOU IMITATE MOST SLASDHOT READERS WHO RESPOND TO ME BY IGNORING IMPORTANT CONTENT IN MY POST To be sure, consumers prefer "improvements in technology" to "no improvements in technology" - you can never beat "something" with "nothing". But that's not the choice here: you have to count the costs, not just the benefits. If you spend $100 billion dollars now to get a benefit of $160 billion fifty years from now that was a loss because the ROR was ~1%/year. You could have benefitted more people by sticking the money in a bank. In other words, the research cost you much better opportunities.
(And please don't say "well you can't just count monetary savings, you have to count improvement in product quality" - because I am. Any benefit can be expressed equivalently, for purposes of comparison, in dollars via indifference curve analysis.)
I'd estimate that when you tabulate the ROR on current long-term research, it's well below 1%, maybe even negative. Remember, you have to count all research costs, not just the costs of research that actually leads to something. Nor can you count research whose results are "force-fitted" into applications we can already do better and cheaper, like memory metal being used to check if fish were defrosted when a 50-cent memory thermometer can do the same thing (which I keep griping about).
If all current long-term research funds were redirected into the private sector, corporations would "flush out" any significant gains from incremental improvements, at which point the ROR on more long-term activities would look more attractive and then they would invest in it.
(Btw, this is kind of tangential - I was just questioning where the thread starter got his conclusion that government funding is corrupting.)
What do copyrights have to do with anything? If you want to read the article, your university probably paid the (all things considered) small fee to get the journal, or it's available online. It's really a tiny cost. Fair use permits citation and excerpt quotes.
And if you got rid of government funding, you wouldn't have much left (or so the conventional knowlege goes). I'd actually agree that gov. funding should be eliminated, but I don't see how it "distorts the intellectual environment". If you're claiming that "money" in general is corrupting, I don't know what to say. People who reserach for the hell of it do it either way; money convinces the greedy bastards to start contributing. It seems you're more blaming shortsightedness than money itself.
His argument (and I use that term advisedly) was that when you use Google, really stupid searches (like for "flowers" alone or "steven" alone) get bad results, so good searches must be getting bad results too. To see how badly he got roasted on that article, you can go into their "fray"
and do a search for articles before 07/17/03 (the day after the article was put on the web) to see the comments of the people around that time. (I'd link the search, but it doesn't seem to let me.)
Now, I know Johnson had a point, and after tons of criticism he eventually put one together, but that hastily thrown-together-argument should have been in the article the first time around. You can see his pitiful attempts to defend this earlier article here, which is the list of his posts on the Fray:
WTF... this is precisely the thing about defenders of evolution that drives me nuts. Nowhere did I advocate "Intelligent Design"! All I said was, the article mentioned a problem with evolutionary theory, and then dismisses it by saying ID is bad science. It's totally unresponsive.
And yes, if evolutionary theory can't explain some development, that is a problem with the theory. You can't just say, "well it's not like God did it or nothin" and expect people to count it as a valid defense of the theory.
Oh okay, so you're agree with me then that they don't assume perfect information. In the future, try not to spout off about how in ALL of undergrad studies they work off of perfect information (whose capitalization only causes people to revise downward estimates of your knowledge on the issue). They don't.
Interesting quote you have there - too bad it says nothing about perfect information, nor claim that all of the theory about how markets work relies on perfect information.
And again, you're missing the point of my terminological quibble - there is no "capitalistic theory", just "market theory". "Capitalistic" sounds like that which is advocated by proponents of capitalism.
I'm glad I was able to improve your understanding of the issues, even if you don't want to admit it.
(would have said evolutionists there, but that would have started a tangential flame war).
This is a quote from the "Kansas Biology Teacher" article:
"At the heart of ID is the idea that certain elements of the natural world--the human eye, say--are "irreducibly complex" and have not and cannot be explained by evolutionary theory. Therefore, IDers say, they must be the work of an intelligent designer (that is, God).
The problem for teachers is that ID can't be tested using the scientific method, the system of making, testing and retesting hypotheses that is the bedrock of science."
Now, if someone tells you that the eye cannot be explained through evolutionary mechanisms, do you respond that, well, ID can't be tested through the scientific method, so you're wrong? Because that's exactly what this article makes it sound like. If there's a response to the argument that the eye could not have arisen through the incremental changes posited by evolutionary theory, this article sure doesn't give it.
Is there a response? What incremental, random changes produced an eye such that each step conferred an evolutionary advantage? Or did it happen all at once? Can scientists reconstruct the formation for an eye through an accidental interference with the DNA? And, most importantly, does even asking these questions imply that I'm an anti-science ignorant hick?
