Well, it isn't. Turning over stocks for short-term profit is gambling, not capitalism. Please look up the historic meaning of "capitalism". It isn't just money-mongering.
I like how you can assert out of thin air that current capitalism isn't valid capitalism, because of the "historic meaning of 'capitalism'." How am I supposed to even take this as a valid assertion? You seem to be arguing by vigorous handwaving, and appeal to authority. No less it completely ignores semantic drift, and that words are constantly expanded to apply to newer versions of older concepts.
Should electric powered cars not be "cars" because historically cars have had internal combustion engines? Thus your argument is invalid as demonsted by analogy.
Perhaps the link I posted earlier will do a better job of explaining what real capital wealth is, than I have. It's late and I am tired. But please note what this man says. He was exactly right about the economy (as Austrian economists have been for quite a while), while all the people following Keynesian theory (official government policy) were 100% wrong.
I will avoid copypasta here, and just link to relevant text. No theory is perfect, and this should be recognized by any valid scientist. You know, Creationists think that the Bible is exactly right about the world, and that evolutionary theory has been 100% wrong. It's easy to make such assertions when your entire theory is unfalsifiable.
And as he says: real capital wealth consists of goods and the infrastructure to produce those goods, not whether the stock index is at 12,000 or 13,000. The goods need not necessarily be physical: informational goods are still goods.
Please provide a rigorous and unambiguous way to differentiate stock trading based on speculation from informational goods. I agree that speculation is a bad thing, it's the entire reason for economic bubbles, and boom-and-bust cycles. But when me and my friends sat down and declared, "we can use magic to enforce rules and regulations, how would we stop trading based on speculation". We realized that there was no way to do it, even with omnipotent magic.
There will always be a free market segment in virtually every industry. It is not the duty of the government to stamp this out, but to ensure for those industries that society has deemed critical and manditory, that all individuals have a minimum level of service that society is willing to accept, especially those that are not able to partake in the free market segment.
Right, so we totally agree. I really only disagreed with you because of the way you phrased the issue. "Profitability" is a horrible way to measure any segment for private vs. public operation.
Rereading your post, you're making sense, but arguing slightly different from the post you're responding to. He's talking about redenominating and then paying off your debt through just-as-inflationary-as-you-were-doing-before actions, i.e. printing money wholecloth, just to pay debts.
I just read your counter-examples and not the stuff you wrote after clarifying your position. You are of course correct (which prompted my reread) but it wasn't really what he was talking about. Germany didn't redenominate and then print off off money to pay off their debts. Actually, in many ways, they just defaulted on their reparations debt.
You can run a private school for selective students at a profit. You can NOT educate EVERY minor in the country to an expected 12th grade level for a profit. There for, while some private institutes can run their for profit model schools, the government must pick up the responsibility for all others.
And private industry cannot run at a profit and provide iPads to everyone either, but we have to ask does everyone need/deserve an iPad? It can be said that everyone needs/deserves education, but not iPads, but then that's the point that I'm trying to make: nothing could be run for-profit and yet still provide it to everyone. So your model then decomposes to "government should be in the business of providing what everyone needs/deserves", and as such your model is not based on profitability, which is what you initially said.
Arguably similar to health care. Where private institutes can maintain a for-profit model, they do. For individuals they choose not to provide service to (via pricing or denial) it falls to the government to cover. Be it through Medicare/Medicaid, socialized plans, single payer, healthy start, etc...
But then you have private insurance providing care to only the healthy people making gobs of profit by providing very little return for what the individuals are investing, and leaving the government to provide insurance for everyone who is a profit-loss. Thus, you're just subsidizing the healthcare insurance industry by taking away everything that is unprofitable and burdening that cost onto the entire taxpayer base. If instead the government had it mandatory that everyone have government insurance, then the government can offset costs, and instead of being a GIANT money sink, it's merely losing money when the entire population's usage exceeds monies collected to cover those costs.
Note, this doesn't apply for private supplementary insurance, but everyone needs to participate in a primary insurance as one large pool, otherwise the primary purpose of insurance is lost, and we elevate profit over people's health.
Oh yeah (duh!) thanks. Sorry, with all the talk about the "gold standard" I jumped to that conclusion.
Still, that would take a lot of Pt, even if the coins were in $1k denominations. Does the statute require that they use pure Pt, or could they use an alloy or plate process?
