Uhh, maybe some points of disclosure about Greg Mankiw:
a) He is a former libertarian turned neocon Harvard economist. b) He is a Bush White House economic adviser, most famous for saying, "outsourcing is.. probably a plus in the long run" back in 2004. c) He is an elitist of the worst sort, a misanthrope who really believes (in the vein of Hamilton) that only very well-trained and well-educated people can possibly know what's best for America.
Please read his blog (gregmankiw.blogspot.com) for a sampling of what he has to say about Econ 101 (the Free Market will crush your feeble format!) and about people in general.
And we're taking what he says at face value? C'mon, people, this is exactly what he and Grover Norquist and other right-wing intellectuals want: they want a public that throws its hands up, says it can't decide on the issues because they are "too complicated", and begs and pleads for Mankiw and his ilk to come save them from themselves.
My system is specifically designed for one choice / multiple options. Take any sheet of paper, write down the numbers 1 through 10, then circle one. Go to a person and tell them you are going to hand them a piece of paper with the numbers 1 through 10 on it, and one of them is circled. Ask them to identify the number circled.
Then hand them the paper.
And yes, my numbers are based on only one choice. Do you know how many voting officials there are in my district? Over 400. In my district. And my district has very little chance of being controversial.
400 people, reading 1200 votes an hour, can read half a million votes every hour. If there were 12 issues on the ballot (I think there will be 9 on mine, but there are variations from city to city, county to county, etc.), with 350,000 votes on each one, that's 4.2 million total votes on all topics - that works out to a little over 8 hours of work.
My point was that with just 40 people, you could easily tally up all the votes in a district on any given topic in 1 day - oh, and you can count as votes are cast, too, not just at the end (in fact, they all do this.)
Having worked as a poll counter on 2 occasions (both at the county level), you are always assigned one question at a time. The sheet you mark on is already all tabled out for easy recording. So I get handed a stack of say 500 ballots, and I just start looking at question 4, and there are 3 choices for County Commissioner #4, and you start dividing them up into piles for Candidate A, Candidate B, Candidate C, write in maybe (there's not always a writein box.)
It takes like 10 minutes. Tops.
Then you count the piles. That takes even less time. Maybe a minute or two.
Lather. Rinse. Repeat.
And there are 400 of me in the district. It really just doesn't take that long to count votes, even on big long ballots with lots of options. It's ridiculously simple. AND IT CAN BE VERIFIED.
And there is always someone counting your tallies right behind you. And someone actually doing the summing. Generally we just do one recount, and we only do a second recount if the number is of consequence. So if someone wins in first count 61,000 to 35,000, and in second count 60,900 to 35,100 (this is on county level, so we're not adding to a state or national count) then we just report the second set and we're done with it. And how long does it take to count 50,000 votes with 20 people counting?
About 3 hours. That's how long it took in my first county vote. My second county vote? Well, only 25,000 people showed up. And we had 30 people helping count. So it took about an hour.
Let's assume we have the best turnout in a non-Presidential election in the past 40 years: 54%. That's highly unlikely - no one's really contesting in my district (our guy's an old time shoo-in) - but who knows? People might show up.
54% of 650,000 = 350,000, give or take a few.
How long would it take to count 350,000 votes for something?
Let's assume a person can count 1 vote every 3 seconds. Count it out loud. "1. 2. 3." It's pretty slow, actually, but let's be fair: some of our more civic-minded people are also some of our eldest, and they're a bit slow.
So 1 vote every 3 seconds, that's 20 votes a minute, which is 1200 votes an hour.
350,000 / 1200 = 291 man hours.
In 8 hour shifts, that's 37 people. And considering my district is spread out over 30 towns, that's roughly 1 person per city - 2 for some of the larger ones. Find 37 more people and you've even got redundancy.
And that's if you want it done in one day.
How about the Presidential election? 2004 was considered a banner year for turnout. Number of voters? 122,294,978. We'll round it down to 120 million. Again, 1200 votes an hour: that's 100,000 man hours.
8 hour shifts, that's 12,500 people. Again, that's in 8 hours, reading 1 vote every 3 seconds. If you got it down to 1 vote every 2.5 seconds (and trust me, when things are repetitive, it's easy to speed through), suddenly you only need 10,417 people.
You've just laid off 2,100 poll workers in half a second.
There is no reason at all for a backlash against paper balloting. It is quick enough. In fact that should be the motto for all paper balloting:
Uhh, the dodo went extinct because it was the only major source of food on the islands it inhabited. When all the Dutch and English explorers ended up in the vicinity, they went to town on the dodo (which was, stupidly, very unafraid of people) and it went extinct fairly quickly.
Not like the tuna at all. People were eating the dodos because they had to in order to survive. If tuna was the only source of food on earth, I'm sure $300/can would be a very reasonable price.
1) Tuna rises to $300 a can. 2) Demand for tuna drops to exactly 1 person, who still buys 1 can a week. (You somehow got the mistaken impression that people will pay $300 for tuna cans like they pay $3 now.) 3) Lower demand means lower supply needed. 4) Tuna populations rise.
