You're welcome to come to Canada or take a trip to the UK anytime you want to see the "benefits" of not-for-profit healthcare. Let me know when you feel like waiting a month or so for a MRI or longer, unless it's serious.
A relative of mine in the US currently has a 3-week wait just to get a physical from her primary care physician to get a knee operated on. I don't know if that's unusual, but that's my anecdote.
Madoff only went to jail because he ripped off rich people.
Now you're moving the goalposts.
The ones that stole so much they crashed the worldwide economy got bonuses.
You seem to think it was just a few people that "stole". In actuality, it was a giant culture of greed, from little people to people at the top. People buying houses they couldn't afford, people selling houses to people who couldn't afford them, incompetent finance guys who believed in formulas over good business sense, and sellers of repackaged shit like Goldman who sold to the greedy finance guys.
Yeah, a few times Google has legally pressed back against government requests for data. That's great for marketing, but in the end, you let them fool you into a false level of comfort.
Lock that theif up, they shouldnt be left to wander about society.
Please do, and put the kid in a social welfare program. Probably won't be doing any worse than with the losers he's with.
Especailly when they are taking money out of the hands of people who dont have enough money
Maybe if you owned a store and tried running it yourself you wouldn't be so cavalier about people stealing shit from you. Until then it's always some rich asshole who can afford to have their shit stolen. In reality, these stores are often run by local owners and barely getting by.
disrespecting the government by not appreciating what aid we give them
You don't need to steal food to get fed in this country.
Down with the Liberals trying to balance out what they claim to be a shit hole of greed and narrowmindedness!
Give up your shit to every fucker that decides he wants what somebody else has.
Internet vigilantism can't be nipped as long as "tough on crime" remains popular, since it's the same thing in different guise: people like letting their sadistic impulses out every now and then, and if they can pretend they're doing it for the sake of justice it's all the more enjoyable.
Liberal bullshit gets +4 Insightful on Slashdot. Maybe the people who want to be tough on crime actually are pissed off about being victims of crime? Just the other day my neighbor had something stolen from his property. If you're a thief you shouldn't be left to wander about society. Tough on crime means "lock the fuckers up", not lynch mob them.
Let's also be fair - the Bill Gates of the 80s and 90s is not the Bill Gates of today.
Yeah, now he's an old man concerned about dying and his reputation.
Where was Bill Gates when Microsoft and Intel were trying to undercut the One Laptop Per Child movement?
What kind of person is Bill Gates when he buys up some awesome Feynman lectures and decides to only release them on a proprietary Windows format, that being Microsoft's latest attempt at the time to own the Web?
Fuck Bill Gates. Hopefully his money will be used for some good, but the man is still an asshole.
There's even a $150000 prize on the first person or group to come up with a prime number that is at least 100000000 digits long. If generating large primes is easy, what are you waiting for?
Oh, so you're only asking for a prime number with 100 million digits? Yes, if you make the number large enough, many algorithms that are O(N) are infeasible in practice. In the meantime, as far as I know there is no practical reason to need primes of this size.
Please note the first two will get you in trouble in the US well
Please, there is no law against "insulting" somebody in the US. Comedians make their living at it.
You can curse as you want in TV, you can say shit, you can show nipples
You've got us there, but these days broadcast TV is not nearly as significant as it used to be. There's plenty of places to get your boobs or swears on television or elsewhere.
you can talk bad of the church if you want to. Try that in america and see how you literally can cried down (not from the law but from many part of society). Chances are high a quite number of disturbed people will demand you get killed.
People bad-mouth the "church" all the time, and here I mean religion in general because there is no singular "church" in the United States. There are no lynch mobs out for these people. One Muslim idiot made some threats against the South Park creators and that made the news, and that idiot was arrested and sentenced.
I thought your question was pretty goofy, and he skewered it pretty well. Your strawman interpretation of his response is as goofy as the original question. You babble on about private industry versus government and the merits of capitalism. His answer and your original question had nothing to do with that. Here's his answer again for clarity:
"You ask whether, given a choice, I would put more resources into space or AI. My answer is that either choice would be stupid. Politicians always want to make such choices too soon, because they imagine they can pick winners. Usually they pick losers. The only way to improve the chances for finding winners is to keep all the choices open and try them all. That is particularly true for space and AI, which are not really competing with each other. They are done by different kinds of people in different kinds of enterprise. Both can and should be supported. It would be totally stupid to starve one and over-feed the other."
