We definitely have some interesting times ahead. Many people believe that all this labor automation will produce a world in which all of everybody's needs can be met by the labors of a very small few, and because of this nobody will be able to find work, and the whole economy will come tumbling down.
Capitalists have been holding firm on the position that this sort of change produces new kinds of work. We shall see if that holds true or not.
When people wrote this in 1884, it was valid speculation, since we hadn't see tech revolutions play out. Now we have. Now we know it's full of shit. Over and over we see that making stuff easier and cheaper means that more people have that stuff, and meanwhile we're all at work making stuff only the rich could previously buy (but now everyone can, because the other stuff is so cheap now).
Always with the calls to lower our standard of living (by which I mean, lower your standard of living, of course). Screw that. You go live in a cave if that makes you happy - I fully support your right to do so. But the rest of us will be finding ways for technology to make life better.
Air travel has had a couple of really significant improvements in fuel efficiency in my lifetime. And since fuel cost is a big part of the cost of air travel (the biggest cost?), research is ongoing and well funded.
Meanwhile, it's still safer, cheaper, and less polluting to fly than to drive! It's really unfortunate that US airport security has discouraged air travel so much - maybe that's something we could fix in 2015. Defund the TSA, return to pre-911 metal detectors, X-Rays, and no long lines or strip searches! Better quality of life for everyone, no environmental harm. Hey, at least I have a useful proposal.
Where did all the farmer jobs go? Where did all the jobs go that were replaced by manufacturing lines? You're asking the wrong questions.
Being able to produce food easier and cheaper than ever meant more people could afford food than ever before. Being able to produce shoes, tableware, and chairs cheaper than ever meant that for the first time everyone could afford these - even shoes for children. Making stuff more efficiently always means more stuff for everyone. The money is just a handy intermediary for barter - the amount of stuff we have is simply the amount of stuff we manage to create. The more efficiently we make stuff (less labor, less power, less raw materials), the more stuff we will all have.
People made the exact same argument's you're making in the late 1800s - that everyone will be unemployed and only the rich will have these new manufactured goods (only the rich could afford those same goods when the were handcrafted, after all). Funny how it didn't work out that way. We went from most everyone working, producing X, to everyone working, producing 100X, meaning the rich no longer were the exclusive buyers of most goods.
The same thing will happen again - we'll mostly be employed providing services to one another that we simply can't afford today because our money goes elsewhere (plus the skilled trades are vastly understaffed today - everyone turned their noses up at being a welder or plumber for some reason, but those jobs pay pretty well).
How many systems with "totally linear tasks" have only 1 user?
Smart phones don't need 1000 cores - heck, they only need 2 so you can have a low-power and a high-power core. But servers? 1 core per user seems like a good start - but across how many boxes? The trick is getting that workload to easily scale horizontally, across any number of servers that can only talk to one another slowly, and that's not an easy trick! I expect a lot of work in that area in 2015.
And which Indian or Chinese province are u from? 2015 is projected to be a year of stalled growth in China. So we'll be ransacked by cheap competitive labor from there. We will also continue to be ransacked by cheaper eastern European labor
Cheaper than robots? The 21st century will see the end of unskilled labor from the mainstream economy, much as the 20th saw the end of agricultural labor from the mainstream. It's good to learn a skill.
Where do you live? Here in the Seattle area, the economy is booming. From fast food to construction right through to dev jobs, everyone is hiring like crazy. There are about 20 new buildings (mostly highrises) going up in downtown Seattle, and apartments are going up everywhere in the suburbs. No question things are doing well here. Where's the suck?
"Too big to fail" is a problem with corruption, not (directly) with concentration of wealth. After all, even if that TBTF company's ownership were distributed across 50 M people in 401Ks etc, the problem would be the same. TBTF, regulatory capture, and the life are failure modes for capitalism - ones that if anyone can see a way around without abandoning free markets for pricing, we'll have a new economic system. I'm not holding my breath.
