These researchers clearly misunderstood the idea of a "smart" power grid. It is not intended to let you control when you consume your electricity so as to save money. It is intended to let the government/corporations control when you consume electricity.
Out of 2.1 million, 12,000 is close enough to no one for me. According to that article, in a typical year the private sector lays off 3% of its workforce for poor performance. In a year where the economy was doing terrible, the federal government could only find 0.55% of its workforce to lay off?
According to the article you linked to, a rate of layoff/firing below 1% shows a failure of management. This indicates that the OP's (the grandparent to your original post) point is false. If private sector companies dream of the numbers that the government gets, it's a nightmare.
There are no real cuts in the debt deal. All they agreed to was that they would not increase spending by as much as they had said they planned on. Further, most of the "cuts" come two or more years from now. The people who agreed to this plan may not even be in office when it comes time to write the actual spending bills involved. This is how it always happens. Every so often the voters get upset and demand that Congress cut spending. A few Congressmen take it seriously and propose to reduce how much the government increases its spending next year over this year. Other Congressmen and various "community" groups wail and caterwaul about how they want to starve little children and throw grandma out in the street. After a few weeks to a few months of going back and forth (assuming that the voters are really upset about spending), they all finally agree to reduce the amount that spending increases next year by a token amount and a really significant number several years into the future. The thing is, the only spending number that means anything is the one for next year (and even that is only meaningful if they can't get some "emergency" appropriation bill through).
Actually they had a 2 year pay freeze [cnn.com] put on them.
Except that it is not really a pay freeze, the majority will still get their "step" increases. Even the article you link to tells us that much.
As for the 12000 people that lost their federal jobs last year, that is out of 2.1 million. The private company I work at has a 14% head count reduction coming up over the next 6 months...and it is the third head count reduction over the last two years (the other two were similar percentages).
Not even that. If you look at the deal, all they have agreed to is to not increase spending by as much as they had planned on...and even that they won't start for a couple of years. They are hoping that by then this fuss will be safely forgotten and they can increase spending not only by as much as they had originally planned, but by even more. There is no spending cuts in the "debt deal". When Washington "cuts spending" it means they won't increase spending by as much as they said they would. What they usually do is, when the voters demand that they cut spending is they argue and fuss about what to cut for a few months. Then they agree not to spend as much as they said they were going to, starting 2-5 years from now. Then when it comes time to actually allocate that money, they ignore that agreement and spend as much or more than they had originally planned on (before the "spending cuts").
...this is not a way to get a government black box in all cars at all. Nothing to see here folks.
No, it's not. The government black box is, for all intents and purposes, already in the car. This is to get systems set up so that the government can log in and download info from the black box whenever they want.
The thing is when PCs entered the business world, we had the same articles about it meaning the death if IT and its control over how and where we use company data. The thing is, over time, IT became even more important as people started to rely on the data being stored on computing devices to a greater degree. We even had a bunch of laws passed which made companies responsible to control their data.
Every decade or so, we have some new consumer computing device come along and people say, "We have to loosen the strictures and controls that IT has over corporate computing devices so that we can get the enhanced productivity these new devices offer." So, upper management overrides IT and demands that these devices be allowed. Sometime after this there is a data breach and upper management wants to know why IT allowed it to happen. Now that the devices have been around for awhile, IT has figured out how to secure them and implements such security. Right about that time, people start saying, "If I need this to get my work done, why doesn't the company supply it."
You are correct that it seems like being "Free App of the Day" on Amazon sounds like a bad deal for the developer. However, this particular developer knew the terms when they signed up for it and did so anyway. This article is the same as the articles complaining about Groupon. The person complaining was in a business that does not benefit from giving people a free sample, but decided to give people a free sample as a promotion. The person then complained that their business did not profit from giving away free samples.
Sorry, while I have sympathy for the loss they took from this. The blame is theirs, not Amazon's. Amazon is not in a position to judge whether or not your business would benefit from giving away free samples.
They did not state definitively whether or not the devs would receive 20% of the earnings,...
