Detrimental, degenerating, cartel of nepotism. That's just what unions are like in Brazil
I think his point was that in Brazil, employee legal protections may be so few that having a union and the associated waste, overhead, and corruption is the lesser of two evils.
That's only true if they die before they can reproduce. Now USA infant mortality rates are very high for a 1st world nation in large part due to the way healthcare is provided, but that's not due to decisions made by the infants, so it's only indirect selection and not strictly Darwinian. Many people in the USA who don't get health insurance just can't afford to get individual plans when their employer doesn't pay for a group plan. Those people that deliberately choose to avoid it because they prefer to spend the fee on non-essentials also still have a pretty good chance of begetting offspring before they get really sick so it's often still not Darwinian.
Now, some young buck deciding not to wear a helmet before getting on his donorcycle? That's Darwinian.
China's total GDP is still less than half that of the USA.
At this rate, it should be clear that it won't take long for that to be reversed. If it holds, you're looking at parity by 2020 and reversed long before 2030. Now we are starting to see dissatisfaction from the Chinese populace due to working conditions and failures in the political system which the Internet is making more visible, so it's likely that rate is going to taper off somewhat. However, even if there is significant (uncontrolled) socio-political upheaval in China in the next couple of decades, the writing is on the wall.
Exactly. Stack ranking is pretty similar to how Jimmy Pattison car dealerships used to (and may still) work for car sales - the lowest performing salesman each month gets let go and someone new is hired. It's effective if you're dealing with unskilled labour and there's a huge supply of the labour you're looking for.
However if you're dealing with a labour force where you claim there's a shortage of skilled workers and you're trying to hire the cream of the crop, telling the majority of those workers they're marginal and telling one of them they suck (even if they may still be part of the top of their field) is bad for morale and retention. If you're trying to hire the top tier and retain them then that's not the way to do it. In the end, the result is that the average replacement hire is at least as likely to perform as badly, but you also need to train them in the corporate culture and you've spent a lot of money on the hiring/firing process. It's good empire building for clueless HR managers who get to have more reports to deal with the churn, but in the long term it's destructive to the competitiveness of the company.
A lot of companies have deadwood, and there's a need to have merit-based processes to deal with that, but stack ranking is like grading on the bell curve. It can help compensate a little for the effects of bad teaching/management, but it's not necessarily a great indicator of competency/desirability. However properly evaluating how your employees are performing, not just within their small group but relative to the company or the industry as a whole, is bloody hard when your worldwide headcount is nearly 100,000 because processes that work well for smaller companies just don't scale up to that size. Punting on that problem by using a skewed bell curve on a sample size of 10 has to cause more problems than it solves, and whoever thought of that one should be required to take remedial stats for social scientists before they're ever allowed to come close to HR policy-making authority again.
On the gripping hand, Microsoft apparently has an attempt at a merit-based system with a transparent enough process (even if it is tragically flawed and easily manipulated) that employees can critique its flaws. How many companies don't have even that much and just promote based on networking and nepotism?
I think his point was that even a country as messed up as China is (in terms of corruption, exercise of basic freedoms, poor social mobility), it is nevertheless currently close to out-producing the USA. Now China does have three times the population, but it should still be raising some alarms.
Another vote for Soekris. I bought a Soekris box on sale a few years ago when they were clearing out an obsolete 486-era-based model. I've been running OpenBSD on it since with nary a problem. It's since gotten rebooted a couple of times for O/S upgrades and that's it.
Nope. Put down your cleansed history book and go hit archives of period popular publications. American Progressives, European Fascists and Russian Communists were birds of a feather.
If your.Net application allows you to configure the database connection string to specify a Failover Partner, then you could set up SQL Server database mirroring, either in High Performance or High Availability modes.
I'll try to expand on my parent comment with another parallel that may resonate better with the more technical orientation of the typical slahdot reader. A few decades ago, my sister recounted to me how an engineering success needed to be both technically feasible, politically acceptable, and economically feasible (nowadays, environmentally sustainable often would be another requirement, although you could make an argument that it's just a special case or subset of politically acceptable). I think you've got a parallel in public policy and legislation where, to be successful, they have to be both politically and economically feasible.