Weight gain is caused by excess caloric intake. If I turned off "the munchies" in your head, you would eat less calories and gain less weight. That's what having a lower core temperature would do: it would reduce your body's unconscious need for food.
The better car analogy would be if you only needed half the gallons of gas to get the same distance in your car.
Lest we be fooled, lowering your body temperature as a warm-blooded person is impossible. What the researchers actually did was artificially inject a protein that when unfolding generated higher amounts of heat than normal proteins into the hypothalamus. This tricked the mouse's brain into lowering its internal thermostat.
This is more like holding a match to a thermometer which can trigger a fire alarm. It's fooling a local sensor to simulate a global sensation.
So you can't eat ice cream, or live in Antarctica, or whatever to fool it. You have to trick your brain. Even better, at this tricked out brain level, you need less calories to survive because your brain doesn't turn on its "must store fat" warning level as quickly. So this might be a good cure for obesity in the future.
But seriously, how cool is it that they can use a heat-generating protein to trick a mouse's brain? I love how neurology proves how gullible we are.
"The Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof; but the Congress may at any time by Law make or alter such Regulations, except as to the Places of chusing Senators."
Article I, section 5:
"Each House shall be the Judge of the Elections, Returns and Qualifications of its own Members, and a Majority of each shall constitute a Quorum to do Business; but a smaller Number may adjourn from day to day, and may be authorized to compel the Attendance of absent Members, in such Manner, and under such Penalties as each House may provide."
Article II, Section 2:
"Each State shall appoint, in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct, a Number of Electors, equal to the whole Number of Senators and Representatives to which the State may be entitled in the Congress: but no Senator or Representative, or Person holding an Office of Trust or Profit under the United States, shall be appointed an Elector."
Congress controls all the laws for electing members of Congress. And they have for the most part delegated this authority to state legislatures.
State legislatures control choosing the electors for the Electoral College. All of them have chosen to use direct democracy (one man, one vote) procedures, although some have chosen to split their electors proportionally (Maine) rather than an all-or-nothing.
The Australian ballot (secret ballot) was adopted in the national election in 1892 and has been a common element ever since. Nobody's planning on taking it away, and good luck trying to getting that past the courts today.
Vote buying is illegal in the US. So is vote selling. So is even offering to buy or sell votes. Giving a cigarette to a homeless guy to get him to vote is illegal.
You can drive people without transportation to a voting station, but you can't give them any literature (including audio and video) on the actual election.
These are all illegal, and while of course it no doubt happens (just like all other crimes), our country has recognized that this behavior is unacceptable.
That's hilarious. I'm bookmarking this and returning in 2010. I just want to see how "insightful" this is. Oh yeah, and the Army? They're waaaaay more beholden to America than the sitting President. Don't go putting crap on their shoulders.
Re:It's the all encompassing .com that's the probl
on
Utube Sues YouTube
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While on one hand I agree with you, the article here explains the problem with your point of view. So many domain-level URLs are either:
a) Nonsensical. "Google." "Yahoo." "eBay." b) Ambigious. "YouTube" (selling tubes?). "SlashDot" (typography?) "MySpace." (online storage?) c) Misleading. "WhiteHouse.com" (NSFW). d) Just some parked domain with a revenue-generating search. e) Typosquatting and fraud.
So, yes, maybe the price of, you know, avoiding issues like this uTube / YouTube thing is having an extra level of ICANN administration and 10 extra digits.
And maybe it isn't, but you can't simply go, "Well, I only want to dial 5 digit phone numbers" and make it true. When you get into big community efforts like the Web, you have to have some standardization, and a lot of time that means bureaucracy and a bit of redundancy.
See? That's an awesome site, but they have 2 major downsides:
1) Max 20 messages? When we all have 2+ gig accounts at gmail? Boo.
2) Addresses can be forged. That whole "prefix" thing is kind of a solution, but I think the better solution is to simply force the user to visit the email site and generate a new address first and *then* post it on a site (instead of being able to create it anywhere.) With the advent of Firefox Extensions and the ubiquitous Internet, this is really just one click away anyway.
But yeah, if they brought this into the 21st century, that'd be my idea in a nutshell. Good on you for pointing that out to me.
Given virtually limitless storage and the arcana of unique "net IDs", I have a proposed solution: infinite alias mailboxes.
So, you have an account with Gmail. You log in. You hit a button marked "Random Alias". Gmail gives you a unique e-mail address: b2563kfsgksg@gmail.com. You can then use this for posting on a webforum, or buying something, or subscribing to a newsletter - whatever. You can reuse this address whenever you want, and you can control where the mail from it goes: forwards straight to you, or goes into a folder marked for it, or deleted automatically, or whatever.
I think the addresses should only be used to receive mail (but this might cause issues - as you can tell, I haven't thought this one out entirely through.)
Give you regular address to people you trust - or don't, give them a dummy address, too. What does it matter? In fact, why even have a "regular address"? As long as anybody you need to contact you has a method to contact you, you're good to go. You could even coordinate your different projects and contacts by email address (this is just a side benefit, and might not exist at all. The key here is killing spam, not saving your life.)
All of those one-time address stops that destroy your account after it's created are on the right track, but not quite good enough. We also need accounts we can dispose of at our own discretion, too.
