Looks like you mostly agree with me, you just think that all investment should come from an entrepreneur's own saved funds (or his partners' saved funds), even after the venture has been around a while. Is that about right?
And in regard to irrationality on the stock market: irrationality isn't a problem as long as some investors are rational, and the irrationality skews randomly. In a bubble, of course, it all skews the same way. But even then, it's not possible for someone to predictably make returns. Even if you know the market's overvalued, you can't profit unless you know when it will correct. And I think most bubble are mainly traceable to monetary policy, but that's really for another day...
That kind of reminds me of an idea I've been wanting to explore in simpler games I write. (This has to do with storylines.) I want a game where, as much as possible, it prevents you from being able to "send information back in time" so to speak. (I prefer the term "causal game".) In most games, you can exploit your advance knowledge of where stuff is and who will betray you when. In a causal game, the internal logic wouldn't even determine that stuff until it either happens, or you observe evidence that it will happen.
(Simple example: if there's treasure hidden somewhere, its location won't be assigned at all. You will have a small chance of finding it wherever you dig. If you unsuccessfully dig, it "collapses the probability bubble", for lack of a better term, and makes it so the only possible location is somewhere else. Also, if someone tells you where it is, the game then "decides" that it is now there, and nowhere else -- but that information won't be useful in other playthroughs or even if you reload without saving!)
With plot elements, the game would not set the story so that character X betrays you until it happens. Its probability of happening would be partly determined by whether you have observed evidence it is likely to happen.
This certainly involves a break from reality in some respects. In the real world, treasure is where it is. Your knowledge has no impact on that. The world doesn't disappear while your eyes are closed. However, causal games would be *more* realistic in that, as you live your daily live, you can only base decisions on what you know. This kind of game would force you to endure the real uncertainty you face in everyday life by making "acting without knowledge" just as dangerous as it is in real life.
It sounds like a good idea. If you wore one on each hand and could somehow holster a wiimote to each leg, you could have a full body, 3-dimensional DDR. (Yes, I know there's one where you ahve to match a silhouette, but that doesn't detect 3D.)
I don't know... I've lost at least one/. account from criticizing Linux. And hey, maybe my criticisms did count as flamebait. But when I'm limited to two posts a day to address like thirty responses, most with obvious falsities, that *kinda* puts a damper on debate about the issue.
Also, I think that to the extent that coders make their code hard to follow, they are compromising the ideals of open source.
Well, most AI's involve some level of randomness to make them seem smarter. (A fully predictable AI loses its edge.) But even if not: let's go back to the forest example. Unless I literally follow an animal over, what do I care whether some algorithm led it in, or some weighted randomizer put it in a place it could be expected to go? In both cases, the animal is likely to be there, and I find it there. I just don't see what it adds.
Er, no. *looks up* I'm not trying to make some kind of deep statement about the equivalence of machine and man, and with it, the inevitability of history. I'm just saying, how do I as a game player, have a different experience when you do:
CRITTER_SPAWN_PROBABILITY = TREE_DENSITY * 0.4 ;//posit probability of critter spawning CRITTER_POPULATION *=1+CRITTER_SPAWN_PROBABILITY;
as opposed to:
for (int i=0;i<CRITTER_POPULATION;i++)//an AI in which the critters "decide" to spawn another {
if (random()*TREE_DENSITY < 0.4)
_critter[i].reproduce(); }
It just seems that with a large enough population, the results are indistinguishable. (I know, it's kind of an over-simplified, AI, but both the AI and pure randomizer would take the same variables into account.)
...that's I've always wanted the answer to from someone who knows what they're talking about:
For the application you've described, and similar ones, people always claim it would be cool to be able to handle massive dataprocessing so you could have lots of AI's, and that would get realistic results. However, it seems that with *that many* in-game entities, you could have gotten essentially the same results with a cheap random generator with statistic modifiers. How is a user going to be able to discern "there are lots of Species X here because they 'observed' the plentiful food and came and reproduced" from "there are lots of Species X here because the random generator applied a greater multiple due to more favorable conditions"?
