Yeah, I know the fakes almost certainly came from China. I was talking about the mentality at newegg in making such a transparently ridiculous statement.
No, not all humans lie. I'll grant that perhaps almost all lie, and that all exaggerate or evade slightly, when deflected by emotion.
The degree of lying I've been seeing precludes the kind of openness and teamwork that you need to make a product that actually works, or to keep your company in business indefinitely. So many people just aren't dealing with reality, and are buying time while coasting on successes from decades past. Like I said, it can't all be like that everywhere. There's got to be honest endeavor mixed in with all the lying or nothing would work. If everything was like Enron, we'd all be dirt poor. Or will be soon anyway.
WTF is happening to our country? Perhaps its not really getting worse, but damn near everyone I've dealt with professionally for the past several years has upon closer inspection proved to be a pathologically lying weasel. There must be real engineering getting done somewhere: the stuff we buy that actually works can't ALL be made in China now can it?
I thought that learning to tell the truth was supposed to be a stage we go through in childhood, not something that most of the population just learns to emulate so that they can try to pass themselves off as the small percentage that's honest.
and I've never been subjected to it in detention. Maybe its the Mozart. They should try playing Bach and see if they get the same result.
Yeah I understand that reasonable people can like Mozart. I just don't find it very appealing myself, except for the first fifteen minutes or so of his requiem, the part he wrote.
At the executive level, a very sizable portion of current profit seeking involves dismantling what was built in previous decades. Its true that its profitable to tear the economy down largely because it was built up so well to start with. But there's still an awful lot of tearing down going on.
Look at HP, or Sun: shells of their former selves. Semiconductor manufacturing by companies like TI or Motorola? Gone to asia. Machine and other engine parts? Mostly gone. Paper mills? Closed in the 80's. Yes there's still a lot of economic health left, and a lot of good work being done, but a lot of that is also left over from former years.
Maybe you've got a good job, or you're still in school. I've got strong coding and math skills, a strong work ethic, and I'm unemployed. Most of the jobs I'm qualified for have gone overseas. And its not just wage competition - the outsourcing decisions that I have first-hand knowledge of have mostly been long term disasters for the companies that made them, nothwithstanding the short term decrease in costs.
Socialism is a worse system to my taste, and I still prefer America and its economy to most other existing alternatives. But the toll that casino capitalism takes is both real and fairly pervasive.
I think the problem can be fixed one company at a time, by giving the company a charter or 'constitution' of sorts for how power is distributed and behavior is rewarded. Most companies are currently despotic in their structure, much how western nations were a few hundred years ago. People build them this way because that's how people are for the most part. Its what they want. The people who started the company created it in large part so that they could exploit the people further down the pyramid, whether that's what they call it or not. Or maybe they created it for other reasons, but they didn't take steps to ensure that people wouldn't be abused, and then later other people moved in that had different motives. If you got a bunch of people together who were more honest, I think they could set up a system of checks and balances that would work better.
I'm game for trying it, but I've never met very many people who thought that the current system was broken, and that were honest about their own role in it. So I think we approximately have what we deserve.
Oh, and thanks for the efence. It doesn't work for the applications I write currently, but I got a lot of mileage out of it years back.
That the Federal Government is overstepping its authority with these images.
To my knowledge, the Feds are only allowed to restrict image use based on its classified status. That is, if it is a matter of national security or not.
As a side note, I think "national security" secrecy is itself very often a way of covering stuff up that people don't want in public view for other reasons. Sometimes one reads of multi-million dollar scandals involving defense agencies squandering money. As if the money is even a drop in the bucket. It seems that most people have no idea what goes on.
As I have posted elsewhere, my wife and I sued Paypal unsuccessfully over something very similar. But the Ohio attorney general got our problem fixed, and the Washington state attorney general contacted us to follow up later, not because we asked them to or lived in Washington, but just because they ran across our case when generally investigating Paypal. So you might try that if you haven't already. I was impressed by the attorneys general, surprised to see the system working the way it is supposed to.
Yes, Paypal gave us a different lie each time we interacted with them. I thought getting bought by eBay might have cleaned them up, but it sounds like maybe it didn't.
Perhaps I should have been clearer. I did not mean to imply that there is never a proper place for things like debt or prescription drugs, or that people can just "shake off" mental illnesses. (My post seemed too long already without additional qualifiers.)
At the same time, "swallowing the spider to catch the fly" is not a new story. If you feel bad, and your mindset is to long for someone or something to to make it better for you, you can find a doctor who will prescribe what you are looking for. Its a matter of supply and demand.
