First, by "the same problem", I was referring to a shortage of engineers, both software and otherwise. Whatever Germany is doing, it's not working. Germany is experiencing a big brain drain.
German engineers are paid much more on average
Wrong again, either way you might mean it. Software developers in Germany earn about the same as other highly paid engineers in Germany. Furthermore, in terms of PPP, German engineers and software developers earn about half of their US counterparts.
My point, though, is that besides what we have paid to keep our own auto makers going
That cost is unrelated to the cost of driving or transportation; we could have car manufacturers fail and the result would probably have been cheaper cars. We paid that money so that more people remain inefficiently employed in the US car industry.
I agree that GM should have been allowed to fail
I didn't say they "should have been allowed to fail", I just pointed out that their bailout was not a subsidy for driving.
and the approximate $7000/year drain on every family that owns a car across the country
And if they used public transit, they would pay even more.
Furthermore, much of that $7000 is a voluntary luxury, not a necessity (e.g., people buying a new car every 5.5 years, instead of 10-15 years).
there is a tremendous expenditure for roads,
Even if most people used public transit, we'd still have much of that expenditure, since roads are needed for many other purposes in addition to personal transport.
and the social cost of air pollution in declined health overall - a really serious problem for children in urban areas now
Yet, urban areas in wealthy countries with excellent public transportation, like Japan and the Netherlands, have far worse air pollution than the US (and even worse if you take into account the whole country). In fact, in international comparisons of urban air pollution, the US is doing quite well, ranking about the same as Ireland, Germany, Finland, and Denmark (I just crunched the data myself).
Also, part of the reason for why the US has more cars and less public transportation is because so many people have chosen to live outside the cities, away from the pollution associated with urban areas. Arguably, reducing automobile use would increase urbanization and expose children to more pollution, not less, since urban areas are associated with high levels of pollution no matter what.
This all ends up losing us much more money than a railroad would or could.
You keep saying that, but you don't provide any data or arguments to support that view.
I like public transit and I travel most of my miles by public transit, but public transit isn't going to get better in the US as long as people keep making bogus and unsupported arguments for it like you do.
It's the same sense in which anything "makes a profit": transportation is a necessity for me to do business (earn a living), and it's cheaper than the alternatives (public transportation), both in terms of direct expenditures and in terms of opportunity cost.
If you have a specific point to make about the cost of cars, why don't you make it?
You're assuming that without the bailout, cars would be more expensive, and with more expensive cars, fewer people would drive. Those assumptions are untenable. Even if the bailout lowered car prices, people would have had a choice of plenty of cheap cars without the bailout (and most of the cheap cars come from overseas anyway), or they could simply keep their current car longer than the average 5.5 years.
The bailout was just about keeping workers employed in what is effectively a market with a glut of luxury goods that nobody really needs. It probably would have been better for the car industry to let some of those manufacturers fail.
Tell me, again, how does your car make money for you, its owner?
Well, I need transportation to get to work, to shop, and to obtain services. A car does that cheaper and better than public transportation. Not only is its per-mile cost lower for me (and many other people) on the routes I regularly need to travel, it is also faster, and it lets me take advantage of goods and services that I simply couldn't take advantage of with public transportation.
As a matter of fact, I actually do usually use public transit anyway most of the time (I take the car out of the garage about once every other week). But I don't kid myself about it: that's a luxury that I can afford. If I were pressed for time and money, the rational thing would be to drive everywhere and never take public transportation, not even in the Bay Area.
In a few places with high housing density and horrendous traffic jams, public transport can be faster on some routes. That's true for SF/Berkeley and Manhattan, and maybe a handful of other places around the US. But the world isn't SF/Berkeley, not even close. Even in the South Bay, public transit is barely usable.
In most places with good public transit (and I have lived in many of them and use public transit frequently), it takes 50-100% longer to get anywhere by public transit than by car. That's because trains tend to be slower and need to make many stops, and because changing trains and buses adds time, while a car usually takes you directly from point A to point B without any delays.
The notion that the popularity of the car is due to some evil machinations of the car companies falls flat on its face when you look at Europe, where cars are also enormously popular and public transit systems are also in trouble.