Let me see if I can help you, Mr. Egg-on-Face. You accuse me of making strawmen and then claim that I'm dying that moving closer to perfect information (which needn't be capitalized) is a good thing? Of course it is. What I object to is your implication that imperfect information is somehow a "flaw" of capitalism that doesn't exist equally in other systems. I'm especially perplexed by all your references to "pure capitalistic theory". I don't know of any "pure capitalist theory"... they talk about "market theory" and its implications for systems like capitalism, socialism, and a mixed economy.
Read your original post: you were claiming, not just that better information is good, but that imperfect information (note lack of capitalization) is somehow a failure of capitalism that rosy-eyed economists assume. Nothing could be further from the truth. If you want to call that a failure of capitalism, you might as well call these a "failure of capitalism":
-production requries labor -technology is imperfect -some people are evil
In your original post, if your current position were actually true, you could have just said "the internet reduces search costs". But you didn't. It was your chance to sneak in a totally unfounded jab at capitalism to say nothing of your ignorance of economics.
Finally let's see your unfortunate quote: "Yes, Perfect Information absolutely IS an assumption at the undergrad level (notice I mentioned Econ 101). " No qualification whatsoever. I proved you completely wrong there. Do they assume zero search costs for some applications? Sure, in certain cases, where warranted. You have to be able to isolate the "ceteris paribus" effects you're now falling back on when analyzing systems.
You have been seriously thrashed this time around and don't even realize it.
Perhaps I was a bit harsh. But he was so clearly wrong yet carried on as if he was right, while trying to make me look like the dunce. If he walks away sad, that's his problem for getting caught telling lies. I'm here to enlighten, not to delight; to inform, not form friendships; to debunk, not gain bunkmates.
So what you're saying is, if you had more servers storing your data, that would reduce search time. In other words, your point was irrelevant to the matter at hand, which was whether the search engine's faster results would confer greater benefits, not any improvement in the way stuff on the internet is already stored.
I want you to read my original post on this one more time before responding again, and this time come up with a relevant answer.
I disagree. You have not clarified, nor shown lack of imagination.
What you seem to be groping for now is that if your enterprise's stuff needs to be searchable, a 100x gain in search time would be a significant improvement. But it wouldn't. Humans are doing the searches. They already get the results from searching your data in 0.2 seconds. The ~0.2 second gain means very little. It does not constitutue a 100x improvement. You seem to have missed the entire point of my post, which is that the search time is not a limiting factor, so you just mixed and matched and came up with an identical scenario to clarify. But what you need to do is come up with a scenario in which someone wants to get search engine results and is able to process them just as fast. If it's a human that needs this information, they will not be able to evalue the results that fast so there is virtually no gain.
Wow, first the "pseudo-intellectual" comment, and now bringing up unrelated matters... you're not desperate, no, of course not.
Let's clear one thing up: I am not attacking you. You stated falsities. I am correcting those falsities. The quote I gave was of course not a quote of you; it is what a course would have to teach for your statements to be right. Let's go over what you said:
So I gave you citations from an actual low-level undergrad econ course that specifically showed it is NOT an assumption. You are in error. Just admit it.
And I'm not restating something you said. You said studies of capitalism "assume" perfect information. (See your first quote again you conveniently forgot.) That then morphed into, well, um, yeah, it's like, uh, "The closer you get to Perfect Information throughout the system the better a capitalist economy runs (all other things being equal)." That's not what you said. If all you were saying is that a "capitalist economy" (as opposed to...?) runs "better" (however it is you're defining it) when costs are lower, you didn't have to resort to ill-conceived attacks on capitalism to say. Everything works better when its costs are lower. Is this the novel insight you brought to this thread? Because it sure sounded like you were saying [note: not a quote of you; don't gripe] "the internet corrects the flaws that are unique to capitalism". But you're actually just saying it's an improvement.
So, all this time you were really just saying that the internet is an improvement, and were not trying to attack capitalism at all. Wow, I really didn't know the internet was an improvement.
Why not try saying precisely what you mean instead of changing it aroud. If anyone's upset, it's you because someone actually knew his shit and was able to offer citations, and that totally caught you flat-footed and red-handed.
At the very least, admit your statement about Econ undergrad courses was in error.
