Arguably the financial industry bailouts were needed and worked
as intended-- and the money has been paid back.
What didn't work: (1) there was no equivalent "bailout" for the
ordinary citizens, e.g. mortgage relief; (2) the rules on the
financial industry were not tightened up very well afterwards, so
we can look forward to replays of 2008 in the future.
But "regulatory capture" is indeed a real problem: so don't let it happen.
Doing without regulation because capture can happen is not
actually a sensible strategy.
For the near future, the prescription is (1) don't elect
Republicans, (2) stay away from "moderate" Democrats.
"Have you recieved funding from the agencies you're regulating"
is not actually a bad litmus test, if you think about it for two seconds.
Craig Newmark argues that television was killing print
journalisms ad revenue long before the internet showed up.
There are a bunch of businesses out there that are based on
bundling various functions together into one package where
some of them can be used as loss-leaders and others as profit
centers-- it's pretty obvious that's ripe for failure when
someone figures out how to do the money-making part without
the loss-leaders.
(One of my favorite examples these days: we've traditionally
had a bunch of social centers disguised as market places-- e.g.
bookstores-- and now that the brick-and-mortar business is going
out of style we really need to re-think this and figure out how
we're going to fund our social centers. I see former-bookstores
playing with becoming non-profits, selling memberships, etc...)
The trouble with government funded news agencies like NPR is that
it can only work as long as the government is reasonably
enlightened as is willing to respect its independence.
So it fails just when you need it most...
The post-Reagan Republicans started making jokes about "National
Pinko Radio" and threatening it's funding. That pulled it back
to the "center" really fast.
I come not to praise systemd, and certainly not to praise Poettering or RedHat...
But these anti-systemd rants would be more impressive if you guys had showed any signs of thinking through what you're saying about The Unix Way and all that jazz.
Yes, sometimes decentralized, small encapsulated components are a win, but sometimes monolithic designs where the pieces can talk to each other easily are a win-- You might notice that when Linus Torvalds was asked about this he made some rather mild comments about how some aspects of linux, like the graphic display environment has always been more monolithic.
Arguably, the initial reason perl was a big deal is it took a bunch of features from the shell programming world and stuck them all inside of one process-- you can do lash-ups of shell, awk, sed and so on, or you can just write a perl script and pretty frequently the perl script is really and truly a better option.
And take a look at some of the classic shell utilities some time. Look at the docs for things like "find", "tar", etc... do they really look to you like something that's designed to just do "one thing"?
You guys who keep intoning "the unix philosophy" over-and-over might want to stop and think about the way things really get done with unix.
But then, none of this is a defense of systemd, or the way systemd was put over...
I have this fantasy where we lock the SJWs and ASJWs in a room together, and let them fight it out for eternity amongst themselves. Kind of like the end of that bad Star Trek episode.
Now do you think you could go away and stop bring up the same point over-and-over in this ground-breaking discussion of systemd?
(Yes, I know. "Let That Be Your Last Battlefield". Third season, of course.)
You seem to be focusing in on all the initial over-reaction to the incident, but want to ignore the real problems here. I don't think having to abandon little chunks of the planet for 100 years when one of these things melts is really a good outcome for nuclear power. I'm not terribly comforted by how it wasn't as bad as people's worst imaginations.
So, you're of the opinion that the alarmism about nuclear power-- whe arguably killed 10s of thousands-- is no big deal, because it's all to avert the greater evil of the dread nuclear meltdown threat which might materialize some day?
See, I'm of the opinion that we should avoid problems with nuclear plants by fixing them, not by shutting them down, because we actually do need clean energy sources like nuclear power if we're going to have any hope of ameliorating global warming, because while solar and wind have had some encouraging progress, they're not going to solve the problem.
I'm not sure how many on Enron's corporate board were Republicans,
Without looking, I would say "a lot": Enron donated money to the Republican party during the rise of the Bush Jr. regime.
Many of Enron's actions were found to be illegal by the FERC, but Enron had already gone bankrupt by that point, so there was not much to do.
A lot of the gyrations with putting The Governator in office looked an awful lot like making sure that no one went after the money Enron has stolen from California. There were some other interesting events around that time like a convenient heart-attack, not that I'm paranoid about it or anything.
A thumbnail history of the California political experience: when Republicans are in power you have bad financial management-- and on the national stage, our Repubican friends blame this on those damn hippies in California-- but then when you get rid of the Republicans, and the financial mismanagement goes away, and things start working again.
