Why the hell was this scored Troll? It's all bascially true, more or less, with the possible exception of Al-Qaeda requiring asymmetric warfare response. I'd suggest a review of foreign polcy FIRST.
Since you haven't been around to see it, I'll explain...it's not just David Koch. It's the Koch brothers, and they're referred to as "The Kochtopus" for getting their tentacles into everything. Case in point - the Tea Party movement started off as a true grass roots campaign to pressure politicians to end the bank bailouts. Most of the initial participants were educated on monetary systems and tend to be supporters of a strong dollar at worst or a gold standard at best. The Kochs bankrolled their way into the organization, literally bribing organizers to stop talking about Ron Paul, and substitute in Sarah Palin and then Michele Bachmann.
Understand that anarcho-capitalism is not closely related to anarchism, despite the similar sounding name. Anarcho-capitalism is strongly anti-violence, and unwaveringly emphasizes the criticality of personal rights (life, liberty, property).
The problem with what you're saying can be summed up in one word which we both, I assume, have a nasty, negative reaction to. The word? "Koch".
These guys are the very definition of neocon cronies, having co-opted the Tea Party movement from the Ron Paul types, replacing him with Michele Bachmann, and wrapping a very right-wing message in libertarian clothing. It's remarkable that you identified exactly the kind of people I was referring to.
Libertarianism isn't about throwing away all the rules. Strong contract enforcement is a cornerstone of free market capitalism (not the crony capitalism of the USA today), with civil litigation or binding arbitration critical for dispute resolution. Bastiat's "The Law" is one of the primary texts of libertarianism. You are mischaracterizing what libertarianism is, but it's probably got something to do with the fact that it is generally not taught correctly, and many of its adherents are, like most people, incompletely aware of the foundations of that which they believe in.
Roads are monopolized. Government collects revenues in the form of taxes, and uses those taxes to enrich well-connected private companies, yes. But ultimately, the revenue to build roads is collected by force in the form of legally mandated taxes. That's a monopoly. Nobody gets to compete.
There is a lot more to free banking than the brief period between 1816 and the Civil War. During much of that period, there were still state banks which enabled pyramiding of fractional reserves, which could cause bank failures. However, at no time when there was not a central bank was there ever a systemic risk to the financial systems as there have been at times such as the Great Depression and since 2008. The long-term value of the dollar rose a little bit over the 19th century, despite many shocks to the system (which were almost all due to inflation during periods of central bank interference). There is no reason at all to believe that a free banking system wouldn't work today, when information is cheap, and audits can be done effectively. Keep in mind the Federal Reserve has fought all efforts to conduct a full audit, and has propped up (with the Treasury's help) the largest cartels, at taxpayer expense. That's hardly protecting the consumer and the free market.
Read Murray Rothbard's "The Mystery of Banking" for more details. It's a great history of banking and money, with an emphasis on understanding the genesis, purpose, and consequences of central banks and monopolization of bank note issuance.
The straw man doesn't stand up to an investigation of the anarcho-capitalist model, either, if that's what you meant by anarchy. If people think that markets need regulating to avoid monopolies, and that a non-monopolized market is beneficial, how then can the legal granting of monopolies by the government over any number of matters (roads, law enforcement, education, the issuance of bank notes) also be beneficial? You cannot have it both ways, and must, at a minimum, address the fact that private security, education, and such exist, despite enormous disadvantages due to government monopolies crowding them out.
You left out the big question that most school districts also forget: How will they go about buying technology to get the results they want? Most, if not all, of the school system officials making purchasing decisions have near zero experience purchasing technology solutions. They fall for a sales pitch, a low bid, and/or a bribe, and then blame the people below them when things don't work out.
The quality of education is not a result of the amount spent on technology. It is almost pointless to fight it, though, because these decisions are made for political reasons in a vacuum of real debate, metrics, or general considerations about what gets the best results. On some level the teachers have a right to resist this, as it's a further encroachment on their autonomy and freedom to teach as they prefer. On the other hand, if teacher unions did not fight every attempt to rationally measure student success, they might get a seat at the table discussing how to handle certain kinds of problems.
Not so sure. Dumbphones, or feature phones, are big sellers in 2nd and 3rd world markets where access to power is a real concern. Not so much in the USA. Otherwise, people wouldn't buy these phones with dual-core processors and such. A daily charge is no big deal for anyone in the first world.
No need. Have you used a Nokia low-end phone lately? They can go two weeks without a charge. Seriously. I just lent a friend a 2320 for use while in the USA and it lasted a full 15 days. And yes, they made calls on it! Amazing.
