The problem with your scenario is that it presents a false choice by framing ISP monopolies only existing because of government approval. That may be true for cable television franchises specifically, but not internet access.
The reality is that utilities are fairly close to a natural monopoly because of the complex infrastructure required. We lack competition not because of government granted monopolies, but because duplicating infrastructure is expensive and the economics of it are poor (essentially your are splitting a fixed market against an entrenched competitor).
What we need is for the government to acknowledge the existing monopoly status and impose a means of regulation that limits exploitation of the monopoly that already exists, and probably further, does something to eliminate the ability of a monopoly to exist (ie, a municipal fiber network with equal access at the head end).
I don't know, the oldest just look like creosote soaked pine trunks stripped of their limbs. The newer ones have the green tinge of more modern wood treatment.
The one weird thing I have noticed in the past couple of years is that somebody (I assume the electric utility, who owns the poles) has sunk ~5/8" torx-head fasteners into all the poles near their bases.
I can't figure out what this is for. My initial thought is that it would risk splitting the pole, and at the base that could be a problem. They seem to be sunk diagonally, so maybe they're meant to prevent splitting problems near the base. Maybe they're just probes, if they sink "right" the pole is OK, and if they go in too easy or don't grip they know the pole is bad?
Generally speaking, you would think that long-term all the replacements would be some kind of concrete composite. They could be made in a factory and would effectively be permanent, although maybe the life on treated pine trunks is effectively so long that there's no reason to make them last longer if it costs slightly more.
At the scale of Google, Facebook, et al, I think to many people they seem to be indistinguishable from the Government -- possessing limitless resources and operating mostly with no apparent oversight.
It's obviously a conspiracy theory, but the accused shooter's total lack of obvious warning signs and general life success *almost* make me wonder if he could have somehow been an unintentional victim of an actual third party conspiracy. Some group of shooters who identified him as being alone and in a high vantage point room and saw a vulnerability they could exploit.
And yes, this is a conspiracy theory and I don't think it will pan out, but over time it would be great to see some or all of the following:
1) Surveillance footage showing him bringing in a large number of suitcases or packages to contain the 23 firearms found in his room and the large amount of ammunition.
2) Room cleaning records & staff interviews of people who had access to the room -- did they notice a lot of suitcases for a single patron? Was there a large gap in staff access to the room, giving him time to unwrap/assemble a bunch of guns, like no cleaning service for 24-48 hours?
3) The exterior photos and NY Times hotel diagram show TWO rooms in use. Did he actually check into two rooms? Does anyone remember asking him why a solo traveler and single patron would want a suite AND an additional room? He was known as a high stakes gambler, not there for a convention or some other purpose where a second room would have an obvious explanation.
4) Can they forensically link all the guns to him? Serial number traces, finger prints, including traces of accessories or third party attachments demonstrating he was the buyer or could reasonably be demonstrated to be the owner. Some gaps may be expected, as I'm sure Nevada or other places he lives have no transfer requirements for in-state private party sales, but even these might be reasonably traced to original buyers in states where he lived.
5) Some material evidence from his life that provides a substantial psychological motivation for doing this. That's my biggest issue now -- this guy was living a kind of everyman's fantasy, independently wealthy (brother quoted in the Times as saying he'd made at least $2 million in real estate) and living a life leisure. Even if everything else checks out to indicate he was the guy that did this (and I'm pretty sure it will), it will be pretty weird if they can't come up with some evidence of a motive.
I think electric cars will become another example of how well-off people are able to leverage technology to maintain an economic advantage.
For the foreseeable future, there is no good way to own an electric car and be a renter without parking spot with a charger. Public charging will take too long and the cars won't have enough reserve to not make it a continual bother. So all of the economic benefits of owning an electric car will go to people who can afford the parking/charging setup.
If governments start eliminating IC cars, you now basically strip the practical ability of renters and high-density area apartment dwellers of the ability to even *own* a car. This isn't a problem in the 20% of urban areas with dense housing and employment and transit, but in many others it becomes a major economic disadvantage. You may not like cars generally, but the reality is they enable a huge amount of employment flexibility and improved time efficiency for other activities.
I'm all in favor of electric cars, but I think in subtle ways they become advantages for well off people and become unobtainable for lower income people who can now manage them. If the technology changes -- charging in the time of a gas fill, week-long charge cycles, maybe it will be a more universal benefit.
I think "running government" is one of those kinds of job environments where you are so disconnected from the day-day outcomes of your policies that it's possible to rationally advocate for policies which you think actually have some kind altruistic outcome. I don't think it's personal mental derangement, it's the unreal nature of structure of the work and environment.
I don't know if its a mental illness or just extremely flawed thinking, but I do think there is a kind of delusional behavior caused by an excess of confirmation bias. I overheard people are work with in their early 30s with at best low-end college degree griping about unions (none are members or have worked in union shops), and I think they believe that because they have been lucky enough to stumble into half-decent IT jobs they are over-invested in the idea of benevolent employers, their own skill and the nature of the job market to supply good-paying jobs.
