I have no idea. I've got my home, my family... that's all I can care about right now. I gave up on political understandings a long time ago. We're no smarter than the Germans or the Chinese or any of the other people who went through crazy political experiments.
My hunch, we'll go through more crazy political experiments before it all comes crashing down.
I work with computers all day. I often wonder what people think computers are all about.
They're all about replacing human labor. I find it odd working in this field and talking to people outside it.
People outside the field seem to think that every age has a 'new economy' but everything else stays the same... as if nothing has changed in history. So they talk as if the 'green' economy will provide everyone with jobs... just 'green' jobs. Or they think we'll all be doing analytical work.
The problem is typically these people lack an understanding of scale. It's odd how so many academics lack an understanding of scale as well. All the 'good' jobs of the future are jobs that do not scale with the population. They are for small groups of highly skilled people.
So Google can do all it does with a mere 30K people or so. That is enough to serve the whole world. Just to put it in context. BlockBuster employed 60K people and it represents just a sliver of what Google can do (content delivery).
The single biggest problem is that the private sector is increasingly not scaling with population. Small highly efficient operations are there.
The public sector typically does scale with population. More nurses, doctors, police officers, teachers... are needed as the population grows. Now we can certainly try and automate parts of these jobs (online class delivery...), but in general we're not there technologically or the unions won't allow it.
So we have a structural imbalance. The only way out of it... is to go to the start... computers are doing what they were meant to do... kill human labor. We should all be working less... job sharing. the result is a much more egalitarian society... with potentially a very rich upper class at the top of some of the automation companies.
However that would kill people's position of privilege in society. Public sector workers expect a premium over the average person. Ditto for bankers...
IMHO, we need to embrace deflation and the lack of work and redirect people to the jobs that still need doing. Maybe we need vast numbers of people to work on the farms 2 weeks a year. Other need to go mine for rechargeable batteries.
One of the biggest problem we still face is the emphasis on 'educated' labor. Just as the industrial revolution automated manufacturing jobs. The information revolution automates so much educated labor. We need a few experts, but computing can do the rest.
So we need to get rid of the idea that just because you're educated, you should be paid more. Most of the legal and financial jobs are unproductive today. Just there to keep educated people in a premium position over society. We could for example automate and simplify the entire tax field and get rid of most accountants.
But as I said, people are used to their position of privilege. Egalitarianism is a hard concept... even though people talk about it. When people talk about good jobs, they mean jobs better than someone else.
It's definitely going to be a rough time... especially since technology is deflationary... but governments and banks are inflationary. We certainly can't embrace deflation as governments have so much debt and banks are dependent on people taking loans... and guess who is in charge of most countries (bankers and governments...)
What I find surprising is that people in IT and technology are so obsessed with being productive... and that includes me.
In no other industry will you find a group of people looking to be productive and kill their own likelihood and jobs.
The professions (law and medicine) protect themselves and make sure their education is valued by stopping others from entering their field or doing their tasks. They typically use quality as a justification for their legal restrictions.
In the rest of the employment world, it is about getting the most for the least amount of work.
So rather than look at the clock punchers and email pushers with dismay, I look at them with admiration.
That is why the acts are very reasonable... you must prove substantial economic harm.
The point was the exclusive deals are not on their own merits bad. They're very common place and reasonable business strategies.
However, they can be a problem if abused... and that is where the substantial economic harm part comes in... and that typically comes in when you have monopolies or just very large players.
It is not just the that tech industry has short lived monopolies... it is that there are diverse players that keep each other in check. For example, if MS really pushed Dell too hard, Dell would invest in its own OS and software... as HP has done with webOS. This separation of software and hardware severely limited Microsoft's ability to to substantial harm IMHO.
However, I'm not against many of the anti-trust accusations against MS. I think the US legal system did the right thing by bringing it to the forefront MS forcing vendors to bundle products and what not.
And they didn't take too drastic action... which is good I think as the tech industry changes so quickly.
Sometimes the legal system actually does a pretty reasonable job.
Railroads are a natural monopoly. If railroads refuse to carry your product, you had no other option. Despite people's fantasies, Microsoft doesn't have this kind of power and never did. You could always use competitive products. This is not to say they didn't make compatibility difficult, but it is incomparable to striking deals with network industries like railroads.
It would be like MS striking a deal with ATT to only connect to MS computers. That my good man would be a comparable analogy. And yes MS did do this... in South Korea by striking a deal with the government to force all financial transactions to go through internet explorer. Of course that is the government causing the problem (a real monopoly) in cahoots with Microsoft.
And if you read things like the Sherman Act you know that exclusive dealings are not illegal on their own. You must prove substantial economic harm first. The reason is blatantly obvious. Because exclusive deals and tying arrangements are common practice.
Internet service provider is a classic monopoly problem.
Monopolies are bad. Everyone acknowledges that. Government can and should regulate natural monopolies like telecom.
Yet why create monopolies where none are needed?
Government is not best fit to run healthcare. Doctors, nurses... seek profit (their salaries) just as much as anyone else. Notice how doctors protect their turf from cheaper health professionals. Ditto for every other health profession and technology.
And price is not the only way to compete. You live in a magical world where the government perfectly understands everyone's needs and should provide the same 'service' and outcomes to everyone.
That's not the case for most people. Different people want different levels of service. How much is 'excellent' health care worth for you?
I can tell you, there are some people who would spend every last penny trying every last healthcare procedure to extend their life. My grandfather on the other hand, turned down most procedures of advanced care.
Different people want different things and value different things. No one really wants the same level of service for healthcare/education... despite the vague claim that they do.
Of course if you promise people everything for free, then they want everything... but everything is never affordable. That's the dilemma you get into with healthcare.
Put a choice for people. Would you rather pay an extra $200/month for access to advanced healthcare or would you rather have that money to spend on whatever.
