So, you're saying conduct yourself within social norms or be excluded? Within our Egalitarian Multicultural world there might be a few problems trying to follow that model.
It is precisely multiculturalism that makes an authoritarian state necessary.
To a large extent corporations not only are OK with this, but encourage more of it with ever increasing degree requirements!
Yes...
An unstructured, pure-vocational model of post-high-school education would be cheaper in money and lifespans. It may arrive. The present system is unsustainable.
But there are factors keeping it in place for the moment. One significant factor is that employers are barred by law from general IQ testing. Higher education can be viewed as a vast and expensive indirect proxy for such testing.
So the FreeBSD folks want more attention, and they've decided to FUD the GPL to get it?
No, I believe it is ZDNet that wants more attention. As other readers have documented, there has been a flood of such "news" items on Slashdot recently, that amount to little more than ads for various such sites.
So it seems to me the -real- money is in integrating an RDBMS which, for usage purposes, is row-oriented; but which, for archival purposes, is column-oriented.
Sybase does this. It integrates its relational server (ASE) with its columnwise server (IQ). Not the only ones doing it, just an example I know something about.
IQ has been on the market since the mid-90's, and may have been the first commercial columnwise database server. But sales have taken off only recently.
For the first two in particular, see Gomory and Baumol, Global Trade and Conflicting National Interests, and references there. Samuelson himself has acclaimed their results.
If we have a trade deficit today- and it's large enough- it means that comparative advantage rules have broken down
"Comparative advantage" is an interesting consequence of some very early econonmic models. Those models assume:
Decreasing returns to scale No innovation (most fundamentally) domestic investment stays domestic.
This is because those early models took agriculture as the paradigm. You can use land to grow A, B, or C, but you can't saw off land and float it over to another country with different climate, and more and more investment (land under cultivation) yields less and less return.
"Comparative advantage" is an mathematical artifact of those restrictions.
Those models have NOTHING to do with this topic, which is about offshoring production (absolute advantage), industrial production (increasing returns to scale), and innovation.
When the formal assumptions are changed to reflect these facts, "comparative advantage" breaks down from first principles.
This topic is vitally important. Will people please, please not be blinded by obsolete models.
After reading this I checked the blog Living Intentionally (www.findingmytelos.blogspot.com), a valued source of unedited opinion from a soldier serving in Iraq. Sure enough, gone.
That is a loss. He did not mince words about what he saw. Here is how he is quoted in Parapundit's blog:
What I object to is what the Iraq war has become, and the fact that great Americans are dying on a daily basis for people who do not appreciate or understand what we are doing. Make no mistake, many people from this culture know the words to use when talking with Westerners....words like freedom, democracy and human rights. When the Westerner leaves the room these words cease to have meaning. They do not speak this way with each other. They mutually recognize that using these words is part of the expected hussle. There is a Westernized elite who own the concepts and desire to live within the framework, but they have no power here, and their desire is to get a US visa as quickly as they can and move to Detroit.
There is nothing in this culture that gives it a framework to understand the notion of consensual government for the common good, outside one's self, kinship or tribal structure. This truth works itself out in this culture in a way that is very masochistic to Western eyes.
Any individual, minimal cooperation we receive is due to perceived self-interest. It's not about appealing to a higher good, or humanitarianism, or sense of wider duty. It's about finding where your interests coincide with the individual, at that moment in time. Creativity in shameless dissembling, if resulting in benefit to one's self, is respected and admired.
I've heard it said that the desire for freedom beats in the heart of every person. This is probably true. But the desire for freedom for one's neighbor, independent of one's own self-interest, does not, and this is the true test, which the Iraqi people have failed.
I worry that we are shedding the blood of America's best on a mistaken assumption about the latter.
1) The make a larger profit, and the people who earn that profit spend it on other things. 2) They invest that saved money in more production or more production efficiency (buy technology, spend on research, build another factory) 3) They lower the price of the product, so the consumer then spends their money on something else.
The important thing here is that previously idle people in India or China are now no longer idle. They're making things. And when they make things, *WE* in the US get a cut of it.
