Calling from Seattle (area code 206) to nearby area code 425 presents some interesting challenges. Sometimes you have to dial 1+425+number like any other long-distance call. Other times that will fail ("the number you reached is not in service or has been disconnected") and you have to dial 425+number -- the full ten digits -- but WITHOUT the preceding 1. I suspect it has something to do with which areas are considered local vs. in-state LD for tariff purposes, but why the f*** should I as a consumer have to know the difference? I mean, if someone leaves a message that says "Call me at 425-555-1000", I have no way of knowing in advance whether I need that leading 1 or not. Retarded!
Code is speech: It is a creative expression of an idea. (Yes, most code also performs a particular function -- but if you've ever seen, say, Perl poetry, you know that message and style transcend the purely functional aspects of the code.) Unfortunately, recent court decisions have not always affirmed this view.
However, if we can get the Supremes to acknowledge that code is, in fact, speech, there's hope for everyone. Because if code is speech, then (at least in the U.S.), it can't be suppressed, even if it may be put to harmful use.
If your goal is to vote for the "least totalitarian" candidate, you want Harry Browne of the Libertarian Party. He's on the ballot in all 50 states and polling at around 1% (more or less the same as Buchanan; he's just not as well known). Basically the Libertarian philosophy is simple and consistent: Get the government the f*** out of our lives and let individuals live how we choose.
Technical measures will undoubtedly help (I love my caller ID), but social and educational changes need to happen too. Surely I'm not the only one who's worked in places where mindless coworkers send out messages with cryptic titles to ridiculously broad distribution lists. I suspect most of these people are not on the receiving end of so much crap, or they'd be much more sensitive about what they send. (Either that or they're just plain dumb, which I suppose is not to be ruled out.) Similarly, people contribute to the problem by using the wrong medium for a particular task -- sometimes it is much more effective to call a meeting to decide something than to have a free-for-all e-mail debate among 20 people.
The continuing invasiveness of business marketing is annoying, too. I honestly don't mind advertisements for stuff I care about (I enjoy getting my REI catalog, certain travel-related deals, and a handful of other things), but stop wasting my time calling me at 9 on Saturday morning asking if I want to change my long-distance service! Unless you are going to give me free, unlimited, ad-free, worldwide long-distance service -- in which case you wouldn't have any incentive to sign me up in the first place -- then my answer will always, always be no. So stop wasting my time and yours.
In an age when most of our jobs could be done from home, it seems like a petty issue of control by run-of-the-mill upper-management to leverage their power by making sure their employees are working right under their eyeballs in a little cube in a building that nobody wants to be confined in.
There's certainly a large element of truth to that, but I'd like to add a couple of comments. I've worked both as a telecommuter and as a manager of remotely located teams, so I have some firsthand experience in this area.
Certain types of jobs, and certain tasks, are much more amenable to modularization than others. And those tend, in my experience, to be the jobs and tasks that can be handled most effectively in a distributed/telecommuting environment. For example, "write this report" or "here's a spec, write this subroutine" are relatively self-contained tasks that require fairly minimal external, real-time input. In fact, I've often found it more effective to have things like this done off-site because it minimizes distractions and lets people concentrate on the task at hand.
However, there are some tasks that I've found extraordinarily difficult to accomplish unless the entire team involved is physically co-located. One is almost anything involving visual design or interface. Another is anything involving fundamental and potentially controversial directional questions about a project: things like defining the objectives and audience for a new product or designing the product architecture. A third is activity that requires rapid response from a cross-disciplinary group. (I used to work in the Web-content business, so some of our tasks/projects had durations measured in hours or even minutes -- if you need to get something written, edited, illustrated, and posted at a moment's notice, it is necessary to have people with those abilities on hand at all times and in an environment where they can collaborate without barriers.)
Mundane as it may seem, there are often administrative, legal, and personnel challenges to having a distributed team as well. If you're a Silicon Alley company, do your HR people know about employment laws in Wyoming? How about payroll issues? Health care? What happens if a remote employee turns out to be incompetent? Trust me, I speak from painful experience when I say that discipling and firing a disruptive remote employee is not straightforward.
Finally, there's one big intangible downside to having a distributed team, which is that in the absence of superb management (which we all know is hard to find), you risk a situation where the individuals feel like lone wolves instead of part of a cohesive team whose members know, trust, and can depend on each other. People form bonds in large part through casual interaction in the office, going out to lunch or for drinks together, observing and responding to each others' body language in face-to-face environments. Also, it's very easy for people in one or another of the physical locations to feel left out of the loop and/or unappreciated, because they may perceive that they're missing out on informal collaboration in the office, or that people don't realize how hard they're working because they don't see them in the next cubicle 14 hours a day, or even that they're not valued as much because of simple things like time differences (if a team leader calls a meeting at 9am Eastern, west coasters can be really put off by the expectation they'll be ready to roll at 6am their time).
None of this is to say that long-distance working relationships are impossible, any more than long-distance personal or romantic relationships are impossible. They just require careful thought, commitment, and often a lot of work -- plus a sizeable travel budget, because sometimes there's just no substitute for face-to-face exposure. Nevertheless, I understand why most companies are conservative when it comes to things like telecommuting: They're aware of all the downsides, they're woefully short of capable managers, and therefore unless they are really hard up for qualified candidates, it's much easier to just follow the default behavior and pack everyone into cubicles.
That said, I do encourage flexibile work arrangements, and I really believe that more and more smart companies are recognizing that their employees really are everything. With the talent shortage in this industry only getting worse, companies must find ways to accommodate people's individual lifestyles more effectively. I'm confident it will happen: Just look at how quickly other mostly-useless artifacts like corporate dress codes have vanished (and not just in the tech industry). The hurdles, both from a psychological and from a business standpoint, to letting people telecommute are just a bit higher than they are to letting people jeans and t-shirts instead of a suit.