Claiming that "nobody" was affected by the radiation would be
hard to prove, even if you excluded the workers at the plant--
on the other hand, there was an intense amount of alarmism
surrounding the Fukushima incident, and that has essentially
turned out to be completely wrong. Democracy Now was running
"worse than Chernobyl" headlines; for years afterwards I was
tyring to convince people in the SF Bay Area that they really and
truly weren't going to die because of leakage in Japan...
What did kill people at Fukushima was an evacutation
panic. If you're anti-nuclear, you think "well of course,
nuclear is inherently scary!", if you're pro-nuclear, you wonder
why no one ever holds the anti-nuclear side accountable for their
fear-mongering...
You skipped the fact that there's another nuclear plant in the same region of Japan that came through okay because their backup generators were placed up on higher ground.
I don't know enough about the social situation in Japan to pin blame (was it TEPCO, was it the regulatory body?) but off hand I don't have any objections to going after management on this one, and I'm pretty strongly pro-nuclear.
If there's no penalty for a screw-up of this magnitude, then what's the incentive to keep management from rolling the dice again?
Does anyone remember "second life"? You know, the one where they
told the industry "journalists" they were the biggest thing ever
with a gazillion people using it, and it turned out they were
simply using the advanced marketing technique known as "lying".
And the industry "journalists" were engaging in the common
practice of "going along with it", because you know, you've got
to write about something, and a phoney trend is better
than nothing.
Jerry Brown signed off on closing the Diablo Canyon plant, and throwing away a big chunk of Califonia's clean power generation capability. A functional, paid-for plant that's been working fine-- try explaining that by "economics".
We haven't seen anything like a sane energy market (no carbon tax, no cap-and-trade), and it hasn't quite sunk into people's heads that natural gas is much worse than we thought it was (courtesy of methane leakage).
Fans of solar and wind are excited because "renewables" are up a bit, but natural gas is up a even more... we are not going to save the planet this way, gang.
True, they tend to call it "renewables", because if they just pushed for "clean" energy, that would include nuclear, and since we all know nuclear power is the ultimate evil anything that might encourage it's use is Bad and Wrong... Green activists that would rather see increases in Greenhouse Gas Emissions are one of the psychological puzzles of the modern world...
Loudness is due to the restaurant having many customers. So maybe they don't lose customers..
And in point of fact, it seems as though they make cavernous, echoy spaces on purpose, because it seems to attract quite a few people-- or it used to, it'd be nice if people are getting sick of it.
I developed a theory in the 90s when this trend seemed to really get going that what was going on is that a lot of yuppies are people who actually enjoyed high school, and they were trying to re-capture the old school lunch room at noon experience.
Maybe everyone is ready for something new, at last... just when I'm ready to give up on the modern world, it sometimes surprises me and suddenly gets a clue.
Yes, but Wikipedia is the biggest donation funded site and has a huge charity operation behind it. That model probably won't work for a lot of sites.
It's almost the only thing that does work. Think about it: advertising support sets up an adversarial relationship with the readers, and always threatens to undermine neutrality. Government support works as long as the government is reasonably enlightened, government supported media fails when you need it the most when the government is going bad. Subscription-only media becomes nearly invisible to the public at large, word of mouth disappears, "social media presence" is zero. There's a constant race-to-the-bottom as things that are "free" absorbs everyone's attention, hiding everything else.
So what we have is (1) donations (2) leaky paywalls with perpetual javascript popup nags.
Paraphrasing from memory, his line goes something like: "We've spent billions of dollars researching Tokamaks and what we've learned is that Tokamaks are no damn good. Even the people working on them will tell you that they're never going to work, but they say the physics is really good. They're like superconducting cathedrals. But fusion works, we know it works, if you look up in the sky you see fusion reactors everywhere, and not a single one of them is torroidal."
More reasonably, he makes the point that even with minimal funding, they were able to get within something like a factor of 10- "not a factor of 100 or 1000, but a factor of 10".
Slashdot Mirror
No, it's a random shot to try to discredit the source. If he made money off of what he's criticizing he must be some sort of hypocrite! Or something.
Of course, it's more likely he's one of the former-partners that the Zuck has reportedly shafted on his climb to the top, and this book is payback.