Well there's your problem. Nobody is great at making investment decisions. White noise is a better and more stable investor than any strategy
False, if your time horizon is 5+ years. Many people are. Not just Buffett (who cheats by buying whole companies and changing them). I've done better on average than the S&P 500 over the past 15 years, and I'm no investing genius, I just avoid the scams and pay attention to macroeconomics. What is true is that, if you hire someone else to manage your money, whether a broker or mutual fund, most of them do worse than the broad market, and those who do better charge more than the difference.
a large number of small businesses would bear a stronger resemblance to white noise than a concentrated power structure.
But then, most small businesses fail pretty quickly.
So someone who owns million/billions in real estate, investments and all that other stuff is not wealthy? It is solely controlling the means of production? (which if you do you will probably have all those billions) If you are some trust fund baby with no clue but billions in the bank you are not wealthy?
To your general point - "wealthy" doesn't really mean "worth a lot", no. Maybe "rich" is the word you want? Though for your specific examples, most land in private hands is actually doing something useful, and so most property owners are in fact wealthy (how to measure the house you live in as wealth is actually a hard question).
Did you know most trust fund babies have a subsistence income from their trust funds? Strange but true. The usual trust fund is "enough where he'll never starve, but not enough that he doesn't want to work for a living". Anyhow, (a) a trust fund is managed by someone other than the beneficiary, almost by definition, and is usually conservatively invested, and (b) people who inherit lots but don't invest wisely tend to die broke, unless you're talking about the thousand richest people in America or somesuch.
My initial point to everyone enjoying a life of luxury, where all of our immediate needs are provided so that we can focus on other pursuits to better ourselves, had to do with the paradigm shift that would be required. One that humanity itself could not do because we are not hard wired that way. We compete, we keep score. We want to be better than the next guy, either by pulling ahead or putting a boot to their throat to keep them down. I don't lament this, it is who we are.
On this we agree completely. It seems to break the spirit, not needing to work or compete or somehow prove yourself. Which is why, of course, most trust funds are set up as they are.
Since Near Earth Asteroids can supply 30-50 times more fuel, plus the potential for other supplies, it makes that service station cheaper to operate
People underestimate the effect of this. A near-Earth fuel station would be a change in kind for space travel. For example, the logistics for a manned Mars journey suddenly become affordable (by national standards), travel to the Moon becomes something a billionaire adventurer could do. Sending hundreds of probes to the planets and finally seeing more than a mailslot view of our own solar system becomes practical.
The cost of lifting fuel to GEO is nuts - most of the expense of anything you want to do beyond Earth orbit is the cost of getting the fuel up to Earth orbit. Sure, manned exploration still would need medical breakthroughs, but unmanned, well, everything changes.
And as for the medical side, if you can't see the benefit "here on Earth" for figuring out how to "radiation-harden" humans, you're not paying attention.
Could is different from would, was my point. If we look at the middle class, people earn more than that in take-home pay by 30, yet have saved very little of it. I was the poster boy - I didn't understand money until I was nearly 30, and it was really an achievement for me when I reached a net worth of "0", thanks to a change in habits. It didn't take too many years after that to reach my $350k, since I was saving half my take-home pay,
From my experience with the various poor neighborhoods I lived in through my 20s, the poor are not more frugal than the middle class: status symbols are more important when you're poor. But that was all urban, rural might be the opposite.
You're sort-of making my point. Money can buy both stuff and wealth. Give wealth to most people and they'll sell it to buy stuff, and the wealth will end up concentrated again in the hands of those who like wealth better than stuff. Plus, since there's only as much stuff as we all of us make, there won't be any more stuff for handing out money, so the wealth-stuff exchange rate would swing wildly as most people dumped their stock to buy a better car then their neighbors (and, to be fair, many would pay off their house).
One liners do not convey a point at all. I guess I could have elaborated. To have everyone live a life of leisure would require sharing of wealth by also foregoing future hording or it.
By the standards of history, we all have a life of leisure already! (Seriously, we live better than a feudal Baron, especially as we age.) Even if we eventually get a "Jetsons" 2-hour work week, we'll still be complaining.