No argument on any count. In no way did I mean to imply that I think you displayed any hint of racism. It's just that it seems any time anyone talks about racial social issues without being overtly PC about it they are accused of racism.
wikipedia says that in NYC, police arrest 200k black males every year, out of a total population of 1200k. 1/6th of that particular group gets arrested EVERY YEAR.
I'm shocked and relieved you weren't accused of being a racist just for posting those stats.
Right. But many paleoconservatives are starting to vote for him, whereas they used to be mainstream GOP guaranteed votes. Thus, he's splitting that vote.
Americans Elect's board is primarily staffed by the far right. This is simply an effort to split the liberal vote. Go look it up; it's pretty easy to find that Americans Elect's board alone makes it untrustworthy.
Not that finding the center between Dems and Republicans is worthwhile anyhow.
Interesting. Do you think this is an astroturfed counterpunch to the Ron Paul folks splitting the paleoconservative vote?
Cavernous ideological divide? What a load of crap. All the noise-making about how we need "moderate" candidates is asinine and misguided; the biggest things the two parties always work together on are favoritism towards big banks and wall street, and belligerent interventionist foreign policy. These are the two things that are the most damaging to our country - we create enemies abroad through militarism, and impoverish the middle class at home through inflationary policies which favor only the too-big-to-fail banks. "Moderate" candidates would continue these same policies, except would pay Romney-esque, slippery, two-faced lip service on social issues like gay marriage and abortion.
So let's compare:
1) C, C++, hell even Java : c = a+b (1 assembly instruction)
2) CPython: c = a + b ( > 2500 assembly instructions)
This means that a C program running on an 8086 will actually calculate faster than a python program running on a current pc.
Honest question - are you counting the 2500 instructions for program startup? If there are 2 addition operations, is it 5000 assembly instructions, or 2501? If the latter, does this matter for the majority of user applications? If you think it matters, tell me why would I care if a program takes a hundredth of a second to start up, but executes reasonably quickly once it's loaded?
Labor History is dominated by Marxists. I spoke to a Labor History professor (who told me that flat out) at a local university about why workers put up with really bad conditions in the industrial revolution, and how much of an effect did unionization have to fix it. His response was that only workers who were on the verge of starvation put up with bad conditions; the rest went back to the farm. It was an influx of Irish that ended up working the textile mills in the northeast USA, themselves escaping starvation at home, who were willing to deal with the awful conditions. And largely, unionization correlated with improved working conditions then and during other periods, but did not cause improvements in the general case.
Regarding health care, etc., do you even read the international news? The social democracies in Europe are almost totally bankrupt. Germany would probably maintain solvency on its own, but it's been subsidising everyone else's socialism, and is now at risk itself.
Yeah, exactly. Knowing how threads work, memory is allocated, all that is critical when you see a bunch of devs running about because their server can only handle three concurrent users. Asynchronous IO? They make a big deal of node.js because it has that. But it's been available in C via select() for decades.
Why not go on a few interviews and see how it goes? You are not established. That's an attitude that will set you up for major hurt. Get your resume together, and see if you're marketable. If you are, nothing lost but a day or two of paid time off to do the interviews. If not, you can make adjustments.
Ability to flow with change is critical for knowledge workers. It is not easy, but who said it should be? Given the quality of life we have, I'm thankful that as hard as this job can be, I'm not melting solder off trashed PCBs in China.
Years ago I decided to move sideways into a position doing C systems development instead of Java web development. My thinking was that few people under 30 (as of 2000) knew C, but it didn't seem to be going anywhere. Did that for a while, doing a little Perl and such on the side. I've been making moves sideways and slightly up since then, moving out of the Unix/Linux world into Microsoft.Net most recently. If you go to high in salary too fast, you find your career path played out by 35 (how old I am now).
By moving sideways, I've got a broad resume, with reasonable depth (just find challenging projects). I have a little headroom to move up salary-wise yet, and have a convincing story to tell that I a) am capable and willing to learn new technologies on the job, and b) don't mind making parallel or even slightly backward financial moves to find work, especially if it gives me exposure to new technologies.
There is nothing brilliant or insightful about this, yet people still fail to do it. I work with people who have been in the same job for 25 years. If they get laid off, they are screwed. No one will see them as anything other than set-in-their-ways old people.
The drawback for me is that I'm finding it harder to continue to get energized to learn new technologies. I can still do it, but it's becoming more of a hassle. Not so much the languages, but the specifics of frameworks and technology domains (i.e. web vs. traditional client-server vs. realtime). Probably more a personal limitation, I'm not the smartest guy in the world.
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Why the hell was this scored Troll? It's all bascially true, more or less, with the possible exception of Al-Qaeda requiring asymmetric warfare response. I'd suggest a review of foreign polcy FIRST.