I know people who are seriously addicted to benzodiazephines and other substances, and I know something of how they got that way. In some cases it started with a relatively trivial medical problem, and snowballed over a period of years. Furthermore, I've done enough research to know that millions of other people are in the same condition. This isn't to say that nobody needs drugs, that drugs are never good, or that most doctors are bad. But to say that there isn't a significant problem with prescription drug dependency, at least in the United States, would be "wildly inaccurate".
I swear there's a certain class of people that don't understand that concept or maybe they do and they just really hope they get to be the masters pet.
I think most of them never reflect enough to be more than vaguely aware of it, they just think in terms of controlling their environment in a way that benefits themselves. A few of the brighter ones do have an idea of where its going, but they don't care.
I think most of the rest of us aren't smart or powerful enough to manipulate the system very much that way, but in a sense we have it coming, because we do not sufficiently value freedom. And I don't just mean freedom from oppressive governments and big business, but also freedom from lots of other things ranging from debt to chronic dependence on prescription drugs.
And yes, almost everyone wants to be the masters pet. You can cut the head off of practically any abusive power structure and it will grow back, because nearly everyone's trying to climb one rung higher on the backs of those beneath them.
On the up side, that's only half the dynamic. Some things are getting worse, but some things are getting better also.
When I say manufacturing, I'm thinking largely about integrated circuits, and things made of modern polymers other advanced materials. Being in the same place as a company that has cutting edge equipment, and gaining a first hand understanding their practical problems by being there is an aid to that kind of research. If that's not the kind of research that you've done, that's fine. But its not nonsense simply because its not an aspect of the economy that you are as familiar with. Yes a lot of good research gets done when it is separated from manufacturing, but certain kinds do not get done. And it has affected political and financial dynamics in fields I have worked in, such as the semiconductor industry. American chip manufacturing and R&D is in my view a shadow of what it could have been without outsourcing and pursuit of the intellectual property business model.
If you've spent any time in academia, you'd know that peer review is a cruel joke.
It's more politics than science.
I think part of the root of the problem is the outsourcing of manufacturing to overseas. Its more difficult to do real, useful R&D when you're disconnected from the concrete applications. And the effect propagates to other areas not directly connected with manufacturing, because of the way everything is related. So the politics takes over somewhat by default in the absence of a more meaningful bottom line.
This problem affects industry as much as academia though, even though the symptoms are somewhat different.
There must be industries where outsourcing makes good, long term sense. And maybe overall it will work out OK in the long run. But for the high tech companies that I have direct knowledge of, its always looked to me like a myopic decision that looked good to someone on a quarterly spreadsheet or powerpoint presentation but doesn't really pan out in the long run.
But in any case, yeah I agree about academia. Its not all BS, but certainly there's a lot of that in it.
emerges naturally from a few very simple assumptions about light and vacuum.
Though I hate the tag Casimir force, since its just a bulk Van der Waals or London's force, not some spooky new energy source.
Even further off topic....People speak of vacuum energy, quantum foam, virtual photons and whatnot, but nobody calls it the ether anymore. Of course earlier pre-relativistic concepts of the ether were flawed, and overturned by observation and better theories. But it still seems to me that what is now called 'vacuum' could be called ether, and that the word ether would be more appropriate in some regards. Maybe someone better qualified would like to comment on this.
Taking a wild, poorly informed guess....Maybe if you were to assume a different value for G and follow through all the implications, you would wind up with essentially the same universe but with different units. So it would be arbitrary, and in theory you could get rid of the G entirely and just use the plank area everywhere.
It's thinking like this that brought us a world where people assume doctors are greedy bastards if they want a high-end salary for 12 years of soul-crushing education
From what I've seen, its the influence of money and ego that has made medical school as expensive and soul crushing as it is. In many ways its less about turning out good doctors, and more about maintaining the position and wealth of those who are higher up on the pyramid. If the motives that shape the training were different, it would still be a long period of very hard work, but would yield more of the kind of enjoyment that hard work and learning bring.
Except of course for those who are in it more for the money.
Maybe its worth pointing out that if you can't attract funding, you can't even work. Its not like you simply settle for less lucrative but higher integrity science. If you aren't able to succeed in gaining support without spinning your research, you just get removed from the picture. Even science that appears to be very 'pure', like mathematics, is distorted this way. Its not that the published conclusions are overtly false, and I don't mean to lend credibility to the people who dismiss science as arbitrary and meaningless. I mean that things that don't look like a lever to someone tend not to become a part of the picture. The field gets distorted, and a lot of research that would make the picture deeper and truer just doesn't get done.
