The problem with openly having bombs to bully people with is that the Saudi defense budget is 7X that of Iran. They can plunk down $50b on their own nuclear weapons program with only minor belt tightening elsewhere.
It is entirely plausible that Khamenei has made the very rational choice that having capability without weapons is the long-term sweet spot. Military confrontation (short of a massive, regime changing invasion) runs of the risk of tripping escalation. Iran's short term deterrent is to threaten to shut down all traffic through the Straits of Hormuz.
People are pretty much indoctrinated since birth to try to get along. So if someone looks authoritative, there's a default reaction to simply go with it.
I think that people (hominids) have been bred for at least the last 2+ million years to try and get along. It is a vital tactic for creatures weak in tooth and claw to band together, and earlier hominids were much smaller and weaker than those that can later.
The ideas of "truth" and "rules" are very modern, maybe just tens of thousands of years. You may happen to be correct that heading north is 75% likely to find game animals, but if the Alpha says we should go south where you correctly believe success is only 25% likely, shaming the Alpha could easily be a lethal mistake. Not because he will necessarily kill you himself, but because he and his burly allies might throw rocks and you and force you to head north alone.
Surely the process as you just described has been common in the restaurant supply system and other wholesale distribution channels for several decades. The previous process may be done on pieces of paper with a different degree of granularity, but the underlying concept is not new.
"Hey, which truck can I get this on? No, I do not need it that soon because it will be stale before the weekend rush. Thursday afternoon? Perfecto!"
More precisely, if you cannot afford to fight the bully, you always lose. You can choose to lose now or lose big in lawyer fees -- because even if you win in court and the bully loses, you can be 100% sure you shot yourself in your own bank account.
Yet another factor is the number of Hamas crews skilled at launching simple missiles with useful accuracy is a limited resource. So if the defenses can intelligently pick off the most dangerous missiles, it is at least buying time. Time is valuable, as it opens many options for avoiding the full arsenal.
Why is it that historical events, in particular the 1979 hostage crisis, are insufficient in explaining those attitudes?
The hostage crisis occurred over 30 years ago on the other side of the world from US soil. Militarily Iran is a 90-lb weakling surrounded by nations armed to the teeth.
What makes Iran such a wonderful "threat" now is we are always being told Iran is a threat. It is not the actual capabilities of Iran that are fearsome.
The Khobar Towers is a perfect example. It was obvious at the time that Iran might not be involved. 18 years later and you are blaming Iran for something that we know was probably a Saudi show. Can you explain the nature of your error? (Propaganda seems likely.)
All your evidence presented against Iran is simply non-evidence. It only has a simple explanation when viewed through propaganda-tinted glasses. (Mind you, the present Iranian gov't has done some terrible things, but those crimes are not what you have been talking about.)
Consider Iran's nuclear program. Isn't it rational to want to keep options open when faced with mountains of US weaponry to the West (Israel, Turkey), mountains of US weaponry to the south (Saudi Arabia, UAE), occupied Afghanistan to the north, and America's terrorist-loving and nuclear-armed fried Pakistan to the east? Why exactly the one irrational explanation (a suicidal attack on Israel) the only likely one? Why do you assert one particular explanation is likely when other explanations exist?
To assume that one's "enemy is irrational is a classic symptom of a propaganda afflicted mind.
Perhaps you have better reasoning, but it is not evidenced by what you posted.
On top of that, you have the Iranians committing acts of war against the US in Iraq (not only supplying and training our enemies, but planning and sometimes participating directly in attacks) and in Saudi Arabia (Khobar Towers), as well as apparently developing a nuclear weapons program aimed directly at destroying a key US ally, Israel, and really, after all of that, does there need to be "propaganda" to explain why American attitudes towards the Iranian government are what they are?
Secretary of Defense William Perry (at the time), the FBI, and Saudi Minister of the Interior Prince Nayef disagree with you about Khobar. The indictment in the US district court looks like a long list of Saudi citizens, and but a few others.