I won't repeat the astute arguments many have already made about the potential economic pros and cons of this development. Instead I want to propose a radical rethinking of health-care coverage that might eliminate the problems of genetic screening entirely.
My proposal: Let government create an "individual health-care account" for each citizen, at birth, containing a fixed amount of money. Each individual could make a decision over his lifetime as to how that money is spent on health-care services, but if they want to exceed that quota, it has to come out of their own pockets (or that of friends, family, employers, churches, cooperative organizations, whatever).
Because the money is coming out of the individual's own account, he'd have an incentive to be judicious in his expenditures and to take care of his health to the extent possible. People who could afford to pay for routine health-care costs out of their own pockets would be smart to do so and save their account for catastrophic expenses, but those who today can't afford routine health-care costs could dip into their account to get coverage. People could make individual lifestyle choices: If they want to smoke and eat fatty foods and never exercise, they should go for it, but they shouldn't expect anyone else to subsidize those habits beyond their basic allocation. (They're not being left completely out in the cold, of course, they're just not being given "cost is no object" health-care coverage either.)
This approach would, I think, have an effect similar to insurance in that it's pooling risk -- in effect you are being taxed (rather than paying premiums) for benefits that go both to you and to everyone else. However, there's no issue of genetic or lifestyle discrimination here, because everyone is getting an equal amount of money to start with. You could make the taxation scheme progressive so that higher-income individuals (who will always be able to spend their own money out of pocket for enhanced coverage) contribute more to these universal accounts (but having a job would not be a condition of having an account).
Now I know that you could say, hey, what if you're unfortunate enough to be born with "bad" genes that predispose you to disease? Or you get unlucky and develop a freaky cancer? Aren't you getting shafted because the amount of money you are given to treat your condition is limited? True, but the reality is that any system must ration people's access to health care in some fashion, because the amount of money that a society -- and I don't mean just government, I mean all individuals in aggregate -- is willing to spend on health care is necessarily bounded. (If you had a fatal disease and discovered it could be cured, for you and you alone, by spending a billion dollars, would we spend a billion dollars? Or would we decide that billion dollars could better be spent on more widespread health-care initiatives or even something else entirely, say education?) So the question is not whether expenditures are bounded and therefore rationing will occur, it's (a) at what dollar amount does the rationing occur, and (b) who determines who benefits from that rationing -- is it the government and insurance companies, or is it individuals in consultation with their doctors?
This is just the kernel of an idea, so I'd be very interested in thoughts, comments, feedback.
Hey, you thought putting a new skin on Winamp or Mozilla was cool, wait 'til you can put a new texture-skin on your OS.
"My personal favorite is the natural wood-grain-feel desktop, but my wife sure likes that soft smooth Corinthian Leather. Of course, my son is into that peanut-butter-and-jelly skin he downloaded from Nickelodeon.com -- I don't just know how he can stand that sticky feeling all day."
Interesting article. Too bad the first sentence is just wrong: "It took billions of years before Earth could support life." Sorry, nice try. Age of the earth is estimated at 4.5 gigayears. There's evidence of life from at least 3.5-3.8 GYA. Hundreds of millions, sure, but not billions.
Second, this is an old idea. As others have pointed out, it was used to great effect in Kim Stanley Robinson's phenomenal Red Mars, Green Mars, Blue Mars trilogy (great science fiction not only because of the science but because of the social, political, interpersonal, and cultural questions it raises).
Third, I find it unconscionable that the scientists (or the writer) didn't consider the possibility that life already exists, or did once exist, on Mars. That final quote -- "we have the chance to spread life beyond its origin" -- is arrogant beyond belief. I suspect that in another century or two (and sooner if we're lucky) the assumption that Earth must be the single "origin" of life will appear as misguided as the belief that Earth was the center of the universe. Yet another example of us stupid humans assuming that the universe exists for our benefit.
This is not to say I'm opposed to extraplanetary colonization or terraforming -- in fact, I think it's critical that, as a species, we ultimately extend ourselves beyond our tiny blue planet. But it would be unconscionable for us to even consider intentionally messing with the climate on Mars until we've determined conclusively that there is no indigineous life. That's not just an ecological argument, it's a scientific one -- if indeed there is life (or evidence of past life) on Mars, the research value would be incalculable. Just think what we could learn about genetics, biology, and evolution if we had access to life that evolved entirely independent of that on our planet. (Or perhaps it didn't evolve independently, giving weight to "panspermia" theories that life can actually be propagated between individual planets and whatnot.)
Considering how long it took us to realize that life survives in some pretty surprising niches on earth -- miles down on the ocean floor, deep inside solid rock, at all kinds of temperature ranges -- I suspect it'll be a long time before we can conclusively declare Mars sterile and even contemplate manipulating the environment. (And that's without even worrying about nonliving attributes of the environment worthy of research, such as geological features.)
Of course, there is some interesting potential here as well. If we do someday terraform Mars, by the time the environment is suitable for higher life we'll probably be pretty good at cloning extinct species and fun stuff like that, so we could turn it into a big nature preserve, Jurassic Park-style. Wouldn't a Canada-like environment be just perfect for those baby woolly mammoth?
Also, this leads me to wonder if we could develop some anti-greenhouse gases that we could use to cool Venus down to habitable levels. If we figured that out, we might also be able to keep ourselves out of trouble if global warming turns out to be the destructive force some have predicted.
This is an appalling idea, and naturally anyone with any technical savvy will choose another provider. But methinks the American people as a whole are sheepish enough to accept it without too much kicking and screaming.
After all, it's merely one more line that could be hidden among this list of stuff on a recent phone bill I received:
Taxes and Surcharges Local Services Local number portability fee: $0.23
Network acces surcharge: $3.50
Federal excise tax: $0.70
State and local taxes: $2.27
State and local surcharge: $1.00
Long Distance Service Federal Excise Tax: $0.82
State and local taxes: $0.25
Federal, state, and local surcharges: $1.40
National access fee: $1.46
Federal universal service fee: $1.65
Payphone access fee: $0.30
That's 11 items already. Who actually reads all this crap? What the hell does it even mean? (State and local taxes; state and local surcharges.) Who's gonna notice one more surcharge? Especially if they give it some bogus name like "National broadband infrastructure support program".