I saw this in the game Republic: the Revolution (or was it Revolution: the Republic?). It bragged about having lots and lots of AI's in it, but in the game, voter support in each district appeared *as if* it were determined by the inputs that are supposed to affect it, with a little randomness thrown in. The AI's just seemed to eat up cycles.
Long story short, aren't emergent results of a large number of individual AI's essentially the same that you would get from statistical random generation?
It would have been nice for a link to describe what Semantic Dementia is so we could get some background info. At least link to wikipedia's article about it. Unfortunately, it's very sparse, but does reveal what I wanted to know:
***
Signs and Symptoms
SD patients often present with the complaint of word-finding difficulties. On further questioning, patients often appear to have lost the meaning of certain words (e.g. asking "What is a fish?"). As the disease progresses, behavioural and personality changes are often seen similar to those seen in frontotemporal dementia although cases have been described of 'pure' semantic dementia with few late behavioural symptoms.
Neuropsychology
Patients perform poorly on tests of semantic knowledge. Published tests include both verbal and non-verbal tasks e.g. The Warrington concrete and abstract word synonym test (Warrington EK, McKenna P, Orpwood L. Single word comprehension: a concrete and abstract word synonym test. Neuropsychological Rehabilitation 1998; 8: 143-154.) and The Pyramids and Palm Trees task (Howard and Patterson, 1992)
Testing will also reveal deficits in picture naming (with semantic errors being made e.g. "dog" for a picture of a hippopotamus) and category fluency (e.g. "Please list as many animals as you can in one minute").
Your closing quip indicates that you're not willing to have a serious discussion, so I'll be brief.
No, sir, the quip I was *responding* to indicates *you* are not willing to have a serious discussion. You are revealing precisely the childish mentality that prevents a responsible, honest handling of the future health of public finances. In your mind, someone wanting to cut or abolish a program is *not* bowing to the harsh reality that it cannot continue at this rate, and trying to remedy the problem before it gets worse, but rather, they're evil people trying to "screw" the beneficiaries of such a program. You're unwilling to think in any terms other than pro/anti-poor, pro/anti-elderly, etc. You are not a problem, you are the problem. The fundamental problem of democracy is that voters don't have the discipline to demand a long term view, and not shove problems over to later legislatures. Actually, it's not "voters", it's "you" and people like you.
When you're ready to quit demonizing people for cutting unsustainable programs, let me know. I won't be waiting, but I'll be glad to hear it.
I maintain that a Ponzi scheme is defined by paying unsustainably high returns to investors. Read more here.
I know what it is, thanks. And it does pay unsustainably high returns to investors. They've already had to break the promise of the program by cutting benefits, raising the age at which payments begin (I won't call it the retirement age), and raising taxes from one to twelve percent. It has already not been sustained. Further, it will get worse as the ratio of workers to retirees increase. But no biggie, right?
I claim that Social Security isn't precisely like that. It's a social service paid for with tax dollars. Calling it a Ponzi scheme is at best a metaphor.
People pay in to the system, and then are paid from later suckers, *precisely on the basis that they paid in*. If that's not a Ponzi scheme, nothing is.
I'm not going to defend Social Security,
That's right, you aren't. A defense of Social Security would require you to admit the obvious.
There are bad Ponzi schemes, and there can be good Ponzi schemes. What there cannot be is a successful defense of a policy that is simultaneously dishonest. The economists that actually, you know, *defend* this policy concede it's a Ponzi scheme. Why can't you?
Are you seriously suggesting that the possession of capital has little effect on whether someone decides to start a business?
Apparently, you're not reading my posts, or my analysis is over your head. YES, it has little effect. It certainly can permit it where may have otherwise been impossible. However, like I said once or twice above, if you grabbed a random person and gave them a huge no-interest or low-interest loan, or just a ton of money, it *does not follow* that they would start a business. More likely, they would a) quickly fritter it away on trivialities (see: lottery winners) or b) put in a high-yield account, draw the interest, and supplement with labor income as needed (if they knew of this option and had the discipline). Why put such a huge, guaranteed amount of capital at risk by starting a business? "A bird in the hand..."
