Moral of the story, though... the people who mocked the F22 as the boondoggle to the F35 should have been fired from the DoD and run out of Congress. The F22 ended up being cheaper and still better (IIRC). There's no excuse for being naive enough to believe "oh yeah, we'll be much cheaper" when building something like the F35.
Hey, thanks for the recognition! I was predicting precisely this on Slashdot at the time, and the consensus here was that I am an idiot... but it's all good. I'm sure those who advocated replacing F-22s with F-35s will happily volunteer to pay the difference.
We kill them on the ground and with ground to air weapons before we take to the air.
That's not even close to true. Aircraft are in the air in the earliest stages: infiltrating special ops; conducting reconnaissance, targeting, and BDAs; escorting unarmed platforms.
We never went to war without overpowering air superiority since, so there were almost no US dogfights since.
Does it follow that the US will never go to war without air superiority again? Given the current state of the world, can you really foresee no possible scenarios where dogfighting might be necessary?
I would agree that Afghanistan and Iraq did not have particularly threatening aircraft. Do you really think Russia, China, or some future rising power will be the same scenario? American soldiers have been safe from enemy air attack since Korea. I am willing to pay a little more to ensure it stays that way.
Scenario 1: Governments tax the hell out of fossil fuels in order to prevent more global warming from happening. Scenario 2: Governments lower taxes on fossil fuels in order to help the economy grow, which will help people adapt to global warming. The warming will of course be much worse than in scenario 1. Scenario 3: Business as usual.
Has this been done and what have the results been?
Not this precisely, but close enough. Plenty of cost-benefit analyses have been done. The results are exactly what one would expect: adapting to significant global climate change is at least one order of magnitude more expensive than reducing CO2 output. And that's if you ignore the anticipated increase in wars/conflicts.
Geo-engineering to prevent/mitigate climate change may be less expensive than adapting to change, depending both on the methods of calculation and the viability of untested/unknown techniques. No technique has been shown to be anywhere near as safe or inexpensive/non-disruptive as Scenario 1.
Scenario 2 is not viable and has not (to my knowledge) been proposed/studied. It should really be dismissed. Decreased costs will further skew the economy towards fossil fuels, making the ultimate shift away from fossil fuels more expensive. Plus all of the costs of Scenario 3 (and then some). Plus the cost of additional subsidies for fossil fuels (both direct, indirect, and towards infrastructure).
Any resident game theorist can correct me, but from the numbers I have seen, you would need greater than 90% confidence that IPCC is completely wrong to choose anything but reducing GHG emissions.
It doesn't matter if it is MS, MS Research, MS Marketing, or even a third party. What I said applies to anyone with an MS bent in their view. That is why what I said was modded up.
And my point is that MS Research is to Microsoft as Stanford University is to railroad tycoons. Danah Boyd doesn't work for "Microsoft", she does academic research for an organization funded by Microsoft. It's technically a division of MS, but it's really not the same thing.
Many of us not only remember the past, but lived through the whole MS "evolution" and can recall many dozens and dozens of examples of MS ruining compatibility, stifling innovation, corrupting standards, destroying competition, lying about FOSS, tampering with regulations, punishing vendors who try to give customers non-MS choices, locking down platforms, buying competing products that were multiplatform and ruining them or simply dropping them, creating unfair licensing agreements, etc, etc, etc.
Indeed. Nobody is arguing any of those points. Not me, not Danah Boyd. Given her focus on social media, I suspect she's in favor of open standards, but that's not really relevant. You're attacking her for working for a largely independent organization that is funded by Microsoft, but her work/career have nothing to do with your complaints.
AT&T sucked. They still do. But the researchers at Bell Labs made incredible contributions to society. Microsoft, Google, Facebook, and others are funding raw research in the hopes of doing the same. What's next, criticizing a gerontologist for taking grants from the same government that invaded Iraq?
And no, I don't have a horse in the game. I despise nearly everything MS has done. But I do respect the notion that real researchers need benefactors, and large corporations should sponsor raw science.
No, he's not right. The income inequality problem is not between engineers and common workers, it's between CEOs and common workers.
