Mr. Pincus' employees need to start wearing voice recorders to meetings.
Bad advice. That's illegal in California without the consent of all parties. I know of a guy who got fired (ostensibly) for that reason. (It was really because he was a jerk who didn't do any work, but the HR people were too risk-adverse to fire him until this convenient excuse came along.) I think Mr. Pincus's employees should carefully avoid giving him "cause" to fire them right now.
I'd guessed as much, but that's still quite bad enough.
You know, returning an insult such as, "So what you're saying is, you don't trust educational systems at technical universities like MIT or RPI, or certification boards like CompTIA capable of weeding out good minds from poor ones."
"Trust but verify." Someone who is really good can answer my dead-simple question in a couple minutes, leaving plenty of time to go on to something more interesting. But unable or unwilling, the result is the same: "don't hire".
Keep in mind that interviewers aren't just trying to establish if someone is smart; they're also trying to establish "culture fit". Successful candidates have to work as part of a team of smart people, some more junior, some more senior. They have to be prepared to learn and to teach. They have to contribute to a pleasant environment where people want to stay. They have to accept that they're not going to be calling all the shots; in fact that for every patch they write they'll have to get a code reviewer to sign off on their change. They have to be that code reviewer many times as well. They have to give and receive yearly peer performance reviews in which strengths and weaknesses are communicated in a respectful way. They have to interview candidates themselves. None of this is a major focus of my interviews, but occasionally people make it obvious to me that they can't do it, and those people never get hired. If I were you, I'd gently suggest to your friends that they adjust their attitudes before they get rejected from many positions for this reason.
Like some of my PhD friends have told me, putting a technical quiz in front of well educated and experienced job candidate is a great way to insult them, and is deserving of a good punch in the face.
I don't ask the multiple-choice, one-right-answer, no-need-to-show-work questions you seem to be referring to, but you've reinforced my belief that it's good to start with dead-simple technical problems.
* I already do so because I've met enough supposedly well-educated and experienced job candidates who have completely failed simple technical problems that I know it's absolutely necessary to start from scratch in an interview, no matter how impressive their resume may be. (And I mean failed. Getting some syntax wrong or even initially writing buggy code is not a deal-breaker, but being unable to debug their own buggy code when I simulate the execution environment for them surely is.) And candidates who don't know these idiots are floating around are either inexperienced (forgivable...if this fact matches their resume and expected seniority at my company) or don't realize they are the idiots (don't hire).
* You've reminded me of another reason: I don't want to work with people who are easily insulted and potentially violent. Apparently these questions sometimes reveal such people. Good interview question then. I wouldn't hire your friends.
I think it's crazy that only 50% of the country pays federal income taxes, but I don't think making them pay them without otherwise changing their situation is the right answer.
$12k is about what our household spends on sales taxable expenses per year. I have a family of four. Granted, I excluded "big ticket" items such as cars because they, if purchased at all, are almost always purchased used and around every 5 years or so at the low end of the economic ladder... If it pleases you, add an extra $1000-$2000 per year for big ticket items.
Hmm, interesting. I guess sales taxable doesn't include rent - I was thinking that it was just part of the check I write, but I was wrong - looks like there's no sales tax on rent in California. Okay, point taken.
The point I think you are missing is that it doesn't matter HOW much other taxes they pay if none of it contributes to the Fed.
I heard you, but I just don't think this matters so much. We all pay taxes, we all understand that programs are paid for with taxes, most people hope to some day be more prosperous than they are today and know that means they're likely to pay higher taxes (including federal ones), etc...
I think it's crazy that only 50% of the country pays taxes, but I don't think making them pay taxes without otherwise changing their situation is the right answer.
Explain to me how it is moral for the government to do what would be immoral for you individually to do. If we have a government of delegated powers, then how can you delegate a power you yourself do not have?
Every government in history has used the threat of jail and violence to do things which advance the common good in violation of individual's wishes. Police, military, IRS, etc. It sounds like you're unsure about that basic principle. And specifically with regard to progressive taxation:
The necessaries of life occasion the great expense of the poor. They find it difficult to get food, and the greater part of their little revenue is spent in getting it. The luxuries and vanities of life occasion the principal expense of the rich, and a magnificent house embellishes and sets off to the best advantage all the other luxuries and vanities which they possess. A tax upon house-rents, therefore, would in general fall heaviest upon the rich; and in this sort of inequality there would not, perhaps, be anything very unreasonable. It is not very unreasonable that the rich should contribute to the public expense, not only in proportion to their revenue, but something more than in that proportion
That's a quote from Adam Smith, often called the father of modern capitalism. If you don't accept that argument, you're so far ideologically from myself or voters in our democracy that your best move is probably to move to this floating city and talk with its other inhabitant about Atlas Shrugged all day.
