I think the point here is that there is no effective standard by which we can define "wasting time". Many people would consider a lot of the startups you fund as "wasting time". Indeed any particular activity could appear useless. But we prefer a market-driven system because in aggregate we are worse than the marketplace at identifying such activities.
The main problem with your argument is that you assume some central authority is able to correctly judge what activities are worthwhile and what activities are not. They tried that in the Soviet Union and failed miserably. "Something productive" is very hard to define and that's why we let the marketplace define it.
This is a valid concern. But by preaching democracy and human rights on the one hand and supporting dictators like Mubarak on the other, we just end up providing ammunition to radicals of all sorts and driving popular support towards them. Freedom of information is a human right or should be and kudos to Google for supporting it
Consider this: if they can predict unplanned admissions, they can
a) better plan for these admissions
b) try to work with these individuals to help them manage their health better
Maybe I am naive, but it seems to me that this is not a zero sum game, you lose, insurance company wins, but a value added for society
I noticed weird behavior recently with my spam filter in gmail. For example, some emails from midventures.com are getting through and other ones are marked as spam ( none of them are actually spam ) Not sure why this is. I don't remember ever having issues like this before.
"...Overall, the picture doesn't brighten much over four years. After four years, 36 percent of students did not demonstrate significant improvement, compared to 45 percent after two..."
So 64 percent showed improvement after 4 years? that seems like a reasonable number
This is disingenuous. It happened in the context of trying to prevent an even bigger number of civilians dying in an inevitable invasion and continuation of the war. Your comment conveniently leaves the context out
if you don't have a strong resume, then follow the advice rather than give up. But first at least try to make sure your resume looks good :) the two are not really mutually exclusive
I don't know if the twins have a case or not and I don't know why they just don't take the money and move on.
But I am getting tired of this "it's not the idea, it's execution" bullshit. It's both the idea and the execution of it. In order to execute, you need to have a plan for what it is you are executing in the first place. And if your idea sucks, no amount of execution can fix that.
extreme claims have low probability of being correct. For example, I am not sure that it is impossible due to laws of physics for 5-6 men to pull all the strings, but common sense would tell you it is extremely unlikely. If your friends don't see that, nothing you can say will convince them otherwise, so just don't engage in pointless debates :)
Your argument is silly for the following reason. Imagine that a firm was able to profit from discrepancies between values of two stocks that last 100 microseconds. Say this firm makes 1 billion dollars a year - it pays 350 million in corporate taxes to society, which is one direct way to measure the value it is adding. Looking at it differently, what value does a pizza cutter provide to society? why not ban pizza cutter production? Why can't people cut pizza with a knife? instead of having all those smart engineers work on making pizza cutters, let them make something worthwhile. Follow this line of reasoning to its logical conclusion and you end up with Soviet Union circa 1975 - i.e. system that does not work
the reason is it is not as big a deal as it seems is that it only applies to affiliates who have a physical presence in the state. For example, if I buy an e-book for my Kindle, it would not fall under this law.