Public transit is important, but it's not going to catch on more if people just plain misrepresent how it works and misdiagnose its problems. Public transit may catch on more if we can build something like PRT systems, if we make car ownership much more expensive and much more of a hassle, and/or if we make existing train and bus service much more comfortable. But merely putting in more buses and rail lines is doomed to failure. And with self-driving cars, public transportation will become even less attractive.
Personal car ownership has a big net benefit to me, both directly and in terms of opportunity cost. And the externalities don't affect me much: they are mostly environmental degradation and wars far away. The increases in pollution and global warming from my choice are negligible.
China building a transit system is completely different: opportunity cost doesn't exist, and it is questionable whether China as a whole ever will be able to derive a net benefit from it. Furthermore, at the level of a nation, the externalities do matter a great deal.
Whatever point Bruce was trying to make, his analogy is stupid and doesn't work.
The fact remains: the success of the automobile is not due to some evil plot specific to the US, since the automobile is extremely successful in Europe as well, where driving is much more expensive and public transport is much better.
The rest of your drivel is both pointless and irrelevant.
Taxes on gasoline in Europe are nearly 100%; I believe they actually add a surplus to the economy. The rail systems, on the other hand, are still government subsidized, and they are extensive. You really can live in many places in Europe without a car. Yet, European car ownership is pretty much comparable to the US: if you can afford it, you buy a car. And some nations like Germany are really car nuts, with higher car ownership rates than the US.
If you want to get people out of their cars and onto rail (and there are good reasons to), merely making driving much more expensive and subsidizing railway systems doesn't seem to be enough.
If the US were the only country in the world where people drive cars, you might have a point. Fact is that people are also choosing cars over trains in Europe, despite high subsidies for railway lines, an extensive railway and transit network, and much higher taxes on gasoline and car ownership. Per capita car ownership is actually even higher in Germany than in the US.
We won't be able to address the environmental and urban planning problems that cars cause until we face the fact that people generally like and prefer cars. And it's only going to get worse with new technology. Merely offering trains, even at a competitive price, will not be enough to get people to switch.
Do you simply not get what's wrong with that analogy? Or are you trying to be funny?
People choose cars over railways because they see a better cost/benefit tradeoff. That's why railways lose many and car manufacturers make money. One can make the argument that personal car use doesn't properly account for all the externalities. You're welcome to make that argument.
But China's problem isn't lack of good public transportation, it's having too many people. If China had 100M people instead of 1000M, all of those people having a car wouldn't be a problem. Ditto for the US.
What will happen is that those other countries will go even poorer.
Much of the US trade imbalance is with Europe. Europe isn't poor, they are using the current situation to get low unemployment and avoid addressing other social and economic problems.
They will then regain their compete advantage as their money and standard of living fall faster then ours.
Some countries will, others won't. We just shouldn't keep the dollar artificially strong, and that's what we're doing.
So if a country doesn't enforce similar environmental laws to the USA
Why is that a good idea? Who is going to do the necessary accounting, and how? If China or India want to destroy their countries in order to send us extra-cheap T-shirts, who are we to stop them?
The simple solution is to repeal NAFTA and restore our tariffs.
The simple solution is to devalue the dollar until we have balanced trade. That has the same effect as across-the-board tariffs, and it is safer from tampering by special interests.
Libertarians may find that "immoral," but then there a whole lot of things about doctrinaire libertarianism such as the radical individualism that eschews innate responsibilities that plenty of others (left and right alike) find immoral.
Who gives a damn about libertarians? They are irrelevant. Instead of whining about libertarians, why don't you examine your own stupid ideological drivel and start thinking rationally about economics for a change.
It's a free market. The simple solution to the "engineering shortage" is to pay more. When graduates can look forward to $250k/year salaries instead of $100/year salaries, you'd be surprised how many people would choose engineering. Right now, you have to become a doctor or lawyer to make that kind of money, so many people do.
Of course, government can't directly regulate what companies pay... but indirectly, it can: after all, the reason doctors and lawyers make so much money is because of the laws that govern their profession.
So if "relying on actual statistics" is how Shuttleworth should pick a default browser, it would seem he is just planning ahead based on very clear market trends.