I'm not sure if you are aware of this, but there is no difference between 0% of 0 and 20% of 0. On the day that Amazon was giving away the app, the earnings on the app would be 0, so even if the developer were to get 20% of earnings they would receive $0.00.
Well, you obviously are a believer in the consumption driven economic model. I'm a believer in the production driven economic model. The way to drive the economy is to produce something that people want. The U.S. is in the problem it is currently in because our politicians have focused on encouraging people to consume rather than on encouraging people to produce. As a result, we have, in a manner of speaking, consumed much of our seed corn. You cannot get further economic growth by consuming the rest of it.
I'm confused, what do banks do with the money people deposit in them if they do not lend it out?
Huge companies do not ever invest in the types of new business opportunities that drive an economy. The best way to drive the economy is to make it simpler for someone to start a small one or two person business. Those are the types of business that most readily meet unmet needs in a down economy. The types of business opportunity that are available in an economy in the shape the current economy is in do not lend themselves to the size of investment/return that are necessary fo r a company like those you listed to bother even looking at them.
Of course the biggest barrier to these kinds of businesses is government regulation. I recently read a story about a woman who was fighting the California dairy board. She said that to be regulated and inspected would cost her $100,000. A few years ago she bought a cow to get raw milk for her grandson (story does not say why). People found out that she was doing this and came to her for raw milk. She sold them shares in her cow and bought a second one. Now the state wants to shut her down. Under California law, the owner of a cow may drink its milk filtered but unpasteurized. She contends that the people who bought shares are part owners of the cows she has and are entitled to their share of the milk. The state contends that it is a commercial transaction and subject to state food safety laws.
I am sorry but I believe that this is a flawed economic theory. The only way that saving money is bad for the economy is if that money is saved by stuffing it in the mattress. If the money is placed in the bank, the bank has more money to lend to businesses meaning that businesses can more readily finance changes necessary to meet opportunities. Actually, the problem with our current economy is that we do not have sufficient amounts of captial in reserve to supply funds to those who wish to take advantage of new business opportunities.
Of course, the economy is, also, slowed by the many new government regulations that are being introduced. It is not just a matter of there being too many government regulations it is the fact that new ones are being introduced at an ever more rapid pace.
And watch someone develop a product that makes yours obsolete. Unless you can get the government to help you keep competitors out (which of course is part of why we have so many big powerful companies as it is), it won't work.
Well, yes, the rise of government regulation also drove the formation of conglomerates. A large company can more readily absorb the costs of meeting regulatory requirements than a small company.
Except that the stock holders in the more successful separate companies are unlikely to be willing to accept stock in a less profitable company that has not divided into divisions and the company that hasn't divided into divisions is unlikely to have the cash to buy up their competitors.
I agree that conglomerates should (at least in most cases) be split up, but not by the government. Most conglomerates were formed when various factors favored centralizing everything. What made that economically efficient was the cost of communicating information from one place to another. It was more efficient to put all of the decision makers in close proximity to one another and send the necessary information to them at that central location since much of the same information was necessary for making decsions about disparate business entities. When the cost of transmitting information was high, this was the most efficient way to organize things.
However, as a result of this centralization, a lot of information that was only significant to one of the business entities was "lost" to the decision makers. This was not critical because the savings of only having to transmit the other information to one place made up for it. Now, as the cost of communicating information to various locations has fallen, the cost savings of centralization have diminished to the point that much of that "lost" information is now more valuable than the savings from centralization. This will gradually lead to the breakup of conglomerates along the fault lines of information.
Of course, not all conglomerates will voluntarily break up. But as their various divisions are less able to compete with the now independent divisions of their competitors, all of their divisions will suffer. If the refining side of an oil conglomerate, must get all of their oil from the exploration side they will not be able to take advantage of cost savings from dealing with outside exploration companies that are at the moment more successful than the in-house exploration division. If the exploration side must sell all of their oil to the refining side, they will be unable to maximize profit by selling to outside refiners who at the moment have a need to pay higher prices to obtain oil. If both sides are free to deal with outside competitors of the other division, the advantages of having both in the same company diminish.