Pitty the oppressed wealthy of America! They get such a raw deal
Whether it's a raw deal is open to interpretation, but it's indisputably true that high-income people *do* pay the lion's share of federal income taxes:
From IRS figures for 1998 (watch out, it's a self-extracting XLS for Windows, sheesh):
Adjusted gross income under $25,000:
Percent of total returns filed = 49.71%
Percent of total tax paid = 4.06%
AGI $25-50K:
% filers: 25.10%
% total tax: 13.04%
AGI $50-$100K:
% filers: 18.53%
% total tax: 24.79%
AGI $100-$200K:
% filers: 5.00%
% total tax: 18.27%
AGI $200K+
% filers: 1.65%
% total tax: 39.85%
In other words, if you made over $100K (in 1998), you were a privileged member of the top 6.65% of wage-earners in the United States, and had the fortune to provide somewhat more than half of the government's revenue from income taxes.
Great points, but there's one thing in your comment that's potentially misleading:
Cisco employees are taxed at the top bracket for personal income taxes whereas Cisco gets taxed at a lower corporate rate.
This is not necessarily true. There are (at least) two kinds of stock options: ISOs (incentive stock options) and NQSOs (non-qualified stock options). ISOs, under the right circumstances, are taxed at the long-term capital gains rate, which is something like 18%; in any case, it's significantly lower than the higher income tax rates (31, 36, 39.6%).
There are restrictions on a corporation's ability to grant ISOs; dollar limits how many ISOs an individual can be granted each year; restrictions on exercise and sale dates (if you want the preferred, i.e. non-income-rate, tax treatment); and furthermore there are circumstances where ISO exercises can trigger the dreaded AMT (alternative minimum tax). So it's basically a big complicated furball. But the bottom line is that ISOs can result in much lower taxation for an individual than an equal amount of income paid as salary. I'm afraid I don't know what the comparable corporate rate would be so I can't say whether it's more or less than that.
OK, I'll admit up front this is somewhat off-topic, but I can't resist.
Recipe for tax simplification in the U.S. (and possibly elsewhere):
Step 1. Require that all politicians complete their taxes by themselves (no help interpreting the laws from CPAs, accountants, or lawyers) and by hand (no TurboTax wizards, although I suppose we should allow Excel spreadsheets and calculators to be fair). Let them see just how difficult they have made the situation for the average citizen.
Step 2. Sit back and wait as the moans mount from Washington D.C. and the respective state capitals.
Basically, my problem with U.S. income tax laws is that they are so complicated that no human being can actually hope to comprehend them (unless they happen to have a super-simple life, like $20K in salary and no income from savings, investments, etc.). But the politicians who create the laws don't *have* to comprehend them, because they can hire a bunch of accountants to worry about it for them. And even though I think Gore is probably a more viable candidate than the other goofball, the complexity he wants to add to the tax code scares the crap out of me.
Taxation across jurisdictions is an extremely complex subject. In the case of Americans who work in Canada or other countries, for example, the IRS says you still pay U.S. income tax -- even though they earned their money abroad. Now, Canada isn't getting any of the money those expats are paying the IRS, but it's not as if those folks are magically getting off without paying any taxes (although I do suspect the U.S. tax rates are lower than those in Canada).
Conversely, until very recently if you lived in, say, Connecticut and commuted into New York City to work -- as hundreds of thousands of people do every day -- you'd pay NY State and NY City income tax and then get to deduct that from your home state income tax. Even though you rely largely on government-run services (schools, fire departments, and whatnot) in your home state.
As far as I can see, what happens with these cross-border situations is that there's always some imbalance one way or the other. Either the residents get a tax advantage from the commuters/expats at the expense of their home jurisdiction (as in the NYC case), or the home jurisdiction of the commuters/expats gets a tax advantage over the jurisdiction where they work (as in U.S. citizens working in Canada, it sounds like).
don't laugh; military testing brain-wave steering
on
When Locusts Attack
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· Score: 1
"Experiments at Armstrong Laboratory's alternative control technology laboratory have unleashed the energy of brain waves, patterns of cerebral electricity, to command a flight simulator to roll left or right."
I love the part where one of the simulator pilots says "'After doing this for a while, pushing a button seems so laborious,' said Calhoun. 'It's very addictive--you get lazy and comfortable.'"
If you're using company equipment to type stuff in, and sending it across company wires, of course they could monitor what you are saying. Doesn't mean it's right, but they can.
The only people likely to be surprised by this "revelation" are the same ones who would be flabbergasted when the boss got upset about the online porn subscription that they charged to their corporate card.
How long before some mad scientist decides to try implanting a human embryo in a chimp|gorilla|orangutan? Perhaps as a way for an infertile couple to have a child of their own (without having to arrange for a human surrogate mother), or perhaps as a perverse research project (what would *really* happen if a human child is raised by wolves -- er, chimps?).
I'll stay away from the ethical arguments about whether this is right or wrong and ask a question from a different angle: Could we use this technique to learn more about animal behavior and its genetic vs. environmental roots? The article mentions, for example, that it the near future a panda embryo might be implanted into the womb of a regular ol' black bear. (Remember that panda "bears" are not at all closely related to bears in the usual sense; as the article points out, pandas are much more closely related to raccoons or rabbits. I imagine that the substantial size difference between those species might be problematic.)
Anyway, it would be *very* interesting, IMO, to watch the development of a baby animal that is genetically a panda but was given birth to by a black bear. What kind of diet would it develop? What sort of social (and mating) behaviors? What predators would it be afraid of? I'm not a biologist, but I'd think this would shed a substantial amount of light on the extent to which behaviors, at least in certain species, are hardwired vs. learned.