I certainly don't classify only manual labour as work....
However, I do not class as work buying a share, providing a loan etc. A person who buys 5,000 shares in Microsoft because they saw its advertising campaign is not performing a socially useful activity in my view.
That's probably because you haven't learned very much about economics and finance. (Obviously, you are not guaranteed to change your position after doing so, but here you seem to be speaking more from ignorance.) When one makes a loan or buys a share, one is forgoing the opportunity to consume goods they otherwise could have, and bearing the risk that the venture will not turn out as expected. These are real costs that inhere in society and so would appear under any economic system, just in different forms. (The communist fallacy is to assume that the true economic value of any good for all time can be known with certainty right now, and therefore to regard those reaping from accurate estimation thereof as exploiters.) In a communist society, production would still require committing heterogenous goods irreversibly to some process, closing off a certain set of opportunities. This is exactly what happens when one makes a loan -- they lose the liquity and opportunity to commit resources to any number of needs that could come up.
Also in communism, not all projects will turn out to be worth the effort, so such societies still encounter risk. When someone buys shares in a business under capitalism, they are diverting that risk to themselves so that people skeptical of that use of resources need to lose out if their skepticism is justified. Communism doese not eliminate this risk, but rather forces it on everyone.
More fundamentally though, the people only *bought* the shares because those with the risky idea issued them on the condition that they would be very liquid (easy to trade with others) and allowing future investors to buy from previous investors is necessary to fulfill this promise. When you "lazily" purchase the shares you are adding your knowledge to a common pool (the stock exchange) that the value of such a venture is higher than others have currently estimated it to be, and in so doing, you signal others of its likelihood of future success, allowing their resources to be better allocated.
Maybe, just maybe, Sony has tried to innovate a bit too much? New type of processor, new type of disc drive, HD.
In regard to innovation, you forgot to mention Sony's pioneering of the use of a motion-sensing wireless controller, which no one had really thought to do before. Nintendo may try to copy this and claim it was their idea. We'll have to wait and see what the Wii has in store. November will be interesting. [/sarcasm if you couldn't tell by now]
Sorry, most of what you've said is just wrong. First things first, when I did the historical comparison, yes, it's *per student* (I thought that was implied) and adjusted for inflation. Second:
- teachers have *never* been payed what they're worth in public schools
Yes, "socially valuable people" "deserve" more. I understand your point. But most comparisons about teacher's pay neglect that they generally don't have to pay the Social Security tax (which is 12.4%, not 6.2%) because of pension systems that were grandfathered in, and work fewer hours and less of the year.
- support for students with special needs has grown
That's true, but again, government generally way overspends. I've talked with a speech therapist who works with special needs children and if you compare what it costs to hire her privately for one child, vs. what the government spends for the same needs, per child, they are spending it very, very inefficiently.
If you enter a new school district, the schools get about a dozen times better, because there's more money per student. They have newer textbooks, more modern campuses, more support for the arts (which are the first to go when there's no funding), and smaller class sizes. This last one in particular has a direct effect on learning.
I'd believe that, if it were not the case that the school districts with the most spending (Washington DC and Atlanta) per student are the worst, and private schools, with higher costs, accomplish more at less per child. (And before you make the special needs case, that difference holds even if you subtracted out the public schools' costs of special needs kids.)
Is this because the Portland schools are mismanaged? Perhaps partly
But that's the point!!! We won't know the *answer* to "perhaps" unless and until schools have to compete for students the same way almost every other service provider has to compete for your business. It's easy to overstate the true management cost unless you have competitors to compare to.
I believe it. I'm just saying, if roads were literally priced so that what is now "rush hour" weren't much different from the rest of the day, it would be economically feasible for there to be classier bus lines you could ride. Public buses suck. On this, I agree, but you shouldn't take it as an indictment of bus transportation itself.
The problem isn't that the houses are farther out - if the population just moved further there wouldn't be any additional traffic. The issue is the larger roads allow more people to get into the same area. MORE houses are built further out, but no industrial/heavy commercial is build nearby so everyone uses the roads.