The problem with both the War on Drugs and the War on Illegal Immigration is that the current approaches are economically infeasible. The popular approach for each increase economic incentives in direct opposition to the stated goals of the policies. With the War on Drugs, prohibition increases scarcity, and as a result increases the unit price and the potential profit from drug trafficking, while discouraging addicts from seeking treatment. Similarly the War on illegal immigration increases the potential profit for unscrupulous employers willing to exploit and abuse illegal workers, thus improving the value proposition over legal workers, while decreasing illegal workers' ability to expose abuse and mistreatment. Both policies are resounding popular/political successes by addressing significant problems with ideologically popular approaches, but are abysmal failures because their economic effect is in direct opposition to the stated goals.>/p>
Only by sufficient education of the public to make an economically successful policy also politically palatable can you solve the problem. It's taken over 6 decades for the USA to slowly come around to the conclusion that drug prohibition approaches aren't working. How much time and loss of liberty do you think will be necessary before an economicall effective policy on illegal immigration will be acceptable and adopted?
Isn't the definition of speculator that for every barrel they buy, they have to sell a barrel? Otherwise they are in the oil storage business. How can someone who has to sell whatever they buy cause the price to increase? What would stop a real buyer from waiting until the speculator was about to be forced to take delivery (and panicking) and then buying? I don't get it.
Oil storage business?. It's a staring content. The one who blinks last wins. The consumers of crude oil (such as refineries) need the supply or else they lose money because the refinery is idled while the refinery owners still have to pay the cost of capital (often in terms of the interest on loans used to purchase the capital equipment). That pretty well works the same down the whole consumption line to the guy who needs to fill his gas tank to get to work. Gas and crude prices shift wildly because most of the demand is very inelastic, so when supply drops...
Saudi Arabia are pretty smart in adjusting supply to keep prices down. What the other OPEC nations don't seem to understand because they are so focused on lost short term profits, but which Saudi Arabia appears to, is that if oil prices are too volatile and/or high, then customers will start looking more aggressively for alternatives/substitutes. That could lead to more research investment and discovery of a power source that might make most oil production obsolete and drastically drop the price. You play the fish just right or else either the line will snap or the hook will tear out.
However, AMD/ATI is a PR stunt. The drivers just wrap non-free software and can't be utilised at all on truly free software platforms.
Seriously? What do you think this is about? What's the licence on this that makes you think it's non-free? You seriously don't think this licence cuts it?
Because you have been abused so long, you accept abuse?
Not at all. It's just an observation. The original post was
The U.S. government has decided it can act in secret to destabilize other societies. That should frighten you.
I was just clarifying that this was not a new choice, but rather a long-held and often-used policy. It's always been shadowy part of the big stick that Teddy Roosevelt talked about. It is a not-surprising outcome of a desire to achieve geo-political goals within the framework of a democratic republic that is naturally reluctant to support outright warfare.
Or to put it another way:
The USA is a bully! Run! - AC
You're noticing now? - me
The US gets away with a lot of stuff because most countries just don't have the resources to call them on it and risk it escalating to a hot war. Back during the Cold War, they mainly kept those activities to states that appeared to be shifting left politically because it could be justified to 1st world allies using the "Domino theory" and the Soviets clearly played the same game. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, "islamofascism" and "terrorism" are the new bogeymen and justification. However due to the USA's large economic and military power, capitulation or asymmetric warfare are the only two possible results whenever it engages in conflict with any other country, with only a few possible exceptions (Russia & China), so it's a self-fulfilling/self-entertaining prophecy. Balancing out that economic power was the original drive for the creation of the European Common Market and its successors.
It's going to be really interesting to see how the dynamic changes as China continues to modernize and assert its power over the next two decades. If China's recent use of cybernetic attacks is anything to judge by, they're probably going to start playing the same game. The USA's reputation as the Cold War knight in shining armour defending freedom and justice took a big hit internationally in the last decade, so it's going to be a lot harder to play the same game against China that they did against the Soviets, especially if the USA finds it hard to disengage from, and stays distracted by, the "War on Terror".
Which isn't to say that islamofascism and terrorism aren't a risk. Islamofascists and terrorists are winning the same type of converts that the Soviets did; they exploit the victims of the inequalities of opportunity and misery that many in the USA and other first world nations either turn a blind eye to or deliberately exploit. However you fight dangerous ideas by showing why they are flawed and by fixing the real underlying problems, not by trying to silence those who voice those ideas. You would think the country of the 1st Amendment would understand that.
To be fair, it appears that the Chinese have been engaged in computer attacks, against both dissidents/political enemies and economic targets, for at least as long as the USA. While I agree with Schneider that we've entered into a new dangerous phase, I don't think Stuxnet ushered in this age, it's just a highly visible marker that at best/worst raised the bar slightly. What it did do is increase visibility so that every state will now take these risks seriously, and invest accordingly. If only commercial interests were to do do the same, then it would be less of a concern.
