One thing is for absolute certain: No matter where this sensation, or region in the brain comes from, when the Atheists take over, it will either be surgically removed from everyone at birth, or we will be genetically modified to eliminate that structure from our physiology. (Not accusing Atheists, in general of anything. Just the ones who are interested in politics.)
. . . of course, if the Atheists never do take over - I'm sure the Christianists will eventually get state-funded brain-scans of all children to detect whether they have a good responding brain thingie - and if they don't, mark that one as "Satan's child". - maybe with a little tatoo, or a brand or something.
The machine has to somehow look at millions of digitized archived Go games (hmmmm - where could one possibly find something like that?) - and figure out which "apparently disadvantageous" positions are actually advantageous (and factor in other metadata; like the player's experience level, past games, playing habits, etc. to see if there is a risk of turning the apparent disadvantage into a real disadvantage). (other metadata would be nice; but probably be unavailable - like, do these players KNOW eachother? do they have a grudge? might they be making emotional decisions? might one guy have skipped breakfast? is one guy coming down with a cold? etc. That way, the machine can more accurately apply "weights" to the moves, with regard to how important that move was towards changing the board position from an "apparent disadvantage" to a victory.)
Given this dataset, the machine has to somehow boil this down into a knowledgebase of some kind, to use as a guide when parsing the tree of a Go game. Now, your programmer can also be a Go Master, and toss in his own expertise to shape the knowledgebase; that's not "pure" machine learning, but it would still a valid "good Go algorithm".
This will all be so much more fun when GM and AT&T are owned by the Chinese thanks to our massive Federal Budget and Trade deficits. (crypto's only as strong as its key, right?)
Warrantless Wiretapping? Your car controlled remotely? By ChiComs?
Not a single shot will be fired.
And it was the Voodoo economics faction of the Republican Party that made it happen! Woo hoo!
And what REALLY sucks about this - is that this "news" was all over CNN and the others this morning.
And now, it's going to be in malpractice suits, and people are going to be demanding it, no matter what the experimental data show - and this may actually INCREASE patient deaths, while increasing costs. And hospital boards are going to adopt it because this is what the market demands, not what produces the best outcomes (plus it's another line-item on the bill that they can pad with their own exhorbitant markup!).
About the only winners in this scenario are healthcare company stockholders who are physically healthy.
(***logs onto Ameritrade, researches stock symbol, prepares a buy. ..)
Just as the guy downthread who tries to argue that Ted Kennedy's drunk driving problem 40 years ago makes everything the Republicans are doing today, all right - there's no excuse for such stupidity.
People will not listen to what they don't want to hear. It's just a sad fact. And there are two ways to look at anything: From a moral standpoint - these people who bury their head in the sand, have the blood of a half-million innocent Iraqi civilians on their hands. That's the morality of the situation. The torture, the destruction of everything we stand for as Americans, THEIR FAULT. They did it, because they wanted it - because they don't believe in America anymore. They believe in being selfish fascist pigs. They don't really believe in freedom, just using freedom as a word to club other people with.
Now, from an Engineering standpoint, I guess the solution is to just not allow anyone with an IQ less than 130 to vote. Politicians who take bribes or campaign contributions (read: public financed elections... money != speech), are immediately removed from office, and summarily executed. Journalists who lie are slapped. That would solve a LOT of problems.
Where's the story about people getting gouged by Legal Services Professionals?
Hell - this story is older than that. How many guys paid for a hooker when their right hand would work just as well, AND NOT GIVE THEM A CASE OF THE CLAP?
Honestly, I think this race is between India, China, and Japan. The US is not in it. We abdicated the moon long ago - and it's foolish of us to try to go and get it back. It's roughly analagous to OJ Simpson, now out on bail, deciding to get back into shape and get back into football to try to keep all these young punks from winning the Heismann trophy. It's really absurd and a little sad.
It's especially sad, because you know damn well that even if we DID make it back to the moon, and even if we did "beat" China/Japan/India, we'd just abandon it again. Because the US has no interest or intent in staying.
There's no oil, no Hooters, and no beer on the Moon.
Actually, Intel's power-saving by throttling the CPU load back is an ugly hack. I don't think that it's completely worthless, but it's still an ugly hack. Motorola's Power PC chips originally pursued a design of low power usage, but as the PPC business alliance disintegrated, and IBM kept pushing the performance envelope for server applications, the PPC architecture just got more and more power hungry. The final Mac generation, the G5, made an awesome workstation platform, but Apple could not shoehorn it into a portable.
