Say you are a banana company. You have gained 6 times productivity, and as far as bananas are concerned you have 6 times more than before and won't starve. If your business model is to provide bananas only for your employees and your employees are happy to be payed only in bananas then everything is fine. Everyone just got a six time raise. But assume some employees want a few other things than bananas and that can't be grown locally by the company itself. The company (or the employees) would have to sell some bananas on the open market for money to buy those things (or directly trade bananas for those things).
But what if your company even with its 6 time productivity gain still can't match the competitor with its 12 time productivity gain and correspondingly half as expensive bananas. Nobody will buy your overpriced bananas so the employees won't be able to buy those things they wanted.
If the US is content with consuming only the things it produces itself, then congratulations, you now have six times as much as in 1960. But in 1960 and now it seems you also want to consume resources from other countries and so it becomes important how the goods you produce is valued on the global market.
"Look at it by analogy, if I work 40 hours a week and my neighbor works 20 hours a week, then I and my neighbor both go to working 60 hours a week, why would my paycheck be smaller than when I only worked 40?"
Because if your neighbor is in the same business as you, the competition will drive down profit margins resulting in lower wages. The more people that compete to do the same job, the lower you are going to have to pay to get the job done. On the other hand, the money you do get will be worth more, since the same lower profit margins also mean that you can buy those same services or goods cheaper.
"The growing concentration of wealth is undeniable."
That may well be, but diminished purchasing power for 99% for a population combined with a general 6 time productivity increase is not necessarily evidence for it.
If, for the sake of argument, productivity in US and the rest of the world were the same in 1960 and then productivity goes up 6 times in the US but productivity in the rest of the world goes up 12 times (to twice that of the US) wouldn't it stand to reason that US citizens would see diminished purchasing power where it comes to imported goods?
With the system you describe, an old painter nearing retirement could never buy a loaf of bread, since everyone would assume he might retire before he could paint their house. So what could he do, but rely on the kindness of family or strangers?
Here is a market opening for a third party who can bridge the generations, the banker. The painter gives some of his IOUs to the bank when he is young. These IOUs are "good", as in transformable into paint services since the painter is young. In return, when the painter is old, he gets repaid in IOUs that are then paid in by new young painters who want to take advantage of the same scheme. The old painter can then give these IOUs to the baker in return for a loaves of bread and the baker can use the IOUs to pay young painters for painting his house.
"It goes even beyond that. The GDP/capita in the U.S. has increased 6 fold (after adjustments for inflation) since 1960 and yet real income for 99% of us has declined."
Would this not apply only to an isolated economy? For a country with a trade balance, would you not have to measure the rate of the US GDP/Capita in 1960 vs that of the rest of the world at that time, and compare to the rate of the GDP/Capita of US today vs that of the rest of the world today? Perhaps that rate has not gone up as much?
Well, content-wise the review author shares that state is bad for scalability, but not why. (It is because it makes load balancing less efficient, as consecutive requests from the same user have to be routed to the same server, the one that keeps that user's state. Optimally the load balancer would be able to send each request to the server with the lowest load for the moment.)
" If each person gives 10 dollars to one individual, then each person is 10 dollars poorer, and that person is 10*X dollars richer."
Let's then say that the guy who gets all the money uses it to start a profitable business, that can repay the 10 dollars plus a good interest to all the guys who gave 10 dollars at the beginning (and perhaps offer employment to some of them).
Say that some article the hive mind disagrees with gets overwhelmed and the "slashdotted" tag goes up with the article link on the front page, as per usual. To what extent does this encourage readers to keep clicking the link in schadenfreude?
"Global warming is caused by a large extent by people"
vs
"have no notable impact on the change in the earth's climate"
Humans could have a _notable_ impact but still not cause global warming to any _large_ extent. Perhaps our contribution is insignificant? Isn't that why "tipping point theory" was invoked (to demonstrate how what would seem like an insignificant contribution could in fact cause global warming to a large extent)?
The solution: Get a cheap headphone (optionally cut off the plug, as it is all you really need) and have it at the ready - as soon as you plug it in to the headphone jack the computer is silent.