Either way, I like this idea! It would be nice to see the gov't printing its own cash for a change, instead of borrowing all its money at interest from a private bank.
They already covered this, skip producing them in $1k denominations, print one at $5,000,000,000,000 denomination.
Germany last did this in 1923. Closer to 88 years.
To be fair, the Marks at that time were already worthless due to hyperinflation... after performing the tactic, the new Reichsmark actually experienced reasonable inflation. So, it's kind of difficult to hold that as the same example, because the tactic was used by Germany to stop inflation, and it did.
If the government is doing something profitable, they shouldn't be doing it. With all likelihood, if something is profitable, a guided free market should be able to manage it much more efficiently.
Except nearly everything can be done for-profit and turn a respectable turn around. Fire departments used to be private, and you basically bought insurance against a fire. Had a fire and hadn't paid your bill? Oh sorry, we're not going to help you out. Oh, but your neighbor who is paid up? We'll put the trucks out there to protect his house, while yours burns to the ground.
The point is not if a venture is profitable or not, because EVERYTHING can be made profitable if you're willing to exploit the customers enough. The point is if it should be fair and right that someone should not have fire service, police service, schooling and the like. Our society has deemed that there are certain things that everyone should be afforded regardless of their ability to pay, and that is what government should be covering. This is why I advocate for government mostly-single-payer healthcare. Because regardless of a person's ability to pay, they should have reasonable healthcare.
Of course, by your system, since the health insurance companies are gouging and exploiting their members by holding back some of the money as profit rather than investing it into actual patient services, the government shouldn't get involved. The result? If you can't pay for healthcare, you're screwed.
It's the best solution to our problems, unfortunately. Defaulting rather than devaluing spreads the pain rather unfairly. Devaluing hits all debt holders equally percentage wise.
Also, it resolves the housing crisis, which would be great for helping the economy overall.
Just a pedantic note of terminology, it hurts CREDITORS... one could claim these are "debt holders", but then you could also understand "debt holder" as one who has debt. So, it's generally better to use the terms creditors and debtors, as they're fixed, and unambiguous.
This "tax" is not just beneficial to the government. That 30 year mortgage that you took out? Yeah, over 30 years of inflation, the value of the original purchase is less meaningful now. Sure the government as the single largest holder of debt benefits the most from inflation, but in reality, anyone who holds debt is winning out. And all the creditors are losing potential money.
Inflation though is part of the reason why monies held in trust must be invested, because any money "left under a mattress" is losing value. Not as much as creditors are losing out on, but still some.
How other factors like handling of profile data come into play would be interesting, but we could isolate the profile factors by just letting the human read the text of the tweet, and nothing else.
True. I won't make the claim that we cannot make a rigorous study of the matter, but real world applications often become more difficult the more real world variables one eliminates from the matter. Even if we had perfect 100% accuracy of guessing the gender when all these factors are excluded, we still fail miserably in the real world case.
True. But there are people who are good at identifying those situations where the gender doesn't match the behavior. In real life, its called 'gaydar'. On line, it could just be a phony picture and a poser.
The gender-behavior mismatch is evident (I've been told) from the writing of the subjects in question. Not just the choice of words or little hearts where the periods should be, but based on the style of writing and subject matter. Apparently, a transcript of a conversation (or series of e-mails) between individuals produces a more accurate determination than an essay.
Yes, humans widely use language differently based on their own subcultures. Women particularly in some cultures speak an entirely different language from the gender-neutral language spoken by everyone. In some languages such as Japanese gendered language is extremely readily apparent, and when I was chatting on Japanese chatrooms, it was nice to be able to identify the gender of the speaker in one or two lines of text from them.
In much the same way, while we often are of the belief that men and women use language the same way in English, because it's not readily apparent, we do actually use language differently. Here is another interesting one: women use fewer contractions than men. Weird but oddly true.
All of this has less to do with "gaydar" than that every subculture speaks a slightly different dialect. Gay men have a selection of words that set them off, (I actually commented to a gay-rights group, where I was an "ally" of gay-rights, that they were using "fabulous" like... A LOT. And I was all, "um... do you REALLY want to be projecting the notion that this stereotype is valid and accurate? Because that is what you are doing.") and this does not mean that gay men talk like women. They actually talk differently and distinctly from women, but in this world of false dichotomies that we live in, we presume that if gay men don't talk the same way as straight men, then they must talk like women. But, in reality, this isn't actually correct.
