*sigh* Oh, alright. You got me. Based on one interpretation of one definition you gave, employer-provided health insurance really isn't "bizarre" in the sense that lots of people think it's a good idea. I guess I chose the wrong word, even though my meaning was completely clear. So, I take back my use of "bizarre", because you are correct: lots of people are stupid enough to think employers should provide health insurance in lieu of more money, while at the same time finding employer-provided groceries ridiculous.
Now, do you want to get into explaining what makes employer-provided health insurance fundamentally different from employer-provided food, etc., or would you prefer to avoid issues you're not smart enough to understand by jerking off to dictionaries?
Yep, as I predicted: you completely missed the fucking point. (And threw in a bizarre spiel about insufficiently high dividends -- an odd complaint from someone like you, but I digress.) Even if I accept that employers need "maintain their greatest capital asset", that doesn't explain why it should be limited to "health care". Employees need food too. And transportation. And all kinds of things. Why shouldn't the employer provide all of these things too?
I know: because the employer gives them "money" that they can use to "buy" those things. So, why can't the employer just give them "money" they can use to "buy" their own health insurance? Wait wait -- I know. You're going to say "but health care is EXPENSIVE". In doing so, you're going to completely forget about how the employer is already paying for it as a cost of hiring the employee, and the cost would show up the same whether that compensation were money or health insurance. Go ahead -- I want to point and laugh when you make that objection.
They pay decent wages to their employees, health benefits are the rule
What about car insurance? What about interior decorating? What about groceries? Does In'n'Out Burger provide these? No, of course they don't. You have a bizarre obsession with employers providing health insurance -- but not car insurance, interior decorating, or groceries.
What would be great is if the Wii could have some game where you strap Wiimotes to your arms and legs with some sort of holder and you could have more of a full-body dancing game that could detect your motions. I wonder if this arcade has or plans to have some game like that?
the only thing that's missing is the connected D-pad, making the PS controller suck and the SNES controller rock
Hold on -- don't get ahead of yourself. The PS controller (at least, using my PS2 controller as a reference) is connected, but that's a bad thing (and likewise for the SNES controller). When I use it for DDR (yeah yeah, it's just to practice rhythm), I can see how the D-pad is all one piece so pushing one will pull the others down. The middle part is just covered up, that's all. This causes problems for when I want to press right and left at the same time -- it's damn near impossible. They should make all buttons on the D-pad function independently, but neither the PS nor the SNES do that.
Actually, there's sort of a paradox or catch-22, or just something amusing going on in this respect. The "cleaners, clerks, and waitresses" generally aren't impressed by defined benefit plans. *As a general rule* those kinds of workers want their compensation NOW. So they really couldn't care less if their employers tanked -- they've received every penny they were promised.
So, it's a tough question -- is it "stupid" for a worker to "fail to see" the advantage of an employer pension? Even when that pension, you know, isn't going to be there?
Damn straight. I think pensions are offered to satisfy people with the whole "dependence mentality". "Oh, I'm incapable of saving my own money so I want my employer to provide all that." No, if you're contributing to a pension fund, give ME the money to invest instead. If the pension has a tax advantage, give MY savings the same tax advantage. It's ridiculous.
That said, they should still be held to honor every promise. If it breaks them -- good. Then maybe people will start learning how stupid these things are.
My sarcasm detector is off today. I'm assuming you're extending my critique to governmental practices through clever use of satire, rather than claiming that the pracitice of unfunded, undebited obligations is acceptable for both government *and* corporations, yes yes?
The issue of how to represent stock options (i.e., the *option* for an employee to buy stock at some pre-determined rate that may be below the market price, and may or may not be redeemed for stock) on a balance sheet is a difficult, and often debated one. Standards about how to represent them on a balance sheet have changed recently, and it's understandable about how there would be errors here. Even Apple screwed up this way (can't find the link, but it was on slashdot a month or so ago).