Not really. Instead, look at the gap between shareholders and common workers. The gap between CEOs and workers has been widening, but it pales in comparison.
The overwhelming majority of CEOs still have to work to maintain their lifestyles (ignoring the what, top 1000 CEOs in the world?). Among those who are independently wealthy, few would continue to passively increase their wealth. At this point, a near majority of the wealth is owned by those whose wealth generates enough passive income to be ensure ever-increasing wealth, as long as they hire a competent team to manage it.
CEOs may be the top 1%, but the real dangerous gap is with the top.0001%.
But I guess the question is, why isn't American management better? The US has the reputation of the best business schools in the world, why can't they do a better job?
I would argue that American managers are, by far, the global leaders in extracting wealth, be it from natural resources, human capital, or corporations.
Of course, being able to extract wealth from a company should not make one a good executive, but... perhaps this is what happens when there is no moral hazard for management?
I've been saying this for a long time, so it's great to hear someone else propose it independently. I would love a return to the fairness doctrine, but I've lost hope on that... either have strict guidelines for what can be called "News", or put a "For entertainment only" marquee on all the crap.
Prevailing theory on first strike is that you fire everything you can, targeting not only cities and military installations, but also the nuclear fields of the enemy to try to knock out as much of their ability to strike back as you can.
References? Who is seriously proposing this as the best option?
It's been a few years since I did any research on the subject, but last I saw the prevailing (strategic choice) theory was that you always leave the other side incentives to acquiesce. E.g. target select military installations on the first strike, but leave population centers intact... "this was justified, if you don't escalate things we won't nuke your cities" might just work.
The reasoning for this is that neither the US nor Russia is believed to have an effective first strike capability. The US's strategic triad makes this virtually impossible, and Russia's got a hell of a lot of SLBMs as well.
Ignoring all that: Have you looked at a map recently? The US is big. To have the effect you are talking about a strike that would require hundreds of warheads. That would be more than enough according to Sagan et al.
You would need to boil the oceans and destroy all the submarines at the same time. Failure to get even a single submarine means absolute devastation. Nobody serious believes any country has an effective first strike against the US or Russia.
No idea how you got modded up so high, but you are barking up the wrong tree.
"Microsoft Research" isn't the same as MS marketing or operations or senior executive. Research does some good stuff, and they employ real researchers. They're closer to the old Bell Labs than anything else.
Glad to see someone else posting this. I would also argue that democracy will likely cease with the introduction of immortality. Although this may strongly appeal to conservatives...
It is routable on the Internet (just define "internet" first).
"Internet" is pretty well defined. If he had said "internet" you'd have a point.
That said, I hate the term "non-routable address". "Reserved" or "private", please... and this whole thread... geez. It reminds me of that scene in the Hobbit.
As for hand-waving about FICA and whatnot, it's all meaningless. I am talking about federal income taxes. If you want to whine about your state or local taxes, or social security then whine about them.
No, this is what you said:
The rich pay most of the taxes and pay a higher percentage of income on taxes than everyone else.
Cherrypick much? When you say "___ pay more of their income in taxes" you're talking about total tax burden. If you don't want people to laugh and know you're a troll, you can't just exclude the regressive taxes that account for a bigger chunk of wages.
If you're a big company getting a fleet of PC, you normally deploy images on them, so IT costs are pretty much the same to build the image, or build the image+firefox
...And it would be entirely reasonable for a company to pay Dell $6 per PC to enable PXE boot, AHCI, Vt-d, or whatever on all those systems in advance.
Mac market share continues to grow...Linux, assuming you count the Android fork, is coming along nicely.
Worth pointing out that Unix and variants absolutely dominate virtually all of the markets now. From a skills perspective, separating "Linux" is a bit pointless...
Not disagreeing with you, just trying to underline your point. I do not advise people to pigeonhole themselves into Microsoft, particularly when they will have a much better foundation for networking, security, storage, mobile, programming, and virtually everything else by learning *nix.
Just out of curiosity: how does a pair of abstract concepts conceive a child?