Everybody already has their separate spam accounts and e-mail addresses that they use when they don't want to possible get spammed or hassled by something they otherwise want. Why not make these so easy to create as to make any single e-mail address worthless to a spammer? You can also easily spot the people selling your address to spammers by how your address ends up on these lists. Maybe even make it so that if one account gets X% spam, it gets trashed automatically (you get an e-mail notice about the destruction.)
The major hurdle, of course, is getting providers onboard. There are other issues, too, and I'll let you guys flame me into nothing with them. But one of the major obstacles on the infamous "Your Spam Solution Won't Work" list is:
"temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome"
I propose that if this statement were no longer true, then almost none of the other issues on the list are relevant.
Of course I agree with the great "Your Idea To Fight Spam Won't Work" cookie cutter doc, but I take issue with one aspect of it - indeed, the chief aspect of the proposed solution:
The "enteral arms race of a filtering application." I mean, on one hand, sure, that's not the ideal solution, and it has its share of issues and kinks that need to be ironed out.
But on the other hand, doesn't this really seem like the ultime answer to spam anyway? From a practical standpoint, we just need to continually and vigilantly improve our filtering applications, constantly moving with the tide of spam, and doing the best with what we can.
This really is the only solution that is guaranteed to *reduce* spam (though obviously not to cure it) short of draconian governmental measures to limit computer ownership and usage. It really is a viable solution, in that it can produce results (certainly it's better than no filter at all.) And I think that from an open-source "many eyes makes all things shallow" perspective, this is a pretty stalwart defense.
It won't eliminate spam - I'm not even so sure eliminating the financial advantages of spam will eliminate spam - but it's a proven defense. Putting it on the "bad things about a SPAM solution" list is wrong.
But there is a happy medium out there, and people will flock to the next level up.
For less than $10,000, you could have a high-quality, professional 1080p HD camera with great lenses, a nice professional lighting setup, a sound mixer, wireless microhpones, a high-quality editing bay, some good software, and one of those fancy French berets directors used to wear. And of course, if you know how to cut corners (or are willing to sacrifice some quality), that number could easily move down to $5 - $6,000.
You could shoot a high-quality 5 to 10 minute video in 3 days on a very limited budget. Edit it, do some post production, compose some music, and put one out every week.
If you could pull in even $500 a week in ad revenue for each video from GooTube (or whoever), that's $25K a year (minus your initial investment) to do something really fun, creative, and be your own boss.
My wife works in the film industry. She's 24, she mostly does low-budget production work (commercials, film festival projects, etc) and she pulls in maybe $1200 a month (I've got the steady gig.) When times are thin, if she could go out, shoot a film, put it on GooTube, and pull down ad revenue for it - even $50 - that'd be a nice night out for the two of us.
I think every 20something filmmaker should jump on this as an opportunity to be creative, independent, and really make a name for themselves now. All of this stuff would be great on a production reel when applying for other jobs or trying to break into the larger industry scene.
Oh, and what exactly are all of those Vs attacking that AV vendors want to have a shot at? Microsoft software, that's what.
I can understand most of the antitrust stuff - Internet browsers, accounting software, Office programs, etc - but AV software is unique because it is protecting another piece of software. It cannot exist in a vacuum - some other piece of software must exist before AV software can exist.
In this case, it's Microsoft software. I don't necessarily believe that Microsoft supplying their own AV software to their own OS is anti-competitive. You may disagree, but this is certainly a major point in MS's favor. I'd like to see the lawyerese surrounding this point before deciding.
And to get at the heart of the matter, what we as a society (indeed, a world community almost) are saying is, "You have a monopoly on OSes. You make *so damn much* money on your monopoly, that you don't need any more monopolies."
And if you agree with that statement - that one monopoly is enough for any company - then you are right with God.
Whether this is true or not remains to be seen. But we have made our bed.
Utility isn't rational. It's about preference, which has no basis in rationality.
Let's you say you need a new watch, and you have $50 to spend. (You won't need the $50 to pay your gas bill tomorrow or anything, so feel free to spend it all without consequence.) There are two watches available.
Watch A is an ordinary digital watch. It's got some basic features, a cheap strap, and that's it. It's $20.
Watch B is a much fancier watch - chronometer, altimeter, calculator, etc (but does it run Linux? - ed.). It's $50.
Finally, let's assume that you don't *need* any of the functions of watch B (there are many other products where it's easy to differentiate beween necessity and non-necessity - computer graphics cards, for example - but bear with me here).
So you can either have Watch A + $30 or Watch B. Which will you choose?
Any choice you make is subjective and arbitrary. Since there is no true "rational" basis for making either decision (indeed, two different people could make very good arguments for either choice), economists invented "utility", which is a measurable concept of satisfaction. This concept, of course, being subjective and arbitrary - but the key word is measurable.
Thus, you as the buyer have to say, "Will Watch B be the best way to spend the $30 I'd save by getting watch A?" So you think of how you might otherwise spend your $30 - maybe a new video game, or a date with your wife, or some nice slippers, or what*ever* - and you figure out how "happy" you'd be with your purchase. Rank every possible combination of purchases on a scale of 1 to 10, and then choose the highest one. (Notice: the "ranking" part is what makes these choices irrational. Of course, ranking this involves practical decisions - since I'm a Windows user, most Mac software products rank pretty low on my utility scale.)