It has little to do with "hoarding" of weath because wealth is not stuff - it's not food, it's not cars, it's not houses wealth is control of the means of production. And we benefit greatly if wealth is hoarded by people who are great at making investment decisions. Wealth is not what you seem to think!
As long as prices for "basics": food, shelter, transportation, and the like keep falling, when measured in hour of work needed, we'll be good. If 3D printing somehow evolves into in-home manufacturing, so much the better.
Another fun number: the total value of all corporate earnings (the number companies exaggerate, not the taxable number) is less than 10% of all American salaries. (Total US pay, total US GDP, and total stock value of all publically traded US corps are all about the same).
There have been many such balloon propaganda efforts - I think the religious ones are common. This is just the latest, and perhaps funniest. Don't underestimate the value of mocking the dictator - it seems petty here, but in a world where no one ever does that, it's powerful. This particular movie is pretty lame, but don't they actually kill KJU off at the end? That's a nice message there.
Well said. The antithesis of casual games, Star Fleet Battles, kept its appeal for years for me for precisely this. You could work out optimal "openings", but as soon as you exchanged heavy weapons fire the first time things could go many different ways. A good player would consistent recover from bad luck in the first volley, while a bad player would count on luck. It was neat that way because the set of situations you could find yourself in was large, and influence both by the basic strategy chosen by you and your opponent, and luck which could quickly change your optimal strategy in very situational ways. The only time you'd find yourself without any recourse for a bad roll was when you were trying a last-ditch desperation move anyhow, which added its own fun.
All of the wealth in America, including all corporate assets, all retirement plans, and all home equity, is less than $350k per citizen. That won't solve much. Even if you distributed it, most people would be broke in a year - wealth is a habit more than anything else.
In the long run, we benefit far more from wise investment decisions than from redistribution, because economic growth is exponential growth, and redistribution is a one-time constant. 95% of Americans live better than 99% of everyone who has ever lived. The median income in America is far more than the $30k or so that makes you a "1%er" of the world. Exponential growth per capita comes from technological progress, and there's no reason to believe technology will stop progressing.
Are the currently wealthy the best as making investment decisions? No, of course it's not optimal, but it's not terrible either. The entire premise of Capitalism is that you buy wealth, rather than being gifted it for loyalty to the leader or military conquest, so the better you invest your wealth, the more you can accumulate. That's a good thing when it works out that way!
When I was a high school kid, there was a neighborhood that had a speed camera. It swiftly became a sport, and the a rite of passage, to paint the speed camera. I don't think the thing stayed working for any 3 consecutive days in the years it was installed.
What in the fuck does that mean? Is that regional jargon somewhere? Some new sex act I haven't heard of? The mind boggles.
Re:"extensive measures" taken...
on
NVIDIA Breached
·
· Score: 1
If you can't make it easy for employees to do what they desire, you're just not very good at your job since that is the job of IT. Keep trying to change human nature and you'll simply fail at security and be seen as an asshole control freak by the people who do the useful and productive work at the company. Especially if those people are driver devs and kernel hackers, who might make a sport of subverting controls.
It's just a nasty combination of hubris and laziness that leads IT to try to change the users, rather than changing their own systems, to achieve security.
You might also notice in a bank, the big vault door is actually propped open during working hours because it's a PITA. Inside there's usually a simple cage door, quick to open as any normal locked door, that provides security while employees need access. Funny that. Of course, most modern setups actually have an automatic cash dispenser for the teller that spits out specific amounts, making it even easier for the teller to do his job. That's good security: a system devised to make it quite easy for the teller while providing needed security.
The recommended solution for the smoking area, BTW, is to have the secure perimeter outside the smoking area - a fence or somesuch - so that it doesn't actually hurt security for the door to be propped open during the day, since you can't really get to it from the street. Again, enabling the worker to do what he wants to, while providing needed security.
Re:"extensive measures" taken...
on
NVIDIA Breached
·
· Score: 1
No, "necessary" entirely misses the point. You're control-freaking. Users will find a way to do what they desire to do, and they'll find a way to make it easy to do so. That's humans for you - we're adaptive animals. Don't fight human nature.
