not only do you listen, you never, ever call them a bean counter to their face
No offense, but an obvious inference is that bean counters have no sense of humor. One thing you can say for most engineers and programmers is they have a sense of humor about it. From what I understand "geek" and "nerd" are not universally considered complimentary.
I think we are lucky that Cerf didn't see that "opportunity" when he worked on TCP/IP, because modifying the paths where data flows is essentially circuit switching. The routing protocol of the internet is so successful because it doesn't rely on switched circuits.
You could look at it that way, but why is that so awful? It seems you can reconfigure the "virtual circuits" dynamically, and it doesn't suffer from circuit switching's big limitation of fixed bandwidth
So the solution to my personal economic problem is to spend money I don't have in the hopes of becoming prosperous?
You presumably are a person. The United States is a country. Has it occurred to you that there might be a difference, or are you susceptible to the fallacy of composition.
Obama? You really ought to follow American politics more closely before you make a decision to move. This comes from someone on the left, not the right.
Interesting, but at some point a heavy duty user is still going to have to deal with floating point rounding issues. There's only so much computing power in the world. Nevertheless it could be useful for debugging some rounding issues. My rule of thumb is that if your algorithm is sensitive to rounding issues, you're doing something wrong.
Accounting does have very well defined rounding techniques. They might make the mathematically inclined go "huh?", but they do serve their purpose of being very repeatable. There are libraries for dealing with that nonsense.
These statements do a great job of conflating median and mean. If you're comparing per household spending to per household income, you don't want median because a small proportion of American households take home a huge amount of income.
R&R were smarter than that. Until very recently they refused to release the data or the "code" used to analyze it. They finally did, but hey, no scam can continue forever. Ask Bernie Madoff.
A government cannot keep borrowing and accumulating debt forever. At some point, it is a mathematical certainty that the interest burden on that debt will exceed 100% of government revenue and eventually 100% of GDP.
Absolutely true, if you simplemindedly assume that GDP is constant. Help ma, more than one variable, I'm confused!
Before all the bailouts and ECB interventions, the PIIGS were looking at rapidly rising interest rates.
Although before the Great Recession, some of the PIIGS, Ireland and Spain, were considered models of fiscal rectitude by people like yourself. What a shame more countries didn't follow their example.
You can't use more debt to cure a debt problem.
Of course that's always true. No reason for complexity in your thinking. If I'm in debt due to unemployment, get a job, but need money to buy a car to get to work, that would be a terrible idea to try to cure debt with debt.
Not sure how you draw the conclusion that it has any desire to be physics.
Because both like to write lots of fancy equations. The difference is that physicists test their theories, and reject them if they fail. Hence they're a pretty good description of reality. Economists like to skip the empirical verification step so as not to interfere with their ideologically motivated conclusions. But hey, those theories must be right - they've got lots of Greek letters and mathematical hieroglyphics.
Notice below how you see the dow begin to recover up until Smoot-Hawly
Post hoc ergo propter hoc. Even Milton Friedman said that, while a bad idea, the effect of Smoot-Hawley was miniscule, because trade was only a small part of the US economy.
And if you think tariffs are always bad, burn Alexander Hamilton in effigy. Under those idiotic protectionist policies he instigated (and which were maintained for well over a century) we became the.... Oops, ok, we became the greatest industrial power in history. But that's not the point you're interested in, is it?
Keynesian theory was shattered when it proposed that stagflation can't possibly happen
That would be damning, if in fact Keynesian theory predicted such a thing. It doesn't, but it's a nice urban legend for people to reiterate until they think it's true.
Horse puckeys. Numerous posters above have said that, for a traditional spreadsheet, Excel is pretty good. I concur. The only problem is that the term "Excel error" is ambiguous. It can either mean a bug in Excel or a mistake in using Excel. Most people (non-programmers) would probably assume the latter.
I guess so, but by an amazing coincidence it was a mistake that reinforced the authors' ideology. The authors also refused to release the data/code for the longest time.
There are languages like that. Ada (no groans please) and IIRC Fortran. Unfortunately the cure is worse than the disease. Lots of dumb errors crop up when you have one person habitually using 0 based and another using 1 based indexing.
You'd be extremely hard-pressed to run into an overflow error or a floating point precision issue if you wrote it in Common Lisp or Scheme
Serious question: how do Lisp/Scheme avoid those floating point precision issues? IIRC (I know little of them) they can have "any size - automatically grows" integers, but what about floats?
None of those is particularly appropriate for sharing data in a useful format with peers.
Neither is Excel. Try something fancy like CSV. Data and "code" should be kept separate. Bonus points if you can take the quotes from around "code".
Excel and spreadsheets like are overused toys that have become the bane of intelligent analysis. I've seen numerous errors because of their idiotic setup (and I don't even used spreadsheets except when forced to). Give every MBA and ideology driven economist a copy of Excel and ship them off to a barren island. Make sure their only Internet connection to the outside world empties into the bit bucket.
How about by not conflating data, formulae, and layout in the UI? This is an error made by all VisiCalc clones, but not by Improv clones. If you use something like Improv, FlexiSheet or Quantrix then this kind of error is almost impossible to make. If you use something like VisiCalc, 1-2-3, Excel or OpenOffice.org Calc, it is trivial.
