I am currently involved in a lot of remediation of silver bullet stuff. Don't get me wrong. I love XML, get a lot of milage out of using UML to drive MDA tools, am an advocate of publishing web services etc. The problem is, so much of it is done in an ass hatted way. And then I get called in, late in the project, to tell folks exactly how screwed they are.
The root problem is people using tools they never bother to even vaguely understand. If you aren't going to bother to understand the technology, please don't use it. Please, I'm begging you, you'll just screw it up. Or at the very least, find someone who *does* understand the tech to advise you.
Biometrics are fine identifiers. They are unique and immutable.
Identification is not authentication. Not even close. Just because someone presents an identifier does not mean they are the authorized thing represented by that identifiers. By their very nature, identifiers are promiscous.
What you are really saying is that in your estimation, scientists are still over compensated, and overvalued.
That's fine.
But it's a market out there. If you want to dramatically undervalue scientists compared to the other available career paths, don't be shocked when you get very few American's going into science, and of a lesser caliber than in past generations. A bunch of economists has taken to responding to the NSF 'we won't have enough scientists' rhetoric that way.
As to your comment on tenure... tenure is definitely in many ways a problem. I've seen lots of folks basically retire in place and become deadwood. Not everybody mind you (I've also known guys in their 90s who are still doing dynamic research and excellent teaching), but a lot of folks. I'm not sure what to do with it though. Sans tenure there is absolutely nothing left to recommend science as a career in the US. Problem is, folks are starting to realize how low the expectation value of that future tenure is, and despairing.
That greatly depends. Please note the modifier in my post about someone who could have succeeded as a scientist. Such people tend to end up on the higher end skill-wise of IT. Perhaps someday they will be outsourcable, but for right now, you generally don't find comparable talent in India or China that you can reliably acheive savings outsourcing to. Don't get me wrong, there is some REALLY bright talent in India. Absolutely top drawer. However, top grade Indian talent is no longer cheap, it's gotten expensive. And that cheap India IT labor? Uhm... yeah... it's not really that great. They take LOTS of supervision if you want a good outcome, and you generally can only get reliably decent results on your lower level tasks. I work with lots of folks who are IT workers in India we have outsourced some work to, I'm unafraid. Don't get me wrong, you can still get REALLY good folks in India, but they are expensive.
As to H1-Bs. Many of those folks are dead brilliant. Just amazing. But their numbers are way smaller than the demand for high caliber talent. Again, I am unafraid.
Will H1-Bs and globalization threaten my career someday? Perhaps, but so far, it doesn't look very threatening to me.
Because everyone I knew going through school was *shocked* to discover the jobs situation was even more screwed up that it was in physics. All through my training in physics, *everyone* kept saying: go away, there are no jobs. Everyone I knew doing an undergrad or grad in bio was convinced there we opportunities there... until they got their degrees, and found the jobs prospects even bleaker than my friends who stayed in physics.
Yes, you can live more simply, and be perfectlly happy with much less in the way of material wealth. I agree. There are trade-offs. I actually left physics for reasons that had nothing to do with the arguments above: it wasn't fun for me anymore. If you enjoy it so much more than the alternatives, then perhaps an academic career will be worthwhile to you, in spite of the sacrifices compared to other career paths you could have chosen.
The problem is that these days the sacrifices to go into science compared to your other options are getting very steep. At the same time many of the things that made science a nice job are available elsewhere. Flextime for example. One of the nice things about being an academic scientist was that to a large extent you had great flexibility in when you worked. That's now true in the private sector as well. Another was that science presented some very interesting problems, and certain kinds of people really *enjoy* working on such problems. But there are now interesting problems to work on in the private sector as well.
Basically, the relative benefits of being a scientist are shrinking, and the relative costs are increasing.
It's not just the money, it's the whole quality of life.
It's being able to live somewhere nice instead of facing possibly having to live in some bubblefuck town in Iowa that has the only university that was hiring in your area of research that year.
It's actually being capitalized. Compare what it takes to get a grant to buy the computing and other equipment you need to what it takes me in the commercial world to get equipment. I am fantastically better capitalized than anyone I know in academia. I've known physics profs who built racks in the machine shop, and soddered their own serial cables to save money... I'd rather not waste my time.
