i am just wondering, how far modern materials science, lasers, telecommunications, computers, opto-electronics, radio communication, etc, would have gotten without quantum physics,... ?
now jobs tries to fucking put kids in jail for doing the same thing.
all you hackers out there should remember. this is what 'business success' means, this is your future in corporate america. putting a younger version of you in prison (or tortured to the point of suicide, like in China).
i hate to tell you this, but in the United States there are plenty of children with no food on the table, no free healthcare, and basically no welfare.
i.e. anyone who is working at a retail job full time with uncertain hours and has a child, they are basically exactly what you describe. no health insurance, no welfare (they are working), and barely able to afford food. certainly not healthy food.
on the other hand, the scenario i paint is taken directly from the several dozen books written about the decision making processes used by the most powerful people on the planet within the last 10 years. i.e. the hedge fund managers, the people who ran lehman brothers, goldman sachs, bear stearns, etc.
enterprises make a large number of high level decisions based on politics and kickbacks. people like to pretend that businesses run efficiently and make extensive costs analysis and blah blah blah ROI whatever. a large percentage of that stuff is crap that people do for reasons of inertia, politics, or 99 other types of corporate bullshit.
the higher up a decision is on the organization chart, the more likely it is to be influenced by who is fucking who, who made a snide comment at the other guys birthday party, who has better hair at the annual retreat, etc etc etc etc. the ROI and numbers are just piles of shit to cover that up, sort of like annual reports and SEC filings that were produced by Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers before they both ate shit and died.
and why do people believe this trash? because it is too painful to deal with reality; that the guy driving the maserati who walks past you like you're a fucking peasant even though you've been at the company 25 years, makes decisions that affect tens of thousands of people based on how much cocaine he snorted last night and whether his prostitute was able to pretend that his impotence was somehow attractive.
jeffrey epstein actually had an investment with one of the Bear Stearns hedge funds that blew up in 2007... those funds were filled to the brim with shitty CDOs and were one of the first signs that the industry was coming unglued.
linux has not won. imagine every business using linux being successfully sued for patent infringement by microsoft.
I know you think 'but that doesnt make any sense'. i hate to inform you that the US justice system also doesn't make any sense. Even if you have judges that are not corrupt, those judges only follow what the law tells them to do. And the law is made by congress. And congress is elected by campaign contributions. Campaign contributions are given by... Microsoft. And Oracle. And Amazon. And the hedge fund people whose cocaine and hooker money is tied up in patent litigation securities or whatever they call the new 'financial products' built around slicing and dicing IP the way mortgages were in 05/06.
Linux is not on top of the mountain, it is headed for the end of the fucking waterfall, about to go straight down and be dashed on the rocks of capitalist reality. You think a trillion dollar industry like proprietary software is just going to sit back and die? You think all the investors sitting on hundreds of billions of dollars of debt of companies like Microsoft and Cisco are going to sit back and watch those bonds go to 0?
Look what happened when mortgage bonds died; the criminals all got bailed out, ordinary people got fucked out of their houses. Tack on a $2500 fee for no reason, declare the payment late, foreclose on the house, send an locksmith to change the locks while you are inside the fucking place. Was that fair? Hell no. Did it violate the fundamental principles of private property? Hell yes.
You thought HB Gary was some tiny flea sucking the teat of the federal government? More like a little piggy of a gigantic piggy army, a massive field of suckling oinkers, like pod blobs in some Matrix, sucking the blood of the real humans dry. What happens when you awaken ten thousand sleeping, pulsating blood bigs? Hint: They don't go "oh, bummer, guess I'll go get a real job".
They attack. They attack anything disturbing their way of life. They attack anyone attacking them; "the enemy". You thought it was bad when Team Themis (HB Gary, Berico Technologies, and Palantir Technologies) teamed up to try to 'neutralize' a couple of reporters, at the behest of the Department of Justice in collusion with Bank of America? Whose side do you think the government is on?
That is the tip of the iceberg. The tip of the fucking iceberg.