Similarly in education. That is perhaps the least needed in terms of government. All you need is a teacher and a room to get an education. Most people have different needs, desires, values they want to pass on...
You seem to rant about profits a lot. I'll end with one thing. I don't see the difference between profits and salaries. Public sector union monopolies fight to maximize their profits regardless of the consequences.
You exhibit very lazy thinking and are in fact quite ideological in your view of businesses.
Most things left on their own don't magically turn into corporations. Look at this history books. Many medical centers are non-profit... ditto for education. Yet they were private.
Your inability to think beyond government monopoly vs corporation is pretty sad actually.
"Inefficient bureaucracy develops in any organization of sufficient size"
Of course it does. Hence I said... the lesser of two evils. The problem with government/public sector is they are a monopoly without choice... hence the inefficient, corruption stays and permeates and ultimately destroys a society.
Businesses due to consumer choice always fight to stay relevant and serve their customers. Microsoft could not rest on its laurels. Google came. Apple came.
That's the real difference. While there are certain things we need government for (law, regulations...), it should always be minimized as it is difficult to change 'providers'.
It's not about efficiency. it's about resiliency. An entrenched government and bureaucracy is hard to change. A society becomes less resilient as it is unable to take on special interests.
Over the long term, the inherent self-interest of government always results in the rest of society being worse off... and democracy is no substitute for choice... as special interests are a part of democracy.
Amazon is a business which gets all its money voluntarily providing a useful service for everyone.
Meanwhile the police departments profits by sending young people to jail for smoking a plant. Public sector workers are a monopoly operation and have the state back pensions the rest of the workers in the state don't get access to.
I'm sorry, Amazon is 100% more moral than any board of education, police department of fire fighting service.
I honestly don't know many people who think the 'public sector' is this honorable public service anymore. It's a gang of self-interested mafia members.
And given the choice between a mafia and a business that voluntarily provides services... I choose the lesser of two evils... business.
There are a whole lost of reasons and violations of the vision of the founding fathers... Naturally you latch onto the media... which is well always blamed.
Here's a few more...and perhaps more important.
1. A federal system where states do most things. This allows a diverse system where states can do their own thing. It allows a state with stupid people to get stupid policies and not ruin the whole country.
2. The founders always acknowledged that enlightened people would not be at the helm. Hence there are plenty of restrictions on the power of government so the stupidity of government doesn't ruin the power of an enlightened individual.
A group of relatively skilled people come up with an idea oh how to improve software. Things like unit-testing, agile... They try it out with other skilled people and notice that the process does create an improvement.
This process becomes the latest and greatest craze and everyone in the software industry thinks it is going to result in better software... yet it doesn't.
The reason... you need skilled people to begin with. I never turn against process. I just firmly think you need good people first before you start on this process binge.
For example, unit-testing is a great idea. I use it all the time. Yet, when half the people don't know what a 'unit' is, unit testing just flops. Unit-testing works great when you have your code well abstracted in clean units.
So for unit-testing to work... you need, abstracted, clean code. How many 'bad' developers write abstracted and clean code? You also need developers who can write proper tests and think of the cases to test for unit testing. Again, if you have a 'bad' developer who isn't checking for errors in actual code... why on earth do you think they're going to write useful unit-tests?
The same is true for every other process. Agile needs good managers, product people, developers, testers...
It's not even about time. Believe me, if all the code I worked on was clean, abstracted... written by good people... I'd have no problem writing unit tests for everything possible and following process 100%.
But typically, you have poorly written code with many mediocre/understaffed people and then some mandate to implement process which doesn't work well given the poor code and people... and just eats up time... and you get frustrated at the process.
In reality... the process isn't the problem perse. It is just exposing the poor code and mediocre/understaffed people.
I don't think you quite understand how the rest of society operates.
My wife works in insurance. Most of my family works in the public sector.
The rest of society works by getting an education for a specific job and any small change... you get training. The idea of hiring someone with 'potential' just doesn't exist in 95% of the world.
Let me give you a little contrast here.
Doctors spend years studying medicine and then a few more years specializing in some narrow field. They continue to work in that narrow field for years, often just doing the same procedures over and over again.
Contrast that with core router equipment supporting the internet. A system with as many complexities as some medical specialization. Oh... just hire some new grad with some general knowledge and have them design and debug issues. Hey, that new grad was me not too long ago:P
Every time one of my family members at work gets a new computer program to use... no matter how small... they get training on it. This is ingrained in 95% of the rest of the workplace. My mother was hiring for some position in the public sector and I read the job description. They put in some obscure computer data entry program that you would of course only use if you worked for the city.
It's really only in tech and R&D where technology is rapid and people are generally apt at self-learning that we think people should just be hired for potential. Of course I think this is the better way:)... but I don't really blame the HR, business people... they do what 95% of society does.
We're the oddballs and quite frankly it is up to us to organize to make sure our field does well.
There are lots of way. Both doctors and lawyers have professional programs with training built in. You can't do surgery without being a professional licensed doctor with know how and proper training. Yet any nitwit can be hired to operate a router.
There will always be a trade off in these areas. Yet I guarantee the same people ranting how ignorant businesses are... are the same people who rant against professional systems.
Doctors, lawyers, teachers, nurses, police officers...every job you can think is first and foremost in it to make a living.
I don't know where people get this idea that the 'helping' sector is more moral. The used car salesman is only considered immoral because they have to earn every single penny they get. So some resort to sleazy tactics.
The ones in the helping sector, don't need to resort to sleaze you face, they just resort to more grandiose sleaze. Forcing the government to pay so they can charge whatever they want. Creating pointless laws and programs to bring them business.
What do you think happens under universal healthcare? It's guaranteed business for the healthcare sector. Ditto for the drug war being guaranteed business for lawyers and police officers, and prison guards. And war is guaranteed business for military and military companies.
No matter which way you slice it... and politicians always try and slice it a million different ways, you will never be able to generate a more honest system than a free market where people voluntarily do what they want.