Conversely, it would be interesting to observe the mother's behavior -- to what extent would she "know" that her child was a little, uhhh, "special"?
Let's say that, back in the Dark Ages before computers, I got into a tiff with my boss. I sat at my desk and wrote out, longhand, a letter that said "Hey you stupid asswipe, I'm gonna kill you." Then I decided that giving him this memo wasn't such a career-enhancing move after all, so I tossed it into the trash.
Is there a statute of limitations on printed paper? If not, I can't see why there should be one for electronic documents. After all, when I threw that thing in the trash I clearly meant to dispose of it so that nobody could ever read it. But surely if it ever *were* recovered from the trash, it could be used against me.
Moral of the story: In the real world, if you *really* want to get rid of something, you don't just throw it away -- you shred it. Same with computer documents. Now, it's possible that with NSA-type technology somebody might be able to recover my message despite my every attempt to eliminate it. To me that's the interesting question: If I really took the effort to eliminate those bits but they were recovered by extraordinary means, should they still be admissible? But to simply say "Delete means delete" is as about as useful as saying "Wastebasket means wastebasket". I pity the fool who thinks that deleting an e-mail makes it go away, just as I pity the fool who thinks that throwing away a paper document means it's gone forever. (I don't know about you, but I always shred or tear up anything remotely sensitive before I put it in the trash.)
The big benefit of flat rate is nobody has to keep track of (and bill) your time online / bits downloaded / whatever. A few months back I had breakfast with [a very senior guy] from [a humongous telecom company]. He admitted that one of the dirty secrets of [another humongous telecom company] was that it actually cost them more to bill residential customers than they received in payments from those residential customers.
At the risk of getting all political, this reminds me of one of the reasons that a VAT or flat tax seems so much more logical than the ridiculous tax system we currently have here in the U.S. Sure, a flat tax might be "less fair" because rich people would pay a lower percentage of their income than they do now, but there would be massive society-wide savings of money and time because of the simplification of the tax code (which currently is about the size of the Encyclopedia Britannica and is incomprehensible even to experts) and reduction in enforcement and litigation costs. Food for thought...
If you rely solely on purchased notes, and the notes are wrong, well, too bad for you. I, for one, don't want to live in a nanny state where the government decides what I can and can't read because I might do something stupid based on my naive assumption that anything in print must be true.
As I read it, this bill merely covers "recordings" and/or verbatim transcripts of lectures, which are protected under existing copyright law in any case. (I can't take your words and sell them myself.) If the note-taker is providing an interpretation of what the lecturer presented -- using his or her own words, summarizing the key points, perhaps organizing things in a more logical fashion and tying them to concepts in previous lectures -- then any government action preventing the publication of that interpretation violates the First Amendment. The government cannot impede publication of accounts of an individual's own experiences or opinions, whether those are opinions of a lecture or of a book or of a drug trip or of a presidential debate. Whether it's done for commercial ends or not, or by a person or a business, is irrelevant. It is constitutionally unacceptable to suppress speech merely because the government (or some interest group that influences it) doesn't like the content of that speech, the source of the speech, or the objectives of its authors -- whether that objective is to propagate Marxism or to enable students to cut class, and whether or not it is commercially motivated. Think about it: This bill is equivalent to a proposal that we not let newspapers (commercial entities!) write about what happened at the presidential debates earlier this week, because the candidates and the TV networks own the copyrights to the statements and the broadcasts. Bullshit.
The fundamental problem here is that too many lectures are wastes of the students' time because they simply recap material in the book. If the professors/lecturers actually took the effort to make their classes worth attending, then they would be attended. After all, the goal of education is not to attend lectures simply because they're there -- it's to learn (or, some would argue, to learn how to learn). If a student can learn more effectively and thoroughly by spending five hours a week with his nose buried in the book, doing problem sets, than by sitting through redundant lectures, then it would be foolish to suggest he sit through the lectures.
Sure, some number of students will use the lecture notes to beat the system. But I don't see how this is intellectually dishonest -- it's not as if you're copying someone else's exam answers or plagiarizing a paper, both of which entail representing someone else's work as your own. You're merely learning the material (perhaps not well) without attending the lecture, just as you could learn it (perhaps not well) by attending the lecture but not reading the assigned books.
Considering that a lot more people in the world speak spanish then german, french, or japanese, this seems a weird choice in languages
Actually, it's completely logical, considering that English, Japanese, and German are, in that order, the three most common languages found on Web pages and among Net users. French, Chinese (Mandarin), and Spanish are in positions four through six, though their specific order depends on which of these numbers you use.
I don't particularly want to cast myself in the role of a Netscape defender, but it's rather knee-jerk conspiracy-theorist to imply this is evil money-grubbing corporate pandering when there is a simple, logical explanation that fits the facts equally well. Namely, that Netscape is devoting its resources to serving the largest markets (as defined by user base) first. Let's save the gratuitous Netscape-bashing for their truly dumb and craven decisions.
...that you walk into a restaurant you've never tried before, vaguely hungry but not desperate. You figure you'll order a cup of coffee, and look at the menu, and if you see something that sounds yummy, maybe you'll stay for a meal.
So you sit down at your table and the hostess hands you a menu. You decide that the pasta-and-salad combo for $12 sounds pretty good and place your order. Oh, and the restaurant offers free refills on your Coke, so when the check comes at the end of the meal, you're feeling satisfied.
But unbeknownst to you, the guy at the next table has a menu with different prices on it. In fact, he just ordered the same pasta combo for only $10. Hey, that means you've been ripped off, since somebody paid less for the same product than you did! Alert the media!
