Because it's at the highest rate since the late 1920's. What happened then, stork? Something really Great.
Yeah, and what provoked the Great Depression. Let's see. The USA passed a bunch of protectionist legislation and the federal reserve tightened the money supply, foolishly. So, we cut off the world, they cut off us, and the result was a collapse in the world economy.
And what does Obama want to do? Geez, he wants to cut off trade and tighten the money supply. What happens after that?
Giant companies like IBM lay off thousands of American workers at a time while continuing to import H1-B workers.
I'm yawning at your xenophobia. I'd rather have workers coming to the USA from another country to earn 75k a year than stay overseas to get paid 5k a year.
Investment firms take crazy risks and get bailed out by the government when they crash and burn
It was actually Democrats that introduced the idea of Federal lending to investment and banking firms. What used to happen in the USA is that there were scores of banking failures during an economic downturn and mom and pop would lose everything. Have you ever seen "It's a wonderful life". We could make it simple. A bank can't lend someone money to buy a house unless it has money to lend.
Let's take a look at Bear Sterns. Let's say the Feds do -nothing-. What happens? Everyone who is invested or has a security at Bear Sterns, withdraws all their money at once, as they were doing. Bear collapses and those people who weren't first in line get their savings wiped out.
You know who is first in line. I'll give you a hint, it's not Mom and Pop at home.
Now, if one big financial services house goes down, what do you think people start doing at all of the other banks, like Lehman, or your local bank, or anywhere else - they start cashing out all of their money, if they get out in time. You have half the country with its 401ks sitting in some investment bank like Bear or Chase or someone else, and, if, all of those people pull their accounts at once, people get pennies per dollar on their retirement and the country takes a bath.
Imagine an america where people lose confidence in all banks of all kinds, where everyone withdraws their money from everything....you get -thousands- of bank failures, a country where 10% of everyone has cash hidden under their mattress or is converted to gold or some sort of a commodity, and 90% of the investment deposits are basically blown out and gone because the banks failed. That, my friend, is what made the great depression happen. National unemployment of at least 30% follows and hits 50% in large sections of the country. Farms don't get planted and food prices skyrocket.
So... geez, what do you do? In the aftermath of that mess, Roosevelt put in the FDIC and strengthened the Federal Reserve, so it can provide liquidity to the system, not so a few rich people keep their money - as they've already lost by investing in stupid securities, but so that the banks don't collapse, and people get to keep their assets.
yet the middle class is SOL on credit card debt and ARMs
Uh, how are you SOL on credit cards? Don't pay them. I got into trouble with them, and it wasn't George Bush's fault. It was mine, and mine alone. I'm not a victim, just someone that did something stupid. So what did I do? I just quit paying them until I got decent settlement offers out of each, and in turn, am paying then down. All that interest goes away, all those late charges go away, pretty much a better deal than you would get with any of these so called credit counselling agencies. Similarly, I bought my house with an ARM, but I knew it was an ARM and I refinanced before it reset. How could people not know they did something foolish.
Warren Buffet bet [forbes.com] Forture 400 CEO's a million dollars if they could prove they paid a higher tax rate than their secretaries. Guess how many have collected so far? Zero
I'm sorry I posted and can't mod you up. Anyone from the Philly area should understand this. Great analogy.
Thank you. And the best part is, the Phillies came back last night to win the game, so Charlie Manuel is a good manager with a clear sense of the game. Had they lost, we'd be listening to WIP arguing over whether or not he should be fired. Just imagine if they had a WIP about science. It would be a pretty fun show, actually.
Charlie Manuel, manager of the Phillies, yanks out home run hitter Pat Burrel for pinch hitter Tso Taguchi, because Taguchi is said to be a better fielder and base runner. But.. Pat has worked on his field, made a number of great plays in outfield, hits 30 home runs, and Taguchi is batting like.150, and just gets a pop fly and, fails to get on base again.
Therefor, Charlie Manuel is a godamned moron, and if the Phillies blow this game against the Dodgers in the same way they blew the season by dropping behind the Mets, I hope they fire his sorry ass. But, if he somehow turns it around, and gets the Phillies into the world series, he's the finest man I ever knew and I hope they make a saint of him.
Your scientists should be thankful they are not "stupid jocks playing baseball."
"Booooo!!!! Fire the guy... this guy shouldn't be a university.. he ought to be doing showing the moon through a 4" Meade at the local middle school... if he could find the moon. retard"
We should probably invite the original scientists to come to Philadelphia, so we can throw snowballs at them and boo them, the same way we booed Santa Clause.
That's -LIFE-. People take their best shot at mastering the unknown, namely, the future, and if they get it right, they are heros, and if they get it wrong, they are goats. Baseball players, bankers, drillers, salesman, farmers, all either have to guess the future correctly, or, they pay the price... hell, we all have to, or we pay the price. Why should scientists be treated any differently?
So you've never heard of those no-name colleges "Columbia University" and "Harvard Law School" (where he served as president of the Harvard Law Review)?
That's not much compared to Bill Clinton:
Undergraduate : Georgetown Graduate : Oxford University (Rhodes Scholar) Law School : Yale
Then, by the time Clinton's in his 30's, he's a popular governor of Arkansas, turns the state's economy around, is identified as a rising star nationally because -he's a good leader-, and then, runs for President, and wins.