It's respect for my time and personaly life. My commercial job is much more respectful of my time and personal life than academia is. If you aren't working 80 hours a week and sacrificing everything in the sciences, people start to question whether you are 'committed' or not. That perception can make a big difference in whether you get to have a career. By way of contrast, nobody questions the commitment of my manager who knocks off every Thursday at 4pm to go to his sons baseball game.
As for my daily job... I rather enjoy the work I do. I have a tremendous amount of control over my own projects. I get to work with cool cutting edge tech. I can see how my work leverages out to make the lives of hundreds of millions of people better. There's a lot more fulfillment for me there than I would get still chasing String Theory.
As to the dream of going into management, I can sort of agree with you there. I am currently dodging the management bullet myself:) But as I look forward I can see the day coming where to accomplish what I want to accomplish, I will need to start doing more managing of people than I do now. At some point you can't realize your vision unless you start scaling significantly beyond yourself.
First, Google's capitalization is higher than Yahoo's (they are more expensive).
Second, remember when AOL bought Netscape? Something like 40% of their workforce quit the next day. If MS buys Google, the google brain trust (which is were all the value is) hits the door immediately.
Uhm... correct me if I'm wrong, but I seem to remember the Japanese getting data that showed pretty clearly that neutrinoes have mass about 5-6 years ago. That's a VERY long time. In addition pretty much EVERYONE *believed* that the experimentalists would eventually find neutrino mass. I remember that being the prevailing opinion approx 10 years ago. That hardly makes discovery of neutrino mass a recent surprise.
American's shun science careers because they are so punishingly expensive. Conside the lifecycle of someone who want's to go into String Theory:
4 years undergrad ($40-$120k in cost) 5-7 years grad school (making $15k per year) 2-6 years postdoc (making $40k per year) 7 years pre-tenure (making $60-80k per year) tenure (making $80-$100k per year)
Oh, and if you fail at any point along the line, you have no career. Since you are looking at 18-24 years to get to tenure, that's a HUGE investmet to make. You are basically looking at not knowing whether you have a career or not until you are 36-42 years old.
Compare this with the career track of an equally bright student going into CS, and getting a job in tech.
4 years undergrad ($40k-$120k in cost) starting job ($60k-80k) 5 years experience ($80k-$120k) move into management ($100k-$150k)
etc... notice how the CS grad going into IT hits the $60-$80k range 7-13 *years* before the scientist?
Plus, while there is less risk of being laid off as a tenured professor, the risk of having your career evaporate as an IT person (please note, IT person who could have hacked being an academic scientist) is MUCH lower. Sure, you may loose your job, but there are plenty of other jobs.
Few American's go into science because the economics of science is so bad. I don't know how to fix that, but the cause is pretty clear.
Oh... by the way, I am an American who was on the academic track in String Theory and got off the merry-go-round. Everytime I talk to my friends who stuck it out I am overjoyed I left. My friends are at the mid-potsdoc stage right now. They are trying to scrape by living on $40k a year in ultra expensive locals like Boston, and live in terror that the only jobs they will be available will be in middle of no-where universities in unpleasant places. By way of contrast there are tech jobs to be had in a variety of nice locals to meet most peoples tastes. It's particularly hard on the women, who are starting to hear their biological clocks tick VERY loudly, and who are still years away from being settled in enough to take a break to have children. It's also very hard for both genders to find a long term mate, as they face the aforementioned prospect of having to move a lot to unpleasant places (like Norma, OK, middle of nowhere PA, middle of nowhere plains states, etc) if they want to continue their careers. And let's not even start talking about the two body problem (two romantically entwined academics).
So basically, if you want more Americans to go into science, make it suck less.
Facts do matter. I finally found some information about the level of US arms exports. It seems the US in 2002 exported about $4.56 billion worth of arms. This brings it in second behind Russia ($4.97 billion) as the worlds largest arms exporter.
So does it matter if the number is $5 billion instead of $700 billion? I mean really, US arms sales are chicken feed even on the scale of US music sales. I guess the question is, what point where you actually trying to make?
If you were trying to make the point that US arms exports is big business, you failed. There are MANY US companies with quarterly revenue over $5 billion, for an export industry, that's pathetic.