Outsourcing turns a guy in India who wasn't doing shit into a guy in India who makes, say, $100 worth of stuff, and keeps $80 of it and we get $20 'for free'. That's good for him and good for us.
That does eliminate a job in the US that may have paid $200 for the same stuff. But that's OK, because the stuff costs $100 less, and the person who would have had that job can now work on something else.
I think I see the problem. You're relying on classical, diminishing-returns-to-scale economic theory, originally inspired by agricultural production circa 1800. Wool, wine. Doubling the land under cultivation can do no more than double the output. And of course, you can't slice off pieces of land and attach them to other countries, so the issues with "outsourcing production" were assumed away, or never thought of.
But in the end, we want to export as many jobs as we can and replace as many workers as possible with machines. If we do this to perfection, none of us will have to work anymore, because machines and people in India will be doing all our work for us, and we'll still have the same amount of stuff.
Or at least, we'll have freed up enough of our labor force to provide the universal healthcare everyone seems to want.
The "Insightful" tag is certainly going cheap on Slashdot these days.
In the presence of increasing returns to scale (essentially the definition of industrial production) and innovation, the predictions of classical diminishing-returns economics fail completely. And that includes classical trade theory. Rigorously. And it's a good thing, otherwise our standard of living would have been drastically lower.
Well, refutations of classical theory are out there in abundance, they don't need to be summarized here. Suffice it to say that it does matter very much what industries a country has.
The wonder is not that a government can be induced to craft trade policy that benefits a few at the expense of many. The wonder is that apparently intelligent people who stand to lose can go along with it for, I guess, some kind of intellectual satisfaction. This is the power of (obsolete) ideas!
What's truly weird is that it happens here on Slashdot. If somebody came in claiming that "RISC is the ultimate in CPU architecture, always has been, always will be!" or something like that, everyone would be all over him. But economic theory is eternal, unchanging dogma in Slashdot land.
I'm really trying to point out that taking the chapest option which meets your needs is the truly competitive American way.
"The truly competitive American way" is sufficiently vague that it can be applied to any policy, or lack of policy.
If you mean, "best for maximizing the value of the total output of the American economy", your statement is false from first principles.
If you mean, "something that Americans try to do, whatever the negative effects", you have a point, if you mean in recent times.
Just remember that that famous enemy of the American way, Thomas Jefferson, advocated producing goods domestically over importing them, even if the imports were cheaper, and that early America was highly protectionist. It's a fact that high-investment, increasing-returns-to-scale industries thereby got a foothold in early America, rather than being kept out of business by imports.
I'm tired of people not addressing the distinction between skilled workers trying to immigrate and improve their lives while also boosting our economy, and the people who hop the fence illegally just to take advantage of health care they won't have to pay for and a lack of responsibility for income taxes.
The purpose of the WSJ article is precisely to blur that distinction. Standard technique. The WSJ is anticipating the forthcoming Congressional debates.
Dunn, Fiorina. Wall Street is probably just sexist. Or maybe it's a fact that men manage companies better. Or maybe misguided thinking elevates inadequate people to positions they aren't qualified for merely for the sake of filling some quota of diversity.
Let's all flex our honesty here and call this game the right way. The geniuses in charge of HP back in 1999 thought it would be cute and "proactive" to hire a "here's my high heel in your back as I climb the corporate ladder" lady as CEO of one of America's largest, most respected companies. They were high on the same La-La juice stoning all of Silicon Valley. How darling. How impressive. How shocking. Oh the attention.
But eventually that high wears off and there's nothing but puke and pain left.
The rise of Wikipedia does not banish expertise from the world. If anything it makes it crucial.
all of the sudden information can come from anywhere.
It always did. Wikipedia increases the availability and volume.
Information includes true information, false information, and a wide range of bullshit. The crucial problem is distinguishing them.
It's a good bet that the most reliable Wikipedia articles are based on writings by those "experts" you have banished, or written directly by them. If I were looking up science or history topics, I wouldn't want it any other way.