The correct approach to power-utilization problems is to push for chip efficiency. Running full-on top-speed at all times is pretty dumb - but intel isn't pushing efficiency either - they're throttling back to save energy. Now; if I have to do X amount of work, and I have Y time to do that work, and if I'm on battery, you slow my CPU down, I'm not going to get that work done any faster. . . either the battery is going to do the job for me or not. Slowing my machine down does not solve this problem. Giving me a CPU that does more with less power (Transmeta!) solves my problem.
Given that Motorola and Transmeta tried to solve this problem (and gave up) - I can't really credit them much more than Intel. I hate their approach, but at least they did *something*.
About 10 years ago, I used a product called Folio, which was the same product Novell used for their "Novell Support Encyclopedia" - they had a great set of robust tools, including support filters for a wide enough variety of formats (and tools to write your own), and your data would all compile down to what they called an "Infobase" - which was a single indexed file containing full text, markup, graphics, and index - readable in a free downloadable reader with a pretty decent (for 1996) search engine, that did boolean, stem, and proximity searches.
It was very convenient to be able to give to either a reseller, or high-end customer, this single-file, containing reasonably up-to-date support information on our product that they could search on. It was probably the #1 thing our tech support department spent money on that reduced call volume. Then we got bought, and the new tech support director, an IBM guy, replaced everything with Lotus Notes - (and other headcount-increasing, empire building tools).
The Folio company was bought up and I think the technology is now used by the company that does Lexis-Nexis.
Back in 1996 - there was Napster. We knew it was illegal - but then, we knew it was legal too. Because it wasn't illegal to let your brother borrow your Doobie Brothers album. It wasn't illegal to make a tape of that album to listen to it in your car.
But sharing it with your closest 200,000 friends on the internet? Gray area. . . as long as you weren't profitting from it, right?
Then the courts decided that, even if there's no money, you still "profit" by letting people download from you, because you get "street cred" (or whatever).
The RIAA went after Napster. Which was wrong. Because Napster wasn't illegal. Napster was just a tool.
But Napster was the easy target. 1 corporation = easy (take out 1 million users with one suit). 1 million individual lawsuits = not so easy. They took out Napster - and we said: pointless, we'll share with other tools. And we did. And they went after every other tool out there, until Bittorrent made that impossible (or difficult) because of it's more fully P2P architecture.
So then they went after the individual people who were actually breaking the (imho flawed) law. The individual file sharers. This was the most stable legal ground for them. But they went about it in such a stupid way (not securing evidence, that was actually easy to get, attacking the wrong people) and their stupid ad campaign worked against them. Bad PR. They blew the one flimsy legal leg they had to stand on.
So how, Mr Environmentalist, do we meet our ever-increasing need for power?
How about we recognize that our planet has limited resources, and stop breeding like bacteria?
I mean, SERIOUSLY.
I'm with you on the nuclear power, and on use of breeder technology. (as long as there is sufficient engineering discipline and oversight to ensure public safety).
But the answer to the fundamental problem that unrestricted population growth incurs is: stop fucking growing.
Personally, I don't think it's that simple, either. There is no legal system, no governmental system in HISTORY, let alone one that respects the rights and freedoms I hold dear, that is capable of managing human reproduction on this scale. People will resist, and fight, and kill and die for their right to overpopulate the planet until it can no longer sustain any life.
I suspect that the answer is in Nature. That nature will manage our population for us. It will not be pleasant. It will not be pretty. It won't make anybody happy. But I suspect that since we cannot manage this ourselves - it will be managed for us. Probably multiple times.
I think it's a mistake to consider Saudi Arabia (and Kuwait, and UAE) our ally. (at least unconditionally, as we have been doing).
Saudi Arabia waves these big (unconfirmed, often specious) oil reserves around, and the US is at their beck-and-call. But at the end of the day, the royals are just as terrified that the mullahs are going to toss them out some day - so they pay them off, and criticize "Israel and the West" to the disaffected masses of their kleptocracy. And who suffers the consequences? We do. If they were our ally, we would not be called the enemy of Islam in their official state-run press.
The US might not be better off if we were to nuke Mecca. But we're certainly not better off since it's been unconditionally taken off the table. 15 of the 19 9/11 hijackers were Saudis. That's not as meaningless a statement as most Americans seem to think it is.
