I agree with you that someone that motivated is someone that a country should welcome in. I think the idea that immigrants = ghettos and welfare stems from the fact that large portions of immigrants are often illegal.
At least, in the US. Look at what happened to California over the last 50 years as the amount of illegal aliens increased. Most of those people are very hard working and honest. But... being as they are illegal, they don't pay very much in taxes, can't get healthcare, and overall consume more of a societies resources than they give back.
If instead, all those "illegal" people were paying taxes, and had preventative healthcare, there would be more money for schools, health, neighborhood programs, etc.. and I think we'd see many of the "ghettos" start to disappear.
Poorly funded schools. Poorly funded social programs. It creates a vicious cycle of poverty that leads to ghettos and lifetime welfare.
We don't let a large group of hardworking people contribute to our society based on principle, and as a result, they become the thing we fear: a drain on our society.
"To the extent that you allow a population of social primitives into your home, they will make it over in the image of the societies they left"
Your entire post reminds me of some of the letters/newspaper articles shown in history books about the mass immigration of Irish into the US. "Those dirty stinking Irish bringing crime, ghettos, not learning English, catholic, etc etc etc..."
News flash: your culture and society is constantly in flux. It basically comes down to finding an acceptable rate of change. Insinuating that Islam is primitive/predatory or that someone's culture is primitive or crude only adds a layer of bigotry that really doesn't help settle the issue.
"While I am by no means a UKIP/BNP voter, I think that in any given country, the concerns of the ethnic majority, about having their way of life disrupted, and their culture diluted by people from poor countries who don't respect their hosts, is justified."
Culture is always changing. When people say "don't dilute my culture" what they should be actually saying is "I am not comfortable with this rate of change".
"ghettoization of its inner cities"
That is usually an indication that the rate of change is too great. It takes time to (usa term) "melt" people into the cultural pot, have them gain skills and get higher paying jobs, and for new jobs to be created to give them, etc..
Well, yes, I didn't mean to imply that there wouldn't be:
corn A: for dry climates corn B: for bug resistance continue for 100 more types...
Even if there are 100 companies designing multiple varieties of corn for differing regions, wouldn't that still be smaller genetic diversity than what you'd naturally find in a field of corn?
Maybe I'm wrong, but my understanding is that "corn A" from above, a field of it, would be 100% clones of each other, whereas a normal field of corn would be comprised of many slightly different corns (genetically speaking).
Doing genetic modifications in a lab runs the risk of creating a genetic mono-culture though. Which means a new disease that is harsh on that particular creation will decimate the thing you made.
Selecting for traits using breeding/growing tends to retain much more genetic diversity.
Your dog analogy would match a lab's cloning/genetic work if all great danes were shared a 100% dna match.
It depends a lot on how the genetic modification took place. I suppose if a corn seed lab had 20 different corn genetic sets, and was able to modify them all to now have some feature, and what was sold was a bag of those mixed seeds (mixed dna, not clones, but the same variety), then that would lessen the risk of being wiped out by something new.
Sure, most of what we eat has been modified, over time, by selecting for traits we need.
Same goes for pets. However, a product created by GM in a lab has the potential for far less genetic diversity than selecting for something by natural processes.
Say a lab GM's some corn, gets the perfect genetic set, and sells clones of that one perfect set. Its so perfect that everyone is the world starts using it. Along comes a disease that happens to really decimate just that 'one perfect set' of GM corn. There goes the worlds corn supply.
Selecting for traits 'naturally' through breeding/growing/selecting tends to retain a much higher genetic diversity in the results.
I think that genetically modified food can be done safely, but I think the science is still fairly young, and runs the risk of genetic mono-culture in our food/animal products.
They don't want you to hear it. Rather, they'd prefer you purchase what they market to you, sight unseen.
It is much easier and cheaper to promote a handful of big acts (Britney, etc..) than it would be to try to promote thousands of artists effectively. Not to mention it is easier to lock those 5-6 'big acts' into contracts.
The ease of browsing music and the metadata being created is allowing people to explore and find a much wider variety of artists. Many of whom are probably not even associated with 'big record label X'.
Exactly. I worked in IT for a hospital for 5 years. Machines that could access patient information were on a physically different network than machines that could access the internet.