What's Obama done in comparison to -that-? Nothing, really. I mean, he becomes a state legislature, and his biggest claim to fame there is redistricting the state so that more blacks could get elected to the leadership, supporting a bunch of affirmative action and pro-life stuff, and along the way, nearly depriving the entire state of electricity as part of a misguided plot to try and bankrupt the local utility. Illinois' economy sucks before and sucks after, the schools are still terrible where he's at.. nothing.. but he runs for Senate and gets in because in Chi-town he's got 100% of the black vote and splits the white vote with his opposition. IT's a good political strategy, for sure, but its not nearly the same caliber of education, leadership, or success that Bill Clinton achieved.
The ones who remember how abysmal the past 8 years have been, and how much worse the next 4-8 would be with McCain keeping the Bush economy running.
George Bush - corn $6/bushel Bill Clinton - corn $2.5/bushel
Yep, they really want to go back to the good old days of Clinton, and make less than half of what they are making now.
Especially those who know that Bush squandered every penny and ounce of respect this country had amassed in over two centuries.
Oh, you mean all that respect LBJ earned when he invaded Viet Nam? Or, that respect earned when Jimmy Carter let the Iranians bully us around for 444 days, or, turned the Olympics into a political event by canceling American participation?
And how, prey tell, do Democrats engender the respect of the world, when, as we speak, they complain that the Iraqis are actually making money and we shouldn't be spending money on reconstruction over there. Does the world really think that we shouldn't have to spend to build up a country that we blew up? OR, when, if we prematurely leave Iraq, and all of those hundreds of thousands of Iraqi people that supported the USA in Iraq, get butchered, and Obama does nothing, then, will that earn the respect of the world? Or, when Obama waffles on Russian bullying of a NATO ally, say, Poland, will -that- earn the respect of the world?
The world may not like that Bush invaded Iraq, but I guarantee you that they respect Bush more for staying and trying to turn that situation around, then they will Obama, who plans on walking out.
The right-wing anarcho-capitalist nutjobs HATE it that "liberal" states tend to be far more economically prosperous than the "conservative" anti-environment, anti-union states. It kills them
Well yeah, as much as you steal food, oil and raw materials from everyone and call it a basic right to consume, of course you should come out ahead. The amazing thing is, that you've even fucked up manufacturing in your states despite having the cheapest water, food and electricity of any of the industrialized nations in the world. Yeah, Wall Street has taken a beating as of late, while commodities have gone up, but maybe that's just because the world has finally figured out American cities are husks of their former selves. They aren't centers of manufacturing, because its t o o d i r t y.... instead, they are just packed full of poor people that shoot each other all day long over a bag of rocks and even that seems preferable to the left wing than actually building a factory because it might hurt mother earth. What person would invest in that? Let alone live there.
So yeah, if you want to have economic fairness, let's let American farmers, miners, and oil men be able to pool together and negotiate quotas for their products, the same way that city bound democrats want to have for unions band together and control the price of labor. Assuming Obama somehow is magically able to drive down the price of commodities without producing anything more, let's revisit every state between the east coast and the west, and Republicans will only need to hang one sign, to get control of all of middle America:
George Bush: Corn - $6/bushel Barrack Obama: Corn - $2/bushel
George Bush: Coal - $100/ton Barrack Obama: Corn - $20/ton
And we could do the same in every state... you tell me, which party these states will go for?
The fact of the matter is, under Bush, US Exports have gone more than under any US PResident, EVER. But what's really stupid about this assertion is that you seem to think that rich people are going to magically stop pulling money out of the country the moment you make its investment return worse. That's utterly retarded. If I have a business in the USA that earns 10% a year on my investment, and Obama comes along next year, raises my taxes, and jacks me down to 5% a year investment, while at the same time Ireland offers me 15%, just where do you think that business is going to be, assuming that I do not close it down altogether?
Decrease the income inequality
Why this obsession with income inequality? Seriously. If you want a billion dollars, start a company that can make a billion dollars. If you don't, then don't bitch about your laziness, stupidity, or lack of luck. At least, if you tried, you had the opportunity to do so and that's a lot more than you get in other countries. Sorry, the whole idea where everybody gets that same crappy food to be equal from uncle sam's public cafeteria totally sucks. I don't like institutional soup for lunch. I want to make more money so that I can eat filet mignon and if some homeless guy smoked crack and can't eat that, that's not my fault, it's his.
I wonder how many farmers will vote for Obama when he says the price of corn too high? How many miners will vote for Obama, when he says the price of iron is too high and there should be no coal mining at all? How many woodsmen will vote for Obama, when he wants to ban foresting? How many autoworkers will vote for Obama, when he wants the government to make them cars not everyone wants to buy? How many investors will vote for Obama, when he wants to raise their taxes? How many of the 400,000 Americans working in the oil business will vote for Obama, when he says that, a profit less than half of what Apple makes on iTunes is too much? How many workers who manufacturer for America's record exports, will vote for Obama, after he speaks of cutting off free trade? I mean, everyone rags on the Bush economy, but, the ones that are primarily getting screwed are those who live in cities anyway and cities were already for Democrats. There's plenty of farmers, miners, manufacturers, all who like that they are finally getting a decent value for breaking their backs in the fields, tunnels and factories.
Reagan was a two time governor of California, a leader, of all things, the California Screen Actors guild, gave numerous presentations and did a lot of fundraising and organization building to really launch the right wing as it is today. It was Reagan that created the now defunct alliance between libertarian Republicans and religious fundamentalists that defined the Republican Party. So, Reagan stepped into the office already an effective leader, party builder and public speaker.