"Investing in the poor" has been the rallying cry for ever expanding government and ever expanding pubic debt for the last 100 years. How has that worked out for us? Have the poor been raised up? Surely after 100 years of social programs, welfare, public education the poor are now well off, right? Oh, they aren't? More people are on public assistance than every before and there are no signs of that changing?
You started with a pretty reasonable question, but I think you're oversimplifying the answer...
I'm saddened by the fact that society has somehow gotten to the point where the "logic" of "he has more so we can steal it from him!" some how is both morally and ethically justifiable.
Taxes have never been voluntary, and the wealthy person benefits from the stability that comes from not having a huge number of desperate, homeless, starving people. I don't think anything has qualitatively changed in your lifetime; it's just the numbers.
Hell, why stop at 50%? By your so called logic we surely can justify taking 95% of what they earn. They can afford it, right?
Funny you should say that. In the history of the federal income tax, the top marginal income tax bracket peaked at 86.45%, according to this history of top rates in wikipedia. It was over 70% from 1936 to 1971. I don't know the full brackets to say exactly what rate someone who makes more than that would pay on his/her overall income, but I expect people who make twice that ended up paying more than 50%, and society didn't fail. One could argue that this created the most prosperous time in our nation's history.
I'm not advocating rates this high. I'm just saying that it's worth investing in the poor for many reasons. fwiw, if I were to single-handedly set the federal income tax code, I might do something vey simple: your rate would be log(income/(people * per-person poverty level)) / log(c), capped at 0% on one side and m% on the other, with c and m chosen every year based on inflation-adjusted amounts of a 20-year exponentially weighted moving average of what it would take for 1% of people to hit the cap and the government to have no deficit or surplus. And I'd have sufficient social services for the poor to become not so poor if they're willing to work. Call it communism if you want, but there'd still be rich people, and it's not fundamentally different from how we've done things for generations.
Their $600/year sales tax burden does NOTHING to reduce our 14 trillion dollar deficit. And if they pay nothing, they have no problems asking for "more" stuff.
Sales taxes range from 5%-10%, right? You're suggesting that a family of four spends only $6,000-$12,000 / year? Even considering that sales taxes in many states exclude some necessities like unprepared foods, that sounds way too low to me. If they're really able to have a comfortable existence saving 60+% of their income (that includes a generous allowance for other state/local taxes), I'd agree with you, they should be able to cough up some federal income tax. But I don't think you're using realistic figures. The poverty level for this family is $22,500/year; I think you should expect they spend at least that much on taxable items and therefore pay at least $1,125-$2,250/year in sales tax alone. They probably also pay at least 10% of their income in state income tax, so add on another $5,000/year. Their total tax rate is at least 12.25% - 15%. Admittedly, this family could likely afford another 1% in federal income tax without problems, but of course you've picked the most outrageous example (beyond the income EIC covers...this is a different set of deductions); there are others who could not.
I had a lesion on my larynx. LA County picked up the tab.
I'm sorry to hear that, and about your father's passing. It's very good that LA County was able to pick up the tab, though. I wonder if after this round of budget cuts they would still be able to help out people like you. I don't know anything about lesions on the larynx...if you had gone untreated, would you have been able to work? would it have been life-threatening? To me it sounds like there are many ways in which you came very close to not making it as far as you have, and I wouldn't want to make it any harder.
In my own life, I had pneumonia once and anaphylaxis once. They were relatively minor inconveniences for me (a couple weeks sick and 5-10 pounds lost in the first case; just a really itchy rash in the second), but I also had good medical care and medication. If I hadn't, they would have been much more serious, maybe even fatal. I also used to get a lot of sinus infections, treated with antibiotics, and eventually had sinus surgery. I got allergy shots for five years. And if I'd been homeless, I probably also would have been likely to have more illnesses... I doubt I could have gotten where I am today.
What's silly is someone with a degree in 16th century literature and a $100,000-$200,000 debt is upset that they cant find a job that will help pay their student loans... Sounds to me that they would have been better off picking a different major/career path. A little "expected income" research when planning a major would have helped.
Yeah, my fiancée made the mistake of not thinking about how she got a job when she picked her major. (She eventually went to graduate school and got a degree that let her get a real job.) I'd thought of it as more of a middle-class mistake, though...do you know how often student loans don't get paid back for this reason? It wouldn't be too crazy for government-paid student loans to be only issued for majors that can be reasonably expected to return their investment...