JIT is not "new" because all it does is say "hey, it helps when you reduce cost X". Look at the costs that can occur in manufacturing:
a) cost of the material inputs b) cost of labor c) cost of negotiating contracts d) costs of breaks in the supply chain e) cost of reducing the reject rate f) costs of setup
and, of course
g) cost of storing the goods before use or sale
So you claim it's a novel idea to try to reduce g). Okay, do you consider it a novel idea, worthy of a specific name and being called a "paradigm" to reduce b) as well? What's the name for when you try to make your process involve lower-skilled labor and thereby reduce labor costs? What's the name for when you try to locate your factory on the cheapest land, accounding for the gain in transportation costs? Would they be considered ground-breaking if someone gave them a name?
"JIT" is always explained as "when you deliver the goods just in time". It's nothing more than reducing one of the costs. But people have always tried to reduce those costs! Does it deserve its own name just because it became more profitable relative to trying to cut other costs?
Wow, calling an economic theory handling the implications of imperfect information "pseudo-intellectual crap"... my confidence is shaken
You really, really don't know what you're talking about. First of all, perfect information (which needn't be capitalized) is not "an assumption at the undergrad level". They might refer to specific circumstances and assume away search costs for simplicity for that application, but I know of no undergraduate cirriculum that teaches "markets only work with perfect information, and markets always have perfect information".
Just off the top of my head, here's an intro econ course (okay, it's 103 instead of 101) that talks about search costs:
And if you want to fall back your pitiful "well, capitalism works better with zero search costs", fine, that's true, but trivial. Capitalism works better with zero transaction costs, zero negotiation costs, zero costs of production, perfect rationality, etc. Again, that doesn't throw any economic insights into doubt. And I don't understand your focus on "capitalism". Mixed economies and socialism have to deal with search costs too, even if, as in the former case, they are dispersed differently, or, as in the latter case, they are denominated in non-monetary units. Having socialism or regulation does not get you out of the problem of information, so it wouldn't itself prove any system better than any other
No, that is not an "assumption when studying pure capitalism". Nor does "studying pure capitalism" "assume", as wags like to claim (are you ready)...
perfect competition, perfect rationality, perfect elasticity, perfect price flexibility, zero externalities, zero negotiation costs, zero transaction costs, zero surprises, zero entry costs, zero exit costs, infinite producers, infinite consumers, time-invariant preferences, homogeneous capital stock, etc etc etc.
Regarding the study of markets under imperfect information, there has been plent of work on what's called "search theory". The model is that people search until the marginal benefit of searching (additional probability of finding a better option times the improvement of that option) is about equal to the marginal cost of searching (any additional time and effort towards searching). It applies to a wide variety of areas: job-searching, bargain-searching, employee-searching, marital-partner-searching, and so on. It's just another "cost" in markets. The role of the entrepreneur is in reducing search costs between suppliers and demanders. The necessity of this doesn't call any fundamental insight into question. In fact, the Nobel Prize winner in economics four years go won it because of his studies that showed that despite lack of information on the part of any one person, markets act as if they were well-informed. Most markets turned out to be more efficient than even the most rosy-eyed economists predicted.
The library? Right. Conservatives have cut library funding for decades. Most of the libraries near where poor people live don't have internet access because they can't afford it. So they have to go to faraway libraries (whilst paying bus fair!) and then pay out-of-zone fees for a library card that you have to get to be allowed to use their internet there. Plus, all of the libraries I know require you to show photo ID to get on, which a lot of people don't want to reveal because they may have a criminal record (though have served their time) or bad immigration status. It's really sad.
So you say that they should just get dialup? Dialup is a horribly slow way for them to access all the moder sites with all their bells and whistles. So then what? Pay $50 a month for high-speed? That's precisely the poverty margin for most people. Yeah, see, most people of color tend to prefer to spend that on, I don't know, diapers and baby formula.
What have I done? I've spent thousands of dollars writing my congressman and starting campaigns to get free internet access to poor people and prevent companies like Google from "dumping" their internet access on richer neighborhoods like San Fran. How much have you given to campaigns for politicians who want to increase internet access?
WTF? I think you seriously misunderstood me there. My point was that (and I can't even believe I have to spell this out for someone, since it should be so obvious) contributing to a collaborative effort does not make one socialist; that the effort itself is not socialist; that the effort itself does not in any way contradict capitalist[1] principles; and that proponents of socialism are no more likely to contribute to it.
I am *not* calling Wikipedia socialist because it's non-profit (non-profits flourish under capitalism). I'm calling it socialist because many articles promote socialism. Get it now?
