When everything can be measured and monitored, are we all looking at the future of work here? "Don't like it -- work elsewhere" -- when elsewhere may be nowhere?
Why can't all the work-obsessed zealots work for the same company, where they can drive each other batshit?
It's an argument against simpleminded justifications for information sharing.
Information sharing in a vacuum makes sense, but the context is not a vacuum, the context is healthcare and there's a lot more going on there, including reasons why more or less information isn't being shared now.
So you can advocate for information sharing among doctors, but you'll also have to advocate for a compatible overhaul of malpractice and probably tort reform as a whole so that it makes sense.
The health benefits only occur if you're actually sick or regularly need treatment from multiple providers, but the privacy and security risks are continuous and ongoing.
Plus, in my experience, the benefits of EHRs are kind of limited -- Doctor B probably won't bother to read the chart from Doctor A unless he wants to, in which case he'll ask for it, and most of the time they will otherwise run their own tests. Duplicated effort, but unless you force Doctor A to share risk with Doctor B, Doctor B will always be on the hook and want his own tests, and Doctor A will never accept the risk from Doctor's B's treatments based solely on the tests Doctor A provided.
And if you find yourself dealing with multiple, unrelated providers, you're probably screwed anyway unless these doctors know each other and have a good working relationship.
Don't you think they work on multiple devices at once? I would assume that there are maybe 2-3 teams working on the future devices.
I don't know how they split the workload, maybe there's some advanced R&D team working on $current_model+3, where they might actually be engaged with the suppliers who provide the technologies they want (retina display, etc), with an advanced prototype team working on $current+2, and some kind of final production group that finalizes the prototype and deals with release engineering.
Or maybe each group sticks with their device through the actual release and then moves back to being advanced R&D.
But either way, it's likely they have multiple pipelines running at once.
Who does benefit financially? Besides criminal drug dealers?
The majority of beneficiaries are the entrenched bureaucrats whose personal livelihoods and careers depend on prohibition. This isn't quite a profit motive, though, as they're not really profiting as much as they are collecting a salary and hoping for advancement.
Law enforcement officials benefit from a policy perspective, as it generally increases their police powers through the erosion of civil liberties. But it's hard to call that a profit motive.
Drug companies? Given the volume of anti-depressants they sell, it might be reasoned that continued prohibition of marijuana would benefit them financially, since legalized marijuana might supplant anti-depressants for the majority of anti-depressant users who are merely stressed out an unhappy vs. actually suffering from serious depression issues.
The treatment industry? They depend on steady supply of people fed to them by the court system, but given the problems with alcohol and the relative size of the industry its hard to see them being a major source of profit.
About the only major profit center might be what I'd call the conspiratorial drug dealers -- the intelligence community or other related paramilitary groups who would get involved in drug dealing (heroin, primarily) for the large profits, and access to intelligence. I have to believe the CIA is stockpiling a lot of heroin form Afghanistan to fund whatever off-the-books operations they have going.
Isn't it a little dubious to try to defend an economic system largely defined as markets free from regulation or control by claiming that its most common practice is "not implemented properly", aka regulated?
And if the implementation of capitalism is the regulation of markets, isn't that what we have now? How do you assure that capitalism is implemented correctly, and what is the appropriate regulatory framework for proper implementation?
And isn't by regulation of markets how we got to where we are now?
There are also no serious political or economic system theories that don't claim to maximize human welfare -- and they all do, in theory, but what matters are the real-world implementations. Fascism is a pretty neat political theory, but in practice it has problems. You can't use the theory to defend the practice.
Someone's willing to take money from political despots in the name of making a profit? Really? This is news?
I'm not saying it's right, the number of Western businesses willing to sell repression tools to China, etc. really kind of makes me sick and I wish they could engage in more complex motivations than just "sales, sales, sales", but they're not.
Was it Khrushchev who said the west would sell it the rope to hang us with?
Will it get as bad as Zimbabwe? It seems to be the same kind of corruption and kleptocracy, albeit not as centralized on one man.
I often wonder if Zimbabweans ever get nostalgic for Ian Smith or wonder what would have happened if Ian Smith had hung on in Rhodesia -- would it have just reinforced the South African government, allow apartheid to continue longer than it did, or would it have transitioned before South Africa, leading the way to a multiracial society?