If you were trying to make the point that the US is the leading arms merchant to the world, you failed, but not by much. We are number 2.
So what exactly was the point you were making that stands up to the actual facts?
I'm really curious where you are getting your numbers. The best source of data I can find is that worldwide military exependiture (non-US) is $500 billion. Considering that part of that $500 billion must be spent on paying, feeding, and housing one's military, I don't see how the US could possibly be exporting $700 billion in weapons, even if we were the only weapons manufacturer on earth.
Additionally, since the 1992 Mine Export Moratorium was signed into law, it has been illegal to export mines from the US. None are being exported currently.
If you dig around enough you will find that prior to the 1992 export moratorium in the US, Italy, China, and the Soviet Union were the largest producers and exporters of land mines in the world.
I am actually not really disturbed by *anyone* advocating for their own interests. Whether it's a company, a government, and individual, a government bureaucracy, etc. I find govnerments and companies tend to be slightly more honest about owning up to the fact they are advocating for *their* interests rather than trying to pretend to advocate for some innocent third parties interests, but that's sort of immaterial.
Make no mistake though, even in the absense of company pressure, the US has a legitimate interest in seeing it's music companies make money from their music through copyright enforcement, and thus has a legitimate interest in trying to shut down allofmp3.
Again, the problem is that the benefit of winning this fight is very small, and the cost of fighting it is very high.
I am not really disturbed at how far the US is willing to go to pressure other countries to change their laws to protect US interests, that's what sovereign states do. What disturbs me is that our current government thinks that *this* interest is worth so much diplomatic capital.
The global music market is only worth $32 billion. That's chicken feed really. Even assuming that US companies were making 100% of that revenue (they aren't) and that AllOfMP3.com could eliminate 100% of that revenue, it *still* isn't worth playing this kind of hardball. I'll bet EU restrictions on GM food cost US companies more money than that (please note, I am not advocating hard ball tactics over EU GM food restrictions).
While it's distressing that HIPAA is essentially seeing no enforcement, I find it more distressing that while it hinders movement of my medical information among my providers (requiring forms be signed by me, etc) it explicitely allows any law enforcement agent to waltz in without a warrant and assert without evidence that I am a suspect or victim in a crime and thus obtain my medical records.
Everytime I hear someone throwing a fit about being able to obtain a warrant to get my library records I think of this. Funny how no one notices MASSIVE give aways of your privacy rights under democratic administrations. Oh, and look up 'know your customer' sometime too:)
I've seen this happen. Large business unit in company looks around and figures out they have a lot of deadwood telecommuting from home all over the country. Rather than go through the hard exercise of identifying and firing the deadwood, they tell everyone they can't telecommute anymore and have to move to one of x possible sights.
What happens is predictable. The deadwood moves, because they can never find a job this good again. A lot of the top talent, who really liked where they lived, and really likes the telecommuting lifestyle, looks around and discovers it can go work somewhere else, frequently at higher pay. The top talent makes for the door.
In essense, it's a great way to reduce your org to only dead wood.
I've noticed in the last few years you simply can't get high quality cheap talent in India. Don't get me wrong, there's still a lot of high quality talent in India, but it's expensive. And you can still get cheap, but the people you get cheap tend not to be very good at all. Things are basically evening out.
However, there are definitely little niggling problems based on it's close relationship with Windows. For example, the Windows clipboard is synchronous, therefore the SWT clipboard is synchronous. The X clipboard is asynchronous, which has caused lock up problems in the past (not present currently). There was a time when you couldn't have ':' in a filename because of the windowisms built in to handle window drive letters. Additionally, since the Eclipse folks seem to think that printing is a function of your widget set, there is still no printing for Eclipse on Linux (since GTK doesn't yet provide printing support).
So are non-Windows users slightly second class Eclipse citizens? Yes, but not by much, and to be honest, I generally don't notice it at all. Eclipse feels just as good to me on Linux as on Windows.
I had the grave misfortune as a grad student in physics of being forced to belong to a union. As a result, I was being paid 60% of the going national rate as a physics TA, while living in an area with 130% of the national average cost of living.
