Would you care to provide some links or citations? I've watched a lot of OWS footage from a variety of sources, and the only stuff that even came close to espousing Marxism was shown on FOX News, which has a clear bias against the OWS movement. Here's an example of how selective editing can be used to skew the protests however you want. Just speaking out against corporate greed is not the same thing as Marxism.
To be fair, I haven't seen much footage from around the world, mostly just the USA. (Seems to me the non-US protests just got started in the last week anyway, so maybe more will get shown soon.)
Also, there is no intrinsic link between dictatorship and any particular economic theory. Authoritarians will happily adopt any ideology that suits their needs, because they don't care about ideology, they only care about power. At the moment, our American authoritarians are twisting "free market" ideology to increase their control of the government. That is what the OWS folks are protesting.
Sorry if I was unclear, I meant that the constitutional amendment should be done first, because that would at least get corporate money out of politics (ie: reverse Citizens United). And that in turn would make the other steps more feasible.
My preference would be a fiat currency controlled by statute (to prevent political meddling), pegged to population growth. Print new dollars each year, based on the calculated population increase, then spend them into the economy to pay for infrastructure projects, etc.. (I don't favor returning to the gold standard, as Ron Paul proposes, because scarce commodities are too susceptible to speculation and monopolization.)
I would also prefer that each country have its own currency, since most countries have unique economic conditions. This is what I was getting at in my earlier comment... the E.U. tried to use its new currency as a way to bring these disparate economies into unity. Wrong tool for the job!! (And probably not a very useful project in the first place.)
Apologies for shooting from the hip, above. After skimming the PDF, I'm less skeptical. (I'll read it in detail later, when I'm not at work.) For example, I'm still skeptical of implementing a demurrage scheme that actually works on a global scale. But anything that gets us off the "money as debt" treadmill is definitely worth a look.
It's a bad idea. A currency should represent and serve a single culture/nation/society. When you implement a single currency across a range of disparate economies you end up with the "Euro crisis" presently unfolding before us.
Certainly no "single" solution will suffice, but ending the Fed would be a damn good place to start. Debt is a huge piece of the puzzle, and our "money as debt" currency is basically a Ponzi scheme writ large. The Fed is a privately owned institution; it's only connection to government is that its board members are appointed by the president and approved by the Senate. (And of course, all such candidates are picked from the population of elite bankers to begin with, so there's really no way for the elected government to influence the Fed's behavior.) Rather than printing our own money (a power which is specifically assigned to Congress in the constitution), we instead borrow our money supply from this private bank... at interest. How stupid is that?
Outsourcing/offshoring was not a boomer idea, it was an integral part of Reaganomics. Up until the 70's, a third of government revenue came from import/export tariffs. So-called "free trade" had already been a longstanding desire of conservative business interests for many years, and Reagan started the process that culminated with NAFTA under Clinton.
I agree with the rest of your analysis, but the idea of "free trade" did not originate with the Boomer generation, it had been around for quite a while already.
The OWS crowd have deliberately avoided touting any specific economic models. The fact that you don't know that only shows how ignorant you are of the movement and renders the rest of your comment irrelevant. Yes, I have heard a few protesters condemn capitalism, but I've heard even more say that they simply want capitalism with fairness. They want justice for the crimes of the banksters and less "corporate capture" of government.
As for taxes, the ratios you cite are very similar to those in the USA. However, that's only for income tax revenue. If you include sales tax, property tax, and all the rest, the lower and middle classes pay a much higher percentage of their gross income to the government than the rich do.
The US economy in recent years has followed Adam Smith about as much as the USSR followed Karl Marx. I agree with the GP that government is part of the problem, but that is largely due to the ever-increasing influence of "big money" in politics, culminating in the horrific Citizens United ruling a year and a half ago. Unfortunately, the only way to cut the octopus tentacles away is a constitutional amendment to strip corporations of their "personal" rights. Only then will our government be able to function properly to protect the people from "inhuman" corporate avarice.
As for how to protect us from the conglomerates, I suggest: 1. a STET tax; 2. get out of NAFTA, and reinstate reasonable tariffs as Adam Smith intended; 3. reinstate Glass-Steagall; 4. break up too-big-to-fail banks into smaller units; and 5. put some banksters in JAIL!
I saw an @Google video a few weeks ago that recommended sitting in the cockpit position, reclined about 35deg. Apparently the Air Force did a study, and found it would be cheaper and more effective to just design their aircraft seats to those specs than to teach their pilots how to keep good posture in a "normal" seat. (At least that's what the guy in the video said.)
