When he left office, inflation was 14%; mortgage rates were 22%. Compare that to the previous ten years (now): 2%-3% inflation and 5%-8% (max) mortgage rates.
Not to defend Carter - he was intelligent and meant well, but wasn't much of a leader - but much of that was the economic fallout of the Vietnam war, which most Americans supported as long as they didn't have to pay for it. Our leaders knew that America loves a free war and thus chose to finance it through deficits rather than by raising taxes. Hence Daniel Berrigan's famous quote that if LBJ had asked for our cars instead of our sons, we would never have gotten involved in it.
Of course now we know better than this, and no responsible American President would put the ecomony at risk by waging war without securing the means to pay for it, and we the people would gladly sacrifice what we could in support of a Just Cause. Oh, wait...
I suspect you're right... Demographics can be a powerful cultural force. Of course, we don't have the 50s to rebel against like the kids in the 60s did, either. If the conservatives succeed at changing that with their "culture wars", though, maybe things can get interesting once again...
When my parents went to school they actively participated in a grassroots book exchange program to protest the high priced book and supply store that had all the business. By the time I started taking classes at that same school, the small book exchange they started had transformed into an equally evil and overpriced textbook boutique.
One of the unique things about the 60s and 70s is that students took the initiative on things like this without waiting for "adult" direction and supervision. I may be wrong -- or maybe just not looking closely enough -- but I've seen relatively little of that since then, and I've often wondered why that is. Perhaps students "back then" were just naive enough to think they could get anything done this way, or maybe they were emboldened by the general climate of political empowerment that existed at the time. Or, maybe leadership is just more likely to sprout during tumultuous times; college campuses have been very placid and comfortable for a long time now.
That's what I've pretty much been doing for the past couple of years. But alas, the money's running out, and I'll soon have to jump back into the fray. It was nice while it lasted, though!
I don't know if I'd actively avoid executive management, simply because if it's not me it'll be somebody else. But you've got to accept that in many/most organizations it's really a social club (usually a Boys' Club, actually) that values political dependability and social cohesiveness over managerial talent per se. Plus, it doesn't hurt to be a golfer...
on a serious note, just having word and excel has replaced many thousands of secretaries already. can anyone out there say that typing is solely a clerical skill like it was 20 years ago?
Heh heh... This reminds me of when I was a VP of a small software company back in the 80s. Despite the fact that it was a software company, I was the only manager with any computer background at all (and was a VP only because I'd started the company). Using the keyboard was the quickest way for me to churn out letters, memos and such, but the other managers were just horrified by this. So one day the CEO walks into my office, sets a voice recorder on my desk, and insists that I dictate all documents, to be typed later by the secretarial staff.
Now things that used to take 3 or 4 minutes were dragging for the better part of a day, often requiring multiple revisions before things were right. But finally the other managers (MBAs all) were happy!
If you had read the post before dishing out insults, you would have seen that I said it could work in some contexts, like verifying identities at ATMs and such. Large-scale screening applications are quite another matter; they require extreme accuracy (especially minimizing false positives). Do the math, if you're capable of that much.
And by the way, fiber ID is neither as challenging nor as accurate as you seem to think.
And on another point, why on earth were you trying to call Detroit Edison? Didn't you know the power was out? did you think maybe they had missed noticing it?
At that point I didn't know if it went beyond my house or not. Unfortunately, my HAM rig was out, too...
...the system will be completely useless as you'll either get dozens of random false positives each day and haul in innocent people...
That's exactly why it's so important to people like Ashcroft that the government not be burdened with the requirement of actually proving their guilt. If you can simply declare that to be suspected - by man or machine - is to be guilty, then you can look like a hero in the war on terrorism in the next election. Getting lawyers and judges involved will just mess things up by eroding the public's confidence in your efforts. What counts is being able to say that you've put X "suspected terrorists" behind bars; that'll be enough for most voters.
Not necessarily true. Visionics failed miserably as we all know and fell flat on their faces. However new technologies are being developed that greatly enhance facial recognition technologies
I'd argue that it is necessarily true. The point is that even a tiny - say 0.01% - false positive rate is a show-stopper in the applications that we're discussing here. If there are 1,000 people in your database and you're monitoring the throngs inside a busy airport, you're probably talking several false-positives per hour, each one requiring a lot of time and hassle to resolve. I suspect that the limitation is fundamental; unique as we all think we are, we're simply not unique enough to be discriminated reliably when large numbers are involved.
I think that perhaps, due to a difference in termperment, that you have sorely mis-interpreted the motivation of most geeks.