Everything else, the self-interest takes over. Hilariously, the self-interest is often disguised as the 'greater good'.
Hey, maybe we'll relearn the lessons of the enlightenment. One day... one day.
While a 'hashtable' is obvious to computer folks, chemical compounds, engines... are obvious to people in chemical or mechanical engineering.
They have to deal with just as obvious patents. The difference is really:
Computer programs have a very low barrier to entry so there are many more players. Whereas there are much fewer car companies for example. They're used to dealing and licensing. The Toyota Prius for example was advertised for having over 1000 patents. Any bets on how 'obvious' those patents were to engineers at Ford or GM?
'Specific implementation' is also quite vague and you risk the more patents as companies files numerous patents to cover the same 'concept' but applied to different things. For example, you might use such a hashtrick and then file a patent for using that hash in different applications (firewall, webserver...)...
Never underestimate lawyers to muck things up.
Personally, I don't think you can really do it in the application process. There are too many patent applications and you really don't want to raise the cost too much which would hurt the small inventor.
I think you really need to focus on invalidating patents once someone decides to actually put resources behind launching a patent law suit.
1. For movies that are really worth seeing at such high resolutions, people generally like going to the movies. It's an event. I remember doing this with Avatar and some action flicks.
2. Web distribution. My parents for example don't rent physical movies anymore. They use the ON-Demand functionality of their cable provider. Obviously, netflix and others do the same thing.
I think a lot of people seem to forget why things are successful in the first place. I'd actually suggest the reason the internet has been successful is because all its standards are crap.
I don't say that sarcastically. I absolutely mean it. Could anyone have designed a better email protocol than Smtp? Of course. Yet it would have brought it authentication, directories... What SMTP did was provide a really simple way to send an email. Eventually the 'more in depth' email solutions went into their own networks... but they can all talk smtp and we can all talk to each other. And we fix problems as they come.
Ditto for IP addresses themselves. It's unthinkable that an IP address is not tied to a known user. I mean how can we charge users for content. You know like a phone number is tied to an actual person and can be charged. How can we be sure people... Yet by keeping things simple, authenticated... the web spread.
Ditto again for HTML. Flexible enough to embed content like Flash (argh) but also enough to give us reasonable text content. And its expanded.
Heck pretty much everything about the internet in terms of standards is crap. But that's why it works and spreads and actually connects people. All the internet standards were made to be simple and easy to spread.
I'll liken it to the political process. I live in Canada and people always complain about the political process that smaller provinces have much high voting power than larger provinces. I suspect the same is true in the US.
Alright, but without that *equalized* voting power, you wouldn't have had a country in the first place. Would PEI have joined Canada if due to population, it basically would have no say in the country? Absolutely not.
Would a small state like Vermont have joined the USA if it knew a larger state would outvote it? Nope.
So it's great to sit around today and imagine *better* ways to organize things... but such people forget they would have had nothing to organize had they tried to implement their vision.
And we can always build upon the current to make things better, But we should never forget that standards should be simple and spreadable to stay relevant in a connected world.
If he wants this complicated linking text format, he can try it, just like like Flash or PDF... see how far he can go. Maybe he earns its place. But lets not complicate the basic building blocks.
Yes... now you're getting it. Everything is a matter of faith and belief.
People make their judgments on what to believe based on lots of things. Are there other motives? What is the person's standing in the community? What do other people say? What they have personally observed...
You take it as a given that the scientific community reveres the principles of science and the scientific method. Many people do not. Some people take it as a given that religious leaders revere the principles of their religion. Many do not.
You as an individual can come to any conclusion you want. But yes, you have to have faith and trust your sources. Can you convince me of your conclusions without me having faith in those same sources? Probably not.
Many parts of science find lots of common ground and most people have faith in it. Gravity, laws of physics... We see the success of science around us. My car works. I can fly in a plane. I've studied enough science to know how it works. I understand logic.
Am I skeptical of huge areas of 'science'. Of course I am, as I see many other motives.
Oh 'science' says investing in ECE will return $4 for every $1 invested! Really? I have neither the time nor energy to go investigate that or prove it wrong. I know that is part of the social sciences which are less factual that the other sciences... but nonetheless come from the same mantel of science. Yet I'm skeptical as the other motive is money and power.
These days, I have less *faith* in the scientific institutions as these issues seem to dominate. I don't trust the word of scientists just because they say so. They're people like anyone else with different ideologies, view points...
Just as priests don't adhere to every virtue they put forth (hint... molesting children is not a Christian virtue), Scientists do not adhere to every virtue they put forth.
So in conclusion. Everything is a matter of faith.
Science is a process. Science is a way of thinking about problem. Science is really the Scientific method.
The problem is people conflating the use of this very good, reasonable, practical process, and thinking this process can be everything.
The question of course is why would ever want to convince someone of some scientific truth? Why does it matter if someone trusts science? The answer is normally it doesn't matter. We can blab away, have a good argument and no one really cares. Just like I can have a discussion about a piece of art or a movie and no one really cares.
However, as science intersects with other domains in life... it does start to matter. in this respect science becomes more of a normal belief system.
You are trying to convince someone of the scientific truth of global warming so that you can have political and economic power over them. This aspect is really no different than any other *truth*. The church claims to have the truth so that it can hold political and economic power over power. As do kings, supreme councils...
Normally you hear *scientists* speak of science, they speak of the superiority of the scientific process (rational, evidence based, trials, peer review...).
Normally when any of other life's domain's speak of science, they are speaking of the religion of science... which basically means... trust these people and give them money and power.
Just because you have the truth, even if it is actually the truth (scientific truth) does not mean you should rule anything. That is a conclusion.
Science is a method. Science can tell you what happens when A, B, and C occur. Science cannot tell you what you should do about it. That is up to morality, which really is no different than religion.