Now, if you want to complain about women being statistically paid less than men, I will strongly support your argument that it (the practice) is based on pure bull--- But the statement that men and women are innately gender neutral and get conditioned exclusively by stereotypes? that is not supported by behaviorists.
Gender stereotypes simply reinforce already existent behaviors, for better or for worse.
I'm going to argue with you a bit here, but not in the ways that you probably imagine. I do not think that men and women are innnately gender neutral. We certainly are born with some innate sense of gender, and whom we want to mimic and conform ourselves to. Much of those behaviors though are not innate, in fact, I would label it as "most" behaviors and stereotypes are acquired. And this "genderless rearing", from where? The kids were unable to watch TV, they were completely cut off from books, culture, and others? We impose these stereotypes quite subtly, and it is nearly as difficult to cool something to absolute zero as it is to keep a child in a purely genderless environment.
That said, our children pick up and acquire much of these stereotyping self-conforming behaviors so easily and readily that they have to be innately directed. Not innate themselves, but acquired innately. Like language. We don't actually teach children language, they are exposed to it, and simply acquire it... but the language that one speaks is still culturally determined. The word for snow is "snow" or it's "xue", the child learns both readily and easily, because it's innately acquired, but the exact nature of the word itself is yet arbitrary and culturally imposed.
The denialist culture is strong especially in America, and it's support here on Slashdot is impressive because I imagine that the geek culture would actually actively discourage this denialist behavior, but I've read studies that suggest that denialism is not a choice.
One thought, I suppose, might be "How can a lot of us work to sabotage things like this and poison their inferences?" Another might be "Is there a way we can learn about who is getting such inferred info about us, and what they're planning to do with it?" Or "It there a way we can find out who has bought this information, and sue the perpetrators if the information is incorrect?"
There really isn't a way to be able to sue them, unless you consider being called the wrong sex defamation, but even if you do, I doubt that courts would really recognize it as an actionable claim.
I would off-the-cuff suggest that it's unlikely that humans are good at it. We have a high-tendency to let previous biases or preconceptions of people get in the way.
So, for example, you see the picture of a tweeter as a female, and you impose that belief into his/her text.
Ehhh, I don't think it has anything to do with greed. I think it has to do with that George Lucas is a great producer but a horrible director. Any director that says "I don't like the talking parts" should never be a director
This statement should apply equally well to Michael Bay.
The Daily Show has a running gag about how Kerry can't give anything but a rambling statement extemporaneously. Sure his prepared speeches may be good, but then President Bush II was able to sound somewhat coherent when he had a speech writer speaking for him.
Which sums it up nicely. The filings show how it could have been stolen - but do not prove that it was stolen.
This case is being tried in civil court. One need merely prove beyond a preponderance of evidence, not to the much more difficult beyond a reasonable doubt. In such cases often mere motive and opportunity is enough. (c.f. OJ Simpson)
By "Speed of Light" - is a constant (C). The Theory of Relativity doesn't state "light can't move faster than light" - it really states "nothing can move faster than 'C' - including light - which can travel at 'C' (in a vaccum)."
Since light moves as fast as "C", the call "C", "Speed of Light".
Anyway - its not really news. If they found it could move faster, that would be news!
I didn't think it were particularly news either, I was all "well, duh..." and recalling the phrase from Red vs. Blue, "Can you put that in a memo and entitle it shit I already know?"
Then I read the summary, and I remembered, oh yeah, proving our assumptions correct is useful and newsworthy as well as proving them wrong.
I noticed that as well. The article talks about how Master's Degrees are a way to wait for the end of an economic downturn, and then "master's degree enrollment has been up since 2009!" It's like, uh... you realize that you just explained why it's gone up, right?
Once configured, the layout of the keys does not change.
Funny, TFA said that it would watch ongoing usage and morph slightly to ensure that it remained efficient and effective. Of course, it won't do massive huge changes, so touch-typing will be interfered with as little as possible.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, it isn't. Turning over stocks for short-term profit is gambling, not capitalism. Please look up the historic meaning of "capitalism". It isn't just money-mongering.