Why not focus on the REAL crime in accounting: the handling of pensions and health care obligations? For decades they were allowed to basically say, "hey, when it comes time to pay you, trust us, we'll have new revenues, and we'll pay you out of that". By not putting these obligations on the balance sheet now, millions of workers' pensions are at risk, and the Pension Benefit Guarantee Corporation may go bankrupt as corporations try to shuck defined benefit plans (which are stupid anyway, but I digress). For GM and I'm sure several others, the present value of these obligations would more than cancel out their entire book value, i.e., the nominal value of all assets they hold. Oops!
And this isn't about some high-paid employees getting a little extra cash. This is about *retirement money*. And they're still allowed to hide the true cost of these things.
It's totally unfair that some corporation can cut its prices just to make someone else's product look bad! Apple is DELIBERATELY trying to compete with another product. We need a law that says "No competing product my be cut in price within one month of the launch of a competing product." That will make the market fair.
I hate people who take a teensy bit of information out of context and act like they know the whole topic. In an unrelated matter:
Gas is price-inelastic. This means increasing the price has very little effect on how much is consumed
Yes, gas is price inelastic -- in the short term. You are correct that
SUV sales and gas sales have not been negatively impacted by the gasoline increases recently
I also do not turn my li'l car in and buy an SUV on every day when gas prices drop.
However, if people expect these to be permanent, *then* they start making long term adaptations. Now, if we have a gas tax, and use the proceeds to clean up or compensate the damage from pollution, and people still drive the same... er... what's the problem?
Okay, first of all -- hiring a mugger for each person and each election (your ID is unique to that election) tends to get expensive real quick.
Second, OVC is great, but I'm still putting too much trust in others without publicly auditable records.
"Age of Electronic voting?
on
Brave New Ballot
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
It seems based on the review that the best way to win "The Battle to Safeguard Democracy in the Age of Electronic Voting" would be to, you know, not be in the age of electronic voting. You know, not electronically vote. There's no way the cost savings can justify all the new opportunities for cheating that it allows.
Of course, I wouldn't be satisfied by anything but publishing the voters' choices. Not by name -- give them an anonymous unique voter ID so that they look at the database, they can say "ah, they got mine right".
You're still not listening. I'm not talking about, "okay, we'll give ourselves a fat markup -- just to save you from ALL that stress of haggling!" -- the "pre-negotiated discount price" you referred to. Look at what you said: "The reason no-hassle one price doesn't work is because buyers looking for a deal will take the no-hassle price into another dealer and they'll beat it."
Dude, if a dealer will deign to lower his price because you could confont him with the outside offer, he was charging an unjustified markup (in the age of the internet) to begin with! If a dealer was capable of lowering his price merely because you could confont him with an outside offer, that "pre-negotiated discount price" was too high to begin with.
The regulations restricting internet sales need to be lifted. We don't need "pre-negotiated discount prices". We don't need "no-haggle prices". We need to allow the real competition to actually happen.
I agree with a lot of what you're saying, but could you explain what's stopping you from starting your own worker-owned cooperative *right now*? Remember, removal of this barrier must not *also* significantly help "larger corporations" or else it wasn't much of a barrier. In other words, be careful not to say, "if I were to raise the capital from a large group of friends, they would hit me with $HORRENDOUS_TAX" wihout at least *checking* if large corporations pay the same tax.
I'm not trying to badger you, I would just like more elaboration on this point.
It's true that dealers will try to funnel all negotiations in that direction, but if you're firm they will negotiate price and finance interest rate separately (firm means be prepared to walk out). Get pre-approved financing from your bank or credit union and walk in prepared to pay cash. They'll still try to sell you their own financing, but if they beat the other rate, it's a bonus for you.
I understand all that, but I think you missed the central point:
You shouldn't have to "be firm" or whatever. You shouldn't have to get extensive training from your world-hardened father on how to drive a hard bargain. We have the internet now. People should be able to look at thousands of offers in minutes with ultra slim margins, but state legislatures pass special interest laws to fatten up the pockets of people using an outdated business model. I can get on ebay and look at hundreds of offers for other products and buy them without anyone's by-your-leave.