In recent years, credits for low- and middle-income families have grown so much that a family of four making as much as $50,000 will owe no federal income tax for 2009, as long as there are two children younger than 17, according to a separate analysis by the consulting firm Deloitte Tax.
I can live with that. If you're thinking they're not paying taxes, you're wrong. They're just not paying federal income tax. This family of four making up to $50,000 will spend a far greater proportion of their income than I do and therefore also pay a far greater proportion of sales tax. There's also property tax, taxes paid by their employer(s), etc.
Hah. Me rich? Of my grandparents, 3 came to this country as children -- penniless. I'm the first one in my family to not only go to college, but to FINISH HIGH SCHOOL. I was effectively homeless for part of my 2nd term at the local community college -- living out of lockers and getting a $25 hotel 2 or 3 times a week until I got a better job and could afford a real room. I finished school with no debt and on my own blood/sweat.
Congratulations on your achievement. You obviously worked very hard...and, frankly, were a little bit lucky as well. What would have happened if you got a major illness during this time? Or your parents did and you had to drop out of college to support the family? Or any number of other scenarios...rags to riches stories like yours are inspiring but I don't think they're as common as you seem to be suggesting, even among smart people willing to work very hard. This infographic shows that the bottom 1/5th actually lost ground from 1980 to 2009.
My own luck was to be born into a loving, two-parent family who gave me healthy food, a stable home environment, medical care, and a college education. I now have an excellent job. Maybe I would have been able to pull it off without some of those things, but I'm sure glad I didn't have to.
With nearly 50% of the US paying no federal income tax, they have no problem asking for "more". Want to be 'fair'? Get rid of the EIC -- or at least prevent it from giving back MORE money that was originally paid by the recipient.
Now that's what I call class warfare. And so unlike raising taxes on people who can afford them, it is indeed rotten economics.
Have you looked at the actual table? For a single person, the Earned Income Tax Credit isn't available if (s)he earns more than $13,460. That's comparable to the US Census Poverty Threshold of $11,344 (for a person younger than 65). If not for the Earned Income Tax Credit, people who have an income might actually starve, go homeless, etc. So when I say this is class warfare, it is only because it could actually kill the working poor.
In contrast, the wealthy really can afford it without noticing. There was an interesting New York Times article on this recently, which linked to this Citizens for Tax Justice fact sheet. If you read through it, you'll see that the revenue from increasing the tax rate on the top 1% by income would be similar to that of raising it on the bottom 60% by the same percentage. I assure you, there will be enough left over to provide basic necessities of life! (In fact, I'm not in the top 1%, but I certainly could pay more taxes without great hardship. It might mean it'd take me longer to afford a house, but I'm not exactly homeless in my 2-bedroom rented townhouse.)
If you're not swayed by arguments such as "don't kill people with taxes", then consider no taxes on poor people an investment. If they have all of a home, healthy food on the table, adequate medical care, a quality education, and available jobs, it's reasonable to believe that many of them will go on to become middle-class tax-payers: enough so to pay back your investment with far more than the nominal 1% tax rate you're suggesting. In fact, by effectively selling too soon, you're virtually guaranteeing you'll throw away what you put in with that government-provided K12 education and the like.
Probably not. I just gave a couple I knew off the top of my head, and I'm a Google software developer. If you want a non-Google non-HTTP example...hmm, I'd guess MMORPGs would do the same thing. I don't play them myself, but WoW, Everquest, City of Heroes, etc. If I knew hostnames I'd give DNS results to prove it. In any case, geolocating through DNS is a general technique that many sites use for HTTP, at least one company uses for several non-HTTP products, and many others could use for a variety of protocols in the future.
All of these CDN services are based on HTTP. When you're using them, that's an HTTP server you're talking to. It's perfectly capable of geolocating you by IP, and it can either hand you back links to a local CDN, or redirect you to another server.
Then it's not possible to geolocate that first HTTP request.
What if you're just running bind for you local net vs the root servers? Bzzt. Doesn't work.
It should work, although it may not be necessary. I see six possibilities:
Your local bind is configured to send queries to the authoritative servers for the domain.
You're using this extension: it sends along the web browser's IP address so it gets back a geolocated response for that address.
You're not using this extension: it doesn't send the web browser's IP address so it gets back a geolocated response for its own address. The two addresses are likely the same (or nearly so) so this distinction is irrelevant.
Your local bind is configured to send queries on to some other recursive DNS server. (You take advantage of their cache to reduce your DNS latency.)
You're using this extension and the other server relays the extra data: you get a geolocated response for your web browser.
You're using this extension and the other server drops the extra data: you get a geolocated response for the other server.
You're not using this extension and the other server adds the extra data: you get a geolocated response for your DNS server.