Right. If you can make a sensational, headline grabbing case against AGW, you can attract more funding. If you can make a sensational argument for it, you stimulate interest in subsequent research and attract more funding. If you want to clarify and deepen understanding of climate change and tradeoffs in a way that doesn't appeal as strongly to people's desires and fears, its harder to convince people to keep sending money your way. I'm not saying that no good science is being done, but the distorting pressures are always there.
When I spoke of 'grants' I was including grants from oil companies. And even if someone is on salary for an oil company, and the money they need to pay for equipment and whatnot is not in a form that could be called a 'grant', the dynamic is still much the same.
To know the undistorted truth, no matter what it turns out to be, that has to be your motive. Most people are not willing to pay very much for that.
Good post. Maybe also worth noting is that all scientists depend on grant money, and winning grant money depends on politics. The best scientists have to compete with the most politically adept ones. If the public were more interested in science and less in empowering their own faction it would make things a lot easier.
The end result of your philosophy is a society where one or two mafia-like power structures control everything, and everyone else is essentially slaves. Whether those power structures are national governments or corporations the dynamic is much the same. Granted that appears to be what a lot of people want. Preservation of a free society requires limitations on the abuse of power. The FTC part of that mechanism.
I write software that may be run on either Intel and AMD processors, so I need a compiler that works for both. If Intel wants to be in both the compiler business and the microprocessor business, they can't intentionally design their compiler to sabotage AMDs microprocessor business. If there are no limits on that sort of thing, then inevitably one company gets a near monopoly, uses its position to screw over everyone, and everything stagnates and we get poorer. This dynamic is why many impoverished parts of the world are impoverished. To the extent that we embrace that model, our economies will wind up in the toilet also.
no, other courts have upheld that a company can not just steal your funds without pretext, $1200 in our case, no matter what the fine print says. I'm glad to hear that in your country you are assured to a just verdict if you are in the right. Here that is not always the case.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, I know the fakes almost certainly came from China. I was talking about the mentality at newegg in making such a transparently ridiculous statement.
No, not all humans lie. I'll grant that perhaps almost all lie, and that all exaggerate or evade slightly, when deflected by emotion.
The degree of lying I've been seeing precludes the kind of openness and teamwork that you need to make a product that actually works, or to keep your company in business indefinitely. So many people just aren't dealing with reality, and are buying time while coasting on successes from decades past. Like I said, it can't all be like that everywhere. There's got to be honest endeavor mixed in with all the lying or nothing would work. If everything was like Enron, we'd all be dirt poor. Or will be soon anyway.
WTF is happening to our country? Perhaps its not really getting worse, but damn near everyone I've dealt with professionally for the past several years has upon closer inspection proved to be a pathologically lying weasel. There must be real engineering getting done somewhere: the stuff we buy that actually works can't ALL be made in China now can it?
I thought that learning to tell the truth was supposed to be a stage we go through in childhood, not something that most of the population just learns to emulate so that they can try to pass themselves off as the small percentage that's honest.
and I've never been subjected to it in detention. Maybe its the Mozart. They should try playing Bach and see if they get the same result.
Yeah I understand that reasonable people can like Mozart. I just don't find it very appealing myself, except for the first fifteen minutes or so of his requiem, the part he wrote.
Congrats on the +5 insightful and -1 troll in the same thread.
At the executive level, a very sizable portion of current profit seeking involves dismantling what was built in previous decades. Its true that its profitable to tear the economy down largely because it was built up so well to start with. But there's still an awful lot of tearing down going on.
Look at HP, or Sun: shells of their former selves. Semiconductor manufacturing by companies like TI or Motorola? Gone to asia. Machine and other engine parts? Mostly gone. Paper mills? Closed in the 80's. Yes there's still a lot of economic health left, and a lot of good work being done, but a lot of that is also left over from former years.
Maybe you've got a good job, or you're still in school. I've got strong coding and math skills, a strong work ethic, and I'm unemployed. Most of the jobs I'm qualified for have gone overseas. And its not just wage competition - the outsourcing decisions that I have first-hand knowledge of have mostly been long term disasters for the companies that made them, nothwithstanding the short term decrease in costs.
Socialism is a worse system to my taste, and I still prefer America and its economy to most other existing alternatives. But the toll that casino capitalism takes is both real and fairly pervasive.
I think you just described the business model for the entire American economy.