The market is perfectly capable of sorting this out. If I am correct, the new companies of the ConocoPhillips split will be more successful than they were as part of one company and other companies will follow suit. Those that do not will gradually fall behind in the market until they either do so, or they go out of business.
You hit on the problem, but the real problem is those times when I see something and start to move my foot for an emergency brake, but than abort the move before I get to the brake because the potential danger has not materialized. An example of where that has happened, I was traveling on an interstate early in the morning, I saw a deer that was facing the roadway start and it looked as if it would jump out into the path of my car. As a result I lifted my foot off of the accelerator and started to move it to the brake. Before I got my foot to the brake, the deer had turned and darted away from the road. The system described in this article would have slammed on my brakes because that was what I was in the process of doing. However, because I was doing it with my foot, the situation changed before I got my foot to the brake and I aborted the action.
The fact of the matter is that the overwhelming majority of "reaction time" accidents occur because the driver was travelling too fast for how far ahead they could recognize a potential danger (whether that was because of conditions or the amount of attention they were paying). Most of those drivers would have been traveling even faster if they had this sort of device. That is, the driver thought they could recognize a potential problem sooner than they actually could, if their reaction time had been reduced, they would have increased their speed to compensate for the additional time they had to react.
The whole point was that people would use the publications to get ideas of things to license.
No, the point was to get inventors to publish how things work. In exchange they were given exclusive rights for a number of years. This is the first I've ever heard of the unfortunate wording you chose (get ideas of things to license). The point was to spread know-how. The sacrifice was limited exclusivity.
Yes, and the point of getting inventors to publish how things work was to make sure that inventions were not lost (this post is in no way intended to contradict the post I am replying to, merely to amplify something he seems to be aware of, but did not explicitly state). This means that when someone has an obscure patent and five or six people independently duplicate it, it is obvious enough that it should not have been patented in the first place.
Re:Could Someone Help Me Out With This?
on
Debt Deal Reached
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· Score: 1
No, I don't believe that Congress should vote on every piece of mail that gets delivered, but then I have the example of the fact that the Post Office existed when they wrote the Constitution. I, also, have the example of how they did government bonds from time the Constitution was enacted until 1917.
I am quite confident that the framers of the Constitution would be horrified at the amount of legislative authority that Congress has delegated to the Administrative branch of the government. I believe that a large portion of the reason that Congress has done so is so that they can take credit for whatever good comes from such legislation (because no matter what they call it, that is what the regulations are), while avoiding the blame for the bad that inevitably results from giving people who are for the most part unaccountable to anyone the power to write laws.
She's the lead actress, the love interest, and, in your words, the "sexiest woman alive"? Come on, Taco... Surely she has a name, or were you too busy spanking it to her tits to bother looking it up? She even shares top billing on the goddamn poster.
Frankly, Olivia Wilde deserves better than this shiat review.
Eh, what tits? She has a pretty face but she has the body of a 13 year old boy.
Ford seems to be one of those actors who just can't accept his age.
It is not so much that as the fact that everything he has done that isn't an action film has bombed.
Re:Could Someone Help Me Out With This?
on
Debt Deal Reached
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· Score: 2
Are you saying that in other countries they decide what kinds of bonds to issue (long term, medium term, short term) when they authorize the spending?
The problem with authorizing the borrowing at the same time they authorize the spending is that they don't know how much they will need to borrow. They create a budget and project how much tax revenue they are going to receive, but the government never receives that amount of money. Usually, it receives less, although it is theoretically possible that it could receive more (Congress always uses the most optimistic assumptions about every possible revenue source when it passes a budget--some of those assumptions being patently unrealistic).
It seems unlikely to me that the framers of the U.S. Constitution would consider our current situation to be abiding by the document they wrote. An understanding of 18th Century usage indicates that the framers of the Constitution intended for the Congress to authorize each and every individual bond issuance by the U.S. government.
Slashdot Mirror
Right, that's why the government has mandated the roll out in certain areas.