You're not using this extension and the other server doesn't add the extra data: you get a geolocated response for the other server.
In all cases, the geolocated DNS response is at least as good as before, and in some it's an improvement, depending on how far the DNS servers are from you. If there's a latency degradation from this change, it'd be in the other recursive DNS server being slower to respond because the only cached responses it has are for different subnets. You can imagine techniques to mitigate that effect, though I haven't checked if the described work does so.
Full disclosure: I work for Google, but not on this.
Isn't this little more than an expensive band-aid for the underlying bandwidth problem?
Keep in mind that Google, Amazon, Akamai, etc. had already created geographically distributed networks to reduce latency and bandwidth. Improving the accuracy of geolocated DNS responses through a protocol extension is basically free and makes these techniques even more effective.
Also, Google cares a lot about latency. A major component of that is backbone transit latency, and once you have enough bandwidth to avoid excessive queueing delay or packet loss, I can imagine only four ways to significantly it: invent faster-than-light communications, find a material with a lower refractive index than the optical fibers in use today, wait for fewer round trips, or reduce the distance travelled per trip. This helps with the last. Building more fiber wouldn't help with any of those and would also be a lot more expensive.
Full disclosure: I work for Google (but not on this).
I often go into our data center, filled with 600 servers, and go listening for the hard drives that are noisier than normal so that I can predict which hard drives are going to fail next.
Babbage said it best: On two occasions I have been asked,—"Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?"... I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question.
I have QoS at the office that keeps our connection from pegging (it's limited to around 75% on the download and 90% on upload) and have never once encountered an issue with latency or jitter.
Right, then you solved the problem by ensuring the queue in question never gets filled. You added your own queues (more than one, prioritized), and you probably made those queues shorter. That works, but it's a shame that you had to throw away 25% of your download capacity and 10% of your upload capacity when it wouldn't be necessary if the equipment you were using had properly configured queues of its own. It's also unusual that you were able to do so: most people (including almost all home users) are not in a position to set up QoS on their download side. Imagine I called Comcast and asked them to set custom QoS settings on data they are sending to me. How do you think that conversation would go? And even for the upload side, most consumers don't have the equipment or knowledge to set up their own queueing.
Let's be conservative and say that you need to handle peak load of twice average
That's not conservative at all.
Most business-related sites are significantly more "spikey" than what you illustrate. Our 50th percentile is about 4 dynamic page requests per second.
Interesting figures. Yeah, my rule of thumb is probably not conservative for your particular site.
Your point would have been stronger if you gave information directly comparable to my statement. By average I meant "mean", the most common/widely accepted definition of the term. With the figures you described, your mean is at least 8 requests per second (that's with 0 requests/sec 50% of the time, 4 requests/sec 45% of the time, and 125 requests/sec 4.9% of the time, and 202 requests/sec.1% of the time). I'd guess more like 20, which means you have a factor of 10 difference between peak and average rather than my "conservative" 2. (You're probably almost entirely US-based?)
Capacity planning is hard to do right, and is never as simple as "two times average load"
I don't mean to suggest you should take my rule of thumb numbers as gospel without confirming them against your own service, or that capacity planning is easy. (Without going into specifics, I spend...well, quite a bit...of time on capacity planning for my...large...service...which uses...many...machines does not use standard...anything.) Likewise as I already alluded to, if your requests are inherently extremely expensive, 88 requests per second may be legitimately infeasible with a standard database stack. I accept that there are exceptions, but the idea that most people need a complex setup to scale to 10M requests per day doesn't seem right, and your post doesn't change my mind about that.
Unless you attract enough attention to require scaling past 10M pages a day, you're wasting your time reinventing the wheel with NoSQL
Significantly past 10M pages a day. That's only 12 per second, which unless your page views are tremendously complex shouldn't even be hard. Let's be conservative and say that you need to handle peak load of twice average, a rewrite would take a year and a half, and you grow at 25% per quarter. Then you should be looking at the number 88 pages per second when deciding if you need to start a rewrite. That still seems doable on one machine with a standard database engine, so you probably don't need to start yet.
I appreciate your concern, but sendmail is definitely not the issue causing the load to skyrocket. I've already tested that by shutting down sendmail right before the window when I know it's going to happen, and it happens anyway.
Good test, but you're nowhere near done. So your load is above 100. That means that on average that are over 100 processes in states "D" or "R", and they're not sendmail processes. What are they? Are they in "D" or "R"? A simple ps should tell you (except maybe if it's short-lived processes, in which case you might need something trickier like SystemTap or oprofile). When you know that, you'll be a step closer to solving the problem.
