I have to agree with Brian Bain on this one: Perhaps energy is a good place for you to look. Many solar companies should offer great returns for years to come and many oil and gas companies will likely be great buys this year as prices decline more.
"Many solar companies should offer great returns for years to come"
Most solar companies offer abysmal returns. Major US companies have gone bust. Well run companies can blow up if the government changes policy on subsidies. In Ontario - the government just decided they would stop paying 82 cents/kw/h for solar, and dropped it to 50 cents/kw/h. Imagine what that would do to your balance sheet.
You can make possibly better returns, but it's not remotely 'low risk'.
Getting out of the 3% ROI range is quite hard while not getting into extra risk.
Maybe they're not grayed out because people are socialists, but because socialism has no relevance here, therefore any use of the word is just flamebait. Have you considered that?
But maybe I'm wrong. You can convince me otherwise if Venezuela's current government has in it's lifetime attempted to put the means of production under control of the working class, and if they have, how it has led to this current crisis.
If deaths caused by leaders purporting to advance communist ideals can be attributed to communism, then how many have died at the hands of those purporting to advance capitalist ideals? Would it be reasonable to attribute these deaths to capitalism as well? I really don't these type of conclusions are a positive contribution to economic discourse.
Are there significant examples of that in history? I would be looking only at governments causing the deaths of their own citizens. I don't think it'd be fair to count foreign wars there.
EDIT: Just to be clear, i'm not implying that they do not exist. Genuinely don't know of any and would be curious if you do.
The great famine of 1876 [1] in Bengal is a possible example. I'm not very familiar with it, but it seems that exports of grains were at an all time high while an estimated 5.5 million people starved to death. Grains were allocated to maximise revenue, and feeding the poor was not the most lucrative option. Of course reality is more complicated than this short paragraph, but this tragedy doesn't reflect well on laissez-faire...
That is certainly an interesting example. I'm somewhat tempted to say that that feels like a consequence of colonialism moreso than capitalism, though?
I'm not sure. It seems like the British forced India to export its grain. They may have been paying higher prices, but that's not made particularly clear, at least not from the article. And of course, they'd have to be paying pretty substantially higher prices to cover also the very high costs of transport at that time, especially for such a bulky commodity as grain.
That being said, it's certainly possible for something like that to happen in principle. That is, a country exporting a product that its citizens need because others are willing to pay more for them.
I suppose though, the capitalist would argue that that would enrich the exporters of that product, causing them to spend more money in their hometowns, thereby enriching the local population sufficiently to compete with the prices paid by foreigners for whatever the product is.
Two potential problems with that, I guess are:
1. The means of production of product X being owned by foreign companies, which is not uncommon.
2. Even if they are owned locally, the owners of the capital might buy mostly imported items, stimulating the economy comparatively little.
It's certainly an interesting issue. One that is probably best resolved by an empirical analysis of foreign investment and laissez-faire policies in relation to income growth for the poorest people of those countries. Certainly there are great success stories, e.g. South Korea, Singapore, Japan, and Brazil maybe to a lesser extent? Cuba is probably the closest thing to a success story in the contrary case (communist policies), and that doesn't seem like much of a success.
American civil war is probably the clearest example. That was a war to defend the private ownership of the means of production. Then there are atrocities committed by capitalist governments, for example the Tasmanian genocide. [1]
Since I am headed for bed, let me preemptively quote from the Georgia's declaration of seperation [2]:
>> The people of Georgia having dissolved their political connection with the Government of the United States of America, present to their confederates and the world the causes which have led to the separation. For the last ten years we have had numerous and serious causes of complaint against our non-slave-holding confederate States with reference to the subject of African slavery. They have endeavored to weaken our security, to disturb our domestic peace and tranquility, and persistently refused to comply with their express constitutional obligations to us in reference to that property, and by the use of their power in the Federal Government have striven to deprive us of an equal enjoyment of the common Territories of the Republic.
Thanks for the response. But is the civil war really a great example of that? Slavery seems largely orthogonal to capitalism. That's a war that could have happened in a communist or capitalist country.
Thanks for that. That seems like a pretty solid example. In reading about it, I would nitpick one detail that seems non-capitalist to me: they didn't allow the currency to float. This is a pretty big deal, from my admittedly limited understanding of economics.