These researchers clearly misunderstood the idea of a "smart" power grid. It is not intended to let you control when you consume your electricity so as to save money. It is intended to let the government/corporations control when you consume electricity.
Out of 2.1 million, 12,000 is close enough to no one for me. According to that article, in a typical year the private sector lays off 3% of its workforce for poor performance. In a year where the economy was doing terrible, the federal government could only find 0.55% of its workforce to lay off?
According to the article you linked to, a rate of layoff/firing below 1% shows a failure of management. This indicates that the OP's (the grandparent to your original post) point is false. If private sector companies dream of the numbers that the government gets, it's a nightmare.
There are no real cuts in the debt deal. All they agreed to was that they would not increase spending by as much as they had said they planned on. Further, most of the "cuts" come two or more years from now. The people who agreed to this plan may not even be in office when it comes time to write the actual spending bills involved. This is how it always happens. Every so often the voters get upset and demand that Congress cut spending. A few Congressmen take it seriously and propose to reduce how much the government increases its spending next year over this year. Other Congressmen and various "community" groups wail and caterwaul about how they want to starve little children and throw grandma out in the street. After a few weeks to a few months of going back and forth (assuming that the voters are really upset about spending), they all finally agree to reduce the amount that spending increases next year by a token amount and a really significant number several years into the future. The thing is, the only spending number that means anything is the one for next year (and even that is only meaningful if they can't get some "emergency" appropriation bill through).
Actually they had a 2 year pay freeze [cnn.com] put on them.
Except that it is not really a pay freeze, the majority will still get their "step" increases. Even the article you link to tells us that much.
As for the 12000 people that lost their federal jobs last year, that is out of 2.1 million. The private company I work at has a 14% head count reduction coming up over the next 6 months...and it is the third head count reduction over the last two years (the other two were similar percentages).
Not even that. If you look at the deal, all they have agreed to is to not increase spending by as much as they had planned on...and even that they won't start for a couple of years. They are hoping that by then this fuss will be safely forgotten and they can increase spending not only by as much as they had originally planned, but by even more. There is no spending cuts in the "debt deal". When Washington "cuts spending" it means they won't increase spending by as much as they said they would. What they usually do is, when the voters demand that they cut spending is they argue and fuss about what to cut for a few months. Then they agree not to spend as much as they said they were going to, starting 2-5 years from now. Then when it comes time to actually allocate that money, they ignore that agreement and spend as much or more than they had originally planned on (before the "spending cuts").
...this is not a way to get a government black box in all cars at all. Nothing to see here folks.
No, it's not. The government black box is, for all intents and purposes, already in the car. This is to get systems set up so that the government can log in and download info from the black box whenever they want.
The thing is when PCs entered the business world, we had the same articles about it meaning the death if IT and its control over how and where we use company data. The thing is, over time, IT became even more important as people started to rely on the data being stored on computing devices to a greater degree. We even had a bunch of laws passed which made companies responsible to control their data.
Every decade or so, we have some new consumer computing device come along and people say, "We have to loosen the strictures and controls that IT has over corporate computing devices so that we can get the enhanced productivity these new devices offer." So, upper management overrides IT and demands that these devices be allowed. Sometime after this there is a data breach and upper management wants to know why IT allowed it to happen. Now that the devices have been around for awhile, IT has figured out how to secure them and implements such security. Right about that time, people start saying, "If I need this to get my work done, why doesn't the company supply it."
You are correct that it seems like being "Free App of the Day" on Amazon sounds like a bad deal for the developer. However, this particular developer knew the terms when they signed up for it and did so anyway. This article is the same as the articles complaining about Groupon. The person complaining was in a business that does not benefit from giving people a free sample, but decided to give people a free sample as a promotion. The person then complained that their business did not profit from giving away free samples.
Sorry, while I have sympathy for the loss they took from this. The blame is theirs, not Amazon's. Amazon is not in a position to judge whether or not your business would benefit from giving away free samples.
They did not state definitively whether or not the devs would receive 20% of the earnings,...