You're never going to get anywhere if you just blame the people who just "provide ping and power" to you instead of getting your hands dirty and doing the troubleshooting. You think it's their fault? Prove it!
For example, since this migration to Dallas, every other Sunday between 7:00am and 8:00am EST, my server's load goes over 100 as incoming connections spike over 700/sec., sendmail refuses connections due to the load, and the box seizes up.
That's something you need to investigate. Are the 700 connections per second the cause of the slowdown, or a symptom? (Probably the cause, but you never know - the sender might have terribly aggressive retries.) Where are they coming from? You may simply be falling victim to an external DoS attack that started around the same time. It's possible the requests are coming from your provider (maybe a problem with a monitoring system), but you need to find that out.
You wrote in another post:
This IS an unmanaged plan. All [they] provide is ping and power, I do the rest. I manage the OS, the configuration and everything else.
It's not their job to diagnose this sort of problem for you, then. Their response to your most recent ticket was unreasonable (and possibly even illegal), but your request wasn't reasonable either. If you need that kind of help, you'll have to pay for it. You'll be butting heads with your next provider as well otherwise.
OK, so assuming that the jobs are equal in qualifying for the top executive job, you are saying that one month more experience makes Obama more qualified to be President than Palin to be VICE President?
Are you saying that one month elapsed between January 4, 2005 and December 4, 2006?
She had more experience as Gov of AK than Obama did as Senator from IL.
That's not entirely true. Palin took office on December 4, 2006; Obama on January 4, 2005. So if you're looking at "more experience" on by comparing them on the same calendar day during the campaign, you're wrong. If you're looking at it at the respective times they entered the race, you're right.
More importantly, US Senator was only the last item in my Obama experience list; I wouldn't consider it sufficient by itself. I also neglected to mention the campaigning itself - I think there is a lot of value in being at the top of the ticket in a major campaign.
Also, let me add that being a governor, where you alone are seen as being responsible for a state is a whole hell of a lot different than being a senator, where you actions are blurred with those of 99 other senators.
Do you then consider Senator McCain's long career of no value? I disagree. I might say a number of things about him, but never that he's unqualified.
Really? Community Organizer? You consider handing out charity and tax payer money to more important than running and working for you own business?
You're talking about her husband's fishing business? I'm not sure how large that was or to what extent she ran it. In any case, yes I do consider handing out charity and tax payer money to be both quite important and an understatement of what a community organizer does.
Seriously, has Obama ever held a blue collar job?
Not sure. Why should I care? Certainly many presidents before never did.
Now below...you start to raise some decent points. They're basically anecdotes rather than the data of your earlier citations, but otherwise you're getting closer to what I'm asking for.
the values described in their editorials are shared by the majority of target audience (Fixed that for you). But the main question here should be, do they present a side that differs from the majority of their viewers/target audience? Fox is the only network that does this on a regular basis.
If by "target audience" you mean something other than the majority of Americans, then I prefer my words as they were before. I think when covering a national election, a media organization is biased if its values are greatly out of line with the majority of people who will be voting. I'm not quite sure what you're saying about Fox here - are you saying that their values differ or that they're presenting significant facts the other networks are neglecting?
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Bad advice. That's illegal in California without the consent of all parties. I know of a guy who got fired (ostensibly) for that reason. (It was really because he was a jerk who didn't do any work, but the HR people were too risk-adverse to fire him until this convenient excuse came along.) I think Mr. Pincus's employees should carefully avoid giving him "cause" to fire them right now.
"Trust but verify." Someone who is really good can answer my dead-simple question in a couple minutes, leaving plenty of time to go on to something more interesting. But unable or unwilling, the result is the same: "don't hire".
Keep in mind that interviewers aren't just trying to establish if someone is smart; they're also trying to establish "culture fit". Successful candidates have to work as part of a team of smart people, some more junior, some more senior. They have to be prepared to learn and to teach. They have to contribute to a pleasant environment where people want to stay. They have to accept that they're not going to be calling all the shots; in fact that for every patch they write they'll have to get a code reviewer to sign off on their change. They have to be that code reviewer many times as well. They have to give and receive yearly peer performance reviews in which strengths and weaknesses are communicated in a respectful way. They have to interview candidates themselves. None of this is a major focus of my interviews, but occasionally people make it obvious to me that they can't do it, and those people never get hired. If I were you, I'd gently suggest to your friends that they adjust their attitudes before they get rejected from many positions for this reason.
I don't ask the multiple-choice, one-right-answer, no-need-to-show-work questions you seem to be referring to, but you've reinforced my belief that it's good to start with dead-simple technical problems.