I do agree that in many ways modern life has turned some corner that is actively creating deranged people. Unfortunately, the guy accused of this particular mass shooting doesn't appear to be a victim of the usual modern life traps -- not in financial crisis, not suffering from an obvious illness (pilot's licenses require medical certifications), basically successfully self-employed for years, so none of the embitterment that comes from suffering at a bad job, no apparent political alignment of any kind and nobody that knew him seems to think he evidenced any kind of problems.
I've never seen a wooden utility pole that wasn't treated against rot. Pine logs wouldn't last 2 years without being treated. I've only seen one pole replaced in my neighborhood in the 18 years I've lived here, so the rest may be going on 20-30 years.
What if you can't trust your electronic instruments?
Presumably part of the reason you have lookouts is for this reason, but if you *always* believe your instruments to be unreliable then your navigation is limited to what you can visually see.
I'm not saying they should only rely on AIS & radar, obviously a military ship should validate those systems' targets which should be in visual range. But those electronic systems can actually do a great job of predicting potential collisions, especially AIS. It's literally a broadcast of a ship's position, heading and speed. Even consumer marine electronics can produce collision prediction and course plotting for these targets.
The Navy's problem isn't that technology doesn't work, it's that they're not using it.
I wonder if the existing method of writing software isn't just running into the limits of general human cognition.
We can conceptualize complex systems or tasks, but to make software that does them requires a very low level of understanding of how it will work and gluing together many low-level functions to get to the finished complex system.
Fixing a system like this when it doesn't work as expected requires an encyclopedic level of knowledge about all of the low level pieces as well as the larger picture of the entire system.
I'm sure there are people who are better at this than others, but maybe we're just reaching the point where the systems are so large and there are so many of them that we lack the access to the human resources or methods of automation capable of managing them. Ordinary, even conventionally above-average people, simply aren't capable of effectively managing the complexity involved.
Busy shipping lanes are too busy to monitor and track with paper and pencil.
Modern shipping works because ships are able to use technology like AIS and radar to track other vessels accurately and in real time. Navigation systems -- chotplotting, AIS, radar, autopilot, and weather information -- can be tied together in real time, allowing a ship's heading and course to be altered in real time based on actual conditions at sea.
I can definitely see the added advantages of humans with binoculars to spot closer in traffic and validate radar tracking and AIS data, but the idea that they'll just do all this in real time with paper and pencil is as silly as the SEC announcing it will combat stock fraud by switching back to pencils and paper spreadsheets.
The confounding problem with the "crazy" analysis is how much planning and effort a shooting like this requires. Usually (but not always) people with serious mental illnesses are lacking in executive functioning and don't do a very good job of creating plans or following through on them.
At the same time, it's hard to understand any motivation to shoot hundreds of rounds at a massed crowd that doesn't seem like the byproduct of a deranged mind.
In order to keep the narrative of white racism alive, "activists" keep turning to more and more ephemeral forms of racism, most of which require no conscious action at all on the part of whites. Conveniently, whites can not refute these racist acts nor can they really change, they can only *atone* for their inherent racism. Racism has become a kind of secular "original sin" -- an inalienable state of being for which they may only pay penance.
Unfortunately as more and more non-white ethnic groups immigrate and rise within the United States, it's becoming apparent that the "race problem" isn't "white racism" as broad, whites vs. nonwhites phenomenon, but is instead something more like "Why can't blacks succeed when others have?"
And the laundry list of others is pretty long -- Latinos, many of whom *don't even speak English*, have managed to thrive in the United States. The Hmong, living like it was the sometime before the 19th century managed to get ripped out of their own country by the US war machine and resettled to the prairies of the Midwest and thrived. The *Somalis* managed to escape a live-action version of "The Road Warrior" and thrive in Minneapolis, Minnesota, in spite of the obvious handicaps of negative sentiment towards Muslims *and* being African (inheriting existing negative sentiment towards American blacks).
How have all of these groups managed to establish working communities not defined by broken families and crime despite substantial cultural obstacles in mere decades or less while native African Americans continue to fail? Surely at some point we can start to talk about problems inherent to and unique to African American communities which cannot be blamed on "racism".
As society as increasingly become more racially tolerant, the racial equity movements have had to turn to increasingly ephemeral explanations (micro-aggression, etc) to justify African American problems.
The broad hiring of Latinos nation-wide in low wage labor positions, the mass hiring of South Asians in IT positions and how it has mostly worked without broad resistance has really made African Americans reliance on "racism" as the principal source of their present problems increasingly less believable.
So they've turned to increasingly more comprehensive and inescapable explanations of white racism. Whites are generally now assumed to be racist in ways they aren't considered capable of overcoming. In the 1960s you could support civil rights and have black friends and easily not be considered racist -- in fact, you were probably considered suspect by conservatives. Now that's not good enough, you have to permanently accept your inherent racism.