Frankly, I don't see what about this situation would make you feel cheated. If you made a choice based on the available information and were satisfied with that choice, why are you suddenly upset that somebody else got a better (or worse) deal? They, too, have the choice to take it or leave it -- nobody is forcing the pasta down their throat. Would you react the same if the menu prices had been the same, but the guy at the next table happened to have a $2-off coupon that he picked up on the street corner before walking into the restaurant? He got a different price than you did, for no reason other than that he happened to pick up the flyer somebody shoved at him as he walked down the street; would that be "unfair"?
Presumably a business does testing like this in order to maximize its revenue and/or profit. I know/.ers like to denounce evil corporations, but it's rather shortsighted not to acknowledge that businesses small and large are in fact responsible for many of the things we all enjoy in life. That doesn't mean we have to love all businesses, just realize that they're not all out to shaft us. If the information the restaurant gleans from this pricing experiment means it can hit a pricing sweet spot that allows it to give out free Coke refills -- or on a more fundamental level, simply stay in business -- is that necessarily a bad thing?
Now, I'm not about to argue that doing this kind of experiment is a always smart business decision, because we all know that perception is more important than reality. If you piss off your customers -- whether you think what you're doing is "logical" or "justifiable" or not -- that probably, in the end, costs you more than just giving everybody a uniformly low price. But I figure it's your decision to make, and it's customers' decision to take it or leave it now and in the future. Any voluntary transaction between two parties implies that both got something more than what they gave away: You valued the food more than the equivalent amount of money, and the restaurant valued your money more than an equivalent amount of (perishable, unprepared) food, so shouldn't you both be satisfied?
Of course, I should point out a couple of places where the "it's all OK, as long as the buyer and seller agree" model clearly breaks down:
When no meaningful competition exists. If this is the only restaurant in a 100-mile radius, and all the markets are closed, then you don't really have a choice about whether you eat there or not. I'll readily admit that you can be treated unfairly if you are under duress.
Where people are given prices based on their personal characteristics rather than their behavior. For example, it would be unethical -- and illegal -- to systematically charge black patrons a higher price than white ones.
I'm sure there are others. I'm no economist.
Maybe our obsession with fixed prices is, historically speaking, an anomaly. After all, it was only pretty recently that mass production and distribution enabled supermarkets, with their little price tags on every item, etc. Historically the bazaar/barter/haggle model seems much more commonplace.
Incidentally, my most jarring firsthand experience with bizarre pricing structure was when I called a travel agent to order plane tickets for a vacation for my girlfriend and myself. The travel agent said "The ticket price is $325 each, round-trip." Then she added, "Oh, wait. That's the price for one ticket. The second ticket is $425." I travel a lot and I'm used to pricing disparities between seats, but it was a real shocker that two tickets ordered by the same person at the same time could differ in price by $100. But hey, it cost what it cost, and if we didn't like the price we would've found another destination, or an alternative way to get there.
Slashdot Mirror
Calling from Seattle (area code 206) to nearby area code 425 presents some interesting challenges. Sometimes you have to dial 1+425+number like any other long-distance call. Other times that will fail ("the number you reached is not in service or has been disconnected") and you have to dial 425+number -- the full ten digits -- but WITHOUT the preceding 1. I suspect it has something to do with which areas are considered local vs. in-state LD for tariff purposes, but why the f*** should I as a consumer have to know the difference? I mean, if someone leaves a message that says "Call me at 425-555-1000", I have no way of knowing in advance whether I need that leading 1 or not. Retarded!
However, if we can get the Supremes to acknowledge that code is, in fact, speech, there's hope for everyone. Because if code is speech, then (at least in the U.S.), it can't be suppressed, even if it may be put to harmful use.
Don't wimp out and vote for Bush or Gore, please!
The continuing invasiveness of business marketing is annoying, too. I honestly don't mind advertisements for stuff I care about (I enjoy getting my REI catalog, certain travel-related deals, and a handful of other things), but stop wasting my time calling me at 9 on Saturday morning asking if I want to change my long-distance service! Unless you are going to give me free, unlimited, ad-free, worldwide long-distance service -- in which case you wouldn't have any incentive to sign me up in the first place -- then my answer will always, always be no. So stop wasting my time and yours.
There's certainly a large element of truth to that, but I'd like to add a couple of comments. I've worked both as a telecommuter and as a manager of remotely located teams, so I have some firsthand experience in this area.
Certain types of jobs, and certain tasks, are much more amenable to modularization than others. And those tend, in my experience, to be the jobs and tasks that can be handled most effectively in a distributed/telecommuting environment. For example, "write this report" or "here's a spec, write this subroutine" are relatively self-contained tasks that require fairly minimal external, real-time input. In fact, I've often found it more effective to have things like this done off-site because it minimizes distractions and lets people concentrate on the task at hand.
However, there are some tasks that I've found extraordinarily difficult to accomplish unless the entire team involved is physically co-located. One is almost anything involving visual design or interface. Another is anything involving fundamental and potentially controversial directional questions about a project: things like defining the objectives and audience for a new product or designing the product architecture. A third is activity that requires rapid response from a cross-disciplinary group. (I used to work in the Web-content business, so some of our tasks/projects had durations measured in hours or even minutes -- if you need to get something written, edited, illustrated, and posted at a moment's notice, it is necessary to have people with those abilities on hand at all times and in an environment where they can collaborate without barriers.)
Mundane as it may seem, there are often administrative, legal, and personnel challenges to having a distributed team as well. If you're a Silicon Alley company, do your HR people know about employment laws in Wyoming? How about payroll issues? Health care? What happens if a remote employee turns out to be incompetent? Trust me, I speak from painful experience when I say that discipling and firing a disruptive remote employee is not straightforward.