Arguably the financial industry bailouts were needed and worked as intended-- and the money has been paid back.
What didn't work: (1) there was no equivalent "bailout" for the ordinary citizens, e.g. mortgage relief; (2) the rules on the financial industry were not tightened up very well afterwards, so we can look forward to replays of 2008 in the future.
But "regulatory capture" is indeed a real problem: so don't let it happen. Doing without regulation because capture can happen is not actually a sensible strategy.
For the near future, the prescription is (1) don't elect Republicans, (2) stay away from "moderate" Democrats. "Have you recieved funding from the agencies you're regulating" is not actually a bad litmus test, if you think about it for two seconds.
Craig Newmark argues that television was killing print journalisms ad revenue long before the internet showed up.
There are a bunch of businesses out there that are based on bundling various functions together into one package where some of them can be used as loss-leaders and others as profit centers-- it's pretty obvious that's ripe for failure when someone figures out how to do the money-making part without the loss-leaders.
(One of my favorite examples these days: we've traditionally had a bunch of social centers disguised as market places-- e.g. bookstores-- and now that the brick-and-mortar business is going out of style we really need to re-think this and figure out how we're going to fund our social centers. I see former-bookstores playing with becoming non-profits, selling memberships, etc...)
The trouble with government funded news agencies like NPR is that it can only work as long as the government is reasonably enlightened as is willing to respect its independence. So it fails just when you need it most...
The post-Reagan Republicans started making jokes about "National Pinko Radio" and threatening it's funding. That pulled it back to the "center" really fast.
So, step zero is elect a bunch of democrats. And not "moderate" democrats, either.
At some point we've got to be willing to talk about the real problem without fear of seeming "too partisan".
Far more important would be a wall to keep drugs from entering the White House.
Anyone old enough to think the "get off of my lawn" joke is still funny is clearly pretty old.
I come not to praise systemd, and certainly not to praise Poettering or RedHat...
But these anti-systemd rants would be more impressive if you guys had showed any signs of thinking through what you're saying about The Unix Way and all that jazz.
Yes, sometimes decentralized, small encapsulated components are a win, but sometimes monolithic designs where the pieces can talk to each other easily are a win-- You might notice that when Linus Torvalds was asked about this he made some rather mild comments about how some aspects of linux, like the graphic display environment has always been more monolithic.
Arguably, the initial reason perl was a big deal is it took a bunch of features from the shell programming world and stuck them all inside of one process-- you can do lash-ups of shell, awk, sed and so on, or you can just write a perl script and pretty frequently the perl script is really and truly a better option.
And take a look at some of the classic shell utilities some time. Look at the docs for things like "find", "tar", etc... do they really look to you like something that's designed to just do "one thing"?
You guys who keep intoning "the unix philosophy" over-and-over might want to stop and think about the way things really get done with unix.
But then, none of this is a defense of systemd, or the way systemd was put over...
I have this fantasy where we lock the SJWs and ASJWs in a room together, and let them fight it out for eternity amongst themselves. Kind of like the end of that bad Star Trek episode.
Now do you think you could go away and stop bring up the same point over-and-over in this ground-breaking discussion of systemd?
(Yes, I know. "Let That Be Your Last Battlefield". Third season, of course.)
Let me go make some popcorn.
Just like the president's IQ.
So, you're of the opinion that the alarmism about nuclear power-- whe arguably killed 10s of thousands-- is no big deal, because it's all to avert the greater evil of the dread nuclear meltdown threat which might materialize some day?
See, I'm of the opinion that we should avoid problems with nuclear plants by fixing them, not by shutting them down, because we actually do need clean energy sources like nuclear power if we're going to have any hope of ameliorating global warming, because while solar and wind have had some encouraging progress, they're not going to solve the problem.
Without looking, I would say "a lot": Enron donated money to the Republican party during the rise of the Bush Jr. regime.
A lot of the gyrations with putting The Governator in office looked an awful lot like making sure that no one went after the money Enron has stolen from California. There were some other interesting events around that time like a convenient heart-attack, not that I'm paranoid about it or anything.
A thumbnail history of the California political experience: when Republicans are in power you have bad financial management-- and on the national stage, our Repubican friends blame this on those damn hippies in California-- but then when you get rid of the Republicans, and the financial mismanagement goes away, and things start working again.
Last I looked it was "warmer winters"-- not all energy is electrical energy, much of the coal they burn is for heating.
