Ha, wow, the first time I've ever been genuinely taken aback by 'victim blaming' and of all possible places it comes from a story about a farmer and his tractor.
For starters, even the text of the article shows that he's reliant on the technician to replace the part, and it doesn't break down what of the 2 days is ordering the part vs scheduling the technician's time. It may be that even with the part in hand it's 2 days for an opening in the tech's schedule.
Further, while the article makes it sound as if there is one part repeatedly failing, the reality is that there are dozens of different sensors, and maybe only one fails per year. Your proposed solution might require the farmer to have thousands of dollars in spare parts sitting around at all times so he has replacements ready for all of them. Modern ag is already a capital intensive operation without forcing every family farm to double as a parts warehouse.
Yeah, well, my parents grew up on farms and starting in 3rd grade our property was sort of one, it came with a hand crank starter. And "my" vehicle until I left for college was a 1967 Jeep, and all this was in a farming region to which I've also retired to. Where I now help my father repair his eminently repairable Grasshopper mowers. So I kinda expect farmers to do some of the basics about this sort of thing.
Going to the text I was working off:
"It takes a technician at least two days to order the part, get out to the farm, and swap out the sensor."
"Order the part" sure doesn't sound like a same day thing. Maybe this only shaves off one day on average. But I can't see how it doesn't shave off some time.
I grant you your last point; if this isn't a single lemon(ny) part prone to failure he's getting unacceptable service. And I predict this gambit will not end well for John Deere.
Flagging as a means of shutting down opinions people disagree with or to target groups they don't like is unfortunately very common. Sometimes even in organized fashion, where a group will urge its members to flag content from someone they oppose. There have also been instances where a group tried to invoke copyright infringement because someone said their name in a video.
It's assumed this is just an issue of manpower, but it's a much thornier problem. There's a point where a video isn't obviously in violation of community standards and at that point, you're asking one of 100,000 different people to make a judgement call. You're bound to get some wrong and the someone will create a whole other post on HN about it.
It didn't have to go anywhere, and in many cases it didn't. Imagine you have a house (500k) and a car(20k) in 2007. Today you still have the same house (now valued at 400k) the same car (now valued at 10k). Your net worth has dropped substantially but the money didn't go anywhere, nobody else gained by the depreciation of your car or the market price correction of your house.
There is just no truth to what you're saying at all, and it's hard for me to even know how to respond. I've written out several responses that I've deleted because your worldview seems so far removed from reality that I'm not sure how to address it.
If the police show up during the day and knock on the front door with a warrant at the house of the NRA-supporting, libertarian, "statist" terminology using person you allude to, he's not going to respond violently. He'll call a lawyer while reading the warrant, then maybe call the media if he thinks it will help. Please stop "othering" people who hold different views than you. Taking it to such an absurd extreme as to suggest that if someone supports the full bill of rights then they need to be treated as dangerous and dealt with like terrorists is just ridiculous.
If someone plans to murder a police officer, they probably don't really care whether the gun they use to do it is legally owned or not.
Did you read the article? "As part of that, there was a new reservation system on certain nights of the week for a $27 permit...left the park open for drop-in play 96 percent of the time".
So 96% of the time, the park is open to everyone and 4% of the time the park can be reserved for a price which is equal to 2.5 hours of work at the local minimum wage.
One could easily argue that the people showing an unreasonable entitlement are the ones who think they should get to use the park in the tiny sliver of time where someone else has paid the city to reserve it for an organized game.
>> One could easily argue that the people showing an unreasonable entitlement are the ones who think they should get to use the park in the tiny sliver of time where someone else has paid the city to reserve it for an organized game.
Your argument seems to be based on the idea that people with money intrinsically have more right to something than those who do not. I understand this is the prominent view in the US but there are other ways to do it(there's a big gap between communism and ultra-capitalism). Look to the scandinavian countries for instance where they place a far great emphasis on wealth redistribution and community support through better schooling and healthcare.
"We do the same for Facebook: Slotboom is able to intercept the login name and password I entered with relative ease."
Is Facebook not using encryption for login? That would surprise me. Or is the author either blatantly lying or intentionally being deceptive (ie, he clicked passed an invalid certificate warning or similar).
If you type in facebook.com, your browser will use HTTP by default. The login page will redirect you to HTTPS, but it's too late, you're MITM'd. The attacker makes the HTTPS connection instead, and serves the page to you over HTTP. You put your username and password in and send it back to the attacker in plain text. The attacker sends the data to Facebook via HTTPS, decrypts the response, and sends it to you via HTTP. It's called sslstrip. http://www.idcloak.com/learning-center/faceniff-SSL-Strip-fa...
Right, but in this case your browser never sees the page over HTTPS. The attacker makes the secure connection, and feeds you data over an insecure connection that they can see.
This was my first thought as well - either there's some major issue with SSL that allows MITM attacks which I'm unaware of, or this article isn't very accurate/precise.
The SAT is in no way more "rigorous" than the ACT. The theoretical difference between ACT and SAT is a slight shift between "achievement" (ACT) vs "potential" (SAT) although the reality is that this is pretty minimal. That is to say, ACT was supposed to slightly more reflect what you had learned in HS, while SAT was slightly closer to something like an IQ test that changed less by HS education.
In practice, the only difference between ACT and SAT for decades has been geographic preference. East&West coast schools primarily use SAT and Midwest/Central schools primarily use ACT.
I can hire a team of lawyers and finance people to set up a complex system of subsidiaries so that my company only realizes profit in a specific way in a specific jurisdiction to avoid taxes, and as long as we've all followed the letter of the law, there doesn't seem to be any problem with the 'spirit of the law'. In fact, entire companies of accountants, lawyers and business consultants exist solely to help other companies follow the letter of the law while avoiding the spirit of it.