I think the problem can be fixed one company at a time, by giving the company a charter or 'constitution' of sorts for how power is distributed and behavior is rewarded. Most companies are currently despotic in their structure, much how western nations were a few hundred years ago. People build them this way because that's how people are for the most part. Its what they want. The people who started the company created it in large part so that they could exploit the people further down the pyramid, whether that's what they call it or not. Or maybe they created it for other reasons, but they didn't take steps to ensure that people wouldn't be abused, and then later other people moved in that had different motives. If you got a bunch of people together who were more honest, I think they could set up a system of checks and balances that would work better.
I'm game for trying it, but I've never met very many people who thought that the current system was broken, and that were honest about their own role in it. So I think we approximately have what we deserve.
Oh, and thanks for the efence. It doesn't work for the applications I write currently, but I got a lot of mileage out of it years back.
That the Federal Government is overstepping its authority with these images.
To my knowledge, the Feds are only allowed to restrict image use based on its classified status. That is, if it is a matter of national security or not.
As a side note, I think "national security" secrecy is itself very often a way of covering stuff up that people don't want in public view for other reasons. Sometimes one reads of multi-million dollar scandals involving defense agencies squandering money. As if the money is even a drop in the bucket. It seems that most people have no idea what goes on.
Shows something though. A generally accepted social tendency for abuse of copyright powers, for protection in general in all kinds of issues.
I think it also shows that the government is thinking more and more like a business.
As I have posted elsewhere, my wife and I sued Paypal unsuccessfully over something very similar. But the Ohio attorney general got our problem fixed, and the Washington state attorney general contacted us to follow up later, not because we asked them to or lived in Washington, but just because they ran across our case when generally investigating Paypal. So you might try that if you haven't already. I was impressed by the attorneys general, surprised to see the system working the way it is supposed to.
Yes, Paypal gave us a different lie each time we interacted with them. I thought getting bought by eBay might have cleaned them up, but it sounds like maybe it didn't.
Perhaps I should have been clearer. I did not mean to imply that there is never a proper place for things like debt or prescription drugs, or that people can just "shake off" mental illnesses. (My post seemed too long already without additional qualifiers.)
At the same time, "swallowing the spider to catch the fly" is not a new story. If you feel bad, and your mindset is to long for someone or something to to make it better for you, you can find a doctor who will prescribe what you are looking for. Its a matter of supply and demand.
I know people who are seriously addicted to benzodiazephines and other substances, and I know something of how they got that way. In some cases it started with a relatively trivial medical problem, and snowballed over a period of years. Furthermore, I've done enough research to know that millions of other people are in the same condition. This isn't to say that nobody needs drugs, that drugs are never good, or that most doctors are bad. But to say that there isn't a significant problem with prescription drug dependency, at least in the United States, would be "wildly inaccurate".
I swear there's a certain class of people that don't understand that concept or maybe they do and they just really hope they get to be the masters pet.
I think most of them never reflect enough to be more than vaguely aware of it, they just think in terms of controlling their environment in a way that benefits themselves. A few of the brighter ones do have an idea of where its going, but they don't care.
I think most of the rest of us aren't smart or powerful enough to manipulate the system very much that way, but in a sense we have it coming, because we do not sufficiently value freedom. And I don't just mean freedom from oppressive governments and big business, but also freedom from lots of other things ranging from debt to chronic dependence on prescription drugs.
And yes, almost everyone wants to be the masters pet. You can cut the head off of practically any abusive power structure and it will grow back, because nearly everyone's trying to climb one rung higher on the backs of those beneath them.
On the up side, that's only half the dynamic. Some things are getting worse, but some things are getting better also.
belongs
When I say manufacturing, I'm thinking largely about integrated circuits, and things made of modern polymers other advanced materials. Being in the same place as a company that has cutting edge equipment, and gaining a first hand understanding their practical problems by being there is an aid to that kind of research. If that's not the kind of research that you've done, that's fine. But its not nonsense simply because its not an aspect of the economy that you are as familiar with. Yes a lot of good research gets done when it is separated from manufacturing, but certain kinds do not get done. And it has affected political and financial dynamics in fields I have worked in, such as the semiconductor industry. American chip manufacturing and R&D is in my view a shadow of what it could have been without outsourcing and pursuit of the intellectual property business model.
If you've spent any time in academia, you'd know that peer review is a cruel joke.
It's more politics than science.