Any patient information being sent off site (for billing or lab work, etc..) was done along dedicated lines.
At least for a state gas tax. You can't read the odometer and determine what percent of your driving day was in Oregon versus Washington state. Therefore a mileage tax wouldn't work.
They've been pushing for this in Oregon for a while now. As I understand it, the GPS unit isn't a black box, and a lot of time has been put into privacy concerns. I think one solution had it being read at the pump, and then immediately deleting its contents after being read. Very limited range transmission, it only recorded miles/location, and the location was just 'oregon' or 'not oregon'.
However, for a Federal gas tax, I have no idea why'd they'd want to implement GPS. Odometer reading would work just fine. Just have a tax applied to your tag renewal each year based on miles driven.
Either way, I hope they still have some differences in tax amounts based on vehicle size and weight. I shouldn't have to pay as much as a Semi Truck.
"The alternative is to let Medicare bureaucrats, who are not doctors, decide whether a device is medically necessary or not. "
Those 'bureaucrats' are advised by doctors/medical experts.
"Now maybe you can understand why most of us don't want the Federal government to have anything to do with health care: they'll just make it worse."
75% of doctors want a single payer plan. http://seminal.firedoglake.com/diary/8141 And it is still roughly 50% of the American people who want reform (depends on the poll/time, but hovers around 50%).
The other 50% have been watching fox news or something I guess...:)
We are the only developed first class country on earth without government run healthcare, and we pay more per person than any other country, and according to WHO statistics we are behind on many quality measures. The only thing we are better at is rare disease/cancer treatments, which doesn't benefit the masses.
So tell me again why Private Insurance is better? Cost? Nope. Quality? Nope. Ability to offer coverage to a wider audience? Nope.
Whether you like it or not, you are indirectly paying for the uninsured by higher healthcare costs. Every time an uninsured person waits until they are very sick, walks into an emergency room, and has an extended costly hospital stay, you and I pay for it.
I wonder if the lack of interest in Science in general is due to there being less and less 'easy' things to discover?
Back in the 1800's/1900's, Science was often associated with inventions or entrepreneurial activities. Now so much of science is very minute discoveries, often requiring specialized equipment and intense training, that the average person out there probably feels very distant from it.
What grabs the average mind more, the invention of the steam engine or the discovery of some obscure physics particle? To appreciate the physics discovery, you need to have a much greater understanding of physics, while just about anyone can be excited about a big steaming engine:)
"For many FOSS applications the UI isn't nearly as polished as the commercial alternatives. This might be partially because UI designers want to get paid for the work (perhaps not a dedicated to the free community as sofware developers)."
I doubt that it is about pay. I think it is more likely two things:
1. A UI designer cannot sit in his house and contribute like a programmer can. Usability tests require finding real people to take the tests, and this often requires paying them to do so. If a UI designer only uses people from his own industry, or programmers, the results will be poor. He needs average folks to test with, and this is a lot of work.
2. A UI designer needs to have the authority to make a programmer change something. Even if a designer went out of his way to conduct formal usability studies with dozens of people, compiled the results, and sent them to the programmers working on the project, it's probably likely that the programmers would consider the suggestion list "not fun" and ignore it.
"Solar and wind will never scale that well and aren't appropriate for base load anyways."
Sure they are. It just requires more investment in a 'smarter' energy grid, that can store excess to be used later. But it would be a lot cheaper to include nuclear alongside wind and solar. Storing excess energy adds quite a bit of cost.
I wish we had spent 1 trillion heavily subsidising solar, wind, and nuclear instead of wasting it in Iraq. And not like a wimpy tax credit. I mean like, the government pays for 50% of it.
"If I were President, I'd tax the crap out of imported oil, and open up Anwar and California. I'd also start damming the rivers and building Nuke Plants to go along with Bio Fuels, Solar.
I'm just as sick about the two wars as the next guy, and don't like funding Jihadist governments. So, lets take a BIG BRIGHT LOOK at the SOLUTION we have available and go with it. "
Or... you know, we could start aggressively subsidising solar/wind/thermal/nuclear instead of killing off our remaining endangered salmon runs and destroying our limited amount of remaining old growth forests......