[1]Again, just to clarify for the n-th person who can't make the distinction. When I talk about capitalism here, I'm talking about free markets within a private property metacontext(a), not the other definition, pursuit of monetary wealth(b). You can have (b) without (a) and (a) without (b). I'm not sure my placement on your foes list is warranted.
That's very true about the internet not being limited to what we personally use in our homes, but I think an important thing to note here is that just-in-time is not unique to the internet. It's not even unique to long-distance communications. [rant] People have always wanted to minimize storage time. Then some people started focusing on it and it had a better return than improving in other areas. Then some genius decided that "hey, I've invented a new concept: just-in-time manufacturing and delivery!" But there's no real invention... it's just improving on existing methods. It's not like one day people realized that storage time imposes real costs. It's in no way a novel idea. It's like if I invented a new manufacturing paradigm called high-quality-manufacturing where I try to give customers the best product.[/rant]
Not that you carry any of these assumptions, it just needed to be said.
and what about the people who can't afford internet access? Should we just forget about them? They don't count? This article should be a clarion call that we need to be doing more to help minorities break the digital divide so they can get good jobs.
That it's not been calibrated. Even if they know the "equations of motion" I don't think they know the "initial conditions" and a lot of what they claim is based not on the actual test but "scientific judgment" (other people's tests) I mean, they claimed oil takes "millions" of years to form, but they've made it in minutes in the lab. (And then there's the messy issue of how we've pumped more oil than the mass of the animals that should have been able to produce it, but that's neither here nor there.)
which corporation gets more in subsidies than it pays in taxes? Please count ONLY things that are unambiguously subsidies, i.e., direct payments or direct provision of goods on unequal terms to the rest of America.
And what actual-welfare recipient pay more in taxes than he/she gets in benefits and uncompensated damage (murder, theft) he/she causes?
I don't deny that there's some cronyism, but you need to keep things in perspective. If you want to rape "corporations" because some of them get favors or do bad things... why not rape poor people too? (rape in the metaphorical sense of course)
Oh, and before I forget... ever wonder why a corporation would want to put its offices offshore? Couldn't be because of a punitive tax strucutre that makes even western Europe look good...
First things first: I'm not a young-earther and I don't even go to church, let alone repeat what they say about carbon dating. I consider myself agnostic on the age of the earth, but believe that some of the estimates simply cannot be right - but that's for another time.
Second, I'm not sure why you're even bringing up the Shroud. It's extremely dubious as an example of something "historical records confirm" as being 2000 years old; it proves neither side right or wrong.
Third, the reason I talk about money is so that people can get serious. It's easy to say "oh I'm 10000000% sure that theory X is true". But when you have to put your own money on the line, that tends to make bullshitters (not that you are one of course, I'm talking about the principle here) shut up. I strongly suspect that a lot of (uncalibratable) long-term estimates of the age of things are heavily contaminated by scientists' prejudices about "what seems right" or "what other scientists said" or "what stuff was found in the area", which itself may have been based on error, which was based on error, and so on. The way to test this and keep scientists from contaminating each other is to use the method I outlined. If scientists were really sure about the validity of their methods, they would jump at the chance to take this test.
And remember: the test involves no knowledge of the sample's source. It shouldn't be necessary if the method's accurate. They shouldn't even know that someone has the answer. They shouldn't even have a clue what geological era the sample comes from - again, it shouldn't be necessary. I seriously doubt scientists' answers would agree, which would throw a LOT of what they claim to know in doubt.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh, there's plenty of reason, but that's not the point. You're showing the exact example of the circular reasoning I'm trying to expose. How do they know the trees were that old? Do they have historical records? You can't just say, ah, it works in this tiny range, must work exactly this way for the long range. I just had a kid under a year ago. He doubled in weight in about a year or so. I guess, according to you, he's going to be a fucking giant at 20, right?
I'm thinking I should go do my experiment and embarass a lot of people.
Okay... fine, dollars posited were given in nominal terms. In that case, it was a waste. Now let's say the dollars posited were given in real terms (i.e., year 2005 dollars). In that case, it was a waste.
You're right that inflation needs to be a factor in calculations, but it really wasn't relevant to this particular example.
I actually have an upcoming paper on this topic, but I don't know where to submit it. I basically flesh out the idea that you could make a return from research, even if you gave it away for free, by speculating in the markets you distort. Say your research unveils an energy source that makes oil obsolete. You could make up research costs by shorting the stock of anyone heavily invested in selling oil. Of course, the paper goes into much more detail. Any idea what the best site to submit it to where it would reach the most people and the most people who would be interested in it?