Questioning this narrative of course makes you "obviously racist" and trying to seek alternative explanations for African American suffering (broken families, gang membership and high levels of criminal participation, poor work ethic in school or labor force participation) gets you shouted down or worse.
I know there are some legitimate beefs about its relation to the Federal Government, but it would seem to have a lot of things going for it. Direct participation in the US dollar economy, border free movement of goods and people between the US. And as Florida fills up and becomes more expensive, wouldn't Puerto Rico become an appealing substitute with the same kind of tropical appeal?
Sure, it's got more poor people than may be average for the US mainland, but shouldn't that result in more business investment due to labor cost advantages? Or contribute to its viability as a retirement/vacation/resort destination?
I suppose there are standard, pedantic arguments that its handicapped by "colony" status and that racist US politicians have treated it poorly because its residents are Spanish speaking "foreigners" and so on.
But generally speaking, I would expect Puerto Rico to be doing better given its relative advantages over someplace like Jamaica or the Dominican Republic.
It's not just Apple, it's Microsoft and even enterprise system vendors who have been relentlessly tweaking interfaces for the worse. Apple may actually have been one of the least worse offenders in comparison, although I think the intensity of irritation varies quite a bit depending on individual usage patterns.
Microsoft had a highly usable, if boring, user interface in Windows 2000. Windows XP kept it mostly the same, but implemented needless changes in the start menu and with great emphasis on shiny colors. Windows 7 was nearly just an improvement on XP but also brought forth some of its own changes. Windows 8 was an abomination, a total abandonment of its desktop UI standards for a fantasy of a touch screen environment, something almost no one wanted on a desktop computer. Windows 10 was just an attempt to salvage the mess of Windows 8 along with a fairly draconian new level of perpetual control by Microsoft.
Completely bizarrely, Microsoft has been folding in these UI changes to their server OS, too, resulting in a confusing mess that serves no purpose in that environment. Tasks are often split between management applications that remain unchanged since Windows 2000/2003 but were reasonably feature complete and new applications that are not feature complete and require their byzantine command line interface to make comprehensive changes. Which really is another topic -- why didn't Microsoft simply implement a well-known shell and syntax from Unix? Why ignore a broadly understood, tried and tested shell and syntax for a new model, one that lacks some of the basic features and capabilities of the Unix shell?
An example from the enterprise software market. VMware had a very straightforward and useful management application for their hypervisor platform. While it has its technical flaws, it's very usable and straightforward. VMware, and mostly for good reason, wanted to move this to a web client to end a dependency on Windows. But rather than merely port their UI to HTLM5, they changed it dramatically, making it a slow and confusing maze of related screens and requiring browser plugins. They changed it again in 6.5 (obsoleting the Windows application), making it HTML5 driven and somewhat more responsive, but still not nearly as straightforward to use.
Frankly, I think in the last 5 years the entire computer industry has run out of meaningful ideas. UI changes are made to keep development staff busy and generate justifications for increasingly expensive required updates, meanwhile nothing really new is being provided (and in many cases, less is being left to the user's discretion). We've reached a kind of treadmill of technology, pointless iterations to generate incompatibilities and sales.
What you're describing is the other problem of the Imperial CEO -- investing a single person with life or death, bet-the-firm decision-making authority.
I think there's two problems here. One, it's kind of a fallacy -- no CEO has the ability to ingest the mass of data that exists to rationally make these decisions. They have armies of support professionals who analyze and summarize data in ways that allow CEOs to make "the decision". So the Imperial CEO isn't really some super-human making amazing rational choices by single-handedly summarizing the entire market.
The other is that because they make such fantastic money that it makes sense to invest them in that much power to begin with. It only encourages a gambling mindset where giant bets are made which can make or break the company. It discourages rational decision-making, and in light of the knowledge scale problems associated with "bet the company" decisions forces these decisions to be made with inadequate information.
I'm always curious about the so-called shortage of CEOs. It's true there's a lack of CEOs with a proven track record within given business sectors, but that's mostly because there's a lack of CEOs in a given business sector, fewer still that are "successful" because by definition every business that's not #1 in its industry isn't as successful.
Even corporations don't believe that someone running a hospitality business is the right choice to run a vehicle manufacturer, no matter how successful they were in running a hospitality business.
I'm honestly surprised there's not more demand for the seasoned careerists just below the CEO level. They're probably wealthy, but not the $90 million golden parachute wealthy and have a strong incentive to make it to the top. There's also a lot more of them numerically, making them cheaper to hire.
I doubt they are significantly less skilled than the "celebrity" CEOs, either.
I think there are two main problems with CEOs in the US.