What makes it so that laws regarding anything "tech" get to be written and interpreted so vaguely and widely (from warrant canaries to copyright issues etc) when rules for everything from finance to oil spills are narrowly defined and interpreted?
I think that's actually a perverse case of survivor bias. You don't really get to be a significant oil or finance company without intimately knowing how to work with / play the regulatory system, so the ones you see still standing are the ones who really know how to capture the regulators. If you have an oil company worth $5 billion, you have figured out how to make regulators work for you.
Luckily, in the US at least, it's possible for a few nerds to build a company (say, Dropbox) that's as financially valuable as some long-established government schmoozers but has never thought about regulatory issues. So the "young" tech companies like Microsoft, Apple, Google, Facebook, etc. are less capable lobbyists on average.
I'm so tired of people who don't know what "free market" means making up their own definition and then saying it's a bad thing.
A "free market" is an economics term meaning a marketplace free from anti-competitive forces such as government subsidies, government price floors or ceilings, monopolies, cartels, oligopolies, non-compete agreements, etc.
If Google and Apple make an agreement about smartphone pricing, then we might not have a free market for cell phones. The government could then use regulations against such anti-competitive agreements to end the price fixing and restore a free market. In that scenario it was private enterprise causing a non-free market and regulation that made it a free market.
Regulations can help a free market (breaking up monopolies, preventing cartels and anti-competitive practices) or regulations can harm a free market (subsidizing production, preventing new entrants from entering the market). This notion of "free market vs regulations" is completely misunderstanding what a free market is and how the systems involved work.
>I'm so tired of people who don't know what "free market" means making up their own definition and then saying it's a bad thing.
"Free market" has multiple, ill defined and often conflicting meanings, which is partly what makes it so useful for propaganda purposes.
Yours is just one of those meanings, and a particularly pernicious one at that, because a marketplace free from anti-competitive forces has NEVER existed and never will exist.
The neoclassical school economics actually uses the term 'perfect competition' to describe your particular meaning, and while it's a very common assumption, it's one that always breaks their models (making them a poor fit to reality).
I disagree with your defintion in the google-Apple example and so does Wikipedia. It's pretty clear that if the government regulates it it's not a free market anymore.
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A free market is a market system in which the prices for goods and services are set freely by consent between sellers and consumers, in which the laws and forces of supply and demand are free from any intervention by a government, price-setting monopoly, or other authority.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_market
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The wikipedia quote doesn't seem to support your point, though.
It specifically lists "price-setting monopolies" and the like (which would include price-fixing agreements between Google & Apple, right?) as interference in a free market. Prices must be set freely by consent between sellers and consumers, not amongst sellers in backroom deals.
If a government's only "regulation" is to stop monopolies, price-fixing, and other violations of the natural supply/demand pricing, then you have a free market.
If no one stops those things, then you do not have a free market.
Enforcing anti-trust regulation depends on the industry:
If BurgerKing and McDonalds collude to set a hamburger at $10, then Joe's Hamburger will quickly open and win market share with its $4 hamburger.
If the product is an advanced piece of tech with large amounts of IP - there can only be a few firms, thus the need to prevent collusion through regulation.
> If Google and Apple make an agreement about smartphone pricing, then we might not have a free market for cell phones.
If people buy the phones voluntarily, knowing that the prices are set by agreement between Google and Apple, then that's a free market. The fact that you disapprove of sellers colluding to set prices does not mean collusion automatically stops the market from being free.
> The government could then use regulations against such anti-competitive agreements to end the price fixing and restore a free market.
Using regulations to force companies (or anyone) to do things they have not chosen to do voluntarily is not a free market. The fact that regulations might lead to an outcome you approve of does not make regulatory coercion a free market operation. The way a free market would "fix" price collusion between two sellers is by buyers voluntarily choosing not to buy from those sellers, causing those sellers to lose money and either go out of business or change their practices.
Exactly this. I have to explain this to people all the time. A free market is not the same as anarchy. Regulations are involved in making a market free by preventing non-governmental anti-competitive forces from distorting the market.
Right. Most libertarians would agree that courts play a vital role in enforcing rules/laws that govern across specific areas relating to contracts - specifically the areas of duress and coercion.
So in the end, what you're saying is that he's right? I took his comment as a broad generalization, not some flippant slogan via "free market is a fantasy economics concept pretty much exclusive to all who read Ayn Rand and vote Ron Paul". But you already knew that.
They narrowly defined a word that has many definitions while demonstrating outrage at any other meaning.
While they are technically correct in a textbook sense, their idea of a "True" free market has never existed in the context of this conversation, and it can be argued that price collusion between suppliers for a market is the natural result of free markets.
Slight correction - it has access to your friends who have also used the facebook login for that site.
If you're the first person to login, the site will get an empty list. Only the set of your friends who have previously used the service, will show up if the service queries fb for your friends.
For starters, even the text of the article shows that he's reliant on the technician to replace the part, and it doesn't break down what of the 2 days is ordering the part vs scheduling the technician's time. It may be that even with the part in hand it's 2 days for an opening in the tech's schedule.
Further, while the article makes it sound as if there is one part repeatedly failing, the reality is that there are dozens of different sensors, and maybe only one fails per year. Your proposed solution might require the farmer to have thousands of dollars in spare parts sitting around at all times so he has replacements ready for all of them. Modern ag is already a capital intensive operation without forcing every family farm to double as a parts warehouse.