While I want to agree with the AC here, I should point out that there is some research into this. Relationships with large differences in IQ do not tend to be successful.
I felt the same about BBedit, until I got good with textmate... I'd never go back, at this point.
Making Mac usable: Path Finder - Finder replacement TotalSpaces 2 - improves workspaces.. instant switching, very customizable. Unclutter - better than leaving files on desktop, stores notes very well Bartender - tidies the menu bar Quicksilver - launcher Xee - image viewer
Productivity: Parallels MS Office TextMate OmniFocus
For admins, I'd also add: Apple Remote Desktop VPN Tracker (if you need a bunch of IPSec vpns) Tunnelblick or Viscosity (OpenVPN) lots of aliases, setting up.ssh, etc.
So, why arent "in app purchases" considered gambling yet anyway ? I'm playing a nice game of.. lets say.. Boker here on my crappy android phone. Another in app purchase lets me play another round at the "high rollers" chat room.. why is that different than physically sitting at a table in Bellagio ?
It's not. Taken to court, I highly doubt the developers would win... but for some reason the FBI aggressively pursues online poker sites while everyone ignored "Apps".
I am [obviously] not a lawyer, but I suspect the defense/justification is that you can't actually win any real money in these games... only in-game currency or items that you would otherwise have to pay for. So I guess it's not gambling if you can't possibly win?
Generally speaking, cars are not investments, unless you're a collector. Just like the fine house one lives in is not meant to be an investment.
So what? It's an asset worth 6 figures that will likely be re-sold during its useful lifetime. Depreciation matters. You expect a house to at least hold its value over time.
I know people who spend a few hundred per year to have the latest MacBooks, buying the new model with every release and selling the old one. Laptops aren't investments, either, but resale value matters.
It's probably also worth pointing out another huge cost: medical insurance. Lee Iacocca (former Chrysler chairman) complained that employee medical insurance cost ~$1250 per car, whereas Toyota Japan paid around $250 per car (read it a while ago and too lazy to get the exact figures right now). He also stated they paid out more to Blue Shield than they spent on steel, rubber, etc.
A good chunk of this is that companies _start_ from the position that they want to hire H1B. Then, to comply with H1B requirements, they create job listings that they know they won't be able to fill. When they fail to fill the positions, they can get H1Bs for people who say they meet the requirements. Approved! It's amazing how many people in India have 20 years of Java experience...
And yes, I have friends who specialize in this little corner of law.
Illegal aliens do not pursue STEM jobs. They have no education. They do minimum-wage (or less) service jobs, or work under-the-table for things like landscaping and other contracting jobs.
That's based on a very restricted view of "illegal alien". Though they may be a minority, there are plenty who are currently here illegally (or undocumented) who are well educated.
The two I am personally aware of are those who have overstayed their visas and those who were brought here as small children, but grew up as Americans.
I agree that it is better for society if we teach these things, and that people need to learn them. Not everyone needs to know how to do a complex tax return or be a CPA, but they should have a basic understanding of the fundamentals.
All that said, I never took a class for any of this. I didn't need to. Not because I came out of the womb fully formed, but because I am a curious person who wants to learn and improve myself. I got books, used the internet, and figured it out.
What's pathetic is not that children need to learn these things, but that so few have bothered to self-teach anything of import. Why don't we have a culture of learning? Why are so few financially responsible? Why do kids graduate highschool with iPhones, iPods, iPads, and laptops, yet no savings accounts? Why is it socially acceptable for a 20-something to be unable to cook, clean, do laundry, or maintain a budget?
I won't say whether past generations were better. But I will say that ours should be.
... and traditional banks have reserve requirements and deposit insurance. And systems in place to monitor their reserves. And regulators to ensure they're actually following some of the rules.
Bitcoin suffers from the same problems the USD and banking system used to: wild fluctuations, crashes, bubbles, terrible banks, and inherent deflation. The difference is that bitcoin can't be fixed.
Slashdot Mirror
Moral of the story, though... the people who mocked the F22 as the boondoggle to the F35 should have been fired from the DoD and run out of Congress. The F22 ended up being cheaper and still better (IIRC). There's no excuse for being naive enough to believe "oh yeah, we'll be much cheaper" when building something like the F35.