* I already do so because I've met enough supposedly well-educated and experienced job candidates who have completely failed simple technical problems that I know it's absolutely necessary to start from scratch in an interview, no matter how impressive their resume may be. (And I mean failed. Getting some syntax wrong or even initially writing buggy code is not a deal-breaker, but being unable to debug their own buggy code when I simulate the execution environment for them surely is.) And candidates who don't know these idiots are floating around are either inexperienced (forgivable...if this fact matches their resume and expected seniority at my company) or don't realize they are the idiots (don't hire).
* You've reminded me of another reason: I don't want to work with people who are easily insulted and potentially violent. Apparently these questions sometimes reveal such people. Good interview question then. I wouldn't hire your friends.
Hmm, interesting. I guess sales taxable doesn't include rent - I was thinking that it was just part of the check I write, but I was wrong - looks like there's no sales tax on rent in California. Okay, point taken.
I heard you, but I just don't think this matters so much. We all pay taxes, we all understand that programs are paid for with taxes, most people hope to some day be more prosperous than they are today and know that means they're likely to pay higher taxes (including federal ones), etc...
I think it's crazy that only 50% of the country pays taxes, but I don't think making them pay taxes without otherwise changing their situation is the right answer.
Every government in history has used the threat of jail and violence to do things which advance the common good in violation of individual's wishes. Police, military, IRS, etc. It sounds like you're unsure about that basic principle. And specifically with regard to progressive taxation:
That's a quote from Adam Smith, often called the father of modern capitalism. If you don't accept that argument, you're so far ideologically from myself or voters in our democracy that your best move is probably to move to this floating city and talk with its other inhabitant about Atlas Shrugged all day.
You started with a pretty reasonable question, but I think you're oversimplifying the answer...
Taxes have never been voluntary, and the wealthy person benefits from the stability that comes from not having a huge number of desperate, homeless, starving people. I don't think anything has qualitatively changed in your lifetime; it's just the numbers.
Funny you should say that. In the history of the federal income tax, the top marginal income tax bracket peaked at 86.45%, according to this history of top rates in wikipedia. It was over 70% from 1936 to 1971. I don't know the full brackets to say exactly what rate someone who makes more than that would pay on his/her overall income, but I expect people who make twice that ended up paying more than 50%, and society didn't fail. One could argue that this created the most prosperous time in our nation's history.
I'm not advocating rates this high. I'm just saying that it's worth investing in the poor for many reasons. fwiw, if I were to single-handedly set the federal income tax code, I might do something vey simple: your rate would be log(income/(people * per-person poverty level)) / log(c), capped at 0% on one side and m% on the other, with c and m chosen every year based on inflation-adjusted amounts of a 20-year exponentially weighted moving average of what it would take for 1% of people to hit the cap and the government to have no deficit or surplus. And I'd have sufficient social services for the poor to become not so poor if they're willing to work. Call it communism if you want, but there'd still be rich people, and it's not fundamentally different from how we've done things for generations.
Sales taxes range from 5%-10%, right? You're suggesting that a family of four spends only $6,000-$12,000 / year? Even considering that sales taxes in many states exclude some necessities like unprepared foods, that sounds way too low to me. If they're really able to have a comfortable existence saving 60+% of their income (that includes a generous allowance for other state/local taxes), I'd agree with you, they should be able to cough up some federal income tax. But I don't think you're using realistic figures. The poverty level for this family is $22,500/year; I think you should expect they spend at least that much on taxable items and therefore pay at least $1,125-$2,250/year in sales tax alone. They probably also pay at least 10% of their income in state income tax, so add on another $5,000/year. Their total tax rate is at least 12.25% - 15%. Admittedly, this family could likely afford another 1% in federal income tax without problems, but of course you've picked the most outrageous example (beyond the income EIC covers...this is a different set of deductions); there are others who could not.
I'm sorry to hear that, and about your father's passing. It's very good that LA County was able to pick up the tab, though. I wonder if after this round of budget cuts they would still be able to help out people like you. I don't know anything about lesions on the larynx...if you had gone untreated, would you have been able to work? would it have been life-threatening? To me it sounds like there are many ways in which you came very close to not making it as far as you have, and I wouldn't want to make it any harder.
In my own life, I had pneumonia once and anaphylaxis once. They were relatively minor inconveniences for me (a couple weeks sick and 5-10 pounds lost in the first case; just a really itchy rash in the second), but I also had good medical care and medication. If I hadn't, they would have been much more serious, maybe even fatal. I also used to get a lot of sinus infections, treated with antibiotics, and eventually had sinus surgery. I got allergy shots for five years. And if I'd been homeless, I probably also would have been likely to have more illnesses... I doubt I could have gotten where I am today.