All of the sudden we don't have this magical authority anymore to tell us what is right and wrong, and for many people that is unimaginable.
I sense an anti-authority morality play. Not everyone needs one. Many people who want nothing more, or less, than reliable facts will not buy a ticket.
What's not getting mentioned in this light-hearted article, or the commentary, is the disastrous 2007 NASA budget. The idiotic "Vision for Space Exploration" coming out of the White House has made honest defenders of NASA's science initiative look like fools for declaring that science would not be cut. Well, it wasn't cut, it was eviscerated.
I don't know what all this hatred of WMT is, of late. What's the difference between a valid business model and an evil scheme? I guess it has to do with how big you are. At the end of the day, I think it all comes down to the fact that WMT has money and other people want to get at it because it is there.
No, it all comes down to monopsony power.
Both monopolies and monopsonies are supposed to be regulated, but the latter have been rarer, historically. It's a blind spot that Wal-Mart is happy to take advantage of.
A key part of Wal-Mart's business model is cost-shifting from the private to the public sector. Tax deals with states and municipalities are the most important part, but even the cost of storage is shifted from warehouses to trucks on streets and highways. The burden of maintaining those thoroughfares is of course on the taxpayer.
And, for those praising Wal-Mart's economic "efficiency", please explain the advantage to the economy of forcing into leases the provision that no competitor can use the buildings after Wal-Mart moves out? The country is littered with crumbling ex-Wal-Mart centers, paid with your tax dollars.
Most of the Slashdot discussion on this story I've read is about Intelligent Design and religion. Indeed, if you say "hostility to the implications of evolution," most people will assume you're thinking of religious-based opposition.
But some of the work acclaimed in the Science article is eventually going to horrify a large community of believers for a completely different reason.
You can read a well-written summary of the situation here.
Slashdot Mirror
So, you're saying conduct yourself within social norms or be excluded? Within our Egalitarian Multicultural world there might be a few problems trying to follow that model.
It is precisely multiculturalism that makes an authoritarian state necessary.
I prefer Scholarpedia over Wikipedia for physics articles. I wouldn't apply the phrase "guard our section of the ivory tower" to it, either.
To a large extent corporations not only are OK with this, but encourage more of it with ever increasing degree requirements!
Yes...
An unstructured, pure-vocational model of post-high-school education would be cheaper in money and lifespans. It may arrive. The present system is unsustainable.
But there are factors keeping it in place for the moment. One significant factor is that employers are barred by law from general IQ testing. Higher education can be viewed as a vast and expensive indirect proxy for such testing.
I took the editors' title of this story too literally.
Now this is a new concept in supercomputers.
So the FreeBSD folks want more attention, and they've decided to FUD the GPL to get it?
No, I believe it is ZDNet that wants more attention. As other readers have documented, there has been a flood of such "news" items on Slashdot recently, that amount to little more than ads for various such sites.
So it seems to me the -real- money is in integrating an RDBMS which, for usage purposes, is row-oriented; but which, for archival purposes, is column-oriented.
Sybase does this. It integrates its relational server (ASE) with its columnwise server (IQ). Not the only ones doing it, just an example I know something about.
IQ has been on the market since the mid-90's, and may have been the first commercial columnwise database server. But sales have taken off only recently.
prove it.
For the first two in particular, see Gomory and Baumol, Global Trade and Conflicting National Interests, and references there. Samuelson himself has acclaimed their results.
If we have a trade deficit today- and it's large enough- it means that comparative advantage rules have broken down
"Comparative advantage" is an interesting consequence of some very early econonmic models.
Those models assume:
Decreasing returns to scale
No innovation
(most fundamentally) domestic investment stays domestic.
This is because those early models took agriculture as the paradigm. You can use land to grow A, B, or C, but you can't saw off land and float it over to another country with different climate, and more and more investment (land under cultivation) yields less and less return.
"Comparative advantage" is an mathematical artifact of those restrictions.
Those models have NOTHING to do with this topic, which is about offshoring production (absolute advantage), industrial production (increasing returns to scale), and innovation.
