Econfag here. Decreasing supply, all other things held constant (my professor liked to say "ceteris paribus") will not change demand. I can guarantee you that if the supply of food was halved tomorrow, demand would at least stay constant.
You would, however, be at a different, presumably higher, point on the demand curve. Notice this picture of an increase in supply's effect on the demand curve - that is, none.
There are horizontal and vertical demand "curves," but you generally won't find them outside of economics textbooks and iPad sales projections.
What the parent poster (probably) meant was that people always want more stuff. Of course that's tempered by the law of diminishing returns and their preferences and budget. But, it doesn't mean that a widget that doubles iPad production will necessarily double unemployment in Cupertino (or Shanghai.)
In fact, very few technologies work this way. The automobile did not lead to the permanent, systemic unemployment of buggy whip manufacturers.
Most things in economics suck in the short term, especially disruptive technologies and other market shocks. But, we shouldn't let anger of microsecond fraudsters lead us to rage-against-the-machine Luddite hatred.
You're assuming that all technology is labor-replacing - that a better machine always displaces a worker. That doesn't mean "you need less people" - it means the same person can crank out more stuff.
But I'm not arguing that the current economy doesn't suck, though it sucks less than last year. I'm also not arguing that high-frequency trading does anything useful for growing the economy.
But everything thus far shows us that perpetual growth is possible. Technology is a wonderful thing - each year we're able to do more with less.
That's not to say that a lot of what goes on in the market isn't pure, unadulterated bullshit, but real, honest-to-goodness "growth" won't stop until technology does.
I've had two dreams in which I was self-aware. In one I was an arena combatant in Unreal Tournament. The map was outdoors; lush, green, and sunny. An uncharacteristically blue sky, and large grass-covered rock precipices jutting out of the ground. I was standing on one.
I jumped and realized someone had turned on the low-grav mutator. I got the "best" parts of the recurring "flying" and "falling" nightmares as I sailed way up into the air, stopped for a stomach-churningly long time, and plummeted to the ground. I remember hearing the UT2K3 took-fall-damage "crunch" and I blacked out.
Blacking out in a dream is weird. I had no idea how long I was unconscious, um, while I was unconscious.
I woke up (in dream) to my teammates pulling me up and asking me if I was OK, and the dream ended before I could answer. Weirder than the in-dream blackout was the total lack of an enemy team, and the friendly team consisting entirely of friendly, conversing folk. In space armor.
Have you ever had a dream that you were so sure was real? What if you were unable to wake from that dream? How would you know the difference between the dream world and the real world?
I haven't done much Android development, but it's not as bad as it sounds. I started learning from a Android 2.1 book; all the sample code ran on a locked-down consumer 1.5 handset, 1.5 being the oldest version in common use. The one exception I found was a flag that told you if you were entering or leaving a given physical area didn't seem to be present on my 1.5 headset, but querying it didn't break anything.
Android versions are like.NET versions; you can change the one you want to target, and your code will be future compatible. If you require a specific OS feature (Oooh, they added a new photo gallery control in 1.6 that I must have!), you mark it in your application manifest along with any other requirements.
Constructing a layout is obnoxious, though. You lay out controls kind of like building a webpage, using an XML syntax to define the controls you have and how they "flow" on a screen. For most cases, different screen sizes and orientations won't matter.
I can't speak to how much real-world testing is necessary, as I've only developed on two phones. However, the emulator that comes with the SDK is really quite good, if very, very slow. You can pick arbitrary screen sizes and layouts, the presence/absence of any feature you can think of (SD card, GPS, clicky-ball thingy, OS version, screen size) and see how your app looks. You can even test GPS applications by feeding the emulator specific coordinates or path to follow.
Debugging is easy - connect your phone via USB and press the compile or debug button in Eclipse. It'll show up as a target device, along with any emulator images. You'll be able to do all the normal debugger stuff as your app runs/doesn't run/hits breakpoints/crashes on the device.
If you're considering trying it, download the vanilla version of Eclipse if you don't have it, get the Android SDK, and try "hello world" on the emulator. It's pretty nifty.
Access to capital alone isn't sufficient, especially when it reinforces the disadvantageous neo-colonial economic relations. A lot of the capital came from the IMF, which seems to be interested solely in retooling third world countries for first world benefit. Corporations like BP nee Anglo-Iranian Oil Company don't help by owning an entire country's national resources, turning the host state into a mere satellite exporting raw materials.
They feel the worst excesses of our particular anti- and extra-market policies. The failure of the "developmentalist project" doesn't mean developing countries can't develop, or that markets work for us and not for them - it means we should stop sabotaging them.
