Heh. I don't understand your point.
Really? Doh! The government is giving student money to pay needlessly high tuition rates. THEN, we are not even asking them to pay it back. Oh, that makes perfect sense now. Certainly, just like with free mortgage money, free education money will drive up prices.
College tuitions are overpriced due to federal subsidies. When colleges will get paid regardless if a student defaults or not, you will see inflated prices like this. You guys are only playing with symptoms at this point.
How can you not see this as a restatement of my point while calling me an idiot? |
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In other words, Apple gave Mr. Jobs $74.75 million worth of stock and a $90 million airplane, plus at least $41.8 million in "tax assistance" to Mr. Jobs for the airplane. And the Wall Street Journal headline and news article tell readers about the fact that he's taken $1 a year in salary since 1997. The Journal story acknowledges that Mr. Jobs "owns about 5.5 million shares of the company," but doesn't say anything about how he received them. http://www.futureofcapitalism.com/2011/01/steve-jobs-compensation[/quote] Yes they gave him an Airplane to make it possible for him to become iCEO. That is well known. He was already the CEO of another company so his daily commute was pretty phenomenal. His 5.5 million shares were the result of an option grant of 10 million shares. You are required to exercise options or they evaporate. In order to exercise the options, you have to go out of pocket for the original value of the stock. Normally people do this by selling the stock and pocketing the difference. In his case, he returned almost half the options to the company in exchange for stock. That showed his commitment to the company and avoided needlessly roiling the market. This is why there was a "tax" charge. He never took any cash, so the company paid his taxes. So when did he convert all that stock into cash and start blowing it on cocaine and hookers? Oh yeah, he died never having taken his profits. Yes, obviously he was out to screw everyone. |
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College tuitions are overpriced due to federal subsidies. When colleges will get paid regardless if a student defaults or not, you will see inflated prices like this. You guys are only playing with symptoms at this point.
Your main problem seems to stem from your inability to realize that you can't call someone an idiot while restating their premise. And Atlas Shrugged is not that tough a read. Download the audio version if you are lazy. |
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Oh, okay. The guys who serve you at basically every business you patronize aren't lazy - just useless, and are best compared to a stereotype of a '60s hippie that you dredged up and dusted off just now. Thanks for the clarification, Nixon.
They are useful and compensated for their utility. Do I want to pay $10 for a Big Mac. No. Will I pay $10 for a Big Mac. No. Will McDonald's replace all those folks with a fascinating Krispy Kreme Machine before they ask me to pay $10 for a Big Mac. Well, they had better or they'll be shit out of luck. Will I shed a tear that people can't burn their hands on McDonald's grills like I used to? Not a single one. But I will marvel at the work of the engineers! |
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In her case, though, one could easily say she died an Ironic Death of Misadventure.
LMAO! |
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You're not the first to make the argument that the system is too complex. I, predictably, disagree.  I'm not making the argument it is too complex. I'm only saying, I'm too lazy to put in that much work. |
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Proudly pinheaded fat white guys like the one pictured in the article taught me that people who work two minimum wage jobs for 80 hours a week and STILL don't make enough to pay taxes are the laziest pricks in the world.
Ask the prick. He will tell you it's not about laziness. Its about usefulness. Hippies that weave baskets work pretty hard at it. Even if they are stoned while doing it. But that doesn't mean I have to give a crap they made a basket. I prefer buckets. --- Throws bucket at Hawker! |
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Read Atlas Shrugged as a teenager. But you know I kinda did grow up in the most capitalism-loving country on Earth that loves to censor and keep anything truly leftist from the people at all costs. I'm gonna go ahead and say I've been way more exposed to capitalist thought than Atlas has to leftist thought living in small-town Texas. Call it a hunch.
It is folly to interpret any Texan's dismissal of leftist views as a lack of understanding of them. We simply dismiss them because they are silly. Not silly in a good way like Jerry Seinfeld. But silly in the way an 8 year old rationalizes their father buying them a new skateboard. Silly like this current events example: http://www.cnn.com/2011/10/26/politics/obama-student-loans/"These changes will make a difference for millions of Americans," Obama told a college crowd. "We should be doing everything we can to put a college education within the reach of every American."
While college costs are rising, employment prospects for new college graduates are dimming. In 2010, the unemployment rate for college graduates age 24 and younger rose to 9.4%, the highest since the Labor Department began keeping records in 1985.
Way to support the president's argument CNN! But still, I'm hugely in favor of education. College education costs have continued to spike in recent years. The price of attending the average public university rose 5.4% for in-state students to $21,447 this fall, according to a report released Wednesday by the College Board. The cost for one year at a typical private college rose 4.3% to $42,224.
OK, the main problem is the cost of education is rising. Granted. Could it be a supply and demand imbalance? No, how could it be possible for college student to have too much money to waste on tuition that is needlessly high. That's Inconceivable! The way the Income-Based Repayment Plan works now is that graduates who enroll get charged 15% of their monthly discretionary income to pay off loans, with debt forgiven after 25 years.