The Saudis (and the Iranians) *KNOW* they can act with impunity, because they *KNOW* we are dependent on their oil. They *KNOW* that we will talk tough, but at the end of the day, if we follow through on our tough talk, like we did in Iraq, we end up with: 1. 4000 dead US soldiers. 2. Tarnished world image, diminished credibility. 3. $1 Trillion in debt (just from the war). 4. No meaningful amount of Iraqi oil flowing for, going on 4 years. 5. An economic and political death-spiral.
The soldier of the future will be a machine, which will take orders directly from a Hedge Fund Manager, without any intervention or interference from politicians, generals, or soldiers.
Imagine the success of the investment fund that can, with impunity, secure natural resources by simply sending a killbot to wipe out the natives. You know this is the investor's wet dream. They will make it a reality, sooner or later. And sooner or later, YOU will either be the investor, or the native.
That's just one more person you have to compete with for the limited resources left on this planet.
Everybody's gotta die. Better you sooner than me.
It's true, to some extent, that I have a stake in my neighbor's survival, and even well being, because my neighbor's well being affects my well being. There's no disputing that.
But to pretend that we're fighting for "freedom" over there, when the freedom we have here is so illusory, is pretty assinine. They're over there killing, and getting killed, and while, to some extent, they're bleeding my country's economy, it's all borrowed money, so they're really hurting our lendors as well, and it was all fiat money that had to come crashing down at some point anyway. Was it for oil? Did we really just spend almost a trillion (probably 2, before it's over) dollars to control less than $500 billion worth of oil reserves? I don't believe that either. Was it for strategic control? were we just knocking over anthills? Were we knocking over our own anthill?
Really, the most plausible explanation at this point was that the Bush administration, and a few insiders in the Texas Republican party, scammed the rest of the Republican party, and the nation, into a war, so they could sock a bunch of money from bogus defense contracts into bank accounts in the caymans, so that when our economy collapsed, (as it was looking like it inevitably would) - they'd be well positioned to take the reigns of power. . . REAL power, (financial) not the bullshit political power we have in D.C.
So while it's a nice thought that we can come up with all this whiz-bang high-tech equipment to make sure that we can sent johnny into the field he can get a 10,000-to-1 kill ratio, come home with his legs blown off, get fitted with stem-cell-grown replacements, and probably still end up unemployed, crippled, and pensioned, with a cost-per-soldier ratio easily 10,000 times what a soldier cost to field in WWII, it's not a nice thought to know that those soldiers in WWII came back, got jobs, started businesses, built America into the world's greatest nation, gave birth to the baby boomer generation, and generated a tidal wave of enormous REAL wealth; and today's soldiers come back with bupkus, into an economy in a death-spiral, their families are on food stamps, the soldiers are unemployable, mentally unstable, and the bulk of that 10,000-to-1 cost offset went into some republican party donor's pocket instead.
Gulf war II - first year cost, approx. $80 billion. This year's run rate is approaching $190 billion. There is something SERIOUSLY wrong with this picture.
We don't need electronic gadgets to help us fight wars. We need new economic tools to figure out how to either finance these wars properly, or survive without having to fight them in the first place.
I agree strongly that one parent should stay home when kids are under the age of about 5-8. It really makes a big difference. But after that age; not so much. It took many years of mounting debt and living paycheck to paycheck, and financial emergencies - but my wife was finally convinced to go back to work after our youngest turned 11. Hallelujah!
I mean - what the hell is she supposed to do with her time for the rest of her life? What if I died? Or got sick and couldn't work? She'd have zero job experience if she had to start again - it's just common sense. There's no damn reason to be a housewife if the husband helps with the housework (come on guys!) and if the kids are old enough to be a little independent. My wife is starting a business - and if it succeeds, we'll have a much nicer lifestyle. We even may be secure enough where I could risk trying to start a business. And if her business fails? Oh well. Try again? Or go work for someone else? sure. Whatever.
Yes; Not only will HR screw you as far as getting in the door is concerned, but they will also screw you with salary.
They will come up with any excuse or plausible reason they can to nickel and dime your starting salary down, I've seen cases where (at a previous employer) we've already made offers to candidates, and then HR chimes in the day before the starting day, telling us we had no authority to make an "official" offer, and then they lowball the "official" offer because they guy went to the wrong school, or didn't have exactly the right degree, or was 6 months shy the experience in a specific skill that was listed in the HR req.