Well, yeah, that's essentially what I said. I didn't mean just people along the road move out there; other people do too, which puts a bigger load on the part nearest the central city.
I imagine the number of people riding the bus or taking the train is some kind of function of the road congestion. Where public transportation is available, as the commute takes longer more and more people take the bus. In my circumstance, I live in a city of nearly 100,000 people. It's MUCH faster for me to drive to work than it is to take the bus. Until the routes are improved, or traffic congestion becomes a real problem I'll continue to drive.
Well, as long as everyone can use the road for free, it will usually be faster, even in a big city, to drive rather than use the bus, so the congestion isn't much of an impetus, except for people who can smuggle a nap in on the way to work. Certainly, if *everyone* (or most) rode a bus, that would ease congestion and reduce commute time. But how do you get everyone to act in lockstep like that? If market rates were charged for peak use, they would choose buses automatically.
I agree. The general mentality is that if the roads are clogged, why, make 'em wider! Which is on the right track, but forget that the road is always there. So when people quickly realize how much faster the commute is, so they build houses farther out, and when everyone does this, the road becomes just as congested as before. I almost wonder if people really evaluate the opportunity cost of having to spend so much on a commute, and if the two hour commute is *really* worse than a bus ride, which would actually be quicker if they put realistic peak hour prices on the roads.
That the various policies work against each other?
If the cost is not a lot different, then why is it so much less than Brilliant to ask that ramps be installed, even on corners which do not have sidewalks, but could have in the not too distant future?
It's not having ramps that I object to, it's that they obviously don't intend to ever put a sidewalk there, so the ramps are kind of an empty gesture.
Also -- how does the presence of a ramp make walking more difficult? Or are you refering to grass?
It's a fair point. Capitalism is indeed weighted against the worker. Unless you have an abundance of wealth it is often too risky to set up your own business
Well, apparently you missed *my* "fair point". My point was that even if you did have your own capital, it would still not be a good idea, in most cases to start your own business. For the same opprtunity (having lots of money) you are better off just loaning it out and then, if desried, supplementing that interest income with labor income. Having the money therefore typically does not change your decision about whether to start a business.
Sorry, that wasn't the point I was trying to make. The original point you were arguing against was about whether "workers should reap the benefits of their own efforts". Under capitalism they don't. If someone merely provides funds for a venture, any profit they eventually reap is from doing no actual work.
Only if you use a crude, clueless conception of "work". You seem to think that anything that doesn't involve direct, manual labor isn't "real work" and therefore ideally should receive no return. (If I've incorrectly described your view, your view nevertheless entails classifying a socially useful activity as "non-work".) But digging a hole is a different input from identifying *where* a hole should be dug (for e.g., a building that will be constructed to provide some service). Both are socially useful inputs. Merely digging a hole does not necessarily produce value for others. Planning the business *is* "real work". Your attempt to write off non-manual labor as "non-work" is arbitary.
The worker does the work, and the person with the capital gets the profit.
Yeah. And the losses. Workers should refund wages when a venture goes sour, right?
me:I agree that's not strictly speaking, communism
you:Hey, I never said it was: I was agreeing with you.
If you knew I already believed it, why did you bring it up?
Bingo. My mom, for 20 years a traffic engineer, also likes to point out how under the ADA, intersections have to have ramps for wheelchairs. But they don't have to have sidewalks actually, you know, leading to those ramps. (!) So everywhere you see these little slopes at the corners of an intersection, which lead to... grass. Brilliant, folks. Just brilliant.
That also, of course, makes it more difficult to get where you want to go by walking, but I think that's kind of by design. One of the "perks" of a car-driven (ha, ha) lifestyle is so you can keep the drivel out, and your kids in. (note -- not a position I support, just mocking it here)
Really? How do you praise something when you don't even know what it is? This reminds me of a memorable Duck Tales episode. The one where this salesman spends most of his own money marketing a product called "PEP" even though, the day before its launch, he hasn't decided what "PEP" is going to be. Do you have links to these articles?
Slashdot Mirror
I honestly would have to agree that it's finally come time for YouTube to start thinking about the whole "revenue model" thing.