1) Imperial CEO myth -- the idea that a single, all-powerful CEO is somehow the sole source of company success (and failure). I don't quite understand how this became true -- it's possible there are some corner cases where a change in CEO resulted in a significant company turnaround (like maybe Jobs at Apple). But for the most part, corporations are huge organizations that rise and fall based on group effort and lots of externalities beyond their control. Too many people are over-invested in the idea that a CEO is singularly responsible for a corporation.
2) Closed-loop compensation committees. Executive compensation committees wind up being board members of other firms, and many of them are executives at other companies are members of these committees. It's an conflict of interest and they use the Imperial CEO concept to justify ridiculous compensation packages.
They price matched to gain the sale, and then sought out a supplier $50 cheaper than their usual supplier or some other kind of discount (maybe holding off until they ordered something else to cut shipping, etc).
Your better compromise was probably to have eaten the $50 and negotiated away the shipping charges, but that's only if you really care about the local AV guys. If they don't matter to you at all, then why bother with them in the first place?
I've read that oil has a long list of critical uses beyond just as a motor fuel. Plastics, fertilizer, and so on.
What's always baffled me is why these oil rich countries always stayed just an extraction export economy and didn't use the wealth + raw materials to develop a petrochemical industry. Cheap energy plus a petrochemical and plastics industry plus surplus wealth after that sounds like a great way to jump start a more advanced and sophisticated economy.
Labor might have been a problem, but given the short distances between the Middle East and India, they could have imported labor or shifted the more labor-intensive parts to their operations to India. Oil rich countries also could have made India into something of a little China in terms of being the manufacturing sector for their materials and petrochemical output.
Even if oil maintains its non-fuel value well into the future, price spikes in oil itself will have driven more advanced petrochemical industries into alternative precursors, recycling techniques, etc, that would make it harder for a desert oil producer to play catch up. So really, they should have gotten started on this in the 1970s or 1980s.
It's not difficult, it's just bothersome. The engineering of their furniture is interesting, but it's tedious to assemble. And it takes a long time, there's a lot of small pieces that need to be repetitively be put together.
Occasionally I run into steps where I need 3 hands -- two pieces are loose fit and adding the third with the fastener makes it prone to falling apart before you can set the third piece.
My only other complaint is that quality is hit or miss. Sometimes the finished piece isn't that sound and wobbles or doesn't sit perfect. A couple things I've added angle brackets to because they were weak.
I'd like to see them focus on fasteners that can be power-driven and use more common drive heads (or include a bit -- probably less metal than 3 different allen wrenches), as well as making their joinery fit tighter and be more reinforced if necessary.
Do you think that, broadly speaking, "left wing" groups are quicker to complain and seek sanctions on their opponents than "right wing" groups?
I'm kind of inclined to believe this, and it might account for some of apparent bias the "average" user not closely linked with "left wing" or "right wing" groups might see on Facebook.
I think in a modern economy you ultimately need credit reporting to lower the transaction cost of lending and to make risk estimation as efficient as possible.
But I do think credit data should be locked by default, and only unlocked by consumers at the time they actually want to borrow money. This should go along with more stringent proof-of-data standards to avoid false information to be reported and with whom and how the information can be shared.
In my opinion, the larger systemic problem with "open" credit reports is that it encourages consumers to engage in excess consumption and excess borrowing through a relentless marketing of credit opportunities.
I think the erroneous credit information data is a large problem that doesn't get enough attention.
The customers of credit agencies are lenders, not consumers, and this means that credit agencies have an incentive to report the highest marginal risk of any potential borrower. The utility value to lenders of a credit report is a loan made at the highest possible risk premium, enabling a profitable loan portfolio.
When credit agencies report a potential borrower as a higher risk than they actually are because of erroneous information, the lender gets to charge a higher risk premium -- interest rate -- than the actuarial risk represented by their true borrowing history. This makes the lenders more profitable, basically able to justify an added borrowing cost.
You would think that competition among lenders would mitigate this, with some lenders using the gap between higher reported risk and actuarial risk to charge lower interest rates. But they have no incentive to do this, accurately estimating the nominal and actual risk requires a lot of estimation (and some risk) cost and since nearly all their competitors will use the same credit agency risk data, the will end up charging the same risk premium. Lending thus becomes a price-fixing cartel, with the price fixing to consumers coordinated by a third party, the credit agency.
At the end of the day, the credit agencies have a incentive to leave junk data in credit histories because it allows lenders to inflate risk premiums and thus profits. This goes a long way to explaining why they want to include information not related to borrower repayment history in credit reports (driving records, divorce records, social media information, etc). They want to add extra negative drag on credit scores to raise borrowing costs to consumers and thus further boost their customers', the lenders, profits.
There should be much more stringent rules on removing bad data in credit reports. Credit agencies should have 30 days (or less) to provide material proof of bad credit data or it should be automatically removed. Failure to comply should be a $500 per false data item penalty. Credit reports should only contain borrowing information. Past loan repayment history should be the only gauge of lending risk.