As for "acts of war" in Iraq, the US plays the same game all the time, including the selling weapons to Iranian enemies, e.g. Saddam Hussein during the Iran-Iraq War. This kind of turnaround is only fair play.
You are clearly demonstrating the power American propaganda has over minds who should know better. It is very "interesting" how selective your memory happens to be.
Exactly what you are hoping for has been done, HBush and Clinton did a lot a work towards getting deficits under control, yet "conservatives" do not celebrate the legacies for those successes. Quite the opposite. In fact, they worked very hard to undo those very accomplishments.
Lucky for us, Obama is proposing pretty much exactly what you are suggesting -- a mix of cuts and taxes to bring the deficit under control. What do "conservatives" think about him?
Quite possibly. The immense uncertainty itself could have easily taken a greater toll in the short term than the actual long term prospect of 6 months or 12 months or 24 months in jail.
While there are always outstanding mavericks, a lot of engineering departments are primarily staffed by brainy people who would make third tier engineers in the real world. Most people who are passionate about a subject area are itching to go out and DO IT. Yes, there are a few amazing brainy oddballs out there that have to be in academia. Yes, there are 5 or 6 CS departments like Stanford or UC Berkeley or Carnegie Mellon that probably do not fit that mold.
But Dawson College? A top notch computer scientist could be racking up six figures with a BS or MS. Who do you think works there and what are they paid?
Most Gulf countries live in fear of Iran and its ambition of hegemony, and it drives large arms purchases.
Yeah, right. You are being played like a fiddle.
At the present time, Iran is no threat to anyone. Iran runs a very distant 5th in arms expenditures in the region, at less than 1/2 of Israel, Turkey, and the UAE, at less than 1/6th of Saudi Arabia (and a little over 1% of what the US spends). Iran is surrounded by nations armed to the teeth, a lot of it American weaponry.
When a 90-lb. weakling is subjected to such irrational fear-mongering by multiple 800 lb. gorillas and on 80,000 lb. godzilla monster at the same time, it is no wonder they are leaving the nuclear option open. How can they dare do otherwise?
In the long run, a QA team matters only a little unless the C-level executives care. There will always be abundant short term (and short-sighted) incentives towards steamrolling over the QA. It is the CEO who must set expectations here -- you cannot expect water to flow up hill.
Adding moving parts is expensive, and can make the plane less safe rather than more safe.
This is a tough problem. If the the number of locations of batteries is small, then you have fewer failure points before the pilots lose all battery power. If the number of locations of batteries is large, you have many, many moving parts that can cause a dangerous decompression of the aircraft.
Boeing lost this bet. You have to know how many times Boeing bet one million dollars and won in order to decide whether this kind of cost analysis is shaving things too close for comfort.
Most people interpret the ancient phrase ("an eye for an eye") as an example of a vicious system of justice. That interpretation is not quite wrong, but it misses the main point. The actual main point of "an eye for an eye" is to baldly state that punishment must be proportional or it will be hateful in the eyes of justice and God.
The ancient wise men were trying to carry us away from a world of completely arbitrary tit-for-tat revenge, where "justice" is inflicting whatever you can get away with, because all who are not friends should be assumed to be enemies. Proportionality in the justice system was an explicit cornerstone in building civilization.
What we have on hand is just one memorable example of what probably happens a million times a year: that we as a society accept (or encourage) prosecutors to ignore all common sense and completely dispense with proportionality, because that is the convenient means to rack up guilty pleas (or political points).
Should we tolerate a justice system where the People's representatives are undermining the foundation of civilization?
I was not upset at your comment in the least (and accidentally replied to the wrong parent, BTW, sorry). If you want to chide "hey, that sounds good, but what are you going to do about it?" I would consider that comment a tangent from the immediate topic with some genuine merit, if but on the snarky/presumptious side of things.