Similarly, Clinton did not have near the track record that Reagan did, largely because he won the election more than 20 years younger than Reagan was. But, Clinton started out with a stellar academic career (you know, Rhodes scholar), wheras Obama went to a no-name college. Clinton did basically build a machine out Arkansas politics, built of the modern DLC, (despised by the left), and, essentially built, in 1992, a political alliance of liberals and just enough fiscal conservatives to make his election winnable. I mean, I voted for Clinton twice, even though I am a staunch Republican, largely because the Federal deficit is a huge concern of mine and Clinton's book had a plan for building it up, and Bush Sr was the worst President ever (at least until his son came along).
In this election, honestly, the key thing is that neither candidate has a lot of real executive experience. McCain, for all of his experience, has always been something more of a one man show than a party builder, and Obama doesn't have any executive track record at all. If we were to have gone solely by genuine executive experience, then the best candidate on the Democrats was actually Bill Richardson - far too moderate to be elected by the liberal vetters. He was a popular governor, a party builder, a key member of Clinton's cabinet, and has done a bunch of stuff. On the Repblican, Mitt Romney was a successful governor AND businessman. But, as usual, the extremists on both sides trashed the genuinely most qualified people and we got this Obama and McCain instead.
I've always liked the Intel compilers... and I even once plinked down some bucks for the Intel compiler and vTune when I was writing commodity server back in the day... but the thing that keeps me away from Intel now is that I don't know how much I can trust that compiler to produce good code for AMD chips. Even though they have nearly the same instruction sets, they are very different internally and it follows that the timings and sequences of the instructions might well be different. I just don't know... and the other thing too is that I don't know how well deploying an Intel compiled solution would even fly on a Linux platform. Doing a source / make solution almost seems like it would be out of the question. Are these perceptions unfounded, or are they accurate. I defer to your experience and await your answer literally with baited breath.
Well, this is arguable. Arrays are essentially pointers in C++. Semantically you can define sized arrays at compile time
I'll give you this. What frustrates me is the lack of multidimensional arrays of various types, but I'm looking at Boost and I think tuple is a better solution for what I'm trying to do. Actually, I might have to take back everything bad I said as I'm sitting here reading through boost and the C++0x standard and I'm like, this is really, really cool.
IN CONGRESS, JULY 4, 1776 The unanimous Declaration of the thirteen united States of America
When in the Course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. â" That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, â" That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security. â" Such has been the patient sufferance of these Colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former Systems of Government. The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world.
He has refused his Assent to Laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good.
He has forbidden his Governors to pass Laws of immediate and pressing importance, unless suspended in their operation till his Assent should be obtained; and when so suspended, he has utterly neglected to attend to them.
He has refused to pass other Laws for the accommodation of large districts of people, unless those people would relinquish the right of Representation in the Legislature, a right inestimable to them and formidable to tyrants only.
He has called together legislative bodies at places unusual, uncomfortable, and distant from the depository of their Public Records, for the sole purpose of fatiguing them into compliance with his measures.
He has dissolved Representative Houses repeatedly, for opposing with manly firmness his invasions on the rights of the people.
He has refused for a long time, after such dissolutions, to cause others to be elected, whereby the Legislative Powers, incapable of Annihilation, have returned to the People at large for their exercise; the State remaining in the mean time exposed to all the dangers of invasion from without, and convulsions within.
He has endeavoured to prevent the population of these States; for that purpose obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migrations hither, and raising the conditions of new Appropriations of Lands.
He has obstructed the Administration of Justice by refusing his Assent to Laws for establishing Judiciary Powers.
He has made Judges dependent on his Will alone for the tenure of their offices, and the amount and payment of their salaries.
He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harass our people and eat out their substance.
He has kept among us, in times of peace, Standing A
Guns and homemade bombs worked pretty good against an army with tanks, snipers and airplanes in Algeria, Viet Nam, Afghanistan (twice), and in Iraq. So yeah, let's imagine a scenario where the Feds try to impose some sort of dictatorship... you'd have an army of 500,000 active duty soldiers trying to suppress an technologically sophisticated and armed citizenry with 80 million rifles and god knows what sort of homemade contraptions. Good luck. Government by the consent of the governed is a statement of fact, not an ideal.
Um, I'm sorry, but... what the hell are you talking about? Restricting pointers?
Yes, restricting pointers.
You know how you tell that C++0x disappoints? It's that arrays are still not first class objects in the language. It's that you can't do cool stuff like attach extra junk to the prologue and epilogue of a function and then walk up the call graph and put things in there. I don't see any keywords for specifying the endianness of an integer - how useful would that be.. to be able to say "bigend int foo" or "littleend int foo". I'd like to be able to specify a structure or a class which could have a single value be composed of a few bits in utterly random places in it. In other words, you could say something like:
struct foo { int a bits 1-2 this+1.2, bits 4-5 this+3.3 };
which you would read as int a bits 1-2 are at a byte and bit offset from the structure.
And, while we were at it, how about packed pointers. AMD64 has 64 bit pointers and we can easily stuff some extra crap at the high end of them if the compiler knew to strip it out before we dereferenced them. You could implement that as a mov and an and.
If you do want to "guard" your pointers, it would be interesting to perhaps tag different pointers as having different selectors for those hardware architectures that support it, like Intel. I mean, you could make programs a lot safer under Intel and AMD if you didn't use a flat memory model. Put all of input data onto their own segments and lock it down with the hardware mmu. If it blows up, or overruns, oh well. No need to check arrays in that case because the hardware will do it. And of course, having some explicit language support for memory mapping seems useful.
To me, a language like C or C++ is that you can evolve your own exact brick of memory and carve it up in some way... really, the idea of C is almost to be just to be a very fancy macro assembler and C++ was to throw a bit of object orientedness around it, if you want.