The USA has been acting in secret to destabilize other countries for so long (starting with native American nations and smallpox-laced blankets), that the USA not secretly destabilizing countries is the exception, not the rule.
I think his point was that until GWB decided invasion and regime change was a good way to secure resources in countries that didn't want to trade for them, those countries didn't really take the possibility of a US invasion seriously. The US had had its nose bloodied in Vietnam and Somalia, and had held back from outright invasion during Gulf War I. The US had only seemed to be recently successful at invasion as part of an international peacekeeping force in Bosnia/Kosovo, already torn apart by civil war. Until Bush went into Irak for oil, the cost proposition for rogue states of developing a nuclear program just wasn't worth it.
True, the semantic origin is the same. But you'll hear people use bandwidth in much more varied scenarios than broadband (which I have still only heard used regarding the transmission of electronic data). These days bandwidth is (mis)used in many scenarios as a generic term for ability to transfer or absorb information, including personal interactions (i.e. I don't have enough bandwidth to deal with all these projects).
You're making the same logical flaw lots of people make: that thieves and criminals are all stupid...
Smart criminals avoid criminal enterprises that involve firearms because they have figured out it means they (not just their victims) are also more likely to get shot - the LEA response will adjust for their armed status. I suppose you could have an exception with middling-smart criminals that get off on the adrenaline rush from the risk, but then they are more likely to get caught after taking other unnecessary risks to increase the rush. Some smarter criminals might plan and lead less intelligent/sophisticated ones to commit the crimes on their behalf, but that can backfire if the lackeys get caught and provide evidence against their leaders.
Generally though, lazy and dumb criminals use firearms because they are a cheap and easy force multiplier. Instead of force, the really smart criminals use their brains to plan and trick their way into getting what they want, without personally using guns. Smart criminals work the system on Wall Street, embezzle from clients, steal people's credit card info by the tens of thousands for identity theft, or run confidence games on rich|old people. Their actions may ruin thousands of lives, but they know that as long as they avoid guns then their personal safety risk and the penalties if they get caught will be much lower than if they use firearms.
That's what people used to say about Bush and Gore. On paper they may have seemed about the same, but in practice Bush was a lot worse than most people imagined he could be.
Slashdot Mirror
I think his point was that in Brazil, employee legal protections may be so few that having a union and the associated waste, overhead, and corruption is the lesser of two evils.
That's only true if they die before they can reproduce. Now USA infant mortality rates are very high for a 1st world nation in large part due to the way healthcare is provided, but that's not due to decisions made by the infants, so it's only indirect selection and not strictly Darwinian. Many people in the USA who don't get health insurance just can't afford to get individual plans when their employer doesn't pay for a group plan. Those people that deliberately choose to avoid it because they prefer to spend the fee on non-essentials also still have a pretty good chance of begetting offspring before they get really sick so it's often still not Darwinian.
Now, some young buck deciding not to wear a helmet before getting on his donorcycle? That's Darwinian.
At this rate, it should be clear that it won't take long for that to be reversed. If it holds, you're looking at parity by 2020 and reversed long before 2030. Now we are starting to see dissatisfaction from the Chinese populace due to working conditions and failures in the political system which the Internet is making more visible, so it's likely that rate is going to taper off somewhat. However, even if there is significant (uncontrolled) socio-political upheaval in China in the next couple of decades, the writing is on the wall.
Exactly. Stack ranking is pretty similar to how Jimmy Pattison car dealerships used to (and may still) work for car sales - the lowest performing salesman each month gets let go and someone new is hired. It's effective if you're dealing with unskilled labour and there's a huge supply of the labour you're looking for.
However if you're dealing with a labour force where you claim there's a shortage of skilled workers and you're trying to hire the cream of the crop, telling the majority of those workers they're marginal and telling one of them they suck (even if they may still be part of the top of their field) is bad for morale and retention. If you're trying to hire the top tier and retain them then that's not the way to do it. In the end, the result is that the average replacement hire is at least as likely to perform as badly, but you also need to train them in the corporate culture and you've spent a lot of money on the hiring/firing process. It's good empire building for clueless HR managers who get to have more reports to deal with the churn, but in the long term it's destructive to the competitiveness of the company.