In this case, the point is these people ranked these cards higher than they should have - and while it's true they may have thought they were getting a better deal than they were, that's no excuse for spending your dollars prematurely. Just as if Watch B's altimeter could only round off to the nearest mile.
And at the end of the day, your dollars are all you have in this scenario. The lesson? Don't buy products with a variable utility. In other words, make sure you know what you're buying. Caveat emptor. Old as civilization itself.
a) A deck of WoW UDE cards - throwing away the cards and hording points for a system not yet in place to spend the points online? b) A video game rental? c) 5 Crispy Chicken Sandwiches from Wendy's (pre-tax)? d) A share in Ford (they're hovering right around that)? e) Some cheap headphones? f) A 1 gig flash drive from TigerDirect (after rebate)? g) 5 lotto tickets? h) 5 songs on iTunes? i) 40 songs on AllOfMp3? j) any other thing on this planet you can get for $5?
Utility theory says that all of these are not equal to everyone. The major downside to spending the $5 is, of course, that you no longer have the $5, and the thing you have acquired may not be worth $5 to anyone else, so you can't always just "turn it back in" and magically get $5 again. It is that moment of choice which defines self utility. And frankly, people scarfing up these decks of cards placed an irrational (and needlessly high) value on these decks.
It's like playing the lotto. Irrationality is predictable, too, because self-utility is not a rational thing, but it can be measured all the same. Good marketing people know this.
Uhh, could you keep the crazy in that corner over there?
You don't think anyone should go to jail for inciting violence? Inciting violence is intent to cause a public disturbance - EVEN if the violence does not come to pass. That's just like the police stopping someone before they stab someone - it's still *attempted* murder.
Oh, I see your sig. You are a crazy anarchist. Never mind. Carry on then.
How can you, in the same breath, say "check out the 10th Amendment" and "the decision to ban abortions is a state issue."
The 10th Amendment was written to expressly state the obvious: that we, as human beings, are born with certain inalienable rights. We don't *need* the Constitution to tell us what our rights are. If something is a right, then it is a right bestowed upon us by our very existence, not a piece of a paper or a government.
Now, you may not believe that the right to medical privacy (or indeed, any privacy) is one of these rights. Jefferson wrote pretty clearly about the right to "life and liberty", and I'm sure they'd be astounded that the government wanted to pry into anyone's medical doings.
You come in here, waving the flag for strict constructionalists like Scalia, AND you try to rant about the 10th Amendment? The 10th Amendment is the ultimate amendment, because it says, "Hey, guess what, government? Just because we didn't write it in here doesn't mean you own it." Which is exactly what you propose at the very end. An abortion is NOT a state issue; it is an issue between a woman and her doctor. Period.
THAT, my friend, is what the 10th Amendment is all about. You are the very definition of a hypocrite.
I'm sorry, but the RIAA has been found guilty of price fixing twice in civil court. A buck a song is outrageous given the low overhead of online hosting + the fact that iTunes is making large bundles of money off music produced 10, 20, 30, and even 50 years ago. To suggest somehow $1 is the appropriate value for these songs is ridiculous.
Put plainly, market forces have not been put into play in an effective manner, primarily due to ITMS' DRM restrictions and the popularity of the iPod.
Anyone with any sort of music habit - indeed, any one who is remotely interested in listening to any music at all that you can't find on the radio dial - shouldn't have to rack up $50 *a month* to buy DefectiveByDesign, limited, controlled digital files.
Frankly put, $1 for 3 minutes of pop bliss isn't worth it. I would gladly - gladly - pay 15 cents for a permanent copy of, say, Duran Duran's Girls on Film. Maybe even 25 cents. That's tops, though. Without market forces (ie basic supply and demand curves), the RIAA is simply stagnating. They're relying primary on a paradigm shift which has moved the demand curve inwards quite a bit, but structurally they're treading water, and artists are getting turned off by that in a big way.
I went Googling to see if a bar association had ever been sued for antitrust, but typing in "bar association antitrust" in Google is probably the most worthless thing I have ever done.
Is 30 years some magic number in which a law gains legitimacy in the public circle? I didn't realize our legal system had a time component as well as a guilty/innocent, component.
"Objection, your honor. This law is what? 12 years old? And you expect my client to really appreciate its inclusion in the US Code? C'mon. C'moooooooon!"
Why must all elections for all offices local, city, county, state, and nationwide take place on the same day?
We try to saturate all of our voting into one day, and for what? Why not have 4 election days a year, instead of one. The national elections will still be in November. State elections in February. City and County elections in May. Local referendums, bonds, and other non-candidate-oriented votes in August.
All dates above are arbitrary (so is the first Tuesday in November.) We're not stupid, we can keep up with 4 days. And then we can use paper ballots, because counting is exponentially easier. Why are we so hard on ourselves for one week in November?