He also talked about the main problem with posture for the average office/cubicle drone. We tend to hunch forward over the keyboard, which forces us to crane our necks up so we can see the screen. This puts strain on the back-of-the-neck muscles and can lead to headaches.
I suspect that's why film has survived this long, despite all the hassles and expense associated with it. I worked in a camera shop in the early 90's, just as digital photography was coming to market, and I remember several "old-timer" customers who scoffed at the idea, often citing their Kodachrome slides from the 40's, still in pristine condition after fifty years.
Instead of barcodes, I think the most "efficient" solution would be to print the image on large format film -- large enough to allow a distinct "box" for each pixel -- and combine this with some sort of histogram of the colors in each frame. Sorta like an MD5 sum, this would allow color correction to control for aging/fading of the film. After a century of development, film manufacturers have gotten pretty good at making an archival-quality product. And film archivists have gotten pretty good at storing it, too. So it seems like a natural fit.
Their goal is not efficiency, anonymous retard, it's longevity. If they're already accustomed to archiving film, then why not just use it? You could probably fit a couple of hundred "tracks" of barcode on one frame of film, though it would still take a LOT of film to store one movie this way. Personally, I would just do an image transfer to large format film, but as an analog medium, that would be "lossy."
Obviously these archivists don't trust the standard magnetic storage media, otherwise they wouldn't be "worried" about the obsolescence of film. So if film is what they trust, they might as well just figure out a way to use it.
Solution: make a film transfer of any movie you want to archive. Also, they could transcode the digital info onto film in the form of one really long-ass barcode.
FTFA: "The question I have is what made the channels,"; said Gregg. Was it water, lava, or something else? "
It's like deja-vu all over again. Makes you wonder what deep discoveries await behind this channel notation... not to mention how long it will take us to generate enough political will to invest what it takes to find out.
Personally, I don't care if they're on the top or the bottom, as long as I can launch programs and manipulate windows without having to work too hard.
I think UI designers get a bit of tunnel vision, and try to "over-design" their features to make things easier... which actually makes them harder. Frankly, I don't spend a lot of time launching applications, but I use them for hours (or days) at a time. So if Unity can save me a click or two on launch, it's an insignificant savings compared to the hours I'll spend actually using that app. I can understand if they want to look ahead to the advent of multi-touch displays on the desktop, but those aren't here yet. In the meantime, Unity is little more than a curiosity, and should NOT be the default interface for a "major" OS.
Yes, it's mostly still WIMP, but just different enough to be annoying, and for no apparent reason. Which is why so many people have been switching to Xubuntu lately (myself included). I see no reason to switch back to Ubuntu, unless someone can explain to me why this new Unity really IS easier to use than the standard WIMP interface.
If it ain't broke, don't fix it.
The standard WIMP has been around, mostly unchanged, for decades. Why change it?
At this point, I don't think it matters much. The damage is already done, we're just going to have to deal with it someday. In the meantime, the rising cost of oil has made alternatives more economical, driving faster uptake. So eventually the problem will solve itself. I just hope a "mass extinction" of Homo sapiens is not a part of that solution.
I was wondering the same thing. I've skimmed a couple of articles about Costner's machine, and compared with the list of teams for this X-prize, but I don't see an obvious match. If his machine wasn't in this competition, one has to wonder why.
The name of his company is Ocean Therapy Solutions, and apparently they're involved in a lawsuit at the moment, so maybe that has something to do with it.
I have no background in this area, but I'm surprised to learn that we didn't know this already. Makes you wonder what other "simple" discoveries are waiting in around the corner.
There's an illustration in TFA (it's the blue thing, next to the boat). You could also follow the link in TFA to the manufacturer's website, where there's a page devoted to this technology. There are photo and video galleries linked from there.
I've just finished an exchange on Facebook with an old friend who's an avid Mac user. He posted a link to an article responding to RMS's rather tasteless comments on the passing of Steve Jobs, and we got into a long exchange about the merits of open-source versus the "walled garden" world of Apple. One of my main points was that open standards and protocols have been a huge boon to the industry. I'll have to remind him how much of the Apple software he loves was built on the free/open foundation provided by Dennis Ritchie.
