1,156 karma · joined September 9, 2013
Why else would you lump all smart people together, and claim they have some psychological issues that you (not so smart maybe, but much more mature), can help with?
When I really learnt it, I treated it like I would any other language: I tried to write nontrivial programs in it, in my case the 2048 game. I learnt Monads by adding real randomness to the game.
So I would say the main problem with Haskell is that people treat it like something special, and not like any other language.
So when someone out of college makes more than someone with 10 years experience, they assume this must be due to agism, since the 10 years experience must, in their view, be more important than being one of the top graduates of that year.
On the original comment, I usually associate Haskell with younger programmers, since it is taught in many schools like MIT and UW. So I found the comment a bit grating since I thought Haskell was the one thing we could have.
The problem with giving people free money, is it reduces the incentive to work. Australia, and other countries, have introduced systems with minimal requirements for receiving welfare: making an effort to find a job, based on simple objective criteria.
If they say that intelligence is correlated with X, if we like X we will say that this proves X is a good thing, and if we don't like X we will say that this proves intelligent people are not so "intelligent" after all. Put another way, it's so hard to do proper Bayesian updating on such loaded statements, they probably make people worse informed on average.
I'll end with a quote from Mohammad Ali being interviewed by Michael Parkinson:
Ali: [Animals don't race-mix so human's shouldn't either]
Parkinson: But we have intelligence
Ali: They don't have intelligence, but yet they stay together [with their own species], we should have more intelligence than them, right?
Your logical error is in assuming that if a company that pays no dividends now is considered a good investment, then that must mean that investors don't care if that company never pays dividends. On the contrary, investors don't care if Google pays dividends now, because every dollar Google doesn't pay as a dividend gets reinvested in the company, or at least kept as cash, which enables them to pay more dividends in the future.
If Google simply kept that money forever, that would make it into some weird ponzi scheme that the world has never seen before (and we would have to wait until the end of time to find out). Back in the real world, companies typically do, as your yourself imply, eventually stop growing and start paying dividends.
>you have no idea to whom you are speaking, how I made my fortune, and you are certainly not in a position to lecture anyone about equities.
No one gives a shit about your fortune. I'm done with this, but next time try reading what you are replying to carefully, instead of just blasting out facts.
The fundamental principal is that of the transversality condition, also called the "no ponzi" condition, which states that assets must eventually deliver. If a company pays no dividends forever then the value of its stock is only based on what people are willing to pay in the future, forming a self-reinforcing ponzi-like system. It is generally assumed (I can think of many good reasons for this, like the finiteness of the universe) that such violations of the transversality condition don't occur.
Therefore the value of a share is the expected value of all future dividends. I suspect you also didn't read my post carefully and missed my qualification of "dividend-like" things. E.g. a company might start small, grow, stagnate and be bought by a private equity firm and split into parts that are sold off. At that point, the company has effectively delivered dividends to the private equity firm.
>With all respect, do you really want to be pontificating about something you know nothing about?
Your smugness is unwarranted and reflects badly on your character. I suggest you read some books on economics and try to be a better person.
The only real value a share has is dividends, and dividend-like things (like share buybacks, the whole company being taken private, etc.).
In theory (and practice) the price of a stock is the expected value of the time-discounted sum of its future dividends.
So yes, people are precisely buying GOOG stock because they believe that at some point in the future, they will pay dividends. Google do, after all, have to do something with all their money one day.
Voting is also not very important. In some cases it might be needed to keep the board/executives in line, but for an individual shareholder, the right to vote is of no importance.
Calling themselves artists (as another pointed out) shields them from the criticism they would receive if they clearly stated their point of view.
Then present them to reviewers and see which ones they would accept for publication.
Tail call elimination is more about allowing a particular style than anything else. Python encourages a different style, so why should Guido care about tail call elimination?
This requires putting oneself in the shoes of the people responsible for this situation, including people who minimize the importance or harm of bullying, people who justify it outright, and people who silently ignore the issue.
In doing so I am going to argue that given certain assumptions (both positive and normative), bullying should be permitted or justified. That is the inevitable outcome of being intellectually honest.