Believe me -- I wouldn't get my financing from some crook at a car dealership. I was just emphasizing the remaining "service" (and I use that term loosely) that car dealerships now have to offer.
Hi Colin. You don't surprise me. You somehow forgot to include all the entitlement spending (Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, welfare, etc.). You know, the stuff that would change the "defense" figure to more like 17%. Oh, that's right -- non-discretionary doesn't count. Because Congress is POWERLESS to cut Social Security benefits (except for hiking the retirement age and starting to tax benefits, which they already did).
(Not to trivialize defense spending of course -- in absolute terms, it's big. But somehow ignoring over half the budget isn't kosher either.)
Sorry for being a cynic, but I don't see how a decrease in financial services or car ads are a bad thing.
1) Cars: auto sales are currently a big cartel. Every state has regulations stopping or significantly shackling internet sales of new cars. All that auto dealerships now offer you is the degrading process of "oh, gee, I dunno, I'm gonna have to talk to my boss about that offer you just made" and "here is a payment plan we can offer you in which I'll only talk about the monthly payments and hide the effective 14% interest rate that amounts to".
2) The financial services industry basically revolves around convincing people to invest with them to "beat the market". They thrive on artificially increasing the complexity of investing. I've had a financial advisor tell me that my investment plan is going to look "totally different from the guy in the next cubicle". Yeah, same age, same investment horizon... whatever, dude. In reality, most of them can't "beat the market" and all you get is the honor of paying them usurious fees for their stock-picking "wisdom".
We really do need less of these ads. Is there something bigger I'm missing?
Er, I just think you need to be careful not to get ahead of yourself. Make sure that whatever comparison you're making is a fair, "apples-to-apples" comparison. That is, don't say, "in theory, communism works like [Garden of Eden], but look at these *practical* examples of capitalist failure". (That wasn't what you were doing here of course.) There, the problem is you need to compare theory to theory and practice to practice.
The problem of incomplete information for actors occurs in all economic systems, and its existence in one is not an indictment of that system. Libertarians for one don't claim that libertarian outcomes have some metaphysical superiority, just that they can't predictably be improved upon. You might be able to say, "well, obviously, obviously, in this particular instance, this particular set of market actors lacked this information, so if government just levied this eensy weensy tax and funded a campaign to tell them that information, that would yield a far superior outcome." But you would have to establish that the set of policies that led it to do that, if followed consistently, would improve over the broader society, not just that one case where the conclusion was more obvious.
Likewise, even if a potato information cartel could form, and important information about potatoes were somehow suppressed, that would at most mean that, as you said, with respect to potato information, the economy has become little more than communism, but would still be much better in all other goods.
Many objections to libertarian stem from these kinds of loaded comparisons. Yes, markets don't work as well as they could, the harder it is for information to get out. But unless some other economy manages that uncertainty, and those "search costs" better, it's not a strike against libertarianism.
Smoking kills about 400,000 Americans a year. Alcohol kills around 100,000 last I heard
Let's grant that for now. Look at it this way:
-Smokers kill themselves.
-Alcohol related deaths also involve other people.
If you smoke, I can ignore you at no risk to myself. If you drink and drive, you're using the same streets as I am. I become an unwilling participant in your riskiness.
(Yes, I know "second hand smoking kills". Actually, it "may" have a statistical correlation with killing. It certainly doesn't *directly* cause me to die on the spot. I am also more able to avoid smoky bars than public roads.)
Slashdot Mirror
Er... hate to break to you, but they reheat stuff in a microwave all the time. Just watch them when you get that chicken sandwich.
*sigh* Oh, alright. You got me. Based on one interpretation of one definition you gave, employer-provided health insurance really isn't "bizarre" in the sense that lots of people think it's a good idea. I guess I chose the wrong word, even though my meaning was completely clear. So, I take back my use of "bizarre", because you are correct: lots of people are stupid enough to think employers should provide health insurance in lieu of more money, while at the same time finding employer-provided groceries ridiculous.