I like how you can assert out of thin air that current capitalism isn't valid capitalism, because of the "historic meaning of 'capitalism'." How am I supposed to even take this as a valid assertion? You seem to be arguing by vigorous handwaving, and appeal to authority. No less it completely ignores semantic drift, and that words are constantly expanded to apply to newer versions of older concepts.
Should electric powered cars not be "cars" because historically cars have had internal combustion engines? Thus your argument is invalid as demonsted by analogy.
Perhaps the link I posted earlier will do a better job of explaining what real capital wealth is, than I have. It's late and I am tired. But please note what this man says. He was exactly right about the economy (as Austrian economists have been for quite a while), while all the people following Keynesian theory (official government policy) were 100% wrong.
I will avoid copypasta here, and just link to relevant text. No theory is perfect, and this should be recognized by any valid scientist. You know, Creationists think that the Bible is exactly right about the world, and that evolutionary theory has been 100% wrong. It's easy to make such assertions when your entire theory is unfalsifiable.
And as he says: real capital wealth consists of goods and the infrastructure to produce those goods, not whether the stock index is at 12,000 or 13,000. The goods need not necessarily be physical: informational goods are still goods.
Please provide a rigorous and unambiguous way to differentiate stock trading based on speculation from informational goods. I agree that speculation is a bad thing, it's the entire reason for economic bubbles, and boom-and-bust cycles. But when me and my friends sat down and declared, "we can use magic to enforce rules and regulations, how would we stop trading based on speculation". We realized that there was no way to do it, even with omnipotent magic.
There will always be a free market segment in virtually every industry. It is not the duty of the government to stamp this out, but to ensure for those industries that society has deemed critical and manditory, that all individuals have a minimum level of service that society is willing to accept, especially those that are not able to partake in the free market segment.
Right, so we totally agree. I really only disagreed with you because of the way you phrased the issue. "Profitability" is a horrible way to measure any segment for private vs. public operation.
I love how it's not "real" capitalism because they're turning over stocks for profit instead of objects with physical properties.
Rereading your post, you're making sense, but arguing slightly different from the post you're responding to. He's talking about redenominating and then paying off your debt through just-as-inflationary-as-you-were-doing-before actions, i.e. printing money wholecloth, just to pay debts.
I just read your counter-examples and not the stuff you wrote after clarifying your position. You are of course correct (which prompted my reread) but it wasn't really what he was talking about. Germany didn't redenominate and then print off off money to pay off their debts. Actually, in many ways, they just defaulted on their reparations debt.
I think you missinterpreted my meaning.
You can run a private school for selective students at a profit. You can NOT educate EVERY minor in the country to an expected 12th grade level for a profit. There for, while some private institutes can run their for profit model schools, the government must pick up the responsibility for all others.
And private industry cannot run at a profit and provide iPads to everyone either, but we have to ask does everyone need/deserve an iPad? It can be said that everyone needs/deserves education, but not iPads, but then that's the point that I'm trying to make: nothing could be run for-profit and yet still provide it to everyone. So your model then decomposes to "government should be in the business of providing what everyone needs/deserves", and as such your model is not based on profitability, which is what you initially said.
Arguably similar to health care. Where private institutes can maintain a for-profit model, they do. For individuals they choose not to provide service to (via pricing or denial) it falls to the government to cover. Be it through Medicare/Medicaid, socialized plans, single payer, healthy start, etc...
But then you have private insurance providing care to only the healthy people making gobs of profit by providing very little return for what the individuals are investing, and leaving the government to provide insurance for everyone who is a profit-loss. Thus, you're just subsidizing the healthcare insurance industry by taking away everything that is unprofitable and burdening that cost onto the entire taxpayer base. If instead the government had it mandatory that everyone have government insurance, then the government can offset costs, and instead of being a GIANT money sink, it's merely losing money when the entire population's usage exceeds monies collected to cover those costs.
Note, this doesn't apply for private supplementary insurance, but everyone needs to participate in a primary insurance as one large pool, otherwise the primary purpose of insurance is lost, and we elevate profit over people's health.
Oh yeah (duh!) thanks. Sorry, with all the talk about the "gold standard" I jumped to that conclusion.
Still, that would take a lot of Pt, even if the coins were in $1k denominations. Does the statute require that they use pure Pt, or could they use an alloy or plate process?
