The problem is, Texas has been electing politicians that while they apparently are exactly what Texas thinks is good, look to the rest of the non-red country as not so hot.
You mean like how the rest of the country elected George Bush twice?
a lot of car makers can build cars in the USA profitably. even small cars. except GM and Ford
Given that Ford earned $7.2 Billion in net income in 2013 and GM made a $3.8 billion profit over the same period I think GM and Ford will be very surprised to hear that they cannot make cars in the US profitably since most of their profit comes from US operations.
part of the problem is the factories are old and there is no more room to expand.
You don't need to expand factories to make the efficient. Inefficient factories get shut down and those that remain are doing just fine. I have visited numerous Ford and GM assembly plants (as well as Toyota and Honda) and for the most part they are as efficient and profitable as those of their leading competitors.
which would of been picked up by the next, possibly innovative, auto company to come along an buy up all the union heavy, bloated, bureaucratic, bankrupt companies assets at rock bottom prices
Wouldn't have happened because the supply chain would have imploded. GM gets liquidated and it would have dragged Ford and Chrysler down with it because they all share the same suppliers. Even the CEO of Toyota publicly admitted that liquidating GM would have been a bad idea because it would have hurt them badly too. GM being liquidated puts Delphi and Lear and a bunch of other Tier 1, 2 and 3 companies out of business. My company would have folded and not come back.
you don't stop being valuable or employable because the company you work for goes out of business.
When a company the size of GM + its supply chain goes under, the jobs go away too and aren't easily replaced. There are a lot of very talented people who had a hard time finding work after 2008. Some still do.
as for moving to Detroit, no thank you. too many union types lurking around up there.
Pretty clueless comment there. You can easily work your whole career in Metro Detroit without having to deal with a union even once. Most workers in the area do not belong to a union of any sort and in fact the state just became a right-to-work state (for better or worse).
List of the most dangerous cities in the US for 2013. Detroit is 3rd, right after Flint, Michigan.
So what? 80% of the population of Detroit Metro lives outside the City. Most of Detroit Metro is actually quite safe, similar to any other large metropolitan region. Very few people live in the City and most of the near-term economic opportunity and jobs is not in the City either. I've lived near Detroit and very rarely had any reason to visit the City itself. If I dropped you off in nearby city like Birmingham you'll find it to be as nice a place as just about anywhere in San Francisco and VERY safe.
It most assuredly is not a marketing ploy. There is a HUGE number of technology jobs in and around Detroit Metro and always has been because guess what? There is a LOT of technology that goes into manufacturing cars. Robotics, computers, automation, coatings, materials science, welding, forming, stamping, chemicals, etc. As the auto industry has bounced back from 2008-2009, job growth has rebounded too. It's actually not surprising at all that Detroit's job growth is rather high at the moment.
Trust me, you DON'T want to live anywhere near there..
Only morons who have never actually come to Michigan think that. Look, 80% of Detroit Metro is outside the City. Oakland Country which is immediately to the north of Detroit is one to the ten wealthiest counties in the US, has a AAA credit rating and is a genuinely nice place to live. Ann Arbor (20 miles west) is one if the nicest college towns you could ever want to visit and has some really cool business activity going on.
What makes ME laugh about such articles is that Detroit is in the midst of some *serious* financial issues.
Detroit CITY is in the midst of such issues. Detroit METRO is largely unaffected. Oakland County immediately to the north of Detroit City is one of the ten wealthiest counties in the US and has a AAA credit rating. Guess where 80% of the population of Metro Detroit lives? (hint - it isn't in Detroit City)
Who would want to live anyplace near such a situation?
Because most people who live NEAR Detroit City don't live IN Detroit City and haven't for a long time. Metro Detroit is actually a very nice place to live and Michigan is absolutely beautiful. I know because I've lived there.
It's like a third world country in decline, with the crime, blight and debt in abundance.
If you think that then you really know nothing about it and clearly haven't visited the area. Yes there are some parts of Detroit City that are pretty crappy. That doesn't describe much of the rest of Michigan.
Nope, articles like this are just the dying gasps of the marketing company hired to try and attract new business to a sinking ship.
Automation Alley is not a marketing company. They are a sort of tech transfer organization/incubator that helps Michigan businesses grow. It's actually a pretty neat operation and I've been to events they hold. The studies they cite are actually well researched and factual. There are a HUGE number of tech jobs in Michigan and Metro Detroit has more engineers per square mile than all but a handful of cities in the US. There is an enormous amount of technology that goes into manufacturing and about 50 of the largest manufacturing companies plus their supply chains are headquartered in Michigan, most fairly close to Detroit.
Funny, because Detroit isn't that far removed from St. Louis weather-wise, and STL is the tech hub of the midwest.
I've lived both places within the last 10 years plus I got my education at WashU. St Louis is decidedly NOT the "tech hub of the midwest". Plenty going on there and some pretty good talent and a nice place to live but there is WAY more tech going on near Detroit than in St Louis except for a few areas. If there is a "tech hub of the midwest" it is either Chicago or Detroit depending on how you want to measure it.
Dice ranked Missouri as the fastest growing state in regards to tech jobs last year.