Instead, make it easier to hit Facebook without hurting corporate security than to do something "clever" to hit Facebook. Make it easy to IM securely, to trade work-related files securely, and so on. Get out in front of what users want to do and make the easiest way to do those things the secure way. Take what you think is "necessary" and shove it someplace necessary.
My 5-year-old phone has hit the concrete a couple of times. Glass is cracked, but it still works fine.
I think people mostly change phones because of fashion - 2 years or so seems right from a fashion perspective.
Re:"extensive measures" taken...
on
NVIDIA Breached
·
· Score: 1
Well said. Security is not about being a control freak, because the more you tighten your grasp, the more systems will slip through your fingers (doubly so if you imagine you can police kernel devs). Instead, security is measured as follows:
[Difficulty of unauthorized access] / [Difficulty of authorized access]
Making authorized access harder reduces security because people. People will always make it easier fo themselves. In the world of physical security, the lesson is: "any door along the quickest path between where people work and the smoking area will be propped open - don't even try to fight it, instead make sure that doesn't compromise security".
The Vietnam war was a proxy fight between us and China, because we weren't going to fight directly (for centuries, whenever two world powers got angry and didn't want to fight directly, one of them would invade Vietnam and the other would fight them there - it's bizarre). We certainly protect Taiwan today, we're still in the Korean DMZ though not like before, we've had troops in Europe since WWII to deter Russian aggression, though only in certain directions. And of course we've been all over the Middle East.
The B1B is still perfectly usable in any war we're likely to get into for the next twenty years, since governments that have advanced air forces generally have some interest in staying peaceful.
I'm really not seeing what we'd be buying with larger armed forces.
The reason we've only been fighting insurgencies and the like is because we've had so large a military that no one would risk provoking us into a "high intensity" war. I fear that we've lost that deterrent.
I don't believe that Russian and China are beyond expanding their borders. Maybe it's not our job in the first place to prevent that (though I'd like to think it's a good result), but we won't be doing that preventive job much longer.
Slashdot Mirror
We definitely have some interesting times ahead. Many people believe that all this labor automation will produce a world in which all of everybody's needs can be met by the labors of a very small few, and because of this nobody will be able to find work, and the whole economy will come tumbling down.
Capitalists have been holding firm on the position that this sort of change produces new kinds of work. We shall see if that holds true or not.
When people wrote this in 1884, it was valid speculation, since we hadn't see tech revolutions play out. Now we have. Now we know it's full of shit. Over and over we see that making stuff easier and cheaper means that more people have that stuff, and meanwhile we're all at work making stuff only the rich could previously buy (but now everyone can, because the other stuff is so cheap now).
Always with the calls to lower our standard of living (by which I mean, lower your standard of living, of course). Screw that. You go live in a cave if that makes you happy - I fully support your right to do so. But the rest of us will be finding ways for technology to make life better.
Air travel has had a couple of really significant improvements in fuel efficiency in my lifetime. And since fuel cost is a big part of the cost of air travel (the biggest cost?), research is ongoing and well funded.
Meanwhile, it's still safer, cheaper, and less polluting to fly than to drive! It's really unfortunate that US airport security has discouraged air travel so much - maybe that's something we could fix in 2015. Defund the TSA, return to pre-911 metal detectors, X-Rays, and no long lines or strip searches! Better quality of life for everyone, no environmental harm. Hey, at least I have a useful proposal.
Where did all the farmer jobs go? Where did all the jobs go that were replaced by manufacturing lines? You're asking the wrong questions.
Being able to produce food easier and cheaper than ever meant more people could afford food than ever before. Being able to produce shoes, tableware, and chairs cheaper than ever meant that for the first time everyone could afford these - even shoes for children. Making stuff more efficiently always means more stuff for everyone. The money is just a handy intermediary for barter - the amount of stuff we have is simply the amount of stuff we manage to create. The more efficiently we make stuff (less labor, less power, less raw materials), the more stuff we will all have.