A lot of companies have deadwood, and there's a need to have merit-based processes to deal with that, but stack ranking is like grading on the bell curve. It can help compensate a little for the effects of bad teaching/management, but it's not necessarily a great indicator of competency/desirability. However properly evaluating how your employees are performing, not just within their small group but relative to the company or the industry as a whole, is bloody hard when your worldwide headcount is nearly 100,000 because processes that work well for smaller companies just don't scale up to that size. Punting on that problem by using a skewed bell curve on a sample size of 10 has to cause more problems than it solves, and whoever thought of that one should be required to take remedial stats for social scientists before they're ever allowed to come close to HR policy-making authority again.
On the gripping hand, Microsoft apparently has an attempt at a merit-based system with a transparent enough process (even if it is tragically flawed and easily manipulated) that employees can critique its flaws. How many companies don't have even that much and just promote based on networking and nepotism?
I think his point was that even a country as messed up as China is (in terms of corruption, exercise of basic freedoms, poor social mobility), it is nevertheless currently close to out-producing the USA. Now China does have three times the population, but it should still be raising some alarms.
True. SuperPACs are just the big box stores of corruption. But don't underestimate the impact of big box stores.
Another vote for Soekris. I bought a Soekris box on sale a few years ago when they were clearing out an obsolete 486-era-based model. I've been running OpenBSD on it since with nary a problem. It's since gotten rebooted a couple of times for O/S upgrades and that's it.
Really? Ever heard of the Spanish Civil War?
You may want to consider the possibility that the sig is sarcasm and in fact critical of people who embody that approach in their posts.
Only if we get a Galaxcity in exchange.
If your .Net application allows you to configure the database connection string to specify a Failover Partner, then you could set up SQL Server database mirroring, either in High Performance or High Availability modes.
I'll try to expand on my parent comment with another parallel that may resonate better with the more technical orientation of the typical slahdot reader. A few decades ago, my sister recounted to me how an engineering success needed to be both technically feasible, politically acceptable, and economically feasible (nowadays, environmentally sustainable often would be another requirement, although you could make an argument that it's just a special case or subset of politically acceptable). I think you've got a parallel in public policy and legislation where, to be successful, they have to be both politically and economically feasible.
The problem with both the War on Drugs and the War on Illegal Immigration is that the current approaches are economically infeasible. The popular approach for each increase economic incentives in direct opposition to the stated goals of the policies. With the War on Drugs, prohibition increases scarcity, and as a result increases the unit price and the potential profit from drug trafficking, while discouraging addicts from seeking treatment. Similarly the War on illegal immigration increases the potential profit for unscrupulous employers willing to exploit and abuse illegal workers, thus improving the value proposition over legal workers, while decreasing illegal workers' ability to expose abuse and mistreatment. Both policies are resounding popular/political successes by addressing significant problems with ideologically popular approaches, but are abysmal failures because their economic effect is in direct opposition to the stated goals.>/p>
Only by sufficient education of the public to make an economically successful policy also politically palatable can you solve the problem. It's taken over 6 decades for the USA to slowly come around to the conclusion that drug prohibition approaches aren't working. How much time and loss of liberty do you think will be necessary before an economicall effective policy on illegal immigration will be acceptable and adopted?
Oil storage business?. It's a staring content. The one who blinks last wins. The consumers of crude oil (such as refineries) need the supply or else they lose money because the refinery is idled while the refinery owners still have to pay the cost of capital (often in terms of the interest on loans used to purchase the capital equipment). That pretty well works the same down the whole consumption line to the guy who needs to fill his gas tank to get to work. Gas and crude prices shift wildly because most of the demand is very inelastic, so when supply drops...
Saudi Arabia are pretty smart in adjusting supply to keep prices down. What the other OPEC nations don't seem to understand because they are so focused on lost short term profits, but which Saudi Arabia appears to, is that if oil prices are too volatile and/or high, then customers will start looking more aggressively for alternatives/substitutes. That could lead to more research investment and discovery of a power source that might make most oil production obsolete and drastically drop the price. You play the fish just right or else either the line will snap or the hook will tear out.
Seriously? What do you think this is about? What's the licence on this that makes you think it's non-free? You seriously don't think this licence cuts it?
Not at all. It's just an observation. The original post was
I was just clarifying that this was not a new choice, but rather a long-held and often-used policy. It's always been shadowy part of the big stick that Teddy Roosevelt talked about. It is a not-surprising outcome of a desire to achieve geo-political goals within the framework of a democratic republic that is naturally reluctant to support outright warfare.