But, instead, we have iterators and containers and ever more powerful templates and, gross, garbage collection support... that's all nice and all, but, its all indicative of a movement towards this idea that C++ is -only- an OOP language and libraries are written on building OOP programs and not necessarily smaller systems ones. C was short and sweet and simple and fast and C++ was a couple of useful things on it at first but now its just getting out of hand with this C++0x.
The great irony, of course, is that C++ templates and, wow, look at generics in C++0x, are so incredibly powerful that, what we have is a extremely high level language that still doesn't do comma delimited output of numbers. It's schizophrenic, is what it is.
Two years is still a little short, I think. One possible reason for the lack of warming at present could be the increase in particles in the air put out by China in the last 10 years.
That's an interesting point. For me, the thing is, if Chinese pollution were dragging down global temperatures, we should have seen a flatter run up in the 1990s than we did, as the industrialization went online. So, I would be a bit skeptical about the Chinese soot theory. One thing though, to really see this, would be if there was a pollution particulate shape function in climate models, so that, for each cell, you could get a distribution of different shapes of suspended particles in the atmosphere and get their effect overall. Like, it might seem silly, but maybe the shape of one kind of particle of pollution along with its size might influence not only cooling but also things like cloud formation and ocean heat exchanges...
But the main thing, really, is this. I think it is fair to say that the charge to regulate CO2 or humanity will die is severely overhyped. I think the better argument is that humans manage the chemistry of the soil (for farming), and we manage the chemistry of increasingly large bodies of water (controlling ph of pools and lakes), and, so, it stands to reason that we ought to manage the composition of the atmosphere as well. The problem is, if, lets say, scientists get AGW totally wrong, its going to set the overall cause of science back and back severely at a time when humanity seems poised to make some rather large breakthroughs, if only we stick it out. The deal is, even if human activity is not really causing the climate changes we undergoing, the very fact that our energy consumption and population are both growing exponentially means that it is inevitable that we will. So, we need to have some movement towards sustainability but if AGW is overhyped, then people will just chuck the baby out with the bathwater and arrive at a foolish position.
No, you can't. The only thing that we can really know for sure, is if, the lack of sunspots continues for say a year, maybe two years, AND, the climate temperatures deviate from what the climate models would otherwise predict. While I'm not 100% sold on the climate models that we have, and am sort of skeptical of them, I'm not jumping into bed with those skeptics who would dismiss AGW as bunk. It would seem to me that those skeptics should have their own climate models that have something we can test. As it is, all we have is this notion that there might be some link between sunspots and climate, but not much of a physical link that we can really go out and measure and correlate to climate, and we won't have that until those climate models we do have fail spectacularly. So, right now, the La Nina is taking the rap for the present global cooling, but, La Nina has been over for a few months now, and the earth's temperatures are either slightly declining or flat, according to the latest satellite temperatures. If we have falling temperatures for at least year we can worry, and if we start falling faster, than we can really worry, but for today, all we can really do is note that if it snows unusually, toss out a link on Slashdot to sunspots and make some snarky comments about how Hansen's FORTRAN really blows.
I read his last book cover to cover, and it was pretty much crap, and, ironically, this "sequel" actually proves it.
In Guns, Germs and Steel, Jared went out of his way to show that some cultures were stupider than others because of all of these manner of environmental forces.
The comparitive historic poverty of Africa has -nothing- to do with the choices Africans made, for example. It came down to a sad and unfortunate combination of natural resources, and they were oh so helpless.
Conversely, early civilizations did not come to dominate the world for a time because of a culture that was better at world domination, instead, they dominated because every other culture had some lame excuse for not taking mathematics from basic algebra into the calculus or some other technological advance.
Of course, Jared even tips his hand as to the point of the book. It couldn't be that some cultures had adopted values that lead to bad decision making, that, would why open up the whole can of worms about cultural worth and thus invite old arguments about cultural superiority. No, no no, we can't have that. But...
In this new book, it turns out that our culture -must- change, and -must- make new choices, in order to save our precious mother earth. The question is then, if there are smart moves to make, and dumb moves to make, is it all remotely possible that European cultures of 1500-1914, American culture of 1800-1960, Chinese culture up until around 1500, Roman culture up till around 200AD, all had some sort of spark of superiority that allowed them to make good decisions and good choices when confronted with environmental change, whereas, other cultures have not?
Let's think about the gobbledygook we right, Jared!
Those of us who are paranoid about the sun have got some justification for our beliefs. First off, the new solar cycle is somewhat late, depending on who you believe. Secondly, there have been very few sunspots this year. In fact, right now, we have gone 30 days without a single sunspot.
GCC should learn from Intel here. ic is way way ahead of them.
I've always liked Intel's compiler but I wonder -- what does ic do that gnu doesn't? Yeah, I know that gnu's error messages make no sense but it does seem to be more standards correct and to generate working code.
I must be mentally ill, but, as much as I gripe about C++ and now C++0x, (even calling it C++#), I have to know, does anyone know when GNU targets the compiler to be due? I mean, I can't imagine them chasing a moving target but with the standard evolving I'm sure there's some stuff that they could work on.
I looked at their C++0x implementation web site, and it looks like they have a way to go:
Slashdot Mirror
Because it's at the highest rate since the late 1920's. What happened then, stork? Something really Great.
Yeah, and what provoked the Great Depression. Let's see. The USA passed a bunch of protectionist legislation and the federal reserve tightened the money supply, foolishly. So, we cut off the world, they cut off us, and the result was a collapse in the world economy.
And what does Obama want to do? Geez, he wants to cut off trade and tighten the money supply. What happens after that?