Science does not tell you to stop Global Warming. Science only tries to tell you what will happen as the Earth warms. You do it because you are a moral person who wants to stop harm from coming to billions of people.
And as you wade into morality and goals, you find out that people's goals and moralities and sacrifices and costs are not all the same.
"Pay people for what they actually accomplish, instead of just for being there"
It's very difficult to do that. 'Performance' reviews in any complex task are very difficult. I remember when I worked for a major telecom equipment manufacturer a few years back. I was fixing one problem that needed restructuring huge areas of the code and getting rid of recursion (hint... the stack was blowing up....). It was a lot of work.
Then a problem came in, was really just a simple 1 line fix. I fixed it. Got a lot of praise and thank yous, and a bonus (we got them each time we did something 'great').
Now of course, how is my manager supposed to know one the one that got praised was basically no work on my part. The long hard problem basically received no attention. They'd have to go in, do code reviews, be able to tell if someone took the best path to the problem... i can't see any manager doing that. they have no time.
Ultimately, telecommuting is really a manager specific thing, and I think it will remain as such. Once a manager sees you can deliver, then you gain that flexibility.
I don't think it's really wise or appropriate to try to do it company wide.
But of course all these people who want the government involved and want 'evidence based policy...' they will just ignore the evidence in favor of their own ideology which says that prevention saves money or we need to tax smokers more...
Unfortunately, innovation has to be paid for by someone.
1. You can have it paid for the current way with VC firms footing the bill, but also taking the biggest cut of profits, and making engineering an unstable field.
2. You can have the government do the innovation. You are seeing more and more countries move this way. Basically tying universities and industry together. Of course this is heavy on the tax payer, can be cut, gets bureaucratic.
3. You can have industries fund innovation by those who use it. Telecoms are natural monopolies. They sustained themselves all that innovation, including developing languages like c++ based on their monopoly like situation.
I know a lot of people in the high tech field are obsessed with innovation, but over the long term, they might regret the move to the startup vc model. More and more young smart people are shunning the field as it is not a stable professional career. So you're going to end up with a lack of talent... especially for areas that require significant domain knowledge.
While you might get some people to make relatively shallow web application, who wants to invest their time and energy learning about 3d hardware processing... without having a stable career option afterwards?
I personally think as workers in the field, we might end up regretting this hyper innovation model. It removes any sense of stable funding, long term career development... and in the end might actually slow down innovation as few take the time to invest in long term knowledge.
The old Bells had their downsides... don't get me wrong... but they did provide a good stable link between the consumer and those developing the technology... including and especially stable funding.
This also allowed more open source use as they weren't afraid of losing money... you have to pay them for access to their network anyways.
Now all the innovation is done by company's like Cisco... who really have to struggle to get that constant funding and can always be undercut by cheaper equipment manufacturers... world wide. And they are concerned with proprietary methods and closed source as that is what they sell and makes them unique.
I'd just like to say, I'm not saying we should go back to the old way; nor am I suggesting we get the government involved... just pointing out some of the benefits of the old way.
Trying to get payment is hampered not so much by people's unwillingness to pay... but by the inconvenience of paying.
1. I don't want to sign up for every single site. This is what really hampers most paywalls. The internet gives you loads of content from lots of sources. Links are being sent all the time. So you need a way to give payments without requiring people to sign up for every single site.
2. Micro-payments seemed like an interesting solution... except once again... there is no standard and often you still need to sign up.
3. What you really want to an 3rd party provider making payment easy. We see that with respect to mobile app stores. Often they tie directly in to your providers billing so you only get one bill. So it becomes very easy to subscribe to sources.
4. It would require a lot of coordination, but a similar thing can happen on the internet in general. Your ISP can help with payments. They could even have packages. For example, ATT might offer you an unlimited news package for $5.00/month subscribing you to all news sites. More convenient if you don't even need to login through your home computer... they can coordinate. Packages like this would make it much more sustainable.
Overall its going to require a fair amount of innovation, but I think coordinating with the ISPs or payment or identity services is going to be the key.
The single biggest problem is not education for 'STEM'. It is the careers people choose.
Think of it this way. Think back to your high school class... the last time you were in a reasonable cross-section of society. What percentage are really talented... let's be super generous and say the top 15%
Ideally... you want a distribution like this.
85-100% (doctors, lawyers, engineers...) 75-85% (nurses, teachers, tech admin, business grads)
75 (admin jobs, service sector...)
What we have due to a variety of circumstances is that this ideal is being thrown out of whack. Some jobs are competing globally. Others are protected at home or paid by the government.
So what happens is those who can be engineers become lawyers or financial people. Others 'work below' their ability and get jobs in the 75-85% range. This forces those displaced people in the 75% range... and this pushes those people out of the job market... and that leaves a large number of skilled positions unfilled.
This is almost universally true across the western world. Shortage of high-end talent, but with high unemployment. They keep trying to address it from the educational perspective. But it won't solve it... not unless you can get the 75 of your society to be capable of doing high end work... and that's not happening.
I always say that a society rises and falls by how it values its engineers. Not that there's anything particularly holy about engineers. We are just a good measure of the work distribution in society. It is hard work and needs among the best in society. If your top people are not entering it because it is easier to get a job in a bureaucracy or protected profession... your private sector wealth generation will eventually collapse.
As that work moves to other societies (india/china) then those societies rise.
Slashdot Mirror
I have no idea. I've got my home, my family... that's all I can care about right now. I gave up on political understandings a long time ago. We're no smarter than the Germans or the Chinese or any of the other people who went through crazy political experiments.
My hunch, we'll go through more crazy political experiments before it all comes crashing down.
I work with computers all day.
I often wonder what people think computers are all about.
They're all about replacing human labor. I find it odd working in this field and talking to people outside it.
People outside the field seem to think that every age has a 'new economy' but everything else stays the same... as if nothing has changed in history. So they talk as if the 'green' economy will provide everyone with jobs... just 'green' jobs. Or they think we'll all be doing analytical work.