Now, do you want to get into explaining what makes employer-provided health insurance fundamentally different from employer-provided food, etc., or would you prefer to avoid issues you're not smart enough to understand by jerking off to dictionaries?
Yep, as I predicted: you completely missed the fucking point. (And threw in a bizarre spiel about insufficiently high dividends -- an odd complaint from someone like you, but I digress.) Even if I accept that employers need "maintain their greatest capital asset", that doesn't explain why it should be limited to "health care". Employees need food too. And transportation. And all kinds of things. Why shouldn't the employer provide all of these things too?
I know: because the employer gives them "money" that they can use to "buy" those things. So, why can't the employer just give them "money" they can use to "buy" their own health insurance? Wait wait -- I know. You're going to say "but health care is EXPENSIVE". In doing so, you're going to completely forget about how the employer is already paying for it as a cost of hiring the employee, and the cost would show up the same whether that compensation were money or health insurance. Go ahead -- I want to point and laugh when you make that objection.
God damn you guys are funny.
They pay decent wages to their employees, health benefits are the rule
What about car insurance? What about interior decorating? What about groceries? Does In'n'Out Burger provide these? No, of course they don't. You have a bizarre obsession with employers providing health insurance -- but not car insurance, interior decorating, or groceries.
What would be great is if the Wii could have some game where you strap Wiimotes to your arms and legs with some sort of holder and you could have more of a full-body dancing game that could detect your motions. I wonder if this arcade has or plans to have some game like that?
the only thing that's missing is the connected D-pad, making the PS controller suck and the SNES controller rock
Hold on -- don't get ahead of yourself. The PS controller (at least, using my PS2 controller as a reference) is connected, but that's a bad thing (and likewise for the SNES controller). When I use it for DDR (yeah yeah, it's just to practice rhythm), I can see how the D-pad is all one piece so pushing one will pull the others down. The middle part is just covered up, that's all. This causes problems for when I want to press right and left at the same time -- it's damn near impossible. They should make all buttons on the D-pad function independently, but neither the PS nor the SNES do that.
Actually, there's sort of a paradox or catch-22, or just something amusing going on in this respect. The "cleaners, clerks, and waitresses" generally aren't impressed by defined benefit plans. *As a general rule* those kinds of workers want their compensation NOW. So they really couldn't care less if their employers tanked -- they've received every penny they were promised.
So, it's a tough question -- is it "stupid" for a worker to "fail to see" the advantage of an employer pension? Even when that pension, you know, isn't going to be there?
Since when does 'inside' an electronic device mean discussing peripherals and the on-screen menu?
Since "real-time weapon change" became a "new feature" -- that is, May '06.
Damn straight. I think pensions are offered to satisfy people with the whole "dependence mentality". "Oh, I'm incapable of saving my own money so I want my employer to provide all that." No, if you're contributing to a pension fund, give ME the money to invest instead. If the pension has a tax advantage, give MY savings the same tax advantage. It's ridiculous.
That said, they should still be held to honor every promise. If it breaks them -- good. Then maybe people will start learning how stupid these things are.
My sarcasm detector is off today. I'm assuming you're extending my critique to governmental practices through clever use of satire, rather than claiming that the pracitice of unfunded, undebited obligations is acceptable for both government *and* corporations, yes yes?
The issue of how to represent stock options (i.e., the *option* for an employee to buy stock at some pre-determined rate that may be below the market price, and may or may not be redeemed for stock) on a balance sheet is a difficult, and often debated one. Standards about how to represent them on a balance sheet have changed recently, and it's understandable about how there would be errors here. Even Apple screwed up this way (can't find the link, but it was on slashdot a month or so ago).