Not hard to grow fast when you don't have all that many to begin with. Plus a lot of the tech jobs in Missouri are in Kansas City.
Over the past few years, the growth rate in Detroit tech jobs has been twice the natural average.
It's not just growth. Detroit has had lots of tech jobs for decades. It's been in the top 5 markets for many types of tech jobs for a long time. There is an ENORMOUS amount of technology that goes into automobile manufacturing. Robotics, CAD, industrial automation, materials science, welding, forming, coatings, chemicals, software and more. There are very few places in the USA with a higher density of engineering talent and opportunity.
Oh and before someone makes yet another ill informed remark about Detroit City, don't confuse Metro Detroit with Detroit City. Oakland County, immediately to the north of Detroit is one of the 10 wealthiest counties in the entire USA and has a AAA credit rating. Michigan is actually a really nice place to live, especially if you love the outdoors. Ann Arbor which is close by is a fantastic college town too if that suits your sensibilities.
People who do "serious" work with Office have real problems migrating.
I'm one of those people who does "serious" spreadsheet work. By and large switching between the Excel and OOo/LO works pretty well. Occasional formatting issues and the odd formula incompatibility but mostly it works fine. I try to use macros as little as possible so I can't speak to compatibility there but I would expect it to be something of a creeping horror.
Write and Word do have incompatibilities.
Sadly yes. Quite a few of them in fact.
I never tried to open a MS Access database in OpenOffice Base,
I have and it generally works but probably not exactly the way you expect. Base isn't really the same thing as Access. It's more of a connector application than a standalone database product. I use it primarily to do ODBC connections between spreadsheets and a database. Unfortunately they tend to break their ODBC code between versions so I've been stuck on a pretty old version of OO for quite a while.
Switching from MS Office to OpenOffice / LibreOffice is not easy at all for power users. To put into geek terms: imagine switching from Apache to Lighttpd. For most things, it will be great. But, if you have some serious.htaccess magic going on or are relying on mods which exist only for Apache - well, you are out of luck and you are probably not going anywhere.
Bingo. If you have a heavily macro'd set of Excel spreadsheets or the like you probably aren't going to want to switch. Just way too painful. But most people could probably switch with only modest problems here and there.
We're thankfully long past the days when an emailed Word document was useless without a copy of Microsoft Word
Sadly that isn't really true. My company has standardized on LibreOffice and we use it for most things. However I get Word and Excel files all the time that cannot be accurately read by OpenOffice or LibreOffice. Particularly.DOCX and.XLSX files. Many are just fine but the more complicated ones tend to have moderate to severe formatting corruption. Sometimes to the point of unreadability. Google Docs and other doc viewers frequently don't do any better of a job of it. I have to keep a seat of Microsoft office available for those documents that I can't read any other way even to this day.
The standardized format part appears to be a solved problem.
It isn't solved I assure you. EDI is useful but not easy or simple enough to be universally implemented. EDI generally only gets used by rather large organizations and it doesn't fit so well with the sort of spot buys that smaller companies tend to engage in. It tends to require a lot of process change rather than being an adaptation of existing processes. Setup is generally too hard and expensive. Think of it a little like using FTP vs email for file transfer. FTP better designed for the actual transfer of files but it's harder to set up, has more transaction handshake overhead for the user, not as useful for one time transfers, requires more training, and users already have email and know how to use it. Despite the fact that using email is technologically worse in a lot of ways it fits people's workflows a lot better so it gets used. Current EDI implementations suffer from basically the same problem.
Given my allergy to "screw the customer as hard as possible" business models,
That's why some sort of open software here would be a huge blessing. Few companies really want to be tied to some proprietary software if it isn't necessary. I would be delighted to see some EDI equivalent to Apache - an open source solution that works well for most and is relatively easy to put in place. Hell it could be as simple as emailing and receiving documents from some piece of middleware which requires relatively minimal changes by users.
I'd sooner write a system that takes advantage of communication systems businesses already have, rather than try to collect extra.
Nothing wrong with that if it gets the job done. I certainly would prefer something that is based on something already well understood and preferably more open. No sense reinventing more wheels than necessary. In fact you would have to at some point implement some way to talk with existing EDI systems because a lot of them are already implemented and they aren't going to get torn out.
To be honest, if Intuit had a brain in their skulls they would implement some form of EDI directly into their software that made document exchange easier and reduced paper shuffling. But they don't seem to be interested. Hell their ODBC drivers were developed by a third party, even the ones they include with their more expensive packages. You would think that would be something they would want to control and use but they don't. Their internal databases appear to be some sort of non-standard home rolled junk.
The problem there is getting everyone to use the same system, or at least a standardized format for exchanging invoices, delivery paperwork, etc.
Yep! Total chicken and egg problem though perhaps not an unsolvable one. You'd basically have to make something that is easy to start and easy to use and falls back gracefully for customers not using it yet. Plug in to popular accounting software packages and maybe a web interchange. Once companies start to use stuff like this they tend to stay with it so the user stickiness would likely be rather high if the experience is good.
I want to make a fortune, but when I looked, I found all links to PeachTree's SDK are dead.