Finally, there's one big intangible downside to having a distributed team, which is that in the absence of superb management (which we all know is hard to find), you risk a situation where the individuals feel like lone wolves instead of part of a cohesive team whose members know, trust, and can depend on each other. People form bonds in large part through casual interaction in the office, going out to lunch or for drinks together, observing and responding to each others' body language in face-to-face environments. Also, it's very easy for people in one or another of the physical locations to feel left out of the loop and/or unappreciated, because they may perceive that they're missing out on informal collaboration in the office, or that people don't realize how hard they're working because they don't see them in the next cubicle 14 hours a day, or even that they're not valued as much because of simple things like time differences (if a team leader calls a meeting at 9am Eastern, west coasters can be really put off by the expectation they'll be ready to roll at 6am their time).
None of this is to say that long-distance working relationships are impossible, any more than long-distance personal or romantic relationships are impossible. They just require careful thought, commitment, and often a lot of work -- plus a sizeable travel budget, because sometimes there's just no substitute for face-to-face exposure. Nevertheless, I understand why most companies are conservative when it comes to things like telecommuting: They're aware of all the downsides, they're woefully short of capable managers, and therefore unless they are really hard up for qualified candidates, it's much easier to just follow the default behavior and pack everyone into cubicles.
That said, I do encourage flexibile work arrangements, and I really believe that more and more smart companies are recognizing that their employees really are everything. With the talent shortage in this industry only getting worse, companies must find ways to accommodate people's individual lifestyles more effectively. I'm confident it will happen: Just look at how quickly other mostly-useless artifacts like corporate dress codes have vanished (and not just in the tech industry). The hurdles, both from a psychological and from a business standpoint, to letting people telecommute are just a bit higher than they are to letting people jeans and t-shirts instead of a suit.
My proposal: Let government create an "individual health-care account" for each citizen, at birth, containing a fixed amount of money. Each individual could make a decision over his lifetime as to how that money is spent on health-care services, but if they want to exceed that quota, it has to come out of their own pockets (or that of friends, family, employers, churches, cooperative organizations, whatever).
Because the money is coming out of the individual's own account, he'd have an incentive to be judicious in his expenditures and to take care of his health to the extent possible. People who could afford to pay for routine health-care costs out of their own pockets would be smart to do so and save their account for catastrophic expenses, but those who today can't afford routine health-care costs could dip into their account to get coverage. People could make individual lifestyle choices: If they want to smoke and eat fatty foods and never exercise, they should go for it, but they shouldn't expect anyone else to subsidize those habits beyond their basic allocation. (They're not being left completely out in the cold, of course, they're just not being given "cost is no object" health-care coverage either.)
This approach would, I think, have an effect similar to insurance in that it's pooling risk -- in effect you are being taxed (rather than paying premiums) for benefits that go both to you and to everyone else. However, there's no issue of genetic or lifestyle discrimination here, because everyone is getting an equal amount of money to start with. You could make the taxation scheme progressive so that higher-income individuals (who will always be able to spend their own money out of pocket for enhanced coverage) contribute more to these universal accounts (but having a job would not be a condition of having an account).
Now I know that you could say, hey, what if you're unfortunate enough to be born with "bad" genes that predispose you to disease? Or you get unlucky and develop a freaky cancer? Aren't you getting shafted because the amount of money you are given to treat your condition is limited? True, but the reality is that any system must ration people's access to health care in some fashion, because the amount of money that a society -- and I don't mean just government, I mean all individuals in aggregate -- is willing to spend on health care is necessarily bounded. (If you had a fatal disease and discovered it could be cured, for you and you alone, by spending a billion dollars, would we spend a billion dollars? Or would we decide that billion dollars could better be spent on more widespread health-care initiatives or even something else entirely, say education?) So the question is not whether expenditures are bounded and therefore rationing will occur, it's (a) at what dollar amount does the rationing occur, and (b) who determines who benefits from that rationing -- is it the government and insurance companies, or is it individuals in consultation with their doctors?
This is just the kernel of an idea, so I'd be very interested in thoughts, comments, feedback.
Everybody knows that Mars Needs Women!
"My personal favorite is the natural wood-grain-feel desktop, but my wife sure likes that soft smooth Corinthian Leather. Of course, my son is into that peanut-butter-and-jelly skin he downloaded from Nickelodeon.com -- I don't just know how he can stand that sticky feeling all day."
Second, this is an old idea. As others have pointed out, it was used to great effect in Kim Stanley Robinson's phenomenal Red Mars, Green Mars, Blue Mars trilogy (great science fiction not only because of the science but because of the social, political, interpersonal, and cultural questions it raises).
Third, I find it unconscionable that the scientists (or the writer) didn't consider the possibility that life already exists, or did once exist, on Mars. That final quote -- "we have the chance to spread life beyond its origin" -- is arrogant beyond belief. I suspect that in another century or two (and sooner if we're lucky) the assumption that Earth must be the single "origin" of life will appear as misguided as the belief that Earth was the center of the universe. Yet another example of us stupid humans assuming that the universe exists for our benefit.
This is not to say I'm opposed to extraplanetary colonization or terraforming -- in fact, I think it's critical that, as a species, we ultimately extend ourselves beyond our tiny blue planet. But it would be unconscionable for us to even consider intentionally messing with the climate on Mars until we've determined conclusively that there is no indigineous life. That's not just an ecological argument, it's a scientific one -- if indeed there is life (or evidence of past life) on Mars, the research value would be incalculable. Just think what we could learn about genetics, biology, and evolution if we had access to life that evolved entirely independent of that on our planet. (Or perhaps it didn't evolve independently, giving weight to "panspermia" theories that life can actually be propagated between individual planets and whatnot.)
Considering how long it took us to realize that life survives in some pretty surprising niches on earth -- miles down on the ocean floor, deep inside solid rock, at all kinds of temperature ranges -- I suspect it'll be a long time before we can conclusively declare Mars sterile and even contemplate manipulating the environment. (And that's without even worrying about nonliving attributes of the environment worthy of research, such as geological features.)