(Btw, like the other guy suggested, this is kind of tangential since the person I was responding to was taking the odd position of saying that gov. funding is corrupting without explaining any alternate funding method.)
When you say something is "not profitable" what you really mean is "consumers don't want it." PLEASE READ THE FOLLOWING ANALAYSIS BEFORE YOU IMITATE MOST SLASDHOT READERS WHO RESPOND TO ME BY IGNORING IMPORTANT CONTENT IN MY POST To be sure, consumers prefer "improvements in technology" to "no improvements in technology" - you can never beat "something" with "nothing". But that's not the choice here: you have to count the costs, not just the benefits. If you spend $100 billion dollars now to get a benefit of $160 billion fifty years from now that was a loss because the ROR was ~1%/year. You could have benefitted more people by sticking the money in a bank. In other words, the research cost you much better opportunities.
(And please don't say "well you can't just count monetary savings, you have to count improvement in product quality" - because I am. Any benefit can be expressed equivalently, for purposes of comparison, in dollars via indifference curve analysis.)
I'd estimate that when you tabulate the ROR on current long-term research, it's well below 1%, maybe even negative. Remember, you have to count all research costs, not just the costs of research that actually leads to something. Nor can you count research whose results are "force-fitted" into applications we can already do better and cheaper, like memory metal being used to check if fish were defrosted when a 50-cent memory thermometer can do the same thing (which I keep griping about).
If all current long-term research funds were redirected into the private sector, corporations would "flush out" any significant gains from incremental improvements, at which point the ROR on more long-term activities would look more attractive and then they would invest in it.
(Btw, this is kind of tangential - I was just questioning where the thread starter got his conclusion that government funding is corrupting.)
What do copyrights have to do with anything? If you want to read the article, your university probably paid the (all things considered) small fee to get the journal, or it's available online. It's really a tiny cost. Fair use permits citation and excerpt quotes.
And if you got rid of government funding, you wouldn't have much left (or so the conventional knowlege goes). I'd actually agree that gov. funding should be eliminated, but I don't see how it "distorts the intellectual environment". If you're claiming that "money" in general is corrupting, I don't know what to say. People who reserach for the hell of it do it either way; money convinces the greedy bastards to start contributing. It seems you're more blaming shortsightedness than money itself.
Is this the same Steven Johnson that wrote this load of crap two years ago?
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http://slate.msn.com/id/2085668/
His argument (and I use that term advisedly) was that when you use Google, really stupid searches (like for "flowers" alone or "steven" alone) get bad results, so good searches must be getting bad results too. To see how badly he got roasted on that article, you can go into their "fray"
http://fray.slate.msn.com/?id=3936&tp=webhead&nav
and do a search for articles before 07/17/03 (the day after the article was put on the web) to see the comments of the people around that time. (I'd link the search, but it doesn't seem to let me.)
Now, I know Johnson had a point, and after tons of criticism he eventually put one together, but that hastily thrown-together-argument should have been in the article the first time around. You can see his pitiful attempts to defend this earlier article here, which is the list of his posts on the Fray:
http://fray.slate.msn.com/?id=3936&tp=webhead&act
WTF... this is precisely the thing about defenders of evolution that drives me nuts. Nowhere did I advocate "Intelligent Design"! All I said was, the article mentioned a problem with evolutionary theory, and then dismisses it by saying ID is bad science. It's totally unresponsive.
And yes, if evolutionary theory can't explain some development, that is a problem with the theory. You can't just say, "well it's not like God did it or nothin" and expect people to count it as a valid defense of the theory.
Imperfect information is assumed
Oh okay, so you're agree with me then that they don't assume perfect information. In the future, try not to spout off about how in ALL of undergrad studies they work off of perfect information (whose capitalization only causes people to revise downward estimates of your knowledge on the issue). They don't.
Interesting quote you have there - too bad it says nothing about perfect information, nor claim that all of the theory about how markets work relies on perfect information.
And again, you're missing the point of my terminological quibble - there is no "capitalistic theory", just "market theory". "Capitalistic" sounds like that which is advocated by proponents of capitalism.
I'm glad I was able to improve your understanding of the issues, even if you don't want to admit it.
(would have said evolutionists there, but that would have started a tangential flame war).
This is a quote from the "Kansas Biology Teacher" article:
"At the heart of ID is the idea that certain elements of the natural world--the human eye, say--are "irreducibly complex" and have not and cannot be explained by evolutionary theory. Therefore, IDers say, they must be the work of an intelligent designer (that is, God).