Hey, thanks for the recognition! I was predicting precisely this on Slashdot at the time, and the consensus here was that I am an idiot... but it's all good. I'm sure those who advocated replacing F-22s with F-35s will happily volunteer to pay the difference.
We kill them on the ground and with ground to air weapons before we take to the air.
That's not even close to true. Aircraft are in the air in the earliest stages: infiltrating special ops; conducting reconnaissance, targeting, and BDAs; escorting unarmed platforms.
We never went to war without overpowering air superiority since, so there were almost no US dogfights since.
Does it follow that the US will never go to war without air superiority again? Given the current state of the world, can you really foresee no possible scenarios where dogfighting might be necessary?
I would agree that Afghanistan and Iraq did not have particularly threatening aircraft. Do you really think Russia, China, or some future rising power will be the same scenario? American soldiers have been safe from enemy air attack since Korea. I am willing to pay a little more to ensure it stays that way.
Scenario 1: Governments tax the hell out of fossil fuels in order to prevent more global warming from happening.
Scenario 2: Governments lower taxes on fossil fuels in order to help the economy grow, which will help people adapt to global warming. The warming will of course be much worse than in scenario 1.
Scenario 3: Business as usual.
Has this been done and what have the results been?
Not this precisely, but close enough. Plenty of cost-benefit analyses have been done. The results are exactly what one would expect: adapting to significant global climate change is at least one order of magnitude more expensive than reducing CO2 output. And that's if you ignore the anticipated increase in wars/conflicts.
Geo-engineering to prevent/mitigate climate change may be less expensive than adapting to change, depending both on the methods of calculation and the viability of untested/unknown techniques. No technique has been shown to be anywhere near as safe or inexpensive/non-disruptive as Scenario 1.
Scenario 2 is not viable and has not (to my knowledge) been proposed/studied. It should really be dismissed. Decreased costs will further skew the economy towards fossil fuels, making the ultimate shift away from fossil fuels more expensive. Plus all of the costs of Scenario 3 (and then some). Plus the cost of additional subsidies for fossil fuels (both direct, indirect, and towards infrastructure).
Any resident game theorist can correct me, but from the numbers I have seen, you would need greater than 90% confidence that IPCC is completely wrong to choose anything but reducing GHG emissions.
It doesn't matter if it is MS, MS Research, MS Marketing, or even a third party. What I said applies to anyone with an MS bent in their view. That is why what I said was modded up.
And my point is that MS Research is to Microsoft as Stanford University is to railroad tycoons. Danah Boyd doesn't work for "Microsoft", she does academic research for an organization funded by Microsoft. It's technically a division of MS, but it's really not the same thing.
Many of us not only remember the past, but lived through the whole MS "evolution" and can recall many dozens and dozens of examples of MS ruining compatibility, stifling innovation, corrupting standards, destroying competition, lying about FOSS, tampering with regulations, punishing vendors who try to give customers non-MS choices, locking down platforms, buying competing products that were multiplatform and ruining them or simply dropping them, creating unfair licensing agreements, etc, etc, etc.
Indeed. Nobody is arguing any of those points. Not me, not Danah Boyd. Given her focus on social media, I suspect she's in favor of open standards, but that's not really relevant. You're attacking her for working for a largely independent organization that is funded by Microsoft, but her work/career have nothing to do with your complaints.
AT&T sucked. They still do. But the researchers at Bell Labs made incredible contributions to society. Microsoft, Google, Facebook, and others are funding raw research in the hopes of doing the same. What's next, criticizing a gerontologist for taking grants from the same government that invaded Iraq?
And no, I don't have a horse in the game. I despise nearly everything MS has done. But I do respect the notion that real researchers need benefactors, and large corporations should sponsor raw science.
No, he's not right. The income inequality problem is not between engineers and common workers, it's between CEOs and common workers.
Not really. Instead, look at the gap between shareholders and common workers. The gap between CEOs and workers has been widening, but it pales in comparison.