But does our market system value the lives of the African villages above one person's gee whiz' feeling of unboxing an iPod?
Our market system doesn't "value" iPods over Africans. Certain individuals, as evidenced by their gee-whizery, value their iPod more than your hypothetical African village. "Our market system" didn't compel our one person to buy an iPod - it simply let him. By lamenting the market outcome, you're really lamenting that people are free to make that choice in the first place.
This presupposes that the iPod-toting hipster is Wrong, that he should have fed Africa instead. But why stop at iPods? You likely have a computer, internet, electricity, utilities, and shelter. You likely have more money in your checking account than they have seen their entire lives.
Even if you have nothing, a single paycheck at minimum wage is more than billions of the developing world see in an entire year. Why does the market value your luxuries over "the lives of the African villages?"
The problem isn't that hipsters have iPods, that you're a hypocrite, or even that I'm a prick - we grow more than enough to feed everyone on the planet. Markets are merely choices - our hypothetical hipster can choose to buy an iPod, feed Africa, or do something else entirely because of our market system. The real problem is that, for much of the developing world, there is no choice - they have no such market.
Large swaths of Africa lack the requisite institutions for a free market - things like a functioning government. Were corruption and genocide to disappear overnight, Africa would still be locked out of the developed world's market because of our government, its tariffs, and its subsidies.
Not all the iPods in the world, nor even Cupertino, can fix all of that.
I'm surprised you find Ubuntu with "jerky audio" and "crappy webcam" is better than Vista - all of those work out of the box on Vista laptops. Then again, it seems invoking "m$" is still worth a +1, Insightful around here.
I'm thinking you just shouldn't be allowed near computers considering that you couldn't get Vista or Ubuntu working.
That is precisely what the rest of the AV industry needs to peddle. If you can't boot to a clean environment, you're just screwed, whether it be virus problems, or any number of other problems.
I actually wonder why more don't do this. Back when I ran a brand-new copy of Windows 98, my copy of McAfee (I was young and didn't know any better!) came with a boot floppy for just that purpose. Surely with Windows PE the whole process would be trivial - boot to the PE, download the most recent AV signatures, and scan away. You wouldn't even have to periodically refresh the signatures on your floppy.
I can only speak for how it works on prepaid; prior I had an "unlimited" plan.
You get a notification that you have a message, and it docks you 1/3 of a minute to "read" it. Which is great, because I read my SMS on Google Voice and not on my phone.
Your understanding of "real-world" problems ends at calling people "twatstains." "We should be angry at people who offer money instead of those who take it" is an infantile thesis that does nothing to solve "real-world" problems.
The problem you are grasping at is called "regulatory capture." Your thesis is "it's bad and it shouldn't happen." Well, good luck with that.
I'm not going to play the last-post-wins game. Come back when you grow up.
And that's an interesting dichotomy. We have more options than 1) support the government's goals exactly as they are right now, or 2) dissolve the government.
You say anger at the government is misdirected because 1) government will always be corruptible, and 2) it's really corporate money anyway. If government can't be faulted for corruption because it's an intractable part of its existence, why are corporations faulted for having money? In fact, money is the reason for a corporation to exist; the same can't be said for government.
Again - it's a strange worldview where corporations and corporations only are worthy of anger.
It's "hard to grasp" because your call is to "stop fighting government. start fighting corporations."
If The Corporations are to be the only target of our anger, that means the government has to be beyond reproach - which it obviously is not. Anger against government is therefore not misdirected.
I'm arguing that you can't argue corporations are entirely to blame for all of our problems. If government is corruptible, they share blame for corruption - especially when they make the rules.
"Idealistic platitudes?" You argue that government is perfect, beyond reproach, and responsible for all progress. Anything bad is entirely the fault of the corporation.
I haven't heard anything like that since the rage-against-the-machine Luddites of the industrial revolution.
0.1% corruption is better than 10% corruption, but both are unacceptable from men who have a monopoly on force and create the rules by which we all have to live.
Again, if government has to be incorruptible to be useful, we're doomed.
Slashdot Mirror
Econfag here. Decreasing supply, all other things held constant (my professor liked to say "ceteris paribus") will not change demand. I can guarantee you that if the supply of food was halved tomorrow, demand would at least stay constant.
You would, however, be at a different, presumably higher, point on the demand curve. Notice this picture of an increase in supply's effect on the demand curve - that is, none.
There are horizontal and vertical demand "curves," but you generally won't find them outside of economics textbooks and iPad sales projections.
