> Meaning that over the long term no large pot of money goes unlooted.
Actually, if you look at average fees charged by financial institution, and the divertion of returns on capital to hedge funds and high-frequency traders, 401k funds are already being effectively looted.
> some form of nationalizing of 401k accounts into pension plans wherein what they are invested in is decided by government employees.
Hahhaaahaahaaaaa. That's a good one. But in cae someone else doesn't get the joke and takes you seriously, let me explain the joke. Wall Street already has your 401k money, they don't need to siphon it off via tax cuts for the wealthy like we did with the Social Security surplus.
I currently pay for two Netflix accounts, and I use neither of them. I have a collection of about 2,300 movies and TV episodes, some ripped from DVDs I own, others from less licit sources.
I pay for two Netflix accounts to salve my moral principles. I would love to pay content creators in the most direct fashion, maximizing the money that goes to the people who make TV shows and movies, minimizing the money that goes to ad firms and middlemen, and eliminating any money that would be spent lobbying the US Congress to destroy my civil liberties and privacy.
Anyone have a suggestion on a better place to send my conscience money?
The ratings agencies were pricing in the risk that Apple lobbyists would not be able to bribe the US Congress to allow overseas profits to be returned tax-free.
Yes, this is exactly what you should feel like if you compete for a limited pool of hipster developers in San Francisco.
I know three different guys who can come in and clean up someone else's shit, but they aren't in San Francisco, and they all currently have jobs, so none of them would come cheap. But if you offer a ton of money to someone with 10 years of experience architecting and deploying web apps with 1M+ users, they will do the boring work of fixing your scalability problems.
If aliens aren't coming to this planet, clearly this is a market ripe for disruption!
I'm now looking for a cofounder who will shake up the L2L (lifeform to lifeform) market with a new disruptive social media platform for unmotivated hypotetcial advanced beings to share pictures of intergalactic felines.
> I'm pretty sure that the only reason you need to keep adding and adding ever more capacity is to prevent someone else coming along and doing the 51% attack, right?Other than that, adding capability doesn't benefit the network, it burns a lot of power as people effectively just burn electricity to try to increase their share of a fixed payout.
Sure, if you want to efficiently allocate resources, all bitcoin miners could get together as a cartel and limit the overall hash rate to 1Mhash/hr, and collectively the bitcoin transactions network would consume a lot less power.
However, the temptation would always be there to add a little extra hash power to the network and network to claim more of the mined blocks and transaction fees. And pretty soon you'll be back where we are today, with each person acting in their own selfish interest, addiing as much hashing power as they can afford to run to get as big a share of a fixed pie as they possibly can.
Usually I'd say pirate it, put 10 hours into it, and buy it to support the authors if you like it.
But right now, you can't play the new Simcity without shovelling dollars into EA's pocket, and reward them for producing a fundementally broken game.
You just have to decide for yourself which is more important to you. Providing feedback to bad corporate behavior by refusing to give EA your money, or your curiosity to play (and ultimately be disappointed by) a shitty sim with all depth and complexity removed in favor of "social" interaction and microtransactions (buy packs of 2 buildings for $5, i.e. http://www.amazon.com/SimCity-German-City-Online-Game/dp/B00...).
However, if you care about the future of games, please don't give EA money.
> I strongly believe that errors are a much more pervasive problem in science and related fields than malice is.
The problem is that economics is not a field related to science. The vast majority of public policy economics starts with a conclusion, and then creates facts to support that conclusion. This is not science, it is religion.
(insert disclamier about this being an overgeneralization)
I agree that there exists a hypothetical future where corporations collapse and all creative work is done by brilliant unpaid individuals who have their work broadly pirated. But that's not what I expect to happen.
Large corporations have the majority of the wealth and capital, and are frighteningly efficient at weilding their economic power to lobby government for corporate-friendly business environments, and will continue to act as rent-seeking cartels in any industry where a barriers to entry can be constructed.
Sure, coroporations are a terrible way of turning human labor into product work, but they are an optimal way of moving wealth from "consumers" to owners of capital.