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The problem with your scenario is that it presents a false choice by framing ISP monopolies only existing because of government approval. That may be true for cable television franchises specifically, but not internet access.
The reality is that utilities are fairly close to a natural monopoly because of the complex infrastructure required. We lack competition not because of government granted monopolies, but because duplicating infrastructure is expensive and the economics of it are poor (essentially your are splitting a fixed market against an entrenched competitor).
What we need is for the government to acknowledge the existing monopoly status and impose a means of regulation that limits exploitation of the monopoly that already exists, and probably further, does something to eliminate the ability of a monopoly to exist (ie, a municipal fiber network with equal access at the head end).
I don't know, the oldest just look like creosote soaked pine trunks stripped of their limbs. The newer ones have the green tinge of more modern wood treatment.
The one weird thing I have noticed in the past couple of years is that somebody (I assume the electric utility, who owns the poles) has sunk ~5/8" torx-head fasteners into all the poles near their bases.
I can't figure out what this is for. My initial thought is that it would risk splitting the pole, and at the base that could be a problem. They seem to be sunk diagonally, so maybe they're meant to prevent splitting problems near the base. Maybe they're just probes, if they sink "right" the pole is OK, and if they go in too easy or don't grip they know the pole is bad?
Generally speaking, you would think that long-term all the replacements would be some kind of concrete composite. They could be made in a factory and would effectively be permanent, although maybe the life on treated pine trunks is effectively so long that there's no reason to make them last longer if it costs slightly more.
At the scale of Google, Facebook, et al, I think to many people they seem to be indistinguishable from the Government -- possessing limitless resources and operating mostly with no apparent oversight.
It's obviously a conspiracy theory, but the accused shooter's total lack of obvious warning signs and general life success *almost* make me wonder if he could have somehow been an unintentional victim of an actual third party conspiracy. Some group of shooters who identified him as being alone and in a high vantage point room and saw a vulnerability they could exploit.
And yes, this is a conspiracy theory and I don't think it will pan out, but over time it would be great to see some or all of the following:
1) Surveillance footage showing him bringing in a large number of suitcases or packages to contain the 23 firearms found in his room and the large amount of ammunition.
2) Room cleaning records & staff interviews of people who had access to the room -- did they notice a lot of suitcases for a single patron? Was there a large gap in staff access to the room, giving him time to unwrap/assemble a bunch of guns, like no cleaning service for 24-48 hours?
3) The exterior photos and NY Times hotel diagram show TWO rooms in use. Did he actually check into two rooms? Does anyone remember asking him why a solo traveler and single patron would want a suite AND an additional room? He was known as a high stakes gambler, not there for a convention or some other purpose where a second room would have an obvious explanation.
4) Can they forensically link all the guns to him? Serial number traces, finger prints, including traces of accessories or third party attachments demonstrating he was the buyer or could reasonably be demonstrated to be the owner. Some gaps may be expected, as I'm sure Nevada or other places he lives have no transfer requirements for in-state private party sales, but even these might be reasonably traced to original buyers in states where he lived.
5) Some material evidence from his life that provides a substantial psychological motivation for doing this. That's my biggest issue now -- this guy was living a kind of everyman's fantasy, independently wealthy (brother quoted in the Times as saying he'd made at least $2 million in real estate) and living a life leisure. Even if everything else checks out to indicate he was the guy that did this (and I'm pretty sure it will), it will be pretty weird if they can't come up with some evidence of a motive.
I think electric cars will become another example of how well-off people are able to leverage technology to maintain an economic advantage.
For the foreseeable future, there is no good way to own an electric car and be a renter without parking spot with a charger. Public charging will take too long and the cars won't have enough reserve to not make it a continual bother. So all of the economic benefits of owning an electric car will go to people who can afford the parking/charging setup.
If governments start eliminating IC cars, you now basically strip the practical ability of renters and high-density area apartment dwellers of the ability to even *own* a car. This isn't a problem in the 20% of urban areas with dense housing and employment and transit, but in many others it becomes a major economic disadvantage. You may not like cars generally, but the reality is they enable a huge amount of employment flexibility and improved time efficiency for other activities.
I'm all in favor of electric cars, but I think in subtle ways they become advantages for well off people and become unobtainable for lower income people who can now manage them. If the technology changes -- charging in the time of a gas fill, week-long charge cycles, maybe it will be a more universal benefit.
I think "running government" is one of those kinds of job environments where you are so disconnected from the day-day outcomes of your policies that it's possible to rationally advocate for policies which you think actually have some kind altruistic outcome. I don't think it's personal mental derangement, it's the unreal nature of structure of the work and environment.
I don't know if its a mental illness or just extremely flawed thinking, but I do think there is a kind of delusional behavior caused by an excess of confirmation bias. I overheard people are work with in their early 30s with at best low-end college degree griping about unions (none are members or have worked in union shops), and I think they believe that because they have been lucky enough to stumble into half-decent IT jobs they are over-invested in the idea of benevolent employers, their own skill and the nature of the job market to supply good-paying jobs.