In fact, I will go so far as to convey this bit of wisdom:
One of the most challenging kinds of jobs there is to get, is the high tech job at the large company - typically higher paying, typically more stable, typically more prestigious, typically more rewarding work. But getting past the HR regs and goons is what will kill you - and often they'll also try to stretch the process out from what could normally be accomplished in a few days, to 6 weeks or more. (trust me, this is as painful for the hirers as it is for the candidates).
The trick is to find a way to get hired there, without going through the HR dept. *know* somebody. A team manager. Make sure he knows you have a critical skill his team needs to complete his project. You can try to get in on a subcontract basis - start your own 1-man-consulting biz, work through a temp agency, whatever. Get your foot in the door. When you're there, work your ass off and make yourself indispensable. When your contract is up - they will HIRE you. (but make sure you grease the wheels, and do what needs to be done, talk to whomever needs to be talked to! Bureaucrats are not known for their initiative!).
Eventually, you'll have to deal with the HR stooge to get a starting salary.
Don't let them lowball you. If you do, you're fucked. Because all large companies have ironclad policies about advancement and raises. (last place I quit had a limit of 6% - even if you were promoted, or got an internal new position at a higher level - the max raise was 6% - I took that 6%, then I quit, and got 15% on top of that somewhere else!).
Make sure you KNOW your skills, your education, and know what the requirements are for the position you're entering, make sure you've met or exceeded them. (in the "internal hire" scenario, you can often Write Your Own Job Description - which is really nice! - probably unethical, but that's your manager's problem).
Start high, because all of your future raises are based on a percentage calculation. The higher your base, the higher your raises. The higher your exit salary, the higher your salary requirements are for your NEXT job, should you decide to leave. Don't take a pay cut, and don't take a bonus or other "bribe" or perk in lieu of base salary.
Remember - HR people are HACKS. All of them. If they weren't there, trying to scam you out of your deserved starting salary, they'd be on a used car lot, trying to sell you "undercoating" or "mud flaps".
You're talking about the "Hedonic adjustment" theory, and it's all bullcrap.
So Greenspan got the FED to eliminate Food, Energy, and recently, Housing, from the calculation for Inflation - and the outsourcing of manufacturing to third world countries artificially depressed costs of certain items, while costs for domestic services (ie. Medical Care, etc.) skyrocketed - and yet did not impact the overall average, because they were supposedly offset by the fact that anybody can now get a DVD player for free with their $5 Happy Meal.
This view of the CPI is perhaps a good view for an economist, or an industrialist, or a banker. But what it does is completely absolutely ignore what is happening to the Average Joe's cost of living. It's a mindset of ivory-towerism. An ideology of denial. A refusal to accept reality. An insistence on enforcing a contrived fantasy view upon the rest of the country, because the CPI is used to direct monetary policy, which affects EVERYBODY.
On the bright side, now Canadians can laugh at Americans for their "funny money".
I left my former employer - got a 15% raise, and a $5k signon bonus; and I'm *still* struggling.
I keep hearing that it's because I'm too materialist - "the things you own end up owning you" - etc.
That's bullshit. No, it's true, actually, but I am most definitely *NOT* materialist; maybe compared to most people I know - whom ARE very materialist - compared to say, an Uzbeki goat herder, I suppose my iPod nano is quite bourgeois. But no, I haven't bought any of the big-ticket toys that many of my neighbors and acquaintances have; the boats, the motorcycles, the trucks, I wasn't in line the other night to get Halo3, I don't have an xBox, I don't have a BMW, all I really have is my house, my wife, and my kids. I work hard, I'm good at what I do, and employers still want to give us the shaft.
I look at this IT salary report, and I think; OMG! I'm way underpaid! Then I look at job ads around here for likely positions I could fill, and they're around 2/3 what I'm making now. I just don't get it.
Slashdot Mirror
One thing is for absolute certain:
No matter where this sensation, or region in the brain comes from, when the Atheists take over, it will either be surgically removed from everyone at birth, or we will be genetically modified to eliminate that structure from our physiology. (Not accusing Atheists, in general of anything. Just the ones who are interested in politics.)
. . . of course, if the Atheists never do take over - I'm sure the Christianists will eventually get state-funded brain-scans of all children to detect whether they have a good responding brain thingie - and if they don't, mark that one as "Satan's child". - maybe with a little tatoo, or a brand or something.
Well, this is where machine-learning comes in.