You claim there is a difference between upholding social value through reprimand, and bullying. I couldn't tell if being "taught a lesson" referred to violence so I won't assume either way. If it didn't refer to violence, then in an individualistic society like ours, people could just ignore it. Maybe in Scandinavia a verbal reprimand is enough, but not in the rest of Europe or the English speaking world.
And yet a free for all of violence would not work either (which seems to be the straw man of bullying you are using in your argument). Bullying is not only violence and the establishment of a pecking order, and also not only punishing violators of the social code. Rather it is doing these things together in a complementary way. The social code is respected because it comes from the most dominant people, and the violence is justified because it also helps cement the social code.
This explains why schools and prisons punish people who defend themselves against bullies more than the bullies themselves. To defend yourself is anti-social violence. Furthermore, as students get older, this social order morphs into the actual social order of the adult world. It is not only a pecking order that teachers tolerate because it makes the school easier to manage. It also gains the gloss of society's actual moral code.
For example, students might be bullied because they exhibit middle class speech and behavior, and are unwilling or unable to adopt "cool" working class behavior. A teacher might be sympathetic, but also consider that without this kind of bullying, middle class student could be as snooty as they liked, and that forcing middle class students to respect working class students (even out of fear) would help societal cohesion in the bigger picture.
The values that bullies enforce are arbitrary, but not entirely arbitrary. If they only punished the truly snooty, or the truly degenerate, would progressives or conservatives respectively complain? I see many people encouraging bullying tech workers in SF because they claim those workers really don't respect the values of the communities they live in. And (this was a while ago) I read a Time magazine article about the bullying of the Columbine shooters, which claimed precisely that their bullying was justified because they violated social norms (as the article said quoting a footballer "they were a bunch of fxxxxts", and this was in the 1990's so the implication wasn't that the footballer was in the wrong!).
I am not saying that society will fall apart without bullying, but that people who want to maintain social norms that aren't enforced by law, logically have little choice but to accept that experiencing an environment with bullying is an imperfect but necessary precursor to knowing your place in society.
But to be more precise about the benefit that conservatives see in bullying: bullying can be thought of as a social pressure not to be (1) weak and (2) different. I know some people will think that I am blaming the victim with (1), but I'm not. I was bullied in school, and I was physically weak and tended not to stand up for myself. Many of my friends were the same. Anyway, many people see discouraging (1) and (2) to be good things. (1) because society needs people (at least) men to be strong and vigorous in order to prosper and fight external enemies, and (2) because if there is no pressure to conform, people might do anything they liked and completely ignore societal norms.
Conservatives (not all, but many) consider the principal that social convention be backed by actual violence, to be sufficiently important that establishing it at young age is worth some suffering or unfairness.
It is not an uncommon (again, I don't endorse this viewpoint) for people to say that bullying is a normal part of growing up, and that it helps strengthen people's character, etc. I don't think people who say this are being 100% honest. I think if they were honest they would say that bullying is a way to identify the weakest or least socially capable 10% of people, and that if you don't fall into this category, then it's a great part of the growing process to find out you belong to the 90%.
Conservatives (somewhat correctly) consider bullying to be part of how society maintains is social structure.
Progressives only consider bullying through the lens of oppressed groups, not individuals who are targeted for their perceived/actual difference or weakness. They don't identify with individual rights and self-defense as these are seen as libertarian issues.
Furthermore, to admit to being bullied as often interpreted as admitting to weakness. That is why it is easier to champion people who have some extrinsic reason for being bullied (e.g. being gay, or some other minority).
However, I suspect the severity of bullying is gradually lowering simply as a result of society becoming more prosperous and adopting middle class lifestyles and values.
What you are advocating is populism. You see a large transaction, and say "we could use some of that!", without thinking about the relative efficiency of different kinds of taxation.
On what basis are you making this claim? Since you are familiar with the term deadweight loss, you must be familiar with the economic theory associated with taxation, and therefore the standard claim that the least distortionary tax is income tax. Taxes other than income tax are usually justified in terms of negative externalities.