I do agree that in many ways modern life has turned some corner that is actively creating deranged people. Unfortunately, the guy accused of this particular mass shooting doesn't appear to be a victim of the usual modern life traps -- not in financial crisis, not suffering from an obvious illness (pilot's licenses require medical certifications), basically successfully self-employed for years, so none of the embitterment that comes from suffering at a bad job, no apparent political alignment of any kind and nobody that knew him seems to think he evidenced any kind of problems.
I've never seen a wooden utility pole that wasn't treated against rot. Pine logs wouldn't last 2 years without being treated. I've only seen one pole replaced in my neighborhood in the 18 years I've lived here, so the rest may be going on 20-30 years.
It can't be found via reason and analysis -- or imposed.
If it could, planned economies would work.
What if you can't trust your electronic instruments?
Presumably part of the reason you have lookouts is for this reason, but if you *always* believe your instruments to be unreliable then your navigation is limited to what you can visually see.
I'm not saying they should only rely on AIS & radar, obviously a military ship should validate those systems' targets which should be in visual range. But those electronic systems can actually do a great job of predicting potential collisions, especially AIS. It's literally a broadcast of a ship's position, heading and speed. Even consumer marine electronics can produce collision prediction and course plotting for these targets.
The Navy's problem isn't that technology doesn't work, it's that they're not using it.
I wonder if the existing method of writing software isn't just running into the limits of general human cognition.
We can conceptualize complex systems or tasks, but to make software that does them requires a very low level of understanding of how it will work and gluing together many low-level functions to get to the finished complex system.
Fixing a system like this when it doesn't work as expected requires an encyclopedic level of knowledge about all of the low level pieces as well as the larger picture of the entire system.
I'm sure there are people who are better at this than others, but maybe we're just reaching the point where the systems are so large and there are so many of them that we lack the access to the human resources or methods of automation capable of managing them. Ordinary, even conventionally above-average people, simply aren't capable of effectively managing the complexity involved.
Busy shipping lanes are too busy to monitor and track with paper and pencil.
Modern shipping works because ships are able to use technology like AIS and radar to track other vessels accurately and in real time. Navigation systems -- chotplotting, AIS, radar, autopilot, and weather information -- can be tied together in real time, allowing a ship's heading and course to be altered in real time based on actual conditions at sea.
I can definitely see the added advantages of humans with binoculars to spot closer in traffic and validate radar tracking and AIS data, but the idea that they'll just do all this in real time with paper and pencil is as silly as the SEC announcing it will combat stock fraud by switching back to pencils and paper spreadsheets.
The confounding problem with the "crazy" analysis is how much planning and effort a shooting like this requires. Usually (but not always) people with serious mental illnesses are lacking in executive functioning and don't do a very good job of creating plans or following through on them.
At the same time, it's hard to understand any motivation to shoot hundreds of rounds at a massed crowd that doesn't seem like the byproduct of a deranged mind.
In order to keep the narrative of white racism alive, "activists" keep turning to more and more ephemeral forms of racism, most of which require no conscious action at all on the part of whites. Conveniently, whites can not refute these racist acts nor can they really change, they can only *atone* for their inherent racism. Racism has become a kind of secular "original sin" -- an inalienable state of being for which they may only pay penance.
Unfortunately as more and more non-white ethnic groups immigrate and rise within the United States, it's becoming apparent that the "race problem" isn't "white racism" as broad, whites vs. nonwhites phenomenon, but is instead something more like "Why can't blacks succeed when others have?"
And the laundry list of others is pretty long -- Latinos, many of whom *don't even speak English*, have managed to thrive in the United States. The Hmong, living like it was the sometime before the 19th century managed to get ripped out of their own country by the US war machine and resettled to the prairies of the Midwest and thrived. The *Somalis* managed to escape a live-action version of "The Road Warrior" and thrive in Minneapolis, Minnesota, in spite of the obvious handicaps of negative sentiment towards Muslims *and* being African (inheriting existing negative sentiment towards American blacks).
How have all of these groups managed to establish working communities not defined by broken families and crime despite substantial cultural obstacles in mere decades or less while native African Americans continue to fail? Surely at some point we can start to talk about problems inherent to and unique to African American communities which cannot be blamed on "racism".
As society as increasingly become more racially tolerant, the racial equity movements have had to turn to increasingly ephemeral explanations (micro-aggression, etc) to justify African American problems.
The broad hiring of Latinos nation-wide in low wage labor positions, the mass hiring of South Asians in IT positions and how it has mostly worked without broad resistance has really made African Americans reliance on "racism" as the principal source of their present problems increasingly less believable.
So they've turned to increasingly more comprehensive and inescapable explanations of white racism. Whites are generally now assumed to be racist in ways they aren't considered capable of overcoming. In the 1960s you could support civil rights and have black friends and easily not be considered racist -- in fact, you were probably considered suspect by conservatives. Now that's not good enough, you have to permanently accept your inherent racism.
