China in 2007 is just like China in 1977 except that its central bank owns more Treasuries. Why didn't I realize that?
Look, anyone who reads a newspaper knows that, since that time, (a) a panoply of totalitarian institutions have been dismantled, leading to unprecedented levels of personal autonomy from the state; (b) standards of living have grown dramatically, as peasants join the industrial economy and the middle class swells; (c) economic freedoms have gone from negligible to moderate, and even in some ways robust; and that (d) these changes are strongly correlated with massive exports of manufactured goods and an influx of foreign risk capital. You draw your own conclusions.
The gradual advancement of economic freedom in China has dramatically weakened its rulers, who now must justify their policies to a ever-growing urban middle class while simultaneously creating tens of millions of factory jobs every year for a rural population that now hopes one day to join the civilized world. A surfeit of export trade is the present catalyst for this process, so you should be thankful that you have the privilege of buying goods from emerging markets like China and Vietnam.
Hundreds of millions of Chinese peasants are still mired in rural poverty. The price of labor can't rise by much until they are absorbed into the economy, something which will happen in a few decades time.
In one hundred years, nuclear-fusion reactors will not merely be practical, but obsolete. Instead they'll be vibrating quarks to produce energy, or doing something equally alien to our primitive scientific knowledge. It's also quite likely that the climate will by then be utterly and effortlessly under man's control. I see little evidence that the rate of scientific and technological advance has slowed, or that the past few centuries have been some kind of anomaly and nothing but the precursor to a new dark age.
I imagine that most of the earth's arable land is either (a) not used for farming; or (b) used rather inefficiently. 10% of today's arable land might be more than adequate if the latest agricultural technologies were universally introduced. (Our ability to make fertilizer doesn't seem to depend on the climate in any way.) Or perhaps high-density hydroponic farming will become more economical than using precious land. I really don't know.
In reality, anyway, climate catastrophes don't happen overnight, so there would be ample time for economies to adapt themselves to declining resource availability. There's every reason to believe that civilization will continue to thrive in a more hostile climate (short of the atmosphere suddenly turning poisonious or something).
That should read 50 years time. 15 years would suffice to recover from a 50% loss of resources. The point is the same: a one-time change of this kind merely sets back man's economic growth by a relatively small period of time. And economic growth is not identical with quality of life; if climate change means that people will have to trade their two SUVs and a McMansion for, say, apartments in resource-efficient cities, how much will they really have lost? Conversely, it does not seem that a hostile climate will prevent anyone from rising out of absolute poverty, which has more to do with economic freedom and technology than with the availability of copious resources.
Suppose that a climate catastrophe were to destroy, tomorrow, 90% of the resource inputs—land, minerals, fuels, and so on—that now feed man's economic processes. If in every subsequent year man succeeded in using those natural-resource inputs 5% more efficiently than he did in the preceding year, in only 15 years time he will have returned to his previous level of prosperity, having learned to do ten times as much with an equivalent quantity of resources. In light of the astounding progress in technology that man has made in the past century, it does not strike me as altogether unreasonable to imagine that, in a time of ecological duress, he would be able to do something much like this.
Even simpler: He mails you his lock, you put it on the suitcase and ship it back to him. That's how asymmetric crypto (eg, PGP) works: I send you my public key, you encrypt a message with it and email it to me. And the practical problem is the same: verifying the authenticity of the lock, or public key.
Object-oriented programming concepts should have sorted out this mess years ago.
1) Write a class for each document type, with methods to construct the logical document structure (eg, add paragraphs to a report, define the author name, whatever).
2) Define a set of standardized rendering interfaces (screen, printer, audio, etc).
3) Write some renderers for various (document-class, rendering-interface) permutations (eg, one that renders articles to the screen, or books to the printer).
You can promote crime all you want; you only run afoul of the law if (a) you know that your speech will directly incite someone to commit a specific crime, and (b) it is your intent to do so. IIRC.
The night is supposed to be dark—that's why the sun sets. I advise you to put some candles (or maybe a small lamp) on your desk, rather than light up your whole house, which is wasteful and obnoxious. Just the same, this law, like many American laws of the past fifty years, is suited to a people who put a low price on their liberty.
IP is unreliable and insecure by design. If people want security and quality-of-service guarantees, they should use another network technology. What else is new?
You just play for N months, rolling the proceeds into another contract on expiry. Index calls are your best bet because their replicating portfolio lies on the capital market line.
Blame evolution. Wealth acquisition is capitalism's version of male competition. The winners attract the best mates. Men are simply hard-wired for the rat race.
Bad parents simply blame society for what evil their own negligence has done, assuming they even bother to raise their children in the first place. Many do not.
If the wealth of the millionaire were essentially illegitimate, the state would not need any further rationale for his expropriation. On the other hand, if he were in some sense entitled to his astounding fortune, what moral arguments could yet be brought to bear that would override his right to property? One broad line of reasoning might maintain that "All people have some duty X, which happens to require that millionares in particular be rather charitable—and the state may compel its citizens to live up to their ethical obligations."
Slashdot Mirror
China in 2007 is just like China in 1977 except that its central bank owns more Treasuries. Why didn't I realize that?