Or to put it another way:
The USA is a bully! Run! - AC
You're noticing now? - me
The US gets away with a lot of stuff because most countries just don't have the resources to call them on it and risk it escalating to a hot war. Back during the Cold War, they mainly kept those activities to states that appeared to be shifting left politically because it could be justified to 1st world allies using the "Domino theory" and the Soviets clearly played the same game. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, "islamofascism" and "terrorism" are the new bogeymen and justification. However due to the USA's large economic and military power, capitulation or asymmetric warfare are the only two possible results whenever it engages in conflict with any other country, with only a few possible exceptions (Russia & China), so it's a self-fulfilling/self-entertaining prophecy. Balancing out that economic power was the original drive for the creation of the European Common Market and its successors.
It's going to be really interesting to see how the dynamic changes as China continues to modernize and assert its power over the next two decades. If China's recent use of cybernetic attacks is anything to judge by, they're probably going to start playing the same game. The USA's reputation as the Cold War knight in shining armour defending freedom and justice took a big hit internationally in the last decade, so it's going to be a lot harder to play the same game against China that they did against the Soviets, especially if the USA finds it hard to disengage from, and stays distracted by, the "War on Terror".
Which isn't to say that islamofascism and terrorism aren't a risk. Islamofascists and terrorists are winning the same type of converts that the Soviets did; they exploit the victims of the inequalities of opportunity and misery that many in the USA and other first world nations either turn a blind eye to or deliberately exploit. However you fight dangerous ideas by showing why they are flawed and by fixing the real underlying problems, not by trying to silence those who voice those ideas. You would think the country of the 1st Amendment would understand that.
I didn't say it worked out as intended.
To be fair, it appears that the Chinese have been engaged in computer attacks, against both dissidents/political enemies and economic targets, for at least as long as the USA. While I agree with Schneider that we've entered into a new dangerous phase, I don't think Stuxnet ushered in this age, it's just a highly visible marker that at best/worst raised the bar slightly. What it did do is increase visibility so that every state will now take these risks seriously, and invest accordingly. If only commercial interests were to do do the same, then it would be less of a concern.
The USA has been acting in secret to destabilize other countries for so long (starting with native American nations and smallpox-laced blankets), that the USA not secretly destabilizing countries is the exception, not the rule.
I think his point was that until GWB decided invasion and regime change was a good way to secure resources in countries that didn't want to trade for them, those countries didn't really take the possibility of a US invasion seriously. The US had had its nose bloodied in Vietnam and Somalia, and had held back from outright invasion during Gulf War I. The US had only seemed to be recently successful at invasion as part of an international peacekeeping force in Bosnia/Kosovo, already torn apart by civil war. Until Bush went into Irak for oil, the cost proposition for rogue states of developing a nuclear program just wasn't worth it.
True, the semantic origin is the same. But you'll hear people use bandwidth in much more varied scenarios than broadband (which I have still only heard used regarding the transmission of electronic data). These days bandwidth is (mis)used in many scenarios as a generic term for ability to transfer or absorb information, including personal interactions (i.e. I don't have enough bandwidth to deal with all these projects).
Smart criminals avoid criminal enterprises that involve firearms because they have figured out it means they (not just their victims) are also more likely to get shot - the LEA response will adjust for their armed status. I suppose you could have an exception with middling-smart criminals that get off on the adrenaline rush from the risk, but then they are more likely to get caught after taking other unnecessary risks to increase the rush. Some smarter criminals might plan and lead less intelligent/sophisticated ones to commit the crimes on their behalf, but that can backfire if the lackeys get caught and provide evidence against their leaders.
Generally though, lazy and dumb criminals use firearms because they are a cheap and easy force multiplier. Instead of force, the really smart criminals use their brains to plan and trick their way into getting what they want, without personally using guns. Smart criminals work the system on Wall Street, embezzle from clients, steal people's credit card info by the tens of thousands for identity theft, or run confidence games on rich|old people. Their actions may ruin thousands of lives, but they know that as long as they avoid guns then their personal safety risk and the penalties if they get caught will be much lower than if they use firearms.
True enough about Lieberman, but if we're talking about Veeps then Lieberman is a boy scout socialist compared to Cheney.
Also see "bandwidth".
How so? Would the offspring be so dense as to collapse under its own weight, form a black hole, and eventually swallow the Earth?
That's what people used to say about Bush and Gore. On paper they may have seemed about the same, but in practice Bush was a lot worse than most people imagined he could be.