I'm not sure if you are aware of this, but there is no difference between 0% of 0 and 20% of 0. On the day that Amazon was giving away the app, the earnings on the app would be 0, so even if the developer were to get 20% of earnings they would receive $0.00.
Well, you obviously are a believer in the consumption driven economic model. I'm a believer in the production driven economic model. The way to drive the economy is to produce something that people want. The U.S. is in the problem it is currently in because our politicians have focused on encouraging people to consume rather than on encouraging people to produce. As a result, we have, in a manner of speaking, consumed much of our seed corn. You cannot get further economic growth by consuming the rest of it.
I'm confused, what do banks do with the money people deposit in them if they do not lend it out?
Huge companies do not ever invest in the types of new business opportunities that drive an economy. The best way to drive the economy is to make it simpler for someone to start a small one or two person business. Those are the types of business that most readily meet unmet needs in a down economy. The types of business opportunity that are available in an economy in the shape the current economy is in do not lend themselves to the size of investment/return that are necessary fo r a company like those you listed to bother even looking at them.
Of course the biggest barrier to these kinds of businesses is government regulation. I recently read a story about a woman who was fighting the California dairy board. She said that to be regulated and inspected would cost her $100,000. A few years ago she bought a cow to get raw milk for her grandson (story does not say why). People found out that she was doing this and came to her for raw milk. She sold them shares in her cow and bought a second one. Now the state wants to shut her down. Under California law, the owner of a cow may drink its milk filtered but unpasteurized. She contends that the people who bought shares are part owners of the cows she has and are entitled to their share of the milk. The state contends that it is a commercial transaction and subject to state food safety laws.
I am sorry but I believe that this is a flawed economic theory. The only way that saving money is bad for the economy is if that money is saved by stuffing it in the mattress. If the money is placed in the bank, the bank has more money to lend to businesses meaning that businesses can more readily finance changes necessary to meet opportunities. Actually, the problem with our current economy is that we do not have sufficient amounts of captial in reserve to supply funds to those who wish to take advantage of new business opportunities.
Of course, the economy is, also, slowed by the many new government regulations that are being introduced. It is not just a matter of there being too many government regulations it is the fact that new ones are being introduced at an ever more rapid pace.
Yes, Standard Oil came about because of the already existing government sanctioned and enforced railroad monopolies.
I guess that explains why there is only one oil company in the world...wait, no there isn't. There are multiple oil companies throughout the world.
And watch someone develop a product that makes yours obsolete. Unless you can get the government to help you keep competitors out (which of course is part of why we have so many big powerful companies as it is), it won't work.
Well, yes, the rise of government regulation also drove the formation of conglomerates. A large company can more readily absorb the costs of meeting regulatory requirements than a small company.
Except that the stock holders in the more successful separate companies are unlikely to be willing to accept stock in a less profitable company that has not divided into divisions and the company that hasn't divided into divisions is unlikely to have the cash to buy up their competitors.
Any conglomerate should be split up.
I agree that conglomerates should (at least in most cases) be split up, but not by the government. Most conglomerates were formed when various factors favored centralizing everything. What made that economically efficient was the cost of communicating information from one place to another. It was more efficient to put all of the decision makers in close proximity to one another and send the necessary information to them at that central location since much of the same information was necessary for making decsions about disparate business entities. When the cost of transmitting information was high, this was the most efficient way to organize things.
However, as a result of this centralization, a lot of information that was only significant to one of the business entities was "lost" to the decision makers. This was not critical because the savings of only having to transmit the other information to one place made up for it. Now, as the cost of communicating information to various locations has fallen, the cost savings of centralization have diminished to the point that much of that "lost" information is now more valuable than the savings from centralization. This will gradually lead to the breakup of conglomerates along the fault lines of information.