It's not hard to recognize the diffence between a conversation where ideas are exchanged and dueling monologues where knowledge is simply being showcased. I see a lot of the latter, and curiously much more from computer geeks than from people in other professions that are equally demanding intellectually.
A geek might quite innocently think that others share their fascination, and have no idea that it would be boring to others.
The ability to "read the minds" of others - i.e., to estimate where others are coming from and to anticipate how they will likely react to what we do or say - is a social skill. In fact, a severe deficiency in this ability is one of the hallmarks of autism. But we are a society made up of different kinds of people with different sets of skills and different contributions to make, and it's hard to imagine that we'd be better off if this weren't so.
BTW, the distinction between "extroversion" and "attention-seeking" is dead-on. For an introvert, it's far easier to show off for a group at arm's length than to have an extended conversation with a single unfamiliar person. That's why it's no surprise that most stand-up comedians are introverts.
Bad analogy. In one case you're talking about about users voluntarily screening access to their own inboxes using a third-party service, and in the other you have a service denied to users that want it whether or not its use would be illegal.
I can relate to this. Do you find that tasks that you are obliged to perform - and that will be judged by others - generate more anxiety than those you do on your own volition, and are therefore harder to get started on? Even if (consciously) you consider yourself an extremely competent person, there nevertheless may be some deep-seated anxiety about how your performance will be judged - even by yourself - and this may be the root of the problem. We tend to manage anxiety by avoiding the source of it, and from that springs procrastination.
Are you something of a perfectionist with regard to your work? Are you often surprised that that others evaluate your work much more favorably than you do yourself? That would solidify the case a bit. Of course, IANAP[sychologist]...
Well, this whole discussion is about how to achieve this trait called self-discipline, isn't it? Your advice is like telling a deaf person to just "listen better".
Some of the best advice I've seen in print is in Pirsig's "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance".
Good advice. I read this book a long, long time ago, but I'll have to get it back on the list for the summer. I fall into gumption traps all the time, and sometimes the only thing that helps is to recognize them for what they are!
I remember hearing shortly after the Florida fiasco that a truckload of ballots got "lost" overnight en route to a counting station only a few blocks away. Then, later on in the storm that ensued, no one talked about it anymore. Thereafter people (especially Republicans) talked about "hanging chads" as if the voters who cast "spoiled" ballots were stupid and thus not worthy of being counted. But this is just the kind of "spoiling" that can be accomplished long after the ballot is actually cast. I've always wondered what the statistics were on the ballots that didn't complete their quarter-mile journey until the next day...
local governments can be pushed around by corporations, the really dangerous power, much easier than the federal government can be pushed around.
Exactly. That's the "race to the bottom" as states and localities are forced to compete for businesses, resulting in tax inequities, reluctance to enact and enforce pollution regulations, etc. Local government easily becomes a pawn for one or a few large corporate interests, often to the detriment of the broader public.
Many conservatives detest "big government" for reasons that are basically libertarian in motivation, but the end result is really a greater concentration of power, and one that is even less responsive to public input. Other conservatives, who are more corporatist in motivation, know this very well but play the freedom card disingenuously. They will lead us straight to something more like fascism than democracy (didn't Mussolini define fascism as the marriage of corporate and governement power?).
Any free society, to remain free, must limit private power no less than than the power of government.
If you think that 128kbps is an acceptable level, then you are a fool. 99% of people can't differentiate between 128kbps and CD quality, and even if they could, the marginal added value would certainly not be worth (leitimate copy equivalent price).
Well, 64K then, if it keeps me from being a fool. The point would be to allow a song to be heard for promotional purposes, but to retain some perception of value in the original recording (for those that like it, of course). Of course the record companies are collectively a cartel and their product is thus overpriced, but that's another issue...
I don't do anything illegal online (warez, stealing music, etc) so I've nothing to worry about.
Well, this is exactly the central fallacy; i.e., that you only need to fear the unbridled power of the state if you're doing something illegal. It is a fallacy because it assumes that all agents of the government have perfect integrity and are interested only in diligently and dispassionately enforcing the law (which is itself perfectly fair and just) and getting the "bad guys" (who are truly bad, always, or else why would they want to get them?).
If this were true, then dictatorships in other countries should be utopias where the Bad Guys are thwarted and Good People (like yourself) live in peace and harmony. But it isn't that way, is it? Dictators - and people in the many layers of authority beneath them - have their own agendas that you won't read in any constitutional document. Maybe you're sitting pretty until some friend of the police chief decides he'd like to buy your house for a really good price, or until some government official notifies your boss that you voted the wrong way in the last election (since you don't need privacy, I mean).