I've bolded the parts which completely contradicts your interpretation of his response.
Were they ever commonly exchanged as currency? Or has it always just ended up as collectors items?
this century in grains of gold
There's your utopian society operating on gold. People ruining the environment and barely surviving and others starving. That's not to say gold is the fault, as society obviously failed before that, but it hasn't lead to a good outcome, either.
I have some of my money in that bank specifically so that I can use the credit card around the world.
So in other words, you don't trade in physical gold, only gold promises in exchange for real money, the kind that is actually accepted around the world.
no, I don't want anything, my point is that saying that "there is not enough gold" is invalid.
You can't argue a system is valid and preferred and then simultaneously claim you don't want it. There is not enough gold to go around, only paper promises of gold.
Debt is not money, debt is promise of money in the future. Promise of money may or may not be fulfilled.
Money, whether gold or fiat paper or promissory notes, is only useful as a medium of exchange if it can be converted to something I actually need in place of some shiny metal -- that is, a debt that can be exchanged for something of value.
So if there is 1 Trillion dollars and 10 tons of gold, then you have that relation of dollars to gold and there is enough gold.
But this is just the gold standard all over again, a complete failure if you actually cared about gold. "This time for sure!" ?
to me gold itself is money.
Except you don't actually use it. You're using the electronic version of gold promissory notes.
Today using gold as money is easier than ever before in history given our ability to move information as electrons around.
I could have said the same thing about the printing press.
No, I mean well before that, and you know it. When were people last commonly exchanging actual, physical, standard units of gold around?
bank notes are 1:1 ounces, but if a bank prints more of them than there are, then it's theft. People dealt with that for a long time, today you can have a gold backed debit and credit cards.
Yes, there's a very, very long history of such theft, so why do you think things would end any differently? Why are you confident in your "gold backed" cards? The world runs on credit, credit = debt, debt = money. I'm sure you've seen the YouTube video. This credit cycle always ends in some kind of crash and re-adjustment.
We are only talking about revaluation of paper against gold, the same amount of gold that exists today can represent 1 dollar or 1 quadrillion dollars, the nominal paper representation is irrelevant.
Bizarre, so you explicitly want a gold-backed standard and the trading of notes. You end up with the same inflation via re-evaluation that you decried earlier.
A seriously government connected banker steals ASSIGNED people's gold bars (gold bars that have serial numbers that are assigned to specific account holders) [..] So what is the LESSON that is learned?
For you, apparently none, because you believe in your "gold backed" credit/debit cards.
But silver is just a benchmark - we could use something else. Perhaps bitcoin even.
Why would you use any of those things instead of looking at basic necessities? Why don't you compare the price of a loaf of bread or a gallon of milk, for example? I don't give two shits about gold or silver.
By the way, that's a big reason as to why I only sees gold as real money, something that cannot be 'revalued' by gov't in a heartbeat.
Anything can be used as "real" money, as it's all entirely a fiction of society in the first place. Some objects make better currency than others.
Gold has its own problems. A big one is that nobody ever really trades gold, they always trade paper notes that represent the gold, and you're back to paper currency (or the electronic version of it) again. Another problem with gold is that there really isn't enough of it around to be used as an everyday currency.
You also mentioned Cyprus, and that kind of bank taxation could have just as easily have happened with gold, unless you kept it safe yourself, which you could have done with paper currency too.
But go ahead, keep on acting like a gold bug and talk about "real" money.
It would be more of an experiment if the experimenters were disinterested observers. Instead the early adopters and creators stand to make a whole lot of money from this if they can convince people to legitimize the system.
To play devil's advocate, from their point of view it was a legitimate effort to put forward a new system, one that at least on some level is working. As for the windfall the creators and early adopters would get (assuming they kept their bitcoins), that's no different than any innovators typically get. A good example would be one of the credit card networks like Visa.
From my point of view, the problems are too big for me to take it seriously, and like you I'm bothered by the huge head start the early adopters have gained. However, if something better comes along and actually replaces Bitcoin, having learned some lessons and copied some ideas, then Bitcoin deserves a lot of credit for blazing a trail.
I have several problems with it, and have made many negative posts about it, but at this point I consider it an interesting early experiment with digital currency, one that will be the seed for something better down the line.