No, I recognize that a school's mission is education.
A parent's mission is making sure that their children are adequately fed, clothed, disciplined and otherwise prepared to be educated.
It is not the school's failure that children whose parents cannot meet the above criteria do poorly in school. This failure belongs to the parents, who probably should not be having children they can't care fore.
If society desires that these parents should be supported, then this should be done through whatever government agency's mission is to provide welfare, not through the school system.
Schools have bloated budgets and missions confused by well-intentioned but misguided desire to also be a social welfare delivery system. This leads to spiraling costs which can never be adequately met via the tax system, compromising the educational mission.
Like schools, libraries are have bought into the notion that their "mission" can't be accomplished without a social services component, because all members of the community have to be brought up to the same level.
And this is where mission creep and budget creep starts happening.
I think this is largely right. What's left of MS monopoly is less about Windows per se than their dominance with Office, SQL Server, Exchange and Windows.
I also think MS has far less monopoly power than they had 10 years ago. Linux is a credible desktop these days, MacOS I think has grown in capabilities, and lots of people are making tablets or mobile phones their primary platform.
And even where they have strength, they are strongly challenged by web platforms like GMail, or by serious competitors like Oracle, and where they were expected to be dominant they have difficulty gaining any traction (search, Windows phone).
I don't think any of the Federal cops, with the possible exception of the NPS rangers on the mall or other open park areas, have much to do with 'crime' control unless it is crime of a Federal nature that the Feds want in on, like homeland security, DEA stuff or the like.
Actual crime control (robbery, assault, murder, larceny, burglary, vandalism, petty drug dealing, gangs, etc) are all left to the DC Metro cops. My guess is that DC metro policing is HIGHLY political and probably deeply influenced by the kind of racial politics that would elect Marion Barry mayor, see him smoke crack on TV, and then re-elect him multiple times to city council and mayor.
The kind of intensive, beat-cop policing that would actually make a dent in crime I'm sure is labeled unfair or racist and just isn't done, because the police force is politicized from the top down and probably apathetic from the bottom up.
They did suffer, but they also built dwellings (especially the better ones) to ventilate -- high ceilings, floor plans that allowed for cross-ventilation, transoms above doors, and attics with windows to better vent the heat.
Some even had "sleeping porches" -- large screen porches people slept on during extreme hot spells.
All these things were less common in MN because it generally is less brutal than more southern states, but I have seen plenty of old photographs and written descriptions of heat spells where people ended up sleeping on front porches or in city parks when it got really hot.
I work in SMB consulting and we get a lot of penny pinchers who come to us and express an interest in "cloud backups" or "offsite backups".
None have the bandwidth for it, but I always ask them how they would handle a large restore. Some cloud backup services claim to supply you with a USB disk, but what's that involve? If you're lucky, next day air delivery? And what do you get, just a USB disk with all your files? No NTFS permissions?
What about data from applications like Exchange? SQL? Tons of places run apps that use SQL Express DBs that won't get backup with cloud software.
It's probably a decent service for an office with six guys and a share file, but its hard to see the value of it unless you get into cloud backup systems that are more sophisticated and you have serious bandwidth to throw at it.
I started working in SMB consulting a few years ago and one of my biggest pre-job worries was that I would be constantly confronted with server down restore situations.
It's almost never happened (like once or twice, max), and this is despite the horror show that is most SMB server hardware, server environments, lack of cooling, power, etc.
Given the spam, scams and malware on Facebook, I'm surprised they would do this.
Just a couple of days ago, I got a Facebook message from my sister in law "Dare you to watch this video" (I didn't) but when you do, it spams all your Facebook contacts with the message (and whatever else).
What happens when it steals money from your Paypal account instead?
And why is it you can even write malware on Facebook? Shouldn't they be able to stop that?
Conquered land was what was given to soldiers as their payment. So you needed an army to conquer land, so you conquered the land and gave it to the soldiers. Now you have more land to guard, so you need a bigger army, so you need to conquer more land, so you can give it to the soldiers, and now you have more land to guard...
Economic expansion was built on conquering foreign lands, and Europe west of Rhine is a limited amount of room, even by horse-and-cart standards, so you kind of have a cap on your expansion room. Africa was kind of limited by the Sahara, and the steppes of Asia weren't a great place for Roman heavy infantry to succeed.