Linux is about to get whacked. A big time, world wide whacking. The hedge funds, the bond holders, the pension fund managers, the sovereign wealth funds, a cotiere of ideological capitalist zealots, vast minions of IT 'professionals' whose lifeblood depends on the inefficiency, stupidity, and corruption of large proprietary IT contracts, the milquetoast bureaucrats whose only joy in life are the kickbacks they get from their vendors, and the thrill they feel as they decide to use a shitty IT system over the protests of ten thousand users? These forces they will all come together against their common enemy.
it is not about 'hate' it is about the basic historical reality of the chinese government.
the baby milk scandal was covered up and whistleblowers put in prison
SARS more of the same
if there were a nuclear accident in China, the government would lie about that too
every government lies, but China has a special affinity for putting anyone who points this out into prison for long periods of time and harassing and abusing their families.
i realize i tend to wander and ramble and meander with crazy talk sometimes, but i try very hard to stick to reality and not go off and have a chalkboard moment. oh well.
1. A Colossal Failure of Common Sense, Larry McDonald 2. The Sellout, Charles Gasparino 3. The Zeroes, Randall Lane 4. Running Money, Andy Kessler 5. And Then the Roof Caved In, David Faber 6. House of Cards, William D Cohan 7. Too Big to Fail, Andrew Ross Sorkin 8. On the Brink, Henry Paulson 9. Confidence Game, Christine S Richard 10. Structured Finance and Collateralized Debt Obligations, Janet Tavakoli 11. The Big Short, Michael Lewis 12. EConned, Yves Smith 13. Devil's Casino, Vicky Ward 14. Street Fighters, Kate Kelly 15. When Genius Failed, Roger Lowenstein 16. Devil take the Hindmost, Edward Chancellor 17. Crash of the Titans, Stephen Ferrell 18. Age of Turbulence, Alan Greenspan 19. In Fed We Trust, David Wessel 20. Diary of a Very Bad Year, by Anonymous Hedge Fund Manager & Keith Gessen 21. Blood on the Street, Charles Gasparino 22. The Two Trillion Dollar Meltdown, Charles R Morris 23. various articles in the WSJ by Carrick Mollenkamp, Serena Ng, etc 24. NYTimes, Louise Story and Gretchen Morgenstern 25. the ProPublica article on Magnetar Capital 26. Fool's Gold, by Gillian Tett (saved the best for last, perhaps)
etc etc etc.
i.e. i do not believe that i have necessarily made anything up or exagerated my points from the actual events of the past 10-20 years in high finance, please respond with specific complaints about my writing if you have a concern that i have misstated something. thank you.
think about it. countries like Japan are full of trains. RIGHT NOW they are saving tens of thousands of people from death, per miles traveled, just by choosing to use trains instead of automobiles.
as for the 'million saved', its a bit misleading. there are 30,000 deaths in auto accidents in the US each year. even assuming google thinks it can prevent all of these with its magic car, which is crazy, that still leaves 970,000 other fatal crashes in other places on the planet. like, say, the middle of india, where rikshaws and 2 cylinder cars from the 60s and cows all share the roadway.
is google going to magically donate its technology to hundreds of millions of people so they can upgrade their cars? you realize of course that the auto-driving technology google wants to put in these cars will cost more than the cars themselves? and be instantly stolen and sold for scrap? there are many, many cars here in the US driving around that are worth, say, 500 to a thousand dollars, on a good day. is google going to stick $5,000 worth of technology into these cars? no.
they are not going to 'save a million people from dying in car crashes', because a million people are dying in car crashes in cars that are 30 years old and that google will never upgrade, ever.
what about new cars? fine. google will save one million people, thirty years from now, after all the old cars have been phased out. way to go google!
meanwhile if we had put that money into high speed passenger trains, we could have saved many more lives.
not only from preventing crashes, but from the massive amounts of pollution that are caused by automobiles, the massive amount of wasted public money that could go into health care that instead goes to transport, the obesity epidemic as 'walkable cities' are paved over in favor of the automobile, the increased rates of health problems caused by the stress of driving, the noise and the ugliness caused by the highway system, and so forth and so on.
and the 'cdo managers' and banking industry types who profited from all the securitization of the mortgages.
in EConned, as well as The Big Short, a CDO manager is basically described as essentially '[two guys with a bloomberg terminal]'. i.e. they dont really contribute much to the 'product', they are basically just there to sit on a pile of money for appearances sake.
nowdays in China they have 'rent a white guy' businesses.
this sort of thing was going on all over the higher echelons of the financial industry.