What the parent poster (probably) meant was that people always want more stuff. Of course that's tempered by the law of diminishing returns and their preferences and budget. But, it doesn't mean that a widget that doubles iPad production will necessarily double unemployment in Cupertino (or Shanghai.)
In fact, very few technologies work this way. The automobile did not lead to the permanent, systemic unemployment of buggy whip manufacturers.
Most things in economics suck in the short term, especially disruptive technologies and other market shocks. But, we shouldn't let anger of microsecond fraudsters lead us to rage-against-the-machine Luddite hatred.
You're assuming that all technology is labor-replacing - that a better machine always displaces a worker. That doesn't mean "you need less people" - it means the same person can crank out more stuff.
But I'm not arguing that the current economy doesn't suck, though it sucks less than last year. I'm also not arguing that high-frequency trading does anything useful for growing the economy.
But everything thus far shows us that perpetual growth is possible. Technology is a wonderful thing - each year we're able to do more with less.
That's not to say that a lot of what goes on in the market isn't pure, unadulterated bullshit, but real, honest-to-goodness "growth" won't stop until technology does.
I've had two dreams in which I was self-aware. In one I was an arena combatant in Unreal Tournament. The map was outdoors; lush, green, and sunny. An uncharacteristically blue sky, and large grass-covered rock precipices jutting out of the ground. I was standing on one.
I jumped and realized someone had turned on the low-grav mutator. I got the "best" parts of the recurring "flying" and "falling" nightmares as I sailed way up into the air, stopped for a stomach-churningly long time, and plummeted to the ground. I remember hearing the UT2K3 took-fall-damage "crunch" and I blacked out.
Blacking out in a dream is weird. I had no idea how long I was unconscious, um, while I was unconscious.
I woke up (in dream) to my teammates pulling me up and asking me if I was OK, and the dream ended before I could answer. Weirder than the in-dream blackout was the total lack of an enemy team, and the friendly team consisting entirely of friendly, conversing folk. In space armor.
Have you ever had a dream that you were so sure was real? What if you were unable to wake from that dream? How would you know the difference between the dream world and the real world?
Other than testing the number of respawns.
I haven't done much Android development, but it's not as bad as it sounds. I started learning from a Android 2.1 book; all the sample code ran on a locked-down consumer 1.5 handset, 1.5 being the oldest version in common use. The one exception I found was a flag that told you if you were entering or leaving a given physical area didn't seem to be present on my 1.5 headset, but querying it didn't break anything.
Android versions are like .NET versions; you can change the one you want to target, and your code will be future compatible. If you require a specific OS feature (Oooh, they added a new photo gallery control in 1.6 that I must have!), you mark it in your application manifest along with any other requirements.
Constructing a layout is obnoxious, though. You lay out controls kind of like building a webpage, using an XML syntax to define the controls you have and how they "flow" on a screen. For most cases, different screen sizes and orientations won't matter.
I can't speak to how much real-world testing is necessary, as I've only developed on two phones. However, the emulator that comes with the SDK is really quite good, if very, very slow. You can pick arbitrary screen sizes and layouts, the presence/absence of any feature you can think of (SD card, GPS, clicky-ball thingy, OS version, screen size) and see how your app looks. You can even test GPS applications by feeding the emulator specific coordinates or path to follow.
Debugging is easy - connect your phone via USB and press the compile or debug button in Eclipse. It'll show up as a target device, along with any emulator images. You'll be able to do all the normal debugger stuff as your app runs/doesn't run/hits breakpoints/crashes on the device.
If you're considering trying it, download the vanilla version of Eclipse if you don't have it, get the Android SDK, and try "hello world" on the emulator. It's pretty nifty.
Access to capital alone isn't sufficient, especially when it reinforces the disadvantageous neo-colonial economic relations. A lot of the capital came from the IMF, which seems to be interested solely in retooling third world countries for first world benefit. Corporations like BP nee Anglo-Iranian Oil Company don't help by owning an entire country's national resources, turning the host state into a mere satellite exporting raw materials.
They feel the worst excesses of our particular anti- and extra-market policies. The failure of the "developmentalist project" doesn't mean developing countries can't develop, or that markets work for us and not for them - it means we should stop sabotaging them.
But does our market system value the lives of the African villages above one person's gee whiz' feeling of unboxing an iPod?
Our market system doesn't "value" iPods over Africans. Certain individuals, as evidenced by their gee-whizery, value their iPod more than your hypothetical African village. "Our market system" didn't compel our one person to buy an iPod - it simply let him. By lamenting the market outcome, you're really lamenting that people are free to make that choice in the first place.