The scam was basically this. The union would bind together a large group of people with quite different interests and needs into a single class. In our case, all grad students where represented as a union, and the union required the university to pay them all equally. The problem is, the going rate of pay nationally for a physics TA is about twice the going rate for an English, Psych, etc TA. The net result was that TAs in technical fields where paid WAY below the going rate, while TAs in the liberal arts where paid way above the going rate.
The university was literally BEGGING the union for permission to pay me more, because their low TA salaries in the sciences where making it almost impossible to recruit grad students. The union refused. The union actually actively suppressed my salary.
Remember this, unions do not represent workers, they are simply an exploiter of workers who claims to represent their interest.
Don't sweat it if you don't do the inflation properly in your head, neither do I:) I use this calculator.
So, using this, what costs $100 in 1985 cost $177.47 in 2005. Or in other words, if nominal book prices have gone up 35% in that last 20 years, they have declined in real price.
Consoles very well may be more expensive, I don't honestly remember what the nintendo cost, but $100 sounds about right. The point is, a great many things that you *perceive* to be more expensive are actually less expensive in real terms. Even with the consoles, you get a far better product.
See that's odd, because my car insurance has held pretty much steady over the last 7 years (as far back as I have records). Of course in that time I've moved across state lines (thus necessitating different coverage limits) had an accident, gotten a couple of tickets etc. Basically, auto insurance is so variable that I don't think *my* single bill means much with regard to auto insurances cost in aggregate. I was hoping you had better data since you made your assertion so confidently:)
Actually yes, I've read Adam Smith, and Hayek, and Freedman, and De Soto, and Malthus in their original.
As to your counter examples:
1) Health insurance is part of the medical system the US government has screwed up (see Milton Freedman for a detailed discussion of how they screwed this up starting in WWII).
2) Car insurnace: do you have any real data about the trend in car insurance costs?
Housing or rent, please note I specifically pointed out that given finite supply of land and increasing demand housing prices do tend to rise strongly. Please also note, that this effect is much worse in areas were over regulation of development radically suppress supply.
Condition number one: That the consumer has a choice. If you are run over by a car and are bleeding to death, do you shop around to find the cheapest surplier of health-care?
You may actually mean two things here. One is the choice of whether to seek a service or not. The other is the choice of where to seek that service. Clearly we have markets in things that are non-optional (food). So that can't be what you mean. The other is the choice of where to seek service. Clearly there are some examples in health care where the consumer is in no condition to make a choice (as the severe car accident you posit). But in the vast majority of health consumption, the consumer has a lot of choice. Even with acute things, like heart attacks, the consumers has a lot of choice. I know that sounds counter intuitive, but local to where I am hospitals are advertising their heart emergency centers in a play to pursuade people having cardiac emergencies (heart attacks) to come to them, rather than other hospitals in the area. I would say that patients could have quite substantial choice in a market health care system.
Condition number two: That health is a commodety that only has value for the individual consumer. Since disease are contaguous other people has vested interest in keeping people around them healthy. The free market fails to address this.
To this I counter: sanitation and plumbing. There is a fairly good case to be made that modern sanitation and plumbing contribute more to public health than modern health care. Yet we amazingly have a market in plumbers and plumbing supplies. True, I am required to have a working toilet in my business or domicile, and forbidden from having an outhouse, but that is not accomplished through government sponsored plumbing, nor can I get my plumbing done with tax free dollars through my employer. True, setting policy and standards for certain kinds of medical treatment may be a public health issue, but the market has proven perfectly capable of providing for those standards in other areas.
Condition number three: That the service is evaluable. Can you tell who good a service you get in a hospital? Or are you more likely to look at how nice it looks, forcing hospitals to waste money one other things that their primary service?
Again, I must appeal to advertising. I have actually been hearing adds for the local emergency cardio center that tout research on health outcomes, etc. If you wander into the public health realm you discover there is good hard data on error rates, hospital infection rates, etc. Would the creature comforts also get better, possibly. But I think you would also see increased data to help people evaluate the services rendered. Would it be perfect, no. But it would be a lot better than it is now. If the service is evaluable at all, it should be evaluable to consumers. If it's not, then providers will compete on other factors (patient comforts, price, etc).
Finally, look at eye surgery as an example of markets in medicine working very well. The proceedures keep getting better and better and cheaper and cheaper (exactly as one would expect in a health market).