The machine has to somehow look at millions of digitized archived Go games (hmmmm - where could one possibly find something like that?) - and figure out which "apparently disadvantageous" positions are actually advantageous (and factor in other metadata; like the player's experience level, past games, playing habits, etc. to see if there is a risk of turning the apparent disadvantage into a real disadvantage). (other metadata would be nice; but probably be unavailable - like, do these players KNOW eachother? do they have a grudge? might they be making emotional decisions? might one guy have skipped breakfast? is one guy coming down with a cold? etc. That way, the machine can more accurately apply "weights" to the moves, with regard to how important that move was towards changing the board position from an "apparent disadvantage" to a victory.)
Given this dataset, the machine has to somehow boil this down into a knowledgebase of some kind, to use as a guide when parsing the tree of a Go game. Now, your programmer can also be a Go Master, and toss in his own expertise to shape the knowledgebase; that's not "pure" machine learning, but it would still a valid "good Go algorithm".
Don't worry.
This will all be so much more fun when GM and AT&T are owned by the Chinese thanks to our massive Federal Budget and Trade deficits. (crypto's only as strong as its key, right?)
Warrantless Wiretapping?
Your car controlled remotely?
By ChiComs?
Not a single shot will be fired.
And it was the Voodoo economics faction of the Republican Party that made it happen! Woo hoo!
True.
.)
And what REALLY sucks about this - is that this "news" was all over CNN and the others this morning.
And now, it's going to be in malpractice suits, and people are going to be demanding it, no matter what the experimental data show - and this may actually INCREASE patient deaths, while increasing costs. And hospital boards are going to adopt it because this is what the market demands, not what produces the best outcomes (plus it's another line-item on the bill that they can pad with their own exhorbitant markup!).
About the only winners in this scenario are healthcare company stockholders who are physically healthy.
(***logs onto Ameritrade, researches stock symbol, prepares a buy. .
60 Million Bad Apples.
Just as the guy downthread who tries to argue that Ted Kennedy's drunk driving problem 40 years ago makes everything the Republicans are doing today, all right - there's no excuse for such stupidity.
People will not listen to what they don't want to hear. It's just a sad fact.
And there are two ways to look at anything: From a moral standpoint - these people who bury their head in the sand, have the blood of a half-million innocent Iraqi civilians on their hands. That's the morality of the situation. The torture, the destruction of everything we stand for as Americans, THEIR FAULT. They did it, because they wanted it - because they don't believe in America anymore. They believe in being selfish fascist pigs. They don't really believe in freedom, just using freedom as a word to club other people with.
Now, from an Engineering standpoint, I guess the solution is to just not allow anyone with an IQ less than 130 to vote. Politicians who take bribes or campaign contributions (read: public financed elections... money != speech), are immediately removed from office, and summarily executed. Journalists who lie are slapped.
That would solve a LOT of problems.
HP will continue its pace of acquisitions until Microsoft feels they can get away with buying them.
Exactly!
Where's the story about people getting gouged by Legal Services Professionals?
Hell - this story is older than that. How many guys paid for a hooker when their right hand would work just as well, AND NOT GIVE THEM A CASE OF THE CLAP?
Honestly, I think this race is between India, China, and Japan. The US is not in it. We abdicated the moon long ago - and it's foolish of us to try to go and get it back. It's roughly analagous to OJ Simpson, now out on bail, deciding to get back into shape and get back into football to try to keep all these young punks from winning the Heismann trophy. It's really absurd and a little sad.
It's especially sad, because you know damn well that even if we DID make it back to the moon, and even if we did "beat" China/Japan/India, we'd just abandon it again. Because the US has no interest or intent in staying.
There's no oil, no Hooters, and no beer on the Moon.
Though there *is* one hell of a truck. . .
You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make him drink it.
Is that the water's fault?
Sheesh.
Actually, Intel's power-saving by throttling the CPU load back is an ugly hack. I don't think that it's completely worthless, but it's still an ugly hack. Motorola's Power PC chips originally pursued a design of low power usage, but as the PPC business alliance disintegrated, and IBM kept pushing the performance envelope for server applications, the PPC architecture just got more and more power hungry. The final Mac generation, the G5, made an awesome workstation platform, but Apple could not shoehorn it into a portable.