Slashdot Mirror
Uhh, maybe some points of disclosure about Greg Mankiw:
.. probably a plus in the long run" back in 2004.
a) He is a former libertarian turned neocon Harvard economist.
b) He is a Bush White House economic adviser, most famous for saying, "outsourcing is
c) He is an elitist of the worst sort, a misanthrope who really believes (in the vein of Hamilton) that only very well-trained and well-educated people can possibly know what's best for America.
Please read his blog (gregmankiw.blogspot.com) for a sampling of what he has to say about Econ 101 (the Free Market will crush your feeble format!) and about people in general.
And we're taking what he says at face value? C'mon, people, this is exactly what he and Grover Norquist and other right-wing intellectuals want: they want a public that throws its hands up, says it can't decide on the issues because they are "too complicated", and begs and pleads for Mankiw and his ilk to come save them from themselves.
Pathetic.
My system is specifically designed for one choice / multiple options. Take any sheet of paper, write down the numbers 1 through 10, then circle one. Go to a person and tell them you are going to hand them a piece of paper with the numbers 1 through 10 on it, and one of them is circled. Ask them to identify the number circled.
Then hand them the paper.
And yes, my numbers are based on only one choice. Do you know how many voting officials there are in my district? Over 400. In my district. And my district has very little chance of being controversial.
400 people, reading 1200 votes an hour, can read half a million votes every hour. If there were 12 issues on the ballot (I think there will be 9 on mine, but there are variations from city to city, county to county, etc.), with 350,000 votes on each one, that's 4.2 million total votes on all topics - that works out to a little over 8 hours of work.
My point was that with just 40 people, you could easily tally up all the votes in a district on any given topic in 1 day - oh, and you can count as votes are cast, too, not just at the end (in fact, they all do this.)
Having worked as a poll counter on 2 occasions (both at the county level), you are always assigned one question at a time. The sheet you mark on is already all tabled out for easy recording. So I get handed a stack of say 500 ballots, and I just start looking at question 4, and there are 3 choices for County Commissioner #4, and you start dividing them up into piles for Candidate A, Candidate B, Candidate C, write in maybe (there's not always a writein box.)
It takes like 10 minutes. Tops.
Then you count the piles. That takes even less time. Maybe a minute or two.
Lather. Rinse. Repeat.
And there are 400 of me in the district. It really just doesn't take that long to count votes, even on big long ballots with lots of options. It's ridiculously simple. AND IT CAN BE VERIFIED.
And there is always someone counting your tallies right behind you. And someone actually doing the summing. Generally we just do one recount, and we only do a second recount if the number is of consequence. So if someone wins in first count 61,000 to 35,000, and in second count 60,900 to 35,100 (this is on county level, so we're not adding to a state or national count) then we just report the second set and we're done with it. And how long does it take to count 50,000 votes with 20 people counting?
About 3 hours. That's how long it took in my first county vote. My second county vote? Well, only 25,000 people showed up. And we had 30 people helping count. So it took about an hour.
About an hour.
Seriously.
My district has roughly 650,000 voters in it.
Let's assume we have the best turnout in a non-Presidential election in the past 40 years: 54%. That's highly unlikely - no one's really contesting in my district (our guy's an old time shoo-in) - but who knows? People might show up.
54% of 650,000 = 350,000, give or take a few.
How long would it take to count 350,000 votes for something?
Let's assume a person can count 1 vote every 3 seconds. Count it out loud. "1. 2. 3." It's pretty slow, actually, but let's be fair: some of our more civic-minded people are also some of our eldest, and they're a bit slow.
So 1 vote every 3 seconds, that's 20 votes a minute, which is 1200 votes an hour.
350,000 / 1200 = 291 man hours.
In 8 hour shifts, that's 37 people. And considering my district is spread out over 30 towns, that's roughly 1 person per city - 2 for some of the larger ones. Find 37 more people and you've even got redundancy.
And that's if you want it done in one day.
How about the Presidential election? 2004 was considered a banner year for turnout. Number of voters? 122,294,978. We'll round it down to 120 million. Again, 1200 votes an hour: that's 100,000 man hours.
8 hour shifts, that's 12,500 people. Again, that's in 8 hours, reading 1 vote every 3 seconds. If you got it down to 1 vote every 2.5 seconds (and trust me, when things are repetitive, it's easy to speed through), suddenly you only need 10,417 people.
You've just laid off 2,100 poll workers in half a second.
There is no reason at all for a backlash against paper balloting. It is quick enough. In fact that should be the motto for all paper balloting:
PAPER Balloting: It's Quick Enough.(TM)
Uhh, the dodo went extinct because it was the only major source of food on the islands it inhabited. When all the Dutch and English explorers ended up in the vicinity, they went to town on the dodo (which was, stupidly, very unafraid of people) and it went extinct fairly quickly.
Not like the tuna at all. People were eating the dodos because they had to in order to survive. If tuna was the only source of food on earth, I'm sure $300/can would be a very reasonable price.
Seriously, is that the best retort you've got?
The key word in your sentence is "if".
1) Tuna rises to $300 a can.
2) Demand for tuna drops to exactly 1 person, who still buys 1 can a week. (You somehow got the mistaken impression that people will pay $300 for tuna cans like they pay $3 now.)
3) Lower demand means lower supply needed.