Another interesting look at declining consumer prices comes from looking at the 1975 Sears catalog, both in terms of real dollars and in terms of how long someone would have to work to be able to afford items then and now.
Slashdot Mirror
Check your facts. US poverty level is set by household size at about $9k plus $3k per additional household member per year.
I am currently involved in a lot of remediation of silver bullet stuff. Don't get me wrong. I love XML, get a lot of milage out of using UML to drive MDA tools, am an advocate of publishing web services etc. The problem is, so much of it is done in an ass hatted way. And then I get called in, late in the project, to tell folks exactly how screwed they are.
The root problem is people using tools they never bother to even vaguely understand. If you aren't going to bother to understand the technology, please don't use it. Please, I'm begging you, you'll just screw it up. Or at the very least, find someone who *does* understand the tech to advise you.
Identification is not authentication.
Biometrics are fine identifiers. They are unique and immutable.
Identification is not authentication. Not even close. Just because someone presents an identifier does not mean they are the authorized thing represented by that identifiers. By their very nature, identifiers are promiscous.
What you are really saying is that in your estimation, scientists are still over compensated, and overvalued.
That's fine.
But it's a market out there. If you want to dramatically undervalue scientists compared to the other available career paths, don't be shocked when you get very few American's going into science, and of a lesser caliber than in past generations. A bunch of economists has taken to responding to the NSF 'we won't have enough scientists' rhetoric that way.
As to your comment on tenure... tenure is definitely in many ways a problem. I've seen lots of folks basically retire in place and become deadwood. Not everybody mind you (I've also known guys in their 90s who are still doing dynamic research and excellent teaching), but a lot of folks. I'm not sure what to do with it though. Sans tenure there is absolutely nothing left to recommend science as a career in the US. Problem is, folks are starting to realize how low the expectation value of that future tenure is, and despairing.
That greatly depends. Please note the modifier in my post about someone who could have succeeded as a scientist. Such people tend to end up on the higher end skill-wise of IT. Perhaps someday they will be outsourcable, but for right now, you generally don't find comparable talent in India or China that you can reliably acheive savings outsourcing to. Don't get me wrong, there is some REALLY bright talent in India. Absolutely top drawer. However, top grade Indian talent is no longer cheap, it's gotten expensive. And that cheap India IT labor? Uhm... yeah... it's not really that great. They take LOTS of supervision if you want a good outcome, and you generally can only get reliably decent results on your lower level tasks. I work with lots of folks who are IT workers in India we have outsourced some work to, I'm unafraid. Don't get me wrong, you can still get REALLY good folks in India, but they are expensive.
As to H1-Bs. Many of those folks are dead brilliant. Just amazing. But their numbers are way smaller than the demand for high caliber talent. Again, I am unafraid.
Will H1-Bs and globalization threaten my career someday? Perhaps, but so far, it doesn't look very threatening to me.
Because everyone I knew going through school was *shocked* to discover the jobs situation was even more screwed up that it was in physics. All through my training in physics, *everyone* kept saying: go away, there are no jobs. Everyone I knew doing an undergrad or grad in bio was convinced there we opportunities there... until they got their degrees, and found the jobs prospects even bleaker than my friends who stayed in physics.
Happiness is a choice.
Yes, you can live more simply, and be perfectlly happy with much less in the way of material wealth. I agree. There are trade-offs. I actually left physics for reasons that had nothing to do with the arguments above: it wasn't fun for me anymore. If you enjoy it so much more than the alternatives, then perhaps an academic career will be worthwhile to you, in spite of the sacrifices compared to other career paths you could have chosen.
The problem is that these days the sacrifices to go into science compared to your other options are getting very steep. At the same time many of the things that made science a nice job are available elsewhere. Flextime for example. One of the nice things about being an academic scientist was that to a large extent you had great flexibility in when you worked. That's now true in the private sector as well. Another was that science presented some very interesting problems, and certain kinds of people really *enjoy* working on such problems. But there are now interesting problems to work on in the private sector as well.
Basically, the relative benefits of being a scientist are shrinking, and the relative costs are increasing.
It's not just the money, it's the whole quality of life.
:) But as I look forward I can see the day coming where to accomplish what I want to accomplish, I will need to start doing more managing of people than I do now. At some point you can't realize your vision unless you start scaling significantly beyond yourself.