As I see it, the practical problem/question is whether prosecutors should be incentivized to go for astronomically high sentences, simply because the letter of the law allows such. That is a solvable problem, once consensus on the silly little "aspiration" can be achieved.
Or we could just indulge in "navel-gazing-on-a-soap-box" by lecturing each other on "navel-gazing-on-a-soap-box". Self-referential humor is most especially funny when spoken without irony!
That is a False Choice argument, and utter nonsense.
The question is whether, given the very broad range of options the letter of the law allows, the prosecutors (apparently) should be incentivized to go for maximum possible sentences always, even if those sentences are stratospheric relative to the moral merits of the case.
This is not just about the particular question of visiting justice upon one alleged perpetrator. This victim of suicide is just the pretty little canary in the coal mine. Is this this desirable for society as a whole? Do you think putting this person in jail for 35 years serves your interests? Are we as a society so desperate and fearful that we need to make examples of everyone by the means of every tool of psychological torture the letter of the law allows?
The prosecutor took a case where the actual victims thought it best not to prosecute, and threatened a future productive tax paying citizen and society as a whole with a few million dollars of pain. How is this a good idea?
Certainly. But we cannot behavior to ever improve (or not decline) unless we can get some kind of consensus on what "should" happen. We must begin with a moral argument, or contests of power devolve to exercises of power merely for power's sake.
We as a society need to ask whether any prosecutor "should" be asking to put a young man away for stealing a few textbooks longer than most rapist-murderers end up in jail. Is that a constructive usage of the moral power of the state? Obviously not. At best, the prosecutor is psychologically torturing an alleged criminal. Gawd forbid the prosecutor wins the case! Should we as a society pay hundreds of thousands of dollars of court costs, around a million dollars in jail costs, and lose a highly productive citizen, so a prick lawyer can put a feather in their cap?
So if we cannot prove that there was direct causation, then are the prosecutor's actions a-okay? N. O.
People in a position of authority or trust should not be treating other human beings like dirt, because they think they can get away with it. I do not care if they are a DoJ suit or an asshole roommate named Dharun Ravi.
Ultimately what keeps the music playing is the bankers have a stable of naive lenders who are willing to not notice the obvious in a desperate chase for a couple extra percentage points of interest rate. Why that happens is complex. Sometimes it is because bankers are happy to screw over their clients with bad advice to make their quarterly numbers. Sometimes it is because the lenders are greedy.
Lending money that allows the owners/management to take their skin out of the game is inherently risky. These takeovers only work because someone is vastly undercharging for the genuine risk involved.
Interviewing a candidate is a difficult and inherently imperfect process. This particular interviewer's opinion of you could easily be misleading, regardless of the coding involved.
Yes, that is a shame. You may be disappointed, but this is not your problem to own.
Removing (or adding) coding problems does not change the big picture here.
I think that this is less about Autonomy's shrinking value and more about HP's willingness to pay any price to enter new markets and their failure to recognize an opportunity to drive down the selling price by being willing to walk away from the deal
I tend to agree. HP should have expected aggressive accounting here, and gone in with eyes open. Buying Autonomy was not a terrible idea, but it always boils down to price.
In the Valley, a valuation of 5X or 6X gross revenue is pretty healthy for a strong adolescent startup that is growing in a large company. Autonomy was priced at 10X IIRC. That is not unheard of, but it is an "aggressive" price that sets sky high expectations. At that kind of lofty valuation, 20% annual revenue growth is failure.
The question is whether there is a positive, a negative, or no correlation between athleticism and braininess. I am saying the correlation is positive. That is a statistical statement that allows for a counterexamples while still being correct and useful.
Almost. Feanor did not consider Galadriel dedicated enough to vengeance against Morgoth, as measured by perceived willingness to draw swords and chop up fellow elves who refused to hand over their boats. Feanor left her behind. Galadriel led a great host the long way around, across the immense icy expanse to the north.