4) Tuna populations rise.
It's amazing, economics.
Weight gain is caused by excess caloric intake. If I turned off "the munchies" in your head, you would eat less calories and gain less weight. That's what having a lower core temperature would do: it would reduce your body's unconscious need for food.
The better car analogy would be if you only needed half the gallons of gas to get the same distance in your car.
Lest we be fooled, lowering your body temperature as a warm-blooded person is impossible. What the researchers actually did was artificially inject a protein that when unfolding generated higher amounts of heat than normal proteins into the hypothalamus. This tricked the mouse's brain into lowering its internal thermostat.
This is more like holding a match to a thermometer which can trigger a fire alarm. It's fooling a local sensor to simulate a global sensation.
So you can't eat ice cream, or live in Antarctica, or whatever to fool it. You have to trick your brain. Even better, at this tricked out brain level, you need less calories to survive because your brain doesn't turn on its "must store fat" warning level as quickly. So this might be a good cure for obesity in the future.
But seriously, how cool is it that they can use a heat-generating protein to trick a mouse's brain? I love how neurology proves how gullible we are.
Article I, Section 4:
"The Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof; but the Congress may at any time by Law make or alter such Regulations, except as to the Places of chusing Senators."
Article I, section 5:
"Each House shall be the Judge of the Elections, Returns and Qualifications of its own Members, and a Majority of each shall constitute a Quorum to do Business; but a smaller Number may adjourn from day to day, and may be authorized to compel the Attendance of absent Members, in such Manner, and under such Penalties as each House may provide."
Article II, Section 2:
"Each State shall appoint, in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct, a Number of Electors, equal to the whole Number of Senators and Representatives to which the State may be entitled in the Congress: but no Senator or Representative, or Person holding an Office of Trust or Profit under the United States, shall be appointed an Elector."
Congress controls all the laws for electing members of Congress. And they have for the most part delegated this authority to state legislatures.
State legislatures control choosing the electors for the Electoral College. All of them have chosen to use direct democracy (one man, one vote) procedures, although some have chosen to split their electors proportionally (Maine) rather than an all-or-nothing.
The Australian ballot (secret ballot) was adopted in the national election in 1892 and has been a common element ever since. Nobody's planning on taking it away, and good luck trying to getting that past the courts today.
Vote buying is illegal in the US. So is vote selling. So is even offering to buy or sell votes. Giving a cigarette to a homeless guy to get him to vote is illegal.
You can drive people without transportation to a voting station, but you can't give them any literature (including audio and video) on the actual election.
These are all illegal, and while of course it no doubt happens (just like all other crimes), our country has recognized that this behavior is unacceptable.
That's hilarious. I'm bookmarking this and returning in 2010. I just want to see how "insightful" this is. Oh yeah, and the Army? They're waaaaay more beholden to America than the sitting President. Don't go putting crap on their shoulders.
While on one hand I agree with you, the article here explains the problem with your point of view. So many domain-level URLs are either:
a) Nonsensical. "Google." "Yahoo." "eBay."
b) Ambigious. "YouTube" (selling tubes?). "SlashDot" (typography?) "MySpace." (online storage?)
c) Misleading. "WhiteHouse.com" (NSFW).
d) Just some parked domain with a revenue-generating search.
e) Typosquatting and fraud.
So, yes, maybe the price of, you know, avoiding issues like this uTube / YouTube thing is having an extra level of ICANN administration and 10 extra digits.
And maybe it isn't, but you can't simply go, "Well, I only want to dial 5 digit phone numbers" and make it true. When you get into big community efforts like the Web, you have to have some standardization, and a lot of time that means bureaucracy and a bit of redundancy.
See? That's an awesome site, but they have 2 major downsides:
1) Max 20 messages? When we all have 2+ gig accounts at gmail? Boo.
2) Addresses can be forged. That whole "prefix" thing is kind of a solution, but I think the better solution is to simply force the user to visit the email site and generate a new address first and *then* post it on a site (instead of being able to create it anywhere.) With the advent of Firefox Extensions and the ubiquitous Internet, this is really just one click away anyway.
But yeah, if they brought this into the 21st century, that'd be my idea in a nutshell. Good on you for pointing that out to me.
Given virtually limitless storage and the arcana of unique "net IDs", I have a proposed solution: infinite alias mailboxes.
So, you have an account with Gmail. You log in. You hit a button marked "Random Alias". Gmail gives you a unique e-mail address: b2563kfsgksg@gmail.com. You can then use this for posting on a webforum, or buying something, or subscribing to a newsletter - whatever. You can reuse this address whenever you want, and you can control where the mail from it goes: forwards straight to you, or goes into a folder marked for it, or deleted automatically, or whatever.
I think the addresses should only be used to receive mail (but this might cause issues - as you can tell, I haven't thought this one out entirely through.)
Give you regular address to people you trust - or don't, give them a dummy address, too. What does it matter? In fact, why even have a "regular address"? As long as anybody you need to contact you has a method to contact you, you're good to go. You could even coordinate your different projects and contacts by email address (this is just a side benefit, and might not exist at all. The key here is killing spam, not saving your life.)