Honestly I'd probably start with Quickbooks which has an active SDK as Intuit is actually the bigger player here. More small businesses use quickbooks than anything else. I do know that Sage works with a lot of third party software but I don't work with their products enough to know many details.
I want to make a fortune, but when I looked, I found all links to PeachTree's SDK are dead.
Of course they are. However that is not incompatible with a tool for exchanging documents and data more easily. I understand and respect your distaste for some of their business practices. I deal with Quickbooks all the time and some of the restrictions are just absurdly arbitrary. For instance you cannot do any sort of inventory costing except for Average Cost (no LIFO, no FIFO, no Standard Cost unless you buy expensive add ons from third parties). It's not like they don't know about these things either.
What scared me away from publishing any accounting software before was the lack of a CPA. Do companies not care if the software is verified as long as it is transparent?
I am a Certified Management Accountant (another type of certified accountant somewhat like a CPA but focused on internal corporate accounting rather than public accounting). Short version is that companies care that it works. If you need accountants to review bits of it, that isn't hard to arrange. There are plenty of plug ins to software like Quickbooks (I'm a Quickbooks Proadvisor too) and the majority of small businesses use some form of Quickbooks with most of the remainder using Sage products. Quickbooks would seem to be the logical place to start but you might even be able to do most of the work through some sort of neutral online exchange.
But if you're serious, I'd love to know more.
Happy to chat on or off slashdot and share my perspective on things even if it comes to nothing ultimately. I'm quite serious about the problem though I can't promise the solution will be easy. The biggest challenge probably isn't actually writing the software, it's getting multiple parties to use it. Kind of a chicken and egg problem. However kind of like social networking sites if you can get it working and groups using it the network effects will be REALLY strong.
The problem with your tax form is that actually calculating the amount of income you had last year is actually pretty complicated for a pretty big portion of the population, particularly the wealthier folks. Seriously. 90% of the tax code not devoted to various tax exemptions is basically devoted to defining income. Why? Because it is not trivial or easy. There are countless corner cases and sources of income and financial instruments and other things to complicate what you income is. We could simplify the tax form quite a bit by eliminating most of the special tax exemptions but you will NEVER get a tax form as simple as the one you propose. It simply is not as easy as you make it sound.
And god forbid they actually lose talking points by actually accomplishing something they've said they'd like to do.
What they want to do is stay in power. They'll change some things if they get the chance but that's a second order effect. What they really want to do is whatever will keep them in power and they will sell their soul to do it. They'll say whatever they think gives them the best chance to retain power and get re-elected but what they actually do is what shows you their real goals.
So the next time you hear someone say the government doesn't create jobs
The government absolutely creates jobs. Lots of them. The government is something like 20-30% of the economy and a similar portion of the jobs. This is true for most of the governments on earth and it's actually not a bad thing. Remember that government jobs include things like the military, police, fire, teachers and the like which are all necessary and useful functions. Some amount of administration is useful too. Many important and necessary private businesses make their money contracting for necessary services to governments. Governments definitely create jobs and many of them are even worth creating.
The problem is that the government doesn't generally have a good way to prune back services that are no longer required and doesn't tend to be exposed to market forces forcing it to be efficient. It also means that those who are doing well with the status quo will try to keep it, even when that doesn't make economic sense.
but only to outsource technical and engineering jobs. Heaven forbid if we automate away accountants and bureaucracy. THEN technology is taking jobs away!
I actually happen to be both an accountant and an engineer and actively practice both in my day job. I would LOVE to automate a lot of the paperwork shuffling I do as an accountant. Want to make a fortune? Come up with an EDI type system that doesn't cost an arm and leg and allows businesses to exchange invoices, delivery information, order acknowledgements, etc automatically between businesses of any size and that integrates with existing accounting systems. Start with Quickbooks and Sage. I probably spend 10-15 hours a week needlessly shuffling paperwork because email and the post office is the only standard way to exchange documents with every business. So does every other accountant in the known universe.
If you are a software engineer and want to hack back on administration and bureaucracy, I'll be happy to tell you the use cases and cost targets and whatever else I know. I'm not a programmer myself but there IS a huge opportunity for automation in accounting. Companies will trip over themselves trying to save a buck if there is a way to automate the paperwork that makes sense.
It would not be hard to make it clear to people how much "The Man" is taking.
You'd think so but I'm an accountant and I do our company payroll. You would be *amazed* at how seldom many people look at their paycheck, particularly if it is direct deposit. I get asked all the time how much vacation people have left even though it is printed right on our paystubs every two weeks.
That said, I'd have no problem in principle with some sort of reasonable (yeah I know...) automatic payment system. The devil is in the details and to do it you can't have too many special tax exemptions. (or the government has to know WAY more about you than you probably want them to) There is however a pretty substantial portion of the population that has very simple tax returns so why not automate it where it makes sense?
Not to make this political but I'm pretty sure the republicans would bitch about it being another government intrusion and the democrats would bitch about lost tax collector jobs or something else that misses the big picture so we'll keep doing things the same stupid way we have for the last 80 years even though it makes very little sense to anyone and costs a fortune in the process.