Giant companies like IBM lay off thousands of American workers at a time while continuing to import H1-B workers.
I'm yawning at your xenophobia. I'd rather have workers coming to the USA from another country to earn 75k a year than stay overseas to get paid 5k a year.
Investment firms take crazy risks and get bailed out by the government when they crash and burn
It was actually Democrats that introduced the idea of Federal lending to investment and banking firms. What used to happen in the USA is that there were scores of banking failures during an economic downturn and mom and pop would lose everything. Have you ever seen "It's a wonderful life". We could make it simple. A bank can't lend someone money to buy a house unless it has money to lend.
Let's take a look at Bear Sterns. Let's say the Feds do -nothing-. What happens? Everyone who is invested or has a security at Bear Sterns, withdraws all their money at once, as they were doing. Bear collapses and those people who weren't first in line get their savings wiped out.
You know who is first in line. I'll give you a hint, it's not Mom and Pop at home.
Now, if one big financial services house goes down, what do you think people start doing at all of the other banks, like Lehman, or your local bank, or anywhere else - they start cashing out all of their money, if they get out in time. You have half the country with its 401ks sitting in some investment bank like Bear or Chase or someone else, and, if, all of those people pull their accounts at once, people get pennies per dollar on their retirement and the country takes a bath.
Imagine an america where people lose confidence in all banks of all kinds, where everyone withdraws their money from everything....you get -thousands- of bank failures, a country where 10% of everyone has cash hidden under their mattress or is converted to gold or some sort of a commodity, and 90% of the investment deposits are basically blown out and gone because the banks failed. That, my friend, is what made the great depression happen. National unemployment of at least 30% follows and hits 50% in large sections of the country. Farms don't get planted and food prices skyrocket.
So... geez, what do you do? In the aftermath of that mess, Roosevelt put in the FDIC and strengthened the Federal Reserve, so it can provide liquidity to the system, not so a few rich people keep their money - as they've already lost by investing in stupid securities, but so that the banks don't collapse, and people get to keep their assets.
yet the middle class is SOL on credit card debt and ARMs
Uh, how are you SOL on credit cards? Don't pay them. I got into trouble with them, and it wasn't George Bush's fault. It was mine, and mine alone. I'm not a victim, just someone that did something stupid. So what did I do? I just quit paying them until I got decent settlement offers out of each, and in turn, am paying then down. All that interest goes away, all those late charges go away, pretty much a better deal than you would get with any of these so called credit counselling agencies. Similarly, I bought my house with an ARM, but I knew it was an ARM and I refinanced before it reset. How could people not know they did something foolish.
Warren Buffet bet [forbes.com] Forture 400 CEO's a million dollars if they could prove they paid a higher tax rate than their secretaries. Guess how many have collected so far? Zero
Questions abound.
Well... they both cause cancer, just to bring this back on topic
who, Obama and McCain?
I'm sorry I posted and can't mod you up. Anyone from the Philly area should understand this. Great analogy.
Thank you. And the best part is, the Phillies came back last night to win the game, so Charlie Manuel is a good manager with a clear sense of the game. Had they lost, we'd be listening to WIP arguing over whether or not he should be fired. Just imagine if they had a WIP about science. It would be a pretty fun show, actually.
Charlie Manuel, manager of the Phillies, yanks out home run hitter Pat Burrel for pinch hitter Tso Taguchi, because Taguchi is said to be a better fielder and base runner. But.. Pat has worked on his field, made a number of great plays in outfield, hits 30 home runs, and Taguchi is batting like .150, and just gets a pop fly and, fails to get on base again.
Therefor, Charlie Manuel is a godamned moron, and if the Phillies blow this game against the Dodgers in the same way they blew the season by dropping behind the Mets, I hope they fire his sorry ass. But, if he somehow turns it around, and gets the Phillies into the world series, he's the finest man I ever knew and I hope they make a saint of him.
Your scientists should be thankful they are not "stupid jocks playing baseball."
"Booooo!!!! Fire the guy... this guy shouldn't be a university.. he ought to be doing showing the moon through a 4" Meade at the local middle school... if he could find the moon. retard"
We should probably invite the original scientists to come to Philadelphia, so we can throw snowballs at them and boo them, the same way we booed Santa Clause.
That's -LIFE-. People take their best shot at mastering the unknown, namely, the future, and if they get it right, they are heros, and if they get it wrong, they are goats. Baseball players, bankers, drillers, salesman, farmers, all either have to guess the future correctly, or, they pay the price... hell, we all have to, or we pay the price. Why should scientists be treated any differently?
Meant to type coal.
So you've never heard of those no-name colleges "Columbia University" and "Harvard Law School" (where he served as president of the Harvard Law Review)?
That's not much compared to Bill Clinton:
Undergraduate : Georgetown
Graduate : Oxford University (Rhodes Scholar)
Law School : Yale
Then, by the time Clinton's in his 30's, he's a popular governor of Arkansas, turns the state's economy around, is identified as a rising star nationally because -he's a good leader-, and then, runs for President, and wins.
What's Obama done in comparison to -that-? Nothing, really. I mean, he becomes a state legislature, and his biggest claim to fame there is redistricting the state so that more blacks could get elected to the leadership, supporting a bunch of affirmative action and pro-life stuff, and along the way, nearly depriving the entire state of electricity as part of a misguided plot to try and bankrupt the local utility. Illinois' economy sucks before and sucks after, the schools are still terrible where he's at.. nothing.. but he runs for Senate and gets in because in Chi-town he's got 100% of the black vote and splits the white vote with his opposition. IT's a good political strategy, for sure, but its not nearly the same caliber of education, leadership, or success that Bill Clinton achieved.