When the formal assumptions are changed to reflect these facts, "comparative advantage" breaks down from first principles.
This topic is vitally important. Will people please, please not be blinded by obsolete models.
After reading this I checked the blog Living Intentionally (www.findingmytelos.blogspot.com), a valued source of unedited opinion from a soldier serving in Iraq. Sure enough, gone.
That is a loss. He did not mince words about what he saw. Here is how he is quoted in Parapundit's blog:
What I object to is what the Iraq war has become, and the fact that great Americans are dying on a daily basis for people who do not appreciate or understand what we are doing. Make no mistake, many people from this culture know the words to use when talking with Westerners....words like freedom, democracy and human rights. When the Westerner leaves the room these words cease to have meaning. They do not speak this way with each other. They mutually recognize that using these words is part of the expected hussle. There is a Westernized elite who own the concepts and desire to live within the framework, but they have no power here, and their desire is to get a US visa as quickly as they can and move to Detroit.
There is nothing in this culture that gives it a framework to understand the notion of consensual government for the common good, outside one's self, kinship or tribal structure. This truth works itself out in this culture in a way that is very masochistic to Western eyes.
Any individual, minimal cooperation we receive is due to perceived self-interest. It's not about appealing to a higher good, or humanitarianism, or sense of wider duty. It's about finding where your interests coincide with the individual, at that moment in time. Creativity in shameless dissembling, if resulting in benefit to one's self, is respected and admired.
I've heard it said that the desire for freedom beats in the heart of every person. This is probably true. But the desire for freedom for one's neighbor, independent of one's own self-interest, does not, and this is the true test, which the Iraqi people have failed.
I worry that we are shedding the blood of America's best on a mistaken assumption about the latter.
1) The make a larger profit, and the people who earn that profit spend it on other things.
2) They invest that saved money in more production or more production efficiency (buy technology, spend on research, build another factory)
3) They lower the price of the product, so the consumer then spends their money on something else.
The important thing here is that previously idle people in India or China are now no longer idle. They're making things. And when they make things, *WE* in the US get a cut of it.
Outsourcing turns a guy in India who wasn't doing shit into a guy in India who makes, say, $100 worth of stuff, and keeps $80 of it and we get $20 'for free'. That's good for him and good for us.
That does eliminate a job in the US that may have paid $200 for the same stuff. But that's OK, because the stuff costs $100 less, and the person who would have had that job can now work on something else.
I think I see the problem. You're relying on classical, diminishing-returns-to-scale economic theory,
originally inspired by agricultural production circa 1800. Wool, wine. Doubling the land under
cultivation can do no more than double the output. And of course, you can't slice off pieces of land
and attach them to other countries, so the issues with "outsourcing production" were assumed away, or
never thought of.
But in the end, we want to export as many jobs as we can and replace as many workers as possible with machines. If we do this to perfection, none of us will have to work anymore, because machines and people in India will be doing all our work for us, and we'll still have the same amount of stuff.
Or at least, we'll have freed up enough of our labor force to provide the universal healthcare everyone seems to want.
The "Insightful" tag is certainly going cheap on Slashdot these days.
In the presence of increasing returns to scale (essentially the definition of industrial production)
and innovation, the predictions of classical diminishing-returns economics fail completely. And that
includes classical trade theory. Rigorously. And it's a good thing, otherwise our standard of living
would have been drastically lower.
Well, refutations of classical theory are out there in abundance, they don't need to be summarized here.
Suffice it to say that it does matter very much what industries a country has.
The wonder is not that a government can be induced to craft trade policy that benefits a few at the
expense of many. The wonder is that apparently intelligent people who stand to lose can go along with
it for, I guess, some kind of intellectual satisfaction. This is the power of (obsolete) ideas!
What's truly weird is that it happens here on Slashdot. If somebody came in claiming that "RISC is
the ultimate in CPU architecture, always has been, always will be!" or something like that, everyone
would be all over him. But economic theory is eternal, unchanging dogma in Slashdot land.
I'm really trying to point out that taking the chapest option which meets your needs is the truly competitive American way.