People made the exact same argument's you're making in the late 1800s - that everyone will be unemployed and only the rich will have these new manufactured goods (only the rich could afford those same goods when the were handcrafted, after all). Funny how it didn't work out that way. We went from most everyone working, producing X, to everyone working, producing 100X, meaning the rich no longer were the exclusive buyers of most goods.
The same thing will happen again - we'll mostly be employed providing services to one another that we simply can't afford today because our money goes elsewhere (plus the skilled trades are vastly understaffed today - everyone turned their noses up at being a welder or plumber for some reason, but those jobs pay pretty well).
How many systems with "totally linear tasks" have only 1 user?
Smart phones don't need 1000 cores - heck, they only need 2 so you can have a low-power and a high-power core. But servers? 1 core per user seems like a good start - but across how many boxes? The trick is getting that workload to easily scale horizontally, across any number of servers that can only talk to one another slowly, and that's not an easy trick! I expect a lot of work in that area in 2015.
And which Indian or Chinese province are u from? 2015 is projected to be a year of stalled growth in China. So we'll be ransacked by cheap competitive labor from there. We will also continue to be ransacked by cheaper eastern European labor
Cheaper than robots? The 21st century will see the end of unskilled labor from the mainstream economy, much as the 20th saw the end of agricultural labor from the mainstream. It's good to learn a skill.
Get the hell out of the tech industry. I went back to school, got my PharmD and couldn't be happier.
Won't you be surprised when the pharmacy robots displace you. Better to learn to program those robots, if you can!
Where do you live? Here in the Seattle area, the economy is booming. From fast food to construction right through to dev jobs, everyone is hiring like crazy. There are about 20 new buildings (mostly highrises) going up in downtown Seattle, and apartments are going up everywhere in the suburbs. No question things are doing well here. Where's the suck?
"Too big to fail" is a problem with corruption, not (directly) with concentration of wealth. After all, even if that TBTF company's ownership were distributed across 50 M people in 401Ks etc, the problem would be the same. TBTF, regulatory capture, and the life are failure modes for capitalism - ones that if anyone can see a way around without abandoning free markets for pricing, we'll have a new economic system. I'm not holding my breath.
Well there's your problem. Nobody is great at making investment decisions. White noise is a better and more stable investor than any strategy
False, if your time horizon is 5+ years. Many people are. Not just Buffett (who cheats by buying whole companies and changing them). I've done better on average than the S&P 500 over the past 15 years, and I'm no investing genius, I just avoid the scams and pay attention to macroeconomics. What is true is that, if you hire someone else to manage your money, whether a broker or mutual fund, most of them do worse than the broad market, and those who do better charge more than the difference.
a large number of small businesses would bear a stronger resemblance to white noise than a concentrated power structure.
But then, most small businesses fail pretty quickly.
So someone who owns million/billions in real estate, investments and all that other stuff is not wealthy? It is solely controlling the means of production? (which if you do you will probably have all those billions) If you are some trust fund baby with no clue but billions in the bank you are not wealthy?
To your general point - "wealthy" doesn't really mean "worth a lot", no. Maybe "rich" is the word you want? Though for your specific examples, most land in private hands is actually doing something useful, and so most property owners are in fact wealthy (how to measure the house you live in as wealth is actually a hard question).
Did you know most trust fund babies have a subsistence income from their trust funds? Strange but true. The usual trust fund is "enough where he'll never starve, but not enough that he doesn't want to work for a living". Anyhow, (a) a trust fund is managed by someone other than the beneficiary, almost by definition, and is usually conservatively invested, and (b) people who inherit lots but don't invest wisely tend to die broke, unless you're talking about the thousand richest people in America or somesuch.
My initial point to everyone enjoying a life of luxury, where all of our immediate needs are provided so that we can focus on other pursuits to better ourselves, had to do with the paradigm shift that would be required. One that humanity itself could not do because we are not hard wired that way. We compete, we keep score. We want to be better than the next guy, either by pulling ahead or putting a boot to their throat to keep them down. I don't lament this, it is who we are.