The overwhelming majority of CEOs still have to work to maintain their lifestyles (ignoring the what, top 1000 CEOs in the world?). Among those who are independently wealthy, few would continue to passively increase their wealth. At this point, a near majority of the wealth is owned by those whose wealth generates enough passive income to be ensure ever-increasing wealth, as long as they hire a competent team to manage it.
CEOs may be the top 1%, but the real dangerous gap is with the top .0001%.
But I guess the question is, why isn't American management better? The US has the reputation of the best business schools in the world, why can't they do a better job?
I would argue that American managers are, by far, the global leaders in extracting wealth, be it from natural resources, human capital, or corporations.
Of course, being able to extract wealth from a company should not make one a good executive, but... perhaps this is what happens when there is no moral hazard for management?
I've been saying this for a long time, so it's great to hear someone else propose it independently. I would love a return to the fairness doctrine, but I've lost hope on that... either have strict guidelines for what can be called "News", or put a "For entertainment only" marquee on all the crap.
Prevailing theory on first strike is that you fire everything you can, targeting not only cities and military installations, but also the nuclear fields of the enemy to try to knock out as much of their ability to strike back as you can.
References? Who is seriously proposing this as the best option?
It's been a few years since I did any research on the subject, but last I saw the prevailing (strategic choice) theory was that you always leave the other side incentives to acquiesce. E.g. target select military installations on the first strike, but leave population centers intact... "this was justified, if you don't escalate things we won't nuke your cities" might just work.
The reasoning for this is that neither the US nor Russia is believed to have an effective first strike capability. The US's strategic triad makes this virtually impossible, and Russia's got a hell of a lot of SLBMs as well.
Ignoring all that: Have you looked at a map recently? The US is big. To have the effect you are talking about a strike that would require hundreds of warheads. That would be more than enough according to Sagan et al.
You would need to boil the oceans and destroy all the submarines at the same time. Failure to get even a single submarine means absolute devastation. Nobody serious believes any country has an effective first strike against the US or Russia.
No idea how you got modded up so high, but you are barking up the wrong tree.
"Microsoft Research" isn't the same as MS marketing or operations or senior executive. Research does some good stuff, and they employ real researchers. They're closer to the old Bell Labs than anything else.
Glad to see someone else posting this. I would also argue that democracy will likely cease with the introduction of immortality. Although this may strongly appeal to conservatives...
It is routable on the Internet (just define "internet" first).
"Internet" is pretty well defined. If he had said "internet" you'd have a point.
That said, I hate the term "non-routable address". "Reserved" or "private", please... and this whole thread... geez. It reminds me of that scene in the Hobbit.
As for hand-waving about FICA and whatnot, it's all meaningless. I am talking about federal income taxes. If you want to whine about your state or local taxes, or social security then whine about them.
No, this is what you said:
The rich pay most of the taxes and pay a higher percentage of income on taxes than everyone else.
Cherrypick much? When you say "___ pay more of their income in taxes" you're talking about total tax burden. If you don't want people to laugh and know you're a troll, you can't just exclude the regressive taxes that account for a bigger chunk of wages.
If you're a big company getting a fleet of PC, you normally deploy images on them, so IT costs are pretty much the same to build the image, or build the image+firefox
...And it would be entirely reasonable for a company to pay Dell $6 per PC to enable PXE boot, AHCI, Vt-d, or whatever on all those systems in advance.
Mac market share continues to grow...Linux, assuming you count the Android fork, is coming along nicely.
Worth pointing out that Unix and variants absolutely dominate virtually all of the markets now. From a skills perspective, separating "Linux" is a bit pointless...
Not disagreeing with you, just trying to underline your point. I do not advise people to pigeonhole themselves into Microsoft, particularly when they will have a much better foundation for networking, security, storage, mobile, programming, and virtually everything else by learning *nix.
Nah, if there were a pattern then the next thing would be some fascist from Europe annexing his neighboring countries.
My kingdom for mod points... ok, maybe my small fiefdom of servers.
Just out of curiosity: how does a pair of abstract concepts conceive a child?