Actually she has mentioned some vaccine method that were safe.
There is NO vaccine that is 100% safe. There is no drug that is 100% safe. Does not exist and probably never will.
Poeple against her have come out and said those vaccine distribution methods were safer however they cost most and would make distribution harder.
When you make distribution harder (whether due to cost or technical complications) you make it less likely to be administered and thus you get worse results overall. The best vaccine is the one that prevents the greatest number of infections, not the one that has the fewest side effects.
Minor pedantic quibble: some vaccines are unsafe for a very small subset of the population, mainly people with compromised immune systems or severe allergies to components of the vaccines
Minor pedantic quibble: ALL vaccines are unsafe for some subset of the population. No drug is 100% safe for all people.
They knocked over a single pin and said that that was representative of any potential link with autism. They then went on to throw balls to represent all the different diseases that vaccines protect against. But the "cost" of all vaccines was only counted once. The "benefit" of vaccine protection was counted dozens of times.
It's an imperfect analogy but they are generally right. They are talking about two things. One is herd immunity. When you are vaccinated you not only cannot get the disease but you cannot transmit it to others either. This means you aren't just protecting yourself once, you are protecting others repeatedly. The other thing they are talking about is the fact that you probably aren't exposed to each virus just once. Odds are good you'll come in contact with a widely spread virus from multiple sources. So by immunizing once you are protected repeatedly. The cost of each vaccine (collectively) is a one time expense but the benefit of it is incurred repeatedly down the line.
It is FAR more economically efficient to vaccinate and prevent infection altogether than to treat infection after they occur. Not only do you save on medical expenses and reduce suffering but you also recoup a lot of opportunity cost from productivity that otherwise would have been lost.
Yes, but that does not lead to "... therefore, we should vaccinate".
Actually it does lead to that. That is EXACTLY why we vaccinate. We vaccinate because it saves lives, reduces medical costs (more expensive to treat than prevent), reduces suffering and enables a greater realization of human potential.
Is culling of the herd necessarily a bad thing for humanity in the long perspective?
You're not "culling the herd". You're not weeding out the weak in most cases. You simply are allowing suffering to continue needlessly. Measles doesn't kill most people it infects before they reproduce so you aren't "culling the herd" in any meaningful way by withholding vaccines.
Is there a plus for humanity to increasing lifespans, or will that slow down evolution?
There are many pluses to increasing lifespans. The most obvious is that people are able to contribute productively to society for longer. More useful work can be done with a longer lifespan. Enabling longer lifespans does not eliminate evolutionary pressure - it merely changes the source of it.
Would humanity be better off if we put half of the money that goes to medical science and practice into other sciences?
You really are cold blooded aren't you? Do you realize the lack of empathy it takes to seriously ask that question? I hope no one ever has to depend on you for their well being.
Doctors have been taking kick-backs for prescribing drugs for years.
SOME doctors do that. Most do not. Most doctors are decent, honest and hard working people who dedicate their lives to keeping you and me healthy. Just because a few turn out to be criminals doesn't mean it is accurate or fair to assume all are.
They have a long historical record of gettings things wrong.
Show me ANY branch of science where we do not have a long history of getting things wrong. The only way to find out what works is to try things and find out what works and what doesn't. There is a lot we don't know about they human body and medicine is very complicated. Furthermore doctors have a very clear track record of saving far more lives than their actions cost. The average lifespan of humans has DOUBLED largely thanks to doctors and modern medicines. Just because we don't know everything and make mistakes doesn't invalidate the enormous benefit doctors provide to society.
However something you are giving to an entire generation of healthy children you had better be pretty damn sure there aren't going to be side-effects down the line.
There ALWAYS are going to be side effects with any drug. You literally cannot have a 100% safe drug. It is impossible. You will do far more harm by insisting that drugs be 100% safe (they will never come to market) than by understanding the risks profile of the drugs available.
McCarthy has a good point. We can't keep pumping our kids full of these old vaccines without doing regular studies, and using some of the profits to ensure safer versions.
No she does NOT have a good point. There already have been copious studies of these drugs safety and efficacy. There also have been numerous (and ongoing) studies of the many theories of dangers presented by these vaccines, all of which have shown that her theories have no evidence backing them up whatsoever. Every time someone has to go and stomp out another anti-vax lunatic theory creates an opportunity cost. Those people could have spent their time and money and energy working on newer or safer vaccines instead of proving yet-another unsupported safety claim wrong.
Personally I will selectively vaccinate my kids up to a certain age, depending on risk factor, then they can choose themselves. I had both mumps and measles, it was hardly a big deal. If the kids are old enough it's probably even better they get it naturally and get over it than take the vaccine.
You are an idiot and a dangerous idiot at that. Mumps and measles can and do kill people and cause significant and lasting damage in many they do not kill. Furthermore you aren't just endangering your own children. You are allowing them to be potential carriers of the disease to other people who cannot be vaccinated against it whether due to age or medical conditions. Actions like what you propose demonstrably results in people dying when it could have been prevented. What you propose is incredibly irresponsible since every bit of scientific data we have says that the safest and most effective solution for both your children and society at large is to get vaccinated.