If you don't allow the currency to float, your import/export ratios can't respond to market forces, and in a globalized economy this can be catastrophic, especially during a global downturn. To quote from the wiki:
"One of the junta's economic moves was fixing the exchange rate in the early 1980s, leading to a boom in imports and a collapse of domestic industrial production; this together with a world recession caused a serious economic crisis in 1982, where GDP plummeted by 14%, and unemployment reached 33%"
Of course, you can't prove a counter-factual. There's no way to know for sure what would have happened if they hadn't done this. But it seems to me that this, at least somewhat, mitigates the significance of this particular example.
True, but /pol/lacks tend to ruin derail discussions outside of their space. This is not only true of 4chan, but a metaphor for the internet in general.
/pol/itical maniacs don't always have a way in: I've never seen that kind of nonsense on boards like /tg/, or /g/ for that matter (although I'm only on /g/ quite rarely: I have a kind of low bile tolerance for a 4chan user).
He means on HN (the internet as a whole) and so forth.
You and I know that /DIY/ (what it sounds like) and /OUT/ (as in outdoors, camping and stuff) have nothing to do with /POL/ the venn diagram is a near perfect non-overlap.
Also /hc/ and /s/ (both NSFW) are supposedly politics free.
/DIY/ and /OUT/ are possibly the last refuge on the entire internet from marketing shills and paid reviews and all that kind of corruption near omnipresent on the internet.
In general yes. But also in specific context of /DIY/ and /OUT/ I have no idea where to go on the internet other than 4chan.
Take for example router tables. Imagine a normal web discussion group. I've never used anything but a Kreg table so my brain is wired Kreg so if all you got is a hammer the whole world looks like a nail. Or someone who wants to tie their name to money can brag about his Incra which he may or may not have (they're like $2K) and it better be the best thing ever if it costs more per pound than solid silver. Then the guy who always gets all signally rants off that most of the results are in the operator skills with the implication that we're the noob and he's the educator when everyone knows that, and the whole point is to min-max the non-operator skill issues. Yeah yeah I know you gotta know which part of the router is the spinny part but I'm more interested in who sells a table where simple adjusting the router height doesn't require contortionist work or where the dust collector actually works as opposed to looks cool. And then people who are just trying to help who point out walmart has some Chinese thing that isn't even flat on sale, as if something thats not even fit for sale is worth considering if its cheap enough. And then the marketing droids descend into the mix at the same time, and oh its just awful.
But if you go to /DIY/ and find the router table thread, you'll get the real story and no BS. Well ... and some screwing around and amazing language it is 4chan after all, and there's probably 50 threads with about 10 threads worth of real content spread across the 50, but its only fair that if you're paying nothing and there's no middleman to shill that you're going to have to invest some time to think about it. 4chan is honest there is no free lunch if you really want to learn you have to put in the analysis time.
Umm, couldn't he just see which manufacturer made the best quality product, and work with them, and make a good profit margin? It may even be in that manufacturers interest to stop the other copycats.
It depends. There are some sites that simply provide a direct link to a file on Google's CDN. That still wouldn't get rid of most of the charges against YouTube-MP3 though, such as circumvention and the like.
This is the tactic used by the CNN / Dailymail dataset[1] released by Google Deepmind. In that situation you want everyone to have the same and original file. The contents of the URL may be updated and/or disappear. The original URLs are recorded but they're retrieved from the Wayback Machine.
Even with that a few of the pages are still essentially lost however - or at least I was never able to retrieve them. Kyunghyun Cho hosts a copy of the processed data on his site at NYU - who may be less likely to receive legal requests compared to Google or a similar commercial company hosting them.
Distribution of datasets is going to be a continued painpoint for machine learning in the future. No-one wants to be the legal guinea pig for exactly what entails fair use in ML.
Strict hashsums (like MD5 / SHA-1 / SHA-2) don't make too much sense here, as the images from the 'less obvious sources' might be thumbnails of different sizes. Or, probably, the same size but reencoded (not always a good idea, but happens in the practice).
Would a fuzzy hash, like the output from a known and fixed classifier work for that?
Not necessarily - they're listed as CC-BY on Flickr but that doesn't necessarily make it true. Specifically the user may not have authority to give out such copyright (as I assume for any case where the user "accidentally" set it to CC-BY they can't retract?)