Yeah, my fiancée made the mistake of not thinking about how she got a job when she picked her major. (She eventually went to graduate school and got a degree that let her get a real job.) I'd thought of it as more of a middle-class mistake, though...do you know how often student loans don't get paid back for this reason? It wouldn't be too crazy for government-paid student loans to be only issued for majors that can be reasonably expected to return their investment...
I can live with that. If you're thinking they're not paying taxes, you're wrong. They're just not paying federal income tax. This family of four making up to $50,000 will spend a far greater proportion of their income than I do and therefore also pay a far greater proportion of sales tax. There's also property tax, taxes paid by their employer(s), etc.
Congratulations on your achievement. You obviously worked very hard...and, frankly, were a little bit lucky as well. What would have happened if you got a major illness during this time? Or your parents did and you had to drop out of college to support the family? Or any number of other scenarios...rags to riches stories like yours are inspiring but I don't think they're as common as you seem to be suggesting, even among smart people willing to work very hard. This infographic shows that the bottom 1/5th actually lost ground from 1980 to 2009.
My own luck was to be born into a loving, two-parent family who gave me healthy food, a stable home environment, medical care, and a college education. I now have an excellent job. Maybe I would have been able to pull it off without some of those things, but I'm sure glad I didn't have to.
Now that's what I call class warfare. And so unlike raising taxes on people who can afford them, it is indeed rotten economics.
Have you looked at the actual table? For a single person, the Earned Income Tax Credit isn't available if (s)he earns more than $13,460. That's comparable to the US Census Poverty Threshold of $11,344 (for a person younger than 65). If not for the Earned Income Tax Credit, people who have an income might actually starve, go homeless, etc. So when I say this is class warfare, it is only because it could actually kill the working poor.
In contrast, the wealthy really can afford it without noticing. There was an interesting New York Times article on this recently, which linked to this Citizens for Tax Justice fact sheet. If you read through it, you'll see that the revenue from increasing the tax rate on the top 1% by income would be similar to that of raising it on the bottom 60% by the same percentage. I assure you, there will be enough left over to provide basic necessities of life! (In fact, I'm not in the top 1%, but I certainly could pay more taxes without great hardship. It might mean it'd take me longer to afford a house, but I'm not exactly homeless in my 2-bedroom rented townhouse.)
If you're not swayed by arguments such as "don't kill people with taxes", then consider no taxes on poor people an investment. If they have all of a home, healthy food on the table, adequate medical care, a quality education, and available jobs, it's reasonable to believe that many of them will go on to become middle-class tax-payers: enough so to pay back your investment with far more than the nominal 1% tax rate you're suggesting. In fact, by effectively selling too soon, you're virtually guaranteeing you'll throw away what you put in with that government-provided K12 education and the like.
Probably not. I just gave a couple I knew off the top of my head, and I'm a Google software developer. If you want a non-Google non-HTTP example...hmm, I'd guess MMORPGs would do the same thing. I don't play them myself, but WoW, Everquest, City of Heroes, etc. If I knew hostnames I'd give DNS results to prove it. In any case, geolocating through DNS is a general technique that many sites use for HTTP, at least one company uses for several non-HTTP products, and many others could use for a variety of protocols in the future.
Yes: Gmail (IMAP and SMTP), Google Chat (XMPP), etc. Try it out...do the DNS lookups yourself from different places.
Then it's not possible to geolocate that first HTTP request.
It should work, although it may not be necessary. I see six possibilities:
In all cases, the geolocated DNS response is at least as good as before, and in some it's an improvement, depending on how far the DNS servers are from you. If there's a latency degradation from this change, it'd be in the other recursive DNS server being slower to respond because the only cached responses it has are for different subnets. You can imagine techniques to mitigate that effect, though I haven't checked if the described work does so.
Full disclosure: I work for Google, but not on this.
Keep in mind that Google, Amazon, Akamai, etc. had already created geographically distributed networks to reduce latency and bandwidth. Improving the accuracy of geolocated DNS responses through a protocol extension is basically free and makes these techniques even more effective.
Also, Google cares a lot about latency. A major component of that is backbone transit latency, and once you have enough bandwidth to avoid excessive queueing delay or packet loss, I can imagine only four ways to significantly it: invent faster-than-light communications, find a material with a lower refractive index than the optical fibers in use today, wait for fewer round trips, or reduce the distance travelled per trip. This helps with the last. Building more fiber wouldn't help with any of those and would also be a lot more expensive.
Full disclosure: I work for Google (but not on this).
Dude. Work SMARTer, not harder.