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The problem is, Texas has been electing politicians that while they apparently are exactly what Texas thinks is good, look to the rest of the non-red country as not so hot.
You mean like how the rest of the country elected George Bush twice?
a lot of car makers can build cars in the USA profitably. even small cars. except GM and Ford
Given that Ford earned $7.2 Billion in net income in 2013 and GM made a $3.8 billion profit over the same period I think GM and Ford will be very surprised to hear that they cannot make cars in the US profitably since most of their profit comes from US operations.
part of the problem is the factories are old and there is no more room to expand.
You don't need to expand factories to make the efficient. Inefficient factories get shut down and those that remain are doing just fine. I have visited numerous Ford and GM assembly plants (as well as Toyota and Honda) and for the most part they are as efficient and profitable as those of their leading competitors.
which would of been picked up by the next, possibly innovative, auto company to come along an buy up all the union heavy, bloated, bureaucratic, bankrupt companies assets at rock bottom prices
Wouldn't have happened because the supply chain would have imploded. GM gets liquidated and it would have dragged Ford and Chrysler down with it because they all share the same suppliers. Even the CEO of Toyota publicly admitted that liquidating GM would have been a bad idea because it would have hurt them badly too. GM being liquidated puts Delphi and Lear and a bunch of other Tier 1, 2 and 3 companies out of business. My company would have folded and not come back.
you don't stop being valuable or employable because the company you work for goes out of business.
When a company the size of GM + its supply chain goes under, the jobs go away too and aren't easily replaced. There are a lot of very talented people who had a hard time finding work after 2008. Some still do.
as for moving to Detroit, no thank you. too many union types lurking around up there.
Pretty clueless comment there. You can easily work your whole career in Metro Detroit without having to deal with a union even once. Most workers in the area do not belong to a union of any sort and in fact the state just became a right-to-work state (for better or worse).
List of the most dangerous cities in the US for 2013. Detroit is 3rd, right after Flint, Michigan.
So what? 80% of the population of Detroit Metro lives outside the City. Most of Detroit Metro is actually quite safe, similar to any other large metropolitan region. Very few people live in the City and most of the near-term economic opportunity and jobs is not in the City either. I've lived near Detroit and very rarely had any reason to visit the City itself. If I dropped you off in nearby city like Birmingham you'll find it to be as nice a place as just about anywhere in San Francisco and VERY safe.
It's a number ploy by a marketing firm...
It most assuredly is not a marketing ploy. There is a HUGE number of technology jobs in and around Detroit Metro and always has been because guess what? There is a LOT of technology that goes into manufacturing cars. Robotics, computers, automation, coatings, materials science, welding, forming, stamping, chemicals, etc. As the auto industry has bounced back from 2008-2009, job growth has rebounded too. It's actually not surprising at all that Detroit's job growth is rather high at the moment.
Trust me, you DON'T want to live anywhere near there..
Only morons who have never actually come to Michigan think that. Look, 80% of Detroit Metro is outside the City. Oakland Country which is immediately to the north of Detroit is one to the ten wealthiest counties in the US, has a AAA credit rating and is a genuinely nice place to live. Ann Arbor (20 miles west) is one if the nicest college towns you could ever want to visit and has some really cool business activity going on.
What makes ME laugh about such articles is that Detroit is in the midst of some *serious* financial issues.
Detroit CITY is in the midst of such issues. Detroit METRO is largely unaffected. Oakland County immediately to the north of Detroit City is one of the ten wealthiest counties in the US and has a AAA credit rating. Guess where 80% of the population of Metro Detroit lives? (hint - it isn't in Detroit City)
Who would want to live anyplace near such a situation?
Because most people who live NEAR Detroit City don't live IN Detroit City and haven't for a long time. Metro Detroit is actually a very nice place to live and Michigan is absolutely beautiful. I know because I've lived there.
It's like a third world country in decline, with the crime, blight and debt in abundance.
If you think that then you really know nothing about it and clearly haven't visited the area. Yes there are some parts of Detroit City that are pretty crappy. That doesn't describe much of the rest of Michigan.
Nope, articles like this are just the dying gasps of the marketing company hired to try and attract new business to a sinking ship.
Automation Alley is not a marketing company. They are a sort of tech transfer organization/incubator that helps Michigan businesses grow. It's actually a pretty neat operation and I've been to events they hold. The studies they cite are actually well researched and factual. There are a HUGE number of tech jobs in Michigan and Metro Detroit has more engineers per square mile than all but a handful of cities in the US. There is an enormous amount of technology that goes into manufacturing and about 50 of the largest manufacturing companies plus their supply chains are headquartered in Michigan, most fairly close to Detroit.
Funny, because Detroit isn't that far removed from St. Louis weather-wise, and STL is the tech hub of the midwest.
I've lived both places within the last 10 years plus I got my education at WashU. St Louis is decidedly NOT the "tech hub of the midwest". Plenty going on there and some pretty good talent and a nice place to live but there is WAY more tech going on near Detroit than in St Louis except for a few areas. If there is a "tech hub of the midwest" it is either Chicago or Detroit depending on how you want to measure it.
Dice ranked Missouri as the fastest growing state in regards to tech jobs last year.