Questioning this narrative of course makes you "obviously racist" and trying to seek alternative explanations for African American suffering (broken families, gang membership and high levels of criminal participation, poor work ethic in school or labor force participation) gets you shouted down or worse.
I know there are some legitimate beefs about its relation to the Federal Government, but it would seem to have a lot of things going for it. Direct participation in the US dollar economy, border free movement of goods and people between the US. And as Florida fills up and becomes more expensive, wouldn't Puerto Rico become an appealing substitute with the same kind of tropical appeal?
Sure, it's got more poor people than may be average for the US mainland, but shouldn't that result in more business investment due to labor cost advantages? Or contribute to its viability as a retirement/vacation/resort destination?
I suppose there are standard, pedantic arguments that its handicapped by "colony" status and that racist US politicians have treated it poorly because its residents are Spanish speaking "foreigners" and so on.
But generally speaking, I would expect Puerto Rico to be doing better given its relative advantages over someplace like Jamaica or the Dominican Republic.
It's not just Apple, it's Microsoft and even enterprise system vendors who have been relentlessly tweaking interfaces for the worse. Apple may actually have been one of the least worse offenders in comparison, although I think the intensity of irritation varies quite a bit depending on individual usage patterns.
Microsoft had a highly usable, if boring, user interface in Windows 2000. Windows XP kept it mostly the same, but implemented needless changes in the start menu and with great emphasis on shiny colors. Windows 7 was nearly just an improvement on XP but also brought forth some of its own changes. Windows 8 was an abomination, a total abandonment of its desktop UI standards for a fantasy of a touch screen environment, something almost no one wanted on a desktop computer. Windows 10 was just an attempt to salvage the mess of Windows 8 along with a fairly draconian new level of perpetual control by Microsoft.
Completely bizarrely, Microsoft has been folding in these UI changes to their server OS, too, resulting in a confusing mess that serves no purpose in that environment. Tasks are often split between management applications that remain unchanged since Windows 2000/2003 but were reasonably feature complete and new applications that are not feature complete and require their byzantine command line interface to make comprehensive changes. Which really is another topic -- why didn't Microsoft simply implement a well-known shell and syntax from Unix? Why ignore a broadly understood, tried and tested shell and syntax for a new model, one that lacks some of the basic features and capabilities of the Unix shell?
An example from the enterprise software market. VMware had a very straightforward and useful management application for their hypervisor platform. While it has its technical flaws, it's very usable and straightforward. VMware, and mostly for good reason, wanted to move this to a web client to end a dependency on Windows. But rather than merely port their UI to HTLM5, they changed it dramatically, making it a slow and confusing maze of related screens and requiring browser plugins. They changed it again in 6.5 (obsoleting the Windows application), making it HTML5 driven and somewhat more responsive, but still not nearly as straightforward to use.
Frankly, I think in the last 5 years the entire computer industry has run out of meaningful ideas. UI changes are made to keep development staff busy and generate justifications for increasingly expensive required updates, meanwhile nothing really new is being provided (and in many cases, less is being left to the user's discretion). We've reached a kind of treadmill of technology, pointless iterations to generate incompatibilities and sales.
What you're describing is the other problem of the Imperial CEO -- investing a single person with life or death, bet-the-firm decision-making authority.
I think there's two problems here. One, it's kind of a fallacy -- no CEO has the ability to ingest the mass of data that exists to rationally make these decisions. They have armies of support professionals who analyze and summarize data in ways that allow CEOs to make "the decision". So the Imperial CEO isn't really some super-human making amazing rational choices by single-handedly summarizing the entire market.
The other is that because they make such fantastic money that it makes sense to invest them in that much power to begin with. It only encourages a gambling mindset where giant bets are made which can make or break the company. It discourages rational decision-making, and in light of the knowledge scale problems associated with "bet the company" decisions forces these decisions to be made with inadequate information.
I'm always curious about the so-called shortage of CEOs. It's true there's a lack of CEOs with a proven track record within given business sectors, but that's mostly because there's a lack of CEOs in a given business sector, fewer still that are "successful" because by definition every business that's not #1 in its industry isn't as successful.
Even corporations don't believe that someone running a hospitality business is the right choice to run a vehicle manufacturer, no matter how successful they were in running a hospitality business.
I'm honestly surprised there's not more demand for the seasoned careerists just below the CEO level. They're probably wealthy, but not the $90 million golden parachute wealthy and have a strong incentive to make it to the top. There's also a lot more of them numerically, making them cheaper to hire.
I doubt they are significantly less skilled than the "celebrity" CEOs, either.
I think there are two main problems with CEOs in the US.