Looks like you mostly agree with me, you just think that all investment should come from an entrepreneur's own saved funds (or his partners' saved funds), even after the venture has been around a while. Is that about right?
And in regard to irrationality on the stock market: irrationality isn't a problem as long as some investors are rational, and the irrationality skews randomly. In a bubble, of course, it all skews the same way. But even then, it's not possible for someone to predictably make returns. Even if you know the market's overvalued, you can't profit unless you know when it will correct. And I think most bubble are mainly traceable to monetary policy, but that's really for another day...
That kind of reminds me of an idea I've been wanting to explore in simpler games I write. (This has to do with storylines.) I want a game where, as much as possible, it prevents you from being able to "send information back in time" so to speak. (I prefer the term "causal game".) In most games, you can exploit your advance knowledge of where stuff is and who will betray you when. In a causal game, the internal logic wouldn't even determine that stuff until it either happens, or you observe evidence that it will happen.
;-)
(Simple example: if there's treasure hidden somewhere, its location won't be assigned at all. You will have a small chance of finding it wherever you dig. If you unsuccessfully dig, it "collapses the probability bubble", for lack of a better term, and makes it so the only possible location is somewhere else. Also, if someone tells you where it is, the game then "decides" that it is now there, and nowhere else -- but that information won't be useful in other playthroughs or even if you reload without saving!)
With plot elements, the game would not set the story so that character X betrays you until it happens. Its probability of happening would be partly determined by whether you have observed evidence it is likely to happen.
This certainly involves a break from reality in some respects. In the real world, treasure is where it is. Your knowledge has no impact on that. The world doesn't disappear while your eyes are closed. However, causal games would be *more* realistic in that, as you live your daily live, you can only base decisions on what you know. This kind of game would force you to endure the real uncertainty you face in everyday life by making "acting without knowledge" just as dangerous as it is in real life.
And, of course, have great replay value
Hm... do you know if I can PayPal my credit card to put money into a money market account...?
It sounds like a good idea. If you wore one on each hand and could somehow holster a wiimote to each leg, you could have a full body, 3-dimensional DDR. (Yes, I know there's one where you ahve to match a silhouette, but that doesn't detect 3D.)
I don't know ... I've lost at least one /. account from criticizing Linux. And hey, maybe my criticisms did count as flamebait. But when I'm limited to two posts a day to address like thirty responses, most with obvious falsities, that *kinda* puts a damper on debate about the issue.
Also, I think that to the extent that coders make their code hard to follow, they are compromising the ideals of open source.
Well, most AI's involve some level of randomness to make them seem smarter. (A fully predictable AI loses its edge.) But even if not: let's go back to the forest example. Unless I literally follow an animal over, what do I care whether some algorithm led it in, or some weighted randomizer put it in a place it could be expected to go? In both cases, the animal is likely to be there, and I find it there. I just don't see what it adds.
...that's I've always wanted the answer to from someone who knows what they're talking about:
For the application you've described, and similar ones, people always claim it would be cool to be able to handle massive dataprocessing so you could have lots of AI's, and that would get realistic results. However, it seems that with *that many* in-game entities, you could have gotten essentially the same results with a cheap random generator with statistic modifiers. How is a user going to be able to discern "there are lots of Species X here because they 'observed' the plentiful food and came and reproduced" from "there are lots of Species X here because the random generator applied a greater multiple due to more favorable conditions"?
I saw this in the game Republic: the Revolution (or was it Revolution: the Republic?). It bragged about having lots and lots of AI's in it, but in the game, voter support in each district appeared *as if* it were determined by the inputs that are supposed to affect it, with a little randomness thrown in. The AI's just seemed to eat up cycles.
Long story short, aren't emergent results of a large number of individual AI's essentially the same that you would get from statistical random generation?
It would have been nice for a link to describe what Semantic Dementia is so we could get some background info. At least link to wikipedia's article about it. Unfortunately, it's very sparse, but does reveal what I wanted to know:
***
Signs and Symptoms
SD patients often present with the complaint of word-finding difficulties. On further questioning, patients often appear to have lost the meaning of certain words (e.g. asking "What is a fish?"). As the disease progresses, behavioural and personality changes are often seen similar to those seen in frontotemporal dementia although cases have been described of 'pure' semantic dementia with few late behavioural symptoms.