The problem is typically these people lack an understanding of scale. It's odd how so many academics lack an understanding of scale as well. All the 'good' jobs of the future are jobs that do not scale with the population. They are for small groups of highly skilled people.
So Google can do all it does with a mere 30K people or so. That is enough to serve the whole world. Just to put it in context. BlockBuster employed 60K people and it represents just a sliver of what Google can do (content delivery).
The single biggest problem is that the private sector is increasingly not scaling with population. Small highly efficient operations are there.
The public sector typically does scale with population. More nurses, doctors, police officers, teachers... are needed as the population grows. Now we can certainly try and automate parts of these jobs (online class delivery...), but in general we're not there technologically or the unions won't allow it.
So we have a structural imbalance. The only way out of it... is to go to the start... computers are doing what they were meant to do... kill human labor. We should all be working less... job sharing. the result is a much more egalitarian society... with potentially a very rich upper class at the top of some of the automation companies.
However that would kill people's position of privilege in society. Public sector workers expect a premium over the average person. Ditto for bankers...
IMHO, we need to embrace deflation and the lack of work and redirect people to the jobs that still need doing. Maybe we need vast numbers of people to work on the farms 2 weeks a year. Other need to go mine for rechargeable batteries.
One of the biggest problem we still face is the emphasis on 'educated' labor. Just as the industrial revolution automated manufacturing jobs. The information revolution automates so much educated labor. We need a few experts, but computing can do the rest.
So we need to get rid of the idea that just because you're educated, you should be paid more. Most of the legal and financial jobs are unproductive today. Just there to keep educated people in a premium position over society. We could for example automate and simplify the entire tax field and get rid of most accountants.
But as I said, people are used to their position of privilege. Egalitarianism is a hard concept... even though people talk about it. When people talk about good jobs, they mean jobs better than someone else.
It's definitely going to be a rough time... especially since technology is deflationary... but governments and banks are inflationary. We certainly can't embrace deflation as governments have so much debt and banks are dependent on people taking loans... and guess who is in charge of most countries (bankers and governments...)
Expect a rough time.
What I find surprising is that people in IT and technology are so obsessed with being productive... and that includes me.
In no other industry will you find a group of people looking to be productive and kill their own likelihood and jobs.
The professions (law and medicine) protect themselves and make sure their education is valued by stopping others from entering their field or doing their tasks. They typically use quality as a justification for their legal restrictions.
In the rest of the employment world, it is about getting the most for the least amount of work.
So rather than look at the clock punchers and email pushers with dismay, I look at them with admiration.
That is why the acts are very reasonable... you must prove substantial economic harm.
The point was the exclusive deals are not on their own merits bad. They're very common place and reasonable business strategies.
However, they can be a problem if abused... and that is where the substantial economic harm part comes in... and that typically comes in when you have monopolies or just very large players.
It is not just the that tech industry has short lived monopolies... it is that there are diverse players that keep each other in check. For example, if MS really pushed Dell too hard, Dell would invest in its own OS and software... as HP has done with webOS. This separation of software and hardware severely limited Microsoft's ability to to substantial harm IMHO.
However, I'm not against many of the anti-trust accusations against MS. I think the US legal system did the right thing by bringing it to the forefront MS forcing vendors to bundle products and what not.
And they didn't take too drastic action... which is good I think as the tech industry changes so quickly.
Sometimes the legal system actually does a pretty reasonable job.
Railroads are a natural monopoly. If railroads refuse to carry your product, you had no other option. Despite people's fantasies, Microsoft doesn't have this kind of power and never did. You could always use competitive products. This is not to say they didn't make compatibility difficult, but it is incomparable to striking deals with network industries like railroads.
It would be like MS striking a deal with ATT to only connect to MS computers. That my good man would be a comparable analogy. And yes MS did do this... in South Korea by striking a deal with the government to force all financial transactions to go through internet explorer. Of course that is the government causing the problem (a real monopoly) in cahoots with Microsoft.
And if you read things like the Sherman Act you know that exclusive dealings are not illegal on their own. You must prove substantial economic harm first. The reason is blatantly obvious. Because exclusive deals and tying arrangements are common practice.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clayton_Antitrust_Act
When you understand the difference between a monopoly and a competitive industry, you will understand the Clayton Act better.
Internet service provider is a classic monopoly problem.
Monopolies are bad. Everyone acknowledges that.
Government can and should regulate natural monopolies like telecom.
Yet why create monopolies where none are needed?
Government is not best fit to run healthcare. Doctors, nurses... seek profit (their salaries) just as much as anyone else. Notice how doctors protect their turf from cheaper health professionals. Ditto for every other health profession and technology.
And price is not the only way to compete. You live in a magical world where the government perfectly understands everyone's needs and should provide the same 'service' and outcomes to everyone.
That's not the case for most people.
Different people want different levels of service.
How much is 'excellent' health care worth for you?
I can tell you, there are some people who would spend every last penny trying every last healthcare procedure to extend their life. My grandfather on the other hand, turned down most procedures of advanced care.
Different people want different things and value different things. No one really wants the same level of service for healthcare/education... despite the vague claim that they do.
Of course if you promise people everything for free, then they want everything... but everything is never affordable. That's the dilemma you get into with healthcare.
Put a choice for people. Would you rather pay an extra $200/month for access to advanced healthcare or would you rather have that money to spend on whatever.
Similarly in education. That is perhaps the least needed in terms of government. All you need is a teacher and a room to get an education. Most people have different needs, desires, values they want to pass on...
You seem to rant about profits a lot. I'll end with one thing. I don't see the difference between profits and salaries. Public sector union monopolies fight to maximize their profits regardless of the consequences.
You exhibit very lazy thinking and are in fact quite ideological in your view of businesses.
Most things left on their own don't magically turn into corporations. Look at this history books. Many medical centers are non-profit... ditto for education. Yet they were private.