Slashdot Mirror
Would you care to provide some links or citations? I've watched a lot of OWS footage from a variety of sources, and the only stuff that even came close to espousing Marxism was shown on FOX News, which has a clear bias against the OWS movement. Here's an example of how selective editing can be used to skew the protests however you want. Just speaking out against corporate greed is not the same thing as Marxism.
To be fair, I haven't seen much footage from around the world, mostly just the USA. (Seems to me the non-US protests just got started in the last week anyway, so maybe more will get shown soon.)
Also, there is no intrinsic link between dictatorship and any particular economic theory. Authoritarians will happily adopt any ideology that suits their needs, because they don't care about ideology, they only care about power. At the moment, our American authoritarians are twisting "free market" ideology to increase their control of the government. That is what the OWS folks are protesting.
Sorry if I was unclear, I meant that the constitutional amendment should be done first, because that would at least get corporate money out of politics (ie: reverse Citizens United). And that in turn would make the other steps more feasible.
My preference would be a fiat currency controlled by statute (to prevent political meddling), pegged to population growth. Print new dollars each year, based on the calculated population increase, then spend them into the economy to pay for infrastructure projects, etc.. (I don't favor returning to the gold standard, as Ron Paul proposes, because scarce commodities are too susceptible to speculation and monopolization.)
I would also prefer that each country have its own currency, since most countries have unique economic conditions. This is what I was getting at in my earlier comment... the E.U. tried to use its new currency as a way to bring these disparate economies into unity. Wrong tool for the job!! (And probably not a very useful project in the first place.)
Apologies for shooting from the hip, above. After skimming the PDF, I'm less skeptical. (I'll read it in detail later, when I'm not at work.) For example, I'm still skeptical of implementing a demurrage scheme that actually works on a global scale. But anything that gets us off the "money as debt" treadmill is definitely worth a look.
Which homepage are you talking about?
The OWS movement is the outrage. And it's just getting warmed up.
It's a bad idea. A currency should represent and serve a single culture/nation/society. When you implement a single currency across a range of disparate economies you end up with the "Euro crisis" presently unfolding before us.
Certainly no "single" solution will suffice, but ending the Fed would be a damn good place to start. Debt is a huge piece of the puzzle, and our "money as debt" currency is basically a Ponzi scheme writ large. The Fed is a privately owned institution; it's only connection to government is that its board members are appointed by the president and approved by the Senate. (And of course, all such candidates are picked from the population of elite bankers to begin with, so there's really no way for the elected government to influence the Fed's behavior.) Rather than printing our own money (a power which is specifically assigned to Congress in the constitution), we instead borrow our money supply from this private bank... at interest. How stupid is that?
Outsourcing/offshoring was not a boomer idea, it was an integral part of Reaganomics. Up until the 70's, a third of government revenue came from import/export tariffs. So-called "free trade" had already been a longstanding desire of conservative business interests for many years, and Reagan started the process that culminated with NAFTA under Clinton.
I agree with the rest of your analysis, but the idea of "free trade" did not originate with the Boomer generation, it had been around for quite a while already.
The OWS crowd have deliberately avoided touting any specific economic models. The fact that you don't know that only shows how ignorant you are of the movement and renders the rest of your comment irrelevant. Yes, I have heard a few protesters condemn capitalism, but I've heard even more say that they simply want capitalism with fairness. They want justice for the crimes of the banksters and less "corporate capture" of government.
As for taxes, the ratios you cite are very similar to those in the USA. However, that's only for income tax revenue. If you include sales tax, property tax, and all the rest, the lower and middle classes pay a much higher percentage of their gross income to the government than the rich do.
No, it merely affirms that all the other less precise mechanisms did not survive.
The US economy in recent years has followed Adam Smith about as much as the USSR followed Karl Marx. I agree with the GP that government is part of the problem, but that is largely due to the ever-increasing influence of "big money" in politics, culminating in the horrific Citizens United ruling a year and a half ago. Unfortunately, the only way to cut the octopus tentacles away is a constitutional amendment to strip corporations of their "personal" rights. Only then will our government be able to function properly to protect the people from "inhuman" corporate avarice.
As for how to protect us from the conglomerates, I suggest: 1. a STET tax; 2. get out of NAFTA, and reinstate reasonable tariffs as Adam Smith intended; 3. reinstate Glass-Steagall; 4. break up too-big-to-fail banks into smaller units; and 5. put some banksters in JAIL!
