I'm sorry, but this statement doesn't make any sense in the digital era. I can download closing prices for nearly every traded US stock over its entire existence in spreadsheet format from Yahoo for free. I downloaded binaries for an entire operating system to run the computer that I'm typing this reply on for free. "Page limit" is not a reasonable excuse for a scientist whose work is funded by the public. I have no doubt that a researcher who was willing to make data available in a digital format that is compatible with commonly used tools such as R would be able to find an outlet willing to host this data for public consumption. In fact, I would almost see this step as a requirement in today's technological environment. How many extra pages would be needed to cite a URL from which further details could be retrieved?
If someone with an honest intention asks about the methods or the data
This statement makes even less sense than the last one. The scientific soundness of data or method is unrelated to the intention of the analyzer. Publishing full details of the analysis can only strengthen confidence in the conclusion that has been reached. Only someone with reservations about the conclusion would seek to obscure the steps in the process by which it was reached.
> I'm sorry, but this statement doesn't make any sense in the digital era.
There are very few peer reviewed online journals. So everything posted online is without the benefit of peer review. Writing exclusively online therefore will not work; hence you're already page limited for one part of your publication. You could write two papers, but a) the effort required is a lot more and b) the longer one (for online publication) will still not be peer reviewed.
And really, if any competent climatologist can understand and infer some steps in your processing, why mention or explain them?
As for data, I don't think it will be very hard. It would probably require one or two days of collecting though. However, I doubt the demand is very high, among competent climatologists anyway. If it was, I would assume this would be common practice.
> This statement makes even less sense than the last one. The scientific soundness of data or method is unrelated to the intention of the analyzer. Publishing full details of the analysis can only strengthen confidence in the conclusion that has been reached. Only someone with reservations about the conclusion would seek to obscure the steps in the process by which it was reached.
If the requests for more information come from competent climatologists, I would have no argument with you. But that's not the case; at least in those cases we're hearing about. The requests are made by economists, politicians and people who have stated—without data to back them up—in the past they don't "believe" in climate change. Some even going so far as to call it a conspiracy—it never was clear to me what the climatologists were conspiring to do, though.
If the requests comes from competent scientists, you can rely on their personal integrity. If it comes from people with no scientific background, you can't. They have little to no understanding of the subject or the methods involved. You can be quite sure that that won't stop them from trying to interpret the data. Their conclusions are certain to be wrong, and—due to their preconceived notions—are certain to call into question: the integrity of the data, the integrity of the scientist, the integrity of his institute and the integrity of all climatologists. Most of the time explicitly too!
Since those guys are opinion leaders, the only effect would be another news article stating climate change doesn't exist and that it's all a big lie by climatologists. An article based on the pre-conceived opinion of an incompetent "user" of scientific data.
That doesn't strengthen confidence in the conclusion being reached; it weakens it. People should listen to the climatologist in such a situation, but they don't. They listen to the one who preaches the opinion they already had.
So refusing the data to those with ill intentions isn't based on reservations about the conclusion—it's based on the reservations about the intentions of the requester.
And all that is because people aren't playing "science" any longer, they are playing "politics". It's a different game and it has different rules.
To expand on this a bit more for the uninitiated, preferred shares are a more sophisticated version of what he's talking about. They basically work like debt that doesn't blow up the company if you can't make your payments. They tend to be junior to debt and senior to common stock if there is a liquidation, there is a secondary market on public exchanges, and there are many variants such as preferred shares that pay higher dividends in years with good earnings or that can be converted into common shares on terms similar to convertible bonds. This is already a well solved problem, but the solution isn't very sexy, so it's not as well known as debt and common stock.
Yeah, that's a good idea, let's penalize capital formation even more while we're trying to recover from an economic downturn. If you want to level the playing field between debt and equity financing for business, maybe you should make dividend payments deductible so that mature businesses will have more of an incentive to return cash to shareholders.
Removing the tax shield that some forms of debt provide would only make one avenue of capital raising difficult, it would act much more to encourage other forms of capital raising than to put any kind of stop on it.
This could of course be counterbalanced by making other forms of capital raising easier by doing such things as lowering capital gains tax or, as you suggested, making divident payments deductible.