The ones who remember how abysmal the past 8 years have been, and how much worse the next 4-8 would be with McCain keeping the Bush economy running.
George Bush - corn $6/bushel
Bill Clinton - corn $2.5/bushel
Yep, they really want to go back to the good old days of Clinton, and make less than half of what they are making now.
Especially those who know that Bush squandered every penny and ounce of respect this country had amassed in over two centuries.
Oh, you mean all that respect LBJ earned when he invaded Viet Nam? Or, that respect earned when Jimmy Carter let the Iranians bully us around for 444 days, or, turned the Olympics into a political event by canceling American participation?
And how, prey tell, do Democrats engender the respect of the world, when, as we speak, they complain that the Iraqis are actually making money and we shouldn't be spending money on reconstruction over there. Does the world really think that we shouldn't have to spend to build up a country that we blew up? OR, when, if we prematurely leave Iraq, and all of those hundreds of thousands of Iraqi people that supported the USA in Iraq, get butchered, and Obama does nothing, then, will that earn the respect of the world? Or, when Obama waffles on Russian bullying of a NATO ally, say, Poland, will -that- earn the respect of the world?
The world may not like that Bush invaded Iraq, but I guarantee you that they respect Bush more for staying and trying to turn that situation around, then they will Obama, who plans on walking out.
The right-wing anarcho-capitalist nutjobs HATE it that "liberal" states tend to be far more economically prosperous than the "conservative" anti-environment, anti-union states. It kills them
Well yeah, as much as you steal food, oil and raw materials from everyone and call it a basic right to consume, of course you should come out ahead. The amazing thing is, that you've even fucked up manufacturing in your states despite having the cheapest water, food and electricity of any of the industrialized nations in the world. Yeah, Wall Street has taken a beating as of late, while commodities have gone up, but maybe that's just because the world has finally figured out American cities are husks of their former selves. They aren't centers of manufacturing, because its t o o d i r t y.... instead, they are just packed full of poor people that shoot each other all day long over a bag of rocks and even that seems preferable to the left wing than actually building a factory because it might hurt mother earth. What person would invest in that? Let alone live there.
So yeah, if you want to have economic fairness, let's let American farmers, miners, and oil men be able to pool together and negotiate quotas for their products, the same way that city bound democrats want to have for unions band together and control the price of labor. Assuming Obama somehow is magically able to drive down the price of commodities without producing anything more, let's revisit every state between the east coast and the west, and Republicans will only need to hang one sign, to get control of all of middle America:
George Bush: Corn - $6/bushel
Barrack Obama: Corn - $2/bushel
George Bush: Coal - $100/ton
Barrack Obama: Corn - $20/ton
And we could do the same in every state... you tell me, which party these states will go for?
Slow the hemorrhaging of money out of the country
The fact of the matter is, under Bush, US Exports have gone more than under any US PResident, EVER. But what's really stupid about this assertion is that you seem to think that rich people are going to magically stop pulling money out of the country the moment you make its investment return worse. That's utterly retarded. If I have a business in the USA that earns 10% a year on my investment, and Obama comes along next year, raises my taxes, and jacks me down to 5% a year investment, while at the same time Ireland offers me 15%, just where do you think that business is going to be, assuming that I do not close it down altogether?
Decrease the income inequality
Why this obsession with income inequality? Seriously. If you want a billion dollars, start a company that can make a billion dollars. If you don't, then don't bitch about your laziness, stupidity, or lack of luck. At least, if you tried, you had the opportunity to do so and that's a lot more than you get in other countries. Sorry, the whole idea where everybody gets that same crappy food to be equal from uncle sam's public cafeteria totally sucks. I don't like institutional soup for lunch. I want to make more money so that I can eat filet mignon and if some homeless guy smoked crack and can't eat that, that's not my fault, it's his.
I wonder how many farmers will vote for Obama when he says the price of corn too high? How many miners will vote for Obama, when he says the price of iron is too high and there should be no coal mining at all? How many woodsmen will vote for Obama, when he wants to ban foresting? How many autoworkers will vote for Obama, when he wants the government to make them cars not everyone wants to buy? How many investors will vote for Obama, when he wants to raise their taxes? How many of the 400,000 Americans working in the oil business will vote for Obama, when he says that, a profit less than half of what Apple makes on iTunes is too much? How many workers who manufacturer for America's record exports, will vote for Obama, after he speaks of cutting off free trade? I mean, everyone rags on the Bush economy, but, the ones that are primarily getting screwed are those who live in cities anyway and cities were already for Democrats. There's plenty of farmers, miners, manufacturers, all who like that they are finally getting a decent value for breaking their backs in the fields, tunnels and factories.
Reagan was a two time governor of California, a leader, of all things, the California Screen Actors guild, gave numerous presentations and did a lot of fundraising and organization building to really launch the right wing as it is today. It was Reagan that created the now defunct alliance between libertarian Republicans and religious fundamentalists that defined the Republican Party. So, Reagan stepped into the office already an effective leader, party builder and public speaker.
Similarly, Clinton did not have near the track record that Reagan did, largely because he won the election more than 20 years younger than Reagan was. But, Clinton started out with a stellar academic career (you know, Rhodes scholar), wheras Obama went to a no-name college. Clinton did basically build a machine out Arkansas politics, built of the modern DLC, (despised by the left), and, essentially built, in 1992, a political alliance of liberals and just enough fiscal conservatives to make his election winnable. I mean, I voted for Clinton twice, even though I am a staunch Republican, largely because the Federal deficit is a huge concern of mine and Clinton's book had a plan for building it up, and Bush Sr was the worst President ever (at least until his son came along).