Doh! The government is giving student money to pay needlessly high tuition rates. THEN, we are not even asking them to pay it back. Oh, that makes perfect sense now. Certainly, just like with free mortgage money, free education money will drive up prices. So let's fix the problem! Congress passed a law set to go into effect in 2014 that would drop the monthly payment for loans originated that year to 10% of discretionary income and would forgive all debt after 20 years.
The administration would improve on the law by fast-forwarding the new terms to take effect in 2012 on loans originated that year, White House domestic policy adviser Melody Barnes noted Tuesday.
WTF! We are going to fix the problem of increasing education cost, by having students pay back less of their loans!!! Why don't we just charge science and engineering majors more because they are going to be rich. But give discounts to english and history majors because they are going to be poor. Wait! Universities are actually doing that! You've got to be fucking kidding me. Deliberately penalizing people from learning to be productive, while encouraging people to study what will keep them in poverty. Well as long as there is a plan! Go left go! |
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Yep, you and the other 1%
Me and the other 1%? Exactly what are you smoking? If you mean geocentrically? Sure, guilty as charged. Where do you fit on that scale, 2%? I am the 53%! |
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And exactly how many millions of dollars in stock options does the average Chinese laborer get?
Curiously, you know how many stock options Steve Jobs died with? ALL OF THEM! Every stock option he received came at the expense of other stock holders. None came at the expense of employees. Each option was worthless when he received it. (Options are the right to purchase stock at the current market price.) They only increased in value because he 1) revived a dying company, 2) saved countless jobs and 3) created multitudes more. The value of his options rose 600 million dollars in the past year alone, even though he received zero additional options. He cashed out none of them. Had he chosen to cash out those options, every penny of the money would have come from new Apple investors. Zero of it would have come at the expense of Chinese laborers. Yeah, I'm sure you think he was a insignificant greedy bastard leaching off the work products of others. I just happen to think you are wrong. |
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1) The koomey's law adjustment is a constant. Hard constants are bad for something should be able to adapt to future circumstance without intervention. It is possible that with further thought it could work similarly to the latest encoin proposal.
If the computer hardware cycle fell outside of koomey's law (and, like Moore's, it always does to some degree and is only a measure of history, not predictive of the future), the value of GEMs would be less stable than ENC.
Still working my way though your new section on how you do this in Encoin. I'm behind on my reading. Koomey's law is the best way I could explain what the goal is. I am still not sure how variances from Koomey's law could be measured of automatically compensated for. I do still think those differences will be swamped by actual economic changes though. This compounds the measurements. 2) It centralizes trust. It would be very complicated to use the block chain to keep track of this trust (or reputation), so Red's idea was to have peers use well-known merchants/exchanges as the basis for trust. I'm sure it would end up being more complex and more secure than just that, but his implementation ideas are still at the early stages; I've had a bit of a head start. But since the bitcoin block chain does not scale well at all, it is likely always going to revolve around a small number of entities.
The basic problem is that given varying necessity for coin generation, there is no absolute way to resolve network partitioning like Bitcoin proposes. Both Encoin and GEM attempt to avoid the problem, by identifying network partitioning up front. Nodes should know ASAP if they have been partitioned from the main network. GEM does this on a 10 minute block basis using the announcements from non-anonymous nodes. Encoin does it for each transaction independently. Both require a benchmark for how a node can measure if they are in the majority or minority network partition. This benchmark is a very difficult thing to name. Encoin proposals have called it by several different names "Trust" being the most common. GEM also uses the term "Trust" but it does so differently than Encoin. Trust in GEM is basically human to human pragmatic trust. If you don't see your friend, you get worried. Trust in Encoin is more of a mathematical relationship. It is (sort of) a summation of "node compliance to the specification" (times) "node availability over time". Consistency or Dependability might be good alternate terms to describe what Encoin is measuring. But these terms don't work in most of the sentences discussing how a node can "trust" that its transactions have been confirmed. Both of these Encoin and GEMs "trust" benchmarks are designed to frustrate Sybil attacks. In this case that means creating additional entities in hopes of convincing a node it is in the majority partition when it is indeed in the minority partition. GEM frustrates this by requiring trusted nodes to be non-anonymous and trusted in the human to human sense. Encoin frustrates this by requiring anonymous nodes to put in extended effort over time (electricity) to build "trust". If a node violates the compliance rules, their expensive trust is easily revoked. The main drawback with Encoin's "trust" implementation is it requires almost as many words to describe (and lines of code to implement) as is needed for the rest of the transaction processing. This does not imply that it won't work or that it isn't worth doing. The main drawback with GEMs "trust" implementation is that it is difficult to guarantee that it is sufficient to frustrate deliberate network DOS or forking attacks. I tend to think it is. However, it requires acknowledging that when things get deliberately wonky, humans are going to step in no matter how much we hope they won't. |
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In your opinion, what design choices make Encoin superior to GEM?