If you're worried about global warming, you do not shut down clean, functioning energy sources. Full stop.
Unfortunately, Jerry Brown over in CA decided to repeat the greens mistake in Germany, and we may lose the Diablo-Canyon plant. here...
But never waste a crisis, right?
Claiming that "nobody" was affected by the radiation would be hard to prove, even if you excluded the workers at the plant-- on the other hand, there was an intense amount of alarmism surrounding the Fukushima incident, and that has essentially turned out to be completely wrong. Democracy Now was running "worse than Chernobyl" headlines; for years afterwards I was tyring to convince people in the SF Bay Area that they really and truly weren't going to die because of leakage in Japan...
What did kill people at Fukushima was an evacutation panic. If you're anti-nuclear, you think "well of course, nuclear is inherently scary!", if you're pro-nuclear, you wonder why no one ever holds the anti-nuclear side accountable for their fear-mongering...
Our Republican friends have been looking like Ayn Rand villains for years now. Take a look at Enron again some time.
You skipped the fact that there's another nuclear plant in the same region of Japan that came through okay because their backup generators were placed up on higher ground.
I don't know enough about the social situation in Japan to pin blame (was it TEPCO, was it the regulatory body?) but off hand I don't have any objections to going after management on this one, and I'm pretty strongly pro-nuclear.
If there's no penalty for a screw-up of this magnitude, then what's the incentive to keep management from rolling the dice again?
Does anyone remember "second life"? You know, the one where they told the industry "journalists" they were the biggest thing ever with a gazillion people using it, and it turned out they were simply using the advanced marketing technique known as "lying".
And the industry "journalists" were engaging in the common practice of "going along with it", because you know, you've got to write about something, and a phoney trend is better than nothing.
At present the nuclear industry is indeed not doing well. If we actually cared about global warming, we would try to fix that problem.
Jerry Brown signed off on closing the Diablo Canyon plant, and throwing away a big chunk of Califonia's clean power generation capability. A functional, paid-for plant that's been working fine-- try explaining that by "economics".
We haven't seen anything like a sane energy market (no carbon tax, no cap-and-trade), and it hasn't quite sunk into people's heads that natural gas is much worse than we thought it was (courtesy of methane leakage).
Fans of solar and wind are excited because "renewables" are up a bit, but natural gas is up a even more... we are not going to save the planet this way, gang.
True, they tend to call it "renewables", because if they just pushed for "clean" energy, that would include nuclear, and since we all know nuclear power is the ultimate evil anything that might encourage it's use is Bad and Wrong... Green activists that would rather see increases in Greenhouse Gas Emissions are one of the psychological puzzles of the modern world...
And in point of fact, it seems as though they make cavernous, echoy spaces on purpose, because it seems to attract quite a few people-- or it used to, it'd be nice if people are getting sick of it.
I developed a theory in the 90s when this trend seemed to really get going that what was going on is that a lot of yuppies are people who actually enjoyed high school, and they were trying to re-capture the old school lunch room at noon experience.
Maybe everyone is ready for something new, at last... just when I'm ready to give up on the modern world, it sometimes surprises me and suddenly gets a clue.
It's almost the only thing that does work. Think about it: advertising support sets up an adversarial relationship with the readers, and always threatens to undermine neutrality. Government support works as long as the government is reasonably enlightened, government supported media fails when you need it the most when the government is going bad. Subscription-only media becomes nearly invisible to the public at large, word of mouth disappears, "social media presence" is zero. There's a constant race-to-the-bottom as things that are "free" absorbs everyone's attention, hiding everything else.
So what we have is (1) donations (2) leaky paywalls with perpetual javascript popup nags.
Myself, if I had to make a guess, I'd pick something like the Polywell design: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
But then, I was largely persuaded by some snark from Bussard: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Paraphrasing from memory, his line goes something like: "We've spent billions of dollars researching Tokamaks and what we've learned is that Tokamaks are no damn good. Even the people working on them will tell you that they're never going to work, but they say the physics is really good. They're like superconducting cathedrals. But fusion works, we know it works, if you look up in the sky you see fusion reactors everywhere, and not a single one of them is torroidal."
More reasonably, he makes the point that even with minimal funding, they were able to get within something like a factor of 10- "not a factor of 100 or 1000, but a factor of 10".
And I trust almost anyone more than people who are still saying stuff like this.