Since you haven't been around to see it, I'll explain...it's not just David Koch. It's the Koch brothers, and they're referred to as "The Kochtopus" for getting their tentacles into everything. Case in point - the Tea Party movement started off as a true grass roots campaign to pressure politicians to end the bank bailouts. Most of the initial participants were educated on monetary systems and tend to be supporters of a strong dollar at worst or a gold standard at best. The Kochs bankrolled their way into the organization, literally bribing organizers to stop talking about Ron Paul, and substitute in Sarah Palin and then Michele Bachmann.
Understand that anarcho-capitalism is not closely related to anarchism, despite the similar sounding name. Anarcho-capitalism is strongly anti-violence, and unwaveringly emphasizes the criticality of personal rights (life, liberty, property).
The problem with what you're saying can be summed up in one word which we both, I assume, have a nasty, negative reaction to. The word? "Koch".
These guys are the very definition of neocon cronies, having co-opted the Tea Party movement from the Ron Paul types, replacing him with Michele Bachmann, and wrapping a very right-wing message in libertarian clothing. It's remarkable that you identified exactly the kind of people I was referring to.
Libertarianism isn't about throwing away all the rules. Strong contract enforcement is a cornerstone of free market capitalism (not the crony capitalism of the USA today), with civil litigation or binding arbitration critical for dispute resolution. Bastiat's "The Law" is one of the primary texts of libertarianism. You are mischaracterizing what libertarianism is, but it's probably got something to do with the fact that it is generally not taught correctly, and many of its adherents are, like most people, incompletely aware of the foundations of that which they believe in.
Roads are monopolized. Government collects revenues in the form of taxes, and uses those taxes to enrich well-connected private companies, yes. But ultimately, the revenue to build roads is collected by force in the form of legally mandated taxes. That's a monopoly. Nobody gets to compete.
There is a lot more to free banking than the brief period between 1816 and the Civil War. During much of that period, there were still state banks which enabled pyramiding of fractional reserves, which could cause bank failures. However, at no time when there was not a central bank was there ever a systemic risk to the financial systems as there have been at times such as the Great Depression and since 2008. The long-term value of the dollar rose a little bit over the 19th century, despite many shocks to the system (which were almost all due to inflation during periods of central bank interference). There is no reason at all to believe that a free banking system wouldn't work today, when information is cheap, and audits can be done effectively. Keep in mind the Federal Reserve has fought all efforts to conduct a full audit, and has propped up (with the Treasury's help) the largest cartels, at taxpayer expense. That's hardly protecting the consumer and the free market.
Read Murray Rothbard's "The Mystery of Banking" for more details. It's a great history of banking and money, with an emphasis on understanding the genesis, purpose, and consequences of central banks and monopolization of bank note issuance.
What's the problem with that? Seriously - please explain your objection to H1B.
The straw man doesn't stand up to an investigation of the anarcho-capitalist model, either, if that's what you meant by anarchy. If people think that markets need regulating to avoid monopolies, and that a non-monopolized market is beneficial, how then can the legal granting of monopolies by the government over any number of matters (roads, law enforcement, education, the issuance of bank notes) also be beneficial? You cannot have it both ways, and must, at a minimum, address the fact that private security, education, and such exist, despite enormous disadvantages due to government monopolies crowding them out.
You left out the big question that most school districts also forget: How will they go about buying technology to get the results they want? Most, if not all, of the school system officials making purchasing decisions have near zero experience purchasing technology solutions. They fall for a sales pitch, a low bid, and/or a bribe, and then blame the people below them when things don't work out.
The quality of education is not a result of the amount spent on technology. It is almost pointless to fight it, though, because these decisions are made for political reasons in a vacuum of real debate, metrics, or general considerations about what gets the best results. On some level the teachers have a right to resist this, as it's a further encroachment on their autonomy and freedom to teach as they prefer. On the other hand, if teacher unions did not fight every attempt to rationally measure student success, they might get a seat at the table discussing how to handle certain kinds of problems.
Not so sure. Dumbphones, or feature phones, are big sellers in 2nd and 3rd world markets where access to power is a real concern. Not so much in the USA. Otherwise, people wouldn't buy these phones with dual-core processors and such. A daily charge is no big deal for anyone in the first world.
No need. Have you used a Nokia low-end phone lately? They can go two weeks without a charge. Seriously. I just lent a friend a 2320 for use while in the USA and it lasted a full 15 days. And yes, they made calls on it! Amazing.
No argument on any count. In no way did I mean to imply that I think you displayed any hint of racism. It's just that it seems any time anyone talks about racial social issues without being overtly PC about it they are accused of racism.
wikipedia says that in NYC, police arrest 200k black males every year, out of a total population of 1200k. 1/6th of that particular group gets arrested EVERY YEAR.