I don't have a deep understand of all the Encoin details, but I understand the concepts and what drove the decision making. Basically nothing in GEM is superior to Encoin. However, given the tools at hand (meaning Bitcoin's code base) GEM is easier to implement. That goes a long way when you are lazy like me. A major difference is Encoin uses a balance sheet approach, in addition to recording all the transactions. This means every node does not have to download and keep the entire block chain. It just starts with the balances and runs. However, this requires a bit of "faith" that those you received the latest balance sheet from never lied in creating it. There is really nothing stopping bitcoin or GEM from rolling the old blocks up into a balance sheet for efficiency. However, Bitcoin isn't big on faith in ones peers. A subtile difference is that Bitcoin relies on a plethora of "accounts" to aid in anonymity. I'm pretty sure this is why Satoshi opted not to create a rolled up summary of accounts. If everyone uses a new account for every transaction, and keeps hundreds of funded personal accounts, then the balance sheet would grow pretty huge pretty fast. The block chain tends to grow linearly with the number of transactions but it is agnostic to the number of accounts. The balance sheet in Encoin will grow linearly with the number of accounts but it is agnostic to the number of transactions. This will be substantially smaller than the total block chain. However, Encoin does record every transaction into its own chain. It's just that every node isn't required to keep up with them all. This adds slight historical risk to Encoin. Since fewer nodes keep up with every transaction, those that do not are required to trust those that do to accurately maintain the historical record. Losing historical transactions does not invalidate the current balances of course, it just makes auditing them impossible. Depending on how you spin this, it either adds to or detracts from anonymity. Having fewer accounts detracts and makes it easier for those with every transaction block to profile account holders. However, not distributing every historical transactions to every node removes the triviality of anyone poking through the history. I tend to think it adds anonymity than it takes away. If the destruction of historical transaction records could be automated and mandated, anonymity would greatly improve. It does not appear to be plausible though. |
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I am talking about salaries of executives of corps like HP, General Electric, Apple, etc,
OK, now Steve Jobs' salary at Apple was $1 a year. I'm pretty sure that's less than lots of unskilled Chinese labor. |
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I really do love the British, even if I don't even speak their language. Could someone from the other side of the pond decode the nuances of "Death by Misadventure" for me? It has to be one of the best phrases I've ever heard. I've always though American's didn't lead adventurous enough lives. Now I'm sure of it! British coroner Suzanne Greenway announced today that the 27-year-old suffered a "death by misadventure" on July 23, and that her passing was an "unintended consequence" of accidental alcohol poisoning.
British coroner Suzanne Greenway announced today that the 27-year-old suffered a "death by misadventure" on July 23, and that her passing was an "unintended consequence" of accidental alcohol poisoning.
http://www.eonline.com/news/amy_winehouses_cause_of_death/271628 |
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Supply or demand manipulation for the purpose of controlling any price, whether for goods or monies, is folly. Price of all things SHOULD fluctuate, it is how scarcity is measured against demand and resources are, over time, arranged in efficient order.
Folly! Woot! I thought only I used that word. Clearly, Encoin and Bitcoin have different goals. Encoin is in no way designed to become a digital scarce commodity. No one will get rich by becoming an Encoin early adopter. Encoin is attempting to design digital currency with the specific goal of facilitating trade. With Encoin, if you have willing traders but no money to facilitate trading then you have a flaw in monetary policy. To rectify the flaw you simply make more money. However, to avoid price inflation, you constrain the creation of money by assigning it a specific proof-of-work cost to create. That cost must be paid-on-demand to the electric company. As such, in Encoin, money is created only when it is profitable to do so. The makes Encoin creation extremely market based.Bitcoin uses a similar electricity cost constraint, but instead of fixing the proof-of-work cost it raises the cost in scale with coin demand. Each bitcoin now costs about $3.41 to create. But if a bitcoin becomes worth $30 again, it will cost $30 in electricity to create each new coin. So when there is little demand for BTC, bitcoin makes them cheaper and easier to create. When there is high demand, bitcoin makes them expensive and hard to create. This seems like folly in a system designed to facilitate trade. But Yes, Bitcoin makes a much better digital scarce commodity than Encoin. Bitcoin will always crush Encoin in the digital coin speculation marketplace. |
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i looked out the window today and it looked a lot like brisbane, australia.
Clearly that is a problem with your window. Have you considered taking it in for service? Just to double check, PatrickHarnett and I looked out our windows. It seems highly unlikely that is brisbane, australia. There should be a river. |
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Damn, that is an excellent visualization. Makes it pretty obvious that we think mostly in relative terms, doesn't it?
I know! Egocentric terms are so ingrained in us it is hard to imagine any other way. However, when reading on different human languages, I was totally blown away to learn that some humans are much less dependent on the concept. They don't even use relative directions like, "On your right side." They would say, "On your north side" or "On your south side" depending on which way you were facing. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relative_direction#Cultures_not_using_relative_directions--- But anyway, "I am the 1%!" Just not egocentrically. |
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Face it. It is pretty much your responsibility to take care of everyone else on the planet. Why? Because if you are here on this site you are "the rich". http://www.globalrichlist.com/ |
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