I can't find the exact article I read, but some people have tallied up the cost of putting in enough solar and wind and nuclear to power the entire country. I think the number was around 7 trillion or so.
Iraq cost close to 1 trillion. Afghanistan we don't know yet, bailouts to bankers ~0.7 trillion, etc etc We have the money to heavily subsidise it, and in the process create tons of new jobs to install, maintain, engineer new solutions, etc..
We have solutions that don't involve turning our country into a polluted mess, but there are powerful established industries that resist that change. Not to mention it would require a 8-12 years of solid effort to totally change. Politics works on 4 year cycles unfortunately:(
"And while they called out the SWAT team for a replica gun, people shrug their shoulders at Labor Day traffic, which kills a lot more people than any shooting spree. Human beings are absolutely terrible at risk assessment."
Risk assessment changes when the risk is near you.
VX nerve agent gas has killed a tiny amount of people. Yet if I saw someone walk past me with something that looked like this http://media.keprtv.com/images/chemical%20weapon.jpg and was marked "VX nerve gas" I might phone it in......
(I have no idea if that is what vx is delivered in)
Well I'm sure that some of the support for banning 'assault rifles' has to do with their image (not to mention the word 'assualt'), you have to admit that they do have a higher firepower than most typical hunting rifles, or police pistols for that matter.
Destructive force is a sliding scale, starting from your fists, progressing to knifes, moving up to handguns, shotguns, rifles, semi auto rifles, fully auto, grenades, cannons, etc etc..
I doubt it had much to do with the gun looking 'scary' and much more to do with deciding an appropriate firepower limit.
I own several rifles and a shotgun, so I'm a 2nd amendment supporter. I don't really feel that assault rifles should be banned, but I do admit that a line needs to be drawn at some point in that sliding scale of destructive force.
It basically boils down to knowing that 99,000 people will use a weapon legally, and 1 out of 100,000 will do something horrible with it. What level of firepower are you comfortable letting that 1 crazy person have?
"Alternately, the deluge of ads could be brain-washing Americans to think, "Without a little purple pill you'll feel bad," such that the illness itself is a nocebo effect, which placebos effectively nullify."
And/or, the deluge of ads could be making people think they have all sorts of things wrong with themselves. Like being lethargic for a while must = depression, because that is what the ad said.
So a person gets out of their routine and tries to 'fix' their lethargy by taking what turns out to be a placebo. Just the act of getting out of a boring routine and 'working on yourself' by going to the doctor is enough to give most people a bit more energy.
"The large apps on the internet are all moving away from RDBMS"
While that might be true for some big name internet apps, it isn't true for many of the proprietary apps for specific industries, something that Oracle DB's dominate. Sungard.com, for instance, pretty much dominates higher Edu systems (registration, human resources, etc..) and the vast majority of it runs on Oracle DB's.
I haven't read "The Innovator's Dilemma", but I imagine all those apps for medium to large scale businesses built on top of Oracle databases aren't going to disappear in the next 10 or 20 years.
I read the 'tearing sun to shreds' article and it sure was exaggerated.
The article title is "Defections Batter Sun Micro.".....whatever. Three jruby developers left, and they didn't go to IBM.
Next the article talks about 170 sun customers going to IBM. And then mentions that none of Sun's big customers have switched to IBM. I wasn't able to find the total Sun customer count...but I'll take a guess and say that 170 is less than 1% of their total.
I know that Sungard.com's Luminis portal for higher ed is mostly installed on Solaris, and there are 75+ installations of that one application alone. One app (Luminis), for one business type (Edu), is nearly half of this "massive exodus" away from Sun.... give me a break hehe.
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I agree with you that someone that motivated is someone that a country should welcome in. I think the idea that immigrants = ghettos and welfare stems from the fact that large portions of immigrants are often illegal.
At least, in the US. Look at what happened to California over the last 50 years as the amount of illegal aliens increased. Most of those people are very hard working and honest. But... being as they are illegal, they don't pay very much in taxes, can't get healthcare, and overall consume more of a societies resources than they give back.