On this we agree completely. It seems to break the spirit, not needing to work or compete or somehow prove yourself. Which is why, of course, most trust funds are set up as they are.
Since Near Earth Asteroids can supply 30-50 times more fuel, plus the potential for other supplies, it makes that service station cheaper to operate
People underestimate the effect of this. A near-Earth fuel station would be a change in kind for space travel. For example, the logistics for a manned Mars journey suddenly become affordable (by national standards), travel to the Moon becomes something a billionaire adventurer could do. Sending hundreds of probes to the planets and finally seeing more than a mailslot view of our own solar system becomes practical.
The cost of lifting fuel to GEO is nuts - most of the expense of anything you want to do beyond Earth orbit is the cost of getting the fuel up to Earth orbit. Sure, manned exploration still would need medical breakthroughs, but unmanned, well, everything changes.
And as for the medical side, if you can't see the benefit "here on Earth" for figuring out how to "radiation-harden" humans, you're not paying attention.
Could is different from would, was my point. If we look at the middle class, people earn more than that in take-home pay by 30, yet have saved very little of it. I was the poster boy - I didn't understand money until I was nearly 30, and it was really an achievement for me when I reached a net worth of "0", thanks to a change in habits. It didn't take too many years after that to reach my $350k, since I was saving half my take-home pay,
From my experience with the various poor neighborhoods I lived in through my 20s, the poor are not more frugal than the middle class: status symbols are more important when you're poor. But that was all urban, rural might be the opposite.
You're sort-of making my point. Money can buy both stuff and wealth. Give wealth to most people and they'll sell it to buy stuff, and the wealth will end up concentrated again in the hands of those who like wealth better than stuff. Plus, since there's only as much stuff as we all of us make, there won't be any more stuff for handing out money, so the wealth-stuff exchange rate would swing wildly as most people dumped their stock to buy a better car then their neighbors (and, to be fair, many would pay off their house).
One liners do not convey a point at all. I guess I could have elaborated. To have everyone live a life of leisure would require sharing of wealth by also foregoing future hording or it.
By the standards of history, we all have a life of leisure already! (Seriously, we live better than a feudal Baron, especially as we age.) Even if we eventually get a "Jetsons" 2-hour work week, we'll still be complaining.
It has little to do with "hoarding" of weath because wealth is not stuff - it's not food, it's not cars, it's not houses wealth is control of the means of production. And we benefit greatly if wealth is hoarded by people who are great at making investment decisions. Wealth is not what you seem to think!
As long as prices for "basics": food, shelter, transportation, and the like keep falling, when measured in hour of work needed, we'll be good. If 3D printing somehow evolves into in-home manufacturing, so much the better.
Another fun number: the total value of all corporate earnings (the number companies exaggerate, not the taxable number) is less than 10% of all American salaries. (Total US pay, total US GDP, and total stock value of all publically traded US corps are all about the same).
There have been many such balloon propaganda efforts - I think the religious ones are common. This is just the latest, and perhaps funniest. Don't underestimate the value of mocking the dictator - it seems petty here, but in a world where no one ever does that, it's powerful. This particular movie is pretty lame, but don't they actually kill KJU off at the end? That's a nice message there.
Well said. The antithesis of casual games, Star Fleet Battles, kept its appeal for years for me for precisely this. You could work out optimal "openings", but as soon as you exchanged heavy weapons fire the first time things could go many different ways. A good player would consistent recover from bad luck in the first volley, while a bad player would count on luck. It was neat that way because the set of situations you could find yourself in was large, and influence both by the basic strategy chosen by you and your opponent, and luck which could quickly change your optimal strategy in very situational ways. The only time you'd find yourself without any recourse for a bad roll was when you were trying a last-ditch desperation move anyhow, which added its own fun.
All of the wealth in America, including all corporate assets, all retirement plans, and all home equity, is less than $350k per citizen. That won't solve much. Even if you distributed it, most people would be broke in a year - wealth is a habit more than anything else.