The correct approach to power-utilization problems is to push for chip efficiency. Running full-on top-speed at all times is pretty dumb - but intel isn't pushing efficiency either - they're throttling back to save energy. Now; if I have to do X amount of work, and I have Y time to do that work, and if I'm on battery, you slow my CPU down, I'm not going to get that work done any faster. . . either the battery is going to do the job for me or not. Slowing my machine down does not solve this problem. Giving me a CPU that does more with less power (Transmeta!) solves my problem.
Given that Motorola and Transmeta tried to solve this problem (and gave up) - I can't really credit them much more than Intel. I hate their approach, but at least they did *something*.
About 10 years ago, I used a product called Folio, which was the same product Novell used for their "Novell Support Encyclopedia" - they had a great set of robust tools, including support filters for a wide enough variety of formats (and tools to write your own), and your data would all compile down to what they called an "Infobase" - which was a single indexed file containing full text, markup, graphics, and index - readable in a free downloadable reader with a pretty decent (for 1996) search engine, that did boolean, stem, and proximity searches.
It was very convenient to be able to give to either a reseller, or high-end customer, this single-file, containing reasonably up-to-date support information on our product that they could search on. It was probably the #1 thing our tech support department spent money on that reduced call volume. Then we got bought, and the new tech support director, an IBM guy, replaced everything with Lotus Notes - (and other headcount-increasing, empire building tools).
The Folio company was bought up and I think the technology is now used by the company that does Lexis-Nexis.
For now, my current employer is using Lucene.
WTF?
Back in 1996 - there was Napster.
We knew it was illegal - but then, we knew it was legal too. Because it wasn't illegal to let your brother borrow your Doobie Brothers album. It wasn't illegal to make a tape of that album to listen to it in your car.
But sharing it with your closest 200,000 friends on the internet? Gray area.
. . as long as you weren't profitting from it, right?
Then the courts decided that, even if there's no money, you still "profit" by letting people download from you, because you get "street cred" (or whatever).
The RIAA went after Napster. Which was wrong. Because Napster wasn't illegal. Napster was just a tool.
But Napster was the easy target. 1 corporation = easy (take out 1 million users with one suit). 1 million individual lawsuits = not so easy. They took out Napster - and we said: pointless, we'll share with other tools. And we did. And they went after every other tool out there, until Bittorrent made that impossible (or difficult) because of it's more fully P2P architecture.
So then they went after the individual people who were actually breaking the (imho flawed) law. The individual file sharers. This was the most stable legal ground for them. But they went about it in such a stupid way (not securing evidence, that was actually easy to get, attacking the wrong people) and their stupid ad campaign worked against them. Bad PR. They blew the one flimsy legal leg they had to stand on.
And in case any Microsoft PM is reading this:
How about fixing the god damned motherfucking 260 character path length limit in NTFS that's been there since 199-fucking-4?
I know NTFS supports paths up to 32,000 characters.
Now how about giving us tools to actually read and write paths that long?
It's 2007. (almost 8). Unicode anyone? Jesus H Christ what a clusterfuck of a "rewritten from the ground up" os.
. . . and soon, given that the loon has overtaken the greenback, and given that they've got oil. . . CANADA!
So how, Mr Environmentalist, do we meet our ever-increasing need for power?
How about we recognize that our planet has limited resources, and stop breeding like bacteria?
I mean, SERIOUSLY.
I'm with you on the nuclear power, and on use of breeder technology. (as long as there is sufficient engineering discipline and oversight to ensure public safety).
But the answer to the fundamental problem that unrestricted population growth incurs is: stop fucking growing.
Personally, I don't think it's that simple, either. There is no legal system, no governmental system in HISTORY, let alone one that respects the rights and freedoms I hold dear, that is capable of managing human reproduction on this scale. People will resist, and fight, and kill and die for their right to overpopulate the planet until it can no longer sustain any life.
I suspect that the answer is in Nature. That nature will manage our population for us. It will not be pleasant. It will not be pretty. It won't make anybody happy. But I suspect that since we cannot manage this ourselves - it will be managed for us. Probably multiple times.
I think it's a mistake to consider Saudi Arabia (and Kuwait, and UAE) our ally. (at least unconditionally, as we have been doing).
Saudi Arabia waves these big (unconfirmed, often specious) oil reserves around, and the US is at their beck-and-call. But at the end of the day, the royals are just as terrified that the mullahs are going to toss them out some day - so they pay them off, and criticize "Israel and the West" to the disaffected masses of their kleptocracy. And who suffers the consequences? We do.
If they were our ally, we would not be called the enemy of Islam in their official state-run press.