Slashdot Mirror
The problem with openly having bombs to bully people with is that the Saudi defense budget is 7X that of Iran. They can plunk down $50b on their own nuclear weapons program with only minor belt tightening elsewhere.
It is entirely plausible that Khamenei has made the very rational choice that having capability without weapons is the long-term sweet spot. Military confrontation (short of a massive, regime changing invasion) runs of the risk of tripping escalation. Iran's short term deterrent is to threaten to shut down all traffic through the Straits of Hormuz.
Checking for oxygenation level might be possible. Does not have to be a very accurate reading.
People are pretty much indoctrinated since birth to try to get along. So if someone looks authoritative, there's a default reaction to simply go with it.
I think that people (hominids) have been bred for at least the last 2+ million years to try and get along. It is a vital tactic for creatures weak in tooth and claw to band together, and earlier hominids were much smaller and weaker than those that can later.
The ideas of "truth" and "rules" are very modern, maybe just tens of thousands of years. You may happen to be correct that heading north is 75% likely to find game animals, but if the Alpha says we should go south where you correctly believe success is only 25% likely, shaming the Alpha could easily be a lethal mistake. Not because he will necessarily kill you himself, but because he and his burly allies might throw rocks and you and force you to head north alone.
Surely the process as you just described has been common in the restaurant supply system and other wholesale distribution channels for several decades. The previous process may be done on pieces of paper with a different degree of granularity, but the underlying concept is not new.
"Hey, which truck can I get this on? No, I do not need it that soon because it will be stale before the weekend rush. Thursday afternoon? Perfecto!"
More precisely, if you cannot afford to fight the bully, you always lose. You can choose to lose now or lose big in lawyer fees -- because even if you win in court and the bully loses, you can be 100% sure you shot yourself in your own bank account.
Yet another factor is the number of Hamas crews skilled at launching simple missiles with useful accuracy is a limited resource. So if the defenses can intelligently pick off the most dangerous missiles, it is at least buying time. Time is valuable, as it opens many options for avoiding the full arsenal.
Why is it that historical events, in particular the 1979 hostage crisis, are insufficient in explaining those attitudes?
The hostage crisis occurred over 30 years ago on the other side of the world from US soil. Militarily Iran is a 90-lb weakling surrounded by nations armed to the teeth.
What makes Iran such a wonderful "threat" now is we are always being told Iran is a threat. It is not the actual capabilities of Iran that are fearsome.
The Khobar Towers is a perfect example. It was obvious at the time that Iran might not be involved. 18 years later and you are blaming Iran for something that we know was probably a Saudi show. Can you explain the nature of your error? (Propaganda seems likely.)
All your evidence presented against Iran is simply non-evidence. It only has a simple explanation when viewed through propaganda-tinted glasses. (Mind you, the present Iranian gov't has done some terrible things, but those crimes are not what you have been talking about.)
Consider Iran's nuclear program. Isn't it rational to want to keep options open when faced with mountains of US weaponry to the West (Israel, Turkey), mountains of US weaponry to the south (Saudi Arabia, UAE), occupied Afghanistan to the north, and America's terrorist-loving and nuclear-armed fried Pakistan to the east? Why exactly the one irrational explanation (a suicidal attack on Israel) the only likely one? Why do you assert one particular explanation is likely when other explanations exist?
To assume that one's "enemy is irrational is a classic symptom of a propaganda afflicted mind.
Perhaps you have better reasoning, but it is not evidenced by what you posted.
On top of that, you have the Iranians committing acts of war against the US in Iraq (not only supplying and training our enemies, but planning and sometimes participating directly in attacks) and in Saudi Arabia (Khobar Towers), as well as apparently developing a nuclear weapons program aimed directly at destroying a key US ally, Israel, and really, after all of that, does there need to be "propaganda" to explain why American attitudes towards the Iranian government are what they are?
Secretary of Defense William Perry (at the time), the FBI, and Saudi Minister of the Interior Prince Nayef disagree with you about Khobar. The indictment in the US district court looks like a long list of Saudi citizens, and but a few others.