In the long run, we benefit far more from wise investment decisions than from redistribution, because economic growth is exponential growth, and redistribution is a one-time constant. 95% of Americans live better than 99% of everyone who has ever lived. The median income in America is far more than the $30k or so that makes you a "1%er" of the world. Exponential growth per capita comes from technological progress, and there's no reason to believe technology will stop progressing.
Are the currently wealthy the best as making investment decisions? No, of course it's not optimal, but it's not terrible either. The entire premise of Capitalism is that you buy wealth, rather than being gifted it for loyalty to the leader or military conquest, so the better you invest your wealth, the more you can accumulate. That's a good thing when it works out that way!
When I was a high school kid, there was a neighborhood that had a speed camera. It swiftly became a sport, and the a rite of passage, to paint the speed camera. I don't think the thing stayed working for any 3 consecutive days in the years it was installed.
and rubber duck with each other
What in the fuck does that mean? Is that regional jargon somewhere? Some new sex act I haven't heard of? The mind boggles.
If you can't make it easy for employees to do what they desire, you're just not very good at your job since that is the job of IT. Keep trying to change human nature and you'll simply fail at security and be seen as an asshole control freak by the people who do the useful and productive work at the company. Especially if those people are driver devs and kernel hackers, who might make a sport of subverting controls.
It's just a nasty combination of hubris and laziness that leads IT to try to change the users, rather than changing their own systems, to achieve security.
You might also notice in a bank, the big vault door is actually propped open during working hours because it's a PITA. Inside there's usually a simple cage door, quick to open as any normal locked door, that provides security while employees need access. Funny that. Of course, most modern setups actually have an automatic cash dispenser for the teller that spits out specific amounts, making it even easier for the teller to do his job. That's good security: a system devised to make it quite easy for the teller while providing needed security.
The recommended solution for the smoking area, BTW, is to have the secure perimeter outside the smoking area - a fence or somesuch - so that it doesn't actually hurt security for the door to be propped open during the day, since you can't really get to it from the street. Again, enabling the worker to do what he wants to, while providing needed security.
No, "necessary" entirely misses the point. You're control-freaking. Users will find a way to do what they desire to do, and they'll find a way to make it easy to do so. That's humans for you - we're adaptive animals. Don't fight human nature.
Instead, make it easier to hit Facebook without hurting corporate security than to do something "clever" to hit Facebook. Make it easy to IM securely, to trade work-related files securely, and so on. Get out in front of what users want to do and make the easiest way to do those things the secure way. Take what you think is "necessary" and shove it someplace necessary.
My 5-year-old phone has hit the concrete a couple of times. Glass is cracked, but it still works fine.
I think people mostly change phones because of fashion - 2 years or so seems right from a fashion perspective.
Well said. Security is not about being a control freak, because the more you tighten your grasp, the more systems will slip through your fingers (doubly so if you imagine you can police kernel devs). Instead, security is measured as follows:
[Difficulty of unauthorized access] / [Difficulty of authorized access]
Making authorized access harder reduces security because people. People will always make it easier fo themselves. In the world of physical security, the lesson is: "any door along the quickest path between where people work and the smoking area will be propped open - don't even try to fight it, instead make sure that doesn't compromise security".
The Vietnam war was a proxy fight between us and China, because we weren't going to fight directly (for centuries, whenever two world powers got angry and didn't want to fight directly, one of them would invade Vietnam and the other would fight them there - it's bizarre). We certainly protect Taiwan today, we're still in the Korean DMZ though not like before, we've had troops in Europe since WWII to deter Russian aggression, though only in certain directions. And of course we've been all over the Middle East.
The B1B is still perfectly usable in any war we're likely to get into for the next twenty years, since governments that have advanced air forces generally have some interest in staying peaceful.
I'm really not seeing what we'd be buying with larger armed forces.
The reason we've only been fighting insurgencies and the like is because we've had so large a military that no one would risk provoking us into a "high intensity" war. I fear that we've lost that deterrent.
I don't believe that Russian and China are beyond expanding their borders. Maybe it's not our job in the first place to prevent that (though I'd like to think it's a good result), but we won't be doing that preventive job much longer.