Your inability to think beyond government monopoly vs corporation is pretty sad actually.
"Inefficient bureaucracy develops in any organization of sufficient size"
Of course it does. Hence I said... the lesser of two evils.
The problem with government/public sector is they are a monopoly without choice... hence the inefficient, corruption stays and permeates and ultimately destroys a society.
Businesses due to consumer choice always fight to stay relevant and serve their customers. Microsoft could not rest on its laurels. Google came. Apple came.
That's the real difference.
While there are certain things we need government for (law, regulations...), it should always be minimized as it is difficult to change 'providers'.
It's not about efficiency. it's about resiliency.
An entrenched government and bureaucracy is hard to change. A society becomes less resilient as it is unable to take on special interests.
Over the long term, the inherent self-interest of government always results in the rest of society being worse off... and democracy is no substitute for choice... as special interests are a part of democracy.
what an odd sense of morals you have.
Amazon is a business which gets all its money voluntarily providing a useful service for everyone.
Meanwhile the police departments profits by sending young people to jail for smoking a plant. Public sector workers are a monopoly operation and have the state back pensions the rest of the workers in the state don't get access to.
I'm sorry, Amazon is 100% more moral than any board of education, police department of fire fighting service.
I honestly don't know many people who think the 'public sector' is this honorable public service anymore. It's a gang of self-interested mafia members.
And given the choice between a mafia and a business that voluntarily provides services... I choose the lesser of two evils... business.
There are a whole lost of reasons and violations of the vision of the founding fathers... Naturally you latch onto the media... which is well always blamed.
Here's a few more...and perhaps more important.
1. A federal system where states do most things. This allows a diverse system where states can do their own thing. It allows a state with stupid people to get stupid policies and not ruin the whole country.
2. The founders always acknowledged that enlightened people would not be at the helm. Hence there are plenty of restrictions on the power of government so the stupidity of government doesn't ruin the power of an enlightened individual.
"In reality... the process isn't the problem perse. It is just exposing the poor code and mediocre/understaffed people."
Didn't I just say that.
Let's explain the typical history of process.
A group of relatively skilled people come up with an idea oh how to improve software. Things like unit-testing, agile... They try it out with other skilled people and notice that the process does create an improvement.
This process becomes the latest and greatest craze and everyone in the software industry thinks it is going to result in better software... yet it doesn't.
The reason... you need skilled people to begin with.
I never turn against process. I just firmly think you need good people first before you start on this process binge.
For example, unit-testing is a great idea. I use it all the time. Yet, when half the people don't know what a 'unit' is, unit testing just flops. Unit-testing works great when you have your code well abstracted in clean units.
So for unit-testing to work... you need, abstracted, clean code. How many 'bad' developers write abstracted and clean code? You also need developers who can write proper tests and think of the cases to test for unit testing. Again, if you have a 'bad' developer who isn't checking for errors in actual code... why on earth do you think they're going to write useful unit-tests?
The same is true for every other process. Agile needs good managers, product people, developers, testers...
It's not even about time. Believe me, if all the code I worked on was clean, abstracted... written by good people... I'd have no problem writing unit tests for everything possible and following process 100%.
But typically, you have poorly written code with many mediocre/understaffed people and then some mandate to implement process which doesn't work well given the poor code and people... and just eats up time... and you get frustrated at the process.
In reality... the process isn't the problem perse. It is just exposing the poor code and mediocre/understaffed people.
I don't think you quite understand how the rest of society operates.
My wife works in insurance. Most of my family works in the public sector.
The rest of society works by getting an education for a specific job and any small change... you get training. The idea of hiring someone with 'potential' just doesn't exist in 95% of the world.
Let me give you a little contrast here.
Doctors spend years studying medicine and then a few more years specializing in some narrow field. They continue to work in that narrow field for years, often just doing the same procedures over and over again.
Contrast that with core router equipment supporting the internet. A system with as many complexities as some medical specialization. Oh... just hire some new grad with some general knowledge and have them design and debug issues. Hey, that new grad was me not too long ago :P
Every time one of my family members at work gets a new computer program to use... no matter how small... they get training on it. This is ingrained in 95% of the rest of the workplace. My mother was hiring for some position in the public sector and I read the job description. They put in some obscure computer data entry program that you would of course only use if you worked for the city.
It's really only in tech and R&D where technology is rapid and people are generally apt at self-learning that we think people should just be hired for potential. Of course I think this is the better way :)... but I don't really blame the HR, business people... they do what 95% of society does.
We're the oddballs and quite frankly it is up to us to organize to make sure our field does well.
There are lots of way. Both doctors and lawyers have professional programs with training built in. You can't do surgery without being a professional licensed doctor with know how and proper training. Yet any nitwit can be hired to operate a router.
There will always be a trade off in these areas. Yet I guarantee the same people ranting how ignorant businesses are... are the same people who rant against professional systems.
Doctors, lawyers, teachers, nurses, police officers...every job you can think is first and foremost in it to make a living.
I don't know where people get this idea that the 'helping' sector is more moral. The used car salesman is only considered immoral because they have to earn every single penny they get. So some resort to sleazy tactics.
The ones in the helping sector, don't need to resort to sleaze you face, they just resort to more grandiose sleaze. Forcing the government to pay so they can charge whatever they want. Creating pointless laws and programs to bring them business.
What do you think happens under universal healthcare? It's guaranteed business for the healthcare sector.
Ditto for the drug war being guaranteed business for lawyers and police officers, and prison guards.
And war is guaranteed business for military and military companies.
No matter which way you slice it... and politicians always try and slice it a million different ways, you will never be able to generate a more honest system than a free market where people voluntarily do what they want.
Everything else, the self-interest takes over. Hilariously, the self-interest is often disguised as the 'greater good'.
Hey, maybe we'll relearn the lessons of the enlightenment. One day... one day.