As for "acts of war" in Iraq, the US plays the same game all the time, including the selling weapons to Iranian enemies, e.g. Saddam Hussein during the Iran-Iraq War. This kind of turnaround is only fair play.
You are clearly demonstrating the power American propaganda has over minds who should know better. It is very "interesting" how selective your memory happens to be.
Exactly what you are hoping for has been done, HBush and Clinton did a lot a work towards getting deficits under control, yet "conservatives" do not celebrate the legacies for those successes. Quite the opposite. In fact, they worked very hard to undo those very accomplishments.
Lucky for us, Obama is proposing pretty much exactly what you are suggesting -- a mix of cuts and taxes to bring the deficit under control. What do "conservatives" think about him?
Quite possibly. The immense uncertainty itself could have easily taken a greater toll in the short term than the actual long term prospect of 6 months or 12 months or 24 months in jail.
While there are always outstanding mavericks, a lot of engineering departments are primarily staffed by brainy people who would make third tier engineers in the real world. Most people who are passionate about a subject area are itching to go out and DO IT. Yes, there are a few amazing brainy oddballs out there that have to be in academia. Yes, there are 5 or 6 CS departments like Stanford or UC Berkeley or Carnegie Mellon that probably do not fit that mold.
But Dawson College? A top notch computer scientist could be racking up six figures with a BS or MS. Who do you think works there and what are they paid?
Most Gulf countries live in fear of Iran and its ambition of hegemony, and it drives large arms purchases.
Yeah, right. You are being played like a fiddle.
At the present time, Iran is no threat to anyone. Iran runs a very distant 5th in arms expenditures in the region, at less than 1/2 of Israel, Turkey, and the UAE, at less than 1/6th of Saudi Arabia (and a little over 1% of what the US spends). Iran is surrounded by nations armed to the teeth, a lot of it American weaponry.
When a 90-lb. weakling is subjected to such irrational fear-mongering by multiple 800 lb. gorillas and on 80,000 lb. godzilla monster at the same time, it is no wonder they are leaving the nuclear option open. How can they dare do otherwise?
In the long run, a QA team matters only a little unless the C-level executives care. There will always be abundant short term (and short-sighted) incentives towards steamrolling over the QA. It is the CEO who must set expectations here -- you cannot expect water to flow up hill.
Adding moving parts is expensive, and can make the plane less safe rather than more safe.
This is a tough problem. If the the number of locations of batteries is small, then you have fewer failure points before the pilots lose all battery power. If the number of locations of batteries is large, you have many, many moving parts that can cause a dangerous decompression of the aircraft.
Boeing lost this bet. You have to know how many times Boeing bet one million dollars and won in order to decide whether this kind of cost analysis is shaving things too close for comfort.
Well spoken, freprado.
Most people interpret the ancient phrase ("an eye for an eye") as an example of a vicious system of justice. That interpretation is not quite wrong, but it misses the main point. The actual main point of "an eye for an eye" is to baldly state that punishment must be proportional or it will be hateful in the eyes of justice and God.
The ancient wise men were trying to carry us away from a world of completely arbitrary tit-for-tat revenge, where "justice" is inflicting whatever you can get away with, because all who are not friends should be assumed to be enemies. Proportionality in the justice system was an explicit cornerstone in building civilization.
What we have on hand is just one memorable example of what probably happens a million times a year: that we as a society accept (or encourage) prosecutors to ignore all common sense and completely dispense with proportionality, because that is the convenient means to rack up guilty pleas (or political points).
Should we tolerate a justice system where the People's representatives are undermining the foundation of civilization?
I was not upset at your comment in the least (and accidentally replied to the wrong parent, BTW, sorry). If you want to chide "hey, that sounds good, but what are you going to do about it?" I would consider that comment a tangent from the immediate topic with some genuine merit, if but on the snarky/presumptious side of things.