I think part of the root of the problem is the outsourcing of manufacturing to overseas. Its more difficult to do real, useful R&D when you're disconnected from the concrete applications. And the effect propagates to other areas not directly connected with manufacturing, because of the way everything is related. So the politics takes over somewhat by default in the absence of a more meaningful bottom line.
This problem affects industry as much as academia though, even though the symptoms are somewhat different.
There must be industries where outsourcing makes good, long term sense. And maybe overall it will work out OK in the long run. But for the high tech companies that I have direct knowledge of, its always looked to me like a myopic decision that looked good to someone on a quarterly spreadsheet or powerpoint presentation but doesn't really pan out in the long run.
But in any case, yeah I agree about academia. Its not all BS, but certainly there's a lot of that in it.
emerges naturally from a few very simple assumptions about light and vacuum.
Though I hate the tag Casimir force, since its just a bulk Van der Waals or London's force, not some spooky new energy source.
Even further off topic....People speak of vacuum energy, quantum foam, virtual photons and whatnot, but nobody calls it the ether anymore. Of course earlier pre-relativistic concepts of the ether were flawed, and overturned by observation and better theories. But it still seems to me that what is now called 'vacuum' could be called ether, and that the word ether would be more appropriate in some regards. Maybe someone better qualified would like to comment on this.
Taking a wild, poorly informed guess....Maybe if you were to assume a different value for G and follow through all the implications, you would wind up with essentially the same universe but with different units. So it would be arbitrary, and in theory you could get rid of the G entirely and just use the plank area everywhere.
It's thinking like this that brought us a world where people assume doctors are greedy bastards if they want a high-end salary for 12 years of soul-crushing education
From what I've seen, its the influence of money and ego that has made medical school as expensive and soul crushing as it is. In many ways its less about turning out good doctors, and more about maintaining the position and wealth of those who are higher up on the pyramid. If the motives that shape the training were different, it would still be a long period of very hard work, but would yield more of the kind of enjoyment that hard work and learning bring.
Except of course for those who are in it more for the money.
Oh, auroras. Never mind.
and you're using a very high resolution camera.
Film photons with electrons, and its another confusing /. title.
Maybe its worth pointing out that if you can't attract funding, you can't even work. Its not like you simply settle for less lucrative but higher integrity science. If you aren't able to succeed in gaining support without spinning your research, you just get removed from the picture. Even science that appears to be very 'pure', like mathematics, is distorted this way. Its not that the published conclusions are overtly false, and I don't mean to lend credibility to the people who dismiss science as arbitrary and meaningless. I mean that things that don't look like a lever to someone tend not to become a part of the picture. The field gets distorted, and a lot of research that would make the picture deeper and truer just doesn't get done.
Right. If you can make a sensational, headline grabbing case against AGW, you can attract more funding. If you can make a sensational argument for it, you stimulate interest in subsequent research and attract more funding. If you want to clarify and deepen understanding of climate change and tradeoffs in a way that doesn't appeal as strongly to people's desires and fears, its harder to convince people to keep sending money your way. I'm not saying that no good science is being done, but the distorting pressures are always there.
When I spoke of 'grants' I was including grants from oil companies. And even if someone is on salary for an oil company, and the money they need to pay for equipment and whatnot is not in a form that could be called a 'grant', the dynamic is still much the same.
To know the undistorted truth, no matter what it turns out to be, that has to be your motive. Most people are not willing to pay very much for that.
Good post. Maybe also worth noting is that all scientists depend on grant money, and winning grant money depends on politics. The best scientists have to compete with the most politically adept ones. If the public were more interested in science and less in empowering their own faction it would make things a lot easier.
The end result of your philosophy is a society where one or two mafia-like power structures control everything, and everyone else is essentially slaves. Whether those power structures are national governments or corporations the dynamic is much the same. Granted that appears to be what a lot of people want. Preservation of a free society requires limitations on the abuse of power. The FTC part of that mechanism.
I write software that may be run on either Intel and AMD processors, so I need a compiler that works for both. If Intel wants to be in both the compiler business and the microprocessor business, they can't intentionally design their compiler to sabotage AMDs microprocessor business. If there are no limits on that sort of thing, then inevitably one company gets a near monopoly, uses its position to screw over everyone, and everything stagnates and we get poorer. This dynamic is why many impoverished parts of the world are impoverished. To the extent that we embrace that model, our economies will wind up in the toilet also.
no, other courts have upheld that a company can not just steal your funds without pretext, $1200 in our case, no matter what the fine print says. I'm glad to hear that in your country you are assured to a just verdict if you are in the right. Here that is not always the case.