Of course, there is some interesting potential here as well. If we do someday terraform Mars, by the time the environment is suitable for higher life we'll probably be pretty good at cloning extinct species and fun stuff like that, so we could turn it into a big nature preserve, Jurassic Park-style. Wouldn't a Canada-like environment be just perfect for those baby woolly mammoth?
Also, this leads me to wonder if we could develop some anti-greenhouse gases that we could use to cool Venus down to habitable levels. If we figured that out, we might also be able to keep ourselves out of trouble if global warming turns out to be the destructive force some have predicted.
After all, it's merely one more line that could be hidden among this list of stuff on a recent phone bill I received:
Taxes and Surcharges
Local Services
Local number portability fee: $0.23
Network acces surcharge: $3.50
Federal excise tax: $0.70
State and local taxes: $2.27
State and local surcharge: $1.00
Long Distance Service
Federal Excise Tax: $0.82
State and local taxes: $0.25
Federal, state, and local surcharges: $1.40
National access fee: $1.46
Federal universal service fee: $1.65
Payphone access fee: $0.30
That's 11 items already. Who actually reads all this crap? What the hell does it even mean? (State and local taxes; state and local surcharges.) Who's gonna notice one more surcharge? Especially if they give it some bogus name like "National broadband infrastructure support program".
Call me cynical.
Whether it's a raw deal is open to interpretation, but it's indisputably true that high-income people *do* pay the lion's share of federal income taxes:
From IRS figures for 1998 (watch out, it's a self-extracting XLS for Windows, sheesh):
- Adjusted gross income under $25,000:
- AGI $25-50K:
- AGI $50-$100K:
- AGI $100-$200K:
- AGI $200K+
In other words, if you made over $100K (in 1998), you were a privileged member of the top 6.65% of wage-earners in the United States, and had the fortune to provide somewhat more than half of the government's revenue from income taxes.Percent of total returns filed = 49.71%
Percent of total tax paid = 4.06%
% filers: 25.10%
% total tax: 13.04%
% filers: 18.53%
% total tax: 24.79%
% filers: 5.00%
% total tax: 18.27%
% filers: 1.65%
% total tax: 39.85%
Cisco employees are taxed at the top bracket for personal income taxes whereas Cisco gets taxed at a lower corporate rate.
This is not necessarily true. There are (at least) two kinds of stock options: ISOs (incentive stock options) and NQSOs (non-qualified stock options). ISOs, under the right circumstances, are taxed at the long-term capital gains rate, which is something like 18%; in any case, it's significantly lower than the higher income tax rates (31, 36, 39.6%).
There are restrictions on a corporation's ability to grant ISOs; dollar limits how many ISOs an individual can be granted each year; restrictions on exercise and sale dates (if you want the preferred, i.e. non-income-rate, tax treatment); and furthermore there are circumstances where ISO exercises can trigger the dreaded AMT (alternative minimum tax). So it's basically a big complicated furball. But the bottom line is that ISOs can result in much lower taxation for an individual than an equal amount of income paid as salary. I'm afraid I don't know what the comparable corporate rate would be so I can't say whether it's more or less than that.
Recipe for tax simplification in the U.S. (and possibly elsewhere):
Step 1. Require that all politicians complete their taxes by themselves (no help interpreting the laws from CPAs, accountants, or lawyers) and by hand (no TurboTax wizards, although I suppose we should allow Excel spreadsheets and calculators to be fair). Let them see just how difficult they have made the situation for the average citizen.
Step 2. Sit back and wait as the moans mount from Washington D.C. and the respective state capitals.
Basically, my problem with U.S. income tax laws is that they are so complicated that no human being can actually hope to comprehend them (unless they happen to have a super-simple life, like $20K in salary and no income from savings, investments, etc.). But the politicians who create the laws don't *have* to comprehend them, because they can hire a bunch of accountants to worry about it for them. And even though I think Gore is probably a more viable candidate than the other goofball, the complexity he wants to add to the tax code scares the crap out of me.
I support Harry Browne, Libertarian for President.
Conversely, until very recently if you lived in, say, Connecticut and commuted into New York City to work -- as hundreds of thousands of people do every day -- you'd pay NY State and NY City income tax and then get to deduct that from your home state income tax. Even though you rely largely on government-run services (schools, fire departments, and whatnot) in your home state.
As far as I can see, what happens with these cross-border situations is that there's always some imbalance one way or the other. Either the residents get a tax advantage from the commuters/expats at the expense of their home jurisdiction (as in the NYC case), or the home jurisdiction of the commuters/expats gets a tax advantage over the jurisdiction where they work (as in U.S. citizens working in Canada, it sounds like).
I love the part where one of the simulator pilots says "'After doing this for a while, pushing a button seems so laborious,' said Calhoun. 'It's very addictive--you get lazy and comfortable.'"
Check it out: http://www.af.mil/news/airman/0296/look.htm
The only people likely to be surprised by this "revelation" are the same ones who would be flabbergasted when the boss got upset about the online porn subscription that they charged to their corporate card.
{shiver}
Anyway, it would be *very* interesting, IMO, to watch the development of a baby animal that is genetically a panda but was given birth to by a black bear. What kind of diet would it develop? What sort of social (and mating) behaviors? What predators would it be afraid of? I'm not a biologist, but I'd think this would shed a substantial amount of light on the extent to which behaviors, at least in certain species, are hardwired vs. learned.
Conversely, it would be interesting to observe the mother's behavior -- to what extent would she "know" that her child was a little, uhhh, "special"?
Is there a statute of limitations on printed paper? If not, I can't see why there should be one for electronic documents. After all, when I threw that thing in the trash I clearly meant to dispose of it so that nobody could ever read it. But surely if it ever *were* recovered from the trash, it could be used against me.