So with some kind of a limit on expansion, both in terms of geography and resources (manpower), you have something of a limit on the economy. Through in a healthy dose of corruption, an unhealthy dependence on barbarian legions & merceneries guarding your frontier, and a political system that has no good rules succession, and well, you kind of end up with the empire falling apart.
I always wondered if it was possible to just deny access to the underground complexes, or make it very difficult.
These facilities are usually located in hard to get to locations, either because they want to bore into the side of a mountain, or they want them to be hard to find.
First wave would be to hit the roads and infrastructure delivery systems (power, water, etc) with whatever weapon does the most damage. Second wave, closer to the entrances, air deliver anti-tank barriers booby-trapped with mines to keep vehicles out -- clearing these should be difficult. Overlapping with these, saturation mining to make all access to the facility difficult.
The ordinance is relatively inexpensive and you make it difficult and time consuming to re-gain access to the facilities without the complexity of trying to actually hit the bunker.
I live in Minnesota in a house built in the 1950s without central air (it was actually added to the house in the 1970s, and we have a modern compressor, etc).
I'm not sure how they lived in the house in the summer before A/C. Any day with a daytime temperature over 80 degrees the house will generally be at least 3 degrees warmer than the outside ambient air temperature, my (master) bedroom, at least 5 degrees warmer. Strangely, even after the sun sets, the house remains warm and retains the heat long after midnight. Bedroom temps at 11 pm will still be above 80. In the morning at 5 AM, the bedroom will be down in the mid 70s, despite an outside air temp in the mid-high 60s.
And all of this, of course, is with all the windows open, including a sliding glass door in the bedroom (which makes for a 7 ft x 3.5 ft open window).
I hate paying for it, but sleeping sucks without air conditioning. When we first moved in (from a duplex with no A/C), the AC didn't work well, so we didn't run it and it was pretty miserable.
What I wish the AC was smart enough to do was draw air from outside if the outside air temp was 2 degrees or more lower than the set point. Much of the time in Minnesota we could just pump in outside air to cool the house after 1-2 AM. I know there are heat exchangers, but from what I've read they don't exactly work this way, and we'd still be running some kind of cold coil to dehumidify any air we'd bring in, mitigating some of the energy savings.
About the only thing that would be practical would be putting an vent in the ceiling of every upstairs room and forcibly venting it outside, thus drawing in air from the windows, but just having that would probably leak too much heat in the winter.
The problem with the hippie campouts in urban areas is that they ultimately end up attracting a low level street criminal class who are there to nick electronics, wallets an purses, deal/use drugs, and maybe commit a little sexual assault.
If the hippies would turn away these people and keep the political protest going, they might attract more people.
But, like most socialist endeavors, adherence to party dogma and ideological purity is first, and practical concerns a distant second.
I'm assuming that this technology will also come with the elusive holographic storage we've been hearing about, as well as those nearly disposable folding color displays as well.
They'd probably have to give it away to OEMs to get it adopted, either outright with support or charge some nominal flat-rate license fee but provide free support and development -- I don't see them capable of licensing it out profitably to any OEMs until it is a totally stable and proven product.
IMHO, tho, the handset hardware market is just evolving too rapidly and the successful makers either have a portable enough build process (Android) or such a well-defined and finite hardware base (Apple iPhone) that it's a product in search of a solution for them.
You laugh, but I've heard more than once that VMware is actively pursuing virtualization for smartphones.
Some VMware employee told me that the basic concept was to create an idealized virtual hardware platform that a phone vendor could target its mobile OS towards. New hardware, CPUs or other physical improvements wouldn't matter then to the OS developers as only the hypervisor hardware interfaces/drivers would have to be changed. You could probably even change the guts on the phone and not change the model as the vm layer would deal with the changes.
It's an interesting concept, but I'm not sure the wicked efficiencies needed on low-power, low(er) CPU/RAM devices would work with a hypervisor.
It would be more fun if it allowed you to run iOS and Android simultaneously and switch between them.
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When everything can be measured and monitored, are we all looking at the future of work here? "Don't like it -- work elsewhere" -- when elsewhere may be nowhere?
Why can't all the work-obsessed zealots work for the same company, where they can drive each other batshit?
