For historical art, yes. You'd need to approach that from an historic perspective, providing primary and secondary sources for your conclusions. Fail to do that, and you're just regurgitating the professor's work: B-grade (or worse) work in any class.

As a modern artist, you are free to express whatever you like, however you like... but you need to be aware of the existing theories to understand how your expression will likely be interpreted. If you make a sculpture today with enlarged hands, what does it mean? Are you indulging a head-and-hand fetish? If so, why even bother with the rest of the sculpture? Are you demonstrating a mastery of anatomy? If that's the case, then why did you not also master proportion?

As others have noted, that's the role of documentation. A modern artist has the ability to write about what a particular work is intended to mean. Much of what we know (and can verify) about older works comes from contemporary correspondence and explanations from the artists themselves.

Do you mean to say the work, or the roles?

If you're actually being as productive as several people, as though they had been working productively 100% of the time, then you should be paid more.

On the other hand, if you're just doing the same amount of productive work, but able to help with other tasks outside your primary discipline when you otherwise would be waiting on something, then you're doing exactly the work you're being paid for.

Art and philosophy do actually require rigorous thinking, for much the same reason as engineering.

When designing, the engineer must consider all possible scenarios in which his design will be used. Some scenarios may be assumed from the start, and others may be accounted for in the design. Regardless of how careful the engineer is, there are always people who will use the design in an unintended manner, perhaps better or worse than the original goal.

An artist, when creating a work, must consider the environment the work will be viewed in. Some aspects may be controlled through framing or instructions to curators, but there will always be different interpretations for different people. Philosophers, too, must consider every implication of their theory, and must understand the universe of discourse in which their theory holds. Another person may interpret a particular situation differently, so a comprehensive philosophical theory must account for that.

Consider, for example, Michelangelo's statue of David. Michelangelo designed the work to be placed high on a cathedral, so the hands and head are enlarged so they'll be noticeable from the ground. A modern viewer ignorant of David's history would see the statue as grotesque, obscuring the quality of the work.

I'm no expert in prothetics, but it seems the printed Cyborg Beast hand is a completely passive device, relying on wrist movements to control the fingers. On the other hand, the $42,000 device was a "myoelectric prosthetic device, which took signals from the muscle fibers in his forearm, translated those signal, and then used them to mechanically move the fingers of the prosthetic, which looks pretty close to an actual hand."

This guy prefers the less-realistic device. Good for him. A direct comparison is somewhat unreasonable, though.

A race with no finish line doesn't have a single finish line, either.

Which rules, exactly?

I've been hearing this silly "maximize profit" nonsense for decades, and I've never actually found any law requiring profit to be the main impetus. As lgw noted above, the real rules say that it's the corporation's charter that really matters.

Damned right.

I tend to type hard. I've broken a space bar or two. My Model M has put up with me for almost three decades now, and has almost no visible damage. Some of the key caps might be getting a bit worn, but I expect they'll last until I bother to print replacements.

You're arguing that I can't refer to a "race with no finish line" because all races have finish lines?

For that level of pedantry, I'd expect you to know that it really was a metaphor.

This is why the question posed by TFS is silly:

As Yahoo's directors, its directors should do whatever aligns with the company's goals. If that goal is "make numbers look happy", then sure, they can do that. If their goal is to (re)build a single strong business, they should keep it together. The common notion that financial "shareholder value" is all-important, or somehow a required priority, is ridiculous.

The purpose of government, funded by taxes, is to improve society. The purpose of deductions is to allow individuals to have some control over which causes they support (including ones they're directly involved with, such as higher education). The perception of fairness comes from having that control, rather than being penalized for supporting a cause the government doesn't like.

Let's consider a hypothetical scenario, wherein the government has heeded religious zealots' demands to stop funding abortion clinics and stem cell research. An individual, having control over his monetary support, can choose to privately donate to those causes through appropriate non-profit charities, and take a portion of that donated money out of what he'll give to government. Indirectly, that also acts as a monetary penalty for causes that have government, but not popular, support.

What should happen, and occasionally does, is that any decrease in government revenue forces a budget cut and a review of spending policies. Programs without popular support take the loss. Today, that would likely mean the NSA and various standing military programs, though I'd expect lobbying would protect those.

As for education specifically, the loss (a few hundred dollars) from my taxes is overshadowed by the government-funded grant money (a few thousand dollars) that I did not need. From the government's point of view, higher education is a benefit to society. I chose to support that benefit directly, rather than letting the government decide which other benefits are more important.

For a more direct example, consider that there is an option on your 1040 to donate $3 to a federal matching fund for presidential campaigns. As I do not choose to support the already-too-expensive campaign circus, I do not contribute to that fund. The "loss" is not replaced.

Meanwhile, they benefit from all of the charities' work supported by the government and private donations. It is indeed their choice to provide the minimum of funding, but to do so means they also lose control over where their money goes.

Honestly, who doesn't want to pay less tax? You should note, though, that only a portion of donations is removed from taxes. Deductions are removed from taxable income, so if your tax bracket is 25%, then your final tax amount will only drop by 25% of what you donated. It is not possible to actually profit from donating (unless you change tax brackets, but that leads into a longer and more mathematical discussion than I care for today). Rather, the primary benefit from deductions is that direct control over where money goes.

The society benefits from having parents available in the workforce. It benefits from having a healthy population. It benefits from everyone having a place to live... That said, there are some deductions with dubious direct or indirect benefit. You'll have to take those up with your representative.

A silly endeavor, in my opinion. A simple tax code is effectively the government saying "we don't care what you do with your money, but this chunk is ours to do with as we please".

Tax code, as it stands today, really isn't even too bad. I've worked for financial planners, and I've seen some pretty complicated returns. They're mostly just 15 copies of the same form, filled in the same manner with information on different investments. The most difficult part of these returns is actually finding the requested information. Every investment's paperwork is laid out differently. One partnership I saw even gave their required data in essay form. That's what I think should be simplified: Each standard form that the taxpayer sends to the IRS should also have a standard information sheet for the taxpayer to receive. Rather than receiving a 1099 with information, they'll receive the 1099, with information.

...Because it'd be silly to encourage things that benefit society. That would be far too civilized.

-An actual definition of oligarchy, highlighting that wealth is one of many criteria used to select a "small number" of people, rather than the tens of thousands of groups and individuals that the study found held the majority of power in the US.

What you're thinking of is a plutocracy, where power comes directly from wealth. The study does show some plutocratic characteristics in US policy, but the correlation is looser than a textbook example.

So one could say that "the power in government is not concentrated in massive grassroots organizations". Fascinating.

Let me know when you get to the point where the group referred to in the abstract as "business interests" is actually defined.

Plutocracy.

That is indeed the main difference between a capitalist oligarchy and a plutocracy. Anyone who can get enough money would gain power in a plutocracy, but may not in an oligarchy. There may be some overlap between the systems, if the elite rulers of an oligarchy are selected primarily based on wealth, rather than family, ethnicity, history, or any other primary criterion. However, the paper notes that there is relatively little difference in power between elite individuals and special-interest groups (which are themselves typically well-funded).