The US might not be better off if we were to nuke Mecca.
But we're certainly not better off since it's been unconditionally taken off the table.
15 of the 19 9/11 hijackers were Saudis.
That's not as meaningless a statement as most Americans seem to think it is.
The Saudis (and the Iranians) *KNOW* they can act with impunity, because they *KNOW* we are dependent on their oil. They *KNOW* that we will talk tough, but at the end of the day, if we follow through on our tough talk, like we did in Iraq, we end up with:
1. 4000 dead US soldiers.
2. Tarnished world image, diminished credibility.
3. $1 Trillion in debt (just from the war).
4. No meaningful amount of Iraqi oil flowing for, going on 4 years.
5. An economic and political death-spiral.
The soldier of the future will be a machine, which will take orders directly from a Hedge Fund Manager, without any intervention or interference from politicians, generals, or soldiers.
Imagine the success of the investment fund that can, with impunity, secure natural resources by simply sending a killbot to wipe out the natives. You know this is the investor's wet dream. They will make it a reality, sooner or later. And sooner or later, YOU will either be the investor, or the native.
Saving lives?
That's just one more person you have to compete with for the limited resources left on this planet.
Everybody's gotta die. Better you sooner than me.
It's true, to some extent, that I have a stake in my neighbor's survival, and even well being, because my neighbor's well being affects my well being. There's no disputing that.
But to pretend that we're fighting for "freedom" over there, when the freedom we have here is so illusory, is pretty assinine. They're over there killing, and getting killed, and while, to some extent, they're bleeding my country's economy, it's all borrowed money, so they're really hurting our lendors as well, and it was all fiat money that had to come crashing down at some point anyway. Was it for oil? Did we really just spend almost a trillion (probably 2, before it's over) dollars to control less than $500 billion worth of oil reserves? I don't believe that either. Was it for strategic control? were we just knocking over anthills? Were we knocking over our own anthill?
Really, the most plausible explanation at this point was that the Bush administration, and a few insiders in the Texas Republican party, scammed the rest of the Republican party, and the nation, into a war, so they could sock a bunch of money from bogus defense contracts into bank accounts in the caymans, so that when our economy collapsed, (as it was looking like it inevitably would) - they'd be well positioned to take the reigns of power. . . REAL power, (financial) not the bullshit political power we have in D.C.
So while it's a nice thought that we can come up with all this whiz-bang high-tech equipment to make sure that we can sent johnny into the field he can get a 10,000-to-1 kill ratio, come home with his legs blown off, get fitted with stem-cell-grown replacements, and probably still end up unemployed, crippled, and pensioned, with a cost-per-soldier ratio easily 10,000 times what a soldier cost to field in WWII, it's not a nice thought to know that those soldiers in WWII came back, got jobs, started businesses, built America into the world's greatest nation, gave birth to the baby boomer generation, and generated a tidal wave of enormous REAL wealth; and today's soldiers come back with bupkus, into an economy in a death-spiral, their families are on food stamps, the soldiers are unemployable, mentally unstable, and the bulk of that 10,000-to-1 cost offset went into some republican party donor's pocket instead.
Gulf war II - first year cost, approx. $80 billion.
This year's run rate is approaching $190 billion.
There is something SERIOUSLY wrong with this picture.
We don't need electronic gadgets to help us fight wars. We need new economic tools to figure out how to either finance these wars properly, or survive without having to fight them in the first place.
I would think that on my system, a visit to that webpage would crash the browser, just like a visit to the router's admin page does.
I agree strongly that one parent should stay home when kids are under the age of about 5-8. It really makes a big difference. But after that age; not so much. It took many years of mounting debt and living paycheck to paycheck, and financial emergencies - but my wife was finally convinced to go back to work after our youngest turned 11. Hallelujah!
I mean - what the hell is she supposed to do with her time for the rest of her life? What if I died? Or got sick and couldn't work? She'd have zero job experience if she had to start again - it's just common sense. There's no damn reason to be a housewife if the husband helps with the housework (come on guys!) and if the kids are old enough to be a little independent. My wife is starting a business - and if it succeeds, we'll have a much nicer lifestyle. We even may be secure enough where I could risk trying to start a business. And if her business fails? Oh well. Try again? Or go work for someone else? sure. Whatever.
Yes;
Not only will HR screw you as far as getting in the door is concerned, but they will also screw you with salary.