Very interesting. I'm occasionally forced to use Excel, and like other spreadsheets I was familiar with, I thought that mixing data and "code" (especially where you can only peek at one formula at a time) was idiotic. Why not separate them, while still maintaining an easy-to-use GUI? Great idea - wish I'd had it 30 years ago.
The US has localised recessions and booms sure, but nobody's seriously arguing that New York City and California should have different currencies.
California is now part of the US? What idiots let that happen!?
Ok, accepting that past mistake, the difference is that NY and CA are both under the federal government. In other words there is a fiscal authority (government) at the same level as the monetary authority (central bank). The main criticism of the Euro is that that's not true. It has a monetary authority (ECB) without a corresponding fiscal authority. The EU is too weak to count as equivalent to the US federal government.
The UK has had much higher debt ratios in the past. It equalled 30 years of tax revenue after the war with France and Spain in the early 19th century. It took most of the century to pay it off
So? That was the UK's greatest period of growth and relative prosperity. It's often cited as an example of debt not impeding growth. Similarly the US had federal debt of 125%/GDP after WWII, and post-WWII was our greatest growth period. It helped that the debt was mostly internal (i.e. War Bonds were held by Americans, so paying off the debt meant paying Americans). AFAIK the same was true of the UK after the Napoleonic wars.
However, I'm not saying debt isn't important, just that it's not the only or the ultimate evil. Other things can be worse, and can justify increasing the debt.
They want somebody who knows all the frameworks and related stuff? Good luck. More likely they need someone to work with one or two that they use in house. Yes, it raises the learning curve, but if you're serious about needing people, you'll live with that.
The differences between object-oriented procedural languages aren't that great
Yes, they are. Learn your OO and design patterns for real and you'll get job offers.
People who are obsessed with OO purity, "design patterns", and other low level issues, rather than worrying about the application area, and the appropriate overall structure, algorithms and data structures, are buzzword fetishists who write code that's beautiful in their own mind, and sucks in the real world.
Linus Torvalds thinks OO means obfuscation squared. That probably explains why he can't get a job.
P.S. OO is sooo 90's. All the cool kids are talking about functional languages.
Slashdot Mirror
not only do you listen, you never, ever call them a bean counter to their face
No offense, but an obvious inference is that bean counters have no sense of humor. One thing you can say for most engineers and programmers is they have a sense of humor about it. From what I understand "geek" and "nerd" are not universally considered complimentary.
I think we are lucky that Cerf didn't see that "opportunity" when he worked on TCP/IP, because modifying the paths where data flows is essentially circuit switching. The routing protocol of the internet is so successful because it doesn't rely on switched circuits.
You could look at it that way, but why is that so awful? It seems you can reconfigure the "virtual circuits" dynamically, and it doesn't suffer from circuit switching's big limitation of fixed bandwidth
So the solution to my personal economic problem is to spend money I don't have in the hopes of becoming prosperous?
You presumably are a person. The United States is a country. Has it occurred to you that there might be a difference, or are you susceptible to the fallacy of composition.
Do you really hope to explain good UI design to people who think that the command name "grep" has mnemonic value?
Maybe under the Articles of Confederation, but not under the Constitution. That's exactly why the US was failing under the Articles of Confederation.
Obama? You really ought to follow American politics more closely before you make a decision to move. This comes from someone on the left, not the right.
The whole problem with overdone nationalism is that everybody wants to claim his country is worse than the other guy's.
Interesting, but at some point a heavy duty user is still going to have to deal with floating point rounding issues. There's only so much computing power in the world. Nevertheless it could be useful for debugging some rounding issues. My rule of thumb is that if your algorithm is sensitive to rounding issues, you're doing something wrong.
Accounting does have very well defined rounding techniques. They might make the mathematically inclined go "huh?", but they do serve their purpose of being very repeatable. There are libraries for dealing with that nonsense.
in XLS format
You want to repeat the mistake?
These statements do a great job of conflating median and mean. If you're comparing per household spending to per household income, you don't want median because a small proportion of American households take home a huge amount of income.
Mod parent up!
peer-reviewed by someone who "could do the math"
R&R were smarter than that. Until very recently they refused to release the data or the "code" used to analyze it. They finally did, but hey, no scam can continue forever. Ask Bernie Madoff.
A government cannot keep borrowing and accumulating debt forever. At some point, it is a mathematical certainty that the interest burden on that debt will exceed 100% of government revenue and eventually 100% of GDP.
Absolutely true, if you simplemindedly assume that GDP is constant. Help ma, more than one variable, I'm confused!
Before all the bailouts and ECB interventions, the PIIGS were looking at rapidly rising interest rates.
Although before the Great Recession, some of the PIIGS, Ireland and Spain, were considered models of fiscal rectitude by people like yourself. What a shame more countries didn't follow their example.
You can't use more debt to cure a debt problem.
Of course that's always true. No reason for complexity in your thinking. If I'm in debt due to unemployment, get a job, but need money to buy a car to get to work, that would be a terrible idea to try to cure debt with debt.