It's really not "huge compensation" until they've scaled their organization to thousands of employees around the world, publishing thousands of journals & tens of thousands of books.
You are backing up the argument made in the article, which is that they jacked up prices and profit margins by becoming a big player in an inelastic market:
"Companies like Elsevier developed in the 1960s and 1970s. They bought academic journals from the non-profits and academic societies that ran them, successfully betting that they could raise prices without losing customers. Today just three publishers, Elsevier, Springer and Wiley, account for roughly 42% of all articles published in the $19 billion plus academic publishing market for science, technology, engineering, and medical topics. University libraries account for 80% of their customers. Since every article is published in only one journal and researchers ideally want access to every article in their field, libraries bought subscriptions no matter the price. From 1984 to 2002, for example, the price of science journals increased nearly 600%. One estimate puts Elsevier's prices at 642% higher than industry-wide averages.
These providers also bundle journals together. Critics argue that this forces libraries to buy less prestigious journals to gain access to indispensable offerings. There is no set cost for a bundle, instead providers like Elsevier structure plans in response to each institution's past history of subscriptions."
On a per-unit basis, their profits are pretty modest.
But on a profit margin basis, they are very big:
"Another [means of analysis] is to look at their profit margins. Elsevier's profit margins of 36% are well above the average of 4%-5% for the periodical publishing business. Its hard to imagine that no one could do the centuries old business of publishing papers at lower margins."
Really, this isn't exactly "fuck you" money that's being gouged out of every researcher.
Slashdot Mirror
You're welcome to come to Canada or take a trip to the UK anytime you want to see the "benefits" of not-for-profit healthcare. Let me know when you feel like waiting a month or so for a MRI or longer, unless it's serious.
A relative of mine in the US currently has a 3-week wait just to get a physical from her primary care physician to get a knee operated on. I don't know if that's unusual, but that's my anecdote.
What comes to Bill Gates, most of his fortune is held in Cascade Investment LLC
That should read, "When it comes to Bill Gates..."
Madoff only went to jail because he ripped off rich people.
Now you're moving the goalposts.
The ones that stole so much they crashed the worldwide economy got bonuses.
You seem to think it was just a few people that "stole". In actuality, it was a giant culture of greed, from little people to people at the top. People buying houses they couldn't afford, people selling houses to people who couldn't afford them, incompetent finance guys who believed in formulas over good business sense, and sellers of repackaged shit like Goldman who sold to the greedy finance guys.
For any privacy issues theyve had, there is NOTHING in Google's history that makes me think they would spill data to the government.
You're rather naive. Google follows the laws of the countries they operate in: How the FBI uses the Patriot Act to get info on Google users
Yeah, a few times Google has legally pressed back against government requests for data. That's great for marketing, but in the end, you let them fool you into a false level of comfort.
Reselling games is stupid and always has been.
Because you say so? I've sold many games for around half-price, games that otherwise would have sat collecting dust.
Gamestop brainwashed many people like you.
GameStop being a terrible place to buy or sell used games. EBay is a much better deal, for both the buyer and seller.
less than $100 million.
Bernie Madoff
FTFY
Fuck off.
If you can take downmods, then just post your statement without invoking the reverse-mod pleading.
In a more rational world, we'd try to find ways to get low crime rates without spending too much.
I'm all for it, if it actually lowers costs. But do note that other countries put their people in prison for stealing.
Lock that theif up, they shouldnt be left to wander about society.
Please do, and put the kid in a social welfare program. Probably won't be doing any worse than with the losers he's with.
Especailly when they are taking money out of the hands of people who dont have enough money
Maybe if you owned a store and tried running it yourself you wouldn't be so cavalier about people stealing shit from you. Until then it's always some rich asshole who can afford to have their shit stolen. In reality, these stores are often run by local owners and barely getting by.
disrespecting the government by not appreciating what aid we give them
You don't need to steal food to get fed in this country.
Down with the Liberals trying to balance out what they claim to be a shit hole of greed and narrowmindedness!
Give up your shit to every fucker that decides he wants what somebody else has.
Internet vigilantism can't be nipped as long as "tough on crime" remains popular, since it's the same thing in different guise: people like letting their sadistic impulses out every now and then, and if they can pretend they're doing it for the sake of justice it's all the more enjoyable.