in other words... when you get above a certain level in the financial food chain, the tech bubble of late 90's was "just another bubble" that the finance gurus could ride the wave of, like riding the surf.
in "Devil Take the Hindmost" you can even find predecessors of this type of behavior, back to the 1600s, tulip-o-mania, the south-seas bubble, the patent business bubble, etc etc.
if you are really a coward, then don't hide behind the shadow of the 'anonymous' tag. those of us who are really, truly cowards are sick of every tom dick and harry claiming the mantle of cowardice for themselves.
step 2. sift through it, keep only the articles about corporations and PR firms
(use the Securities and Exchange commission databases to help with this..
you can use name pattern searching, and also the SEC's categorization codes to isolate PR firms)
step 3. you install your own CMS (mediawiki or whatever), copy those articles to it
step 3.5 erase all the parts of those articles not having to do with astroturfing
step 4. hack your CMS to enable voting, 'alleged tags', etc etc etc.
step 5. figure out how to get access to digital archives of PR trade journals, like Jack ODwyer's PR newsletter.
scrape facts out of those, articles, integrate them into your wiki. this is legal because of court cases like Feist and
the Gerald Ford Biography case.
step 5.5. do the same for 'letters to the editor' pages of newspapers.
Step 6. hire people off of freelancer.com for $3/hour to help you with fact scraping, fact checking, editing, etc.
Slashdot Mirror
i am just wondering, how far modern materials science, lasers, telecommunications, computers, opto-electronics, radio communication, etc, would have gotten without quantum physics, ... ?
i think the internet has officially acheived its original purpose.
to create a discussion thread that goes from laser weapons, to enemas, to dvorak keyboard arguments, without any intervening replies.
absolutely unbelievable. bravo to you, sirs. bravo.
good point. now let me add enough meaningless text in so that slashdots comment filter will not destroy my post.
Quantum Physics and Relativity were considered "Jewish Science", and it is kind of hard to do anything in space without those things.
It would be like trying to build an Mars probe under a religious state that banned the discussion of heliocentric solar systems.
we would be on Mars by now instead of getting groped by TSA guards.
now jobs tries to fucking put kids in jail for doing the same thing.
all you hackers out there should remember. this is what 'business success' means, this is your future in corporate america. putting a younger version of you in prison (or tortured to the point of suicide, like in China).
therefore, whats all this whining about private ryan and band of brothers etc?
it was only a tiny proportion of people who actually got killed. Hitler - not actually a big deal.
i call this the 'inverse godwin'.
i hate to tell you this, but in the United States there are plenty of children with no food on the table, no free healthcare, and basically no welfare.
i.e. anyone who is working at a retail job full time with uncertain hours and has a child, they are basically exactly what you describe. no health insurance, no welfare (they are working), and barely able to afford food. certainly not healthy food.
on the other hand, the scenario i paint is taken directly from the several dozen books written about the decision making processes used by the most powerful people on the planet within the last 10 years. i.e. the hedge fund managers, the people who ran lehman brothers, goldman sachs, bear stearns, etc.
the people who funded amazon, netscape, google.
all those types.
enterprises make a large number of high level decisions based on politics and kickbacks. people like to pretend that businesses run efficiently and make extensive costs analysis and blah blah blah ROI whatever. a large percentage of that stuff is crap that people do for reasons of inertia, politics, or 99 other types of corporate bullshit.
the higher up a decision is on the organization chart, the more likely it is to be influenced by who is fucking who, who made a snide comment at the other guys birthday party, who has better hair at the annual retreat, etc etc etc etc. the ROI and numbers are just piles of shit to cover that up, sort of like annual reports and SEC filings that were produced by Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers before they both ate shit and died.
and why do people believe this trash? because it is too painful to deal with reality; that the guy driving the maserati who walks past you like you're a fucking peasant even though you've been at the company 25 years, makes decisions that affect tens of thousands of people based on how much cocaine he snorted last night and whether his prostitute was able to pretend that his impotence was somehow attractive.
jeffrey epstein actually had an investment with one of the Bear Stearns hedge funds that blew up in 2007... those funds were filled to the brim with shitty CDOs and were one of the first signs that the industry was coming unglued.
dude you apologized for being wrong on slashdot.
i think that violates some kind of fundamental rule or something.
jesus you did it again!
linux has not won. imagine every business using linux being successfully sued for patent infringement by microsoft.