Try reading 'physical' patents sometime.
While a 'hashtable' is obvious to computer folks, chemical compounds, engines... are obvious to people in chemical or mechanical engineering.
They have to deal with just as obvious patents.
The difference is really:
Computer programs have a very low barrier to entry so there are many more players. Whereas there are much fewer car companies for example. They're used to dealing and licensing. The Toyota Prius for example was advertised for having over 1000 patents. Any bets on how 'obvious' those patents were to engineers at Ford or GM?
'Specific implementation' is also quite vague and you risk the more patents as companies files numerous patents to cover the same 'concept' but applied to different things. For example, you might use such a hashtrick and then file a patent for using that hash in different applications (firewall, webserver...)...
Never underestimate lawyers to muck things up.
Personally, I don't think you can really do it in the application process. There are too many patent applications and you really don't want to raise the cost too much which would hurt the small inventor.
I think you really need to focus on invalidating patents once someone decides to actually put resources behind launching a patent law suit.
lol. I was just about to post it.
That's what I look for.
I'm past my get onto the hot project. That just means a whole of stress for not much payout.
The best jobs are the backend essential jobs. Writing tools, source control scripts... low stress, but absolutely essential.
There's also a few other factors.
1. For movies that are really worth seeing at such high resolutions, people generally like going to the movies. It's an event. I remember doing this with Avatar and some action flicks.
2. Web distribution. My parents for example don't rent physical movies anymore. They use the ON-Demand functionality of their cable provider. Obviously, netflix and others do the same thing.
I think a lot of people seem to forget why things are successful in the first place. I'd actually suggest the reason the internet has been successful is because all its standards are crap.
I don't say that sarcastically. I absolutely mean it.
Could anyone have designed a better email protocol than Smtp? Of course. Yet it would have brought it authentication, directories... What SMTP did was provide a really simple way to send an email. Eventually the 'more in depth' email solutions went into their own networks... but they can all talk smtp and we can all talk to each other. And we fix problems as they come.
Ditto for IP addresses themselves. It's unthinkable that an IP address is not tied to a known user. I mean how can we charge users for content. You know like a phone number is tied to an actual person and can be charged. How can we be sure people... Yet by keeping things simple, authenticated... the web spread.
Ditto again for HTML. Flexible enough to embed content like Flash (argh) but also enough to give us reasonable text content. And its expanded.
Heck pretty much everything about the internet in terms of standards is crap. But that's why it works and spreads and actually connects people. All the internet standards were made to be simple and easy to spread.
I'll liken it to the political process. I live in Canada and people always complain about the political process that smaller provinces have much high voting power than larger provinces. I suspect the same is true in the US.
Alright, but without that *equalized* voting power, you wouldn't have had a country in the first place.
Would PEI have joined Canada if due to population, it basically would have no say in the country? Absolutely not.
Would a small state like Vermont have joined the USA if it knew a larger state would outvote it? Nope.
So it's great to sit around today and imagine *better* ways to organize things... but such people forget they would have had nothing to organize had they tried to implement their vision.
And we can always build upon the current to make things better, But we should never forget that standards should be simple and spreadable to stay relevant in a connected world.
If he wants this complicated linking text format, he can try it, just like like Flash or PDF... see how far he can go. Maybe he earns its place. But lets not complicate the basic building blocks.
Yes... now you're getting it.
Everything is a matter of faith and belief.
People make their judgments on what to believe based on lots of things. Are there other motives? What is the person's standing in the community? What do other people say? What they have personally observed ...
You take it as a given that the scientific community reveres the principles of science and the scientific method. Many people do not. Some people take it as a given that religious leaders revere the principles of their religion. Many do not.
You as an individual can come to any conclusion you want. But yes, you have to have faith and trust your sources. Can you convince me of your conclusions without me having faith in those same sources? Probably not.
Many parts of science find lots of common ground and most people have faith in it. Gravity, laws of physics... We see the success of science around us. My car works. I can fly in a plane. I've studied enough science to know how it works. I understand logic.
Am I skeptical of huge areas of 'science'. Of course I am, as I see many other motives.
Oh 'science' says investing in ECE will return $4 for every $1 invested! Really? I have neither the time nor energy to go investigate that or prove it wrong. I know that is part of the social sciences which are less factual that the other sciences... but nonetheless come from the same mantel of science. Yet I'm skeptical as the other motive is money and power.
These days, I have less *faith* in the scientific institutions as these issues seem to dominate. I don't trust the word of scientists just because they say so. They're people like anyone else with different ideologies, view points...
Just as priests don't adhere to every virtue they put forth (hint... molesting children is not a Christian virtue), Scientists do not adhere to every virtue they put forth.
So in conclusion. Everything is a matter of faith.
Science is a process.
Science is a way of thinking about problem.
Science is really the Scientific method.
The problem is people conflating the use of this very good, reasonable, practical process, and thinking this process can be everything.
The question of course is why would ever want to convince someone of some scientific truth? Why does it matter if someone trusts science? The answer is normally it doesn't matter. We can blab away, have a good argument and no one really cares. Just like I can have a discussion about a piece of art or a movie and no one really cares.
However, as science intersects with other domains in life... it does start to matter. in this respect science becomes more of a normal belief system.
You are trying to convince someone of the scientific truth of global warming so that you can have political and economic power over them. This aspect is really no different than any other *truth*. The church claims to have the truth so that it can hold political and economic power over power. As do kings, supreme councils...
Normally you hear *scientists* speak of science, they speak of the superiority of the scientific process (rational, evidence based, trials, peer review...).
Normally when any of other life's domain's speak of science, they are speaking of the religion of science... which basically means... trust these people and give them money and power.
Just because you have the truth, even if it is actually the truth (scientific truth) does not mean you should rule anything. That is a conclusion.
Science is a method. Science can tell you what happens when A, B, and C occur. Science cannot tell you what you should do about it. That is up to morality, which really is no different than religion.