Liberal bullshit gets +4 Insightful on Slashdot. Maybe the people who want to be tough on crime actually are pissed off about being victims of crime? Just the other day my neighbor had something stolen from his property. If you're a thief you shouldn't be left to wander about society. Tough on crime means "lock the fuckers up", not lynch mob them.
My first thought was "uncanny valley". The people don't even look real.
Huh? The people look real, it's just the lighting seems a bit strange.
Let's also be fair - the Bill Gates of the 80s and 90s is not the Bill Gates of today.
Yeah, now he's an old man concerned about dying and his reputation.
Where was Bill Gates when Microsoft and Intel were trying to undercut the One Laptop Per Child movement?
What kind of person is Bill Gates when he buys up some awesome Feynman lectures and decides to only release them on a proprietary Windows format, that being Microsoft's latest attempt at the time to own the Web?
Fuck Bill Gates. Hopefully his money will be used for some good, but the man is still an asshole.
There's even a $150000 prize on the first person or group to come up with a prime number that is at least 100000000 digits long. If generating large primes is easy, what are you waiting for?
Oh, so you're only asking for a prime number with 100 million digits? Yes, if you make the number large enough, many algorithms that are O(N) are infeasible in practice. In the meantime, as far as I know there is no practical reason to need primes of this size.
Please note the first two will get you in trouble in the US well
Please, there is no law against "insulting" somebody in the US. Comedians make their living at it.
You can curse as you want in TV, you can say shit, you can show nipples
You've got us there, but these days broadcast TV is not nearly as significant as it used to be. There's plenty of places to get your boobs or swears on television or elsewhere.
you can talk bad of the church if you want to. Try that in america and see how you literally can cried down (not from the law but from many part of society). Chances are high a quite number of disturbed people will demand you get killed.
People bad-mouth the "church" all the time, and here I mean religion in general because there is no singular "church" in the United States. There are no lynch mobs out for these people. One Muslim idiot made some threats against the South Park creators and that made the news, and that idiot was arrested and sentenced.
Brian Cox on the other hand seems much more opened, approachable and optimistically enthusiastic.
Yet every time I see his face I get the urge to punch it. Maybe it would help if I were British.
This is probably the worst written summary that I have ever read on Slashdot.
You must be new here.
I thought your question was pretty goofy, and he skewered it pretty well. Your strawman interpretation of his response is as goofy as the original question. You babble on about private industry versus government and the merits of capitalism. His answer and your original question had nothing to do with that. Here's his answer again for clarity:
"You ask whether, given a choice, I would put more resources into space or AI. My answer is that either choice would be stupid. Politicians always want to make such choices too soon, because they imagine they can pick winners. Usually they pick losers. The only way to improve the chances for finding winners is to keep all the choices open and try them all. That is particularly true for space and AI, which are not really competing with each other. They are done by different kinds of people in different kinds of enterprise. Both can and should be supported. It would be totally stupid to starve one and over-feed the other."
I've bolded the parts which completely contradicts your interpretation of his response.
30-40 years ago as coins [Krugerrand]
Were they ever commonly exchanged as currency? Or has it always just ended up as collectors items?
this century in grains of gold
There's your utopian society operating on gold. People ruining the environment and barely surviving and others starving. That's not to say gold is the fault, as society obviously failed before that, but it hasn't lead to a good outcome, either.
I have some of my money in that bank specifically so that I can use the credit card around the world.
So in other words, you don't trade in physical gold, only gold promises in exchange for real money, the kind that is actually accepted around the world.
no, I don't want anything, my point is that saying that "there is not enough gold" is invalid.
You can't argue a system is valid and preferred and then simultaneously claim you don't want it. There is not enough gold to go around, only paper promises of gold.
Debt is not money, debt is promise of money in the future. Promise of money may or may not be fulfilled.
Money, whether gold or fiat paper or promissory notes, is only useful as a medium of exchange if it can be converted to something I actually need in place of some shiny metal -- that is, a debt that can be exchanged for something of value.
So if there is 1 Trillion dollars and 10 tons of gold, then you have that relation of dollars to gold and there is enough gold.
But this is just the gold standard all over again, a complete failure if you actually cared about gold. "This time for sure!" ?
to me gold itself is money.
Except you don't actually use it. You're using the electronic version of gold promissory notes.
Today using gold as money is easier than ever before in history given our ability to move information as electrons around.