Just because Shuttleworth's decisions sometimes agree accidentally with some statistics doesn't mean he picks by statistics.
But I think the decision should be about what is better,
"Better" for who and according to what criteria? Many users want something that just works, not something with more features.
and in my opinion chromium is the best browser for routine use
In my opinion too. But opinions shouldn't count much, actual usage, feedback, and user needs should. I don't know what the effect is of switching a large user base from Firefox to Chrome by default. Are there common extensions a lot of people use that don't exist for Chrome? Are there usability problems that you and I don't know about yet?
Shuttleworth should look at usage and ask its users instead of deciding ex cathedra like he's the Pope. And he should justify and communicate clearly what user needs major changes address.
The benchmark imposes the restriction of using "idiomatic constructs". But that's just what you wouldn't do if you had to optimize a performance critical section by hand.
Nevertheless, for deciding among those for languages, the conclusions are probably still reasonable. The verbiage before just serves as an alibi.
What the paper really says is "we don't want to use Go"; there is probably pressure to do just that inside Google.
The govt should stay the fuck out of the free market
The cell phone market in the US is not a "free market" at all.
Apple should price their stuff at whatever the market will bear to maximize their profit.
That's monopoly pricing in this case, not free market pricing.
Cell phone service in Europe is much closer to a free market: any phone works on any carrier and you are usually not locked into contracts anymore. As a result, voice and data cost a fraction of what they cost in the US, and phones are cheaper too.
Not all Linux users are 'nerdy' enough to want to play around with a different browser. Some just want to stay with the default. Same for other applications.
And they should get the tried and true, instead of whbatever a geek like Shuttleworth happens to like these days.
With your same argument I could say that IE is the best browser, because for many years it held more than 50-70% of internet users.
Stop hallucinating and putting words in my mouth. Where did I make an argument anywhere that more users for software means that something is better? I didn't even use those numbers.
I said that Shuttleworth shouldn't willy-nilly replace software because he thinks something is better, he should rely on actual statistics. Before even considering making something the default, it should have a substantial and growing user base. Whether that's 20%, 30%, or 50% is debatable.
What's not debatable is that imposing beta quality software with no user base just because someone happens to package a distribution is a lousy idea.
Shuttleworth should much more rely on what users want, instead of making decisions for users.
Canonical can tell what users want based on usage statistics. Once close to 30-50% of users post-install Chrome or Unity, with a growing trend, then consider making these things the default. Until then, keep the old, tried and true the default.
Slashdot Mirror
It may kill unlimited HD video downloads and put a crimp into companies that use that as their business model.
Just about everything else is not affected by these "caps" because the data volume is so tiny in comparison to video downloads.
First, by "the same problem", I was referring to a shortage of engineers, both software and otherwise. Whatever Germany is doing, it's not working. Germany is experiencing a big brain drain.
Wrong again, either way you might mean it. Software developers in Germany earn about the same as other highly paid engineers in Germany. Furthermore, in terms of PPP, German engineers and software developers earn about half of their US counterparts.
That cost is unrelated to the cost of driving or transportation; we could have car manufacturers fail and the result would probably have been cheaper cars. We paid that money so that more people remain inefficiently employed in the US car industry.
I didn't say they "should have been allowed to fail", I just pointed out that their bailout was not a subsidy for driving.
And if they used public transit, they would pay even more.
Furthermore, much of that $7000 is a voluntary luxury, not a necessity (e.g., people buying a new car every 5.5 years, instead of 10-15 years).
Even if most people used public transit, we'd still have much of that expenditure, since roads are needed for many other purposes in addition to personal transport.
Yet, urban areas in wealthy countries with excellent public transportation, like Japan and the Netherlands, have far worse air pollution than the US (and even worse if you take into account the whole country). In fact, in international comparisons of urban air pollution, the US is doing quite well, ranking about the same as Ireland, Germany, Finland, and Denmark (I just crunched the data myself).
Also, part of the reason for why the US has more cars and less public transportation is because so many people have chosen to live outside the cities, away from the pollution associated with urban areas. Arguably, reducing automobile use would increase urbanization and expose children to more pollution, not less, since urban areas are associated with high levels of pollution no matter what.
You keep saying that, but you don't provide any data or arguments to support that view.