In this election, honestly, the key thing is that neither candidate has a lot of real executive experience. McCain, for all of his experience, has always been something more of a one man show than a party builder, and Obama doesn't have any executive track record at all. If we were to have gone solely by genuine executive experience, then the best candidate on the Democrats was actually Bill Richardson - far too moderate to be elected by the liberal vetters. He was a popular governor, a party builder, a key member of Clinton's cabinet, and has done a bunch of stuff. On the Repblican, Mitt Romney was a successful governor AND businessman. But, as usual, the extremists on both sides trashed the genuinely most qualified people and we got this Obama and McCain instead.
I've always liked the Intel compilers... and I even once plinked down some bucks for the Intel compiler and vTune when I was writing commodity server back in the day... but the thing that keeps me away from Intel now is that I don't know how much I can trust that compiler to produce good code for AMD chips. Even though they have nearly the same instruction sets, they are very different internally and it follows that the timings and sequences of the instructions might well be different. I just don't know... and the other thing too is that I don't know how well deploying an Intel compiled solution would even fly on a Linux platform. Doing a source / make solution almost seems like it would be out of the question. Are these perceptions unfounded, or are they accurate. I defer to your experience and await your answer literally with baited breath.
Well, this is arguable. Arrays are essentially pointers in C++. Semantically you can define sized arrays at compile time
I'll give you this. What frustrates me is the lack of multidimensional arrays of various types, but I'm looking at Boost and I think tuple is a better solution for what I'm trying to do. Actually, I might have to take back everything bad I said as I'm sitting here reading through boost and the C++0x standard and I'm like, this is really, really cool.
Should we just abolish the FBI? I mean, is there anything the FBI does that actually makes you feel safer than the threat posed by the FBI itself?
IN CONGRESS, JULY 4, 1776
The unanimous Declaration of the thirteen united States of America
When in the Course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. â" That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, â" That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security. â" Such has been the patient sufferance of these Colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former Systems of Government. The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world.
He has refused his Assent to Laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good.
He has forbidden his Governors to pass Laws of immediate and pressing importance, unless suspended in their operation till his Assent should be obtained; and when so suspended, he has utterly neglected to attend to them.
He has refused to pass other Laws for the accommodation of large districts of people, unless those people would relinquish the right of Representation in the Legislature, a right inestimable to them and formidable to tyrants only.
He has called together legislative bodies at places unusual, uncomfortable, and distant from the depository of their Public Records, for the sole purpose of fatiguing them into compliance with his measures.
He has dissolved Representative Houses repeatedly, for opposing with manly firmness his invasions on the rights of the people.
He has refused for a long time, after such dissolutions, to cause others to be elected, whereby the Legislative Powers, incapable of Annihilation, have returned to the People at large for their exercise; the State remaining in the mean time exposed to all the dangers of invasion from without, and convulsions within.
He has endeavoured to prevent the population of these States; for that purpose obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migrations hither, and raising the conditions of new Appropriations of Lands.
He has obstructed the Administration of Justice by refusing his Assent to Laws for establishing Judiciary Powers.
He has made Judges dependent on his Will alone for the tenure of their offices, and the amount and payment of their salaries.
He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harass our people and eat out their substance.
He has kept among us, in times of peace, Standing A
Guns and homemade bombs worked pretty good against an army with tanks, snipers and airplanes in Algeria, Viet Nam, Afghanistan (twice), and in Iraq. So yeah, let's imagine a scenario where the Feds try to impose some sort of dictatorship... you'd have an army of 500,000 active duty soldiers trying to suppress an technologically sophisticated and armed citizenry with 80 million rifles and god knows what sort of homemade contraptions. Good luck. Government by the consent of the governed is a statement of fact, not an ideal.
Um, I'm sorry, but... what the hell are you talking about? Restricting pointers?
Yes, restricting pointers.
You know how you tell that C++0x disappoints? It's that arrays are still not first class objects in the language. It's that you can't do cool stuff like attach extra junk to the prologue and epilogue of a function and then walk up the call graph and put things in there. I don't see any keywords for specifying the endianness of an integer - how useful would that be.. to be able to say "bigend int foo" or "littleend int foo". I'd like to be able to specify a structure or a class which could have a single value be composed of a few bits in utterly random places in it. In other words, you could say something like:
struct foo {
int a bits 1-2 this+1.2, bits 4-5 this+3.3
};
which you would read as int a bits 1-2 are at a byte and bit offset from the structure.
And, while we were at it, how about packed pointers. AMD64 has 64 bit pointers and we can easily stuff some extra crap at the high end of them if the compiler knew to strip it out before we dereferenced them. You could implement that as a mov and an and.
If you do want to "guard" your pointers, it would be interesting to perhaps tag different pointers as having different selectors for those hardware architectures that support it, like Intel. I mean, you could make programs a lot safer under Intel and AMD if you didn't use a flat memory model. Put all of input data onto their own segments and lock it down with the hardware mmu. If it blows up, or overruns, oh well. No need to check arrays in that case because the hardware will do it. And of course, having some explicit language support for memory mapping seems useful.
To me, a language like C or C++ is that you can evolve your own exact brick of memory and carve it up in some way... really, the idea of C is almost to be just to be a very fancy macro assembler and C++ was to throw a bit of object orientedness around it, if you want.