This presupposes that the iPod-toting hipster is Wrong, that he should have fed Africa instead. But why stop at iPods? You likely have a computer, internet, electricity, utilities, and shelter. You likely have more money in your checking account than they have seen their entire lives.
Even if you have nothing, a single paycheck at minimum wage is more than billions of the developing world see in an entire year. Why does the market value your luxuries over "the lives of the African villages?"
The problem isn't that hipsters have iPods, that you're a hypocrite, or even that I'm a prick - we grow more than enough to feed everyone on the planet. Markets are merely choices - our hypothetical hipster can choose to buy an iPod, feed Africa, or do something else entirely because of our market system. The real problem is that, for much of the developing world, there is no choice - they have no such market.
Large swaths of Africa lack the requisite institutions for a free market - things like a functioning government. Were corruption and genocide to disappear overnight, Africa would still be locked out of the developed world's market because of our government, its tariffs, and its subsidies.
Not all the iPods in the world, nor even Cupertino, can fix all of that.
Windows 7 is Vista; they have the same kernel.
I'm surprised you find Ubuntu with "jerky audio" and "crappy webcam" is better than Vista - all of those work out of the box on Vista laptops. Then again, it seems invoking "m$" is still worth a +1, Insightful around here.
I'm thinking you just shouldn't be allowed near computers considering that you couldn't get Vista or Ubuntu working.
That is precisely what the rest of the AV industry needs to peddle. If you can't boot to a clean environment, you're just screwed, whether it be virus problems, or any number of other problems.
I actually wonder why more don't do this. Back when I ran a brand-new copy of Windows 98, my copy of McAfee (I was young and didn't know any better!) came with a boot floppy for just that purpose. Surely with Windows PE the whole process would be trivial - boot to the PE, download the most recent AV signatures, and scan away. You wouldn't even have to periodically refresh the signatures on your floppy.
And, Steam only does that if:
1) The game is set to be always kept up to date, or failing that
2) You started steam in online mode.
1) Uncheck "always keep this game up to date" for games you don't want kept up to date.
2) Hit "Steam => Go Offline" if you want Steam to stay in offline mode.
Penny stocks don't need fat-fingering to be incredibly volatile. E-mail pump-and-dump probably influences their prices more.
You just described the plot of Gundam 00.
I can only speak for how it works on prepaid; prior I had an "unlimited" plan.
You get a notification that you have a message, and it docks you 1/3 of a minute to "read" it. Which is great, because I read my SMS on Google Voice and not on my phone.
Even if you don't have an unlimited plan, receiving is free. Reading the message will cost you. Until you do, you merely get to see who it was from.
Your understanding of "real-world" problems ends at calling people "twatstains." "We should be angry at people who offer money instead of those who take it" is an infantile thesis that does nothing to solve "real-world" problems.
The problem you are grasping at is called "regulatory capture." Your thesis is "it's bad and it shouldn't happen." Well, good luck with that.
I'm not going to play the last-post-wins game. Come back when you grow up.
And that's an interesting dichotomy. We have more options than 1) support the government's goals exactly as they are right now, or 2) dissolve the government.
You say anger at the government is misdirected because 1) government will always be corruptible, and 2) it's really corporate money anyway. If government can't be faulted for corruption because it's an intractable part of its existence, why are corporations faulted for having money? In fact, money is the reason for a corporation to exist; the same can't be said for government.
Again - it's a strange worldview where corporations and corporations only are worthy of anger.
It's "hard to grasp" because your call is to "stop fighting government. start fighting corporations."
If The Corporations are to be the only target of our anger, that means the government has to be beyond reproach - which it obviously is not. Anger against government is therefore not misdirected.
I'm arguing that you can't argue corporations are entirely to blame for all of our problems. If government is corruptible, they share blame for corruption - especially when they make the rules.
"Idealistic platitudes?" You argue that government is perfect, beyond reproach, and responsible for all progress. Anything bad is entirely the fault of the corporation.
I haven't heard anything like that since the rage-against-the-machine Luddites of the industrial revolution.
0.1% corruption is better than 10% corruption, but both are unacceptable from men who have a monopoly on force and create the rules by which we all have to live.
Again, if government has to be incorruptible to be useful, we're doomed.
The post I was replying to was arguing that we should hate corporations and corporations exclusively because they corrupted the government.
My argument is just that if only an incorruptible government is good, we're doomed.
That's why I said, "given the legitimacy of both." If you assume one or both are illegitimate, the question's a moot point.