Not sure how you draw the conclusion that it has any desire to be physics.
Because both like to write lots of fancy equations. The difference is that physicists test their theories, and reject them if they fail. Hence they're a pretty good description of reality. Economists like to skip the empirical verification step so as not to interfere with their ideologically motivated conclusions. But hey, those theories must be right - they've got lots of Greek letters and mathematical hieroglyphics.
Notice below how you see the dow begin to recover up until Smoot-Hawly
Post hoc ergo propter hoc. Even Milton Friedman said that, while a bad idea, the effect of Smoot-Hawley was miniscule, because trade was only a small part of the US economy.
And if you think tariffs are always bad, burn Alexander Hamilton in effigy. Under those idiotic protectionist policies he instigated (and which were maintained for well over a century) we became the .... Oops, ok, we became the greatest industrial power in history. But that's not the point you're interested in, is it?
Keynesian theory was shattered when it proposed that stagflation can't possibly happen
That would be damning, if in fact Keynesian theory predicted such a thing. It doesn't, but it's a nice urban legend for people to reiterate until they think it's true.
Horse puckeys. Numerous posters above have said that, for a traditional spreadsheet, Excel is pretty good. I concur. The only problem is that the term "Excel error" is ambiguous. It can either mean a bug in Excel or a mistake in using Excel. Most people (non-programmers) would probably assume the latter.
And you should be frightened by that news. Very frightened. Oops, didn't mean to destroy that country's economy. Sorry about the mistake.
The guy made a mistake
I guess so, but by an amazing coincidence it was a mistake that reinforced the authors' ideology. The authors also refused to release the data/code for the longest time.
There are languages like that. Ada (no groans please) and IIRC Fortran. Unfortunately the cure is worse than the disease. Lots of dumb errors crop up when you have one person habitually using 0 based and another using 1 based indexing.
You'd be extremely hard-pressed to run into an overflow error or a floating point precision issue if you wrote it in Common Lisp or Scheme
Serious question: how do Lisp/Scheme avoid those floating point precision issues? IIRC (I know little of them) they can have "any size - automatically grows" integers, but what about floats?
None of those is particularly appropriate for sharing data in a useful format with peers.
Neither is Excel. Try something fancy like CSV. Data and "code" should be kept separate. Bonus points if you can take the quotes from around "code".
Excel and spreadsheets like are overused toys that have become the bane of intelligent analysis. I've seen numerous errors because of their idiotic setup (and I don't even used spreadsheets except when forced to). Give every MBA and ideology driven economist a copy of Excel and ship them off to a barren island. Make sure their only Internet connection to the outside world empties into the bit bucket.
How about by not conflating data, formulae, and layout in the UI? This is an error made by all VisiCalc clones, but not by Improv clones. If you use something like Improv, FlexiSheet or Quantrix then this kind of error is almost impossible to make. If you use something like VisiCalc, 1-2-3, Excel or OpenOffice.org Calc, it is trivial.
Very interesting. I'm occasionally forced to use Excel, and like other spreadsheets I was familiar with, I thought that mixing data and "code" (especially where you can only peek at one formula at a time) was idiotic. Why not separate them, while still maintaining an easy-to-use GUI? Great idea - wish I'd had it 30 years ago.
The US has localised recessions and booms sure, but nobody's seriously arguing that New York City and California should have different currencies.
California is now part of the US? What idiots let that happen!?
Ok, accepting that past mistake, the difference is that NY and CA are both under the federal government. In other words there is a fiscal authority (government) at the same level as the monetary authority (central bank). The main criticism of the Euro is that that's not true. It has a monetary authority (ECB) without a corresponding fiscal authority. The EU is too weak to count as equivalent to the US federal government.
The UK has had much higher debt ratios in the past. It equalled 30 years of tax revenue after the war with France and Spain in the early 19th century. It took most of the century to pay it off
So? That was the UK's greatest period of growth and relative prosperity. It's often cited as an example of debt not impeding growth. Similarly the US had federal debt of 125%/GDP after WWII, and post-WWII was our greatest growth period. It helped that the debt was mostly internal (i.e. War Bonds were held by Americans, so paying off the debt meant paying Americans). AFAIK the same was true of the UK after the Napoleonic wars.
However, I'm not saying debt isn't important, just that it's not the only or the ultimate evil. Other things can be worse, and can justify increasing the debt.
They want somebody who knows all the frameworks and related stuff? Good luck. More likely they need someone to work with one or two that they use in house. Yes, it raises the learning curve, but if you're serious about needing people, you'll live with that.
The differences between object-oriented procedural languages aren't that great
Yes, they are. Learn your OO and design patterns for real and you'll get job offers.
People who are obsessed with OO purity, "design patterns", and other low level issues, rather than worrying about the application area, and the appropriate overall structure, algorithms and data structures, are buzzword fetishists who write code that's beautiful in their own mind, and sucks in the real world.
Linus Torvalds thinks OO means obfuscation squared. That probably explains why he can't get a job.
P.S. OO is sooo 90's. All the cool kids are talking about functional languages.