I could have said the same thing about the printing press.
you mean since 1971
No, I mean well before that, and you know it. When were people last commonly exchanging actual, physical, standard units of gold around?
bank notes are 1:1 ounces, but if a bank prints more of them than there are, then it's theft. People dealt with that for a long time, today you can have a gold backed debit and credit cards.
Yes, there's a very, very long history of such theft, so why do you think things would end any differently? Why are you confident in your "gold backed" cards? The world runs on credit, credit = debt, debt = money. I'm sure you've seen the YouTube video. This credit cycle always ends in some kind of crash and re-adjustment.
We are only talking about revaluation of paper against gold, the same amount of gold that exists today can represent 1 dollar or 1 quadrillion dollars, the nominal paper representation is irrelevant.
Bizarre, so you explicitly want a gold-backed standard and the trading of notes. You end up with the same inflation via re-evaluation that you decried earlier.
A seriously government connected banker steals ASSIGNED people's gold bars (gold bars that have serial numbers that are assigned to specific account holders) [..] So what is the LESSON that is learned?
For you, apparently none, because you believe in your "gold backed" credit/debit cards.
But silver is just a benchmark - we could use something else. Perhaps bitcoin even.
Why would you use any of those things instead of looking at basic necessities? Why don't you compare the price of a loaf of bread or a gallon of milk, for example? I don't give two shits about gold or silver.
By the way, that's a big reason as to why I only sees gold as real money, something that cannot be 'revalued' by gov't in a heartbeat.
Anything can be used as "real" money, as it's all entirely a fiction of society in the first place. Some objects make better currency than others.
Gold has its own problems. A big one is that nobody ever really trades gold, they always trade paper notes that represent the gold, and you're back to paper currency (or the electronic version of it) again. Another problem with gold is that there really isn't enough of it around to be used as an everyday currency.
You also mentioned Cyprus, and that kind of bank taxation could have just as easily have happened with gold, unless you kept it safe yourself, which you could have done with paper currency too.
But go ahead, keep on acting like a gold bug and talk about "real" money.
It would be more of an experiment if the experimenters were disinterested observers. Instead the early adopters and creators stand to make a whole lot of money from this if they can convince people to legitimize the system.
To play devil's advocate, from their point of view it was a legitimate effort to put forward a new system, one that at least on some level is working. As for the windfall the creators and early adopters would get (assuming they kept their bitcoins), that's no different than any innovators typically get. A good example would be one of the credit card networks like Visa.
From my point of view, the problems are too big for me to take it seriously, and like you I'm bothered by the huge head start the early adopters have gained. However, if something better comes along and actually replaces Bitcoin, having learned some lessons and copied some ideas, then Bitcoin deserves a lot of credit for blazing a trail.
I have several problems with it, and have made many negative posts about it, but at this point I consider it an interesting early experiment with digital currency, one that will be the seed for something better down the line.
Not that the IRS would do this, that's a gimmie.
That's a given. What you said, uncompressed, is "that's a give me".
It's really not "huge compensation" until they've scaled their organization to thousands of employees around the world, publishing thousands of journals & tens of thousands of books.
You are backing up the argument made in the article, which is that they jacked up prices and profit margins by becoming a big player in an inelastic market:
"Companies like Elsevier developed in the 1960s and 1970s. They bought academic journals from the non-profits and academic societies that ran them, successfully betting that they could raise prices without losing customers. Today just three publishers, Elsevier, Springer and Wiley, account for roughly 42% of all articles published in the $19 billion plus academic publishing market for science, technology, engineering, and medical topics. University libraries account for 80% of their customers. Since every article is published in only one journal and researchers ideally want access to every article in their field, libraries bought subscriptions no matter the price. From 1984 to 2002, for example, the price of science journals increased nearly 600%. One estimate puts Elsevier's prices at 642% higher than industry-wide averages.
These providers also bundle journals together. Critics argue that this forces libraries to buy less prestigious journals to gain access to indispensable offerings. There is no set cost for a bundle, instead providers like Elsevier structure plans in response to each institution's past history of subscriptions."
On a per-unit basis, their profits are pretty modest.
But on a profit margin basis, they are very big:
"Another [means of analysis] is to look at their profit margins. Elsevier's profit margins of 36% are well above the average of 4%-5% for the periodical publishing business. Its hard to imagine that no one could do the centuries old business of publishing papers at lower margins."
Really, this isn't exactly "fuck you" money that's being gouged out of every researcher.
Yes, it is. Try reading the article.