If instead, all those "illegal" people were paying taxes, and had preventative healthcare, there would be more money for schools, health, neighborhood programs, etc.. and I think we'd see many of the "ghettos" start to disappear.
Poorly funded schools. Poorly funded social programs. It creates a vicious cycle of poverty that leads to ghettos and lifetime welfare.
We don't let a large group of hardworking people contribute to our society based on principle, and as a result, they become the thing we fear: a drain on our society.
"To the extent that you allow a population of social primitives into your home, they will make it over in the image of the societies they left"
Your entire post reminds me of some of the letters/newspaper articles shown in history books about the mass immigration of Irish into the US. "Those dirty stinking Irish bringing crime, ghettos, not learning English, catholic, etc etc etc..."
News flash: your culture and society is constantly in flux. It basically comes down to finding an acceptable rate of change. Insinuating that Islam is primitive/predatory or that someone's culture is primitive or crude only adds a layer of bigotry that really doesn't help settle the issue.
"While I am by no means a UKIP/BNP voter, I think that in any given country, the concerns of the ethnic majority, about having their way of life disrupted, and their culture diluted by people from poor countries who don't respect their hosts, is justified."
Culture is always changing. When people say "don't dilute my culture" what they should be actually saying is "I am not comfortable with this rate of change".
"ghettoization of its inner cities"
That is usually an indication that the rate of change is too great. It takes time to (usa term) "melt" people into the cultural pot, have them gain skills and get higher paying jobs, and for new jobs to be created to give them, etc..
Well, yes, I didn't mean to imply that there wouldn't be:
corn A: for dry climates
corn B: for bug resistance
continue for 100 more types...
Even if there are 100 companies designing multiple varieties of corn for differing regions, wouldn't that still be smaller genetic diversity than what you'd naturally find in a field of corn?
Maybe I'm wrong, but my understanding is that "corn A" from above, a field of it, would be 100% clones of each other, whereas a normal field of corn would be comprised of many slightly different corns (genetically speaking).
Doing genetic modifications in a lab runs the risk of creating a genetic mono-culture though. Which means a new disease that is harsh on that particular creation will decimate the thing you made.
Selecting for traits using breeding/growing tends to retain much more genetic diversity.
Your dog analogy would match a lab's cloning/genetic work if all great danes were shared a 100% dna match.
It depends a lot on how the genetic modification took place. I suppose if a corn seed lab had 20 different corn genetic sets, and was able to modify them all to now have some feature, and what was sold was a bag of those mixed seeds (mixed dna, not clones, but the same variety), then that would lessen the risk of being wiped out by something new.
Sure, most of what we eat has been modified, over time, by selecting for traits we need.
Same goes for pets. However, a product created by GM in a lab has the potential for far less genetic diversity than selecting for something by natural processes.
Say a lab GM's some corn, gets the perfect genetic set, and sells clones of that one perfect set. Its so perfect that everyone is the world starts using it. Along comes a disease that happens to really decimate just that 'one perfect set' of GM corn. There goes the worlds corn supply.
Selecting for traits 'naturally' through breeding/growing/selecting tends to retain a much higher genetic diversity in the results.
I think that genetically modified food can be done safely, but I think the science is still fairly young, and runs the risk of genetic mono-culture in our food/animal products.
My guesss:
They don't want you to hear it. Rather, they'd prefer you purchase what they market to you, sight unseen.
It is much easier and cheaper to promote a handful of big acts (Britney, etc..) than it would be to try to promote thousands of artists effectively. Not to mention it is easier to lock those 5-6 'big acts' into contracts.
The ease of browsing music and the metadata being created is allowing people to explore and find a much wider variety of artists. Many of whom are probably not even associated with 'big record label X'.
Or, you know... you give the doctor a wireless netbook/laptop to read papers with...
I've been given 'orders' like that also, but have managed to persuade the person.
Are you sure that your manner, tone, and ability to explain complex technical problems isn't the issue?
Your situation sounds rather unbelievable. But I've only worked for one hospital, so my experience is fairly limited. Was this before HIPAA?
Exactly. I worked in IT for a hospital for 5 years. Machines that could access patient information were on a physically different network than machines that could access the internet.
Any patient information being sent off site (for billing or lab work, etc..) was done along dedicated lines.