Babbage said it best: On two occasions I have been asked,—"Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?" ... I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question.
Right, then you solved the problem by ensuring the queue in question never gets filled. You added your own queues (more than one, prioritized), and you probably made those queues shorter. That works, but it's a shame that you had to throw away 25% of your download capacity and 10% of your upload capacity when it wouldn't be necessary if the equipment you were using had properly configured queues of its own. It's also unusual that you were able to do so: most people (including almost all home users) are not in a position to set up QoS on their download side. Imagine I called Comcast and asked them to set custom QoS settings on data they are sending to me. How do you think that conversation would go? And even for the upload side, most consumers don't have the equipment or knowledge to set up their own queueing.
Interesting figures. Yeah, my rule of thumb is probably not conservative for your particular site.
Your point would have been stronger if you gave information directly comparable to my statement. By average I meant "mean", the most common/widely accepted definition of the term. With the figures you described, your mean is at least 8 requests per second (that's with 0 requests/sec 50% of the time, 4 requests/sec 45% of the time, and 125 requests/sec 4.9% of the time, and 202 requests/sec .1% of the time). I'd guess more like 20, which means you have a factor of 10 difference between peak and average rather than my "conservative" 2. (You're probably almost entirely US-based?)
I don't mean to suggest you should take my rule of thumb numbers as gospel without confirming them against your own service, or that capacity planning is easy. (Without going into specifics, I spend...well, quite a bit...of time on capacity planning for my...large...service...which uses...many...machines does not use standard...anything.) Likewise as I already alluded to, if your requests are inherently extremely expensive, 88 requests per second may be legitimately infeasible with a standard database stack. I accept that there are exceptions, but the idea that most people need a complex setup to scale to 10M requests per day doesn't seem right, and your post doesn't change my mind about that.
Significantly past 10M pages a day. That's only 12 per second, which unless your page views are tremendously complex shouldn't even be hard. Let's be conservative and say that you need to handle peak load of twice average, a rewrite would take a year and a half, and you grow at 25% per quarter. Then you should be looking at the number 88 pages per second when deciding if you need to start a rewrite. That still seems doable on one machine with a standard database engine, so you probably don't need to start yet.
Good test, but you're nowhere near done. So your load is above 100. That means that on average that are over 100 processes in states "D" or "R", and they're not sendmail processes. What are they? Are they in "D" or "R"? A simple ps should tell you (except maybe if it's short-lived processes, in which case you might need something trickier like SystemTap or oprofile). When you know that, you'll be a step closer to solving the problem.
You're never going to get anywhere if you just blame the people who just "provide ping and power" to you instead of getting your hands dirty and doing the troubleshooting. You think it's their fault? Prove it!
That's something you need to investigate. Are the 700 connections per second the cause of the slowdown, or a symptom? (Probably the cause, but you never know - the sender might have terribly aggressive retries.) Where are they coming from? You may simply be falling victim to an external DoS attack that started around the same time. It's possible the requests are coming from your provider (maybe a problem with a monitoring system), but you need to find that out.
You wrote in another post:
It's not their job to diagnose this sort of problem for you, then. Their response to your most recent ticket was unreasonable (and possibly even illegal), but your request wasn't reasonable either. If you need that kind of help, you'll have to pay for it. You'll be butting heads with your next provider as well otherwise.
Are you saying that one month elapsed between January 4, 2005 and December 4, 2006?
That's not entirely true. Palin took office on December 4, 2006; Obama on January 4, 2005. So if you're looking at "more experience" on by comparing them on the same calendar day during the campaign, you're wrong. If you're looking at it at the respective times they entered the race, you're right.
More importantly, US Senator was only the last item in my Obama experience list; I wouldn't consider it sufficient by itself. I also neglected to mention the campaigning itself - I think there is a lot of value in being at the top of the ticket in a major campaign.
Do you then consider Senator McCain's long career of no value? I disagree. I might say a number of things about him, but never that he's unqualified.
You're talking about her husband's fishing business? I'm not sure how large that was or to what extent she ran it. In any case, yes I do consider handing out charity and tax payer money to be both quite important and an understatement of what a community organizer does.
Not sure. Why should I care? Certainly many presidents before never did.
Now below...you start to raise some decent points. They're basically anecdotes rather than the data of your earlier citations, but otherwise you're getting closer to what I'm asking for.
If by "target audience" you mean something other than the majority of Americans, then I prefer my words as they were before. I think when covering a national election, a media organization is biased if its values are greatly out of line with the majority of people who will be voting. I'm not quite sure what you're saying about Fox here - are you saying that their values differ or that they're presenting significant facts the other networks are neglecting?