Look, anyone who reads a newspaper knows that, since that time, (a) a panoply of totalitarian institutions have been dismantled, leading to unprecedented levels of personal autonomy from the state; (b) standards of living have grown dramatically, as peasants join the industrial economy and the middle class swells; (c) economic freedoms have gone from negligible to moderate, and even in some ways robust; and that (d) these changes are strongly correlated with massive exports of manufactured goods and an influx of foreign risk capital. You draw your own conclusions.
The gradual advancement of economic freedom in China has dramatically weakened its rulers, who now must justify their policies to a ever-growing urban middle class while simultaneously creating tens of millions of factory jobs every year for a rural population that now hopes one day to join the civilized world. A surfeit of export trade is the present catalyst for this process, so you should be thankful that you have the privilege of buying goods from emerging markets like China and Vietnam.
Hundreds of millions of Chinese peasants are still mired in rural poverty. The price of labor can't rise by much until they are absorbed into the economy, something which will happen in a few decades time.
In one hundred years, nuclear-fusion reactors will not merely be practical, but obsolete. Instead they'll be vibrating quarks to produce energy, or doing something equally alien to our primitive scientific knowledge. It's also quite likely that the climate will by then be utterly and effortlessly under man's control. I see little evidence that the rate of scientific and technological advance has slowed, or that the past few centuries have been some kind of anomaly and nothing but the precursor to a new dark age.
I imagine that most of the earth's arable land is either (a) not used for farming; or (b) used rather inefficiently. 10% of today's arable land might be more than adequate if the latest agricultural technologies were universally introduced. (Our ability to make fertilizer doesn't seem to depend on the climate in any way.) Or perhaps high-density hydroponic farming will become more economical than using precious land. I really don't know.
In reality, anyway, climate catastrophes don't happen overnight, so there would be ample time for economies to adapt themselves to declining resource availability. There's every reason to believe that civilization will continue to thrive in a more hostile climate (short of the atmosphere suddenly turning poisonious or something).
That should read 50 years time. 15 years would suffice to recover from a 50% loss of resources. The point is the same: a one-time change of this kind merely sets back man's economic growth by a relatively small period of time. And economic growth is not identical with quality of life; if climate change means that people will have to trade their two SUVs and a McMansion for, say, apartments in resource-efficient cities, how much will they really have lost? Conversely, it does not seem that a hostile climate will prevent anyone from rising out of absolute poverty, which has more to do with economic freedom and technology than with the availability of copious resources.
Suppose that a climate catastrophe were to destroy, tomorrow, 90% of the resource inputs—land, minerals, fuels, and so on—that now feed man's economic processes. If in every subsequent year man succeeded in using those natural-resource inputs 5% more efficiently than he did in the preceding year, in only 15 years time he will have returned to his previous level of prosperity, having learned to do ten times as much with an equivalent quantity of resources. In light of the astounding progress in technology that man has made in the past century, it does not strike me as altogether unreasonable to imagine that, in a time of ecological duress, he would be able to do something much like this.
Were I the Queen of England, I should have long since had these shameful perverts lashed until they drop!
Just ten gigabits? One decent motherboard has two...
Even simpler: He mails you his lock, you put it on the suitcase and ship it back to him. That's how asymmetric crypto (eg, PGP) works: I send you my public key, you encrypt a message with it and email it to me. And the practical problem is the same: verifying the authenticity of the lock, or public key.
The most accessible introduction to science is Immanuel Kant's Critique of Pure Reason.
40 cents/gig? 500GB disks cost 20 cents/gig.
Object-oriented programming concepts should have sorted out this mess years ago.
:)
1) Write a class for each document type, with methods to construct the logical document structure (eg, add paragraphs to a report, define the author name, whatever).
2) Define a set of standardized rendering interfaces (screen, printer, audio, etc).
3) Write some renderers for various (document-class, rendering-interface) permutations (eg, one that renders articles to the screen, or books to the printer).
You're welcome.
You can promote crime all you want; you only run afoul of the law if (a) you know that your speech will directly incite someone to commit a specific crime, and (b) it is your intent to do so. IIRC.
My GNU system never seems to have any of these weird activation problems. Maybe I'm just lucky?
The night is supposed to be dark—that's why the sun sets. I advise you to put some candles (or maybe a small lamp) on your desk, rather than light up your whole house, which is wasteful and obnoxious. Just the same, this law, like many American laws of the past fifty years, is suited to a people who put a low price on their liberty.
IP is unreliable and insecure by design. If people want security and quality-of-service guarantees, they should use another network technology. What else is new?
You just play for N months, rolling the proceeds into another contract on expiry. Index calls are your best bet because their replicating portfolio lies on the capital market line.
Educated risk-takers would buy out-of-the-money equity-index calls, not lottery tickets. Compare the expected values!
You could have educated yourself in the time you instead expended in boasting of your own ignorance.
Blame evolution. Wealth acquisition is capitalism's version of male competition. The winners attract the best mates. Men are simply hard-wired for the rat race.
Bad parents simply blame society for what evil their own negligence has done, assuming they even bother to raise their children in the first place. Many do not.
My friend, you are a genius.
If the wealth of the millionaire were essentially illegitimate, the state would not need any further rationale for his expropriation. On the other hand, if he were in some sense entitled to his astounding fortune, what moral arguments could yet be brought to bear that would override his right to property? One broad line of reasoning might maintain that "All people have some duty X, which happens to require that millionares in particular be rather charitable—and the state may compel its citizens to live up to their ethical obligations."
"Shall we steal money and use it for noble purposes?" Well, how do you vote?