Either way, I like this idea! It would be nice to see the gov't printing its own cash for a change, instead of borrowing all its money at interest from a private bank.
They already covered this, skip producing them in $1k denominations, print one at $5,000,000,000,000 denomination.
Germany last did this in 1923. Closer to 88 years.
To be fair, the Marks at that time were already worthless due to hyperinflation... after performing the tactic, the new Reichsmark actually experienced reasonable inflation. So, it's kind of difficult to hold that as the same example, because the tactic was used by Germany to stop inflation, and it did.
If the government is doing something profitable, they shouldn't be doing it. With all likelihood, if something is profitable, a guided free market should be able to manage it much more efficiently.
Except nearly everything can be done for-profit and turn a respectable turn around. Fire departments used to be private, and you basically bought insurance against a fire. Had a fire and hadn't paid your bill? Oh sorry, we're not going to help you out. Oh, but your neighbor who is paid up? We'll put the trucks out there to protect his house, while yours burns to the ground.
The point is not if a venture is profitable or not, because EVERYTHING can be made profitable if you're willing to exploit the customers enough. The point is if it should be fair and right that someone should not have fire service, police service, schooling and the like. Our society has deemed that there are certain things that everyone should be afforded regardless of their ability to pay, and that is what government should be covering. This is why I advocate for government mostly-single-payer healthcare. Because regardless of a person's ability to pay, they should have reasonable healthcare.
Of course, by your system, since the health insurance companies are gouging and exploiting their members by holding back some of the money as profit rather than investing it into actual patient services, the government shouldn't get involved. The result? If you can't pay for healthcare, you're screwed.
It's the best solution to our problems, unfortunately. Defaulting rather than devaluing spreads the pain rather unfairly. Devaluing hits all debt holders equally percentage wise.
Also, it resolves the housing crisis, which would be great for helping the economy overall.
Just a pedantic note of terminology, it hurts CREDITORS... one could claim these are "debt holders", but then you could also understand "debt holder" as one who has debt. So, it's generally better to use the terms creditors and debtors, as they're fixed, and unambiguous.
This "tax" is not just beneficial to the government. That 30 year mortgage that you took out? Yeah, over 30 years of inflation, the value of the original purchase is less meaningful now. Sure the government as the single largest holder of debt benefits the most from inflation, but in reality, anyone who holds debt is winning out. And all the creditors are losing potential money.
Inflation though is part of the reason why monies held in trust must be invested, because any money "left under a mattress" is losing value. Not as much as creditors are losing out on, but still some.
How other factors like handling of profile data come into play would be interesting, but we could isolate the profile factors by just letting the human read the text of the tweet, and nothing else.
True. I won't make the claim that we cannot make a rigorous study of the matter, but real world applications often become more difficult the more real world variables one eliminates from the matter. Even if we had perfect 100% accuracy of guessing the gender when all these factors are excluded, we still fail miserably in the real world case.
True. But there are people who are good at identifying those situations where the gender doesn't match the behavior. In real life, its called 'gaydar'. On line, it could just be a phony picture and a poser.
The gender-behavior mismatch is evident (I've been told) from the writing of the subjects in question. Not just the choice of words or little hearts where the periods should be, but based on the style of writing and subject matter. Apparently, a transcript of a conversation (or series of e-mails) between individuals produces a more accurate determination than an essay.
Yes, humans widely use language differently based on their own subcultures. Women particularly in some cultures speak an entirely different language from the gender-neutral language spoken by everyone. In some languages such as Japanese gendered language is extremely readily apparent, and when I was chatting on Japanese chatrooms, it was nice to be able to identify the gender of the speaker in one or two lines of text from them.
In much the same way, while we often are of the belief that men and women use language the same way in English, because it's not readily apparent, we do actually use language differently. Here is another interesting one: women use fewer contractions than men. Weird but oddly true.
All of this has less to do with "gaydar" than that every subculture speaks a slightly different dialect. Gay men have a selection of words that set them off, (I actually commented to a gay-rights group, where I was an "ally" of gay-rights, that they were using "fabulous" like... A LOT. And I was all, "um... do you REALLY want to be projecting the notion that this stereotype is valid and accurate? Because that is what you are doing.") and this does not mean that gay men talk like women. They actually talk differently and distinctly from women, but in this world of false dichotomies that we live in, we presume that if gay men don't talk the same way as straight men, then they must talk like women. But, in reality, this isn't actually correct.