Neuropsychology
Patients perform poorly on tests of semantic knowledge. Published tests include both verbal and non-verbal tasks e.g. The Warrington concrete and abstract word synonym test (Warrington EK, McKenna P, Orpwood L. Single word comprehension: a concrete and abstract word synonym test. Neuropsychological Rehabilitation 1998; 8: 143-154.) and The Pyramids and Palm Trees task (Howard and Patterson, 1992)
Testing will also reveal deficits in picture naming (with semantic errors being made e.g. "dog" for a picture of a hippopotamus) and category fluency (e.g. "Please list as many animals as you can in one minute").
Your closing quip indicates that you're not willing to have a serious discussion, so I'll be brief.
No, sir, the quip I was *responding* to indicates *you* are not willing to have a serious discussion. You are revealing precisely the childish mentality that prevents a responsible, honest handling of the future health of public finances. In your mind, someone wanting to cut or abolish a program is *not* bowing to the harsh reality that it cannot continue at this rate, and trying to remedy the problem before it gets worse, but rather, they're evil people trying to "screw" the beneficiaries of such a program. You're unwilling to think in any terms other than pro/anti-poor, pro/anti-elderly, etc. You are not a problem, you are the problem. The fundamental problem of democracy is that voters don't have the discipline to demand a long term view, and not shove problems over to later legislatures. Actually, it's not "voters", it's "you" and people like you.
When you're ready to quit demonizing people for cutting unsustainable programs, let me know. I won't be waiting, but I'll be glad to hear it.
I maintain that a Ponzi scheme is defined by paying unsustainably high returns to investors. Read more here.
I know what it is, thanks. And it does pay unsustainably high returns to investors. They've already had to break the promise of the program by cutting benefits, raising the age at which payments begin (I won't call it the retirement age), and raising taxes from one to twelve percent. It has already not been sustained. Further, it will get worse as the ratio of workers to retirees increase. But no biggie, right?
I claim that Social Security isn't precisely like that. It's a social service paid for with tax dollars. Calling it a Ponzi scheme is at best a metaphor.
People pay in to the system, and then are paid from later suckers, *precisely on the basis that they paid in*. If that's not a Ponzi scheme, nothing is.
I'm not going to defend Social Security,
That's right, you aren't. A defense of Social Security would require you to admit the obvious.
There are bad Ponzi schemes, and there can be good Ponzi schemes. What there cannot be is a successful defense of a policy that is simultaneously dishonest. The economists that actually, you know, *defend* this policy concede it's a Ponzi scheme. Why can't you?
That's Stock Keeping Unit - wharehouse management system speak for "part number". I've also seen SKUL used.
It's true. My warehouse, for example, keeps a lot of skulls. Though I don't advertise it on the front page!
Are you seriously suggesting that the possession of capital has little effect on whether someone decides to start a business?
...
Apparently, you're not reading my posts, or my analysis is over your head. YES, it has little effect. It certainly can permit it where may have otherwise been impossible. However, like I said once or twice above, if you grabbed a random person and gave them a huge no-interest or low-interest loan, or just a ton of money, it *does not follow* that they would start a business. More likely, they would a) quickly fritter it away on trivialities (see: lottery winners) or b) put in a high-yield account, draw the interest, and supplement with labor income as needed (if they knew of this option and had the discipline). Why put such a huge, guaranteed amount of capital at risk by starting a business? "A bird in the hand..."
I certainly don't classify only manual labour as work.
However, I do not class as work buying a share, providing a loan etc. A person who buys 5,000 shares in Microsoft because they saw its advertising campaign is not performing a socially useful activity in my view.