It's being able to live somewhere nice instead of facing possibly having to live in some bubblefuck town in Iowa that has the only university that was hiring in your area of research that year.
It's actually being capitalized. Compare what it takes to get a grant to buy the computing and other equipment you need to what it takes me in the commercial world to get equipment. I am fantastically better capitalized than anyone I know in academia. I've known physics profs who built racks in the machine shop, and soddered their own serial cables to save money... I'd rather not waste my time.
It's respect for my time and personaly life. My commercial job is much more respectful of my time and personal life than academia is. If you aren't working 80 hours a week and sacrificing everything in the sciences, people start to question whether you are 'committed' or not. That perception can make a big difference in whether you get to have a career. By way of contrast, nobody questions the commitment of my manager who knocks off every Thursday at 4pm to go to his sons baseball game.
As for my daily job... I rather enjoy the work I do. I have a tremendous amount of control over my own projects. I get to work with cool cutting edge tech. I can see how my work leverages out to make the lives of hundreds of millions of people better. There's a lot more fulfillment for me there than I would get still chasing String Theory.
As to the dream of going into management, I can sort of agree with you there. I am currently dodging the management bullet myself
First, Google's capitalization is higher than Yahoo's (they are more expensive).
Second, remember when AOL bought Netscape? Something like 40% of their workforce quit the next day. If MS buys Google, the google brain trust (which is were all the value is) hits the door immediately.
Uhm... correct me if I'm wrong, but I seem to remember the Japanese getting data that showed pretty clearly that neutrinoes have mass about 5-6 years ago. That's a VERY long time. In addition pretty much EVERYONE *believed* that the experimentalists would eventually find neutrino mass. I remember that being the prevailing opinion approx 10 years ago. That hardly makes discovery of neutrino mass a recent surprise.
American's shun science careers because they are so punishingly expensive. Conside the lifecycle of someone who want's to go into String Theory:
4 years undergrad ($40-$120k in cost)
5-7 years grad school (making $15k per year)
2-6 years postdoc (making $40k per year)
7 years pre-tenure (making $60-80k per year)
tenure (making $80-$100k per year)
Oh, and if you fail at any point along the line, you have no career. Since you are looking at 18-24 years to get to tenure, that's a HUGE
investmet to make. You are basically looking at not knowing whether you have a career or not until you are 36-42 years old.
Compare this with the career track of an equally bright student going into CS, and getting a job in tech.
4 years undergrad ($40k-$120k in cost)
starting job ($60k-80k)
5 years experience ($80k-$120k)
move into management ($100k-$150k)
etc... notice how the CS grad going into IT hits the $60-$80k range 7-13 *years* before the scientist?
Plus, while there is less risk of being laid off as a tenured professor, the risk of having your career evaporate as an IT person (please note, IT person who could have hacked being an academic scientist) is MUCH lower. Sure, you may loose your job, but there are plenty of other jobs.
Few American's go into science because the economics of science is so bad. I don't know how to fix that, but the cause is pretty clear.
Oh... by the way, I am an American who was on the academic track in String Theory and got off the merry-go-round. Everytime I talk to my friends who stuck it out I am overjoyed I left. My friends are at the mid-potsdoc stage right now. They are trying to scrape by living on $40k a year in ultra expensive locals like Boston, and live in terror that the only jobs they will be available will be in middle of no-where universities in unpleasant places. By way of contrast there are tech jobs to be had in a variety of nice locals to meet most peoples tastes. It's particularly hard on the women, who are starting to hear their biological clocks tick VERY loudly, and who are still years away from being settled in enough to take a break to have children. It's also very hard for both genders to find a long term mate, as they face the aforementioned prospect of having to move a lot to unpleasant places (like Norma, OK, middle of nowhere PA, middle of nowhere plains states, etc) if they want to continue their careers. And let's not even start talking about the two body problem (two romantically entwined academics).
So basically, if you want more Americans to go into science, make it suck less.
Facts do matter. I finally found some information about the level of US arms exports.
It seems the US in 2002 exported about $4.56 billion worth of arms. This brings it in second behind Russia ($4.97 billion) as the worlds largest arms exporter.