I saw an @Google video a few weeks ago that recommended sitting in the cockpit position, reclined about 35deg. Apparently the Air Force did a study, and found it would be cheaper and more effective to just design their aircraft seats to those specs than to teach their pilots how to keep good posture in a "normal" seat. (At least that's what the guy in the video said.)
He also talked about the main problem with posture for the average office/cubicle drone. We tend to hunch forward over the keyboard, which forces us to crane our necks up so we can see the screen. This puts strain on the back-of-the-neck muscles and can lead to headaches.
> film has more resolution...
I suspect that's why film has survived this long, despite all the hassles and expense associated with it. I worked in a camera shop in the early 90's, just as digital photography was coming to market, and I remember several "old-timer" customers who scoffed at the idea, often citing their Kodachrome slides from the 40's, still in pristine condition after fifty years.
Instead of barcodes, I think the most "efficient" solution would be to print the image on large format film -- large enough to allow a distinct "box" for each pixel -- and combine this with some sort of histogram of the colors in each frame. Sorta like an MD5 sum, this would allow color correction to control for aging/fading of the film. After a century of development, film manufacturers have gotten pretty good at making an archival-quality product. And film archivists have gotten pretty good at storing it, too. So it seems like a natural fit.
Their goal is not efficiency, anonymous retard, it's longevity. If they're already accustomed to archiving film, then why not just use it? You could probably fit a couple of hundred "tracks" of barcode on one frame of film, though it would still take a LOT of film to store one movie this way. Personally, I would just do an image transfer to large format film, but as an analog medium, that would be "lossy."
Obviously these archivists don't trust the standard magnetic storage media, otherwise they wouldn't be "worried" about the obsolescence of film. So if film is what they trust, they might as well just figure out a way to use it.
Solution: make a film transfer of any movie you want to archive. Also, they could transcode the digital info onto film in the form of one really long-ass barcode.
FTFA: "The question I have is what made the channels,"; said Gregg. Was it water, lava, or something else? "
It's like deja-vu all over again. Makes you wonder what deep discoveries await behind this channel notation... not to mention how long it will take us to generate enough political will to invest what it takes to find out.
Personally, I don't care if they're on the top or the bottom, as long as I can launch programs and manipulate windows without having to work too hard.
I think UI designers get a bit of tunnel vision, and try to "over-design" their features to make things easier... which actually makes them harder. Frankly, I don't spend a lot of time launching applications, but I use them for hours (or days) at a time. So if Unity can save me a click or two on launch, it's an insignificant savings compared to the hours I'll spend actually using that app. I can understand if they want to look ahead to the advent of multi-touch displays on the desktop, but those aren't here yet. In the meantime, Unity is little more than a curiosity, and should NOT be the default interface for a "major" OS.
Thank you!
Yes, it's mostly still WIMP, but just different enough to be annoying, and for no apparent reason. Which is why so many people have been switching to Xubuntu lately (myself included). I see no reason to switch back to Ubuntu, unless someone can explain to me why this new Unity really IS easier to use than the standard WIMP interface.
If it ain't broke, don't fix it.
The standard WIMP has been around, mostly unchanged, for decades. Why change it?
At this point, I don't think it matters much. The damage is already done, we're just going to have to deal with it someday. In the meantime, the rising cost of oil has made alternatives more economical, driving faster uptake. So eventually the problem will solve itself. I just hope a "mass extinction" of Homo sapiens is not a part of that solution.
I was wondering the same thing. I've skimmed a couple of articles about Costner's machine, and compared with the list of teams for this X-prize, but I don't see an obvious match. If his machine wasn't in this competition, one has to wonder why.
The name of his company is Ocean Therapy Solutions, and apparently they're involved in a lawsuit at the moment, so maybe that has something to do with it.
I have no background in this area, but I'm surprised to learn that we didn't know this already. Makes you wonder what other "simple" discoveries are waiting in around the corner.
There's an illustration in TFA (it's the blue thing, next to the boat). You could also follow the link in TFA to the manufacturer's website, where there's a page devoted to this technology. There are photo and video galleries linked from there.
Wish I had mod-points...
I've just finished an exchange on Facebook with an old friend who's an avid Mac user. He posted a link to an article responding to RMS's rather tasteless comments on the passing of Steve Jobs, and we got into a long exchange about the merits of open-source versus the "walled garden" world of Apple. One of my main points was that open standards and protocols have been a huge boon to the industry. I'll have to remind him how much of the Apple software he loves was built on the free/open foundation provided by Dennis Ritchie.