The problem for teachers is that ID can't be tested using the scientific method, the system of making, testing and retesting hypotheses that is the bedrock of science."
Now, if someone tells you that the eye cannot be explained through evolutionary mechanisms, do you respond that, well, ID can't be tested through the scientific method, so you're wrong? Because that's exactly what this article makes it sound like. If there's a response to the argument that the eye could not have arisen through the incremental changes posited by evolutionary theory, this article sure doesn't give it.
Is there a response? What incremental, random changes produced an eye such that each step conferred an evolutionary advantage? Or did it happen all at once? Can scientists reconstruct the formation for an eye through an accidental interference with the DNA? And, most importantly, does even asking these questions imply that I'm an anti-science ignorant hick?
Let me see if I can help you, Mr. Egg-on-Face. You accuse me of making strawmen and then claim that I'm dying that moving closer to perfect information (which needn't be capitalized) is a good thing? Of course it is. What I object to is your implication that imperfect information is somehow a "flaw" of capitalism that doesn't exist equally in other systems. I'm especially perplexed by all your references to "pure capitalistic theory". I don't know of any "pure capitalist theory"... they talk about "market theory" and its implications for systems like capitalism, socialism, and a mixed economy.
Read your original post: you were claiming, not just that better information is good, but that imperfect information (note lack of capitalization) is somehow a failure of capitalism that rosy-eyed economists assume. Nothing could be further from the truth. If you want to call that a failure of capitalism, you might as well call these a "failure of capitalism":
-production requries labor
-technology is imperfect
-some people are evil
In your original post, if your current position were actually true, you could have just said "the internet reduces search costs". But you didn't. It was your chance to sneak in a totally unfounded jab at capitalism to say nothing of your ignorance of economics.
Finally let's see your unfortunate quote: "Yes, Perfect Information absolutely IS an assumption at the undergrad level (notice I mentioned Econ 101). " No qualification whatsoever. I proved you completely wrong there. Do they assume zero search costs for some applications? Sure, in certain cases, where warranted. You have to be able to isolate the "ceteris paribus" effects you're now falling back on when analyzing systems.
You have been seriously thrashed this time around and don't even realize it.
Perhaps I was a bit harsh. But he was so clearly wrong yet carried on as if he was right, while trying to make me look like the dunce. If he walks away sad, that's his problem for getting caught telling lies. I'm here to enlighten, not to delight; to inform, not form friendships; to debunk, not gain bunkmates.
So what you're saying is, if you had more servers storing your data, that would reduce search time. In other words, your point was irrelevant to the matter at hand, which was whether the search engine's faster results would confer greater benefits, not any improvement in the way stuff on the internet is already stored.
I want you to read my original post on this one more time before responding again, and this time come up with a relevant answer.
I disagree. You have not clarified, nor shown lack of imagination.
What you seem to be groping for now is that if your enterprise's stuff needs to be searchable, a 100x gain in search time would be a significant improvement. But it wouldn't. Humans are doing the searches. They already get the results from searching your data in 0.2 seconds. The ~0.2 second gain means very little. It does not constitutue a 100x improvement. You seem to have missed the entire point of my post, which is that the search time is not a limiting factor, so you just mixed and matched and came up with an identical scenario to clarify. But what you need to do is come up with a scenario in which someone wants to get search engine results and is able to process them just as fast. If it's a human that needs this information, they will not be able to evalue the results that fast so there is virtually no gain.
Try one more time.
Wow, first the "pseudo-intellectual" comment, and now bringing up unrelated matters... you're not desperate, no, of course not.
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Let's clear one thing up: I am not attacking you. You stated falsities. I am correcting those falsities. The quote I gave was of course not a quote of you; it is what a course would have to teach for your statements to be right. Let's go over what you said:
"One of the ASSumptions when studying pure capitalism is Perfect Information." http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=166641&cid=13
then you said
"Yes, Perfect Information absolutely IS an assumption at the undergrad level (notice I mentioned Econ 101)."
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=166641&cid=13
So I gave you citations from an actual low-level undergrad econ course that specifically showed it is NOT an assumption. You are in error. Just admit it.
And I'm not restating something you said. You said studies of capitalism "assume" perfect information. (See your first quote again you conveniently forgot.) That then morphed into, well, um, yeah, it's like, uh, "The closer you get to Perfect Information throughout the system the better a capitalist economy runs (all other things being equal)." That's not what you said. If all you were saying is that a "capitalist economy" (as opposed to...?) runs "better" (however it is you're defining it) when costs are lower, you didn't have to resort to ill-conceived attacks on capitalism to say. Everything works better when its costs are lower. Is this the novel insight you brought to this thread? Because it sure sounded like you were saying [note: not a quote of you; don't gripe] "the internet corrects the flaws that are unique to capitalism". But you're actually just saying it's an improvement.