"Trees don't grow by an algorithm. If you believe this, you don't understand anything the Creationists don't."
Not only fractal growth but also Darwinian evolution by natural selection is algorithmic (see for example "Darwin's Dangerous Idea" by Dan Dennett). Please note that many creationists understand this quite well (without buying into the concept that Darwinian evolution is responsible for the speciation on earth).
Evolution occurs in response to environmental (selective) pressures. The closest candidate to a "designer" of an organism is its environment. Interestingly, for many organisms on this planet the environment "is intelligent" (contains other clever organisms). So talking of nature as "the (distributed) intelligent designer" is apt, at least for some cases.
If he sees a rather small risk that hyperinflation would happen it would be stupid to take your bet, but the risk could still be big enough that it would also be stupid to stick with USD.
"what, did they count the number of stack frames between renderPage() and drawLine(), roughly speaking?"
As far as I can understand, that's roughly it. Of course, there is also translation costs between different data structures used in different layers and sometimes work is done more than once (repeated in many layers) due to lack of coordination. While I'm speaking from a general standpoint and don't know about these APIs, pretending that abstraction layers have no performance cost is not reasonable so the argument from MS bears some plausibility. But the cost may well be small enough as to be negligible, end-to-end benchmark tests could certainly turn out to demonstrate a very small real life performance impact, so while their argument may be technically reasonable it remains to be seen if it is actually very relevant.
Slashdot Mirror
Say you are a banana company. You have gained 6 times productivity, and as far as bananas are concerned you have 6 times more than before and won't starve. If your business model is to provide bananas only for your employees and your employees are happy to be payed only in bananas then everything is fine. Everyone just got a six time raise. But assume some employees want a few other things than bananas and that can't be grown locally by the company itself. The company (or the employees) would have to sell some bananas on the open market for money to buy those things (or directly trade bananas for those things).
But what if your company even with its 6 time productivity gain still can't match the competitor with its 12 time productivity gain and correspondingly half as expensive bananas. Nobody will buy your overpriced bananas so the employees won't be able to buy those things they wanted.
If the US is content with consuming only the things it produces itself, then congratulations, you now have six times as much as in 1960. But in 1960 and now it seems you also want to consume resources from other countries and so it becomes important how the goods you produce is valued on the global market.
"Look at it by analogy, if I work 40 hours a week and my neighbor works 20 hours a week, then I and my neighbor both go to working 60 hours a week, why would my paycheck be smaller than when I only worked 40?"
Because if your neighbor is in the same business as you, the competition will drive down profit margins resulting in lower wages. The more people that compete to do the same job, the lower you are going to have to pay to get the job done. On the other hand, the money you do get will be worth more, since the same lower profit margins also mean that you can buy those same services or goods cheaper.
"The growing concentration of wealth is undeniable."
That may well be, but diminished purchasing power for 99% for a population combined with a general 6 time productivity increase is not necessarily evidence for it.
If, for the sake of argument, productivity in US and the rest of the world were the same in 1960 and then productivity goes up 6 times in the US but productivity in the rest of the world goes up 12 times (to twice that of the US) wouldn't it stand to reason that US citizens would see diminished purchasing power where it comes to imported goods?
With the system you describe, an old painter nearing retirement could never buy a loaf of bread, since everyone would assume he might retire before he could paint their house. So what could he do, but rely on the kindness of family or strangers?
Here is a market opening for a third party who can bridge the generations, the banker. The painter gives some of his IOUs to the bank when he is young. These IOUs are "good", as in transformable into paint services since the painter is young. In return, when the painter is old, he gets repaid in IOUs that are then paid in by new young painters who want to take advantage of the same scheme. The old painter can then give these IOUs to the baker in return for a loaves of bread and the baker can use the IOUs to pay young painters for painting his house.
"offshoring, outsourcing and "free trade" destroyed the American manufacturing sector in the 1980s and 1990s"
Sooo....OWS in the US protests against offshoring jobs to other countries...and that protest goes global? "Dey gave us juuuubs"?!