Moral of the story: In the real world, if you *really* want to get rid of something, you don't just throw it away -- you shred it. Same with computer documents. Now, it's possible that with NSA-type technology somebody might be able to recover my message despite my every attempt to eliminate it. To me that's the interesting question: If I really took the effort to eliminate those bits but they were recovered by extraordinary means, should they still be admissible? But to simply say "Delete means delete" is as about as useful as saying "Wastebasket means wastebasket". I pity the fool who thinks that deleting an e-mail makes it go away, just as I pity the fool who thinks that throwing away a paper document means it's gone forever. (I don't know about you, but I always shred or tear up anything remotely sensitive before I put it in the trash.)
At the risk of getting all political, this reminds me of one of the reasons that a VAT or flat tax seems so much more logical than the ridiculous tax system we currently have here in the U.S. Sure, a flat tax might be "less fair" because rich people would pay a lower percentage of their income than they do now, but there would be massive society-wide savings of money and time because of the simplification of the tax code (which currently is about the size of the Encyclopedia Britannica and is incomprehensible even to experts) and reduction in enforcement and litigation costs. Food for thought...
sort of like development of an open-source class-notes archive...
If you rely solely on purchased notes, and the notes are wrong, well, too bad for you. I, for one, don't want to live in a nanny state where the government decides what I can and can't read because I might do something stupid based on my naive assumption that anything in print must be true.
The fundamental problem here is that too many lectures are wastes of the students' time because they simply recap material in the book. If the professors/lecturers actually took the effort to make their classes worth attending, then they would be attended. After all, the goal of education is not to attend lectures simply because they're there -- it's to learn (or, some would argue, to learn how to learn). If a student can learn more effectively and thoroughly by spending five hours a week with his nose buried in the book, doing problem sets, than by sitting through redundant lectures, then it would be foolish to suggest he sit through the lectures.
Sure, some number of students will use the lecture notes to beat the system. But I don't see how this is intellectually dishonest -- it's not as if you're copying someone else's exam answers or plagiarizing a paper, both of which entail representing someone else's work as your own. You're merely learning the material (perhaps not well) without attending the lecture, just as you could learn it (perhaps not well) by attending the lecture but not reading the assigned books.
Actually, it's completely logical, considering that English, Japanese, and German are, in that order, the three most common languages found on Web pages and among Net users. French, Chinese (Mandarin), and Spanish are in positions four through six, though their specific order depends on which of these numbers you use.
I don't particularly want to cast myself in the role of a Netscape defender, but it's rather knee-jerk conspiracy-theorist to imply this is evil money-grubbing corporate pandering when there is a simple, logical explanation that fits the facts equally well. Namely, that Netscape is devoting its resources to serving the largest markets (as defined by user base) first. Let's save the gratuitous Netscape-bashing for their truly dumb and craven decisions.
So you sit down at your table and the hostess hands you a menu. You decide that the pasta-and-salad combo for $12 sounds pretty good and place your order. Oh, and the restaurant offers free refills on your Coke, so when the check comes at the end of the meal, you're feeling satisfied.
But unbeknownst to you, the guy at the next table has a menu with different prices on it. In fact, he just ordered the same pasta combo for only $10. Hey, that means you've been ripped off, since somebody paid less for the same product than you did! Alert the media!
Frankly, I don't see what about this situation would make you feel cheated. If you made a choice based on the available information and were satisfied with that choice, why are you suddenly upset that somebody else got a better (or worse) deal? They, too, have the choice to take it or leave it -- nobody is forcing the pasta down their throat. Would you react the same if the menu prices had been the same, but the guy at the next table happened to have a $2-off coupon that he picked up on the street corner before walking into the restaurant? He got a different price than you did, for no reason other than that he happened to pick up the flyer somebody shoved at him as he walked down the street; would that be "unfair"?
Presumably a business does testing like this in order to maximize its revenue and/or profit. I know /.ers like to denounce evil corporations, but it's rather shortsighted not to acknowledge that businesses small and large are in fact responsible for many of the things we all enjoy in life. That doesn't mean we have to love all businesses, just realize that they're not all out to shaft us. If the information the restaurant gleans from this pricing experiment means it can hit a pricing sweet spot that allows it to give out free Coke refills -- or on a more fundamental level, simply stay in business -- is that necessarily a bad thing?
Now, I'm not about to argue that doing this kind of experiment is a always smart business decision, because we all know that perception is more important than reality. If you piss off your customers -- whether you think what you're doing is "logical" or "justifiable" or not -- that probably, in the end, costs you more than just giving everybody a uniformly low price. But I figure it's your decision to make, and it's customers' decision to take it or leave it now and in the future. Any voluntary transaction between two parties implies that both got something more than what they gave away: You valued the food more than the equivalent amount of money, and the restaurant valued your money more than an equivalent amount of (perishable, unprepared) food, so shouldn't you both be satisfied?
Of course, I should point out a couple of places where the "it's all OK, as long as the buyer and seller agree" model clearly breaks down:
- When no meaningful competition exists. If this is the only restaurant in a 100-mile radius, and all the markets are closed, then you don't really have a choice about whether you eat there or not. I'll readily admit that you can be treated unfairly if you are under duress.
- Where people are given prices based on their personal characteristics rather than their behavior. For example, it would be unethical -- and illegal -- to systematically charge black patrons a higher price than white ones.
- I'm sure there are others. I'm no economist.
Maybe our obsession with fixed prices is, historically speaking, an anomaly. After all, it was only pretty recently that mass production and distribution enabled supermarkets, with their little price tags on every item, etc. Historically the bazaar/barter/haggle model seems much more commonplace.Incidentally, my most jarring firsthand experience with bizarre pricing structure was when I called a travel agent to order plane tickets for a vacation for my girlfriend and myself. The travel agent said "The ticket price is $325 each, round-trip." Then she added, "Oh, wait. That's the price for one ticket. The second ticket is $425." I travel a lot and I'm used to pricing disparities between seats, but it was a real shocker that two tickets ordered by the same person at the same time could differ in price by $100. But hey, it cost what it cost, and if we didn't like the price we would've found another destination, or an alternative way to get there.