They will come up with any excuse or plausible reason they can to nickel and dime your starting salary down, I've seen cases where (at a previous employer) we've already made offers to candidates, and then HR chimes in the day before the starting day, telling us we had no authority to make an "official" offer, and then they lowball the "official" offer because they guy went to the wrong school, or didn't have exactly the right degree, or was 6 months shy the experience in a specific skill that was listed in the HR req.
In fact, I will go so far as to convey this bit of wisdom:
One of the most challenging kinds of jobs there is to get, is the high tech job at the large company - typically higher paying, typically more stable, typically more prestigious, typically more rewarding work. But getting past the HR regs and goons is what will kill you - and often they'll also try to stretch the process out from what could normally be accomplished in a few days, to 6 weeks or more. (trust me, this is as painful for the hirers as it is for the candidates).
The trick is to find a way to get hired there, without going through the HR dept.
*know* somebody. A team manager. Make sure he knows you have a critical skill his team needs to complete his project. You can try to get in on a subcontract basis - start your own 1-man-consulting biz, work through a temp agency, whatever. Get your foot in the door. When you're there, work your ass off and make yourself indispensable. When your contract is up - they will HIRE you. (but make sure you grease the wheels, and do what needs to be done, talk to whomever needs to be talked to! Bureaucrats are not known for their initiative!).
Eventually, you'll have to deal with the HR stooge to get a starting salary.
Don't let them lowball you. If you do, you're fucked. Because all large companies have ironclad policies about advancement and raises. (last place I quit had a limit of 6% - even if you were promoted, or got an internal new position at a higher level - the max raise was 6% - I took that 6%, then I quit, and got 15% on top of that somewhere else!).
Make sure you KNOW your skills, your education, and know what the requirements are for the position you're entering, make sure you've met or exceeded them. (in the "internal hire" scenario, you can often Write Your Own Job Description - which is really nice! - probably unethical, but that's your manager's problem).
Start high, because all of your future raises are based on a percentage calculation. The higher your base, the higher your raises. The higher your exit salary, the higher your salary requirements are for your NEXT job, should you decide to leave. Don't take a pay cut, and don't take a bonus or other "bribe" or perk in lieu of base salary.
Remember - HR people are HACKS. All of them. If they weren't there, trying to scam you out of your deserved starting salary, they'd be on a used car lot, trying to sell you "undercoating" or "mud flaps".
Make rather than Buy?
Make your own tools? Raw materials? Parts? It's not ALL free.
I know for a fact that cycling is NOT a cheap hobby. . .
You're talking about the "Hedonic adjustment" theory, and it's all bullcrap.
So Greenspan got the FED to eliminate Food, Energy, and recently, Housing, from the calculation for Inflation - and the outsourcing of manufacturing to third world countries artificially depressed costs of certain items, while costs for domestic services (ie. Medical Care, etc.) skyrocketed - and yet did not impact the overall average, because they were supposedly offset by the fact that anybody can now get a DVD player for free with their $5 Happy Meal.
This view of the CPI is perhaps a good view for an economist, or an industrialist, or a banker. But what it does is completely absolutely ignore what is happening to the Average Joe's cost of living. It's a mindset of ivory-towerism. An ideology of denial. A refusal to accept reality. An insistence on enforcing a contrived fantasy view upon the rest of the country, because the CPI is used to direct monetary policy, which affects EVERYBODY.
On the bright side, now Canadians can laugh at Americans for their "funny money".
Yes.
Agreed.
I left my former employer - got a 15% raise, and a $5k signon bonus; and I'm *still* struggling.
I keep hearing that it's because I'm too materialist - "the things you own end up owning you" - etc.
That's bullshit. No, it's true, actually, but I am most definitely *NOT* materialist; maybe compared to most people I know - whom ARE very materialist - compared to say, an Uzbeki goat herder, I suppose my iPod nano is quite bourgeois. But no, I haven't bought any of the big-ticket toys that many of my neighbors and acquaintances have; the boats, the motorcycles, the trucks, I wasn't in line the other night to get Halo3, I don't have an xBox, I don't have a BMW, all I really have is my house, my wife, and my kids. I work hard, I'm good at what I do, and employers still want to give us the shaft.
I look at this IT salary report, and I think; OMG! I'm way underpaid! Then I look at job ads around here for likely positions I could fill, and they're around 2/3 what I'm making now. I just don't get it.
To quote a rigorous defender of such regimes from a previous employer:
"Configuration Management is a serious engineering discipline!"