While I want to agree with the AC here, I should point out that there is some research into this. Relationships with large differences in IQ do not tend to be successful.
I felt the same about BBedit, until I got good with textmate... I'd never go back, at this point.
Making Mac usable:
Path Finder - Finder replacement
TotalSpaces 2 - improves workspaces.. instant switching, very customizable.
Unclutter - better than leaving files on desktop, stores notes very well
Bartender - tidies the menu bar
Quicksilver - launcher
Xee - image viewer
Productivity:
Parallels
MS Office
TextMate
OmniFocus
For admins, I'd also add: .ssh, etc.
Apple Remote Desktop
VPN Tracker (if you need a bunch of IPSec vpns)
Tunnelblick or Viscosity (OpenVPN)
lots of aliases, setting up
So, why arent "in app purchases" considered gambling yet anyway ? I'm playing a nice game of .. lets say .. Boker here on my crappy android phone. Another in app purchase lets me play another round at the "high rollers" chat room .. why is that different than physically sitting at a table in Bellagio ?
It's not. Taken to court, I highly doubt the developers would win... but for some reason the FBI aggressively pursues online poker sites while everyone ignored "Apps".
I am [obviously] not a lawyer, but I suspect the defense/justification is that you can't actually win any real money in these games... only in-game currency or items that you would otherwise have to pay for. So I guess it's not gambling if you can't possibly win?
Generally speaking, cars are not investments, unless you're a collector. Just like the fine house one lives in is not meant to be an investment.
So what? It's an asset worth 6 figures that will likely be re-sold during its useful lifetime. Depreciation matters. You expect a house to at least hold its value over time.
I know people who spend a few hundred per year to have the latest MacBooks, buying the new model with every release and selling the old one. Laptops aren't investments, either, but resale value matters.
It's probably also worth pointing out another huge cost: medical insurance. Lee Iacocca (former Chrysler chairman) complained that employee medical insurance cost ~$1250 per car, whereas Toyota Japan paid around $250 per car (read it a while ago and too lazy to get the exact figures right now). He also stated they paid out more to Blue Shield than they spent on steel, rubber, etc.
A good chunk of this is that companies _start_ from the position that they want to hire H1B. Then, to comply with H1B requirements, they create job listings that they know they won't be able to fill. When they fail to fill the positions, they can get H1Bs for people who say they meet the requirements. Approved! It's amazing how many people in India have 20 years of Java experience...
And yes, I have friends who specialize in this little corner of law.
Illegal aliens do not pursue STEM jobs. They have no education. They do minimum-wage (or less) service jobs, or work under-the-table for things like landscaping and other contracting jobs.
That's based on a very restricted view of "illegal alien". Though they may be a minority, there are plenty who are currently here illegally (or undocumented) who are well educated.
The two I am personally aware of are those who have overstayed their visas and those who were brought here as small children, but grew up as Americans.
I agree that it is better for society if we teach these things, and that people need to learn them. Not everyone needs to know how to do a complex tax return or be a CPA, but they should have a basic understanding of the fundamentals.
All that said, I never took a class for any of this. I didn't need to. Not because I came out of the womb fully formed, but because I am a curious person who wants to learn and improve myself. I got books, used the internet, and figured it out.
What's pathetic is not that children need to learn these things, but that so few have bothered to self-teach anything of import. Why don't we have a culture of learning? Why are so few financially responsible? Why do kids graduate highschool with iPhones, iPods, iPads, and laptops, yet no savings accounts? Why is it socially acceptable for a 20-something to be unable to cook, clean, do laundry, or maintain a budget?
I won't say whether past generations were better. But I will say that ours should be.
I'm shocked someone else actually posted this on slashdot. My thoughts exactly.
I'd mod you up if I wasn't already commenting here.
... and traditional banks have reserve requirements and deposit insurance. And systems in place to monitor their reserves. And regulators to ensure they're actually following some of the rules.
Bitcoin suffers from the same problems the USD and banking system used to: wild fluctuations, crashes, bubbles, terrible banks, and inherent deflation. The difference is that bitcoin can't be fixed.