As I see it, the practical problem/question is whether prosecutors should be incentivized to go for astronomically high sentences, simply because the letter of the law allows such. That is a solvable problem, once consensus on the silly little "aspiration" can be achieved.
Or we could just indulge in "navel-gazing-on-a-soap-box" by lecturing each other on "navel-gazing-on-a-soap-box". Self-referential humor is most especially funny when spoken without irony!
That is a False Choice argument, and utter nonsense.
The question is whether, given the very broad range of options the letter of the law allows, the prosecutors (apparently) should be incentivized to go for maximum possible sentences always, even if those sentences are stratospheric relative to the moral merits of the case.
This is not just about the particular question of visiting justice upon one alleged perpetrator. This victim of suicide is just the pretty little canary in the coal mine. Is this this desirable for society as a whole? Do you think putting this person in jail for 35 years serves your interests? Are we as a society so desperate and fearful that we need to make examples of everyone by the means of every tool of psychological torture the letter of the law allows?
The prosecutor took a case where the actual victims thought it best not to prosecute, and threatened a future productive tax paying citizen and society as a whole with a few million dollars of pain. How is this a good idea?
Certainly. But we cannot behavior to ever improve (or not decline) unless we can get some kind of consensus on what "should" happen. We must begin with a moral argument, or contests of power devolve to exercises of power merely for power's sake.
We as a society need to ask whether any prosecutor "should" be asking to put a young man away for stealing a few textbooks longer than most rapist-murderers end up in jail. Is that a constructive usage of the moral power of the state? Obviously not. At best, the prosecutor is psychologically torturing an alleged criminal. Gawd forbid the prosecutor wins the case! Should we as a society pay hundreds of thousands of dollars of court costs, around a million dollars in jail costs, and lose a highly productive citizen, so a prick lawyer can put a feather in their cap?
So if we cannot prove that there was direct causation, then are the prosecutor's actions a-okay? N. O.
People in a position of authority or trust should not be treating other human beings like dirt, because they think they can get away with it. I do not care if they are a DoJ suit or an asshole roommate named Dharun Ravi.
Ultimately what keeps the music playing is the bankers have a stable of naive lenders who are willing to not notice the obvious in a desperate chase for a couple extra percentage points of interest rate. Why that happens is complex. Sometimes it is because bankers are happy to screw over their clients with bad advice to make their quarterly numbers. Sometimes it is because the lenders are greedy.
Lending money that allows the owners/management to take their skin out of the game is inherently risky. These takeovers only work because someone is vastly undercharging for the genuine risk involved.
Interviewing a candidate is a difficult and inherently imperfect process. This particular interviewer's opinion of you could easily be misleading, regardless of the coding involved.
Yes, that is a shame. You may be disappointed, but this is not your problem to own.
Removing (or adding) coding problems does not change the big picture here.
I think that this is less about Autonomy's shrinking value and more about HP's willingness to pay any price to enter new markets and their failure to recognize an opportunity to drive down the selling price by being willing to walk away from the deal
I tend to agree. HP should have expected aggressive accounting here, and gone in with eyes open. Buying Autonomy was not a terrible idea, but it always boils down to price.
In the Valley, a valuation of 5X or 6X gross revenue is pretty healthy for a strong adolescent startup that is growing in a large company. Autonomy was priced at 10X IIRC. That is not unheard of, but it is an "aggressive" price that sets sky high expectations. At that kind of lofty valuation, 20% annual revenue growth is failure.
The question is whether there is a positive, a negative, or no correlation between athleticism and braininess. I am saying the correlation is positive. That is a statistical statement that allows for a counterexamples while still being correct and useful.
Almost. Feanor did not consider Galadriel dedicated enough to vengeance against Morgoth, as measured by perceived willingness to draw swords and chop up fellow elves who refused to hand over their boats. Feanor left her behind. Galadriel led a great host the long way around, across the immense icy expanse to the north.