It always amazes me how secure conservatives often feel about their own immunity after they sell out our freedom and liberty for the sake of the "culture wars" they're always talking about. They think that they can always ensure their own safety by whoring themselves to the wealthy and powerful. But eventually the winds don't blow they way you think they will, and you may discover yourself on the enemies list of someone who can do whatever the hell they please. And who will be left to defend your "rights" then?
If I want to talk PRIVATELY, I'll use an encrypted connection.
Of course your benevolent dictatorship that only goes after the Truly Bad will have no problem with your use of encryption.
Next move I see is for a single source to be limited to providing 20 seconds of a particular music file so that we can take advantage of more fair use laws.
It probably makes more sense to allow distribution but limit the bit rate (and thus the audio quality). After all, their big concern about digital music is that it makes it too easy to distribute perfect copies of their product. MP3 is a lossy compression algorithm, so there must be some level (128 Kbps?) below which the RIAA should be fine with it as a promotional aid (like free radio)...
Slashdot Mirror
Oh... So I guess I'd better stop braaging about that invitation I got...
Not to defend Carter - he was intelligent and meant well, but wasn't much of a leader - but much of that was the economic fallout of the Vietnam war, which most Americans supported as long as they didn't have to pay for it. Our leaders knew that America loves a free war and thus chose to finance it through deficits rather than by raising taxes. Hence Daniel Berrigan's famous quote that if LBJ had asked for our cars instead of our sons, we would never have gotten involved in it.
Of course now we know better than this, and no responsible American President would put the ecomony at risk by waging war without securing the means to pay for it, and we the people would gladly sacrifice what we could in support of a Just Cause. Oh, wait...
Not to pick nits or anything, but I think your equation should be xw = r...
I suspect you're right... Demographics can be a powerful cultural force. Of course, we don't have the 50s to rebel against like the kids in the 60s did, either. If the conservatives succeed at changing that with their "culture wars", though, maybe things can get interesting once again...
One of the unique things about the 60s and 70s is that students took the initiative on things like this without waiting for "adult" direction and supervision. I may be wrong -- or maybe just not looking closely enough -- but I've seen relatively little of that since then, and I've often wondered why that is. Perhaps students "back then" were just naive enough to think they could get anything done this way, or maybe they were emboldened by the general climate of political empowerment that existed at the time. Or, maybe leadership is just more likely to sprout during tumultuous times; college campuses have been very placid and comfortable for a long time now.
That's what I've pretty much been doing for the past couple of years. But alas, the money's running out, and I'll soon have to jump back into the fray. It was nice while it lasted, though!
I don't know if I'd actively avoid executive management, simply because if it's not me it'll be somebody else. But you've got to accept that in many/most organizations it's really a social club (usually a Boys' Club, actually) that values political dependability and social cohesiveness over managerial talent per se. Plus, it doesn't hurt to be a golfer...
Heh heh... This reminds me of when I was a VP of a small software company back in the 80s. Despite the fact that it was a software company, I was the only manager with any computer background at all (and was a VP only because I'd started the company). Using the keyboard was the quickest way for me to churn out letters, memos and such, but the other managers were just horrified by this. So one day the CEO walks into my office, sets a voice recorder on my desk, and insists that I dictate all documents, to be typed later by the secretarial staff.
Now things that used to take 3 or 4 minutes were dragging for the better part of a day, often requiring multiple revisions before things were right. But finally the other managers (MBAs all) were happy!
You have lawyers?
And by the way, fiber ID is neither as challenging nor as accurate as you seem to think.
At that point I didn't know if it went beyond my house or not. Unfortunately, my HAM rig was out, too...
That's exactly why it's so important to people like Ashcroft that the government not be burdened with the requirement of actually proving their guilt. If you can simply declare that to be suspected - by man or machine - is to be guilty, then you can look like a hero in the war on terrorism in the next election. Getting lawyers and judges involved will just mess things up by eroding the public's confidence in your efforts. What counts is being able to say that you've put X "suspected terrorists" behind bars; that'll be enough for most voters.
I'd argue that it is necessarily true. The point is that even a tiny - say 0.01% - false positive rate is a show-stopper in the applications that we're discussing here. If there are 1,000 people in your database and you're monitoring the throngs inside a busy airport, you're probably talking several false-positives per hour, each one requiring a lot of time and hassle to resolve. I suspect that the limitation is fundamental; unique as we all think we are, we're simply not unique enough to be discriminated reliably when large numbers are involved.
How's that? My phones (both land line and cell) were both working fine during the whole thing. Couldn't get through to Detroit Edison, though!
It's not hard to recognize the diffence between a conversation where ideas are exchanged and dueling monologues where knowledge is simply being showcased. I see a lot of the latter, and curiously much more from computer geeks than from people in other professions that are equally demanding intellectually.