At least for a state gas tax. You can't read the odometer and determine what percent of your driving day was in Oregon versus Washington state. Therefore a mileage tax wouldn't work.
They've been pushing for this in Oregon for a while now. As I understand it, the GPS unit isn't a black box, and a lot of time has been put into privacy concerns. I think one solution had it being read at the pump, and then immediately deleting its contents after being read. Very limited range transmission, it only recorded miles/location, and the location was just 'oregon' or 'not oregon'.
However, for a Federal gas tax, I have no idea why'd they'd want to implement GPS. Odometer reading would work just fine. Just have a tax applied to your tag renewal each year based on miles driven.
Either way, I hope they still have some differences in tax amounts based on vehicle size and weight. I shouldn't have to pay as much as a Semi Truck.
me: "We are the only developed first class country on earth without government run healthcare"
him "That's not entirely accurate. Canada does not have a central-government run health care system, either. Each province has their own system. "
Ya, I didn't mean federal/central government only. State/Provincial governments are included.
"The alternative is to let Medicare bureaucrats, who are not doctors, decide whether a device is medically necessary or not. "
Those 'bureaucrats' are advised by doctors/medical experts.
"Now maybe you can understand why most of us don't want the Federal government to have anything to do with health care: they'll just make it worse."
75% of doctors want a single payer plan. http://seminal.firedoglake.com/diary/8141
And it is still roughly 50% of the American people who want reform (depends on the poll/time, but hovers around 50%).
The other 50% have been watching fox news or something I guess... :)
We are the only developed first class country on earth without government run healthcare, and we pay more per person than any other country, and according to WHO statistics we are behind on many quality measures. The only thing we are better at is rare disease/cancer treatments, which doesn't benefit the masses.
So tell me again why Private Insurance is better?
Cost? Nope.
Quality? Nope.
Ability to offer coverage to a wider audience? Nope.
Whether you like it or not, you are indirectly paying for the uninsured by higher healthcare costs. Every time an uninsured person waits until they are very sick, walks into an emergency room, and has an extended costly hospital stay, you and I pay for it.
I wonder if the lack of interest in Science in general is due to there being less and less 'easy' things to discover?
Back in the 1800's/1900's, Science was often associated with inventions or entrepreneurial activities. Now so much of science is very minute discoveries, often requiring specialized equipment and intense training, that the average person out there probably feels very distant from it.
What grabs the average mind more, the invention of the steam engine or the discovery of some obscure physics particle? To appreciate the physics discovery, you need to have a much greater understanding of physics, while just about anyone can be excited about a big steaming engine:)
"For many FOSS applications the UI isn't nearly as polished as the commercial alternatives. This might be partially because UI designers want to get paid for the work (perhaps not a dedicated to the free community as sofware developers)."
I doubt that it is about pay. I think it is more likely two things:
1. A UI designer cannot sit in his house and contribute like a programmer can. Usability tests require finding real people to take the tests, and this often requires paying them to do so. If a UI designer only uses people from his own industry, or programmers, the results will be poor. He needs average folks to test with, and this is a lot of work.
2. A UI designer needs to have the authority to make a programmer change something. Even if a designer went out of his way to conduct formal usability studies with dozens of people, compiled the results, and sent them to the programmers working on the project, it's probably likely that the programmers would consider the suggestion list "not fun" and ignore it.
Batteries would be dumb for storage, but simple things like pumping water up a mountain is a simple and easy way to store energy.
But you're right, nuclear does need to be part of the equation.
"Solar and wind will never scale that well and aren't appropriate for base load anyways."
Sure they are. It just requires more investment in a 'smarter' energy grid, that can store excess to be used later. But it would be a lot cheaper to include nuclear alongside wind and solar. Storing excess energy adds quite a bit of cost.
I wish we had spent 1 trillion heavily subsidising solar, wind, and nuclear instead of wasting it in Iraq. And not like a wimpy tax credit. I mean like, the government pays for 50% of it.
"If I were President, I'd tax the crap out of imported oil, and open up Anwar and California. I'd also start damming the rivers and building Nuke Plants to go along with Bio Fuels, Solar.