That's probably because you haven't learned very much about economics and finance. (Obviously, you are not guaranteed to change your position after doing so, but here you seem to be speaking more from ignorance.) When one makes a loan or buys a share, one is forgoing the opportunity to consume goods they otherwise could have, and bearing the risk that the venture will not turn out as expected. These are real costs that inhere in society and so would appear under any economic system, just in different forms. (The communist fallacy is to assume that the true economic value of any good for all time can be known with certainty right now, and therefore to regard those reaping from accurate estimation thereof as exploiters.) In a communist society, production would still require committing heterogenous goods irreversibly to some process, closing off a certain set of opportunities. This is exactly what happens when one makes a loan -- they lose the liquity and opportunity to commit resources to any number of needs that could come up.
Also in communism, not all projects will turn out to be worth the effort, so such societies still encounter risk. When someone buys shares in a business under capitalism, they are diverting that risk to themselves so that people skeptical of that use of resources need to lose out if their skepticism is justified. Communism doese not eliminate this risk, but rather forces it on everyone.
More fundamentally though, the people only *bought* the shares because those with the risky idea issued them on the condition that they would be very liquid (easy to trade with others) and allowing future investors to buy from previous investors is necessary to fulfill this promise. When you "lazily" purchase the shares you are adding your knowledge to a common pool (the stock exchange) that the value of such a venture is higher than others have currently estimated it to be, and in so doing, you signal others of its likelihood of future success, allowing their resources to be better allocated.
Do you disagree with the above?
Maybe, just maybe, Sony has tried to innovate a bit too much? New type of processor, new type of disc drive, HD.
In regard to innovation, you forgot to mention Sony's pioneering of the use of a motion-sensing wireless controller, which no one had really thought to do before. Nintendo may try to copy this and claim it was their idea. We'll have to wait and see what the Wii has in store. November will be interesting. [/sarcasm if you couldn't tell by now]
Yep, now flamebait responding to troll. Both -1!
Sorry, most of what you've said is just wrong. First things first, when I did the historical comparison, yes, it's *per student* (I thought that was implied) and adjusted for inflation. Second:
- teachers have *never* been payed what they're worth in public schools
Yes, "socially valuable people" "deserve" more. I understand your point. But most comparisons about teacher's pay neglect that they generally don't have to pay the Social Security tax (which is 12.4%, not 6.2%) because of pension systems that were grandfathered in, and work fewer hours and less of the year.
- support for students with special needs has grown
That's true, but again, government generally way overspends. I've talked with a speech therapist who works with special needs children and if you compare what it costs to hire her privately for one child, vs. what the government spends for the same needs, per child, they are spending it very, very inefficiently.
If you enter a new school district, the schools get about a dozen times better, because there's more money per student. They have newer textbooks, more modern campuses, more support for the arts (which are the first to go when there's no funding), and smaller class sizes. This last one in particular has a direct effect on learning.
I'd believe that, if it were not the case that the school districts with the most spending (Washington DC and Atlanta) per student are the worst, and private schools, with higher costs, accomplish more at less per child. (And before you make the special needs case, that difference holds even if you subtracted out the public schools' costs of special needs kids.)
Is this because the Portland schools are mismanaged? Perhaps partly
But that's the point!!! We won't know the *answer* to "perhaps" unless and until schools have to compete for students the same way almost every other service provider has to compete for your business. It's easy to overstate the true management cost unless you have competitors to compare to.
I believe it. I'm just saying, if roads were literally priced so that what is now "rush hour" weren't much different from the rest of the day, it would be economically feasible for there to be classier bus lines you could ride. Public buses suck. On this, I agree, but you shouldn't take it as an indictment of bus transportation itself.
You can't refute someone's faith that:
1) All races and sexes have exactly equal means and distribution patterns in all abilities.
2) Special interests won't exploit every power you give government.
3) Cutting a tax mainly paid by the rich could ONLY possibly benefit the rich.
4) Problems in public schools are solely a matter funding, even if they spend several times more than they have historically.
I feel your pain.
The problem isn't that the houses are farther out - if the population just moved further there wouldn't be any additional traffic. The issue is the larger roads allow more people to get into the same area. MORE houses are built further out, but no industrial/heavy commercial is build nearby so everyone uses the roads.