Not hard to grow fast when you don't have all that many to begin with. Plus a lot of the tech jobs in Missouri are in Kansas City.
Over the past few years, the growth rate in Detroit tech jobs has been twice the natural average.
It's not just growth. Detroit has had lots of tech jobs for decades. It's been in the top 5 markets for many types of tech jobs for a long time. There is an ENORMOUS amount of technology that goes into automobile manufacturing. Robotics, CAD, industrial automation, materials science, welding, forming, coatings, chemicals, software and more. There are very few places in the USA with a higher density of engineering talent and opportunity.
Oh and before someone makes yet another ill informed remark about Detroit City, don't confuse Metro Detroit with Detroit City. Oakland County, immediately to the north of Detroit is one of the 10 wealthiest counties in the entire USA and has a AAA credit rating. Michigan is actually a really nice place to live, especially if you love the outdoors. Ann Arbor which is close by is a fantastic college town too if that suits your sensibilities.
People who do "serious" work with Office have real problems migrating.
I'm one of those people who does "serious" spreadsheet work. By and large switching between the Excel and OOo/LO works pretty well. Occasional formatting issues and the odd formula incompatibility but mostly it works fine. I try to use macros as little as possible so I can't speak to compatibility there but I would expect it to be something of a creeping horror.
Write and Word do have incompatibilities.
Sadly yes. Quite a few of them in fact.
I never tried to open a MS Access database in OpenOffice Base,
I have and it generally works but probably not exactly the way you expect. Base isn't really the same thing as Access. It's more of a connector application than a standalone database product. I use it primarily to do ODBC connections between spreadsheets and a database. Unfortunately they tend to break their ODBC code between versions so I've been stuck on a pretty old version of OO for quite a while.
Switching from MS Office to OpenOffice / LibreOffice is not easy at all for power users. To put into geek terms: imagine switching from Apache to Lighttpd. For most things, it will be great. But, if you have some serious .htaccess magic going on or are relying on mods which exist only for Apache - well, you are out of luck and you are probably not going anywhere.
Bingo. If you have a heavily macro'd set of Excel spreadsheets or the like you probably aren't going to want to switch. Just way too painful. But most people could probably switch with only modest problems here and there.
We're thankfully long past the days when an emailed Word document was useless without a copy of Microsoft Word
Sadly that isn't really true. My company has standardized on LibreOffice and we use it for most things. However I get Word and Excel files all the time that cannot be accurately read by OpenOffice or LibreOffice. Particularly .DOCX and .XLSX files. Many are just fine but the more complicated ones tend to have moderate to severe formatting corruption. Sometimes to the point of unreadability. Google Docs and other doc viewers frequently don't do any better of a job of it. I have to keep a seat of Microsoft office available for those documents that I can't read any other way even to this day.
The standardized format part appears to be a solved problem.
It isn't solved I assure you. EDI is useful but not easy or simple enough to be universally implemented. EDI generally only gets used by rather large organizations and it doesn't fit so well with the sort of spot buys that smaller companies tend to engage in. It tends to require a lot of process change rather than being an adaptation of existing processes. Setup is generally too hard and expensive. Think of it a little like using FTP vs email for file transfer. FTP better designed for the actual transfer of files but it's harder to set up, has more transaction handshake overhead for the user, not as useful for one time transfers, requires more training, and users already have email and know how to use it. Despite the fact that using email is technologically worse in a lot of ways it fits people's workflows a lot better so it gets used. Current EDI implementations suffer from basically the same problem.
Given my allergy to "screw the customer as hard as possible" business models,
That's why some sort of open software here would be a huge blessing. Few companies really want to be tied to some proprietary software if it isn't necessary. I would be delighted to see some EDI equivalent to Apache - an open source solution that works well for most and is relatively easy to put in place. Hell it could be as simple as emailing and receiving documents from some piece of middleware which requires relatively minimal changes by users.
I'd sooner write a system that takes advantage of communication systems businesses already have, rather than try to collect extra.
Nothing wrong with that if it gets the job done. I certainly would prefer something that is based on something already well understood and preferably more open. No sense reinventing more wheels than necessary. In fact you would have to at some point implement some way to talk with existing EDI systems because a lot of them are already implemented and they aren't going to get torn out.
To be honest, if Intuit had a brain in their skulls they would implement some form of EDI directly into their software that made document exchange easier and reduced paper shuffling. But they don't seem to be interested. Hell their ODBC drivers were developed by a third party, even the ones they include with their more expensive packages. You would think that would be something they would want to control and use but they don't. Their internal databases appear to be some sort of non-standard home rolled junk.
The problem there is getting everyone to use the same system, or at least a standardized format for exchanging invoices, delivery paperwork, etc.
Yep! Total chicken and egg problem though perhaps not an unsolvable one. You'd basically have to make something that is easy to start and easy to use and falls back gracefully for customers not using it yet. Plug in to popular accounting software packages and maybe a web interchange. Once companies start to use stuff like this they tend to stay with it so the user stickiness would likely be rather high if the experience is good.
I want to make a fortune, but when I looked, I found all links to PeachTree's SDK are dead.