Selling your property involves paying a 5% cut to the agent, buying a property involves paying 5% in fees as points, closing costs, inspections, legal fees, etc. I would hate to do that every year or two as I moved between employers, but being able to rent an apartment anywhere in the world means I can go where there is demand for my skills.
The reason why people spend 65% of their after-tax income on rent is because people are willing to spend 65% of their after-tax income on rent. Supply and demand is a bitch, and when you fuck with it, you create massive distortions that end up enriching a small minority at the expense of everyone else (for an example, see anyone paying $600/mo for a nice 2 bedroom rent-controlled apartment in Manhattan).
And I like the idea behind a progressive property tax, but it would never, ever, ever become law in the US. Not while there is a single breath of life in any lobbyist or congressman.
How unfortunate, another "app" that would be more useful implemented as a web page and text messaging service.
I realize web pages have discovery problems, but so do apps at this point. But if the goal is an aquihire, I guess they can get bigger bonuses as an app development team rather than a web development team.
> Because online wallets are not less secure than an E-Banking account at a conventional bank.
Nope. Look at everything you can do with your online bank account. Transfers to other accounts, wires, bill pay, stop payments, ACH (if you're lucky), etc. What's the common there? All those transaction are reversable. This makes it hard for hackers to steal money from banks, they need an unwitting third party (mule) to accept an account transfer, and then go to a branch or ATM to withdraw cash.
So it's not like your online banking accounts are secure, you can purchase any number of stolen online banking credentials from trojan/botnet operators. The price for those accounts is quite low, because the real effort is in finding unwitting mules.
The problem with bitcoin, is that bitcoin transfers are irreversable. So banks will never be able to protect bitcoin wallets effectively, because they can't rely on being able to reverse transactions for compromised accounts.
> If the IRS helps you save $5000 [via a tax deduction] that you would have otherwise paid, then the IRS loses $5000
Many Americans have a (one-sided) adversarial relationship with the IRS, thinking it is some kind of evil entity that only exists to financially destroy everyone in America.
But the IRS only exists to implement the tax code enacted by the "representatives of the people" (ha), the US Congress. When the IRS saves someone $5,000 because of a deduction that Congress specifically created as a tax expenditure, the IRS doesn't "lose" $5,000, they are simply performing the function that they are required by law to do.
It is "gaming", in the same sense that every decision you make to optimize toward a desirable outcome is "gaming".
40 years he had a choice; go work at the mill for $25/hr, and come home tired and dirty, or stay home and be unemployed, and face the scorn of his peers.
Now he has a choice, either go to "retraining" that is run by for-profit corporations hungry to suck up government funds, and whose "graduates" are still unemployable, or go on disability. Given the world he lives in, he made the best choice.
Now his choice involved some meaure of dishonesty. But while I'd love to live in a world that rewarded honesty and integrity, that's not the world we live in. We live in a world that has no place for a unskilled but hard-working individual, so those people have to take welfare to survive, welfare that they would likely refuse if there were better options.
So they have created an mechanism that allows replacing a small subset of what execptions can do (communicate errors to the callers of a function).
The downside is they need to write all code in a non-standard idiom, need wrappers around standard libraries, cannot easily bubble up errors through multiple levels of the callstack when appropriate, and have made their typing system significantly more complex.
I cannot see an upside.
The example they gave, that division by zero is a "crafty little exception can sneak out of our net and crash our program", could just have easily been solved by wrapping division in a try/except block that caught the RuntimeException, and threw a MyDivisionByZero exception. Then the compiler would enforce that the exception must be caught, elimiating their handwaving argument that unchecked runtime exceptions are "the wild west".
Actually, if you look at average fees charged by financial institution, and the divertion of returns on capital to hedge funds and high-frequency traders, 401k funds are already being effectively looted.
> some form of nationalizing of 401k accounts into pension plans wherein what they are invested in is decided by government employees.
Hahhaaahaahaaaaa. That's a good one. But in cae someone else doesn't get the joke and takes you seriously, let me explain the joke. Wall Street already has your 401k money, they don't need to siphon it off via tax cuts for the wealthy like we did with the Social Security surplus.