Hyena

I proposed something similar to this as a way to handle fraud or non-performance in Federal contracts:

https://plus.google.com/u/0/+StevenFlaeck/posts/BNzLK4wwwPY

I would think that certs would be useful in signaling commitment for people wanting to join that workforce.

There is no real difference. The term "capitalism" is felt to be dissimilar from "free market", but no one is usually able to articulate a coherent difference. The central problem is that "capitalism" took on negative connotations over time and became deeply connected to Marxist/anti-Marxist rhetoric. At its core, though, it's still largely about ownership, even in Marxist critique or anti-Marxist defense. "Free market" is also a loaded term, it seems to signal being a libertarian, but generally refers to exchange restrictions; libertarians usually use "property rights" with respect to ownership issues. "Market" is fairly neutral, I think.

To take a stab at it, "capitalism" emphasizes the ownership elements of markets; "free market" emphasizes the exchange elements of markets; "markets" is just a neutral term, there aren't markets without ownership (rightful or not) and exchange (good or not). Neither "capitalism" nor "free market" deny exchange or ownership, it is merely a rhetorical emphasis; both specify the same set of objects, they just signal which features the author intends to dwell on.

Groups tend to have fewer free speech rights than individuals. A person can usually shout whatever he wants from a street corner; 100 people will probably need a permit and relatively few people see this as problematic.

That would be beyond awesome if they could tack down karma weighting.

They don't need to generate a profit and it would be preferable if there was no profitable business model for it. Donations to both MIT and Harvard are considered charitable; making more of their classes freely available online would justify that.

Well... there's also a right to asylum (14), group rights for families, to some form of social maintenance (22), limitation of working hours and minimum wage (24), full and free education (26), to copyright (27). Lastly there are vague duties to your "community" and it has power to determine what justly fulfills a grab-bag of ethical and legal concepts (29).

So... Not the best document in the world to quote on this front.

Except that's how this is usually done. Federal loans can be deferred and payments scale to income. The counterargument to the high cost of college is that she, or her parents, should have looked at how much it would all cost and chose a cheaper school. More aggressively, it really sounds like "by good fit" she meant "incredibly expensive facilities" or even "fits how I view myself as a high status person".

There are college where in-state tuition runs far cheaper and many states give free rides if you get a good SAT score. So it's incredibly hard for me to have much pity.

Or "macho cultures" have a lower percentage of male college graduates, creating more opportunities for women at the top. Or they correspond to fast-growing underdeveloped countries which, because they are developing in an equal(er) rights environment, aren't replicating the male-dominated model elsewhere. But who knows? There's not any data to back p explanations in the article anyway.

Housing doesn't need to disappear. If we tried to move everyone in California closer to the center of its major cities, we'd see prices increase dramatically.

A state can have population growth and net emigration.

It took me a while to realize that you were probably talking about television. My instant thought was "channels" as in communication channels.

Life is easier when everyone else is a failed version of yourself, amirite?

What's the actual advantage to the game? Why would a company want to create a research server for people to perfect their bot programming?

No? Money simply has a signature. The major reason why cash is "anonymous" is because there is no attempt to track the serials beyond initial deliveries to financial institutions, etc. Money already is simply pseudonymous; if, for example, we tracked serial numbers during transactions, you'd be trackable unless you exchanged currency outside of a bill reader setup.

But this is true of electronic systems as well. I could just as easily give you an SD card with $1,000 on it and the tracking system would fail rapidly.

Actually, I think the ACA does improve the situation he describes. Small companies, like start-ups, wouldn't be required to purchase health insurance and people whose earnings teeter at the edge of "ramen profitable" would likely be eligible for extensive subsidy.

Note that the criteria are weighted heavily towards luminary faculty and not towards student results.

Those same universities have selection criteria which predict success after college independent of the college attended. So it's not like they are masterfully teaching anything; rather, it seems very much like they are simply rebranding the best students.

To the extent that they also teach students more and better, this is actually damaging socially because it sucks secondary educational capital into a few locations. Lower end schools could do more and better if they housed many more bright and ambitious students. But if they're all going to a handful of schools, they're not improving the social networks at Random State.

<I>This isn't possible. A person can either spend money or store money.</I>

This isn't quite accurate. You note later how markets work, but you're not seeing how much that's in tension with wealth concentration. At its furthest end, you simply have a private person in charge of a command economy. Look at countries considered "kleptocratic": most aren't klepto- anything, they literally possess most of the wealth and thereby direct development towards their families in a sort of feudal way. Most could probably forgo formal taxation altogether and my impression of compliance is that they essentially do.

You are basically describing the LXTHW model.

The irony being that Spotify has a social strategy.

Even if that's correct, that doesn't mean that what Kim did wasn't illegal or wrong. Kim wasn't simply engaged in "file sharing" he ran a multimillion dollar parallel distribution system. He wasn't sharing, he was basically using file sharers as a Mechanical Turk to scrape the Internet for content which he then monetized at a large scale.

If you think Kim was in the right, then why not Amazon? your cable company? Why does Valve even bother paying Bethesda a share? Etc. File sharing is highly tolerable as a small enterprise, even if it is aggregately large; it's not tolerable as a highly profitable business model.

It's worth noting that Kodak was a leader in digital cameras even in the 1980s. It's also worth considering the impact of vertical integration: companies like Samsung and LG also make phones, giving their own CCD makers a boost. In order for Kodak to survive, it would need to be a vastly trimmed down CCD maker or expand into the mobile phone market. That is, there was simply little way for Kodak to remain viable as an independent company.

I often wonder about these findings. To what extent are we seeing a neurologically-driven phenomenon vis-a-vis one generated by a host of factors causing relatively common skill atroph? By 45, many people might be working largely on autopilot, causing flexible skills to decline in favor of scripted response.

The article is actually about Brent council and the use of digital media as an excuse to remove libraries from poor communities--where they are popular as free Internet cafes and provide books for people who couldn't afford readers--and dubious plans to reinvest the money. The story comes complete with suggestions of corruption and further deprivation of an already impoverished community.

Then it seems like there isn't so much a problem and the course is plausibly performing its intended function. Obviously the course was designed by Stanford to fill some role; unless you think that the course had a design flaw only detectable once it got rolling, then the best assumption would be that your expectations were wrong.

Of course, you could certainly have asked, as a Stanford student, what drove the design of the course and how the professor actually felt about the execution. That would have been an interesting follow up.

This post needs a comparison with CS229a prior to the online courses. Was the course harder before online classes and then got significantly dumbed down? Or was the course easy enough that it was a good candidate for the project?

This is a step in the right direction, actually. Instead of just filling the internet with keywords, they're filling it with information. Now we just need to train the SEO companies to make it good information and advertising will, for the first time in... ever, actually align with the public good.

Best to hold off on boycotts as it's coming out that the committee and other groups have been claiming support they don't have.

Unless you're spending immense amounts of R&D, that tends not to be as severe a problem as constricting development because of patent thickets or creating aggregately large legal problems (Lodsys, et al).