Well, yeah, that's essentially what I said. I didn't mean just people along the road move out there; other people do too, which puts a bigger load on the part nearest the central city.
I imagine the number of people riding the bus or taking the train is some kind of function of the road congestion. Where public transportation is available, as the commute takes longer more and more people take the bus. In my circumstance, I live in a city of nearly 100,000 people. It's MUCH faster for me to drive to work than it is to take the bus. Until the routes are improved, or traffic congestion becomes a real problem I'll continue to drive.
Well, as long as everyone can use the road for free, it will usually be faster, even in a big city, to drive rather than use the bus, so the congestion isn't much of an impetus, except for people who can smuggle a nap in on the way to work. Certainly, if *everyone* (or most) rode a bus, that would ease congestion and reduce commute time. But how do you get everyone to act in lockstep like that? If market rates were charged for peak use, they would choose buses automatically.
I agree. The general mentality is that if the roads are clogged, why, make 'em wider! Which is on the right track, but forget that the road is always there. So when people quickly realize how much faster the commute is, so they build houses farther out, and when everyone does this, the road becomes just as congested as before. I almost wonder if people really evaluate the opportunity cost of having to spend so much on a commute, and if the two hour commute is *really* worse than a bus ride, which would actually be quicker if they put realistic peak hour prices on the roads.
And your point is ...?
That the various policies work against each other?
If the cost is not a lot different, then why is it so much less than Brilliant to ask that ramps be installed, even on corners which do not have sidewalks, but could have in the not too distant future?
It's not having ramps that I object to, it's that they obviously don't intend to ever put a sidewalk there, so the ramps are kind of an empty gesture.
Also -- how does the presence of a ramp make walking more difficult? Or are you refering to grass?
Take a wild, wild guess there, kid.
It's a fair point. Capitalism is indeed weighted against the worker. Unless you have an abundance of wealth it is often too risky to set up your own business
Well, apparently you missed *my* "fair point". My point was that even if you did have your own capital, it would still not be a good idea, in most cases to start your own business. For the same opprtunity (having lots of money) you are better off just loaning it out and then, if desried, supplementing that interest income with labor income. Having the money therefore typically does not change your decision about whether to start a business.
Sorry, that wasn't the point I was trying to make. The original point you were arguing against was about whether "workers should reap the benefits of their own efforts". Under capitalism they don't. If someone merely provides funds for a venture, any profit they eventually reap is from doing no actual work.
Only if you use a crude, clueless conception of "work". You seem to think that anything that doesn't involve direct, manual labor isn't "real work" and therefore ideally should receive no return. (If I've incorrectly described your view, your view nevertheless entails classifying a socially useful activity as "non-work".) But digging a hole is a different input from identifying *where* a hole should be dug (for e.g., a building that will be constructed to provide some service). Both are socially useful inputs. Merely digging a hole does not necessarily produce value for others. Planning the business *is* "real work". Your attempt to write off non-manual labor as "non-work" is arbitary.
The worker does the work, and the person with the capital gets the profit.
Yeah. And the losses. Workers should refund wages when a venture goes sour, right?
me:I agree that's not strictly speaking, communism
you:Hey, I never said it was: I was agreeing with you.
If you knew I already believed it, why did you bring it up?
Bingo. My mom, for 20 years a traffic engineer, also likes to point out how under the ADA, intersections have to have ramps for wheelchairs. But they don't have to have sidewalks actually, you know, leading to those ramps. (!) So everywhere you see these little slopes at the corners of an intersection, which lead to ... grass. Brilliant, folks. Just brilliant.
That also, of course, makes it more difficult to get where you want to go by walking, but I think that's kind of by design. One of the "perks" of a car-driven (ha, ha) lifestyle is so you can keep the drivel out, and your kids in. (note -- not a position I support, just mocking it here)
Really? How do you praise something when you don't even know what it is? This reminds me of a memorable Duck Tales episode. The one where this salesman spends most of his own money marketing a product called "PEP" even though, the day before its launch, he hasn't decided what "PEP" is going to be. Do you have links to these articles?
Does anyone have the list of the cities redesigned to accomodate the Segway?