"It goes even beyond that. The GDP/capita in the U.S. has increased 6 fold (after adjustments for inflation) since 1960 and yet real income for 99% of us has declined."
Would this not apply only to an isolated economy? For a country with a trade balance, would you not have to measure the rate of the US GDP/Capita in 1960 vs that of the rest of the world at that time, and compare to the rate of the GDP/Capita of US today vs that of the rest of the world today? Perhaps that rate has not gone up as much?
Well, content-wise the review author shares that state is bad for scalability, but not why. (It is because it makes load balancing less efficient, as consecutive requests from the same user have to be routed to the same server, the one that keeps that user's state. Optimally the load balancer would be able to send each request to the server with the lowest load for the moment.)
How many woods would a magnetron ignite if a magnetron could ignite woods.
But GPS tech relies on Einstein being right, no?
So we have to assume Einstein was right in order to prove him wrong...?
" If each person gives 10 dollars to one individual, then each person is 10 dollars poorer, and that person is 10*X dollars richer."
Let's then say that the guy who gets all the money uses it to start a profitable business, that can repay the 10 dollars plus a good interest to all the guys who gave 10 dollars at the beginning (and perhaps offer employment to some of them).
What about an intentional slashdotting ?
Say that some article the hive mind disagrees with gets overwhelmed and the "slashdotted" tag goes up with the article link on the front page, as per usual. To what extent does this encourage readers to keep clicking the link in schadenfreude?
"I'm not sure what the hell you're trying to say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
"Global warming is caused by a large extent by people"
vs
"have no notable impact on the change in the earth's climate"
Humans could have a _notable_ impact but still not cause global warming to any _large_ extent. Perhaps our contribution is insignificant? Isn't that why "tipping point theory" was invoked (to demonstrate how what would seem like an insignificant contribution could in fact cause global warming to a large extent)?
So moving to pass phrases with a random character thrown in _would_ be a (non-brief) solution to the problem, right?
"although, for the sake of truth, universal agreement by all witnesses is as close as you get to an absolute in reality"
I had a friend who tried to convince me of the merits of Christianity using exactly that argument.
What is the entropy of an English 7 word phrase with at least one random character thrown in?
The solution: Get a cheap headphone (optionally cut off the plug, as it is all you really need) and have it at the ready - as soon as you plug it in to the headphone jack the computer is silent.
"Trees don't grow by an algorithm. If you believe this, you don't understand anything the Creationists don't."
Not only fractal growth but also Darwinian evolution by natural selection is algorithmic (see for example "Darwin's Dangerous Idea" by Dan Dennett). Please note that many creationists understand this quite well (without buying into the concept that Darwinian evolution is responsible for the speciation on earth).
In a Time of Universal Confusion, telling things clearly is a Revolutionary Act
It is a good point!
Evolution occurs in response to environmental (selective) pressures. The closest candidate to a "designer" of an organism is its environment. Interestingly, for many organisms on this planet the environment "is intelligent" (contains other clever organisms). So talking of nature as "the (distributed) intelligent designer" is apt, at least for some cases.
"The Internet did it!"
there's a contrap for that.
Couldn't they synch their watches and agree that Joe looks first ?
If he sees a rather small risk that hyperinflation would happen it would be stupid to take your bet, but the risk could still be big enough that it would also be stupid to stick with USD.
"what, did they count the number of stack frames between renderPage() and drawLine(), roughly speaking?"
As far as I can understand, that's roughly it. Of course, there is also translation costs between different data structures used in different layers and sometimes work is done more than once (repeated in many layers) due to lack of coordination. While I'm speaking from a general standpoint and don't know about these APIs, pretending that abstraction layers have no performance cost is not reasonable so the argument from MS bears some plausibility. But the cost may well be small enough as to be negligible, end-to-end benchmark tests could certainly turn out to demonstrate a very small real life performance impact, so while their argument may be technically reasonable it remains to be seen if it is actually very relevant.
And why is that argument not applicable to any cloud server (it will be local for someone)?