I'm shocked and relieved you weren't accused of being a racist just for posting those stats.
Right. But many paleoconservatives are starting to vote for him, whereas they used to be mainstream GOP guaranteed votes. Thus, he's splitting that vote.
Americans Elect's board is primarily staffed by the far right. This is simply an effort to split the liberal vote. Go look it up; it's pretty easy to find that Americans Elect's board alone makes it untrustworthy.
Not that finding the center between Dems and Republicans is worthwhile anyhow.
Interesting. Do you think this is an astroturfed counterpunch to the Ron Paul folks splitting the paleoconservative vote?
Cavernous ideological divide? What a load of crap. All the noise-making about how we need "moderate" candidates is asinine and misguided; the biggest things the two parties always work together on are favoritism towards big banks and wall street, and belligerent interventionist foreign policy. These are the two things that are the most damaging to our country - we create enemies abroad through militarism, and impoverish the middle class at home through inflationary policies which favor only the too-big-to-fail banks. "Moderate" candidates would continue these same policies, except would pay Romney-esque, slippery, two-faced lip service on social issues like gay marriage and abortion.
So let's compare: 1) C, C++, hell even Java : c = a+b (1 assembly instruction) 2) CPython: c = a + b ( > 2500 assembly instructions)
This means that a C program running on an 8086 will actually calculate faster than a python program running on a current pc.
Honest question - are you counting the 2500 instructions for program startup? If there are 2 addition operations, is it 5000 assembly instructions, or 2501? If the latter, does this matter for the majority of user applications? If you think it matters, tell me why would I care if a program takes a hundredth of a second to start up, but executes reasonably quickly once it's loaded?
yeah, but they taste better.
Really? How do you know?
I'm almost certain he does not have Excel skills, but has skills getting other people to do the Excel bits for him.
Labor History is dominated by Marxists. I spoke to a Labor History professor (who told me that flat out) at a local university about why workers put up with really bad conditions in the industrial revolution, and how much of an effect did unionization have to fix it. His response was that only workers who were on the verge of starvation put up with bad conditions; the rest went back to the farm. It was an influx of Irish that ended up working the textile mills in the northeast USA, themselves escaping starvation at home, who were willing to deal with the awful conditions. And largely, unionization correlated with improved working conditions then and during other periods, but did not cause improvements in the general case.
Regarding health care, etc., do you even read the international news? The social democracies in Europe are almost totally bankrupt. Germany would probably maintain solvency on its own, but it's been subsidising everyone else's socialism, and is now at risk itself.
Yeah, that is probably a better idea given the valid comment a responder made about wasting the time of the interviewer.
Yeah, exactly. Knowing how threads work, memory is allocated, all that is critical when you see a bunch of devs running about because their server can only handle three concurrent users. Asynchronous IO? They make a big deal of node.js because it has that. But it's been available in C via select() for decades.
Why not go on a few interviews and see how it goes? You are not established. That's an attitude that will set you up for major hurt. Get your resume together, and see if you're marketable. If you are, nothing lost but a day or two of paid time off to do the interviews. If not, you can make adjustments.
Ability to flow with change is critical for knowledge workers. It is not easy, but who said it should be? Given the quality of life we have, I'm thankful that as hard as this job can be, I'm not melting solder off trashed PCBs in China.
Years ago I decided to move sideways into a position doing C systems development instead of Java web development. My thinking was that few people under 30 (as of 2000) knew C, but it didn't seem to be going anywhere. Did that for a while, doing a little Perl and such on the side. I've been making moves sideways and slightly up since then, moving out of the Unix/Linux world into Microsoft .Net most recently. If you go to high in salary too fast, you find your career path played out by 35 (how old I am now).
By moving sideways, I've got a broad resume, with reasonable depth (just find challenging projects). I have a little headroom to move up salary-wise yet, and have a convincing story to tell that I a) am capable and willing to learn new technologies on the job, and b) don't mind making parallel or even slightly backward financial moves to find work, especially if it gives me exposure to new technologies.
There is nothing brilliant or insightful about this, yet people still fail to do it. I work with people who have been in the same job for 25 years. If they get laid off, they are screwed. No one will see them as anything other than set-in-their-ways old people.
The drawback for me is that I'm finding it harder to continue to get energized to learn new technologies. I can still do it, but it's becoming more of a hassle. Not so much the languages, but the specifics of frameworks and technology domains (i.e. web vs. traditional client-server vs. realtime). Probably more a personal limitation, I'm not the smartest guy in the world.