Why not focus on the REAL crime in accounting: the handling of pensions and health care obligations? For decades they were allowed to basically say, "hey, when it comes time to pay you, trust us, we'll have new revenues, and we'll pay you out of that". By not putting these obligations on the balance sheet now, millions of workers' pensions are at risk, and the Pension Benefit Guarantee Corporation may go bankrupt as corporations try to shuck defined benefit plans (which are stupid anyway, but I digress). For GM and I'm sure several others, the present value of these obligations would more than cancel out their entire book value, i.e., the nominal value of all assets they hold. Oops!
And this isn't about some high-paid employees getting a little extra cash. This is about *retirement money*. And they're still allowed to hide the true cost of these things.
Someone's priorities are out of order...
It's totally unfair that some corporation can cut its prices just to make someone else's product look bad! Apple is DELIBERATELY trying to compete with another product. We need a law that says "No competing product my be cut in price within one month of the launch of a competing product." That will make the market fair.
I'm surprised no one (in my search) has mentioned this now-undiscredited Scientific Theory. Somone want to edit the Wikipedia article?
I hate people who take a teensy bit of information out of context and act like they know the whole topic. In an unrelated matter:
... er ... what's the problem?
Gas is price-inelastic. This means increasing the price has very little effect on how much is consumed
Yes, gas is price inelastic -- in the short term. You are correct that
SUV sales and gas sales have not been negatively impacted by the gasoline increases recently
I also do not turn my li'l car in and buy an SUV on every day when gas prices drop.
However, if people expect these to be permanent, *then* they start making long term adaptations. Now, if we have a gas tax, and use the proceeds to clean up or compensate the damage from pollution, and people still drive the same
The targeted automakers are Ford Motor Co., General Motors Corp., Toyota Motor Corp., Chrysler Motors Corp., Honda Motor Co. and Nissan Motor Co.
Yeah, I always knew my Kia was safe for the environment.
Okay, first of all -- hiring a mugger for each person and each election (your ID is unique to that election) tends to get expensive real quick.
Second, OVC is great, but I'm still putting too much trust in others without publicly auditable records.
It seems based on the review that the best way to win "The Battle to Safeguard Democracy in the Age of Electronic Voting" would be to, you know, not be in the age of electronic voting. You know, not electronically vote. There's no way the cost savings can justify all the new opportunities for cheating that it allows.
Of course, I wouldn't be satisfied by anything but publishing the voters' choices. Not by name -- give them an anonymous unique voter ID so that they look at the database, they can say "ah, they got mine right".
You're still not listening. I'm not talking about, "okay, we'll give ourselves a fat markup -- just to save you from ALL that stress of haggling!" -- the "pre-negotiated discount price" you referred to. Look at what you said: "The reason no-hassle one price doesn't work is because buyers looking for a deal will take the no-hassle price into another dealer and they'll beat it."
Dude, if a dealer will deign to lower his price because you could confont him with the outside offer, he was charging an unjustified markup (in the age of the internet) to begin with! If a dealer was capable of lowering his price merely because you could confont him with an outside offer, that "pre-negotiated discount price" was too high to begin with.
The regulations restricting internet sales need to be lifted. We don't need "pre-negotiated discount prices". We don't need "no-haggle prices". We need to allow the real competition to actually happen.
I agree with a lot of what you're saying, but could you explain what's stopping you from starting your own worker-owned cooperative *right now*? Remember, removal of this barrier must not *also* significantly help "larger corporations" or else it wasn't much of a barrier. In other words, be careful not to say, "if I were to raise the capital from a large group of friends, they would hit me with $HORRENDOUS_TAX" wihout at least *checking* if large corporations pay the same tax.
I'm not trying to badger you, I would just like more elaboration on this point.
It's true that dealers will try to funnel all negotiations in that direction, but if you're firm they will negotiate price and finance interest rate separately (firm means be prepared to walk out). Get pre-approved financing from your bank or credit union and walk in prepared to pay cash. They'll still try to sell you their own financing, but if they beat the other rate, it's a bonus for you.