I know you think 'but that doesnt make any sense'. i hate to inform you that the US justice system also doesn't make any sense. Even if you have judges that are not corrupt, those judges only follow what the law tells them to do. And the law is made by congress. And congress is elected by campaign contributions. Campaign contributions are given by ... Microsoft. And Oracle. And Amazon. And the hedge fund people whose cocaine and hooker money is tied up in patent litigation securities or whatever they call the new 'financial products' built around slicing and dicing IP the way mortgages were in 05/06.
Linux is not on top of the mountain, it is headed for the end of the fucking waterfall, about to go straight down and be dashed on the rocks of capitalist reality. You think a trillion dollar industry like proprietary software is just going to sit back and die? You think all the investors sitting on hundreds of billions of dollars of debt of companies like Microsoft and Cisco are going to sit back and watch those bonds go to 0?
Look what happened when mortgage bonds died; the criminals all got bailed out, ordinary people got fucked out of their houses. Tack on a $2500 fee for no reason, declare the payment late, foreclose on the house, send an locksmith to change the locks while you are inside the fucking place. Was that fair? Hell no. Did it violate the fundamental principles of private property? Hell yes.
You thought HB Gary was some tiny flea sucking the teat of the federal government? More like a little piggy of a gigantic piggy army, a massive field of suckling oinkers, like pod blobs in some Matrix, sucking the blood of the real humans dry. What happens when you awaken ten thousand sleeping, pulsating blood bigs? Hint: They don't go "oh, bummer, guess I'll go get a real job".
They attack. They attack anything disturbing their way of life. They attack anyone attacking them; "the enemy". You thought it was bad when Team Themis (HB Gary, Berico Technologies, and Palantir Technologies) teamed up to try to 'neutralize' a couple of reporters, at the behest of the Department of Justice in collusion with Bank of America? Whose side do you think the government is on?
That is the tip of the iceberg. The tip of the fucking iceberg.
Linux is about to get whacked. A big time, world wide whacking. The hedge funds, the bond holders, the pension fund managers, the sovereign wealth funds, a cotiere of ideological capitalist zealots, vast minions of IT 'professionals' whose lifeblood depends on the inefficiency, stupidity, and corruption of large proprietary IT contracts, the milquetoast bureaucrats whose only joy in life are the kickbacks they get from their vendors, and the thrill they feel as they decide to use a shitty IT system over the protests of ten thousand users? These forces they will all come together against their common enemy.
You.
And your freedom.
it is not about 'hate' it is about the basic historical reality of the chinese government.
the baby milk scandal was covered up and whistleblowers put in prison
SARS more of the same
if there were a nuclear accident in China, the government would lie about that too
every government lies, but China has a special affinity for putting anyone who points this out into prison for long periods of time and harassing and abusing their families.
everyone must be under the same law? how quaint!!!
trailer park moms with a few ounces of pot get years in prison,
cocaine using prostitution beating hedge fund managers who rip off 500 million dollars get mansions and hang out with Bill Clinton
i guess a two trillion dollar black hole in the world economy is not as important as some kids ripping brittney spears songs
i realize i tend to wander and ramble and meander with crazy talk sometimes, but i try very hard to stick to reality and not go off and have a chalkboard moment. oh well.
1. A Colossal Failure of Common Sense, Larry McDonald
2. The Sellout, Charles Gasparino
3. The Zeroes, Randall Lane
4. Running Money, Andy Kessler
5. And Then the Roof Caved In, David Faber
6. House of Cards, William D Cohan
7. Too Big to Fail, Andrew Ross Sorkin
8. On the Brink, Henry Paulson
9. Confidence Game, Christine S Richard
10. Structured Finance and Collateralized Debt Obligations, Janet Tavakoli
11. The Big Short, Michael Lewis
12. EConned, Yves Smith
13. Devil's Casino, Vicky Ward
14. Street Fighters, Kate Kelly
15. When Genius Failed, Roger Lowenstein
16. Devil take the Hindmost, Edward Chancellor
17. Crash of the Titans, Stephen Ferrell
18. Age of Turbulence, Alan Greenspan
19. In Fed We Trust, David Wessel
20. Diary of a Very Bad Year, by Anonymous Hedge Fund Manager & Keith Gessen
21. Blood on the Street, Charles Gasparino
22. The Two Trillion Dollar Meltdown, Charles R Morris
23. various articles in the WSJ by Carrick Mollenkamp, Serena Ng, etc
24. NYTimes, Louise Story and Gretchen Morgenstern
25. the ProPublica article on Magnetar Capital
26. Fool's Gold, by Gillian Tett (saved the best for last, perhaps)
etc etc etc.