So does it matter if the number is $5 billion instead of $700 billion? I mean really, US arms sales are chicken feed even on the scale of US music sales. I guess the question is, what point where you actually trying to make?
If you were trying to make the point that US arms exports is big business, you failed. There are MANY US companies with quarterly revenue over $5 billion, for an export industry, that's pathetic.
If you were trying to make the point that the US is the leading arms merchant to the world, you failed, but not by much. We are number 2.
So what exactly was the point you were making that stands up to the actual facts?
I'm really curious where you are getting your numbers. The best source of data I can find is that worldwide military exependiture (non-US) is $500 billion. Considering that part of that $500 billion must be spent on paying, feeding, and housing one's military, I don't see how the US could possibly be exporting $700 billion in weapons, even if we were the only weapons manufacturer on earth.
Additionally, since the 1992 Mine Export Moratorium was signed into law, it has been illegal to export mines from the US. None are being exported currently.
If you dig around enough you will find that prior to the 1992 export moratorium in the US, Italy, China, and the Soviet Union were the largest producers and exporters of land mines in the world.
I am actually not really disturbed by *anyone* advocating for their own interests. Whether it's a company, a government, and individual, a government bureaucracy, etc. I find govnerments and companies tend to be slightly more honest about owning up to the fact they are advocating for *their* interests rather than trying to pretend to advocate for some innocent third parties interests, but that's sort of immaterial.
Make no mistake though, even in the absense of company pressure, the US has a legitimate interest in seeing it's music companies make money from their music through copyright enforcement, and thus has a legitimate interest in trying to shut down allofmp3.
Again, the problem is that the benefit of winning this fight is very small, and the cost of fighting it is very high.
I am not really disturbed at how far the US is willing to go to pressure other countries to change their laws to protect US interests, that's what sovereign states do. What disturbs me is that our current government thinks that *this* interest is worth so much diplomatic capital.
The global music market is only worth $32 billion. That's chicken feed really. Even assuming that US companies were making 100% of that revenue (they aren't) and that AllOfMP3.com could eliminate 100% of that revenue, it *still* isn't worth playing this kind of hardball. I'll bet EU restrictions on GM food cost US companies more money than that (please note, I am not advocating hard ball tactics over EU GM food restrictions).
While it's distressing that HIPAA is essentially seeing no enforcement, I find it more distressing that while it hinders movement of my medical information among my providers (requiring forms be signed by me, etc) it explicitely allows any law enforcement agent to waltz in without a warrant and assert without evidence that I am a suspect or victim in a crime and thus obtain my medical records.
:)
Everytime I hear someone throwing a fit about being able to obtain a warrant to get my library records I think of this. Funny how no one notices MASSIVE give aways of your privacy rights under democratic administrations. Oh, and look up 'know your customer' sometime too
I've seen this happen. Large business unit in company looks around and figures out they have a lot of deadwood telecommuting from home all over the country. Rather than go through the hard exercise of identifying and firing the deadwood, they tell everyone they can't telecommute anymore and have to move to one of x possible sights.
What happens is predictable. The deadwood moves, because they can never find a job this good again. A lot of the top talent, who really liked where they lived, and really likes the telecommuting lifestyle, looks around and discovers it can go work somewhere else, frequently at higher pay. The top talent makes for the door.
In essense, it's a great way to reduce your org to only dead wood.
I've noticed in the last few years you simply can't get high quality cheap talent in India. Don't get me wrong, there's still a lot of high quality talent in India, but it's expensive. And you can still get cheap, but the people you get cheap tend not to be very good at all. Things are basically evening out.
I'm a big Eclipse fan. I use it daily. I love it.
However, there are definitely little niggling problems based on it's close relationship with Windows. For example, the Windows clipboard is synchronous, therefore the SWT clipboard is synchronous. The X clipboard is asynchronous, which has caused lock up problems in the past (not present currently). There was a time when you couldn't have ':' in a filename because of the windowisms built in to handle window drive letters. Additionally, since the Eclipse folks seem to think that printing is a function of your widget set, there is still no printing for Eclipse on Linux (since GTK doesn't yet provide printing support).
So are non-Windows users slightly second class Eclipse citizens? Yes, but not by much, and to be honest, I generally don't notice it at all. Eclipse feels just as good to me on Linux as on Windows.