Now, if you want to complain about women being statistically paid less than men, I will strongly support your argument that it (the practice) is based on pure bull--- But the statement that men and women are innately gender neutral and get conditioned exclusively by stereotypes? that is not supported by behaviorists.
Gender stereotypes simply reinforce already existent behaviors, for better or for worse.
I'm going to argue with you a bit here, but not in the ways that you probably imagine. I do not think that men and women are innnately gender neutral. We certainly are born with some innate sense of gender, and whom we want to mimic and conform ourselves to. Much of those behaviors though are not innate, in fact, I would label it as "most" behaviors and stereotypes are acquired. And this "genderless rearing", from where? The kids were unable to watch TV, they were completely cut off from books, culture, and others? We impose these stereotypes quite subtly, and it is nearly as difficult to cool something to absolute zero as it is to keep a child in a purely genderless environment.
That said, our children pick up and acquire much of these stereotyping self-conforming behaviors so easily and readily that they have to be innately directed. Not innate themselves, but acquired innately. Like language. We don't actually teach children language, they are exposed to it, and simply acquire it... but the language that one speaks is still culturally determined. The word for snow is "snow" or it's "xue", the child learns both readily and easily, because it's innately acquired, but the exact nature of the word itself is yet arbitrary and culturally imposed.
I don't have mod points, so I have to post a comment to tell you, "funniest thing I read all day". You boys are weird :P
The denialist culture is strong especially in America, and it's support here on Slashdot is impressive because I imagine that the geek culture would actually actively discourage this denialist behavior, but I've read studies that suggest that denialism is not a choice.
One thought, I suppose, might be "How can a lot of us work to sabotage things like this and poison their inferences?" Another might be "Is there a way we can learn about who is getting such inferred info about us, and what they're planning to do with it?" Or "It there a way we can find out who has bought this information, and sue the perpetrators if the information is incorrect?"
There really isn't a way to be able to sue them, unless you consider being called the wrong sex defamation, but even if you do, I doubt that courts would really recognize it as an actionable claim.
I would off-the-cuff suggest that it's unlikely that humans are good at it. We have a high-tendency to let previous biases or preconceptions of people get in the way.
So, for example, you see the picture of a tweeter as a female, and you impose that belief into his/her text.
Ehhh, I don't think it has anything to do with greed. I think it has to do with that George Lucas is a great producer but a horrible director. Any director that says "I don't like the talking parts" should never be a director
This statement should apply equally well to Michael Bay.
The Daily Show has a running gag about how Kerry can't give anything but a rambling statement extemporaneously. Sure his prepared speeches may be good, but then President Bush II was able to sound somewhat coherent when he had a speech writer speaking for him.
Which sums it up nicely. The filings show how it could have been stolen - but do not prove that it was stolen.
This case is being tried in civil court. One need merely prove beyond a preponderance of evidence, not to the much more difficult beyond a reasonable doubt. In such cases often mere motive and opportunity is enough. (c.f. OJ Simpson)
By "Speed of Light" - is a constant (C). The Theory of Relativity doesn't state "light can't move faster than light" - it really states "nothing can move faster than 'C' - including light - which can travel at 'C' (in a vaccum)."
Since light moves as fast as "C", the call "C", "Speed of Light".
Anyway - its not really news. If they found it could move faster, that would be news!
I didn't think it were particularly news either, I was all "well, duh..." and recalling the phrase from Red vs. Blue, "Can you put that in a memo and entitle it shit I already know?"
Then I read the summary, and I remembered, oh yeah, proving our assumptions correct is useful and newsworthy as well as proving them wrong.
I noticed that as well. The article talks about how Master's Degrees are a way to wait for the end of an economic downturn, and then "master's degree enrollment has been up since 2009!" It's like, uh... you realize that you just explained why it's gone up, right?
Once configured, the layout of the keys does not change.
Funny, TFA said that it would watch ongoing usage and morph slightly to ensure that it remained efficient and effective. Of course, it won't do massive huge changes, so touch-typing will be interfered with as little as possible.
And we use his numbers.
No, we use an "Arabic numeral" system, but the glyphs that they use are actually quite different from ours. I would include the numbers from 0-9 here, but I imagine that slashcode will maim it to the point of it being fruitless.