So he'll be forced to use something less grating?
It's an argument against simpleminded justifications for information sharing.
Information sharing in a vacuum makes sense, but the context is not a vacuum, the context is healthcare and there's a lot more going on there, including reasons why more or less information isn't being shared now.
So you can advocate for information sharing among doctors, but you'll also have to advocate for a compatible overhaul of malpractice and probably tort reform as a whole so that it makes sense.
The health benefits only occur if you're actually sick or regularly need treatment from multiple providers, but the privacy and security risks are continuous and ongoing.
Plus, in my experience, the benefits of EHRs are kind of limited -- Doctor B probably won't bother to read the chart from Doctor A unless he wants to, in which case he'll ask for it, and most of the time they will otherwise run their own tests. Duplicated effort, but unless you force Doctor A to share risk with Doctor B, Doctor B will always be on the hook and want his own tests, and Doctor A will never accept the risk from Doctor's B's treatments based solely on the tests Doctor A provided.
And if you find yourself dealing with multiple, unrelated providers, you're probably screwed anyway unless these doctors know each other and have a good working relationship.
Don't you think they work on multiple devices at once? I would assume that there are maybe 2-3 teams working on the future devices.
I don't know how they split the workload, maybe there's some advanced R&D team working on $current_model+3, where they might actually be engaged with the suppliers who provide the technologies they want (retina display, etc), with an advanced prototype team working on $current+2, and some kind of final production group that finalizes the prototype and deals with release engineering.
Or maybe each group sticks with their device through the actual release and then moves back to being advanced R&D.
But either way, it's likely they have multiple pipelines running at once.
Who does benefit financially? Besides criminal drug dealers?
The majority of beneficiaries are the entrenched bureaucrats whose personal livelihoods and careers depend on prohibition. This isn't quite a profit motive, though, as they're not really profiting as much as they are collecting a salary and hoping for advancement.
Law enforcement officials benefit from a policy perspective, as it generally increases their police powers through the erosion of civil liberties. But it's hard to call that a profit motive.
Drug companies? Given the volume of anti-depressants they sell, it might be reasoned that continued prohibition of marijuana would benefit them financially, since legalized marijuana might supplant anti-depressants for the majority of anti-depressant users who are merely stressed out an unhappy vs. actually suffering from serious depression issues.
The treatment industry? They depend on steady supply of people fed to them by the court system, but given the problems with alcohol and the relative size of the industry its hard to see them being a major source of profit.
About the only major profit center might be what I'd call the conspiratorial drug dealers -- the intelligence community or other related paramilitary groups who would get involved in drug dealing (heroin, primarily) for the large profits, and access to intelligence. I have to believe the CIA is stockpiling a lot of heroin form Afghanistan to fund whatever off-the-books operations they have going.
"...when its not implemented properly..."?
Isn't it a little dubious to try to defend an economic system largely defined as markets free from regulation or control by claiming that its most common practice is "not implemented properly", aka regulated?
And if the implementation of capitalism is the regulation of markets, isn't that what we have now? How do you assure that capitalism is implemented correctly, and what is the appropriate regulatory framework for proper implementation?
And isn't by regulation of markets how we got to where we are now?
There are also no serious political or economic system theories that don't claim to maximize human welfare -- and they all do, in theory, but what matters are the real-world implementations. Fascism is a pretty neat political theory, but in practice it has problems. You can't use the theory to defend the practice.
Someone's willing to take money from political despots in the name of making a profit? Really? This is news?
I'm not saying it's right, the number of Western businesses willing to sell repression tools to China, etc. really kind of makes me sick and I wish they could engage in more complex motivations than just "sales, sales, sales", but they're not.
Was it Khrushchev who said the west would sell it the rope to hang us with?
Will it get as bad as Zimbabwe? It seems to be the same kind of corruption and kleptocracy, albeit not as centralized on one man.
I often wonder if Zimbabweans ever get nostalgic for Ian Smith or wonder what would have happened if Ian Smith had hung on in Rhodesia -- would it have just reinforced the South African government, allow apartheid to continue longer than it did, or would it have transitioned before South Africa, leading the way to a multiracial society?
No, I recognize that a school's mission is education.