But, instead, we have iterators and containers and ever more powerful templates and, gross, garbage collection support... that's all nice and all, but, its all indicative of a movement towards this idea that C++ is -only- an OOP language and libraries are written on building OOP programs and not necessarily smaller systems ones. C was short and sweet and simple and fast and C++ was a couple of useful things on it at first but now its just getting out of hand with this C++0x.
The great irony, of course, is that C++ templates and, wow, look at generics in C++0x, are so incredibly powerful that, what we have is a extremely high level language that still doesn't do comma delimited output of numbers. It's schizophrenic, is what it is.
Two years is still a little short, I think. One possible reason for the lack of warming at present could be the increase in particles in the air put out by China in the last 10 years.
That's an interesting point. For me, the thing is, if Chinese pollution were dragging down global temperatures, we should have seen a flatter run up in the 1990s than we did, as the industrialization went online. So, I would be a bit skeptical about the Chinese soot theory. One thing though, to really see this, would be if there was a pollution particulate shape function in climate models, so that, for each cell, you could get a distribution of different shapes of suspended particles in the atmosphere and get their effect overall. Like, it might seem silly, but maybe the shape of one kind of particle of pollution along with its size might influence not only cooling but also things like cloud formation and ocean heat exchanges...
But the main thing, really, is this. I think it is fair to say that the charge to regulate CO2 or humanity will die is severely overhyped. I think the better argument is that humans manage the chemistry of the soil (for farming), and we manage the chemistry of increasingly large bodies of water (controlling ph of pools and lakes), and, so, it stands to reason that we ought to manage the composition of the atmosphere as well. The problem is, if, lets say, scientists get AGW totally wrong, its going to set the overall cause of science back and back severely at a time when humanity seems poised to make some rather large breakthroughs, if only we stick it out. The deal is, even if human activity is not really causing the climate changes we undergoing, the very fact that our energy consumption and population are both growing exponentially means that it is inevitable that we will. So, we need to have some movement towards sustainability but if AGW is overhyped, then people will just chuck the baby out with the bathwater and arrive at a foolish position.
No, you can't. The only thing that we can really know for sure, is if, the lack of sunspots continues for say a year, maybe two years, AND, the climate temperatures deviate from what the climate models would otherwise predict. While I'm not 100% sold on the climate models that we have, and am sort of skeptical of them, I'm not jumping into bed with those skeptics who would dismiss AGW as bunk. It would seem to me that those skeptics should have their own climate models that have something we can test. As it is, all we have is this notion that there might be some link between sunspots and climate, but not much of a physical link that we can really go out and measure and correlate to climate, and we won't have that until those climate models we do have fail spectacularly. So, right now, the La Nina is taking the rap for the present global cooling, but, La Nina has been over for a few months now, and the earth's temperatures are either slightly declining or flat, according to the latest satellite temperatures. If we have falling temperatures for at least year we can worry, and if we start falling faster, than we can really worry, but for today, all we can really do is note that if it snows unusually, toss out a link on Slashdot to sunspots and make some snarky comments about how Hansen's FORTRAN really blows.
I read his last book cover to cover, and it was pretty much crap, and, ironically, this "sequel" actually proves it.
In Guns, Germs and Steel, Jared went out of his way to show that some cultures were stupider than others because of all of these manner of environmental forces.
The comparitive historic poverty of Africa has -nothing- to do with the choices Africans made, for example. It came down to a sad and unfortunate combination of natural resources, and they were oh so helpless.
Conversely, early civilizations did not come to dominate the world for a time because of a culture that was better at world domination, instead, they dominated because every other culture had some lame excuse for not taking mathematics from basic algebra into the calculus or some other technological advance.
Of course, Jared even tips his hand as to the point of the book. It couldn't be that some cultures had adopted values that lead to bad decision making, that, would why open up the whole can of worms about cultural worth and thus invite old arguments about cultural superiority. No, no no, we can't have that. But...
In this new book, it turns out that our culture -must- change, and -must- make new choices, in order to save our precious mother earth. The question is then, if there are smart moves to make, and dumb moves to make, is it all remotely possible that European cultures of 1500-1914, American culture of 1800-1960, Chinese culture up until around 1500, Roman culture up till around 200AD, all had some sort of spark of superiority that allowed them to make good decisions and good choices when confronted with environmental change, whereas, other cultures have not?
Let's think about the gobbledygook we right, Jared!
Those of us who are paranoid about the sun have got some justification for our beliefs. First off, the new solar cycle is somewhat late, depending on who you believe. Secondly, there have been very few sunspots this year. In fact, right now, we have gone 30 days without a single sunspot.
http://www.solarcycle24.com/
Fire up those SUVs and coal plants, little ice age, here we come.
GCC should learn from Intel here. ic is way way ahead of them.
I've always liked Intel's compiler but I wonder -- what does ic do that gnu doesn't? Yeah, I know that gnu's error messages make no sense but it does seem to be more standards correct and to generate working code.
I must be mentally ill, but, as much as I gripe about C++ and now C++0x, (even calling it C++#), I have to know, does anyone know when GNU targets the compiler to be due? I mean, I can't imagine them chasing a moving target but with the standard evolving I'm sure there's some stuff that they could work on.
I looked at their C++0x implementation web site, and it looks like they have a way to go:
http://gcc.gnu.org/projects/cxx0x.html
I like C++, even though I hate it, and this next incarnation has me tremendously excited.
As for 'automatic memory management', that was one of C's big features. Remember the 'auto' keyword?
LOL. However, the auto keyword always had problems with thus:
mystruct *getmystruct()
{
auto mystruct value;
return
}