So, all this time you were really just saying that the internet is an improvement, and were not trying to attack capitalism at all. Wow, I really didn't know the internet was an improvement.
Why not try saying precisely what you mean instead of changing it aroud. If anyone's upset, it's you because someone actually knew his shit and was able to offer citations, and that totally caught you flat-footed and red-handed.
At the very least, admit your statement about Econ undergrad courses was in error.
JIT is not "new" because all it does is say "hey, it helps when you reduce cost X". Look at the costs that can occur in manufacturing:
a) cost of the material inputs
b) cost of labor
c) cost of negotiating contracts
d) costs of breaks in the supply chain
e) cost of reducing the reject rate
f) costs of setup
and, of course
g) cost of storing the goods before use or sale
So you claim it's a novel idea to try to reduce g). Okay, do you consider it a novel idea, worthy of a specific name and being called a "paradigm" to reduce b) as well? What's the name for when you try to make your process involve lower-skilled labor and thereby reduce labor costs? What's the name for when you try to locate your factory on the cheapest land, accounding for the gain in transportation costs? Would they be considered ground-breaking if someone gave them a name?
"JIT" is always explained as "when you deliver the goods just in time". It's nothing more than reducing one of the costs. But people have always tried to reduce those costs! Does it deserve its own name just because it became more profitable relative to trying to cut other costs?
Wow, calling an economic theory handling the implications of imperfect information "pseudo-intellectual crap"... my confidence is shaken
e 103/econ103.htm (see week 10)
e 103/micro8.htm - see section II
You really, really don't know what you're talking about. First of all, perfect information (which needn't be capitalized) is not "an assumption at the undergrad level". They might refer to specific circumstances and assume away search costs for simplicity for that application, but I know of no undergraduate cirriculum that teaches "markets only work with perfect information, and markets always have perfect information".
Just off the top of my head, here's an intro econ course (okay, it's 103 instead of 101) that talks about search costs:
The course notes: http://www.gmu.edu/departments/economics/bcaplan/
And the specific lecture: http://www.gmu.edu/departments/economics/bcaplan/
And if you want to fall back your pitiful "well, capitalism works better with zero search costs", fine, that's true, but trivial. Capitalism works better with zero transaction costs, zero negotiation costs, zero costs of production, perfect rationality, etc. Again, that doesn't throw any economic insights into doubt. And I don't understand your focus on "capitalism". Mixed economies and socialism have to deal with search costs too, even if, as in the former case, they are dispersed differently, or, as in the latter case, they are denominated in non-monetary units. Having socialism or regulation does not get you out of the problem of information, so it wouldn't itself prove any system better than any other
No, that is not an "assumption when studying pure capitalism". Nor does "studying pure capitalism" "assume", as wags like to claim (are you ready) ...
perfect competition, perfect rationality, perfect elasticity, perfect price flexibility, zero externalities, zero negotiation costs, zero transaction costs, zero surprises, zero entry costs, zero exit costs, infinite producers, infinite consumers, time-invariant preferences, homogeneous capital stock, etc etc etc.
Regarding the study of markets under imperfect information, there has been plent of work on what's called "search theory". The model is that people search until the marginal benefit of searching (additional probability of finding a better option times the improvement of that option) is about equal to the marginal cost of searching (any additional time and effort towards searching). It applies to a wide variety of areas: job-searching, bargain-searching, employee-searching, marital-partner-searching, and so on. It's just another "cost" in markets. The role of the entrepreneur is in reducing search costs between suppliers and demanders. The necessity of this doesn't call any fundamental insight into question. In fact, the Nobel Prize winner in economics four years go won it because of his studies that showed that despite lack of information on the part of any one person, markets act as if they were well-informed. Most markets turned out to be more efficient than even the most rosy-eyed economists predicted.
The library? Right. Conservatives have cut library funding for decades. Most of the libraries near where poor people live don't have internet access because they can't afford it. So they have to go to faraway libraries (whilst paying bus fair!) and then pay out-of-zone fees for a library card that you have to get to be allowed to use their internet there. Plus, all of the libraries I know require you to show photo ID to get on, which a lot of people don't want to reveal because they may have a criminal record (though have served their time) or bad immigration status. It's really sad.