All of those one-time address stops that destroy your account after it's created are on the right track, but not quite good enough. We also need accounts we can dispose of at our own discretion, too.
Everybody already has their separate spam accounts and e-mail addresses that they use when they don't want to possible get spammed or hassled by something they otherwise want. Why not make these so easy to create as to make any single e-mail address worthless to a spammer? You can also easily spot the people selling your address to spammers by how your address ends up on these lists. Maybe even make it so that if one account gets X% spam, it gets trashed automatically (you get an e-mail notice about the destruction.)
The major hurdle, of course, is getting providers onboard. There are other issues, too, and I'll let you guys flame me into nothing with them. But one of the major obstacles on the infamous "Your Spam Solution Won't Work" list is:
"temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome"
I propose that if this statement were no longer true, then almost none of the other issues on the list are relevant.
Of course I agree with the great "Your Idea To Fight Spam Won't Work" cookie cutter doc, but I take issue with one aspect of it - indeed, the chief aspect of the proposed solution:
The "enteral arms race of a filtering application." I mean, on one hand, sure, that's not the ideal solution, and it has its share of issues and kinks that need to be ironed out.
But on the other hand, doesn't this really seem like the ultime answer to spam anyway? From a practical standpoint, we just need to continually and vigilantly improve our filtering applications, constantly moving with the tide of spam, and doing the best with what we can.
This really is the only solution that is guaranteed to *reduce* spam (though obviously not to cure it) short of draconian governmental measures to limit computer ownership and usage. It really is a viable solution, in that it can produce results (certainly it's better than no filter at all.) And I think that from an open-source "many eyes makes all things shallow" perspective, this is a pretty stalwart defense.
It won't eliminate spam - I'm not even so sure eliminating the financial advantages of spam will eliminate spam - but it's a proven defense. Putting it on the "bad things about a SPAM solution" list is wrong.
But there is a happy medium out there, and people will flock to the next level up.
For less than $10,000, you could have a high-quality, professional 1080p HD camera with great lenses, a nice professional lighting setup, a sound mixer, wireless microhpones, a high-quality editing bay, some good software, and one of those fancy French berets directors used to wear. And of course, if you know how to cut corners (or are willing to sacrifice some quality), that number could easily move down to $5 - $6,000.
You could shoot a high-quality 5 to 10 minute video in 3 days on a very limited budget. Edit it, do some post production, compose some music, and put one out every week.
If you could pull in even $500 a week in ad revenue for each video from GooTube (or whoever), that's $25K a year (minus your initial investment) to do something really fun, creative, and be your own boss.
My wife works in the film industry. She's 24, she mostly does low-budget production work (commercials, film festival projects, etc) and she pulls in maybe $1200 a month (I've got the steady gig.) When times are thin, if she could go out, shoot a film, put it on GooTube, and pull down ad revenue for it - even $50 - that'd be a nice night out for the two of us.
I think every 20something filmmaker should jump on this as an opportunity to be creative, independent, and really make a name for themselves now. All of this stuff would be great on a production reel when applying for other jobs or trying to break into the larger industry scene.
Oh, and what exactly are all of those Vs attacking that AV vendors want to have a shot at? Microsoft software, that's what.
I can understand most of the antitrust stuff - Internet browsers, accounting software, Office programs, etc - but AV software is unique because it is protecting another piece of software. It cannot exist in a vacuum - some other piece of software must exist before AV software can exist.
In this case, it's Microsoft software. I don't necessarily believe that Microsoft supplying their own AV software to their own OS is anti-competitive. You may disagree, but this is certainly a major point in MS's favor. I'd like to see the lawyerese surrounding this point before deciding.
And to get at the heart of the matter, what we as a society (indeed, a world community almost) are saying is, "You have a monopoly on OSes. You make *so damn much* money on your monopoly, that you don't need any more monopolies."
And if you agree with that statement - that one monopoly is enough for any company - then you are right with God.
Whether this is true or not remains to be seen. But we have made our bed.
Utility isn't rational. It's about preference, which has no basis in rationality.
Let's you say you need a new watch, and you have $50 to spend. (You won't need the $50 to pay your gas bill tomorrow or anything, so feel free to spend it all without consequence.) There are two watches available.
Watch A is an ordinary digital watch. It's got some basic features, a cheap strap, and that's it. It's $20.
Watch B is a much fancier watch - chronometer, altimeter, calculator, etc (but does it run Linux? - ed.). It's $50.
Finally, let's assume that you don't *need* any of the functions of watch B (there are many other products where it's easy to differentiate beween necessity and non-necessity - computer graphics cards, for example - but bear with me here).
So you can either have Watch A + $30 or Watch B. Which will you choose?
Any choice you make is subjective and arbitrary. Since there is no true "rational" basis for making either decision (indeed, two different people could make very good arguments for either choice), economists invented "utility", which is a measurable concept of satisfaction. This concept, of course, being subjective and arbitrary - but the key word is measurable.