Of course, not all conglomerates will voluntarily break up. But as their various divisions are less able to compete with the now independent divisions of their competitors, all of their divisions will suffer. If the refining side of an oil conglomerate, must get all of their oil from the exploration side they will not be able to take advantage of cost savings from dealing with outside exploration companies that are at the moment more successful than the in-house exploration division. If the exploration side must sell all of their oil to the refining side, they will be unable to maximize profit by selling to outside refiners who at the moment have a need to pay higher prices to obtain oil. If both sides are free to deal with outside competitors of the other division, the advantages of having both in the same company diminish.
The market is perfectly capable of sorting this out. If I am correct, the new companies of the ConocoPhillips split will be more successful than they were as part of one company and other companies will follow suit. Those that do not will gradually fall behind in the market until they either do so, or they go out of business.
You hit on the problem, but the real problem is those times when I see something and start to move my foot for an emergency brake, but than abort the move before I get to the brake because the potential danger has not materialized. An example of where that has happened, I was traveling on an interstate early in the morning, I saw a deer that was facing the roadway start and it looked as if it would jump out into the path of my car. As a result I lifted my foot off of the accelerator and started to move it to the brake. Before I got my foot to the brake, the deer had turned and darted away from the road. The system described in this article would have slammed on my brakes because that was what I was in the process of doing. However, because I was doing it with my foot, the situation changed before I got my foot to the brake and I aborted the action.
The fact of the matter is that the overwhelming majority of "reaction time" accidents occur because the driver was travelling too fast for how far ahead they could recognize a potential danger (whether that was because of conditions or the amount of attention they were paying). Most of those drivers would have been traveling even faster if they had this sort of device. That is, the driver thought they could recognize a potential problem sooner than they actually could, if their reaction time had been reduced, they would have increased their speed to compensate for the additional time they had to react.
No, the point was to get inventors to publish how things work. In exchange they were given exclusive rights for a number of years. This is the first I've ever heard of the unfortunate wording you chose (get ideas of things to license). The point was to spread know-how. The sacrifice was limited exclusivity.
Yes, and the point of getting inventors to publish how things work was to make sure that inventions were not lost (this post is in no way intended to contradict the post I am replying to, merely to amplify something he seems to be aware of, but did not explicitly state). This means that when someone has an obscure patent and five or six people independently duplicate it, it is obvious enough that it should not have been patented in the first place.
No, I don't believe that Congress should vote on every piece of mail that gets delivered, but then I have the example of the fact that the Post Office existed when they wrote the Constitution. I, also, have the example of how they did government bonds from time the Constitution was enacted until 1917.
I am quite confident that the framers of the Constitution would be horrified at the amount of legislative authority that Congress has delegated to the Administrative branch of the government. I believe that a large portion of the reason that Congress has done so is so that they can take credit for whatever good comes from such legislation (because no matter what they call it, that is what the regulations are), while avoiding the blame for the bad that inevitably results from giving people who are for the most part unaccountable to anyone the power to write laws.
She's the lead actress, the love interest, and, in your words, the "sexiest woman alive"? Come on, Taco... Surely she has a name, or were you too busy spanking it to her tits to bother looking it up? She even shares top billing on the goddamn poster.
Frankly, Olivia Wilde deserves better than this shiat review.
Eh, what tits? She has a pretty face but she has the body of a 13 year old boy.
Which perhaps explains Taco's interest.
Ford seems to be one of those actors who just can't accept his age.
It is not so much that as the fact that everything he has done that isn't an action film has bombed.
Are you saying that in other countries they decide what kinds of bonds to issue (long term, medium term, short term) when they authorize the spending?
The problem with authorizing the borrowing at the same time they authorize the spending is that they don't know how much they will need to borrow. They create a budget and project how much tax revenue they are going to receive, but the government never receives that amount of money. Usually, it receives less, although it is theoretically possible that it could receive more (Congress always uses the most optimistic assumptions about every possible revenue source when it passes a budget--some of those assumptions being patently unrealistic).
It seems unlikely to me that the framers of the U.S. Constitution would consider our current situation to be abiding by the document they wrote. An understanding of 18th Century usage indicates that the framers of the Constitution intended for the Congress to authorize each and every individual bond issuance by the U.S. government.