i.e. i do not believe that i have necessarily made anything up or exagerated my points from the actual events of the past 10-20 years in high finance, please respond with specific complaints about my writing if you have a concern that i have misstated something. thank you.
think about it. countries like Japan are full of trains. RIGHT NOW they are saving tens of thousands of people from death, per miles traveled, just by choosing to use trains instead of automobiles.
as for the 'million saved', its a bit misleading. there are 30,000 deaths in auto accidents in the US each year. even assuming google thinks it can prevent all of these with its magic car, which is crazy, that still leaves 970,000 other fatal crashes in other places on the planet. like, say, the middle of india, where rikshaws and 2 cylinder cars from the 60s and cows all share the roadway.
is google going to magically donate its technology to hundreds of millions of people so they can upgrade their cars? you realize of course that the auto-driving technology google wants to put in these cars will cost more than the cars themselves? and be instantly stolen and sold for scrap? there are many, many cars here in the US driving around that are worth, say, 500 to a thousand dollars, on a good day. is google going to stick $5,000 worth of technology into these cars? no.
they are not going to 'save a million people from dying in car crashes', because a million people are dying in car crashes in cars that are 30 years old and that google will never upgrade, ever.
what about new cars? fine. google will save one million people, thirty years from now, after all the old cars have been phased out. way to go google!
meanwhile if we had put that money into high speed passenger trains, we could have saved many more lives.
not only from preventing crashes, but from the massive amounts of pollution that are caused by automobiles, the massive amount of wasted public money that could go into health care that instead goes to transport, the obesity epidemic as 'walkable cities' are paved over in favor of the automobile, the increased rates of health problems caused by the stress of driving, the noise and the ugliness caused by the highway system, and so forth and so on.
and the 'cdo managers' and banking industry types who profited from all the securitization of the mortgages.
in EConned, as well as The Big Short, a CDO manager is basically described as essentially '[two guys with a bloomberg terminal]'. i.e. they dont really contribute much to the 'product', they are basically just there to sit on a pile of money for appearances sake.
nowdays in China they have 'rent a white guy' businesses.
this sort of thing was going on all over the higher echelons of the financial industry.
in other words... when you get above a certain level in the financial food chain, the tech bubble of late 90's was "just another bubble" that the finance gurus could ride the wave of, like riding the surf.
in "Devil Take the Hindmost" you can even find predecessors of this type of behavior, back to the 1600s, tulip-o-mania, the south-seas bubble, the patent business bubble, etc etc.
to be offensive.
if you are really a coward, then don't hide behind the shadow of the 'anonymous' tag. those of us who are really, truly cowards are sick of every tom dick and harry claiming the mantle of cowardice for themselves.
i didnt realize he had done other work. this 'star trek' certainly sounds a little outside my normal fare, but i am willing to do a trial run.
ok heres the plan.
step 1. download wikipedia
step 2. sift through it, keep only the articles about corporations and PR firms
(use the Securities and Exchange commission databases to help with this..
you can use name pattern searching, and also the SEC's categorization codes to isolate PR firms)
step 3. you install your own CMS (mediawiki or whatever), copy those articles to it
step 3.5 erase all the parts of those articles not having to do with astroturfing
step 4. hack your CMS to enable voting, 'alleged tags', etc etc etc.
step 5. figure out how to get access to digital archives of PR trade journals, like Jack ODwyer's PR newsletter.
scrape facts out of those, articles, integrate them into your wiki. this is legal because of court cases like Feist and
the Gerald Ford Biography case.
step 5.5. do the same for 'letters to the editor' pages of newspapers.
Step 6. hire people off of freelancer.com for $3/hour to help you with fact scraping, fact checking, editing, etc.
Step 7. non-profit!
thank you for summing up the economy of the United States, circa 2000-2010
dude. i am all for it. will you pay me to write about and research the topic?
i can live on 16 grand a year. that's all i need.