"The truly competitive American way" is sufficiently vague that it can be applied to any policy, or lack of policy.
If you mean, "best for maximizing the value of the total output of the American economy", your statement is false from first principles.
If you mean, "something that Americans try to do, whatever the negative effects", you have a point, if you mean in recent times.
Just remember that that famous enemy of the American way, Thomas Jefferson, advocated producing goods domestically over importing them, even if the imports were cheaper, and that early America was highly protectionist. It's a fact that high-investment, increasing-returns-to-scale industries thereby got a foothold in early America, rather than being kept out of business by imports.
I'm tired of people not addressing the distinction between skilled workers trying to immigrate and improve their lives while also boosting our economy, and the people who hop the fence illegally just to take advantage of health care they won't have to pay for and a lack of responsibility for income taxes.
The purpose of the WSJ article is precisely to blur that distinction. Standard technique.
The WSJ is anticipating the forthcoming Congressional debates.
I thought Niagara 2 is supposed to have more FPUs.
anyone who believes he's really dead is an idiot
Ken Lay still alive? This is a tremendous scoop, enough to make a journalist's career. What is your evidence?
And here in California, there is fruit rotting in the fields because border tightening has cut the supply of farm workers.
Are you sure that isn't from excess supply?
http://www.jerrypournelle.com/archives2/archives2m ail/mail381.html#tractatus
From http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/04/01/rtg_hurd_
All of the sudden nobody is an expert
The rise of Wikipedia does not banish expertise from the world. If anything it makes it crucial.
all of the sudden information can come from anywhere.
It always did. Wikipedia increases the availability and volume.
Information includes true information, false information, and a wide range of bullshit. The crucial problem is distinguishing them.
It's a good bet that the most reliable Wikipedia articles are based on writings by those "experts" you have banished, or written directly by them. If I were looking up science or history topics, I wouldn't want it any other way.
All of the sudden we don't have this magical authority anymore to tell us what is right and wrong, and for many people that is unimaginable.
I sense an anti-authority morality play. Not everyone needs one. Many people who want nothing more, or less, than reliable facts will not buy a ticket.
How about adding an Opera topic to Slashdot? It seems popular enough. (I swear by Opera myself.)
What's not getting mentioned in this light-hearted article, or the commentary, is the disastrous 2007 NASA budget. The idiotic "Vision for Space Exploration" coming out of the White House has made honest defenders of NASA's science initiative look like fools for declaring that science would not be cut. Well, it wasn't cut, it was eviscerated.
And, on the financial-markets-to-music side, Tom Hamilton already produced
London Fix, a pretty-good sounding electronic work based on gold prices.
I don't know what all this hatred of WMT is, of late. What's the difference between a valid business model and an evil scheme? I guess it has to do with how big you are. At the end of the day, I think it all comes down to the fact that WMT has money and other people want to get at it because it is there.
No, it all comes down to monopsony power.
Both monopolies and monopsonies are supposed to be regulated, but the latter have been rarer, historically. It's a blind spot that Wal-Mart is happy to take advantage of.
A key part of Wal-Mart's business model is cost-shifting from the private to the public sector. Tax deals with states and municipalities are the most important part, but even the cost of storage is shifted from warehouses to trucks on streets and highways. The burden of maintaining those thoroughfares is of course on the taxpayer.
And, for those praising Wal-Mart's economic "efficiency", please explain the advantage to the economy of forcing into leases the provision that no competitor can use the buildings after Wal-Mart moves out? The country is littered with crumbling ex-Wal-Mart centers, paid with your tax dollars.
Most of the Slashdot discussion on this story I've read is about Intelligent Design and religion. Indeed, if you say "hostility to the implications of evolution," most people will assume you're thinking of religious-based opposition.
But some of the work acclaimed in the Science article is eventually going to horrify a large community of believers for a completely different reason.
You can read a well-written summary of the situation here.
Please mod this up, recycling paper has zero impact on cutting of forests, paper pulp "trees" are grown on farms.
http://kleercut.net/en/kenogami