Honestly I'd probably start with Quickbooks which has an active SDK as Intuit is actually the bigger player here. More small businesses use quickbooks than anything else. I do know that Sage works with a lot of third party software but I don't work with their products enough to know many details.
I want to make a fortune, but when I looked, I found all links to PeachTree's SDK are dead.
Of course they are. However that is not incompatible with a tool for exchanging documents and data more easily. I understand and respect your distaste for some of their business practices. I deal with Quickbooks all the time and some of the restrictions are just absurdly arbitrary. For instance you cannot do any sort of inventory costing except for Average Cost (no LIFO, no FIFO, no Standard Cost unless you buy expensive add ons from third parties). It's not like they don't know about these things either.
What scared me away from publishing any accounting software before was the lack of a CPA. Do companies not care if the software is verified as long as it is transparent?
I am a Certified Management Accountant (another type of certified accountant somewhat like a CPA but focused on internal corporate accounting rather than public accounting). Short version is that companies care that it works. If you need accountants to review bits of it, that isn't hard to arrange. There are plenty of plug ins to software like Quickbooks (I'm a Quickbooks Proadvisor too) and the majority of small businesses use some form of Quickbooks with most of the remainder using Sage products. Quickbooks would seem to be the logical place to start but you might even be able to do most of the work through some sort of neutral online exchange.
But if you're serious, I'd love to know more.
Happy to chat on or off slashdot and share my perspective on things even if it comes to nothing ultimately. I'm quite serious about the problem though I can't promise the solution will be easy. The biggest challenge probably isn't actually writing the software, it's getting multiple parties to use it. Kind of a chicken and egg problem. However kind of like social networking sites if you can get it working and groups using it the network effects will be REALLY strong.
The problem with your tax form is that actually calculating the amount of income you had last year is actually pretty complicated for a pretty big portion of the population, particularly the wealthier folks. Seriously. 90% of the tax code not devoted to various tax exemptions is basically devoted to defining income. Why? Because it is not trivial or easy. There are countless corner cases and sources of income and financial instruments and other things to complicate what you income is. We could simplify the tax form quite a bit by eliminating most of the special tax exemptions but you will NEVER get a tax form as simple as the one you propose. It simply is not as easy as you make it sound.
And god forbid they actually lose talking points by actually accomplishing something they've said they'd like to do.
What they want to do is stay in power. They'll change some things if they get the chance but that's a second order effect. What they really want to do is whatever will keep them in power and they will sell their soul to do it. They'll say whatever they think gives them the best chance to retain power and get re-elected but what they actually do is what shows you their real goals.
So the next time you hear someone say the government doesn't create jobs
The government absolutely creates jobs. Lots of them. The government is something like 20-30% of the economy and a similar portion of the jobs. This is true for most of the governments on earth and it's actually not a bad thing. Remember that government jobs include things like the military, police, fire, teachers and the like which are all necessary and useful functions. Some amount of administration is useful too. Many important and necessary private businesses make their money contracting for necessary services to governments. Governments definitely create jobs and many of them are even worth creating.
The problem is that the government doesn't generally have a good way to prune back services that are no longer required and doesn't tend to be exposed to market forces forcing it to be efficient. It also means that those who are doing well with the status quo will try to keep it, even when that doesn't make economic sense.
but only to outsource technical and engineering jobs. Heaven forbid if we automate away accountants and bureaucracy. THEN technology is taking jobs away!
I actually happen to be both an accountant and an engineer and actively practice both in my day job. I would LOVE to automate a lot of the paperwork shuffling I do as an accountant. Want to make a fortune? Come up with an EDI type system that doesn't cost an arm and leg and allows businesses to exchange invoices, delivery information, order acknowledgements, etc automatically between businesses of any size and that integrates with existing accounting systems. Start with Quickbooks and Sage. I probably spend 10-15 hours a week needlessly shuffling paperwork because email and the post office is the only standard way to exchange documents with every business. So does every other accountant in the known universe.
If you are a software engineer and want to hack back on administration and bureaucracy, I'll be happy to tell you the use cases and cost targets and whatever else I know. I'm not a programmer myself but there IS a huge opportunity for automation in accounting. Companies will trip over themselves trying to save a buck if there is a way to automate the paperwork that makes sense.
It would not be hard to make it clear to people how much "The Man" is taking.
You'd think so but I'm an accountant and I do our company payroll. You would be *amazed* at how seldom many people look at their paycheck, particularly if it is direct deposit. I get asked all the time how much vacation people have left even though it is printed right on our paystubs every two weeks.
That said, I'd have no problem in principle with some sort of reasonable (yeah I know...) automatic payment system. The devil is in the details and to do it you can't have too many special tax exemptions. (or the government has to know WAY more about you than you probably want them to) There is however a pretty substantial portion of the population that has very simple tax returns so why not automate it where it makes sense?
Not to make this political but I'm pretty sure the republicans would bitch about it being another government intrusion and the democrats would bitch about lost tax collector jobs or something else that misses the big picture so we'll keep doing things the same stupid way we have for the last 80 years even though it makes very little sense to anyone and costs a fortune in the process.