1) Imperial CEO myth -- the idea that a single, all-powerful CEO is somehow the sole source of company success (and failure). I don't quite understand how this became true -- it's possible there are some corner cases where a change in CEO resulted in a significant company turnaround (like maybe Jobs at Apple). But for the most part, corporations are huge organizations that rise and fall based on group effort and lots of externalities beyond their control. Too many people are over-invested in the idea that a CEO is singularly responsible for a corporation.
2) Closed-loop compensation committees. Executive compensation committees wind up being board members of other firms, and many of them are executives at other companies are members of these committees. It's an conflict of interest and they use the Imperial CEO concept to justify ridiculous compensation packages.
They price matched to gain the sale, and then sought out a supplier $50 cheaper than their usual supplier or some other kind of discount (maybe holding off until they ordered something else to cut shipping, etc).
Your better compromise was probably to have eaten the $50 and negotiated away the shipping charges, but that's only if you really care about the local AV guys. If they don't matter to you at all, then why bother with them in the first place?
I've read that oil has a long list of critical uses beyond just as a motor fuel. Plastics, fertilizer, and so on.
What's always baffled me is why these oil rich countries always stayed just an extraction export economy and didn't use the wealth + raw materials to develop a petrochemical industry. Cheap energy plus a petrochemical and plastics industry plus surplus wealth after that sounds like a great way to jump start a more advanced and sophisticated economy.
Labor might have been a problem, but given the short distances between the Middle East and India, they could have imported labor or shifted the more labor-intensive parts to their operations to India. Oil rich countries also could have made India into something of a little China in terms of being the manufacturing sector for their materials and petrochemical output.
Even if oil maintains its non-fuel value well into the future, price spikes in oil itself will have driven more advanced petrochemical industries into alternative precursors, recycling techniques, etc, that would make it harder for a desert oil producer to play catch up. So really, they should have gotten started on this in the 1970s or 1980s.
It's not difficult, it's just bothersome. The engineering of their furniture is interesting, but it's tedious to assemble. And it takes a long time, there's a lot of small pieces that need to be repetitively be put together.
Occasionally I run into steps where I need 3 hands -- two pieces are loose fit and adding the third with the fastener makes it prone to falling apart before you can set the third piece.
My only other complaint is that quality is hit or miss. Sometimes the finished piece isn't that sound and wobbles or doesn't sit perfect. A couple things I've added angle brackets to because they were weak.
I'd like to see them focus on fasteners that can be power-driven and use more common drive heads (or include a bit -- probably less metal than 3 different allen wrenches), as well as making their joinery fit tighter and be more reinforced if necessary.
Do you think that, broadly speaking, "left wing" groups are quicker to complain and seek sanctions on their opponents than "right wing" groups?
I'm kind of inclined to believe this, and it might account for some of apparent bias the "average" user not closely linked with "left wing" or "right wing" groups might see on Facebook.
I think in a modern economy you ultimately need credit reporting to lower the transaction cost of lending and to make risk estimation as efficient as possible.
But I do think credit data should be locked by default, and only unlocked by consumers at the time they actually want to borrow money. This should go along with more stringent proof-of-data standards to avoid false information to be reported and with whom and how the information can be shared.
In my opinion, the larger systemic problem with "open" credit reports is that it encourages consumers to engage in excess consumption and excess borrowing through a relentless marketing of credit opportunities.
I think the erroneous credit information data is a large problem that doesn't get enough attention.
The customers of credit agencies are lenders, not consumers, and this means that credit agencies have an incentive to report the highest marginal risk of any potential borrower. The utility value to lenders of a credit report is a loan made at the highest possible risk premium, enabling a profitable loan portfolio.
When credit agencies report a potential borrower as a higher risk than they actually are because of erroneous information, the lender gets to charge a higher risk premium -- interest rate -- than the actuarial risk represented by their true borrowing history. This makes the lenders more profitable, basically able to justify an added borrowing cost.
You would think that competition among lenders would mitigate this, with some lenders using the gap between higher reported risk and actuarial risk to charge lower interest rates. But they have no incentive to do this, accurately estimating the nominal and actual risk requires a lot of estimation (and some risk) cost and since nearly all their competitors will use the same credit agency risk data, the will end up charging the same risk premium. Lending thus becomes a price-fixing cartel, with the price fixing to consumers coordinated by a third party, the credit agency.
At the end of the day, the credit agencies have a incentive to leave junk data in credit histories because it allows lenders to inflate risk premiums and thus profits. This goes a long way to explaining why they want to include information not related to borrower repayment history in credit reports (driving records, divorce records, social media information, etc). They want to add extra negative drag on credit scores to raise borrowing costs to consumers and thus further boost their customers', the lenders, profits.
There should be much more stringent rules on removing bad data in credit reports. Credit agencies should have 30 days (or less) to provide material proof of bad credit data or it should be automatically removed. Failure to comply should be a $500 per false data item penalty. Credit reports should only contain borrowing information. Past loan repayment history should be the only gauge of lending risk.