I had the grave misfortune as a grad student in physics of being forced to belong to a union. As a result, I was being paid 60% of the going national rate as a physics TA, while living in an area with 130% of the national average cost of living.
The scam was basically this. The union would bind together a large group of people with quite different interests and needs into a single class. In our case, all grad students where represented as a union, and the union required the university to pay them all equally. The problem is, the going rate of pay nationally for a physics TA is about twice the going rate for an English, Psych, etc TA. The net result was that TAs in technical fields where paid WAY below the going rate, while TAs in the liberal arts where paid way above the going rate.
The university was literally BEGGING the union for permission to pay me more, because their low TA salaries in the sciences where making it almost impossible to recruit grad students. The union refused. The union actually actively suppressed my salary.
Remember this, unions do not represent workers, they are simply an exploiter of workers who claims to represent their interest.
Don't sweat it if you don't do the inflation properly in your head, neither do I :) I use this calculator.
So, using this, what costs $100 in 1985 cost $177.47 in 2005. Or in other words, if nominal book prices have gone up 35% in that last 20 years, they have declined in real price.
Consoles very well may be more expensive, I don't honestly remember what the nintendo cost, but $100 sounds about right. The point is, a great many things that you *perceive* to be more expensive are actually less expensive in real terms. Even with the consoles, you get a far better product.
See that's odd, because my car insurance has held pretty much steady over the last 7 years (as far back as I have records). Of course in that time I've moved across state lines (thus necessitating different coverage limits) had an accident, gotten a couple of tickets etc. Basically, auto insurance is so variable that I don't think *my* single bill means much with regard to auto insurances cost in aggregate. I was hoping you had better data since you made your assertion so confidently :)
Actually yes, I've read Adam Smith, and Hayek, and Freedman, and De Soto, and Malthus in their original.
As to your counter examples:
1) Health insurance is part of the medical system the US government has screwed up (see Milton Freedman for a detailed discussion of how they screwed this up starting in WWII).
2) Car insurnace: do you have any real data about the trend in car insurance costs?
Housing or rent, please note I specifically pointed out that given finite supply of land and increasing demand housing prices do tend to rise strongly. Please also note, that this effect is much worse in areas were over regulation of development radically suppress supply.
You may actually mean two things here. One is the choice of whether to seek a service or not. The other is the choice of where to seek that service. Clearly we have markets in things that are non-optional (food). So that can't be what you mean. The other is the choice of where to seek service. Clearly there are some examples in health care where the consumer is in no condition to make a choice (as the severe car accident you posit). But in the vast majority of health consumption, the consumer has a lot of choice. Even with acute things, like heart attacks, the consumers has a lot of choice. I know that sounds counter intuitive, but local to where I am hospitals are advertising their heart emergency centers in a play to pursuade people having cardiac emergencies (heart attacks) to come to them, rather than other hospitals in the area. I would say that patients could have quite substantial choice in a market health care system.
To this I counter: sanitation and plumbing. There is a fairly good case to be made that modern sanitation and plumbing contribute more to public health than modern health care. Yet we amazingly have a market in plumbers and plumbing supplies. True, I am required to have a working toilet in my business or domicile, and forbidden from having an outhouse, but that is not accomplished through government sponsored plumbing, nor can I get my plumbing done with tax free dollars through my employer. True, setting policy and standards for certain kinds of medical treatment may be a public health issue, but the market has proven perfectly capable of providing for those standards in other areas.
Again, I must appeal to advertising. I have actually been hearing adds for the local emergency cardio center that tout research on health outcomes, etc. If you wander into the public health realm you discover there is good hard data on error rates, hospital infection rates, etc. Would the creature comforts also get better, possibly. But I think you would also see increased data to help people evaluate the services rendered. Would it be perfect, no. But it would be a lot better than it is now. If the service is evaluable at all, it should be evaluable to consumers. If it's not, then providers will compete on other factors (patient comforts, price, etc).
Finally, look at eye surgery as an example of markets in medicine working very well. The proceedures keep getting better and better and cheaper and cheaper (exactly as one would expect in a health market).Another interesting look at declining consumer prices comes from looking at the 1975 Sears catalog, both in terms of real dollars and in terms of how long someone would have to work to be able to afford items then and now.