I like public transit and I travel most of my miles by public transit, but public transit isn't going to get better in the US as long as people keep making bogus and unsupported arguments for it like you do.
It's the same sense in which anything "makes a profit": transportation is a necessity for me to do business (earn a living), and it's cheaper than the alternatives (public transportation), both in terms of direct expenditures and in terms of opportunity cost.
If you have a specific point to make about the cost of cars, why don't you make it?
But that wasn't a grand conspiracy; you need a road system anyway, and once it's put in, of course cars are going to piggy-back on it.
In many places, the railroads are operated by the government and subsidized by the tax payer.
You're assuming that without the bailout, cars would be more expensive, and with more expensive cars, fewer people would drive. Those assumptions are untenable. Even if the bailout lowered car prices, people would have had a choice of plenty of cheap cars without the bailout (and most of the cheap cars come from overseas anyway), or they could simply keep their current car longer than the average 5.5 years.
The bailout was just about keeping workers employed in what is effectively a market with a glut of luxury goods that nobody really needs. It probably would have been better for the car industry to let some of those manufacturers fail.
Well, I need transportation to get to work, to shop, and to obtain services. A car does that cheaper and better than public transportation. Not only is its per-mile cost lower for me (and many other people) on the routes I regularly need to travel, it is also faster, and it lets me take advantage of goods and services that I simply couldn't take advantage of with public transportation.
As a matter of fact, I actually do usually use public transit anyway most of the time (I take the car out of the garage about once every other week). But I don't kid myself about it: that's a luxury that I can afford. If I were pressed for time and money, the rational thing would be to drive everywhere and never take public transportation, not even in the Bay Area.
In a few places with high housing density and horrendous traffic jams, public transport can be faster on some routes. That's true for SF/Berkeley and Manhattan, and maybe a handful of other places around the US. But the world isn't SF/Berkeley, not even close. Even in the South Bay, public transit is barely usable.
In most places with good public transit (and I have lived in many of them and use public transit frequently), it takes 50-100% longer to get anywhere by public transit than by car. That's because trains tend to be slower and need to make many stops, and because changing trains and buses adds time, while a car usually takes you directly from point A to point B without any delays.
The notion that the popularity of the car is due to some evil machinations of the car companies falls flat on its face when you look at Europe, where cars are also enormously popular and public transit systems are also in trouble.
Public transit is important, but it's not going to catch on more if people just plain misrepresent how it works and misdiagnose its problems. Public transit may catch on more if we can build something like PRT systems, if we make car ownership much more expensive and much more of a hassle, and/or if we make existing train and bus service much more comfortable. But merely putting in more buses and rail lines is doomed to failure. And with self-driving cars, public transportation will become even less attractive.
Personal car ownership has a big net benefit to me, both directly and in terms of opportunity cost. And the externalities don't affect me much: they are mostly environmental degradation and wars far away. The increases in pollution and global warming from my choice are negligible.
China building a transit system is completely different: opportunity cost doesn't exist, and it is questionable whether China as a whole ever will be able to derive a net benefit from it. Furthermore, at the level of a nation, the externalities do matter a great deal.
Whatever point Bruce was trying to make, his analogy is stupid and doesn't work.
The fact remains: the success of the automobile is not due to some evil plot specific to the US, since the automobile is extremely successful in Europe as well, where driving is much more expensive and public transport is much better.
The rest of your drivel is both pointless and irrelevant.
Taxes on gasoline in Europe are nearly 100%; I believe they actually add a surplus to the economy. The rail systems, on the other hand, are still government subsidized, and they are extensive. You really can live in many places in Europe without a car. Yet, European car ownership is pretty much comparable to the US: if you can afford it, you buy a car. And some nations like Germany are really car nuts, with higher car ownership rates than the US.
If you want to get people out of their cars and onto rail (and there are good reasons to), merely making driving much more expensive and subsidizing railway systems doesn't seem to be enough.
If the US were the only country in the world where people drive cars, you might have a point. Fact is that people are also choosing cars over trains in Europe, despite high subsidies for railway lines, an extensive railway and transit network, and much higher taxes on gasoline and car ownership. Per capita car ownership is actually even higher in Germany than in the US.