A geek might quite innocently think that others share their fascination, and have no idea that it would be boring to others.
The ability to "read the minds" of others - i.e., to estimate where others are coming from and to anticipate how they will likely react to what we do or say - is a social skill. In fact, a severe deficiency in this ability is one of the hallmarks of autism. But we are a society made up of different kinds of people with different sets of skills and different contributions to make, and it's hard to imagine that we'd be better off if this weren't so.
BTW, the distinction between "extroversion" and "attention-seeking" is dead-on. For an introvert, it's far easier to show off for a group at arm's length than to have an extended conversation with a single unfamiliar person. That's why it's no surprise that most stand-up comedians are introverts.
And so starts a thriving black market in postage stamps...
Bad analogy. In one case you're talking about about users voluntarily screening access to their own inboxes using a third-party service, and in the other you have a service denied to users that want it whether or not its use would be illegal.
Are you something of a perfectionist with regard to your work? Are you often surprised that that others evaluate your work much more favorably than you do yourself? That would solidify the case a bit. Of course, IANAP[sychologist]...
Well, this whole discussion is about how to achieve this trait called self-discipline, isn't it? Your advice is like telling a deaf person to just "listen better".
Good advice. I read this book a long, long time ago, but I'll have to get it back on the list for the summer. I fall into gumption traps all the time, and sometimes the only thing that helps is to recognize them for what they are!
I remember hearing shortly after the Florida fiasco that a truckload of ballots got "lost" overnight en route to a counting station only a few blocks away. Then, later on in the storm that ensued, no one talked about it anymore. Thereafter people (especially Republicans) talked about "hanging chads" as if the voters who cast "spoiled" ballots were stupid and thus not worthy of being counted. But this is just the kind of "spoiling" that can be accomplished long after the ballot is actually cast. I've always wondered what the statistics were on the ballots that didn't complete their quarter-mile journey until the next day...
Exactly. That's the "race to the bottom" as states and localities are forced to compete for businesses, resulting in tax inequities, reluctance to enact and enforce pollution regulations, etc. Local government easily becomes a pawn for one or a few large corporate interests, often to the detriment of the broader public.
Many conservatives detest "big government" for reasons that are basically libertarian in motivation, but the end result is really a greater concentration of power, and one that is even less responsive to public input. Other conservatives, who are more corporatist in motivation, know this very well but play the freedom card disingenuously. They will lead us straight to something more like fascism than democracy (didn't Mussolini define fascism as the marriage of corporate and governement power?).
Any free society, to remain free, must limit private power no less than than the power of government.
Everybody knows that if we give up all of our freedom, then we'll be perfectly safe.
Well, 64K then, if it keeps me from being a fool. The point would be to allow a song to be heard for promotional purposes, but to retain some perception of value in the original recording (for those that like it, of course). Of course the record companies are collectively a cartel and their product is thus overpriced, but that's another issue...
Well, this is exactly the central fallacy; i.e., that you only need to fear the unbridled power of the state if you're doing something illegal. It is a fallacy because it assumes that all agents of the government have perfect integrity and are interested only in diligently and dispassionately enforcing the law (which is itself perfectly fair and just) and getting the "bad guys" (who are truly bad, always, or else why would they want to get them?).
If this were true, then dictatorships in other countries should be utopias where the Bad Guys are thwarted and Good People (like yourself) live in peace and harmony. But it isn't that way, is it? Dictators - and people in the many layers of authority beneath them - have their own agendas that you won't read in any constitutional document. Maybe you're sitting pretty until some friend of the police chief decides he'd like to buy your house for a really good price, or until some government official notifies your boss that you voted the wrong way in the last election (since you don't need privacy, I mean).
It always amazes me how secure conservatives often feel about their own immunity after they sell out our freedom and liberty for the sake of the "culture wars" they're always talking about. They think that they can always ensure their own safety by whoring themselves to the wealthy and powerful. But eventually the winds don't blow they way you think they will, and you may discover yourself on the enemies list of someone who can do whatever the hell they please. And who will be left to defend your "rights" then?
If I want to talk PRIVATELY, I'll use an encrypted connection.
Of course your benevolent dictatorship that only goes after the Truly Bad will have no problem with your use of encryption.
It probably makes more sense to allow distribution but limit the bit rate (and thus the audio quality). After all, their big concern about digital music is that it makes it too easy to distribute perfect copies of their product. MP3 is a lossy compression algorithm, so there must be some level (128 Kbps?) below which the RIAA should be fine with it as a promotional aid (like free radio)...