A parent's mission is making sure that their children are adequately fed, clothed, disciplined and otherwise prepared to be educated.
It is not the school's failure that children whose parents cannot meet the above criteria do poorly in school. This failure belongs to the parents, who probably should not be having children they can't care fore.
If society desires that these parents should be supported, then this should be done through whatever government agency's mission is to provide welfare, not through the school system.
Schools have bloated budgets and missions confused by well-intentioned but misguided desire to also be a social welfare delivery system. This leads to spiraling costs which can never be adequately met via the tax system, compromising the educational mission.
Like schools, libraries are have bought into the notion that their "mission" can't be accomplished without a social services component, because all members of the community have to be brought up to the same level.
And this is where mission creep and budget creep starts happening.
I think this is largely right. What's left of MS monopoly is less about Windows per se than their dominance with Office, SQL Server, Exchange and Windows.
I also think MS has far less monopoly power than they had 10 years ago. Linux is a credible desktop these days, MacOS I think has grown in capabilities, and lots of people are making tablets or mobile phones their primary platform.
And even where they have strength, they are strongly challenged by web platforms like GMail, or by serious competitors like Oracle, and where they were expected to be dominant they have difficulty gaining any traction (search, Windows phone).
I don't think any of the Federal cops, with the possible exception of the NPS rangers on the mall or other open park areas, have much to do with 'crime' control unless it is crime of a Federal nature that the Feds want in on, like homeland security, DEA stuff or the like.
Actual crime control (robbery, assault, murder, larceny, burglary, vandalism, petty drug dealing, gangs, etc) are all left to the DC Metro cops. My guess is that DC metro policing is HIGHLY political and probably deeply influenced by the kind of racial politics that would elect Marion Barry mayor, see him smoke crack on TV, and then re-elect him multiple times to city council and mayor.
The kind of intensive, beat-cop policing that would actually make a dent in crime I'm sure is labeled unfair or racist and just isn't done, because the police force is politicized from the top down and probably apathetic from the bottom up.
They did suffer, but they also built dwellings (especially the better ones) to ventilate -- high ceilings, floor plans that allowed for cross-ventilation, transoms above doors, and attics with windows to better vent the heat.
Some even had "sleeping porches" -- large screen porches people slept on during extreme hot spells.
All these things were less common in MN because it generally is less brutal than more southern states, but I have seen plenty of old photographs and written descriptions of heat spells where people ended up sleeping on front porches or in city parks when it got really hot.
I work in SMB consulting and we get a lot of penny pinchers who come to us and express an interest in "cloud backups" or "offsite backups".
None have the bandwidth for it, but I always ask them how they would handle a large restore. Some cloud backup services claim to supply you with a USB disk, but what's that involve? If you're lucky, next day air delivery? And what do you get, just a USB disk with all your files? No NTFS permissions?
What about data from applications like Exchange? SQL? Tons of places run apps that use SQL Express DBs that won't get backup with cloud software.
It's probably a decent service for an office with six guys and a share file, but its hard to see the value of it unless you get into cloud backup systems that are more sophisticated and you have serious bandwidth to throw at it.
I think there's something to this.
I started working in SMB consulting a few years ago and one of my biggest pre-job worries was that I would be constantly confronted with server down restore situations.
It's almost never happened (like once or twice, max), and this is despite the horror show that is most SMB server hardware, server environments, lack of cooling, power, etc.
Given the spam, scams and malware on Facebook, I'm surprised they would do this.
Just a couple of days ago, I got a Facebook message from my sister in law "Dare you to watch this video" (I didn't) but when you do, it spams all your Facebook contacts with the message (and whatever else).
What happens when it steals money from your Paypal account instead?
And why is it you can even write malware on Facebook? Shouldn't they be able to stop that?
It's funny, but you'd think they'd get it.
The "average person" looks at a dumb windows PC and thinks "cheap and a great system".
The nerd looks at a complex, expensive UNIX system that barely replicates the Windows PC functionality and admires its technical sophistication.
IIRC, it was worse than just tax revenues.
Conquered land was what was given to soldiers as their payment. So you needed an army to conquer land, so you conquered the land and gave it to the soldiers. Now you have more land to guard, so you need a bigger army, so you need to conquer more land, so you can give it to the soldiers, and now you have more land to guard...