Thus, you as the buyer have to say, "Will Watch B be the best way to spend the $30 I'd save by getting watch A?" So you think of how you might otherwise spend your $30 - maybe a new video game, or a date with your wife, or some nice slippers, or what*ever* - and you figure out how "happy" you'd be with your purchase. Rank every possible combination of purchases on a scale of 1 to 10, and then choose the highest one. (Notice: the "ranking" part is what makes these choices irrational. Of course, ranking this involves practical decisions - since I'm a Windows user, most Mac software products rank pretty low on my utility scale.)
In this case, the point is these people ranked these cards higher than they should have - and while it's true they may have thought they were getting a better deal than they were, that's no excuse for spending your dollars prematurely. Just as if Watch B's altimeter could only round off to the nearest mile.
And at the end of the day, your dollars are all you have in this scenario. The lesson? Don't buy products with a variable utility. In other words, make sure you know what you're buying. Caveat emptor. Old as civilization itself.
You have $5 in your hand. Do you buy:
a) A deck of WoW UDE cards - throwing away the cards and hording points for a system not yet in place to spend the points online?
b) A video game rental?
c) 5 Crispy Chicken Sandwiches from Wendy's (pre-tax)?
d) A share in Ford (they're hovering right around that)?
e) Some cheap headphones?
f) A 1 gig flash drive from TigerDirect (after rebate)?
g) 5 lotto tickets?
h) 5 songs on iTunes?
i) 40 songs on AllOfMp3?
j) any other thing on this planet you can get for $5?
Utility theory says that all of these are not equal to everyone. The major downside to spending the $5 is, of course, that you no longer have the $5, and the thing you have acquired may not be worth $5 to anyone else, so you can't always just "turn it back in" and magically get $5 again. It is that moment of choice which defines self utility. And frankly, people scarfing up these decks of cards placed an irrational (and needlessly high) value on these decks.
It's like playing the lotto. Irrationality is predictable, too, because self-utility is not a rational thing, but it can be measured all the same. Good marketing people know this.
Uhh, could you keep the crazy in that corner over there?
You don't think anyone should go to jail for inciting violence? Inciting violence is intent to cause a public disturbance - EVEN if the violence does not come to pass. That's just like the police stopping someone before they stab someone - it's still *attempted* murder.
Oh, I see your sig. You are a crazy anarchist. Never mind. Carry on then.
How can you, in the same breath, say "check out the 10th Amendment" and "the decision to ban abortions is a state issue."
The 10th Amendment was written to expressly state the obvious: that we, as human beings, are born with certain inalienable rights. We don't *need* the Constitution to tell us what our rights are. If something is a right, then it is a right bestowed upon us by our very existence, not a piece of a paper or a government.
Now, you may not believe that the right to medical privacy (or indeed, any privacy) is one of these rights. Jefferson wrote pretty clearly about the right to "life and liberty", and I'm sure they'd be astounded that the government wanted to pry into anyone's medical doings.
You come in here, waving the flag for strict constructionalists like Scalia, AND you try to rant about the 10th Amendment? The 10th Amendment is the ultimate amendment, because it says, "Hey, guess what, government? Just because we didn't write it in here doesn't mean you own it." Which is exactly what you propose at the very end. An abortion is NOT a state issue; it is an issue between a woman and her doctor. Period.
THAT, my friend, is what the 10th Amendment is all about. You are the very definition of a hypocrite.
I'm sorry, but the RIAA has been found guilty of price fixing twice in civil court. A buck a song is outrageous given the low overhead of online hosting + the fact that iTunes is making large bundles of money off music produced 10, 20, 30, and even 50 years ago. To suggest somehow $1 is the appropriate value for these songs is ridiculous.
Put plainly, market forces have not been put into play in an effective manner, primarily due to ITMS' DRM restrictions and the popularity of the iPod.
Anyone with any sort of music habit - indeed, any one who is remotely interested in listening to any music at all that you can't find on the radio dial - shouldn't have to rack up $50 *a month* to buy DefectiveByDesign, limited, controlled digital files.
Frankly put, $1 for 3 minutes of pop bliss isn't worth it. I would gladly - gladly - pay 15 cents for a permanent copy of, say, Duran Duran's Girls on Film. Maybe even 25 cents. That's tops, though. Without market forces (ie basic supply and demand curves), the RIAA is simply stagnating. They're relying primary on a paradigm shift which has moved the demand curve inwards quite a bit, but structurally they're treading water, and artists are getting turned off by that in a big way.
I went Googling to see if a bar association had ever been sued for antitrust, but typing in "bar association antitrust" in Google is probably the most worthless thing I have ever done.
Is 30 years some magic number in which a law gains legitimacy in the public circle? I didn't realize our legal system had a time component as well as a guilty/innocent, component.
"Objection, your honor. This law is what? 12 years old? And you expect my client to really appreciate its inclusion in the US Code? C'mon. C'moooooooon!"
Why must all elections for all offices local, city, county, state, and nationwide take place on the same day?
We try to saturate all of our voting into one day, and for what? Why not have 4 election days a year, instead of one. The national elections will still be in November. State elections in February. City and County elections in May. Local referendums, bonds, and other non-candidate-oriented votes in August.
All dates above are arbitrary (so is the first Tuesday in November.) We're not stupid, we can keep up with 4 days. And then we can use paper ballots, because counting is exponentially easier. Why are we so hard on ourselves for one week in November?