I understand all that, but I think you missed the central point:
You shouldn't have to "be firm" or whatever. You shouldn't have to get extensive training from your world-hardened father on how to drive a hard bargain. We have the internet now. People should be able to look at thousands of offers in minutes with ultra slim margins, but state legislatures pass special interest laws to fatten up the pockets of people using an outdated business model. I can get on ebay and look at hundreds of offers for other products and buy them without anyone's by-your-leave.
Believe me -- I wouldn't get my financing from some crook at a car dealership. I was just emphasizing the remaining "service" (and I use that term loosely) that car dealerships now have to offer.
Hi Colin. You don't surprise me. You somehow forgot to include all the entitlement spending (Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, welfare, etc.). You know, the stuff that would change the "defense" figure to more like 17%. Oh, that's right -- non-discretionary doesn't count. Because Congress is POWERLESS to cut Social Security benefits (except for hiking the retirement age and starting to tax benefits, which they already did).
(Not to trivialize defense spending of course -- in absolute terms, it's big. But somehow ignoring over half the budget isn't kosher either.)
Sorry for being a cynic, but I don't see how a decrease in financial services or car ads are a bad thing.
... whatever, dude. In reality, most of them can't "beat the market" and all you get is the honor of paying them usurious fees for their stock-picking "wisdom".
1) Cars: auto sales are currently a big cartel. Every state has regulations stopping or significantly shackling internet sales of new cars. All that auto dealerships now offer you is the degrading process of "oh, gee, I dunno, I'm gonna have to talk to my boss about that offer you just made" and "here is a payment plan we can offer you in which I'll only talk about the monthly payments and hide the effective 14% interest rate that amounts to".
2) The financial services industry basically revolves around convincing people to invest with them to "beat the market". They thrive on artificially increasing the complexity of investing. I've had a financial advisor tell me that my investment plan is going to look "totally different from the guy in the next cubicle". Yeah, same age, same investment horizon
We really do need less of these ads. Is there something bigger I'm missing?
Er, I just think you need to be careful not to get ahead of yourself. Make sure that whatever comparison you're making is a fair, "apples-to-apples" comparison. That is, don't say, "in theory, communism works like [Garden of Eden], but look at these *practical* examples of capitalist failure". (That wasn't what you were doing here of course.) There, the problem is you need to compare theory to theory and practice to practice.
The problem of incomplete information for actors occurs in all economic systems, and its existence in one is not an indictment of that system. Libertarians for one don't claim that libertarian outcomes have some metaphysical superiority, just that they can't predictably be improved upon. You might be able to say, "well, obviously, obviously, in this particular instance, this particular set of market actors lacked this information, so if government just levied this eensy weensy tax and funded a campaign to tell them that information, that would yield a far superior outcome." But you would have to establish that the set of policies that led it to do that, if followed consistently, would improve over the broader society, not just that one case where the conclusion was more obvious.
Likewise, even if a potato information cartel could form, and important information about potatoes were somehow suppressed, that would at most mean that, as you said, with respect to potato information, the economy has become little more than communism, but would still be much better in all other goods.
Many objections to libertarian stem from these kinds of loaded comparisons. Yes, markets don't work as well as they could, the harder it is for information to get out. But unless some other economy manages that uncertainty, and those "search costs" better, it's not a strike against libertarianism.
Smoking kills about 400,000 Americans a year. Alcohol kills around 100,000 last I heard
Let's grant that for now. Look at it this way:
-Smokers kill themselves.
-Alcohol related deaths also involve other people.
If you smoke, I can ignore you at no risk to myself. If you drink and drive, you're using the same streets as I am. I become an unwilling participant in your riskiness.
(Yes, I know "second hand smoking kills". Actually, it "may" have a statistical correlation with killing. It certainly doesn't *directly* cause me to die on the spot. I am also more able to avoid smoky bars than public roads.)
You might want to bring a bulletproof vest. They're free (as in speech) for the most part. You can take them apart, learn how they work, etc.
*ducks*