Economic expansion was built on conquering foreign lands, and Europe west of Rhine is a limited amount of room, even by horse-and-cart standards, so you kind of have a cap on your expansion room. Africa was kind of limited by the Sahara, and the steppes of Asia weren't a great place for Roman heavy infantry to succeed.
So with some kind of a limit on expansion, both in terms of geography and resources (manpower), you have something of a limit on the economy. Through in a healthy dose of corruption, an unhealthy dependence on barbarian legions & merceneries guarding your frontier, and a political system that has no good rules succession, and well, you kind of end up with the empire falling apart.
I always wondered if it was possible to just deny access to the underground complexes, or make it very difficult.
These facilities are usually located in hard to get to locations, either because they want to bore into the side of a mountain, or they want them to be hard to find.
First wave would be to hit the roads and infrastructure delivery systems (power, water, etc) with whatever weapon does the most damage. Second wave, closer to the entrances, air deliver anti-tank barriers booby-trapped with mines to keep vehicles out -- clearing these should be difficult. Overlapping with these, saturation mining to make all access to the facility difficult.
The ordinance is relatively inexpensive and you make it difficult and time consuming to re-gain access to the facilities without the complexity of trying to actually hit the bunker.
I live in Minnesota in a house built in the 1950s without central air (it was actually added to the house in the 1970s, and we have a modern compressor, etc).
I'm not sure how they lived in the house in the summer before A/C. Any day with a daytime temperature over 80 degrees the house will generally be at least 3 degrees warmer than the outside ambient air temperature, my (master) bedroom, at least 5 degrees warmer. Strangely, even after the sun sets, the house remains warm and retains the heat long after midnight. Bedroom temps at 11 pm will still be above 80. In the morning at 5 AM, the bedroom will be down in the mid 70s, despite an outside air temp in the mid-high 60s.
And all of this, of course, is with all the windows open, including a sliding glass door in the bedroom (which makes for a 7 ft x 3.5 ft open window).
I hate paying for it, but sleeping sucks without air conditioning. When we first moved in (from a duplex with no A/C), the AC didn't work well, so we didn't run it and it was pretty miserable.
What I wish the AC was smart enough to do was draw air from outside if the outside air temp was 2 degrees or more lower than the set point. Much of the time in Minnesota we could just pump in outside air to cool the house after 1-2 AM. I know there are heat exchangers, but from what I've read they don't exactly work this way, and we'd still be running some kind of cold coil to dehumidify any air we'd bring in, mitigating some of the energy savings.
About the only thing that would be practical would be putting an vent in the ceiling of every upstairs room and forcibly venting it outside, thus drawing in air from the windows, but just having that would probably leak too much heat in the winter.
The problem with the hippie campouts in urban areas is that they ultimately end up attracting a low level street criminal class who are there to nick electronics, wallets an purses, deal/use drugs, and maybe commit a little sexual assault.
If the hippies would turn away these people and keep the political protest going, they might attract more people.
But, like most socialist endeavors, adherence to party dogma and ideological purity is first, and practical concerns a distant second.
I'm assuming that this technology will also come with the elusive holographic storage we've been hearing about, as well as those nearly disposable folding color displays as well.
They'd probably have to give it away to OEMs to get it adopted, either outright with support or charge some nominal flat-rate license fee but provide free support and development -- I don't see them capable of licensing it out profitably to any OEMs until it is a totally stable and proven product.
IMHO, tho, the handset hardware market is just evolving too rapidly and the successful makers either have a portable enough build process (Android) or such a well-defined and finite hardware base (Apple iPhone) that it's a product in search of a solution for them.
You laugh, but I've heard more than once that VMware is actively pursuing virtualization for smartphones.
Some VMware employee told me that the basic concept was to create an idealized virtual hardware platform that a phone vendor could target its mobile OS towards. New hardware, CPUs or other physical improvements wouldn't matter then to the OS developers as only the hypervisor hardware interfaces/drivers would have to be changed. You could probably even change the guts on the phone and not change the model as the vm layer would deal with the changes.
It's an interesting concept, but I'm not sure the wicked efficiencies needed on low-power, low(er) CPU/RAM devices would work with a hypervisor.
It would be more fun if it allowed you to run iOS and Android simultaneously and switch between them.