Science does not tell you to stop Global Warming. Science only tries to tell you what will happen as the Earth warms. You do it because you are a moral person who wants to stop harm from coming to billions of people.
And as you wade into morality and goals, you find out that people's goals and moralities and sacrifices and costs are not all the same.
"Pay people for what they actually accomplish, instead of just for being there"
It's very difficult to do that. 'Performance' reviews in any complex task are very difficult. I remember when I worked for a major telecom equipment manufacturer a few years back. I was fixing one problem that needed restructuring huge areas of the code and getting rid of recursion (hint... the stack was blowing up....). It was a lot of work.
Then a problem came in, was really just a simple 1 line fix. I fixed it. Got a lot of praise and thank yous, and a bonus (we got them each time we did something 'great').
Now of course, how is my manager supposed to know one the one that got praised was basically no work on my part. The long hard problem basically received no attention. They'd have to go in, do code reviews, be able to tell if someone took the best path to the problem... i can't see any manager doing that. they have no time.
Ultimately, telecommuting is really a manager specific thing, and I think it will remain as such. Once a manager sees you can deliver, then you gain that flexibility.
I don't think it's really wise or appropriate to try to do it company wide.
What amazes me is people still think smokers and obese people should pay more.
They should pay less as they cost the system less.
They die earlier and thus need less old age care... which just happens to be the most expensive kind of care.
Reference:
http://www.cbc.ca/news/health/story/2008/02/05/unhealthy-study.html
This is from the Dutch Ministry of Health BTW.
But of course all these people who want the government involved and want 'evidence based policy...' they will just ignore the evidence in favor of their own ideology which says that prevention saves money or we need to tax smokers more...
corporation - "take less money from us and we'll give you jobs"
government - "give us more of your money and we'll give you jobs"
Umm... sounds like the corporations wins here as the lesser of two evils :P
Unfortunately, innovation has to be paid for by someone.
1. You can have it paid for the current way with VC firms footing the bill, but also taking the biggest cut of profits, and making engineering an unstable field.
2. You can have the government do the innovation. You are seeing more and more countries move this way. Basically tying universities and industry together. Of course this is heavy on the tax payer, can be cut, gets bureaucratic.
3. You can have industries fund innovation by those who use it. Telecoms are natural monopolies. They sustained themselves all that innovation, including developing languages like c++ based on their monopoly like situation.
I know a lot of people in the high tech field are obsessed with innovation, but over the long term, they might regret the move to the startup vc model. More and more young smart people are shunning the field as it is not a stable professional career. So you're going to end up with a lack of talent... especially for areas that require significant domain knowledge.
While you might get some people to make relatively shallow web application, who wants to invest their time and energy learning about 3d hardware processing... without having a stable career option afterwards?
I personally think as workers in the field, we might end up regretting this hyper innovation model. It removes any sense of stable funding, long term career development... and in the end might actually slow down innovation as few take the time to invest in long term knowledge.
The old Bells had their downsides... don't get me wrong... but they did provide a good stable link between the consumer and those developing the technology... including and especially stable funding.
This also allowed more open source use as they weren't afraid of losing money... you have to pay them for access to their network anyways.
Now all the innovation is done by company's like Cisco... who really have to struggle to get that constant funding and can always be undercut by cheaper equipment manufacturers... world wide. And they are concerned with proprietary methods and closed source as that is what they sell and makes them unique.
I'd just like to say, I'm not saying we should go back to the old way; nor am I suggesting we get the government involved... just pointing out some of the benefits of the old way.
Trying to get payment is hampered not so much by people's unwillingness to pay... but by the inconvenience of paying.
1. I don't want to sign up for every single site. This is what really hampers most paywalls. The internet gives you loads of content from lots of sources. Links are being sent all the time. So you need a way to give payments without requiring people to sign up for every single site.
2. Micro-payments seemed like an interesting solution... except once again... there is no standard and often you still need to sign up.
3. What you really want to an 3rd party provider making payment easy. We see that with respect to mobile app stores. Often they tie directly in to your providers billing so you only get one bill. So it becomes very easy to subscribe to sources.
4. It would require a lot of coordination, but a similar thing can happen on the internet in general. Your ISP can help with payments. They could even have packages. For example, ATT might offer you an unlimited news package for $5.00/month subscribing you to all news sites. More convenient if you don't even need to login through your home computer... they can coordinate. Packages like this would make it much more sustainable.
Overall its going to require a fair amount of innovation, but I think coordinating with the ISPs or payment or identity services is going to be the key.
The single biggest problem is not education for 'STEM'. It is the careers people choose.
Think of it this way.
Think back to your high school class... the last time you were in a reasonable cross-section of society. What percentage are really talented... let's be super generous and say the top 15%
Ideally... you want a distribution like this.
85-100% (doctors, lawyers, engineers...)
75-85% (nurses, teachers, tech admin, business grads)
75 (admin jobs, service sector...)
What we have due to a variety of circumstances is that this ideal is being thrown out of whack. Some jobs are competing globally. Others are protected at home or paid by the government.
So what happens is those who can be engineers become lawyers or financial people. Others 'work below' their ability and get jobs in the 75-85% range. This forces those displaced people in the 75% range... and this pushes those people out of the job market... and that leaves a large number of skilled positions unfilled.
This is almost universally true across the western world. Shortage of high-end talent, but with high unemployment. They keep trying to address it from the educational perspective. But it won't solve it... not unless you can get the 75 of your society to be capable of doing high end work... and that's not happening.
I always say that a society rises and falls by how it values its engineers. Not that there's anything particularly holy about engineers. We are just a good measure of the work distribution in society. It is hard work and needs among the best in society. If your top people are not entering it because it is easier to get a job in a bureaucracy or protected profession... your private sector wealth generation will eventually collapse.
As that work moves to other societies (india/china) then those societies rise.