So you say that they should just get dialup? Dialup is a horribly slow way for them to access all the moder sites with all their bells and whistles. So then what? Pay $50 a month for high-speed? That's precisely the poverty margin for most people. Yeah, see, most people of color tend to prefer to spend that on, I don't know, diapers and baby formula.
What have I done? I've spent thousands of dollars writing my congressman and starting campaigns to get free internet access to poor people and prevent companies like Google from "dumping" their internet access on richer neighborhoods like San Fran. How much have you given to campaigns for politicians who want to increase internet access?
WTF? I think you seriously misunderstood me there. My point was that (and I can't even believe I have to spell this out for someone, since it should be so obvious) contributing to a collaborative effort does not make one socialist; that the effort itself is not socialist; that the effort itself does not in any way contradict capitalist[1] principles; and that proponents of socialism are no more likely to contribute to it.
I am *not* calling Wikipedia socialist because it's non-profit (non-profits flourish under capitalism). I'm calling it socialist because many articles promote socialism. Get it now?
[1]Again, just to clarify for the n-th person who can't make the distinction. When I talk about capitalism here, I'm talking about free markets within a private property metacontext(a), not the other definition, pursuit of monetary wealth(b). You can have (b) without (a) and (a) without (b). I'm not sure my placement on your foes list is warranted.
That's very true about the internet not being limited to what we personally use in our homes, but I think an important thing to note here is that just-in-time is not unique to the internet. It's not even unique to long-distance communications. [rant] People have always wanted to minimize storage time. Then some people started focusing on it and it had a better return than improving in other areas. Then some genius decided that "hey, I've invented a new concept: just-in-time manufacturing and delivery!" But there's no real invention... it's just improving on existing methods. It's not like one day people realized that storage time imposes real costs. It's in no way a novel idea. It's like if I invented a new manufacturing paradigm called high-quality-manufacturing where I try to give customers the best product.[/rant]
Not that you carry any of these assumptions, it just needed to be said.
and what about the people who can't afford internet access? Should we just forget about them? They don't count? This article should be a clarion call that we need to be doing more to help minorities break the digital divide so they can get good jobs.
Again, clarify. What appliance? What does the appliance do? Who is processing this information this fast?
That it's not been calibrated. Even if they know the "equations of motion" I don't think they know the "initial conditions" and a lot of what they claim is based not on the actual test but "scientific judgment" (other people's tests) I mean, they claimed oil takes "millions" of years to form, but they've made it in minutes in the lab. (And then there's the messy issue of how we've pumped more oil than the mass of the animals that should have been able to produce it, but that's neither here nor there.)
which corporation gets more in subsidies than it pays in taxes? Please count ONLY things that are unambiguously subsidies, i.e., direct payments or direct provision of goods on unequal terms to the rest of America.
And what actual-welfare recipient pay more in taxes than he/she gets in benefits and uncompensated damage (murder, theft) he/she causes?
I don't deny that there's some cronyism, but you need to keep things in perspective. If you want to rape "corporations" because some of them get favors or do bad things... why not rape poor people too? (rape in the metaphorical sense of course)
Oh, and before I forget... ever wonder why a corporation would want to put its offices offshore? Couldn't be because of a punitive tax strucutre that makes even western Europe look good...
First things first: I'm not a young-earther and I don't even go to church, let alone repeat what they say about carbon dating. I consider myself agnostic on the age of the earth, but believe that some of the estimates simply cannot be right - but that's for another time.
Second, I'm not sure why you're even bringing up the Shroud. It's extremely dubious as an example of something "historical records confirm" as being 2000 years old; it proves neither side right or wrong.
Third, the reason I talk about money is so that people can get serious. It's easy to say "oh I'm 10000000% sure that theory X is true". But when you have to put your own money on the line, that tends to make bullshitters (not that you are one of course, I'm talking about the principle here) shut up. I strongly suspect that a lot of (uncalibratable) long-term estimates of the age of things are heavily contaminated by scientists' prejudices about "what seems right" or "what other scientists said" or "what stuff was found in the area", which itself may have been based on error, which was based on error, and so on. The way to test this and keep scientists from contaminating each other is to use the method I outlined. If scientists were really sure about the validity of their methods, they would jump at the chance to take this test.
And remember: the test involves no knowledge of the sample's source. It shouldn't be necessary if the method's accurate. They shouldn't even know that someone has the answer. They shouldn't even have a clue what geological era the sample comes from - again, it shouldn't be necessary. I seriously doubt scientists' answers would agree, which would throw a LOT of what they claim to know in doubt.