We won't be able to address the environmental and urban planning problems that cars cause until we face the fact that people generally like and prefer cars. And it's only going to get worse with new technology. Merely offering trains, even at a competitive price, will not be enough to get people to switch.
Do you simply not get what's wrong with that analogy? Or are you trying to be funny?
People choose cars over railways because they see a better cost/benefit tradeoff. That's why railways lose many and car manufacturers make money. One can make the argument that personal car use doesn't properly account for all the externalities. You're welcome to make that argument.
But China's problem isn't lack of good public transportation, it's having too many people. If China had 100M people instead of 1000M, all of those people having a car wouldn't be a problem. Ditto for the US.
Much of the US trade imbalance is with Europe. Europe isn't poor, they are using the current situation to get low unemployment and avoid addressing other social and economic problems.
Some countries will, others won't. We just shouldn't keep the dollar artificially strong, and that's what we're doing.
Why is that a good idea? Who is going to do the necessary accounting, and how? If China or India want to destroy their countries in order to send us extra-cheap T-shirts, who are we to stop them?
Did I say "entry level" anywhere???
Besides, do "entry level" doctors or lawyers or financial advisors have any more experience???
The simple solution is to devalue the dollar until we have balanced trade. That has the same effect as across-the-board tariffs, and it is safer from tampering by special interests.
Who gives a damn about libertarians? They are irrelevant. Instead of whining about libertarians, why don't you examine your own stupid ideological drivel and start thinking rationally about economics for a change.
Are you kidding? Germany has the same problem.
It's a free market. The simple solution to the "engineering shortage" is to pay more. When graduates can look forward to $250k/year salaries instead of $100/year salaries, you'd be surprised how many people would choose engineering. Right now, you have to become a doctor or lawyer to make that kind of money, so many people do.
Of course, government can't directly regulate what companies pay... but indirectly, it can: after all, the reason doctors and lawyers make so much money is because of the laws that govern their profession.
Just because Shuttleworth's decisions sometimes agree accidentally with some statistics doesn't mean he picks by statistics.
"Better" for who and according to what criteria? Many users want something that just works, not something with more features.
In my opinion too. But opinions shouldn't count much, actual usage, feedback, and user needs should. I don't know what the effect is of switching a large user base from Firefox to Chrome by default. Are there common extensions a lot of people use that don't exist for Chrome? Are there usability problems that you and I don't know about yet?
Shuttleworth should look at usage and ask its users instead of deciding ex cathedra like he's the Pope. And he should justify and communicate clearly what user needs major changes address.
The benchmark imposes the restriction of using "idiomatic constructs". But that's just what you wouldn't do if you had to optimize a performance critical section by hand.
Nevertheless, for deciding among those for languages, the conclusions are probably still reasonable. The verbiage before just serves as an alibi.
What the paper really says is "we don't want to use Go"; there is probably pressure to do just that inside Google.
The cell phone market in the US is not a "free market" at all.
That's monopoly pricing in this case, not free market pricing.
Cell phone service in Europe is much closer to a free market: any phone works on any carrier and you are usually not locked into contracts anymore. As a result, voice and data cost a fraction of what they cost in the US, and phones are cheaper too.
Is that for real? That idiot is running a major computer company? Unbelievable.
And they should get the tried and true, instead of whbatever a geek like Shuttleworth happens to like these days.
Stop hallucinating and putting words in my mouth. Where did I make an argument anywhere that more users for software means that something is better? I didn't even use those numbers.
I said that Shuttleworth shouldn't willy-nilly replace software because he thinks something is better, he should rely on actual statistics. Before even considering making something the default, it should have a substantial and growing user base. Whether that's 20%, 30%, or 50% is debatable.
What's not debatable is that imposing beta quality software with no user base just because someone happens to package a distribution is a lousy idea.
If Microsoft were to do that, what's left? Their kernel? Their aging MS Office suite? Or are they going to become a total patent troll?
Shuttleworth should much more rely on what users want, instead of making decisions for users.
Canonical can tell what users want based on usage statistics. Once close to 30-50% of users post-install Chrome or Unity, with a growing trend, then consider making these things the default. Until then, keep the old, tried and true the default.