Actually she has mentioned some vaccine method that were safe.
There is NO vaccine that is 100% safe. There is no drug that is 100% safe. Does not exist and probably never will.
Poeple against her have come out and said those vaccine distribution methods were safer however they cost most and would make distribution harder.
When you make distribution harder (whether due to cost or technical complications) you make it less likely to be administered and thus you get worse results overall. The best vaccine is the one that prevents the greatest number of infections, not the one that has the fewest side effects.
Minor pedantic quibble: some vaccines are unsafe for a very small subset of the population, mainly people with compromised immune systems or severe allergies to components of the vaccines
Minor pedantic quibble: ALL vaccines are unsafe for some subset of the population. No drug is 100% safe for all people.
They knocked over a single pin and said that that was representative of any potential link with autism. They then went on to throw balls to represent all the different diseases that vaccines protect against. But the "cost" of all vaccines was only counted once. The "benefit" of vaccine protection was counted dozens of times.
It's an imperfect analogy but they are generally right. They are talking about two things. One is herd immunity. When you are vaccinated you not only cannot get the disease but you cannot transmit it to others either. This means you aren't just protecting yourself once, you are protecting others repeatedly. The other thing they are talking about is the fact that you probably aren't exposed to each virus just once. Odds are good you'll come in contact with a widely spread virus from multiple sources. So by immunizing once you are protected repeatedly. The cost of each vaccine (collectively) is a one time expense but the benefit of it is incurred repeatedly down the line.
It is FAR more economically efficient to vaccinate and prevent infection altogether than to treat infection after they occur. Not only do you save on medical expenses and reduce suffering but you also recoup a lot of opportunity cost from productivity that otherwise would have been lost.
Yes, but that does not lead to "... therefore, we should vaccinate".
Actually it does lead to that. That is EXACTLY why we vaccinate. We vaccinate because it saves lives, reduces medical costs (more expensive to treat than prevent), reduces suffering and enables a greater realization of human potential.
Is culling of the herd necessarily a bad thing for humanity in the long perspective?
You're not "culling the herd". You're not weeding out the weak in most cases. You simply are allowing suffering to continue needlessly. Measles doesn't kill most people it infects before they reproduce so you aren't "culling the herd" in any meaningful way by withholding vaccines.
Is there a plus for humanity to increasing lifespans, or will that slow down evolution?
There are many pluses to increasing lifespans. The most obvious is that people are able to contribute productively to society for longer. More useful work can be done with a longer lifespan. Enabling longer lifespans does not eliminate evolutionary pressure - it merely changes the source of it.
Would humanity be better off if we put half of the money that goes to medical science and practice into other sciences?
You really are cold blooded aren't you? Do you realize the lack of empathy it takes to seriously ask that question? I hope no one ever has to depend on you for their well being.
Doctors have been taking kick-backs for prescribing drugs for years.
SOME doctors do that. Most do not. Most doctors are decent, honest and hard working people who dedicate their lives to keeping you and me healthy. Just because a few turn out to be criminals doesn't mean it is accurate or fair to assume all are.
They have a long historical record of gettings things wrong.
Show me ANY branch of science where we do not have a long history of getting things wrong. The only way to find out what works is to try things and find out what works and what doesn't. There is a lot we don't know about they human body and medicine is very complicated. Furthermore doctors have a very clear track record of saving far more lives than their actions cost. The average lifespan of humans has DOUBLED largely thanks to doctors and modern medicines. Just because we don't know everything and make mistakes doesn't invalidate the enormous benefit doctors provide to society.
However something you are giving to an entire generation of healthy children you had better be pretty damn sure there aren't going to be side-effects down the line.
There ALWAYS are going to be side effects with any drug. You literally cannot have a 100% safe drug. It is impossible. You will do far more harm by insisting that drugs be 100% safe (they will never come to market) than by understanding the risks profile of the drugs available.
McCarthy has a good point. We can't keep pumping our kids full of these old vaccines without doing regular studies, and using some of the profits to ensure safer versions.
No she does NOT have a good point. There already have been copious studies of these drugs safety and efficacy. There also have been numerous (and ongoing) studies of the many theories of dangers presented by these vaccines, all of which have shown that her theories have no evidence backing them up whatsoever. Every time someone has to go and stomp out another anti-vax lunatic theory creates an opportunity cost. Those people could have spent their time and money and energy working on newer or safer vaccines instead of proving yet-another unsupported safety claim wrong.
Personally I will selectively vaccinate my kids up to a certain age, depending on risk factor, then they can choose themselves. I had both mumps and measles, it was hardly a big deal. If the kids are old enough it's probably even better they get it naturally and get over it than take the vaccine.
You are an idiot and a dangerous idiot at that. Mumps and measles can and do kill people and cause significant and lasting damage in many they do not kill. Furthermore you aren't just endangering your own children. You are allowing them to be potential carriers of the disease to other people who cannot be vaccinated against it whether due to age or medical conditions. Actions like what you propose demonstrably results in people dying when it could have been prevented. What you propose is incredibly irresponsible since every bit of scientific data we have says that the safest and most effective solution for both your children and society at large is to get vaccinated.