I'm just as sick about the two wars as the next guy, and don't like funding Jihadist governments. So, lets take a BIG BRIGHT LOOK at the SOLUTION we have available and go with it. "
Or... you know, we could start aggressively subsidising solar/wind/thermal/nuclear instead of killing off our remaining endangered salmon runs and destroying our limited amount of remaining old growth forests......
I can't find the exact article I read, but some people have tallied up the cost of putting in enough solar and wind and nuclear to power the entire country. I think the number was around 7 trillion or so.
Iraq cost close to 1 trillion. Afghanistan we don't know yet, bailouts to bankers ~0.7 trillion, etc etc We have the money to heavily subsidise it, and in the process create tons of new jobs to install, maintain, engineer new solutions, etc..
We have solutions that don't involve turning our country into a polluted mess, but there are powerful established industries that resist that change. Not to mention it would require a 8-12 years of solid effort to totally change. Politics works on 4 year cycles unfortunately:(
"And while they called out the SWAT team for a replica gun, people shrug their shoulders at Labor Day traffic, which kills a lot more people than any shooting spree. Human beings are absolutely terrible at risk assessment."
Risk assessment changes when the risk is near you.
VX nerve agent gas has killed a tiny amount of people. Yet if I saw someone walk past me with something that looked like this http://media.keprtv.com/images/chemical%20weapon.jpg and was marked "VX nerve gas" I might phone it in......
(I have no idea if that is what vx is delivered in)
Well I'm sure that some of the support for banning 'assault rifles' has to do with their image (not to mention the word 'assualt'), you have to admit that they do have a higher firepower than most typical hunting rifles, or police pistols for that matter.
Destructive force is a sliding scale, starting from your fists, progressing to knifes, moving up to handguns, shotguns, rifles, semi auto rifles, fully auto, grenades, cannons, etc etc..
I doubt it had much to do with the gun looking 'scary' and much more to do with deciding an appropriate firepower limit.
I own several rifles and a shotgun, so I'm a 2nd amendment supporter. I don't really feel that assault rifles should be banned, but I do admit that a line needs to be drawn at some point in that sliding scale of destructive force.
It basically boils down to knowing that 99,000 people will use a weapon legally, and 1 out of 100,000 will do something horrible with it. What level of firepower are you comfortable letting that 1 crazy person have?
"Alternately, the deluge of ads could be brain-washing Americans to think, "Without a little purple pill you'll feel bad," such that the illness itself is a nocebo effect, which placebos effectively nullify."
And/or, the deluge of ads could be making people think they have all sorts of things wrong with themselves. Like being lethargic for a while must = depression, because that is what the ad said.
So a person gets out of their routine and tries to 'fix' their lethargy by taking what turns out to be a placebo. Just the act of getting out of a boring routine and 'working on yourself' by going to the doctor is enough to give most people a bit more energy.
I
"The large apps on the internet are all moving away from RDBMS"
While that might be true for some big name internet apps, it isn't true for many of the proprietary apps for specific industries, something that Oracle DB's dominate. Sungard.com, for instance, pretty much dominates higher Edu systems (registration, human resources, etc..) and the vast majority of it runs on Oracle DB's.
I haven't read "The Innovator's Dilemma", but I imagine all those apps for medium to large scale businesses built on top of Oracle databases aren't going to disappear in the next 10 or 20 years.
I wonder if that is why companies like Google give their employees one day (I think it was 1 day) per week to work on whatever they want.
It is number one in the following way:
We spend the most per person for healthcare!
Undisputed kings of overspending, we're number one! we're number one! ;)
I read the 'tearing sun to shreds' article and it sure was exaggerated.
The article title is "Defections Batter Sun Micro.".....whatever. Three jruby developers left, and they didn't go to IBM.
Next the article talks about 170 sun customers going to IBM. And then mentions that none of Sun's big customers have switched to IBM. I wasn't able to find the total Sun customer count...but I'll take a guess and say that 170 is less than 1% of their total.
I know that Sungard.com's Luminis portal for higher ed is mostly installed on Solaris, and there are 75+ installations of that one application alone. One app (Luminis), for one business type (Edu), is nearly half of this "massive exodus" away from Sun.... give me a break hehe.