We got into this "downturn" because too many people borrowed too much, as well as too many lenders being less than careless about who they loaned money to. Failing to fix the incentives to borrow will only make this stuff happen again and again until there is no more economic system left to abuse.
Too many companies are issuing bonds to repurchase stock. And they're not doing it for valid business reasons: they're doing it to puff up their stock prices so that the CEO and Board can get their bonuses - and the vast majority of bonuses at that level are based on stock prices.
Back in my student days long ago, a friend of mine who was working on a very difficult assignment hatched a plan to include a SIGSEGV handler that would print "NFS server not responding, still trying..." for use on the day when we had to demo the results to the TAs. The NFS system was pretty flaky and his hope was that the TA would move on to the next demo and get back to him, giving him time to fix whatever problem was happening. Not sure if he actually put it in though.
When ran, it made the OS say "Out of memory" and then it was lab assistant's headache to unload all that resident stuff that was sitting there and eating good 20-30% of available RAM. They typically opposed to doing that, so the TAs assumed the program actually worked. The end :)
I must be the only moron who used to be eager for others to see his programs. No teacher ever looked at it long enough to appreciate it though; I quickly established a reputation as a computer show off and the teachers were dismissive of me, spending more time with kid who actually had problems.
Exactly what evidence do you use to characterize the loan as predatory? The other story I've read on this (in the Times as well if I recall correctly) characterized Leibovitz as being bad at managing her finances. If you pledge property as collateral for a loan and you don't pay the loan back according to the terms that you agreed to, then the creditor has the right to foreclose on the property and sell it, what's predatory about that?
Not only that, she lost every perspective. I'm surprised it ended - for the time being - as well as it did. She probably should not be managing her own funds at all.
One of the comments on the article suggests applying for a patent on the "patent troll" business model and then suing these guys. Fans of recursion will notice that you could then apply for a patent on the "patent on the 'patent troll'" business model, and then we're really off to the races.
One day - just one day - I'd like to see a discussion about patents where someone doesn't suggest patenting something 'amusing' that already exists and has years of prior art.
The U.S. would never allow this to happen because then U.S. citizens would be able to invest in equities in someplace like Hong Kong and pay much lower taxes. It would be very nice if this happened.
Most people savvy enough to make international investments have setup structures that ensure they don't pay any tax at all. Forcing the issue and making everyone pay where the value is generated would be a win for each country. The U.S. has lost massive potential tax revenue by not collecting on foreign investment gains in U.S. entities. China does not need to make such a move as they already have in place a much larger protection deal going: your gains in China for the most part, get locked up in RMB and can't easily be moved out of China. So although your foreign invested capital gains are not taxed directly, your gains mostly have to get reinvested in other China interests. Now that is a sweet racket!! Its t least on par with the petrodollar scheme.
I can't answer for the author of the parent, but for my part I combine my own personal experiences dealing directly with employees of government agencies with the stories I hear from a friend of mine who works for a consulting firm and often deals with government employees, including a very long assignment working for FEMA as part of the Hurricane Katrina cleanup. A particularly interesting data point for me was the experience of registering a car at the Connecticut DMV vs. registering in Pennsylvania where the process is privatized.
Has anyone ever seen any scientific evidence comparing productivity of private sector vs. public sector employees?
I'm sorry, but this statement doesn't make any sense in the digital era. I can download closing prices for nearly every traded US stock over its entire existence in spreadsheet format from Yahoo for free. I downloaded binaries for an entire operating system to run the computer that I'm typing this reply on for free. "Page limit" is not a reasonable excuse for a scientist whose work is funded by the public. I have no doubt that a researcher who was willing to make data available in a digital format that is compatible with commonly used tools such as R would be able to find an outlet willing to host this data for public consumption. In fact, I would almost see this step as a requirement in today's technological environment. How many extra pages would be needed to cite a URL from which further details could be retrieved?
If someone with an honest intention asks about the methods or the data
This statement makes even less sense than the last one. The scientific soundness of data or method is unrelated to the intention of the analyzer. Publishing full details of the analysis can only strengthen confidence in the conclusion that has been reached. Only someone with reservations about the conclusion would seek to obscure the steps in the process by which it was reached.